50th Academic Year: COA Magazine Spring 2022

COAmag

COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

Editorial EDITOR

Daniel Mahoney

EXECUTIVE EDITOR

Rob Levin

EDITORIAL ADVICE

John Anderson

Dru Colbert

Darron Collins ’92

Jennifer Hughes

Caitlin Meredith

Suzanne Morse

Chris Petersen

EDITORIAL CONSULTANT

Jodi Baker

DESIGN

Corey Blake

Z Studio Design

Administration

PRESIDENT

Darron Collins ’92

PROVOST

Ken Hill

ASSOCIATE ACADEMIC DEANS

Jamie McKown

Bonnie Tai

DEAN OF ADMISSION

Heather Albert-Knopp ’99

DEAN OF INSTITUTIONAL ADVANCEMENT

Shawn Keeley ’00

DEAN OF ADMINISTRATION

Bear Paul

DEAN OF STUDENT LIFE

Sarah Luke

DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS

Rob Levin

Board of Trustees

TRUSTEE OFFICERS

Beth Gardiner, Chair

Marthann Samek, Vice Chair

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

DAN MAHONEY

Since I began thinking about the 50th anniversary issue of the magazine and how to honor the past while looking toward the future, I’ve had the image of the Roman deity Janus in my mind. Janus is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings. In sculptures, drawings, and coins, Janus is depicted as having two faces looking simultaneously to the past and future.

I was introduced to Janus by the art film distribution company Janus Films. Starting in the early 1950s, Janus brought an amazing array of international films to audiences in the US, including the work of Sergei Eisenstein, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, François Truffaut, and Yasujiro Ozu, among so many others.

The directors of films distributed by Janus extended time in ways most directors in the US did not. Movies in the US seemed to want to crush time into a ball, to make two hours feel like 20 minutes.

Our host told us El Comandante regularly gave long speeches venerating the Cuban Revolution. He loved taking his audiences back to 1959, but was unable to register the boredom on their faces in 2000. For Castro, the present and future were in a constant state of surrender to the revolutionary past.

Hank Schmelzer, Vice Chair

Ronald E. Beard, Secretary

Jay McNally ’84, Treasurer

TRUSTEE MEMBERS

Cynthia Baker

Timothy Bass

Michael Boland ’94

Joyce Cacho,

Alyne Cistone

Barclay Corbus

Sarah Currie-Halpern

Heather Richards Evans

Marie Griffith

Cookie Horner

Anniversaries are times we look to the past and the future. We look at where we were and where we are going. One purpose of an anniversary is to congratulate ourselves on making it this far. Huzzah, COA! Onward we go!

Nicholas Lapham

Casey Mallinckrodt

Anthony Mazlish

Chandreyee Mitra ’01

Nadia Rosenthal

Abby Rowe

Laura McGiffert Slover

Laura Z. Stone

Steve Sullens

Claudia Turnbull

LIFE TRUSTEES

Samuel M. Hamill, Jr.

John N. Kelly

William V.P. Newlin

When my spouse and I were in Cuba, we happened to catch a televised speech by Fidel Castro. I should say, we caught some of a speech by Castro, as the entire thing lasted four hours and we had a whole country to see.

As Darron points out, COA founding president Ed Kaelber said: Any college that is not constantly seeking new ways of doing things is only half alive. I don’t know if it’s the natural beauty of campus, my smart and funny colleagues, the bracing wind off of the Atlantic, or the amazing students, but being at COA, I’ve never felt more alive.

John Reeves

Henry D. Sharpe, Jr.

TRUSTEES EMERITI

David Hackett Fischer

William G. Foulke, Jr.

Amy Yeager Geier

George B.E. Hambleton

Elizabeth D. Hodder

Philip B. Kunhardt III ’77

Chantal Akerman’s film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, distributed by Janus Films, features one of the most amazing scenes I’ve ever seen. The lead character, Jeanne Dielman, mixes and shapes ground beef into a meatloaf in real time. I’ll just say that again, she mixes and shapes ground beef into a meatloaf in real time. The whole thing is glorious.

The film Jaws came out in 1975, the same year as Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. The amazing scene in Jaws where Quint, Brody, and Hooper sing after showing each other their scars, lasts as long as it takes Jeanne Dielman to shape a meatloaf.

There are wonderful pieces of writing in this issue of the magazine that deal with time and the challenges of being present: A conversation with Okwui Okpokwasili, College of the Ecstatic, and Today is not special. I hope you devour each of them.

Philip S.J. Moriarty

Phyllis Anina Moriarty

Cathy Ramsdell

Hamilton Robinson, Jr.

William N. Thorndike

John Wilmerding

EX OFFICIO

Darron Collins ’92

At College of the Atlantic, we envision a world where creativity, presentness, compassion, respect, and diversity of nature and human cultures are highly valued. A world where all people have the opportunity to construct meaningful lives for themselves, gain appreciation of the relationships among all forms of life, and safeguard the heritage of future generations.

COA Magazine is published annually for the College of the Atlantic community.

coa.edu

In Ways of Seeing, John Berger says, “If we can see the present clearly enough, we shall ask the right questions of the past.” I keep looking for a third face on Janus, one that signifies the present.

For a preteen a year is endless, but for an octogenarian 50 years passes in the blink of an eye. COA is moving into exciting territory: new faces, new buildings, new energy—don’t blink or you might miss it.

Beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings is a whole lot of territory for a single god to cover, but the Romans were nothing if not ambitious.

According to Eleanor Roosevelt, the coolest first lady in history, “Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That’s why we call it ‘The Present.’”

If Janus were to have a third face—a face for the present—I’d want it to look like COA emeritus faculty in philosophy John Visvader. For many years John led weekly Tai Chi sessions at COA. On certain mornings, in the midst of a chaotic 10-week term, there would be an oasis of calm movement happening in the center of campus. As he led these sessions, John would repeat the phrase: make it delicious…make it delicious…make it delicious… Dan

LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT

DARRON COLLINS ’92

Back out of all this now too much for us ... Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

Robert Frost, Directive

College of the Atlantic is many things: a geography—acreage delineated on maps; an assemblage of infrastructure—buildings and sheds and the metal, glass, and wood that give them form and function; a legal entity— an institution with the authority to grant degrees based on collectively established norms. Yet, as we look back at our 50-year history and project our thoughts into the future, I feel most satisfied describing COA as a collection of some of the most driven, creative, and caring people the world has known. We are the students, staff, faculty, trustees, alumnx, parents, philanthropists, and partners who have walked these acres, who have been sheltered and nourished by this architecture, and who have wrestled with, and built, and benefited from the idea of human ecology.

human ecologists who, across the past five decades, have worked to build a better world.

In the words of our founding president, Ed Kaelber:

Any college that is not constantly seeking new ways of doing things is only half alive. But the very fact that there has been the need to coin the phrase ”experimental college” is an indication that the structures and teaching methods of many colleges have become rigid and unresponsive to changing conditions in our society.

College of the Atlantic expects to be experimental in the best sense of the word. Above all, we will build into the structure of the college a mechanism that insists on continuing evaluation. Without selfcriticism, rigor becomes empty form and compassion becomes merely sentiment. Education, as we see it, is possible only as this institution changes to reflect new knowledge and new techniques aimed at meeting the changing needs of man [sic] and his environment.

Here at COA, we have done that selfcriticism and self-correction—and we continue to be experimental, even with 50 years of academics under our belts. Without jettisoning the kernels of brilliance and distinctiveness in our genetic code, our experimenting, evaluation, and self-criticism is carrying us through an institutional adolescence in many important ways.

2 About our cover

3 News

3 Love of philosophy spurs chair gift

4 Housing needs come to the fore

5 COA celebrates 50th academic year

6 New faces

12 Goldsworthy comes to COA

14 College of the Ecstatic

16 Student profile: Isidora Muñoz Segovia ’22

18 Just doing my part

22 COA’s community garden celebrates its 50th year

24 Alumnx profile: Ryan Higgins ’06

25 A farewell letter to the COA community

26 Home on the range

31 Donor profi le: Mary K. Eliot, Casey Mallinckrodt, and Walter Robinson

32 Student profile: Desmond Williams ’23

34 Off the Wall

36 Origins

Centerfold: To dwell in possibility

38 Islands in our lives

40 Looking for the weather inside

44 Bits & pieces

46 Alumnx profile: Jasmine Smith ’09

48 Why I give: Lisa Bjerke ’13, MPhil ’16

49 Alliances

50 Difficult conversations

51 Interns in the community

52 Creating lasting cross-cultural relationships

And there are thousands of us. In these pages we celebrate the stories and the work of some in the hopes of painting an impression of us all. That work is one of watercolor, not hyperrealism. As any human ecologist worth their mettle would do, we don’t only relish the past, but sift critically through our stories with a methodical kaizen geared toward a better next 50 years.

I often find myself imagining being at an All College Meeting in the 1970s, surrounded by the Kaelbers and Carpenters and Katonas, by the Pingrees, Johnsons, and Hazards, building an institution to reverse the failing health of the planet. We have come so far, on so many fronts, and for this we can point gratefully to the ideas and actions of so many COA

Today, our version of human ecology is profoundly connected to the real world. I find a most powerful hope in this connectivity because we have successfully resisted the all-too-plausible future where connection homogenizes to an educational leastcommon denominator. I find hope because our people—those who make us who we are—have made wildly creative, wonderful homes and lives in a multitude of places, all while embracing and deriving inspiration from the world some of us once turned our backs on. That connectivity is what has provided, and what will continue to provide, the speed and creative power of experimentation we need in these times. Frost’s Directive was a foundational text at COA when students arrived in 1972. It continues to be foundational to me to know that our watering place feeds, and is fed by, a much larger aquifer.

Enjoy reading this special 50th academic

54 Of islands and institutions

55 Transformative experiences

56 Alumnx notes

59 Community notes

63 Retirements

64 In memoriam

66 Making something from everything…

67 Alumnx books

70 Millard

71 Today is not special

year edition of COA Magazine with both a celebratory and critical eye on our past so that you—one of those foundational people I spoke of earlier—can continue to help strengthen our form and function.

Most importantly: thank you for being a part of this wonderful and wonderfully experimental college, Darron

About our cover

By Rob Levin

In the summer of 1971, 13 students and three faculty members embarked on the College of the Atlantic experimental pilot program. Their challenge was to test and evaluate what would become COA’s interdisciplinary, place-based approach. Working collaboratively, those students and faculty joined several staff members and trustees in raising and answering questions about the future direction of the college. Among that intrepid bunch were Diane Pierce-Williams and Jill Tabbutt-Henry. Their engaged work and spirit of open exploration helped prove COA as a concept, which, one year later, in the fall of 1972, would lead to the college’s first academic class.

DIANE PIERCE-WILLIAMS

As a member of the first entering class at another experimental, interdisciplinary institution, participating in the pilot program for the soon-to-open College of the Atlantic was the perfect summer job for me.

Although there was no degree or certification in the offing, we took our courses seriously. Each of us worked toward a final project, researching and presenting our notions of what could happen on Bar Island. As I recall, Jill was creative enough to propose an aquaculture facility. My own idea was much less visionary: that it should be a nature preserve.

Like at other residential colleges, much of our joy and growth came during extracurricular moments. There were the usual frisbee games, meetings, and late night discussions. Other aspects were more particular to that time and place such as watching the comings and goings of the Bluenose ferry, standing firewatch at night, or exploring the abandoned mansion next door.

There is something else I carry besides treasured remembrances of an idyllic summer in Bar Harbor. COA provided a certain intellectual infrastructure. My vocational pursuits have included positions as varied law professor, community volunteer, and librarian. All those roles had to do with how people interact with their environments, thus I have remained a proponent of human ecology during the half-century since I was first introduced to the concept. I deeply appreciate that COA continues to offer that framework to others.

and now:

JILL TABBUTT-HENRY

That summer at COA, 1971, quite simply, changed my life. It made me realize that education—at its best—is dynamic, evolving, and focused on the needs of the learners—and the world itself. It made me think about not only what I wanted to learn, but how I wanted to learn it. I went off to my first semester at another college after that, but it paled in comparison. I would soon return to COA to be part of the admissions staff, selecting the first year of students—including myself!— and staying for two years.

Some years later, I got bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the fi eld of community health education. I was a family planning community educator, worked internationally as a curriculum developer and trainer in sexual and reproductive health counseling, and was a curriculum developer and trainer in long-term, homebased care.

I had learned at COA that I could find my path by holding education accountable to meeting my needs. I applied those same principles in all my curriculum development and training work—addressing the needs of the learners. I will always be grateful for the impact on my life of that summer program, with its smallbut-stellar staff, and the tiny college that grew from it. They taught me self-worth, resilience, creativity, and to always question both the purpose and the impact of my actions on the world. What incredible gifts! What an incredible education!

Then and now: Diane Pierce-Williams

Then

Jill Tabbutt-Henry

Love of philosophy spurs chair gift

By Rob Levin

ACOLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC

ALUM who was one of the driving forces behind the technology that helped expose the biggest corporate securities fraud of the 21st century is behind the creation of a new academic chair in philosophy at College of the Atlantic.

Jay McNally ’84, whose data analytics software played a key role in uncovering important details of the notorious Enron scandal, said that endowing The McNally Family Chair in Human Ecology and Philosophy is one way of making sure that current and future COA students are exposed to many of the same ideas that influenced the early years of the college.

“Important elements of the COA curriculum, like transdisciplinarity, self-directedness, or experientiality, there are philosophical issues that are tied to that, and those issues have greatly influenced my life and career. I have felt unconstrained,” McNally said.

COA students as they navigate their selfdesigned academic paths, he said.

“Philosophy is one of the mirrors that helps let us know who we are. In a way it’s also a compass that tells us where we are going. It tells us what the nature of the world is, and in a certain way keeps us honest,” McNally said. “Understanding ethics and morality is a key way that we, as individuals or as cultures, can make determinations on why we do the things we do.”

Dr. Heather Lakey ’00, MPhil ’05 is the inaugural holder of the McNally Family Chair. As an undergraduate and graduate student at COA, through a second master’s degree at University of Oregon and the doctoral program at University of Maine, Lakey deeply understands the importance of philosophy to an interdisciplinary education.

said. “It is an honor to be appointed to this position and I am grateful to the McNally family for enshrining philosophy as a core part of COA’s curriculum.”

Studies in philosophy and ethics drove McNally’s success with Ibis Consulting, his pioneering electronic discovery firm that worked on the Enron case, he said, and his self-directed COA education continues to influence his interactions with the professional world.

“There are always ways to push the direction of an investigation rather than follow the evidence, but the idea of morality and ethics and the ability to look at yourself in the mirror and know that you were an honest and truthful broker is one of the reasons I became popular among influential people to handle these things,” he said.

“I was encouraged at COA to question and analyze and be responsible with my activities, but to explore the territory and make the connections that were important to me.”

Philosophy and ethics, McNally said, underpin science, business, and culture. This vital, interdisciplinary role makes this area of study especially important to

“Because human ecology studies the relationships between human beings and their natural, cultural, and constructed environments, it is imperative that we think carefully about these concepts and their complex interrelationships. What do we mean by human? What distinguishes a natural environment from a cultural or constructed one? Philosophy provides intellectual resources to productively engage these questions and to imagine new ways to theorize these relationships,” Lakey

“Conducting complex legal investigations required the ability to talk to a lot of people from very different perspectives, including law, technology, and business. At COA I learned how to learn, and I learned how to work with other people.”

The McNally Family Chair is established in honor of the graduation of McNally’s daughters, Rose Besen-McNally ’19 and Lily Besen-McNally ’20, from COA. Rose is currently a graduate student at University of Maine, and Lily is enrolled in a graduate program at Maine College of Art.

Jay McNally has served the college as a trustee since 2002. He previously helped create, endow, and instruct in COA’s sustainable business program, helped fund a chair position in the humanities, and founded the Russo Scholarship, in honor of his grandparents, Rose and Michael Russo.

“As a college that has very deep intellectual roots, it’s important to make sure that the education at COA never becomes superficial, that we continue to question everything, that we continue to examine the world in deep detail, and that we continue to look for connections in disparate areas,” he said.

“The McNally Family Chair is one of the things that will allow us to do that in perpetuity.”

From left to right: Rose Besen-McNally ’19, Jay McNally ’84 and his partner Teresa Tierney, and Lily Besen-McNally ’20.

Housing needs come to the fore

By Rob Levin

ASKY-HIGH, ultra-competitive housing market, lack of affordable housing, and diminishing rentals are issues being felt across the US, and the communities around COA that have been traditional sources of student housing are no exception. While students here have long grappled with a lengthening tourist “shoulder season” making some rentals unavailable at the beginning of the school year, the rise of Airbnb and pandemic purchasing of second homes has led to record-low amounts of available housing at all.

With this new reality in mind, college officials have adjusted development priorities, paused the multi-stage project on the north end of campus (the Davis Center for Human Ecology was the first of several planned developments), and set their sights on increasing student housing options. Utilizing more than $8 million raised in the recent Broad Reach Capital Campaign for student residences, the school has made offcampus purchases in Bar Harbor, partnered with a community revitalization group in Mount Desert, and set plans in motion for a new residence hall on campus within the past year.

“By greatly increasing capacity on campus and adding space in town and on the island, we’ll have gone a long way toward assuring a productive and beneficial living and learning environment for every COA student,” says COA president Darron Collins ‘92. “While the college has long favored the idea of having many of our students live off campus and support local landlords, the profound changes to the rental market have caused us to rework how

we approach housing, and led us to develop a program that better supports our students’ needs.”

Starting in earnest in the fall of 2021, OPAL architect Tim Lock and project manager John Gordon, who worked together with architect Susan Rodriguez on the recent Davis Center for Human Ecology, met with students, staff, trustees, and faculty to scope out the need for new housing. The result: a planned 12,000-square-foot residence hall with room for nearly 50 students, built to Passive House standards. The facility, slated to open in fall 2023, will include a fully outfitted, multi-stationed community kitchen, large common area with exposed mass-timber beams, and a covered outdoor gathering area. The building is proposed for the south end of campus, near the south parking lot and Blair/Tyson residences.

The College of the Atlantic Mount Desert Center, developed in partnership with community revitalization group Mount Desert 365, will bring space for 15 students, a faculty/staff apartment, and a year-round storefront to Main Street in Northeast Harbor beginning this summer. The project, made possible with gifts from Mitch and Emily Rales and Lalage and Steve Rales, was designed by Gordon, wearing his hat as an architect this time and working with project manager Millard Dority, COA’s founding director of buildings and grounds who retired this year (see page 70). Energy performance and low-carbon emissions are again at the forefront of the design.

In the fall of 2021, COA was presented with the opportunity to purchase the

“Summertime” apartments on Highbrook Road and a small block of houses on Norris Avenue and Glen Mary Drive, both in Bar Harbor. The nine properties, with room for nearly 40 students, had typically been rented to COA students during the academic year, so when they went on the market, Collins, dean of administration Bear Paul, and others knew they had to act. Those properties, now securely in COA’s hands, underwent major energy and efficiency upgrades with guidance from director of energy David Gibson (see page 8) during the winter.

Combined with the Birch Tree Lane apartments just to the north of campus that were acquired in 2019, the college now has rental space off campus for 80 students. When the new campus residence hall opens in 2023, COA will have capacity to house 290 students, or 83 percent of the 350-person student body.

“I cannot overstate my gratitude to the many people who helped make these changes possible,” Collins said. “I want to thank each and every one of them for helping COA students thrive.”

Development plans for the north end of campus—which include removing the old arts and sciences building and adding additional performance space to Gates Community Center, a welcome pavilion off the entrance drive, and a multi-use building near the center of campus—are still planned, even if timing is up in the air. Funding for these projects was included in the successful $55 million Broad Reach campaign.

A new campus residence hall, planned for fall 2023, will house nearly 50 students. Credit: OPAL Architecture

COA celebrates 50th academic year

By Rob Levin

RECORD ENROLLMENT, a new, 30,000-square-foot academic center, and a cadre of strong regional partners in attendance highlighted College of the Atlantic’s 50th convocation ceremony.

Scores gathered for the event in front of the new COA Davis Center for Human Ecology, an interdisciplinary, passive house facility with regionally sourced, mass timber construction, 350 solar panels, wood fiber insulation, and triple-insulated, bird-safe windows. Speakers included COA governance moderator Olivia Paruk ’24, architects Susan Rodriguez of Susan T Rodriguez | Architecture • Design and Tim Lock of OPAL, Craig Kesselheim ’76 of COA’s first incoming class, and COA President Darron Collins ’92.

The center includes a new teaching greenhouse, dedicated on Sept. 9 as the Congresswoman Chellie Pingree ’79 Greenhouse, with the Congresswoman on hand for the occasion.

“I’m so proud of my alma mater College of the Atlantic for remaining dedicated to ecology and innovation,” Pingree said.

“For 50 years, COA has put Maine on the national map for positive climate action. Their new, beautiful Davis Center for Human Ecology will nurture growth and green learning for generations to come.”

COA’s 50th academic year began with the largest applicant pool in the college’s history, 536 applications for approximately 100 spaces. Fall 2021 marked the college’s highest fall enrollment to date, with 373 students from 49 countries and 40 states. That number leveled out to around 350 fulltime-equivalent students over the course of the academic year, which is the school’s enrollment cap.

“The 50th class marks an impressive chapter in COA’s history,” said Paruk at the opening of the afternoon convocation ceremony. “This is a great time for introspection, where we can learn from our past, and continue to grow and enrich ourselves to help serve all current and future change makers without losing sight of the ideals we hold close to our hearts.”

The college has come a long way since its founding in 1969 and first enrollment in

1972, Kesselheim said in his alumnx address.

“As a prospective student, I came to a campus where there were no classes to visit, because the college hadn’t actually started yet. There were no students to mingle with or chat with or just get a vibe from. There were no faculty on campus, there was no cafeteria to sample, no dorms to peek in on,” Kesselheim said. “So, instead we talked to the founders of the college… who wanted this year-round institution to be part of Bar Harbor life, island life, and we talked about their dreams, and considered ourselves invited.”

The Davis Center for Human Ecology is COA’s first purpose-built academic building since the early 1990s. It was designed during a multi-year community process by Rodriguez in collaboration with OPAL, and built within COA’s rigorous discarded resources framework by Maine’s E.L. Shea Builders and Engineers.

“Our team has worked hard to design a building that could only be here. One that is derived from this unique intersection of the natural world and the study of human ecology,” Rodriguez said.

OPAL Architecture’s Tim Lock speaks at College of the Atlantic’s 50th convocation in September 2021.

Palak Taneja, literature and writing

By Rob Levin

COLLEGE OF THE

ATLANTIC is pleased to welcome Palak Taneja as a new faculty member in literature and writing.

As a child, Taneja made her way to and from school in busy Jalandhar, India, once the site of one of the largest refugee camps in the world. An overly quiet student who liked best to blend into the background, Taneja was brilliant with her studies and loved to learn, but so shy that barely a teacher knew her name. That all began to change when she discovered the power of literature, and a series of excellent English teachers helped her discover that stories could serve as a medium through which to understand the world, and gain one’s voice in the process.

Later, studying English at the University of Delhi, a fascinating world of ideas opened up for Taneja as she read and discussed texts that talked about Marxism, postcolonialism, and other theories of modern life, and began to understand how these ideas filtered down through the stories we tell one another, and the way that people search for meaning in the day to day.

“It was a way of understanding the world through literature and seeing some of the biases and some of the things that exist on a deeper level, and knowing that even in, say the 1940s, when equality wasn’t a thing, there were some people who were progressive enough, who wrote about women as full-fledged characters,” she said. “Literature always gives you the hope that better things are possible. I am personally not an optimistic person, so literature helps me balance that out. Even though most of the stuff that I read is sort of tragic, there is always a sliver of hope in there somewhere.”

It’s this life-changing power of books and stories that compelled Taneja to continue studying English at Emory University, where she received a MA and PhD in English. For her doctoral dissertation, she focused on the partition literature of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and the way that objects have played a central role in the lives of those who have lived, and continue to live, through decades of upheaval in the area.

“A lot of my work has to do with trying to discover

that part of myself, because I come from a family that underwent partition. Both sides of my family were in what is now known as Pakistan, and a lot of those stories I couldn’t get access to directly because my grandparents had passed, so I’ve gotten many of those stories from the objects that my family has and the stories that they associate with it,” she said. “That was the personal motivation that sparked that research, but more generally I’m interested in the idea of hierarchical systems in society, classes, gender, caste, race, and how those get influenced and reflected in post-colonial literature.”

COA is fortunate to have Taneja join the college as a new faculty member, provost Ken Hill said. “Her focus on postcolonial literature, South Asian studies, and digital humanities will expand and strengthen our curriculum. We are delighted to have her join our team.”

Taneja is excited to be working within COA’s interdisciplinary pedagogy, for the many possibilities of a humanecological perspective, and by the highly engaged nature of COA students.

“When I interviewed here I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that students were a part of the process, how they were asking questions, and how very active they were with it,” she said. “I hadn’t seen that before, and I was appreciative of that fact because I remembered being one of those invisible students in school.”

Taneja is the recipient of a number of awards, including the QTM Advanced Graduate Completion Fellowship, Department of Quantitative Theory and Methods, Emory University. Her publications include; “Partition: Oral Histories” (Postcolonial Studies @ Emory); and “Book Review: This Side/That Side Restorying Partition: Graphic Narratives from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh curated by Vishwajyoti Ghosh” (Postcolonial Studies @ Emory).

In her free time, Taneja enjoys spending time with her kitten, Syaah, and rooting for the Atlanta United Football Club. She is enjoying exploring Bar Harbor and getting to know Acadia National Park.

New faculty Jonathan Henderson, music

By Jeremy Powers ’24

JONATHAN HENDERSON turns on his Zoom camera, unmutes his microphone, and gives a thumbs up. Instruments hang on the wall in the background, a few guitars, a fretless bass, and the bookshelf to his right stretches up to touch the ceiling.

College of the Atlantic is pleased to welcome Henderson as a new faculty member in music. He plays bass, percussion, piano, and guitar, and brings a unique insight into how social structures and music interact and affect one another. His experience as a teacher and professional musician show his love and dedication to the craft, and he is excited to begin teaching at COA.

“I’m really interested in interdisciplinary work, and as an ethnomusicologist I’m interested in the intersection between music, anthropology, politics, and history. COA feels like a great place to be able to teach at those intersections and collaborate in a creative way with students and other faculty members,” he says.

Henderson completed his graduate work in ethnomusicology at Duke University and worked as an instructor and mentor in the departments of music and African American studies there. He has a range of teaching experience, both in secondary and higher education settings, and his is a student-focused teaching philosophy.

“A lot of my work begins with what interest students have in music and working out from there,” he says. “I think the best teachers are life-long learners, and I love being in the classroom because I’m always surprised by what a student shares, or I’m caught off guard by a piece of music that they bring in that I’ve never heard.”

Watching students grow as musicians is another thing he loves about teaching. “I know that through my work they’ll figure out ways of incorporating music into their lives going forward, and learn skills that they can apply to everyday situations,” he says.

Henderson has some plans in the works to expand the musical offerings at COA. One project is to start using a newly renovated recording studio on the second floor of Gates Community Center, an effort led by COA audio

visual technology specialist Zach Soares ’00 which has been in the works for a while. “It’ll be great to have students creating podcasts in the studio, recording original music, and just getting in there to learn about this technology,” he says. He is also hoping to start a Brazilian percussion ensemble in the fall term.

COA is delighted to add Henderson to the faculty, provost Ken Hill said. “In the coming years, Jonathan will teach courses on ethnomusicology, studio recording, composition, and applied instrument training. His broad musical training spans multiple regions and historical genres, and will be most welcomed in our community.”

In his musical life outside of teaching, Henderson has a band called Kaira Ba, which is a collaborative project with Senegalese musician Diali Cisshoko. “We’re still going to try to remain active from a distance. We have a few things happening this year that I’m going to fly in for, and in the summer, we’ll be collaborating more closely. We’ll be playing at the Ossipee music festival in Maine, down near Portland in the summer, in July.” Additionally, Henderson recently premiered a piece titled Anechoia Memoriam, “which is a participatory installation for a typewriter that electro-mechanically controls a grand piano. The score for this piece is composed of over 150 names of people of color killed by law enforcement in the United States, so it’s designed as a participatory memorial,” he says.

In his free time, Henderson enjoys getting outside with his family and exploring the Maine coast. “I also love cooking and baking, which seems to square pretty well with Maine winters,” he laughs. He also, of course, enjoys listening to music, and since he’s moved here, he’s had a certain piece on his mind. “I’ve always loved visiting the ocean, but I’ve never actually lived in such proximity to the ocean before. I’ve been thinking recently about a piece called Become Ocean by the composer John Luther Adams, which is an orchestral work that is very textural and is composed around the idea of energy building and releasing through the development of waves. It’s just a series of several waves kind of swelling and receding. It’s maybe 40 minutes long, and I’ve been thinking about that since being here, so I’ll have to put it back on and listen to it again,” he says.

David Gibson, director of energy

By Jeremy Powers ’24

COLLEGE

OF THE ATLANTIC director of energy David Gibson brings extensive experience working with renewable energy in the public sector, the private sector, and as an energy educator. He is excited to engage with students through COA’s interdisciplinary approach, and is already helping the COA community realize their ambitious renewable energy framework.

“I worked for an educational nonprofit for five years out in Reno, Nevada and really enjoyed working with students and teaching the next generation the tools and skills they’ll need to address the climate crisis and transition off fossil fuels,” Gibson says. “COA’s mission to eliminate fossil fuel use on campus by 2030 really drew me in, and made me want to be somewhere that aims to be a leader and demonstrate that to the community.”

In his first months at COA, Gibson has jumped head first into bringing the college’s green energy goals to life. The college recently bought 11 units of off-campus housing, and Gibson immediately began coordinating installation of heat pumps and improving the insulation of the buildings. “Every building that we add insulation to, we’re saving money in the short term and saving carbon pollution in the long term,” he says. “If we don’t address our existing building stock and make it more efficient, we’re just going to continue wasting energy 40, 50, 100 years from now.”

Energy-use literacy and awareness is something that Gibson is working to bring to COA, partly through real-world, practical applications and partly through in-class learning. He’s taught two classes, one with math and physics professor David Feldman called Math and Physics of Sustainable Energy and one called Green Building Through the Lens of LEED, the latter in which students had the opportunity to work on sustainability projects on campus and have a meaningful impact outside of class.

“I’ve been working directly with students on some of the energy projects and see the same thing happening in other aspects of managing the college, and to me that’s just such a wonderful, real-world experience

where you’re learning about stuff in classes and then being able to apply it,” he says.

Gibson founded Powered by Sunshine, a nonprofit working to put Nevada on track for 100% renewable energy by 2040, and he worked for Envirolution (through Americorps VISTA) teaching K-12 students about energy efficiency and literacy. “The effort to educate students to be smarter energy consumers, I just see as really essential towards transitioning our building stock,” he says.

He also serves as the vice chair for the Sierra Club Maine Chapter, and in this position has successfully led efforts to pass two energy-related bills in the Maine legislature in 2021. LD1659 requires Efficiency Maine, a quasi-state agency, to provide more affordable avenues for efficiency and clean energy projects, and is focused especially towards low-income communities and communities of color. LD99 requires the Maine State Treasurer and Maine Public Employee Retirement System to fully divest from fossil fuels by 2026. “Essentially, over the next 20 years, Maine is going to have to invest at least $40 to $50 billion to transition off of fossil fuels… and we can see a return on investment for, ideally, the homeowners and building owners,” he says.

Gibson holds a BS in civil engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, is certified LEED AP BD+C by the Green Building Certification Institute, US Green Building Council, is a Certified Energy Manager by the Association of Energy Engineers, and holds a Permaculture Design Certificate.

Gibson has transitioned two homes entirely off of fossil fuels, including a post and beam farmhouse built in 1828. He owns a homestead with his wife, Willow, and the two of them are implementing a permaculture plan there. They have planted a nut grove with chestnuts, heartnuts, pecans, and hickories, and a fruit orchard with apples, pears, peaches, plums, cherries, and a variety of berry bushes. He enjoys hiking, mountain biking, alpine and cross country skiing, snowshoeing, paddling, and other outdoor activities.

April Nugent, manager, Peggy Rockefeller Farms

By Jeremy Powers ’24

IT’S A MILD, SUNNY DAY as April Nugent picks her way across a field at College of the Atlantic Peggy Rockefeller Farms, eyes peeled for hidden cow patties in the knee-high grass. As she walks, she points out some of the geography—the brook that splits the farm in two, the sheep pasture, the yellow farmhouse, and the gray barn that sits back from the road. A wisp of breeze rustles the leaves of the oaks and aspens at the edge of the field; a cow lows softly as it works through a patch of grass.

Nugent, the new manager of Peggy, as it’s affectionately known, has been around farm animals most of her life. From the age of eight, her family raised chickens, turkeys, geese, and goats. Being involved in the everyday care of these animals and marketing the farm’s products sparked her interest and set her path in life, she says. She’s loved combining farming with education since her days at Hampshire College, and looks forward to doing so in COA’s interdisciplinary environment.

“I like working and living in environments with a focus on asking big questions and challenging the current way of doing things,” she says, “and farming and caring for the land and the animals makes me feel empowered to make meaningful change in the world and gives me a sense of purpose.”

Nugent is an alum of Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she studied sustainable agriculture with a focus on livestock management. She explored many facets of agriculture at Hampshire, including food systems, animal physiology, dairy herd management, environmental ethics, and farm business management, and even managed to work in an oil painting class or two, she says. After graduation, she became Hampshire’s grass fed livestock operations manager with a specialization in rare breed swine genetics.

“We are super lucky to have April,” says COA administrative dean Bear Paul. “She impressed everyone throughout the interview process, and she’s been even more impressive on the job. CJ Walke did a wonderful job establishing COA’s operations at Peggy, and April has come in and built off the work CJ did. April has really made Peggy her own and has some super exciting ideas that she’s making happen.”

Nugent has known about COA for a long while and says that the college has always spoken to her.

“I had looked at COA when I was a prospective student, but I opted to stay closer to home,” she says. “I’ve stayed interested in COA ever since, so when this opportunity came up, I just knew it would be the perfect fit. ”

The 125-acre Peggy Rockefeller Farms is operated as both a production and educational facility, with a handful of workstudy students employed there during the academic year. Classes such as Agroecology, Wildlife Ecology, and COA Foodprint make use of the farm, and students can use the property for class projects and independent studies.

Nugent looks forward to expanding on all of the educational opportunities the farm holds and tying the farm and the academic program together more directly. She’s also working to improve systems and better balance the work and study portions of workstudy positions on the farm. During her first winter at the college, she teamed up with COA Partridge Chair in Food and Sustainable Agriculture Systems Kourtney Collum to teach a course on farm animal management.

New trustees

By Rob Levin

JOYCE CACHO

with fellow trustees, she hopes that COA will become a post-COP 26 leading education institution by embedding Environmental, Social, and Governance and Task Force on Financial-Related Financial Disclosures metrics into its operations and finance policies to capture COA’s culture and goals.

Drawing from a rich familial legacy of engagement and investment in education, she was additionally drawn to COA’s innovative and integrative approach to teaching.

Cacho and her husband recently moved to Massachusetts and enjoy summer sailing in Rockland, ME. She enjoys hiking, snowshoeing, tennis, golf, and volunteering to support ecosystem and community health. Joyce’s Cardamom and Crystalized Gingerbread Pudding is a family favorite!

HEATHER RICHARDS EVANS

“WE’RE STANDING AT A CROSSROADS,” is how our new distinguished trustee Joyce Cacho, PhD described why she joined the board of trustees for the College of the Atlantic. “COA has incubated how tertiary education should be done, which is particularly valuable during this moment in time defined by a global pandemic and racial reckoning for which the US is the epicenter.”

Uniquely suited for this moment and opportunity, Cacho is a change catalyst who brings broad and deep expertise to the board, coupled with a clear and dynamic vision for COA’s future. Fluent in five languages, she has leveraged her background in multiple industries nationally and internationally, including Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. She is a recognized leader in innovation, growth and business culture transformation, while also being a passionate sustainability advocate by meaningfully embedding ESG enterprise risk management in business growth strategy.

Cacho notes that COA’s history, vision, and numerous accolades, which include being the first college to be carbon neutral, one of the first to divest fossil fuel holdings from its endowment, and being named the greenest college in the country by The Princeton Review, align with her own experience, vision, and passion. During her time with COA working

“COA is exemplary of education that prepares our talent pipeline for the US and abroad, where integrative thinking and respect for ‘other’ is paramount in both business and personal decisions,” says Cacho. Cacho hopes that COA will work to normalize BIPOC and other currently under-represented communities throughout the complexity of private and public education. Doing so is integral to COA being a welcoming, inclusive ecosystem and a champion of normalizing the broad base of diverse perspectives that student populations bring, and which is required of course and academic program content today.

Passionate about financial accounting governance and its role in creating business and community resilience, Cacho is a board director of Sunrise Banks, NA, an OCC-US Treasury regulated financial institution, one of 950+ Community Development Financial Institutions, a Certified Benefit Corporation with national and Minnesota charters, and a member of the Global Alliance for Banking on Values. The bank offers financially inclusive products and embraces social entrepreneurship and innovation on the cutting edge of the rapidly emerging fintech industry across the country.

Previously, she served as a board director of Land O’Lakes, Inc., a Fortune 200 company and one of the nation’s largest farmer cooperatives. She is among Savoy Network’s 2017 and 2021 Most Influential Black Corporate Directors, and Directors and Boards Magazine’s 2018 Directors to Watch

HEATHER RICHARDS EVANS is founder and president of Yaverland Foundation, which supports conservation, education, and the arts, with a particular focus on programs benefiting underserved communities.

Evans has broad experience in governance, strategic planning, and master planning. She enjoyed practicing law as a litigation associate in New York prior to moving to London where she lived for 10 years before returning to the US. After a brief stint in Connecticut, Evans now resides in Delaware. While in London, Evans was active in strategic planning for the American Friends of the British Museum, Business in the Community, and West London Action for Children. Her board service, as well as her ad-hoc work, are informed by the communities in which she lives and complement Yaverland’s mission.

Evans served for a year in an advisory role on the COA Buildings & Grounds

Committee before her election to the board. She is excited to have the opportunity to work with the diverse and talented group of individuals comprising the COA community in exploring our collective understanding of human ecology.

“I’m energized by the challenges and possibilities of building upon the vision of COA’s founders 50 years ago as we proceed together in strengthening a framework that supports the exploration of what it means to be a world in balance,” she said.

Evans is a seasonal resident of MDI. In a mobile world, Northeast Harbor has always been the place where she, her three adult children, extended family, and friends can reliably find each other and renew their sense of wonder.

Evans has an AB in history from Princeton University and received her JD from NYU School of Law. She completed additional graduate work in environmental planning at the University of Pennsylvania. Evans is a member of the New York and New Jersey State Bar associations.

CHANDREYEE MITRA ’01

first crew of students to spend a summer on Great Duck Island, where she researched Herring Gulls, an experience that she credits with shaping her subsequent passion for scientific research. “I love COA as an institution and firmly believe in its mission and vision,” she says.

Mitra takes a whole-organism and interdisciplinary approach to her research, using tools from animal behavior, physiology, anatomy, and evolutionary biology. The central goal of her work is to explore how observed behavioral and physiological traits are affected by changes in environmental variables.

An associate professor of biology at North Central College, where she has taught since 2015, Mitra probes these areas using two very different animal systems—field crickets and butterflies.

“My work with field crickets has focused on the idea that adaptive phenotypic plasticity is one way for species to persist in variable environments,” she says. “Specifically, I have examined aspects of the environmentally mediated life-history trade-off between flight and reproduction in different polyphenic morphs.”

Through her parallel work with swallowtail butterflies, Mitra has focused on the costs and benefits of male nuptial gift giving. In many butterfly and moth species, males take in salt from the environment and transfer it to females during mating. Mitra’s work examines how salt availability affects male behavior and fitness, and how variation in male-provided salt affects the fitness of females and their offspring.

As part of that first crew on Great Duck, at what would become the Alice Eno Field Research Station, Mitra credits her time at COA with sparking a lifelong passion for scientific research.

“My time on Great Duck, especially doing research with John Anderson, helped me find my path to becoming a researcher working in animal behavior. And that eventually led to my seeking a position teaching at a small liberal arts school where, like John did for me and so many, I could introduce undergraduates to the wonders of scientific research.”

Mitra holds a PhD and an MS from the University of Nebraska School of Biological Sciences. Previous to her current appointment at North Central, she served as assistant professor of biology and coordinator of the environmental studies program there. She has been a National Institutes of Health Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Award Fellow, a graduate teaching and research assistant at the University of Nebraska, a field assistant at the University of California Hastings Natural History Reservation, and a wildlife biologist at the Lassen National Forest. Her research has been published in Animal Behavior and Ecological Entomology. Mitra has presented numerous times at the Animal Behavior Society Annual Meeting, the National Conference on Undergraduate Research, and the Midwest Ecology and Evolution Conference, among others.

BIOLOGIST CHANDREYEE MITRA ’01 has been a dedicated fan of College of the Atlantic since she attended school there back in the late 1990s. She was part of the

She writes, “Human activity is changing the abiotic environments of many extant species, and how a species responds to such changes may affect its persistence in a changing world. One nearly instantaneous way animals can respond to changes in their environment is by changing their behavior. Therefore, my students and I have been working on how organisms adjust their behavior based on the surroundings they happen to find themselves in.”

Public outreach efforts are a big part of Mitra’s career. She helped celebrate Monarch Madness at the Growing Place, coordinates Project BudBurst at North Central, and has organized display tables at the Insect Festival, the WonderLab Museum of Science, Health and Technology, and University of Colorado Museum of Natural History, among other efforts. She is a member of the Animal Behavior Society, the Association for Biology Laboratory Education, Sigma Xi, the Society for the Study of Evolution, and the National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science.

Goldsworthy comes to COA

ENGLISH

SCULPTOR, photographer, and environmentalist Andy Goldsworthy visited COA in the fall of 2021.

Goldsworthy gave a fascinating and wide-ranging talk and slide show featuring art he created during the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. While most of the world was hunkered down working remotely, Goldsworthy was engaged in creating work in and around his property in Penpont,

Scotland. For Goldsworthy, who is used to traveling internationally to create work, being locked down was something new but also oddly rooted in how he approaches working: “I’ve always said the best way to understand change—and my art is about change—the best way to understand change is by staying in the same place.” The following quotations are from Goldsworthy’s talk at COA.

“It’s not like these works are illustrating some political view. They are about trying…they come out of trying to figure things out, which is what I do when I make art. I’m trying to figure things out, trying to understand what’s going on. What’s in front of me, the weather, the light, the stone.”

Left: Andy Goldsworthy, Watershed (detail), 2019. Installation at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA.Courtesy: Galerie Lelong.

Right: Plaque at the base of the wall, Storm King. Credit: Catherine Clinger.

Andy Goldsworthy (right) and Steve Haynes, founder of The Maine Granite Industry Historical Society and Museum in Mount Desert. Credit: Darron Collins.

“The way something changes and decays is as important as the way it’s made. And I learn as much about the material and the place as it decays as when I make the work. And that is the essential driving force… It is the reason why I make my art.

When I make things, I learn about them, I understand them, I have a connection to them. It’s a knowledge that can only be gained by touching and by working. I’m not trying to improve what is there, I can’t do that, but I do feel this deep need to be involved in the land.

As I said before, It’s not like I’m trying to illustrate some political or environmental issue with my work. The work is an environmental issue. I am an environmental issue. I live and breathe that.”

“There’s always this leap into the unknown for me… But it’s quite extraordinary, the solutions that can arise.”

Above: Andy Goldsworthy, Walking Wall, 2019. Credit: Gabe Hopkins. Bottom left: Andy Goldsworthy, Stacked Whalebones, 2001. National Museum of Scotland. Credit: Bruce McAdam. Bottom right: Andy Goldsworthy, sculpture in Refuge d’Art hike in Haute-Provence around Digne-les-Bains, France. Credit: Pmau.

College of the Ecstatic

By Terry Tempest Williams

“IAMECSTATIC to be here,” I recall a student saying to me on my first visit to COA.

From that day forward, I have called College of the Atlantic, “College of the Ecstatic.”

My husband Brooke and I had been invited by Steven Katona and his wife Susan Lerner for a tour of the college in 1999. Steve was president of COA, as well as being one of its founding faculty members as a biologist.

The setting was impressive, a learning community on Mount Desert Island devoted to human ecology with a shimmering view of the Atlantic Ocean from campus. We had just come back from an inspiring lunch when a puppet procession led by large, imaginary animals and comical birds was underway. We followed the procession through the woods. At its helm was the creator—Eli Nixon ’99.* We were led by the beasts down trails to the small cove as panels of text soared from the pines above and were pulled dripping from the bay by way of zip-lines. A wild band of horn players accompanied the pageantry with music composed by another student, Nikolai Fox ’00. Word had it that various students trained in forestry and agro-ecology were now draped in paper maché receiving theater directions from Eli. It was all a grand, feral pageant: an epic Battle Between Hope and Fear.

Later that afternoon, we listened to students speak about their senior projects. The puppet theater we had experienced outside was expanded inside as Eli spoke of art as a vehicle for social change capable of illuminating our relationship with Nature, interconnected and interrelated. As they spoke, the field of human ecology was cracked wide open. I not only saw a brilliant student courageously engaging with the world with their original vision, I saw a leader who transcended

categorization. They not only spoke about what was possible, but necessary through igniting the imagination.

I asked Eli if they would come with their band of puppets from College of the Ecstatic and accompany me to Fire & Grit, the Orion Society’s gathering of writers, educators, and public policy makers to be held at the National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.

Eli accepted the invitation. A month later, we organized an artistic coup.

As an invited writer, I had been given 30 minutes to speak. I yielded my time to Eli and their troupe without warning government officials. A revised Battle Between Hope and Fear with banners flying across the auditorium ensued. They brought the house down. These students from COA bypassed rhetoric and touched the heart. One of the lasting images for all of us was seeing the dignified Barry Lopez dancing with a 10-foot tall carrot as he wore the paper maché husk of a rhinogahog.

Today Eli Nixon continues their work as a cardboard constructionist and educator, activist, and creator of magic in schools and community centers around the country. After two decades, we are back in touch and once again, Eli has agreed to collaborate. We will gather at Cape Cod on a beach with Harvard Divinity School students and discuss Eli’s new book, Bloodtide: A New Holiday in Homage to Horseshoe Crabs. It will be another portal of possibilities we can walk through together.

I think of Samantha Haskell ’10, a young agrarian who is now the owner of the revered independent bookstore, Blue Hill Books. She has not only built on the bookstore’s solid tradition of being smart and savvy, she is activating an intellectual community of care within the next generation of residents and readers in Hancock County in Blue Hill, Maine.

*Eli Nixon ’99 formerly used the name Beth. Their book is available for order through 3rd Thing Press and Samantha Haskell ’10 is happy to order it for you at Blue Hill Books.

Eli Nixon as horseshoe crab.

Samantha writes:

As students, our line was always, “Human ecology is everything,” which is both hyperbolic and true. The context of the human’s relationship to the environment is all-encompassing, particularly in the anthropocene, but it also includes us as conscientious observers. The concept is expansive, overwhelming, and liberating; find the thing you’re most interested in, whatever it may be, rest assured it is relevant, and now explore it deeply, critically, thoughtfully. This is human ecology in action.

For me, it was rural communities. How do we define a sense of place? What brings us together? This became courses in landscape architecture, American literature, ornithology, and environmental law. Then an exploration of the communities near national parks around the world. After graduating, it bloomed into running the independent bookstore in my hometown, and becoming president of the local land trust. I hope that I’m helping to advance and meld those traditions today in the place that I love.

And close to home in my own state of Utah, I think of Ky Osguthorpe ’19, who is now the government grassroots liaison for the Utah Rivers Council. We met recently at the Save Our Great Salt Lake rally. Like Eli and Samantha, Ky is passionate about her work, even as it involves embracing grief alongside her love as she witnesses the Great Salt Lake disappear into a horizon of salt.

Ky writes:

The air of mystery around human ecology is intentionally cultivated by professors, their courses, and the inescapable final assignment of the school, the Human Ecology Essay. This assignment gives students an opportunity to define human ecology, a seemingly odd task for students who have ostensibly spent four years studying the subject.

Like most of my peers, I had a difficult time figuring out what to write. I ended up writing my essay about leaving Mormonism and feeling isolated, stuck in a chasm between people who hate the LDS church and those who belong to it, and trying to figure out what kindness meant through it all. I equated human ecology to the rivers that flow between such chasms. I wrote, “To seek connection is to participate in human ecology, to believe, in the face of deep canyons, that there exists something exciting, something dynamic and stochastic between the world’s stubborn monoliths of false certainty.”

So here I am, an ex-Mormon, river-loving human ecologist. I look at the impossibly high walls on either side of myself, feel the depth of the chasm in which I stand, and remember that between towering evils, good and truth reside in meandering cracks.

This is why College of the Atlantic is singular—passion gives rise to hope where students can put their love into

action. “It’s an Ivy League education that cares about our relationship to the Earth and all its inhabitants in all its diversity,” Steve Katona, now president emeritus, told me so many years ago. I see this same kind of leadership continuing through the exuberance and generosity of spirit with President Darron Collins ’92 and COA’s committed faculty and staff.

The testament to being awake, alive, and engaged in this liminal moment of climate collapse and a global pandemic resides in the pragmatic vision of our young people. Eli Nixon, Samantha Haskell, and Ky Osguthorpe are examples from the COA student body and alumnx who are not only “finding beauty in a broken world” but creating beauty in the world they find.

On this 50th anniversary celebration of College of the Atlantic, I still see this small college on Mount Desert Island as College of the Ecstatic, where the embodied intellectual life at COA encourages each student to become their highest and deepest selves, be it through a pageantry of puppets, owning an independent bookstore in rural Maine, or protecting the shrinking Great Salt Lake in the climate of now.

Above: Strange and wonderful animals. Below: A creature winding through the woods.

Isidora Muñoz Segovia ’22

THERE WERE MANY THINGS that attracted me to COA when I applied. I was looking at schools in Europe and not really considering the US as a potential home for four years of my life. However, right when I thought I had made up my mind to study in Ireland, COA came into the picture. It was the small college, tight-knit community, and nature-oriented education that mesmerized me. This was not what I thought the US could

NUTRITIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Before coming to COA I knew I wanted to focus on something related to environmental politics, Indigenous knowledge, and climate change. Throughout my time at COA, I have learned that a way to combine all of these passions is through the study of food systems. Nutritional Anthropology taught me so much about human history, how we relate to our food, how evolution reflects our society’s eating habits, and how intertwined that is with our culture and identity. This class made me even more interested in the science behind the chemical reactions of different foods. I really enjoyed how Kourtney Collum taught this class because I felt that by the end of the term I had learned so much and I was eager to continue learning more.

offer in terms of colleges.

I think one of the biggest factors that attracted me to COA was its location and the degree in human ecology. I knew I needed a lot of greenery close to me, and Acadia National Park seemed like a real-life dream. Human ecology looked like the perfect combination of everything I was interested in, mostly because it allowed me to create my own focus. The problem was,

right when I realized COA was perfect, I also realized I wanted to take a year off to gain realworld experience. After getting accepted to the college, I asked to defer for a year and COA agreed. It could not have worked out more perfectly; in my gap year I gained many skills I would find myself using as a student at COA.

GARDENS & GREENHOUSES: Theory/Practice of Organic Gardening

This was an amazing class because it was the perfect mixture of hands-on experience that I was so eager to get from COA, a super interesting syllabus, and a really great class dynamic, which was so important during the first pandemic term. One of the coolest things about this course, taught by Suzanne Morse, was that, due to the nature of being remote, each one of us had completely different climates we were using to grow our orchards. My parents were really excited about me redesigning our garden into a beautiful edible green space!

STUDENT SCHEDULE

DEPT/ID COURSE NAME

ES 1014 Gardens & Greenhouses: Theory/Practice of Organic Gardening

ES 2040 Introduction to Forestry

HS 3095 Nutritional Anthropology

Morse, Suzanne

Morrell, Hale

Collum, Kourtney

Monday/Thursday

Tuesday

Tuesday/Friday

INTRODUCTION TO FORESTRY

Introduction to Forestry was taught by Hale Morrell ’12 and, similar to Gardens and Greenhouses, it was a great mixture of hands-on experience and more traditional class time. This class truly opened my eyes to an area that I don’t often think about when considering climate change and sustainability. Forest management is such an important topic that you don’t usually learn about in school, unless you are very interested in it. I really enjoyed the special guests—professionals in the field from Maine and around the world. In particular, I really enjoyed our class with Matheus Couto who works with Brazil’s UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre. Couto gave a fascinating talk about agroforestry, reforestation, eucalyptus, and GMOs in Brazil.

PICTURE WAS TAKEN during my fi rst term at COA in one of my favorite classes, Ecology: Natural History, with Steve Ressel. The class went on a field trip to Borestone Mountain and spent a night camping by the river as we immersed ourselves in the ecology of the site. I had a hard time choosing only one picture because there are so many treasurable moments at COA. I was able to gain fi rst-hand knowledge about Maine’s ecology through the course. This grounded me with a sense of place and was exactly the type of experiential class I was looking for when I applied to COA. DAYS

CREDITS 1 1 1

Just doing my part

Ursa Beckford ’17 interviews US Rep Chellie Pingree ’79

WITH A NEW ADMINISTRATION comes new challenges and new opportunities. What does it mean to work in government after the challenges of the last administration? For US Congresswoman Chellie Pingree ’79 it means remembering your roots while becoming chair of the House Appropriations Committee Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Subcommittee, one of the most powerful positions in Congress. Ursa Beckford ’17 brings us this insightful interview with the congresswoman.

I’ve been focusing on those issues in the infrastructure packages we are working on right now.

Similar to how it was framed in the Green New Deal, you can’t just talk about environmental issues and leave out people. It can’t be just about the environment. You have to think about environmental justice and then you have to think about people’s everyday lives. How do people get to work? Do they have childcare? Do they have health care? Are their own lives manageable and healthy? Do they have housing? Really, the things that people confront every single day in Maine. So I think I always look at it through that lens. How are we going to do this and make sure we also are thinking about people?

When people ask me about human ecology, I tend to say, It’s not just a funny degree with a complicated name… It’s actually how you take some of these science-related issues and think about them from a human perspective.

UB: That’s fascinating, because I think human ecology is often defined as the study of the relationships between humans and their natural or social environments, meaning someone might focus on one or the other. But you see them as integrated.

CP: Yeah, part of the difference is that once you’re out of college you’re trying to implement what you learned... So you have to think about everything.

COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC

UB: How does COA continue to influence you?

URSA BECKFORD: To start off with, what are you focused on right now? What makes you get up in the morning?

CHELLIE PINGREE: Well, as a member of Congress, every day is a little bit different. One of the challenging, but wonderful, things about this job is you wake up in the morning and you’re often facing a day completely different from the day before. We do everything from deal with challenging constituent issues to internal debates and negotiations within our own party. We have committee meetings and hearings, we’re working on bills, we’re voting on the floor. But overall, I’ve always worked on some of the same themes. I’m an organic farmer in my other life, so everything about farming and food systems has been at the forefront for me. We’re doing a lot of work on climate change and its relationship to agriculture. So

CP: You spend a fair amount of time in college and you learn things that you don’t know you’ll use until much later in life. I learned a lot of different things that still impact my life. I even took a couple of business classes, I took basic bookkeeping. I don’t know how I snuck that class in, but I’ve run a small business most of my life, so I still lean on a lot of that knowledge.

I was at COA the other day. They were opening up the Davis Center for Human Ecology, and I was very excited because it’s such a green building and my committee oversees the Forest Service budget, so I’ve been interested in funding a lot more forest product innovation. One of the things about that building is they used wood fiber insulation, a new product that’s going to be made by GO Lab, a company in Maine, using a German technique to repurpose wood byproducts into environmentally friendly insulation material that is really efficient.

We’ve had somebody from GO Lab come and testify at agriculture hearings to talk about how to have a sustainable forest and how

Representative Pingree in Acadia

a product made out of wood holds onto carbon, which then stays in the building and becomes a carbon sink for a long time. I think this was the first time that they’d used wood fiber insulation in a building on a large scale, and it’s at COA. So it’s nice how it all tied together for me. COA is doing a lot of really great stuff that is topical for what we’re working on today. I feel really connected to the things happening at the college.

UB: What was it like to be back on campus?

CP: I found myself talking to another alums and saying, When I was here, it was before this building burned down... And I sort of felt like one of those really old people who’s like, Yeah, in my day we only had one building...

When I first got there in the 1970s, we didn’t have on-campus housing. There was just a weird little motel down the road they rented for students… It was like a horror movie motel. You could share a tiny, gross, smoke-filled room with a roommate. So very quickly a couple of my friends and I found a place to rent in town. Today, I feel like I’m talking to people who can’t even conceive that it was the same college when I was there. But I just love the fact that it’s grown, it’s become a college with a lot more resources and more opportunities. It’s great.

UB: How has human ecology influenced your life and work? I imagine you’re the only powerful congresswoman with a degree in human ecology. Do you notice that you bring a different perspective?

CP: I’m sure I’m the only congressperson who has this degree. I think it’s a combination of that degree, but also coming from Maine, where I don’t think people separate the natural world from our daily lives as much as you might in some other places. You can go up to anybody in Maine and start a conversation about the weather. When you live in a rural area or area impacted by weather, people talk about it all the time. And that may seem incidental, but it’s a reflection of the fact that people pay attention to what’s going on outside. A lot of Mainers are much more aware of things like, Have the trees changed? What season are we in now? A huge percentage of Maine people burn wood to heat their houses. They have a garden in their backyard. They can’t wait to get outdoors, whether they’re hikers or hunters or cross-country skiers. Some people really like going fishing or being

on lakes… That’s always given me this perspective that everybody has an equal amount of concern about their lives because their lives are rooted in nature.

BACK TO THE LAND

UB: Did you bring that human-ecological perspective to COA, or did it develop there, or later on?

CP: I chose COA because it was a college in Maine that represented some of the things that interested me, but it wasn’t as if I grew up in life thinking, I want to be an environmentalist. Before I went to COA, I had been living in Maine for a couple years and was a back-to-thelander, which really hadn’t been my plan in life either. I grew up in Minneapolis, went to an alternative high school in Massachusetts, and then followed a boy to Maine. I was reading Helen and Scott Nearing’s books, and I decided it was something that made a lot of political sense… It was a way to differentiate yourself from what the establishment was doing. We had a government we couldn’t trust, sending our friends and siblings to Vietnam, and you had to live a life to show that you were protesting the status quo. So even though I didn’t know much about how to run a wood stove or can tomatoes or anything, it just somehow all flowed.

So I guess I brought all of that to College of the Atlantic when I got

Representative Pingree at the dedication of the Congresswoman Chellie Pingree ‘79 Greenhouse, part of the COA Davis Center for Human Ecology.

Helen and Scott Nearing’s book, Living the Good Life, was published in 1973.

there, and it colored what I wanted to study. I wasn’t interested in going to a school where you had a lot of required classes that you had to take… I was sort of done taking classes the way I had in high school. Being able to focus on what I wanted to do and figuring out how all those things fit together was pretty useful.

UB: So it seems like your views on human ecology are really related to your core interests in Congress and they go back to those early days.

CP: When I was at the college, I mostly focused on growing things, growing plants. Eliot Coleman, who sort of became the guru of organic farming, taught a few classes... I instantly gravitated to being a farmer, having an organic farm, living a rural life.

By the time I ran for the House, I had, one way or another, either been a gardener or had a small farm, or had a small business related to farming, all my life. I served for eight years in the Legislature, where I focused more on health care, prescription drug prices, things like that. When I got to Congress, there were a lot of members who were very focused on health care, and it’s a big national issue. That’s when we passed the Affordable Care Act. But I literally found no one who was interested in food systems. There were a few people who supported organic farming, but it wasn’t their issue. So that really was when I just dove in and said, look, I know so much about agriculture, organic farming, the changing consumer market, what people want to buy, what they want to eat, what they want to feed their kids, toxins related to the environment—all those things. I was like, This is a void and someone needs to do this.

UB: What do you think your younger self would’ve said about you coming to serve in Congress? It’s interesting to hear about your earlier views on government, and here you are.

CP: Well first off, I literally had never engaged with the political process in terms of whether I was a Democrat or Republican, or how political parties worked, until a few months before I ran for the Legislature in 1992. I always voted, but I paid very little attention to it all. I’d never gone to a party meeting. And certainly when I was a teenager, I felt very alienated from government. I didn’t engage in it.

I really started to get interested in the process of governing on a local level because I live in such a small town. We have a town meeting every year in March, a form of government in and of itself. The entire town fits into a big room and takes a vote on every line item in the budget. And it really got me thinking much more about how the system works, how we govern. You weren’t abstracting it

because you think about it all the time. You talk to people in your town about it… You don’t think, Oh, that’s government and it doesn’t connect with me. It’s more like, What do I want to have happen in my future, in my kids’ future?

Eventually I was a tax assessor, then a planning board member, and then I was on the school board. That got me thinking about how you get the five people on the school board to agree about what you think is important for your kids. So I came into government and got comfortable with it in a totally different way.

I don’t like all the chatter that goes on every single day about whether the Democrats are going to make a mistake here, or what about the strategy of this or that issue…

UB: So you’re not reading Politico every day.

CP: [Laughs] I have to read Politico every day because I need to know what’s going on, but when several reporters call me to ask, What do you think Senator Sinema will finally do? I’m kind of like, tomorrow will be different from today, a week is a long time in politics, and I can’t get agitated. You have to understand that sometimes you’re a cog in a wheel and, yes, you might have a lot of influence, but you also just have to do your little part every single day. So that’s what I do, I just keep doing my part.

WORLD CHANGING

UB: I think it’s fair to say that people don’t have much faith these days in the government’s ability to deliver, solve problems, or to work together. Thinking of COA’s motto, “Life changing, world changing,” in this particular moment—with the pandemic, George Floyd’s murder, climate change, withdrawing from Afghanistan— what are your thoughts on world changing? How do we proceed in this environment? How do we move things in the direction that we want to see them go?

CP: There are some days when I think, A week is a long time, and things may look very different next week. At other times, I wonder if people will look back in 50 years and say, This was the decline that led us to bottom out and ruin civilization. Honestly, I don’t know. So again, I just have to get up every day and think, I’m going to work on my part. I’m going to do my best to keep the system moving.

We do have a lot of big things that we’re really worried about— how voting rights are going to work out in the future, the age of disinformation and misinformation, climate change, the gap between the rich and the poor, how people are surviving in the pandemic. I don’t want to make light of any of it, but every once in a while, I’ll watch a documentary on the 1960s, because it’s hard to remember exactly how you felt 50 years ago. I’ll see the students being shot at Kent State and all the civil unrest. In that era, we thought we were living through a failure of government and things were never going to come back together again. We thought there would never be a president we could trust. Young people then were just as disaffected from government as some people feel today. Sometimes it’s hard to tell, but I’m not sure if we’re in the worst era we’ve ever lived through.

UB: Are you in the thick of cajoling your colleagues about the President’s agenda? What does that work look like?

CP: My work is about being well informed about exactly what’s in the package, what its impact will be, what the statistics are around it. I’m doing everything from lobbying the speaker on why this is important, to working with my colleagues in the Senate who also focus on agriculture issues… And then because some of the climate change policy is in flux and because this or that senator doesn’t like the Clean Energy Plan, there might be some more openings because if we cut out that section, then we’re going to still try to reduce emissions. So I’ve been talking to my environmental colleagues who are in the negotiations, because sometimes people don’t understand how you can reduce emissions through good agricultural practices that sequester carbon. It’s the whole spectrum from policy to personalities, talking to people, talking to the administration.

UB: What do you think of civility? You don’t seem like someone who pulls punches. But I think there’s this interesting question about whether civility is a dirty word. Is it important to be civil, or does being civil mean we’re not speaking the truth, or speaking truth to power? I’m curious where you land on that.

CP: Well, I’m a strong believer in civility. I’ve lived in a small town my entire adult life, and you can’t get along with your friends and neighbors in a small town if you’re always picking a fight or telling somebody what you think. You don’t walk up to people and say, I saw you got a Trump sticker on the back of your car, so you’re not coming into my house to do the plumbing… It just

doesn’t work like that. Your kids go to school together. I live on an island, so we ride on the same ferry. All my life I’ve had to get along with people, it’s part of survival. It’s part of human nature. We don’t want to be in a constant state of conflict. And I don’t know that I’ve ever met a person I didn’t agree with on something. Sometimes I’ll have my knitting or handiwork on the plane, and people will talk to me about that. And I’m sure some of them hate me, but they’re like, Oh, my grandmother uses the same kind of yarn.

Civility was meant to be built into our political system. That’s why we have parliamentary procedure or Robert’s Rules of Order. That’s why when you get up and speak in the Maine Legislature, you say, My good friend, the gentleman from Knox County. Those things might be a little bit of fake civility, but they’re partly to keep the temperature down and keep the argument to the argument, not to the personal attack. It’s one of the things that in some ways has started to become a norm in our country, so I feel like civility goes hand in hand with governing.

TOMORROW WILL BE ANOTHER DAY

UB: Any moments on the other end of the spectrum? Moments in the course of your work lately that gave you hope or made your week?

CP: Sure. I mean, honestly, I can’t tell you how hopeful it’s felt being able to work with a brand-new president... It’s a completely different world. You get to talk to people who are professional and competent and eager to do their jobs. And that’s true at the National Park Service or at the Veteran’s Department or wherever you are. I feel very hopeful working in an environment where in spite of all the politics of will we get it done or not, we’re working on one of the biggest transformational agendas that I’ve been able to work on during my entire time in Congress. This is way bigger than anything we did in the Obama administration. We won’t be able to accomplish everything because that’s the nature of politics, but I feel great about what we get to work on every day and it’s a completely different world from the last four years.

UB: That’s great to hear because I think it’s the political headlines about whether the president is doing a good job or the latest poll out of Iowa that we often latch onto.

CP: Yeah. I mean poor President Biden. In my opinion, he doesn’t catch a break. The guy’s working hard. He’s compassionate. He cares about his job. He’s putting forward big agendas. Everything’s not going to go his way. He’s dealing with this pandemic, a 20-year war in Afghanistan, recalcitrant members of Congress. But he’s a decent guy… every day, trying to do the right thing. It’s always portrayed in the media as, Oh my God, the nation just lost faith in him, but, like I said earlier, you just have to close your eyes and say, Tomorrow will be another day, we’ll just keep doing it.

Editor’s Note: Since this interview was conducted, President Joe Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act into law on November 15, 2021.

Kent State poster from May 4, 1970

COA’s community garden celebrates its 50th year

TAKE A WALK through the College of the Atlantic Community Organic Garden with Rachel Carson Chair in Human Ecology Suzanne Morse and you will get a history lesson about the place and the community around it. Jackson Gillman (’78) planted a winding orchard of apple trees… Kim M. Wentworth Chair in Environmental Studies Steve Ressel surreptitiously brought frogs into the small pond… The daffodils were planted by former dean of development Fran Day… The gate was a project built with art and design faculty member Dru Colbert… A displaced farmer from the UK decided to build a vineyard with grapes and berries… Brendan Shepherd ’21 grew wheat here last year… Jessie Schneider ’21 built raised beds. And then you will hear the names of people who have helped establish and then steward the garden throughout its 50-year existence: former administrative dean Mel Coté, former vice president Sam Eliot, former faculty member Janet Anderson, plant breeder John Navazio, and Mary Roper ’85. For the last 25 years, the job of managing the community garden has fallen to Morse.

“COA has been really great allowing community members on campus to garden during the pandemic, and we’ve had about 20 this year,” Morse says. “For a lot of people in the early days of the pandemic, working in this garden constituted the bulk of their outside time. They were able to get out, grow their own food, and feel a sense of regularity in the midst of such chaotic times.”

“One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use is the gardener’s own body,” Wendell Berry reminds us. “A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.”

Community gardens have been around for a long time in the United States. Since the 1890s, people have turned to the garden to confront social problems such as economic recession, war, urban decline, and environmental injustice. The names of community gardens give a snapshot of 20th century history in the US: vacant lot gardens, school gardens, wartime gardens, thrift gardens, victory gardens, and urban revitalization gardens.

The COA community garden has been an ongoing work in progress since the school’s inception. Started by Coté and Eliot in 1971 in order to help supply their own families, it was opened to students and community members in 1974. Eliot says he and Coté chose the spot because of how open and accessible it was, but weeding required an extraordinary amount of time. Witch grass was endemic on the spot and grew profusely in the fertile soil around campus. The stubborn grass may have been brought in and nourished by the original owners of the property, the Byrne family, as well as members of the Oblate monastery to whom the Byrne’s bequeathed it. There was also no water on the site so Eliot and Coté

watered using buckets from a nearby faucet. In those early days, crops planted included corn, chard, beets, spinach, peas, lettuce, beans, tomatoes, cucumber, and mammoth pumpkins. Some crops worked better than others. Eliot remembers, “dandelions and slugs were doing best of all…”

Students began working in the garden in 1974 and, recalls Eliot, were the cause of a huge traffic jam in town. The community garden sits at the north end of campus close to Route 3. Students, regardless of sex, would remove their shirts when working on especially hot days. Needless to say, some local drivers made the road a parking lot in order to get a good look at their new neighbors. It became such a problem the local police chief had to call Ruth Wright at the front desk and ask her to have the female students put their shirts back on because of the hazard it was causing.

These days, the Community Garden is used for a variety of purposes. It allows Bar Harbor residents who don’t have the space an opportunity to grow their own food, and provides apples for making cider. It builds community by sharing common ground between people, and is a lab used by COA students and faculty members for bird and bee watching, insect collection, composting, and soil testing. It also provides a place for quiet contemplation.

Morse and her classes use a few plots for trying out seed varieties. “This past season I got to work with FEDCO to trial seeds of an open-pollinated corn variety developed for the coast of Washington. They thought it might do well here and it did incredibly well,” she says. FEDCO is a cooperative seed and supply company based in Clinton, Maine, specializing in Northeast, cold climate varieties of plants and seeds. As Morse has gotten more into seed saving, she has been trialing more crops: squash, Goldie cucumbers, lettuce, chard, peas, and fava beans. Morse notes, “this is a garden but it is also my classroom space, I use it in my organic gardening class. It’s so nice that it is right here on campus so we don’t need to drive anywhere.” This past year the class also trialed carrots, of which “two of the varieties were terrible and one of them was great,” she says. The garden also supplies COA’s advancement office with fresh cut flowers for events like the hugely popular COA Summer Institute.

Another summer program—COA Summer Field Studies for Children—benefits from use of the community garden too. COA students design and plant that garden and then the young people in the program care for, taste, smell, observe, and harvest during the summer. What greater gift than the gift of the garden, given freely each spring by COA students to children they will probably never meet. The gift of the garden is a gift that says, I was here before you, I’ve been thinking about you, and I’m so happy you’ve come.

’06

From field biology to Bruce the Bear

By Kiera O’Brien ’18

ACCLAIMED

CHILDREN’S BOOK

author and illustrator Ryan T. Higgins ’06 keeps the only existing copy of his very first publication, Moon Frog and the Moon Gold, within easy reach of his desk at his home studio. “I had been asked so many times by kids what my first book ever was that I had to go track this one down. It was in my mom’s attic. I’m glad I did because now I can show kids that I started in the same place as them: my first grader drawings look like something a first-grader would do. It’s important to show them that I have a cool job making books for children because I worked really hard.”

Along with years of hard work and a lifelong passion for cartooning, Higgins credits a well-timed conversation with his COA advisor, John Anderson, as pivotal in shaping his career as an author. For his first two years at COA, Higgins opted to pursue his second passion, wildlife biology, over cartooning. “I always wanted to grow up to be a cartoonist, but I also realized it’s a pretty hard business to break into. If I couldn’t do that I wanted to run around in the woods following coyotes or black bears.”

Things shifted in his third year while weighing internship opportunities. “There was a possibility I could do an internship studying grizzly bears out West, but I also had a connection with one of the original cartoonists from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Steve Levine.” Both were right up his alley, and both presented a very different set of challenges and opportunities.

At the time, Higgins recalls, “I didn’t think cartooning was

feasible. But one day John Anderson pulled me aside and said, ‘Ryan, I really enjoy reading your research papers, but such papers aren’t typically supposed to be funny.’ That was his way of encouraging me to follow my passion for cartooning.” Higgins jokes that, while he would have enjoyed being a bear biologist, he probably “went with the safer career option.”

Higgins hasn’t completely lost sight of bears, or field biology, however; his New York Times award-winning series Mother Bruce centers around a curmudgeonly black bear named Bruce. “I think I made the first book partly because I felt guilty about not studying bears. I was like I gotta do something with bears. But they’re not even my favorite animals!” Higgins is also quick to point out that black bears like Bruce, and indeed all the other animals in Mother Bruce, are local to Maine, where he lives and works. “They’re talking animals, but I do try to insert some of my biology studies in there. They’re all animals from Maine, unless they arrive on a tour bus, like the elephants that show up at one point.”

Apart from the ecological accuracy behind his children’s books, Higgins reflects that his time at COA instilled “an interdisciplinary approach to life” and art that he carries with him today. “As a cartoonist, my job is marrying words and pictures, as a grownup, writing for kids, so I cast a pretty wide net. I’m trying to do a lot all at once.”

Lately, this interdisciplinary approach, cultivated at COA, has been extending beyond the page: “I started a solar farm business, Loki Solar, with an engineer friend. I wanted to invest in something I really believed in.” Luckily for fans of Bruce the Bear, the solar farming business is slow and steady, and Higgins is already at work on another book in the series.

A farewell letter to the COA community

By College of the Atlantic writing program director and writing professor Anne Kozak

JANUARY 2022 I began my 45th year teaching at COA, and it was a bittersweet moment, particularly since the course I am teaching winter term is one of my favorites— Advanced Composition. I first taught this course in spring 1984 and have used all 12 editions of Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace. Each time I file away the answers to the editing exercises for a particular lesson, I feel a loss and sadness, but also gratitude to all those who have shaped and supported my tenure here. I was fortunate to begin my teaching career at COA under Ed Kaelber, for he instilled in all of us a commitment to the institution, a comprehensive understanding of the relevance and importance of a human-ecological approach to education, and the resilience to ensure its survival.

seek ethical, inclusive solutions, and eliminate artificial distinctions among community members.

While I am grateful for Ed and those who helped us survive the fire, I am also grateful to many others, especially the staff who selflessly ensure that the college can operate smoothly. They plow the roads, shovel sidewalks, enter grades, graciously help students change courses, ensure that we are paid and have insurance coverage, order books and supplies, type our recommendations, print articles, oversee important committees, counsel students, and at times explain why some academic issues preclude a student from continuing here. The staff also ensure that we have healthy food even in storms and the chaos of pandemics. They staff the library, computer services, financial aid, admissions, development, and academic services. While over the years staff have changed, they have not ceased to ensure that faculty and students are supported, and I cannot thank them enough.

Just six years after I started at COA, our resilience and commitment were tested. On July 25, 1983, the college suffered a devastating fire. Some in the administration thought we should close. But many faculty, staff, and trustees thought differently. I remember standing outside one of the administrative offices on the second floor of The Turrets with director of development Marion Kane and COA trustees Tom Hall and Charlie Tyson, Sr., all of them arguing for and committed to reopening—and we did, admittedly with some difficulties. As a community we pulled together and against all odds we succeeded. We gave up space and made do with whatever resources we could marshal, for we had worked for Ed and were committed to his founding vision of a degree in human ecology: students would not only acquire knowledge from multiple disciplines about environmental and social problems, but would use that knowledge to ethically and collaboratively develop and implement solutions. Ed’s vision is still the cornerstone of the college’s curriculum in human ecology, and those who embrace it—even those who did not know or work for Ed—continue to foster and sustain his vision. But if we are to continue implementing it, we as a community must recommit to working together. We must put aside differences, share resources,

Without Ed’s unstinting support and his confidence in me, I probably could not have pulled off establishing a viable writing center—one that still plays a critical role at COA. Just as Ed set a bar for me—a bar that would shape the writing center’s ethos—I have set a bar for tutors. They must be non-confrontational, knowledgeable enough to make effective suggestions, and humble enough to recognize that what they initially suggest might not work and thus they must find another approach. Tutors must help students come to understand writing as process, to decipher a confusing prompt, to assess audience needs, and to find a way to develop a tack that both addresses the question and resonates with the student’s ideas or beliefs.

I am grateful not only to these students but to the many others who have helped and befriended me—and many are still friends I cherish. They have walked my dogs, stripped wallpaper, shoveled snow, weeded, raked, and spent time visiting not only while they were students but in subsequent years. And I so appreciate them and all they offer to the college and the world.

Leaving is bittersweet and my memories are tinged with sadness and gratitude. I will miss the college and all who have helped me flourish here. But I leave knowing that if we all recommit to the tenets of a human-ecological approach to education, put aside differences, and recognize that whatever our title we are all equal, we will ensure that the college continues to thrive and endure.

With many thanks,

Home on the range

By Austin Schuver ’17

Photographs by Amy Toensing ’93

IN

MONTANA, farmers often say things like, “We’re always in a drought, sometimes it rains.”

As a new grad student studying resource conservation at the University of Montana, I wanted to know how the state’s farmers cope with drought and extreme weather. Over 80% of farmland in Montana is dryland. Without irrigation, they grow wheat, barley, peas, lentils, and other crops on 13 inches of unpredictable rainfall a year. How these farmers adapt to climate change could give us a window into a hotter, drier future.

It was my second week of collecting social science data for my thesis, research that consisted mostly of driving on lonely highways to talk to farmers. I turned onto a gravel road that joined the Rockies to the Great Plains. I was invited to sit in a room where every square foot of wall space held a mounted menagerie, heads of deer, elk, antelope, moose, and buffalo. The furry jurors kept quiet. On trial: climate.

Throughout my interviews I heard the gamut: the dismissal— the climate is always changing, it’s nothing new; the religious— mankind can’t change the climate; and the impressively pseudoscientific—all the wildfires this summer released more carbon dioxide than humans have ever released since the 1800s.

Cruising back to Missoula after the interview, I spotted a pair of black terns. Pulling off and stepping outside, I emerged into a 95-degree haze courtesy of wildfires across Montana, Idaho,

Along with the fisherfolk, the foragers, and the hunters, some of the first human ecologists were farmers.

and British Columbia. A regional heat dome killed dozens of people just weeks earlier. As I walked to the edge of the lake, hundreds of grasshoppers flung around my footsteps. The west was experiencing the second-worst grasshopper outbreak in a half century. I lost the terns as they flew deeper into the smoky sky.

Climate change was all around me. Yet many farmers I met denied that it existed, instead practicing a kind of climate change atheism.

Along with the fisherfolk, the foragers, and the hunters, some of the first human ecologists were farmers. Across the world, they cultivated astronomy alongside agriculture. The stars showed them when to sow and when to reap. But when they gazed into the heavens, it wasn’t only to survey the seasons. It was to appease the gods. It was about explaining why, despite doing everything right, the rains didn’t fall or the crops didn’t grow.

The current state of Montana’s farmland was shaped by belief systems. Spurious but powerful notions like manifest destiny in the US and others around the world justified the genocides of Indigenous communities whose cultures—and often specifically their farming—was “uncivilized.” These labels were applied under the authoritative guise of Western science. Instead of diverse prairies where buffalo roam, our most precious resources are devoted to those apostles of capitalism: the cash crop and the beef ranch.

Today, facts and beliefs are supposed to be incommensurable. Once technological revolutions honed the hard science of producing as much as possible to feed the planet, we thought, at least in agriculture, that the two worlds separated. However, in an era of climate change, what happens after the seed goes in the ground is anyone’s guess. God’s in charge.

In 30 years, much of Montana will be nine degrees warmer and receive half as much precipitation, on average. As climate change intensifies, extreme weather events will become more common and less predictable. Despite advances in weather and climate forecasting, science can’t predict whether a farmer’s fields will receive the one rainstorm that can make a bumper crop. Uncertainty lives on and with it, so do the ancient faiths of farming.

As generations before them, Montana farmers believe they must not waver in their steadfast belief that their labor will provide. If they put in a good crop, the moisture will come. To this researcher, their blind faith is only one step removed from rain follows the plow.

In practice there’s little difference between a Montana farmer who accepts climate change and one who doesn’t. They both use some of the most efficient technologies, they both take advantage of the latest zero tillage methods, and they both plan far more diverse crop rotations than their predecessors. But they do so because the local weather and the global

markets demand them. Farming is a business after all (They never hesitated to tell me that).

Even though some Montana farmers believe in climate change and others, sometimes called agnostic, might accept it as an unknowable and irrelevant possibility, climate change is the least of their immediate worries. Embedded in a system that prioritizes immediate financial outcomes, it only takes two bad seasons to put a farmer out of business. Short-term thinking and faith-based decisionmaking are necessities in a land of uncertainty. Farmers can only control what they can control.

As America’s farmers age out of the industry, most will attempt to pass on their operations to their children. Some families will see the growing prices of land, labor, equipment, inputs, the self-exploitation, the lack of health care, and the absence of retirement savings as reasons enough to move on from the family business. Yet some will succeed.

For these families, the future is an abyss that only confidence can cross.

Amy Toensing’s photographs first appeared in National Geographic Magazine (Feb. 2020). The original article can be found at hannahnordhaus.com.

Donor profile Mary K. Eliot, Casey Mallinckrodt, and Walter Robinson

By COA Dean of Institutional Advancement Shawn Keeley

AS COA RINGS IN its 50th academic year, friendship stands out as one of the most enduring and sustaining qualities that make up the fabric of our community. This year, the power of friendship was on display when three long-time friends of COA—Mary K. Eliot, Casey Mallinckrodt, and Walter Robinson—generously offered to contribute a $50,000 match if COA raised $50,000 for our annual 24-Hour Challenge. Thanks to more than 630 donors, we collectively met their challenge as well as an additional $25,000 matching gift offered by another COA friend. In total, COA raised a record-breaking $194,000 in one day.

Mary K., Casey, and Walter’s friendships formed around the college and continue to make an impact today.

In the early 1970s, Mary K. and Sam Eliot were part of the innermost circle of COA staff and advocates. Mary K.’s most enduring mark on the college is COA’s iconic logo, which she developed using five Germanic runes, while Sam’s work provided the backbone of the curriculum and our approach to human ecology. In the first years of the college, Sam was traveling to promote COA and gave a talk at Casey’s high school in St. Louis. Casey was fascinated by the college and interested in enrolling, but her parents thought COA was too new and too experimental. Nonetheless, Casey made her way to MDI and took summer classes in 1974, one of which was a poetry class taught by Mary K. and Sam. Mary K. has been one of Casey’s dearest friends and mentors ever since.

Casey taught art classes at COA in the 1990s and has served as a trustee for many years. Ever since Walter and Casey became friends in 1982, Walter was intrigued by Casey’s stories of the college, and happily agreed when she asked him to join the board. Coming from teaching pediatrics and medical ethics at Harvard Medical School, “it took a little while,” he admits, for Walter to figure out how COA worked. Over time, he has watched larger institutions adopt COA’s focus on human ecology and interdisciplinary approach to education, noting, “You know you’re on the right track when everyone copies your success.” Walter served two terms on the COA board, one in the 1990s and one in the 2000s, and has come up to the island as a guest lecturer as often as he can. “Being with COA students is exciting —it’s thrilling to see them think through problems with creativity and rigor,” he says.

In the fall of 2020, when COA President Darron Collins ’92 asked Walter to consider helping with a challenge grant for the upcoming 24-Hour Challenge, Walter quickly agreed, adding, “Let’s get Casey involved, she introduced me to the college.” And when Casey agreed, she said, “Let’s get Mary K. involved, she and Sam introduced me to the college.”

And so it goes. Friends introduce friends to a cause about which they are passionate. Over time, both the friendship and the commitment to the cause deepens. This blending of friendship and philanthropy is a powerful combination, and has been a huge part of COA’s success over the years.

’00

“A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Standingon a manure pile, nestled in the back acres of my house. This photo was snapped by my dear compatriot, Tess Moore ’23. Immediately after this photo was taken, we ventured into the woods and unearthed an old well covered by a stone slab. By opening the well we probably released some type of ancient terror, but in the end it was all worth it. This pile of manure is much like COA, it gives me the power to seek out the undiscovered wells of my future and release their awesome potentiality. Thank you, Tess, for helping me capture this deep moment.

EQUITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE IN EDUCATION

The power of intersectionality is ever important, even more so when you’re a prospective teacher. Throughout the term, Ming-Tso Chien hammered this point home, illustrating for us how equity manifests or, more commonly, does not manifest within the walls of the classroom. We came to these conclusions through the use of small and large group discussions. Equity and Social Justice in Education was largely structured around the discussion of a core reading assigned for the day. The material we read ranged from peer reviewed and technical to more anecdotal and abstract. I was particularly attached to a poem we were assigned early in the term, Audre Lorde’s There Is No Hierarchy Of Oppressions. The poem’s emphasis on the necessity of intersectionality within any social revolution informed everything else throughout the course. I had an opportunity to combine the final for this class with the final for my Documentary Video Studio class. This gave me an opportunity to express my identity, which, in my experience, can be a rare occurrence within academia. For me, the opportunity to share a slice of the “radical” philosophy of the Black Panthers inside a classroom felt like a subversion of academic norms.

STUDENT SCHEDULE

DEPT/ID

Desmond Williams ’23

IGREW UP on an alpaca farm in southern Maine. I knew in some capacity I needed my college experience to mirror the feeling of chasing alpacas and rolling around in muddy pastures; furthermore, I am a freak. These were the two great truths I considered during my college search. It was inevitable I’d land at COA; it had the rustic,

eating-bark-off-trees feeling I so desired, but more importantly, it possessed a unique sense of collectivism that I couldn’t find as readily at other schools.

A song by the Parquet Courts, Total Football, helped me find a name that aptly fits this concept. We’re all working towards this goal of human ecology, but we

INTRODUCTION TO ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY

As someone who struggles to connect deeply with the specifics of math and science, psychology has been a bridge for me to interact with these concepts in a way that’s clear in my mind. Introduction to Adolescent Psychology with Ken Hill served to strengthen this bridge as we drove into a myriad of different theories and psychological conjectures. I really appreciated the emphasis on self-application of theory. We would often discuss whether or not our readings applied to our own adolescence and this often led me to question how any theory could truly be universally applied. We were also able to talk about Freud, which was awesome, because, well, he was kind of a freak.

DAYS INSTRUCTOR

Hill, Kenneth

Chien, Ming-Tso

Shaw, Matthew Patrick

Monday/Thursday

Tuesday/Thursday

Monday/Friday

CREDITS 1

1 1

also exist within the same space with our own individual/academic specialties. The Parquet Courts sing, “Collectivism and autonomy are not mutually exclusive,” meaning we’re all sweepers, but we’re all strikers as well. It’s the community that makes COA special. We’re a bunch of individuals joining together to make a greater whole.

DOCUMENTARY VIDEO STUDIO

In Documentary Video Studio, we often explored the definition of documentary or, more broadly, nonfiction filmmaking. Matt Shaw ’11 asked us to consider how nonfictional films exist outside the arena of strict drama but, in the end, can also be fictionalized. We watched a multitude of documentaries throughout the term, many of which reinforced this concept. I worked on three main projects for the class, my first two centered around bigfoot and aliens. The former taught me how soul crushing animation can be. For my final, I put together an archival film documenting the rise and destruction of the Black Panther Party. I wanted to produce something that felt honest; far too often the Black Panthers are presented as hyper-violent and anti-white. It was important for me to use the voices of the leadership in order to present what the Black Panthers actually stood for. Violence is sometimes necessary, but so is intersectionality, community service, Marxism, and education.

- “Providence” by James

ORIGINS

By Bill Carpenter, founding faculty member

COLLEGEO

F TH E ATLANTICwas conceived in the late 1960s as a response to the tragedy of war and the looming ecological catastrophe. We came to a remote and beautiful island to reexamine where we had come from and who we were. We established a physical and intellectual center where we could recover the wholeness of vision necessary to understand a broken world. Our name reflected the depth and fragility of the ocean that ultimately gave birth to us. We arr ived as individuals but bonded into a single community that has been steadily expanding for half a century.

It was an eraof worldwide student revolt From Paris to Berkeley,students denouncedtheir universities as citadels of meaninglessness and irrelevance.They weredemandinga voicein their own education, and that was their expectation at COA . The original facultyspent the whole summer planning thenew curriculum; when thestudents arrived in September theysaid, “Wait a minute,thisis our college too,” and theAll College Meetingwas born. Students have participatedon everycommitteeandalllevels ofhiringand decision makingsinceTermOne.

Weremoved the bo undarybetween aesth et icsandscience,andgot

rido f thespecialized majorsand depart me ntalsilo s thathadpartitioned the mi ndandfenc ed offknowledge

sincetheMiddleAges . Web as ed our principleso n thedirectobservation

o f natura l s ystemsandthereal-time dy namic s ofaclose , huma n com mu nity.

It’s nosurprisethat 50 years later we havethe highest student votingrateintheUnited States. Our students’sense of purpose and agenc y in theworldcomes from theequality and self-determination they arelearningat COA Whether you’reabrand-new student or an octogenarian professor or acook sautéingdelicious eggplant in TAB, each community member has an equal voicein theplenaryassembly andan equalvote Wewerethefirst andonlycollegeestablished as adirect democracy. We renouncedhumansupremacy and respectedthesacredness ofalllivingthings Dogs were welcomein allclassrooms andmeetings until theyvoted for meat in TAB andhad tobe removed.

We questioned every aspect of academic authority: no tenure track, no faculty rank, no Dean’s List, no deans (back then), no publish or perish, no summa cum laude, no Phi Beta Kappa, no valedictorians. “I do not call one grea ter or one smaller,” says Walt Whitman. “That which fills its place is equal to any.” We discouraged competitiveness because the excesses of human competition were compromising the existence of life on Earth. We removed the boundary between aesthetics and science, and got rid of the specialized majors and departmental silos that had partitioned the mind and fenced off knowledge since the Middle Ages. We based our principles on the direct observation of natural systems and the real -time dynamics of a close, human community. Human ecology was not an established disc ipline but an unsurveyed dimensionforstudent and teacher to encounter on a level f ooting, and which every COA generation has interrogated in a different light.

We recycledan oldsummer estatefromthe GildedAge so anew generation couldlearn toinhabit our planetwithout drainingit dryandcarbonizingits atmosphere. It hadan elegant circularstaircasethat roseupthroughthecenter andboundthecommunitylikeaspiral of DNA The previous tenants had beenOblate priests andseminarians,which lentsome religious gravitytothehuman ecology cult Their hallowed shrinebecameour spiritualcenter,andweechoed their passionatemonotheismin oursinglemajor reflecting theoneness of all life Wewereatinycollegebut our totem

spirit was the largest animal on the planet, withaskull the size of a bus stopandahear t that weighs 400 pounds.

When a renowned architect designedus a hilltop campus overlookingBar Harbor, it was the All College Meetingthat kept us here on the sea’s edge where we belong The living proximit y of the ocean has inspired COA’s dreams, poems, research, and reflection for 50years. The overarching presence of Acadia National Park is aconstant reminder of the beaut y and order of the natural world, our symbiotic relation toit, and our responsibilitytopreserve it as a way of preserving ourselves.

When I arr ived at 105 Eden Street in June 1971, the first person I laid eyes on was COA Buildings and Grounds Director Millard Dority. I thought, “My God, are they all like that?” He was 17 years old and his hair reached down almost to the lawnmower blades—but over time, in every phase of our existence, he has created a physical environment answerable to our mission. Wherever we found ourselves, the space was always a little larger than we were and inspired us to grow into it. Millard made human ecology visible and habitable, and, more than anyone, his life has been synonymous with this college and what it means. He was a high-sc hool dropout who understood student rebellion and who now holds an honorary degree from COA.

Back in July1983when Kaelber Hall burneddown and the fateof thecollege was in doubt, Millard dedicated himself to its resurrection before the embers hadeven cooled. That pointless destruction now seems ahistorical inevitability; it testedour purpose with a near-death experience from whichweemerged stronger andmore coherent than before. Youcan burn an old mansion along withits library, offices, schoolrecords,zoologicalspecimens,andworksinprogress, but youcan’t burn an idea.

It’s always been the moments when we were gravelytested that human ecology has most clearly revealed its face For two years now we’ve been under the adaptive pressure of a pandemic,andwe’ve responded withthe resilience, humor, and resourcefulness that bound us together in our infancy

andstill does.This fall our inboxes contained aconfessional poemwrit ten by our multidisciplinar y chemist Reuben Hudson, defendingacertain accumulation of debris behind theDavis Center for Human Ecology (CHE).

Thisismy outdoor kitchen

Ofitsappearance, I hear you are bitchin’

Daviskitchen, you see, I want nothing ofit WithCOVID concerns, it just doesn’t cut it

I’ve got a large class

To cram them inthere, I’d just be anass

So Itucked usaway Right back behind CHE

Yes, CHE is asingle syllable andit does rhyme with“away.” It is one more tribute to our revolutionar y background as the People’s Collegeof Downeast Maine.

Five decades ago we chasedtheghosts out of some venerable oldmansions and repurposed their bathrooms, pantries,closets, bedrooms,andservants’quarters for a collaborative journey to redress our histor y of violence to theearth The foundingmay seemlike adistant event of a former centur y but it is still happeningnow and will continue intothe future. COA has grown by an order of magnitude andnow comprises the Davis Center for Human Ecology, one ofthe most sophisticatedbuildings on the Maine coast, but of our creation still lies aheado vision willalways be unde watched over at night byHowdy Houghton sowe can sleep

BillCarpenter retired fromteachingafter 48 years at College of the Atlantic His latest book, Silence, was published by Islandpor t Press in June 2021.

Fivedecadesagowech as ed theghostsoutofs om evenerable oldmansion s andr ep urpos ed theirbathrooms,pantries, closets , bedrooms , andservants ’ quarter s fo r acollaborative journey t o redress ourhistor y o f violenc e toth e e arth.

1969

College of the Atlantic is incorporated by Catholic priest and peace activist Father James Gower and local businessman Les Brewer (who would remain an active member of the COA board of trustees for more than 40 years).

A 12-acre estate on Frenc hman Bay, former home of the Oblate seminarians, becomes the College of the Atlantic campus.

1972

First board of trustees is named, with Les Brewer as the chair.

The B lue Marble image of Earth taken by the crew of A pollo 17 helps galvanize the modern environmental movement.

First class of 32 students arrives, with 15 total staff and facult y members.

1970

Founding president Ed Kaelber is appointed.

The BlueMarbl e,phot o gra ph t a nek morf .2791ni71ollopA

1971

First faculty member Bill Carpenter is hired.

Experimental pilot program launches with 13 students and three faculty members.

1977

The first Off the Wall, COA’s intermit tent student newspaper, is published.

A solar-heated shop that would become B&G headquarters is built by environmental design staff and students.

Allied Whale publishes the first North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catalog, which would grow to over 10,00 0 individual whales.

Coverillustrationfrom1989

1973

The Turrets is purchased and becomes an iconic part of COA campus.

Allied Whale is founded by faculty member and future COA president Steven Katona, and opens a research facility on Mount Desert Rock .

The Maine State Legislature authorizes the college to award the degree of Bachelor of Arts in human ecology. Students head out on the first Outdoor Orientation Programs (OOPs) trip.

1974

The first degrees in human ecology are awarded to two gradua ting students.

1976

The New England Association of Schools and Colleges grants COA full accreditation.

issue of Off the Wall

1978

The Maine Poets Festival is held on campus.

1979

The student-designed, solar-heated bioshelter that would become the pottery studio is constructed.

1983

Kaelber Hall, where all of COA’s academic facilities and libraries are located, is destroyed by fire.

Peter Wayne ‘83 is the first COA student to win a Watson Fellowship.

1987

The Champlain Society is established to honor contributors who give $1,000 or more to the college annually.

The Maine State Board of Education authorizes COA to certify graduates as public sc hool teachers

1988

The new Kaelber Hall, home of Take-a-Break , the Thorndike Library, and more, is dedicated just six years after the fire.

1991

Newlin Gardens is dedicated.

1992

COA celebrates its 20th birthday.

1993

A federal Title III grant allows the college to establish a campus-wide computer network.

FirefightersfighttheblazeatKaelber

1984

The $6M Phoenix Fund to rebuild Kaelber Hall, construct the Arts and Sciences building, and create a community center is launched.

Faculty member Rich Borden is elected first president of the Society for Human Ecology. The arboretum is established.

1985

Summer Field Studies for Children holds its first programs.

1986

The Arts and Sciences building, which would comprise labs, studios, GIS services, IT, the writing center, and more, is opened.

The Society for Human Ecology holds their second-annual meeting at COA.

1990

The Maine State Board of Education authorizes COA to offer a Master of Philosophy in human ecology.

The pier is dedicated.

Faculty member Ken C line and four students decide to jump off of the new pier, launching the tradition of the Bar Island Swim.

the edge of campus as

The Thomas S. Gates Community Center is dedicated.

The Ethel H. Blum Gallery opens.

House in 1994

1994

Gate House residence hall is moved across campus and renamed Peach House after COA’s first staff member, Ann Peach.

The faculty village on the south end of campus is built.

1999

The college endows its first faculty chair, The Newlin Chair in Botany, and the position is given to Craig Greene (1949–2003).

Barbarina ‘88 and Aaron Heyerdahl ’87 donate Beech Hill Farm to the college, ten years after founding the operation.

1995

The Blair/Tyson Residence Hall, designed by former faculty member Roc Caivano, is dedicated.

COA’s first research vessel, the 34-foot R/V Indigo, is launched.

1996

The George B. Dorr Museum of Natural Histor y opens in the repurposed former headquarters of Acadia National Park , which was transported to campus from across town.

COA is one of six colleges selected to receive a “genius” grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Mount Desert Rock is acquired from the US Coast Guard.

2000

The first incoming class of the Davis United World College Scholars program arrives. COA is one of five schools to comprise the early program—it has since grown to 99.

The Alice Eno Field Research Station on Great Duck Island is dedicated.

The Edward McC. Blair Marine Research Station on Mount Desert Rock is dedicated.

2001

COA joins the Maine IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence.

Station onGreatDuckIsland

2004

COA students join the United Nations Framework Convention on C limate Change Conference of the Parties (which included the first Meeting of the Parties of the Kyoto Protocol) for the first time, in what would become an annual event.

2007

COA is the first college to go carbon neutral.

2008

The Kathryn W. Davis Student Residence Village and Deering Common are dedicated. The houses that comprise the village are the first on campus built with an eye toward environmental sustainability.

2010

The Peggy Rockefeller Farms is dedicated.

The 100-acre Cox Protectorate is established.

To dwell

2011

Darron Collins ‘92 is inaugurated as the first alumnx president. A new research boat, the 46-foot M/V Osprey, is launched

2013

The Turrets undergoes a major renovation to preserve the ou ter envelope of the building, reconstruct two oceanside turrets and replace windows and doors using energy-saving and historically accurate materials.

COA becomes one of the first colleges to divest from fossil fuels.

COA joins the Maine S pace Grant program.

2014

The Fund for Maine Islands is launched in partnership with The Island Institute.

2016

The Community Energy Center is established to pair students with real-world energy independence work in the local community.

COA is named the #1 Green College by The Princeton Review, a ranking it has held onto through the present time.

2017

The Discarded Resources and Ma terial Management Framework is adopted by All College Meeting, set ting a goal of 90% waste diversion by 2025.

The Energy Framework is adopted, setting a goal of establishing a fossil fuel-free campus by 2030.

The Summer Institute is launched.

2019

The $50M Broad Reach Capital Campaign is launched.

2015

2021

Ph as e 1 o f th e COA Diversity, Equit y & Inclusion Strategic P la n is pas se d by AC M and unan im ously a pp rove d by the boar d o f trustees.

COA l au nches its 50th a cad emic yea r by opening the D av is Cente r for H um a n E col ogy, a hi gh ly sust ai nable, interdiscip li nary acad emi c cente r and th e coll eg e’s first pu rpose-built acad emi c fac il ity sinc e th e post-fi re construction o f the 1980s.

2020

COA goes fully remote for the spring term as the COVID-19 pandemic begins.

dwell in possibility years of human ecology

The Diana Davis S pencer Hatchery sustainable enterprise accelerator is dedicated.

Islands in our lives

By W. H. Drury Professor of Ecology/Natural History John Anderson

ISLANDS AND “ISLANDNESS” have been a part of College of the Atlantic since its founding. Our heartland is located on Mount Desert Island, and an early recruitment poster included the 1968 Apollo “Earthrise” photograph, the first to show our planet as an island in a sea of space. Our commitment to islands runs deep. In a founding legend, former COA president Steve Katona loaded the entire college community onto a Coast Guard barge for a day trip to Mount Desert Rock. Out of that trip came our involvement with “The Rock.” Bill Drury directed teams of students in clearing the gulls off Petit Manan and working with agencies to establish tern colonies along the Maine coast. Graduates of this initiative and The Rock went on to work for the National Audubon Society and to lead trips to South Georgia, the Falklands, and Spitsbergen.

In 1998, the college acquired titles to the Mount Desert Rock and Great Duck Island light stations through the Maine Lights Program, which allowed the Coast Guard to transfer their lighthouses to other federal and state agencies or to educational institutions. Given our history of working on The Rock and Great Duck (Peter Wayne ’83 and Dave Folger ’81 had done the original ecological inventory for Great Duck in 1985), it made sense for us to accept the stations. In the case of The Rock, this meant the entire island. On Great Duck, we received title to the 12 acres occupied by the station, and subsequently negotiated agreements with the Nature Conservancy and the State of Maine for access to their portions of the island, to use for teaching and research.

During the early days on The Rock, the focus of work was photographic identifi cation of whales using small, rigid-hull inflatables. This provided students with excellent hands-on training that put them in good stead when they went on to entertain tourists or conduct research on the Arctic and Antarctic ice shelves. Artist Harriet Corbett directed operations, and her fearless dog, Toby, ensured that no gulls or seals ventured

on shore. By the time the college had acquired The Rock, the whales had mostly moved too far east to be photographed from inflatables, and Harriet and Toby were gone. In their absence, gulls, eiders and a growing population of seals moved in, providing subjects for artistic, literary, and scientifi c study.

Gulls were also a major focus on Great Duck, home to one of the oldest—if not the oldest—gull colonies on the Eastern Seaboard. Students have banded, weighed, and measured several thousand gulls over the course of the 23-year operation of what is now the Alice Eno Field Research Station. Senior projects and master’s theses have examined the effects of snowshoe hares on the island’s vegetation, nest site selection in guillemots, predation —or the absence of—on eider chicks, and the impact of bald eagles on nesting gulls. At the start of our occupancy, only around 100 pairs of gulls nested around the station, and by 2021 this number had risen to over 700, while gulls at the northern end of the island, more easily accessible to eagles, had declined precipitously. In addition, successive generations of “Ducklings” (students who have worked on Great Duck) have mapped and examined the distribution of Leach’s storm petrels, and a partnership with the Intel Research lab has allowed us to monitor temperature and humidity within petrel burrows.

Even the most optimistic models of sea level rise suggest that our time on The Rock may be short—by 2050, the sea will likely close over the island. However, our continued presence on Great Duck ensures that future generations of COA students will continue to have an island in their lives.

Looking for the weather inside

By Gaby Gordon-Fox ’22

THE MARION BOULTON

STROUD FOUNDATION, in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, its Art Advisory Committee, and arts faculty at the College of the Atlantic, selected writer, performer, and choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili as the 2021 Kippy Stroud COA Artist in Residence. Okpokwasili was joined by her partner and collaborator, Peter Born, and their daughter, Umechi, for a month-long residency early last fall. While she was here, I got the chance to talk with her and attend the participatory outdoor event she held on campus.

As Okpokwasili and I were walking towards a shaded bench overlooking the ocean, I was trying to explain what an amazing opportunity this was for me. I had studied her performance work in several classes with Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman Chair in Performing Arts Jodi Baker, and the complexity of Okpokwasili’s work—especially in terms of sound/score, text, comedy, and movement—has been hugely influential in my own developing practice. The list of topics I wanted to cover was endless, but I was also very nervous. All of that lifted though as soon as we sat down. She caught me at my use of the word “amazing.” She noted that it’s a sensationalizing word. It indicates some heightened sense of feeling, as if it’s something that we should all strive for. But what does it actually mean to feel amazing? Or be in a state of amazement? I appreciated this note… What I really wanted to say was that I had been looking forward to this opportunity in all of the messy, nervous, and euphoric ways possible.

During her time at COA, Okpokwasili worked almost exclusively in the Blum Gallery; she opened up the big Dutch doors to let in fresh air and autumn light. In this dedicated space, she and Born experimented

with sound, score, image, and movement for an upcoming piece. Okpokwasili spoke candidly about the need for a private space to create and explore her own sound. This intimate practice of letting out noise is not one she is keen on having interrupted, even though COA campus residents are certainly not strangers to stumbling upon spontaneous performance, sound, and music work being developed in the oak trees or the tidal zone. After a chaotic few years, Okpokwasili admitted that the calming nature of the COA landscape helped her realize that her mind was not at peace. She was struck by the beauty and vulnerability of this geography. “It gives you a reminder that your pores are open. No matter what agenda you arrive with, there is strength in adaptability and the ability to be open to change.” This is a useful reminder for all of us but maybe especially for performing artists in the context of the pandemic. For practices that require proximity—living, breathing bodies together in a room—masking and social distancing disrupt the work on the most basic level.

For the past three years, Okpokwasili has been developing participatory performance pieces that involve generating sound and very slow, shared movement; she calls these pieces Sitting on a Man’s Head. In collaboration with Born, she adapted the slow walk from a pre-colonial collective practice that Southeastern Nigerian women performed to publicly shame powerful men and demand redress of grievances during the Women’s War of 1929— this practice was called “Sitting on a Man.” The womens’ means of protest involved creating an improvisational dance and chorus to disrupt the status quo, and force colonizers to hear and address their concerns. When presenting Sitting on a Man’s Head, Okpokwasili brings community members and local artists together to create the piece. Born designs the sonic foundation for these walks that ground the work and propel the group forward.

During the walk, Okpokwasili invites participants to vocalize in any way they’d like: singing, harmonizing, talking, moaning, crying—offering spontaneous prompts and suggestions as the work unfolds. Before participants enter the space, they are invited to answer the question, “What do you carry, and how in turn does that carry you?” The answers to this question become part of what is spoken, sung, and shared during the slow walk. Okpokwasili describes her slow walking practice as simply “… being in some kind of connection with each other. It invites you to think about how to generate, in a generous way. There is a recognition that you are trying to be in touch and in connection with your own impulses, but also having an awareness of others around you.” The practice changes significantly depending on who is taking part, where it is located, and what is going on in the world at the time. There is an encounter with difference that emerges through each iteration, as all the elements of the piece meet and generate with each other.

In connection to this discussion about the significance of shared movement, of being moved, Okpokwasili contrasts her work process with what’s experienced

Okwui Okpokwasili. Credit: Peter Born

Left: Katrina Reid and Okwui Okpokwasili in a performance of Poor People’s TV Room at NYLive Arts in 2017. Credit: MG

in more conventional theater institutions, where directors often say the blocking of the show is “locked” before opening. “I’m like, how do you lock a show? What do you mean lock? Does someone have a key? Are we all in a box? I’m just like, God help us if anything is locked. You don’t lock your knees. You don’t lock anything if you want to keep going and have life and juice.” She highlights that the power of any piece lies in its ability to affect and be affected in each iteration, by the choices of the performers and the presence of an audience. According to Okpokwasili, “performances are not locked because we are alive, we are not dead.”

She has shared various iterations of Sitting on a Man’s Head, working with hundreds of artists worldwide. From the Berlin Biennale in 2018, to the Countercurrent festival in Houston Texas in 2019, and to Danspace in New York City in March 2020. She planned to share it at the Tate Modern in London in March 2020 but this had to be canceled when in-person events became impossible due to the pandemic.

In November 2020, after Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the US presidential election, Okpokwasili and Born created a socially-distanced slow walk at the Culture Mill Lab in Saxapahaw, North Carolina. There was an overwhelming feeling of change in the air because of the imminent shift ahead. “It was our first time going out and being with people. Your feet, your body, you’re just vibrating. And then to be with folks to ask these questions and to try to be in that space of all that you carry; you’re just thinking about everything you’ve been carrying, and that we’re all also carrying together. Yeah. I was weeping.” This walk was something new. Okpokwasili and Born also try to get their young daughter, Umechi, to take part in the practice on any given day by saying, “The last one to get to that pole wins” when walking along the busy streets of New York.

For Okpokwasili, the “slow walk” is at the core of her work, a thing she returns to again and again. Amidst the business of constant building and touring, “Sometimes it’s like, oh, let’s strip away. You have all

this stuff and then you start to strip. That’s why sometimes the walk to me is so clear. It has been something of a teacher on how to work with and recognize difference. When I’m making my work, I have to wonder, how do I embrace things that aren’t necessarily clear or super legible, but that feel like: yes, right. You have to open yourself up to feeling different ways as you move through it. And then it’s like, how do I not be afraid, now that I feel differently about it? Is this the difference? Can I live with this difference? Is this the right difference? Whether you’ve been working on a show for years or you’ve just started developing it, when you move with difference, it can be scary.” For Okpokwasili, this openness is especially important when inviting others into her practice. “Hopefully the fear of discovering something unexpected, something that could change the piece entirely, well, that’s the beautiful thing. The thing that may make you take pause, but does not stop you from keeping on going.”

Okpokwasili began thinking about movement in college.

A still photo from the practice Sitting On A Man’s Head at New York at Danspace Project as part of the Platform “Utterances from the Chorus.” Credit: Tony Turner

After she graduated, she started working with a New York-based performance group who had just returned from Japan. They introduced her to aspects of Min Tanaka’s Body Weather movement ethos and practice. About three years later she traveled to the Body Weather Laboratory (BWL) in Japan. Working in this rural farm landscape altered Okpokwasili’s understanding of sensation. She spoke about this setting as a space for exploring movement in nature, “working in landscapes, doing duets in streams, and climbing trees. It was really a practice of finding the weather of the body on the land, within the land, with the land. That practice was deeply infl uential to me in the way that I thought about sensation. I was never necessarily interested in, oh, here’s my feeling and here’s how I project exactly what I’m feeling to the people watching. Why do you want to hold on to one feeling and be only invested in transmitting that one thing? You could be going through multiple feelings and thus creating some spaciousness.” Working at the BWL awakened her inclination to articulate feeling through

interaction, creating space in the body to move through multiple sensations and images to create a kind of “weather” in the body. Seeing Min Tanaka perform at PS 122 (now Performance Space New York) had a huge impact on Okpokwasili. “In a way it was like I was learning how to be there with him… Watching Min, my body felt like it was changing in line with his body… I felt the way time moved was changing… It made me feel free.” Hearing her talk about this kind of connection to another’s work was reassuring for me. I understand it on a profound level. Okpokwasili’s work affects me in much the same way.

Okpokwasili complicates the role of spectator and performer. “When encountering somebody in an audience or someone watching, you couldn’t necessarily be sure that they understood the particular weather that was forming in your body. But at least they knew that something was happening. They could see it happening, and there was room for their feeling… It opens up the possibility for a meeting space of two mysterious weathers.” She notes that duration

is a signifi cant part of the practice “it gives people the choice. I’m gonna stay in this one thing and it’s gonna degrade in its own time. And you, person, wherever you have been at some point, you’ll choose to be where I am with me and we’ll be together. Or you won’t, or you’ll choose something different. But I’m trying to make a path for you to make a choice.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s often felt like we have little room for choice. Necessary adjustments for safety have presented unique and sometimes overwhelming problems for performance work and study. I tell Okpokwasili how COA has adapted, and she is amused and impressed, especially with how Baker managed to teach Tadashi Suzuki’s Physical Training Principles in an online format. With a warm smile she takes a second— the warblers are chirping—and she says, “One of the good things that may have come out of this pandemic is that maybe we’re all a bit weirder, more porous. We had to let go of certainty. And we have to be open to imagining other ways of doing things.”

Okpokwasili performing Bronx Gothic at Danspace Project as part of PS 122’s (Now Performance Space New York) COIL festival in 2014. Credit: Ian Douglas

Cultivating a sense of place, self, and community

By Kiera O’Brien ’18

SOMEWHERE along the 211 mile stretch of the John Muir trail in California, Jasmine Smith ’09 began to shape the outlines of her next big adventure. “I was at a point of, ‘Okay, now what?’” Smith, founding director of the Community School of Mount Desert Island, recalls. “I was directing the Summer Field Studies Program at COA, teaching part time at The Bay School in Blue Hill, and had set up a homeschool classroom in my house at the time. Local families were starting to ask me what was next, if I would consider starting something more formal on MDI.”

For Smith, trekking the Muir trail with her partner, Nick Jenei ’09, was a catalyzing moment. “In that walking, the vision for the Community School began to form. I thought, how can I fuse the feeling and community-based nature of the one-room schoolhouse model with this notion of journey, adventure, and outdoor education? How do these pieces come together?”

Smith honed her vision for a place-based independent school on MDI in dialogue with the community. “There was no independent school on the island at the time. I had many of my own ideas and had worked in the public schools so I felt like I could be a good bridge, but I really wanted feedback from the community.” In January 2014, she hosted a series of open community roundtables at the island libraries, posing the question: “What are people’s hopes, dreams, and expectations for an independent school on MDI?”

The conversations that arose out of these roundtables proved to be both informative and deeply affirming. “I heard time and time again, and I agree, that the public schools here have their strengths. At the same time, I heard that a different model

could work for different kids, and families deserve options.”

Somewhat to Smith’s surprise, the interest was also immediate. “As the round tables gained momentum, people began asking: Okay, so how do we apply?” Smith, just 20-something at the time, decided to take the plunge. “It was big! I knew this had the potential to be a piece of my life’s work. The momentum was there and something in my heart and intuition just said: Go for it.”

In the fall of 2014—eight months after offering the idea up to the island community—Smith, along with founding teacher Bethany Anderson ’12 and 12 students, gathered for the first year of the Community School of Mount Desert Island. Since then, the school has grown to support 40 students spanning grades K-8, and has found a permanent home in a historic farmhouse-turned-schoolhouse along the tidal Babson Creek in Somesville.

Even as the Community School continues to grow and adapt, the core mission remains the same. “At the Community School, we cultivate a sense of self, a sense of place, and a sense of community. These three pillars are woven throughout all we do here.”

This place-based educational model shares much in common with the humanecological lens, a connection Smith credits as integral to the Community School’s ongoing vibrancy. Since its inception, the school has employed nine COA alumnx as teachers, facilitated close to a dozen COA internships and independent research projects, and collaborated with over 60 alumnx community members in the greater MDI area. “The existing COA network on the island has really made the Community School what it is. The human-ecological

experiment is working—it’s alive and well.”

From the outset, Smith’s vision for the Community School ran parallel to the experimental, engaged spirit of education championed at COA. “One of our founding board members was Ed Kaelber, COA’s founding president.” Smith recalls Kaelber’s humility, humor, and faith during the earliest days of the project. “Every time we ran into a roadblock—and there were many—he would share a parallel roadblock encountered in the founding of COA. His

stories kept me going. It was hard to fathom that the college, an organization I respected so deeply, was ever in a parallel stage because it felt so vulnerable.”

Kaelber’s advice continues to resonate with Smith in the face of our ever-vulnerable present: “Ed spoke to vulnerability so beautifully, always encouraging you to move towards that vulnerability, the discomfort, because it meant you were on the edge of something important and worthwhile.”

Why I give

By Lisa Bjerke ’13, MPhil ’16

COLLEGE

OF THE ATLANTIC is a foundational part of my educational experience and personal development. The Mount Desert Island and COA communities supported me in learning about myself, helped me reflect on my assumptions about the world, encouraged me to try, and allowed me to fail upwards.

I give to COA because I want to pay it forward to students and give back to the community. COA has so much potential in its education and operations, and I want to support the community’s motto of “Life-changing, world-changing.” While I try to take action for a more equitable and just world, and dream of global wealth redistribution, I also dream of one day being able to give back the scholarship funds I received to the educational institutions that have been part of my life. I believe giving back to COA is one small practice for more accessible education. Donating enables me to influence the college, to ask for accountability, and to show my support. In addition, the alumnx giving percentage impacts the college’s ability to receive funding from foundations, which is always so important.

I joined the Black Fly Society because I want COA to be able to focus on things other than asking alumnx to donate. I want to support the community, specifically the operating budget, and enable the college to take action on climate justice and walk its talk.

Alliances

HOW CAN a small liberal arts college remain small but seem so large at the same time? You make friends, share the work, and build alliances. COA has spent the last 50 years building alliances in and outside of Maine that benefit the entire COA and Mount Desert Island communities. We are small but we are not isolated. Since our founding, COA has hosted everything from the Maine Poets Festival to the International Conference of the Society for Human Ecology. Some COA students travel all over the world pursuing their educational goals while others take advantage of opportunities closer to home. The spirit of human ecology animates and connects all things at COA, and with each new incoming class the dynamic impact of new faces, new work, and new alliances grows exponentially. Here are five alliances COA faculty members have built, are building, and will continue to build.

DIFFICULT CONVERSATIONS

IN SEPTEMBER 2020, the directors of four museums scheduled to participate in an international retrospective tour of the work of artist Philip Guston (1913-1980) canceled the tour, postponing it until 2024. A joint statement released by the museum directors stated that they were “postponing the exhibition until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted.” This decision led to public debates about race and censorship, privilege, and freedom. One of the main questions these debates raised is whether institutions such as museums, colleges, and universities have an institutional responsibility to engage in diffi cult conversations.

In November 2020, College of the Atlantic lecturer Josh Winer ’91 sent out an email to the COA community with a link to a panel discussion about Guston’s retrospective tour and its cancellation. This inspired professor of cultural anthropology Netta van Vliet to organize a COA panel discussion about the topic. “At COA, where faculty have private conversations with each other about what’s happening in the public domain and how these issues overlap—or resonate—with subject matter they are teaching,” van Vliet says, “why not make those conversations public and invite students into the mix?”

In February 2021, the panel “Philip Guston Now and Questions of Art, Politics, Curation and Interpretation” was held. The panel featured COA professors Catherine Clinger, Allan Stone Chair in the Visual Arts; Nancy Andrews, T.A. Cox Chair in Studio Arts; and professor of painting and drawing Daniel Kojo Schrade. It was a huge success and showed—during the ongoing pandemic— the COA community was starving for more engaged and engaging discussions. This kind of undertaking is fundamental to COA’s core mission.

The fact that the Guston panel was well attended, and sparked much conversation and enthusiasm, led van Vliet to organize two more panel discussions in the spring term. These were informed by a class she was teaching on the thought of Frantz Fanon. Interested in broadening the conversation to include neighboring institutions, van Vliet contacted colleagues at the Philosophy

Department at the University of Maine and the Humanities Institute at Colby College, who enthusiastically and generously cosponsored two panel discussions in the spring of 2021: “Black Studies and Questions of Institutional and Structural Change: A Discussion with Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jonathan Fenderson,” and “On Questions of Structural Change: The Human, Afropessimism, and Indignity; a Discussion with Frank B. Wilderson III and Ranjana Khanna.” These collaborative events made it possible for students, faculty, and community members from all three institutions, along with people from across the country (and even a handful from around the world), to participate in these conversations.

“It was really exciting,” notes van Vliet. “There were people Zooming in from Maine but also from Africa, Europe, and Australia. The panelists brought different questions and ways of thinking to the table, and audience participants asked some really excellent and critical questions. I think it is important for there to be spaces for people to be challenged, to think out loud together in the moment, and to engage in conversation where disagreement and critical questions are not only possible but welcomed, whether that thinking happens through writing, performance, painting, or other modes of articulation.

“Initially, what was most exciting about the panel discussions was just being able to bring these speakers into conversation and have students and faculty from other colleges be able to engage with them. But it was also rewarding and a pleasure to meet and collaborate with colleagues at other institutions in Maine… and they were also really excited. We all said we would like, when the pandemic ends, to try to continue such conversations in person. Each institution could contribute in terms of organizing labor or funding. It is still a work in progress,” notes van Vliet, “but we are all looking forward to future collaborations.”

INTERNS IN THE COMMUNITY

“ISEE UNPAID INTERNSHIPS as a social justice problem, as a diversity, equity, and inclusion problem,” says Mitchell and Emily Rales Chair in Ecology Chris Petersen.

“A student should not have to make a judgment call between paying rent or having an internship that advances their career aspirations.”

College of the Atlantic requires internships of all its students in order for them to graduate. Students find a lot of internship positions at nonprofit organizations. Most nonprofits are small and underfunded; in order to manage their staffing, they rely on college students willing to do unpaid (or underpaid) labor. The ability to work for little or no money is an option for some students; however, the limited finances of many college students make unpaid internships impractical—if not outright impossible. Petersen and former development officer Kristina Swanson put their heads together and wrote a grant proposal to help support both COA students and local Downeast Maine nonprofits that rely on student labor. The Seth Sprague Educational and Charitable Foundation funded the grant and, thus, the COA Works Downeast project was born.

COA Works Downeast aims to strengthen the relationships between students and the varied and vibrant nonprofit communities of Hancock and Washington counties. The grant works to help provide half the money for a paid internship while the nonprofit puts up the other half. Petersen reached out to his COA colleagues who helped put together a list of over 40 local organizations that could benefit from this partnership. One such organization, Mount Desert 365, works on housing and promoting sustainable, year-round residential communities in the Town of Mount Desert. For Cali Martinez ’22, who has been working on sustainability and housing projects on MDI, this was the perfect match. Martinez writes, “I am most proud of the sustainable building and construction criteria I created for Mount Desert 365. I learned so much about building methods and materials and how to balance sustainability with costs. My internship included a lot of technical aspects like building codes, standards, and certifications, but it also included an understanding of the community implications of each decision.” Kathy Miller, executive director of Mount Desert 365, was impressed with the new program. “We

are grateful to COA and the Sprague Foundation for making this internship possible and creating the connections that brought Cali to our office. Our deepening relationship with College of the Atlantic is an important part of our mission to strengthen our island community, and we look forward to many years ahead working together.”

With 350 students from 40 states and 45 countries, College of the Atlantic plays a significant role in the social and economic fabric of Downeast Maine. On campus students help manage several historic gardens, the George B. Dorr Museum of Natural History, Bateau Press, and the Ethel H. Blum Gallery. Off campus, students conduct marine mammal and seabird research on Great Duck Island and Mount Desert Rock, work on COA Beech Hill & Peggy Rockefeller farms, and do solar assessments for area businesses.

This past COVID-challenged year, Jill Barlow-Kelley, director of internships and career services, used the grant to help fund student internships at Open Table MDI, Schoodic Institute, Woodlawn Museum, Artwaves, Mount Desert 365, and the Somes-Meynell Wildlife Sanctuary. According to Barlow-Kelley, “This grant allowed six students to be paid for their summer internship and gain experiences in nonprofit management, development, community services, and environmental education.”

Ideally, Petersen would like to see the program expand. “It would be ideal to be able to raise money for an internship fund where, instead of going to nonprofits and and asking, ‘Do you want an intern,’ we’d actually help students look for places that are doing exciting work in their field, then through this newly created internship fund at COA, the entire internship would be financially covered.” Shawn Keeley ’00, dean of institutional advancement, is excited about this, faculty is excited about this, and Petersen is excited about this. “We want these internships—these opportunities—available for all of our students,” he says. And, yes, this is good DEI policy but, according to Petersen, “Good DEI policy is just good policy.”

Above left: MD365 staff, from left: Mollie Seyffer, Cali Martinez ’22, Eloise Schultz ’16, and executive director Kathy Miller. Above right, from left: Heidi Leighton from the Department of Marine Resources, technician Tessa Huston, Scientists in Parks intern Anna Lee, and COA intern Sophie Chivers ’24.

CREATING LASTING CROSS-CULTURAL ISAT

ONSTAGE in a spacious auditorium in Mérida, Yucatán with a group of fellow College of the Atlantic students, each of us presenting a small piece of of our three-month immersion program in Yucatán: the art of weaving hammocks by hand, traditional healing practices, artwork carved out of coconuts, an in-depth study of Mayan architecture. From the foot of the stage to the back of the theater, the faces of our friends, Yucatecan families, and many other community members were softly illuminated as we shared our stories. As my friend Jackson Day ’21 stood in the spotlight, speaking easily in Spanish about his new understanding of traditional farming and what it means to be a family, I could not help but sit beaming as I remembered us in a classroom at COA just months before, stumbling over our own words in Spanish, gesticulating, laughing, unprepared but nervously excited to participate in Programas de Inmersión Cultural en Yucatán (PICY), aka: the Yucatán Program.

PICY brings together COA students and Yucatecan families and communities, transcending the boundaries of race, class, and religion through intercultural exchange. The program began 26 years ago as a cultural exchange between COA faculty Gray Cox, Douglas Barkey, Rich Borden, and their colleagues at the Autonomous University of Yucatán. From the beginning, the program was founded on the idea of co-mentorship and an ongoing relationship of mutual exchange and interest where professors and students from both places could collaborate and teach each other about their respective cultures and academic pursuits. However, as the program evolved, it became clear that COA students needed advanced Spanish language skills to enter into and experience the culture of Yucatán. In 1998, Karla Peña, a Yucatecan native and professional Spanish teacher, began teaching Spanish at COA each fall to prepare students for their winter term immersion in Mérida. Under her supervision, the Yucatán program began to take further shape, not just as a collaboration between universities but as a professional Spanish language learning program, a sophisticated intercultural ambassadorship training, and a long-term alliance between COA and many small communities across the Yucatán peninsula.

I was lucky enough to participate in this program as a student, starting with Karla’s 10-week Spanish course at COA’s home campus in Maine. Soon we would travel to Mérida, Yucatán, a city of squat concrete buildings packed hip to hip, hidden backyards full of broad-leafed tropical plants, colonial haciendas behind wrought-iron gates, and

parks full of artisans selling clothes, and street vendors selling tacos, tortas, and elotes. Tucked in among the neighboring buildings in the center of Mérida, PICY has grown into a sister campus to COA, with an academic building where students take classes, participate in workshops, and do independent work such as senior projects or residencies. The program has also grown to include longterm staff and faculty and relationships with all manner of professionals who give workshops in dance, Mayan gastronomy, astrology, history, traditional medicine, and more. Karla and her staff work hard before students arrive to prepare for orientation, connect students with their host families, and ready the PICY Center for upcoming Spanish and Mayan Anthropology courses.

My peers and I stepped off the plane at midnight into Mérida’s warm, heavy, humid air and piled into the van that Karla rented. As we left the airport for the city center, the streets flashed by; we saw plastic laminated signs strung on house gates advertising Cochinita los Domingos; a moped carrying a young man and a grandmother dressed in her finest huipil and laden with shopping bags; the roar and huff of commuter buses skirting inches from the sidewalk. We wandered around the hotel and adjoining square that night, drinking in the sights, sounds, and smells we didn’t quite know how to interpret. Those first few weeks were a true plunge into a whole new world that slowly took on more meaning with each day. Fernando, Gaby, and Mikey—my new papá, mamá, and hermanito—supported and oriented me, and, most importantly, brought me everywhere. And, despite the rush of unfamiliar references, traditions, and rhythms, I was slowly able to adapt to my new life in my new family—all this thanks to the constant support and training that Karla and the other teachers provided, as well as the unrelenting support from our host families.

It was an eye-opening experience to walk the same streets and ride the same buses back and forth from my house to PICY and notice new details every day. New discoveries began to take on meaning; the rhythms of the abuelitos enjoying the night air in lawn chairs became more predictable. I was quickly learning what it meant to be a member of my family, what their family-run restaurant of Yucatecan food meant to them, and how the Spanish language joined all of it together, the culture of Yucatán hidden in the bones of the language itself. In this way, as my grasp of the language improved, I was gaining fluency not just in Spanish but in the

RELATIONSHIPS

By Gaelen Hall ’21

subtle tones of a particular place, people, and history. And every day at lunchtime—my family’s main meal—the smiles and laughter abounded as I reflected back my wonder, appreciation, and learning.

The first months flew by, with daily classes, independent projects, workshops, theater visits, dinners with relatives, and all of the holiday celebrations of Christmas and the New Year, filled with fireworks, piñatas, carnes asada, karaoke, salsa dancing, and endless chatter and laughter. And suddenly it was time to say goodbye to my family in Mérida and head off to nearby Xocén, a small, traditional Mayan community, where I would carry out the culmination of the PICY curriculum: a three-week independent project with a new family in a small town. My peers also began their independent projects, scattering across the peninsula to meet new families in small communities where they would pursue their own individual interests. During this time, it quickly became apparent that PICY had done something very few study abroad programs are able to do: establish a relationship of trust and good faith with hundreds of families across scores of small communities throughout the peninsula. Even with the dominant tourism economy that revolves around outsiders paying for access to cenotes and hotels, Karla and her team have stayed close to their vision of reciprocity and co-mentorship, trusting that people from such distinct contexts can share some innate human connection. Nothing is more human ecological than that.

As students we felt prepared to go off into these small towns alone. During our time in Mérida, we had practiced stepping outside ourselves and learning about new and different ways to live. We were ready to begin this final chapter without the immediate support of Karla and the PICY staff. We had the cultural and linguistic tools to dig deep into the individual projects that brought us to these towns and communities, and we were more than ready to enter into the new relationships our host families graciously offered. In these small Mayan towns we became sons, daughters, students, hammock makers, farmers, confidants, cousins, and soccer players—and we were accepted as family rather than tourists.

In the blink of an eye, the three weeks were over and we found ourselves sitting in that semi-circle on stage in the auditorium, beginning the

forum that marked the end of the program. It was an opportunity to gather together for an evening and share brief presentations on our projects and how we had changed during our three months in Yucatán. After the presentations, many of our Yucatecan family members in the audience stood up and shared how grateful they were for this group of young people who came from countries far and wide to value so earnestly and completely the culture of Yucatán, a culture which the Yucatecans themselves sometimes take for granted.

For me, those three months with PICY keep unfolding into an ever deepening connection, not just to Spanish, but to the culture and community in Yucatán, and the importance of other young people being immersed in cultures unfamiliar to them. The impacts of these kinds of programs ripple out far beyond a single person studying intercultural education and spending time in a unique place. I think of my fellow students Iain Cooley ’21, Zeya Lorio Zeya ’22, and Jackson Day ’21, and how they move differently through the world after their time with PICY. And I think of Jorge, a young man I met recently while walking on the beach in Puerto Morelos. He assumed I was a tourist and asked if I wanted a boat ride. I answered him in Spanish and we ended up talking about the coasts of Maine and Yucatán, sargassum, species diversity, the warming oceans, and our lives as two young men using ocean tourism to make a living. The sun went down and we began to walk back into town. When we parted, Jorge asked me if I knew where I was going and I smiled and said, No, but I can figure it out just fine.

As a recent graduate of COA, Gaelen Hall ’21 plans to further his studies on topics of language learning, cultural exchange, and how human beings connect across cultural differences. He’ll be working in both Spanish and English, acting as an ambassador to help more people connect with programs like PICY. COA is currently at work to endow Programas de Inmersión Cultural en Yucatán in order to secure it in perpetuity as a just, sustainable, resilient showcase of international human ecology, language study, and cultural immersion. Please consider supporting these efforts.

Above, left to right: Thomas Witten with his “father,” professor Don Crisanto Kumul, in the community of Sisbichen. A student enjoying a swim at Cenote X’canché. Cenote X’canché in the municipality of Hunucú. Molly Donlan in the village of Cuch Holoch, weaving jipijapa (toquilla palm) leaves for hats.

OF ISLANDS AND INSTITUTIONS

FRIEDLANDER, Sharpe-McNally Chair in Green and Socially Responsible Business, is impressed. “The number of parallels between Mount Desert Island (MDI) and Osakikamijima still amazes me... both are island communities that were traditionally natural-resources based and facing economic decline and depopulation. Like MDI 50 years ago, Osakikamijima is using education as a means to attract young people and revitalize their communities. They are seeking to build an educational model that embeds students in their community and seeks solutions to thorny problems.” Indeed, the COA students and professors who have gone to Osakikamijima have come away from the experience amazed by the similarities and excited about future collaborations.

The collaboration between COA and Osakikamijima began after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster revealed a fundamental flaw in the Japanese higher educational system. The siloed disciplines and isolated theoretical training exacerbated the crisis by hindering critical communications between engineers, policy makers, and others. As a result, educational reformers set about to create a new type of higher educational institution; one that was both interdisciplinary and focused on combining theory with practice.

The collaboration started off as a proof of concept for fi eld-based education. The Human Ecology Lab and Island Odyssey (HELIO) was the initial edition of that idea. Students have been involved in every step of building out the process and have seen the highs and lows of the journey. The physical institution in Osakikamijima is still developing but its audacious goal has attracted students, faculty, and administrators from over a dozen institutions of higher education around the world. The fi rst students in the HELIO program represented colleges such as Brown, Fordham, and Western Washington universities, Hamilton and Babson colleges, and Wilfrid Laurier and Dublin City universities. A total of eight students from COA and eight students from Japan were also included in the group. Since that initial program, more than 100 students, faculty, and administrators from over a dozen universities have participated in HELIO or visited Osakikamijima.

“We were tasked to dive deep into the community… talk with

the locals, visit different sites, and generate ideas of what the ideal education model for the island would be,” former COA student Clément Moliner-Roy ’19 wrote on his blog after visiting Osakikamijima. The experience of working within the island community, he said, was inspiring and exciting. Many other COA students have also benefi ted from the alliance: Makiko Yoshida ’18 did an internship after HELIO at a multigenerational soy sauce factory; Maggie Hood ’22 worked to help Japanese students practice their English; and Abigail Barrows MPhil ’18 did microplastics research in the Sea of Japan. The program infl uenced Moliner-Roy so much he based his senior project on the experience and went on to study Ikigai (a Japanese concept referring to something that gives a person a sense of purpose, a reason for living).

“As COA was doing more HELIOs, the concept developed into the Setouch Global Academy (SGA), which created a physical educational institute that Japanese students and US colleges could benefi t from,” says COA provost Ken Hill. “One facet of SGA is that it allows students in Japan to take intensive courses for a year… they then matriculate to COA as second-year students and stay until graduation. It’s like a higher education launching platform.” Japanese students benefi t by coming to COA and COA has benefi ted by having the following wonderful group of students from Osakikamijima: Yoichiro Ashida ’20, Aoi Seto ’20, Sora Kawamoto ’24, and Kizuna Shintani ’24.

From working in fisheries and starting up sustainable businesses, to food systems and community resilience in recovering from disasters, the possibilities between SGA on Osakikamijima and COA on Mount Desert Island are enormous. “We are excited to see COA’s educational approach spread and grow,” notes Hill. “Partners like SGA make for a stronger overall curriculum and have the potential to develop into something truly exceptional.”

Above left: COA students & Ken Hill on a HELIO trip. Above right: Osakikamijima lies roughly at the center of the Seto Inland Sea

TRANSFORMATIVE EXPERIENCES

“HOWDO STUDENTS learn geoscience?” asks Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Chair in Earth Systems and Geosciences Sarah Hall. Since arriving at COA in 2012, that question has been her primary focus. There is a whole field of study based on fostering transformative geoscience experiences in the field and the classroom, Hall notes. These experiences encourage students to think in different time and space scales and this, in turn, changes how they observe, learn, and think. In disciplines as varied as geology, music, puppetry, and prose, Hall has learned that students benefit from slowing down, looking around, and immersing themselves in what’s around them.

To encourage students to actively slow down, focus, and get their hands dirty, Hall takes her classes out into Acadia National Park to study the unique geography of Mount Desert Island. This sort of close-to-home fieldwork is part of the transformative experiences her students engage in at COA. The park, Hall says, provides an excellent environment for studying the processes that shape the earth, including glaciers, watersheds, active faulting, and climate change. Hall has found willing research partners at the MDI Biological Laboratory (MDIBL) and the University of Maine, Orono (UMO). “MDIBL does a lot of place-based watershed and public health research and UMO has a great group of people engaged in geomorphology and climate change research,” she says.

Hall and her geoscience students can often be found in locations around MDI monitoring streams and testing private well water for residents.

“Jane Disney (associate professor of environmental health at MDIBL) already had the well water project running and I just called her up and asked if I could collaborate and use her program infrastructure,” says Hall. The project began with local school children in Maine and New Hampshire testing their wells. Hall extended the project to include the broader MDI community. “Then we just started testing people’s wells. We put calls out in the newspaper and on social media asking if people had wells that needed testing. Our research found that some island residents have elevated arsenic in their water.”

Despite the perks of being out in the field during most class periods, Hall says keeping students interested in environmental STEM careers is sometimes a tough sell. “A lot of the literature in my field points to the fact that people have a pretty narrow view of geology. Nobody says, I want my kid to grow up to be a geologist.” It’s ironic, Hall notes, that this same sort of thinking can be applied to the field of human

ecology. If you are unfamiliar with the term you may think it applies to agriculture or biology when in reality it is a stance, a way of seeing the world and its interconnected systems.

In 2014, Hall and two colleagues from the west coast received the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) grant: the GEOPaths IUSE grant. The IUSE grant is aimed toward developing programming to keep undergraduate students interested in STEM fields. According to the NSF website, the grant seeks to “improve the quality and effectiveness of undergraduate education in all STEM fields. IUSE investments enable NSF to lead national progress toward a diverse and innovative workforce and a STEM-literate public.”

The trio of professors combined their students to create a methods course in field-based research in California. They spent several weeks together studying botany, hydrology, geology, and geomorphology. “It was important for us that students learn methods relevant to those fields that would build employable skills for the future,” Hall says. It was also essential for the group to have students interact with stakeholders in the field. “These were people working in environmental STEM fields already who might hire students in the future,” she notes. Having stakeholders present for students to interact with was a key piece of the course. Students created career portfolios of the people they met with in order to see their career paths. “It was really interesting,” says Hall, “a lot of these professionals had radically different paths into geosciences, some were involved in international studies or dance or English literature… It shows students that no matter where you start educationally, you don’t have to remain fixed into that lane.”

Hall notes that most people working in geosciences need to be interdisciplinary thinkers because of the vast time and space scales over which many different processes are acting, whether those processes are related to people, plants, weather, orbital parameters, animals, or plate tectonics. When seen through this lens, interdisciplinary thinking just comes with the territory.

Above left: Students in the Rocks and Minerals class explore the Bumpus pegmatite mine in southwestern Maine. Above right: Students describing the bedrock at Seawall, Acadia National Park.

1975

BARBARA DOLE ACOSTA

’75 is loving retirement and being back in the MDI area. She’s going to be a grandma in May! Get in touch if you plan to be in town.

1979

ANDREA LEPCIO ’79

is now health and fitness director at the Neighborhood House in Northeast Harbor. Andrea teaches yoga, Tai chi, and Mat Pilates classes, and offers personal training and private yoga. She still writes plays and lives in Bar Harbor.

Watson ’93 and Bob DeForrest ’94 at Maine Coast Heritage Trust. She is always open to chatting with alumnx who are considering a law degree. www.douglasmcdaniel.com

1999 JILL (MONTGOMERY)

he founded 17 years ago. He and his partner, Emily Henry, welcomed their daughter, Juliann Peregrine Davis, at the end of April, 2021.

2004

1993

JEFFREY FRAZIER ’93 is living in High Springs, Florida and has been a clinical case manager at the University of Florida’s College of Medicine for the last five years. He enjoys working with children from birth to three years old. He makes art, plays music, and paddles as often as possible in beautiful North Central Florida. Just this year a little baby manatee was born in a river near his place!

SARAH (COLE) MCDANIEL ’93 completed training as a mediator last year at Harvard’s program on negotiation. She is expanding her law practice to include mediating real estate disputes between neighbors and families in Maine. In her work representing land trusts and landowners in conservation transactions, 2021’s projects put her over the mark in helping to protect over 130,000 acres over the years! Her conservation work often connects her with Pat

KIERNAN ’99 and her husband JOSEPH KIERNAN ’01 met at COA and have two beautiful children, Aiden and Aevary. Aevary was one of the first 13 people in the world to be diagnosed with a very rare disease called Tatton Brown Rahman Syndrome (TBRS). Jill has started a nonprofit organization to support all families affected by TBRS and to advance research toward interventions. Joe helps a lot behind the scenes and provides encouragement and support. She is happy to report that the TBRS community was recently awarded the Rare As One Grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). Find their profile on chanzuckerberg. com. The Rare as One Grant is an amazing opportunity as it provides $600,000 worth of funding over three years, but also provides resources and tools to be more effective advocates for—and partners in—research, with the ultimate goal of curing rare disease.

On January 19, 2022, DUSTIN EIRDOSH ’04 completed his PhD in biology education at the University of Jena, Germany, as part of his continuing work at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. His thesis, Teaching Evolution as an Interdisciplinary Science, explores how science education can use themes of human cooperation, cognition, and culture as an interdisciplinary nexus for 21st century curriculum design. openevo.eva.mpg.de

2007

2002

CALEB DAVIS ’02 mentored students in the fall Human Ecology Core Course who rebuilt a dry-stack stone wall near Witch Cliff on the south end of campus. Caleb owns and operates Songscape Gardens songscapegardens.com, an ecological landscape design/build studio on MDI that

ANNA GOLDMAN ’07 completed her PhD from the University of Hong Kong in December 2021. Her thesis was titled Trophic Interactions Between Mammals and Insects and Implications for Conservation in Tropical Asia. Currently, she’s a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Hong Kong working with the Hong Kong Government’s Agriculture, Fisheries, and Conservation Department on rediscovering local Chinese pangolin habitat and developing active conservation strategies. She spends most of her days exploring the mountains in Hong Kong, looking for signs of pangolins.

KATE SHEELY ’07 completed her master’s in English at Connecticut’s Trinity College in May 2021. She received The Paul Smith

Clockwise from left: Anna Goldman ’07, Barbara Dole Acosta ’75 and friends, Caleb Davis ’02 with daugher Juliann, new arrival Elliot, and Jeffrey Frazier ’93.

Distinguished Master’s Thesis Award for her thesis, The Ones Who Entered for Us: An Introduction to the Literature of Slaughterhouses.

DAVID CAMLIN ’07 and Megan Grumbling are codirecting We Are The Warriors, a documentary film following residents of Wells, Maine as they decide the fate of their high school’s American Indian mascot after facing public allegations of racist behavior at a football game.

JOANNA WEAVER ’16 is a coproducer and assistant editor. The film is nearly ready for consideration by PBS stations. For more information and to watch the trailer, visit WeAreTheWarriorsFilm.com.

2009

NOAH HODGETTS ’09

was promoted to principal planner at the New Hampshire Office of Planning & Development (OPD) in Concord, New Hampshire. In this position, Noah will be OPD’s lead on housing initiatives and planning and zoning legislation, while also providing technical assistance and training to planning and zoning board officials throughout the state.

In April 2021, KATIE HOLLER ’09 was hired by the University of Pittsburgh Program Evaluation Research Unit as a senior program implementation specialist within their Overdose Reduction Technical Assistance Center. Within this position, she provides technical assistance to counties across Pennsylvania as they work to eliminate

overdoses and implement supportive programming for persons with substance use disorders. She writes, “It’s wonderful to be able to support coalitions across the state that are passionate in implementing evidencebased programming to address the opioid epidemic. I earned my master’s of public health at the University of Pittsburgh, so I was excited to be hired back to support the work they are doing throughout the state.”

MIKE KERSULA ’09 and ANNIKA

EARLEY MPHIL ’14 welcomed their first child, Elliot, in February 2021. As of April 2021, Annika is the new managing director of SPEEDWELL projects in Portland, Maine. SPEEDWELL is an artist-run, nonprofit gallery dedicated to promoting the work of women, gender-fluid, and nonbinary artists.

and siblings in the backyard of their new house in Abingdon, Virginia. While smaller than originally planned, it was a beautiful day and loved ones were there in spirit. They honeymooned in Maine and were able to catch up with many COA folks during alumnx weekend. Sarah wrote that she “enjoyed sharing this special place with Kyle.”

2011

EMILY POSTMAN ’11 graduated from Stanford Law and joined the Office of General Counsel at the Service Employees International Union. She was able to be home for most of the summer and fall—which was glorious— and landed in Washington, DC in winter 2022, where she is currently Craigslisting miscellaneous furniture items and eating Ethiopian food (DC alums HMU!).

2010

ALY BELL ’10 and Christian Millan Hernandez got married this summer in an intimate ceremony in her parent’s backyard with their families.

ANDREW COATE-ROSEHILL ’10 and his partner Sarah Rosehill welcomed their third child, Linden Jonathan, in a (surprise!) home birth at their new home in Westhampton, Massachusetts, on March 31, 2021. Linden joins older siblings Alexa and Julian and looks forward to being able to chase them around and join in their shenanigans.

SARAH COLLETTI ’10 and Kyle McMillan got married in July surrounded by their parents

MADDY CUTTING VORIO ’11 got married in April 2021 in a small elopement ceremony with her children present. She and her husband, Dan, welcomed twin boys, Liam Bayard Vorio and Theodore “Theo” Michael Vorio, in September 2019. She continues to work as a nurse in the neonatal ICU. The family lives on a small farm in Durham, Connecticut with their three dogs, Bear, Zero, and Millie, and a whole bunch of chickens, ducks, and geese.

HAZEL STARK ’11 and Joe Horn’s Milbridgebased business, Maine Outdoor School, L3C, passed the threshold of five years in business in 2021 and hired RAIN PEREZ ’12 as their

Clockwise from left: Maddy Cutting Vorio ’11 and family, Aly Bell ’10 and family, new arrival Linden, Emily Postman ’11, and Sarah Colletti ’10 wedding party.

first communications and marketing assistant. In the third week of October 2021 alone, Hazel brought over 200 public school students from Downeast Maine outdoors to learn from nature at their schools or along local hiking trails. Hazel and Joe’s weekly five-minute radio show and podcast, The Nature of Phenology, also aired its 200th episode in November 2021. Meanwhile, Hazel and Joe continued building their house in Gouldsboro, estimated to be complete by spring 2022.

2012

JILL PIEKUT ROY ’12

is the special collections librarian at University of Southern Maine. She works with the collections of the Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine and the University Archives. She is currently processing the records of the Gorham Normal School and teaching students how to engage with primary sources.

2013

ANGELINE ANNESTEUS

’13 moved back to Haiti in 2014 and got married the same year. She now has two lovely children and her own house. Since 2015, she has been working for ActionAid International. She started as program officer for three consecutive years, then moved to program coordinator for two years, as of 2021, is country director. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in business administration.

2014 MAGDALENA GARCIA

’14 is living in Surprise,

Arizona and working as a livestock manager at Blue Sky Organic Farms, in Litchfield Park. She takes care of goats mostly but also horses, pigs, chickens, and donkeys. She is taking classes at Glendale Community College to complete prerequisites required to apply for the doctor of veterinary medicine program at Midwestern University.

2015

This past fall, LUCIA ALLOSSO ’15 became an eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) trained therapist at a private group practice in Manchester, New Hampshire. In December, she received her license as a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker in New Hampshire. In the next year, she and a colleague who specializes in somatic healing (EMDR, yoga, and group fitness… to start) are planning to open a healing center. Lucy is still living in New Hampshire with husband Bob, two lab mixes, a cat, and a duck.

2016

CONNOR HUGGINS ’16 and EMILY PETERSON

’15 are living in Bowdoinham, Maine and got married in October 2021! Emily finished her master’s in anthrozoology in August 2020. Connor finished his master’s of public health at University of Southern Maine in August 2021, and now works for Medical Care Development as a senior program associate.

In August 2021, ELLEN SUMIRE IIDA ’16 and her husband, Fernando Herrera,

finally got married after two previous wedding cancellations. They had a Zoom wedding party, which turned out to be a game changer, because it let them have people close to their hearts, but far away geographically, join in from the US, Japan, Europe, and other countries. They are currently living in Mexico City, Mexico, where Ellen works as a certified Japanese-Spanish translator and Japanese teacher.

KIRA MARZOLI JONES ’16 is living in Deer Isle, Maine. She got married on June 23, 2019, bought a house in October 2019, and welcomed a son, Elias, in June 2020. Kira and family are expecting a little baby girl in July 2022!

2017

SOPHIE CAMERON ’17 and JACQUELYN JENSON

’15 moved to Silver Spring, Maryland together for Sophie’s new position as the coexecutive director of Lumina Studio Theatre, a multi-age theater company with a focus on Shakespeare.

2021

STEPHANIE GUARACHI

AYALA ’21 joined the Hatchery during her last term at COA. Thanks to that program, she started a summer camp named Ampuy Camp in Bolivia. She has been working on this startup during fall 2022 and has joined a Bolivian incubator to continue building out the project.

Clockwise from left: Angeline Annesteus ’13 and her family, Magdalena Garcia ’14, Ellen Sumire Iida ’16 with her husband Fernando, and Kira Marzoli Jones ’16 and family.

T.A. Cox Chair in Studio Arts NANCY ANDREWS is the recipient of the 2021 Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Fellowship award for a Maine artist working in the visual arts. In addition to a cash award, she will have a show at The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) in summer 2023. The three jurors, Ian Alteveer, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ellen Tani, an art historian, curator, and critic based in Washington, DC, and Danielle Jackson, a critic, researcher, arts administrator, and the cofounder and former co-director of the Bronx Documentary Center, were unanimous in their decision. Alteveer stated, “It was thrilling to review the work of so many talented Maine-based artists with such expansive and diverse practices. The work of Nancy Andrews made a deep impression on the jury. Her personal yet kaleidoscopic practice, across many media, centers narratives of trauma and discovery while inventing countless new possibilities for looking at the world.”

LINDA BLACK ’09 stepped down as director of financial aid and started her new position as associate director of admission in January 2022. Linda has been a staff member of the college for seven years as of June 2022.

COA faculty emeritus RICH BORDEN

provost KEN HILL, trustee JAY MCNALLY ’84, PIETRO CASCIA ’22, and SARA LOWGREN ’20 (currently a graduate student at Gothenburg University, Sweden) presented the opening symposium at the XXIV International Conference of the Society for Human Ecology (SHE) in October 2021. Their presentation, “Building a College of Human Ecology: Reflections on the 50-year History of College of the Atlantic,” was part of a seven-day online event organized by SHE, Sociedade Brasileira de Ecologia Humans, and Sociedade Latino-America de Ecologia Humana. All conference presentations were recorded with simultaneous Portuguese, Spanish, or English subtitles and are available on the SHE website.

BRETT CICCOTELLI ’09 and BOB DEFORREST ’94) but in August 2021, Cline finally got to boat the Colorado River for 14 days through the Grand Canyon.

,

KEN CLINE, David Rockefeller Family Chair in Ecosystem Management and Protection, was recently appointed as the coordinator of the Sierra Club’s Native American Land Rights Team. This national Sierra Club committee partners with tribes to promote tribal sovereignty and land and water protection. The team organized a fall 2021 conference that centered tribal people’s voices on ways that conservation groups can effectively collaborate with tribes on conservation campaigns. Rivers continued to be a major theme for Cline this year. Not only did he get to teach his signature Whitewater Whitepaper course in the spring (with help from COA alumnx

The Institute of Higher Nervous Activities Journal, edited by faculty members DRU COLBERT and NANCY ANDREWS, released “Volume 2” in fall 2021. The new issue features the work of Chicago artist John Henley and the award-winning web series 195 Lewis maker Rea Leone Lewis. The Journal strives to showcase the work of previously underrepresented writers, visual artists, cooks, poets, politicians, homemakers, scientists, separatists, patriots, fishermen—creators from different worlds and terrains— in pairings that prompt unforeseen avenues of connection for the reader.

DARRON COLLINS ’92 is proud to announce the publication of his first poem, “Maggie,” in StorySouth

Partridge Chair in Food and Sustainable Agriculture Systems KOURTNEY

COLLUM would like to give a shout out to COA’s community fridge. The community fridge is a mutual aid resource for students started by CYRUS JOHNSON ’23, a student in Collum’s Active Optimism class in spring 2021. The fridge was approved by Campus Planning and Building Committee on a trial basis and

Left: Art for The Institute of Higher Nervous Activities Journal. Right: Ken Cline on the Colorado.

is now managed by Collum’s work study students, SHREYA VINODH ’23 and MADI PERSON ’24. The fridge is open 24-7 and is completely supported through mutual aid. The motto is, “Take what you need, give when you can.” According to Kourtney, “It’s one small step towards ending hunger on campus. Very exciting.”

JAY FRIEDLANDER, the SharpeMcNally Chair of Green and Socially Responsible Business, traveled to Colombia on a Fulbright Scholar award in June 2021. During his month there, Friedlander worked with two Colombian universities on sustainable business, social entrepreneurship, and other topics. Friedlander has also been involved in a number of virtual conferences and presentations over the last 12 months, including a workshop for the Maine Center for Entrepreneurship Cultivator program to help food entrepreneurs develop a profitable business model. He delivered a paper on reimagining strategic planning at the International Social Innovation Research Conference, giving an overview of work he did at the Academy of Natural Sciences, the oldest natural sciences institution in the Western Hemisphere. Other virtual presentations included a lecture and masterclass on unlocking innovation with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the National University of Ireland, Galway.

He was also on the organizing committee for the Arctic Opportunity Explorers. The program, based out of Copenhagen, brings teams of students from around the world together to use the UN SDGs to solve problems in Arctic communities. Finally, Friedlander was a featured speaker at the Global Leadership Symposium at Rosario University in Colombia.

A long-overdue book of poems by adjunct faculty ARIELLE GREENBERG called Come Along with Me to the Pasture Now, (named for a song by Johnny and June Carter Cash) originally due out in 2017, was finally released by Agape Editions, with cover art by Acadia-area artist Mark Kelly. The book, the publisher says, “maps [Arielle’s] decision to leave city life and an academic career, and relocate with her family to a rural area,” and asks, “what relationships do we have with the people and environments that surround us?” These are poems about “failures and doing better.”

COA music faculty JONATHAN

HENDERSON and collaborator

Mark Dixon premiered their new work, Anechoia Memoriam, at the ReVIEWING Black Mountain College Conference in November 2021. The piece is a long-form participatory installation for the Selectric Piano, an IBM Selectric typewriter that electromechanically controls an acoustic

piano. The score for Anechoia Memoriam is composed of a list of 180 unarmed people of color killed by law enforcement in the United States. As the piece unfolds over seven hours, a sign invites passing observers to take a seat in front of the typewriter and perform from the score that scrolls by slowly on ticker tape. When typists participate, each letter typed is enunciated by specific notes on the piano. If no one types, the score scrolls by, accumulating on the floor in silence. Participation and non-participation, attention and inattention, ringing piano strings and silence are all elements of the performance. The piece was set to show next at the Universities Studying Slavery Conference in March 2022.

Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Chair in Earth Systems and GeoSciences SARAH HALL, faculty member DRU COLBERT, and visiting faculty ALEXANDER GOLDOWSKY joined Dorr Museum director CARRIE GRAHAM and SAHRA GIBSON ’20 to present the process of collaborative planning and design of the Maine Geopark at the 2021 New England Museum Association Conference. Gibson developed this idea of a public geopark focused on Maine’s unique geology as her senior project. Her project was further developed through the work of multiple students in multiple courses at COA.

Left: Cover of Come Along with Me to the Pasture Now. Right: Performance of Anechoia Memoriam

CASEY SCHULLER JORDAN and her husband, Finn, purchased a house in Ellsworth in June 2021. The 1864 fixerupper is a lot of work, but they are loving giving the house a new life while preserving its history. You may have seen them in the Islander this fall in an ad for Bar Harbor Savings & Loan (see picture). Casey and her husband were also very excited to add a dog, Elmer, to their family in November 2021. Elmer came to them as a rescue from Louisiana, but quickly embraced the snow and has enjoyed many walks around COA’s campus. Adopting a puppy has proven to be a lot of work too, but both adventures (the house and the dog) have been very rewarding.

Elizabeth Battles Newlin Chair in Botany SUSAN LETCHER has spent the COVID-19 times parenting, teaching, gardening, and working on manuscripts with an international team of coauthors. In the 2021-22 academic year, she published a short communication in Ecology and Evolution with a former student (though not a COA student), a paper in Forest Ecology and Management with a group of researchers from the Chinese Academy of Forestry, and two high-profile publications with an international consortium based at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, one in Science and one in PNAS

In keeping with adjunct faculty RICH

MACDONALD (’06)’s interest in teaching ornithology, he published Little Big Year: Chasing Acadia’s Birds in celebration of the centennial of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. The book is an account of a year of local birdwatching told in Rich’s inimitable storytelling style, drawing on nearly five decades of experience as both birder and ornithologist. With the chickadee being the Maine State Bird, fittingly, his year started with a black-capped chickadee and ended with a boreal chickadee. In between, Rich’s stories include childhood banding of ducks on the Niagara River, biking in the dark to look for nightjars, hiking Acadia’s mountains in the winter to see snowy owls, and journeying to Mount Desert Rock in search of pelagic seabirds. Little Big Year is available locally and directly from Rich.

COA Magazine editor DAN MAHONEY, also editor-in-chief of Bateau Press, was proud of the work Bateau did over the last challenging year. Bateau published two books, Drakkar Noir, by Michael Chang and How To Be the Worst Laziest Fattest Incontinent Piece-of-Shit in the World Ever! Encouragement for Struggling Creatives by Miss Expanding Universe, by Ashley Yang-Thompson. Bateau hosted two readings at Bar Harbor’s Lompoc Café as well. The Drakkar Noir reading was held in solidarity with a student group raising awareness and funds for victims

of state-sponsored violence in India and the occupied Palentinian Territories. How To Be The Worst Laziest… was held in conjunction with the launch of COA faculty members NANCY ANDREWS & DRU COLBERT ’s latest installment of The Institute of Higher Nervous Activities Journal.

COA Mitchell and Emily Rales Chair in Ecology CHRIS PETERSEN, in collaboration with director of internships and career services JILL BARLOWKELLEY, helped place six students in internships at nonprofits in Hancock County through a grant from the Seth Sprague Educational and Charitable Foundation (see page 51). Chris continues to work with state and local partners on intertidal conservation and management with grant support from the Broadreach Fund and through a Town of Bar Harbor grant from the Maine Shellfish Restoration and Resilience Fund. This work has involved collaboration with aquaculturists, wild harvesters, students, and town and state regulators on a wide variety of issues including changing town committee practices to include additional species within their management and reforming and standardizing both town reporting of management practices and marine resource data collection throughout the state. He continues to work on the Coastal and Marine Working Group of the

Left to right: Rich MacDonald, cover of Drakkar Noir, Casey Schuller Jordan and her husband Finn.

Maine Climate Council, chair the Marine Resources Committee in Bar Harbor, and work as a member of the Downeast Fisheries Partnership, the Downeast Conservation Network, and Frenchman Bay Partners.

In October 2021, library assistant CATHERINE PRESTON-SCHRECK testified in the US District Court in support of a proposed settlement in the case Maine People’s Alliance and the Natural Resources Defense Council vs. Mallinckrodt US LLC. As a former member of Penobscot Alliance for Mercury Elimination and concerned citizen, Preston-Schreck testified in support of holding Mallinckrodt US LLC responsible for almost 50 years of mercury pollution of the Penobscot River. If settled, Mallinckrodt US LLC will be required to pay as much as $267 million towards mercury remediation of the Penobscot. Preston-Schreck is entering her seventh year as an election clerk for the Town of Bar Harbor. She is proud of the dedication and hard work of COA faculty, staff, and students to participate in elections, an effort noted by Civic Nation, who recognized COA for having the highest undergraduate voting rate in the country for the fall 2020 elections. Preston-Schreck is also beginning her third season as a part-time farm worker at Bar Harbor Farm, owned and operated by GLENON FRIEDMAN ’86 and ROSE

AVENIA ’86. She is exploring the overlap of books and farming by writing book reviews for The Maine Organic Farmer and Gardener, the quarterly publication of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association.

During the 2021 spring term, Kim M. Wentworth Chair in Environmental Studies STEVE RESSEL redesigned his Applied Amphibian Biology course to facilitate student involvement in projects that addressed the research needs of two island partner organizations, such as surveying incidence of road mortality during spring migration of amphibians in Acadia National Park and surveying aquatic turtle diversity, vernal pool-breeding, and amphibian abundance at the Land and Garden Preserve. Students also carried out the fieldwork associated with a third project in relation to Ressel’s ongoing work on salt tolerance in spotted salamanders. Here they worked closely with Acadia National Park wildlife biologist BIK WHEELER ’09, MPHIL ’18, and Dr. James Godwin of Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory to examine salamander blood plasma osmolarity and immune response in relation to elevated salt.

During winter 2022, adjunct faculty DANI ROBBINS continued their recent ensemble project, songs from the edge of this dream. Robbins took part in a residency

and performance of the piece at Engine in Biddeford, Maine in March 2022. They have also been collaborating with COA alum ZACHARY TAIBI ’17 on a new dance film installation, NEST, which opened at the Portland Media Center in February 2022. Robbins also premiered a new duet at Arts at the Armory in Somerville, Massachusetts in late February 2022 as a part of National Choreography Month.

Despite being locked down in New Zealand, JENNY ROCK ’93 met many stellar students by distance teaching several courses. Three of those students are potentially NZ-bound over the next year as research assistants or master’s students on research projects. In 2021, Rock produced more book chapters: “If the Ocean Were a Person,” in Intimate Relations: Communicating (in) the Anthropocene (which includes two of Rock’s illustrations) and “Narrative, Rhetoric & Science: Opportunities & Risks,” in Rhetorics of Evidence; plus several papers, including one she co-published with Zoom-met COA master’s student ELIE GILCHRIST ’23, “Creating Empathy for the More-Than-Human under 2 Degrees Heating,” in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. Rock and Gilchrist also introduced community arts practice into social & environmental risk assessment for the Dunedin City

Left: Jenny Rock ’93. Right: Steve Ressel’s students in the field.

Council’s project, “Whakahekerau –Rakitea Rautaki Tai: A Community’s Vision for a Resilient Coast,”which was awarded the International Association for Public Participation’s 2021 Australasian Project of the Year.

HANNAH STEVENS ’09, the college’s archivist and cataloging librarian, is a participating member of two archivesrelated collaboratives that both achieved substantial milsteones in 2021. In May, the History Trust designed and launched—

with support from Gordon Longsworth ’90 and the GIS lab—its first digital exhibit called Where Our History Is Housed. The exhibit is about the iconic structures that represent the member organizations ranging from a converted one-room schoolhouse to a former country store, to a summer cottage turned academic hall, a one-time convent, a repurposed fire station, and an iconic village clock. In June, the Maine Contemporary Archives Collaborative (MCAC) was selected for a 2021 Award of Excellence from the

RETIREMENTS

American Association for State and Local History, which recognizes an achievement in the preservation and interpretation of state and local history. The collaborative formed to collect, preserve, and provide access to materials related to Maine community members’ experiences of current events, namely the COVID-19 pandemic. In October, Hannah and two MCAC partners presented about the collaborative’s work at the Maine Archives and Museums annual conference.

The magazine salutes these amazing people for their dedicated years of service to COA and the greater COA community.

Clockwise from top left: Marie Stivers; Millard Dority and dog Willie; Judy Allen (left) and Tom Fernald ’91; Donna McFarland; and Bob Nolan.

Howdy Houghton

James “Howdy” Houghton

December 27, 1947–August 22, 2021

By COA lecturer Scott Swann ’86, MPhil ’93

IAMTRYING TO REMEMBER exactly how long I knew Howdy Houghton. Most certainly since I was a student at COA. I think of myself as having known him forever which, of course, is not exactly true… Perhaps we knew each other in a prior life when we both were cod. As a student, I confess to initially being highly frightened of Howdy. Our first meetings took place in the taxidermy lab where he had a proclivity for silently apparating, like a Hogwarts ghost, in the room where I was working alone at night. It seemed like Howdy would transport through a solid wall—whichever wall happened to be at my back—and announce his presence by walking around, pulling out a chair, and putting his club-ofdeath flashlight on the table. And, because I was well versed in horror films, I was sure I knew what would happen next in this scene (he the Stephen King-like night watchman and I the cowering student) but the horrific “next” never happened. I

did, however, stick to my role by quickly scanning the taxidermy table to see if there was any student-age contraband that needed covering by a half-prepared bird skin, but Howdy would just sit there and start talking. We did this for decades. If I had to write the book, The Who and What of Human Ecology, Howdy would be either my first chapter or my last. My wine or my coffee. My beginning and my end.

Howdy and I had many common interests—fishing was a big one. He was a lifelong member of the fishing and fishing boat community, and he and I would spend hours discussing the ins and outs of diesel mechanics. That said, our strongest bond— none who knew us would suspect— was that we both used the same secret hiding spaces on campus to provide meals to students who were facing food insecurity. He would line up at TAB, buy a bunch of food, and deliver it like clockwork to these secret places. That’s a part of the

Howdy that I want to remember, kind, caring, gruf, and a bottomless heart. In my mind, Howdy was COA’s superhero. When I think about it, I can’t decide what sort of superhero Howdy was; he didn’t have muscles of steel, or x-ray vision, or raging hair… The Howdy I remember was old, wizened, gray, and bald since birth. No, Howdy was not like Iron Man or Spiderman or Superman, he was more like Don Quixote (they actually look quite similar). They were both devoted to their calling and were men of action—of course the big difference between Quixote and Howdy was that one lived in his dreams and the other lived in Maine. You could say Quixote was a romantic and Howdy was a realist; Howdy had to be a realist, there is nothing more real than hunger. Howdy knew hunger and did his part to help those who were in need. Rest in peace, Howdy Houghton, you will forever live in the deepest part of my heart.

Roc Ritchie Caivano

February 12, 1944–July 8, 2021

By John Gordon

ROC RITCHIE CAIVANO, who gave shape to COA’s earliest work in environmental design, died on July 8, 2021. He was born February 12, 1944 and grew up in Tarrytown, New York. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1966 and Yale School of Architecture in 1970. In 1974, responding to an ad in The New York Times, Roc took a job at College of the Atlantic and led the charge to build a curriculum in environmental design. In 1983, Roc and his family moved to Philadelphia, where he worked for Venturi, Rauch & Scott Brown Architects as an associate for five years before joining Lyman Perry Architects as a partner. In 1990, the Caivanos returned to Mount Desert Island and opened Roc Caivano Architects, where he practiced architecture until his retirement in 2012. During that time, Roc designed several hundred projects across MDI and beyond.

In 1966, Roc met his life partner Helen Lee McGregor ’80. They

married on November 30, 1969 in NYC. Their first daughter, Katharine Starlight, was born in 1975, and their second daughter, Lilly McGregor, was born in 1981. Roc fondly enjoyed his time with granddaughter Juniper Helen. Quoting from his published obituary, “The true love Roc and Helen shared is legendary to anyone fortunate enough to know them. Roc was a deeply loving father, ‘Be careful,’ and, ‘I’m so damn proud of you’ being his most common refrains.”

Roc possessed a profound understanding of the shinglestyle aesthetic of many historic Mount Desert Island cottages. His unparalleled ability to reinterpret the local vernacular deeply enriched the island’s built environment. Nonresidential buildings of significance designed by Roc include the Wendell Gilley Museum in Southwest Harbor, the iconic, arching footbridge in Somesville (often claimed to be the most photographed structure in Maine), the Acadia National Park

visitor center pavillion, and Schoodic Institute’s Wright Hall.

In addition to being an early faculty member, Roc designed and constructed several buildings on the COA campus. These include a student workshop (the current Buildings & Grounds shop/offices), the 1976 restoration of The Turrets (an outgrowth of an early design class taught by Roc and primarily supported by student work), and the Blair-Tyson student residence hall.

Barbara Sassaman ’78 remembers Roc’s teaching style as “calm, smart, and funny” and as being incredibly fair to his students. He didn’t espouse a specific design style, but rather focused on knowledge and skills required for students to discover their own style and approach to design. Sass remembers design assignments as oftentimes being fun while Roc promoted an iterative process of “doing it over and over and over.” Roc enjoyed

Roc Caivano (left) helping Jackson Gillman ‘78.

working alongside his students as they “built stuff” including the many beloved bus shelters scattered across MDI (reportedly, the last known shelter is located just off Beech Hill Road on the way to COA Beech Hill Farm).

I worked for Roc in 1994-95. My primary duty was project manager for the Blair-Tyson construction. Roc’s mentoring and willingness to share hard-earned wisdom had a profound impact on my life as an architect. I fondly remember desk crits with Roc—if you’re familiar with the notion of a desk crit, you know that they are seldom fondly remembered. Here’s a brief summary of one such memorable session. I had been working away for hours on trying to find the “just right” fenestration (composition of windows and doors on the exterior

wall) for a house design. Roc comes over to my desk, sits down, rolls out the tracing paper and grabs a pencil (pre-CADD days), then commences mastery. He sketches away and helps me to understand why my effort was coming up short, doing so without berating me at all. In relatively short order, he arrives at a suitable solution. Then, he says, “Let’s add two lights flanking the front door, just like buttons on a shirt.” Nearly 30 years later, I think of Roc every time I add “buttons on a shirt” to a design.

Roc served on many local nonprofit boards and committees and was most proud of being a volunteer firefighter with Bar Harbor Fire Department. His BHFD service included designing an addition to the Town Hill fire station. After retirement, Roc devoted most of

his time to making things. He loved to paint and pretty much did so full time. It was during this time that Roc painted oil portraits of four of the founders of College of the Atlantic—Ed Kaelber, Les Brewer, Father Jim Gower, and Ann Peach. These paintings now hang in The Turrets, one of Roc’s most beloved buildings and site of his Celebration of Life on July 24, 2021.

Roc Caivano wore many hats during his lifetime—son, brother, student, husband, father, grandfather, carpenter, filmmaker, teacher, architect, painter, and mentor. His intelligence, creativity, charisma, passion, and resolve had a deep and lasting impact on many, many lives during his 77 years.

Celebrated children’s author, illustrator, and paragon of creativity and community Ashley Bryan passed away in February 2022 at the age of 98. Over the past decades, many within the College of the Atlantic community were touched by Bryan’s broad spirit— whether from his many appearances on campus or during visits to his energetic, whimsical home on Little Cranberry Island, where his incredible collection of puppets—made out of bones, shells, and other objects he found on nearby beaches—filled the shelves. This year, COA was lucky enough to become the caretaker

of 25 of Bryan’s puppets thanks to the generosity of the Ashley Bryan Center. A selection of the puppets is now on display in the Davis Center for Human Ecology in an exhibit designed by COA professor Dru Colbert. The showcase, including some of Bryan’s books and illustrations, is a reminder of his contagious joie de vivre and all the good he brought to the world. Six puppets will be featured on campus on a rotating basis, and a selection of the work will rotate through an exhibit at the Ashley Bryan Center Storyteller’s Pavilion on Little Cranberry Island.

Making something from everything…

Alumnx books

WILLIAM GINN ’74

Valuing Nature: A Handbook for Impact Investors. Island Press, 2020.

As the world faces unprecedented challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss, the resources needed far outstrip the capabilities of nonprofits and even governments. Yet there are seeds of hope—and much of that hope comes from the efforts of the private sector. Impact investing is rapidly becoming an essential tool, alongside philanthropy and government funding, in tackling these major problems. Valuing Nature presents a new set of naturebased investment areas to help conservationists and investors work together.

KEVIN P. TIMONEY ’ 78

Hidden Scourge: Exposing the Truth about Fossil Fuel Industry Spills. McGillQueen’s University Press, 2021.

A six-year investigation into the impacts of fossil fuel production in western North America. Hidden Scourge takes the reader on a journey behind the firewall of disinformation to uncover scientific truths about crude oil, saline water spills, and the covert cumulative impacts of the fossil fuel industry on ecosystems and society. The book began when the author noticed a suspicious pattern in data reported by the Alberta Energy Regulator. For tens of thousands of spills, recovery volumes exactly matched the reported spill volumes. In short, the data were too good to be true. And so began a search for the scientific truth about spills.

GARRETT CONOVER ’78

Sauna Magic: Health, Happiness, Community. Maine Authors Publishing, 2019.

Sauna Magic is a lyrical and evocative celebration. Imagery and story embrace a tradition that sustains calm renewal and thoughtful quiet in a world that too often seems overly busy, and overwhelming. The introductory chapter invites readers into a remarkable realm provided by the elemental resonance of fire, stone, water, and wood, and a ritual shared widely all over the world. Subsequent chapters profile a diversity of saunas and their people. Each exploration personalizes experience and provides a dreamscape that will reward seasoned practitioners and intrigued newcomers alike. Within is an accessible, luminous love song to health, happiness, and community.

SUSAN

B. INCHES ’ 79

Advocating for the Environment, How to Gather Your Power and Take Action. North Atlantic Books, 2021. Advocating for the Environment begins with how we must learn to think differently in order to heal the planet. We must see and treat each other and the earth as if our lives depend on them. The first half of the book shows how understanding and working with people with different views is the key to moving policies forward. The second half is all about action. How to use power for good, how to work with decision makers, how to organize events, manage a coalition, communicate with the public, and work with the media are all laid out in an easy to read and reference format. A bibliography and sample press releases, public testimony, and letters to the editor fill out this complete field guide to citizen advocacy.

LIZ CUNNINGHAM ’82

Ocean Country. North Atlantic Books, 2015.

Ocean Country is an adventure story, a call to action, and a poetic meditation on the state of the seas. But most importantly it is the story of finding true hope in the midst of one of the greatest crises to face humankind, the rapidly degrading state of our environment. After a near-drowning accident in which she was temporarily paralyzed, Liz Cunningham crisscrosses the globe in an effort to understand the threats to our dazzling but endangered oceans. This intimate account charts her thrilling journey through unexpected encounters with conservationists, fishermen, sea nomads, and scientists in the Mediterranean, Sulawesi, the Turks and Caicos Islands, and Papua, New Guinea.

LELANIA AVILA ’ 92

An Abecedarian Reflection: Parenting through Childhood Cancer

This book features 26 action verbs illustrated with art and poetry to describe one mother’s journey. An Abecedarian Reflection is a collection of hand-lettered poems accompanying multimedia art pieces (pen and ink, pencil/colored pencil, pastels, watercolor, acrylics, collage). The book was inspired during the January 2020 open mic at the Northeast Harbor library. As Lelania Avila viewed art from students at Mount Desert Elementary on the walls, she envisioned 26 words, with poems scrolling beneath.

GLEN MITTELHAUSER ’89

Wildflowers of Maine Islands. University of Maine Press, 2021.

Wildflowers of Maine Islands is an identification guide to all the wildflowers on islands along the coast of Maine from Muscongus Bay (situated in Maine’s Midcoast region) east to the Canadian border (Knox, Waldo, Hancock, and Washington counties). This portion of the Maine coast and the adjacent islands are heavily influenced by the cool marine environment that, coupled with the geomorphic characteristics of the region, has produced unique assemblages of plants that often differ significantly from those in the southwestern half of the Maine coast. Tempered by the cold Labrador Current and dotted with hundreds of islands, this easternmost portion of the continental United States fosters arctic species, threatened and endangered species, rare community types, and a diversity of habitats not found elsewhere in Maine.

ANDREA LANI ’ 95

Uphill Both Ways: Hiking Toward Happiness on the Colorado Trail. Bison Books, 2022

In Uphill Both Ways, Andrea Lani tells the story of the 500-mile hike she took through the Colorado mountains in 2016 with her husband, Curry Caputo ’95, and their three kids, and the hike she and Curry took on the same trail two decades earlier, while reflecting on the changes that have taken place on the landscape and within herself over that same period. Uphill Both Ways is at its essence a book of human ecology; the author goes into the mountains to deepen her connection with the natural world while confronting the environmental toll wrought by a century and a half of natural resource exploitation in the Rocky Mountains.

ELI NIXON ’ 99

Bloodtide: A New Holiday in Homage to Horseshoe Crabs. The Third Thing, 2021

Eli Nixon is proposing a new/primordial holiday and everybody is invited! Through comics, puppetry, and other crafty modes, Bloodtide uses anthropomorphism to destabilize anthropocentrism. The floating holiday (to celebrate anytime) is built around reversing patterns of extraction and shifting our humancentered lens on time, nature, debt, and ancestry. It’s a holiday about interspecies enmeshment, cultivating awe, and healing sites of environmental and cultural harm. Holiday activation includes collective and individual opportunities for costume creation through cardboard transformation, staging a 450-million year parade, performing a pre-human pageant, assembling a detritivore pie, contributing to habitat restoration and reparation efforts, singing crabaoke (altered lyrics), encapsulating time, trying impossible dances, and more.

RICHARD

MACDONALD (’06)

Little Big Year: Chasing Acadia’s Birds. The Natural History Center, 2020.

Little Big Year documents Richard MacDonald’s year-long adventure in search of the birds of Acadia National Park and his corner of Maine. With each bird found, Richard weaves a narrative filled with fun facts and stories from his many years studying the natural world, birding, and traveling from the Arctic to the Antarctic. His year is book-ended with chickadees: a black-capped chickadee on the Schoodic Christmas Bird Count and, 364 days later, a boreal chickadee near the Sunkhaze Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. He voyages out on research vessels into the Gulf of Maine to look for seabirds, hikes Acadia’s mountains to see snowy owls, takes a nighttime bicycle ride into Great Pond Mountain Wildlands to find the rare chuck-will’s-widow, and views shorebirds from the cockpit of a sea kayak. Anyone with an interest in natural history will want to read this book.

RYAN T. HIGGINS ’06 Thanks for Nothing. Disney-Hyperion, 2021.

Ryan T. Higgins celebrates the season of thanks in this Little Bruce book, the latest in the Mother Bruce series. It’s autumn in Soggy Hollow, and the mice have a lot to be thankful for. But Bruce the bear is not so thankful for all the thanking. This bite-sized Little Bruce book is perfect for fans of the Mother Bruce board books. In addition to the Mother Bruce series, Ryan is also the author and illustrator of Norman Didn’t Do It!, We Don’t Eat Our Classmates, We Will Rock Our Classmates, BE QUIET!, and What About Worms!?

At College of the Atlantic’s weekly All College Meeting on Wednesday, January 25, 2022, director of campus planning, buildings, and public safety Millard Dority was preparing to present the minutes for Campus Planning and Building Committee for what would be the last time in his 51-year career at the college. But before he could share the doings of this important committee, COA David Rockefeller Family Chair in Ecosystem Management and Protection Ken Cline rose to challenge the minutes—a parliamentary maneuver often used to correct recorded statements or even for political means. But in this case, Cline had a more novel motive: to use this time to honor Dority’s lengthy contributions to college governance and to present him with a parting gift, a luxurious knife handmade by COA provost Ken Hill.

MADAME MODERATOR, I would like to challenge the minutes of this committee. I cannot believe that they are allowing Millard to retire or at the very least have not passed a resolution honoring his outstanding service to governance at COA.

Since they have not, on behalf of all the past steering chairs and members of the Steering Committee, we would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank Millard for his invaluable contributions to participatory governance at College of the Atlantic.

Millard, your commitment to democracy and genuine participation in our governance system has been exemplary. You believe in our system and you act on those beliefs. Some of your contributions include:

• Involving, training, and empowering students through their participation on CPBC

• Faithful attendance at ACMs and conscientious reporting of CPBC minutes (how many thousands of times?)

• Your willingness to work with the community and have real conversations about hard topics (even when you have heard the same topic raised for the 25th time—dogs on campus anyone?)

• Your openness to feedback and receptivity to comments from everyone (first years to presidents and trustees)

• And your faith that we make better decisions together than we do in isolation.

You did all of this and still got stuff done. Best of all, you got stuff done in a way that strengthened us as a community.

As a small token of our esteem and appreciation, we want to present you with a knife crafted by our own provost, Ken Hill. I think that you will find this knife to be especially fitting.

• The wood on the handle is from the copper beech tree in front of Turrets.

• The center of the mosaic pin in the knife is made from a copper nail from the Turrets roof when you did the replacement.

• And in the words of Ken Hill, “This knife reminds me of Millard—it is full of character, very functional, and it will cut you if you mess with it.”

Millard and Jamien St. Pierre ’06 in 2005 working in the garden.

Today

is not special Student perspective speech by Kyle Shank ’14

SUGGESTS that I stand before all of you today to provide some personal insight into the student experience here at our college. Good manners and decorum suggest that I do so in such a way as to be a champion of the cause that we’ve shared in our educational endeavors here, whether we call that cause human ecology or something else entirely. However, honesty demands of me to speak truth to my experiences, and if I must choose which of these to follow, I think it best to be honest.

TRADITION

So I ask all of my fellow graduates that which I ask of myself: If you’ve put off beginning something important until after graduation, or waited until some other auspicious-seeming day to give something up, stop. Do not use events like these as an excuse to begin or to end anything in your life. Your dreams and aspirations do not need to have start and end dates, so don’t give them any.

With that, I’ll be direct—much of what I have learned here and hope to share with you today revolves around two distinct phenomena: those of time and of change. It is these concepts, more than any others, which have come to have significant meaning in how I have interpreted my experiences here at COA.

It has been the very process of crafting this speech that has brought me again and again to the phenomenon of time, especially since it’s pretty hard to get an extension for a graduation speech.

These ceremonies, events, and rituals that we use to divide and demarcate our lives into compartments of meaning are wonderful. They are the forum in which we share our past experiences and find common ground for our future endeavors. Frankly, I can think of no greater pleasure than to use such a time as this moment to pause and congratulate every graduate on this stage for all of their hard work and success.

However, ceremonies like this one today also conceal a secret, one that honesty dictates I reveal: Today is not special. I do not mean to say that what we have accomplished is not noteworthy and good—it most emphatically is. What I mean is this: today is not simply some pivot in the autobiographical narrative of our lives. The conferral of a degree will not have you waking up tomorrow a different man, or a changed woman, or a newly enlightened person. More likely, we are going to wake up tomorrow with the same passions and dispassions, beliefs and disbeliefs, and good and bad qualities that we have today.

Ceremonies, like the one we are taking part in, can trick us into thinking that we’ve drawn some line in the sand between who we are and who we will become. In my case, I have been on this journey to a degree for a decade now, and I want to tell you from my experience: celebrations are always post scripts—whatever changes and growth they are marking in time have already happened to you. These observances are simply scrapbooks of the past, not guideposts for the future.

Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, said that “nothing valuable can be lost by taking time.” I could not disagree more. Time is lost by taking time. Though we may be young (sort of) now, it will not always be so. Days are numbered, and we must put those remaining to good use. The things we hope to understand, the stories we hope to tell, the situations we hope to improve—they must not wait for a stage to be crossed or a degree to be conferred. You have to do them now, without delay.

At the start of this speech I mentioned that I wanted to talk about two phenomena. The word change has never been far from my mind since I arrived here. I imagine, for many of us, it’s the reason we came—“Life changing, world changing.” For many of us, the drive to be agents of change in a world in sore need of them can, will, and has led us to do great, wonderful things.

But sometimes in the rush to bring about change we have neglected to remember something very important: that change can be both positive and negative, and is almost never value neutral. We must remember, hard as it may be, that conservatism is not a dirty word—a resistance to rapid change does not itself imply some kind of moral failing or cowardice.

In fact, if we are to be honest with ourselves, many of the most radical beliefs and arguments that many of us here hold dear are rooted in a stronger conservatism than many would care to admit. The arguments we make here about things like climate change, or the conservation of public lands, or perhaps more local issues, like student participation in faculty reviews, or our trimester system, are ones that we are deeply passionate about.

Yet deep down our worries about the future of the institutions we hold most dear express an inherently conservative view of the world, one that is radically skeptical of rapid (or at times any) change. This is intuitive, as the pain wrought by unexpected change is something that all of us have felt in some manner or another, be it personal or professional. Assuming that most, if not all, of us will become the champions of causes large and small in the years stretching before us, I only ask that we remember these pains and approach our future endeavors to change our worlds with wisdom, grace, and humility. Sometimes being effective, compassionate agents also means knowing when it isn’t yet time to do so.

I realize that, in speaking these things, I have really asked all of us to hold two dissonant thoughts in our minds: to make haste with that which we do, and at the same time to temper that hasty rush to change the world with a healthy bit of thoughtful reflection. I hope that this kind of seemingly paradoxical advice isn’t too bothersome, as the remainder of our lives will be preoccupied with balancing such contradictions.

But perhaps I’ve been wrong from the start and today need not be the day to be preoccupied with such things. While it is true that you might not wake up a different person tomorrow because you’ve graduated from College of the Atlantic, you’ll still wake up with the experiences, knowledge, and wisdom you’ve gained here; and you’ll wake ready to change at least one world—your own. Thank you.

Our One and Only Ocean July

25–29, 2022

COA Summer Institute is a week-long ideas festival that welcomes experts from around the world to share perspectives on the most pressing issues of our time. The 2022 Summer Institute: Our One and Only Ocean will explore the beauty, promise, and perils of our greatest commons—the ocean.

This year, we are pleased to feature renowned leaders and Explorers from the global nonprofit organization the National Geographic Society. You’ll hear from CEO Jill Tiefenthaler about the Society’s efforts to illuminate and protect the wonder of our world, as well as oceanographer Bob Ballard, who discovered the sunken RMS Titanic, photographer Brian Skerry, who revealed unprecedented insights about whale culture, and storyteller Tara Roberts, whose journey to reveal the lost stories of the transatlantic slave trade captured the world’s attention.

Featured COA alumnx include ocean plastics researcher and oyster farmer Abby Barrows MPhil ’18, Bar Harbor Oyster Company owner Joanna Fogg ’07, Ocean Exploration Trust’s Allison Fundis ’03, Maine Sea Grant’s Natalie Springuel ’91, renowned ocean conservationist Greg Stone ’82, chair of the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium Scott Kraus ’77, and founding faculty member and former COA president Steve Katona

Cofounders of Sailors for the Sea and Oceana board members David and Susan Rockefeller, Billion Oyster Project’s Tanasia Swift, cofounder of the Society of Black Archaeologists Justin Dunnavant, Atlantic Sea Farms CEO Briana Warner, and Hollander & de Koning’s Fiona de Koning round out the initial speaker lineup with additional speakers to be announced throughout the spring.

coa.edu/si

MORE THIS SUMMER AT COA

Alumnx Weekend

June 23–26, 2022

Take over campus with fellow alumnx! Bring your families, stay in the dorms, and eat in TAB. Attend workshops with alums and faculty, explore Acadia, enjoy guided hikes, kayak, and canoe trips.

C O A . E DU/ALUMNX

Conversation

Tuesdays at 9:30am in July and August

Join us on Tuesday mornings at the Davis Center for Human Ecology. COA faculty and trustees lead hour-long, in-depth conversations with special guests that engage the audience in thought-provoking discussions.

Past speakers include Senator George Mitchell, artist Ashley Bryan, author Christina Baker Kline, forest conservationist Roger Milliken, historian David Hacket Fischer, and CEO of The Atlantic Nick Thompson, among many others. COA.EDU/SUMMEREVENTS

Benjamin Troutman ’24