“All education is environmental education.”
– David W. Orr
It’s time to update the mission of U.S. land-grant and state universities to align education and research with a growing understanding of ecosystems and the world’s changing environmental and social conditions. That means working together across landscapes and bioregions. We need colleges connected by nature.
In the last post, I proposed adapting the idea of NCAA athletic conferences in a way that fosters bioregional collaboration among US colleges and universities in order to understand better and promote awareness of nature and ecosystems. (I was, admittedly, in the throes of bowl season.)
Many of the major state universities — including those belonging to the six conferences in the Bowl Championship Series — share a common origin as land-grant institutions, which were created by Congress during the mid-1800s.
“A State University for the Industrial Classes”
Let’s take a quick look at the historical roots of the land-grant university.
During the middle of the 19th century, the industrial revolution began to transform life and work across a largely agrarian America. Led by the populist preachings of Jonathan Baldwin Turner and the statesmanship of Representative Justin Morrill from Vermont, a reform movement arose in the (these) still fragmented United States and territories. Congress responded to the call to open up education and opportunity to the growing “industrial classes.” Previously, higher education was accessible mainly to the elites and focused on classical studies. (If one considers that currently only half of Americans have attended any college, and approximately one quarter graduate with a Bachelors degree, significant disparities in educational attainment remain.)
The Morrill Act of 1862, signed into law by Abraham Lincoln, called for each state to establish a major public university,
without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactic, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.
Turner’s words, carved onto the main quadrangle of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1867 (then the Illinois Industrial University), capture the context of a nation in transition: “Industrial Education Prepares the way for the Millenium of Labor.”
The Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 (the latter to incorporate the former Confederate States) launched the expansion of education through land-grant and public universities and supported the widespread agricultural and industrial development of the United States. The precursors to Michigan State and Penn State became the first land-grant institutions.
Today, the 218 universities (including 76 land-grant institutions) included in the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities now enroll 4.7 million students annually and claim 20 million alumni. (18.2 million students were enrolled in 4800 colleges and universities in the US in 2007.)
Public and land-grant universities for the 21st century
A century and a half since the Morrill Act, our world is in transition again. Populations are much more urban, more mobile. (Students and academics are also more mobile.) Families are smaller; life expectancy is greater. Advances in medicine and sanitation have brought many diseases under control. Food is more plentiful for many. The human world is more connected in many ways. Information, news, and gossip flow at speeds previously unimaginable.
In the US, people live less connected to nature. We plug into electronic forms of entertainment. Manufacturing has given way to a service-based economy. We know little about the origin and resources embodied in goods and products. The fulfillment of needs has merged with the encouragement of wants and the tyranny of convenience.
The scale of development and consumption has led to tremendous collective human impact on the world, including biodiversity loss, acidification of the oceans, and climate change. In some ways, local and global inequalities have been amplified by development.
The era of climate change calls for an evolution of the land-grant university. As Professor Richard Grimes of Washington State University (home of the Cougars) suggests, land-grant universities can contribute their significant expertise to meeting the challenges of global food security and energy.
In a separate piece, Grimes highlights the need to predict and respond to the “downstream effects of regional climate change”:
The anticipated changes in our global climate and their varied impact on regional climate systems where crops are grown confound a “one size fits all” response as considered in Copenhagen.
That’s why we must work to mitigate the consequences of global climate change at the regional level — in Eastern Washington, in sub-Saharan Africa, or wherever food crops are grown. The U.S. and world require a dynamic and responsive research-based approach that will allow the rapid development and deployment of regional responses to climate change.
Our land-grant research universities have many of these tools in hand and, in concert with the National Institute for Food and Agriculture and other agencies, others can be developed quickly.
Grimes make a good case for regional approaches.
Yet these commentaries also highlight the traditional focus of the land-grant university, that is, agricultural sciences and engineering. Undoubtedly, food, energy, and agriculture are critical areas of research for addressing climate change that need to be supported. Bioenergy can contribute towards the shift from oil and coal. Farmers can play a significant role in conserving ecosystems.
Remaining true to its origins, the land-grant institution has co-evolved with an industrializing nation. These universities supported farmers, communities, and fledgling industry. This practical approach towards harnessing “natural resources” reflected a can-do perspective that is increasingly outdated and problematic. The overexpansion of industrial agriculture and multinational agribusiness and the corporatization of biodiversity owes much to the land-grant university.
These institutions are not monocultures, of course, but the shift towards corporate funding of research and marketing intellectual property has clouded the independence of the university and charge of research for the “public good.” Still, the public research institution — and the legacy of the land-grant university — is severely threatened by state budget cuts. (requires subscription to the Chronicle of Higher Education)
Collaborations for “nature states”
Another historical feature of the land-grant institution that presents a challenge for the upcoming century is its state-centric focus. Public institutions follow the designated state territories platted out before the early 1900s.
State boundaries (in the US and elsewhere) are historical constructs, the choices of surveyors and politicians, the legacy of a certain way of laying dominion over the land.
Some borders reflect natural divisions, either rivers or the crest of a mountain range. Remember, though, that a river boundary means that at least one other state shares the same watershed.
Problems arise when examining environmental (and other) issues primarily through the lens of state divisions. To be practical, dealing with existing governmental administration is often necessary, but more and more, cross-jurisdictional cooperation will be needed to address most ecosystem and habitat challenges.
Spencer Beebe and Ian Gill of Ecotrust write in “A Nature State of Mind” in the Stanford Social Innovation Review:
[T]rue restoration — environmental and economic — will not come from congressional legislation, top-down stimulus money, or EPA rulings. Instead, restoration will come from a shift in the relationships between people and their ecologies, as well as from the businesses, policies, and cultural changes that will arise from this shift.
[R]eliable peace and prosperity will elude humankind unless we change our relations with each other and the environment. A good first step toward this lofty goal is to start thinking at the scale of “nature states.” Also called bioregions, nature states are defined by their social and geographic coherence, rather than by state or national borders. People organize themselves by nature states, such as the Pacific Northwest, the Mississippi Delta, and the Chesapeake Bay.
By recognizing each nature state’s distinctive environmental and geographic characteristics, its citizens can preserve those qualities while building businesses and organizations that take advantage of them. This nature state thinking has the potential to fuel more bottom-up local and regional innovations, which will in turn produce more of what our country really needs, not just more of what we think we want.
Nature states also provide a good scale at which to work. Only systemic solutions solve systemic problems. Cities, counties, and even most states are often too small for systemic solutions, and the world is almost always too big.
I’m not calling for dispensing with the states.
State universities have long provided valuable policy analysis and recommendations to their sponsoring state governments. If the ecological systems do not recognize state boundaries, then there are significant opportunities and valuable resources being wasted on redundant or incomplete approaches. Data is being collected for historically convenient, but ecologically inappropriate analyses.
There’s simply a tremendous opportunity for rethinking university research and education so that they reflect the way the natural world operates, and acknowledge that regional collaboration and mutualism are essential to engaging the global challenges. Universities, when not turned inward, are ideal places for the convening the broad range of stakeholders needed to generate systemic solutions. No school is an island.
This concept is not wholly original. For example, the Environmental Consortium of Hudson Valley Colleges and Universities brings together institutions to harness place-based education. But it seems rare in practice.
Funding (including federal stimulus money) and support for interdisciplinary research and cooperative engagement of bioregions by institutions could catalyze a range of benefits, including: better understanding of local/regional biodiversity; business and urban development solutions in line with ecological realities; collaborative mitigation of and response to human disasters associated with extreme weather events; more engaged and informed students and communities.
The bioregion is not the ultimate perspective; it just may be a more useful framework for collaboration in a changing world.
Further thoughts on education in a future post.
Update: I’d love to hear about other institutional collaborations around bioregions or watersheds.
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