In mid-September, the National Research Council (NRC) released the results of a year-long study titled: A New Biology for the 21st Century: Ensuring the United States Leads the Coming Biology Revolution. As one of the members of the committee, I believe this report signals the critical importance of biological research writ large, and the fundamental nature of ecological research in particular, in ways that will reverberate throughout the entire Ecological Society of America (ESA), and indeed, society in general. The report lays out several substantial challenges that the world will certainly face over the coming decades: feeding a growing human population, slowing and reversing ecosystem degradation, providing sustainable energy alternatives to fossil fuels, and customizing healthcare for individuals. It argues that these challenges are of such magnitude that they play an equal role in justifying a need for increased research along with the more traditional interest in satisfying our own curiosity about how biological and ecological systems work. The report also identifies the investments in fundamental research infrastructure, observational capabilities, and information technologies that will be required, as well as the biological foundation that needs to be improved: recognizing and using the outcome of long evolutionary histories of adaptability, understanding the mechanisms that govern the relationship between genotypes and phenotypes, and understanding the dynamics of complicated networks in biological systems. Several features of this report and its recommendations should be of considerable interest to ecologists, as a number of the challenges identified are inherently ecological in nature. The problem of feeding a human population expected to reach 9 billion without continuing to contribute to ecosystem degradation is as much an ecological issue of providing sustainable services as it is an applied biological problem in creating, deploying, and managing new, more adaptable crops. The development of sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels through biology is as much a problem in understanding the forces that control land-use change and the ecological consequences of those changes as it is a matter of creating better enzyme packages for decomposing cellulose. And the reversal of environmental degradation and concomitant restoration of ecosystems have been major concerns of ecologists for decades, both in responding to local stresses and the impacts of climate change. The importance of these issues is obvious. What should be equally obvious, and what the report points out, is that the potential solutions are interdisciplinary – within the various biological subdisciplines as well as across traditional scientific disciplines. In this respect, ecologists have a critical role to play. I see our role as having at least three different aspects. The first involves research. As a community, we have a long history of productive research collaborations with other biological subdisciplines, as well as with atmospheric scientists, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and all the other research communities with environmental applications and interests. But the timeframes of the challenges outlined in the NRC report will require an even greater dedication of our leading researchers to the rapid development of interdisciplinary teams. The second revolves around education. Many ESA members already have substantial experience as part of interdisciplinary teams, but for most of us, that experience has been hard-won, and is the result of long years of learning to communicate effectively with scientists from other disciplines, training, traditions, and scientific backgrounds. The New Biology will demand of us that we seek more creative ways to prepare our students for the inherently interdisciplinary tasks that lie ahead. The third aspect centers on communication. The issues outlined in the NRC report are extensive, difficult, long-lasting, and demand solutions, not just diagnosis. We must be equally skilled in communicating the results of our science, including both its successes and its limitations, to political and public audiences who will ultimately make the decisions about possible paths forward. Meeting these challenges will require our full creativity as researchers, as teachers, and as communicators. The agenda laid out in the NRC report is daunting, but necessary if we are to make the vital contributions to a sustainable future that we are capable of making.