Despite the efforts of the winter weather and an over-complicated information system owned by American Airlines (which has little real information to offer), I managed to attend part of the Council of Scientific Societies Presidents meeting in DC this weekend. Session for session, there is more substance in this gathering than I’ve experienced at other conferences. Every speaker seems really top-notch and able to deliver deep content in a manner that truly spans disciplinary boundaries. Most enjoyable was Rob Dietz’s overview of the Center for the Study of Steady-State Economy’s work on assessing the real costs and values of our current use of the planet. He made a lot of sense, and made an even stronger impression when he revealed he believed so much in this approach to economic modeling that he had moved his whole family into a sustainable community housing arrangement in Oregon. 
Among his many messages, I took away the argument that economic growth is a really inappropriate measure or goal for a nation to live by and that we need to rethink our collective sense of what is good for our societies, measure this appropriately, and then set policy. Of course, much of this also requires behavioral changes that perhaps economists are not best equipped to understand. More interdisciplinary challenges ahead.
Lots of other good stuff at CSSP, including a too-short but important committee discussion on the need (or not, as I argued) for longer moratorium periods for scholarly work in open access publication processes. I understand the realities of professional associations and their publication revenues, but we are entering an age where the ideas and requirements for access will so fundamentally shift scholarly practices that locking material down to protect the market for certain journals will no longer seem viable. It’s fair to say, I was in a minority on this one but the discussion was instructive.
While CSSP is really a closed shop, it is possible to represent your society there without being president. I suspect the small size and selectivity is not independent of the resulting high quality discourse, but what a shame more academic gatherings were no so stimulating.