Yes, the Department of Plant Biology, which was a successor of the Department of Botany, has been resident on the Stanford campus since the 1920s. From that time, there has always been an ecology group within the Department. At the time the Institution decided to create a new Department of Global Ecology, we were down to two faculty members who were ecologists. Since then we hired a third. Most Carnegie departments are quite small, on the order of six to eight faculty members. Global Ecology is now growing from three to what we hope will be a steady state in the six-to-eight range.

I think it reflects several things, one certainly being the founding of the Department. But we also had a very senior ecologist retire in 2000, and we replaced him with an outstanding young ecologist the following year. So the number of faculty members hasn’t really changed; what’s changed is that the group has grown consistently in strength. The increase also reflects the fact that problems of global ecology are really receiving a prominence they didn’t have in the past. Probably more than anything else the increase is a coalescence of international interest with the research agenda we have been pursuing.

Basically we’re focused on understanding how big chunks of the earth’s system operate. And by big chunks I mean the systems in which the important features that emerge do so as a result of organisms interfacing with the physical environment in a two-directional mode: organisms are influencing the environment, which is, in turn, influencing the organisms. We’re interested in what kind of organisms succeed and fail and how they interact with the physical climate system, with the solid earth and with the fluid earth. We start our approach to global-scale issues with an emphasis on organisms that make up ecological systems. We try to identify potential faculty members who have a deep appreciation of the way biology works but are committed to expanding their understanding of individual organisms into a framework that includes many players and many processes. If you contrast that with the way most earth-systems modeling is done, you’ll see we approach it with a stronger emphasis on the underlying biology. We tend to think in terms of developing a large-scale understanding and to put balanced emphasis on the biology, on the solid earth and the fluid earth.

We have a highly interactive group with certainly a substantial amount of teamwork. I think even more characteristic of our Department is that almost all our projects involve collaborations both within and without the Institution. We have a large number of collaborations with the Stanford faculty and students, and our current faculty also works with the international community of global change researchers, which includes oceanographers, atmospheric scientists, geologists, and even social scientists.

I think the nature of the work we’re doing requires people to be aggressive about building collaborations. We don’t have a special administrative agenda for that purpose, but we do have some flexible funds that can be used to encourage collaboration.

Well, I will tell you how I think we have to go about understanding the problem. I think that what we’re really trying to do with the work underway here is to get a mechanistic understanding of the new kinds of processes that arise as one moves to larger and larger spatial scales. Our starting hypothesis is that processes that tend to dominate the way the world works have a very large element of control through what we call emergent properties—properties that you couldn’t quantify by studying individual organisms. You can only do so and ultimately understand by stepping back and looking at how large groups of these processes interact. Ultimately we would like a comprehensive understanding of the way these systems function, and the way they influence the cycling of matter and energy through oceans and atmosphere. That agenda is very, very strongly connected with human fingerprints, human impacts on the earth’s system, and it interacts very directly with topics such as climate change, changes in biodiversity, over-fishing the oceans, and lots and lots of examples of other human impacts. It’s likely that the most profound effects will come at the level of these emergent properties, and that will give us a big head start in understanding the way that human impacts occur and also the basic foundations for figuring out ways to address those human impacts.

I can talk about a few specific problem areas that we are deeply engaged in now and where I see those heading. One issue all members of the Department are working on is the global carbon economy, and the way that interfaces with climate change. The main heat-trapping gas is carbon dioxide, which is also exchanged by the oceans and taken up by plants when they grow and released when they decompose. We are working to understand how, over the next century, the land and oceans will exchange carbon in a way that either makes the carbon-exchange problem worse or better than in the absence of these influences. We’re optimistic that in the next 10 years we will have a very clear understanding of the way the land and the ocean will interact with climate change to control the future atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. This is an extremely important contribution. Uncertainty in the carbon budget is one of the core issues in understanding the impact of climate change. I feel if we can bring a high level of uncertainty reduction to the carbon cycle, if we can narrow the uncertainty, it will make it much easier to have a rational discussion of climate change and of approaches to limiting climate change and climate-change impacts.

Another area we’re working in is deforestation, the cutting of forests—especially in tropical countries where the bulk of deforestation is now occurring. I feel we have a combination of technical tools for quantifying forest cutting and modeling tools for understanding impacts, so that in a decade we should be able to have a very comprehensive picture of how the world’s forest resources are changing. That should be able to feed directly into forest management discussions, and discussions of global diversity, global forests, and the carbon cycle, and forest resources that might be used for exploitation by governments and private companies. I think it also relates directly to the sustainability of societies across the tropics.

Right at the moment, we are expanding our faculty into the area of biological oceanography. The oceans cover about 70% of the earth’s surface and are the source of many poorly understood processes. One of the problem areas we’re hoping to tackle is the connection between biodiversity in the ocean and microbial communities and the processing of carbon and nutrients in the ocean water. This connects strongly with the global carbon cycle and the extent to which oceans remove carbon dioxide from the air, and it connects to a variety of processes that are important globally. It goes all the way from maintenance of commercially important fisheries to changes in biodiversity in oceans to global cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus and other essential elements.

Probably the most important message is the one that Andrew Carnegie left when he founded the Institution, which is that basic science research has a critical role in laying the foundations for a sustainable future. We believe that the kinds of investigations we’re undertaking, looking at large parts of the earth’s system, is an area where great opportunities for progress can be found, and where the progress can contribute in a very, very fundamental way to the creation of a sustainable future.