Kevin McSweeney is the arboretum director at the University of Illinois and also teaches soil science classes on campus. He is going to be teaching with EJP in Spring 2024.
In Spring of 2024, EJP will welcome Kevin McSweeney as a new instructor. Kevin studied environmental science at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, received his MS and PhD from U of I, and then served as a faculty member in the Soil Science Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for nearly 30 years. Along the way, he worked in Central America, Africa, China, and the Philippines, which gave him broad insight into landscapes, people, societies, and the interactions among them. When his wife got a position at Illinois six years ago, he followed, returning to his alma mater and accepting a two-fold position as arboretum director and clinical professor of soil science.
As Kevin explains it, soil can be defined as “the thin veneer upon which all life depends.” He says he plans to bring this type of broad perspective to his classes with EJP.
“There’s a lens on the world that one can look at through soil. You start 4.5 billion years ago, with the coalescence that established the planet we now live on. You look at the evolution of the Earth’s surface over time, eventually seeing how plants arrived on the land, and then hominids evolved, and then we as humans emerged from that. And then you see how the fabric that we sit on or walk on, build on, live on, eat off, has helped shape our world.
“I think this gives people a vista that is novel and hopefully inspiring. On the one hand, it’s humbling, and on the other, it’s fascinating. I think there are stories that can be told that allow people to reflect on who they are, where they are, how they came to be, where they might be going, with lessons that can be learned from our Earth’s history.”
Kevin also plans to approach teaching at Danville with a receptive and listening frame of mind, in order to discover what students’ goals and aspirations are. He says a major component in his development of this skill was working with people with small land holdings all over the world. “I’ve learned as much working with diverse communities as I have studying from textbooks. For me, this is another community I would like to learn from and hopefully give something useful back to them.”
Beyond the classroom, the sweeping vantage of geological study also informs Kevin’s perspective on incarceration:
“All of us are on this planet. Sometimes people get into unfortunate situations, but that shouldn’t mean that we don’t care about them or have concern for our fellow brothers and sisters. My parents were always insistent when we were growing up that you treat other people the way you wished to be treated yourself. And I have tried my best to live my life by that maxim.”