While criticizing our work and going to considerable effort to preach what minimal models cannot tell, van Nes and Scheffer overlooked that our article (Huppert et al. 2002) was intended to convey the opposite, namely, what minimum models can tell. Our article reflects a more positive and optimistic philosophy. In their critique, van Nes and Scheffer confuse three different and unrelated problems. The most serious technical point relates to a parameter scaling error of little consequence that had mistakenly crept into our article. The others concern the bottom-up versus top-down controversy in ecology and the role of minimal models. We address these in turn.