From Gombe, Bombay, Wittenberg, and Williams.

• Author: Ayres, Ed
• Position: Janet Abramovitz, Chris Bright, Anne Platt McGinn, David Malin Roodman, Payal Sampat, Molly O'Meara Sheehan, Michael Renner, Sandra Postel, John Tuxill, Lori Brown

In the last issue, to mark the Worldwatch Institute's new "second generation" strategy for the critical years ahead, I profiled some of our research staff members, in hopes of making it clear that our authors are not just scholarly wonks, but actual people. I got half-way through the roster before running out of space, so in this issue let's complete the introductions. While what follows is quite suitable for family reading, I should caution you that it does contain disturbing mentions of such subjects as a giant python, a Darth Vader-like black dome, and a serious case of anthropogenic climate change.

Janet Abramovitz is a senior researcher who heads the Institute's human-and ecosystem-health team. She has helped to develop the concept of "services" provided by natural processes-processes such as soil formation, water supply, and pollination-which are essential to human life yet are often taken for granted by conventional economic accounting (she wrote the cover story "Nature's Hidden Economy," for the January/ February 1998 issue of WORLD WATCH). She has devoted much of her attention to the ecology and economics of forests. An especially interesting spinoff of this work has been her analysis of the synergistic shocks we can experience when natural disasters are exacerbated by stresses such as clear-cutting, wetland-filling, or anthropogenic climate change. A couple of years ago she co-authored a joint Worldwatch/World Resources Institute atlas, Watersheds of the World, which quantifies in stark detail how vulnerable many of the great river basins have become. Janet and her husband, Tim, have begun a mult i-year effort to eradicate invasive plants and restore the native vegetation in their part of the local ecosystem around their home in Baltimore city.

Chris Bright, in addition to his work as senior editor of WORLD WATCH, serves as a key research staff member. Chris was the author of the cover story "Bio-Invasions: The Spread of Exotic Species" (July/August 1995), which described the growing problem of organisms spreading into ecosystems in which they did not evolve and which sometimes have no defenses against them. He followed this article with a widely acclaimed book, Life Out of Bounds: Bioinvasions in a Borderless World (W.W. Norton, 1998). More recently, he has been studying a broad phenomenon that could well turn out to be the real "sleeper" among incipient 21st century problems: the phenomenon of environmental surprise. His theory is that when large human-caused stresses-such as global warming, acid rain, increased UV radiation, etc.-overlap, the effects may be more severe, yet less predictable, than the more directly known effects of the individual stresses.

He was author of the article "The Nemesis Effect" (May/June 1999), and authored a chapter on this topic for State of the World 2000. Chris is a cum laude...