From the recent ladies of disaster — Hurricanes Katrina, Ophelia and Rita along the Gulf Coast — to the monstrous tsunami in the Indian Ocean, Mother Nature is assuming an active role. Farther along the west, mudslides, wildfires and earthquakes have swept California lands and the following question buzzes in our minds: Are climate change and natural disasters part of evolutionary progression or is human society beginning to see repercussions of its misuse of the environment?
Looking forward:
Charles Kennel, Director of Scripps Institute of Oceanography, sees the importance of acknowledging the connection between humans and the environment.
“The world at large hasn’t yet comprehended how large these environmental problems could become, but it’s going to,” said Kennel, the director of SIO and leader of a new program that will deal with global environmental issues. “The question is: When the time comes, are we going to be ready? Will we understand enough science? And, most importantly, will we have trained people who will know what to do? And that’s what universities do. We need to prepare the world to detect problems.”
Faculty members at UCSD and Scripps Institution of Oceanography announced plans over the summer to develop the new collaborative initiative that focuses on addressing environmental issues, including biodiversity, conservation, climate change, air pollution and issues associated with the coastal cities of San Diego and Tijuana.
The goal of the program will be to understand the nature of these environmental problems in terms of science, economics and culture, Kennel said. This knowledge, in turn, is to be used in legislative bodies.
“Encouraging more rapid and broader development of the science needed to inform the political decision-making process about environmental issues, and educating several generations of students about that science, is a main goal of this program as I understand it,” said Myrl Hendershott, a professor of oceanography and supporter of the program. “I think it is a very important matter, one that the university is, in many ways, uniquely equipped to address.”
Plans are quite premature, and a true agenda has yet to be created. However, talk exists of a new building initiative requiring all new buildings to comply with new environmental standards.
The new program will join a national effort to improve the environment, as a number of other universities have launched similar programs in recent years. Currently, there are 14 in the United States, including programs at Columbia, Duke, Yale and the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at UC Santa Barbara.
However, UCSD will be a unique interdisciplinary effort, with the combined efforts of multiple departments including biomedical sciences, earth sciences, social sciences, information sciences and engineering, according to Kennel.
“There is a tremendous amount already going on that we could tie together,” Kennel said. “We want to collect the pieces of the mosaic into a very broad fabric that is big enough to solve problems.”
Various department professors, including Hendershott, have voiced their support for the program, whether or not they are to be involved.
“The university maintains a significant number of programs that have something important to contribute to the new program,” he said. “The earth sciences department is definitely one of those and it is hard to imagine that earth science won’t play an important role in the new program. Whether this is as the present earth sciences program is likely not yet decided.”
However, coordination among departments and finding a common ground will be one of the biggest challenges that the program will face, according to Kennel, who acknowledged the difficulty in “getting a political scientist and an earth scientist to talk.”
Another challenge the program will face is the desire to meet “green” goals, while facing realities. This means also taking finance, regulation and management into consideration along with environmental concerns, according to Raymond Clemencon, a political science professor at UCSD. Establishing “relevant practical implementation rather than feel-good activism” will be one of the barriers the program will have to bypass, he said.
Specifically, the program will focus on environmental sustainability, or to put it more simply, a self-preserving practice for the human race, Kennel said.
“If you look forward about 50 years or so, you’re going to find that the United Nations will predict that the world’s population will level off at about 9 billion, and that world population will have to feed, clothe and shelter itself,” Kennel said.
Kennel hopes to ride UCSD’s recent wave of scientific notoriety, highlighted by Newsweek, which named the campus “hottest for science” over the summer, to develop the program.
“This is one of the most exciting scientific environments I’ve ever been in,” Kennel said. “The three areas that I think are most important to this program are earth science, biology and medicine and information science. Some universities may be better than UCSD in one of these areas, but I don’t think any university in the country has a collection of the three as strong as UCSD.”
Funding for the program is currently nonexistent, but will come primarily from federal research grants and private donors, with little or no funds coming from the university, Kennel said. The practice is consistent with most research done at UCSD, which is one of the most successful universities in the country at raising research grants, he said.
Financing will be a major hurdle for program, according to Hendershott.
“Some of the science and engineering required is global and can’t be learned or practiced cheaply,” he said.
Although the program still in the preliminary stages, the public has already shown a great amount of support for it, with much of the support is coming from the student population, Kennel said.
“Volunteers have turned up saying they really want to work for us,” he said. “This is the most exciting part of the process, especially since there are many professors and students among the volunteers.”
Kennel will step down as SIO director by fall 2006 to lead the program and assume a teaching position.
Readers can contact Madeline Phillips at [email protected] or Katie Westfall at [email protected].
