This morning I put “The Dave Brubeck Quartet at Carnegie Hall” on my turntable. After a long and productive life in music, jazz pianist and composer Dave Brubeck passed away at age 92, as recounted here in the New York Times.
Take Five, Dave.
Junior’s Fall from Grace: More Bad News for Peotone
You’d think that Jessie Jackson Jr.’s stunning fall from political grace last week would have opponents of the Great Imaginary Airport in Peotone doing cartwheels of joy out in the cold autumnal winds of eastern Will County.
After all, the last significant public appearance by Jackson was way back on April 21st, when as a progressive-minded environmentalist he promoted Earth Day by sanctimoniously spading up soil in a Peotone-area cornfield while surrounded by media and bussed-in supporters from his 2nd Congressional District. His purported “people’s groundbreaking” was for what Jackson insisted on calling the Abraham Lincoln National Airport.
That grandiose name is telling, for it expresses Jr.’s once-vaulting political ambition even as it inappropriately cloaks a misguided boondoggle of an airport project in the image of one of America’s most revered presidents. It also signifies the longstanding logjam between Jackson’s Cook County-based Abraham Lincoln National Airport Commission (ALNAC) and the various governmental bodies of Will County, which understandably want to retain control over the airport’s construction and administration.
That’s why the folks of S.T.A.N.D. (Shut This Airport Nightmare Down) and other grassroots opponents of the Great Imaginary Airport should mourn rather than celebrate Jackson’s departure and ALNAC’s inevitable dissolution. Without the gridlock-producing squabbles over the airport’s construction funding, name, or design that Jackson’s commission helped create, airport proponents now have before them a slightly less congested path toward the project’s FAA approval — which hinges upon, among many other things, a unified governing authority for the airport.
(M. Bryson)
Note that I said “slightly.” That’s because building a functional political alliance in Illinois these days is about as likely as finding a Republican candidate with a chance to win Jackson’s empty seat in the forthcoming special election his resignation necessitates. Consequently, the fate of the Great Imaginary Airport will continue to be determined by a long war of retrenchment among various factions, some high profile and others little known.
On one side are Governor Pat Quinn and his army of IDOT technocrats, who have spent $29.8 million of taxpayer money thus far buying up 2,317 acres of land in the as-yet-unapproved airport’s footprint, and are now expanding their holdings through eminent domain proceedings against unwilling sellers.
Aligned with Quinn are various Will County leaders eager for a big fat construction project to provide local jobs, no matter how temporary those might be or whether the long-term prospects of the airport are viable.
On the other side are Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, who strenuously opposes the project as antithetical to an expanded O’Hare; and United CEO Jeff Smisek, who is on record opposing a third airport for the Chicago region (a view shared by other major airline execs, as well).
Joining their ranks are the politically weak but morally righteous grassroots opponents in eastern Will County, who correctly view the airport as a naked land grab by the state; and a guy named Jim Bult, who in a supreme example of irony already owns and runs a small private airport within the footprint of the GIA (Bult Field) and who to my knowledge has no desire to shut down his operation or take his neighbors’ land.
Sure, we’ll miss you, Junior, and all the free theater you provided us over the years. But as for the Great Imaginary Airport controversy in Peotone, the war grinds on.
A version of this article was published as my monthly op-ed column in the 4 December 2012 edition of the Joliet Herald-News. For more information from IDOT’s perspective, consult the official South Suburban Airport website. For past news and critical analysis, see the commentary and news reports on this blog.
Spring Registration at RU is Underway
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!
How to Get Elected to Political Office
It’s not terribly hard to get elected to political office these days. All you need are lots of money, well-heeled connections (preferably of the family variety), a dash of luck, and some clever campaign tactics to bring the vote home. Given this short and simple list, it’s a wonder more of us aren’t running.
First, you’ve got to have money. Lots and lots of it. The higher your office aspirations, the more you need. To get this money, you must make connections with people who have money.
Yes, you could work like a dog to earn money and cultivate your connections. But sheer luck is quicker and much less exhausting. Being born into a rich and/or politically connected family is a marvelously effective conduit to money and its siblings, power and influence.
If you’re considering families to be born into, check out the Romney, Kennedy, or Bush clans if you plan to compete for state or national office. In Chicago, I recommend having Daley, Jackson, or Madigan as your last name. Here in Will County, a good way to an Illinois General Assembly job is to be born a Walsh or McGuire.
Next, you need to figure out what you stand for on the great issues of the day. But don’t get bogged down by complicated stuff like foreign policy or pension reform. Given Americans’ long-established preference for style over substance, I recommend utilizing some generic yet appealing phrases such as freedom, opportunity, lower taxes, and the middle class. These are patriotic, battle-tested, and delightfully vague non-positions that appeal to folks across the political spectrum.
Finally, don’t forget to use tactics: practical campaign strategies carefully engineered to cultivate votes. Two wonderful examples of tactical mastery are currently on display right here in Will County.
State Representative Larry Walsh, Jr. (D-86th District) definitely knows how to get his name out there. Appointed by a special Democratic committee last spring to replace Jack McGuire (who conveniently retired right after his election when he suddenly realized he just wasn’t up for the job anymore), Walsh is a relative newcomer to state politics with a high profile name. His dad, Larry Walsh, is the longstanding Chief Executive Office of Will County, a former state senator, and one of the area’s most recognizable politicians.
Wisely, Rep. Walsh, Jr. has designed his campaign signs to highlight his name in big bold letters — LARRY WALSH — while including the “Jr.” as a teeny-tiny afterthought that you can barely see without a magnifying glass. Even though most voters don’t know beans about Walsh, Jr. himself, they sure recognize his name. You can’t buy publicity like that — though you can be born into it (see above).
But for sheer political brilliance and understated bravado, there’s Jesse Jackson, Jr., the embattled and recently reclusive US Representative from IL’s 2nd Congressional District who is heading toward a landslide victory despite not having shown up at his office for the last four months, let alone hit the campaign trail.
Reportedly suffering from mental and gastrointestinal illness, and politically buffeted by two different ethics-related inquiries, Jackson realizes that saying and doing nothing at all as the entrenched incumbent is the most expedient route to re-election while facing two overmatched and unknown challengers, Republican Brian Woodworth and Independent Marcus Lewis.
Sometimes in politics, small is beautiful. And silence can be golden.
A version of this essay was published as my regular op-ed column in the 28 Oct. 2012 edition of the Joliet Herald-News as “Illinois One Big, Happy, Political Family.”
Canoeing the Upper North Branch of the Chicago River
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
- Linne Woods water chemistry data 2012-10-20 (pdf)
- Linne Woods macro-invertebrate data 2012-10-20 (pdf)
- Linne Woods streamflow data 2012-10-20 (pdf)
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.
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.
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.
Sustainability Week at RU: Oct. 23-25 Events
Roosevelt University celebrates Sustainability Week next Tuesday through Thursday, Oct. 23-25!
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.
Check out the complete schedule here, and spread the word! All events are free and open to the public.
At the AASHE 2012 Conference in LA
Today and tomorrow I’m attending the annual Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) conference, held this year in Los Angeles. This is the biggest and most diverse gathering of its kind in the US (if not the world) and brings together faculty from all academic disciplines, graduate and undergraduate students, sustainability coordinators, campus operations administrators, and others to explore every conceivable aspect of sustainability in our colleges and universities.
Given that AASHE sprung into being as recently as 2006, the size and diversity of this annual gathering and the remarkable resources of the association in general are testament to the growing significance of sustainability in higher education’s curricular innovations and physical operations.
This afternoon, Oct. 15th, I’m participating in a roundtable session entitled Teaching Sustainability 101: How Do We Structure An Introductory Course? Chaired by Prof. Tom Schrand of Philadelphia University, the session focuses on the pedagogy and learning objectives of introductory sustainability courses. Fellow participants include:
Lindy Biggs (Auburn University)
Lisa Benton-Short (George Washington University)
Geoffrey Habron (Michigan State University)
Our panel discussion, according to our submitted abstract, “brings together five university instructors who have been teaching some version of ‘Intro to Sustainability’ for at least several years. The panelists will share and compare their different approaches to sustainability as an academic discipline, as a practice, and as a set of values. What concepts and ideas are essential, what assignments and activities are effective, what readings and audiovisual materials are engaging, and what outcomes can be achieved? The panel members represent different disciplines, different types of institutions, and different curricular settings. They assess what has worked in their different contexts and what they share in common when they introduce students to education about and for sustainability.”
Position Available: Assistant Professor of Sustainability Studies at RU
Roosevelt University is seeking an Assistant Professor in Sustainability Studies for a tenure-track position beginning 15 August 2013. Applicants should have the ability to teach multiple courses in the Sustainability Studies (SUST) undergraduate curriculum as well as interdisciplinary social and/or natural science seminars to adult learners in the Professional and Liberal Studies (PLS) program. Teaching load is six courses per year. Courses are offered at Roosevelt’s Chicago and Schaumburg campuses as well as online.
Duties: (1) Teaching courses within the SUST major as well as adult general education seminars with the PLS program. (2) Assisting with SUST program development through curriculum enhancement and assessment, service learning project development, community outreach, and online social media writing. (3) Maintaining an active scholarly research program within one’s academic discipline and/or the emerging field of sustainability studies. (4) Advising undergraduate students. (5) Performing departmental, college, university, and professional service.
Roosevelt’s Sustainability Studies program, founded in 2010, is the first of its kind in the Chicago region. Housed within the Evelyn T. Stone College of Professional Studies, it maintains a close relationship with the College’s PLS program, a longstanding leader in educating returning adult students. Roosevelt University was founded in 1945 on the principle that higher education should be available to all academically qualified students. Today, Roosevelt is the fourth most ethnically diverse college in the Midwest (U.S. News and World Report, 2011) and a national leader in preparing students to assume meaningful, purposeful roles in the global community.
Minimum Qualifications: PhD or terminal degree in a sustainability-related discipline (or interdisciplinary field) within the natural or social sciences. Active scholarly research program and the ability to apply research to the classroom and communicate findings to a general audience. Evidence of excellence and versatility in teaching. Ability to teach with technology and in multiple formats (such as hybrid and online courses). Understanding of interdisciplinary teaching and curriculum development.
Highly Desirable Criteria: Expertise in multiple areas within sustainability, especially urban agriculture, energy and climate change, and/or waste and recycling. Experience in service learning initiatives and/or academic program development. Experience with both adult and traditional-age students. Enthusiasm for teaching general education seminars as well as more specialized SUST courses. Experience teaching critical thinking, research, and writing.
To Apply: Visit the Roosevelt HR webpage and click on “Full Time Faculty” to find the SUST Assistant Professor listing. Applicants should provide a letter of interest outlining their teaching experience, research program, and suitability for the position; an up-to-date curriculum vitae; and a list of three to five professional references.
For More Information: Consult the SUST program website for details on the curriculum, faculty, and degree options for students. Applicants may address questions to the search committee chair and SUST program director, Professor Michael Bryson (mbryson@roosevelt.edu).
Application deadline is 1 December 2012. Position begins on 15 August 2013.
Equitable Education = a Strong Economy
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.
Citizens of wealthy school districts don’t consider these things “luxuries,” but rather absolute necessities. So why is it acceptable to us as a nation that so many of our schools do without?
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.
A version of this essay appeared as my op-ed column, “Equitable Education Equals a Strong Economy” in the Sunday, 23 Sept 2012 edition of the Joliet Herald-News (p25).
Assessing Water Quality on the Chicago River’s North Branch at West River Park
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.
(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.
(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.).
(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.
(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.
(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.
West River Park Water Quality Data 2012-09-08 (pdf)
(M. Bryson)