An Ongoing Story of Growth, Change and Adaptation
Norm Christensen's Professional Path to Ecology Followed Many Twists and Turns p.3
Outside the Southeast, Christensen has applied his team's research findings to many of the nation's most pressing environmental issues. He has served on numerous national, regional and local science and policy task forces, including high-profile stints on the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, the National Commission on Sustainable Forestry and the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Environmental Issues in Forest Management in the Pacific Northwest. In 2003, he testified before Congress about improvements needed to the Healthy Forest Restoration Act. The act removed administrative barriers to cutting timber on fire-prone public lands, ostensibly to reduce fuel loads.
Conciliatory by nature, he can nonetheless be a fearless advocate for the responsible stewardship of natural resources. Few issues have engaged him as passionately as the management of public lands in his native West.
"Norm has contributed heavily to developing fire policies for public lands," Peet says. "He was perhaps the major figure in the re-evaluation of fire policy by the National Park Service following the Yellowstone fires" of 1988.
"Decades of mismanagement have helped fuel the intensity, frequency and destructive power of wildfires we're seeing in western forests today," Christensen says. "Plans to fireproof the West through fire suppression, logging and allowing grazing on fire-prone public lands have failed. Many forests are now more flammable, and urban encroachment extends right up to, and sometimes into, their borders, putting people and property in harm's way."
Christensen's calls for new management practices have repeatedly landed him in the national media spotlight and sometimes have drawn the ire of industry executives, developers and environmental extremists. ("Sometimes they say I've gone too far," he says with a shrug. "Sometimes they grumble that I don't go far enough.") He tries to take it all with a grain of salt.
"I don't seek out controversy, but I don't shrink from it either," he says. It was his personal sense of responsibility and "parentship" on issues relating to the environment and education that led Christensen in 1991 to take on the greatest challenge of his career so far as founding dean of Duke's new School of the Environment.
"Being named dean was a transforming moment," he says. "I am eternally grateful for the opportunities it gave me. Aside from the thousands of students I've had the pleasure of teaching or working with over the years, it's what I'm most proud of."
His pride is justified. During his decade in office, Christensen oversaw a period of enormous growth and change. His administration's accomplishments include the construction and occupation of new space in the Levine Science Research Center; large increases in the size of faculty, research funding and the school's Master of Environmental Management program; the creation of the Coastal Environmental Management program and two undergraduate majors; growth in the school's endowment from less than $5 million to more than $94 million; the establishment of 11 new endowed faculty chairs; and greatly increased national and international recognition for the school's programs and faculty.
After stepping down as dean in 2001, Christensen returned to the faculty as professor of ecology. Although he admits to sometimes missing "the adrenaline rush" of deanship, the "so-called slower pace" of being a faculty member suits him just fine.
"I have more time now for things I had to put aside as dean," he says. Among other pleasures, that means catching up with former students; spending lazy weekend mornings watching flocks of brightly colored goldfinches and tanagers congregate around the bird feeders in his heavily wooded backyard, reading the works of Gabriel García Márquez and other favorite Latin American authors, and making up for lost time on his guitar.
"I've played guitar since I was a teenager, but it sort of fell by the wayside during my dean years," he says. "In the past five years I've become much more serious about playing again." His dream, he says, would be to play "like a mixture of Doc Watson, Eric Clapton and Chuck Berry, with a little of (classical guitarist) Christopher Parkening thrown in for good measure."
photo captions: David Gilluly MF'87 measures loblolly pine in Duke Forest; Norm Christensen measuring tree diameter at a permanent sample plot; Preparation of field area in the Blackwood Division of the forest; Bark of shortleaf pine; Clarence Korstian, the first forest director, examines a permanent sample plot in the early 30s.