Human Ecology #226

Darron Collins:

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.

Richard Borden:

And when I visited there the first time, that's what blew my mind is 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 out of them. It was just fascinating.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine radio show number 226, Human Ecology, airing for the first time on Sunday, January 17, 2016. It is impossible to separate us as humans from the world in which we live. We impact and are impacted by not only the air we breathe and food we eat, but also our fellow humans and other living beings who inhabit the planet with us today. We discuss the concept of human ecology with College of the Atlantic President Darren Collins and with educator and author Richard Borden, founding member of the Society for Human Ecology. Thank you for joining us.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

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 Darren 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 tamen, from the brink of extinction. Darren lives in Bar harbor with his wife and his two daughters. Thanks for coming in today.

Darron Collins:

Hi, Lisa. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So I have to start with the Mongolian tamen. That seems very specific.

Darron Collins:

Do you know what it is?

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, apparently it's the largest member of the salmon family.

Darron Collins:

That's right. It's an enormous, voracious predatory fish that can reach in adulthood, you know, five or six feet in length and weigh a hundred pounds. And 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. So it's a very relevant river for Mongolia, and it's an amazing fish.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So considering that it's enormous and a predatory fish, it's surprising to me that somehow it almost reached extinction.

Darron Collins:

Yeah, well, you know, it's become something like a. The big five mammals in Africa, so people hunt the fish for its head as a trophy, but it also, formerly, 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. But even in northeastern Mongolia, where the landscape is pretty quite close to pristine, it's hunted there as well. But we've made great progress to bringing that fish back from the brink of extinction.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You have an interesting background because although you've worked on this Mongolian Taiman, you actually have your doctorate in cultural anthropology.

Darron Collins:

That's right, yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And you're now at a school where apparently you've got your undergraduate degree that offers a degree in human ecology.

Darron Collins:

That's right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So these all seem kind of linked, but they're not all exactly the same thing.

Darron Collins:

Yeah, you're absolutely right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

How did you get from point A to point B to point C to where you are now?

Darron Collins:

You know, so I grew up in New Jersey, and I'm the first kid in the family to go to college, and 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. And 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. So 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. You know, 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. But I didn't come through that, you know, that mix. And 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. And it worked out. And I'm in my fifth year now and loving it. So it's really good to be back at coa.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Was there anything in your background growing up in New Jersey that caused you to be interested in things like Houston, human ecology?

Darron Collins:

My mom. New Jersey is not the kind of place you think about when you think about kids and nature. But my mom managed to find every square inch of woods in the county that I grew up in. And 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, you know, if I look back at my childhood, I think she had a lot to do with it. I also had some. 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. And Jim, definitely, 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.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

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, and 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 Collins:

It is. And institutions are important and people are important. You know, again, when I look back at my high school, it was that one individual that really sparked my interest. And so at COA, we've always, in our kind of 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. And that's what makes the institution what it is.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

How many students are at the College of the Atlantic?

Darron Collins:

We're at 350, and 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. And so we are strategically capped at 350 students, which allows us to do things that would be very, very difficult at other colleges. And it allows us this 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. So that's an important part of the education. And that would be really hard to do at larger scales. But at 350 it really works.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

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 Collins:

Oh, yeah. I mean, that's about how many kids I graduated with in my senior class in high school. So it is small and it's strategically small. It's that for a reason.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

How many faculty do you have?

Darron Collins:

We have about 35 full time faculty and then a cohort of five to 10 adjuncts, assistants and lecturers. So we have a very small student to faculty ratio, which is a guiding principle at the college.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It doesn't seem to me that you could be much older than the college itself.

Darron Collins:

So I'm 45 and 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. And a Catholic priest, Father Jim Gower, came together with A local businessman, Les Brewer, and 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. And 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. So those two came together and formed the college and brought in an amazing man, Ed Kalber, as our founding president. And in 1972, our first cohort of students came and they were 36 and a group of four, 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.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, that's what I'm wondering is that we've interviewed, we interviewed the president at Bates, and their college was founded with ideas of sort 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 of their founding. And it sounds like yours is similar, but yours is so young.

Darron Collins:

It's young. And it's amazing to be able to reach back to our founders, to be able to call. I just had lunch with Ed Kalber the other day, the founding president, and ask him, you know, 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 colleges, most of the kind of 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 and that offers a unique possibility for students as well, to be so close to the origin.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

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 Collins:

That's right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

At the College of the Atlantic and sustainable business. And he's also young.

Darron Collins:

Yeah, Jay's. I'll kid him. He's a little older than I am. He's probably 47 or something like that. But yeah, we're about the same age.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So that's so fascinating to be as I would think, you know, 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 kids?

Darron Collins:

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, and he is every bit as vivacious as Jody Baker, who is a relatively new faculty member at the college. And so I think what's amazing is having that cross section of people, and that is a real special thing. And 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.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, and 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, there's a spiritedness, it's sort of a sense of youth that I get. And yet the interesting thing about the College of the Atlantic for me is it seems very like, I guess adventurous, I guess adventuresome, like, da, da, da. Here we are, it's the College of the Atlantic. Superhero. Ish. Almost.

Darron Collins:

Well, adventurous, yes, Superhero. Cultivating a sense of humility is also important. So 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. And it is not just adventurous in the sense of the physical nature of adventure, but like academically and intellectually adventurous also.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, and I guess when I said superhero, I just meant like sort of willing to take on things that were large, you know, bigger than oneself.

Darron Collins:

That's exactly right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

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 are trying to get 40% of your alumni to participate in the giving process.

Darron Collins:

That's right. This past fiscal year, which ends July 1st. So out in June, I did a hike in Acadia national park that covered 40 of the named peaks in 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. And it did, it did inspire interest and we had 43% of our alumni make a gift to the college, which is a lot, is a really very significant number. And that was really hard. Even though the mileage, you know, 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 the persistence is what made it interesting. It was really hard and I'm still, I think I'm recovering. I found 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. It was amazing.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

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 Collins:

Yeah, 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 pop up 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, for what the local grocery stores don't use. And they will create a pop up restaurant in town for one night. And it'll 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, 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 and 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. And 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 unbridged islands on the coast of Maine, working with food security and sustainability energy, working with education and adaptation to climate change. And so 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. So there's loads going on on the campus.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You also have some distinguished alums, including our congresswoman.

Darron Collins:

Yeah, Shelly Pingree. Yeah, Shelly is just a fantastic woman and her leadership in the state is something that we talk about a lot. But she's, you know, she's one of. We only have. I think we're up to 2,100 alumni, so we don't have, you know, 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 graduating 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. So he was in that first class. And so we often talk about Bill Ginn as one of the two people that graduated in the class of 1974. But then Shelley is an obvious one. But we have folks from, like Anjali Apuradai, who 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. So this woman, Anjali, kind of led the youth delegation throughout Durban, South Africa, during that time. And it will be in France a week from now on the 30th. Cop 21. So it really, 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. I mean, there are writers, they're teachers, they're businessmen. There are field ecologists, there are artists. But they all have this passion for serving and wanting to make their communities better. And so they have also this real entrepreneurial spirit. So 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 Shelley.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

The College of the Atlantic was featured in the New York Times for work that they work that you have been doing in sustainable energy.

Darron Collins:

That's right. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

That's kind of. That's a big honor.

Darron Collins:

It's a huge honor. Yeah. I mean, 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 in 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. And so 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 samsoa, 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. And so working actually we didn't. 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. So you know, 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.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

For that we've been speaking with Darren Collins, who is the president of the College of the Atlantic and also an alumni. 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 Tayman. I remain very impressed by this.

Darron Collins:

Good. Yes, we're not out of the woods with the fish yet, but we're heading in the right direction.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, thank you so much for coming in.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

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, 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 Reflections from a Human Ecological Perspective. Thanks so much for coming down and having a conversation with me today.

Richard Borden:

Thank you, Lisa. It's a pleasure to be here.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So this is a really a 400 page work of a lifetime, really. I mean, this must have taken your book Ecology and Reflections from a Human Ecological Perspective. This must have taken a lot of energy and time to create for you.

Richard Borden:

Well, yes, and it sort of spreads out over many years and actually touches all of my life at some point or other stages of my life. And it was also an opportunity. I was dean at College of the Atlantic for a long time, and when I stopped being dean and stepped down from that and went back to teaching, I didn't know what I wanted to do next. But I thought I wanted to learn how to write essays. I'd always enjoyed people like Loren Isley and people who could take complex ideas but 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. And I just started off on that. And I really started with a class. The title of the class was Ecology and Experience, same as the book. And 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, it was, some of it was literature. And we just read that together. And that started to form in my mind. And without being sort of on duty every single day as dean, I had a chance to stay home one, 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. And I had never had that kind of opportunity before. So having 14, 15, 16 hour blocks, I got quite lost in my own thinking. And 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. And I just spent a lot of time weaving these little things together. And it turned into a book.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And 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 have felt at times a little lost because there's just so much. And I was impressed by that. The fact that you could actually focus it down and put it into this book.

Richard Borden:

Yeah. The book starts with five chapters and I sort of use an ecological metaphor there called transect and plot, which is sort of a way of understanding a landscape, if you will. You sort of go across it, but stop along the way and do inspections. And the five areas that I felt I had some familiarity with were my own life. And so I sort of start there and I actually begin it with sort of an autobiographical transect through my life. And then after that, these academic areas where I had been involved one way or another, certainly psychology or the mind or the inner world or consciousness ecology, which is about how nature works and so on. Then with the intersection of those two, human ecology, which is, I guess what my life work has really been about, is 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 sort of 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. Of higher education. So it was a chance for me to put those together. And that was really, I guess I'd say a foundation. And at that point I was sort of done with being Sort of academically legitimate. And from then on I could dance. And the next 10 or so chapters are me just doing, I guess, sort of little jazz interpretations, pulling pieces from the foundation.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, let me read a little bit from chapter three called Experience. And you start out with a quote from Sren 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. So 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. And it is this interesting house of mirrors and one as a writer and a doctor that I see all the time. What is the actual nature of reality? Which is a huge question.

Richard Borden:

Yes, yes, I think that's from the chapter on experience or psychology. And 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 get to put something around the idea of consciousness. And one of the beautiful things about consciousness, human consciousness, is that 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 what we're doing. And that splitting, that capacity for introspection, that capacity for insight, is what makes psychology psychology. And 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 sort of dilemma of free will. And that's both a stubborn philosophical problem, but it's a beautiful thing. Also.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Tell me about human ecology. And one of the things I liked about reading your book is that I. 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.

Richard Borden:

Right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So tell me what human ecology is, because that's kind of the baby of all of these.

Richard Borden:

This is where it starts to get hard. So let me start with something very simple and give you a definition, sort of the standard keyhole definition of human ecology. And let's say it is the study of human environment interactions. That's a starting point. Small. 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. And it's really trying to figure out how to bring those things together. And let me add here that given that those 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. And in many ways, that's what science does. Science sort of brings things that are out there into our awareness. They bring them into consciousness, and then we have to. We can use that knowledge or do what we want with that knowledge. Ecology as a science is very, as you say, very recent as a field. This year, 2015, is the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Ecological Society of America. And I was quite involved with that back in August in Baltimore. Ecology, I think 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. And it's only in those things together that you see the patterns that connect those Things and 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. So 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 sort of went down the hill from there. Other people start from architecture or planning, and they want to understand how to plan in an ecological and in human ecological kind of way. In medicine, particularly public health, there's 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. And you will find those kinds of people in the tent that has the name human ecology on the outside of it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

When I think about ecology, I think about sort of this. This. This movement that has occurred and the idea of Earth Day and how we all want to, quote, unquote, 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 Borden:

It's all in my lifetime. I remember reading Rachel Carson. My mother was a member of the Book of the Month Club, and 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 and I was there for the first Earth Day. So really what I'm trying to do is I'm using my lifetime in some way as a measure of just how much change and what kinds of changes have happened in the last whatever, 50 or 60 years.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It must be interesting for you to be in Maine doing this now, because you're not originally. You're not originally from Maine, and you came to Maine very specifically to work with an academic organization that was also relatively young but had similar principles to yours.

Richard Borden:

Well, there's a lot of starting points for this story, but 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 really was not a good system for providing services. And I found that difficult. And I sort of thought, maybe I don't really want to do this. And I went and did a postdoc in animal behavior and behavioral ecology because I thought, well, maybe I want to go out and study wolves in the wild or something like that. And in the process of that, I got more interested in the idea of ecology than any particular species of animal. And it started to occur to me that ecology as a science has something to. 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. So I started going out in the world looking for people who knew something about ecological 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. And 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. And I was more interested in the sort of classical analytical notion of consciousness, unconsciousness and transformation of consciousness and personality change through insight. So I was looking for ways in which ecology could provide psychological insights that would be life changing for people. And 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 bona fide interdisciplinary education. And one of the responses that came back came from a psychologist at the University of Michigan. And 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 minute I. The instant I saw the term, I thought, yes, that's it. And 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, sort of formal, and said, you know, 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. And I did. And I studied the students pretty seriously as it's personality psychology, attitudinal psychology kind of study, and started writing that up and doing things like that. And then I had an opportunity to, to take a sabbatical from Purdue and I spent that semester at coa and I guess I fell in love and sort of reciprocated and they invited me to be the first psychologist on the faculty. And that's how I got started in this.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

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, in these efforts. So 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 on the dealing with human ecology that it would be in Maine, there's something about, I don't know, the way that we pay attention to what, what's going on around us that seems to make this a prime spot for these sorts of efforts.

Richard Borden:

Yeah, I think that's true. I think that's true for Maine as a whole. It's especially true for Mount Desert Island. Mount Desert Island. The history of Mount Desert island, of course, was sort of 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 and 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 and Philadelphia. People said, where's that? And 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 did not that harmonized with the landscape. They didn't build them on the tops of the mountains like they did in most other places. They built them in sort of hidden in the woods and so on. And Then there was a hotel era there. The same kind of thing happened. And then other people of money, the Rockefellers and George Dorr, went about protecting the 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, and that completely changed the landscape in a dramatic way and burned up half of the town of Bar harbor and a third of the island in a big portion of the park. And 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. And as they started to develop the idea, Jim Gower actually overheard, heard on the radio a lecture by Ian McCarthy. And Ian McCarg was a founder of a human ecology planning program at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960s. He wrote a very influential book called Design with Nature, which was sort of a breakthrough in regional planning and landscape architecture. And 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? And 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, the founding president, Ed Kohlberg, who came out of the Harvard Ed School. He'd been an associate dean down there, and he put words around it and he wrote up the mission statement for the college and what human ecology would mean as an interdisciplinary institution. And a college to 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 out of it. It was just fascinating.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So just as the. Just as the Bar harbor and Mount Desert island had to, like the Phoenix, rise from the flames, you had a similar experience at 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, I don't know, a space for any sort of reflection on your part?

Richard Borden:

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. And I had. In those days, all of our research data was kept on IBM cards. This was before online kinds of things. And I had boxes and boxes and boxes of them in our little computer center there. And all of the work that I had 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. So my research psychology identity was over with. 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. And 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 human ecology program at Oxford and the University of London and University of Edinburgh and Bergen in Norway and in Oslo and Sweden and Denmark. And I went to France. And anyhow, I found all these people who were doing human ecology and higher education in Europe. Most of them didn't know about each other. And 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. And the new president had been selected. It was Lou Rabineau. And Lou was the former chancellor of the University of Connecticut system. And we went out to dinner the first night I met him. And the next day he calls me and he says, rich, I want you to be the academic dean. So 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. But I also. This was also an opportunity, and Lou really supported it, to build connections to other human ecologists around the world. And that became. That replaced my psychology thing with now networking human ecology worldwide. And that's what I've been doing ever since.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

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 at the College of the Atlantic?

Richard Borden:

Well, the book, of course, is available through all of the online places. Barnes and Noble, Amazon. That's the easiest, probably the cheapest way to get it. In terms of what else I'm doing. I am 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. And I'm now working on a similar history of human ecology elsewhere. This idea of human ecology has been around for a long time, very much under the radar. But as soon as the term ecology came into the language, it was inevitable that people would start to bring humans to it. And they would be anthropologists, they would be geographers, they would be people in medicine, they were the sociologists. There were all different kinds of ways that you could look at human relations that have an ecological or have ecological dimensions. And so that has grown from all this sort of 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. 195 countries have gotten together to talk about climate and to try to do something about it. There will be people who 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.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, 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 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 Borden:

Thank you. I'm grateful for the opportunity as well.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

have been listening to LoveMain radio show number 226, Human Ecology. Our guests have included Darren Collins and Richard Borden. For a preview of each week's show, like our LoveMain Radio Facebook page or sign up for our e Newsletter, follow me on Twitter as DrLisa and see my running travel, food and wellness photos as bountiful1 on Instagram. We'd love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our Human Ecology show. It's an appropriate show for me given that this is my birthday week and this is a topic that I care deeply about. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.

Richard Borden:

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