Improving ecological communication: the role of ecologists in environmental policy formation

This paper begins with the premise that communication regarding ecological risk and ecologically based management decisions should be improved. Failures of communication are attributed to lack of terms, indicators, and measures that are based in ecological science, but that are also associated with important social values. I show that, especially in the area of wetlands management, current scientific and policy discourse has failed to provide adequate linkage between descriptive characteristics of natural systems and changes in social values associated with them. As a result, wetlands policy is being implemented without analysis of social values affected by policies such as wetland banking and mitigation efforts. Ecologists have contributed to this unfortunate situation because they are reluctant to mix values issues with scientific study. I also show that ecologists are slow to pick up on signals flowing from policy discourse to ecological science; this is illustrated by the fact that ecologists often fail to study nature at a scale that would provide guidance to decision makers. I suggest that the problems of ecological communication would be abated if policy and science were integrated within a broader, adaptive-management system in which both scientific hypotheses and social values are evaluated within a broader system of experimental management. Such a broader system of management could include an integrated language of management that is: (1) adaptive, (2) perspectival, (3) multiscaled, (4) operationalizable, (5) normative in content, and (6) communication enhancing.