Reflections on a New Century: Stan Garnett & Dr. David Fahey

Stan Garnett, President, Boulder Valley Public School District Board

BMAG: What educational issues do you think we’ll be confronted with in the next century?
Stan Garnett: The biggest issue in the next century will be whether the role that public education has traditionally played in American culture will continue. That role has been to provide the vast majority of people with enough educational skills to be able to pursue the American dream and to train people in American citizenship: tolerance, public spiritedness, the ability to get along in a pluralistic society. I believe that public education has been the foundation of our democratic society because it puts everybody together at a young age, teaches them to get along with each other, and helps them develop the tools to participate in our society as adults.

BMAG: One argument for public education is the enculturation process, while an argument against it is that it doesn’t provide a good education. What’s your take on this debate?
Garnett: Obviously public school systems vary. There are many very good public school systems, and the Boulder Valley District does an excellent job of providing students with a fine education. This is borne out by almost any measure you would apply: test scores, graduation rates, where our kids go to college. I think things like the voucher movement, efforts to split the public schools into a system of publicly financed parochial schools—which is what I see as kind of the motive of the voucher movement and some of the more extreme charter-school movements—could really undercut the ability of public schools to socialize and train kids in citizenship. Those will be the big issues that we’ve got to sort out.

BMAG: Can we deal with population growth and afford to keep quality in public education?
Garnett: It’s going to be a real challenge because not only is there growth, the growth has been in places where we don’t have much capacity for educating students. One of the first things we’re going to have to do is reallocate our facilities, which will be a challenge. The answer to whether there will be enough money basically depends on whether the state really commits itself to financing the public school system at a level that’s necessary to educate kids in a highly technological society.

BMAG: Do you see any major shift or trends in what our kids will be learning in the next century?
Garnett: Obviously we need to continue to make sure our schools have complete access to computer hardware and to the Internet and other developing technological tools, but the basic idea of an education won’t change in the twenty-first century. I’m a big proponent of a traditional renaissance-type education because I think the primary goal is to give kids the tools they need to succeed in life. Those tools are the ability to think clearly, the ability to express yourself, and the ability to do mathematics and necessary technical skills.

BMAG: Are there socialization issues schools should be addressing?
Garnett: I think schools need to work more overtly and aggressively to help kids deal with issues of diversity. In Boulder Valley we need to do a better job of that than we’ve done so far.

BMAG: What’s your take on kids today?
Garnett: Kids face the same temptations and problems—substance abuse, destructive rebellion and that sort of thing—that kids have dealt with for generations. Those issues are still going to be challenges, particularly for adolescents. I strongly believe that reading has to be a priority.
In the world of digital cable and Nintendo it’s incredibly easy to spend no time reading! This is going to sound like the “good old days,” but when I was a kid I read the newspaper everyday. I read Time Magazine cover to cover—not every word, but I skimmed through it and read the articles that interested me—each week. I read journals on things I was interested in, like fishing and hunting. And I read a lot of books. I watched some TV, maybe McHale’s Navy, but it wasn’t that engrossing.
It’s a whole different thing now. Electronic media is almost narcotic. It really captures our kids. That will be a problem for them, because if they don’t learn to read and understand the written word, they’re not going to be able to express themselves and fully partake in what our society has to offer.

BMAG: Any final thoughts you’d like to share?
Garnett: I’m very optimistic. I think we’ve always had a good school system in our community, and I’m convinced we always will. How we do it will vary from time to time depending on political realities and other problems we face, but I’m convinced that Boulder Valley will always have an excellent public school system.

Dr. David W. Fahey, Research Physicist at the Aeronomy Laboratory at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

BMAG:Given your specific field of research—the ozone layer—what issues will be coming at us in the new century?
David Fahey: The recovery of the ozone layer is almost a poster child for the new millennium in that it’s an issue that may draw our attention for a good fraction of that time. The last half of this century witnessed severe declines in the Antarctic ozone and lesser declines throughout the globe which, we came to realize, was due to chlorofluorocarbons from human activities on the Earth’s surface. It kind of caught us by surprise. Prior to that, humans hadn’t realized we had that kind of leverage on such an important feature of our atmosphere.

BMAG: So the jury’s no longer out that ozone depletion may be just a natural cycle?
Fahey: There is very broad, international scientific consensus that changes in the ozone layer, particularly over the Antarctic, are not due to natural phenomena but to human activity. After the hole in the ozone was announced in 1985, the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement to control the emission of ozone-depleting substances, was initiated in 1987. Much as the ozone decrease itself was unprecedented in human recorded history, so was this international effort to ameliorate an environmental problem. The Protocol came up with rules and regulations, and the process by which they would be revisited and vulnerable to change by good science.
Since then the Protocol has been revisited every four years and, indeed, emissions of ozone-depleting substances across the globe have gone down measurably. So we’re in the early part of the recovery of the ozone layer in the sense that the causative agent has been reined in, so to speak. But the full consequences of the problem may not show up for many decades. The compounds we’ve released are very long-lived. It takes a long time for the atmosphere to cleanse itself of them.

BMAG: So we’ve gone some distance to stopping the cause, but the problem still exists?
Fahey: The solution takes time to become effective. Chlorine is one of the principle active agents in ozone damage, and we’ve been able to show that its levels in the stratosphere have peaked out and are coming down. We think that the ozone won’t get any worse, but it won’t be until 2050 that the amount of ozone-depleting substances will have neutralized to where they were when we first noticed the ozone hole. It will take time for our efforts to result in the return of the Antarctic ozone layer to its natural cycle.
We’ve already done quite a bit as an international community. That’s some great news to start the next century. If we adhere to the Protocol, manage its economic and social aspects, and make sure other nations don’t disregard it and reverse the gains made, if we’re able to sustain and respect its validity, then we will literally be witness to the recovery of the ozone layer.

BMAG: Part of your specialty also concerns high-altitude aircraft emissions. What’s important in this area?
Fahey: My research involves both our commercial subsonic fleet and the proposed supersonic fleet. Although no commercial entity has stepped forward to build a supersonic fleet at this time, we can expect that commercial aviation will continue to expand. Because this form of transportation emits pollutants into the upper atmosphere rather than at the surface of the Earth, they’re much more potent in terms of their ability to change the properties of the atmosphere. Global evaluation shows aviation contributes to, for example, global warming through the change in radiated properties in the atmosphere that are a direct or indirect result of aviation. Aviation emits carbon dioxide, a principle greenhouse gas. It also releases reactive nitrogen oxides—much as automobiles and other combustion sources do—away from the surface of the Earth where they last a lot longer and lead to the formation of ozone, just like pollution on the surface leads to the formation of ozone. What we’re trying to evaluate is how aircraft will affect the ozone layer and other changes that may occur.

BMAG: What other areas are important regarding ozone?
Fahey: The ozone layer is not recovering in the same kind of atmosphere as it was created in. While the ozone layer was becoming a larger and larger phenomenon, the chemical and radiative properties of the atmosphere were changing because of the greenhouse gases we were emitting into it. We can’t reasonably expect to go back to the same atmosphere we had in 1985 when the ozone hole was first noticed. Scientists must study how the background atmosphere continues to change and how high-visibility problems like ozone depletion, the effect of aircraft and global warming itself alter the nature of atmospheric evolution. The next century will be a very important time as we start to see some of these basic relationships develop.

BMAG: Do you feel our pace in addressing these issues is too slow, or the best we can do?
Fahey: As scientists we don’t always have the tools or information at our disposal, so it will never be a perfect world in terms of how much we can know by when. Our country, more than any other, makes a very strong contribution to the global understanding of these problems because we’re very well equipped to do it and have a lot of interested, dedicated, talented scientists. The importance of the problems will only increase, affecting foreign policy as well as the guy on the street. People will demand consistent answers based on good science. And there will have to be some consensus built across international boundaries. I’m looking forward to being actively engaged, for the rest of my career, in problems that continue to gain in visibility and in scientific stature at the same time.