Interaction
Fall 2006
Earth, Woods and water
Richard Luthy, left, chairman of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department and one of many water researchers there, works on San Francisco Bay with an Aguamog, which mixes activated carbon into sediment to prevent pollutants from entering the aquatic food chain.
Ask people in earth sciences or civil engineering what they do, and odds are many of them will say water.
That's why fresh water, marine water and estuaries will all share a floor when the new Environment and Energy Building opens in late 2007. The new building will be organized by areas, not by traditional disciplines, and will house the Woods Institute for the Environment and most of the university's environmental programs.
The arrangement illustrates the challenge of balancing the needs of disciplines and interdisciplinary areas while slighting neither. Most of those involved with the new building say the best of both worlds is within Stanford's reach.
"Relatively few schools have organized around water," said hydrologist David Freyberg, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and, by courtesy, of geological and environmental sciences. He is also a senior fellow, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. "We've accomplished what we have because people come from a huge array of backgrounds. Each one brings tools and knowledge that maybe wouldn't be as effectively developed if people rubbed shoulders only with people who worry about water."
"Some universities have created environmental systems science groups about, for example, the 'fluid envelopes of the planet,'" said Pamela Matson, dean of the School of Earth Sciences. "Stanford chose not to set up an environmental sciences school. Here, engineers and lawyers are in their own schools; the economists are with the economists. Yet there are still possibilities for collaboration."
Many possibilities, in fact. "There's a long tradition at Stanford: If you're relatively small, as we are, it's not cost effective to construct departments," Freyberg said. "Rather, you embed people." And the embedded scholars find themselves working with a varied group of colleagues.
That said, there also is a widely acknowledged advantage to organizing academia around the object of study rather than around the method. The Environment and Energy Building will embody that virtue. Take water, for example. It's fresh, it's salty, it comes out of taps, it waters golf courses and spreads disease and irrigates fields, and either too much or too little falls in certain parts of the world. Through water, no matter how murky, we can study livelihoods, agriculture, health, climate and poverty.
An undergraduate class and a research project recently funded by the Woods Institute offer examples of the breadth of Stanford's multidisciplinary approach to water.
Undergraduates enrolled in Rosemary Knight's Geophysics 104, The Water Course, spend a quarter plotting water's course in their hometown, from precipitation to tap. Town by town and state by state, they are creating an online national map complete with student projects and a guide for researching public information (http://pangea.stanford.edu/courses/gp104/waterscape/). Knight, a professor of geophysics and a senior fellow at the Woods Institute, believes students must have what she calls geoliteracy, which entails geology and math and government research skills. Inevitably, it forces students to weigh the relative needs of societies and their environments.
L.A. Cicero  |
IPER student Kate Brauman, who is doing
her doctoral research in Hawaii, checks precipitation as it runs down
tree trunks, part of her effort to measure the potential long-term impact
of deforestation. |
Kate Brauman, a third-year student in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Environment and Resources, took The Water Course her first year here. Her hometown is actually Stanford, so instead she studied a water cycle in Hawaii, the site of her dissertation research. Later she became a teaching assistant in the course.
"Students have a hard time at first because there's no right answer," Brauman said. "That's why it's fabulous. People outside science always think there are right answers. But you have to make judgment calls and estimates, and students have a hard time with that. The course is quantitative, it involves lots of writing, it deals with human health and with natural resources.
"It's designed specifically to bring together nature and people. Interdisciplinary work is harder than people think, and this class was designed explicitly for that purpose. Students come to embrace it," she said.
Students' hometown water may be scarce at times or may not taste very good, but it is probably safe—at least for now. But that is not the case in many parts of the world; an international study released in August 2006 reported that one-third of the world's population does not have clean water. Some have no water at all.
A sizeable group of professors and their students in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department (CEE) is trying to remedy that. Indeed, there seems to be a consensus that CEE is reconfiguring itself around the idea of sustainable systems, whether that means construction, lab work or social policy.
Jenna Davis, for example, is Stanford's first faculty member with a joint appointment split between the Woods Institute and a department; in her case, CEE. Her degrees are in environmental management and public health, and she is a member of a team (along with her department colleague Alexandria Boehm and Gary Schoolnik of the School of Medicine) that recently won a Woods Institute Environmental Venture Program grant to study childhood survival in Mozambique.
Davis had worked on childhood disease, especially diarrhea, in Latin America. Realizing that the children were being sickened by the water, she moved into environmental engineering. Fix the water, she said, and you're on the road to fixing the disease. But it's essential to first understand how water and communities interact.
In Mozambique, whose per capita gross domestic product is about $1,400, roughly 90 children die each day, mostly from diarrhea or malaria, another water-related disease. The research project will take place in the summer of 2007, combining water sampling (in the hands of Boehm's students), public health organizing and epidemiology.
"Despite decades of work, people are still debating the connections between getting water to people, ensuring that it's clean and providing health care," she said. "Disciplinary bias comes into play here. An engineer is going to think engineering is the answer, a social scientist will prescribe behavioral change and doctors will treat disease."
As a result, researchers can miss the larger picture, Davis said. They can impose their assumptions on their subjects. The idea, instead, is to get inside people's heads. Boehm's students, who train by taking water samples in Palo Alto, will follow children around throughout the day and sample every drop of water they come into contact with. The researchers will try to figure out how women's routes are different from men's. They'll try to discern why people do what they do.
Davis and others credit CEE Chair Richard Luthy for guiding the department's transformation into a multidisciplinary site for sustainability research that embraces projects such as hers. Luthy and the rest of the new building's faculty leadership committee were convinced that CEE and the Woods Institute, along with the rest of the organizations, should be physically and scientifically joined, yet at the same time autonomous.
This could happen only as a result of surveys, conversations and many, many meetings among everyone involved. It grew from below, from the articulated needs and visions of faculty and graduate students whose scientific work in the field is bringing about, quite literally, a sea change in the academy.