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The Greening of Political Science: Growth Pains and New Directions

Over the past decade, interdisciplinary programs such as gender studies, global studies, and environmental studies have proliferated quickly across the American academy. One study showed that the number of environmental studies programs at four-year colleges and universities doubled between 1990 and 1995, and more are still being added. Political science departments frequently find themselves at the center of these new programs, and courses in environmental politics are often in high demand among students. The complexity and persistence of environmental problems is finally forcing the academy to recognize the importance of interdisciplinary research and teaching. Consider the case of global warming. It is impossible to discuss this issue intelligently from the perspective of any single discipline. Political scientists might illuminate certain facets of the debate, such as how national and international political structures create few incentives for policymakers to aggressively address the issue. But however important such insights might be, they are far too narrow to even begin to encompass the complexity of the climate change issue, which requires literacy in the discourses of other disciplines, including environmental economics, atmospheric research, and environmental ethics. After decades of suspicion in the academy about the intellectual rigor of interdisciplinary approaches, the persistence of complex environmental problems, and simply the rapidly growing cohort of scholars engaged in environmental research and teaching, is driving increasing acceptance of such approaches.Philip Brick received the APSA's Pi Sigma Alpha Award for Outstanding Teaching in Political Science in 2000, and in 2004 he was named Outstanding Environmental Educator by the Environmental Education Association of Washington. His environmental field program is described at www.whitman.edu/semester_west, and he can be contacted at brick@whitman.edu. The author thanks Jennifer Hochschild at Perspectives on Politics and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. He also thanks the research assistants at Perspectives on Politics and Whitman College student Kalin Schmoldt for gathering syllabi for this review.