This fall 2017 semester I am teaching two linked sections of SUST 350 Service & Sustainability. The Chicago-based section (01) will meet in AUD 825 the first week of class (Tues 8/29) at 10am and subsequently off-campus at Eden Place Nature Center on Chicago’s South Side (4417 S. Stewart in the Fuller Park neighborhood). Starting week 2, we will convene at 9:30am in the WB Lobby and walk to the Red Line’s Harrison Stop. Eden Place is a half-mile walk from the 47th Street stop. Street parking is also readily available at the Nature Center for anyone traveling by car.
The online section (98) officially starts on 11 Sept 2017. However, students in that section are encouraged to participate in the 8/29 introductory session via Zoom video-conference. The session will also be recorded and archived on the course Bb site for the reference of students who have a scheduling conflict for 8/29.
Login information for the 350 Zoom session is as follows:
Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://roosevelt.zoom.us/j/903113673
Or iPhone one-tap (US Toll): +14086380968,,903113673# or +16468769923,,903113673#
This March saw the publication of the new book Wildness: Relations of People and Place, edited by Gavin Van Horn and John Hausdoerffer (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2017), an environmental humanities project sponsored by the Center for Humans and Nature. Part 3 of the book, entitled Urban Wild, includes an essay I co-wrote with Mr. Michael Howard, a Chicago community leader, conservationist, and environmental educator: “Cultivating the Wild on Chicago’s South Side: Stories of People and Nature at Eden Place Nature Center.”
I’m fortunate to have been part of this wonderful project, which began with a writer’s retreat in September of 2014 in Crested Butte, CO, featuring writing workshops by the award-winning scientist and nature writer, Robert Michael Pyle (whose own essay follows a poem by none other than the legendary Gary Snyder). My interviews and writing sessions with Mr. Howard at Eden Place in 2015, and the three semesters I’ve worked there with my students each fall since 2014, have made getting a sense of this special place in the world an immensely gratifying experience. Thanks to Gavin and John for shepherding this project through its publication!
From the book’s promo page on the Univ. of Chicago Press website:
Whether referring to a place, a nonhuman animal or plant, or a state of mind, wild indicates autonomy and agency, a will to be, a unique expression of life. Yet two contrasting ideas about wild nature permeate contemporary discussions: either that nature is most wild in the absence of a defiling human presence, or that nature is completely humanized and nothing is truly wild.
Eden Place Nature Center, Sept 2014 (M. Bryson)
This book charts a different path. Exploring how people can become attuned to the wild community of life and also contribute to the well-being of the wild places in which we live, work, and play, Wildness brings together esteemed authors from a variety of landscapes, cultures, and backgrounds to share their stories about the interdependence of everyday human lifeways and wildness. As they show, far from being an all or nothing proposition, wildness exists in variations and degrees that range from cultivated soils to multigenerational forests to sunflowers pushing through cracks in a city alley. Spanning diverse geographies, these essays celebrate the continuum of wildness, revealing the many ways in which human communities can nurture, adapt to, and thrive alongside their wild nonhuman kin.
From the contoured lands of Wisconsin’s Driftless region to remote Alaska, from the amazing adaptations of animals and plants living in the concrete jungle to indigenous lands and harvest ceremonies, from backyards to reclaimed urban industrial sites, from microcosms to bioregions and atmospheres, manifestations of wildness are everywhere. With this book, we gain insight into what wildness is and could be, as well as how it might be recovered in our lives—and with it, how we might unearth a more profound, wilder understanding of what it means to be human.
Visit the Center for Humans and Nature’s Wildness website for upcoming events and a series of related short films, including one of Michael Howard and Michael Bryson talking about Eden Place.
Click on the image above to go to the video interview of Michael Howard (pictured) and Michael Bryson at Eden Place Nature Center.
425 S. Wabash (looking east), Chicago, IL, June 2013 (photo: Brad Temkin)
Nature within the urban landscape is simultaneously close at hand and hidden from view — a paradox of proximal obscurity. Yet its myriad forms are as diverse in kind as their human denizens. City parks, urban farms, back yards, forest preserves, vacant lots, and green rooftops — all these and more comprise the spaces of urban nature.
Despite the ubiquity and diversity of urban nature, it remains largely invisible to and thus unappreciated by many city dwellers. We are much more likely to assume nature exists “out there,” away from our cities and suburbs — especially in remote places characterized by few people and sublime landforms. An implicit corollary to that is that the city is unnatural.
Lurie Children’s Hospital (looking southwest), Chicago, IL, May 2012 (photo: Brad Temkin)
Yet the recent coinage of the seemingly oxymoronic phrase urban wilderness signals that we have begun to re-envision the role of nature within metropolitan landscapes. This nature is almost always hybrid in character, a product of human design and action even when appearing “natural” in outward form. Consider our location right here, along the southwestern rim of Lake Michigan — where the surveyor’s grid was laid down upon the marshy prairie, a river’s current audaciously reversed, and lakefront parkland perched atop thousands of tons of landfill.
The intersections of the made and the natural can be apprehended in such settings . . . if one observes carefully, knows where to look, and possesses a spirit of exploration. The dramatic roofscapes by Brad Temkin in Rooftop: Second Nature are striking visual compositions that reveal the city from a different and unfamiliar angle, as well as information-rich object lessons in how green infrastructure enhances urban sustainability.
More broadly, though, this exhibit speaks to the vital role played by the environmental arts and humanities in envisioning a more sustainable future for humanity as well as for the millions of fellow species on our beautiful yet vulnerable planet. Thought-provoking ideas, artwork, architecture, poetry, stories, historical accounts, theater, music, and film are necessary complements to painstaking ecological analysis and pragmatic environmental policy.
Why? Because ideas and vision matter. Compelling narratives, whether literary or visual, can animate science, challenge our use of technology, inspire policy, and change hearts and minds. Such narratives must guide our thinking to ensure that social equity and environmental justice are not trampled in the relentless pursuit of short-term profits from, say, building oil pipelines across sources of drinking water in the Great Plains; or dumping the “overburden” of mountaintops into the creeks and rivers of Appalachian coal country; or selling more Pepsi or iPhones.
In such fraught and perilous times, a sustainable future can only be achieved, let alone properly envisioned, with the full participation and engagement of the environmental arts and humanities.
By showing us the “second nature” of the urban landscape in these images of green rooftops, Brad Temkin’s art not only delights and inspires with unexpected manifestations of beauty, but also implicitly challenges us to consider what “first nature” is, and what sort of relationship we want with it — one which in we are conquerors . . . or stewards.
This is a slightly edited version of a short speech I gave at the opening reception for Rooftop: Second Nature on 9 Feb 2017 at Roosevelt University’s Gage Gallery, 18 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago IL. The Gallery is open 9am-5pm weekdays and 10am-4pm Saturdays.
Opening reception and talk by Brad Temkin
Thursday, February 9th, 5-7 p.m.
Roosevelt University’s Gage Gallery
18 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago IL
(312) 341-6458
Statement from the Artist
“Rooftop: Second Nature draws poetic attention to an important new movement to counter the heat island effect caused by city life. Green roofs reduce our carbon footprint and improve storm water control, but they do far more. They reflect the conflict of our existence, symbolizing the allure of nature in the face of our continuing urban sprawl.
“My images do more than merely document rooftop gardens. By securely situating the gardens within the steel, stone, and glass rectangularity of urban downtowns, I ask viewers to revel in their far more open patterns, colors, and connection to the sky. In this break, I see not merely beauty and dichotomy, but the framework for positive change.”
— Brad Temkin
On Urban Ecology, Green Rooftops, and the Sustainability of Cities Exhibit Essay for Rooftop: Second Nature, Roosevelt University, Spring 2017
What does a sustainable city look like? Solar panel arrays, bike lanes along busy thoroughfares, and urban farms converted from vacant lots all come to mind; but the iconic symbol of the contemporary green metropolis is the green rooftop. Though mostly invisible to us at ground level, these living surfaces embody key chacteristics of the urban ecosystem even as they serve as sustainability badges of honor for environmentally-minded civic leaders.
The science of urban ecology demonstrates that cities are not mere technological constructions, distinct from and diametrically opposed to nature, but complex ecosystems constituted by energy flows and waste sinks, evolving communities of organisms, and habitats both natural and designed. The green rooftops that increasingly dot the skylines of 21st-century cities are engineered to serve specific ecological, economic, and/or aesthetic functions for the buildings they crown and the people who inhabit them. Such spaces are simultaneously technological and natural: well-ordered assemblages of soil, plants, and micro-organisms that soften the surfaces and round the edges of the rectilinear built environment.
Said rooftops also are prime examples of green infrastructure, a critically important element of the urban fabric. Parklands and nature preserves, wetlands and riparian zones, bioswales and rain gardens, farm lots and backyard gardens, and green rooftops — all comprise a city’s green infrastructure. These diverse physical spaces provide a myriad of ecosystem services: they conserve freshwater resources, reduce energy consumption, mitigate air and water pollution, create wildlife habitat, and enable our own physical contact with nature.
The dramatic images in Rooftop: Second Nature are striking visual compositions that reveal the city from a different and unfamiliar angle, as well as information-rich object lessons in how green infrastructure enhances urban sustainability. Within one roof’s environs, a diverse riot of native prairie plants is juxtaposed with the boxy lines of air conditioning units, while other images expand the frame beyond the rooftop’s edge to portray its larger context, such as Chicago’s street grid bisected by its namesake river.
Such visual elements evoke the entanglement of ecological cycles in which the roof participates. These living surfaces provide superior building insulation, thus reducing heating and cooling costs and, in turn, decreasing carbon emissions. Plants evapotranspire water, which cools the micro-climate of the building’s exterior, thus mitigating the urban heat island effect. Precipitation falling on these rooftops is not wasted as runoff to an energy-intensive sewer and wastewater treatment system; rather, it is captured in place, absorbed by the resident plant community, and returned to the atmosphere in a silent yet eloquent demonstration of the water cycle.
Brad Temkin’s photographs are densely layered with meaning and invite inquiry from the viewer: From what vantage point was that shot taken? What are beehives doing on a skyscraper roof? How is this largely unseen rooftop relevant to the river flowing only two blocks away? Who has access to these spaces, and what psychological benefits might accrue from exploring them? Such questions suggest the dynamic interplay between art and science within our perceptions of the sustainable city.
Atop Observation Hill near McMurdo Station, Antarctica (Oct 1991)
Twenty-five years ago, I had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel to Antarctica as part of a scientific research expedition from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Taking a semester’s leave from my graduate studies at SUNY Stony Brook, I worked for two months as a field technician and writer-in-residence on a team researching the biogeochemistry of Lake Fryxell, a permanently frozen-over lake in Antarctica’s Dry Valleys. This extraordinary experience was memorable in many ways, including a brief three-day stopover in New Zealand, where we made our final preparations at the US Antarctic Program’s headquarters in Christchurch before flying to McMurdo Station on the Ross Ice Shelf.
Now as a mid-career academic seeking new challenges and opportunities beyond my Midwestern home at the southern rim of the Great Lakes — and having traveled outside the US (to Canada) only twice during this time — I decided to apply for a Fulbright Scholar fellowship to explore a distant locale that has always resonated powerfully in my memory. But this time, instead of a mere fleeting taste of Christchurch and a brief fly-over of the North and South Islands, I hope to spend several months in 2018 researching, writing, and living in New Zealand, based at Lincoln University a few kilometers outside of Christchurch, in order to enrich my understanding of urban river ecosystems as well as gain a much-needed global perspective on my scholarship and teaching.
Objectives and Methodology: My proposed project focuses on the Otakaro-Avon River that flows through Christchurch, NZ, as a natural and human ecosystem undergoing stress and change. The Otakaro-Avon is an important focal point of urban sustainability planning and ecological restoration. Using the qualitative research framework of the environmental humanities, which blends insights and analytic methods from literary studies, environmental history, ecology, and other disciplines, I plan to undertake an ecocritical study of this urban river’s history, present condition, and future prospects in the context of urban redevelopment underway after the 2011 earthquake that devastated Christchurch and many of its suburbs. This place- and observation-based perspective on the Otakaro-Avon watershed merges humanistic scholarship with physical exploration of the river as a highly modified, impaired, yet still biologically rich ecosystem with great sociocultural significance.
Otakaro-Avon River, Christchurch NZ (photo: Ian McGregor, The Press, 15 July 2016)
I will examine a wide range of “water stories” focused on the river — from historical documents to scientific analyses to technical reports — as well as current representations of the river in post-earthquake planning documents and journalistic accounts; conservationist, community-based, and indigenous discourse; plans for memorials and sustainable redevelopment along the river; and works of literature, film, and online media. This research will influence the crafting of my own stories of the Otakaro-Avon River and its fluid future, based on my in-the-field observations and experiences, in both narrative forms suitable for general readers as well as in scholarly prose for academic audiences — much as I have done in my recent work on the Chicago River‘s history, ecology, and future sustainability.
Key questions to be addressed in this project include but are not limited to:
How has the Otakaro-Avon River been utilized, modified, polluted, exploited, abused, defended, etc. over time? How does the history, quality, and character of the river inform people’s relationship to its present state and future prospects?
In what ways is the river important, economically and culturally, to the Maori indigenous people (as mahinga kai, a food-gathering place) as well as New Zealanders of European descent? How do people in Otakaro-Avon River’s watershed connect to the waterway? What kinds of activities do they undertake in terms of recreation, industry, and conservation?
How do the above issues intersect with questions of environmental justice, especially with respect to toxic pollution, public access to water resources and open space, and iwi (indigenous people) living with the Otakaro-Avon River watershed?
As an interdisciplinary-minded scholar within the environmental humanities, I employ a qualitative research approach. Using the analytic tools of ecocriticism, I emphasize the close reading and analysis of individual texts, their relationships with one another, and their place in the broad contexts of scientific discourse, nature writing, environmental history, and sustainability. At root, my work starts from the premises that the urban environment (both built and natural) is a worthy object of study; that natural resources are imperiled and therefore in need of protection and conservation; and that humanistic inquiry about the myriad relationships between humanity and nature in cities can foster, in the long run, ecological awareness and environmental progress.
The LA River in 2010 (photo by Mark Boster of the LA Times)
Academic and Professional Context: Urban rivers are many things simultaneously: corridors of biodiversity, green infrastructure for storm water retention, transportation arteries for commerce, waste sinks, places of human recreation, and sites of environmental restoration. This partial list illustrates their dual nature: waterways in cities are all too often heavily polluted, modified, and abused ecosystems that bear scant resemblance to their former selves. They function as receptacles of waste and servants of commerce/industry, at the expense of water quality and biodiversity; and in many cases, city dwellers are physically as well as culturally cut off from access to waterways.
RU students paddle the North Branch of the Chicago River, Fall 2013 (M. Bryson)
Yet urban rivers also harbor tremendous renrenga ropi (biodiversity) and exhibit a capacity to connect citizens to the natural world that exists cheek-by-jowl with the built environment as well as to their cities’ natural and cultural histories. In this sense, damaged urban water systems are pathways of connection that can foster a sense of place vital to building an environmental ethic of care among city dwellers.
Geographers, urban ecologists, environmental scientists, and sustainability scholars are assessing waterways as a critical component of urban ecosystems. Given that cities consume energy and resources from far beyond their geographic boundaries and produce high levels of waste as well as greenhouse gases, their future sustainability depends upon large-scale actions such as repairing water/wastewater infrastructure, conserving energy, improving transportation access and efficiency, enhancing biodiversity, and reducing material waste.
RNZAF aerial survey of damage, showing flooding due to soil liquefaction in Christchurch NZ (Royal NZ Defence Force)
Such goals are complicated and made urgent by the destructiveness of natural disasters. The 2011 Christchurch earthquake provides a monumental challenge as well as golden opportunity for inclusive and socially just urban planning that embraces environmental sustainability as a central goal. Unsurprisingly, the Otakaro-Avon River is prominent within this planning and rebuilding process (and illustrative of its many challenges).
More broadly, urban rivers provide a specific context for assessing the impacts of global urbanization on human relationships to nature. As of 2015, over 50% of the world’s population is urban; in the US and NZ, that figure is 82% and 86%, respectively, according to the World Bank. A consequence of this is a pervasive (though hardly universal) alienation from the natural world of urban citizens. River systems constitute important natural resources where people can have direct and meaningful contact with nature close to where they live.
The stories we tell about cities and rivers are a means of grappling with the ideas and questions noted above. While the natural and social sciences generate vital empirical data on urban rivers, the role of the arts and humanities is uniquely critical to understanding urban waterways and our relationships to them. Our “water stories” are both a means of representing our values and history as well as a method of critique. The fundamental power of storytelling within human experience points to the impact of artistic expression and humanistic analysis on understanding the importance of waterways within urban ecosystems and human communities.
Significance of Study: Understanding the role of water in urban ecosystems is vital to improving the resilience of cities (e.g., protecting people and property from floods and other environmental disasters) and making them more sustainable (e.g., improving water retention and quality through expansion of green infrastructure). Cities are where most people in the world now live, a trend that will continue in coming decades as we grapple with the impacts of climate change, water quality degradation, toxic pollution, and environmental injustice. As a vital resource for all human communities, water is an important node of inquiry within environmental science and, more broadly, sustainability studies.
Urban rivers (and their watersheds, which include tributaries, wetlands, and estuaries) are ideal barometers of the ecological and socio-cultural health of our cities as well as our attitudes about and connections to the natural world. The Otakaro-Avon River is one of New Zealand’s most polluted waterways and, at the same time, one of its most important — both ecologically and symbolically — given the high number of people who live and work within its watershed and its centrality within the city’s earthquake recovery process.
Enhancing our knowledge, awareness, and appreciation of the river’s status and value is vital to its remediation and restoration as a living ecosystem that is not just an integral part of Christchurch’s green infrastructure, but also a significant thread within the city’s historical and cultural fabric. My research will explore how stories have defined the Otakaro-Avon River thus far, and how new ones might shape its sustainable future.
Why New Zealand? As an island country distinguished by highly diverse ecosystems, small and large cities, a vibrant indigenous culture, famously productive agricultural lands, longstanding conservation values, and threatened ecosystems and natural resources, New Zealand is a remarkable laboratory for exploring questions of environmental sustainability in the early 21st century.
Possessing a uniquely complex postcolonial mix of people from indigenous Maori (tangata whenua), European, and trans-Pacific Island cultures, New Zealand is progressive in its formal and structural recognition of indigenous rights, which has important implications for urban sustainable development and environmental conservation. More locally, Christchurch is a vitally important urban center: not only is it the biggest city on the South Island (pop. ~366,000), but its ongoing efforts to recover from the devastating earthquake in 2011 make it a test case for how cities can respond to natural disasters and seize opportunities to improve the sustainability of urban infrastructure, revitalize waterways, increase open space, enhance biodiversity, and involve the citizenry within the ongoing planning and reconstruction process.
Lincoln University: An incredible wealth of people and resources exist in and around Christchurch that would be invaluable to me as a scholar and writer. The Faculty of Environment, Society, and Design and its Department of Environmental Management at Lincoln University — a land-based institution located near Christchurch with a phenomenal array of environmental academic programs and research centres — offer an interdisciplinary community of scholars and teachers dedicated to environmental research and sustainability education.
LU’s Centre of Land, Environment, and People (LEaP), which is closely affiliated with the aforementioned Faculty, provides an intellectual home for research and collaboration with scholars and students from diverse disciplines spanning the natural/social sciences, the humanities, and various technical fields. Additionally, the Waterways Centre for Freshwater Management, a research collaboration between LU and the University of Canterbury, has published a wealth of technical reports on water resources throughout the Christchurch metro area and the Canterbury region, and would be an invaluable resource for advice and collaboration.
Tomorrow afternoon my SUST 340 Policy, Law, & Ethics class at Roosevelt University’s Chicago Campus proudly hosts a special presentation entitled “City Creatures: Urban Biodiversity in Chicago” at 3:30 p.m. in Roosevelt’s LEED-Gold Wabash Building, Room 1214. Dr. Gavin Van Horn of the Center for Humans and Nature will discuss his recent book, City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness (University of Chicago Press), published in November 2015; and then engage in dialogue with my students and the RU community about urban biodiversity from the perspective of the environmental humanities.
Dr. Van Horn is the co-editor of City Creatures and is the Director of Cultures of Conservation at the Center for Humans and Nature, as well as editor of the widely-read City Creatures blog. His work focuses particularly on how place-based values are developed and strengthened in dialogue with local landscapes. He continues to explore cultural perceptions of wildlife; place-based ethics; endangered species recovery, ethics, and policy; and the values involved in ecological restoration projects, community gardening, and wildlife management.
This special event is free and open to the public, and is hosted by students in SUST 340 Policy, Law, & Ethics. A limited number of signed copies will be available for purchase ($30 cash) and discount order forms will be available.
Videoconference Option: For those who cannot attend in person, the City Creatures event will be video- and teleconferenced live via Zoom as well as recorded, so that you may watch and/or listen from anywhere in the world. Login information is here:
Topic: City Creatures at RU Presentation 11 Apr 2016
Time: Apr 12, 2016 3:30 PM (GMT-5:00) Central Time (US and Canada)
We usually think of cities as the domain of humans—but we are just one of thousands of species that call the urban landscape home. Chicago residents knowingly move among familiar creatures like squirrels, pigeons, and dogs, but might be surprised to learn about all the leafhoppers and water bears, black-crowned night herons and bison, beavers and massasauga rattlesnakes that are living alongside them. City Creatures introduces readers to an astonishing diversity of urban wildlife with a unique and accessible mix of essays, poetry, paintings, and photographs.
The contributors bring a story-based approach to this urban safari, taking readers on birding expeditions to the Magic Hedge at Montrose Harbor on the North Side, canoe trips down the South Fork of the Chicago River (better known as Bubbly Creek), and insect-collecting forays or restoration work days in the suburban forest preserves.
The book is organized into six sections, each highlighting one type of place in which people might encounter animals in the city and suburbs. For example, schoolyard chickens and warrior wasps populate “Backyard Diversity,” live giraffes loom at the zoo and taxidermy-in-progress pheasants fascinate museum-goers in “Animals on Display,” and a chorus of deep-freeze frogs awaits in “Water Worlds.”
Although the book is rooted in Chicago’s landscape, nature lovers from cities around the globe will find a wealth of urban animal encounters that will open their senses to a new world that has been there all along. Its powerful combination of insightful narratives, numinous poetry, and full-color art throughout will help readers see the city—and the creatures who share it with us—in an entirely new light.
I was very saddened to learn a few weeks ago of the passing of Pauline Dubkin Yearwood, whom I befriended several years ago while doing research on the life and work of her father and Chicago nature writer, Leonard Dubkin. Pauline graciously allowed me to interview her twice in 2007 and lent me a trove of her father’s papers and letters to assist my research, which she encouraged and supported with enthusiasm and generosity. She will be dearly missed by her family, colleagues, and many friends.
Pauline Dubkin Yearwood, the longtime managing editor of the Skokie-based Chicago Jewish News, was a prolific and award-winning journalist who covered topics from arts to health care to personal profiles.
“She was an excellent reporter and beyond that a very graceful writer,” said Joseph Aaron, editor and publisher of Chicago Jewish News. “She could handle any subject. For us she wrote a 2,500-word cover story almost every week — something like 900 cover stories.”
Aaron said Yearwood always took an unbiased approach to her work. “Everybody felt she’d given them a fair shake, covered the story fairly,” he said.
Yearwood 73, died of complications of pancreatic cancer on Dec. 22, 2015, according to her daughter Lagusta. She moved to her daughter’s home in New Paltz, N.Y., about a year ago after being diagnosed with the disease.
After high school at Francis W. Parker School in Chicago, she got a bachelor’s degree from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania before returning to the Chicago area to get a master’s degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism of Northwestern University.
By the mid-1970s, she was married and living in Phoenix. She later divorced but remained in Phoenix, where she raised her children and began writing for newspapers including the Phoenix New Times and the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix.
“She reviewed plays and was a theater critic,” her daughter said.
Yearwood moved back to the Chicago area in the late 1990s and was soon writing for the Chicago Jewish News, work she continued until early December.
“Her writing and reporting were both very impressive,” Aaron said. “I would give her an assignment, and she would know exactly who to call, how to pursue it and how to do the research.”
Yearwood won a Chicago Headline Club Peter Lisagor Award for Exemplary Journalism in the category of Best in-depth Reporting in a Community Newspaper for her October 2008 story, “Obama and the Jews,” examining the relationship between the then soon-to-be president and the Jewish community.
She also won a 2014 American Jewish Press Association award for a 2013 profile of Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis.
“I found her to be kind, probing and thought-provoking,” Lewis said in an email about the profile, which focused on Lewis’ conversion to the Jewish faith. “It is the essence of Jewish life she was interested in.”
“She was devoted to her children and her writing,” said former Tribune writer Harriet Choice, who met Yearwood when both were in high school.
Yearwood “also had a passion for animals, very into animal rights,” Choice said. That interest grew out of childhood adventures with her father, who took her to what he called his “secret places” to see natural places around the city.
“She did a lot of work for animal causes” and was a vegan for 22 years, her daughter said.
Judy Voigt, another longtime friend, called Yearwood a brilliant and prolific writer whose work didn’t stop at journalism. “She was an incredible writer — she wrote a couple of plays,” Voigt said.
Yearwood’s play, “The Natural History of Mozart Street,” was based on her father’s efforts to become an expert on nature in the city and was presented in 2010 as a staged reading by Chicago’s Genesis Theatrical Productions.
Aaron said he regularly heard compliments from people covered in Yearwood’s stories. “She really was able to grasp a topic and convey it in a both accurate and colorful way.”
She is also survived by her son, Leonard.
A tribute will be from 1 to 3 p.m. Jan. 24, in the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership, 610 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago.
Graydon Megan is a freelance reporter. A version of this article appeared in print on January 07, 2016, in the Business section of the Chicago Tribune with the headline “Reporter, editor with Chicago Jewish News.”
Still plenty of room in this new one-week-intensive summer course! Pre-session is next Wed., May 6th, at 4:3pm in Gage 218. For more detailed information on my summer intensive course, check out this Writing Urban Nature preview; and share a pdf version of the image above via email.
RU students paddle the North Branch of the Chicago River, Fall 2012 (M. Bryson)
This May 2015 one-week-intensive section of SUST 390Writing Urban Nature is an environmental literature and writing special topics course distinguished by in-the-field explorations of various natural and urban environments. The class provides a unique immersive experience in “nature close at hand” at sites of ecological and cultural significance in the Chicago region. Strong emphasis on close observing place and people; walking and exploring landscapes and neighborhoods; and reflecting on / discussing compelling ideas, stories, and images of urban nature, broadly defined.
Assigned readings will include selections from May Watts, Reading the Landscape of America; Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac; Joel Greenberg, Of Prairie, Woods, and Water; blogs such as City Creatures and The Nature of Cities; and other texts. The reading list will be distributed well in advance of the class so that students will have time to read ahead prior to the week’s explorations and discussions.
Daily activities will consist of field excursions to sites of interest in Chicago’s urban landscape; discussion of assigned readings; quiet time for personal reflection, journal writing, and photography; and potential service work for local environmental organizations. Students’ daily journal and photo archive will provide material for a personal/critical reflection essay (due one week after the class ends) that incorporates text and image, critically analyzes selections from the course reading list, and reflects on the student’s individual experience in the class. Collectively, the class will produce an online project (“Chicago’s Urban Nature”) as part of the SUST at RU Blog that features creative/reflective writing that reflects upon their experience and incorporates both text and image.
SUST students visit the North Park Village Nature Center, Fall 2012 (M. Bryson)
Potential sites we will explore include Chicago’s lakeshore parklands and public spaces, the Chicago River (on foot and/or by canoe), neighborhood parks of cultural and ecological significance, nature centers on the North and South Sides, selected urban farms within the city, and the natural and industrial lands of the Calumet Region on the far South Side. The week’s schedule is still under development, but the varied locations will give students an opportunity to explore many seldom-seen parts of the city within a unique learning context. Most of these activities will be free, though a small fee may be charged to cover certain trips (e.g., canoe trip on the Chicago River). Public transportation will be used to access most sites. Carpooling options will be discussed at the May 6 pre-session (see below).
Who Should Take this Class
SUST students working at the Eden Place Nature Center on Chicago’s South Side, 2 Dec 2014 (M. Bryson)
SUST 390 Writing Urban Nature is cross-listed with ENG 340 Writing Urban Nature and PLS 371 Humanities Seminar II. SUST majors can take SUST 390 Writing Urban Nature for major credit as a SUST core course, as a Relevant Elective within their major, or as a general elective. Students who have taken a previous version of SUST 390 are eligible to take this version for credit. English majors may use this as an upper-level ENG credit or as an elective course in SUST or ENG. Students in the PLS Flex-Track program may register for PLS 371 for Humanities II credit as an upper-level general education course, or take SUST 390 for elective credit.
Registration Information
SUST 390-X1 Writing Urban Nature — CRN 30666 / Pre-req: ENG 102 with a grade of C- or better
ENG 340-X1 Writing Urban Nature — CRN 30689 / Pre-req: ENG 220 with a grade of C- or better
PLS 371-X1 Humanities Seminar II — CRN 30690 / Pre-req: PLS 370 or concurrent; admission to Flex-Track program for adults or advisor consent
Meets May 18-22 from 10:30am to 5pm at RU’s Chicago Campus. Required pre-session on May 6 from 4:30-6pm, room TBA. Some additional work online required; final assignment due May 29.
For more information, contact Prof. Mike Bryson (mbryson@roosevelt.edu or 312-281-3148).
