About the Project

What is the Piedmont Project?

Faculty Workshop: the Heart of the Project

Each summer since 2001, the Piedmont Project at Emory University has drawn together cohorts of roughly twenty faculty from diverse fields across the university to learn about environmental issues and sustainability. Development of new courses or course materials begins with a two-day introductory workshop in May, immediately after graduation, in which two to four faculty facilitators lead discussions about sustainability, environmental issues, the local Atlanta/Emory ecosystem, and political, economic, social, philosophical, and ethical dimensions of these issues. Three or four resource experts provide information on ecology, public health, environmental justice, and an overview of campus environmental efforts. Midday woods walks provide some recreation and an opportunity for experiential learning. The lectures, discussions, outdoor time, and workshop materials all highlight connections among environmental dimensions of Atlanta, the campus, and broader national and international issues of sustainability. There are two follow-up meetings (a fieldtrip in August and a dinner the following March), in which participants report on their progress and share their learning experiences. Pedagogical innovation, as well as expanded content, has been a hallmark of the Piedmont Project.

Engaging Graduate Students

In 2004, this faculty development program was extended to graduate students, and 18 Piedmont Graduate Fellows participated in a workshop and curriculum development project. In addition, sustainability issues were introduced throughout the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences teacher training program, as part of the university’s commitment to its Environmental Mission Statement, adopted in 2002. Every second year graduate students in the university engaged in interdisciplinary discussion about integrating issues of environment and sustainability into their teaching and research. Graduate student fellows are now also introducing new courses and modules into the curriculum.

New Courses Emerge: Water

An enormous array of new courses and modules have emerged from the Piedmont Project. An especially exciting new course on water, highlighting the diverse dimensions of sustainability inherent in this central component of life, will be team-taught in 2005 by Piedmont Project faculty alumni from English, Philosophy, and Environmental Studies.

Cross-disciplinary Dialogue

Many of society’s most significant and complex problems can best be addressed and resolved through multi-disciplinary inquiry. Universities are ideally equipped to address these problems, but rarely do so effectively. As part of a broader, university-wide awakening to environmental and sustainability concerns, the Piedmont Project focuses on curricular change, to support faculty intellectual development to address these urgent societal issues.

While the modern university has the resources to address complex cross-disciplinary issues, its organization into discipline-centered departments has erected barriers that are often difficult to cross (Orr, 1994; 1996). The very geographical design of campuses serves to strengthen separation of people and ideas; scientific research facilities and classrooms, for example, are often isolated from humanities and social sciences buildings. South African physicist and humanitarian George Ellis posits that every social problem demands three groups of individuals: a core of specific researchers, a group of generalists, and teams of combined specialists and generalists who can bridge and synthesize to create new knowledge. Such teams require balance and mutual respect. The Piedmont Project is one of a number of efforts to develop pedagogical experiences for students that allow them to develop such skills.

Origins of the Piedmont Project:

A small environmental program for undergraduates, combined with growing public awareness of a rapid deterioration in Atlanta’s environmental indicators, laid the groundwork for broader interest in sustainability on campus. One of the early interdisciplinary efforts at Emory was the Human and Natural Ecology Program, a five-course undergraduate “co-major” (a minor concentration with the addition of an internship experience and a senior research paper) that pulled together faculty from social science and natural science departments.

It was during a period of transition in leadership in this program that Atlanta’s environmental dilemmas became front page news. Municipal and regional failures to comply with the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act led to various federal penalties, drawing substantial attention for the first time to some negative aspects of Atlanta’s much-celebrated economic growth. A study conducted not long after revealed the Atlanta metropolitan area to be one of the fastest-growing regions in the world (Leinberger, 2001). Urban sprawl and rising population lengthened commute time to one of the longest in the nation, further increasing the number of days of summer smog. Droughts highlighted urban water use, and disputes with neighboring states revealed that increasing population growth might soon outstrip water supplies. Though known as a city of trees, Atlanta lost half its tree cover in less than twenty years, and scientists documented an urban heat island effect. Many faculty, as well as staff and students, were concerned about these environmental dimensions of growth and urban (and suburban) lifestyles, but there were few ways that such concerns could be addressed within the central mission of the university.

The Piedmont Project was based on the 5-year experience of the Ponderosa Project at Northern Arizona University (see “The Ponderosa Project: Infusing Sustainability in the Curriculum” by Geoffrey W. Chase and Paul Rowland, in Sustainability on Campus: Stories and Strategies for Change).

Impact