Environmental Studies as a multidisciplinary subject, and what each discipline adds

Introduction

Environmental Studies looks at every issue that affects living organisms and their surroundings, and at how human activity changes those surroundings. No single subject can explain such issues, so the course draws on many subjects at once. It is also an applied field: its aim is to find practical ways of making human life sustainable on a planet whose resources are finite.

Why Environmental Studies is multidisciplinary

1. The environment is not one subject. It is an integration of several subjects from both the sciences and the social studies, and its scope touches some part of nearly every major discipline.
2. Its problems have natural and human sides together. Deforestation, for example, is a biological loss, but it also changes the water cycle (an intact forest holds water like a sponge, so its loss brings floods in the monsoon and dry rivers afterwards), and its causes lie in population, demand and economic choices.
3. The components of the environment interact. The atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere and biosphere are studied as linked parts, not as separate boxes, which is why the DU course opens with them alongside the multidisciplinary idea.
4. Solutions need more than one kind of knowledge. A cleaner river needs chemistry to measure the pollutant, engineering to treat the effluent, economics to price it, law to enforce limits and public participation to keep it clean.

Hence Environmental Studies is a meeting point of disciplines rather than a branch of any one of them.

How the disciplines contribute

Natural sciences and technology:

• Geology and geography deal with rocks, minerals, soil, landforms and the location of resources, which is needed to study mining, soil erosion and land use.
• Biology and ecology explain living organisms, food chains, energy flow, species and habitats, and therefore what is lost when an ecosystem is damaged.
• Physics explains energy, heat and radiation, which matter for energy resources and for problems such as thermal and noise pollution.
• Chemistry identifies pollutants, their reactions in air, water and soil, and how they can be measured.
• Statistics and computers collect, analyse and model environmental data, from pollution readings to population trends.
• Engineering designs the practical remedies: treatment plants, cleaner technologies and waste handling.

Social sciences and humanities:

• Economics and resource management explain why resources are overused, how growth draws on natural resources, and how they can be used sustainably.
• Sociology and anthropology show how communities depend on nature and how environmental change affects different groups unequally.
• Population studies link the number of people, and what each person uses, to the pressure on resources.
• Health sciences connect pollution to disease, such as air pollution with respiratory illness and polluted water with gastro-intestinal illness.
• Philosophy and ethics ask what we owe to other species and to future generations.
• Law and political science turn knowledge into rules and policies that can be enforced; in India, public interest litigation filed by environmental lawyers such as M. C. Mehta, from 1984 onwards, has pushed the courts to act on pollution.

Conclusion

Each discipline sees one side of an environmental issue; Environmental Studies brings these sides together so that a problem such as deforestation or urban pollution can be understood fully and solved in practice. Its multidisciplinary nature is therefore its basic character, not an added feature.