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The
Forest and the Trees
The
new dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies trained
as a lawyer and trotted the globe for the U.N. before coming to
New Haven. James Gustave Speth has a taste for multidisciplinary
study, and he believes that "things can't stay as they are."
October
1999
by Bruce Fellman
At the
beginning of this century, Gifford Pinchot, a member of the Yale
Class of 1889 and the founder of the U.S. Forest Service, helped
Yale establish the School of Forestry.
The goal was to train a cadre of professional forest managers, men
who understood that keeping the woods healthy, productive, and profitable
involved more than mere expertise with axe and crosscut saw.
As the
oldest forestry school in the country nears its centennial next
October, it is still turning out the occasional forester (who is
now as likely to be female as male). But these days, the educational
and research mission of the School of Forestry and Environmental
Studies, as it has been called since 1972, has expanded well beyond
its original mandate. "The challenge that FES faces is no longer
limited to one resource in one nation," says President Richard C.
Levin. "It extends to understanding and managing the environment
worldwide, and to integrating environmental, economic, and developmental
concerns."
When
Levin assigned a search committee to look for a replacement for
Jared Cohon, who stepped down as FES dean in 1997 to become president
of Carnegie Mellon University, his hope was to find someone whose
credentials matched the School's increasingly interdisciplinary
and international reach. The name James Gustave Speth '64, '69LLB,
who was then the administrator of the United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP), quickly surfaced, and when Speth was approached,
he revealed that he was interested in the job. There was, however,
a problem, for he had recently begun a second, four-year term at
the UNDP and didn't feel he could leave. But after some discussion,
the forestry school decided it could wait for Speth to finish his
work, and after a somewhat lengthy interregnum, he assumed the deanship
on July 1.
The Speth
era promises to be an interesting beginning to the school's next
century. "We need a new generation of environmental professionals
who understand the complexity of global issues," says Speth, a soft-spoken
57-year-old whose UN agency had a budget of more than $2 billion
and offices in 132 developing countries. "Many solutions to today's
environmental challenges lie outside the established 'environmental
sector' and require approaches different from those adopted in the
1970s."
In those
days, the villains were obvious, and the remedies clear-cut. They
included the Clean Water and Clean Air acts, and broad legislation
to save endangered species. To be sure, critics called this straight
forward, "top-down" legislative approach heavy-handed. But to varying
degrees, federal policies and the people trained at places like
FES to implement them have been effective in reducing the large,
so-called "point sources" of pollution and the species-depleting
effects of overdevelopment.
However,
environmentalists must now address a whole host of new problems -- from
more diffuse, "non-point sources" of pollution, to global warming,
the need for sustainable development, and the equitable distribution
of the planet's resources. Tackling these "issues without borders,"
as Speth describes them, requires a different set of skills -- and
a different kind of school.
Speth
seems to have the ideal resume to manage the makeover. "He's
a real visionary on environmental issues," says 1974 FES graduate
Frances Beinecke '71, who is the executive director of the Natural
Resources Defense Council (NRDC), an organization that Speth helped
start nearly 30 years ago. "Gus understands that you can meet the
needs of the human population and protect the environment at the
same time."
The son
of a farm-machinery salesman, Speth grew up in Orangeburg, South
Carolina, a rural cotton-growing area. He came by his environmentalism
as a fisherman and a hunter, but these interests did not translate
into an academic career in the sciences. A summa cum laude political
science major at Yale, Speth studied economics as a Rhodes Scholar
at Oxford, and then returned to New Haven to complete a law degree.
"The problem was that I wasn't terribly excited about a traditional
law career," he recalls. "Remember, it was the late 1960s, and my
heart was into some sort of public-interest pursuit. On a trip to
New York, I happened to read a story in the New York Times about the NAACP's legal defense fund, and I got an idea: Perhaps
I could use my training and my interest in environmental issues
to create a legal defense fund for the environment."
In short
order, Speth enlisted a group of kindred spirits among both students
and faculty at the Law School and launched the NRDC. It quickly
became (and remains) a force to be reckoned with in the realm of
environmental protection. "Gus brought top quality science and economics
to the field of environmental advocacy," notes Beinecke. "He was
and is a truly interdisciplinary guy who is always ahead of the
game."
Speth
served the NRDC as senior attorney from 1970 until 1977, when he
joined President Jimmy Carter's Council on Environmental Quality.
He served on the CEQ for four years, the last two as chairman, and
in 1980 helped produce the landmark Global 2000 Report. It predicted
that at the turn of the century the world would be "more crowded,
more polluted, less stable ecologically, and more vulnerable to
disruption than the world we live in now," said Speth.
The poor
would get poorer -- and more hungry. The world's forests would be
cut down for timber and to make way for crops. Increased energy
use would "bring to the fore what has been called the Mother of
All Environmental Problems -- global warming and climate change."
There
were "four horsemen of the modern apocalypse," noted Speth in discussing
the report. "Not just the vast military armadas . but also
explosive population growth, widespread environmental deterioration,
and growing human poverty." The first horseman was justly feared,
but letting the last three ride unchecked would also lead to a bleak
future.
Many
read the report (which sold 1.5 million copies in book form), and
many talked about its conclusions. But not much has changed. In
an address he gave to this year's graduating class of the Trinity
School in New York titled "Last Chance to Get It Right," Speth declared:
"It cannot be said that your parents' generation did nothing. No,
we have analyzed, debated, discussed, and negotiated these issues
endlessly. And as a member of that generation, I say this: We're
great talkers, overly fond of conferences. If only we could talk
these issues to death; we certainly tried."
For his
part, Speth is no stranger to analyzing and debating issues. After
his work in the Carter administration, he joined the law faculty
at Georgetown University, and then, in 1982, founded the World Resources
Institute, a Washington, DC-based center for policy research and
technical assistance on environment and development issues. Speth
served 11 years as president of the WRI, one of the world's premier
environmental think tanks, before being tapped to lead the UNDP.
According
to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Speth's mandate was to "reform,
reshape, and revitalize" an agency beset by charges of inefficiency
and by declining financial support from industrialized countries,
the U.S. in particular. Created in 1970, the UNDP was essentially
an organization that transferred technical assistance grants to
underdeveloped countries. Unfortunately, the money often didn't
reach its intended recipients.
Speth
soon began to streamline the agency and effect fundamental changes
in its operation. Funding from donor nations has recently increased,
and, in assessing Speth's tenure, Annan called the administrator
"one of the UN's most effective and articulate leaders," who had
advanced "a vision of development that is both sustainable and centered
on the real-life experience of human beings."
Characteristically,
Speth did so by putting a premium on projects that could help alleviate
poverty without destroying the natural environment. "Development
assistance," he wrote in the May/June 1999 issue of Foreign Affairs, is "not a handout but rather a solid investment in peace and a more
equitable and habitable world."
As an
example of what might be achieved, Speth described the Songhai Center
in the African country of Benin. "At the Center, people are raising
animals like ducks, chickens, and quail, both for slaughter and
for sale," he explained. "Then, they created a system for treating
the waste, which is used for fish farming and for producing vegetables
and fruits, as well as trees and other renewable energy sources.
To accomplish all this, they've had to develop skills with small-scale
farm machinery and with its repair, and the result is an integrated,
sustainable facility that trains people and produces income."
This
was the kind of success story that the UNDP could help achieve,
but the continued failure on the part of the industrialized nations
to provide sufficient seed money has prevented the establishment
of similar enterprises in other parts of Africa and Asia. As a result,
the gap between the haves and have nots has widened. "The costs
of neglecting the rapidly growing international class divide will
be immense," warns Speth. Not only can failure to provide opportunities
for sustainable economic growth lead to humanitarian disasters,
he argues; there are also numerous examples of a tight link between
recalcitrant poverty and environmental degradation.
This
is the sort of global perspective Speth has brought to FES. But
because his portfolio is heavier on policy than on traditional forest
management (Jared Cohon was the first non-forester to be dean of
the school; Speth is the second), a number of faculty members greeted
the news of his appointment with concern that the school's long-standing
commitment to the woods and to the natural sciences was in jeopardy.
These fears were exacerbated by calls from more than one professor
that to "honor" Speth's arrival, it was time to commit what for
some was the ultimate heresy: dropping "forestry" from the name
and calling the venerable institution the School of Environmental
Science and Management.
"The
'F' will stay," insists Speth, who describes the legacy of FES as
a "wonderful heritage."
There will also be no diminution in an FES hallmark: the emphasis
on research and training in ecology and biology. "Without a science-based
approach, environmental managers are astronauts without a life-support
system," he says.
But Speth
recognizes that the nature of the field has changed dramatically -- and
that the School must change with it.
"The
vast majority of jobs are in policy analysis with a focus on pollution
and resource management," says Daniel Esty, an associate professor
of environmental law and policy who is investigating the connection
between environmental protection and world trade.
As a
result, 85 percent of the approximately 100 members of the master's
degree classes this decade now concentrate in environmental studies,
not forestry. "Environmental studies is the growth area," Esty says,
"and while a thorough grounding in the natural sciences is extremely
important as the underpinning of almost everything that's done in
the environmental world, we recognize that this field is made up
of a lot of other elements, including such disciplinary areas as
political science, economics, risk management, public health, law,
governance, business, and epidemiology. Time and time again, we've
learned that if you base your analysis on, say, just what the biologists
tell you, or just what the economists tell you, you'll get the wrong
answer. Progress is completely dependent on triangulating across
and among disciplines that contribute to the world of environmental
knowledge."
The way
the school might achieve this interdisciplinary perspective was
explored in a wide-ranging examination of FES that was begun two
years ago by a faculty committee convened by former FES dean John
Gordon, himself a bonafide forester, and chaired by John Wargo,
professor of environmental risk analysis and policy. "We came away
believing that we've got a really good thing going," says Wargo,
whose most recent work examines the toxic relationship between children's
health, pesticide regulation, and environmental law. "But we also
found gaps that most of us feel demand additional coverage."
While
forestry is strong, the report, which was issued last January, described
18 issues that FES should take on to retain its leadership position
among rivals like the University of Michigan, Duke, and the University
of California at Berkeley, each of which has recently upgraded its
programs and facilities. The target issues include population growth,
the preservation of biological diversity, corporate behavior, international
security, urban resources, and climate change.
Such
a problem-based, as opposed to the more traditional discipline-based,
approach could require a considerable number of new faculty members
-- the report suggests nearly doubling, from 20 to 36, the number
of senior professors. But at least some of the newcomers could be
shared appointments, and some could come under the FES umbrella
simply by judiciously linking up with other professional schools,
as well as with the College, where forestry professors, Wargo among
them, are already teaching undergraduates in such areas as the Studies
in the Environment major. "This school should be a place where you
cross relevant disciplines to understand problems," says Wargo.
John
Gordon agrees. "Almost everything, beginning with forestry, is becoming
more integrated," he says, citing as examples such FES programs
as the Center for Industrial Ecology (Yale Alumni Magazine, May 1997), the Tropical Resources Institute, and the "Mastodon Project,"
an endeavor coordinated by Emly McDiarmid, executive director of
the FES's Center for Coastal and Watershed Systems.
The project
(whose name comes from the old joke about the difficulties a group
of blind men have in describing an elephant) brings together six
FES researchers for a pioneering exploration of the interconnection
between the ecological and social systems that make up the Greater
New Haven Watershed, in which some 400,000 people live. "Each researcher
represents a different discipline, and each sees the world in a
different way," says McDiarmid. "Typically, environmental investigations
exclude people, but we see humans as an integral part of ecological
systems. You can't get at problems, much less solve them, without
considering the human dimension."
The goal
of the three-year study, which was funded by a $900,000 grant from
the EPA, the National Science Foundation, and Connecticut Sea Grant,
is to examine the hypothesis that there is a link between healthy
ecosystems and healthy people. "This sounds obvious, but it's never
been tested," says McDiarmid, "and clearly, there are enormous implications
for environmental policy."
There
are also implications for FES. The project's investigators not only
weren't used to working together, they didn't necessarily speak
the same language. "Crossing disciplinary lines is hard," McDiarmid
admits, "but everyone involved has been able to develop a kind of
research pidgin so we can integrate a wide number of perspectives
and learn how an urbanized coastal watershed works."
The
end result of this kind of many-sided analysis would be a better
brand of environmental management: strategies that can be employed
by FES-trained experts who have more than verbiage in their tool
boxes. "In terms of the sustainability of life systems, we've reached
a turning point," says Speth. "Things can't stay as they are. This
school has an important contribution to make toward developing sustainable
economies and ecosystems." 
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