Resilient Communities in a Time of Change Jon Jensen

Resilient Communities in a Time of Change

by JON JENSEN, Professor of Philosophy

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously said that you can never step into the same river twice. Since both the river and you are constantly changing, it will no longer be the same river and you will not be the same person when you step in again. Heraclitus believed that change is the fundamental reality of our universe, a view that seems quite compelling in the spring of 2020 as Luther, the US, and the world react to the everchanging circumstances of the coronavirus pandemic. As I write this essay, the Luther College campus is empty, nearly 2,000 students have left their dorms to return to their families, and most Luther faculty and staff are working from home as well. For the first time in its 160-year history, Luther is doing distance learning rather than the place-based, community focused pedagogical approach that is a hallmark of a Luther College education. We are adjusting, students and faculty alike are adapting, utilizing new technologies and techniques, making do, but the reality of change lingers and generates a nearly constant series of questions. How bad will it get? When will infections peak? When will the campus reopen? How long will this last? What will the new normal look like for us and the world? How will the community bounce back after this shock? This last question about “bouncing back” is at the very heart of my recent research and the subject of this essay. I study community resilience, the ability of a community to prepare for and respond to disruptions. Resilient communities bounce back after adversity and are able to thrive in the changing and challenging world of the 21st century. In what follows I describe a couple of these research projects before returning at the end to some closing thoughts on the coronavirus and what it means for community resilience. What do flooding and childhood obesity have in common? No, this is not the opening for a bad joke. Like a pandemic, these are two threats to thriving, resilient communities and subjects of research projects of which I was a part. Though trained as a philosopher, my primary work for the past decade has been in the area of sustainability. As a teacher, I have been focused on integrating sustainability into the curriculum through our Environmental Studies program and throughout all disciplines and departments at Luther. My service included helping to found and direct Luther’s Center for Sustainable Communities and working on campus sustainability and community resilience projects at many levels. As a scholar, I have pursued opportunities to both study sustainability and engage with communities to nurture more resilient, thriving communities that respond to the challenges of our time. While sustainability is often associated with recycling and solar panels, and these things are important, the real work of sustainability is primarily about community and connections. While individuals can (and should) work to make their lives more sustainable, the primary unit of sustainability is communities, and the key is often to strengthen connections. Whether that is a campus community like Luther College, a municipality such as Decorah, Iowa, or a bioregion like the Driftless Region, communities must strive to achieve the balance between human systems and nature’s systems that is the hallmark of true sustainability. If community is the unit of sustainability, building connections is a primary tool of the work. How can we connect people to each other and the land? How can we help organizations make the connections that will advance their work? How do communities become more resilient to the inevitable shocks of the 21st century and improve the lives of citizens while reducing our impacts on the environment? Luther’s Center for Sustainable Communities has as its mission to “promote sustainability and be a catalyst for change on campus and in the region.” This involves the daily work of waste and energy management for the roughly 3,000 people that live, work, study, and play on the Decorah campus. But it also includes a wide variety of projects in Decorah and surrounding communities to address sustainability challenges and nurture more resilient communities. Here I highlight two projects that were part of my recent sabbatical, with an emphasis on the way that the work of sustainability can create unique learning opportunities for students while assisting communities to look to the future. The Upper Iowa River forms the western border of the Luther College Jon Jensen

Emergency responders in Freeport, Iowa, August 2016

campus before meandering through Decorah on its journey to the Mississippi. While this small river is usually a peaceful backdrop to the view from Peace Dining Room, with its riverside trails serving as a favorite spot for students to walk or jog, the Upper Iowa has another side. On the night of August 23, 2016, a predicted light shower turned into a sustained downpour—more than 10 inches in a few hours—and the river rose rapidly, causing severe flooding of lowlying areas. Residents of Freeport, an unincorporated community on the downstream edge of Decorah, were especially hard hit. The rising river converged with flash flooding on two local streams to catch Freeport in a “perfect storm” of flooding. Basement walls collapsed, homes were flooded, evacuations were made by boat, roads were closed. While the August 2016 flood impacted the whole watershed, Freeport suffered the most, partly due to its geography but also because of underlying vulnerabilities. In the aftermath of the 2016 Upper Iowa River flood, the Luther Center for Sustainable Communities convened a team of faculty and students to work in partnership with the Iowa Flood Center and the Upper Iowa River Watershed Management Authority to study community flood resilience, with a particular focus on Freeport. Funded by a federal grant, our research on the Upper Iowa was part of the Iowa Watershed Approach, a statewide initiative that sought to understand and enhance flood resilience in nine watersheds across the state. Both climatological research and anecdotal experiences are showing that flooding is a growing concern in the upper Midwest. Especially those who live near rivers like the Upper Iowa must adapt to this changing reality and enhance our ability to respond. Our research sought to understand how this can be done most effectively. What are the impacts – direct and indirect – of flooding on communities within our watershed? How do various elements of social vulnerability – such as poverty, race, age, household size, and isolation – impact flood resilience? What can be done to enhance community response and recovery to future floods? Working with teams of students and faculty over two summers, we sought to answer these questions and more through extensive interviews of Freeport residents, a survey of households throughout the watershed, and conversations with key community stakeholders, from emergency management personnel to community leaders. While the Luther team worked on our particular project, we were part of a much larger team within this watershed and throughout the state who were all seeking to understand the impacts of flooding and how communities can bounce back after a flood. One result of this project was a report that highlighted both the impacts on Freeport residents and lessons learned from the flood of 2016: “On the path to community flood resilience for the Upper Iowa Watershed.” 1 This report included a thematic analysis of the detailed interviews that students conducted of Freeport residents using the general themes of Response, Impact, and Resilience. Not surprisingly, the analysis showed no “silver bullet” or easy solution to increase community resilience to future flooding. Better communication, enhanced formal and informal networks, and more coordinated efforts both before and after floods were recommended as steps to help communities prepare for and “bounce back” after the next flood. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

A summary of this report and the underlying research was presented to both Freeport residents and the Upper Iowa River Watershed Management Authority. The process and subsequent product have also been shared across the state through the Iowa Flood Center. While the specific research project in Freeport has concluded, Luther faculty and staff remain actively involved in ongoing watershed planning efforts and work to enhance community flood resilience in Northeast Iowa. 3 3 3 3 Flooding is not the only change that threatens communities, nor are environmental factors the only element of sustainability. There is a social dimen

sion that is equally strong, especially in the work of the Center for Sustainable Communities. One of the longestrunning projects is Luther’s partnership with the Northeast Iowa Food and Fitness Initiative. For more than a decade, Luther has been a core partner in this six-county project to address childhood obesity and create healthier communities in Northeast Iowa. The Center and other partners have worked closely with local schools, Head Start classrooms, and other early education centers to incorporate healthy local food and ageappropriate educational interventions. Obesity is a growing problem nationally as an increasing percentage of the US population is overweight or obese and health problems related to obesity are rising rapidly. While often seen as a personal issue, obesity is best viewed as a systemic problem, a symptom or output of the policies, institutions, and structures of contemporary western society. It is, in short, a systems issue rather than an individual one and thus requires a systems perspective and approach. Food and Fitness was premised on exactly that approach: looking beyond individual behaviors to uncover the structures and drivers that result in individual health outcomes. Working in schools and with the food systems, Food and Fitness intervened at strategic points to “make the healthy choice the easy choice” and to increase access to healthy local food. Recently, the focus of our work has shifted beyond K-12 schools and the food system to address issues with younger children and the institutions that serve the early childhood population. Supported by a large grant from the WK Kellogg Foundation, Luther’s Center for Sustainable Communities has led an ongoing project titled “Expanding Farm to Early Childhood Education.” This project works with Head Start throughout Northeast Iowa and other early childhood learning environments to “create a refined model to expand and enhance Farm to Early Education in preschools and early childhood environments.” The project uses three pillars to structure our work: 1) increased access to healthy local food–making connections between local farmers and educational institutions and reducing barriers to purchasing local food; 2) professional development for early educators—we have a curriculum that helps teachers introduce new foods and develop habits of healthy eating and; 3) parent engagement—from cooking classes to grocery stores, our peer educators work to ensure lessons from the classroom are transferred to the home environment. One key element of this project was utilizing a systems approach, and this was highlighted in an article we published in the journal Health Promotion Practice. With co-authors Kathy Zurcher and Ann Mansfield, we explained the models and how they were applied in “Using a Systems Approach to Achieve Impact and Sustain Results.” 2 The systems approach works to move beyond a narrow, linear understanding of causes and effects to grasp the complicated relationships and feedbacks that influence and drive institutional and individual behavior. This article describes the ways that we employed systems thinking within the Food and Fitness Initiative while also sharing lessons learned for other practitioners. One exciting element of this project is the many connections to Luther College students, faculty, and alumni. Utilizing data collected over several years, in 2017 we embarked upon a new chapter in this work as we partnered with the Mayo Clinic to study the effectiveness of the initiative’s interventions. Through a unique partnership, the Center for Sustainable Communities brought together our community partners, Luther alum Dr. Brian Lynch at the Mayo Clinic, Luther nursing students, and Dr. Loren Toussaint and students in his psychology lab. The collaboration produced the paper “Slowing BMI Growth Trajectories in Elementary School-Aged Children: The Northeast Iowa Food and Fitness Initiative,” which was published in Family and Community Health: The Journal of Health Promotion and Maintenance. Not only did this project add to our knowledge of strategies for addressing childhood obesity, it also provided unique experiential learning opportunities for Luther students. 3 3 3 3 Both of these projects involve teams of people working with vulnerable communities over a period of time. Each of them attempts to both understand the disrupters that affect community vitality and also to play some small part Luther students and staff respond to the 2008 Upper Iowa River flood LUTHER COLLEGE PHOTO BUREAU

Aerial view of flooding on the Luther campus in 2016

in enhancing community resilience, improving the ability of communities to “bounce back,” to create healthy, flourishing, sustainable communities in which all people thrive. These projects also understand that change is part of the fundamental reality of life in the 21st century. Sustainability is not about achieving or maintaining some static state; rather, it recognizes the dynamic nature of life and strives to fortify communities to accept and work with change. We must find a healthy relationship with the more than human world rather than attempting to ignore change or pretend that we humans stand above the natural world, immune from the many limits we face. As we all strive to find our way through the radical change of 2020 and the global pandemic that at times seems to upset all that we know and care about, we would do well to remember Heracli- tus and his metaphorical river of change. Enhancing resilience – personal, insti- tutional, community, and societal – is the wise choice and we have no shortage of examples from which to draw in this ongoing work.

Notes

1. The full report is available online at https:// www.luther.edu/sustainability/assets/Re- port___Community_Flood_Resilience_in_ Freeport.pdf 2. Health Promotion Practice, September 2018 Vol. 19, 15s-23s.

IMAGE COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR