Category: Faculty

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?

“Artifacts & Illuminations” Wins 2012 Nebraska Book Award

In the spring of 2012, my essay “Unearthing Urban Nature,” an analysis of scientist-writer Loren Eiseley’s investigations and representations of urban and suburban landscapes, was published in the critical anthology Artifacts and Illuminations: Critical Essays on Loren Eiseley, edited by Tom Lynch and Susan Maher (University of Nebraska Press).

Artifacts and Illuminations coverI just received word that the collection has won the Nebraska Book Award for best anthology in 2012, which is a testament to the hard work of the book’s editors as well as the high production quality by UNP. You can read the book’s Table of Contents and Editors’ Introduction (pdf), a pre-publication pdf of my chapter, as well as reviews in Western American Literature (Andrew Angyal, 2013) and Prairie Fire (Christine Pappas, 2013).

About Artifacts & Illuminations

Loren Eiseley (1907–77) is one of the most important American nature writers of the twentieth century and an admired practitioner of creative nonfiction. A native of Lincoln, Nebraska, Eiseley was a professor of anthropology and a prolific writer and poet who worked to bring an understanding of science to the general public, incorporating religion, philosophy, and science into his explorations of the human mind and the passage of time.

As a writer who bridged the sciences and the humanities, Eiseley is a challenge for scholars locked into rigid disciplinary boundaries. Artifacts and Illuminations, the first full-length collection of critical essays on the writing of Eiseley, situates his work in the genres of creative nonfiction and nature writing. The contributing scholars apply a variety of critical approaches, including ecocriticism and place-oriented studies ranging across prairie, urban, and international contexts. Contributors explore such diverse topics as Eiseley’s use of anthropomorphism and Jungian concepts and examine how his work was informed by synecdoche. Long overdue, this collection demonstrates Eiseley’s continuing relevance as both a skilled literary craftsman and a profound thinker about the human place in the natural world. (from the book’s website)

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!

CIMBY Students Visit RU Campus and Tour Stearns Quarry Park

Last month I had the great fortune of playing host at Roosevelt’s Chicago Campus to a terrific group of Chicago Public High School kids from the far South Side — the Calumet region, specifically — for a sustainability-themed tour of the university and a little bit of urban nature field-tripping.

CIMBY students tour the Wabash residence hall at RU; this is the student lounge on the 31st floor!
CIMBY students tour the Wabash residence hall at RU; this is the student lounge on the 31st floor!

These students are leaders within the noted Calumet Is My Back Yard environmental education program, in which dozens of high school teachers and hundreds of students participate in several ecological/community restoration projects on Chicago’s Far South Side — and in the process, learn about urban ecology, community development, and the history of this industrialized yet still biodiverse landscape. The 12-year-old program is a collaboration between the Field Museum of Natural History and Chicago Public Schools.

Our day started by meeting up at RU’s Wabash Building, then heading up to an 11th floor classroom that features spectacular views of the city’s lakefront. I conducted a simulated college class session on the topic, “Sustainability and Urban Nature: An Introduction to Roosevelt University and Exploration of the Chicago River” (pdf). There was no trouble getting discussion going with this group! We had such a good give-and-take during my talk that I could cover only half of my slides.

RU's fitness center, looking out on Wabash Ave in downtown Chicago
RU’s fitness center, looking out on Wabash Ave in downtown Chicago

After this session, we enjoyed a student-led tour of the Wabash Building residence hall, fitness center, and other highlights — with a short stop at the Tutoring / Student Support center in the historic Auditorium Building. Then, a tasty lunch at the 2nd floor Dining Center, where I got to visit with several of the students as we munched our hot dish.

To cap off our day, we headed outside with work gloves and trash bags to hop the L and ride the Orange Line to Stearns Quarry, aka Palmisano Park — a relatively new urban parkland on the near SW Side in the Bridgeport neighborhood. A former limestone quarry until the 1970s, and then a landfill until the 2000s, Stearns Quarry Park is now a model of sustainable parkland development, and a great place to talk about land use, the relation between land and water, urban biodiversity, and the history of Chicago.

Looking out at the wetland at Stearns Quarry; CIMBY coordinator Samantha Mattone talks about the restored wetland and fishing pond here on the boardwalk.
Looking out at the wetland at Stearns Quarry; CIMBY coordinator Samantha Mattone talks about the restored wetland and fishing pond here on the boardwalk.

We hiked the park’s extensive trails, chatted and laughed, and collected litter and recycling along the way. I don’t know how many readers have had a chance to do that with boisterous and fun-loving high schoolers, but I can tell you that I thoroughly enjoyed it! The highlight of our visit was when we took in the view at the meadow on the hilltop, which offers great views of the downtown skyline as well as the Fisk Generating Station — a recently shuttered coal-fired power plant which for many decades spewed pollution here on the SW Side until environmental activists succeeded in pressuring Midwest Generation to shut it down.

Two students talk about their environmental justice work here on Chicago's South Side.
Two students talk about their environmental justice work here on Chicago’s South Side.

Here, in the shadow of the Fisk plant, two CIMBY students told of the community service work they’ve been doing with key grassroots environmental organizations — the Southeast Environmental Task Force, which is based in Calumet; and the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, here on the SW Side. These inner-city teens were passionate, articulate, and highly informed — and the impact of what they had to say in just a few minutes didn’t just complement my previous lecture about sustainability and social justice . . . it totally blew it away.

You can check out more photos of our day together here in this online album.

Our group atop the hill at Stearns Quarry Park, with the Fisk Power Plant in the background.
Our group atop the hill at Stearns Quarry Park, with the Fisk Power Plant in the background.

Snow on the Ground, Water on the Mind

Last Saturday, Feb. 23, my SUST 220 Water students (both past and present) joined me at a wonderful annual event here in the Windy City: the Chicago River Student Congress, convened by the environmental conservation organization Friends of the Chicago River. This 2013 celebration of river conservation and environmental education was held at Marie Curie Metro High School on Chicago’s SW Side, and featured yours truly as the “special guest speaker,” a designation that made me proud and humble at the same time, for I still consider myself a student of rather than an expert about the Chicago River.

The Chicago River: Transformed, Exploited, and Abused — but Still Alive
Chicago River Student Congress Special Guest Presentation (pdf version)

SUST majors Ron Taylor, Angi Cornelius, and Ken Schmidt at the 2013 Congress
SUST majors Ron Taylor, Angi Cornelius, and Ken Schmidt at the 2013 Congress

Last year, I co-presented a workshop session on Water and Sustainability with then-SUST major (and now alum) Amanda Zeigler (BPS ’12); you can view a pdf of our slideshow from that 2012 workshop. This successful experience led me to recruit three students from my Fall 2012 Water class at Roosevelt to be fellow participants in this year’s Congress. The fact that my Fall and Spring Water classes this academic year are partnering with Friends of the Chicago River on a “Blueways to Green” environmental education grant made that prospect irresistible.

Former canoeing partners and classmates, Ron Taylor and Ken Schmidt — whose collective nickname “Ebony and Ivory” demonstrates the awesome power of the river to bring together people of all races, creeds, and colors — agreed to co-present a workshop with me entitled “Sustainability and the Chicago River: from Urbanization to Pollution to Restoration,” which we did twice during the course of the Congress (here’s the pdf of our slideshow (8MB file). Ron and Ken skillfully shifted back and forth in their presentation, and were able to elicit lots of dialogue from their audience member, mainly students from CPS high schools who have done environmental conservation and/or science projects on the river.

Meanwhile, roaming the halls of the Congress was fellow SUST major Angi Cornelius, another student from my Fall 2012 Water class, who indulged her theatrical side by dressing up as one of six “Super Villians” who represented ecological/social threats to the biodiversity and water quality of urban rivers. Angi’s character was “Z. Mussel” (the zebra mussel, naturally), an invasive bivalve species that she refashioned into the persona of a Russian femme fatale. Along with her fellow Villians, Angi worked the crowd throughout the morning by engaging students in small group conversations about the impact of invasive species on rivers, streams, and the Great Lakes ecosystem.

Students from my current section of SUST 220 Water met at the Congress for our 4th week of class and our 2nd field session of the semester. The Congress is a unique learning opportunity, as it features a wide variety of speakers and workshops — some by high school teachers and students; some by college profs and students; and a few by conservationists, environmental professionals, etc. — that provide attendees with science-based knowledge about the river’s history, ecology, present status, and future prospects.

For photos of the Congress, check out my annotated slideshow as well as this online album from the Friends of the Chicago River’s Facebook page.

Hiking the trail at Portage Woods; Joliet and Marquette were here about 340 years ago
Hiking the trail at Portage Woods; Joliet and Marquette were here about 340 years ago

Following the Congress and a quick sack lunch at the high school, during which we bade farewell to Ron, Ken, and Angi, my 220 scholars and I carpooled to a nearby Cook County Forest Preserve location that has profound historical and geographic significance to the city of Chicago, the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers, and two of the great North American watersheds (those of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River). This is the Chicago Portage National Historic Site at 4800 S. Harlem Ave. in Lyons, one of only two National Historic Sites in the entire State of Illinois.

If the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District’s Stickney wastewater treatment plant just to the east is a supreme example of how we use technology and the built environment to control water as a resource (and deal with the problem of wastewater), the Chicago Portage is polar opposite kind of experience. Here we see the landscape much as it appeared to the 17th century explorers Louis Joliet and Pierre Marquette, when they crossed Mud Lake (now occupied by the Stickney WTP) between the Des Plaines and Chicago Rivers, thus staking out a trade route between the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico.

Picking up trash from the shoreline of the Chicago River's South Turning Basin, at the mouth of Bubbly Creek
Picking up trash from the shoreline of the Chicago River’s South Turning Basin, at the mouth of Bubbly Creek

Our last stop of the day was further east on Interstate 55, where we exited north on Ashland Avenue and stopped at Canal Origins Park. This riverside parkland (and fishing spot) provides impressive views of the present-day juncture of the Chicago River’s South Branch and Bubbly Creek, and commemorates the origin of the historic I&M Canal, which was constructed from 1836 to 1848 and fulfilled Joliet’s dream of connecting the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River system. Here, then, is a superb spot to talk about the history, ecology, and geography of the creeks and rivers which run through the city, as well as the industrial and wastewater treatment processes that have polluted these waters over the years.

At Canal Origins, we engaged in some good old-fashioned service learning, Roosevelt-style, by donning work gloves and picking up any litter/recyclables we came across. A recent blanket of snow concealed most of the litter in the upper part of the park, along the busy street. But down at the river line at the South Turning basin, where Bubbly Creek enters into the South Branch, lots of garbage and urban detritus presented itself for our labors.

Conor and Chris drag a heavy tire up the steep slope from the river's shoreline
Conor and Chris drag a heavy tire up the steep slope from the river’s shoreline

My students hurled themselves into this effort with purpose and enthusiasm, not the least impressive for coming at the end of a rather long day to that point. All manner of intriguing (and sometime revolting) artifacts were retrieved, from beer cans to paper cups to plastic bags to old clothes and towels to large pieces of ships’ rope to automobile tires to tampons to (most bizarre) fur-covered rat traps with wheels.

Here’s an annotated slideshow of photos from the day of our visit to Chicago Portage and Canal Origins.

After heroically hauling a heavy, ice-filled tire out of the river and up a steep slope, using one of the old ships’ ropes as a winch line, Conor and Chris suggested that the SUST program at RU should adopt the Canal Origins Shoreline as a parkland, and clean up litter there on a regular basis.

Doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me.

The day's most bizarre find: a furry rat trap, on wheels? We're not sure.
The day’s most bizarre find: a furry rat trap, on wheels? We’re not sure.

 

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.”

Position Available: Assistant Professor of Sustainability Studies at RU

Roosevelt University is seeking an Assistant Professor in Sustainability Studies for a tenure-track position beginning 15 August 2013. Applicants should have the ability to teach multiple courses in the Sustainability Studies (SUST) undergraduate curriculum as well as interdisciplinary social and/or natural science seminars to adult learners in the Professional and Liberal Studies (PLS) program. Teaching load is six courses per year. Courses are offered at Roosevelt’s Chicago and Schaumburg campuses as well as online.

Duties: (1) Teaching courses within the SUST major as well as adult general education seminars with the PLS program. (2) Assisting with SUST program development through curriculum enhancement and assessment, service learning project development, community outreach, and online social media writing. (3) Maintaining an active scholarly research program within one’s academic discipline and/or the emerging field of sustainability studies. (4) Advising undergraduate students. (5) Performing departmental, college, university, and professional service.

Roosevelt’s Sustainability Studies program, founded in 2010, is the first of its kind in the Chicago region. Housed within the Evelyn T. Stone College of Professional Studies, it maintains a close relationship with the College’s PLS program, a longstanding leader in educating returning adult students. Roosevelt University was founded in 1945 on the principle that higher education should be available to all academically qualified students. Today, Roosevelt is the fourth most ethnically diverse college in the Midwest (U.S. News and World Report, 2011) and a national leader in preparing students to assume meaningful, purposeful roles in the global community.

Minimum Qualifications: PhD or terminal degree in a sustainability-related discipline (or interdisciplinary field) within the natural or social sciences. Active scholarly research program and the ability to apply research to the classroom and communicate findings to a general audience. Evidence of excellence and versatility in teaching. Ability to teach with technology and in multiple formats (such as hybrid and online courses). Understanding of interdisciplinary teaching and curriculum development.

Highly Desirable Criteria: Expertise in multiple areas within sustainability, especially urban agriculture, energy and climate change, and/or waste and recycling. Experience in service learning initiatives and/or academic program development. Experience with both adult and traditional-age students. Enthusiasm for teaching general education seminars as well as more specialized SUST courses. Experience teaching critical thinking, research, and writing.

To Apply: Visit the Roosevelt HR webpage and click on “Full Time Faculty” to find the SUST Assistant Professor listing. Applicants should provide a letter of interest outlining their teaching experience, research program, and suitability for the position; an up-to-date curriculum vitae; and a list of three to five professional references.

For More Information: Consult the SUST program website for details on the  curriculum, faculty, and degree options for students. Applicants may address questions to the search committee chair and SUST program director, Professor Michael Bryson (mbryson@roosevelt.edu).

Application deadline is 1 December 2012. Position begins on 15 August 2013.

Talkin’ Biodiversity at the Field Museum

Last week I had the privilege of attending a two-day meeting at the Field Museum’s Biodiversity Synthesis Center (BioSynC) hosted by museum botanist and early land plants collections manager Matt von Konrat. I joined faculty and students from several Chicago colleges and universities to discuss how to develop college curriculum for the taxonomic study of the liverwort genus, Frullania, one of many under-studied yet incredibly important bryophytes that are the oldest type of land plants and key bio-indicators of environmental degradation and climate change.

Faculty and students convene at the Aug 29 and 30 biodiversity research and curriculum workshop held in the FMNH’s BioSynC center
(photo: K. Lugo)

With the rise of molecular genetics and related disciplines since the 1950s, biology as a whole has seen a massive shift away from the traditional natural history-based disciplines of comparative anatomy and taxonomy, pursuits rooted in the 18th- and 19th-century study of nature. Yet the imperative to catalog and assess the world’s remaining biodiversity in our current age of mass extinction, a process largely driven by human action, means that current taxonomists working in museum collections and the field have a critical task ahead of them. The NSF-funded Connecting Biodiversity Research with Curriculum project spearheaded by the Field Museum’s Konrat and his colleagues is a creative way to involve students and non-scientists in the essential data collection and analysis work vital to cataloguing bryophyte species, re-assessing their place on the tree of life, and providing a model for similar work for other organisms.

For more on this endeavor, check out this post on the SUST at RU blog.

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.