BUniverseSimon A. Levin, George M. Moffett Professor of Biology and director of the Center for BioComplexity at Princeton University, explores the best paths to both environmental and socioeconomic sustainability in the second of this year’s two Pardee Distinguished Lectures. In studying how to keep our natural ecosystems robust, he says, we may find valuable clues to maintaining our global networks as well.
When formulating environmental policy, Levin says, we must first ask ourselves how much we value our biosphere. We must consider what our ecosystems provide for us — material goods like food and pharmaceuticals, their indirect role in stabilizing the climate or pollinating the soil for agricultural purposes, or even aesthetic beauty — and also what our ecosystems require — which species are necessary to maintain biodiversity, how these species interact, and what it takes to keep a habitat “resilient and robust.” To do this, he argues, we need to begin to study the environment as a series of complex adaptive systems; we must develop ways to identify patterns at both the microscopic and macroscopic levels and to statistically relate the data across scales and systems. He goes on to describe how these biostatistical techniques apply to human societies, especially in the realm of economics. Yet while we may believe in the “invisible hand” that according to 18th-century economist Adam Smith steers our markets, we can’t leave the environment up to fate, Levin says: “There is no invisible hand that guides or preserves the biosphere.”
About the speaker:
Simon A. Levin is the George M. Moffett Professor of Biology and director of the Center for BioComplexity at Princeton University, where he founded the Princeton Environmental Institute. He is a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He edited the Encyclopedia of Biodiversity, I-V (2000) and the forthcoming The Princeton Guide to Ecology (2009). Levin is a former president of the Ecological Society of America, which awarded him its MacArthur Award in 1988 and a Distinguished Service Citation in 1998. He has received the Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences (2004), the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences (2005), and the American Institute of Biological Sciences Distinguished Scientist Award (2007) for his contributions to computational and theoretical biology and ecology. He will serve as a Resources for the Future University Fellow through 2011. He holds a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland.
