Advocacy, science, policy, and life in the real world. Available from the Internet. That is what Gordon Baskerville suggests in the following Perspective, but seven commentators with experience in both science and policy enrich and challenge that view. L. Baskerville 1 Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia Vancouver, British Columbia Disruption of the structure and function of ecological systems constitutes a set of major problems for contemporary society. It is straightforward to conclude that the actions of humankind that create these problems are improperly, or insufficiently, informed.
Actions follow on decisions, and a decision is a choice among forecasts.
It is rare that a manager making a decision chooses to implement a forecast for a bad future. As a society, we seem to converge on pathological gridlock with respect to linking economics and ecology in decision making. When ecological science does not enter this computation, there is no basis for testing the forecast of the decision with respect to dynamics of the system. Thus, it is common that failure of a decision results in damage to the system, without benefit of learning by the manager, which, in the final analysis, is the place where learning counts. The opportunity to learn exists whenever expectation does match reality, but the quality of learning depends heavily on how clearly the functional basis for the expectation is stated a priori.