CUE Loves Bikes

by Ryan Puckett

The Center for Urban Ecology at Butler University (CUE) is an inspirational place and I’ve had the pleasure of working with CUE for the past year. CUE is all about how our urban lives interact with the natural environment and how our city is an ecosystem unto itself.

As humans, one thing we can do to tread lightly on our local ecosystem is ride our bikes more. I realize that’s easier said than done. I, for one, have a newborn, a 4-year-old in daycare and consulting job that takes me all over the city. Try taking care of all that on two wheels!

But occasionally, I like to ride. I recently signed up for a Pacers Bikeshare membership – it’s a great way for me to travel throughout downtown (and the bikes are fun to ride too). From time to time, I also make my way to Gallahue Hall on the Butler campus via my humble, low-budget commuter bike.

The CUE staff member who really takes the cake on biking is the indomitable Molly Trueblood, local redhead celebrity and community organizer for the Indianapolis/City as Living Laboratory (I/CaLL) project.

Recently, Indy-based storyteller Tim Taylor directed a video of Molly’s bike habits and her mission to save the planet, one bike ride at a time. The timing of the video of Molly is great as May is National Bike Month. Established in 1956, National Bike Month is a chance to showcase the many benefits of bicycling — and encourage more folks to give biking a try. Check it out!

Others at the CUE are also passionate about about their ride. You’ll frequently find CUE Director Tim Carter about Midtown on bike during the summer and I’ve seen Travis Ryan, chair of the department of biological sciences, (un)locking up on campus and at Hubbard & Cravens. McKenzie Beverage, Butler’s first sustainability coordinator, can frequently be seen on her trusty Masi Speciale CX she’s named “Root Beer”.

When I asked McKenzie about her bike habits, here’s what she shared,

“I have been a bike commuter since I was in college. It started out of necessity because I lived in a college town but I quickly fell in love with it. I have lived close enough to campus or work that I’ve always been a year-round bike commuter although I admittedly drove to work quite a bit over this nasty winter because the roads weren’t clear and the temperatures were so extreme. Before moving to Indy, I was able to take a bus to work so this is the first year since college that I’ve relied so much on a car.

I commute by bike for so many reasons. It saves on gas, I get exercise, and it’s better for the environment. There are some more subtle reasons I ride too. I get to smell the wonderful spring blooms, hear kids playing during recess, and observe tiny interactions between people as I pass.”

Keeping with the Bike Month theme, local bike advocacy superheroes IndyCog are challenging Indy residents to participate in the National Bike Challenge and collectively reach a goal of 1 Million Miles in May.

And if you’re heading to ‘The Race” on Sunday, IndyCog has the skinny on how to ride to the Indy 500.

Ryan Puckett is the principal of TWO21 LLC and a communication consultant for the Center for Urban Ecology. 

Cooking Knowledge as Key to Healthy Food Systems

by Nic Mink

foodfellowfromscratchcookingOne of my favorite lines from Wendell Berry comes from his essay, The Pleasures of Eating, an instructive piece that offers a stinging rebuke of the industrial food system and outlines guidelines for more thoughtful eating.

“That they,” he writes of the food industry, “do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into our mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so….The ideal industrial food consumer would be strapped to a table with a tube running from the food factory directly into his or her stomach.”

In re-conceptualizing my Sustainable Food Systems class this spring, I took Berry’s line to heart, as I thought of ways to ensure that my students would never find themselves strapped to a table with a tube running directly into their stomach! This resulted in the creation of three gastronomy labs, created in partnership with Maggie Hanna, the executive director of Fall Creek Gardens Urban Growers Resource Center.

The labs sought to provide hands-on lessons about the science, history, and culture of food, all while instructing students in food preparation. Over the course of the semester, we ended up cooking fish and chips, macaroni and cheese, and gumbo, all from scratch. In the process, we interrogated ingredients, examined labels, and explored personal conceptions of health and well-being.

These labs were some of the most rewarding I have ever instructed and they taught me many lessons.

First, despite the fact that most of my students had a real interest in eating “healthy,” most of them had never considered that healthy eating included the necessity of cooking their own food from scratch. Healthy, to many of them, simply meant ensuring that food had the proper number of calories (few) and the right amount of fat (even less).

Second, the labs also taught me that most of my students had never actually cooked a meal from scratch. Ever. In their two decades of existence, they had always relied on others—parent, fast food chains, sit-down restaurants, or a school cafeteria—to provide their nourishment.

The process of cooking with students (and learning these lessons) suggested, to me at least, the value of making culinary and nutrition education a core part of any college curriculum. Not only can you teach just about any subject through cooking, but you can also provide an outlet for creativity and an avenue to build interdisciplinary connections.

At the end of the semester, one of my students remarked that these labs were the best classes he’d ever had. While it would be nice to pin this success on Maggie and I’s uncanny abilities as educators, in reality I think the remarks this student made reflects the power of food to build community, nourish our souls, and teach us that immense and profound happiness can be found in cooking with one another.

Nicolaas Mink, PhD is the urban sustainable foods fellow at the Center for Urban Ecology.

Year of (Less) Waste: One Semester In

by McKenzie Beverage

Trash AuditThe “Year of Waste” is the unofficial term for my first objective at Butler: get the recycling program, behaviors, and awareness locked in, then tackle things like transportation, local food, etc. Recycling is a baseline. The program (and participant behavior) should be seamless. Once that happens, we can take the conversation to the next level. This blog entry is a reflection on the first half of the Year of Waste.

[Reduce]
Trash audit results are in. People at Butler are putting 33% of their recyclables in the trash. Students from my class (and a couple of daring volunteers), helped us sort through the 1,800 pounds of trash strewn across Butler’s west mall during Earth Week. Reporters from many of the local news channels and the Indianapolis Star also joined us.

Are you as excited as I was to know what is being thrown away? There were some things that surprised me—two bags full of clothes in perfect condition, a case of unopened Ramen, and an unopened box of windshield wiper blades.

There were many things that didn’t surprise me: plastic water bottles, fast food containers, LOTS of pizza boxes, beer cans, Starbucks cups, and uneaten (but cooked) food leftover from the dining halls. Food waste itself accounted for one-third of the total. Read Shel Silverstein’s poem “Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout” and you’ll get a good idea of what it was like to root around through one day’s worth of garbage from the dining halls.

The trash audit served two purposes: 1) raise awareness and 2) collect data. Reducing consumption is directly tied to raising awareness about our current consumption patterns. It was a newsworthy spectacle that hopefully gave some perspective on just how much we consume.

[Reuse]
When you think of Butler, what do you think of first? For some people, it’s the lovely green campus, maybe the bell tower, or the historic buildings. For most people, it’s Hinkle Fieldhouse.

On Earth Day, we announced that we are working with People for Urban Progress (PUP) to salvage fieldhouse seats to sell them to the public and install them in public places as the second round of PUPstops. This unprecedented project has already received national media attention and will hopefully inspire other university athletics departments about how to get engaged in sustainability initiatives.

[Recycle]
In addition to the trash audit, students from my class designed and implemented two-week recycling competitions for some Greek houses and graduating seniors. The students completely managed the whole process and came up with exceptionally creative ways to incentivize participation. Between the recycling competitions and the trash audit, my class helped divert over 2,500 pounds of recyclables from the incinerator. While I am thrilled that they were so successful, I am also deeply bothered by how many pounds were accumulated by so few people in such a short period of time.

I am an absolute advocate for recycling, but I truly believe that it encourages consumption. The good feeling that we get knowing that we can recycle something often blinds us from the fact that that product was still manufactured and shipped which takes an enormous amount of energy. Recycling itself uses significant amounts of energy. Advocating for reducing and reusing before recycling is difficult, especially in our one-time-use-disposable-culture.

I’ve got some big ideas for the next half of this year. I’ll check back in soon and let you know how it goes.

McKenzie Beverage is the sustainability coordinator for Butler University.

Making Nice with Money

by Tim Carter

MakeChangeLogoMoney has always been, and will continue to be, a hard topic to write about. Wars are fought over it, it’s inherently exclusionary, and it’s one of those topics (like religion and politics) that you’re not supposed to discuss at a dinner party.

Many of us in the non-profit sector, as implied by that description, are not inherently driven by the desire for our organizations to make gobs of money; therefore, the relationship to funding is always one laced with tension. We need it to do what we do, but we strive to not let it drive our operations. To put together successful grant applications, like our recent one from the National Science Foundation, it takes a lot of partnerships, months of planning and conceptual development, and creativity to fit your proposed activities within the funder’s framework.

Which is why it’s so refreshing to encounter a program privately funded by Smallbox called “Nice Grants”. Nice Grants started in 2013 and the premise is simple: if you have a good idea that helps to improve the city, fill out a short application and potentially get $1,000 to make it happen.

CUE’s proposal, along with nine others, was selected for funding this year. Our project is to expand the “Make Change” initiative that we piloted in the Mid-North area of Indianapolis into all of Indy’s Midtown neighborhoods.

Make Change also directly engages the monetary system. When you do something good for your neighborhood’s environment, you earn community currency that can be redeemed at participating businesses.

Be on the lookout for the official launch of Make Change expansion this summer! In the meantime, if you see a coin with a logo that looks like this, you know that person has done something that improved their local environment. If you see a sign in a business that looks like this, you know the next time you receive one of those coins, you can redeem it at that business.

Nice Grants and Make Change are two ways to rethink how money can be used in service to community. When we are creative about the use of currency, it may help us operate out of a mindset of abundance rather than scarcity.

Tim Carter is director of the Center for Urban Ecology at Butler University.