2015 Open House

An Open House was held in the dome on 9/3/15 for SUIE students and student organizations to learn more about this strange looking building designed by Buckminster Fuller for their campus.

The SIUE Gospel Choir raising their voices

While visitors flowed in to the Center for Spirituality and Sustainability, the SIUE Gospel Choir filled the dome with their gorgeous voices, joyously singing the words, "VICTORY... victory shall be mine!" The choir did an amazing job and we hope to have them back in the dome very soon.

the SIUE Juggling Club

As students and faculty took the opportunity of this open house event to tour the dome the SIUE Juggling Club skillfully entertained onlookers. This was a wonderful occasion to share the beauty and vision offered to the SIUE students and student organizations by the Center's transcendent miniature earth dome. 

The Center's geodesic dome reflected in Dee's glasses

Lessons From Prehistory

Friday, April 25th, 2014 (date first posted)

by Betsy, Chair of the The Center for Spirituality and Sustainability Board

On Monday, April 14, 2014 the Center for Spirituality & Sustainability hosted a joint program meeting with the Piasa Palisades Chapter of Sierra Club. About 35 people gathered to hear Dr. Julie Zimmerman Holt, a professor of Anthropology at SIUE, talk about her research on the emergence and decline of the civilization at Cahokia, or Cahokia Mounds as it is popularly known. In her career she has focused her research on the prehistory of western Illinois, particularly the American Bottom (the portion of the Mississippi River valley that stretches from Alton to Chester) and the Illinois Valley.

Dr. Holt has said that one of the greatest contributions archaeology can make to contemporary society is to show how past societies used and sometimes abused their environments and to take lessons from past successes as well as failures.

Her talk, titled Cahokia: A prehistoric Piasa Palisades, traced the development of the Cahokia civilization from the Archaic Period (3400 – 900 BC) – when our hominid ancestors were hunter-gatherers – through the Woodland and Mississippian Periods as the population grew and prospered, domesticating vegetation by gardening and building villages. Cahokia was the earliest and largest of Mississippian cultures.

Until about 1050 Ad, the population continued to grow and the culture flourished, indicated by findings of pottery, other domestic and artistic crafts, as well as indications of thriving trade with settlements outside of their own. However, beginning in that year a downward spiral began, which ended with the collapse of Cahokia sometime during the 14th century AD.

Dr. Holt did not explicitly address the lessons to be taken from the rise and fall of Cahokia. Rather she left it to those in the audience to draw their own conclusions from her detailed account. For this particular audience member, the lessons couldn’t have been clearer. Her descriptions of the characteristics of Cahokia as it grew in size and complexity – and then declined – immediately brought to mind parallels with contemporary civilization. In my opinion, the main difference between then and now is that she was describing a single culture, contained in a regional locale, whereas today the same characteristics are present globally.

Looking at the characteristics of Cahokia as it began to decline circa 1050 AD, the parallels to the global environmental crises of today are stark:

• Overpopulation and the over-hunting and fishing required by it
• Extreme exploitation of natural resources
• Deforestation – for fuel, construction and expansion of agriculture
• Status hierarchies demonstrated by the building of walls to keep “the others” out
• An unstable agricultural system brought about by fewer fallow periods, the monoculture of maize (corn), soil depletion, and hydrologic changes causing rapid run-off.
• Drought
• Disease
• Some indications of warfare

If these points were to be put into a chart showing “then” and “now,” only a slight updating of language might be needed to describe the “now.” One of Dr. Holt’s Power Point slides brought us closer to current times, featuring an advertisement dating to the 1940s, encouraging “the housewife” to use corn by-products in everything she conjured up in the kitchen. Eventually advertisements targeting individuals weren’t needed since food product manufacturers began including some form of corn in so many of the products they put on the market.

According to Dr. Holt’s timeline, the collapse of the Cahokia civilization took several hundred years. Based on some climate science predictions, it won’t take much longer than that for the current demise of our civilization to be complete. The changes we hominids are making to the earth are moving much faster than they did during the “prehistory” periods Dr. Holt studies.

Our wake-up call to preserving the future of our planet sits right in our own back yard.

Fracking in the National Forests

Monday, June 3rd, 2013 (date originally posted)

Last month I joined approximately 40 people from the Piasa Palisades Group of Sierra Club who gathered at CSS to hear Christopher Johnson, an environmental writer from Chicago, speak about hydraulic fracturing – or “fracking” – in the National Forests.
I attended with a heavy heart because his presentation was to focus on fracking in the Allegheny National Forest in Western Pennsylvania, where I spent many happy hours as a child and where I learned to love the natural world. Until I heard the announcement about Mr. Johnson’s talk, I was too naïve to even realize that fracking was happening on National forest lands. I oppose fracking. I have read many articles about people becoming ill and animals dying from the effects of the process on land and water. I also object to the fact that fracking extends our dependence on fossil fuels (and the companies that extract them) when we should be pursuing the development of renewable energy sources.
Johnson is a co-author with, David Govatski, of Forests for the People: The Story of the American Eastern Forests. After presenting a fascinating history of the development of national forests and the steady encroachment of both logging and drilling, Johnson described their experiences in researching the book.
The authors visited both fracking and surface drilling sites in the Allegheny National Forest, an area where oil companies first began surface extracting operations in the United States. They viewed first-hand the devastation to the land from the processes themselves and from the waste produced, as well as the disruption of habitats cause by cutting roads though the forest and running heavy equipment over the land. Johnson and Govatski documented fracking’s impact on nearby populations and cited numerous scientific reports of chemical pollution to the water table and the dangers of methane gas byproduct in both the atmosphere and ground water.
In visits to national forest fracking sites, the authors, who were accompanied by two representatives from National Sierra Club, experienced heavy-handed security measures. Such measures are apparently pervasive in the area. The sites are heavily guarded by contracted security guards, who do not allow people to take pictures or get too close to operations. Helicopter surveillance was also part of the security effort. Johnson and Govatski left with the impression that the security measures were intended to intimidate observers more than safeguard the premises. One has to wonder whether the oil companies believe their own PR about the safety of the operation when they keep their sites so closely guarded.
Johnson closed out his presentation with comments about the current deliberations in the Illinois Legislature over plans for fracking in Southern Illinois. Much of the Q & A that followed focused on concerns related to local issues. As with most of the push for “development” that devastates our environment, this technology is being sold on the basis of job creation and the economic benefits to localities often experiencing decline or persistent poverty. During the social gathering after the program, the conversation covered the gamut of issues involved in the increase of fracking as a short-term answer to energy needs and job creation without taking into account a longer view of what it does to destroy a way of life for many and eventually our planet itself.