This spring we celebrate the 40th Earth Day – an anniversary marking a journey of commitment for me and others at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. For the first Earth Day in 1970, I was a new graduate student at University of California, Berkeley. Then as now, it was a raucous time with the country at war and intense focus on civil rights and the role of government.

The first Earth Day developed as a grassroots movement with teach-ins focused on the environment. I focused on a career in ecology, but Earth Day inspired my commitment to solutions for human impacts on the biosphere. In the ivory tower of Berkeley, applied research was then portrayed as a lower calling to “pure research.” But I was committed to merging fundamental ecology applied to human impacts, now a hallmark of SERC research.
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