Outside the bounds of Allegheny’s neatly divided areas of academic study, environmental problems impact all forms of life on Earth — including you, regardless of your college major. We can see how pervasive environmental problems are in the Canadian wildfires that blanketed the northeastern U.S. under a thick, hazardous smog this past summer; in the accumulating research proving microplastics are now found in more than three-quarters of tested human blood; and in the rapidly-depleting water supplies in the western U.S.
The scale of environmental problems tests the limits of even our conceptualization of them. Climate change transcends all boundaries — geography, wealth, time, power, language and identity. Winners and losers are collective; either everyone benefits from keeping the planet’s warming under the 1.5-degrees Celsisus target set in the 2015 Paris Agreement or everyone endures a hotter planet with wilder, more dangerous weather. To secure a stable, healthy future for everyone on Earth, everyone needs to be engaged.
Allegheny has recognized environmental sustainability as a core value, founding one of the nation’s first environmental science programs in the 1972-73 school year, achieving carbon neutrality in 2020, constructing LEED-certified buildings, and diverting and composting kitchen waste in dining halls, among a long list of other programs and accomplishments that grows each year. Our efforts have led to recognition from the Department of Energy and the Pennsylvania Environmental Resource Consortium.
The question that follows is: How can Allegheny assure that its students will carry the core value of environmental sustainability with them into their post-college lives?
Make it a distribution requirement.
The opening lines of Allegheny’s Institutional Learning Outcomes statement declare that the school expects “graduates to be capable and farsighted leaders and rational and responsible citizens equipped to meet the challenges confronting all society.”
And there has never been a problem that requires as much mass collaboration of capable, far-sighted, rational and responsible leaders as the climate crisis demands today.
In order to fulfill this institutional learning outcome and prepare students for lives as global citizens, Allegheny’s sustainability distribution requirement would educate students on how to create systems through which everyone can thrive equitably.
“That includes non-human stakeholders, like the ecosystem,” said Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Sustainability Delia Byrnes.
Director of Sustainability Kelly Boulton, ’02, said that students themselves have already quietly built this into their own educational paths through college. The last time Boulton tallied it up prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, 40% of students took ENVSC 110 “Intro to Environmental Science” at some point during their time at Allegheny, even though just 15% of Allegheny students were environmental science majors.
Topics that ENVSC 110 typically covers invoke skills and ways of thinking that are applicable to all types of cross-discipline problem solving. This includes assessing stakeholder perspectives; understanding “wicked problems” that are difficult to solve because of their complicated, variable, contradictory and uncertain nature; the intersections of science and society; the history of the environmental movement; and how the climate crisis came to be. Informed decision makers of the future need to be able to make decisions that promote wellbeing for the environment, the economy and people in both the short run and long run.
“It’s feasible that if we required all students to take some sort of sustainability distribution where we introduce the sort of longer-term broader thinking, it might expand how they think about the things that they’re interested in anyway,” Boulton said.
This would not represent a new course of study, but an integration of the way citizens of tomorrow need to see the world.
“One of the things that’s really exciting about that idea is that sustainability is not a topic — it’s a way of doing things, whether that’s a business venture, an educational venture, or something else,” Byrnes said.
Recent shifts in the job market indicate that the integration of sustainability into other majors could unlock more post-graduation paths for students.
In an article titled “Sustainability went mainstream in 2021,” the Harvard Business Review stated that “virtually all of the world’s largest companies now issue a sustainability report and set goals; more than 2,000 companies have set a science-based carbon target; and about one-third of Europe’s largest public companies have pledged to reach net zero by 2050.”
At the same time, the Securities and Exchange Commission recently passed a rule requiring “that U.S.-listed companies publicly report their greenhouse gas emissions, climate-related risks and information about their plans to transition to a low-carbon economy.”
This recent uptick in environmental targets means that regardless of whether you’re an intern at Microsoft, Netflix, JP Morgan Chase or Toyota, being able to link your own career goals to environmental sustainability outcomes will make you a “highly competitive candidate,” according to Associate Director of Alumni and Employer Engagement Autumn Parker, ’16.
“When I think about Allegheny and playing a part in that, we’re coming from a cross-disciplinary educational background, where we see everything is interconnected and intertwined,” Parker said. “So if we’re preparing students for the future, not just as professionals but as people who are going to be responsible for continuously purposeful, meaningful work to society, you have to show them what that actually looks like.”
While ushering seniors through their final year at Allegheny and into the job market, Byrnes said that she has increasingly seen employers prioritizing a background in sustainability.
“I think it’s actually especially coming out more in business fields or STEM fields that you wouldn’t necessarily associate with it,” Byrnes said. “So yeah, I think it could only be an advantage when people are going out into the professional workforce.”
Adding in a sustainability distribution requirement could open up new opportunities for students who don’t necessarily see themselves as part of the environmental science major. A sustainability distribution requirement that gives credit for ENVSC 110, for example, would incentivize more students majoring in political science to take ENVSC 380 “Climate & Energy Policy,” which many political science students don’t take because of the ENVSC 110 prerequisite, despite credit offered for the course in their major.
Other potential classes that could deliver on sustainability-related learning outcomes include classes like GHS “Introduction to Global Health Studies,” GHS 322 “Climate & Health,” and GHS 324 “Environmental Health,” ENGL 116 “Literature and the Environment,” ART 142 “Industrial Design Principles,” ENERG 105 “Intro to Energy & Society,” and ENVSC 352 “Environmental Justice.”
There are potentially even other pathways to sustainability education in majors that don’t immediately come to mind, like integrative informatics or computer and information science.
“I think there’s a tendency to talk about computer science as this sort of de-material realm. It’s the cloud, it’s virtual, whatever,” Byrnes said. “And there are real physical material correlates to that that do have impacts.”
The groundwork for a sustainability distribution requirement has already been laid through a variety of courses connecting individuals, the environment and their communities. The college’s “Sustainability” page states that “Allegheny College encourages the development of citizens who actively promote sustainability. Our students learn about environmental issues and stewardship at each step of their education,” although we have yet to actually formalize this as a distinct learning outcome.
“I do think it’s everyone’s responsibility to be thinking about environmental sustainability and environmental well-being overall,” Byrnes said.
It’s time that the school expands once again upon its community’s support for thoughtful, long-term citizenry.
“Sustainability issues are making it into your lives if you breathe, if you eat, if you want to go outside and take a walk, if you want to travel,” Boulton said. “So I think there’s a lot of ways that sustainability issues are very personal, even if you’re not recognizing them as sustainability issues.”
Adopting a sustainability distribution requirement will continue to place Allegheny at the forefront of nationally recognized climate change education and prepare students for pressing issues other universities have yet to focus on.
“It’s easy to argue that with sustainability being a core value of this institution that we would want to send people out into the world who understand that core value,” said Sustainability Coordinator Kurt Hatcher, ’07.
Environmental sustainability prepares students to be the rational, capable, far-sighted leaders our institution promises.
“Allegheny students aren’t just thinking about themselves,” Parker said. “They’re thinking about the world, and that’s what sets them apart. It makes them ready to be part of it.”