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At the same time, protected from both the logic of the marketplace and the capriciousness of politics by the imperative of national defense
This is a good point from the article. A problem is that in order to really "solve problems", science needs to be protected from the marketplace AND from bureaucracy/politics, yet still be directed by someone to point it towards what's most important.
I just read the well known "The Soil and Health" by Sir Albert Howard. He was a British agricultural scientist who identified massive systemic issues in agricultural research and practice in the first half of the 20th century, but found quite a lot of difficulty addressing it, with obstacles thrown at him from multiple sides. To summarize briefly:
1. The natural direction of the official research institutions where he worked often delved into "pure science" that had little to nothing to do with real world problems. He was supposed to be studying agricultural science, but had no opportunity to actually practice agriculture, and therefore wasn't doing anything that actually improved real-world agriculture in any real way.
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In Barbados I was a laboratory hermit, a specialist of specialists, intent on learning more and more about less and less....I began to detect a fundamental weakness in the organization of that research which constituted officially the more important part of my work. I was an investigator of plant diseases, but I had myself no crops on which I could try out the remedies I advocated: I could not take my own advice before offering it to other people. It was borne in on me that there was a wide chasm between science in the laboratory and practice in the field, and I began to suspect that unless this gap could be bridged no real progress could be made in the control of plant diseases: research and practice would remain apart: mycological work threatened to degenerate into little more than a convenient agency by which - provided I issued a sufficient supply of learned reports fortified by a judicious mixture of scientific jargon - practical difficulties could be side-tracked.
Even when "sample plots" were used, the falseness to their real-world truths was enormous. A half-acre plot test plot is not farmed in at all the same way as a 30-acre real-world, and issues like edge effects are massively increased so as to possibly affect the entire plot and thus invalidate the entire test. Continuous tests of the same kind of crop on the same plot do not reflect the best practices of real-world farming, which rotate various crops through the seasons and years, which may result in complete different ideal methodology than one-crop studies. And finally, for every test completely new material (most importantly new seeds that were selected from the best produce in the country!) were imported in from outside sources for each year's crop, which in no way shows the real-world effects of the process that acts on the seeds of the strain as they go through generation after generation, as they would in a real farm. Of course, most scientists looking for publishable results are understandably reluctant to test 30-acre plots in 5-year cycles with all the additional variables of multiple crops and seeds and soils that need to be put through decades of cycles before their long-term health and viability can be truly evaluated!
In short, the best process for a half-acre edge-effect monoculture farmed with different small-plot techniques and continuously produced without rotation with a constant influx of new seeds from an unrelated source, even if you repeat your experiments for 50 years, will never tell you what will work best in all the complexity of the real world.
But all the size, timescale, and complexity of the real world is really difficult to publish with any frequency.
2. However, the "marketplace" profit motive fails even worse in his estimation:
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The phrase mining the land is now recognized as a very accurate description of what takes place when the human race flings itself on an area of stored fertility and uses it up without thought of the future. In the mid-nineteenth century this began to take place on an unprecedented scale. For if agriculture was, so to say, the nurse of industry, she was persuaded to learn one salient lesson from her nursling. This was the lesson of the profit motive....
The result of the exploitation of the soil has been the destruction of soil fertility on a colossal scale...if the profit and loss account is made to look brilliant merely because capital has been transferred and then regarded as dividend, what business is sound?
He goes on a lot more about this, and Wendell Berry later picked up on him wonderfully. Basically, the marketplace values short-term gain over long-term gain, values speed over sustainability, values commodities that must be resold new over recyclable or sustainable ones, values things that can be patented over things that exist naturally, and values machines over human workers. In short, the natural direction of the marketplace will be to employ fewer and fewer people so that the work gets less and less attention in the course of destroying more and more resources to produce more and more product of lower and lower true quality that is further and further from nature as quickly as possible until the available capital stored in the land runs out and the whole thing collapses. And nothing in the marketplace is geared to stop such "progress" until the moment of collapse appears within the short-term horizon of the CEO who has to prove his bottom line within the next 3-4 years or the investment manager who has to prove year-to-year interest profits or risk his investors pulling out.
To get away from short-term publishing AND short-term profit as the primary motive for scientific exploration is not easy. And I don't really have a plan to make it happen.
Jimi wrote:
I'm here to tell ya, if "the US military" gets it in their head that they plan to do something, it tends to get done. Also, they really do their best to comply with environmental law (surprisingly or not, many public organizations are pretty blase about this...). Consequently, they are fantastic partners in conservation. That's what I have personally experienced with the Navy, Air Force, Army, and also the Army National Guard.
That's pretty cool to hear. With all the real problems I have with the military, it's not too hard to see why most other large landowners (private or public) would have a lot more ulterior motives and/or simple incompetence in the way than a large military base.
Bryan Hamilton wrote:
For me, the real win, win in conservation and ecology is to do both. Answer the applied question and try to get at some bigger questions too. Its not always possible but often times there is considerable overlap.
Jimi wrote:
So anyway...I guess I'd have to admit I'm a strong proponent of managing research.
I agree with you here. But I often have a core set of questions that have to be addressed with funding. What the researcher wants to do above and beyond that in terms of research goals is their businesses.
I'm also noticing a lot more willingness from researchers to work on applied management questions. Funding is tight and researchers are more often willing to work on management issues.
That's really good to hear too.
Statistics: Posted by jonathan — September 28th, 2016, 8:08 am