Classes tackle ecopuzzles

Five years ago, Bob Costanza and his colleagues made headlines when they put a dollar value on nature: $33 trillion, to be exact.

Today, Dr. Costanza is still crossing the lines between economics and ecology in his roles as a professor at the University of Vermont in Burlington and director of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics there.

His courses aim to make sure students meld disciplines and shape what they're learning around real-world problems, not just theory.

In an academic world where professors have increasingly narrow areas of expertise and student assignments don't often reflect pressing issues outside the classroom, Costanza's approach is iconoclastic. "People forget how to talk to each other across their different departments," he says. "We've become a university of idiot savants. So we're very good at doing the things that we do, but we have no way of communicating with the rest of the world."

Costanza's own background is as eclectic as his courses. He studied engineering as an undergraduate, earned a master's degree in urban planning and architecture, and did his doctorate in a systems-ecology program within an environmental-engineering department. As part of his PhD, he studied economics.

Some of his "problem-based courses" have included trips abroad: Students researched how to establish successful ecotourism in the Dominican Republic, and how to manage dry forests in Zimbabwe.

In his most recent course, his students faced the daunting task of putting a value on biodiversity. They did a massive review of data to see if they could figure out how the number and variety of species in an area affects theservices the environment provides us - such as nutrient cycling or carbon sequestration, both of which are important for maintaining the climate. Costanza hopes to publish the results, with his students as coauthors, in a magazine such as Bioscience.

In a recent interview, he discussed his interdisciplinary approach and the importance of problem-based courses.

On crossing disciplines:

We're trying to integrate across the natural sciences and the social sciences - you could even say reintegrate. I think there was a split several years ago, and now we're trying to put things back together. The reason is that the problems we're now facing are much more integrated problems. You can't ignore the linkages between the environment and the economy. [This way], you get people to think outside their boxes. It's in fact a very creative thing to do. And by thinking outside the constraints of their discipline, [students] generate new ideas.

On why his research looks at "value":

Economists have in some sense captured that word for some uses. They talk about economic value. But it's a little broader than just the market-exchange value of things.

There are things that happen outside the market that have economic implications that are valuable to us. So that's what we focused on in that study of the value of the earth's ecosystem's services. And we discovered that those values, even conservatively estimated, are larger than the market values.

That sort of turns economics on its head. Until then, the conventional wisdom was: Yes, there are these externalities, yes, there are some things the market doesn't capture, but those are small [portions] of what's going on.

On his most recent course:

This was partly a spinoff from a workshop we did in Cambridge a year ago that led to a paper in Science [magazine]. At that meeting, the original idea was to look at the value of biodiversity. In order to do that, you have to say: What's the link between biodiversity and the way systems function? And that's still a pretty controversial research area.

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