Day two, Society for Conservation Biology annual meeting
Another long, inspiring, overstimulating, brain-jangling day. I’ve now sat through 34 presentations on a dizzying range of subjects and places—a few comically academic, a couple just flat-footed or wrong-headed, but most absolutely riveting or brilliant or heroic, and a few simply visionary. I’ve been typing up notes and trying to catch up with everything I’ve heard and learned—it’s now very late, and I’ve got to get up in time to catch Chuck Cook’s plenary talk on fisheries issues early Wednesday morning. But I’m taking the afternoon off tomorrow to write up the highlights and headlines, and post them here.
So very briefly, for now: It’s surreal to be a journalist reporting on an event that’s getting virtually no press coverage, while jaw-dropping headlines and great stories are falling at your feet at the rate of one every hour or two. The inability or unwillingness of conservation biologists to package their discoveries, not just as rigorous science, but as amazing news, is certainly endearing, in a way—but still, these guys have got to get a better press agent.
