Oceanography is a powerful and well-established environmental science. In the face of the growing human impact on the global environment, the discipline must lead in understanding causes and consequences of human-driven change. This will require science that begins to routinely exploit large experiments for learning. The potential for these experiments is widely evident in fisheries where human activity creates powerful manipulations. This essay, however, could have been written based entirely on examples drawn from the literature on eutrophication or species invasions. In other words, these opportunities are extensive. Oceanographers - by their very training, are well equipped to take the broad view and to overcome measurement limitations with powerful technical and intellectual innovation. A wise funding agency will facilitate this work and recognize that these efforts may well evolve from new alignments among non-governmental organizations, management agencies, and scientists. In our view, those alignments will be most advantageous to our science and to the society that sponsors it if they can adopt an approach based on bold, large-scale experimental manipulations.

Reprinted with Permission from http://www.ecostudies.org