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Fall 2003 THE JOURNAL OF THE School of Forestry & Environmental Studies EnvironmentYale The Mastodon Project Linking Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment Inside: Green Republicans—Quo Vadis? page 2 letters To the Editor, To the Editor, The common bond provided by Yale F&ES First of all I’d like to express my hearty brings alums in Bhutan together (Seeking the gratitude for your sending me an outstanding Middle Path, Spring 2003). We interact on a journal, Environment: Yale,Fall 2002. I find it regular basis on the job, problem-solving and very helpful for my research work, especially the innovating with our Yale thinking caps on. One LMS software. Hopefully, I will receive the next such problem was the trail to remote Lunana, edition.Once again,thank you very much. mentioned in the article and built during my MOHAMMED ADILO CHILALO tenure as the first park manager of Jigme Dorji J. RESEARCHER II National Park. The people of Lunana wanted and ETHIOPIAN AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH ORGANIZATION needed the trail. Uncertain of the consequences, (EARO) we were hesitant. Finally, after many brain- FORESTRY RESEARCH CENTER storming sessions with Yale colleagues, the ADDIS ABABA,ETHIOPIA people of Lunana signed an agreement that if we built the trail they would voluntarily curtail poaching of endangered species within their communities. This worked to the advantage of both the park and the people.Also,the trail made possible regular anti-poaching patrols by park staff, which reduced the incidence of poachers Due to the volume of correspondence, Environment: Yale regrets that it is unable from outside of the Lunana community. to respond to or publish all mail received. Letters accepted for publication are subject TASHI WANGCHUK ’99 to editing. Unless correspondents request otherwise, e-mail addresses THIMPHU,BHUTAN will be published for letters received electronically. THE JOURNAL OF THE School of Forestry & Environmental Studies contents Environment 2 Dean’s Message 3Cover Story: A Project as Big Yale as a Mastodon 8Yale Team Obtains Million Dollar NSF Grant 10 At 81, An Environmentalist Looks Forward 8 11 Faculty, Students Participate in Forestry, 18 Parks Congresses 13 At the School 3 16 BookShelf 18 An Early Opportunity Environment: Yale Inspires a Lifelong The Journal of the School of 28 Forestry & Environmental Studies Commitment to Fall 2003 • Vol. 2, No. 2 Reaching Out Editor David DeFusco Director of Communications 20 Farmers Threatened by Copy Editor Trade, Economic Pressures Anne Sommer Alumni/ae Liaison to Editor Kathleen Schomaker 22 Honor Roll Director of Alumni/ae Affairs Design 28 Paying It Forward Margaret Hepburn PlazaDesign Editorial Advisory Board 31 Gift Establishes Alan Brewster, Jane Coppock, 31 Apprentice Program Gordon Geballe, Stephen Kellert, Emly McDiarmid, Peter Otis, Frederick Regan 33 Tribute to Dave Smith Dean James Gustave Speth Environment: Yale is published twice a year 36 Class Notes (Spring and Fall) by the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. Editorial offices are located at 205 Prospect Street, 47 Obituaries New Haven, CT 06511. 203-436-4842 • e-mail: [email protected] www.yale.edu/environment 49 33 49 Commentary printed on recycled paper with soy-based inks Fall 2003 1 DEAN’S MESSAGE: GREEN REPUBLICANS—QUO VADIS? by the Club also tend to some greenness,and so the environment gets caught in the cross-fire. It wasn’t always this way. The halcyon days of American environ- mentalism were the 1970s. Beginning with the enactment of the National Environmental Policy Act under President Nixon and culminating in President Carter’s protection of Alaskan lands,it was a bipartisan era with Democrats such as Ed Muskie joining with Republicans such as Howard Baker to compile an unmatched record of tough environmental legislation.Within a short span of a few years © Michael Marsland © Michael in the early 1970s, with a Republican president and Republican Dean James Gustave Speth leaders such as Russell Train, Bill Ruckelshaus and Russell Peterson, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Council on have in front of me the “2003 Presidential Report Environmental Quality were created, and a handful of major laws Card” recently released by the League of such as the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts began to take effect. It is a Conservation Voters (LCV), and it gives President fact of profound importance that America’s period of maximum Bush bad marks. To say that the U.S. environmental progress on the environment was a period of bipartisanship. Icommunity is distressed by the Bush Administration is to On my trips on behalf of the school and Yale, I meet many understate the situation. Environmentalists are alarmed, Republicans who are concerned by what they see today in Washington and they are girding for what may be their largest political concerning the environment. (At the state and local levels there is mobilization ever. actually a lot of environmental progress occurring, reversing the Though I have been a lifelong Democrat, I have nonetheless begun historic pattern of Washington leadership.) When we talk, three to wonder: what’s a green Republican to do? The LCV (www.lcv.org) is options come up: they can take back the party; they can decamp for not allied with the Democratic Party, but it will certainly be the other side; or they can take the position that environmental supporting a lot of Democrats in 2004. When one looks at the voting concerns are not the fundamental ones at this point and stand pat. record of the two parties in Congress, it is not hard to see why. The This last option should be rejected in my view. Just one issue— divide between the parties on the environment could hardly be wider climate change—should be convincing on this score, and I want to (See Table).This is not a healthy situation,however it came about. explain why. The best current estimate is that, without major corrective action (especially by the principal polluters), global Average LCV Environmental Ratings warming in this century could wreak widespread havoc. For instance, it would make it impossible for about half of the U.S. lands to sustain the types of plants and animals that now inhabit them.A huge portion of America’s protected areas, large and small, is now threatened. In one projection, the much-loved maple, beech and birch forests of New England will disappear in this century. House Democrats ■ Another projection shows that much of the southeastern United ■ House Republicans States will become a huge grassland savanna, too hot and dry to support forest. Heat waves and other extreme weather events,a rise in sea level, coral bleaching and new public health risks are among the Deb Callahan, the president of LCV,reports that LCV searches hard other predicted consequences. for Republicans to support. Often, when they find them and provide There is a number that future generations will focus on the way we support, LCV then encounters the Republican-leaning Club for follow quarterly economic reports: the amount of carbon dioxide in Growth on the other side, working to beat moderate Republicans. As the atmosphere, measured in parts per million, or ppm. The environ- recently noted in The New York Times Magazine (“Fight Club,”August mental consequences just noted are what could unfold if atmospheric 10, 2003), the Club for Growth’s real passions are cutting taxes and carbon dioxide concentration rose from today’s 370 ppm to about 700 supply-side economics,but Republicans who lack the zealotry favored by 2100.The pre-industrial level was about 280. CONTINUED on page 9 2 ENVIRONMENT:YALE The School of Forestry & Environmental Studies AA ProjectProject © Brian Sytnyk/Masterfile asas BigBig asas aa MastodonMastodon By Alan Bisbort attempting to close this gap in environ- understanding a huge, mysterious, yet very mental research. real beast.” ost environmental studies “For decades, environmentalists have been The goal of the Mastodon Project, according have, in the past, focused trying to understand how the environment to Stephen Kellert, Tweedy/Ordway Professor on places where bio- works without people,”said Gaboury Benoit, of Social Ecology and co-director (with Benoit) diversity was rich and, professor of environmental chemistry and co- of the project, is to “ascertain how ecological Mmore often than not, the concentration director of the study.“This study puts people and social systems shape each other and, of plant and animal species included back in the environment. Most of the more particularly, how the structure and everything but Homo sapiens.While environments that are of greatest importance function of natural systems affect human such efforts to study and preserve the to people are the ones they are living in, and so values and socioeconomic behaviors, as well as remaining pristine (read: human-free) far we have a very poor understanding of how the reverse.” corners of the globe are, of course, those environments function.” The footprints that this “unwieldy beast” important, they often overlook the fact The scope of Yale’s study is as enormous as have left thus far in Mastodon Project data offer that the vast majority of Homo sapiens, its potential impact,given the presence of more exciting evidence that the condition of the including in all likelihood those reading than 6 billion Homo sapiens on Planet Earth. environment where one lives matters for this, live in areas where the environment This explains its nickname—the Mastodon reasons beyond aesthetics. That is, a healthy has been dramatically altered by their Project—a moniker supplied at the outset by environment is more than a nice but optional presence.And people have, in turn, been Ya le professor of hydrolog y Paul Barten (now at quality-of-life amenity; it is vitally important altered by their immediate natural the University of Massachusetts), reflecting the to the physical and mental well-being of an surroundings, whether they live in sense researchers had of having “grabbed onto area’s human population.