Evergreen first unfolded before me as I rode a burro 500 miles down the western flank of the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains starting in the Mexican State of Durango.\u00a0 Every night, around the campfire, I heard more about this new school scheduled to open in less than a year, September 1971.\u00a0 I had the privilege of being asked to join Evergreen\u2019s original teaching faculty which was my first and last teaching position when I retired in 2004.<\/p>\n
My teaching assignments over the years placed me in ecology and environmental studies with intradisciplinary formats joining colleagues in allied fields or teaching interdisciplinariliy by pairing ecology and environmental studies with widely divergent fields of study.\u00a0 I also had a brief stint as an TESC Academic Dean.<\/p>\n
In the early 1980\u2019s, graduate studies appeared on the college\u2019s horizon.\u00a0 The college\u2019s administration brought forward interest in a second graduate program, following the Master in Public Administration.\u00a0 They charged a DTF to design our Master of Environmental Studies program.\u00a0 I was appointed chair of that committee.<\/p>\n
The plan led to the design of the program and my appointment as the first Director of Evergreen\u2019s MES Program.\u00a0 Before opening, the program needed endorsement from the other state schools and the state\u2019s Higher Education Coordinating Board.\u00a0 Upon completion of these steps, the MES got ready to open for business with the recruitment of students through local national advertising. The response was positive, but we were stopped in our tracks when our Provost decided to decide to postpone our opening by two years due to a budget exigency at the college.\u00a0 Eventually, we got the go ahead and finally opened our doors.\u00a0 We have been busy ever since.<\/p>\n
My six years as Director taught me a great deal and cemented some lifelong friendships.\u00a0 After MES, I returned to teaching here for fifteen more years at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.\u00a0 During my TESC and post-TESC days, I have been involved in several Evergreen and Olympia community projects.\u00a0 It is a true professional honor to see the heights reached by the dedicated students, staff and faculty who have spent time in The Evergreen State College\u2019s Master of Environmental Studies Program.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Evergreen first unfolded before me as I rode a burro 500 miles down the western flank of the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains starting in the Mexican State of Durango.\u00a0 Every night, around the campfire, I heard more about this new… Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8089,"featured_media":151,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/mes40thanniversary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/mes40thanniversary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/mes40thanniversary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/mes40thanniversary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8089"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/mes40thanniversary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/mes40thanniversary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":150,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/mes40thanniversary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions\/150"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/mes40thanniversary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/mes40thanniversary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/mes40thanniversary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/mes40thanniversary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}