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By contrast, jobs are readily available with a bachelor's in
environmental engineering or in other environmental specialties, where
demand exceeds supply. In the natural resources disciplines, however,
there is a kind of buyer's market except in specialties such as
wetlands ecology.
Several hundred colleges in the United States are churning out natural
resources and environmental science graduates with advanced degrees.
Out of 141 responses to a Conservation Fund survey of 390 colleges and
universities with natural resources or environmental science programs,
37 percent had graduate programs. The survey did not include
environmental engineering or waste management programs or agricultural
specialties such as range science.
Because of the job satisfaction and contact with nature offered by
natural resources careers, students are still attracted to them.
According to a recent Society of American Foresters survey, enrollment
(both graduate and undergraduate) at SAF.accredited schools rose 16
percent in 1991 compared with 1990. During the 1991.92 academic year,
nineteen thousand students enrolled in these programs alone; however,
fewer than a quarter were in graduate school. Ervin Zube, Gregg's
colleague and a professor at Arizona's natural resources school, says
that with this kind of ratio, 'the agencies and consulting firms that
have been hiring people can literally high.grade the market. They take
the best people, and those are the people who have graduate degrees."
In environmental engineering and other technical fields, it is a
seller's market, because tens of thousands of new engineers and other
specialists will be needed by the year 2000. They will be able to find
jobs easily with a bachelor's degree. However, because graduate
degrees may double starting salaries in this field, engineers also have
strong motivation to continue in school.
Another reason for the increasing emphasis on graduate education in
both natural resources and environmental sciences is the information
explosion that has occurred in the field over the past thirty years.
The state of knowledge and the techniques available to natural
resources professionals have improved dramatically. "It's naive to
think we can produce a person in the same amount of time today with the
breadth of knowledge needed to encompass the new science and the new
tools," says Zube.
As interest in the environment has grown through the years, so have the
number and kinds of programs in the natural resources and
environmental fields. Today, the available curricula are almost as
numerous and diverse as the schools that offer them. These programs may
be found in forestry, natural resources, engineering, or agriculture
schools, to name a few. Possible degree fields are even more numerous,
including natural resources management, wildlife biology, forestry,
parks and recreation, marine biology, coastal zone management,
environmental law, environmental engineering, environmental studies,
fisheries, parks and recreation, range science, fish and wildlife
management, and environmental communications.
Curricula in the graduate schools show many stages of gradation between
two educational philosophies.intensive scientific study in one
discipline, on the one hand, and the interdisciplinary approach, on
the other. A number of natural resource programs date back to the
early 1900s. Created to focus on forestry, fisheries, wildlife, and
agricultural issues in their regions, these schools often retain more
traditional curricula. Environmental science programs founded in the
1960s and in the heady 1970s after the first Earth Day focused on the
needs of the biophysical sciences and technology developments in
addressing environmental problems. As the '70s progressed,
environmental studies programs were born that were interdisciplinary
from the start, combining biological and physical sciences with social
sciences and humanities to resolve environmental problems.
Academics differ as to which is the better path for today's graduate
student. Gregg argues thatmany problems faced by today's natural
resources professionals demand solutions combining elements of the
physical sciences, social sciences, law, economics and other
disciplines. He points out that "the war in professional education in
natural resources is always between traditionalists who want to turn
out people whole education is fundamentally reductionist, who know
quite a lot about a very narrow range of knowledge, and those who want
to turn out people who are capable of finding relevance in apparently
unrelated subjects."
One common argument in favor of the more traditional approach is the
concern that if you educate people broadly enough top be really
knowledgeable in all those fields, they will not have enough
substantive understanding in one discipline to deal with technical
issues. According to Zube, "I've come to the conclusion that an
interdisciplinarian without a discipline has a hard time finding a
home."
He argues, for example, that if a student gains a broad understanding
of the field as an undergraduate then zeros in at the graduate level on
a specific discipline he or she will have gained the advantages of each
style of education. The order can be reversed; a student educated in a
traditional forestry undergraduate program would be advised to go into
an interdisciplinary graduate program.
Stephen Kellert, professor of Yale's School of Forestry and
Environmental Studies, points out the need for curricula that prepare
students for policy making as well as communication outside their
disciplines. He says most masters students at Yale are more interested
in "policy making, decision making, management, and leadership types of
positions rather than becoming, for example, forest technicians or
range technicians.
James E. Crowfoot, professor and former dean of the University of
Michigan's large and highly respected School of Natural Resources,
examines the national gap between curricula and the severity of
environmental problems in Voices from the Environmental
Movement, by The Conservation Fund (see Book List). He predicts
that "the pressure for interdisciplinary environmental problem solving
in both curricula and research programs will continue to increase"
because of the severity of environmental problems, even though teachers
and students at many schools have not been trained to work in this
way. "Problems such as hazardous and solid waste management,
atmospheric deposition, ecosystem management, and forest planning
cannot be adequately understood without the expertise of several
disciplines.
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