Photo from Slickguns.com (“Best deals on guns and ammo posted by users”)
The trouble is, this Wild West-inspired idea isn’t very creative or original. And it’s bound to be expensive, what with paying for the security guards’ salaries, insurance, training, equipment, medical treatment (after in-school gun battles gone awry), and the occasional funeral.
Alternatively, we might consider other slaughter-reduction strategies that don’t involve turning our schools into quasi-military installations. Something like this one, which I just thought up. I call it A Kindergartner in Every Gun Shop.
One of the 51,438 gun retailers in the United States, as of December 2012. By comparison, there are 36,536 grocery stores in America. (Source: ABC News)
My plan’s a little different from the NRA’s approach in that its ultimate goal is fewer guns in circulation rather than more. Better yet, as a voluntary community service program staffed by five- and six-year-olds, it’s free.
Here’s how it would work. Every kindergarten class in America would be assigned to a gun shop, ammo dealer, firing range, or firearms expo somewhere in the community. Parents and teachers would develop a schedule for the students to monitor each gun-related location — with one kid at a time working a morning, afternoon, or evening shift — during business hours. Yes, each child would miss a little school every month, but the public-service experience would be mighty educational.
Customers would be required to do a fifteen-minute “kindergartner check” before buying guns or ammunition. This would involve looking into the eyes of the child, who then asks the adult a series of standard questions, such as “Do you know how many people in Illinois die each year from gun violence?” and “Do you really need yet another assault rifle for your collection?”
Assuming the customer still desired to make a purchase, the kindergartner would then run though some basic guidelines on gun safety, including “Don’t bring your gun to school and shoot at teachers”; “Never let your surly teenage son mess with your semi-automatic rifle after playing excessively violent video games“; and “Don’t point your pistol at your face to demonstrate the safety mechanism, because it might fail and you’ll blow your head off.”
Skeptics might quibble that elementary schoolchildren aren’t truly qualified to lecture adults on gun ownership and safety, since most of them are still learning their letters and numbers. (The kids, I mean.)
A gun show at Houston’s Convention Center
True, but kindergartners are really good at talking, not to mention the educational technique of “show and tell.” Some of them, particularly in crime-plagued cities like Chicago and Joliet, could offer real-life lessons in how their older relatives died in gun battles, or shot themselves accidentally, or got thrown in jail from blasting someone else. Such anecdotes can really liven up an otherwise dry lecture on firearm safety.
I see one drawback to my plan, though. Assume that the many thousands of gun dealers in our country are each open for 50-60 hours per week. Even with little Sally and Bobby pulling double shifts at their local bazooka retailer, those are a lot of business hours to cover.
I’m a little worried that at the rate that children are getting mowed down these days in our schools, we won’t have enough kindergartners to go around.
Last Friday marked the graduation of several Sustainability Studies majors at Roosevelt: Alexandra Bishay, Jessie Crow Mermel, Kenton Franklin, Keith Nawls, Jeff Wasil, and Joe Zambuto. These former undergraduates walked across the famed Auditorium Theater stage in downtown Chicago to join the growing list of alumni from Roosevelt’s SUST program, which was founded in 2010 and offers classes in downtown Chicago, suburban Schaumburg, and online.
Jessie Crow Mermel and Jeff Wasil at RU’s graduation ceremony, 15 Dec 2012 (photo: M. Bryson)
Kenton Franklin worked as an environmental sustainability work-study student, then intern, at RU’s Schaumburg Campus, and has been an instrumental contributor to the sustainable campus redevelopment efforts focused on making the Schaumburg facility more sustainable in its landscaping, energy use, and recycling. He plans to study environmental economics in graduate school.
Jeff Wasil was already working in the environmental field when we transferred to Roosevelt in 2009, and then soon thereafter declared himself as one of the very first SUST majors at RU in the Fall of 2010. That semester he took SUST 220 Water, and managed to find time to fly to Lake Constance in Switzerland to give a talk at one of the most prestigious water conferences in Europe. Jeff later won acceptance to the University of IL at Chicago’s summer Sustainability Institute in 2011, where he worked on Chicago water conservation issues and planning with fellow undergraduate and graduate students from throughout the region. Jeff is employed as an Engineering Technical Expert in the Evinrude Corporation’s emissions testing, certification, and regulatory program, trying to lower the carbon emissions of boat engines as much as is technically feasible.
Congratulations to all our SUST grads this December, and best of luck to our continuing majors as they enjoy a well-earned rest and gear up for the Spring 2013 semester!
Here is an image posted by one of my students to the last discussion forum of this semester in my Sustainability Studies 220 Water course, along with her comment about it.
It can sometimes be challenging to wrap our minds around water scarcity on Earth when we so often picture it as a blue planet with immensely deep seas. Graphs certainly help to put the idea of water scarcity in perspective, but nothing has driven home this idea as much for me as this image from the USGS. The large blue bubble represents the volume of all the water (salt and fresh) on Earth (its diameter being 860 miles) in comparison to the volume of Earth. The small bubble represents the freshwater on Earth (including the water that is within trees, plants, you and I). And the teeny tiny blue dot by Georgia (look closely) represents all the freshwater that is accessible for our use. It looks smaller than the Great Lakes, but you must imagine it in three dimensions.
We live in a very visual culture. What water-related environmental images have you come across that have had a strong impact on you? What campaigns can you think of that have been successful in using images to impact change? How do you see art, photography, film, etc, having a role in expanding awareness on these critical issues we face? ~Jessie
One of the great things about the USGS page this comes from is that this arresting visual representation of the volume of Earth’s water (and fresh water, and available fresh water) compared to the total volume of Earth as a whole is then accompanied by statistical data and explanations that help us understand the physical story being told in that image. This in turn highlights, and then complicates, the often-evoked dichotomy of image (emotion) and text (reason) — the assumption in popular culture that pictures speak to our hearts and guts, while words appeal to our minds.
Of course, we know that dichotomy to be simplistic, if not simply false. Images such as this do more than pull at our heartstrings — consider the lonely and threatened polar bear here, or seals with fur matted with oil; they get us to think; they cause us to ask questions — in this case, about scale, about the relationship of water to the rest of the Earth’s mass, about the thinness and fragility of the biosphere (which is defined by water, without which there would be no “bio”).
Conversely, textual discourse — whether a poem or a scientific technical report — can stoke our emotions and even spur us to action, especially if we’re open to receiving its message and understand its internal logic. The impacts and effects of both text and image are wonderfully complex, and in the best cases work together more powerfully than they can separately. This example of Earth’s water is a fine case of that, writ large.
The work of science is phenomenally important to the advancement of sustainability in human communities — both in terms of economics and social equity — as well as to the conservation of natural ecosystems, basic resources (air, water, soil), and species. But science alone cannot change the policy that governs our human actions and regulates our excessive tendencies to waste, to think only of the short term, to ignore the unintended consequences of our technologies.
For those huge and ever-present challenges, we also need ideas — and those are debated and created in the creative fires of the arts and humanities in ways that cannot be replicated in scientific and political discourse. For sustainability to be a guiding force of human culture as well as a central feature of our governments (regardless of political persuasion), it needs art, music, literature, and other creative endeavors that define us as a species. And it needs people to connect such expressions to the worlds of science and policy as much as possible, as a means of building bridges and reshaping our views of the world — and our role in it.
Advising and registration are now ongoing (since Nov 1st) for the spring semester at RU. If you’re one of my advisees, please check out the Advising Resources here on this blog (accessible from the top menu). Look over the spring schedule, check your remaining course requirements, and shoot me an email with your planned schedule and any questions you have about your upcoming classes.
Otherwise, be sure to contact your assigned advisor to talk with them about your course selections for spring (and summer, while you’re at it). November is the best time to get signed up!
This past Saturday, students in my SUST 220 Water and PLS 391 Natural Science seminars at Roosevelt University joined me for an urban ecology adventure on the Upper North Branch of the Chicago River. We convened mid-morning at Linné Woods, a woodland site locatedin the Cook County Forest Preserve system in Morton Grove, IL, where we met up again with Mark Hauser and Claire Snyder, naturalists from Friends of the Chicago River, for a water quality sampling session of the river where it flows past the lovely picnic grounds in Linné Woods.
Claire Snyder and Mark Hauser, naturalists from Friends of the Chicago River (M. Bryson)
While this was the second go-round for my 220 Water students on field sampling (our first session was further downstream on the North Branch, at West River Park in Chicago), the students from my natural science seminar were new to this exercise; however, after three weeks of being introduced to issues and concepts in urban ecology (from biodiversity to climate change), they were ready to get out in the field and get their hands dirty.
Breaking up into different teams, we measured key chemical indicators such as temperature, turbidity, pH, dissolved oxygen, nitrate, phosphate, and total dissolved solids; and wading into the river with D-nets to scrape up mud in search of macro-invertebrates (worms, leeches, crawfish, snails, damselfly nymphs, etc.), we also garnered a biological snapshot of the river’s relative quality.
Down from the meadow and near the riverbank, Claire discusses the various chemical and physical tests we’ll perform to assess the water’s overall quality: pH, nitrate, phosphate, dissolved oxygen, temperature, total dissolved solids, and turbidity. Half our group work on gathering these measurements, while the other half work on the biological survey with Mark. (M. Bryson)
Taken together, these two approaches give us an in-the-moment (chemical) and over-the-longer-term (biological) assessment of the ecological health of the North Branch. This is because while the chemical profile of a river can change day to day — even hour by hour — depending upon the weather and various inputs into the watercourse, the biological community in the river’s benthos is stationary; and some of organisms that live there have been there awhile.
Our quality results were decidedly mixed.The chemical profile we established had some indicators looking rather good, such as a low nitrate reading of 1.3ppm and a fairly neutral pH of 6.5; turbidity levels were also reasonable. The low nitrate reading makes sense, given that in this area of the northern suburbs north of Dempster Ave. (Glenview, Golf, Morton Grove), communities use a separate sewer system, so wastewater treatment plants are not burdened by high inputs of stormwater run-off, and the waterways do not received Combined Sewage Overflows as they do in older suburbs and the city. Moreover, there is not much, if any, agricultural land in this part of the river’s watershed, meaning that fertilizer run-off from farm fields is not an issue.
Hunting for macro-invertebrates in the river’s water and sediments, under rocks, and along the shoreline (M. Bryson)
On the other hand, phosphate levels were rather high at 0.7ppm and the all-important indicator of dissolved oxygen was fairly low (at 7ppm and 60% saturation), posing challenges for many types of organisms to thrive in the river’s watercolumn and benthos. All in all, we calculated a “Quality Index” grade of 68% on our collective chemical analyses, or if you’re using a letter-grade system, D-plus. Nothing to write home about, despite the lovely, even bucolic, scenery in this part of the Chicago River which follows its natural watercourse and winds through forest preserve land. This assessment was echoed rather closely by our macro-invertebrate survey, which identified 8 different taxa of organisms, ranging from several that are “modertely intolerant to pollution” to four that are “fairly” to “very tolerant” of impaired water quality. Our Water Quality index of 2.6 was on the low end of “fair” in terms of biological diversity (call it a C-minus).
Measuring stream flow (M. Bryson)
Finally, our group waded into the stream and use measuring tape, rules, a stopwatch, and a collection of sticks to calculate the stream flow rate. The trick here is to stake out a place where the width and depth of the river is known, and then release the sticks in the current. Students time how long it takes each stick to travel a given distance (here, 40 feet) and then calculate the stream flow (cubic feet/second) accordingly. Our result: a stream flow rate of 98 cubic feet per second.
Curious readers can review our original field data sheets and calculations here; and for photos of our water sampling activities, see this online slideshow.
Here on the upper North Branch, the river follows its natural course and thus has lots of twists and turns. It took us about two hours to paddle five miles. Lots of overhanging branches required careful maneuvering. (M. Bryson)
After a picnic lunch, we used several of our vehicles to shuttle our group up to our canoe launching spot five river miles north, at Blue Star Memorial Woods in Glenview. Here we met up with Dave Rigg and his fellow volunteer canoe guides from Friends of the Chicago River, who would lead us on an intimate exploration of the water, woodlands, and wetlands of the West Fork of the Upper North Branch of the Chicago River — one of the most scenic and naturalistic stretches of the entire Chicago River system. Dave and Co. gave the many inexperienced but enthusiastic paddlers in our group a paddling lesson, and once outfitted with our safety gear, paddles, and a canoe partner, we hit the water for what would be a two-hour downriver journey in utterly perfect October weather.
Ron and Ken getting ready for our first portage (M. Bryson)
The majority of this trip runs through forest preserve property, with the notable exception of the Chick Evans Golf Course that straddles the river where the North Branch splits into its Middle and West Forks. The result is that we traveled along the natural course of the stream, mostly unchanged from before the time of European settlement, with all its twists and turns and with a wide buffer zone of floodplain forest. The heavily vegetated riverbanks proved to be a stunning contrast to the reinforced concrete and rusty steel that encases much of the Chicago River further south in the watershed.
Besides navigating all the twists and turns of a sometimes narrow and always lovely river channel, as well as ducking under overhanging branches, we had to negotiate two portages — the first for a couple of large downed trees, the second for a dam that is slated by the Cook County Forest Preserve for future removal, since it no longer serves a practical purpose and has deleterious impacts upon the river’s flow, water quality, and recreational value.
Portaging around some downed trees (M. Bryson)
These proved to be an interesting and fun challenge, though — especially given our previous contemplation of the long portages done by explorers and Native Americans between the West Fork of the South Branch, through the wetlands of Mud Lake, to the Des Plaines River (a place now commemorated by the Chicago Portage Historic Site).
More photos of our canoe trip can be seen in this online slideshow. In the near future, I’ll post some additional comments about the state of the river and its surrounding landscape that we observed on this trip.
This dam is a significant obstacle for canoeing humans and swimming fish; Friends of the Chicago River advocates its removal, the sooner the better. (M. Bryson)Heading downstream on the Upper North Branch, about a half-mile from our destination in the Linné Woods forest preserve in Morton Grove, IL (M. Bryson)
Roosevelt University celebrates Sustainability Week next Tuesday through Thursday, Oct. 23-25!
Derrick Jensen
Presented by the RU Green student organization, Sustainability Week at RU’s Chicago Campus features a terrific array of events, including an appearance by acclaimed author/activist Derrick Jensen on Oct. 24th and many other speakers, informational sessions, films, and activities.
The recent Chicago Teacher’s Union strike has exposed a long list of contentious issues in our K-12 educational system. The most troubling of these is the glaring inequity among our region’s public schools.
Nowhere is this more evident that in Chicago’s District 299, where a small percentage of children enjoy a world-class education at one of the District’s vaunted selective enrollment schools, while most students languish in understaffed and overwhelmed neighborhood schools surrounded by violence and economic stagnation. It also applies to our state as a whole, which is ranked among the worst in the nation by the Education Law Center in their recent report cards on public school funding equity.
This long-entrenched divide between the educational haves and have-nots not only mirrors the gulf between rich and poor in American society, it also replicates and reinforces these socioeconomic inequities. You don’t need a PhD to know that students from disadvantaged schools are less likely to graduate, go to college, and get good jobs, and (not incidentally) stay out of prison.
The source of this inequity is equally obvious. Since local property taxes provide the lion’s share of funding for America’s school districts, the resources (and therefore the quality) of the schools are directly proportional to the wealth of their community.
Schools in big-money districts have all the bells and whistles: small class sizes, good facilities, broad offerings in languages and the fine arts, and gifted learning programs. Meanwhile, impoverished districts limp along with overcrowded classrooms, out-of-date technology, bare-bones curricula, and overstretched faculty. (The metal detectors are state-of-the-art, though.)
This is not right. It’s not acceptable for a kid’s educational future to be determined simply by where she was born. And it darn well needs to change.
That’s because the fates of our economy and educational system are inextricably linked. When the economy tanks, we unwisely respond by slashing public education funding — cutting programs, firing teachers, closing schools. State and federal support for K-12 education has steadily deteriorated. But this misguided strategy merely guarantees more economic problems down the line, as we end up with poorly-educated citizens who are not college-ready and cannot compete for good entry-level jobs, let alone start businesses and become “job creators” themselves.
Here’s an alternative plan. Let’s invest in two critical pillars of K-12 educational excellence that every high-achieving school district in America takes for granted: small class sizes and rich curricular offerings. We do it by (1) hiring tens of thousands of teachers for overpopulated schools, and (2) building additional classroom space where needed. This initiative would put people to work by creating superior learning environments for our kids.
Instead of just emphasizing crowd control in classrooms of 30 children (the standard class size in Joliet’s District 86), teachers could do meaningful work with groups of 18-22, thus giving kids exponentially more time and quality instruction. Every school, not just the richest 1%, would have foreign language from kindergarten onward, full-time art and music teachers, a school garden linked to the science and health curriculum, and gifted education for students who need greater challenge.
Let’s get our professional educators and our tradespeople back to work building a better, more equitable educational system. There is no more important investment in our future that we can make.
Saturday, Sept. 8th, was the first day of class for my Fall 2012 Sustainability Studies 220 Water seminar at Roosevelt University. Instead of staying inside our classroom all day, though, we took advantage of excellent late-summer weather here in Chicago to take an urban river parklands adventure to Chicago’s North Side. From RU’s campus in downtown Chicago, we caught the Brown Line L train to a quiet and charmingly at-ground-level station near the end of the line (Francisco, in case you’re curious), where we walked through a quiet residential neighborhood just south of Lawrence Avenue to the entrance of Ronan Park. This is one of several parklands that border the North Branch of the River as it winds its way south through the city.
The North Branch of the Chicago River, as seen from the Ronan Park Bird Sanctuary trail (M. Bryson)
We met up with naturalist-educators Mark Hauser and Claire Snyder from the environmental organization Friends of the Chicago River, who led us on a hike through the community-established Bird Sanctuary in Ronan Park — a charming linear greenspace that hugs the river and provides excellent wildlife habitat as well as soil stabilization with a lush landscape of native grasses and wildflowers as well as trees.
Hiking along the Ronan Park trail, through its restored Bird Sanctuary along the west bank of the river. (M. Bryson)
Immediately north of Ronan Park, we entered West River Park, a multi-use parkland which provides numerous recreation activities as well as open space and excellent public access to the river. Prominent here is the confluence of the North Branch, which heads north for several miles out of the city and toward the Wisconsin border; and the North Shore Channel, a canal that was dug between 1907 and 1910 to provide a connection between Lake Michigan and the North Branch, thus increasing the flow and improving the water quality of the latter.
This confluence is an excellent place to examine the water quality of the river, for we were able to take a chemical and biological profile above and below the dam/spillway on the North Branch, which is just upstream from the North Shore Channel’s mouth. We measured key chemical indicators such as temperature, turbidity, pH, dissolved oxygen, nitrate, and phosphate; and wading into the river with D-nets to scrape up mud in search of macroinvertebrates (worms, leeches, crawfish, snails, damselfly nymphs, etc.).
In West River Park, north of Argyle Ave, looking north toward the dam/spillway on the North Branch. This wide area is the confluence of the N. Branch (which heads upstream to the upper left of this photo) and the North Shore Channel, built between 1907 and 1910 to provide an influx of Lake Michigan water (from Wilmette) for the North Branch. (M. Bryson)
Above the dam, where the water travels downstream from the North Branch’s long journey southward through forest preserves and residential areas in the northern suburbs and North Side of the city, the water quality rated a “D” according to our chemical profile, mainly due to high suspended solids, high phosphates levels from polluted stormwater runoff, and low dissolved oxygen concentrations. Here our biological profile was slightly better (rated as “fair”) since we found a decent diversity of organisms, some of which are not highly pollution tolerant.
Sampling the macro-invertebrates living in the sediment and along the margins of the river, north of the spillway. This provides a biological sample of the river’s biodiversity and water quality, since different species of macro-inverts have different tolerance levels for pollution. (M. Bryson)
Downstream of the dam, the chemical analysis results were a little better (“C-“), since the spillway served to oxygenate the water and significantly raise the dissolved oxygen value, which is critical for aquatic life to flourish. This was despite somewhat higher nitrate levels, which likely result from the wastewater effluent inputs to the Channel north of here, at the MWRD’s O’Brien wastewater treatment plant just north of Howard St.
The spillway is a great place for fishing, whether you’re a human or one of three heron species we saw that day (great blue, green, and black-crowned night). (M. Bryson)
Both the North Branch and North Shore Channel are impacted by polluted stormwater runoff in the city and suburbs (which includes excess pesticides and chemical fertilizers applied to residential and commercial lawn properties, as well as from the ten golf courses within 20 miles of our sampling site); normal wastewater effluent discharges (where treated water nevertheless contains high bacterial levels, since effluent is not yet disinfected in a final stage of treatment, as in all other major US cities); and periodic combined sewage overflow (CSO) events, which occur when during a rainstorm the sewage system reaches capacity and untreated wastewater is released into the waterways to prevent sewage system back-ups into people’s homes.
Beyond learning to use the water sampling equipment and calculating a quick chemical and biological profile of the For images and notes from our trip, this trip allowed us to examine the way people interact with the river in an urban parkland, as well a discuss the river’s history of transformation here in Chicago. For more images from our day, see this annotated slideshow of photos; and check out the data from our sampling work at the link below.
Looking for a cool sustainability-themed event this coming weekend? Here you go: this Saturday from 10am to 4pm at Truman College on Chicago’s North Side, the Institute for Cultural Affairs will host the “Accelerate 77” Share Fair that brings together people and organizations working on all kinds of sustainability initiatives in each of Chicago’s 77 community areas.
Back in the spring of 2012, my SUST 210 Honors seminar at Roosevelt’s Chicago Campus did on-the-ground research in small groups in 5 different communities in Chicago: Fuller Park, Rogers Park, Little Village, and the North and South halves of the Loop. Their research added to that of students at several other Chicago colleges and universities, as students fanned out across the city to learn about urban sustainability initiatives and meet people from every walk of life, in every neighborhood of the city.
The main room will be filled with representatives of all 77 communities of Chicago. These representatives have been identified as leaders in their respective communities, but a leader can be embodied in many ways. We work towards realising a sustainable Chicago, the foundations of which rely on economic, cultural, and social sustainability. You can expect to see examples of urban agriculture, green technology, and alternative energy, but then also so much more! Each leading program has their own methodology in how to encorporate/encourage environmentalism in their neighborhoods. True to the richness of the Chicago community, we expect a lot of different ideas to come out in our exchange of best practices. To see a full listing of the organizations that have signed up already check out the See Who’s Coming page.
Connection Seminars: Q&A with Citywide Stakeholders
In “breakout rooms” located outside of the main fair space, there will be representatives of programs which work all across Chicago. If you’re part of an organization, these will be great opportunities to learn more about exciting programs across the city and gain some “how to” at the same time. To see a full listing of the organizations and topics covered, head over to the Connection Seminars listing page.
The Reception: Celebrate and Learn
After the Share Fair, a reception will be held at the ICA, located at 4750 N Sheridan Ave. Come and learn about Chicago’s very own GreenRise and help us celebrate the Institute of Cultural Affairs’ 50th anniversary. To learn more about the GreenRise tours, head over to the GreenRise Tours page.
During the spring semester of 2012, the 20 students in Prof. Mike Bryson’s SUST 210 Sustainable Future honors class conducted a semester-long community-based research project in conjunction with the ICA’s effort during 2011 and 2012 to map and describe as many sustainability initiatives and assets as possible in each one of Chicago’s 77 official Community Areas. Two RU students, international studies major Dylan Amlin and sustainability studies major Ngozi Okoro, pursued summer internships with the ICA by conducting community research in several South Side neighborhoods. As Dylan notes about the Share Fair:
It will be an excellent networking opportunity for students as well, and we could really use some youthful energy in the room. If students are interested in volunteering, they can contact me directly asap (dylanamlin@gmail.com). They also can go to the Accelerate 77 website to learn more about the project and to register.
Join Dylan, Ngozi, and lots of other students, faculty, sustainability professionals, grassroots activists, and area officials for this singular event!
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.
