Seeing Rivers as Ecosystems in LA and Chicago

For the first time in decades, people in Los Angeles this month were able to paddle along the much-maligned and concrete-encased Los Angeles River without breaking the law. It was, if you’ll pardon the pun, a watershed moment — both for the river, which is making a comeback in the eyes of the general public as well as elected officials; and for the greater Los Angeles community, which is slowly coming to grips with the fact that it has a potentially dynamic natural resource threading its way through neighborhoods that are starved for high quality green space.

The LA River in 2010 (photo by Mark Boster of the LA Times)

Even the U.S. Corps of Engineers, the same outfit that tamed the flood-prone river in the 1930s by building levees and a concrete channel for the formerly wild LA river, is coming on board. This past month’s float down the Sepulveda Basin section of the river included civic officials as well as Mark Toy, District Commander of the Corps of Engineers. As reported by the LA Times on 9 August 2011,

Los Angeles is urban territory, and this 1.5-mile trip is arrow-straight, flanked by the San Diego and Ventura freeways and strewn with discarded bicycles, shopping carts, trash and, occasionally, the carcasses of rodents.

It is also home for 212 species of birds, including yellow warblers, hooded orioles and the federally endangered least Bell’s vireo.

In July, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers District Commander Col. Mark Toy issued the license allowing the Los Angeles Conservation Corps to operate the program along a soft-bottom stretch of the river between Balboa and Burbank boulevards, about 17 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles.

On Monday, his participation in the program’s inaugural “ceremonial paddle” was viewed by environmentalists as an important juncture in the history of the river that was tamed and polluted in the 1930s by the corps’ concrete walls and 12,000 storm drains.

“For more than a century, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has built walls between people and their rivers here in Los Angeles and nationwide,” said David Beckman of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “So to have the corps’ district commander metaphorically jumping over that wall and into a boat is symbolic and potentially very important.”

Toy shrugged off such accolades, saying, “This is a team effort, and I’m proud to be a part of it. What we learn from the program this year will help shape the future of the river.”

The recent resurgence of interest in the LA River, spurred by river enthusiasts and environmental advocates, exemplifies an important axiom in relation to urban streams. If people start using them for recreation, they suddenly become more important, no matter their state of abuse or degradation. And such usage, in turn, spurs efforts to clean up the rivers in order to benefit from their important functions as green corridors.

This has long been the case with the Chicago River, which has experienced a remarkable resurgence in recent decades since the formation of the non-profit river advocacy group Friends of the Chicago River in the 1970s. Now canoe races are held along various stretches of the river, schoolchildren and adults come to the water to learn about aquatic ecology and urban conservation, and the city has poured millions of dollars into building attractive riverwalks and improving water quality — all testament to the fact that the river is a cultural amenity and economic resource.

Yet even Chicago has a long, long way to go before its channelized, reversed, and polluted waterways regain their ecological health and biodiversity. The mere name of the transformed south branch of the river — the Sanitary and Ship Canal — indicates its primary identity as a transportation conduit and sewage conveyance channel, rather than as a living river. But the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District’s recent decision to plan for disinfecting the treated wastewater it releases into the Chicago Area Waterway System (CAWS) is a landmark step in working toward the river’s ecological improvement and reshaping that identity which dates from the late 19th century.

It looks like LA, with the Corps of Engineers’ recent foray on the river and the building public interest in exploring its hidden reaches, is taking initial steps down a similar path. The ultimate goal: to treat urban rivers like living ecosystems, which they are, instead of mere tools for flood control, shipping, and wastewater management.

From the City to the Country: Visiting the Will County Fair

Late every August, my family performs a sacred ritual. We get up early, eat a stout breakfast, then drive east from our urban homestead in Joliet out into the countryside. Our destination: Peotone, Illinois — home of the utterly splendid Will County Fair.

From the vantage point of our little bungalow on Joliet’s near-West Side, just getting to the fair is half the fun. We always cut through downtown Joliet, then take country roads out toward Peotone. Minutes after threading our way through the most urbanized part of Will County, we’re whizzing by fields and farms on the outskirts of the Big City. We slow down, open the car windows, breath in the fresh country air, and take in the view of a huge expanse of blue sky.

Though big as the world to a child’s eye, the Will County Fair is a small and wholesome event that looks and feels like a journey back in time. It features all the classic Midwestern fair elements — deep-fried elephant ears, carnival rides, a baby contest, live music, a rodeo, tractor pulls, magic shows, a demolition derby — without the aggressively seedy atmosphere created by over-the-hill 80s rock bands or, worse yet, grandstanding politicians.

In the Swine Barn — that’s some pig!

Best of all, Will County’s fair puts agriculture front and center, as it should be. From the fairground’s main parking lot, you can buy your admission ticket and walk right into the Swine Barn — an arrangement both excellent and deeply symbolic.

The Will County Fair is where city kids like our two girls can get up close and personal with goats, chickens, dairy cows, beef cattle, hogs, sheep, horses, ponies, turkeys, geese, and pigeons — wonderful livestock all.

Visiting with the goats

Airy old barns dominate half the fairgrounds, and we strolled through the long corridors of stalls for several hours to see the animals, scratch their heads, thump their bellies, take in the pleasantly pungent smell of manure, and chat with the farm kids who tend these beasts with skill and devotion. This is 100% fun, and the type of education you can’t get in school or from a book. A few years ago our then 40-pound daughter Lily got to hop into a farmer’s hog pen to help herd several 250-pound swine through the barn to get their baths. She slapped those hogs on their muscled rumps and barked out “Away, pig!” — and by golly, they moved.

And the food? Boy, oh boy. We ate burgers and fries from the 4-H stand run by an enthusiastic squadron of teenagers, portabella mushroom sandwiches and marinated veggies expertly grilled by Farmer John Moore of Wind N’ Oaks Farm, ice cream from the Peotone United Methodist Church ladies, and some sinfully delicious corn dogs.

I wonder how many city folk head to Peotone each year to connect with Will County’s still-thriving but increasingly pressured rural heritage. Year after year our civic leaders race to pave over our fertile farmland according to the economic gospel of “development.” From the vantage point of the county fairgrounds, though, the foolhardy and state-sanctioned land grab called the Peotone Airport looms as an exquisitely ironic example of misguided priorities.

Maybe more of our urban and suburban citizens, and especially our politicians, should spend some quality time in the livestock barns visiting with farmers and the 4-H kids who live and work on our county’s farms. It might provide some much-needed perspective on balancing economic development with the preservation of rural culture.

The only bad thing about the 108th Will County Fair? Having to leave. We’re already looking forward to next year.

A print version of this essay was published on Sunday, 4 September 2011, as “County Fair a Crucial Connection,” my monthly op-ed piece in the Joliet Herald-News, p26. Also see the online version here.

How Safe Is Chicago’s Water?

Environmental reporter Michael Hawthorne of the Chicago Tribune has published a series of excellent articles this month about the state of water quality in Chicago and the suburbs. These detail the detected presence of lead, chromium, hormones, vinyl chloride, herbicides, antibiotics, and other contaminants — some of which are regulated by the EPA, others of which are not. He also reports on the latest developments in the Crestwood IL water scandal in which village officials knowingly laced their Lake Michigan municipal water supply with vinyl chloride-polluted well water for over 20 years.

For commentary on and links to these water-related stories, see my essay “Water Quality in Chicago” on the Sustainability Studies at RU Blog.

Fox in the City

This morning in Joliet while biking to the city’s public library, I had the 2nd urban fox sighting of my life. The first dated back to my years in Chicago, when once in the early 2000s while driving home after teaching a night class, I saw a red fox (Vulpes vulpes) cross Lawrence Avenue, right along the Chicago River’s North Branch.

Today I was biking on a quiet side street, listening to the gentle throb of the early August cicadas, when a very slight rustling on my right caught my ear.

Photo by Dan Walters (AKA Images)

I kept pedaling but turned, and saw a beautiful adult red fox lope through a front yard, then turn down a grassy alley. I never made eye contact, as the encounter lasted all of five seconds — but got a good look at this splendid creature’s color and form, especially the distinctive tail.

It’s good to know that there’s at least one fox on the prowl on Joliet’s West Side. (For you locals, this was on Mason Avenue, between Midland and Larkin Avenues — an area of ranch houses and ample, though not huge, yards.) For more reflections on the presence of foxes in urban environments, see this 2009 article from Chicago Wilderness.

Teale Woods in Joliet: Urban Nature Restoration

The announcement that the Forest Preserve District of Will County has begun work on developing a short trail through Teale Woods, a small nature preserve near where I live in Joliet, Illinois, got me thinking about this little essay I wrote about that patch of urban nature for the Joliet Herald-News back in March of 2010.

The advent of spring last week inspired me to visit one of my favorite quiet corners of Joliet — a place where time slows down and wild nature flourishes amidst the paved-over, gritty landscape of concrete, traffic noise, and hustling people.

My destination was Teale Woods, a 15-acre woodland along Theodore and Center Streets on Joliet’s near northwest side. With only one low-profile sign marking its existence as Will County Forest Preserve property, Teale Woods is still undeveloped and without official public access; but a couple of informal trails cut through the woodland and afford a quiet route away from the tumult of Theodore Street’s traffic.

This humble urban sanctuary is emblematic of wild spaces that exist, and sometimes flourish, against all odds within the built landscape of our cities. Homes, businesses, and busy roads are only steps away. The thoughtless litter of humans, newly revealed from the recent melting of winter’s snow cover, distracts the eye and disturbs the spirit.

Nevertheless, these scrappy, imperfect woods provide a natural haven where one can hear the plaintive tones of a white-throated sparrow and study the rugged form of a downed oak.

I suspect very few people in Joliet today know this place’s namesake, Edwin Way Teale. Born in 1899 in Joliet, Teale’s love of and fascination with nature were stoked in his formative years during visits to his grandparents’ farm near the Indiana Dunes. He later became one of the most celebrated American nature writers and photographers of the 20th century.

One of Teale’s most admired books was North with the Spring (1951), which chronicles a 17,000-mile journey following and celebrating the season’s arrival throughout the eastern US. While Teale visits several famous landscapes along the way, he also describes many virtually unknown spots of no particular significance — except that they provided a place for him to encounter a lively insect, find a native wildflower, or admire an old tree.

I like to think that Teale Woods in Joliet — about as low-profile and neglected as a nature preserve can get — is been one of those places he would’ve cherished.

The next time I visit the woods, I’ll pause a moment to reflect on Edwin Way Teale’s immeasurable impact upon Americans’ growing interest in preserving wild nature, even in cities. Then, I’ll grab my work gloves and trash bag, and get down to work picking up some litter.

This essay was published as “Teale Woods Hidden Joliet Gem” on 25 March 2010 in the Joliet Herald-News, p20. A few month’s after the article’s appearance, the Will County Forest Preserve District held public hearings on planned future developments of Teale Woods. The WCFPD plans to start restoring the woodland in 2011.

Time To Lock Down on Joliet Budget Talks

Ever since last April’s elections, I’ve been waiting for some blockbuster news to come out of City Hall in downtown Joliet. Now it’s late July, and though the outside temperature has been in the 90s, things are mighty cool in the city’s governmental chambers. So cool, in fact, one might think all’s well in the land of casinos, racetracks, and intermodal shipping container transfer centers.

But this deafening silence from Joliet’s leadership worries me a tad. I can’t help but wonder what we’ve been doing about that teensy little $27 million budget deficit projection for 2012.

Sure, there’s been some encouraging news from other quarters. Just last week Joliet scored a $820,000 grant from the Illinois EPA for upgrading its sewage infrastructure in order to significantly reduce the amount of untreated waste we routinely dump into the Des Plaines River. As an enthusiastic proponent of minimizing combined sewage overflow events, I’m sincerely impressed.

Also laudable is State Senator Wilhelmi’s recent tour of the Joliet Correctional Facility with a bevy of high-ranking state officials, an effort to underscore the need for preserving one of Joliet’s key historical and architectural assets. It’s possible to imagine Joliet someday making some tourism industry hay, Alcatraz-style, from its uneasy international reputation as a prison town.

The old Joliet Prison, shuttered since 2002 (photo courtesy of Joliet Herald-News)

There’s only one little hitch: raising the tens of millions necessary to secure and restore the monumental but crumbling limestone structure. By comparison, breaking out of jail is child’s play.

The subject of money leads me back to that $27 million deficit looming in front of us.

Again, it’s been almost four months since the April election. Our fiscal clock is ticking very loudly. Where is the budget crisis mitigation plan from our City Council? What is Mayor Giarrante doing to lead this critical effort?

I have a couple of friendly suggestions for City Manager Tom Thanas, whose job surely must be one of the most stressful in Will County. First, reassign the brilliant technocrat who wrote that blockbuster EPA wastewater grant to plugging the leaks in the city’s budget, which surely could use some re-engineering.

Secondly, get in touch with Senator Wilhelmi and see if you can hold a special budget meeting in the old Joliet Prison, where the peeling paint, rusting cell bars, and weed-filled exercise yards are evocative symbols of neglect and decay — and a grim foreshadowing of the city’s future if we cannot put our fiscal house in order.

Perhaps such a setting will impart the proper sense of seriousness and urgency the situation demands. And if some of Joliet’s well-compensated police officers could patrol the grounds to make sure that no Councilman or Councilwoman escapes until an initial plan is hammered out, all the better.

This column was written as an op-ed piece for the Joliet Herald-News‘ 29 July 2011 edition and published as “When Will Joliet Officials Deal with $27 Million Deficit?“. After my column’s deadline last week, HN reporter Bob Okon wrote on July 27th that the Joliet City Council had again rescheduled its summer budget meeting for Monday, August 1st, which is a regularly-scheduled “pre-council” meeting that has a public comment period scheduled at the end. Read HN reporter Cindy Cain’s coverage of that meeting, which announced that the projected deficit for 2012 isnow $23 million and floats various possibilities for reducing the city’s expenditures.

The Council’s regular meetings are on the 1st and 3rd Tuesdays of each month at 6:30pm. For more information, check the City of Joliet’s website.

Get on Your Bike

A few weeks ago marked the summer solstice, and I venture the following exhortation as we relish (or endure) this season of heat and long days.

We need to get out of our cars and get back on our bikes. Few things you do this summer will be better for your mind, body, and spirit.

Whether you’re a twenty-something or a senior, bikes are low-impact exercise machines that folks of all ages can use safely and pleasurably. My five-foot-tall arthritic Grandma Dorothy, bless her departed soul, rode a three-wheeler well into her seventies. And my spry 71-year-old father just got out his 1950s-era English road bike — the same one he rode through Joliet as a teenager — and started cruising again. Dad, I salute you!

Don’t have a bike? Just get one. Try a garage sale, where bikes abound; or even a neighbor’s garage, where I once scored a dusty vintage Schwinn Varsity ten-speed for fifty bucks. I’ve already put hundreds of miles on this classic and fully expect to be riding it for the next thirty years.

Feeling cheap? In case you haven’t noticed, gasoline is no bargain. For the price of a few fill-ups, you can get a very good bike at a local establishment and soon recoup your investment hand over handlebar. After that, you’re saving money every time you ride.

Old bike need a tune-up beyond oiling the chain and inflating the tires? If you’re not up to doing it yourself, take it to your local repair shop, get the job done right, and feed our hometown economy rather than the multinational oil production/pollution complex. (Yes, I’m liberal, but I’m also patriotic.)

Beyond these undeniably compelling reasons to get on your bike is something intangible but no less important: the experience of riding.

On a bike, life is palpably different. You feel the wind and sun. You breathe fresh air instead of recycled, air conditioned exhaust. Out of necessity, you pay attention to your surroundings. You use your muscles — remember them? — and challenge yourself physically. You glide by queued-up cars and see envious glances from the imprisoned drones therein.

On a bike you discover new ways to travel to your favorite places — back streets and bike paths where car traffic is lighter and life moves more slowly. You say hello to people working in their yards or to kids playing on the sidewalk, and in return get a smile or a friendly wave. In the process you start to see your community in a much different way — and, I would humbly suggest, a much better way.

Dear readers, I therefore beseech thee: get on your bikes! If you do, be sure to check back with me at the autumnal equinox and let me know how your summer went.

The essay, one of my monthly op-ed pieces for the Joliet Herald-News, was originally published as  “See Joliet, Will County by Bicycle” on 23 June 2011.

An Agricultural Landscape Adventure

Angelic Organics Farm, Caledonia, IL (photo by L. Bryson)

This past Sunday, July 10th, students in my PLS 392 Seminar in Humanities online summer course at Roosevelt University took an “agricultural landscapes” field trip to north-central Illinois, near the city of Rockford and just south of the Illinois-Wisconsin border. Such an adventure might seem an odd outing for a class like ours, which focuses on “representations of the urban landscape.” However, as the environmental historian William Cronon argues in his prologue to Nature’s Metropolis (1991), the city and country exist in a symbiotic relation, one defining the other in a dance of mutual dependence. And given the continued importance of farming in the otherwise heavily urbanized six-county Chicago region, we found it appropriate to explore northeastern Illinois’ remaining agricultural lands and to think about the shape and character of these lands and their relation to the city.

Enter Angelic Organics Farm, an organic community supported agriculture (CSA) operation based in Caledonia, IL. Angelic Organics was founded in the early 1990s by John Peterson, whose family had farmed this land since purchasing it in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The Learning Center's pavilion (photo by L. Bryson)

Peterson’s colorful history as a soul-searching farmer, writer, performance artist, and philosopher is the subject of the fascinating 2006 documentary film, The Real Dirt on Farmer John. The Angelic Organics Learning Center provides public tours and a wide variety of educational programs to teach visitors the craft of sustainable agricultural and its vital connection to the stewardship of nature. This farm is a living classroom where visitors observe how local diverse agricultural traditions thrive in our age of mega-industrial monocultural croplands and large-scale animal confinement operations.

Our tour guide on Sunday was April, an instructor at the Learning Center with a background in outdoor education and natural history. She led us on a two-hour walk around the grounds of the 180+ acre site and introduced us to the methods of vegetable production as well as animal husbandry employed on this diversified farm. Along the way, her narrative gave us a sense of how the ideas and philosophy behind such a farm are as important as the technical knowledge and hard physical labor that keep it going.

The farm has 30 acres under cultivation at any one time (photo by L. Bryson)

While there was only minimal active work being done on the farm that day (mostly the daily tending of animals), we did get a chance to inspect the many acres of vegetable fields up close and personal; pick some beets and basil; take home a broccoli flat or two; see the newborn baby bull frolic with his mother in a bucolic pasture; and hang out with the goats and chickens in their pens.

What one takes away from such an extraordinary opportunity to tour a working organic farm depends upon, in part, one’s background and connection to agriculture. Those in our group ranged from city folk like me with little to no experience working or living on farms, to those who grew up on farms or visited them frequently as children. For several people in our class, this represented their first time ever setting foot on a working farm. In that context, the opportunity to see where food comes from — what it looks like and how it’s grown in the fields — is a remarkably eye-opening experience.

Good Illinois soil is mighty productive (photo by L. Bryson)

For those familiar with conventional agriculture in the Midwest, the seemingly unending fields of corn and soybeans destined to be processed into a myriad of industrial agricultural products (from corn syrup to ethanol to animal feed), Angelic Organics is a throw-back to an earlier age when farms were diverse. And for those who garden small plots in their yards, the long orderly rows of perfectly cultivated vegetables — kale, lettuce, fennel, garlic, onions, tomatoes, potatoes, sweet corn, beets, and much more –represent a staggering achievement of scale using labor-intensive growing methods.

In such a neo-traditional model, dozens of different vegetables are grown in a well-orchestrated crop rotation in which fields are rested two out of every four years so that the soil is replenished; different types of crops are planted on a given plot of land, so as to avoid excessive nutrient depletion; animal waste is composted and used to fertilize the soil; hand labor and the intelligent use of technology is used to mitigate against pests and avoid the use of chemicals in protecting plants.

A recently born calf and its mother (photo by L. Bryson)

I say “neo-traditional” because while Angelic Organics, as the largest CSA farm in the Midwest, is at the cutting edge of contemporary farming, it also is a throwback to the time before World War Two when most American farms were family-run, highly diversified operations that used animals to produce eggs, cheese, milk, and meat; rotated crops and pastureland to maintain soil fertility; and recycled key elements of the farm — grass and manure — in a closed-loop ecosystem.

Angelic Organics, like other CSA operations, is a great place to contemplate the connection of farm to city. The idea of a CSA — where citizens purchase shares in a farm in advance of the growing season in order to help finance the farm’s operation, then receive a weekly box of harvested produce throughout the summer and/or fall — is a method of food production in which the farmer sells directly to the consumer and the purchaser feels an economic, social, and even physical connection to the farm.

Lily, age 9, crossing a field (photo by L. Bryson)

This sort of social contract is a strong element of Angelic Organics’ method and identity, and it connects this part of rural Illinois to urban residents in Rockford, Chicago, Schaumburg, and several other urban and suburban communities where the farm delivers its CSA share boxes to customers.

Another means of connection is the farm itself, which has developed its own education and public outreach programs through the Angelic Organics Learning Center. Here people can travel from cities, suburbs, and small towns to see a working Illinois organic farm in action, where all its operations are visible to the public and various kinds of skills and traditions (making soap, baking bread, tending animals) are taught in family-oriented programs. CSA members can also come to the farm and pick their own produce, a privilege that encourages them to think of the place as “their farm” — something they have ownership of in a very literal way.

The two Esmés (photo by L. Bryson)

This kind of welcoming attitude which defines many small-scale CSA farms stands in stark contrast to the industrial mega-farms and confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) that bar visitors, reporters, and cameras from their premises — a common practice depicted in recent agricultural documentaries such as Food, Inc.

For our group from Roosevelt University, the visit to the Angelic Organics Learning Center was a transformative experience. Students gained a much deeper appreciation of the work, planning, and creativity that go into a sustainable farm operation; and we were impressed by the aesthetics of the farmland and the sense of place it engenders within the rural landscape. A few students brought their children, as I did, and they were excited to learn about the crops and animals. Future Roosevelt field trips to this agricultural haven are definitely in the works!

Attending the 2011 ASLE Conference

Tomorrow I head down to Bloomington, Indiana, to participate in one of my favorite professional conferences — the biannual meeting of ASLE, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. As a scholar whose work straddles the humanities and natural sciences, and as someone teaching in RU’s newly-developed Sustainability Studies program, I’m always delighted to attend this energetic and intellectually-stimulating gathering of writers, teachers, scholars, artists, and activists. All of them are committed to advancing the cause of environmentalism, but from a myriad of perspectives and methods. Plus, we always manage to take a good field trip or two in between the formal conference proceedings.

This year’s ASLE meeting is hosted by Indiana University, and my journey this week will mark my first visit to that university as well as to Bloomington — another reason I’m looking forward to the adventure.

Indiana University's campus in Bloomington, IN

I’m very familiar with the “other Bloomington” of the Midwest — the one in Illinois where I went to college at Illinois Wesleyan University and which I still visit periodically with my family — but I’ve always had a notion to see this much-touted community that was the setting for the wonderful 1979 film, Breaking Away.

I’m taking part in a roundtable-style panel entitled “Sustainability Education: Multidisciplinary Perspectives and Approaches” that includes faculty participants from colleges and universities all across the US. My fellow panelists are presenting on topics ranging from teaching sustainability and literature in Appalachia, to designing interdisciplinary courses on climate change, to the creation of a sustainability blog that showcases student writing and art, to exploring ways in which sustainability can be infused throughout the general education curriculum for undergraduates.

My own presentation focuses on the new Sustainability Studies (SUST) program here at Roosevelt University. The program grew out of an experimental course on urban sustainability I team-taught back in the spring of 2009, an experience described in an essay from the July 2010 issue of Metropolitan Universities. As a new undergraduate degree housed in Roosevelt’s College of Professional Studies, the nascent SUST program just finished its third semester and has approximately 25 majors enrolled at Roosevelt’s two campuses (Chicago and Schaumburg, IL) and taking online courses. The curriculum’s core is a series of interdisciplinary courses that integrate the natural and social sciences with the humanities and address key issues and themes such as water; food; waste; biodiversity; energy and climate change; sprawl and transportation; and policy and ethics.

Three things strike me about our program as relevant to this panel’s discussion of sustainability education. The first is the institutional context in which our program emerged at RU, since many colleges and universities are considering ways to incorporate sustainability into their curriculum, whether as new ways to teach existing courses or in the shape of new courses and/or programs. In our case at Roosevelt, the university had some “vacant land” within the undergraduate curriculum which provided us with an opportunity to propose and develop this new major. While RU has well-established programs in biology and chemistry, there were no majors in environmental policy, studies, or science. My home college has an entrepreneurial orientation, and thus the development of the SUST curriculum received strong in-house support from our dean. It was favorably received by university-wide faculty committees, as well, in part because we took pains to show how the program was meant to complement existing science programs, rather than compete/conflict with them. By developing solid cross-college relationships with faculty colleagues in biology, chemistry, environmental science, math, and business, we hope to engage in future collaborations on many levels. One promising example of this is that SUST faculty were invited to participate in the current revamping of RU’s environmental science minor.

A second observation is how sustainability education contributes to an institution’s overall work to improve its physical operations and thus serve as a model of a sustainable community (a process I describe in my “Sustaining Sustainability” essay circulated previously). We at RU are behind many other US colleges and universities (such as Dickinson College, as chronicled by Professor Ashton Nichols), but we have become galvanized recently around a common goal of improving the sustainability of our two campuses and connecting this improvement as much as possible to our teaching, research, and service-learning activities. In this respect, sustainability education — whatever form it takes in a particular institution — can be an powerful force in getting people (from college administrators to alumni to community members) to see the ethical importance and economic benefits of reducing resource use, reducing waste, recycling materials, conserving water and energy, fostering local food production, and educating eco-literate citizens.

Lastly, there’s the transformative potential of technology, field experiences, and service-learning for sustainability education, all of which are exciting areas of inquiry and experimentation that can revitalize our teaching and stoke the inherent enthusiasm we’ve observed in our students for the ideas and practical applications of sustainability. In line with the College of Professional Studies’ tradition of serving adult / non-traditional learners (quite often parents juggling work, family, and school), we use technology to offer courses in a mix of formats — face to face, fully online, hybrid, and weekend — a course delivery approach which, though challenging to manage, greatly increases student access to our program. Just as significantly, our Sustainability Studies @ Roosevelt University blog, authored and maintained by my colleague Carl Zimring, serves triple duty as a teaching resource, marketing tool, and go-to news source about environmental issues impacting the Chicago region.

Another key feature of the SUST curriculum is its emphasis on field experiences to supplement classroom and online instruction. In my SUST 210 Sustainable Future and SUST 220 Water courses, as well as other classes, I take students out to various sites in the city and suburbs where they can talk with experts, gather and analyze empirical data, examine innovations in sustainable design and planning, and engage community members in environmental/social justice issues. Recent field trip sites have included the Chicago Center for Green Technology, the Field Museum of Natural History’s zoology collection and laboratories, the Chicago Wilderness “Wild Things” biannual environmental conference at University of Illinois at Chicago, the Chicago River, and local nature preserves and restoration sites. Many students describe these trips as powerfully transformative experiences that introduce them to places they never knew existed, educate them about social and environmental problems in a way no course reading or lecture could, and dramatically shift their perceptions about the status and potential of urban natural resources.

Closely connected to these field experiences are the service-learning activities we are currently engaged in as well as planning for the future. These run the gamut from students in our SUST 330 Biodiversity class working side-by-side with Field Museum scientists analyzing data and cataloguing specimens, to SUST 230 Food students contributing their labor to local urban farms. Service-learning is the explicit focus of SUST 350 Service & Sustainability, a course I will debut next spring as “Urban Farming, Community Development, and Social Justice.” Students here will learn about one of the most important components of sustainability, food production and consumption, in the context of urban neighborhoods and ecosystems. By doing hands-in-the-dirt labor at the Chicago Lights Urban Farm operation in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green neighborhood, they will gain direct knowledge of modern organic/urban agricultural systems as well as learn about pressing urban social justice issues such as food deserts, gentrification, pollution, environmental racism, and persistent poverty.