Working at the Nexus of Science and Public Policy

Science news drives headlines on a daily basis, whether the issue is the Kyoto Protocol, avian flu, gene mapping, or genetically modified food. Reactions to opportunities, crises or economic realities often show leaders in reactive mode. These three Milton grads are among those with the scientific and social expertise to gather information, evaluate and act, helping leaders make effective, broadly beneficial choices, in the face of real-world considerations.

Elizabeth Grossman ’88
Staff Director, Subcommittee on Research, Committee on Science, U.S. House of Representatives

The Committee on Science began in January 1959, born of a House-Senate leadership initiative to promote American strength in science and technology, a bold response to the 1957 launch of Sputnik.

In 2001, Representative Sherwood L. Boehlert became chairman of the Committee on Science. He pledged to “build the Science Committee into a significant force within the Congress” and “to ensure that we have a healthy, sustainable, and productive R&D establishment—one that educates students, increases human knowledge, strengthens U.S. competitiveness and contributes to the well-being of the nation and the world.”

To ensure that the Science Committee had access to the expertise to tackle the technical questions before it, Chairman Boehlert hired staff with scientific backgrounds, such as Elizabeth, who has a Ph.D. in physics.

Today, Elizabeth directs a subcommittee with broad jurisdiction: It handles issues related to education, basic research and the health of the U.S. academic research enterprise. It oversees the National Science Foundation and the science and technology programs of the Department of Homeland Security; it also reviews science and math education, computer security, government-wide research and development initiatives such as information technology and nanotechnology, and fire and earthquake mitigation efforts.

How do you wrap your arms around everything from nanotechnology to first-grade math to communications for first responders? You don’t. Elizabeth explains, “We have two jobs: looking ahead and avoiding crises.”

A primary task for the Committee is thinking about how to determine federal priorities and what the federal investment should be. “Critical issues for the Science Committee include innovation and competitiveness, because there’s a fundamental connection between science and technology and America’s economic and national security,” Elizabeth says.

“I’m part of a nerdy, political family,” she adds. “After Milton, I went to Swarthmore, where I got a physics major with a math minor.” At the University of Chicago, Elizabeth—who says she likes physicists and mathematicians and thinks calculus is “beautiful”—completed a doctorate in computational physics. “[Doctoral work] trains you to be a research professor, but I would not have been good at that. What’s fun to me is learning how to tackle a problem and then moving on.”

“I started thinking,” Elizabeth says, “‘I can write. I’ve been trained to think analytically. Yet I actually like science and scientists, and I want to continue to be part of the scientific community.’” So she came to Washington, D.C., where she worked at the National Academies, a private, nonprofit organization that brings together committees of scientific experts to advise the federal government on critical national issues.

At the National Academies, one of her projects was working on a post-9/11 report titled “Making the Nation Safer: the Role of Science and Technology in Coun-tering Terrorism.” Ideas in the report were incorporated into the legislation that established the Department of Homeland Security, and so she moved from the National Academies to the Committee on Science to help with congressional oversight of the new department.

Working for Congress is an exciting, if exhausting, experience. There are so many topics to tackle each day, even before the email or phone call with the newest urgent request. “To do this job, I need to be good at trying to understand, analyze, and explain something I knew nothing about 10 minutes ago,” says Elizabeth.

Mainly, Elizabeth spends her days talking to people, to learn what the exciting future opportunities are in science and technology and whether existing federal programs are working well. “Mostly the people who know these things come to me,” says Elizabeth, “but sometimes I get to travel to see them.”

For example, in January, Chairman Boehlert led a congressional delegation, including staff, to view federal science programs in Antarctica (see photo). There, Elizabeth was able to see National Science Foundation–supported research on glaciers, volcanoes, climate change, the origins of the universe, and penguins.

“That trip was a unique opportunity,” Elizabeth stresses. “More often, I go to see universities, science museums, and government research facilities within the United States.” Last summer, she visited various institutions in Massachusetts, where she saw automated vessels to map the sea floor, heard about storybooks that show second graders what engineers do (from designing buildings to purifying water), and learned about research on how to use proteins from spinach to generate solar power more efficiently.

“I love talking to scientists and educators about what they do, and how the federal government can help them do it better,” says Elizabeth, “but I don’t miss being a scientist.”

“I work for Congress now,” Elizabeth says. “I know the pros and cons of consensus. Congress is a bunch of people who have different needs and goals and are constrained by funding. In science, people try to figure out what’s true. Here, we’re trying to figure out what’s possible—what works best within the constraints of money, time, goals and other priorities.”

All full committee and subcommittee hearings and markups are Webcast live on the committee Web site: www.house.gov/science.

Linn Gould ’76
Founder, Erda Environmental Services, Inc.

Linn Gould (M.S., M.P.H.) is the owner and operator of Erda Environmental Services, Inc., an environmental consulting firm, that has specialized in risk assessment/management services and environmental policy issues since its inception in 1991. Since the completion of her M.P.H. in 2003, she has expanded Erda’s services to solve problems that cross both the public health and environmental health sectors. Her recent work has focused on the social causes of health including environmental justice, sustainability, the effects of income inequality on health, health inequities associated with obesity, the built environment, and tobacco use and control. Linn and three other colleagues recently launched a nonprofit organization called the Population Health Project, which develops and teaches middle-school and high-school curricula on the root causes of health inequalities.

“My overarching goal,” says Linn, “is to promote equality among all people. I’ve internalized that ideal over my lifetime: I have a great-great-grandfather, William Lloyd Garrison, who was an abolitionist. My parents have been involved with the struggle for equal rights for women as well as land conservation. My focus is on promoting health equality for all.”

In 1991, Linn founded Erda, a Seattle-based environmental consultancy firm named for the Nordic goddess of the earth. Linn, whose first master’s is in soil science, focused in her early career on environmental issues in the Pacific Northwest—working with industry and governmental agencies to remediate contaminated waste sites and addressing emerging environmental policy issues. “But the bigger picture always bothered me and I wasn’t sure that I was improving the world.” In her travels through developing countries, Linn saw that many of the world’s environmental problems were caused by poverty and resource conflicts. In addition, environmental degradation was often exacerbated by those most adversely affected by it, resulting in a downward spiral of increased poverty and depleted resources. “People often didn’t have the choice or power to act differently,” Linn says. “Even though it was clear that desertification was the cause of many of their problems, they needed wood for their fires. Their choice was survival.”

Linn was interested in addressing the root causes of the link between poor health and environmental degradation. “I needed to understand the connection between our environment and population health. That led me to get a second master’s in public health. Our society talks about individual choice and responsibility as the cause of good and bad health outcomes. I wanted to learn about the root causes of health inequalities (political, social, and economic) in populations, otherwise referred to as ‘social determinants of health.’ This interest led me to my current work on environmental justice: Why are low-income people and minorities disproportionately exposed to contamination and what can be done to change this problem?”

Environmental justice is defined by the Environmental Protection Agency as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of color, national origin or income with respect to development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations and policies.”

Linn considers public health, public policy and social justice to be inseparable. “How can society give people better choices?” Linn suggests that some choices people make are not choices at all: If a disadvantaged community has no access to sidewalks, parks, and healthy, affordable food destinations, it’s harder and less inviting to go for a walk, and therefore stay healthy. If school lunches are not healthful and soda machines line the walls of your school, the environment encourages, and almost ensures, poor decision making. She says that in the 1970s, social justice was dropped from the mainstream environmental agenda, therefore low-income and minority communities lost their power to participate and collaborate in decisions that were affecting their communities.

Linn and three other colleagues recently launched a nonprofit organization called the Population Health Project, whose mission is to raise awareness of the root causes of health inequalities and to develop strategies to create societal conditions favorable to health for all. They develop and teach middle-school and high-school curricula on the root causes of health inequalities. “Our goal is to teach students to think critically and to take action as part of their coursework. We ask them to make connections between low income and obesity, discrimination and stress—to understand how social, economic, and political forces shape health outcomes and the need for policy change to help individuals take responsibility for their behavior. We give students a framework, a set of questions that allows them to incorporate the consideration of health inequalities into other subjects they are already studying.”

“Understanding science,” says Linn, “gives me the credibility and confidence to advocate for change.”

Kirk Emerson ’69
Director, U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution

“The best we can do as leaders is affect policies that will improve overall decision making,” says Kirk Emerson ’69, a native West Virginian and director of the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Reso-lution of the Morris K. Udall Foundation. “Many people that end up in the field of conflict resolution,” Kirk notes, “have a winding career path. They are motivated by bringing folks together.”

Kirk’s interest in science was once limited to a Milton biology class and it broadened somewhat to include psychology at Princeton. She sees her early investigations, involved with children, as the beginnings of her interest in how an individual interacts with his environment.

Later, Kirk earned a master’s in environmental and urban planning at MIT, where she studied participatory planning and citizen development in community planning. In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, she worked in environmental planning before becoming director of countywide planning.

“Dealing with what is known about the impact of development, natural systems, ecosystems and critical habitat, I became increasingly interested in helping people address differences in opinion about how to conserve or protect the environment,” Kirk recalls. She trained as a community mediator and gained experience in mediating land use and development disputes.

“I worked on water supply and wells going dry and traffic patterns around schools. Then I went back to school at Indiana University for a doctorate in political science and public policy. I needed the analytic tools to work with my background in applied social sciences.”

Having moved with her husband to Tucson, Kirk became a visiting scholar at the Udall Center for Public Policy at the University of Arizona. In 1998, Congress created the U.S. Institute for Environmen-tal Conflict Resolution (ECR) to assist parties in resolving environmental conflicts around the country that involve federal agencies or interests. The institute provides a neutral place inside the federal government but “outside the Beltway” where public and private interests can reach common ground.

Resolving conflicts related to the environment, natural resources, and public lands involves using a range of methods. Unlike traditional litigation, in which a judge or jury imposes judgments or make determinations, alternative methods of assisted negotiation—facilitation, mediation, conflict assessment—allow all stakeholders in a dispute to reach a mutually satisfactory agreement on their own terms.

“We’re a democracy. Turmoil and conflict are natural, particularly when you have the environment at stake,” Kirk says. “When people are making decisions that might be irrevocable, you hope that they might not swing back and forth with political fortunes. Our work contributes to not having the pendulum swing quite so far. One of the benefits of this work is that you can introduce information and knowledge that might not otherwise be considered. Both the quality and durability of outcomes are bound to be improved.

“We do assessment upfront,” Kirk says. “A lot of the work is getting ready to get people to the table—convening work. That allows the parties to own the process, and the odds are increased that they are going to be successful.”

The institute also provides assistance in consensus-based processes, such as negotiated rule-making, community-based collaborations and policy dialogues. The goal here is to engage representatives from groups affected by proposed federal policies or actions to help formulate, revise, or implement them.

“These are very complex problems. The science is not always neat and tidy. There’s a lot of distrust of science as well as government. There’s a real need for trustworthy, transparent institutions to facilitate these complex conversations. We’re facing very different kinds of issues than we did when our rivers were burning back in the 1960s, and we faced the loss of species from known sources (like DDT). Now we have much more complex, cross-boundary issues.

“I would hope that science teachers would see the opportunities to teach students not only about the science, but also about the intersection between science and community. I’d hope that they might role-play—encourage students to take on different interests through perspective training—and think about what it means for a saw mill to close down or a landfill to be cited in a minority neighborhood.

“For those going into science, there’s a lot to learn about educating and communicating. You really need the scientific community to honor and reward those who are the peacemakers.”

Kirk has overseen the strategic direction, organizational development and program administration of the institute since its inception. She oversees the selection of cases and projects, devoting most of her time to early case consultation, process design and facilitation of interagency conflicts. In addition, Kirk works with federal agencies in developing other ECR programs through strategic planning, training, system design and program evaluation.

Prior to her work at the U.S. Institute, Kirk developed and coordinated the environmental conflict resolution program at the University of Arizona’s Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy, where she conducted research, taught, and directed several conflict management and public involvement projects involving water resources, endangered species, and western range policies. She has taught graduate and undergraduate courses on conflict resolution and environmental law and has written on environmental mediation, land use law and environmental policy. She received the William Anderson Award from the American Political Science Association for her dissertation on regulatory takings and state property rights laws in 1998.

Kirk says that listening well is the most important part of successful mediation. “The parties need to do the negotiations,” she says. “We’re just the midwives.”

Some information in this story is courtesy of http://www.ecr.gov/.

Heather Sullivan

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