Building and Applying the Discipline of Sustainability

A few weeks ago, AASHE Executive Director Paul Rowland and I were in the nation’s capital for the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Symposium: Science, Innovation, and Partnerships for Sustainability Solutions, held in a glass-enclosed room of the Pew Convention Center.

The NSF is a renowned federal agency that funds research advancing scientific knowledge across the spectrum. NSF’s Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) program was established to specifically address issues of sustainability while encouraging interdisciplinary research and collaboration.

“Sustainability issues remain at the forefront and will into the foreseeable future; the solutions have to be based in basic scientific understanding,” remarked Tim Killeen, Assistant Director for Geosciences at NSF. Sound science is the nucleus, the common ground among all of the disciplines of sustainability. Whether we think of sustainability as three legs of a stool or four interconnected circles, whether we are researching sea level rises or population dynamics, science is the indispensable core.

But what about the anthropologists, historians, shortly put, social scientists? According to Killeen, “science is in all of those” disciplines too. It comes down to getting data that is usable and easily understood. There are “enormous challenges with mining the data, weaving it together while granting the public access to data.”

This theme of data collection, as well as the integrity of interdisciplinary research resonated throughout the day. Holm Tiessen, Director of the Inter-American Institute commented that interdisciplinarity is about “teaching scientists how to ask the right questions to fellow scientists.”
Chad Gaffield, President of Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) offered a model for us to consider in relation to interdisciplinarity. His T-shaped model on an individual level aims to describe how interdisciplinarity should be approached: we should have depth as well as breadth. The issue with this approach, as other panelists pointed out, is that when it comes to constructing interdisciplinary sustainability curriculum we consistently run up against the question of what should be in the “vertical” and what can be dispersed into the “horizontal.”

I found it interesting the different prefixes of “-disciplinary” that were used, most significantly, “inter,” “cross,” and “trans.” The last one struck me the most because it is commonly used today in relation to transnationalism, the concept used to explain the exchange and flow of physical, human, and intellectual capital across geographical boundaries. And if we think about the global nature of interdisciplinary partnerships (i.e., Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability), “trans” seems to make even more sense as a way to describe sustainability curriculum development; it’s no longer just about crossing geographical boundaries, but national boundaries. Students and researchers of varying nationalities are partnering on research that is endemic to their country or world. What that means to sustainability, and specifically higher education sustainability, is that crossing disciplines is far from divorced from crossing cultures. So, thinking about ways in which we can marry those concepts when it comes to teaching and practicing sustainability on our campuses is important.

Perhaps as sustainability professionals we should be looking more closely at how we personally define interdisciplinary, and how it’s defined by the immediate and extensive communities in which we’re implicated. This would give us a better idea of what questions need to be asked among a given, self-proclaimed interdisciplinary group in order to not just create a conversation amongst individuals from varying disciplines but create a permeable boundary – one that allows a constant and consistent exchange of information and knowledge.

Paul presented on the second day about the role of higher education in sustainability, alongside representatives from other non-profit as well as for-profit organizations. A theme that emerged was a (near) consensus that sustainability is necessary, but the mechanisms desired and required to achieve it are still not fully understood. Bill Clark, Professor of International Science, Public Policy and Human Development at Harvard University expounded on his research regarding barriers to establishing sustainability as a field: mutual incomprehension between and among scientists, policymakers, and the general public (avoided by trust-building); fragmentation of knowledge (avoided by strategic integration, supply-chain thinking, and project management); and inflexibility (avoided by shifting from knowledge systems to learning systems, and creating safe spaces for experimentation and failure). The last barrier especially brings to the forefront the importance of the university in this process.

In conferences or symposiums such as this one in which there is a great deal of information packaged into a short time frame, participants sometimes leave with a sense of overwhelm. However, in this case, the collective sense of optimism around cross-discipline and –sector collaboration resonated above all. The combination of meta discussions around sustainability with concrete examples of current (NSF-funded) research, as well as generative discussions around the real challenges different stakeholders are facing in this movement afforded an energetic dynamic.

Be sure to check the NSF website for archives of the plenary speeches, Powerpoint presentations, and more information.

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