Ever Green!

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St. John's Magazine, Winter 2003
By Jennifer Delahunty Britz

Last spring, Christian Breczinski, OSB, a monk of Saint John’s Abbey and a 1998 graduate of Saint John’s University, joined his classmates for an annual ritual: tree planting. They headed out into the woods with shovels, gloves and buckets of saplings. Their charge was to plant a barrier of northern white cedar between Interstate 94 and the northern perimeter of the 2,400 acres that Saint John’s Abbey and University call home.

Tree planting is both a tradition and a powerful symbol at Saint John’s.

Since joining the monastery, Br. Christian, who works in the Saint John’s Arboretum, has spent much of his time in the woods and prairies with visitors and his fellow monks. When he strolls through the woods with his older confreres, they often point to a towering white pine and tell him, “I planted that tree during my novitiate.” Last spring, Br. Christian performed the same ritual. “I can imagine how these cedars will look in 20 or 30 years, but I know I won’t live long enough to see them fully mature and that’s okay,” he reflects. “Someone else will see them and enjoy it. That gives me a sense of peace.”

Br. Christian’s sense of peace stems from the 1,500-year Benedictine tradition of stewardship and a commitment to sustainability of the environment. “The Rule of Benedict speaks about how the tools and goods of the monastery should be cared for, and we extend this teaching to the land and the buildings,” says Br. Christian. “We are instructed to take care of everything so it is here for the generations who will follow.”
Across campus, in a classroom on the second floor of the Quad, a group of students in environmental historian Derek Larson’s class are learning what happens when future generations are not considered. When asked if they can guess the location of the nearest superfund site—those areas of the country so polluted they are uninhabitable—his students are stymied. “They all think those sites lie somewhere ‘out there,’ in New Jersey or someplace,” observes Larson, who heads the CSB/SJU environmental studies program. He asks them if they’ve been to the mall in St. Cloud. Most of them have. “I tell them there’s a significant superfund site across the road where an old railroad yard once stood. They look out across the beautiful woods and lakes and realize that is just a dozen miles from campus. They are horrified at the thought.”

The contrast between caring for the environment for future generations and not caring for it … this is just one of the many important lessons that come to life at Saint John’s University.

The Place Leads to the Program

On this campus of woodlands and lakes, three remarkable forces—Benedictine-style stewardship, environmental education and a remarkable natural learning laboratory—coalesce to form one of the most effective and innovative environmental studies programs in the country.

“We are among 2 to 3 percent of programs in the country with an interdisciplinary focus,” says Economics Professor Ernie Diedrich, a program co-founder. “We combine theology, humanities/social sciences and the natural sciences—it’s a kind of three-layer cake that creates very capable policy makers. Plus we have
one heck of a setting.”

Anyone who has passed through the Pine Curtain knows precisely what Diedrich means. This setting, this place—one of the most picturesque and unspoiled spots in the Upper Midwest—has been the sacred and sustaining home to the Benedictines since 1856.

When Abbot Boniface Wimmer, OSB, dispatched four monks from St. Vincent’s Abbey in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, to establish a Benedictine presence in the Minnesota territory, they had tree seeds in their pockets. They planted the swayed pines (mostly scotch pines) that welcome every campus visitor. And for almost 150 years, the Benedictines have maintained this forest and the land surrounding the abbey.

John Geissler '99, the Arboretum's assistant director, teaches local school children that wetlands are more than just water.

Self-sufficiency is woven into the history of the Benedictines who settled in Central Minnesota. They built their first structure from fieldstone gathered from nearby hillsides. When they began building the first church in 1879, they ran their own brickyard round the clock for months on end, producing 15,000 bricks a day from clay found on site. They damned Watab Creek to run their own water-powered sawmill. After clearing some land, they raised wheat and rye, which they ground in their own gristmill to make the original “Johnnie Bread.” Up through the 1950s, the monks provided for themselves and for their students by growing all their own vegetables, milking their own dairy cows, harvesting honey, tapping maple sugar trees, milling lumber, even experimenting with horticulture. At one time more than 100 pear and apple tree species were grown on Abbey lands.

Though it became economically inefficient by the 1950s to raise all the food for the abbey and university, several remnant sustainability practices are embedded into Collegeville life. Every spring, monks, faculty and students join together to tap hundreds of maple trees. Brothers still tend a small orchard. And today Br. Gregory Eibensteiner, OSB, and his assistants continue to build the desks, chairs and other pieces of red oak furniture that reside in university buildings and alumni homes. “God doesn’t make junk and neither should monastic communities made in God’s image,” writes Abbot John Klassen in a paper on environmental stewardship.

Indeed, the sacred and the sustainable come together in many of the Benedictine’s practices. “We have the advantage of being supported by our spiritual beliefs, which tell us to care for the earth,” says S. Phyllis Plantenberg, OSB, an emeritus professor of biology and one of the co-founders of the environmental studies program. “The earth is a gift from God, and its care is a matter of justice.”

With that foundation, it’s no surprise that a strong environmental studies program has grown and flourished at CSB and SJU. The program was born in the late 1980s while Ernie Diedrich and S. Phyllis were returning from a campus sustainability conference with the late Fr. Paul Schwietz, OSB, the Abbey’s land manager. “We had heard all these compelling reasons for revamping our campuses to be more sustainable and to raise the level of awareness of environmental issues, and so we had to ask ourselves ‘Are we actually going to do something?’ That answer had to be ‘yes,’” recalls Diedrich.

A coalition of faculty formed the Environmental Coordinating Organization to examine campus energy and recycling practices and to begin the process of building an environmental studies curriculum. About that same time, Fr. Paul began the 150-acre Habitat Restoration Project—a project that raised visibility of environmental stewardship, gave students and faculty a research focus, and became the basis for the land’s designation as a natural arboretum 10 years later. By 1994, a minor in environmental studies was in place, and more than 45 students have completed that program to date.

From Minor to Major

Today, about 60 students are pursuing an environmental studies minor. “Environmental studies used to be a quiet little backwater,” says program director Larson. “Not any more. There’s been a genesis—more faculty, more students, more resources and more people realize the uniqueness of our opportunities here. The idea for a major has been around for 10 years. It’s just now reached a critical mass.”

Last October, the faculty overwhelmingly approved an environmental studies major with uncharacteristic shouts of “Yea!” to register their enthusiastic approval of the program. The Board of Regents gave final approval for the major in December. Now students clamoring for the opportunity to marry their beliefs with their studies will be able to do so. Unlike most college programs that focus on environmental science, the CSB/SJU program is designed to produce graduates who will be able to make a difference in environmental policy. But that doesn’t mean the program is short on science; in fact, the first course in the program is a two-semester science sequence.

“We give students a solid foundation in geology, biology and chemistry so that they can evaluate policy decisions from a scientific perspective,” says Chemistry Professor Mike Ross, one of several faculty members responsible for the science component of the program. Ross and his colleagues have literally written the book on an integrated approach. “No textbooks exist that teach the subject the way we want to teach it,” he says. On the horizon are further curricular developments, including classes in environmental psychology and environmental sociology. The faculty feels strongly about the rigor and promise of the program. “Our program has the potential to be one of the best in the U.S.,” says Geology Professor Larry Davis. “It’s not just that we have the right mix of disciplines, but also that we’re situated in the most perfect place. Everything you need to teach environmental studies—wetlands, lakes, streams, forest, prairie—is right outside our door.”

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