2018 Conference

Individual Paper Presentation

U.S. undergraduate students with a strong interest in environmental issues, and who are enrolled in ESS courses and perhaps majoring in an ESS program, are a diverse group.  They attend small colleges and large universities.  They are drawn to varied disciplinary treatments (i.e. natural sciences, social sciences, humanities) of environmental issues.  They view the future with varying shades of optimism or pessimism.  Yet one constant appears to nearly unite them all: a deep, enduring faith in crisis to foster sustainable-world outcomes.  This faith runs so deep that most undergraduates cannot imagine a path toward an environmentally prosperous, socially just world absent profound crisis.

This empirical paper, based on heretofore unpublished survey data, explores how the centrality of crisis to ESS undergraduate thinking is understandable and, given the current configuration of ESS curriculum, perhaps inevitable.  This paper also explicates how and why this faith in crisis is deeply alarming, insofar as it reveals deeper assumptions about human nature and processes of social change that are individually and collectively debilitating.  It is likely true, as many social organizers will argue, that one ought not waste a good crisis – but this strategic view of crisis as one of many opportunities to be seized upon by agents of change is markedly different from the ESS undergraduate view that nothing will change without deep crisis, and that such crisis is fundamentally the ally of progressive change.

These arguments flow from and are illustrated by a just-concluded multi-year survey of U.S. undergraduate students enrolled in environmental studies and science (ESS) courses. The 31-item survey (at https://tinyurl.com/ess-socialchange) was completed by more than 1200 students from 71 randomly selected ESS programs catalogued by the National Council of Science and Environment. It inquires about students' understanding of and attitudes toward social change, and assesses their perspectives on topics ranging from the effectiveness of green consumption to the role of education, policies, value-change, and crisis in driving environmental solutions.  This paper reports on aspects of the survey that illuminate the depth and drivers of ESS student preoccupation with crisis, and concludes with a call for fundamental change in the curricular orientation of ESS undergraduate programs.