Alex Stupple ’00 Reports On GTMO Trial

Posted on by
Reply
Pictured: Alex Stupple '00

Pictured: Alex Stupple ’00

When Alexandra (Alex) Stupple ’00 was offered the opportunity to observe a pre-trial hearing at the Guantanamo Bay prison detention camp, she jumped at the possibility. Stupple was nominated by her law school professor, who was also then-president of the National Institute of Military Justice (NIMJ), the NGO responsible for sending her as a trial observer. Stupple didn’t know what she was in for, and with the hearing date continually postponed, she wasn’t sure if it was even going to occur. But finally, last February, Stupple boarded a military plane to Cuba for the chance of a lifetime, where the alleged perpetrator of the suicide bombing of the U.S.S Cole in Yemen was standing trial. The experience, which Stupple reported on with only ten other NGO observers, was mentally somewhat of a struggle. Stupple recalled:

“Everything was so contradictory. Beach bars and barbed wire. Secret roads. Gift shops with ‘I heart GTMO’ merchandise without even a sense of irony. We stayed in MASH-style tents, with one for men and one for women. There was another tent surrounded by barbed wire. They wouldn’t tell us what it was for.”gtmo6

What might have been most difficult for Stupple were not the accommodations, but the fact that “the hearings themselves weren’t as blatantly unfair as [she] imagined they would be.” Stupple described a place where nothing was black and white, clear cut, or totally fair. In Stupple’s eyes, “the law strives for fairness and ways of dealing with conflict without violence. The problem with the GITMO situation is that we did resort to violence.” But sorting out these questions is something Stupple is well equipped to do.

Alex Stupple described her Evergreen experience, where she focused on American Studies, as where she “learned how to think.” While attending the Hastings College of Law at the University of California, Alex came to appreciate her Evergreen education more. She views the traditional model of education as “a ridiculous way to learn,” and recounted one class at Evergreen in particular, with David Marr, where she was tasked with the challenging assignment of “writing one perfect paragraph.” When she arrived at law school after spending ten years as an English teacher in China, then as a science editor in Scotland and in D.C. working for the National Academy of Sciences and the American Journal of Public Health, she wondered what traditional colleges actually taught students. Since Alex’s law school experience, she concedes Evergreen has “since been dear to my heart” especially during three and a half hour exams that comprised 100% of her class grades.

Alex is an Attorney for the California Department of Public Health in Sacramento and in her spare time is “still obsessed with international and military law.” You can read more about the significance of her experience to observe the pre-trial hearings at Guantanamo Bay in her other proud alma mater’s news release.

Join the Evergreen Conversation

    “Terry Oliver ’73: Saving the World One Kilowatt Hour at a Time”

    Posted on by
    1
    Photo Credit- BPA

    Photo Credit- BPA

    Winning the “Oscars of Bonneville Power Administration (BPA),” officially known as the Administrator’s Excellence Awards Program, is a big deal at the Portland, Oregon-based nonprofit federal agency. BPA is in the energy marketing business, and Terry Oliver ’73 has been leading and directing research and development there for decades. Receiving the Administrator’s Meritorious Service Award is an acknowledgment of a career built on Oliver’s mantra: “Saving the world one kilowatt hour at a time.”

    After trying everything from grassroots organizing with the now-defunct Citizens for Solar Washington to land-use planning and even working in a Minute-Mart, Terry Oliver has worked for BPA since 1981. He also took “maybe the world’s longest period of leave without pay” from BPA (from 1992 to 2000), during which he served as the Managing Director of the International Institute for Energy Conservation in Bangkok, Thailand, and worked on sustainable energy issues in the Middle East, South Africa, and throughout Asia.

    Oliver studied International Relations at Evergreen, a school he chose as a community college transfer student because of its coordinated studies, and he heard it was a place to “combine things into interesting puzzles.” Evergreen was where he “learned how to learn,” which Oliver calls “the key theme” of his career. Of his “leave-without-pay” experience, Oliver recounts that he “picked up some of what I learned from a U.S. context and something from Evergreen… [getting] to recombine things in an interesting way.” When he started at BPA, managing programs like the Hood River Conservation Project was only going to be a three-year job. But with groundbreaking success on a global scale, even when Oliver returned from leave, coming back to work at BPA “was like putting a familiar shoe right back on. It was a good fit.”

    In 2005, completing the circle, Terry Oliver was named BPA’s first Chief Technology Innovation Officer, responsible for energizing, focusing, and managing BPA’s research portfolio. Since then, he has restarted the BPA’s R&D program and created a publicly articulated research agenda, shifting its philosophy to “Copy people like Apple or Boeing who do R&D, not because it’s a hobby, but because it’s vital to their business.” When asked if he’s figured out the formula for success, Oliver laughs, replying, “That’s what they finally wrote up the award for!”

    With such honors as this award and being named a Fellow by the Portland International Center of the Management of Engineering and Technology, Terry Oliver is able to confidently say his work “has actually delivered value to BPA.” In the R&D world, that is “a really big deal.”

    Join the Evergreen Conversation

      Anthony Airhart ’00 Takes On Hunger in Coastal Washington

      Posted on by
      Reply

      Tony and Coastal Harvest's Food Bank Truck

      Tony and Coastal Harvest’s Food Bank Truck

      When Anthony (Tony) Airhart ‘00 arrived at Coastal Harvest in 2010, he reflects that the Hoquiam Washington based organization “was simply screaming for a collaborative, multi-dimensional, creative set of solutions to organizational woes—it needed to have someone question why things were done as they were—to look at everything with a critical view. Someone who knew how to work across boundaries and barriers to build consensus and coordinate a path forward.” Coastal Harvest started out of a pickup truck more than 25 years ago. It now delivers as much as 4 million pounds of food a year for more than 54 agencies (food banks and feeding programs), all for free, in seven counties across Southwest Washington.

      AmeriCorps members sorting food at Coastal Harvest

      AmeriCorps members sorting food at Coastal Harvest

      Tony’s path to becoming the Executive Director of Coastal Harvest was a long, winding road that took him from “cog in the wheel” at Weyerhaeuser to where he is today. Tony attended Evergreen’s Grays Harbor Reservation-based AA Degree Bridge program, graduating at 45 years old with a bachelor’s degree in community leadership in 2000 . Although he originally enrolled while working, a facility closure at Weyerhaeuser meant he was out of a job after nearly 31 years. With his degree and experience from Evergreen, Tony got the opportunity to direct the small nonprofit, which has 6 employees, many dedicated volunteers, and an enormous daily impact.

      Tony insists “the Evergreen learning style and methodology is a perfect fit in the nonprofit world. The ability to work with diverse groups and communities and having excellent communication skills are very important.” He describes the foundational role of interdisciplinary studies in preparing an executive director to wear many hats, juggle priorities, keep learning, and become proficient in a broad spectrum of topics, all while working for a diverse board of directors and with staff and community members. For Airhart, this means that “all of this information must be filtered, absorbed and analyzed, then placed against the needs, priorities, and mission of Coastal Harvest before making decisions.” In the big picture, Airhart reflected that his “years at Evergreen prepared [him] to face these challenges”.

      It was a long and unexpected road for Tony Airhart, but he eventually found his passion at an organization that clearly needed a Greener.

      Join the Evergreen Conversation

        The Living Tradition of the Rachel Carson Forum

        Posted on by
        Reply

        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

        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.

        Join the Evergreen Conversation

          Spring Lecture Series Draws Notable Alumni in Tech World

          Posted on by
          Reply

          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

          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.

          Join the Evergreen Conversation

            Religious Studies Scholar Joins Evergreen Faculty

            Posted on by
            1
            s200_sarah.eltantawi

            Sarah Eltantawi joins the Evergreen Faculty

            Evergreen eagerly awaits the arrival of new faculty member Sarah Eltantawi, a scholar of religion, writer and political analyst. Sarah has a PhD from Harvard University (2012) focusing on Islamic studies in general, with a focus on Islamic law in contemporary Muslim-majority societies. Her vita includes fieldwork and research on the “political theology” of the Muslim Brotherhood in contemporary Egypt, and an in-depth study of the notorious case of Amina Lawal, a peasant woman from Northern Nigeria who was sentenced to death by stoning in 2002.

            Starting in 2011, Sarah has been a visiting fellow at the Freie Universität, Berlin, a Scholar in Residence in Religion, Culture, Gender and the Law at Brandeis University, and the Sultan Postdoctoral Fellow in Arab studies at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of CA, Berkeley.Sarah takes up her post at Evergreen later in 2014. Those eager to meet her can follow her on Twitter and read Lessons from the Egyptian Revolution, 3 years later, in Ma’an News Agency.

            Join the Evergreen Conversation

              Alex Becker Appointed to Seattle Human Rights Commission

              Posted on by
              Reply
              becker

              Alex Becker

              “A distinctively dedicated and engaged student;” this is how Evergreen faculty member Lin Nelson describes her former student Alex Becker, ’11, who has just been named to the Seattle Human Rights Commission.

              Alex is the community organizer for the social justice non-profit organization Real Change, and has been active in public service and social justice issues since 2005, according to Real Change News. Read the full article.

               

               

               

              Join the Evergreen Conversation

                Writer Nick Mattos, ’06, Interviewed on LGBT Characters in Pop Culture

                Posted on by
                Reply
                069b2ce14cf929a57efa386aa91dcd81

                Nick Mattos, ’06, is a freelance journalist and essayist.

                Nick Mattos, ’06, is a freelance journalist and essayist living in Portland, OR. He turned up recently in The Guardian as one of three panelists discussing the evolution of LGBT characters in pop culture.  Here is a sample:

                The Guardian: The concept of the ‘gay sidekick’ is a classic mainstream exploration of the LGBT community in American pop culture. Have gay characters moved more to the center of the plot in recent years, and where does work still need to be done?

                Nick: One great effect I’ve observed in recent representation of queer people in pop culture is the presence of queer characters whose sexuality is not the crux of their identity. A great example of this was the character of Mitch Downe in the excellent 2012 film Paranorman, who was arguably the first openly gay character in a mainstream children’s animated film. He wasn’t stereotyped at all – the revelation of his sexuality was actually a humorous but sensitively handled plot twist. [He] was instead a whole, integral character, whose personality grew organically through the course of the film. In terms of work that still needs to be done, there are still very few representations of queer people that don’t fit the mold of being affluent, white, and relatively heteronormative in expression.

                Read the entire interview at The Guardian.

                Join the Evergreen Conversation

                  The Inkwell Project: Part of Evergreen’s Writing Culture

                  Posted on by
                  1
                  Inkwell volume 1 cover 300 px

                  Cover of the first Inkwell, 2006.

                  Editor’s Note: The Writing Center, located in the Library building just off Red Square, is the creative home of Inkwell, A Student Guide to Writing at Evergreen. In this interview, Writing Center publications editor Thane Fay, ’13 talks with Inkwell co-founders Shaun Johnson, ’07 and Victoria Larkin, ’07 about the history of this student publication. 

                  This is the first of a series exploring the Inkwell project and how students, faculty, and alumni can benefit from its influence on Evergreen’s writing culture. 

                  cover

                  Inkwell cover 2012

                  Inkwell is written, edited, and designed entirely by Writing Center peer tutors, students dedicated to helping others find their voices through the writing process. Each year, authors discuss writing specific to Evergreen—such as seminar papers, evaluations, and academic statements—as well as exploring themes like developing a writing process, finding your voice as a student writer, and learning tools for academic and creative writing. With its emphasis on cultivating student voices and creating a culture of student empowerment in academics, Inkwell inspires student writers to think about how they write and invites them to become part of the Writing Center community

                  coverx

                  Inkwell cover 2008

                  Inkwell co-founder Shaun Johnson, ’07 reflected that “Evergreen puts incredible emphasis on writing in curriculums across disciplines, so it seemed especially appropriate to draw a map for students to navigate.” Inkwell was created to be this kind of map.

                  The Writing Center distributes over a thousand free copies of Inkwell annually, both on campus and to the wider community. Inkwell co-founder Victoria Larkin ‘07 sees the publication as providing “a common ground, a jumping off place for conversations,” inspiring writers to “go into and beyond their preconceptions of the writing process, of writing in general, and of their own abilities.”

                  Learn more about The Writing Center. Read digital copies of past editions of Inkwell.

                   

                  Continue reading →

                  Join the Evergreen Conversation

                    Learning Opportunity on Campus: A Bee Fair – Where Are the Bees Going and Why Does it Matter?

                    Posted on by
                    Reply

                    beeeA 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:

                    • 6:00 pm – Informational displays and student art show in the Rotunda.
                    • 7:00 pm – A short film, created by Evergreen students, on the bee crisis.
                    • 7:30 pm – A presentation of the “Pollinator Protector Award” will be given to local business owner Robert Thompson, Jr. of Lincoln Creek Lumber.

                    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:

                    • Seating is limited.
                    • Admission is free with Evergreen I.D.
                    • For non-Evergreen attendees, tickets are $10 each, available at Traditions and Radiance in Olympia, Gordon’s Garden Center in Yelm.
                    • For more information: www.olympiabeekeepers.org

                    Sponsored by:

                    Join the Evergreen Conversation