With attention to environmental issues growing in recent years, college campuses nationwide have seen a surge of interest in environmental studies courses.

But while some universities offer special programs to meet these needs, Harvard is still considering how to design a curriculum for a field of study that reaches across virtually every academic discipline.

During the past year, an 18-member faculty committee has been weighing options for strengthening environmental studies at Harvard. The committee, which will make a recommendation to President Derek C. Bok this spring, has concluded that if environmental studies ever becomes an official undergraduate concentration, it will have to develop over time out of a less formal program.

The members of the University Working Group on the Environment, appointed by Bok last spring, have consulted students and faculty in all the University's schools in order to formulate recommendations for improving environmental studies at Harvard.

Harvard currently offers a number of courses in environmental studies, but there is no coordinated curriculum for the discipline. Since the inception of the special concentrations program in 1972, about 15 undergraduates have chosen to concentrate in environmental studies by creating their own special concentration.

The committee is unlikely to propose to Bok a new environmental studies concentration, such as the ones many other universities offer, according to committee members.

Instead, the faculty committee is looking at ways to consolidate and fill gaps in what is now an uncoordinated and incomplete selection of environmental course offerings in the College and many of the graduate schools, says Michael W. Binford, a member of the Working Group and an associate professor of landscape architecture at the Graduate School of Design.

A Broad Discipline

Most faculty on the committee agree that studies of the environment, which could include work in most of the natural and social sciences, is too broad a topic for an undergraduate concentration at this time, Binford says.

"My own opinion is that it would be too early to create a special environmental concentration," said Working Group member and Baird Professor of Science Edward O. Wilson.

But Pratt Public Service Professor Lewis M. Branscomb, who chairs the Working Group, says that any recommendation the committee makes will have the potential to evolve into an interdisciplinary degree program such as Social Studies.

"My hope is that we'll come up with an evolutionary strategy that [has an environmental studies concentration] as a possible endpoint," Branscomb said.

Unlike the student and faculty disagreement that in the past has accompanied the creation of new departments on campus, the faculty's restraint in developing an environmental studies concentration is shared by many students.

"A lot of us are wary of establishing a big building and calling it the environmental studies building," says Trenton H. Norris, a second-year law student who acted as a liaison between the Harvard Environmental Network, an umbrella organization of all campus environmental groups, and the Working Group.

Environmental studies could be construed to include almost every discipline, Norris says, which may weaken professors' work by placing them apart from their colleagues in an all-inclusive department.