Civil & Environmental Engineering/McCormick
At Northwestern University, Jean-François Gaillard is a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering within the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, has a courtesy appointment with the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, and he is a member of the Center for Catalysis and Surface Science.
Jean-François’ first research interests were in early diagenesis – the transformation of surficial sediments - and he lead the geochemical component of the benthic group within the French Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (F-JGOFS). Since his move to the US his research shifted towards the environmental geochemistry of metals in aquatic systems and the use of microscopic and spectroscopic methods based on synchrotron light.
Jean-François teaches courses in Earth System Science: Earth a Habitable Planet, Aquatic Chemistry, Metal Speciation, and a Laboratory class in Environmental Engineering. He served as an editor for the Journal of Hydrology and is a fellow of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC).
What does sustainability mean to you? Your definition, key features? Living within the physical limits of the Earth System, the very surface of our planet. This means that we – the human species - need to plan carefully our actions, at the local as well as the global scale, perturbing as little as possible the environment that we live in. To accomplish this, many societal trends need to be changed and the society at large needs to be re-engineered. With our energy consumption – in the US we currently need every day 300 energy “slaves” – i.e., the energy produced by 300 humans working constantly around the clock - and our consumption of resources - we move every day on average our weight of Earth material – how can we, in the next 40 years or less, reach 9 billion human beings with 70% of us living in cities? We have fashioned the Anthropocene, this geological era where most of the Earth surface processes are changing at a rapid pace because of our unbounded growth and activities. It is pretty clear that this drives a series of unanticipated consequences and that we are rushing ourselves towards … oblivion.
How does your research/professional work connect to sustainability? How (or why) did you get involved? At the core I am an environmental chemist/geochemist. I have always been interested in deciphering the processes that lead to the chemical evolution of aquatic systems. I started working on the effect of acid rain and metal contamination on Canadian Shield lakes near Sudbury – one of the largest mining sites in North America -, then on the role of the Ocean in the global carbon cycle within the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study, where I was looking at the preservation of organic matter (i.e., carbon) in marine sediments and now I am back to looking at the fate of metals in aquatic systems. We are currently working on As, Hg, and Ni. In addition, we are analyzing the structural properties of new materials using synchrotron light, so that one can come up with more benign products to use in electronics. Sustainability is for me a natural evolution from the environmental movement that I followed in the mid-seventies.
What role do you see for universities (broadly) in advancing sustainable practices? Universities educate people and are also the place where new education paradigms emerge and evolve. I think that Universities could play a very important role as real “think tanks.” Inherently, all the different aspects of the human endeavor are represented within a University – or, let's say they should be! By really promoting a dialogue between disciplines and people, the University is one of the cardinal settings where one can have this “reflection” about our future. Sustainability for me is more a philosophical/social decision that we need to reach at the collective level, rather than the promotion of technologies that are supposed to promote this endless economic growth that we seem to accept as a given.
How can the university setting contribute practical, near-term solutions to the urgent and immediate need for sustainability? Hmmm… that is a difficult question to answer because it is, after all a political decision and what I am going to say may not be well received. As an example of near term actions, I would convert some parking lots to lawns, reduce traffic on campus to a bare minimum, install solar panels on buildings so that they can be used as shades – presently I see many people shutting down their window curtain during the day time and turn their lights on! Well, I could go down a long laundry list and would rather stop here!
What do you see as the key step or steps to achieving sustainability?
We need to change our current economic system. It is mostly based on short term perspectives, an unregulated “free market” where people are not so free after all and that is, for the most part, disconnected from the physical fluxes of matter and energy that we can tap into.
If you could have one sustainability wish come true, what would it be?
The one I just mentioned above… a paradigm shift in terms of our economic perspective. It has to be congruent with the biological chemical and physical boundaries in which we are bond to survive as a species, or else…
What’s your favorite sustainable product? (Or is that a contradiction in terms?) Wood
