Hitting the Green Running

By Joelle Seligson

Looming above the admissions desk, Giganotosaurus, perhaps the largest predator to ever walk the earth, is one of visitors’ first encounters at the Academy of Natural Sciences. Towering skeletal mounts of this and other prehistoric creatures are what the 197-year-old Philadelphia fixture is known for; most locals identify it simply as “the dinosaur museum.” But now the country’s oldest natural science research institution is going beyond natural history to look toward the future. With its new Center for Environmental Policy, the academy is helping lead efforts to prevent our own species’ extinction.

In less than a year since its launch, the center has hit the green running. It played a part, for example, in forming Mayor Michael A. Nutter’s recently announced plan to make Philadelphia the greenest city in America by 2015. The center pulled together some of the region’s leading naturalists and other science and engineering experts to help devise the plan’s framework, input that proved “super useful,” attested Mark Alan Hughes, the city’s first director of sustainability and a senior adviser to Mayor Nutter. “For a new institution, [the center] provided contacts and a venue for having at least one conversation that probably wouldn’t have happened otherwise.”

It is the museum’s ability to provide neutral grounds for discussion that distinguishes the center from its environmentally active peers. “It’s really related to the academy’s iconic role in the community,” noted Roland Wall, director of the center and of environmental policy at the academy. “Our scientific work has been going on for so long that it gives us a level of trustworthiness in the community that a lot of organizations might not have.”

The center is strictly nonpartisan; it conducts no lobbying or advocacy work. Instead, it aims to serve as a “knowledge-based institution that can provide both good scientific thinking around environmental policy and also as a vehicle and forum for broad-ranging discussion and action,” Wall explained. In short, “We want to try to be the spot that people can gather around to work together on environmental issues”—from climate change and pollution to urban agriculture and the role of religion.

The center became an official entity when its funding, an $82,500 start-up grant from the William Penn Foundation, came through last September. But the academy’s environmental efforts date to long before green was in vogue. More than 60 years ago, Ruth Patrick, who was then a curator—and who was, until recently, still coming into work (she turns 102 this year)—had what was a unique vision for the time: using science to protect the environment. She assembled a multidisciplinary team of experts to explore the impact of water pollution. The department, known today as the Patrick Center for Environmental Research, has worked with the federal and state environmental protection agencies and natural resource associations, as well as a number of businesses.

“The academy told companies at the time, ‘We’ll do the research, and we’ll give you the information that the science indicates. It might mean that you’re doing a good job, but it might mean that you need to clean up your act, and we will speak publicly, whatever it is,’” recalled William Y. Brown, president and CEO of the academy since 2007. Brown most recently was president and CEO of the Bishop Museum in Hawaii; before that, he served in such positions as vice president for environmental planning and programs for Waste Management Inc., and science adviser to former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt.

The center was a natural outgrowth, Brown said, of the academy’s background in environmental policy issues and of its established public programming. Since 2004 the museum has engaged experts and the community in discussion of critical environmental issues through its popular Town Square series, which includes Urban Sustainability Forums, public meetings centered on greening the city. The meetings have now been folded into the center; recent sessions explored the mayor’s 2015 plan and raised such questions as “How can we feed Philadelphia?”

Going beyond museum walls, the center is reaching out to other like-minded organizations—collaborating with the mayor’s office of sustainability and the Clinton Climate Initiative, for example, on the Green Museum Initiative, a plan to reduce the carbon footprint of all of Philadelphia’s cultural institutions. The center has also united nearly 20 churches, synagogues and other religious organizations with environmental missions through the Interfaith Environmental Network. The concept grew out of an Urban Sustainability Forum that asked what the faith community was doing to aid in conservation, explained Joy Bergey, federal policy manager of PennFuture and project director at the Pennsylvania Interfaith Climate Change Campaign. While many area religious groups had been working independently on environmental projects, the center is now coordinating their efforts.

“It’s always good to know what others are doing. If you feel you are the only one doing something, it’s hard to plug along and make a difference,” Bergey said. “Now we can share information on finding sources of funding, on how to go about organizing a certain project.” For example, she said she and Wall were developing an interfaith project to clean up a local park.

Bergey believes the center is also helping bridge another gap: between science and theology. “It’s exasperating to me that in this country there is so often proposed this false contradiction—this sense that science and religion are at odds,” she explained. “To me it’s wonderful to be able to work in an interfaith capacity with the support of the science community.”

Brown would like to see the center tackle other kinds of weighty issues—nuclear power, for example. “The academy is a natural to get into areas that are kind of dicey because it’s well respected. It’s not going to compromise itself,” he said. 

“In the current economy, we’re playing it by ear,” Wall said of the center’s future. “My plan is that it will continue as-is or grow more in the next year or two as we find our legs a little more.” In particular, he said he hopes to build more partnerships, such as with local universities, and to expand the center’s communication role. “We’re looking at ways to start getting the word out more.”

All natural history museums must take on a similarly active role when it comes to protecting the environment, Brown added. “The environmental mission of natural history institutions like the academy is critically important to the earth,” he said. “I think we who work in these institutions need to do more in getting that message out there.”