I am writing about the legacy of MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI) because it will be closing at the end of this spring semester. After a series of discussions that I organized with a group of interested members of the MIT faculty, including the Vice President for Research, the decision was made, by the VPR, to close the initiative. It was a difficult decision but one that does not mark the end of ESI’s mission – rather an extension of it across the Institute.

The ESI was founded in 2014 with Professor Susan Solomon as inaugural director. It was established after many years of consideration by professors from several Schools interested in fostering an Institute wide effort to address a range of environmental challenges. I took over as director in October 2015 and have led it ever since.

I believe it is important to highlight some of the more effective and creative elements of the ESI in suggesting that after the initiative ends it may have a lasting legacy at MIT. From my perspective, it is already apparent that the ESI has had a significant role in contributing to the creation of what is now a rich institutional landscape of work in sustainability and climate change. I have also heard over the years from faculty colleagues and students who have valued the ESI as a model for an entity that productively coexisted alongside and in symbiosis with Schools and departments, as well as other initiatives at MIT.

So, what is ESI’s legacy?

I have organized my answer into three parts: critically engaging the MIT community, initiating and stewarding critical environmental research, and catalyzing efforts to promote sustainability as fundamental to the mission of a research university.

Critical engagement of the MIT community began with two programs at ESI’s inception: a research seed grant program and a proposal for a new integrative undergraduate minor in Environment and Sustainability. Prof. Solomon directed the first round of seed grants to attract novel, high risk and reward, and multidisciplinary research proposals from all corners of the Institute. When I joined as director, I oversaw the second round of awards. To this day, many of the topics that received seed grants support are as relevant as ever: seabed mining, plastic pollution, AI and climate change, sustainable cities, metals and minerals for decarbonization, and more.

The effort to obtain Institute approval for the undergraduate minor in Environment and Sustainability took about two years and has been managed by ESI Education Program Director Chris Rabe. Since its inception, the minor has had a steady enrollment of students who have welcomed the opportunity to explore in depth and across disciplines the variously coupled and complex challenges of the environment, the economy, technology and society.

Subsequent to the launch of these two programs, the ESI invested enormous time and energy on engaging the MIT community in many more ways. We served as an advisor to student sustainability and climate groups and worked to enhance the agency that students, especially undergraduates, develop in contributing productively to environmental progress. We coordinated our activities with the MIT Energy Initiative, the Office of Sustainability, J-WAFS, and other DLCs as we sought to be additional to the rich MIT context. We started the Rapid Response Group which brought opportunities to undergraduate and graduate students to work on relatively short term and high value projects with external stakeholders. Partners in this effort included members of Congress, Massachusetts state legislators, major environmental and science organizations such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, World Resources Institute, the Humboldt Institute, and others, a broad array of companies and startups across industrial sectors, and community groups like the Mystic River Watershed Association, as well as other groups well beyond Massachusetts such as the Center for Coalfield Justice in southwestern Pennsylvania.

The primary motivator behind providing these kinds of opportunities to students, especially undergraduates, is simply the value of learning by doing in a messy and environmentally-challenged world. With the RRG, students learned what it takes to get things done outside of the academic context – in government, the private sector, civil society. Very often a meaningful small step takes much, much longer to achieve than a young person would imagine and just as importantly, the environmental challenge that seemed fairly straightforward at the outset turned out to be more complex and nuanced than expected. Tradeoffs abound, difficult decisions emerge, black and white goes away and grey infuses the work. This kind of learning by doing in the world can be rough, sometimes dispiriting in the moment but ultimately empowering and motivating. It can also offer valuable insight on how to direct an early career toward meaningful work in the environment.

There are too many stories of students engaging in eye-opening and motivating ways than I can relate in the space of this article. Suffice to say that I regularly receive emails from students, many of them undergraduate alumni, who tell me how consequential those experiences were for their education and their careers.

The second part of my answer highlights the essential role the ESI played as the steward of a set of critical environmental challenges. To do this, we established research programs on important environmental topics that we had determined could benefit from the unique capacity and interest of the MIT faculty and involving key external partners and stakeholders. Over time we built up six research programs that flourished in different ways with the participation of diverse members of the faculty and researchers: Natural Climate Solutions, Mining and a Circular Economy, Cities and Climate Change, Plastics and the Environment, Arts and Climate, and Climate Justice. Each program has its unique and textured history. Each has involved particular members of the faculty for short and long periods and generated projects that have flowed out from the ESI into departments and Schools. Each was also led by excellent staff members of the ESI: Chris Noble, Scott Odell, Norhan Bayomi, Marcela Angel, and others.

Among the many partners and collaborators have been three Colombian presidential administrations, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, many affected communities including former coal miners in the US, indigenous groups in Latin America and the US, the ICMM and the Chilean Consejo Minero, New York City, Boston, Cambridge, Bangkok, many companies, the UN, the Inter American Development Bank, the Global Environment Facility, Warner Music Group, Live Nation, the band Coldplay(!), and so many more. The list of past partners is long and diverse.

Among the many successes and some instructive failures, we were able to engage stakeholders in difficult situations. We worked with mining companies on the need to rigorously anticipate and seriously mitigate the environmental damage from expanded operations for primary metals and critical minerals needed for decarbonization worldwide. We sought out ways to account for biodiversity loss resulting from urbanization in places like the Amazon. We worked hard to convene plastic companies, government officials at the highest levels, key researchers at MIT and other institutions to productively contend with the exploding health and environmental threat from expanding plastic production and pollution. While I could go on and on – it’s been a very busy 10 years! – an important part of this work has been the institutional service we provided as a dependable home at MIT for these topics.

It was the role that the ESI played as a host and steward of these research programs that may serve as a key element of our legacy. Each of these research programs developed a deep understanding of the challenge through a continuing and collaborative engagement with experts, stakeholders, vested interests and, of course, the MIT community. The ESI was committed to holding these programs in place and offered opportunities for engagement over time.

I had a vision that ultimately our research programs would reflect the sectors articulated in the Nine Planetary Boundaries. John Rockström, the main author of this framework, longtime member of ESI’s External Advisory Board and a good friend, was the inspiration for moving in that direction.

The third element of our role moves us to the moment we find ourselves in. We have always operated under the premise that the research enterprise of a technical university, and actually, of all academia should and would inevitably shift toward priorities consistent with protection of the planet and sustainable pathways for the economy and society – priorities that align with our 21^st century reality.

MIT was founded by William Barton Rogers, who had a vision of a country moving beyond its agrarian economy and toward becoming an industrial powerhouse. Since then, MIT has fulfilled his vision in teaching science and engineering and conducting research that has contributed enormously to the industrial development of the US and the world.

Is it not time now to reconsider what the essential role of a technical university should be in a century to be dominated by climate change, rapid urbanization, severe degradation of natural capital, and likely continued loss of biodiversity? What if we were to commit to economic development, and the associated technology and policy innovation, within a sustainable framing such that the current rate of degradation of natural capital, biodiversity loss, emission of greenhouse gas pollution and many other pollutants can be slowed and ultimately arrested. Maybe the more important question is what happens when we no longer have a choice, but are forced to do so by way of disaster and depletion of ecological services, major disruptions in the supply of critical resources and massive climate instability, and more?

At the ESI, we have always understood that we could not assume that this vision would be shared generally by the MIT community, and in fact we knew many may be actively opposed to it. This did not deter or disturb us in our activities to support the development of sustainability courses across Schools and departments, engage professors in cross-departmental research projects and mentor students on how to craft their learning and their future careers for optimal contribution to environmental progress, whatever their major. We did everything we could to infuse the Institute in its teaching and research activities with the idea that the world is now in dire need of sustainable solutions.

We also broadcast the work of the MIT community to the world. Through the Climate Portal, the Climate Primer, and our podcast, TILClimate, we helped MIT to spread the best information about climate change far and wide – and in a decidedly nonpartisan manner. The voice and creative force behind all three of these efforts was Laur Hesse Fisher, ably assisted by Aaron Krol.

Another mechanism we used in our positioning as a catalyst for a new era of sustainability at MIT was the development of a set of Principles of Conduct and Engagement. Prompted in our early years by an expanding list of corporate partners, we asked ourselves the question of whether we needed to guide our conduct through specific criteria in assessing the risks of engaging with certain funding sources and research collaborators. For whatever reason, we seemed to anticipate by many months the blowout of concern on issues of the vetting of research funding at MIT prompted by the Epstein-Joi Ito Media Lab debacle and the problems that arose from the institute’s engagement with Saudi Arabia. We did not have a crystal ball. What we did have was an emerging intuition that relations with funders, especially corporate support, but not only, is more complicated in an age of planetary environmental crisis. We needed a robust guide to navigate through this issue and produced our principles, which we have revised annually.

Finally, while we cannot assert that the current situation at MIT is wholly or even substantially a result of our work these past 10 years, we can assert that the ESI has contributed to an expansion of interest, awareness, and meaningful engagement in the environment and sustainability. MIT now has an Institute-wide commitment to taking meaningful action on climate change in the form of the Climate Project, a Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy, a Climate Policy Center, and more.

As the ESI ends its run, its various programs are finding homes across the Institute. In discussions on ESI’s future, the group of MIT faculty mentioned at the outset of this article were adamant that the important work of the ESI should continue by finding appropriate homes in units across the Institute. We have been doing this and will continue to do so until as much of our work as possible continues unabated.

For example, as part of the next phase for the programs Natural Climate Solutions, Cities and Climate Change, and Arts and Climate Change, I am co-founding a research group with ESI Research Program Director Marcela Angel and Research Scientist Norhan Bayomi. In the coming months, Sophia Apteker will join us as writer and communications lead. We will be addressing accelerating climate change and biodiversity loss, alongside global urbanization through AI, nature-based solutions and urban analysis, planning and design. We are calling it Environmental Research Action (ERA): Cities, Nature and AI. ERA will be situated within the School of Architecture and Planning but will be oriented, as the ESI has been, on perspectives and collaborations across the institute.

Finally, I would like to thank several individuals who have been extremely important to the ESI over years.

I have been humbled and endlessly honored by getting to know, work with and benefit from the intellect, wisdom and grace of Prof. Susan Solomon. To me she embodies the best of the scientific and academic world through her research, teaching, involvement in policy and engagement on the threats to the environment we face, and will face. It is not often that one has the opportunity to work with a person who led a successful effort to literally save the world. MIT – and higher education generally – needs more of what Susan has been able to achieve as we settle into this century of planetary uncertainty. I have also benefited enormously from the friendship and keen counsel of former Head of EAPS, Prof. Rob van der Hilst. Rob’s generosity of spirit and sharp insight were so helpful to me over the years.

In addition, while there are too many MIT faculty colleagues to thank here, I am most grateful for support throughout my tenure as director from Profs. John Sterman, Desiree Plata, Noelle Selin, Penny Chisholm, Tim Gutowski, Roberto Rigobon, Elsa Olivetti, Joe Paradiso, David McGee, Janelle Knox-Hayes, Bob Jaffee, John Essigmann, Daniela Rus, Jessika Trancik, Charlie Harvey, Elfatih Eltahir, Chris Knittel, Benedetto Marelli, Dara Entekhabi, Larry Susskind, Heidi Nepf, and former MIT professors Steven Barrett and Valerie Karplus.

Thank you to the Tang family, the Martin family, Charlene and Derry Kabcenell and to all our donors and supporters.

And finally, many thanks to former Vice President for Research Maria Zuber for the years of guidance and the level of confidence to let me direct the ESI mostly in the way I wanted to.

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