The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Applying the Peace Corps Idea : Earthwatch Can Serve as a Model for Cash-Strapped Agencies

With the federal government destined to play less and less of a role in our lives, scientists--like a lot of other people--are wondering where the money will come from to support their important research.

Maybe they should take a close look at an innovative program that has funded scientific expeditions around the world for the past 23 years.

This year about 4,000 volunteers will use their vacation time to go out into the jungles and the deserts of the world where they will fight off mosquitoes and scorpions while working long hours in exotic locations. They won’t get paid for it. In fact, they will pay an average of about $800 a week to do things like digging through the muck in search of an archeological trophy or sitting in a tree and watching for a rare type of monkey.

That fee will provide them with a place to stay, although it may be a tent, and food to eat, but they will buy their own plane tickets to get to sites ranging from Indonesia to Africa, from the Arctic to Brazil. The fee will also cover the cost of carrying out the research.

It is all part of Earthwatch, founded by attorney Brian Rosborough. Rosborough was working for a New York investment banking firm in 1972 when he was approached by scientists from the Smithsonian Institution who were trying to raise funds for an expedition to Africa. He raised the money, took leave from his post to volunteer for the project, and later that year founded Earthwatch.

The nonprofit organization has since grown into one of the nation’s largest providers of funds for independent scientific research, but that is only part of the story. More than 40,000 volunteers have “bought a piece of the problem” through direct involvement in carrying out research and protecting and enhancing natural resources around the world.

Around 150 projects are picked from about 1,000 proposals each year and funded by Earthwatch through fees paid by the volunteers who work alongside professionals. More than $5 million will go to scientists this year to pay for the projects.

It won’t work for every kind of program, but with funding becoming ever more scarce, scientists and government agencies would do well to look closely at the Earthwatch program and see if a similar strategy might work for them.

Each project funded by Earthwatch must be peer reviewed by three experts picked from around the world to make sure the science is real. The work done by the volunteers must be the kind of thing that novices can learn quickly, and the volunteers must be used as researchers, not just dishwashers. The scientist who is in charge of the project must agree to publish the results.

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All the projects have one thing in common: There is a lot of work to be done, and it can only be done by people who are willing to work hard under sometimes difficult circumstances.

Not only do people volunteer, “they just keep coming back for more,” says Gail Pierson, chief operating officer of Earthwatch, based in Watertown, Mass. Many are professional people who can afford an “exotic” vacation, but the range of volunteers is “all over the map,” she says.

“Thirty percent of the people who go on projects volunteer for at least one more because it has been such a positive experience for them,” Pierson adds. Ages range from 16 up to one woman who is nearly 90 and has served as a volunteer about 35 times.

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The program is ideal for such long-term projects as archeology, which is labor intensive, and resource management, which requires years of monitoring. Eager to meet new challenges, Earthwatch is now teaming up with aerospace companies, and possibly the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, to carry out research on the ground that can verify images from satellites.

Satellite images can pinpoint natural resources, such as a fresh water supply or a particular type of vegetation, as well as natural hazards, such as a mosquito-infested pond. Before the data can be deciphered, however, ground troops must be sent into the field to see if the images accurately reflect what is on the surface. But “ground truthing,” as it is called, is labor intensive. NASA normally does it by using paid workers to do what Earthwatch volunteers pay to do.

This summer, Earthwatch teams will prowl through the Amazon forest in what Pierson calls a “proof-of-concept” demonstration to verify images from space, and the project will serve two purposes. It will tell scientists whether the images they are getting are reliable, and it will inform local residents of resources in their area that they may not even know are there. Earthwatch hopes to persuade several aerospace companies to use its volunteers on similar projects that might otherwise be unprofitable, Pierson said.

The fringe benefit of getting private citizens directly involved in solving problems around the world should appeal to a wide range of government agencies. One example is NASA, which is desperately searching for ways to rekindle public interest in the space program. But it will require a great deal of creativity to develop Earthwatch-type programs for NASA.

Ted Clarke of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, himself a veteran of Earthwatch, has argued for years that volunteers could handle some of the chores of the space program, such as monitoring long spaceflights.

But his boss, Joe Gleason, thinks it’s a bad idea.

As manager of the Galileo Flight Control and Support Office, Gleason has custody of a billion-dollar spacecraft. Usually, monitoring the spacecraft is a boring job. But when something goes wrong, Gleason wants someone at the controls who has much experience and knows instantly what to do.

“I want it to work,” he says, and he doesn’t think using volunteers is the way to go.

But surely, somewhere in NASA, there are programs that could lend themselves to volunteers who are willing to shell out a few bucks and help the funding crunch while taking an active role in the nation’s space program. The agency could save some money and at the same time build a corps of supporters with strong ties and a personal investment in space exploration.

And there must be many other areas in science where this type of program will work. The people at Earthwatch think so. They think their time has come.

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Lee Dye can be reached via e-mail at 72040.3515@compuserve.com.