Even though images in the pool seem so blurry, grasp the main thing” – Rilke

Since leaving Dartmouth, I have been lucky enough to find regular nine-to-five jobs that pay me to help save the planet.

Granted, I don’t get paid that much, and I actually do a lot of the same things at work that those working for the Man and his money do––working with Outlook express calendars, making project budgets in Excel, updating websites, and filling out timesheets. Non-profit do-gooding in action is usually not any more fun day-to-day than any other office job, and when I get wrapped up in those details it can also be just as unsatisfying as any other job. But there is one simple thing that makes a huge difference: when I think about the larger implications of my work, I’m contributing to solutions, not perpetuating problems. And that is satisfying. In fact, for me, it is non-negotiable.

But I didn’t always feel this way. And, as is the case with most Dartmouth alums, my experience in Hanover played a huge part in shaping my life and values.

I’m an ’05, and during my years at Dartmouth, I learned the art of eco-activism on campus. I was an environmental studies major, anthropology minor, worked on the organic farm, and ran the Green Magazine for a number of years. I pushed to get a sustainability coordinator at Dartmouth (dreams DO come true, although Merkel has since departed… sigh), co-founded the Big Green Bus, did a lot of local food project work, and didn’t eat meat (unless it was local and sustainably produced––I liked to call myself a localtarian). I was a Panarchist, played ultimate, and wore the “farm” t-shirt with pride. I took eco-mugs and forks to dining halls, and when I really felt like touting my crunchiness, I wore corduroy pants with patches down the side while playing the spoons barefoot handing out samples of local yellow watermelons on frat row. You get the idea.

Now I live in Oakland, California in a small co-op where we have house meetings, buy local (and mostly organic) food in bulk, and share food and chores. I wash my clothes in cold water, use compact fluorescents, get many of my favorite clothes from free-piles, and meditate regularly. I bike to work most every day and work for Global Footprint Network, an organization dedicated to advancing the Ecological Footprint and making ecological limits central to decision making everywhere (see www.footprintnetwork.org for more information, it’s a great organization for those of you who like to see cool models for saving the planet).

Most of the time I can laugh at this picture of myself that seems absurd to so many people in our country, my family and many friends from Dartmouth included, and can understand that in many ways the stereotypes about people like me are true. But I must admit that I often feel a bit of sadness when people label me as something extreme and leftist and other, because I see these “out there” life choices to be much more sane and healthy than the “norm” in our consumer culture.

I see my way of life not as radical or crunchy or leftist, but as healthy, meaningful, and deeply satisfying in a way that my Midwestern suburban upbringing was not. And that’s my personal anecdotal evidence that keeps me moving further in this direction. What feels satisfying, what feels meaningful, what brings me joy, what feels true––these are my compasses. And when I think about all the unhealthy systems, cultures, and institutions that define our society––our neoclassical growth-based economy, our reactive and non-preventative health care system, the obesity epidemic and corn-based food economy, our fossil energy addiction, our consumer throw-away culture, our education system that teaches children to pass tests without teaching them how to learn––when I think about these broken systems that guide our choices (and our lack of choices), that are throwing our minds, bodies, and planet so wildly out of balance, I feel a very deep sadness. And so I’m drawn to understanding and healing these systems that so profoundly shape our lives.

But as I said, it turns out that I didn’t always feel this way. Recently a friend of mine from high school, one of the few other do-gooders from my class, moved into my co-op. We were talking about activism of some sort in our kitchen one day and he reminded me that in high school I didn’t care about the environment at all.

I was borderline flabbergasted. Memory, as anyone who has taken a psychology class knows, has quite a bit of artistic license with how we recollect, or recreate, our past. But I was convinced that, surely, I had really cared about the state of the world in high school. I watched the Discovery Channel! No, my friend reminded me, I thought that we’d find technologies to fix everything when we needed to and it wasn’t worth wasting our time trying to save the planet.

This was fascinating news to me. It turns out that I am not a native do-gooder, but a convert, a born-again tree-hugger. In many ways, it makes sense––I have painted myself thus far as a classic eco-freak, but I also grew up in suburban St. Louis in a big house, with lots of meat (none of it local), shopped at J-Crew, was a debutante, ran the literary magazine, and never once did anything with the storm-drain stencils. Sometimes I look back on that life and feel like I escaped from something that just never felt right. But how? And how did I become a case study of successful environmental evangelism?

A great deal of thought on this question brought me to realize that most of the important eco-insights and influences I’ve had in my life unfolded in my time at Dartmouth.

I remember the day in my freshman-year Native American religion class when Professor Chris Jocks talked about the influence of time spent in nature as a young child, and I realized the profound importance of my dad taking me out fishing. Another day in that same class I realized that religion didn’t have to be about guilt and commandments (I went to Catholic school), but that it could be about gratitude and respect for the life-affirming.

The accumulation of these epiphanies led to a moment in that same Moore hall basement classroom, when I first felt a clear and simple purpose in my life: to give back to that which has given me life. (Unfortunately, given the current state of affairs and how seldom this is actually done, this is a full time job).

In the environmental studies library with Richard Howarth after his Ecological Economics class, playing with big picture thoughts and scheming ways to redefine “value” in our economy; learning about the Kula, a shell exchange system in Polynesia, in Kurt Endicott’s Oceania class and realizing that there are functional economies in the world that not growth-based; learning the value of caring teachers, I gained a greater sense of possibility.

Reading Ecologies of the Heart by E.N. Anderson, in a class on Humans and the Environment, and learning one man’s theory about why people like high-school me don’t care about the planet, I understood that education is the primary solution to such problems.

Studying the ecological collapse of Polynesian islands, I learned the ramifications of living beyond our ecological means. The three months I spent interning in Dublin, Ireland, living off a grant from Career Services, reading more than I ever did in a Dartmouth term, and learning about core ideas that are foundations of my life and work now—natural capitalism, systems theory, biomimicry, voluntary simplicity, I gained knowledge to act on this urgent sense of purpose.

The journey was not solely intellectual. Once, walking through the pines from the River dorms down to the river, I noticed a tree leaning so far over the road that it looked like it was going to fall, its balance and strength entirely in its roots. The tree became my personal symbol for balance throughout college, and I would go visit it and those pines whenever I needed to find mine again.

I can offer only a partial list of these formative and revelatory experiences: learning yoga in the incredibly cheap and wonderful classes offered by the college, and being blown away by my teacher when he spoke of the idea of an internal landscape, a profound way in which the environment is not a separate and external idea. Learning the smell of dirt at the farm; experiencing unbelievably powerful lessons of putting your hands in the dirt with intention, and watching life do its thing.

Listening to Scott Stokoe talk about alternative ways of living; discovering that there are options for how to live your life that aren’t covered by Career Services; that deep satisfaction comes from little things like real food and real community. Taking a crazy idea like buying a bus and converting it to run on waste vegetable oil, and doing it. Experiencing grassroots education and the power of leading-by-example first-hand. Living with people and learning to function as one organism.

This list could go on for days, and I think you’ve gotten a fair sense for how much Dartmouth helped me discover what matters to me, what excites my intellect and passions at the same time, what motivates my desire to learn and be engaged in my life and work. Learning about the complex problems of our world, learning how we can address them without perpetuating them, and learning that I could refuse to live and work in a way that doesn’t help move us towards what we most commonly call “sustainability” ––these were the invaluable lessons that I got for a steal at $40,000 a year.

I tell you my story not because I am some example of how to live (though as I said, I do think we could all use a little more community and bicycling and local produce in our lives). Rather, I tell you my story as a tale of the power of freedom and access to real education in creating positive change in ourselves and in the world.

To be that nostalgic alum for a moment, there are so many amazing people, classes, resources, and opportunities that Dartmouth has given me and all of you as well. Dartmouth gives us a chance to think big-picture, figure out where our passions lie, and find work that we love doing. It provides access to some invaluable outside-the-box education, and it creates opportunities for us to begin transforming ourselves into what we want to become.

The only truly sustainable solutions to our global environmental and social justice problems are much deeper than carbon credits and recycling. In my admittedly youthful and perhaps Californicated opinion, while good technologies, integrated solutions, and even some band-aid fixes for climate change are needed, we also need to facilitate some major value shifts in our culture. We must redefine our economy to value growth in happiness and consciousness, not profit and consumption. We need to reclaim our time and create personal balance so we can address our planetary and social imbalances more effectively, and we need to find authentic ways to care about our planet, based in respect and gratitude, not in guilt and fear.

You have a chance in your time at Dartmouth to lay some important foundations for living a conscious and authentic life. And a world filled with more people sharing this foundation would not only be a happier world, but also a more sustainable world. So please, live it up in that small town in the woods, and let it get the best of you.