Listen (QuickTime) to Professor Robert Sterner, who currently heads the NSF’s Division of Environmental Biology. He talks about how climate change may require a commitment on par with that made to the space program decades ago.
ROBERT STERNER: Hi, my name is Bob Sterner. I’m currently the directory of the Division of Environmental Biology at the National Science Foundation in Washington. I’m fortunate in some ways to be occupying this position in this particular time, which will straddle the present administration and it will begin the next one. Many people in Washington are wondering how things will change after the next election. It doesn’t take a really powerful crystal ball to think that environmental issues will be of increasing importance to the political process as we go forward.
Climate change is widely recognized as a serious issue. There’s increasing acceptance of doing something at the federal level about climate change. We are thinking really hard about how environmental biology plugs into a possible expanded federal role in terms of research having to do with climate change. So that’s one possibly important aspect.
One way to look at this is on a very big scale, U.S. science policy has been through a couple of different periods over many decades and the most profitable time—if that’s the right word—for science funding was immediately after Sputnik, going into the Apollo era. That was a wake-up call to the U.S. population that science was an important thing and that we had to invest in it in order to, well, it ended up the goal ended up being putting a person on the moon.
The big question of today I think is whether climate change is a Sputnik-like event. I don’t know that it is. It might be, but Sputnik and the Apollo program resulted in very large increases in federal funding for scientific research. After that period, it’s been about one in every seven federal discretionary dollars that’s been spent on research and development. And that goes back for tens of years. So we had the burst of Apollo and then R&D settled down to about one in seven dollars from about mid-sixties, late-sixties, all the way to today.
To me the most interesting question is whether climate change will rise to a Sputnik-like event in terms of increasing science funding. If it does, then the kinds of work that DEB is funding, the kinds of work that the University of Minnesota is so strong in, we’ll be there, basically positioned to ramp up our efforts to try to provide the kinds of knowledge that the public needs going forward with these serious environmental issues.
