NIE YES!!!!

[lday at iquest.net]

>I dunno. sounds like more government to me. i don't think gov't is the 
>way to go. 

It's not a regulatory agency.  It's a proposed funding agency.  So that
a tiny trickle of govt funds can go to the kind of research we think is
important, after huge agencies like NIH and the military have gobbled most of
it.  So that people doing studies of the ecology and populations 
of non-game, non-ag-pest animals and plants can get enough money to
buy gas for their field vehicles.

NIE, National Institutes for the Environment, would be like the 
Natl Instit of Health (funds medical research), or Natl Sci Foundation
(funds science of all kinds, so poor entomologists have to compete with
chemists, physicists, and molecular genetics labs), or the USDA (funds
agricultural research), or NASA (funds space and atmospheric research).
Notice a lack of any existing agency to cover the stuff we care about?
That's why ecology/environmental/biodiversity/etc stuff is so poorly
funded.  This will change that.

Of course, you may believe that govt shouldn't fund any scientific research
at all.  But if it does, I don't see why a small piece can't go to what
most of us believe is important.

Liz

(I know all this because my ex-advisor is one of the two people who
started the idea.)

Liz Day

LDAY at iquest.net 
Indianapolis, Indiana, central USA, 40 N latitude, zone 5.