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Spring 2007

Educating the Green Generation

By Jennifer McNulty (831) 459-2495; jmcnulty@ucsc.edu

Undergraduate Ryan Carle on a coastal bluff he is helping to restore. Photo by Jim MacKenzie.

Undergraduates like Ryan Carle feel the burden of the global environmental crisis they are inheriting, and they are determined to build a brighter future.

“Our generation grew up seeing all these problems in the world,” said Carle, 21, an environmental studies major at UC Santa Cruz. “We’ve been hearing about them our whole lives, and we have a strong incentive to solve them. Nearly everybody in environmental studies wants to make a difference.”

To prepare young people to tackle today’s environmental problems, UCSC offers a comprehensive environmental studies program that brings together ecology, conservation biology, economics, agroecology, and politics and public policy. Coupled with the department’s emphasis on field study and internships, the program gives students a uniquely well-rounded understanding of ecosystems and the human forces that shape them.

Environmental advocates must develop expertise in multiple subjects to address complex ecological issues, professor Daniel Press told 200 undergraduates during a lecture in last fall’s Ecology and Society course. “As environmental studies students, you have to work harder and smarter than everybody else,” he said. “But I’m going to ask you to do it, because we can’t keep sweeping these problems under the rug.”

Today’s undergraduates were raised to “reduce, reuse, recycle.” They carpool, compost, and carry their own coffee mugs to cut down on trash. Global warming has been part of their vocabulary since grade school.

“I pretty much grew up with the environmental studies community,” said Carle, who was raised in the small town of Lee Vining, near Mono Lake, the son of state park rangers. His appreciation of the natural world was coupled with an acute awareness of environmental problems and a deep concern about the future.

Carle turned to environmental studies for a “real-world, applicable” education. UCSC’s program focuses on land use, and the interdisciplinary approach helps students find their niche, whether in the laboratory, on an organic farm, or in the nation’s capital.

For many students, hands-on work restoring the landscape is gratifying and energizing. Carle helped restore a stretch of coastal scrub on the bluffs overlooking Monterey Bay during an environmental studies internship. “Restoration is a way to combat the despair people are feeling,” he said. “People feel healed when they do restoration, and it gives them hope. They feel connected to the land.”

Professor Karen Holl, a biologist who specializes in restoring damaged ecosystems, requires students in her Restoration Ecology class to pitch in on projects. For many, it’s not their first time, and Holl credits K–12 educators with providing powerful learning opportunities.

• At Sir Francis Drake High School in Marin County, Rebecca Hendricks participated in an environmental academy that restored a riparian corridor. The experience sparked her interest in environmental studies, her major at UCSC. “Our program is really at the cutting edge,” she said. “It’s a good place to be.”

• Sara Reid’s applied ecology class at Bishop O’Dowd High School in Oakland transformed a trashy three-acre hillside adjacent to the school into an outdoor classroom complete with wetlands and native plants.

• As a fifth grader at Deer Creek Elementary School in Nevada City, Matt Freitas and his classmates tended fertilized salmon eggs in a classroom aquarium and released the young fish into the Yuba River as part of a restoration project. “It was great,” said Freitas.

“Five years ago, my students hadn’t had these experiences during high school,” noted Holl.

UCSC’s interdisciplinary program demands a lot of students, who are required to take chemistry, ecology, ethics, politics, economics, statistics, and math before they can enroll in Ecology and Society, the first upper-division course for students majoring in environmental studies. Cotaught by a natural scientist and a social scientist, the writing-intensive course is considered the “heart and soul” of the major.

“When you’re out to change the world, the forces of the status quo are infinitely strong,” said Gregory Gilbert, a disease ecologist who cotaught the course last fall. “Environmentalists get a lot of push-back. We know that, and our program prepares students to anticipate criticism.”

If the interdisciplinary approach demands more of students, it also asks more of professors, who have to go beyond the disciplinary silos that defined their own academic training.

“When I came to UCSC and started sitting on dissertation committees, it was a little like going to graduate school all over again to learn the literature and language of my social science colleagues,” said Gilbert, who left UC Berkeley to be part of a department where natural scientists and social scientists worked together to solve problems.

Like their students, Gilbert and his faculty colleagues share a vision of a better world, and they see interdisciplinary work as a necessity, not an option. A forest ecologist and passionate environmentalist, Gilbert learned the hard way that good science is not enough to protect the natural world. Gilbert works in central Panama, an area he calls “the best-studied tropical forest in the world,” because scientists have published more than 2,000 papers about the region’s ecology.

“But after 15 years of research there, I saw that the overriding forces in conservation were social,” said Gilbert. Over and over, critical decisions about roads, dams, and parks were made by people who operated beyond the reach of scientists. “No matter how much we learn about the ecology, conservation depends on politics, economics, and social processes to work,” he said.

Environmental studies students step up to the challenge of their major, which requires them to work outside their primary interests. Undergraduate Sarah Carvill is a writer inspired by the work of authors like Terry Tempest Williams and Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring helped launch the environmental movement. But professor Alan Richards, an international economist, commanded her attention in his Natural Resource Economics course.

“Economic considerations often seem antithetical to environmental advocates, but we have to learn how to use the language of economics to speak to people in that framework,” explained Carvill, who said she has known since third grade that she would work as an environmental advocate. “It’s a language you have to speak, because so many people speak the language of money.”

A senior, Carvill is pleased with the breadth of her education. Last fall, an internship with the City of Santa Cruz Water Department tapped multiple skills as she supervised the restoration of a hillside where a landslide caused erosion that was polluting the city’s primary drinking-water supply. For her senior thesis, she is writing the untold story of the restoration of the North Basin of Mono Lake. Overlooked in the glare of publicity around the David-and-Goliath effort to save the lake itself, the neglected story of the hotly contested Mill Creek project nevertheless revolves around the essential elements of all western dramas: water and people. “It’s a microcosm of water policy in the West,” said one restoration advocate.

“This department has given me the opportunity to do science and field-based science, to write political memos and critique policy, to write literary nonfiction and to try teaching,” said Carvill. “I wouldn’t major in anything else.”

Although each student’s path in environmental studies is different, each brings enthusiasm, passion, and a heartfelt desire for change to their studies. Professors routinely go beyond their jobs as educators to offer inspiration and encouragement, too.

“There are days when you’ll feel like you’re making a difference and other days when you’ll feel overwhelmed,” Holl told her students on the last day of class in early December. “But there are many ways to make a difference for the environment, so choose one that you will enjoy every day.”

And she reminded them that change sometimes happens incredibly quickly: In 1988, Holl spent her junior year of college in Berlin. “We traveled to East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. We were told where we could and couldn’t go, we were forced to get our passports stamped to show where we spent every night, and we were regularly searched by military police when crossing borders,” she recalled. “We never considered that this might change in the near future.”

A year later, the Berlin Wall came down. “Although my peers and I didn’t know it at the time, people had been fighting for years to bring that wall down,” said Holl. “Likewise, we have to keep up the fight for things that are important to us.”

Bolstered by such calls to action, Ryan Carle is spending this spring on Santa Cruz Island near Santa Barbara, studying the interaction of songbirds with native and nonnative plant species and evaluating different proposals to control invasive plants.

And another piece of the global environmental picture will snap into focus.

“Everybody has a small part to play,” said Carle. “No one person can save the world. It’s more about finding your place.”

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For more information about environmental studies at UCSC, visit http://envs.ucsc.edu. To inquire about ways to support the environmental studies program, contact John Leopold at jleopold@ucsc.edu.

This article first appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of the UCSC Review magazine.

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