The Landscape of Discovery

A childhood in motion

Samuel Cushman’s path into ecology began long before it became science.

His family has a farm in Olympia, Washington, where five generations have lived in what he describes as “a kind of family eco-village.” As a child, he visited his grandparents there every weekend and holiday. It was “the most stable, happy, and safe place in my life,” but also “a place of adventure and discovery - climbing trees, swimming in the bay, building tree houses, sleeping in the woods, learning to fish.”

He was, as he puts it, “a passionate explorer, outdoors kid.”

The science came later. An uncle, a wildlife biologist, took him on field trips, to islands off the Washington coast, into arctic wilderness to look at gyrfalcons, into the desert to study endangered rabbits. All in his early teens. Eventually he was hired to do fieldwork in high school and college.

“That was the first time I actually learned that you could do science and be an outdoors adventurer.”

That realization turned ecology into a profession.

Thinking in patterns

Today, Cushman works at a scale that matches those early experiences of roaming freely through landscapes.

“What I’m doing here and now,” he explains, “is using modern statistical scientific methods to understand biodiversity, climate change, human well-being, and find solutions that optimize all of those simultaneously.”

This systems-based perspective places him within landscape ecology, a field that marked what he calls “a revolutionary change in how scientists think about ecology and study it.”

Traditional ecology, he notes, is often site-based: “a one-meter square quadrat or a Petri dish in the laboratory.” Landscape ecology, by contrast, studies “ecological patterns continuously across space, not just in a particular location,” and examines processes “from molecular level genes to the biosphere.”

“It is across scales,” he says, “but unified by this idea of ecological processes interacting with environmental patterns, acting at different scales of space and time.”

For Cushman, this shift felt natural. “The landscape scale was a natural scale for me because that’s the scale that I experienced the world.”

A world under pressure

Such work became possible only recently. Landscape ecology was enabled, he explains, by three developments: “extensive spatial data,” geographical information systems, and computing power.

Earlier ecologists had conceptualized nature as systems and networks, but “they couldn’t get the data. They couldn’t analyze it.”

With technological revolutions in remote sensing and computing, those ideas could finally be implemented. And with the challenges that the world is facing, these technological advances are a much-needed assistance.

“The world’s facing several simultaneous crises that are interrelated,” Cushman says. Climate change is accelerating ecological disruption in systems already “extremely stressed and damaged by human exploitation.” Biodiversity loss and climate change are “synergizing”, accelerating one another.

“The biggest challenge the world faces - not just in ecology, but period - is managing the climate and ecological crisis and finding solutions that are technically rigorous, politically feasible, economically viable, socially acceptable.”

It is precisely because this is not just a biological problem, but also an economic problem, a sociological problem, and a political problem, that he sees DIAS as the right environment.

“Science alone is necessary, but not sufficient. It needs to be interwoven with these other disciplines that are critical for decisions in humans.”

Reasons for hope

Over decades of fieldwork, Cushman has witnessed ecological change firsthand all over the globe.

In parts of Africa, he was struck by “how little was left.” Vast areas transformed, wildlife populations reduced by staggering proportions, up to 90%, within his own lifetime. In China, he encountered both ecological degradation and something else: “the first time I saw the glimmer of hope.”

He visited landscapes once densely cultivated for subsistence agriculture that were now abandoned and “growing back into forests, meadows.” Urbanization and demographic shifts, he observed, could create conditions for ecological recovery. Even when millions had lived there.

“I think there’s great reasons to be hopeful,” he says. Global population is expected to peak, urban migration will continue, and concentrated, high-tech living has “the potential to use less resources per person” and “enable vast ecosystem recovery and rewilding across the world.”

Despite all the challenges at hand, not all hope is lost, he concludes.

The Danish connection and DIAS

The work and career of Cushman has taken him across the world, both geographically, but also within the fields of research, policy and practice. So when asked why Denmark and DIAS felt like the right place to go at this point in his career, he answers promptly.

“It’s the right place at the right time. Denmark is more visionary, more bold in its effort to actually do a green transition - carbon mitigation, biodiversity preservation, sustainable agriculture at a national scale. And that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to study, so it’s an opportunity in a place where this is not just theory, it is actuality.”

At DIAS, Cushman sees an opportunity to move beyond disciplinary boundaries. It is not enough, he argues, to “develop good science” and understand nature in isolation. Science must inform policy, shape economic models, and interact with the social structures that determine whether solutions succeed.

The ambition is to achieve a “win-win-win,” where biodiversity, climate mitigation, agriculture, economics, and human well-being are aligned. That kind of challenge - “the ultimate wicked problem of interdisciplinary complexity”, as he calls it - requires exactly the environment DIAS is designed to foster.

And the institute, he adds, provides something essential: proximity.

“It is the ability to rub shoulders, drink coffee, talk through these ideas on a daily basis with world leaders in different disciplines.”

If researchers remain in silos, “you don’t really get any synergy.”