NATURE AND COMPLEXITY:
A RENAISSANCE IN MUSEUM RESEARCH

ROBERT W. FRI

Collaborative efforts will help close the wide gaps in human knowledge

In March 2001, President George W. Bush declared that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant and, therefore, was not to be regulated under the Clean Air Act. The sharp controversy that followed was somewhat predictable. Environmental groups deplored the administration’s insensitivity to the health of the planet and its people. Some, though by no means all, business organizations applauded the President’s good sense in refusing to incur significant immediate costs to gain uncertain and distant benefits. On the surface, none of this debate seemed very different from the arguments of the early 1970s, when I first became an environmental regulator.

But the situation is indeed different, and regardless of whether he knew it, President Bush had a point in concluding that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant to be regulated under the Clean Air Act. This piece of legislation is designed fundamentally to regulate pollutants that cause easily understood health or economic damages within reasonably coherent political jurisdictions. In contrast to this set of criteria, excessive atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide may lead to consequences that are complex, global, and unfamiliar to most people.

Human modification of the complex global climate system is only one of several threats to our natural world. Other global systems affected by humans include the circulation of ocean currents and a number of widely different and productive ecosystems, such as major rainforests and fragile estuaries. The human activities that are altering these systems include the burning of fossil fuels, the demands of growing concentrations of populations on natural resources, and the disposal into the environment of the waste of industrialized and industrializing economies. These systems comprise the basis of life as we know it on Earth, and maintaining their integrity is among the most urgent and critical issues we as a society face.

But we don’t yet have all the right tools to tackle this problem effectively. Therefore, it is imperative to support and pursue the research to close three looming gaps in our knowledge before society can manage successfully the dangers that human activities create for complex natural systems. In so doing, it is important to emphasize the special importance of the study of natural and cultural history in conducting this research.

Measuring System Performance

The authors of the Clean Air Act set out to protect human health and, secondarily, economic damage from air pollutants. They realized, however, that these damages would in many cases appear only slowly, and that waiting to close the barn door after watching the horse get away was not a good basis for regulation. Rather, successful management of the problem required a metric, or standard of measurement, of system performance that could be measured in real time, but which also would be a reliable predictor of outcomes for human health and economic damage.

In the case of air pollution, the appropriate metric is the ambient concentration of pollutants. Research links this metric to expected health and economic effects by showing, for example, that no unacceptable adverse health effects would occur if the concentration of a particular pollutant stayed below some number of parts per million. Armed with this linkage, regulators could monitor ambient concentrations and establish policies to bring them within allowable limits.

A very similar problem exists for managing complex natural systems. Waiting for the climate to warm up, or for the essential parts of an ecosystem to die off, is not a useful management approach (although arguably that’s the policy we seem to be following at the moment). At this stage, however, science knows too little about the behavior of complex natural systems to come up with an operationally useful metric of system performance analogous to pollutant concentrations under the Clean Air Act. For example, the link between ambient carbon dioxide concentrations and temperature change at specific places on Earth’s surface is not entirely nailed down. And, in some cases, the ultimate goal is not clear, as often seems to be the case in assessing the health of major ecosystems.

Any number of prestigious reports from the National Science Board, the National Research Council, and the President’s Science Advisory Committee testify to the gaps in our knowledge about the behavior of complex natural systems. Filling these gaps is not simply a matter of interesting science. Doing so is essential to developing the tools needed to preserve the health of these natural systems.

Verifiable Models

Conventional regulation relies on modeling of physical systems to connect changes in human activity to the metric of system performance. For example, computer models of the Los Angeles basin relate local driving habits to the amount of automotive pollutants emitted, their geographic location, the time of day, expected wind currents, solar insolation rates, and other such factors to forecast levels of photochemical oxidant concentrations. These models allow policy makers to test alternative strategies for controlling the smog for which that city is famous.

Control strategies are always very expensive, so a lot rides on the accuracy of these models, which are always approximations. Even a system so relatively simple as smog production in the Los Angeles basin (well, simple as opposed to the global climate, anyway) can’t be modeled completely. Therefore, analysts must verify the models by comparing their predictions of ambient smog concentrations against actual observations. If necessary, the models are adjusted to tighten the linkage between calculated and real outcomes.

Management of complex natural systems also requires models that link patterns of human behavior to changes in the relevant metric of system performance. But in this case, it’s hard to see how models can meet a standard of verifiable prediction that gives comfort to policy. The problem lies in the nature of the systems themselves.

Thus, the historical record of changes in these systems suggests they are given to discontinuities, and even to chaotic behavior. Such phenomena are inherently difficult to model. Moreover, the global systems of interest are in perpetual flux, and relying on models to isolate the effect of one change (like an increase in carbon dioxide emissions) from all the rest is quite difficult. And even if research overcame these systemic problems, changes in complex natural systems take a long time to occur—so long that it’s too late to fix the model when it turns out to be wrong. It is hardly rational, for example, to let the global temperature rise by a few degrees to check on the validity of climate models. Unfortunately, many models of large natural systems are tested by historical data to see if they produce the known outcome. While doubtless useful, this is calibration, not verification.

Valuing Nature

Even if useful metrics and verifiable models were at hand, only half the battle would be won. These tools define only cause and effect, a reliable and predictable link between human activity and resulting changes in system behavior that managers can use to craft policies for mitigating damages. The other half of the management problem is getting people to agree to do something about their behavior, and to accept a policy for which perceived benefits exceed perceived costs. Achieving this acceptance is difficult even for familiar air pollutants, but it happens in large part because people have a pretty good feel for the benefit of controlling conventional pollution. Smog, particulates, and acid precipitation all cause fairly obvious effects that motivate individuals to do something about them, even at some cost to themselves.

For complex natural systems, getting people to act turns out to be a much harder problem. One issue is that most people have at best a limited understanding of the value to them of these systems. Without this understanding, it’s just not possible to strike a balance between benefits and costs that leads to action. This gap in understanding recently became clear at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. We discovered from surveys of our well-educated visitors that most of them had never encountered the term “biodiversity.” Fewer still could define it. So, while many of our survey respondents and others would opt for having more biodiversity than less, few could make an informed judgment about how much they would be willing to pay to protect biodiversity on Earth.

Compounding this lack of understanding among individual members of society is the fact that complex natural systems transcend normal political and cultural boundaries. As a result, gaining agreement about how to manage these systems is very hard. At one level, the problem is simply that of reaching an enforceable political consensus in international forums like the United Nations. Experience shows that’s hard enough, but the difficulties are even more profound than the merely political. Deciding what to do about human impacts on these systems involves a diversity of cultures that embody an even greater diversity of values.

Even if individual members of society understand the value of nature as defined within their own cultures, this cultural diversity can result in sharp disagreement. For example, the wealthy tend to place a great value on the sustainable use of resources, while the poor usually are more interested in using these resources to achieve the quality of life that the wealthy enjoy. Different cultural views of the value of nature can cause other complications. For example, some cultures value human dominance over nature, while others embrace a more symbiotic relationship. The cultural setting in which management of complex natural systems takes place is vastly more complicated than even controlling smog in Los Angeles.

THE ROLE OF NATURAL HISTORY RESEARCH

If we are to manage complex natural systems in a sustainable way, we need to learn a lot about how the systems behave and how society can reach a consensus on changing its own behavior. Filling these gaps in understanding requires very difficult research. Implicit even in the foregoing recitation of the gaps in our knowledge is a research agenda of mind-boggling scope and scale— and great urgency.

The phenomena to be understood, whether physical or cultural, are simply too complex to describe with analytic precision. Of course, scientists can carve out pieces of the system, subject them to controlled experiments, and, ultimately, pin down the behavior of the pieces with considerable accuracy. But assembling even these well-understood pieces into a deterministic model of the whole is not very likely to answer all the questions. And even if a reasonably good model could be put together, experimenting with the whole system to validate the model usually is impossible. Pumping carbon dioxide into the air to see what happens is not a controlled experiment, and maybe not even a reversible one.

Something more than this experimental, reductionist research paradigm is needed. To get some idea of the whole picture requires seeking evidence of physical and cultural system behavior where nature put it, and learning to synthesize these data into a coherent explanation of how the system works. This is the work of disciplines like anthropology, archaeology, astronomy, ecology, geology, paleontology, and systematic biology—all sciences that rely on observation of natural phenomena to develop and test hypotheses about the behavior of complex systems. Jared Diamond, a professor of physiology at the UCLA School of Medicine, calls these the historical sciences, in contrast to the experimental sciences like physics, chemistry, and molecular biology. To Diamond, human history must be studied using a variety of tools, including the latest advances in genetics, molecular biology, linguistics, and other areas of scientific research seemingly remote from history.

At the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, and at other museums and research institutions, scientists are embarking on a number of collaborative projects. Smithsonian scientists, for example, are involved in researching biological diversity around the world. In the Guianas, Smithsonian botanists, entomologists, and zoologists are studying the rich animal and plant life of this South American region where over 70 percent of the natural habitat remains pristine. The project hopes to expand its fieldwork to include the areas of eastern Venezuela and a small part of northern Brazil, and to use the data collected for evolutionary studies in the region. Other Smithsonian researchers are combining archaeological, ecological, and geological theories and techniques to understand the history of human development. By understanding the environments humans lived in, and the range of plant and animal life at various stages of geological history, these researchers hope to shed new light on the processes that caused environmental and humankind changes over the last million years.

Now is a time of renaissance for the historical study of nature and human culture and their interactions. Seizing this extraordinary opportunity, however, requires some significant changes in the way museum research operates. In my judgment, to advance museum research to the cutting edge requires innovation along three main avenues.

The first is pursuing an integrative research agenda that cuts across traditional disciplinary lines to focus on the understanding of complexity. In her opening remarks at the 1998 annual meeting of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, National Science Foundation Director Rita Colwell (CC ’88) spoke directly to this challenge in the context of biological systems:

When we speak of biodiversity, we mean primarily maintaining the plant and animal diversity of the planet, a very important goal. On the other hand, “understanding biocomplexity” speaks of a deeper concept. It is not enough to explore and chronicle the enormous diversity of the world’s ecosystems. We must do that...but also reach beyond to discover the complex chemical, biological, and social interactions in our planet’s systems. From these subtle but very sophisticated interactions and interrelationships, we can tease the principles of sustainability.

Similar challenges abound for other kinds of large natural systems like Earth’s climate. In every case, what’s needed is an interdisciplinary, question-driven research program. In the past, research museums around the world have been noted more for their disciplinary walls than for their interdisciplinary integration. Ecologists don’t always talk to systematic biologists, and biologists of any stripe rarely encounter anthropologists. That has to change and, indeed, is changing.

A second and related avenue to pursue is the deployment of scientific resources more strategically to fill the gaps in knowledge most likely to advance integrative understanding. If, for example, it turns out that little-studied microbes play a pivotal role in ecosystem behavior, applying limited scientific resources to these microscopic critters may be more useful than tracking down another charismatic megafauna. Or if some cultures, past or present, seem to have a handle on managing fragile natural systems in a sustainable way, learning from them might well be as useful as another exercise in trying to quantify the value of ecosystem services. Being more strategic is an urgent matter because of the accelerating rate at which nature is changing under the influence of human activity. There just isn’t time left to do everything.

In the past, individual investigators doing their own thing—often brilliantly—has been a hallmark of museum research. Focusing resources, especially the time of the scientists involved, means that the scholarly community will have to set some priorities. This kind of cooperation has not characterized museum research until recently. But it’s not unrealistic to think it possible. Experimental physicists have been doing it for years.

And, finally, a third avenue to pursue is conducting research into how to advance public understanding of the value of nature. This, to me, seems important new ground for museums to break. Every day, museums engage the public with a variety of exhibits and education programs. These programs not only are useful vehicles for understanding nature, they also are valuable platforms for testing new communications strategies. Taking advantage of this opportunity means reaching beyond the familiar historical disciplines to integrate the thinking of cognitive psychologists, educators, exhibit designers, and others. But raising the woeful level of public understanding of the value of nature is too important not to try.

Natural history research (including its human dimension) can and should be at the leading edge of science in addressing issues that will determine the very health of the planet. But museums can’t get there by doing more of the same. This is not enough, even if the same is more highly prized than it once was. The change that is in the air makes today one of the most exciting times for museum research in the past half-century.

Robert W. Fri (CC ’99) was director of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution from 1996-2001. He learned to be a regulator as the first deputy administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in the 1970s. From 1986-95, he was president of Resources for the Future, a research institute specializing in environmental and natural resource economics.

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