Semester in the west is the Whitman college program that we learned about when the students came to film the beaver festival for the climate change documentary. Sarah Koenigsberg and Suzanne Fouty were teaching there that year, Students spend 90 days in the field, camping under the stars each night. i got to meet an amazing array of enrollees the year i went to utah to speak at their beaver festival. It’s a huge operation and undertaking, almost like a military base, jon and i waited in line for our plates of – that night jumbalaya – cooked outdoors by students and sat under the stars in folding chairs around the fire in a huge ring of future congresswomen or scientists who were camping in little tents spread around the rocky terrain.
Whitman College’s Semester in the West is an interdisciplinary field program focusing on public lands conservation and rural life in the interior American West. Our objective is to know the West in its many dimensions, including its diverse ecosystems, its social and political communities, and the many ways these ecosystems and communities find expression in regional environmental writing and public policy. The program first ran in 2002, and is scheduled for the fall semester every other year in even years.
i mention that now because their recent podcast is about our favorite subject. Young Eliza Van Wetter conducts the interview and our good friend Ben is a bright spot in the middle. Just so you know i can personally attest that every single one of the SITW students, women and men, look just like some variation of Eliza; Bursting with wholesome energy, living out of a backpack, and requiring neither showers nor running water to make their eager difference in the world. For the life of me I cannot figure out how to link directly to the audio, but if you click on the sound bar you’ll be brought to their page where you can listen directly. Its worth the effort.
i’m sharing this great photo from Quonquont farms Massachusetts. The wrote on their facebook page ‘Beach weather—Melting ice gave the Quonquont beavers a chance to get out of the lodge and enjoy some sunshine this afternoon’. i just love how luxurious that fur looks.
