We face the added difficulty of being far enough outside mainstream focus that it will be difficult to shoehorn our ideas into the project goals of major funding sources. In other words, we're going to have to work hard to get funding anyway--as long as we're fighting an uphill battle, let's do it in a direction that will give us a long term payoff.

Another important consideration is the sheer magnitude of the task. Even if we were only seeking to develop environmentally enriching components for a single discipline (such as mathematics or history), there is essentially no limit to the work that could be done. The scope of the work that we want to do is vast. A permanent endowment is the only thing that can be said to fundamentally address the size of the problem.