The CCC Reborn
by Joann Podkul
When the city of Chicago’s Department of the Environment recently announced that it was launching a Chicago Conservation Corps to train volunteers to protect land, air, energy and water resources, the concept appealed to my husband, Kevin, and me.
Recently and happily retired, we were seriously seeking a project we could sink our teeth into, something that would provide positive results at day’s end; something that might not save the world but would at least point it in the right direction.
Our work with high school students on Service Learning projects had proven to us that 40 kids could do an amazingly good job of wilderness restoration in about two hours time on a Saturday morning. So it was not too farfetched to think that we could work with adults or intergenerational groups to do the same.
Our community houses a vast number of environmental organizations, which do everything from stewardship to political protests. (One organization conducts a popular “Down in the Dumps Tour,” something akin to visiting Dante’s Inferno, which takes participants to several waste sites, including the highest one on Chicago’s Southeast Side where they can get a great view of the city’s skyscrapers. During the warmer months, goats graze atop this mound.) So we knew that the culture of the community would support the process and would not write us off as impractical idealists.
We were old enough, too, to know that the conservation corps concept had succeeded at the federal level during the Great Depression. In fact, our late brother-in-law, who had lived just a few blocks away from us, had spent some of his youth in CCC Camps from as close to us as suburban Skokie to as far away as the State of Oregon.
Finally, we wanted something beyond passport stamps to show for our retirement years and we wanted it close to home. So, we volunteered for the first group to be trained.
All four of the CCC training sessions were conducted at the Chicago Center for Green Technology, a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum industrial brown field building reborn “green” with such features as a roof garden, cisterns for roof-run-off and elevator cables lubricated with canola oil. We were challenged to “become green” by cleaning with baking soda and vinegar, to value water as if it were black gold (how long does it take you to shower??), to audit our household use of energy and to opt for energy-efficient light bulbs. Not only did we learn never to use the dishwasher when it rains, but also how to channel the rainwater into the garden.
At the end of the training, each participant, now armed with the knowledge imparted by the Green professors, was to develop his or her own project with the assistance of a liaison person from the Department of the Environment. Participants, already green, had turned more green and vowed to take the cause into the work place and the community; even into leisure time activities with a “Bike for Beer” project.
Our own project was an easy choice. At the end of our street, there is a wooded area bounded by a cross street and a railroad line. A popular dumping ground for passing vehicles, the site could provide sufficient data in broken bottles and empty cans to conduct a study of the drinking preferences of area visitors. For area residents, however, it was not the most charming aspect of the neighborhood…and yet it could be. What if we made it so beautiful that people would feel guilty about trashing it?
Building on good will generated through our collaboration with neighbors over the previous summer on a block yard sale and block party (the first of each ever on our street), we recruited volunteers to plant 300 spring bulbs provided to us by our C3 liaison. Participating families chose their own patch to cultivate along the edge of the wooded area. The largest single planting was a curving 24-foot long furrow on the edge of the railroad embankment, where 3 family members planted 100 daffodils. Not only brawn, but brain came into play. One teenager working with a senior citizen convinced her to plant red tulips close to the stop sign so that drivers would slow down to look at them and actually stop. Hyacinths, scilla, grape hyacinths, geraniums and snowdrops were also planted.
Working quickly to beat the onslaught of winter weather, which appeared to be looming right around the corner, we relished the prospect of a lovely spring garden blooming in about 3 months and felt that was sufficient reward for this first phase of our project. And then there came the bonus….
When we finished the day’s planting, we found notes at the bottom of the bulb bags, requesting that we send letters of appreciation to the Chicago Botanic Garden, which had donated the bulbs to the city. That magnificent garden, about as far North of downtown Chicago as we were South of it, had been built on the Skokie Lagoons where our then young brother-in-law and his buddies in the Civilian Conservation Corps had worked in the late 1930’s! Like a benediction, their bread cast upon the water had now reached us, and we felt that it was our turn to do likewise.
http://www.cityofchicago.org/Environment/C3