The Chicago Architecture Foundation recently hosted Mortgage Due: The Environmental Costs of Home Building through its Eric R. Multhauf Lunchtime lecture series. The lecture, by Adam Rome, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History, Pennsylvania State University, focused on the relationship between the growth of suburbia after 1945 and the rise of the environmental movement. Mr. Rome also explored the relationship between developers, homebuyers and environmental stewardship.

Mr. Rome's first book, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism, published in 2001, won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for the best first book in American History and also won the Louis Mumford Award for best in planning history. He is now working on two books projects. One is a history of Earth Day 1970, and the other is a study of environmental reform in the Glided Age and Progressive Era.