UW-Parkside group wants Root River education center

By Journal Times staff

Monday, December 25, 2006 2:10 AM CST

Racine - Saving rain forest in South America is fine. Protecting polar bears in Antarctica is a worthy cause. But for Racine families working two jobs to make ends meet, worrying about getting their children back and forth to school, environmental issues might start sliding down their list of priorities.

Now a group from the UW-Parkside wants to work with Mayor Gary Becker to make environmentalism important to citizens who might otherwise not even give it a passing thought. But those wouldn't be the only people who they think would benefit from a planned Root River Environmental Education Community Center.

Becker believes there are many urban environmental issues that affect people's lives locally, so he'd like to focus his attention closer to home.

He's thought this way for a while, then he talked with John Skalbeck.

Skalbeck, an assistant professor in UW-Parkside's geosciences department and director of the school's environmental studies program, said he and Becker struck up a conversation at a conference on beach health that both men attended.

It's hard to miss Lake Michigan hugging Racine's east side.

The Root River is another matter. It's there, but Becker and Skalbeck see the river as an untapped resource - both recreationally and educationally.

That helped give Skalbeck some focus when he wrote for a grant from the Wisconsin Coastal Management Program.

"The idea was, if we can get people tied to the river and its connection to Lake Michigan through recreation, we could also incorporate learning into that mix," Skalbeck said.

"Another goal we have is to get broader awareness in the community of the river. It's hard to know about the river unless you walk or bike along it. Just driving over a bridge doesn't give you a good sense of the river."

Becker said the city had a storage building at 1301 Sixth Street that would work perfectly as an environmental education center. There's a nice view of the river from the building.

Part of the proposal includes providing rental opportunities, for boats and bikes, along with educational opportunities.

"There's only a select community of people who can afford a boat that would be in a marina," Skalbeck said. "(With boat rentals) now you're opening up a whole new community of people who can have access to the water. That's an exciting component of this proposal."

Officials at UW-Parkside are looking for opportunities to work in the community, which is one of the reasons Becker sees the relationship as a positive way to move the project forward.

The immediate target audience is the urban community, people who live in Racine close to the river, but who might not have opportunities to use the river.

"If you can connect people to the fact that the quality of water affects their recreational activities, if we can get that culture, anything we can do to get people connected back to the river (would be good). There's something magical about water. It's a beautiful thing," Becker said. "From a city perspective, (I'm wondering) what can I do to use that as a hook to protect the environment and make people's lives better?" Skalbeck said he is interested in water issues, among other environmental concerns, and tries to educate the public about them.

He's hoping the environmental education center would help that cause. If Skalbeck gets the funding he requested, it would likely get the project off the ground. Then he said the idea would be to get other community partners involved, like conservancy and corporate groups.

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