ISSUE 9 • SPRING 2008 • STANFORD UNIVERSITY • MULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://mult i .stanford.edu

Too Much FoodA team of researchers at the School of Medicine wants to get kids out and about, playing soccer and folk-dancing,page 6

Feeding The PlaneTThe Food Security and the Environment program aims to find innovative solutions to global hunger, page 3

The “Third secTor”Faculty, graduate students and practitioners are studying how civil society is slowly supplanting the state, page 8

energy and BehaviorA behavioralist and an anti-obesity researcher are joining forces to see if people can learn to consume less energy, page 11

see story, page 2

eating, one of the most basic of all behaviors, has become extraordinarily complicated in recent years. We eat too much, or too little, or things that don’t belong on our plates to begin with. And food has become integrally related not only to how we look but also to our roles as citizens. We should eat local, organic, natural, humane. We should not subsidize cigarette manufacturers, who, it turns out, also manufacture lots and lots of things to eat. We should grow what we eat. Eat what we grow. Reap what we sow. And bring a calculator to the table: carbs, calories, food miles, carbon footprint, value added. Instead of pleasure, eating has become a series of rules and obligations and, sometimes, guilt.

2 SPRING 2008

Eating, one of the most basic of all behaviors, has become extraordi-narily complicated in recent years. We eat too much, or too little, or things that don’t belong on our plates to begin with. And food has become integrally related not only to how we look but also to our roles as citizens. We should eat local, organic, natural, humane. We should not subsidize cigarette manufacturers, who, it turns out, also manufacture lots and lots of things to eat. We should grow what we eat. Eat what we grow. Reap what we sow. And bring a calculator to the table: carbs, calories, food miles, carbon footprint, value added.

Instead of pleasure, eating has be-come a series of rules and obliga-tions and, sometimes, guilt.

In fact, it could be much easier. According to the now famous slogan on the cover of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, people should sim-ply “eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” Pollan’s appearance on the Stanford campus in March was akin to the arrival of a rock star. Kresge Auditorium was jammed a half-hour before he made his way to the stage. Disappointed would-be listeners had to resort to Stanford on iTunes U.

There are issues that appear sud-denly, containing the essence of the

zeitgeist. Such is food. And such is food at Stanford. It is a matter com-bining science, civic responsibility, health and enjoyment. Food is being served up not only at Stanford Din-ing, but also in the departments of Economics, Linguistics and Human Biology, interdisciplinary programs, international centers and university community outreach programs. For a university concerned about its place in a globalized globe, there are few things more interesting than understanding where our next meal is coming from and what the cost of that meal will be to us and to the rest of the planet.

The Barbara and Bowen McCoy Program in Ethics in Society cap-tured that sense perfectly in winter and spring with a series called “The Ethics of Food and the Environment,” at which Pollan was one of the fea-tured speakers. Beyond the organiz-ers’ wildest expectations, meeting halls were full night after night as audiences watched movies about the economics and politics of food and discussed matters afterward with an intensity befitting headier social

movements of prior years.“We were completely surprised by

the large turnout,” said Joan Berry, coordinator of the ethics program and organizer of the series. “What was most gratifying was that the series brought together students, faculty, nutritionists, public health specialists, chefs and interested community members, and we were able to have some really powerful conversations.

“It was clear that people care deeply about the food they eat, the environment, mass marketing and a host of other related topics. We hope to continue looking at the issues again next year.”

This issue of Interaction focuses on the attention Stanford is paying to sustainable dining, agricultural re-search and childhood obesity, three different areas that nonetheless are bound together by a series of calcu-lations: how much, how far, at what price, in whose benefit.

Beyond the purely physical as-pects of food, there also is a cultural aspect. At this point, Stanford has tried a few courses of “food studies,”

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Europeans don’t do ha l f the precious cu-linary things that upscale marketers tell us they do, but they do mostly

sit down with friends or fam-ily in the middle of the day for a substantial meal. That culture is vanishing in the United States, both the sitting-down part and the substantial part. Journalist Michael Pollan estimates that 20 percent of all American meals are

eaten in a car. All fast food can be eaten with one hand.

There are plenty of people at Stanford, starting with the staff at

Stanford Dining, who are out to make sure that the culture of food is revived.

(It’s worth pointing out that there also are people in Europe trying to ensure that

their culture survives.)It is a task that requires policy expertise,

advocacy skills and the ability to calculate car-bon footprints. It requires psychologists to figure

out why people eat stuff that’s bad for them, adver-tising executives to make sure they do, and economists

and agronomists to figure out how to transform cheap potatoes into expensive potato chips. It requires geniuses like the person who, in the midst of cholesterol panic, de-vised the slogan “Eggs: Nature’s Miracle Food,” or like the people who have convinced us that eating is compli-cated and that some food is bad for us.

If it’s bad for us, it’s probably not food. And there is no one nutrient that will help us do anything or prevent

us from doing something else. It’s all of them working together. It’s the fiber and the cholesterol and the calo-ries and the omega-3 and the vitamins and the colors.

Thinking globally and working locally, Stanford stu-dents several years ago began mobilizing to make the university accountable for the 18,000 meals served to students every day. Maybe pestering is the word.

“I started by asking everyone, ‘How come it’s winter and we’re serving tomatoes?’” remembered Erin Gaines, chief among the food advocates on campus. A Phi Beta Kappa 2007 graduate of the Earth Systems Program, Gaines has worked and taught at the Stanford Commu-nity Farm, managed the dining hall gardens, organized the creation of the Sustainable Choices Guide and cre-ated the full-time job of sustainable foods coordinator for Stanford Dining, which from the start has worked with the student activists.

That entrepreneurial spirit differentiates today’s in-terest in growing food with the back-to-the-land move-ment of the 1960s. This is not a cultural movement or a withdrawal; it’s a dead serious movement to save us and the planet. And it differs from the previous movement in that, today, there is big money behind organics and sustainability.

Had Earth Systems not existed, Gaines said, she prob-ably would not have come to Stanford at all. It was the perfect program for someone who wanted to link eco-nomics and environmentalism. Like so many other Stan-ford students, she began with World Food Economy, taught by Rosamond Naylor and Walter Falcon, direc-tors of the Food Security and Environment (FSE) pro-gram. Now, as an Earth Systems co-term (though she’s on leave), Gaines and her colleague Anna Lee have drawn up a list of around 30 classes that directly or pe-ripherally relate to food studies.

“Lots of people are interested, but people don’t real-ize they can study food,” Gaines said. For example, Lee

see eaTing, page 10

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SPRING 2008 3

a field comprising sciences, humani-ties and the arts, but the menu may grow. The University of California Press has a Studies in Food and Cul-ture series, there is an international Association for the Study of Food and Society and the Davis Humanities In-stitute is one of many such centers that hosts a food studies group. Ac-cording to a 2005 review article in the Journal of modern History, “food has acquired an intellectual presence as a subject all of its own.”

Gastronomica, a beautifully de-signed journal of food and culture published by UC Press, is directed by a professor of Russian with a Stan-ford PhD.

“Back in the 1970s, when I was at Stanford, I wanted to write my dis-sertation on food in Russian litera-ture, but the proposal was met with considerable scorn by my adviser,” said Darra Goldstein, the journal’s founder, who teaches at Williams Col-lege. “I’ve probably been trying to prove him wrong all these years!

“Food can be a symbol of power, an aesthetic display or an ideological expression,” she said. “It can intro-

duce students to foreign languages, literature, film, psychology, art, reli-gion, economics, anthropology, soci-ology, classics, biology, chemistry.” In founding the journal, she said, she wanted to establish a place where the appetites of food enthusiasts and scholars, often the same peo-ple, could be sated. It’s not simply a middle ground between Gourmet and scholarly journals, she pointed out, but a liberated, eclectic forum for ev-eryone with a passion for food.

Marion Nestle, nationally known nutritionist and writer whose appear-ance on campus last quarter also attracted crowds, shares with Gold-stein a conviction that food is a good thing in the classroom.

“You can talk about anything through the lens of food,” she told a campus gathering of scientists, food activists, nutritionists, students and just plain eaters last March. Referring to her courses for undergraduates at New York University, she said, “I can teach them molecular biology, cur-rent events, climate change, health, politics and genetics, all by talking about food.” At Brandeis, she re-

membered, she had students in a biology class dissect squid and then eat them.

At Stanford, food-related classes tend toward agriculture and land use, but they also include several offerings in the departments of His-tory, Political Science and Human Biology. Political theorist Rob Reich offered a sophomore seminar, Food and Politics, that was so popular it will become a regular 5-unit course.

Linguist Dan Jurafsky in winter taught The language of Food to 15 freshmen whose reading material included cookbooks, articles in Gas-tronomica, studies in semantics and language histories. Class presenta-tions included such themes as fussy language to advertise expensive po-tato chips, the ways in which people describe chocolate and Mexican mole as fusion food. Plus field trips and class treats, of course. Though no squid.

On the panel with Nestle was Da-vid Magnus, director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. He, too, has a professional interest in food.

“The foods we choose to eat em-body moral choices,” he said. Obvi-ously, animal welfare, but also ag-ricultural practices and regulatory systems. Those are moral spheres. And there is an ethical component to the unintended consequences of the success of the sustainable food movement. Organics is a booming field, which attracts capital, which leads to consolidation, which leads to undermined standards. Sharehold-ers’ interests are balanced against those of consumers.

Food, Magnus said, is a social is-sue, not an individual one. Just as the autonomy model in medicine overlooks the social and systemic nature of medicine, so an approach that looks only at alleged individual choice (e.g., I ’m autonomously choosing Pringles over whole wheat crackers) misses the real story.

“It’s the most wonderful thing that this is happening!” Nestle exclaimed. “It’s a social movement. And we can all do something about food. We have tremendous people power now. This is what America is about, so let’s use it.”

‘Food security” doesn’t refer to the problem of protecting food from theft or bioterrorism. Rather, it’s the opposite of hun-ger. In practice, it means simply that most of the world’s people have no security whatsoever that they will get enough food.

A joint program of the Freeman Spogli and Woods institutes, the Food Security and the Environment (FSE) program was established to generate innovative solutions to global hunger and its causes, be they re-lated to climate, trade, science or politics.

FSE’s director, Rosamond Naylor, said in the early stages of the program that her goal was “to put food and agriculture back on the map at major universities,” particularly at Stanford. With her own research rang-ing from rice production to offshore fisheries to meat consumption, Naylor said then that her work was ba-sically about one thing: how to feed the world. A few years later, what began as a research proposal is now a program.

“We’re doing extremely well,” said Deputy Director Walter Falcon. Though the program does not grant de-grees, its researchers work closely with undergraduates and graduate students in the sciences and in interdisci-plinary programs, as well as with the Goldman Honors program.

“There are more and more classes in the area of food,” Falcon said. World Food Economy, which he and Naylor teach and which features a group project asking students to evaluate the world food system in 2030, “is famous,” he said. “The land-grant schools can’t seem to get enough undergraduates; we can’t find rooms large enough to hold them.”

A good example of how food research is most def-initely back on the map is the trajectory of Marshall Burke, FSE’s program manager and himself a young re-

searcher. He was an Earth Systems major when he went on a five-month program to Nepal sponsored by Cor-nell. When he returned to Stanford, he said, he wanted to shift gears, so he took World Food Economy. He got to know Naylor and Falcon, switched into Interna-tional Relations and worked as a teaching assistant for the class. Once he graduated, he got a job at the Center for Environmental Science and Policy, which eventually spawned FSE.

cliMaTe change

One of the most newsworthy areas of concentra-tion at FSE is that of climate and food security. As the atmosphere heats up, sea levels rise and storm action increases, people whose access to food is shaky at the best of times may be in danger of literally starving. The loss of agricultural lands in arid or flooded areas will, in turn, affect millions of people worldwide. What hap-pens to the world’s seeds if temperatures rise 3 degrees? And what does that tell us about investment strategies for the next decades?

Among the people trying to answer those questions is David Lobell, a senior research scholar with a PhD in geological and environmental sciences. He was the lead author of a recent article in Science (co-authored by Burke, Falcon and Naylor, among others) that first identified 94 critical crops in 12 areas of the world that are home to the highest numbers of malnourished people. The researchers then matched that data to best-case, likely and worst-case climate data for the next 25 years based on Lobell’s climate modeling work.

The Science research concluded that among the most endangered crops in the world is maize in southern Af-rica—which could essentially disappear over the next 30 years.

“It’s a great example of interdisciplinary work,” Lo-bell said. “First you have the socio-economic research,

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continued on next page

How to feed the planet

“Food can be a symbol of power, an aesthetic display

or an ideological expression,” Goldstein said.

Harvesting oil palm in Sumatra, Indo-

nesia, is very labor intensive; above, a

laborer uses a curved ax to cut out the

stem from the fruit bunch. The stem,

where the oil is absorbed, and the indi-

vidual fruit will then be taken to a mill.

Joanne Gaskell

GaeTan lee

4 SPRING 2008

Anyone looking closely at Stan-

ford’s Food Security and the Envi-

ronment program might be forgiven

if they did a little double-take: Wait,

isn’t this the old Food Research In-

stitute?

Not quite. The famed FRI was

established in 1921. Over the de-

cades, it was housed in various

schools and built up an unparalleled

reputation. “There are no analogs at

the present time anywhere” for the

FRI, said Marshall Burke, program

manager for Food Security and the

Environment. “Almost all the great

applied agricultural economists in

the world worked with FRI.”

But by the 1990s, many of the

FRI professors were nearing retire-

ment, the depar tment awarded

only graduate degrees

and there was general

pressure at the university

to streamline the number

of academic units in eco-

nomics.

So t h e FR I was a

logical candidate to go,

though i ts d ismant lement was

met with dismay in many circles.

Walter Falcon, an economist and

longtime director of both FRI and

of what would become the

Freeman Spogli Institute,

said he tried to provide a

safe haven for a number

of the FRI faculty. Some

moved to other depart-

ments, some retired and

the junior faculty mostly

went elsewhere. A few years later,

Falcon and former university Presi-

The Food Research Institute

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figuring out which crops people depend on, and then you have the hardcore climate science, agronomy and nutrition. The study has started a great dialogue.”

Lobell previously was a postdoctoral scholar at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, one of the world’s outstanding centers for climate analysis. Using satellite, census and agricultural data, he devises simulations for climate change. (He got his start in that field with his dissertation for Pamela Matson, dean of the School of Earth Sciences, on agriculture in Mexico.)

Once climate scientists and social scientists do their work, figuring out which are the endangered crops, trade and investment experts can then step in. Which crops are going to increase in price? Does it make sense to invest in endangered crops or in societies structured around those crops?

“Some people say, these people should just switch crops,” Lobell admitted. “But other people, myself among them, say that habits are a lot harder to change than technology is. It’s easy to transport seeds, and my view is pragmatic. We have to move very quickly. Thirty years is very little time.”

Small farmers do not have access to 30 years’ worth

of climate data, and though they may note productivity changes from year to year, it is impossible for them to grasp the extent of the problem over the long run. Thus Lobell’s climate projections are enormously valuable.

His numbers are also being applied closer to home: in the Napa and Sonoma valleys, where doctoral candi-date Kim Cahill is working on her dissertation, “Global Change in Local Places.” A fifth-generation resident of the wine country, Cahill has set up 12 field sites in pi-not noir vineyards and is tracking the grapes against alterations in climate. As the weather gets warmer and more arid, growers will be able to both adapt their techniques and mitigate the damages, she says.

In addition to her dissertation work in the Interdis-ciplinary Graduate Program in Environment and Re-sources (IPER), Cahill is collaborating with Lobell and her adviser, Christopher Field, on a project about the vulnerability of California agriculture. As with the Sci-ence article or, on a smaller scale, Cahill’s dissertation, the point is to help growers, landowners and investors plan ahead.

For example, Cahill said, “avocados are at their op-timal climate right now. Any increase in temperature will decrease yields, and that’s true for most California crops. They’re within 1 or 2 degrees of their limit.”

The team of researchers is looking at 12 crops, in-cluding avocados, grapes, almonds, citrus fruits and strawberries, and plotting yields against 25 years of cli-mate data.

Cahill was an undergraduate at Stanford, with a ma-jor in Earth Systems and a minor in Human Biology.

“That exposed me to a diversity of disciplines,” she said. “It’s a challenge to personalize the mix of philoso-phies and tools and disciplines in order to address the problems you care about. I’m driven by questions in the real world. In more traditional disciplines, you train in tools. But if you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

BioFuels and rising Prices

A second, closely related cluster of researchers at FSE is working on biofuels. The agricultural space devoted today to biofuels used to be devoted to food. Ethanol, to take the most obvious example, puts pressure on the price of corn. That affects the price of land and of all other crops that become more scarce as corn becomes more plentiful. The price of eggs, bread and milk in the United States, for example, has increased this year because the price of feed has risen.

Chief among the biofuels researchers is agricultural economist Scott Rozelle, the Helen F. Farnsworth Se-nior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for Interna-tional Studies, who says he is more optimistic than his colleagues, who fear widespread starvation.

“I’m more positive than they are,” said Rozelle. “In the short run, there are lots of dangers. But in the long run, there are dynamic effects and it’s the best thing that could happen to agriculture. Prices will invigorate markets in the long run.”

Rozelle points to the fact that, for a century or so, food prices have gone down, driven by advances in sci-ence and technology that increased productivity. Biofu-els mark a historic breakthrough on the demand side, he said, forcing prices up. So farmers shift to biofuel crops, forcing other prices up. Steep rice prices, for ex-ample, have led to the imposition of strict export limits in much of Asia, to shortages and to food riots in places that cannot obtain rice.

Rice farmers stand to gain; consumers do not. Ro-zelle, one of the world’s most prominent experts in modern Chinese agricultural economics, says most Chinese own some land, so most everyone can expect to benefit from the biofuels phenomenon.

But not everyone everywhere owns land, and peo-ple can starve in the short run. A grant from the Gates Foundation is enabling FSE researchers (in conjunc-tion with experts in Washington, D.C., China and Ne-braska) to study the impact of biofuels, crop substitu-tion and price and market shifts on the world’s poor.

Agricultural researchers are very concerned about

the effect of biofuels on food prices.

Walter Falcon

continued from previous pageAbout 90 percent of all vegetable oil

consumed in Indonesia comes from

palm, and there have been reports

that high prices are leading vendors

to re-use cooking oil, cutting it with

toxic ingredients.

Jane Gaskell

SPRING 2008 5

dent Donald Kennedy put together

what would become the Center for

Environmental Science and Policy

(CESP), out of which the program

in Food Security and the Environ-

ment (FSE) later emerged.

What goes round comes round:

One of FSE’s most outstanding re-

searchers, Scott Rozelle, started

off his career at FRI, went to the

University of California-Davis and

today holds the same endowed

chair that Falcon used to hold

at FRI. Another of the former FRI

scholars, Peter Timmer, who went

on to hold endowed chairs at Cor-

nel l and Harvard, among other

places, is back at FSE as a visit-

ing professor teaching Pathways

Out of Rural Poverty, cross-listed

in Earth Systems, Economics and

International Policy Studies.

The new institution differs from

the old one in various ways, Falcon

pointed out. It is a program, not a

department, so it does not grant

degrees. It is more explicitly multi-

disciplinary than FRI, which started

off that way in the 1920s but as the

decades passed became increas-

ingly focused on agricultural eco-

nomics. FSE has a stronger base

in the sciences than FRI did. And,

Falcon said, FSE is “more nimble”

at forging partnerships. It ’s a more

flexible beast, less encumbered,

more able to respond to complex

challenges straddling the natural,

climate and social sciences.

Timing can make all the differ-

ence, Rozelle said.

“We were just at the start of

globalization” when FRI was dis-

mantled, he said. “But now, at FSE,

we’re back in the mainstream. A

big difference was John Hennessy

and his philosophy of taking re -

search to the world.”

The aim is to move beyond biofuels as an energy ques-tion to study them as a social question, to see when and where investments in biofuels might help or hinder the struggle against poverty.

There are several causes for the high prices, said Pe-ter Timmer, a visiting professor at FSE and former Stan-ford faculty member at the Food Research Institute: Not just biofuels, but also rapid growth in demand in China and India, drought and disease in certain regions and the weak U.S. dollar, which increases demand for commodities.

“I see four important responses,” he said: First, countries might try to subsidize or protect food, which won’t work in the long run. Next, consumers might shift eating patterns; but for the very poor, this means starvation. Third, producers shift crops, add inputs and move into marginal lands. And finally, science responds with new varieties and techniques.

But, he pointed out, “the science and tech response has been so vigorous over the last two centuries that the long-run trend of agricultural prices has been steadily

downward. The big question now is whether that his-torical trend is about to be reversed.”

A recent article co-written by a group of FSE re-searchers tried to figure out how the expected shifts in commodity markets will affect consumers depend-ing on which sort of biofuel is developed. Called “The Ripple Effect,” the article studied linkages among en-ergy, food and land prices, and the environment in the United States, Brazil, China and Indonesia, the four biggest biofuels players. “The extent to which biofuels growth is compatible with sustainable development re-mains questionable,” they said.

The section on oil palms was written by Joanne Gaskell, an IPER student.

“Palm oil is the cheapest vegetable oil in the global market,” she said, “so it’s attractive as a biodiesel feed-stock.” But there are serious environmental drawbacks limiting its potential, notably the conversion of rainfor-est to plantations. As in Brazil, the forests are burned and cleared, displacing species and polluting the air. In

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PHoTos, CloCkWIse FRom ToP: maRsHall BuRke, CouRTesy Fse, maRsHall BuRke, Ivan oRTIz-monasTeRIo

FSE post-doctoral scholar Jennifer

Burney, top right, is working on a

solar electrification project in Benin.

Above left, David Lobell monitors soil

nitrogin in the Yaqui Valley, in Mexico.

Above center, agricultural economist

Scott Rozelle speaks with a colleague

in China; above right, Rosamond Nay-

lor meets with millet farmers in India.

see Fse, page 10

6 SPRING 2008

‘Epidemics cannot be controlled at the level of the individual,” said Lisa Chamberlain, an assistant professor of pediatrics. “That’s true for cholera, and it’s true for obesity.”

What’s needed, she said at a recent talk at the Center for

Healthy Weight (CHW), is better policy and an aware-ness of the disparate linkages that have led us to a situ-ation in which one-third of all children born in this decade will develop type-2 diabetes because they are overweight. Half of all Mexican American boys and half of all African American girls are on track to de-velop the disease.

Fiscal policy, food prices, advertising, city planning, family life, international trade, the public school sys-tem and television are all part of the story. It’s an ex-pensive and dangerous story whose solution requires a vast array of expertise and imagination.

The director of CHW is Thomas Robinson, profes-sor of pediatrics.

“From very early on in my career, I was exposed to the fact that factors in determining health lay outside the medical care system,” he said. He first realized this as a Stanford biology major, when he started wondering why healthcare spending wasn’t going to prevention. Later on, in medical school, he worked with John Farquhar, founder of the pioneering Stanford Heart Disease Pre-vention Program, today called the Stanford Prevention Research Center, which spans several departments.

“As a researcher, to make the greatest impact, I had to look across the disciplines. I had a different perspec-tive, a [World Health Organization] approach to health that was very broad and emphasized health and wellbe-ing,” he said.

Other centers, he said, focus on just research, or just advocacy or just medical care. “But we wanted to do it all, building on our strengths, from basic research to policy, linking physicians with public schools, com-munity advocates, education experts, working together through initiatives such as soccer and dance programs.

“What’s unique about us is that we put an advocate, a lab researcher, a clinician and a community program together. Stanford School of Medicine stresses transla-tional medicine, from benchside to bedside, but if you really want to disrupt business as usual, put a commu-nity advocate in the mix as well.”

enTrePreneurshiP Week

You might also think about putting a venture capi-talist, a mechanical engineer, a surgeon and an en-trepreneur there. One of the events at Stanford’s En-trepreneurship Week in winter quarter did just that. Sandra Miller, managing director of the Biodesign Program, was referred by someone at the Graduate School of Business to Karen Kemby, director of busi-ness development at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospi-tal, who works with Robinson at CHW. They all put their heads together and came up with an event that

would combine entrepreneurship and human health.At a packed gathering in Clark Auditorium, Robin-

son launched a challenge: Let’s reduce pediatric obe-sity. A panel of experts then responded, offering the particular challenges in their field: developing surgical methods and devices that work for kids; raising money for research; feeding healthy meals to schoolchildren.

After that, representatives of the medical school’s Biodesign Program called on audience members—students, engineers, parents, members of the commu-nity—to huddle in small groups to brainstorm with strangers. The resulting ideas were announced at the end of Entrepreneurship Week. There were nine sub-missions, and awards were made in three categories: policy, video games and medical devices. Winners will get to meet with the panel member who can most help them; the medical device inventor, for example, will sit down with venture capitalist Dana Mead, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and a board member of the Packard hospital.

Another of the Entrepreneur Week speakers was alumna Pat Christen (AB ’82, Values, Technology and Society), president and chief executive officer of HopeLab, a nonprofit research and innovation organi-zation that helps children with chronic illness. The or-ganization’s current initiative is called Ruckus Nation, which recently sponsored a worldwide competition for ideas to get kids moving. More than 400 teams from 37 countries and 41 states entered ideas.

The 10 category finalists (middle school, high school, college and other) each received $25,000; among them was David Ngo, a 27-year-old Stanford graduate student in product design who created a game called Scoot, whose display poster read, “Imagine if you mashed up musical chairs and a disco ball.”

Many of the finalists drew their inspiration from the arcade and video game Dance Dance Revolution (DDR), in which youngsters gain points for speed and accuracy by moving their feet on a special mat to cor-responding dance steps displayed on the screen. But most went one step further, making their devices and games more interactive than DDR.

Yet another idea competition around the problem of child obesity was undertaken by the members of a mechanical engineering class, Transformative Design, taught in winter by a team of professors led by Bernard Roth and also including anthropologist Sarah Jain. Class members divided up into teams according to in-terest and then used interactive technology to develop products that encourage behavioral transformation.

One of the teams decided to tackle child obesity. The four graduate students, one each from Mechanical Engineering, the Graduate School of Business, Envi-ronmental Engineering and Computer Science, came up with two ideas. The first one drew from Dance Dance Revolution, like so many of the Ruckus Nation projects. It was scrapped, among other reasons, be-cause the team did not want a game that might be pro-hibitively expensive. The second, which they call “Fit Full Fun,” was given a test run at the fourth birthday

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CHILD OBESITY AND THE NEED FOR SOCIAL MOVEMENT

“Stanford School of Medicine stresses

translational medicine, from benchside to bedside,

but if you really want to disrupt business as usual, put a community advocate

in the mix as well,” said Thomas Robinson.

Thomas Robinson

eBRulI

SPRING 2008 7

party of the nephew of team member Sun K. Kim. It entails standing before a screen and jumping back and forth and side to side to catch healthy food items as they descend, and then putting them into a basket.

‘sTealTh inTervenTions’

Robinson, the Irving Schulman, M.D., Endowed Professor in Child Health, is interested in social move-ment theory, both the theoretical kind and the more obvious kind. Like soccer. Like DDR. Like folk-danc-ing. Anything to get kids moving. Christen’s guiding slogan, “Lead with fun and health will follow” is simi-lar. Don’t call it exercise, she said, call it fun.

As a result, Robinson and his medical colleagues have obtained federal funding to work with a sports league in East Palo Alto aimed exclusively at over-weight children. Asked if there might not be a stigma to playing on the fat kids’ team, he replied that if half the kids are overweight, it’s no stigma. For the first time in their lives, he said, the children enjoyed sports. Parents don’t have to take their children to weight clin-ics or other special appointments, and the kids aren’t home eating junk. It’s cheap, it’s easy and it works.

Robinson calls such approaches “stealth interven-tions,” another way of saying that the kids are having too much fun to notice they’re exercising.

How did it get to the point that children don’t know how to play? How did we come to think that “kids’ food” is different from regular food? Children have become expert consumers; Robinson published a study last year revealing that even 3-to-5-year-olds chose what they thought were Mc-Nuggets over identical processed chicken in different packaging. If aiming cigarette advertising ex-plicitly at young people gets the anti-tobacco forces particularly riled, what about the advertising of certain fast-food giants who tuck in stuffed animals and color-ful plastic drinkware along with the nutrient-bereft nuggets? What about the fact that those plastic cups, generally filled to the brim with corn syrup, are enormous?

Psychologist Sam McClure works on an area called in-tertemporal choice or temporal discounting—our ability to make decisions whose benefits are distributed in the future. For example, saving now to spend later, or eating food to satisfy an urge now versus eating something else to ensure good health in the future. He and Robinson are in conversations about linking their research.

“One question may be how different policies influ-ence the way we think about health-related choices and what the consequences of this are on behavior,” McClure said. He has used imaging techniques to study how the brain processes delayed and immediate rewards, and he is helping organize a conference this fall at the National Institutes of Health called “Neu-roimaging in Obesity Research.” (His work on inter-

temporal choice may also be applied to energy-saving techniques; see article on page 11).

PuBlic Policy

Advertising restrictions, snack taxes, school lunches, physical education classes and commodity price supports all affect whether children end up in the overweight soccer league, which brings us back to Chamberlain’s observation: We need policy. Robinson and others believe that change must originate with children themselves and that some inner transforma-tion must take place; but it is also true that punitive or redirecting policies can be part of the story.

The negative publicity surrounding the documen-tary Super Size Me, for example, led McDonald’s to cut back on serving sizes. (Executives said the decision had nothing to do with the film. The enormous con-tainers originated with the observation in the 1970s that people would be embarrassed to order seconds but not to order a huge first.) Congress is considering an amendment sponsored by Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, to the current Farm Bill that would ban the sale of junk food in schools. There are a host of similar state and local measures wending their way through committees, and CHW staff is watching every move they make. (Cali-fornia had a junk food tax until 1992, when the Cali-fornia Grocers Association, using the effective slogan “Don’t Tax Food,” managed to persuade 60 percent of state voters to repeal it.)

There are moral, economic and social arguments in favor of public policy aimed at obesity, says Michelle

Mello, a graduate of Stanford’s Pro-gram in Ethics in Society and today a professor of health policy and law at Harvard’s School of Public Health. She has written on obesity as a potential new frontier of pub-lic health law and has examined fast-food litigation, in which plain-tiffs have sought damages for their health problems. Personal choices, she says, are reaping public ills.

“I did the Ethics in Society Hon-ors Program as a means of learn-ing how to think systematically

about the ethical dimensions of problems of major public health significance,” she said. “At the time, I did not know what it meant to analyze problems from an interdisciplinary perspective. But today I know that solutions to the obesity problem are likely to require interdisciplinary research and policy-development ef-forts. The more we learn about obesity, the more we understand that it has multiple, interacting causes, ranging from the level of the gene to the level of the social structure.”

So it is complex, as complex as the 39 ingredients in a Hostess Twinkie, which, despite all the packag-ing and processing, is still cheaper than an apple. It sounds like something an economist, a psychologist, a nutritionist—and a soccer coach—could fix.

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The Stanford Prevention Research

Center has organized a Latina girls

dance troupe called ECHALE, which

performed recently at Clark Center

after an Entrepreneurship Week ses-

sion devoted to battling child obesity.

In the two-year randomized controlled

trial in Redwood City schools, re-

searchers are studying the efficacy of

the dance program and reduced tele-

vision-viewing in diminishing weight

gain among the girls.

CHILD OBESITY AND THE NEED FOR SOCIAL MOVEMENT

Entrepreneurs and inventors are turning their attention to devices and games to get

kids to move more and weigh less.

GennaDIy CHuyesHov

GennaDIy CHuyesHov

8 SPRING 2008

It’s a poor excuse for a celebrity these days who doesn’t have a cause for which he’s will-ing to tramp through deserts, meet with ref-ugees or hug patients with tropical diseases. It’s a rare shortstop who doesn’t give back to the community in the off-season, a rare young multimillionaire who doesn’t devote at least part of her wealth to establishing a nonprofit

guaranteed to solve a pressing social problem.Philanthropy is not what it used to be. Today what

the New York Times recently called the “celebrity-phi-lanthropy complex” is hot. In the United States, there is more wealth than ever before, and it’s not inherited wealth. Many of the newly rich are young people who are pretty sure they know how to fix the world. They get glossy spreads in Fortune, cover stories in the New York Times Magazine, websites and blogs. Giving is both sexy and strategic, and philanthropists are called “smart,” not just “good.” It’s what some people call philanthrocapitalism, what Stanford’s Bruce Sievers calls venture philanthropy.

A few years ago, Leonard Ortolano, then director of the Haas Center for Public Service, took steps to ensure that recipients of the Haas summer fellowships with philanthropic organizations linked their practice with academic coursework on the subject. At around the same time, Laura Arrillaga, one of the Haas Cen-ter’s chief donors and an instructor at the Graduate School of Business, where she teaches courses on phi-lanthropy, mentioned to Ortolano that she’d like to see a more deliberate program for undergraduates around philanthropy.

“She really was the one who lit the fuse,” Ortolano remembered. “She played a crucial role in getting it started.”

“It” was the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Soci-ety (PACS).

Gradually a vision started to gel; the center would be both a place for graduate students to do basic research and a place where research could be linked to practice. Faculty would support research; donors would support practice. Ortolano called a meeting.

“So I explained the vision and I said, ‘I already have two jobs,’” said Ortolano, also the UPS Foundation Professor of Civil Engineering in Urban and Regional Planning. In response, two people raised their hands to volunteer to lead the new center. Both are from the School of Education, with courtesy appointments else-where: Walter “Woody” Powell and Debra Meyerson.

“At that point I figured we had a base of faculty sup-port,” Ortolano said. “Haas was the incubator and it provided the center with neutral territory. If it wasn’t for Haas, this thing wouldn’t have gotten started.”

It was perfectly logical that Powell would raise his hand, he said recently, since he has spent 25 years studying the nonprofit world. For Meyerson, though, the gesture was a bit more risky.

“This was a new interest,” she said. “I’m a hybrid, both ideologically and in terms of the sectors I study,” with degrees in management and organizational be-havior. “I’m interested in nonprofits and social change, and I wanted to take my work in that direction, but I didn’t know where it was going to take me. It was an impulsive commitment.”

Not much was known about how philanthropy works, said Malka Kopell, the center’s managing direc-tor. How does it solve problems? What new problems does it create? What does it say about the public sector that private money is now so essential? How has civil society developed over the past century? What hap-pened to old-fashioned charity? The scholarship and lit-erature on these and other problems, she said, is thin.

Other universities across the country have similar centers. The most prominent of these is at Indiana, which offers graduate degrees and is known for its

massive quantitative research capability. Most other philanthropy centers are housed at policy schools; that is the case at Duke, Johns Hopkins, the University of Southern California and Texas.

But Stanford’s center is different, said Kopell, who has long experience in public policy and community relations. It is not housed in any particular school but rather at the Haas Center, and it is a program of the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences. It is meant to be a place where people from many fields and disci-plines can gather and then take their new knowledge back to their departments. It is a place to conduct basic research.

Stan Katz, director of the Center for Arts and Cul-tural Policy Studies at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, was a speaker at the PACS seminar series in January, and he later blogged about his visit on the Chronicle of Higher Education.

“The establishment of the Stanford Center high-lights the importance of convincing bright young scholars … that the field is one that can sustain first-rate scholarship,” he wrote.

The ‘Third secTor’

Among the topics floating through the PACS meet-ing rooms: the role of nonprofits in the fight against AIDS; the degree to which philanthropic foundations are altering the country’s education agenda; the impact of the Internet on donations; and the degree to which charitable tax deductions actually increase inequality.

An astonishing number of Stanford students appear to establish their own nonprofit as soon as they gradu-ate. When she graduated from Stanford, Kopell said, students thought that working for the government was the way to change the world. Today it is neither government nor established businesses that lure them; rather, they strike out on their own in what statesman and Stanford educator John Gardner famously called the “third sector,” the area that intersects with both the state and the market but which aims to use private money for the public good.

“The ‘and’ in our name [philanthropy and civil soci-ety] is a bit misleading, because philanthropy clearly is a subset of civil society,” Kopell said. “The point of the center is to study how these sectors overlap and inter-act, both in theoretical and in practical terms.”

The center’s leaders define civil society as activi-ties and arenas that pertain to neither the state nor the market, though they are quick to point out that no human activity can be considered as entirely separate from either. The term was originally used by Hegel to describe forms of civic interaction that arose after the decline of feudalism; today it is often synonymous with volunteerism and the nonprofit sector.

“I see three sectors,” said Sievers, the former direc-tor of the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, who is on the PACS steering committee and is a visiting scholar at the Haas Center. “Economic models, political prac-tices and civil society. To some degree, then, civil so-ciety has its own dynamic. There are intersections, but there is a distinct set of institutional structures unique to civil society.

“And I say, vive la différence! These spheres interact, which creates something more interesting than if they were simply smooshed together.”

graduaTe research

One of the core elements of PACS is the graduate workshop, where fellows and non-fellows study com-mon readings and present their work. The students come from education, communications, economics, political science, sociology, business and environmen-tal studies.

“It’s a cliché, but it’s really expanded our horizons,” said Megan Tompkins, a student of Meyerson’s. “I

Making Society a Bit More Civil

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Graduate student Megan Tompkins

returned to Stanford from Harvard,

she said, because the School of Edu-

cation here is so open to working with

other schools and departments on in-

terdisciplinary projects.

l.a. CICeRo

SPRING 2008 9

definitely went toward more political ideas because of those interactions, because we all know such different things. We all have to defend our ideas, and it can get pretty intense.”

One of the fellows this year is Hilary Schaffer, a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Environment and Resources (IPER). A couple of years ago she sat in on the fall semester of the workshop, and later she applied for the fellowship. Her project, about civic networks formed in response to natural gas facilities, has benefited as a result of the workshop, she said.

Referring to another graduate student with whom she has had a particularly fruitful interaction, she said, “We have totally different subjects but similar path-ways. My favorite part about the workshop is hearing from other students. In fall we get a good basis in the literature, and then it’s so much fun hearing how peo-ple apply the literature in different ways.”

Powell, who has led the workshop for the past two years, said something similar: “The students learn that there are multiple pathways to one outcome, and also that one pathway can lead to multiple results. This is a nightmare for standard regression analysis, but it hap-pens a lot.”

When PACS was being organized, Powell said, sev-eral faculty members went to the provost to discuss the idea. Are there really that many graduate students in-terested in these topics? the provost asked. Yes, Powell replied, but they have no place to gather. Now they do.

“We’ve produced a community where the students can critique each other, help each other, interact,” he said. “That’s our priority. For the first time, these stu-dents have intellectual colleagues.

“One student said, ‘This is the department I wish I was in.’ They’re willing to take risks now, they’re not afraid, like they might be in their department. It’s a wonderful venue for presenting work.”

Among the dissertation topics that have found a home in the PACS workshop are the slums of Rio de Janeiro, teacher labor markets in India, secular and religious nonprofits in Chicago neighborhoods, school desegregation in San Francisco, political campaigns and the Internet, schooling in Sierra Leone, the efficacy of nonprofits adopting business plans, and the distribu-tion of AIDS drugs by nonprofits in South Africa.

Tompkins (’00) is doing her dissertation on char-ter schools and philanthropy. She said she returned to Stanford from graduate school at Harvard pre-cisely because the School of Edu-cation is so open to working with other schools and departments. “It’s woven into the fabric of the place; they don’t just pay it lip ser-vice,” she said.

So she’s studying the ways in which large philanthropic orga-nizations can shape education. Charter schools used to be small, locally-controlled ventures; lately, what are called charter manage-ment organizations have begun adopting economies of scale, using a more managerial, professional approach, Tompkins said.

“What’s the normative impact of that?” she asked. “Foundations seek niches where other foundations aren’t active, so as a result, schools might shift to get more funding. In that way, philanthropy ends up af-fecting the educational agenda. What does this say about democracy?”

WhaT haPPened To The sTaTe?

Similar questions are being raised by Sievers, whose degrees (in political science) are from Stanford. He is not interested in studying the management of philan-thropy but rather its normative, moral essence. Volun-tary engagement in civil society, he said, offers people a moral choice.

“Civil society allows opportunities for voices of dissent and champions of other modes of thinking,” he said, offering such examples as the civil rights and the environmental movements. “And ideally, philan-thropy is one independent source of financial support not driven by the market that enables these ideas and movements to bubble up. Philanthropy is a critical piece of civil society.”

And engagement is a critical component of philan-thropy, he added. It’s not enough for a percentage of your credit card purchases to be shipped off to charity; you have to engage directly in that cause.

“Rob Reich thinks philanthropy adds to inequity.” he said, referring to Reich’s path-breaking work on tax deductions for charitable contributions, which he ar-gues end up hurting the people who most need help. “I say that’s the business of pluralism. The challenge is to have pluralism and equity balanced.”

Reich, an associate professor of political science, and Sievers teach an undergraduate class together, “Theories of Civil Society, Philanthropy and the Non-profit Sector.”

Reich, a Teach for America alumnus whose Stan-ford Ph.D. is in education and who will join Powell and Meyerson as a PACS co-director in fall, is working on a book that will offer a political theory of philan-thropy and examine the ethics of private activity in the public interest. The philanthropic and nonprofit sec-tor has come to assume enormous weight in American society; the Gates Foundation is the obvious example, but there are thousands of ways in which health care, education, the environment, culture—all of which used to be in the public sector—now rely on what used to be called charity.

“We need to do research on the relationship between philanthropy and government,” Reich said. “The cen-ter is a place to debate these issues, to ask uncomfort-able questions. Philanthropists may expect a ‘celebra-tion of philanthropy’ here, but that’s not what’s going to happen. That’s not what a university is all about.”

For Powell, too, an expert on network and organiza-tional theories, the center is a place for research and thinking, particu-larly about the ways in which civil society is supplanting the state.

“We’re desperate for answers on this issue,” he said. “We’re turn-ing to big philanthropy to solve problems that governments used to resolve. And we think that’s good, but there’s NO evidence that it scales up, that it makes things work better. There’s no sense that these private solutions will last.”

Students’ faith in nonprofits and entrepreneurship to solve society’s problems is not surprising, he said, given that the state has been out-

sourcing social services for decades.“Today there are thousands of little experiments go-

ing on. We’re seeing an extraordinary preference for nonprofit or philanthropic delivery” of social services, he said. “But is that revitalizing society? It reflects indi-vidualism; but at the same time, it also reflects volun-teerism. It’s a fantastically interesting time to be study-ing this stuff.”

Theory and PracTice

PACS is less service-oriented than similar centers at other universities, that is, it doesn’t advise nonprof-its and foundations on how to run themselves. That, Kopell and Powell both pointed out, is something the Center for Social Innovation at the Graduate School of Business does exceedingly well. But PACS does invite practitioners to form part of its community.

That is the function of the PACS seminar. Speak-ers this year included Lucy Bernholz, president and founder of Blueprint Research & Design, Inc., a con-sulting firm for foundations, who spoke about if and how the Internet has changed giving (one of the best-known examples is Kiva, an online microfinance nonprofit with Stanford roots). Another guest was Elisabeth Clemens, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, who delivered a paper on ways in which NGOs and similar organizations implicitly collaborate with government in mobilizing citizens in explicitly na-tional projects, what she calls “charitable citizenship.” And Google executives involved with google.org came to discuss the “charity gap”—the disturbing fact that only between 10 percent and 30 percent of donations actually help the poor. Most people give to religious, educational and cultural organizations. In other words, they give to themselves.

Along with the seminar, PACS is launching what they call scholar-practitioner dialogues, structured conversa-

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“It ’s a fantastically interesting time

to be studying” philanthropy and civil

society, said PACS co-director Woody

Powell, with, far left, managing direc-

tor Malka Kopell and faculty co-direc-

tor Debra Meyerson.

“Philanthropy ends up affecting the educational agenda. What does this say about democracy?”

Tompkins said.

see PhilanThroPhy, page 10

l.a. CICeRo

10 SPRING 2008

and Earth Systems junior John Mul-row took a class on the environmen-tal history of the San Francisco Bay Area; for her final paper Lee wrote about land use and food, and Mul-row wrote about waste management. Both essentially have found them-selves diving into environmental economics. (Both took, and Lee is a teaching assistant for, the course on behavior and energy use discussed on page 11.)

dreaMing oF a salad Bar

At a time when students mobilize around such issues as AIDS or geno-cide, food has not had an easy time competing because the linkages and costs are not as evident, said Gaines, Lee and Mulrow.

“In Earth Systems, we really study how to educate people,” Mulrow said. “If we had a furrow of water connecting all our houses, everyone would be conscious of what they do to the water. Water gets to our houses, but we don’t know how. We can expose that process to people.”

How does water or food get from here to there? From Chile to Stan-ford?

“In the past five years, the gen-eral awareness around food has been raised so much on campus,” Gaines said one day in March when she was on a panel with famed food journal-ist Pollan. “I have a dream of a salad bar with all the items organized by locality, with the most local ones on one end and the most exotic on the other. It would be hard to imple-ment, though.”

Not everyone thinks that calculat-ing food miles is the best way of go-ing about deciding what to eat. What if lamb is raised in a more humane and ecological fashion in New Zea-land than in the Midwest? What if the Bangladeshi rice farmer needs our money far more than the rice plan-tation owner in California? And if something is out of season here but in season in Mexico, should we import it?

The cost-benefit analysis Stanford Dining must do has been a creative

one, allowing the university to forge partnerships with local, sustainable food and livestock operations while remaining within budget and ensur-ing that students get tasty food. (Eric Montell, acting director of Stanford Dining, recalled the case of a local farm that supplied just cabbage and kale; “try diversifying,” he suggested hopefully, anticipating the rush to McDonald’s if that’s all students saw on their plate.)

Those creative partnerships with local growers do not necessarily have to result in higher prices. But if they do, Gaines said, what about alter-native distribution methods? What about subsidizing foods other than soy and corn? What about experi-menting with the supply chain?

Thus food activists must act like economists to figure out how, if we pay what food actually costs (that is, if we eliminate or decrease com-modity price supports and corporate welfare), how poor people will eat, given farmers’ very small margin. These are the same economic forces being considered by researchers at FSE (see accompanying article) who are looking at what happens to land and crop prices during the current corn boom.

Obesity and pollution are bad for business, food conglomerates have learned, and slowly they are becom-ing accountable to picky eaters who

care about the planet.“I collect corporate social respon-

sibility reports,” said New York Uni-versity nutritionist Marion Nestle during her appearance at Stanford for the “Ethics of Food and the En-vironment” series. “I love them. They’re so cynical; they make for wonderful reading.”

susTainaBiliTy in The FraT house

So thinking globally while eat-ing and acting locally requires that Stanford students and Stanford Din-ing consider agriculture, economics, transportation, behavior and social organizations.

Mulrow is especially interested in the byproducts of food: waste, recy-cling, re-using, reducing. He and his colleagues at http://refusepact.org figure the Stanford campus generates 1.5 tons of garbage a week just from beverage containers, and, with sup-port from the Woods Institute, they are working to get students to pledge not to use disposable water bottles. His fraternity, Sigma Nu, recently elected a sustainability chair (Mul-row himself) and is slowly getting on board.

“It’s weird to have a fraternity all psyched about this,” he admits, but, hey, that’s what social movements are all about. There’s room for improve-ment though, he noted, as he told Gaines and Lee about being served

crab legs and veal in a Row house. “And they have shrimp every night!”

When Nestle spoke to a morning gathering of Stanford food lovers and experts, one of her co-panelists was Christopher Gardner, an associate professor (research) of medicine and director of nutrition studies at the Stanford Prevention Research Center.

“Something is really resonating with this topic and this series,” he ob-served after Nestle had said the latest edition of one of her books has a new chapter on food as a social movement. Somehow, these ideas, long held by just a small minority, are taking off.

“Like mixed salad greens,” he noted. “How are they suddenly ev-erywhere? How did soy get marketed? How do ideas get socially marketed?”

And speaking of marketing: Early this quarter and through the sum-mer, students committed to sus-tainable living and dining will once again be operating a produce cart ev-ery Friday afternoon in White Plaza. They will be selling goods grown by ALBA, the Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association, which helps aspiring organic farmers in Monterey County.

tions before an audience that, Kopell said, “allow participants the rare op-portunity to explore the landscape between research and practice.”

Along the same lines, Powell said he’d like to create an informal venue, maybe with pizza, where the gradu-ate workshop and the seminar could come together, so graduate students could present their work to people in the field.

Pizza is cheap, but many of the center’s objectives require more. The Haas Center recently had eight of its goals approved by The Stanford Challenge, the university’s ongoing fundraising effort. One of those, “public service scholarship,” explic-itly refers to PACS. So they’re seek-ing donors. Philanthropy scholars need philanthropists, after all.

addition, political decentralization in Indonesia has made environmen-tal management more precarious.

Rozelle, another of the authors of the article, studies these questions as they pertain to China, the world’s largest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions. China in 2007 pro-hibited crop production for bio-eth-anol on land traditionally devoted to staple grain production, instead encouraging cultivation of minor crops and the use of marginal lands. It also is looking elsewhere in Asia to grow its crops.

How will China’s massive growth affect the world agricultural econ-omy? That’s one of the questions be-ing addressed by the Center for Chi-nese Agricultural Policy, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Rozelle is the chair of the center’s board of academic advisers and a firm believer that its multidisciplinary approach will yield innovative solutions.

“We’re known for multidisci-plinary fieldwork,” he said. “We work with geographers, physicians, hydrologists, solving policy problems for the rural economy.”

Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project in January 2008 be-gan funding another FSE biofuels project, this one looking at the effect of biofuels expansion and large-scale

land conversion on global climate. Not surprisingly, the principal in-vestigators include Lobell, as well as Field and Naylor.

‘deadly connecTions’

Water shortages, hunger and mar-ket disruption can lead to disease and starvation. They also may lead to social upheaval. A third group of researchers at FSE is beginning to examine links between food scarcity and political turmoil. The venture is unique in bringing together political scientists and agricultural econo-mists, who traditionally study pov-erty each in their own way.

The effort began after Naylor con-tacted Stephen Stedman, a senior fel-low at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, who at the time was research director of the U.N. Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. The group’s objective was to iden-tify the world’s most salient threats, which it found to be a difficult task. Sudan, for example, does not face the same sort of threats as England.

“The panel could either prioritize among very different threats or we could try to define threats in such a way as to validate all of them,” Sted-man said, “and we chose the latter ap-proach.” Defining threats as situations resulting in the large-scale loss of life and undermining of the state, they created six categories, among which were economic and social threats,

including poverty, infectious disease and environmental degradation.

But all six clusters are interrelated, Stedman pointed out, “in ways we only dimly understand in some cases.” Warfare, poverty, terrorism, even or-ganized crime all have linkages.

Naylor saw that it would be im-portant for FSE to incorporate those issues into the framework of food security, and she invited Stedman to join. In February 2006, they were among the researchers awarded one of the first grants by Stanford’s Presidential Fund for Innovation in International Studies. Their project, “Feeding the World in the 21st Cen-tury,” led to the formation of FSE.

One of the first projects, in fall 2006, was the “Deadly Connec-tions” seminar. Among the partici-pants was Jeremy Weinstein, assis-tant professor of political science, who presented his work on “AIDS, Security and Social Stability,” a proj-ect for which he received his own Presidential Fund award.

“The seminar was a wonderful forum for people from a wide di-versity of fields to think critically about the intersections among the environment, food security, health and stability,” he said. This year, the seminar is on hold, and Stedman and Naylor hope next year to run a workshop that will help Stanford scholars figure out what research has been done on the various dyads (poverty-environment, disease-vio-

lence, climate-poverty, etc.), so as to determine the best way to proceed.

“If the net effect of climate change is to reinforce shortages of key re-sources and make economic growth more difficult, then yes, that makes for a conflict environment,” Sted-man said, adding that the means with which countries make them-selves resilient to climate change may well be the same means that mitigate violence.

Though the causal relationship between climate change and politi-cal violence on the one hand seems logical, it also is hard to pinpoint and possibly can be overstated. But the United Nations has established climate change to be a security issue, and there is a growing feeling that the potential linkage should be made a research priority, with climate and conflict models being improved and better coupled.

At an evening session of the series on “Ethics of Food and the Environ-ment” featuring the film Darwin’s Nightmare, Naylor provided some thoughts on the linkages. The film portrays the social, economic and ecological devastation around Tan-zania’s Lake Victoria.

“Is Africa at a turning point?” she asked. “The income from Lake Vic-toria’s fish,” monstrous perch that had eliminated all other species, “is destroying everything around it. Can there be broadly distributed sustained growth? Is there hope or not?”

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Eatingcont inued from page 2

Philanthropycont inued from prev ious page

Stanford graduate Erin Gaines, above left, the sustainable foods coordinator

for Stanford Dining, spoke at a panel with journalist Michael Pollan.

l.a. CICeRo

FSEcontinued from page 5

SPRING 2008 11

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If it is difficult to get kids to think they can do something about being overweight, imagine getting them to think they can do something about global warming. But it turns out both are possible, and some people think they are related.

The Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency was established in 2006 with a gift from

alumnus Jay Precourt. The institute is organized into six clusters of research: building, transportation, en-ergy modeling, policy, systems and behavior.

Everyone from Precourt Institute Director James Sweeney down to the average well-meaning citizen knows that overcoming global warming is a compli-cated endeavor.

“There’s no silver bullet,” he told a group assembled in March to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP). “There’s not even silver buckshot.”

In the 1970s, he pointed out, interest in energy alter-natives vanished as soon as the price of oil went back down. “So we can’t have a limp response, and it’s not going to be cheap or easy. Behavior change is impor-tant, but without fundamental technological change, nothing will happen.”

But there are those who say behavior change is a critical piece, though the approaches are not mutually exclusive. It’s quick, it’s cheap and it’s essential.

Among those proponents at Stanford is postdoctoral scholar K. Carrie Armel, who earned a PhD in psychol-ogy and cognitive science with an emphasis in neurosci-ence. She outlined her views this winter to the Energy Seminar, an initiative by the Woods Institute for the En-vironment that drew crowds week after week to listen to engineers and policy analysts. California State As-sembly Bill 32 in 2006 established the goal of reducing greenhouse gases by 2020 down to 1990 levels, a reduc-tion of nearly 30 percent compared to projected levels. There’s not a lot of time, Armel said in her presenta-tion, describing those behavior-related approaches that are less effective (public service announcements and standard advertising approaches) and more effective (opt-out renewable energy programs and card-swiping or readable meters that remind users how much energy they’re using and how much they’re paying).

“I’ve known since high school that I wanted to work on some-thing related to both behavior and the environment,” she said later. “I’ve been talking about these is-sues of behavior so long. I used to get smirks and embarrassed looks. Around a year ago they stopped smiling. Al Gore’s movie changed everything; it made that possible.”

Her first mentor at Stanford was Antonio Rangel, a pioneer in the field of neuroeconomics. Soon after arriving, Armel submitted a fund-ing proposal to the Woods Institute to design a climate-change reality television show, such as those that have been wildly successful in Latin Amer-ica. But the proposal did not get funded.

Thomas Robinson, professor of pediatrics and a leader in the fight against child obesity through “stealth interventions,” was one of the researchers on that pro-posal. He had independently contacted Woods to see if his interest in brain imaging and motivational activities might find some echoes there. Members of an ongoing committee of environmental and medical scholars re-ferred him to Armel. By then, Rangel was getting ready to leave Stanford, so Armel and Robinson created a partnership combining their interests in energy, obesity and behavior.

Promoting Behavior Change, cross-listed in Human Biology and Earth Systems, is one of the results. The class develops activities aimed at motivating people to change their energy consumption. Last year, the Stan-ford students divided into four groups—food, waste, electricity and transportation, and their respective rela-tionship to climate change. Each group designed an in-tervention for high-school students; for example, hav-ing them keep logs recording their energy use, setting up a buddy system to enforce behavior or organizing relay races around the use of line-drying clothes (some of the kids had no idea one could dry clothes on a line). This year the class will move to an elementary school. The hands-on work is accompanied by readings in psy-chology, marketing, communication, education, behav-ioral economics, design and other disciplines.

The teaching assistant for the course this year is Anna Lee, an Earth Systems co-term student. Last year, when she was a student in the class, she also worked on the Sustainable Choice Card, a project organized by

Earth Systems students to help people make wiser eat-ing choices.

“We wanted people to be aware that their decisions make a difference, and we gave a lot of thought to how to present that information,” she said. “That process was very similar to what we went through in class to choose our target energy behaviors.” And, she added, she dries her own laundry on a clothesline now. She has even adapted the social psychology she picked up from Robinson and Armel to make herself practice the viola.

For Robinson, there is an obvious methodological similarity in getting kids involved in changing their own behavior around eating or around energy use. For one thing, at times they are one and the same thing. Walking instead of driving. Eating healthy food grown nearby versus eating processed food manufactured far away.

The Precourt Institute was one of the sponsors of a unique con-ference last fall in Sacramento on “Behavior, Energy and Climate Change.”

“We got double the expected at-tendance,” said Armel, one of the organizers. Some 500 people at-tended the meeting—so many, in fact, that the conference will be-come an annual affair. The next one, in November, will feature an extra day of sessions.

“The Department of Energy is interested in behavior now, and the state Public Utilities Commission is pursuing behavioral initiatives,”

Armel said. “Once they figured out we need to make changes really fast, they got interested, because tech-nology can take decades. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, among others, has suggested that some of the cheapest and most significant energy re-ductions are at the residential level.”

Presentations at the conference covered a range of is-sues that all seemed to hover around one central issue: What do we know about human behavior and decision-making that can be applied to energy-use reduction? The work spanned policy, buildings and technology, media and marketing, and community-based initia-tives. What people know, or think they know, may get in the way of certain cost-cutting, it turns out. They may believe clean energy is an impossibility; they may believe it’s too late; they may believe they’re the only ones interested, making their behavior useless. But, to use a political metaphor, every vote counts.

The Precourt Institute funds research proposals in its six clusters, and Armel said she hopes the round of proposals this spring will include some that empha-size behavior and energy. There may be one from the Graduate School of Business on environmental atti-tudes by different social groups, and perhaps one from a researcher at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital evaluating media messages about climate change. Psy-chologist Sam McClure, who is talking with Robinson about possible collaboration regarding child obesity, is also interested in consumer attitudes toward energy-efficient technology. The rate at which people demand to recoup the purchase price of a new refrigerator in reduced power bills is extraordinary, he said. “They are much more impatient in this domain than in most others.”

SWITCHING BEHAVIOR

Post-doctoral scholar Carrie Armel

organized a conference on “Behavior,

Energy and Climate Change” that was

hugely successful.

l.a. CICeRo

l.a. CICeRo

“The Department of Energy is interested in behavior now, and the state Public

Utilities Commission is pursuing behavioral initiatives,” Armel said

Anna Lee, an Earth Systems co-term,

is a teaching assistant in Armel’s

course; last year she helped create

Stanford’s Sustainable Choice Card,

which helps people make better eat-

ing decisions.

12 SPRING 2008

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B Y J A M E S P L U M M E R

Engineers take basic scientific discov-eries and turn them into things that are useful to people. In that role, en-gineers are the agents of progress for human society in a natural world. For most of history, people did not con-sider environmental sustainability in deciding whether something was “use-

ful.” Now we must, and the urgency and complexity of this challenge vividly illustrates why we emphasize collaboration in our work. Technology cannot succeed unless its development is informed by the context and needs of the society it serves. To meet the goal of sus-tainability, engineering is necessary, but not sufficient.

Sustainably achieving continued improvements in the living standards of a growing global population certainly will require engineers to create new technolo-gies and to derive accurate models of complex systems. We will provide society with choices by determining what is possible. But none of the choices we provide will produce real benefits if they don’t incorporate the insights of the humanities and social sciences. This is exactly why Stanford is so well positioned to take on as ambitious a goal as the Initiative on the Environ-ment and Sustainability. We have an excellent engi-neering school that is literally surrounded by excellent programs in the liberal arts, social sciences, natural sciences and medicine. At Stanford we have not only what is necessary, but also what is sufficient.

The level of activity within the School of Engineer-ing dedicated to the mission of providing tech-nical choices is simply astounding. More than 30 tenure-line faculty members have active re-search projects devoted to sustainable energy, with heavy concentrations on three themes: solar power, fuel cells and energy efficiency. Characteristic of Stanford, each is strongly supported by inherently multidisciplinary means. The first two are supported by the Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) and the last by the Precourt Institute for En-ergy Efficiency (PIEE).

Each one of the school’s nine de-partments has at least one faculty member whose research directly contributes to improving the sus-tainability of our energy future. The Department of Civil and En-vironmental Engineering (CEE) re-cently adopted sustainability as its core theme.

Energy is a big issue within the broader sustainability challenge, but it is not the whole problem. Dozens of Stanford engineering professors and students, particu-larly within CEE and Mechanical Engineering, have been working for decades—with some great suc-cesses—to understand and combat pollution in our water, air and soil. More recently, CEE has begun refocusing its considerable expertise in building design and construction to ensure that our built environment has maximum environmental per-formance and minimal environmental impact.

collaBoraTion across The universiTy

Including both energy and environmental projects, a total of 50 members of our current faculty—and hundreds of their students and research staff—are working on research directly related to environmental sustainability. They all publish original work within the subdisciplines of their traditionally defined fields. In this regard they are performing in line with tradi-tional academic expectations.

But that’s not the only culture within the school or the university.

As part of a Stanford community that seeks to meet the challenge of sustainability, we are engaged in building collaborations with colleagues in law, busi-ness, Earth sciences, medicine, biology, economics, sociology and numerous other fields to see our techno-logical and mathematical innovations through to prac-ticality in society. To be an engineer is to create useful solutions, after all, and to make solutions useful is to work with peers who can expand the understanding of the nature of the problem.

Perhaps the newest and most visible manifestation of this collaborative culture is the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building (Y2E2), which brings together students, faculty and staff from many engineering and policy-focused departments and programs. Within Y2E2 are the offices of GCEP and PIEE and the Woods Institute for the Environment. All three of these organizations bring diverse minds together to focus on sustainability challenges.

Woods, through its Environmental Venture Projects program, has brought together 21 groups of Stanford faculty members over the last four years, each explic-itly selected because they feature collaboration across department and school lines. Engineers have been part of 11 of those projects, including efforts to improve water sanitation, model the economics of California’s water and sequester toxic metals such as lead. These projects have coupled engineers with colleagues in medicine, law and Earth sciences.

susTainaBle BuilT environMenT

This spring, a new research and teaching program emerged within Woods and the university’s environ-mental initiative that further illustrates this collabora-

tive direction. CEE Professor Ray Levitt and sociology Professor Douglas McAdam have marshaled the university’s diverse intellec-tual resources under the umbrella of the Sus-tainable Built Environment, which refers to the environmental, economic and social sus-tainability of our buildings and infrastruc-ture. Woods will give interdisciplinary teams of faculty seed grants to develop research proposals along these lines. Fundraising for the best of these projects will be part of the

environmental initiative. Anyone who has studied the history of so-lar power, for example, will un-derstand why engineering alone is not enough to put panels on buildings; economic, policy and legal issues also hold sway. This new effort recognizes the multi-faceted nature of the challenge.

It would be a convenient half-truth to declare all this to be com-pletely new or completely unique to Stanford. We’ve recognized the importance of interdisciplinary research and teaching for some time now, as have other peer institutions. Before Y2E2, the Clark Center proved a successful experiment in bringing together

similarly diverse groups of human health researchers.But understood in the broadest sense, this inter-

disciplinary push is new. For hundreds of years, uni-versity structures have evolved around distinct disci-plines. Tenure and other incentives have driven people to specialize to the point where their work can become insular and very narrowly focused.

Especially at a time of urgent environmental con-cern, collaboration across disciplines is imperative. And so as we pursue innovations for the good of sus-tainability, we are pursuing innovations in how we ap-proach our broader research and educational missions.

James Plummer is the Frederick Emmons Terman Dean of the School of Engineering and the John M. Fluke Professor of Electrical Engineering.

“Each one of the school’s nine departments has

at least one faculty member whose research directly contributes to improving the sustainability of our

energy future.”

Solutions for the Good of All

The Energy and Environment building

is the newest and most visible mani-

festation of Stanford’s commitment

to sustainable architecture.

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James Plummer