I am an Environmental Psychologist (Ph.D. University Buffalo Social Psychology 1975) who heads the Environmental Studies program at Ramapo College of New Jersey, where I have taught since 1974.
Michael R. Edelstein. Ph.D.
Environmental fields such as Environmental Psychology were just forming in 1970 in response to the First Earthday and the signing into law of NEPA (the National Environmental Policy Act)---a document that I always tell my students is my Bible. My initial graduate work was on how spatial density affects behavior and my dissertation was on privacy. My background in Social Psychology has shaped my work in Environmental Psychology, but the fields are inherently incompatible in my view. Social Psychology has historically been largely acontextual.
My Bio, Where do psychology and architecture meet?
As an Environmental Psychologist, I am primarily concerned with how context shapes behavior as well as how behavior shapes context. During graduate school, I taught for three years in the Environmental Design program in the School of Architecture at the University of Buffalo. My work project at this time was on how to design housing for severely handicapped individuals living in community settings. I also worked for three years at the Buffalo Organization for Socio-Technical Innovation (BOSTI) under the celebrated design thinker Michael Brill. As the first psychologist collaborating with designers at BOSTI, my work focused on describing the social dynamics to be addressed in staff training for a large HHS project and in collaboratively designing a participatory environmental system for schools and daycare centers. Both teaching and working in Environmental Design forever shaped my thinking about issues of sustainability and about how to teach.
Develop it.
In Graduate School, I was afforded great independence by virtue of being a Herbert Lehman Fellow. I spent much of my time working with Barbara Benedict Bunker on issues related to social process (group, community and organizational dynamics, etc.). I also attended the two year Graduate Professional Development Program at NTL (National Training Labs), the experimental and training institute created by the profoundly influential Psychologist Kurt Lewin. From both experiences, I gained extensive experience in thinking about social change and working with people to bring it about. I consider myself to be a Lewinian Psychologist.
Teach it.
Although I was invited to stay at SUNY Buffalo as a faculty member, I chose to move in 1974 to Ramapo College of New Jersey, one of the small number of new institutions created to pursue interdisciplinarity. Hired by fellow Environmental Psychologist Joel Kameron, I joined a diverse faculty in the pioneer School of Environmental Studies, where I was able to develop and teach innovative courses often team taught with colleagues from other disciplines and to pursue the kind of teaching, research and community practice that most excited me. Among my colleagues were Murray Bookchin , founder of the field of Social Ecology; Trent Schroyer, a major theorist and activist forming the global sustainability movement; Bill Makofske, an energy physicist who was an important pioneer in developing a pedagogy for renewable energy and more than a dozen others. I was in the midst of a learning salon where early concepts of sustainability were formed, shaped and employed. I collaborated mostly with Bill Makofske on an amazing project, begun in 1975, the Alternative Energy Center, which was a model sustainable, renewable and regenerative on-campus community modeled after John Todd’s work on the ARC. Our students were collaborators, and we trained generations of broadly trained, deep thinking and decisively acting change agents. Bill and I also collaborated on research on Radon gas early in the issue’s emergence, producing several books on the subject and a major field testing and public information project done through Orange Environment that ended up as the pilot for the subsequent New York State radon project.
Research :
Dream it.
For forty-five years, I have been studying the psycho-social impact of environmental contamination, degradation, and destructive environmental and social change---all part of what I call Environmental Turbulence. I have done extensive research supported by grants and by law firms who hired me to prepare expert testimony.
During the same time, my teaching, additional research, and practice focused on sustainability---or how to avoid creating Environmental Turbulence. My practice has been through Ramapo College, through a non-profit I co-established in 1982 and headed until recently, Orange Environment, Inc., and most recently as a Climate Reality Leader. I also have practiced as an environmental Impact professional, particularly working on what I call Psycho-Social Impact Assessment, or how people are impacted by environmental change---both already evidenced or planned or emergent future changes---and how to address, avoid or mitigate these impacts. I collaborated for a long time with C.P. Wolf, the father of Social Impact Assessment, through his Center for Social Impact Assessment. A particular focus of this work was the conundrum of how to address high level nuclear waste. Through the center and also through Impact Assessment, Inc, we worked on impact studies for two of the candidate sites identified under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. In particular, I spend considerable time at the Hanford Nuclear Complex working on issues relating to Downwinders and the response to making Hanford into the nation’s high level nuclear waste site.
Build it.
My work on Environmental Contamination also brought me early on to what came to a sub-field called Environmental Justice and Environmental Racism. Meeting Bob Bullard for the first time in 1982, when I attended his session at the Organization of Black Sociologists, I have always considered myself to be attached to the burgeoning EJ research and activism. Around that time, I served as an expert witness for litigation at one of the earliest EJ sites, the xxxxxx. I have subsequently too often witnessed and studied further issues of EJ. Unlike most researchers, my work on EJ has been more focused on Psycho-Social Impact---or the specific mechanisms of the injustice---than on the injustice per se.
My work has also engaged me often with Native Americans and Native Hawaiians, leading me to spend a great deal of time focusing on the particular EJ issues encountered by Indigenous Peoples. I have twice had the honor to work with Native Hawaiians on impacts from Geothermal Energy Development and other projects that caused impacts including significant challenges to cultural belief and practice. I spent several years working with the Tahono O’Odham people of Arizona at the San Xavier Reservation on impacts to the reservation---the first ever created---from the drawdown of the Santa Cruz aquifer, principally caused by the growth of water demand in Tucson, but also from mining and agriculture. More recently, I have worked on impacts to local tribes from uranium mining in New Mexico. I have long worked on the effects for the Ramapo-Lenape tribe---neighbors of my college---from contamination caused by Ford Motor Company. Such experiences exposed me to grave environmental injustices and gave me a profound appreciation of indigenous people’s approach to the earth in comparison to our tragic modern approach.
Grow it.
Another theme to my work has been comparative study. Working with my colleagues Maria Tysiachniouk and Ludmila Smirnova (for twenty years, my wife), I was involved in a series of projects in Russia funded by the Trust for Mutual Understanding. Although the first project was sustainability-oriented, focused on Ecovillage development, the major project addressed the differences between how the U.S. and Russia addressed Environmental Turbulence (it turned out that there is less difference than one might hope). We had a powerful U.S. team matched by an amazing Russian team for the project, which led to the volume xxx.
A subsequent project also funded by the Trust involved a research expedition to Uzbekistan in search of the disappearing Aral Sea. This time my wonderful American team were former students and colleagues. The amazing Uzbek team was headed by water engineer Abror Gadaev. This was a dream project---the ancient Silk Road, high adventure and witnessing what I have long called the earth’s “dry run for climate change.” But, as with all of my confrontations with the reality most do not want to see or admit, it was profoundly sad and moving. The project resulted in several conferences and a book entitled xxxx co-edited with my former colleague Astrid Cerny and Abror Gadaeev.