A Profile of Wes Jarrell

It’s 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 9, and Wes Jarrell, a faculty member in the University of Illinois’ College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES), looks down from the podium at the half-filled auditorium of the Beckman Institute. In its second day, the Human Story of Climate Change (Planet U) conference hosted by UI, is coming to a close. Following the conference agenda, Jarrell is to give a 15-minute presentation on the Environmental Change Institute (ECI).

Sporting a corduroy blazer and a red tie, the 60-year-old Jarrell stands before the podium and introduces himself as an educator, an environmentalist and farmer. What is not visible to the audience is how this man’s life story, starting as a boy growing up on the family farm in Bend, Ore., and shaped by a career straddling between academia and agriculture, has defined the man standing before them; a man who is on crusade to save the planet.

 Along with his appointment in ACES, Jarrell is also the interim director of ECI, which was established to raise awareness and to inform public policy on matters related to climate change. In order to achieve this mission ECI seeks to engage the public through research, teaching and public engagement, Jarrell said. Although he smiled, and he conveyed a relaxed tone, a sense of urgency was present in Jarrell’s message.

“Very importantly, a lot of us are near the end of our careers, shall we say, and (climate change) is a problem that is going to go a long way into the future. So, we need (to develop) highly motivated, broadly trained, ethical leaders for the 21st century and we want to do our part to make that happen.”

In order to cultivate future leaders equipped to address climate change issues, Jarrell used the ECI platform to develop a course in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences (NRES). The course titled NRES 199, was offered for the first time during the spring semester and is held on Thursdays from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. The students range from freshmen to graduate students and the goal of the course is to develop a carbon registry and a business plan to address how UI can reduce its carbon footprint. The class will present findings to the campus administration on May 7.

To prepare themselves for this presentation, the students rehearsed during class last Thursday. The clean-shaven Jarrell was seated at a table with arm sleeves rolled up to his elbows, listening as students reported on group projects. This was a rehearsal for the upcoming presentation to the administration.  Jarrell served as co-facilitator for the meeting and gestered with his hands as he offered solutions to research problems identified by students. Each suggestion Jarrell posed was usually accompanied with a smile and slight chuckle.

Freshman Matt Rundquist said he "he enrolled in the  class because it looked like a good way to learn about carbon trading and that side of environmental economics in a real-world kind of way." Regarding Jarrell's teaching style he added, "He's been more of a manager than a teacher on this project, and really let us take the this thing where we wanted to."

During his tenure at UI Jarrell has not always been as at peace with his work as he appears to be now. From 2003 until 2007, he served as the director of NRES and faced what he described as a difficult time, as a result of his efforts to change the department’s culture. “I don’t see boundaries where other people see boundaries. And I didn’t appreciate how impenetrable some of these boundaries were, in terms of how people (viewed) what they did and what they thought their jobs were.”

Jarrell said that one of the major challenges in academia is related to the unwillingness by many professors to engage in collaborative endeavors that are not directly aligned with their particular scholarship.

 “Many people in academia are more loyal to their disciplines than they are to society and societal needs, in general.”

He added, “(Some people) tie up their identity so much with the discipline they got their degree in, that they have an enormous amount of trouble breaking free of it. I’m not that way, so that made for a disconnect (in my department),” he said.

Jarrell’s vision for how the department should function involved stripping away discipline boundaries that hindered collaborative research efforts and it encouraged the restructuring of certain course curriculum in order to better serve the needs of students.

One of the biggest challenges with NRES is that it consists of faculty from different disciplines, including horticulture, forestry, soil sciences, and human dimensions, among others, said Interim Director Bruce Branham.

“I think what got to Wes was trying to get everybody to buy into his vision of what the department should be because a lot of people felt they were comfortable with the old vision of how they were and did not want to change.”

After fours years of departmental turmoil, Jarrell resigned in 2007.

“My psychological makeup just wasn’t able to accept that, I guess, and just go with the flow, so I stepped down,” Jarrell said.

After he resigned, Jarrell spent more than three months away from academia and focused his energy on the 39-acre certified-organic farm that he owns with his wife Leslie Cooperband. Located about ten miles from downtown Urbana on North Lincoln Avenue, Prairie Fruits Farm and Creamery is home to a herd of goats that includes 50 milkers and 350 fruit trees.

His wife describes a typical 12-hour day on the farm. “So, the day would (begin at) 6 a.m. or 6:30 a.m. and go until 6:30 p.m. or 7:30 p.m., depending on what type of cheese we were making,” Cooperband said.

The farm produce is primarily sold to customers through the Urbana and Chicago farmer’s markets, she said.

Prior to purchasing the farm land in 2003, the couple lived in Madison, Wis., where both were faculty members at the University of Wisconsin in the soil sciences department. Cooperband described herself and Jarrell as “two soil nerds” that met in Las Vegas at an agronomy conference.

“We’re both kind of dreamers and schemers,” Coooperhand said. “We were interested in applying science to good ends and not just doing science for science’s sake, but applying it to pressing needs of the day. I think that’s what attracted us to each other initially.”

Jarrell’s appreciation for the natural world stems from growing up on the family farm in Central Oregon, with a view of the Cascade Mountains, where he and his two sisters assisted with the chores.

“One of his responsibilities, when he was 11 or 12, was to get out and pick berries,” said Jarrell’s mother, Edith. “He was noted for the rows he picked (because) they were very clean – he picked the good berries and left the bad ones.”

Reflecting on her son's behavior as a boy, Edith stated, “He did what he was told. He was a very obedient kid (and) he didn’t need to be corrected more than once, if there was something he did wrong,” she said.

Among Jarrell’s earliest memories was attending Peter Boscow Elementary School located in Hillsboro, Ore. This is the same school that his mother attended, he said. Jarrell remembered that his mother taught him and his sisters to count by making flash cards from “old shredded wheat boxes.”

In high school Jarrell excelled in the classroom and in extra curricular activities. He was the student body president during his senior year, a member of the wrestling team and played the clarinet as a member of the band, he said.

            After graduating from high school, Jarrell attended Stanford University on a merit scholarship. As a freshman, Jarrell was interested in pursuing a law degree but Ms. Kinsella, his English teaching assistant, encouraged him to pursue another field, he said.

            “I came in as a pre-law (major) but discovered I didn’t write as well as I needed to.”

The switch from his rural community to the life of a college student surrounded by seemingly sophisticated peers, was a transformative moment for Jarrell, he said.

            “(Going) from the backwoods of Oregon to downtown Stanford, there were quite a few rich kids from cities. That was my first real jarring experience of rural meets urban.”

            While recognizing that students from urban areas dealt well with people, he also discovered that not many of his peers knew as much as he did about farm life, he said. Jarrell enjoyed the time he spent in the woods and in fields and decided to become a biological science major, he said.

Another transformative moment occurred for Jarrell when he realized he was more interested in focusing his energies toward a discipline that had practical applications. Intent on joining the Peace Corps and saving the world, Jarrell enrolled in a course titled “Physical Resources of the Tropics,” which was a course in soil science, he said.

            Reflecting back on the course, he recalled, “I was just blown away because as a kid I had worked in (soil) all this time and I knew nothing about it. And then I found out a lot about it was really fascinating.”

His mother Edith recalled that once Jarrell focused his studies on soil science, some of his dorm mates nicknamed him the “dirt doctor,” she said.

After graduating from Stanford, Jarrell took a job for one year delivering metal shelving in the San Francisco Bay area before attending graduate school at Oregon State University. There he received a master’s and a doctorate degree in soil science, he said.

As a professor, Jarrell worked for 12 years at UC Riverside before giving up his tenured position and moving back to Oregon, where he taught for 10 years at the Oregon Graduate Institute, he said. Jarrell decided to leave the security of his tenured position because he had grown tired of being in an environment where many colleagues abused the tenure system, he said.

“I grew up blue collar and I figured that if you weren’t carrying your weight, you should not be paid,” Jarrell said.

Jarrell’s journey would lead him to Madison, Wisconsin, where he joined the UW soil sciences faculty after spending a few years exploring business ideas, he said.

 In 2007, Jarrell met Joel Friedman, president of the Alvin H. Baum Family Fund based in Chicago. At the time, Friedman had contacted members from the UI Law and Business Schools and had expressed and interest in funding a collaborative project that would assist the current administration to establish policy to address climate change, Friedman said.

Friedman recalled being “impressed with Jarrell’s leadership” and with the contacts Jarrell had developed both within the University and the broader communities, he said.

Before Friedman would agree to allocate foundation funds for the project, he demanded that a collaborative team form that would include the Law School, the Business School and the College of ACES, he said.

“Lawyers can do some but they can’t solve the problem; The Business School could do some things, but they can’t solve the problem; The folks at ACES could potentially solve the problem, but communicated poorly with the broader community,” Friedman said.

Once the three entities agreed to work together and had showed initial progress, the foundation awarded ECI a $ 300,000 grant in 2007 and committed an additional $300,000 for the next two years. The College of ACES also contributed $100,000 to the organization. With the seed funding it has received, ECI has five years to raise a $5 million dollar endowment to sustain itself, Jarrell said.

Beyond the carbon registry course, ECI will host the Chicago Cap and Trade Summit May 28^th.  The conference will feature discussions about how to achieve an 80 percent reduction in U.S. carbon emissions by 2050. Among the presenters, students from NRES 199 will share the research they are conducting on how UI can reduce its emissions. To learn more about the conference and other ECI initiatives, log onto www.eci.edu.

  Back inside the auditorium, Jarrell’s 15-minute presentation is over and he collects his materials and prepares to exit the podium to make room for the next presenter. Pleased with the presentation, he will soon enjoy a silent moment as he drives north on Lincoln Avenue, where the urban landscape will quickly dissolve into open fields. Several years removed from the country boy of his freshman year at Stanford, Wes Jarrell the man, has become comfortable traversing between rural and urban settings.