Professor’s book takes aim at ecological ‘givens’

The thing about environmental sustainability is, it may not ever be feasible to make a wholesale transformation.

For example, the output necessary to substitute a renewable resource — sun, wind or waves — for fossil fuel is absolutely daunting, according to Tim F. Allen, professor of botany.

“Developing any of these alternatives will cost us dearly in terms of the amount of land and concrete required to make the system work,” he says. “At the very least, it will take political will that will be very difficult to achieve.”

Whatever sort of transition we adopt will involve new ways of using fossil fuel as a stopgap, he says.

“The problem is, we don’t have enough information to make fully informed decisions on how to make the transition, but decisions must be made,” he says, adding that post-normal science deals with making those decisions, insufficient information notwithstanding.

Allen submits these and other unorthodox scenarios for consideration in his new book, “Supply-Side Sustainability: Complexity in Ecological Systems” (Columbia University Press, 2003). He will discuss the book on Tuesday, Nov. 11, at 7 p.m. at Borders Books, 3750 University Ave.

Looking at situations through unorthodox intellectual prisms is Allen’s stock in trade. As a theorist specializing in hierarchy and complexity within biological systems, he is the first to admit that, although he may not always ask the right question, at least he will approach a problem by asking a different one.

Allen has spent a good deal of his 30-plus years at UW–Madison reducing and redefining systems thinking. He calls it “the science of the messy situation.” His book, for example, upends traditionally held tenets of conventional ecological management.

Indeed, if the fictional Scottish teacher Jean Brodie had had a son, he could well have been Allen. Like Brodie, he applies his iconoclastic approach to his classroom as well as to his discipline. Currently on sabbatical, he will be back next year to conduct his now-legendary undergraduate course Plants and Man, which debuted in 1971.

The several hundred students who enroll in it every fall can choose from a project menu of paper-writing, beer-brewing or dinner-making to absorb and savor the ways that plants and humans have affected each other’s development throughout the ages.

The Tuesday lunchtime potluck of ideas and food, open to all comers, is a longstanding tradition. An ardent supporter of mixed media lectures, Allen has brought his dogs, father and son, to class to illustrate comparative fang size and social order.

“The father was smaller, but still very much the boss,” he says.

“Lecturing should be theater,” Allen often says, perhaps recalling his appearance as a young teen in an Edinburgh Festival production of “Hamlet” during the 1950s. The dark and brooding prince in that presentation was then-neophyte actor, now Sir Derek Jacobi.

Allen played Ophelia. “I had a long blond wig,” he says. “I have to say, I was gorgeous.”

Nevertheless, Allen forsook the stage for the lab, and what followed Ophelia for this native Londoner were B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Wales, where he studied algae. Afterward, he left to lecture in Ife, Nigeria.

Over the years, he has broadened his approach to embrace just about everything.

“My focus is on complexity per se, and so the particular things my students and I study are eclectic,” he says. In addition to sustainability, some of the systems to which Allen has turned his attention include forest fire; ants, beavers and the thermodynamics of biological work; complexity in Wisconsin dairy farming; origins of the genetic code; and more.

He has concluded from these and other topics that outside-of-box thinking should be standard procedure in science.

“The technology that science uses to tell the story may tyrannize us by explaining how things work, blunting our curiosity about how things might otherwise work,” he says. “We should continue to find out how things work, but we also need to put more effort into expansive theory.”