By Hanna Wheeler

Julie Zickefoose is one of the lucky few who are gutsy enough to make a living— and a difference— by doing something they love.

She spends most of each day walking, observing, sketching and painting the inhabitants of 80-acre nature sanctuary in the Appalachian foothills of southeast Ohio. Her glowing watercolors and personal essays reflect careful attention and joy.

“You can reach a lot of people through writing and art,” she said. “The world is made up of so many moving parts. If I can give somebody a deeper connection to what they’re seeing outside the window, that’s a good day’s work.”

Julie always knew she wanted to be an illustrator and wanted to work in conservation. What she didn’t know was how to combine the two. After working for a non-profit for a number of years, she decided to quit and give it a go as a freelance artist.

“I realized that if I was going to starve, I might as well starve on my own rather than letting some nonprofit starve me,” she said. “I house-sat for people. I moved 10 times in one year. I lived very simply and pursued the study of nature. I’m so glad that I did that instead of saying, ‘I need to rent an apartment and get a car.’”

Now, she is the author of Enjoying Bluebirds More, Natural Gardening for Birds and a collection of paintings and essays titled, Letters from Eden: A Year at Home in the Woods. She is the illustrator of Restoring North America’s Birds: Lessons from Landscape Ecology and she served as a primary illustrator of the 17-volume work, The Birds of North America.

Julie travels around the country giving lectures on birding, painting and writing. She has a regular column in Bird Watchers Digest and her commentary airs on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

Julie attributes her narrative gift to her father. “Listening to him, I figured out how to construct a story,” she said.

Her father also instilled in her a love of nature. The youngest of five, Julie spent her childhood following him around the yard. “My dad grew up on a farm in Iowa. He was a real outdoors guy and great gardener,” she said.

Julie taught herself to be an artist. She was always sketching as a child. While attending Harvard for biological anthropology, she took some drawing classes. But her painting, she said, is still a “work in progress.”

“Most of what I know comes from taking books out of the library. I look at what other people do. Surprisingly enough, it’s a pretty good way to learn,” she said.

Julie is both poetic and scientific. During the interview, she described her home as “the rumpled part of Ohio,” but then switched to scientific mode, saying, “The forest is overwhelmingly oak and hickory with very little native evergreen.” Then, back to poetry, with, “This time of year is an unrelieved gray.”

When she first moved to Ohio from coastal Connecticut, she wasn’t sure she would like it. But when she saw Ohio’s wildflowers, she realized she could stay. “I enjoy living in a place that people don’t normally give any thought to. I like living in a place that has all these incredible natural wonders. That’s really all I need,” she said.

In the upcoming “Boundaries” issue of Whole Terrain, Julie writes about a rare Ohio wildflower and finding common ground with her Appalachian neighbors.

“It’s taken me time to fit into this community and carve out a place in it,” she said. Now, her neighbors come to the local tavern to see her play with her band, and compliment her on her radio and blog pieces. “There’s a lady down the holler who reads my blog on dial-up. She does dishes and laundry while it downloads. I have more readers in Ohio than in any state in the nation. I like that,” said Julie.

Julie especially appreciates her avian neighbors. “They’re my TV. They’re incredible birds and we’re so blessed to have them,” she said.

Julie urges nature enthusiasts to get to know birds as individuals. “It’s the same birds every year. I know which bluebirds lay white eggs, which are aggressive, which are passive. I know when one of the birds I know well goes missing and is replaced by another individual. Get out and work with them enough to get a feeling for their individual behaviors,” she said.

Julie has studied the consciousness of birds almost her whole life with sometimes comical and sometimes touching results.

She described once hanging an umbrella beneath a barn swallow nest in her garage to save them from a landlord fed up with bird droppings on his car. Hating the umbrella, the birds dive-bombed Julie each time she walked through the garage. But one day, Julie saw a five-foot black rat snack sliding across the rafters towards the baby birds. Climbing a ladder, she plucked the writhing snake from the rafter with a stick, lowered it into a pillowcase and took it away. “I think I invented a new phobia,” she joked.  “Ophidostepnophobia. It’s the fear of being up on a ladder with a snake over your head.”The barn swallows were completely silent the whole time, and they never attacked her again. “There’s so much more going on in the minds of birds than anyone realizes,” Julie concluded.

This anecdote and others will be in Julie’s upcoming book due out in the spring of 2012.  The book, which Julie describes as an “illuminated memoir,” focuses on different birds that have come into her life.  Its working title is Bird Woman and the publisher is  Houghton Mifflin.

Julie’s enthusiasm for birds and the natural world is infectious. And her story inspires us all to pursue what we love. “I think people are of most use to society when they do what they’re best at,” she said. “It’s a disservice to yourself not to do that.”

Julie Zickefoose is a widely published natural history writer and artist. Educated at Harvard University in biology and art, she worked for six years as a field biologist for The Nature Conservancy before turning to a freelance art career. Her observations on the natural history and behavior of birds stem from more than three decades of experience in the field.

If chores were a car trip, instead of a process from one end of the barn to another, from full udder to empty, we’d be in Montreal by the time the milked cows were let out to pasture, the machines were rinsed, and the last toss of sawdust sighed to the clean barn floor. It’s dark when we start, but light by the end, as if milking made the morning. –excerpt from the poem “A Process” by Julia Shipley

Julia Shipley is a farmer and a writer in the small community of Craftsbury in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. “Process” is a featured theme in her writing as well as in her life. Leaving suburban Philadelphia to apprentice on farms and then buy her own farm was a process. Earning her MFA in Creative Writing and Literature and then really honing her writing craft at the Vermont Studio and publishing her work was a process. Through these processes, she realized her twin dreams and became part of a long legacy of writer-farmers in Vermont.

Shipley says there is a connection between her two crafts. “I find there’s a reciprocity. In some ways, the discipline of farming has taught me the discipline of writing.”

She says jotting down ideas in her journal is like planting seeds. Selecting some of those ideas for a fuller piece is like transplanting the healthiest seedlings. She nurtures, weeds and prunes her writing and her crops. The final product is something she can share, a pesto or a poem.

Spending all day only writing at a computer or all day only performing repetitive farm tasks can be “tedious,” Shipley said. “I need both.”

She lives in the right place for doing both. Shipley says that Vermont has more writers and more farmers per capita than any other state. Her article about Vermont’s farmer-writer legacy is featured in the latest issue of Vermont’s Local Banquet.

Some of those Vermont farmer-writers include Helen and Scott Nearing, Elliott Merrick and, of course, Robert Frost. A common theme in all of their work includes celebration of rural living, simplicity, and connection to the land. “We could use that advice today,” said Shipley. “It’s not obsolete.”

Shipley sees her dual lifestyle as an almost patriotic duty. “The Jeffersonian Ideal is somebody who is both a farmer and a writer,” said Shipley. “President Jefferson had this belief that this country should be filled with gentlemen farmers, with people who are learned, who are using their intellects for democracy… but also using their muscles and their bodies to produce their food and have a connection to land.”

Shipley has served as the Director of Writing Studies and Faculty in Sustainable Agriculture at Sterling College, where the motto is Working hands, Working minds. Now she is a newspaper columnist and a freelance writer. Her chapbook, Herd, was published by Sheltering Pines Press and her poems and essays have been published in Alimentum, Hunger Mountain, Small Farmers Journal, Vermont Life, Vermont’s Local Banquet and Whole Terrain. She runs a writer’s retreat and facilitates writing workshops for elementary students and elders.

Much of Shipley’s writing takes the form of “braided essays.” When asked about the term, Shipley grabbed one of the ubiquitous pieces of twine in the barn to demonstrate. She teased apart a frayed end to show that rope is really a bunch of individual strands that form something new. Like rope, her life and her writing braid together things that one might not normally connect.

“I started writing essays that bring disparate things together,” she said. “A braided essay does the work of mending divisions that we’ve become used to between this and that. It does a little of repair work like this twine does. Akin to the life I’m trying to build,” she said.

Shipley farms six acres of fruits and vegetables. Usually, she also has sheep, dairy cows, and poultry, though this season she’s livestock-free due to some fencing improvements she has to make. Shipley said her goal isn’t to make all of her income from farming alone, but to grow at least 50 percent of her diet.

Even though she’s following in the shoes of Vermont’s farmer-writers, her own farming looks a little different. Before she had land of her own, she had to improvise. Her desire to farm became something of a town effort. In the parking lot for her apartment building, she turned a child’s playhouse into a chicken coop. She raised vegetables behind the coffee shop, raised milk calves behind the doctor’s office, grew potatoes at the studio. “What’s so beautiful about Vermont is the community really catches you,” she said.

Finally, she found property of her own. She compares her farm to a story, saying, “We’re just out of the first chapter.” In it, there are different characters including “not just human neighbors but animal neighbors” and a fantastical setting including a river that “swerves like a drunk through this town.”

Her farm is also a story of a barter system that is alive and well in Vermont. “I think smaller, more agricultural towns are apt to have the wherewithal to barter,” said Shipley. For example, she worked on a friend’s farm in return for two milk calves. She raised them up, then traded one of the cows in return for a year’s supply of hay for the other cow. And so on.

Everywhere Shipley looks, she finds connections between writing and farming. Even the alphabet shows a connection between the two. She says writing and agriculture came about around the same time since farmers needed to a way track their new abundance. If you tip over the letter A, it looks like a bovine face with two horns. This is how the first letter of the ancient Semetic alphabet was written and it gave rise to the upright Greek letter A we use in the English language. “Aleph is for ox. Bet is house. Aleph bet. Alphabet. You’ve got an ox house! These disciplines are not so far apart,” said Shipley.

In fact, for Shipley, the disciplines are interwoven. It all comes back to process. “When you make something with your hands, when you bring chaos into some deliberate order, an internal process is happening at the same time,” she said.

Julia Shipley is a 2010-11 Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant recipient, completing a manuscript of braided essays about small scale agriculture. As both a professional writer and subsistence farmer she’s interested in the overlap and interplay between these two fields. Read more here.

(This is Part 3 of a three-part series on climatologist, Dr. Cameron Wake. Read Part 2 here.)

Part 3: On Sustainability

Photo courtesy Dr. Cameron Wake

Dr. Cameron Wake has been heavily influenced and inspired by the University of New Hampshire’s chief sustainability officer, Tom Kelly, who leads the university’s sustainability programs. Started in 1997, the UNH sustainability program was first endowed university office of its kind in the U.S. Kelly’s multi-faceted approach to sustainability—applications in teaching, research, campus culture, operations and extension—resembles an outline for systemic change.

“It’s not about incremental change,” said Wake. “We need transformational change in the way we deal with climate, the way we deal with ecosystems and biodiversity, the way we deal with food and agriculture and the way we deal with society.”
Wake said that working with Kelly opened his eyes to why good science is important but not enough. “There’s a whole education, outreach and engagement effort that’s [also] important.”

Wake thinks that sustainability must be place-based in order for it to be truly successful. For example, the way New England defines and achieves sustainability may be different from what sustainability means to someone from the southwest.

Cameron Wake and others discuss climate change and solutions on GreenScreen.tv

“Trying to solve this problem with a cookie-cutter approach from Washington makes no sense,” Wake said. “Washington might want to do something like big cap and trade to reduce carbon emissions. . .but then how we actually figure out how to reduce our emissions, or how we adapt to more flooding or heat waves?”

“This needs to be done on a regional to local scale. The solutions are not going to be global, the solutions are going to be where people live.” Similar to the coalition of six Kansan towns, sustainability manifests most effectively when it is approached as a matter of shared goals and culture.

Wake attributes an aspect of his success to his ability to collaborate, something else he said he learned from his childhood mountaineering adventure. “It was daunting,” Wake said. “They took us from this unskilled, unknowledgeable group of kids who didn’t know each other, and by the end of the month we had climbed mountains together, we had saved each others lives, we had worked as a team, we developed all of these skills. . .We relied on each other.”

It may be just that sort of ardent collaboration–partially kindled by the dangerous terrain of icy mountains–that is required of communities in order to implement the systemic changes that Wake and his colleagues dream of and encourage.

Dr. Cameron Wake is a research associate professor with the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space at the University of New Hampshire. Find more of his research here.

If you gave a 250 acre farm over to a group of writers, artists, actors, musicians and filmmakers for three days, you might well get anarchy. Or you’d get an amazing festival…

September 16-18

Glen Brook’s annual Monadnock Literary & Arts Festival invites writers, artists, musicians – and participants – to celebrate the effects of place on our daily lives. Whether we live in city neighborhoods, the suburbs or exurbs, or rural landscape, our environment affects who we are: our choice of music and entertainment, our outdoor adventures and our culinary tastes, even the friends we choose. Artists and writers and visitors are invited to Glen Brook’s Marlborough, New Hampshire, campus to celebrate three days of the arts – writer discussions and readings, artist presentations, and musical performances.

This year’s writers include Alexandra Zissu, author of Planet Home and contributor to The New York Times, New Hampshire humorist Rebecca Rule, Christian McEwen, author of Wolrd Enough and Time, Rick Carey, author of Our Own Version of Iowa–and many others. Musical performances include Peter Siegel, Erica Wheeler, and New Hampshire’s own Lunch at the Dump! Featured artists include Wolf Kahn and several others. Join us for a two-day celebration of the arts!

Find the schedule and more details at glenbrook.org

(This is Part 2 of a three-part series on climatologist, Dr. Cameron Wake. Read Part 1 here.)

Dr. Cameron Wake. Photo courtesy UNH

Part 2: The Ice Cores of Research

Dr. Cameron Wake’s research started with the analysis of ice cores from the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau and evolved to include cores from Arctic glaciers. He studied the composition of water and amount of dust that existed in the layers of the glaciers formed over thousands of years ago. He said that this research led to three at first seemingly uninteresting discoveries that added up.

The first of such was that his team’s research defined “the spatial and temporal variation of precipitation chemistry in central Asia.” Wake explained that the study of ice cores is the study of changes over time, but central to the understanding of what those changes over time mean is the understanding of how the basic chemistry of precipitation varies over space and time.

The analysis of the change over time of precipitation chemistry led to the second significant result of Wake’s research in the Arctic: the development of a relationship between changes in ice core chemistry and changes in summertime sea ice extent. Lastly, his team tracked changes over time of various pollutant deposition in the ice.

During this exploration and research, a new batch of ice core scientists were educated by working on these research projects.

“Our understanding of the way climate has changed over thousands to millions of years does not come from studying meteorological records, because reliable records only extend back a few hundred years at best,” said Wake. “Rather, our understanding of climate changes in the past comes from paleoclimate records developed from the study of ice cores, tree rings, sediments, cave deposits, rocks and other natural archives.”

“[The paleoclimate record] has provided me with a perspective that allows me to say with confidence that humans have now become a major geological force capable of changing the climate system,” he said.

Climatology… on ice! Cameron Wake, Researcher and Professor at the University of New Hampshire, is passionate about ice. He plays on it and he works on it. Hockey and ice cores shows Cam how ice is part of the fabric of life in northern New England. And the ice itself has a story to tell. For over 100 years the ice has told of the effects of climate change by marking the day of its departure from lakes in the region. And as that date gets earlier and earlier over the passing decades the ice tells the story of a warming world, even in spite of winters with snow to spare.

The Crevasse of Denial

With a 2011 Gallup poll showing only 50 percent of respondents concerned about climate change, there seems to be an obvious rift between the climate science that Wake studies and public understanding or opinion on climate change risks.

Wake pegs part of such climate change denial on citizen inclination towards certain beliefs, such as whether or not the government should interfere with business or with individual decisions. He said that climate change denial advertising campaigns paid for by Exxon/Mobile and big coal companies appeal to individuals who are predisposed against government intervention.

“It’s not really about rational thought,” said Wake, “It’s about ‘Who do you trust?’ and ‘Where do you get your news from?’ This notion that everybody is going to weigh the scientific evidence equally is garbage. That’s a world where everybody thinks rationally, and we live in a world where many individuals do no think rationally.”

He says he grapples with climate change denial a lot because it has a big impact on how climate scientists, ecologists and environmentalists go about solving the problem.

“I think for 20 years scientists have basically said, ‘Hey look, we just need to do good science and public policy will follow,’ and in fact, that’s not the case,” said Wake.

Although the rift between both public policy and opinion and what translates as a climate crisis in the data of climate science is a tough bridge to gap, Wake has made the bridging of that gap a recent focus. “My goal is to find out how it is that we engage with the rest of society, where they are, not where I am,” he said. “We need to say, ‘Where is it that you’re at that we can talk about this issue and meet on some common ground?’”

He references an October 2010 article in The New York Times about six towns in Kansas focusing on decreasing energy usage for the sake of moral obligation, energy independence and economic prosperity rather than climate change. “That’s the next step,” said Wake, “to figure out how is it that we get people to engage in this issues. Because it is so sad that it’s a political issue. It shouldn’t be.”

Wake does his best to take part in this engagement through a variety of means. He talks at dozens of events each year to share the results of his research with the general public and has written a series of reports on climate change for a broader audience. He also served on the governor-appointed NH Climate Change Policy Task Force that wrote the climate action plan for the state and he currently serves on the NH Energy and Climate Collaborative, a group that seeks to facilitate and track progress towards implementation of the climate action plan.

TOMORROW, Part 3: Solutions

Dr. Cameron Wake is a research associate professor with the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space at the University of New Hampshire. Find more of his research here.

Part 1: The Ascent from Mountaineer to Climatologist
A childhood adventure in the Canadian Rockies completely altered the course of Dr. Cameron Wake’s life. He was 14 when he traveled, on the suggestion of his older brother, from his hometown in Montreal to Banff National Park to complete a mountaineering course. He described the area where he camped in the Kananaskis Valley as three miles from any road, adjacent to a wide gushing river, surrounded by snow-peaked mountains and untouched forest. It was there that he fell in love with the mountains.

“I discovered a pretty powerful chord,” he said. “Some people learn how to play piano, other people learn how to hit a baseball—I went to the mountains. Everything I did from that point forward was about gaining the skills and putting myself in a position to work in the mountains.”

And that he did. Now a climatologist and associate research professor at the University of New Hampshire’s Earth Systems Research Center, Wake’s journey began with an undergraduate degree in geology and a graduate degree in geography. At the end of his undergraduate degree in Geology he was a sedimentary geologist who, in his words, was “headed for the oil patch.”

“But there were no jobs in the early 1980s because there was a huge oil glut then, and so I got a job monitoring a glacier in the Canadian Rockies,” said Wake. “It was exactly what I wanted to do.”

Through his experience monitoring a glacier he met a geographer who worked in a part of the Karakoram located in northern Pakistan. The Karakoram is a large mountain range that passes through Pakistan, India and China, north of the Himalayas, that contains the highest concentrations of mountain peaks in the world.

A mountaineer’s dream, Wake traveled to Pakistan to work in the Himalayas and the Karakoram for the next 15 years. While studying the glaciers of that area and learning about climate change, Wake said he realized the potential of glaciers as a “tremendous archive from which we could study climate change and the past.”

“That’s when I shifted from a guy that just wanted to climb mountains to a guy that wanted to study the science,” said Wake. That brought him to the University of New Hampshire to do his PhD in Earth Sciences, where he has remained to teach and continue his research.

TOMORROW Part 2: Ice Core Research

Dr. Cameron Wake is a research associate professor with the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space at the University of New Hampshire. Find more of his research here.

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By Hanna Wheeler

In her desk’s side drawer, Principal Dana McCauley keeps a pair of sneakers, an old tee-shirt and jeans. She has to be prepared. At any point in the day, she might be wading in the stream, weeding the butterfly garden or banding birds with her K-5 students. She also participates in what’s become an annual tradition: rolling down the hill behind the school. And she has the grass stains to prove it.

During 10 years as a teaching principal at Crellin Elementary in western Maryland, McCauley has changed the curriculum to include projects that bring the students, and their principal, away from their desks and outside the classroom.“If we’re gonna preach it, we have to do it. I have to be willing to change my clothes and go outside too,” she said.

Crellin Elementary School in western Maryland is a rural public school with fewer than 90 students. It once faced the sadly typical challenges that public schools face, including student disengagement and failing test scores. But McCauley’s changes have transformed the small public school and rural town: overhauling the blighted playground, restoring the stream, creating an environmental education center, recruiting scores of volunteers and earning multiple awards including the President’s Environmental Youth Award, the Ernest Boyer Best Practices in Character Education Award, and last year’s much publicized ranking as the Number One School in Maryland when 100 percent of students earned passing test scores.

Crellin students working in the school garden

Planting trees

Dana McCauley monitors the stream with students

The principal, staff, and students get muddy

Dana McCauley and students

Observing one of the butterflies from the school's butterfly garden

Studying the local birds

When McCauley first came to Crellin, people warned her against sending her own kids there. “The school didn’t have a very good reputation,” she said.

And the community of Crellin faces the reputation that is often affixed to small mining towns in Appalachia. In Garrett County, where Crellin is located, the per capita income and number of college degrees are far below the state and national averages. About 87 percent of Crellin students will receive free or reduced lunch this year. Driving to the school involves turning past the fire-damaged building of the local bar where patrons sit and stare from the porch. And remember that grassy hill behind the school? It once was an exposed black mound of coal waste, called a gob pile, that leached toxic metals into the stream and turned the water bright orange.

But McCauley doesn’t let statistics define her students or town. “That’s not the best thing about us,” she said. She says the best part is that students “are being responsible and respectful and taking care of what’s around. That’s what we do.”

McCauley has energized the parents too. “The parents are awesome,” she said. “They can’t always give us financial aid, but they’ll roll up their sleeves and do anything. You can’t find that everywhere.”

That level of involvement has earned the school even more national awards and speaking invitations. But the best evidence of the community’s pride in and hope for its children can be seen in the schoolyard.

When McCauley first came to Crellin, the schoolyard consisted of derelict equipment and a single line of scrubby trees separating the school from the gob pile. The property behind the school was overgrown, the neglected site of a former sawmill and railyard. McCauley says it was a place for drug deals and late-night parties. “I got tired of picking up beer cans,” she said.

She organized a community meeting to ask people how they would use the back property if the school could access it. The community responded that they wanted a place to walk and a safe place for their children to play. McCauley set out to attain that vision.

She also wanted to help her students develop a greater sense of town pride. She had them interview community members about the town’s history. The historical society helped students use old photos and documents to study what once was in the school’s back yard. Using that research, the students designed a new playground to tell the story of Crellin. When the time came to erect the new structure, a whopping 638 volunteers came to build it.

Meanwhile, the school had started a summer science camp where children explored the back property. One camper asked why the creek was orange, and McCauley promised she’d find out.

McCauley has a knack for finding people in town who seem to know everything and everyone. And she’s not afraid to ask for help. She says her tactic is “Using everybody’s strengths. And asking, ‘How can we figure this out together?’”

In a short amount of time, she collected a group of dedicated scientists, bureaucrats, business owners, non-profit workers and parents. She even tracked down a former Crellin student who had become a landscape architect. Together, they cut through legal tape to gain the use of the property, capped the gob pile with soil, treated the orange water and built a network of trails and boardwalks through the newly dedicated Crellin Environmental Education Laboratory. The restoration work was part of the curriculum. Students also built bat boxes and benches. They monitored the wetlands. They researched the history and ecology of the area and created educational signs. Instead of dealers and vandals, now families walk here after hours. Students jog along the trails as part of PE. They do real field research with experts in water chemistry, birds and fisheries.

Principal McCauley and students in the Environmental Education Laboratory

“When you see the most squirrelly kid in the class— who cannot stay focused on anything— be fabulous outside because he can multi-task and do so many things and suddenly he’s the leader… how do you not say this [kind of learning] is good stuff? You just watch them, and you know that it’s right. You just feel in your gut that it’s right,” McCauley said.

McCauley’s success comes from reaching out to people. “We ask people to do things that they’re good at,” she said. She said volunteers become “rock stars” in the eyes of the kids just from knowing what they know about birds or carpentry or old trains. At a conference on parent engagement, a father of a Crellin student said he volunteers because he’s allowed to contribute his strengths and skills. He said he feels uncomfortable with literacy tutoring— that’s “the teacher’s job”— and he doesn’t want to just “decorate some bulletin board.” So he plants trees and fixes things and helps students to learn academic and practical skills through these hands-on projects.

All of the community involvement gives school work at Crellin a sense of purpose. But there’s a sense of fun here too.

Walking through the halls and grounds is like strolling through an interactive science museum. There’s a BirdCam with live footage of hatchings in the school nesting boxes. Students build and launch their own rockets with a real rocket scientist (a former NASA aerospace engineer who retired to Garrett County) while blasting Elton John’s “Rocket Man.” There’s the tank of trout that the students are raising. Now that they’ve restored their watershed, students can release their baby trout in the creek out back. Rows of waders and kick nets hang in the hallway, getting frequent use as students regularly monitor for benthic macroinvertebrates. And classrooms aren’t classrooms, they’re “base camps” where outdoor expeditions are launched.

Most importantly, the school has a sense of heart. The students and parents all have McCauley’s cell number. They call at night or over the summer when they have exciting news or want to know if the school veggie garden needs weeding. When they won the President’s Environmental Youth Award and were told they could bring only one student to the ceremony, McCauley and the teachers declined to go at all until the entire fifth grade could attend.

At the heart of Crellin, there’s a real focus on the children. When television crews come to interview McCauley about national awards or test scores, she tells them,“You need to focus on the kids. That’s what it’s really about. It’s not about me. It’s not about the teachers. It’s about the kids gaining that confidence and pride of where they are and what they know.”

Photo by Daphne Hougard, 2011

By Emily Bowers

Tim DeChristopher’s fate was decided last week  at the Salt Lake City federal courthouse. He was sentenced to two years in prison and a fine of $10,000 for disrupting a controversial federal oil and gas-leasing auction in December of 2008, but his sentence was not taken quietly.

Twenty-six of his supporters were arrested after the sentence was announced when they blockaded the entrance to courthouse and then, according to Fox13 news, moved to the middle of the street when police refused to arrest them on the steps.

In an official statement posted by Peaceful Uprising, the organization wrote that they support DeChristopher by continuing to organize: “Our response to this sentence is an affirmation: we will not be intimidated. What’s yours?”

The post continues, “Unless we decide to respond accordingly, as Tim serves his time, the real criminals — the fossil fuel industry wrecking our planet and our communities — will continue to run free, unaccountable for the countless oil spills, asthma attacks, contaminated waterways, cancer clusters, and carbon seeping into the air we breathe every day.”

Bill McKibben, a DeChristopher supporter and environmental figurehead, denounced the sentence as too strict and continues to call for more civil disobedience in the environmental movement. His organization, 350.org, is rallying people to answer the call for peaceful uprising through two weeks of sustained civil disobedience to halt the Keystone XL tarsands pipeline. The tarsands action is to be held between August 20^th and Septmeber 3^rd in Washington D.C, and may prove for many DeChristopher supporters the outlet they are looking for in response to his sentence.

Coverage of the sentencing ranges from local TV footage of the protests…

 

to commentary in the Huffington Post.

But those of us of a more moderate bent should stand up and support DeChristopher as well. This is someone whose actions stopped an unlawful, unethical act from taking place. He deserved to be found guilty, but he also deserved a minimal sentence. His was not a crime of vandalism or violence — only a commercial act which disrupted something which shouldn’t have been going on anyway. It was, in many ways, a desperate act, but it was also an act of conscience.

(–Jay Michaelson: Why Liberals Should Be Outraged by the Tim DeChristopher Sentence. July 27,2011)

Read the Whole Terrain interview with Tim DeChristopher here.