About AESS

Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS) is an independent faculty-and-student-based professional association in higher education, designed to serve the needs of environmental scholars and scientists who value interdisciplinary approaches to research, teaching, and problem-solving.  Founded in 2008, the Association seeks to provide its members with the latest environmental information and tools to create better courses, strengthen research, develop more satisfying careers, harness the power of a collective voice for the profession, and enjoy each other’s company at national and regional meetings. 

As part of our commitment to support the professional development of Association members we offer a carbon-friendly, electronic Newsletter that is available as a PDF on our web site.

A major aim of AESS is to encourage interdisciplinary understanding of environmental science, policy, management, ethics, history, and all of the other vital contributions of traditional disciplines.  From its beginning, the Association has been envisioned as a community of environmental scholars and scientists, not a confederation of disciplines. Fundamental to its members’ embrace of higher education is the notion that broad advances in environmental knowledge require disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary approaches to research and learning.

The AESS is committed to achieving its goals by

Committee Structure

AESS members are encouraged to contribute actively to the organization’s development through participation in important AESS committees which presently include:   

• Awards –  to recognize and honor the contributions of environmental leaders in higher education and beyond
• Membership – to expand and diversify the membership base
• Nominations – to recruit and nominate candidates for elective offices in AESS
• Professional Development – to improve the quality and institutional
• Program – to oversee development of the program for the annual meeting
• Publications – to supervise publication of the official journal and other professional publications of AESS
• Site Arrangements – to solicit proposals for hosting the annual meeting and other official meetings, and to coordinate local arrangements and services

Click here for the current list of AESS Officers.

Journal of the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences

The flagship journal of the Association is planned for launch in 2010. It promises to provide AESS members with peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary coverage of the leading research and professional issues confronting our society.

The journal will assist in the creation of integrative environmental knowledge, along with useful applications for society, by providing a forum for scholars and scientists whose research extends beyond the boundaries of any one discipline.  The journal will be particularly useful for junior scholars with interdisciplinary interests who are especially in need of peer-reviewed outlets for their professional development.  Clearly, such a journal will add value and visibility to the scholarly contributions of all AESS members within higher education, and provide an important vehicle of communication for enhancing their professional development. A successful AESS Journal will also improve the credibility of and respect for environmental fields in higher education.

Article:  Observations by Lamont (Monty) C. Hempel -- Invitation to Join AESS, 2008

I. RAISON D’ETRE

Imagine a situation in which thousands of faculty members at U.S. colleges and universities lack a professional association to promote and represent the academic field that most deeply engages their interest.  Unlikely, you say, that such high levels of demand would remain unmet by supply.  After all, this country currently has more than 140,000 formal associations, with more than 23,000 of them organized at the national level.[1]  In higher education, professional associations exist for almost every field imaginable – from anthropology to zoology; from abstract art to Zoroastrianism.  Strange that a learning enterprise so intent on differentiating knowledge into disciplines and subfields would miss an opportunity to erect one more academic “silo,” accompanied by a flagship journal, annual conference, and a newsletter chronicling the progress and professional accomplishments of its devoted members.  But therein lies the problem.  Some interlocking fields resist “stove- pipe” classification.  They may be interdisciplinary, or even transdisciplinary, and many are energized more by synthesis and systems integration than by ever more specialized analysis.

There is perhaps no field in all of academe that better exemplifies this situation than Environmental Studies & Science (ES&S).  More than four decades after the first environmental studies program was launched, we are only now building a professional society to serve the thousands of faculty members who teach, manage, or perform research in one of the nearly 1,500 ES&S programs and departments that have since been added to American higher education. Thousands more faculty members are housed within traditional disciplines and professional associations but teach or perform research in ES&S domains, making them additional candidates for a new faculty-based association.  To this must be added a growing number of students who seek involvement as pre-professionals in college and graduate school programs.

In order to provide identity, collective voice, and continuing education for these individuals, we are announcing the formation of the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS – pronounced “ace” for those who prefer the brevity of monosyllables).  It is perhaps telling that the proposed acronym for the new association is shared by the older Association for Ethics in Spine Surgery – testimony to the specialized nature of existing professional associations.  Our AESS is far broader in its scope and design, and it features a collective “spine” that is conceptual rather than physical.  Despite our diversity, at least in terms of traditional academic disciplines, we are united by a focus on understanding environmental systems.

Beyond the obvious needs for community and identity, the AES&S can serve other important purposes:

• enlarging our capacity for cross-campus collaboration, mentoring, and shared scholarship;
• creating a collegial process for speaking, networking, publishing, and conference development;
• developing professional and accreditation standards;
• supporting  the career development of members, especially junior faculty;
• providing professional advice on important matters of environmental policy and management.

AESS will encourage excellence in research, teaching, and practice in environmental studies and science. It will assist members in discovering like-minded colleagues at other campuses. Conversely, it will facilitate encounters with other colleagues who hold different viewpoints and professional orientations. Enlarging and strengthening the community of scholars and scientists with whom we interact is arguably the most important benefit of the new association. It will allow us to learn more efficiently from one another about new developments in a range of interrelated fields.

Environmental scholars and scientists inevitably discover that the challenges we face transcend the disciplinary knowledge many of us practice.  As E. O. Wilson observed, “The fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos are not reflections of the real world, but are artifacts of scholarship.”[2]  A major aim of AESS will be to encourage interdisciplinary understanding of environmental science, policy, management, ethics, history, and all of the other vital contributions of traditional disciplines.  The Association is envisioned from the start as a community of environmental scholars and scientists, not a confederation of disciplines.  Our ranks will include microspecialists, synthesists and enviro-generalists. Fundamental to our embrace of higher education is the notion that broad advances in environmental knowledge require disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary approaches to research and learning.  Moreover, they require humility about what we know and don’t know, both as individuals and as representatives of disciplines. For it is only through learning communities of the type proposed for AESS that we can achieve “whole system” environmental education and the creative synthesis of new knowledge.  Such a synthesis would truly mark the coming of age of ES&S as a professional society.

II. HISTORY

The impetus for the latest discussion about an ES&S association came from faculty members at the University of California, Santa Barbara, led by Bill Freudenburg and Bob Wilkinson.  Seeking a forum in which to examine interest in forming a national professional society, they organized the first-ever “Environmental Summit” at Santa Barbara's UCSB campus, Feb. 23-25, 2006.  The Santa Barbara summit quickly attracted over 250 participants, from seven nations, almost all of whom supported the idea of developing a professional society for ES&S, although the precise nature of such a society was left undefined, with some participants favoring development within an existing association and others seeking additional studies and survey results to inform the mission statement and design of the new organization.

Following the Santa Barbara summit, an unofficial steering committee was formed to continue discussions and planning for the proposed association. The initial group consisted of Bill Freudenburg (UCSB), Walter (Tony) Rosenbaum (Florida), David Blockstein (NCSE/CEDD), Bob Wilkinson (UCSB), and Monty Hempel (Redlands), with additional help from Maya Fischhoff (Michigan State), Rob Bachman (University of the South at Sewanee), Debra Davidson (University of Alberta), and the New York Summit planning team: Steve Brechin, Rick Smardon, Sharon Moran, and Brenda Nordenstam (Syracuse University and SUNY ESF). Rosenbaum was asked to take the lead in exploring the possibility of a new journal to serve the Environmental Studies and Sciences community.

The heavy presence of Syracuse faculty reflected the fact that Syracuse was willing to put in the effort to host a second summit, following up on the success of the Santa Barbara meeting.  The second summit was held in upstate New York in June 2007, co-hosted by Syracuse University and the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry.  In the special plenary meeting that was scheduled as the final session at the New York Summit, a strong majority of participants voted to support the development of a new, independent, faculty-based association that would embrace  both "environmental studies" and "environmental sciences."  Following the Syracuse summit, two more volunteers were added,  to the informal steering committee -- David Hassenzahl (UNLV) and Stephanie Pfirman (Barnard).

The next question had to do with deciding how to structure the new organization.  At the Syracuse meeting, there was considerable support for the idea of continuing to work in cooperation with the National Council on Science and the Environment (NCSE) and the Council of Environmental Deans and Directors (CEDD), although that decision left open some important question about the details of developing a relationship between an existing organization of Deans and Directors (with its established office and staff in Washington D.C., to say nothing of its existing responsibilities) and a not-yet-formed organization of "worker bees" from those same environmental programs, departments and colleges.  With all the speed ordinarily associated with all-volunteer organizations, discussions went on for several months, considering any number of possible business relationships; ultimately, by late in the fall term of 2007, essentially all of the parties involved had reached consensus that the sensible thing to do was to follow the advice we academics often provide to professional resource managers.  We decided to take an "adaptive management" approach, beginning the process of setting up an independent organization, which would provide the most realistic possible answers to the understandable questions from NCSE/CEDD about the number of likely members, potential resource burdens and opportunities, and the like.  This informal agreement was presented at the annual winter meeting of NCSE/CEDD in Washington, D.C., in January 2008, where it won strong approval.

The next minor complication was the Catch-22 of setting up bank accounts -- something that proves to be harder than you might guess, given the terrorism-obsessed world of present-day banking regulations.  One key concern is that you need officers before you can set up a bank account, and you need a bank account before members can start sending in dues money, becoming eligible to vote.  After several false starts, Bob Wilkinson and Bill Freudenburg talked the Environmental Studies Program at UCSB into serving as an initial business office -- helped immeasurably by the fact that one of their colleagues, Greg Mohr, was willing to volunteer to serve a term as the founding treasurer.  Ultimately, we decided to use the same approach Bill and Bob had used in setting up the initial Santa Barbara Summit -- act as if the organization already exists.  Bill tells me that they finally found a Credit Union that was willing to set up a bank account if we could provide two officers -- a treasurer and a secretary -- so Bill named himself secretary.  He tells me he's already trying to get out of that job, even though he doesn't know what duties might be involved, but he's our secretary for now.

III. CURRENT & FUTURE PLANS

Now that AESS is being "formally" launched -- realizing that any reference to formality in this organization needs to be interpreted in relativistic terms -- the Environmental Studies Department of the University of California at Santa Barbara has agreed to be the initial host institution.  It will play an “incubator” role, developing a membership database and providing start-up business management and accounting services for the new organization.  With the development of a successful business plan, financial management strategy, and track record, the organization is expected to migrate in the future -- perhaps three to five years from now moving to a new and more permanent home in the offices of the National Council for Science and Environment (NCSE) in Washington, DC.

As with other academic societies and associations, AESS will provide the range of services to its members necessary to support their intellectual, professional and institutional needs. This will include a journal, an annual conference, a newsletter, a database of fellow members, and recognition (e.g. awards and AESS Fellows).  So far, much of our attention has been devoted to ideas for the journal.  The organizing committee has been discussing with several potential publishers the creation of both a hard copy and electronic edition. Articles in each issue are anticipated to include traditional academic research; analysis and commentary on policy related issues; reviews of significant publications; and perhaps a news/information section about professionally related events.  The committee  anticipates that the prospective journal’s editorial office will be closely associated with a major research university.  The journal would be managed by an Editor-in-Chief and a Board of Editors.

We'll be providing an update to the people who attend the third Summit, which will take place at Arkansas State University in May 2008, and preliminary plans are now in development for holding a summit (maybe we'll need to start calling it an "annual meeting") in Madison, Wisconsin, in 2009. Now, though, the key decision is yours.  Our decision has been to keep the membership fees as low as possible.  We hope your next decision is to join us, and to twist the arms of at least six of your closest friends and colleagues, urging them to join us as well.

[1] American Society of Association Executives, Encyclopedia of Associations, Gale Publishing, 42nd edition, 2005.

[2] E.O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Knopf 1998, p.8