Outside the O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library, St. Thomas students had the opportunity to tell their stories about the Mississippi River in the Elm Tree Story booth.
The Elm Tree Story booth, in partnership with the environmental 212 Sustainability in Context class and the Minnesota Watershed management organization, made an appearance on campus during the week of Nov. 4 – 8.
“Our class is collecting data about people’s experiences of the Mississippi River,” Maria Dahmus, the Director of the Sustainability Communities partnership and also the Assistant Director of the Office of Sustainability said. “They’re analyzing data through some of the frameworks of the class to create a set of recommendations for the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization to inform their public outreach.”
Dahmus is also the professor of the class conducting research through the Elm Tree story booth. Their mission is to collect data and present it in a way that is a clearer layout for people who are not part of the scientific data collection.
“It’s a tree that travels around to different places in the Twin Cities and has a phone inside and people can walk into the booth and tell stories about their experiences of Mississippi watershed and specifically how people interact with the river,” Rachel Schauer, a St Catherine’s Environmental Studies Major, said. “By being able to turn it into art, we can communicate with a broader community, what we’re trying to, like get across with our environmental studies.”
Before the Elm Tree story booth came to St Thomas, it was hosted at St. Paul Lutheran church in Minneapolis. After coming to campus, the booth was moved to Minneapolis’ Surly Brewing Co. and then will travel to the Science Museum of Minnesota.
This project is working with a group called the Natural Heritage Project, that works to promote learning and human connections with the urban environment through art.
The Sustainability Community Program works in the St. Thomas community to raise awareness of environmental issues. One way they are able to communicate with the community is through accessible and user-friendly interactive art pieces.
“I think a lot of times people who study the environment and academics aren’t always necessarily artistic. They’re usually more data-driven, or they like to focus more on the specific interactions and not the artistic interpretation of it,” Schauer said. “It’s really nice that we have an artist that we can work with to translate those into without having to do the work ourselves and get the message out to a broader community.”
The St. Thomas Sustainability Community Program and Environmental 212 class have an installation in the O’Shaughnessy Education Center about the class’ survey-collected data.
The data collection art is located in the O’Shaughnessy Educational Center’s Art History Gallery from September 4 through December 20.
Mae Macfarlane can be reached at macf7507@stthomas.edu.