Are we winning the science communication war?

Since the time that I was a young graduate student, there have been constant calls for ecologists to communicate more with the public and policy makers (Norton 1998, Ludwig et al. 2001). The impetus for these calls is easy to understand –we are facing serious threats to the maintenance of biodiversity and ecosystem health, and ecologists have the knowledge and facts that are needed to shape public policy. To some, it is unconscionable that ecologists have not done more advocacy, while others see a need to better educate ecologists in communication strategies. While the reluctance for some ecologists to engage in public communication could be due to a lack of skills that training could overcome, the majority likely has had a deeper unease. Like all academics, ecologists have many demands on their time, but are evaluated by research output. Adding another priority to their already long list of priorities can seem overwhelming. More fundamentally, many ecologists are in the business of expanding our understanding of the world. They see themselves as objective scientists adding to global knowledge. To these ‘objectivists’, getting involved in policy debates, or becoming advocates, undermines their objectivity.

Regardless of these concerns, a number of ecologists have decided that public communication is an important part of their responsibilities. Ecologists now routinely sit on the boards of different organizations, give public lectures, write books and articles for the public, work more on applied problems, and testify before governmental committees. Part of this shift comes from organizations, such as the Nature Conservancy, which have become large, sophisticated entities with communication departments. But, the working academic ecologist likely talks with more journalists and public groups than in the past.

The question remains: has this increased emphasis on communication yielded any changes in public perception or policy decisions. As someone who has spent time in elementary school classrooms teaching kids about pollinators and conservation, the level of environmental awareness in both the educators and children surprises me. More telling are surprising calls for policy shifts from governmental organizations. Here in Canada, morale has been low because of a federal government that has not prioritized science or conservation. However signals from international bodies and the US seem to be promising for the ability of science to positively influence science.

Two such policy calls are extremely telling. Firstly, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which includes the governments of Mexico, Canada, and the USA, which normally deals with economic initiatives and disagreements, announced that they will form a committee to explore measures to protect monarch butterflies. They will consider instituting toxin-free zones, where the spraying of chemicals will be prohibited, as well as the construction of a milkweed corridor from Canada to Mexico. NAFTA made this announcement because of declining monarch numbers and calls from scientists for a coordinated strategy.

The second example is the call from 11 US senators to combat the spread of Asian carp. Asian carp have invaded a number of major rivers in the US, and have their spread has been of major concern to scientists. The 11 senators have taken this scientific concern seriously, requesting federal money and that the Army Corps of Engineers devise a way to stop the Asian carp spread.

There seems to be promising anecdotal evidence that issues of scientific concern are influencing policy decisions. This signals a potential shift; maybe scientists are winning the public perception and policy war. But the war is by no means over. There are still major issues (e.g., climate change) that require more substantial policy action. Scientists, especially those who are effective and engaged, need to continue to communicate with public and policy audiences. Every scientifically informed policy decision should be seen as a signal of the willingness of audiences to listening to scientists and that communicating science can work.

References

Ludwig D., Mangel M. & Haddad B. (2001). ECOLOGY, CONSERVATION, AND PUBLIC POLICY. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 32, 481-517.

Norton, B. G. 1998. IMPROVING ECOLOGICAL COMMUNICATION: THE ROLE OF ECOLOGISTS IN ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY FORMATION. Ecological Applications 8:350–364

Speaking the language: is jargon always bad?

You hear mostly about the evils of jargon in science. Undeniably jargon is a huge barrier between scientific ideas and discoveries and non-scientists. Translating a complex, nuanced result into a sound bite or recommendation suitable for consumption by policymakers or the public can be the most difficult aspect of a project (something Alan Alda, as part of his Center for Communicating Science, is attempting to assist scientists with). But sometimes the implication in general seems to be that scientific jargon is always undesirable. Is jargon really always a bad thing?

Even between scientists, you hear criticism about the amount of jargon in talks and papers. I have heard several times that community ecology is a frequent offender when it comes to over-reliance on jargon (defn: “words or expressions that are used by a particular profession or group and are difficult for others to understand”). It is fun to come up with a list of jargon frequently seen in  community ecology, because examples are endless: microcosm, mesocosm, niche, extinction debt, stochastic, trophic cascades, paradigm shift, priority effects, alternate stable states, or any phrase ending in ‘dynamics’ (i.e. eco-evolutionary, neutral, deterministic). Special annoyance from me at the usage of multidisciplinary, trans-disciplinary, and inter-disciplinary to all express the exact same thing. I don’t think, despite this list, that jargon is necessarily problematic.

If the meaning implied by the word or phrase is more than the sum of its parts it is probably jargon. Ideally, jargon is a shared, accurate shorthand for communicating with colleagues. A paper published without any jargon at all would be much longer and not necessarily clearer. Instead of saying, “we used protist microcosms”, it would have to say, “we used a community of protist species meant to encapsulate in miniature the characteristic features of a larger community”. (And arguably ecology is still relatively understandable for a newcomer, compared to disciplines like cell and systems biology, where an abstract might seem impenetrable: “Here, we report that, during mouse somatic cell reprogramming, pluripotency can be induced with lineage specifiers that are pluripotency rivals to suppress ESC identity, most of which are not enriched in ESCs.”)

Jargon is useful as a unifying tool: if everyone is using the same nicely defined label for a phenomenon, it is easier to generalize, contrast and compare across research. Jargon is many pieces of information captured in a single phrase: for example, using the term 'ecophylogenetics' may imply not only the application of phylogenetic methods and evolutionary biology to community ecology, but also the accompanying subtext about methodology, criticism, and research history. At its best, jargon can actually stimulate and unify research activities – you could argue that introducing a new term (‘neutral dynamics’) for an old idea stimulated research into the effects of stochasticity and dispersal limitation on community structure.

That’s the best case scenario for jargon. There are also consequences to developing a meaning-laden dialect unique to a subdiscipline. It is very difficult to enter a subdiscipline or move between subdisciplines if you don’t speak the language. New students often find papers difficult to penetrate because of the heavy reliance on jargon-y descriptions: obtaining new knowledge requires you already have a foundation of knowledge. Moving between subdisciplines is hard too – a word in one area may have completely different meaning in another. In a paper on conservation and reserve selection, complementarity might refer to the selection of regions with dissimilar species or habitats. In a biodiversity and ecosystem functioning paper, a not-very distant discipline, complementarity might refer to functional or niche differences among co-occurring species. Giving a talk to anyone but the most specialist audience is hampered by concerns about how much jargon is acceptable or understandable.

Jargon also leads to confusion. When using jargon, you can rely on understood meaning to delimit the boundaries of your meaning, but you may never specify anything beyond those boundaries. Everyone has heard a 30-second spiel so entirely made of jargon that you never develop a clear idea of what the person does. The other issue is that jargon can quickly become inaccurate, so laden with various meanings as to be not useful. The phrase ‘priority effect’, for example, has had so many particular mechanisms associated with it that it can be uninformative on its own. And I think most ecologists are well aware that jargon can be inaccurate, but it’s a difficult trap to get out of. The word “community”, essential to studying community ecology, is so broadly and inconsistently defined as to be meaningless. Multiple people have pointed this out (1, 2, 3) and even suggested solutions or precise definitions, but without lasting impact. One of the questions in my PhD defense was “how did I define an ecological community and why?”, because there is still no universal answer. How do we rescue words from becoming meaningless?

Something interesting, that you rarely see expressed about jargon is that linguists tells us that language is knowledge: how we understand something is not independent of the language we use to describe it. The particular language we think in shapes and limits what we think about: perhaps if you have many ways of finely delineating a concept you will think about it as a complex and subtle idea (the 100-words-for-snow idea). On the other hand, what if you have to rely on vague catch-alls to describe an idea? For example, a phrase like ‘temporal heterogeneity’ incorporates many types of differences that occur through time: is that why most researchers continue to think about differences through time in a vague, imprecise manner? Hard to say. It is hard to imagine where community ecology would be without jargon, and even harder to figure out how to fix all the issues jargon creates.