What if you had to give up a word you use every day? That’s what a group of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ student tutors were asked to do this fall as a way to consider how words — and the loss of words — influence our cultural identities. 

When Nancy Campbell came to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ in October to give the 2023 Otis Lecture on endangered languages, the poet also conducted a workshop with the college’s peer writing tutors to help them think more deeply about word choice and language.

The workshop exercise, in which the tutors were asked to give up a word, resonated strongly for Caroline Cassell ’24 of Woodstock, Vt., whose senior thesis in gender and sexuality studies is about the impact of language in the classroom.

“It’s easy to not pay attention to the impact of small choices and the impact they have on other people. However, language really shapes how we interact with one another. I think Nancy Campbell really speaks to that,� said Cassell, who is also majoring in sociology and theater.

Campbell, a poet, has traveled in and written extensively about the Arctic, including how indigenous communities in Arctic regions face challenges in maintaining their languages and cultural traditions. “The writing tutors wanted to hear about that,â€� said Bridget Fullerton, the director of student writing and a lecturer in humanities.

Campbell’s concern for endangered languages came out of the artist residency she held at a museum in Greenland in 2010, where she studied Greenlandic, which had just been added to UNESCO’S list of endangered languages. Following that experience, Campbell wrote The Library of Ice, a non-fiction book about her travels around Greenland and other glacial regions. This was followed by a book on global terms for winter weather, Fifty Words for Snow, which has been translated into 10 languages.

“In the Arctic, Indigenous languages are rich in traditional knowledge about the environment that can help us understand climate change,� Campbell said. “I was devastated to realize that not only the Arctic landscape and the human lives dependent on it are threatened by catastrophic climate change, but also the language.�

In her workshop with the peer tutors in the Student Writing and Language Center, Campbell brought her participatory art project The Polar Tombola, named after an Italian Christmas raffle.

After she developed the artistic exercise, in the mid-2010s Campbell took it on the road to events around the United Kingdom. During the tour, she gathered not just English words but Danish, Dutch, Farsi, Icelandic, Korean, and Spanish words, too. In 2017, Campbell published a selection of abandoned words in The Polar Tombola: A Book of Banished Words, an anthology featuring images of the hand-written words and poems on language loss. 

As she has done elsewhere, Campbell gave each ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ student a Greenlandic word for them to try to use in their everyday lives — such as “akunagaa,â€� which means it is too late to begin, or unnuarpoq, which means there is no night any longer.

In exchange, she asked them to give up a word they felt was worth abandoning, a word they promised to never use again. Campbell hoped the exercise would generate a deep commitment, as well as an appreciation of the power of language.  

The students’ words were written on a white board, words such as “stupid,â€� “nevermind,â€� “sure,â€� “like,â€� “weird,â€� “normal,â€� and “crazy.â€� Campbell approached the workshop like a ritual, noting that the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ words will be included in the second volume of the Banished Words anthology. “When people donate words to me, I take my duties as custodian very seriously,â€� Campbell said. 

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ peer tutors also took the participatory art project quite seriously, especially since it coincides perfectly with one of the goals of the tutor’s umbrella program, the center: the imperative to embrace language diversity, recognizing that honoring the variety of language and dialects used within the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ community is part of social justice work.

Aleisha Martinez Sandoval ’26 of Edinburg, Texas, appreciated the message inherent in The Polar Tombola: Be more mindful of the words, to be more concise, and to consider the effect they can have on people. She added that the center has been a good place to explore such ideas because it’s a supportive community, one that’s helped her become a better communicator.

Sandoval grew up in a bilingual household speaking both English and Spanish, and intends to give up the Spanish word “es que,â€� which translates to “butâ€� when it precedes “excuses for one’s own actions,” she said. “As I move on in my professional career, I want to be known as someone who is not afraid of making mistakes, learns from them, and uses those findings to better themselves.”

Taking part in The Polar Tombola art project wasn’t Cassell’s first time trying to drop certain words from their everyday language. Upon arriving at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ two years ago, Cassell decided to ditch the phrase “you guysâ€� in an effort to use more gender-neutral language. The term, Cassell said, made a friend feel “really unseen, unheard, and uncomfortable.â€�

During The Polar Tombola participatory project, Cassell decided also to stop using the word “sureâ€� because the word lacks enthusiasm and suggests hesitancy. “It was really great to have someone here who could speak to the power of the very small choices we make with words, something that might seem insignificant.”

After the Lewiston shootings on Oct. 25, Cassell decided to give up a third word: “Productive.” In the days after the tragedy, students were being asked when they’d dive back into their school work — when would they be “productiveâ€�? Living through that strange, horrible time made Cassell reflect on what it meant to be productive.

“Productive in our culture means go, go, go and work, work, work,� they said. “I wanted to reflect on how grief and rest and space also is producing something in ourselves.�

Of the center’s nearly 70 tutors, more than a third attended Campbell’s workshop. Campbell said she enjoyed the students’ robust debate that came out of the group exercise, such as questioning whether giving up the use of a word dulled its effect on you.

“Can you remove hate, for example, by eradicating the word?â€� Campbell posed. “If only!” The idea of giving up difficult and charged words prompted “very sophisticated questions from the students about censorship,” she said. “I felt we were coming to a group understanding of the frustrations encountered by those navigating language loss, whether through cultural change, or on an individual level in conditions such as aphasia.â€�

The question of using — or not using — explosive words is part of the work of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ student tutors as they help their fellow students learn how to use inclusive and respectful language in their writing. “Words matter deeply,” Fullerton said. “Bad things make us want to give up horrible words like violence and hate, but when we give them up, how do we talk about them and cope with the problem?â€�

In the peer-tutor model in place at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and elsewhere, tutors are called upon to “carefully consider the words used in their peers’ writing,” said Fullerton, “even if those words are painful or unknown to the tutor — and must confront words that hurt or be curious about words that they don’t understand.”

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ tutors, Fullerton said, “hold their peers accountable, asking questions and being curious: Why this word? Why here? What do you mean? We would all do well to ask ourselves such questions on a regular basis.”

Three hundred miles away from the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ campus, on a 12-acre estate in New York’s Westchester County, a single weeping cherry tree drapes its branches over the side of a hill, surrounded by daffodils and grass.

For Carolyn Finney, a storyteller, author, and cultural geographer who delivered this year’s Otis Lecture, the tree has complex significance, representing the connection her father and mother had to that land, the erasure of Black people’s experiences from any aspect of environmental history, and the power of reparative gestures.

Speaking in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, Finney centered her talk, “Reparative Gestures: On Race, Redemption and (Re)making a Green World,� around a story about her parents, who were caretakers of the Westchester estate and lived on the grounds in a gardener’s house. It’s where Carolyn and her two siblings grew up and where, some years later, her father planted a cherry tree as a gift to Finney’s mother on their 40th wedding anniversary.

Then the estate was sold, and Finney’s family moved to Virginia, leaving the tree, the land, and a piece of her father’s heart behind. “I watched my father in particular get incredibly depressed,� Finney said. “He talked about missing the land. He talked about missing place. He talked about the idea that they had no legacy, no money. And more importantly, they had no land.�

A few years later, they learned that the estate had been put into a conservation easement with the Westchester Land Trust, which thanked the new owners for their conservation efforts. Nothing was said about Finney’s parents, who had cared for the land for over 50 years. “And just like that, they were gone,� she said.

It got Finney thinking broadly about how people’s histories and experiences get erased “when we think about land, when we think about stewardship.â€� Because land and place are tied up in “caring and engagement and stories and love…what we’re talking about is love and connection and a sense of belonging. A place where you can stand, that you come to know, and what it’s like when you can be erased, just like that.â€�

Around the same time, in 2003, Finney had hit a roadblock in her intended doctoral dissertation, and was looking to pursue a whole new topic. “And my professor had said, ‘Look, you’ve been talking about African Americans and the environment. Nobody’s doing it. Why don’t you?â€�

She scoured the library shelves for anything about or by Black people in the environment, but found nothing besides “a few things on environmental justice and the bad things that happened to Black people. But we aren’t only the bad things that happened to us,â€� said Finney.

So she exited the library, exited the ivory tower, and headed out to do fieldwork. “It was some of the best research, in terms of the experience, that I’ve ever had,â€� she said.

Finney interviewed people, mainly African Americans, and asked them for their stories. The most common answers she got were, “Oh, I don’t have a story� and “No one’s ever asked me that before.� Those responses “really moved me,� said Finney.

The fieldwork led to Finney’s first book, in 2014, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors, which mapped out the ways in which Black Americans’ experience has been excluded from discussions and concepts of nature and the environment in the U.S.

But what about her own family’s experience of being erased from that Westchester land? Finney felt that pain, but didn’t know what to do with it. Quoting Nadia Bolz-Webber, host of The Confessional podcast, Finney asked herself, “What do I do with my pain? Do I transmit it, or do I transform it?â€�

Plans had been made for Finney to team up with a documentary filmmaker to visit the estate and tell the story about her family and the tree. But then she learned that the tree was gone, removed during landscaping work at the estate. At first, she was hurt and angry. Then came the impulse to tell a story. “This is a story we have to tell because this is what always happens,” she told the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ audience. “I’m not blaming anybody, but this is the story we need to talk about.â€�

So everyone got involved — Finney, the film crew, the land trust, the estate’s owners — and came together on a sweltering summer day in 2021 to plant a new cherry tree. “It felt quite sacred to have everybody involved,” she said.

It was a reparative gesture, a theme of her talk. “My parents’ story is going to become part of their story. It’s not simply my story, it’s our story,â€� Finney said. “Everybody becomes accountable for the story of the tree. Not simply me.â€�

Sometime later, Finney received a picture of the new tree, and what she saw gave her joy. Not just the tree but also daffodils, planted by the homeowners. “What they didn’t know is that daffodils are my father’s favorite flower and I felt so moved by that.â€�

Finney’s joy prompted, during her Otis talk, a brief reflection on the concept of joy in the context of how we endure and fight the crises of our times.

“When we talk about climate catastrophe, or environmental and social justice, and democracy breaking down — all of it’s hard,” she said. “But we don’t have to just do that and not have joy in our lives. You can do this work, you can care deeply, you can show up — and you can still be joyous doing it.

“That doesn’t mean you’re not angry. It doesn’t mean you’re not hurt. And it doesn’t mean you’re not scared. None of these things operate in the silo, but you can still have joy.â€�

Near the end of her talk, Finney made a point of noting that a reparative gesture is at the heart of her ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ visit. The Otis Lecture is sponsored by the Philip J. Otis Endowment, established by his family in memory of the young ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ alum who died in 1996 while attempting to rescue an injured climber on Mount Rainier.

The act of establishing the endowment and the annual lecture is, for the family, perhaps the “ultimate reparative gesture,� said Finney. “When I think of a family who lost their child in 1996, and how, every time there is an Otis Lecture, they elevate and celebrate and remember their son and everything that comes with that memory, I am humbled.

“The gesture is the choice,” she said, “that possibility is revealed in the repetition of practice: the transformation of tragedy and trauma and pain.â€�

Reparative gestures are “not about right or wrong. It’s about an intention to do better, an intention to see better. It’s about remaining curious and compassionate and empathetic and present while looking to the future.â€�

What do hemp, centuries-old squash seeds, and a lake of carefully tended wild rice have in common? The future, according to environmentalist, economist, writer, and activist Winona LaDuke.

The coronavirus pandemic has changed economies globally, crippling large and small businesses alike. Supply and demand never seem to match, and countries’ unwillingness to give up fossil fuels has delivered a setback to the world’s climate change goals, while increasingly extreme weather events — drought, heat, floods, and rising ocean waters — underscore the need to take action.

Even with modern and sustainable methods of generating power, conserving water, and consuming more efficiently, not all the solutions we need are new. Sometimes, reaching back into the past and consulting the cultures who lived here before us — and live here today alongside us — can reveal the answer we’re all looking for.

That was LaDuke’s message last Monday while delivering ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ 24th annual Otis Lecture, “.â€�&²Ô²ú²õ±è;

LaDuke is a member of the Ojibwe people, part of the larger Anishinaabe group of North American Indigenous cultures. The “7th Fire� of her talk’s title draws from Anishinaabe prophecies made 500 years ago. Our troubled world is in the time of the Seventh Fire, she explained. The promise of a sustainable, green, and socio-economically just future is the Eighth Fire, and LaDuke wants us all to be ready for it.

“We were told that we would have a choice in the time of the Seventh Fire between two paths,� said LaDuke. “It said one path would be well-worn and it would be scorched. And the other path would not be well worn; it would be green. They said, ‘You need to make a choice between two paths.’ And I would suggest to you that that is not actually just an Anishinaabe conundrum: I think that’s really an American conundrum.�

“We have some experience with sustainability. I would suggest to you that the U.S. does not.â€�

Few with any environmental awareness would argue against the dire need to create some sort of post–fossil fuel world, with an intentional shift toward solar power, greater sustainability in food and materials, and protection of natural resources.

But getting there? That’s the rub. And from LaDuke’s perspective and expertise as an Indiginous activist, one of the many crimes of American colonialism is how it has systematically pushed aside — and tried to erase — sustainable and effective practices and ways of life.

For example, the Ojibwe people have harvested the same crop of lake-grown wild rice for over 10,000 years, bringing in up to 500 pounds of rice a day “with just two sticks and a canoe,� LaDuke said.

That, she added, is an example of what sustainability is. “You take care of your lake, make sure the water levels are good. So we have some experience with sustainability. I would suggest to you that the U.S. does not.�

To illustrate that point, LaDuke visited the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota to study Ojibwe rice-harvesting practices and left with a disdain for the limitations of its simplicity. In The Wild Rice Gatherers of the Upper Lakes, published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1900, it is said that “wild rice, which had led to their advance thus far, held them back from further progress, unless, indeed, they left it behind them, for with them it was incapable of extensive cultivation.�

The point is, Indigenous practices and ways of life are presented as a thing of the past, says LaDuke. Methods of growing and gathering food, building communities, and sharing culture are often seen as outdated and inefficient. Producing food for local — and not global — communities without an eye toward commercialization doesn’t fit what many of us see as progress.

Wild rice is also central to another of LaDuke’s themes, biodiversity. “In this world that we’re in today, it is essential for all of us to protect where the wild things are,� LaDuke said. “That’s where I say I live: where the wild things are. And that is how we survive: by protecting biodiversity.�

Around 13 years ago, LaDuke was given some very old squash seeds. (There are a .) She gave some away and planted the rest and they yielded big, bright orange, bumpy squash, now a heirloom variety, which LaDuke named Gete Okosomin, meaning “really cool old squash.�

Even centuries-old seeds remember how to grow, and those ties to the earth can help create stronger, more diverse crops. “The solutions are to grow local, and to grow indigenous varieties,� LaDuke said.

“The next economy should be owned by the people who didn’t benefit from the last one.�

Hemp is another example of a once-powerful economic driver that was relegated to throwback status. Industrial hemp was used to make a variety of industrial and consumer products, including textiles. “anything that you can do with fossil fuels you can do with hemp, plus more. Just think about the fact that the word ‘canvas’ comes from cannabis.â€�

Then, in 1937, industrial hemp was made illegal. “About 100 years ago, ,� she added. “And we made a wrong choice.�

LaDuke grows hemp on her farm near Callaway, Minn. She’s cultivating it as a perennial, which means that she’s not focusing on the CBD properties but the plant itself, and the way it interacts with the soil. Growing hemp perennially means it can , and the plant is healthier.

As CBD products continue their march into the marketplace and hemp potentially replaces more fossil-fuel plastics, LaDuke believes the people at the forefront of those industries should be Indigenous and people of color, asserting that “the next economy should be owned by the people who didn’t benefit from the last one.�

LaDuke’s recent activism includes her efforts to in northern Minnesota. The pipeline carries tar sands, a type of heavy crude oil. Replacing and building new pipelines to transport tar sands continues to power the demand for unsustainable energy while ignoring Indigenous land rights and the climate crisis. 

Indeed, there’s still no coherent energy framework in the U.S. that accounts for climate change and its disasters, LaDuke said. “There’s no plan.â€� And with no national plan, it can be difficult to see any action that can be taken, outside of political and social activism. Which returns her to the promise of the Eighth Fire.

LaDuke quoted :

“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.�

“You have an opportunity to transform things,� LaDuke said. “The question is, what can you do in those moments? What do you learn from them? How do you adapt?�

Let’s admit it: I’ve been Jane Costlow’s shadow — a Boswell to her Johnson — these last three months as I try to document her 34th and final year of teaching at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

I’ve followed her onto the Quad for Opening Convocation, into ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ classrooms to see her teach, and down to Portland (and into a Trader Joe’s store) to photograph a student-led climate protest.

Little did I know that we were just getting started.

In late October, I rode the bus for seven hours to New York City to photograph Costlow presenting scholarly research about oil pollution in the Volga River in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Behind me on the ride down, a woman read her poetry aloud off her laptop (aren’t they handy?) to a stranger, an all-too-willing conversational partner who compared her poems, at length, to Yeats and then to Thoreau.

At first, I had a rosy reaction to their dialogue. What great preparation, I reasoned, for entering Costlow’s academic milieu, a heady mix of literature and history and language study — until the dialogue persisted for the full seven hours, the kind of time I wouldn’t spend even on Costlow.

But was it worth it? Yes, because I got to see how Costlow, in her final year at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ as the college’s Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies, continues to excel at teaching, research, and service, the holy trinity of faculty responsibilities by which professors across the land are judged and measured.

And over a recent three-week span, Costlow undertook all three with zeal.

On campus, she taught students and graded their papers.

In New York, she presented the paper “Seeing Oil: Transporting the Volga into the Modern Era� at the conference Energy, Aesthetics: Force, Flow, and Entropy in Russian Culture at New York University’s Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia.

And then, serving as chair of the college’s Philip J. Otis Committee, she orchestrated a three-day visit to campus in early November by poet and essayist Ross Gay, who visited classes, dined out with faculty and students, and delivered this year’s Otis Lecture.

(Squeezed into the mix, too, was Costlow offering commentary one Saturday afternoon on the documentary film Makala, screened at Lewiston Public Library for the Tournées French Film Festival.)

We spoke to Costlow about the pleasures and challenges of trying to manage all of these roles nearly simultaneously.

In American higher education, the triad of scholarship, teaching, and service defines an academic’s career. How do those expectations define what it’s like to be a faculty member at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½?

Ideally, they all feed into, nourish, and sustain each other. At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, I’ve had the good fortune to teach what I really love, things that I’m intellectually and personally really interested in.

There are ways in which my teaching has led me into new kinds of scholarly questions, which is great. And there really is something about your own intellectual curiosity, and other forms of curiosity, that can be fed by your scholarship and then that comes back into the classroom.

But there’s never enough time for the scholarship that you want to do.

The service part can sometimes feel really integrated, and sometimes it’s just part of what we need to do to keep the household of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College going, part of what it is to be at a liberal arts college. I find that service is more likely to sap energy than necessarily nurturing energy.

You’ve mentioned that doing all three nearly simultaneously, as you did in recent weeks, is a bad idea. Why?

It’s just too much — I don’t think that’s healthy for anybody.

And it’s not just the faculty trying to keep all these balls in the air. I have a first-year student violinist who’s very excited about everything. I heard someone ask him after class, “Oh, are you going to be playing in the orchestra?â€� And he said, “Well, technically, I don’t have the time to play in the orchestra. But I might try to anyway.â€�

And I just found myself laughing because I thought, “There it is: You don’t really have enough time to do all these things, but you’re kind of ramming more things into your day.â€� I worry about us trying to get too much done in too little time at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

We hear these concerns throughout American society. What might an alternative look like?

We had dinner with Ross Gay at Nezinscot Farm in Turner the other night. We do it each year: a group of faculty and students take our Otis visitor to Nezinscot for a wonderful country-farm meal. It’s just incredibly relaxed. We sit around this long table and have a sort of Thanksgiving dinner. We chat, and then at a certain point, somebody tries to ask a good question that we can all have a conversation around.

This year, we talked a lot about what an environmental studies education ought to be, about the students’ hunger for some kind of hands-on aspect to their education.

The next day, my colleague Carissa Aoki told me that on the ride back to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ from the farm, the students talked about how wonderful it was to sit and just talk with the faculty, just to have that big, rambling, relaxed conversation, and that we don’t do it enough. And they’re absolutely right. We don’t.

At top, before dinner at Nezinscot Farm, essayist and poet Ross Gay kicks off introductions as Costlow and environmental studies major Alexandra Cullen ’20 listen. Above left, Costlow consults with host Gloria Varney, and above right, Costlow leads the group in a moment of gratitude before dinner. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

What’s the solution?

I don’t know. Do I need to bring in donuts and coffee to my classes? Should we sit on the floor instead of at desks? There’s something about the arrangement here — the stress and the dizziness — that gets in the way of having those deep conversations. I guess I’m thinking that we just live in a world that is not conducive to reflection. And that impacts me and it also impacts my students.

How so?

For example, to write well, you really do need space to be reflective — space to empty and clear your mind and get ready to write. Do we give our students that space for deep creative work?

In that sense, for me, writing and teaching often seem incompatible. The poet Adrienne Rich said that when she was teaching, she wasn’t actually able to write poetry. It had to do with the way that being in a classroom takes the energy out of you.

One of any teacher’s major responsibilities is grading papers. I’ve seen you running to class, papers in hand. I’ve seen you hand those papers back to eager students. Presumably this process is valuable to you as well as your students.

Teaching students how to write and responding to their writing is probably one of the most important things I do as a teacher. And it’s a big task. I have pretty large classes now, and I just can’t imagine teaching without having them write papers. I need to see their writing. I need to see their ideas developed. I need to try to help them even in the context of a fairly large class. I need to give them feedback and help them develop as writers.

Has anything changed for you in the process of responding to your students’ writing?

I think I’ve learned a lot over the years about how to approach responding to student writing. But grading is a whole other thing: It’s really hard to know how to put a letter grade on a piece. I always hope that my responses to a student’s writing are more complicated and helpful than just the grade. But you know that students are going to look at the grade, and the grade matters.

I learned years ago from the Writing Workshop at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ to start your remarks with something positive. I think that’s something I’ve pretty much internalized. I always try to say something supportive to a student in terms of responding to their ideas, even if something hasn’t come together very well or that there’s a really interesting idea that’s kind of buried on page four.

The other thing I’ve learned is not to get bogged down in minutiae or get lost in the weeds. Try to give some general comments that can be helpful for the development of their writing.

Jane Costlow shares her thoughts on the importance of student writing. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Do your graded papers end up dripping red ink?

I don’t use red pens; I use green or purple. When I edit my own writing, I tend to have a twitchy finger: I circle a lot and make lots of marks. I try not to do that too much on a piece of student writing because everything that I’ve learned about student writing says that while the mechanics of the paper — the grammar and the like — are important, it’s a lower-order importance. You have to try to look at the overall organization: the structure and the ideas.

I continue to learn from student papers, a new take on something that I’ve been reading or a movie that we’ve been watching for a really long time. That’s exciting. Then you can also really tell when a student is engaged in what they’re writing about. It’s hard to put a name to it, but there’s this intangible feeling in the tone of the paper that you can recognize.

At the NYU conference, I saw you respond to the other scholars’ papers, and it seemed that they accepted your comments with appreciation and respect. People eagerly engaged with you after your own presentation. I saw you reconnect with contemporary colleagues and reach out to younger ones. What did that feel like?

That was a wonderful workshop because it was a relatively small, focused, and interactive gathering of scholars. We were all interested in similar issues, but it wasn’t such a narrow focus that it felt like we were all talking about the same thing all day long. I like that kind of conference, where it’s more intimate and you can actually have sustained conversations with people over the course of a day.

We have a shared language. We all speak Russian. But we also share a deep love for some of the same texts and have similar kinds of questions about Russian culture.

At top, Costlow presents her paper at NYU’s Jordan Center. Above left, Costlow receives feedback on her paper from a colleague. Above right, conference participants take a break before lunch. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

That day in particular was incredibly helpful because I’d been working on this paper all summer and was super into it. Then the semester began, and I had to basically say, “Okay, all those files have to go down on the floor, because the student papers have to come on to the desk.�

That meant that I was significantly overdue with the paper — it was commissioned for a volume of essays written mostly by environmental historians — and I didn’t know where I wanted to go with it. So, the comments that I got from people at the workshop were just amazing and really helpful.

So the image of the isolated scholar isn’t always an accurate one.

Yes, it’s a reminder that in the best situations, our work can be involved in dialogue with each other. And so as much as I like kind of going and closing the door of my study and doing a deep dive into the material, there’s something about being in conversation with other people. That’s actually true of my students as well as other colleagues, where I can get to that “ah-haâ€� moment and figure out my way through a writing project. That’s kind of cool.

Looping in your other New York City experience, tell us about your Saturday morning breakfast with your friend and colleague Ellen Chances at the Utopia Diner on the Upper West Side.

Ellen is a professor of Russian literature at Princeton. She’s from Lewiston, and her mother taught piano in Lewiston and at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ for years — Natasha was a very beloved teacher, and taught my daughter piano. Ellen’s father, Ralph Chances, was in the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ economics department for years, though I unfortunately never got to know him.

Ellen and I have become really close friends. We share a love of Russian literature, but we share lots of other things as well, and we actually have regular telephone conversations. Whenever I go to New York, we have breakfast at the Utopia Diner. It’s always energizing and heartwarming to see her.

Back to the question of a faculty member’s service. What’s involved in hosting a speaker like Ross Gay for this year’s Otis Lecturer?

Being chair of the Otis Committee is a wonderful opportunity, and we receive great help from a lot of people, in College Advancement in particular. But of course there’s still a lot of scheduling, logistics, and working everything out that I end up having a hand in. So on the one hand, it’s really gratifying. But there are only so many hours in the day. And it’s on top of other things.

It’s an example of a service contribution that folds integrally into my teaching and my scholarship. Service contributions don’t always do that. This service was a huge benefit for my students and for my own thinking about literature and the environment. It’s nice when it feels like you’re all kind of heading in the same direction.

In what ways did you particularly enjoy this year’s lecture?

I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so much at an Otis Lecturer, as a lot of our speakers tend to bring us perspectives about difficult and dire situations in the world, whether it’s extinction or climate change or plastics in the Pacific Ocean, those really tough issues. And those have been wonderful contributions.

But what I felt from Ross was that he was reminding us what we love and treasure — why we care about particular places and possibilities in the first place. He also, somehow, created an experience of community in that place and short time.

It was like everybody there was really with him. Having that experience of being a kind of mini-community for the space of his performance was energizing and life-giving.

“I want to share with you a series of stories that ground a set of questions that inform my work as an environmental writer,â€� Elizabeth Rush told a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ audience on Oct. 27.

“I want to focus on these questions because I believe, simply put, that answers change over time and that we ought to learn the questions instead.�

Rush, an author who is exploring human adaptation to climate change, gave the annual Otis Lecture in Olin Concert Hall.

For Rush, giving the lecture was a homecoming of sorts. She taught at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ from 2015 to 2017 as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities; while here, she wrote much her most recent book, . ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, she says, is a “special place where both intellectual curiosity and community are equally honored.â€�

Elizabeth Rush laughs as geology professor Beverly Johnson introduces her to students in her course on global change, including the impact of greenhouse gases on global climate, sea level, and ocean acidification. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

As Rush explained to her audience, she’s beginning a big new project.

Supported by a , she’ll head to Antarctica for the 2019 field season to research a new book about ice loss on the continent. Specifically, Rush will accompany three research teams studying the role the Thwaites Glacier will play in the upcoming years.

To access the glacier, Rush will embark on a 50-plus-day journey across the Drake Passage on the research vessel Nathaniel Palmer.

The Thwaites Glacier, she explained, has been nicknamed the “Doomsday Glacier� because its melting destabilizes the entire West Antarctic ice sheet, and its .

“Thwaites is one of the most remote regions in the world,� she said. “Only 28 people in the history of the planet have ever been there.�

Upon receiving news of her grant, Rush called a male geologist. “I asked him, ‘You know what I should do to prepare?’ And he told me, ‘Pack as if you’re going to the moon.’ But I’ve never been to the moon before. I went, instead, to the library.â€�

In the library, Rush noticed that the “overwhelming majority of books written about Antarctica in English were written by white men, many of whom set out to conquer the continent in its various forms.

“While women have travelled to this continent before as scientists and artists and writers, as electricians as cooks, on their experience, their intimate experience of the journey had rarely made it into those Antarctic narratives.�

While at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ to deliver the Otis Lecture, Elizabeth Rush speaks with students in Associate Professor of Geology Beverly Johnson’s course on global change. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

So Rush reached out to Erika Blumenfeld, “a wonderful Antarctic photographer and current artist and resident for NASA,� who told her all she needed to know about the unique experience of being a woman on the ice.

“She told me to bring baby wipes, because showers are infrequent, and more tampons than you think you will ever need,â€� Rush said. “Bring soda crackers, and, possibly, also bring a satellite phone in case the boat doesn’t have one.”

None of what Blumenfeld told her was in the wilderness adventure stories Rush had read in the library. Yet as a child, reading these stories helped inspire Rush to spend time outside and fostered her interest in environmental advocacy, she said.

Rush approached this dilemma by pointing to two essays. In the first, “� writer and biologist Ethan Linck argues that mere enthusiasm for outdoor recreation will not fight climate change.

In the second essay, “,� Louis Geltman, a lawyer, whitewater rafter, and the policy director for Outdoor Alliance suggests that “stoke� can also mean to help feed a fire, and that outdoor recreation fosters passion for environmental conservation and activism.

(It’s a concept Philip Otis might have greatly agreed with. Deeply committed to environmental issues, Otis, a member of the Class of 1995, died attempting to rescue an injured climber on Mount Rainier in 1995.)

Elizabeth Rush wrote much of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore while at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ on a postdoctoral fellowship in the humanities. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

“As I prepared my remarks for you all tonight,� said Rush, “I was thinking about how to make ‘stoke’ into something larger and also, in an even broader sense, how to expand the idea of who belongs in the environmental conversation in the first place.�

Rush then asked her audience to consider the groups of people who are excluded from the North American narratives of adventure and exploration.

“There are so very many that ‘us’ leaves out,â€� she said, “from the hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples exterminated through genocidal projects across the Americas, to those whose ancestral roots reach back to Africa and Asia and native America. Too often, that ‘us’ excludes those who didn’t have the money to launch an expedition or escape to the wilderness on the weekends.â€�

For Rush, questions of inclusion, exclusion, and climate change came into sharp focus in 2012, when deadly and destructive Hurricane Sandy struck while she was teaching at the College of Staten Island in New York.

As it’s believed that the storm’s fury , Rush was able to see first-hand how climate change affects people on U.S. soil today, not a century from now.

“Many of my students were missing, displaced, or worse by a seemingly unimaginable amount of water,� Rush said.

“It just rushed into the neighborhood over the informal levee system that separated the city from the seas. It entered all at once and very suddenly, and it pulled many homes off their foundations and dragged them into the surrounding tidal marsh.�

In 2015 at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, author Elizabeth Rush, then a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ postdoctoral fellow, prepares to give a Language Arts Live reading. At left and right are faculty members Rob Farnsworth and Robert Strong. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Many of her students lived in low-income areas, and many were forced to leave school due to the flooding, yet this part of the story wasn’t reported by the mainstream media.

“As I watched the story unfold in the context of New York City after Sandy, I began to realize that the coverage of the storm and all it gestured toward was incomplete,� she said.

“I began to understand that sea-level rise was already disassembling some of the most vulnerable communities in one of the most powerful cities in the world.�

As these stories of climate change are becoming increasingly common, Rush encouraged her audience to question the kind of stories that they hear and tell. Who is being included in these narratives, and what voices are being left out?

Science journalist and New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert delivers the 2016 Otis Lecture in the Olin Arts Center on Monday evening, Oct. 24 2016. (Josh Kuckens/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Known for her writing in The New Yorker about the environment, Elizabeth Kolbert saw her book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History win the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.

The book examines mass extinctions through history and focuses on the tremendous losses that nature is now sustaining because of human activity — the “sixth extinction” of the title. An especially compelling concept in the book comes from scientists who believe that we are living in a relatively new and unprecedented geological age: the “Anthropocene,” in which humanity is altering the environment on a lasting and planetary level.

Both The Sixth Extinction and Kolbert’s previous book, the influential Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (2006), began as series for The New Yorker, for which Kolbert has been a staff writer since 1999.

The Sixth Extinction was Kolbert’s topic when she gave the at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ on Oct. 24. Here’s what she said in a brief call from her home in Williamstown, Mass., in mid-October.

How and when did you start covering environmental issues for The New Yorker?

Field Notes was a major shift in focus. I was mostly covering politics before that — in fact, I was hired by The New Yorker to cover politics. And I became very interested/concerned about climate change and did the series [“The Climate of Man”] about it in 2005. And that sort of took over my journalistic career and to a certain extent even my life.

The New Yorker has just been a great place to work because you really can pursue your interests. When I started down this road, more than a dozen years ago now, I just told my editors, “I think we ought to write something on climate change.” And they basically said, “Fine.â€�

So there’s a tremendous amount of freedom to pursue the stories that are important or are, alternatively, just interesting. And there’s a fair amount of latitude stylistically and narratively, so for a writer, it’s one of the few places left where those things are true.

Elizabeth Kolbert. (Nicholas Whitman)

One of the endangered species you looked at in The Sixth Extinction was the Rabbs’ fringe-limbed tree frog, from Central America. “Toughie,” the last-known specimen, recently died in captivity at Zoo Atlanta, as you noted How do scientists who witness the demise of a species cope with it?

Well, I think it’s extremely painful. People who knew Toughie were pained because he was quite weirdly charismatic, and it’s very sad, it’s like a close friend has died. It’s hard to really wrap your mind around, even if you are a scientist, the idea that there are none of these out there anymore.

Joe Mendelson [curator of herpetology at Zoo Atlanta] said something like, “I went into herpetology because I like animals, but I didn’t expect it would come to resemble paleontology.”

I think that is what a lot of scientists out in the field are feeling, that they’re just chronicling all of these losses. [ on Toughie’s death in The New York Times.]

Your New Yorker pieces on the environment, and the books that came from them, have gotten a lot of attention. Do you think people are getting the message about the need to address these environmental issues?

I definitely think there’s been a sort of state of awakening around certain issues — for instance this term the “Anthropocene,” which I’ve written about in a couple ways. That, I think, got people to really think about things in a new way.

“There’s always a problem in this business, as it were, that you’re preaching to the choir.”

For those who are paying attention, there are a lot of things that are much more part of the public discourse than they were even a few years ago. But they obviously haven’t made it into the political discourse, and I don’t think they’re displacing any of our other obsessions anytime soon, unfortunately.

There’s always a problem in this business, as it were, that you’re sort of preaching to the choir. Those who are interested are very interested, and they want to know more, and those who are not interested don’t want to know anything about it. And how do you bridge that gap? I don’t have any answer for that.

Last June, speaking at Williams College’s Baccalaureate, you told the seniors that you hoped that as they go forth, they would neither turn away from the truth or be paralyzed by it, and would have the courage to act without the certainty of making a difference. Does that characterize the way you have responded to the issues that you cover?

It’s certainly a set of guidelines that I try to follow. Scientists I’ve talked to all are horrified with what they’re seeing but they also think to themselves that this is an amazing time to be working.

They feel privileged to be working on something so phenomenally important, and that is sort of how I feel too. I’ve gone to amazingly fascinating places, I learn new stuff all the time — so while the underlying message is incredibly grim and depressing, the actual experience of doing the work is not depressing.

Documentary filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal gives the 2015 Otis Lecture at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College. (Jim Panou)

Jennifer Baichwal, a filmmaker whose award-winning documentaries have explored subjects as diverse as the life of writer Paul Bowles, the nature of indebtedness and the metaphysics of being struck by lightning, offers the annual Otis Lecture at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 5, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Baichwal’s talk at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is titled Plans are Subject to Change: An Existential Approach to Documentary Filmmaking.

Made possible by the Philip J. Otis ’95 Endowment, the talk is open to the public at no cost, but tickets are required, available at . A reception follows the lecture in the Olin Arts Center Lobby. For more information, please call 207-786-8371.

The Philip J. Otis Endowment was established in 1996 by a gift from Margaret V.B. and C. Angus Wurtele in memory of their son, Philip, a member of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ class of 1995 who died attempting to rescue injured climbers on Mount Rainier.

Baichwal has directed and produced documentaries for 20 years. “While much contemporary documentary filmmaking is polemical . . . Baichwal’s work is decidedly different,” Daniel Baird wrote in the magazine Canadian Art in 2013.

“I’m just not a polemical kind of person,” Baichwal told Baird. “I tend to see complexity. I think this comes from my philosophical background — I believe one can embrace complexity and sustain meditation.”

Her first film, Looking You in the Back of the Head (1995),” examined the problem of personal identity as Baichwal asked 13 women to try to describe themselves. It premiered to critical acclaim on TVOntario and was subsequently sold for broadcast across Canada.

Baichwal’s feature documentary debut was 1998’s Let it Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles, which a New York Times reviewer called the “definitive film biography” of the expatriate novelist and composer. Winner of a 1999 International Emmy for Best Arts Documentary, the film has been broadcast and selected for film and television festivals all over the world.

Baichwal and cinematographer Nick de Pencier, her husband, have twice collaborated with photographer Edward Burtynsky. Named Best Canadian Feature Film at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival, Manufactured Landscapes is a critically acclaimed examination of the often-appalling industrial environments that Burtynsky renders as strikingly beautiful images.

‘I believe one can embrace complexity and sustain meditation’

The trio’s second collaboration is 2014’s Watermark, a feature documentary about human interactions with water around the world. Baichwal and Burtynsky co-directed, and de Pencier produced and shot the film. A box office success in Canada, Watermark won the Toronto Film Critics Association prize for Best Canadian Film in 2014.

Baichwal is currently conducting research for another collaboration with de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky: Anthropocene, planned for a 2017 release.

Her other films include:
• The Holier It Gets (1999), Baichwal’s most personal work, documenting a trek she took with her siblings to the source of the Ganges river with her father’s ashes;
• 2002’s The True Meaning of Pictures, a feature-length film on the work of Appalachian photographer Shelby Lee Adams;
• Act of God, a 2009 exploration of the metaphysical effects of being struck by lightning;
• and 2011’s Payback, a documentary adaptation of Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.

Baichwal was born in Montreal and grew up in Victoria, British Columbia. She studied philosophy and theology at McGill University and received a master’s of arts degree in 1994, supported by a McGill Major Fellowship and a two-year FCAR Master’s Scholarship.

In recognition of Philip Otis’ appreciation for nature, the Otis Endowment helps support ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ programs with an environmental focus, in particular those exploring the spiritual and moral dimensions of humanity’s relationship with the environment.

Mike Hulme is a professor of climate and culture in the School of Social Science and Public Policy at King’s College London.

Known for his scrutiny of the cultural dimensions of climate change, a British scholar brings the ancient philosophical concept of virtue to bear on the climate crisis in a lecture at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 17, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Mike Hulme of King’s College London offers the annual Otis Lecture at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. A reception follows. Admission is free, but tickets are required and are available only online at . For more information, please contact 207-786-8371.

“Few people talk as intelligently and compassionately about climate change as Mike Hulme,” science journalist Fred Pearce wrote in a review of Hulme’s book Can Science Fix Climate Change? A Case Against Climate Engineering (Polity, 2014).

“He is a rare voice of sanity and humility in an increasingly rancorous and megalomaniac debate.”

Hulme’s ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ talk is titled Climate Change: What’s Virtue Got to Do With It? He will seek to relate contemporary anxieties about climate change with the ancient religious and philosophical idea of virtue, and with its renaissance in the field of virtue ethics.

Hulme is a professor of climate and culture in the geography department in the School of Social Science and Public Policy at King’s College. He applies historical, cultural and scientific analyses to representations of climate change in public and political discourse.

“I believe it is important to understand and describe the varied ideological, political and ethical work that the idea of climate change is currently performing across different social worlds,” Hulme writes.

In 2009, he published Why We Disagree About Climate Change (Cambridge University Press), chosen by The Economist as one of its science and technology books of the year. Here, Hulme provides an insider’s account of the emergence of climate change and the diverse ways in which it is understood — and he shows that climate change, more than being simply an ‘issue’ or ‘threat,’ can act as a catalyst to revise our perception of our place in the world.

This year he published Can Science Fix Climate Change? in which he argues that using science to radically affect the global climate is undesirable, ungovernable and unattainable.

Hulme joined King’s College in September 2013, following 25 years at the University of East Anglia. There he was a member of the Climatic Research Unit and later the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

He served on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from 1995 to 2001, and has been an adviser on climate change to the European Union, the British government, and private and nonprofit organizations. Learn more about Mike Hulme:

The annual Otis Lecture at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is funded by the Philip J. Otis Endowment, established in 1996 by a gift from Margaret V.B. and C. Angus Wurtele in memory of their son, Philip, a member of the class of 1995 who died attempting to rescue injured climbers on Mount Rainier.

In recognition of Otis’ appreciation for nature, the endowment helps support ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ programs with an environmental focus, in particular those exploring the spiritual and moral dimensions of humanity’s relationship with the environment.

Rubén Martínez is the 2013 Otis Lecturer at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. (© Angela Garcia)

Rubén Martínez, whose book Desert America combines memoir and journalism to depict harsh consequences of boom times in the American West, gives the 17th annual Otis Lecture at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 14, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Titled Desert America: Politics and Contemplation on the Mythic American Landscape, Martínez’s presentation is free, but tickets are required and are available at . A reception and book signing take place in the Olin Arts Center lobby immediately following the lecture.

For more information, please call 207-786-6163.

“Searing, erudite, evocative, gritty and funny are not adjectives I often apply to a single book, but there are few writers as singular as Martínez,” historian Richard White wrote about Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West.

Published in 2012 by Metropolitan Books, Desert America weaves Martínez’s own experiences and careful reporting together into stories that evoke a new world of extremes: outrageous wealth and devastating poverty, sublime beauty and ecological ruin.

“The essential theme is the brutality of capitalism in the desert West,” Martínez told the Santa Fe Reporter in 2012. “There’s an extreme form of capitalism in the West––extremes of wealth and extremes of poverty.”

Martínez was inspired to start Desert America in the late 1990s as personal problems drove him to seek a kind of refuge in California’s Joshua Tree Desert. Past deadline on a book project, “I was broke and doing a lot of drugs,” he told the Santa Fe newspaper.

“I began a period of 10 years living in the borderlands,” from California to New Mexico to Texas, and elsewhere. “The book begins with me trying to get my life back together and trying to live in these other settings, and noticing I wasn’t the only one in trouble in that landscape.”

Martínez’s work broadly explores the lives of immigrants and the impacts of globalization, and his narratives emphasize human relationships. A native of Los Angeles and the scion of immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador, Martínez holds the Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature and Writing at Loyola Marymount University, and is an artist in residence at Stanford University’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts.

His other books include Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail (Paw Prints, 2008) and The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City and Beyond (San Val, 1993).

He is an Emmy-award winning journalist with two decades of experience in print, broadcast and online media. He hosted and co-wrote the feature-length documentary film, When Worlds Collide: The Untold Story of the Americas After Columbus (2010), shot on location throughout Latin American and Spain, for PBS.

As a musician, he has collaborated with the likes of The Roches, Los Illegals and Concrete Blonde. A veteran of the spoken-word and performance art scenes, he is the host of the Variedades performance salon in Los Angeles, featuring interdisciplinary shows that focus on topical themes.

The annual Otis Lecture at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is funded by the Philip J. Otis Endowment, established in 1996 by a gift from Margaret V.B. and C. Angus Wurtele in memory of their son, Philip, a member of the class of 1995 who died attempting to rescue injured climbers on Mount Rainier.

In recognition of Otis’ appreciation for nature, the endowment helps support ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ programs with an environmental focus, in particular those exploring the spiritual and moral dimensions of humanity’s relationship with the environment.

Noted environmental photographer Chris Jordan gives the 2012 Otis Lecture.

Photographer Chris Jordan, known for confronting viewers with the environmental devastation produced by the consumer society, speaks at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 9, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Titled Encountering Midway, Jordan’s presentation is the 2012 Otis Lecture at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. A reception in the Olin Arts Center lobby follows. Supported by the Philip J. Otis Endowment, the event is open to the public at no cost, but tickets are required; please contact olinarts@bates.edu. For more information, please call 207-755-5978.

Jordan’s subject at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, his Midway: Message from the Gyre project, explores the death of albatross chicks from plastic waste fed to them by their parents. Foraging in a section of the ocean known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a massive vortex of trash that is changing the Pacific’s ecology, the adult albatrosses pick up the plastic along with their regular food. Jordan’s images include heartbreaking depictions of the plastic lingering in the decomposing corpses of juvenile birds.

“Talking to Americans about consumerism is like talking to someone with an alcohol problem,” Jordan told Orion Magazine in 2007. “Our culture is in deep denial about what we are doing to our planet.” What might be most tragic, he added, “is that we are in denial about how our consumer lifestyle is sapping our own spirits.”

His images, often beautiful and always compelling, confront the viewer with the consequences of heedless consumerism — particularly the mind-bending quantities of waste left by the production and disposal of consumer goods. In other projects, he has composed thousands of photos of waste items into replicas of familiar images; depicted the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; and rendered captivating images of discarded cell phones and junked cars.

Formerly a lawyer with a passion for photography, Jordan took up camera work full time in 2003 and is now a preeminent environmental artist. He has exhibited widely in the U.S., Europe, and Asia and received numerous awards including the Sierra Club’s Ansel Adams Award for Excellence in Conservation. His work appeared in the 2007 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art exhibition Green Horizons.

Learn more:

The annual Otis Lecture at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is funded by the Philip J. Otis Endowment, established in 1996 by a gift from Margaret V.B. and C. Angus Wurtele in memory of their son, Philip, a member of the class of 1995 who died attempting to rescue injured climbers on Mount Rainier.

In recognition of Otis’ appreciation for nature, the endowment helps support ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ programs with an environmental focus, in particular those exploring the spiritual and moral dimensions of humanity’s relationship with the environment.