The Huck Finns of Ecology and The EnvironVan
In 1970, two Beloit College students set out with a bold idea: to bring environmental education to students along the Mississippi River.
As the sun began to wane across the Rock River on Sept. 15, 1970, a small group of people gathered around an 18-and-a-half-foot Starcraft Motorhome parked next to Chamberlin Hall of Science. Two students checked onboard equipment, shook hands with friends and a few wistful-looking geology professors, and climbed aboard. The engine revved, hands waved, and Beloit College’s “EnvironVan” set off on its maiden voyage.
At first glance, the project proposed by the geology department seemed simple enough. Two students would take environmental education on the road, visiting countless schools in rural communities within 10 miles of the Mississippi River. The proposal intrigued college officials, who saw it as good publicity and a way to promote Beloit’s unique educational vision. Geology major Greg Fernette ’72 committed to the project first, and physics major Alan Crossley ’72 soon joined him. Their work during the 14-week trip would fulfill the Field Term requirement of the Beloit Plan-era.
College staff contacted schools and began to create an intensive itinerary and speaking schedule. Others secured funding for supplies and outfitted the van, which would serve as a combination home, library, laboratory, and conference center. Local merchants supplied equipment, discounted and donated. Beloit Sign Design painted EnvironVan’s eye-catching logo.
In August, Fernette and Crossley hopped into a car and made a madcap 12-day dash along the Mississippi River, snapping color photographs, collecting geological specimens, and surveying sights for potential field trips. Along the way they discovered some disturbing environmental issues. For instance, they learned that nearly 40 communities in Iowa were dumping raw sewage into the Mississippi because they had no treatment plants. And they found plenty of other fodder for their school visits. By mid-September they were ready.
That fall, the two students followed the Mississippi River for three months, from near its source at Brainerd, Minnesota all the way to Donaldsville, Louisiana near the Gulf of Mexico. Along the way they presented slide show lectures to over 24,000 students at 78 schools, while also hosting on-site field trips for students and service groups on Saturdays. They focused on the Mississippi River region’s geographic and geologic changes over time. Featuring what the St. Louis Dispatch described as “a mixture of humor and shock treatment,” they talked about the human impact from urban areas and farmland, from dams and locks to industrial pollution and raw sewage. And they talked about nationwide and local solutions, urging personal responsibility and individual action.
Greg Fernette put it this way: “We’re finding so many people who think of pollution only in terms of the big industrial centers. We’re trying to alert them to what’s happening to the environment of their own farms and villages. We point out that not even the remotest crossroads is immune to deterioration.” Alan Crossley added, “The parents of many of the kids we met farm near the Mississippi. They’re the ones who are hurt when it floods. We’re trying to explain that management of the watershed is desperately needed. Unplanned use of the land is turning floods into disasters.”
Credit: Beloit College Archives
Their 6,000 mile odyssey attracted attention from the press. The Wisconsin State Journal dubbed the two “the Huck Finns of Ecology” while The New York Times described them as “traveling evangelists, preaching the gospel of ecology and damning the sins of pollution.” At Nauvoo, Illinois, an ABC-TV crew filmed their presentation to 400 students and then followed them to a hands-on ecology lesson on the bank of the Mississippi. The two Beloiters appeared on NBC’s Today Show, and The Smithsonian did a feature on the EnvironVan. The Great River Road Association declared that the EnvironVan program was the first of its kind conducted by a college.
The national publicity generated by EnvironVan came to the attention of the U.S. Office of Education, which granted the college $41,000 to help purchase and equip five EnvironVans for the fall of 1971. Five pairs of students visited schools along other waterways in the Rock and Wisconsin River valleys, the Lake Michigan shoreline, the Miami River Valley of Ohio, and elsewhere. EnvironVan director and math professor Tom Renfrow explained that the program pushed “environmental education out of its ivory tower and out into the community where it’s really needed.” That fall, EnvironVan visited 265 schools and civic groups and the students spoke to 95,000 people.
In the years that followed, through post-visit questionnaires, the college kept track of the impact EnvironVan had on some of the communities it visited. Many of the students, with the encouragement of Beloit’s two young environmentalists, formed school ecology clubs to clean up local streams, riverbanks, and nearby roads. One school collected eight tons of broken glass and discarded bottles for recycling, while another forced their local bottling company to service soda machines with returnable bottles.
Although the EnvironVan research project, which was funded by a grant from the Office of Education, U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, ended in 1972, this partnership between Beloit College students, faculty and staff, and communities along the Mississippi River remains a notable success story and a milestone in the college’s longstanding commitment to issues of ecology and the environment.
From “Fridays with Fred,” published online Feb. 28, 2013
