Moving along with the Sustainable mindset

While the system shown on the left was not drawn by me, it is very reminiscent of a drawing, now lost unfortunately, of the first lecture I ever gave. Ask Rod McKenzie at USC. He will remember (and he saved me on that first outing in front of a class. Thank you again Rod!) I have always thought in the circular pattern, but didn't have a term to describe how I thought. Only slowly, after many years of study, did I finally come to the conclusion that the way I thought naturally was as a systems thinker. Knowing that now, makes a lot of the difficult past easier for me to understand. I just never got the Band Aid way that I saw the world applying "answers" to their problems. but since working on my book I have had to work out the many problems that were mine, and those that were part of the paradigm I was never able to accept. Maybe my mother will finally begin to understand why I was such a difficult adolescent (and adult).

Sustainability and so much of what I have written about in this blog over the years has been about bringing us along to do things tangibly sustainable. Grow good food, drive smart cars or ride your bike!, conserve energy, but in my classes things have been changing. I wasn't even aware of it until a couple of years ago when I realized that everything I saw now was through the eyes of the sustainable mindset. All my classes were geared to looking at the world with humans as part of nature (not apart as my students have now realized) and that everything is connected. certainly my students, if nothing else, get a strong dose of the interconnectivity of it all. But if that is all they learn (and I think there is much more) it is the best thing they will EVER learn.

This all brings me back to why I ended up as a geographer (even though I was explicitly told I was not one, but a philosopher - which I am guilty of, but as a geographer). I was drawn to geography because in it I saw the ability to bridge the disciplines. Art, humanities, science are all a part of what makes geography my chosen world. And a regional geographer at that, something that is certainly not popular amongst the current stream of geography, but so be it. I am just an old-fashioned geographer, with a twist. As Nevin Fenneman said long ago (1919)

...the one thing that is first, last, and always geography and nothing else, is the study of areas in their compositeness or complexity, that is regional geography.

To me the perfect life is one where I gain the knowledge, experience, and background within all the regions (or bioregions, but that is another subject) we can know. By doing that we begin to know place and that tender feeling of "sense of place." We see the complex patina formed when humans work within the ecosystems and the physical world. When that happens it gets exciting and one can begin to see the fractal relations of one region to another, they patches that don't fit, but do, and the world does become as one.

All right, calm down now Chris. That's enough to get you feeding on that high that cannot be named.

Ypsilanti Score Card

Pre-Development vegetation for Ypsilanti, Michigan. Map is by Tali Kritzer, GIS student and
part of the Sustainable Cities class.


The semester is over and the Sustainable Cities class came through with creating an excellent first pass at a score card showing sustainable indicators for the city of Ypsilanti. It was a semester long project that involved everyone in the class finding sources and people that could help them create the scorecard.

The sustainable indicators for the city of Ypsilanti can be found at: http://www.emich.edu/public/geo/Ypsilantiindicators/indicatorsindex.html

Along the way we had two excellent speakers in our class who helped explain what their experiences have been and how to come up with indicators.
Richard Murphy: formerly the planner for Ypsilanti but now going on to be with the Michigan Suburbs Alliance.

Matthew Naud: Environmental Coordinator at the city of Ann Arbor

The Future is Here (Buses!?)

So, this weekend there was a conference called the Future of Urbanism at U of M. Geesh, I learned some interesting things but not all of them were at the conference.

Finally after way too long (I depend on my bike for local transportation most of the year) I took the AATA bus. I have never liked going to Ann Arbor because the parking situation is awful and so decided to bypass that by taking the bus. It took a while to figure out the routes and the stops (the map is quite small and does not show all the stops) and I can see how this might off put some people, but ultimately I prevailed and figured out the route (Route 5) and the time. During the week buses arrive about every 15 minutes, but over the weekend they are once an hour, which proved to be a problem, but more on that later.

The bus trip provided an opportunity to think about the relationship of EMU and buses. You see at U of M and WCC (Washtenaw Community College) they have bus passes for faculty and students. No so at EMU. It cost U of M about $1.9 million a third of which U of M is able to get the federal government to pay, but everyone there has free use of the bus! This seems like a tremendous advantage. On the 4 trips I took there were certainly some students on the bus, although I hardly saw any other professionals. Most everyone who was riding the bus were students, the elderly, or poor people who could not afford cars. But unlike a memorable trip in LA when I tried the bus (there was a local crazy aboard and someone who was throwing up, AND the half hour trip by car turned into 3 hours by bus) was clean, nothing disruptive and people were just fine. There is no reason not to use the bus, especially is you are going to parking space starved areas like Ann Arbor or EMU. Plus, the buses are hybrid that save over 100,000 gallons of gas, plus less pollutants in the air.

There are other things that make the bus trip difficult though. For example, the lack of sidewalks makes people walk in the street, or in the spring time mud, and very few of the bus stops have any shelter: Not good in a wet and cold climate like we have here much of the year. Fixing both these problems (for example Washtenaw Blvd. is the main drag and it has very few sidewalks. A person would have to be nuts to walk on the street or ride a bike.) would go a long way to making our area more sustainable transit wise.

I hear the Pres. Susan Martin may be interested in pursuing passes for EMU (or at the least discounts), which would be a great thing. It could certainly help our parking situation. I heard at one time we did have some access thru the Rynearson Lot near the stadium, but that was disbanded by Kirkpatrick sometime back in 2003 or 4. But today we have no passes. though The Ride is not expensive ($1.25 for most) it is still a lot for a student, and does not encourage you to take the bus, rather than spending time seeking a parking space if you arrive after 9 AM. Of course you could park in the North Lot, but it is pretty far and if you have to carry something in or walk during a bad winter day, or at night, well, it just isn't that great. Pretty far from the rest of campus. Most people want to park much closer, like the Oakwood lots. (Area circled in red are the north lots. Lower left hand lots are the Oakwood lots)

I came back on Saturday on the most traveled route, #5, along Washtenaw, which also has several other problems, but keeping the focus...during the weekend the number 4 route runs only every hour, and if you miss it you do what during the next hour? So I looked around on the routes and saw that Route 4 runs every half hour, still a lot to wait, but if I ran.......so I did and just caught the bus. Pretty good for me since I still can't figure my way around AA, mostly because I have avoided it for so long. It is a nice town (if I could afford it) but without parking and other things that EMU faculty sometime feel about the place.......(another time another story).

So what can be done? Fortunately there are a few others on campus who are willing to work on this problem and the solution of getting bus passes for our faculty and staff. I am one of those people but now more (Marti Bombyk, Ethan Lowenstein, and Steven Moore) are thinking similarly. Maybe there is hope.

Been a long time coming

Oh no! What's this? A happy girl?

Things are slowly but slowly changing at EMU. I haven't written in quite a while, I know, but I have been busy. the sustainability fever is growing at EMU and others are getting into it.

Last fall I wrote a proposal for a grant to help form a sustainability unit here and since that time I have been working on being a part of a group, which, since I have been here has not been easy. I have not fit in well in Michigan. Once again the prophetic words of my mentor ring out clearly: You can take the girl out of California, but....

So now, 10 years later Michigan is ready to move in the direction I was headed while still in grad school all so many years ago. But come to think of it, USC was also not ready to hear the kinds of things that were going through my (and many others) heads. I will never forget a professor there who told me when I started to talk about negative feedback: Chris, you have to stop being so negative.

I was negative probably way too much because she had no idea what I was talking about, even though there were scores of articles dealing with negative and positive feedback. I was interested in living in a steady state world, rather than the one I found myself in operating from crisis to crisis. Of course, I still live in that positive feedback world, the world where one small thin amplifies beyond control. It what happens when you work in a reductionist -fragmented way, the way we have all been taught, but which for some of us stuck in our craw.

So, now at EMU things are slowly changing. I have started another sustainable class (Sustainable Cities) and we are working with setting up some indicators for the city of Ypsilanti - something to measure how we are doing in being sustainable. Ann Arbor has indicators and we are using them amongst others to set up our own. It is a good way to study where our city is in relation to others, as well as to learn what are the elements of a sustainable city.

But beyond that movement, Liz Palmer has taken over the sustainable development class, and Tom Wagner is interested in teaching the sustainable cities class, and that may allow me to begin another class: this time on consumerism. Last October I was fortunate to be able to go to Vermont to learn about what is happening there in the way of sustainable education, and there I met Stephanie Kaza and she teaches a class called "unlearning consumerism" and that is where I want to go next. I am hoping that she and I will be able to continue our conversation and I will receive more inspiration from her on that subject.

But even more! has happened. My proposal for bringing other faculty into sustainability was granted and we had our first meeting last month. I have chosen to focus on three aspects of sustainability for each of our months:
1. local. What is happening in Michigan that we should be aware of.
2. more local. What is happening at EMU that we should be aware of.
3. bringing sustainability into the whole school. Where we can go next.

I have been fortunate to have speakers for each:
1. Janet Kaufmann spoke last month on how our dairies have changed in the past 10 years, especially in the Hudson area of south central Michigan. The dangers of factory farming has taken on its own horrors in our state. She has been talking and writing about it for years now. I was fortunate to meet her when I first arrived and kept contact. She stimulated a lot of conversation.
2. Steven Moore has been in our physical plant at EMU for a few years now and has been working to find more efficient means of using energy at EMU. He will be discussing the headway he has made. That will be this Friday in the library at 2PM.
3. Terry Link will be talking about what a sustainability director does. I met him now 3 years ago when he had this job at MSU. He has since left but has kept the way of thinking and kept in contact. He will add a lot of information to what we can do and how we can grow sustainably at EMU. April 9.

The faculty group I have been working with are still people that I still do not know well, but it is obvious that they are all committed to learning more about what sustainability is and how to incorporate it into their classes, and so it has forced me to go deeper into what I have learned and how I operate. I am fortunate to have this opportunity and look forward to learning from them as I teach.

It is a good case of negative feedback to make me work without going off because it moves so slow and I want to move faster. All this forces me to fill in blanks that I may have overlooked in my path toward the sustainable. but it is also positive feedback, that initial break with the continuum that changes everything. See I can be positive!

When Michigan is first

I guess I am just lucky. When I grew up in California I felt I was in the center of the universe, and oddly enough, I was. As it turned out the 50 years I spent there were the years when California was number one in the nation for innovation and healthy lifestyle, and I was in the middle of it all. At 24 I had the house on the hill and enough BMWs and Porsches to wonder why everyone didn't do the same. I mean, I did it so why not everyone? Nothing special about me, no trust fund, no inheritance, only hard and continuous work from the time I was in high school forward. Even in my hippie days I held down a full time job (in accounting no less) and paid my way through school. Yes, I shared a modest apartment in the Valley, but, I was in my 20s, who didn't?

As it turned out California was number one during those days - in fact the economy was so good that the state's economy was usually placed somewhere between 6th and 8th in the world, easily number one in the nation overall. I was blessed to be a part of it.

But things change.

Though I had a good career in commercial real estate, the dog eat dog life, the lack of community, care, and the overall wellness of people to each other and their place in the world (whew) wasn't what I hoped it would all be. So, a few years after having my son I began to change that life. No more house on the hill, no more fancy car, hello school. Once again I returned to a place that I had always felt was my calling in one way or another. A few years in art school later, now minus what had been a good marriage (he didn't want a woman who didn't earn money) I floundered and then finally found my way into grad school. There was no turning back now. I was the biggest pain in the ass that most of my grad school profs had seen in a while (and I understand now and respectfully thank you for putting up with me) I never stopped until I reached that point where I was a PhD (post hole digger as my Oklahoma friends called it) and at 50 was searching for a job.

I left California. I found my tenure track position and future in Michigan. It was a nexus time. Little did I know that California was about to have the ride of a lifetime up and then crash, crash, crash. I left just as the ride began and now from afar I hear the Goverator making budget cuts only Michigan can truly appreciate.

But Michigan, my new home, was now in the lead and had been almost from the time I moved here 10 years ago. Each year the cuts were more onerous. There was no fat to cut, and the cuts keep on coming. With GM going into bankruptcy it hit Ypsilanti yet again. We have been and continue to cut into the bone, amputating limbs- in education (of all things) and everywhere else now. As us academics looked around (especially those who had no ties to the Big 3) we could see the tsunami coming, and come it has.

Despite long impassioned talk with friends and colleagues we had to agree that the auto industry had to come down. They had done nothing for years but make money off the backs of their consumers. They never looked at the 50,000 feet that my partner says I have the uncanny (and irritating)ability to do. The car makers did not think of what they were doing to the nation, how the world had changed, what were setting themselves up for by depending on unions when the new plants opening in America opened in right to work states (good pay, no union, no pension). A few years ago the cost to pay pensions and health care was estimated at $2,00 per car, and then last month David Littmann, senior economist for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, said that unions had "strangled this state to death." In many ways he is right- even for states outside of Michigan. Notice that GM opened and is now on "stand by" in its union plant in Tennessee, while nearby non-union Nissan nearby has expanded. GM was greedy, and the workers and consumers were hoodwinked. Education was lacking. It didn't take much to see where the world was going. My trips to Germany educated me about where the affluent and more sustainable world was going. I checked out everything I could by traveling there and learning and seeing the life that could be had by moving over to sustainability.

I studied Michigan and agree, it is a manufacturing state and will stay that way for a while (especially if the education continues to be cut as it has been over the past decade), but disagree that we need to keep our manufacturing jobs - or at least the ones that were part of the first Industrial Revolution (the one that began in the nineteenth century). It is NOT going to happen - at least not how it has been in the past.

Okay, so here I go again. We can be a manufacturing state, but we must start the New Industrial Revolution based on cradle-to-cradle technology and biomimicry. Both will require returning to school for many, but it will also give jobs to the many who now need them - once they are educated to the future, not only for Michigan, but for the world. If you want an overall book to explain the needs and directions we need to aim, go to Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce. Very impressive.

I grew up in one state that led the world and then moved to another state that also led the world. Michigan is number one in the highest unemployment rate in the nation (April 2009 at 12.9%, while California is at a measly 11.9%*). It is effectively 20% right now when you see all the people who have given up, and those who have no unemployment benefits because their small business can't take it any more. Yes, we need to do many things including lowering business taxes, and reducing the power of unions across the board in Michigan. We need to educate the workers (and management) but we also need to understand that when we adopt a triple bottom line economy that endorses energy efficiency, renewable energy, cradle-to- cradle industry, we won't need unions as we have in the past. With environmental and social equity woven into the economic bottom line we won't need them. The company, the workers, and the environment will be healthy. How bad is that?

*It must be noted that California's unemployment rate is also skewed. Its informal economy, mostly employing illegal workers pays no taxes and no unemployment. It has become so bad that many Mexicans are returning home.

Sustainable shopping

Almost every year I visit my brother in Berlin. I have, over the years, become enamored with the style of life in this city. I have written before about how bikes are the norm in transportation, but now I am expanding my repertoire by going out there myself (while my brother is working) and discovering what life is like here.

My brother is in his 40s and has lived in Berlin for 17 years without owning a car. We go on biking holidays on the weekends (along with many others) and with a few exceptions on terrible weather days, he rides the bike everywhere. Everyone else does too. Very few wear helmets, because they don’t have to. This is not Michigan where it is the duty of every driver to seemingly aim for that bicyclist on the street. Like one Ypsilanti man who yelled at me the other day, “Why don’t you get an SUV?!” because I had the nerve to get exercise and put less CO2 into the air. The nerve of some people to not drive a car in Motown. But I digress….

Today I rode my bike to go shopping for dinner. Eating in Europe, I have discovered over the years, is not the same as in the states. First of all, unless you are wealthy, you don’t have the space in your apartment (or a large refrigerator) to store all the food that Americans typically have. So shopping is an almost daily routine, but not the onerous drive to the off ramp on the outskirts to shop in a store the size of a warehouse (all to “save” a few pennies on way too many of whatever it is you want to buy. Oh and to spend $ in gas to do it).

Instead, dinner is around almost every corner. Yeah, sure a lot of it is little cafes with tables on the street (this isn’t bad either), but there is a wealth of little bakeries, vegetable stands and smaller markets where one can bike to and then carry home on the back of the bike their ingredients for the next few meals. I know there are some big box stores as in America, but it is not the ordinary choice when you don’t own or drive a car, which is what living in European cities is all about. Many people do not own cars. Everything they need is close by and there are many choices. Every block has another small set of shops offering unique goods, bakeries, and clothes. Entrepreneurs abound in this city. It is really fun. And there are jobs galore for everyone who is selling what they believe in, not what they have been assigned that day in a company they have no ownership in.

Out with the Walmarts, and in with the small owners. Yes, it may cost a little more in the shop, but is it better to pay for unemployment and depression medicine for those displaced from their business, or to frequent a local shop where they know you and are willing to please? When was the last time you had that in America?

I look at Ypsi and I see the shops closing. The art shop is no longer, some of the few restaurants we have, a market, a local clothing shop, a nursery...... Let's keep people employed in doing the things they love and have an ownership interest in, rather than keep Walmart running an unsustainable show.

The Susan Boyle of Universities

By now we all know who Susan Boyle is, and if you are like me, are not ashamed to admit that you have watched her audition for Britain's Got Talent several times. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY The underdog with a mighty gift. Someone from whom we expect nothing, and receive much more than we may be able to give. Someone who reaches and teaches us.

Eastern Michigan University is the Susan Boyle of Universities. Not only that, but we have so many potential Susan Boyles at our university. It is a match made in heaven, but we have not, perhaps, appreciated what we have.

I have always believed we all have a gift. For many of us, most of us, our gift will never be realized as Susan's has. But it does not mean it will not be recognized, only that we may not have that instant success, and we may not want that. Let's hope her notoriety does not fizzle as fast as the firecracker that she sent off.

First a caveat: I just read Mitch Albom's cynical column about Susan. http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2009904190439 He expresses something that lingered inside me after the initial shock of her talent--what if it was a setup? What is there is a catch? Oh, I do hope this does not turn out to be. Let's hope her talent is real and she is who she says she is. But our world can be so manipulated today that you MUST question everything you see or hear. But for the moment, let us beleive that this is all as it seems, and take the lesson.

That brings me to the title of this blog - The Susan Boyle of Universities - good ole Eastern Michigan University. Downtrodden, maligned, overworked, shabby, antiquated, unfashionable---in a word, dowdy. As dowdy as Miss Boyle appears to be on the outside. But as with Miss Boyle what you see is not what you get. It is easy to be judged as yet another Brittany or Jessica, but not so easy to truly be what that outside package promises.

Eastern has many problems, and perhaps a little shining through of that inner beauty would help us all appreciate the dedication and care that many of the professors lavish on the students who show their Susan Boyle selves to us. We don't get many pretty packages at our school, but instead those who find themselves here for a variety of reasons, often tied to a down turned economy and the unexpected shock of being the first in your family to attend college. In a town where a high school diploma has been more than enough to have the house, the SUV, and a boat, in a town that has little need for college, we have students trying to understand what has happened to the Michigan life their parents lived.

We educate many teachers at EMU. We produce a lot of teachers, more than most schools in America. Many of the students turn to EMU because teaching is something they understand after K-12. They hardly know what other possibilities lie before them, or what their own particular "Susan Boyle" gift is. We all have a gift. Our gift can be something innocuous and seemingly unheralded, but haven't we all known people who have touched our lives, not by their intellect, or their talent, but for their caring, their love, their passion? They may only touch the few in their lives, but they make a difference and if believed in and practiced honestly, it spreads across the world. At EMU, we do produce teachers (some of whom will be wonderful!) but we produce much more. Our faculty often finds the real gems inside of these students and let that shine through - like finding a scruffy treasure and refining it so all can see its worth.

Not everyone is made to be a teacher, but they end up at EMU because they still don't understand who they are. They just know that teaching is something they know, have seen, has been part of their lives. But college can be more than just 4 or 5 years of study along a path set in stone. College is the last time you may get to know who you are and believe in yourself. The last time that you can be your own Susan Boyle and show the world what you are really made of. You may be a great teacher one day, but explore while in college. Experiment. Find your way--YOUR way. Not the way set in stone by some educational matrix.

But be honest in that exploration. This does not mean to make college one long drinking spree or free ride provided by your parents, but as the chance you have to let your passion ride on that roulette of life. Your number can come up at any time. Be ready. Be Susan. When her time came, she was ready. It did not come from nowhere.

Let the Susan Boyle of Universities help you do this. Don't judge this book by its cover. There are untold opportunities if you only allow yourself to actually invest yourself into being the best YOU
can be. Our school may not be much to look at. The classrooms may be frumpy. Our technology antiquated. The faculty overworked. But inside each of us the ember of care still simmers waiting to help that student who will shine through give us that Susan Boyle moment.

So I sign off for this semester. Thank you Don, Doug, Beck, Liz, Robin, Robert for making my last year. Thank you Gerald, Sara, Thomas, Kris, Michael, David, and Tom for teaching me by teaching you, for taking the chance to be you. Thank you Diane, Lynn, Doug, Ross, David for letting me help you continue your search for you.