In its special Spring 2015 issue, Ezra Magazine asked faculty members to imagine the world in 2065, when Cornell celebrates its bicentennial.
Among those featured inthat cover storyare:
- Wendy Wolford, the Robert A. and Ruth E. Polson Professor of Development Sociology and faculty director for economic development programs at Cornell’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.
- Margaret Smith, professor of plant breeding and genetics, and Associate Director of the Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station.
- Katherine McComas, Chair of the Department Communication in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
- C. Lindsay Anderson, Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering and the Norman R. Scott Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow.
Here’s what they had to say …
Too close to call
Wendy Wolford罗伯特和露丝·e·D Polson教授吗evelopment Sociology and is faculty director for economic development programs at Cornell’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.
Charles Dickens said it best: It is the best of times, it is the worst of times. Perhaps never before has the field of economic development seemed to hold so much potential for growing new economies, healthy citizens and responsive, democratic societies – the best of times – while being fraught with growing inequality, environmental degradation, human deprivation and social unrest – the worst of times.
Over the next 50 years, it will become clear whether the best we can do is enough to address the worst of what we have done. We have no real precedent for this: the field of economic development has always been the study of the past, where developed countries like England were held up as examples for developing countries to follow. But the next five decades will see new issues and actors, ones that seem to have no exact historical parallel, like the rise of China, climate change, transnational civil society, mass species extinction and widespread resource degradation.
中国和其他的emerging economies (Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa) are reshaping the international agenda through what is optimistically called “South-South Development,” where emerging countries partner with developing ones to transfer knowledge and experience. Climate change requires new strategies in rich and poor nations alike, ones that address both overconsumption and poverty. At the same time, transnational civil society, from international nongovernmental organizations to farmers’ movements and Twitter followers, will play an increasingly visible role. The rapid loss of species in the Anthropocene (the first geological era dominated by human activity) will require this transnational coordination if whole ecosystems and populations are not to be lost.
Finally, the question of whether or not the next 50 years of development are sustainable is, not surprisingly, the most pressing issue for the future. The next 50 years will be pivotal in determining whether we see the best of times or the worst: Whether development can generate fertile land, clean water, living forests and renewable energy, or leads to increasing exclusion and war over limited resources. At the very least, there is still a choice
Agricultural balancing act
“As a plant breeder, I feel the looming challenges for our discipline are huge,” saysMargaret Smith, professor of plant breeding and genetics.
Challenges include a growing world population that will require farmers to produce as much food in the next 50 years as has been produced in the entire history of settled agriculture, says Smith. She researches sweet and field corn breeding to develop new varieties for farms in New York state and internationally.
She also seeks to enhance understanding of corn adaptation to marginal environments.
When Smith looks into the crystal ball of her research area, she envisions a world that will require more nutritious food grown on limited arable land. That finite amount of land must also bear the burdens of soil degradation and increased meat production, as populations become more affluent, creating shifts in dietary patterns that include more animal protein.
“Demands [for food on limited land] will go up rapidly, and as if that’s not enough, we have to lump climate change onto it,” she says.
Shifts in climate patterns pose risks for unpredictable rainfall in the U.S. corn belt, where four states produce a quarter of the world’s corn, Smith says. And countries across the developing world, including those in sub-Saharan Africa, will have greater stressors from projected high temperatures and drought.
“The discipline of plant breeding will need to be alert to being as efficient as we possibly can,” Smith says.
She advocates using traditional breeding methods to create new populations of plants that tolerate modern stressors, and then use the tools of genetics to evaluate how adaptations occur.
Scare tactics will get less scary
Instead of “Ebola hits New York,” the risk-savvy headline should have been “Texting while driving kills New Yorkers.”
Katherine McComas, department chair of communication in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, is reality-savvy enough to know what kinds of information drive the media world – and what that landscape might look like in the future.
“The risk of catching Ebola as we go about our daily lives,” McComas says, “is just about zero – yet people don’t always pay attention to what the scientists think are the most dangerous things; they fixate on others that have much less likelihood of happening to them.”
That’s too bad for the general public in an increasingly perilous world, but McComas and her Cornell colleagues in the social sciences have moved beyond that perception glitch to explore the deficit of trust in what’s becoming the Too Much Information Age.
“We have to move past a knowledge-only paradigm – this belief that if people just knew the risks then they would act the way we think they should – because people in their day-to-day lives have to make decisions on so many things; [it’s] a field of messages from so many different sources. One of the things they’re going to base a decision on is: 'Can I trust the person who’s talking to me? Can I trust in the process?’”
She cites two areas of research where Cornell is thoroughly engaged and nonscientists frequently question the process: Climate change and genetically modified foods.
Here at Cornell, McComas says, “there is a genuine effort to try and understand these wicked problems” that will challenge humanity throughout the 21st century. “This is where the transformational research will happen.”
Power up local
In 50 years, people can expect that renewable energy sources will be better integrated with traditional power sources and energy systems will become less centralized, saysC. Lindsay Anderson, assistant professor in the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering.
Anderson, the Norman R. Scott Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow, researches how to improve integration of renewable energy into existing power systems.
Currently, the U.S. has huge centralized power sources that distribute energy to residences and commercial interests and serve entire regions of the country. But Anderson predicts that the U.S. will move to smaller sources that are geographically distributed and serve smaller areas.
Much like how financial investors recommend portfolio diversification to buffer market fluctuations, smaller energy sources that are spaced out from each other “will make the system more robust,” Anderson says.
These same principles of decentralization and distribution apply to low-carbon, renewable energy sources such as wind farms. For example, a large wind farm gets in trouble when winds die down, but if many, smaller wind farms are spread out over a larger area, there is more diversity and resilience built into the system, she explains.
“I don’t think we can ever replace fossil fuels completely,” Anderson says. “But I would hope to get to 50 percent” of energy needs met by solar, wind and geothermal, for example, in 50 years.
Solving our energy issues will require improvements in math, computational power and speed, environmental, electrical and mechanical engineering, and policy. “It’s an interdisciplinary problem,” she says.
Also quoted in the feature wereJane Mt. Pleasant, associate professor of horticulture and a member of the food focus group of the President’s Sustainable Campus Committee, and布莱恩·汪幸科, the John Dyson Professor of Consumer Behavior and director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab.
To read the full Ezra Magazine feature, with insights from more than 40 faculty, staff and students at Cornell,click here.
