The Evergreen State College has joined #GivingTuesday, a first of its kind effort that will harness the collective power of a unique blend of partners—charities, families, businesses and individuals—to transform how people think about, talk about and participate in the giving season. Continue reading
This gallery contains 62 photos.
Thanks to the over 250 alumni and friends in attendance, over 40 alumni and faculty facilitators, and incredible collaboration amongst the campus community, Return to Evergreen on October 18, 2014 was a great success. Until next time, enjoy some of … Continue reading
“You go to nature for an experience of the sacred…to re-establish your contact with the core of things,… to enable you to come back to the world of people and operate more effectively.”
-Willi Unsoeld
Renowned for his book, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill: A Love Story, Mark Bittner is the first speaker in the Willi Unsoeld Seminar Series at The Evergreen State College, on October 30. Continue reading
Winona LaDuke, guest speaker at Evergreen’s Class of 2014 Commencement Ceremony.
Photo Credit- The Evergreen State College Photo Services
Congratulations to Evergreen’s Class of 2014! We are thrilled to welcome Evergreen’s newest graduates into the the alumni community.
Check out photos from the 43rd Annual Commencement Ceremony.
Evergreen’s Class of 2014 includes:
• 58 students in the Master of Public Administration program.
• 27 students in the Master in Teaching program.
• 32 in the Master of Environmental Studies.
• 1,187 undergraduate students earning Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science degrees.
The 2014 Class Theme: “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination”- unknown.
Here is a link to Winona LaDuke’s keynote speech on KAOS.
The Rachel Carson Forum is one of the oldest traditions of Evergreen’s Graduate Program on the Environment offering the Masters of Environmental Studies (MES) degree, now approaching its 30-year anniversary. The event was established in 1990 as a tribute to Rachel Carson, a marine biologist and writer in a time when it was almost impossible for women to pursue careers as scientists. While Carson wrote several well-known books, such as The Sea Around Us and Our Ever Changing Shore, her legacy is largely tied to her groundbreaking book, Silent Spring. While the science of the environmental and human effects of pesticide application was outside her area of expertise, the book’s bold and impassioned arguments started inspired conversation and debate that helped spark the environmental movement of the 1960s.
Student organizers and panelists for the 2014 Rachel Carson Forum
The Rachel Carson Forum has always been organized by students of Evergreen’s MES Program. The current organizing group, the Masters of Environmental Studies Student Association (MESA), put together the 2014 panel featuring two amazing Evergreen alumni, Rhys Roth ’90, an MES graduate and Director of the Evergreen Center for Sustainable Infrastructure, and Thera Black ‘92, Senior Planner for the Thurston Regional Planning Council (TRPC). The panel also featured Richard Fealy, Senior Scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Nobel Prize recipient, and Andy Haub, Planning and Engineering Manager for the City of Olympia. Such an incredible group of guest speakers has come to be expected of the Rachel Carson Forum; the event has featured true giants of the environmental community, such as the late Billy Frank Jr. and mycology pioneer Paul Stamets ’80, in recent years.
Martha Henderson, Director of the MES Program, started the conversation on April 24 by recounting the lasting legacy of Rachel Carson in helping convey and rally people to complex environmental issues through strong science and communication. The panel members perfectly exemplified that mission, and the mission of the Rachel Carson Forum’s founding faculty, who Henderson conveyed, “wanted to provide images of environmental action.” Henderson emphasized that the event wasn’t just for students, but that is was “a service of MES to the broader community.”
MES leadership has always represented that philosophy, including the likes of Oscar Soule, Ralph Murphy, John Perkins, Tom Rainey, Richard Cellarius, and now Martha Henderson. Henderson’s term as director will end in late August, when she will return to teaching full time; she will take a group of students to the eastern Mediterranean region in Spring 2015. In talking about the MES Program, Henderson recalled it traditionally as a home for “Environmental Refugees” from across the country. While today’s graduate students have many schools where they may pursue a Masters in Environmental Studies degree, Evergreen’s MES program has adapted to changing times. It has three prongs of study: Climate and Energy Studies, Ecology, and Community Sustainability. Approximately 70% of the program’s students are women, an important focus of Henderson’s work as MES Director. Another important issue is global climate change, which Henderson believes will inform a shift in the focus of MES to “to help us understand alternative ways to have constructive relationships with the environment.”
Hopefully, the Rachel Carson Forum can help students, and the broader community, do just that, for the next 30 years and beyond.
The annual spring PLATO Lecture Series, which highlights innovation in computing and technology, owes its origin to the work of John Aikin and Evergreen Students in the early 1980s. One of those students, Greg Starling ’78, went on to form Starling Consulting Inc., a technology consulting firm in Olympia. Aikin endowed royalties from the computer aided instruction (CAI) courses developed by himself and his students around 1985 to fund the PLATO Lecture Series and PLATO Technology Grants in perpetuity.
Disney Pixar Monsters University
Also called the Cutting Edge Symposium, the lecture series is coordinated by different faculty members every year. This year’s theme is “Greeners on the Cutting Edge,” featuring an extraordinary cast of Evergreen alumni involved with interesting and innovative technology research and development. Organized by faculty members Judy Cushing, Richard Weiss, Paul Pham, Rik Smoody, Sheryl Shulman, and Neal Nelson, the planning for this spring’s lecture series started over a year ago. Judy Cushing, currently offering “Student Originated Software” and “Undergraduate Research in Scientific Inquiry”, remarked that “people don’t think of Evergreen as a hot spot for technological innovation,” and that with this year’s alumni panel “we are hoping to change that perception”.
With a small annual budget to work with, panelists traditionally don’t receive an honorarium and often the speakers or their companies pay for travel. In addition, this year’s speakers aren’t coming to Evergreen’s Olympia campus simply to give a lecture; they provide reading for students in partnering academic programs and visiting their classrooms to participate in seminar or give a talk. After their lectures, many of this year’s speakers will stay on campus to work with students. Dylan Sisson ’94 from Pixar worked with students in the CCAM (Center for Creative and Applied Media) after his lecture on April 14. Select students have also had the opportunity to join the speakers and organizing faculty members for dinner after each lecture.
Notable speakers for the rest of the 2014 lecture series include Moishe Lettvin ‘03, an engineering manager at Etsy, and Lynda Weinman ‘76, Co-Founder and Executive Chair of lynda.com.
More information on the lecture series, speakers, and abstract materials can be found on Evergreen Lecture’s Blog.
A Public Event at The Evergreen State College:
The Olympia Beekeepers Association and Evergreen Academic Programs present a Community Bee Fair, featuring “More than Honey,” an internationally acclaimed film describing the looming, world-wide crisis of disappearing bee colonies.
March 8, 2014, 6:00 – 10:00 pm
A Film, Community Bee Fair and Student Displays
The Evergreen State College, Lecture Hall 1 and Lecture Hall Rotunda
Program:
The feature film “More than Honey” will be followed by a Q & A with a panel of local bee experts and the filmmaker via Skype from Berlin.
Please Note:
Sponsored by:
Tom Ikeda, founder and executive director of Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project, to speak at Evergreen February 27
Event Notice: Don’t miss this talk by Tom Ikeda, founder and executive director of Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project, on Thursday, February 27th, at 7:00 p.m. at the Longhouse Cultural Center on the Evergreen campus in Olympia. Admission is free and open to the public. This presentation is part of Evergreen’s Willi Unsoeld Seminar Series.
The stories of local Japanese Americans who were incarcerated in Idaho concentration camps during World War II are the subject of a talk by Tom Ikeda, founder and executive director of Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project, on Thursday, February 27th, at 7:00 p.m. at the Longhouse Cultural Center on the Evergreen campus in Olympia. Admission is free and open to the public.
Ikeda’s presentation, “When Citizenship Didn’t Matter: Personal Stories from Japanese Americans Incarcerated during World War II,” will explore issues of democracy, intolerance, wartime hysteria and civil rights, based on hundreds of oral histories conducted by Densho over the last 18 years.
Ikeda was born and raised in Seattle. His parents and grandparents were incarcerated during World War II at Minidoka, Idaho. A former manager at Microsoft, Ikeda graduated from the University of Washington. He has received numerous awards for his historical contributions, including the Humanities Washington Award for outstanding achievement in the public humanities, the National JACL Japanese American of the Biennium award for Education, and the Microsoft Alumni Fellows Award.
Ikeda’s presentation takes place under the banner of the Willi Unsoeld Seminar, a speaker series honoring Unsoeld, a founding faculty member of The Evergreen State College.
“Each year, faculty, staff, and students focus on a theme linked to the college’s core values,” said Evergreen faculty member Nancy Koppelman. “This year, the theme is ‘listening’, and why listening is essential to education.”
Evergreen launched the academic year by assigning NPR Story Corps creator Dave Isay’s book, Listening is an Act of Love, to all students, and he spoke on campus in September 2013. Ikeda’s presentation continues and elaborates on the theme.
Evergreen Provost Michael Zimmerman
Note: Provost Michael Zimmerman and Arts Advisor Pablo Schugurensky ’84 will facilitate an Evergreen Traveling Seminar in Seattle on March 14, titled Pushing Back Against the “STEM” Tide: The Value of A Liberal Arts Education. If you are in area and wish to attend, reserve your seats soon. Participation is limited to 25.
‘Long before Michael Zimmerman joined Evergreen as Provost, he was a nationally respected voice in the often strident conversation about the value of a liberal arts education in an increasingly technology-driven world. Michael chairs the Washington Consortium for the Liberal Arts, a role that allows him to champion the restructuring of the conversation from the oppositional – liberal arts versus STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) – to a nuanced discussion of curricular balance on a continuum of knowledge. It starts with a respectful insistence on accurate definitions. Continue reading
Filmmaker Bryan Smith ’97 visits Olympia as National Geographic speaker
Award-winning filmmaker Bryan Smith ’97 is living an Evergreen-powered dream, capturing the world on film for National Geographic. In January, he returns to Olympia as part of the 2014 National Geographic Live speaker series to talk about his globe-trotting career. Guaranteed, there will be lots of Greeners in the audience to welcome Bryan back, celebrate his success and maybe even sing an impromptu chorus of The Geoduck Fight Song.
When: Jan. 10 from 7:30-9:30 p.m. Where: The Washington Center for Preforming Arts, 512 Washington St. SE, Olympia.
Read the full story in the Olympian.