UVM aims to add color to white environmental field

Lisa Rathke

SHELBURNE, Vt. — For a few of the New York City high schoolers surveying it, the rural landscape of Shelburne Farms was like something from a movie.

But if the University of Vermont has its way, more people like them will find themselves venturing afield.

Hoping to diversify the racial and cultural mix of students in its environmental programs, the college hosted a group of inner-city students last month, giving them a taste of life far from the city.

They tromped through the high grass in search of nesting birds — some covering their prized sneakers with plastic shopping bags. They pointed to a red-winged black bird, insisting it was a robin — while one girl, allergic to dandelions, fought off sneezes.

But when a UVM professor pulled a bobolink from a net set up in the field, the 14 teenagers circled around, holding up their cell phones and cameras to snap pictures as he attached a radio tag to the bird’s spindly leg.

“I love the nature here,” said Grace Niyeon Hwang, 15, a sophomore from the High School for Environmental Studies, a public school located in Manhattan. “It’s beautiful. The air is just so clean.”

Different from New York, she said.

Historically, undergraduate forestry and wildlife programs perhaps haven’t connected to ethnic minority populations scattered through the country, said Don DeHayes, dean of UVM’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources.

“That’s now changing, because the issues of air and water quality are as important … in urban areas,” he said.

Issues of environmental justice and, more recently, global warming, have also broadened interest.

“In the day we live now, global warming is a big issue,” said Joshua Carrera, 17, a junior, who said he’s considering attending UVM. “You can see how the world is really going to change, the temperature. At least once a month, you’ll hear something about ice caps melting. It’s really scary.”

Since 1989, the number of black, Latino, Asian and Native American undergraduate students at UVM’s Rubenstein School has increased from six to 27 — out of 489 people.

In the 1980s, the school had none, DeHayes said.

“It was very obvious to me that the field of natural resources and environmental studies was conspicuously underrepresented by people of color nationally. It was even more obvious to me at our school,” he said.

“It just became something that I really felt was important, to create access for students for all walks of life. And I also thought it was important for the environmental field … to remain credible in an increasingly diverse society,” he said.

But he says the field didn’t do a good job reaching out to people from urban backgrounds.

So he started lecturing at city schools, and eventually brought other faculty in.

This year, funding for multicultural scholarships and other diversity efforts at the Rubenstein School reached $1 million, with two federal grants and a private gift. That money underwrote the high school students’ May 24 trip north.

Still, colleges, universities and environmental organizations need to do more to attract minorities, said Dorceta Taylor, an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment, who has researched the topic.

“To say that minorities are not interested, the evidence is just the opposite,” she said.

Schools need to recruit students, diversify their faculty, and make curriculum more multicultural, she said.

“The quest for diversity is really driven by students … and also by a greater sense that the environment is very complex in every way and the cultural complexity is a part of that that needs to be incorporated into the curriculum,” Taylor said.

Recruitment will only work if the curriculum is engaging and relevant to all students, DeHayes said.

UVM graduate Joanna Pina, who grew up in the Dominican Republic and later New York City, stumbled across UVM as a senior at the High School for Environmental Studies. She had never heard of Vermont, and as the first generation of her family to attend college, her parents were reluctant to have her go.

“It was so incredibly different than what I was used to, and I think that’s what made it so great,” she said of her four years at UVM. “To be honest, I had not even interacted with Caucasian people much.”

After graduating in 2002, she eventually got a job as an environmental health and safety coordinator for a property management company in California.

But DeHayes said the process of transforming the environmental work force and programs has been slow, “much slower than it needs to be and should be.”

“When we have a faculty, staff and student body that more accurately reflects the diversity in our society, we will actually have greater attention to the management of natural resources … and to the environmental challenges that face our country,” he said.

(Associated Press)