We’ll take any chance to talk with Dr. William Schlesinger — or as he’d want you to call him, Bill.

“Most people are scared of science when they walk in the room,” he says. “But I’ve found in a lot of public presentations to non-scientists that if you can communicate with them, they really find science fascinating and have good questions.”

As President Emeritus of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and a noted authority on global environmental change, Bill has been an important member of SELC’s Board of Trustees for almost 20 years, and a trusted consultant and mentor on our work ranging from protecting old trees to navigating rising sea levels and stopping hog waste pollution.

Bill looks over the latest edition of his textbook on biogeochemistry in 2020. (Contributed)

For 27 years, he was a professor of biogeochemistry at Duke University, where he retired as dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences. In the mid 90s, his popular class on biogeochemistry pulled in large numbers of graduate students — some from other nearby universities.

“I was trying to teach a complicated and interdisciplinary subject in terms that everyone, regardless of their background, could understand,” he says. “Any success I achieved in the classroom was something I was proud of.”

Bill was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2003, and his research focused on soils as a component of natural ecosystems has been featured in places like Scientific American, National Geographic, and The New York Times.

To commemorate his lifetime of studying and sharing about the basic scientific concepts that inform how we exist on Earth, he recently accepted the Ecological Society of America’s 2025 Eminent Ecologist Award. Here’s what’s on Bill’s mind right now.

This interview was edited for clarity and length.

It can be hard to talk about science. How often do you think amazing discoveries are lost due to that communication barrier?

Frequently. I won’t say any discovery is dead and hidden forever, but it can stay hidden for a long time until somebody makes the effort to dig it up and translate it into understandable concepts.

You’re an expert biogeochemist. How would you translate that to someone like me who’s never heard of it?

It’s a fancy word for environmental chemistry. And it recognizes that biology has a lot to do with the chemistry that we consider normal in our environment — it’s not simply a physical process.

How have you been able to share this knowledge with so many people?

One of the first things I noticed in my academic career is how poorly scientists often described their work to the public. They did not use concepts or phrases and words the general public could understand. This was prevalent among my colleagues, and I was astounded.

For a long time, I’ve been interested in communicating my research to people in other fields, and I learned the only way to do that is to talk on their terms and in their vocabulary. I’ve tried to perfect that over the years, mainly in the classroom and in op-eds. Until recently, I had an active blog on the Duke website that also attempted to take a simplified approach to explaining difficult scientific questions.

I find simplifying concepts in an effective way is often harder than it sounds. Do you have a recent example?

You’re absolutely right. Of course, we always run the risk of simplifying a concept so that it’s not really correct anymore. Using words that are in circulation among the general public is a good way to go. Once I was out with another scientist talking to a reporter about some work we were doing in the forest, and my colleague kept talking about leaf area index.

Well, you know, to a scientist who works on trees, leaf area index has some meaning. But to a reporter, and presumably to that reporter’s readership, leaf area index should be changed to the “display of leaf area” or the “display of leaves”. While it would never happen in a scientific journal, just that simple rephrasing of things can make it understandable.

Where did you first find out about environmental chemistry?

I caught the bug at Dartmouth College. A professor there, William Reiners, took me into his lab and introduced it as a really neat way of thinking about ecology. I just had a gut feeling that combining biology and geology was really interesting and exciting and something I’d rather do than go to medical school.

Why does everyone benefit from understanding your field?

A lot of what I talk about is relevant to things that are in front of the public at all times, like climate change, mercury pollution of the oceans, and acid rain. If you explain them simply, the listener will be interested in any number of environmental issues, most of which have a basis in environmental chemistry. If you don’t explain concepts simply and use a lot of jargon, people tune you out and won’t appreciate what you’re trying to communicate.

Tell me about your biggest discovery.

Among the loblolly pines of Duke Forest in 1997, Bill overlooks the noteworthy Free-Air Carbon Dioxide Enrichment (FACE) experiment. The years-long effort studied how a forest ecosystem responds to increased levels of atmospheric CO2, simulating future climate conditions. (Contributed)

If I put humility to the side for a moment, I am best known for making the first estimate of the amount of carbon that’s held in soils. And it turned out that it was a rather large number. I found out there’s more carbon in the soils than there is in the vegetation, and a lot more carbon in the soils than there is in the atmosphere, where it’s found as carbon dioxide.

As a young guy, that put me in the limelight among academic biogeochemists of the world. I carried on working with soils for years, and I had a lot of students working on soils from various aspects. We looked at the circulation of chemicals between the soil and what percent of that might be released to the atmosphere in different circumstances.

I’d love to hear some more career highlights. Will you share a few?

I got to meet and interact with Al Gore, who is famously interested in global climate change. Soils play a big role in determining the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, and therefore, the potential for climate change. My interaction with him over the years is not an everyday thing; sometimes we’ve gone several years or more without talking, but that’s been a highlight and a big rush, when it happens.

I did a few instances of congressional testimony on various subjects, often involving soils, and it was a big event to be at those hearing tables that you see on nightly television when people are offering testimony and getting questioned.

And I taught biogeochemistry at Duke for 25 or 30 years. I covered a wide range of topics like the chemical circulation in the world’s oceans, interactions of atmospheric chemistry with land vegetation, and alteration of the trace metal content of the world based on human activities. That course developed a real following among graduate students and attracted them from not only Duke, but University of North Carolina and North Carolina State. In the middle of the 1990s, I peaked in enrollment at 65 or 70 graduate students instead of the usual five to 10 in most graduate courses.

When I look back at my career, I have to say being asked to join SELC’s board is another one of the highlights. It’s an honor to be asked for scientific insight on some of the legal cases.

What is some of SELC’s work that you’ve weighed in on?

Tidal flooding in downtown Charleston. (Lauren Petracca)

I offered some advice to the group down in Charleston that has been considering sea level rise along the southeastern coast. I’ve also given some input on cases in North Carolina involving emissions of ammonia and other gases from hog lagoons. Recently, there’s been concern about whether forests in the Southeast would take up a significant amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and therefore help alleviate the potential for global warming, and I was able to offer some input on that based on some of the forest studies I’ve conducted.

What’s happening right now that you wish more people understood?

The elected government in Washington D.C. is doing its best to destroy the scientific capabilities of many fields across the country. Environmental science is one of them.

They’re actively in the business of reducing our natural lands in favor of development. And there’s a general disrespect for scientific facts when it comes to decision making in Washington. That’s just so overwhelmingly depressing.

So what gives you hope?

I was a dean at Duke for seven years, and when people would ask me that question, I would say: I get up every day. I put on a tie and go to work. And I know I’m probably going to lose nine times out of 10, but I get up and go to work and do the job because of the one we’re going to win, which is inevitably going to leave a better environment for future generations.

That’s what motivates me. Is there hope? Well, is the glass half full or half empty? There’s always hope that you win another case and leave something better.

You can’t give up if you’re going to be an environmental advocate. You got to be able to take defeat, get back up, and go in fighting the next day.