Intangible (Fall 2024) by Northland College

INTANGIBLE

VOICE FOR WILDNESS AND WONDER

INTANGIBLE

A VOICE FOR WILDNESS AND WONDER

OUR MISSION

The Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute prepares people to meet the challenges of the future with intellectual and artistic creativity by promoting and protecting experiences of wildness and wonder.

To realize its mission, the Institute hosts LoonWatch, the Timber Wolf Alliance, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Awards, and numerous events for young people and adults.

LOONWATCH

LoonWatch protects common loons and their aquatic habitats through education, monitoring, and research.

TIMBER WOLF ALLIANCE

With a particular focus on Wisconsin and Michigan, the Timber Wolf Alliance uses science-based information to promote human coexistence with wolves and an ecologically-functional wolf population in areas of suitable habitat.

SIGURD OLSON NATURE WRITING AWARDS

Established in 1991, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Awards honor the literary legacy of Sigurd Olson by recognizing and encouraging contemporary writers who capture the spirit of the human relationship with the natural world and who promote awareness, preservation, appreciation, or restoration of the natural world for future generations.

YOUTH AND ADULT PROGRAMS

To promote experiences of wildness and wonder for young people and adults, the Institute offers annual internships, camps, clinics, lectures, conferences, retreats, and outings.

THE COVER

Northern lights photo by Tom Klein.

Editing by Katherine Jenkins

Design by Brian Donahue, bedesign, inc.

FALL 2024

INTRODUCTION

We need both the state of wildness and wonder as well as the experience of wildness and wonder for our personal wellbeing and the health of the planet. In my humble home I often wake to the yips, barks and howls of coyote. I walk outside each morning to a sea of tall grasses, towering white pines, spikey spruce and calls of crow. And I consider, would the feeling of happiness have come so quickly to me if I had not climbed the smooth branches of the magnolia tree in my front yard each day as a child? Would the playful curiosity within me still have a home if I had not seen the Rocky Mountains when I was sixteen years old and learned the “true” meaning of awesome? Would I feel compelled to bow to the call of the loon across a misty lake at sunrise if I’d not had the experience of portaging and paddling a canoe through the Boundary Waters or a sea kayak over the frigid June water of Lake Superior? It is in these moments of experiencing both wildness and wonder that keeps me in close relation to daily gratitude and keeps a smile on my face.

We all know that it is in our early years that we are filled with wonder and curiosity. It is still within us as we grow older. It is our opportunity to nurture this daily. You will be reminded of this in the following essays, poetry and photographs.

This fall, we return to our roots, the place of curiosity and wonder inherent in us as children, our past. It is through connecting with the stories and experiences of our past that we can often better understand our history and live into the present. In these stories you will also hear the theme of the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute. In this time of transition of Northland College and the SOEI we return to the roots of the Institute. We lean on the past for wisdom, reconnection and support. It is in this spirit that the contributors to this issue of Intangible are former directors of the SOEI. I feel certain their stories will move you.

As you journey through Fall 2024 Intangible , we invite you to remember your own connections with wildness and wonder as our writers do here.

KATHERINE JENKINS DIRECTOR FOR THE

SIGURD OLSON ENVIRONMENTAL INSTITUTE

WAKING TO WONDER

It is shortly after 7:00 p.m., and my partner and I are lying in our tent, pretending to be asleep. Earlier in the day, we drove to a Boundary Waters put-in near Ely, Minnesota, loaded our canoe with food and equipment for a ten-day trip with our eleven-monthold daughter, and launched. We didn’t paddle far, but we found a nice campsite, tucked into balsams and spruce.

As young parents steeped in the prescriptive advice of parenting books, our plan was to maintain as closely as possible our daughter’s regular evening routine so that she would fall quickly to sleep and be well-rested for our second day of paddling. It seemed like a good plan, and we followed it diligently, preparing and eating dinner on schedule, changing Abby into pajamas, reading stories together in the tent, and now, modeling

the behavior we expected by pretending to be asleep.

But instead of nestling in and falling asleep as prescribed, Abby is busily scooting around the tent. She finds my brimmed hat and tries it on. She unzips a duffel bag and removes some items, examining each one as she does. Her exploration, over, under, around, continues for a maddingly long time. Until, mid-scoot, she collapses, immediately sound asleep.

The lesson Abby taught us about parenting that night is one that Rachel Carson shared with a previous generation of parents in a 1956 magazine article titled “Help Your Child to Wonder.” In this article, Carson writes that a “child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement,” but observes that parents often deny their children experiences that reinforce this

TEXT AND PHOTOS BY ALAN BREW

Alan Brew paddles while his daughter studies the water

wonder “because they are inconvenient, interfering with bedtime or involving wet clothing.” As a consequence, Carson laments, the wonder of children, is too “often dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.”

What Abby needed from us as parents that firstnight in the Boundary Waters was not to be confined by a nylon tent and a predictable routine, but instead to be released into the wild, awe-inspiring wonders of a darknight on the shadowy shore of a granite-rimmed lake.

Over the years, I’ve found this lesson is a challenging one to implement. Rather than exploration and discovery, our schools prioritize career-oriented skills development. And our media relentlessly promotes the accumulation of material wealth as the only path to success and satisfaction. To embrace and prioritize the natural, mysterious wonders of the world is to be out of step with the majority.

And yet, careers are all too frequently cut short by the whims of corporate executives and the material wealth with which we surround ourselves is often lost in a moment, swept away by financial reversals, storm surges, fire. In the face of these realities, we need more than ever, in Carson’s words again, “a sense of wonder so indestructible that it [lasts] throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

Fortunately, the innate curiosity of children and young people, their penchant for wildness, and their delight in the wonders of the world, continue to thwart societally prescribed expectations and through their examples I find hope.

I started a new job recently, and during my interview I toured a lab devoted to counting and identifying zooplankton found in water samples from Lake Superior. The passion and excitement for this work was palpable in the young woman leading this portion of the tour, but I didn’t appreciate its significance until, a couple of months later, I was looking for photos on a shared drive and discovered a folder labeled simply “Zooplankton.”

When I opened the folder, I found image file after image file carefully labeled with unfamiliar names: Brachionusbidentata, Cyclops-strenuus, Rhynchotalona-longiseta.

I clicked on a file labeled Diaphanosoma fluviatile, and when the image appeared on my large monitor, I understood the life-affirming delight I’d seen in the eyes of my young colleague and woke, again, to the wonder that surrounds each and every one of us every moment that we’re awake to see it.

Alan Brew works at the Lake Superior Research Institute, where he manages programs for their education and research vessel, the Sadie Ann . Alan served as executive director of the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute from July 2017 to July 2024.

Zooplankton Diaphanosoma fluviatile, a freshwater ctenopod, habitus in lateral view.

Brew making eco art on the beach

SMALL INTERACTIONS CAN PRODUCE BIG EFFECTS

I like to lie on sandstone outcrops next to Lake Superior and listen to the Big Lake’s “voice.” Occasionally, the steady rhythm of waves is interrupted by a rogue wave that splashes over me. A rogue wave forms when several small waves combine. I now see that, just as small events in nature can spur rogue waves, interactions among people can produce big effects, too.

When the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute was founded in 1972, its mission was “dissemination of environmental and social knowledge and the encouragement of practices that will protect and preserve the unique character of our homeland here in the North.” Institute leaders soon learned that simply providing good information about an issue failed to effect change. Real changes require trusting relationships, too. The daily work of the Institute involves building such relationships, and these interactions can produce big effects.

TEXT AND PHOTOS BY KIM BRO

Kim Bro and his daughter at Otter Island 2023

For example, in 1974 a shoreland property owner on Madeline Island, came to the Institute when I was an intern and asked for help in dealing with Lake Superior’s high water levels that nearly flooded her home. Other groups around the lake also complained that holding back water in Lake Superior to reduce erosion damages on the lower lakes was unfairly damaging the Big Lake.

The Institute served as a voice for citizen groups trying to influence national and binational agencies. Years later, these agencies asked the Institute to help encourage citizen participation in developing the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement and later in the Binational Program for Lake Superior. Daily small interactions among people produced a big effect. The Institute brought a variety of groups together around common concerns.

In 1993, the Institute’s reputation attracted the attention of the Rainforest Alliance. The Alliance was launching a worldwide program to promote sustainable forest management. The Institute convened groups of scientists, foresters, and environmentalists to develop a system to assess sustainable forestry in the Lake States. The Institute then led certification of one million acres of forestland. These forests are now part of the Forest Stewardship Council’s network of independently certified

forests. The FSC label is a widely recognized mark of sustainable forest management. Institute interactions with people led to big effects on forest management.

The Institute’s citizen science programs LoonWatch and Timber Wolf Alliance had similar origins from citizens’ calls for help. Today part of Northland College’s “brand” are the centers that connect college faculty, staff and students with “our homeland here in the North.”

The Institute’s original mission is now embraced by the entire college community.

When I wrote to Sigurd Olson in 1973 asking for career advice, he encouraged me to contact the Institute and emphasized that “conservation is more than saving rocks and trees and waters and mountains; it is saving the spirit of man.” In many years of working with the Institute , I learned that, at the heart of these “waves” of human interactions is the quality of our relationships with the people and places of the North Land.

With encouragement from Sigurd Olson, Kim Bro volunteered after college as an intern at the Institute in 1973-74 and 1976. He later served on the Institute’s advisory board from 1977-1994, on the college’s board of trustees from 1994-96, and as Institute director from 1996-2002.

SOEI Staff Retreat 1998 at Listening Point

RETURN TO ROBINSON LAKE

TEXT AND PHOTOS BY MARK PETERSON

The following baccalaureate speech was given by Mark Peterson, former Director of the SOEI, to the Northland College graduating class of 2017.

Good morning 2017 graduates, families, friends, Northland College faculty and staff, on this celebratory day. The reading for this morning’s service – in keeping with our celebratory mood – is from one stanza in Mary Oliver’s poem, “Sometimes.” She writes:

INSTRUCTION FOR LIVING A LIFE:

Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

Ms. Oliver puts great emphasis on the importance of paying attention and being open to astonishment as essential elements for living a full life. In my life’s work in environmental education, we call this tendency in some people a sense of wonder – a theme Sigurd Olson often wrote about. Socrates told us over 2000 years ago that, “Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.” But wonder gets short shrift in our world today and thee sense of wonder is often dulled in many people sometime after college graduation. Thus, I wish this morning to hold wonder up and see why Oliver, Olson and Socrates, among others, describe it as life enriching.

Wonder may be the closest experience we have to experiencing magic. We don’t see things we would describe as magic in our everyday existence. It is discovering those “ordinary miracles” that surround us each day and causes us to be amazed, to be in awe, to marvel. Wonder has been described as a tingle in the spine, the jolt and the jar, the gape and the gawk, the thrill, the epiphany leading to astonishment and awe.

Class of 2017, Northland College afforded you many opportunities to wonder in the classroom and outdoors. Think back over these past four years. When was a moment you caught yourself silently exclaiming, “Whoa!?” Something that seemed almost magical.

Rachael Carson believed that there is value in looking for awe and beauty in nature – that it leads to spiritual renewal, inspiring thoughts, and deeper understandings to the adventure of life. In 1956, before she wrote her famous book Silent Spring, she published an essay about the sense of wonder that was inspired at her beloved coastal cabin in Maine. She wrote:

“For most of us, knowledge of our world comes largely through sight, yet we look about with such unseeing eyes that we are partially blind. One way to open your eyes to unnoticed beauty is to ask yourself, ‘What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?

I remember a summer night when such a thought came to me strongly. It was a clear night without a moon. With a friend, I went out on a flat headland. We lay and looked up at the sky and the millions of stars that blazed in darkness…my companion and I were alone with the starts. I have never seen them more beautiful, the misty river of the Milky Way flowing across the sky, the patterns of the constellations standing out bright and clear, a blazing planet low on the horizon. Once or twice a meteor burned its way into the earth’s atmosphere.

It occurred to me that if this were a sight that could be seen only once in a century or even once in a human generation, this little headland would be thronged with spectators. But it can be seen many nights in any year, and so the lights burned in the cottages and the in habitants probably gave not a thought to the beauty overhead, and because they could see it almost any night perhaps they will never see it.”

She concludes:

“It is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.”

Oftentimes wonder grabs us unexpectedly, usually when we’ve taken time out to slow down, and have temporarily simplified our lives, such as when traveling through wildness. This was the experience of Sigurd Olson on a trip in Quetico Provincial Park. One evening from his island campsite on Robinson Lake He paddled his canoe to the lake’s eastern shore. From there he climbed a ridge that had an expansive western view of the wilderness. He would write about his transformative experience 30 years later in his first book, The Singing Wilderness.

“When I reached the bald knob of the peak the sun was just above the horizon, a flaming ball ready to drop into the dusk below. Far beneath me on a point of pines reaching into the lake was the while inverted V of my tent. It looked very tiny down there where it was almost night.

As I watched and listened, I became conscious of the slow, steady hum of millions of insects and through it the calling of the white throats and the violin notes of the hermit thrushes. But it all seemed very vague from that height and very far away, and gradually they merged one with another, blending in a great enveloping softness of sound no louder, it seemed, than my breathing.

The sun was trembling now on the edge of the ridge. It was alive, almost fluid and pulsating, and as I watched it sink I thought that I could feel the earth turning from it, actually feel its rotation. Over all was the silence of the wilderness and that sense of oneness which comes only when there are no distracting sights or sounds, when we listen with inward ears and see with inward eyes, when we feel and are aware with our entire beings rather than our sense.”

I had always thought of a sense of wonder being singular; we sense one incredible thing. But in the fall of 2015 I began to think of it differently. Gary Ferguson came to our campus to accept that year’s Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award for his book, The Carry Home. In his acceptance he told us that he had once worked on a project that required him to read more than 1000 nature myths from around the globe. As he neared completion, he realized that nearly every tale pointed to at least one of three intangibles that people – spanning countless generations – considered essential for living well. They are beauty, mystery and

the sense of community. It strikes me that Sig’s Robinson Lake experience had all these elements.

Beauty may be the easiest to experience because its all around us and comes in an infinite number of forms.

Like beauty, the mysterious is also ever-present as it was at Robinson Lake as Sig felt the unmistakable presence of a greater spirit.

Finally, there is community. In writing about his experience, Sig identifies “oneness” to describe his feelings. Oneness too is a fact of our existence, although we tend to emphasize differences and don’t often think of our kinship with all of life. John Muir captured oneness in an often-quoted passage from, My First Summer in the Sierra.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

Sages through the ages have sensed unity as a fundamental truth. Artists help us to perceive this unity and feel it in our soul.

Beauty, mystery, and community – these elements of life surround us, but we pay little attention. For we live in a time when our politics are filled with division and discord, and many have great cynicism about our institutions. We hear too frequently of tragedy from our global village and can’t help but be impacted by the sadness and suffering. And it is the Age of the Anthropocene – the 6th great extinction – when every living system is declining – and the rate is accelerating. Some people tell us that the world will never be more beautiful than it is today.

Socrates was right: “Wonder IS the beginning of wisdom.” Mary Oliver, Rachael Carson, Sig Olson, and others admonish us to arouse our sense of wonder, for the foundation of learning is cradled in what we love. And what we love, we strive to preserve. Let us make the effort to pay attention and be astonished at the wonders all about us. And tell about then. Let us return time and again to our own Robinson Lake experience that frame our love for the planet and our inspiration for its care.

Mark Peterson, Ph.D., was associate and executive director at the SOEI from 1984 to 1991 and 2012 to 2017. During his tenure, the Timber Wolf Alliance, Apostle Islands School and SONWA programs were founded, programs that continue today.

IMPACT AND INFLUENCE OF A BACKYARD WILDERNESS

Fall Leaves

I took this photo after it rained. The flat light from the cloudy sky helped to accentuate the water droplets on the leaves.

“The simplicity of the wilderness life can be a profound source of happiness. To see a sunset over the hills, to feel the wind in your face, to hear the call of a wild bird—these things bring a sense of joy that nothing material can.”

—Sigurd Olson Wilderness Days (1972)

Snow Mushrooms

I took this photo at night in front of my house. We had a gentle snowfall that left more than a foot of snow. A pair of tree stumps and a septic pipe created the “mushroom stems” and the light snow created the mushroom cap. A motion sensor light on the tree behind the “mushrooms” created the perfect light to photograph the snow mushrooms at night.

PHOTO ESSAY BY STEVE SANDSTROM

Crawfish

One of the things that I love most about walking in the woods is that you never know what you might find. This photo of the shed exoskeleton of a crayfish hanging from a Thimbleberry twig is a great example. How in the world did this piece of a crayfish skeleton end up in the middle of a boreal forest!

“As I sat there, I experienced the same sense of peace and tranquility that had always come when I was alone in the woods, the feeling of timelessness that is the very essence of wilderness. It was as though the years had rolled back, and I was again a boy in love with the freedom of the hills and lakes.”

—Sigurd Olson Reflections from the North Country (1976)

Tree Frogs

Doe

It’s amazing sometimes how White-Tailed Deer can stand so still and allow you to approach so close.

—Sigurd Olson Reflections from the North Country (1976)

Gray Tree Frogs (Hyla versicolor) are quite common in Wisconsin. Their ability to change color to match their surroundings is astonishing. But seeing an albino Gray Tree Frog is very rare! Their vocalizations often come from high in the trees and are often mistaken for bird calls. All three of these photos were taken within walking distance of my home in Brickyard Creek, just north of Bayfield, Wisconsin.

“There is a need for a place of quiet, a place where the beauty and the voices of the land and water speak only to the inner spirit, where the mind and the soul are not distracted by conflicting demands, but are free to concentrate on the great mysteries of being.”

—Sigurd Olson Listening Point (1958)

Steve Sandstrom served as director and interim director of the SOEI from 2001-2003. He lives on the shores of Lake Superior among the maple trees, frogs and mushrooms who inspire him.

SEARCHING FOR WONDER

TEXT AND PHOTOS BY TOM KLEIN

I know when I first felt it: that intoxicating feeling of what Sigurd Olson called the sense of wonder. It was deep in my childhood on a sandstone bluff roughly 100 feet above the Wisconsin River, about 15 miles south of Portage. When I was eight years-old, my parents bought an old cabin on a spectacular 40-acre parcel of woods and cliffs. It was a short walk through the woods to get to the lookout where I could see several miles up and down the river. Over big chunks of my childhood summers my family stayed “at the cottage” and every day I walked alone to that spot, just to soak in the view and the infinite quiet. It was mine. And I loved it. Three or four years later, which puts us into the mid-1950s, there was a lot of talk about some new highway. Apparently in an office thousands of miles away federal highway planners were mapping a new interstate highway, Interstate 90. What were the odds? Apparently just right. That damn highway that I and millions of others have benefited from over the past sixty years was mapped right through our property, my Huck Finn paradise. That gorgeous sandstone bluff, a sort of mini-Wisconsin Dells without the people, would be the anchor for the new bridge over the river. It was a big deal. And it did happen. By 1962 that section of the interstate and the big bridge were opened. I felt attacked by progress. Along with the bluff, a chunk of my childhood was destroyed. We had moved the cottage to the edge of our acreage. It was less than a hundred yards from the highway and the dishes rattled whenever trucks (almost constantly) rumbled by. I was stubborn. Having access to a boat, I just moved my base of operations. Almost every day I got away from the bridge and headed upriver to where Duck Creek flowed into the Wisconsin. It was a wild wetland area. Perfect. I often camped (always solo) on the high ground above the creek. It was my new Huck Finn paradise. Short lived though. After a couple of years of hunting and fishing there, I saw a lot of flagging tape and numbered posts. It didn’t feel right. And it wasn’t. A different set of planners, this time sitting in Madison, Wisconsin, designated my new redoubt as the site for a 1000-megawatt coal-fired power plant—the Columbia Energy Center. My refuge would become Lake Columbia, a cooling lake, complete with planted hybrid bass, a

Frankenstein blend of white bass and striped bass, now long gone. More progress. Another tactical retreat. It was time I headed further north, much further. In the summer of 1965 with a high school buddy, I loaded up my ’53 Chevy with camping equipment, fishing tackle and strapped our early model 17’ Grumman aluminum canoe on the roof and headed to Ely, Minnesota for my first trip into the Quetico-Superior, an area a bit bigger than my Duck Creek retreat by a couple of million acres. Picking up some supplies at Bill Rom’s Canoe Country Outfitters, I chanced upon Sigurd Olson’s book The Singing Wilderness. Obviously, it fit the trip. Reading it at campsites along the famed Hunter’s Island route, paddling through Moose, Agnes, Kawnipi and dozens of other wilderness lakes, the book was more than inspiring. It was a revelation. The old spark from the sandstone bluff caught fire, becoming a bonfire and eventually leading me to the Sigurd Olson Institute in Ashland, Wisconsin where I worked for about a decade; Sigurd Olson, the author, became Sig, a mentor. All these years later I still often ask myself: “What would Sig have thought of this?”

I know he would have appreciated my continual quest for wilderness and wonder. I have canoed many far northern rivers, going right to the Arctic Ocean on the Coppermine and paddling big chucks of the Thelon and the Dubawnt rivers. I’ve traveled by Twin Otter to the top of Ellesmere Island and covered much of the Arctic, fished the Tree River where it enters the Arctic Ocean, hiked in Greenland and explored many of the Arctic Islands. Always searching for that sense of wonder. I think I’ve found it. For the past thirty years I’ve spent every summer at a fishing lodge right on the 60th parallel that my wife and I purchased to get closer to true north. Our closest neighbor to the south is 50 blissful miles away; to the north it’s 500. I hope I’ve finally outdistanced progress, staying ahead of the planners in small offices in urban jungles. I’ll keep that spark alive. It all started on that sandstone bluff so many years ago. Thanks, Sig, for helping me see the light and the wonder, and hear the singing.

Tom Klein served as director of the SOEI from 19791985. In 1985 he founded Northword Press. In 1997 he purchased Scott Lake Lodge, a fishing lodge in northern Saskatchewan where he spends his summers.

POETRY

BY KATE LIDFORS MILLER

Rain Song

When thunder growled and lightening struck the lake in front of me, the withholding clouds opened, pouring their blessed water upon the hardened ground. A watery veil blended bay and sky bathing all I could see in translucent light. The sound of steady rain said all is well, and all will be well.

I felt the earth soften and open to receive. I saw the poplars lift their leaves and the soft boughs of the Norway spruce relax, accepting. This dry season slipped away while the waters of my body moved with the swells of the storm. I released the breath I’d held so long, my heart washed and clean.

After Sauna

If your bare feet have pressed the snow as naturally as moccasins on forest floor, your skin wide open to the sky, naked to the stars, no different than the first time you undressed before your lover, though the air is colder, but you wrap yourself in the darkness of boreal spruce, roots sunk deep in geologic time, branches piercing the cloud scrim backlit by the moon, and you are not cold, but stilled, radiant–then you have pierced the latitudes of being, your own light answering the darkness, your own heat signaling the spheres.

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire*

On a trillium washed morning honeysuckle tossed against blue sky an animal lies dead at woods’ edge.

Ears once turned toward me could almost be alive, fur sun-warmed, brown, but eyes empty, face down body melting into soil.

I know this creature. Once we stared into each other’s distance, took the other’s measure across a giant basswood limb I claimed as my place to lean and dream.

At that moment I lost possession of the tree. A fisher had come to tame old pastures and seared my human memory’s retina with the immanence of wild.

Still the leaning basswood holds the fisher’s presence, as does the morning air and maggots turning life to life.

Everywhere I stand is holy ground.

* Title from Gerard Manley Hopkins

Kate Lidfors Miller served as executive director of SOEI from 1991-95. Kate has published poetry and articles in diverse publications and is currently preparing a collection of poems for publication.

PHOTO BY CLAIR EMMONS

REFLECTIONS FROM THE SOEI

TOGETHER WE CARRY SIGURD OLSON’S LEGACY FORWARD

“It is warming to see how connected Loon Rangers are to the loons and the surrounding environment. They become very in tune with all the little things that may go unnoticed in day-to-day life, which is very valuable to science, but also one’s personal connection to the natural world.” —Adri Losey, Senior at Northland College

“I was able to get students in my Wetlands class out in canoes in Fish Creek Sloughs. Without the help of the SOEI Logistics Support Center, exploring Fish Creek Sloughs by canoe was previously not in the cards for my courses. Not only was canoeing a fun way to explore the ‘freshtuary’ that we all drive by so often students were also able to get experience collecting data on aquatic plants. We now have the start of a long-term study we can repeat in future years, so I give credit to the staff at the LSC for helping me engage students in science and place-based education.”

—Sarah Johnson, Professor of Natural Resources at Northland College

“Thank you so much to all of you for making the weekend special and for teaching us all about this truly remarkable animal!” —Dana Herman, Wolf Symposium 2024

“My Outdoor Pursuits trip made me feel so much more connected to the outside world that I am studying about at Northland.” —NC student, Outdoor Pursuits trip 2024

“I was in awe of the tombolo and how the environment changes throughout the forest.” —7th grader Westfield School District, Apostle Islands School 2024

“On the most recent retreat I led in September one of the participants said that she had seen the stars reflected in Lake Namekagon the night before. After the last meditation on the last night of the retreat we all went out on to the deck of the Boathouse to see what we could see. To our great surprise we found the reflections of the stars shining ephemerally in the lake. It was amazing and really beyond words, seeing the stars in the lake.”

—Jodi Supanich, Adjunct Meditation Professor, Forest Lodge Retreat Fall 2024

“The Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award reflects Sigurd’s lyrical style of writing about the bond between humanity and the natural world. The winners of the Adult and the Children’s award continue the theme. As society changes, too often as humanity distances from each other and the natural world, SONWA books offer the opportunity to rekindle old bonds, healing bonds with the world.” —Jan Penn, SONWA Reading Committee Member

Learn more about leaving a legacy gift to the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute. Visit northlandlegacy.org to help us keep the wilderness and wonder alive for future generations.

northland.edu

“I understood the life-affirming delight I’d seen in the eyes of my young colleague and woke, again, to the wonder that surrounds each and every one of us every moment that we’re awake to see it.” ALAN BREW

Photo by Katherine Jenkins