He explains science behind climate change
As a teenager, Stephen Nodvin used to lecture high school assemblies about acid rain and why pollution is bad. Thirty-five years later, he's still doing it.
As director of the School of Arts and Sciences at Mount Ida College in Newton, professor Stephen Nodvin teaches students to ask questions about basic science - what's the structure of a particular chemical compound, for instance. But his bigger job as an educator is in helping New Englanders to ask questions about global warming. As a member of Al Gore's "Climate Project," Nodvin travels around New England lecturing everyone from rotary clubs to bank executives to schoolchildren about the science behind climate change.
"I tell people what's the deal with global warming, what are specific effects for New England, and what are the solutions," says Nodvin, 54. "People in New England want to know what can be done. But there's not a silver bullet for this. There's silver buckshot."
Nodvin rattles off the well-known list: recycling, energy-efficient light bulbs, hybrid cars, and voting for environmentally aware politicians.
"Sometimes it's as simple as paper or plastic," says Nodvin, who is trying to get in the habit of using reusable bags from home instead. "But that's what's great about New England. We've shifted the focus to solutions. There are places in this country where people don't even get the basic message."
The basic message Nodvin gives in his lectures is that global warming is steamrolling ahead.
"I am no longer worried about the earth," says Nodvin. "The earth has been around for 4.5 billion years. In that time, there have been at least five major extinction events where most major species were wiped out, and scientists have identified that we're in the latest great extinction. The earth has recovered its biodiversity in all these previous events. It has all the time in the world. The species in most danger is us."
Nodvin is a born advocate. When he was a high school student, he was amazed at the first pictures of the entirety of the globe taken by Apollo 13, showing people, for the first time, that we are, indeed, stuck together on a ball in space. He started writing environmental articles for his school paper, led green groups, and even received a congratulatory letter from President Richard Nixon for giving talks to other high school students. Then, driving home from school one day, the father of a friend asked him why protecting forests and rivers was really necessary. He realized he didn't know.
"For me, it was almost a question of aesthetics," he says. "But it got me thinking about the physical reasons for environmentalism."
Nodvin went to Emory University, then to Cornell to do graduate work on acid rain. He spent his postdoc years in California's Sierra Nevada mountains studying pollution. As a professor at the University of Tennessee, he researched the water systems of National Parks. "My end goal was always to find information to help manage things better," says Nodvin. But was as an educator that he found his true calling.
"Global warming has the effect of getting kids interested in science," he says. "Like after Sputnik, there was a big push in this country for scientific education. But today we're not where we should be in scientific literacy." Nodvin believes that the desire to understand climate change is opening people to learning science.
Strangely for a lecturer on global warming, Nodvin is optimistic. "We have the technical know-how to manage this problem," he says. "It's not a technical issue. There's a whole series of strategies to manage this problem. If we change, we can avoid some really bad catastrophes. What we do in next 10 years will affect the world for many generations to come."
Hometown: Nashua, N.H.
Family: Wife Sabette Elter-Nodvin, 44, daughters Leah, 16, Madelaine, 13.
Other interests: On the board of directors of the Unitarian Universalist Church in Nashua.
On Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth": "I'd been presenting this stuff to graduate classes for 18 years. What he did in 1 1/2 hours, I did in several weeks. And he had really great slides."
