Berry and Wuthmann 1 Erica Berry and Walter

Berry and Wuthmann 1 Erica Berry and Walter Wuthmann Professor Pearlman Collaborative Independent Study 23 December 2012 40 Years of Environmental Studies at Bowdoin College Introduction: Ten years ago, a committee of faculty members from Skidmore, Middlebury, and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill reviewed Bowdoin’s Environmental Studies (E.S.) Program. The program is uniquely special; in an extensive self-evaluation Bowdoin E.S. faculty wrote before external assessment, they noted, “Here the sprawling suburbs of the Northeast collide with rural America and 19th century industrial towns, in a community that is home to several strong state and regional environmental NGOs, many regional and national experts on environmental affairs and an engaged citizenry.”1 Last spring, when our E.S. advisor, Jill Pearlman, and the E.S. Program manager, Eileen Johnson, asked us to research and write a history for the program’s 40-year anniversary, we agreed immediately. As E.S.-English coordinate majors, we saw this project as a means to apply our interest in storytelling to a history that directly affects both of us. The program’s next ten- year review is forthcoming, and in imagining progress for future years, we see a value in exploring the path that led us to where we are today. When we began our research in early September, our goal was to construct a strong chronological narrative of the department’s genesis and growth at Bowdoin. The more we researched, however—and as we began to interview some of the most important actors in this story—we quickly saw this supposedly “narrow” story expanding into something that was much 1 “Self-Evaluation,” Bowdoin College Environmental Studies Program, January 2002, Property of the Bowdoin Environmental Studies Program, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME, 4. Berry and Wuthmann 2 larger than a sequential study of the Bowdoin course catalogues. The history of the Bowdoin E.S. program is a complex story of changing education in the United States. It’s a story of how influential students, professors, and administrators responded to national trends with the constant intent to create a program that could effectively prepare students to face the most pressing question of the modern era: how can humanity inhabit this world without completely degrading and destroying the very resources we depend upon for life? More than anything else, the pursuit of answers to this question has shaped the department. What sort of curriculum will be most effective at educating students of the various angles in this issue? What does it mean to go into the world as an Environmental Studies major, and what should these students be prepared to do? As we pieced together this complex history, we tried to keep these questions in mind, putting significant weight on the near-twenty oral interviews we conducted. We spoke with people on campus, over the phone, and in a borrowed Bowdoin-branded Prius that carried us through the colors of late fall to the houses of former professors and administrators (it seems that most of the old guard retires in the Harpswell countryside—we don’t blame them). Thank you to everyone who engaged with us to help piece together this patchwork of social and institutional history, indulging our appetites for both ginger cookies and hot apple cider as well as personal anecdotes and recollections. From our preliminary research in special collections, we noted trends of class enrollments and peaks in public relations material related to the program; this framework provided momentum and guidance to our interview questions as we tried to flesh out not just what happened in the last 40 years, but why and who made it happen. We relied heavily on the memories, thoughts, and perceptions of the people we talked to—this is their story much more than it is ours. Nonetheless, our history is not an accurate echo of some condensed past. It is told—however objective we have tried to make it—through our own lens as transient but Berry and Wuthmann 3 passionate students, in odd turns cynical and idealistic. We tried to fact-check dates, names, titles and places as thoroughly as we could, but we apologize for any existing errors. We regret that we only had a semester to spend on this unpredictably intricate story, so any errors and omissions are shortsightedness on our part, not the people who so generously donated their time and mental energies to our project. In the program’s 2002 self-evaluation, Bowdoin E.S. professors quoted famed biologist E.O. Wilson in noting that we were entering “the century of the environment.”2 Ten years later, this seems clearer than ever. Internationally, climate change has materialized as the primary environmental issue of the future, a problem scarcely realized at the time of the program’s formation forty years ago. Amidst calls for environmental literacy to be taught broadly across the academic platform, we don’t know what the course of an E.S. major will be in the next ten years. “It’s hard to tell where the environment in terms of Environmental Studies is going,” said Phil Camill, director of the E.S. program until 2012. Nonetheless, we believe interrogating the roots of Bowdoin’s construction of the environment is a step in the right direction. Part I: A Climate of Ferment The Impact of ’Nam: The Vietnam War triggered the environmental movement at Bowdoin College. Not directly, of course, but the student response to the war and other pressing political issues of the time created a mindset where the birth of an Environmental Studies Program at a small, academically conservative liberal arts college in Maine was possible. On the morning of Monday May 4, 1970, around 1,000 students gathered on the Commons, a grassy gathering spot in the center of Kent State University in Ohio. The crowd 2 ““Self-Evaluation”,” 10. Berry and Wuthmann 4 came to protest the United States’ ongoing military involvement in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. The students, “angered by the expansion of the war into Cambodia, … held demonstrations for the last three nights.” On the previous Saturday night a group of students had burnt the Army Reserve Officers Training Corps building to the ground in an act of defiance, inciting the National Guard to occupy campus under the declaration of martial law. On Sunday night, the Guard drove students into their dorms and made 69 arrests. The morning after, the toll of the iron Victory bell on the campus Commons called all students to gather and continue what they understood as a peaceful protest. By noon, National Guard officers had broken up the crowd with tear gas, and began forcing crowds of students towards the dormitories. The largest crowd was followed as “a platoon of guardsmen, armed—as they have been since they arrived here with loaded M-1 rifles and gas equipment—moved across the green and over the crest of the hill, chasing the main body of protesters.” About 500 students regrouped in a parking lot, picking up rocks and throwing them at the Guard. As the guardsmen reached the top of the hill cresting the parking lot, they formed a skirmish line and opened fire onto the crowd, choking the afternoon air for a full minute of smoke and gunfire. When the firing ceased, “a slim girl, wearing a cowboy shirt and faded jeans, was lying face down on the road at the edge of the parking lot, blood pouring out onto the macadam, about 10 feet from this reporter.” When all the smoke had cleared, three students lay crumpled, dead on the ground. One more would die in the hospital. Eight more were severely wounded.3 At 2:10 pm, President Robert White ordered Kent State to be closed indefinitely, and began to make arrangements for students to evacuate dormitories and bus out-of state students to 3 John Kifner, “4 Kent State Students Killed by Troops,” The New York Times, May 4, 1970, accessed December 5, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0504.html. Berry and Wuthmann 5 nearby cities.4 Seven hundred and fifty seven miles away in Brunswick, Maine, Bowdoin College students awoke on Tuesday to these ghastly headlines. A small group of students met at noon to discuss the tragedy, but the meeting quickly “mushroomed into an evening meeting of about 350 people” and a forum for heated student discussion about both the Kent State murders and the wider invasion of Cambodia. That day’s issue of the Orient said the consensus of this meeting “seemed to be that these events finally brought the present American situation home to the minds of Bowdoin students.” One student, the aptly named John Locke, said, “I’m greatly puzzled by what my country is doing in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and at Kent State. Now is the time to demand some answers. In light of the last few days, attending college has become irrelevant.”5 This buzzword—irrelevance—echoed over and over in meetings through the course of the day. In a hand vote, “all but 12 people agreed to strike for one day and organize a mass meeting to consider an indefinite, all-college strike.” John Cole, a former President of the Student Council, attempted to preserve “constitutionality” and argued that sending mass telegrams and letters to President Nixon would be a more “responsible action” than a campus-wide strike. The vast majority of students, however, “felt that the time for talk had ended.”6 An Orient editorial affirmed this belief the next day: “ We are saying that our concern has reached a level at which normal life becomes impossible.”7 By the end of Tuesday evening, student leaders had organized a five-point strike platform to discuss at the next day’s meeting: 4 Kifner, “Kent State Students Killed.” 5 “Shut It Down!,” The Bowdoin Orient, May 5, 1970, 1.

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