Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T17:53:44.056Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Greening of Political Science: Growth Pains and New Directions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2004

Philip Brick
Philip Brick
Affiliation:
Philip Brick is Director of Environmental Studies at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Over the past decade, interdisciplinary programs such as gender studies, global studies, and environmental studies have proliferated quickly across the American academy. One study showed that the number of environmental studies programs at four-year colleges and universities doubled between 1990 and 1995, and more are still being added. Political science departments frequently find themselves at the center of these new programs, and courses in environmental politics are often in high demand among students. The complexity and persistence of environmental problems is finally forcing the academy to recognize the importance of interdisciplinary research and teaching. Consider the case of global warming. It is impossible to discuss this issue intelligently from the perspective of any single discipline. Political scientists might illuminate certain facets of the debate, such as how national and international political structures create few incentives for policymakers to aggressively address the issue. But however important such insights might be, they are far too narrow to even begin to encompass the complexity of the climate change issue, which requires literacy in the discourses of other disciplines, including environmental economics, atmospheric research, and environmental ethics. After decades of suspicion in the academy about the intellectual rigor of interdisciplinary approaches, the persistence of complex environmental problems, and simply the rapidly growing cohort of scholars engaged in environmental research and teaching, is driving increasing acceptance of such approaches.Philip Brick received the APSA's Pi Sigma Alpha Award for Outstanding Teaching in Political Science in 2000, and in 2004 he was named Outstanding Environmental Educator by the Environmental Education Association of Washington. His environmental field program is described at www.whitman.edu/semester_west, and he can be contacted at [email protected]. The author thanks Jennifer Hochschild at Perspectives on Politics and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. He also thanks the research assistants at Perspectives on Politics and Whitman College student Kalin Schmoldt for gathering syllabi for this review.

Type
REVIEW ESSAY
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , June 2004 , pp. 337 - 346
Copyright
© 2004 American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Chaloupka, William. 2002. The tragedy of the ethical commons: Demoralizing environmentalism. In The Politics of Moralizing, eds. Jane Bennett and Michael J. Shapiro. New York and London: Routledge, 113–40.
Collett, Jonathan, and Stephen Karakashian, eds. 1996. Greening the College Curriculum: A Guide to Environmental Teaching in the Liberal Arts. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.
Cronon, William, ed. 1995. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York: Norton.
Easterbrook, Gregg. 1995. A Moment on the Earth: The Coming Age of Environmental Optimism. New York: Viking.
Guber, Deborah Lynn. 2003. The Grassroots of a Green Revolution: Polling America on the Environment. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Hempel, Lamont C. 2000. Climate policy on the installment plan. In Environmental Policy: New Directions for the Twenty-First Century, 4th ed., ed. Norman J. Vig, Michael E. Kraft. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 281–302.
Hunt, Ed. 2003. The restoration paradox: When one bird attacks another, is it our fault? Tidepool. Available at www.tidepool.org/ebbtide/ebb72503.cfm. Accessed 15 December 2003.Google Scholar
Jenkins-Smith, Hank C. 1990. Democratic Politics and Policy Analysis. Pacific Grove, Calif.: Brooks/Cole.
Kraft, Michael E. 1996. Political science. In Greening the College Curriculum: A Guide to Environmental Teaching in the Liberal Arts, ed. Jonathan Collett, Stephen Karakashian. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 235–67.
Loeb, Paul Rogat. 1994. Generation at the Crossroads: Apathy and Action on the American Campus. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
Lomborg, Bjorn. 2001. The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Luke, Tim W. 1997. Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Maniates, Michael F. 2003. Civic virtue and classroom toil in a greenhouse world. In Encountering Global Environmental Politics: Teaching, Learning and Empowering Knowledge, ed. Michael Maniates. Lanham, Md.: Rowman, Littlefield, 129–47.
Maniates, Michael F., and John C. Whissel. 2000. Environmental studies: The sky is not falling. BioScience 50:6, 509–17.Google Scholar
Merchant, Carolyn 2003. Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture. New York and London: Routledge.
Orr, David. 1996. Reinventing higher education. In Greening the College Curriculum: A Guide to Environmental Teaching in the Liberal Arts, ed. Jonathan Collett and Stephen Karakashian. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 8–23.
Soulé, Michael E., and Daniel Press. 1998. What is environmental studies? BioScience 48:5, 397–405.Google Scholar
Soulé, Michael E., and Gary Lease. 1995. Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.