I had this crazy thought that things would slow down a little after the conference.  I definitely wasn’t considering what missing a week of classes was going to do to my workload.  Oh well.

The conference was a good experience for me.  It was a smaller conference that brought together policy makers, social scientists, and ecologists to talk about water issues.  Based on the arguments conversations we had,  I can see why things take so long to change.  Most of the students, including myself, were very frustrated with the pace of the discussion.  We spent so long very carefully defining the problem (which we all knew and agreed on before we got there) instead of having real conversations about solutions.  For example, we talked a lot about how important it is to engage all stakeholders, or at least as many as you can.  I knew this before I got to the conference and so did everyone else.  I wanted to talk about why we fail at it so often, how to do it, and what to do when you can’t engage them.