Portland State junior Kathleen Cummings attributes her love of nature to her outdoorsy upbringing in southern Arizona and the many adventures she went on with her family.
"It made me really appreciate the natural world," she says.
But that world is changing. "A lot of this is not going to be the same way that it was when I was a kid, when I'm in my 50s, 60s, 70s," says Cummings.
The topic of climate change has always been top of mind for Cummings, particularly because she grew up in a state that's vulnerable to it.
"It inspired me to want a career where I can dedicate my life to combating these issues and turning what feels like a hopeless situation into a possible future," she says.
The warming planet is fueling students like Cummings to be part of the solution — and PSU's new School of Earth, Environment and Society (SEES) is helping meet that demand.
The school, which was formed last year and officially launches this fall, unites five departments and programs focused on understanding the environment, societies and the relationship between them: Anthropology, Complex Systems, Environmental Science and Management, Geography and Geology.
In the face of more extreme weather, more frequent and severe wildfires and the ever-looming threat of the seismic "Big One," faculty saw a need for greater coordination and collaboration across their programs. This will help them better train a workforce to address the pressing environmental and societal challenges facing the world today, and in the future.
Students and faculty agree that those challenges — climate change and adaptation, human health, pollution and natural hazards, environmental justice and more — will not be solved by one discipline alone. They require a convergence of ideas, approaches and technologies that the new school is poised to deliver.
These are the stories of five students who are part of the School of Earth, Environment and Society.
Using Geography for Good
Cummings always knew she wanted to do "something environmental" with her life. She took a liking to human geography — the study of people, cultures and how they interact with the environment — after taking an AP geography class in high school.
She started out at a tiny liberal arts college in California, but decided to transfer to PSU after her freshman year. She liked that the university was located in a more open-minded, progressive city and had a good geography program.
A few weeks before making the drive north to relocate to Portland, Cummings got an unexpected email from the School of Earth, Environment and Society. The email was inviting incoming students to participate in a free rafting trip down the Deschutes River. Faculty from the school had organized the trip to help students build community, discover an exciting part of Oregon’s landscape and learn about PSU's Outdoor Program.
The trip was too good to pass up for Cummings, who didn't know a single person in Portland and would get the chance to meet other environmentally minded students.
"It was really cool," she says. "There was a girl on the trip who is an environmental science major, and we've since had two classes together. It's been nice to have a familiar face and have that shared rafting history."
Cummings, who is majoring in geography and minoring in GIS, has her sights set on her dream job of working for a national park, but says she'll be happy as long as she's in an environmentally driven career using geography for good. And she's in good company.
"I've talked to a lot of students in the school that I would not have had a class with normally, but we have a lot in common," she says. "We have a lot of the same values and we have very similar visions for our futures, like what we want to do and how we want to affect the world.
Putting Names to Remains
As a kid, Andrew Morton was naturally curious, and fascinated with plants, roadkill and anything he could find outside. The TV show "Bones" about a forensic anthropologist put a name to his interests — even if he'd later learn that it wasn't entirely accurate.
"It really took that interest that I had growing up into an actual useful, applied field," says Morton, who is pursuing a combined bachelor's plus master's degree in anthropology with a minor in biology.
Morton says the accelerated pathway was the deciding factor in choosing PSU. It allows him to earn both degrees in as little as five years, and he already knew that he would need a Ph.D. to become a board-certified forensic anthropologist.
It's bringing together all of these different fields to really be able to inform one another.
Forensic anthropologists work to identify an individual — whether it's a cold case, a missing U.S. service member of a war long past or a wildfire victim — by establishing a profile from the skeleton. It holds clues to a person's age, ancestry, sex, stature, how they lived and how they died.
"That feeling of bringing closure is something that every practicing forensic anthropologist talks about," Morton says. "You did something for someone that you know no one else really can do, and that's something that I'm looking forward to being able to do."
Forensic anthropology is an interdisciplinary field that requires understanding from other fields of physical and social science. At PSU, Morton has been able to find the foundational training he needs with classes in biological anthropology, archaeology, biology and chemistry — and it's that approach that excites him most about the university’s new school.
"It's bringing together all of these different fields to really be able to inform one another," says Morton, who was part of student focus groups to help identify a name for the school.
He says his field can benefit from having a good understanding of geology and soil to date remains and geographic techniques like remote sensing, while those in other disciplines can learn from anthropologists' methods and approaches, like their ethical considerations and how they work with communities to understand the world through their eyes.
"You really do get a more well-rounded practitioner in whatever field we're working with," he says.
Preparing for Geohazards
Brittni Bishop credits her move out west from Florida with finding her love for geology.
"Being outdoorsy, I'd go out hiking and look at the landscapes and be like, 'Well I want to know why this is here,'" she recalls.
Bishop was on a psychology path at Portland Community College when she started taking introductory geology courses. Learning about the Cascadia earthquake and other geologic hazards only solidified her interest in the field, and she hasn't looked back.
A lot of people think, 'Oh what are you going to do with a geology degree — go look at some rocks?' but there's actually a lot of geotechnical jobs out here on the West Coast.
She took as many geology and prerequisite courses as she could before transferring to Portland State in 2022. She wasn't quite sure what kind of jobs existed, but started connecting with professional geologists at networking events hosted by the Association of Environmental & Engineering Geologists, which has both a PSU student chapter and an Oregon chapter.
A lot of people think, 'Oh what are you going to do with a geology degree — go look at some rocks?' but there's actually a lot of geotechnical jobs out here on the West Coast, she says, for example, making the Burnside Bridge earthquake-ready.
Bishop learned from her networking connections that firms and agencies would be looking for candidates with a master's degree, prompting her to continue into PSU's master's program in geology.
For her research, she's studying central Oregon's Harney basin, which has always been somewhat of an enigma and has increasing attention from state and federal agencies looking to understand the declining groundwater levels. Using data from the field and poring over water-well logs, Bishop is developing a subsurface model of the basin that will reveal the region's tectonic and structural history. The hope is that the work can also inform the ongoing groundwater research.
"A lot of wells are going dry, but if we understand the subsurface, my research can then aid in understanding where that water is and where it can move, why there's water depletion in some areas and not in others," she says.
Bishop, who's had a chance to go on site with the state's Department of Geology and Mineral Industries, hopes to eventually work for the agency. She likes their community outreach and wants to be a part of educating the public about hazards.
"Educating the community around me is what really drives me," she says. "As our climate changes here, what does that mean for the landscape around us with geologic hazards, landslides or even wildfires? Helping the community be aware of what's around them and the ways they can prepare makes a big difference."
It's also why she's excited for students to have the opportunity to more easily take classes from across the disciplines and learn from one another within the new school.
"If you're going out into the workforce, you can't really pigeonhole yourself into one discipline," she says. "You're always going to have to use different skills or work with other people that have different skills or knowledge. This integration will help build people's skill sets."
Protecting Our Waterways
For Allie Tissot, passion and curiosity have kept her going, even when the path was tough.
Tissot grew up wanting to be a marine biologist. But after struggling in biology and chemistry courses as an undergraduate, she felt panicked about her future. At the encouragement of a professor, she switched her major to environmental science.
"It was life-changing," she says. "It was a better fit for how my brain worked."
She loved taking a toxicology class — and that fascination stayed with her, even as she continued studying invertebrates and ecology. After her undergrad, she spent three years in Chile working as a lab technician and research assistant. When she started looking at grad school, she connected with PSU's Elise Granek, whose coastal marine research was right up her alley.
Tissot started in the master's program, battling imposter syndrome over whether she could do a doctorate. Granek tapped her to do a three-month tank experiment looking at the effects of individual and combined forestry pesticides on soft-shell clams.
"It was really challenging, but I did it and I loved it," she says.
It was then that she knew she would switch into the Earth, Environment and Society doctoral program. Tissot is now in her final year, focusing on the effects of pesticides as multiple stressors on aquatic invertebrates, like pesticides combined with other pesticides or contaminants such as microplastics.
Every individual has power and can help but, for me, I see it as a responsibility and a privilege to be on the front line for some of these things.
So far, the highlight of her career has been a fun but intense study looking at how exposure to pesticides and microplastics may be impacting the recovery of sunflower sea stars, which have been decimated by a mysterious wasting syndrome over the past decade.
"Contaminants are a big part of climate change that folks don't necessarily focus on as much, but they’re a really important stressor that are only going to get worse as water levels change," she says.
Tissot hopes to land a job at a regulatory agency in a position that would allow her to play a more active role in limiting the pollutants that are released into waterways. She says being able to make actionable change, however small, is what gives her hope amid the global climate crisis.
"I'm lucky enough to be in a field where I can actually do something," she says. "Every individual has power and can help but, for me, I see it as a responsibility and a privilege to be on the front line for some of these things."
She says a benefit of SEES will be more integrated research across the different disciplines.
"We can all get stuck in these silos where we're just thinking about the one thing that we're focusing on, but people don't think about the intersectionality between a lot of these questions," she says.
For example, electric vehicles may be better for carbon impact but worse for tire wear particles that run off into waterways, or plastic bottle bans can help reduce the presence of microplastics in the environment but can be a barrier for communities without access to clean water.
"If you're going to school in cohorts thinking about multiple areas, you're more likely to think about the whole picture," Tissot says. "Those questions are going to be addressed more holistically."
Solving Complex Problems
Mary Muhly considers herself a big-picture thinker.
"Once I found Complex Systems, it was pretty obvious that's where I was meant to be," says Muhly, who is a year into the doctoral program.
Everything is a system — from as small as a cell to as large as the universe — and she says systems thinking and tools can be used to solve complex problems in a way that can't be solved using linear thinking.
Anybody who is interested in these environmentally focused programs should be studying complex systems because everything is driven by systems.
"When you're thinking about solving problems like climate change, you need to understand how the system works, how the dynamics work and no matter what size system you're looking at, that's all fundamentally the same," she says. "Once you learn how feedback loops and delays manifest within systems to create these repetitive dynamics, you can now start to solve problems."
For Muhly, the problem to solve has always been about transforming the educational system to empower students and teachers. After injuries necessitated a career change, she went back to school and found a job at PSU's University Place Hotel that would make tuition affordable. She started in the Educational Leadership and Policy master's program, and shifted her focus to digital transformation as she became more interested in the tools and technology to make change. She's already completed two master's degrees and two graduate certificates.
"My dream is to work in higher ed and lead when it comes to transformation," she says. "I'm interested in finding my place within the larger work that needs to be done, whether that be advising students, creating curriculum or teaching."
Though Complex Systems is the smallest of the five programs in the School of Earth, Environment and Society, Muhly says all of its students can benefit from learning systems thinking and methods.
"Anybody who is interested in these environmentally focused programs should be studying complex systems because everything is driven by systems," she says. "We're headed toward ecological collapse — it's not even a debatable thing — so eventually we're going to get to the point where we get into a problem-solving mode. When that happens, we're going to need to be educated and empowered for that, and we're not there yet."
But she's inspired by the students who are passionate about making change — and wants to give them the tools to succeed.
"I see my work as being related to that work, always pushing for the bottom-up approach and opening the space for students to be part of the solution and to find their space within the work that we all need to do collectively," she says.