Message from the Director
'Q WORDS' OF LIFE AND SCIENCE
"Quality" versus "Quantity?" How often in our daily lives do we engage in that debate? Is more better? Is small beautiful? Would you rather be a jack of many trades or a master of one? Dine annually at Le Bec Fin or weekly at the local diner?
In our work on streams, rivers and their watersheds, we face such questions all the time. Do we need cleaner water or more water? Which is better, natural or regulated flow? Do we want better fishing or more sewage treatment plants?
Nowhere is the quality-versus-quantity debate livelier - or tougher - than in our conversations about what kind of place we want the Stroud Center to be. It permeates our staffing issues: Will our resources go further if we hire one great scientist or two good ones? Should we focus on one stream over a long time or study a variety of streams less intensively? Should our education programs seek to influence relatively few people in depth or spread our resources more broadly - and so more superficially? Should our scientists spend their time polishing one painstaking monograph or several more cursory papers? These are not simple questions, and they have become a lot more difficult of late as both our clients and our funding agencies now demand more output — with higher quality assurance — for less money.
While we believe in the need to produce as much good science as we can, in the end we draw a firm line on the side of quality. We believe our thirst for new understanding of streams and rivers will best be quenched with fewer but better staff, fewer but better projects, fewer but better publications. We will grow - but never at the expense of quality.
And what does making quality the "Q" word of choice at Stroud mean? It means we can't be all things to all people. It means we must know who we are and what we do. It means following our research wherever it leads. It means no easy answers. It means, we firmly believe, better science and better education.
Bern Sweeney
Director
