Category Archives: CUE News

Anticipating Summer: An Update from the Farm

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by Tim Dorsey

cuebarnAfter a long harsh winter and an unpredictable spring, the heart of the growing season is certainly upon us at the CUE Farm. A few early, cold-hardy crops have come and gone, but mostly we’re in that sweet spot of having many of the spring crops available and the summer crops on their way. Our CSA and Thursday afternoon farm stand begin this week (June 5), and I know many other area farms have just begun or will soon. The wait is over!

Over the last few years we’ve been finding ways to utilize more and more of our available space at the farm. For us that includes new infrastructure and new crops.

Last year, we had completed a shade structure built from reclaimed and recycled materials, including a fabric roof repurposed from the RCA Dome and re-milled barnwood roofing members. Just before winter, a team of architecture students from Ball State University completed their design and implementation of a repurposed shipping container, transforming it on site into a classroom and resource center space, complete with furniture, a creative shade canopy, a rain-catchment system and a solar-powered fan to exhaust warm air from inside.

On the biological side, we’ve also planted some new perennial fruiting shrubs this spring with hopes of reaping their bounty in the years to come. Some folks will be familiar with Gooseberries. Many may not be so familiar with Seaberries, aka Sea Buckthorn. Both of these shrubs are a bit thorny but known for delicious fruit. Sea Buckthorn has recently been finding its way into North America from countries such as Russia, Germany and Norway as folks are becoming acquainted with its highly nutritious orange berries. Just as important, the plant is a legume and a soil-builder capable of fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere (through a symbiotic relationship with certain soil bacteria) for its own use as well as other plants nearby. It’s also extremely cold-hardy, down to -40 or -50 degrees F, and without many pest problems. If we can figure out a way to efficiently harvest while negotiating the thorns, it should be one of the more nutritious hedges in town.

Tim Dorsey is the CUE Farm manager.

Making Nice with Money

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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.

Urban ecology (re)defined

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by Tim Carter

I’m really excited for the day when Google develops a retina-mounted camera…something that can capture people’s immediate responses to things you say to them. Whenever I tell people I work at the Center for Urban Ecology (CUE) at Butler University, they look as if they just heard that a new planet was discovered or found out that their cousin is trying out for American Idol.

Kind of awkwardly happy and interested but not sure what it really means or what to say next.

So, for all of you out there who have given me that look in the past, here’s an attempt to give three points about what urban ecology means for us here at the CUE (pronounced Q):

  1. The city is an ecosystem.
    The city is an ecosystem that includes all the living and non-living things as part of it. This includes humans, plants, water, buildings, and everything else that is here. We don’t treat humans as separate from their environments. In fact, understanding how humans work is really important to understanding how the urban ecosystem works.
  2. Humans are important.
    Ecology is a discipline that studies living and nonliving things and the interactions between those things. Many ecologists study interactions that “drive” the ecosystem, such as how much solar energy it takes to make plants grow, what the temperature changes are during the year in an area, and what food is available for animals to eat. In a city, many of these drivers are uniquely dominant such as human culture, legislative and regulatory influences, and socio-economic factors. To understand urban ecology all of the drivers, including the human ones, must be considered important.
  3. The future can be better than the past.
    It’s true that the humans’ relationship with non-humans is not a healthy one, either historically or presently. In many ways this relationship is fundamentally broken as our species acts, not surprisingly, in very self-serving ways. In no place is this relationship more profoundly dysfunctional than in cities. What this doesn’t mean, however, is that our past or current activities will necessarily determine our future ones. Human self-reflection may be our strongest asset in developing future urban ecosystems that don’t look like the past. Human innovation and creativity, while not a panacea, leads us at the CUE to be optimistic rather than fatalistic about urban futures.

The CUE is working here in Indianapolis to improve our city. My hope is that through our projects we can inspire others to view cities as opportunities for creative restoration…and I can throw away my Google glasses in the meantime.

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