Chattermarks

by Bill Dietrich

I’ve led a double life, writing about Nazis, pirates, and Napoleonic generals in my fiction but drawing on my newspaper experience to teach environmental journalism. I just ended a five-year stint of such teaching at Huxley College of the Environment at Western Washington University, and my swan song was completing work on the just-published: Green Fire: A History of Huxley College.

This was an in-house book, of course, aimed at alumni and students, but it also turned out to be an ambitious and complicated project that I hope will be of wider interest to those involved with environmental education. From start to finish took three years and involved at least 20 different contributors.

The 185-page book has my narrative history of one of the first (arguably, the first) dedicated environmental colleges in the United States, which was controversial when founded and has been pioneering and experimental ever since.

It also has profiles of 40 Huxley alumni that provide environmentalists with 40 wide-ranging examples of how to lead one’s life. The grads have ranged from organic farmers and a zen monk to high-powered attorneys and environmental activists. They are saving the tiger, climbing mountains, reforming high school education, running an airport, cleaning up toxics, coaching composting, rehabilitating salmon streams, mediating disputes, the examples go on and on. The book has about 170 illustrations, all on recycled paper, naturally.

It was very much a collaborative effort. Most of the profiles were done by a team of nine recently-graduated students who had been editors on the college’s undergraduate Planet magazine I advised, and it’s gratifying to make them published authors. Some of the photos came from students as well, and the book was given a lovely design by recent graduate Avela Grenier of Bozeman, MT. I’m always impressed what college-age students can do if given the opportunity.

Other parts include a brief biography of Thomas Henry Huxley, “Darwin’s Bulldog,” from which the college takes its name, and an environmental timeline of the last 40 years. As noted, Huxley’s history parallels modern environmental history: it was founded in 1970, the same year as the first Earth Day and the creation of basic U.S. environmental laws and agencies.

Since Huxley Development Director Manca Valum managed to raise the money necessary to produce the book, all proceeds from its sale will go directly to student programs, which is very gratifying. I also hope the book will increase Huxley’s own self-awareness (it is a modest place, to an extreme), interest future students and donors, and encourage a dialogue with other environmental colleges.

The book is $30. It’s available through Village Books in Bellingham, Washington and the bookstore at Western Washington University. If you know of folks interested in environmental teaching, give them a heads up: I think they’d find “Green Fire” provocative and intriguing.

By Kurt Hoelting
May 3, 2010

My new book The Circumference of Home: One Man’s Yearlong Quest for a Radical Local Life grew quite seamlessly out of a yearlong experiment in car-free local living in 2008. I had been concerned about climate change since it first surfaced as an issue in the 1980’s. Yet my own carbon footprint had only grown larger in the ensuing years. The gap between what I knew to be true, and how I am actually living my life, had grown steadily larger. My wake up call came after I took my own carbon footprint online. I thought I’d do fairly well. After all, I was driving a hybrid car, actively recycling, keeping my thermostat low. But I was also flying a lot for work and pleasure, not noticing how thoroughly this jet travel was trumping all my other conservation efforts. I was shocked to see the size of the discrepancy between the two.

Yet fashioning an appropriate response proved elusive. I was too enmeshed in my high-carbon lifestyle to see any obvious way out of the conundrum. Feeling thoroughly stuck in the mire of this contradiction, I found myself sliding into a chronic depression. I had almost given up finding a way forward at all when the genesis of a creative response ambushed me one morning over breakfast with a friend. “What would it be like,” I found myself musing, “if I didn’t get into a car for a year? What would it be like if I spent an entire year living car-free within walking distance of home.”

Something in the audacity of this idea grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let me go. I started scheming about places close to home that I could explore under my own power, hidden gems I had neglected in my rush to more distant places. I drew a circle on the map sixty miles in radius with my home at the center – a circle that traced a nearly perfect circumference around the Puget Sound basin. I took a sabbatical from all work and travel that would take me outside this circle, and on the winter solstice in 2007 I parked my car in the garage for a full year. Armed with my boots, a bicycle and a kayak, and public transportation, I set off on the adventure of a lifetime.

» Continue reading Reflections on “The Circumference of Home”

Kathleen Dean Moore is one of the finest writers in our country, a great teacher and generous spirit. We’ve gotten to know her over the past few years as she has been an instructor in our Thunder Arm Writing Retreat at the Learning Center, teaching writing skills alongside Rick Bass, Holly Hughes, Gary Ferguson, Ana Maria Spagna and Jim Bertolino. So, when we received a copy of her new book Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature, published in early March by Shambhala, we were excited to plunge in to it and see what she has turned her attention to. Even better, we learned that she will be reading in Bellingham on April 2 and Seattle on April 3 (details and more dates at the end of the post).

In anticipation of her visit to the Fourth Corner, we struck up a conversation with Kathleen via email about her new publication.

NCI: What is Wild Comfort about? What were your motives in composing it?

KDM: Wild Comfort is about the healing power of the wet, wild world. Why does the sound of moving water calm us? What explains the gladness we feel in the return of tides, the return of spring, reliable morning after returning morning, bright in our eyes even if they are closed, or crying? How does the Earth transform dark into light, death into life, sorrow into a kind of peace that opens us to the wonder and solace of the world?

NCI: What did you learn in the writing of it? Did you end up somewhere different than where you started?

KDM: I had started out to write a book about happiness, examining times of gladness and by that means learning how to live.  But events overtook me, death after death, and my book became a different journey toward learning how to live.  Even though I was still writing about what I love the most — floating in fog, pitching camp in the desert, tracking buzzards and whales — I found myself on the trail of the hardest questions I know. How do we restore meaning to lives suddenly unmoored?  How can grief bring us into the deepest currents of life, and so connect us to sources of wonder and solace? How do we find the way to celebration and the courage to be glad again?

NCI: Do you have any specific hopes as far as how your essays in this book will be received by the reader? Anything particular you hope will linger in the readers mind?

» Continue reading Kathleen Dean Moore’s “Wild Comfort”

The days are getting longer, but slowly, and there are still plenty of dark, rainy evenings this winter for reading.

If, as a member of the Institute community, you wish to broaden and deepen your knowledge of conservation history – We are into “conserving and restoring northwest environments through education” are we not? – then I have the perfect read for you. As a bonus, this one book will take you through to spring. It is Douglas Brinkley’s The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (Harper, 2009, 940 pages).

While there are multitudes of books about Theodore Roosevelt, no one has explained and dissected how natural history and conservation were central to his life and work with the thoroughness and insight Brinkley brings to the task. He describes the young Roosevelt’s fascination with the natural world, the influences on his interests of his eccentric Uncle Rob, the centrality of Darwin’s theorizing upon his thinking, and how his fascination with the American West formed many of his ideas about land in general and public land in particular.

» Continue reading The Wilderness Warrior