When Billie Turner started his career as a geographer in 1974, the term 'sustainability' had yet to enter the lexicon. Turner, now one of today's leaders in sustainability science, used a knowledge of geography to demonstrate how humans, not just nature, can shape Earth's landscape. See CV

Turner was attracted to geography as an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin because it was one of the few disciplines that bridged the social and biophysical sciences. “Geography gave me greatest latitude to define the environmental contribution of humans,” Turner says.

He ended up studying agricultural intensification while pursuing his PhD at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. In doing so, he overturned long-held assumptions about 'efficient, low-input' agriculture practised by the Maya civilization in the first century ad. Mayans, he found, actually ran intensive, land-denuding operations.

Later, as an assistant professor at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, Turner turned an international symposium called 'The Earth as Transformed by Human Action' into a noteworthy book with collaborator Robert Kates (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991). “We realized little was known about humankind's role in global environmental change,” says Turner. “It was a black box.” Kates says Turner helped crack open that black box by creating interdisciplinary physical, ecological and social-sciences programmes to determine, for example, the causes and consequences of deforestation and desertification.

To that end, Turner helped create the Marsh Institute at Clark University in 1991. The institute united the university's efforts to assess land-use change and pioneered ecological project sites, such as a biosphere reserve in the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico, which models forests' vulnerability and resilience to climate change and human disturbance.

Turner will continue his life's work as the latest of several top-notch recruits to Arizona State University (ASU; see Nature 449, 372–373; 2007). “I share the notion of breaking down departments and recasting schools to answer pertinent questions of the time,” says Turner of ASU's aim to reinvent the university ethos. He plans a partnership with the ASU School of Sustainability to build, for example, mechanisms that can assess and promote both economic and environmental progress if and when the Kyoto Protocol (or something similar) gets enforced in the United States. It's one way, says Kates, that Turner will help ASU make the transition from “great promise to accomplishment”.