Advising and registration are underway for the Summer and Fall 2018 semesters at Roosevelt. Sign up now to get the classes you want! Spaces are still available in our SUST courses, and we’ve got many hands-on learning opportunities for both summer and fall.
RU students: (1) look over the Summer and Fall 2018 schedules using this Coursefinder, (2) check your remaining course requirements in Degree Works, and (3) email or call your assigned academic advisor with your planned schedule and any questions you have about your upcoming classes. Your advisor will provide you with an RU Access registration code so you can register. Click on selected titles below for detailed course previews!
Sustainability Studies courses offered in Summer 2018:
SUST 210 Sustainable Future (online, May 29 – July 25, Prof. Pickren)
SUST 360 Writing Urban Nature (Chicago, one-week intensive, May 22-26, Prof. Bryson)
SUST 390 Rooftop Garden (Chicago, May 29 – July 25, Prof. Gerberich)
Sustainability Studies courses offered in Fall 2018:
SUST 210 Sustainable Future (M, 2-4:30pm, Prof. Pickren)
SUST 210 Sustainable Future (online, 8/27-10/20, Prof. Pickren)
SUST 220 Water (T, 2-4:30pm, Staff)
SUST 230 Food (online, 10/22-12/15, Staff)
SUST 240 Waste (W, 2-4:30pm, Prof. Bryson)
SUST 310 Energy & Climate Change (online, 8/27-12/15, Staff)
SUST 320 Sprawl, Transportation, & Planning (Th, 2-4:30pm, Prof. Pickren)
SUST 330 Biodiversity (Field Museum, Th 9am-1pm, Prof. Kerbis)
SUST 350 Service & Sustainability (Eden Place Farm, T 12-3pm, Prof. Bryson)
SUST 350 Service & Sustainability (online, 8/27-12/15, Prof. Bryson)
SUST 390 Intro to GIS (M 11-11:50am & W, 11am-1pm, Prof. Pickren)
Click on the links above for detailed course previews!
March is a super busy time of the academic year, but don’t neglect getting in touch with your advisor. It’s the best time to get signed up for classes. For additional useful info, see this Advising Resources page on my faculty site as well as this Registration page on the RU website.
You’re Invited to a Celebration of Black History Month!
The Chicago area is known as a crossroads of diverse cultural groups and ideas. Less commonly known, is the biological diversity of our region. Varied ecosystems are home to native plant and animal species thriving within the Forest Preserves of Cook County.
With nearly 70,000 sprawling acres of wild and wonderful wilderness, the Forest Preserves is a regional asset which improves our quality of life, but not everyone is aware of or has the opportunity to enjoy the benefits that come from spending time outside. The Forest Preserves and its partners recognize the challenge of ensuring that everyone has access to nature and are working to better engage communities of color and grow public stewardship of nature.
Please join us to hear about both the historical and contemporary connections between environmentalism and the African American experience and how we can work together to protect nature and ensure that it is welcoming and accessible to all.
A panel discussion will follow thought-provoking presentations by Brian McCammack, professor at Lake Forest College and author of the new book Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago, Veronica Kyle, Chicago Outreach Director with Faith in Place, and Arnold Randall, General Superintendent of the Forest Preserves of Cook County. Kimberly N. Ruffin, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English at Roosevelt University, will act as moderator.
Light refreshments will be served. Hardback copies of Professor McCammack’s book Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago will be available for sale for $40 each (cash or check).
The event is free but space is limited, and registration is required. For directions and transportation information please visit www.roosevelt.edu/campuses/maps-directions
This event is co-sponsored by Roosevelt University and the Forest Preserves of Cook County.
Speaker Bios and Abstracts:
Veronica Kyle directs all of Faith in Place’s Chicago outreach programs, with a particular passion for those related to Sustainable Food and Land Use. She is responsible for the creation of the Migration & Me Program which came about as the result of the realized concern that there were not enough people of color, mainly brown and black people, who were visibly engaged in available extracurricular outdoor activities, stewardship, and Earth care.
Brian McCammack is the author of Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago (Harvard University Press, 2017) and Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Lake Forest College, where he teaches courses on environmental history and politics. Landscapes of Hope recently won the 2018 George Perkins Marsh Prize for best book in environmental history from the American Society for Environmental History. In Landscapes of Hope, he examines the deep connections to nature that black Chicagoans forged in the first half of the twentieth century. The Forest Preserves of Cook County were particularly notable in this regard because African Americans not only sought out leisure there despite racial segregation and intimidation, but the labor of young black men in the Civilian Conservation Corps also helped improve and even build areas like the Skokie Lagoons.
Arnold Randall is the General Superintendent of the Forest Preserves of Cook County. The Forest Preserves of Cook County, established over a century ago, is one of the oldest and largest urban conservation districts in the United States, managing nearly 70,000 acres of diverse habitat across Cook County and offering recreation and education programs for audiences of all ages and from all walks of life. But preserving nature today in the nation’s second largest county comes with its own particular challenges – a lack of funding, climate change, and an urban population often out of touch with nature. The Forest Preserves is actively working with partners to provide a variety of programs that link diverse and urban populations with nature, including a Conservation Corps job training program and robust camping program at five new campgrounds.
Kim Ruffin is an Associate Professor of English at Roosevelt University, author of Black on Earth: African-American Ecoliterary Traditions (U. of Georgia Press, 2010), and nature-loving Certified Forest Therapy Guide.
I’m honored to deliver a guest faculty lecture at this event today at Roosevelt University. Please come and engage in a meaningful conversation about how food insecurity is prevalent and relates to our community while you learn more about issues of hunger, sustainability and how you can help. Please register for the event here.
Sponsored by the Black Student Union and the RU Counseling Center, the Oxfam Hunger Banquet provides a chance for us to address the severity of food insecurity and starvation as it relates to our community, and will assist in fostering a community of care that will allow us to join in the fight against inequality, injustice, and oppression. Oxfam is a global organization working to end the injustice of poverty.
Here’s a cheerful autumnal thought: advising and registration are now ongoing (since Nov 2nd) for the Spring & Summer 2018 semesters here at @RooseveltU. The Sustainability Studies program is offering a wide range of courses and we’re planning two exciting semesters of learning, research, and campus outreach projects!
Undergraduate students: please look over the Spring 2018 schedule using this coursefinder, check your remaining course requirements, and email or call your assigned academic advisor with your planned schedule and any questions you have about your upcoming classes. Your advisor will help you craft your schedule and provide you with an RU Access registration code so you can register.
Sustainability Studies courses offered in Spring 2018:
* First Year Seminars are open to new full-time undergrads with 12 or fewer hours in transfer credit.
§ These 8-week accelerated online courses are open to all students and synced with the Flex-Track adult degree calendar. They may be taken back-to-back.
◊ Students may register for either ACP 250 (Grounds for Change credit) or SUST 250 (Sustainability Studies credit).
Sustainability Studies courses offered in Summer 2018:
November is a super busy time of the academic year, but be sure to make a little time to get in touch with your advisor to sign up for the classes you need! My advisees should be sure to check this Advising Resources page here on my faculty website.
Before you email me:
Check your remaining course requirements for your designated major, minor, etc. in Degree Works (or, if you started prior to Fall 2015, on your signed curriculum checksheet).
Review the online course schedule for class availability and draft a schedule that will work for you.
Make sure you don’t have any holds on your registration by checking RU Access.
Check your RU student email for important announcements from me or the university.
Include in your email:
Your name, student ID, declared major, and phone number
The classes you wish to take in the upcoming semester, including dept, course number, and title
This fall semester, students in my SUST 220 Water class have been studying our American obsession with bottled water, which comes at the expense of (among other things) proper investment in and maintenance of public drinking water infrastructure. While taxpayer-funded repairs to underground water infrastructure are expensive and politically unpopular, the bottled water industry continues to thrive and grow: the International Bottled Water Association reported industry wholesale revenues of more than $14.2 billion in 2015 alone.
Water intake crib off Chicago’s shoreline (photo: A. Perez, Chgo Tribune)
But as this important investigative report published online in the Chicago Tribune reveals, billions of gallons of treated drinking water are wasted each year, while communities pay millions of $ for water that never reaches their taps. Meanwhile, wide disparities in drinking water rates, combined with differential amounts of waste via leaks, disproportionately saddle poor and minority communities with extra costs they cannot afford.
Thus does neglected urban infrastructure meet environmental injustice in 21st century America, here along the southern rim of Lake Michigan.
Sources:
Patrick M. O’Connell, Cecilia Reyes, Ted Gregory and Angela Caputo. (25 Oct 2017). Billions Lost, Millions Wasted: Why Chicago-area Residents Pay Millions for Water that Never Reachers Their Taps. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from
http://graphics.chicagotribune.com/news/lake-michigan-drinking-water-rates/loss.html.
——. (25 Oct 2017). Same Lake, Unequal Rates: Why Our Water Rates Are Surging — and Why Black and Poor Suburbs Pay More. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from http://graphics.chicagotribune.com/news/lake-michigan-drinking-water-rates/index.html.
I’ll be attending this upcoming “Major Madness” event (share the pdf of the above poster) as an ACP 101 first year seminar faculty member and as department chair of sociology and sustainability studies. All students are welcome (and my 101 students are required) to attend this event and learn about our various undergrad majors here at Roosevelt. Free food? That’s a nice bonus!
This past Thursday, September 14th, folks from all corners of the university headed up to the 5th floor Rooftop Garden at RU’s Wabash Building in Chicago to get some fresh air, pull weeds, enrich the planting beds, harvest herbs, and sow winter rye and butterfly weed for the coming cold season. We also enjoyed some fine views of the downtown Chicago skyline, a definite benefit of working at altitude in what one volunteer called “Roosevelt’s very own Secret Garden.”
As part of Service Day, which concluded the 2nd annual American Dream Reconsidered Conference, students, alumni, faculty, staff, and administrators all pitched in on this effort — plus we were graced with a visit from President Ali, who took great delight in sowing the first seeds of our winter rye crop.
RU President Ali with SUST alum Diana Ramirez (BA ’17), sowing winter rye seeds in the WB Rooftop Garden at Service Day 2017
Special thanks to the 4 teams of volunteers who worked throughout the day; to RU Dining Services, which donated snacks for the volunteers (muffins flavored with chives from the garden and salad greens likewise harvested from these plots); and SUST alumni Diana Ramirez and Moses Viveros (both BA ’17), who worked this summer as Rooftop Gardeners here at the Chicago Campus, and who organized/led this volunteer effort. Thank you all!
Below are image versions of the two-page informational handout (see this pdf) on the importance of sustainability at Roosevelt Moses created and which we distributed on Service Day. Please share widely!
This fall 2017 semester I am teaching two linked sections of SUST 350 Service & Sustainability. The Chicago-based section (01) will meet in AUD 825 the first week of class (Tues 8/29) at 10am and subsequently off-campus at Eden Place Nature Center on Chicago’s South Side (4417 S. Stewart in the Fuller Park neighborhood). Starting week 2, we will convene at 9:30am in the WB Lobby and walk to the Red Line’s Harrison Stop. Eden Place is a half-mile walk from the 47th Street stop. Street parking is also readily available at the Nature Center for anyone traveling by car.
The online section (98) officially starts on 11 Sept 2017. However, students in that section are encouraged to participate in the 8/29 introductory session via Zoom video-conference. The session will also be recorded and archived on the course Bb site for the reference of students who have a scheduling conflict for 8/29.
Login information for the 350 Zoom session is as follows:
Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://roosevelt.zoom.us/j/903113673
Or iPhone one-tap (US Toll): +14086380968,,903113673# or +16468769923,,903113673#
This is an open letter I wrote recently to the leadership of Joliet Junior College in my hometown of Joliet, Illinois. The issue at hand is a future road extension, proposed by a mall developer, that would bisect the protected natural areas of the JJC Campus and compromise a rare type of Illinois wetland. The proposed roadway has galvanized support for the JJC Fen and associated natural areas on campus and in the Joliet community, as the College’s Board of Trustees debates how to proceed.
13 June 2017
Dear President Judy Mitchell and Board Chairman Bob Wunderlich –
I write to you today as a citizen of Joliet, a longtime environmental educator, and the son and grandson of JJC graduates. My overall message to you and your colleagues on the JJC Board of Trustees is simple: I strongly support the view of the JJC Natural Areas Committee and numerous faculty, students, alumni, and community members that the JJC Fen and associated open/natural areas must be protected from the proposed road extension by Cullinan Properties.
Since its settlement began in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Illinois has lost over 90% of its natural wetlands to agricultural and urban development. In the meantime, it has built what must be millions of miles of roads, many of which are deteriorated and no longer in use. In short: we have enough roads. We cannot afford to lose yet more high quality wetlands.
Map of proposed development and roads. The County Road extension (vertical blue line at left) is the road that would traverse the JJC protected natural areas.
As the above map illustrates, the proposed County Road Extension is neither the shortest nor the most convenient traffic route from the adjacent I-55 and I-80 interstates to Cullinan’s proposed “mixed-use lifestyle center” — yet even if it were, it would not be the best route. As the great writer, ecologist, and conservationist Aldo Leopold famously wrote in his 1949 book A Sand County Almanac, “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise” (pp. 224-5).
The importance of JJC’s high quality open spaces, biodiversity, water quality, landscape aesthetics, and overall campus sustainability far outweigh the supposed advantages of this road extension, which serves no other purpose than to direct traffic to a shopping center that could otherwise take several other perfectly viable alternative routes that are faster and more direct.
Detailed map of the JJC campus buildings, open spaces, water bodies, and wetlands
As the College mulls over the tempting overtures of Cullinan Properties and decides whether to protect this ecologically and educationally valuable ecosystem, or to allow its fragmentation and ultimate degradation, I urge you and your colleagues to take a long view of the matter. A perspective informed by environmental sustainability inspires us to ask careful questions about the road, the character of the campus, and the institutional mission — questions that relate not just to the issues of the day, but those decades into the future.
We now live in a world of rapid urbanization, climate change, and accelerating species extinction. A century from now, I highly doubt that the leaders, faculty, students, and alumni of JJC will look favorably upon a decision in 2017 to disturb and degrade its coveted and protected natural areas with a road built exclusively to service a single shopping center. In fact, given the economic vagaries that occur over a mere 20-30 years, let alone a century, it’s questionable said development will even be operating that far into the future. (The example of the Jefferson Square Mall, built in 1975 with great fanfare and now vaporized from the landscape a mere 40 years later, comes to mind, though there are many others one could cite.)
However, I do think that the future stewards of America’s first and oldest community college (founded 1901) would be rightly proud in the year 2117 that its leaders in the present day chose to maintain the ecological and aesthetic integrity of the campus ecosystem by conserving its tranquil and species-rich open space, protecting the water quality of its beautiful lake and stream, and ensuring the opportunities of generations of students to study field-based biology and ecology in the extraordinary “living classroom” provided by one of Illinois’ most rare and endangered wetlands, a fen.
JJC biology prof Andy Neill leads students on an exploration of the campus natural areas, spring 2017 (photo: Eric Ginnard, Joliet Herald-News)
As a graduate of the local public schools (JT West class of 1985), a current resident of Joliet, and now a professor of sustainability studies at Roosevelt University in Chicago, I have developed a close relationship over the past 12 years with many students and faculty at JJC. I can attest from my vantage point in the regional higher ed community that JJC’s commitment to environmental sustainability – embodied in its native woodland, prairie, and wetland ecosystems; its 1998 Natural Areas Resolution; its LEED-Platinum greenhouse facility and widely-praised arboretum; its progressive academic programming; and its campus sustainability leadership – is the envy of many colleges and universities in the Chicagoland region.
Consequently, harming the fundamental character of the campus’ rare and biodiverse ecosystems would not just diminish the quality of the College’s outdoor learning laboratories; it would also directly contradict JJC’s professed commitment to sustainability and potentially erode its hard-won reputation among its institutional peers.
As a local citizen who cares deeply about and greatly appreciates JJC’s remarkable history and unique educational mission, I ask that you heed the recommendations of the Natural Areas Committee and protect said Natural Areas, including the fen, from any present or future road development.
Yours sincerely,
Mike Bryson
Resident of Joliet, IL
Professor & Director of Sustainability Studies, Roosevelt University
As the spring semester’s regular classes end on Monday and we begin Finals Week at Roosevelt, it’s a great time to take a few minutes’ break from studying and writing papers to get registered for summer and fall classes!
Advising and registration are ongoing this week, so if you’re an @RooseveltU student, (1) look over the Summer and Fall 2017 schedules using this coursefinder, (2) check your remaining course requirements, and (3) email or call your assigned academic advisor with your planned schedule and any questions you have about your upcoming classes.
Your advisor will provide you with an RU Access registration code so you can register. Click on selected titles below for detailed course previews!
Sustainability Studies courses offered in Summer 2017:
SUST 210 Sustainable Future (online, May 30 – Aug 8, Prof. Pickren)
SUST 390 Writing Urban Nature (Chicago, one-week intensive, May 22-26, Prof. Bryson) — pre-session on May 10 from 4-6pm, WB 1215 and video-conference
Sustainability Studies courses offered in Fall 2017:
ACP 101 Our Sustainable Future (MW, 11am-12:15pm, Prof. Bryson)*
SUST 210 Sustainable Future (T, 2-4:30pm, Prof. Pickren)
SUST 210 Sustainable Future (online, Prof. Pickren)
SUST 220 Water (M, 2-4:30pm, Prof. Bryson)
SUST 230 Food (online, 9/12-12/10)
SUST 240 Waste (W, 2-4:30pm, Prof. Pickren)
SUST 310 Energy & Climate Change (online)
SUST 330 Biodiversity (Field Museum, Th 9am-1pm, Prof. Kerbis)
SUST 350 Service & Sustainability (Eden Place Farm, T 10am-1pm, Prof. Bryson)
SUST 350 Service & Sustainability (online, Prof. Bryson)
SUST 390 Environmental Crime (MW, 12:30-1:45pm, Prof. Green)
* First Year Seminars are open to new full-time undergrads with 12 or fewer hours in transfer credit.
Yes, finals week is a super busy time of the academic year — but don’t neglect getting in touch with your advisor! It’s the best time to get signed up for classes. And for additional useful info, see this Advising Resources page on Prof. Mike Bryson’s faculty website.
Hauling straw in the Eden Place Nature Center’s pickup truck during a SUST 350 Service workday on Chicago’s South Side, Fall 2014 (photo: C. Dennis)
