From manatees to koalas to pangolins, endangered wildlife was a recurring theme among 148 submissions to the 2022 One Earth Young Filmmakers Contest. Students ages 8 to 25 revealed the impact of weather extremes and plastic pollution on people, animals, and the planet, with a new note of urgency about the climate crisis in their short films.

It’s what you’ve been waiting for. . . our 2022 lineup of tide-turning films is here! All screenings are free (with a suggested $8 donation) and open to the public. Seventeen virtual events will screen during the week of March 4-13. If the Omicron surge cooperates, we will be adding up to 15 in-person events—they will be offered at the same times and days as the virtual events.

It’s time to look back and celebrate all the things we’ve accomplished together this year. Here’s 2021 by the numbers.

4,046 attendees at 26 film watch parties
At each of the virtual events during the main Fest Season in March and during Earth Week in April, we learned about the climate crisis, were presented with more than 250 action ideas, and pledged to take action.

Each year, the One Earth Young Filmmakers Contest receives amazing short film entries from all across the U.S. The submissions are rolling in ahead of the Jan. 5 deadline, and we are preparing to evaluate them. In 2022, we are excited to announce a new prize level—“The Environmental Activism Prize”—to elevate both the young filmmakers and the organizations on the frontlines of climate change activism.

Lake Michigan, one of Chicagoland’s great treasures, is connected to the Mississippi River by a series of waterways, including the Little Calumet River, which flows through several south-side Chicago neighborhoods, carrying nearly two centuries of African American history. The African American Heritage Water Trail honors this history and the remarkable stories of African American freedom seekers and trailblazers who traveled, lived, worked, and overcame enormous obstacles around this river and its banks. Please stop right now and visit this beautiful website, where you’ll find everything you need to understand the trail and the stops along its way.

One Earth Collective (formerly Green Community Connections) and West Cook Wild Ones are holding the annual Native Tree & Shrub Sale now through Friday, Sept. 10.

A couple dozen trees and shrubs are available. According to West Cook Wild Ones Board Member Carolyn Cullen, this year’s best-selling plants so far are Wild Black Currant, New Jersey Tea, Kalm St. John's Wort and Wahoo. These versatile and attractive plants are compact enough to fit in any suburban or urban landscape and offer attractive blooms and seasonal color that will add year-round beauty to your yard. We also love them because they provide food and shelter to pollinators and other beneficial insects, birds and other wildlife.

The very first finding in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UNIPCC, or simply, IPCC) August 9 report is this:

“It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred.”

I strongly suspect that this is the first time the word “unequivocal” has appeared in an IPCC report, given the IPPC’s “calibrated language” and the fact that these reports require both scientific and political consensus. Artist Alisa Singer illustrated one thread of the evidence for human-caused climate change.

The art show “Third Coast Disrupted: Artists + Scientists on Climate” was scheduled to close on Friday, Oct. 30, but will reopen Monday, Jan. 11, and continue through Friday, Feb. 19, at Columbia College Chicago’s Glass Curtain Gallery, 1104 S. Wabash.

After seeing the show recently, one of its artworks continues to haunt me.

Begin with this: Today, nearly 65,000 Native Americans, representing more than 100 tribal nations, live in Chicagoland—making this one of the largest urban Native American populations in the country.

Move on to this: I have lived in Chicagoland for over 30 years, and I only recently learned what I’ve just told you. For this new awareness, I credit the Cook County Forest Preserve Foundation’s October symposium, called “Racial Equity and Access to Nature.”

Like many other Oak Parkers, our family tries to live in an environmentally responsible way. We compost food waste, eat meat-free and organic, and drive electric cars. When we lived in a single-family house, we imagined installing solar panels on the roof, but it wasn't practical or, at the time, affordable. When we downsized into a condo, we faced the challenge of getting buy-in from our fellow owners to add a rooftop solar array, and the available space would have been too small to make much of a dent in our building’s electricity consumption.

During the recent Wild Ones/Green Community Connections Native Tree & Shrub Sale, a customer ordered five species of oak tree. Valerie Kehoe, from the sale’s planning team, wondered why this person had ordered so many oak tree varieties. Curious minds wanted to know, and so I set off to find out.

Following up on last year’s successful Austin Grown summer youth leadership program—but adding in a pandemic—proved . . . challenging. Last year, youth worked at BUILD Chicago’s Iris Farm and Peace Garden. They had their hands in the dirt. But during the first week of June, and with the program scheduled to begin on July 6, the word came in that all youth programs through After School Matters and One Summer Chicago (of which Austin Grown is a part) had to be 100% virtual.

Third Coast Disrupted: Artists + Scientists on Climate is an exhibition of new artworks culminating a yearlong conversation between artists and scientists centered on climate change impacts and solutions in the Chicago region.

Through science-inspired sculpture, painting, collage and more, the artworks examine local impact—happening here and now—ranging from extreme heat to flooding to habitat loss and more. They also shine light on local solutions underway, like “cool roofs,” nature-based approaches to slowing stormwater, and backyard habitat restoration. Some imagine future possibilities.

Growing a native garden has never been easier: plant sales and information are readily available. Are you curious? Here are two resources you can access that will help you add more native plants, more beauty, more flavor, more life, and less work to your landscape.

The Fall Native Tree and Shrub Sale is going on now. Sponsored by several area non-profits, all proceeds will go to Green Community Connections and its programming. Support sustainability and beautify your yard: win-win!

Who We Expect to See Where and Doing What

Some of you might have already heard of Christian Cooper via the 2019 One Earth Film Festival screening of "Birders: The Central Park Effect." Far more of us had a first introduction to him via his disturbing encounter with a dog walker in Central Park on Memorial Day and the subsequent news reports.

West Cook Wild Ones launches its 2020 Garden for Nature program by announcing grants totaling more than $4,500 to 14 nonprofit and public organizations in the Chicago area.

Garden for Nature funds projects mainly in western Cook County that engage young people in planting native gardens and natural landscapes to make their communities healthier and more beautiful.

Some of our area’s oldest living beings are oaks that sunk roots here long before the first European settlers arrived. Ernest Hemingway might have walked under their branches. Generations of children played in their shade.

Celebrate OAKtober Tree Forum will honor these oaks and point us forward toward a “tree culture.” Featuring four exceptional speakers and information tables, the event will take place from 2 to 5 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 13, in the 2nd floor Veterans’ Room of the Oak Park Main Library, 834 Lake St.

August brought an end to another successful completion of Green Community Connection’s youth sustainability leadership program, formerly known as “I Can Fly.” This summer’s program, “Austin Grown,” was a collaboration between GCC and BUILD Chicago, an organization serving Chicago’s at-risk youth since 1969 through gang intervention, violence prevention, and youth development programs.

The 8-week “Austin Grown” program involved 10 students, hailing primarily from the Austin, Garfield Park, and North Lawndale communities of Chicago, including two who returned from GCC’s 2017 pilot cohort.

We are blessed with an abundance of mature trees on the Greater West Side of Chicago. And that means birds are flying above us all the time.  What makes them want to stop and linger in a particular garden? Jim Gill and Elaine Petkovsek are making that discovery. For the past year, they have been working on creating a “bird garden” in their backyard. They are putting the finishing touches on a project that’s taken some muscle, a little research… and becoming a bit of a bird-brain.

Pembroke Township, in the southeast corner of Kankakee County, is full of treasures of both place and people. From its black oak savanna to its black rodeo, topography and culture meet to create a one-of-a kind, rural community.

This summer, six area high school students participating in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Youth Conservation Corps (YCC) documented some of what makes Pembroke so unique via three Young Filmmakers Workshops with Matt Wechsler of Hourglass Films.

Out of Oak Park, Forest Park, Maywood and Berwyn, one community earned the title of “greenest suburb” when comparing per capita carbon dioxide emissions, but the winner may surprise you.

Author, researcher and former Oak Park resident Susan Subak will reveal the answer on Wednesday, July 10, when discussing her 2018 book, “The Five-Ton Life: Carbon, America, and the Culture That May Save Us.” The presentation will include Susan’s research on the low carbon culture of west suburban Chicago compared to other environmental leaders on the East Coast, a slideshow and a book signing. The event will take place from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Oak Park Public Library Main Branch, 834 Lake St., in the Veterans Room on the second floor.

A month after losing Sally Stovall (co-founder of Green Community Connections), we are so very thankful for the hundreds of people who reached out to share memories of her, attend a memorial service and even help to continue her work. If you feel inspired to do so, please contact us to help with or attend any of these initiatives.

Sally Stovall Memorial Plastic-Free/Low Plastic Summer Challenge. Plastic-free living was a cause Sally was working on shortly before she passed away. Reduce your plastic waste and compete for a prize and bragging rights.

Join a book discussion of "Braiding Sweetgrass" at 7 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 15, at Trailside Museum of Natural History, 738 Thatcher Ave., in River Forest. Sponsored by the Forest Preserves of Cook County’s Nature Book Club.

This collection of essays was a favorite of GCC’s co-founder, Sally Stovall, who passed away a little more than a month ago. “It opened up a whole new way of looking at things,” she said about the book a few years ago, when she organized a five-week reading group around it. Later, in writing a brief review, Sally wrote, “The stories in each chapter have delighted and nurtured me in a way that I find hard to describe. From the first essay on, I have been sharing my enthusiasm for this book like an evangelist!”

When most people retire, they kick back, take cruises, and visit the grandchildren. Sally Stovall was not most people. She did, indeed, relish visiting her grandchildren, but after she retired from a career in organizational development, Sally embarked on a new, vibrant career as climate activist and community organizer.

In September 2010, Sally and her partner, Dick Alton, were worried about global warming and decided to hold a community meeting to see if others felt the same way. Out of the woodwork poured a cohort of people with the same concerns --no real surprise in progressive Oak Park.

When monarch butterflies migrate over 2,000 miles to Mexico during the winter, they head to the same places within the fir forests each year. This fact may not sound impressive, but the monarchs who fly to Mexico may be fourth generation butterflies who have never seen the mountain forests and do not have any living ancestors to lead the way from experience.

Doug Taron, chief curator at Chicago Academy of Sciences’ Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, will speak about the life cycle and migration of monarch butterflies at a West Cook Wild Ones monthly meeting from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, May 26, at the Oak Park Public Library Maze Branch, 845 Gunderson Ave.

It happened suddenly, almost overnight. Just 700 feet from young children playing, MAT Asphalt, LLC appeared on the southern border of McKinley Park, at 2055 W. Pershing Rd., in Chicago, in early 2018. The plant produces up to 890,000 tons of asphalt per year.

Almost as quickly, Neighbors for Environmental Justice (N4EJ) formed in response; they are a group of local citizens who claim the plant brings dust and fumes, which could damage children’s lungs, increase rates of asthma, and possibly worse.

Not many people would let a tarantula crawl across their hand and consider it a “magical” experience. Nor allow an octopus to grasp their arm with its suckers, but author Sy Montgomery did both, telling stories about the animals in “How to be a Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals.”

The Nature Book Club of the Trailside Museum of Natural History will hold a free discussion of “How to Be a Good Creature” at 7 p.m. Thursday, May 2. The museum is located at 738 Thatcher Ave. in River Forest. For details, contact 708-366-6530 or trailside.museum@cookcountyil.gov. “How to Be a Good Creature” is a New York Times bestseller, and Montgomery is a National Book Award finalist.