Coping with collapse: Ecological and social dynamics in ecosystem management

The role of ecological expertise in policymaking is evolving. In fields such as engineering or medicine, long-established professional standards guide the application of expertise in public decisionmaking. Professional ecologists, however, participate in decisionmaking in variable and changing ways. Some function as technicians, providing factual information used by decisionmaking; others as detectives, drawing attention to some previously unrecognized problem; and still others as advocates, adducing information designed to support a particular position. In some of the most successful applications of ecology, governments have actively sought the expert opinions of ecologists. In other cases, ecological expertise has been manipulated by agencies or interest groups to serve narrow political goals. Some ecologists have compounded the discipline's problems through self-serving advocacy, arguing that "more research is needed"--an argument aimed at sustaining their own funding--while delaying effective action on environmental problems. Other ecologists, however, are frustrated by these abuses of expertise and by dilution of ecology's impact on public policy. Such frustrations prompted a reconsideration of ecologists' participation in decisionmaking processes, which led to the papers in this issue of BioScience. In this article, we begin by looking at the context in which ecological expertise is ignored or manipulated to serve narrow interests.