social concerns that drive national in- terests and ... difficult times, it is hard for environ- ... gate or repair the consequences. .... networks can gather consistent data on .... the dead Zone in the northwestern gulf of mexico is an example of a.
Now Is the Time
for Action: Transitions and Tipping Points in Complex Environmental Systems by Susan G. Stafford, Dennis M. Bartels, Sandra Begay-Campbell, Jill L. Bubier, John C. Crittenden, Susan L. Cutter, John R. Delaney, Teresa E. Jordan, Alan C. Kay, Gary D. Libecap, John C. Moore, Nancy N. Rabalais, David Rejeski, Osvaldo E. Sala, J. Marshall Shepherd, and Joseph Travis
Many of our current environmental challenges unfold over such vast spatial scales and create consequences of such broad scope that they require a qualitatively different kind of scientific and social attention. The U.S. National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Advisory Committee for Environmental Research and Education (AC-ERE) concluded that the necessary research and education in the environmental sciences are not progressing at the pace required by challenges of such scale and scope. In its recent report, the committee issued a “call for action” for researchers, educators, and policymakers.1 This agenda called for the National Science Foundation to increase its commitiStockPhoto/Steve Lovegrove
ment to environmental science by increasing its investment in two areas: 1) fostering research that improves our ability to live sustainably on Earth, and 2) strengthening our understanding of the links between human behavior and natural processes. Why now? And why is this call to action so prescient?
Our purpose in writing this article is to ensure that the recommendations and the larger discussion around these critical issues reach a broad audience. We anticipate a healthy discussion among many sectors, including the science community (the physical, natural, and social sciences) and policymakers. If we are to make progress toward understanding the feasible options for sustainability, the points addressed in the article need to be at the core of the conversation.
The Challenges
1. Increasing Stress on the Planet The world is at a crossroads. Rapid development and growth of human populations and our patterns of resource use are causing unprecedented changes to natural ecosystems and loss of biodiversity. We are also changing our environment at rates and global scales that stretch our abilities to mitigate or repair the consequences. Whether we focus on climate change, land use conflicts, management of water, energy sources, or environmental pollution, the consequences of actions we take in one place reach across long distances to other places. While many changes appear to be small individually, taken all together they have large and even synergistic effects. At the same time, technological advances are changing lifestyles and livelihoods on every level. As these socioeconomic systems have become more globally connected and interdependent, so too have their interactions with environmental systems. Issues that previously were addressed at the local level are no longer adequately understood without a regional, continental, and increasingly, global perspective. 2. Little Time to Act The rate and extent of environmental change is outpacing the ability of institutions and governments to re-
spond effectively.6 While we recognize the direct connection between local human activities and global environmental changes, the feedback of that change on regional ecological and social systems is poorly understood. The challenges are not just the result of broader spatial scales of problems. It is also clear that there can be a substantial gap in time between human activities and the consequences of those activities on the environment and, of course, between remedial actions and actual remedies. We must rapidly increase our ability to forecast change in globally connected natural and human systems, or we face being able to do little more than respond feebly to crisis after crisis. Some would argue that because environmental change is happening so quickly, we cannot afford more research and must now take action in policy and management. Unfortunately, the uncertainties about environmental systems also apply to remedial actions and policies. While actions such as reducing carbon emissions are clearly necessary, many possible remedies may have ecological or economic ramifications that we have not had the time or insight to anticipate or to effectively examine. These distributional effects can drive differential political support for collective action. One need only look at the history of fisheries management7,8 for examples of well-intended decisions that, through a combination of unantici-
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Along with the global economic and social concerns that drive national interests and policies, environmental issues must become a priority for the security of citizens and governments around the world. The environment has often been pitted against the economy, and with the backdrop of today’s difficult times, it is hard for environmental issues to resonate when people are losing their jobs and homes. But why does society tend to view the environment and the economy as being mutually exclusive? While it might seem straightforward to frame environmental issues in ways that convey the economic value of a sustainable planet, attempts to do so have not been as successful as we might hope. Indeed, several papers with different perspectives—ecological, engineering, economic—have analyzed why this is so.2–5 Yet the need to do so is
more urgent than ever because of three prominent global challenges:
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pated human responses and unappreciated system complexity, produced outcomes other than those desired9 or late adoption of more successful arrangements.10 Emerging ideas to “geoengineer” the planet carry similar uncertainties11 that must be fully understood. 3. New Research Is Needed Environmental science must move beyond identifying issues and toward providing sound bases for the development of innovative solutions, effective adaptation, and mitigation strategies. To accomplish this goal, it is urgent that we expand our capacity to study the environment as an integrated system that includes the human dimension. Humans are inextricably embedded within environmental systems—our footprint is vast; we create effects on our environment and alter our actions, for better or worse, in response to the state of the environment. To understand this reciprocal coupling of natural and human systems, we must focus on systems science and ecosystems services, and describe the processes that link natural systems, from local to global scales, with human systems from individuals to collectives. Incorporating the human component will require long-term, regional-scale research that addresses how individual behavior, demography, and social systems respond to changes in the functioning of environmental systems. While scientists from every discipline can make significant contributions, studying the components of environmental systems in isolation from each other is neither adequate nor meaningful. To address the environmental challenges that confront us, we must take an integrated systems approach to synthesize data from diverse fields into a whole-systems perspective by considering the complications of interactions occurring on different spatial and temporal scales. One of the characteristics of environmental dynamics, natural and human-induced, is the existence of thresholds of rapid transition, or tipping points (see Sidebar, “Tipping Points”). Tipping points, as popularized from a sociological perspective in Gladwell’s best seller,12 are nonlinear transitions where “a small change can January/February 201o
make a big difference.” Natural and human systems alike are changing in ways that are poorly understood. How far and in what ways can these systems be stressed or pushed before they reach tipping points, i.e., undergo rapid transition to new states with unforeseen consequences?2 We usually discover tipping points after we pass them; as noted by one commentator, “The challenge is to look at a system that still seems to be stable and tell whether or not it is running headlong into a tipping point.”13 Tipping points are characteris-
tic of complex systems, and we must learn how to identify them, forecast our approach to them, and manage our systems to avoid undesirable outcomes. The challenges to the bold research and public engagement agenda advocated in the AC-ERE report1 will be difficult to overcome, and conducting research and education via a model of “business as usual” will not be sufficient. While we can look to disciplinebased science for most of the scientific advances within the last century, the
Tipping Points Although understanding and predicting tipping points is complex and complicated, we can’t shy away from tackling the major issue of how best to portray and explain tipping point phenomena to the public. There is an obligation on the part of the academic community to find the “currency,” i.e., simple, non-jargon words, with which to explain these phenomena. We do have a few things in our favor. It would appear that more examples of “tipping points” are presenting themselves in both the popular and scientific literature. These should be exploited as “teachable moments.” For example, in the recent collapse of global financial markets, systems tipped, models failed to adequately predict, impacts propagated rapidly in a tightly coupled system, and some of the impacts may be irreversible. Are all tipping points detrimental? The answer to this depends on the application of a value system. Unfortunately, it is easy to cite examples of detrimental thresholds crossed in environmental systems as a consequence of human activities. For example, the engineering works that facilitated shipping in the channel of the Mississippi and diminished the impact of annual flooding on its floodplain eventually led to such depletion of sediment supply to the Mississippi delta and Louisiana coastline that natural barriers to hurricane-driven surge and waves were lost.22,23 Increasing hurricane damages to coastal Louisiana are directly related to the loss of wetlands, a loss borne from nearly a century of human reshaping of the Mississippi River and its deltaic plain. Another example is global warming and its role in the disproportionate warming of the polar regions. If the recently accelerated annual loss of ice mass from the Greenland ice sheet persists, the sea level will rise faster than it has over the last century, and coastal cities across much of the globe will experience progressive salt water flooding.24 If we do not mitigate the human activities that are driving greenhouse gases toward a tipping point and instead we cross that point, the environment in which humans have developed their coastal infrastructure will change drastically, potentially setting in motion a cascade of social and political turmoil. But not all examples are negative. Tipping points can have beneficial outcomes as well. When the Cuyahoga River caught on fire in 1969, an emotional tipping point was reached that helped people recognize critical environmental issues, resulting in the cleanup of the Great Lakes. Despite the fact that officials from the city of Cleveland, Ohio, had authorized over $100 million to improve the Cuyahoga River’s water before the fire occurred, it was the fire itself that brought attention to the other environmental problems across the country. One could ask, without the river’s burning, would the Clean Water Act of 1972 have been passed? WWW.ENVIRONMENTMAGAZINE.ORG
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single-discipline approach has limited the capacity of science to address problems we now face.14 What is needed is a swift kick to catapult us out of our parochial comfort zones. As Nobel Prize–winning physicist Murray GellMann reminds us, “the mind most at premium in the 21st century will be the mind that can synthesize well… the most ambitious form of synthesis occurs in interdisciplinary work.”15
Opportunities There are, however, emerging opportunities that provide a glimmer of hope in the transition to a sustainable future through environmental research and education. A Pervasively Networked Planet Developments in cyberinfrastructure16 are changing how we conduct science and how scientists interact with each other and with the public. On the one hand, sensors and observational networks can gather consistent data on many variables; exploiting this capability is critical to responding to environmental challenges. These networks have the capability to monitor conditions across broad spatial and temporal scales and allow us to examine new kinds of variables, including those in the social sciences, and develop new theory and conceptual frameworks. On the other hand, cyberinfrastructure connects people, enabling us to share vast amounts of data and encouraging collaboration and open source innovation. This fosters the interdisciplinary connections and syntheses needed to address complex environmental challenges. Just as the first view of planet Earth from space helped crystallize a global perspective and an environmental awareness, the advent of global, interconnected, interdisciplinary data networks will be important in fostering international collective action to address environmental problems. Engage the Public Without an adequate knowledge base, citizens and policymakers are illequipped to make informed decisions about our environmental future. Although elements of environmental science and engineering are included in 42
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current formal and informal education, most efforts to integrate them and promote a deeper understanding of the linkage between natural and human systems fail. If we are to address our challenges, we will need concerted action, and that can only come from building cooperative behaviors that in turn can only emerge from greater understanding of the science and greater dialogue on the value and differing perceptions of the relationship between humans and environment. The networked world opens up new opportunities to engage the public, increase environmental literacy, build understanding, and thereby change the way we approach environmental science. Within this decade, over 5 billion people will be connected through cell phones and the Internet. Ironically, this comes at a time when many of the younger generation are spending less actual time in the natural environment.17 For example, Balmford et al.18 have shown that more children can identify the characters of a popular electronic game, Pokémon, than an otter, beetle, or oak tree. This begs the question, how can you value nature if you don’t interact with it? The answer lies first in recognizing that a connected generation is growing up with a new capacity for collaboration and interest in social networking enabled by new computing and communications platforms. In this digitally connected and socially networked world, people are no longer passive consumers of information, and because of the increasing power of mobile devices, nor are they bound to the desk. They interact with and contribute to information and co-create solutions in cyberspace, often providing their wisdom and creativity for low or even no cost. This invites exciting new avenues for learning opportunities that meaningfully connect people to their environment through data and models. It is time to ask how we can best promote environmental literacy by engaging a cyberconnected society for the benefit of environmental science. NSF’s Unique Position The NSF is the only federal agency that systematically supports all fields of basic science and engineering that
are necessary to understanding complex, coupled natural–human systems. This places the NSF in a unique position to lead a collaborative effort with other federal agencies to encourage interdisciplinary research that improves our ability to live sustainably on Earth. If the NSF is to be an effective agent of change in environmental research, greater priority must be given to advancing an integrated approach to earth systems and addressing the complexity of coupled natural–human systems from local to regional to the global scale. Just as the NSF has provided the pre-eminent model for peerreview of scientific proposals, it also can lead by example and illustrate to other federal agencies how to promote the kind of interdisciplinary research we need. In doing so, the NSF faces its own tipping point in how to best organize itself to support this kind of “systems thinking” research and education.
Why We Aren’t Responding: The Problem Current mindsets, organizational structures, and practices in academic and government institutions, with their traditional disciplinary funding and evaluation mechanisms, often inhibit the truly innovative and integrative science and education the nation (and world) needs. The NSF and other research funding organizations should adopt organizational and review strategies that promote interdisciplinary innovation, and ensure that programs funded for interdisciplinary activities have the longevity necessary to attract scientists to work collaboratively across the disciplines. We can’t solve the environmental issues overnight, or within the normal funding cycle of most federal grants. One federal agency cannot change the current collective approach to environmental research and education by itself. The environmental challenges are multifaceted in nature and large in scale, and the NSF must join with other agencies, both domestically and internationally, to promote the strongest effort that the nation’s scientific talent can muster. Moreover, interdisciplinary priorities for the NSF and other agencies will not achieve
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their potential if the institutional practices within the research and education communities are not adapted to facilitate interdisciplinary inquiry, research, and action. Our mixed record of managing in the face of uncertainty indicates that we must do a better job of identifying the most common environmental challenges and focus research on the systems in which they have emerged. In this sense, environmental research of the kind we advocate must move from individual case studies (e.g., the Aral Sea) to the systematic investigation of representative systems (e.g., grasslands, megacities, polar regions), founded on empirical research complemented by computational modeling (see Sidebar, “Dead Zone”). There will be priorities under this regime because of the urgency that the pace of environmental change demands. The need for both triage and study of representative systems argues for the NSF to take the lead role for this kind of research. The NSF, among those agencies that support environmental research, has a history of engaging the research community to define the most important problems, identify the representative examples of those problems, and catalyze the multidisciplinary research necessary for their solution.
Recommendations It was the juxtaposition of these
vivid challenges and opportunities that created the point–counterpoint backdrop for the AC-ERE’s five primary recommendations. These recommendations are as follows. 1. It is imperative to increase our understanding of coupled natural and human systems through increased support for broadly interdisciplinary environmental research. Such research should be responsive to the urgent needs of society for knowledge that addresses our environmental challenges and informs a more sustainable way of life. We must understand better the complications of processes that operate on different scales, and the feedback that can trigger abrupt change in environmental systems. Such understanding will maximize our ability to predict thresholds of change, design remedial actions January/February 201o
that move us away from those thresholds, and identify pathways of adaptation in response to change. 2. The NSF must evolve from its primarily discipline-centered organization to one that better promotes and supports interdisciplinary approaches, and attracts more scientists and engineers to engage in collaborative and integrative research and education that addresses the nation’s environmental challenges. To achieve this, the NSF must increase the size and longevity of funding programs that support broadly interdisciplinary research, i.e., programs that span multiple NSF directorates. Sustaining such programs on a timeframe relevant to the career paths of individual researchers is necessary to facilitate cross-disciplinary dialogue
and synergistic collaboration. The NSF should explore additional models of promoting interdisciplinary research, including new partnerships with other federal agencies,19 foundations, and the private sector, and new ways of conducting peer review so as to foster more collaborative and innovative approaches. 3. The NSF should lead the effort to ensure the implementation of a well-designed and integrated system of observational sensor networks that measure critical environmental variables as well as the changes in key human activities with environmental consequences. This effort should be well-coordinated with other federal agencies and state governments to ensure that data can be shared across networks and
Dead Zone The Dead Zone in the northwestern Gulf of Mexico is an example of a complex environmental problem that operates over large spatial and temporal scales and has complicated connections among environmental, social, and economic systems. First noticed in the early 1970s, the Dead Zone has grown from an area of about 8,000 square kilometers in the mid1980s to more than two and a half times that size today. Dead zones appear when phytoplankton production increases beyond the point at which it can be consumed through the food chain. Dead cells sink to the bottom, and in the process of decomposition by aerobic bacteria, the oxygen is depleted from the sediments and bottom waters. This results in a “dead” zone that cannot support crustaceans or fish. Studies indicate that the Gulf of Mexico’s oxygen-depleted waters began to appear seasonally after intense farming and fertilizer use in the Mississippi River’s watershed began post–World War II and accelerated in the 1960s.25,26 Land use changes and farming practices, such as liming and changes in drainage, crop type, and rotation, have increased water flow and changed water chemistry in the river. The net result has been a large increase in nutrients, primarily nitrogen, delivered to the Gulf. Seemingly unrelated policy decisions to address the nation’s energy demands have had implications far beyond what could be imagined or contemplated. For example, energy security in the United States has motivated a national policy that has shifted land use decisions by farmers whose collective action now affects a coastal ecosystem and threatens economic security of a fishing industry located thousands of kilometers away. In an effort to meet the Renewable Fuel Standard goals for biofuel production as specified in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. Farmers are now rewarded for increased corn production used to make ethanol. As a consequence, lands previously set aside for conservation or in production for other crops may be shifted into corn production, with an expected increase in levels of fertilization and greater water needs. Greater nitrogen inputs on lands in the midwestern United States will result in increased export of nitrogen to the Gulf of Mexico, thus illustrating the long-distance connections of environmental, energy, and social systems.1 WWW.ENVIRONMENTMAGAZINE.ORG
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to maximize the opportunities for synergy. The priority for the NSF in creating environmental observatories should be to facilitate research needs, as stated above, to address clearly defined scientific questions and hypotheses, and to better link site-based and experimental studies to long-term observations spanning regional to global scales. Related to this goal is a need to ensure long-term stewardship of data. The NSF should require that all proposals provide plans for management, accessibility, and preservation of data to be collected during a project, and evaluate those plans as part of the review process. 4. We must redouble efforts to promote new and participatory approaches to environmental education and public engagement through formal and informal venues. A higher level of environmental literacy is essential if we expect people to adopt behaviors that will solve environmental problems. An environmental literacy framework that is grounded in basic concepts to integrate disciplines into a holistic perspective of Earth’s natural and human systems should be developed for K-20 education and beyond. Achieving this will require educators, scientists, and social scientists to work across traditional disciplinary and institutional boundaries in order to rethink teacher training and professional development, revise curricula, and expand partnerships beyond formal education settings to include a more interdisciplinary approach. The recent trend report to adopt an integrative earth science curriculum as a science requirement in middle schools and high schools is a step in this direction. We should strengthen the connections between K-12, higher education, and informal education settings (e.g., museums, science learning and discovery centers, and nature centers), as well as build strong connections between those educational centers and organizations or spokespersons who reach more nontraditional audiences, such as staterun Cooperative Extension services, the Farm Bureau, civic organizations, TV weather newscasters, and Webcasts. In doing so, we would move beyond the current arrangements that include the pre-service teacher training between state departments of educa-
tion, local school districts, and higher education schools of education to include greater involvement from disciplinary scientists and informal education settings. Much as many universities transitioned from site-based laboratory schools for teacher training to partnerships with local schools within adjacent districts in the last century, the partnerships could be expanded by making full use of the aforementioned advances in cyberinfrastructure, research and observational sensor networks (e.g., NSF’s LTER and NEON networks), and social networking to include additional venues and partners. 5. We must help policymakers develop a better understanding of complex environmental systems, an understanding that helps them appreciate the concepts of tipping points and the socioeconomic effects of severely altered environmental systems. Tools must be developed that assist stakeholders to visualize and synthesize data from multiple sources. We call for the advancement of decision support tools that integrate knowledge across disciplines to address long-term consequences. Policymakers and the general public must be engaged in activities that lead to a better understanding of the interconnectedness of environmental challenges, such as water availability, biodiversity loss, population growth, and energy demand, and of the uncertainties we face in making predictions in an era of rapid environmental and social change.
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Action Agenda The challenge before us is daunting, and we must develop an action plan. This will be neither easy nor simple— but it can be exciting and invigorating. In many ways, an effective plan will challenge the current structure of universities and funding agencies. At present, significant barriers remain at American universities that thwart interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research. Universities will have to rethink their reward structures to accommodate multidisciplinary, multiinvestigator research and teaching. Similarly, funding agencies will need to go further to accommodate crosscutting proposals that often do not fit
into neatly packaged disciplinary or predetermined programmatic areas. Restructuring how environmental science is funded, practiced, rewarded, and taught is the key to success. For example, the development of sustained transdisciplinary environmental research initiatives that transcend NSF divisions and directorates is a good first step. Working collaboratively with federal mission agency partners to support such transdisciplinary initiatives is another. Developing more effective initiatives to engage the public and disseminate the results of environmental research is a third. Finally, educating university administrators and opinion leaders on the need for such multidisciplinary expertise and human capital is another step that can be taken.
Conclusions We must develop a blueprint to exist sustainably within nature. This implies that we must use renewable resources that nature provides and generate wastes that nature can assimilate. We are failing on both fronts. Only about 5 percent of the 3 gigatons of materials20 that we use annually to fuel the U.S. economy are renewable, and we release about 7 gigatons of carbon annually21 into the atmosphere, which causes increases in carbon dioxide that contribute to climate change. This is what we refer to as the gigaton problem. To solve these gigaton problems, we will need to develop solutions that have gigaton effects. Accordingly, we need to examine the social, economic, and political drivers that underlie these problems, and we need to develop technologies that can be brought to scale to solve our environmental challenges. Only about 1 billion of the earth’s inhabitants are causing the current gigaton problems. If we bring every one of earth’s inhabitants up to the same standard of living, this will surely bring new prosperity, security, and ability to address environmental problems to the world. However, it means that if we conduct “business as usual,” we will multiply our current gigaton problems by a factor of 10. We can ill afford to continue using current technology or solution-driven mindsets to NUMBER 1
increase prosperity and security to the world, and so we must initiate new research toward new understanding and new kinds of solutions. The complexity of the challenges we face demands a fundamental environmental literacy of all citizens—one that embraces the realities of diverse cultural perspectives, transgenerational timeframes, and local-to-global connectedness. Environmental literacy must bridge the gap between the academics that do the research, the tool developers who design curricula and applications, and the communicators and educators who translate the science into terms that can be broadly
understood by policymakers and the public. Efforts should be redoubled to promote new and participatory approaches to environmental education and public engagement through formal and informal venues. In essence, we call for a tipping point within our educational (K-20) system. To successfully pursue an environmental agenda, the public must be actively engaged by the scientific research establishment in many different aspects of its work, which will encourage a greater role for “citizen scientists.” Finally, helping policymakers develop an in-depth knowledge of complex environmental systems, and economic costs and ben-
efits posed by not addressing them, is a priority. Policymakers need an understanding that allows them to appreciate the concept of tipping points, the thresholds of large magnitude or abrupt change, and the socioeconomic effects of severely altered environmental systems. History marks the early twentieth century as the beginning of the first environmental movement in the United States. Now, a century later, we face yet another call to action. Time is running out, and we must act now if we are to make any headway in meeting the challenges before us—as a public, as a nation, and as a planet.
SUSAN G. STAFFORD (“Now Is the Time for Action: Transitions and Tipping Points in Complex Environmental Systems”) is chair of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Advisory Committee for Environmental Research and Education (AC-ERE). She is a professor in the Department of Forest Resources in the College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resources Sciences at the University of Minnesota. The following co-authors are also NSF AC-ERE members. DENNIS M. BARTELS is the Executive Director of the San Francisco Exploratorium. SANDRA-BEGAY-CAMPBELL is an engineer at Sandia National Laboratories. JILL L. BUBIER is the Marjorie Fisher Professor and Chair of the Environmental Studies Program in the Department of Earth and Environment at Mount Holyoke College. JOHN C. CRITTENDEN is Director of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Environment Magazine Executive Editor SUSAN L. CUTTER is the Carolina Distinguished Professor and Director of the Hazards Research Lab Department of Geography at the University of South Carolina. JOHN R. DELANEY is a Professor of Oceanography and the Jerome M. Paros Endowed Chair in Sensor Networks at the University of Washington School of Oceanography. TERESA E. JORDAN is the Chair of the Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences at Cornell University. ALAN C. KAY is President of the Viewpoints Research Institute, Inc. GARY D. LIBECAP is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Sherm and Marge Telleen Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the Donald Bren Distinguished Professor of Corporate Environmental Management at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. JOHN C. MOORE is the Director of the National Research Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University-Fort Collins. NANCY N. RABALAIS is the Executive Director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium DeFelice Center. DAVID REJESKI is the Director of the Foresight and Governance Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center. OSVALDO E. SALA is the Sloan Lindemann Professor of Biology in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Brown University. MARSHALL SHEPHERD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Georgia.
NOTES 1. Advisory Committee for Environmental Research and Education (AC-ERE), Transitions and Tipping Points in Complex Environmental Systems: A Report by the NSF Advisory Committee for Environmental Research and Education (2009): 56 pp. National Science Foundation, Arlington, Virginia. 2. J. Rockström, W. Steffen, K. Noone, A. Persson, F. S. Chapin III, E. F. Lambin, T. M. Lenton, M. Scheffer, C. Folke, H. J. Schellnhuber, B. Nykvist, C. A. de Wit, T. Hughes, S. van der Leeuw, H. Rodhe, S. Sorlin, P. K. Snyder, R. Constanza, U. Svedin, M. Falkenmark, L. Karlberg, R. W. Corell, V. J. Fabry, J. Hansen, B. Walker, D. Liverman, K. Richardson, P. Crutzen, and J. A. Foley, “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461 (2009): 472–475. 3. P. M. Vitousek, H. A. Mooney, J. Lubchenco, and J. M. Melillo, “Human Domination of Earth’s Ecosystems,” Science 277, no. 5345 (1997): 494–499. 4. EPA, “A Price Tag for Nature,” http://www.epa.gov/ ecology/spotlight.htm#price_tag (accessed November 21, 2009). 5. W. Nordhaus, A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 6. J. F. Richard, High Noon: Twenty Global Issues, Twenty Years to Solve Them (New York: Basic Books, 2002) 7. H. K. Lotze, H. S. Lenihan, B. J. Bourque, R. H. Bradbury, R. G. Cooke, M. C. Kay, S. M. Kidwell, M. X. Kirby, C. H. Peterson, and J. B. C. Jackson, “Depletion, Degradation, and Recovery Potential of Estuaries and Coastal Seas,” Science 312 (2006): 1806–1809. 8. O. R. Young, G. Osherenko, J. Ekstrom, L. B. Crowder, J. Odgen, J. A. Wilson, J. C. Day, F. Douvere,
C. N. Ehler, K. L. McLeod, B. S. Halpern, and R. Peach, “Solving the Crises in Ocean Governance: Place-Based Management of Marine Ecosystems,” Environment 49, no. 4 (2007): 20–32. 9. E. Tenner, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (New York: Random House, 1996). 10. C. Costello, S. D. Gaines, and J. Lynham, “Can Catch Shares Prevent Fisheries Collapse?” Science 321, no. 5896 (2008): 1678–1681. 11. G. C. Hegerl and S. Solomon, “Risks of climate engineering,” Science 325 (2009): 955–956. 12. M. Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, (Little, Brown and Company 2000). Boston, Massachusetts. 13. NPR, Predicting the Crash (2009), http:// w w w. n p r. o rg / t e m p l a t e s / t r a n s c r i p t / t r a n s c r i p t . php?storyId=112886911 (accessed November 21, 2009) 14. A. Leiserowitz, R. W. Kates, and T. M. Parris, “Do Global Attitudes and Behaviors Support Sustainable Development?” Environment 47, no. 9 (2005): 22–37. 15. H. Gardner, Five Minds for the Future (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2007): 46. 16. D. E. Atkins, K. K. Droegemeier, S. I. Feldman, H. Garcia-Molina, M. L. Klein, D. G. Messerschmitt, P. Messina, J. P. Ostriker, and M. H. Wright, Revolutionizing Science and Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure: Report of the National Science Foundation Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastucture (2003): 84 pp. National Science Foundation, Arlington, Virginia. 17. R. Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2005).
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18. A. Balmford, L. Clegg, T. Coulson, and J. Taylor, Why Conservationists Should Heed Pokémon, Science 295 (2002): 2367. 19. Fiskel, J., T. Graedel, A. D. Hecht, D. Rejeski, G. S. Sayler, P. M. Senge, D. L. Swakhamer, and T. L. Theis. 2009. EPA at 40: Bringing environmental protection into the 21st century. Environmental Science and Technology. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/es901653f. November, 2009. 20. L. A. Wagner, Materials in the Economy: Material Flows, Scarcity, and the Environment (Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, 2002). 21. International Energy Agency, Key World Energy Statistics (2009), http://www.iea.org/textbase/nppdf/ free/2009/key_stats_2009.pdf (accessed December 21, 2009). 22. K. L. Ebi, G. A. Meehl, D. Bachelet, R. R. Twilley, and D. F. Boesch, Regional Impacts of Climate Change: Four Case Studies in the U.S. (2007): 70 pp Pew Center on Global Change, Arlington, Virginia. 23. N. N. Rabalais, “We All Live Downstream (and Upstream).” Journal of Soil and Water Conservation 58, no. 3 (2003): 52A-53A. 24. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2007 Synthesis Report (2007), http://www. ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg3.htm.(accessed November 21, 2009). 25. L. Mee, “Reviving Dead Zones,” Scientific American 295, November (2006): 78–85. 26. R. E. Turner, N. N. Rabalais, and D. Justić, “Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia: Alternate States and a Legacy,” Environmental Science and Technology 42 (2008): 2323– 2327.
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