Introduction

1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 The Authors 1.1.1 Harald-Growing up in Norway The reason why I am writing about natural resources has to do with my back- ground and goes back to Norway, where I grew up. The subjects of sustainability and the environment were early amongst my interests. I spent many summers as a child with my grandfather, Torleiv Rasmussen (1895-1991), in the Norwegian Rondane mountains, Norway’s first National Park. We would walk the mountains and talk about how nature worked and how everything was interdependent. My grandfather was an eager sports fisherman, and he was an excellent bird hunter. He also had a keen interest in the environmental impacts of industry on nature. In 1948-50, he moved the family company out of Oslo, Norway, to the city of Hamar, 110 km north of Oslo, to be able to expand the business. The family company is a precious metal refining and processing plant that uses many mechanical and chemical processes. As part of the design, the facility was fitted with a sewage treatment plant and a metal recovery plant for taking precious metals out of sewage, so that every dust particle of precious metal that ended up on the floor or in the plant wastewater could be recovered. It was the first sewage treatment plant in Norway (1948), based on American know-how and design, and there was no other of its kind in Norway for many years. My grandfather, Torleiv Rasmussen was educated as a Goldsmith Master in Schwäbisch Gemünd in the province of Baden-Würtemberg in Germany, but he had a sense for engineering. He would often tell me “Nothing is too difficult to learn! ….just try harder if it is difficult”. To learn how to design the precious metal recovery unit for wastewater from the plant, he ordered books from the United States and Germany on the subject, and taught himself how to design it. And, then he built it… Precious metals like gold, silver and platinum play a prominent role in this text as examples. These metals are very valuable, and society keeps very good track of them. Much data is available on these metals. My family’s company, K.A. Rasmussen is a precious metal company, and thus, I grew up learning about how to work, refine, and never lose these metals. Precious metals are very valuable, and thus, great care in their handling is taken. Therefore the sewage treatment plant I mentioned earlier, through the recovery of precious metals, more than paid for itself. GEOCHEMICAL PERSPECTIVES | HARALD U. SVERDRUP ◆ K. VALA RAGNARSDÓTTIR 131 Downloaded from http://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/perspectives/article-pdf/3/2/131/3148013/gsgp_3_2_section1_OA.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 I started school when I was 7 years old, and I remember that my mother, Elise (1928-1996), gave me a book she had from her father (1888-1932, the chief engineer at Norsk Hydro), who died when she was quite young. It was about the oil fields of Texas, issued by Texaco in 1927. I think it was called “Texaco, a picto- rial story.” It was full of black and white photographs, and not much text, like Figure 1.1. I read the book before I knew English (I read it anyway), fascinated with the pictures of drilling towers, refineries, petrol stations and office buildings. My father, Rolv (1928-1995) had a subscription to Scientific American from 1963 onward, and it came every month to our home in Norway. I avidly read everything in each issue. I still do, it is a wonderful way to stay updated. Figure 1.1 From the Texaco operations in Texas (about 1901). Another defining moment for me personally was when the bookLimits to Growth (Fig 1.2) by Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jørgen Randers and Wilhelm Behrens, came out in 1972. I was in my second year of gymnasium in Hamar, and I remember that I read the book twice just to be sure that I under- stood it and I experienced a great Ah-ha moment. I realised how everything is connected – what I learned in secondary school (I was in the natural sciences division) and from my grandfather, and how nothing should ever be lost in the precious metal business – everything resonated with the message of Limits to Growth. I realised there are limits to everything and that these limits are built 132 GEOCHEMICAL PERSPECTIVES | VOLUME 3, NUMBER 2 Downloaded from http://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/perspectives/article-pdf/3/2/131/3148013/gsgp_3_2_section1_OA.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 into the fundamental foundations of our world. I have come back to that book and its follow-up books many times since (Meadows et al., 1972, 1992, 2004; Randers 2012). What was outlined in there has become a part of my own research. The book received some scientific critique, but also detri- mental political lobbying (Nørgård et al., 2010). That is how slander and outright propaganda buried the important message in the book. Limits to Growth has, despite all the efforts to the contrary, stood the test of time and current data shows how the concept was spot on (Turner, 2012). As it now turns out, climate change is perhaps a small problem – the real challenge of today is the combination of conscious thought, human population and planetary limits. I am now a member of the Balaton Group, and get the pleasure of discussions with Figure 1.2 Book cover Limits to growth Dennis Meadows’ aspects of Limits to by Donella Meadows, Dennis Growth and on how we develop the Meadows, Jørgen Randers and Wilhelm Behrens. next generation of models. 1.1.2 Harald-Becoming a researcher I went abroad to study Chemical Engineering at the ETH in Zürich, Switzerland and later for a PhD at Lund University in Southern Sweden. I ended up staying in Lund for 27 years. After completing my graduate education and starting my career in research, the environment, and sustainability of society came to be the pervasive themes of everything I worked on. Thus I came to spend time on subjects like: liming acid lakes, modelling acidification effects on soils and water, aquatic population dynamics in polluted lakes, sustainable forestry, predator-prey relationships, sustainable agriculture, chemical weathering components of sili- cate minerals as nutrients for trees and crops, business and economics systems dynamics, and modelling of large integrated and complex systems. Enginering and geochemistry was at the base of it all, but nothing is isolated. Other disci- plines overlap but biogeochemistry is an important part of the bigger picture. For engineers, the most important pathway to understanding a system’s behaviour properly is to model it. This cannot be done without having a mental model as the basis for understanding. With a mental model, I mean a conceptual understanding in the mind. For this, systems analysis and systems dynamics GEOCHEMICAL PERSPECTIVES | HARALD U. SVERDRUP ◆ K. VALA RAGNARSDÓTTIR 133 Downloaded from http://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/perspectives/article-pdf/3/2/131/3148013/gsgp_3_2_section1_OA.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 are essential. Richard Feynmann, the brilliant American nuclear physicist, once wrote a book entitled “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out” (Feynman, 1999). I found the book very inspiring when I read it. Doing systems analysis on complex situations and problems and modelling them to create solutions, to me always becomes “the pleasure of finding things out.” Thank you, Mr. Feynman! I have been asked several times about whether there are any limitations to this way of working, and after using it for 30 years, I have not found any yet. In 1981, when I was travelling to the United States of America for the first time, I met two young Americans, Douglas Britt (Fig. 1.3) and Jimmy Fraser, working in a private consultancy in Reston, Virginia. I started to cooperate with them and in the process they became very good friends. They opened my eyes to a new world of thinking. I experienced together with them how to initiate a company the American way, starting with nothing but an idea and working your way up. I learned how we would search for clients with problems, and sell proposals on how to solve them. And we would win the proposals and do what we promised. I loved the American attitude of “everything is possible.” We started many different companies, and we succeded in many endeavours, in environmental science, mainframe computer services, ecological restoration, geographical information services, environmental modelling, and restoration technologies. Finally the company moved on to space science and built systems for NASA for the life support for long distance space travel. On almost every Space Shuttle launched in the late 1980s and 1990s we had our cargo on the shuttle. We had a fantastic time, full of optimism working for the future. In the mid 1990s the American companies were sold and we moved on. My friends stayed there to pursue successfully their careers as businessmen, I went back into academia in Europe to continue work on biogeochemistry of terrestrial ecosystems, critical loads, modelling of biodiversity and sustainable societies, from sustainable food supply to the role of resources in the global economy, and as we will see, later also to business. In 1988, I was called in by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agen- cy’s research department, to participate in an effort referred to as “Critical loads for sulphur and nitrogen to mitigate acid rain.” The effort resulted in the first research- based (actually evidence based) environmental policy in Europe. The Agency knew from earlier projects, which I had Image Exchange.

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