On campus, science embraces environmental ethics
By G. Jeffrey MacDonald, Special to USA TODAY
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Justin Becknell became an environmental science major because he wanted to help solve ecological problems. He is so determined to get results, in fact, that he's developing a subspecialty in ethics.
The rationale oozes scientific pragmatism. Becknell, a junior at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, ranks among a rising generation that has too often seen the world ignore what scientists recommend. So he and peers at other institutions are striving to understand deep convictions that lead to roadblocks and breakthroughs in human relationships. In a word: values.

"It's interesting that these problems (of implementation) exist, but scientists certainly don't know how to solve them," Becknell says. "We're trying to learn how to be good scientists who can be trusted to provide data. But we also understand that to solve some global problems, it's going to involve a moral, society-wide shift in how people use resources and spend money."

Values-based approaches are gradually winning converts in a field that for decades has emphasized problem-solving through hard science. Even programs that developed interdisciplinary methods as far back as the early 1970s have only in the past five years come to closely examine moral reasoning and "environmental values." Some examples of the new direction:

This winter, Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., rolled out a required course for all 2,000 freshmen to explore their "responsibility" for the global environment.

Colgate University of Hamilton, N.Y., created a faculty position in environmental ethics in 2003 and introduced a course this winter examining how indigenous religious beliefs can support environmentalism in South Asia.

Students now study environmental values at not only the University of Minnesota, but also at the University of Denver, the University of San Francisco and Wells College in Aurora, N.Y.
[they missed the entire Environmental Ethics MA at U of North Texas]

Such academic tracks on one level aim to provide a forum for students to clarify their own values by considering concepts of environmental sustainability and interdependence. Yet on another level, they also aim to equip future scientists with "bridge building" skills that could make or break what happens to solutions developed in a laboratory. "To me, this is where the forefront in the past few years is," says Frances Westley, director of the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "Scientists-in-training and scientists in practice are now realizing they need to develop a skill base that goes beyond merely being able to understand that other people have different ethical perspectives, but in real time being able to work with those people ... to be able to build trusts so that you say, 'Well, that's a different kind of know-ledge, but I understand the rules of evidence or the rules of truth in your system,' " Westley says.

On a recent afternoon, students tested their emergent skills in Dan Philippon's "Issues in the Environment" class at the University of Minnesota. They role-played several interest groups, each with a stake in a hot Midwest debate: prairie dogs. Some played ranchers with disdain for the creatures, whose holes can be big enough to trap and break a grazing steer's leg. Others urged protection for prairie dogs, a favorite of animal rights advocates and a primary food source for the endangered black-footed ferret. On another day, students considered how fertilizer used for crops in Minnesota kills off ecosystems downriver toward the Mississippi Delta. The goal in each case is the same: make students aware of interconnectedness, multiplicity of interest groups and the values that drive decisions.

"We could see this just as a technical problem to say, 'Well, we need to moderate our use of fertilizer on farmland,'" says Philippon, a professor of rhetoric with a specialty in environmental ethics. "But we can also see it as a question of values for how you bring that about — making the connection of what's happening in one landscape with what's happening in another."

Teachers of environmental values nevertheless face what Philippon calls "the danger of introducing advocacy into the curriculum." To minimize this risk, he says, he aims to provide a balance of viewpoints in lectures and readings. Even so, the Program in Agricultural, Food and Environmental Ethics, which he directs, embraces three core values of its own: biodiversity, sustainability and minimizing dangers to human health.

Other schools say they presuppose no particular environmental values but hope students will learn to defend their own. At Old Dominion, for instance, presenters in the required global environment course pre-test their material on colleagues, who critique whether a lecture will strike students as agenda-driven. Students "understand that maybe they need to decide on principles, but we're not going to tell them what they are," says Old Dominion president Roseann Runte. "We're not supposed to indoctrinate students. We're supposed to open their minds."

Still, some educators hope certain values will take root.

At Colgate University, assistant professor of religion Eliza Kent designed her new course, "Religion and Environmentalism in South Asia," with an eye, she says, toward urging students "to question the taken-for-granted idea that economic concerns are all that matter. I am trying to indoctrinate them with some sense of hope that these (environmental crisis) situations are reversible," Kent says. "I don't make any apologies for trying to instill in them hope that this environmental crisis can be reversed."