Interview with Steve Ellner

Sarcozona has just posted her latest ESA interview, with Steve Ellner. Great stuff. Steve's thoughts on why microcosms are useful very much mirror my own. And he has a very trenchant question at the end about whether much of the putatively "policy-relevant" research ecologists do is really all that policy-relevant. That raises an issue worth its own post at some point--what "fundamental" research is and why it's worthwhile (indeed, essential) even in a world faced with urgent "applied" problems.