“How to be a Shrub: Transdisciplinary Thinking and the Making of a Deep Generalist”
Interview with Dr. Tina Evans, Colorado Mountain College
I first encountered Tina Evans during the literature review stage of my doctoral dissertation, circa 2005, when I was devouring everything I could find about sustainability curriculum in higher education. I had started out in Educational Psychology, but switched to Educational Administration when my advisor told me that my proposed research on how college students responded to climate change information would be too difficult, because “I’d have to establish to the committee that climate change was real.” (A true story that I tell as a reminder of how inconsistent higher education remains, to this day, on the topic of our planetary predicament.)
At that time, there were way fewer degree programs in Sustainability and I didn’t even know anyone with a Ph.D. in Sustainability Education. When I read Tina’s dissertation work at Prescott College, which would later become the book, Occupy Education, I felt like I had found that I was looking for: scholars like Tina Evans, Richard Kahn, and Debra Rowe were doing the type of curriculum work that showed me something new that higher education could become.
Being an academic fangirl, I had emailed this this awesome sustainability scholar and teacher, and Tina actually wrote back to me and gave me some advice on my research. Fast forward seventeen years, and it’s pretty obvious that this climate thing is real. Tina Evans is still an awesome sustainability scholar and teacher. And, I’m honored to consider her a collaborator and friend.
I recorded this interview during a visit to Colorado Mountain College in Steamboat Springs, where Dr. Evans teaches many courses including: Permaculture Design, Energy Systems and Sustainability, Cultural and Place-based Equity, Sustainable Economics, Sustainability Capstone, Careers and Professional Skills in Sustainability, Sustainability Assessment and Reporting , and occasionally, Introduction to Sustainability. We had a wide-ranging conversation recorded over several days and locations: the Bear Park Permaculture dome, the cafeteria, which overlooks summer-bright grassy ski slopes, the Taco Cabo restaurant (which makes excellent salsa), and a pre-dawn ride to the small regional airport.
The Teaching Climate Change Field Notes Blog is part of a formal research study to try and figure out what makes some faculty become great climate educators, mastering new fields of content and study, redesigning courses, doing justice work and activism and regenerative agriculture, while other faculty…well, they just don’t. Maybe they feel they lack expertise, or they don’t see the connection to their discipline. Like my former graduate advisor, they aren’t exactly climate deniers — they are just climate resistant.
Tina started by sharing with me how she got into sustainability education after double majoring in English and History for her BA, continuing with an MA in Latin American Studies and a second MA in Library Science. How does a Librarian get into sustainability? She described an upper division gen ed class that she taught at her former institution, Fort Lewis College, also in Colorado.
TE: “It was a genius thing really to put an integrative experience in the upper division because students don’t necessarily make connections across disciplines. You just put courses next to each other and even if there are relationships, students don’t necessarily draw the connections you would think. Our assessment had shown that they really need help in doing that.” Tina helped to design one of the first team-taught integrative courses coming out of this project around the year 2000, which was called Computers, Solar energy, Ethics and You.
(In the recording, this title causes us both to crack up, because of its retro Y2K vibe.) “The idea of team-teaching was that you could teach together to get launched then be able to handle the courses on their own.” Team teaching contributed to Tina’s interest in areas like economics, sociology, and permaculture, and in topics such as energy, peak oil, and climate change.
TE: “Even in the ’80s I thought things were really going awry, I just didn’t understand what it was. I didn’t like the way our culture was, the ‘me generation’ and people just running around with a focus on entertaining themselves. I didn’t see a lot of meaning in it. Our culture seemed very empty, to me. It was too early for climate change — my high school teachers didn’t talk about that. But they did talk about nuclear war, the potential for nuclear war, … all these close calls, the potential firing of nuclear weapons and the arms race and the cold war.”
KH: “Us Gen Xers did come of age with an existential threat…it was just a different one.”
TE: “Yeah, and it’s still there, it’s not gone. All of those weapons are there.”
Going back to junior high, Tina had a social studies teacher who focused on the progressive era in U.S. history:
TE: “She talked about all the things that led up to the progressive era, like no 40 hour workweek, no regulation of food…we read The Jungle, talked about child labor, women not having rights, all of the discrimination against immigrants. And that really stuck with me. It made me realize that these things did not just exist, but they had to be fought for. And if they had to be fought for, then they could be fought away, and they could be lost. Which is what we are seeing today.”
KH: “So you had this feeling, that the culture is not right, there’s an emptiness, a looming nuclear threat, a nascent social justice seed planted in junior high — and then you read this book about peak oil.” Peak oil, Tina had taught me, was first predicted by M. King Hubbert, a geologist who predicted, in 1958, that the lower 48 would reach peak production in the 1970s. He was “almost laughed out of the profession” for his research, because oil production was rising and people thought it would never end.
TE: “Peak oil is when you get to the point where no matter how hard you try, the production declines. It has to do with declining pressure in the fields, as you poke more and more holes in the fields, and you can use enhanced oil recovery, you can pump the fields full of CO2 and seawater to try and re-pressurize them, but it just speeds up the depletion. You might be getting it out faster but you are just going to crash harder.”
KH: “It’s when the cost of getting out becomes more than the value of it?”
TE: “It’s not the money cost, but the net energy cost. If you are having to put more energy into recovering the oil than you get out of the oil, then you are not really in an energy operation. If you are an energy operation and putting more energy in than you are getting out then you aren’t really making energy.”
Which is basically what we are seeing today, with fracking, which offers a declining net energy yield, with big environmental impacts.
TE: “We are fracking so much because that’s the dregs. We already got all the good stuff. These are poor source rocks with tiny bubbles of oil and to get it out they use fracturing process. High pressure water with a soup of chemicals which have caused a lot of health problems and are used to fracture this rock. We’ve been able to go over old fields with this technology, and open up new areas of called ‘tight oil’. If you are not in good rock you aren’t going to get stuff. It’s a drilling treadmill, and then there are sweet spots, where you can do a lot of drilling, but … it’s looking like it’s going to be a rush of production followed by a really quick collapse.”
KH: “So, when will there just really be no more oil to be had?”
TE: “The question, really, is oil is at what price. Cost starts cutting off different uses, driving inflation from cost push, starts cutting down shipping to do with globalization, shipping now is cheap and subsidized, but if that fuel is never coming down in price it’s going to be a factor driving costs. Of everything.”
Also something we are seeing today?
Energy education is its own field of academic study. Tina came to understand the peak oil situation by reading Richard Heinberg’s 2003 book, The Party’s Over.
TE: “I cried when I read this book, it just really hit home. How up a creek without a paddle we really are.”
She went to conferences like the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas to learn more. “One of the presentations I went to was called “Do nations have a plan?” As this peak oil thing is unfolding, are people just going to be freaking out, and not understanding why this is happening and just blaming other countries and blaming immigrants and blaming the leaders, when we are talking about is really geology. And at that time, no countries had any plan whatsoever for a liquid fuel emergency.”
She isn’t a geologist, and she isn’t an economist, or a sociologist, yet her work involves all three. Tina is a Transdisciplinary Thinker who has developed the ability to connect the dots and maybe even see things that some “disciplinary experts” can’t see, and certainly the ability to explain things in a way that helps students make sense of the world.
While disciplinary silos are frequently bemoaned in academia, the usual advice, still, is for faculty is to “stay in your lane” until you get published, established, tenured. Tina remembers being given this advice at a conference early in her career, when she was starting to have these transdisciplinary ideas about energy and climate change.
TE: They said, “you really need to be a tree. You need to develop a strong trunk in your discipline — you can’t be like a shrub and have things just like sprouting up all over.”
On the recording, there is more laughter at this.
TE: “I’m totally a shrub,” (she says over my giggles). “I’ve always been a shrub. But I love my work! There is something to being a deep generalist. We can be the networkers for creating new things, who know the different people in the field, who know how things need to fit together in an educational program, can tap into the language. It takes a lot of effort to be a deep generalist!”
And, she adds, “especially with climate change, maybe us shrubs are going to rule the world!”
I will close with five things that Tina suggested colleges and universities could do to nurture Transdisciplinary Thinkers, particularly related to sustainability and climate change education.
1.Support innovations in pedagogy “for real”. Not just a one-semester pilot or a 3-year grant project. Tina emphasized that class times need to be more conducive to deep conversation, and more flexible. “Holistic study takes a holistic approach to teaching, and that means situating things in place, it means really getting experience with students. They’re not just there to absorb knowledge, they have to have some kind of practice dealing with really difficult subjects and that’s hard to get with the way institutions are structured.”
2.Prepare for more mature students. Higher education in the U.S. will be dramatically affected by demographic changes, including a “demographic cliff” which says that in the next 3–5 years there will 3.5 million fewer college-aged students in the U.S. At the same time, other professions will be changing or contracting, so colleges can prepare for reskilling and helping people retool their careers to include dealing with climate impacts and getting skills in change management.
3.Pay all academic disciplines the same. “I’m fortunate to be at a place now where all faculty, no matter your discipline, are paid at the same level. It’s not a place where the business faculty make more because ‘they could go work in business’ or ‘the scientists really need a lot more money or they are going to go be scientists’. Those compensation systems feed into the culture of hierarchy and how we see the disciplines. They actually come to see themselves as smarter or better, as if this other “stuff” like sociology or history is just “soft” science, like it’s not REAL. But we need these fields, and they have a lot of insight to offer, so they should be paid the same amount.”
4.Transciplinary reading groups. It’s a simple idea but, Evans said, “when faculty are compensated to participate and there are some ground rules for working together, reading groups can be effective in transforming academic culture.” When her college did this, she said, “We got to know each other, and got to know each others fields. It’s hard to have respect for something you don’t know much about.”
(Might I recommend my companion blog, The Ultimate Cli Fi Book Club?)
5.Change tenure criteria to reward interdisciplinary work, including Sustainability.
(Gosh, I wish I had a dollar for every time someone had mentioned tenure criteria — who sets these and why are they so intractable? If you have any answers please feel free to comment!)
