This is our backyard

By Jayne Spencer, Editor, “IU Home Pages”

You might recall that Lewis and Clark began that journey after spending time at the cabin of Revolutionary War hero Gen. George Rogers Clark in the Hoosier community now known as Clarksville, not far from rapids along 350-million-year-old fossil beds we now call the Falls of the Ohio. The landscape was pristine. John Audubon, among other naturalists, contemplated the rich diversity of wild creatures thriving in whole habitat not far from where IU Southeast stands today.

Artists’ depictions of the bottomland forests in Indiana record even earlier times: IU’s Dan Willard, a SPEA emeritus professor and an advocate for wetlands preservation throughout his career, once commented that a squirrel could travel east, all the way from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean, without touching the ground; the green canopies provided a highway.

Jefferson would be astonished to see what modernity has wrought, that discovery has led so swiftly to environmental diminishment: endangered species, polluted air and water, economic wrangling for precious resources.

Had Lewis and Clark lived in the 21st century, they might have been policy analysts instead of explorers, evaluating environmental infrastructures and the cultural mindset that spawned the NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard) syndrome we heard so much about in the 1980s.

Today, of course, we know that our backyard is as wide as the world is round.

Home Pages’ examines the issue of water in this current edition and invites you to listen to “Conversation online” with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., brought to you from the IPFW campus in Fort Wayne. As an attorney for Hudson Riverkeeper Inc., Kennedy has found his niche for public service. A grassroots organization formed in the 1960s to advocate for the health and well-being of the Hudson River and the New York City watersheds, Hudson Riverkeeper has become a model across the country for citizens’ watches of our most precious natural resource.

In Indiana, we’ve been observing the Indiana Year of Clean Water as an addendum to the 30th anniversary of the federal Clean Water Act (http://www.in.gov/idem/govconf/yocwin.html). And earlier this week, the fifth annual Partners for Pollution Prevention brought scientists and corporate leaders together to discuss advances, set-backs and new strategies for improving environmental quality in our Hoosier backyard (http://www.in.gov/idem/oppta/). As private citizens, we are all invited to “adopt” a Hoosier river for safe-keeping or help monitor one of the approximately 500 glacial lakes in the state that are larger than five acres.

And speaking of resources, I’d like to make a couple other pitches: if you haven’t made a United Way pledge yet, please consider doing so; deadlines are approaching and UW is another quality-of-the-backyard issue. Or contribute a pint of blood during the sixth annual IU-Purdue Blood Challenge, running through Nov. 15 and sponsored by the alumni associations of both schools. Call 1-800-GIVE-LIFE for a donation site close to your campus. The winning school will be honored at the Old Oaken Bucket game Nov. 23.

Also, mark your calendar for the start next week of the award-winning Spirit & Place Festival, a “civic conversation” coordinated by IUPUI’s Polis Center that will explore the topic of “breaking silences,” and the risks and opportunities inherent in doing so.

Earlier this week, a new monograph by Charles Shelton of Regis University arrived on my desk from IU’s Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions. The Jesuit priest, who lectured in Bloomington last April, discusses human capacities for moral meaning and action, and the essences of both gratitude and empathy.

Empathy, he writes, “is the psychological glue that cements interpersonal relationships, civic duty, nation building and (our) ties to the wider global community.”