The physicist that went back to nature
Some kids want to be firefighters when they grow up, or doctors or these days, probably hip-hop artists. Not John Harte. He was drawn to biology. “When I was a kid, my major interest was bird-watching and natural history,” says the Professor of Ecosystem Sciences at UC Berkeley, who will lecture in Sonoma on August 26.
“I collected everything I could collect,” he recalls. “My bedroom as a kid was a museum. “It was extraordinarily overstuffed with fascinating little things I would find. I would catalog them and arrange them and study them.”
He soon was thinking like the scholar who would earn a PhD in physics, looking for simplicity, a unifying theme, behind all of nature’s detail. “I went into physics partly because I thought that that was a branch of science where you could freely exercise this desire to seek universality, generality and unification. Physicists are very open to that goal — that’s what they do.”
He taught at Yale, but realized a few years later that he wanted to go back to what he loved the most, “biology and especially ecology. So I left the physics department and took a job as an ecology professor at Berkeley in the early 1970s and I’m very glad I did it.”
Harte has since become an expert on climate change, leading critical research on the effects of human actions on the environment. His goal is to understand the interdependence of human well-being and the health of ecosystems.
The author of over 200 scientific publications, including eight books, Harte has won numerous awards and honors including a Pew Scholars Prize in Conservation and the Environment, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Leo Szilard prize from the American Physical Society, and a George Polk award in investigative journalism.
The title of his August 26 lecture at Quarryhill Botanical Gardens is, “Can Civilzation Endure?” The complicated answer is, yes… if. At Quarryhill, he will review the major threats to a sustainable future, and describe the solutions he feels could ensure civilization’s survival.
There’s definitely hope. With his wife, biologist Mary Ellen Harte, he authored “Cool the Earth, Save the Economy: Solving the Climate Crisis is EASY.”
Harte is also concerned with the issue of food security – ensuring sufficient food supplies for a surging human population. The challenge requires policymakers to give food security high political and fiscal priority, he says, but that kind of intervention is increasingly problematic.
“As environments deteriorate, people will have less time and energy for governance reform aimed at reducing inequality or preserving the environment,” Harte wrote in an essay with Paul Ehrlich. “As a result, those in power will feel less pressure to arrange systems to provide food to those who need it most.”
The event is $35 for members, $45 for non-members. Gates open at 5; lecture begins promptly at 5:30 p.m. Refreshments will be available, plus wine and beer for sale. www.quarryhillbg.org
