http://www.alternativesjournal.ca/community/blogs/aj-special-delivery/academic-evolution-innovation-knows-no-boundaries
Extract Tim Kruger spends his days looking at environmental problems through the lenses of various disciplines. He runs the Geoengineering Programme at the University of Oxford, where he is responsible for the coordination of interdisciplinary research applications in the area of geoengineering and the governance mechanisms required to ensure that any research in this field is undertaken in a responsible way. Because we may not be able to reduce emissions sufficiently to avoid catastrophic climate change, geoengineering tools are being explored to deliberately manipulate environmental processes, counteracting the effects of global warming, ocean acidification and drought, among other disastrous scenarios. Funded by the Oxford Martin School, the program is multidisciplinary by design. “We are looking at a broad range of proposed techniques,” explains Kruger. “From using aerosols in the atmosphere to reflect sunlight back into space, to making clouds brighter, to physically removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and oceans. Working in an interdisciplinary fashion requires a lot of patience. You need to act as an interpreter between disciplines.– Tim Kruger Kruger is one of the authors of the Oxford Principles (2009), a set of governance principles guiding geoengineering research. “Working in an interdisciplinary fashion requires a lot of patience,” admits Kruger. “You need to act as an interpreter between disciplines. In the morning I might be talking to a philosopher about the ethics of a proposal, and later talking to an engineer about thermodynamics principles. I don’t have a depth of knowledge as they do but I am able to bring them together, to help them understand each other’s perspectives.”Even though Kruger has pioneered a potential geoengineering technique himself, he insists he is a generalist, not an expert. A graduate of the sciences at Cambridge University in 1994, he ran a startup in Nepal with his Canadian wife for seven years. He returned home to England in 2001, where he worked as an innovation manager at Shell in London. The experience of working for an energy and petrochemicals company turned his focus to climate change, and how to mitigate its effects through geoengineering. Kruger’s geoengineering proposal involves the addition of alkalinity to the ocean to enhance its capacity to act as a carbon sink, counteracting the effects of ocean acidification. You can better understand the mechanism he proposes by watching this animated clip. Oceans have seen a dramatic increase in acidification since the Industrial Revolution, resulting in negative alterations to marine ecosystems, and the disappearance of a known buffer to global carbon dioxide absorption (the oceans have been absorbing a disproportionate share of atmospheric carbon dioxide for the past century). Kruger’s geoengineering technique and work at Oxford Martin have been cited in Nature, Science and The Economist. Climate change presents systems problems, involving multiple, complex mechanisms. “What is left now, are those problems which are not amenable to being solved by a single disciplinary approach,” concludes Kruger. “The problems that we are now facing are the ones that require a multidisciplinary approach.”Who better than an eco-polymath to innovate approaches that require general knowledge of multiple environmental disciplines? Long-standing subject areas have provided us with a variety of useful frameworks that innovators like Orbinski and Kruger can use to push traditional boundaries, giving rise to original lines of inquiry. “Interdisciplinary work demands that a problem be addressed in all of its dimensions,” concludes Orbinski. “Ultimately, what’s needed is an open mindedness to new ways of understanding.” Somewhere, in new dimensions of innovative research, we will find the tools needed to regain a healthy, integrative balance on our planet. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
