The more I learn about specific issues within energy and environmental policy–biofuels, for instances–the more clearly the complexity of those issues demand reshifting the terms of the debate. Biofuels, for example, aren’t just about “energy independence.” But they’re also not just about renewable sources of energy. There are so many issues interwoven in this one “wickedly complex” topic–life-cycle carbon emissions, land use concerns, food prices, agricultural subsidies, fertilizer run off, water management, biodiversity–that the top-level framework for thinking about biofuels has to be sustainability.
If one other thing is clear about the complexity of the biofuels debate, it’s that in order to make informed policy decisions, we need more research to understand the problems and their interdisciplinary solutions. Might this work benefit from a prestigious, well-organized and well-supported open-access journal that drove discussion? At least one such journal has been around since 2005: Sustainability: Science, Practice, and Science.
But the publication I’m envisioning would have a little more polish, a little more bravado, and a lot more marketing and community development. Basically, it would have the digital panache, selectivity, and impact scores of a journal in the Public Library of Science family.
Naive, perhaps, to think that a single journal could help drive solutions for debates like those over biofuels? Absolutely. But if you’ve seen ecologists debate miscanthus crop yields and the attendant impact on Iowa watersheds within the economic framework of the current Farm Bill, then you know that running a provocative publication is the easy part.