Changing the Climate

Neil Leary set his own course as an environmentalist three decades ago

March 17, 2009

Neil Leary talked his way into a 400-level field-ecology course at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., 32 years ago and has been an ardent environmentalist ever since.

Neil Leary's environmental epiphany occurred 32 years ago when he was a sophomore at Macalester College.

A roommate talked Leary, then an economics major, into taking a 400-level field-ecology course. Leary talked his way into the course, admission to which required the usual lower-level prerequisite classes, and he hadn't completed them. The course included treks through forests and wetlands near the 1,900-student campus in St. Paul, Minn.

"We went out into the field, different natural environments to study and compare different kinds of ecosystems—hardwood and deciduous forests, floodplains, grasslands, prairie potholes, lakes and streams—and we did a lot of bird watching," Leary said. "The professor was an avid bird watcher."

It was then that Leary knew that the environmental beat, not Wall Street, was for him.

Back to business

Leary went on to earn a bachelor's degree at Macalester with majors in environmental studies and economics and a master's degree and doctorate in natural-resource economics from the University of Washington, where he was able to intensify his focus on economic and environmental issues.

Last year, Leary was named Dickinson College's first director of the Center for Environmental & Sustainability Education. His mission is to weave sustainability into the curriculum—an agenda for which he's suited given his varied background and the college's environmentally strong foundation.

Leary came to Dickinson from START, an international science network of developing country institutions and researchers, where he was a senior scientist and directed interdisciplinary research and training programs on global environmental change, principally climate change. He remains involved in START's activities and is a member of its development committee.

Leary was one of the leaders of the 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. He also was a senior economist in the Office of Policy of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and assistant professor at Middlebury College.

Creating incentives

Throughout his career, Leary has advocated sound stewardship of natural resources as a key to economic growth. He says it's an idea that can succeed throughout the world, from industrialized nations to the most destitute regions on earth.

Reaching an audience is a matter of "how you create incentives to influence people's behavior so they might tread a little bit more gently on the environment than they would otherwise," Leary said.

"In developing countries, a large portion of the people face pressing challenges that pose immediate threats to survival such as crushing poverty, food insecurity, high disease burdens and conflict," Leary said. "In that kind of environment, trying to make a case to protect the environment can be difficult. This is particularly true for an environmental threat such as climate change that can seem abstract, disconnected from daily life—a problem for the distant future. But when people living in these countries and contexts can connect environmental degradation to life and death issues, then they are willing to act. They're dealing with misuse and overuse of land and the degradation that it causes. That interferes with how much food can be produced. When you connect environmental issues directly to survival and livelihood, that's when people say, 'OK, that's important. That's something I'm willing to engage in.' "

The same approach can work in the United States, though the goal of enhancing the understanding of human impact on the environment, notably climate change, is sometimes hampered by politics, a lack of scientific awareness, or both.

"I think there is a good deal of misunderstanding of science and how science works and the whole scientific method. When you see quotes in the paper of somebody saying 'I believe' or 'I don't believe,' well, it's not a question of belief," Leary said. "It's a question of developing constructs, ideas, models of how the world works, collecting observational information, testing your ideas against the data and seeing if it matches. Where it doesn't, you rethink, revise. So it's continually evolving based on evidence."

Bias of 'balance'

The media play a role in fostering debate on issues such as climate change and evolution in ways that misrepresent the scientific evidence and the extent to which the evidence supports or contradicts scientific theories, Leary said.

Leary said one of his classes is studying the issue of whether the media's emphasis on providing "balance" on issues such as climate change and evolution is a form of bias against science.

"When you look at the press coverage of climate change, the tendency is almost always one of providing 'balance' in a story—to give equal weight to each view," Leary said. "That may not be reflective of the weight of evidence or the conclusions of those who are more knowledgeable and who are informed and have a greater understanding that it's not this sort of 50-50 thing."

Often lost amid forced balance is the fact that the majority of scientists and international science academies endorse the 2001 IPCC report in which Leary played a role. The report concluded that, taking into account the evidence and uncertainties that existed at that time, "most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse-gas concentrations," which is a result of human activities such as burning fossil energy and clearing forests. The evidence that has accumulated since the 2001 report is even stronger. In its most recent 2007 report, the IPCC concludes that it is "very likely" that the observed warming is attributable to human causes, where "very likely" means a 90 percent confidence level.

Leary and his wife Tory Natale have three children, Molly, 18; Conor, 16; and Eleanor, 13. He'd like to hand off a more sustainable world to his children, to Dickinson students and to future generations.