COA Magazine: Vol 3. No 1. Winter 2007

COA Volume 3 | Number 1

WINTER 2007

The College of the Atlantic Magazine

COA MISSION College of the Atlantic enriches the liberal arts tradition through a distinctive educational philosophy—human ecology. A human ecological perspective integrates knowledge from all academic disciplines and from personal experience to investigate, and ultimately improve, the relationships between human beings and our social and natural communities. The human ecological perspective guides all aspects of education, research, activism and interactions among the college’s students, faculty, staff and trustees. The College of the Atlantic community encourages, prepares, and expects students to gain the expertise, breadth, values, and practical experience necessary to achieve individual fulfillment and to help solve problems that challenge communities everywhere.

COVER: Puppets

by Nancy Andrews These puppets, inspired by Japanese prints of ghosts and demons, were used in Andrews’ most recent film, The Haunted Camera, the last of her Ima Plume Trilogy.

Photo by Toby Hollis

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR It is Fat Tuesday as I write this, the last day of carnival, a time when the world is turned topsyturvy and we recognize that the very things we most try to hide are the ones that will jump out to surprise us. How fitting, then, to have Nancy Andrews’ demonic puppets on the cover, whirling devils teasing us, even terrifying us, insisting we pay attention—not just to the world around, but to the world inside. And as we do, maybe even to laugh a little, because as odd and frightening as these puppets may be, they are also quite endearing—few things are as frightening as we fear they will be when we allow them to reach the light of day.

For years, the wild mystery of Nancy’s films have had their New York premiere at the Museum of Modern Art, the nation’s foremost showcase of contemporary art. Recently, her edgy creativity has also come to the awareness of Maine, where she’s just received the first-ever "Outside the Frame" award from the Maine International Film Festival for her Ima Plume Trilogy.

Like all issues of COA, this one is a kaleidoscope of the energy and activity of the broad COA community, from our heritage as environmental crusaders to a tribute to our passionate trustee, Alice Eno. But most of all, this magazine celebrates the ways we step away from the world of crusades and research to seek out the world inside. This issue features three faculty members whose artistic guidance has given students one of life’s most essential tools: the power to transform experience. We offer you a taste of Nancy Andrews’ puppet demons, a glimpse into how John Cooper introduces dozens of students a term to music, and a sneak preview of the first chapter of Bill Carpenter’s novelin-progress, Victory Garden.

Enjoy.

BACK COVER: Jamus Drury ’08 took this photo of displaying great frigatebirds while volunteering on Tern Island, a thirty-four-acre sand and coral island that is part of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument. While on the island, Drury is researching the reproductive success of two species of albatross as well as the Tristram’s storm-petrel. More of his photos can be viewed at www.flickr.com/photos/ jamusdrury

Donna Gold editor, COA

The College of the Atlantic Magazine Volume 3 | Number 1

EDITOR

Donna Gold

COA Gets Top Marks in Student Engagement ~ p. 3

A Pledge to Tackle Global Warming by Paul Thacker ~ p. 4 The NASCAR Hybrid by Inaugural Speaker Frank Loy ~ p. 6 Making Sure COA is There for Others ~ p. 14 A donor profile of Elena Tuhy ’90

Alice Eno: Force of Nature ~ p. 15 A tribute by John Anderson

WINTER 2007

:

features

COA EDITORIAL BOARD

Sarah Barrett ’08 Richard J. Borden Dru Colbert Carla Ganiel Noreen Hogan ’91 Jennifer Hughes Linda Mejia ’09 EDITORIAL CONSULTANT

Bill Carpenter ALUMNI CONSULTANTS

Jill Barlow-Kelley Milja Brecher-DeMuro COP Y E D I TOR

Jennifer Hughes

What Do We Need to Start a College? ~ p. 16

DESIGN

An oral history interview with Ann Peach

Winter Ecology ~ p. 18

Mahan Graphics PRINTING BY

JS McCarthy Printers, Augusta, Maine

Class of ’74 Takes on Nation’s Largest Landowner ~ p. 24 In their separate ways, Bill Ginn and Cathy Johnson work to get Plum Creek to do the right thing by Loie Hayes ’79

The Magical Piece ~ p. 30 John Cooper’s human ecology of music

Nancy Andrews ~ p. 34

:

Excerpts from a field journal by Rowen Gorman ’07 COA ADMINISTRATION

TRUSTEES

David Hales President

Edward McC. Blair, Sr. Life Trustee Eliot Coleman Alice Eno David H. Fischer William G. Foulke, Jr. Timothy Fuller ’03 James M. Gower, Life Trustee George B. E. Hambleton Charles E. Hewett Sherry F. Huber John N. Kelly, Trustee Emeritus Philip B. Kunhardt III ’77 Susan Storey Lyman, Life Trustee Suzanne Folds McCullagh Sarah A. McDaniel ’93 Stephen G. Milliken Philip S. J. Moriarty Phillis Anina Moriarty William V. P. Newlin Daniel Pierce Helen Porter Cathy L. Ramsdell ’78, Trustee Emeritus John Reeves Hamilton Robinson, Jr. Henry D. Sharpe, Jr., Life Trustee Clyde E. Shorey, Jr., Life Trustee Donald B. Straus, Life Trustee Cody van Heerden John Wilmerding

Kenneth Hill Academic Dean, Associate Dean of Academic Services John Anderson Associate Dean for Advanced Studies

Drawings and paintings from The Haunted Camera

David Feldman Associate Dean for Academic Affairs

Victory Garden ~ p. 37

Andrew Griffiths Administrative Dean

Novel-in-progress by Bill Carpenter

departments COA Beat ........................................ p. 3 Class Notes ...................................... p. 44 SHE Conference Notes ................ p. 48 Faculty & Community Notes........ p. 50

Sarah Luke Associate Dean for Student Life Karen Waldron Associate Dean for Faculty BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Samuel M. Hamill, Jr. Chairman Elizabeth D. Hodder Vice Chair Casey Mallinckrodt Vice Chair Ronald E. Beard Secretary Leslie C. Brewer Treasurer

Appreciating our donors

Greg Stone: Ocean Defender ~ p. 64 When Professors Change: What I Learned at COA ~ p. 65 The Human Ecology Essay Revisited

by Etta Kralovec

:

Annual Report ~ p. 52

COA is published twice each year for the College of the Atlantic community.

Please direct correspondence to: COA Magazine College of the Atlantic 105 Eden Street Bar Harbor, Maine 04609 Phone: (207) 288-5015 email: dgold@coa.edu

www.coa.edu This publication is printed on recycled paper.

Chlorine free, acid free manufacturing process.

LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT

At

College of the Atlantic we believe that relationships among humans and between humans and the environment can be made more sustainable, more peaceful and more just. We believe that humans are firmly and inextricably embedded in the natural world, and that each person can make a difference. We believe that leadership in response to global challenges is a fundamental purpose of institutions of higher education.

Because we believe these things, we have a responsibility to make it so, and to act in ways that demonstrate that it is possible.

It is clear today that business as usual as of the end of the twentieth century will never produce a world in which we want our children and grandchildren to live at the end of the twenty-first century. We must do things better, and we must start with our own actions.

This fall, our trustees declared that COA will be a NETZERO institution with regard to the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. COA will do whatever is possible to avoid and reduce emissions. For those emissions we cannot avoid or reduce, we will invest in quantifiable and verifiable emissions reductions elsewhere that totally offset our contributions to the warming of this planet.

The Kathryn Davis Student Village, on which construction will begin this spring, will not only be spectacular student housing, it will be the epitome of “green” construction, heated and lighted without any net contribution to global warming. We have shifted our marine fleet to ethanol-based fuel, and the few vehicles we own will follow this pattern as they are replaced. For several years, all of our electricity has been wind-generated. We celebrated the first zero-waste graduation ceremony in 2005, and we approach zero waste at other ceremonies and events. We no longer allow college funds to be spent on bottled water.

And we have much more to do: We are committed to achieving 100 percent reliance on renewable energy by 2015. We still have efficiencies to pursue in our heating and lighting. The transportation and production costs of much of the food we consume are too great, and we need to increase our commitment to organic and local food. We need to redouble our efforts to partner for sustainability with the Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce, Acadia National Park and local businesses. We need to continually review our endowment portfolio and purposefully decide what roles we want to play as investors.

If we are successful, it will not be because of our values or our vision for the future. It will be because of what we do. We must learn more, teach better, act more wisely, and cherish each other and this planet that is our only home. We are not here to prepare students to live in the world as it is—we are here to prepare students to shape the world in which they will live.

We will meet that challenge with ideas and with action.

David Hales 2 | COA

COA BEAT

COA Gets Top Marks in Student Engagement The education that College of the Atlantic offers is more challenging, interactive, dynamic, critical and supportive than that of many of the nation’s top schools according to the 2006 National Survey of Student Engagement, or NSSE. The survey, sponsored by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, is considered the most comprehensive assessment of effective practices in higher education. It includes data from 260,000 students at 523 four-year colleges and universities, including such selective institutions as Marlboro, Middlebury, Wesleyan and George Washington.

This year, as in 2005, COA scored as high or higher than the top 10 percent of participating schools in nearly every category.

“We have always felt that COA offers an extremely high-quality education,” says Ken Hill, COA’s academic dean and faculty member in education and psychology. “The NSSE survey supports our claims with empirical evidence. We have scored at nearly the top of all assessed benchmarks in comparison to our peer institutions, and we can use our responses to keep making educational improvements.”

To gather the data, COA first-year students and seniors were asked detailed questions about their engagement in five essential areas: • Level of Academic Challenge: such as applying theories to new situations.

• Active and Collaborative Learning: such as working with others in and out of class.

• Student-Faculty Interactions: discussions with faculty and students outside classes, and collaborating with faculty on research.

• Enriching Educational Experiences: student diversity; internship and study abroad opportunities.

• Supportive Campus Environment When asked about gaining critical and analytical thinking skills at the college, seniors gave COA one of the highest possible scores. Similarly, students ranked COA’s method of engaging students

directly and actively with their material through fieldwork, analysis or creative endeavors as very high, as was the level of basic academic challenge.

Students say emphatically that they have learned to synthesize ideas and concepts from other courses and frequently discuss ideas from readings and classes with faculty members and with other students outside of class, thus expanding their ability to use the material they learn.

Another significant finding was the high quality of student-faculty connections. Even first-year students reported feeling comfortable interacting with faculty members. Similarly, COA soared in comparison to the other top 10 percent of schools when students were asked whether they felt the campus was supportive of their needs.

“What fascinates me,” says COA President David Hales, “is how closely the NSSE standards reflect COA’s educational philosophy. We have always engaged our students actively and collaboratively, using the entire college as a learning community. Our faculty expects critical thinking. COA’s basic integrative approach naturally embraces concepts from across all disciplines. These standards express the core of a COA education.”

For more information visit http://nsse.iub.edu.

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COA BEAT

Walking the Talk:

COA’s green path Carbon Net Zero, leftovers, safe paint and sustainable floors ~ Donna Gold

nyone who knows anything about College of the Atlantic knows about our active environmentalism. Along with members of our earliest classes Bill Ginn, who is featured in this issue, was instrumental in getting Maine to pass its first-in-the-nation bottle bill.

For thirty-five years, whether it’s organic food, composting, safe cleaning supplies, or architecture that maximizes energy and light, COA has walked the talk.

In 2004, we offset all our electricity use with windpower.

In 2005, we held a zero-waste graduation. We feted eight hundred people and yet produced only five pounds of trash.

This October, College of the Atlantic went carbonneutral. At this moment, students, staff and faculty are engaged in examining our greenhouse gas emissions to determine what can be reduced or avoided. All other emissions will be offset by the close of the fiscal year.

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A Pledge to Tackle Global Warming “We’ll be the first carbon-neutral campus on the planet” ~ David Malakoff ’86

by Paul D. Thacker, reporter Inside Higher Ed adapted and reprinted courtesy of insidehighered.com Some institutions commit to hiring celebrity faculty and some to building winning sports teams, but a small college in Bar Harbor, Maine is doing its best to slow global warming. With help from its students, all of whom major in human ecology, 4 | COA

In each issue of COA, we’ll use this space for updates on how we walk the talk. Come summer, we’ll explain our carbon offset plan. Right now, we have a few smaller items to report: • The George B. Dorr Museum of Natural History has a new hemlock wood tile floor, harvested from trees that were sustainably grown, thanks to a generous donation from Everett Towle, who manages a sustainable wood lot in Buxton, Maine.

• COA’s painter, Mary Harney ’96 has been busy repainting the interior of Take-A-Break and Turrets.

Ninety percent of the materials are “green,” she says, much safer for those who work in the building.

• One more note. When I asked Jamie McGown, COA’s new faculty member in government and polity, and holder of the James Russell Wiggens chair in Democracy and Polity, why he chose COA, he said, “leftovers.”

“Leftovers?”

“Leftovers. What other college cafeteria thinks so much about waste to offer leftovers at reduced prices?

COA walks the talk.”

College of the Atlantic has resolved to fully mitigate its future effect on climate change by reducing use of fossil fuels and offsetting any carbon emissions with investments in renewable energy.

College officials say the policy is the first of its kind for an institution of higher education.

“Being a big institution may have advantages, but moving quickly to address major social and environmental challenges isn’t always one of them,” said David Malakoff, who graduated from the college in 1986 and is science correspondent for National Public Radio. “So, we may not have a football team and a marching band, but we’ll be the first carbon-neutral campus on the planet.”

Photo by Noreen Hogan ’91

“College of the Atlantic’s net-zero carbon emissions plan is scientifically sound, simple to understand and straightforward to implement,” said Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in a news release released by the college.

The college’s president, David Hales, said that the commitment will serve as a model for other institutions to follow, but also as a learning tool for its fewer than 300 students. “Students will be getting firsthand, real world experience handling finances, and the educational value of this type of experience is just tremendous,” he said.

Hales recently took over as president of College of the Atlantic and his first request to the trustees was to achieve 100 percent reliance on renewable energy by 2015. “I am hopeful that other administrators can see that this is not that complex or expensive,” he said. “Once they understand that, we’ll see others come along.”

In fact, much of the groundwork for creating the new policy was laid before Hales arrived. For the last year, a senior, John Deans, has been working to figure out how much carbon College of the Atlantic emits into the atmosphere when fossil fuels are burned to create the electricity it uses.

The job was not easy and Deans says he is still fiddling with the numbers, but he has determined that the college’s annual consumption is 1 million kilowatt hours. He then partnered with a nonprofit group, Clean Air-Cool Planet, to calculate the amount of greenhouse gases emitted to create that much electricity.

The college is working hard to lower its own electricity consumption, but emissions are a global, not a local, problem, so they can be “offset” by lowering emissions elsewhere. In this case, the college decided to lower greenhouse gases by paying for windmills that are generating electricity in South Dakota. This pays for the costs of carbon pollution by the college and also helps spur the market in renewable energy.

“None of this stuff is perfect, but it does push the market in the right direction,” said Deans. The college expects to spend no more than $30,000 a year for the offset program.

Deans said that College of the Atlantic is now emissions-neutral for its electricity use, and that the next step is to examine other fossil fuel consumption such as the gasoline that staff and faculty members and students use to travel to campus.

Deans, a member of his campus’s SustainUS affiliate, hopes that students elsewhere will lobby their administrators to enact their own carbon neutral programs.

Hales added that the American Council on Renewable Energy has formed a higher education committee that is setting two goals for universities and colleges by 2010. First, it wants 100 institutions to begin investing 10 percent of their endowments into funds that support renewable energy.

Second, the group is asking these same universities to ensure that they purchase only renewable energy by the same date.

Noting that students are becoming more aware of the potential costs from climate change and the need to change patterns of energy use, Hales added, “This will have not only an educational purpose but will also save all of us more money in the long run.”

Read the original article at: http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/11/green

COA | 5

© The New Yorker Collection 1995 J.B. Handelsman from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.

INAUGURAL TALK

The NASCAR Hybrid Re-invigorating the environmental movement Excerpted from the talk given at the inauguration of David Hales, October 8, 2006. By Frank E. Loy I want to talk about a cartoon. A New Yorker cartoon. It shows two men sitting in a restaurant. One says to the other, “I’m rather fortunate. I have no parents, so Medicare is no problem, and I have no children, so the environment is no problem.” It nicely captures a paradox I want to talk about today.

For millions of Americans, the issue of the environment, of our relationship to the planet we inhabit, is central to our thinking. It shapes our personal and political behavior and is absolutely vital to our common future.

These Americans have built an impressive movement in the last thirty-five years. The many environmental organizations are stronger than ever, and we as a nation have accomplished a great deal.

And yet—and this is the paradox—as the movement has grown stronger and cleaned up rivers and the air in many of our communities, we find that globally we are falling backwards. When we compare how much we need to do just to stay even environmentally with what we actually are doing—our progress is totally inadequate. The adverse health impact of toxics in our society is growing; we’re losing species every day; our climate is changing irreversibly.

How come? Because we don’t have the political will. And why? Because we have been quite unable to bring the bulk of Americans to our way of thinking. For them, the environment is far down the list of what’s important; it shapes neither their personal nor their political behavior.

Quite frankly, it seems more important on this occasion to ask why this is, than to discuss any specific environmental challenge—for if we can’t understand better why this division in America exists, and what to do about it, we as a nation are doomed to make totally inadequate progress.

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Let’s tackle this by posing three questions: 1. What do we know about America’s views on the environment?

2. Why has it been so hard for the environmental community to be more persuasive?

3. What can we do?

The Facts: There are plenty of surveys that show that Americans care about the environment. But there is equally plentiful evidence that the issue does not rate high on their priority list. Last May, The Gallup Organization conducted a poll in which it asked Americans what they thought were the most important problems facing the country today. The environment ranked twenty-third.

How can this be? Several reasons come to mind: • We are victims of our own success. The environmental goals, say, of Earth Day 1970, have been perceived as achieved.

• While the environment is viewed as relevant, it is not seen as an immediate problem. Air pollution that causes asthma cannot be seen; the mess in Iraq is on the tube every night.

• Voters believe there are negative impacts from progressive environmental policy, that stronger standards might raise taxes, cost jobs and increase governmental interference without noticeably improving our lives.

• The environmental agenda is bewilderingly diffuse, with multiple priorities.

• A well-financed, active anti-environmental movement has ensured that for millions of Americans the very term environment is locked in a permanent embrace with the term extreme. Take the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which says, “CO2. They call it pollution. We call it life.”

• Finally, even among voters who express concern about the environment there is no agreement on what the problem is or what should be done about it. That makes crafting a message about the environment very tricky.

What do we do? We need to dig into the beliefs of Americans more deeply than just looking at their attitudes on toxic wastes or on global warming.

We need to identify what Americans care about most deeply—something we sometimes call values. And in our messages we need to respond to those values. This requires research, messaging that stems from that research, new messengers, and innovative marketing—much as you would market a brand of athletic shoes. (See www.ecoAmerica.net.)

Americans care about Prosperity, Health, National Security and—America. The latter meaning Patriotism, Morality and Culture. That is a damn good list. What we have failed to do is to make the case that good environmental policy will deliver each and every one of these values.

Go to an anti-environmental website; they talk values—the values I just mentioned. Environmentalists talk issues.

What to do? A group of us recently asked ourselves how to go about tapping into patriotism.

Could we get the spectators at a NASCAR race to drop what we perceived to be their indifference, even hostility, to climate change? That would be a coup. What if an American car manufacturer— say, Ford—were to sponsor some NASCARsanctioned races. But only by hybrids. We pictured the winning driver stepping out of his hybrid in his yellow driving suit, advertising patches all over. The TV commentator comes over and says: “Congratulations, Joe. Great race. But tell me, why

David Hales hands Frank Loy a stone from Mount Desert Island.

the hybrid? It doesn’t even go all that fast.” And Joe would respond to the 75,000 fans, “Because I am a patriotic American. This country simply has got to use more efficient cars so that we won’t have to import so much oil.”

I like the sound of it.

My challenge to you, to David Hales, and to the whole College of the Atlantic community is: make a difference that will be meaningful to the man in the New Yorker cartoon. I bet that there are good values deep within that apparently lazy, indifferent and selfish guy. The task of human ecologists is to find those values and build an environmental ethic on them. It’s not an easy challenge. But a grand one.

Frank Loy has had an extensive career in international affairs, business and the non-governmental sector. He served as Under Secretary for Global Affairs under President Clinton, and also held State Department positions under presidents Carter and Johnson. Loy was senior vice president of Pan American Airways, a founding partner of the firm that rescued Penn Central from bankruptcy, president of the German Marshall Fund of the U.S. and has chaired many environmental organizations. He holds an LLB from Harvard.

COA | 7

COA Students Help Secure Global Youth Movement Nairobi climate change conference marks new youth acceptance

COA’s youth delegation to COP 12 in Nairobi: Alexander Fletcher ’07, Sarah Neilson ’09, Matthew McInnis ’09, Virginie Lavallee-Picard ’07, Juan Pablo Hoffmaister ’07, Michael Kersula ’09 and John Deans ’07, wear the t-shirts they created for the journey. The logo refers to the typical practice at international negotiations of bracketing language that is not yet agreed upon. In bracketing the globe, the students are saying that the future of Earth is still under negotiation.

The seven College of the Atlantic students who attended the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol negotiations found that preparation pays off.

Though undergraduates, these students say they were heard, even courted, by the international officials in attendance.

The students had spent the fall term entirely focused on the convention, taking a class in climate chemistry with Don Cass, another in Global Environmental Politics with Doreen Stabinsky, while also working independently to read the international protocols to be discussed at the negotiations.

“It made an incredible difference,” said John Deans ’07. Knowing the issues, knowing each other, the COA students—all members of the youth environmental group SustainUS—were able to effectively assist other youth. In part because of their work, the hundred international youth delegates, hailing from more than a dozen nations in Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas, were able to issue swift responses to decisions made by international leaders and craft daily policy statements.

“Eight weeks prior to the conference, I didn't even know the vocabulary,” recalled Deans, who hails from Topsham, Maine. “When we landed in Nairobi, I could read the reports and understand what was going on. When other students saw

8 | COA

what we’ve been able to do at COA their jaws dropped—COA allowed you to focus on this?”

More importantly, the students found they were taken seriously. “At last year's meetings, members of the youth delegation had to keep calling to try to get just one meeting with the U.S. State Department,” said Juan Pablo Hoffmaister ’07 of Costa Rica. “This time, the youth had a meeting within days, and I was given the cell phone number of the State Department’s logistics coordinator to make sure everything went smoothly.

We were able to meet with every minister, political advisor, and UN official that we wanted to—and they were interested in what we had to say.”

While official policy changes lagged, the global youth movement tightened. “We’re now gaining a full grasp of the total process,” said Hoffmaister.

As one of fourteen elected youth representatives to the United Nations Environment Programme from across the globe, Hoffmaister has attended many such conferences. “At any meeting that any minister attended, they could look around the room and see the face of the future.”

And youth have a powerful message, added Deans. “Just by meeting with us, the heads of delegations are forced to confront the impact of climate change. The more we can do it, and the more regular we can make those meetings, the more our face—the face of the next generation— can affect the process. After all, it’s our future that they are negotiating.”

What We See: Report from COP12

By Sarah Neilson ’09, Youth Delegate

Global environmental politics. This concept seems to exist in a completely different sphere in the “real world” than in a classroom. I am sitting at a table under a tent at the Gigiri Complex of the United Nations Offices in Nairobi, surrounded by trees with purple flowers and plants whose names I don’t know. Delegates in suits, guards in uniforms with guns in their holsters wander the complex. Dark hands wipe this morning’s rain off the stairs to the courtyard as high heels and shiny loafers hurry by. I am here with six of my classmates and hundreds of other youth and government delegates because of the 12th Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international governments of the United Nations’ attempt to reach some kind of agreement for action on the adverse impacts from onging climate change.

But what are we really doing? When we meet each other’s eyes, what do we see, what do we feel, what judgments do we make? Because really, we’re all people who are a little lost in different ways and it is people who make these things—who make up conferences, documents, ad-hoc working groups.

Sure, there are veto states, geographical and political coalitions, but what happens between people when they look each other in the eyes? Who is this diplomat, this elegantly-suited person, this person cleaning hallways and stairs? What does he represent? What are her beliefs about climate change and climate change action? Where does she live?

Does he have children? Who do I seem to be to them? How does one get from people talking to politics? What is it about politics that changes relationships?

Opening day; not much is happening. People are talking, adopting agendas, giving presentations about deforestation, drinking bottled water and hoping not to get sick. Cleaning stairs.

Justice seems so important and yet so unreachable. From our matatu, the minibus that serves as the primary form of transportation in Kenya, I have seen slums and villas, beautiful trees, beat-up cars, roads that can hardly be classified as such, hundreds of walkers, brightly painted pottery. The

Sarah Neilson and fellow youth delegate Josh pause for a coffee break during the Conference of Youth, held just before the UN Framework Convention.

environment? This is the environment. Politics? I don’t see politics in the purple trees, the red mud, the pots. The politics are here, I know, but what is most immediate is survival, which comes down to care—for each other, for where we live. We don’t always show care and sometimes one has to choose what one cares most about. I care about excess trash impacting people’s quality of life, but I can’t drink the water because I might get sick from it. So I drink Dasani. And then I throw away the bottle. And it stays in this country. That’s global environmental politics.

But global environmental people—all of us who live on this earth—we turn to each other and smile or frown, we hug each other and talk—or we don’t.

And because everything is connected, the earth is affected. Not to mention the billions of other relationships that make up this breathing, wild life. So Continued on page 11

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Sea Urchins, Cancer and Human Ecology An alum finds his way into Science via the sea urchin genome

By Helen Hess, faculty member in invertebrate zoology and biomechanics About the size of a plum, and only a bit more active, the purple sea urchin seems unlikely to arrest attention or even inspire casual interest.

Using its five little teeth, this unassuming marine invertebrate can be found grazing on kelp from Alaska to Mexico. Yet a sea urchin’s genome contains information that can give insights into subjects as diverse as cancer, genetic disease, developmental biology and the evolutionary history of life on Earth. The sequenced genome of Strongylocentrotus purpuratus has far-reaching implications and applications, worthy of a broad audience.

Thanks to the work of COA graduate Seth Carbonneau ’05—along with some 228 other researchers—S. purpuratus has now gotten the attention it deserves. Carbonneau was an author on a paper published in the November 10, 2006 issue of Science magazine, a premier journal for communicating results of important scientific research. The paper, “The Genome of the Sea Urchin Strongylocentrotus purpuratus,” reported that the purple sea urchin has joined the select group of species, including our own, whose entire genome has been sequenced. A publication in Science is quite a feather in Carbonneau’s cap, even if he shares it with dozens of coauthors.

Sequencing and interpreting the 23,300 genes was a massive project, involving collaborators from over seventy institutions worldwide.

One very startling pattern revealed by sequencing the genomes of diverse organisms is that species as different as humans and flies share similar versions of many of the same genes. The bulging, compound eyes of a fly are morphologically quite distinct from the mobile and expressive eyes of mammals, yet very similar genes, derived from an ancient common ancestor living more than 500 million years ago, orchestrate their development in the embryo of each. Urchins look even less like humans than do flies; urchins have no heads, no legs, no eyes, nor ears. Nonetheless, genes that regulate the development of these 10 | COA

Seth Carbonneau ’05 in Dr. A. Thomas Look’s lab at the DanaFarber Cancer Institute in Boston. Photo by colleague Rima Kulkarni.

structures in human embryos can also be found in the urchin genome. Furthermore, it’s not just birth defects that result from the malfunction of developmental genes; scientists are now discovering that diseases such as Huntington’s disease and muscular dystrophy, that don’t appear until late in life, can be traced to problems in these genes. The Science paper adds to the surprise, reporting that urchins also share versions of the very same genes that can lead to human disease.

Carbonneau became involved in the genomesequencing project while working in Jim Coffman’s lab at Mount Desert Biological Laboratories after graduation. He had already taken a course in Molecular Biology Research Techniques at MDIBL, part of the INBRE program bringing biomedical research to COA. Carbonneau is modest about his role in the sequencing effort but pleased to find that what he considers minor contributions earned him a place among the listed authors. He felt more involved in other research projects in the Coffman lab, which studies sea urchin development. The process by which a fertilized egg—one single cell—becomes an embryo composed of many cells and many different kinds of cells, is a complex choreography ultimately controlled by genes. The genes explored by the Coffman lab are essential to

development; in addition to regulating the development of an embryo, they are also responsible for various diseases and cancers when they don’t function properly. Says Carbonneau of Coffman, “Jim considers cancer a developmental biology problem to be solved.”

Carbonneau is now at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, in the lab of Dr. A. Thomas Look, working on genes that are important in embryonic development but that also have been linked to cancer.

Instead of urchins, the organism is the zebrafish, whose transparent embryonic circulatory system makes it ideal for investigating pediatric leukemia.

There is a relationship between genes that regulate embryonic development and the incidence of certain cancers. Understanding genes in the con-

text of the entire genome and understanding development in the context of the entire embryo can yield insights into disease treatments. As unlikely as it seems, sequencing the sea urchin genome contributes to finding cures for cancer.

Carbonneau’s senior project on invasive fire ant colonies’ patterns of aggression gave him experience couching ecological questions in evolutionary terms and working with tiny organisms. The research that Carbonneau has been doing more recently involves even tinier organisms in a remarkable evolutionary context with its unsuspected connections to human disease. He finds the work exciting, but looks forward to getting back to ant research—working outdoors and without a microscope.

What We See: Report from COP12 Continued from page 9

we sit and try to make documents, review actions and plans, because we care about each other, our lands, our health, our image. But it seems there is not enough care to go around. Mother Theresa said that if there is no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other. It seems to me that peace and health—environmental health and reciprocal human health—are inextricable from one another; that the society we live in— dependent on motors for transport, on markets for wealth—is one in which we all keep forgetting.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, while an attempt to remember, is also an effort to appease the forgetful by creating lax standards and market incentives to help mitigate the harmful effects of many human behaviors (especially those of the wealthiest industrialized nations). I am sometimes angry about what I consider to be a weak process, sometimes sad, sometimes hopeful that people often do remember that we belong to each other, like the people at a children’s home I visited who offer a relatively safe place for street orphans, teaching them to grow their own food despite the minimal facilities, or the people of Wangari Mathaai’s Greenbelt Movement planting trees throughout Kenya; these people are the true source of change and hope.

Noble laureate Wangari Mathaai of the Green Belt Movement meets with COA students and other COP12 youth delegates.

While governments seem overly concerned with bottom lines that seem to have more to do with economic and political interests than human and environmental ones, these people are taking time now to care for one another. Outside conference room walls, away from the classroom and from theoretical textbooks, people are people, with values and ideas. When it comes down to it, we can only really look each other in the eyes and see what we see.

COA sophomore Sarah Neilson participated in the youth actions at the UNFCC COP in Montreal in November 2005 and subsequently attended several climate change summits and conferences. The people she met on a post-COP12 journey through Kenya changed her perspective on politics and life.

Sarah plans to focus her studies on social and community issues and hopes to return to Kenya.

COA | 11

Society for Human Ecology An Extraordinary Exhibition of World-Class Human Ecology

by Gene Myers (’80-81), SHE president-elect

I could feel the anticipation sweeping through campus. It was the fall of 2006, and the Society for Human Ecology Conference was coming to COA. As a scholar-inresidence on sabbatical from Western Washington University's Huxley College of the Environment, I watched the conference become a climactic occasion, gripping the current generation of students along with the many visiting scholars. And for a month afterwards, the glow remained, with students and faculty unable to stop discussing the conference's multifaceted issues.

This was not unlike other SHE conferences I've attended. For a fairly small organization, these gatherings attract an exceptionally international set of people. I was at sessions with many participants from Europe and South America; indeed, there were representatives from all continents except Antarctica at the conference. SHE's diversity extends to how its members define human ecology as well, with several schools of thought and interest areas represented, from the Cornell conception that grew out of home economics, to policy activists, to community resource management practitioners and scholars, to cutting-edge re12 | COA

searchers on the ecological footprint of nations. As usual, there was a packed agenda of sessions, roundtables, and plenary speakers.

But in other ways, this was a landmark event. The SHE board, Executive Director Rich Borden, President John Anderson, staff Barbara Carter and Sean Berg ’08, and COA itself pulled out all the stops. The keynote speakers included some very high-powered ecological luminaries such as William McDonough, Richard Levins and Robert Kates. There was a lobster megadinner; John Cooper composed original music, which he performed alongside COA students.

Most remarkably, being the chthonic musical instrument of Human Ecology that it is, the college was played—it hummed; it resonated in such perfect melody and harmony to the intellectual vibes of the gathering, leaving no doubt that COA is one of the pre-eminent centers of human ecology.

This was not lost on the students, who were treated to an extraordinary exhibition of worldclass human ecology. The response was palpable.

All classes were cancelled, and large numbers of students participated. First-year students, all of whom were enrolled in the Human Ecology core

What does human ecology mean to you?

were prominent at every turn. course, found multiple points For students, this meant seeof connection with conference ing their teachers in a new, scholars and practitioners.

My Ocean Ghoul? Holy Emu Can Go? esteemed, professional light.

What a way to start out college!

One dark night in the depths of a Maine Faculty pulled the students Read McDonough’s Cradle right up to the same table to Cradle, then hear fresh in- winter, a lone COA professor, in search of the deeper meanings of Human Ecology, as colleagues. Student voices formation from the author plugged our one major into an anagram were heard everywhere, inhimself, then ask questions generator … and found ... cluding at the sessions on New like, “What did the Bush Directions in Human Ecology Cabinet say after they heard Holy Ocean Mug My Canoe Ghoul Education, where discussion the same speech?” Answer: Huge Clay Moon Much Lone Yoga took a process/content direc“Now that, gentlemen, was a Holy Emu Can Go Moon Gauchely tion. How appropriate! good dose of common sense!” Meanly Go Ouch Each Ugly Moon I saw student involvement After Harvard's Richard Levins up close in the four sessions I organized on conspoke, students and attendees convened with servation psychology. Two focused on the human Levins and David Feldman, COA faculty member in relation to nature, and two were more applied, physics and math, to discuss the math behind probing “Getting psychology right for sustainadynamic systems. Everyone TAB’d together, makbility.” We heard from colleagues measuring ing for even more personal contact. Rich Borden people’s unconscious associations of self and said it was one of the most electric SHE confernature, and from others triangulating our moral ences he had witnessed. responses to nature by looking at how people A lot of action happened in the themes that ran regard robotic pets! We heard about applying through the conference. Interested in the deterconservation in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, minants of the dimensions and scale of ecological and about automaticity versus “mindfulness” in footprint of nations? Attend the several paper sesbehavior change. SHE has become an important sions on Structural Human Ecology. Have a Down meeting ground for our effort to “green” psychEast marine resource side? Experts shared results ology and apply it. As elsewhere, we saw a surge of in aquatic and fisheries issues—and first-year stuinterest from students whose minds have a psydents were ready, having read Kurlansky’s Cod: A chological bent but whose passions connect to Biography of the Fish That Changed the World. ecology. After the conference was over, I conCOA’s recent conversation on green business was tinued to meet with a handful of students who carried forward in at least four sessions, including wanted to extend the conversation, a tremendous “The Compatibility of Financial Goals and a Green pleasure for me.

Business Environment” (co-chaired by alum, At the end of the conference, I was chosen as current faculty member and former trustee Jay president-elect. In 2009, the SHE Conference will McNally ’84), and “Green Communities: Business be at Western Washington University. As an and Economics I and II.” Also available were land exchange student in 1980-81, I may be the closest and wildlife law, wildfire, GIS, sustainability scito a COA alum to hold this office, and as such, I ence, a series of three sessions on education, and encourage all alumni to invite their professional three or four on philosophy. There were sessions comrades to make use of the SHE conferences and on music (performed live) and the arts, as well as networks. COA’s SHE bonanza set a high water history, forestry, climate change, community, mark as I begin thinking of 2009. health, agro-ecology. The conference agenda read like a COA catalog! Continuing education at its best for folk like me. And COA faculty members COA | 13

DONOR PROFILE

MAKING SURE COA IS THERE FOR OTHERS

By Donna Gold

B

Elena Tuhy ’90 Alumna donor

14 | COA

efore Elena Tuhy ’90 argued a case in front of the Supreme Court of Ohio, before she became a prosecutor and then a defense attorney, before she went to law school, Tuhy worked at College of the Atlantic. In 1990, just as Tuhy was graduating, public affairs director Carolyn Dow left the college to focus on her art. Tuhy, who had been a work-study student under Dow while at COA, was asked to take over.

“It was the most pressure I have ever felt; much more than being a lawyer,” Tuhy recalls. “I loved the college so much, and it was my job to tell the world how great it was and what amazing things the students, teachers and staff were doing. I felt like the weight of the college was on my shoulders.”

Tuhy later studied law at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law in Cleveland, Ohio, and served as an assistant law director in Licking County in central Ohio. She is now in private practice.

Despite her many other experiences and allegiances, Tuhy continues to feel responsible for COA. Each year since her 1990 graduation, Tuhy has donated to the annual fund. During the leaner loan-repayment days, the gifts were smaller, but they have increased over the years. Tuhy is a tither; each year she tries to give one-tenth of her income to non-profit organizations that are meaningful to her. COA is high on that list.

“It just makes sense,” Tuhy says. “Someone had given money so that the college was there for me. I want to be sure that it is there for others.”

Tuhy’s enthusiasm for the college permeated her experience at COA. It was so contagious that she helped bring about one of the greatest media coups the college had realized: a column in The Washington Post by Colman McCarthy, who had stopped by the Public Affairs Office one afternoon during Tuhy’s first summer on the job. Recalls Rich Borden, “I will never forget the pure excitement Elena had when Colman McCarthy wrote a rave review of COA in The Washington Post. She made it happen. It was a bases-loaded home run!”

But for Tuhy, whatever she said was simple fact. “I had an amazing time at COA. I loved the community. I loved walking across campus, saying hello to others, knowing that even if I didn’t know them then, I probably would, eventually. It was all so incredible: the passion of the students, the enthusiasm of the teachers. It was at COA that I really learned that what each of us does has an impact on the entire world.”

Alice Eno

1923-2007

COA TRIBUTE

Force of Nature

By John Anderson, faculty member in zoology and behavioral ecology

It

is not often that one gets to meet a Force of Nature, but for twenty

years Alice Eno has been here, encouraging me, inspiring me, making me laugh, making me crazy—always bringing out the best in those around her.

I first met Alice back in the days when we were working on terns with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. Alice would come roaring out to Petit Manan in her boat Clam City Express. One summer, for some reason, we always found ourselves setting the table for six, when there were only five on the bird team. We started making jokes about the “ghostly sixth person.” On a particularly wet and windy day we were all indoors huddled around the stove. Alice had said that she was coming to visit, but it was blowing half a gale and nobody would be headed our way, we were sure. Suddenly, the door burst open upon a vision of pink and Alice bounded into the room “Ah called and called, you ahnt listening to your radio,” she complained in the delightful Texas drawl that resisted forty years of Princeton refinement. Alice had rowed herself in through the surf with beer, wine and cookies for stranded bird biologists. The “ghostly sixth” had come calling!

Alice adopted the college’s seabird program.

Her particular loves had always been puffins and bald eagles, and it was only fitting that the first puffin to fledge on Petit Manan was called Alice.

The darn birds seemed to follow her: we had our first puffin chick on Great Duck in sight of Eno Station last summer. Alice was always very polite about other birds, and passionately interested in every student project done at the station, but I know she had a hankering for puffins; I am glad that they have chosen to oblige.

Alice Eno stands in front of the Alice Eno Research Station on Great Duck Island.

The Alice Eno Field Station is more than just another branch campus for College of the Atlantic; it is a labor of love by a remarkable woman and home to a generation of fledgling field biologists who go to sleep at night to the chuckle of petrels and rise to a new day among the gulls and pounding surf. Without Alice, I doubt that there would ever have been a bird project, no Eno Station.

Alice believed in College of the Atlantic, in the teaching of young people about the glories of boats and islands and, yes, in puffins, in a way that puts me to shame. Even when she was sick she had no time for her illness, she wanted to hear about students, classes, teaching, projects, next season.

Just before Thanksgiving, last year’s interns and I went to visit her in Falmouth. Riding back, Virve Hirsmaki ’09 said, “John, knowing Alice makes growing old all right.” Yes, exactly. May we all come at life with the same gusto that Alice has shown us. A Force of Nature indeed.

COA | 15

What Do We Need to Start a College?

Excerpts from an interview with Ann Peach Interviewed by Donna Gold

Ann Peach: Ed came and interviewed me at my kitchen table up on Shannon Road where I lived and on January 2, I think it was, 1970, we went to work. We started in what is now “Peach House.” It was a caretaker’s cottage: had no heat, no phone, no furnishings. I took a card table, my typewriter and a folding chair and 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 we needed was a coffee pot. That was first on our list.

Then we sat there looking at each other.

Donna Gold: What was it that led you to want to do this work?

AP: It was fun. It was a challenge, there were lots of times that you never knew where your next nickel was coming from and I got very good at handling people that we owed money to.

DG: Oh dear, what was that like?

Photo by Noreen Hogan ’91

AP: Ed always said that the reason I bought supplies from California was because I knew exactly how long it took for that check to go to California and come back and clear my bank before I had to make sure I had funds for it. That was almost true.

DG: So did this make you very anxious?

Ann Peach had three young children in August, 1969, when she read a Bar Harbor Times article about the idea of starting a college on the island.

She’d worked with founding trustee Les Brewer before—they belonged to the same church. That very next Sunday, Ann Peach offered her services.

She intended only to volunteer a bit, but when Ed Kaelber came on as the college’s first president, he convinced her to stay on as COA’s first staff member. Four presidents and twenty-five years later, in 1994, Ann Peach retired from her final position, running the business office.

16 | COA

AP: No, it was more of a challenge. And I had lots of faith in Ed. I would go to him and say, “Look, I've got a payroll coming up next month and I need ten thousand dollars.” And he would say, “Don't worry, I’ll get the money.” Sometimes he got it and sometimes he didn't.

DG: And when he didn't?

AP: We delayed. We never missed payroll, but we often delayed it. I would figure out how much money I had and I would go to the bank and pick up checks for the secretaries, the maintenance people—the people who really lived from paycheck to paycheck. I would pick up as many of those checks as I had money to cover—the bank let me do this. I might pick up a check for a faculty member, who would split the check with some other faculty member who had a mortgage payment due or something they had to have. This is one of the great things about the college. We all shared. Ed and I were the last ones to pick up our checks.

DG: So, were you in charge of budgeting?

AP: Yes. Not that it did a whole lot of good!

Presumably we would set a budget and everyone would follow it—except when they needed more money and forgot to let me know that they did.

The ongoing joke around campus was that I hated boats—and I did hate boats. They are so expensive. And of course, the faculty wanted boats. Every time you turned around, someone was donating a boat, or they wanted to buy a boat, so the joke was, “see if we can get a boat on campus without Ann knowing about it!”

DG: I’ve heard that people would come to you and say, “I need to be paid, I need sixty dollars to buy food, I have children at home.”

And you would say, “Can you take forty?” Did that actually happen?

AP: That's true. And then there was the peanut butter jar. Have you heard about the peanut butter jar?

DG: Yes, but not from you—

So when I locked up to go home that Friday night before the fire, I put it in the safe.

DG: Tell me about the fire.

AP: I remember Steve Katona coming out with his arms loaded with stuff from the section of the building that hadn’t started burning, but it started right behind my office. As soon as they had done all they could, Judy [Swazey], Millard and maybe Rich and—oh there were probably a half a dozen of us—went down to West Street to Judy’s house and started making plans for what needed to be done next. My job was to get the telephone communications back “We put the $30 in and get the office running again. the peanut butter jar We all had our chores.

and students, faculty, whoever, could borrow money, write their name on a slip

DG: That very day?

AP: Before lunch even. This was in July. We had a month before we had students coming in.

DG: Do you remember how you felt when you saw the fire?

AP: I was probably too stunned to AP: I shared an office with Bunnie and pay when they really have any reaction, because it Clark and people would come to seemed perfectly natural to me our office for coffee. I really couldhad the money.” that we should sit around Judy’s n’t afford to furnish coffee on my table and discuss how we were $400 a month, so I said, “It’s going going to repair this problem. It was another chalto be a quarter a cup, flat rate, no IOUs.” At the lenge, really, and that did not seem out of the ordiend of that first summer we had twenty, thirty nary to me at all. bucks that we had made on our coffee. One of us said, “Let’s just put this away and the next time a DG: Another challenge? student wants some money, we’ll pay out of this fund first.” Prior to that, whenever a student came to us for five dollars to take their dog to the vet or buy a book, we would lend them money out of our own pockets because the college had no money.

So I took a peanut butter jar to work and we put the thirty dollars in the jar and students, faculty, whoever, could borrow money, write their name on a slip and pay when they had the money. There was one kid who borrowed one hundred dollars and never gave it back—as far as I know—but that’s the only one.

By the time we got done, we had a couple of thousand dollars in that jar and it survived the fire, because while we kept it out on the desk so that kids could borrow from it whether we were in the office or not, on Friday nights, I put it in the safe.

AP: Yes, it was another challenge and I think that probably most of us viewed it that way. It was not nearly as devastating as the loss of Dick Davis (faculty member in philosophy who died in 1982).

Not nearly. He was just such a great resource to go to when you needed someone to talk to or someone to help you through a problem. I felt it like a personal loss and I’m sure that a lot of other people felt the same way.

DG: I’m sure you’re right. . . . Anything else you would like to say about the college?

AP: I hope it lasts for a million years. It’s certainly been one of the greatest experiences of my life. I loved every minute of it.

COA | 17

winter ecology Excerpts from a field journal

By Rowen Gorman ’07 Photographs by Stephen Ressel, faculty member in vertebrate zoology.

18 | COA

In high latitudes and altitudes, up to nine months of each year can be spent locked in winter. Biologist Stephen Ressel’s course, Winter Ecology, focuses on the unique adaptations of wintering in the north through field trips and journal entries detailing the changes students notice. Writer, artist and scientist Rowen Gorman ’07, took the class in the winter of 2006 and shares her perceptions and poetry in these excerpts from her field journal.

tracks&cracks JANUARY 7, DUSK COLD, CLEAR ALEXANDRA ’77 AND GARRETT ’78 CONOVER’S, WILLIMANTIC, ME

Here, just a few hours inland, winter is a reality rather than a shadow. Ice encroaches on the river and snow carpets the ground revealing a map of animal activity printed across the clean slate. Tracks are not merely identifiers; they are stories. If you are literate in the language of the animal’s patterns of movement, the prints come alive.

A line of coyote tracks crosses the trail as I walk towards the river. I step off the trampled path and follow the coyote’s lead, threading through trees and under toppled logs. My tall stature and uneven gait feel awkward and ungainly as I struggle to negotiate around the features in the landscape that posed no obstacle for the coyote, its path straight and unwavering. Paralleling the thread of prints I continue through the open-canopy forest, pausing to examine particularly clear prints, changes in gait where the coyote descends a steep slope, and the potentially lethal intersections of mice and deer.

The pursuit is addictive, the story continually unfolding, leading me endlessly onward. It is dusk, but my curiosity makes it difficult to abandon the coyote. Just a little further, just a few more minutes.

At last I agree to go my separate way. Getting my bearings, I set off with less confidence and directness than the coyote, my footprints a wavering chain behind me. How do animals find their bearings so successfully? Refined sense of smell? Familiarity?

COA | 19

Twilight is quickly settling. Sitting on the periphery of the woods, I hear trees cracking as soon as the sun slips out of sight. The sound is intermittent but recurring. Why do trees crack at dusk? Reading through articles, I find that in the afternoon, the earth’s surface begins cooling off (releasing more heat than it is gaining in solar radiation).

Though the lowest temperature isn’t reached until just before dawn, the most extreme drop occurs just at sundown. I have several hypotheses. One is that the trees are not cracking due to the cold but due to the quick change in temperature, which probably creates a temperature gradient between the inner and outer tree, or different portions of the tree. As the wood cools it restricts; if areas of the tree cool at different rates (the outside most quickly), the un-uniform shrinking would cause the tree to crack.

But I only hear the popping sound on cold nights. Perhaps this is because the temperature gradient is larger, or the sun has a more critical influence and its disappearance is strongly felt. Or perhaps the trees are not cracking because of uneven stress but because of universal tension. If the trees are very cold the sound may be simultaneous freezing, causing the wood to pull apart and snap, analogous to the sound made when ice forms on fresh water.

JANUARY 12, LATE MORNING WARM, CLEAR GREAT HILL, MOUNT DESERT ISLAND Last night’s rain erased all traces of snow: rapid melt-metamorphosis due to the energy transferred from penetrating raindrops. The ground is saturated with snowmelt and rain, all dips brimming with standing water. The forest floor is damp and bare beneath the trees. Last autumn’s fallen leaves are packed from the earlier snow pack.

Ice Shattered crystal catches my eye refracted light spattered in the midst of dull debris a splintered oasis of January surrounded by premature April sought out, rushed to knee-down discovery . . .

That the sun’s hot breath left only a broken bottle immune to melt and thaw.

20 | COA

more than skin deep The penetrating implications of bark surface FEBRUARY 5, MORNING RAINY BERND HEINRICH’S CABIN, WILTON, ME

To the inattentive eye, winter trees appear homogenous. In the spring, flowers flag stems and twigs; in summer, lush leaves provide differentiation, and in the fall, species are highlighted with distinct colors. One of the wonderful aspects of winter is the necessary attention to subtlety. Winter dictates a different way of seeing, an observational shift: the pattern of branching, the scales of the leaf buds, the texture of the bark.

Bark serves as an initial key to identification, though more difficult with older, gnarled specimens. And some species encourage this approach more than others: the long, vertical, x-ing bark of ash is easily identified, as is the unique blanch of white birch. But what determines these divergent appearances of bark? What are the implications for the tree of the different surfaces—light versus dark, smooth versus rough? Some of the difference is evident in taking temperature readings of various trunks. Light-colored maple bark measured 14° C while the dark bark of a white pine was only 9° C; data that undermines the theory of dark bark absorbing heat and light bark reflecting it. What else varies between these trees that could account for this? Texture.

Bernd Heinrich argues that the baffled surface of many dark trees, such as white pine, creates more surface area and air turbulence, thus dissipating heat like a radiator to cool the trunk. Two trees with relatively equal reflectivity values (coloration) but different textures still produced a clear temperature difference; smooth bark at 11.4° C and rough at 9.2° C. This leads to the conclusion that the temperature difference is dependent more on texture than hue.

These temperatures only represent the outside of the bark; in the interior, the relationship is reversed. In the trees sampled, the interior of the smooth bark was 9.5° C and beneath the baffled bark was 10.5° C. Thus, baffling might cool the surface but allow heat to penetrate into the interior of the tree. The smooth bark absorbs more heat at the periphery of the tree but maintains a cooler temperature on the inside.

Both interior temperature readings are cooler than the exteriors; this seems contrary to reason. Is this an effect of the unusually warm air temperature today? How would the relationship of these temperatures shift in very cold weather?

COA | 21

windscapes FEBRUARY 6, LATE AFTERNOON SETTING SUNLIGHT, VERY WINDY, COLD CHAMPLAIN MOUNTAIN

Ascending the westward face of Champlain I am washed in low, long rays of gold and scoured by sharp wind. Traversing stretches of bare granite, I feel the wind nipping my fingertips curled inside my mittens.

The contrast felt in the protected pockets of scrubby trees, when the trail dips away from the rocky edge, illustrates the reality of windchill; I can feel it in my bones.

Running along the ridge, I open out my arms and tip towards the wind, feeling the air resist my body like water, thick and full of currents.

I note the branches of the isolated pitch pines, all pointing in the direction the wind is racing towards, as if they were as flexible in the wind as flags. The power of consistency shapes solid objects; the wind must often rush towards the west, off the ocean and across this crest. As the sun begins to sink, my pace quickens, making up for what heat the sun sheds on me with the pounding of my blood. Heading towards The Bowl, feet fly, eyes focus on the twisting path, navigating rocks and wet mud. Breath comes faster. The heat differential between my throat and the air increases; I feel as if I am inhaling shards of ice.

As dusk slips in around me, the world is suddenly still; the wind stalls, trees pause. What is it that silences the motion of the air when the sun sets? I piece together an answer. At dusk (and dawn) air currents “turn over;” the general direction of movement reverses. During the day the earth’s crust is absorbing solar radiation; thus the air close to the heated surface is warmer than the air above. The warmer air rises, creating a low-pressure area near the surface. At night the earth begins to cool, drawing the warmer air aloft back down towards the surface (where a high pressure area develops). The moments of stillness at dusk represent the period of transition when these two movements cancel each other out, leaving the air quiet as if the mountains are holding their breath.

22 | COA

Champlain Naked slope blown and bare Wind-whipped pockets packed with snow varicose and webbed like a foliose lichen thallus licked into sculpture by incessant gasps of breath blustering past Raw rock rumpled into a mountain top Sporadic pools of ice precariously appear under foot patching cracks with glue that dries clear polished, smooth Stunted pitch pines stand silhouetted against the stark sky.

FEBRUARY 12, EVENING SNOWING, COLD, WINDY BAR HARBOR

Snowstorm Today there is no road no sky no ocean no mountains— even buildings are dim and partial.

Upon closer inspection in front of black fences and under floating orbs of tangerine streetlights the air is pixilated.

The static gets in my nostrils my eyelashes and pockets, attempting to delete me speck by speck as thoroughly and silently as the rest of the white world.

COA | 23

Graduation, 1974 24 | COA

COA Class of ’74 takes on nation’s largest landowner

By Loie Hayes ’79

In their separate ways, Bill Ginn and Cathy Johnson work to get Plum Creek to do the right thing.

In 1974, COA held its first graduation. Two students graduated: Bill Ginn and Cathy Johnson. Today, both are living in Maine and working on regional conservation issues. In their own ways, Ginn, with the Nature Conservancy, and Johnson, with the Natural Resources Council of Maine, are working toward a solution for Plum Creek’s Moosehead Lake land holdings. Negotiations continue even as we go to press. ~ DG

wo of Maine’s most prominent environmental leaders, Bill Ginn and Cathy Johnson, comprise College of the Atlantic’s entire class of 1974.

With barely more than two-dozen students enrolled in those first years. Ginn and Johnson often took classes together. Both remember canoeing Washington County’s Great Heath with former faculty member and conservation lawyer Dan Kane, seeing wild salmon spawn, and participating in a nascent conservation effort that would bear fruit many years later.

After leaving COA, Johnson followed Kane’s example, becoming a lawyer before starting her path in land protection. Ginn joined Maine Audubon, working in part to preserve the Great Heath through cooperation with an adjacent blueberry farmer, then spent several years in the business world pioneering the recycling of sludge and other municipal and industrial waste. It was another COA project—the bottle bill—that had first taught him the power of using market-based strategies to leverage ecological goals. He still marvels at the effectiveness of that small five-cent deposit.

T

COA | 25

Ginn now serves as director of the Global Forest Partnership of The Nature Conservancy, a position that has taken him all over the world working with conservationists, government agencies and business owners to promote sustainable forestry and ecosystem preservation.

Johnson is senior staff attorney and North Woods project director for the Natural Resources Council of Maine. Now they and their respective organizations are deeply engaged with a project that could set many precedents for development in Maine’s unorganized townships, that vast swath of forests and lakes in the northern section of the state. Their different ways of engaging with the Plum Creek Timber Company’s development proposal for the land surrounding Maine’s largest lake, Moosehead, has, in Ginn’s words, “created the occasional tension, but underscores the importance of many minds working to test alternative approaches.” While their tactics are as divergent as a carrot and a stick, they share the goal of guiding the nation’s largest landowner to do the right thing—or at least not the strip-and-sell thing—in this prime jewel of Maine’s forested wilderness.

In the three decades since Johnson and Ginn’s time at COA, Maine has experienced profound development pressures. Population growth is a big factor. Maine now has roughly 1.25 million residents, up 25 percent from 1970. Nationwide growth is even more dramatic, at 50 percent during the same decades. Add rising standards of living to the simple numerical growth, along with federal policy that subsidizes automobile ownership and disinvests urban infrastructure, and you can see why small towns and rural areas are facing so much sprawl.

Maine’s timber industry has also undergone a dramatic shift in recent decades, leading directly to the Moosehead situation today.

New land ownership patterns and employment practices have decimated the economic health of North Woods communities like Greenville.

As Bill Ginn explains, “When I was at College of the Atlantic, Great Northern Paper Company employed 5,100 people. Today those mills employ about five- to seven hundred people. That’s not to say that more people are not involved but the companies no longer have company crews in the woods cutting trees; that’s all contracted. They no longer have truck drivers; that’s all contracted. They have automated processes in the mills so that they can use fewer employees. This is part of moving to a ‘lean and mean’ manufacturing environment, which is not a bad thing, because the reality is that we have to compete with the rest of the world. But it has been part of the gut-wrenching change in the rural areas of Maine and in the rural areas of most forest-owning states.

Greenville had twice as many people living in it thirty years ago as it does today.”

Ginn and Johnson are each playing high profile roles in responding to this economic change in the North Woods. Greenville and 26 | COA

Moosehead Lake are the gateway to the largest tract of contiguous forest east of the Mississippi. Within those twenty-six million acres is a half-million-acre tract surrounding Moosehead that has passed from one multinational timber company to another in relatively quick succession, most recently coming into the possession of Plum Creek, the largest private U.S. landholder.

Plum Creek bought the land in 1998, paying Sappi Fine Paper North America a cool $180 million for some 900,000 acres zoned for timberland and dispersed recreation such as hiking, snowmobiling, and fishing. The company’s Real Estate Investment Trust sold off eighty-nine lots for vacation homes on First Roach Pond, twenty miles north of Greenville, in 2001. A few years later, Plum Creek unveiled a rezoning proposal based on a plan for the largest development ever proposed in Maine— some 400,000 acres—including almost a thousand house lots, three RV parks, and two resorts equal to another thousand or more accommodations, spread out all over the Moosehead region.

The Natural Resources Council of Maine, with Cathy Johnson leading the charge, joined with local area residents arguing that Maine’s Land Use Regulatory Commission (LURC) should not grant the rezoning request. With opposition to the proposal running high, Plum Creek withdrew its plan for revision. The second iteration of the Plum Creek plan in April 2006 included a corollary brokered by Bill Ginn: a 350,000-acre conservation easement sale, conditioned upon approval of the rezoning proposal. The conservation groups that had negotiated the easement sale—The Nature Conservancy, Maine Audubon, and Forest Society of Maine—made it clear that they were taking no position on Plum Creek’s rezoning plan.

Natural Resources Council of Maine likewise sees the easement sale as legally irrelevant to the decision LURC needs to make about Plum Creek’s development proposal.

Johnson worries that making the easement sale contingent on approval of Plum Creek’s development application sets a bad precedent. She explains her perspective on the distinction between the easement sale and the development proposal, “The law sets forth specific criteria that Plum Creek needs to meet in order to get its land rezoned. Donated conservation, not paid-for conservation, is what the law requires. We would like to see Plum Creek go forward, now, with its thirty-five million dollar conservation agreement with the Nature Conservancy, as have a number of other large landowners, including Katahdin Forest, another conservation deal Bill worked on. Separating the paid-for conservation project from the development proposal would eliminate any appearance of inappropriate pressure on the independent [LURC] commissioners.”

COA | 27

Plum Creek’s second plan was an improvement over its first. The company increased the acreage on which it would donate permanent conservation easements from eleven to seventy-one thousand. Yet, while it shifted a portion of the more far-flung developments closer to Greenville, 90 percent of the house lots remained in the same locations specified in the original plan, some as far as thirty-five miles from Greenville, necessitating the building of many miles of new roads and power lines and promising a staggering increase of traffic on the few existing gravel roads around the lake. The NRCM is particularly concerned about what Johnson calls this “wilderness sprawl.”

“Our concern is that future development be located in, or right next to, existing development, where it can take advantage of existing public services like snow plowing, fire protection and police protection, and be near the hospitals, churches, and school, rather than having it spread many miles up into the woods, which has the negative effect of destroying the very character of the region. A significant portion of the Moosehead Lake region’s future economy is going to be based on tourism. And you don’t want to destroy the very reason that tourists come to the area, which is the spectacular beauty of the lakes and forests in the Moosehead region. Scattering development up through there is like killing the goose that lays the golden egg.”

Ginn also fears “kill[ing] the very thing that makes [people like] me want to live in rural areas: the privacy, the small communities....

We need to frame development in the places that are best for development and set aside the places that have other values for society. And the only way we’re going to get there is to work with the developers.”

While Ginn and Johnson both want to encourage more conservation, a viable economy combining tourism and ecologically sound forestry, and development clustered near existing towns, their organizations’ different approaches to Plum Creek illustrates some widespread strategic differences within the larger environmental movement.

Ginn acknowledges that, “There’s no question that Plum Creek sat down with us because they were worried that their initial offer to the community was not destined for success because of public opposition.... Public pressure writ large is vitally important to building a compromise because otherwise there’s nothing to compromise.” Yet he also speaks with frustration about what he sees as inherent weaknesses in the rezoning process. “If we think that the only answer [to inappropriate development] is through the regulatory process, we won’t get the vision that we want. Regulatory processes are typically yes or no processes. They’re not ‘let’s work out and optimize and get the best solution.’ We think that we’ve created a framework that is allowing for conservation. Is it perfect? No. It’s not perfect. But it’s an old saw: ‘Perfection is the enemy of the good.’ I think this is a much better solution because we engaged Plum Creek directly in the conversation.”

It was during the returnable containers struggle in the 1970s—the long battle to win and retain the bottle bill—that Ginn first realized the power of using market incentives to accomplish policy goals, 28 | COA

employing the logic of profit to win environmental concessions from capitalists. He used those principles to succeed in this waste recyling business, and in his more recent conservation efforts has endeavored, “to make these market-based ideas around conservation part of the toolkit that conservation deploys.... This is an idea that’s greatly expanding as we look at things like global climate change and people begin to recognize that market-based systems actually can work and can be quite efficient ways of getting regulatory change accomplished.... You might have seen [on January 22] that ten major businesses and a group of advocacy organizations joined together to lobby for a mandatory carbon cap-and-trade regime. I believe we will see even the U.S. adopting some kind of market-based approach [to limiting greenhouse gas emissions] in the coming years.” Ginn details his belief that environmental entrepreneurship is a way for conservationists to surmount the barriers of dwindling public resources and scarce charitable dollars in his book Investing in Nature.

The debate of the relative merits of “street heat” and “in the suites” bargaining too often obscures the fact that both tactics can contribute to the ultimate goal of bringing a corporation closer to a community’s ideals. NRCM has worked with Moosehead area residents to create a detailed alternative development proposal entitled, “A Vision for the Moosehead Lake Region,” which calls for development of less than five hundred total accommodation units and a single, smaller resort, with all development clustered within two miles of Greenville, the village of Rockwood, or the existing ski resort between the two towns.

In the face of continued public opposition and questions from LURC, Plum Creek has decided that they will again revise their proposal. Plum Creek stands to gain about twenty million more in profits from their land if they obtain the rezoning requested in their second application, according to a study by the Open Space Institute. This would be in addition to the thirty-five million they stand to gain from the compensated easement negotiated by the conservancy. With that much profit at stake, Ginn feels optimistic, and Johnson hopeful, that the next revision will be another step closer to their shared vision for an ecologically and economically sound plan for the Moosehead region.

This article was completed before Plum Creek released the full version of its revised 2007 plan. Early reports indicate that the proposed development may shift closer to existing towns, donated easements would increase by about ten thousand acres and more shoreline would be preserved. The conservation easement sale negotiated by Bill Ginn would remain unchanged.

Loie Hayes ’79 is a freelance editor and writer. When not working or parenting two daughters, she’s very involved in climate change activism. loiehayes@verizon.net.

For more information on Ginn’s Investing in Nature, go to http://www.nature.org/wherewework/northamerica/states/maine/council/art18264.html and for NRCM’s A Vision for the Moosehead Lake Region, go to http://www.nrcm.org/publication_alternative_vision.asp.

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The Magical Piece John Cooper’s human ecology of music

By Jim Frick ’78

hen John Cooper plays the saxophone, you can hear the influence of alto sax greats Paul Desmond and Cannonball Adderly and you can sense a deep understanding of the history and evolution of the music—from swing to bebop, from cool to fusion. But John Cooper’s brilliant jazz style and sound are all his own. His solos are lyrical and fluid, filled with original ideas that can span the spectrum of musical expression—from humor to downand-out blues, from serenity to edgy irreverence.

W John Cooper, Jim Frick ’78 and Millard Dority in the John Cooper Trio of the 1990s.

30 | COA

Cooper is also an accomplished composer. His works incorporate fresh melodic ideas with modern, jazz-influenced harmonies and frequently changing, often unusual time signatures. Dozens of his works have been published and performed around the country. He’s written scores for the films of College of the Atlantic colleague Nancy Andrews, as well as for some half-dozen documentaries that are featured on Maine Public Television. He’s also composed original music for numerous special events, including the inaugurations of former Maine governor, Angus King, and current COA president, David Hales.

But as vitally important as performing and composing are in Cooper’s life, it’s teaching that is his number one priority. And as COA’s only music professor, John Cooper is a man on a mission—to make understanding the language of music a part of every human ecologist’s education and to bring the joys of musical self-expression to as many COA students as possible.

In pursuit of that mission, his commitment to students at the college is becoming legendary.

“John is a teaching machine,” exclaims COA faculty memeber in art, Ernie McMullen, who headed the search committee that brought Cooper to the college in the late 1980s. “It was obvious from the start that he was dedicated. He easily carries the heaviest teaching load of anyone at the college. Not only are all his classes very popular, he also does all these one-on-one sessions and tutorials. He doesn’t turn any student away.”

In addition to the full load of courses, Cooper takes on an amazing twenty-five to thirty tutorials per year. He also directs the COA chorus and a wide range of instrumental ensembles.

A good part of Cooper’s dedication is just a reflection of his deep passion for music. But he admits that part of it also comes from his stubborn ego.

“Yeah, it’s an ego thing, I think,” he says. “I have this feeling that there isn’t anyone out there who can’t learn music from me. It’s the challenge—I thrive on that. Most people have a good enough ear that they can develop in the language of music. I have students come to me and say, ‘I’m not musical, no one can teach me.’ But I know I can. I sit down with them with the guitar or piano and I can’t wait to teach them all the stuff they can do on the instrument.”

John Cooper is willing to work with any level of student, from the trained and gifted to the musical novice. But there’s a catch. You have to buy into his system. And you had better be prepared to work.

“I tell students, ‘I know where the gold is buried,’” Cooper says. “‘I’ll lead you there if you are willing to stay with it and work at it.’”

Working at it means learning the fundamentals of music through Cooper’s system of studying scales and patterns in every key based on a number system. His no-nonsense approach had one student refer to his fundamentals course as “music boot camp.”

“I’m tough,” Cooper insists. “I‘m not a cheerleader. I‘m more like a drill sergeant. Sometimes students sign up thinking they can pick and choose what they want to learn in music. Not with me. They have to

John Cooper eagerly listens to the playing of his piano students.

COA | 31

learn the fundamentals and know that music is a serious study as well as a whole lot of fun.”

In making his point, he uses an example of an English major taking a college math course. “The math teacher doesn’t look at that student and say, ‘Well, you’re never going to do any difficult math, so just learn these few simple things so you can balance your checkbook.’ No, he expects every student to learn the same material whether they are going to be a scientist or a novelist.”

Part of Cooper’s tough approach comes from knowing that the true joy and satisfaction of music only comes with a certain level of understanding and technique.

“John’s approach to music is this,” says COA president David Hales, “you can be the most inspired player in the world, but you’re not going to create anything worthwhile without developing your technique. It’s exciting to watch him. John knows what every one of his students is capable of and he pushes them to their limits. It’s a tough-love approach, but one that stems from his dedication to students.”

Hales adds that he believes Cooper’s approach has an impact on the pedagogy of the whole college.

One musically-gifted student who, early on, had a difficult time with the Cooper “tough-love” approach was Phelan Gallagher. Gallagher first took saxophone lessons from Cooper when he was a high school student in Blue Hill.

“I remember he laid into me about not knowing my major scales,” Gallagher says.

“I always got by because I had a good ear and, to be honest, I wasn’t ready to work as hard as he wanted me to.”

Gallagher went on to study music at Loyola College in New Orleans.

In the middle of his sophomore year he took a visiting term at COA and gave the Cooper method a second try. This time he understood why Cooper had put such demands on him.

“The more teachers I studied with, the more I came to respect his approach, Gallagher says. ”He pushes hard and has high expectations, but when I finally committed myself to John’s method, it made such a huge difference. He was right; there is no getting around learning the fundamentals. He once told me that I had all the talent, but I didn’t have the work ethic. He said if I could develop that, I could do anything I wanted to in music. That is probably the greatest thing he did for me— he made me understand that.”

Gallagher had such a productive term at COA that when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and Loyola closed for six months, he returned to the college for another term as a visiting student.

Cooper may be the college’s music boot camp director, but he is fully aware that COA is a college of human ecology, not a conservatory.

Although he’s tremendously impressed with the level of talent of many

“Music and all the arts are vital to human ecology because they are a way of us communicating with one another in forms other than speaking or writing”

32 | COA

of his students, he knows that only a few will choose musical careers.

Still, more than a dozen have done so. Over the years he’s developed a deeper understanding of just how music relates to the college’s overall mission.

“Music and all the arts are vital to human ecology because they are a way of us communicating with one another in forms other than speaking or writing,” Cooper explains. “I consider it another language, another way of communicating ecological perspectives, humanistic values or artistic ideas. For many COA students, music is the part of their life in which they can release those values, ideas and emotions.”

And in the COA tradition, Cooper uses an interdisciplinary approach. His History of Western Music course doesn’t just analyze Beethoven’s nine symphonies, it looks at what was going on in the politics and culture of Europe at the time that was influencing Beethoven’s thinking. In his history of jazz, rock and blues, students don’t just learn to appreciate the music of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Muddy Waters, they’ll also learn about the slave trade, life in cosmopolitan New Orleans and Supreme Court decisions that greatly affected the life of African-Americans.

Cooper admits that he really wasn’t very familiar with human ecology or the mission of the college when he first arrived on campus for a job interview in the spring of 1989. At the time he was living in New Jersey, teaching music at the University of Pennsylvania and Lincoln University. What impressed him most about COA was the involvement of the students and the quality and commitment of the faculty.

Over the years, though, his interaction with COA colleagues has greatly expanded his perspective.

“One thing about being the only music person at the college is that it’s hard to keep up with all the latest things related to my own discipline,’ Cooper says. “On the other hand, I’m learning a great deal about other disciplines. That’s really invigorating and something I love about the college. COA faculty members are just plain smart; talking with them is challenging and stimulating.”

In turn, folks at the college seem to feel very fortunate to have the dedication and talent of a John Cooper.

“One reason that John is so perfect for the college is that he’s interested in and well-versed in every variety of music—classical, jazz, Latin, blues—everything,” says McMullen, himself a pianist. “And he can play and teach almost every instrument. I’II walk by his studio and see him working with students on trumpet, piano, guitar, bass, voice, as well as all the wind instruments. That’s what it takes when you are a one-person department. That’s what we never had here before. What John has done with music at COA enriches the whole college. I think music and art are what make us special. It’s the magical piece of our curriculum.”

Jim Frick ’78 worked at COA 1978 to 1983, spending three years as admission director.

He now lives in Orono and is executive editor of the University of Maine’s Maine Alumni Magazine. A vibes player, he has had his own group, “A” Train for more than twenty years.

John Cooper often plays with the ensemble. Photos by Toby Hollis.

COA | 33

Nancy Andrews’

latest film, The Haunted Camera, the final work in her Ima Plume Trilogy, had

Drawings and Puppets from the Haunted Camera

its New York premiere in October at the Museum of Modern

Photos by Toby Hollis

the 52nd annual Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. A four-time

Art. Earlier in the year, Andrews, faculty member in performance art and video production, was a featured filmmaker at nominee for a Rockefeller Foundation Film and Video Fellowship, she has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the 2007 Outside the Frame Award from the Maine Film Academy, honoring a Maine filmmaker who has taken filmmaking beyond traditional boundaries.

In presenting the award, the Academy wrote, “Nancy Andrews has now completed a brilliant trilogy of absolutely unique films. The Ima Plume Trilogy . . . marks the full emergence of a great talent.”

Not only are the films surprising, unsettling and witty, but the individual components, the drawings and puppets and guises that make up the animation and live action collages of Andrews’ films, are also works of art. COA is proud to present puppets and drawings from Andrews’ The Haunted

Camera.

34 | COA

“

Nancy Andrews’ films are small treasures, finely crafted, exquisite in subtle details and as rare as they come. Her cinema is artisanal— beautiful in its homespunness, expressive in its miscellany of hand-made images, whether drawn, animated or acted, and sly in its humor. The art of performance is integral to Andrews’s short pieces, and disguise and masquerade are keen aspects of her Ima Plume Trilogy which is at one and the same time a meditation on the universe and a hoot. ~ Laurence Kardish

”

Senior Curator, Department of Film and Video Museum of Modern Art

COA | 35

Untitled study for The Haunted Camera Sumi ink on paper, 22” x 30”

Untitled study for The Haunted Camera Sumi ink on paper, 22” x 30”

36 | COA

Untitled study for The Haunted Camera Sumi ink on paper, 22” x 30”

NOVEL EXCERPT

Victory Garden

By Bill Carpenter

Adapted from the first chapter of Bill Carpenter’s novel-in-progress with the working title, Victory Garden, a coming-of-age story about 12-year-old Richard Curtis, whose father, a professor, is headed to Britain as a World War II intelligence officer. – D.G.

H

e sat down on the front steps and let the cold wet slush soak through his leggings and wool pants till he could feel the skin raisining up against the wool. The mailman, who usually got to his building before nine on Saturdays, had come at nine-fifteen or nine-thirty before, but he had never been as late as ten of ten. Even if he appeared at this moment it would be another twenty minutes before he arrived. One time Richard had made the mistake of running all the way to meet him and Mr. Petrillo had told him it was selfish to ask for his own mail out of turn, especially in wartime, and if he tried it again there would be no mail at the Curtis apartment for a week. So, with his clothes soaking up the frigid slush like a thick flannel sponge, he sat and waited, occupying himself with a new term from sixth-grade science, capillary action.

Perhaps Mr. Petrillo would know of his numbing pain—in fact, the danger of lethal pneumonia—and speed things up.

COA | 37

Richard Curtis 33 Irving Street Cambridge, Mass.

His mother had said, ‘how could anyone possibly want anything on the day after Christmas?’

Of course at her age she had no idea what want means. It is a word like hunger. Just because you eat a big breakfast doesn’t mean you won’t be starving again by ten. The reason parents don’t need stuff is because they’ve lost their imaginations. It must be like death, being that old and not wanting anything at all.

The Captain Midnight announcer had said, “allow four weeks for delivery.” Richard deliberately mailed it off on a Saturday so it would arrive on the Saturday four weeks later and he would be home to receive it. That week they still had both calendars on the pantry wall, side by side, and he traced the four weeks with a thin pencil line between them, the old 1942 Peace on Earth December one and the new 1943 January one with a B-24 Liberator flying through the snowy night.

Four weeks from December 26 was this very morning, January twenty-third.

All the way down Irving Street, in fact, all the way around the corner to the Rindge School, the ice storm had covered the bare branches so the trees stooped and sagged like old grandmothers who could barely stand up. Now, finally, it was warmer and one by one, with a snap like gunfire, the branches were shedding their coats of ice and breaking free. Waiting for his decoder ring to arrive, he could gaze down the line of trees and imagine they were a squadron of Liberators, dropping their incendiary rain on the helpless, snowed-in vehicles below.

Then the door opened behind him and his mother’s hand grabbed him by the hood of the parka and, even though he gripped the top step with both mittens, she pulled him up. “For God’s sake, Richard, that’s your only dry pair of leggings and now they’re soaked. That does it, sweetheart.

You’re spending the rest of the day inside.” She spoke to him like a child, but when he stood up, if she hadn’t had high heels on, he would look her almost directly in the eye. “Mom. Have mercy. Mr. 38 | COA

Petrillo’s coming down the sidewalk with my decoder ring.”

“You won’t have much use for a decoder ring in the hospital. Come here, I’ll give you something to do.” In the kitchen she had the cake tins out, the sugar and flour. She handed him the bowl of white, fat-colored margarine and the small bright sunset-colored pellet that somehow had enough color to turn the whole bowl a pink-orange color like pig butter. “Knead,” she said. “And don’t leave any white spots. It’s for your father’s going-away cake and it’s supposed to be a surprise.”

Before he was halfway through kneading the margarine, Mr. Petrillo’s boots sounded on the porch, the mail spat through the door slot and he was gone. Richard tore across the apartment towards the front door, his hands two yellowstreaked boxing gloves of lard. Three or four flat white envelopes lay on the floor along with a copy of LIFE that had been folded over to fit through the slot. His eye-sockets grew hot and he bit his tongue to keep from crying.

Photo by Philippe Halsman © Halsman Estate

Richard had sent away for the Captain Midnight Secret Decoder Ring on the twenty-sixth of December. He taped three quarters from his Christmas stocking to an Ovaltine boxtop and carefully printed out his name and address on a plain piece of paper:

“Richard, sweetheart, Paul’s going to be leaving tomorrow. We have no idea when we’ll see him again. Do you want me to think you care more about that decoder ring than your own father?”

“Yes.” “What kind of an answer is that? My mother would have washed my mouth out with soap.”

“He told me himself to be honest in everything while he was gone.”

“Except what?”

“Except we can’t say where he’s going in the army or what he does. But that’s different. That’s war. This is just a family. You asked a question and I gave you an honest answer.”

“Richard, you’re almost twelve. You should know honesty’s not as simple as it looks.”

“I know. Military secrets. You have to lie in all directions if you want to win a war. I’m going to lie about my age when the time comes to join up.

Winning the war is more important than a little piece of truth, like a birthday. Dad’s probably lied to us already. I don’t care. He’s a spy and a soldier and it’s his work. But outside of war, a man’s not supposed to lie at all.”

“A man? What about us?”

"I don’t know. It seems like women get to lie sometimes." “‘Not I,’ said the pig.”

“Never? I’m thinking of Santa Claus? Oviparous easter mammal?”

“We can’t lie to a child that knows ‘oviparous,’ especially if we don’t know what it means ourselves. Egg-laying I suppose. I wish we could get some eggs. Your father’s cake might be a little tastier.”

With a hot mug of Ovaltine on the table to encourage speedy delivery of the ring, and the baking cake making the kitchen smell like Schraft’s, he examined the cover of LIFE with Rita Hayworth sipping a chocolate malted through a double straw. “You’d look like her, Mommy, if you painted your nails.”

“And caked my face, and rouged my lips, and plucked my eyebrows, and permed my hair, and said good-bye to a few pounds and years.”

“She’s making a face,” he noticed. “I don’t think she likes the chocolate malted.”

“I’m sure she’d rather be drinking something else. What else is in there?”

“Blimps.”

“Oh, that’s something I can identify with. Let’s see them.”

He showed her a shot of the dirigible’s cabin: bombardier looking for U-boats with binoculars, pilot at the controls. “I hope the war lasts forever.”

“Richard. Why would you say such a thing?”

“Cause I want to be in it. It has to last at least four more years. Kids are enlisting at sixteen.”

“Not in this household they’re not. What would you do, be a blimp pilot?”

“No. I would fly a P-51 Mustang. They go four hundred miles an hour. This blimp only does sixtyfive.”

His mother opened the oven door and put a fork in the cake and let him lick it off. It was still wet. “Damn. The gas is off again. The cake’s not done. What are we going to do?”

“Swearing won’t help, Mom. You could put it on the radiator.”

“The radiators are stone cold. I haven’t heard the heat banging since eight this morning.”

“The gas will come on again this afternoon. It did yesterday.”

“The cake will be ruined. Your father will be home by then.” She picked up the LIFE and pursed her lips around an invisible straw like Rita Hayworth, whether in scorn or imitation, he couldn’t tell. He wandered into the dining room to work on his model plane.

His mother lit a cigarette and watched him twist his face up with his tongue between his teeth, trying to drag his father’s old penknife along the blue curve painted on the balsa sheet. It would be a month’s work to make the P-40 look as good as Ivan Phillips’ A-26, and even then it would be half the size.

The gas went on again. Finally, the entrance darkened with his father’s lofty form. He was so tall, with the stiff, visored officer’s hat on, he had to dip his head slightly to clear the door frame.

COA | 39

She ran to greet and kiss him at the door. Richard stayed in the dining room, standing over his aircraft factory for his father’s military approval, proud but nonchalant. When the uniformed man came to inspect his Warhawk, Richard gave a sharp salute.

“At ease, Private.”

“Thank you, sir.” Then, like a little kid, he jumped up into his father’s arms.

“Hey, I’m only qualified to lift a hundred pounds.”

“Then put me down, I’m a hundred and five.”

“Over the limit. Bombs away!” His father spun and dropped him like a blockbuster on the living room couch.

“Let me see your uniform. The gold bars are lieutenant, right?”

“Right.”

“Where are your ribbons?”

“None yet, those have to be earned.”

“What’s that pin?” His brown US army uniform jacket had three small gold letters where the combat ribbons should be, over the breast pocket.

“That’s my outfit. OSS.” “I know, ‘Office of Secret Services.’”

“Strategic Services. But secret just the same.”

His father loosened his tie after dinner and said, “Richard, you’re going to be the man of the house for a while. Unquestioning obedience, that’s what I’ve been studying for the last month out at Fort Devens.”

“I thought we were fighting for democracy,” Richard said. “I thought unquestioning obedience was the other guys.”

His mother said, “Please don’t talk back, Richard, tonight of all nights.”

“It’s all right, Helen. I wasn’t a very good soldier myself. Let’s put it this way. Democracy is the light at the end of the tunnel.”

“Oh, I get it,” Richard said. “Obedience is the tunnel.”

“Exactly. Richard, Mrs. Lukeman is coming over, and I’m taking your mother to the Brattle. But first, a surprise.”

His mother turned the corner into the pantry and out of sight, but he could hear her reach up on tiptoes to the high pantry shelf where the cake was stored. In a minute she came in again with the cake for his father, only it was decorated with candles. Twelve.

“Happy Birthday,” they both said.

40 | COA

“But it’s not till February!”

“Your father wanted to be here. So we changed the date.”

He filled his lungs and blew out the twelve candles with a single breath. He wished for the war to last through 1946, when he would join up and bring it to a fiery end by diving out of the sun on the tails of the last few Luftwaffe in his turbocharged Mustang. He and Ivan had already divided the world between them. As soon as they got their wings, Ivan would use his Chance-Vought Corsair to eliminate the Japs and Richard would take out the Krauts with a single long strafing run in his P-51. Then he would rule the Pacific and Richard would have Europe. All Japs and Nazis would be tortured to the point of death, then hanged.

“Did you make a wish?”

“Yes. I wished for the war to be over quickly so Daddy could come home.”

“Amen, sweetheart. That was my wish too.”

His father reached into the long canvas duffelbag and pulled out a huge present wrapped in newsprint with a brown ribbon taped around it.

“That’s the only color they had at the commissary.”

He tore through the wrapping and came up with a box saying MARX JUNIOR BOMBARDIER. He thought he’d heard of all the toys in the world but this was a new one. According to the box cover it was a complete plane cockpit, steering wheel, instruments, and in the middle a bombsight with marble bombs. The sight had elevation and windage controls just like the real Bendix bombsights of a B-17. “It will take some assembly,” his father said. “You and Mrs. Lukeman can handle it.

Leave it out for us, so your mother and I can play with it when we come home.”

Then the telephone rang. His mother picked it up and her grin sagged into a disappointed frown.

“Thanks,” was all she said and hung up. She turned to her husband. “Mrs. Lukeman can’t come.”

“Then we’ll stay home and build the bomber kit,” his father said. “We can listen to the Philadelphia at eight. They’re playing the Shostakovich Seventh.”

“Seventh time this month,” his mother said.

“I want to see Casablanca. I’ve waited three weeks to see it with you. Richard, you’re coming with us.”

“Mother, please. It’s a love story. Besides, I’ve already started on the plane, see?” He dumped the parts box on the table amid dishes and silverware but it didn’t help.

In a few minutes his father had washed the dishes and the three of them had buckled on their overshoes and were feeling their way down the dark sidewalk towards Dudley Street and Harvard Square. “As soon as our eyes get accustomed,” his father said, “it will seem like daylight.” Then he added, “We had to crawl under barbed wire at night.” That stopped his parents for a kiss, but Richard kept right on walking, his head lowered somewhat to creep under the live fire.

At the Brattle Theater he wanted to sit between his parents but they wouldn’t let him, so he sat on the inside, between his mother and an old woman with several strands of pearls among her fleshy neck rings and a fur scarf that had the heads of the minks still on it with their sharp fangs and hard little black eyes, staring at him through the syrupy perfume smell. The screen was dark since the show hadn’t started yet, but the red EXIT lights and the aisle lights were so bright they made him blink and squint like an owl at sunrise. In the National Geographic they showed fish that grew huge eyes because they had hardly any light, other fish gone blind from having no light at all.

At first Casablanca was better than he expected.

Right away the cops shot a fugitive from justice, then a very clever pickpocket took a fat man’s wallet without him even suspecting it. Richard wished he could run the film back so he could see how the crook worked. Then a plane buzzed right down over the city of Casablanca, not a warplane but a Junkers JU-52 military transport with a swastika on the side. A bunch of Nazis got out of the

plane and heiled Hitler, then they showed a guy in a night club playing chess with himself. He was playing the white pieces and looked very worried about the move, which didn’t make much sense because the black pieces were his too. Maybe he was learning to think like the enemy. The chess player’s name was Rick, which could have been him, too, but nobody called him that.

Then a colored man named Sam was singing and playing the piano with big round eyes and a big fat white man was trying to buy him, like the old slave days, but Sam refused to be sold. Then the plane took off again, only it was a different plane this time, an American DC-1; the Nazis came into the restaurant and they arrested a short little guy who started shooting everything in sight.

For a long time nothing happened, then it got good again. Rick was trying to give the pretty movie star a long disgusting kiss, worse than his parents at their worst, but the Nazis must hate kissing too because they came in with a whole army to break them up. They started with horses, then they brought in a column of Panzer IIIs along with air support from Stuka dive-bombers and a twinengine Heinkel 111. That took care of the kissing for a while. When they started going at it again in the restaurant the Nazis attacked them with their 77 millimeter field guns. She called him Richard, then he kissed her so hard she broke a wine glass with her hand. But even after all that kissing, the girl didn’t show up at the train station so Rick had to run away with Sam. COA | 41

The movie got boring so he went to sleep.

When he opened his eyes there was a roulette table and a man was playing the number 22 over and over and winning every time.

The metallic light of the screen fell on his mother’s profile so it looked like she was also in blackand-white. She had the same look on her face as the lady in the movie, the same haircut and the same silvery skin. He decided she looked more like Ilsa than Rita Hayworth, then when he looked back to the screen Ilsa was pointing a gun, something his mother wouldn’t do in a million years.

She probably wouldn’t even know how to pull the trigger. Rick Blaine was such a hero that he walked right up to her and told her she could shoot him dead, which would have been a great scene, but instead she put the gun away and they started kissing again.

When he woke up they were at the airport and the Nazi was phoning the control tower to stop the plane. He tried to shoot Rick but his bullet missed and Rick shot him dead with the telephone still in his hand. Then the plane took off. The screen said THE END and the lights in the theater turned on but his mother stayed in her seat crying while his father put his arm around her and she put her head on his shoulder like Ilsa and Rick Blaine in the convertible. In a minute she was smiling again and they could get up and leave.

In the morning the first thing he saw was the long olive-drab army duffelbag fully packed and lying near the doorway. His father was already in uniform at the table; his mother was as red-eyed as she was after the movie.

Then his father said, “Richard, why don’t you look in the other room?”

He ran back past the pantry into the dining room, which was always dark because the Phillips’ big house was so near. At the far end of the room was the Junior Bombardier set, fully assembled and clamped to the end of the dining room table, ready to fly. “Hey, you weren’t kidding. You did make it last night.”

“What else do parents have to do after the kids are asleep? Why don’t you try it out?”

“Did you?”

“I did. I scored a perfect hit, right on the target.”

“What’d you hit? Frankfurt?”

“The butter knife.”

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Then someone knocked on the door. He ran to answer and it was Professor Lowenfeld from upstairs. The professor took a folder out of his briefcase and gave it to his father. "These are the informations you wanted. I have put every piece in my best memory. I have been four years since Berlin but in Stockholm I was hearing from others all the time.”

So Professor Lowenfeld was a spy too with an envelope of German secrets he was giving his father to take with him. He felt that he was not in his own house but somewhere realer, like a movie, which made him feel large and scared at the same time. His father brought Professor Lowenfeld’s papers into his study and came out with one of the big brown bellows folders that he always took to work. “Well, Heinz, here are my lecture notes for the second semester. How’s that for a deal?”

His mother came back in her green Christmas dress with high heels and fake nylon stockings crayoned on the back of her legs. “Good morning, Professor. Paul is so relieved that he has someone like you to take over his classes.”

“I am honored.” Professor Lowenfeld bowed his head with the pigeon-colored hair and kissed his mother’s hand, old-fashioned as the German waiter in the movie who cried when the girl’s husband won all the chips. “Now I must go back upstairs to Hannah. Do not worry about your students. I vill exactly follow your excellent notes.”

The Professor took his glasses off and stooped down a bit to look at Richard. Then he reached out and pinched his cheek gently and turned his face around, as if he were Doctor Rosen looking for chicken pox. He said, “My vife had a boy like that, but he vas smaller.” He turned to the back window and looked out on the snowy back yard with its one bare chestnut tree. Then he left and they could hear him on the stairs to his own apartment.

“What’s wrong with the Professor?” Richard asked.

His father didn’t answer. His mother said, “They had a boy your age, though he would have been younger when they last saw him. They had to leave him behind in Europe.”

“Where is he now?”

“Nobody knows, darling. So many people over there are just lost.”

He went over to his Bombardier set and took out the red plastic control wheel. A cardboard landscape lay in front of the bombsight window. It turned right or left like steering a car, but it also pulled in and out to control the elevators, and as

you worked the controls, the view through the bombsight window changed. He turned and pushed in till the sight was right on the butter knife, whose broad flat blade resembled the carrier Shokaku. He then pushed the Bomb Bay Release in the center of the wheel and a marble rolled down the chute and onto the butter knife on one bounce. Then he asked, “How did that other kid get lost?”

“They had stayed too long in Germany,” his mother explained. “They were taking a train from Berlin to Copenhagen in 1939. When the train stopped at the Danish border, the police asked to speak with their son and told Heinz and Hannah they would put him on the next train. They waited in Copenhagen and he never came.”

“Why didn’t they go back for him? You would have gone back for me, wouldn’t you?”

“They weren’t allowed to go back. They had a transit visa for Sweden and they had to get on the boat. Heinz had a job here and a U.S. visa, but they waited for their son in Stockholm all that time.”

“It’s like the movie.”

“It is like the movie,” his mother agreed. “They were in a foreign country, waiting for visas. But there weren’t any children in the movie.”

“You would have come back for me.”

“We would have. We would have gone back to Germany and found you, darling, if it took us our whole lives. But the Lowenfelds are Jewish, and they were not allowed back into Germany once they had crossed the border. So you must remember when they look at you, they are also thinking of someone else.”

“You would have gone back for me, Jewish or not.”

His mother said, “Oh darling,” and pulled him up from his bombardier’s turret to hold him against her dress.

She was crying, but he pushed her away. A car started honking outside. His father said, “must be them.” He stood up, put his officer’s hat on and shouldered his duffelbag.

His parents kissed for a long time, worse than the movie, then the car honked again. It was starting to snow.

His father kissed him on the cheek. The two of them stood on the porch and waved till the black DeSoto turned the corner of Irving and Dudley and went out of sight.

He went back in and left his mother in her light dress on the porch. When she came in she started immediately on the breakfast dishes. She had

squeezed her lips into a tight straight line trying not to cry.

“Mom, what was his name?”

“Who?” “You know. The other boy. The one that was lost.”

“I think his name was Jacob.”

He trained the bombsight on the butter knife. It wasn’t much of a target but it was the one his father chose. Now it became the train taking little Jacob back to Germany. He aimed very carefully so he would hit just the locomotive and not the cars carrying the children in the opposite direction from their parents. The pilot held the B-24 Liberator on a steady course over the train below.

He found the plume of smoke from the steam engine and angled the sight just behind it, where the engineer and the train crew would be. He opened the bomb bay doors and dropped a 2000pound Blockbuster that blew the engine to pieces and derailed the train so the children could run for their lives into the blinding snow. Then he unclamped the Junior Bombardier from the table and pulled the shaft of the control wheel out of its socket, the way it had been before his father built it. He got the box out of the pantry cabinet where they kept the cardboard and put the set in it and put it back. His mother looked around the corner and said, “Richard, what are you doing? Your father worked an hour on that.”

“I’m putting it away. It’s just a toy.”

His mother finished shelving it inside the pantry cabinet, then latched the door. She knelt down and held him close for a minute and he felt her eyes grow warm and moist against his hair. Then she dried her face off with her apron and went back to the kitchen sink. “We must be brave. You can help in here if you want.”

He stood on the footstool beside her and dried the mixing bowl, then waited with the dish towel while she scrubbed the batter off the two Mixmaster beaters and rinsed them off. When he got the decoder ring on Monday, he wouldn’t even open the box. He would wrap it like a birthday present and bring it to the Lowenfelds upstairs, and they could save it for when the war was over and they found their son.

Bill Carpenter, COA founding faculty member, teaches literature and creative writing. He is the author of the novels The Wooden Nickel and A Keeper of Sheep, and of three volumes of poetry.

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C L A S S N OT E S

Barbara Dole Acosta (’75) and her family visited her parents’ home in Trenton, Maine last summer and visited with Father Jim Gower and Rich Borden.A senior research scientist at the Center for Equity and Excellence in Education, she hopes to, “beg and cajole state departments of education to do the right thing for English language learners in the public schools.” As trustees of the Oscar Romero University in El Salvador, Barbara and husband Paco struggle with making a positive dent in El Salvador, “where two steps forward seem to be followed by at least one back.” barbara.acosta3@verizon.net Molly (McAdams) Hampton ’76 writes that she lives in Lander, Wyoming with her husband, Bruce, and daughters, Sara, 18, and Kaili, 9. “After twenty-plus years working for the National Outdoor Leadership School, I am now the director of philanthropy for the Wyoming Chapter of the Nature Conservancy.”

“I have finished my dissertation at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California,” writes Carol Manahan ’77. “‘The Moral Economy of Corn: StarLink and the Ethics of Resistance,’ is a study of the ethical arguments involved in the controversy over genetic engineering. I’ve been teaching part-time while a student and am now looking for a full-time position.”

Scott Mercer ’78 and family embarked on a 6,246-mile camping and hiking road trip in August from their home in Cape Neddick, Maine to the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska. One highlight was waking at 2 a.m. in North Dakota to Jurassic Park type growls and finding several dozen buffalo roaming around their tent. “A few female bison in the area were in estrus, and the boys were in midnight rambler mode.

The low, rolling, guttural sounds, especially when heard from a sleeping bag at ground level, were amazingly similar to baleen whales.” Son Tyler is featured on the cover of Scott’s upcoming book.

“I am working as an employment specialist through the Ellsworth office of Allies, Inc., a non-profit mental health agency with offices throughout Maine,” writes Anne Patterson ’80.“I find work for people with disabilities, especially those ages 18 to 26. After hours and on weekends I still tutor students and do a couple of massages. My daughter, 18, is at Maine Maritime Academy in small vessels operations. My son, 20, is at Eastern Maine Community College studying computer systems technology. He’s a wiz when it comes to troubleshooting computers! I live with my dog, Tori, and four birds in Southwest Harbor.”

After some particularly challenging years during which Becky Buyers-Basso ’81 and her sisters dealt with the heartbreaking and sometimes bizarre problems created by their father’s struggle with Alzheimer’s, followed by his death last spring, Becky is taking a leave from her job as a reporter for the Mount Desert Islander. “Skip ’83 and I plan to visit our daughter Marisa, 20, who is at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia, and I hope to accompany Kundalini yoga instructor Siri Prakash Kaur to India to learn more about the origin of this spiritual practice and document the trip. I look forward to using my writing and photography skills ‘on the road.’”

Liz Cunningham ’82 writes, “Enjoying my work as an illustrator and writer. My husband and I traveled to Andros Island in the Bahamas this year. We did some terrific cave diving in the saltwater blue holes. Our eldest dog Skippy turns 15 in December, living testament to the possibility of being ’an old and bold dog.’ If anyone is in Berkeley, don’t hesitate to contact me.” Find her at www.lizcunningham.net.

COA EARTH DAY & ALUMNI WEEKEND

April 20-22nd, 2007 Join alumni sharing art, photography, film, video & music! food, workshops & fun Milja Brecher-DeMuro 207-288-2944 x268

44 | COA

“I am living in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania with my wife, Christine,” writes Paul Cady ’82.

“We are both economic migrants from Maine but hope to return someday. In early 2006 I was diagnosed with colon cancer and underwent surgery and chemotherapy. I am coming to the end of that process and ‘the omens are good’ for the future. Until I get back to health, I am helping out on my wife’s video projects: www.verstehenvideo.org.”

Johannah Bernstein ’83 writes, “I have been in Brussels for eight years, running my own international environmental law practice, guest lecturing on international law at several universities and leading international environmental negotiation training for diplomats.

It has been richly rewarding, not without its stresses, a constant intellectual challenge.

When not pursuing the cause of sustainable development, I hike and ski in the highest altitudes possible. I had an extraordinary week of cross-country skiing near the Arctic Circle in Sweden last spring. This summer I spent a week on the Amazon with scientists and religious leaders studying deforestation impacts on climate change. And I return to my beloved Maine for chamber music weeks at Kneisel Hall in Blue Hill. My home is always open to COA travelers: johannahberns24@hotmail.com”

Evelyn Ashford (’83) sends greetings from Minnesota’s twin cities, where she lives with her son, Zeke, 13, and the mice in the wall. She is working as a massage therapist and doing some writing, happily eschewing Great Deeds for small ones.

C L A S S N OT E S

“I still live on Vashon Island just off the coast of Seattle and life is very good,” writes Scott Durkee ’84. “Jill, my new wife, and I just drove across the country. Now that we’re home, we can fill the tank with biodiesel from the island pump. It feels good to be somewhat off the petroleum grid. After Christmas we’re heading to New Zealand. I heard that if you plant five trees, it mitigates the effects of flying, so Jill and I have planted about sixty on our property. We heat our house with firewood from our land and are building a greenhouse. Our goal remains to live lightly on the earth.”

Housemates from the Kennebec Street house of 1981–82 recently had a reunion in Deer Isle. From left, Tim and Elizabeth Spahr ’86 live in Kennebunk (daughter Emily has just started her bachelor of science degree in entrepreneurship at Johnson and Wales); Holly Devaul ’84 lives in Boulder, Colorado with partner Rob Edwards and children Noah, 18 and Emma, 14; Marion Harris ’88 works for the Digital Library for Earth System Education (www.dlese.org), and Jennifer Schroth ’84 is organically farming at Carding Brook Farm in Brooklin, Maine with husband Jon Ellsworth and sons Nolan and Walker (not pictured). Twenty-five years!

“I work for Panich and Noel Architects, a small firm in Athens, Ohio,” writes Teny Bannick ’86.We are getting mostly health and medical service clients, and I help promote the firm’s sustainable—integrated—design expertise. With my boss, David Panich, we are hosting a national solar conference in Cleveland this July.”

Eric Roos ’86 continues to work and live on Mount Desert Island with his wife Kelly and son Nicholas Alain Roos. Eric worked as the Marina Manager/Harbormaster in Northeast Harbor for seven years. Feeling “land-locked,” he traveled over 30,000 nautical miles as captain of sailing yachts for a private family. The next time his seven-year itch struck, Eric moved ashore to join the Southwest Harbor sales team at Hinckley Yachts.

In less than a year, Eric was off to set up a Hinckley sales office in the Great Lakes. In April 2004, Eric returned to MDI as sales manager of the Morris Yachts sales team—and plans to stay put! eroos@morrisyachts.com.

Lori Gustafson ’87 was offered a job as a veterinary analytical epidemiologist for the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Surveillance Unit (the veterinary equivalent of the Centers for Disease Control) in Fort Collins, Colorado. She, Mike Kimball ’89 and their boys, Conor, 10, and Liam, 4, now own a home in Fort Collins just a stone’s throw (with a really good arm) from the Rocky Mountains. Mike continues to teach anthropology at the University of Maine at Machias, but plans to take a year’s leave next fall. Come visit! mkimball@maine.edu Rebekah (Resnick) Padgett ’91 lives in Seattle with her husband, John. As a Federal Permit Manager at the Washington State Department of Ecology, she protects water quality and coastal resources. Over the last year, Rebekah has bicycle toured in the San Juan Islands, backpacked along the Olympic Coast, voyaged through the Greek Isles to Turkey, and tubed down the Wenatchee River with family members.

Cedar Bough (Blomberg) Saeji ’93 is frantically finishing PhD applications and preparing to leave for India to present at the Pacific Asian Conference on Korean Studies accompanied by her husband, Karjam, and his parents. Afterwards, they hope to see the Dalai Lama. This will be the last chapter in the book Cedar is writing about last summer’s sponsored 2,600-kilometer pilgrimage walking from Karjam’s hometown to Lhasa.

“I have taken a new position as the assistant regional trails and route designation program leader for Region 5 of the Forest Service, comprising eighteen forests in California,” writes Colleen G. O’Brien ’93. She heads up implementation of the new national travel management rule and has moved to Ocean Beach in San Francisco. cobrien@fs.fed “Our newest family member, Cyrus Reid Rosbach, arrived November 8,” writes Derren Rosbach ’95. “I have somehow managed to balance my role as a new parent and a student (yes, still in school!) working on a PhD in environmental design and planning at Virginia Tech. We live near the small town of Riner, not far from the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Appalachian Trail and the New River.”

COA | 45

Rebecca Melius ’01 recently began a new position as assistant curator of collections at the Museum of Science in Boston. Her last day in the conservation department of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts was Friday the 13th of October. rebeccamelius@hotmail.com Leah Stetson ’01 and MPhil ’06 writes, “I just started a job writing about wetlands for the Association of State Wetland Managers, a national nonprofit with offices in southern Maine and New York. I write and edit their newsletters, Wetland Breaking News and Wetland News. I recently attended a Vulnerable Wetlands Forum in Massachusetts hosted by the New England Interstate Water Pollution Control Commission and felt extremely grateful for my human ecology background because of the interdisciplinary aspects of wetlands restoration, protection and policies.”

After graduating from COA, Jordan Posamentier ’01 spent two years starting instrumental music programs in low-resource New York City elementary public schools while getting a masters in education at Queens College. Then he and sweetheart Maria Skorobogatov ’03 headed to Texas where Jordan got a law degree from the University of Houston Law Center. He interned with a child advocacy center, a cancer hospital and an oil and gas exploration corporation (not evil, really!) while serving on the board of a health law journal. Having passed the California bar, Jordan and Maria are in the Bay Area. Jordan works at a small civil litigation firm focused on healthcare law. A job that actually pays Jordan to argue!

COA ALUMNI RELATIONS

Alumni: Stay in Touch!

To update your contact information, share class notes in upcoming publications, tell us of changes in your job or life or find out about regional alumni events and other alumni services, contact Milja Brecher-DeMuro, alumni relations—development coordinator. Call 207-288-2944 x 268 or mbrecher-demuro@coa.edu.

“Nettie Jane Fox was born gently and quickly at home on January 31, 2006,” writes Nichele Hooper Fox ’02. She joined big sister Willa, 3, and Harvest Moon, the yellow lab, to complete the Fox family. “We are living in Bar Harbor, but are planning a big move to our fifteen acres on the Happytown Road in Orland, Maine in the spring. We are very busy!” nichelefox@gmail.com Jody Kemmerer ’02 is living in New York City and fundraising for her documentary film, Sky Dancer, about Khandroma Kunzang Wangmo, a contemporary female Buddhist saint living in a remote corner of Tibet. This film is part of Jody’s work to preserve Tibetan culture and share its wisdom with the West. Largely inspired by the death of a woman and child in childbirth during the filming of Sky Dancer, Jody is founding the Tibetan Women’s Health Initiative, a grassroots program of women’s health education in eastern Tibet. www.kaydeychen.org.

Borbala Kiss ’02 writes, “I’ve been sailing on schooner Maggie B since March 2006. In early January we will be sailing from the Indian Ocean towards Australia and then on to Tasmania. The boat’s captain and owner, Frank Blair, is the son of COA life trustee Edward McCormick Blair. Check out www.schoonermaggieb.net or email me at kissbori@yahoo.com.”

“This year started with my boyfriend Bob and me ditching snowy Chicago for the tropics of Australia,” writes Allison Garoza ’03. “We worked in Queensland, Australia for four months doing refit work on a research dive boat, scuba diving and snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef, exploring Daintree Rainforest, riding horses through sugar cane, getting chased by wild boars and avoiding crocodiles in the river. After we tackled driving on the wrong side of the road, we took an adventurous road trip through the outback to Uluru, passing camels, dingoes, goannas, thorny devils, and narrowly avoiding a kangaroo. As soon as we can afford it, we’re headed back to the land down under!”

After three years working as a zoo keeper in Houston, Texas (and perfecting her “yeehaaw!”) Maria Skorobogatov ’03 is working as an animal behaviorist at the Humane Society and SPCA in Northern California. She continues to write screenplays and dance. agentms@yahoo.com Briana Duga ’04 recently moved to Georgia where she and her husband, Seth, are attending Life University for Chiropractics. Bri and Seth were married last summer in Wells, Maine. She is due to give birth to their first child in May.

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Nellie Wilson ’04 writes, “I’ve been living in Oakland, California and working at the Acupuncture and Integrative Medicine College as an admissions and programs coordinator. I often reflect on how COA committees and ACM prepared me to become an administrator in a small graduate college. I’ve learned a lot about acupuncture, Chinese herbology, and integrative medicine, as well as the work of running a college. If you’re interested in acupuncture, find me at www.aimc.edu. I also volunteer with the Center for Sex and Culture (my COA internship) and am involved with others working as healers of the mind, body, sexuality and spirit. I look forward to starting my own career in the healing arts.”

Marianna Bradley ’06 received a Research Education for Undergraduate Fellowship funded by the National Science Foundation. She will be conducting research on juvenile snook in Charlotte Harbor, Florida.

S O C I E T Y F O R H UM A N E CO LO G Y CO N F E R E N C E This fall, much of the faculty’s efforts were directed toward the Society for Human Ecology Conference. Thanks to COA faculty members Richard Borden, SHE executive director, and John Anderson, SHE president, the conference was an inspiring success.

At the opening reception, held in the George B. Dorr Museum of Natural History, COA board chair Samuel Hamill, Jr. and biology faculty member Stephen Ressel welcomed the 250-odd participants from twenty-one nations. Barbara Carter, SHE executive assistant, and students Sean Berg ’08 and Margaret Soles ’08 were instrumental in the smoothness with which the conference ran. The following is a list of presentations by COA faculty, staff and alumni: Nancy Andrews, faculty member in performance art and video production introduced June Lacombe’s talk, “Insights from Environmental Art.” Trustee and adjunct faculty member Ron Beard of the University of Maine Extension Service chaired the Community Development session and presented the paper, “Mount Desert Island Tomorrow: Using Principles of Human Ecology to Build Local Rural Capacity—1987 to Present.”

Ken Cline, faculty member in public policy and environmental law, chaired the Environmental Management session and presented “A River Runs Through It: A collegecommunity collaboration for watershed-based regional planning and education.” Cline also chaired the session, “A Human Ecological Approach to Land Conservation: Protection, Education and Regulation” with Sarah McDaniel ’93, attorney with the Portland, Maine firm, Murray Plumb and Murray, and the Maine Coast Heritage Trust’s Patrick Watson ’93. McDaniel also chaired “Integrating a Human Ecological Perspective into the Practice of Law,” with participation by Cline,Johanna Bernstein ’83, international legal consultant for the United Nations, Leslie Jones ’91, Wilderness Society general counsel, Barbara McLeod, former policy analyst and attorney for the Environmental Protection Agency, wife to David Hales, and Katrina Van Dine ’82, marine resource attorney. At the closing reception, Cline was given an award for his distinguished contribution to SHE. Dru Colbert, faculty member in graphic design, three dimensional art and museum issues, co-chaired a session on “Arts, Aesthetics and Human Ecology.” Nancy Andrews, JoAnne Carpenter, faculty member in art and art history, and Ernie McMullen, faculty member in art, participated. In the Arts and Community Session, Colbert presented the paper, “Cultural Appearances, Community and Interpretive Projects,” and Janey Winchell ’82 of the Peabody Essex Museum presented “Mend Nature—Heal Ourselves: Collaborative Quilt Project with Artist Clara Wainwright.”

John Cooper, faculty member in music, chaired a Music and Nature session. Presenting at the session was Chrystal Schreck ’03 of the New College of San Francisco. At the closing awards reception Cooper performed a composition he wrote using a poem by David Hales, president, sung by Sophie Pappenheim ’08 (photo). At the ceremony, Cooper was given an award for distinguished contribution.

Gray Cox, faculty member in social theory, political economics and history, chaired a session on philosophy and presented the paper, “The Epistemological Problematic of Human Ecology: A Quaker Approach.” He was joined by Chrystal Schreck ’03 who presented “The Intersection of Ecofeminism and Queer Theory: New Stage in Multi-systems Analysis, An Inquiry into Theory and Practice.”

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Judith Cox, director of the educational studies program, chaired an Education session at which Harry Cabot ’97 of Harvard University presented “EcoCity Schools—Design and Purpose for Learning and Time.” Following the conference, Cox invited local COA alumni educators to share perspectives on human ecology and teaching.

Faculty associate Fran Day received an award for distinguished contribution for the work done by Ecological Society of America.

Libby Dean ’89 of Dalhousie University, Halifax, presented “Communicating About Environmental Contaminants, Food, and Health Issues with Young Inuit Women in Labrador.”

David Feldman, associate dean for academic affairs and faculty member in mathematics and physics, chaired a session in “Qualitative Mathematics for Interpreting Dynamic Systems” with keynote speaker Richard Levins of Harvard University.

Federico Giller ’91 of the Centro Nacional de Ecologia Humana in Venezuela, gave a paper, “Adapting to the Information Age: the Challenge of Losing Cultural Identity of the Taurepam Peoples of the Guyana Highlands, Implications for Conservation and Biocultural Restoration,” in the “Sustainable Communities: Culture and Attitudes” session.

William Ginn ’94 of the Nature Conservancy gave the opening keynote speech, “Investing in Nature.” David Hales introduced him. With COA faculty member in economics, Davis Taylor, and COA adjunct faculty member and former trustee Jay McNally ’84, Ginn co-chaired the roundtable discussion, “The Compatibility of Financial Goals and a Green Business Environment.”

COA CAREER AND INTERNSHIP SERVICES

Alumni: We can help!

College of the Atlantic’s Office of Internship and Careers offers internships and job opportunities at www.coa.edu/internships.

Contact Jill Barlow-Kelley, director, at jbk@coa.edu or 207-288-5015, ext. 236 for: • Career Information and Guidance • Graduate School Information • Job Search Skills • Resume Review • Relocation Guidance • Employment Websites • Mentoring of Current Students and Other Alumni

Academic Dean Ken Hill, associate dean for academic services and faculty member in education and psychology, chaired two roundtables on “New Directions in Human Ecology Education.” Stephen Pulaski ’82 of Southern Connecticut State University participated.

Faculty associate Robert Kates gave a keynote address, “Sustainability Science—Where it’s at?” and participated in a roundtable follow-up, “Sustainability Science.”

James Kellam ’96 of Franklin and Marshall College chaired a Wildlife Management session and gave the paper, “Purpose, Execution, and Effects of Lethal and Non-lethal Management Techniques at a Communal Roost of American Crows.”

Michael Kimball ’89 of the University of Maine at Machias co-presented the paper, “How Diverse is the Maine Public Radio Landscape? A Geographic Analysis of MPBN News Coverage.”

Gordon Longsworth ’90, GIS laboratory director, chaired the GIS and Remote Sensing session and presented the paper, “GIS in the Context of an Education in Human Ecology.” Faculty associate Justine Delahunty of Texas Tech University presented “Contemporary Land Cover Change in the United States.”

Isabel Mancinelli, faculty member in planning and landscape architecture, chaired the “Green Communities: Business and Economics” session.

Trustee Stephen Milliken introduced the keynote address by William McDonough, “Cradle to Cradle: Designing for Human and Ecological Health.” Milliken received an award for distinguished contribution to SHE. Biology faculty member Suzanne Morse introduced Richard Levins for his keynote address, “Converging Crises and a Glimmer of Hope.”

Gene Myers (’81) chaired a four-part session on Conservation Psychology and co-presented two papers, “Attunement Empathy and Caring with Wild Animals: A Theoretical Overview” and “Fear and Caring: Children’s Conceptions of Bats.”

Peter Pavacevic ’07 won a prize for his poster presentation; Marianna Bradley ’06, Jamus Drury ’08 and Brittany Slabach ’09 received honorable mention notices. Sarah Spruce ’06 and April Boucher ’06 also presented posters.

Fae Silverman ’03 gave a paper on “Communication for Divers: A Model for International Communication, A Tool for Underwater Stewardship.”

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Bonnie Tai, faculty member in education, chaired two Education sessions and co-presented two papers, “Enacting Eco-Justice Education: Educating Humans Who Can Reconcile Cultural and Environmental Agendas” and “Enacting Human Ecology in Education: A Paradoxical Framework Joining Eclectic Theory with Versatile Practice.” In these sessions Nicole d’Avis ’02 of Sociedad Latina presented “Urban Education and Human Ecology: Serving Urban Youth and Nature Through a Unified Practice of Human Ecology” and Mike Kimball ’89 presented “A Pedagogical Model for Empowering Undergraduate Students as Community Change Managers.”

Davis Taylor, faculty member in economics, co-chaired a roundtable on the “Compatibility of Financial Goals and a Green Business Environment” with William Ginn ’74 and Jay McNally ’84, adjunct faculty member in green business. Taylor also chaired the “Forestry and Agro-Ecology” session and, with McNally, a “Business Education in the Liberal Arts Environment” roundtable.

Craig Ten Broeck, sustainability director, chaired the “Climate and Global Issues” session and presented the paper “Colleges Taking Climate Action!”

John Visvader, faculty member in philosophy, chaired a philosophy session and presented “The Main Event: Human Ecology in Practice.” Faculty associate Patricia Honea-Fleming presented “Identity, Insight and the World Story: Holding Your Place in Indra’s Net.” Karen Waldron, associate dean for faculty and faculty member in literature and theory, chaired the roundtable, “Writing the Environment,” at which Bill Carpenter, faculty member in literature and creative writing, was present. She also introduced Lizzie Grossman for her keynote talk, “High Tech Trash.”

FA C U LT Y N O T E S John Anderson led a talk titled, “It Shall Bruise Thy Head: Conservation Biology and Human Ecology” during the inauguration weekend seminars on Saturday, October 7.

After the New York premier of The Haunted Camera at the Museum of Modern Art last October, Nancy Andrews’ full Ima Plume Trilogy was screened at the Cinema Project in Portland, Oregon in November. It was also screened at the San Francisco International Film festival. Andrews was a guest of the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, held on the Vassar campus in New York last summer. For the fourth time, Andrews was nominated for a Rockefeller Film/Media Foundation Fellowship, to be announced this spring. A DVD of the trilogy is available: nandrews@coa.edu.

Bill Carpenter taught a writing seminar at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts’ Open Door Weekend, read poetry on WERU and at a Belfast, Maine New Vaudeville Review, and led a discussion of his book, The Wooden Nickel, for a group of doctors, nurses and others at Eastern Maine Medical Center.

Ken Cline gave the presentation, “Thinking Like a Watershed” to the Hancock County Democrats in Ellsworth and to the Good Life Center, the Harborside, Maine center that advances Helen and Scott Nearing’s commitment to social justice and simple living.

Thanks to the work of Dru Colbert and grant writer Carla Ganiel, COA received a grant of $30,000 from the Quimby Family Foundation to create a green media center to serve as a model of sustainability. Colbert also received a $3,500 grant from the Cricket Foundation for the center.

Todd Little-Siebold, faculty member in history and Latin American studies, participated in the Latin American Studies Association’s meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico where he organized the workshop, “Archived Memory: Reconstructing Guatemala’s Past,” and presented the paper, “Guatemalanist Ethnography and the State: Reading the Ethnographic Archive.”

The Maine Space Grant Consortium gave botanist Nishanta Rajakaruna ’94 a $5,000 grant to continue work on plant-soil relations in Maine and a $2,500 grant to organize a workshop on plants that grow in toxic soils. With B.A. Bohm, Rajakaruna published “The Lasthenia californica story: It started with flavonoids,” Natural Product Communications I1:1013-1022. With R. S. Boyd, Rajakaruna contributed “The edaphic factor” to The Encyclopedia of Ecology, edited by S. E. Jorgensen, Elsevier, Oxford, United Kingdom, currently in press.

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At the Maine Women’s Studies Association Conference in November, Bonnie Tai gave a paper with Maria Lis Baiocchi ’07 on “A Global Feminization of Teaching: Does it Matter?” Tai also led a curriculum development in-service workshop at SAD 22 on inquiry-based science for K-5 teachers.

CO M M U N I T Y N OT E S Students Maria Lis Baiocchi ’07, Rashmi Bhure ’09, Stacie Brimmage ’08 (photo), Melody Brimmer ’08, Sarah Haughn ’08, Hannah Hastings ’08, Jessica Woodbury ’08 and Mariah Wyman ’08 led the discussion, “The Future of Feminism in Human Ecology,” with the assistance of faculty members Suzanne Morse, Dave Feldman, and Bonnie Tai during the inaugural weekend seminars, October 7.

Moira Brown, former faculty member in marine mammals, was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from Canada’s International Fund for Animal Welfare for her, “inspiring and tireless work to understand and protect the world’s remaining North Atlantic right whale population.”

John Cooper organized the “Arts Put the ‘Human’ in Human Ecology” session with arts faculty members Nancy Anderson, JoAnne Carpenter, Dru Colbert, Isabel Mancinelli and Ernie McMullen during the inaugural seminars.

Gray Cox, Salahaldin Hussein ’06, Olivia Bobadilla Rodriguez ’09 and others hosted a roundtable discussion, “The Human Ecology of Terror, War, and Peace in the 21st Century,” during the inaugural seminars.

Trustee and historian David Hackett Fischer gave the talk, “What is the nature of leadership among free people in an open society?” during the inaugural seminars.

Grant writer Carla Ganiel announced a grant of $50,000 from the Hillsdale Fund to strengthen recruitment and retention, a grant of $10,215 from the Cabot Family Charitable Trust to support audio-visual upgrades in Gates and a Beech Hill Farm grant from the Virginia Wellington Cabot Foundation.

Administrative Dean Andy Griffiths taught a class in nonprofit management at Brown University last fall. In exchange, a Brown professor will be giving a lecture in the winter class taught by Jay McNally ’84.

Tonia Kittelson, director of student leadership and engagement, received $800 from Healthy Acadia to maintain COA’s bike fleet with safety equipment and maintenance tools for students, staff and faculty.

Rep. Ted Koffman, director of summer programs and community relations, led the discussion, “Mount Desert Island’s Changing Landscape: A Human Ecological Approach to Coastal and Community Futures,” with trustee and planner Ron Beard, COA Charles Eliot Professor Isabel Mancinelli and GIS director Gordon Longsworth ’90 during the inaugural seminars.

“The Ecology of Business” discussion was presided over by Jay McNally ’84 with Nick Jenei ’09 and Samuel Heller ’09 during the inaugural seminars.

In November, the Ellsworth Public Library hosted “Sean Hugh Murphy: A Show of Photographs” featuring Maine twilight images by COA’s webmaster, Sean Murphy.

COA’s international political negotiators, faculty member Doreen Stabinsky and student Juan Pablo Hoffmeister ’07, led the talk, “Contemporary Climate Politics: It’s Getting Hot in Here!” during the inauguration weekend seminars.

Craig Ten Broeck, director of sustainability, attended the Co-op America Green Business Conference in San Francisco last November along with three students (whose expenses were covered by an alumni donor).

Karen Waldron, who organized the inauguration weekend seminars, and trustee Phil Kunhardt ’77 led the roundtable discussion, “Environmentalism and Religion: The Political Divide, the Spiritual Connection,” with John Visvader, Rich Borden, Gene Myers (’81) and trustee Father Jim Gower.

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FROM THE CHAIRMAN

annual report

2006

was a year of change at College of the Atlantic. In July, at an otherwise joyous Asticou Inn celebration, we bade a sad farewell to founding faculty member and thirteen-year COA president, Steve Katona, and to Susan Lerner, his constant colleague through these exciting times. As one last parting gift, we announced the full funding of the Steven K. Katona Chair in Marine Studies.

In October, we celebrated the inauguration of David Hales, our fifth president. David comes to COA with broad experience in academia, non-profit advocacy, and international and domestic environmental policy. Under David’s leadership, we have brought strategic planning to the fore, creating a team of trustees and staff to address the college’s financial sustainability.

There are other milestones. Early in 2006, the trustees approved a fund for more equitable faculty and staff compensation. Additionally, we are now close to fully funding the Katherine W. Davis student housing project of fifty new units, offering students an even greater connection to their campus. We expect to break ground this spring. A student center is contemplated. Beyond this, there have been changes in the college’s landscape dramatically marked by new signage.

The college’s distinctiveness lies in its commitment to the interdisciplinary understanding of humans, nature and their complex interrelationships, with the intent of improving these connections—the approach we call human ecology. The college pioneered this mode of teaching and learning in the early seventies and perfected it in the ensuing years.

As a way of understanding and addressing challenges from Mount Desert Island to the wider developing world, the teaching of human ecology has become more essential than ever.

Students respond to this mission. According to the 2006 National Survey of Student Engagement, or NSSE, students find the education that College of the Atlantic offers is more challenging, interactive, dynamic, critical and supportive than that of many of the top schools in the nation.

As I consider the global change unfolding daily, it is rewarding to be connected to an institution dedicated to the betterment of the planet and its inhabitants. I am proud to be associated with the faculty, staff, students, trustees and friends of this college—individuals who built a community of interest around the conservation and sustainable development of Mount Desert Island and have now extended it far into the world beyond. We thank you for your support, and hope that we will continue to earn your confidence during this year—and the years to come.

Sam Hamill Chairman

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A N N UA L R E P O RT

Financial Operations Report Operating Revenues Tuition and Fees Contributions—annual fund Contributions—restricted Investment and endowment income Government and other grants Student housing and dining Summer programs Museum, Summer Field Studies & Blum Gallery Research and projects Beech Hill Farm Other Sources Total Revenues

FY 2004–2005

FY2005–2006

$6,741,000 $941,000 $2,534,000 $473,000 $806,000 $713,000 $432,000 $68,000 $419,000 $135,000 $79,000

$7,580,000 $833,000 $2,340,000 $547,000 $799,000 $782,000 $482,000 $61,000 $467,000 $137,000 $115,000

$13,341,000

$14,143,000

$2,269,000 $207,000 $512,000 $274,000 $159,000 $4,728,000 $1,104,000 $1,197,000 $1,105,000 $530,000 $98,000 $806,000 $161,000

$2,586,000 $225,000 $544,000 $275,000 $179,000 $5,365,000 $1,177,000 $1,291,000 $932,000 $586,000 $105,000 $819,000 $145,000

$13,150,000

$14,229,000

$191,000 ($91,000) $100,000

($86,000) $86,000 $0

Operating Expenses Instruction and student activities Library Student housing and dining Summer programs Museum, Summer Field Studies & Blum Gallery Financial aid General and administration Payroll taxes and fringe benefits Development Buildings and grounds Interest Grants, research and projects Beech Hill Farm Total expenditures Excess Revenue (Expense) Transfers and capital expenditures Net operating surplus (loss)

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A N N UA L R E P O RT With deep gratitude and appreciation we acknowledge the generosity of our alumni, trustees and friends. This annual report recognizes all those who made gifts to College of the Atlantic from July 1, 2005 through June 30, 2006.

THE CHAMPLAIN SOCIETY FOUNDER $10,000 + Mr. Edward McC. Blair Mr. and Mrs. F. Eugene Dixon, Jr. Mrs. Amos Eno Mr. Samuel Hamill, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. Melville Hodder Ms. Casey Mallinckrodt Mr. and Mrs. Grant McCullagh Mr. Jay McNally ’84 Mr. and Mrs. Stephen G. Milliken Mr. and Mrs. I. Wistar Morris III / The Cotswold Foundation Lynn and Willy Osborn Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Pierce Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton Robinson, Jr. Dr. Walter Robinson Mr. A. Laingdon Schmitt Dr. and Mrs. Peter Sellers Mr. and Mrs. Henry Sharpe, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. Clyde E. Shorey, Jr. PATHFINDER $5,000–$9,999 Mr. and Mrs. Robert Bass Mr. and Mrs. Leslie C. Brewer Estate of Mrs. Frederic E. Camp Michele and Agnese Cestone Foundation Mr. and Mrs. Roderick Cushman Tina and Philip DeNormandie Forrest C. Lattner Foundation Mr. and Mrs. Edward Guthrie, Jr. Ms. Lynn Horowitz/ Rosengarten-Horowitz Fund Mr. and Mrs. John Kelly Mr. and Mrs. Peter Loring Mr. and Mrs. William V. P. Newlin James Dyke and Helen Porter Mrs. Walter Robinson, Jr. David Rockefeller Fund, Inc. DISCOVERER $2,000–$4,999 Bar Harbor Bank and Trust Mr. and Mrs. Louis Cabot Ms. Barbara Danielson Eaton Vance Management Mr. and Mrs. David H. Fischer Mr. and Mrs. William Foulke, Jr. Fr. James Gower Susan Dowling and Andrew Griffiths

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Cyrus and Patricia Hagge Mr. and Mrs. George B. E. Hambleton Mrs. Anne Stroud Hannum Hon. and Mrs. Charles Heimbold Mr. Henry Hinckley III Mr. and Mrs. Michael Huber Ms. Sherry Huber Mr. Peter Hunt/The Point Harbor Fund of the Maine Community Foundation Mr. and Mrs. John Kemmerer III Machias Savings Bank Mrs. Louis Madeira Mr. and Mrs. David Moore Mr. and Mrs. G. Marshall Moriarty Dr. Frank Moya/Frank Moya Charitable Foundation, Inc. Rev. Albert Neilson Ms. Sandra Nowicki Mr. and Mrs. C. W. Eliot Paine/ The Puffin Fund of the Maine Community Foundation Mr. and Mrs. Jay Pierrepont Mr. and Mrs. John Reeves Mr. Winthrop Short Southern Maine Wetlands Conservancy Ms. Lisa Stewart Mr. and Mrs. Donald B. Straus The Swan Agency–Insurance Ms. Katherine Weinstock ’81 Mr. John Wilmerding Mr. David Witham EXPLORER $1,500–$1,999 Mr. Ron Beard Mr. and Mrs. Peter Blanchard III Dr. and Mrs. H. Keith Brodie Mr. and Mrs. Tristram Colket, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. Shelby M.C. Davis Mr. and Mrs. William Dohmen Mr. and Mrs. George H. P. Dwight Mrs. John Emery Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Erikson The First Mr. William Foulke, Sr. Mr. and Mrs. Will Gardiner Mr. Edwin Geissler Mrs. Philip Geyelin Mrs. Margaret Grace Mr. and Mrs. Philip Grantham, Sr. Mr. and Mrs. Paul Growald Mr. and Mrs. Edward Johnson III Susan Lerner and Steven Katona Mr. Arthur Keller Mr. and Mrs. Jack Kelley III Ms. Joanne Kemmerer ’02 Mr. and Mrs. Robert Kogod

Mr. and Mrs. Keith Kroeger Mrs. Anthony A. Lapham Mrs. Francis Lewis Mr. and Mrs. Edward Lipkin Ms. Pamela Manice Mrs. Donald McLean Mr. Charles Merrill, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. David Milliken Mr. and Mrs. Gerrish Milliken Mr. and Mrs. A. Fenner Milton Mr. and Mrs. Philip S. J. Moriarty Amb. and Mrs. Henry Owen Jim and Suzanne Owen Ms. Judith Perkins Ms. Gail Perry Mr. and Mrs. Ferguson Peters Mr. Bruce Phillips ’78 Dr. and Mrs. Richard Pierson John and Carol Rivers Mr. and Mrs. Hartley Rogers Mr. and Mrs. Peter Roy Cynthia Livingston and Henry Schmelzer Mr. Kenneth Simon Mr. and Mrs. Allan Stone Ms. Ellen Reid Thurman Mr. and Mrs. Christiaan van Heerden Mr. and Mrs. Rodman Ward, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Weg Mr. and Mrs. Harold White III Douglas and Priscilla Williams ALUMNI, BUSINESSES, PARENTS AND FRIENDS Mrs. James Abeles Acadia Corporation Acadia Senior College Ms. Dena Adams ’01 Barbara Clark and Charles Adler Dr. and Mrs. Peter T. Adler Ms. Beverly Agler ’81 Ms. Heather M. Albert-Knopp ’99 Ms. M. Bernadette Alie ’84 Mr. William W. Allen ’87 Mr. Peter Anderson ’81 Mrs. Diane H. Anderson Mr. John K. Anderson Mr. and Mrs. Stockton A. Andrews Ms. Genevieve M. Angle ’00 Mr. and Mrs. John Anthony Mrs. Grace W. Arnold Mr. and Mrs. Edgar Aronson Ms. Evelyn Ashford Wendy Knickerbocker and David Avery ’84 Ms. Lelania Prior Avila ’92 Marie McCarty ’82 and Steven Baird ’83

A N N UA L R E P O RT Mr. Alan L. Baker Dot and Art Baker Mr. Jeffrey Baker ’77 Mr. Ethan Balmer ’95 Mr. and Mrs. William Bancroft Bangor Letter Shop Ms. Tenia Bannick ’86 Bar Harbor Lobster Bakes Bar Harbor Motel Bar Harbor Savings and Loan Association Barbara Tennent and Steven Barkan Mrs. Mary L. Barnes Mr. and Mrs. Richard Barnhart Mrs. Alfred P. Barton Mr. H. B. Beach Drs. Wesley and Terrie Beamer Mr. Bruce C. Becque ’81 Ms. Katie M. Bell Mr. Bruce D. Bender ’76 Mr. Glen A. Berkowitz ’82 Jason E. Bernad, MD ’94 Mr. John Biderman ’77 Ms. Janet Biondi ’81 Mr. and Mrs. Robert Bird Mr. Edward McC. Blair, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. Francis I. Blair Ms. Susan Thomas Blaisdell Carol Bult and Judith Blake Hon. and Mrs. Robert O. Blake Mr. and Mrs. Robert Blake Ms. Jennifer Blansfield ’89 Mr. Jerry Bley Ms. Edith Blomberg Mr. and Mrs. John R. H. Blum Mr. and Mrs. Michael Blythe Ms. Pamela L. Bolton ’79 Rev. Paul J. Boothby ’88 Mrs. Charlotte T. Bordeaux Dylan C. Bosseau ’98 Ms. Joan D. Bossi Dr. and Mrs. James L. Boyer Mr. Dennis Bracale ’88

Stewart Brecher Architects Ms. Virginia Brennan Judith Tharinger and Daniel Breslaw Ms. Letitia Brewster ’75 Ms. Teisha Broetzman ’88 Ms. Carla Burnham ’84 Ms. Lara Burns Laperle ’99 Mr. and Mrs. Charles P. Burton II Mrs. E. Farnham Butler Becky ’81 and Skip Buyers-Basso ’83

Ms. Nicole Monique Cabana ’99 Mr. Robert E. Cahill ’84 Roc and Helen Caivano ’80 Ms. Julie Cameron ’78 Ms. Lorraine Cannatta Mr. Colin Capers ’95 Sarah and Oliver Carley ’96 Ms. Frances S. Carlin Mr. and Mrs. John H. Carman Donna Gold and William Carpenter Ms. Amy Breen Carroll ’94 Ms. Liza Carter ’76 Mr. and Mrs. Robert W. Cawley Mr. Erin B. Chalmers ’00 Ms. Sophia Chiang Ms. Judith L. Chiara Ms. Taj Chibnik ’95 Mr. and Mrs. Sohrab Choksey Mrs. Katherine Kaufer Christoffel Ms. Cecily G. Clark Ms. Katherine D. Clark ’91 Ms. Kim Clark Ms. Patricia A. Clark ’86 Mrs. Sarah L. Clark Hannah S. Sistare and Timothy B. Clark Ms. Ann Clemens ’96 Mr. Paul R. Clough Ms. Janis Coates Ms. Pamela Cobb ’83 Mr. and Mrs. Philip Cobb Ms. Tammis Coffin ’87 Mr. and Mrs. Elliot Cohen Ms. Barbara C. Cole Mr. and Mrs. E. Judson Cole Mr. and Mrs. Gerald E. Colson Mr. Gifford Combs Alexandra ’77 and Garrett Conover ’78 Mr. and Mrs. John Constable Dick Atlee and Sarah Corson Dr. and Mrs. Melville P. Cote Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Cough, Jr.

Jill ’83 and Benjamin Cowie-Haskell ’84 Ms. Moira Creaser Criterion Theatres, Inc. Ms. Sally Crock Mr. Stefan Cushman Mrs. Rose Cutler Ms. Jessica Lynn Damon ’99 Ms. Lisa Damtoft ’79 Mr. John Allen Dandy Mr. and Mrs. William V. Daniel Mr. Adam Dau ’01 Mr. Hans Ivory Daubenberger ’03 Ms. Barbara David Mr. Andy Davis ’97 Ms. Julia Davis ’03 Ms. Norah D. Davis Stan and Jane Davis Mr. and Mrs. William H. Davis Ms. Deanna Day Diane and George Deans Mr. Todd DeGroot ’97 Ms. Cerissa Desrosiers ’00 Ms. Holly Devaul ’84 Janet Redfield and Scott Dickerson ’95 Mr. and Mrs. Charles Dickey, Jr. George and Kelly Dickson, MPhil ’97 Ms. Angela DiPerri ’01 Prof. and Mrs. Arthur A. Dole Janet Anker and Charles Donnelly Mr. Cameron Hale Douglass ’02 Down East Enterprise, Inc. Mr. and Mrs. Michael Downey Mr. and Mrs. E. Bradford Du Pont, Jr. Ms. Lucinda Nash Dudley Mr. Larry Duffy Mr. Peter Dyer Mr. and Mrs. William C. Eacho III Mr. Alden Eaton Mr. Thomas R. Eberhardt ’04 Mr. Joseph Edes ’83 Mr. Samuel T. Edmonds ’05

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A N N UA L R E P O RT Mr. George M. Ehrhardt, Jr. Iris and Jacob Eichenlaub ’99 Mr. David Emerson ’81 Mr. Peter W. Emmet ’92 Ms. Carol B. Emmons Carol and Jackson Eno Mr. Richard H. Epstein ’84 Mrs. Bertha E. Erb Ms. Julie A. Erb ’83 Mrs. Sylvia H. Erhart Mr. and Mrs. Spencer Ervin Ms. Lynne Wommack Espy ’93 Mr. Richard Estes Mr. John D. Evans ’96 Mr. Preston M. Everdell Mr. Todd Ewing Ms. Lisa Farrar ’90 Dr. and Mrs. Richard Faust Ms. Joan Feely ’79 Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Felton Mr. and Mrs. Nathaniel Fenton Mr. William Fenton Thomas and Carroll Fernald Ms. Cynthia Jordan Fisher ’80 Mr. Thomas Fisher ’77 Mr. and Mrs. John Fitzgerald Mr. and Mrs. William M.G. Fletcher Mr. David Flynn ’85 Mr. and Mrs. A. Irving Forbes Ms. Peggy Forster Dr. and Mrs. Richard R. Fox Mrs. Ruth B. Fraley Mr. and Mrs. W. West Frazier, IV Mr. James Frick ’78 Diane Lokocz ’03 and Tim Fuller ’03 G and G Electric Galyn’s Galley Ms. Carla Ganiel Ms. Lucretia Gatchell Mr. and Mrs. Jon Geiger Ms. Laurie Geiger Ms. Helen D. Geils Ms. Amy George ’98

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Mr. and Mrs. Stephen A. George Ms. Nadine Gerdts ’76 Matt and Andrea Gerrish Ms. Susan M. Getze Ms. Anne Giardina Ms. Lauren N. Gilson ’88 Mr. and Mrs. Alan Gladstone Mr. and Mrs. David Glick Dr. and Mrs. Donald J. Glotzer Mr. Lyman B. Goff Mr. Paul M. Golas Ms Jennifer Goldman Mrs. Laura Arm Goldstein Jill and Sheldon Goldthwait Mr. Ira W. Gooch ’03 Mr. and Mrs. John M. Good Mr. and Mrs. Robert M. Goodman Bruce Mazlish and Neva Goodwin Jonathan ’78 and Nina Gormley ’78 Mrs. Therese Goulet ’78 Mr. and Mrs. John P. Gower Dr. and Mrs. Joseph L. Grant Mr. and Mrs. Vernon C. Gray Graycote Inn Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Green Ms. Sajit Wendy Greene ’80 Ms. Linda Gregory ’89 Ms. Mary K. Griffin ’97 Mr. Joseph Grigas Mr. and Mrs. Michael Gumpert Ms. Elizabeth Gwinn ’01 Ms. Savannah Hadler ’92 Dr. and Mrs. Joseph H. Hafkenschiel Mr. and Mrs. Theodore J. Hahn Mrs. Mary T. Hall Mr. and Mrs. G. Bernard Hamilton Ms. M. Rebecca Hancock ’97 Mr. and Mrs. John Michael Hancock Ms. Marilyn Handel Mr. Matthew Hare ’84

Mr. Judson A. Harmon Ms. Marion Harris ’88 Mr. and Mrs. Henry F. Harris Mrs. Nancy G. Harris Ms. Holly Hartley Ann and John Hassett Mr. John Hay Mr. and Mrs. Larry Hayes Atsuko Watabe ’92 and Bruce Hazam ’93 Ms. Barbara J. Hazard Ms. Katherine W. Hazard ’76 Ms. Erin L. Heacock ’04 Ms. Mary Heffernon Jean and Lane Heimer Kate Russell Henry and Eric Henry Mr. and Mrs. William Hersey Mr. and Mrs. H. Lawrence Hess, Jr. Ms. Katherine Hester ’98 Ms. Susan Hester Dr. Jo Heth ’76 Charles and Jackie Hewett Ms. Tanya L. Higgins ’00 Ms. Barbara Hilli Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Hinchcliffe Dr. and Mrs. Leonard F. Hirsh, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. William P.H. Hoar Dr. and Mrs. John P. Hoche Ms. Margaret A. Hoffman ’97 Dr. Kathleen Hogan ’81 Ms. Noreen E. Hogan ’91 Mr. William Hohensee ’81 Mr. and Mrs. David M. Hollenbeck Robert ’79 and Lisa Holley ’80 Ms. Betsey Holtzmann Homewood Benefits Mrs. J. Brooks Hopkins Dr. and Mrs. William Horner Horton, McFarland and Veysey Howe and Company Ms. Jean Howell Ms. Jessica Ruth Hudson ’98 Mr. Reginald D. Hudson

Mr. Mansfield L. Hunt Mr. and Mrs. Charles E. Huntington Mr. and Mrs. Christopher Hutchins Mr. Samuel Hyler Mr. and Mrs. John J. Inch, Jr. Ms. Susan B. Inches ’79 Mrs. R. Duane Iselin Island Realty Ms. Nancy Israel ’92 Mr. Orton P. Jackson, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. James P. Jacob Mr. Isaac S. Jacobs ’99 Mr. William S. Janes Ms. Marcia L. Jaquith ’88 Mr. Peter Jeffery ’84 Ms. Patricia A. Jennings Ms. Catherine B. Johnson ’74 Mr. Bruce Jones ’81 Ms. Leslie L. Jones ’91 Mr. Christopher Jones Ms. Constance Jordan Jordan-Fernald Ann Sewall and Edward Kaelber Laura Fisher and Michael B. Kaiser ’85 Mr. and Mrs. William R. Kales Ms. Esther R. Karkal ’83 Dr. and Mrs. Steve Kassels Mr. and Mrs. Robert Kates Mr. Michael Kattner ’95 Mr. John Kebler Shawn ’00 and Sarah Keeley ’05 Dr. James Kellam ’96 Mr. and Mrs. James M. Kellogg Mr. and Mrs. Edward Lee Kennedy Dr. Craig Kesselheim ’76 Mr. David M. Kessner Lorraine Stratis and Carl Ketchum Mr. and Mrs. Steven Kiel Mr. and Mrs. Kyung Kim Mr. and Mrs. Neil J. King Mr. Peter Kim ’01 Margaret V. and Robert Kinney Ms. Amy R. Kitay ’81 Ms. Barbara Knowles

A N N UA L R E P O RT The Knowles Company Mr. Greg W. Koehlert ’96 Ms. Aleda Koehn Mr. and Mrs. Ted Koffman Mr. and Mrs. S. Lee Kohrman/Kohrman Family Foundation Ms. Anne Kozak Mrs. Franz Kraus Mr. Scott D. Kraus ’77 Mr. Noah Krell ’01 Dr. and Mrs. Julius Krevans Dr. and Mrs. Jeffrey A. Kugel Margi and Philip Kunhardt ’77 Ms. Judith E. Lamb ’00 Ms. Angela Lambert ’83 Ms. Carrol Marie Lange ’99 Dr. Barbara Kent Lawrence Mr. and Mrs. Donald Lawson-Stopps Ms. Amanda LazrusCunningham ’02 Dr. and Mrs. David Lebwohl Kathryn Harmon ’94 and Rob Ledo ’91 Dr. and Mrs. Leung Lee Ms. Juliet Leeming ’95 Mrs. Paulus Leeser Mrs. Susan Shaw Leiter Ms. Caroline Leonard ’01 Ms. Andrea Lepcio ’79 Randy Lessard and Melissa Lessard-York ’90 Ms. Mary E. LevantiCuellar Dr. and Mrs. Jeffrey Levine Mr. Aaron J. Lewis ’05 Ms. Nicole M. Libby ’04 Mr. James R. Lindenthal Ms. JoEllen Lindenthal ’87 Dr. John H. Long, Jr. ’86 Dr. and Mrs. Ralph C. Longsworth Laura Casey ’01 and Benjamin Lord ’99 Mr. and Mrs. William G. Lord II Mr. and Mrs. George Lord Ms. Lu Lovejoy

Mrs. Oliver H. Lowry Ann Luther and Alan Vlach Mrs. Ronald T. Lyman, Jr. Ms. Mayo Lynam Mr. James MacLeod Mrs. Constance B. Madeira Michael Mahan Graphics Meg and Miles Maiden ’86 Maine Community Foundation Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Malone Ms. Carol Manahan ’77 Ms. Margaret C. Manter Ms. Christine Manzey Mrs. Elizabeth Hulbert Marler Mr. Robert M. Marshall ’87 Mr. Erik Hilson Martin ’98 Ms. Kathleen C. Massimini ’82 Mr. Stephen Vincent Mather ’99 Adele Ursone and Geo Matteson Dr. Robert A. May ’81 Mrs. Anne A. Mazlish Mr. Francis H. McAdoo, Jr. Ms. Lynda McCann-Olson ’82 Mr. John Drury and Ms. Lucy McCarthy Jon and Sarah McDaniel ’93 Mr. William B. McDowell ’80 Mr. and Mrs. Clement E. McGillicuddy Mr. Ian Scott McIsaac ’76 Mr. Donald K. McNeil Ms. Gabrian McPhail ’97 Mr. Clifton McPherson III ’84 Ms. Jeanne McPherson Mr. and Mrs. Robert J. Meade Ms. Rebecca Melius ’01 Mrs. Jean P. Messex Ms. Pamela Meyer Mr. Jeffrey Miller ’92 Mr. and Mrs. Keith Miller Mr. and Mrs. Henry Millon Sen. and Mrs. George Mitchell

Ms. Chandreyee Mitra ’01 Mr. Frank Mocejunas Nancy McCormick and Paul Monfredo Mr. Peter W. Moon ’90 Mr. and Mrs. Sung Moon Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Morgenstern Mrs. Lorraine B. Morong Mr. William Morris Mr. Justin Nathaniel Mortensen ’01 Mr. and Mrs. Stuart Mudrak Ms. Anne M. Mulholland Mr. and Mrs. Charles Mullen Dr. and Mrs. James S. Murphy Mr. Sean Murphy Ms. Bethany A. Murray ’03 Dr. and Mrs. David D. Myers Mr. Olin E. Myers, Jr. ’80 Mr. Michael Nardacci Mr. and Mrs. Robert A. Nathane, Jr. National Park Tours and Transport, Inc. Mrs. Harry R. Neilson, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. William L. Neilson Mr. and Mrs. John H. Newhall Mrs. A. Corkran Nimick Mrs. Marie Nolf James Lowry and Merideth Norris Mr. and Mrs. David Noyes Mrs. Elizabeth Higgins Null Mr. and Mrs. J.D. Nyhart Ms. Hope Olmstead Hannah and Judd Olshan ’92 Mr. W. Kent Olson Ms. Lois Jean Ostrander Mr. Benoni Outerbridge ’84 Mr. and Mrs. Jon R. Pactor Ms. Diana Papini Warren ’92 Mr. Robert W. Patterson, Jr. Ms. Casey Greer Paul ’02 Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth

Paul Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm E. Peabody Mrs. Sara Weeks Peabody Mrs. Stephen Pearson Ms. Martha C. Peed Mr. and Mrs. Robert Pennington Ms. Andrea Perry ’95 Mr. Stephen R. Petschek Ms. Meghan Pew ’99 Mr. Shiva Polefka ’01 Ms. Frances L. Pollitt ’77 Mr. James Stewart Polshek Ms. Jennifer Prediger ’00 Mr. and Mrs. Ben G. M. Priest Ms. Susan Priest-Pierce ’77 Mr. Charles Provonchee Mr. and Mrs. Hector Prud’homme Mr. Stephen Pulaski ’86 Mr. and Mrs. George Putnam Quimby House Inn Mona and Louis Rabineau Dr. Nishanta Rajakaruna ’94 Ms. Cathy L. Ramsdell ’78 Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Rappaport Rosamond and Fred Rea Mr. Morton Reich Mr. Jason Rich ’96 Mr. and Mrs. Owen W. Roberts Dr. and Mrs. Gordon Robinson Drs. Paul and Ann G. Rochmis Dr. Jennifer Rock ’93 Mr. David Rockefeller, Jr. Ms. Sydney R. Rockefeller Mr. and Mrs. Ronald D. Rogers Ms. Allison E. Rogers ’04 Dr. Burt Adelman and Ms. Lydia Rogers Ms. Kelly Rollins ’97 Mr. Eric Francois Roos ’87 Ms. Volha Roshchanka ’04 Dr. and Mrs. Stephen A.

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A N N UA L R E P O RT Ross Mr. Jeffrey N. Rothal ’84 Mr. and Mrs. Max Rothal Ms. Elizabeth Rousek ’95 Mr. and Mrs. William E. Russell Ms. Linn Sage Ms. Kerri Sands ’02 Ms. Blakeney V. Sanford ’02 Mr. Daniel Sangeap ’90 David and Mary Savidge Mr. and Mrs. Harold G. Schaeffer Mr. and Mrs. John H. Schafer Ms. Margaret Scheid ’85 Ms. Ellen Seh ’75 Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer Sellers Mr. and Mrs. Roland Seymour Mr. Samuel Shaw E.L. Shea, Inc. Mrs. Margaret M. Sheldon Ms Clare F. Shepley Mr. and Mrs. John Grace Shethar Dr. and Mrs. Dennis L. Shubert Mrs. Leonard Silk Ms. Fae Jolie-ge Silverman ’03 Mr. Grant G. Simmons, Jr. Mr. Mark E. Simonds ’81 Mr. and Mrs. Wickham Skinner Ms. Susanne Slayton Mr. and Mrs. Stephen R. Smith Mr. and Mrs. R. Charles Snyder Ms. Harriet H. Soares Mr. and Mrs. Jerome Soloway Ms. Deborah Soule ’81 Mr. John David Speckmann ’87 Wendy and Leonard Spector Mrs. Samuel Spencer Ms. Marie St. John Lynne and Michael Staggs ’97 Ms. Margaret Stanton Ms. Heidi Stanton-Drew ’98 Mr. and Mrs. Bruce Stedman

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Mr. Edward W. P. Stern ’03 Ms. Marion Stocking Mrs. John Frederick Stockwell Ms. Dorie S. Stolley ’88 Mr. and Mrs. Marc Stretch Dr. and Mrs. Sidney Strickland Mr. and Mrs. John F. Sullivan Mrs. Robert Suminsby Mr. Stuart Dickey Summer ’82 Ms. Joan H. Swann Dr. Douglas Sward ’96 Mr. Gilbert L. Sward Ms. Sally C. Swisher ’78 Ms. Jasmine Renee Tanguay ’98 Ms. Patricia Tanski Tapley Pools Davis Taylor Ms. Katrin Hyman Tchana ’83 Ms. Tracey Anne Teuber ’98 Mr. and Mrs. John L. Thorndike Mr. and Mrs. W. Nicholas Thorndike Ms. J. Louise Tremblay ’91 Mr. and Mrs. David Trickett Ms. Kristen A. Tubman ’03 Mr. and Mrs. Charles Tucker Ms. Elena V. Tuhy ’90 Ms. Rita Turner ’01 Mr. Frank Twohill ’80 Ms. Sarah R. Tyson ’96 Ms. Cindie Umans Union Trust Company Ms. Caitlin Marie Unites ’03 Mary Long and Dennis Unites Mr. and Mrs. David Vail Mr. John Van Dewater Ms. Katrina Van Dusen Ms. Wendy L. Van Dyke ’80 Ms. Anne Vernon Mr. and Mrs. Dennis J. Viechnicki Mr. John E. Viele

Mr. Leo Vincent ’92 Ms. Dana Vocisano ’83 Mr. and Mrs. Thomas F. Volkmann ’90 Mr. Ralph Voorhees Ms. Ann Staples Waldron/Spirit Fund of the Maine Community Foundation Stacy Hankin and Benjamin Walters ’81 Ms. Hua Wang ’04 Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Watson Ms. Joan Weber Mr. Michael Weber ’83 Mr. and Mrs. E. Sohier Welch Ms. Alice N. Wellman Ms. Karen Wennlund ’85 Mr. David Wersan ’79 Ms. Lynne Wheat Ms. Carolyn Reeb Whitaker ’92 Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Whitehead Mrs. Joan B. Whitehill Ms. Jacqueline Williams Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Williams Williams Family Foundation Ms. Susan Willis Ms. Nellie E. Wilson ’04 Ms. Jane M. Winchell ’82 Window Panes Mr. Joshua I. Winer ’91 Mrs. George P. Winship, Jr. Mr. Christopher Witt ’97 Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Witt Ms. Susan G. Woehrlin ’80 Ms. Katia Wolf ’92 Richard Bullock and Carol Woolman Mr. Jeffrey A. Wooster Mr. and Mrs. William Worthen Prof. and Mrs. W. Howard Wriggins Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Wright Mr. and Mrs. John M. Wright Ms. Cathleen Wyman Ms. Jingran Xiao Mr. and Mrs. Louis

Zawislak Mr. Fred Zerega Mrs. Jane S. Zirnkilton Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Zirnkilton Ms. Yazmin Zupa ’93 GIFTS IN MEMORY

> In memory of Peter Barton Mrs. Alfred Barton

> In memory of Mitchell Carter ’80 Mr. Frederick Moss ’79

> In memory of William H. Drury, Jr. Ms. Pamela Manice Mrs. Robert H. I. Goddard

> In memory of Philip Geyelin Ms. Cecily Clark Mrs. Philip Geyelin > In memory of Thomas Hall Mrs. Mary Hall

> In memory of James R. Hooper Ms. Lorraine Nazzaro

> In memory of Howard Kyle Linda K. and John H. Carman > In memory of David Eliot McGiffert Mr. Jerome Ackerman Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Applebaum Mr. Jeffrey Blackwell Mr. and Mrs. Irving Blickstein Ms. Jessica Blystone Ms. Marta Bonet Mr. Ricardo Bosnic Christopher Dorval and Elizabeth Britton Mr. and Mrs. Charles Buffon Ms. Sheila Byrd Covington and Burling Steven Depaul and Elisabeth Rendeiro Ms. Elizabeth Dudley Mr. John Ellicott Mrs. Laura Eakin Erlacher

A N N UA L R E P O RT The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation L. Jean Emery and Stephen Ives, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. Peter Kelly Mr. and Mrs. James Lewis Peg Beaulac and Carl Little Adm. and Mrs. T. Joseph Lopez Mr. and Mrs. James Lowy Ms. Maya Carol MacGuineas Mr. Noble McCartney Mr. Alfred Moses Mr. Rolando Ortega Mr. and Mrs. C. W. Eliot Paine Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm Peabody Ms. Gwen Pearl Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Pollak Project Northstar Mr. and Mrs. George Putnam Mr. and Mrs. John Rand Mr. Andrew Rice Ms. Lois Rice Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Rosen Mr. and Mrs. John Schafer Mr. and Mrs. Adam Schneiberg Mrs. Jean Slattery Mr. and Mrs. John Smith Mrs. Samuel Spencer Ms. Margery Stafford Mr. and Mrs. Stuart Stock Mr. Stanley Temko Mr. and Mrs. Peter Trooboff Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Vaughan

> In memory of Dr. Edward J. Meade, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. Robert Meade > In memory of Valerie Rough Mr. Peter Dyer > In memory of Mary Schmitt

Mr. A. Laingdon Schmitt

> In memory of Priscilla Smith Ms. Carol Kleinman, MD Ms. Adeline Wheeler > In memory of Jesse Tucker ’95 Mrs. Donna Laliberte > In memory of Linda VanEerde Louise Backer and Nicholas Ciciretti Mr. and Mrs. Michael Gump Mr. and Mrs. Tim Kamp GIFTS IN HONOR

> In honor of Edward McC. Blair Philip and Jack DeNormandie Ms. Pamela Meyer Katharine Homans and Patterson Sims > In honor of Leslie C. Brewer Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Erikson > In honor of Virginia Chafee Mr. and Mrs. Henry D. Sharpe, Jr. > In honor of Marcia Dworak Mr. Glen Berkowitz ’82 > In honor of Mr. and Mrs. William Foulke Mr. Gifford Combs > In honor of Andy Griffiths Mr. and Mrs. Henry Becton, Jr. > In honor of Steven K. Katona and Susan Lerner (See also Steven K. Katona Chair in Marine Studies)

Mr. Colin Capers ’95 Davis United World College Scholars Program George and Kelly Dickson MPhil ’97

Mr. and Mrs. Grant G. McCullagh Ms. Kerri Sands ’02 Ms. Fae Jolie-ge Silverman ’03 Mr. Frank Twohill ’80

> In honor of Dr. Walter Robinson III Mrs. Walter Robinson, Jr. > In honor of Donald B. Straus For the Donald B. Straus Seminar Room Anonymous Nancy Andrews and Dru Colbert Patricia Honea Fleming and Richard Borden Donna Gold and William Carpenter Suzanne Taylor and Don Cass Mr. Kenneth Cline Mr. and Mrs. Richard Dudman Doreen Stabinsky and David Feldman Mrs. Philip Geyelin Mr. and Mrs. Paul Growald Helen Hess and Christopher Petersen Ingrid and Ken Hill Ms. Laura Johnson Mr. and Mrs. H. Lee Judd Mr. and Mrs. Robert Kates Susan Lerner and Steven Katona Mr. and Mrs. Moorehead Kennedy Ms. Anne Kozak Sam Coplon and Isabel Mancinelli Nancy McCormick and Paul Monfredo Gerrish H. Milliken Foundation Dr. Suzanne Morse Dr. Nishanta Rajakaruna ’94 Mr. David Rockefeller, Sr. Mr. and Mrs. Clyde E. Shorey, Jr. Sean and Carolyn Todd Richard Hilliard and Karen Waldron

> In honor of Mitzi Wertheim Mr. and Mrs. Irving Blickstein MATCHING GIFTS Albert Lea Seed House, Inc. AT&T Foundation Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation Chubb Corporation Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation Fidelity Foundation Ford Motor Company Fund Freeport-McMoRan Foundation GE Foundation IBM International Foundation Johnson & Johnson Microsoft Matching Gifts Program Milliken and Company Verizon Foundation ADOPT-A-WHALE Ms. Janet Aimone Mr. Rick Alexander Arnold and Peggy Amstutz Ms. Abagael Anderson Victoria Stein and John Balder, Jr. Mrs. Barbara Ballard Kathleen Belfiglio Mr. and Mrs. Robert Bonkowski Ms. Tina Bradford Mrs. Karen Brawner Mr. and Mrs. Leslie C. Brewer Ms. Carolyn Brown Mr. Murray Carpenter Mrs. Virginia Cate Mr. Louis Cirelli, Jr. Ms. Margaret Clagett Ms. Karrie Coburn Mrs. Alyce Cohen Ms. Doris Combs Mr. Philip Contic Dick Atlee and Sarah Corson Ms. Marylouise Cowan Mr. Timothy Culbertson Mr. Lee Davis Mrs. Lee Davis

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A N N UA L R E P O RT Ms. Deborah Della Pia Ms. Diana DenooyAguirre Mrs. Karen Deterding Mrs. Allison Di Staulo Ms. Susan Diamond Ms. Hazel Dietrich Ms. Tamara Duff Melissa and Eric Eckstein Ella Lewis Elementary School Mr. and Mrs. Joel Ellis Ms. Donna Erikson Ms. Julia Fones Ms. Natalie Foster Ms Susan Frank Dawn and Gerald Freeman Ms. Carolyn Gallant Gen. Bryant E. Moore School Ms. Diane Giberson Mrs. Sandra GorsuchPlummer Ms. Beth Gosselin Ms. Elizabeth Porter Gray F.G. Guido Funeral Home, Inc. Ms. Victoria Gutschenritter Mrs. Kimberly Haines Ms. Joanne Harbluk Ms. Mary Ann Harriman Dr. and Mrs. Leonidas Hayes Mrs. Cheryl Henderson Mr. and Mrs. H. Lawrence Hess, Jr. Ms. Ellen Hixenbaugh Ms. Betsey Holtzmann Barbara Brizzee and John Hunt Kyriacou Irini Mrs. Rose Janus Ms. Melissa Jeffries Mr. and Mrs. Edward Johnson III Mr. Nathan Johnson Mrs. Joyce Kelly Leigh Kennedy Mrs. Patricia Koechley Mr. Robert Kopka Mr. and Mrs. Bernhard Kraus Ms. Joni Larson Mr. Gary Liebowitz Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Maass Mr. and Mrs. Ernest

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Machia, Jr. Mrs. Florence MacKay Ms. Holly MacKenzie Ms. Nora Maloney Ms. Marilyn Marshall Mr. F. Nathan McKnight Amy and Stewart Murphy Ms. Joann Nahlovsky Ms. Judith Neher Paula and Lee Neuman Kathleen and Michael Nicolas Mr. Donald Nolin Elizabeth and Madeleine Onstwedder Mary Page Mr. and Mrs. Richard Parker Mrs. Christine Patrick Mr. James Pedersen Ms. Julia Phillips Ms. Barbara Purves Erin Qualls Manoja Ratnayake Lecamwasam Mr. and Mrs. Brian Reilly Ms. Denie Reynolds Ms. Susan Roberts Ms. Gail Rosenkrantz Mrs. Suzanne Russell Safeground Landcare Dr. Walter Sannita Ms. Marianne Santoro Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Schmitz Mr. and Mrs. William Schultz Mrs. Lois Seamon Ms. Daria Self Ms. Rona Sergeant Ms. Judy Shalvi Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Smith Sara and Roger Soens Mrs. Kathleen Sparkes Ms. Cynthia Steele Mrs. Nadine Steinberg Ms. Kristen Stemp Ms. Joan Stephens Ms. Christine Taylor Mrs. Pamela Taylor Ms. Cynthia Thompson Ms. Linda Tracy Mr. David Voorhees Ms. Sherry Wallace Ms Denise Wellham Ms. Elisabeth Wells Mr. and Mrs. William Whitener

Ms. Penny Williams Ms. Nancy Wilson Mr. and Mrs. Dick Woehr Ms. Victoria Wood Camp Yavneh ALLIED WHALE PROGRAMS Ms. Judith Allen Barbara Tennent and Steven Barkan Ms. Carolyn Berzinis Mrs. Jean and Will Boddy Dr. Andrew Campbell Michele and Agnese Cestone Foundation Mrs. Colleen Copelin Mr. Millard Dority Mrs. Tatiana Ertl Mr. Walter Goodnow Mr. James Houghton Ms. Jennifer Hughes International Whaling Commission Robert and Kim Jackson Ms. Laura Johnson Susan Lerner and Steven Katona Mr. and Mrs. R. Zackary Klyver Ms. Brenda Lake Mr. David Lamon ’91 Ms. Carrol Marie Lange ’99 Maine Coast Sea Vegetables Maine Community Foundation Mr. and Mrs. William McFarland Ms. Barbara Miller Ms. Amy Mitchell Ms. Anna Murphy Corey Papadopoli Ms. Linda Parker Sage Park Middle School US Dept. of Commerce Stephen and MarieFrancoise Walk Yael Wiechmann Mrs. Susan Wuorinen Mrs. Diana Young Sue Berman and Michael Zamkow FRIENDS OF THE ARTS Mr. and Mrs. John Anthony Ms. Katie Bell

Mr. Edward McC. Blair Mr. and Mrs. John R. H. Blum Michael Boland ’94 Ms. Virginia Brennan Mr. and Mrs. Leslie C. Brewer Ms. Lorraine Cannatta Ms. Judith Chiara Criterion Theatres Inc. Mrs. John Devlin Prof. and Mrs. Arthur Dole Ms. Lucinda Nash Dudley Mr. Richard Estes Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Felton Thomas and Carroll Fernald Ms. Peggy Forster Mr. and Mrs. W. West Frazier, IV Friends of the Arts Fund of the Maine Community Foundation Fr. James Gower Ms. Barbara Hagan Mr. and Mrs. Melville Hodder Mr. and Mrs. Christopher Hutchins Mrs. R. Duane Iselin Dr. and Mrs. Steve Kassels Mr. and Mrs. Robert Kates Mr. Arthur Keller Ann Luther and Alan Vlach Maine Community Foundation Mr. and Mrs. Grant McCullagh Mr. and Mrs. Keith Miller Mr. and Mrs. Stephen G. Milliken Mr. and Mrs. Paul Monfredo Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Morgenstern Mr. and Mrs. G. Marshall Moriarty Mr. and Mrs. William V. P. Newlin Jim and Suzanne Owen Mrs. Sara Weeks Peabody Mr. and Mrs. Robert

A N N UA L R E P O RT Pennington Mr. Stephen Petschek Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Pierce Mr. and Mrs. Jay Pierrepont James Dyke and Helen Porter Mr. and Mrs. Hector Prud’homme Mona and Louis Rabineau Ms. Sydney Roberts Rockefeller Ms. Linn Sage Dr. and Mrs. Peter Sellers Mr. and Mrs. Henry Sharpe, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. Donald B. Straus Dr. and Mrs. Sidney Strickland Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Thomas IV Ms. Joan Weber Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Williams

GEORGE B. DORR MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY FRIENDS OF THE MUSEUM Mr. Edward McC. Blair Mr. and Mrs. Leslie C. Brewer Mr. and Mrs. Louis Cabot Mr. and Mrs. John Constable Mrs. Amos Eno Fr. James Gower Mr. and Mrs. John Guth Mr. and Mrs. Richard Habermann Mr. and Mrs. George B. E. Hambleton Mr. and Mrs. Melville Hodder Mr. and Mrs. Edward Johnson III Mr. and Mrs. Gerrish Milliken Mr. and Mrs. Stephen G. Milliken Mr. Douglas Monteith Mr. and Mrs. William V. P. Newlin

Mr. and Mrs. C. W. Eliot Paine Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Pierce James Dyke and Helen Porter Ms. Sheila Sonne Pulling Mr. and Mrs. George Putnam Dr. Jennifer Roberts ’94 Ms. Sydney Roberts Rockefeller Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer Sellers Dr. and Mrs. Peter Sellers Mr. and Mrs. Christiaan Van Heerden SUMMER PROGRAMS L. Schellie Archbold Ms. Tamara Bannerman Bar Harbor Garden Club Ms. Jennifer Benz Kim and Brenda Cartwright Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Michael Childs Mr. and Mrs. James Coffman Darlene and Ray Alan Coker Dr. Mary Dudzik Ms. Jillian Glaeser Mrs. Marianne and Douglas Grant Jeffrey Jones and Lisa Heimann Melisa Rowland and Scott Henggeler Barbarina ’88 and Aaron ’87 Heyerdahl Mr. and Mrs. Tedd Higgins David and Monica McAndrews Hill Peter and Hope Hill Racheal Wallace and Douglas Kiehm Ms. Helen Koch Anne and Robert Krieg Caroline Pryor and David MacDonald Mr. Paul Girdzis and Ms. Adrienne Paiewonsky Katherine and Stanley Pelletier David Rockefeller Fund, Inc. Mr. and Mrs. Michael

Saxenian Regina and Edward Volkwein

THORNDIKE LIBRARY Mrs. Alfred Barton The Camden Conference Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Felton Ms. Carol Kleinman, MD Ms. Lorraine Nazzaro Carol ’93 and Jacob ’93 Null Ms. Adeline Wheeler Karen Waldron ENDOWMENT GIFTS Ms. Sally Crock Mr. and Mrs. F. Eugene Dixon, Jr. Mrs. Philip Geyelin Mr. and Mrs. Horace Hildreth, Jr./Seal Bay Fund of the Maine Community Foundation Jennifer Reynolds and Jay McNally ’84 Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton Robinson, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. Henry Sharpe, Jr. Davis Taylor Mr. and Mrs. W. Nicholas Thorndike Ms. Elena Tuhy ’90 Mary Long and Dennis Unites

STEVEN K. KATONA CHAIR IN MARINE STUDIES Anonymous Mr. and Mrs. Richard Ames Drs. Stephen and Janet Andersen John and Karen Anderson Mr. and Mrs. Schofield Andrews III Mr. and Mrs. Stockton Andrews Wendy Knickerbocker and David Avery ’84 Ms. Jennifer Aylesworth ’94 Sarah and David Baker Ms. Tenia Bannick ’86 Bar Harbor Bank and Trust Mrs. Jill Barlow-Kelley Ms. Alana Beard ’03

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A N N UA L R E P O RT Mr. Ron Beard Ms. Katie Bell

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Mr. and Mrs. William Benjamin II/William E. Benjamin II Fund of The Community Foundation for Palm Beach and Martin Counties Ms. Carolyn Berzinis Mr. Edward McC. Blair Hon. and Mrs. Robert O. Blake Mr. and Mrs. Peter Blanchard III Mr. Michael Boland ’94 Rev. Paul Boothby ’88 Patricia Honea-Fleming and Richard Borden Mr. and Mrs. Leslie C. Brewer Ms. Carla Burnham ’84 Roc and Helen Caivano ’80 Ms. Julie Cameron ’78 Donna Gold and William Carpenter Barbara and Vinson Carter Ms. Jean Cass Mrs. John Chafee Ms. Cecily Clark Mr. Kenneth Cline Ms. Janis Coates Ms. Sarah Louise Cochran, DVM ’78 Mr. and Mrs. Elliot Cohen Ms. Diana Cohn ’85 Mr. and Mrs. E. Judson Cole Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Coleman Barbara Damrosch and Eliot Coleman Mr. and Mrs. Francis I.G. Coleman Dick Atlee and Sarah Corson Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Cough, Jr. Mr. T. A. Cox Jennifer ’93 and Kevin Crandall ’93 Mr. Fred Davis ’75 Mr. and Mrs. Joel Davis Ms. Norah Davis Mr. and Mrs. Shelby M.C. Davis Davis United World College Scholars Program Mrs. John Devlin Mr. and Mrs. F. Eugene

Dixon, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. William Dohmen Mr. Millard Dority Mr. and Mrs. Darrold Dorr Mrs. William Drury Mr. and Mrs. Wesley Dudley Ms. Briana Duga ’04 Dr. Margaret Dulany Dr. Samuel Eliot Dr. Dianna and Mr. Ben Emory/Ocean Ledges Fund of the Maine Community Foundation Mrs. Amos Eno Dr. and Mrs. Arthur Factor Doreen Stabinsky and Dave Feldman Thomas and Carroll Fernald Mr. and Mrs David H. Fischer Mr. and Mrs. William Foulke, Jr. Mrs. Ruth Fraley Mr. and Mrs. W. West Frazier IV Ms. Ardrianna FrenchMcLane ’02 Dr. and Mrs. James C. A. Fuchs Ms. Carla Ganiel Mrs. Robert Gann Mr. Matthew Gerald ’83 Mrs. Philip Geyelin June LaCombe and William Ginn ’74 Jill and Sheldon Goldthwait Mr. and Mrs. John Good Bruce Mazlish and Neva Goodwin Jonathan and Nina Gormley ’78 Dr. and Mrs. Robert Gossart Fr. James Gower Ms. Linda Gregory ’89 Ms. Mary Griffin ’97 Susan Dowling and Andrew Griffiths Mr. and Mrs. Michael Gumpert Mr. and Mrs. John Guth Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Vincent Hall Ms. Briana Hall-Harvey ’02

Ms. M. Rebecca Hancock ’97 Mr. Matthew Hare ’84 Mrs. Nancy Harris Mr. and Mrs. James B. Harrison Ms. Lois Hayes ’79 Atsuko Watabe ’93 and Bruce Hazam ’92 Ms. Katherine Hester ’98 Ms. Barbara Hilli Mr. and Mrs. Melville Hodder Ms. Jean Hoekwater ’80 Ms. Margaret Hoffman ’97 Horton, McFarland and Veysey Mr. James Houghton Mr. and Mrs. Michael Huber Ms. Sarah F. Hudson Ms. Jennifer Hughes Ms. Jane Hultberg Ms. Norene Hunter Ms. Susan Inches ’79 Mrs. R. Duane Iselin Mr. John Jacob ’81 Mr. William Janes Ms. Laura Johnson Ms. Leslie Jones ’91 Mr. and Mrs. H. Lee Judd Ann Sewall and Edward Kaelber Ms. Mary Kashman Mr. David Katona Mr. Nicholas Katona Dr. James Kellam ’96 Mr. Arthur Keller Mr. and Mrs. Jack Kelley II Mr. and Mrs. John N. Kelly Mr. and Mrs. Richard Kelly Dr. Craig Kesselheim ’76 Ms. Tonia Kittelson Ms. Dorothy Wills Knapp Ms. Aleda Koehn Mr. and Mrs. Ted Koffman Mr. and Mrs. Robert Kogod Ms. Anne Kozak Margi and Philip Kunhardt ’77 Mr. and Mrs. Chester Laskowski Mr. and Mrs. Edward Lipkin Ms. Maria Vanegas Long

A N N UA L R E P O RT ’84 Mr. and Mrs. Peter Loring Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Lukens Mrs. Marcia MacKinnon Mr. James MacLeod Mr. David Malakoff ’86 Sam Coplon and Isabel Mancinelli Ms. Pamela Manice Eduardo Bohorquez and Nancy Manter Ms. Stephanie Martin ’93 Ms. Kathleen Massimini ’82 Mr. Wyatt Matthews Mr. Francis McAdoo, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. Robert McCarthy Ms. Elizabeth J. McCormack Mr. and Mrs. Grant G. McCullagh Ms. Donna McFarland Mr. J. R. McGregor Mr. and Mrs. David Milliken Mr. and Mrs. Gerrish Milliken Mr. and Mrs. Stephen G. Milliken Dr. and Mrs. Larry Mobraaten Ms. Sandra Modeen Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Morris Suzanne Morse Dr. Frank Moya Mr. Stephen Mullane ’81 Ms. Anna Murphy Mr. Sean Murphy Ms. Kimberly Austin Nathane ’04 Mrs. Harry Neilson Jr. Mr. and Mrs. William V. P. Newlin Mrs. Carlo Ninfi Mrs. Marie Nolf Lynn and Willy Osborn Mr. Benoni Outerbridge ’84 Ms. Ellen Pactor Mr. and Mrs. Jon Pactor Mr. Robert Patterson, Jr. Mrs. Sara Weeks Peabody Mr. and Mrs. Robert Pennington Kim and Keating Pepper Ms. Judith Perkins

Ms. Meghan Pew ’99 Mr. Bruce Phillips ’78 Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Pierce Thomas and Patricia Pinkham Ms. Carole Plenty Ms. Frances Pollitt ’77 James Dyke and Helen Porter Mr. and Mrs. George Putnam Mr. and Mrs. Eben Pyne Mona and Louis Rabineau Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Rappaport Robin and David Ray Mr. and Mrs. John P. Reeves Dr. and Mrs. Stephen Ressel John and Carol Rivers

Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton Robinson Jr. Dr. Walter Robinson Mr. David Rockefeller Sr. Dr. and Mrs. Steven Rockefeller Hilda and Thomas H. Roderick Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Rosenfeld Ms. Kerri Sands ’02 Mr. Daniel Sangeap ’90 Victoria ’80 and Steve ’77 Savage Ms. Margaret Scheid ’85 Dr. and Mrs. Peter Sellers Mr. James Senter ’85 Mr. Samuel Shaw Ms. Clare Shepley Mr. and Mrs. Clyde E. Shorey, Jr. Mr. Winthrop Short Ms. Kimberly Smith ’92 Rich MacDonald and Natalie Springuel ’91 Lynne and Mike Staggs ’97 Mr. Corky Philip Steiner Dr. Elizabeth Kellogg and Dr. Peter Stevens Ms. Marie Stivers Ms. Marion Stocking Ms. Dorie Stolley ’88 Austen Yoshinaga and Gregory Stone ’82 Ms. Candice Stover Mr. and Mrs. Donald B. Straus Jean and Bill Sylvia

Dan Thomassen and Bonnie Tai Steve and Beth Thomas Union Trust Company Mr. and Mrs. Christiaan Van Heerden Mr. John Viele Mr. Ralph Voorhees Ms. Ann Staples Waldron Richard Hilliard and Karen Waldron Ms. Hua Wang ’04 Douglas and Priscilla Williams Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Wishcamper/Joe and Carol Wishcamper Fund of the Maine Community Foundation Mr. Richard Wishcamper ’97

Help Make a

COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC welcomes gifts of all kinds to support our work of educating students to make a difference throughout the world. Please consider including the college in your annual giving.

Equally as important, to ensure COA’s future, consider becoming part of our planned giving program. Bequests, charitable gift annuities, charitable reminder trusts and other similar programs help the college while also offering you income tax benefits.

COA | 63

Underwater photos by David Obura; Greg Stone photo by Mary Jane Adams

In the year 2000, Dr. Greg Stone ’82, the New England Aquarium’s vice president for global marine programs, visited the Phoenix Islands, eight coral atolls that belong to the Republic of Kiribati, an island nation in the south Pacific northeast of Fiji.

Stone could not believe their pristine beauty. “Nobody had ever looked under the water,” he said. If they had, they might have noticed, as he did, several new species of fish and one new coral species.

Stone went to work. Six years, uncountable meetings and 1,500 dives later, on March 28, 2006, Kiribati (pronounced kee-ree-bas) created the Phoenix Islands Protected Area.

At 73,800 square miles, it’s the world's third largest marine wildlife sanctuary, as big as Huron, Michigan and Superior lakes combined. On November 14, 2006, National Geographic Adventure recognized Stone at its first-ever Adventurers of the Year celebration, honoring “twelve people who dared to dream big.”

Q. Why a marine sanctuary in the South Pacific?

A. Globally, the most systemic diversity is in the ocean, and the Phoenix Islands are near the oldest part of the ocean, where we have some of the highest biodiversity anywhere. This area is about ten times the size of the Serengeti, only instead of elephants, lions and wildebeests, we have whales, sharks and huge schools of tuna.

But ocean conservation is about one 64 | COA

hundred years behind land conservation.

Oceans are opaque. If people could see the bleached reefs, the clear cutting that comes from fishing, they’d be appalled.

Q. Do you think you go about things differently because of your degree in human ecology?

greg

A. Oh, yes. The negotiations to protect the Phoenix Islands were very complex and COA prepared me well for it. I worked closely with the president of the country, a great, brilliant man. We had to keep the economic engines spinning and understand the culture and the politics. COA also gave me what I consider a graduate school atmosphere as an undergraduate, working closely with faculty, which for me was principally Steve Katona.

Q. What are you working on now?

A. I am planning an expedition to study sea mountains. There are more mountains in the ocean than on land and they are essential areas of biodiversity. Off Lord Howe Island in Australia, there’s a mountain that’s the size of Mount Rainier. It’s 15,000 feet from the sea floor with peaks three hundred feet below the surface. Underwater mountains are steep and big and full of life—and you don’t have to hike them, you can drift around on them with submarines.

T H E H U M A N E C O L O G Y E S S AY R E V I S I T E D

When Professors Change: What I learned at COA

BY ETTA KRALOVEC When I arrived at COA from New York City, the natural world was for me a thing of beauty, much like a painting in a museum. I was a culture junky, so thinking of nature that way was just fine with me. I was angry about the state of the environment, but that was really a political position for me. Nature ... well really, I saw the relationship of humans to nature as problematic, socially-constructed and genderbiased. So ‘nature’ cut two ways in my mind. While it provided a lovely backdrop for the picnic, as it were, it also provided an excuse for our countless, stupid, human mistakes.

I arrived intellectually out-of-sync with COA notions about ‘nature.’ I was not an advocate of the view that ‘the natural’ shapes and determines our experience. In fact, I believe human nature doesn’t exist, except in the sense of John Dewey’s notion about its enormous plasticity. And I arrived believing that science was basically a White, male, Western conspiracy. I pictured science as a sort of Wyatt Earp, rounding up outlaw ideas and jailing them.

Early on I remember standing outside of Turrets watching sea smoke rising from Frenchman Bay and having Don Cass offer to explain what was happening. I declined his explanation, responding that I preferred a more poetic understanding of the natural world. You see, I came to COA believing that science drowns out poetry and art.

I still don’t know what causes sea smoke, but COA taught me the importance of building a scientific understanding of the natural world precisely to enhance our appreciation and respect for it. Beyond teaching me that science was not, in fact, the cause of all the problems in the world, COA didn’t change all the above-mentioned intellectual predilections that I arrived with. It did hone my debating skills. And it shifted my sense of positioning in the world.

I now know my place—geographically—by the natural environment. The Arizona night sky and monsoon season serve to shape the rhythm of my life, and because of COA, I understand my life rhythms in relation to those of nature. That change was no doubt pushed along by the demands the natural world in Maine places on its inhabitants, but I believe this repositioning of the human is what COA is really all about, whether we are talking about our positioning in relation to nature or each other. This repositioning is learned by being a member of a community. For it is in community where we learn to respect the ‘other’ and the diversity of views that implies.

While I was at COA, there were the requisite behind closed-door negotiations, debates over knotty moral issues, fights about policy. This all seemed a rather dysfunctional decision-making process born

Etta Kralovec relishes the rhythms of her new home in Bisbee, Arizona.

from a male-dominated governance structure that was built on an out-of-date notion of democracy.

I now understand that what I saw as dysfunction is really what community is all about. What sets COA apart in my mind is that it really isn’t an institution like other colleges, it is a community. And communities are very hard to live in.

It is not just the natural world that teaches at COA, it is the community that teaches. Being in a community teaches its members the essential democratic habits of mind of tolerance, respect and commitment. It teaches that everyone is unique, sees an issue from a slightly different perspective and needs to be heard. It is this learning to be in community, both the human and the natural community, that is the real education at COA. Whether a community can run a college in any kind of efficient way is certainly still an open question. But let’s not forget that Mussolini may have gotten the trains to run on time—and at what cost?

Learning to be a member of a community is perhaps the most important learning for us all. And as Dewey taught, in order to learn to value community and democracy you have to live it. For that learning I have COA to thank.

Etta Kralovec, COA faculty member in human studies and director of teacher education, 1989-1999, is now associate professor of education at University of Arizona South. kralovec@email.arizona.edu.

R e a d e r s a r e e n c o u r a g e d t o s u b m i t p o e t r y, short stories, and human ecology essays to COA . Please send your work t o d g o l d @ c o a . e d u o r D o n n a G o l d , C O A M a g a z i n e , 105 Eden S t r e e t , B a r H a r b o r, Maine 04609.

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