Last week at the Education and Curriculum Committee, science and humanities faculty described their proposal for an Enivironmental Science major. The proposal is interesting not only because the subject matter is so fascinating, but because the major proposal struggles to find a way to uniquely combine the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences in the study of the environment.

A drawing of the Arb by Alice Newman '11. It was drawn for Field Drawing, one of the ENVS classes.

The Environmental Science major is laid out as follows:

• An introductory course in biology or geology.
• A methods course (Intro to Geospatial Analysis or Intro to Statistics)
• Three core courses that all of the majors will take: Ecosystems Ecology, Environmental Economics and Policy, and American Environmental History
• Four classes in one of the four foci. The foci each hone in on a different aspect of environmental science. They are:
  • Food and Agriculture
  • Conservation and Development
  • Landscapes and Perceptions
  • Water Resources
• Comps

The comps proposal itself is exciting in its ambition. All the ENVS majors for a single year will be focused on some enormously broad interdisciplinary subject. For example: Biodiversity. Under this topic there will be small groups of students focusing on some aspect of the topic (for example: ethical implications of using Amazon rain forest for medicinal purposes). The small groups approach their specific topic in an interdisciplinary way, so every small group would have natural science ENVS majors, social science ENVS majors and humanities ENVS majors all working together. At the end all the groups come together and present a symposium and a unified paper.

Photo from the arb website.

The whole thing sounds amazing. It takes the individual major (toiling in obscurity on comps) and makes her part of a greater effort. Of course it won’t be everything I imagine during the first year of comps, but the program will grow and evolve.

There are some concerns about the major, but I am confident they will be put to rest and Environmental Science will become a major. I believe that this kind of interdisciplinary work presents a unique angle that a liberal arts college can offer that other institutions cannot.