Michael Maniates

Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?

An increasingly dominant, largely American response to the contemporary environmental crisis understands environmental degradation as the product of individual shortcomings and finds solutions in enlightened, uncoordinated consumer choice. Several forces promote this process of individualization, including the historical baggage of mainstream environmentalism, the core tenets of liberalism, the dynamic ability of capitalism to commodify dissent, and the relatively recent rise of global environmental threats to human prosperity. The result is to narrow our collective ability to imagine and pursue a variety of productive responses to the environmental problems before us. When responsibility for environmental problems is individualized, there is little room to ponder institutions, the nature and exercise of political power, or ways of collectively changing the distribution of power and influence in society. Confronting consumption requires individuals to understand themselves not primarily as consumers but rather as citizens in a participatory democracy, working together to change broader policy and larger social institutions. It also requires linking explorations of consumption to politically charged issues that challenge the political imagination.

Teaching for Turbulence

In late 2010, a respected research team led by Yale University professor Susan Clark released a two-part assessment of college and university programs in environmental studies and science (ESS). The team’s conclusions were hardhitting and pointed. Too many ESS programs, they wrote, do too much too quickly with insufficient clarity of purpose and method. They “suffer from muddled goals, disciplinary hodge-podge, and an educational smorgasbord of course offerings.” At a time when the need for dynamic college and university programs in environmental science and studies has never been greater, those who plan and deliver these programs appear to be selling their students and the planet short.1

Fifteen claims: social change and power in environmental studies

Claims about social change and the dynamics of power permeate the environmental science and studies (ESS) curriculum. These claims are frequently implicit, under examined, and contradictory. Their acritical internalization by students and faculty can undermine the efficacy and relevance of an ESS education. This essay describes 15 such claims and summarizes patterns of ESS student response from three workshops. We make no argument about which claims are superior, how social change occurs, or how political power is best analyzed. Instead, we seek to encourage those who design and deliver ESS programs to become more self-critical and intentional when disseminating, however unwittingly, claims about power and social change.

Suddenly More Than Academic: Higher Education for a Post-Growth World

Over the past twenty years, higher education has undergone an environmental revolution. Campus sustainability offices that track resource use and promote eco-efficiency are becoming the norm. The number of academic programs in sustainability science and environmental studies has increased, as have student enrollments and passion. New academic journals have flourished, and with them venues for publication by young academics aspiring to become tenured professors in the field. It is true that many colleges and universities worldwide have not fully embraced this momentum: they have yet to incorporate tenets of sustainability into their hiring, curriculum, infrastructure planning, or investment strategies. But these institutions are viewed increasingly as outliers that poorly serve their students and the social good. Anthony Cortese, an early advocate of environmental stewardship within higher education, gets it right when he recently observed that “higher education’s rapidly expanding response to this [environmental] challenge over the last two decades is a beacon of hope in a sea of turbulence.”