Jordan Howell, Ph.D. is an associate professor and program coordinator for environmental and sustainability studies in the School of Earth & Environment at Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ. He is also co-director of the Rowan Center for Responsible Leadership in the Rohrer College of Business, also at Rowan University.
Dr. Howell researches humans' responses to environmental problems and, in particular, understanding how and why we deal with our garbage the way we do. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Beth Dombkowski:
Hello. My name is Beth Dombkowski and I'm coming to you from the Office of Admissions at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey.
Beth Dombkowski:
Welcome to Rowan Confidential. I am here today with Dr. Jordan Howell. Originally from Michigan, Jordan P. Howell studied anthropology at the College of William & Mary before earning his PhD at Michigan State University. His teaching and research focus on our responses to environmental problems and in particular understanding how and why we deal with our garbage the way we do. Jordan's work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency among other sources. He is currently Associate Professor and Program Coordinator for Environmental and Sustainability Studies in the School of Earth and Environment and Co-Director of the Rowan Center for Responsible Leadership in the Rohrer College of Business. Finally, Jordan sits on the New Jersey Pinelands Commission and is a designee to the Pinelands Development Credit Bank. Thank you for joining us today, Jordan.
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
Well, thank you for having me.
Beth Dombkowski:
Happy to have you. Absolutely. So I'm going to ask you some questions so we can get to know you a little bit more.
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
Okay.
Beth Dombkowski:
What wakes you up in the morning? What's your inspiration or passion?
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
I do have an alarm clock and sometimes it doesn't work, so our cat will wake me up.
Beth Dombkowski:
Okay.
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
Okay. But her passion is cat food at that point in time. When I'm up and working, the thing that gets me going in the day is that I'll start by working on my research because I feel like that's one of the most meaningful impacts that I can make over time.
Beth Dombkowski:
So you don't actually start by feeding the cat?
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
No. I leave that for my wife. She's very nice.
Beth Dombkowski:
Okay.
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
Yeah. But no. So I'll get up and I'm working, I'm thinking almost right away about how can we address some of the environmental problems that we're facing? And for me, it's interesting because a lot of times environmental studies is focused just on the science.
Beth Dombkowski:
Okay.
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
And a lot of my research looks at the economic or policy dimensions of environmental problems or cultural dimensions of them and tries to figure out how can we solve this environmental problem in a way that's equitable and we're all satisfied with what we've come up with.
Beth Dombkowski:
Interesting. So this is your area of research?
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
Yeah. So I do research on environmental issues and environmental policy a little bit more specifically and even more specifically for the past 10 years or so, I've been researching garbage in the U.S. And then also in some other countries around the world. But mostly in the U.S. And right now, my research focuses on the history of waste management in New Jersey.
Beth Dombkowski:
All right. So I have to ask, how did you become interested in garbage?
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
I don't totally know. I'm sure there's some deep subconscious thing going on with keeping a tidy space or something like that.
Beth Dombkowski:
Okay.
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
People have told me that my favorite Sesame Street character was always Oscar the Grouch.
Beth Dombkowski:
Well he is one of the coolest. Yes.
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
Yeah. Him and Cookie Monster. Clearly the coolest, but-
Beth Dombkowski:
I was always a Snuffleupagus fan.
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
Also a solid choice. But you really can't go wrong. But I do remember as a youth being into Oscar the Grouch and his trashcan house. I think as an adult though, I'm not still watching Sesame Street I would like to clarify first, but also the thing that is interesting to me is this attitude that we've taken towards garbage as the stuff that we absolutely have to get rid of it. We want it out of our house, out of our town, take it somewhere, bury it under the ground. If we look at what that actually is though, there's a lot of valuable stuff in garbage. Is it really the best thing that we can do as intellectually advanced human society to just take this valuable resource and bury it somewhere and hope that it doesn't cause a problem for us or maybe our descendants? I feel like we could do better. And so that's something that motivates a lot of my work is trying to find ways that we can do better and also strategies for implementing those solutions.
Beth Dombkowski:
Very interesting. So what's one thing you wish people knew about your research focus?
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
About my own research that I'm working on?
Beth Dombkowski:
You're own research that you're working on.
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
Yeah. If you say you study waste management in New Jersey, sometimes people will think that it's code speak for you're involved in the mafia and to be totally accurate, there is a long history of organized crime involvement in the waste industry in New Jersey. But beyond that, it's actually a really innovative place. It has been historically. We in New Jersey came up with a lot of the national and international models for not just what we should do with waste, but also approaches for planning for waste management, some policy issues, some economics around how we dispose of garbage and pay for it. A lot of folks are a little bit surprised to hear that New Jersey would be an innovator in that area, especially because for a long time, it was the butt of a lot of jokes. We take all the trash from New York and Philadelphia, but we're doing something interesting with it and we're coming up to a point in our history now, I think, that it's time for some reinvestment and re-imagining how we do what we do with garbage here.
Beth Dombkowski:
Very interesting. So how do you engage students in this work?
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
Well, I guess in some ways it's through the classes that I teach in the environmental studies program. We'll talk about garbage in those classes. I also do try to work with students who are interested. Garbage research isn't for everybody, but for those that are interested in the subject, I find ways to incorporate them into my research projects. I've written I think two papers now with Rowan undergraduates, and these are real papers, scientific papers that have gone through a peer review process and they're out there in the world. So I try to do that. Other times, students will be involved in my research as research assistants and it's not just getting donuts or something and making copies, but I'll actually assign them like, "Hey, I need you to crunch the numbers around this type of policy issue," or, "Can you please summarize 25 years of waste management data that we have just collected from the state of New Jersey and make it meaningful and interesting and useful?" So I do try to incorporate students in real ways into the work that I have going on.
Beth Dombkowski:
So a theme that we've been hearing in the podcast is research and what I'm trying to do is demystify the word, "Research," and help people understand what is actually involved. Can you walk me through a project that you would do?
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
Yeah. So research, I feel like it's important to specify. It doesn't just happen in a scientific laboratory. It doesn't happen in only a library or some secluded office or anything like that. We can do research all the time in our day-to-day lives. And one of the things that I try to emphasize... Excuse me, in my class is how can we encounter research in our daily lives? Research is really just an organized and intentional effort to try to solve a complicated problem. And so for the type of research that I do, it's a little bit historical. So I might involve actually going to a library and digging around in some archives and stuff like that. I interview a lot of people. I try to gather the experiences of people who were involved in some of these waste management decisions, whether they worked for the state or county or local government, or maybe they worked for a company that actually picks up trash or throws it away.
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
So that's a part of it too. Those are my two preferred approaches, just interviewing and historical work. But there's so many ways of going about research and I think it's such an opaque idea that professors do research or scientists do research, but everyone does research to some extent in their own lives. And when we think about it or focus on it as a process, it's almost a skill that you can learn. You can learn how to do research even if it seems like something that's not really for you. We can all learn how to clearly identify a question or identify a problem, look to see what other attempts have been made to solve that problem, maybe what other researchers have done and then come up with what would be the ideal answer to the question or problem that we have and try to figure out what would I need to know to actually address this thing?
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
And so for people in history, it looks one way. For people in environmental studies, it looks another way. For scientists out there, maybe the questions or the process is a little bit different, but we're all doing the same thing at the end of the day. And students absolutely should learn how to do that in their time.
Beth Dombkowski:
So this is a global concern, garbage. So have you done work abroad with other systems or visited other places that could inform your research?
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
Yeah. So I mean I guess as far as other places, it's part of the U.S., but it's really different. A lot of my dissertation focused on Hawaii. So I spent some time out there looking at what do we do to manage garbage in Hawaii? And it was really interesting because you'd think they would do the most efficient things possible because there's so limited space available. But in some parts of Hawaii, where you're talking about landfills and dumps that are the type that we eliminated in the mainland maybe 30 years ago, and they're still operational today. So even within the U.S., there's a lot of diversity in response to this problem. My research has been interesting and that it's also taken me to some other places.
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
I've had a chance to learn how people in Denmark handle their garbage. Very different approach to thinking about waste. They see it more as a resource. Almost all the garbage in Denmark is burned in these incinerators that also generate electricity and they provide heating to local houses in business. We could use that same technology here in the U.S. It would be easy to adopt the same technology, but for some reason people here are very uncomfortable with it. So for me, it's interesting to see how people around the world, they're facing the same problem of what do we do with our garbage? And they might even have the same set of technological options to address that problem. But people will make these different decisions based on cultural ideas or what they think is environmentally safe or safe for their health or something like that. So it's interesting to make these cross-cultural, cross-national comparisons, I guess, about the same types of environmental problems.
Beth Dombkowski:
So what's one thing that this field has allowed you to do that you'd either dreamed about doing or thought you'd never get to do?
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
Sometimes I think about the concept of what I do in my job. I study garbage, which doesn't seem like it should be a job. But it is and that's amazing to me in some ways. So the fact that that's how I get to spend most of my time thinking and examining this really expensive, really complex system that could have a lot of environmental implications and then I get to write about that and try to share those things that I found with the rest of the world, that in itself is really rewarding as a job experience. And then also, I like to share what I find with students. I think that many of them appreciate that and I try to share my approach to solving environmental problems with them, with students in the classes that I teach in the majors that I get to supervise. And I think also working on this problem, it's certainly allowed me to have some interesting travel experiences. I mentioned going to Hawaii, which is a really tough posting as you might imagine, to go out and do research in Hawaii.
Beth Dombkowski:
Oh, sounds miserable.
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
In January. Yeah, it was tough. It was tough. I guess I got to go to Denmark. There's opportunities for travel to other places, maybe to meet with colleagues that are working on environmental problems as well. So those are exciting opportunities.
Beth Dombkowski:
So you mentioned that your work has been supported by National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities. NEH, tell me about that. Is that through a grant? What did that process look like?
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
Yeah. So along with my colleague Dustin Crowley and the Department of English here at Rowan, we submitted a grant proposal to the NEH a couple of years ago and they had this program to try to find ways of bringing the humanities into conversation with other academic disciplines, and in particular STEM fields. So science, technology, engineering and math. The idea was how can we get more humanities ideas or humanities content from history, philosophy, literature into STEM classes at Rowan? And so we got this grant and then were able to assemble this team of really excellent like-minded faculty at Rowan and with that money, we supported this program to create new teaching materials around environmental humanities here at Rowan that we're glad to say are all out there in the world. They're open not just for Rowan faculty to use, but also faculty at any institution on the planet that want to maybe inject some humanities ideas into their STEM classes.
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
We've also been able to bring a lot of interesting speakers to campus through that program. So people from outside the university community who maybe have a lot of experience or ideas with this notion of environmental humanities. So that's been pretty cool. We're one of the few universities to actually receive this award and a lot of the other ones that did were really fancy pants, public or private institutions, Columbia, University of Texas, Wisconsin, those places that we're becoming more and more like at Rowan. We're on the uptick here at Rowan University.
Beth Dombkowski:
Certainly are. Can you tell me about the Rowan Center for Responsible Leadership in the Business College?
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
I can tell you about it and I will.
Beth Dombkowski:
Okay.
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
Yeah. So this is a new university wide initiative that's focused on this question of what's the role of business in society? So the Center for Responsible Leadership is focused around three areas. One is this idea of sustainable business, one is the idea of a socially responsible business and then we have this third area of emphasis around business ethics. So right now, it's located in the College of Business and we're trying to connect in the same way we did with our project from the NEH, how can we connect environmental and humanities thinking to STEM fields? How can we connect the business teaching and research to these other areas of concern that we all have for business nowadays?
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
And so that's just getting up and running, but there's going to be a lot of opportunities for students and other faculty to be involved to participate in the types of programming that we're putting together. We'd like to be able to support student projects around this area of sustainable business or responsible business and so we're just getting started with that. But it's really nice at Rowan that we can have these new initiatives and see them take off and try to do something different than what other schools are doing.
Beth Dombkowski:
So this isn't just for the School of Earth and Environment and it's also not just for the students in the Rohrer College of Business. Any student on campus can be involved.
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
That's correct. Anyone can. Right now, we have a whole slate of events scheduled for this fall semester and then starting hopefully in the spring, we'll have opportunities for students from anywhere on campus to participate in some of the other stuff we've got planned.
Beth Dombkowski:
Great.
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
Yeah.
Beth Dombkowski:
Great. So my last question for you, why Rowan?
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
Well, I took this job at Rowan among other job offers because when I was here for an interview, a common thing that happens on professor job interviews is that places will tell you that they care... "We care about your teaching. We also want you to do really good research." Some places say that, but it's not really true. They emphasize one area or the other and you can find out just from talking to the other professor friends you might have, what is it really like? But I was really impressed at Rowan, and I'm still impressed by this today, that they actually do take both things seriously here. You have to be a good teacher and do innovative things in your classrooms and you also have to be committed to doing interesting and important research. And in my experience here, the university and my department and the departments that I've been involved in have really supported that.
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
And so professor jobs have a lot of burnout. Some inside baseball for listeners is that there's a lot of people that are professors for a long time, but there's a lot of burnout too. But Rowan does a nice job, at least in my experience, of supporting all these aspects of the job and I still like that to this day. I think it's a place that supports faculty ambition to do new things, like the Center for Responsible Leadership or those support faculty that are trying to get grants that might involve students or even just new excellent research grants too. So I like it for those reasons.
Beth Dombkowski:
So why would you tell a student, why would you advise a student that Rowan is the place for them for your particular field?
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
For my particular field? Okay. I like that question because I get to talk about these programs that I helped put together. So if people are listening that are interested in the environment at all, at Rowan, we actually have way more environmental programs than many other universities. So we have my program, which is Environmental and Sustainability Studies. We also have degree programs in environmental science and geology, environmental engineering, biology, of course, chemistry, those sorts of things. What that means is you can come as a student and you can focus on one thing that maybe captures your attention the most, but also learn about the environment from all these other perspectives that are just as important. So my program in particular, it focuses on the human dimensions of environmental issues. So the policy or economics or cultural dimensions of environmental problems. Whereas some of the other programs we offer are more focused on the science and technology and that dimension of environmental problem solving.
Jordan Howell, Ph.D.:
And if you're really interested in environment, you probably know you have to have both of those things to really be an effective problem solver. I'd say another illustration of why I would encourage someone to come to Rowan is that it's easy to combine those interests in your time as a student and we even have some new programs. This literally just started last week with the start of this fall semester, we're one of the few universities now, might be the only one in New Jersey but certainly one of the few along the East Coast, where students can come and earn an undergraduate degree in environmental studies and also get an MBA, a master's in business administration, and it's a condensed five-year program. So you can come here because maybe you're interested in the environment or concerned about environmental problems, and also study how businesses operate and figure out how can I use a lot of these tools that businesses have to actually solve environmental problems too? So we're really unique in that we offer these interesting combinations of ways of studying the environment.
Beth Dombkowski:
Jordan, thank you so much for coming in and speaking with us today. It has been a pleasure. I know I've learned a lot. We would love to have you back at some point in time, hear about the research that you're doing and the student involvement. And this has been Rowan Confidential.