After the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) was the co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace
Prize, Christopher Field, faculty director of Jasper Ridge
Biological Preserve, director of the Carnegie Institution’s
Department of Global Ecology and one of the lead authors of the
IPCC reports, remarked that the collective nature of the honor
was significant. One person alone cannot advance the field of
climate change, he said; it requires teamwork and many
discoveries in many fields. So, it is no accident that Field
works at Jasper Ridge. There, natural scientists,
archaeologists, computer scientists and even a few historians
can be found hiking trails and sometimes tramping through the
brush, setting cameras, scribbling in notebooks, squinting at
computers. It’s a place where scholars and scientists can wander
in every sense of the word, where students from many schools and
departments (and not just from Stanford) take classes, do
fieldwork, complete theses and dissertations and make a