“What are you doing?” my three year-old accuses me, wandering into the kitchen at 7am on a school morning fuzzy-haired and bunny-dragging. Oatmeal cookie frozen in my guilty hand, I debate, Sneaking a treat? Getting ready for work? Standing with feet firmly on the laminate? It turns out she really wants to know why, telepathy failing, I set out the purple not the blue plate for the toast. Your question is so important. And rarely self-evident.

Crafting good questions plagues conservation as much as chronic underfunding and powerful fossil-fuel lobbies. Maybe people don’t think it’s important. Maybe it’s just plain hard. I think some of it is that a question that is good and right depends on your perspective and when you’re passionate about your work it’s hard to remember to notice and accept alternate perspectives.

Let’s say we want to set up a series of marine protected areas (MPAs) in Reeflandia. They’ll be governed by local communities and funded by a huge cruise ship company. The conservation science question is, “Will the MPA network enhance connectivity for critical life stages of endangered migratory fish?”

Wrong, wrong, wrong! Well, right, right, right, but only for those who care.

Maybe the right question for the human community is, “Does managing the MPA network mean we get formal recognition and decision-making power from the provincial government?” Perhaps the right question for the cruise ship company is, “Will clients pay more for a ‘people and nature’ cruise?” All three questions make up the science of how conservation works.

One more question, “Why do I care?”

I care because I’ve seen conservation science programs get caught up in measuring what is easy or interesting or fundable without taking the time to articulate what we are trying to do and why. Maybe our real conservation question wasn’t about the fish. It was more like, “Can partnerships help us help reefs?” We won’t know if we don’t ask.