Transcription of Human Ecology #226
Lisa: People who have visited Bar Harbor have likely seen as they’re coming into town the College of the Atlantic which is set right on the coast and right towards the more urban part of that island. Today we have with us Darron Collins who is the president of the College of the Atlantic. Collins has his doctorate in cultural anthropology and prior to his role at the Mount Desert Island College he worked as a managing director at the World Wildlife Fund where he helped lead a project to save the largest member of the salmon family, the Mongolian taimen, from the brink of extinction. Darron lives in Bar Harbor with his wife and his two daughters. Thanks for coming in today.
Darron: Hi Lisa, thanks for having me.
Lisa: I have to start with the Mongolian taimen. That seems very specific.
Darron: Do you know what it is?
Lisa: Apparently it’s the largest member of the salmon family.
Darron: That’s right. It’s an enormous, voracious predatory fish that can reach in adulthood 5 or 6 feet in length and weigh 100 pounds. It’s a fish that once existed all over Eastern Europe all the way to Japan and over the past century has been really forced down into just a few small rivers, one being the Onon River in Northeastern Mongolia which is actually the river where Genghis Khan was born. It’s a very relevant river for Mongolia, it’s an amazing fish.
Lisa: Considering that it’s enormous and a predatory fish, it’s surprising to me that somehow it almost reached extinction.
Darron: It’s become something like the Big 5 mammals in Africa. People hunt the fish for its head as a trophy. It doesn’t do well at all where there’s development or where there’s damming or mining and so that’s what shrunk the population down to where it is today. Even in Northeastern Mongolia where the landscape is quite close to pristine, it’s hunted there as well. We’ve made great progress to bringing that fish back from the brink of extinction.
Lisa: You have an interesting background because although you’ve worked on this Mongolian taimen, you actually have your doctorate in cultural anthropology.
Darron: That’s right.
Lisa: You’re now at a school where apparently you’ve got your undergraduate degree that offers a degree in human ecology.
Darron: That’s right.
Lisa: These all seem linked but they’re not all exactly the same thing.
Darron: You’re absolutely right.
Lisa: How did you get from Point A to Point B to Point C to where you are now?
Darron: I grew up in New Jersey and I’m the first kind in the family to go to college. I found the College of the Atlantic. It was the absolute perfect program for me. I just loved my four years there. Absolutely loved it. After that, I went on and I got this degree in anthropology, a PhD in anthropology and that’s not a huge leap from what I worked on at the College of the Atlantic. I was interested in this balance between how can we find sustainable solutions for communities where at the same time preserving some sense of ecological integrity. Anthropology is also a good lens to do that. At Tulane, that’s where I did my PhD, my wife and I moved down to Guatemala and we were living in a very, very, very remote village in Northern Guatemala trying to understand how a local community manages its own resources. Then it wasn’t a huge leap to move from that situation to working with the World Wildlife Fund which is an excellent organization based all over the world but I was working out of Washington, D.C. where the goal is again, to try and find these balances between habitat conservation, species conservation and community-based development.
Maybe the jump back to the College of the Atlantic was a little bit more significant or different. I did not come up through the typical ranks that most college presidents come through. Most of the time people go to … They’re a faculty member, then they lead a department and then they’re a dean and then they’re provost and then they’re president. I didn’t come through that mix. Frankly, I’m glad and I would have no interest in being president really anywhere else except the College of the Atlantic. I was drawn to the college, not to the rank so to speak. It worked out and I’m in my fifth year now and loving it. It’s really good to be back at COA.
Lisa: Was there anything in your background growing up in New Jersey that caused you to be interested in things like human ecology?
Darron: My mom. New Jersey is not the kind of place you think about when you think about kids and nature. My mom managed to find every square inch of woods in the county that I grew up in. That experience was I think what really cultivated the interest in being outside. I loved to be outside and that’s probably one reason why I’m very happy being back in Maine because there’s no better place to do that than in Maine but if I look back at my childhood, I think she had a lot to do with it. I went to a public high school and there was one teacher in high school that was just fantastic and really saw something in me, saw that kind of “Aha” moment in my eyes and helped me cultivate that interest in, Jim Duffy, who I still call Mr. Duffy, because you always call your high school teachers by Mr. and Mrs. and Mr. Duffy really helped cultivate that interest as well.
Lisa: I agree with you. I’m thinking about all my high school teachers, many of whom have now taught my own children and I still will go to my children’s conferences and I’ll say, “Oh, there’s Mr. Hall.” Increasingly more and more of them have retired because that’s how old I am but yeah, there is something interesting about education and how much it really can impact someone for decades which must be part of your fascination with working with the College of the Atlantic.
Darron: It is. Institutions are important and people are important. Again, when I look back at my high school, it was that one individual that really sparked my interest. At COA, we’ve always in our 43 year history have focused on getting the right people there and the faculty, staff, trustees and students we have there are really spectacular people. That’s what makes the institution what it is.
Lisa: How many students are at the College of the Atlantic?
Darron: We’re at 350. That is the maximum. One of the things I did when I came in as president is to say, “To be small is to be special.” We are strategically capped at 350 students which allows us to do things that would be very, very difficult at other colleges. It allows us this very close relationship between students and faculty and it allows students to really be participatory in the future of the college. We want students to play a role in how the college evolves. That’s an important part of the education. That would be really hard to do at larger scales but at 350, it really works.
Lisa: That’s a pretty small student population. That’s smaller than many of the high schools, many of the larger high schools in Maine.
Darron: Oh yeah. That’s about how many kids I graduated with in my senior class in high school. It is small and it’s strategically small. It’s that way for a reason.
Lisa: How many faculty do you have?
Darron: We have about 35 full-time faculty and then a cohort of 5-10 adjuncts, assistants and lecturers. We have a very small student to faculty ratio which is a guiding principle at the college.
Lisa: It doesn’t seem to me that you could be much older than the college itself.
Darron: I’m 45. The college was founded a year before I was born in 1969. It was an amazing time and the mythology of the college is really interesting. A Catholic priest, Father Jim Gower, came together with a local businessman Les Brewer. They had this idea of creating a college on Mount Desert Island and Les, the business owner who lives here in Portland now, said, “My gosh, we have to do something to help revitalize the community. A college would be great to do that.” Jim Gower, who passed away a few years ago, had buried way too many boys coming back from Vietnam and he was struck by the social and ecological upheaval of the time. Those two came together and formed the college and brought in an amazing man, Ed Kaelber, as our founding president. In 1972, our first cohort of students came and they were 36 and a group of 4 remarkable full-time faculty and a smaller number of part-time faculty and created this school and I have a picture of that initial cohort on my desk because it really captures what it must have been like back in 1972 to be starting something entirely new. It must have been amazing.
Lisa: That’s what I’m wondering is we interviewed the president at Bates and their college was founded with ideas of equality and at a time when women weren’t really being educated and people who are of African-American descent weren’t really being educated, so they had a very specific cultural context.
Darron: Yep. Of their founding. Yep.
Lisa: It sounds like yours is similar but yours is so young.
Darron: It’s young. It’s amazing to be able to reach back to our founders, to be able to call … I just had lunch with Ed Kaelber the other day, the founding president and asked him, “What would you do in this kind of situation?” Or talk to Les Brewer here in Portland who’s still on the board of trustees of the college and having that proximity to the origin is really exciting. Most of the liberal arts colleges that you can name are 150 or 160 years old and so it’s really remarkable to be a college that’s only 40 or so years. That offers a unique possibility for students as well, to be so close to the origin.
Lisa: We had Jay Friedlander in talking to us and Jay originally had worked with Stonyfield and had more of a business background and came in and does a lot with marketing …
Darron: That’s right. Yeah.
Lisa: At the College of the Atlantic and sustainable business. He’s also young.
Darron: Jay’s all kid. He’s a little older than I am. He’s probably like 47 or something like that. Yeah, we’re about the same age.
Lisa: That’s so fascinating to be as I would think, I have college age children and to be working with people that aren’t too much older than you are, the sort of the vitality, the energy, the excitement. Do you have that sense around campus?
Darron: I definitely have that sense but it’s not necessarily pinned to age. We have a founding faculty member Bill Carpenter there who was one of the four founding faculty members. He is every bit as vivacious as Jodi Baker, who is a relatively new faculty member at the college. I think what’s amazing is having that cross-section of people and that is a real special thing. Like I said, the faculty are what drive this college and the students because adventurous faculty attract adventurous students and I think that’s a pretty descriptive and useful descriptor of the College of the Atlantic would be adventurous.
Lisa: I guess I wasn’t suggesting, just to be fair to people who are not around your age, I wasn’t suggesting that once you get older, you automatically become less energetic. I think there is a sort of spiritedness that’s a sense of youth that I get.
Darron: Absolutely.
Lisa: The interesting thing about the College of the Atlantic for me is it seems very … I guess adventurous. I guess adventuresome, like “Duh-duh-duh, here we are, College of the Atlantic!” Like superheroish almost.
Darron: Adventurous, yes. Superhero, like cultivating a sense of humility is also important. Yes, students, faculty and staff are at COA because they want to make the world a better place. That can happen at all different levels from trying to help solve the climate change problem which is universal and global down to making one’s family a better place. I think adventurous is a great, great word for describing it. It is not just adventurous in the sense of physical nature of adventure, but like academically and intellectually adventurous also.
Lisa: I guess when I said superhero, I just meant willing to take on things that were large. Bigger than oneself.
Darron: That’s exactly right.
Lisa: You actually did. I follow the College of the Atlantic on Instagram and you hiked, what was it, 24 trails in so many days because you were trying to get 40% of your alumni to participate in the giving process?
Darron: That’s right. This past fiscal year which ends July 1 so out in June, I did a hike in Acadia National Park that covered 40 of the named peaks and one … I was trying to do it in 24 hours but I didn’t finish it in time so it was 26 or 27 hours. It did inspire interest and we had 43% of our alumni make a gift to the college which is a lot. It’s a really very significant number. That was really hard, even though the mileage … Any athletic person that can stay up for 27 hours could probably have done the walk so it wasn’t like some El Capitan climb or anything like that. All these peaks you can walk to the top but I think it was that persistence is what made it interesting. It was really hard and I’m still … I think I’m recovering. I showed my age a little bit that I felt a little … I was beat up a little bit after that trip but it was great and it was amazing.
Lisa: What are some of your favorite things that are happening right now on the campus and that are happening, that our alums are making happen around the world?
Darron: Gosh. There’s so much going on. On campus, one of the things that our students do which somehow is emblematic of the college is they frequently create popup restaurants so students are living off campus and they will glean all the food possible from our two farms, from what the kitchen doesn’t use, what the local grocery stores don’t use, and they will create a popup restaurant in town for one night. It will be for a fundraiser to support Share The Harvest or something which is a student led project to bring good food to people who can’t afford it. The work on our farms I think is really exciting. We have these two farms, Peggy Rockefeller Farm and the Beach Hill Farm, and they are there for student learning, for people that are interested in agriculture but they’re also there to provide food for our own campus which is really important.
We have two islands that are further off the coast of Maine. One is called Great Duck Island another is Mount Desert Rock which is the furthest point of land out in the Gulf of Maine and the work that happens on those islands is really very, very special. It’s a lot to do with marine mammal conservation and seabird conservation, but it’s also about art and production of art and learning about how the ocean landscape affects human beings and humanity and our islands in Maine are one of our unique values I think as a state. Another thing is the relationship we’ve developed with the Island Institute based in Rockland and we’ve been doing work collaboratively with the 15 unabridged islands on the coast of Maine working with food, security, and sustainability, energy, working with education and adaptation to climate change. Getting our students, faculty together with the Island Institute staff and with community members on these islands to help make life more of a possibility for folks out on those outer islands. I think that’s pretty exciting. There’s loads going on on the campus.
Lisa: You also have some distinguished alums including our congresswoman.
Darron: Yeah. Chellie Pingree, yeah. Chellie is just a fantastic woman and her leadership in the state is something that we talk about a lot. She’s one of … I think we’re up to 2,100 alumni so we don’t have hundreds of thousands of alums but when you look at a cross-section of them, they’re pretty impressive again, and they’ve done things across just a crazy spectrum. One of our first graduates in the first graduate in class was Bill Ginn, and Bill Ginn lives here in Portland but he’s also a very senior person at the Nature Conservancy in Washington. He runs the science and field programs at the Nature Conservancy and so he was in the first class. We often talk about Bill Ginn, one of the two people that graduated in the class of 1974.
Chellie is an obvious one. We have folks from Angelie Peridi who has just graduated a few years ago, who is the youth delegation leader at some of the conference of parties for the UNFCCC, the climate change party. This woman, Angelie, kind of led the youth delegation throughout Durbin, South Africa during that time and it will be in France a week from now on the 30th, the COP21. You might think, “Oh, the College of the Atlantic, a degree in human ecology. They must be all field ecologists,” and that’s not the case. They’re writers, they’re teachers, they’re businessmen, there are field ecologists, they’re artists, but they all have this passion for serving and wanting to make their communities better. They have also this real entrepreneurial spirit. I think those two things, the entrepreneurial spirit and the sense of serving is the thread that runs through those 2,100 or so people like Chellie.
Lisa: The College of the Atlantic was featured in the New York Times for work that you have been doing in sustainable energy.
Darron: That’s right.
Lisa: That’s a big honor.
Darron: It’s a huge honor. I’ve pointed to that article a number of times and I’m not afraid to do so again because it was July 1, the front page of the business section and the author, Diane Cardwell did just a great job at capturing a program that we have that was inspired by this partnership with the Island Institute to do work out on an island called Samso which is Denmark and Samso made this transition from being completely dependent on the mainland for fossil fuels to being not only independent but actually manages to ship sustainably produced electrons actually back to the mainland.
It’s become self-sufficient in a really interesting and useful way and so our students and Island Institute staff and community members from five different islands off the coast of Maine visited Samso, learned what we could learn from their example, and brought that back to places like Peaks Island and Long Island and Vinalhaven and Matinicus and Monhegan. Matinicus wasn’t one but Monhegan was and working with those communities to say, “Okay, so we saw what was possible here on Samso. You have all this youthful student energy and you have the expertise of people like Anna Demeo and Jay Friedlander and of the Island Institute staff and you have our other faculty at the College of the Atlantic wanting to play a role and I think the take home message there was it’s not a technological solution.
It is not rocket science to get electrons from wind or from the sun and get them so they’re flowing out of an outlet. The real hard part is the community involvement and how to make that happen. Our expertise with people like Gray Cox who works on community development with people, certainly like Anna, that is a physicist, but people like Davis Taylor who is an economist, all that mix and that’s really a great example of what human ecology is, trying to bring sometimes disparate fields together to solve interesting challenges and it’s worked really well and the future will be exciting for that.
Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Darron Collins who is the president of the College of the Atlantic and also an alum. Thank you so much for all the work that you’ve done not only with the College of the Atlantic and with your daughters but also with saving the largest member of the salmon family, the Mongolian taimen. I remain very impressed by this.
Darron: Good. Yes. We’re not out of the woods with the fish yet but we’re heading in the right direction.
Lisa: Thank you so much for coming in.
Darron: Thank you Lisa.
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Lisa: I really enjoy reading books from people who are thinking about things in a broader perspective because often as someone who thinks about things in a broader perspective myself I feel a little alone in the world, but today I know I am not alone in the world because I have with me a guest who really has made a lot of interesting connections between the things that he has studied and experienced. This is Richard Borden, who holds the Rachel Carson Chair in Human Ecology at the College of the Atlantic where he teaches courses in environmental psychology, personality and social development, contemporary psychology, and the history and philosophy of human ecology. He served as the College of the Atlantic’s academic dean for 20 years, is a founding member of the Society for Human Ecology, and is the author of Ecology and Experience: Reflections from a Human Ecological Perspective. Thanks so much for coming down and having a conversation with me today.
Richard: Thank you Lisa. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Lisa: This is really a 400-page work of a lifetime, really. This must have taken your book, Ecology and Experience: Reflections from a Human Ecological Perspective, this must have taken a lot of energy and time to create for you.
Richard: Yes. It spreads out over many years and actually touches all of my life at some point or other, the stages of my life. And it was also an opportunity … I was dean at College of the Atlantic for a long time. When I stopped being dean and stepped down from that, I went back to teaching, I didn’t know what I wanted to do next. I thought I wanted to learn how to write essays. I had always enjoyed people like Loren Eiseley and people who could take complex ideas and put them into essays instead of into textbooks. I didn’t want to write a textbook but I wanted to write about what I thought I knew something about and definitely what I cared about.
I just started off on that and I really started with a class. The title of the class was Ecology and Experience, the same as the book. Where I started was I invited students to just read sort of random ideas with me in a seminar style but they were the things that were my gaps. They were the areas that I knew I wanted to know about but never had taken the time to do it. Some of it was philosophy, some of it was evolutionary biology, some of it was literature, and we just read that together and that started to form in my mind and without being on duty every single day as dean, I had a chance to stay home alone, sometimes two days a week, and I developed a writing style that if I was able to be alone for the whole day, if I got up in the morning, unplugged the phone, made a pot of coffee, and sat down, I could maintain myself until the end of the night.
I’d never had that kind of opportunity before so having 14, 15, 16-hour blocks, I got quite lost in my own thinking. At that time, I only had dial-up Internet, which was slow, which was really good because I didn’t get overwhelmed. I could search for things and they would come to me slowly. I just spent a lot of time weaving these little things together and it turned into a book.
Lisa: That is the interesting thing about what you have done and that is bringing together ecology and history and biology and psychology. I can understand why you would’ve felt at times a little lost because there’s just so much. I was impressed by that, the fact that you could actually focus it down and put it into this book.
Richard: Yeah. The book starts with five chapters. I use sort of an ecological metaphor there called transect and plot. It’s sort of a way of understanding a landscape if you will. You go across it but stop along the way and do inspections. The five areas that I felt I had some familiarity with were my own life and so I start there and I actually begin it with sort of an autobiographical transect through my life. After that, there were academic areas where I had been involved one way or another: certainly psychology, or the mind, or the inner world — our consciousness; ecology, which is about how nature works and so on. With the intersection of those two, human ecology, which is I guess, what my life work has really been about, it’s certainly what the College of the Atlantic has been trying to do and it’s why I came to College of the Atlantic was to try to put something around the idea of human ecology. And then finally education, higher education, which I fell into being a dean. I never planned on being a dean, but I ended up being a dean for a pretty long time and having to learn a lot about the history of higher education. So, it was a chance for me to put those together. That was really I guess I’d say a foundation. At that point, I was done with being academically legitimate and from then on I could dance. The next ten or so chapters are me just doing little jazz interpretations, pulling pieces from the foundation.
Lisa: Let me read a little bit from Chapter 3 called Experience and you start out with a quote from Soren Kierkegaard, “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” You say, “To talk of experience is to enter a house of mirrors. Knowledge of reality requires awareness yet we cannot know consciousness independently of reality. Experience is constructed and held together by subjective consciousness but in an instant it can become the target of its own reckoning as objective self-awareness. The objects of thought cannot be untangled from the processes of thinking itself.”
That’s such an interesting idea that we’re meant to live this life and simultaneously study this life but once we’re studying it, it’s the observer becoming the observed. It is this interesting house of mirrors and one as a writer and a doctor that I see all the time, that what is the actual nature of reality? Which just is a huge question.
Richard: Yes. I think that’s from the chapter on experience or psychology. Basically for me that’s the beauty of psychology. I believe in a few things. One is I believe the world is really there, so I don’t have that problem. But in addition to that I also believe that consciousness is real and that’s what that part of the book is about. It’s trying to put something around the idea of consciousness and one of the beautiful things about consciousness, human consciousness, is it has the capacity to split itself. We can both think our thinking, or do what we’re doing, but we can also observe ourselves thinking what we’re thinking and doing what we’re doing — and that splitting, that capacity for introspection, that capacity for insight is what makes psychology psychology.
It’s also what makes psychology so different let’s say from ecology. The living world is out there, but an awful lot of it I would say does not have the capacities for self-awareness in the same way that we do. It knows how to do what it does, but not in a self-conscious kind of way. We have this other opportunity, this other set of problems of figuring out now what do I do in becoming who I am. A plant doesn’t have to think about that too much, it just adapts or finds its way in its environment. We are in this dilemma of free will. That’s both a stubborn philosophical problem but it’s a beautiful thing also.
Lisa: Tell me about human ecology. One of the things I liked about reading your book is it reminded me that some of these fields are really relatively young. Some of the fields that you’ve been involved in. Psychology is relatively young, even biology per se is relatively young. We’re talking not hundreds of thousands of years worth of study officially, we’re talking maybe a few hundred years. Tell me what human ecology is because that’s the baby of all of these.
Richard: This is where it starts to get hard. Let me start with something very simple and give you the definition, sort of the standard keyhole definition of human ecology. Let’s say it is the study of human-environment interactions. That’s a starting point — small. We broaden it a little bit and say it’s the study of the interrelations between humans and their natural, their social, and their technological environments, it gets a little bit bigger.
Once you get through that, it really becomes in some ways about everything. We are part of the living world. Even though we can stand away from it, we are part of it also. It’s really trying to figure out how to bring those things together. Let me add here that given that those are two starting points, I would say there are two kinds of unconsciousness. There’s the unconsciousness that we have of our inner selves, that through insight all of a sudden you recognize something about yourself, a buried intuition or whatever that you didn’t know before, but it changes who you are, at least it potentially can do that.
To turn that the other way around, or inside out, or onto the world, I think there’s also a lot of unconsciousness about the world. In many ways, that’s what science does. Science brings things that are out there into our awareness. It brings them into consciousness, and then we can use that knowledge or do what we want with that knowledge. Ecology as a science is, as you say, very recent as a field. This year, 2015, is the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Ecological Society of America. I was quite involved with that back in August in Baltimore.
Ecology, I would say, is the quintessential interdisciplinary science. To understand what ecology is trying to get at, you have to know physical science, you have to know geology, you have to know hydrology, you have to know about soils, you have to know about botany, you have to know about continental drift, you have to know about animal behavior and you have to know about all those things together. It’s only in those things together that you see the patterns that connect those things. Those patterns, which connect the living world within itself, is what ecology is about. It’s not just about the naming of the organisms. It’s about how they interact with each other and how those interactions change, here and now, into what’s going to happen next — basically how they participate in evolution.
What I was trying to do here is to bring that into awareness and that’s what human ecology is about in many other places. Although different people start from different places. I started really as a psychologist who got interested in ecology and then went downhill from there. Other people start from architecture or planning and they want to understand how to plan in a human ecological kind of way. In medicine, particularly public health, there are a lot of people who use human ecology as a frame to understand not just what the concept of health is but how it relates to the environment and how it relates to evolution and how it relates to human choices. It becomes inherently interdisciplinary. You will find those kinds of people in the tent that has the name “Human Ecology” on the outside of it.
Lisa: When I think about ecology, I think about this movement that has occurred and the idea of Earth Day and how we all want to “save our planet”. You pointed out that Earth Day itself is really only I believe just over 40 years old and also the actual ecological movement and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and I think it was the burning of the Cuyahoga River and all of this stuff, it all was happening really not that long ago.
Richard: It’s all in my lifetime. I remember reading Rachel Carson. My mother was a member of a book of the month club. We got her early books before Silent Spring and I remember reading Silent Spring. I definitely remember the Cuyahoga River bursting into flames because I was in Ohio at that time. I was there for the first Earth Day. Really what I’m trying to do is I’m using my lifetime in some ways as a measure of just how much change and what kinds of changes have happened in the last fifty or sixty years.
Lisa: It must be interesting for you to be in Maine, doing this now because you’re not originally from Maine. You came to Maine very specifically to work with an academic organization that was also relatively young but had similar principles to yours.
Richard: There are a lot of starting points for this story. I was a psychologist. I was trained as a psychologist. I worked for a while in community mental health centers and the work was not rewarding for me or for the people who were there because the system was really not a good system for providing services. I found that difficult. And I sort of thought, “Maybe I don’t really want to do this.” I went and did a post doc in animal behavioral and behavioral ecology because I thought, “Well maybe I want to go out and study wolves in the wild or something like that.”
In the process of that, I got more interested in the idea of ecology than any particular species of animal. It started to occur to me that ecology, as a science, has something to tell us as human beings about the world. That is, it can put up a certain kind of mirror and if you see yourself in that mirror, it has the potential to change how you think about yourself, how you think about everything. So I started to be interested in the way in which ecology came into the human psyche and what happened when that happened. I just started going out in the world looking for people who knew something about ecology or thought about it or whatever.
This was at Ohio State; but then I went to Purdue. And at Purdue they gave me the opportunity to start to create a small program in environmental psychology, which is where these things could come together. At that time, most people who said anything like environmental psychology were talking about how the built environment affects us or noise pollution or all those kinds of things — sort of the outside in. I was more interested in the classical, analytical notion of consciousness, unconsciousness and transformation of consciousness and personality changes through insight. I was looking for ways in which ecology could provide psychological insights that would be life changing for people.
I was in sort of a bad mood one day and I wrote a little snarky article where I said that I didn’t think there was anywhere in American higher education where a person could get a bonafide interdisciplinary education. One of the responses that came back came from a psychologist at the University of Michigan. He said, “Well Rich, there’s this little college that was just founded up in Bar Harbor, Maine by a bunch of Harvard types and they’re doing something called human ecology.” That’s the first time I heard the term. But the instant I saw the term, I thought, “Yes. That’s it.” It was itself an insight for me, that those are the words that are getting at what I’m trying to get at myself.
So I wrote a letter to the College of the Atlantic. It was sort of formal and said I’m a research professor at a university — and blah, blah, blah — and I would like to come and study you with my graduate students; and I did. They invited me, in fact, the then faculty member Steve Katona who later became president of COA, wrote back to me on the back of my letter, handwritten, he said, “Yeah, come on up. Help yourself. You can stay with me.” I did and I studied the students pretty seriously as a personality psychology, attitudinal psychology study, and started writing that up, and doing things like that. And then, I had an opportunity to take a sabbatical from Purdue and I spent that semester at COA and I guess I fell in love, and it was reciprocated and they invited me to be the first psychologist on the faculty. That’s how I got started in this.
Lisa: Maine has a long history of being at the forefront of ecological efforts. I believe it was our senator at the time, Ed Muskie, and don’t quote me on this, anybody who’s listening if I’m wrong, please let me know but involved in the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and then eventually we had George Mitchell and Cohen. We’ve had a lot of people who have been involved in these efforts. It somehow doesn’t surprise me that if you’re going to have a small college that’s being founded roughly in the same time frame, dealing with human ecology that it would be in Maine. There’s something about the way that we pay attention to what’s going on around us that seems to make this a prime spot for these sorts of efforts.
Richard: Yeah, I think that’s true for Maine as a whole. It’s especially true for Mount Desert Island. The history of Mount Desert Island of course was it was an out of the way place that no one paid much attention to I’m sure in the mid 1800s until some of the Hudson River School painters came. They started, Thomas Cole and people like that started painting the island and they took the paintings back to the big cities, New York and Boston, Philadelphia. People said, “Where is that?” Some of those people started to come and ‘rusticate’ as they called it back then, stay with the local farmers and before long, they wanted to have their own places here and they started to build what they called cottages which as you know were very large homes, but nicely built. But they did it in a way that harmonized with the landscape. They didn’t build up on the tops of the mountains like they did in most other places. They built hidden in the woods and so on.
Then there was a hotel era there and the same thing happened. Then other people of money, the Rockefellers and George Dorr, went about protecting many of the features of the island and purchasing the land and turning it into the first donated land national park. So you have that kind of attitude right there in the landscape. It’s been there for a very long time, and then there was the fire of 1947. That completely changed the landscape in a dramatic way. It burned up half of the town of Bar Harbor and a third of the island and a big portion of the park. In the recovery of that, some local men who had gone to Bar Harbor High School, one a Catholic priest, Jim Gower, and the other a businessman, Leslie Brewer, started to play with the idea of, “Let’s build a college here.”
As they started to develop the idea, Jim Gower actually heard on the radio a lecture by Ian McHarg. Ian McHarg was a founder of the Human Ecology Planning Program at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960s. He wrote a very influential book called Design with Nature, which was a breakthrough in regional planning and landscape architecture. Anyhow, Father Gower heard him on the radio in his car and as they were having their meeting about what kind of college should this be, he said, “How about a college of human ecology.”
That’s sort of the birth or the creation myth of how it happened. And then they looked for their first employee, who was the president and founding president, Ed Kaelber, who came out of Harvard Ed school, he’d been associate dean down there; and he put words around it. He wrote up the mission statement for the college and what human ecology would mean as an interdisciplinary institution — and College of the Atlantic is unlike most other places, almost all other places because it has no departments. It’s completely non-departmentalized. When I visited there the first time, that’s what blew my mind. I had lunch with an artist and an engineer and a biologist and an anthropologist, all people trying to talk to each other and actually trying to build a college. It was just fascinating.
Lisa: Just as Bar Harbor and Mount Desert Island had to … like the phoenix, rise from the flames, you had a similar experience with the College of the Atlantic where there was a big fire and your research was essentially destroyed and not only you but the entire college really had to rebuild around this and recreate itself. Did this provide a space for any sort of reflection on your part?
Richard: Yes. Let me go back to that — because in 1983, the main building, the center of the college which was a large, rambling estate in Bar Harbor, burned down. It was in July as I remember. In those days all of our research data was kept on IBM cards. This was before online kinds of things. I had boxes and boxes and boxes of them in our little computer center there. All of the work that I’d been doing on environmental attitudes and ecological understanding in this country — and I’d also been working in Scandinavia and other places — was all destroyed. My research psychology identity was over with.
The college was going through some other changes at that point. One of the changes was they were looking for a new president. I had just gotten a grant to go and see if I could find other people who were doing human ecology. I’d heard of some in Europe; so the following summer, I took off to Europe and I traveled all over Europe from England, I found a human ecology program at Oxford and the University of London and the University of Edinburgh and in Bergen Norway, in Oslo, in Sweden, Denmark and I went to France. And anyhow, I found all these people who were doing human ecology in higher education in Europe. Most of them didn’t know about each other. So when I got back, I had all this new knowledge that there is this human ecology happening in the world. It’s not just a COA phenomenon.
The new president had been selected, it was Lou Rabineau — and Lou was the former chancellor of the University of Connecticut system. We went out to dinner, on the first night I met him and the next day he calls me in, he says, “Rich, I want you to be the academic dean.” That was life changing. In many ways, I stopped being a psychologist and I turned into a dean, though I didn’t know anything about how to be a dean. This was also an opportunity, and Lou really supported it, to build connections to other human ecologists around the world and that replaced my psychology thing with now networking human ecology worldwide and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.
Lisa: I found a quote in here. While there were lots of quotes this one you didn’t actually create yourself, but you are quoting a colleague of yours, Bill Drury, who says, “When your views on the world and your intellect are being challenged and you begin to feel uncomfortable because of the contradiction you’ve detected that is threatening your current model of the world or some aspect of it, ‘pay attention’, you are about to learn something. This discomfort and intellectual conflict is when learning is taking place.” I think that’s fabulous.
Richard: Why did you pick that?
Lisa: Because I believe that most of us want to move away from conflict. We don’t want to deal with things that make us feel uncomfortable, and yet this idea that this is somehow… that there’s something making us squirm. Maybe we’re supposed to go towards it; maybe it’s supposed to teach us something.
Richard: That’s true and one of the reasons I put that in there is because Bill Drury was an absolute inspiration for me. He was the best ecologist, field biologist, I have ever known. He had been on the faculty at Harvard and Ed Kaelber enticed him to leave Harvard and come to College of the Atlantic. He was there when I arrived, and this is a person who really brought prestige and a whole different level of understanding and education to COA. And what he is really saying is a psychological statement. He is really talking about insight. This is an ecologist who is speaking psychology, and he puts it out there so straight ahead and effectively.
Lisa: I learned a lot from your book and probably in a lot of ways that won’t quite come to light yet but I’m guessing that they will cause me to make connections that I probably wouldn’t previously have made. How can people find out about your book, Ecology and Experience: Reflections from a Human Ecological Perspective and also the work that you’re doing with the College of the Atlantic?
Richard: The book of course is available through all of the online places: Barnes & Noble, Amazon, that’s the easiest, probably the cheapest, way to get it. In terms of what else I’m doing, I’m still very active with the Society for Human Ecology. I have just finished my term on the council of the Ecological Society of America where I was a founder of the human ecology division and we just recently did a history of the human ecological ideas within the Ecological Society of America over the last hundred years. I’m now working in a similar history of human ecology elsewhere. This idea of human ecology has been around for a long time, very much under the radar. As soon as the term ecology came into the language, it was inevitable that people would start to bring humans to it. They would be anthropologists, they would be geographers, they would be people in medicine, they were the sociologists, and there were all different kinds of ways that you could look at human relations that have an ecological or have ecological dimensions.
That has grown from all this little bit of ecology in various other departments of this or that in the university, to maybe what COA is for sure — to turn the whole thing inside out and now the disciplines are part of the human ecology. And that idea, I think, is growing. It’s growing slowly. You see it indirectly all over the place with all the language of sustainability; you see it just yesterday or these last couple weeks in Paris One hundred and ninety five countries have gotten together to talk about climate and to try to do something about it. There will be people who’ll say more could have been done, but that that even happens is for me evidence of a human ecological point of view and those kinds of concerns.
Lisa: I appreciate the years and energy that you’ve put into your work and also appreciate your coming down and speaking with us today. We’ve been having a conversation with Richard Borden, who holds the Rachel Carson Chair in Human Ecology at the College of the Atlantic and who is also the author of Ecology and Experience: Reflections from a Human Ecological Perspective. I’m very grateful for the time that you’ve put into these efforts and I appreciate your being with me today.
Richard: Thank you. I’m grateful for the opportunity.