Higher Education in the Environmental Century

• Date: 01 May 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12194
• Published date: 01 May 2017

Higher Education in the

Environmental Century

By STEPHEN MULKEY*

ABSTRACT. The environmental crisis that threatens the future of our

species is unprecedented as we begin the “environmental century.”

Natural conditions that were favorable for the development of

civilization have been degraded. Climate change has begun to disrupt

ecosystems and is likely to undermine agricultural and industrial

production, reducing the ability of the global economy to support a

growing population. Under these dire conditions, it is imperative that

colleges and universities transform themselves into institutions

organized around transdisciplinary programs in sustainability science.

The curriculum should be oriented around training the future

workforce in skills that will be needed in new institutions that seek to

adapt proactively to natural systems as they are transformed. Those

skills will involve learning to address the dynamic changes of the

biosphere rather simply attempting to preserve and restore natural

systems to some desired previous condition. Every institution—

political, legal, economic, medical, and scientif‌ic—will need to be re-

aligned to achieve sustainability. Higher education is currently failing to

meet this mandate. Sustainability science remains on the margins of

academic life, with few resources and little prestige. Faculty are still

primarily oriented toward the questions raised within their disciplinary

specialties, not toward tasks associated with transdisciplinary problem

*Ecologist who has directed interdisciplinary environmental programs at three

research-intensive public universities. President of Unity College in Unity, Maine from

2011 through 2015. Led Unity College to become the f‌irst college in the United States

to divest its endowment from the top 200 fossil fuel companies and to become the

f‌irst college in the United States to adopt sustainability science as the framework for

all academic programming.

The author acknowledges the support and engagement of the Unity College Board

of Trustees, the Board of Directors of the American Association for Advancement of

Sustainability in Higher Education, the University of Idaho Environmental Sciences

Program, and the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of

Florida.

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 76, No. 3 (May, 2017).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12194

V

C2017 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

solving. Reframing higher education to meet the challenges of the

environmental century is going to require a revolution in the purposes

and structures of the university.

Introduction: The Crises of the Environmental Century

Previous generations of humans have been aff‌licted with crises that

affected localities and regions: war, plague, famine, or local exhaustion

of a key resource. Our generation is distinctive in that humans have

now f‌illed the planet, and the crises of our era are no longer localized.

We face a planetary crisis. Insofar as our species has succeeded in

becoming masters ofthe planet, we have pushed the earth to its limits.

The risk we have created for ourselves is greater than at any time

since the exodus of Homo sapiens from Africa about 100,000 years ago,

when our species began its expansion to every corner of the globe. At

that time, our species had declined to an effective breeding population

of about 10,000. Earlier studies reassured us that world population

would stabilize by 2100, but the United Nations has revised those opti-

mistic projections and projects up to 12 billon people by then (Gerland

et al. 2014). Even with half that population, agriculture, mining, forest-

ry, and f‌ishing have displaced most non-domesticated species, eroded

the soil, and modif‌ied the landscape.We presently tread uponour plan-

et with the impact of major geological events. With double the popula-

tion and accelerating climate change, there can be little doubt the

damage to the biosphere will be profound and irreparable within any

meaningful human timescale. Megan Clark, executive of Common-

wealth Scientif‌ic and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia’s

national science agency, estimates that over the next 50 years, agricul-

ture will need to produce as much food as produced in the previous

10,000 years (Potter 2009). This is supposed to occur despite wholesale

impacts of climate on growing conditions, reduced water for crop irri-

gation (due to shrinking glaciers and over-mining of groundwater),

increased populations of insect pests, and theloss of soil fertility.

According to Barnosky et al. (2012), we have transgressed the

boundaries of a safe operating space for humanity with respect to

several key environmental factors. Chief among these is climate

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology698

change, which amplif‌ies the effects of all other critical factors such as

freshwater depletion, nitrogen and phosphorous pollution, biodiver-

sity loss, ozone depletion, and changes in land use. There is now

mounting evidence that sometime during this century we will reach

a state shift in the planet’s ability to support us. That means an

abrupt and irreversible shift could take place in the planetary envi-

ronment if we pass a “tipping point.” Steffen et al. (2015) estimate

that we have already exceeded the operating limits for our bio-

sphere. We have gone past the limits of safety with respect to the

extreme loss of species diversity and phosphorus and nitrogen load-

ing. A recent analysis showed over the last 20 years there have been

catastrophic losses of wilderness (Watson et al. 2016).

In addition to these extreme environmental conditions, there is sub-

stantial evidence that the next generation will live in a world depleted

of natural resources and with far less fossil energy with which to power

the economy. A relatively minor decrease in the world supply of petro-

leum in 1974 and 1979 sent the global economy into a tailspin. That

was minor compared with what could happen as low-cost energy

resources are depleted and increasingly costly sources of energy

replace them on a smaller scale. Unless we are able to make signif‌icant

adjustments in our use of natural resources and bring new sources of

energy rapidly online, a global economic and humanitarian catastrophe

is not far in the future.

In addition, a sustained decline in net fossil energy resources will

have dramatic effects on the ability of most countries to supply enough

calories to feed their populations, since mechanized agriculture is

heavily dependent on multiple inputs that are energy intensive to pro-

duce. When the world price of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus

suddenly peaked in 2008,the world’s poor were pushed to the brink of

starvation. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (2011:

19), the cereal price index reached a peak 3.4 times higher in 2008 than

in 2000, and in 2011, even after the price of fertilizer had come down,

the world price of grain remained 2.9 times higher than in 2000,

although there is evidence that this sustained higher price is in part due

to manipulation of commodities markets (Bourne 2015: Ch. 6). Regard-

less, world food prices have already started revealing the disturbing

consequences of the decline in low-cost energy sources and climate

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