By: Ava H.
Photo from: UVM
With over 160,000 high school students (including myself) taking AP Environmental Science this year alone, the science component of studying the environment is quite common knowledge at this point (College Board). However, how are other disciplines, such as political science, integral to studying the environment?
This is where Professor Robert V. Bartlett comes into play.
Currently the Gund Professor of the Liberal Arts at University of Vermont, Professor Bartlett’s areas of expertise are in environmental policy and politics. He began his academic zeal for the environment when he was inspired by the first environmental awakening in 1969 while in high school.
Entering college at Indiana University as a political science major, his first college course was in environmental policy by the the foremost expert in the world on environmental politics who wrote about environmental policy for the very first time anyone wrote about it in 1963. Politics came together.
Years later, he earned his Ph.D. at Indiana University. Inspired by University of Chicago political scientist Herbert Simon, his dissertation was about the role of rationality within the National Environmental Policy Act.
As a consequence of his doctoral dissertation, Professor Bartlett published some journal articles that turned out to be quite influential. One journal article regarding the National Environmental Policy Act was picked up by the US Council on Environmental Quality, and used for a few decades to train federal employees to think about the purpose and logic of the National Environmental Policy Act as an environmental impact assessment.
Professor Bartlett had a lot of insight on how reliance on science in environmentalism can be a double-edged sword. “So science is a kind of source of problems. The consequences of a lot of scientific discovery, are contributing to causing climate change.” While science provides humanity with profound discoveries, science also helped bring about the industrial innovations in humankind that are major contributors to anthropogenic climate change, providing multidimensional complexity to the role of science in environmental issues.
Naturally, he acknowledges that environmental science provides the data necessary to understand climate change. However, Professor Bartlett doesn't think that environmental science provides the whole picture. “My argument would be, is that the central way of understanding climate warming, and certainly to think about addressing the warming of the climate has to be through politics. If you really want to understand the system that creates human contributions to climate warming, you'd have to look at political systems, any hope of addressing those, it would be doing it through politics.” The immense amount of climate inaction is due to the politicization of the issue. In order to break down such the complex climate crisis, it is integral to analyze how public opinion on climate change affects governmental officials' priorities, as shifting from a short term gain to a long term benefits mindset is essential for tackling the climate crisis. Not only is political science necessary for mitigating anthropogenic climate change, but so are an abundance of social science fields. "Economics is certainly very important to understanding as is sociology as as law, as a psychology, and so on. But they all connect back to politics.”
Having his students read The Uninhabitable Earth (a phenomenal book I read that fueled my academic zeal for the environmental social sciences), which serves as an insightful introduction to his course of the politics of climate change, as it not only demonstrates the urgency of the climate crisis in not a completely pessimistic manner, but also opens the door for understanding how the problem is a fundamentally political one that involves human beings deciding what to do, and making it happen.
As an influential environmental professor, several of Professor Bartlett’s students set out to make their own positive impact in the environmental sector. One student is currently head of the Canterbury regional government in New Zealand, dealing with climate warming and environmental policy. Many have become professors teaching environmental politics or environmental policy at other universities. Some have started their own environmental NGOs, and one worked for a Congressman and is now a top executive at Amnesty International. All in all, there is quite versatility in environmental careers, and that not all of them have to be in STEM. Teaching, politics, and business can all be important areas for environmental action.
With that being said, STEM subjects are still important for environmental careers, especially in academia. After all, when asking about Professor Bartlett’s advice for individuals interested in pursuing an environmental career in academia, he emphasized the importance of obtaining a broad, multidisciplinary background to effectively study the environment and bring about collective action. Although he was a political science major, Professor Bartlett actually took more courses in the sciences during college, including geology, biology, physics, geography, and even economics. Skills wise, learning how to use advanced statistics and various modeling programs can help professors produce substantive climate research. Even just being numerate in these advanced data programs is a significant advantage, because it allows individuals to comprehend and criticize climate models, since there are many statistical models that have to do with human health and epidemiology, and modeling, ecological systems, limnology, hydrology, and more.
Professor Bartlett’s story is a great example of how regardless of one’s interest, whether it be psychology or in this case political science, there are seemingly endless environmental interconnections. This simple yet somewhat uncommon ideology can help open doors to so many people interested in the environment, but do not want to become an environmental scientist. There is not a “one size fits all” approach towards mitigating climate change, meaning that everyone has their own personal strengths to offer when combatting this crisis.
Photo from: UVM