Untangling Webs -- UW Professor Loves Tackling Thorny Problems That Span Several A Number Of Disciplines

Public policy. To Edward Miles, the best kind of challenge is a huge problem that spans the disciplines. He has tackled such problems while building an international stature in science-based marine policy.

The white board behind Ed Miles distills years of research on global warming into its biggest components:

At the hub of a wheel is a black circle representing hydrology/water. Radiating like spokes from that center are black circles representing coastal water quality, urban centers, forests/rangelands, energy generated from water, agriculture and aquatic ecosystems.

Green lines connect the various sectors to the hub, representing bonds. Tight red script indicates the dimensions to which that bonding is important.

The drawing soon will become a three-dimensional image representing the probable local impacts of global warming trends into the next century.

But not now. It's the end of a long day. First comes sleep, then a review of the options in the morning, then the decision on which of two drawings to use for the 3-D model.

After working at breakneck speed to organize a recent White House-sponsored conference in Seattle on the regional impacts of global warming, the group that Ed Miles leads stopped briefly to smell the roses he gave staffers as a reward. Then they returned to the frenetic pace, putting the final touches on a follow-up report to be mailed to the White House by next week.

Miles, a professor of marine and public affairs at the University of Washington, relishes this type of weighty work. While others shun thorny problems whose multiplying vines weave through many disciplines, Miles searches out these tangled webs, harnesses the strength of the best-qualified scientists in the various disciplines and seeks solutions.

A scientist who commands respect internationally, Miles is soft-spoken about his accomplishments. But his projects have stretched from Norway to France; he's given advice on how to manage the fish resources of the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska, as well as conducting negotiations on behalf of nations that look like fleas on the map.

"Ed is about as international and global a figure as you'll find. He stands pretty high with everybody that I know in the marine game," said Bill Burke, a recently retired law professor who coaxed Miles to join the UW staff. "He has real standing in the world."

A glance at Miles' resume shows entries that reflect decades of teaching, grants from the Rockefeller and Andrew W. Mellon foundations, continuing education at institutions such as Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, international negotiations and problem-solving.

Smooth skin the color of Swiss chocolate belies his age. But there are hints that he's approaching 60 in his weathered hands and the curls that have lost the battle for dominance, receding as the scalp advances.

At times, the political winds have blown in his favor, bringing the magic combination of ample funding and governmental will. In a few painful episodes in his past, the opposite has been the case. He says his resolve remains unswayed.

"I guess I'm Don Quixote, and I like to work on large, difficult problems of an interdisciplinary nature that combine the natural sciences, the social sciences and law," Miles said. "And you couldn't get find a juicier problem in those respects than the global-climate-change problem and its probable regional effects."

Miles' group that planned the recent conference, The Joint Institute for the Study of Atmosphere and Oceans, received a three-year, $1 million grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

As a teacher, he covers governmental responses to global warming. As a policy shaper, he was lead author for the Marine Policy section of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a document that underpins scientists' projections of the future impact of global warming.

Ultimately the reason he does what he does the way he does it lies less in Cervantes, however, and more in the strong will of his father.

"It doesn't matter what work you undertake, whatever you do, you have an obligation to do it well," Miles said, quoting his father, Cecil B. Miles. "Slipshod work only demeans those who offer it. So one of the worst sins I could commit is to be slipshod in the work I do."

His voice lifts, then dips in volume like a butterfly in flight, a lingering accent recalling his childhood spent in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad's capital city. Just as Miles still lives by his now-deceased father's code, the accent he acquired while growing up remains, tinged by the cultural influence of fluency in French and an adult life spent in the United States.

Miles came to the U.S. in 1959 as an undergraduate at Howard University. He graduated with a Phi Beta Kappa and pursued a Ph.D. in international relations at the University of Denver, combining history, political science, international law and sociology. He became fascinated by the process of developing international law that applied to the global common - those sections of the oceans and outer space over which no single state can claim exclusive jurisdiction.

The Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, which started in 1973, tried to nail down international laws to cover military transport, fishing, mining and recreation to reinforce the notion that harvest from the seas belongs to all, not just one generation or solely industrialized nations.

The conference gave Miles the "real-time experiment" he needed for his dissertation, following a major initiative from start to finish. He wrote detailed analyses read by conferees as negotiations marched along for a decade.

For 15 years, some overlapping, he worked for the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), a series of islands west of Hawaii with limited resources and a population slightly less than that of Bellevue. Miles helped to resolve conflicts between them and the U.S. on their tuna fisheries.

And he served as chief FSM negotiator in hammering out fishing-access agreements with fishing nations such as Japan, Taiwan, Korea and the U.S.

Miles' influence has been lasting, said David Doulman, former deputy director of the South Pacific Forum Fisheries Agency in the Solomon Islands. Fees from license fishing have helped develop and keep afloat the national fisheries sector there.

"Ed was a very skilled negotiator who always impressed with his intense preparation for negotiations. He wrote all his own verbatim notes in longhand (often for a period of four days) and used these notes for many years afterwards to rebuff arguments in negotiations," Doulman wrote in an e-mail message.

The signs of leadership appeared early in his career. When Burke was looking for professors to teach at the UW's new Institute for Marine Studies in 1974, he tapped Miles, whom he had known about eight years from his work for a National Academy of Science committee.

Miles' background was so outstanding that it promised to help in attracting needed grant money for the fledgling institute.

"Here was a guy who was going to bring in lots of money: You get capable people; they can go out and get support. I knew he would be able to do that," Burke said.

In 1982, Miles was named director of the institute, a post he held until 1993.

In addition to such successes, his career is marked by some disappointments.

For instance, despite years spent proving the viability of disposing of high-level radioactive waste under seabeds beyond national jurisdiction, the research wasn't acted upon. In 1987, Congress decided to concentrate on Yucca Mountain, a repository under study in Nevada.

"The science, you see, was impeccable," Miles said. It had to be, or public opinion would have killed it much sooner. While some segments of the Department of Energy lauded the work, DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management shut the project down.

"Killing us was a pure act of political opportunism in quintessential bureaucratic politics," he said. "We had become a liability to their main program."

In jest, he calls the project a dirty little nuclear-waste secret in his past. Still, he called the experience one of the most exciting intellectual challenges in his life.

What impressed Miles the most about working on that project was how the team leader assigned some team members the task of searching for fatal flaws in the larger group's concept and experiment designs.

"Flaws that would render inoperable the whole idea. And these people worked assiduously for seven years. . . . They never could invalidate us," he said.

Another trying experience involved the Law of the Sea negotiations, which Miles initially thought would take a few years. Talks lingered for a decade, and the United States initially spurned the agreement.

Why, then, tackle the issue of climate change with any aggressiveness when the work could ultimately be shelved by politicians?

"I don't make a choice on whether I work on the political life cycle," he said simply. "My choices are made on whether the problem is large, interdisciplinary and significant. Does it matter? And if the answer is yes, then I'm willing to take risks."

Diedtra Henderson's phone message number is 464-8259. The e-mail address is: dhen-new@seatimes.com