History of the Environmental and Resource Studies (ERS) Program

The Environmental and Resource Studies Program (ERS) was created in 1974 as a strategic interdisciplinary program because:

• there was a societal need for alternative approaches to environmental and natural resource education, and
• the recognition by the concerned Departments at Trent University that they could not easily cover the interdisciplinary subject matter within the existing academic structure.

The founding Departments were Canadian Studies, Geography, History, Politics, Biology, Chemistry and Physics. Trent’s initiative was especially noteworthy because it was only the third university in Ontario to establish a stand-alone environmental program and it was the first to truly embrace the sciences. To this day it remains unique because of its balanced mixture of science and policy courses.

The operation of the Program has transformed markedly since 1974, from collaborative coordination via a committee of the founding Departments to a self-directed academic unit. Indeed, the Program is pondering the recent offer by the university to rename any “Program” as a “Department”, recognizing that the two types of academic unit operate in the same way.

The origins of the Program are important, because they help to explain the delivery of its academic offerings. The first-year course and the core second-year courses sustain the team-taught pedagogical basis of the initial 1970’s courses. The second year as a whole emphasizes skill-development, methods, basic theory and critical thinking. Some of the larger enrolment courses in second year remain as cross-listed offerings of other Departments. They are thus staffed by those units, even though ERS usually participated in their development and they are integral to the ERS degrees and degree-options. The comparatively high enrolments in those courses are neither accounted in ERS enrolments nor reflected in tenure-track staffing which is driven heavily by enrolments. Similarly the long-term involvement of ERS faculty in graduate Programs is not reflected in staffing, because the only university commitment of faculty to graduate staffing is in the form of ad hoc back-filling on a course-by-course basis.