(inspirational music) (inspirational music continues) - "Eye on Education," I'm Fred Martino.

Coming up the health of plants and animals under threat in our region.

We'll hear from an expert at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

But first a building on the SIU campus that's had people talking since it opened decades ago.

Here's Anna Toomey from the SIU Alumni Association.

- [Anna] It's the crossroads that connect campus.

The building every student ends up lost in at some point.

No matter how hard some try, Faner Hall cannot be mastered.

- It's huge, it's 900 feet long.

It's the length of the Titanic.

- We have our hidden passages and doorways and staircases to nowhere.

It's kind of like going to Hogwarts except it's on a college campus.

- [Anna] Faner Hall was built in 1974, and named after well-known SIU English Professor Robert Faner.

Our journey into the past starts with the man who's been at SIU for nearly 50 years.

- My name is Jon Davey.

I'm a Professor of Architecture in the School of Architecture.

- [Anna] Jon Davey sees Faner Hall through a different lens than most.

- On a day like today with the sun shining, the shadows cast, the green of the new grass coming up and stuff, I think it's a beautiful building.

- [Anna] Davey says the stern appearance of Faner Hall is intentional, an architecture style known as Brutalism, which first emerged in the 1950s.

- Brutalism is a very emotional way to describe a style of architecture.

It is in your face.

It is not polite.

Many times it is concrete completely.

And I think it was a building that was just offensive aesthetically to the students.

- [Anna] And they didn't hesitate to show it.

Davey shows us bits of splattered paint that are still on the walls today.

- It almost looks like a little bitty Jackson Pollock painting.

It was my understanding when this building was built, the students didn't care for it too much because it was brutalism, it was in their face.

And my understanding is that they came one night with paint and did a Jackson Pollock on the side of the wall.

- [Anna] Davey says architect Robert Geddes designed the building.

Geddes received an Excellence Award from the American Institute of Architects for the design.

- This is the only brutalist architecture that he did.

His East Coast Ivy League background.

- [Anna] Davey says Geddes was inspired by the works of a Swiss French architect known as Le Corbusier, who spent time on a Grecian island living in a monks cell.

Le Corbusier is known for his austere designs, and that influence can be seen in Faner Hall's cramped offices and classrooms.

- If you go upstairs here and you go into anybody's office, it looks like a cell, a monk cell or a prison cell either way.

Corbusier made the statement that architecture is the play of light upon forms, and look around us.

I mean, there's shadows being cast.

It creates a contrast, and we like things that contrast in our architecture, in our design, and even in ourselves.

- [Anna] Davey says building Faner Hall was a massive project, with some parts of it put together offsite then brought to campus.

The construction process brought tragedy in 1972, when a piece of equipment came crashing down as students were trying to switch classes.

- The crane was had been lifted up.

They were installing the concrete.

The balance of the crane lost a fulcrum, and it came crashing down and killed a young man.

It was pretty sad.

- [Anna] Two other students were injured.

According to a "Daily Egyptian" article about the accident, a worker believed the crane had been overloaded.

Davey says Faner Hall was partly built to replace the Old Main building, which an arsonist set on fire and burned.

This was during anti-Vietnam War unrest on campus according to records at Morris Library.

This fact, along with Faner Hall's fierce exterior prompts a question that's been asked for decades, was Faner Hall built to be riot proof?

The experts have mixed opinions.

- My guess is one, it's made out of concrete, then that's pretty hard to blow up concrete.

It's designed so if you're gonna run through the building destroying something, you're gonna get caught in a dead end hallway.

It's almost like a ship, you know with a ship you can compartmentalize the ship if it started to be flooded or something like.

- [Anna] We dug for answers through interviews, university archives, and Carbondale historical records, but found nothing that gave a definitive answer.

Some claimed the plans for Faner Hall were well developed before any violence was occurring.

Betty Mitchell, a former Associate Professor of English, was on the administrative committee that helped make Faner Hall a reality.

She told the "Daily Egyptian" in a 1999 article that the committee hadn't even heard of riots when they were planning Faner Hall.

Historian Eric Jones took a close look at the dates Faner Hall was built, and how they coincided with periods of both violent and non-violent demonstrations across the country.

- I've been convinced in both directions many times.

Student protest started in 1964, long before the building came along, but they weren't very violent until '67 or '68.

And this building started to be in plans by '67 late in the year, and then the architects had it in blueprints by '68, so it does fit well with the times and how violence begin to erupt.

And so somebody could have known that we needed to be riot proof.

- [Anna] Anti-war demonstrations that became rowdy enough to close campus happened in May, 1970.

Plans for Faner Hall began in 1965, and the building was finished in 1974.

- I doubt this building's really riot proof, but it's fun to think of it that way.

- Meet the Dean of the college that calls Faner Hall home.

- I'm Andrew Balkansky.

I'm the Interim Dean in Liberal Arts and I've been at SIU for 18 wonderful years.

(ball clacking) - [Anna] Once you're inside Faner's walls, the real games begin.

- The way I've survived navigating Faner Hall all these years, is that I come in one way, and I leave the same way, and I never vary my pathway in and out of the building.

That has served me well all these years.

- [Anna] Balkansky and Recruitment Coordinator, Layla Murphy, give us the insider tour.

- It's a workout.

You don't need that expensive gym membership when you spend time in Faner Hall.

- So we'll go up this half a flight of stairs, because the second floor is on two halls.

- I'm already getting dizzy.

- [Anna] They show us a passageway hidden almost perfectly in the center of Faner Hall.

You have to know it's there to use it.

- This is the top of the Stairway to Heaven.

No idea how long it's been called that, no idea who decided to do it.

- I have some speculative ideas about that, Layla.

- Do you?

- Yeah.

- Do tell.

- Well, the fourth masterpiece from Led Zeppelin came out in 1971, and it featured the song "Stairway to Heaven," which is also when this building opened.

- We've been walking through Faner Hall, and we're definitely seeing a lot of things we didn't expect to, discovering new things at every turn, and it isn't always what it seems.

(hand knocking) Faner Hall might be one of the safest places on campus during a natural disaster.

Signs in the common areas tell people they can close the doors for safety during a tornado.

We found one employee who took refuge during an earthquake in the late '80s.

- Southern Illinois had an earthquake, and I had left this office and went down to the restroom.

And when I came back, things were knocked over.

I never felt a thing, but I came back and stuff was off the file cabinets and the other office manager Patty, was visibly shaken, and she's like, "We just had an earthquake."

I'm like, what?

I never felt a thing.

So Faner Hall, the safest place in Faner Hall during an earthquake is one of the bathrooms.

- [Anna] There are some parts of Faner Hall you can't get to at all.

John Davey calls them the balconies to nowhere.

- What we see is a very small petite balcony, one door.

What is it there for?

Well, architects like to do two side things called follies.

You know as something for a joke, an intellectual joke.

That's one of 'em on Faner.

- So we are inside Faner Hall.

Now next to the door that leads to the balcony John was talking about.

We wanted to see if it was locked, and it is.

As you wander Faner Hall, you'll eventually come across holes in the wall where students sometimes like to stick their candy wrappers.

- This is intentional.

It's part of the architectural design of the building, but some cynics among us occasionally suggest that we ran out of funding back about 1970 and just didn't finish these walls.

- [Anna] Architecture experts say these holes were a necessary part of Faner's construction process.

The holes are formed by concrete ties.

The ties hold wooden forms or casts together as the concrete is being poured and shaped into a wall.

Without the ties, the casts would break apart and the wall could not be formed.

(birds tweeting) One of the most unknown places in Faner Hall may also be its most beautiful.

The Dorothy Morris Garden is delicately hidden outside C Wing.

- It's protected from the wind so you can be out there and in the sun and have a good time.

But again, this goes back to Le Corbusier and his five points of architecture, and roof garden was one of the things that he always built in his architecture.

- It's a nice quiet place to go that not everyone knows about, but if you know about it, you can go and read a book there and just walk through it.

It's like a little special space to be in.

It's absolutely a hidden gem on this campus.

- [Anna] It's a Faner Hall rumor that a person can't go from one end of the building to the other without having to go outside.

We put that to the test with the help of our Faner Hall tour guides.

(shoes clacking) We successfully navigated from the second floor on C Wing all the way to the second floor of A Wing going up a half flight of stairs, but this isn't possible on every floor.

- On the first floor you cannot go from one end of the building to the other without going outside.

The second floor you can do it, but you do have to make a change, a half a floor change on some stairs.

The third floor, you can definitely go from one end to the other, and the fourth floor does not extend all the way across the building, so you can't go from one end to the other on the fourth.

- [Anna] It takes a lot of experience walking the halls of Faner to get to that level of understanding.

Some would rather avoid it all together.

For others, Faner Hall finds a place in their heart.

- I think I love to walk past Faner.

I love the beauty of it with the shadows being cast, with clouds in the sky, the breezes that are coming through.

But I thank the good Lord that I don't have an office in here.

(laughs) - After a decade or so, the brutalism starts to grow on you and you come to love it, but it's not right away.

It takes a while to get there.

- The development and design of Faner Hall went through many changes before it was finally built.

That's a process the University Museum, housed in Faner Hall, has carefully documented through an exhibit.

Joining me now is Eric Jones, he's the curator of this Faner at 40 exhibit.

We're gonna ask him a little bit more about what went into this Eric, building this exhibit.

- This was a fun exhibit.

We did it in 2014 when I was still working for the museum.

I was assigned the task of doing something to celebrate Faner at 40.

I wasn't a tremendous fan of Faner for its own sake, but I decided I could find something fun about it, and something enjoyable.

So I found several things I really liked about what it is and also about what's hiding below it.

And some of the things I enjoyed were the colors, especially these what I call bell bottom colors that are featured as the bands on top and bottom of the posters, the bright orange and blue and hot lime and so forth, and how those work work throughout the building.

All we have left today is the semi-circular things in the concrete out on the front that still have the bright colors.

But for people that want to play sleuth today, you can watch around the elevator door openings, around any other door openings and see if you can find a little tiny peak of hot blue peeking out or bright lime or something else, 'cause those were throughout the building that have now been painted white.

- Jones shows us images of what campus used to look like before Faner Hall existed all the way until modern day.

- Here we have Faner in its completed form as it looked in '73, sandwiched between OBF built in 1940, and the big Student Center, and we're looking from the east toward the west.

- [Anna] Before then, campus was a lot busier.

The old 51 corridor used to run through the area where Faner now stands.

- This is the old 51 corridor now in front of Faner.

As you can see, it's starting to get chopped up into not being a street anymore.

They took out pavement.

Here's some of the old barracks buildings being used as theater and other departments.

- [Anna] In the '50s and '60s, the university purchased surplus World War II Army barracks, which filled the area where Faner Hall now stands as well as many other parts of campus.

According to the archives at Morris Library, the barracks were a temporary solution to limited funds and a huge need for classrooms and dorm rooms.

Jones says Faner Hall is much different now than it was in the original plans.

- Faner was built in several section.

So the first two were already in the plan before Main burned, and they were almost done.

And then they had to continue to add to the building to replace the space lost.

The museum was one of the spaces that that was lost during the old Main fire, so something had to be done.

They just added onto it.

One of the plans was to build the building all the way out past OBF, across the street all the way to Woody Hall.

Another possibility was to create an L between Morris Library and Faner.

- [Anna] How would you describe the purpose of Faner Hall?

- I think it's all about power in a way, because Carbondale is not a big famous place, and for us to get a huge building like this is a pretty big deal.

Even the student center was and may still be the biggest in the nation, and this Faner dwarfs the student center.

- [Anna] And at the time this was built, was it a time when university architecture was a big deal, so to speak?

- Oh yeah, this building was designed to look different from all the classical buildings that we have in what we consider the old Main plaza or whatever now.

So the architects wanted to do something different, and this is different for sure.

It's huge and brutal and they considered it beautiful.

The awards were won with it, even though some people would beg to differ.

(upbeat music) - Thanks to Anna Toomey, from the SIU Alumni Association for that fascinating report on Faner Hall.

Now a look at biodiversity in the region, and I'm pleased to welcome Brent Pease.

He's an Assistant Professor of Forestry at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Brent, thank you so much for being with us today.

- Thank you very much, I appreciate the opportunity.

- Good to have you here.

And you know, this is an issue that some folks may have seen in the news, including on the PBS News Hour, biodiversity.

I wanna start with the regional angle, and plants and animals that are under threat in this area.

What have you learned about that?

- Sure, yeah.

So the list unfortunately is quite long, as if we're just thinking about Illinois at the state level.

There over are almost 500 threatened and endangered species in Illinois.

About half of those are plants.

And then, you know, even a quarter of all amphibians and reptiles in the state are listed on the threatened and endangered species list.

So this is concerning across all taxa, plants, animals, insects, and I think probably the largest driver that we could say across all taxa would be habitat loss.

So all of these species need a space.

They have very specific requirements usually.

And what we're seeing over a long period of time is some large scale conversion of forest and grasslands or prairies to intensive agriculture.

And that seems to be pretty detrimental for a lot of these populations across the state.

So it is a concern even at the state level, yeah.

- Okay, well of course in addition to the conversion to agriculture, climate change is a concern worldwide threatening biodiversity.

Recently there was a United Nations agreement that was forged.

About 200 countries, the US not participating in this, agreed to protect 30% of the planet's land and oceans by 2030.

In its report on the agreement, "The New York Times" said something that may surprise some people.

They said "Researchers have projected that a million plants and animals are at risk of extinction, many within decades.

The last extinction event of that magnitude was the one that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago."

This is pretty alarming.

- Oh yeah, this is huge.

You know folks consider this to be in the sixth mass extinction event, and you mentioned bees, and that's probably a good place to start.

Insect populations, most folks don't quite realize, global insect abundance is plummeting.

In some places as high as 99% decline from previous studies even just a few decades ago.

On average we might see 50% to 75% decline across different regions, and this is huge.

And if we think about kind of ecosystems, larger scale ecosystems and species reliance on each other at different orders of the ecosystem, insects are pretty low at the bottom.

A lot of higher up species depend on insects.

- And of course if we lose our bees, we lose our food supply.

Well that's one very- - That's huge.

- Concrete example.

- Absolutely, pollinators is a huge loss here.

But you know, I study and my students study birds quite a bit in the region of Southern Illinois.

And there's a group of birds that have been in large decline.

They're called aerial insectivores.

So they fly around and eat insects.

And this includes species like the nightjars, which are whip-poor-wills if you've ever heard of a whip-poor-will.

But there's also swifts, chimney swifts, all sorts of barn swallows, all sorts of species.

And these bird species have been in huge decline since about the 1960s, and most of that decline is credited to that insect loss.

So we have these important links in the food system or the food chain that are kind of falling apart at the very basis because of this large global decline of biodiversity.

Insects are essential.

- Great example, you lose one species and it affects another, it trickles down.

- Absolutely.

- So important.

Of course, and we have to understand a problem in order to tackle it.

So you're at the heart of this here, and you study biodiversity with community help.

I thought this was very interesting.

One of your projects is called Sounds of Nature.

Tell me about that.

- Sure thing, yeah, so this is a community science project.

Well you know if we just think about sound generally, we go out to the corner, to a city park, we hear the firetrucks whizzing by, we hear the trash trucks, we go out to the forest, we hear the tree swaying in the wind, we hear the stream, we hear the birds.

So sound is all around us, and people have a lot of attachment to sounds of places.

And it turns out that sound in a place can be a great indicator for ecosystem health and biodiversity.

So I create a project at SIU called the Sounds of Nature Project, which I mentioned again is a community science project.

So I partner with the public to deploy sound recorders on public and private land to learn about the sounds in people's backyard and beyond.

And we send these out via mail, folks deploy them on their private property and their residents right outside of their house.

We listen for a few days, and we get to hear about all of the cool insects, all of the cool bird species just happening in their backyard.

So when we think about biodiversity loss or we think about just biodiversity in general, people think about it in the national park.

Well no, it's not just in our national parks, it's in our backyards.

It's all around us, we just have to listen for it.

- Very important.

Citizen science it's called and it's growing in many different ways, and you have one here with Sounds of Nature.

You also have a project called Saluki BioBlitz.

I hadn't heard about this until setting up this conversation, tell me about it.

- Sure, the Saluki BioBlitz has been a lot of fun.

I started that when I got to SIU two years ago, and the idea is that, listen SIU's campus is really neat.

We have Thompson Woods, we have Campus Lake.

It's a beautiful unique campus.

We also of course have Touch of Nature, which is not directly connected here, but it's a wonderful asset that we have on campus.

And I wanted the way for us to document the biodiversity here on campus.

So once a year at the start of the fall semester, students, the general public, faculty, staff, whoever go out for 24 hours and try to document as many plants and animal species as possible on campus.

And why is this important?

Well we have a digital voucher.

We know when and where some given species occurred at some point in time, right?

And we can track how this changes over time, and we can also maybe try to link this to larger scale changes in biodiversity right here on SIU's campus.

So it was a way for us just appreciate the general biodiversity here.

We know that it's really neat place as far as tree species and plant or animals go, and I want students to be able to go out and appreciate that, interact with that, see that, and then also just be able to track this change over time.

- I love walking around Campus Lake like so many folks, about two miles that you can walk around Campus Lake there.

You'll see squirrels, and you'll see sometimes deer.

You'll see lots of different birds, ducks, Canadian geese.

Are there things that we don't see as much because of the loss that you were talking about?

I mean you mentioned the loss of birds because of the insect population perhaps going down.

- Sure, yeah.

So bird communities have certainly changed over time.

Again, going back to the state's threatened and endangered species list, about 29 bird species across our state are on this threatened and endangered list.

So that might not seem that many, it's about like 6% or so of the state's known species occurrence, but this is important.

And I also mentioned that one of my students was studying aerial insectivores.

So you know, I mentioned whip-poor-wills earlier on.

This is a nocturnal bird that has a very distinct song, and if you've ever heard it, it calls out nonstop just over and over.

It says its name, whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will.

You talk to folks today?

You know, do you have whip-poor-wills around you?

Have you heard of whip-poor-will?

"Oh, I haven't heard them since I was a kid."

So these changes are happening on campus.

Again, it's happened all across Southern Illinois.

So there's certainly been changes in bird communities over time, and I have students focusing on this.

One of the last big survey efforts was about 30 years ago, called the Breeding Bird Atlas in Illinois where we documented the bird communities then.

But there really hasn't been much follow up.

So I have several students trying to do that follow up work to see how bird communities have changed over time, where they're changing, and what might be driving it, and what we can do to help slow that change.

- Well speaking of that, slowing the change, as you know, while there is a lot of concern, there's also reason for hope as lots of folks are working on climate change advancements in clean energy.

- Sure thing.

So you know, one thing I was mentioned earlier about the state, I wanted to mention that folks probably don't realize, but the southernmost Illinois is considered one of the 36 global terrestrial biodiversity hotspots.

It is an amazing place just an hour south of us, and there's a lot of really good things going on down there as far as biodiversity conservation goes.

So folks are working on the ground locally to implement some management actions that might help slow declines with certain species or certain taxa.

And then globally of course there's lots of effort.

You mentioned earlier on the UN report, well just over the past two weeks, world leaders have met for up in Montreal for the Convention on Biological Diversity.

And one of the biggest things that came out of this two-week meeting was a global biodiversity framework.

Trying to slow the loss of biodiversity, preserve nature, and its benefits to people.

So you also mentioned one of the ways we can do this is protecting land.

So that is one of the primary goals of this global biodiversity framework is to protect and preserve 30% of biodiversity on land and on water.

This is so important.

One of the key ways we can do this, I shouldn't say the only way, one of the key ways we can do this is just protect land.

They just need space.

We need space.

We have a growing human population of course, but surely we can set aside one third of the earth for other species.

- Very good information.

Brent, thank you so much for being with us.

- Sure thing.

- My guest was Brent Pease.

He is an Assistant Professor of Forestry at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

That's "Eye on Education."

For everyone at WSIU, I'm Fred Martino.

Thank you so much for being with us.

Have a great week.