2015 Conference

Full Presentation Panel

An Integrated Theoretical Framework for Socio-Environmental Studies

Debbie Kasper, Ph.D.

“An Integrated Theoretical Framework for Socio-Environmental Studies”

Environmental studies literature is replete with calls for a comprehensive framework within which diverse disciplines and their work can be situated, and from which they can commonly proceed in studying, and informing efforts to address, socio-environmental issues. Despite certain efforts, however, the consensus is that we still lack a unifying framework, without which it is more difficult to achieve the interdisciplinary work needed.  And given the evidence pointing to the likelihood of near term and massive societal transitions (whether via shifting environmental, energy, and economic circumstances or deliberate efforts to mitigate problems through intentional social re-organization), a framework that can handle the interdependent relationships and processes at work in socio-environmental phenomena is crucial for navigating and/or mindfully directing these kinds of changes.  Synthesizing contributions across the social and natural sciences, I develop a parsimonious model depicting the general pattern of socio-environmental processes over time.  Such a model can help facilitate communication and collaboration among the disciplines that study them.  The basic premise is that the more accurately we understand the interdependence of social and environmental processes—and how things come to be as they are—the better equipped we will be to direct these processes more deliberately.  We already have what we need to cultivate a deeper and more integrated understanding.  The proposed framework is a small initial step toward enhancing that understanding and our capacity to use it.

The Earth’s Critical Zone as an Integrating Theme for Undergraduate ES Courses: Case Study at the Calhoun Critical Zone Observatory

Katherine O'Neill

Environmental Science (ES) seeks to integrate multiple scientific disciplines towards understanding how natural processes and patterns both impact and are impacted by human activity.  However, much of the basic science underlying these discussions at the undergraduate level remains disciplinary in nature with limited availability of inter- or multi-disciplinary datasets for use in classroom and laboratory activities. The NSF Critical Zone Observatory (CZO) program is a national network of land-based observatories that focus interdisciplinary research towards quantifying the physical, chemical, and biological processes operating within the Earth’s Critical Zone (the layer of the Earth’s surface extending from the base of weathered bedrock to the top of the vegetation canopy). Critical Zone (CZ) science is explicitly interdisciplinary and encompasses components of the earth (hydrology, geology, soil science), life, and atmospheric sciences.  At the same time, Critical Zone science is relatively new, with the first set of CZO’s formally established in 2007.  Perhaps not surprisingly, little of the emerging CZ science has filtered to the undergraduate level, particularly at primarily undergraduate institutions, where concepts from the earth sciences (soils, geology, hydrology) are often framed with little direct conceptual overlap to topics from other natural and social science disciplines. Here, we discuss the potential for using emerging science from the CZO network as an integrating theme in undergraduate ES courses using examples from the Calhoun CZO.  Like much of the southern Piedmont, the landscape represented by the Calhoun CZO was severely impacted by extreme soil erosion and water degradation resulting from agricultural practices during the 18th - early 20th century which was later followed by land abandonment and reforestation.  As such, emerging research from the Calhoun CZO provides the opportunity for ES students to explore place-based, interdisciplinary scientific research within the context of land management, environmental history, and social/cultural institutions.

Peter Smallwood

Undergraduate programs in Environmental Studies and Sciences have developed a diversity of approaches to employ experiential learning in the curriculum. They range from having the class participate in clean-up projects, to creating environmental programs for their campus, to working as an environmental consulting organization for local clients. Each approach has its own advantages and disadvantages, both for the students and the faculty of the courses.  We co-taught the capstone course for our Environmental Studies degree, where we have used policy advocacy as the basis for experiential learning.  After studying the scientific, economic and policy aspects of our chosen environmental problem, students in the course developed specific policy recommendations for officials of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and advocated for those policies. Our choices for specific problem areas to address with our recommendations have been very opportunistic.  In our most recent iteration of the course, we noted that the Governor of our state had appointed a commission to make recommendations for actions to help the state adapt to climate change in the coming decades.  We found the structure of the committee focused on the built environment, with little attention to the natural environment.  Therefore, we developed recommendations for conserving the state’s biodiversity in the face of climate change, and presented them to members of the Governor’s Climate Change Commission.  Mechanisms of advocacy included writing and submitting opinion pieces for local newspapers and face-to-face meetings with Virginia officials.  Here, we review our approach to experiential learning for environmental studies, the advantages and disadvantages to our approach, and compare them to a selection of other approaches. We again advocate an opportunistic approach to bringing experiential learning into the classroom.

The Environmental Sciences and Ethical Thinking

Dr. Richard Shearman

I relate the effort made at RIT to incorporate ethical reflection as a component of the intellectual tool kit for prospective environmental scientists. This has been realized in part via a required course entitled Environment and Society. This course is one among many that participates in the Ethics Across the Curriculum program, affiliated with the Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum. The purpose of both the Society and its iteration at RIT is to incorporate ethics in all academic disciplines.  Over the past two years a rubric with clearly defined learning outcomes has been developed and implemented at RIT. In my opinion, this has contributed greatly to the inclusion of meaningful ethical content into many disciplinary areas, including environmental science. While this experience does not provide a substitute for a more comprehensive exploration of ethical thinking in particular or of the humanities in general, it does offer a means for students to engage more holistically in environmental problems and their potential solutions and perhaps offers a blueprint for future related endeavors.