Inaugural Speech

Quentin Wheeler
President
State University of New York
College of Environmental Science and Forestry
September 12, 2014


Chancellor Zimpher; Madam Chair DeMarchi and members of the ESF
Board of Trustees; distinguished members of the platform party; ESF
faculty, staff and students; family and friends, Marie and I are deeply
honored by your presence and that of our honored guests previously
mentioned, and the current and past chancellors and presidents in
attendance.

This is an historic day in the life of the State University of New York College
of Environmental Science and Forestry. Not because I stand before you as
its 4
th
president, but for what the day represents. Such investiture
ceremonies have been held by universities since the Middle Ages. They are
waypoints. Opportunities to reflect on an institutions milestones,
progress, and direction while passing the symbols and authority of the
institutions highest office to a new president. I am honored by the trust
you have placed in me; humbled to follow in the footsteps of those who
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have built this most special institution; and eager to accept the challenges
and opportunities that lie ahead.

This century will be dominated by environmental challenges: natural
resources exploited to the breaking point, uncertainties of climate change,
diminished and degraded ecosystems, a citizenry increasingly urban and
remote from wild life, and the sobering thought that, if the present rate of
extinction is unchanged, 75% of all the kinds of plants and animals would be
gone in just 300 years. The last time our planet was witness to such a
massive loss of biodiversity was 65 million years ago. That time, the great
dinosaurs perished by no fault of their own. This time, one species, Homo
sapiens, is driving the event and threating its own survival in the process.

There is good news. It is not too late to mitigate losses, to find sustainable
alternatives to meet our needs, to protect largely intact ecosystems, to
write a happy ending to this story. As we confront these frightening
specters of what will be if we fail, we should take solace in the great good
we can achieve and share with the public the small triumphs along the way,
always spreading hope and inspiration. We do not want environmentalists
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to fall into the wrong group in Oscar Wildes dichotomy, who said there are
people who spread joy wherever they go, and those who spread it
whenever they go.

In spite of clear voices of warning Peter Raven, Ed Wilson, Tom Lovejoy,
and many others neither our society at large, nor the scientific
community, are responding in the ways necessary or on a scale sufficient to
these challenges. What is missing is institutional leadership: institutions of
vision and courage, willing to risk breaking from the herd, leading by
example, and blazing a new trail.

The values of too many institutions have been turned upside down by
competition for large-scale science funding. For too many, grants have
become an end, rather than a means, and the most pressing needs for
research thereby ignored. This Kardashian Science, celebrating scientists
who have the most money and confusing modern for better, is out of step
with the realities of the great challenges of our time. We should remember
that Isaac Newton, Linnaeus, and Darwin did OK as scientists without a
single government grant.
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Competing for grants is necessary, of course, in todays world, but as a
means of pursuing answers to pressing questions and obtained without
losing sight of the important goals that lie in education, discovery,
problem-solving, outreach, and preserving the natural world. The
alternative to being enslaved by fashions of pop science is inspired
leadership. By tackling the most important questions, by doing so in a
manner that invites public participation and understanding, and by
demonstrating the relevant and transformational impacts of such work, it is
possible to create funding opportunities rather than respond to them; to
attract investors who want to be part of truly making the world better.

ESF was founded to confront an urgent environmental challenge that had
emerged by the end of the 19
th
century. When ESF opened its doors in
1911, the great northern forests of New York had been diminished to less
than 25% of the states surface area by careless extraction of timber. Now,
New York is 65% forested, a testament to ESFs scientific approach to
forest management that we would today describe as sustainable.

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Now, 103 years later, the world faces a very different set of environmental
challenges. Greater in number and larger in scale, complexity, and
implications. The ESF community, with its passion for the environment,
small and nimble size, access to Americas great experiment in
conservation, the Adirondacks, and networked with the great institutions of
SUNY, is perfectly poised to create a new vision, take necessary risks, and
become a model institution for the confrontation of this new generation of
problems.

The challenges before us are incredibly complicated. It follows that
effective solutions must be no less complex. This means breaking down the
barriers between disciplines to assemble the kind of diverse teams only
possible on a university campus; preparing a new kind of environmental
leader for a world changing more rapidly than ever before; confronting
issues, not from within the walls of the ivory tower, but in an open way that
invites public understanding and participation; and building a coalition of
institutions, across the state, nation, and world, to scale up solutions to
meet the harsh realities.

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I challenge our dedicated and creative faculty and staff to redesign the ESF
Experience for undergraduates, creating a unique and comprehensive set
of classes and experiences, on our campus, in our field stations and forests,
in the communities in which we work, that fully prepares the next
generation of environmental leaders. The ESF Experience should be a
combination of curriculum and experiential learning that gives to ESF grads
the knowledge, competencies, literacies, skills, experiences, views, and
ethics that, in aggregate, make them uniquely qualified to tackle the
unprecedented challenges ahead. Lets compile a list of learning outcomes
that distinguish our grads from all others, and that stretch the normal
definition and boundaries of education.

Finding scientific and technological solutions is no longer enough. In order
to fundamentally shift our society to a more sustainable footing will require
broad public support. As Abraham Lincoln said: With public sentiment,
nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. In our wishes to
preserve the diversity of life underpinning the planets dynamic biosphere,
we are losing ground, and our national will power to do more is stifled by
irreconcilable differences across the political spectrum. It is nave, after
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forty years, to think that we are approaching this in the right way.
Environmentalism having a concern for the status and welfare of the
planet you live on should not be a controversial or partisan thing, but a
responsibility eagerly shared by all.

The inspiring symposium yesterday began to lay the foundations for the
kind of New American Environmentalism urgently needed to break the
political impasse, to remind all Americans that they have a stake in this
struggle for a sustainable way of life, to be inclusive, hearing all voices in
the debate, to provide objective science for fact-based policies, to
re-examine our ethics and values so that they inform and shape our
priorities.

Being right is not enough. We must be right for the right reasons. Recent
statements to the public that they should accept manmade global warming
as fact because most climate scientists agree it is so, sends the wrong
message. They should accept it because the data says that the average
temperatures are rising. Before 1543, all learned men agreed that the sun
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obviously orbited the earth. Throwing science under the bus to win a
debate is no victory.

As a SUNY research campus we have a sacred responsibility to protect and
uphold the integrity of science. Data, information, and knowledge belong
to humanity and must be seen to be objective, testable, and openly
available to all. But even this is not enough. As Isaac Asimov said The
saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster
than society gathers wisdom. Through a collaboration with all relevant
branches of human endeavor, we must also engage in the tireless search for
wisdom and be a source of guidance to society as it makes irreversible
decisions about the environment in this, a century of tipping points.

ESFs work thus does not end at the edge of campus. Increasing science
literacy in the public is imperative, as is awakening a love of nature in
children. Environmental disasters do not distinguish among socio-economic
groups or religious creeds. We all prosper or suffer alike on this small blue
dot. It is the job of science to provide facts, theories, and projections; it is
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the right of every human being to have a say in how that knowledge is used
in the creation of their future.

We must recognize and begin to close an alarming and widening gap
between urban dwellers, with smart phones ingrown into their hands, and
Nature. People will not vote or make sacrifices or invest limited resources
into environmental projects based on statistics alone. People who have
personal meaningful interactions with the natural world are those who will
be so inclined. And it is not good enough to say that we need to save
biodiversity. If science does not care enough about the individual species
making up the living machinery of the biosphere to give them names, to
learn what they contribute to ecosystems, and to make them recognizable,
why should the general public care enough to pay to save them? We must
put a face on biodiversity by telling the amazing natural history stories of
each and every kind of plant, animal, and microbe.

ESF will aspire to be Americas pre-eminent college of the environment, to
be a trusted partner among the countrys great institutions of higher
learning and discovery, to be the spark that ignites a revolution leading to a
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New and effective American Environmentalism, to be an inspiration to
children and citizens as a bridge to Nature, and to be a national leader in
environmental work where we can have special relevance and impact.

Historians of science say that asking the right question is more important
than finding the right answer. When scientists ask the right question it
inevitably leads to major breakthroughs. While remaining adaptable to
unforeseen opportunities, ESF will select a handful of questions right for
us. These may include a subset of questions in an area already being
pursued by national labs or larger universities or they may fill gaps in
scientific knowledge. But either way, they will be selected because of
what ESF can contribute to science, society, and the biosphere.

Let me illustrate what one deceptively simple question, impossible to
answer in exact form, and currently ignored by other institutions, could lead
to.

What are Earths species?

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To answer this question we must complete an inventory of the flora and
fauna. In so doing, we create an ecological baseline against which we can
detect invasives, measure extinctions, and set measurable conservation
goals.

We must individuate and name species by learning and describing what
attributes make each unique. In so doing, we see each species as a
masterpiece of adaptation to environmental change and open a flood gate
for the emerging field of biomimicry. For 3.8 billion years, natural selection
has rewarded the good ideas for survival and weeded out the bad ones.
We need only study these evolutionary adaptations to reveal billions and
billions of models and inspiration for sustainable alternatives to better
meet our own needs in greater harmony with the biosphere.

Biomimicry is a hot topic. The MIT Biomimetics Robotics Lab, Harvards
Wyss Institute for biologically inspired engineering, the Exploration
Architecture firm, Janine Benyus Biomimicry Institute, and a dozen others
are astonishing the public with the power of emulating organisms to solve
problems. What these fantastic and rapidly expanding organizations all
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share in common is that they are constrained by access to only a tiny
fraction of the possibilities. We have described fewer than 2 million of an
estimated 12 million species. Described in technical jargon, few of the two
million known species are tractable to engineers, designers, architects,
inventors, or entrepreneurs who could be solving problems.

By exploring what species exist we can create something new,
unprecedented, and awesomely powerful. We can create Supply Side
Sustainability. Partnering with experts in bioinformatics, cyber
infrastructure, and entrepreneurism, we can simultaneously speed an
inventory of life on earth while opening the door to a vast library of
biomimicry possibilities billions of years in the making. Imagine Syracuse as
the silicon valley of sustainability, spinning out start up companies and
fueling a biomimetic industry, already beginning to blossom, by prying
open this store of knowledge.

This simple question also addresses a deep, uniquely human need to
understand our origins. Where did we come from? How do we relate to
the living world and the Cosmos? Everything we flatter ourselves with as
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uniquely human: our upright gate, our larger than normal brain case, our
speech, can be traced to modifications of attributes present in ancestral
mammals. And everything that makes a mammal unique was modified
from even earlier ancestors. To truly understand what makes us human is to
explore and understand all kinds of life, tracing its history all the way back
to the first single-celled ancestor.

It is our most uniquely human quality to be deeply curious about this, but
unless we collect specimens, make observations, preserve tissue samples
and recordings, millions of the pieces of this puzzle may be lost. Humans a
thousand years from now will be no less curious about the meaning of their
lives, but they will have access to far less evidence than we. We owe it to
ourselves and to all generations to follow to preserve as much biodiversity
as possible, as well as evidence of that soon to be lost.

In answering this question, we also map the components of the biosphere
creating a snapshot of the world largely as we found it. Among earths
millions of species are sensitive indicators of climate change. Flowering
times, dates of insect emergence, and subtle shifts in geographic
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distributions are an early warning system for changes in climate if we know
enough to interpret them.

All this, from one simple question. As we ask this and other right
questions, imagine all that we can learn. Imagine what ESF students
specially prepared to be a new kind of environmental leader can
accomplish. Imagine what a New American Environmentalism can do by
engaging our entire society to overcome the impediments of the past.
Imagine lives changed when urban children come face to face with bizarre
creatures and awaken their innate biophilia. Imagine unleashing the
potential of billions of already tested, product-ready biomimetic models.
Imagine what this amazing institution, with its unique mixture of scholars,
scientists, designers and engineers, and can-do culture, is capable of
contributing when focused on its right questions.

This wont be easy. If it were, some other institution would already be
shining the light on the path to a better tomorrow. It would be difficult for
a large, comprehensive university to achieve, because such institutions are
rightfully pulled in many directions. It will take a small institution with a
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focused environmental mission, a passion for exploration, uncompromising
optimism of what the world might be, and an openness to collaboration
across disciplines and far beyond its campus to achieve what the world is
hungry for: environmental leadership that offers hope, that puts solving
problems and having impact above all else, that sees its mission as
educating and inspiring its students and the public alike. It will take an
institution like ESF.




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