| WHY A SUMMIT ON ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES? |
Still, although there are professional associations for almost every field of study imaginable -- from anthropology through zoology -- there is no one obvious association to serve the professionals who work within those environmental programs. In the past few years, the Council of Environmental Deans and Directors (http://www.ncseonline.org/CEDD/) has begun to fill some of the need for greater communication, but as suggested by the fact that CEDD is a co-sponsor of the Santa Barbara Summit, there may still be a need for a professional organization. The CEDD is an organization of institutions, not individuals, meaning that the Deans and Directors are expected to represent their institutions, in an overall or top-down way. From the trenches, meanwhile -- among the faculty, students and staff in the same programs -- the view will sometimes be different. We sometimes make the comparison to artists and art museums; while art museums play a key role in the arts, the actual painting and sculpting get done by different people -- the artists, who often face different sets of opportunities and constraints. A number of existing organizations do offer important contributions; click here to see the Excel spreadsheet prepared this year by Tyler Durschlag-Richardson, offering basic information on the 25 that we judged to have the greatest potential for overlap. As can be seen from the list, several of the 25 associations do perform a number of functions that might be appropriate for a new association, but they tend either to be smaller and less widely known (e.g., the Interdisciplinary Environmental Association, or the Society for Human Ecology) or else to have a geographic focus that has limited the number of members they attract from other regions (e.g., the Environmental Studies Association of Canada, or the Northeastern Environmental Studies Group). Members from all of those groups, and more, are being invited to the Santa Barbara summit, and a number of them have already provided invaluable advice, based on the lessons they have learned from their own experience to date. In addition, there are “environmental” specialty groups within any number of associations that are mainly built around “non-environmental” fields of study, ranging from rural sociology to international studies, just as there are “societal” specialty groups within the professional associations that serve a number of environmental sciences. Not many historians or political scientists, however, actually belong to the American Geophysical Union -- to pick just one example -- and not many chemists or geologists belong to the Society for Environmental Journalists or the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. All of these existing associations appear to be ones in which there are conversations about the need for interdisciplinary conversations, but it is not clear how many actual interdisciplinary conversations can take place unless an association's actual members come from a reasonably full range of relevant disciplines. It is possible that the most sensible approach is to ask an existing association to take on additional challenges; it is also possible, however, that such a request might seem to an established organization to be something like what the corporate world calls a bid for a hostile takeover, and that a cooperative effort to establish a new association would be easier and/or more appropriate. That, in fact, is one of the topics that will be considered at the summit -- but it will be only one of them. The Santa Barbara Summit is being planned in the spirit of adaptive management. Rather than asking participants to talk about interdisciplinary conversations, we will ask them to participate in actual interdisciplinary conversations. Rather than focusing mainly on the “organizational” question of whether there is a need for a new association, will ask participants to discuss the same kinds of topics that would be likely to come up in a meeting of such an association. We expect that some of the relevant questions will focus on education: What are the best ways to structure a professional graduate program? How does that differ from or build on the best ways to structure an undergraduate program? Why? Read any good textbooks lately? Is there a canon -- a body of environmental writings that all “environmental” students ought to know? Should there be? We also expect that some of the sessions will focus on research: What are the latest findings in your own research -- especially those that might be considered promising or even exciting to those who teach in other interdisciplinary environmental programs, even if they tend to fall on deaf ears in traditional disciplinary associations? Still other questions probably won't fit neatly into the categories of research or education, but will probably include an important mixture of both: If there is a canon, are there widely known works that deserve to be removed from it? Are there newer but lesser-known works that deserve to be added? If you could send any one message to your colleagues at other environmental programs, what would it be? If there is any one question you could ask to all of the same colleagues, what would that be? Our hope is that, by actually discussing these and related topics, we will be participating in a more realistic and informative experiment on what might take place in a meeting of such an association, if one were to be established. If participants find their participation to be sufficiently valuable, intellectually, and sufficiently enjoyable, interpersonally, then volunteers will be invited to participate in the next steps of actually setting up a new professional association and planning another such meeting in the reasonably near future. |
It is clear that “environmental” programs
of varying descriptions have been established on a wide range of
college and university campuses, including essentially all of the
most prestigious ones. The extensive but not exhaustive list on
the Brown University website (