COA Magazine Spring 2017

COA

THE COLLEGE OF THE ATL ANTIC MAG A ZINE Volume 13 . Number 1 . Spring 2017

GREENING THE FUTURE

ECOLOGICAL HOPE FOR CHALLENGING TIMES

Michael "Spike" Reid, international mountain leader and river activist, paddles beneath transformers on the Ganges River above Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India.

Photo by Galen Hecht '16.

COA The College of the Atlantic Magazine

Letter from the President

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News from Campus

4

Why Teach in Taiwan?

8

Watson Report • Globalism

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GREENING THE FUTURE Ecological Hope for Challenging Times

15

Community as Classroom

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Growing Greener

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Changing the Rules • Cooperatives, Institutions, Economics

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Enriching the Earth

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In Their Own Words • Alumni reflect on the UNFCCC

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Elutriate • Kate Donohoe ('91)

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Poetry Thursdays

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Remembered Earth • Kirsten Stockman '91

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Donor Profile • William and Donna Eacho

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Alumni & Community Notes

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In Memoriam

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Transitions 54 The Wood Pellet Boiler

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2017 Summer Events

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COA The College of the Atlantic Magazine Volume 13 · Number 1 · Spring 2017

Editorial Editor Editorial Advice

Editorial Consultant

Donna Gold Heather Albert-Knopp '99 Rich Borden Lynn Boulger Dianne Clendaniel Dru Colbert Darron Collins '92 Anna Demeo Jennifer Hughes Tyler Hunt '16 Rob Levin Matt Shaw '11 Bill Carpenter

Design Art Director

Rebecca Hope Woods

COA Administration President Academic Dean Administrative Dean Associate Deans

Dean of Admission Dean of Institutional Advancement Dean of Student Life

Darron Collins '92 Kenneth Hill Andrew Griffiths Chris Petersen Karen Waldron Heather Albert-Knopp '99 Lynn Boulger Sarah Luke

COA Board of Trustees Timothy Bass Ronald E. Beard Leslie C. Brewer Alyne Cistone Lindsay Davies Beth Gardiner Amy Yeager Geier H. Winston Holt IV Jason W. Ingle Philip B. Kunhardt III '77 Nicholas Lapham Casey Mallinckrodt Anthony Mazlish Linda McGillicuddy

Jay McNally '84 Philip S.J. Moriarty Phyllis Anina Moriarty Lili Pew Hamilton Robinson, Jr. Nadia Rosenthal Abby Rowe ('98) Marthann Samek Henry L.P. Schmelzer Laura Z. Stone Stephen Sullens William N. Thorndike, Jr. Cody van Heerden, MPhil '17

Life Trustees Samuel M. Hamill, Jr. John N. Kelly William V.P. Newlin John Reeves Henry D. Sharpe, Jr.

Trustee Emeriti David Hackett Fischer William G. Foulke, Jr. George B.E. Hambleton Elizabeth Hodder Sherry F. Huber Helen Porter Cathy L. Ramsdell '78 John Wilmerding

The faculty, students, trustees, staff, and alumni of College of the Atlantic envision a world where people value creativity, intellectual achievement, and diversity of nature and human cultures. With respect and compassion, individuals construct meaningful lives for themselves, gain appreciation of the relationships among all forms of life, and safeguard the heritage of future generations.

From the Editor There was quite a discussion over what to name this issue of COA. President Darron Collins '92 quite liked Sustainability 2.0; others thought it restrictive.

Faculty member Rich Borden suggested Only One Earth, the title of a book co-authored by René Dubos, a trustee during our first five years. That got my vote, but I was countered by those who thought it "too 1970s." That dates Rich and me for sure. Those were formative times, years of change when populist actions pushed our nation to expand civil rights and halt a shameful war— actually, it was all shameful, the war, the segregation, the limits on women, the discrimination against lesbians and gays. As a teenager at the time, I held an innocent trust in the good of the world, a trust enshrined by a moment I'll never forget. It was at the end of the October 15, 1969 Vietnam Moratorium in Washington, DC. There were maybe a hundred of us on a knoll with a clutch of musicians. Somehow, we all joined in a large circle dance, large enough to ring Turrets and then some. The green grass, the pink and blue tie-dye clothing, the flowing hair, the flowers, all of us together. So simple. So powerful. I was certain the exuberance of my generation would prevail.

From those years, too, came the environmental movement, of which René Dubos, the Pulitzer Prize-winning microbiologist, humanist, and COA trustee, was a leader. He is thought to be the author of the phrase, "think globally, act locally," for he believed that environmental issues are best handled in their "unique physical, climatic, and cultural contexts."

COA listened then, and we listen still. Our experiential form of education is local by definition. Our energy studies result in siting renewables on campus.

Our investigation into the world's trash problem is echoed by our efforts to become zero-waste. Those who study food issues know the feel of dirt as they pull carrots and onions from the earth. And those who study the esoteric language of international treaties, especially the ones focused on climate change, actualize their studies in the halls of United Nations negotiations.

COA's interest in not wasting our resources, in using what we have, in living well with the land, began long before sustainability or even green were buzzwords. Consider our community gardens, our free box, our very curriculum! Perhaps at the very moment when I was shyly grasping the hands of strangers on that DC rise, the sages of COA—Les Brewer, Father Jim Gower—were planning this college-to-be, this extraordinary, experimental, environmental excursion into education; hands-on, local, and global.

Donna Gold, editor

COA is published biannually for the College of the Atlantic community. Please send ideas, letters, and submissions (short stories, poetry, and revisits to human ecology essays) to: Donna Gold, COA Magazine, College of the Atlantic 105 Eden St, Bar Harbor, ME 04609, or dgold@coa.edu

WWW.COA.EDU

Front cover: Frenchman Bay by Ana Maria Zabala Gomez '20.

Back Cover: To create these twenty-five-foot-long lines in the sand, Melissa Relyea Ossanna '91 and Mary Ropp '09 joined local runner Gary Allen and some nine others at Acadia National Park's Sand Beach before dawn on January 29, 2017. The images went viral. That's Melissa walking down the last S in the bottom photo, taken by Brent Richardson. Mary Ropp '09 took the wide shot on top.

COA indicates non-degree alumni by parentheses around their class year. Members of COA's initial pilot program in the summer of 1971 are indicated by P'71 after their name.

From the President Darron Collins '92, PhD

College of the Atlantic. The school with one degree, human ecology. I'm certainly not alone in getting queried—quite often—with questions that boil down to, What is it, exactly, that you do?

Recently I saw the answers to this question unfold most eloquently and completely at a gathering of alumni, friends, and prospective students and their families in Washington, DC. In New York, Boston, DC, San Francisco, Seattle, and other cities in the United States, we periodically host Degree of Difference events. After friends catch up and prospective students get a lay of the land, I clink a glass to get the party's attention.

Rather than give a formal presentation, I ask alumni in the room for a sixty-second summary of what they are working on and how it ties back to their experience with human ecology at COA. After almost six years as president, I've attended about three dozen of these events, and each time I've seen the audience's collective jaw drop, the amazement at the diversity is that palpable.

Often, the parents of prospective students expect to hear park ranger, natural resource management specialist, or environmental scientist with the EPA, and indeed, there are those stories. But what we heard in DC was: Undersecretary of Agriculture in charge of the US Forest Service, Department of Defense counter-terrorism specialist, senior editor at Science Magazine, teacher at a new sustainability school, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration pilot, and curator at the International Spy Museum, to name just a few.

I consider it part of my job to find and explain the thread running through those people. Most importantly, our alumni are not defined by their positions. It's often fascinating work, but these individuals have dynamic backgrounds and are as complex as the college they

COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

attended. They are almost to the number brilliantly articulate. That's something most parents of prospective students notice, and I explain that because our students are expected to play a leading role in classes and on governance committees, they have great fluidity with speaking, with storytelling. Beyond this, the transdisciplinary perspective of human ecology leads alumni to toggle adroitly between analyses and creative syntheses as they tackle the complexities of the world.

Their jobs are rarely monolithic.

Though not always in the standard sense of the term, our alumni are leaders. Whether as a midwife, lawyer, scientist, parent in a community, writer, or numerous other pursuits, our alumni tend to shape the world around them. They are also entrepreneurial—again, not in the typical sense of the word. They make things happen and so are often charting their own creative, variable paths. Finally, they are compassionate, empathetic people who exude a sense of caring and a dedication to making the world a better place.

That complexity, that storytelling panache, that transdisciplinarity, that leadership, that entrepreneurship, and that compassion form the special sauce of the human ecological experience at COA and the quality of green we need for a better future. In these increasingly complex and troubled times, the sense of green cannot be the special interest of the few, it must be pervasive and must fundamentally alter the way we walk through the world.

Read the stories herein and look for the connective tissue between them. Let the individual anecdotes and the total package be your guide to the question, What is it that COA does, anyway? And also let those same stories be points of hope in an increasingly uncertain world.

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NEWS FROM CAMPUS NOVEMBER Plant scientist Susan Letcher accepts COA's offer to join the faculty in the fall of 2017. Says President Darron Collins '92, "Susan is a brilliant botanist and human ecologist whose mind is wide open to exploring the diverse ways in which plants weave through our lives."

Ten of the 12 students in an advanced tutorial on the United Nations climate change negotiations head to Marrakesh, Morocco to participate in the 22nd Conference of Parties and the accompanying Conference of Youth.

DECEMBER COA's Neva Goodwin Computer Lab becomes a comfy computer lounge thanks to the resourcefulness of Pamela Mitchell, information technology director. The space now sports a couch and chairs from a local salvage lot, and coffee table and art from her attic. The paint colors?

They're named Double Click and High Speed.

COA joins hundreds of colleges in a petition to continue the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA program. Later, Darron Collins '92 welcomes all to campus with these words, "we are committed to fostering an inclusive, nondiscriminatory, diverse, secure environment to learn, think, and grow."

JANUARY Thorndike Library hosts "human book" Emma Burke '17. To "open" such books as Llamas Can Go on Strike or You Can Heal Cows, You Can Do Anything, says Emma, "Look at the book (me) in the eyes for three seconds straight." To close the book, and halt Emma's whispered tale, you need only break the stare.

Some 45 people brainstorm ideas for renovating and expanding the existing Arts and Sciences building 4

at a workshop with architect Bruce Coldham and Millard Dority, director of campus planning, buildings, and public safety.

Violinist Augustin Martz '17 presents a duet he wrote and performed in concert with the sounds of frozen Somes Pond. "I see this gathering at a lake as a way of feeling our connectedness and our strength," he says.

COA REVIVES THE LITERARY MAGAZINE BATEAU

Food Systems Working Group offers "The Basics of Cooking: Soups & Stews," the first in a Food & Farming Workshop Series.Â

FEBRUARY

THE STRANGE EYES OF DR. MYES , THE SERIAL

Folks riff on the theme Fish Out of Water at the Thorndike Library story slam.

An opinion piece on college choice

by Darron Collins '92 appears in the Washington Post, ending with, "it's especially important for students to gain the skills that come from engaging in conversation and dialogue with faculty and peers, in asking and responding to complex, nuanced questions, and in respectfully but appropriately challenging authority."

DORR HOSTS NATURAL SCIENCE ILLUSTRATORS

MARCH Angela Valenzuela '17, using the stage name LoĂŻca, releases her senior project, a full-length album, In the Shade of Her Tree. The songs reference climate change, political violence, and the need to find one's self in pain and joy.

COA EXCEEDS ITS GOAL WITH 857 DONORS, RAISING $71,700

Fragmentation and Convergence, the senior project by Gregory Bernard '17, is shown in the Ethel H. Blum Gallery. The work explores intersections of sea, land, and sky through a process combining photography and printmaking.

After a global search, visiting anthropologist Netta van Vliet accepts a full-time appointment to the COA faculty.

TINY BOOKS OFFERING HOPE AND DISSENT APPEAR ON CAMPUS COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

NEWS MARCH ON Within days of the announcement of the Women's March on Washington, the two buses from Mount Desert Island to the January 21 rally were full, with many COA community members filling the seats.

By bus, plane, and carpool, students, staff, faculty, alumni, and former faculty and staff populated marches throughout the world.

In the Northeast, they gathered in Augusta and Portland, Maine; Concord, New Hampshire; Montpelier, Vermont; Boston, Greenfield, and Northampton, Massachusetts; Providence, Rhode Island; Hartford, Connecticut; New York and Albany, New York; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and, of course, Washington, DC. On the West Coast, we heard from people in Bellingham, Olympia, Seattle, and Spokane, Washington; Ashland, Eugene, and Portland, Oregon; and Eureka, Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento, San Francisco, and Santa Cruz, California. More southerly community members demonstrated in Loreto Bay, Pensacola, and West Palm Beach, Florida; Atlanta, Georgia; Phoenix, Arizona; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Austin, Texas. In the nation's center were those in Cincinnati and Wooster, Ohio; Chicago and Urbana, Illinois; Indianapolis, Indiana; St. Paul, Minnesota; Boise, Idaho; and Crested Butte, Denver, and Durango, Colorado. That's just those we heard from—in this country.

Among our further afield alumni were those joining rallies in Toronto, Vancouver, and Victoria, Canada; San JosĂŠ, Costa Rica; Dublin, Ireland; and Tokyo, Japan.

Photos by Felipe Fontecilla '20 and Aubrielle Hvolboll '20.

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NEWS

Photo by Rebecca Hope Woods.

WHEN LOVES COLLIDE

By Donna Gold We love our trees. We also love our walkers and bicyclists.

To ensure safe travels to and from Bar Harbor for locals and visitors alike, in 2011 the Maine Department of Transportation began discussing widening Route 3 to "provide a safe, efficient, and aesthetically pleasing transportation corridor that encourages multiple uses and maintains or enhances the historic standards representative of Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park."

The work of creating eleven-foot traffic lanes, with wide paved shoulders and what the DOT describes as, "enhancements to pedestrian and bike safety by providing sidewalks and a multi-use path … with esplanades where possible, plus updates to drainage and utilities" began in December 2016. By the end of February our guardian trees, that lovely, stately row of birch, linden, locust, maple, oak, spruce, and most notably tall European black 6

pine were gone. Some had stood for more than a century.

We will miss them, and yet I, for one, won't miss that tremor of fear in my chest when I see a biker traveling the rutted, uneven road toward Bar Harbor on a shoulder that's barely a foot wide.

According to head gardener Barbara Meyers '90, the DOT has been quite collaborative on all aspects of the project, "as good as we could hope for." Barbara, COA faculty member Isabel Mancinelli, and the DOT's Lawrence Johannesman are working on a replanting plan.

"I believe that, in time, our frontage will be even lovelier," says Barbara.

Before the cutting, Agafia Andreyev '19 sent out this note, under the subject line Hug the Trees, "Wish the trees a sweet farewell before they're cut down and send some good vibes into the air."

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NEWS LEARNING BY DOING lab fellowships For a year now, full-time in summer and ten to fifteen hours a week during the academic year, Rose Besen-McNally '19 has been at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory, or MDIBL, peering through a high-magnification dissection microscope, tiny instruments in hand, to probe the abdomen of fruit flies, seeking to understand how their healing process differs from ours.

Though fruit flies are only three millimeters long, they share 60 percent of their DNA with humans.

But while humans use numerous cells to heal injuries, in fruit flies, says Rose, "there's one large cell that covers the damaged area." Does this offer possibilities for regeneration and aging in humans? Possibly. It's why, she adds, "I want to figure out which genes signal this alternative mechanism of wound healing."

Rose came to COA with an interest in medicine and medical research.

Thanks to yearlong fellowships at the laboratory, all funded by the IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence, or INBRE, Rose was able

to begin her research in the lab of Vicki P. Losick as a first-year student.

Mamiko Yamazaki '18 is also exploring wound healing at MDIBL, but in Sandra Rieger's lab, and through nerve cell regeneration and the role of the peripheral nervous system in zebrafish fins.

"I am constantly learning new techniques, new knowledge, and making mistakes," says Mamiko.

"It's important to know and study the background to understand the significance of the research project— and that is the most challenging part." Senior project material?

Perhaps, says Mamiko.

Two other fellows are studying the tiny roundworm C. elegans. For Heath Fuqua '18, it's to learn more about the fundamental biology of stem cells. A veteran of eight years in the army, with service in Iraq and Afghanistan, Heath is so captivated by his work in Dustin Updike's lab that he is planning a career as a research physician specializing in the neuroscience of aging. Meanwhile, Amruta Valiyaveetil '19 is exploring C. elegans to learn more about diseases

like Parkinson's in Aric Rogers' lab.

INBRE was created in 2001 by the National Institutes of Health to increase undergraduate access to biomedical research training in certain rural states. For more than a dozen years it has funded an intensive course in molecular genetics at MDIBL, leading to INBRE-funded work for students as summer researchers at both MDIBL and The Jackson Laboratory. With the extended fellowships, students now have a strong pathway to continue the research they began in the summer throughout the academic year. Similar Jackson Lab opportunities will begin in the fall.

"The most amazing benefit of INBRE is the opportunity to send students to these world-class research institutions," says faculty member Chris Petersen who has overseen the INBRE program at COA for ten years.

Rose agrees, "It's pretty amazing that as a student at a small college on an island in Maine, I have the opportunity to work in such a worldclass laboratory."

COA's academic-year fellows and their mentors at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory. From left: Heath Fuqua '18; Chris Smith, MDIBL assistant director of education; Amruta Valiyaveetil '19; Aric Rogers, MDIBL researcher; Rose Besen-McNally '19; Dustin Updike, MDIBL researcher; Mamiko Yamazaki '18; Sandra Rieger, MDIBL researcher; Jane Disney, MDIBL education director; and Vicki Losick, MDIBL researcher. Photo courtesy of MDIBL. COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

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NEWS

Why Teach in Taiwan?

Reflections on immersive learning

By Suzanne Morse From December 2016 to March 2017, nine students from eight countries joined education faculty member Bonnie Tai in Taiwan.

For the first three weeks, Suzanne Morse, botany faculty member, was with the class, officially known as Human Ecology Abroad in Taiwan, or HEAT. Students studied Mandarin, explored local food systems, participated in several forms of intercultural education, including a primary school of the indigenous Rukai community, wrote travel essays and epistolary poetry, and interviewed residents about the Japanese occupation, among other independent studies.

A few weeks before our class set off for Taiwan, I was asked, Why teach in Taiwan? I come back to this question after three weeks of living here and return to the puzzle put forward by Elizabeth Bishop in her poem "Questions of Travel."

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

Where should we be today?

Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theatres?

I bring a stranger's eye to this place and puzzle about a plethora of differences—from the organization of the street lined with vendors offering up noodles, oyster omelets, shoes, bedding, and betel nuts, to the nervewracking, daily roar of F16s passing overhead, to the broad, rough, and barren river beds with rocks as big

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as erratics seemingly tossed here and there in the last typhoon, to the mist-encircled sacred mountain of Dulan, where the sounds are as quiet as flitting butterflies, to the noisier foraging of macaques.

Teaching here is not the search for these new experiences, but an opportunity to reflect on the remarkable ways we have made meaning in our place on this single earth—how people have weathered change with conflict, innovation, or perhaps migration, how the possession of mediums in the Taoist temple persists with such hair-raising power, and how I and the Taiwanese see my home, America, which they call Mei Guo, the beautiful country.

Coming here to teach is to ponder the surprising answers to the question of how to live life in relation to land, ocean, and people. Coming here is to relearn not only the inevitability of death, but also the particularities of a lived life.

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NEWS I have spent the last year reading about Taiwan: politics, botany, ethnobotany, indigenous cultures, trade, colonialism, martial law, night market foods, history, China's great famine, the Green Revolution, and more. Slowly, a platform emerged for asking questions about meaning-making through food and place and the ever-changing lifeways on this island over the past four hundred years.

Reading is not enough. As I stood by rice paddies in Taitung, I was overwhelmed by the colossal communal energy required to grow rice intensively, and how the steep mountains and typhoons provide the remarkable fertility and longevity of these systems. Having returned to Maine, I am left pondering how these communal feats of water engineering for rice production and systems of water sharing might lead to different social norms of helpfulness, even to "minding each other's business."

From afar, I am led to reconsider California and the levees of the Central Valley upon which I have traveled my entire lifetime. I more palpably see the skill and backbreaking labor of Chinese immigrants who built the first intricate network of embankments there, levees first imagined in the 1850s that today protect the vast tracts of

rice, wheat, orchards, pasture, and row crops in one of the most fertile places on earth.

In bringing the poem "Questions of Travel" to a close, Elizabeth Bishop asks, Is it lack of imagination that makes us come to imagined places, not just stay at home?

I think our imagination is boundless, but we can never know a place without our feet on the ground, our face in water, our fingers feeling the strange, black, silty soil, our spirits shaken in confusion and conversation. We weave together the imagined and the real. We correct our path, and the world is as rich as the tales told by Italo Calvino.

This travel speaks to each of us differently; for some, it can feel like a coming home and to others a sense of loss or displacement. Teaching while traveling asks even more of me: it commands discipline and accountability to both home and away. In the best of circumstances, we deepen our understanding of human ecologies, and with these new perspectives we have the chance to step into our fractured and shared futures, refreshed and willing.

For more, visit vtaylor6.wixsite.com/heat.

A rice field in Taitung on a flood plain at the base of mountains. Left: A view from the ridge of Dulan Mountain over the Beinan River flood plain. Photos by Suzanne Morse.

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Globalism A view from the Ganges

By Galen Hecht '16

In 2016, Galen Hecht '16 was one of forty nationwide recipients of the annual Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, which sends college graduates on yearlong journeys in pursuit of a dream. As Galen travels to Scandinavia, Chile, India, and Nepal on his project, "Poetic Cartography: Charting People's Place in Three Great Watersheds," he is immersed in "the poetry of rivers, voyaging from headwaters towards the sea to learn about the connections that people form with place, asking how and why we humans treat natural resources the way we do, and how we can better coexist."

I am in a Starbucks.

There is a fountain outside, the walls are glass, touting modernity. The only flaw is that here they don't have Wi-Fi. At the counter, they subtly tell me to use the other conglomerate's Wi-Fi from next door.

I am in a Starbucks.

The jolt of globalism is as strong as the sea of black aromatic brew in my cup, the first non-instant coffee I've had in a long while. I just came off of a few months trekking and paddling along the Ganges River and I was really tempted.

I am in a Starbucks, and I am thinking about my grandmother.

The other day, as she was processing the topsyturvy elections, she sent me an eloquent short essay. A historian by trade, known to her grandchildren as Tita, Irene Hecht places humans in the midst of a revolution on the grand scale. Like the Green Revolution and the Industrial Revolution before, this revolution is altering the groundwork of our species and consequently the earth.

She refers to it as the Planetary Revolution.

I recall a passage from her essay: "Global corporations have their 'homes' anywhere and everywhere. In the US we are tangled up with our anger over massive corporations escaping taxes by placing their 'homes' in the best locations from a tax perspective, avoiding US business taxes. Bad behavior by old standards."

The Ganges River is a home. It is a home to over 450 million people, hundreds of species of birds, bears, tigers, dolphins, sandflies, snakes, scorpions, E. coli, fish, grass,

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water buffalo. Rivers are not just a stream of surface water that flows from snow to sea, A to B. Engaged with that flow is the entire plain from peak to groundwater to ocean, the entire watershed. Rivers enable life.

Temperate lands, especially like those in northern India where most annual precipitation is delivered by monsoons, are prone to run dry. To mitigate dry seasons, humans use infrastructure—dams, pipelines, canals, and other feats of engineering. The Ganges is a river full of walls and gates like most of earth's great rivers today.

Paddling is regularly interrupted to portage around barriers. India's massive population, like most, is thirsting for power and water.

In India, farmers are guaranteed unlimited rights to groundwater by the government, all they have to pay for is the diesel to run their pumps; metering water use is not a common practice. To those unaccustomed to water scarcity, this may sound like an obvious right, but unlimited use of a limited resource is a recipe for parched earth. Nearly 50 percent of India's employed worked in agriculture in 2013. I am glad that India tries to take care of its farmers—they are some of the most important members of our hungry humanity—but the current practice sounds like a dangerous equation to me.

Groundwater use across India is on the rise. According to India's Standing Committee on Water Resources, 62 percent of the annual replenishing source for the country's groundwater was used in 2011, and 89 percent of that was for irrigation. In dry areas such as Haryana, in the Gangetic Plain, the same committee estimates that over 130 percent of the replenishing source is being drawn. In many places, farms are using aquifer water

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Students at the Parmarth Niketan ashram in Rishikesh, Uttarakhand, India wash after cleaning the banks of the Ganges.

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The confluence of the Alaknanda and Bhagirathi rivers, forming the Ganges at Devprayag, Uttarakhand, India. Photos by Galen Hecht '16.

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faster than the monsoons and the seepage from the Ganges can restore it.

In my home state of New Mexico, heavy aquifer and surface water use for agriculture caused parts of our major river, the Rio Grande, to run dry in the 1990s. The Ganges is a much more voluminous river than the Rio Grande, but it is not hard to imagine that in future dry seasons the surface flow will disappear into the sand.

When I recently spoke to a Canadian official whose specialty is Indian agriculture and economics, he said that policy actions in India can have a more widespread and dramatic effect than anywhere else in the world. New Mexico was able to recover after drying the Rio Grande and now maintains a flow in the river by practicing water conservation in urban and rural areas. With many watersaving options available, such as drip irrigation, proper soil development, responsible waste management, and metering, there is certainly a way to live water-wise, but how can it all be implemented and paid for?

That brings me back to my current position … at Starbucks.

Starbucks is here in Noida, the New Okhla Industrial Development Authority outside New Delhi, because it can be, and it's just as busy and expensive as in Seattle.

In her essay, Tita questions the present role of nations as our predominant governing body and suggests that as we move into planetary consciousness, we must have effective regulatory systems for planetary behavior.

We have the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, etcetera, but while a select few nation states and major capitalist players remain the powerful actors behind these institutions, we lack empowered, environmentally responsible, planetary establishments.

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Corporations, governments, not to mention a public that functions globally, must not only be held accountable by national regulations, but by global regulations for things like aquifers, forests, oceans, rivers, soil. What water nourishes the produce that feeds the customers and employees at Starbucks in Noida? Some of it undoubtedly comes from the Gangetic Plain. When American multinationals, and multinationals in general, are responsible for people's livelihoods in India and around the world, what will be our planetary etiquette?

In a planetary context of immense wealth disparity and an urgent need for conservation, could we design a global system in which multinational corporations and others who exploit resources for profit will pay to conserve them? We must equate the availability of fresh water and fresh air to the possibility of enjoying an Americano at Starbucks in Delhi. The practice of dealing with our daily resources worldwide requires increasingly intricate choreography.

Earth is called the Blue Planet, water is our essence.

If we cannot find a way to keep track of our scarce fresh water and promote conservative and equitable ways of consuming it, we will run out. Not everywhere, not everyone, but some of us will run out. Some of us are already running out.

So as we revolve in this era when globalization is a household term, and I am funded by a foundation to travel nearly anywhere except my home country to try, try, try to understand the scope of watersheds, the shades of our blue, I wonder how we can savor our global commons? What can we do to make this revolution a promising one?

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THE FUTURE

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Ecological Hope for Challenging Times Sustainability—being green, free of fossil fuels, carbon neutral, energy independent, having zero emissions— the words all speak to ensuring that the planet thrives into the next generation, though navigating the lexicon of environmental badges can be confounding. In higher education's race for the nirvana of all things environmental, it is easy to lose sight of the goal. While the linguistics still need to be sorted out, COA's path forward is clear. We have shifted away from buying offsets and returned to our roots of learning through doing, engaging the wider community in the process.

COA was founded by a small group of educators and Mount Desert Island residents on the principle of participatory, interdisciplinary learning that explored the interactions between humans and their environment. It was a vision of education that valued a varied and intermingled approach to this exploration from every conceivable perspective, and encouraged interactions beyond campus. In the decades that followed, climate change and its human, social, environmental, economic, and political impacts brought the need for understanding our world through a multi-dimensional lens into sharp relief.

The founders also wanted COA to integrate with and help rejuvenate the local economy, creating an enduring and dynamic relationship that has grown over the past forty years. Our island is very much a part of who we are, be it exploring Acadia National Park, working with area businesses and residents, or engaging in research that complements and supports the commercial and recreational uses of our Atlantic coast.

At a time when higher education struggles to cross the boundaries of academia and figure out how to engage students in the real world, COA is already there. We were literally born to this task. Free of the divides of majors and having found our identity with the support of the island, we are epically fortunate to have a strong sense of place from which to build. The community within which we live is our foundation and our wings. If the study of human ecology has taught us anything, it is that we are all interconnected and COA does not and cannot live in a bubble. We acknowledge that we are both dedicated and beholden to our neighbors, that their success is ours, and vice versa.

These relationships do more than make our school unique; they educate our students.

Engaging in the community and working on real-world problems with people from a variety of social and political viewpoints provides invaluable experience to students. Understanding first-hand the challenges and opportunities for residents, business owners, or the nonprofit sector gives students insight into the varied and multi-faceted constraints that make progress possible. In the face of walls going up at the federal level, community becomes even more vital.

Through education and experience, students, faculty, staff, and the world beyond campus gain a deeper understanding of the issues and develop skills and perspective to create solutions.

— Anna Demeo, COA lecturer and Director of Energy Education and Management

Frenchman Bay sunset taken from the COA pier.

Photo by Ana María Zabala Gómez '20.

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Kali Lamont '18 seals a window insert destined for a member of the Mount Desert Island community.

She is volunteering with the nonprofit organization WindowDressers. Photo by Zakary Kendall '17.

Community As Classroom COA's Energy Outreach

By Eloise Schultz '16 The light is fading fast on Mt. Desert Street as I let myself into the unlocked side door of the Bar Harbor Congregational Church. I'm here with WindowDressers, a Rockland-based nonprofit that works with volunteers to construct insulating window inserts for Maine communities. Though the front hall and chapel are deserted, familiar strains of folk music filter up the basement steps. I'm in the right place.

Today's "community build" was organized by Zak Kendall '17, my friend and bandmate in the folk group GoldenOak, and Tony St. Denis, a local boatbuilder who represents WindowDressers in Bar Harbor. The three of us first met at a GoldenOak show and then again at the Common Ground Fair, which is where Tony enlisted us as volunteers.

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Walking down the hall, I find our album playing on the boombox and Tony in deep contemplation of a roll of plastic wrap. Also in the room are Pastor Rob Benson and two eighth graders from the Conners Emerson School.

The brightly lit room is a jumble of wooden frames and boxes, with five folding tables piled high with sealing tape and heat-shrink plastic. Tony greets me enthusiastically and then, gesturing to the workstation in front of him, asks, "What do you think about the size of this sheeting?"

I agree that it's probably big enough for the large frame that he has propped against the side of the table. I hope so, anyway—I've never done this before.

After the formalities, I'm handed a roll of packing tape and a pair of scissors, and instructed to seal the edges of the window insert before a final layer of padding is added.

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As the afternoon darkens to evening, people filter in and out of the church basement, greeting each other and diving into the work. Another COA volunteer, energy workstudy student Kali Lamont '18, joins my station. I show her how to finish the seal by sliding a finger along the window's edge before heading on to discover what comes next. The room moves in a rhythm: Learn one, make one, teach one. Pass it on.

While I work, I notice that each window insert is labeled with the name and address of its recipient. Some are people I know from around the island, and I find myself thinking of them as I put the finishing touches on each frame. The short-term solution is the product we're making: reusable inserts that significantly reduce heat loss through older windows. But the long-term solution is the process: building our relationships with each other and responding to the needs of the community. We are not exactly experts; we are just people who happen to live here, learning to live together.

Community energy At the dinner break, Rob orders a pizza and we clear a space by the kitchen to sit and talk. I ask Zak how he came to organize this event with Tony. Their connection formed through his position as an energy fellow at COA's Community Energy Center, he says. The CEC was created to connect COA's sustainability and renewable energy efforts to our surrounding communities, and to ensure the continuation of these efforts from one class, independent study, or internship to another, "with the implication that we could work with the community and aid them in their projects," says Zak. For students, the CEC can serve as laboratory, sounding board, and classroom.

In exchange, student enthusiasm is channeled into ongoing initiatives from which the community benefits.

The event with WindowDressers, Zak continues, is a perfect example of the reciprocal relationships the CEC hopes to facilitate. And on campus, some COA students are now working with B&G carpenter John Barnes to build reusable window inserts for COA's draftier buildings.

Founded in 2016, the CEC is currently managed by Andrea Russell, MPhil '17. After spending a term with COA faculty and students on the energy-independent island of Samsø, Denmark, Andrea returned to secure home energy audits for six MDI residents. "Having been a part of the MDI community since 2001, doing this community work was like a homecoming for me," Andrea says. "Localism is very strong here. People whose families are from MDI hold a unique sway over the community at large. If we can get them excited about local renewable energy, we have a chance to truly change the energy infrastructure on the island as a whole. Their pride in MDI can be the driving force." Andrea's perspective demonstrates a fundamental premise behind the CEC's work: it's essential that solutions be both envisioned and carried out from within a community.

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Education first COA's work with the community is also an extension of the effort to navigate between the college's role as a leader in sustainable strategies and its responsibilities as a functioning institution with consumptive habits. "Other schools are getting close to complete dependence on renewable resources. That's a huge feat because colleges are incredibly visible," notes Zak. But, he adds, "they're buying it from elsewhere, like wind farms," or investing in renewable projects to earn carbon offsets—as COA once did. Additionally, many other schools have hired external consultants to research and advise their decisions, whereas COA is committed to integrating our sustainable efforts with our education so that student-led initiatives and class projects are the driving force behind these changes.

In 2007, COA made a global splash by becoming the first carbon-neutral college in the nation, reducing and avoiding the emissions it could, and purchasing offsets for the rest. But by 2013, COA had a new plan.

"We had bought carbon offsets and divested from fossil fuels, but we didn't actually change things on campus, we just changed who we invested our money in," says Zak. Rather than buying offsets, which helps the global market through sustainable investments, COA altered its approach to achieving energy independence, "veering more toward the idea of producing all of our energy on campus, whether in the form of electrons or wood pellets or heat pumps to heat our spaces."

Energy framework In 2013, COA's All College Meeting ratified the energy framework created by the Campus Committee for Sustainability. The framework foregrounds education as a means to both improve school-wide environmental literacy and facilitate the essential planning, implementation, and analysis of the college's efforts to be free from fossil fuels by 2030. Under these guidelines, says Zak, "The most important part of developing any kind of project is student input, education, and involvement.

We hold classes to identify issues, come up with projects, and develop solutions that fit our systems." As a result, students learn through experience to think practically and to see obstacles as resources. Lisa Bjerke '13, MPhil '17, whose focus has been on encouraging others to view waste as "discarded resources," adds that "COA can't buy itself out of this situation, just like the world can't buy itself out of this situation." The college's new framework, she says, is grounded in the conviction that "students have to first learn about the process of change-making before they can go out into the world and create more change." By placing projects in the hands of students, COA puts human ecology to task—and demonstrates our trust that the learning process is the living process.

"We're going to come up with rough solutions first," continues Lisa, "and through that process learn how to

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come up with better ones." In COA's new strategy, process is essential.

Former CEC energy fellow Spencer Gray '17 has focused on rooftop solar and electric vehicles. He finds that classes in this vein, "are almost treated like a business, and you have to bring a proposal to the people who will be funding it. When I'm working with businesses in town, and providing counseling for them, it's a practical application." Students actualize their education through application; in turn, islanders benefit from the students' work. The CEC creates the framework for this authentic and reciprocal learning process: helping community members transition toward renewable energy sources while aiding organizations like the CEC in developing statewide energy solutions.

Real people; Real issues Zak recently completed his internship with MDI Clean Energy Partners (MDI CEP), a local nonprofit founded by William Osborn and Steve Katona, former COA president. Willy and Steve collaborated with Anna Demeo, COA lecturer and director of energy education and management, to launch the CEC, which is funded by grants, including one from the US Department of Agriculture's Rural Energy for America program. One of Zak's internship responsibilities at MDI CEP was to research community solar models—cooperatively owned solar arrays—tailor them to fit Maine policies, and publish his findings online for others to access.

For Mainers who don't own their homes, community solar makes the conversion to renewable energy sources more cost-effective and thus attainable, building networks within communities, since consumers don't necessarily need to be located where the energy is generated.

During his internship, Spencer worked on a proposal to construct a community solar array at Beech Hill Farm. When asked about the challenges to the project, which is

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still in the planning stages, he talked about land-use policies: "It all depends on how the holder of the easement interprets the language. Putting solar panels in a field is not like digging a new oil well, but depending on how you read the language, is it utilizing a resource, or building a new building?" Other factors include "zoning setbacks, local infrastructure—whether the utility system can handle the electricity—and neighbors." Zak and Spencer both emphasize that developing the models isn't just about crunching numbers; you have to be able to relate to individual stakeholders and to anticipate their needs and concerns.

Beyond technology and technique, students are learning to navigate the human side of sustainability. When you're working "with real people and real issues," as Zak says, the stakes are higher. These risks, however, are the conditions through which the community itself becomes a classroom.

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Together, Ana Zabala '20, left, and Gillian Welch '19, right, stretch plastic over the frame of a window insert to create a clear, more energyefficient window. Photo by Zakary Kendall '17.

The connections built through the CEC will enable us to re-envision what's possible and not possible for the community as a whole. And in the process, we become empowered within a situation that can otherwise feel largely out of our control. For more, visit coa.edu/cec. *** Eloise Schultz '16 recently completed her teaching certification in English language arts. She plays trumpet in the band GoldenOak and is the oral history and youth outreach intern at the MDI Historical Society.

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"The most important part of developing any kind of project is student input, education, and involvement."

Zak Kendall '17 19

Growing Greener One human ecologist at a time When Jason Mark, editor-in-chief of Sierra, chose COA as the top "cool school," he used the words by a landslide.

Clearly, Sierra recognized the multitude of approaches COA uses to become a more savvy, environmentally educated campus. There are literally hundreds of ways we seek to walk our talk, from light switches and trash choices to investments and courses. Here are a few.

For more, visit the Environmental Commitment section under About COA at coa.edu.

Energy Education

Waste Begone

COA's sustainable efforts are undertaken by students. They've sited and installed solar panels, found ways to limit the energy spent on irrigation pumping at Beech Hill Farm, and assessed campus heating needs and heating alternatives, like investigating heat pump technology for utilizing the warmth of the campus kitchen to warm domestic hot water. All furthering our practice of learning by doing.

In just two years, COA's trash plunged by nearly 50%. At the college's third annual waste audit— pioneered by Lisa Bjerke '13, MPhil '17—a week's worth of trash was weighed and counted. Only 30%, 577 pounds, was landfill-bound, down from 1,115 pounds in the first audit. How? Attention. Better buying and reusing practices. Better communication of how and where to recycle. And many more bins for reusing and recycling.

Climate Shake Sergio Cahueque '17 was invited to join former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at a celebration for the Paris climate agreement.

Thoreau Workshops

Harvest Sharing Some 70 low-income families ate organic produce in 2016, courtesy of Share the Harvest, run by COA students and farmers.

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Lobbying, messaging, listening, and organizing are essential in advocating for justice and the environment. Once each term, COA holds daylong workshops funded by the Thoreau Foundation for students to learn and practice these skills. This year, presenters Chellie Pingree '79, Lauren Nutter '10, Emily Postman '11, and Anjali Appadurai '12 shared their experiences and expertise with current students.

Trash to Treasure Need shoes? Guitar? A slinky dress for a party? The Free Box, chock full of pre-used goods, is about as old as the college.

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Lights Out

"WTF!"

Enter a room, the lights go on.

Leave, an electronic sensor turns them off. It's standard environmental design. But architect Bruce Coldham didn't need sensors for the rooms of the super-insulated Kathryn W. Davis Residence Village.

"COA has a uniquely reliable conservation mentality. Why leave the lights on for a pre-set period when the COA human computer is programmed for immediate switchoff? This was a first for us."

"Where's the finance!" protesters cried at the 2016 UNFCCC. Speaking to Amy Goodman ('80) of Democracy Now! Aneesa Khan '17 elaborated.

Of the expected $100 billion from the US to help developing nations handle climate change, the UN received less than $34 billion, she told Amy, adding, "We spent $13 trillion to bail the banks out during the financial crisis—Where's the equity? Where's the justice?"

Poster Power In Dru Colbert's design course, students learn visual problemsolving by creating posters for local groups.

Fearsome Fleece Each time we launder our warm, convenient fleece jackets, says Abigail Barrows, MPhil '17, bits of plastic wash off the fabric, headed for the ocean. Every ocean. While all fabric sheds, plastic fibers are forever. Analyzing Maine shellfish— lobsters, mussels, oysters—Abby found a concerning level of microplastics in the tissues. She's already used these facts to help achieve plastic reduction legislation in the state.​

Community Garden Edible flowers, veggies, and herbs, the garden is both lab and classroom. As old as COA—and with plots for neighbors.

Sustainable Strategies

Divested

Entrepreneurs can change the world, and students in Jay Friedlander's Sustainable Strategies class are assisting them, linking with local breweries, restaurants, and other businesses, asking hard questions. Ultimately the students offer innovative and often quite valuable suggestions that can improve the business' social and environmental impacts—while not forgetting that all-important bottom line.

It was swift. Students met with Andy Griffiths, administrative dean, to divest of fossil fuelrelated stocks, then visited the trustee investment committee. A meeting or two later, the board agreed. That was a Saturday. By Tuesday, COA was divested. Said Lucas Burdick '15, beyond moral and political justice, "divesting was reinvesting and didn't mean we had to lose any money, or raise anyone's tuition."

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[Re]Produce A business plan to limit farm waste by freezing surplus, unwanted produce shared first prize at the 2016 Maine Food System Innovation Challenge.

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Away Big Stuff

Solar-Electric Stations Campus and farm solarelectric stations enable electric vehicles—visitors, locals, ours—nearly fossil fuelfree travel.

On a cold January morning, COA awoke to this email note: "If you have anything that you want to be removed or disposed of but don't know how because of its size, material, or type of product, please send a stuff-removal request to bg-stuffremoval@coa.edu so that B&G [buildings and grounds] can help you with it." Mattresses.

Lumber. Other goods. As much as possible COA seeks to repurpose what comes in.

Leavings to Leaves Food scraps, napkins, grass clippings—COA composts what it can to grow next year's veggies and flowers.

Farm Schooling

Systemic Design

Conners Emerson students who had never seen kohlrabi now love its crunch and sweet taste, having harvested, chopped, even fermented it. They also learned how next year's apple comes from right where this year's is picked, along with lessons in soil science, math, English, and social studies, thanks to weekly 70-minute classes taught

by COA students—who also helped the school with greenhouses and composting.

Waiting to shower? In the Kathryn W. Davis Residence Village, your hot water has been heated by locally sourced wood pellets and prewarmed from the previous shower. Later, the greywater helps to irrigate COA's award-winning landscape. Gotta go? In the KWD Residence Village and the Deering Common Community Center the toilets are composting, the urinals waterless. And a foot of insulation lowers the heating need.

Investor Students

BYO … M Going to an Open Mic? Farm feast? Bring Your Own Utensils! Longing for some java? BYO Mug or deposit $1.

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Members of the student investment fund accentuate the positive as they manage some $15,000 of COA investments with the caveat that their worth must be trackable. Students apply enhanced environmental, social, and governance screens to better align their investments with COA values.

Meetings are a time for learning, dialog, and action related to the college's sustainable goals.

Peep! Peep!

Only Maine-raised meat from humane, free-range pastures on the menu, thank you. Often our farms are the source!

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Clean & Green

Solar Power

Russell Holway, head custodian, finds the best products— choosing peroxide over bleach, experimenting with waxed paper instead of plastic bags, buying Green Seal-certified cleaning products, and low-VOC paint, educating local distributors on health and toxicity. "I'm still learning—I continue to find greener products," he says. He's now learning even more, as COA's discarded resources king.

More than 750 panels on student residences, the pottery building, and the farms—many installed by students in Anna Demeo's Practicum in Renewable Energy course—provide about 11% of COA's energy needs. Thanks to these land-based solar collectors, we now can consider our research stations on Great Duck Island and Mount Desert Rock to be net-zero for electricity.

Pushing Pedals Need a bike? Borrow one through COA's bike-share program. For an hour, a day— or a term. Tools are available, too.

Glean Queen Apples, berries, chard, carrots, kale, squash—1.5 tons or 18,658 servings of excess or aesthetically unusual produce from Beech Hill Farm— went to food pantries, community kitchens, and the food insecure, thanks to COA's Gleaning Queen Morgan Heckerd '18 (pictured) and Hannah Semler '06 of Healthy Acadia, which gathered and distributed 65,000 pounds of food from regional fields.

Java Only fair trade coffee is served on campus. And while sparkling water is around, plain bottled water is neither sold nor distributed. Not since 2010.

Town Planning

Join Up!

When Isabel Mancinelli and Gordon Longsworth '91 teach Land Use Planning, students also get a lesson in public commitment. Surrounding communities ask for help and the class goes at it—from the island to Ellsworth, from creating zoning assessments to offering stormwater drainage plans, or identifying cycling and pedestrian routes.

Students serve as they learn, benefitting themselves and our communities.

COA committees and student organizations make many of the decisions that guide us. In addition to All College Meeting, where students, faculty, and staff gather to discuss policies and other matters, there's the Campus Committee on Sustainability, Council on Foreign Affairs, [Earth], Food Group, Student Framework for Environmental and Social Justice, and the Zero Waste Club—to name but a few.

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Earth Day It's COA's special holiday— celebrated with a community fair, and discussions, displays, dance, drumming, and more.

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Changing the Rules: Cooperatives, Institutions, and Economics A discussion of possibilities with Davis Taylor Interviewed by Andrea Lepcio '79 Davis Taylor, faculty member in economics, sees worker-owned cooperatives as contributing to a future economy with more sustainable goals. He's been exploring the possibilities recently, so we asked Andrea Lepcio '79 to spend some time talking with him about cooperatives and the economic institutions that might promote them.

Andrea Lepcio '79: Davis, can you talk about what possibilities worker-owned cooperatives can open up?

Davis Taylor: I'm on the board of the Cooperative Development Institute, where Rob Brown ('91) works. We wrote the report, Cooperatives Build a Better Maine: New Ideas on Economic and Community Development (maine. coop). We wrote it prior to the elections but now we feel it's even more relevant. While there are complex reasons why Trump won, to say it has nothing to do with economic inequality is ignoring the obvious. His election really frames the question of how can we begin to restore economic well-being to working-class Americans.

Andrea: Can we?

Davis: Well, co-ops, spreading ownership of the economy, just make so much sense. It's more than just getting a share of profits. While people who work for co-ops don't get rich, there's more pride in working, more sense of control over one's life, and co-ops return the social to the work environment. You're countering Marx's accusation that selling labor alienates people from the product, from their coworkers. Studies show that what motivates people at work is not salary, it's the work and social interactions, and making it engaging—so being able to design your own work, find meaning in it, and connecting with others is what makes work valuable. From a human ecological perspective, I think reintegrating social life with work life is critical and will cause us to de-emphasize simply earning money. That relates to sustainability because there's plenty of evidence that our consumption patterns are tied to our work patterns. People who have satisfying work are less likely to feel the need to spend a lot of money to project their identity. If we're going to consume less, we have to make work better.

Andrea: I love that.

Davis: When researchers and activists imagine a sustainable world, they envision a lot of co-ops. Social activists say there is no justice without control and there is no control without ownership. But the "sustainability world" doesn't talk much about how we're going to get there. People who work with co-ops know it's not easy to start or run a worker-owned business. I think the

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sustainability community is largely clueless of this; they seem to think co-ops are a groovy thing that are just going to happen. The research I'm doing now seeks to rectify this disconnect by clarifying the relationship between coops and sustainability. If we're going to have more co-ops, there needs to be cultural changes, policy changes. If we can harness the sustainability world in the interest of the co-op world, we could get a lot further.

Andrea: Define sustainability.

Davis: I don't have a single definition—the standard one is that future generations are at least as well-off as we are. Another is that the total amount of capital—financial, built, natural, and human—is increasing or not declining.

That involves assumptions about substitutability between natural capital—the planet's basic assets, from bedrock to air—and, for example, human capital. We have to have enough natural capital to keep the planet running. A third definition treats sustainability as political discourse.

Something is sustainable when people have a voice in their future through the political process. Theoretically, all three of these would produce the same results, but there's no consensus. I'm pretty pessimistic about achieving sustainability as many conceive it.

What I tend to focus on now is that sustainability is far from dichotomous; it's not either we're sustainable, or we're not sustainable. We can think about this a bit more concretely in the context of climate change. It's not like there will or will not be climate change, or that less than a two-degree increase in global temperatures will be okay, and greater than two degrees will be disastrous.

And there is no single we who can avoid climate change if we do the right things. It's a spectrum: there are some people being seriously hurt by climate change right now, some who are moderately hurt, and those who will probably never be hurt, even if we roast ourselves and seriously damage our environment and economy. This last group has the resources to build higher seawalls, get more air conditioning, withstand more severe storms, etcetera. Instead of dichotomizing things as sustainable or unsustainable, I think it is more accurate to recognize that we're changing the condition of the world, and many people are going to be impacted. Our humanity compels

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us to steer change toward more just conditions in which people are less vulnerable and freer to be fully human.

That's where my research is heading.

Andrea: Are you pessimistic because of climate or are you pessimistic in general?

Davis: We seem to be incapable of steering toward anything approximating sustainability. This is where the theory known as new institutional economics comes in— institutions being the rules of the game, socially, culturally, and economically. There are formal institutions like laws and constitutions and contracts, and informal institutions that are norms of behavior, expectations—soft squishy things like that.

Andrea: In the age of Trump, it seems there are no norms of behavior.

Davis: Trump is making me grapple with this because, theoretically, institutional change is supposed to happen slowly. But a better way to describe the election is that over the past thirty years, tensions built up around the increasing economic inequality in the United States, but there was very little institutional change. All of a sudden something snapped, Trump was elected, and now we've got some significant institutional change happening.

In the context of sustainability, the rules of the game— the institutions in the economy—determine economic outcomes. There are countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America with institutional structures that absolutely inhibit their economic growth. Institutions have to fit into society, or more accurately, societies reflect institutions.

In the US, we have very good institutions for capitalistic growth, but now we're deciding we want sustainability.

The proper institutions for sustainability are significantly different from the ones for capitalistic growth.

health, leading to negative effects on human and natural communities. It's not that the sustainability community wants to eliminate private property, they just see a need for balance in the institutions regarding property rights.

Andrea: And what institutions would encourage a cooperative economy?

Davis: An example is that worker-owned businesses govern themselves under a one worker, one vote rule; this flies in the face of the more familiar capitalistic notion that votes are dependent on how much capital investment people have in the business. Arguments can be made for either, it depends on whether you think people or capital are more important in the operation of a business. There are some businesses that are very capital-intensive, such as auto factories; they should probably stay investorowned and controlled. But returning to my arguments regarding the quality of work, we would benefit greatly from more peoplecentered businesses that prioritize good work, while still giving capital a normal return. To do that, people need to see the idea of one worker, one vote as nothing out of the ordinary.

In the US, we have very good institutions for capitalistic growth, but now we're deciding we want sustainability.

The proper institutions for sustainability are significantly different from the ones for capitalistic growth.

Andrea: So what institutions inhibit sustainability?

Davis: Well, for example, strict private property rights are an institutional arrangement that are great for economic growth because people invest more in property that they know can't be taken away from them, and whose rights of use are almost unlimited. This high level of investment leads to greater productivity and economic growth.

But from a sustainability perspective, what people do with their property can impact local or global ecological

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Andrea: The idea of a worker co-op is still new— Davis: A lot of institutional change centers around changing what people perceive as possible and normal. In our current culture, we lionize the wealthy investors of Wall Street, while the possibilities surrounding worker ownership remain largely unknown.

But there's plenty of evidence that worker-owned businesses can be very successful. In many ways, we just have to get the word out.

I should add that it was COA students that led me to focus on institutions. They appreciated the models of neoclassic economics, but they recognized that there were all kinds of things missing. I found myself talking about history, about the way businesses are structured, about all these things that turn out to be highly institutional.

I finally came across new institutional economics and I realized this is the missing piece. Neoclassical economics ignores transaction costs, ignores missing information, assumes everyone has perfect information and all transactions are costless. New institutional economics says if you include information costs and transaction costs, then all of a sudden the rules matter immensely, just as they do for cooperatives, and for sustainability.

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Enriching the Earth Abe Noe-Hays '00 and his Rich Earth Institute

By Marina Garland '12

Dean Hamilton, collaborating farmer, and Abe Noe-Hays '00 (in blue shirt) apply 1,000 gallons of sanitized urine per acre to a test plot on Dean's hayfield in Brattleboro, Vermont.

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"How long would it take my family of four to save enough urine to fertilize our hayfield?"

I ask fellow alumnus Abe Noe-Hays '00. He raises his eyebrows. "It's five acres, you said? You're going to need some friends."

Abe has many friends, or rather, participants, donating their nutrient-rich urine to his projects. More than one hundred participants, in fact, who generate over five thousand gallons of urine each year to be used in fertilizing trials on the hayfields of two local farms near his home in Brattleboro, Vermont. As a farmer with a hayfield that needs a little TLC, I am duly impressed by the photographs he shows me of the experiment; the swaths without urine look like my tired hayfield, while the strips with urine fertilizer grow lush and green. "Every day, one person's urine contains enough nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium to grow the wheat for a loaf of bread. And a lot of trace nutrients too," Abe tells me. It's enough to make me think again about the valuable nutrients my family is flushing away. Then again, maybe I'm an easy person to convince. After all, I spent my four years at COA using facilities installed by Abe himself.

Human ecology of waste Abe has been applying human ecology to composting and human waste diversion since his early days at COA. Eight years before he installed the composting toilets in the Kathryn W. Davis Residence Village, he piloted the idea with homemade commodes in the handicap stalls of the Thorndike Library. He had become interested in the sources of soil fertility while working at Beech Hill Farm and studying agroecology. "Where does it all come from and how does it get renewed?" he wondered.

"I realized that the nutrients were sort of on a oneway track. We would recycle them on the farm—we composted everything, used cover crops—but when that fertility [the produce] leaves the farm, it ends up on someone's plate, then in someone's toilet." So with permission from COA's buildings and grounds, a carefully engineered compost bin with twenty-seven sensors, and the Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins as assurance for skeptics—Look, it won't smell!—Abe sought to achieve high-temperature composting on a home scale.

"I was afraid my toilets weren't going to get enough business," Abe tells me with a chuckle. But the opposite was true; he had to shut them down for most of the week because he was on track to collect more "donations" than would fit in his compost bin. The experiment was a success, a perfect senior project for a student whose other projects included an independent study on vermiculture, or worm composting, and being the "compost Kaiser," in charge of all the Take-A-Break food waste. His senior project, he says, "got me hooked on composting. It was human ecology. It was psychology. It was biology. There was physics and chemistry. I learned a lot about thermodynamics—it engaged so many different ways of thinking and angles of looking at things, and a lot of my different abilities. So I finished at COA saying, alright, I guess I'm in the composting toilet business!"

With a grin he adds, "It was a seamless transition." He started by fixing his parents' composting toilet and kept going, his passion and expertise naturally developing into his business, Full Circle Composting Consulting. But he

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wasn't completely satisfied. "Because of rules restricting its use, which vary from state to state, it becomes really difficult to use the compost beneficially. It felt like I was providing toilets, but not cycling nutrients." In 2011, Abe received an enthusiastic call from fellow Brattleboro resident Kim Nace, whose master's thesis in 1989 centered on composting toilets. That connection sparked a collaboration that soon became the Rich Earth Institute, which today employs six people and works on the myriad questions surrounding the best methods for and uses of urine recycling.

Collection mechanics Kim gives me the full tour of her own home system, starting with the normal-looking bathroom with a varnished wooden box where a toilet would be. The toilet seat would be normal too, except for a molded plastic divider that shunts urine to a separate receptacle down cellar. Feces and toilet paper go down the back, followed by a scoop of sweet-smelling wood shavings.

We head next to the basement where three rectangular recycling bins—the sort of bin you might see on a trash pick-up day—sit on wheels. The lids, however, have been modified. One is hooked up to a flexible plastic hood sealed to a pipe coming through the ceiling above.

These bins are for solid waste, and they are on a simple rotation. It takes six months for the first to fill up. By the time the third bin is full, the first is over a year old and has decomposed into dry compost. And the urine? Kim points to a pipe that comes down through the ceiling, leads underground, and then to their side yard where a 275-gallon plastic tank surrounded by insulated concrete is buried. It takes six to eight months for her family of three (who work from home) to fill it.

Another such tank resides above-ground at a nearby urine depot, where participating families bring urine in five-gallon, rectangular plastic jugs to a pump-out station beside the tank. These small jugs allow participants who do not have built-in waste diversion systems in their homes (or a garden or farm on which to use their

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nutrients) to donate their urine to the Rich Earth Institute.

I eye these five-gallon "cubies," as they are called, a bit skeptically. Lacking the Y chromosome, I have a hard time imagining how to use them. I needn't worry. While a funnel allows the cubie to function as a stand-alone urinal, those who prefer to sit can fit a nifty insert called a "nun's cap" into their flush toilets. This receptacle has a spout that makes it easy to pour the contents into the cubie after each use. Vinegar is added to each fresh cubie to reduce odor and lock up nutrients. In fact, Abe says that an odor coming from your compost or composting toilet means nutrients are escaping. The Rich Earth Institute has brought portable urine collecting toilets to large festivals such as Brattleboro's Strolling of

the Heifers. Users find them much more pleasant and ecologically friendly than a plastic box full of liquid, blue, perfumey chemicals.

Beyond farming But if you're not a farmer in need of fertilizer, why worry about what you flush away? Abe and Kim offer some compelling facts, noting that there's no real away in flushing. In her own home, Kim estimates that she saves 12,800 gallons of water each year just by eschewing the flush toilet. That's especially attractive after a dry Vermont summer in which many reliable springs went dry. But even in a wet year, it's less water for the wastewater treatment plant to process, and,

Abe Noe-Hays '00, research director, and Kim Nace, executive director, are co-founders of the Rich Earth Institute.

Photos courtesy of the Rich Earth Institute.

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more importantly, diverts most of her home's nutrients away from the sewer system. Getting those nutrients to a farm keeps them out of waterways, where discharge from water treatment plants can be a substantial culprit in nutrient pollution and eutrophication. It's the urine, Abe explains, that contains most of the nutrients in human waste, a fact that surprises most people. "So if you're looking to recycle nutrients, and you're thinking about starting with number one or number two, urine is the one to start with." Partly for economic reasons, the town of Brattleboro is considering teaming up with the Rich Earth Institute to use urine diversion, rather than costly treatment upgrades, to meet new, more stringent pollution requirements.

In Sweden, says Abe, urine diversion is encouraged by the government because of the environmental benefits. "The World Health Organization says that pure urine collected at home is safe to use immediately as fertilizer. If you're using it on raw crops, wait a month before harvesting them. If it's urine collected beyond the household level, store it for at least a month at room temperature." The United States, however, does not yet have regulations regarding urine diversion, so the Rich Earth Institute's efforts are currently lumped in with wastewater treatment plants. As such, they must pasteurize the urine before applying it. "We put it on hayfields because we wanted to start the project in a way that didn't stir up too many people's anxieties. We've since done trials on vegetables, but psychologically … well, there are plenty of hayfields!"

The Rich Earth Institute recently collaborated with the University of Michigan on a two-year study seeking evidence of pharmaceuticals and associated metabolites in vegetable crops fertilized with urine. "We were looking at the soil, the crops that were grown in the soil, and the soil water." The study used urine from their portable urinals and from permanent urinals at a major rest area in eastern Massachusetts, guaranteeing a large and diverse sample size. The most prevalent compound?

Caffeine. Followed by acetaminophen—Tylenol. But even as the most abundant drug by far in urine, caffeine was at such low levels in the lettuce that one would have to eat a whole salad from the study plot every day for two thousand years to accrue as much caffeine as is in a single cup of coffee.

COA beginnings Our conversation circles back to COA, and then, of course, to human ecology. Reflecting back to what he loved about COA, Abe recalls, "When I was starting to think about colleges, a friend gave me a copy of the Princeton Review

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with COA bookmarked. I thought, Wow, this is so cool, I can't wait to read the rest of the book! I thought the whole thing was going to be full of schools like COA." Fresh from completing the Appalachian Trail, "I felt pretty grownup and ready to tackle the next thing. COA was a place where I could pursue the science that I was passionate about … but have it incorporated with everything else I took. So I also took literature and philosophy and I loved how when I sat down to write papers often there'd be elements of all of my classes in those papers. At first it felt like cheating, and then I realized, no, it was working!"

Faculty members "Suzanne Morse and John Anderson were really influential in my course of studies," Abe continues, "Suzanne got me turned onto agroecology and excited about all of the potentials for more sustainable agriculture systems. And when I was trying to figure out what my senior project would be, it was John who said, You're into all this composting, why not do composting toilets? That's what got me going in this direction.

"It's exciting to be doing this work that I love doing.

I feel so lucky that it's a total progression from my undergrad studies to my senior project, and now to this work that I love. I'm a research director with a BA! And it works because it's a field where the cutting edge is a lot of hands-on stuff that takes a human ecologist to do. We have legal and permitting stuff, we have human relationships, we have agriculture, chemistry. I do a lot of hands-on, applied, quantitative experimentation that's right out of my thesis. It's just so engaging to have that many facets to the work. … And I get to tinker! I've always loved to tinker." Many specialized partners "have a piece of it, and they interface into this project in a great way, there's a lot of synergy. But we're this hub, and I feel like the human ecological approach is what makes it possible."

As I bundle up for the cold outdoors, one last question occurs to me. "Can I make a donation?"

For more on the work of Abe Noe-Hays '00 and the Rich Earth Institute visit richearthinstitute.org. ***** Marina Garland '12 lives and works in Weathersfield, Vermont on a small, mostly subsistence, intergenerational farm, where she and her husband, Hank, tend gardens, orchards, sheep, chickens, and bees. Seasonal work adds pruning, grafting, cider making, sugaring, haying on neighboring farms, and teaching natural history at the local elementary school—work in which human ecology is, of course, ever-present.

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In Their Own Words

Alumni reflect on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Collected and Edited by Marni Berger '09 Since 2005, College of the Atlantic students have attended the annual Conference of Parties, or COPs, to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the UNFCCC. By 2006, some COA students were shaping their entire fall term around these meetings, taking classes and full-term residencies to pore over diplomatic language and investigate national histories and international treaties with Doreen Stabinsky, faculty member in global environmental policy, or Ken Cline, faculty member in law and policy, sometimes with both. Whether the students have become international negotiators as Juan Pablo Hoffmaister '07 was for a time, or farmers like Tara Allen '15, the immersion in international treaty-making has been formative, even life-changing.

Negotiating for the G-77 in 2011, Juan Hoffmaister '07, seated, second from right, consults on national adaptation plans with Robert Owen-Jones, chair of the Subsidiary Body for Implementation and member of the Australian delegation. Photo courtesy of IISD ENB.

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Juan Pablo Hoffmaister '07: International Policy Specialist Juan Pablo Hoffmaister '07 and classmate Jessica Glynn '06 were instrumental in creating the very first delegation COA sent to the UNFCCC. This was the Montreal COP 11 of 2005.

Already Juan was a leader, having been elected as one of fourteen youth advisors to the United Nations Environment Programme, or UNEP, in September 2005. Following his graduation from COA, Juan received a Watson fellowship to study how communities around the world were adapting to extreme weather changes. After completing a master's at the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden, Juan went on to serve as a lead negotiator on climate change, first for Bolivia under the administration of Evo Morales, then for the G-77, a coalition of 134 developing nations that jointly promote their interests at UN multilateral negotiations. During the negotiations that created the 2015 Paris Agreement, Juan was lead negotiator for several of the agreement's chapters. He now leads the policy team at Green Climate Fund, an arm of the UNFCCC dedicated to assisting developing countries in financing their response to climate change.

Coming from Costa Rica, a country that doesn't have a military and is heavily engaged in international diplomacy, the belief in peaceful outcomes and peaceful resolutions to complex problems is something I've grown up knowing—that's the way to do things. That has always been with me.

In Bolivia, I was supporting the implementation of the country's entire response to climate change— national planning efforts and some initiatives Bolivia was designing, but also supporting a lot of the work on foreign policy. Then I joined their national delegation and supported negotiations related to climate change impacts and Bolivia's response to them—what we call adaptation in the United Nations.

At that point I started negotiating for this larger bloc— the G-77—and through that started the work on the general concept of response to climate change impacts.

This led to creating what is now a new field of work in

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international relations, loss and damage. This is more than just responding to impacts but actually addressing those impacts that are too big to be resolved, starting from understanding the risks, to taking a more proactive approach to addressing them. Through that work, I was the lead negotiator for the Warsaw International Mechanism of Loss and Damage that the UN launched in 2013. It now does work ranging from assessing these impacts, to more specific issues, like applying financial incentives to addressing risk, or trying to better coordinate humanitarian responses to some of the major droughts and disasters worldwide.

The work that we do at the Green Climate Fund is financing some of the initiatives that countries are taking, from reducing emissions to building resilience nationwide; from climate information services in East Africa to concrete initiatives dealing with coastal management on islands in the South Pacific. It is quite a spectrum of work that we're financing.

Do I ever feel totally discouraged? Many times. Many times. These are very complex international decisionmaking processes. Now as I look back to see the minuteby-minute of all of these processes, I can begin to see how some of those things that were quite sad and frustrating back then have actually moved along—maybe not at the pace that we've wanted, but at least they are moving.

COA offered me the opportunity to get much more serious about international affairs and understand the complexities that go with trying to wrap your head around the field of international governance, international relations, as well as law. It was a rich experience. I can't think of any other place where I could take such complex and advanced courses that had to be studied together, and often it was maybe just five students who were involved. Being at COA also offered an opportunity to really value creative thinking and problem solving—and that's not to be underestimated.

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Lauren Nutter '10, center, joins the group of Udall Foundation scholars she facilitated during the annual scholars orientation. Photo by Martha Lochert.

Lauren Nutter '10: Mediator While studying for a master's degree in international environmental policy and conflict resolution at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Lauren Nutter '10 continues part-time at the Udall Foundation's US Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution, where she's been for five years. At COA, Lauren attended several COPs, becoming fascinated by the need for collaboration in environmental policy work. After graduation, she traveled the world, further exploring youth empowerment in environmental decision-making on a Watson fellowship.

At the Udall Foundation, my work has been to improve collaboration in environmental decision-making and policy processes, such as implementing parts of the Clean Water Act and bringing together local, state, and tribal leaders with the National Ocean Council on ocean planning and sustainability issues. I'm especially proud of the National Ocean Policy work.

The policy encourages regional planning on ocean issues and increased coordination among agencies responsible for ocean management and regulation. It also calls for government-to-government engagement of Native American tribes at the same level as states and federal agencies, and emphasizes the value of traditional knowledge in ocean management. It is historic for the tribes to be included proactively at the highest level of government. My biggest impact there was helping to design and facilitate discussions among state, tribal, and local leaders. These meetings were powerful as tribes had their perspectives understood and supported on a deeper level.

My most exciting days have been out in the field, like when I would go to the Obama White House to discuss ocean policy work with the National Ocean Council—and on occasion take advantage of some after-hours bowling at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

When I came to COA, I was sure I wanted to study marine biology, but I took a range of classes my first 32

year, one of which was a Ken Cline policy-oriented class.

I became interested in the process of working with multiple perspectives to inform decision-making and the importance of collaboration in solving environmental challenges. I still took science classes, but my path was evolving beyond just wanting to be a marine biologist.

My first UNFCCC was in Bali in 2007. That year there was no UNFCCC-focused class. Matt Maiorana '11 and I went as part of the youth organization SustainUS. There were thousands of people at the meeting, and we were trying to figure out where and when to be places and how to actually engage in the process. We were all kind of teaching each other. But it was formative—all these diverse people, perspectives, and knowledge. It's a challenging, messy process to try to work together to resolve issues. And that fascinated me—the hard work of consensus building among all these countries, the urgency of climate change, and the heartbreak of young people from island nations advocating for their countries, uncertain of their futures.

After the Bali conference, Doreen Stabinsky created a climate negotiations class, offering space to debrief what I had experienced firsthand. That and other classes helped me explore how to tackle big, international challenges, such as climate change.

Working for the Udall Foundation's US Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution has built upon the challenges I saw through the climate talks—the hard work of fostering collaboration, of oftentimes not having neutral facilitators and mediators, and working with diverse people and skill sets. I remember seeing how a chair can do a really great job with a group and how that can help create success for consensus, versus the challenges when that's not the case. These experiences definitely influenced my desire to work in environmental collaboration and conflict resolution, bringing me full circle for a more internationally focused master's degree.

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Matt Maiorana '11 at the COP 21 in Paris, France in 2015. Photo by Julia DeSantis Maiorana '12.

Matt Maiorana '11: Organizer Matt Maiorana '11 went to his first UN negotiation as a second-year in 2007. He's since attended multiple UN meetings, but after that first meeting he helped create COA's environmental justice group Earth in Brackets, or [Earth], and obtain official observer status at the UNFCCC. Matt has worked for both the government and advocacy groups, including as an organizer for the 2014 People's Climate March. Currently, he's with the nonprofit Oil Change International. He also cofounded the website activistlab.org with Sam Miller-McDonald '09.

The first negotiation I went to was Bali in 2007. That's when they put in place a roadmap to the Copenhagen negotiations of 2009, where we were going to create the agreement that would solve climate change. I thought, This is going to save the world! So my years at COA were knee-deep in climate issues. I went to negotiations, worked for the House of Representatives' Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming, and interned in the State Department office that dealt with climate change to see if the inside game was where I was going to fit. But I found it way too bureaucratic and ended up working for Avaaz, a global advocacy organization.

Then, as a senior, Climate Action Network hired me in the year leading up to Copenhagen, first as an intern, then as staff. I went to five negotiations that year because there were a bunch of prep meetings. And it all came crashing down in Copenhagen! This house of cards I'd built for myself was totally blasted. I was super disillusioned—and I still had to get back to campus to try to graduate on time.

I didn't want to have anything to do with the UN or with climate. Then Julia DeSantis '12 was interested in going to the UN Commission on Social Development in New York. I've heard you went to the UN a bunch; do you

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have any advice? she asked. The only thing I could muster was, Prepare to be disappointed. Then I felt bad, so I went with her to the Commission on the Status of Women. Six years after, last October, we got married!

But Copenhagen, and having to wrestle with the hard reality of the challenges we're facing, that this isn't a short-term endeavor, was my growing-up moment.

Coming to terms with this as a lifelong struggle toward justice, that we're always going to fall short—because we're already falling short and climate change is already here—is a tough thing to internalize.

The orientation I take now is less about the grand abstract sense of solving climate change and more about creating change better—being a better activist, a better citizen, finding new and better ways to engage people and build community and resilience with them. I used to just work until I fell asleep. Now I'm taking time to appreciate life and marriage and friends and family, because that's what it's all about.

ActivistLab is an online space to share what we're learning, what we're doing well, what we're doing poorly, to examine our assumptions, challenge ourselves to take risks and push beyond what's easy to cross-pollinate between issues, movements, organizations. Also to tell stories of who we are and why we do this work, because progress is slow and it happens in fits and starts. I'm excited to be working on it with Sam Miller-McDonald '09.

He's at Oxford now getting a PhD and looking at these issues through a more academic lens.

The time that I spent off campus as an undergrad, the connections I made, and the work I did in the real world has led to this career. It's different when you're applying for a job and can say, I organized this rally and mobilized these people. You're able to enter the job market with four years of experience.

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Trudi Zundel '13 speaks about ETC's online resources to a group of representatives from Africa, Latin America, and Europe at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference in December 2016. Photo courtesy of ETC.

Trudi Zundel '13: Communicator Trudi Zundel '13 attended two UNFCCC conferences while at COA. She is now a master's candidate in geography at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, as well as the first full-time communications coordinator at ETC Group, a nonprofit working to "address the socioeconomic and ecological issues surrounding new technologies that could have an impact on the world's poorest and most vulnerable people."

With political science and governance courses, it's hard to do hands-on, practical learning, because it's an abstracted system. In COA's UNFCCC course, we spent the term learning about the ins and outs, the politics and history of that political forum, and then we were able to experience those politics in the place where they occurred.

The two UNFCCC negotiations definitely inspired me, but many of my good friends returned saying, The international space won't save us. Our work on the ground is more important, which is also valuable. It can go both ways. Engaging in international governance is really only useful if you also pay attention to the impacts of international policy at smaller scales.

I've been learning a lot about the national and subnational levels relating to agriculture and climate change. The year after I graduated, I worked with the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice, a civil society network that seeks to bring campaigns around energy, food, and migration together under one framework of climate justice. I did some writing and communications for them and worked for part of the year in the Philippines, where I learned so much about social movements in the Global South. Afterward, I started my master's in Ontario, researching how a concept from the UN is implemented

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in Ghana. This is helping to put the UNFCCC and other UN fora into perspective and better understand the impacts that political agreements might have in the real world.

ETC Group is also focused on the real-world implications of global policy. A lot of the communications work we do is with governments—communicating some of the social impacts of various international policies. I also work with other civil society groups, trying to build a movement to influence global public opinion on climate change issues, and mainstream some more progressive issues on climate justice—especially in North America—to communicate the importance of the global impacts of climate change.

I wouldn't have the understanding of the global significance of those politics if I hadn't studied with Doreen Stabinsky, but also if I hadn't taken other courses outside the UN system. I took Nature of Narrative with Karen Waldron and a short story class with Candice Stover. Looking back, they taught me to think critically about texts, which is so valuable in my master's and my job. We learned about critical thought beyond just the books we were reading, extending those critical-thinking tools to our own lives, and learning to understand radically different perspectives.

In my work I help facilitate people's stories and I try to tell them in a way that will resonate with different audiences, but they are not my stories. I'll never be able to communicate climate change or agricultural issues as effectively as someone who lives them. That humility and also that responsibility to not make it about me— especially working at the intersection of global and localized issues—is important, as is understanding that a communicator's role includes a responsibility for making sure other people's voices are heard.

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Tara Allen '15 holds a bunch of kale in the fields of Green Flamingo Organics. Photo by Shayna Hunt.

Tara Allen '15: Farmer Tara Allen '15 attended her first COP as a high school senior at the School of Environmental Studies in Apple Valley, Minnesota, and her second in 2009 as a COA student, which inspired her to take an activist turn away from policy. In her fourth year, Tara interned at Green Flamingo Organics, a Florida organic farm where she is now the manager.

much time and energy into doing all these things and trying to raise awareness and talk to people!

The organic farming movement is small in Florida, and it's a little more challenging, but it's also exciting. Florida has a reputation for retirement and Disney World and vacation, not for awesome organic farming. We have a lot of retirees who live here, so I think sometimes it's just about education and informing people about foods like Seminole pumpkins, a native Florida species of pumpkin that thrives year-round, also okra, muscadine grapes, persimmons. We could be eating things that are more native. A lot of people go to the grocery store and do the routine they've done for so many years. Asking them to think about stepping out of that is challenging. This is my third season at Green Flamingo Organics, which is about seven years old. It's come a long way since the beginning, by persisting, by going to local restaurants and saying, Hey, we have local produce, do you want to buy it?

You have to really love this work and be willing to give yourself to it. We start at seven, and some days we're done at three, and some days we're not done until six. You never know what's going to happen, and you have to be willing to keep going. I'd love to start my own farm, but here I'm learning a lot, and every season I build upon my knowledge. I love everything I'm doing, I definitely feel like I found my thing. Which is very lucky! Some people don't find their thing for a long time.

The COA class that I took to prepare for the UNFCCC was called Climate Justice. We dove into the philosophy of justice in general and applied that to climate. In high school, I had been more focused on the environment and sustainability, but I didn't have a good grasp on what those things meant and how to apply them on such a big scale. The students in the COA class got really close, which made us really motivated. I feel like I learned how to work with a team.

I was interested in the policy and science behind climate change. I thought maybe I would go into climatology and some kind of geology. I took a lot of science courses the first couple of years. After Copenhagen, I started switching gears. I got more into agriculture; I took some gardening classes, also art classes. I wanted to do something tangible, something where I could actually feel like I was making a difference.

Not that the people who do policy work aren't making a difference! But I wanted something I could see a little bit more. People I know go the UNFCCC every single year. And I'm like, How do you do it? It's so emotional and you invest so ***** Marni Berger '09 holds an MFA in writing from Columbia University. Her short story "Waterside" was published in the Spring/Summer 2016 issue of Glimmer Train. Marni's work has also appeared at The Common, The Days of Yore, The Millions, and Fringe Magazine, and her fiction frequently has been a finalist or received honorable mentions. Her novel-inprogress, Love Will Make You Invincible, is a dark comedy about a precocious tween who believes his father is a citizen of a hidden underwater village.

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Threshhold, film negative, liquid emulsion on rice paper, 16x20 inches, 2015.

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Elutriate

Kathleen Donohoe ('91)

By Donna Gold Kathleen—Kate—Donohoe ('91) has strong childhood memories of passing through the New Jersey Meadowlands, a region rife with stories about the dumping of illegal chemicals and Mafia victims. "We would hold our noses driving through," she says. "Still, I thought it was beautiful. I wanted to run away from home, get a boat, find an estuary, and disappear into it."

The allure of this wetland has not left her, leading to her series Elutriate (meaning, "to purify, separate, or remove by washing"). On days she is photographing, Kate heads to New Jersey, arriving just as the dawn light glimmers, or perhaps before sunset, carrying three large-format pinhole cameras, one of which she built herself. Among the tall reeds and shifting waters she seeks to capture "the point at which a landscape morphs from documentary to memory to fantasy." The largest images are exposed on eight-by-twenty negatives Kate creates from rice paper brushed with a light-sensitive liquid emulsion, the brushwork adding texture to the image. The process requires attention, deliberation. Each exposure takes up to three minutes. Kate generally only brings five negatives. She chooses her subjects carefully.

Kate's connection to COA came in 1985, when she visited while on a semester course with Outward Bound. Intrigued by its freedom, she soon enrolled, studying birds, ceramics, drawing, poetry, philosophy, painting. Then she took up boatbuilding, and left for the Caribbean—which is where she was when faculty emerita JoAnne Carpenter contacted her in 1987, asking Kate to be her teaching assistant for a winter term class in Greece and Turkey. "It changed my life," she says. "It shaped the way I now make art." Kate later transferred to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, where she received a BFA while also designing her own curriculum.

"My work is about interpreting the landscape," Kate writes in an artist statement. "It is also about memory. My feelings about nature are visceral. I am constantly striving to reflect the serenity, freedom, and sense of security that I feel when I am outside and alone. … I photograph 'fringe' places—areas that are not inhabited by people but that are rife with evidence of them, as well as places from my childhood that have stayed with me and evolved into strange, monochrome memories."

The memories that create these hypnotic images aren't necessarily pleasant. About Elutriate Kate writes, "I am in the back seat of my father's car. … My elbow is digging into the armrest and I am pressed firmly against the door. No one in my family is speaking. The tension is palpable in this small, enclosed space. We are speeding down the highway. My window is open just a crack and the backs of my legs are sticking to the vinyl seat. … There is a lump of fear in my throat. … My face is against the window and my breath is creating a fog on the glass. … Through this steamy fog I see fires burning out of control. I see train tracks, towers, endless power lines, factories, and swaths of open water interrupted by a labyrinth of estuaries weaving through millions of tall reeds—all whipping by at a rapid speed. I am mesmerized by this bizarre industrial landscape and I am desperate to disappear into it."

For more on Kate Donohoe visit kathleendonohoe.com.

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Rumination, film negative, liquid emulsion on rice paper, 20x16 inches, 2015.

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Division, diptych paper negative, liquid emulsion on rice paper, 20x16 inches, 2015.

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POETRY THURSDAYS On Thursday mornings, Alyssa Coleman '17, Morgan Heckard '18, Mayah Murchison '20, and I head to Witchcliff and the office of Bill Carpenter. There, we spend two hours sharing original poems, offering critique and praise to each. In groups like this the finest qualities of our writing can emerge: we know each other, we know where to push each other, we know what standards to hold. There is something honest in our process—it seems to be at the center of our work.

—Arlo Cristofaro-Hark '18

Jeremias

Goat's Cream

Alyssa Coleman '17

Morgan Heckard '18

The little boy is a golden child he is made of setting

And the goat's cream keeps on swirling,

sun he crouches like the jaguars that were in his

blending with the black coffee. Soft white slips softer.

chest before he was he digs sweet little holes in

What is darkness, as it fades? So I watch,

the ground says I love to plant I love to plant he

as if observing something sacred.

runs around wild jumps screams he was an animal once as I was we talk about it by talking about other things he forgets the words I teach him remembers instead every detail of every movie he has seen I will never need another theater he tells me about the men with guns the bad ones slash open throats and the others get slashed he says he’d rather be the first he tells me again and again but he dances and laughs a lot too he was an animal once as I was we talk about it by talking about other things he says

Desolation settles and makes a home in my morning mug. From across the counter, you scrutinize my movements— I sit, sip, lick my lips—and you say nothing.

Here in the kitchen, the clock reads 2:35 a.m.

And the clock in the kitchen is slow.

You part your lips, but still you say nothing; your mouth is a cave. Inside, savages begin to have sex and multiply.

he saw the dead baby they took out of his mother he says he saw it he saw it he asks me if I saw it asks me what it was made out of I tell him I am trying to find out he says small how small asks me if it was real he says it didn’t move says that was in my mother he says it was cute almost but it was dead so dead he says death death death and he dances

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This morning,

Poetry Thursdays

Arlo Cristofaro-Hark '18

Mayah Murchison '20

somebody tips over a big jar of honey in the sky

Scratchy throat, Sore pupils.

Head aches before eyes open.

Skin smells sweet and rancid.

Never enough hours of REM.

and swiftly golden morning spills through the hallway, kitchen into the bedroom illuminating Josephine, barefoot in the doorway, and myself, in sheets; before each day, the steady weight of living is lifted slightly. the steady weight of living is present, yet lifted, slightly.

I open my mouth, And the torrential spill Of letters: Combinations Syllables Fall free.

I sit up Fast.

Too fast.

Whack my head against Stray paragraph.

Bat it away, Double take.

No. Delete.

"Always trim" Watch beeps: time for breakfast!

Shall I dine On prose this morning?

Or perhaps a line of poetry.

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Remembered Earth

By Kirsten Stockman '91, illustration by Peter Kennell '17 Fire in the field and the birth of fire. Dry rivers and thirsty soil. The strong wind, steady as a blast furnace, and windmills drawing deep.

This is the remembered earth that is lodged within her. This is what clogs her ears and crowds her vision: and it is greater than the thunder of fifty million buffalo. This is the known world, these plains. She's touched them with her hands through every season, and she asks of them: Are these dry hills I see around me also inside?

She has lived here forever and what she sees is this: the chalk soils, the blanched sky, and an empty horizon.

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It was ten years ago, the year after Beatrice had buried her husband.

Anna arrived at the door with nothing but a neatly packed, waxed cardboard fruit box of mementos and a small suitcase of worn-out and outgrown clothes. She had kept a sandalwood music box of her mother's and an antique silver mirror, a beautiful, handmade doll, a pair of her father's creased, brown leather shoes, and a worn-out tweed jacket—his only one—perhaps the one he was married in.

The girl had arrived with five crisp hundred-dollar bills in an unmarked envelope in her pocket. And the passbook to her father's savings account, which contained three thousand, eight hundred dollars.

There was insurance money too, which Beatrice carefully put away for the girl's future.

It was awkward at first. The child seemed indifferent to comforting.

Beatrice would take her in her arms, and it was like hugging a wooden chair. She was a cold little thing, a quiet child who rarely laughed or even smiled.

In those early days together, Beatrice used to wake at night to the terrible, lonely sound of the girl crying in her sleep. The child never cried in daylight though. If something bothered her, she withdrew into herself and became so small and silent that she seemed almost to disappear. This swallowing quietness was even more upsetting to Beatrice than tears.

But struggling through those first bewildering months with the girl helped soften the edge of Beatrice's own losses. This new problem, this strange child, helped point Bea forward. It became her purpose to blow warm life back into the girl's frozen heart. She became dedicated to this incubation. Tenderly, she devoted herself to the child's revival, and for the first time since Niko's death, she saw the future open up again before her.

But when she had emptied her bag of tricks for the girl and still

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couldn't warm her, Beatrice saw that it would take something radical: perhaps the strong sun would help, perhaps the open country. She didn't know; she went on instinct. She turned away from the familiar. She turned boldly away, trying hard not to look back at what she'd left behind her.

"Let's just choose a place, dear.

How does that sound?" Beatrice said, rolling the map out before them on the table. The girl shrugged disinterestedly, but Beatrice had seen her eyes fly open in surprise for an instant. Yes, that's what she wanted—to shake her back to life. To show her that courage came in many forms and sizes. Even in the form of a foolish, overweight, forty-yearold widow. Maybe Beatrice wanted to convince herself of this too: that the world was still there for her, still open, still big. That it wasn't all endings yet for her, that there were still beginnings ahead.

"Let's just pick a place that looks nice and let's go there. It's crazy. What do you say?" She was frightening herself with this idea.

What if she did take the bait? Then they would have to do it. There was no going back on this girl. "We don't have to stay. We can just explore. We can always come back here."

"What about school?" The girl was skeptical. She didn't fully trust Beatrice yet. She didn't trust anybody.

"We'll get books. We'll bring them with us. I'll teach you. And if we find a place that we like, you can go to school there."

"Let's see," Beatrice bent over the map. "Shall we cross the Mississippi?

We could head south or west …" The girl stepped a little closer and stiffly peered over at the map. "It's a big country, we could even go north. I hear Maine's nice. Or Minnesota.

Look at all of these lakes! We could go fishing and swimming. We could find an old farmhouse and fix it up however we like …"

The girl was silent but appeared to be thinking, so Beatrice did not

say anything more. She traced highways, rivers, and mountain ranges with her finger. She became so engrossed with the possibilities that she forgot, for a moment, about the girl standing so quietly beside her. Until she was startled by a voice, tentative and small, that broke into her thoughts.

"Could we have a garden?"

Beatrice looked up from the map and straightened to standing. She turned toward the girl and a slow smile spread across her face.

"We'll have a big garden.

Definitely a garden. We'll grow tomatoes and corn and sunflowers, and we'll have birdhouses all around the yard. And every spring we will have the first blooming zinnias of anyone in town. How does that sound?"

The girl's pale cheeks lifted a little and her small teeth peeked out from between her pink lips as she gave Bea a fragile smile. "Okay," she said.

"Then I think we should head west," Beatrice said, turning back to the map. "We need to find a place where the soil is good. See the Great Plains?" She swept her hand across the middle of the country.

The girl stepped to the table and examined the map closely now. With her eyes she traveled from the realm of the familiar—the New England shores where she had spent her nine years—and moved westward. She went straight through the middle.

She crossed the Mississippi and traveled just east of where Beatrice's hand lay. She lightly touched the tip of her finger to the map—to the very center of the map.

"Kansas?" Beatrice asked, willing herself to be calm—and open. Her heart stepped up its pace and began to beat hard against her chest.

Anna nodded.

"Do you think that's the place for us?" Beatrice asked with complete seriousness. The girl shrugged. Her cheeks reddened. "Did you see The Wizard of Oz?" The girl mutely nodded, yes.

"Did you like it?"

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"Yes," Anna said. "Except I didn't like it when Dorothy was caught in the witch's castle and the witch sent the flying monkeys out the window to get the scarecrow."

"That was a scary part all right."

The girl was studying the map closely now, whispering the names of the dream towns that walked across the rectangular state in the deadcenter of the country: Haysville, Crystal Springs, Kiowa, Enterprise, Cedar Vale, Whitman, Maple City, Council Grove, El Dorado, Mt. Hope, Pretty Prairie, Elyria, Paradise. She did not know the meaning of these words, but the sounds of them rang like little bells to her and she could hear her future in them.

Beatrice bent close, her head almost touching Anna's and said, "Kansas, huh?" The girl shrugged

*** Crossing the prairie at night, they couldn't see a thing, only darkness to either side and in the distance the tall mysterious lights of a grain elevator or the clustered twinkling of a town.

During the day, she watched everything. She could not tear her eyes away from the endless landscape of America as it rolled out before her. She had never imagined it so big, so wide, so empty. After a while, Anna curled up on the front seat and slept. When the girl had bad dreams, Beatrice would talk to her in a low, confident voice of all the good things to come. "We will have a kitchen with lots of cupboards," she said. "White wooden cupboards.

And a cuckoo clock on the wall with a

"We'll have shiny brass beds with lots of fluffy goose down pillows. And we'll hang our sheets on the line in the sun, so that every night you'll fall asleep with the smell of the blue sky in your dreams." again. It was that shrug—of anticipated disappointment, of accepted defeat, of already abandoned expectations—that did it.

"Okay. We'll do it. Let's go there and check it out," Beatrice said firmly. "Oh boy," she sighed, feeling the full weight of her decision, feeling amazed, feeling afraid but … willing.

"Kansas …" she said again and smiled. She covered the girl's small, cool hand, lying across the sunflower state with her own and squeezed it.

Beatrice expected Anna to extract her hand immediately, or to leave it inert and unresponsive until she pulled her own away, but she didn't. The girl's cheeks showed encouraging spots of color now.

"Oh boy, oh boy," Beatrice said shaking her head and smiling. "I never thought I'd live in Kansas." The child smiled tentatively back and gave Beatrice's hand a quick, hard squeeze.

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little blonde bird that looks just like you. That springs out on the hour and says: Cuckoo-Cuckoo.

"And shiny brass beds. One for me and one for you. With lots of fluffy goose down pillows. And we'll hang our sheets on the line in the sun, so that every night you'll fall asleep with the smell of the blue sky in your dreams.

"We'll have a good life, Anna.

You and me—" Bea would say, only to look and find that the child was already sleeping.

It was after ten when Bea finally pulled off the highway and onto the dark streets of Elder's Grove. The place looked as good as any and she was exhausted. She had assumed they would be able to find a motel room, but after passing one sleeping town after another, she'd realized her mistake. "I guess we're in the country now," she said to herself as she drove down the main street

of the town and saw that the shops were all dark. PATIENCE + THRIFT = SUCCESS, she read from a big sign as she turned into town. "Yes, yes, for God's sakes patience, Bea," she muttered, impatiently. She just wanted a place to lay her head! Was this so much to ask?

She had just about decided to pull off the road and sleep in the car when she saw a small battered sandwich board sign with half the letters fallen off. It said: ROSE'S R OMS—WE WE COME WALK-INS. The shabby, peeling framed house didn't look much better than the sign, but there was no choice. If she wanted a bed, this was it.

She angled the station wagon to the curb and shut the engine off, dropping her head onto the seat back and heaving an exhausted sigh as the quiet night seeped in through the open windows. Beatrice glanced down at the child who was sleeping on the seat beside her, and for a brief moment she felt a rise of fear and a spinning sense of vertigo. "I am responsible for this creature," she told herself. "She's got only me and no one else." Bea hated to think what would happen if she messed this up.

What on earth are we doing here? Is this crazy? Where are we going? She studied the child with a worried look as if her face might hold the answer to these mysteries. But her answers were only the even breath of sleep.

Bea slipped out of the car into the balmy summer air. She pushed the door against the latch quietly so as not to wake the child, and stretched her cramped arms and legs with a moan of relief. She kept listening for something but there was, amazingly, nothing to hear. It was the most complete silence she had ever experienced, except maybe underwater. There was no highway noise, no sirens, no music, no voices.

All was still. She shivered a little at the strangeness of it all. But where are all the people?

Just as she was about to get back into her car and get the hell

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out of this queer, hushed place, she heard the deep, low rumble of a V8 engine. Bea waited, standing there in the street, feeling lost and a little bit scared. The engine sound came closer. And then, as if she had called it to herself from out of the black night, the cheerful headlights of a truck appeared around the corner.

Bea watched as the truck slowed in front of her car. She started to wonder if this wasn't very stupid of her to just be standing here like this.

Maybe she should be preparing to defend herself and Anna against the advances of some perverted creep.

But before she had a chance to look for her tire iron, the truck stopped and a disarmingly gentle male voice spoke up out of the darkness of the cab's interior.

"Everything okay, ma'am? You need some help maybe?"

A boy, who had been riding in back, sprang over the side of the truck. He surprised Beatrice by coming to stand companionably beside her, almost rubbing shoulders, close enough to take her hand, close enough so she could smell his sweet, boy sweat.

"Car trouble?" the voice asked again. "I'll be happy to give you a lift somewhere."

"Oh," Bea sighed and pushed up her sleeves tiredly. "We've been driving all day and we needed to stop for the night. I saw the sign for rooms." She looked back toward the darkened house doubtfully. "I know it's kind of late … but I was hoping we could stay."

The man in the truck indicated the boy with a tilt of his head, "Well, you're all set then. Here's your man. Rose is his aunt. She's got the rooms."

The boy grinned. "Rooms are all empty—always are. She never has anybody. But she won't cook."

"Shorty's is just up the way here. You can get yourself a decent breakfast there in the morning," the man said.

"But just don't get the oatmeal.

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It's gross," the boy added. The man in the truck laughed.

"Yeah, he's right. Steer clear of the oatmeal and the Hawaiian omelet. By the way, I'm Harlan Whitehouse." A burly hand came out to meet her and Bea stepped forward and shook it.

"I'm Bea." "Pleased to meet ya. Welcome to Elder's Grove."

He was an attractive man, Bea noted, and friendly. But he seemed shy, and once they were introduced he was quickly at a loss for something to say. He turned back and pointed his finger at the boy. "I need you early tomorrow and I need you awake. So don't go out gallivanting." Then his expression softened and he winked at Bea. He said goodnight and pulled off—to Bea's great disappointment.

hanging unbuttoned. He patted the breast pocket and smiled, gingerly extracting a crooked cigarette.

"Mind if I have a smoke before we go in? My aunt won't let me smoke in the house. She hates the stink.

It's been a hellish long day. We're harvesting wheat, you know."

"I'm surprised your aunt lets you smoke at all. You're awful young to smoke." Bea watched with surprise as he struck a match and lit it. "Do your parents let you do that?"

He shrugged and shook out the match. "I've been smoking since I was twelve."

Bea was tempted to give him a lecture about the idiocy of smoking, but she restrained herself. This wasn't her kid and she was tired. So she crossed her arms over her chest and leaned against the car to wait.

There wasn't a trace of the insolence that filled the eyes of many fifteenyear-olds. But there was a sort of unsparing appraisal, a kind of honest scrutiny that Bea found a little unnerving in such a young face.

Beatrice looked after the truck's diminishing tail lights with a twinge of unaccountable regret. She turned to the boy and he shrugged and smiled. She tried to smile back, though she almost felt unequal to the effort. "Is that guy married?" she asked suddenly, her voice poised between humor and hope.

"Yep," the boy answered. "'Fraid so." He gave her a sly, sideways look.

"But I'm not." This made Beatrice laugh out loud, and the boy laughed with her and she liked him all at once.

It was a humid July night, and the boy was naked from the waist up with his shirt slung loosely at his hips. Beatrice watched as he twisted and fished for something in his back pocket. He was lean and muscular, his body just fleshing into manhood, and she could see the outline of every rib as he turned. He untied his shirt and shrugged into it, leaving it

The boy smoked and looked out into the street, turning now and again to calmly study the woman beside him, squinting as he took hungry drags on his cigarette as if it were his only sustenance.

Bea fidgeted at first, a little uncomfortable with the silence. She tried to think of things to say, but she was too tired to make conversation.

The boy did not seem to care either way; he seemed willing to chat or just as happy to be silent. He was absolutely at his ease, in no apparent hurry to finish, move, or speak.

As he studied her, there wasn't a trace of the insolence that filled the eyes of many fifteen-year-olds.

But there was a sort of unsparing appraisal, a kind of honest scrutiny that Bea found a little unnerving in such a young face. But she had nothing to hide really, so she stood up to it without flinching. After a while he smiled slowly and cocked

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his head.

"So. You running away from home?"

This made Beatrice laugh. "Oh boy. Is it that obvious? Honestly, I haven't a clue what I'm doing." She laughed again, a bit wistful now.

"Yes, we're looking for a life. Got any great ideas?"

At the word we, the boy bent to look in the car window and saw the sleeping girl for the first time. She was clutching a pillow like it kept her afloat, her long hair fanned wildly around her.

"Maybe you should stay here?" he suggested, peering at the girl.

Bea took this lightly at first and almost laughed, but then she looked around at the empty streets and quiet houses. A shiver coursed through her. Everything seemed so strange: the truck coming out of nowhere right to where she stood, the boy's uncanny gravity, the stillness, and her own exhaustion. It all combined to make the moment seem dense and grainy like an old movie, so that it almost felt like fate was pressing on her shoulder.

"Do you like it here?" she heard herself say in a voice that sounded thick and odd. The boy turned back to her with a thoughtful look, as if he'd never stopped to consider such questions.

"I don't know. It's home. The wind blows a lot," he answered. He paused to think of something more definitive to add but couldn't come up with much. "It's okay, I guess," he finally said with a shrug. "As good as anywhere." He sucked the last of the smoke into his thin frame and threw the butt on the ground. "Ready?

I'll show you up. The place is never locked, so you can come and go as you please. Should we wake her?" He nodded toward the car.

"I hate to. She's had an awful hard time sleeping lately. Why don't you show me the room first. Then I'll come back and carry her up."

"Suit yourself." The boy started to walk across the dry lawn toward the darkened building. Bea followed.

There was a light affixed to the eave of the garage and it cast long, eerie shadows from their bodies over the ground. As they were about to step in the side door, Beatrice heard a cry.

They both spun around and saw the girl standing small against the car, a tight patch of darkness except for her upturned face and yellow hair that grabbed the angled light. She was standing on the grass, clutching the door handle with both hands behind her and seemed unwilling or unable to let go of the car.

"Beatrice," she called in alarm.

"Don't go!"

Bea motioned with her arm.

"Come here, honey. We were just going inside to get a room. I was going to come right back out for you.

Come on, sweetheart, come with us then." But the girl didn't budge.

She seemed fastened there, caught behind some invisible barrier.

"I had a nightmare," she said in a voice that grew fainter and trailed into silence, unable to project itself over the distance between them.

When he heard her cry out, the boy, Jonny Carter, did not hesitate. He started toward her, quickly crossing the lawn. When he reached the car, he held out his hand.

As the girl looked up at him, the darkness that always seemed to confront her upon waking began to subside, but the familiar headache that went with it began to set in earnest, slanting behind her eyes so that she had to squint to see him.

Through half-closed eyes she saw that his hair and chest and eyebrows were covered in a dust that made him look pale and glowing. Strange and ethereal and blue, she thought, like a moth or an angel even. And there were patches of darkness on his body where the night had pasted him with shadow, where, it seemed to her, he harbored pockets of magic; ragtag, like the pied piper. She wondered what on earth could be inside of them.

The girl slowly released her frozen grip upon the door, reached out, and took his hand. He reminded her of a luna moth she had once seen fluttering over a city street after a summer rain, silvery and night-draped. The reason she took his hand was that she suspected he might be from Mars or some other planet, like her, dropped down from nowhere to nowhere.

She was watching him, instead of watching where she was going and she stumbled a little, inadvertently wrenching his hand and squeezing it a bit too hard. She would always, always remember how he didn't wince or scold or pull away but only looked down and smiled at her and said softly, "I got ya."

It must have been then, when she first saw him, bare chest powdered in grain dust and dark night obscuring his eyes. It must have been then.

*** Kirsten Stockman '91 (1968–2013) studied botany and agriculture as a COA student, interning with the Land Institute in Kansas, where she participated in a wheat harvest. This experience became the backdrop of her coming-of-age novel about Anna Garland, a young woman deeply connected to the prairie, farming, and the 1954 pickup truck she restores.

Posthumously published, Remembered Earth was written as a series of vignettes. The above edited excerpts recall how Anna, orphaned at age nine, and her widowed Aunt Beatrice come to Kansas. The book is available at KirstenStockman. com.

Peter Kennell '17 uses digital and traditional media to illustrate landscapes and architecture. For his senior project, he's launching an illustration and design business through the Diana Davis Spencer Hatchery.

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COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

Donor Profile Donna and William Eacho

By Donna Gold

Each summer, whether they're in DC, Austria, or elsewhere, the Eachos have been certain to return to their home on Mount Desert Island. Whether indoors or out, Maine is connecting time for parents Bill and Donna Eacho, and their three sons, now in their twenties.

Early on, for at least a few weeks each summer, the children would begin their days at the George B. Dorr Museum of Natural History as participants in the Summer Field Studies day camp that COA has run since 1985. The boys would hike mountains, climb rocks, and explore tide pools, returning home in the afternoons with excited stories about where they had been and what they had discovered. "They knew more than we did because they had gone to Summer Field Studies. It taught them a lot— and us too!" recalls Donna.

Over the years, she adds, the family has dined on produce from the college's Beech Hill Farm, and enjoyed the weekly conversations, lectures, movies, and gallery shows hosted at COA. More recently, they've also come to engage with students.

A graduate of Duke University and Harvard Business School, Bill spent most of his life building and ultimately selling a food distribution business. He then invested in private equity and real estate until he was asked to serve as ambassador to Austria by President Barack Obama in 2009. When he stepped down from the position in 2013, Bill took stock of himself, the world, and his impact. What he saw looming as "the biggest challenge that humanity faces" was climate change. Having experienced how fulfilling public service could be, he wanted to do more.

After pondering the problem—and its urgency—his solution was economic. "The most effective way to reduce pollution is to price it," he says. "If the US were to do so, COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

we could start the ball rolling and incentivize others to match us." Bill is not talking about a carbon tax. His idea is what he calls a pro-growth fee, with the revenue recycled.

"Economic studies show that if you put a price on carbon and collect an extraction royalty, you could recycle that revenue into reducing other taxes that are a drag on growth. The United States has the highest statutory tax rate in the developed world, so there's a lot of interest in lowering the corporate tax rate, though no one wants to give up the revenues. At thirty-five dollars a ton of CO2, we can reduce emissions, cut the corporate tax rate to 25 percent, drive faster growth, and return funds through tax cuts and rebates to hard-working households." He refers to his plan as "carbon-funded tax cuts—making polluters pay." Though a strong step was taken at the 2015 Paris climate change meetings, says Bill, "it was not enough to bend the curve." The pledges to limit CO2 emissions, he adds, "could reduce the overall increase to three degrees Celsius, but we needed to get to two degrees or less. Only a market-based price mechanism can deliver that result along with stronger growth."

Once he left Austria, Bill wasted no time. In 2014, he launched his advocacy nonprofit, The Partnership for Responsible Growth. As he did, he spoke with Doreen Stabinsky, COA faculty member in global environmental politics, a longtime participant in climate negotiations.

When they talked, Bill asked Doreen whether she knew of students who could help him design the initial website for the organization. Khristian Mendez '15 and Lucas Burdick '15 obliged. Says Bill, "COA has positioned itself as one of the best colleges with an environmental focus. Students are learning how to make a difference in the world and lead fulfilling lives."

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ALUMNI NOTES 1976

"Enjoying retired life," writes Susan Applegate. "More gardening, yoga, kayaking, reading, making baskets, traveling. And always looking for ways to live lightly on the earth."

Sally Morong Chetwynd is finishing her second novel, The Sturgeon's Dance, to be released this spring. She also creates marketing graphics and is building a copyediting portfolio, having earned a professional certificate from Emerson College. She still plays pennywhistle and fife with Shades of Gray, a Civil War string band (sharing that interest with Kate Sheely '07).

1977

In MetroWest Boston, Frances Pollitt is building a passive house.

Beyond requiring minimal energy, it incorporates architectural elements to describe spiritual reality. "There is a stained glass skylight representing the Bahá'í solar calendar, a woodinlay compass rose indicating the direction of prayer, and a stained glass door and sidelights adorned with grasses, as a metaphor of prayer."

1978

Sally Swisher recently married fellow X-ray technician Tom Bridson.

They both enjoy birding, hiking, and kayaking—and are planning a trip to Belize with classmates Jonathan and Nina Gormley.

1979

In December, Andrea Lepcio presented The Weakness in Me, a work-in-progress, at New York City's Dixon Place. In February, the Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York offered a reading of her new play, World Avoided, based on her 48

experiences witnessing diplomatic meetings of the Montreal Protocol.

Island Journal, a publication of the Island Institute.

1980

1990

"Living the good life in paradise, changing the world one lightbulb at a time," writes Susan Freed, who is enjoying her job as the energy and sustainability project manager for the County of San Diego, CA.

1982

After two hip replacements, Suzanne Hellman is again working as a massage therapist, a career she intersperses with human services work. Most recently, Suzanne was the program coordinator of a mobile assertive community treatment team at the Mental Health Association of Ulster County, NY. She proudly reports that grandson Xzavier Everest Hellman started kindergarten in September.

1983

Peter Wayne is now an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, while son Sam has just started college in California.

Peter is still teaching Tai Chi and enjoying frisbee in his spare time.

1984

Thirty-two years after graduating COA, Anna Hurwitz returned to academia to pursue a master's in library and information science at the University of Washington.

"My goal is to do archival work for artists and arts organizations to help preserve and share cultural history, but I'm open to seeing where the degree takes me," she writes. "Before now, I never realized or appreciated how well COA prepares students for post-graduate work. I was able to jump right in, unafraid to go to the primary source for information and data. Only 49 credits to go."

1989

A folio of oil paintings by David Vickery was featured in the 2016

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And I—I took the road less traveled by, becoming deputy superintendent of banking at the New York State Department of Financial Services," writes Dan Sangeap.

1991

Federico Giller is the president and CEO of FPG Creative, an agency focusing on video production.

1995

Andrea Lani and Curry Caputo, along with their children, Milo, Zephyr, and Emmet, completed a six-week thru-hike of the 485mile Colorado Trail. The Denver to Durango journey was an anniversary for Andrea and Curry, who walked the trail in 1996. Andrea is writing a book about the hikes and the intervening 20 years of change in the environment and social landscape of Colorado. Find Curry's videos of the walk at youtube.com under Curry Caputo, and updates of Andrea's book at remainsofday.blogspot.com.

After 21-plus years with the City of Lindsborg, KS, Kathy Peterson is retiring, but still enjoying life in "Little Sweden, USA." She has become a copy editor for a youngadult author from Minnesota and is restoring her 1913 home. "After retiring, I will finally have time to work on artistic projects and hopefully sell some of my work," she writes. She also continues to ride her horse most days.

1998

Having relocated to Palermo, ME after 18 years of work in education, environmental justice, and nonprofit management in the US and abroad, Lindsey Cotter-Hayes, her wife, Amy, and their two children, COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

Finnegan, 5, and Sawyer, 13 months, are thrilled. Besides operating their family farm, Poundsweet, Lindsey is assistant director of the Oak Institute for the Study of International Human Rights at Colby College.

has two daughters and is expecting a third child in early spring. While Cassie runs her fitness and health coaching business, her husband is finishing his final years of active duty in the Air Force.

1999

Dean of Admission Heather AlbertKnopp and husband, Erich Reed, welcomed Ezra Owen Reed to their family in the spring of 2016. His adoption was legally finalized in December. "Ezra is incredible, and I'm so grateful that he gets to grow up in the COA community," says Heather.

2000

After moving back to Mount Desert Island from Philadelphia, PA, Nikolai Fox began working for the Beatrix Farrand Society as the general coordinator at Garland Farm. He is also freelancing as a photographer.

He writes that the potent magic of the island is just as he remembers and can't help but attend to his sketchbooks, oil paintings, and musical endeavors. "So wonderful to see the amazing things my old friends and mentors have been up to since graduating from COA."

2001

Cassie Cain recently relocated to the Emerald Coast of Florida. She COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

THE BLACK FLY SOCIETY IS NOT JUST FOR ALUMNI, IT'S FOR EVERYONE!

In January, Chase Morrill and his family debuted their series, Maine Cabin Masters, on the DIY network, saving and renovating old camps across Maine, reusing salvaged, sustainable, and local materials whenever possible. Meanwhile, Sarah (Heifetz) Morrill '01 is an oncology navigator at Central Maine Medical Center while completing her master's degree in integrative medicine. They live in Wayne, ME with their four children.

Working with the community, Todd West, principal of Deer Isle-Stonington High School, has developed a four-year marine studies pathway, using fisheries ecology, business, and navigation to teach the basics, enabling students to apply for a license to steer a Coast Guardcertified vessel, and encouraging students to remain in school.

Graduation rates, at 57 percent in 2009, are now above 90 percent.

2002

Cameron Douglass is a biologist in the Environmental Protection Agency office of pesticide programs, working with an interdisciplinary science team to evaluate ecological effects data and related reports for existing or new pesticides. "A lot of our work now is focused on pesticide impacts on pollinator communities, so it's a big shift for this plant scientist." He adds, "My wife, son, and I just moved into our first home in the Petworth

The Black Fly Society was established to make donating to COA's Annual Fund easier and greener.

We hope you'll join this swarm of sustaining donors by setting up a paperless monthly online gift.

Follow the instructions at coa.edu/donatenow.

If you want to give by mail: COA Annual Fund 105 Eden Street Bar Harbor, ME 04609 (Please make checks out to College of the Atlantic.)

Questions?

Call 207-801-5625.

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neighborhood of DC. I haven't lived in any one place longer than three years since graduating from COA, so this putting down roots thing will be a new adventure."

Vanessa Jette writes that she recently relocated to San Diego, CA. Having graduated from law school, Jacob Oakes left Chapel Hill, NC for a position with Legal Aid of North Carolina in Raleigh, representing migrant farmworkers on employment, housing, and immigration issues. "Although we miss the North Carolina mountains as well as Maine, Asha has her dream job as a nurse at a birth center and the kids are thriving in school," he writes. "The area is starting to grow on us."

2005

Last summer marked Sarah Drummond's 10th season of guiding small groups on wilderness trips through Alaska's Inside Passage.

"I continue to enjoy teaching and exploring the natural world through art," she writes. She is now starting her own guiding operation, Wonderlust Expeditions, wonderlustexpeditions.com, offering both artist workshops and small group trips with a focus on natural and cultural history, art, and conservation.

2006

Tora Johnson, MPhil, has completed her PhD in human dimensions of natural resources at the University of Maine. The day she submitted her dissertation, son Wolf began his first year there. Tora is now an associate professor at the University of Maine at Machias and continues her applied research on rural communities confronting a changing world.

Ten years in the making, Ten Days in Acadia: A Kids' Hiking Guide to Mount Desert Island,

by Hope Rowan, MPhil, has been published by Islandport Press.

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Sarah Drerup is an emergency response specialist in the Federal Emergency Management Agency's public assistance division, as well as a chemical officer leading a decontamination platoon as a second lieutenant in the Army National Guard.

Leland Moore is now a legislative and administrative advisor to the Connecticut Board of Pardons and Paroles.

2011

Writing from Chicago, Alicia Hynes says she is now the full-time production manager of the American Theater Company. "I am loving it!"

"I am managing forest restoration projects in highly degraded urban forest sites," writes Philip Kunhardt IV, now a forester in the natural resources group of New York City's Department of Parks and Recreation.

2003

After five years with another scientific society, Bethany Adamec is working on issues surrounding education reform, especially in higher education, at the American Society for Microbiology. She and her husband have a three-year-old about to start preschool.

2009

In October, Elsie Flemings and husband, Richard Cleary, welcomed Sylvia Candice Cleary into the world.

Fiona, 3, loves being a big sister.

2012

2007

Jacquie Ramos Bullard selfpublished her first novel, Erased by the Tide. She began the novel in Bill Carpenter's Starting Your Novel class, and continued it as a senior project in collaboration with Bill, Karen Waldron, and novelist classmates.

In it, a young woman discovers that her family has been harboring dark secrets. Find it online.

2008

Jessica Hardy started a new job as a naturopathic doctor at Nutritional Wellness Center in Colts Neck, NJ.

Julia DeSantis and Matt Maiorana '10 were married in Kentucky on Oct. 29 surrounded by loved ones. In the photo, clockwise from Julia and Matt: Jeannie Surheinrich ('13), Annie Cohen '14, Meg Barry '10, Sarah Colletti '10, Sarah Gribbin, Phinn Onens '13, Dan Rueters-Ward '11, Sam Miller-McDonald '09, Geena Berry '10. Not shown is Maggie Maiorana '15. Julia was back from several months teaching high school science in American Samoa as a WorldTeach volunteer. Currently, she is choosing medical schools while Matt continues to fight the fossil

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fuel industry and advocate for clean energy with Oil Change International.

In his free time, Matt works on activistlab.org.

In the spring of 2016, Jane Piselli married Rachael Roberts, who is now Rachael Piselli. This spring, Jane graduates from Antioch New England with a master's in education, certified in early childhood, elementary, and special education, and a certificate in nature-based preschool education. Jane and Rachael are currently living in Vermont.

2013

In December, Marissa Altmann received her master's degree in environmental studies from Prescott College with a thesis analyzing the impacts of wildlifebased ecotourism. Marissa is now in Allentown, PA, working as a strategic partnerships fellow with the Wildlife Friendly Enterprise Network.

Markéta Doubnerová returned to her native Czech Republic and is working on community development projects and education at The Via

Foundation. "It is very exciting to be using what I learned while exploring the world and being able to put it to a good use," she writes.

Why I Give For a second winter, Carly Segal has been seasonally employed in the bison management office of Yellowstone National Park, seeing wildlife as she skis to sample sites.

She writes, "I am super-excited to be helping gather information about an animal that is both iconic and controversial and plays such a large role in the ecology of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem."

2014

Magdalena Garcia is teaching English in Italy for the Greenheart Travel Teach English Abroad Program through this April.

PANCHO COLE '81 "As someone who doesn't have children, I have not had to pay for anyone else's college education. I send money to COA knowing the graduates have the tools and understanding to protect what's left of the environment​, and moderate or repair some past and current mistakes. Now, more than ever, our planet needs all the help it can get."

COMMUNITY NOTES Deep Things Out of Darkness: A History of Natural History, by John Anderson, William H. Drury Professor of Ecology and Natural History, has been translated into Korean.

Art faculty member Nancy Andrews was interviewed on Australian radio, had her drawings featured in the German magazine, Draeger Review, and released the eight episodes of her web series, The Strange Eyes of Dr. Myes, thestrangeeyesofdrmyes. com. This series features many COA community members on camera and behind the scenes. The movie itself was shown as part of the Dutch International Science Film Festival in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, and was a nominee for the NTR Audience COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

Award. Meanwhile, a limited edition monograph series, What It Means to be Human, produced by three arts organizations, will feature Nancy's work along with an essay by former trustee Walter Robinson, MD. Eight poems by Bill Carpenter, faculty member in literature and creative writing, have been translated into German and are online at The Golden Fish, dergoldene-fisch.de, found under the name of German poet and translator Mathias Jeschke. These poems, from the unpublished collection Girl Writing a Letter, are also in the current issue of the German literary magazine Akzente.

Ken Cline, David Rockefeller Family Chair in Ecosystem Protection and Management, was appointed to the Acadia National Park Advisory Commission by former Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell. Created

by Congress, the commission consults with the interior secretary on issues of park management and development. Steve Katona, former COA president and faculty member, recently stepped down as commission chair. Ken has also been selected as a member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature's World Commission on Protected Areas, an international group of experts promoting the establishment and effective management of a global 51

representative network of protected areas. Last fall, Ken attended the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Hawaii where he focused on protected area governance and environmental law. He was also recently elected to the board of the Schoodic Institute, the nonprofit education and research organization managing Acadia's Schoodic Education and Research Center.

Working with Acadia, the institute advances ecosystem science and learning for all ages.

On April 13, Gray Cox P'71 will be giving the talk "Let's Make the Earth Great Again: A Gandhian Response to Our Global Crisis" at the University of Maine, sharing core ideas from a chapter forthcoming in a RoutledgeIndia book on contemporary Gandhian thought. Gray continues to write and perform original songs on love and social change, available at graycox.bandcamp.com and breathonthewater.com.

In December, Sarah Hall, Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Chair in Earth Systems and GeoSciences, worked with colleagues at Mount Desert Island Biological Lab and Dartmouth College on a study of local groundwater chemistry, collecting samples from private wells with help from students and community members. While on a winter term sabbatical, Sarah collaborated with colleagues at the University of Grenoble and University of Maine on various Andean tectonics and climate projects. In March, she presented a paper co-authored by Spencer

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Gray '17 at the Northeast Geological Society of America meeting in Pittsburgh, PA. Meanwhile, Sarah prepared for a spring term Climate Change Seminar series.

Jay Friedlander, Sharpe-McNally Chair of Green and Socially Responsible Business, led Fair Food Network Business Boot Camps for food entrepreneurs in Michigan and New England as well as a session at the Maine Food Leader's Forum. He also gave talks on the Abundance Cycle in Ithaca, NY and at the AshokaU Exchange, a gathering of more than 800 social entrepreneur educators in Miami, FL. Finally, Jay and Darron Collins '92, COA president, presented on COA's Hatchery and its sustainable business program at Leadership Maine, a program which develops the next generation of Maine leaders.

Etta Kralovec, who taught education and directed the teacher education program at COA, received the 2015 Distinguished Outreach Faculty Award from the University of Arizona for her work in closing "gaps in achievement and educational opportunities in K–12 schools, especially those in underserved communities." As one colleague commented, "It's not that she thinks out of the box, she doesn't even see the box." Etta credits COA as the place where she learned how to work in communities—which is what outreach is all about.

In completing her SARE, Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education grant on the use of alder chips as a soil amendment, Suzanne Morse, Elizabeth Battles Newlin Chair of Botany, found that alder can be used as a renewable, on-farm source of chips on a three- to five-year cycle, helping to build soil carbon, the foundation of organic practices. Find the report under alder at mysare. sare.org.

In December, Doreen Stabinsky, faculty member in global environmental politics, and Ken Cline took six COA students to the 13th Conference of the Parties for the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in Cancun, Mexico. The students followed negotiations, lobbied parties, and worked with NGOs and youth representatives on issues they had been studying during a preparatory tutorial in the fall term.

Sean Todd, Steven K. Katona Chair in Marine Sciences and Allied Whale director, attended the annual North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium meeting in New Bedford, MA with his Marine Mammal Biology class.

Then, over winter break, he joined the expedition cruise vessel Seabourn Quest, traveling to the Antarctic Peninsula and onto Valparaiso, Chile as an Antarctic guide, offering six presentations.

In March, Karen Waldron, Lisa Stewart Chair in Literature and Women's Studies, chaired the panel "Literary Landscapes: Isolation and Connection in Island Representations" and presented a paper on Ruth Moore at the Northeast Modern Language Association annual conference in Baltimore, MD. In April she'll be chairing the panel, "The Female Sleuth," and presenting "The Complexities of Female Strength in Julia Spencer Fleming's Clare Fergusson Novels" at the Popular Culture Association annual conference in San Diego, CA.

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In Memoriam Dewitt Kimball '83

Susan Storey Lyman

Liane "Ann" Peach

November 16, 1958 – December 6, 2016

May 17, 1919 – December 29, 2016

December 31, 1931– February 26, 2017

Our friend and client, DeWitt (Dee) Clark Kimball died after a lionhearted, fearless, and very personal fight against esophageal cancer. I was privileged to have been one of his caregivers. Dee centered his life around teaching, the building profession, and the ecological study of home design; his education informed his work.

Through his business, Complete Home Evaluation Services, DeWitt was Maine's leading independent energy auditor, diagnosing and recommending fixes to hundreds of Maine homes and buildings for efficiency, health, safety, and durability. While driven by the urgency of climate change, Dee was a building scientist, on the cutting edge of many emerging issues in homes, and a strong voice for bettering the state's energy efficiency programs. He also had a master's in education from the University of Saint Joseph in West Hartford, Connecticut, and spent sixteen years as a teacher, three of them in Arctic Village, Alaska, one of the few outsiders accepted into this Native American community. Dee's teaching extended to his auditing work, as noted by Peter Warren of Warren Construction Group who wrote, "DeWitt was very smart, exceptionally patient, and a huge cheerleader as we hit targets in building envelope performance that some only dream of. He was able to infect even our most grizzled, setin-their-ways carpenters with the enthusiasm for the envelope. Many of our folks never understood how dew points worked or how to chase vapor through a wall assembly until DeWitt explained it in his careful, easy manner."

—Peter Troast of Energy Circle; for more on DeWitt see Peter's blog at energycircle.com

Seeking to strengthen COA's reputation, Lou Rabineau, COA president from 1983 to 1993, recruited Susan Storey Lyman to the board of trustees in 1990. She came with a BA from Radcliffe College, a business administration certificate from Harvard-Radcliffe, a Harvard master's in education, and more than two decades as a Radcliffe trustee, eight years as chair, and a year as acting dean of the Bunting (now Radcliffe) Institute.

Those experiences accrued to COA as Sue told educators, university administrators, and others about "this remarkable small college in Maine." Among them was writer Max Hall, whose 1994 article in Harvard Magazine, "A Distaste for Walls" is one of the most influential pieces written about COA. An experienced fundraiser, during her ten years on the board Sue championed the raising of nearly eight million dollars for COA's endowment, and the acquisition of Sea Fox, Deering Common, Davis International Center, Beech Hill Farm, and the two islands. As grateful as I am for these efforts, what I remember and appreciate equally was Sue's openhearted, gracious, and downto-earth way. I have an indelible memory of Sue, handsome and elegant in pearls and the blue and white silk dress she always wore to trustee meetings. I told her once how much I liked the dress. She replied, "I got it at the thrift shop on Charles Street. I get all my clothes there. I would never buy a new dress!" A Boston Brahmin by birth and marriage, she was a human ecologist by nature, championing cultural diversity, multicultural education, and many youth efforts.

—Steven K. Katona, former faculty member and COA president

Ann Peach had three young children at home when she volunteered her time and thoughts to help COA's first board of trustees, led by Les Brewer and Father Jim Gower. In January 1970, when Ed Kaelber arrived as president of the yet-to-be college, Ann stayed on. In an oral history, Ann recalled: "We started in what is now Peach House. It was a caretaker's cottage; no heat, no phone, no furnishings. I took a card table, my typewriter, and a folding chair from home. Les Brewer brought another chair, and we sat down with a yellow pad and said, What do we need to start a college?

The first thing was a coffee pot.

"That first year it was Ann, Millard, and me," says Ed. "Ann was truly my partner, and in many ways the leader. We would talk through the many priorities and options to pursue. Often, in response to a direction I might propose Ann would say, You might want to think that through once again. Invariably she was right! That year, I'd go off to do one thing or the other, people would call, and Ann would answer the college's one phone. When the caller asked for the dean of students, Ann would respond, Yes, this is she.

Someone else would ask for the dean of development and she'd say, Speaking. Someone else would ask for the academic dean and she'd answer, Ann Peach, at your service.

Ann ran every aspect of this college during those earliest days!"

Adds Darron Collins '92, COA president, "One of my happiest memories of Ann was as co-pilot in our July 4, 2015 COA parade float.

Ann rode shotgun in Diver Ed's truck with the COA float in tow. Her smile stretched to the horizon!"

—Ed Kaelber, founding president and Darron Collins '92, president

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TRANSITIONS FAREWELLS Farm: Tess Faller After managing Beech Hill Farm for four years, Tess Faller '09 has moved on to other callings.

Co-manager Anna Davis now runs it with partner David Levinson. "Tess does everything with enthusiasm, energy, intelligence, and grace," says faculty member Suzanne Morse. "She brings a spiritual power to her work and life. With humor, insight, and determination she led BHF workers, sifting through new possibilities with a most pragmatic lens." Andy Griffiths, administrative dean, adds, "Under Tess, the farm has flourished, expanding production. She's been great working with students, administrators, and our food systems people, developing close relationships

with restaurants and others to support wholesale efforts, and with our kitchen to provide more produce for students." Says Teagan White '18, "thank you for being so welcoming and encouraging. It has been a true gift to be able to work with you." And Jenna Farineau '18 adds, "If you have ever had the pleasure to know, meet, speak with, work with, laugh with, dance with, sing with, enjoy any kind of moment with Tess Faller, then you know just how big of a hole we have in our little community. She is a clear and beautiful image of commitment and hard work— Tess and Anna have been the best role models and support system I could have ever asked for."

Library: Terri Rappaport Terri Rappaport retired in December after managing the library's work-study program, among other tasks, since 2006. Years before, she had worked in COA's development office, then moved on to teach in the Conners Emerson and Pemetic schools. Writes Jane Hultberg, library director, "she built a strong program that instills the value and importance of good work habits, professionalism, teamwork, and pride in a job well done, forging strong bonds with students and skillfully matching library staff needs with student skills and interests." Says Natasha

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Kahn '19, "Terri was my supervisor and friend.

We had a multitude of profound conversations and I learned a lot from her views, perspectives, knowledge—and the smile that was forever on her face." Adds Emmanuel Greeno ('17), "The library remains one of my favorite aspects of COA—thanks, Terri for always fitting our schedules with our academics and commitments, and for being patient and understanding as we grow not only professionally, but as also as people."

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WELCOMES Admission: Matt Shaw '11 "Matt Shaw '11 brings his nuanced perspective of COA and a strong ability to communicate our academic and community experience in words and images," says Heather Albert-Knopp '99, dean of admission. Matt holds an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and has worked in Vassar College's film department, Bard College's

experimental humanities program, and also managed the iconic Oblong Books & Music in Rhinebeck, NY. His senior project was the Blum Gallery installation Those Dark Trees. Delighted to be back on MDI, Matt looks forward to exploring Maine and continuing to make art.

Development: Tyler Hunt '16 Having spent three summers working for development, and temporarily covering gift processing during Amanda Mogridge's maternity leave, Tyler Hunt '16 successfully applied for Amanda's database position when she transitioned to alumni relations. At COA, Tyler studied art and writing, and interned with the

Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory in its development and communications office. For his senior project he created the Blum Gallery exhibition, Form & Figure, a study in figure drawing and high realism. He happily lives in Ellsworth with his husband, Tim, and pets Riley, Ludwig, and Prim.

Library: Catherine Preston-Schreck Catherine Preston-Schreck is now the library's assistant and work-study coordinator. She holds a BA in art and master's degrees in both communication/media from Illinois State University and in visual anthropology from the University of Oxford. She has taught photography and communication, worked in libraries and

bookstores, served as camerawoman and editor on several documentaries, and spent ten years as a breastfeeding counselor and doula. Recently, Catherine volunteered as a gleaner for Hannah Semler '06 at Healthy Acadia, and with voter registration at the Bar Harbor Town Office.

Library: Hannah Stevens '09 Thorndike Library's new archivist and cataloguer is Hannah Stevens '09, following Ingrid Hill's transition to a position with student life.

Hannah holds a master's degree in library and information science from Simmons College with a concentration in preservation management.

At COA, Hannah took a photography archive

internship at the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor.

She also interned at Wellesley College working on architectural plans, and at the preservation company Gaylord Brothers. For the past four years, Hannah worked as an archivist and librarian at the Northeast Harbor Library.

Summer Programs: Renee Duncan After four years directing the Summer Field Studies program, Renee Duncan will now also serve as the associate director of summer programs, taking over from Jean Sylvia. Writes Laura Johnson, summer programs director, "Renee has done a wonderful job overseeing SFS in keeping with the values and mission of

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COA and will continue to supervise that program during the summer months." Her year-round work will be assisting in the preparation of COA's other summer programs: Family Nature Camp, Summer Field Institute, Adult Learner Courses, and the various summer conferences held on campus.

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COA's Wood Pellet Boiler Ask Millard Dority, director of campus planning, buildings, and public safety, about our wood pellet boiler and he sounds as proud of this Viessmann AMSE—the first for institutional use sold in the United States—as he is of his little dog, Willie.

"The pellet boiler is part of an integrated design approach," Millard explains. It runs at 50 percent of capacity because the buildings in the Kathryn W. Davis Residence Village—which is most of what it heats—are so well insulated, the windows and doors so airtight.

The theory behind the boiler is pretty simple—a matter of burning the pellets to heat a small amount of water, which in turn heats more water, which then flows into the buildings, heating them.

The pellets are delivered three to four times each year from Skowhegan's Maine Woods Pellets, twelve to fifteen tons at a time, filling the silo.

Once the pellets enter the boiler, an igniter—something like a turbo-charged hair dryer—starts them burning.

Just above the oven are twenty-three slender tubes through which water flows. The fiery pellets heat this water, which then flows into coils within a large, columnar tank that is itself filled with water, raising it to 153°.

The entire system is tracked, so we know how much CO2 and carbon are released into the environment and how many pellets it uses.

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Illustration by Rebecca Hope Woods.

After heating the 30,000 square feet of the Davis Village and Deering Common, the water returns at 130° to the tank for reheating. Meanwhile, the wood ash drops out of the oven and is emptied into a large can, to be carted out to the compost pile.

SUMMER 2017

AT COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC June 3: Commencement COA celebrates the class of 2017 with poet and essayist Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib.

July 6: Lecture Dissent Collars Artist Roxana Geffen speaks on her creations, inspired by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

July 10: Lecture Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument An evening with Lucas St. Clair, the environmentalist behind Maine’s new national monument. Co-sponsored

by Acadia Senior College.

July 31 through August 4 COA Humanities Institute with Jeff Rosen A weeklong series of lectures, presentations, and panels curated by the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center. Check coa.edu/calendar for a full listing.

August 7: Sherry Geyelin Luncheon Chef and food blogger Serena Wolf discusses her new book, The Dude Diet.

August 8: Coffee & Conversation Poet Dan Burt joins Karen Waldron, COA’s Lisa Stewart Chair in Literature and Women’s Studies, for a reading of his work.

July 11: Coffee & Conversation Ann Luther, trustee and former president of the Maine League of Women Voters, speaks with Jamie McKown, COA’s James Russell Wiggins Chair in Government and Polity.

August 15: Coffee & Conversation Christina Baker Kline, author of Orphan Train, talks about her newest book, A Piece of the World.

July 13: Blum Gallery Opening Reception The Wonders of Tribal Ethiopia Photographer Clare Stone’s new work depicts life in the Omo Valley, one of the world’s last great tribal regions.

August 16: Lecture A Conversation with Clare Stone Photographer and collector Clare Stone discusses her exhibit The Wonders of Tribal Ethiopia with Rebecca Hope Woods, COA director of creative services and Blum summer curator.

July 18: Coffee & Conversation Monica Wood, bestselling author of When We Were the Kennedys, speaks with Lynn Boulger, COA dean of institutional advancement.

July 20: Lecture Thinking the Human in the Time of STEM William (Bro) Adams, chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities and former college president, speaks on science and the humanities. *July 21: President’s Circle Dinner Join William Thorndike, COA board chair, and his wife, Geneva, at their Bar Harbor home.

July 25: Coffee & Conversation Reza Jalali, writer, educator, and Muslim scholar, joins Sarah Luke, COA dean of student life. *July 29: Champlain Society Reception Hosted by trustee Stephen Sullens and his wife, Allison.

August 21: Lecture Preparing Leaders in American Life Michael Gilligan, current president and former program director for theology of the Henry Luce Foundation, speaks on America’s religious diversity, how religion is integrated into the humanities and social sciences, and its role in international affairs.

August 22: Coffee & Conversation Professor, historian, COA trustee emeritus, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Hackett Fischer speaks on his upcoming book on slavery, freedom, and the creativity of African cultures in America.

August 29: Coffee & Conversation Patrick Chassé, historical landscape architect specialist, joins Isabel Mancinelli, COA’s Charles Eliot Professor of Ecological Planning, Policy, and Design, to discuss the iconic landscapes of MDI and how they can be preserved and integrated into our modern lives.

All events are subject to change. For locations, times, updates, and other information, please visit www.coa.edu/calendar. *These events are open to TCS members only. For Champlain Society or President's Circle membership information, call Lynn Boulger, 207-801-5620.

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COA

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