Each issue of COA reflects the pursuits, activities, and ethos of the COA community.

The spring 2017 issue, “Greening the Future: Ecological Hope for Challenging Times,” celebrates COA’s consciousness about our place within the environment, and to learn by doing, engaging students and the wider community of Mount Desert Island in our efforts to increase sustainability, and reduce humanity’s impact on our planet. 

Latest from the COA Magazine

  • NEWS
    Community As Classroom: COA’s Energy Outreach
    The Community Energy Center or CEC was created to connect COA’s sustainability and renewable energy efforts to our surrounding communities, and to ensure the continuation of efforts based in classes, internships and independent studies once each term is done.
  • NEWS
    Enriching the Earth: Abe Noe-Hays ’00 and his Rich Earth Institute
    “How long would it take my family of four to save enough urine to fertilize our hayfield?” I ask fellow alumnus Abe Noe-Hays ’00. He raises his eyebrows. “It’s five acres, you said? You’re going to need some friends.”
  • NEWS
    In Their Own Words: Juan Pablo Hoffmaister ’07: International Policy Specialist
    Since 2005, College of the Atlantic students have attended the annual Conference of Parties, or COPs, to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the UNFCCC. Soon COA students were shaping entire terms around meetings, taking classes and full-term residencies to pore over diplomatic language and investigate international treaties with Doreen Stabinsky or Ken Cline, sometimes both.
  • NEWS
    In Their Own Words: Matt Maiorana ’11 Organizer
    Matt Maiorana ’11 went to his first UN negotiation as a second-year in 2007. He’s since attended multiple UN meetings, but after that first meeting he helped create COA’s environmental justice group Earth in Brackets, or [Earth], and obtain official observer status at the UNFCCC. Matt has worked for both the government and advocacy groups, including as an organizer for the 2014 People’s Climate March. Currently, he’s with the nonprofit Oil Change International. He also cofounded the website activistlab.org with Sam Miller-McDonald ’09.
  • NEWS
    Elutriate: the work of Kathleen Donohoe (’91)

     

    Kathleen—Kate—Donohoe (’91) has strong childhood memories of passing through the New Jersey Meadowlands, a region rife with stories about the dumping of illegal chemicals and Mafia victims. “We would hold our noses driving through,” she says. “Still, I thought it was beautiful. I wanted to run away from home, get a boat, find an estuary, and disappear into it.”

  • NEWS
    Why Teach in Taiwan? Reflections on immersive learning
    From December 2016 to March 2017, nine students from eight countries joined education faculty member Bonnie Tai in Taiwan. For the first three weeks, Suzanne Morse, botany faculty member, was with the class, called Human Ecology Abroad in Taiwan, or HEAT. Students studied Mandarin, explored local food systems, participated in several forms of intercultural education, including a primary school of the indigenous Rukai community, wrote travel essays and epistolary poetry, and interviewed residents about the Japanese occupation, among other independent studies.
  • NEWS
    Remembered Earth
    Fire in the field and the birth of fire. Dry rivers and thirsty soil. The strong wind, steady as a blast furnace, and windmills drawing deep. This is the remembered earth that is lodged within her. This is what clogs her ears and crowds her vision: and it is greater than the thunder of fifty million buffalo. This is the known world, these plains. She’s touched them with her hands through every season, and she asks of them: Are these dry hills I see around me also inside?
  • NEWS
    Changing So what? to Aha!

    As deputy chief of interpretation at Acadia National Park, Christie Denzel Anastasia ’92, seeks to ensure that every visitor intersecting with the park has the best experience possible. What this means is that Christie spends a lot of time behind a computer so that the seventy-odd rangers, volunteers, interns, and partnership program staff she oversees can be outside, doing their jobs.

  • NEWS
    Leave No One Behind
    On June 4, 2016, noted writer and naturalist Barry Lopez spoke to the seniors and their friends and families during COA’s commencement. He generously offered COA  this written version of his powerful talk.
  • NEWS
    Seeking Acadia’s Bats
    Acadia’s bats are suffering from the often deadly fungus known as white-nose syndrome. Erickson Smith ’15 joined a team of scientists surveying and measuring the bats in hopes of protecting them.
  • NEWS
    Cracking the Coconut: COA’s Yucatán Program

    The Yucatán Program—with its language immersion in either Spanish or Mayan—is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year. As COA’s first ongoing off-campus program, it has transformed the lives of multiple students, among them Rebecca Haydu ’16.

  • NEWS
    The Ears and Eyes of American Music
    Aaron Lewis ’05 takes down-home American music across the ocean, with his Corn Potato String Band. Why the name? “We’re the ears and eyes of America.”
  • NEWS
    Waste is a Verb: The Odyssey of Lisa Bjerke ’13, MPhil ’16
    Lisa Bjerke ’13, MPhil ’16 is transforming how COA thinks about what and how we dispose. Waste, she says, is a verb; not a noun.
  • NEWS
    Mozambique Sustenance
    Helena Shilomboleni ’09 is completing her PhD in the social and ecological sustainability of food systems at Canada’s University of Waterloo, examining food security in Mozambique through two local organizations.
  • NEWS
    Baltic Fisheries
    Edward Stern ’03 has dipped his feet into almost every aspect of the ocean fisheries world: commercial fishing, policy, government, science, technology, even boatbuilding. He currently works for The Fisheries Secretariat in Stockholm, Sweden.
  • NEWS
    Portland Stories
    Maine resident Marjolaine Whittlesey ’05 is the Teaching Artist Associate at The Telling Room, a nonprofit writing center for students ages six to eighteen in Portland, Maine, which recently received one of a dozen National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Awards from First Lady Michelle Obama.
  • NEWS
    Exploration Antarctica

    Alex Borowicz ’14, Antarctic field guide and PhD student in ecology and evolution at Stony Brook University, New York, speaks about his love of the creatures and vistas of the South Pole.

  • NEWS
    Island Activism
    Hiyasmin Saturay ’15, creator of the film Pangandoy: The Manobo fight for land, education and their future on the struggles of a Philippine indigenous group, speaks about her commitment to her homeland.
  • NEWS
    Island Journals: Great Duck Island
    Through observation, field research, and archival searches, summer research sessions by COA students on Great Duck are amassing a thorough ecology of this one small island.
  • NEWS
    Island Journals: Mount Desert Rock

    Battered by waves, coursed by wind night and day, Mount Desert Rock’s location—twenty-one miles out to sea—makes it an excellent platform for studying whales, seals, and other marine life.