COA Magazine Spring 2016 by College of the Atlantic

COA

THE COLLEGE OF THE ATL ANTIC MAG A ZINE Volume 12 . Number 1 . Spring 2016

A GLOBAL EDUCATION GROUNDED IN COMMUNITY

COA The College of the Atlantic Magazine

A Global Education Letter from the President

News from Campus

COA in Japan

COA's Newest Faculty Member

Allied Whale Researchers in South Georgia

A GLOBAL EDUCATION, GROUNDED IN COMMUNITY

COA's YucatĂĄn Program

Waste is a Verb

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COA The College of the Atlantic Magazine Volume 12 · Number 1 · Spring 2016

Editorial Editor Editorial Advice Editorial Consultant Alumni Consultant

Donna Gold Nancy Andrews Jasmine Bourgeois '17 John Cooper Darron Collins '92 Jen Hughes Bonnie Tai Katharine Turok Bill Carpenter Dianne Clendaniel

Design Art Director

Rebecca Hope Woods

COA Administration President Academic Dean Associate Academic Deans Administrative Dean Dean of Admission Dean of Institutional Advancement Dean of Student Life

Darron Collins '92 Kenneth Hill Catherine Clinger Stephen Ressel Sean Todd Karen Waldron Andrew Griffiths Heather Albert-Knopp '99 Lynn Boulger Sarah Luke

COA Board of Trustees Timothy Bass Ronald E. Beard Leslie C. Brewer Alyne Cistone Lindsay Davies Beth Gardiner Amy Yeager Geier H. Winston Holt IV Philip B. Kunhardt III '77 Anthony Mazlish Suzanne Folds McCullagh Linda McGillicuddy

Jay McNally '84 Philip S.J. Moriarty Phyllis Anina Moriarty Lili Pew Hamilton Robinson, Jr. Nadia Rosenthal Marthann Samek Henry L.P. Schmelzer Stephen Sullens William N. Thorndike, Jr. Cody van Heerden, MPhil '16

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

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

In compiling the spring issue of COA, with its theme, A Global Education, Grounded in Community, I first sought to frame the expansive reach of a COA education. Our student body draws from six continents, our alumni work on all seven, and our academic focus has few limits. As the articles came in, however, I realized that wherever we are, whatever we do, whether we're on the Baltic or in Bar Harbor, we are working locally, personally, within a community. The problems we need to solve, the humanity we seek to honor—from the integration of immigrants to the celebration of traditional music—begin on the ground (or stages and waters), enlisting the enthusiasm and energy of those around us. The timing of this theme celebrates two anniversaries. This academic year marks the fifteenth anniversary of the Davis United World Scholars Program, one that has had an incalculable impact on numerous colleges and universities across the United States and on tens of thousands of young people around the world (see page 16). Begun during the 2000–2001 academic year, the program propelled COA into becoming one of the nation's most international colleges. For fifteen years, between 15 and 20 percent of our students have come from outside the United States. Think of that. Though perched on an island in the far northeast corner of the United States, COA engages so many voices from so many nations that our students can't limit themselves to considering the world just as a citizen of the United States, or Myanmar, or Guatemala, France, Rwanda, or New Zealand. And so the perspective of every one of us at COA has broadened, granting us insights, knowledge, and especially friendships that will last a lifetime. The second anniversary is that of the Yucatán term, launched twenty years ago, in 1996. This immersion into the life and languages of rural Mexico has had a lasting impact on many alumni (see page 10). More recently, we've also been sending students to France for a spring term course. But COA has had been working globally for nearly three decades, with faculty bringing students to explore the stories of India, the art of Greece, the education of New Zealand, the agriculture of Guatemala, among other locales. The hallmark of these programs is full immersion, independent exploration, and the sharing of discovery among faculty and students. Hands on, heart in.

Donna Gold, editor Left: A bike trip to Santa María del Tule in Oaxaca, Mexico.

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

PS: We already know what the next issue is: a celebration of Acadia National Park and the National Park Service on this double centennial year. Feel free to suggest ideas, or submit fiction, poetry, or your personal stories of park adventures.

COA is published biannually for the College of the Atlantic community. Please send ideas, letters, and submissions (short stories, poetry, and revisits to human ecology essays) to:

Cover: The seventeenth century Bhairavnath Temple in Kathmandu Valley stands undamaged after the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Nepal on April 25, 2015. For photographer Rohan Chitrakar '04, it is a testament to the spirit and resolve of the Nepalese people. The chariot? It transports deities during festivals. For more see page 34.

COA Magazine, College of the Atlantic 105 Eden Street, Bar Harbor, ME 04609 dgold@coa.edu

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Back Cover: The COA pier, photographed by Russel Holway, head custodian. Russel's campus images of changes in the weather, the waters, and the skies have delighted our community for years. You'll often find them on COA's facebook page. COA indicates non-degree alumni by parentheses around their class year.

From the President Darron Collins '92, PhD

COA President Darron Collins '92 visits a historic home and garden on Osakikamijima Island in Japan.

Both in their passions and their professions, COA alumni are strongly biased toward service. The setting and scale of these efforts cover the widest ranges imaginable. When we use the tagline "Life Changing, World Changing" we do not mean one single life changing the entirety of the widest world—that's absurd and pompous. Lives Changing, Worlds Changing might be more accurate, however clunky. The boundaries between our lives as individuals and the lives of the global community are very porous. And our world stretches imperceptibly from our body to our home, from our community to our region, from our country to our planet. It is this pluralism of scale we wrestle with in the current issue of COA. Global education, in my opinion, is the logical successor to the antiquated and problematic junior year study abroad still so common in higher education. And those who receive a global education— what we might call a globalized student body—are the logical successors to the oversimplified dichotomy of a domestic versus international student body. Human ecology teaches us to recognize the connective tissues between our immediate environment and the wider world: say, for instance, the link between local zooplankton and global climate patterns (page 23); or the power and universality of fiddle music in Georgia, just north of Florida, and the Georgia on the Black Sea (page 30). Not everything need be connected so literally, but hunting out those non-obvious connections is important. Look for them throughout this issue. More important than the connections themselves, a global education erases the allure of the distant and exotic and asks that we look for the beauty, the complexity, and the problems in places right under our

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noses. Such an approach chips away at the dangers of academic relativism while acknowledging the power and importance of differences in place and people. This chipping away is something that puts us at the vanguard of higher education. A COA education is based in experience. Students are out in the field in its many forms: observing, journaling, photographing, experimenting, creating, learning. To eliminate barriers to this kind of learning, we now provide every single student with a fund for expeditionary learning. Made possible through the generosity of the late Kathryn W. Davis and her family, among other donors, the fund provides students with a personal budget to plan and execute their own adventure, whether it takes them to Lewiston, Maine or Lesotho, Africa. Through the fund, students design and participate in collaborative expeditions, manage both budgets and expectations, set a real goal that's sometimes realized but sometimes not, and become comfortable with being uncomfortable—both intellectually and physically. With the help of these expeditionary funds, COA's global education produces those "aha" moments of clarity and understanding that then allow our students and alumni to affect change in our world. This issue of COA highlights such stories of expedition, of global education, and of our greater community's effort to make our world just a bit better than it is. Enjoy the adventure—

NEWS FROM CAMPUS NOVEMBER

named the park's first poet laureate. He serves throughout Acadia's 2016 centennial year.

Moni Ayoub '19 reflects on her year working at a Syrian refugee camp in her home country of Lebanon during a fundraiser for Syrian refugees at the Bar Harbor Congregational Church.

FEBRUARY

COA marks New Economy Week with the teach-in, Maine and MDI in the New Economy, with Rob Brown ('91), business ownership solutions program manager at the Cooperative Development Institute, Jasmine Bourgeois '17, Paige Hill '17, Peter Kemos '17, and faculty member Davis Taylor.

At a Human Ecology Forum, Austin Schuver '17 speaks on his work with water, social approaches to environmental issues, and the western Washington nonprofit, Spring to the Tap, which he started in middle school.

DECEMBER Seventeen COA students attend the United Nations climate summit in Paris, lobbying for climate justice and carbon reductions. Following the meetings they head to Sweden to connect with the Uppsala University students that faculty member Doreen Stabinsky taught during her Zennstrรถm Visiting Professorship. Staff and faculty and their families celebrate the holidays and the end of the year in New Orleans style thanks to hosts Karen and President Darron Collins '92.

JANUARY For more than five hours, students, faculty, and staff take turns reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' moving and disturbing memoir Between the World and Me in honor of the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. A seagull banded by Audra McTague '19 on Great Duck Island in July is found in Pascagoula, Mississippi. In 17 years of banding gulls on the island this is the furthest distance reported. MDI Clean Energy Partners in Bar Harbor receives $3,601 from Rural Energy for America Program, or REAP, to install a new solar array at the Peggy Rockefeller Farms. Christian Barter, poet, Acadia National Park trail crew supervisor, and adjunct faculty member, is 4

Jodi Baker is hired as a permanent faculty member in the performing arts.

Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson speaks to campus about the evolution of institutions during a special Human Ecology Forum.

DORR EXHIBITS WORK OF BIOLOGY THROUGH THE LENS CLASS.

STUDENTS CREATE FREEZER SHELTERS OUTSIDE TAB.

The Advanced Comedic Improvisation class performs a fundraiser for Share the Harvest, the food access program run by Beech Hill Farm. COA's 24-Hour Challenge nets 805 donors and $79,000 for the annual fund.

MARCH

HOCKEY TIME ON COA'S ICE RINK.

Kourtney Collum, who studies pollinators in Maine and Canada's Prince Edward Island, is selected to lead food systems as the new Partridge Chair in Food and Sustainable Agriculture Systems. She starts in September. Look for more in the fall. Ella Samuel '16 paints and destroys her public senior project presentation, Liminal, through a dance and wall mural reflecting the vulnerability of earth's species.

13 LAMBS BORN AT PEGGY ROCKEFELLER FARMS.

Botany professor Nishanta Rajakaruna '94 saddens campus with the announcement that he's taking a position at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. Look for more in the fall. Galen Hecht '16 receives a Watson Fellowship to spend a year exploring his project, Poetic Cartography: Charting People's Place in Three Great Watersheds.

CHEKOV'S THE SNEEZE PERFORMED. COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

NEWS

FROM NUCLEAR DISASTER TO HOLISTIC EDUCATION: COA inspires Japanese island

The Golden Pagoda in Kyoto, Japan. Photo by Darron Collins '92.

On a small, rural island punctuated by mountains and ringed by porpoises, community members are exploring holistic education as a means of revitalizing the economy. Sound familiar, early COAers? Yet the time is now—not 1969, when Mount Desert Island visionaries launched COA. And the place? The island of Osakikamijima, Japan. In January, COA President Darron Collins '92 traveled from Maine to Japan to ferry across the Seto Inland Sea to Osakikamijima, or OK, where he spent six days with a team of Japanese colleagues. The interest in COA stems from the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster of 2011, referred to as 3/11. According to Darron, when officials reviewed the disaster, they tied "the string of bad decisions and general human error … to an educational system that placed too much emphasis on rote memorization, specialization, and information acquisition over true understanding." Both power plant managers and the responders, Darron continues, "lacked the ability to lead multidisciplinary groups, lacked the power to innovate and think creatively, and lacked the experience necessary to absorb large quantities of

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information, data, and ideas, and respond to them with an appropriate degree of experimentation and adaptive management." These realizations weighed on Hiromi Nagao, a former college president, whom Darron describes as a "whirlwind of intensity, smarts, and vision entirely focused on educational reform in Japan." She connected with Ashoka U, an international organization encouraging institutions of higher education to "serve as vehicles for positive, sustainable social impact and innovation." In 2009, COA became one of Ashoka U's first "changemaker campuses." At a 2014 Ashoka U exchange, Nagao-sensei, as Darron calls her, became captivated by COA. Having met both Darron and Jay Friedlander, sustainable business faculty member, she brought Jay to Japan last summer to find out more about the college. Still fascinated, she organized a visit by Darron in January. After a few sushi-laced meals, a hot spring bath or two, a climb up OK's Mt. Kannomine to a view of some 105 islands of the inland sea, and numerous conversations, Darron proposed a pilot plan: a two-week

summer program for two dozen students—half from Japan, the rest from elsewhere, possibly including high school students—to be held this summer on OK. The program is tentatively named HELIO, Human Ecology Lab and Island Odyssey, with a working focus on helping the region design a long-term, placebased, educational institution dedicated to studying and practicing human ecology in the inland sea. What students in the program will find is an island about half the size of MDI, with sandy beaches, winding roads, and alluring vistas. A tourist guide calls it a place where "human beings and nature have existed together through the ages." Many of the eight thousand year-round residents build ships, or cultivate citrus and blueberries. Going forward, Darron and his Japanese colleagues are committed to exploring ways of establishing "an Ashoka-recognized college on the island of Osakikamijima based on the College of the Atlantic pedagogy." Whatever comes of it, says Darron, "it is certainly confirmation and external verification that we're doing something right and the world is watching." For more, visit coadejavu.com.

NEWS

Sean Foley, COA's newest faculty member, discusses technique with Elsa Crocket '17 during his Beginning Painting class. Photo by Rob Levin.

SEAN FOLEY Art and wonder Artist Sean Foley first encountered COA during a visit to Bar Harbor with his wife, Cindy, and his artist friend Mark Dion. Intrigued by this little college by the bay, the group walked into the George B. Dorr Museum of Natural History and "were blown away," says Sean. What captivated them were the student-created exhibits within the museum and the locals tending the community gardens outside. "This is the kind of school we needed!" both Sean and Mark lamented. Sean has now found his way to COA, taking up the mantle of retired arts faculty member Ernie McMullen. He brings an extensive pedigree as artist and teacher, having spent some twenty years instructing art majors at both Ohio State University, where he received his MFA, and Maine College of Art, where he was also chair of painting. Collected by numerous museums, Sean has exhibited world-wide. His honors include several residencies, among them a Rauschenberg Foundation Residency, and both the Jurors' and Purchase prizes at Portland Museum of Art Biennial exhibitions. He has also exhibited at Mass MoCA, the famed Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, a hub of contemporary visual and performing arts. This May, Sean and MASS MoCA curator Denise Markonish open an exhibit at MASS MoCA called "Explode Every Day: An Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder." Wonder—from the glory of a sunrise over the Atlantic to the horror of watching the twin towers crumble on 9/11—is a moment when the

body may know what is happening, but the mind might not, says Sean. The research for both course and exhibit took him into philosophy, history, literature, science, and beyond. Exploring these concepts, and the crosspollination of ideas—"these realizations that get me out of my discipline"—is what lured Sean to COA. Of course, there was also his admiration for the Dorr and the reality that though COA isn't an art school, students here explore widely, in multiple arenas, and often physically work at their learning, gaining knowledge with their hands as well as their heads. "My wife describes COA as 'the way Sean thinks'," he continues. "Artists take leaps of faith between seemingly unrelated ideas or disciplinary boundaries in ways that aren't always acceptable elsewhere. That's the wonder of it all, the beautiful question, the curious connection. I am honored to help students gain comfort with ambiguity so that they're more capable of embodied knowledge and dynamic thought." Sean pauses a moment in his Davis Center office, where volumes on science, literature, and the supernatural rub shoulders with art books. "I'm a generalist, a committed amateur. This transdisciplinary learning, where thinking is unfettered and you're developing your own relation to knowledge, is what COA has always been doing—I've never seen a school like it."

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NEWS

King penguins in South Georgia. The brown ones are yearlings, which early whalers called Oakum Boys. Photo by Tom Fernald.

SOUTHERN OASIS "Experiencing South Georgia was the expedition of a lifetime," says Rosemary Seton, Allied Whale research associate, better known as Rosie. "The southern elephant seals, Antarctic fur seals, king penguins, gentoo penguins, macaroni penguins, chin-strap penguins, the sea birds— especially the wandering albatross—were spectacular. Then there was the dramatic mountain range and the mercurial weather that changed by the time you took your next breath!" Last fall, Rosie and Allied Whale colleagues Judy Allen (also COA's registrar), Tom Fernald '91, and Peter Stevick '81, were invited to join the expedition staff of Cheesemans' Ecological Safari to South Georgia. This Antarctic island is located in the middle of the southern Atlantic Ocean, forming a triangle with Tierra del Fuego, which is twelve hundred miles to the west, and a spit of an Antarctic peninsula, about a thousand miles to the southwest. It might be isolated, but for amazing numbers of penguins and seals, it's a breeding mecca. As their vessel neared South Georgia, the sheer edge of a massive tabular iceberg towered above them, a remnant of one of the Antarctic ice shelves. Debarking, the group spent time at king penguin colonies with several hundred thousand breeding pairs, watched four-ton elephant seal bulls battling for control of the beaches, and saw some of the first South Georgia pipit chicks hatched on the mainland in two hundred years, thanks to the recent

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eradication of rats. One day, as they helped passengers off their zodiac boats, recently weaned elephant seal pups followed close behind. Another day, Judy watched an adult wandering albatross, with a wingspan approaching twelve feet, return to the nest to feed its chick. The researchers spent hours with passengers discussing the animals they encountered and the particulars of scientific research. On bridge watches they sighted nine species of whales and dolphins. While aboard, Rosie and Peter gave talks on their work with marine mammal strandings and whales, respectively, and on COA. The island was also the destination of polar explorer Ernest Shackleton and five crewmembers some seventeen months after their ship Endurance was trapped and eventually crushed by sea ice off Antarctica in 1915. Having taken an open lifeboat over treacherous waters about a thousand miles to South Georgia, they hiked twenty-six uncharted miles to a whaling station, from where a rescue boat was sent to save the remaining crew. "It is hard to pick a highlight of a trip that was filled with them," says Peter. "But what an opportunity it was to strap on snowshoes and follow the final miles of Shackleton's remarkable crossing of the island that was the climax of his epic self-rescue. Coming over the final ridge and seeing the old whaling station below—the first sign of other people that they would have seen after almost a year and a half stranded in the ice—was awe inspiring."

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A Global Education, Grounded in Community In 1988, I arrived at College of the Atlantic as a first-year student inspired to change the world. We were a school of just 220 adventurous, successful people who sought a non-traditional college experience. A fire had burned the center of campus, and students, staff, and faculty alike felt a responsibility to rebuild the institution. Those four years were some of the best in my life. In July 2011, nineteen years after my 1992 graduation, I returned as president of COA. During my first year back, I must have been asked a hundred times, "So, Darron, how has the college changed since you were a student?" Well, the commitment to human ecology and to a more just, sustainable world is as strong as ever. There are more buildings and more resources. Enrollment has grown by 50 percent. But those changes are superficial compared to the evolution within the student body. When I was enrolled at COA, my classmates were largely from the northeast, as I was, and almost entirely white. Just about all of us spoke English as a first language. More difficult to define but every bit as real, is that we all had a similar outlook on life. The new world we hoped to build looked pretty much the same to all of us. The 350 students currently at COA hail from forty US states and forty nations. One of every six is international; most funded by the Davis United World College Scholars Program, which, over the past fifteen years, has brought 208 students from seventy nations to campus (see page 16). The heterogeneity of the Davis Scholars and our other international studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;both in culture and

perspectiveâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;has radically changed the campus conversation. The transformation can be seen in the classroom, on the ocean, and in the woods and studios and laboratories where we practice human ecology. Because COA students work in tandem with faculty to design their own course of study, our students sought changes in curricular offerings that better reflected the profound change being felt in the classroom. In response, we have added more language immersion, comparative literature, and area studies. We've also enhanced our already extensive collaborative field experiences and transdisciplinarity, expanded our activism, and increased project-based classes. As a result, our learning environment now better reflects the complexity and diversity of our world and the college's original mission to understand and serve humanity and the planet. Today, COA is a truly globalized institution. And that means we need to recognize, understand, and serve the global world right in our own backyards. We're more likely to be effective if we recognize the global nature of where we live and work, and if we increase applied learning opportunities in our most immediate environments. For us in Maine, that's the migrant laborers from Mexico who arrive to harvest blueberries and potatoes, the Somali refugee families raising children and grandchildren, the increasingly international nature of our local fishery. Yes, our brave new world is nothing if not complex. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Darron Collins '92, COA president

Sun rays break through clouds on the path to Barpak, the epicenter of the April 2015 earthquake in Nepal. Photo by Rohan Chitrakar '04. COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

Cracking the Coconut: COA's Yucatán Program Story and photographs by Rebecca Haydu '16 The Yucatán Program—with its language immersion in either Spanish or Mayan—is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this \HDU $V &2$ V ȴUVW RQJRLQJ R΍ FDPSXV SURJUDP LW KDV WUDQVIRUPHG WKH OLYHV RI PXOWLSOH VWXGHQWV DPRQJ WKHP 5HEHFFD +D\GX

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I had travelled outside the United States before but never truly left my emotional and ideological bubble. When I lost sight of my classmates in Ek Balam pueblo, I entered another world. My temporary host family showed me hospitality I had never seen before. My host sister introduced me to her parents, siblings, aunts, and uncles; she showed me where they slept and ate together. I even met the chickens and pigs. We talked about school and our favorite subjects. It was December; the family had built an altar to the Virgin of Guadalupe and was preparing for a posada that night. We sang a prayer song together that we read from their songbook. Time stood still. Upon returning to the cabanas and our group for dinner, we recounted our experiences. A good friend shared her frustration about not being able to "give something back." Although our meals were covered as part of the program, many families fed their guests. My friend's host mom cooked for her, fed her, and then wouldn't let her help with dishes. Others had similar reactions. Strangers opened their home to us—and we felt bad about their generosity. This is when Karla worked her magic by asking us a simple question: "Why?" Something clicked. We assumed our help was needed. How arrogant of us.

Previous page: In 2015, Rebecca Haydu '16 helped to launch Centro Cultural RealizArte with one of the host families from COA's Yucatán Program and funds from the Davis Projects for Peace. The center celebrates and teaches local culture, Mayan language, and various arts. Here students leave the local church with their pinhole cameras. Left: Writes Rebecca Haydu '16, "In my time in Yucatán, I've had three host families. The moments I've gotten to share with these adoptive families have meant the most to me." Doña Reina was Becca's host mother in the rural Mayan community of Chan Kom; working in the garden with her was one of Becca's favorite parts of her stay. COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

From then on I realized I was not in YucatĂĄn to learn Spanish or have an adventure I could boast about on social media. I was in YucatĂĄn to listen. To share. The last thing I should be thinking about was "helping." Thus began the never-ending journey of "breaking open my coconut," to borrow Karla's terminology. If you've ever opened a coconut, you know that the best way to do it is with force, preferably using a machete. Imagine that the coconut is your mind, and its hard shell is all the cultural baggage each of us carries. To get to the nutritious and delicious insides, you must destroy the fear, stereotypes, prejudice, moral superiority, and bigotry you don't even know you hold onto. It feels like trying to break open a coconut with a pocket knife. You look stupid and you'll probably hurt yourself. Thankfully, I've gotten to know an overwhelming number of incredibly generous individuals who have taken the time to teach me how to use a machete. In addition to my endlessly loving and lovable host families, I owe just about everything to Karla and her team at PICY, Programas de Inmersion Cultural en YucatĂĄn. +DYLQJ Č´QLVKHG WKH WHQ ZHHN immersion program, I was left wanting more but not sure exactly what. After some searching, I decided to complete my internship with Karla and PICY. I worked mostly in translation, but also in research and development, gaining an even clearer understanding of the program's value. In my spare time I connected with master black and white photographer Jorge Luis Reyes, who became my mentor. With his GDUNURRP JXLGDQFH Î&#x2013; KRVWHG P\ Č´UVW solo photography exhibition at a cafĂŠ in MĂŠrida in June 2014. A week later Î&#x2013; OHIW <XFDWÂŁQ ZLWK LQČ´QLWH JUDWLWXGH and an inkling that I'd be back. Last summer, I received a Davis Projects for Peace grant to join my host parents from the immersion program (who I still call Mom and Dad) in founding a cultural center in 12

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Zoe and Matias, the children of Becca's colleagues in the Centro Cultural RealizArte, play with a mask inside a toy car at a grocery store in Mérida.

Yaxkukul, located twenty miles outside Mérida. The center develops and supports local artistic talent while promoting and valuing Yucatec Mayan culture. Our first summer arts program was a success, with workshops in theater, music, photography, and Mayan. I co-taught the photography workshop with maestro Jorge and we hosted Jaime Li Wu '17 as a volunteer. Although I returned to Bar Harbor in September, Centro Cultural RealizArte continues to grow and take shape thanks to the community's dedication and my host family's elbow grease. For my senior project, I've returned to Yucatán to explore my own artistic vision while continuing the communitybased work I started this summer. For those who can't make it to the Ethel H. Blum Gallery between May 16 and 20, 2016, I've been working with traditional Yucatec artisans to create a combination of photography, cyanotype, and embroidery. My family often asks me why I keep returning to Yucatán. "Isn't it so hot? What about the mosquitoes? The food? Are you just trying to avoid us?" I tell them I'll always be a Jersey girl, but for now I'm trying to break open that coconut (if only palm trees grew in Ocean City). While I'm still working on my machete-wielding technique, two years later I can say that I've gotten a taste of the fresh water and sweet meat inside. And nothing's ever been so rico. For more on Centro Cultural RealizArte, visit facebook.com/CentroCulturalRealizArte. For more of Becca's photos, visit beccahaydu.com.

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WASTE IS A VERB The Odyssey of Lisa Bjerke '13, MPhil '16 By Donna Gold When Lisa Bjerke '13, MPhil '16 goes to a restaurant, she often takes along an empty glass container. What she doesn't eat—the skin of a squash or the rind of an orange—she scoops into the jar to bring to her own compost bin. She also darns, patches—and encourages, cajoles, and admonishes one and all in her quest to reduce the inordinate amount of stuff wasted. Lisa is COA's resources guru and one of her gentle scolds is linguistic: "Waste is a verb," she declares, "not a noun. It's an action, not an object." What we discard, she adds, are resources. Discarded resources. OK, so on one level, we're talking about the, uh, discarded resource can beneath our kitchen sinks. But the quest to reduce wasting ranges from the most elemental of human actions (like the stuff that goes into that other can, the toilet), to the structure of our municipalities, the global economy, and ultimately the health of the planet as a whole. This is not an exaggeration. What humans discard, experts warn, could eventually come close to burying us. Plastic containers are prime breeding grounds for mosquitoes; garbage piles harbor disease. Developed nations are only 17 percent of the world's population but responsible for some 40 percent of all municipal solid waste, according to the World Bank. And much of it is organic, producing methane—some twentyfive times more potent in trapping atmospheric heat than carbon. The loss of space and resource to incinerators and landfills—and the toxicity—will only get worse as other nations aspire to our habits. The World Bank warns that by 2025 the municipal waste of our planet will double. "If everyone lived as a COA student the world would need three

planets," says Lisa. Not that COA students are incorrigible wasters; still, we discard. COA should be a model, she adds. "If COA can't do it, who can? We're good, but we could go further with better infrastructure, more consciousness, and innovative ways to reduce wastage." This powerhouse of action and passion would like to see the college be zero-waste by 2020. Lisa hails from Sweden, where, a generation ago, school food scraps were routinely fed to local pigs. A Davis Scholar, she came to COA planning to study water issues. But this focus was nudged aside during her first term, when she and three other students looked into the school's composting system for the Human Ecology Core Course. "No one was in charge," Lisa recalls. Most of the compost was slated for the farm, but who would get it there? "That's when I realized that sustainability is not about technology; it's about people." Lisa spent her workstudy time maintaining and improving COA's composting system. Though she also took business and energy classes, and oversaw the installation of the solar charging station at the north end of campus, humanity's discards gnawed at her. Seeking insights, she applied for and received a coveted Watson Fellowship, spending a year investigating systems in Germany, India, China, and Japan. Now she's applying her increasing knowledge to campus as a candidate for a master's in philosophy in human ecology, focused on discarded resources. While also reading portions of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, and Philip K. Dick's post-apocalyptic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the basis for the film Blade Runner), Lisa is studying ethnography to understand

how people interact with and view discarded materials. She wants to change how we function in our environment. Much of her work is hands-on, managing the day-today discarded-resource system, observing the community's habits so as to develop systems that minimize harmful wasting. Take special events. After witnessing a few receptions, Lisa saw guests' confusion at just how to dispose of their food scraps, compostable flatware, paper plates, and napkins. Now every building where a special event might occur boasts a permanent discard station with clear signage. "In the beginning it seemed like an imposition," says Millard Dority, director of campus buildings, planning, and public safety, who works closely with Lisa. "Now it's part of the planning." Millard pauses. "She's made life a lot more difficult here. You know how it is; you hide behind a time schedule." Then he smiles. "It doesn't really take much longer to try to save a lot of stuff." But to really know what's being thrown out you have to see it, even count it. For the last two Octobers, Lisa has directed a discarded resources audit—assembling, weighing, and sorting every tissue and cellophane wrap tossed into recycling, compost, and trash. Though she found measurable improvement from 2014 to 2015, still about half the weight was organic matter—despite compost buckets in all on-campus houses and the composting bin a few minutes' walk away at the community garden. Also troubling were the papers and cardboard that ought to have been recycled. Though every floor, and every office on every floor, has a recycling bin, 75 percent of what was audited could be recycled, though

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only 45 percent actually had been. And recycling, says Lisa, should be a last resort. When plastic, paper, or cardboard gets recycled, it's downgraded and eventually wasted. Only glass doesn't lose quality. The mantra of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle doesn't cut it for her. To avoid drowning in stuff, Lisa expands the possibilities: Recover, Replenish, Repair, Remodel, Rethink, Restructure, Refuse, Remember, Research, Reach Out. It's all about changing people's outlook—and offering options. The

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spring move-out from housing is a fraught time. The term, with its papers, exams, and farewells, ends on a Friday. Graduation is the next day—when students also need to be out of their rooms. Off-campus, some students must leave even earlier. Finding new homes for the pounds of bedding, books, and bottles accumulated over the year drops to the bottom of most priority lists. Last spring, Lisa assembled a team to assist. At announced times, vans and trucks circled through Bar Harbor, stopping by student

apartments, exchanging cookies and coffee for clothing, furniture, even broken electronics. Some items, like winter clothing, sheets, and towels, were held for international students who often arrive ill-equipped for Maine weather. More than five hundred pieces of clothing were donated to Goodwill and the local thrift store Serendipity, which is connected to the Bar Harbor food bank. Some furniture went to a summer program at the Peggy Rockefeller Farms. Much of the rest was stored on campus for incoming students this fall. "Every fall everyone wants to buy the reading lamp that we threw out in spring," says Lisa. "We're feeding the circle." The changes have spread throughout campus. Last summer, when Millard and his crew refashioned the ceramics studio into a general use space, they devised a new system. Even before beginning the reconstruction, all resources were inventoried. "In the past, we'd say, we've got to tear this wall down; if there's some wood we can save, we'll save it." Renting a construction dumpster would be a given. This time there was no dumpster. So much of what was inside the building was reused, recycled, or composted— with remaining art supplies donated to an Ellsworth arts organization— that there was only one trip to the dump. "Lisa has changed the face of the way we regard discards," Millard says. "These are resources, not waste or garbage. It's really opened our eyes—she has shown us that we can go to another level." As humans struggle to live sustainably on our one planet, such local efforts expand the conversation, offering a sense of possibility and momentum to those seeking solutions across the globe.

Donor Profile Shelby Davis: Fifteen Years of Davis United World Scholars Back in 1997, Shelby M.C. Davis was thinking about a change. He had learned, studying history at Princeton University. He had earned, founding his own mutual fund company after having become the Bank of New York's youngest vice president since Alexander Hamilton. Now was the time for him to give back, according to the adage learn, earn, return instilled in him by his parents—financier turned diplomat and philanthropist Shelby Cullom Davis and philanthropist and scholar Kathryn Wasserman Davis. Shelby's firm was managing over forty billion dollars a year. He was nearing sixty, ready for the next stage. But what would it be? That winter, Shelby happened to be skiing in the mountains surrounding Taos, New Mexico. So was Phil Geier, president of the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West, or UWC-USA. The two ended up riding the same bench of the mountain's old, lumbering ski lift, one that moved slowly enough up the high mountain for Phil to explain the United World College concept to Shelby. "He collared me and talked about UWC for seven uninterrupted minutes," recalled Shelby in a recent phone conversation. Phil then invited Shelby to visit his campus, some eighty miles away in Montezuma, New Mexico. For those new to UWC, the idea began with Kurt Hahn, founder of Outward Bound. He sought to bring youths together from around the globe for their final two years in high school. By connecting a diversity of students, he hoped to help overcome the misunderstandings that difference so often engenders. The first UWC school was launched in 1962 at a cliffside castle in Wales. There are now fifteen schools on five

Just before the 2004 commencement, the first COA Davis United World Scholars graduates posed for a photo. Back row, from left: Phil Geier, Rohan Chitrakar '04, Steven K. Katona, former COA president, Susan Lerner, former COA faculty member and gallery director, Dominic Muntanga '04. Front row from left: Amy Geier, Arber Davidhi '04, Hua Wang '04, Shelby Davis, Volha Roshchanka '04, Ranjan Bhattarai '04, Gale Davis, Mukhtar Amin '04, and Anna Wlodarczyk '04.

continents with an astounding 55,000 alumni from 180 nations. In classes that mix Palestinians and Israelis, Chinese and Tibetans—funded through need-based scholarships— students engage in both the intensive education required of the international baccalaureate that the schools administer, and the powerful conversations that lead to lasting friendships. Shelby made the trip down to Montezuma—and his life pivoted. That year he donated forty-five million dollars to the UWC-USA endowment fund. At the time it was, according to Phil, "the largest gift ever made to international education anywhere in the world." Yet Phil was haunted by what happened to the students after they graduated. Many wanted to return to their home nations, but others longed to continue their international education, maybe attend college in

the United States, only most financial aid at US colleges is reserved for citizens. So when Shelby told Phil that Princeton was courting him for a sizeable gift, but he wanted to make it significant, Phil had an idea: "What if you said to Princeton that you'd help meet the scholarship needs of any UWC student who applied and was accepted?" That concept blossomed into a US education for more than six thousand young people around the globe, expanding the view of thousands more of their classmates whose friends might now include Rwandan refugees, European royalty, aspiring Indian artists, passionate New Zealand activists, and climate change diplomats from the Americas. It has also transformed a small college on the coast of Maine into a school with one of the highest percentages of international students of any liberal arts college in the nation, and a sense

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of global concern and reach that is unprecedented in its history. As Shelby and Phil figured out the details of the gift to Princeton, they decided to extend the offer to Colby, Middlebury, and Wellesley colleges, schools Shelby's family members had attended. Then, hearing David Rockefeller, Jr. and others praise COA for invigorating Mount Desert Island (where both the Rockefeller and Davis families have summer homes), College of the Atlantic was added to the pilot Davis United World College Scholars Program. That was fifteen years ago. The program has since grown to more than ninety US institutions, where some 2,500 students from 150 nations study. While the Davis scholarship now only funds a portion of student need, with the schools making up the difference, the philanthropic effort remains enormous. The foundation established by Shelby and his wife Gale contributes some forty million dollars annually to the scholarships. But Shelby doesn't speak of giving. Rather, he considers the Davis Scholars Program a second investment career, with one major difference. In his first career, at his company, Davis Selected Advisers, "the money rolled in." In his second, scholarship, career, he notes, "the faster we grow, the faster the money rolls outâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and it's been just as rewarding, maybe even more rewarding, to invest in students." Besides, Shelby loves being around the students. "It keeps you young at heart to be around young, optimistic people." While assisting the individual scholars, Phil and Shelby also hoped the investment would help US colleges and universities become, says Phil, "a genuine

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global community." The timing was prophetic. "In the year 2000 no college or university had a strategic plan to internationalize. In the intervening fifteen years, in part because of us, the campus experience has been genuinely transformed." Surely no other school has felt this as much as COA, where Davis scholars were 15 percent of the graduating class in 2004â&#x20AC;&#x201D;the first to include the UWC studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and nearly 25 percent of the 2015 class. More than two hundred UWC students from seventy nations have attended COA. Despite the fact that some Davis scholars at COA had never seen snow

before they arrived, the fit between COA and the UWC schools is strong, says Phil. Like COA students, most UWC graduates "are self-motivated, highly principled, and driven to change the world." Comments President Darron Collins '92, "the presence of Davis scholars has radically changed the campus conversation. Our learning environment now better reflects the complexity and diversity of our world, and the college's original mission to understand and serve humanity and the planet." Today, he adds, "COA is a truly globalized institution."

Shelby Davis celebrates COA's UWC students at a dinner in 2007.

In Their Own Words COA alumni speak of their work throughout the world Collected and edited by Marni Berger '09

In the early morning hours, members of UNAC, the National Union of Farmers in Mozambique, water their crops in Marracuene, Mozambique. Photos by Helena

Shilomboleni '09 unless otherwise indicated.

Mozambique Sustenance Helena Shilomboleni '09 came to COA from Namibia via the United World College system. She is completing her PhD in the social and ecological sustainability of food systems at Canada's University of Waterloo, examining food security in Mozambique through two organizations: the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, or AGRA, which seeks to improve small farm productivity, and the National Union of Farmers in Mozambique, or UNAC, which advocates for peasant land rights and resources for rural development.

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A farmer's home surrounded by his maize field in Gondola, Manica, Mozambique.

The global food system is really quite fragile. We see this in rising and volatile food prices, and the fact that close to a billion people do not have adequate food. We need to provide nutritious food for seven billion people, but in a manner that is ecologically and socially sustainable. In North America, people have this idea that sustainable food systems must be without chemical fertilizers or anything related to industrial agriculture. Elsewhere, the conversations are different. There are so many other problems to consider. About 50 percent of households in Mozambique are food insecure. In the central part of the country, where I did field research, farmers see low crop yields, primarily due to the limited availability and relatively high cost of improved agricultural technologies. Mozambique has had a shortage of seeds for sale, and so has resorted to importing them. It's expensive, and the imported seeds are not bred to their particular agricultural or even climatic conditions. So AGRA

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In Manica, Mozambique, Helena Shilomboleni '09 (center back, in blue) listens to beneficiaries of AGRA, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, which seeks to improve smallholder farm productivity. Charles, her research assistant, sits to her right.

invests money to strengthen local seed breeding and multiplication, including providing scholarships to Mozambicans to study crop science at top universities in African countries with similar climatic conditions. Over forty-four new seed varieties have been released, thirty-six of which are commercialized. It takes training and research to breed and select the best seeds. But improved seeds cost money, and many farmers in Mozambique don't really have a way to earn an income. Thus AGRA also invests in market access programs to help farmers sell their produce. There's also a debate over land-use rights. The country has a fairly robust national land law to protect peasant rights to land. However this law has also been used to appropriate communal land. The government encourages investment in agriculture to stimulate productivity and bring about rural development. As a result, foreign investors have leased numerous acres to grow agro-crops like biofuels, sugar cane, or food for export. In the process, large numbers of peasants have been displaced, while others are in danger of losing their lands. UNAC has made the fight for land-use rights central to its work and to food security, educating peasants about their legal rights to land, letting them know that they can say no. These efforts underscore UNAC's determination to augment food security through traditional food systems.

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Through my research and field experience, I have learned that farmers have different visions of the livelihood opportunities they desire. For some, a livelihood based on traditional agriculture as a way to maintain social relations and culture is very important. Consequently, their right to remain on the land needs to be protected. Other farmers want to grow commercially viable crops to earn some income and to improve their lives. It's a vision of freedom and choice familiar to all human beings. My interest in food system sustainability is informed by my background growing up in a farming community in Namibia, where agriculture is more than just producing food, but a connection to culture, nature, and to each other. In graduate school I've been able to further understand how to sustainably meet global food security needs; from there I can start to make suggestions. That's why it was really important for me to do field research, to really understand what people are saying. There isn't a silver bullet to solving the problems of food systems. It's a matter of collaboration, and of learning from different examples. Above: Members of a Manica union belonging to UNAC, the National Union of Farmers in Mozambique, host a visit with UNAC's late President Augusto Mafigo, kneeling, and Vice President Dona Anna Paula in the white shirt. The uniformed woman is the traditional chief of her district, also a UNAC member, and president of her farmers' association.

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Portland Stories Maine resident Marjolaine Whittlesey '05 is the Teaching Artist Associate at The Telling Room, a nonprofit writing center for students ages six to eighteen in Portland, Maine, which recently received one of a dozen National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Awards from First Lady Michelle Obama. Portland has a growing immigrant population. The incoming class of Deering High School, one of Portland's public high schools, has almost 50 percent English Language Learners, or ELLs. Some of The Telling Room's programs focus on the immigrant community, but any program in the Portland public schools is going to involve a high number of international kids. There are only ten people on staff at The Telling Room, but we work with dozens of teaching artists and hundreds of volunteers— local teachers and artists who are looking to stay connected to the written word and to youth. Working alongside these people is so refreshing and fun and exciting. The whole place runs on collaboration, which is something I loved about COA, too. When you're working with a group of students over six weeks or two months, you go through a generative process before finding the story you want to tell. This is my favorite part of our residencies—I love the dedramatization of writing. It's a messy process, but by sharing that process, and watching others comb through words, memories, ideas, and working together to craft the story, students see sides of each other that are pretty raw and messy and fun and challenging. I love seeking out the personal connections, highlighting the differences of where we come from, but also the similarities. In a lot of schools, the ELL kids are in their own classrooms before they integrate into the mainstream, so sometimes they rarely interact with the other students. This spring we're starting a residency with South Portland High School focused on inclusion. ELL and mainstream students are collaborating on creating children's 22

Marjolaine Whittlesey '05 greets a new group of middle schoolers to The Telling Room for the launch of its new after-school program, The Writers Block. Photo by Molly Haley.

books they will then read in the elementary school. We did another project with South Portland high schoolers that also mixed mainstream and ELL students. Some of the mainstream kids thought they were part of the project to tutor the ELL students. Then they realized, Oh, wow, I have to write too—but I don't have anything to say! Through the residency they found they did have a story, many even. One student was helping a Salvadoran newcomer with minimal English craft a story about his grandfather. Then the Salvadoran started teaching him how to count

and read in his Mayan dialect. Suddenly, two high school juniors, who probably wouldn't ever have talked or interacted with each other, were sharing stories about their grandparents. It's impossible to share a story with someone and then not look at them in a new light. From this comes a certain amount of respect and curiosity. That's why we're here. It's about creating those friendships and connections through the writing process, which can otherwise be really lonely. For more, visit thetellingroom.org. COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

Global Plankton Sanae Chiba '94 is a biological oceanographer with JAMSTEC, the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. She analyzes the health and changes in plankton communities to understand climate change impacts, since plankton diversity is strongly linked to marine health. I grew up in a coastal town in Japan. When I was a small child I wanted to become a marine biologist—it was my dream. But I had no idea how to become a scientist; I had no role models nearby. This was thirty years ago, long before the Equal Opportunity Law in Japan. The best way for a girl to get a good salary was studying English—going to the twoyear college instead of the four-year university. After, I was employed by JAMSTEC. My job was to help visiting scientists settle in Japan. Greg Stone '82 was one of the scientists. With Greg I talked about my old dream of becoming a marine biologist. Greg and other scientists encouraged me. They said: If you want to be a marine biologist, you can make it; you can start now. So I decided to go back to school. Of course, Greg recommended COA. I focused on marine biology, but I learned much more—I understood a more interdisciplinary method of working in the natural

sciences. That was a treasure. Every class was small and it was possible to discuss many things with professors and other students. It was inspiring. I'm really happy with how the international scientific community has collaborated in the area of climate change. In some fields— in molecular biology or the development of new medicines— scientists have to be very competitive. In my field, we share our findings because our job is like making a huge jigsaw puzzle. Each scientist has their own pieces—we are putting the pieces together to make the big picture. We've found a synchrony of ecosystem changes on a global scale. Not only the warming trend, there is also a pattern of atmospheric change in the waters over decades. We discovered long-term changes in the North Atlantic, the Arctic, the North Pacific, and probably the Southern Hemisphere. Changes in seasonality for example, with earlier or later

spring blooms of phytoplankton and increased warm water zooplankton in the higher latitudes. These largescale observations reflect varying regional impacts. Once the plankton community—the biodiversity and the biomass—changed, its effect was obvious: climate systems, the ocean environment, and marine ecosystems are all connected on the global scale. Going to COA was a turning point. Now I have another big turning point. I have just begun a two-year science communication program at the United Nations Environmental Programme's World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge, England. Many scientists think about the importance of communicating to non-scientists; it's a huge recent trend in the ocean science community. This kind of interdisciplinary career just might be my cup of tea, especially with my experience at COA.

Sanae Chiba '94 (standing in the center in blue working gear) joins other scientists aboard the R/V Mirai on a biogeochemical research cruise in the subarctic North Pacific Ocean. Photo courtesy of Sanae Chiba '94.

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Aboard Myriad off southeast Alaska in 2004, Edward Stern '03 cleans coho salmon. Photo by Nancy Behnken.

Baltic Fisheries Though he hails from the Midwest, Edward Stern '03 has dipped his feet into almost every aspect of the ocean fisheries world: commercial fishing, policy, government, science, technology, even boatbuilding. He currently works for The Fisheries Secretariat in Stockholm, Sweden. Six days after graduating from COA, I was standing on the deck of the fishing boat Myriad in Sitka, Alaska. That kicked my assâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;sixteen, eighteen hours a day, day after day after day, moving fish, trying to stand up straight, having a miserable time. When I wanted to quit, when it felt just too hard, I remember thinking, If I fail, I'll never make it as a fisheries manager. Fisheries courses at COA with Sean Todd and Elmer Beal

taught me the value of working with communities, that firsthand experience is essential to succeed. I had to become a fisherman. I had to understand the perspective and speak the language of people on the water, or everything to come would be a waste of time. So I stuck with it through the season. And I thought I was done. The next April, when I was engineer on the schooner Spirit of Massachusetts, I mustered the

courage to do it again. Eventually I fell in love with fishing. It's different than working nine-to-five. It's work and life and play and big gray areas between. It gets into your system. Since then I've fished commercially in Alaska and in Newfoundland. I've also looked at fisheries in Australia, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, the Caribbean, and now the Baltic. My fascination with the sea took off when I started sailing alone as

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Clockwise from left: Meeting small scale fishers in Beirut, Lebanon, July 2014; stormy North Atlantic seas viewed through a porthole aboard the R/V Celtic Explorer, April 2012; at an Ottawa protest on Parliament Hill, July 2012. Photos courtesy of Ed Stern '03.

a boy. I found my confidence in adversity, learning the hard way that whatever happened on that little boat, I had only my wits and creativity to depend on. From sailing to winter fishing off Labrador, working on a boat embodies—literally—a vessel to adventure and the unknown. For a little over a year now I've been the fisheries policy officer with The Fisheries Secretariat in Sweden. It's a nonprofit that advocates for sustainable fishing practices embedded in thriving communities fishing within the limits of the marine ecosystem. Half my

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job is participating in the Baltic Sea Advisory Council, which provides fisheries management advice to European Union countries. The Baltic EU countries—Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, and Denmark—each have different cultures and social values. Council members from these countries bring different ways of communicating, too. The sea is our unifying factor, and my earlier fishing experience is extremely valuable. Our biggest challenge is developing more inclusive and representative governance.

Luckily, fishing in Alaska gave me a starting point for how fisheries could succeed. Southeast Alaska hosts diverse, small fleets—and it works. People are involved in their communities; they're educated and informed about their impact on the ecosystem. There are a few communities in the Baltic like this too, but I don't know yet if people are aware of just how good it could be. Fisheries represent one of our most ancient and intimate relationships. To me, they're human ecology manifest, and I'm in awe.

The Island Reach team and resource monitors from Vanuatu celebrate the formation of a local environmental network on Malekula Island. Brooks McCutchen '84 and Janis Steele '86 are to either side of the wheel of their ketch, the R/V Llyr. Photo by Connor SteeleMcCutchen.

Vanuatu Diversity Janis Steele '86 and Brooks McCutchen '84 are family farmers and climate change activists. Janis, who hails from Canada, has a PhD in cultural anthropology; Brooks, who is from Massachusetts, holds a PhD in clinical psychology. In 2011, three years after an ice storm wiped out a thousand of their maples, they were moved to found Island Reach. It seeks local, scalable solutions to climate change and ecosystem exploitation by working with communities and nonprofits across the archipelago of Vanuatu, a small-island developing nation located between Fiji and Australia. The two spend five months each year aboard the steel ketch R/V Llyr, continuing their conservation farming in the Massachusetts Berkshires when stateside. Our take on human ecology is that biological and cultural diversity are inextricably linked. The imposition of monoculture, whether in human societies or nature, makes both social and natural ecosystems more

fragile and vulnerable to collapse. Even large-scale global responses to climate change can negatively pressure cultural diversity. We are motivated by the fact that 80 percent of the planet's remaining biodiversity

and over 90 percent of endangered cultural diversity are situated in the homelands of indigenous peoples. As we were responding to changes on our forest farm we were increasingly focused on the

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Water tanks and gutters for a water security project are being delivered to the island of Buninga in Vanuatu. In the distance is R/V Llyr. Photo by Janis Steele '86.

crises of the oceans and impacts of economies of scale on the environment and on artisanal and subsistence farmers, particularly in coastal communities. This led us to envision a ridge-to-reef scalable project that seeks to combine best science and conservation practices with traditional knowledge. We were drawn to Vanuatu, an archipelago on the edge of the Coral Sea, not only because it's at the frontlines of climate change, but because it is rich in biocultural diversity. It is a dynamic model of indigenous peoples designing and implementing locally appropriate, culturally sensitive, innovative strategies for climate-change adaptation. For adaptations to become sustainable,

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they must emerge from a local, intimate process. Island Reach doesn't advocate specific solutions; rather, we work as catalysts and culture brokers, collaborating with our partners to build local capacity. This collaboration serves as the groundwork for peer-to-peer training activities and as a replicable model. One of our many projects is to tackle the crown-of-thorns starfish, or COTS, outbreak. This coral-eating starfish is a Pacific native, but recent population explosions have led to devastating impacts on reefs throughout the Pacific. Scientists believe that warming seas, increased nutrients, and over-fishing trigger infestations. Island Reach works with communities on education and

management, employing both new technologies and simpler methods to cull COTS in order to protect small zones of healthier reef for future regeneration. Local management has had some positive outcomes in Vanuatu. We value working in the border zones between disciplines, intellectual and physical labor, land and sea, and cultures. The potential creativity and elegance of such actions brought us to COA many years ago and continues to drive us to take carefully planned risks on expedition in the southwest Pacific. For more, visit IslandReach.org.

Mexican Education Enrique Valencia '11 came to COA from the Mahindra United World College in India. He is now working in his homeland of Mexico as a data analyst seeking to build equal and fair access to education for all Mexicans. Employed as a deputy director by the National Institute for Educational Evaluation and Assessment, Enrique and his colleagues are designing a central analytical framework from a rights perspective to generate more accurate indicators of student access, permanence, and performance in the educational system. I currently work on designing educational indicators from the perspective of human rights—the right to education. We've been trying to understand what quality means in an educational system. We're seeking a system that delivers a minimum of relevant skills and knowledge to all students, ensuring they reach their learning potential— regardless of their social and personal circumstances— while also considering the varying contexts of children's lives. We have a very collaborative, interdisciplinary team— economists, statisticians, sociologists, mathematicians. I am surrounded by very idealistic colleagues. Currently, we're considering indicators in these categories: context (social needs), input (financial and human resources invested in education), processes (the learning environment and organization), and output (achievement and labor market results). It's been assumed that these statistics will be enough to monitor the educational rights of children and adolescents. But they're not enough. They don't measure, completely, other aspects, for example, the appropriateness and accessibility of teachers' education, or the extent to which the state allows stakeholders— children, parents, communities—to participate in educational matters. We want to guarantee that every person, regardless of ethnicity, religion, personal circumstances, or language, is able to attend school, remain in school, and learn what is necessary to function and thrive in society. Our main challenge right now is to determine how to generate the indicators. Building that central analytical framework is part of the role of the Directorate for Data Analysis and Information Integration, where I work. The other part is understanding what contextual factors are associated with student achievement, permanence, and access to education. Because we are working from a perspective of equity, we are also seeking to identify which groups are disadvantaged—indigenous people, for instance, because there are still disparities. I've always thought of COA as a good continuation of my UWC experience in India, where I did volunteer

service. COA gave me a framework to understand the lives of vulnerable populations more profoundly, and helped me to realize the ethical problems that could be involved. After COA I worked for a bank, also doing data analysis. While there, I reflected—I even reread my senior project. I realized I have had generous donors who have trusted that I could be well educated. But education is a right, it should allow people to develop their capabilities as much as they want. I see my current work as a way of saying thanks for the education I received.

Enrique Valencia '11 stands in front of the Instituto Nacional para la Evaluación de la Educación, or INEE, Mexico's National Institute for Educational Evaluation, where he works. Photo

courtesy of Enrique Valencia '11.

····· Marni Berger '09 is a writer, editor, and teacher living in Portland, Maine. She holds an MFA in writing from Columbia University. Her first print short story is forthcoming in the next issue of Glimmer Train. Her stories, profiles, and author interviews can be read online at Litro, Fringe Magazine, The Millions, The Days of Yore, and The Common. Marni has taught writing at Columbia University and Manhattanville College, and tutored middle and high school students in both Maine and New York. 28

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Ibeji Zachary Taibi '17 Among the Yoruba peoples of Nigeria forty-five of every thousand births result in twins. According to my family tree my sister and I are the only ones. It is part of Yoruba culture that twins are considered sacred. My mother so hard of birth considers us sacred. Tradition says twins be named Taiyewo and Kehinde first to taste the world and last to come. My sister's name means gift of the Lord mine, remembered by God. In the Yoruba ancestral line twins share a soul halves of a whole, spiritual and mortal. My sister and I shared a room for the first three years of our lives until she moved herself out. There is a belief that Taiyewo's birthing cries determine Kehinde's life or death. My sister tells me the happiest time in her life was the two minutes before I was born. When a twin dies the Yoruba craft small wooden figures to house the soul of the dead. In my house there is a photograph of a twin on the fireplace mantle.

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Aaron Lewis '05 has played in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom. Here is is in Sofia, Bulgaria. Photo by Veselina Hristova.

The Ears and Eyes of American Music Aaron Jonah Lewis '05

We're expanding our arts pages beyond the visual. Since music doesn't translate into print very well, you might click on cornpotato.com, the website for the Corn Potato String Band, hit the YouTube button on the far right, and listen to the energy within the sawing and the strumming and the rhythm of the fiddle, banjo, and guitar played by Aaron Lewis '05 and his bandmates, Ben Belcher and Lindsay McCaw. Why Corn Potato? They're the ears and eyes of America.

Aaron Lewis '05 has played his fiddle from India to Ireland, from the Georgia that's on the Black Sea to the one on the Atlantic Ocean. A classically trained violinist who studied at Interlochen Arts Academy, since about the time he came to COA, Aaron has been playing down-home, traditional, old-time, and bluegrass music—along with some Dixieland, klezmer, and swing. "It's fun. It's really fun. The main point is to connect with people and be part of an experience, not to show off and be complicated and technical. Even if we're playing a performing arts center, it's a party—this is music that's made for social occasions and dances." The form also allows for individualism, he says. "It's all about interacting, collaborating, innovating, improvising," which is unusual within traditional music. Aaron recalls an Italian musician telling him that not a note of the tarantella he played had changed in five hundred years. American old-time music may be traditional, but it is not static. "Every generation, every individual, every region, is different. You might play it one way one week, the next week it might sound really different—it's all about growing and changing."

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Aaron Lewis '05 lived in Berlin for three years. "My first night there, two different bands asked me to play with them, and three other people asked if I could teach them. In Berlin, people didn't care what you did, as long as you did it with some kind of style, enthusiasm, energy." His Western swing band, The Froggy Mountain Boys, was an international group. Back row, from left to right: Johannes Hagenloch (France), Roland Satterwhite (US), Aaron, and Laurent Humeau (France). Front row: Laurin Habert (Germany), Carlos Santana (Spain). Hear their album at froggymountainboys.bandcamp.com. Photo by Neige Grande.

Music is Aaron's life and his lifeblood. "I need to play and I need to play in front of people. If I don't, I get some kind of muscle soreness of the soul. This is what I want to do, what I care about, what fulfills me. And it's how I make a living." For his COA senior project, however, Aaron collected sound, rather than making it, creating the CD, Sounds of Mount Desert Island, with recordings of wind blowing through trees, surf crashing against rocks, children playing, and diners at a lobster pound. Aaron's 2013 India tour, like the one in Eastern Europe, was sponsored by the United States State Department. Aaron and Lindsay created the Corn Potato String Band for that gig, which had them performing in small villages, at the home of the US ambassador, and at a Muslim university. There, they were told they couldn't touch, couldn't dance, and had to be sure no elbows or knees were visible. But as soon as the band started playing, "the whole room, packed full of students, began cheering. They cheered at the end of each song, at the beginning, and randomly in the middle. It was overwhelmingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;an amazing experience." The students had heard American music, but it was mostly mainstream. Aaron isn't sure what it was that energized them, except that the music is fun, cheerful, and rather straightforward. "When you hear it you get excited, you want to tap your feet, dance to it."

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Lindsay McCaw, Aaron Lewis '05, and Luke Richardson play at the Stag and Hounds in Bristol, England, December 2014. Photo by Julian Marshall.

More complicated were the frequent requests that they collaborate with traditional Indian musicians. "We would meet people who play music that's thousands of years old, and we'd have three hours to come up with songs to perform together. It was really challenging but just amazing because they were such sweet people." Among the musicians were Bauls, wandering minstrels from the Bengali mystical tradition. "Their music is a channel to the divine," says Aaron. "Our music is pretty secular. But I could relate to them because music is my religion, it gives me all the satisfaction that I'm looking for in lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;it gives me a path and a direction." Besides, they're musicians, and music "is made for people, to serve people. When you meet someone who plays music that's completely foreign, you both know that you have something very important in common, which is that you care about music, about playing music." â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Donna Gold

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Above: In Rajasthan, Aaron Lewis '05 visits a family from the Langha musical community. "There were about fifteen family members of all ages joining in with voice, wooden clappers, and saranghi, the bowed string instrument. When the woman began singing, the man stood up to close the door because a woman's singing voice must only be heard by her family (and, apparently, those outside of her community, like us)." Photo by Lindsay

McCaw.

Below: At the American Center in Kolkata, members of the first incarnation of Corn Potato pose with musicians of several Bengali traditions. Standing from left to right: Roy Pilgrim, Saurav Moni (a singer of river boatman songs), Golam (a Fakir), Shyam Khyapa (a Baul), Aaron Lewis '05. Seated: Aviva Steigmeyer, Lindsay McCaw, and another Baul. Photo courtesy of Aaron Lewis '05.

A journal of the India tour is atÂ aaronjonahlewis.com/india-tour-journal.

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AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE: Visions of Nepal Photos and stories by Rohan Chitrakar '04

On April 25, 2015, Nepal was shaken by a devastating earthquake. Surya Karki '16 was in his home district of Sankhuwasabha, Nepal at the time, working to build two related organizations: United World Schools Nepal, to construct and operate primary schools, and Diyalo Foundation, to enhance agriculture and provide electricity in rural villages. Following the earthquake, he and his teammates put those efforts on hold to help to reconstruct homes and distribute tarpaulins for shelter. Shortly after a second earthquake, on May 12, photographer and filmmaker Rohan Chitrakar '04 returned home to be with his family and document the devastation. Both Surya and Rohan are among several COA Davis Scholars from Nepal. Surya is again in Sankhuwasabha, a district in eastern Nepal just south of Mount Everest. In villages accessed by eight-hour treks after long off-road drives, the Diyalo team continues to rebuild schools and provide solar electricity through a communityled, sustainable development approach. Come August, Surya will move to Beijing, China to join the inaugural master's class at Schwarzman College on the Tsinghua University campus. Of the three thousand applicants, 111 were chosen from around the world to "prepare the next generation of global leaders," according to the program's website. It's been nearly a year since the earth tremored and roared, tumbling buildings and mountains. "Recovery has not moved swiftly on the government side," writes Surya, a situation exasperated by an unofficial blockade of fuel by India. Rohan's photos and recollections remind us of what the people are up against. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Donna Gold

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May 17, 2015 Family friend and admired artist Indra Kaji Silpakar walked me through the ancient city of Bhaktapur, outside of Kathmandu, to witness the aftermath of the earthquakes in his community. Two children were rescued from the rubble here while two others lost their lives. In the background, this man's home still stands, but without a side wall.

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May 18, 2015 Lamu is from the district of Sindhupalchok, northeast of Kathmandu. More than two thousand deaths were reported there. Lamu was rescued from the rubble, but lost three of her siblings. She was being cared for at the Nepal Orthopedic Hospital in Kathmandu, where aid organizations set up tents on lawns for patient housing and operations due to the continuing risks of aftershocks.

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May 23, 2015 While traveling to the epicenter of the April 25 earthquake in Barpak, northwest of Kathmandu, I encountered this man looking at a landslide that claimed several lives. For weeks after the earthquake, many roads to remote villages were impassable because of large and dangerous landslides like this. As a result, relief work and aid were extremely slow to arrive in Barpak and beyond. A few days before, I had been walking through the town of Sanku, east of Kathmandu, and felt the deepest level of sadness and shock. I remembered visiting many years ago and seeing vivid colors; now it's just shades of dust. I meet residents and hear their stories and part with eyes filled with tears. But crying is not enough.

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May 23, 2015 Villagersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;like this mother-daughter pairâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;are incredibly welcoming to visitors, even in the midst of losing their homes and families. The village of Barpak, population five thousand, was completely in rubble and lost more than sixty residents and 90 percent of its homes. It had been described as a model village for successful development in rural Nepal. Seeing these kinds of smiles, or being welcomed for tea by a family when they do not even have a solid roof over their heads, is not uncommon in rural Nepal.

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May 27, 2015 Laxmi, age fourteen, lives in a remote village in the hills of Sindhupalchok district, northeast of Kathmandu, where more than two thousand people died. She lost one of her younger sisters in the April 25 earthquake. Her house, like many in remote areas of northern Nepal, is located on a steep hill and is made of load-bearing stone walls held together by mud. When the earthquake struck, the walls crumbled and the roof caved in, burying her sister. Residents said the hills shook violently, the entire river valley boomed with loud noises from landslides, and the sky turned black with dust. Frightened, Laxmi's little sister unfortunately ran for shelter inside their home through this front entrance. Over 500,000 homes, mostly in rural villages, were destroyed and many children displaced and traumatized. Aid organizations set up temporary child-friendly camps in an effort to create safer spaces where children could play and begin the healing process. The government also enacted a policy of not allowing children under sixteen to travel outside their districts without a parent or another approved adult. It also halted international adoptions from Nepal for several months in fear of human trafficking.

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May 28, 2015 These kids distracted me from listening in on a community meeting near the village of Ramche in the Rasuwa district, located in the mountains north of Kathmandu. Locals discussed immediate needs for food and shelter and longterm needs for their livelihood with staff from an organization gathering information to propose an aid package to donors. But who can resist watching a top spin?

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On the Shores of Crisis By Heath Cabot, faculty member in anthropology

The Aegean islands, with their sparkling harbors, mountain villages, expanses of sea, and scents of pine and thyme, have emerged as both the tragic frontline and the moving success story of the European refugee crisis: sites of sea deaths and unspeakable loss, but also of extraordinary efforts to alleviate human suffering. With little state or European Union assistance, local and international volunteers have provided safe haven to those seeking refuge in Europe. Still, there have been more than seven hundred drownings since the summer of 2015, and exhausted recent arrivals face shortages in shelter, food, and medical care, even as volunteers work persistently to address these urgent needs. Lesbos (pronounced Lesvos), an island only a bit larger than Mount Desert Island, is nestled between two Turkish peninsulas just seven miles from the mainland. Famous for its ouzo production and Sapphic and cosmopolitan histories, Lesbos has been the hub of both refugee arrivals and voluntary assistance. I first went there in 2006 with workers from an Athens-based refugee advocacy organization—at the time one of the few of its kind in Greece. It was late November, when crossings become particularly dangerous: the wind is raw and the waves high in the winter Aegean. A boat carrying forty-five Afghans had arrived, many of them minors; I accompanied two pro-bono lawyers who met with boys in the courtyard of the (now-closed) Pagani detention center, a concrete space open to the elements, with just a roof and bars on the windows and doors. As the lawyers informed the boys of their right to asylum with the help of an interpreter, a local woman—a social worker—circled our makeshift meeting space, bringing the boys sweaters and cleaning their faces with the rough care of a Greek grandmother. My work in Lesbos and elsewhere in Greece led to the publication of my book, On the Doorstep of Europe: Asylum and Citizenship in Greece, on refugees in the European

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Union and the role of Greece as a gateway to Europe. Significantly, I conducted almost all of my anthropological fieldwork for the book between 2005 and 2011, before the civil war in Syria and the rise of Isis. At that time, Iraqis and Afghans were the primary groups seeking refuge in Europe from wars spearheaded by the United States and NATO. Yet the difficulty of finding or ensuring safe haven in Europe was already an overwhelming struggle for my field interlocutors: the lawyers and social workers in the asylum effort, as well as asylum seekers, refugees, and other migrants. The dangers of border crossings, detention, and brutal policing; the lack of access to the asylum system and social services; the grinding fear of moving and living with precarious status, were everyday crises for these people, long before they made headlines in the Euro-American world.

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ASYLUM SEEKER? REFUGEE? MIGRANT? In legal terms, an asylum seeker has a pending case for asylum; a refugee is someone whose claim to asylum has been "recognized" and granted; and a migrant refers to those who migrate primarily for economic reasons. In practice, however, the line between refugee and migrant is fluid: people flee poverty just as they flee political violence; war can lead to poverty, and vice versa.

The situation of refugees in Europe is now recognized as one of the most critical issues on a global scale. Following economic collapse in 2010, Greece has become Europe's poorest and most indebted country, subject to austerity measures that have further dismantled its already struggling welfare state. Violence in Syria has sparked massive displacements of people, and while Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey have received the largest numbers, Europe is facing what has been dubbed the worst refugee crisis since WWII. Over 800,000 of the million refugees (not just Syrians, mind you) who entered Europe in 2015, entered through Greece. This past fall, as people rushed to cross before seas became even more treacherous, an estimated five thousand people arrived on Lesbos every day. Imagine if, for days or weeks in a row, large cruise ships disembarked passengers and crew onto Mount Desert Island—but wet, hungry, with nowhere to stay, and no guaranteed passage off the island. The Greek populace has risen to these challenges, creating their own grassroots venues of reception, seeking to establish solidarity with refugees. Every day I receive updates from Greek friends and colleagues providing humanitarian relief alongside local islanders who are not all that different from many here in Maine. They too make ends meet through fishing, farming, and tourism. Most are not specialists or experts; they struggle to cobble livelihoods together despite a changing and often failing fishing economy. They have responded to the predicaments of fellow humans: seeking to bring people to safety, offering food (if sometimes just figs from the garden), clothing, care, and even their homes. These efforts have been featured and celebrated in the international press, garnering calls for a Nobel Peace Prize nomination—and rightfully so. Still, I cannot help but lament how the ongoing, chronic predicaments facing refugees in Europe have gone unnoticed for so long. Both the current refugee crisis and Greece's financial crisis have extensive back stories, and they are not so much new as intensifications of structural inequities that have been in the making for years. There is, of course, the

history that has led to violence in Syria, to which I cannot speak. But from a European perspective, critics have highlighted the problems with EU migration and asylum regimes for years: the dearth of financial and material resources for member states and civil society groups to provide protection to refugees; the lack of social support for refugees themselves; the ambiguous responsibilities of member states in granting safe haven; and deeply problematic, inequitable legislation. In particular, the legislation known as the Dublin system requires that asylum claimants lodge applications and remain in the first EU country of entry (which is most often, of course, a border country like Greece). Meanwhile, in the face of economic instability and debt in Europe's poorer countries, the Eurozone has enforced austerity policies on Greece, cutting the very capacities necessary for states to provide care and support for citizens and non-citizens. For those I met in researching my book, it was obvious that the EU was deeply, perhaps willfully, ill-prepared for even earlier refugee movements—let alone those from the war in Syria. These critiques were not heeded. This cautionary account of my own work on refugees in Europe highlights the need to pay attention to things before they become "interesting" or "relevant." Race relations, access to clean water, US migration policy— these ongoing debates and struggles are nearing crisis points, having also been relatively unacknowledged by governments and institutions. Crisis seems to come out of nowhere; then it takes on its own life, and the press, donations, and public and political attention follow. But really, once we have hit crisis point, we are much too late (as colleagues and students engaged in climate justice well know). A global approach to liberal education necessitates critical thinking, awareness of interconnections, curiosity, hands-on experience, and hard work. If practiced well, through such an approach we can learn to pay attention in new ways—perhaps even capture the attentions of others. Serious study and disciplined, often uncelebrated work, may go a long way toward highlighting and even alleviating unacknowledged, everyday crises-in-themaking.

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My Teeth Miranda Benson '18

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Her urn was a plain black box. I decorated it myself: a picture of her wedding pasted on the top, and one pink, swan-shaped lotion bottle hot-glued to each vertical side. They were staring at me now, the swans and Grandpa and Grandma and whatever was left of her inside of that box. I opened it just once to add a lock of my own chopped-off hair. "What, are you a lesbian now?" That's what she would've said. But she also would've pulled me into her cigarette-cloud arms and stained my forehead with light pink lipstick. "A girl after my own heart." I wish I was after the heart of someone who hadn't chain-smoked for fortyfive years because now it was just me and my own heart and my nearly shaven head. I rolled from the bed and put the urn on the top shelf of my closet. "Take my ashes somewhere pretty. I didn't see enough beauty in this world." I shut the closet doors and crawled back beneath my blankets.

knew I would end up alone. I didn't think it would be after five minutes. Let me tell you about Jennifer and Jed. When they kiss they just smash their lips together and shove their tongues in as far as they can possibly go. I think they like triggering each other's gag reflexes. It's a game of if-youdon't-barf-you-actually-love-me, and they started playing as soon as Jennifer spotted him standing in a corner with some guys I didn't recognize. He whispered something in her ear, and she giggled as he led her through the window to the fire escape. I remembered reading a book that said people emit a special light when they have sex, and with the right equipment this light can be seen from space. I could see some deadbeat astronaut laughing about the weird little glow coming from the rooftops of Los Angeles apartments. Or even stranger places like the girls' bathroom stalls at Grover High where dear old Jenny lost her virginity. At least my vagina wasn't sending light signals into space, even if I was alone and sad and hungry.

The night of my butchered hair happened just a week after the hospital call announcing my grandma's death. "You're more ravenous than a storybook wolf," Grandma The next morning, my once told me. roommate, Jennifer, peeled I grinned, my mouth full of The barber looked at the wrinkles in me off of the kitchen floor spaghetti. I licked my tomatomy party dress and the uneven mess and drove me straight to stained lips with a red tongue the barber shop her dad and the sauce from the fork. of my hair and grunted. He asked if I had been going to for ten I licked the plate too, then wanted to throw in a free shave as well. years. "To avoid all of the yipped like a coyote. "More catty questions you'll get at a please!" salon," she explained. Grandma laughed. "I used to have your appetite. I filled The barber looked at the wrinkles in my party dress it with other things though." and the uneven mess of my hair and grunted. "It'll be ten She gave me what was left, and I tried to eat with the dollars for an even cut." He asked if I wanted to throw big wooden spoon, but my jaws weren't wide enough to in a free shave as well. He revved the razor switch like a envelop it. chain saw and began buzzing what was left, leaving a bit "Other things?" I asked through a mouthful. less than an inch. There wasn't much of a choice after Smoke spun pirouettes from the end of the cigarette the disaster I created. I'd woken up that morning on the that dangled from her fingers as she swayed back and kitchen floor surrounded by clumps of dark hair, and forth in the middle of the kitchen. She moved her arms screamed. I didn't think it was mine. to a Spanish fourth and slowly pas de bourrĂŠed in a circle By the time he put the razor in a drawer, my lips were then stopped spinning to take a drag from the cigarette. quivering. He looked a bit uncomfortable. "Let me tell "Other things that you'll understand when you're older." you, sweetie, hair grows back." But I was already bawling. "I turn eight next week." That's probably why he accepted seven dollars and the "Heaven help me, older than eight!" two warm beers left in my purse from the party. She took the pot and added it to the pile of dishes in I cried against the car window, wishing for one of those the sink. beers, wishing for ten beers and miracle hair growth. I "Can I have ice cream now?" As usual, she gave me the was a twenty-year-old woman transformed into a tenwhole carton to eat from, and we watched a B movie from year-old boy. "He was right about it growing back," said her endless collection. She got a new one in the mail every Jennifer softly. I waited until her old truck finally roared two weeks. The main character had her heart broken and to life before I answered. "It's not about my stupid hair." she couldn't stand the pain, so she found a surgeon who Jennifer just turned on the radio and let me rub snot could remove it while allowing her to stay alive. But the and tears into the sleeves of a sweater she had on the procedure left a gaping hole in her chest filled with teeth. floorboard. "She's always hungry like me!" I said. But the girl in the movie consumed everything. She had to keep herself I think Jennifer felt bad about dragging me to that party in in a concrete room with only a small slot where her best the first place. She told me it was to help me get over the friend slipped her food. Eventually she couldn't stand it shock of my loss, but she knew he would be there, and I anymore, and she let the hole consume her. I'd watched 44

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more scarring horror movies with Grandma, but this one gave me nightmares for weeks. In the dreams I would be alone somewhere and get so hungry that I would begin eating myself.

negative energy into my hair, and that's why I couldn't lift my head. Those throbbing bodies were so joyous because I had saved them. The teeth were no longer gnashing in my chest, they were absorbed too. I rolled my heavy head back and forth on the back of the couch, laughing. A body slumped beside me into the gape-mouth space on "Margo?" Jennifer's face wriggled in the hazy light. Jed the couch. stood behind her with his ridiculous polo shirt gleaming "Party's totally lame," said the girl. bright white, his hair mussed and falling into his eyes. I nodded and took a sip of the cat piss beer. They each grabbed one of my arms, and it felt like flying "I'm Lucy," she said. except for my feet dragging against the ground. "Margo." "She took one of Lucy's concoctions," said Jed. She inched closer so I could feel the heat of her on "I thought they were natural," said Jennifer. my bare skin. Her breath was soft on my neck, sour with "If you just have mushrooms, yeah." beer. "I know what would make this more fun." Her fist "Fucking bitch." was resting on my knee, and she unfurled her fingers now I shook my head. "She wasn't a bitch, Jen. I figured out to reveal bits of shriveled grey mushrooms. Grey like fog, how to make everyone happy. She did that. She let me like elephants, like ashes. "They're totally safe, the Native figure out happiness." Americans used them to find their spiritual destinies." "You're just high," said Jennifer. I glanced at the window where Jen had disappeared. Jed parked in front of the apartment and helped "How long will it take?" I asked Lucy. Jennifer get me into the elevator. Dumped into bed, I "Thirty minutes depending." She slipped a piece into couldn't sleep. The negativity in my hair was poisoning my mouth, then leaned me, poisoning the world. I forward and slipped her had to get rid of it. As soon I really thought that I could see the tongue in after it, pressing as the yellow rectangle of stars through the ceiling, and then the her lips into mine. She slid Jennifer's door turned black, her hand onto my thigh, I crept from the bed and into gnashing came back because I wanted and the other into my hair. the kitchen, dropping to my to consume them all. I relaxed my jaw but didn't knees from the weight of my move any more than that. She hair. I crawled toward the tilted her head and pulled her tongue away, softly kissing drawer with the scissors, head drooping down to the fake the corners of my lips. "Have you kissed anyone before?" Spanish tiles. I strained one arm upward and groped for she asked. the scissors until my left hand came up victorious. "Boys." I don't know why I said that. One swift snip and I could lift my head an extra three Lucy twisted her fingers into the hair at my nape and inches. Another, and another, and I became lighter still. I pulled me closer. "If you relax, it will all work better." I continued this way, my dark hair like shadows on the tile. glanced at the window again, at the orange night beyond At the last chop, I was suddenly overwhelmed. I lay back it, and I let my body slouch into the tired couch cushions. on the floor, and I really thought that I could see the stars She pulled my lower lip with her teeth, and then ran through the ceiling, and then the gnashing came back her tongue slowly around my mouth. I felt teeth in my because I wanted to consume them all. chest, and I imagined pulling her into my throat to stop the gnashing. Her hand moved closer to my crotch and I As a kid, I thought heaven was Alaska because it was couldn't help it, I jerked away from her. above us and cold and white. After I found out that Alaska She shrugged. "Oh, I see." She patted my leg and left. was a state I didn't really believe in heaven at all, but at For a desperate second I wanted to pull her back. the memorial I gave the eulogy and told them that that's I checked my watch six times, asked a stranger for a where she was. Sitting in heaven smoking cigarettes with stick of gum, and counted how many times the angry rap Grandpa. Only I left out the cigarette part since that's song used fucking as an adjective. I could feel the beat of what killed her. the music altering the pulse of my heart, so it changed Nothing makes you realize how little you know a with each song, fast and now slow, and even slower when person than writing a eulogy. There were the little things the hippies took control of the speakers. They swayed like that everyone knew about, like her pink nail polish and saplings in a rainstorm and I loved them. I was high as striped blazers. She craved cigarettes and cheap holiday a Georgia pine, and I was in love with the entire world. I cookies from the grocery store. She was good at cooking wanted to dance with them, but I wasn't strong enough to because her mom had forced her to learn, but she would move. My head felt as if it had somehow melted into the only use her talent for birthdays. Her closet was cluttered couch. I strained my neck, but my efforts were useless. My by swan-shaped lotion bottles and a box of white scarves pulse quickened, but then my fear gave way to epiphany: she never wore. She had a voice like sand and needles, the world was happy because I had absorbed all of the and her laugh was deep and loud. She had two smiles, one COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

for the world and one just for me. She wore ballet tights instead of panty hose because they made her feel young. After she came out of the hospital, she could fit into her tights from New York. She put on her pointe shoes too, but didn't test her arthritic ankles. "You should have been a dancer, Margo, the men are beautiful, and the whole world loves you." She was expelled from ballet school for "substance abuse" and "excessive fornication." I didn't believe her, but these were the words on the letter she kept folded in her resin box. "Women and men all loved me in those days—what did they expect? And everyone did drugs—how else were we supposed to stay that skinny?" I'm not sure if she was a good person. She ruined her marriage with a string of affairs, one of them with my grandfather's best friend. She let my dad drink bourbon for his tenth birthday because at twenty-nine she still wasn't old enough to be a mother. She called my mom a dirty slut when my dad introduced them. But she held me the first time I cried over a boy. She taught me how to wear makeup, and to curl my hair like movie stars from the fifties. When my mom kicked me out of the house for coming home stoned, she wrapped me in a bathrobe and helped me finish a pot of mac 'n' cheese. I could put none of this in a eulogy. In the end, I just talked about heaven and how she had touched our lives in unique ways. I kept expecting her to fling open the doors and slap my face for spewing bullshit. If heaven does exist, I'm not sure that the doors are open to people who call God a self-satisfied son-of-a-bitch. My dad phoned a few minutes after I got home. "How was it?" "You should have been there." I had intended to keep the conversation light. I could picture him clenching his jaw. "Plane tickets don't grow on trees." Bullshit. "She was your mom." Not a particularly great one by any account, but we both knew I wasn't just talking about the memorial. He was silent, and I knew he was counting down his anger on the other side of the line, the other side of the country, just like his therapist told him. "It's nice to hear your voice, Margo. You should come visit sometime." "Plane tickets don't grow on trees." "If you get the chance, is all I'm saying." He cleared his throat to fill my side of the conversation. "Goodbye. I love you," he said at last. "Goodbye." Before I slammed the receiver down, I was crying again. The reason my grandma stuck around after my father left was to look after me. "You're not like your mother's people. They'll tear you apart with their cold politeness and handshakes. You're like me." She had torn

people apart too, but death transforms us into the best versions of ourselves. Her nineteen-year-old smile from the top of the urn haunted me more than her cigarettestained grin. I have a story in my head where she is happy that she is pregnant and she is in love with Grandpa and she is ready for her life to take this turn. In reality, her wedding bliss probably didn't outlast her first glass of champagne, but I am desperate for her to be a good person because she saw so much of herself within me.

Three weeks after I shoved it there, I took the urn from the top of my closet and asked Jennifer to drive me out to the pier in the middle of the night because I didn't want people watching. The ocean was the only pretty place I had been able to think of. The reason my grandma didn't see enough beauty in her life was because she spent it in LA where the brightest lights are neon and you see everything through a haze of smog. Jennifer pulled the car parallel to a curb—the VIP parking of late night beach visits—we staggered over the sand, tripping around bottles and chip bags from day-trip lunches. My grandma always talked about moving east, where the air was sweet to breathe, but living in an ugly place made her feel like a saint. Saint Bernadette of Cigarette Lighters and Excessive Fornication. There were some teenagers making out on the shadowy benches, but the pier was mostly empty at this hour. The lights of a few boats shone brighter than the stars. I hugged the urn close to my chest, a swan bottle pressing into the spaces between my ribs. I would live in that city for the rest of my life, just like she did. People like us live in ugly places to curb our appetites. "You don't have to do it now," said Jennifer. She put her arm around my shoulder and we began the slow walk back to the car. I kept holding the urn, trying to press it into the gnashing hole of my chest, but I wasn't hungry anymore, not for this. At home I pushed it back into the closet where the swans couldn't stare and I couldn't see her smile which was also my smile. I lay on my bed, and I imagined a sky full of ravenous stars. ····· Miranda Benson '18 is in her second year at COA, studying literature and botany. Born and raised in Southern California, she decided to come to Maine after participating in the Fall Fly-In as a high school senior. She wrote "My Teeth" for the class Fail Better: Writing Short Fiction, taught by COA lecturer Daniel Mahoney in fall 2015.

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ALUMNI NOTES 1976

Bruce Bender retired in May 2015 from the Federal Highway Administration where he was the team leader for environmental policy. He has moved from DC back to Santa Fe, NM.

1980

complementing her JD and master of environmental law and policy. She plans to work with small businesses and renewable energy companies on available tax credits and other benefits.

1989

In August, Susan Freed passed the exam to become a certified energy manager. She continues to work for San Diego County as energy and sustainability project manager.

1984

Following lunchtime conversations about careers during alumni weekend, Jessie Greenbaum (back row) paused for a photo with (left to right) Emily Bracale '90, Lelania Avila '92, Mary Harney '96, and Julianna Lichatz '90. Holly Devaul is the manager of educational programs and services at University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO. She writes, "In the past year I have sold my house, moved, bought a new one, moved again, and married a wonderful man with two sons. Tim Weston and I now have four kids between us: mine (Noah, 27, and Emma Marion, 23), already out on their own and his (Nate, 17, and Danny, 13). We were married in the mountain town of Gold Hill, CO and had a post-wedding party with COA folks and other Mainers at the Brooklin, ME farm of Jen Schroth and Jon Ellsworth '87 in late September. Life is good!"

1981

Jennifer Douville van Horne is a candidate for an LLM in taxation at Boston University School of Law,

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1990

For the past three years, Emily Bracale has devoted time to Lyme research and education, fielding questions and providing support. She recently trained with Delta Gardens in the use of special flower essence sets and offers this and energy healing to clients with Lyme disease and co-infections. Emily also teaches a course on Lyme for medical professionals and healers, and presents at Lyme awareness conferences. Her book, In the LymeLight II, is intended to help others get the care they need: inthelyme-light. com. "Kia ora and greetings from Polynesia!" writes Susi Newborn. As campaigns coordinator for Oxfam NZ, her work focuses on climate change in the Pacific. Susi also advises and writes articles on gender,

climate, inequality, divestment, and clicktavism for the Green Party. As a Greenpeace co-founder, she is working with its international board on new directions for the organization. From Waiheke, NZ she writes, "I count my time at COA as one of the happiest in my entire life and feel blessed to have had such an enriching experience. Now, more than ever, we need human ecologists to mend this broken planet. I would love to start a College of the Pacific right here on this island, so similar to MDI: a national park, whales and dolphins in the gulf, and teeming with fascinating people from around the world. If any of you do decide to visit, you have an open invite. Haere mai! Arohanui."

1991

Noreen Hogan joined Miriama Broady ('86) in Tujereng, The Gambia to document the inaugural session of the Groovy African Ladies Music School, teaching young African women and girls to play musical instruments: mamamiriamamusic. com.

1994

Anne Gustavson became a licensed architect in 2014. She spent this past summer working in Shanghai and hiking in the Olympic Peninsula and the Cascades, following a move from New York to Seattle, WA with her husband, Luke.

2000

1995 Rob and Jaime (Duval) Beranek announced the arrival of their baby girl, Emma Joy, on June 23, 2015. Writes Jaime, "She already has quite the personality and loves being outside—just like her mama and papa!"

In December, Sonja Johanson (center), Jeanee Dudley '10, and Martin Steingesser read from their work at Word Portland, a monthly reading series in Portland, ME.

1996

Ryan Ruggiero has been negotiating and completing land and trail acquisitions for Metro Regional Government in Portland, OR since late 2014. Metro owns and manages more than 17,000 acres of nature parks, natural areas, cemeteries, and trails in the greater Portland metropolitan region. He also serves on the lands committee for The Wetlands Conservancy, based in Portland.

1997

Jaime Torres welcomed his son, Connor Sebastian James Torres, on Feb. 9, 2015.

University of Minnesota, wrote that he studies plant evolution, combining theory and data. His summer on Great Duck was his first research experience; he also did research at the Jackson Lab, MDIBL, and the Savannah River Ecology Lab while at COA. Yaniv earned a PhD in evolutionary biology from Indiana University, Bloomington and held a postdoc at the Center for Population Biology at the University of California, Davis.

Shawn Keeley and Natalie Springuel '91 provided feedback to COA seniors during a resumé review session in November.

2003

Kathryn Hunninen celebrated a five-year work anniversary with the Mount Washington Community Development Corporation where she now directs the Emerald View Park initiative. In partnership with the City of Pittsburgh, it is building a 257-acre park by combining historic park spaces with formerly mined and deforested hillsides. The park features a trail network, habitat restoration, and other capital improvements. This January she joined the board of directors of the newly formed Pittsburgh Conservation Corps, an expanded spin-off of the Emerald Trail Corps workforce development program. Living in Pittsburgh's Brookline neighborhood with her husband, Jose Luis, their daughter, Hannah, 10, and pet, Porch Cat, she thanks "the COA Yucatán program for introducing me to my husband of 12 years!"

2004

In response to an inquiry about Great Duck Island alumni, Yaniv Brandvain, a professor in the department of plant biology at the

Lindsay Parrie and Levi Rummel were married in a lakeside wedding in Rocky Mountain National Park in September. She writes, "We have put down roots in Loveland, CO. This past summer we bought a house with amazing gardening potential. We're looking forward to making many happy memories in our new home." Lindsay completed her PhD in May 2012 and works as a postdoctoral fellow at Colorado State University in the newly formed Prion Research Center. She studies the role of the cellular prion protein in neurogenesis in hopes of informing stem cell therapies for neurodegenerative disorders.

2005

Nishad Jayasundara, a postdoctoral researcher at Duke University, received the Karen Wetterhahn Memorial Award at the November 2015 annual meeting of the NIEHS Superfund Research Program. Nishad's work is focused on understanding how rapid and profound environmental changes affect the health of ecosystems and, in turn, human health and wellbeing. COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

2006

of Hartt offers beginner to preprofessional music, voice, and dance classes for infants through adults.

2008

Jason Childers works seasonally as a commercial captain on various passenger vessels in South Carolina. During the off season he sails his 35-foot sailboat throughout the Caribbean, Bahamas, and southeastern US. He writes that it has been a fun, challenging, and enriching period. Future plans may include pursuing a PhD, teaching again, or plotting and saving for a circumnavigation trip. Hailee Strassner and Carl Davis were wed on Sept. 26, 2015 in Southwest Harbor, ME. Currently in Bellingham, WA, Hailee writes, "it was well worth the coast-to-coast trip to celebrate with friends and family on the island of our meeting."

2007

Now living and working in Boise, ID, Gabe Finkelstein is the coordinator for the Cycle Learning Center, Boise State's campus bike shop, which supports the city's sustainable ridership. He manages the full-service shop and its student employees, teaches bicycle maintenance courses, leads trips, and advocates for improved infrastructure for human-powered transportation. Outside of work he can be found riding his mountain bike in the foothills or, in winter, backcountry skiing. Kate Sheeley started a new position as marketing and communications coordinator at the University of Hartford's Hartt School Community Division in September. This noncollegiate, community branch

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In February, Meesha Goldberg performed her project Equilibrium Rites, a 100-mile walk through the California almond orchards as 80 billion bees were trucked in for pollination. The walk combined art, ritual, and activism to "raise awareness of the bee die-off and inspire creative response to crisis." She is also creating a video and a series of paintings to be exhibited at The Hive Gallery in Los Angeles during the August almond harvest. Follow the project at equilibriumrites.com.

2010

Ariel Mahler (formerly known as Daniel) released the pilot episode of the original web series Façades. Based on Ariel's COA senior project, Façades is a typical boy-meetsthey story, as characters of varying genders struggle to figure out who they are and how they form relationships. The first episode can be seen at facadeswebseries.com; the rest of the first season will be released this spring.

2011

Stephen Wagner and Cayla Moore '13 celebrated their marriage on Aug. 8, 2015 in Lubec, ME before family and friends, including many COA community members. Cayla is the office manager for RM Financial Services, LLC. Stephen, who graduated magna cum laude last spring from the University of Maine

School of Law, currently clerks for the Maine Superior Court.

2012

On May 9, 2015, in the company of COA alumni and other friends and family, Tasha Ball and Evan Griffith '11 were married in a weekendlong celebration. The couple lives in Vermont with their cat, dog, and four chickens. Pictured with Tasha and Evan are Josh Carter '18, Matt McElwee, Mike Shepard '03, Lilly Demers '13, Eliah Thanhauser '09, Sara Patterson '10, Kyra Chapin '10, and Miles Chapin '10. Also celebrating were Heather Wight, Lucy Atkins, and several children. Ashley (Heinze) Kelly was first author on "A Forward Genetic Screen for Suppressors of Somatic P Granules in Caenorhabditis elegans," published in the journal G3 with Dustin Updike at MDIBL. She and her high school sweetheart were married on Sept. 20, 2014 in Southwest Harbor, ME. They've recently moved to Virginia where Ashley is a fleet forces acoustic analyst for SAIC, a company contracted by the US Navy. After completing a master of science degree at Trent University in Ontario in September, Michelle Klein began work as a fisheries observer for NOAA/NMFS and AIS, Inc. She has moved back to New England after spending time in Canada, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Arizona. In April she will marry her high school sweetheart, Steven Seyler.

counselor and accompany survivors to law enforcement, the hospital, and court. Last summer, Kali and Bethany Anderson spent a fun week in Portland, OR and Vancouver, WA filled with sunshine, ice cream, haircuts, fondue, walks around the city, and lots of laughter.

Virginia and Eli Mellen '11 are living and working on MDI, and were thrilled to welcome their son, Avi Lachlan, to the family on Jan. 2, 2016â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Ellsworth Hospital's first baby of the year.

2013

Anna Flanagan is living in Portland, ME, working at Cornerstone Medical Communications in Cape Elizabeth, and studying linguistics and American Sign Language at the University of Southern Maine. Sarah Gribbin '12 and Phinn Onens share, "we had a lovely wedding day; getting married in Edinburgh, Scotland was wondrous and magical." Phinn has finished a master in marine mammal science degree at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, while Sarah is working at Orchard Valley Waldorf School in Vermont as a kindergarten classroom assistant. They are navigating the visa and immigration system, but hope to be able to live together soon.

Kali Rothrock writes that she is working at her dream job, a prevention educator/advocate at the North Coast Rape Crisis Team where she teaches preschoolers, adults, and everyone in between. She is training to be a hotline 50

hibernacula to protect MDI's bats, including the northern long-eared bat, now listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. He plans to return next season for Acadia's and the park service's centennial year.

2014

Chloe Chen-Kraus is in the second year of a PhD program at Yale University, working on her dissertation project concerning lemur behavior, ecology, and conservation. She spent the past summer in Madagascar exploring the country, developing project ideas, and picking a research site. She plans to examine the impact of various forms of human activity and disturbances on lemurs in hopes of informing conservation and management practices.

2015

Lucy Allosso is a residential counselor at Wediko, a therapeutic boarding school for boys in New Hampshire. She writes, "I have been working a ton, spending time with coworkers, and exploring the woods in the local area. In late June, I plan to take a vacation to Alaska and afterward will be moving with my boyfriend to the New Hampshire seacoast where I'll continue working in the mental health field. After another year or so of clinical work, I hope to go back to school for a graduate degree, but we'll see where life takes me." Erickson Smith is working for the Schoodic Institute preparing records for archiving and gathering historical information about the Cromwell Brook watershed on MDI. Last summer he completed another season as wildlife technician at Acadia National Park, conducting the first survey of monarch butterflies and milkweed habitat inside and outside of the park's boundaries as part of a national effort to conserve pollinators and their habitats. He also worked on locating bat

DEGREE OF DIFFERENCE EVENTS COA hosts Degree of Difference receptions around the country for alumni, parents, friends, and prospective students to gather for conversation and to learn about new developments at the college. This year we added activities, such as behindthe-scenes tours of alumni workplaces from museums to mushroom farms. When alumni gathered in New York City recently, Gabriel Willow '00 led an urban ecology walk in Central Park. In Portland, Maine, a group toured North Spore with alumni Matt McInnis '09, Jonathan Carter '09, and Eliah Thanhauser '09. Find them in the photo above. Check www.coa.edu/calendar for a Degree of Difference reception in your area.

For more news about alumni go to www. coa.edu/alumni/alumni-news. Would you like to submit a class note item? Contact Dianne Clendaniel at dclendaniel@coa.edu.

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ALUMNI IN THE NEWS Innovative outdoor education in The New York Times

Photo by Samuel Heller '09.

Sarah (Short) Heller '09, naturalist and science educator, co-founded and co-directs Fiddleheads Forest School, a fully outdoor preschool at the Washington Park Arboretum of the University of Washington Botanic Gardens. Among the requirements for acceptance in this popular program is this: "Your child must be prepared to (and want to!) be outside rain or shine." That's four hours a day, five days a week. In the December 2015 Times article "A Preschool Without Walls," journalist Lillian Mongeau writes, "A typical day at Fiddleheads starts at 9 a.m., with Desi, Stelyn, Joshua, and fellow students zipping up waterproof suits so they can climb on, and sometimes slip off, sopping-wet logs; create secret forts under dripping boughs of bright green, and examine squirming earthworms in grubby hands. "Students go on 'listening walks' with their teachers during which they stand in a circle with their eyes closed and name the things they can hear, like wind and rain, when they don't talk. The children also eat lunch, sing songs, and occasionally squabble under the open sky and towering trees." For more, visit nytimes.com and look for Preschool Without Walls.

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Photo by Nicole McConville.

Mindful Baker in Bon Appétit Magazine

Tara Jensen '07 bakes bread in the wood-fired brick oven of Smoke Signals, her bakery set in the hills of North Carolina. She also shapes a life that is about caring for people, for herself, for art, and for good, wholesome food. Every two weeks she offers a daylong workshop for up to six people who might be making the journey from as far away as New York or Colorado. Writes Julia Kramer, who spent several days with Tara to write her January 2016 feature in Bon Appétit, "Gallery-worthy sweets are not Jensen's goal; they're the medium. Her aspirations are deeper and, well, a little more abstract. The bakery is a way for her to grow as a person. To share stories. To connect. Through breadmaking, she believes, people can learn to trust their intuition, to accept themselves for who they are. Baking is not the essential truth about Jensen. … Her dedication shows in each bread and pie, which she patterns with intricate handmade stencils and cutout shapes. … She shares her principles: Observe the process closely. Walk away when something isn't working. Don't become attached to the outcome." Tara's long-term goal: to use her business for social justice, community organizing, and individual empowerment. For more, visit bonappetit.com and look for Smoke Signals, or visit smokesignalsbaking.com.

Illustrator receives The Ezra Jack Keats Honor Award Ryan Higgins '06 has been drawing since he was four. Now both his illustrations and his writings are getting published, and winning awards. Mother Bruce, written and illustrated by Ryan, was reviewed in The New York Times in December 2015, appeared on several bestselling children's book lists, and received the Ezra Jack Keats New Illustrator Honor Award. Continuing the saga of the grumpy bear he calls Mother Bruce, Ryan's Hotel Bruce is due out in October 2016. For more, visit ryanthiggins.com.

COMMUNITY NOTES In late October 2015, when arts faculty member Nancy Andrews' feature film, The Strange Eyes of Dr. Myes, had its New York premier at the Imagine Science Film Festival at Anthology Film Archives, it received the Imagine Science Films Outstanding Feature Award for best film incorporating "science into a unique and compelling long-form narrative." The film's West Coast premiere was held at the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose, CA in March. Earlier in March, Nancy was a guest at the annual Brakhage Center Symposium's weekend of short films, lectures, and discussions at The University of Colorado at Boulder. Work on the film is ongoing, thanks to a year-long Independent Filmmaker Project fellowship to assist with turning it into a series. Meanwhile, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to the group Artists in Context is funding the publication of a monograph themed "Letting Go of Normal," featuring Nancy's work and an essay by former trustee Walter Robinson, MD. Cristy Benson, laboratory manager, just completed her third season as head coach to the Mount Desert Elementary School Lego Robotics Team. Two of the six team members are children of alumni. Jon Harmor '18 and Betzi Lindberg '19 donated their first day of winter break to act as judges at the district qualifying tournament. Rich Borden, Rachel Carson Chair in Human Ecology, and Darron Collins '92, COA president, teamed up for an hour-long, two-part program on Love Maine Radio, WLOB/WPEI, in Portland, ME. Rich spoke on human ecology; Darron on COA. The show, which aired Jan. 16, can be heard at themainemag.com/radio. Also, Rich and Ken Hill, academic dean, are coorganizers of the XXI International Conference of the Society for Human Ecology, or SHE. The theme of the 52

meeting, which runs April 12–15 in Santa Ana, CA, is Shaping a Livable Future: Research—Education— Practice. Anthropology faculty member Heath Cabot recently published "Refugee Voices: Tragedy, Knowledge, and Ghosts in Advocacy and Ethnography," in the peer-reviewed Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Her November 2015 article on refugees in Europe was one of the top ten most-read posts of the year in the blog Allegra Laboratory. Trisha Cantwell-Keene, Thorndike Library associate director, served as a community panelist at the Mount Desert High School Senior Exhibition Festival in February, evaluating graduating seniors' final projects. Serving with her were Bonnie Tai, director of educational studies, and Linda Fuller, associate director.

meeting of the Foreign Language Association of Maine he presented "Teaching Students How to Learn Languages on Their Own: Developing Life-Long Language Learners." Gray also testified at a hearing of the Maine Citizen Trade Policy Commission in December on "How Comparative Advantage can be Comparatively Awful: Why the TransPacific-Partnership is a Fast Track to Ecological Disaster and Profoundly Undermines Democracy." His album Just Down the Road a' Peace was released at bandcamp.com. In September, Abigail Curless joined the COA community to become executive assistant to the president. She can't believe how lucky she is to have such an incredible view of Frenchman Bay from her office on the oceanside of Turrets.

In December, Ken Cline, David Rockefeller Family Chair in Ecosystem Management and Protection, was invited to attend the Renewable Natural Resources Foundation's Congress on Sustaining Western Water in Washington, DC. Says Ken, "It was a great opportunity to learn about recent developments in water law in the drought-stricken West and catch up with COA alumni Nat Keller '04, Ivy Keller '05, and Lauren Nutter '10."

Nina Emlen, admission counselor, and Alex Birdsall, sustainable business program manager, welcomed 10-pounder Asher Emlen Birdsall on Jan. 16.

Philosophy and peace studies faculty member Gray Cox published "Reframing Ethical Theory, Pedagogy, and Legislation to Bias Open Source AGI Towards Friendliness and Wisdom" in November's Journal of Evolution and Technology. In January, while on sabbatical in India, he presented the invited plenary paper "Gandhi's Innovation in Ethics: Satyagraha as a Method of Rational Proof" at the Gandhirama Conference: 2016 at Gitam University in Visakhapatnam. At the March

This fall, Dave Feldman, physics and math faculty member, taught Fractals and Scaling, a new Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC, as part of the Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Explorer project (available at complexityexplorer. org). While teaching the 1,500 people in the MOOC, Dave also taught the same subject as an advanced course to seven students at COA. Class-central.com, an aggregation and rating website for MOOCs, ranked Dave's class as the fifth best COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

of 2015â&#x20AC;&#x201D;out of more than 2,200 first-time MOOCs. Also, in the Dec. 2015 issue of Physics Today, Dave's invited discussion of David Nolte's Introduction to Modern Dynamics was the lead book review. Stanford Social Innovation Review published "From Sustainability to Abundance" by Jay Friedlander, Sharpe-McNally Chair of Green and Socially Responsible Business. In conjunction with this, Jay relaunched abundancecycle.com with Jordan Motzkin '10. The site details how enterprises can build economic, social, and environmental prosperity. Jay recently hosted a PhD candidate from University of North Dakota studying COA as an exemplar embedding social innovation across the curriculum. He served on the panel selecting new Changemaker Campuses for Ashoka U. Additionally, Jay led the third annual Fair Food Business Boot Camp, teaching business skills to food entrepreneurs. And thanks to the generosity of the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, Alex Birdsall joined COA as sustainable business program manager. Sarah Hall, Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Chair in Earth Systems and GeoSciences, traveled to the Northeast Geological Society of America Meeting in Albany, NY with Spencer Gray '17, Ian Medeiros '16, Alba Mar Rodriguez Padilla '18, and Gemma Venuti '18, where all presented recent work. Last November, along with geoscientists at Mt. San Antonio College and University of San Francisco, Sarah received a grant of $340,733 from the National Science Foundation to support the development of handson geoscience training experiences. This will culminate in 2017 and 2018, when students from the three schools will join a field-based, interdisciplinary, summer research intensive in eastern California. COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

Jen Hughes, manager of donor engagement, was elected secretary of the Hub of Bar Harbor, a citizen group dedicated to enhancing economic development, business growth, housing revitalization, historic preservation, and culture. After 20 years in the development office, Laura Johnson is now director of summer programs. "With all the hustle and bustle in summer, COA is like a secret garden," says Laura, "and so a perfect place to host a conference or workshop. It's a team effort. Jean Sylvia, summer programs associate director, has been the biggest help in my transition, but there's also COA's kitchen, the buildings and grounds staff, Renee Duncan at Summer Field Studies, and the COA students who stay for the summer to clean and assist." The Wild Gardens of Acadia, by writing faculty member Anne Kozak and Susan Leiter, will be issued on May 2 by Arcadia Publishing. The authors volunteer in these Acadia National Park gardens that display, preserve, propagate, and label area native plants. Josh Winer '91, lecturer in photography, contributed many of the photographs. "Ghazal of Witness," a poem by writing lecturer Daniel Mahoney, was published in the anthology Ghazals for Foley (Hinchas Press 2016). This collection of non-fiction and the ancient Arabic poetic form known as ghazals is dedicated to American combat journalist and poet James Foley, who was killed by ISIL on Aug. 19, 2014. Dan's poem is online at sliverofstonemagazine.com.

JOIN THE BLACK FLY SOCIETY! The Black Fly Society was established to make donating to COA's Annual Fund easier and greener. We hope you'll join this swarm of sustaining donors by setting up a monthly online gift. It's the paperless way to give to the college. Follow the instructions at coa.edu/donatenow. If you want to give by mail: COA Annual Fund 105 Eden Street Bar Harbor, ME 04609 (Please make checks out to College of the Atlantic.) Questions? Call 207-801-5625.

Marine biology and policy faculty member Chris Petersen coauthored the poster presentation "Downeast Drainage: Examining and Communicating the Dynamics of Bacteria Pollution Events in the Gulf of Maine" at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting in San Francisco. In January Chris, Ken Cline, and students Teagan White '18 and Nicholas Tonti '19 attended the Atlantic Salmon Ecosystems Forum in Orono, ME. In December, Steve Ressel, faculty member in biology and zoology, was a guest instructor in Jennifer Riefler's Science of the Outdoors course at Mount Desert Island High School, conducting a winter ecology field-based lab focused on heat loss in small animals. Also, the citizen science senior project work

by Sarah Colletti '10 on salamander monitoring in Acadia National Park, which Steve supervised, was featured in Eye of Newt and Toe of Frog, Adder's Fork and Lizard's Leg: The Lore and Mythology of Amphibians and Reptiles, a new book by scientist Marty Crump. Last summer, Lauren Rupp '05, coordinator of wellness and campus engagement, took Amrit, the ceremony that marks official conversion to the Sikh faith. She is now transitioning to her Sikh name, Puranjot Kaur Khalsa, and remains thankful for the patience and grace she's received from the COA community. Puranjot and her husband, Mahan Deva Singh Khalsa, were married on Oct. 11, 2015. The Great Hall of Turrets was transformed into a Gurdwara, a

place of Sikh worship, where all are welcome. They were blessed to be joined by friends, family, and many COA alumni. Zach Soares '00, audio-visual technology specialist, is now a certified interior call force firefighter for the town of Bar Harbor. Both Allied Whale and the North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catalog were prominently featured at the

IN MEMORIAM Dallas Darland

Gunnar Hansen

November 1943–September 19, 2015

March 4, 1947–November 7, 2015

Dallas Darland was vice president for development from

Though best known for his role as Leatherface, the masked killer in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Gunnar Hansen was a gentle poet and writer. He taught at COA from 1982 to 1985, enthralling students with his many stories. Born in Reykjavik, Iceland, he moved to Searsport, ME at age five, and then to Texas six years later, returning to Maine in 1975, where he worked as a freelance writer.

1990 to 1993. Among other achievements, he assisted in fundraising for Gates Community Center, co-chaired the COA–2000 long-range plan, and facilitated a $1.8 million Title III grant in support of the academic program. Before coming to Maine he served as a senior administrator at several universities. After COA, Dallas went on to hold vice president and development posts in higher education. He and his wife Ursula returned to MDI several times, maintaining friendships with their former colleagues. —Rich Borden

Robert Rothschild 1918–October 7, 2015 Robert Rothschild joined COA's board of trustees with his wife Maurine in 1985, serving until 1990. (Maurine remained on the board, becoming a life trustee until her death in 2004.) Both were advocates for education studies, endowing The Maurine and Robert Rothschild Scholarship fund to assist graduate students and those preparing for careers in education. Their passion for exploration of all kinds led to the Maurine and Robert Rothschild Student/Faculty Collaborative Research Fund. 54

Bogart Salzberg '96 February 9, 1975–January 6, 2016 Creative and insightful as a student, a storyteller who enlightened while entertaining, Bogart Salzberg was a very special person. Remarkably capable inside and outside the classroom, he brought creativity and discipline to his work as a carpenter, filmmaker, writer, newspaper reporter, web designer, and more. He was a delight to work with. I had the pleasure of getting to know Bogart initially through an introductory biology course during my third year of teaching at COA. John Anderson and I were leading a descent of Cadillac Mountain, discussing past and present patterns of plant and animal distributions, riffing off ideas of natural history and the role humans have played in transforming landscapes. On this trip, Bogart and his future wife, Ava Moskin '95, were bright-eyed youths, clearly up to the task of looking at life through the lens COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals in San Francisco last December, says Peter Stevick '81, Allied Whale senior scientist. Six presentations highlighted new results showing unexpected population dynamics among humpback whales from Guadeloupe, along with analyses of humpback whale movement patterns from the Azores, Iceland, Virginia, and Puerto Rico. Presenters were Olivia Bolus '16, Marina Cucuzza '16, Siobhan Rickert '18, Grace Shears '17, Abby St. Onge '17, and Davis Yeo '16, while Molly Martin, MPhil '14 offered some results from her thesis on passive acoustic studies of right whales. Peter was co-author on these works. Many alumni and several other students also attended.

In March 2015, Kristina Swanson pulled up roots in Montana and moved to Maine to work as COA's development officer. Kristina is passionate about local food, social justice, music, and wild nature—so human ecology just makes sense. Davis Taylor, faculty member in economics, joined the board of directors of Cooperative Development Institute, or CDI (cdi.coop), which offers technical assistance to cooperatives (food co-ops, worker-owned businesses, credit unions, etc.) in New England and New York. Rob Brown ('91) works there, heading CDI's Business Ownership Solutions program, which has gained national attention for conversion of sole proprietorship

of biology. And yet there was always something ethereal about Bogart, so keen in observation. Upon graduating he was asked, What are you going to do for the rest of your life? His answer: Create. And so he did with abandon, humor, and often an impish smile. What grounded this sprite in our pedestrian world were aikido, kayaking, carpentry, a wife, a child, and his brilliant writing that came to completion with his Brain Cancer Diaries. In writing these diaries, he fenced with death waving at him in the form of the gliosarcoma, and the harrowing medical approaches that keep patients teetering on the edge of life. Knowing this, Bogart risked much alone, including kayaking from Portland to Bar Harbor, crashing upon the rocks of Great Head, wandering barefoot over prickly spruce and moss, and eventually ending up upon the porch of my house. "I almost died," said this bloody visage that day, so present in body-spirit—rough in beard and blood and light—in frank and luminous speech. —Suzanne Morse Find Bogart Salzberg's writings at mybraincancerdiary.com. His kayak adventure was first published as "My Brain Cancer Diary" in the Spring 2013 issue of COA.

Richard Levins June 1, 1930–January 19, 2016 An ex-tropical farmer turned ecologist, biomathematician, and philosopher of science, Richard Levins was the John Rock Professor of Population Sciences at Harvard School of COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

businesses to worker ownership in Maine (see his Nov. 2015 article in Yes! Magazine at yes.org). Davis was previously on the board of the Good Tern Food Co-op in Rockland, ME. Karen Waldron, Lisa Stewart Chair in Literature and Women's Studies, delivered the paper "Reinventing Eve: Sarah Grimké's Letters on the Equality of the Sexes" to a panel on the Bible in 19th century American Literature at the Northeast Modern Language Association annual conference, and chaired a panel on "Literary Landscapes: Water and Island Worlds." She also chaired a panel and presented a paper at the Popular Culture Association Annual Conference in Seattle, WA, on Laurie R. King's Mary Russell series.

Public Health and a COA honorary degree recipient. After a certain age he would only travel to two places: COA and Cuba. He loved the intelligence of our inquisitive students and would happily sit cross-legged on the floor until they felt ready to bring the conversation to a close. Dick was an important elder within the human ecology community, participating in SHE conferences, helping students get internships or navigate the Cuban bureaucracy, and honing the thinking of several faculty members. For me, he was the person who made it clear that what we most need to teach are the paradoxes of the world, to teach them so that we can truly understand complexity. —Suzanne Morse

Shyanna Rose Pruette ('17) January 9, 1995–February 10, 2016 Spring Rays of sunlight beaming down Grass feels soft to bare toes Trees dance in the wind Embracing its gentle blows There's laughter outdoors Sounds of horseplay all around Spirits lifting in every soul Joy emanating from every sound —Shyanna Rose, COA student 2013–2014

Written for Bill Carpenter's Poetry and the American Environment

Our Back Pages

The Columns Hard to believe, but the half-dozen cement columns hanging out at the north end of campus for the last twenty-five years are an architectural feat, a technological innovation, an international experiment, and a tourist lure. Millard Dority, director of campus planning, buildings, and public safety, says they're second only to COA's whale skull in attracting the attention and cameras of visitors. Back in 1990 and 1991, Canadian Mark West was teaching architecture at COA and experimenting with ways of creating reusable molds for cement. He was seeking material that wouldn't be destroyed, but that could be cut apart—like maybe … spandex? Yes, spandex. One spring, class members sat in the parking lot shaping huge bolts of spandex into shaped twelve-foot cylinders, carefully stitching them by hand. When it came time to pour the cement, the class raised the forms, shoring them up with netting, tarps, plywood, rope—whatever was available. Then they began mixing the concrete. By hand. That is until Millard walked by with Robert Nolan, his second in command. A quarter of a century later, they recalled that day: Millard: Bob said, "Mark you'll never live long enough to mix enough cement by hand to fill that." Bob: Right. So they got a cement truck. But the truck couldn't lift the trough up high enough to reach the top of the form, so they still had to pour the cement by hand. Students were carrying five gallon buckets in a kind of bucket brigade—up the staging and down— pouring the cement into the six forms. Millard: Those columns have been standing for twenty-five years and there's only one piece of rebar in each column and they're only one foot in the ground. That's one hundred and fifty pounds per square foot. Turns out that COA's columns—which many have grown fond of, even those who consider them phallic eyesores—are actually prototypes. Up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, the CanWest Global Theatre boasts thirteen reinforced concrete columns cast in, you guessed it, spandex. The website doesn't actually mention spandex. It does, however, claim them to be, "the first structural use of fabric-cast columns." —Donna Gold 56

COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

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*These events are open to TCS members only. For membership information, call Lynn Boulger, 207-801-5620.

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