Green research involves rainbow of disciplines

By Alvin Powell

Harvard News Office

From ancient glaciers to modern mining pits, from atmospheric carbon to environmental literature, Harvard faculty members are working all along the broad intersection between human society and the environment that sustains it.

“Harvard has a long-standing commitment to research on the environment and on training the next generation of investigators,” said Harvard Provost Steven E. Hyman. “Research by our faculty stretches from basic science to economics and policy — as it must to have the great impact that it does. Indeed, led by the University Center on the Environment, this research represents one of the oldest areas to be addressed in a strongly interdisciplinary manner at Harvard.”

Across Harvard are not only a plethora of individual faculty members working on the environment, but a suite of centers, programs, and collaborations.

The Harvard University Center for the Environment has increasingly become a University-wide nexus for environmental research, learning, and discussion. The center, under the leadership of Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering Dan Schrag, has become a unifying home for a field that touches a wide array of disciplines.

“The idea is this center is a service organization,” Schrag said. “The environment is such a broad subject that it can be part of every school. My role is not to just build my organization, but to build environmental studies across Harvard.”

Schrag said he has encouraged interested faculty from across Harvard to attend center events, dinners, and seminars to get to know each other. Schrag said the center is not just boosting environmental studies, it’s also creating a community of scholars.

Those connections are already leading to cross-discipline collaborations. For example, Charles Bullard Professor of Forestry Noel Michele Holbrook is studying soybeans with the Harvard Business School’s John D. Black Professor Forest Reinhardt.

Holbrook said their collaboration involves understanding the environmental impacts of the drought-resistance of crops such as soybean for biologically diverse regions like southern South America. Reinhardt said that as society becomes more environmentally conscious, it becomes more important to understand the effect this has on business. Further, he said, any solution to the critical environmental issues of the day will need business input to be successful.

“The active involvement of business is necessary but not sufficient to design the solutions to these problems,” Reinhardt said.

The center is also providing a place for up-and-coming scholars to pursue their work. The center’s fellows program hosts six postdoctoral fellows working on projects involving the environment.

Though the fellows program is in its first year, Harvard’s faculty has already benefited. Peter Huybers, a fellow studying ancient climate, was hired as an assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences.

Huybers said it’s important that we understand ancient climate extremes because if we merely consider the historic record, we would restrict our outlook to a very small window on Earth’s possible climates.

“It’s clear that humans have altered the composition of Earth’s atmosphere and that this is changing the climate,” Huybers said. “But while we know it’s changing, just how much and how quickly the climate will change in the future is unclear. There’s still a lot of room for surprises.”

Health on the front burner

Professor of Environmental Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health Joel Schwartz has been researching the effects of pollution on human health for decades, doing pioneering work on the effects of lead in gasoline in the 1980s.

Schwartz, who sits on the Harvard University Center for the Environment’s steering committee, said health effects from environmental toxins can be broad, but, because they’re often not linked to a single disease, don’t get the attention they deserve.

“The basic issue with the environment is that it floats beneath the radar screen an awful lot, because environmental toxins aren’t associated with a single disease,” Schwartz said.

Schwartz said studies show that air pollution is responsible for 200,000 deaths annually — more than AIDS, breast cancer, and prostate cancer combined.

“What I try to do is find the intersection of things that matter and things that are modifiable — that can have a public health impact,” Schwartz said. “It was easy to take the lead out of gasoline. Just stop putting it in.”

The economics of the environment

Faculty interested in the environment and economic issues have formed the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, an interfaculty initiative whose aim is to study the numerous economic dimensions of environmental problems and develop sensible and effective solutions.

Program director Robert Stavins, the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, said that economics is essential to solving environmental problems because virtually all have economic causes; they are an unintended consequence of market activity.

“As a result, there has been an explosion of interest in environmental economics around the world,” Stavins said.

Stavins’ own work may have an impact on the problems of the day. He is currently designing a carbon cap and trade program for the Brookings Institution, aiming to influence national debate on the subject. He’s also working on the next generation of an international climate policy architecture as a successor to the Kyoto climate accord, which effectively expires in 2012.

The environment strikes back

Richard Zeckhauser, the Kennedy School’s Frank Plumpton Ramsey Professor of Political Economy, is looking at natural disasters caused or made more severe by human activity. Zeckhauser said the calamities he studies all have a similar feature. They are caused or exacerbated by the cumulative effect of seemingly minor, distant activities that are so far removed in space and time that they’re difficult to connect to the ultimate tragedy.

Global warming, for example, is a worldwide problem, but its cause boils down to the individual decisions we make every day: We drive to work instead of walking, we turn on a light instead of sitting in natural light. The diffuse nature of the cause makes it particularly difficult to address, he said.

Zeckhauser is collaborating with Alan Berger, associate professor of landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Together, the two are applying Zeckhauser’s principles to Berger’s specialty, rehabilitating former mining sites.

Berger’s Project for Reclamation Excellence aims to design reclamation projects for mines and involves five at Harvard and perhaps another 20 from the federal Superfund and Brownfields programs.

The project is currently designing a scheme to handle contaminated water running from a Colorado mine mouth with a treatment plant to remove pollutants and a natural wetland to provide additional purification.

The project uses high-tech tools to help town residents to imagine what the finished project will be like. The imaging work, which includes a virtual tour, has the potential to make Superfund cleanup planning far more accessible to the public, opening up participation in the process.

Reaching people is a role that Lawrence Buell embraces. Buell, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature, has focused his work on American environmental literature. Buell said it’s critical that scholars in the humanities as well as the sciences work on the environmental issues of the day.

Problems such as global warming and environmental equity, Buell said, are problems for society to solve, not just scientists, policymakers, and economists. As such, it will require everyday people to get involved. Great books in the past, such as Rachel Carson’s landmark “Silent Spring,” have changed minds and influenced policymakers.