Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
other physicists, questioned two widely held assumptions among scientists:
that society can achieve well-being only through ever-greater expenditures
of energy, and that physicists should work only on problems of energy sup-
ply, not of energy use.The Twin Rivers project, carried out by physicists and
engineers, was a model of a new application of physics research.
In his first years at CEES, parallel with his work on energy efficiency,
Socolow launched a second multi-disciplinary study, this one focusing on
the proposed construction of Tocks Island Dam on the Delaware River,
just above the Delaware Water Gap, between New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Tocks Island Dam was slated to be the largest dam in the Northeast. The
study explored the analytical methods of ecologists, hydrologists, energy
analysts, and economists, calling into question the applicability of the
assumptions used in each field. Early work on the resulting book,
Bound-
aries of Analysis: An Inquiry into the Tocks Island Dam Controversy,
co-edited
with colleagues Harold Feiveson and Frank Sinden, may have influenced
the decision of Governor William Cahill of New Jersey to question the dam
in his role as a member of the Delaware River Basin Commission. Cahill's
concerns changed the political balance, and the project was scuttled a few
years later. Today, a stretch of the Delaware is a part of the National Wild
and Scenic River System. Socolow observes: “It is not much of an over-
simplification to say that in the United States, until the Tocks Island dam
controversy, all dams of that type that had been proposed were built; after
Tocks Island, all similar dam proposals were rejected before construction.”
Socolow, succeeding Reynolds and Glassman, served as director of CEES
from 1979 to 1997. Among his colleagues were Robert Williams, an influ-
ential analyst of energy technology and policy, and Frank von Hippel, a spe-
cialist in nuclear energy and arms control and a leader of Russian-US arms
control collaborations. Socolow saw his job as twofold: to connect CEES
with the rest of the university through formal teaching and supervision of
work by undergraduates and graduate students, and to “infect the disci-
plines” at Princeton, to nudge the academic enterprise to take the environ-
mental challenge seriously.
Socolow believes CEES has had an impact on a lot of individual careers
of people with straight science backgrounds, typically physics backgrounds:
“I describe our place as a roundhouse.They come in, oriented in one direc-
tion . . . and we help them turn about thirty degrees, and they leave in a
different direction, . . . still using physics, but in a different way.” Socolow
advises students to get a firm grounding in physics or another discipline
