Urban Ecology

A Natural Way to Transform Kids, Parks, Cities, and the World

Ken Leinbach

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781683506522
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Children's Studies in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

With climate change in the news, an urban core that has reached boiling point, and many children growing up without role models and with limited dreams, where is hope?

There is a quiet experiment in Milwaukee that is turning heads. It starts with the simplicity of getting a city kid exploring their neighborhood park. How is it that so much life, community, and opportunity can grow from this unlikely soil? It's been called a miracle. It's contagious. It's spreading. It's exciting. And it works!

This is the story of a group of ordinary people in a neighborhood who created something extraordinary.

Readers will discover… the power of getting a city kid outside in nature; that kindness does work; how to say no while following the yes; the value of clarity and focus; how to find abundance within their own diverse community by simply and humbly asking for help; ten tried and tested rules for raising money (a lot of it!) while having a ton of fun doing it; a positive, believable, and very real vision for the future of the environment (we've got this!); and... how to join the Urban Ecology movement.

Chapter 1

Awakening

“We are one blink of an eye away from being fully awake.”

–Pema Chödrön

Have you ever had one of those really uncomfortable dreams that feels so real you actually think you’re awake? Then, all of a sudden, you open your eyes to the realization that it was, in fact, only a dream. That’s a wonderful feeling of relief. That same feeling happens when we find hope amid hopelessness. Below is the story of Michael’s awakening from a place of hopelessness to a first glimmer of hope.

Michael’s Story

When Pam and Michael moved into their neighborhood a little over a year ago, they knew it was not a perfect place to live, but they had some friends nearby and they could afford a house there on their modest salaries. The house they bought was a short bike commute to the high school where Michael worked as an assistant principal, and the house was near a bus line for Pam. The best part was that it was only a block from a city park with what looked like a nice playground, soccer fields, and a bit of woods next to a small lagoon where they saw some migratory ducks. That park was important to Michael and Pam because they valued nature and having space for their little ones to play.

Last spring, Michael was at the high school when the father of one of their brightest students walked in to his office. It was a little unexpected.

“Hello Mr. Robertson,” Michael said. “What can I do for you today?”

“It’s about Kaiulani,” the older gentleman started. “She’s doing well in school and all, but we’re a little concerned. Over the past couple of months, we’ve noticed that she’s lost her spark. She’s not smiling as much and she’s spending a lot of time alone.”

Mr. Robertson went on to share how he and Kaiulani had been biking together. As they rode, he’d been slowly putting the pieces together through their rambling conversations. In history class, Kaiulani was learning about the origins of slavery; in English, they were reading the diary of Anne Frank; and in her AP environmental studies class, the discussion was all about the various ways people were poisoning the earth, plowing over valuable habitats, and creating the largest extinction episode since the dinosaur collapse. Add to that the childish negativity Kaiulani saw in the political campaigns that flooded the Internet, along with the news of the recent police shootings not too far from her school, and no wonder she was feeling so down!

“We’re not showing her a really great picture of humanity, are we?” Mr. Robertson sighed. He was not angry or accusatory, just observing. He went on to ask, “Is there anyone paying attention to the whole experience of the child at this school? Is there anyone offering any sense of hope?”

Mr. Robertson’s visit and that question really hit home with Michael, because, if he was honest with himself, he had been feeling the same way as Kaiulani. His mind, of late, kept spinning from the very real global problem of climate change to the national issue of racism to the limited opportunities students had to engage productively in the community to his own young children, who couldn’t play in that neighborhood park after all, because it wasn’t safe. That last bit, about the park, really got to him.

Michael biked through the park every day to get to and from work, and the things he saw there broke his heart. There he was, in the most beautiful part of the neighborhood, and there were so few people. The most frequent visitors to the park were the homeless people in the morning and, in the afternoons, the people who – he assumed, by the looks of them, and by some conversations he overheard – were jobless. There were shopping carts in the lagoon, condoms under the bushes, and he and Pam found some used needles under the slide in the playground the last time they were there. When the students at Michael’s school got out of school, they would wander the park in groups and make all kinds of trouble. He knew some of those kids. They were normally good kids, and it made him sad to see them getting into trouble. But he felt like he was the only one who saw that stuff, who noticed the bigger picture. It felt like he was the only one who cared – until Mr. Robertson came to talk with him about Kaiulani.

Reflecting on his own experiences, Michael shifted his thoughts back to Kaiulani. He thought about how nice it would be if she could realize that she could make a positive, tangible difference in the world. Frankly, it would be nice for Michael, too.

How could Michael get his high school involved in a solution, instead of only teaching them the depressing facts of humanity? How can I give her a sense of hope when I struggle to have any myself? he thought to himself.

That whole whirlwind in his head, the one that had been recurring in one fashion or another over the past months, coalesced in the blink of an eye, into a need to take action.

That night, Michael got serious. The conversation with Mr. Robertson awoke something in Michael. He kept feeling that there was more he could do, and now he felt like there was more he must do. He felt like he’d been losing his soul, his happiness, and his optimism. He’d been living in a state that was either frustrated and angry or distant and disconnected. He realized that he would do just about anything to start moving in a direction that he really believed in. He knew he needed to make a change. He decided to figure out how to make a difference.

Michael remembered biking home earlier that day, through the park, and noticing a grandmother playing with her two grandchildren by the lagoon. It had surprised him, as it was not a usual sight. They had seemed so peaceful, calm, and… normal. The memory of that tranquil scene triggered a sudden thought. If I could somehow snap my fingers and live in the community that we envisioned when we moved in – near a park that was safe and welcoming, that was a place where my kids could play, where my wife could exercise alone, and where perhaps even my students could volunteer, so that Kaiulani could get her hands dirty and feel a sense of purpose – well, that one small thing could make a huge difference in my life. Really, in all of our lives.

With that thought in mind, Michael put on some good music and started googling things like neighborhood improvement around parks, urban park revitalization models, how to get people to care about the environment, housing prices in the local suburbs, urban environmental community centers, who is my city council representative, urban park advocacy, good environmental news worth sharing, and church involvement in parks.

In a few of his searches, one organization kept popping up. It was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, of all places. It was called the Urban Ecology Center. What was that place? He dug in further. From the photos he saw on their website, it looked like their parks in the mornings were full of volunteers helping out with the land, and kids were going through the parks on field trips. He dug deeper and read more. In the parks, after school, instead of gangs of youth making trouble, there were high school students showing younger kids how to fish, canoe, and garden.

How are they doing that? he mused to himself. Could we do this here at our park?

Urban Ecology Center – A Place for Transformation

This book is written for Michael, and for all the “Michaels” who reach out to us and who are struggling to find hope within the urban context in which they live. Although we can’t, in Star Trek fashion, transport an Urban Ecology Center to Michael’s park, we can empower him to consider creating one of his own.

By reading this book and engaging with the support systems that we set up to help him, Michael will not only learn what, exactly, an Urban Ecology Center is, he will also learn some of the basic steps he can take to get an Urban Ecology Center up and going in his neighborhood. He will find out how we, in Milwaukee, through definitive intention, mixed with a little bit of self-made luck, have managed to find, create, and manifest a very hope-filled way of being in our city.

Telling our story is a lot like opening up an onion. At first, you only see the outside layer, but – as you cut it open and look further – more layers are revealed. On our website, www.urbanecologycenter.org, you can see the outside layer of the Urban Ecology Center. If you visit or live in Milwaukee, you can see options for engaging in a very practical way through our environmental community centers set up across the city. However, there are many layers of transformation that the Urban Ecology Centers are catalysts for, and those less-obvious layers are the ones this book brings to light.

Interspersed within this story are six primary areas of transformation:

• The transformation of kids and, in some cases, their families

• How an Urban Ecology Center can transform a park

• Transforming a neighborhood

• How this movement can transform an entire city

• At the root is a hoped-for transformation of the world – the natural world and the human/nature relationship

• The personal transformation; the change within yourself

Through this experimental social initiative that we call the Urban Ecology Center, we have figured out that urban green space – your local neighborhood park – is a surprising and often overlooked leverage point for the community. It can be a leverage point for bad activity, or it can be a leverage point for good activity. Our focus is the latter.

We have three Urban Ecology Center branches in Milwaukee, each with their own story, yet all starting out roughly like Michael’s park. All are vastly improved now and are in an upward transformation cycle.

A Reason to Care

During the early writing of this book, while being given a ride home from an event (I don’t own a car, so I get a lot of rides), I was asked, “So, Ken, why should I care about the story of the Urban Ecology Center? I mean, what makes this story book-worthy?”

It was a good question. Here’s the gist of how I answered: “There is something about the comprehensiveness of this project and the broad array of powerful impacts it’s having that resonates with people. As a result of the impacts the Urban Ecology Centers are having, we’re being discovered. We get calls from people in cities all across the globe, asking us how we do what we do. We have a rich and helpful story to tell, about how one very focused community effort has produced complex and exciting results. The Centers have tens of thousands of visitors a year, and pretty much everyone who walks in the door of one of our Centers, or into one of the parks that we manage, and then talks to us or writes to us, says they felt better by doing so. It is a warm and positive place to be, in what can often seem like a not-so-positive world.”

That prompted a lively conversation about change with the person giving me a ride, which is exactly the kind of conversation I like to have, so it was perfect.

* * *

Last fall, a friend and I canoed through Milwaukee on the restored section of the Milwaukee River (see Chapter 8 for more about the river revitalization project), from the outlying suburb of Glendale all the way through the city to Lake Michigan. Along the way, we saw people of every age and skin color imaginable. We saw black families out with their grills, Hmong families fishing, a mix of races playing soccer together, and white folk (me) canoeing. Around every bend were similar activities, but different subsets of types of people doing them. Everyone we saw was smiling and enjoying the day. Most were interacting with each other. I swear there wasn’t a group we passed who did not give us friendly waves.

We all instinctively know that being in nature is healing, that taking some time to be outdoors is a way to connect to each other and to ourselves, as well as to the other species with whom we share this lovely planet. That is why so many folks with wealth get a cabin up north, in the mountains, or at the shore. But we have nature right here in the city, too. With so many people living in urban areas these days (over 80% in the U.S. and over 50% globally), accessing nature’s healing power is so crucial to society as a whole.

Students in the Young Scientist Club explore a wetland in Three Bridges Park

It’s wonderful to see what happens when we make nearby nature in the city more accessible to people. This is what we do. We get people, especially urban kids, outside.

* * *

A series of studies done over the last decade by researchers like Hillary Burdette and Robert Whitaker (2005), Frances Kuo and William Sullivan (2001), and others is revealing that children spend half as much time outdoors as they did 20 years ago, which is even less than it was 20 years before that.

According to a report from the Kaiser Family Foundation, kids who are ages eight to eighteen devote an average of 53 hours a week – seven hours and 38 minutes per day – to entertainment media or screen time. That does not leave much time to go outside and play!

According to Kenneth Ginsberg (2007) in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), we know that kids who go outside to play are more physically active, more creative in their play, less aggressive, and show better concentration. The AAP states that a full hour of unstructured free play each day is essential to children’s physic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 – Awakening
• Chapter 2 – Percolation
• Chapter 3 – Where to Begin?
• Chapter 4 – The Power of Prototypes
• Chapter 5 – Finding Abundance
• Chapter 6 – Urban Ecology Center Defined
• Chapter 7 – Decision-Making
• Chapter 8 – Healing
• Chapter 9 – Leadership
• Chapter 10 – Impact
• Chapter 11 – Money
• Chapter 12 – Crossing Divides
• Chapter 13 – Kindness and Play
• Chapter 14 – Hope, Vision, and Action
• Afterword – The Sacred
• Recommended Resources
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Thank You!