Critical Environmentalisms: Overcoming Institutional Obstacles to Meet Students’ Demands for Sustainability Curricula and Action

Abstract

This chapter brings together the voices of undergraduates, faculty and staff to share their perspectives about whether UC Santa Cruz is doing enough to address environmental concerns, and how it can better support critical sustainability and action. In the first section, we report the longitudinal results of surveys conducted in 2016, 2019 and 2022 of over 8000 respondents in total. Students’ self-reported environmental concern increases over time, and is mostly similar for white and non-white undergraduates, except for a few environmental issues. However, the disparity between students’ environmental concern and how they perceive the campus to be prioritizing environmental issues grows over time, with students perceiving the university as falling short on addressing all environmental issues surveyed. We then shift focus to environmental curricula at UC Santa Cruz, exploring the results from the 2022 data about coverage of a range of environmental topics, how much students reported learning about environmental concerns, and what they wanted to see emphasized in their coursework. One of the major findings is that students of color, by a large margin, want environmental curricula to have greater racial, ethnic, gender, etc. representation. To this end, the chapter shares results of a new project, Critical Environmentalisms, in which faculty and staff were asked how the institution could support environmental efforts and education that is connected to issues of power, difference, identity and equity.