It was 50 years ago this fall that residents of Donora, a small town near Pittsburgh, suffered the effects of severe air pollution. Twenty-three people died over the Halloween weekend in 1948; one of the 23 was my uncle. That incident began a revolution in our attitudes in the United States toward the environment. As a chemical engineer who has been researching air pollution and atmospheric chemistry for the past 25 years, I have seen this awareness evolve into an understanding of the mutual effort that will be required to preserve the earth’s environment and its biodiversity. Today, researchers from many disciplines are using a mix of resources, the latest scientific tools, and traditional scholarly savvy to preserve and protect the environment.
Because our well-being and the well-being of the earth are linked, an environmental imperative to preserve the rainforests finds support from the National Institutes of Health. Chemist David Kingston’s search for new sources of medicine in tropical forests is part of an international effort to preserve biodiversity by proving that a wealth of plant life can contribute to the economic health of the countries in which it is located, not through the sale of beautiful hardwoods, but through the discovery, development, and sale of cures for a host of ills.
But it’s slow work. For people with daily needs for food and shelter, the rewards must seem as distant as the hope of a cure seems to a person diagnosed with a deadly disease. We owe a lot to the people of countries like Suriname who can look beyond their immediate needs to preserve their forests for us all.
We also owe a debt of gratitude for the hard work, patience, and trust of the people of Brazil’s Rondonia. A handful of farmers took a chance on their future to cooperate with John Browder, an urban planner who found largely private resources and got his own hands dirty in an agriforestry pilot project that demonstrated how decades of using up the forest could be reversed. While there is no way to recover unknown plant species that have been cut down, burned up, or plowed under, planning and investment can eventually make it possible to restore the trees that are the earth’s lungs and provide sustainable livelihoods.
Not all of the destruction of fragile life takes place in other countries. Wildlife and forestry researchers Carola Haas and David Smith are looking at the results of a century of different strategies for harvesting Appalachian forests — now largely second-growth forests that are nonetheless one of the most important centers for biological diversity in the United States. What they are discovering about the impacts of harvesting strategies can help us preserve forest biodiversity.
Researchers are also working to prevent and correct water pollution. Animal and plant scientists, funded by the Commonwealth of Virginia and farmers themselves, are using biotechnology tools to prevent nutrients and pollutants from reaching waterways. And microbiologists and engineers, working together and funded by the National Science Foundation, are using the same advanced technology to understand and enhance microbes to remove waste and chemicals that reach the waterways.
All of these articles about environmentally based research are about people understanding each other and working together — across disciplines, across cultures, and across national boundaries. There are also articles in this issue about living with the Internet, and about history. The common element is perspective. We all want to do more than just survive. We want to understand.
In the centuries when we worked from dawn to dusk to survive — as many in the world still do — in the hours that remained, we were both active and thoughtful. Roger Ekirch’s research shows us the way we lived before we could make night as bright as day. And Nikki Giovanni shows us how people in difficult lives did more than simply survive.
“Understanding, for the sake of the future as well as the past,” to quote Giovanni, is the common thread of this issue of Virginia Tech Research, and of Virginia Tech research, as well.