Environmental Studies Mission, Values & Vision
VISION
We envision a socially and environmentally just world in which all human communities and ecological systems thrive. This vision inspires us to train effective local, national, and international environmental leaders and achieve excellence in our doctoral and master’s programs and collaborative community service.
MISSION
Our mission is to educate a critical mass of visionary, effective leaders who will achieve environmental victories for a just and thriving world. We do this in a collaborative, interdisciplinary community founded on academic excellence and principles of justice.
VALUES
COMMUNITY SERVICE AND ACTION
Supporting positive change and experiential learning beyond the classroom are significant values we hold. We want students, faculty, staff, and alumni to actively engage in solving complex environmental and social issues. We challenge students and ourselves to be systems thinkers in understanding how our experiences, interests, and work connect to communities beyond the classroom. Such communities may be professional networks, local or geographic communities, families, friends, or any number of conceptions of community. We need all hands on deck in this work through stewardship, innovation, excellence in practice, servant leadership, capacity building, and inspiring others to engage in ways that make sense to them, in their lives, and in their communities. Active engagement lends itself to hope, resilience, positive change, and excellence in teaching. As faculty, our commitment to community and service as engaged scholars also circle back to enhance our scholarship, which becomes another avenue for student learning.
ENVIRONMENT
The well-being of our natural environment and human communities provides the academic and moral compass for our department and is reflected in our responsive curriculum. We recognize the intrinsic value of the natural world and all its biotic and abiotic forms. We also realize that “nature” has a myriad of interpretations across cultural contexts. We want students to gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of both the built and natural environment through their studies here. To that end, we value an interdisciplinary focus on social and natural sciences, conservation, education, resource management, humanities, and social justice, which promotes systems thinking, environmental scholarship, and stewardship in our graduates.
INCLUSIVITY & WAYS OF KNOWING
No one disciplinary approach will solve the complex environmental and justice challenges of today or in the future. We must challenge learners and teachers to think for themselves, commit to exploring the messiness of seeking interdisciplinary solutions and envisioning the world as interconnected, holistic systems. To do so, we commit to inclusive educational practices and realize the inherent tensions of marginalization and the privileged status of higher education generally. Further, we contend that historically marginalized voices— particularly of women, indigenous peoples, people of color, youth, elders, and residents of lesser developed countries—are key contributors of innovative solutions to the world’s environmental challenges. Engaging and learning alongside these leaders will facilitate social change and enable us to fully embrace the lived experiences of all community members.
INTERDISCIPLINARY & EXPERIENTIAL
The Department of Environmental Studies values innovative and experiential approaches to graduate education and the explicit integration of Natural and Social Sciences and the Humanities.
JUSTICE, EQUITY, DIVERSITY & INCLUSION
Through experiences in and outside of the classroom, we actively seek ways for students, faculty, staff, and community members to explore issues of power and privilege, enhance their intercultural communication, and lean into cultural awareness with humility and compassion. We pay special attention to issues of equity and justice-mindedness, particularly as environmental hazards and climate change disproportionately impact poor and marginalized groups in societies across the globe. We believe our commitment to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion enhances the scope of environmental sustainability and creates opportunities to authentically engage potential allies among a broader reach of civil society.
We also realize that as a graduate department composed mainly of white, middle-class, well-educated faculty, staff, and students, we have far to grow. We are aware of — and educate our students about — the long and well-documented history of the ways in which the environmental movement in the United States has marginalized cultures, peoples, and voices. This history includes significant evidence of overt racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, White Supremacy, and other forms of oppression. Early U.S. conservation and preservation movements emphasized the separation between people and nature and focused largely on land and animals over people and health, which misrepresented the interests of many.
Similarly, a dominant focus on Western, scientific, and positivistic approaches to knowledge acquisition in environmental studies curricula marginalizes other ways of knowing and doing, particularly Indigenous ways, as well as those voices of migrants to cities coming from agricultural backgrounds and has prevented some groups from fully participating and contributing to environmental issues. Our curriculum intentionally emphasizes social justice. We seek to advance justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion ourselves, and we encourage and support our students in doing the same through engaged scholarship and civic action.
We also recognize that for more than five hundred years, Native communities around the world have demonstrated resilience and resistance in the face of violent efforts to separate them from their land, culture, and each other. They remain at the forefront of movements to protect Mother Earth and the life it sustains. Critically examining the history of the narratives and voices present and missing from environmental agendas is essential to equity and justice, and part of the deep work we are committed to doing in this department.
SCHOLARSHIP & PRACTICE
The world needs adept, flexible, creative, collaborative, culturally humble educators, leaders, scientists, policy-makers, advocates, artists, philosophers, and citizens. Our hope is that together–students, faculty, staff, and community members–we build our capacity to serve in these essential and eclectic roles.
Integrating systems fundamental to sustainability requires new forms of human organization, moving away from reductionist, problem-solving strategies to interdisciplinary, holistic, solution-seeking approaches. We value rigorous applied scholarship and leverage various strategies and epistemologies to make the world a better place for all. We value inquiry-based learning, research, reflection, and service learning as essential tools for engaging the environmental challenges of local, regional, and international communities.
TRANSFORMATIVE LEARNING COMMUNITY
Our department embraces student-centered teaching excellence, and we actively cultivate a dynamic learning community. This is a learning space where you can bring your full self to experience, and we deeply value teaching and learning alongside you as a whole person. We cannot fully separate our intellectual selves from all that makes us who we are–from our prior life experiences to our physical, emotional, and spiritual selves, among countless other dimensions of every learner. We want to challenge our assumptions in a supportive environment where personal and social change can occur in both subtle and powerful, dramatic ways. Descriptors oftentimes applied to our learning community include authenticity, playfulness, innovation, personal transformation, democratic processes, valuing voices, empathy, transparency, mentorship, active listening, professionalism, peace, reflectivity, compassion, respect, collaboration, curiosity, and solutions-focused learning for all.