**1. Introduction**

Bombay Beach, near the Salton Sea in southeastern California, is a unique place. It was once a popular resort town in the 1950's and 1960's, attracting the residents of Los Angeles to a beach in the middle of the desert. But the Salton Sea, it itself a human accident, became increasingly polluted with agricultural runoff, and with the smell of the dead fish that would wash up on shore and the algal blooms, tourism decreased dramatically. The resident population of Bombay Beach aged or left. But within the last 10 years, artists and writers have begun to re-inhabit the census designated place (population 295 as of 2010), turning dilapidated trailers into gallery spaces and creating huge installations by the water. Harkening back to the town's past is the only restaurant for miles, called the "Ski Inn", though jet skis have long since skied out.

The project featured in this chapter does not focus on tourism in the Mojave Desert. Rather, it was designed to help undergraduate students understand the complexities of the attitudes of area residents towards different types of solar development in the Mojave Desert. Namely, what is the proper place for solar development? How do residents feel about it? Why is there such a strong discrepancy between attitudes towards residential and industrial scale solar? So why, on one of our field visits, did we (an undergraduate researcher and the Principle Investigator) spend half a day at Bombay Beach and the Salton Sea?

Most solar developments, in the Mojave Desert and elsewhere, begin with site suitability analysis. A number of variables – slope, aspect, parcel size, zoning- are overlayed using a Geographic Information System (GIS), and ideal locations for solar are identified. However there is a history of community opposition to solar development in the very regions it makes the most technical sense. Much of the opposition to solar installations in the Mojave, industrial and residential, comes down to government policies, corporate management, and (of particular applicability to this project), attitudes of local residents. These attitudes are not easily attributed to the pejorative concept of NIMBYism ("Not in my Backyard") or attitudes towards renewable energy itself.

The reason the Principal Investigator chose to visit Bombay Beach was to better understand the broader geographic and historical context in which any type of development takes place. While not directly related to solar development, these types of appropriation of land by corporations has a long history that is deeply rooted in the local psyche. Thus, when trying to understand attitudes towards one type of development, one must understand the region as a whole. This visit was part of a larger pedagogical approach with sought to provide students with firsthand readings of the landscape, in addition to a multi-methodological analysis of attitudes towards development, especially solar, across the Mojave desert.

Geographers interpret places not as entities in and of themselves with a fixed set of characteristics, but rather as nodes through which various flows intersect- economic, human, transportation, environmental- and shape the ongoing evolution of a place. Students are increasingly aware of and concerned about the intersection of human and environmental communities, and looking for skill sets to be able to gather multiple types of data to solve a problem. Providing students with the tools to address environmental problem solving, be they analytical, technical, or quantitative, comprises a critical aspect of contemporary environmental studies and sciences/geography pedagogy.

This project, while rooted in geography and spatial science, has very explicit connections with the field of environmental studies and sciences. The Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS; ESS) is the prominent professional higher-education field encompassing ESS, and explicitly states that "broad advances in environmental knowledge require disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary approaches to research and learning". Student demand for programs at the undergraduate and graduate level is steadily increasing [1]. Though many programs in natural resource management have experienced a slight decline in the last 20+ years, this is likely due to individual departments capitalizing on the broader environmental

#### *A Multi-Disciplinary Undergraduate Pedagogical Experience Looking at Attitudes… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101248*

concerns of their student population and shifting to a less extractive framing [2]. Other programs have "rebranded" their identity and restructured their content, often using sustainability as a uniting factor across disciplines. The number of active sustainability groups on campuses has skyrocketed. Many geography departments have added "environment" to their name. This all represents an incredible opportunity for educators to facilitate students becoming effective problem solvers and suggests that more students will be seeking the tools needed to have a viable career addressing both the human and the biophysical aspects of environmental problems.

As ESS has grown, there has been a robust discussion about how to best structure, teach, and assess the programs in the name of academic rigor [3]. Multidisciplinary pedagogy, in which this project is grounded, attempts to create students equipped to wrestle with complex problems. The approach recognizes the way in which all disciplines are partial. Soulé and Press [4] received ample criticism and pushback when they suggested that the increasing interdisciplinarity and multiple perspectives of ESS programs threatened careful scholarship, leaving students with a grab bag of skill sets and broad and shallow fields of knowledge. However Soulé and Press, as Maniates and Whissel argue, make a key oversight in assuming that interdisciplinary teaching, thinking, and learning inherently creates conflict. Soulé and Press's argument has since been largely seen as a straw man. In the years since, the field has cohered around the concepts offered by the National Council for Science (NCSE)'s report, "Interdisciplinary Environmental and Sustainability Education on the Nation's Campuses 2012: Curriculum Design" [5]. This includes the following concepts. "(1) The ideal ESS curriculum builds on diverse forms of knowledge; (2) This diverse knowledge can be organized into major curricular models; and (3) sustainability integrates these curricular models" [6]<sup>1</sup> . Others have demonstrated that despite these goals, syllabi are not diverse enough. In their review of undergraduate environmental studies syllabi, Kennedy and Ho [7] found three major discourse typologies, though some were over-represented while others were under-represented. They ultimately advocate that faculty consistently monitor their own blind spots and ideological prejudices, allowing students to come to their own conclusions about approaching environmental challenges.

In addition to interdisciplinarity thinking and problem solving, a key component of ESS is field work. For many reasons, including that there is a field-based component in many ESS professions, fieldwork has long been understood to be an integral component of ESS curricula [8, 9]. While part of this is content-based, much of it is affective. Students increase information retention, and also simply enjoy field trips, increasing recruitment. Fieldwork has also been associated with the principles of deep learning through experience [10]. That said, fieldwork is not without its critics. For example, within the field of geography the pedagogical benefits have been challenged. A number of factors, both logistical, and financial, have made fieldwork much more difficult for institutions of higher education to facilitate, even when they value its educational merits [11].

One of the most critical impediments beginning in 2020 has been the COVID-19 global pandemic. Social distancing, avoiding indoor spaces, remaining home as much as possible, and masking all placed huge strains on fieldwork, if not making it outright impossible. Equally challenging is the inability to effectively plan for fieldwork, given the amount of work, financial commitment, and logistics that go into the simplest of field excursions. A number of researchers have suggested ways to work through these

<sup>1</sup> Note that Proctor also argues that this study lacks theoretical depth and demonstrates conceptual leaps.

challenges, including contingency planning, recognizing the role of the virtual word as our contemporary "field", and the ways to incorporate citizen science in data collection. Many of these trends existed far before the advent of COVID-19, and perhaps researchers being pushed out of their comfort zones will help develop them further [12].

These approaches—interdisciplinarity, field work, multi-methodological research tools—are housed under the larger umbrella of critical geography. Within the field of spatial science, the last 20 years have shown exponential growth in the world of "big data", with ever more accessible tools for processing and visualizing data. While hugely beneficial for researchers and citizens (and often quite lucrative) some have argued that geography is increasingly done on a screen [13]. A researcher could come to normative conclusions and policy descriptions for a location without ever having visited, thus bypassing citizen engagement, local knowledge, and a general "sense of place". The methods we chose for this project, including fieldwork, surveys, participatory mapping, and interviews, were intended to engage deeply with the actors involved in this issue, in an attempt to avoid a detached and mechanized view of the region.

This project ran from 2019 to 2021 under the umbrella of the Undergraduate Research Associates Program (URAP) at the University of Southern California. The URAP program is intended to expose undergraduates to research opportunities typical of graduate level research, namely "learning as inquiry". This program is of particular interest to students pursuing graduate school, as they will be better prepared to develop research questions, conduct independent research, and draw well-reasoned conclusions. Faculty mentor small groups of students, or even one student at a time, providing them with an invaluable learning and research experience. The Primary Investigator is given a small stipend allotted to funding students, with a small portion available for supplies.

Students associated with the Spatial Sciences Institute (SSI) at USC are provided with a number of URAP projects, which faculty have already applied for and had funded. Within the Spatial Sciences Institute, students rank the projects they would most like to work on. Both years, this project was highly popular, demonstrating the demand from students for research involving environmental problem solving, multi-disciplinarity, and field-based research. One student was selected each year, though the first student (a co-author of this article) remained involved in the project during the second year of its iteration. At the completion of the project, both students went on to present at a number of academic conferences, which will be discussed later in the chapter.
