Category: Conferences

Attending the Sustainable City Year Program Conference at Univ of OR

Yesterday afternoon I arrived in Eugene, Oregon, for the Sustainable City Year Program conference — the 3rd such gathering held annually at the University Of Oregon. I’m on a fact-finding mission to learn how the five-year-old SCYP got started at U of O, get insights from other colleges and universities who have started their own versions of the program at their institutions, and bring back good ideas to potentially implement at Roosevelt in Chicago.

13th Street at the Univ of Oregon in Eugene OR
13th Street at the Univ of Oregon in Eugene OR

I’ve already met some fantastic and interesting people here in Eugene, where we’re comfortably appointed at the downtown Eugene Hilton, and greatly anticipating today’s workshops and discussions. This gathering is rather small — more like a workshop than a conference — so I expect to get to know almost everyone in the group fairly easily in what will be three days of vigorous discussion and socializing. There are folks here from all across the US and even abroad (the Centre Transnational de Recherche Gabon), and it’s a nice mix of academics like myself as well as city professionals and officials — since the point of this program is connecting academic service learning to urban sustainable development in particular communities. But as far as I can tell, the only other folks from IL are a group from Augustana College in Rock Island; so I’m the sole participant from the Chicago Region. (That makes me rather happy, actually.)

According to By Nicole Ginley-Hidinger writing for the SCI blog, here’s an overview of the three-day conference:

A lot of student work goes to waste. After brilliant plans, layouts, and other assignments are turned in for a final grade, the reports, essays, and drawings are crammed into the back of a closet and forgotten about. SCYP changes that by creating a partnership between the University and a nearby city. Students get the chance to pitch ideas on real-world projects while cities get a wide array of proposals that they can incorporate into the development and growth of sites and programs. 

Institutions in over ten states have now implemented SCYP, adopting the program and crafting their own innovative approach. During April 16-18, many of these schools will converge in Eugene to share ideas and teach other universities interested in developing their own program during the SCYP conference.

The three-day conference includes SCI faculty who will discuss the Oregon model, panels made up of cities Oregon has worked with, cities other universities have worked with, and panels of program coordinators and faculty who will address how the format can be adapted and utilized in different locations.  

During the 2014 SCYP Conference, scheduled for April 15-18, the University of Oregon, will share tactics to creating a successful program centered on sustainability with the help of SCYP-like programs across the nation.

“The conference is huge,” says SCI co-director, Marc Schlossberg. “The conference will give new programs all of the context, and the nut and bolts, of how a program like this is organized, how it can be effective, and how to navigate through the system of cities and universities to get something done and organized.”

The SCI staff will share everything, from inspiring moments like the support they receive from the city staff and community to the more difficult aspects, such as not being able to find a city last year.

The three-day conference includes the SCI “program how-to”, where the Oregon model is broken down into city, student, and institutional engagement. The model is explained through presentations and discussions with cities Oregon has worked with, cities other universities have worked with, and panels of program coordinators and faculty who will address how the format can be adapted and utilized in different locations.  

“There’s been schools around the country that have been interested in this type of work and to this scale,” says SCI co-director, Nico Larco. “They have an interest in developing programs that are similar. We have all these different adaptations of this model.”

SCI wants to share that their model is versatile and can be implemented at any school, no matter the size or the type.

“The basic idea is that it takes advantage of classes that are already being taught in the university and leverages them in a different way,” says Schlossberg. “It can work anywhere there’s students, courses, and faculties.”

The main goal of the conference is to help schools build programs that take advantage of the resources that they already have to help the communities around them. In SCYP programs, classes help address vital community issues, such as climate change, minority outreach, and how to handle limited fiscal resources in conjunction with a community need for fresh ideas that are from a neutral source.

“Students are demanding applied learning opportunities and to make an impact in the world now, while they are students,” says Schlossberg. “We have idea-generating machines in students, classes and faculty, so if we’re going to make any progress at all on these big vexing multi-disciplinary problems in a community, the university should be active in addressing them.”

The first day of the conference will focus on schools that are interested in developing a program of their own. The University of Oregon is the sole presenter and will teach curious schools the ins-and-outs.  

“[It’s on] everything from how you structure within the university, like the faculty, to how you structure things within the city, like contracts, the schedule throughout the year, and the breath and depth of the projects” says Larco.

The second day is focused both on schools who already have programs and schools who want to build them. The discussions will center on engaging faculty, students, budgeting issues, funding issues and different ways to work with cities.

It will feature schools who have adopted the program and implemented it in unique and innovative ways, from the Oregon model where all thirty classes focus on one community to other campuses who engage with several communities at one time.

The third day is focused on developing a national network of SCYP programs and how universities can go after funding and develop together.

“We are interested in changing the way higher education is delivered in this country,” says Schlossberg. “The more people that are engaged in that endeavor, the stronger the message is.”

This is the third year the University of Oregon will put on the SCYP conference. The 2014 SCYP conference strives to share how to create an effective program while building a peer to peer network of institutions who are ready to improve the higher education model.

Introducing Sandra Steingraber at the Great Lakes Bioneers Conference

Back on November 1st, the opening day of the Great Lakes Bioneers environmental sustainability conference on “Community Resilience” hosted by Roosevelt, I had the honor of introducing Dr. Sandra Steingraber, that evening’s keynote speaker. Here’s the text of my introductory comments.

Connection. It’s a basic tenet of ecology as well of human relations. Nothing and no-one are truly disconnected. The water cycle flows through the ground, the ocean, the air . . . and each of us. We throw away our trash and flush our bodily wastes; but ecology teaches us there is no “away.” That is a falsely comforting myth of our disposable and fossil-fueled society, in which pollution and toxicity — in our lakes and streams, in our food, even in human breast milk — are accepted as normal.

Normal? That is where I first met our distinguished keynote speaker this evening, Dr. Sandra Steingraber, back in the late 1980s. More precisely, I mean the campus of Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, where I had gone for a poetry reading upon the recommendation of my creative writing professor at nearby Illinois Wesleyan, Jim McGowan. He had rightly admonished me for being a lazy writer, too content with a quick semi-catchy draft of a poem. “Go hear my former student, Sandy Steingraber,” he said. “Then you’ll understand the difference between just dashing something off and really working at your craft.” Boy, he was right.

Science. At the time of being blown away by Steingraber’s poetry in Normal, I didn’t know she was a scientist, too. Like me, only a few years earlier, she had studied biology and English at Illinois Wesleyan; then she had gone on to get a masters in creative writing and a PhD in ecology. I remember my brother David attending Columbia College here in Chicago as a theater major and telling me, “I’m taking this amazing class on evolution. It’s taught by a really cool professor, Sandra Steingraber. Do you know her?” I thought, wow — anyone who can get young hipster actors to dig Charles Darwin has to be really good.

That far from eloquent assessment turns out to be uncannily accurate and widely shared. Since the original publication of her acclaimed book, Living Downstream, in 1997, Dr. Steingraber has become an award-winning author of several subsequent books; an influential environmental journalist for Orion, the Huffington Post, and other publications; a sought-after speaker and scientific consultant; an internationally recognized authority on the links between cancer and the chemical pollution of our environment; and a passionate yet scientifically rigorous critic of the environmentally devastating gas and oil extraction process called fracking.

It’s a distinct honor and privilege to have Sandra Steingraber speak at this year’s Great Lakes Bioneers conference at my longtime academic home, Roosevelt University. Her writing and life’s work — as an environmental activist, an artist, and a parent — truly embodies the spirit of this gathering and the ethos of sustainability. As Steingraber argues in Living Downstream and elsewhere, as Rachel Carson knew more than fifty years ago as she wrote the complacency-shattering book Silent Spring, it is not enough to know something scientifically, or to express that knowledge poetically. We must also act — to change policy for the better, to fight for environmental justice in all communities, and to become true stewards rather than reckless exploiters of nature.

Please join me in welcoming Dr. Sandra Steingraber.

Presenting at SLSA 2013: Water & the Postnatural City

UND in fallYesterday I arrived at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana — my first visit to this storied campus — to participate in the annual meeting of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. This year the conference theme is “Postnatural.”

My talk yesterday afternoon was part of a panel entitled “Water and the City,” and included stimulating presentations by Christine Skolnik of DePaul University (“Imagined Eco-Futures” Restoring the Current” [of the LA River]) and Peter Hobbs of York University in Toronto (“What Does Lead Do? Toxic Entanglements, Exposures, and Cosmo-Chemo-Politics”).

Below is the introduction to my talk, which was an extemporaneous exposition of this slideshow (pdf, 10MB file).

Water and the Postnatural City: Reversals, Invasions, and Prospects for Sustainability

It is hard to think of a natural substance more vital to life than water. Yet, “the natural” is difficult to locate amidst the bewildering complex of intakes, filters, screens, pumps, chemical treatment chambers, distribution mains, pipes of all sizes, gutters, storm drains, sinks, sewers, settling tanks, combined sewage overflows, canals, locks, oxygenating waterfalls, electric fish barriers, and myriad other technological accouterments that allow us to convey, control, imbibe, and dispense with freshwater/wastewater in our cities and suburbs.

One of the tunnels within the Deep Tunnel / TARP system (photo: Chicago Tribune)
One of the tunnels within the Deep Tunnel / TARP system (photo: Chicago Tribune)

Despite the utter domination of water’s movement by what environmental engineers call the “hard path” of water resource management, however, the capacity of even highly degraded urban river corridors to support surprising levels of biodiversity — not to mention the tendency of urbanized landscapes to flood — demonstrates that Nature in the form of wild (read: violent) water frequently reasserts its power over us.

This presentation takes a deep dive into the water resources and management systems of the Chicago Region to ask:

  • What does it mean for the aptly named Chicago Area Waterway System to be “postnatural,” and why has it been such for so many decades?
  • How does a dredged, straightened, polluted, reversed, flushed, rerouted, industrialized, and biologically invaded since the mid-19th century urban river become a locus of urban sustainability and ecological restoration in the 21st century?
  • In what ways are Chicago’s rivers and canals connected to its other vital water resources and systems: fresh water supply (intake) and wastewater (outflow)?
  • Finally, what might the salient tropes of various Water and the City narratives teach us about our capacity to explore and apprehend an urbanized but still wild (read: unpredictable) nature in a postnatural age?

Teaching Sustainability 101

Last fall I attended the annual AASHE conference/expo, held in Los Angeles, and it was a great time. I contributed to a faculty roundtable presentation on teaching introductory sustainability courses to undergraduates. Our session was really productive, substance-wise, and extremely well-attended; so the panelists, led by chair Prof. Tom Schrand of Philadelphia University, revised the edited transcript of our conversation into a journal article.

Sustainability journal cover 2013AugI’m not able to attend 2013’s AASHE conference in Nashville, unfortunately. But it’s good to see that our article has appeared this month in the August 2013 issue of Sustainability: The Journal of Record, one of the leading journal publications for sustainability in higher education.

Read the article here in pdf format: “Teaching Sustainability 101: How Do We Structure an Introductory Course?” Note that the SUST student website/blog Schaumburg’s Sustainable Future gets a mention in both the text and the article’s bibliography. Quite likely I’ll be re-reading it as I work on my SUST 210 Sustainable Future syllabus for this Fall 2013 semester at Roosevelt!

Winter Symposium on Sustainability at Augustana College

Today I head west to the city of Rock Island, which hugs the Mississippi River in northwestern Illinois (right across the water from Davenport, Iowa). I’ve been invited to give a talk on urban sustainability issues in Chicago at Augustana College’s annual Winter Symposium, which this year is focused on sustainability and environmental issues. Since I can never resist a chance to talk about urban waterways, my talk is entitled “Paddling the Chicago River: A Good Way to Think about Science, Art, Ethics, and the Sustainability of Cities.”

Heading downstream on the Upper North Branch, about a half-mile from our destination in the Linné Woods forest preserve in Morton Grove, IL (M. Bryson)
Heading downstream on the Upper North Branch, about a half-mile north of Linné Woods forest preserve in Morton Grove, IL, north of Chicago, Oct. 2012 (M. Bryson)

The degraded yet undeniably charismatic Chicago River is a mighty fine place to contemplate the tangled relationships among water quality, land use, and sustainability within cities and suburbs. As a site for exploring urban nature, an object of analysis in the scientific assessment of water quality and urban ecology, and a case-study in landscape aesthetics, the Chicago river provides students and citizens myriad opportunities to develop a sense of place. More generally, experiencing urban rivers — and understanding their function within the complex watersheds of metropolitan regions — can foster not just ecological literacy about urban ecosystems but also ethical engagement with one’s community.

Here’s a pdf version of my presentation.

At the AASHE 2012 Conference in LA

Today and tomorrow I’m attending the annual Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) conference, held this year in Los Angeles. This is the biggest and most diverse gathering of its kind in the US (if not the world) and brings together faculty from all academic disciplines, graduate and undergraduate students, sustainability coordinators, campus operations administrators, and others to explore every conceivable aspect of sustainability in our colleges and universities.

Given that AASHE sprung into being as recently as 2006, the size and diversity of this annual gathering and the remarkable resources of the association in general are testament to the growing significance of sustainability in higher education’s curricular innovations and physical operations.

This afternoon, Oct. 15th, I’m participating in a roundtable session entitled Teaching Sustainability 101: How Do We Structure An Introductory Course? Chaired by Prof. Tom Schrand of Philadelphia University, the session focuses on the pedagogy and learning objectives of introductory sustainability courses. Fellow participants include:

Lindy Biggs (Auburn University)
Lisa Benton-Short (George Washington University)
Geoffrey Habron (Michigan State University)

Our panel discussion, according to our submitted abstract, “brings together five university instructors who have been teaching some version of ‘Intro to Sustainability’ for at least several years. The panelists will share and compare their different approaches to sustainability as an academic discipline, as a practice, and as a set of values. What concepts and ideas are essential, what assignments and activities are effective, what readings and audiovisual materials are engaging, and what outcomes can be achieved? The panel members represent different disciplines, different types of institutions, and different curricular settings. They assess what has worked in their different contexts and what they share in common when they introduce students to education about and for sustainability.”

Urban Farms in Silicon Valley

The key litmus test of a good professional conference for me is this: are there cool field trips planned? If the answer is yes, the gathering is likely to be an enjoyable and fruitful occasion. That was definitely the case at the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences conference this past weekend in California, where I went on a bus and walking tour of two urban farms in the Silicon Valley: Full Circle Farm in Sunnydale (near Santa Clara), and Veggielution Community Farm in San José. Both are quite large operations by urban farm standards, but like many such sites are relatively young in age and still under development.

Full Circle Farm is intriguing for a number of reasons. At ten acres, the farmstead is huge — walking the grounds you have an expansive view of the sky and feel the freedom of being in a large swath of open land — something rather different from most small gardens and farms that are hemmed in with the urban built environment.

The farm is located on grounds owned by the local school district: formerly a football field, the land now belongs to an adjacent middle school, which leases the property to the Full Circle Farm non-profit organization in exchange for free educational programming for the school district. (The precise and somewhat complex terms of the lease are now up for renegotiation, something fairly typical for urban farm operations.) The farm is incredibly diverse: it has plot after plot of veggies and herbs, of course, but also free-roaming chickens, a children’s garden, a huge community garden area run by volunteers, a large outdoor theater (!), and more.

Full Circle Farm, Sunnyvale CA (from their website)

One fascinating thing that happened while we were there was an up-close wildlife encounter: a juvenile red-tailed hawk flew around and perched near us for several minutes. It was trying to hunt some recently fledged killdeer in a plowed field, something the parent killdeer weren’t too pleased about; while unsuccessful in her hunt, perhaps due to the fussing of the parent killdeer, the hawk taught us an important urban ecology lesson: a farm of this scale, and probably one considerably smaller, can provide critical habitat for wildlife in the city and suburban landscape, and thus contribute to the conservation of biodiversity (in addition to all the other incredible functions of these spaces).

The other farmstead we visited was in San José, in the midst of a largely Hispanic community of limited means and with great need of access to fresh, healthy food. Hence the mission of Veggielution Community Farm, which aims to “build community[,] . . . embrace diversity[,] . . . empower youth[, and]  . . . create a sustainable food system.” At two acres under cultivation, this farm started back in 2008 as a humble community garden plot within an existing city parkland — the Emma Prusch Farm Park — that itself was donated to San José by a forward-thinking woman who decided that agricultural land preservation in the fast-urbanizing Silicon Valley was more important than selling her property to developers. Current plans call for significantly expanding the farm’s operation within several more acres they have leased from the park district.

Veggielution Community Farm, San Jose CA (from their website)

An intriguing features of Veggielution Community Farm is its location: right along the soaring and rather imposing structure of a long, curving highway entrance ramp — a landscape feature that is highlighted in their official logo. But looking in the other direction with the roar of the highway at your back, you can see mountains in the not-too-far distance along the suburban horizon (as shown at left). To a native Midwesterner, this was a visually dramatic location to observe the typical on-the-ground activities of an urban farm.

My big takeaway from visiting these urban farms in Silicon Valley, a place simultaneously of great wealth and of considerable need among the less-fortunate population? Large-scale farms such as these are impressive for a number of reasons, and incredible diverse and multifaceted in their outreach to and impact upon the community. They also, like most urban farms, plunge forward despite heavy reliance upon volunteer labor (and even volunteer management, to some degree), regular turnover among staff (such as the 1-2 year rotations by AmeriCorps workers, who are an amazing and vital human resource here), and razor-thin budget margins. They have the benefit of a year-round growing season, yes, but must import all of their water because the region is so dry. And they combine the production of good food with exuberant cultural activities and positive and progressive community development. They are thus places of magic and inspiration — and hope for a more sustainable food production system in suburban ecosystems.

Here in the Midwest, the heart of the heartland, we’re making strides with urban farming — especially in big cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, and Detroit. But the smaller cities and suburbs have a lot of catching up to do. That’s OK, but we should get going soon. For while our growing season here in Illinois is shorter than that of CA, we’ve got good land to work and/or reclaim — and abundant precipitation to feed our crops (this dry spring and early summer excepted). And as for people in need of work, inspiration, education, and healthy food? Yeah, we’ve got them in abundance.

The Ethics of Place in Urban Areas

This weekend I’m at Santa Clara University in California’s Silicon Valley at one of my favorite professional conferences: the annual gathering of the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences. Like the literature and environmental folks I hang out with at ASLE‘s biannual conferences, these folks in AESS are my professional tribe: educators, students, writers, scientists, and activists working on every conceivable kind of issue or project related to environmental education and sustainability. (In fact, I’m struck by how pervasive a theme sustainability has become at the AESS conferences, despite the fact that it is not explicitly a part of the organization’s name or identity).

Santa Clara University

This morning I’m part of a presentation panel entitled “Ethics of Place in Urban Areas,” which was organized by my colleague and friend Gavin Van Horn of the Center for Humans and Nature in Chicago. Here he describes the context, themes, and over-arching issues our panel addresses:

Place has become a topic of increasing scholarly attention and research. Place is particularly relevant to environmental studies and environmental sciences, because place provides a spatial anchor of memory and meaning in which care for the natural world is fostered. Most work in moral philosophy and Western ethics is abstract in the sense that it seeks to discover standards of right and wrong that are universally valid and applicable. Paradoxically, moral psychology tells us that ethical thinking and our sense of value are rooted in the lived experience in a specific place, with specific natural and social characteristics, landscapes, and cultures. The session panelists submit that an ethics of place which roots our ethical obligations more concretely and locally is essential for a more robust environmental future. We examine the ways in which ethics might be re-envisioned to include a respect for complexity and multiplicity of place in an urban context.

Our presentations integrate urban agriculture and alternative economies, landscape aesthetics, urban water quality, environmental education, and the ethics of care to discuss the ways in which place can inform an ecological ethic that is democratic and participatory in its orientation. Our approach is rooted in the disciplines of geography, political science and bioethics, religious studies and ethics, urban ecology, and sustainability studies. While addressing conceptual and ideological questions about the ethics of place, we profile on-the-ground case studies and relevant research from each panelist’s community-based work. Our goal is to engage audience members in a dialogue about how scholars and citizens can better understand how to cultivate respect for and engagement with nature in metropolitan areas – spaces frequently misunderstood as un-conducive to an ethics of place.


Photo by Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee (2010)

My presentation, “Exploring the Chicago River: Ethics, Sustainability, and a Sense of Place” (view pdf of slideshow) looks at this waterway/ecosystem as one key manifestation of urban nature in Chicago. I explore how scientific and artistic engagement with the river can contribute to one’s sense of not just the river’s history, ecology, and identity, but also that of Chicago in particular and watersheds more generally. As my abstract notes,

The degraded yet undeniably charismatic urban waterway, the Chicago River, is a mighty fine place to contemplate the tangled relationships among water quality, land use, and sustainability within cities and suburbs. As a site for exploring urban nature, an object of analysis in the scientific assessment of water quality and urban ecology, and a case-study in landscape aesthetics, the Chicago river provides students and citizens myriad opportunities to develop a sense of place. More generally, experiencing urban rivers — and understanding their function within the complex watersheds of metropolitan regions — can foster not just ecological literacy about urban ecosystems but also ethical engagement with one’s community.

You can also view a Powerpoint slideshow of my presentation (here with annotations) that features several photographs of the river by Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee, who collaborated with me on a Mindful Metropolis cover story about the Chicago River back in 2010. Read more about rivers here on this blog, as well.

City Creatures Writer’s/Artist’s Retreat at the Indiana Dunes (Midstream Reflections)

There are many times when I give thanks for having the wonderful job of being a professor — and today is one such day. I’m writing this update from a motel room in Chesterton, Indiana, where I’m attending a writer’s/artist’s conference (with my two children in tow) sponsored by the Center for Humans and Nature, an environmental humanities organization which is leading the development of a book project / art exhibit scheduled for 2014 entitled City Creatures.

As a contributing author to this project, I’m lucky enough to be a part of this retreat to the amazing and inspiring landscape of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, one of the most ecologically significant places in the Midwest and the closest national parkland to Chicago. Our goal is to think of ways in which humans relate to, connect with, and/or learn from non-human animals in the Chicago metro region — precisely the kind of “urban nature” questions my students and I have been grappling with the first two weeks of our summer humanities seminar on “Representations of the Urban Landscape.” Talk about a happy coincidence of timing!

Yesterday afternoon, before taking a leisurely hike in the Calumet River marshlands of the Dunes, I heard a remarkable presentation by Ron Engel, a theologian, social activist, writer, and conservationist who lives in the Dunes community of Beverly Shores with his wife, Joan — herself a gifted writer and fellow conservationist. For four decades, Ron and Joan have dedicated themselves to protecting the Dunes from further industrial/commercial encroachment, advocated for their continued conservation and restoration, and documented their historical and cultural significance to the region. Ron is the author of the well-received book, Sacred Sands: The Struggle for Community in the Indiana Dunes (1983), which is sadly out of print but available at local libraries.

Today we gather again for a morning of discussion, brainstorming, and essay planning — the goal of which is to create a book and accompanying art exhibit that explores our human relationships with and connections to the non-human animals we encounter in a variety of urban settings within the Chicago Region: backyards, parklands, industrial sites, rivers and lake shoreline, etc. Then we’ll take another hike through the rich Dunes landscape to learn more about the complex cultural and natural history of this place — and how they are intricately intertwined.

It’s good to meet people this way — interacting, conversing, exploring . . . all with a common goal in mind. Yes, we could’ve planned and brainstormed this project solely by email and conference call. But I’m glad the project’s organizers, Gavin Van Horn and David Aftandilian, set up this retreat — a rare opportunity for many of us to take time out from our busy lives and collaborate face to face in a deep and meaningful way.

Next week — pictures from the retreat!

Student Initiatives in Sustainable Agriculture Conference (March 31-April 1)

Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, will host a student-focused conference on sustainable agriculture on March 31 and April 1, 2012. One of the keynote speakers is John Ikerd, a noted author and longtime advocate of sustainable farming; I’ve assigned some of his writings in my SUST and PLS classes.

See this post on the Schaumburg’s Sustainable Future blog for more details on the conference and how to register. It’s cheap ($30) and includes food and lodging. Very cool stuff is on the conference slate for people interested in community/college gardens and farms, sustainable agriculture, etc.