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[J. Arthur] Environmental work is by its very
nature interdisciplinary, and when I was going to IUPUI I was absolutely interdisciplinary,
I'm a journalist and I'm doing science, so I have a life at the end of all this. Well I think
one of the things that has really grown since I was a student here is the service learning. In
general the service learning component that this university has is, without compare I think, and
especially through CEES, because, as an environmental professional, those learning
experiences that you can get through CEES are amazing. It gives you hands on practice that you
can't get from a textbook. It really requires getting out and doing it.
That's what environmental work requires. Research twists your brain in ways that you can
never imagine. It forces you to think in a way that you never thought before, and that was
another thing that was really appealing to me about the science, was doing the research and
challenging myself in a way that I'd never been challenged before. It gives me skills now,
I draw as much on the things that I learned about how to research and how to find things
out is really important in what I do now. Urban restoration is a challenge to say th
e least. You have so many different stakeholders and interests and then the stream that faces
urban pressures like this one does. I call it a stream, most folks think of it as a river, but
we call all of these streams, streams that face these kinds of pressures are very difficult to
deal with because you have such competing land uses. And Lenore Tedesco put together a project
with partnerships and that's what environmental work is all about, is building partnerships to
get things done. All I did was plant some trees, but it was really fascinating to see all the
people who came out to do that and there were students. At the time I was an adjunct, teaching
here in Geology and my students came out and Lenore had students come out and there were
citizens. A lot of people care about this river, and it was really fascinating. That was right at
the time I was beginning my job at IDEM, so what a nice way to move into the environmental arena,
professionally, to come from that kind of experience into IDEM.
I work in the office of water quality at IDEM. I work with a number of scientists, we look at
water quality data collected on waters throughout the state, and we look at hose data
to determine whether or not the water quality, water bodies, are meeting what we call
designated uses. Those are really best described as what we as citizens want to be
able to use our water bodies for. And so we look at those data, we determine whether or not
the water quality is good, and then every two years, I produce a list, it's called a 303D
list, unfortunately, the 303D list focuses on all the waters that are bad. It's a list of
where our water problems exist. It's very one sided and very negative just by its nature. So
one of the challenges that I find is a way to tell the good things that we do here in the
state.