Editor’s note: This is an article from the Spring 1999 issue of UCLA Magazine.
Lest he ignore the 800-pound gorilla in the room, Richard Ambrose Ph.D. ’82 acknowledges the complaint he’s heard more than once about university researchers and the way they approach real-world environmental problems.
“The classic stereotype is that when you get academics involved in trying to come up with solutions that can be implemented, they’ll do a study and then conclude that there need to be more studies done before any decisions can be made,” says Ambrose, an ecologist in the School of Public Health.
“Many times we do need more information,” he protests, laughing. “But we can also make recommendations based on what we know right now.”
Not long ago, academics in Ambrose’s field looked askance at colleagues who focused their energies on finding practical solutions to specific environmental problems. Some of the best evidence that this is no longer the case has developed over the past few years at UCLA, where a grass-roots movement by faculty culminated in 1997 with the establishment of the Institute of the Environment (IoE).
The IoE involves approximately 60 faculty in fields whose academic paths typically have not crossed in environmental studies. Law professors, political scientists, urban planners, sociologists and economists mix freely with biologists, chemists, physicists, engineers, statisticians and experts in business and public health. That unusual transcendence represents the conviction of IoE members that environmental problems increasingly demand a team approach by experts from a broad spectrum of disciplines if they are to be adequately addressed.
“Technologists like myself have tended to say, ‘Here’s the answer; if people just did as we said it would be a perfect world,’” says IoE Director Michael Stenstrom, a civil and environmental engineering professor. “Then we get upset when decision-makers don’t do as we say.” Stenstrom points out that technical solutions exist to many of our most vexing environmental problems, but many of these solutions are not politically or economically feasible: Just ask your local electric-car manufacturer.
“We’re trying to adopt an approach that is transdisciplinary in the sense that our work will be based not only on good technology, but also on an awareness of policy, law and economics,” Stenstrom explains. “That way, our solutions will be more amenable and adoptable.”
Taking after the well-received quarterly business forecast published by the Anderson School at UCLA, the IoE leadership created its own model, a yearly “report card” on the Southern California environment. The first Southern California Environmental Report Card was published late last year; the second (which will visit a new group of topics) is scheduled to be released in September. “We hope to be able to produce something each time that will attract the attention of both government agencies and the public,” says Stenstrom.
In its inaugural edition, the IoE analyzes progress — and regress — in the region’s response to four particular issues: air pollution, wastewater treatment, water usage and wetlands conservation. The marks are mixed, indicating that while the IoE is eager to work with environmental policy-makers, it is also not about to pull punches in its assessments.
Take air quality, for example. Southern California gets an “A” for its progress to date in meeting federal emission standards for nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide and lead, and for the dramatic strides it has taken to reduce peaked ozone levels over the past 40 years (an achievement all the more remarkable given the growth in population and automobile use during the same period). But the region’s lack of new policies to match the aggressive strategies laid out in earlier times results in a “C” for current efforts. “The point is that this could turn around if we’re not careful,” says Arthur Winer ’64, an atmospheric chemist and faculty member in UCLA’s Environmental Science and Engineering program.
There is a similar split in the area of wastewater treatment. Again, Southern California gets top grades for the area’s inland water reclamation plants, but a “C” for the coastal plants, based in part on more than 20 years of delay in construction of secondary treatment facilities as the City of Los Angeles and L.A. County Sanitation Districts sought legal waivers from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). (The waivers were ultimately not granted, and the facilities are set to be completed within the next couple of years.) “Our worst grade is for allowing the deterioration of the Hyperion treatment plant in the early ’80s, where we fail,” the report concludes.
While the agencies that supply water to the Los Angeles area receive a respectable “B” for their increasing investment in strategies to manage demand, water users themselves get a “C” for their insufficient conversion to water-efficient technology and little evidence of enduring changes in water-use behavior. And in wetlands conservation, the IoE confers its lowest marks: a “C” for recent efforts to protect and restore wetlands, but a barely passing “D” overall. Given the “dismal” current state of wetlands in Southern California, estimates indicate that only about 10 percent of the original wetland area remains, and most of that has been severely degraded, the report says.
A stated purpose of the Report Card is to promote a dialogue with environmental decision-makers on important issues — and to be sure, some of the agencies singled out in the first report are talking, even if it’s to disagree. Barry Wallerstein D.Env. ’88, executive officer at the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD), while welcoming specific policy input from the IoE, is disappointed that the report expresses doubt about the agency’s current policy direction. “All of the easy solutions have already been implemented in Southern California — any other region that has an air-quality problem only needs to look to what we have done and implement a small portion of that,” Wallerstein asserts. “Regarding the future, we need to continue to press for technological advancement and commercialization of low-polluting alternatives that can be implemented in a cost-effective manner. And we’re actively doing that.”
Leaders in the government agencies cited in the wastewater report had their own complaints. “We believe we were unfairly characterized as dragging our feet on secondary treatment,” says Jim Stahl, assistant chief engineer and assistant general manager at the L.A. County Sanitation Districts. “We had laid out very good scientific and engineering principles for why we thought it was necessary to continue with the type of treatment we had, which we felt was an environmentally sound, cost-effective system that was doing the job.” John Cross, assistant director of the Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation, argues that recognition should have been given to improvements at the Hyperion plant since 1989, when the city began meeting full secondary treatment standards.
But neither Stahl nor Cross has any problem with the report card concept; indeed, Cross’ main complaint is that his agency wasn’t given the opportunity to review and comment on the report prior to publication. Each of the authors of the 1998 Report Card are soliciting readers’ comments, which will be summarized in the next report.
The 1999 Southern California Environmental Report Card is being timed for release at the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), which will be hosted and sponsored by UCLA Sept. 16–19. It will be the first time that SEJ, which includes environmental reporters from the country’s major print and broadcast outlets, will hold its national meeting on the West Coast.
Environmental reporters and IoE faculty have a common goal, observes SEJ executive director Beth Parke: a desire to advance public understanding about issues so complex that even environmental reporters often have difficulty grasping them. “We’re in an era in which it’s extremely important for scientists to be public communicators,” says Parke. “That’s why an institutional effort such as we’re seeing at UCLA is helpful.”
Ambrose believes the Southern California Environmental Report Card can be particularly useful in offering a broader perspective than event-focused news coverage typically provides. “You always read about this or that oil spill in wetlands, but rarely do you see articles about the status of wetlands generally,” he says.
In its effort to provide such perspective, the inaugural Report Card lays down the gauntlet, arguing: “While human civilization has made extraordinary social and technological strides in the past century, too often the environment has been sacrificed for profit or convenience. Accordingly, although such progress has improved the quality of life for some, it has resulted in a serious deterioration of the planet’s water, land and air resources, thus jeopardizing the future quality of life for all.”
IoE members believe one of the keys to fighting environmental deterioration is to help crystallize the issues for the citizenry. “When confronted with reasonably accessible facts, people are very ready to pitch in and try to make things better,” says IoE member Richard Berk, a professor of sociology and statistics. Berk has studied public opinion in various areas of environmental policy and found, contrary to conventional wisdom, that most people are willing to make sacrifices on behalf of a cleaner environment. Winer agrees: “You don’t hear people saying they won’t pay $200 in order to have a catalytic converter on a $30,000 automobile [as was predicted]. A few years back, we heard predictions that recycling wouldn’t be supported, and my impression is that Southern California is moving strongly that way. In a sense, the public has always been out in front of the decision-makers. And it’s the public’s priorities that ultimately determine whether the political will exists to carry out these programs.”
One current study, funded by the U.S. EPA and headed by IoE founding director Richard P. Turco, provides what may be the best illustration of the IoE’s raison d’etre. The Los Angeles Basin Watershed Project is an effort to understand, in a more comprehensive way, the processes that control water availability in a major urban setting. Turco, an atmospheric chemist, is joined by eight IoE colleagues in an ambitious effort to synthesize data and create a predictive model that encompasses all aspects of water quality, availability and management; regional meteorology and climatology; basin hydrology, vegetation and land use; human water consumption and disposition; runoff sources of sediments, toxins and nutrients; air pollutant transport, transformation and surface deposition; downstream wetlands ecology and impacts; and coastal water circulation, biogeochemistry and sediments.
“It is one of the best integrated projects I’ve seen,” says Brian Sidlauskas, an environmental-protection specialist in the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, who assists the project director in administering the grant. “In the past, a lot of these studies have been very disciplinary. By working together in a more integrated way, these professors can examine what’s happening in the watershed around Los Angeles as a whole.”
The SCAQMD’s Wallerstein notes that environmental pollutants tend not to respect the boundaries of land, water and air that traditional higher education has drawn. “Putting together multidisciplinary teams is critical to ensure that our solutions don’t simply transfer the pollution from land to air or water, or vice versa,” he says.
Wallerstein, along with one of his key deputies and several staffers, is a product of UCLA’s 25-year-old Environmental Science and Engineering program, an interdepartmental doctoral-degree program — among only a handful of programs of its kind in the nation — whose mission is to prepare professionals for environmental leadership positions by giving them the well-rounded training that is increasingly required. That educational philosophy has more recently been extended at the undergraduate level, where the IoE began team-teaching a yearlong freshman course, “The Global Environment: A Multidisciplinary Perspective,” in Fall Quarter 1997.
Now, IoE faculty hope the Report Card and the visibility afforded by the SEJ conference and other high-profile events will help bring the institute to the attention of those in government, industry and the general public who have an interest in environmental issues. “I’m very interested in letting people know that UCLA has knowledgeable faculty covering all facets of the environment,” says Berk, “and that, through the IoE, we are anxious to work with these leaders so that everyone can benefit.”