Fossil fuel pollution, crop shortages, climate change, damaged ecosystems⌠Our environment clearly needs to be rescued, and we need dedicated environmental scientists to tell us how to do it.
Spurred by financial support from investors and public funding, careers in environmental sciences abound. Among scientists from all sorts of backgrounds â biology, chemistry, geology, physics, oceanography, computer science â thereâs now a âhuge trend in the direction of environmentalismâ, says Michael Lassner, vice president of trait discovery at plant genetics company Pioneer Hi-Bred International in Johnston, Iowa. In everything from alternative energy sources and sustainable agriculture to basic research into our planetâs climate, he says, âweâre seeing a lot of creativity â training a lot of people and actually getting people to change fieldsâ.
Energy, food and Arctic ice
Looking for alternative and renewable energy sources is a rapidly growing area of environmental science, says Meredith Hastings of the Environmental Change Initiative at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. âWith the different issues our society is facing, anything related to energy is interesting, exciting and pressing right now,â she says. Researchers in academia, government and the private sector are involved in myriad efforts to find cheap energy sources that do not increase carbon emissions or have the potential to inflict environmental disasters such as the Gulf oil spill.
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Changes in energy policy over the past decade or so have already created new jobs in many states. California, Wisconsin and Massachusetts, among others, have voluntarily adopted more restrictive energy regulations than those mandated by the federal government, and regulatory jobs in state and local governments will probably increase further as more states follow suit, Hastings says. To help meet this need, many consulting firms have recently opened environmental consulting branches that try to help businesses make decisions about how to meet regulations or how to avoid having a particular environmental impact.
Agricultural science also underlies many scientistsâ efforts to work toward a sustainable future. Much research in this area focuses on technologies that improve yield when crops face different types of adversity. ĐÓ°ÉÔ´´s at Pioneer, for example, are working to engineer plants that re resistant to disease, drought and flooding.
One of the most successful areas of agricultural research and development revolves around insect-tolerant plants. Farmers have to use less insecticide with these crops, which is good both for the environment and for the farmersâ bottom line. Pioneer scientists are now moving a droughttolerant line of crops from the research phase to product development, Lassner says, which should give farmers more reliable yields from year to year.
Studying Earthâs systems
Although many environmental scientists work in applied research like energy and agriculture, some are engaged in the basic research that helps us understand how our planet works â what we could call âyet to be appliedâ research.
Søren Rysgaard of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg studies what happens in Arctic waters as the ice caps melt. When the freshwater sea ice melts, the salinity of the surrounding ocean decreases, which can affect microorganism populations and have a domino effect on local food webs.
Rysgaard and his colleagues are building models of complex feedback systems between Arctic ice caps, atmosphere, fjords and ocean circulation â and how all of this is altered by climate change.
Rysgaard has scientists from many different disciplines working with him on these complex environmental analyses, including atmospheric chemists, physicists, oceanographers, biologists and computer scientists. âEverything is connected: the ocean affects the climate system, temperature feeds back to influence ocean composition, and phytoplankton affect cloud formation in the atmosphere,â he says. âAs we do our research, we come up with questions that can only be answered by someone next door.â
In terms of climate research, he believes that interdisciplinary work is the only way to go: in recent years, many new discoveries have been made at the borders between disciplines.
âBecause of the inherent need for cross-discipline research in environmental work, thereâs a lot of discussion about the best way to educate future environmental scientists,â Rysgaard says. Older environmental scientists have usually been educated in a traditional discipline such as biology, chemistry or geology, he says, but todayâs students have the opportunity to study environmental sciences more broadly from the beginning of their education.
The tendency in both academia and the private sector, however, still seems to be to seek out students who have a solid background in any physical science discipline. âJust being trained in science gives you the skills and the viewpoints you need,â says Hastings. âIn most environmental research, youâre applying knowledge that youâve learned in a different context.â
Lassner believes that the most successful environmental scientists will combine both generalist and specialist knowledge and approaches. âĐÓ°ÉÔ´´s today have to be specialists, but they also have to be able to integrate approaches from a lot of different disciplines,â he says. âHaving a broad perspective on experimental approaches is necessary to be successful today.â
Learning to view environmental problems from other perspectives is especially important for mid-career scientists who may be moving from a classical discipline to something more broad and systems-based. âYou might be trained in, say, chemistry and you might be focused on a laboratory project, but when youâre in the field, you donât have control of the elements,â says Hastings. âYou have to take a system approach. You have a piece that you want to understand in detail, but you have to remember that itâs connected with a lot of other things that are happening in the environment.â
âBurgeoning environmental scientists will still be required to specialize in order to get a PhD,â Lassner says, âbut the people I admire the most are the ones that arenât too set in one way of thinking or one way of doing something.
âLearn about other approaches, learn about how to stretch the bounds of your thinking, and apply new approaches to old problems.