Education of Environmental Specialists and ... - ACS Publications

Chapter 26

Education of Environmental Specialists and Generalists in American Universities

Downloaded by UNIV OF MISSOURI COLUMBIA on January 7, 2018 | http://pubs.acs.org Publication Date: February 4, 1992 | doi: 10.1021/bk-1992-0483.ch026

Charles E. Kupchella Ogden College of Science Technology and Health, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY 42101

Universities must take responsibility for the general environmental education of all graduates and the preparation of greater numbers of appropriately educated environmental specialists. All university students must be environmentally educated because the health of the environment depends upon knowledge and attitudes about the environment among leaders in all walks of life. The issue here is how to fit the environment into the long list of things all students need to know. The eclectic nature of environmental problems requires that environmental specialists also need to be broadly educated. Here the issue seems to be how broad is broad enough, since breadth comes at the expense of depth. Perhaps we need a number of different ways of preparing environmental workers.

Many of the things going on today are pulling biogeochemical cycles out of balance and threaten the stability of planet, Earth. Tens of thousands of square miles of tropical forest are being burned off each year, and this is changing the chemistry of the atmosphere as well as wiping out unknown numbers of species. The world's wetlands are disappearing at an alarming rate, and this, too, distorts chemical and biological cycles and diminishes the biological richness of our planet. While urbanization continues to overrun some of the world's best farmland, many people of the world live on land that is physically and chemically abused. Thousands of lakes and millions of acres of forests are dying worldwide, most likely from the effects of acid rain. Every day it seems we have new toxic spills and old toxic disposal sites are discovered. Our atmosphere has a worrisome ozone hole in it; and there is evidence that, because of changes in atmospheric chemistry, the earth is warming up. Our prospects for solving these and other related problems are not

0097-6156/92/0483-0473$06.00/0 © 1992 American Chemical Society Dunnette and O'Brien; The Science of Global Change ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 1992.


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good. Some are global problems whose solutions will require unprecedented international cooperation. All of them are complex problems whose solutions will require people able to grasp the big picture, people able to appreciate and deal with complex problems, and people able to support strategies having long-term impacts. We don't have many of these kinds of people: our universities aren't turning them out anymore, if indeed they ever did. The need for environmental education at the college level has two major dimensions. One of these is the need to educate all college graduates about the environment. Environmental problems simply will not be solved by experts if government officials, leaders in business, law, medicine, and citizens, in general, have no understanding of such problems. The task here will be to determine how to add the environment to the long existing list of things all students need to know. The other major dimension has to do with the expanding need for appropriately trained and educated environmental specialists. Environmental specialists also need to have a broad appreciation of the environment built into their education. Here the issue is how much breadth is enough-since it comes at the expense of depth. The purpose of this chapter is to explore further the issues related to the education of environmental generalists and specialists at the college level. The Environment in General Education Much has been written lamenting the fact that college and university curricula no longer generate "educated" people. As Ernest Boyer put it in his book on The Undergraduate Experience in America (i), "The nation's colleges have been much less attentive to the larger, more transcendent issues that give meaning to existence and help students put their own lives in perspective." He went on to say, "This nation and the world need well-informed, inquisitive, open-minded young people who are both productive and reflective, seeking answers to life's most important questions educated men and women who not only pursue their own personal interests but are also prepared to fulfill their social and civic obligations," - implying that our colleges fail to generate such young people. This has especially serious implications for the environment. A sequence of events on our campus recently provided a striking illustration of the nature and perhaps even the roots of the problem. We returned several years ago to that point in the rhythm of academic cycles at which we decided to revise our general education program. A program that had served us well for a time seemed to have gotten out of hand. The number of course alternatives had grown, and the distinctions between courses designed to educate generally and those designed to serve as foundation courses for particular majors had blurred. A task group was appointed; and when its proposed new program came out in first draft, it had a course called Planet Earth. Planet Earth was to be a course required of all students and was to be designed to achieve the important general education objective of showing the relationship of humankind to the environment. Campus-wide

Dunnette and O'Brien; The Science of Global Change ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 1992.


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reaction to the proposal was distilled and a second draft was generated. Somewhere along the way, Planet Earth was deleted. Inquiries into the reasons for this yielded several unofficial possibilities. It was suggested that some faculty feared that such a course would be too "watered down" and not have enough substance. There was some concern about who would teach it. The idea that such a course could be team taught was thought by some to be unworkable. Apparently the environment was perceived as being too big to be dealt with by any one academic specialty, too broad to be deep enough, and too complicated to be dealt with by groups of different kinds of specialists - specialists who have difficulty working together anyway. Perhaps our world is in trouble for some of the same reasons. Environmental problems are too global to be dealt with by any one country, too complex to be tackled by any single kind of specialists, too important to be left to generalists, and too complex to be appreciated by citizens, legislators, or by narrowly trained specialists. What now? The environment simply must be made an inevitable part of the undergraduate experience, but because of very real concerns such as those just cited, this will not be easy. I would like to propose a strategy. First of all it must be acknowledged that arguments based on the need for college graduates to know about the environment, compelling though such arguments may be, are not likely to carry the day alone. There are simply too many things students "need to know." We must begin nevertheless by developing the conviction that, as subject matter goes, the environment is at least as important as anything else in the general education curriculum. Next, we have to develop arguments for environmental education based on the conventional rationale for general education, arguments wrapped in objectives having to do with writing and related skills, quantitative and logical skills (including data analysis) social science, natural science, and the humanities. Social sciences are found in all general education programs; perhaps a good case could be made for the idea that the proper study of man is not so much man as it is the study of humans in the system of nature. We should suggest that ecology underpins culture. It is often said that to understand the Japanese we must first understand Japanese culture. But Japanese history and culture reflect the ecology of Japan, an island nation with scarce natural resources. History is an inevitable component of college and university general education programs. One of the justifications offered for this is that those who fail to consider history are doomed to repeat it. We must make it clear that those who fail to consider ecology are doomed. We might also link environmental science to the need for students to think and to reason. The beginning of this argument could be that environmental issues are, and will continue to be, among the most important things students will be called upon to think and reason about. Although integrative/reasoning courses are found in many general education programs, the argument may well have to begin in some cases with the need for courses specifically designed to give students integrative reasoning experiences. Perhaps every university should have an upper-level course experience



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wherein students are required to engage other educated people in reasoning involving complex ideas and issues. Such courses should be designed to illuminate the ways in which contending arguments are weighed and should provide practice in - so that graduates become comfortable with - substantive debate and group reasoning. Although there is some evidence that reasoning can be taught, the idea is still hotly debated (see 2). One view is that there are no inferential rules of reasoning, only empirical rules covering specific events and situations; a related argument is that rules of reason are specific to each individual - and thus cannot be taught. Even giving these arguments some credence, the best way to hedge all bets would be to help students learn logical reasoning skills by providing opportunities whereby they can practice and hone whatever they do when they reason. The environment as subject matter can also help students learn how to get to the heart of issues. We often get into trouble in our society because we ask and answer questions at the wrong level with too narrow a focus. Should a certain pesticide be used? The typical approach to answering this question might focus on the toxicity and safety of the pesticide. If it is found safe, we use it. Considered at another level, however, perhaps the pesticide will result in the selection of resistant strains of pests and ultimately require more expensive, more chemically intensive strategies; perhaps the use of the pesticide will upset natural balances and end up causing more problems than it solves. Students ought to be keenly aware of the importance of asking the right questions at the right level. Issues courses can help accomplish this objective and can also help undergraduates come to appreciate the fact that they have power. Perhaps one of the things we now fail to do in educating citizens is to help them discover that they are the loci of control in our society, that people able to explore issues and to develop solidly based conviction can indeed get things done even in a big, complex world steeped in inertia. If people are to be responsible citizens, they must first believe that they can change things for better by exercising their responsibility and by bringing their intellect to bear on the search for solutions. Could there be any better focus for an issues course than the environment? Ecology is the integrative discipline of the sciences and environmental science can be the integrative discipline of "all" the disciplines. More than 10 years ago Eugene Odum described a kind of new ecology (3), not as an interdiscipline but as a new "integrative discipline that deals with the supraindividual levels of organization, an arena that is little touched by other disciplines as currently bounded - that is, by disciplines with boundaries established and strongly reinforced by professional societies and departments or curricula in universities." An environmental issues course would have the additional advantage of illuminating science in its relationship to other disciplines in the real world. We must find some way to persuade our colleagues in the sciences that environmental science is not so much a threat as it is an opportunity to help students appreciate the importance and relevance of science. Perhaps this could be done by helping them see that science teaching tends not to be very



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engaging and thus not very effective. In a 1979 study, one of many documenting the scientific illiteracy of the American people, it was shown that only 7% of American adults met basic criteria for scientific literacy; a 1985 follow-up study suggested that this may have deteriorated to 5% (4). Among holders of B A degrees, the figure was 12%. Science is grossly underrepresented in college curricula. According to the National Research Council, colleges "have lowered their science requirements over recent years to the alarming point where the average non-specialists student devotes only about 7% of a college course load to work in the sciences (5). Even when students take science they don't seem to get caught up in it. Science is still all too often presented as very large collections of stale, static facts, definitions, and esoteric formulas to be memorized outside of any meaningful context. A course illuminating science in the context of current environmental issues would, at the very least, show the relevance of science to daily living and help illuminate science as an important, effective way of giving shape to truth. There is no more important product of higher education than graduates able to think and able to seek and find the truth. There is nothing more important to think about and discuss the truth about than our impacts on the chemistry of our Planet and the consequence of these impacts. Responsible environmental behavior ought to be one of the primary goals of general education. The Education and Training of Environmental Specialists The job outlook for environmental professionals in the United States is very good (see 6). Throughout our society there is a great need for people who can solve environmental problems. Federal, state, and local governments (seeking to regulate environmental quality) compete with consulting firms and with private industries (seeking to comply with regulations) for too few people with appropriate training and experience. Driving the need for environmental specialists are the significant pieces of environmental protection legislation enacted over the past 25 years. Chief among these are the Clean Air Act, the Water Pollution Control Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act. These have created the need for trained workers in such areas as solid waste management, water quality, air quality, hazardous waste management, planning, land and water conservation, fisheries and wildlife, forestry, parks and recreation, and environmental education. The issue of what is the best kind of university preparation for environmental work remains controversial. Some claim that environmental problem-solving requires broadly trained individuals. They argue that universities need to establish environmental specialist degrees at the bachelors, masters and doctoral levels because narrowly trained specialists are unable to deal with the social, economic, and political as well as scientific aspects of environmental problems. Others (7) have argued that environmental problems cannot be attacked effectively using the blunted lances of the well rounded. We need, they say, people who are solidly


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grounded in the life-sciences, chemistry, the physical sciences, and other specialties, with perhaps some additional general education in environmental matters. In a recent survey of environmental science and environmental studies programs throughout the U.S., Judith Weis (8) of Rutgers University elucidated the characteristics of these programs. She received responses from nearly 80 programs, including 40 environmental science programs, 28 environmental studies programs, 6 environmental health programs and 2 programs in environmental engineering. (Her study did not include programs in traditional natural resources management fields such as wildlife/fisheries, or forestry). She found that about half the respondents had interdepartmental programs; the rest were housed in traditional academic departments of biology, geology, forestry, etc. Most of the programs required courses in biology, chemistry, and earth science or physics. Most also required courses in social science or law. Less than half the programs required a research experience. About half had provision for internships. Field work was required in less than half the programs but laboratory sciences were essential components in nearly all the programs. Programs using the word, "studies" in their titles tended to emphasize social, political, and economic aspects of environmental management more than the others. Environmental "science" programs tended to emphasize the importance of various laboratory courses such as microbiology, chemistry, geology, field biology, ecology, tropical biology, and physiology. Dr. Weis' survey revealed some disagreement among the program directors themselves, as to whether or not environmental science/studies graduates did better or worse than graduates with traditional majors in the job market. Among the problems with environmental degree programs cited by Dr. Weis were the following. 1. Identity. There is considerable variation in the use of terms like, "environmentalist," "environmental science program," "environmental studies program," etc., such that no particular background is guaranteed by the use of these terms. 2. Image. In the academic world, environmental programs are perceived as weak or soft. Many apparently believe that such programs generally sacrifice narrow depth for shallow breadth. 3. Insufficient training in field/lab work. The breadth of these programs does not allow for sufficient field training or laboratory skills training. 4. Students. Many of those initially attracted to environmental careers are often not prepared for even moderately rigorous science and mathematicsbased programs. 5. Staffing/organization. Interdisciplinary programs often suffer within universities because they are perceived as drains on the financial and personnel resources of the traditional departments and it is difficult to get cooperation. These are real problems that have to be weighed against the problem of specialists who may be well-trained but who are too narrowly trained. One



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solution to the dilemma of how best to balance breath and depth is to offer graduate training in environmental science to complement strong, traditional undergraduate majors. This would have the effect of combining the best of both sides of the argument - graduates of these programs would retain clear academic identities, and they would also have a multidisciplinary perspective, in this case developed at the graduate level of maturity. Another approach is to use an environmental "minor" to complement various traditional specialties. We have such an environmental studies minor at Western Kentucky University. This minor is designed to complement science majors QT majors in other fields such as Journalism. Currently, we have about thirty students enrolled in this minor; it has been growing rapidly, but the jury is still out on just how effective the program will be. The minor consists of 10-12 semester hours of required courses and 12-14 hours of électives selected from a list of approved courses. The required courses consist of an introduction to environmental science (3 hrs.), either a course in environmental ethics or economics (3 hrs.), and a one credit senior environmental seminar course designed to give students practice in interacting with specialists from other disciplines. Science majors taking this minor are also required to take a 2-hr. course in "environmental sampling and measurement" and a 3-hr. course in "environmental impact assessment." Students from other disciplines are required to have a course in either chemistry or physics (3 hrs.). A course in statistics is also strongly recommended for those with science majors. Electives are chosen from lists of approved courses from the departments of biology, chemistry, geography/geology, health and safety and engineering technology. This program is supervised by a committee consisting of a biologist, a chemist, an engineer, a public health specialist, and an earth scientist. We expect that this minor will serve as an effective entryway into the work of protecting the environment. Given the complexities of environmental issues, perhaps a number of different ways of preparing environmental workers should be available to students. Armies need the equivalents of lancers with sharp lances but they also need tacticians and the equivalents of platoon leaders, lieutenants, and generals, as well as various support personnel, each with different training needs. The point here is that there will likely be plenty of environmental work in the future for chemists, wildlife biologists, geologists, journalists, and the like. These could benefit from some broad educational exposure to environmental principles and issues as they go about the business of their specialties. There will also continue to be a need for environmental bigpicture people - some of whom may even have specialized in such general subjects as environmental studies. These would benefit from substantive exposure to the scientific and technical dimensions of environmental problem solving.


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Literature Cited 1. Boyer, E. The Undergraduate Experience in America; Harper and Row: NY, 1987; pp 7. 2. Nisbett, R.E.; Fong, G.T.; Lehman, D.R.; and Cheng, P.W. Science. 1987, 238, 625-631. 3. Odum, E.P. Science. 1977, 195, 1289-1293. 4. Miller, J.D. American Scientist. 1988, 76(2):(editorial). 5. McDonald, K. The Chronicle of Higher Education. 1982, p.6. February 24. 6. Kelley, J. Environment Today. 1990, Jan/Feb, 27-29. 7. Nash, R.F. J. Env. Ed. 1977, 8(4), 2-3. 8. Weis, J.S. Env. Sci.Technol.1990, 24(8), 1116-1121. RECEIVED July 23, 1991


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