STEVE LANSING: I was going to do physics as an undergraduate,
and then I got a chance to go to the island of Bali when I was a
junior, I guess. And I just about decided that I was not
going to break new ground in physics, and I'd read some
anthropology and it was fascinating, so I thought I'd
give that a try. And it kept getting more interesting.
STEVE LANSING: Read.
STEVE LANSING: I don't know that I did experiments. I had a
telescope when I was in the fourth grade or maybe the fifth
grade. But I watched things. I think I was more of an observer,
a kind of, more like a naturalist child
than an experimenter.
STEVE LANSING: I like everything about being a
scientist or researcher. I can't believe I get to do it. I
get to think up questions and pursue them in interesting
places. And the National Science Foundation, if I come up
with a good enough question, will help me do it. So I think
it's fabulous. I think it's, it's a, it's a dream career.
STEVE LANSING: Clarity, I think. You have to think hard
about the questions that you're asking. Coming up with the
right questions, I think. Coming up with good questions,
figuring out how to answer them, and, and thinking about the
nuances of the things that you're doing. Those are the
skills that we try to teach the students, right.
I mean people go around, I think, most of the time,
thinking they understand things. And it takes an act of will,
kind of a mental state of realizing that probably you
don't really understand, and trying to think through, what is
the problem, what are you actually seeing. I think that's
the hard part, and I think that's key.
STEVE LANSING: Well, one benefit of my research is that
there is now a new World Heritage, The UNESCO World
Heritage on the island of Bali for the subaks and the water
temples that I have studied over the last couple of decades. And
I was able to write the nomination document and shape
that plan. So that, I hope, will have a real effect for the
people within the sites, I mean, for the Indonesians.
And then we're hoping also that it will provide a new model for
UNESCO for how to manage World Heritage in a way that has more
to do with the needs of the local people, putting them in
charge rather than top-down, which is how these things are
usually managed in the world.
STEVE LANSING: Clifford Geertz had an enormous impact on me and
Jürgen Habermas in my younger days, and then Chris Langton and
Stu Kaufman and John Holland at the Santa Fe Institute gave me a
new way of seeing the world. And I think I have to say a
couple of physicists, actually: Richard Feynman, who got
interested in the Balinese calendar with me and
also Mary Galman.
STEVE LANSING: I spend a lot of time in Indonesia, which is sort
of a hot spot. It is the hot spot of hot spots for
biodiversity, both the terrestrial and marine
biodiversity. And things are deteriorating very fast there.
So I think what people would be surprised by is the rate of
change. In other words, what we're doing to the planet we
can see that really happening most acutely in the Tropics.
And, unfortunately, I think it's going to take a while.
In other words, there's a lag time before people realize
what state the world's in, so getting that message out, I
think, would have, if people really understood what's going
on with respect to things like biodiversity or the nitrogen
cycle, what's going on in the planet, then that would
definitely affect how they see the world.
STEVE LANSING: My computer.
STEVE LANSING: It used to be Baroque, but now I've sort of
moved into the 19th century, taking a few little steps toward
the 20th century, a little bit of Mahler, but basically
classical music.
