Category Archives: Greener Stories

Christina Meister ’13 Lands Coveted White House Internship

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Christina Meister, Evergreen senior & Intern at the White House

This year Christina Meister, a senior at Evergreen, is jumping in the White House for a four month Internship Program. More than 5,000 students applied and only 165 were chosen.  In the midst of her busy schedule, Christina answered our questions about this highly competitive internship.

Dante Garcia (DG): How did it feel to receive the internship? What was the first thing that you did after finding out?
Christina Meister (CM): It’s hard to describe the initial feelings I had when I was notified of my acceptance. Shock comes to mind but so does extreme excitement, happiness, relief, and honor. I think one of the first things I did was recheck the email, hug my roommates, jump around, and call my mother.

DG: How is it now that you are there? Who are you working with and what are they like?
CM: I feel so humbled and grateful to be here. I am a White House intern assigned to the Office of Digital Strategy, which is responsible for creating and developing content for official White House websites, mobile apps, email programs, and social media presences. I work with a very diverse group of people who are passionate about what they do.

DG: What are you looking forward to? What are you most excited about? What are you getting involved with?
CM: Each day is a new adventure. One of the things that I love about our office is that you never know what to expect and you are constantly learning new things. I know this may sound cliché, but I am just so excited to be here. This is an amazing time in history and I couldn’t have asked for a better experience.

Last year Alyssa McClure ’12 was the first Greener to be accepted for the White House Internship Program. You can find her story in the Evergreen Magazine, Fall 2012.

Readers: Did you have a memorable internship when you were a student?  Did it help you in your career?  Share your memories by commenting.

Jackie Heinricher ’86 and the Dream Trees

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No, this is not a Greener version of Jack and the Beanstalk.  It’s better.

Jackie Heinricher ’86 and her team of scientists at Booshoot Gardens in Mount Vernon, Washington have cracked the code for large scale cultivation of giant bamboo through a secret process that doesn’t use genetic modification. The technology can create forests of 100-foot bamboo trees in an astonishing 45 days.  Scientists call them “dream trees.”

Scientists call giant bamboo “dream trees.” With her company, Booshoot, Jackie Heinricher ’86 turns these dreams into a greener future.

The harvests can be turned into anything from hard lumber to clothing to toilet paper.  With this biotech breakthrough, the Booshoot team is poised to infiltrate the paper products market, help protect threatened natural forests and start rebuilding a healthy planet.

Recently, Booshoot signed a contract with world’s largest tissue manufacturer, Kimberly-Clark , to explore replacing 20% of traditional forest products used in toilet paper with fiber from giant bamboo.  Jackie and her team were featured over the summer on several news outlets including the Seattle Times, Greenbiz and King 5.

Happy dreams.

 

Tim Girvin ’75 Exhibit at Everett Community College

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Tim Girvin ’75

Beginning this week, Everett Community College (EvCC) is hosting an exhibit by the internationally recognized designer and illustrator Tim Girvin ’75. A reception and workshop are part of the project.

Additionally, if you’ve clicked around the blog you may already know that Tim has been instrumental in its design. If not, you can learn more in our About Page.

Gypsy Davy, film screening at the Olympia Film Festival

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Film by Rachel Leah Jones ’93 screens at the Olympia Film Festival, Tuesday November 13 at 5:00 PM

Rachel Leah Jones ’93 will screen her latest film “Gypsy Davy” at the Olympia Film Festival, Tuesday November 13 at 5:00 PM

Selected by Screen International as one of the top 10 movies of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, this documentary by Evergreen alum Rachel Leah Jones (who will participate in a Skype Q&A following the screening) tells the unusual story of her father, flamenco guitarist and serial womanizer David Serva. Shot over a ten-year period across three continents and utilizing an ingenious editing structure that Variety describes as akin to a “flavorsome, twisty literary novel”, Jones turns a tangled family history into a homemade epic. Featuring performances from some of the finest flamenco artists in the world, as well as interviews with the many women and children that Serva left in his wake, the richly textured film pivots on an attempted reconciliation between the filmmaker and the father who left her thirty years earlier. As Paul Sturtz, programmer of the True/False Documentary Film Festival, wrote about this new classic of the genre, “other than a few other landmarks like Capturing the Friedmans, I’m not sure I could name very many films that use interviews so effectively…. this is quite special, and begs to be watched.”-Olympia Film Festival

Rachel Leah Jones as a child

Filmmaker Rachel Leah Jones ’93 remembers a childhood with her flamenco dancer father, David Jones.

 

Erik Fabian ’00 Reports From the Wake of Hurricane Sandy

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Editor’s Note: In the wake of Hurricane Sandy we asked Erik Fabian ’00 to share his experience from New York City.

Erik Fabian ’00 lives in Clinton Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY and works in Manhattan where he manages the Moleskine brand in the Americas from Moleskine America office in Chelsea.

As we cross the cusp of October and November in 2012, Hurricane Sandy has redrawn the lines that define and divide the northeastern United States. A new line that divides the haves and have-nots in NYC currently stretches east to west in a band near 30th street in Manhattan. To the south, a third of Manhattan island is without power. There is little traffic except bikes and taxis during the day, no working stop lights, no working subways, office building are shuttered, grocery stores are closed, and people are without running water. Night brings a spooky, suspicious, desolation that is exhausting the locals as much as is the lack of showers. Most restaurants are closed but you see a few curbside fridge clean-outs – like a westside steakhouse that caters to Wall Street executives selling their $70 dollar steaks as $10 steak sandwiches from curbside grills. To the north, the coffee shops are full of refugees seeking WIFI, warm drinks, and electrical sockets. Continue reading →

Greener Coffee Fanatics Secure Top Award

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Greener entrepreneurs, Oliver Stormshak and Sam Schroeder ’04 pose in front of a cupping.

Roast Magazine, an insider’s publication for the coffee industry, selected Greener-owned Olympia Coffee Roasting Company as the 2013 Micro Roaster of the Year.

Late last week, Oliver Stormshak and Sam Schroeder ’04 shared some thoughts on coffee, Evergreen and the award while “cupping”  the latest roast at their flagship cafe in downtown Olympia.

Abby Kelso (AK): Tell our readers about this award. What does it mean? Why is it important?
Oliver Stormshak (OS): Roast is the trade magazine in our business and this award is its most prestigious competition for a company like ours.  There were over 600 applicants. We submitted a written application and then we sent three of our coffees for the judges to taste at a cupping.
Sam Schroeder (SS): We’ve been using the application process for the past few years as a way to assess our business practices.  We have a business plan, but this helps us see how we’re doing in terms of sustainability, fair trade, labor standards and coffee quality.

AK: How has your your Evergreen experience influenced your work as entrepreneurs?
SS: At Evergreen, you have to be self-motivated and direct your own education — that carries over in the direction of a company.
OS: Evergreen definitely worked well for me, because I was driven to get what I needed.  I studied with Donald Morisato and Martha Rosemeyer.  They both helped me as I moved towards becoming a small business owner.

AK: What do you see in the future of roasting?
OS: Technology will change the industry, this is a new field that is intensely complex.  Today’s roasting is based on 18th century technology and is very craft oriented. Technology will reveal the potential in coffee.
SS: We don’t even know what coffee is capable of yet!

AK: Do you have a particular business philosophy?
OS: Basically we are coffee fanatics and we let that drive our business.

Oliver and Sam enjoy a cup of coffee at their westside location.

Oliver and Sam enjoy some espresso at Olympia Coffee Roasting Company’s west side location. The company was recently named Micro Roaster of the Year by Roast Magazine.

Travels with Speedy

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Admissions counselor Julian Genette ’08 takes  Evergreen’s lovable mascot, Speedy, with him on his travels. Over the past few years, he and Speedy have covered thousands of miles, talked to thousands of prospective students and had some international adventures as well.

Join Julian in spreading the Evergreen word, and some of its unique charm, by nabbing your own Speedy from the Greener Store (its under gifts) to take on your rambles.  Email us a photo with caption and we’ll post it here.  We can’t wait to see how far Speedy can go.

 

Alumni Author Finds Hope and Family in Alaska

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Hank Lentfer

Hank Lentfer ’91 lives in and writes about Alaska and its wilderness areas.

From the outside, alumni author, Hank Lentfer ’91, is living an American dream.  He quits his 9-5 office job,  treks through untouched Alaskan wilderness, fells trees and mills them to build his own cabin, and gains prominence in conservation circles as he serves on boards and travels to Washington DC to defend his home state from environmental destruction.

Yet, Lentfer’s 2011 book, Faith of Cranes: Finding Hope and Family in Alaska really isn’t a celebration of personal liberation or a bland reporting of an idyllic life in Alaska’s wilderness.  Rather, it’s a story about the author’s journey through despair.  Despair in the face of unrelenting “progress”.  Despair in the face of habitat loss.  Despair and frustration with the interminable political process failing to protect the earth’s wild lands.

Book Cover Image

In his latest book, Faith of Cranes, Lentfer describes his journey into fatherhood and his evolving perspectives on hope and conservation.

Lentfer’s story will resonate with many Greeners working in environmental or social justice fields.  How does one maintain hope and optimism when the challenges are so many?  Lentfer describes his effort to “keep his despair in check” and connects the birth of his daughter with a shift in his thinking that enables him to stop worrying so much about the future.  He writes,

“I now believe even the extinction of cranes cannot render efforts at conservation irrelevant any more than the death of a soldier can strip meaning from calls for peace….”

What do you think?  Join the conversation by responding to the following question posed by Hank Lentfer in Faith of Cranes:

“If every step of one’s way is along a path of caring, does it matter what the future brings?”

 

 

Ken Tabbutt’s Field Report from Yellowstone

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Field report author, Ken Tabbutt.

Editor’s Note: Member of the Faculty, Ken Tabbutt provides the following Field Report from his program’s Fall 2012 trip to Yellowstone.

The upper-division science program, Environmental Analysis, used the first few weeks of Fall quarter to travel through the west in order to study microbiology, hydrogeology, and analytical chemistry in an integrated and applied manner.  

The trip followed the path of the Missoula Floods up the Columbia River Gorge, through the scablands and up the Clarks Fork drainage.  A week in Yellowstone National Park provided an opportunity to grasp the interconnections between the unique geology, thermal systems and microbiology.  

Clyde Barlow and Ken Tabbutt lead their students through Yellowstone National Park–an environment epically rich in both science and artistic beauty. Photograph by Shauna Bittle

 

Visits to the Berkeley Pit of Butte, Montana and Silver Valley, Idaho focused on the mining history and the physical and biological processes that create acid mine drainage and metal contamination. A final stop at the unusual alkaline lakes of Grand Coulee provided an opportunity for students to sample lake water and identify chemoclines, thermoclines and do alkalinity titrations until the wee hours of the morning.  

One Minute Evergreen: Yellowstone

Yellowstone ranger Wes Hardin leads Environmental Analysis students through Mammoth Hot Springs. ** Faculty Ken Tabbutt, Andy Brabban and Clyde Barlow take a group of students through Yellowstone National Park with the program Environmental Analysis on Fri., Sept. 30, 2012. The group was studying the unique geological and microbiotic conditions in the park.