Pioneers of interdisciplinary sustainability

When the 1973 oil embargo sent shockwaves through global society, few people could predict when—and how—spiking gas prices and fuel rations would end. Those anxieties were compounded by fears that the United States had surpassed its peak oil production and an increasing awareness of how fossil fuels harm the environment. 

But even before talk of a crisis began to spread, UC Berkeley faculty were well poised to address it. Since 1969, a group of Berkeley faculty interested in understanding the energy problems of the future had gathered for lunch in the Physics building every other Wednesday. These meetings were organized by Charles K. “Ned” Birdsall, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, and eventually led to the formation of the Energy and Resources Group (ERG): a graduate program that connects students and faculty across many disciplines to address the environmental and social challenges regarding energy, water, and resource use.

“A great university should have a component that thinks about the integrational pieces. We proposed to create that component in the form of an augmented graduate group in energy and resources,” Professor Emerit John Holdren, one of ERG’s co-founders, said in an oral history interview recorded in 2024. Additional oral histories were recorded with ERG co-founders Richard Norgaard and John Harte, who recounted ERG’s formation and early years.

Since accepting its first graduate students in 1975, ERG has inspired generations of scholars to reframe ecological and resource issues by incorporating methods and approaches from numerous disciplines. As ERG celebrates its 50th year, the program looks back on its impact over the past half century and continues its interdisciplinary work to advance a sustainable environment and a just society.

Birsdall joined UC Berkeley in 1959 and was regarded as a pioneer in microwave devices and plasma physics. His textbook Plasma Physics via Computer Simulation is now considered a classic in the field, and he founded the Plasma Theory and Simulation Group on campus to highlight the importance of solving plasma problems and promoting its use. According to his obituary, Birdsall believed his research would help achieve a sustainable long-term energy future but was alarmed by the “more immediate problems concerned with energy supply and the impacts of energy use on the environment.”

The lunchtime meetings allowed Birdsall to gather colleagues from across the UC Berkeley campus who could offer new perspectives on the world’s mounting power problems. The group agreed that if the University wanted to take an active role in addressing these challenges, it would need to create a new form of teaching and instruction that merged technical, economic, and policy research. “We needed a program that was like our lunches, that had a conversation between the disciplines,” said Norgaard, an agricultural economist who began attending the weekly meetings in 1971, during his oral history interview. “We wanted to bring people from different perspectives together, to learn from each other.”

By 1972, Birdsall had successfully convinced Vice Chancellor Mark N. Christensen to establish the campus-wide Energy and Resources Committee, which fostered relevant instruction and energy research within existing academic programs and units. In its first year, the Committee developed five new integrated courses in energy; sponsored geologist M. King Hubbard, a leading expert on fossil fuel resources, as a visiting professor; and recruited Holdren, who was then a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, as the first assistant professor of energy and resources. 

“It was an amazingly audacious thing to do,” said Holdren, who was appointed to a campuswide teaching position in a program that didn’t yet exist. “[Christensen’s] idea was that once I came and started teaching courses, and attracted good students…[that] it would basically be a fait accompli—the Committee on Educational Policy wouldn't dare try to roll it back.”

For nearly two years, Holdren taught while working with the Committee on a proposal that would transform the budding Energy and Resources program into a graduate group authorized to admit students, offer courses, grant degrees, and host core faculty appointments. He quickly connected with Harte, a trained physicist turned ecologist who joined Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s nascent Energy and Environment division in 1973 “I didn't know about ERG or about [Holdren],” recalled Harte. “[But after] he told me what [ERG] was going to be all about, and I told him what this program at LBL was all about, we decided to join forces and [collaborate] as much as we could.”

Getting the approval to form a new graduate group was a “long and arduous” process, Holdren remembers, and required meetings with nine different groups at UC Berkeley, within the University of California system, and the California legislature. “In many cases, their first or second question was, ‘Who's going to hire your graduates?’,” he said. His answer came in the form of letters from “the heads of research labs, government organizations, and NGOs” asking where they could find people like him to hire. “That was very influential, because the fact was, the world was ready for more people who were willing and able to work at the intersection of multiple disciplines, on problems that require some of that if they are going to be understood and solved.”

California legislators ultimately signed off on the Committee’s proposal in early 1975, allowing the newly minted Energy and Resources Group to welcome its first master of science students that fall. 

According to Norgaard, ERG was initially envisioned as a professional degree program for people who wanted to work at the interface of science and policy. Courses were initially developed across three core pillars—environmental science, energy, and economics—to provide students with an overview of the technical and social problems related to the production and use of energy. Collaborative research projects, graduate seminars, and interdisciplinary courses from other departments rounded out ERG’s curriculum and ensured that graduates “would have enough science and enough social science to be effective and to ask the right questions of the experts,” said Norgaard.

As the program grew, ERG expanded its core teaching faculty beyond its early affiliates. Physicist turned political scientist Gene Rochlin joined as a lecturer in 1975; Christensen returned to ERG in 1976 after serving a short stint as the second chancellor of UC Santa Cruz; and economist Anthony Fisher, now a professor emerit in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, was hired in 1977. Harte, who had been an ERG affiliate since the program started, also joined the program that year as an adjunct faculty member. He split his time between his research group at Berkeley Lab and ERG, where he was the primary mentor for students who expressed an interest in environmental science and ecology and served on ERG committees that oversaw its preliminary exams, admissions process, and governance.

Though ERG is now famous for its PhD program, no doctoral candidates were admitted in its inaugural cohort. The first PhD in energy and resources was awarded in 1977 to Jane Hall, who was originally a graduate student studying with Norgaard. “She was officially getting a PhD in agricultural economics, except she kept wandering into questions that are much more like the Energy and Resources Group,” he remembered, noting that her doctoral research focused on the economics, technology, environmental impact, and policy of California’s sulfur standards. “She wound up taking oral exams in ERG as we were creating the rules.”

When the energy crisis that shaped ERG’s early years began to wane in the 1980s, students and faculty began to broaden their research to encompass fields like environmental justice and sustainability. “Many in ERG increasingly realized that there are no energy and resource problems, only people problems,” Norgaard wrote in a 2004 book chapter recounting ERG’s first three decades. Students with backgrounds in the natural sciences and engineering began enrolling in the program to transition to fields that drew more heavily on the social sciences. Faculty began leading projects that focused on the lifecycle of toxics, conducted some of the earliest research on issues relating to environmental justice and sustainability, and supported the development of global renewable energy policies. 

Harte, who knew the importance of bridging elements from multiple disciplines, published the first edition of his book, Consider a Spherical Cow, in 1985. The book—which draws its title from the spherical cow metaphor used in theoretical physics—describes how basic mathematical modeling skills, when used correctly and with awareness of their strengths and limitations, can be used to develop quantitative answers to complex environmental problems. Earlier in his career, Harte used a spherical cow model to show that building a supersonic jetport in the Florida Everglades would ruin the water supply for half a million people. “It convinced me that making models overly complex to try to capture all the detail, loses the whole point of the effort, which is to influence people that don't understand complex models,” he said. That approach served as the basis for his ERG course on back-of-the-envelope forecasting as applied to global environmental problems.

Rochlin—who taught physics at Berkeley for several years before re-training in political science as an advanced postdoctoral scholar at MIT and Harvard in the mid-1970s—was instrumental in the development of ERG’s fourth pillar, social sciences, which focuses on the study of the broader social, cultural and organizational implications of technology. His 1997 book, Trapped in the Net: The Unanticipated Consequences of Computerization, highlighted the vulnerability of people and organizations in the face of increasing computerization, which he argued alienated workers from their jobs, soldiers from the battlefield, and the stock market from reality. The text is still relevant today. 

As the scope of ERG’s research grew, so did its core faculty. Jack Hollander, a nuclear physicist and co-founder of Berkeley Lab’s environmental research program, was appointed ERG’s fourth full-time faculty member in 1980. Harte was “de-adjuncted” shortly after when he was offered a dual-appointment professorship split within the division of Plant and Soil Biology in the College of Natural Resources. Norgaard joined in 1987 after the University agreed to a faculty transfer that brought Fisher into Agricultural and Resource Economics. Rochlin was made a professor in 1990 after serving as a lecturer and adjunct faculty member for more than a decade. And in 1994, former Ciriacy-Wantrup fellow Rachel Schurman became the first woman to serve on ERG’s core faculty after accepting a dual-appointment assistant professorship with the Department of Sociology. 

Many of ERG’s early faculty and affiliates were concerned that the program’s interdisciplinary emphasis would draw criticism from skeptics who argued the program had breadth, but not much depth. According to Holdren, ERG’s status as the only interdisciplinary graduate program in energy and resources at the time made it attractive to “cream of the crop” students who understood that solving the big problems of the future required strategies from multiple disciplines. “These students came [and] burned up the track in whatever they did. They wrote brilliant dissertations and, starting with our very first graduating class, got great jobs,” he said

Among those early standouts were students like Hall, who is now a nationally recognized expert on environmental economics. She was hired by the California Air Resources Board after leaving ERG and contributed to writing the state’s first standards for emissions of sulfur dioxide. Peter Gleick, MS ’80 PhD ’86, conducted some of the earliest research on the interaction of global climate change and regional water availability. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003 and is now a leading researcher on water challenges in the world. Deborah Jensen (BA ’79 Botany; MS ’87, PhD ’93 ERG) became vice president of the Nature Conservancy after completing her PhD, and continues to lead conservation groups in the Pacific Northwest. Patrick Gonzalez, PhD ’97, has helped advance science-based action to protect nature and people as an advisor to the Biden White House and National Park Service. He also served as a lead author on four reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), including the report that earned the IPCC part of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

These and the program’s other students were supported by ERG faculty and affiliates, who are considered to be at the forefront of their field. Holdren’s research earned him not only one of the first MacArthur Fellowships but also led to his involvement with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. When the Pugwash Conferences were named co-recipient of the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize, Holdren, who was chair of Pugwash’s executive committee and “chief architect” of their public statements, accepted the award on its behalf. Norgaard’s long-term studies of development in the Brazilian Amazon helped lay the groundwork for the field of ecological economics, which explores development as a process of coevolution between social and environmental systems. Harte led the longest-running warming experiment in the world, simulating the effects of climate change on a subalpine meadow for nearly 30 years. Harte’s research and Congressional testimony on acid precipitation in the Western US during the 1980’s influenced the passage and content of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. 

Many ERG faculty have been sought-after advisors to lawmakers and government agencies in Sacramento and Washington, DC. From 2009 to 2017, Holdren was President Obama’s Science Advisor and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, becoming the longest-serving Science Advisor to the President in the history of the position. Professor Daniel Kammen served as science envoy to the US Department of State during the Obama administration, and was the Biden administration’s senior advisor for energy, climate, and innovation for the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

“When I came here in 1984, one of the things that absolutely struck me was… the ability of faculty and students to move across the campus to teach and do research,” Catherine Koshland—now a professor emerit in ERG, the College of Engineering, and the School of Public Health—said during ERG’s 29th Annual Lecture on Energy and the Environment. “There were so many things that I could do [at Berkeley] that I never felt I could do [elsewhere].”

Koshland, who held various high-level roles in campus administration, said ERG’s track record of accomplishment helped strengthen the viability of interdisciplinary research and instruction at UC Berkeley. Professor Isha Ray, who joined ERG in 2002, leveraged the program’s model to build a research network focused on the social equity dynamics of water and development. Other researchers across UC Berkeley are now linked by graduate groups in areas like microbiology or computational biology, and areas of designated emphasis are offered to graduate students as new avenues to expand their expertise. Dozens of institutes and centers have flourished since ERG was founded and serve as intellectual hubs for students and faculty to advance multidisciplinary research. And since 2020, faculty cluster hires—which have resulted in the appointment of multiple new faculty—have helped strengthen interdisciplinary research across departments.

Current and former faculty and students say the ERG’s reputation as a research powerhouse stems from its innovative model of instruction. Since its foundation, ERG has offered students the opportunity to work alongside its faculty and affiliates as activist-scholars addressing questions at the forefront of climate change, social equity, and environmental justice. “Coming to ERG was the first time that I felt like professors and other researchers treated you not like a student, but like a colleague,” said Kripa Jagannathan, MS ’15 PhD ’19. 

Jagannathan found strong mentors in Harte, adjunct professor Margaret Torn (PhD ’94), and Ray as she worked on her PhD, which focused on improving the “usability” of climate science for water resources managers and agricultural planners. She is now a social scientist in the Earth & Environmental Sciences Area at Berkeley Lab, where her work connects researchers and community members to make climate change adaptation and climate-resilient planning more relevant and actionable. 

“A lot of our environmental and public health problems needed solutions a decade ago,” said Laura Moreno, BS ’08 Conservation and Resource Studies; MA ’15 PhD ’18 ERG. “A big part of what ERG does is bring different disciplines together in different contexts and affect policy change, as well as train others to do the same.” 

While at ERG, Moreno—who began her career in sustainability at the US EPA—collaborated with the Natural Resources Defense Council to lead the first citywide household food waste measurement studies in the United States. Her findings offered decision makers in Nashville, Denver, and New York City insight into household behavior and policy alternatives to prevent waste through recycling and food rescue. Other alums remain highly active in shaping policy across the US and abroad through advocacy and service to society. “I feel so honored to be part of the ERG community, a group of people who have accomplished so many amazing things,” said Andrea Vas, MS ’15.

“Going out into the world, it's always impressive to see what other ERGies are doing,” added Chris Hyun, PhD ’20, a leader of the ERG Alumni Network. “They are compassionate for other people and what’s happening in the world, and they are looking at the big picture to assess global problems and then move the needle for solutions.”

Many alums also speak fondly of ERG’s unique culture, which helped build a sense of camaraderie and familiarity throughout the community. Staff members like Kay Burns, ERG’s longtime graduate student advisor, championed the program’s mission and helped hundreds of students navigate issues like class registration, financial aid, and job hunting. Graduates are honored at an ERG-only commencement ceremony, and every master’s cohort selects a recipient for the Spherical Cow Award—a nod to Harte’s textbook. And even after graduating, the tight-knit alumni community remains engaged and helps organize networking events and mentorship opportunities for current students.

As the University’s structure changed over the years, various calls to dissolve ERG or merge it into other units on campus were made. The first of those, Holdren says, happened in 1975 right as ERG was founded. “Initially, the dean of Engineering had tried to persuade me … [to] bring ERG under its umbrella. I [was] not willing to do it because … moving under a single school's umbrella would violate the fundamental proposition under which [ERG] was established.”

For most of its history, ERG’s chairperson was selected from its affiliate faculty—a decision Holdren said demonstrated the group’s intent to draw on the assets of the university rather than remake them. Oversight was provided by campus-level administrators, which insulated ERG from departmental influence but resulted in occasional hiccups. When old administrators retired, new leaders called for review. Core and affiliated faculty and graduates often wrote letters and sent reports stressing the importance of keeping ERG independent. 

After Holdren accepted a position at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government in 1996, Norgaard and Harte worried his departure would renew scrutiny of the program’s independence. Harte, who served as ERG’s chair between 1996 and 1998, led a comprehensive review process to present the Vice Chancellor and Provost (EVCP) with options for ERG’s future. “We see our future not in independence nor isolation, but in enlarging our special contributions to undergraduate and graduate education at Berkeley by offering teaching and research that complements that offered elsewhere,” wrote members of ERG’s executive committee.

ERG remained independent until 2011, when campus administrators expressed a strong desire for it to report to a dean within a College rather than to the EVCP. Several meetings were organized with campus administrators, ERG faculty, affiliates, staff, and students to solicit input. ERG leaders ultimately decided to affiliate with the College of Natural Resources, finding a supportive partner in then-Dean J. Keith Gilless. Many faculty from the College of Natural Resources had been affiliated with ERG since its inception, and joining offered ERG a central administrative home. 

Law professor Daniel Farber, who was chair of ERG at the time, told Breakthroughs in 2011 that the change would offer the program the resources needed to address growing issues like global food security, managing energy demand, sustainable consumption, and global environmental governance. “We think this partnership will strengthen ERG, providing a foundation for our growth and the valuable perspectives of colleagues with related interests,” he said.

Professor and chair Duncan Callaway said ERG’s partnership with the College is very valuable and has helped strengthen the program. “College leaders have been strong advocates for ERG's interdisciplinary approach and have supported us through faculty hiring and promotions,” he said. “We’ve built deep relationships with students, faculty, and staff from across the College in ways that amplify our strengths, and help us both spread the word about our work in the media and with donors who support our mission.”

Half a century since ERG’s founding, students and faculty in the group continue to produce research that is relevant and impactful to society. “We’re still very proactive in figuring out what the most pressing problems are today, and then assembling the team and the tools needed to create a more sustainable environment and just society,” said Callaway.

Research by Kammen and Callaway is helping transform and decarbonize power systems at the local, regional, and global levels. Ray frequently serves as an expert group adviser to UN Women and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization on projects relating to international development and access to water and sanitation for poor and rural communities. Torn and ERG faculty members Andrew Jones, MS ’07 PhD ’11, and Lara Kueppers are developing computer models that project how humans impact the climate and biogeochemical cycles. Professor David Anthoff’s research into the economic harm caused by carbon emissions supported the development of an integrated assessment model now used by the Environmental Protection Agency to calculate the social cost of carbon.

Updated versions of the original courses developed by Harte, Holdren, Norgaard, and other ERG founders are still taught today, and the number of ERG-affiliated faculty at UC Berkeley and beyond now exceeds 150. “I feel really optimistic about ERG maintaining its preeminence, which comes back to the fact that we’ve set up such a strong structure,” Callaway said. “But we’re also building on that by strengthening our emphasis on scholarship relating to justice and equity.” 

As climate change continues to transform our natural world and society, policy makers have grown increasingly cognizant that the burden of the problem—and its proposed solutions—does not always protect the most vulnerable populations. ERG’s newest core faculty—professors Meg Mills Novoa, Youjin Chung, and Paige Weber—bring fresh perspectives from the social sciences and strengthen the group’s ability to address evolving challenges relating to energy and sustainability. As a trained economist, Weber uses quantitative methods to analyze the equity impact of green policies. Her research helps policymakers understand the costs and benefits of environmental policies, and mitigate any unintended consequences. Chung’s research on the relationship between gender and inequality, rural development, and socio-environmental change in East Africa highlights how the green transition can harm communities and ecosystems around the world. Mills Novoa works to improve climate equity in communities by advancing research on the design, implementation, and outcomes of adaptation projects.

These new faculty work alongside Kammen (who chaired ERG from 2017 to 2022), Ray (who served as Rausser College’s first Associate Dean for Equity and Inclusion), Anthoff, Jones, and Callaway in the recently formed Climate Equity and Environmental Justice Roundtable on campus. “It is clear that we cannot solve the climate crisis without social justice, and we cannot address social injustices without recognizing the role of climate,” said Kammen, who co-chairs the roundtable.

Just as in 1975, ERG is still training flexible and creative thinkers who are contributing to a sustainable environment and a just society. “I’m grateful that 50 years ago, a group of people on campus recognized the importance of creating a structure like ERG,” said Callaway. “That idea has been more successful than people might have possibly imagined.”