My name is Deborah Lawrence and I'm a professor of environmental sciences at
the University of Virginia. I received a grant from the Provost's Office, in a program
called the programs of distinction. It's a global study of food, fuels and forests.
We're trying to imagine out to the year 2050. We're going to have nine billion people on
the planet; we still have one land surface. We need to feed all those people,
we need to be sure that the earth delivers all the ecosystem services that
we need. And so we're trying to understand possible future scenarios. We
start always with the land surface. We plug it into a climate model to try to
understand what are the effects. Then with the climate feeds back to the ecosystems, tells
us how we're doing in terms of food and water. And then we engage with her our
colleagues to try to say: "What would this mean? What would this world be like?" So our
group is an interdisciplinary group: anthropologists, economists, ethicists, people
who have not necessarily thought about climate models as a way to think about
our future.
Let's go beyond the usual concept of human well-being and try to think about
the moral and ethical dimensions of the choices we make.
Jefferson had a vision for all of us, including the students, to emerge as
citizen-scholars, and this research program is really all about being
citizen-scholars. We are trying to engage in problems that effect society,
but we're focusing on this problem because we believe that our role as
citizens is important, that we have something to say about the future of our planet and
our society.