Los Angeles, home to 18 million people, is the physical and cultural gateway to Asia and the Americas, and one of the World’s great laboratories for the study of humans in an urban ecological context. The bluff on which LMU is located provides a panoramic view from downtown LA through dense development to the degraded Ballona Wetlands contextualizing the importance and challenges of studying ecology in an urban setting. The LA metropolis allows students to explore ecosystem services coupled with environmental justice leading to applied solutions across a wide array of settings including high-density development, urban parks, and the urban-wildlands interface. The university mission emphasizes education of the whole person and the strategic plan has as an objective the university’s commitment to stewardship, ethical sustainability, environmental justice and human resilience. The top-down thrust of mission and strategic plan are complemented by bottom-up engagement of students and faculty across campus in diverse activities. These programs initiate from the Colleges and from a growing cadre of research centers including; The Center for Urban Resilience, The Center for the Study of Los Angeles, The Coastal Research Institute, The Institute for Business Ethics and Sustainability and The Center for Equity for English Learners.
Results/Conclusions
The Ballona Wetlands, negatively impacted by urban development, serve as an outdoor laboratory for LMU students in many disciplines. Restoration plans for the wetlands are debated and challenge students to consider ecosystem services of a wetland. Longitudinal studies of the wetlands conducted by research classes, faculty-led projects and the interdisciplinary centers inform restoration plans while sea-level rise studies identify areas of concern for a sustainable restoration. The Center for Urban Resilience (CURes) conducts a wide range of studies on ecosystem services, the human bond with nature and community science. Many projects focus on a locally based existing management challenge with the provision of critical scientific information to policy-makers as an outcome. These projects also provide field experiences for local school students through the Urban EcoLab curriculum, an on-line national urban ecology course hosted at LMU through CURes. These projects and others provide a platform for the education of the whole person, contextualizing global challenges in the local context. The integration of the landscape into ecological education yields a rich and diverse educational outcome, centered on the ideas of resilience and nested within the ethical framework that is the core of Jesuit education at Loyola Marymount University.