[Coral-List] ICRS2020 and remote meetings

Gregory Boland g_boland at hotmail.com
Sat Sep 14 00:42:32 UTC 2019


Great point Peter.  Just back on list with personal email after a year in retirement. As an over-the-hill "sometimes" coral reef scientist, we struggled constantly relating the value of networking and face-to-face science conference meetings to management my entire 20-year career at MMS/BOEM.  Many requests for travel were granted, but not nearly enough to keep scientists in touch with the cutting-edge and fully inspire future research needs.  I have not noticed a mention of the elephant in the room: are folks talking about a carbon reduction of one less passenger on an Airbus 330 or whatever flying RT to the conference being measurable? Would 100 less passengers make a difference? Will all flights continue as scheduled regardless of how many coral reef scientists decide to watch presentations on a computer?  Great heart-felt philosophy, but.. just saying... (take care of your feet, the world needs them).

Greg Boland
retired Biological Oceanographer

________________________________
From: Coral-List <coral-list-bounces at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> on behalf of Peter Sale via Coral-List <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
Sent: Thursday, September 12, 2019 7:50 PM
To: Grottoli, Andrea <grottoli.1 at osu.edu>; coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
Subject: [Coral-List] ICRS2020 and remote meetings

Well spoken Andrea, and congratulations to the organizing committee to have thought carefully about how to green the ICRS meetings.  Science could shoot itself in the foot if it were to address climate change by reducing opportunities for face-to-face interaction at conferences.  Coral reef scientists should all be trying to walk the walk on climate change, but there are many ways of doing this - avoiding our one global quadrennial meeting seems an unwise solution to the problem.  That said, as an over-the-hill reef scientist I am not planning to travel to Bremen - I wish those who do, the best possible meeting, and the invigoration of research ideas such a meeting can provoke.  Those of us who attended the second ICRS on board the Marco Polo never forgot that experience, and I can think of a number of subsequent ICRS meetings that were equally worth travelling to.

Peter Sale
University of Windsor
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