Before it hit the mainstream, the green movement was often criticized as having its head in the clouds. Sure, saving the environment is a brilliant idea, but it’s just too expensive and will inconvenience too many people. Ecologists, with their earnest messages about rainforests, corals and other delicate ecosystems, were seen as part of this.

Yet that picture might be changing. One of the main themes of this week’s meeting was the idea of pragmatism in dealing presenting ecological solutions and recommendations to policymakers. That’s reflected as much as anything by the sheer number of economists giving talks here.

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Think about it for a second – what would be wrong with a synthetic version of the wilderness, if you can still go hiking and fishing there? How about a virtual reality program that allows you to witness the fall colours of New England without going there?

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Why are scientists so dubious, wary, and even downright scared of journalists? While so many politicians, musicians and sportsmen seem to be in their element when talking to the press, attitudes to the fourth estate among the scientific community range from mistrust to open hostility and cynicism. Yet scientific issues have never been more important and newsworthy, and the public appetite for coverage of scientific issues has never been greater. So how can we get scientists to relax and feel comfortable speaking to the media?

It was this question that led to me finding myself sat on a panel last night alongside Wired magazine’s Adam Rogers, freelance science journalist Thomas Hayden, and Paul Rogers of the San Jose Mercury News. Facing us were several dozen scientists, all keen to find out exactly what we look for in a story and how they can get their message across.

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Biodiversity loss isn’t just bad for the species that go extinct – it can also lead to major increases in human disease. That’s the message from ecologists at the ESA meeting, who are today calling for greater awareness of the often complex link between ecosystem harm and human health.

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If you’ve ever tried to eat lunch in an urban park you might know this already, but ecologists have shown that squirrels get a lot more cocky when there are loads of them around. Tommy Parker of the University of Missouri-Columbia studied squirrels in several parks in Baltimore, as well as Lafayette Park in nearby Washington DC – the single place with the highest density of grey squirrels in the world. What’s more, it’s bang opposite the White House: “It’s hard to do science with all the secret service guys around,” Parker says.

The results showed that squirrels, like people, get more pushy in crowded urban areas. Parks with the highest squirrel densities witnessed more squirrel-on-squirrel brawls, and the rodents were also less nervous of people. “The Lafeyette squirrels are very aggressive and not wary at all,” says Parker. “You could walk directly up to them and they would just lean on your shoe.” Yet another reason not to loiter near the White House, then…

Often, the best way to explain a scientific idea to someone is to put it in terms they can easily envisage, using a cleverly chosen metaphor, simile or other quip. A bon mot can clarify a tricky concept more easily than all the powerpoint presentations in the world – a case in point being Mark Twain’s pithy meteorological explanation: “Climate is what you expect; weather is what you get.”

So the ESA decided to hold a competition to find the best analogy to explain an ecological concept – in a field where ecologists often have problems explaining ideas to each other, let alone to the public. The runner-up’s prize went to the following explanation of the staggering odds against an individual salmon successfully reproducing: Imagine you have to drive from the centre of a city all the way to the highway on the outskirts without stopping even once. Thus, if you come up against just a single red light anywhere on the journey you don’t make it.

The winning entry sought to explain the complex issue of ecosystem stability in terms of Jenga. Say each brick represents a species – at first, removing a piece makes the system a little more unstable, but overall it still stands up. But remove too many bricks and there comes a point when it all comes crashing down.

While it might be true that no man is an island, it seems that his teeth are. According to researchers studying the bacteria that cause gum disease, your pearly whites have more in common with a tropical archipelago than you think.

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Almost a year after Hurricane Katrina, researchers are still wringing their hands over the continued failure to start thinking about how to stop it happening again. The time has come, they say, for some drastic solutions… just don’t expect them to be popular.

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More than 2,500 ecologists have descended on Memphis, Tennessee, for this year’s annual conference, which has the them ‘Icons and upstarts of ecology’. And the society chose a political upstart (if indeed it’s possible to be an upstart at 58 years of age) to give the opening address. Ron Sims, county executive for King County, Washington, is the first county leader in the United States to sign up to the Chicago Climate Exchange, a voluntary counterpart to Europe’s formal emissions-trading scheme, which aims to cut emissions by imposing caps on emissions and then trading in the right to exceed them if necessary.

Sims claims that the move, along with a raft of other green initiatives, has the backing of the impressive roll-call of businesses, Microsoft and Starbucks included, that are based in his backyard. But his attitude makes him an upstart as compared with the continued slow progress of the federal government in tackling carbon emissions. In an impassioned speech, he argued that all politics is ultimately local, and that “the federal government will move slowly by design”. He also called for scientists to speak up for themselves, citing the oft-quoted example that, among scientists, there is a genuine consensus that man-made climate change is really happening, however much politicians and the media would like to maintain that the issue is shrouded in controversy.

Although this is not a climate conference, there was much nodding of heads, because ecosystems so often hold up a mirror to climate change. And the fact that we’re in Memphis, which is currently sweltering under an official severe heat advisory warning, was not lost on anyone either.