Bob Riesenberg

My primary academic discipline is Psychology.  My involvement with sustainability began about 40 years ago before we used the term, while I was with the Indian Health Service of the USPHS.   My major focus on my dissertation was Environmental Psychology, then a new area of psychology.  I have taught a course related this almost every year since 1982 at the University of Vermont.  Most of our environmental issues are greatly affected by human behavior.  Psychology is the science of behavior, including the causes of behavior and behavior change.  I have developed and taught Psych 240 Environmental issues and Human Behavior, and our new offering IDS 170 Introduction to Sustainability last Spring and this past Fall.

At WCC Debbie Lancaster, Fred Tabor, and I advocated for making Environmental Science a required course in the mid 1990's to no avail.  We requested a Learning Community involving Environmental Science, Environmental Ethics, and Psychology to no avail.  In 2008 Barry, Linda Maier (an adminstrator), and I attended a conference on sustainability in community colleges in Eugene, Oregon, sponsored in part by AASHE.  Sustainability got support at WCC after that due to the advocacy of administrators Linda Maier and Dick Fulton.  Barry then crafted a strategy to create our Sustainability Courses designation and degree requirement.  It was accepted with little resistance because it gained involvement from many faculty, cost no more money, and did not add to the amount of credits needed to graduate. Barry became our first Sustainability Chair.

When Barry took a break from chairing Sustainability here in 2011, I was lucky and got to do the job for about 4 years until I retired from my full-time position last June.  It has been the highlight of my career at WCC.  I am so happy that all of you are planning to include something of sustainability in your courses.  That's the best way for us to educate our students about this.  They come to see it as a normal topic that is relevant to most disciplines, most activities in our lives, and most areas of society.  Not considering the sustainability implications of policies and actions will eventually  seem as "abnormal" as driving without your seatbelt, or smoking in our classrooms.

In my estimation, the next big endeavor is for us to begin to assess sustainabiiity literacy in our students and track it across their time at WCC.  Interested?