The AWU Center for Environmental Research (CER) at the Hornsby Bend Biosolids Management Plant is a partnership formed in 1988 with the University of Texas and Texas A&M University to support urban ecology and sustainability studies for Austin. As a community service, the CER auditorium and classrooms are used by a wide range of organizations for environmental workshops, training, and classes throughout the year.

Click here for a map to the Hornsby Bend site and CER.

CER Monthly Events December 2008
Check out what is happening at Hornsby Bend this month. Most of the events are free and open to the public!

CER Lunchtime Lectures
Each monthly talk for 2008 begins AT NOON AT Waller Center, 625 East 10th Street - between I-35 and Red River.
Lectures are free and open to the public. Bring a lunch and learn.
Next meeting is Monday, Noon - 1:00p.m., December 15 at Waller Creek Center.
Lecture is by Kevin M. Anderson. Fall Lecture Series - Geography of Place: Nature, Culture, and Waterways
Merriam-Webster's Dictionary defines "Geography" as "a science that deals with the description, distribution, and interaction of the diverse physical, biological, and cultural features of the earth's surface". As you can see from this definition, we geographers can study just about anything involving the earth's surface and place. In a series of talks about geography, I will introduce some central geographical concepts - space, place, cultural landscape, environmental perception - while focusing on some particular places that I have studied.

Also, for the lunch lecture: The Life-world of Waller Creek: Nature and Culture in an Urban Creek"
"The life-world is the world of our immediately lived experience, as we live it, prior to all our thoughts about it. It is that which is present to us in our everyday tasks and enjoyments - reality as it engages us before being analyzed by our theories and our science…it is not a private, but a collective, dimension - the common field of our lives and the other lives with which ours are entwined - yet it is profoundly ambiguous and indeterminate, since our experience of this field is always relative to our situation within it. [David Abram Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than- Human World (Vintage, 1997) p. 40]

More about Austin's birds at the Travis Audubon Society website - www.travisaudubon.org and more about Hornsby Bend birds at www.hornsbybend.org

More about Texas riparian ecology at the Texas Riparian Association - www.texasriparian.org

Hornsby Bend Site
The 1200-acre Hornsby Bend site presents a unique opportunity for research and education about issues of urban ecology. All of Austin's sewage and yard trimmings are recycled at Hornsby Bend, which represents over 15% of all the solid waste produced by the City. Moreover, what is waste for us is the beginnings of a high nutrient food chain that provides nourishment to wildlife while recycling these "wastes" in an ecologically sound and sustainable manner. This biodiversity is present both because of the bio-treatment processes used by the facility and because of the diversity of habitats at the site stretching along 3.5 miles of the Colorado River. One measure of this biodiversity is that Hornsby Bend is nationally known as one of the best birding sites in Texas--harboring over 370 species of birds and an abundance of other wildlife, which is monitored through citizen science programs and university researchers.