“The work is going well. But it looks like the end of the world.”
,Nobel Laureate Dr. F. Sherwood Rowland
to his wife, during his early ozone research
You can find them in the warm waters of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and the frozen tundra of Alaska, in the wilds of the Amazon rain forest and the bureaucratic warrens of Switzerland.
But mostly, you can find them in Irvine.
They are the faculty, associated professors and students of the University of California, Irvine, Department of Earth System Science, a disparate group of 14 scientists who have taken as their charge the study of the Earth’s environment and how it can change in the span of a human lifetime.
And the department, by design, is right in the thick of some of the environmental battles now being waged in the halls of government and industry, most notably the controversial global-warming debate that recently found its way into the presidential campaign.
“We’re tying to put a really strong scientific base under the discussion of environmental problems and what to do about them,” said Dr. Ralph Cicerone, who founded the department in 1992 and now is chancellor of UCI.
The department, unique at its inception and still among just a handful of similar groups at U.S. campuses, stresses “the scientific point of view, not the political,” Cicerone said.
It’s a distinction the other earth systems professors are quick to make, as well.
“We’re trying to inform public policy, not make it,” said Dr. Susan Trumbore, a charter member of the department.
“We’re as apolitical as possible,” said Dr. William Reeburgh, who took over as department chairman last month. “We believe policy should be science-based, not the other way around.”
The goal, Reeburgh said, is to distinguish for policymakers “what is known certainly, what is known less certainly and what is possible” in environmental science.
Still, it’s not always possible to stay out of the limelight, especially when you win the Nobel Prize, as Dr. F. Sherwood Rowland did in 1995. Rowland helped Cicerone organize the earth science department and is a voting faculty member, although he remains officially attached to the university’s department of chemistry.
Rowland was cited for his research showing that the earth’s stratospheric ozone is being depleted. His studies sparked a movement within the environmental community that culminated after years of contentious debate on an international treaty banning the use of ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons in spray cans.
The Nobel, Cicerone said, was a boost to the fledgling earth science department both because of Rowland’s involvement and because it was “recognition for the field (of) applying science to environmental studies.”
More recently, a report on global warming co-authored by the department’s Dr. Michael Prather became a presidential campaign issue two weeks ago, and last week Cicerone published a study that tended to undercut the federal government’s reasons for banning methyl bromide pesticides in the ’90s.
Other department professors have been involved in the drafting and implementation of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, the development of cleaner-burning aircraft engines and studies that bear on such disparate issues as forest-fire management in Canada, pesticide use, and logging in the Amazon rain forest.
Though he is aware of the political charge packed by some of the department’s work, Cicerone says he’s nevertheless surprised sometimes by how the research is manipulated by those with political axes to grind.
“Sometimes it’s because we don’t explain things well enough, but more often it’s someone twisting the data or what we’re saying,” Cicerone said.
The department was created in 1991 following a survey of the faculty that generated more than 100 suggestions for new areas of focus. Two were acted on: East Asian language and literature and the earth sciences.
Cicerone was given the charge of organizing the new unit, helped by Rowland. Several professors, including Prather and Trumbore, were recruited in 1992 and 1993. From the beginning, the department has taken an interdisciplinary approach to environmental studies, with faculty drawn from fields such as soils, oceanography, atmospheric chemistry, plant physiology and numerical modeling.
“The real world,” said Cicerone, “is not organized by disciplines.”
“We treat the Earth as a system,” said Reeburgh. “It’s a new way of doing science.”
It’s an approach that has helped attract faculty. Prather said he joined UCI in 1992 from NASA in part because of the mix.
“It’s wonderful to have a brain trust that covers the breadth” of environmental studies, he said. “It was unique to UCI then, and it still is somewhat.”
The professors voted a few years ago to keep their offices together rather than seek office space near their respective labs, just so the synergy could be maintained, Reeburgh said.
Not that that will be an issue for long. The department in July received a $6 million naming grant from Jack Croul, co-chairman of Santa Ana-based Behr Process Corp. for a new building. More fund-raising needs to be done, Cicerone said, but the university is planning to break ground next fall and have the building ready in 2003.
The department also is adding staff. It is advertising for two positions and will soon advertise a third. Reeburgh said he is interested in adding expertise in physical oceanography, biogeochemistry and coastal oceanography.
And this semester, the university for the first time is offering a degree in earth and environmental sciences, another milestone for the department.
“We’re kind of like an OTC stock,” Reeburgh said. “We can grow really fast.” n
