Interaction

Fall 2006

Stanford inhabits Planet Earth

Courtesy School of Engineering

An artist’s rendering of the new Environment and Energy Building, whose construction will be green and whose distribution will reflect new scientific and collaborative priorities.

Jeff Koseff, co-director of the Woods Institute for the Environment, has trod some deep furrows these past few years between the engineering buildings, the Quad and the modular building that houses the institute—often with architectural renderings of the new Environment and Energy Building under his arm.

It's passion that keeps him going, he says.

The new building, he said, which will form part of the Science and Engineering Quad 2 (SEQ2), "is the physical embodiment of the institute. It's about finding and creating a vehicle for people to work together in space that reflects our values. It's also beautiful, and it sends an important message: Green isn't ugly."

Most of all, it will allow environmental researchers at Stanford to construct an environment conducive to solving some of the planet's greatest problems.

"They wanted to translate the programmatic vision into space," said Sandy Meyer, director of facilities and planning for the Engineering School and acting program representative for SEQ2.

To that end, in some areas of the new building, researchers will be grouped by their field of study (i.e., water or land) rather than by discipline. The Lane Center for the Study of the North American West will be there, along with the entire Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, Earth Sciences Dean Pamela Matson's ecology research group and the Global Climate and Energy Project. There will be space for labs and visitors and "strategic collaboratives," sites temporarily assigned to projects, not people, where researchers from different areas can work together for as long as their project requires it.

"There are very few academic buildings in the United States that house an institute, a full department and several programs," said Koseff, the William Alden and Martha Campbell Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering. "Here, every group will have its own shingle, but the building is about collaboration." And those researchers who won't have a permanent space there—most of the Earth Sciences faculty will remain where they are, for example—will find temporary space.

"I am passionate about making sure our goals on Day One regarding sustainability are achieved," Koseff said. "There will be no compromise on sustainability. We can do it. And we'll become an example."

Many people might think a green building is an expensive building, he said, but this project has proven that that's not necessarily the case: "Trustees and greenies alike can both be happy."

There are few fields as obviously and necessarily multidisciplinary as the environmental sciences. Call it earth sciences, or civil and environmental engineering or geography. Call it what you will—that part of the academy devoted to saving the planet and making it a healthier place to inhabit is crowded with researchers with different degrees and expertise.

At Stanford, collaboration goes way back. Referring to a newspaper article a few years ago praising Stanford for "finally" paying attention to the planet, David Freyberg, a hydrologist in Civil and Environmental Engineering, said indignantly, "We've been working on the environment for 50 years!"

L.A. Cicero

Len Ortolano, an early enthusiast of IPER, is praised by his students for his understanding of the challenges of environmental research in developing countries.

In the 1980s, after the Institute for International Studies (now the Freeman Spogli Institute) was established, economist Roz Naylor, today the Julie Wrigley Senior Fellow at the Center for Environmental Sciences and Policy (CESP) and associate professor, by courtesy, of economics, set up an informal group she characterizes as a "loose federation without boundaries." It was called the Environmental Faculty Forum, essentially a weekly lecture and discussion group on environmental topics. It has survived to this day, and it claims to be the university's longest-running lecture series. In the 1990s, when the institute organized itself around centers, the people active in the forum turned it into CESP, and CESP later became a prime impetus in the founding of the Woods Institute.

For Leonard Ortolano, the UPS Foundation Professor of Civil Engineering, whose students tend to work on environmental projects in the developing world, Stanford has an advantage because of this collaborative tradition.

He and his engineering colleagues find themselves sitting on all sorts of dissertation committees. "We're small, but we're all over the place," he said.

"I'm part of the Woods community; that's the way I think of it."

Woods is the epicenter for environmental research at Stanford, but it does not grant degrees. Instead, students, both undergraduate and graduate, leave Stanford with degrees from the schools of Earth Sciences and Engineering, physical or life sciences departments in the School of Humanities and Sciences, or interdisciplinary programs housed in one or more of those schools.

No program better exemplifies the possibilities of borderless study than the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Environment and Resources (IPER), which was founded in 2001 and recently renewed for another five years. Bringing together people from the sciences, engineering, policy, social sciences and law, the program, which offers PhD and dual master's degrees, is above all devoted to solving problems.

Ortolano, who was on the program's admissions and curriculum committees for the first three years, said that before IPER was founded, Stanford was losing potential students to the University of California-Berkeley and Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "Civil Engineering is very flexible, but I had a credibility and a publicity problem," he said. "Students would ask for a mix of disciplines. So when I heard about the effort to set up IPER, I was very supportive."

Today, in the sober judgment of second-year student Joanne Gaskell, who studies the impact of food production on the environment, "IPER is the most exciting academic program in the universe."

Gretchen Daily

This year, biologist Gretchen Daily became director and, in the words of one of her students, Kate Brauman, she "codified" the program. "At first, very little [about IPER] was written down, which was both fantastic and awful," Brauman said. "Gretchen put everything down on paper."

"I happened to assume directorship at exactly the time when IPER needed to grow out of its teenage phase and jell," Daily said. "We did it—the whole community of IPER faculty, staff and students—and the result is beautiful. Serving IPER brings me a lot of pleasure and inspiration."

IPER students—there are 30—spend their first year bonding in an office donated by Earth Sciences, taking a core sequence of seminars (including the CESP Forum) and planning a rigorous course of study for the following five or so years. They must have breadth in four concentration areas (economics and policy, natural sciences, culture and institutions, and engineering and technology), and their dissertations must combine two distinct fields.

Because they come from vastly different backgrounds, they end up teaching one another, Gaskell said. Climate and energy were two fields in which she had no expertise, for example, but classmates pointed her in good directions. Her project is about soybean production and deforestation in Brazil, so in her first year, she studied soil science, Brazilian history and economic theory, along with the core seminars.

"Someone said it's like having a bus pass to the university, and they were right," she said. "The whole course catalog is at our disposal."

Gaskell did a double undergraduate major in economics and biology. "Everybody said, 'What an unusual double major!' But here it makes perfect sense. It's not odd, it's sensible. I wanted to be a science major when I started, but I was also interested in people. So I picked agriculture as a way of studying the interaction between people and the environment."

Brauman, a third-year student who works with Daily on water management, said there is nothing like IPER anywhere. "This is a program for crazy masochists," she said, clearly happy to be one. "It's incredibly unique. Other programs are mostly master's programs for professionals, but I wanted to do research. I could have cobbled together what I wanted elsewhere, but in terms of structure, support and peers, it's completely unique."

"Earth Sciences hosts IPER," said Matson, referring to the fact that her school gives the program office space in the Mitchell Earth Sciences Building until the program moves to the new building next year. "But it belongs to the whole university. Students are completely interdisciplinary; they do what I call far-field interdisciplinarity in sciences, technology and policy, and they're very deep in all of them."

That sounds good, but how do people trained in disciplines teach graduate students in a program explicitly designed to bridge disciplines?

L.A. Cicero

Professor Rob Dunbar, director of the Earth Systems Program, says, “We’re living in an interdisciplinary playground.”

"Most of us don't have good interdisciplinary training," said Rob Dunbar, professor of geological and environmental sciences and a member of IPER's advisory council. "So we didn't know how to design an interdisciplinary curriculum. The challenge was to take good multidisciplinary people and put them together and then bring in PhD students so they can learn how to be interdisciplinary.

"How can we teach them to think in an interdisciplinary manner? We don't know; we're grasping at straws. So we teach by example, using great projects, using case studies."

One of the members of IPER's first PhD cohort is Xuehua Zhang, who came to Stanford with environmental engineering degrees from China and Western Washington University. She also had worked in pollution monitoring and at an environmental research institute.

Her dissertation will be an empirical analysis of the effects of administrative lawsuits on China's environmental enforcement in Hubei province. What interests her, she said, is not policy but practice. China has plenty of laws, policies and agencies; the problem is how the rules are enforced, how the rule of law—a new concept in China—translates to daily life.

Lawsuits against agencies or polluters, filed by other agencies or by private citizens, are a new phenomenon in China's judicial landscape, having begun to appear only in the 1990s. They are not easy to investigate, so she has help on the ground from graduate students inside China. Here at Stanford she is studying law, economics and institutional theories that will help her figure out the complex interplay of the judicial, social, political, industrial and natural forces that influence environmental enforcement.

"Stanford advocates problem-solving," Zhang said. "Students from developing countries live in two worlds here. We do research according to Western standards, and then we try to apply it in developing countries with very different economic and political systems. There's a big gap. It has to be useful to developing countries' policy managers; it has to make sense to both sides.

"In that respect, I'm getting lots of support here. Len Ortolano and Buzz Thompson [the Robert E. Paradise Professor of Natural Resources Law and co-director of the Woods Institute] have a lot of respect for developing countries. They think about what's useful for both sides."

Graduate students whose interdisciplinary leanings are less inclined toward the social or applied sciences have another program available to them: Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences (EEES), authorized by the Faculty Senate in May 2006 to grant degrees for the next five years. Basically, it allows Earth Sciences students to design a degree drawing on all three of the school's departments: Geophysics, Geological and Environmental Sciences, and Energy Resources Engineering (formerly known as Petroleum Engineering).

Kevin Arrigo

Program director Kevin Arrigo said there is a growing number of faculty members in his department, Geophysics, whose work does not adhere to the discipline's boundaries. Arrigo, for example, is a bio-oceanographer with a background in mathematics; he has colleagues who are geostatisticians and atmospheric chemists. His specialty is ecosystem modeling, which he does both with remote sensing and in the laboratory. (One of his current collaborative projects, on the pattern and process of coral-reef adaptation, last year was awarded one of five Environmental Venture Program grants by the Woods Institute.)

Arrigo said his graduate students also found themselves bound by Geophysics requirements that made little sense for their particular projects. "It's hard on my students, who are always exceptions to the rule. They can feel way out of place. They're always having to petition to get classes accepted because they don't fit into the mold of the three departments. They have a very unusual blend of skills—physics and biology at the systems level.

"We don't want to lose the departmental identification, but we also needed new directions."

The program started this fall with 11 students; three are from outside Stanford, and eight are transfers from existing Earth Sciences departments.

One of those transfers is Kristina Keating, a third-year student of Rosemary Knight, the chair of the Geophysics Department and a senior fellow at the Woods Institute. Keating has an engineering physics background and wants to use geophysics to develop nuclear magnetic resonance devices for environmental remediation. To do that, she, like the IPER students, needed to study new things—for example, soil chemistry, the same field that Gaskell needed to add to her repertoire. That would have been time-consuming if Keating had remained in Geophysics, which has stiff course requirements; in EEES she'll be able to design a curriculum that better suits her research.

Like anyone who is venturing off the beaten disciplinary track, Keating says she is aware of the potential tradeoff: depth for breadth. But she's cautiously optimistic.

"This puts me in a good place jobwise because I can talk to a lot of people," she said. "I'm a little more marketable. I'll understand geophysics and its applications and geochemistry and hydrology."

In the meantime, she's having fun planning a cross-listed course for spring quarter called Earth Sciences in the Movies. It will star such offerings as The Core, in which the Earth's magnetic field goes awry, leaving scientists no choice but to drill a hole into the Earth's core and there detonate a nuclear device to jump-start things. The Day After Tomorrow, which Keating described as "global warming in a day," is scientifically accurate, she admitted, though the chaos occurs a bit faster than even the worst scenario we could expect.

In some ways, EEES and IPER were modeled on the undergraduate Earth Systems Program, which began in 1992 and today has more than 100 majors. Like IPER, the program temporarily resides in Earth Sciences (its new home will be on the ground floor of the Environment and Energy Building), but it has students and faculty members from throughout the university.

In fact, the program's introductory course, ES10, usually taught by Dunbar, the Victoria P. and Roger W. Sant Director of the Earth Systems Program, features a succession of guest professors from different fields, and the teaching assistants (often from IPER) hail from various disciplines. Again, the course is organized around problems, not methods.

Julie Kennedy

After an initial blast of interdisciplinarity in ES10, said Julie Kennedy, associate director of the Earth Systems Program, the students go through two years of nuts and bolts: statistics, geology, math, biology. After that, they re-emerge "and they're ready for the fun stuff," Kennedy said. The program offers several tracks and aims to train students to be on solid disciplinary ground, not just in terms of scientific knowledge but in terms of the assumptions of those disciplines. How does an economist think? An engineer? A chemist? A government official? Students who know the answers to those questions are well positioned to participate in meaningful change and to communicate ideas to other key environmental players, Kennedy said.

"Interdisciplinarity is not just a mushing together of the disciplines," she said pointedly. "Earth scientists have to focus on systems. They are constantly being forced to think about a huge number of simultaneous effects."

In their senior year, Earth Systems majors, usually in two seminars of around 15 students, decide on a group project. One year they chose Hetch Hetchy, the reservoir in the Sierra Nevada that supplies San Francisco with its water. Could the dam be dismantled and the valley restored, as some critics advocate? What would the environmental and financial cost be? What does "restoring" the valley actually mean? How would such a move affect the Bay Area's energy supply? Which other sectors would be involved?

Last year seniors took on two projects: studying a federal act to sell U.S. Forest Service lands to fund rural schools, and working with Stanford Dining, which supplies meals to residence halls and other facilities. In the latter case, they examined the costs and benefits of organic and local produce, looking at sustainability, labor and markets. They even produced handy little "California Seasonal Fruit" cards showing which fruits are in season, which are not and which never grow here at all.

Faculty members, graduate students and undergraduates who research the ills, the gifts and the possibilities of Planet Earth are a serious and devoted lot of people. They work hard. There's a lot at stake. But they're also, they confess, in it for the fun of it, because there's no more dynamic field around.

As Dunbar said, "We're living in an interdisciplinary playground."