From Total Environment to Sustainable Development: Interdisciplinary Learning as the Cornerstone to a Survivable Future

Abstract

This chapter explores the history of interdisciplinary learning in higher education. Tracing its roots to the late 1960s, it shows how the call for interdisciplinarity first gained traction with the push for environmental education as seen in the events leading up to and following the first Earth Day (1970). Between the inaugural publication of The Journal of Environmental Education (1969) and the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (1972), educators formulated the belief that an understanding of “total environment,” or the interconnectedness of natural, economic, and social phenomena, would require a multidisciplinary approach. This belief has continued to the present in the context of education for sustainable development, being articulated in the Bonn Declaration (1999) and the Sustainable Development Goals (2015). Yet, apart from a limited number of academic programs, interdisciplinarity within the context of environmentalism failed to materialize. Rather, interdisciplinary learning was eventually reformulated in the context of bolstering the liberal arts and developing twenty-first-century competences. Nevertheless, the arguments formulated 50 years ago have become increasingly relevant with the growing environmental crisis. The scale and complexity of the current crisis necessitates an interdisciplinarity capable of developing within the current generation the ecologically oriented competences needed to sustain the next.