Eric Pallant

Department of Environmental Science

Allegheny College

Meadville, PA 16335

"Being a fishhead was a great thing."

Becky Curtis

Meadville, Pennsylvania (Pop. 14,900), is the home of Allegheny College and the first town in America to manufacture zippers, but it is no longer the home of Talon's zipper factory. The factory closed during the Depression of the 1980s. Talon shut its doors within months of the closings at the Avtex Fibers corporation, the Abex Breakshoe company, and the Conrail fix-it yard for freight trains. Avtex, makers of rayon, left behind a superfund dump, and only a court injunction kept Conrail from ripping up their tracks that connect Meadville to the rest of the country. With the loss of more than three thousand jobs between 1983 and 1986 Meadville's unemployment rate shot into the teens. Stores closed. Houses were abandoned.

Steep unemployment among blue-collar workers did not breed a strong environmental ethic. On the contrary, a staunch anti-government, anti-regulations ideology permeates local politics. Meetings to support local militias have been well attended and Northwest Pennsylvania appears to be well prepared for any invasions directed by the United Nations. Although unemployment has dropped by two-thirds in just over a decade, emigration has produced much of that decline. Those that could leave, have left. Hard work by the regional redevelopment authorities has generated more than a thousand jobs since 1990, but many of the new jobs are low-paying. Efforts to attract a major factory to revive the town have failed. Nearly one in seven in Crawford County still live in poverty.

So what kind of service learning can a 1990s Department of Environmental Science offer to a community like this? The service, it seemed to me, was to provide jobs: jobs that were fulfilling, and part of an ecologically restorative, sustainable economy. First I read some big names in ecological economics: Paul Hawken, Herman Daly, and Robert Costanza. I liked their theory, but struggled to try to apply it to Meadville: could I name two businesses that would come to Meadville, create jobs, make a profit, and improve the environment all at the same time? Second I searched the local landscape for resources that might be used both profitably and sustainably. My list included timber, water, scenery, and abandoned factory sites. More than 50 percent of Crawford County is covered by forests. Unfortunately nearly all those forests are hacked to the ground within the hour the trees reach marketable dimensions, pressured by underclass land owners and unscrupulous timber haulers. So there is plenty of room for improvement in our forests. Meadville's pet name of Mudville is not just a charming local expression. It really does rain a lot here. A solar energy expert has told us that Meadville averages just forty-four blue-sky days a year. That means streams, groundwater, and wetlands are nearly always full. All those trees, streams, and wetlands means our scenery is good and so is hunting, fishing, birding, canoeing, and hiking. Consequently ecotourism has some potential. Finally, all the abandoned factory sites are perfect brownfield locations for new businesses to use without having to rip up pastures and forests.

I brought my ideas for the sustainable economic development of our resources to my departmental colleagues and after discussion and refinement we divided them up into Junior Seminars on the basis of inclination and expertise. Junior Seminars in the Environmental Science Department at Allegheny have long been bastions of student teamwork directed at solving real world problems. My idea was to use our plentiful supply of water to grow fish in tanks warmed by heat wasted at a local factory. Dissolved fish excrement from the aquaculture tanks would be pumped to a greenhouse to nourish vegetables and herbs. The integrated hydroponics and aquaculture operation, sometimes called aquaponics, would create a couple of jobs and provide the rest of the town with locally produced fish, the herbs to season it, and a side of salad, all available at the BiLo supermarket. It would also serve as a model for other depressed small towns.

I employed a college junior as a research assistant the summer before my seminar to gather whatever information she could on the world of aquaponics. I even went to visit an aquaponics operation outside New York City right before classes started. The operator, Annie Farrell of Cabbage Hills Farms, Inc., was exceptionally informative. She told me that "no aquaponics plant anywhere [including her own] is profitable. The one that is closest to being profitable has already dumped $16 million dollars into his operation. Another has been at it for eight years without breaking even, and a third just recently lost his entire stock of fish to a Staph infection." Reading between the lines I concluded that there must be a reason why so many people were trying to get started despite the odds. Ignoring Farrell's dire predictions, I handed the charge of a designing a profitable aqauponics factory to a bunch of inexperienced twenty-year olds.

I asked the fifteen students enrolled in my Fall 1996 Junior Seminar, called "Sustainable Solutions," to investigate the feasibility of creating a sustainable aquaponics business in Meadville. On the first day of class I told them, but they forgot, that they were beginning a long-term project, which might take years to complete, if ever. Disappointment mounted midway through the semester when it became clear they weren't going to get to eat the fruits of their labor by finals. So I promised to continue their work (using students who would build on their successes) if they produced enough information and their feasibility study demonstrated aquaponics was worth pursuing. I urged them to infuse the project with everything they could think of that would make the factory a paradigm of sustainable development, but insisted they could not sacrifice profitability on the altar of environmental correctness, a position which grated several the wrong way for much of the semester. A student whose e-mail to me always arrived from "SULL-DADDY" insisted in one class that "I don't care whether the aquaponics plant ever makes a profit so long as it uses sustainable energy." No one refuted him and I fell off my chair in disbelief. Though SULL-DADDY's determination to back a factory that lost money was impractical, the ensuing discussion of how far we should go to trade-off sustainability for a factory in the black was excellent.

It's worth speculating, however, what I would have done if the mid-semester calculations were already showing that only a fool would bother proceeding. I'd like to believe that even a feasibility study demonstrating guaranteed financial losses year after year would have been intellectually remunerative. Students could still have proven to themselves which parts of sustainability don't cut it in the 1990s and that would have been lesson enough. But the issue never arose, for within days of the opening bell the class confirmed my summer research. They contacted lots of people trying to assemble hydroponic and aquaculture plants and we took that to mean that if we failed to construct a bottom line in the black that our research wasn't good enough. Either that or everyone was else was crazy, and the everyone else included the agribusiness behemoth, Archer Daniels Midland. If we designed sustainability into the operation correctly I reasoned, i.e. very efficient recycling of water, energy and materials, I felt it would help make our factory just a little more competitive than the others. At least that is what the theorists in ecological economics suggest and I never let my students forget it.

We met once a week for one semester around a large table. I acted as the lead consultant among a firm of consultants and divided the students among several research teams. The groups were told to 1) choose crops and species of fish; 2) assess local markets for greenhouse vegetables, herbs, and Tilapia fish, or other fish if Tilapia wasn't the right choice; 3) calculate the energy requirements to heat fish tanks, pump water to greenhouse vegetables, light and warm the greenhouse, and see if the entire operation could run off heat wasted by an existing industry; 4) determine if excess heat in the operation (should any exist) could be used to dry produce from the greenhouse plus fruits produced by area farmers; 5) design the factory so the water and nutrients knew how to get from the fish to the veggies and back again, arriving with the right amounts for each station; 6) locate several plant locations including appropriate brownfields (abandoned factory) adjacent to surviving industries and rank them; 7) prepare a Net Present Value estimate for a business under optimistic and pessimistic scenarios, and; 8) write and edit a final report.

During the first class I also made it clear that their work mattered, not just to the life of a future hothouse tomato, but rather because their factory would become the piece of a larger puzzle I, and a small core of others dedicated to sustainable development, were trying to assemble in northwest Pennsylvania. To raise the stakes still further I let them know that their research was being supported in part by the Heinz Family Endowments, who were anxiously awaiting their results, before deciding whether to supply additional funding to the Department of Environmental Science at Allegheny. Raising the stakes acted as a stimulant. They charged ahead, each working on their own small portion of the puzzle, tackling concepts in business planning and energy efficiency for which they had no training and for which Allegheny offers little support. I relied, too, on what I have learned from earlier seminars: students are motivated by a desire for immortality. A fish farm that consumes its own excrement would let them leave their mark on the local society, almost as if they were constructing a statue of themselves on the town square.

The integrity of the research groups lasted two weeks. By that time students were surging into class and stopping one another in hallways and dormitories with discoveries that were more important to another group than their own. Information poured in throughout the semester from the World Wide Web, hundreds and hundreds of telephone calls, field trips, letters, and e-mail discussions with growers and aquaponics aficionados from Arizona to the Virgin Islands. Students invented and then perfected a method of interview that began meekly. "Hi, I'm a junior in college [giggle, giggle], and I'm doing a report about aquaculture." Five minutes into the interview, after the barricades were fully breached, students let loose with heavy artillery. "You said the coefficient of production for the low-end heat pump was 2.8, but my research shows..."

About a month into the semester things really started hopping when the Small Business Administration, the Meadville Redevelopment Authority, and the Crawford County Development Corporation all responded to our requests for assistance. We were inundated with eager engineers and business analysts. I even started getting solicitations from rural electrification cooperatives trying to sell me electricity to run my factory. More than once I had to be firm: "I'm not starting a company. I'm just studying how to start a company."

Class meetings turned into free-for-alls. Each week as we gathered around the table students performed concurrent brain-dumps followed by group hand-wringing. We worried whether juniors in a college with no business school and no engineering program could really achieve anything meaningful. I concluded our weekly sessions by assigning new tasks for the upcoming week to answer questions generated during our three hours together. Still, Chrissy Scott told me "I felt a whole lot more motivation to work hard because there was a specific endpoint to reach and no one knew just how much work was required. The fact that this was a real feasibility study, and not just for practice or to help us learn increased the determination to get the job done and for it to be done perfectly." Kristen Graziano agreed. "I've never worked so hard to just go to class! Unlike any other curriculum, the material from this class will never leave me, because I have essentially taught it to myself through hands-on experiences."

Evaluation of student performance in a class where students are supposed to work in teams is normally tough for any instructor, but in this class, where the groups they were assigned to dissolved, it got tougher before it got easier. In order to complete a feasibility study using novices in about a dozen weeks I needed to see good work and a lot of it. The good students took off like speedboats, at first pulling the slower ones behind them, and then eventually forming new groups of their own. It was obvious from what each student was sending me in their weekly e-mail dumps what they were hauling in with their nets and even more clear who knew what they were doing during our weekly class meetings. What worked best of all were two narrative evaluations I had them prepare; one at mid-term and one at the end. The mid-term report let them tell me quite clearly what was going well, and what wasn't, with them, their teammates, and the class as a whole. That's when the burn-out issue came up and I took a hiatus of two weeks to work on more philosophical issues related to sustainability before pushing the class to full throttle in an effort to squeeze the final bits of research out of them before finals. Their evaluations also gave me a chance to tell them what I liked about their contributions up to that point and what more I hoped they would achieve in order to improve the midterm grade they were receiving. I had to tell several students that learning is not a passive process. I told Megan Terebus, a competitive swimmer, "you will need to be just as aggressive out of the blocks in this class as you are during a meet. It won't be enough to just dive into the water. You will have to push hard with every stroke to teach yourself what you need to know for this class and in learning situations beyond this one." Then I gave Megan and several others low grades. It worked. The quality of work improved during the second half of the class, and my final grade was a summation of the quantity and quality of their work presented in class, in writing, during meetings with me, and the two self evaluations.

By the end of the semester my original prediction stood unamended: it would be years before my class could hold a reunion dinner of broiled Tilapia served on a bed of greenhouse lettuce. But the class was still a success, and for reasons I hadn't imagined.

We introduced the business community of northwest Pennsylvania to sustainable development and they loved it. Maryann Martin, Director of Grants Administration for the Crawford County Development Corporation, told me "Allegheny College's Environmental Science students have really influenced our thinking in making the environment a priority in whatever we do. Because our offices are at a site that was a superfund site, we want to continue to work with companies that will keep the environment clean and healthy and not deplete resources." Martin, whose primary function for years had been to attract any old jobs, began sending me monthly progress reports on a tire recycling business she was courting. It wasn't just that tire recycling was appealing, it was that Martin knew that the process of melting the tires was going to generate enough heat and natural gas as byproducts to run the aquaponics farm.

Chet Shoop, an engineering consultant from Erie, brought our way by the Small Business Administration, called our project "one of the most interesting I have ever worked on." Shoop became so excited that he brought us five more engineers with specialties in heat transfer, mechanics, and systems analysis. The engineers were fascinated by a project whose primary objective was to balance sustainability, worker satisfaction, and profit. They had all spent careers groveling exclusively for profit. They loved tinkering with plant designs to increase energy, material, and water efficiency. Sarah Vernier of the Small Business Administration's office in Meadville echoed the engineers. She, too, called the creation of an aquaponics plant "a fascinating proposal," and she called me several times to be sure that I and my students had received all the support we needed. Joe Boito, the geothermal energy expert for our regional electric company, GPU, made a special trip to Allegheny to help us work through calculations and cost estimates.

The integration of aquaculture and hydroponics took on a life of its own, too. Plants can only absorb dissolved nutrients and much of what fish excrete is solid. The current factory design, therefore, includes a mushroom room to produce Shiitakes and Portabellas on a substrate of solid fish poops mixed with newsprint now piling up at our recycling center for lack of markets. So now there is a fish room, a greenhouse, a fruit drying room, and a mushroom room, with heat exchangers to take heat out of the mushroom room and put into the food drying room.

Markets for our products are soft. Currently, Tilapia arrives in Meadville rarely, and only to one store. It comes from Costa Rica to Maine to Pittsburgh to our local Giant Eagle where it sells very slowly because the name is funny. If Tilapia were renamed for the way it tastes, boring-white-fish-that-Americans-would-eat, it would sell better in places like Meadville. Lacking a local supermarket anxious for our product, we called Heinz to assess their interest in buying our vegetables and fish to make soup, but got nowhere with the lead. Alas, the family endowments and the pickle people are completely divorced these days. Nevertheless, the markets we could secure were sufficient to cover production. After he ran our last Net Present Value estimate on his computers, Roy Campbell, the Business Analyst for the Small Business Administration, said "the numbers look reliable enough that I would be ready to invest in it."

There were unforeseen successes in the classroom, too. Spontaneity and chaos often overwhelmed us. Once, near the beginning, all fifteen students went to the blackboard simultaneously to list their facts under 11 different categories. On another occasion near the very end of the semester, as we were trying to tie up loose ends, all the students rushed out of the room to telephones throughout the building we worked in. Few events have been as satisfying to me as a teacher as those two, when the excitement of learning overcame conventional decorum. During both events, I sat at the table alone waiting for their breathless returns to the customary.

In addition to teaching Meadville about sustainability, the students came away with extraordinary lessons of their own. Chrissy Scott summed up the academic side of things. "Our research was fully interdisciplinary and collaborative so that we had to learn everything from the thermodynamics of heat pumps to the biogeochemical cycling of fish crap and the business of advertising." By the end of the semester Becky Curtis admitted, "I was so tired of thinking because I had never thought as much as I had in that one class. It was not just memorizing notes but actually thinking, understanding, and putting the pieces together."

Shana Stewart listed the class lessons she added to her notes. The list is interesting, because we discussed much of it, but I never lectured about any of it. "1. Make a good presentation of yourself--even if it means wearing dress clothes. 2. Be on time. 3. It's easier to criticize a new idea, than to run with one or come up with one. 4. Not everyone that looks like they know what they're doing really does. 5. Be skeptical of your sources. 6. Expect impediments, but realize that you will most likely be able to cross them if you persevere. 7. I have the ability to teach myself and I get more out of it than when someone is feeding me information. 8. Most people are actually pretty nice and open to these sort of projects. 9. Staunch educators: you don't always have to lecture to teach or for me to learn. In fact I probably learned and will retain more information from this class than many of my other classes and I did not have one exam or paper on aquaponics." Kristen Graziano added to Stewart's list. "I learned a tremendous amount from failure and frustration; it's hard to believe the number of trials it took for me to get the information I wanted. I've learned to network by phone, e-mail, and correspondence. Granted, there were days I wanted to choke someone because they criticized an idea I had spent days intensely researching. It taught me the importance of listening and presenting my information quickly, clearly and concisely!"

The biggest successes for the students were how they, as future promoters of environmental issues, came to view their task. According to Scott Ferrenberg, "[There was] one unexpected occurrence in particular, which really changed the way I think about sustainable development. I altered my feelings toward business. At the onset of the class, I viewed business as an evil entity hell-bent on making money regardless of the costs to society. After our class focus began to shift from how to make a sustainable, efficient, model business toward how to make a profit, I realized that my earlier thoughts were unfounded. If a group of environmental science and studies majors could become caught up in making money and capturing a market, I could understand how people, without an environmental focus could do so. These people are not inherently evil and money-minded, but rather trying to survive in a capitalist society."

Regardless of whether a Tilapia ever grows in Meadville a profound change has occurred. I am now a regular collaborator with the Redevelopment Authorities in Crawford and Venango Counties. Together we think about redevelopment in terms of sustainable development. And in addition to whatever sustainable businesses we can bring to life in Meadville, at some other time and some other place sustainable businesses like the one my students created will grow. Becky Curtis has the skills to make her dream come true. "I hope to one day work with inner city youth. I have been thinking of starting something like an aquaponics project in the city to give the youth a place to come, work a little, but especially to enjoy the beauty of wildlife right in their own back yards."