Leading Researchers Strive to Open New Paths in the Business of Science : Ecologist Solves Problems by Asking Right Questions
A strangely disrupted patch of forest can be seen from the air over Long Island.
The trees that once grew there were destroyed by beta and gamma rays from a piece of Cesium 137, a radioactive metal used to treat cancer patients.
The architect of the damage is one of the nation’s most respected and influential ecologists, a man who works hard to preserve what’s left of the world’s quickly disappearing natural heritage.
George Woodwell, an ecologist by profession and conservationist by conviction, made an important scientific discovery with his irradiated forest project, set up in 1961 adjacent to the Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he was then employed.
Biologists knew that radiation would kill trees and plants. Woodwell asked what it would do to an ecosystem: a natural biological community in sensitive balance with its environment.
Predictable Changes
The answer came as a surprise: There was no haphazard destruction. The radiation produced a measurable, predictable series of changes. “It was a systematic series of changes that are also observed when almost any toxin or chronic disturbance is applied to a forest,” Woodwell said.
It was one of the first demonstrations of Woodwell’s knack for asking the right questions. He--with colleagues at Brookhaven--had asked a new question and designed the simplest, clearest possible experiment to answer it, and thereby advanced the cause of science.
“Scientists have a hard time thinking up new questions,” Woodwell said. “Scientists are as conservative as anybody. You have to make an effort to open up new paths for scientists to think and work in.”
Throughout his career, which began at the University of Maine in 1957, Woodwell has shown a talent for asking needling, disturbing questions. That talent has put him in the thick of nearly every environmental controversy that has arisen in the last 25 years.
Controversial Topics
He is a scientist who has chosen to pursue controversial research topics that have important consequences for public policy. He has examined the effects of DDT spraying, the sensitivity of estuaries, the possible disastrous consequences of a global warming of the atmosphere with the buildup of carbon dioxide and the notion that a “nuclear winter” could spread over much of the globe after a nuclear war.
He went to Dartmouth College to study physics but switched to ecology. At Duke University he got his Ph.D. for a study of the pond pine, found in bogs along the Atlantic Coast from southern New Jersey to Florida.
Office in a Closet
He then moved to the University of Maine against the advice of his Duke advisers, who warned him that he would teach the introductory ecology course and get an office in a closet with a telephone down the hall.
“After three years, I realized I had to teach the introductory course, that my office was in a closet and the telephone was down the hall,” he said, laughing. “So I decided it was time to move on.”
It was 1961, and he went to Brookhaven to begin the irradiated forest project.
Before he left Maine, though, Woodwell had already become embroiled in a touchy political issue by agreeing to study the effects of DDT on the state’s white spruce and balsam fir forests.
The state was spraying DDT in an attempt to control the spruce budworm, a caterpillar that kills trees by eating the needles. Woodwell was asked to study the effect of DDT on the trees. He determined how long the chemical survived and noted its harmful effects on birds and wildlife.
Environment Crusade
While Woodwell was in the midst of the study, the environmental crusader Rachel Carson published “Silent Spring,” a landmark work that was in part an attack on DDT.
Woodwell was then a supporter of DDT. “I was a little suspicious of somebody who thought DDT spraying might be unwise,” he said. “It wasn’t a year later, I began to realize what a terrible thing it was.
“Those little bits of insight come to you slowly. It’s astonishing how slowly they come. Once you have them, it seems as though they should have been there all the time.”
Woodwell continued his research on DDT when he moved to Brookhaven, and he first became involved with environmental lawsuits. He supported local citizens who were suing the mosquito control commission to force a halt to DDT spraying.
The effort was successful. “It was clear that it was a very powerful tool, this business of taking an issue to court. So in the end we founded the Environmental Defense Fund.”
Conservation Law
The Environmental Defense Fund is now a thriving conservation law group, as is the Natural Resources Defense Council, which a group of young lawyers from Yale established with Woodwell’s guidance.
Meanwhile, as the irradiated forest experiment began to yield results, Woodwell established a project to look at all the flows of energy, oxygen, carbon dioxide and nutrients in and out of Flax Pond, an estuary on the north shore of Long Island.
He was gradually developing the idea of biotic impoverishment, the gradual, measurable decline in the health of an ecosystem. That concept is now central to his thinking.
“I want to start a new realm of science,” he said. He would like to do with oceans, coastal zones, various forests and vegetation types the same thing he did with the irradiated forest: determine the precise series of changes that show how impoverished an ecosystem is.
“If you can get those stages well laid out, then you can use the stages themselves as an index of how well you’re doing,” he said.
Ecological Research
By 1975, Woodwell had become disenchanted with the prospects of doing further ecological research at an institution that was primarily devoted to physics research, and he left Brookhaven for the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole.
He had built the ecology program at Brookhaven and now, for the second time in his career, he built a laboratory, this one called the Ecosystems Center.
He made it into one of the premier institutions of its kind as he became increasingly interested in what is often referred to as the carbon dioxide problem, or the greenhouse effect.
A buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can lead to gradual warming of the Earth, as the atmosphere traps heat much the way the windows in a greenhouse do.
This global warming can sharply alter worldwide crop yields and raise sea levels by melting polar ice packs--changes that could foment political unrest or even war.
Computer Models
Woodwell uses computer models of climate, satellite photographs showing the rate of disappearance of the world’s tropical forests and other research tools to demonstrate that deforestation is a major contributor to the release of carbon dioxide.
His studies of ecosystems have shown him how forests “fix” carbon, thus decreasing the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As trees grow, they absorb and break down carbon dioxide to get the carbon that is one of their major constituents. When forests are burned or cut, much of their carbon is released into the atmosphere again as carbon dioxide, Woodwell said.
Earlier this year, Woodwell again outgrew the institution employing him, and he left to build his third research organization, the Woods Hole Research Center, under the auspices of the Hudson River Foundation of New York.
Bursting With Ideas
He is typically bursting with ideas--about a land-use study of Cape Cod, an investigation of the Hudson River Valley, a symposium he hopes to sponsor on the concept of biotic impoverishment.
Woodwell’s clear, strong voice in dealing with the environment is not likely to disappear. “You don’t like the altercations--you’d like to see the world run smoothly,” he said. “But there are bound to be altercations if you’re dealing with issues that have economic implications or political implications.
“It’s certainly true that doing the sorts of things I’ve done isn’t for everyone. It’s also true that it has a cost in science. Many of your colleagues are angry at you. Some are jealous--they think they could have said it better. Some think you’re oversimplifying their field and misrepresenting it.
“On the other hand, the public issues are going to be decided. So it seems to me that the scientific community has an obligation to participate.”
