New Environmental Studies Program To Be Launched in the Fall
Venture in general education rather than pre-professional trainingseeks to combine student interest in problem-oriented educationwith established disciplinary approaches
Our society has suddenly recognized that man's activities are altering his environment on an unprecedented scale and in shockinglyunexpected ways. The need to understand, to anticipate and to exertsome measure of control over thisenvironmental alteration is one ofthe great challenges and obligationsof the present day. The problemsdemand new ways of thinking andof asking questions before they willyield to constructive solutions. Itis clear that education must play acentral role in sensitizing more people to the dimensions of the problem and in providing them withthe multidisciplinary capabilities forsolving them.
With these words, Chemistry Professor James F. Hornig, Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for the Sciences, began a report in March describing a proposed Program of Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College.
To a College historically concerned with natural conservation reaching back 200 years to Eleazar Wheelock's preoccupation with the Indians, it did not take the appropriate faculty body long to act. Within the month, the program was approved by the executive committee of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and was announced by Provost Leonard M. Rieser on the eve of Dartmouth's campus-wide participation in "Earth Day," April 22.
The enabling authorization capped two years of careful study by a faculty-student planning committee commissioned to consider how Dartmouth might best prepare its students from now on to bring their future leadership to bear on this central problem of the last third of the Twentieth Century.
Just as the problems of the environment cut a wide swath across the center of the vital concerns of man and society, so the Environmental Studies Program will be highly interdisciplinary in structure. For its faculty, the program will draw from such departments as Biological Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering Sciences, Economics, Chemistry, Geography, and Political Science, in an unprecedented integration of specialized fields of knowledge all focused on the relationship of man and his environment.
"The time has come for a unified approach to the problems of environment," explained William A. Reiners, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences who chaired the ad hoc interdisciplinary study committee which hammered out the program. "It doesn't make much sense to keep putting everybody through conventional majors, when in 20 or 30 years, if environmental management continues in the present manner, there may not be any education at all."
The program will offer at the start a series of three essentially freshman and sophomore courses geared to supplement, and be supplemented by the traditional major fields of the students. It will bring all the learning together in a senior-year course featuring major problem-solving research projects, such as a coordinated research attack on the ecological problems of the Connecticut River Valley.
While it is anticipated that the program ultimately will embrace a program of graduate study, as well as community education and public service, the first priority will be vested in the undergraduate phase in keeping with Dartmouth's traditional emphasis on, and strength in, undergraduate education.
The four courses providing the initial core of the program are Environmental Studies (E.S.) 1, 2, 3, and 85.
In E.S. 1, selected key resources (energy, air, water, land and food) will be examined in terms of demand, supply and use and against a background of the principles of ecology and biogeochemical cycling. Population history, dynamics, and control policies will be surveyed, as will the stresses placed on environmental quality by the combined effects of expanding population and increasing per capita consumption of resources.
E.S. 2 will introduce the concept of this planet as a finite environment containing certain properties essential for life, many of which are dynamic in nature and impart an interrelated "systems" quality to the earth's environment. The influences of man, including global pollution, will be examined in the light of their impact on the dynamics of the environment. As part of this course, classes will be broken up into small discussion groups to study case histories of such environmental problems as those relating to Egypt's Aswan Dam, the Trans-Alaskan pipe-line, or the proposed use of nuclear explosive to build a new isthmus canal. The objective will be to show how evidence is obtained and brought to bear on such problems and to illustrate the scientific basis on which policy decisions are made.
The evolution of social man, his attitudes, culture and technology in relation to his environments from primitive times to the present will be traced in E.S. 3, with special attention to the cultural, religious, and economic developments that have accompanied changes from an agricultural to an industrial and then to a technological society. Students will also examine the viability of possible changes in technology and social patterns which might be called for to cope with such problems as dwindling resources, pollution, wilderness destruction, and scenic despoliation.
Finally, after each student enrolled in the program has devoted his junior year to getting deep into his particular major, thus adding to the sum of special knowledge each may bring from the various disciplines to the study of environmental problems, the students will be drawn together as seniors in E.S. 85, the problem-solving course. Here, drawing on experience already gained in such successful problem-solving courses as Engineering Sciences 21, students will be formed into interdisciplinary teams to work on possible solutions to environmental problems.
It is expected that initial projects will be directed at the Connecticut River Valley, a living laboratory flowing past the campus and containing along its length the full range of modern environmental conditions from the highly populated, industrialized stretches in Connecticut and Massachusetts to near wilderness at. its headwaters in northern New Hampshire.
Discussing the program, Dean Hornig explained that the new environmental curriculum has been designed as "a venture in general education rather than as a pre-professional program to prepare students for graduate work in environmental sciences." It is important, he said, "to bring sophisticated environmental education to the large number of Dartmouth undergraduates who are aiming toward careers in such areas as medicine, business, and law."
This emphasis on the seeding role of the program was also voiced by Professor Reiners who stressed in his committee report to the faculty that "future leaders in many professions should not only have an awakened concern, but also a reasonable understanding of the principles and problems of human ecology."
Final decisions on the scope and purpose of the program were made following a "Working Conference on Environmental Studies" last fall for which some 50 educators pioneering in environmental studies gathered to consider the kinds of environmental concerns which should be studied in an undergraduate curriculum.
"We believe that this curriculum, as it has evolved, presents an answer to one of the more perplexing and pervasive questions being raised in academia today: how to reconcile student society interest in problem-oriented education with the long-term educational values of disciplinary perspective and rigor," Dean Hornig explained. "We all recognize that conventional disciplinary approaches have produced citizens who are incapable of detecting and dealing with some of the complex problems of our society. At the same time, we are becoming painfully conscious of the fact that problem-oriented educational approaches easily dissolve into fadism and emotional purgations, which do little to expand intellectual capacity.
The program will be co-directed by Charles L. Drake, Professor of Geology in the Earth Sciences Department, and Frank Smallwood '51, Orvil Dryfoos Professor of Public Affairs and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for the Social Sciences.
Approval of the Environmental Studies Program comes as another major step in Dartmouth's commitment to the variety of issues that fall under the general rubric of environment.
Under student initiative, the Dartmouth Outing Club, long active in conservation activities, has established an Environmental Studies Division, which will mobilize student activities and concerns toward environmental control projects and add an intellectual and social purpose to the classic appeals of outdoor life. Already, the new division is working under the chairmanship of William H. Schlesinger '72 to create a Regional Resources Environmental Library in Robinson Hall, to be open to both the Dartmouth community and the interested public. Another project will organize students to clear Girl Brook in Hanover from silting and other erosion damage which Schlesinger said is destroying Pine Park on the Golf Course.
"We aim to concentrate first on local problems," he said. "But instead of just studying and talking about the problems, we, in the D.O.C. tradition, want to do things about them."
"These may be little drops of water," he said, "but if we can help to make Dartmouth an example in environmental planning and development, we may help to move a nation to recognize that things can be done to control this problem."
In still another area, working with the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, the Spaulding-Potter Charitable Trusts, the New Hampshire Charitable Fund, and the University of New Hampshire as co-sponsors, Dartmouth had a key role in the establishment of "New Hampshire Tomorrow," a demonstration project in environmental enhancement and development.
These and other projects have been encouraged by the Dartmouth Office of Regional Programs established early last year under a grant from the Spaulding-Potter Charitable Trusts of Concord, N. H., to bring the resources of the College to bear on the solution of regional problems.
As part of Dartmouth's observance of Earth Day on April 22, Station WDCRand student work crews were on call to clean up public eyesores around Hanover.
Robert Deyle '72 (l), coordinator, andDwight Sargent '72, son of David R.Sargent '42, with pesticides picked up asanother DOC activity on Earth Day.
