Newest Environmental Science Programs Build On A Broader Definition Of `Green'

Researchers at many U.S. universities are participating in curricula that now stress hard science Top colleges and universities throughout the United States are responding to an unprecedented demand for environmental education programs with new undergraduate degree programs, graduate-level research opportunities, and environmental colloquia. What distinguishes most of these new programs from academia's previous environmental offerings is a high level of interdisciplinary study and a clear focus on hard science. Over the last two years, Harvard and Yale universities and even Rockefeller University, which heretofore focused almost exclusively on basic research in the life sciences, have all set up formal environment programs that cut across traditional academic department boundaries. At Yale, for instance, a two-year-old undergraduate program-- entitled Earth, Environment, and Resources--is offered through the department of geology and geophysics. Additionally, Yale's Institute for Biospheric Studies, funded with a $20 million gift from Texas billionaire and businessman Edward Bass--who also funded Biosphere 2, the controversial giant Arizona greenhouse where eight researchers lived for two years-- functions as a canopy over several other environmental studies and research programs, including the Center for the Study of Global Change, Center for Earth Observation, and Center for Computational Ecology. The proliferation of environment programs "reflects an increased awareness of environmental issues, which has accelerated over the past five to 10 years," says Jesse H. Ausubel, director of Rockefeller University's nine-month-old Program for the Human Environment. "The environment has become a mega-issue. It ranks with health, violence, and international conflict." At Harvard, the new Environmental Science and Public Policy undergraduate program, which enrolled its first students last September, is just one of several environmental initiatives under way at the school, according to William Clark, director of the Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government and vice chairman of Harvard's University Committee on the Environment. Comprising 30 senior faculty members representing every one of the university's schools and divisions, the group functions as a steering committee on environmental teaching, research, and outreach programs. All three kinds of programs have been boosted with a $2 million grant from the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation, a charitable organization set up in Copenhagen in 1991 to mark the 50th anniversary of the family business. Villum Kann Rasmussen started his eponymous company, which manufactures and sells roof windows and skylights, in 1941 in Copenhagen. In 1975, its U.S. distributor, Velux-America Inc., opened facilities in Massachusetts and, later, in South Carolina. In addition to establishing the new undergraduate program, the committee's activities have included building a distinguished lecture series on environmental topics and setting up a biannual, university-wide research program on the environment. The topic of this year's collaborative research effort is energy development in China. Scholars participating in the program hope to produce a book on their work once it is completed, Clark says. Overall, more than 170 of Harvard's tenured or tenure-track faculty members are involved in major research in the environment, he notes. Many other universities, including the University of California, Santa Barbara, have added new natural sciences-oriented tracks or study concentrations to existing undergraduate environment programs housed under a school or faculty of arts and sciences. Also under development at UC-Santa Barbara is a new graduate School of Environmental Science and Management, which will begin accepting applications in the 1994-95 academic year. Once established, this will bring to 90-plus the number of graduate programs in environmental toxicology, environmental chemistry, and environmental sciences in the U.S. and Canada. University-based environmental studies programs are by no means new. Some got their start as early as 1970, following the signing of the National Environmental Act, which made protection of the environment a matter of national policy. Today's programs differ from most predecessors in that they extend well beyond a single discipline or handful of environmental researchers to touch base with nearly all departments and disciplines on campus. At Harvard, for example, students are permitted to pursue a particular area of environmental studies, but only after completing a broad curriculum in biology, chemistry, earth and planetary sciences, economics, government, and mathematics. In explaining this requirement, Clark notes that "the current crop of environment issues aren't addressed in their entirety from disciplinary perspectives around which the university has been organized." Across the board, educators emphasize that an interdisciplinary approach is imperative if the new environment programs are to adequately prepare young scientists to deal with this era's highly complex environmental challenges. Solutions to problems such as ozone depletion or global warming may be grounded in hard science, but they also are driven by societal, political, and economic issues, all of which environmental scientists must be equipped to tackle. "Cross-cutting may be the viable way to go because there's a green dimension to everything," says Rockefeller's Ausubel. Although Ausubel won't reveal exactly how his Rockefeller program is being funded "because it's political"--a sentiment that other environment educators echo--he does say that the interdisciplinary nature of today's environment programs has worked to attract a broad funding base, including "foundation money, some government money, and funds from industry." The problem, Ausubel explains, "is that nobody's money is considered quite clean by the public. Industry looks at private foundations as liberal do-gooders. A lot of citizens view industry with suspicion. The Department of Energy and government agencies are also looked at with suspicion. So it's best to have a balance of sources of funds." Philanthropists like Bass, meanwhile, seem to view the university as an ideal place to funnel funds for environmental research and teaching. "Yale has great strength in the basic sciences," Bass noted in presenting the university with his gift of $20 million. As such, "I am convinced that Yale has extraordinary potential to take the lead in advancing understanding of the biosphere and in refining creative approaches to environmental issues," he added. Rockefeller's relatively small environment program is home to two full-time researchers in addition to director Ausubel: a physicist concentrating on materials flows in the environment, and an applied mathematician/computer scientist whose research centers on systems modeling and the use of computational tools. Ausubel says that one of the program's main research themes is the long-term interaction of technological change with ecosystems and human health. Through seminars, workshops, and research collaborations, the program aims to "knit a community of interest and to cut across the compartments into which universities inevitably divide themselves," he says. The goal of Stanford University's Global Environment Program, part of the Institute for International Studies, is similar, according to Donald Kennedy, a biologist and former Stanford president who is now Bing Professor of Environmental Science at the institute, as well as a biology professor at the university. "The institute's role is to bring people together for collaborative research on environmental topics with international implications," Kennedy says. Research topics have included the use of herbicides in rice production in Southeast Asia and the implementation of market-based--as opposed to regulatory-- approaches to achieve environmental goals. At the undergraduate level, Stanford also offers a degree in earth systems through its earth sciences department. Students in this program have the option of taking a junior-year seminar offered through the Global Environment Program. This undergraduate seminar and research program is funded in part by a grant from the San Francisco-based Richard and Rhoda Goldman Foundation, Kennedy notes. Currently, Kennedy says, Stanford has no immediate plans to offer graduate degrees in environmental studies through the Institute for International Affairs. For now, the focus is on putting together useful collaborations. Once that has been done, he says, the university would consider setting up a formal graduate-level program and research center. The interdisciplinary approach is one that is being repeated throughout virtually all of the new environment programs, according to Thomas F. Malone, director of the Sigma Xi Center--a study branch of the honorary science society Sigma Xi--which sponsored a 1992 University Colloquium on Environmental Research and Education that was attended by representatives of more than 50 academic institutions. What's driving this approach is "the increasing interdependence of the world," Malone says. "We humans compartmentalize things, but the environment doesn't care about scientists or nonscientists or politics or economics," notes UC-Santa Barbara physicist and environmental studies professor Mel Manalis. "We need to produce people with a broad perspective." Still, to offset the risk of creating students who know only a little bit about everything, including science, today's interdisciplinary environment programs also are placing a much stronger emphasis than ever before on chemistry, biology, physics, and mathematics. "The route we've taken is that whether you're working in a technical area, [in] law, or at a nongovernmental organization, a firm grounding in the sciences matters a lot," says Harvard's Clark. "People coming out of the [new undergraduate] program could go on to a graduate program in earth and environmental sciences, and they will have had chemistry for chemists and physics for physicists, not chemistry and physics for poets," Clark says. According to UC-Santa Barbara's Manalis, it's especially critical to educate liberal arts students in environmental programs in the hard sciences "because it's these people who often turn out to be the movers and shakers in environmental policy." Grounding an environment program in a thorough course of study in the natural sciences also works to lend it more credibility, according to Karl Turekian, a geology professor and director of Yale's Center for the Study of Global Change. "The reason Yale created the Earth, Environment, and Resources program in the department of geology and geophysics was to give a hard science bias to environmental study," Turekian says. About 50 percent of students currently enrolled at Yale's geology and geophysics department are pursuing a bachelor of arts degree under the Earth, Environment, and Resources program. From there, Turekian says, most will go to medical school, law school, or a professional school. "People who take the environment track do so because that's where they figure the jobs are going to be," says Turekian. "It's not because they're all altruistic. They know they're not going to find oil anymore." All in all, educators foresee a growth in job opportunities for program graduates, especially as environmental issues continue to move up higher on the national and global economic and sociopolitical agendas. Indeed, if the employment picture tracks that for environmental engineers, there could well be a shortfall of environmental scientists, some say. An estimate by Kenneth Noll, chairman of the Illinois Institute of Technology's Pritzker Department of Environmental Engineering, pegs the current annual shortfall of environmental engineers at about 3,000, for example. Moreover, Rockefeller's Ausubel notes that over the last two years, he has received many more queries from institutions looking to hire high-level environmental researchers than inquiries from candidates seeking jobs. "In a period when the job market is generally depressed, I've had an awful lot of calls from people wanting to hire," he says. "People do not call for a midlevel person to work at an [Environmental Protection Agency] lab, but for people at the high end of the market," he notes. "I'm not aware of any unemployed first-rate people or first-rate graduates." Julia King is a freelance writer based in Ridley Park, Pa.

Newest Environmental Science Programs Build On A Broader Definition Of `Green'

Mar 6, 1994

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