A short-and-sweet story at the Chronicle of Higher Education notes that even English majors can get their hands dirty at Furman University:

"The course was about Henry David Thoreau's Walden,
but instead of simply reading the memoir and discussing it in a traditional classroom setting, David Bernardy took his class to a wooded area near a 30-acre lake on the college's campus to build a cabin similar to the one Thoreau had written about in his book," says the report.

Thoreau might have approved. Considered a pioneer of nature writing, he is often referenced by modern environmentalists and social justice advocates who admire his commitment to deliberately living well with less, his thoughts on equality, and his willingness to spend most of his time out in the natural world, providing for himself and learning about his environment. Walden is as much an examination of the ways people should live as a memoir, and the questions Thoreau poses are as valid today as when they were written, particularly in the face of large-scale environmental collapse. So, as this group of students read Thoreau and then put themselves in a similar place, doing similar work, one imagines they were able to gain more from the text than they would have by simply reading it in an American Lit course.

Drew Woten, a sophomore in the course, believes it was a success. He said, "It helped us come to appreciate what he did, and to learn what it's like to really use your hands and use engineering and construction, as well as problem solving." He adds that Thoreau would have found it "silly for someone to sit in a classroom and just listen to lecturing."

More and more, faculty are deciding that students need these chances to learn differently. Bernardy says, "I think anytime you can help the students understand the text through something tangible and experiential, you create pathways of understanding that go beyond typical classroom learning."

Image credit: bjearwicke/stock.xchng

Yesterday, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar formally announced the creation of an Office of Youth within the Interior Department to create and manage programs that are intended to get youth working outside again.

“The new office will build our programs, expand opportunities for young people, teach them to hunt and fish, and help us coordinate our efforts across the bureaus,” Secretary Salazar said.

It is hoped that these programs will introduce youth from all backgrounds to America's national parks and forests, instilling an ethic of nature conservation and volunteerism, as well as creating new opportunities for employment. Salazar, who headed a similar youth program in Colorado, says, "Still today, I hear from the kids who went through that program –- many tell me they would never have gone to college, let alone landed a job in natural resource stewardship, if it were not for that program."

Heather White, Director of Education Advocacy for National Wildlife Federation, notes that this kind of program will address a vital need to connect kids and families to nature. "In the past 20 years, time spent in the outdoors by youth has been cut in half. Meanwhile, the average 8 to 14 year old spends 6.5 hours a day plugged into some type of electronic media," she says. "Engaging youth outside is important to our public health, our economy, and the future of conservation."

Image credit: stock.xchng/markvanpay

Nalini Nadkarni, a faculty member at Evergreen State College, talked to TED about her work studying and preserving rainforests, including outreach projects that get inner-city youth from Washington into the trees and learning about nature. Here she describes the richly developed ecosystems of rainforest canopies, which are unlike the dark, quiet forest floors.

As a warm-up to this year's AASHE conference, I toured Duke University with a group of other sustainability professionals, starting with the swamp.

I imagine most campus visitors don't immediately get dragged out into the marsh, but the interest on everyone's faces was a visible reminder that schools aren't just invested in clean energy, but also in traditional environmental work, such as restoring wetlands. This is particularly true when projects involve students in the process.

The SWAMP (Stream and Wetland Assessment Management Park) project is designed to restore an urban watershed, research several different kinds of wetlands, and purify local water supplies. The work was largely funded by the state of North Carolina because of its positive impact on downstream water quality, with a smaller contribution from the university itself. Students are trained on "real-world restoration techniques, modern hydrologic modeling, and the basic principles of stream, lake, and wetland ecology" as part of their coursework, and they came on the tour with us to answer questions and tell us about the work they've done.

As part of the tour, we also looked at several LEED-Silver campus buildings, counted bike racks, toured a prototype "smart house," and ate a meal of local food from one of the campus cafes. However, for many people the most memorable part of the day was the morning walk through the woods. One attendee remarked, "I love that students are out here doing the work. That happens at a lot of universities, but not enough. Maybe it needs to be more than just the natural science students."

The idea that students and others on campus need to connect better to their surroundings was a common theme of the conference. Between sessions on eco-literacy, local environmental history projects, campus habitats, and Vandana Shiva's appeal to get people back on the land, almost everybody had something to say.

After Janice Crede started taking small groups of students out to a cabin for a week (no laptops or TVs allowed) for a "Nature Immersion" curriculum she piloted at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, she started seeing results. "We wanted to help students understand a little bit more about their impact on the planet. They have a half-hour biology class each day, then we let them loose to explore the lake, the woods, the bog, before we have some conversations about sustainability and leadership. Everything is outside. We eat dinner by the campfire and stay up too late, and by the end of the week they no longer miss their laptops, and they don’t want to leave."

Surveys and open-ended writing assignments that the students complete before and after the course corroborate Crede's thesis: "What they told me is that they come back and they feel changed in their attitudes, perceptions and behaviors. They feel as if they have a whole new group of people they can relate to."   

We are recapping AASHE: Sustainability on Campus and Beyond as it happens. If you were at the sessions we're covering, weigh in with your comments below. Or see others' blogs, photos and Twitter updates on the AASHE live page.

In the space of an hour, Vandana Shiva, physicist and agricultural activist, managed to connect the oil and human labor inputs required by modern agriculture, the nutritional deficit of monocrops, the dangers of species loss, the moisture depletion of agro-chemically treated fields, the imbalance of grain that goes to factory farms rather than human mouths, obesity and diabetes, US grain subsidies, biofuels, the 160,000 annual suicides of Indian farmers who are finding the monocrop seeds they purchased won't grow, and the mass exodus of families from heritage land. The coherent case that emerged at the end was simple: "We must get people back on the land."

One of several sustainable food experts that have earned attention in recent years, Shiva is in good company. Michael Pollan, Frances Moore Lappe, and even Jane Goodall have spent years studying the American industrial food systems and come to similar conclusions.

While agricultural yields increased dramatically in the mid-1900's, the soil depletion that has resulted makes farmers even more dependent on intensive chemical fertilizer and water inputs. Not only is this problematic for the farmers who are increasingly sensitive to drought and price fluctuation, but fertilizers based on fossil fuels could very soon become impossible to obtain, if declining oil predictions are correct. The answer, says Shiva, is biodiversity. "The delicacy that small-scale farming requires, is the delicacy that encourages biodiversity. And biodiversity makes for healthier food.”

As she spoke, Shiva compared universities—and their status within their communities—to the recent election, making the case that just as President-elect Obama will use his advisors to find solutions to the problems facing the nation, "every campus should make its own transition team for food beyond oil. We can create a food system beyond toxics. Beyond genocide."

In fact, she claimed, food is not only an agricultural issue, but integral to national security and peace. "For me, food is about peace. Peace with nature, peace between communities, and peace with our own bodies. Because we are at war with our bodies now, and food has become ammunition."

She went on to say that universities and colleges, who made major strides in the research that based our current agricultural system on fossil-fuel based fertilizers, have a large share of the responsibility for finding a solution."Campuses have a lot of eaters, and a lot of influence in their community. Wouldn't it be exciting if biology classes planted their own biodiversity plots? Why shouldn't edible schoolyards be on every campus?"

Given the intricacies of the global food system, it's no small demand. Shiva’s final comparison drew a laugh from the audience: “Those guys fiddling with the derivatives that put your economy into this state are like me, they juggle numbers. But wouldn’t it be amazing if they were juggling numbers that would make a better system for us?”

Podcast Interview with Vandana

Vandana Shiva: Why Shouldn't Edible Schoolyards Be On Every Campus?

We are recapping AASHE: Sustainability on Campus and Beyond as it happens. If you were at the sessions we're covering, weigh in with your comments below. Or see others' blogs, photos and Twitter updates on the AASHE live page.

A recent Chronicle post about Sierra magazine drew a lot of commenter ire, including a nasty call for Scott Carlson, the writer of the piece, to be reassigned to the obituary column. Several of these commenters seemed to take offense at what they perceive as an anti-sustainability bias, as if Scott has his laptop plugged into the A/C adaptor in an idling Hummer, cackling as he pricks holes in the reputations of well-intentioned universities.

I can tell you from personal experience that Commenter Dan couldn't be farther from the truth, and that Scott's high standards come from a real desire for better practices in the way we build, manage, and teach at our universities. In the Sierra piece, it means he poked a little at their incomplete research. Other times, when talking about sustainability, that means he refrains from cheerleading to point out the incredible distance left to go, or perhaps even cries foul from time to time. If only more environmental reporters looked so thoroughly: corn ethanol, anyone? Unfortunately, good journalism is all too easy to denigrate, and far more difficult to do.

All this is to say that I love Scott's latest piece in the Chronicle: an appeal for a better, more holistic look at green building in general and on campuses in particular. He says:

The new star architecture would strive for "living building" status, a grail for the architecture profession. It would be made of recycled, nontoxic, and renewable materials. It would produce more energy than it uses. It would recycle rainwater and waste in a closed loop. It might even provide microhabitats for animal and plant life. In short, it would contribute to, rather than take from, the resources around us.

Moreover, it would be a building that teaches about natural systems, building systems, and a groundbreaking style of design—lessons that should be part of every college curriculum these days.

Indeed, Scott. Indeed.

Being part of National Wildlife Federation, those of us at Campus Ecology talk a lot about wildlife habitats. Not only are we invested in maintaining biological diversity and preserving the migration paths of plants, birds, butterflies and animals, we also know that creating spaces for wildlife means that we are providing natural carbon sequestration opportunities.

We recently hosted a teleconference on campus habitat restoration (available here) and learned about some great things that schools have been doing to green their campuses through the use of habitat. The University of Central Florida, for example, focused their efforts on education by creating several distinct ecosystems in the UCF arboretum that replicate habitats exclusive to central Florida. The 12-acre biogeographic garden is crisscrossed with trails for students and visitors. The university has also started a temperature tracking system on campus to explore the "urban heat island effect." Native vegetation will be planted on roofs and in hot spots, and then temperature will be tracked again. Staff hope to see significant cooling in certain areas.

Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, Illinois, took a different approach by restoring habitat that had already been damaged.  Oakton's acres of habitat had been overrun with buckthorn and a Eurasian garlic mustard plant which crowded out native species and plants. With a grant from BP and a lot of help from student volunteers, these plants are slowly being eradicated to make room for seeds from local (within a 25-mile radius) northeastern Illinois. Once these take hold, the ecosystem can return to its natural state and attract pollinating insects and other wildlife. Oakton also uses controlled burns, as local species are adapted to fire and will survive, while invasive plants often won't.

An even bigger project is currently taking place at The University of Washington Bothell Cascadia Community College, where staffers looked at a dilapidated section of the North Creek floodplain on campus lands, and embarked on a decades-long restoration to manage watersheds and coax the forest back to life. (Look here for more details.) The ongoing restoration acts as a valuable case study to students, while it also attracts good press to the school as one of the biggest floodplain restorations in the Pacific Northwest.

It can sometimes be difficult to convince other campus decision-makers that habitat restoration is important and effective. It took several years to formulate the plan and gain permits for the wetlands restoration project at UWB/CCC, and even though progress is being made, it takes several decades for an ecosystem to reach maturity. Many of the people who contributed to the project may never see this part of North Creek functioning in its full glory. Also, seeing energy costs go down due to increased efficiency is, to many people, more satisfying than knowing that green space is sequestering carbon. This means some campuses are more willing to retrofit buildings than create habitats. Both are important, but we think that the Wildflower loop at UCF's aboretum is good evidence that habitats are important for well-being, not just carbon capture.

Check out our podcast and powerpoint of the web conference if you want to get more details on these projects. You can also contact us for more research and examples if you're interested in implementing this kind of project on your own campus. To start small, consider dedicating a small section of your campus as a Certified Wildlife Habitat. And for extra credit, check to see if Fritz Haeg's Animal Estates exhibit is coming to your town. This traveling installation reintroduces animals into environments such as strip malls, garages, office parks, freeways, front yards and parking lots to examine the displacement of wildlife by humans and bring species back into harmony. 

This underwhelming waterway is known as Kraut Creek to residents of Boone, NC, who remember the days when a local sauerkraut factory sent its runoff downstream, polluting air and water alike. Now that the factory is long gone, a group of professors, students, engineers and local environmentalists who are inspired by the creek's potential have teamed up to restore a 150-foot stretch of the stream to its former glory.

“When the project is completely finished, it’s going to be beautiful,” says Jana Carp, pictured at left. “We have a landscaping plan that will filter storm water runoff, stabilize the banks and incorporate native plants and shrubs that will shade the creek and provide a better habitat for fish, amphibians and birds.”

While the scope of the project is small, the Committee hopes that their work, in partnership with local organizations such as the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce, MountainKeepers, and the National Committee for the New River, will inspire other property owners along the stream banks to embark on similar projects.

The restoration is expected to take about four weeks to complete, although it will take much longer to see the return of wildlife and measure differences in water quality. For more information, click here.

Image: Members of the Kraut Creek Committee on the damaged banks. Photo taken by Marie Freeman, via Appalachian State University News.

My friend, Justin, just climbed Denali and the official expedition name was "Big Guy and the Monster". And Denali is, indeed, a monster! Seeing Justin's amazing summit pictures made me realize that I will never, ever, become a mountaineer. Denali National Park is one of the most beautiful and diverse places I’ve ever seen but the thought of climbing at altitude is just not appealing to me. But I am wicked jealous of Justin’s experience.

Hearing about his trip also made me start thinking about global warming. How are temperature changes going to affect Denali and the Arctic region? Climate change is affecting the poles of the earth more than anywhere else. What is going to happen to the web of life if temperatures continue to change in that region? Anyone who has seen An Inconvenient Truth knows that the Arctic is in trouble. The entire way of life for Arctic Tribes is in trouble. And it all comes back to our carbon consumption.

It’s a tough problem we are facing, but people are working on it. From scientists at the University of Alaska – Fairbanks to NWF Fellow Bree Jambor, who is attending Sheldon Jackson in Sitka, Alaska and working on ways to improve her school’s energy efficiency.

I really hope that everyone has the opportunity to see the Arctic at some point in their life. And I hope we find a way to save such an amazing place.

Photo credit: Justin Fantasia

Tigers are a valuable species and indeed, among many others, being impacted by global warming (thanks for the tip, Puja!). According to the World Wildlife Fund, the Sundarbans delta -- the world's largest mangrove ecosystem (home to tigers), which stretches across India and Bangladesh around the Bay of Bengal -- is succumbing to rising sea levels due to global warming. Global warming could do what poachers never managed: wipe out the Bengal tiger in that part of the sub-continent. Only 6,000 or so tigers remain in the wild, due to poaching, the loss of their habitat (mostly mangrove forests) and depletion of the tiger’s natural prey.

In just one century, the earth’s temperature has risen by about 1 degree Fahrenheit, and it expected to rise by another 2-10 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. As temperatures increase, local climate systems are being altered in ways that directly affect fish and wildlife, as well as forests, lakes, prairies, rivers, wetlands and other habitats upon which they depend, says National Wildlife Federation.

Colleges and universities recognize the threat to wildlife due to global warming and are taking action! The University of Missouri in Columbia, whose mascot is a tiger, is the first university to actively support conservation of critically endangered wild tigers. The Mizzou Tigers for Tigers program is a pioneering effort to raise awareness and support to ensure that there will be wild tigers for as long as there are Missouri Tigers.

 

Photo Credit: USFWS