Environmental Studies Program Faculty Pen Two New Books

By James Devitt

Dale Jamieson, who directs NYU’s Environmental Studies Program, and Tyler Volk, who is the program’s science director, have each recently published books on the environment.
    Jamieson, a professor of philosophy, authored Ethics and the Environment: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2008), which explores the philosophical issues surrounding environmentalism and how it figures into an ethical life. It addresses a range of topics, including the environment as an ethical question, human morality, the value of nature, and nature’s future. “(T)here are deep ambivalences in environmental thought and rhetoric,” Jamieson writes. “On the one hand, judging human action by a standard different from ‘natural’ events requires distinguishing people from nature, but convincing people to live modestly may require convincing them to see themselves as part of nature. Aesthetically appreciating nature involves seeing ourselves apart from nature, but this is supposed to be the attitude that gives rise to environmental destruction in the first place.”
    Volk, a professor of biology, wrote CO2 Rising: The World’s Greatest Environmental Challenge (MIT Press, 2008), which explains the process at the heart of global warming and climate change: the global carbon cycle. Volk describes what happens when CO2 is released by the combustion of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas), letting loose carbon atoms once trapped deep underground into the interwoven web of air, water, and soil. The work contends that knowledge about the global carbon cycle and the huge disturbances that human activity produces in it will equip us to consider the questions Volk raises: projections of future levels of CO2; which energy systems and processes (solar, wind, nuclear, carbon sequestration) will power civilization in the future; the relationships among the wealth of nations, energy use, and CO2 emissions; and global equity in per capita emissions.
    The Environmental Studies Program aims to provide students with the breadth of understanding and the skills necessary for resolving environmental questions and creating a sustainable future on scales ranging from local to global. It does so through integrated, problem-oriented study and a broad range of courses across disciplines and schools.
    The program draws upon NYU’s strong faculty base in departments of the Arts and Science, such as biology and philosophy, the Center for Atmosphere Ocean Science (Courant/FAS), the Center on Environmental and Land Use Law (law school), the M.A. program in Bioethics: Life, Health, and Environment (FAS), and the Environmental Conservation Education Program (Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development), as well as in the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, the Stern School of Business, the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and the School of Medicine, reflecting the wide-ranging expertise and concerns of the Environmental Studies Program.