Traits of a good ecologist: What do contemporary ecologists think?

Background/Question/Methods:

By the time ecologists are employed, they have developed a set of personal and professional values they take to be appropriate for being a “good” ecologist—good being a subjective result of personal influences. Because ecology itself is multidimensionally heterogeneous; we can expect variety in ecologists’ idealizations of good. How do individual perspectives of ecology influence preferences for traits associated with professional “goodness.” We are exploring these relationships with data from a survey of U.S., non-student members of the ESA.  Our survey was executed in April 2010 and yielded complete sets of responses from 1,215 respondents, 20% of the pool. For this aspect of the survey, we requested assessments of importance over a 100 point scale for 15 traits that might be associated with being a good ecologist, e.g. has an appreciation for the beauty of nature, possesses scientific objectivity, and, has a sense of duty to future generations.  Besides calculating the ranking of these traits for the entire population, responses were cross-correlated with seven respondent properties. These properties included: age, gender, highest degree, employment, primary domain of ecological inquiry, primary method for investigating nature, and the aspect of professional activity giving the greatest personal satisfaction.

Results/Conclusions:

The entire respondent population valued traits associated with scientific competency and rigor (e.g. has rigorous mathematical training), over traits associated with aesthetic values (e.g. enjoys being outdoors), and especially ethical values, (e.g. believes that we are morally obligated to preserve aspects of the natural world.)  The ranking of these traits varied with age (e.g. valuation of aesthetic and ethical values increased with age) but not with gender. We can only wonder whether these age-related differences represent changes in the ecological community with sociological trends, or changes in individual values with personal experience.  Divergences in trait valuation emerged with subpopulations sorted by domain of inquiry, primary method of investigation and source of satisfaction, supporting our suspicions that multiple cultures exist within the discipline of ecology.

How might our disciplinary pioneers have valued these traits?  Have our values changed since the times of Darwin, Humboldt, Forbes, Clements, Elton, Hutchinson and the Odums?  Were our disciplinary forebears as culturally disparate as we are today?  Did their attitudes change over their career lifetimes.  Answers to these questions require diligent archiving and disciplined historical scholarship.  Expert science historiography will help us better understand who we are and the sources of our professionally relevant values.