Month: June 2011

Attending the 2011 ASLE Conference

Tomorrow I head down to Bloomington, Indiana, to participate in one of my favorite professional conferences — the biannual meeting of ASLE, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. As a scholar whose work straddles the humanities and natural sciences, and as someone teaching in RU’s newly-developed Sustainability Studies program, I’m always delighted to attend this energetic and intellectually-stimulating gathering of writers, teachers, scholars, artists, and activists. All of them are committed to advancing the cause of environmentalism, but from a myriad of perspectives and methods. Plus, we always manage to take a good field trip or two in between the formal conference proceedings.

This year’s ASLE meeting is hosted by Indiana University, and my journey this week will mark my first visit to that university as well as to Bloomington — another reason I’m looking forward to the adventure.

Indiana University's campus in Bloomington, IN

I’m very familiar with the “other Bloomington” of the Midwest — the one in Illinois where I went to college at Illinois Wesleyan University and which I still visit periodically with my family — but I’ve always had a notion to see this much-touted community that was the setting for the wonderful 1979 film, Breaking Away.

I’m taking part in a roundtable-style panel entitled “Sustainability Education: Multidisciplinary Perspectives and Approaches” that includes faculty participants from colleges and universities all across the US. My fellow panelists are presenting on topics ranging from teaching sustainability and literature in Appalachia, to designing interdisciplinary courses on climate change, to the creation of a sustainability blog that showcases student writing and art, to exploring ways in which sustainability can be infused throughout the general education curriculum for undergraduates.

My own presentation focuses on the new Sustainability Studies (SUST) program here at Roosevelt University. The program grew out of an experimental course on urban sustainability I team-taught back in the spring of 2009, an experience described in an essay from the July 2010 issue of Metropolitan Universities. As a new undergraduate degree housed in Roosevelt’s College of Professional Studies, the nascent SUST program just finished its third semester and has approximately 25 majors enrolled at Roosevelt’s two campuses (Chicago and Schaumburg, IL) and taking online courses. The curriculum’s core is a series of interdisciplinary courses that integrate the natural and social sciences with the humanities and address key issues and themes such as water; food; waste; biodiversity; energy and climate change; sprawl and transportation; and policy and ethics.

Three things strike me about our program as relevant to this panel’s discussion of sustainability education. The first is the institutional context in which our program emerged at RU, since many colleges and universities are considering ways to incorporate sustainability into their curriculum, whether as new ways to teach existing courses or in the shape of new courses and/or programs. In our case at Roosevelt, the university had some “vacant land” within the undergraduate curriculum which provided us with an opportunity to propose and develop this new major. While RU has well-established programs in biology and chemistry, there were no majors in environmental policy, studies, or science. My home college has an entrepreneurial orientation, and thus the development of the SUST curriculum received strong in-house support from our dean. It was favorably received by university-wide faculty committees, as well, in part because we took pains to show how the program was meant to complement existing science programs, rather than compete/conflict with them. By developing solid cross-college relationships with faculty colleagues in biology, chemistry, environmental science, math, and business, we hope to engage in future collaborations on many levels. One promising example of this is that SUST faculty were invited to participate in the current revamping of RU’s environmental science minor.

A second observation is how sustainability education contributes to an institution’s overall work to improve its physical operations and thus serve as a model of a sustainable community (a process I describe in my “Sustaining Sustainability” essay circulated previously). We at RU are behind many other US colleges and universities (such as Dickinson College, as chronicled by Professor Ashton Nichols), but we have become galvanized recently around a common goal of improving the sustainability of our two campuses and connecting this improvement as much as possible to our teaching, research, and service-learning activities. In this respect, sustainability education — whatever form it takes in a particular institution — can be an powerful force in getting people (from college administrators to alumni to community members) to see the ethical importance and economic benefits of reducing resource use, reducing waste, recycling materials, conserving water and energy, fostering local food production, and educating eco-literate citizens.

Lastly, there’s the transformative potential of technology, field experiences, and service-learning for sustainability education, all of which are exciting areas of inquiry and experimentation that can revitalize our teaching and stoke the inherent enthusiasm we’ve observed in our students for the ideas and practical applications of sustainability. In line with the College of Professional Studies’ tradition of serving adult / non-traditional learners (quite often parents juggling work, family, and school), we use technology to offer courses in a mix of formats — face to face, fully online, hybrid, and weekend — a course delivery approach which, though challenging to manage, greatly increases student access to our program. Just as significantly, our Sustainability Studies @ Roosevelt University blog, authored and maintained by my colleague Carl Zimring, serves triple duty as a teaching resource, marketing tool, and go-to news source about environmental issues impacting the Chicago region.

Another key feature of the SUST curriculum is its emphasis on field experiences to supplement classroom and online instruction. In my SUST 210 Sustainable Future and SUST 220 Water courses, as well as other classes, I take students out to various sites in the city and suburbs where they can talk with experts, gather and analyze empirical data, examine innovations in sustainable design and planning, and engage community members in environmental/social justice issues. Recent field trip sites have included the Chicago Center for Green Technology, the Field Museum of Natural History’s zoology collection and laboratories, the Chicago Wilderness “Wild Things” biannual environmental conference at University of Illinois at Chicago, the Chicago River, and local nature preserves and restoration sites. Many students describe these trips as powerfully transformative experiences that introduce them to places they never knew existed, educate them about social and environmental problems in a way no course reading or lecture could, and dramatically shift their perceptions about the status and potential of urban natural resources.

Closely connected to these field experiences are the service-learning activities we are currently engaged in as well as planning for the future. These run the gamut from students in our SUST 330 Biodiversity class working side-by-side with Field Museum scientists analyzing data and cataloguing specimens, to SUST 230 Food students contributing their labor to local urban farms. Service-learning is the explicit focus of SUST 350 Service & Sustainability, a course I will debut next spring as “Urban Farming, Community Development, and Social Justice.” Students here will learn about one of the most important components of sustainability, food production and consumption, in the context of urban neighborhoods and ecosystems. By doing hands-in-the-dirt labor at the Chicago Lights Urban Farm operation in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green neighborhood, they will gain direct knowledge of modern organic/urban agricultural systems as well as learn about pressing urban social justice issues such as food deserts, gentrification, pollution, environmental racism, and persistent poverty.

An Urban Nature Adventure

This past Saturday, June 11th, students in my PLS 392 Seminar in Humanities online summer course at Roosevelt University took an “urban landscapes” field trip to Chicago’s near Southwest Side, where we visited two city parklands: Canal Origins Park on South Ashland Avenue, and Stearns Quarry (aka Palmisano) Park on Halsted Street. This afternoon field trip was a chance for us to discuss the history and ecology of these locations and their relation to Chicago’s urban landscape, as well as think about the visual aesthetics of these areas, the integration of nature and culture in urban environments, the importance of parks to city communities, and how such areas can serve as windows into the rich history of Chicago.

PLS 392 students help clean up Canal Origins Park before our walking tour of this urban parkland along the Chicago River, June 2011 (photo by M. Bryson)

We began our afternoon by meeting at Canal Origins and, before starting our walking tour of this 2002 riverfront parkland, picking up several bags’ worth of litter along Ashland Avenue near the park’s entrance. (Thanks to my students for pitching in like troopers!) Canal Origins provides impressive views of the present-day juncture of the Chicago River’s South Branch and Bubbly Creek, and commemorates the origin of the I&M Canal, which was constructed from 1836 to 1848. Use of the canal peaked in 1882 (when over a million tons of cargo were transported), but construction of Sanitary & Ship Canal in the late 19th century spelled the eventual demise of the I&M, as did the advent of railroad transport in the latter third of the 1800s.

The old canal, though, has made a comeback the during the last 30 years though the establishment of the I&M Canal Heritage Corridor by Congress in 1984 by Congress, which celebrates and promotes the Canal as natural resource, wildlife corridor, recreation destination, and source of cultural memory and historical preservation. Here at this area of Chicago, the canal is filled in and is covered by Interstate 55. Visitors to the park can see it only in their imaginations.

This walkway from the entrance of Canal Origins Park leading to the river symbolizes the canal’s walls, and features artwork by Chicago high school students. Unfortunately, now the displays are heavily tagged with graffiti (photo by M. Bryson)

To the west, the South Branch soon morphs into the Sanitary and Ship Canal, begun in 1892 and completed in 1900. This canal marked the permanent reversal of the Chicago River for improved sanitation (via dilution) and navigation, and continues to be used heavily to this day for commercial transportation. North of the S&S Canal is the filled-in waterway formerly known as the West Fork of the South Branch, which flowed southwestward until it ended at the Continental Divide separating the two watersheds that meet here in the Chicago region (those of the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes). Here was located Mud Lake, between Kedzie (to the east) and Harlem (to the west), which earlier voyageurs could paddle across in wet years to travel between the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers. The Chicago Portage National Historic Site is at Harlem Avenue, north of the canal, and it commemorates the history of the portage made via Mud Lake. The Stickney Wastewater Treatment plant, the world’s largest, now sits where the fickle waters of Mud Lake once were.

After touring Canal Origins Park, we walked a few blocks south to the Ashland stop of the CTA Orange Line, where suburban students enjoyed the novelty of an L ride one stop to the north to Halsted Street, where we disembarked and walked a couple of blocks south to Stearns Quarry Park.

RU students walk the trails at Stearns Quarry Park in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood, June 2011 (photo by M. Bryson)

This extraordinary urban greenspace finished in 2009 is a cutting-edge example of city park design with nature in mind. Its meandering walking trails provide a different kind of view as one walks along, from the terraced wetlands that filter water circulated between the park’s fishing pond to its entrance fountain; to the old walls of the limestone quarry, which operated here from the late 1830s to 1970, when the site became a landfill; to the neighboring churches and houses of the Bridgeport neighborhood; to the dramatic scene of the Loop’s skyline, as viewed from the grassy-topped mound of the park. Throughout the park, native vegetation provides natural beauty, efficient water retention, and ample wildlife habitat — and many other sustainable design features make this truly a 21st century parkland.

A view of the terraced wetlands in Stearns Quarry (photo by M. Bryson)
A closer view of the one of the wetland’s terraces; red-winged blackbirds and barn swallows were in abundance here (photo by M. Bryson)
A view of the stocked fishing pond at the bottom of the quarry, as well as the its limestone walls — a most unusual sight within the city of Chicago (photo by M. Bryson)

Those seeking an off-the-beaten-path Chicago experience should consider visiting Stearns Quarry Park, which is easily accessible via the CTA (Orange Line and #8 bus) as well as car, with free street parking available next to the park. An excellent audio tour is provided by the Chicago Park District, as well.

The mound at Stearns Quarry Park affords impressive views of Chicago’s downtown skyline, only a few miles to the northeast (photo by M. Bryson)

SUST 220 Water — Fall Preview

This coming fall semester, SUST 220 Water will be offered for the first time at RU’s Schaumburg Campus. The 12-week course will run in a unique “hybrid” format combining four Saturday meetings (from 10am to 4pm) with online interaction via the course Blackboard site during the intervening weeks. This weekend/hybrid schedule not only makes the course accessible to students in the suburbs as well as the city, it provides us with the opportunity to pursue some interesting water-focused field trips to instructive sites in the region, such as the Chicago River (which just received this good news about its future water quality) and the Des Plaines River Wetland Demonstration Project (just to mention a couple of places I have taken past classes).

RU students & faculty canoe the Chicago River, May 2009 (photo by B. Hunt)

Course Profile / Registration Info

  • SUST 220 Water, section L30 (Schaumburg Campus) / Fall 2011
  • Meeting dates: Sept 10th, Oct 8th, Oct 29th, and Dec 3rd
  • Pre-req: English 101
  • Online interaction required through RU Online / Blackboard
  • Taught by: Professor Mike Bryson (mbryson@roosevelt.edu / 847.619.8735)

These books are on order at the RU bookstore:

Recommended but not required is an excellent text I used last year in the augural section of SUST 220 — The Atlas of Water, by Maggie Black and Jannet King (Univ of CA Press, 2nd ed., 2009).

If you are interested in enrolling in SUST 220 this coming fall, please contact your academic advisor, and feel free to get in touch with me if you want to learn more about the course. Enrollment is limited, so plenty of personal attention from yours truly is guaranteed. And if you’ve never tried an online course before, taking a hybrid course such as this is a great way to “test the waters,” since students will have ample opportunity to interact with me and each other face-to-face, as well as get help/support with the online component if need be.

Wetlands Research Inc. ecologist Jill Kostel talks about the restoration work underway at the Des Plaines River Wetland Project, April 2009 (photo by M. Bryson)

Like to know more? Below is a preview of the kinds of topics we’ll investigate in SUST 220.

Water, the Stuff of Life

Without water there is no life. Without clean water, human and animal life is vulnerable to catastrophic disease. How, despite population growth and industrial production, can we ensure clean supplies of water for humans and wildlife? This course evaluates water quality and water sustainability issues through the analysis of local, regional, and global issues and case studies.

Consider, for example, the connections between local and regional water issues here in the Chicago area. Chicagoans have the luxury of living on the shores of the world’s greatest repository of fresh surface water, the Great Lakes, a position we regrettably abuse by withdrawing several hundred million gallons of Lake Michigan water every day simply to flush our sewage downstream to Peoria and all points south. By contrast, most communities in northeastern Illinois that lie outside the Great Lakes basin draw their water from surface streams or underground aquifers, sources that are vulnerable to over-use and pollution. According to the 2009 report “Before the Wells Run Dry” by the Chicago-based Metropolitan Planning Council and Openlands, the long-term sustainability of fresh water in Illinois requires much better conservation of these finite resources and improved long-term water supply planning.

: : For more information on local water issues, as well as sustainability events and issues within the Chicago region, be sure to check out the Sustainability Studies @ Roosevelt University Blog, which just reported on a landmark vote on June 7, 2011, by the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District to start disinfecting wastewater returned to the Chicago River.

Canoeing highly polluted Bubbly Creek, aka the South Fork of the Chicago River's South Branch (photo by L. Bryson)

A global perspective on water availability reveals far more disturbing realities. The earth is a planet defined by an abundance of water, of which almost 98 percent is salty or brackish. Just over two percent is fresh, and more than two-thirds of that water is locked up in ice sheets, glaciers, and permafrost. Thus, only a tiny fraction of the earth’s water is available to us for drinking, bathing, flushing toilets, growing crops, etc. That finite resource is imperiled by the unsustainable trends of pollution, overuse, waste, and lack of access. In developing countries, about 90 percent of sewage is dumped into rivers without any treatment. Worldwide, polluted rivers transport toxins and excess nutrients to coastal areas, where biological “dead zones” result; from 1995 to 2007, the number of such oceanic dead zones increased by 30 percent. Depending where you look, overconsumption or scarcity is the defining problem. Citizens of the US accustomed to readily available freshwater consume about 100 gallons day per household, on average; while globally, nearly two billion people lack ready access to clean water.

Key concepts and themes addressed in SUST 220 include the science and policy of ensuring a safe water supply; water conservation strategies, particularly in urban areas; wastewater treatment and  watershed management; and wetlands ecology, restoration, and management. Students will develop a thorough understanding of the water cycle and its relation to the sustainability of water systems; understand and assess the importance of water as an environmental as well as cultural resource; learn to define, measure, and sample water quality in a variety of contexts using simple yet effective field-based water chemistry sampling techniques; and evaluate contemporary water management and policy issues, particularly those affecting the waterways of the Chicago region as well as the Great Lakes ecosystem.

Studying Biodiversity at the Field Museum

This past spring, the Sustainability Studies program offered its inaugural section of SUST 330 Biodiversity as a hands-on learning and research experience at the famed Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. One of the students in the class, Amanda Zeigler, offers these reflections on her experiences here:

SUST major Amanda Zeigler working at the Field Museum of Natural History

As a Sustainability Studies major, every course I have taken in the program has been meaningful and rewarding, but none has matched the experiential aspect of SUST 330, better known as Biodiversity. This class met once a week at the Field Museum, and was taught by Julian Kerbis Peterhans, Professor of Natural Science at Roosevelt University and an Adjunct Curator in the museum’s Zoology Department. A typical class consisted of a lecture by a member of the museum’s renowned staff, followed by internship duties. These internships included work in invertebrate fossils, vertebrate paleontology, botany, small mammals, geology, insects, botany and lichens.

Prof. Julian Kerbis Peterhans at work in his lab at the Field Museum

I had the pleasure of working in the small mammals division, along with three other students, and it was a blast. Getting the opportunity to work “back stage” at a world-class institution was informative and just plain cool. Our duties ranged from data entry, to manually cleaning various bones and skulls, cleaning, sexing and organizing specimens, and providing assistance in any way we could, to further the success of the department. Getting to spend a semester as part of the museum team was an exciting way to witness biodiversity firsthand, and learn how it relates to sustainability on a global level. I can honestly say that SUST 330 has changed the way I view the natural world around me, and has made me more conscious of the ecologically fragile world that both we, and all other living creatures, inhabit.

Through this course, I got plugged into an internship in the Botany Department of the Field Museum, where I will be working this summer. I’m looking forward to returning to the museum, and helping in any way that I can, while all the while advancing the cause of sustainability.

Congratulations to Amanda on her upcoming summer internship at the Field Museum. She is one of many talented SUST majors in our program, which began in the spring of 2010 and is now in its fourth semester this summer. Next fall, Professor Kerbis Peterhans will again offer SUST 330 Biodiversity at the Field Museum on Friday mornings. If this kind of learning experience appeals to you, check out this listing of our upcoming Fall 2011 course offerings, or contact Profs. Mike Bryson or Carl Zimring to learn more.