Lin Nelson
Future of Environmental Studies at Evergreen
Interviewed by Matt Smith
MS: How’s your teaching been? Are you teaching this year again?
LN: Oh, do I grade myself? (laughs)
MS: No, no, no, not to grade yourself at all but just to think about what’s been good about the kind of
teaching that you’ve been doing. What’s seemed problematic about it.
LN: Well the good points have been, I’ve taken great pleasure in the interdisciplinary teaching. And I
think I’ve been blessed with very good teaching colleagues for my first year and that was Ralph Murphy,
Javon Brown and John Perkins. Each in their own way were just tremendous for me. So I really have felt
that that part of the Evergreen experience in Environmental Studies has been just superb, really good. And
I taught courses particularly when I did Research Methods and Quant, what do we call it, Research
Design and Quant Methods with John Perkins which is the, the course of gloom and doom that all
students dread and fear and faculty don’t seem to be too drawn to it either. That was the course that I
found to be particularly daunting in all sorts of ways. But working with John was tremendous. And the
students, though they came in dreading the worst, I think exited feeling that they really felt much stronger
about their skills and a broader view of research problems in Environmental Studies. I had a chance to
teach one elective on my own this year which was Environmental Health. And I would say for the most
part I was satisfied with it. I had taught it a year earlier as an adjunct. It’s a course that because it doesn’t
exist right now in the undergraduate program, it drew many undergrads and I had to turn many away. And
that was what I was hired for largely and Jude Van Buren as well. And both of us, having worked in that
in different ways for years and coming here, I think our interest and commitment jointly is to just
cultivate that, obviously not just in and of itself but integrated with everything else going on in campus as
best we can. But that’s taken a while. I would say one of the hard parts this year was to try to take stock of
what is already here in the way of other faculty in different arenas on campus who have an interest in
health and environment, however tangential. Also to take stock of library and AV resources of which
there are few in that area. Very bad on that so…
MS: Right, this is just school (unclear)… And there are no others. I mean the only place is UW and
there’s no medical schools nearby so there’s no…
LN: Right. But there are generous resources in the region. I mean this region in the labor and health and
environment ecology departments and UW and otherwise, this region generally for teaching at this is very
resource rich. It’s just that the college hasn’t quite carved that out until recently. So having taught that
course as an adjunct and then this past year was an eye opener because the students for the most part
seemed very interested, eager and almost taken aback that they hadn’t looked at it before. So clearly that’s
an area that I feel personally challenged to develop and one that I think needs to be woven into the
curriculum.
MS: Right. So you got a chance to see some undergraduate students in that context and undergraduate and
environmental studies students? Or were these students who were coming out of the sort of the STH help
curriculum?
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Lin Nelson
Future of Environmental Studies at Evergreen
Interviewed by Matt Smith
LN: (unclear) Both, yeah. And now I only was able to admit I think six or something and had to turn
many others away. But they faired quite well, they did. And the graduate students in that course were both
MES and MPA. So it was a real mix of backgrounds.
MS: So to go back to the program teaching a little bit, what seems to be the, when you think about being
in a program and teaching in a program, what makes it good? I mean what are the elements that make it
rewarding and fun for you to do in that kind of teaching? I mean is it the colleagues, is it the fact that
there is something intellectually different occurring? I mean…
LN: Well as I said, the three particular colleagues I worked with, I was delighted to work with. And I’m
not putting on a smile button about that either. I mean I really, it was very intellectually and emotionally
and politically gratifying. And so in that sense, that’s just maybe a stroke of luck. More abstractly, I’ve
found the territory we covered conceptually and the materials we used to be very intellectually
stimulating for me personally. So that’s always satisfying. So I wasn’t, I was feeling like I learned a lot at
the time and also was able to handle it sufficiently fast enough that I could be of service working with the
students. I mean sometimes that’s one thing I’ve heard amongst newcomers at Evergreen is sometimes
you are in such a whirl of activity where you’re, here I am with a background in social science and health
and public health, teaching with Ralph who’s an economist who has, his whole different turf. Much of it
is very mysterious to me and vice versa. But I’ve found that what I was able to learn from his work in the
course was very helpful, and the same with Javon. So I just find it very stimulating personally. And I have
to say also that having taught in a few other places under different circumstances, I have so far been very
impressed with the students. Now I think I left teaching several years ago to work in community
organizations. I was co-director of a worker health project for years and have worked with the labor
environment movement back in the Northeast. And so I’m used to working with people as colleagues. I’m
very much out of the teacher-student schism there. So to come back here into MES, one of the nice things
was I felt like I could kind of reconnect the process of community education from a much more practical
hands-on kind of base to Evergreen without feeling a terrible breach there. And partly it’s because many
of the students are very engaged with things already. So it felt very collegial to me with them as well. I
mean I’ve been very stimulated about just observing and participating in the students’ projects, students’
Master’s essays and so on. So that’s, you know, I’ve been very pleased with the whole process. My only
real debit side of the first year at Evergreen is trying to figure out Evergreen (laughs) as an institution
which I understand is a lifelong work. But that’s been probably the most daunting, just the flow of
evaluative material, all of that.
MS: Someday you can be a dean and that will help (laughs).
LN: Yeah, so that’s probably been the more of a down side…
MS: I mean I’ve been here almost 20 years and about 15 years with those folks. Six years ago I first was a
dean and then I went in and I was just really, I mean I really was surprised about what I was learning
about the institution. And although I knew a lot about the institution and had been sort of a student of it
for years, just there was just even more that I had not even crossed my mind. I mean I was sort of focused
on faculty issues and by the time I sort of got into the deans areas, then the whole world of student
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Lin Nelson
Future of Environmental Studies at Evergreen
Interviewed by Matt Smith
craziness started opening up and administrative craziness started opening up. And it just became, it’s just
amazingly complicated and bizarre notion (unclear). No you know I mean, you can write books about it if
you want to. People have, but … When you look at the, I don’t know to what extent you’ve had to look at
the undergraduate students and to look at the undergraduate curriculum, but to the extent you have, what
do you think it is that we’re doing best for the undergraduates? What comes across in the ones you’ve
seen and in the materials of some of them?
LN: You know I really hesitate to answer because I feel, this year I’ve been so absorbed with the work in
MES. And it’s not that MES draws some boundary around itself and says we’re that different from
Environmental Studies. It’s just that I’ve been so consumed with surviving and just figuring it out and just
working with the students who have been very demanding, partly because… I don’t mean in a bad way,
but demanding in the sense that (unclear) come in with a new field and then we have tons of people
wanting to work with us because it hadn’t been done before. So I don’t feel I’ve had the time or taken the
time to really learn much. So I really feel pretty just speculative and lots of questions myself. It looks to
me from looking at the curriculum and from what I hear, the strong feature of the undergraduate program
is the science preparation and the ecology. And you’d said habitat studies a few years ago. I don’t know
quite what that meant but certainly it was…
MS: No, no that was the name of the program, the Habitats …
LN: That was the name of… But I mean I’m thinking of some of the work that Steve Furman does and
others which sounds to me, and from what I hear from students is all absorbing and high quality and…
MS: Yeah, good natural history stuff.
LN: Yes, and students seem to really like it and feel very gratified by it. I also hear wonderful things
about Pat Levine’s work. And you know I hear nothing much but good stuff about the program. What I
don’t know is, and this is just sort of across campus kind of question, who works with who when, how,
under what conditions, what’s worked, what hasn’t, all those sorts of things, like what would make that
program or others gratifying for everybody? Sort of, what’s the natural history of all this? I don’t know.
And so my sense is that the science side of things is the strength. In fact some of the faculty even said to
me not in really a dismissive way but almost like, well our students want this policy as a really a main
thing here.
MS: That’s true.
LN: So I’m not sure, but I’m not sure what that means. The people I probably gravitate to and I’m starting
to talk to most are Russ Fox and Rob Knapp and others who are going to do this three year sustainability
project and I’m going to jump in in the second year of that and work with them on particularly on
environmental health and environmental movements. But it sounds like, and I say policy in the broadest
sense not in the sense of lock stepping into Olympia, DC or whatever, but policy / politics / the movement
base for environmental philosophy. I don’t know how much of that goes on at the undergraduate level.
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Lin Nelson
Future of Environmental Studies at Evergreen
Interviewed by Matt Smith
MS: Not much. I mean, it never has, it never has. I mean the things that have gone on are really are two
different pieces. There has always been a very strong natural history orientation and that. And then there
has always been a strong sort of community studies, well there was especially in the early years and there
is still some remnants of a strong community studies planning level of policy. I mean planning policy but
not necessarily legal law policy. There has been a kind of avoidance of politics as a subject area. I mean
there’s been kind of a real accepting at this sort of how do we deal with the local politics kind of game.
But the notion of this sort of political economy of environmental decisions and the kind of allocations of
resources issues that are you know sort of crucial to thinking about how capitalism organizes the
universities is not something people are very interested in. And if they have been interested, students have
sort of been encouraged to not do it here but to go off and take the introduction to political economy
program and somehow think about trying to apply it to this. So there really hasn’t been a lot of sort of
serious systemic policy kind of discussion here.
LN: Well I would say that, I may be jumping on to other questions but one area that I’d like to see
developed in the undergraduate but also in the MES is something more broad and beyond the particular
policy development and the procedural legislative electoral manner, but the broad development of
environmental political understanding in view of the movements which in fact are the foundations for
environmentalism anyway. I don’t know how much of that goes on in the undergraduate program. We’re
trying to build it in the undergraduate program. In fact I am offering a course, I’ll make a copy of this for
you, called Environmental Movements in Organizations. And my thinking is, I’d offered an adjunct
course, a similar one where we looked at the relationship of the environmental movements, I sort of insist
on pluralizing that since I think there are more than one, as it relates to other movements for social
change, particularly in labor, social justice, gender issues and so on. Both to sort of examine the broad
political context but also then to begin to look at specific organizational bases for work in environmental
change so that there’s both a broad philosophical political examination of the history and the current
political understanding of what environmental change is and environmental problems are, but also give
students a much more nitty gritty grounded and possibly work related sense of the organizational base for
work. So the students don’t feel that they only have a choice between…
MS: Becoming DOE employees or standing on street corners.
LN: Right, or just you know living an ecologically pure life. I mean my feeling is that this region in
particular is rich with fascinating environmental organizations. So I’m interested in bringing onto campus
and connecting much more concretely with regional activities. And I don’t know what goes on so far. I
mean I’ve got to talk to Russ and other people but… For example, in environmental health, I brought in
an attorney from the government accountability project who does defense work with whistle blowers who
blow the whistle (unclear) and others. And he brought in a hand (?) for whistle blower and I brought in
other guests with the students that several people said it was the most incredible class they’d ever had in
here and had never heard of these people. And they’re you know, they’re right here. And so I think maybe
the region could be mind a little more for bringing in that kind of vitality.
MS: I think that’s actually, yeah. I mean there are all sorts of interesting people around. I mean nearly
every national organization has a field office out here. There are lots of political organizations and to the
4
Lin Nelson
Future of Environmental Studies at Evergreen
Interviewed by Matt Smith
extent when you could really tap into that. I’ve never, I mean I’ve known a few people but I don’t think
anybody’s really tapped it as a sort of consistent kind of thing. But I think it would be really valuable to
do that.
LN: And then to urge the students to corner those people and get themselves an internship which a few
people did. And in this course, one of the things I want to do is go from the broadly philosophical
political analysis to bringing some closure with concrete information about how people found, fund,
sustain and develop organizations for change so that people really have a sense of a work life out there
with this stuff and how do you develop a base of operations. And because this region is like a living
laboratory. I mean it’s fascinating to me. I come from an area where there wasn’t as much going on. So
here it’s like I’m constantly saying bring these people in here (laughs). So that would be the one, along
with environmental health broadly, that’s the one other area that I’m most interested in and committed to
work and the one that I get messages of encouragement which everybody says yeah do this, this is
needed. So that’s sort of where I’ve directed myself.
MS: Yes it is extremely, it would be a very, very interesting thing to do. I mean I’ve had lots of interns
working for various (unclear). I had a wonderful one working for the Autobahn Society and then for the
fish and wildlife area. You know, two successive internships because he wanted to understand the making
of environmental policies. So he spent the winter at the legislature and the spring writing the policy for
Marble Merilots (?) to figure out how… Because the agency was supposed to be determining whether or
not they were going to have a fishery this year and they hadn’t done any work on it. So he was an intern,
he was pulled in, he hadn’t done any of this stuff. He happened to be a very smart guy and a very
confident person and he managed to pull it together. But I mean it’s just like they sort of took him and put
him you know full scale, full blown policy position, day one (laughs). That was pretty amazing. And you
know I mean I think that that stuff is really available and to really get into it. That would be terrific to
have some strong interest in that and to be doing that in the context of thinking about social change in a
more general sense I think is really the way it has to happen. I think that there is a lot of support for that. I
wouldn’t say lots of support for it, but there are other faculty who would be useful in that kind of effort. I
mean I would be interested in it and I think Tom Wombledorf would be a person that you really would
need to work with pretty carefully because I think he would be really helpful. Richard Solarius of course
has done a lot of that. So there would be some folks who are really strongly interested. When you think
about, I’ll only read you a list of titles. This might be a useful list for you to have in your head. This is a
list of some of the things that the area has said it has offered either as pathways or areas of emphasis and
they’re from different points in history. So they sort of overlap. They have always overlapped a lot but I’ll
just read them to you. It’s a list: terrestrial ecosystems, marine ecosystems, natural history, community
planning, community development, organic agriculture, political ecology, environmental ethics, energy
systems, environmental design. I guess the question is, is this an appropriate range of offerings? What
should be, or is that too broad? Is it too narrow? I mean obviously you’ve mentioned a couple of things
about this political thing and environmental health. They’re both things you might want to add. But is this
list too big? Is it going in too many directions? Should it be…
LN: It’s hard for me to answer since I don’t know the composition of each of those and how people make
use of them. It doesn’t sound too broad. I think the question would be, how is each conceived and
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Lin Nelson
Future of Environmental Studies at Evergreen
Interviewed by Matt Smith
developed and how are they connected? And how do the faculty work together to make the connections
and bring some coherence to that for the students. It’s just hard for me to know from the titles. I mean
I’ve certainly read all of these titles several times looking through catalogs and thing all of it looks great.
It’s just a matter of, there’s some omissions, like some of the things I’ve mentioned. So I’d probably want
to extend the list. But it’s more important just for me or for students to understand what goes on there.
And I think the other thing you mentioned earlier, the predictability, if things shift around a lot and
whoever’s doing marine ecosystems exits stage right for five years or something. What happens? These
are things I don’t know. I mean I spend a lot of time asking those sorts of questions and students will ask
me for advice on the curriculum and I just feel pretty, because our students, the MES students need to
understand the undergraduate program as well because they dip into it because our program doesn’t do
everything by any means. I mean this MES program has many areas that needs to be developed. So I can’t
give you an answer out of my experience.
MS: Yeah, I think that helps to just point out that if these things are in fact a curriculum, the relations
among them need to be articulated. And I think that at times they have been and part of what’s at issue
now is of course that they aren’t. I mean the relations among them are simply well I want to do it and I
don’t feel much like talking to anybody else about doing something so I’ll do some of this, you know
(laughs). It’s just, being sure it’s done and that’s, but not, I don’t think there’s a coherent sense of
curriculum.
LN: See one of the things that I don’t know about is, and again this is a campus wide thing, but to what
extent do faculty get together and really talk, plan and conceptualize together and think through the sort of
cross references of each others’ work so that… A couple environmental studies planning sessions I went
to, you know I felt like I was walking in on a continuing discussion but I’m not quite sure about its
history or future. And I also feel that there may be other little niches on campus that have a lot to offer
that are not drawn in. One area that I’m particularly interested in that the students have a really hard time
with and that is to be the social and political impacts of environmental problems and environmental
policies, i.e., dislocated workers due to environmental restrictions on logging etc. And I’ve worked with
the labor committee for a long time so I’m particularly interested in that. And the labor center, which I’ve
had some relationship with, offers courses that I encourage environmental students to take. I absolutely
am convinced that the students, especially, I consider myself and the students consider me to be quite
radical but not radical in the sense of everything else be damned. I mean I come out of a long movement
history. And I left doing straight environmental work because I thought the environmental movement was
almost decidedly oblivious to a lot of other things and it was not…
MS: Right, there’s a kind of pious upper middle class piety that attaches to wanting to be sure
everything’s pristine and good enough for us to get there with our backpacks.
LN: Right and a lot of backfires because of it. And I’ve worked with people who, I chose to work with
people who are on the frontlines of toxic exposure because I was interested in toxics as a health issue.
And in fact these people have rich resources politically. I don’t mean fiscally rich but hands on, out in the
trenches, kick them in the shins kind of experiences and information that’s very valuable to environmental
activists. So when I think about curriculum I also ask myself well who else on campus or who else in the
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Lin Nelson
Future of Environmental Studies at Evergreen
Interviewed by Matt Smith
region could vitalize a program even if it makes people uncomfortable. I feel discomfort is a key part of
(laughs) anyone’s education. So that’s one thing that I am interested in. And I think it’s because some of
the students who are very radical in environmental turfs can join that with a fuller view with some work.
MS: Yeah I mean the other, there’s certainly some connections to the labor center and to occasional work
in political economy. And also although that area is in such disarray that…
LN: Which, political economy?
MS: Yeah. And also to some of the STH stuff…
LN: Yeah, which is an area I don’t know what’s going on yeah.
MS: I mean the way those folks tend to be thinking of themselves as radical is sort of bizarre but there’s
certainly a lot of interest in alternative health kind of in that area. And it is not entirely discouraged. I
mean it isn’t, there’s a lot of sort of support for thinking about culturally different health practices as it
were and that sort of thing. So there’s, yeah there are some possible connections that could be made and
that’s definitely an issue. I mean one of the members of the STH area who I was interviewing for this sort
of said, I really cannot for the life of me understand why the environmental studies is not a part of STH.
Well I could have given him a lot of answers. But there are some rude reasons for thinking that it might
be too you know, which sort of gets into another, a round about way of sort of getting at another question
I had and that’s just, you know when somebody says Environmental Studies, what does that mean? What
does it mean to you? What gets into that definition or that reality for you?
LN: Well for me it would really of necessity encompass the examination of the relationship of human and
natural ecosystems and emphasizing the connections, not just the coexistence. I think this particularly
rings true with environmental health because this species then must look at itself as biologically
vulnerable. So I’m particularly interested in Environmental Studies that focuses on this species not only
as evil perpetrator which it of course sometimes is, but also looking at our ecological place and
vulnerability.
MS: Interesting. I like the concept of biological vulnerability as an interesting, not….
LN: Well you know some of the most exciting research is looking at cross generational, cross species
vulnerability to toxics. Great Lakes research right now is doing some very advanced garden (?) work
which I’m trying to get a hold of for students because I think, and it’s much maligned by the
establishment. But it’s looking at where we are very concerned about other species understandably. But
now we’re learning about our own vulnerability. And some people I think suspiciously say well we only
care about our own vulnerability. Well that’s partly true but if that’s what it takes to trigger the alarm. So
I’m particularly interested also in shifting and hopefully improving models of research on all of this and
very much interested in multi-interdisciplinary approaches to studying ecosystems.
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Lin Nelson
Future of Environmental Studies at Evergreen
Interviewed by Matt Smith
MS: Where do you see things that are sort of more, I guess old fashioned or straightforward, natural
history, geology, earth sciences, all of that stuff. How does that fit into this sort of understanding of
Environmental Studies?
LN: Well I think that that’s really the foundation for Environmental Studies that needs to be built on. I
guess I sort of assume that…
MS: I’d love to hear you talk about why that is and what that is because I think that’s really important and
I think that’s where there is going to be some undergraduate agreement about all this is you know this is
the stuff we’ve got to teach.
LN: Yeah, yeah. Well I think that whenever someone like me comes along and talks about environmental
movements, how the human side of it, i.e., are gilled all the way to our vulnerability, that does not at all
displace what is the sort of I think basis for this which is understanding ecology itself. But because so
much of the emerging understanding of natural history, marine ecology, everything, is done by humans,
makes demands of humans, can be thwarted by humans, all of that, we have to understand our role in it.
And so I would be particularly interested for example if I were to work with someone who is doing the
natural history work in the program to then say okay now let’s look at it politically and organizationally.
How is the research done? What is its political life? Where does it go? What’s the organizational base?
Who makes it happen in the real world? I guess in some ways natural history and the sciences as taught in
this or any program in some ways are the more biocentric, pure, unencumbered arenas. The beauty of
what’s left of the globe is there to witness and to measure and to honor everything else. But it strikes me
that all of that work if it’s going to continue has to be understood in its political ramifications and its
political vulnerability. So I would be particularly interested then in saying okay well how does that work
get done? And also what are the kind of expert lay relationships? I mean I think in some ways that work
can be, and the students might see this too as sort of the radical pure work, but it’s also the arena of
expertise. And I think it’s really important to always be looking and the same with health, that there’s
those MDs, epidemiologists, dah dah dah dah, all of those folks looking at our, the species vulnerability
and its relationship to a degraded environment. But what about folks out in the field, be they
ethnobotanists or be they what people call barefoot epidemiologists or other people who have lay working
knowledge due to their pleasure in nature or their vulnerability to things. So I’m always interested in
looking at how knowledge evolves in expert arenas and then out there. And I think for students that can
be particularly helpful because they are going to be out there working with a range of folks in different
organizational ways. And I think it’s good for people to start to muddy their feet a little bit with sort of
organizational savvy about who’s doing what. This particularly becomes true in environmental health
where there are the arenas of experts and attorneys and folks in court fighting. And then there’s people
out there doing their own “uneducated” health surveys. So when it comes to like natural history and
ecology then I would be, if I were a part of a team, I would be asking the questions, well how does it get
done? What is its impact? Who’s thwarting it? Why are they thwarting it? And who are the people
without the degrees who contribute to this kind of knowledge?
MS: One of the things that one of the faculty said and I was wondering how you might… was that he felt,
this is actually a philosophy faculty, he felt that it was very, very, very important to get students to really
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Lin Nelson
Future of Environmental Studies at Evergreen
Interviewed by Matt Smith
understand and be able to use the science and not just take it but to be so knowledgeable about it that they
could actually make judgments about it and use it in argumentation. And therefore he felt like that the sort
of philosophy and environmental ethics, this is Slovinski you know, that he’s been working on that he’s
very committed to. And he feels like that really shouldn’t be the dominant reality for the undergraduates
because he says that what they really have to be able to do is to know the material well enough to make
the arguments, to use it in an ethical argument or a political argument but until they do they are just going
to look like fools you know. They get, I’m wondering if that…?
LN: I don’t have a particular strong feeling about that. I mean it seems to me that, well when you get
involved in this sort of work you always risk looking like a fool at certain points in the game when you’re
trying to present a position. I guess in a way that would be why I’m particularly interested in working
with the students and faculty on how these things manifest themselves organizationally. And I don’t mean
just lobbying on the hill. I mean when a group whether it’s Friends of the Earth, whoever it is, tries to
create a strategy. How, why, what are they doing with the science? I mean science does not just reside in
institutions. It’s used, it’s misused, it’s cultivated, all of that. Do you need a pen? It has a life onto itself
and in fact the public discussion in use and abuse of science is I think absolutely critical for anyone’s
understanding and for making any headway with this. So for example I’m really interested in science in
the courtroom and how I mean recently there’s some just path breaking cases about the very issue of what
kind of evidence is allowed into court. And some very key cases on toxic exposure were just actually won
on I would say on the good side of that, but had to do with the very issues of what evidence is accepted,
how do you win cases, how do you articulate that.
MS: What rule of evidence applies to this…
LN: Right, right, what’s legal versus scientific ways of providing that, all of that. So I think that all of this
plays a part building on the science base that’s provided.
MS: Well, yeah I think that it’s very, very… I mean one of the things that I’ve enjoyed figuring out over
the last several couple decades really is just how constructed science is and how socially built it is and the
whole sort of play of the notion of the objective and the sort of way in which that gets used as a political
blunder bust. And that whole piece of it is really very, very interesting. And it’s something that I think is
useful to get across to students. At the same time that you’re getting across to them they still have to
know how to do it right. You have to know how to make arguments, you have to know how to make cases
and you have to know why you would make one case as opposed to another. It’s that sort of, it strikes me
as the same kind of difficulty that we used to get into in political economy when we were trying to teach
classical economics, which is one of those horrible etiological constructs. On the one hand it’s
extraordinarily valuable. It’s really useful to be able to do that kind of stuff and to know that this is the
language that everybody’s speaking. And on the other hand it’s all really pretty up in the air and pretty, I
mean it’s ultimately challengeable and probably doesn’t work as a good theoretical explanation. And you
can pretty much destroy it if you just changed your assumptions a little bit. And the students would be so
happy to destroy it theoretically that they wouldn’t want to learn it as a practice. And so it’s sort of, and
we ended up undermining part of what we were trying to teach and leaving the person who was trying to
9
Lin Nelson
Future of Environmental Studies at Evergreen
Interviewed by Matt Smith
teach the economics in a very, very difficult place oftentimes. So I’m wondering what will happen when
we get seriously into this notion that we’re constructing science in Environmental Studies.
LN: Well I think in the field that I watch most closely in environmental epidemiology, there’s some very
strong specific structures about how EPI is conducted and it’s very detailed, very difficult. If you transfer
standard statistics to its operationalization and EPI it’s much more difficult. I mean the work is very hard,
very taxing but it is not pure. I mean in fact so the students need to learn much of that if they’re going to
learn environmental health they have to have some sense of the foundations there. But I also have people
read some very critical exposes of how EPI works its way out in the public domain by people who are in
the field who are dismayed and by critics who are environmental health activists. So I mean you sort of
have to do both (laughs). But you know the quote you had, it is hard to know what kind of balance to
bring in in any class. All the classes seem so short to me anyway. You don’t have quite enough time to
lay foundations but you want to have time to provide critique. And I guess it’s the perpetual…
MS: Well I think that one of the things that’s real is that when you get out of the MES curriculum and
into the regular undergraduate curriculum that you have much longer periods of time. I mean you’re
really talking about doing things over a couple three quarters which is really quite a luxury and often a
whole lot of fun. Because you find yourself making connections that you never knew really you were
going to make by the time the year ends. I was wondering if maybe, this sort of seems to be leading to
this question of what should we be doing in the sophomore year. And let me sort of explain why this is
the question. The reality is, is that we have been able to come up with a whole range of interesting junior
level programs that are oftentimes taught and have sophomores in them but people would really like them
to be available to juniors. You know the nature of natural history is a classic example. Lots of sophomores
end up taking it but the original design and interest in it was thinking of this as a junior – senior program.
And forest and salmon is another one. The rain forest is another one. I mean just go down the list and lots
and lots of people think of trying to design some more or less advanced piece of project oriented work.
Assuming that somehow students have learned something in their sophomore year and they’re now ready
to take this stuff. And yet what it is they really want out of the sophomore year is often quite different. I
mean people who are doing community studies really don’t care. They don’t have much in the way of a
specific prerequisite. They just want the student to have worked hard at something and know how to read,
whereas people who are doing botany really would like their students to have had a biology course. I
guess so the question is really, what should we be trying to do in the sophomore year? What kinds of
information should we be trying to get across? With the assumptions that students have learned to write
an essay, to read a book more or less, they may have even looked at a little bit of prescriptive mathematics
but not much, and they’d learn how to talk as freshmen and they’ve got to college you know. They’ve got
to college and they’re sort of here now by the end of their freshman year and they sort of they are more or
less up to speed. What is it that you would hope you are looking at when you look at the students at the
end of their sophomore year? Do you think of it in sort of a value added approach? Where should they be
when they start and where should they be when they end?
LN: Well I guess it’s safe to assume that their first year here that the core that they are exposed to may not
and probably has not had anything to do with Environmental Studies.
10
Lin Nelson
Future of Environmental Studies at Evergreen
Interviewed by Matt Smith
MS: I think it’s best to assume it hasn’t.
LN: It hasn’t. Well then I could only say that it would seem to me the sophomore year should be laying
the foundations of ecological science. Whether it’s focusing on a particular feature of that, marine
ecology or whatever, it would seem to me that’s what the sophomore year should do. Even though my
background is obviously more social science, political analysis movement stuff, I do think that would be
the foundation I would like to see laid the sophomore year with a part of the teaching team providing that
more political social assessment of things. And that’s the mystery to me. I don’t know at this point when
there is interdisciplinary teaching at that level whether there is any kind of more sociological and political
or movement analysis that would adjoin itself to the education around ecology. I don’t know if that
happens. And that would just depend on the faculty…
MS: It really does.
LN: It’s partly their own proclivity and their own skills.
MS: When you say laying the foundations of ecological science, could you unpack that a little bit and say
what do you think they ought to know? I mean… (skip in recording) (silence)
LN: … To specify that. But enough so that people would emerge by the end of the year with a sense of
the conceptual territory, the nomenclature and the general principles in that field. And perhaps it would
focus on a particular element of that, whether it was forest or marine ecology, whatever, and to have the
benefit of several faculty’s viewpoints with different backgrounds. You know for example I don’t know,
now Steve Herman works with, who does…?
MS: Al Wademan.
LN: Right. Now when they do that, that’s mostly for juniors then I take it?
MS: It is advertised that way but in fact lots of sophomores are into it.
LN: Well I don’t know, I’m just shooting in the dark here because I don’t know who’s here and who does
what. But it would seem that it would be good for that year to have a teaching team that had some varied
skills and provided some combustion there for cross disciplinary discussion and disagreement also. For
example, even if you were doing a course on ecosystems analysis and pretty much sticking to the nonhuman aspects here, there is ample opportunity every step of the way to look at human health
implications. I think that’s what I was talking about with aside from looking at social political elements,
this species by logical place in its I think almost unassessed vulnerability to changes in the environment
could very easily play itself into ecosystems analysis, changing food supplies, impacts on marine ecology
and how it impacts human nutrition, all of that. There are particular studies now being done on the
particular vulnerability of people of color to changes in fisheries for example. With some amount of
planning that kind of brief viewing to the broader political context could be introduced and that you
wouldn’t think that would be a main feature necessarily.
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Lin Nelson
Future of Environmental Studies at Evergreen
Interviewed by Matt Smith
MS: Yeah I think I see what you’re (saying). I mean I think what you would probably do as I hear what
you’re saying is that you’d probably pick an area or set of issues that you wanted to focus on that were
relatively constricted. They probably wouldn’t be the whole world of environmental problems because
you can sort of burn out on that pretty quickly. But bring several people’s views of it and focusing
primarily on understanding and how this works as a sort of set of scientific explanation systems. But
asking a set of both, and here you’re suggesting a sort of science question about human beings relation to
this and then pointing out some of the ways in which humans make political and social decisions about
the natural world.
LN: I mean it would seem like some of that it’s just the planning of taking stock of who’s here on campus
or in the region that could be drawn in for a brief part of the course to give a slightly different take on
something that would help the students telescope in on something that would happen later in their life
here. The reason I mentioned people of color and fishery issues is that a lot of work now in environmental
justice has to do with who is differentially vulnerable to environmental degradation by race and class.
And it just so happens that the Department of Natural Resources and other kind of fishery activities
around Detroit and other cities is starting to look at this. And low and behold, surprise, surprise, you find
that certain people who are more dependent upon, even though it’s the backpackers and the eco-freaks
and so on who are sort of nature freaks, we’re not as dependent with fewer choices on what nature
provides. If there’s polluted fish we often might know about it and choose not… If you’re an inner city
Black person and you’ve fished a river for years and you continue fishing because it’s your food supply
that’s in some ways much more of a critical issue. So I think those sorts of things can be brought in by
just some careful planning and saying who’s here on campus who might want to bring a certain
perspective to a course like this. But I still think the broad ecological science foundations would provide
the…
MS: One of the things that Steve actually suggested as a piece of this course and one way of thinking
about a piece of this course that might sort of fits with what you’re talking about, is that he was thinking
that one of the important features of it might simply be a series of lectures by every person on the faculty
who considers themselves to have a strong…
LN: (laughs) A show and tell.
MS: It’s basically a show and tell. What are the issues I think are important? What are the problems that I
think are worth studying ecologically and why should they be studied. And that would do the kind… And
that would be very useful I think to undergraduates I mean sophomores because you say, Gosh, Lin
Nelson’s doing all this interesting work and someday I want to be sure to try and find a way to work with
her you know. And then…
LN: It sounds like it’s something that would be good to allow the faculty to be forced to attend (laughs). I
see, my question I don’t, I am not being facetious here. I really don’t know, for myself I know so little
about other people’s work except the three people I’ve worked with that I have no way of knowing how
much other people here know about each other’s work.
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Lin Nelson
Future of Environmental Studies at Evergreen
Interviewed by Matt Smith
MS: They don’t know much.
LN: Yeah, and it would be wonderful if you know…
MS: Actually Bert did a thing a couple about five or six years ago in which he went around and basically
gathered from everybody on campus who was doing work, what it was they were doing and got the
provost’s office to publish it and it was distributed. And it was actually very sort of illuminating because
all these people who you thought had not been doing anything were in fact many of them anyway, some
of them were just sitting around twiddling their thumbs, but many of them were actually doing something
and had a project that they were sort of…
LN: One thing I don’t know, I was going to ask you about this, whether you’re interviewing the adjunct
faculty and whether people understand what they have offered and have to offered.
MS: I’m not and I’m not going to. I mean it would be nice if I had time but…
LN: Oh. Because there’s some great courses taught by people who have that field experience that I had
constantly pushed the students to take. And so I mentioned that because as an ex-adjunct, I know that
adjuncts feel more so than anybody that nobody knows or cares about what they’re doing.
MS: Well I think that’s, I mean I hate to say that that’s true but that is true. And given the level of
difficulty in trying to get the faculty that’s nominally being paid to attend to this stuff full time, to pay
attention to it, trying to drag in more folks is just more than I can imagine having to do. Also I’ve got to
try and get something done by the end of the summer thank you (laughs). I don’t think I’ve got that…
LN: Right, but Steve’s idea, it would be interesting, I don’t know if this happens in faculty meetings,
whether one sort of gives a 10-15 minute thing once a year and says here’s what I’m doing this year. That
kind of stuff would be so helpful. And I knew enough I could naively ask all these things because I don’t
know (laughs).
MS: One of the things that I had thought about in terms of the sophomore year stuff is to think about the
area… One of the issues is to try to do some project work to try and get people to focus on specific things
and really work, get their hands a little dirty and that’s really useful. It’s one of the things that we can do
in school in a way that we can’t do in a lot of others. And so I wanted to exploit that in the sophomore
year as sort of preliminary to really doing it in junior and senior years. But the difficulty with that is that
when you start talking about 120 students, projects start looking a little bizarre. So one of the things I’d
thought was to try and come up with a number of interlinked 40 person or 45 person or 50 person
programs rather than one giant program. And that would maybe try to divide the world up so that there
would be one program that’s main focus was sort of on something like restoration ecology that’s
fundamentally an introduction to natural history and another one that had a focus on forests and salmon. It
was fundamentally an introduction to policy, and another one that was sort of half science half social
science and another that was sort of on community studies like eco-ag that has some very strong elements
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Lin Nelson
Future of Environmental Studies at Evergreen
Interviewed by Matt Smith
of both that could easily share elements with. I don’t know whether anybody could be conned into that or
not but… I guess the question I… let me see if this thing’s… Are you aware of hiring needs? Are there
things that you have observed already?
LN: Just what I hear. I hear we need a geographer.
MS: I hear that, this famous, we used to have one, therefore we need one now theory of geography.
LN: Well I just hear, but Bill Brown is a geographer. So I just heard. I don’t know why I’ve heard that
but… In fact he’s doing what looks like a great course here. I don’t know, I really don’t know.
MS: Yeah Bill actually came as a geographer, sort of went into mush land for a long time, you know just
sort of didn’t teach much of, I mean he just taught… But I think in the last five and six years he sort of
said huh, maybe I can do this, and has really focused on trying to up his skills and his attention to
geography once again and it’s really paying off in terms of…
LN: Well it was mentioned once maybe because, yeah maybe it was because there had been a geography
position open and then close. I just knew there was some kind of search for another person with that…
MS: Yeah, right, Jamie Cuzer had been here and taught and taught and then she disappeared. And then we
had the position all lined up and the money dried up and then…
LN: Right. Other than that I don’t know because I just feel like I don’t know who’s here (laughs).
MS: That’s fine. I was just thinking if you’d spotted glaring holes you know, people that you felt like
gosh we need more of them or there’s…
LN: I really can’t say.
MS: This is just sort of an off the wall one but no it isn’t off the wall. Are there facilities that you need at
this point to do your teaching that you don’t or haven’t got access to or need more access and more of?
Computer work, software…
LN: Well the software part, I’m working on and looking into a little bit more in relationship to some of
the grant work that, I forgot her name for a minute…
MS: Portia.
LN: No, librarian…
MS: Sarah Ridal (?).
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Lin Nelson
Future of Environmental Studies at Evergreen
Interviewed by Matt Smith
LN: Sarah, yeah. So I’m watchful of that. Yeah there are many computer accesses that are not here that
should be. And so I looked over her grant and put her in touch with other people in the region because
there is a possibility of linking those kind of computer programs between campus and agencies and
another region. So I hooked her up with a person who is an epidemiologist in Labor and Industries and so
on. So those sorts of organizational and computer resources would be great. Other things I think are partly
up to me to make happen which is to really review more carefully what books are here. I don’t feel at all
comfortable referring the students to do anything at the library at this part. Partly I just haven’t learned it
yet. But when I do look myself, for example I look at my book orders and I go in and see if they’re in the
library, I think maybe I could have ten books a course or something and maybe two might be in the
library. So that’s very underdeveloped because environmental health wasn’t taught here before. The same
with audio-visual. So I tend to just use my own videos I’ve gotten from groups. Partly when I was hired it
was a time when everybody was saying we don’t buy anything (laughs) right now. So it’s an
underdeveloped part of campus resources. It doesn’t feel handicapping, it’s not that sort of thing. I don’t
need laboratory kind of… I guess the other thing would be and it kind of goes back to your question about
who else should be hired, realistically I don’t know and I’m not sure I would feel in a position to push
anything. Jude and I play around with the ideas of other people in environmental health studies that would
be great to have here, if not full time in some ways linked to campus. An industrial hygienist,
toxicologist, epidemiologist, people who have skills that typically you would see in a graduate program, a
particular like a public health retro program but that would never necessarily need to be here full time but
who perhaps could provide some kinds of teaching and internships for students. I think it would be
very…
MS: Yeah, it would be, trying to develop a sort of systematic set of adjunct people that…
LN: Many courses…
MS: Who would either do coursework and/or could do or provide internships. Developing that in a very
systematic way would be a very interesting kind of model actually. I mean there’s been a bit of that I
think. When Carolyn and Russ were doing a lot more of the planning orientation and planning work there
as essentially a sort of, I mean it’s almost as if there was the Thurston County Planning Office was a sort
of adjunct faculty for the area in a sense that we had students in there all the time as interns. And we on
the other hand were doing baseline studies for them and doing sort of places where you could use 20
warm bodies to do some important leg work as a sort of research project.
LN: That program isn’t continuing or?
MS: The planning stuff?
LN: Yeah.
MS: No. I mean Carolyn is off playing dean and has been for six years and Russ’s interest in community
studies is still as strong as ever but it’s just not focused on planning in that way. And he’s been working
with Carol Minugh on this…
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Lin Nelson
Future of Environmental Studies at Evergreen
Interviewed by Matt Smith
LN: Right, right, community based…
MS: Community based education stuff. And you know Russ’s interest in this is really much more, it is not
the planning element anywhere near as much as it is this sort of community organization aspect. And so
while there still are some links to the planning department, I mean in the 70s it was sort of like you know
you walk in there and everybody was a graduate at Evergreen and everybody who wasn’t a graduate of
Evergreen was teaching at Evergreen (laughs). You know it was really close and it just isn’t that way
anymore. I guess one other question I have is, if you think about your experience in the real world and
think about Evergreen as a curriculum, what might we be doing better? What things might we be doing
better to prepare students to get out when they walk out the door to either be finding work or more
importantly doing the work well when they’re out there? If you don’t quite feel like you could say what
we could do better since you’re not too sure of what we’re doing, what is it that students really need in
your perception? What skills and capacities do students really need to have when they graduate from an
environmental, you know claiming to have some background in Environmental Studies?
LN: Well I really do feel, I’m hesitant about saying what we could do better since I really am not too sure
about what’s done well and not so well. Overall I’m quite impressed with what I see. But my own
experience as having taught for years first at (unclear) College and then at Cornell and then having left
academics to do other things, whatever I could say has less to do with Evergreen than what I just my
sense of what can be useful and engaging both for people who leave academia as graduates and also for
those on the receiving end who are looking to hire. So this isn’t so much Evergreen specifically. It’s just
generally. Just to let you know some of my personal experiences. When I left full time teaching, I began
working with the American Indian program at Cornell to do environmental resource development for the
Honosina (?) Confederacy or better known as the Iroquois. And then I continued to work with them
particularly in an environmental health project. In fact to this day I still work a little bit with them. And
then also began working with the labor community on the labor environment connection. So I became
very interested in the workings of environmental science in the public arena, particularly in non-profit
organizations. Not so much agencies, but non-profit movement organizations. So from that perspective if
students have any interest in the sort of public arena…
MS: Which they do.
LN: Which they do, and not just the state arena but the public arena, then I would say of course Barley (?)
would want the strongest analytical and writing skills possible. Also for students to conquer any math and
research phobia they may have and I know from my own experience. Partly because one of the greatest
contributions an individual can make is helping to a group wind its way through the morace (?) of
environmental research, help decode it, critique it and so on.
MS: So being able to read the literature is a really important skill that students should have, read and
critique and paraphrase that literature as a…
16
Lin Nelson
Future of Environmental Studies at Evergreen
Interviewed by Matt Smith
LN: And yeah provide a kind of access to other… I’m thinking for example I watch a lot now what
Greenpeace does. Greenpeace, which I’ve worked with off and on, is now doing some very interesting
work on chlorine and the chlorine economy and its impact on public and ecologic health and the politics
of dechlorination you know, the whole thing. And that’s one example of sort of the public exercise of
science. Now any toxicology, industrial hygiene, other folks may have particular grievances with a
particular documents that Greenpeace put out but in fact Greenpeace is, by virtue of its calling through the
more obscure, hidden, not publicly accessible material, is pulling it together in such a way as to create a
public arena in a whole, and I think we’ll fast track the whole I think what I consider necessary dealing
with the dependence on chlorine as part of production activity in this country. They’re looking at how
that’s working its way out in Scandinavia and other places, pulling it together in documents that are both
scientifically grounded and very critical and publicly accessible. And I think that’s terrific. And I know
some of the people doing that work and they’re always looking for students who are comfortable with
both the science, the critique of it, and also how to make waves politically. And so I would say aside from
analytic skills and writing and research is a certain openness and also willingness to learn about strategy
development. And that’s going to mean working with people you don’t like (laughs). That’s why I
think… And I don’t mean just personally. I mean for example, Greenpeace now is part of a group that I’m
working with called the zero toxics lines. And we’re trying to build a set of principles which are also
sensitive to the needs of workers that would be dislocated in the course of this kind of transformation.
And in doing that, that doesn’t mean groups have to compromise. It means that the groups have to figure
out how to build a broad strategy that encompasses both the best of our ecological understanding but also
a sense of how do we do this in view of the industrial changes that are necessary. So I would say there has
to be, especially for the non-profit public interest in geo kind of sector, I think they’re interested in
students who have organizational skills who, I as a co-director of one of those groups is also looking for
people who are more driven by the pleasure of the work and less by the accoutrements of a career if you
know what I mean.
MS: More fun, less money.
LN: More fun, more action, yeah. And that’s part of the reason I’ve always sort of moved in and out of
certain things because that’s really where a lot of the action happens. It’s also where there’s a lot of risk
and it’s also where there’s a lot of blunders. I mean you know in the sense of… And that’s where in some
ways even academics at Evergreen as progressive radical environmental types as they are, are
discomforted by that arena at times. I mean Evergreen, though it’s a very rad place and kind of still seems
to me cloistered, having been out of academia for a long time, I’m always jarred by it and always sort of
bridging those two worlds. Because in fact there is this issue and I think maybe students, good graduates
of this kind of place could be very useful which is that in the eager understandable through eager moment
of wanting to make an impact around an issue, whether it’s chlorine or whatever the particular
environmental evil is, there’s lots of room for screwing up your strategy, misfiring on your preparation of
your evidence or whatever. And I think people who are well grounded in both science and public policy,
the political process can be very helpful. And also sometimes one of the things maybe would be to, it just
depends where students go, but if there were (unclear) concerned (?) organizations to learn that all the
scientific preparation in the world is not going to be well received unless it’s delivered in such a way
that’s respectful of the circumstances. I think of working with the American Indian program, people are
17
Lin Nelson
Future of Environmental Studies at Evergreen
Interviewed by Matt Smith
often, ask people like me and others to help decode but then understand that the decision making was a
broader political thing than just people who had certain degrees, exercising their…
MS: Yeah and that’s really the place where you can imagine internships being an extremely valuable
piece of this. I mean I remember the days long ago when I was just a volunteer and growing out there and
sort of having that experience of trying to figure out for six months how it was I was ever going to talk to
anybody about anything because I did know some stuff but it just took forever for me to figure out how to
stop talking like a college graduate and (laughs) you know start talking like a person who might know
something that people might really want to know and use and could use. And it was, it took a lot. And I
think that’s, when I see our students I see a lot of them who don’t have that problem but I also see a lot of
them who do have that kind of, you know both the over-enthusiasm aspects of it and the sort of just too
narrow of a focus aspects of it.
LN: Has anyone ever studied where all the graduates in the undergraduate program go? What they’re
doing and what they think of…?
MS: We have some data on it. And one of the things I want to do, one of the phone calls I need to make
tomorrow is to phone Steve and see what he can grab quickly. I don’t want him to do a lot of work on it.
A lot of them go to state agencies. I’d say probably half or a majority of the students who graduate in this
area with a careering focus, to the extent they have a careering focus, probably end up doing state agency
work. It just is such a natural.. I mean it is the only real employer in town and to the extent they stay here
and everything, that’s what they’ll do. But there are a lot of others and I think there’s a fair number of
people who work for agencies on a sort of field part time-y kind of basis who sort of go out there and
count the birds for them in the winter and summertime. You know I mean it’s a lot of that sort of
behavior. There are a lot of activist types.
LN: Yeah see since I’m not with the undergrads that much I don’t have a firm impression. Most of the
grad students who range 22-50 are either going through a career change or are well situated in an agency.
And some are new grads just searching for things. But one of the interesting examples I think of as
someone bridging different work is an industrial hygienist who works for the labor department who is in a
program that I know pretty well that’s very… The only state in the country that has this really path
breaking worker health program with a continuing eye to environmental conditions, and he is taking this,
he loves the MES program and it’s allowed him to do something that only probably a handful of
industrial hygienists in the country are doing which is to link very specific rounded IH skills in sort of the
industrial sector to environmental conditions more broadly. And I just love it because some of my heroes
are the union industrial hygienists who are then taking their good union savvy and looking at industry and
making it available to the communities and teaching community people to do industrial inspections after
negotiating with industry and so on. So it’s a very interesting bridging of skills and this is the very kind of
skills, not so much as technical but the political skills of the people understanding that the industrial mess
has people who are watchful of it who can then share skills beyond. And the community people then
working with people inside that mess and trying to develop a kind of surveillance of activities much more
close up. A lot of this stuff doesn’t make its way into environmental studies. It’s more of the
18
Lin Nelson
Future of Environmental Studies at Evergreen
Interviewed by Matt Smith
environmental activism that the people who are the love canal veterans and all of those folks doing that
sort of stuff.
MS: Yeah I think that our program such as it is here really has not I mean to the extent that its been
human centered, it has not been human health centered in any important sense and it hasn’t been
particularly social justice centered. Although there’s been a strong notion that somehow we were doing
good, there’s not been a sort of notion of social justice hasn’t been the fundamental definition of doing
good. It has had more to do with both doing right by the trees and building the appropriate utopian
community (unclear). Well, do you have any other wonderful, witty comments that I should have?
LN: No, no. This has just provoked more questions for me to think about my continual search to (laughs)
understand what’s going on. I mean Evergreen is interesting because of its interdisciplinary team teaching
activity and then the ways in which the work is evaluated and all the rest of it. I feel like I’m a barefoot
anthropologist in continual search of (laughs) decoding things.
MS: One piece of reading, I don’t know. Did you ever see the accreditation?
LN: You asked me about it and I didn’t and I haven’t. I should look at that.
(End of recording.)
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