Help us to help "physicist and biologist cubs" grow into scientists able to deal with sustainable development

My issue area is \"Women in informal and care economy\".
And I have a sub-issue, too: \"\"

Personal testimony: molding young environment scientists individually.

My story deals with undergraduate instruction in the field of environmental physics, biology and geology. This is a very important point in my feeling: if we wish a sustainable future for our descendants and us, we strongly need many scientists who are competent in these fields, passionate, and willing to share their knowledge with following generations.

This, because the problem we face is immense, but yet largely unknown. We know something about how life and global ecology function, but this knowledge is insufficient to imagine reliably what will happen to our planet, us, our children and their descendants. Without reliable prediction, we are not able to govern.

To better know, we need the knowers. Allowing new scientists to grow, become productive and thrive should be a top priority.

As far as I've seen in the last 30 years, helping young scientists to form their professional identity and passions can only in part be done by frontal courses. Sure these have a great importance to impart basic knowledge, but also are largely insufficient to grow adult scientists.

What actually goes on is a behind-the-scene, immense activity of mentoring, following student theses, leading laboratories. This work is done mostly informally, often unpaid, and without any positive career impact. Meanwhile it is immensely gratifying, when you do: you strongly feel doing something useful, both individually and to the world. It may too be heavy and \"time consuming\", would \"consuming\" be an appropriate term.

Slightly rephrased: \"typical women work\".

On the other side, it can not been done differently. When issuing a frontal lecture you may \"teach\" 100 people. But when you want to form new colleagues, you can only interact with them one after one individually, and give them something on a person-by-person basis. This can not be industrialized.

If it is so indispensable, why not acnowledging and supporting it?

Recommendation

I urge the World leaders to acknowledge the positive role scientific research (not only applied: also basic) will have in the process of devising sensible, realistic and rationally informed approaches to sustainable development.

And to foster scientist development activities to date made by informal networks, by encouraging individual stated to emit laws which:
- Acknowledge the existence of informal networks aimed at developing students near graduation to became scientists;
- Acknowledge their positive and indispensable function;
- Acknowledge their position across the boundary of academia and productive world;
- For people working in academia: acknowledge participation to these networks (and, more generally, of \"relational\" work) as a legitimate, accountable and career-score-generating work;
- For students: to include mentoring and informally-given knowledge and goods in academic curriculum;
- And finally, to allocate appropriate resources for this all.

In the meanwhile, we go on, informally, caring and nourishing our cubs.

Love.

Mauri

In partnership with the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), World Pulse is collecting personal stories outlining women’s experiences and recommendations on sustainable and equitable development for presentation at the Rio +20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development.

All stories submitted on our community platform between now and June 3, 2012 will be presented at the Rio+20 Conference. Additionally, selected entries will be published in World Pulse’s digital magazine and distributed widely to international media partners.