Ball State continues to lead in sustainability. Here are some examples of how our students and faculty are protecting our planet.
A Great (Lakes) Story
It may sound glamorous to spend your summer on a lake, but graduate students David Starzynski and Kip Rounds wouldn’t use that adjective to describe their two months on Lake Michigan. Grimy, grungy, and exhausting might be more accurate, but the biology students wouldn’t have traded the experience for anything. Rounds and Starzynski spent summer 2011 researching the yellow perch population in Lake Michigan, part of a decades-old Ball State collaboration with the Indiana Department of Natural Resources.
Fighting Blight
Jonathan Spodek instructs the students joining him for his EcoRehab course to forgo laptops and backpacks and come prepared for class with protective glasses, steel-toed boots, and leather gloves.
Central Indiana Clean Cities Alliance Gives Ball State award
The Central Indiana Clean Cities Alliance (CICCA) presented Ball State with its Stakeholder Achievement Award for the university’s use of biodiesel and ethanol in campus shuttles, trucks, and cars.
A Passion for Plants
Cheryl LeBlanc’s fascination with plants was sparked when she was introduced to her first orchid as a 9-year-old living in Massachusetts. That first meeting ignited a love affair with one of the world’s most beautiful plant species. LeBlanc admits she is very lucky to be working with Ball State’s orchid collection, which is nestled in a greenhouse in Christy Woods. Surrounded by a lush green landscape and teeming with squirrels, rabbits, and the occasional deer, the collection has developed a reputation for being one of the nation’s most diverse.
Modeling Sustainable Living
On a prairie north of the Ball State campus, architecture students are learning firsthand about sustainability in a house made of a building material not traditionally used in the Midwest—straw. The Eco Center, constructed by students from the College of Architecture and Planning and Associate Professor Timothy Gray, is the first-ever load-bearing straw building in the region.
Seeking Bedrooms for Bats
Timothy Carter wants to help some creatures of the night, endangered Indiana bats. “I have always been fascinated with the marvel that is the bat,” said Carter, an assistant biology professor at Ball State.
Working with Unimin Corporation’s Tamms/Elco plant in southern Illinois since 1998, Carter has helped turn abandoned mines into habitats for hibernating bats. For those efforts, he was named the 2006 Community Partner of the Year by the Wildlife Habitat Council.
Perseverance for Pachyderms
A pioneering elephant researcher teamed up with a pioneering university to share his story, A Life with Elephants. As the 2010 recipient of the Indianapolis Prize—the world’s leading award for animal conservation from the Indianapolis Zoo, Iain Douglas-Hamilton talked about his life’s work during a September 28, 2010, simulcast, which was webcast to other universities, zoos, aquariums, and other educational institutions around the country and aired on selected PBS stations.
Measuring Man's Effect on the Planet
Humanity's history in the air and space is documented in millions of images looking back at Earth. Apollo 8's iconic Earthrise probably is the best-known example. Many of those prints, film reels, slides, and digital files represent an important visual record—more than a century long—of mankind's effect upon the planet. Immersive learning students at Ball State now analyze some of that material to reconstruct land use patterns in Delaware and Randolph counties in Indiana, helping the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) hypothesize about their impact on portions of the White River watershed.