The Visionary Oasis: The long term challenge of interdisciplinary environmental studies

摘要

Has an academic field of study ever burdened itself with as much ambition as environmental studies? When environmental studies (ES) faculties and departments began to appear in the late 1960's, they were immediately saddled with two daunting, if not impossible challenges. First, they would make substantial contributions to saving the planet from the looming and unfolding ecological crisis. Second, they would play instrumental roles in developing something new and different: interdisciplinary approaches to environmental education and research. A key underlying premise was that traditional university programs, with their disciplinary silos and reductionist approaches to science, were more part of the problem than the solution. Notwithstanding this subversive premise, ES departments were compelled, as a matter of course, to make as many inroads as possible, all over the academic map, and inspire radically different approaches. A tall order, to say the very least.