In July, Nancy Mathews arrived at UVM as the new dean of the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources. She brings with her a rich understanding of problems that blur the boundaries between wildlife, ecology, and people — like the deadly chronic wasting disease spreading through central Wisconsin deer herds. Her decades of field research on white-tailed deer taught Mathews that, “first, we need to let the data speak,” she says. And that, “solutions often begin with deep listening to people on many sides of an issue,” she says — like hunters and state regulators.
Mathews, who was professor of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, also brings a long-held commitment to service learning, following four years as the director of Wisconsin’s Morgridge Center for Public Service.
UVM Today spoke with Nancy Mathews to discuss her plans for the Rubenstein School and her vision for environmental education.
UVM Today: Recently, Jennie Stephens, a professor in the Rubenstein School who studies energy systems, said her research aims to help people navigate a world of “extreme complexity, radical uncertainty, increasing connectivity, unprecedented rates of change, and overwhelming unsustainability.” Do you see the world this way?
Nancy Mathews: Yes, she's nailed it. From the standpoint of sustainability, all trends point in the wrong direction. As the dean, I’m tasked with asking: how are we ensuring that we are preparing students to thrive and lead in this rapidly changing world? We should not be mired in tradition. We need to be forward-thinking, imagining how these issues are going to play out 20 years from now. When today’s students peak in their careers, they must be prepared with the knowledge and skills they need to lead the efforts to resolve complex problems.
For example, we shouldn't necessarily train doctoral students in our likeness. Success is not only defined by going on to a post at a research-intensive university. Success is having the impact that they want to have — whether it's going into nonprofits, government, higher ed, or corporate America. Executive directors of environmental nonprofits have a huge capacity to make a difference. They would do well to have a Ph.D. that prepares them to do that work.
I'm a big believer in experiential learning, whether it's through an agency, nonprofit, business or school district. Students learn things on-site, in communities that they cannot possibly glean from the classroom. Students need to be honing communication skills, conflict resolution and negotiation. These are the kinds of skills they’re going to need to work in an interdisciplinary team; no one will solve complex problems on their own. I also want to see every student who graduates from Rubenstein immersed in a conversation about cultural awareness and cultural humility. They're not going to be global problem-solvers if they don't understand some of the fundamental human elements of belief systems.
How do you see conservation changing in this century?
Conservation in the past — maybe it wasn't intended that way — was about privilege. We’re realizing now that the underserved are carrying the brunt of many environmental catastrophes and environmental injustices. And if we don't pay attention to these situations around the world, we are going to see increasing disparities that lead to massive loss of resources and loss of people. In the Rubenstein School, we hope to build our capacity to help prepare students to better understand key issues of human and resource interactions. In the next nine months, we will hire a team of new faculty, a cluster, around the theme of sustainability studies and global environmental equity. They’ll engage in research and teaching on issues related to resource distribution, and power and privilege. Disparity and inequity drives many environmental issues now.
Where do you see climate change fitting into undergraduate education?
All students should leave all universities with an understanding of the role that climate change plays in questions of sustainability — and that it is not reversible. We are now into the Anthropocene. If our students don't know that term yet, they will within the next 12 months, because it's part of the Rubenstein curriculum now! Technology is going to be a part of the equation, playing a critical role in mitigating the conditions the result from climate change — and students need to understand that too.
What have been your main research interests over the years?
My research has had several lives. Early on for my doctoral work, I studied white-tailed deer behavior. As an assistant professor at Texas Tech, I shifted my focus to songbirds, when I began to study the relationship between livestock grazing and brown-headed cowbird parasitism. Cowbird parasitism is a major threat to some species of songbirds in pinyon-juniper habitat. When I moved to the University of Wisconsin, I continued to focus on cowbird parasitism in the Southwest. I had at least a dozen graduate students come through, looking at various aspects of cowbird behavior that ranged from the rates of parasitism to the dynamic relationship between location of breeding, foraging and roosting habitat. A lot of this research was focused on questions connected to livestock grazing practices and it also fed into complex questions about climate change and drought as well.
When chronic wasting disease in white-tailed deer hit the scene in 2002, I was immediately drawn into studying it because of my doctoral work that focused on deer behavior — and deer behavior was a fundamental piece of understanding how CWD was transmitted. I develop a major research effort on chronic wasting disease to understand patterns of deer movement, dispersal rates, family group composition, longevity — and how these might relate to the transmission of CWD. We didn't know for a long time how CWD was transmitted — and we still don't fully understand. Researchers found out recently that plants are absorbing the disease prions and that there’s a good chance that the deer are consuming them. So the prions are on the landscape and in the soil. But we didn’t know that at the time I was studying this. It's quite alarming to know that the prions degrade slowly in the environment and persist for at least three to five years. Given that they may be transmitted through both direct contact with other deer and indirect means through the environment, such as through soil or plant contamination, it is not at all surprising that we are facing an uphill battle to control the spread of the disease.
Why was this issue controversial?
The deer and chronic wasting disease story really heated up in early 2000s because there were conflicts between landowners and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. Some people thought the DNR wasn't being aggressive enough in culling deer; some of the landowners and hunters thought they were being too aggressive. Part of the landowner and hunter concerns focused on not disrupting cultural tradition of the hunting season. In Wisconsin, as in many other states, deer are the sacred cows! You mess with the hunting season, and you have just disrupted a long-held tradition that is part of the fabric of many residents’ lives. There is a huge traditional deer hunt during Thanksgiving Week. So some of the proposed management prescriptions to slow the spread of CWD changed the nature of the hunt by increasing removal of does using tools such as the “Earn-a-Buck” requirement in the CWD management zone. The DNR looked at ways to encourage hunters to take more females off the landscape to help reduce the population. This policy, in addition to changing the dates of the hunt, turned the culture of the deer season upside down. Landowners and hunters pushed back.
My work was really in the thick of this controversy. I worked closely with landowners to develop trust, and to have them allow my teams access to their land in order to trap and radio-collar deer. Our results suggested that deer are not, in fact, dispersing long distances across the landscape. Dispersal is limited to young bucks that left areas where they were born, traveling between two and five miles before establishing a new “home.” We also confirmed a well-known phenomena that females were staying in their home ranges for life; 95 percent stayed just when they were born. They form matrilineal groups. Bucks are dispersing, but usually not far. Our work suggests that the family groups of females are becoming the hotspots where you might find the highest rates of environmental contamination.
You’re an accomplished researcher and administrator — and also a parent. Tell us about your thoughts on finding a work/life balance?
My son is 18 and just started as a freshman at a small college in western Colorado, and my daughter is 20 and she is a sophomore at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He's going into business with a focus on sustainability, and she’s considering medicine with a focus on the environment. The fruit haven’t fallen too far from the tree!
A passion of mine is working with faculty to not only help them navigate the tenure pathway, but also how to balance their professional aspirations with their life outside of academia. I have been well-served by several great mentors in my career; I hope to establish a mentoring program within RSENR. Many academics struggle with the work/life balance, and, in some cases, this well-known challenge discourages bright young Ph.D.’s from going into research tracks at major research institutions. We must do a better job of helping faculty to find the balance that allows them to achieve their goals.
I'm of the philosophy that you can't do it all well — at the same time. You have to change your focus over time. One of the things I did was reduce my travel when my children were toddlers and youngsters. This was essential because I was also a single parent. My professional career may look different from many others because I didn't travel a lot. Did that hurt my career? I don't know. You can see me as a dean today and say, “It didn't hurt you.” But it did hurt then because there were many things that I let go of both as a parent and as a professional. It was a tough trajectory to get tenure.
Every parent has to make some tough choices and those choices will impact either your family or your career, or both. You have to triage, be clear about your priorities, and stick with them. It's very difficult. I don't think there's any good solution for timing when you have kids — if you want kids — or how many kids you should have.
I think there's a big challenge for us to better support parents in academia — not just women, though women still have the larger burden of childcare. That’s still a fact these days. We need to look for ways to support them and to continue to encourage them to set the bar high for their scholarship. They shouldn't be encouraged to drop the bar; they should be encouraged, by having appropriate support.
I don't think you can do it all well the same time. I think you have to plan it out in segments, and you can choose when to change your focus. So, for me, changing my focus came once my kids left the house. Then I was ready to move into a high-intensity job, like this one. And when they were younger, the attention was on the kids — and I don't regret that for an instant. When I die, my tombstone is not going to say, “She had 99 publications.” I hope to have left a legacy of healthy, thriving children and their families. That’s much more important to me.