USC Dornsife Magazine Spring-Summer 2019

F O R A L U M N I A N D F R I E N D S O F U S C D A N A A N D D AV I D D O R N S I F E C O L L E G E O F L E T T E R S , A R T S A N D S C I E N C E S

MAGAZINE

SPRING / SUMMER 2019

The Climate Issue

A BRIGHTER FORECAST

As our familiar world starts behaving in new and unexpected ways, our scholars find opportunities and hope where many see only obstacles.

Climate of Hope

Faculty find optimism in our changing climate.

“We all have hopes for our future, and for our childrens’ future. Take a moment to consider: What are your hopes, priorities and values? All of us here at USC are looking forward, striving for new knowledge — pursuing higher education is the ultimate expression of hope for the future and dedication to evolve our thinking. Knowing that we collectively prioritize personal growth and learning gives me hope. The science is clear, and our students know it: Our actions (e.g., driving, flying and consuming relentlessly) are damaging our environment. We owe it to ourselves, our students and our children to adopt better ways of being in the world right now, while our students, faculty and alumni work on understanding problems and pursuing solutions for a better future. Our climate depends upon it.”

SARAH FEAKINS, associate professor of Earth sciences

“I have to admit it’s hard to find hope amidst the many changing climates we face daily, be it climate change itself, or the shifting tenor of political and public discourse, especially around race and gender politics.

A sense of equilibrium, let alone futurity is difficult to see on the horizon. But every time I fear things may be irreparable, I find hope in the optimism, tenacity and commitment of my students. Their sheer force of effort, the power of their desires and their capacities to transform the world, punctures my own cynicism. They are ready to do the difficult work — and to fight, if necessary, for restorative justice. In turn, we have to remember that our role is to give them the tools to perform this transformative work, both intellectually and spiritually.”

KAREN TONGSON, associate professor of English, gender studies and American studies and ethnicity

“What brings me hope is that Americans overwhelmingly believe that climate change is a threat, and that we have to deal with it. That’s true especially for Democrats, but independents largely share that view, and so do a plurality of Republicans. The support for a rational climate policy grows steadily, and that gives me hope.

Two other things also give me hope. First, we’re seeing states and cities act on their own even as the federal government rolls back some of the policies designed to deal with the climate crisis. Many of them have independently signed up to do their part to observe and fulfill the Paris Agreement. Second, the private sector now perceives real economic opportunity in coming up with solutions on climate. Today there are far more people employed in the solar energy industry than there are in coal mining.”

ROBERT SHRUM, Carmen H. and Louis Warschaw Chair in Practical Politics and professor of the practice of political science, director of the Center for the Political Future

“I am not sure ‘hope’ is the word I would use. I would say I derive strength from the places where climates of resistance exist: In the region I study, Palestinians continue to struggle against a brutal Israeli military occupation; Algerians and Sudanese in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, have protested peacefully over months to bring down corrupt systems; Egyptian defenders of human rights continue to resist the repressive Sisi regime.

Closer to home, many of the 2018 class of U.S. congressional representatives have set a new standard of tenacity and fearlessness in confronting structures of oppression and injustice.

These examples, both at home and abroad, demand of us all not to hope, but, each in her/his own way, to accept the responsibility, as part of a common humanity, to act — to engage in the struggle for social, economic and political justice.”

LAURIE BRAND, Robert Grandford Wright Professor and

professor of international relations and Middle East studies

“Fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) on Earth are based on stored carbon derived from the sun’s energy and synthesized over eons and can be broadly characterized as ‘fossilized sunshine.’ The sun is going to be around for the next 4.5 billion years. Therefore, Earth, per se, does not have an energy problem (plenty of solar and wind energy is available to produce electricity), but rather energy storage and energy carrier problems.

All living things on planet Earth are invariably tied to carbon.

Renewable methanol made through carbon dioxide capture and conversion using water and renewable energies is a simple solution to a very complex climate change conundrum. Liquid methanol is a versatile fuel to replace gasoline and diesel and is a chemical feedstock to make petroleum products.

Therefore, if carbon is considered the problem (excessive atmospheric CO2 concentrations causing climate change), carbon has to be the solution.”

G.K. SURYA PRAKASH, George A. and Judith A. Olah Nobel Laureate Chair in Hydrocarbon Chemistry and professor of chemistry

“It makes me hopeful when I see military veterans organizing for peace, especially when their actions against militarism forge connections with efforts to end Islamophobia, violence against women, racial injustice and destruction of the natural environment.

When groups and coalitions connect the dots between what might seem on the surface to be separate issues, they shift the political climate in ways that point to a more peaceful and just future.”

MICHAEL MESSNER, professor of sociology and gender studies

“I believe we are living in an era of rapidly changing climates that are competing for political space and for our attention. One is a climate of fear. This is a pessimistic view of humanity that invites hatred and violence. It promotes authoritarianism and the interests of a few at the expense of freedom, liberty and human rights for all. This rather Machiavellian climate seems to be dominant at this time.

The good news is that the climate may be changing. The successor generation is promoting a climate of change that encourages open societies, innovation, creativity, social justice and respect for all humankind. They say the world is not a dangerous place. It is a place to encourage cooperation and problem solving.

This climate promotes courage and hope not fear and despair.

The words of St. Augustine capture this climate of change: Hope has two beautiful daughters. … anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.

A climate change cannot come soon enough.”

STEVEN LAMY, professor of international relations and spatial sciences

“What gives me hope is that our talented students are taking much more interest in political participation.

They are increasingly speaking out about the injustices they observe on campus, in the United States and across the globe. Our students are principled and they truly have the courage of their convictions. Our brilliant Trojans will help effect the changes that are so urgently needed.

Their commitment to human rights and global justice is inspiring.”

ALISON DUNDES RENTELN, professor of political science, anthropology, public policy and law

SENIOR ASSOCIATE DEAN FOR STRATEGIC INITIATIVES AND COMMUNICATION

Lance Ignon

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Darrin S. Joy

MANAGING EDITOR

Susan Bell

ART DIRECTOR / PRODUCTION MANAGER

Letty Avila

WRITERS AND EDITORS

Michelle Boston Margaret Crable Emily Gersema Jim Key Stephen Koenig DESIGNER

Dennis Lan VIDEOGRAPHER AND PHOTOGRAPHER

Mike Glier

COMMUNICATIONS ASSISTANT

Deann Webb

CONTRIBUTORS Joanna Clay, Lilly Kate Diaz, Eric Lindberg, Laura Russell, Annamaria Sauer USC DORNSIFE ADMINISTRATION Amber D. Miller, Dean • Stephen Bradforth, Divisional Dean for Natural Sciences and Mathematics • Steven Finkel, College Dean of Graduate and Professional Education • Lance Ignon, Senior Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives and Communication • Andrew Lakoff, Divisional Dean for Social Sciences • Peter Mancall, Divisional Dean for the Humanities • Renee Perez, Senior Associate Dean and Chief Operating Officer • Eddie Sartin, Senior Associate Dean for Advancement • Andrew Stott, College Dean of Undergraduate Education USC DORNSIFE BOARD OF COUNCILORS Robert D. Beyer, Chair • Wendy Abrams • Robert Alvarado • Richard S. Flores • Shane Foley • Lisa Goldman • Jana Waring Greer • Pierre Habis • Yossie Hollander • Janice Bryant Howroyd • Martin Irani • Dan James • Stephen G. Johnson • Suzanne Nora Johnson • Bettina Kallins • Yoon Kim • Samuel King • Jaime Lee • Arthur Lev • Kathy Leventhal • Rodger Lynch • Robert Osher • Gerald Papazian • Andrew Perlman • Lawrence Piro • Edoardo Ponti • Kelly Porter • Michael Reilly • Harry Robinson • Carole Shammas • Kumarakulasingam “Suri” Suriyakumar • Rajeev Tandon

PHOTO BY THOMAS ECKHARDT

USC DORNSIFE MAGAZINE Published twice a year by the USC Dornsife Office of Communication at the University of Southern California. © 2019 USC Dornsife College.

The diverse opinions expressed in USC Dornsife Magazine do not necessarily represent the views of the editors, USC Dornsife administration or USC. USC Dornsife Magazine welcomes comments from its readers to magazine@dornsife.usc.edu or USC Dornsife Magazine, SCT-2400, Los Angeles, CA 90089.

Contents

SPRING / SUMMER 2019 1 CLIMATE OF HOPE Faculty find optimism in our changing climate.

4 FROM THE HEART OF USC Mother follows kids to school; Yoga helps young’uns; Poet laureate completes state tour; Cancer’s clock may be unwound.

5

Curriculum

6 Profile 10 In

The Field

12 Our

World

40 SMOKE SIGNALS

Earth scientist Julien Emile-Geay links wildfires to inequity.

THE CLIMATE ISSUE

14

Matters of Degrees

Apocalypse fatigue got you down? The remedy may be found in a different climate change narrative emphasizing the vast potential for a thriving planet. By Stephen Koenig

20

Gut Reaction

The science is clear: Microbes living within us hold great sway over our well-being. But how much do they control our internal climate, and can we manipulate the microbiome to adjust the thermostat? By Darrin S. Joy

24

Baby, Can I Change My Mind?

It’s our beliefs, even those that are unmoored from objective reality, that determine what to us is true and false.

And that’s why it’s so difficult to change your mind, much less someone else’s. By Lance Ignon

28

Making Politics Civil Again

Scholarly leaders from USC Dornsife’s Center for the Political Future discuss the forces driving Americans apart and explore how those same forces could bring them together. By Emily Gersema

32

The Mustard Seed Man

PHOTO BY PHILLIP COLLA

Steve Fabijanski’s holistic approach to climate change tackles two major contributors to greenhouse gases: airline travel and meat production. His solution? A mustard-like oilseed called carinata. By Susan Bell

36

Environmental Ingenuity

Cars that run on kelp. Cosmetics from waste products. Energy fueled by clean chemicals. USC Dornsife scholars are creating new products and businesses to mend the planet and create a strong economy. By Michelle Boston

42 Legacy

43 Faculty

43 Alumni

News

News

44 DORNSIFE FAMILY Top science academy elects two more members; Technology alters the search for love; Young rancher becomes genomics pioneer.

44 Faculty

46 Alumni

Canon

Canon

47 Remembering 48 IN MY OPINION

Geology alumnus S. Julio Friedmann gives the recipe for energy and climate success.

ON THE COVER

Much more than the weather is changing.

Cover illustration by Dan Stiles for USC Dornsife magazine.

CONNECT WITH USC DORNSIFE dornsife.usc.edu/facebook dornsife.usc.edu/twitter dornsife.usc.edu/youtube dornsife.usc.edu/instagram

dornsife.usc.edu/magazine

FROM THE HE ART OF USC Viewpoint EXPERT OPINIONS

“Cultural representation is about something deeper than parity for the sake of parity – that everyone needs to be mirrored in the public sphere in order to exist and to count as a fully dimensional human being.”

DORINNE KONDO, professor of American studies and ethnicity and anthropology, in a Feb. 21 op-ed in The Conversation on her research that shows the importance of people seeing their own experiences and lives mirrored in popular culture.

“The huge widespread success of the Black Panther movie, showcasing T’Challa, Shuri and other Wakandans as highly accomplished scientists, remains one of the most significant boosts for science engagement in recent times.”

CLIFFORD JOHNSON, professor of physics and astronomy, in a Feb. 21 op-ed in The Conversation about the movie’s ability to inspire future generations of scientists.

DAVID TREUER, professor of English, in a Jan. 22 Los Angeles Times Q&A about his new book, Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, which he says offers a counternarrative to Native American history, which often focuses on tragedy and is told from nonnative perspectives.

4

After home-schooling eight children, Margarita Lopez set her sights on a psychology degree. By Joanna Clay Margarita Lopez is getting her son ready for the day.

Emilio, 22, has cerebral palsy.

She turns on the Channel 5 news, his favorite, and gets him dressed before using a lift to hoist him from the bed into his wheelchair. She buckles him in before wheeling him into the kitchen for breakfast.

“It’s like one of those pit stops at a race,” she said. “You just do it fast.”

Lopez, 58, has to leave for school soon. It’s her first semester studying psychology at USC Dornsife. Lopez transferred from Santa Monica College and is now a junior. If it weren’t for her kids, she’d be the first in her family to go to college.

“I can’t believe I’ve done what I’ve done,” said Lopez.

“It’s surreal.”

Education was always a priority in the Lopez household.

Even though she only completed eighth grade, Lopez homeschooled her eight children for the bulk of their childhoods, then did whatever she could to get them into elite private and public high schools. In between jobs cleaning homes and working at the craft store Michaels, Lopez volunteered at her children’s schools. Many went on to four-year universities, including the University of California, San Diego and the University of California, Berkeley.

Now, for probably the first time in Lopez’s life, she’s doing something just for herself.

It started five years ago, when her daughter, Emma, told Lopez she was enrolling at a community college.

At the time, Lopez was reeling from the death of her daughter Milanca, a high school valedictorian who had a child at 16 and went on to graduate from UC Berkeley. Milanca was about to start graduate school at UCLA when she and her 6-year-old son were killed in a car accident.

Milanca had encouraged her mother to chase her dream of higher education.

“I found a message on Facebook. She said, ‘It’s your turn,’ ” Lopez said.

“I never responded to her.

It made me so sad. Here she was, encouraging me.”

That day, when Emma was pushing her to pursue her dream, Lopez felt like it was time to see it through.

“I felt it was my daughter [Milanca] urging me on,” she said. “That it was my turn. That I could do this.”

Lopez not only got into USC, which gave her a partial scholarship, but also Columbia University, UCLA and UC Berkeley. She wants to be a counselor for young people from marginalized communities and is considering a master’s degree.

“This is a dream,” she said of going to USC. For her kids’ college graduations, Lopez made T-shirts and themed leis. She remembers her own from Santa Monica College.

“Everyone showed up at my graduation and they had T-shirts,” she said. “I see ‘Margarita’ [on the front] and they turn around and it said ‘badass’ on the back. I was laughing so hard.”

Her family stacked her neck with leis — made from candy, money and flowers — so high she could barely see.

Next year, she knows her family will be there to root for her again.

It’s her turn.

IL L U S T R AT I O N BY D E N N I S L A N

“I don’t know any other way to tell Indian history than through Indian voices.”

Back to School

Curriculum

PHOTO BY DOROTHE A L ANGE, NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINIS TR ATION; PERL-ROSENTHAL PHOTO BY PE TER ZHAOYU ZHOU

HOW TO BE AN AMERICAN: GLOBAL HISTORIES OF U.S. CITIZENSHIP Instructor: Nathan PerlRosenthal, associate professor of history

Perl-Rosenthal challenges students to examine the history

of immigration and citizenship policies in the United States by exploring their own family history, enabling them to understand the hurdles that their own ancestors faced to become American citizens.

“I wanted to give students a civics lesson — to get them thinking about how the community of Americans came to be,” Perl-Rosenthal said.

As students interviewed relatives and friends they discovered painful experiences.

The stories of citizenship

granted or denied, compiled and retold by students for their final essays, demonstrate not only the evolution of U.S. citizenship and immigration policies, but the enduring trauma caused when citizenship rights are stripped away or held out of reach, and for some, the joy of citizenship when it’s finally granted.

Psychology major Nathalie Yee traced the citizenship struggles of her great-grandmother, Chiyo Machikawa, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1918, married a

HIST-210gw

Japanese American and became a jewelry store owner in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo.

She was forced into an internment camp during World War II, only gaining citizenship in 1952.

“My great-grandmother faced many barriers obtaining citizenship,” said Yee. In some ways, she argues, immigration policy isn’t very different today. Certain groups of immigrants continue to face discrimination, their fate determined in large part by

laws and policies that result in inequitable access to citizenship. —E.G.

Children recite the Pledge of Allegiance at San Francisco’s Raphael Weill Public School in the early 1940s. Those of Japanese ancestry and their parents, along with thousands more throughout the country, were sent to War Relocation Authority centers — internment camps — where they remained until the end of World War II. Spring / Summer 2019 | 5

Profile

6

O

ne of USC’s most beloved professors, Steven Lamy holds the distinction of being the only member of its faculty to have been portrayed by Robert Redford on the silver screen.

Redford played the inspirational Professor Stephen

Malley (the name is a twist on Lamy’s) in the 2007 playturned-movie Lions for Lambs, written by Lamy’s former student, Matthew Carnahan, and directed by Redford.

In a letter to Lamy explaining he was the basis for Redford’s

character, Carnahan wrote, “Frankly, at the end of the day, Redford didn’t really come close to his character’s inspiration.”

Carnahan is not alone in feeling this: Alumni and students frequently cite Lamy as their

most inspirational professor.

He’s also (in)famous across campus for knowing everybody’s name and whether they attended class the previous week. No mean feat when his international relations classes are often packed with upwards

PHOTO BY LE T T Y AVIL A

Mug Shot Steven Lamy looks back over Polaroids he took of former students when they first enrolled in his classes — a trick he developed long before student head shots were common practice and one that underpins his legendary ability to remember names and faces.

S T E V E N L A M Y , P R O F E S S O R O F I N T E R N AT I O N A L R E L AT I O N S A N D S PAT I A L S C I E N C E S

FROM THE HE ART OF USC

of 250 students. So, what’s his secret?

“Getting people to sit in the same place,” Lamy says, eyes twinkling. “And I make them wear name tags.”

But that’s not all. When Lamy joined USC Dornsife in 1982, he invested in a Polaroid camera. He takes mugshots of each student on the first day of class and keeps them pinned to his office wall. He grades all papers himself.

(His teaching assistants use pencil; he uses pen.)

“While I’m grading, I’ll keep the pictures next to me. It’s a big time commitment, but it’s worth it,” says Lamy, former director of the USC Center for Excellence in Teaching.

“These kids matter. They’re not numbers.”

On the morning of this interview, Lamy had received an email from a former student he taught in 2011 requesting a letter of recommendation for law school. “I’m the kid who went to Tokyo for a marathon and burned his hand trying to climb right before graduation.

Remember?” writes Marcus Knoll.

Lamy does remember — he still has Knoll’s photograph in his files.

“I keep them all,” Lamy says, “because you never know when somebody’s going to need a letter of recommendation.”

GROWING UP Born in Goffstown, in rural New Hampshire, one of five children of a French-Canadian regional sales manager for Miller Brewing Company and a homemaker who later became a bank manager, Lamy spent his childhood outdoors, fishing, hiking and riding his bike. He grew up hearing and speaking French at home and was an avid reader who showed an early predilection for world affairs.

Returning home from his first day of elementary school, Lamy tried to read the local newspaper, then burst into tears. “I started crying because my mother had told me as soon as I went to school, I’d learn to read,” Lamy said.

By his senior year of high school, he was a foreign exchange student with the American Field Service, spending 16 months in Flemish-speaking Belgium where he learned to speak Dutch, perfected his French and taught himself to read German. Later, he would add Afrikaans.

Lamy’s Belgian classmates were supportive, but critical of America’s role in Vietnam.

“I found myself in a situation of trying to defend America, but not defend the war,” Lamy said. “I learned a lot about the importance of different narratives and belief systems.”

The death of his father shortly after Lamy’s return narrowed his college choices.

“I had to be closer to home.

Often in life you have dreams to do one thing, and something else intervenes,” he says, adding philosophically, “but it’s all been to the good.”

Lamy earned his bachelor’s degree in political science from Siena College near Albany, New York. Despite his love for the great outdoors, and the fact that all his college career aptitude tests said he should become a forest ranger, Lamy’s passion for world affairs won out. He earned his master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies, where he was taught by Korbel, father of former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

PASSION FOR PEDAGOGY Lamy joined USC Dornsife’s

School of International Relations (SIR) in 1982, promptly taking on the challenge of revitalizing its undergraduate curriculum.

A firm believer in case-based learning, Lamy says, “We don’t learn by PowerPoint, we learn by decision-making stories. It’s not stepping on the student’s toe, the top of their head opening up, and pouring in knowledge. It’s wrestling with that knowledge.”

Explain, Predict, Prescribe and Participate — that allow them to go beyond ideological labels.

“The whole concept of PWP was to get kids involved in thinking about global challenges and problems and finding ways to resolve them,” he said.

He’s led undergraduates on four PWP trips to the Arctic, visiting Finland, Norway and Iceland and looking at the impact of climate change on culture, economics and politics.

In addition to creating PWP and the USC Dornsife Washington, D.C. Program, and serving for five years as director of SIR and for 10 years as vice dean for academic programs, he set up SOAR (Student Opportunities for Academic Research) and SURF (Summer Undergraduate Research Fund) — two programs that award funds to students for doing research with professors.

“We don’t learn by PowerPoint, we learn by decision-making stories. It’s not stepping on the student’s toe, the top of their head opening up, and pouring in knowledge.

It’s wrestling with that knowledge.”

His case-based class remains among the most popular he’s created at SIR. One of the first case studies he teaches is titled “Keeping the Cold War Cold: Dick Cheney and the Department of Defense.”

“It looks inside Cheney’s head, examining theoretical and analytical concepts like the importance of belief systems,” Lamy says. “I’ve got lots of emails from kids who saw Vice (the 2018 biographical film about Cheney), saying, ‘It’s just like the case study.’ ” Lamy also fosters problembased learning through USC Dornsife’s Problems Without Passports (PWP) program, which he created.

One of his particular gifts is to break down complex world problems into relatable, human concepts. He encourages students to analyze global affairs from multiple perspectives using what he calls DEPPP skills — Describe,

Lamy tells his students that “what happens in the Arctic never stays in the Arctic” because the region is considered a canary in the coal mine for climate change.

JUST DO IT Lamy was a serious runner for many years, participating in the Los Angeles, Skylon (renamed in 2007 the Niagara Falls International Marathon) and Boston marathons. He still runs or cycles for 45 minutes a day. Two years ago, he was knocked off his bicycle by a hitand-run driver who ran a red light. Lamy’s watch was ripped off by the impact as he went face first into the asphalt.

Two black eyes and a couple of bruised ribs later, Lamy’s motto remains, “just keep going.” He cites an old Nike commercial showing a man rising at 4:30 a.m. to run in the dark and rain.

“It’s that ‘Just Do It’ kind of thing. I love that,” Lamy says.

Lamy certainly got it done.

He also established the Fisher Fellowship for first-generation students and founded TIRP (Teaching International Relations Program), which gives high school students a basic grounding in the key principles of foreign relations.

Now he wants to concentrate on a new master’s program he’s developing and the Global Policy Institute he recently created.

“I’m very proud of the classes I teach and the work I’ve done intellectually,” he says. “There are some regrets in terms of not spending enough time writing the best book or the best article in the world. I still have time to do that.”

But when asked what he considers his greatest achievement, Lamy talks about how good he always feels when he sees students graduating.

“I don’t have children, so they’re like my kids, and to see them go on, it’s kind of neat.”

—S.B. Spring / Summer 2019 | 7

FROM THE HE ART OF USC Numbers HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE COLLECTION USC boasts one of the largest standalone collections on the Holocaust and genocide of any university in the United States, largely due to the efforts of Wolf Gruner. The founding director of the Center for Advanced Genocide Research at USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education, Gruner began to build a Holocaust library when he arrived at USC Dornsife via Berlin to take his post as professor of history and the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish studies.

1

Decade since the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Collection was launched.

18K+ Books in the collection.

1930s – 40s

Climate Change Is Bipartisan

Republican and Democratic leaders at a USC conference on climate change agree that global warming is an urgent issue that must be addressed from both sides of the aisle. By Emily Gersema The issue of climate change is “completely consistent with Christian conservative orthodoxy,” former Republican U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis of South Carolina argued.

“It is not hearsay. It is actually starting to pop, and it’s really pleasant to see Republicans come around,” Inglis said on April 4 at the “Climate Forward: Navigating the Politics of Climate Change” conference.

The event drew an estimated 1,000 people, including former Secretary of State John Kerry, former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, former California Senator Kevin de León and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.

The conference was hosted by USC Dornsife’s Center for the Political Future and USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies, and the USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy at USC Price School of Public Policy.

Inglis lost his seat in 2010 after declaring support for a tax on carbon emissions. His stance has since intensified as he advocates for various measures to slow global warming.

New York Times environmental writer Lisa Friedman said that there appears to be momentum to address the problem, citing the “Green New Deal” resolution by

Democratic U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. It calls for multiple measures, such as reducing dependence on fossil fuels and switching to sustainable energy options, such as hydrogen, wind and solar power, to slow global warming.

Robert Shrum, Center for the Political Future director, asked if promotion of the Green New Deal hurts or helps the cause.

Inglis noted that the far left supports the deal. The left should avoid repeating the mistakes of the “tea party” members of the Republican Party, who learned and did nothing about climate change, he warned.

Julien Emile-Geay, associate professor of Earth sciences at USC Dornsife, says he finds it incomprehensible that climate science somehow became a liberal issue.

“I find it really dumbfounding that it comes to be branded as an issue of the ‘tea party of the left,’ ” he said.

“Theoretically, it should be more oriented to the right.”

Former California Senate President pro tempore de León, a Democrat, told the panel that California is leading the nation and world on reducing pollution, with its stringent auto emissions standards.

1k

Publication years of rare books held exclusively by the collection.

Books added to the collection annually.

300

B-24 The room in Doheny Library that houses this collection.

8

Former Republican Congressman Bob Inglis, left, now works to promote measures to cut back on greenhouse gases.

PHOTO BY MAURICE ROPER

Boxes containing transcripts of the Nuremberg Trials.

FROM THE HE ART OF USC Spotlight

Yoga for the Young

Learning yoga helps inner-city grade school students overcome stress and focus better in the classroom.

“If kids master some of these poses, they feel they are masters of their own universe, and then they can go out and do productive things in the world,” Power said. —S.B.

Grand Poetry Tour

California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia fulfilled his mission last fall, visiting every county in the state.

J E P P H O T O BY S U S A N B E L L ; IL L U S T R AT I O N BY D E N N I S L A N; A F L AT O O N I P H O T O BY E R I C L IN D B E R G

In Los Angeles, yoga tends to be associated with affluent women on the city’s West Side, but USC Dornsife’s Joint Educational Project (JEP), one of the oldest and largest service learning organizations in the United States, is teaching this ancient Indian physical, mental and spiritual practice to underserved elementary students in L.A.’s inner city schools. Why? As Tina Koneazny, JEP’s associate director of administration and educational outreach, explains, yoga can have a profoundly positive influence on the lives of these young students, many of whom desperately need the benefits it can bring. All too often, inner-city children face considerable stress in their everyday lives — a result of poverty, proximity to gang violence and, increasingly for many, the fear that their families could be torn apart by deportation.

Indeed, a 2014 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that almost a third of inner-city children in the United States suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder at a higher level than soldiers.

Teaching these kids yoga, Koneazny says, gives them a valuable lifelong skill that enables them to relax and find an inner place of calm, even if they’re in the midst of chaos. It helps children focus in school, and improves behavior and interpersonal relationships.

A donation from alumna Teresa Updegraff Power ’84 has enabled JEP to expand the Little Yoginis afterschool program by training USC students to become yoga instructors — “USC Yogis” — who teach the Little Yoginis curriculum at USC ReadersPlus partner schools.

A former lawyer turned yoga teacher, Power is the author of The ABCs of Yoga for Kids series of books (Stafford House) and the founder of the nonprofit World Yoga Power that aims to bring the benefits of yoga to inner-city children.

In 2017, California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia announced a challenge that would further familiarize him with his home state and expand poetry’s cultural reach: He would visit all of California’s 58 counties over the course of two years and lead poetry events at each.

After that announcement, Gioia, Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at USC Dornsife and USC Price School of Public Policy, drove thousands of miles, often accompanied by his wife, Mary Elizabeth Gioia, and an audio book or two. Throughout this modern-day odyssey, Gioia brought poetry to the people, and he heard poetry of and by the people.

For years, Gioia has written commentary and criticisms about modern poetry, and in particular, about its exclusivity.

In his 1991 landmark essay, “Can Poetry Matter?,” published in The Atlantic, Gioia lamented that ownership and appreciation for poetry had shifted from “bohemia to bureaucracy,” confined by academic writing programs that emphasized analysis and criticism rather than performance and writing.

Gioia, who hails from South Los Angeles, has practiced what he preached. Since that essay, he has emerged as a vociferous advocate for arts and culture nationwide and has led the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2015, Gioia was named California poet laureate by Gov. Jerry Brown.

Gioia may be the first laureate to have visited all 58 counties, state officials say. He met his goal in October, with final stops in Kings, Merced and Santa Barbara counties.

“There is always this debate in public arts policy about who you serve. Do you serve the artist? Serve youth? Serve minorities?” says Gioia. “There is only one proper answer in a democracy. We must serve everyone.” —E.G.

NIKKI AFLATOONI ’19 Health and Human Sciences SHALIZ AFLATOONI ’22 Human Biology

“Our parents always wanted us to get exposed to other experiences, … so we started volunteering.

“Having these scholarships has helped us be able to focus on our academics and volunteer involvement. And we’ll definitely want to come back and stay involved after we graduate.”

Nikki Aflatooni, an aspiring dentist, and her sister Shaliz Alfatooni have received meritbased scholarships, inspiring them to volunteer and help others while they study.

As president of USC’s chapter of Global Dental Brigades, Nikki traveled to Central America with other USC students, helping set up a clinic to provide dental care in underserved areas. During a trip to Honduras, she screened kids for oral health issues. She also teaches oral health in neighborhood schools through USC Dornsife’s Joint Educational Project.

Shaliz volunteers with USC Science Outreach and is a Red Cross member.

Both sisters received meritbased scholarships from Town & Gown of USC. Nikki received the Presidential Scholarship and additional support from alumni groups while her sister received the Dean’s Scholarship from USC Dornsife.

“I definitely want to continue volunteering here,” said Shaliz, who hopes to become a pediatrician. “Because I have these scholarships, I feel like it will be my way of giving back.”

Spring / Summer 2019 | 9

In The Field

EARTH SCIENCES

Mudslides After Fires

Rainfall can be a risk as much as a relief in fire-damaged areas of California. Last year, at least 21 people died and more than 100 were injured when heavy rains prompted a mudslide in Montecito, California, which was heavily damaged in the Thomas fire.

Joshua West, Wilford and Daris Zinsmeyer Early Career Chair in Marine Studies and associate professor of Earth sciences, explains what mudslides are, and why the risk heightens in fire-ravaged areas when rainstorms strike.

He notes that the conditions are exacerbated due to a changing pattern in climate.

California now has longer wildfire seasons that are quickly punctuated by a rainy season.

Fires strip away grasses and brush, clearing a path for debris to slide down. In addition, when vegetation burns, it leaves behind waxy leaf residues that coat the soil, creating a film.

This hydrophobic layer actually repels water.

However, the hydrophobic layer isn’t on the surface. It’s a few inches below. The rain percolates through until it reaches that waxy layer, and, because it cannot penetrate, it starts to accumulate, creating a soupy mess that easily slips off steep slopes.

Scientists are learning more and more about the relationship between fires and debris flows. Important factors to consider include the intensity of the burn, how steep the slopes are, and the type of soil. By looking at past fires, scientists and authorities can make predictions on where the worst mudflows might occur for a given rainfall. That is why authorities keep an eye on the weather and anticipate areas most at risk, so they may issue 10

NOV

DEC

JAN

FEB

MAR

Most fires in California used to happen in summer, leaving time for recovery before the rains came in the fall or winter. Now, fires often occur into December, allowing little time to rebound before the storms arrive.

The rate of rainfall is key — a large amount of rainfall in a short time is a recipe for disaster.

HOW LANDSLIDES CAN FORM AFTER A WILDFIRE

1

During a fire, burning plants release chemicals that permeate into soil.

2 3 4

These chemicals create a waxy, water-resistant layer.

Water can’t sink below that layer, so it accumulates in the soil above.

Soil and rocks slide off slopes due to the buildup of water.

FROM THE HE ART OF USC

warnings for vulnerable areas during heavy rains.

The steeper the slope, the more likely that mud and debris will slip off. When rain is forecast, authorities now warn residents in fire-scarred areas of a risk of mudflows.

To try and divert a mudflow, homeowners can put sandbags out and create other barriers. But that does not guarantee that their home will stay safe. And when there are evacuations for potential mudslides, residents should leave their homes so that they don’t become trapped — or worse. — E.G.

Those Left Behind

Doctoral student Blanca Ramirez researches how families cope when a parent is detained or deported.

deportation. “Latino immigrants and Latino children are going to be the majority of Americans in the future,” she said. “If their households are struggling as these kids are growing up, that will have significant consequences for the United States down the road.” —S.B.

Cancer’s Biological Clock Scientists find a molecule that can disrupt cancer cells’ sleep cycle and hinder their spread.

IMAGES BY DENNIS LAN

Blanca Ramirez is haunted by a little girl who stopped buying lollipops. Each lollipop cost a quarter, and the young girl loved to buy one every day after school.

But then she stopped. Her undocumented father had been deported, and she was determined to contribute that daily quarter to her family’s finances instead.

Ramirez, a doctoral student in sociology, researches what happens to families of Latino immigrants in California who have lost a parent because of detention or deportation. How do those left behind — including children — cope? To find answers, she interviews them.

“I generally find that children become emotional anchors for their parents, although they themselves are going through psychological pain,” she said. “They also try to give financial support to their family. Even if they’re too young, they still try in their own small ways to figure out how they can contribute financially.”

Ramirez refers to this process of being forced to take on adult responsibilities at a young age as “adultification.”

Herself the daughter of Mexican immigrants, Ramirez grew up in Orange County, California, where many of her family’s neighbors were also immigrants. Ramirez says her passion for her research stems from them.

“When I go out and talk to families, they seem like people I could have easily grown up with, but they’ve lived through so much more and they’re still standing and still trying to maintain their families,” Ramirez said. “To me, they’re some of the strongest, most resilient people I’ve met.”

A first-generation college student, Ramirez has earned two of the most competitive graduate fellowships available — in any discipline: a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship.

She hopes her research inspires critical thinking about the long-term effects of a single act of detention or

A new drug shows potential to halt cancer cells’ growth by stunting the cells’ biological clock.

The findings from scientists at the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience and Nagoya University in Japan advance a burgeoning area of research: turning the body’s circadian rhythms against cancer.

Their study, conducted on human kidney cancer cells and on acute myeloid leukemia in mice, was published Jan. 23 in the journal Science Advances. The study showed the molecule, GO289, was also effective on human bone cancer cells.

“In some cancers, the disease takes over the circadian clock mechanism and uses it for the evil purpose of helping itself grow,” said Steve Kay, director of convergent biosciences at the USC Michelson Center and Provost Professor of Neurology, Biomedical Engineering and Biological Sciences.

“With GO289, we can interfere with those processes and stop the cancer from growing.”

Scientists know that disrupting sleep and other elements of humans’ circadian rhythm can harm health. The same is true for the circadian clock of cells themselves.

GO289 targets an enzyme that controls the cells’ circadian rhythm. This drug-protein interaction disrupts the cell’s sleep cycle and other functions critical for survival.

It worked on other forms of cancer, too — kidney cancer in human cells, and acute myeloid leukemia in mice. And it had very little impact on healthy cells.

“This could become an effective new weapon that kills cancer,” said Kay. —E.G.

Spring / Summer 2019 | 11

Our World FACULTY Myanmar

Preventing Genocide

Pioneering small satellite technology detects and documents evidence of human rights violations.

12

Despite toiling up to 18 hours a day, Rhoda, a Filipina migrant domestic worker in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), was given food only once every 24 hours by her employers, who insisted she finish all her daily chores before eating.

“They expected her to survive just drinking water throughout the day,” said Rhacel Parreñas, professor of sociology and gender studies and an expert on human trafficking.

Parreñas interviewed Rhoda — whose last name is omitted to protect her identity — for her current research on Southeast Asian migrant domestic workers in the UAE. It is one of 165 indepth interviews Parreñas has completed on workers’ experience of what she prefers to term “unfree labor,” but which is often described by those within the trafficking community as modern-day slavery.

Trafficking, Parreñas explains, differs very little whether it occurs in the United States or in the Middle East. “In the U.S., it’s very hard to quantify the extent of trafficking because it’s a hidden problem,” she said.

However, Parreñas notes, the National Human Trafficking Hotline reports calls from around 10,000 people in 2017.

California Superior Court Judge Curtis Kin ’93 first fought human trafficking as a federal prosecutor working for the U.S. Department of Justice in Los Angeles. As head of the unit specializing in sex and labor trafficking, he supervised cases and trained prosecutors to work with federal agents to bring traffickers to justice. He agrees that in the U.S. we tend to underestimate the scale of human trafficking, believing it occurs in other countries rather than right here on our doorstep.

“It’s the type of crime that can go unnoticed due to its hidden nature, so raising awareness among the community so that it can be discovered and reported is the best way to combat trafficking,” he said.

STUDENTS California As the seven justices on the California Supreme Court filed into the San Francisco court house, Chief Justice Tani Gorre Cantil-Sakauye welcomed the 10 USC undergraduates and their instructor, gathered in the audience. The group had traveled to San Francisco in October to hear oral arguments presented before the court as part of Antonio Elefano‘s “Advanced Legal Writing” course, an upper division elective offered by the Writing Program at USC Dornsife.

Aimed at students serious about working in law, politics or policy, Elefano’s course enables them to learn the art of legal writing by studying current cases going before the California Supreme Court and then by researching cases to recommend to Southwestern Law School’s Amicus Project.

Erica Kelley, a senior majoring in psychology, described seeing how a Supreme Court case is conducted as “eye-opening.”

“It’s not something that most people have the opportunity to see in their lifetime,” she said.

“Maybe that could be me eventually, arguing a case before the Supreme Court.”

The students were struck by one case in particular, in which it was evident which attorney would probably lose.

“For them to be able to see that,” said Elefano, assistant professor (teaching) of writing, “to watch it play out, to talk to the lawyer afterward — there’s no substitute for this as a learning experience.”

PREVENTING GENOCIDE IMAGE COURTESY OF ANDREW MARX; TRAFFICKING IMAGE BY DENNIS LAN

At USC Dornsife’s Spatial Sciences Institute, Andrew Marx runs the Human Security and Geospatial Intelligence Lab, developing and leveraging new, “smallsat” technology to quickly detect human rights abuses and violations, preventing isolated events from developing into genocide.

The information collected provides evidence that can be used to corroborate refugee accounts of atrocities in international courts.

Many of the world’s worst human rights abuses, including genocide, occur in areas that are difficult to observe, notes Marx, associate professor of the practice of spatial sciences and creative technologies. While smallsat technology can provide daily imagery of the entire Earth, the images are too fuzzy to visually identify details that can signal human rights abuses. Marx and his team are overcoming this by designing algorithms to automatically detect potential human rights violations — such as villages that have been burned down.

Working with Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights, the team is monitoring the persecution of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar.

“Satellite imagery provides data that cannot be refuted when used in conjunction with geospatial intelligence and victim testimony,” said Marx, whose goal is to develop an early warning system to prevent human rights violations.

“Once you work on something that powerful,” he adds, “you don’t really have an appetite to do anything else.”

FACULTY/ ALUMNUS Global

FROM THE HE ART OF USC

P E R U P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F E M I LY B U R T

FACULTY Armenia Since the Republic of Armenia gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, it has struggled to establish a stable, genuinely democratic government. Last year’s “velvet revolution,” one of the most peaceful regime changes in history, offered many Armenians new hope.

However, the country faces many challenges as it transitions to democracy. To tackle them, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, L.A. City Councilmember Paul Krekorian, and USC Dornsife’s Institute of Armenian Studies teamed up with the Armenian government to launch the USC Institute of Armenian Studies Policy Fellows Program. The program invites mid-career public servants from Armenia to L.A. to experience the inner workings of democratic institutions.

“The world expected postSoviet societies to naturally transition to functioning democracies, forgetting that the frameworks that make for effective, participatory governance often don’t exist,” said institute Director Salpi Ghazarian.

The first fellows spent the Fall 2018 semester working with the city’s planning and public works and sanitation departments. They also visited USC centers and faculty.

“This is a most direct path linking scholarship, USC and global impact,” Ghazarian said.

For Armenia, in this crucial moment in its history, the lessons gained from the program promise to be revolutionary.

STUDENT Peru

FACULTY Middle East

Sustainability Focus

Middle East Studies Department aims to train new leaders to address region’s critical environmental issues.

Earth sciences Ph.D. student Emily Burt researches the Amazon River watershed, studying how sulfur makes its way across the South American continent.

Her research explores how water moves through a watershed — a land area that channels rainfall and snowmelt to creeks, streams and rivers, and eventually to outflow points such as lakes, bays and the ocean.

Conducting her research mainly in Peru, she uses the Amazon flood plain as a natural lab to investigate how dramatic environmental gradients like large changes in elevation, topography, temperature and forest type can affect how watersheds work.

“I’m really interested in the processes that happen as rain falls on a watershed, moves through the ground and becomes water that you see in a river.”

By learning how such an environment functions, her work can help scientists understand how more basic land features, such as elevation or topography, can influence other environments.

USC Dornsife’s Department of Middle East Studies is the first ever university department of its kind to focus specifically on the role of the environment on social change in the Middle East, providing a distinctive framework to explore more traditional topics such as politics, ethnicity and religion.

For example, scholars might explore regional politics in Egypt, where air pollution and congestion incited the government to build a new administrative capital. Approaching Egypt’s political system from this angle inspires connections with environmental issues such as population density, infrastructure deterioration and globalization.

Department Chair Ramzi Rouighi, associate professor of Middle East studies and history, said the department’s approach is unique. “This sort of scholarship does exist out there, but it’s fragmented. Scholars who work on sustainability issues are studying the Middle East, but they aren’t part of a Middle East program.”

Rouighi says Middle East universities are excited about sending students to USC Dornsife. While students in the region can train in science or engineering fields that produce sustainable technology, there are few opportunities for them to develop social science skills that help leaders and communities take action.

“These kinds of experts do not yet exist,” he said. “We have to develop them here — that’s our bet.”

Spring / Summer 2019 | 13

14

Matters of Degrees Apocalypse fatigue got you down? The remedy may be found in a different climate change narrative emphasizing the vast potential for a thriving planet.

By Stephen Koenig

Conversations about climate change often beeline to the weather du jour. We’ll gather around the water cooler to lament the onslaught of extreme storm systems, seemingly born of a comic book universe. Polar Vortex has finally met his match: Thundersnow! Veer toward the incisive policy or collective action needed to address climate change at a fundamental level and discussions quickly fizzle into sighs, shrugs or plans to buy a hybrid.

It’s not surprising. This is existential stuff.

We can no longer claim the target is vague. It’s the boldface headline of 2018’s special report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): To ensure a livable world, we must limit global average temperatures to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

The good news is that this goal is viable. The bad news is that we’re on the wrong trajectory. At the current rate we’re polluting the atmosphere, the world will exceed the IPCC’s recommended limit sometime between 2036 and 2052.

We didn’t need this report to make obvious the need for drastic action. From raging wildfires that intensify each year to flooded coastal city streets, climate change is already here.

But fear or frustration hasn’t motivated collective action.

It hasn’t for more than 100 years. The greenhouse effect was identified before the turn of the 20th century.

The fact is, climate change is not a scientific challenge, but a psychological one.

AN OBLIQUE STRATEGY

When rock icon and celebrated chameleon David Bowie felt stuck in a rut, he would turn to producer Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt’s deck of “Oblique Strategies,” cards that would send him off in a new direction — to change instruments or “discover the recipes you are using and abandon them.”

If the way we think about climate change only leads to resignation, maybe we need to abandon the recipe. Could we talk instead about the abundant opportunities to create new wealth and improve human health by transitioning to an economy powered by renewable energy? Or highlight the ever-improving technology that can curtail humancaused emissions? Could we push creative, new policy and

motivate action toward a future that may look different, but also more vibrant, more alive?

These strategies have already started in California. The state has planted its flag as America’s leader on environmental policy and activism, and it continues to pursue a sustainable future in the face of a disruptive politic. Los Angeles, too, is leaning on its tradition of ingenuity to meet the needs of 10 million residents while wearing a smaller carbon Birkenstock.

The actions we take during the next few years will demonstrate our resolve as a society and a species. Most of the stories we hear threaten a future in which we get it wrong.

But what will life be like — in L.A. and beyond — if we get it right?

ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE

“As long as things happen slowly, everything seems to be OK,” says Professor of Earth Sciences and Biological Sciences Ken Nealson, the sanguine director of the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies. “But if you look through the geological record and see when the great extinction events happened, they were all when things got out of balance — and they happen fast.”

Case in point: “In less than 200 years, humans have been digging up 200 million years’ worth of carbon dioxide and putting it back into the atmosphere,” Nealson said.

Clip-art perceptions of greenhouse gas emissions evoke Dickensian factories or congested, rush-hour freeways. But the two most aggressive producers of carbon dioxide emissions are fossil fuel-burning electric utilities and deforestation. Theoretically, these are among the easiest to curb with obvious, accessible solutions.

CATCHING SOME RAYS

We can electrify almost anything under the sun. In a place like L.A., solar-centric electric grids are virtually guaranteed to become the standard for energy production over the next few decades. Already, these systems can be cheaper and more efficient than utilities burning fossil fuels.

In years to come, a stroll through the neighborhood could also mean strolling through a power plant. By 2050, smaller

CLOCKING IN Time is no longer on our side.

We need all hands on deck, joining the innovators and leaders taking on our climate change crisis.

Spring / Summer 2019 | 15

solar panels or roof tiles will power most homes, enabling localized microgrids that better balance electricity distribution based on demand. In addition to our homes, solar power will likely propel driverless cars, mass transit and small airplanes. It’s even zapping the catwalk. Designers are creating clothing that can produce a small charge for a phone or device.

“In less than 200 years, humans have been digging up 200 million years’ worth of carbon dioxide and putting it back into the atmosphere.”

The downtown L.A. skyline might take advantage of organic photovoltaic innovations, like those that Mark Thompson, Ray R. Irani, Chairman of Occidental Petroleum Corporation, Chair in Chemistry and professor of chemistry and chemical engineering and materials science, is developing in his laboratory at USC Dornsife. The technology could soon be used to make electricity-generating transparent windows or window shades for commercial buildings. And Richard Brutchey, professor of chemistry at USC Dornsife, works on solar cells made from nanocrystals so small they can exist as a liquid ink that can be painted onto surfaces. Owners could potentially coat their homes with this innovative material to harness energy, while also keeping up with the latest Pantone trends.

While established cities retrofit for renewable energy, the greatest opportunities exist in emerging cities. As Africa, Latin America and India experience unprecedented population growth, cities in these parts of the world are building upward and outward. The limited infrastructure currently in place will require they essentially start from scratch. Solar and wind utilities will make the most sense — both environmentally and financially — in these regions.

TRILLIONS OF TREES

A HIGHER POWER Already a leading solar city, Los Angeles is primed to capitalize on the next wave of renewable energy innovations.

16

According to the World Resources Institute, deforestation is now responsible for allowing more greenhouse gas emissions to be released than 85 million cars would release over their entire lifetimes.

“An average tree holds a half ton of C02,” said Nealson, who also holds the Wrigley Chair in Environmental Studies.

Rainforests, particularly in South America, bear the brunt of deforestation. Further compounding the problem, 80 percent of the cleared land is used for small-scale agriculture like cattle ranches, rather than staple crops that feed exponentially more people.

Yet these forests are a powerful ally in the battle against climate change. A study by Global Forest Watch found that tropical tree cover can provide 23 percent of the mitigation needed by 2030 to meet the goals set in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Spatial science research suggests there’s enough room in the world’s parks, forests and abandoned land to plant more than 1.2 trillion trees. These could gobble up 10 years’ worth of CO2 from the atmosphere.

L.A. will never become Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, but new policies could ensure we emphasize the value of an

urban canopy. While trees have typically been regarded only as decorative enhancements punctuating the concrete jungle, a recent study commissioned by the L.A. nonprofit City Plants values the city’s trees at $12 billion. Efforts are underway to convince civic leaders that quantifying trees in terms of economic value would awaken people to the fact that they are, in fact, essential infrastructure. In the years ahead, the trees of L.A. might receive funding for maintenance similar to that currently earmarked for streets, storm drains and utilities.

That said, we should expect to lose a lanky icon. Given their small canopy, Southern California’s legendary palm trees are among the least effective at collecting carbon dioxide and storing water in their shallow roots. As these palms die off, they will likely be replaced by more robust native species.

It’s another beautiful day in the land of sunshine and … scrub oaks.

PIPELINES AND POLITICS

USC Dornsife Professor of Sociology Andrew Lakoff’s measured baritone could count down the adult contemporary top 40. It’s almost soothing, until you consider his expertise — public disaster preparation and mitigation.

“The water infrastructure we built in Southern California assumes there’s going to be a snowpack to draw on in the Sierras,” said Lakoff, who also serves as divisional dean for the social sciences. “Our system isn’t built for new projections that look ahead 20 or 30 years from now.”

A warmer climate means that rain, not snow, will produce the lion’s share of California’s future water supply. Rain is more difficult to capture and store, however, which has California planners and policymakers scrambling to work through competing ideas for moving water from the northern part of the state. One of the major initiatives, the California WaterFix (commonly known as the twin tunnels pipeline project), was recently scaled back by Gov. Gavin Newson, triggering another long review process for the multi-billiondollar project. But the general public is largely unaware that this massive undertaking is in the works.

“The future of livability in California is being shaped in these very high-stakes political and technical battles that mostly take place behind the scenes,” said Lakoff. “You don’t see protesters; you don’t see headlines or big public debate.

I call it the ‘unconscious of water’ in Southern California.”

According to Circle of Blue, a water news agency, water rates in L.A. skyrocketed 71 percent between 2010 and 2017.

Given the state’s decentralized system of more than 400 public water agencies, it’s difficult to understand who or what is responsible for the increase. Some point to large estates that consume 10 times the water that a normal household uses, while others blame particularly thirsty California crops, including almonds and alfalfa.

Lakoff believes we can take more informed action with better transparency in water pricing. As the public learns where water is being used and why the cost is rising, calls for a more equitable distribution could reverberate through Sacramento.

Even with new water infrastructure and policies in place, Californians will need to ration the supply. Recycling will be the norm, with many households installing greywater systems that filter water from showers and washing machines. A more challenging sociopsychological effort will be building public acceptance for pumping highly treated sewage back into L.A. County aquifers. It’s an effective conservation method, but leaders will have to call in better spin doctors than those who IL L U S T R AT I O N S BY DAW ID RY S K I F O R U S C D O R N S IF E M AG A Z IN E

Spring / Summer 2019 | 17

18

led the Metropolitan Water District’s regrettably named attempt in 2016: “toilet to tap.”

A BETTER GREENHOUSE EFFECT

One constituency is paying close attention to the politics of water. Farmers in California’s Central Valley feel the acute effects of long droughts. Given that the state accounts for 13 percent of the nation’s agriculture and generates $50 billion in revenue each year, global warming is drying up their bottom line.

Nealson proposes a solution: “Take one-tenth of land in the Central Valley and put greenhouses there.”

Plants cool themselves by releasing water. In a greenhouse, that water can be captured and cycled back into the system.

Nealson claims this would yield better harvests with just a small fraction of the water currently used.

Imagine barreling up the I-5 freeway 20 years from now.

Skirting autonomous semi-trucks, you see a hyperloop on one side of the road and the massive domes of fecund greenhouse systems on the other. The land is blanketed by solar panels that enable a nearly self-sustaining agricultural region.

And unlike the olden days, you can open a window without holding your breath.

FEELING THE HEAT

If global warming continues its current pace, L.A. will have the same climate as Mexico’s Cabo San Lucas by 2100. But this future City of Angels will be no Margaritaville.

Temperature fluctuation is greatest at the poles, but global warming’s adverse effects concentrate on places that are already hot. By 2050, Southern California could see up to 95 days a year when temperatures top 90 degrees, as opposed to the current average of 67 days a year. While the higher cost of air conditioning will be easy to recognize, there are more opaque expenses related to human health.

“The annual number of 90-degree days is an important threshold, particularly when you look at the infant mortality rate,” said Associate Professor of Economics Paulina Oliva, whose research is focused on environmental economics and development.

Oliva says that the mortality rate holds steady over days with temperatures below 90 degrees, and then it spikes at this specific threshold. A similar increase in the rate of heat stroke has been noted, as well.

Global warming hits low-income families hardest, widening the chasm of existing economic disparity. Around the world, many of the poorest nations frequently simmer above 90 degrees already. The same holds true in the United States, where many of the most economically disadvantaged populations live in the warm climate of the South. (The outlook is particularly unfortunate for states such as Oklahoma, Texas, Florida and Kentucky, which all have congressional representatives or governors who are among the most vocal climate change deniers at this pivotal moment.)

A TAXING ENDEAVOR

“We do have the means to address this,” says Oliva. “But if we want to tackle both climate change mitigation and the distribution of its costs, we need to use multiple economic instruments.”

She suggests that low-income families could be provided with income tax credits to redistribute wealth, and better unemployment benefits would help families through hard times. These public costs could be offset with a carbon tax —

a fee that a government imposes on companies that burn fossil fuels, usually at a set rate per ton of emissions.

Many economists believe the carbon tax is the best policy instrument for curtailing the use of fossil fuels across sectors.

“It makes the market work,” Oliva says, “because you’ll get the biggest reductions from the polluters who have the lowest mitigation costs.”

“One of the building blocks of collective action is trust.”

IT’S TIME TO HAVE “THE TALK”

Even if we think about climate change in terms of opportunities for new business, innovation and improving human health, we still have to build consensus around the solutions.

We need to supplant apocalypse fatigue with frank, productive conversation. That seems easier today than ever before, as democratized communication channels are abundant. From social media to blogs to podcasts, the resources we have to connect and speak out broadly encourage far-reaching social interaction. Many expect the movement toward climate action will find its voice online.

They might be wrong.

“The most powerful kind of revolutionary action usually comes out of face-to-face interaction,” says Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, associate professor of history. “One of the building blocks of collective action is trust. And trust can be more easily and deeply established with interaction in person.”

Perl-Rosenthal notes that the convening of the First Continental Congress was a crucial turning point in the American Revolution. Until then, there had been little interaction among leaders of the colonies. Folks like John Adams, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson used the in-person forum to figure out who was trustworthy and how reliable they were — and to work out a shared strategy.

Recent movements have gained momentum in a similar fashion. Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement may have started online, but they became much more real and enduring, when people from different places and backgrounds came together to rally in person.

Perl-Rosenthal explains that movements usually begin with local cohesion that plugs into something broader.

Fifty years from now, we might trace our lives on a thriving planet to the local and regional movements that are taking shape today. Environmental activists and scientists can rally around evidence, while drought-plagued farmers and emptynet fishermen rally around their occupational security.

Displaced fire victims in Northern California can find shared purpose with displaced flood victims in Southern California.

And politicians can get reelected by acting on the will of a new electorate — a generation of students and advocates who demand more conscientious climate change policy.

As these groups come together, calls to “save our planet,” will take on new context through the personal stories of those whose lives have already been affected by climate change.

Earth will be just fine, after all. Our ancient planet can endure the worst climate change scenario. It’s us, humanity, that has so much at stake. Yet, time and again, history has proven it is when we face our greatest challenges that we’re at our best.

GETTING IT TOGETHER As the effects of climate change cause disparate populations to speak out, it becomes clear that we are all working to solve the same puzzle.

Spring / Summer 2019 | 19

20

GUT REACTION The science is clear: Microbes living within us hold great sway over our well-being. But how much do they control our internal climate, and can we manipulate the microbiome to adjust the thermostat?

By Darrin S. Joy Steven Finkel tells the story of a close family member who had a discomforting health issue — the kind you don’t discuss at the dinner table.

“She went and chose a bunch of yogurts with active culture,” he says. The first yogurt — call it Yogurt A — made her constipated, and Yogurt B gave her diarrhea. “It’s like Goldilocks,” he adds, before concluding her tale of woe with a happy ending: “Yogurt C made her feel great.”

Hoping to understand how three versions of one food could cause such dissimilar reactions, the relative contacted Finkel, who is professor of biological sciences at USC Dornsife and an expert on bacterial physiology, genetics and evolution.

“So then I get the phone call: ‘Steve, I read the labels.

They all say lactobacillus. So how come this one made me feel rotten, this one made me feel rotten in a different way, and this one makes me feel great?’”

His answer? It’s complicated. Very complicated.

Spring / Summer 2019 | 21

ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL

It has to do with the human microbiome, the vast array of microbes that live inside each of us and which, in many ways, make us who we are. It comprises around 100 trillion microbes and includes thousands of different species.

Bacteria seem to get the most attention in the news media and even within the research community, though fungi, viruses and other microorganisms also claim a place in this complex ecosystem. All together, these tiny stowaways outnumber their host: For every human cell there are at least three microbes, and for every human gene, 200 microbial genes.

“WE CAN DETERMINE THE MICR OBIOME OF ANY THING PRET T Y QUICKLY, BUT WE DON' T KNOW WHAT IT MEANS .”

These minute organisms — the average bacterial cell is about 10 times smaller than the average human cell — are by no means freeloaders. They constitute an integral part of the human organism and exert considerable influence over the body’s function and well-being.

In fact, some scientists refer to the microbiome as another, supportive organ.

Most, if not all, areas within the body — skin, mouth, sinuses, reproductive tract, you name it — appear to house their own microbiomes, but the most studied is that of the gut. That’s almost certainly driven to some degree by economics. A 2017 World Gastroenterology Organisation study put the global market in probiotics at $36 billion in 2013. Several estimates project it will reach about $60 billion by 2022 — astonishing growth considering the science is far from settled.

Probiotics are living organisms, including those active lactobacillus cultures in Finkel’s yogurt anecdote, that are ingested with the aim of influencing the gut microbiome. The goal is to induce positive benefits such as more stable digestion, weight loss and even better mental health.

But that’s easier said than done. The microbiome is a complex and dynamic system — and as unique to each individual as a fingerprint. What works for one person is by no means guaranteed to work for another. For instance, Finkel’s relative recommended Yogurt C to her friend, and it backfired, making the friend feel awful. Ensuring a positive result for any 22

given individual when ingesting probiotics is, at present, virtually impossible.

MICROBES ON THE BRAIN

Still, there is a growing body of credible evidence suggesting that tinkering with the body’s microbial ecology could be used to influence health. Take body weight, for example.

In a landmark 2013 study published in Science, a team led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine transferred gut microbiome samples from a pair of twins — one obese the other not — into mice.

“The mice that received the obese microbiome transfer showed some metabolic dysfunction,” said Scott Kanoski, associate professor of biological sciences at USC Dornsife.

“That was one of the early big-splash findings.”

Kanoski, a neuroscientist, studies how the body and brain interact to influence food intake and body weight. His lab has produced results that suggest a potential link between the gut microbiome and brain function. For example, they found that rats that swigged sugary beverages during early developmental periods in their lives suffered from learning and memory impairment. Later experiments then showed those same drinks caused changes to the rats’ microbiome.

“We’re trying to establish whether those changes in the microbiome may be functionally related to the memory deficits associated with sugar consumption,” Kanoski said.

Even if the link proves valid, researchers — and probiotics dealers — are far from understanding how to manipulate the microbiome to produce a desired effect. Thousands of species interacting with one another, their host and the microenvironment around them make predicting results difficult to say the least. But scientists are making inroads.

INTERACTION AND INFLUENCE

James Boedicker, assistant professor of physics and astronomy and biological sciences at USC Dornsife, is investigating the interaction of different bacterial species.

Specifically, he is trying to develop mathematical tools to predict what happens when different species commingle.

“You can’t really just look at how individual species respond in isolation,” he said. It’s the group dynamic that matters. “So, even if you’re trying to only influence one cell, there’ll be feedback within these communities that might give you unexpected changes in the system.”

Boedicker and his team showed this in a study of the interaction of four distinct bacterial species. It gets complicated, but essentially they measured each species’ metabolic output separately, then mixed equal parts of the four together and measured the overall metabolic rate of the combined group.

If living together has no effect, they reasoned, then the overall metabolic rate would simply be the average of each species’ individual rate (that is, add up all rates and divide by four).

But if cohabitation makes a difference, the overall metabolic rate would vary from the predicted average.

Anyone who’s ever had roommates can guess the answer: Living in close proximity to one another is never simple; it changes things. For their test, Boedicker’s team found the overall metabolic rate they measured was higher than the average.

Next, the scientists looked for a way to actually predict

whether mixing the species together would boost or inhibit overall metabolism. The math gets a little deep — physicists solve this stuff on their lunch break; the rest of us not so much — but it turns out you only need to understand how any given pair of the species interact at various ratios to get a reasonable idea of how the whole group of four will fare when mixed together.

This kind of information could help inform how different kinds of probiotics might affect a person, and it could also lead to better clinical decisions. Antibiotics, chemotherapy and other drugs can impact the microbiome dramatically, and understanding how changes in the mix of species will affect a patient could avoid adverse events or, in some cases, predict beneficial effects.

A SEA CHANGE

The human microbiome isn’t the only one that could affect human well-being.

Seafood aquaculture is on the rise, representing an increasingly important food source. Led mostly by oyster and salmon production, domestic aquaculture sales climbed 13 percent per year from 2007 to 2011. Even so, the United States ranked only 16th in global sales as of 2016, indicating a need for improved farming techniques.

One route may be to use probiotics to reduce losses and promote yield.

Ariel Levi Simons, a USC Dornsife Ph.D. candidate in the laboratory of Professor of Biological Sciences Sergey Nuzhdin, is exploring how to influence the oyster gut microbiome in the hope of improving production of these and similar filter-feeding shellfish — mussels, scallops and clams — that are farmed as food.

In recent experiments, Simons studied Pacific oysters, altering their diet, which is rich in a variety of bacteria, and then sampling their gut microbiome to look for changes. With his methods, he could manipulate the microbes in the oysters’ digestive tracts relatively quickly and predictably, a first step in showing that probiotics might improve the industry.

IL L U S T R AT I O N S BY D E N N I S L A N F O R U S C D O R N S IF E M AG A Z IN E

“So, if somebody were to find a good probiotic bacteria, we have the background to say, ‘If you introduce this in the feed, it’s going to rapidly change the microbiome,’” Simons explained.

But Simons, like Boedicker, Finkel and Kanoski, cautions that these are early results, and much research remains to be done. The microbiome is intensely complex, and real understanding is years away.

THE PROBLEM WITH BEING UNIQUE

While the technology to define a microbiome — identifying the species involved and even their genetic makeup — has been available for years, the means of processing the information in a meaningful way still eludes scientists.

“We can determine the microbiome of anything pretty quickly, but we don’t know what it means,” says Finkel.

A great deal of that falls to one simple fact: We’re all individuals. Our microbiomes are unique.

“How different are two people?” Finkel asks. “How different are two people who live in the same house even?”

The problem becomes one of managing mounds of data from millions of people teeming with trillions of organisms, winnowing it down to the useful bits — much as Boedicker is doing with his mathematical models — to create a tool that empowers people to improve their health.

Then maybe folks like Finkel’s relative won’t have to play Goldilocks to find their perfect yogurt — the answer will be right there on the label.

Spring / Summer 2019 | 23

Think facts win the argument? Think again. It’s our beliefs, even those that are unmoored from objective reality, that determine what to us is true and false. And that’s why it’s so difficult to change your mind, much less someone else’s. By Lance Ignon

Baby, Can I Change My Mind?

They say seeing is believing. But it would be more accurate to say believing is seeing.

Our beliefs not only define which political party we vote for, what god we worship and who we associate with, they determine which facts we choose to accept or deny.

Once beliefs, no matter how wacky, become part of our identity, they are hard-wired into our brains and almost impervious to contradictory information — and indistinguishable from objective facts.

“What we think of as facts are beliefs that we have decided are true,” said Norbert Schwarz, Provost Professor of Psychology and Marketing at USC Dornsife.

Their power has been reinforced by thousands of years of evolution in which like-minded groups have thrived because they’ve unified through shared beliefs. We’ve been conditioned to reject, or at least view with great suspicion, those who are not part of our clan, those who look or speak 24

differently — or who hold different beliefs.

“The whole species has thrived on being tribal,” said Morteza Dehghani, assistant professor of psychology and computer science at USC Dornsife.

But something has changed. It wasn’t long ago that we believed a common set of facts: The Earth is round, vaccines prevent deadly illnesses and scientists are to be believed when they almost universally agree on a topic, as is the case with man-made climate change.

But today, even the most settled facts are being challenged by people who have formed tribes defined by increasingly outlandish beliefs.

In February, a producer with a Los Angeles-based news outlet contacted USC Dornsife to ask if there was a scholar who would appear on a program to debate whether the Earth was flat. The ancient Greeks firmly established that the Earth is round, yet thanks to the growth of evermore fabulist ideas, IL L U S T R AT I O N S BY D E N N I S L A N F O R U S C D O R N S IF E M AG A Z IN E

Spring / Summer 2019 | 25

there is a small but growing niche who believe that we live on a large, circular plane. The invitation was politely declined based on the principle that there is nothing to debate.

“What we think of as facts are beliefs that we have decided are true.”

To the flat-Earthers one can add a growing number of oddball beliefs and conspiracy theories, such as QAnon, the Marvel-esque notion that the military convinced Donald Trump to run for president so he could vanquish the forces of evil.

Though humans have always been tribal, a newly emerged force has accelerated the splintering of society: the internet and its spawn social media. Whereas people with bizarre beliefs were largely isolated prior to the internet revolution, today they can easily find like-minded believers online to reinforce their worldview.

“I think social networks have shown to be more divisive than anything else,” said Dehghani.

“It’s a propensity that we have as humans that we like connecting with others who are similar to us. Most of the time it’s in terms of values: political orientation, religion. Essentially what the social media sites are doing, they’re just fueling these propensities, whether they’re innate or learned.”

SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS

At USC Dornsife, scholars are delving into how we form our beliefs and how, through that knowledge, we might be able to return to a common set of facts — and avoid spiraling into a world of fantasy.

26

What researchers already know is that it’s very difficult to change beliefs.

“It is just exceedingly rare to ever witness anyone change their mind about some of these important things,” said Jonas Kaplan, assistant professor (research) of psychology at the USC Dornsife Brain and Creativity Institute. “It seems so important for us to be able to change our minds, especially about important topics like climate change or whether vaccines are healthy for us. It can be a life and death issue in that kind of a circumstance.”

Kaplan combines behavior studies with sophisticated measurements of brain activity to understand what makes us tick. His work made headlines in late 2016 when he published a study indicating that people were particularly resistant to political arguments that challenged their beliefs.

Not long after the study was published, a man contacted him with a story that illustrated the peril of rejecting your tribe’s political beliefs and one of the reasons we cling to them so fiercely. The man had worked in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush before going to work for a conservative think tank, but his beliefs began to change until he morphed into a card-carrying liberal.

“The cost of this change for this man was tremendous,” Kaplan said.

“When he started

questioning the conservative politics, his coworkers were unhappy with this … and he lost his job, ultimately.”

It turns out the reason we defend our most cherished beliefs has to do with why we don’t like to eat garbage.

Our brains are designed to protect not only our physical but our psychological well-being. “If a belief becomes part of our psychological self, it then benefits from all the brain’s protection mechanisms,” Kaplan said.

And the portion of the brain that keeps up this vigil, the insula, is the same one that’s responsible for our gut feelings and emotions, such as disgust.

“It literally is the same part of the brain that says you don’t eat that rotten food,” Kaplan said.

THE IMPERFECT BRAIN

Knowing how valuable yet difficult it is for almost anyone to remain open to facts that challenge their beliefs, the question becomes how we can short-circuit our brain’s

predilection for raising the mental drawbridge when we are confronted with disagreeable facts. Kaplan suggests developing the habit of being aware of how you feel when confronted with uncomfortable information.

He also suggests retaining a healthy dose of skepticism, without taking it so far that you become a conspiracy theorist.

The next question is how we interact with people who don’t share our beliefs — but who we wish did.

Schwarz, who has conducted extensive laboratory and field experiments on how people process information, said there is nothing to be gained by trying to argue someone out of their beliefs. In fact, it can be counterproductive.

For example, if you get into an argument with someone at a party about the disproven link between vaccines and autism, your chances of winning the debate are next to zero, but just by raising the issue you inadvertently raise questions about it in those who overhear your debate.

“You should not only worry about the person who holds the wrong belief, but you should also always worry about the bystanders,” Schwarz said.

Kaplan says the key is to connect with people on a social level before tackling contentious differences of opinion. “We know from a lot of experiments that a fullfrontal assault is unlikely to work because what you do is you arouse the defenses,” he said.

Schwarz notes that most people are lousy listeners, which is one of the ways that disproved beliefs get lodged in our psyche like a lifelong virus. “We’re very bad at tracking who says what when, where you heard it, and we’re mostly relying on a feeling of familiarity to gauge how widely shared an opinion is,” he said.

And because most of us are less than perfect listeners with clunky memories, we’re also bad at replacing nonsense with fact — even when we have accepted the fact.

Schwarz has conducted experiments in which people have accepted a certain truth after first hearing a falsehood. On day one, they’ve changed their mind. But by day three, they’re back to believing the falsehood.

“When you hear (the falsehood) again … it now feels very familiar and it feels like there’s something to it because you seem to have heard it before,” Schwarz explained.

TRUE LIES: 6 Things to Keep in Mind When Judging if Something Is the Truth or Fake News For decades, psychology researchers have studied how we form beliefs, and why we are often easily fooled. Here are six findings that, if kept in mind, could help you avoid pitfalls. 1

When knowledge is uncertain, people turn to social consensus to gauge what is likely to be correct.2 It’s easy to go along with the herd, but try not to get corralled into believing — and spreading — a lie.

People are more likely to believe statements when they are made in a familiar and easy to understand accent and when the speaker’s name is easy rather than difficult to pronounce.⁵ Fear of “the other” can lead to suspicion. Fight the urge to vilify those you don’t know or understand.

People are more confident in their beliefs if others share them.3 Don’t be afraid to pop the bubble. Just because others agree with you doesn’t mean any of you are right.

A given claim is more likely to be accepted when it appears with a photo — even when the photo has no probative value.⁶ Pretty pictures sell; ask anyone posting on Craigslist. Don’t let the eye candy fool you.

People are more likely to accept a claim that is compatible with their own beliefs than one that is not.4 If it fits with your current world view, it’s easy to accept it. Avoid being seduced into the status quo.

False information is notoriously difficult to correct. … Corrections after exposure are often futile.⁷ Once the cat’s out of the bag, it’s very hard to put it back. Don’t be afraid to question a long- and widely held belief.

(That’s the principle at the heart of science.)

CHANGE FOR THE BETTER

Despite our brain’s tenacious ability to protect our beliefs — even those that are grounded in hogwash — we are capable, at least over the long run, of changing our minds. Most of the country did so when it came to cigarettes, same-sex marriage and racism, the recent rise in hate speech and crimes notwithstanding.

“It’s not that people never change their minds,” Schwarz said, “but it does require that it seems very important to some, that they’re highly motivated, that they encounter the other arguments very often. That’s one pathway in which things change.”

But for some, there is another way to let go of those familiar, comfortable — and inconveniently false — beliefs, one that perhaps strikes a little closer to the ego.

“The other pathway is what you could think of as social climate changes: that it becomes increasingly difficult to hold some positions — that you’re getting increasingly worried that you look foolish. When social reality changes, beliefs follow.”

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Schwarz, Newman and Leach, 2016.

Festinger, 1954.

Visser and Mirabile, 2004.

Abelson, et al., 1968; Wyer, 1974.

Lev-Ari and Keysar, 2010; Newman, Sanson, Miller, Quigley-McBride, Foster, Bernstein and Garry, 2014.

Newman, Garry, Bernstein, Kantner and Lindsey, 2012.

Schwarz, Sanna, Skurnik and Yoon, 2007; Lewandowsky, Ecker, Seifert, Schwarz and Cook, 2012.

Spring / Summer 2019 | 27

28

Scholarly leaders from USC Dornsife’s Center for the Political Future discuss the forces driving Americans apart and explore how those same forces could bring them together.

By Emily Gersema

The end of 2018 delivered significant change to American politics. Nearly half of eligible voters cast ballots last November — the biggest midterm election turnout in over a century. Record numbers of women and ethnic minorities were elected to Congress. And a Democratic majority took control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

In spite of it all, one thing has not changed: The nation remains politically divided.

“We have a balance at the federal level that we didn’t have before,” says Robert Shrum, director of USC Dornsife’s Center for the Political Future. “But people’s disagreements are the same and people’s positions are the same.”

The center aims to address the political divide through education, research and practice. Staunchly nonpartisan, the center facilitates reasonable and open political discussions about matters that sometimes divide politicians and the public, serving as a model for students who are eager for a role in the political system, either as voters, staffers or candidates.

The center is led by Shrum, a longtime Democratic political strategist who holds the Carmen H. and Louis Warschaw Chair in Practical Politics. Veteran GOP strategist Michael Murphy is the center’s co-director.

The center’s launch last fall was timely. Many researchers, public opinion polls, political analysts and even psychologists say America’s political fault lines have widened to a worrisome degree. Polls provided warning signs of this polarization long before Donald Trump was elected president in 2016.

Multiple forces have converged, largely through advancements in technology and the transformation of media, sending seismic waves across the political landscape. The rise of cable TV news and the 24-hour news cycle expose viewers to endless — and frequently partisan — political coverage.

Smartphones are increasingly popular, and social media sites have become a primary source of news for many Americans, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center survey.

“Political communication is so ubiquitous now, you cannot escape it,” says Murphy. “The digital world allows people to go out and choose what they want to hear.”

IL L U S T R AT I O N S BY D E N N I S L A N F O R U S C D O R N S IF E M AG A Z IN E

Demographic changes and social movements contribute further to the stressful political atmosphere.

GROWING DISPARITIES

“We’re really at an extraordinary time in American history where there are two unique dynamics. The first is that this socioeconomic class divide is growing,” says Michael Madrid one of the center’s visiting fellows this semester and the principal of a campaign management and lobbying firm, Grassroots Lab. “The other is the demographic transformation that is unprecedented in American history.”

Although the size of America’s middle class is steady at about 51 percent, Pew found that income disparities have been widening.

The median income of middle-class households in 2016 was around $78,000 — not much higher than in 2000 when it was about $74,000. Pew says the minimal shifts reflect a lingering effect of the 2008 Great Recession and a recession from 2001. The median income for upper-income households increased by about the same dollar amount, but low-income households decreased by 5 percent over that period.

The nation is transforming racially, too. Whites are expected to become a minority by 2045, the U.S. Census Bureau predicted in recent reports. Asian, Asian-American and Hispanic populations have been growing while the birth rate among whites is declining.

Madrid says racial, gender and income disparities have become key issues in today’s political landscape, igniting social movements from the Tea Party to Black Lives Matter and the Women’s March, the latter galvanized in part by #MeToo movement harassment complaints.

All of the movements have taken to social media to highlight issues that previously might have been invisible to some Americans. For example, the 2017 video of Ferguson, Missouri, police shooting Michael Brown was shared repeatedly on social media, propelling the Black Lives Matter movement that had begun in 2012. The result is similar to how the Civil Rights movement gained traction in the 1960s Spring / Summer 2019 | 29

when photographers captured images of police siccing police dogs on protesters and spraying marchers, including children, with fire hoses.

“Right now, you’re seeing really ugly stuff,” Madrid said.

“When you start to see things like police brutality — in videos and on social media — and it’s undeniable, that starts to move public opinion.”

Madrid says this is a cultural and political turning point in America, much like that which occurred during the Vietnam War. Images of the war turned the tide of public opinion against both the war and President Lyndon B. Johnson.

“The first time the war was brought in to people’s homes, [via newspapers and television] it turned public opinion against the government and you could actually see it,” he says.

“Political communication is so ubiquitous now, you cannot escape it.

The digital world allows people to go out and choose what they want to hear.”

DIFFERENT PLACES, SHARED PROBLEMS

Symone Sanders, another fellow at the center and a political analyst, was a campaign aide in Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid and joined Joe Biden’s presidential campaign in April. She notes that people who may seem politically opposed often have issues in common. But they don’t seem to recognize this fact. That’s because differences in rhetoric and semantics can obscure their commonality. This is true, for instance, among people who are poor, she says.

“If you’re a poor person working in McDowell County, West Virginia, you are dealing with some of the exact same issues as a working poor person on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois,” Sanders says. “But because they talk about it differently, and they differ racially, they may not feel a connection to the other person.”

30

Madrid says that racial differences inhibit the ability of all low-income Americans to come together, preventing them from sharing a common agenda that would force both parties to the center.

Madrid and Sanders believe that a period of healing will come only after tensions worsen, and not before the 2020 presidential election.

Even then, Sanders says, this country will need to have some very difficult conversations about race and inequality.

STARTING TO HEAL

For its part, the Center for the Political Future is focused on healing the country as much as it can by preparing students — future political leaders, informed voters and active campaign supporters — to learn how to engage in civil dialogue about political issues and to respect the truth.

A number of students are learning about the Iowa caucus process in preparation for a visit to the state this summer, at which time they will perform volunteer work on a presidential campaign. The students will return to Iowa in January to gain more exposure to the caucus process.

Shrum says the center is proof that it is possible to bring together political opponents and have a civilized, rational discussion about the state of the nation, the needs of Americans and policy matters.

The center has hosted speakers such as former Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci. In April, it hosted former Secretary of State John Kerry at Climate Forward, a conference the center organized with USC Dornsife’s Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies and the USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy. The conference focused on policy solutions and practices that could address climate change. True to the center’s mission, the conference brought together policy experts from both sides of the political aisle, as well as business leaders.

“Civic institutions and universities have a leading role in addressing polarization,” Shrum says. “We need to advance the dialogue so that if someone wins the game, people don’t burn down the stadium.”

Back on Thin Ice?

by Susan Bell

THE CONJECTURE THAT WE MAY BE ON THE BRINK OF A NEW COLD WAR IS A CHILLING ONE, RATCHETING UP OUR GLOBAL ANXIETY LEVELS. BUT IS IT ACCURATE? The Cold War. The phrase evokes grainy images of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Space Race, Soviet propaganda posters and the proliferation of fallout shelters in backyards across America.

The end of World War II set the stage for the Cold War — the struggle between capitalism and communism that pitted East against West for almost half a century and brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later signaled the death knell of the ideological battle for hearts and minds of people worldwide.

“If you define the Cold War as a battle between rule books, then the liberal internationalists’ book — based on Anglo-American capitalism, the promotion of democracy and democratic values, the rule of law and multilateral building of institutions to manage security and the global economy — won,” notes Steven Lamy, professor of international relations and spatial sciences.

For a while, the United States enjoyed a unilateral moment as the undisputed global superpower. But now, 30 years later, with the rise of China as a major economic and military power, the interference by Russia in the U.S. 2016 presidential election, and what many regard as the abdication of America’s leadership role as defender of the liberal world order, is a new Cold War heating up again?

Lamy prefers to describe the heightened global tension as a period of great power rivalry between the U.S., China and Russia.

“I don’t think we’re in a new Cold War, although it serves a purpose for some people to suggest that, especially those who want to increase military budgets,” he said.

Certainly, the language of the Cold War is flourishing, he argues, not only in the Pentagon and within the Chinese and Russian military, all of which favor an “us and them, good versus evil” mentality, but also in wider American political discourse which, he notes, increasingly incorporates Cold War rhetoric based on fear and the outsider.

The concept of a new Cold War, he says, is “a fireball thrown down the hallway” to divert attention from the real issues — namely how to manage globalization so it’s more equitable and sustainable and to address the world’s key problems of climate change, global poverty and increasing inequality.

USC Dornsife’s Russia expert Robert English takes a different view, arguing that we are already in a new Cold War, although he concedes that it’s significantly different from the last one.

“It’s not Marxism versus capitalism, it’s not ideological, but it is a competition that has many parallels,” notes English, associate professor of international relations, Slavic languages and literature, and environmental studies. While English agrees with Lamy that the focus on a Cold War is serving as a diversion from more pressing issues, he still maintains that we’re in a spiral of mutual demonization, which is how the last Cold War began.

Just as they were last time, these increasing tensions, English says, are “marked by irrational fear that’s distracting both countries from much bigger problems.”

A NEW KIND OF WARFARE? Cyber warfare, English adds, is a perfect example of this demonization.

“If Americans understood that we have cyber war capabilities and

have used them more than the Russians ever have, then they might look at Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election a little differently,” he said, noting that the U.S. has interfered in Russia’s elections on numerous occasions.

English also recalls tension over 2013 reports that the U.S. National Security Agency hacked German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone. Now, when the U.S. complains about Russian hacking, the Germans roll their eyes, English says. In fact, recent Europe-wide polling from the Pew Memorial Trust shows that majorities in Italy, France and Germany view America as a greater threat to world stability and to their countries than Russia.

“We tend to forget our own transgressions and magnify those of the other side,” English said. “If we’re serious about improving relations with Russia, this has to be acknowledged. There are many ways we could cooperate with Russia instead of being at loggerheads.”

A BIGGER THREAT In fact, in terms of cyber warfare, China is a far greater threat than Russia, English argues. The Chinese, he says, have excelled at using cyber interference and social media manipulation to influence elections and politics in Southeast Asia.

But the most serious challenges to our liberal international order are coming not from China or Russia, English insists, but from inside the liberal states.

“Only we can destroy ourselves,” he says.

Describing Brexit as a disaster of the first order for the West, English warns that the threat to European integration and cooperation by far-right populists is far more important than anything Moscow or Beijing can dream up.

“It’s the nationalism of our own members that’s the problem, not Russia or China,” says English, cautioning against the dangerous reflex of blaming others for our own problems.

Lamy agrees. The situation we now face is much more complex than the Cold War, he notes. No longer a single issue about trying to convert the world to our ideology, today’s situation is a geopolitical conflict that involves the forces of democracy and liberalism against authoritarianism and state capitalism.

Lamy argues that under President Donald Trump, the U.S. has abandoned Pax Americana and the promotion of liberal internationalism — the global economic system that won the Cold War — for a more neo-mercantilist position based on “America first.”

Among the victims of this great power rivalry, he says, are some of the moral positions we’ve now set aside that made the U.S. different from other states.

“Now blatant national interests prevail in all three major powers,” Lamy said. The casualty of this new focus is human rights. “That’s what’s collapsing. And it’s collapsing because of national interests, not because of a new Cold War.” Spring / Summer 2019 | 31

32

The Mustard Seed Man Alumnus, biologist and inventor Steve Fabijanski’s holistic approach to climate change tackles two major contributors to greenhouse gases: airline travel and meat production. His solution?

A mustard-like oilseed called carinata. By Susan Bell

The Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner roared down the runway before sailing serenely up into the blue skies over Los Angeles International Airport. The Qantas flight, heading for Melbourne, Australia, seemed like any other leaving LAX that day, except for the fact that this plane was partially powered by biojet fuel, making for a reduced carbon footprint.

That this — the world’s first United States-to-Australia biofuel flight — happened at all, is thanks to USC Dornsife alumnus Steve Fabijanski.

Fabijanski, who earned his Ph.D. in biology in 1981, is the CEO and president of Agrisoma Biosciences Inc., the company he founded in 2001 in Quebec, Canada, to provide a strategy for more sustainable commercial transportation.

As airlines worldwide pledge to become carbon neutral by 2021 and cut their carbon footprint in half by 2050, Fabijanski believes he has found a solution. It lies in a

mustard-like oilseed called carinata. Closely resembling kale in appearance, the plant, a combination of canola and mustard, has long been eaten as a vegetable in North Africa.

Fabijanski’s team used plant-breeding techniques to develop carinata into a non-GMO, seed-producing crop containing high levels of oil and protein. The chemical composition of the oil makes it particularly well-suited to being refined into jet fuel. Once processed, carinata is chemically identical to conventional, fossil fuel-derived jet fuel.

In fact, Fabijanski says, anyone examining a gallon of jet fuel and a gallon of carinata-derived biojet fuel would be hard pressed to tell them apart. However, Agrisoma’s biojet fuel produces 77 percent lower greenhouse gas emissions than fossil fuels. That’s because carinata uses its capacity for photosynthesis to capture significantly more of the greenhouse gas CO2 from the atmosphere than is released by burning carinata biojet fuel.

Spring / Summer 2019 | 33

While less than 5 percent of flights are currently powered by blending biofuel with traditional jet fuel, he is optimistic that eventually half of the more than 79 billion gallons of fuel used by the airline industry will be replaced by biofuel.

In September 2018, Fabijanski fueled a second international flight, this time a United Airlines transatlantic run from San Francisco to Zurich. In April this year, Agrisoma began working with Canada’s Department of National Defence, fueling sustainable flights for military transport and patrol and for search and rescue. More biofueled flights are planned for the near future.

“The reality is that to address climate change, we need to either stop what we’re doing now, or dramatically change how we’re doing it.”

A MULTI-PRONGED APPROACH

But Fabijanski’s approach to climate change is aimed at tackling not just one major contributor to greenhouse gases, but two — air travel and meat production. Animal agriculture, particularly the production of beef, accounts for up to 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Deforestation, which is driven primarily by agriculture, contributes another 18 percent.

“The reality is that to address climate change, we need to either stop what we’re doing now, or dramatically change how we’re doing it,” Fabijanski said.

His solution focuses squarely on the latter option. After all, he notes, we’re unlikely to stop eating meat and traveling by air. What’s remarkable is that his innovative strategy appears to have killed two birds with one stone.

Not only does Agrisoma’s biojet fuel help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, he says, carinata crops also offer a new source of sustainably produced protein.

“The combination enables us to provide what we see as a solution that can address climate change from both angles — it’s not only the fuel we burn, but also where we get our food and how we eat.”

If that weren’t success enough, the plant also has the capacity to rejuvenate and enrich the soil.

This means that carinata is good for the environment, the world’s food supply and farmers.

Fabijanski says this multi-pronged approach to addressing climate change will have a significant impact that will increase over time as it results in more greenhouse gas savings and a positive effect on the food chain.

His company’s mantra, he stresses, is to grow carinata without taking food out of production.

“We want to add to the overall food supply through this animal feed product so we can produce energy and more food, but not increase the footprint of farming,” he said.

“That’s one of the big challenges — how to feed and power the planet without taking away natural prairie and pasture.”

The answer? Fabijanski developed carinata to flourish in areas where typical food crops won’t grow or during 34

seasons when food crops cannot be grown due to crop rotation.

“For us, it’s all about sustainable farming practices that then enhance the land and add back to it,” he said. “The last thing we want to do is cut down forests to feed people. The company we formed was built on the idea that we can do better with what’s available and we can do more with less.”

TWO MAJOR CHALLENGES

Fabijanski says his company faces two major challenges to get airlines to adopt biojet fuel. First, availability: At the time of writing, there are only two airports with a regular supply, LAX and Oslo Airport in Norway.

Agrisoma is tackling that issue by expanding carinata farming to South America and the southeast U.S. The company is also evaluating the crop as an option for European producers.

“Our objective is to go from millions of gallons to billions of gallons of fuel, so obviously that requires us to scale up production,” Fabijanski said.

The second challenge is to ensure that policy and incentives are in place to ensure appropriate pricing. Renewables in general carry a higher expense than fossil-derived products, but with the right policy and incentives, more inclusion of renewables becomes possible.

California is leading the way, Fabijanski says, with the California Air Resources Board and California Low Fuel Standards. He hopes other jurisdictions follow the state’s example by allowing fuel companies to generate carbon credits based on the greenhouse gas performance of their products, thus enabling the alternative fuel industry to play a bigger role in greenhouse gas reductions.

“When you have really good greenhouse gas mitigation, that fuel’s worth more and its value then gets offset within the market,” Fabijanski says, explaining California’s system.

“So, it’s not a subsidy, it’s not a grant, it’s a market-based measure that enables renewable fuels to compete with petroleum-based fuels, based on their performance and environmental attributes.”

And, after all, fossil fuel companies have been receiving enormous subsidies for decades, with the global total in 2017 alone reaching more than $300 billion, according to the International Energy Agency.

FEEDING THE WORLD

Born in 1960s Chicago to a machinist and a housewife, Fabijanski’s upbringing during a politically turbulent era not only helped forge his belief that it was possible to change things for the better, but also sharpened his determination to do so.

“I remember Civil Rights riots, Watergate, the Vietnam War — all these areas where, if you had enough people focused in the right direction, you could actually change things,” he said. “Part of that philosophy rubbed off on me.”

Fabijanski originally wanted to be a marine biologist, attending the University of Miami for his undergraduate degree. But his growing interest in genetics and protein chemistry and his desire to work with Maria Pellegrini, former professor and chair of biology and dean of research, brought him to graduate school at USC Dornsife.

There, Fabijanski said he found freedom to be creative and to think differently.

“Those were the best years of my life. Biology, at that point, was throwing out surprises that nobody could see six months before. It was a very exciting time to be part of that.”

Fabijanski’s first focus after earning his doctorate was how to use technology to increase crop yields in order to feed the world.

The solution — creating hybrid seeds, which provide better crop performance and overall yield — came to Fabijanski and a group of fellow scientists over beers in a Toronto bar.

Originally sketched out on a cocktail napkin, this pioneering concept underpinned Fabijanski’s first company, Paladin Hybrids, one of the earliest to apply techniques of biotechnology to the production of hybrid seeds.

Fabijanski and his team believed that to invigorate self-pollinating plants, they could make them into male or female plants, then combine them to create hybrid seeds.

Fabijanski filed the patent for the idea — one of more than 100 he currently holds.

It’s still the one that makes him happiest. It’s also the one, he notes, that’s underpinning the 22-million-acre-strong Canadian canola seed industry.

“To see an invention go to a patent, and then see that patent show up in regular commerce was a huge accomplishment, both from a patent and a development perspective,” he said.

FABIJANSKI PHOTOS COURTESY OF AGRISOMA BIOSCIENCES INC.

A LOFTY GOAL

When he’s not developing pioneering patents, Fabijanski is a keen amateur cyclist and music lover. He’s the proud owner of between 2,000 and 3,000 records from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, including Chicago blues and rare vinyl from L.A.’s hard-core punk scene, and he still cruises swap meets and record shops looking for unusual collectors’ items.

Fabijanski wakes every morning at sunrise to the squawking of Penelope, his wife’s 22-year-old African gray parrot, one of two she owns.

Penelope has adopted Fabijanski’s voice and her favorite phrases are ones — he pauses here, searching for a way to put it delicately — “you don’t say in church.

“Put it this way,” he adds, “she’d be really at home on a pirate ship.”

Fabijanski believes it’s his education as a scientist that has

helped him feel at home navigating a startup environment.

“With scientific training, maybe 95 percent of what you do usually doesn’t work. But you live for the times when everything goes right and you do something really new and innovative. You fall down a lot, but it’s really more about knowing that you can get up and go do something and get it right the next time, that keeps me going,” Fabijanski says, then chuckles. “Maybe I’m just a masochist that way.”

Of all the many times he has got it right in his life, Fabijanski is most proud of his degree from USC Dornsife.

It inspired him, he says, to try to change the world.

“You can tilt at windmills all day long and you’ll make a lot of noise and at the end you might feel good, but you may not change things,” Fabijanski warns. Instead, experience has taught him that the best way to effect change in sectors like energy, with its political capital, infrastructure and huge investment in major companies and jobs, is from within.

“You can actually work within a well-established industry to bring about some meaningful change so it becomes more sustainable,” Fabijanski says. “It’s a lofty goal, but I think we’ve made an impact in terms of demonstrating there are ways to create positive change that don’t require you to wear organic cotton T-shirts and Birkenstocks.”

CARINATA KING Steve Fabijanski stands in a field of carinata. The chemical composition of oil from the plant’s seeds make it particularly well-suited to being refined into jet fuel.

Carinata crops also offer a new source of sustainably produced protein.

Spring / Summer 2019 | 35

36

ENVIRONMENTAL INGENUITY Cars that run on kelp. Cosmetics made from waste products. An alternative energy model fueled by clean, green chemicals.

USC Dornsife researchers are creating innovative new products and businesses to mend the planet and create a strong economy.

By Michelle Boston

Picture this: Out in the open ocean, rows of farmed kelp spanning an area about the size of Mexico. Once harvested and processed, this rapid-growing seaweed would be turned into a fuel that you could pump into your car. No more relying on fossil fuels that take millions of years to form — and whose emissions into the atmosphere are the biggest contributor to the Earth’s rising temperatures.

Reams of scientific evidence including a recent report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — a nonpolitical assessment by 91 scientists from 40 countries — paints a stark picture for the economy, health and the environment if aggressive steps to reign in global warming are not taken in the next decade.

To tackle the challenge, USC Dornsife researchers have been testing creative solutions, from kelp biofuel to entirely new energy economies to redesigning waste. These solutions can be both entrepreneurial and profitable, creating innovative business models that can fuel jobs and a healthy economy while also saving the planet.

PLANT POWER

At the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies’ Marine Science Center on Santa Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles, researchers are testing whether kelp could become a renewable fuel.

Why kelp? Diane Kim, associate director for special projects at the institute, is part of the team heading up the biofuel research.

She says that the common giant kelp found along the coast of California is one of the fastest growing organisms on the planet. Requiring a minimum of natural resources, it can grow one to two feet per day under ideal conditions.

“Kelp is often referred to as a ‘sequoia of the sea’ because it can get so massive — up to 100 to 150 feet in length,” she said. “And these organisms start out not much larger than a bacterium.”

To grow, kelp requires sunlight and nutrients. Both are plentiful in the ocean, but there’s a hitch.

“Light is up near the surface and nutrients are found deeper

TURNING THE TIDE Kelp has the potential to become the biofuel of the future.

USC Dornsife researchers are currently testing a method designed to grow enough of the seaweed to transform the energy landscape.

Spring / Summer 2019 | 37

in the water column,” Kim explains. Along California’s coast, upwelling brings that water to the surface, which is why such large kelp forests are found near the shoreline. But that’s not the case in the open ocean, where kelp has the potential to be grown on a much larger scale.

With funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency on Energy, USC Wrigley Institute researchers, aided by an industry partner, are testing a depth-cycling strategy using a pilot-scale system nicknamed the “kelp elevator” — a structure in the ocean that moves kelp up and down, taking it to the surface to absorb sunlight, then back down to the nutrient-rich depths.

If successful, this system could be the basis for an autonomous network of floating kelp farms that could be scaled up to produce the amount of kelp biomass necessary to make macroalgae biofuel cost competitive with fossil fuel.

Over the next year or so, the team, which includes Kim, John Heidelberg, associate professor of biological sciences and environmental studies, David Ginsburg, associate professor (teaching) of environmental studies, and many undergraduate and graduate students, will test different depth-cycling strategies and varying species of macroalgae for optimal growth.

Once they can demonstrate kelp growth under those parameters, their industry partner, Marine BioEnergy, will start commercialization. Chemical engineers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are refining a process to turn the kelp into biofuel on a large scale through a process called hydrothermal liquefaction. The output, they anticipate, will be nearly carbon neutral.

Preliminary calculations suggest that if their concept works, kelp biofuel has the potential to meet the needs of all U.S. transportation fuel.

“This has the potential to transform the energy landscape as we know it,” said Kim. A NEW ENERGY ECONOMY

The USC Wrigley Institute’s kelp biofuel project continues a legacy of energy research at USC Dornsife that stretches back decades.

Enter the office of G. K. Surya Prakash, director of USC Dornsife’s Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute, and you’ll find clues that a brilliant and prolific scientist dwells within.

A bookcase lined with organic chemistry textbooks from years teaching fundamentals to undergraduates stretches along his desk, which is covered in neat piles of scientific papers nearly 2 feet high.

And if you look closely, you’ll find a series of curious instruments that reveal his life’s work: a palm-sized plastic propeller attached to a fuel cell that runs on methanol; a dinnerplatesized cook stove, also fueled by methanol; and a small glass bottle filled with what looks like powder laundry detergent.

Holding up the bottle, Prakash, George A. and Judith A. Olah Nobel Laureate Chair in Hydrocarbon Chemistry and professor of chemistry at USC Dornsife, explains that the unassuming white granules are a new product using technology developed at the institute to help large buildings manage their air quality more efficiently.

The particles, fabricated for commercial use by the company enVerid with a license from a Loker patent, absorb and capture carbon dioxide and other air contaminants.

38

“Think of any large building,” Prakash says. “Thousands of people are breathing in oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide.”

If carbon dioxide levels rise too high, people will get dizzy or sleepy. So typically, building ventilation systems will cycle in air from the outside every couple of hours to clear out carbon dioxide and other contaminants. That process uses a great deal of energy, Prakash explains. But when the granules are put into the HVAC system, it absorbs air impurities and reduces a building’s energy use by 20 to 30 percent.

“It’s a way to offset carbon dioxide that’s twofold,” he says; Reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in a building’s air circulation while also reducing the carbon footprint of energy used to manage the air quality.

Prakash has spent four decades at USC Dornsife thinking about energy — ways to store it and ways to harness it.

Those instruments in his office illustrate some of the practical uses of what’s known as the methanol economy, the visionary concept for creating renewable energy sources he originally developed with the late USC Dornsife Professor of Chemistry George Olah, a Nobel laureate and Prakash’s former colleague and mentor.

The starting point is carbon dioxide — a naturally occurring gas that is rapidly increasing in our atmosphere primarily due to human activities such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation. The methanol economy, a model by which chemistry is used to produce methanol in place of fossil fuels for energy storage, fuel and feedstocks, seeks to use carbon as a solution.

“Earth does not have an energy problem,” said Prakash.

“What it has is an energy storage and an energy carrier problem.

“The idea is that we’re going to take carbon dioxide and convert it back to some chemical fuels and feedstocks using the sun’s energy,” Prakash said.

Methanol is easily created in a lab, and at relatively low cost, he adds. The infrastructure already exists to put it into use as a fuel and a feedstock to replace petroleum-based products.

The United States has been slow to adopt the technology, mainly because oil companies don’t have much of a financial incentive to switch to the cleaner burning alternative.

However, countries like China, Iceland, Israel and Sweden have adopted the renewable fuel source for various uses, mainly for transportation. (A renewable methanol production plant operated by Carbon Recycling International in Reykjavik, Iceland, bears Olah’s name.)

India is also considering how to incorporate methanol as a transportation fuel as well as a cooking gas to replace widely used kerosene, which produces dangerous pollutants — hence the prototype of a methanol-fueled stove on Prakash’s desk.

A WINNING CATALYST FOR CHANGE

Zhiyao Lu is a postdoctoral scholar at the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute. Prior to earning his Ph.D. in chemistry from USC Dornsife in 2016, he was studying pharmaceutical sciences. But his interests began to shift. Around 2010, he began seeing reports showing that, as the biodiesel industry expanded and vegetable oil was being used on a larger scale, crude glycerin was being produced in rising quantities.

“More and more of it was ending up as waste or as a pollutant,” Lu said. “I realized it was a problem, and I set this goal for myself to provide at least one solution to make the situation better.”

He set his sights on finding a way to turn the waste material into something valuable. Working with USC Dornsife IL L U S T R AT I O N S BY DA N S T IL E S F O R U S C D O R N S IF E M AG A Z IN E

“THIS HAS THE POTENTIAL TO TRANSFORM THE ENERGY LANDSCAPE AS WE KNOW IT.” Professor of Chemistry Travis Williams, he developed a catalyst that enables an exceptionally efficient chemical transformation that converts glycerin into lactate. Usually derived from plants, lactate is a valuable natural preservative and antimicrobial agent with a wide range of applications.

Most often it is used in cosmetics and soaps.

Lu was interested in commercializing their findings.

Williams encouraged him to pursue support to translate their research. So, Lu applied for the 2018 USC Wrigley Sustainability Prize, which was created by the USC Wrigley Institute to inspire and support the development of entrepreneurial businesses focused on improving the environment.

He took home first place along with $7,000 to help get the business off the ground.

On the heels of that honor, Lu was selected to participate in the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program, a seven-week curriculum that supports scientists in bringing their technology to market. Through I-Corps, Lu and Williams met with potential customers,

partners and investors to learn the next steps that would take their technology from the lab to a commercial enterprise.

As a result, the pair’s company, Catapower, will be working with World Energy, a top supplier of biodiesel in the U.S., to co-develop the chemical process into a commercial one. Right now, they are building a demonstration of how that would work in their manufacturing plants.

Lu explains that with just a few extra steps and some additional staff, glycerin can easily be converted to lactate as part of each plant’s day-to-day operations, using existing equipment.

By Lu’s calculations, Catapower’s process could lower the overall cost of producing lactate by 60 percent, when compared with the current commercial practice used to manufacture it.

“Our business advisor said once we start producing it, it will be like printing money,” Lu said. “I’m not as optimistic, but I think the profit margin is good enough for us to run a sustainable business.”

GLAM IT UP A natural byproduct of the biodiesel industry is getting a second life. USC Dornsife researchers have invented a way to turn glycerin into a valuable natural preservative and antimicrobial agent that can be used to make cosmetics and soaps.

Spring / Summer 2019 | 39

40

SMOK E SIGNA L S JULIEN EMILE-GEAY Associate Professor of Earth Sciences When the crown jewel of industrial civilization — the automobile — was introduced in London, it was met with resistance. Wouldn’t burning fossil fuels pollute the air? “Yes, it would,” admitted its proponents, “but think of how much cleaner the streets would be for lack of horse manure.” As one technology has supplanted another, so has one pollution changed forms. Horse manure, for all its faults, is a great fertilizer. Carbon dioxide, the main byproduct of fossil fuel combustion, has no such virtue: Unless processed in ways that are currently very costly, it is a long-lived greenhouse gas, warming the planet for centuries on end.

This fact was surmised in 1896 (two years after the Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894) by Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist who saw little harm in a few degrees of warming. Sweden is cold, most of the time.

Over a century of scientific progress has shown how right he was about the human-made greenhouse effect, and how wrong he was to regard it as benign.

Anthropogenic global warming has nefarious consequences on many aspects of our environment, including sea-level rise, heat waves, droughts, invasive species migrations, and yes, wildfires. These days, few extreme weather events happen without my phone ringing and journalists asking, “Is this due to global warming?” (another way of asking, “Could we have prevented this?”). The answer is more complex than people want to hear: No single event can ever be directly tied to climate change, though we can now compute the odds of this event happening in today’s climate versus it happening in a hypothetical climate unaffected by our carbon emissions.

The result is, quite often, that such disasters were made more likely — sometimes vastly so — by the burning of fossil fuels that currently power our civilization.

Any fire scientist will tell you that there are multiple factors making California wildfires — like the Woolsey fire that ravaged Malibu last year — worse. Climate change, and its tendency to suck moisture from the ground, is a major one. Increased building at the wildland-urban interface, and the increased opportunities it affords for sparks to spread to vegetation, is another. Equally consequential is our related forest management practice of not letting even minor forest burns take their course, which is how natural California ecosystems had self-regulated for thousands of years. This has resulted in an accumulation of burnable material that fuels blazes of unprecedented scale. Finally, there is our rising population, and its social problems: Utility company accidents are a leading cause of human-started blazes, and most Angelenos remember that the 2017 Skirball fire, which brought scenes reminiscent of Mordor, was started by an illegal cooking fire at a homeless encampment in a brush area near the Sepulveda Pass.

California wildfires are the visible manifestations of our society’s difficulty in grappling with the same fundamental issue: inequity. Carbon is disproportionately emitted by the super-rich and their carbon-intensive lifestyles. Globally, it is poor countries that bear the brunt of this burden.

Carbon justice is social justice and creating a more just world will require nothing less of us than reinventing what it means to create and share energy and wealth, in ways that respect the planet and the creatures that live on it. Until we do, wildfires will keep asking the same question of us: “Is there a more pressing issue?”

PORTRAIT BY PETER ZHAOYU ZHOU PHOTO BY WALLY SKALIJ/LOS ANGELES TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES

Legacy

42

boat, opened in 1907. It thrived until after World War II, when its fortunes declined and the decision was made to close it down.

To get rid of the myriad small boats that had populated the lake during the camp’s heyday, the owners decided to scuttle them.

“Sinking them in the lake was an easy way to dispose of them,” says USC Dornsife’s Lynn Dodd, associate professor of

the practice of religion.

Not only did the small, locally made boats reflect the handicraft, skill and local traditions of boat building, she says, the sunken boats of Emerald Bay could also tell us the story of the emergence of vacations in our lives.

But all is not lost. An underwater Maritime Heritage Trail that allows divers to explore the sunken boats has been created thanks to a collaboration

between archaeologists and staff from the California State Parks. Now, Dodd is making it possible for USC students to help preserve the history of this area for future generations through her Fall semester course ARCG 305L, “Virtual and Digital Culture Heritage and Archaeology.”

“This is a whole maritime landscape that captures life at a certain time in the history of the United States, and it

hasn’t been fully documented yet,” she notes. “Our students can participate in research that’s meaningful and that gives California’s state park system new information about our cultural heritage.” —S.B.

Capturing the moment: An early 20th-century postcard shows vacationers admiring a freshly caught fish at Emerald Bay, Lake Tahoe, once the site of a popular holiday camp.

PHOTO COURTESY OF FRASHER FOTO POSTCARD COLLECTION, POMONA PUBLIC LIBRARY

The first Emerald Bay vacation camp on Lake Tahoe sprang up in the late 19th century as railroads began to snake over mountain passes, making it possible for city dwellers to escape the hubbub of city life and find peace, solace and recreation in nature. Boating, fishing and hiking were all tremendous draws. Lake Tahoe became a mecca for wilderness lovers, and a second Emerald Bay camp, accessible only by

LY N N D O D D , A S S O C I AT E P R O F E S S O R O F T H E P RACT ICE OF RELIGION

Faculty News

GIAN MARIA ANNOVI, associate professor of Italian and comparative literature, received the Howard R. Marraro Prize from the Modern Language Association of America.

SUSANNA BERGER, assistant professor of art history, received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She also was awarded the Roland H. Bainton Art and Music Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference.

DANIELA BLEICHMAR, professor of art history and history, won the 2018 Alice Award from the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

STEPHEN BRADFORTH, divisional dean for natural sciences and mathematics and professor of chemistry, received a 2019 Cottrell Plus STAR Award.

ANTONIO DAMASIO, University Professor, David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience, and professor of psychology, philosophy and neurology, received the Paul D. MacLean Award for Outstanding Neuroscience Research in Psychosomatic Medicine from the American Psychosomatic Society.

MARK IRWIN, professor of English, won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for his collection of poems titled Shimmer.

JUHI JANG, associate professor of mathematics, was named a 2019 Simons Fellow in mathematics.

STEVE KAY, Provost Professor of Neurology, Biomedical Engineering and Biological Sciences and director of convergent biosciences at the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

CARLY KENKEL, Gabilan Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, received a 2019 Sloan Research Fellowship.

REBECCA LEMON, professor of English, received the Marlowe Society of America Roma Gill Prize.

SMARANDA MARINESCU, assistant professor of chemistry, received a 2019 Sloan Research Fellowship.

DAPHNA OYSERMAN, Dean’s Professor of Psychology, was named an American Educational Research Association Fellow.

F R IE D L A N D E R P H O T O BY M AT T M E IN D L ; H U T C H IN S P H O T O BY P E T E R Z H AOY U Z H O U

MARGARET GATZ, professor of psychology, received the 2018 Distinguished Career Contribution in Gerontology Award from the Behavioral and Social Sciences Section of the Gerontological Society of America.

RHACEL PARREÑAS, professor of sociology and gender studies, has received the Jessie Bernard Award from the American Sociological Association.

ROBERT GURALNICK, professor of mathematics, was named a 2019 Simons Fellow in mathematics.

M. HASHEM PESARAN, John Elliot Distinguished Chair in Economics, was elected a distinguished fellow of the International Engineering and Technology Institute.

PIERRETTE HONDAGNEUSOTELO, Florence Everline Professor of Sociology, received the 2018 Julian Samora Distinguished Career Award from the Latina/o Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association.

ELENA PIERPAOLI, professor of physics and astronomy, was named a 2019 Simons Fellow in theoretical physics. She also received the 2018 Gruber Foundation Cosmology Prize.

Alumni News 1940s

IRIS CUMMINGS CRITCHELL (B.A., physical sciences, ’41), pioneering aviator and 1936 Olympic swimmer, has been named one of 19 living “Phi Mu History Makers” in honor of Phi Mu Fraternity’s alliance with the National Women’s History Museum.

1960s

RONALD BLACK (B.A., political science, ’68) has been appointed Grand Army of the Republic Highway Officer for Los Angeles County by the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War. Formerly U.S. Route 6, the highway was the longest transcontinental highway and now comprises I-110, I-5, Route 14, Route 395 and Route 6 from San Pedro, California, to the Nevada state line.

DALE GRIBOW (B.A., history, ’65) was selected by Palm Springs Life Magazine as Top Lawyer PI/DUI for 2018–19, as well as Top Lawyer by Inland Empire Magazine 2018–19.

1970s

DIANA TURNER (B.A., journalism, ’73) earned a Top Producer award from Vista Sotheby’s International Realty. She ranked in the Top 25 for 2018, among over 200 agents and brokers.

DAVID WATSON (B.A., economics, ’79) is CEO of Akiri Inc.

1990s

DIANA STARESINIC-DEANE (B.A., English literature and language, ’97) was appointed the new executive director of the Franklin County Historical Society in Ottawa, Kan., and a member of the Humanities Kansas Speakers Bureau.

Continued on page 44.

HONORS

Two professors elected AAAS fellows Academy honors Eric Friedlander of mathematics and David Hutchins of biological sciences.

Eric Friedlander, Dean’s Professor of Mathematics, and David Hutchins, professor of biological sciences, have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest multidisciplinary scientific society.

The AAAS reported that Friedlander received Eric Friedlander the distinction for his “distinguished contributions to several fields of mathematics” with an emphasis on algebraic geometry, as well as his leadership in the American Mathematical Society. The association also said in a statement that Hutchins earned the honor for his “fundamental contributions to understanding the influence of trace metals, ocean acidifiDavid Hutchins cation, and climate change on the productivity and evolution of marine phytoplankton populations.”

Friedlander, who chairs the Department of Mathematics, joined USC Dornsife as Dean’s Professor of Mathematics in 2008. Since 2016, he has been chair of the U.S. National Committee for Mathematics. Over the course of his career, he has served on the editorial boards of 10 different journals and has organized nearly three dozen mathematical conferences.

Hutchins, whose research interests include marine phytoplankton biology, nutrient and carbon cycling, and climate change, has been awarded over a dozen grants for his scientific research and has published 114 articles since 2006. He has served on several scientific committees and assisted in organizing numerous conferences for the National Science Foundation.

All fellows of the AAAS are chosen based on their scientific or social contributions to their areas of study. The process is rigorous, requiring a nomination and election from the AAAS Council.

Friedlander and Hutchins were honored at the AAAS Fellows Forum in February at the 2019 Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. —L.R. Spring / Summer 2019 | 43

F A C U LT Y C A N O N

For Better or Worse: Looking for Love in the Internet Age

Online dating and social media have revolutionized how we look for love. Julie Albright reveals how this technology has profound effects on our health and well-being.

When online dating began, there was no swiping left or right, no Photoshopped selfies or alluring videos, just lonely singles pouring out their hearts in internet chat rooms.

Initially, there was a certain shame attached to online dating, Julie Albright says. “But people were really opening up and talking about things, maybe for the first time. It was all about getting to know the inner person, and many people felt like they’d met their soul mate.”

The original stigma may have gone as online dating went mainstream with the dawn of the mobile internet era, but Albright, a lecturer in psychology, says everything else has changed, too, as the app economy commodified people and relationships into something far more superficial.

Online dating is now the second or third most common way — depending on age — for Americans to meet romantic partners. In Albright’s book, Left to Their Own Devices: How Digital Natives are Reshaping the American Dream (Prometheus Books, 2019), she describes how it has altered the landscape of love and romance in the 21st century and reveals how the ways we now look for love are affecting our relationships, our health and our well-being — even the very fabric of society.

Online dating creates the idea that there are thousands of romantic possibilities available to us. However, that brings problems of its own, Albright warns, because when faced with a vast array of choices, paradoxically, we are unable to choose.

“We keep thinking there are endless choices, that maybe someone better will come along,” she says. “But at the end of the day, people who don’t choose are going to end up lonely because they’re not in a relationship. You have to choose and you have to commit to build something.”

But by facilitating a “hookup” culture, dating apps have created an environment that’s not conducive to settling down.

Dating has become a sport, Albright argues, rather than a means to build a long-term relationship. The result is that people find themselves lonely or anxious without knowing why.

“You would think we’re more connected than ever,” she says, “yet paradoxically, as we become increasingly enraptured and mesmerized by our devices, we’re separating from one another.” —S.B.

OUTSIDE LOOKING IN: A NOVEL Ecco / Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Writer in Residence Emeritus T.C. Boyle explores the first scientific and recreational forays into LSD and its mind-altering possibilities. Taking us back to the 1960s, Boyle writes about the early days of a drug whose effects have reverberated widely throughout our culture.

SHAPED BY THE WEST, VOL. 1 & 2 University of California Press / William Deverell, professor of history, and Anne Hyde provide a nuanced look at the past, balancing topics in society and politics representing diverse people from across the West and the shifting frontier.

44

ALBRIGHT PHOTO BY CODY PICKENS; COMPOSITE BY LE T T Y AVIL A

TIME’S CONVERT Viking Press / Professor (Teaching) of History Deborah Harkness’ engaging and fascinating follow-up to the All-Souls trilogy appeals to fans of the supernatural and history alike.

D O R N S I F E F A M I LY TROJANA LIT Y truths we tell each other and ourselves. Her poems return again and again to our relationships with each other, with parents, children and loved ones, and with God.

PAST FORWARD: ESSAYS IN KOREAN HISTORY Anthem Press / Kyung Moon Hwang, professor of history and East Asian languages and cultures, introduces core features of Korean history that illuminate current issues and pressing concerns including recent political upheavals, social developments and cultural shifts.

WHY KAREN CARPENTER MATTERS University of Texas Press / Karen Tongson, associate professor of English, gender studies and American studies and ethnicity, explores Karen Carpenter’s enduring ability to transcend cultural differences, bridging not only American suburbia and Tongson’s native Philippines but also diverse communities and fan cultures worldwide.

P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F M I C H A E L WAT E R M A N; P O R T R A I T BY P E T E R Z H AOY U Z H O U

WORLDMAKING: RACE, PERFORMANCE, AND THE WORK OF CREATIVITY Duke University Press / Dorinne Kondo, professor of American studies and ethnicity and anthropology, theorizes the racialized structures of inequality that pervade theatre and the arts.

SLIPPERY SURFACES Finishing Line Press / Donna SpruijtMetz, director of the USC mHealth Collaboratory and professor (research) psychology, takes an unflinching journey into personal history, the lies and

ELECTRIFIED VOICES: HOW THE TELEPHONE, PHONOGRAPH, AND RADIO SHAPED MODERN JAPAN, 1868–1945 Columbia University Press / Kerim Yasar, assistant professor of East Asian languages and cultures, examines the roles played by the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, radio and sound film in the discursive, aesthetic and ideological practices of Japan from 1868 through World War II.

From Cattle to Genomics

A trailblazer in computational biology, Michael Waterman got an unlikely start in life.

Growing up on an isolated livestock ranch in southwestern Oregon, Michael Waterman worked grueling hours. When he wasn’t in school, he was tending cattle and sheep, repairing fences and putting up hay for the winter.

It was an unlikely start for a man who is widely regarded as a trailblazer in computational biology and whose career has taken him around the world, bringing him national and international recognition. Waterman, University Professor, USC Associates Chair in Natural Sciences and professor of biological sciences, computer science and mathematics, makes no bones about his relief at leaving those early years on that remote ranch far behind.

“The reason I’m here is that — to get away from that life,” he says.

University offered a longed-for escape route.

“It was just like going on a roller coaster of knowledge. It was incredible” After earning his Ph.D. in statistics at Michigan State University, Waterman taught mathematics at Idaho State University. He spent summers at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he first became involved with researching genetic sequencing. He joined USC Dornsife in 1982.

Waterman’s research concentrates on the creation and application of mathematics, statistics and computer science to molecular biology, particularly to DNA, RNA and protein sequence data. He is co-developer of two fundamental algorithms used for mapping the human genome: the Smith-Waterman algorithm for sequence comparison and the Lander-Waterman formula for physical mapping.

His current focus is taking his original work in aligning genetic sequence information and revising it, using the new method of alignment-free sequence analysis, which uses a more statistical approach to cope with vast volumes of data.

A fellow of the National Academy of Inventors and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, Waterman still considers “getting off the farm” to be his greatest achievement.

“I’m serious,” he chuckles. “After that, it’s all gravy.” —S.B. Spring / Summer 2019 | 45

ALUMNI CANON

2010s

presents stories that pass through landscapes of loneliness, stagnation and bad good intentions, with characters often confronting the disparity between illusion and reality.

WONDER AND CRUELTY: ONTOLOGICAL WAR IN IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE Roman & Littlefield / Steven Johnston (B.A., political science, ’82; B.A., psychology, ’82) explores how the classic holiday film rehearses an ontological war between contending parties with rival conceptions of what it means to lead a meaningful life.

THE PRETENDER OF PITCAIRN ISLAND Cambridge University Press / Tillman W. Nechtman (M.A., history, ’02; Ph.D., history, ’05) shares the tale of Joshua W. Hill, the fraudulent ruler whose reign has, until now, been swept aside as an idiosyncratic moment in the larger saga of Fletcher Christian’s mutiny against Captain Bligh, and the mutineers’ unlikely settlement of Pitcairn.

BEYOND THE LIGHTS No Record Press / Ryan Shoemaker (Ph.D., literature and creative writing, ’14) 46

TEMPERATURE RISING: IRAN’S REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS AND WARS IN THE MIDDLE EAST Rowman & Littlefield / Nader Uskowi (B.A., international relations, ’71) tells the story of how the Quds Force and its Shia militias fought on three fronts to advance the Islamic Republic’s militant interpretation of Shia Islam and create a contiguous land corridor linking Iran through Iraq to Syria, Lebanon and the Israeli northern fronts.

TARA CAMPBELL (B.A., political science, ’15; B.A., broadcast and digital journalism, ’15; M.A., public administration, ’16), at age 25, was voted mayor of the city of Yorba Linda, California, making her the youngest woman mayor in U.S. history for a city of 30,000 or more.

In Memoriam

DAVID ARELLANES (B.A., physical education, ’82) of Montrose, CA (08/02/2018) at age 59.

ANNE CRONIN GILLMAN (B.A., political science, ’10) joined the U.S. Foreign Service in July 2018 as an economic officer and is currently serving at the U.S. Embassy in The Hague, Netherlands.

THOMAS HOBSON BATES JR. (B.A., physics, ’51) of Petaluma, CA (11/29/2018) at age 91; professor of world business at San Francisco State University; member of the National Defense Executive Reserve.

CRISTINA ANN GROSSU (B.A., sociology, ’12) was named to the National Association of Realtors “30 Under 30 Class of 2019.”

MARY CHAVARRIA (Ph.D., English, ’92) of Los Angeles, CA (1/16/2019) at age 68; professor at California State University, Northridge, Mission College, and Pierce College; lover of literature.

KELLY OKI (B.A., psychology, ’10) has become an associate at Fisher Phillips, a national labor and employment law firm representing employers.

Marriages and Births

SARAH HIENTON (B.A., international relations, ’08) and her husband, Matt Hienton, welcomed a son, Owen Matthew.

EDWARD HYNES (B.A., psychology, ’08) and his wife, Laura Lefkow-Hynes, welcomed son Edward Michael “Teddy” Hynes on Feb. 20, 2019, in Chicago.

VIETNAM BAO CHI: WARRIORS OF WORD AND FILM Casemate / Marc Yablonka (M.P.W. ’90) brings together interviews with 35 combat correspondents who reported on the Vietnam War. They wrote the stories of Vietnam, captured the images and filmed the television coverage of their fellow servicemen on the battlefields from the Mekong Delta in the south to the DMZ in Central Vietnam, from the Tet Offensive in 1968 to the fall of Saigon in 1975.

KATHERINE WESTON (B.S., exercise science, ’99) and GARY WESTON JR. (B.A., political science, ’99) welcomed their third son, Aaron Patrick, on Aug. 2, 2018.

JOHN LAMBERT (B.A., history, ’13) and Kristen Lambert welcomed their first child, Madeline Virginia, on Dec. 9, 2018, in Redwood City, California.

JENNY LANEY (B.A., interdisciplinary studies, ’03) and Zach Laney adopted a daughter, Carmon.

STEVEN RICHARD VOSSMEYER, (B.S., social sciences [economics], ’02), and Taylor Radvany welcomed a girl, Lawsyn Paige.

JOSEPH PETER D’ARELLI (B.A., biological sciences, ’64) of Santa Ynez, CA (1/30/2019) at age 78; established the San Gabriel Valley Trojan Club; eye doctor for the USC football team; talented musician.

MARY DRURY (B.A., international relations, ’91) of Las Vegas, NV (12/6/2018) at age 49; founder of Law Offices of Mary J. Drury & Associates.

CLARA GETMAN (B.A., history, ’40) of White Plains, MD (1/22/2019) at age 100; loving mother and grandmother; active member of her church.

ABDULGHANI HASAN ABDUL GHANI (M.S., political science and linguistics, ’78; Ph.D., linguistics, ’80) of Dallas, TX (11/30/2018) at age 72; former head of investment banking at Aljazira Capital in Jeddah and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; enjoyed farming and spending time with family.

BOBBYE LOUISE WILLIAMS GILBERT (M.A., English, ’53) of Midland, TX (10/17/2018) at age 89;

distinguished college professor at Paul Quinn College, University of Pine Bluff, and East Texas State University; celebrated author; prominent speaker and presenter.

MERRILL DUARD HARDY (Ph.D., kinesiology, ’68) of St. George, UT (1/9/2019) at age 89; beloved professor at California State University, Northridge; avid golfer, singer and lover of sports.

RUBINA HARTEL (B.A., international relations, ’88) of Colorado Springs, CO (12/4/2018) at age 52; former military intelligence soldier for the U.S. Army; accomplished runner and cyclist; avid reader and athlete.

STANISLAO IEBBA (B.A., psychology, ’01) of Deerfield, NH (1/10/2019) at age 39; served in public service through AmeriCorps; administrator in funding in public health; lover of nature and animals.

DANIEL KAUFMANN (B.A, history, ’39) of Los Angeles, CA; (11/26/2018) at age 100; former pilot and captain in the U.S. Army; assistant attorney general; professor at USC Gould School of Law and Loyola Law School; judge at the Los Angeles County Superior Court and presiding judge of the superior court in Van Nuys, California; lifelong piano player.

WALTER HENRY KLEFFEL (B.A., anthropology, ’54) of Oak Harbor, WA (1/26/2019) at age 86; former A-6 pilot during the Vietnam War; employee at Whatcom Security; lover of woodcarving, photography and drawing.

SAMMY KWAN (B.A., social sciences and communication/ economics, ’90) of Phoenix, AZ (2/5/2019) at age 51; member of the U.S. Army Reserve; former IBM systems administrator; software engineer at Intel Corporation; baseball card collector; car enthusiast.

D O R N S I F E F A M I LY WILLIAM LAMBERT (Ph.D., social ethics and religion, ’08) of Monterey, CA (12/16/18) at age 62; educator with North Monterey County Unified School District; avid traveler and outdoorsman; proud father of four.

K. BRUCE MILLER (Ph.D., philosophy, ’63) of Bonita, CA (12/23/2018) at age 91; former chaplain and USC Dornsife Department of Philosophy professor; lover of teaching, pastoring, mentoring and the violin.

GREGORY NAROG (B.S., biological sciences, ’75) of Moreno Valley, CA (1/8/2019) at age 66; avid entrepreneur and businessman; voracious reader; lover of music, hiking, gardening and spending time with family.

P E T R U S K A P H O T O B Y P E T E R Z H A O Y U Z H O U ; VA N A R S D O L P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F T H E VA N A R S D O L FA M I LY ; H A B I N E K P H O T O B Y R O G E R S N I D E R

LINDA TALBERT (Ph.D., comparative literature, ’79) of Boulder, CO (2/13/2019) at age 67; professor of philosophy, literature and women’s studies; scholar of literature; animal lover.

R EMEMBER ING

JOHN PETRUSKA, professor of biology, died Feb. 14. He was 86.

Born to immigrants from Czechoslovakia, he grew up in a poor mining town in rural Canada.

His father got him a chemistry set when he was 5, sparking a lifelong curiosity about science.

Petruska earned his doctorate in chemical physics in 1962 and joined the USC Dornsife faculty in 1969. He was widely respected in his fields of research and teaching and believed that being an educator was just as important as being a scientist.

JOHN W. WITT (B.A., social sciences and communication, ’54) of San Diego, CA (11/4/2018) at age 86; colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps; San Diego city attorney; respected author and lecturer; lover of travel, family and public service.

SEND ALUMNI NEWS FOR CONSIDERATION TO USC Dornsife Magazine SCT-2400, Los Angeles, CA 90015 or submit online at dornsife.usc. edu/alumni-news. Information may be edited for space.

Listings for the “Alumni News” and “In Memoriam” sections are compiled based on submissions from alumni and USC Dornsife departments as well as published notices from media outlets.

dornsife.usc.edu/alumni-news

A Student of Stoicism

For more than 25 years, Thomas Habinek, Dean’s Professor of Classics, was a respected colleague and beloved mentor to the USC community.

MAURICE ‘DON’ VAN ARSDOL JR., professor emeritus of sociology died Sept. 19, 2018. He was 90.

For 38 years at USC Dornsife, Van Arsdol mentored students and faculty in demography and population studies. His research looked at concerns such as immigration in the United States and in China, where he also studied family planning issues.

Van Arsdol often recruited students from Asian and African nations, and he and his wife welcomed them into their home.

Said Ed Ransford, professor of sociology at USC Dornsife: “He and Marian really provided them with a kind of support system.”

Dean’s Professor of Classics Thomas Habinek, a longtime chair of the Department of Classics who produced groundbreaking scholarship on Roman rhetoric, literature and philosophy, died Jan. 19. He was 65.

Born on Christmas Day 1953 in Cleveland, where he grew up, Habinek had a restless intellect that continued to move on to new challenges, from old-school classical philology to the politics of Latin literature, from anthropology to the issue of diversity throughout the ages.

“He was outstandingly generous, intellectually and in other ways, to his colleagues and students,” said William “Greg” Thalmann, professor of classics and comparative literature, who succeeded Habinek as chair of the Classics Department.

Habinek’s registered domestic partner of 16 years, Hector Reyes, associate professor (teaching) of art history at USC Dornsife, recalled something Habinek did before undergoing surgery shortly after being diagnosed with stage-four liver cancer in 2006.

“It was not certain whether the surgery would be a success, and we were prepared for the worst outcome,” Reyes said. Habinek felt a need to repaint the walls of the Classics Department. “He wanted to leave them with beauty. … It was hard work and it was a truly Stoic gesture, and not only because his response to possible impending death was hard work for the benefit of others.

“As a student of Stoicism, he understood that beauty is the material form of truth, a shared experience of order that exceeds the self. This Stoic attitude perfectly captures him.”

Spring / Summer 2019 | 47

IN MY OPINION

Winning Recipe

S. Julio Friedmann ’95 describes the steps needed to create a successful future in terms of climate and energy.

Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it. — Mark Twain

48

S. Julio Friedmann graduated from USC Dornsife with a Ph.D. in geology in 1995. He was principal deputy for fossil energy at the U.S. Deptartment of Energy from 2013–16, and chief energy technologist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He lives in Livermore, California, with his wife, also a graduate of USC, and two children.

CARBON CAPTURE PHOTO BY ARNI SAEBERG; OWN TOMORROW PHOTO BY CHRIS SHINN

The science is settled around climate change. The action plan is not.

Beyond the astonishing scientific consensus on humaninduced climate change from greenhouse gas emissions, reasonable people disagree on what to do. Delays in implementing important policies worldwide have heightened the urgency to act, and during the last 20 years, we’ve made remarkable progress in deploying efficiency measures and some kinds of clean energy. Still, several years of growing emissions and lack of progress after the 2016 Paris Agreement have largely ended the happy talk in serious policy and business circles. The technology gets better — we do not.

So, what should we all do?

I’ve worked in industry, government and academia. I have my own small business and have worked in large institutions.

The bottom line is we know the recipe for creating the future we want. We’ve used it many times already, including in the energy space.

Solar and fracking, nuclear and wind, LEDs and batteries: There’s a specific set of actions we take — in order — to make it all work.

Invest in innovation: Over the past 100 years, important clean energy innovations started with federal and other public research and development funds. These programs helped university, business and government researchers solve vexing problems and make rapid advances towards commercialization.

Government procurement: Solar panels, fuel cells, lithiumion batteries, nuclear reactors, and LEDs all moved from the benchtop to early applications through government purchase, often by the Department of Defense, NASA or the Department of Transportation. These public purchases

created early markets and moved these technologies down the cost curve.

Push into markets through policy: A combination of market incentives (like investment tax credits) and regulatory limits (like appliance efficiency standards) created markets where these clean energy innovations could benefit from commercial entrepreneurs and economies of scale, making rapid and profound improvements on cost and performance. These improvements enabled further policy measures such as renewable portfolio standards without unreasonable fiscal commitments. For climate change, policy measures are essential to create and expand these markets and provide competitive landscapes for cleaner tech.

Innovate in business and finance: This is where America shines. Once markets are aligned with policy outcomes, independent financiers, entrepreneurs and business leaders unleash their own innovations and capital to create new jobs and industries, develop export technologies and markets, and reinvent the present into the future while creating wealth.

This recipe is most important for those approaches that have not yet cleared into widespread markets. Advanced nuclear, the next wave of solar and batteries, carbon capture technology, CO2 recycling, and other approaches require additional support and investment. We need more options, not fewer.

Two individuals embodied and mastered the recipe set nearly a century ago. Vannevar Bush served President Roosevelt before and during World War II. Bush created the modern scientific enterprise in 1939 with two massive scientific and technical efforts: the National Defense Research Committee and the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Knowing that we needed more than we had to beat the Axis powers, his efforts delivered many critical innovations that helped the Allies win. These large public investments in research, design and development engendered the first round of government procurements for the innovations that followed.

Daniel Guggenheim created aviation business. He made supply chains and whole enterprises, and helped drive public policy to support them. He also invested some of his personal fortune in fundamental math, science and engineering, mirroring and augmenting public investments. Together, the efforts and investments stimulated by Bush and Guggenheim created the modern aviation industry and U.S. military superiority.

The recipe is the same for clean energy and climate, and the potential commercial and national benefits are equally great. The punchline is that there is much we can do to rapidly reduce and even reverse greenhouse gas emissions. Not much can be done individually — most of the recipe must be organized and executed at the state, national or international level, or by companies in the private sectors. To that end, the central task for citizens is to elect individuals who care about the topic of clean energy and who seek to act.

Own Tomorrow USC Dornsife is creating the first new model for an elite research university in more than 50 years by bringing the university into the public square in ways never imagined. This new initiative connects our world-leading scholars with public and private sector leaders to work hand in hand — bringing a new way of thinking to complex issues.

Learn more at dornsife.usc.edu/usc-dornsife-own-tomorrow.

Spring / Summer 2019 | 49

CHANGE SERVICE REQUESTED

Non-Profit Org. U.S. Postage

PAID

University of Southern California

University of Southern California SCT-2400 Los Angeles, California 90089

Life Moment

C L I M A T E F O R WA R D : N AV I G A T I N G T H E P O L I T I C S O F C L I M A T E C H A N G E

“I know the dangers of climate change, and so do you.”

— Former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry

PHOTO BY KRISTI PLAZA