“The unity of human and nature (天人合一)” is a philosophical idea that has crossed the three studies of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism in China since ancient times. Until the Industrial Revolution, humans, whether in the East or the West, consciously or unconsciously followed this philosophy to coexist with nature in harmony. After the Industrial Revolution, productivity exploded and the quality of human life improved while the balance with nature that had lasted for thousands of years was broken. The ensuing energy crisis, environmental pollution, and climate extremes have taken a heavy toll on human society and forced us to reflect on our relationship with nature, thus the era of "carbon neutrality" has come.

 

In this new era, we want to reduce and eventually eliminate the negative impact of human activity on nature without unduly affecting the existing quality of life. Further, we want to develop next-generation energy and production technologies in order to maintain the current rate of economic and technological development. This requires a deep understanding of both nature and ourselves, and in fact, we are not doing well enough on either side. One of the knowledge gaps is the tendency of traditional science to use reductionism to deconstruct nature and human society. This is basically possible for simple, unliving, non-dissipative, approximately linear systems. However, the real world is complex, living, dissipative, and highly nonlinear, so traditional reductionism is no longer sufficient for the future development of science. As a result, various schools of complexity science based on holism have emerged.

 

The Environmental Toxicology group in the Cross lab is working to combine reductionism and holism to quantitatively assess the effects of human activities on ecosystems and to further explore methods to eliminate them. We are now working on the toxicological evaluation of microplastics or microfibers on the marine organism and micro-ecosystem.  In addition, we will further attempt to develop new energy technologies for the carbon-neutral era, including energy storage and microbial fuel cell technologies. We welcome people who love nature and are interested in environmental, biological, and energy sciences and engineering to join us.