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Interview with John Perkins

Recent Teaching History
Director of MES
Master of Environmental Studies; 2000-1; 1999-2000; 1998-99; 1996-97
Contemporary Environmental Issues; Spring 1998
Political Ecology; Fall 1997 - Winter 1998

Recent and Current Areas of Interest

My teaching work and my research work tend to merge. I am very interested in the interaction between science and policy particularly around issues of environmental policy. The science/policy interaction field is so large that I tend to narrow the scope to environmental issues although other areas are interesting. At one level my interests are deeply epistemological, I am interested in how scientists form their ideas given the political contexts within which they work. And I am interested in how scientific ideas become something that gets stirred around in the political and economic arenas. In addition, I have this faith that may be very naive, misguided, and impractical, but I believe that people who are going to go out and have careers working as environmental policy makers, often for regulatory agencies, will be better bureaucrats if they understand how science and policy interact. I may be dead wrong, but I believe that it helps a career professional headed for work in the natural resource agencies, regulatory agencies to understand how politics works and science works and how they interact. Of course, in my more cynical moments, I recognize that what works is to figure out what the governor wants and what the legislature wants and just do it.
When I look at more specific issues they tend to center around agricultural topics. Pesticides have been a long-standing interest and I just recently finished a book on the Green Revolution. The ideas that are in that book come out in my teaching all the time, and in the Political Ecology program this spring we did a lot of work with the pesticides issue. I got into these agricultural issues when I finished my Ph.D. in biology. It was in the middle of the Vietnam War and while I enjoyed bench level biology, I looked around for something that seemed a bit more relevant and agriculture was it. The first stuff I did was to try to do a history of DDT. I wanted to figure out why the science of entomology got so wrapped up with a pesticide that turned out to be so controversial on environmental grounds. I plunged into the agricultural stuff and discovered that it was better than playing Bridge. That’s a game I had to foreswear because it ate up too much of my time. But the thing that fascinates about bridge is that every hand is different, there are so many combinations of the cards, and every situation is different. Well, pesticides and agriculture are a little like that. You delve into it and you quickly realize that if you are going to work on pesticide issues, particularly if you are interested in reform, the pattern of variation is so infinite. Essentially every pesticide, every use, every situation the pesticide is used in is incredibly different on biological grounds, economic grounds, political grounds, social grounds, and cultural grounds. I have never given up being fascinated by the complicated arrays of factors that you have to work on. So I guess until I exhaust these possibilities, and they keep coming up with new chemicals, I will have plenty to do.

As a part of the agricultural work I have been involved with a few other topics have become important. The first is population issues. There is a pretty strong component of population issues in the most recent book I completed. A second set of issues is a history of technology and environment interactions. I try to do reading in the history of technology and the technical innovation process. And third environmental history, in general, I find really interesting. While I have never offered courses or programs on these topics directly, these things show up in everything I do. I think it is often hard for students to see how these things are central to environmental issues, so usually they get taught in programs whose titles aremore environmental and popular.

Are there particular authors/artists/thinkers whose work you interested and which you often ask students to examine?

I am a reconstructed, unapologetic, unmitigated Kuhenian. So in fact I use The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Students find it hard, but with the proper structuring and guidance students can make great use of it. I also think that Carolyn Merchant’s book The Death of Nature is a turgid but exceedingly important book for students to get through. So, I do inflict it on them. And probably this is where my political incorrectness begins, but I actually find some of Julian Simon’s stuff quite important. I haven’t used The Ultimate Resource in class for years, because the examples are dated. But I find that it is useful for jarring environmental studies students, particularly those who are convinced that they have it all worked out, that they have the solutions and let’s just get on with it. I think those students need to be shaken out of their complacency. I find Simon’s arguments ultimately fatally flawed, but his arguments are just right enough that you have to take him seriously. It is also important to recognize that half the people of the United States probably agree with him, which means you need to take it seriously. I read his stuff as an essay on population, technology, and natural resource use. Where I think he is right is that humans are an incredibly inventive species and if we run short of something, I know we will look for an alternative and there is a good chance we will find it. My sense is that if an environmental student gets out and doesn’t understand this, they have really missed the dynamics of American life. One other author who really shaped my thinking in the past was Barry Commoner. I don’t think I would assign him any more, but he shaped my thinking about the significance of technology in social and environmental processes nearly completely.

Are there specific areas of interest or issues you want to work with students on in the current year?

Almost anything having to do with agriculture, pesticides, toxic substances, and technology and intellectual property rights would be a good topic, if I had worked with the student previously.

Specific Skills, Competence, Techniques:

They aren’t particularly profound. I think people ought to be able to write clearly, and they ought to be able to count – to make something out of numbers. They ought to be able to think logically and clearly and have a sense that evidence matters. I don’t like student work that is driven entirely by ideology. I think that people’s writing and thinking needs to have logic and arguments and needs to be grounded in something that has a basis in the material world. To make work interesting to me, no matter how theoretical it is has to have a tie into a real historical event, situation, or circumstance that involved people and the biological world. When it comes to numbers I mean to start with nothing profound – I mean percentages and proportions. At a slightly more profound level simple descriptive statistics, some inferential statistics are important. I don’t do much with calculus and matrix algebra. I teach a fair amount with sampling, data gathering and the like. I like to do that with social science faculty. When I work with social sciences and focus on the issue of research design then we can help students see how numbers might be useful. How we learn to ask a question that a number might be relevant to answering is actually a hard thing to do. So in MES we really have come to see research design as the key element in teaching quantitative methods. We have been quite successful in getting students to be able to read the material and quite a few who have been able, with help, to use quantitative methods in the research projects.

What are key qualities you look for in student work? What techniques do you use to assess their work? How do you help students assess their work?

I always tell students "If you are going to write a paper make sure it says something – that it has an argument. There should be a proposition, a thesis, that you’re trying to demonstrate." I have come to recognize that about the only thing a student can absorb are comments like "What is you major argument here?" If they can identify the thesis and state it they are on their way. If they are writing a fifteen or twenty page paper they should be able to say what they are doing in one sentence. If they can’t the paper is usually a mishmash that wanders about.
The concept of analysis is even more difficult to convey to students. Students are very different in their ability to do analysis. A lot of them seem to have been taught in high school that everything you say has to be documented. Which was important in high school, because it forced them to ground their assertions in something. But it makes them frightened to have their own idea or think their own thoughts. I have had students turn in four page papers with three and a half pages worth of quotes. I tell them I don’t want to see any quotes I am interested in what you think. Writing isn’t pulling out endless series of quotes, rather there is this idea and you are supposed to think about it and discuss it. There is no tidy way to convey this, rather it is an iterative process.

There is no simple way of helping students get this, but mostly it evolves through comments on the paper or interactive conversations. Sometimes it is simply a matter of persuading a student that what they think they know is not as basic and simple as they assume. Thus they have to articulate the truth of their reality.

Teaching Style:How would you characterize yourself as a teacher?

I am well organized and methodical. I am not a dynamic lecturer. I don’t put people to sleep immediately, but I am pretty methodical and I am organized to a fault. I tend to be very gentle with people, but relentlessly demanding in the sense that I don’t try to scare them half to death. I don’t try to be the mean ogre, rather I am the nice uncle. " It’s not done quite well enough, I think you might need to do it again." "This isn’t quite right, what about this?" I really try to cultivate this approach. I had an undergraduate teacher who cultivated the ogre. It worked for me, I found him fascinating, but it turned off a lot of my classmates.

What types of students tend to do well with you?

I would say about 90% of the graduate students do well with me, with undergrads it is more like 70 or 80 percent. The ones who are methodical as I am get along well with me. People who recognize that around any biological question there is a host of philosophic, political, cultural and economic questions that you will need to understand as well.

What types of students have a hard time with you?

I don’t get along well with students who are excessively ideological. I often take a devil’s advocate position just to push them a bit. I also don’t get along too well with students who think only natural history work is important in environmental studies. If they see natural history as very important but want to see it in context we will get along fine. But people who only like their critters are going to find me asking them what they think of as irrelevant questions.

What do your student evaluations say about the way you come across to students?

"John is very clear and well organized." They say I am extremely demanding with very high standards, but very supportive and very patient. I get comments about support and standards from students who do what I see as some of the best work, so I think I am doing something right. Some students find my lectures boring – in a word. But others simply find them clear.

Expectations about Contracts, Internships, and Evaluations
What qualities do you look for in a student who comes to you for work in a contract?

I almost always work with students on contract who I have worked with before. To me successful contracts almost always require that the student has an analytical framework that we are sharing. Thus the requirement that they have worked with me before means that they know something about how I approach problems and they can use that framework to investigate an issue in greater depth.
I look for seriousness. By that I mean if you want a contract in spring quarter, the first part of winter quarter is just barely in the nick of time to get started planning for it. People who come to me in the first week of the quarter looking for a contract are simply out of it. I always tell people that contract work is the hardest mode of study you can imagine. It really takes exceptional students with good basic skills.

What information do you want to see when a person comes to look for a contract?

They need to know what they want to learn and what they want to learn has to be unattainable any other way. Individual contracts should be the mode of learning of last resort. I tend to take contracts from student I know, I don’t use portfolios very much. They definitely need a solid proposal.

Interviewer: Matt Smith

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Last Updated: March 15, 2007