This summer my family and I took our annual vacation to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where we camp out at the Bryson family cabin — a fairly humble one-room cottage in Hiawatha National Forest on the shores of little Crooked Lake (a lovely place to canoe and observe wildlife, among other woodsy pursuits). There’s no bathroom or hot water: just a hand pump in the cabin and an outhouse twenty yards out into the woods. The nearest little town of any note is about 12 miles up the road. Still, with a roof over our heads and electricity in the cabin, staying there feels rather more deluxe than, say, camping out in a tent.
After a week or so in the UP, we drove back roads through Wisconsin to Baraboo, where we spent a few days exploring the countryside and doing fun stuff with the kids. The Baraboo area is home to many delightful natural areas and sites of interest, including the much visited Devil’s Lake State Park; the beautiful though overly commercialized Wisconsin Dells; and the International Crane Foundation, a remarkable wildlife conservation facility. After our visit to the Crane Foundation north of Baraboo, we drove one of Wisconsin’s beautiful “rustic roads” that parallels a levee along the south bank of the Wisconsin River, and pulled off the road once we came to an unmarked turnoff in the middle of the woods.
Here I took a few minutes to hike a sandy road into a clearing not quite visible from the road. This is the site of “The Shack” — Aldo Leopold’s weekend retreat on the farm he purchased in the early 1930s as a family getaway and place where he could put into practice the conservation principles and restoration techniques he and others were developing in the early to mid-20th century.
Once a chicken coop that Leopold converted into a family cabin, the shack is a tiny structure by today’s standards. I realized as a walked around it, dwelling in its quiet presence, that it was significantly smaller than the 20×24-foot cabin we use in the UP — by comparison, our summer home is a roomy palace. Yet this humble shack looms large in American conservation and literary history, given its inspiration for Leopold’s classic 1949 work of environmental literature, A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There. Though I spent a mere twenty minutes or so at the site — listening to the wind filtering through the tree canopy, and wondering about the current of the Wisconsin River, flowing just to the north of the Leopold farmstead — it was impossible not to feel the power of this particular place. I left reluctantly.
As we drove east on Levee Road, we pulled off again to scale the grassy levee, which was topped by a profusion of wildflowers — and enjoyed a commanding view of the Wisconsin River, here a wide and fast-flowing stream with many sandbars and heavily-wooded shorelines. Further on up the road, my wife spotted a family of wild turkeys, which scuttled up over the levee at the noise of our passing. We stopped to take a look at them, and watched mesmerized as the male set ran off first in one direction, toward the river, while the female led her young away at a different angle, toward a copse of trees. An exciting and special moment, one I was glad to have on the heels of finally seeing Leopold’s cabin after many years of simply reading about it.
I recently received this intriguing call for papers through email. If you’re a young and aspiring writer and have an interest in the natural environment, sustainability issues, and related subjects, check this out!
In the prescient 1988 book, The End of Nature, Bill McKibben forecast the end of a primordial relationship between humans and the untrammeled earth. Evidence abounds that our ancient connections with the home planet have irrevocably altered. What happens to individuals and societies when their most fundamental cultural, historical, and ecological bonds attenuate—or snap? How do the young, especially, cope in a baffling and mutable new world? “When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit,” wrote Henry Beston, “man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw. . . .” It is vital that we hear from members of the generation who have grown up on the new earth, who can express their challenges, fears, dreams, and sources of resilience for living and thriving as cosmic outlaws.
Co-editors Julie Dunlap and Susan A. Cohen are soliciting submissions for an anthology tentatively titled, “Cosmic Outlaws: Coming of Age after the End of Nature.” Submissions are invited from young writers, born in 1982 or later. We are interested in essays, short fiction, and poetry that explore themes including (but not limited to) growing up in a warming climate, accepting biodiversity decline, defining responsible consumption, understanding the relevance of wilderness, interpreting moralities of resource allocation, new views of urban design, sustainability, and environmental justice, technological optimism or pessimism, environmental heroes for the future, and sources of joy in a diminished place.
Julie Dunlap is co-editor of Companions in Wonder: Children and Adults Exploring Nature Together (MIT Press, 2012) and an award-winning author of children’s books, articles, and essays about nature, science, and environmental history. Susan A. Cohen (formerly Susan A. C. Rosen) is co-editor of Wildbranch: An Anthology of Nature, Environmental, and Place-Based Writing (University of Utah Press, 2010), editor of Shorewords: A Collection of American Women’s Coastal Writings (University of Virginia Press, 2003), professor of English at Anne Arundel Community College, and the author of numerous essays on American literature and the environment.
Please submit materials electronically (.doc or .rtf files only for essays and fiction – .pdf files will be accepted for poetry) by December 31, 2012, along with contact information and a one-paragraph author bio. We will accept essays & fiction up to 4,000 words (one per contributor) and up to three poems per person. Please submit copies of your work to both of the e-mail addresses below. If you must submit by mail, please send TWO double-spaced copies to both addresses below. We will be reading and selecting pieces in early 2013. We are happy to accept simultaneous submissions, but we ask that you please notify us if your submission is accepted elsewhere.
Send your work to:
Julie Dunlap: juliejdunlap@earthlink.net (6371 Tinted Hill, Columbia, MD 21045)
Susan A. Cohen: sacohen3@aacc.edu (40 Johnson Road, Pasadena, MD 21122)
Thank you. We look forward to reading your essays, stories, and poems!
Here’s an exciting new blog to check out: City Creatures, a place of insightful writing about animals (and their human neighbors) here in Chicago’s urban and suburban environments. This is a project of the environmental non-profit organization, the Center for Humans and Nature, that will support and complement a book and art exhibit of the same name.
As a contributing author to the project and the blog, I’ll be writing about the Bubbly Creek ecosystem on Chicago’s Near Southwest Side and the many animals, past and present, that exist in that damaged yet resilient landscape — from the herons and other birds that find food and shelter within the creek’s waters and riparian zone; to the carp swimming below the surface that harbor bio-accumulated toxins in their tissues; to the decades-old offal from the millions of processed cows and pigs that was once dumped untreated into the waters of Bubbly Creek, and which is still slowly decomposing within its sediments.
Paddling south on Bubbly Creek, May 2012, on Chicago’s Southwest Side; to the right are 34th Street and the Iron Street Farm (M. Bryson)
A marsh within the Calumet River watershed in the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore
I’ve never been invited to a writer’s retreat before (not to mention a writers and artists retreat), and despite long anticipation and careful planning for this one, I almost didn’t get to go to this one when my spouse took ill and the kids needed tending. Thank goodness for CHN retreat organizer and all-around problem-solver Gavin Van Horn’s wisdom and quick decision-making, as he called me up and said, “Bring the girls along.”
I’m glad I did, as we had a terrific time — and I’m grateful to Gavin’s wife Marcie, who generously and graciously volunteered to watch my children during the times when I was occupied with fellow participants in wonderful discussions about our forthcoming City Creatures project.
For me the retreat had a number of highlights. Some of them were formal, in the sense that they were on the planned agenda — like the splendid hike through the wetlands of the Great Calumet Marsh on Friday led by Ron and Joan Engel, who escorted us along some of their favorite biodiversity-rich trails in the Dunes back-country; the lovely reception hosted by the Engels at their beautiful home in Beverly Shores (which surely has the best home study/library I’ve ever seen); the delightful dinner at Sage restaurant in Chesterton; and the “soundwalk” excursion we took in Gary on the grounds of the Paul Douglas Environmental Learning Center at the western end of the National Lakeshore.
Joan and Ron Engel, with Steve Packard
But the less-scripted elements of the retreat held many delights, as well. I became pals with a conservationist and writer I much admire, Stephen Packard, who rode in my car from field site to field site, and delighted my children with his funny stories, endless questions, and brilliant bird call imitations. At one point on our way to the soundwalk field trip, I deliberately got us lost (no, really!) so I could listen to the end of a story that involved “mucking about” a salt marsh on Cape Cod; the ensuing delay was worth it. I met some old friends but also made a bunch of new ones among a group of immensely talented and utterly fascinating people. And I learned a lot about what our collective project is aiming for, and had time and encouragement to think about how my small contribution fits into the bigger picture.
Lea Schweitz holds an opossum mandible
My two girls, Lily (age 10) and Esmé (age 5), had fun cavorting with Gavin’s 5-year-old son Hawkins, and they got a kick out of our field hikes, too. During our marsh walk, we had several great kid discoveries: Steve Sullivan found the mandible of an opossum; Steve Packard found some eggshell fragments, still soft and pliable, from a turtle; and we all admired a large beaver lodge and the abundant nearby evidence of busy-ness on the part of this intrepid wetland mammal and fellow water engineer.
On our Saturday morning hike, I was initially concerned that my chatterbox children would fill the “soundscape” with their songs, stories, and sisterly bickering and thus necessitate my hanging back from the group. Turns out I greatly underestimated them. Lily hiked ahead with the grown-ups, while Esmé and I lollygagged with the renowned naturalist and writer Joel Greenberg, who happily pointed out flowers and identified bird calls for us. Esmé got a nosebleed for no apparent reason, but rather than crying or complaining, she just asked me for tissues until it stopped, and kept trudging along behind Joel and looking at everything he noted.
At a rest stop on our soundwalk, listening to the marsh and woods
The best part of that wonderful hike was when we ascended a hill about two-thirds of the way along the circuitous trail we were following, and stopped for a long listen. Here in the Dunes there’s lot of sand, of course, and this summit we were on was like a big sandbox. As we naturally formed a circle to listen, observe, and talk quietly about what we were experiencing, the girls just played quietly in the sand.
We watched them, too, and I couldn’t help but think about how our project — about connecting with nature and, more specifically, the non-human animals within the urban and suburban environment of the Chicago region — is also, ultimately, about nurturing an ethic of stewardship and love of nature in our children.
Esmé holds a piece of turtle eggshell; Gavin shows another to Hawkins
It had been way too long since I had been to the Dunes. This was a splendid excuse to return to that special landscape, and to introduce my kids to some of its treasures. It was also an inspiring way to begin our work on City Creatures.
I’m looking forward to future gatherings with these new friends and colleagues. I wonder what critters, or the leavings thereof, we’ll come across on our ensuing explorations?
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.
One of my favorite children’s authors, Russell Hoban, died this past Tuesday at the age of 86. Hoban was a skilled and highly-praised novelist, as well; but as a father of young girls, I came to know his work through his immortal Frances the Badger series of books from the 1960s, which featured brilliant illustrations — first from Garth Williams, then from Hoban’s wife, Lillian Hoban.
The first page of "Bedtime for Frances" (1960); illustration by Garth Williams.
This appreciation published today the Lawrence Downs of the New York Times aptly describes the remarkable level of craft and insight Hoban brought to his work.
It’s hard to write a book. It’s harder to write one with living characters, clever scenes, warmth and wit. And it’s harder still when the people you’re writing for can’t read, or read only a little, when the words you choose must be simple, short and sweet. And if not always sweet, at least short.
Pictures help. They help a lot, sometimes more than they should. If pictures in a picture book are an enchanted countryside, the words are often just the tracks the story chugs along toward bedtime, more functional than lovely.
Russell Hoban, who died on Tuesday in London, age 86, was an author whose books for youngest readers contained writing as good as the drawings. He wrote grown-up books, too, which were praised for dazzling and inventive language. A Times reviewer called “Riddley Walker,” Mr. Hoban’s 1980 novel about a postnuclear dystopia, Beckettian, Boschian and Twain-like. Mr. Hoban knew what he was doing.
Which is obvious from his seven books about Frances. Frances is a badger who has a mother, father, baby sister and friends whose stories unfold in sentences that will delight you and make you laugh. Frances is witty and stubborn. She is adorable not because the author tells us she is. She just is:
“Frances did not eat her egg.
She sang a little song to it.
She sang the song very softly:
I do not like the way you slide,
I do not like your soft inside,
I do not like you lots of ways,
And I could do for many days
Without eggs.”
Children’s books, like pop songs, are simple things we’ll never run out of, partly because so many people want to write them and think they can. But simplicity is harder than it looks. So are depth and beauty. Mr. Hoban’s Frances books take us all the way to delight, using an easy-reader vocabulary.
The announcement that the Forest Preserve District of Will County has begun work on developing a short trail through Teale Woods, a small nature preserve near where I live in Joliet, Illinois, got me thinking about this little essay I wrote about that patch of urban nature for the Joliet Herald-News back in March of 2010.
The advent of spring last week inspired me to visit one of my favorite quiet corners of Joliet — a place where time slows down and wild nature flourishes amidst the paved-over, gritty landscape of concrete, traffic noise, and hustling people.
My destination was Teale Woods, a 15-acre woodland along Theodore and Center Streets on Joliet’s near northwest side. With only one low-profile sign marking its existence as Will County Forest Preserve property, Teale Woods is still undeveloped and without official public access; but a couple of informal trails cut through the woodland and afford a quiet route away from the tumult of Theodore Street’s traffic.
This humble urban sanctuary is emblematic of wild spaces that exist, and sometimes flourish, against all odds within the built landscape of our cities. Homes, businesses, and busy roads are only steps away. The thoughtless litter of humans, newly revealed from the recent melting of winter’s snow cover, distracts the eye and disturbs the spirit.
Nevertheless, these scrappy, imperfect woods provide a natural haven where one can hear the plaintive tones of a white-throated sparrow and study the rugged form of a downed oak.
I suspect very few people in Joliet today know this place’s namesake, Edwin Way Teale. Born in 1899 in Joliet, Teale’s love of and fascination with nature were stoked in his formative years during visits to his grandparents’ farm near the Indiana Dunes. He later became one of the most celebrated American nature writers and photographers of the 20th century.
One of Teale’s most admired books was North with the Spring (1951), which chronicles a 17,000-mile journey following and celebrating the season’s arrival throughout the eastern US. While Teale visits several famous landscapes along the way, he also describes many virtually unknown spots of no particular significance — except that they provided a place for him to encounter a lively insect, find a native wildflower, or admire an old tree.
I like to think that Teale Woods in Joliet — about as low-profile and neglected as a nature preserve can get — is been one of those places he would’ve cherished.
The next time I visit the woods, I’ll pause a moment to reflect on Edwin Way Teale’s immeasurable impact upon Americans’ growing interest in preserving wild nature, even in cities. Then, I’ll grab my work gloves and trash bag, and get down to work picking up some litter.
This essay was published as “Teale Woods Hidden Joliet Gem” on 25 March 2010 in the Joliet Herald-News, p20. A few month’s after the article’s appearance, the Will County Forest Preserve District held public hearings on planned future developments of Teale Woods. The WCFPD plans to start restoring the woodland in 2011.
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.
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.
Normally Friday nights are pretty quiet at RU’s Schaumburg Campus. But not this past Friday night. Despite pounding rain and a brief hailstorm, around 60 people converged on Alumni Hall for the special Earth Day screening of the new Aldo Leopold documentary film, Green Fire. In attendance were several Roosevelt faculty, staff, and students; but the bulk of the crowd came from the larger community. Folks like Steve and Jill Flexman, veteran restoration volunteers from the Poplar Creek Prairie Stewards; Jean and Jim DeHorn of the Chicago chapter of Wild Ones; and a prospective student from Joliet Junior College who drove all the way from Joliet (just like me) to see the film and meet some current RU Sustainability Studies students.
This small sampling of the eclectic audience at last night’s screening gives a hint of what proved to be a dynamic gathering of academics, environmental stewards, and social activists who live and work in the northwest suburban region . . . and beyond. After the film we engaged in a spirited discussion of Leopold and his classic 1949 book A Sand County Almanac, local environmentalism, the need for a more ethical relation to the land (and each other), and the value of ecological stewardship. Schaumburg’s Sustainable Future, a website created as a collaborative research project by the students in my SUST 210 Sustainable Future class this spring at the Schaumburg Campus, aims to provide a platform for keeping that exciting conversation going.
Special thanks go to Gavin Van Horn, Director of Midwest Cultures of Conservation for the Center for Humans and Nature in Chicago (one of Green Fire‘s co-producers), who helped me introduce the film and moderate discussion afterward; Jessie Crow Mermel, a Sustainability Studies major and educator at Angelic Organics farm in Caldonia IL, who planted the idea of getting Green Fire to screen at Roosevelt and provided a student’s perspective on the important of Leopold’s Land Ethic in her introductory remarks; Schaumburg Campus Provost Doug Knerr, who provided planning support and encouragement for this event from the get-go; RU professional staff Yvette Joseph, Jackie Talerico, Tim Hopkins, Jon Resele, and Sharon Del Prete for their incredible support and hard work in the planning and logistics for last night’s screening; and the students of my SUST 210 class — particularly Mary Beth Radeck, who provided superb content for and great student leadership on this project.
As a literary critic, one recognizes the rare privilege in discovering an obscure yet talented writer — whether someone living or from the distant past — and reintroducing that person to a contemporary readership. Such was my opportunity a few years ago when I came across a book by Leonard Dubkin (1905–72) in a used bookstore in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood. That serendipitous finding was the seed of a research project on Dubkin, a self-taught naturalist and longtime Chicago journalist, which culminated this month in the publication of my essay, “Empty Lots and Secret Places,” in the Winter 2011 issue of Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and the Environment. As I write in the article’s introduction:
Dubkin [was] an urban naturalist and Chicago writer who immersed himself in Chicago’s natural history long before the recent rediscovery of urban environments by literary critics and nature writers. Like the [small city] park that commemorates him, Dubkin has been easy to overlook. Although he penned several books on nature in the city, wrote a widely read nature column for Lerner Newspapers in Chicago for many years, and published frequently in major national newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune and New York Times, Dubkin today is a virtual unknown.
Yet the recent resurgence of interest in the environmental issues and history of urban areas in general and the Chicago region in particular makes Dubkin’s work important. His writings are a rich historical document of urban nature as well as a detailed exploration of one person’s engagement with the “wild” elements of the city: plants, birds, insects, mammals, and various representatives of the human population. Dubkin has much to say not just to Chicagoans interested in their city’s environment or to aficionados of nature writing, but to all who are engaged in the conservation, preservation, restoration, and representation of urban nature. He speaks, as well, to city and suburban dwellers who feel alienated from an idealized nature they imagine exists only “out there,” away from urban sprawl and congestion.
Dubkin’s essays and books extol the value of the commonplace and mundane for exploring biological adaptation and ecological complexity, illustrate the rewards of patient observation of and direct experience with natural phenomena, and explore the inescapable interconnection of humanity and nature in the urban landscape.
I frequently teach selections from Dubkin’s books in my humanities seminar at Roosevelt University, and students respond enthusiastically to his work. While my essay is the first scholarly treatment of Dubkin’s work, short excerpts from his books have been included in two recent literary anthologies: Terrell Dixon’s City Wilds: Essays and Stories about Urban Nature (2002) and Joel Greenberg’s Of Prairie, Woods, and Water: Two Centuries of Chicago Nature Writing (2008). These books not only signal the growing interest in the genre of urban environmental writing, but also illustrate the significance of Dubkin’s work within national literary contexts as well as the environmental history of the Chicago region.
Appreciations and thanks go to Terrell Dixon, professor of English at the University of Houston and colleague in the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, who back in 2005 strongly encouraged me to follow my interest in Dubkin’s writings. Roosevelt University supported my work with a faculty research and professional development leave in the spring of 2007. Last but far from least, Chicago Jewish News journalist and editor Pauline Dubkin Yearwood granted me two interviews and access to a treasure trove of her father’s documents and letters that greatly informed and inspired my research.
As we drove east on Levee Road, we pulled off again to scale the grassy levee, which was topped by a profusion of wildflowers — and enjoyed a commanding view of the Wisconsin River, here a wide and fast-flowing stream with many sandbars and heavily-wooded shorelines. Further on up the road, my wife spotted a family of wild turkeys, which scuttled up over the levee at the noise of our passing. We stopped to take a look at them, and watched mesmerized as the male set ran off first in one direction, toward the river, while the female led her young away at a different angle, toward a copse of trees. An exciting and special moment, one I was glad to have on the heels of finally seeing Leopold’s cabin after many years of simply reading about it.
