But awareness does not equal understanding. The concerned yet uninformed can muddy the picture: Having heard of climate change, a casual observer tends to simply draw a direct causal line between global warming and any unseasonably hot day or single hurricane. Holiday travelers bemoan the fate of species in Great Smokey Mountain National Park while driving their carbon-burning vehicles into gridlock on the park's main road.

Webster's interdisciplinary program in Environmental Studies fills the void between awareness and understanding. With a focus on the spectrum of factors that create and steer the health of the land and natural systems — air, water, and the energy flows that link everything together — on which humans depend, the program exposes students to the science, the literature, the politics, and the social movements that impact the environment.

An interdisciplinary minor, the Environmental Studies program does not have any courses designated solely for it. Rather, its qualifying courses draw from disciplines throughout the University.

Webster students take advantage of this range of offerings through the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies (CIS), an umbrella organization created to promote these unique learning opportunities and provide a central source of information about them. Essentially, the CIS enables students to approach significant subjects from multiple perspectives, thus expanding their understanding.

So it is with the Environmental Studies program.

"The requirements are designed to emphasize the humanities and social sciences more than most environmental studies programs do," says English professor Karla Armbruster, one of the program's faculty directors and an expert in the emerging field of ecocriticism.

"To understand any environmental issues, you need a grounding in basic science," she says. "But the field has so many issues that go beyond science, and the humanities help you approach them: The values, the decision-making, the politics, the human behavior. They are complex problems, and to solve them, your understanding must be broader than basic science."

Armbruster says that broad approach makes it an attractive field for any student concerned with the way humans interact with their environment, no matter what his or her major.

"It usually draws students who have a personal concern for environmental issues," she says. "They are often highly motivated by that concern."

One Student's Experience

One such student is Teresa Shipley, a recent Webster graduate. Born on a Missouri farm to a science-minded father, Shipley's long-held interest in nature and human interdependence only got deeper when she attended Webster.

"My father always took me on walks into the woods, where he would point out so many things about our surroundings," Shipley says. "As I got older and developed more of a social conscience, and as I was exposed to so many new things at Webster, I started to really see the connection between our health and the environment."

"The courses and professors I had really inspired me,", Shipley says. "They made me think beyond the science of environment. How there are so many stakes involved: public health, jobs, government, our survival."

Consequently, Shipley — originally an "undeclared major" student — kept taking more Environmental Studies-related courses from a variety of departments at Webster. They ended up forming the foundation for her self-designed interdisciplinary major (SIM) in Science Writing.

Teresa Shipley surveying in Wyoming as a field technician for the U.S. government's Landfire project.

"I never took a class that I didn't like," Shipley says. "How many college students can say that?"

Offerings in Environmental Studies include courses from across the spectrum of biological sciences, humanities, and beyond: Ecology, American Environmental History, Environmentalism in Film, Science Writing, and Environmental Ethics are just a few examples.

Shipley says this wide range of offerings exposed her to great faculty from all over the University.

"The courses and professors I had really inspired me," Shipley says. "They made me think beyond the science of the environment. How there are so many stakes involved: public health, jobs, government, our survival."

So as she has embarked on her post-graduate career, Shipley has drawn heavily on her Webster experiences — whether in a research position she held with National Geographic magazine, or in her Americorps position on the federal government's Landfire project, for which she spent six months surveying vegetation and terrain in Wyoming and California.

She credits Joyce Bork, chair, Biological Sciences, and Bork's variety of outdoor labs at Tyson Research Center, for teaching her to think like a scientist — "That's the gold standard for science writing," Shipley says. She credits the year she spent studying at Webster's London campus for the international exposure and science writing courses she took there. She raves about her mentor Armbruster, who guided her choices and her writing.

While working in the field, awe-inspiring views such as Zion National Park were a regular occurrence for Shipley.

Most of all, Shipley says, she has attained a clear understanding of the interconnected nature of environmental issues. How, for example, out West, where issues of water access, range management, and conservation all intersect, people both depend on the land and can be broken by it.

That kind of post-graduate success, Armbruster says, is what the designers of the Environmental Studies program have in mind.

"As far as a mission," she says, "We just want to help people live as responsible citizens of the world. These students usually have high aspirations. We're here to tell them to go for it."