Marlene Zuk

Last month, the cabinet of the UAE government banned the import of palm trees from any country where red palm weevil had been identified. “This is a great danger for the date palm industry,” said Abdul Wahab Zaid, the director of the date palm research and development unit in the UAE. “Ideally, movement of planting material from infested plantations within the country and also from one country to another needs to be stopped. Wherever this is not possible, it is essential to implement strict preand post-entry quarantine regimes wherein only pest-free and certified planting material can be transported,” writes J.R. Faleiro, at the Plant Protection Laboratory, ICAR, in Goa, India, for the Red Palm Weevil Forum. One of the major worries about the weevil’s arrival in Europe is the last remaining population of the Cretan date palm, which is found in Vai in the north-east of the island. In 2006 the weevil was found in many parts of Greece, including Crete. Researchers suspect that the import of many palms ahead of the Athens Olympics in 2004 may have been a source of the pest. In Malta, like Crete, which has critically endangered populations of native palms, there has been widespread concern about the weevil. “It came fairly easily. But eliminating and controlling it is almost impossible,” the Times of Malta recently reported. “Measures necessary to control this introduced alien species are expensive, as with all other alien species. One wonders if the entrepreneurs who have been directly importing palm trees to the Maltese islands are going to finance such measures to control this species — though perhaps the ecological and economic damage is not so much a concern to them as cashing in on the profits,” the paper said. “It is more realistic than pessimistic to conclude that at the end of the day, it will be common families who will eventually have to dig deep into their pockets to pay for the hidden costs. The prevention and control of the introduction of alien invasive species is being handled without any national strategy, without any policy, without any vision but with one driving force — short-term financial return. Who will be paying for such mismanagement?” and credibility that others lack. Also, not to sound too self-aggrandizing, it is harder than it looks. People often tell me that they too intend to write books or articles for a general reader “when they retire” or “if they can find the time”, with the implication that it would be easy to do if they weren’t working on more important things — and perhaps inadvertently meaning that I must not be! In fact, of course, it requires a different set of skills than the ones most of us use as researchers. It is also not a very stable or lucrative way of life. But having said that, I think it is extremely important for scientists to be involved in communicating their findings and their way of approaching problems to the public. I am greatly disturbed by the hostility toward science that one sees in everything from the uncritical embrace of alternative medicine, to the wholesale rejection of technology, to the chasm between ‘the two cultures’. The more we acknowledge that people outside of our discipline can and must understand what we do, the clearer our own thinking becomes. And in interacting with the media, we need to work to overcome the common tendency for journalists to automatically present ‘both sides’ of an issue, even when the scientific consensus is clearly in one camp.