Our vision for this pause is to bring together academics, activists, and advocates to acknowledge, identify, and address challenges to collaboration.  We hope to support and empower academics to be better advocates; to convert environmental scientists into environmental leaders, encourage the pursuit of more use-inspired science, and educate on how to better express uncertainty, rather than use it to justify inaction.  At the same time, we hope to better educate activists and advocates on the science behind agriculture and climate change; clarifying what we know and can say with confidence, as well as how to be more discerning at identifying rigorous science.

Ultimately, we believe that academics and activists agree on far more than we disagree on, but we have been pegged against each other without substantial efforts to engage in dialogue and seek compromises between the two.  We hope to utilize this pause to identify and highlight the issues we do agree on; while acknowledging and working through issues where disagreement still exists.  More importantly, however, we hope to begin building a stronger coalition of activists, advocates, and academics who can reach across the aisle and support one another in building a food and agricultural system that can not only adapt to climate change, but also mitigate it.