WHEN Andrew Pattison was looking to pursue a graduate degree in sustainability, he drew on his post-college experience working as a conservation biologist in upstate New York. Butterflies were his thing, and he produced numerous recommendations about what should be done to protect them. “I found that quote-unquote important people who were decision makers would read the reports I filed and then not follow them,” Mr. Pattison says.
Those frustrations led him in a different direction. “I knew I wanted to study the way decisions were made on environmental policy,” he says. He also knew where many of the important decisions were made: in cities. With energy and climate policy, he says, “the problem is global, but all politics are local.”
Mr. Pattison, 32, is now a doctoral student in the sustainable urban infrastructure program at the University of Colorado, Denver. It’s one of a growing number of graduate programs in sustainability where the issues affecting cities are front and center.
“We’ve seen a growth in programs that are more focused, either on a particular geographic area or on a discipline,” says Paul Rowland, executive director of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. The organization’s Web site, aashe.org, lists nine universities offering doctoral or master’s degrees in urban sustainability studies, and many more programs include the urban environment as a central part of their studies.
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