2015 Conference

Full Presentation Panel

A Conceptual Approach to Environmental Law as a Foundation for Teaching Environmental Policy

David Driesen, J.D., M.Mus., B. Mus.

The boundary between environmental law and environmental policy is quite porous, for almost all significant environmental policies find their expression in laws. Thus, the teaching of environmental policy requires some knowledge of law. Yet, figuring out how to teach some law and what law and policy to teach poses a dilemma for policy-oriented environmental studies teachers.

This presentation highlights the possibility of using a conceptual approach to environmental law as a way of marrying the two fields in ways useful to environmental studies. It presents the conceptual framework underlying the textbook, Environmental Law:  A Conceptual and Pragmatic Approach (by Driesen, along with Robert Adler and Kirsten Engel), which some environmental studies teachers have used. Part of this conceptual framework will receive sustained scrutiny in a forthcoming article, Toward a Positive Theory of Environmental Law. Thus, the presentation will reflect the experience gained from classroom use of the earlier editions of the textbook for several years (a third edition will be published soon) as well as the preliminary research for the article.

This work reflects the methodology used to generate legal theory, which involves careful study of legal texts to produce high-level generalizations that describe the main normative commitments and dilemmas in a legal field. These generalizations identify key recurring policy issues. This approach offers a way of selecting materials for study most likely to provide a focused foundation for working with the vast and confusing array of environmental law and policy issues that environmental policy professionals must face. It also provides a means of orienting students well. 

Water, Infrastructure and Sustainability: Who Owns What Rain?

Prof. Lance Neckar, MLA

Sustainability education in a liberal arts curriculum can be focused on environmental analysis towards solutions.  One kind of pedagogy takes a transdisciplinary learning perspective on problems of interdependent systems and linked consequences in fragmented and discipline-, and legally-and financially-bounded decision structures.  The study of water and its infrastructure, the human interface with this natural resource, provides just such a distinctly powerful focus on the challenges of understanding and solving wicked environmental problems.  

What can be done in a liberal arts context to help students gain knowledge and experience toward solutions to such problems, especially here in Southern California, across so many boundaries, margins and systems?

A suite of several Environmental Analysis courses at Pitzer and the other Claremont Colleges examine water.  Two courses in the Sustainability and Built Environment track, Case Studies and Studio, sharpen this focus using design and planning experiences.  The projects and problems chosen for these courses illuminate the complexity of interdependent environmental systems and other resources such as food, energy and emissions, and other built infrastructure systems, especially transportation.  At the core of these courses are critical questions about the public realm.  How do values inform our decisions about the public realm that we share? Why do we design our infrastructure to take rain water as quickly to as possible to rivers and the ocean? How do the public and private benefits of water infrastructure mirror biodiversity, access, and environmental injustice challenges more generally? How could green infrastructure make a more sustainable and resilient commons?

In their case studies and design and planning projects, students see and then demonstrate what processes need to be adopted for more just, regenerative, integrative and place-specific policy, planning and design around water and the constellation of other systems with which this critical resource might be more carefully linked across boundaries.

Confronting Issue Borders and Disciplinary Boundaries: The Role of Environmental Studies Foundation Courses

Graham Bullock, PhD

Environmental studies and sciences programs and majors have developed over the past 50 years in large part to bring together disciplines to provide students with a more holistic understanding of environmental issues and challenges.  With some exceptions, most elective courses that count for environmental studies credit are nevertheless still firmly grounded in disciplinary perspectives and lack significant interdisciplinary content.  In order to provide such content to their students, environmental studies programs have designed foundation courses that are designed to highlight the connections across disciplines and address the gaps between them.   Often required courses for environmental studies majors and minors and designed to cover a wide range of theoretical concepts, research methods, and environmental knowledge, these courses are in many ways at the front line of efforts to confront the boundaries and borders that impede society’s – and academia’s – ability to both understand and solve serious environmental problems, from local biodiversity loss to global climate change.  Conceptualizing these foundation courses as “boundary objects” that have the ability to both enable and regulate communication across institutional and theoretical borders, this paper explores the strategies that these courses have used to transcend the boundaries between disciplines and issue domains.  Using a case study approach, the paper analyzes the content of several environmental studies foundation courses from a diverse set of colleges and universities.  It also provides a more in-depth analysis of the process of designing and teaching an environmental social sciences foundation course at Davidson College, which highlights the challenges of confronting different types of boundaries simultaneously.  The paper concludes with a set of recommendations regarding the development of environmental studies foundation courses and a discussion of areas for future research on this important form of “boundary work.”