[MUSIC]
So dear Hal, it's really a pleasure having you here for this interview.
We're preparing a MOOC on ecosystem services.
And I was told by some friends that you were among the people that have been
initiating also this, a big part of this whole idea and concept.
So to start this interview, I would like you to kind of
summarize your quite extensive and long career in ecology.
And maybe that brought you here at Stanford as a professor in biology, and
to give maybe some highlights of this successful career.
>> Well, I did my graduate work at Duke University.
And that was the main place where ecology was taught in the United States at
the time I was a student.
And from there I got my first job at the one place I didn't want to go,
Los Angeles.
>> [LAUGH] >> But I went to UCLA for six years and
started research there on local vegetation, and became interested in
comparing California systems with those in other Mediterranean regions, like Chile.
So I started a project doing a comparison between these.
And at that time, I was offered a job at Stanford, which I
gladly accepted, because I was born in Santa Rosa, very near here.
So coming up back to Northern California was a great thing.
>> Okay, and so looking backward at the work you have done and
your role in developing ecology as a science in recent years,
do you feel that this field of research ecology has grown and
evolved fast enough to address now the kind of key societal
issues that we are facing in protecting biodiversity, for instance?
>> Well, that's a very good question.
I guess the short answer, in view of how fast the world is changing,
probably no field is advancing fast enough to keep up with the changes and
be prepared for the future that's coming.
So I think that ecology [LAUGH] is not keeping up the pace, but
I don't think any sector of society is.
Because the changes are so big and are happening so
fast that it's a real challenge for all of us.
>> Mm-hm, so I was wondering how you were, as again an ecologist,
doing the link between the different aspects of biodiversity, genes,
species, ecosystems, with their functional diversity that they bring,
and at the end, the services that they deliver to the people.
Do you see still kind of knowledge gaps in linking
this different aspect of biodiversity, functions and services?
>> Well, I guess I have to go back a little bit.
[LAUGH] I first became interested in biological diversity
when I was on a committee, a national committee.
And someone from the food industry asked me, he says, well,
what good are all these species?
We have all the species we need, we have chickens and cows, and
we have wheat and we have rice.
And so what more do we need?
And so I started thinking, well, we ought to be able to answer that question
a little better [LAUGH] than we've been doing in the past.
And so I thought the first thing that we needed to do is,
how does biological diversity relate to ecosystem functioning?
What are the roles of the various species in processing the light that comes in from
the sun and cycling the water and mining the nutrients, and so forth?
So that question had never been asked, really,
is what is the relationship between ecosystem functioning and biodiversity.
So I was with an international organization at the time,
the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment, and
suggested we start a program in that area.
So that program was very successful, because I think a lot of people working
in biodiversity hadn't been thinking about how this relates to function.
So that program went on for a while and came to an end.
And then the next phase came, of well, we see the diversity-function relationship.
How does that relate to ecosystem services?
And that came later, and my, I guess,
interest in that was sparked by this first phase.
But then Walt Reed came up with the idea that maybe
we should extend the biodiversity concept into ecosystem services.
And so I became involved in a Millennium Ecosystem Assessment where that was
developed to a high level or degree,
and has now become very popular in governments and so forth.
It's been a wonderful track, I guess.