Matthew Griffith

Chicago based Environmentalist seeking a career in design, advocacy, and sustainable solutions.

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DePaul Urban Garden: Native Wildflower Garden and Butterfly Way Station

This design uses native plants to bring some of illinois prairie plants onto campus. This site will be a valuable educational tool to engage students with plants that are important to regional ecology as well as attract insects to aid in pollination for the vegetable crops. It is also our intention to increase and preserve diminishing Butterfly habitats that have been effected by increased development and urban sprawl. A portion of the seeds used will be purchased from monarchwatch.org, including milkweed, joe pye weed, Indian blanket and other general nectar plants.

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KENMORE REDUX: Environmental Design

This project was kickstarted as a final project for an Environmental Design Course taken in Autumn 2011, it was later redrafted and presented at the DePaul Environmental Science Symposium, Spring 2012.  

The concept was developed in order to assist the “Kenmore Green” plan which will close Kenmore Avenue to thru traffic as part of the school's ten year master plan. This design seizes a very unique opportunity to enrich the social fabric of the neighborhood while promoting alternative transportation, improving storm water management, and limiting the University's impact on climate change. 

Kenmore Redux combines [natural] history with functionality and facilitates regional awareness that showcases DePaul’s commitment to sustainability. The plan includes native wetland plants, up-cycled permeable pavement to aid in storm water management, comfortable seating,wifi hotspots, and hanging gardens. All to encourage DePaul Students to spend more time outdoors studying, relaxing, and forging a deeper connection with the [natural] world.    

[griffithmatthew]

A Ramble Through Lincoln Park: Urban Ecology Photo Essay

For this Urban Ecology assignment we were to take Thoreau's favorite pastime Walking and engage in a 3-5 hour journey through Chicago's Lincoln Park, Chicago's largest park which lies along the lakefront from Ohio Street Beach in the Streeterville neighborhood, northward to Ardmore Avenue in Edgewater. The walk helped further acquaint students with Urban Nature and reorient the environmentalist frame of thought which romantically places nature somewhere outside the city. The walk also helped familiarize me to Lincoln Park which was the site of study for the nine week course. Included are the photos I took along the way. 

"It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk thither; but I believe that the forest which I see in the western horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the setting sun, and there are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me." - Henry David Thoreau, Walking, Atlantic Monthly, 1862