Lets Appoint a Committee to Study It.

There's an old saying in rural America: You don't fatten a calf by weighing it. Similarly, you don't halt a species decline by counting its numbers. There is a ntable mania, worldwide it seems, among scientists to document the numbers and range of various species of animals. In 2000 for example, in San Francisco, the keynote speaker at the State of the (San Francisco) Bay conference noted that ninety per cent of the fish and other aquatic species in the bay were either in steep decline, or had disappeared entirely. Her proposal - "We need to get funding for projects to study this problem." Revealing, I believe, her principal aim. Money, to wit. If the good doctor (PhD; not a real doctor) gave a hoot about the problem, she would probably have suggested something else; like not diverting all the freshwater flows from the bay, or stemming the flow of industrial waste into the bay. These seem to me to be relatively modest and fairly obvious steps to take. We are hearing similar calls now at the meeting of the World Conservation Union, being held this week in Bangkok. At the same time that ministers in the Thai government are decrying the "waste" of water being allowed to flow into the sea instead of being diverted to dry areas (most of the nation at the moment) to grow rice for export. Exported at a price that makes middlemen rich while increasing the debt of the farmers who sell at a loss. Sorry, I digress again. To resume: However, it is well understood among scientists as well as politicians that a solved problem receives no funding. A study in the hand is far preferable to remediating action.
Thus we find, not to our surprose, that legions of "concerned scientists", possessed of mortgages, credit card debt, and an addiction to regular meals, display a marked tendency to wish to weigh the calf rather than to actually do the necessary things to fatten it.
Just to establish that I'm not totally cynical, I do acknowledge two things. One, that it is indeed important to study these isssues, which are not simple at all, and two, that there are a lot of people who are calling for action, and even some people who are simply acting.
Good for them!