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Independent
JANES & KELLY CLAIM TOP STUDENT GOVERNMENT SEATS
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Yann Crist-Evans Art Director
“I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster and leaves less room for lies.” - Le Corbusier, Artist & Architect
Lucas Hess
Online Editor
“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” - Mark Twain
Tanya Marchun
Creative Director
“A good plan is like a road map: It shows the final destination and usually the best way to get there.” - H. Stanley Judd
Kaitie Martinez Editor in Chief
Clare O’Connor-Seville Chief Copy Editor
“I’d like to end up sort of unforgettable.” - Ringo Star
Lacey Schuster
Public Relations Director
“Thank you for your support at our Duck Race Fundraiser!”
Content News Editor
JR Starns
Financial Advisor
“People say ‘money doesn’t buy happiness.’ It does if you live in America. It buys a waverunner. Have you ever seen a sad person on a waverunner?” - Daniel Tosh
Gavin Wisdom
Content News Editor
Haley Pruitt Lucas Hess
Jordan Boudreaux
“Thank you for another great year FLC!”
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“You have four years to be irresponsible here. Relax...Spend money you don’t have. Drink ‘til sunrise. The work never ends, but college does.” - Tom Petty
Make It or Break It by: Zoey Strum
New Leadership by: Steph Cook
Four Years, One Project by: Dylan Leigh
Feeding Durango by: John Miller
Summit Initiatives Stalled by: Luke Ramseth
Editorials Sports Stats
Cover Photo by Jordan Boudreaux
We encourage reader participation through our perspectives section. Submit letters, cartoons, or anything else you’d like to see in print to Editor in Chief Kaitie Martinez at kmmartinez@fortlewis.edu or News Editor Steph Cook at sscook@fortlewis.edu. Note: The Independent reserves the right to edit submissions as necessary or deny publication. News tip? Contact Steph Cook at sscook@fortlewis.edu For any other inquiries, contact Kaitie Martinez at kmmartinez@fortlewis.edu Do you want to have your work seen? Have your photography, artwork, written words or any other media posted online at theindyonline.com. Submissions can be sent via Email to lchess@fortlewis.edu.
6 Haley Pruitt
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Advertising Director
Change is in the air as this landmark school year marking the centennial anniversary is coming to a close. Final exams wait just around the corner, seniors are preparing for graduation, while many of us if not all are readily anticipating the arrival of summer. This being my first semester as Advertising Director, I want to thank everyone on staff for all the hard work they put forth in order to produce such a fabulous publication. Another group of individuals that deserve recognition for making sure the Independent continues to flourish are Dr. Leslie Blood, our Practicum Director, Dr. Faron Scott, our Ethical Advisor, Dr. Mika Kusar, our Business Advisor, and our newly appointed Advisor Mary Ann McCarthy. I also wanted to extend my gratitude to every business or organization that has advertised with the Independent this semester. Finally, a special thanks is always reserved for our readers, your loyalty is greatly appreciated. Best regards, Haley Pruitt Advertising Director
“We want to recognize the Senior editors and staff members that have put so much time, work and devotion into the Indy. Thank you Tanya Marchun, Yann Crist Evans, Gavin Wisdom, Laura Beth Waltz, Johnathan Van Orne, Robert Walsh, Alex Wissing and James Addoms. You have been a great asset to this publication. Good luck in all your adventures to come. We know you’ll do great! We will miss you!” - From The Independent News Magazine Staff
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OR
Whether on the free-throw line trying to make a point or sitting in an exam room staring at a problem, performance depends on how one deals with pressure. Both athletes and students can benefit from learning how to overcome pressure, and this skill can be advantageous in many arenas, said Jim Cross, a professor of exercise science at Fort Lewis College. In a recent study on athletes’ choke versus clutch performance, researchers found that athletes perform better when under pressure, according to Mark Otten, one of the researchers in the study, “Choking vs. Clutch Performance: A Study of Sport Performance Under Pressure” in The Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology. “Athletes thrive on pressure. It is a motivating factor for them,” said Susan McGinness, the director of Fort Lewis Counseling Center.
Athletes’ tendency to choke, versus give a clutch—or better than usual—performance depends on their personality, according to Otten. Based on the participant’s free-throw score and the results from their pre-test and post-test assessing their anxiety levels, researchers concluded that athletes responded positively—made more freethrows—when under pressure. Damien Clarke, the head women’s soccer coach at Fort Lewis, agreed with the study, explaining how the women’s soccer team would get better throughout the season with harder games and more pressure. “They do perform better in bigger games that have more pressure,” Clarke said. Cross agrees that an athlete’s level of play steps up in
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high-pressure situations. Athletes are drawn to competition because they have found some sort of intrinsic reward from it—like winning a game or race—that keeps them motivated, Cross said. There are few differences between the personalities of successful students and successful student athletes, McGinness said. There are the same pressures and anxieties in sports as there are in academics. Preparing for a big game can bring up the same anxiety as preparing for a final exam, McGinness said. Athletes are passionate about their sport, and passion is what fuels an athlete or student to do well at something, McGinness said. “The hard part is regulating that passion and not letting emotions get in the way,” McGinness said. Athletes and students have to use their anxiety if they want to succeed, McGinness said. Cross said one key factor in being able to handle pressure and anxiety is having a routine, both in training and studying. Routine is how and why athletes train or students study, and it develops a base of knowledge and trust in one’s self, Cross said. “Athletes have a faith in their routine, which allows them to trust themselves when it is game time and perform well under pressure,” Cross said. “Faith is the bridge between sport and religion,” Cross said. “Humans created religion to deal with fear the same way athletes use faith to deal with pressure and anxiety.” According to the study, an athlete’s successful performance under pressure in a sport is the result of reliance on implicit knowledge—knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person, like a language, riding a bike or algebra. Experts tend to rely more on implicit knowledge of a skill, while novices rely more on their explicit knowledge— knowledge that can be easily transmitted to others, according to the study. Athletes who rely on their natural skills are more successful than those who depend more on having someone coach them every step, Cross said. Researchers found that athletes could be trained to rely
on their perception of control rather than explicit knowledge when performing, whereas students may be told the same thing for successful performance under pressure on an academic test. McGinness agrees with the study and said that there are
few differences between successful students and successful athletes, especially when you look at their upbringing. “As a group, most of the athletes that I have worked with have a pretty good support system,” McGinness said. “Their parents are interested, and they are used to having people being invested in them,” “Usually there is some family member seeing that the kid gets to practice, someone who pays for the sport, the uniform, there is a lot of family involvement,” McGinness said. “Support like that is key.”
As well as athletes, students need this kind of support from family to form the skills to be able to structure their lives. “The world wants us to structure our lives,” she said. A student can develop structure many ways like managing time, making goals and knowing the steps to meet them, though a lot has to do with personality and upbringing, she said. Upbringing has a lot to do with everything, McGinness said. “It fosters drive which is important for students and athletes,” she said. Drive is what motivates successful athletes to practice. They then need an outlet to display their skills, Cross said. “Once they have mastered a skill, the act of doing it should be innate,” Cross said, the same goes for a student, if a student has studied enough and understands the material, then the test shouldn’t be stressful. “With enough practice, pressure becomes a nonfactor,” Cross said. “We have a saying in golf—trust your swing. Once you have mastered the skill you should not be thinking and analyzing your swing while you are swinging,” Cross said. “Students’ motivations aren’t much different from an athletes,” Cross said. “The thing that is different is that a student’s success isn’t public like it is with athletes, who are used to being in a public arena.” A student might receive a good grade on an important exam that means a lot to them personally, but it isn’t broadcasted like it is with an athlete’s success, which is often very public, Cross said.
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Campus
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ort Lewis College has elected Natalie Janes and Mike Kelly as student president and vice president. Elections took place on April 5 and 6, with students voting in Animas lounge as well as from computer labs around campus. “The campaigning went quite well,” said vice president-elect Mike Kelly. Some of the keys to Janes’ and Kelly’s success were their ability to campaign hard early on and their last-minute drive on election day to get as many votes as possible, Kelly said. “We wanted to make sure that this election was as legitimate as possible, and the best way to do that was to get as many students to vote as we could,” he said. Runners-up Tse Chi Chad Yen and Patrick Littlebear also felt that the election was a positive experience and that they made the most out of their campaign. Yen and Littlebear took pride in their ability to set a standard of sustainability with their campaign and to successfully spread their vision throughout campus, Littlebear said. The weekend before the election, Yen and Littlebear visited San Juan Dining every night to speak with students and reach out to them, Yen said. “What is important to us is that we shook hands with all the students there, shared our visions with each and every single one of them, and listened to their feedback and concerns with what we had to offer,” he said. President-elect Natalie Janes is a junior economics major who has served on the student senate for the past four semesters, Janes said. “I am a student at Fort Lewis because I am not just another number on a class roster, but rather I am a person that a professor actually knows,” she said. Janes and Kelly, as well as Littlebear and Yen, cited making the students comfortable to speak out and come forward to ASFLC as a major goal. As former senators, Janes, Kelly, and Yen have worked together in the past, Yen said. “Although we have not always agreed with each other’s opinions on the table, we have been able to respect our dissenting views and move forward as a team,” Yen said. “Ultimately the reason why we serve on the senate table is to serve the student body and the college.” Along with making students comfortable with ASFLC, student pride and involvement are two areas of student life that Janes and Kelly will work to develop, Kelly said. “I hope to improve school pride by expanding avenues of campus 6
entertainment to the best of my ability, push for more attendance at sporting events, and to strive for better communication between ASFLC, students, faculty, staff and administration,” he said. Extracurricular activities and student involvement are also important causes to the new executive team, he said. Getting as many students involved in as many campus activities as possible will make Fort Lewis a better school for everyone, Janes said. With several causes on their to-do list, the main concern for Janes and Kelly is the students’ issues. Their team will work to adapt to the changing and developing issues that come up throughout the year, Janes said. “I would honestly like to make Fort Lewis a school where all students feel comfortable enough to speak their minds about any issue, and allow me to fight for them on their behalf,” she said. Janes and Kelly will be available to students either in their office in the Student Union building or by email or phone, Kelly said. “We will do our best to always be available to students when they have concerns, and we invite all students to attend senate meetings on Wednesday nights to be informed on what’s happening on campus,” he said.
Three Students and their Senior Experience
By Dylan Leigh
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Trevor Ycas
When students are preparing to graduate, they are asked to complete a final project. This project can take many forms, but it is meant to be a culmination of their four years in college. These projects often take a full year or more, and are completed with the guidance and help of a faculty advisor. The Independent asked deans and professors to feature one exceptional student from each of Fort Lewis’ three schools who have outstanding senior seminar projects. What follows is a sneak peak at what they’ve been working on.
Paige Regan
massive literature review in order to learn how to design the project, which took three months,” he said. “Then I needed to research potential funding resources and apply for grants. I needed at least $3800.” After the grants were secured, data was collected on six tree samples, which consisted of tree cores that needed to be at least 200 years old, pre-dating mining. The cores were tested for seventeen toxic metals at the University of Arizona, he said. “We needed to process the data, but soon the impact of mining started to look clear,” he said. “While natural School of Natural and Behavioral Sciences events are capable of producing pulses of metals, mining sent the levels much higher.” Trevor Ycas is a graduating Envi T hese t race met a ls fou nd f rom ronmental Geology major who has been “It is really a great m ining a re dead ly to t he aqu at ic comnamed the geology student of the year. His feeling to be able to have mu nit y, a nd ca n a f fect water’s d r in ksenior project has taken a year to plan and a done this at Fort Lewis.” abi l it y, he sa id. year to implement. Ycas will be giving a presentation of “The idea started one day while I - Trevor Ycas his project to the Four Corners Geological Society, the Animas was eating a sandwich, and just staring at tree rings,” Ycas said. River Stakeholder Group, and the Honors Symposium for the “I wondered what information was in there.” School of Natural and Behavioral Sciences, and he is planning on Ycas said there are two goals of his study—the first is taking it to the National Geological Society. to see if tree rings record fluctuations in stream metal concentra He said that after graduation he plans to take a year or tions, and the second is to characterize the impact of mining on two off before graduate school to work for an environmental scistream metal content using those tree rings. ence consulting firm. Ycas collected the data in Prospect Gulch, immediately “It is really a great feeling to be able to have done this at across the valley from Silverton Mountain, he said. Fort Lewis,” he said. “No one has ever used the tree ring method to detect toxic metal levels in the San Juan Mountains,” he said. Dr. Ray Kenny from the geology department is the priSchool of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences mary advisor for this study. Erica Bigio from the University of Arizona has also been instrumental in this process, Ycas said. Paige Regan will be graduating this April with a degree in “After I found an advisor, I needed to conduct a English for secondary education. 8
Elizabeth Dejong
“Senior year is a scary experience, but also an empowering experience because you see all your work coming together,” Regan said. Regan started discussing the project in the fall in a linguistics class, she said. Regan wanted linguistic concepts in a book so that an early educator could use them, she said. A book like this was never encountered in all of their studies, and that’s why it had to be done, she said. Regan said that Ben Zerr, Sam Roberts and herself, along with their advisor, Ellen Hartsfield, are planning to publish the book, called Use Your Words: A Gazetteer’s Guide to Linguistics in June. “We are trying to play with the material to make concepts not as abstract so that anyone can understand them,” she said. “We are trying to validate every person’s identity as a linguist.” When the project started, everyone figured out what they could offer in terms of abilities and interests. Some of the concepts include the history of English, gender fashioning of language, propaganda, and humor, she said. “From comic strips to horoscopes, the book hopes to simplify these concepts so that anyone can understand them,” she said. “We want to establish some relevancy in terms of linguistics.” The book comments on the way language is used, and doesn’t make value judgments about language, she said. “The study of language is fascinating,” she said. “As humans, it can’t be overlooked.” Regan will begin student teaching at East High School in Denver this fall.
School of Business Administration Elizabeth Dejong will graduate this April, with a double major in European History and Accounting. “Elizabeth has been able to turn her passions at Fort Lewis College into a passion for success in life,” said Professor of Man-
agement Doug Lyon, who teaches Dejong’s senior seminar class. “I started w ith European histor y,” Dejong said. “But then I took an accounting class and just ran w ith it.” If she had gone to a different college, she doesn’t think she would have been able to tr y out different disciplines, she said. At Fort Lewis, students don’t have to feel stuck in one department, she said. “But senior year has been tough,” she said. “In my final year I have had to complete my business senior seminar, and since I’m an accountant major I need to do a senior audit of a small company.” Both projects are group projects that are done through computer simulations, she said. “Auditing is like editing a paper—you have to go through it again and again,” she said. “While it is tedious to go through each line of this company’s records and check them, the world will always need accountants.” Dejong said she gets business statements and then cross-references them with other information she is given to make sure that the company is following all the rules. In a business senior seminar, students have to set up a business and compete with other classmates within the computer simulation, she said. Each member of the group runs a particular segment of the business. Dejong said that the different responsibilities for the project include research and development, production, budgeting and marketing. “Our business is called Ferris, and we sell computers,” she said. “We have to make business decisions and see our decisions’ impacts over time.” After graduation, Dejong will be starting an accounting job in Albuquerque with the firm Moss Adams, a mid-level accounting firm that has medium-sized companies as its clients. “The firm has consistently hired people from Fort Lewis because of their well-rounded liberal arts background,” she said.
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Community
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wenty five years ago, a woman was found dead in a horse stall at the fairgrounds, where she had been living. When they found the woman, who had died of starvation, they saw a phrase she had written on the wall before her passing that said “nobody cares.” Manna Soup Kitchen Executive Director Sarah Comerford said a group of people who were appalled that such a thing could happen in the Durango community decided to start a soup kitchen. It was a way for them to try and fight the hunger problem that challenges so many people today. The soup kitchen started twenty five years ago from a van in a church parking lot, Comerford said. Since then it has moved from church to church, whether in a van in the parking lot, or a kitchen in a church basement. The current location was built nine years ago in 2002, all by volunteers from the community, Comerford said. The kitchen became a 501-c3 non-profit organization and is mainly run by volunteers. Warren Smith, the kitchen manager, said college students are starting to take advantage of the free meals. Smith said the students are starting to get over the stigma of eating at a soup kitchen and realizing that they are hungry and don’t care who knows or sees them at the soup kitchen. Comerford said they also have a lot of working poor in the community that have to decide between buying groceries or paying the electric bill. The soup kitchen started a sack lunch program for those who don’t have money or time to get lunch at work, Comerford said. Smith said that one of his interns informed him that some Durango High School students were getting free and reduced meals throughout the academic year, but once school is out, they are left to fend for themselves. Smith’s intern, who works with Big Picture, another local non-profit organization, got the message out that the Manna Soup Kitchen was a safe place to go,
Above: Freddie Chatto and Dennis Hogue at Manna Soup Kitchen. Left: Ruby Etter being served by a Manna staffer. Photos by Jordan Boudreaux Smith said. The sack lunches went up drastically from five hundred sack lunches to sixteen hundred sack lunches in a month, he said. Smith has also been taking sack lunches down to the skate park everyday and the reaction there is utter excitement, he said. “The kids will stop skating and all of them will sit down along the wall and just grub,” Smith said. “They’re really excited to eat after working up a sweat.” Comerford is currently working on grants to help out kids that drop off free and reduced lunches in the summer, he said. Smith said they are working on a backpacking program, which will provide nonperishable food for those that can’t make it to the kitchen or aren’t around for the sack lunches. Health codes dictate that sack lunches must be consumed within four hours before it has to be thrown out, Smith said. The food for the backpacking program is purchased through Care and Share which is associated with the food bank of the Rockies. Comerford said they had started a little “grub hub” in a shed next to the soup kitchen, but were unable to keep it running. They have recently teamed up with the sociology department on campus to start Fort Lewis’ own Grub Hub. The food banks are provided for by the Manna Soup Kitchen and also many stores around town such as City Market, Smith said. They helped set up the Grub Hub on campus but it has been really running itself as of late, he said. Manna soup kitchen goes through around twelve hundred pounds of food per month, Comerford said. Th is does not include donated non-perishables, fruit and produce provided by local farmers, and Manna’s own garden, which will be expanding three times its size over the summer, she said.
On a recent Monday afternoon, student senator Tse Chi Chad Yen is multi-tasking inside the Student Union. He fields interview questions while simultaneously recruiting passersby to vote in the student elections. Yen deftly explains the ins and outs and the pitfalls and excitements of a project he’s been working on in student government. The project Yen took on this year, along with two other Fort Lewis College students, was to figure out a way to install a Native American advisor to Fort Lewis College President Dene Thomas. The idea was to create a new position within the college administration that would always have the college’s Native American population in mind. Native Americans make up 22 percent of Fort Lewis’ student body. “I am a Chinese-American,” Yen said. “But the Native American culture reminds me of home. That’s why I wanted to be involved in this topic.” That idea was not just Yen’s. It was one of three initiatives Fort Lewis students decided should be the focus for the 201011 school year as part of the Student Opportunity Summit held every fall semester. The other two initiatives were to reduce bottled water on campus and to bring more local and healthy food into the campus food system.
Native American Advisor Yen said the first step was to determine what a Native American advisor would look like. He, along with Fort Lewis students Dawn Murphy and Tracey Williams, used Arizona State University as a model. They found that Arizona State has successfully utilized a single Native American advisor to the president, and this has in turn improved ASU Native American recruitment and retention, Yen said. Yen explained the cheaper alternative was to formulate a council that would advise administrators on Native American issues. He said that model had been successful on the Northern Arizona University campus. Along the way, problems arose with both the single advisor and committee ideas. “How realistic is it to create a new position?” Yen said. “We realized with the college’s financial situation it may not be feasible.” Yen said when he presented t he idea, t he college adv isor y panel voted aga inst hav ing a single Native A mer ican adv isor, probably due to f inancia l constraints. Currently, President Thomas is considering whether the committee model is a good idea. Yen said it will be
either the committee model or nothing. Yen said it’s crucial to have some sort of Native American advisor on the Fort Lewis campus, no matter what form that takes. “It has to do with cultural sensitivity and awareness,” he said. “It’s not about race.”
Local, Healthy Food Student senator Christine Myers spearheaded the campaign to bring more local and healthy food into the campus food system last semester. She is frustrated in the overall lack of progress, Myers said. “Quite frankly, I don’t think there’s been any real progress on the food sustainability front,” she said. She explained bringing local farmers into the equation is tough, as Fort Lewis food-provider Sodexo requires that farmers have big insurance policies that local farmers can’t afford. One solution Myers has worked on is to develop the Old Fort Lewis in Hesperus, and start a farm there that students could be a part of. That solution would allow Sodexo to have more control over food quality, Myers said. But efforts to get the Old Fort going have ground to a halt too. She explained that so far, the various costs of starting such a farm program have been too much. One possible solution is to find a separate entity, outside of Fort Lewis, to manage the Old Fort land, she said. Myers admits any solution on the food sustainability front will take time. “We can’t change Sodexo’s policy, but we’re looking at other options,” she said. “But that’s going to take a while.”
Eliminating Bottled Water Fort Lewis’ financial constraints have also limited the student-initiated call for cutting down on plastic bottle use on campus. Student body president Laura Beth Waltz said that the original idea to help cut down on plastic waste was to install hydration stations around campus. But that was deemed too expensive. Instead, Waltz said a small group of students who “felt really passionate about it,” have decided to focus more on educating people instead. Waltz said Fort Lewis Student Affairs has stepped in to provide educational movies, like “Tapped”, which was shown in the Chemistry Hall last Tuesday. “Every incoming student at orientation gets an aluminum bottle,” Waltz said. Next year, there will be more discussions and panel talks on various water and plastic waste issues, she said.
Editorials
By Rebecca Schild Several years ago, I went to graduate school to study environmental management and sustainability in Durham, North Carolina. Sitting in class, inundated with gloom and doom facts of the global environmental crisis, I found myself daydreaming about Too Many Puppies, a rock climb that I had almost done successfully at the Red River Gorge, 450 miles away. Consistently, I stared the quickdraw in the face as I went to do the crux move, knowing that I shouldn’t clip it until I finished the move and knowing that this was my last chance to climb this because I couldn’t justify the drive one more time, I then quickly froze up and grabbed the draw. Reluctantly resigned to the life of the weekend warrior, I gulped the faint hint of hypocrisy in my morning coffee as I drove no less than 100 miles each way to the closest climbing, Moore’s Wall, a place I didn’t even like because of how terrifying it was. The last thing I needed on a Saturday morning, after wreaking havoc to my brain calculating carbon emissions and energy efficiency, was to be on dangerous terrain fearing for my life. So I became a vegetarian and drove further west. Let me explain. I grew up in Boulder, CO, indoctrinated with an environmental, hippie philosophy within an upper class, homogenized bubble from an early age – reminiscent of Left Over Salmon’s satirical “Alfalfa’s.” After college came the part time life of a NOLS instructor, part time climbing dirt bag. Living out of my hybrid Prius with boyfriend and dog, I justified my disengagement with the “real world” and obsession with climbing by getting on my high horse of simple living, minimal impact, and integrity to my environmental values. As I drove East, leaving behind a litany of rock faces to explore, little did I know how much my need for climbing interfered with the box I had put myself in, labeled “idealistic steward of the earth.” Edward Abbey once wrote that, “Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good
bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself. If industrial man continues to expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making.” These words ring so true to my life. My inspiration comes from being outside and experiencing the beauty and awe of the natural world. Climbing helps me to explore vertical spaces in a way that is exhilarating and makes me feel alive. Yet I cannot claim that this is a low-carbon lifestyle. So, how do I rationalize my passion for traveling and rock climbing without calling myself an environmental hypocrite? There is no black and white in environmentalism. There is no judgment of right and wrong. We must accept that right now, we live in a system that supports single driver commutes, food that travels an average of 1,500 miles to our door and such a dependence on fossil fuels that we see the volatility of that resource impact everything we do. We must find our own environmental ethic and make decisions in our life that support it. We must work toward positive change while recognizing that there are trade-offs – we cannot view our actions as a sacrifice but rather a way to build a lifestyle that supports our environmental ethic. I cannot stop rock climbing simply because it leaves an impact. But I can be mindful of reusing waste, eating locally-grown food, living with less stuff, and choosing to live in a place where my passions and activities are more accessible. And most importantly, I believe that we must strive to connect with the wilderness and natural that is a necessity of the spirit, whether through our personal relationships, growing local food, examining a steaming compost pile, or hanging off the edge of a cliff, reveling in the vast expansiveness of the world we are blessed to be a part of.
Fort Lewis College Students and National Public Lands Day By Kathe Hayes, San Juan Mountains Association, Volunteer Program Director National Public Lands Day will take place on Sept. 24, 2011, and is a project of the National Environmental Education Foundation. It is a chance to help keep our public lands beautiful. Each year thousands of Americans will participate in the nation’s largest handson volunteer effort in order to improve and enhance the public lands. Last year 150,000 volunteers participated at more than 2,000 locations across the country. Their efforts to build trails, remove invasive species, paint signs, beautify landscaping, and remove trash totaled millions of dollars in improvements. The day is also set aside as a fee-free day in many federally-managed lands. Volunteers who participate are given coupons for a second free entry into their favorite federal public land areas that have entrance fees. This year marks the eleventh annual celebration of the National Public Lands Day project on the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument. The event is co-organized by the San Juan Mountains Association and the Bureau of Land Management. The San Juan Moun12
tains Association is a non-profit 501c3 dedicated to education and the stewardship of our public lands. The work projects are designed to provide an education for the participants. The Monument is home to the largest concentration of cultural dwellings in the country. The work projects are often centered around the protection of these sites. During the 10 years working on the Monument, volunteers, including Fort Lewis students, have contributed over 1000 hours of time rehabilitating illegal routes, removing old fence, disassembling non-functional water catchments, building new fence, delineating trails at cultural sites, spring enhancements, backfilling structures and removing old trash. Volunteers like the hands-on projects and the opportunity to get down and dirty. Perhaps the dirtiest project to date was removing a water catchment located in the Goodman Point fire area. The old rubber catchment was full of soot from the fire and had to be cut with razor knives. Volunteers removed the pieces by hand, making blackened faces and clothing
the order of the day. Fort Lewis College students have participated as volunteers on National Public Lands Day at the Monument for the past four years, thanks to Brett Davis from Outdoor Pursuits. Their contributions have been invaluable, not to mention inspiring, as the younger generation chips in to protect and care for our public lands. The volunteers at these projects are well taken care of. They meet for carpooling and are fed hot coffee and breakfast burritos. After a morning of hard work, they are treated to a gourmet lunch and then back to work to finish up the projects. Volunteers are given collectable t-shirts and other small gifts in addition to their free entry coupons. The projects are so popular the same volunteers return year after year. Some participants travel great distances to be part of the team on the Monument. For more information please email kathe@ sjma.org or call Brett Davis at Outdoor Pursuits at 970.247.7037. For more information about SJMA; www.sjma.org or see us on Facebook.
SPORTS STATS Women’s Softball Schedule: 4/22/2011 4/23/2011 4/30/2011 5/1/2011
Western New Mexico, Away Western New Mexico, Away Western New Mexico, Away Western New Mexico, Away Colorado State- Pueblo, Home Colorado State- Pueblo, Home Colorado State- Pueblo, Home Colorado State- Pueblo, Home
12:00 p.m. 2:00 p.m. 11:00 a.m. 1:00 p.m. 12:00 p.m. 2:00 p.m. 11:00 a.m. 1:00 p.m.
Women’s Softball Results: 4/8/2011
4/9/2011
Regis @ Fort Lewis
L 0-2
Regis @ Fort Lewis
L 3-4
Mines @ Fort Lewis
L 5-9
Mines @ Fort Lewis
L 0-3
4/16/2011 Adams State @ Adams State
4/17/2011
W 11-4
Adams State @ Adams State
L 1-9
Adams State @ Adams State
L 1-11
Adams State @ Adams State
L 5-13 13
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- Permaculture Design Certificate - Outdoor Education - Workshops: Cob Building, Beekeeping
- Ecopsychology - Native Plants
University Centers of the San Miguel 970-369-5255 www.ucsanmiguel.org
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Moving into a new place after school is out?
Leaving for the summer?
Store your stuff at Affordable Mini-Storage for the summer and take advantage of our student rates! Located 5 minutes from FLC campus (down the north hill, right on Florida Rd, left on County Rd 250 1.3 miles) Perfect student sizes (4x4, 4x6, 4x8, 10x10) Mention this ad for a 10% student discount We can have you checked in over the phone in 5 minutes AND we accept credit cards Secure storage and you control your unit with your own lock Locally owned by a former FLC graduate Please call Affordable Mini-Storage at (970) 259-2371 1378 County Road 250 Durango, CO 81301
Free month with move-in! • • • •
5x10 for only $45 a month clean premise w/security gate Friendly service Located on HWY 160 near the hospital next to the Fun Center
Call 970-382-9400 for details!
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Congratulations FLC Graduates!
Planned Parenthood is offering $10 STD testing & $10 HIV testing on April 26 & April 29 46 Suttle Street Durango
Get Ready for Summer Festivals and Travel with Easy, Stylish Apparel for Your Upcoming Adventures!
Summer Dresses, Blouses and Skirts Fashionable Purses and Bags Men's Casual Shirts, Shorts and Pants Colorful Swimsuits and Sarongs
970.247.3002 For more information visit www.pprm.org
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