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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 résumé 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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