On a bright, crisp morning in early May, a group of community members makes its way around the University of Chicago campus, stopping in front of buildings, lingering on lawns, clustering underneath budding tree branches, and gazing out and up while listening intently to their group leader’s animated exposition. Tour groups on campus are commonplace—prospective students and their parents visit year-round, led by undergraduate guides skilled at walking backward while delivering rapid-fire monologues full of campus facts and figures. On this occasion, however, the audience is more diverse—we are scientists, clergy, community organizers and nonprofit leaders, divinity school faculty and students, and neighbors. The pace is leisurely, and the questions are about not class sizes or dorm life but the names and habits of the native trees, prairie grasses, and wildflowers that share our urban landscape.
This is a “tree walk,” led by Kathleen Golomb, the university’s manager of campus environment and design, and meant to introduce participants to the campus not simply as a collection of buildings but as an arboretum. UofC’s 217-acre campus was designated as a public botanic garden more than 25 years ago, and this garden has been contributing to the well-being of the community ever since. As we walk, we experience intimations of this well-being firsthand, our minds awakened by our guide’s descriptions of the lively ecosystems that sustain diverse colonies of plants and animals. Our imagination is activated, our curiosity stirred. Now our eyes can discern the distinctive growing patterns of branches and the many shades of green in budding leaves. Snatches of birdsong inspire intervals of silence: We pause together to listen, as if one body. Heart rates relax and spirits soar. The environment—so often problematized, its decline inciting anxiety, worry, and fear—becomes a source of connection, resilience, and joy.
The tree walk was part of a one-day conference called Living Well During Climate Change, hosted by the divinity school with support from a grant from the Climate Science in Theological Education initiative of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Planning began the previous year, when three faculty members invited a group of Chicago-based clergy, environmental nonprofit leaders, and graduate students to meet monthly for a year to explore the depth and breadth of our human responses to climate change. The project’s aim was not to debate the veracity of climate science, to amass evidence of environmental decline, or even to garner support for one mitigation strategy or another. It was to create a community of conversation and support for the essential work of determining what it might mean to live—and to live well—amid the reality of climate change.
