The Nelson Institute Blog

The Nelson Institute Spring 2008 courses are now available on our Courses Search website. The courses search website allows you to see what courses the Nelson Institute is offering along with the course description.

Also, don’t forget about our Special Topics, New Courses and Seminars pages. This is where we post non-catalog, environmentally related, courses from all across campus. If you would like to have a course posted, please fill out the submission form.

In response to the recent conversation with Molly Jahn in our Governance Faculty meeting, Bill Bland has composed a “mini-manifesto” to advance Nelson Institute thinking regarding our contributions to undergraduate credentialing in the environment. I take the following sentence as one of the key ideas in that draft:

The principles of the fundamental indeterminacy of the environment and the diversity of ways of knowing it are a nexus at which all disciplinary training would usefully meet.

We have learned a lot about the environment and human interactions with it (?) over the last several decades. To my mind a key element of that learning has had to do with the complexity of the relationship between humans and the natural world and the corollary that exclusively rational approaches to managing and thinking about the environment are incomplete.

Bill argues, and others have expressed similar ideas, that we need to develop a set of courses that map out a nexus of ideas that all environmental graduates of the UW-Madison should be familiar with. If we are going to implement such an idea, now is the time to act.

What do you think?

I met today with the University Academic Planning Committee to present the documentation they had requested regarding support for changing the name of Land Resources to Environment and Resources. I gave the committee a brief overview of our efforts and addressed their previous concerns. There were no questions.

Earlier this evening Jocelyn Milner sent word that the name change has been approved by unanimous vote of the UAPC. There are implementation details to be attended to, but we no longer need to hedge and waffle as we refer to the program.

And we can now begin in earnest the process of changing our verbal habits…

As the colors change and the semester hits its full stride, I am looking back on what I have learned so far as interim director. On the broadest scale, I have learned that, beyond signing a lot more paper, the Director has a view of Institute in the context of the University and its landscape that is different from that of the Associate Director. A corollary to this view is that I have gained an appreciation of the unique character of the Institute.

The view from the Director’s office is that, at its heart, the Nelson Institute is a collection of faculty members who share an interest in advancing our understanding of the interaction between humans and our environments. We are organized into research centers and teaching programs and extension activities, but at the end of the day the Nelson Institute is its faculty writ large.

The faculty is the group that determines the directions of our research, it is the group that designs and teaches our curricula, and it is the group that relates knowledge to the needs of groups beyond the Institute. In these roles the faculty rarely speaks with a single voice and given the range of enterprises that we represent, that is an important reflection of the the topic we share. Our challenge then is to not remain silent or to revel in cacophony, but to identify themes we agree upon and to join our voices toward an orchestrated whole.

I am thinking about these themes because the view I currently have of the Institute and its landscape suggests that there is advantage to be gained (and conversely, opportunity to be lost) in the Nelson Institute exerting leadership on a range of issues of importance to the University. The Director can facilitate, and on occasion personify, that leadership - but the strength of our Institute’s contribution will come from our ability to lead in a distributed fashion within Schools, Colleges and Departments across our campus. Nelson Institute leadership requires us all to speak and to listen and to facilitate conversations around themes related to our mission. And we must take positive action with what we learn and know.

I appreciate the support that you have all shown me and look forward to your thoughts with respect to my thoughts.

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Two disclaimers:

1) I have not forgotten about students. Clearly students are central to our mission. I can write more later…

2) Please interpret “faculty” broadly. If called to clarify, I would start by saying that I mean at least “governance faculty” and hopefully “affiliate faculty” as well.

In his column today Tom Friedman talks about an entrepreneur in the Oakland area who is working to address the economic challenges of his communities by creating jobs to retrofit buildings to be more energy efficient, etc.

This sort of thinking is crucial to our path forward. Environmental justice (and I see this idea as an interesting flip to that set of concerns) is the theme of this year’s Nelson lecture series and the sort of thinking that Van Jones is doing is great example of positive action on that front.

It began half a dozen years ago as an informal colloquium for UW-Madison professors and students with a shared interest in environmental history. It evolved into a more structured interdisciplinary “research circle” with seed funding from the Nelson Institute.

It came into its own this year as the Center for Culture, History and Environment (CHE), our first full-fledged center anchored primarily in the humanities and social sciences. CHE this month settled into newly renovated space in the Bradley Memorial building at 1225 Linden Drive (see map) and launched a Web site.

Supported by a major gift from a private donor, CHE is devoted to the study of environmental and cultural change in the full sweep of human history from many perspectives. Its faculty participants, drawn from such disparate fields as anthropology, botany, forestry, geography, history, history of science, landscape architecture, law, literature, and rural sociology, among others, seek to understand human-environment interactions over time and their consequences in public policy, public health, social justice, and other cultural realms.

The center already has helped organize “place-based” workshops for professors and graduate students in Montana and in the Apostle Islands region of northern Wisconsin. This fall it offered new courses in environmental film history and documentary production featuring two artists in residence and will host a major environmental film festival, Tales from Planet Earth, in downtown Madison Nov. 2-4 that will be free and open to the public.

Gregg Mitman is CHE’s founding director and our first faculty member to receive an endowed professorship made possible by the donor’s gift. A medical and science historian, Mitman has written several books, including, most recently, Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes (Yale University Press, May 2007), which earned a favorable review this month in Science magazine (on-line access limited to individual and institutional subscribers).

Welcome, CHE!

UW-Madison researchers made significant contributions in developing the reports on the implications of global warming that led today (Oct. 12) to the awarding of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize to Vice President Al Gore and the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Thousands of scientists from around the world contributed to the IPCC reports, which evaluated the phenomenon of climate change and its implications for human society and the natural world.

In a statement today, Ole Danbolt Mjos, chair of the Nobel committee, said, “Through the scientific reports it has issued over the past two decades, the IPCC has created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming. Thousands of scientists and officials from over 100 countries have collaborated to achieve greater certainty as to the scale of the warming.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established in 1988 to study climate change information. The group doesn’t do independent research but instead reviews scientific literature from around the world.

UW-Madison faculty involved include:

- Jonathan Patz, a professor in the Nelson Institute’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE) and a lead author of the North American chapter of the 2007 IPCC report. He was also a lead author on previous IPCC reports in 2001 and 1995, as well as a past co-chair for the Health Expert Panel of the U.S. National Assessment on Climate Change.

- Several faculty and staff members associated with the Nelson Institute’s Center for Climatic Research (CCR). The most recent IPCC report included an article on anticipated changes in the global water budget over the next century co-authored by CCR associate director John Kutzbach, an emeritus professor of atmospheric and oceanic science and environmental studies; associate scientist Steve Vavrus; and Jack Williams, assistant professor of geography and environmental studies. Kutzbach, who directed CCR for many years, contributed to previous IPCC reports, as well.

- John Magnuson, a professor emeritus of zoology, director emeritus of the Center for Limnology and a lead author of chapters in the 1995 and 2001 IPCC reports. His contributions focused on the impacts of climate change on freshwater ecosystems.

(Disclaimer up front - I am trying to catch up so this post is going to be a tad on the long side.)

(Hopeful assertion - I hope to avoid such posts in the future by writing more often and summarizing with a meta-post periodically)

Communication and Coordination: Since the beginning of the semester, I have met with two groups that have not historically met with the Director on a regular basis: 1) the Student Representatives; and 2) chairs of the home departments of our governance and affiliate faculty. This post and my hopeful assertion above are the result of my meeting with the students. I plan to meet with each of these groups on a regular basis in the future.

Undergraduate major: The issue of how to credential UW-Madison undergraduates wrt the environment is again on the agenda. CALS is anxious to move ahead with an Environmental Science major. A small group of Nelson Institute folks got together to discuss how best to work with CALS on this initiative and as a result of that meeting Molly Jahn will join the upcoming Governance Faculty meeting to discuss the CALS proposal.

Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts (WICCI): This partnership with the WI Dept of Natural Resources is moving forward. An ad hoc group has designed a structure that includes a Science Council that oversees working groups, an Advisory Committee that provides guidance regarding problem articulation and an Outreach and Operations unit (Nelson Institute) that provides logistical support.

The Science Council, with representation from across the state, met for the first time in late September. The group is enthusiastic and plans to meet monthly as the program gets off the ground. It is my hope that we will be able to seed fund some working groups soon and we have submitted a Baldwin preproposal toward that end.

Business, Environment and Social Responsibility: Ideas continue to develop around this theme. There is growing activity in the Business School and we will hold a Forum featuring Stu Hart and a distinguished panel of commentators on 2 Nov 2007 at the Monona Terrace. Panelists will include Stephen Viederman, past-president of the Jesse Smith-Noyes Foundation, Josh Farley from the Gund Institute, and Bruce Kahn from Smith Barney.

The Search: Rumor has it that the search for a permanent Director is proceeding apace. I have heard that a strong pool was formed and that a medium list may be close to formed. It is likely to still be a while before the process becomes more public.

Annual Report: The Nelson Institute’s 2006-07 Annual Report is completed and we are in the process of distributing it.

Lt. Gov. Lawton: Tia Nelson, Steve Pomplun and I met with the Lt. Governor recently and were very well received. We discussed state climate initiatives and briefed her on the relationship between WICCI and the Governor’s Global Warming Task Force. (WICCI, climate impact on humans; GWTF, human impact on climate).

Reccreditation Project: The Nelson Institute is strongly represented on this important project. Nancy Mathews is leading the overall effort and Jon Foley is co-chair with Jeremy Suri of the “Shaping the Global Agenda” theme. I am also member of the committee for that theme. The Dean’s Retreat yesterday focused on that effort and there is a lot of excitement around the study themes and anticipation of the strategic plan that will follow from the effort.

Community Environmental Forum: Our third semester of this External Relations activity is off to a strong start. The focus this semester is on community sustainability efforts and is being led by Tom Eggert.

What did I forget?

Prof. Harvey M. Jacobs is serving a second one-year term with the Council for International Exchange of Scholars (the Fulbright Commission) on the panel that reviews urban planning mobile apps for the Fulbright Senior Specialists Program. The program invites applications from senior practitioners and scholars in urban planning for short international visits under the sponsorship of universities or public agencies.

As part of his continuing European work, Prof. Jacobs will be collaborating with a frequent UW-Madison visitor, Prof. Rafael Crecente Maseda of the University of Santiago de Compostela, Lugo, in a new Spanish research program on “Decision Support Systems for Land Use Planning at the Local Level.” He will be joined by participants from Brazil, Italy, and Norway.

Closer to home, in August, Prof. Jacobs was the featured speaker to the Sensible Land Use Coalition of the Minnesota Twin Cities; his talk was part of a program on “Property Rights vs. Community Rights: Backlash or Whiplash?” Most recently Prof. Jacobs is the author of “New Actions or New Arguments over Regulatory Takings?” in Yale Law Journal Pocket Part 117 (2007): 65-70.