Professor Sposito (born Garrison Gabriel Navarro in Los Angeles, CA) has been elected a Fellow of six international scientific societies and has been a Fulbright Lecturer (Theoretical Physics) as well as a Guggenheim Fellow (Applied Mathematics). He received the Soil Science Research Award from the Soil Science Society of America, and in 2008 was designated a “Legend in Environmental Chemistry” by the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific organization. He is the recipient of three hydrologic science honors bestowed by the American Geophysical Union, the world's largest earth science organization, including its Robert E. Horton Medal, for "outstanding contributions to the geophysical aspects of hydrology;" the Hydrologic Sciences Award of its Hydrology Section, for "outstanding contributions to the science of hydrology;" and the Walter B. Langbein Lectureship, "awarded for contributions to the basic science of hydrology." A Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Excellence laureate, he is also the only person to receive campus-wide Distinguished Teaching Awards from both state university systems in California.
He was a charter member of the National Research Council Committee on Women in Science and Engineering and of the Executive Committee of The Center for the Study and Teaching of American Cultures, which provided the initial intellectual leadership for the UC Berkeley undergraduate multicultural breadth requirement. For three years he was Chair of the Berkeley Academic Senate Committee on the Status of Women and Ethnic Minorities, during which time the Berkeley administration endorsed the inclusion of efforts toward increasing diversity as one of the four key criteria for faculty advancement.
With Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet, Robert Hass, he taught an innovative undergraduate course which surveys current global environmental issues; introduces students to the basic intellectual tools of environmental science; investigates ways the human relationship to nature has been imagined in literary and philosophical traditions; and examines how the tools of literary analysis, scientific method, and imaginative thinking can clarify what is at stake in environmental issues and ecological citizenship. This course, supported by grants from the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at Berkeley, introduced Berkeley students to scientific articles, nature writing, poetry, and philosophical essays addressing the Idea of Nature, relationships between humans and ecosystems, and approaches to resolving global environmental issues.
Education
- Ph.D. Soil Science University of California at Berkeley, 1965
- M.S. Soil Physics University of Arizona 1963
- B.S. Agriculture University of Arizona, 1961
Research Interests / Specializations:
soil chemistry, aqueous geochemistry; hydrology of "green water," physics of flow through porous media
Research Description:
Soils are open, multicomponent, biogeochemical systems containing solids, liquids, and gases. That they are open systems means soils exchange both matter and energy with the surrounding atmosphere, biosphere, and hydrosphere. These flows of matter and energy to or from soils are highly variable in time and space, but they are the essential fluxes that cause the development of soil profiles and govern the patterns of soil health.
Crop production must increase at least twice as fast as human population growth during the coming 40 years to meet global food demand. Proven strategies for achieving this goal have not yet emerged, but a few constraints to guide the search for them are known. For example, the adverse ecological impacts of both land conversion to agricultural use and freshwater withdrawals for irrigation will strongly limit the viability of these two traditional approaches to increasing crop production, whereas abundant opportunity exists for optimizing soil water ("green water") availability to and consumption by crops to increase their yields.
Increasing global freshwater scarcity and the demand for food from an expanding world population point to an urgent need to develop treated wastewater generated by farms and municipalities as an alternative water resource for irrigated agriculture. This approach, however, cannot be successful without an accurate assessment of its potential for causing a serious reduction in soil permeability, as numerous case studies have shown. In addition to sodium, treated wastewaters can have elevated concentrations of potassium, magnesium, and organic carbon, which also may impact soil structure negatively. However, no irrigation water quality guidelines for these constituents yet exist in order to assess this possibility.
