Sustainability as Transdisciplinary (but not-so-diverse) Praxis

According to the most recent report on Sustainability in Higher Education, students graduating in 2008 were less likely to be "environmentally literate" than they were when the survey was administered back in 2001. The report attributes this backward slide in eco-awareness to a lack of exposure to ecological principles in the curriculum. The irony is that the report also showed a greening of physical campus infrastructure (e.g. recycling, renewable and reduced energy use, etc.) and ever greater pledges of commitment to reduced environmental impact by the campus administration and leadership. The report does not rank or rate individual campuses. I am not sure how our College compares to the report's overall findings, though it occurs to me that we have a campus "sustainability officer," and we report on our progress in greening our physical infrastructure, but we have no coordinator or measure of sustainability in our curriculum.

Over the winter break I attended a workshop at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia to learn ways to better integrate environmental sustainability into our curriculum. The workshop was sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), and its purpose was to help "faculty leaders of all disciplines who wish to develop curriculum change programs around sustainability on their campuses." My original purpose in attending was to figure out how to improve our Department's new Sustainabilty concentration, but the workshop was actually aimed at showing us how to encourage and assist any or all faculty, in any or all disciplines, to integrate sustainability into their curricula: anthropology, biology, business, chemistry, English, foreign languages, geography, history, philosophy, political science, sociology, etc. The key, we learned, is to respect individual faculty members as experts in their respective disciplines, and to allow them to figure out how best to integrate sustainability. Our job is simply to educate or encourage appreciation of sustainability, and guide discussion and planning of curriculum changes.

The idea of breaking down disciplinary barriers was strong. One of the articles we read in preparation for the workshop went so far as to argue that schools should avoid establishing specific departments or programs in sustainability. Sustainability, they argued, will be more successful in the long term if it is a perspective or value that permeates all disciplines rather than being the protected turf of a particular department or group of experts. I know this must have raised some hackles, but they were raised quietly. This perspective makes sense to me. The concept of sustainability or sustainable development or environmental sustainability is supposed to occur at the intersection of economics, society/culture and the environment. How do we create, and sustain, a world that meets the needs of the present and the future across all of these domains? No one discipline or expert can possibly fathom all aspects of this problem (though Geographers come close!).

Inherent in this transdiciplinary ideal is an appreciation for the value of a diversity of perspectives. Indeed, our workshop hosts very deliberately admitted a diversity of attendees (37 in total): a wide variety of academic and professional disciplines, men and women, older and younger, tenured and untenured. Good. But somehow, racial or ethnic diversity, as far as I could tell, fell well short. I think, though I could be wrong, that I was the only racial/ethnic minority in the room. Not so good. Why does this matter? It matters for the same reason that it matters to involve people with different disciplinary training, with different forms of experience, or with different cultural orientations; different kinds of people, with different kinds of experience, bring different kinds of perspectives to what may appear to be the same issues (and to which people with the same perspective may be blind). For all of the self-congratulatory rhetoric about our post-racial society (look, we've got a Black President!), race/color/ethnicity remain defining aspects of Americans' identities, experiences, and for too many, their chances of success and happiness in life.

Low racial or ethnic diversity is a widely acknowledged problem in academia in general. However, I think it is especially problematic for sustainability. One of the most important transformations (or disruptions) in Environmentalism was the emergence of the Environmental Justice movement - the push to acknowledge the unique needs and problems of marginalized or oppressed groups in environmental problems and how these were interrelated with larger social (in)justice problems. Classic environmentalism was about saving the natural (i.e. non-human) environment and about averting catastrophic degradation of our world; not a bad thing. What often went unacknowledged, however, was how common environmental problems weighed most heavily on minority and working class or poor communities. Worse, efforts to cleanup or protect some places often mean simply displacing environmental burdens on to other places with less economic or political clout (read: marginalized communities). The issues go deeper, but the point is that these were aspects of our environmental crisis that were either ignored or were simply invisible, in part, because they were not within the experiences of the more privileged (i.e. well-heeled, White male) leaders of the early Environmental movement.

Today's Environmentalism is better for having acknowledged the social justice aspects of environmental problems. As with most big problems, however, our work is nowhere near done. My own anecdotal experience is that the socio-economic dimensions of sustainability continue to be underappreciated or misunderstood (why am I always the only one asking about the distributional implications of these efforts?). For sustainability to succeed, it must penetrate disciplinary boundaries AND it must incorporate the widest array of human perspectives. Otherwise, we're likely to miss something important.