Alumni

Lake Forest College Improves the Environment for Environmental Studies

by Jeffrey Sundberg
Associate Professor of Economics

Recent growth in the Lake Forest College student body has resulted in a larger faculty at the College. One of the majors reaping the most benefit hasn’t hired a single full-time faculty member. That’s because the Environmental Studies Program doesn’t hire full-time faculty—instead it relies on a variety of professors from other departments to provide a true interdisciplinary approach to understanding environmental issues.

New faculty members hired in other departments have created a dramatic increase in the number of Environmental Studies courses offered over the last few years, to the benefit of both ES majors and the overall student body.

While most students major in traditional disciplines taught within academic departments, the Environmental Studies Program provides an interdisciplinary major by tapping into faculty from traditional departments to create a set of courses appropriate for ES majors. Traditional majors teach students a progression of critical thinking skills within the context of one field, interdisciplinary programs teach a similar progression of skills while also introducing students to a variety of ways of thinking about a topic.

Environmental topics are interdisciplinary, and understanding them requires the ability to look at many perspectives. For example, a careful analysis of energy policy requires some understanding of physics, economics, history, philosophy, chemistry, politics, sociology, international relations, and biology, at a minimum. While we need specialists in these fields, we also need people who can speak the language of specialists and integrate the different perspectives to create a fuller understanding of the issues. Liberal arts graduates, who possess critical thinking and communications skills honed in seminars as well as electives in many fields, have a wonderful ability to understand different viewpoints and help find solutions that address multiple problems.

While many feel that a traditional major is important to students (or at least to their career), let’s think about this more carefully. We all know people who majored in philosophy—but how many of them became philosophers? Do you bump into a lot of sociologists or economists in your daily wanderings? It’s not likely. Similarly, students majoring in environmental studies are not likely to be environmentalists in the purest sense of the word. But, they will develop the critical thinking skills necessary to make significant contributions in this or any other field by taking courses that build on previous coursework, and by increasing the level of rigor in their analysis. This can be done by combining courses from different departments, giving students a more varied set of approaches to a common topic, if appropriate courses exist.

And in fact, ES majors have a wide variety of options after graduation. Many students go on to graduate or professional school, typically law school or programs in ecology or public policy. We have alumni working in elementary and secondary education, running a nature center, working with The Nature Conservancy and The Chicago Botanic Garden, providing scientific environmental consulting services, and working for government agencies, including the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Creating a successful interdisciplinary program requires a group of faculty from multiple disciplines with an interest in the topic. When the ES Program was revamped in 1995, there was considerable student interest, but there were relatively few faculty members able to participate in the program. As a result, course offerings were somewhat limited.

The situation for ES majors has improved dramatically in recent years, however. Several new faculty members, including professors Lori Del Negro (chemistry), Caleb Gordon (biology), and Rui Zhu (philosophy), have greatly improved the course offerings available to students, and have provided valuable leadership for the program. Next year, newly hired English professor James Barilla will join the team.

In addition, the College has increased the ability of the program to hire adjuncts, and courses like Plant Biology, Environmental Law, and an upcoming course on public health topics have been added as a result.

Students also continue to have great opportunities for independent study. Sara Moriyama ’05 is pursuing a senior thesis that examines the possibility that international businesses, not national governments, can determine how to most efficiently achieve the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions called for by the Kyoto Accord, while Sean M. Sparks ’05 is exploring the success of different regulatory frameworks in protecting ocean fisheries. Both projects argue that biological goals cannot be achieved without first addressing severe economic and political challenges.

The increase in ES faculty participants has allowed the program to begin offering interdisciplinary seminars that are team-taught by faculty from different areas. For example, students in last year’s senior seminar studied coffee production in Latin America. Professor Caleb Gordon used his background in ecology and agroecology to discuss various ways of growing coffee and the impact of those methods on biodiversity.

In addition, I was able to provide some economics background to help students think about the economic implications of changing coffee production techniques to improve habitat, and students left the course fully aware of the importance of protecting biodiversity in ways that maintain or even improve the economic viability of coffee production. Next year professors Ray Wiggers (biology) and Ben Goluboff (English) will offer a seminar on the ecological and cultural importance of native plants, while Lori Del Negro helps students explore the challenges and possibilities of alternative forms of energy, with assistance from other faculty members.

Students in ES courses are given many opportunities for curricular field experiences, including semester-long research at The Chicago Botanic Garden, class visits to local sites, longer trips to Nebraska and northern Wisconsin, and a spring break tropical ecology research trip to Costa Rica. Students see the value of different perspectives through these experiences. The ES class, Wildlife in North America, spent one weekend this past February learning about wolves in northern Wisconsin. In addition to discussing wolf ecology, the workshop addressed the history of humans and wolves in the state, the ways humans and wolves come into conflict, and how the state tries to manage the wolf population for the good of both wolves and humans. The trip included faculty members from four different departments, providing examples of many different ways to examine topics.

Students also have an extraordinary variety of other experiences available to them. ES majors have recently completed internships at two local land trusts, the Sierra Club, the Lake County Forest Preserve District, Lincoln Park Zoo, and Shedd Aquarium. They participate in summer research projects banding birds and analyzing data, doing archival research, or creating a tree map for the campus. They participate in habitat restoration projects on campus, and head up to the roof of Carnegie to help count raptors for the Lake Forest College Hawkwatch. Mike J. Ahern ’04 helped several of our group count over 2,500 sandhill cranes that migrated past the College one afternoon in November 2003. The previous September, John Brugos ’04 and several other students helped count broadwinged hawks; several hundred were overhead at one time during the peak movement.

From counting migratory birds to analyzing the ecological and cultural importance of biodiversity, the Environmental Studies Program prepares students for a variety of challenges, no matter where their paths may lead. 

Jeff Sundberg is associate professor of economics and business, and is currently chair of the environmental studies program. He teaches a seminar on North American wildlife and a course on environmental economics for the ES Program, as well as more traditional courses in microeconomics and finance.