As the world-leading scientific journal PNAS launches an issue dedicated to how we can best design marine reserves, I can’t help but wonder who’s actually reading all this stuff. Over the years I’ve noticed hundreds of authors giving advice not just to ‘policy makers’, but also to ‘reserve managers’. Presumably these reserve managers must be incredibly well-funded, because by my count most of them have been subscribing to the jouranls ‘conservation biology’, ‘conservation letters’, ‘ecological applications’ and PNAS for decades.

Scientists are constantly worried about how they can interface with policy makers, presumably because many of them (I know I do) have an inherent desire for ‘truth’, and get upset when people are unable to recognise it. I personally think there’s something quite comical about some scientists’ responses to the idea that policy makers aren’t engaging enough with the literature: they write highly-cited papers calling for scientists and policy makers to work together (some feature some lovely metaphors about co-evolution), and argue over the particulars of how this could best be achieved. Yet at no point do they actually seem to do anything!

Sadly, the reason for all these problems are blindingly simple – which is probably why the issue hasn’t been attacked that strongly by scientists, who as a rule are bored by things they already know the answers to. Policy makers listen at first, because they are reasonable people, but there comes a point when they need to take action, and after that it doesn’t help to have scientists arguing that actually they should change tack – particularly since scientists must exaggerate differences between theories to help move their fields forward.

A good example would be the ‘hotspots’ prioritisation debate that has raced its way across the pages of Nature (and this very blog) over the last decade or so. Conservation International got very excited at the idea of being able to save most of the world’s biota by concentrating on just a few parts of the world. While scientists were right to clamour (a decade later) that it might not be quite as simple as this, and we needed to change what we were doing right now if we were to save the optimal number of species, they missed that CI were already in the process of saving quite a lot with the millions of dollars they’d raised and didn’t really need anyone telling their funders they were wrong, thank you very much.

Which brings us back to those ‘reserve managers’. In my experience, people working ‘on the ground’ tend to have low opinions of scientists who postulate from their ivory towers, and so even if they had time to follow the intricacies of debate flowing in the pages of PNAS they wouldn’t bother, partly as a matter of principle. So if the authors of these articles in PNAS actually want to see any return from their hard work, they’re going to have to get out there and start getting their hands dirty.