The Chicago area, despite its urban character, is home to significant biodiversity. Situated at the intersection of the northern boreal forest, prairie, savanna, and dune environments, Chicago is a crossroads for more than just our own species. Here the great eastern tallgrass prairies met oak-hickory woodlands as well as wetlands, savannas, swamps, and other associations, forming a complex mosaic of environments. The long history of human habitation in this region has significantly transformed local environments, but not all pre-contact environments have vanished and local efforts at restoration and conservation have begun to make a significant difference in the extent and health of indigenous plants and animals. Our logo is derived from the Hickory (Carya); local oak-hickory forests are dominated by Shagbark Hickory (C. ovata) and Bitternut Hickory (C. cordiformis).Speakers & Abstracts
Keynote Address, Friday May 9
“Is Development Sustainable?—Not Even Close”
Robert Repetto, Professor in the Practice of Economics and Sustainable Development, Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
Is development sustainable? Certainly not the way the world is now going about it. Major trends are heading straight toward ecological and human disasters and if they are not changed and changed soon, development efforts will fail for billions of people, comprising mainly the world’s most vulnerable populations. Climate change, water scarcities, pollution, population growth, and growing pressures on natural resources that are already extremely stressed reinforce one another in raising these vulnerabilities.
Is disaster inevitable? Of course not. But a change in direction is essential and bringing about that change will require significant, even drastic, changes in economic, political, and social patterns. The institutional, market, and political failures that have brought the world to this point will have to be addressed and reformed. If development is to be made sustainable, business as usual is not an option.
Conference Presentations, Saturday May 10
“The End of Sustainable Development: Capitalism, Economic Growth, and Global Inequality”
Murat Arsel, Lecturer in Environment and Development, Institute for Social Studies, The Netherlands
This paper engages with the debates surrounding the sustainability of global capitalist development. Specifically, it critically interrogates the twin arguments that ongoing developmental processes in the world’s poorer regions are not sustainable and that they pose a direct threat to the environmental security of the rest of the world. In so doing, the paper argues that the deployment of ‘sustainable development’ as a solution serves to depoliticize what is essentially a highly contentious political issue that reflects longstanding concerns regarding the sustainability of modern capitalism and North-South relations.
“Pittsburgh: ‘Child of Nature and Necessity’”
Angela Gugliotta, Lecturer and Research Associate in Environmental Studies and Humanities, University of Chicago
Stories, poems, and magazine and newspaper articles about the city of Pittsburgh from the 1920s and 1930s advance arguments that the city’s special relationship with nature has determined its essential character, its own nature. They present both mutually supportive and contrasting visions of the role of mineral nature, exploited by industry, and animal and vegetable nature, growing spontaneously, in determining the character of Pittsburgh’s people and its future trajectory. Reflections based on materials from this period will be compared with more recent arguments about Pittsburgh’s place in national culture and politics.
"Can Sustainable Development Be Just?”
Breena Holland, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science and The Environmental Initiative, Lehigh University
The Brundtland Commission’s original formulation of sustainable development calls for development that “meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” As a condition of meeting the needs of future generations, environmental sustainability can be understood as an important dimension of sustainable development. However, I argue that this understanding of environmental sustainability is flawed. The goal of environmentally sustainable development should involve more than passing on an environment that can provide for future people’s mere needs. Specifically, the present generation should pass on an environment that promises to sustain conditions of justice. I propose an understanding of environmentally sustainable development that will meet conditions of justice as defined in Martha Nussbaum’s partial theory of justice—the “capabilities approach.” Building on this capabilities approach to justice, environmentally sustainable development should protect the ecological conditions necessary for protecting the current generation’s “central human functional capabilities” without compromising the ecological conditions necessary for protecting the same capabilities for people living in the future. I argue why this formulation of environmentally sustainable development is better than one that seeks to protect the environmental preconditions of human needs or of Rawlsian “primary goods.”
“Assessment of U.S. Middle School Student Environmental Literacy”
Ron Meyers, Principal, Ron Meyers & Associates and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy, University of Arkansas
The first national random sample survey of U.S. middle school student environmental literacy was conducted in spring 2007. The National Middle School Student Environmental Literacy Assessment Project administered four sets of surveys to forty-nine schools across the United States, selected through probability proportional random sampling methods. For each of the schools, four surveys were administered to characterize: school demographics; 6th and 8th grade environmental education programming; teaching styles, training, and beliefs of teachers of the participating 6th and 8th grade classes; and the environmental literacy of 2,004 students in selected 6th and 8th grade student classes, using the Middle School Environmental Literacy Survey v10. The project advances the goals of the National Environmental Education Act, specifically the U.S. EPA Office of Environmental Education’s (OEE) Strategic Plan to support research that assesses the effectiveness of environmental education in meeting environmental protection and academic achievement goals. By providing instrumentation and baseline and comparative data on environmental literacy, this project will help to fulfill the North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE)’s mission of advancing environmental literacy, and provide resources and data to use in the development and advancement of quality environmental programming. Key partners include the NAAEE and researchers from the Center for Instruction, Staff Development, and Evaluation, Florida Institute of Technology; Ron Meyers & Associates; Southern Illinois University at Carbondale; and the University of Wisconsin, Platteville.
Four general indexes were developed and used to create a composite environmental literacy score with a mean score of 147.2 for 6th graders, 142.1 for 8th graders, and a grand mean of 144.7, out of a possible 240 points. Each of the four primary indices had a possible 60 points: Ecological knowledge, (6th grade mean score = 40.1, 8th grade mean score = 40.1, grand mean = 40.5; Environmental Affect, including pro-environmental behavior intentions (6th grade mean score = 40.8, 8th grade mean score = 38.1, grand mean = 39.5); Environmental Cognitive Skills (6th grade mean score = 26.0, 8th grade mean score = 26.4, grand mean = 26.2); and Environmental Behavior (6th grade mean score = 38.2, 8th grade mean score = 35.0, grand mean = 36.6). The findings provide a baseline assessment of environmental literacy against which particular environmental education programs and future national samples can now be compared.
“Is Commodifying Nature Sustainable?”
Leigh Raymond, Associate Professor of Political Science and Associate Director, Purdue Climate Change Research Center, Purdue University
Part of the paradigm of sustainable development is the idea of “getting the prices right”—internalizing the externalities of environmental degradation in the price of everything from SUVs to palm oil. Thinkers from Robert Costanza to Lester Brown to Robert Repetto to our own Professor Steck espouse various versions of this line of thinking, arguing in favor of policy mechanisms ranging from environmentally-friendly cost-benefit analysis, to “green taxes,” to emissions trading and other systems of commodifying natural resources in order to give them greater economic value as “natural capital” to be preserved and protected carefully. But is this approach to our environmental challenges the right one? Can we sustain our environmental resources by giving them a higher price? Or is the continued commodification of nature the source of our problems rather than the answer? This paper will consider some of these questions as part of the larger debate over sustainable development, looking at specific examples of market-based policies and the crucial details of such policies that may determine their relative “sustainability” in the political and environmental realms.
“Climate Change Impacts and Response in Alaska”
Sarah Fleisher Trainor, Research Assistant Professor and Coordinator, Alaska Center for Climate Assessment & Policy, and Stakeholder Liaison, Scenarios Network for Alaska Planning, University of Alaska, Fairbanks
Climate change is already impacting marine and terrestrial ecosystems in Alaska and the people who depend on these ecosystems for nutritional and economic sustenance and continued cultural traditions. September 2007 saw the most extreme minimum sea ice extent on record in the Arctic and this ice degradation is on the outer boundary of model projections. Diminished sea ice results in increased erosion for vulnerable coastal communities in Northwest Alaska, creates stress on marine mammals such as polar bear, walrus, and ring seal, and allows for increased off-shore oil and gas exploration and drilling as well as increased opportunities for an open northern shipping route through the North West Passage. The 2004 and 2005 wildfire seasons in interior Alaska were two of the three most extensive on record, and 60% of the largest fire years have occurred since 1990. While one of the few regional negative feedbacks to warming, increasing numbers of wildfires have the potential to change the boreal forest stand types, to threaten life and property and to create hazardous air quality conditions. Arctic tundra lakes are drying gradually with warming temperatures and draining catastrophically due to permafrost degradation altering the northern wetlands upon which migratory birds and water fowl depend. The growing season in interior Alaska has increased by 50% since 1904 allowing for both increased agricultural production as well as opportunity for exotic and invasive plant and insect establishment. Alaska native peoples report rapid changes in weather patterns and environmental conditions beyond the scope of their five thousand year oral histories. While the bulk of greenhouse gas emissions contributing to warming occur in southern latitudes, climate models project that northern latitudes will continue to experience the most dramatic biophysical changes world-wide.
How are state, regional and municipal governments in Alaska responding to these changes and preparing for continued projected change? What are Alaskan native organizations doing to facilitate rural village planning for climate change? This talk will address these questions and explain how you and others in the continental United States are being and will be affected by climate change impacts in Alaska.
