Sand and Steel: My Summer Educating Urban Youth

The opinions and commentary expressed in this blog post are my own, and therefore they do not necessarily represent the views and policies of the National Park Service, the Dunes Learning Center, or any affiliated organizations.  

This past summer I worked as a naturalist with the Dunes Learning Center, a non-for-profit residential environmental education center and camp located within the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.  The camp and park are located in close proximity to the urban sprawl of Chicago and surrounding suburbs, where rapid development, high-impact industry, and economic decay have ravaged the region.  In between these blighted areas, however, are small pockets of gems.  Adjacent to rusty steel mills and putrid landfills are white sandy beaches, tall and wavy sand dunes, and a diverse array of colorful wildflowers (see Photos A and B and C)
Photo A:  Butterfly weed and black-eyed susans in bloom in an oak-savanna woodland along the Inland Marsh Trail in the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.  June 2012.
Photo B:  Bailey Beach in the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, adjacent to the Arcelorormitol steel mill.  July 2012.
Photo C:  Open sand dunes overlooking Lake Michigan on a sunny early-August day (2012) at Indiana Dunes State Park near Trail 8.

Photo D:  A six-lined racerunner (center) along the Inland Marsh Trail in the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.  June 2012.  This is the only lizard found in Northwest Indiana.

The park lies in a unique geographic region, where the grand prairies of the great plains, the conifer-dominated northern hardwood forests, the lush eastern deciduous forests, the warmer southern-end of Lake Michigan, sand dunes, and wetlands all merge within the park boundaries.  Thus, despite its urban and temperate location, the Indiana Dunes is one of the most biologically diverse parks in the national park system, with well over a thousand different species of plants indigenous to the park's ecosystems (National Park Service, 2012).  A hiker could stand less than a mile from Gary, Indiana, a ghost town of concrete and rusting steel and stare at a six-lined racerunner lizard (Cnemidophorus sexlineatus) (Photo D) hiding underneath prickly pear cactus (Photo E), perhaps making it obvious why the area is now protected as a national lakeshore.  



Photo E:  Eastern Prickly pear cactus growing along the Inland Marsh Trail.  June 2012.

Because these unique natural resources are so close to one of the world's largest urban areas, and also due to its abuse by past industries and over-development, a residential environmental education center was established in the late 1990s within the park and in partnership with the federal government. Today, the Dunes Learning Center features a lodge with a mess hall, several wood cabins, a large campfire ring, and access to more than 15,000 acres of federal parkland.  The camp facilities are used by school groups, summer camps, youth centers, and urban outreach programs from around Northwest Indiana and Chicago.  It is the ONLY overnight environmental education facility in the region.  Here is a tour of the camp and the kinds of activities that take place (click each photo to enlarge): 
 Photo F:  The entrance to Cowles Lodge, where campers and students gather for meals and indoor activities.  

Photo G:  The general day-use area planted with groves of native trees.  
Some of the cabins can be seen in the background.

Photo H:  One of the cabins.  Each cabin is named after a native tree 
or shrub that can be found in the park.   This cabin's name is 'sugar maple.'

Photo I:  The campfire ring, where songs and skits are performed by campers 
and staff alike, and where urban youth have the opportunity 
to experience a nighttime campfire with s'mores for the first (and perhaps their only) time.  

 My duty as their summertime naturalist was different than their school year programs in that it was less academically focused and more geared towards nature exploration and fun camp activities.  For example, one such exploratory program was the all day Cowles Bog hike.   The Cowles Bog Trail (pronounced 'Kohl's') is one of the longer loop trails in the park, and it passes through all five of the lakeshore's main habitats:  wetland, oak savanna, hardwood forest, sand dune, and the open beach (Photos J-N).  They would  of course have plenty of time to explore and hang out at the beach!  They also learned the characteristics of each habitat.  The trail is named for Henry Chandler Cowles, an astute naturalist who studied ecology in the Indiana Dunes Region and brought national and international attention to the natural resources present there.  This eventually led to the establishment of a new national park.    
Photo J:  Oak savanna area along the Cowles Bog Trail in the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore (July 2012).  
An oak savanna is an area of widely dispersed oak trees with prairie flowers in between.  

Photo K:  A wetland area near the start of the Cowles Bog Trail.  

Photo L:  Hardwood forest

Photo M:   Campers cross over sand dunes on the Cowles Bog Trail  before heading onto the beach.  
The green grasses on the sand dunes are called Marram grass (Ammophilia breviligulata), and their roots hold the erosion-prone sand dunes in place.

Photo N:  The open beach.  Bailey Beach area of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.  June 2012.

Students and campers also participate in a program called Riverwatch, a state coordinated effort to monitor water quality in rivers and streams across the state of Indiana by engaging citizens and youth in the process. Photo O shows the Little Calumet River, where the Dunes Learning Center performs their monitoring.  Campers had the opportunity to catch and examine animals living in the river, such as small fish, aquatic insects, and crayfish.  "The higher the number of aquatic invertebrates found in the river, the better the water quality," campers were told as they opened their eyes to an often overlooked world of life.  

Photo O:  The Little Calumet River lined with Day Lillys (Hemerocallis sp.) along Howe Road in the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.  June 2012.
Each camp session only lasts a week, but to children from the most desolate areas in the country, a week must feel like a lifetime.  I am proud to have played a positive role in their lives, and I hope some of them will become life long stewards of Indiana's natural resources - which need help badly!  
~

"I'm so glad you have career that you love doing," exclaims my aunt as I tell her about my summer.  "That's exactly why I am going to find something else to do," I bluntly reply.  While I love natural history education and interpretation, I am unable to make sufficient income doing so.  This adventure in Indiana was my seventh seasonal job in the field (not including volunteer endeavors), and the most I've ever made per hour at a particular job is $7.00 (see Table A).  Most of these jobs included no benefits, and none of them were permanently funded positions.  

 Table A: My position titles working for various environmental organizations,
along with their duration and the hourly pay. 

Budget cuts across the country have trimmed available naturalist job openings,  and the National Park Service (among other environmental branches of the federal government) has given veterans first preference to park ranger positions.  Therefore, I am concluding my profession as a naturalist for now, and I will be moving on to my next career goal which will be discussed in a later blog post.  

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following individuals for their reference on my resume for this job:
  • Coco Ventiruin, Natural Resources Manager for Lake County Parks in Lake County, IN
  • Victoria Mills, Director of the Doan Brook Watershed Partnership in Cleveland, OH  
  • Andrew Brown, Senior Naturalist at Calvert County Parks in Calvert County, MD  
I would like to also thank the following people for helping to make my summer job a successful one:
  • My mother and father.  They paid for all expenses not covered by the job, including health insurance, car insurance, and my cell phone bill.  
  • Jessica Orlando.  She was an outstanding coworker and housemate of mine at the Dunes Learning Center, and she is now a lifelong friend.  
  • Jared Wicks.  He  was an outstanding coworker and housemate of mine at the Dunes Learning Center, and he is now a lifelong friend.  
  • The rest of the staff.  You know who you are and you all were great to work with, were knowledgeable about natural history more than you give yourselves credit for, and you all have become good friends of mine.  

References
National Park Service. (2012, July 18). Indiana dunes nature & science. Retrieved from http://www.nps.gov/indu/naturescience/index.htm    
Sunset over Central Beach.  Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.  July 3, 2012.  

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