The Greening of Wofford College: A History

In late spring of 2005 an editorial in the Old Gold & Black by biology major Brain Green chided Wofford College for not teaching students to be "environmentally literate" in an age when it's so important. Green, the biology department's top graduate, was not heading to medical school. He planned to continue his studies of ecosystems in graduate school. During his four years at Wofford he had also won an award for writing about his ecological study in Mexico, and at the senior awards ceremony shared The Walt Hudgins Award for the graduating senior exhibiting the most creativity. We'd all agree we would be happy with the "Brian Greening" of Wofford.

Thirty-five years earlier in Old Gold & Black's April 24th issue a front page article entitled "Earth Day Plus Three is Saturday" chides "Wally Wofford" for leaving "something to remind him of his Saturday afternoon under the shade tree"-beer cans and litter deposited after the latest fraternity party. This was two days after the first Earth Day, April 22nd 1970.

There was no coverage in the college paper concerning how the Wofford community actually celebrated Earth Day, but then Dean of the College (and several years later president) Joe Lesesne remembers that there was indeed an Earth Day rally at Wofford, and that it happened right out in front of Burwell Campus Center. Mostly what the students demanded was to get the day off. Lesesne says he addressed the crowd, but that he bets few of them remember the advice he offered: "It really doesn't matter whether or not you get Earth Day off from class," he told them. "What really matters is what you'll be doing to address these same environmental problems 30 years from now."

Earth Day's still around, and so is Joe Lesesne. And here we are, over thirty-five years down the road asking questions, discussing methods, serious about starting an environmental studies program. How many science courses should we have? Should interim count toward requirements? Who heads it up and how do we build it without stretching resources? Would the graduates get jobs? Go to graduate school? Would such a program improve the citizenship of students who take the courses? All good and important questions. Lesesne laughs when he now talks about that first Earth Day celebration, says there were some people in that crowd who should be ashamed of what they're doing for a living today. I'm sure there were also some students there that day who are now good environmental citizens. In a formal sense we at Wofford have had little to do with either outcome. Brian Green's 2005 editorial would suggest there hasn't been much progress in the intervening 35 years. This assessment of the college curriculum, its buildings and grounds shows quite the contrary. We are a much "greener" campus than we were 35 years ago.

Is there a need for more, for possibly adding a program in environmental studies to the proliferation of programs, emphasis, and concentrations in the last five years? It's my hope that by chronicling here the historical groundwork-with curriculum, with buildings and grounds, with personal commitment-we might be able to see the need and go into the future with an answer to Brian's call for more literacy in "things environmental." So here goes. There's probably more here than anyone needs to know about the last 35 years, but what follows are green dots in a line that lead to where we stand today.

WHAT IS ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES ANYWAY?

Environmental studies began in the sciences — geology,
biology, meteorology — but it has widened its embrace
to include humanities and social sciences."

—Jay Parini in "The Greening of the Humanities,"

The New York Times Magazine (1995)

In the ten years since Parini's article appeared, the spread of environmental studies has continued and even entered the mainstream. Now environmental studies programs are quite common. A quick review of The Associated Colleges of the South, a group that contains many of the schools we see as our peers (Rhodes, Davidson, Sewanee, Furman, and Washington and Lee among them), show that 9 of the 16 member schools have developed either majors, minors, concentrations, or programs in environmental studies. All nine of these schools have developed a core of required environmental science courses, most of them require courses in the areas of policy and ethics, and a few of them require courses in religion, history and literature. Some of the program descriptions are quite frank. Furman reminds students that the concentration in environmental studies is not, by itself, adequate preparation for graduate study in environmental science or environmental studies. It is instead "designed to broaden a student's perspective so that they understand the complexities of environmental problems and solutions."

Among the schools in ACS, Washington & Lee's program comes closest to what we've talked about adopting at Wofford. Their description could even serve as a model for our own:

"At Washington and Lee, we take an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the environment. Faculty and students from the sciences, the humanities, the social sciences, and law are involved in this approach through research, the curriculum, and a variety of co-curricular activities, including numerous public lectures, service learning projects, monthly luncheon seminars, as well as outdoors activities. Students are educated not as experts in any one discipline but to understand how insights from different disciplines complement each other. This is not only a unique academic experience, but also one that expands the students' ability as citizens to be aware of the scientific, ethical, and policy issues they will face in their local communities, their professions and in their broader world community."

A few words come up in every description of environmental studies-interdisciplinary, relationships, sustainable, integration. These words have also been quite common in our discussions.

ENVIRONMENTAL CURRICULUM AT WOFFORD:
THE 60S AND EARLY 70S

Wofford is a Southern classical liberal arts college, and the "earth sciences" have been important here since the college's founding in 1854. It's interesting to look for the beginnings of environmental study at Wofford in the early course work and faculty of two science departments, biology and geology, two of Wofford's oldest and strongest disciplines. Looking back may help us go forward. By looking at our history we can see clearly that we already have a strong tradition in the environment, even if we have not always called it that.

Geology has been taught at Wofford since the 19th Century when Warren Dupre took students on week-long field trips. In the first decades of the 20th Century, it dropped out of the curriculum for awhile, and then picked up again in the 1950s. In 1964, John Harrington was hired after a successful career as geology professor at SMU and a petroleum geologist and consultant working out of Chapel Hill. The story of Harrington's hiring is legendary and stands in humorous contrast to today's tedious search committees, campus visits, and "job talks." In the early 1960s Dean Covington was on a flight once and sat in the window seat looking down. John Harrington happened to be in the next seat and spent the entire flight explaining the geology of the eastern United States based on what they were flying over. He offered Harrington a job on the spot, and the next year he took it, and taught hundreds of students geology at the college until retiring in 1984.

From 1964 until 1984 Harrington also taught valuable skills to many "non-science majors" at the college-to "see a world," to learn to view nature & culture in context of a larger global world view. On his field trips each week hundreds of Wofford students saw stretches of piedmont and Blue Ridge landscape they would have never visited and learned to appreciate them.

Harrington's geology classes did not lead to a major. In many ways his three courses made up what today we might call a "program." They were very popular and students who studied with him learned to see the world broadly and across disciplines. All of his courses were field based.

Renowned naturalist Rudy Mancke, a Wofford College biology major, was one of Harrington's students in the late 60s and his foreword to a reprint of the geologist's book To See a World, Manke says, "John Harrington made field trips an integral part of his teaching. He recognized the importance of firsthand experiences."

For twenty years, Harrington not only was an exciting teacher and a challenging colleague. The ideas he articulated in his three important books [To See a World (CV Mosby Company, 1973; reprinted by Holocene, 1994), Discovering Science (Houghton Mifflin, 1981), and Dance of the Continents: Adventures with Rocks and Time (J.P. Tarcher, 1983] are still important in the national discussion about teaching geology and science.

Since 1986 current Geology professor Terry Ferguson, a Wofford sociology major, has carried on and expanded Harrington's field tradition at Wofford. Geology as Harrington taught it, and Ferguson continues it, offers possibly the clearest antecedent for environmental studies program with have-field work, solid grounding in natural science, and a highly developed reflective interdisciplinary study of local landscapes. Two of the 12 people putting the environmental studies proposal together were Harrington's students, and another (Abercrombie) taught for a year as Wofford's resident geologist after "Dr. Rock" retired. It would be our hope that somehow the memory and spirit of John Harrington would be preserved in an environmental studies program at Wofford.

The word "ecology" first appeared in a college catalogue in 1954 when the biology department added a course called "Animal Ecology" taught by then associate professor Ray Leonard in days before he had become Wofford's legendary biology department chairman of over 40 years.

When Vanderbilt graduate Ray Leonard arrived at Wofford in 1949 biology and chemistry were one department. There was only one professional biologist, Dr. Owsley on the staff, and no biology major, so Leonard was charged with creating the department and major.

When asked how "ecology" made its way into the early curriculum Leonard remembered that he became interested in ecology when he was a graduate student at Vanderbilt though he did not take any courses in it. At Vanderbilt he befriended a "descriptive botanist" interested in fungi and a lymnoligist, and his friends, in turn were friends with pioneering ecologist Eugene Odom at the University of Georgia. "So Odom influenced me and what I wanted to teach at Wofford indirectly through them," Leonard says.

The teaching of animal ecology in 1954 was the result of Dr. Leonard's determination to provide biology students bound for medical school some botany. Even though Wofford was getting more students into medical school than USC or Clemson, Leonard hated calling them ‘pre-meds." He wanted them simply called biology majors and a biology major needs a broad array of courses, not simply what they'll need to be successful in medical school.

Leonard was not trained as a field scientist. How did he manage to teach ecology? "I just had to learn by doing," he says. "I wanted our kids to have some botany and the closest I could come in those early years was an ecology class, so that's what I created."

The field work for the animal ecology course was conducted out on two pieces of property Leonard remembers vividly-the Milliken property that would, later in the 1950s, become the company's research park off Highway 9, and a parcel of old farm land that would later become Jesse Boyd School off Fernwood-Glendale Road. This second site was along the Lawson's Fork, a place we have hopes of establishing a study site today.

Over the first twenty years of ecology's existence the course changed names, from "animal ecology, to "general ecology," to "plant ecology," and finally, "ecology" which it remains today. Was the course popular in those early years? "No," Leonard laughed. "For the kids bound for med school it was like saying, ‘Eat your spinach.'"

In the middle 1950s, after several years Leonard handed over the ecology courses to Mr. Wiggs, Mr. Robinson and Mr. Ferchau, all instructors whose names have now settled forever into the compost heap of short-term faculty appointments, though Leonard notes that Ferchau should probably be remembered as "Wofford's first botanist."

In 1963 Gibbs Patton became the college's first official full-time botanist, and with his appointment it became possible for Dr. Leonard to add botany as ¼ of the core for all biology majors. Patton brought with him a strong interest in ecology.

Patton was a member of a panel on campus in the winter of 1970 that addressed the problem of pollution in South Carolina. Other panel members included Linton Dunson, J.W. Smith, consultant to the South Carolina Pollution Control Authority, and James R. Mann, U.S. Representative at the time. Each panel member made a 5-minute statement to the audience. Patton chose to use his time to ask four simple questions: Can we learn see the environment as a whole? Can we limit your resource consumption? Do we understand the natural cycles? What is the role of the college in defining these problems?

With Patton's retirement in 1988 the ecology course passed to George Shiflet and then on to Doug Rayner and today it's taught by Rayner and Ellen Goldey.

The course as its taught today would be quite different than that first Animal Ecology course in 1954, but it would share a few things-a strong field component, and focus on those first principals Eugene Odom developed a half-century ago.

Today the biology department continues its tradition of training biologists, not simply "pre-med" majors. It now offers not only "ecology," but also "botany," "field biology," "field botany," "living mammals of the world," "marine biology, and "freshwater biology." There are also opportunities for case study, selected topics, and research in the environment.

In 1970 Wofford received a three-year $295,000 COSIP grant from the NSF, at that time the largest grant ever received in South Carolina by a private college for a curriculum program. The grant, for use over a three-year period, was used to fund a junior/senior seminar during interim, a summer research program, "establish a permanent experimental sciences study group," to meet and discuss "problems arising within and between the different experimental science departments," and purchase equipment to "improve electronics instruction," and an over flight program as part of the geology laboratory program. An interesting footnote: the geology over flights were done from a rented DC-3 that had flown Winston Churchill in World War II.

Among biology's plans for improved science study the department wanted to create a college "natural area for field work in biology." Now, 35 years later, the dream surfaces again.

Also in 1971 BG Stephens, then a chemistry professor, used the science 101 and 102 program (an early version of "science non-science majors" program) to teach environmental sciences and biology professor Gibbs Patton taught some ecology in his science 101 classes as well during the early ‘70s. Others would have used these classes to teach courses we might recognize as early "environmental studies," but the effort was mostly centered in the sciences. Among the Wofford biology faculty of the 1970s (Dobbs, Leonard, Hubbard, Patton) only Patton seemed to have a serious interest in "environmental" science. By this time the curriculum was geared, even more than now, toward preparation for medical school.

That same year Patton and government professor Jim Fowler began the ahead-of-its-time "Friends of the Lawson's Fork" in order to try and protect the watershed of the Lawson's Fork in which the college is located. Over the next several years Patton and Fowler became the center of a grass-roots effort in Spartanburg to save the creek, but they kept their environmental activism mostly an effort centered off campus. Though the mailing address for the organization was a Wofford CPO, many then at Wofford say they were not even aware of the community effort by several of their colleagues to save the Lawson's Fork.

Patton, with a Yale undergraduate and Duke doctorate, was well-versed in the science of ecology and conservation when he arrived. Fowler, though without the use of his legs, was a prime mover of public interest in befriending Lawson's Fork. In a brochure announcing the 1972 effort to "save" the Lawson's Fork he wrote:

"Lawson's Fork presents that rare opportunity for each of us to make some distinct contribution to the quality of life within our city. Here is a project large enough to excite and to challenge with its significance for all of us, yet, small enough to accomplish without overwhelming us with its complexity… Each individual has at least one local means through which he can mobilize efforts to preserve this wild heritage."

Fowler, Patton, and Friends of Lawson's Fork suggested four actions that the organization would support:

1. Monitoring violations of existing laws.
2. Forming a natural-land trust.
3. Lobbying the city to get a strong zoning law on flood-plains.
4. Recommending specific uses that are compatible with preservation of the valley.

Among Wofford faculty of the 1970s, John Harrington was also key to supportive of the principles of environmental stewardship and community activism outlined in Fowler's FLF statement. Harrington wrote letters opposed to the efforts of the Corps of Engineer's to channelize the Lawson's Fork through Spartanburg for flood control.

These efforts were successful. Over two or three active years there were a number of "Friends of Lawson's Fork" meetings and through the group's efforts attention was shifted to the stream that, in 1972, was mostly seen as a "drainage ditch" for the Spartanburg's economic life.

Patton and Fowler's hard work and vision did not go unrewarded. This early organization founded by two Wofford professors led directly, in the late 1980s, to the formation of SPACE (Spartanburg Area Conservancy) and the preservation of 100 acres of Lawson's Fork flood plain with in the city limits of Spartanburg, what is now the Edwin Griffin Preserve. Fowler left Wofford in late 1970s and moved to Texas. Patton retired from Wofford in 1988 after 25 years teaching biology.

THE INTERIM:
THE 60S AND EARLY 70S

It's a time when the student can embark upon the unknown
on his own… — John Harrington, on Wofford's interim (1970)

In the fall of 1967 the college voted to move to a 4-1-4 schedule to accommodate the interim program, which began in 1968 as a creative and innovative response to traditional learning and continues today. Though the courses were offered mostly by a small group of faculty-Gibbs Patton, John Harrington, Linton Dunson, Jim Fowler among them—the early years saw plenty of interims with themes or interests and explorations we would call "environmental". In 1969 Patton, Dunson, and Fowler offered an interim called "Environmental Problems and Land Use" in which students looked at different conservation problems-wildlife management, land use in urban areas, air pollution, thermal pollution, and local water management.

That same year physical education professor Duane Stober offered one of the most remarkable interims in the program's 38-year history-"River Voyagers"-in which 15 students and two "guides" paddled 350 river miles from Spartanburg to the sea. In the Old Gold & Black Lewis Jones called this epic journey from Spartanburg to Charleston "the first of its kind in 100 years."

In 1970 Gibbs Patton offered "Geography of Life: Field Trips, Readings, Student Reports, on Plants & Animal Characteristics of Different Life-Regions of the State," and Harrington offered an archeology project in which students would "locate and map the outstanding soapstone quarries from which rock was used to manufacture bowls in the piedmont." Harrington offered another project that year called "The Chattahoochee" whose proposal called for "a romantically oriented team of geo-photographers to traverse the stream from headwaters to confluence compiling a photo-essay of the river today."

Then in 1971 Patton offered "Internships in Resource Management" and also, with government professor Jim Fowler, an on-campus interim called "Water: Its Ecology and Politics" in which local water issues were examined and discussed. Harrington continued to offer his "Field Work in Archeology" projects, moving in 1971 from work on rock shelters and soapstone quarries to an examination of Spartanburg's colonial-era Anderson's Mill. Harrington's proposal promises "publication of significant findings… assured through Dr. Robert L. Stephenson, State Archeologist, and Director of the Institute of Archeology at University of South Carolina."

Those early years of the interim were a time of great promise and Harrington was one of the true believers. "Interim is a time when the passivism of the classroom-centered education gives way to the activism of the student's initiative," Harrington told a reporter for the Old Gold & Black in January of 1968. How strange it is that now most of the faculty feel the opposite is true 35 years later. How to return the curriculum to that sense of optimism of the late ‘60s?

THE GREENING OF THE CURRICULUM:
THE 1970S AND BEYOND

Ab Abercrombie's arrival on campus in 1973 marked the beginning of a period of serious "intramural" natural history study and field research that continues at the college to this day. Though first trained at Yale as a sociologist, Abercrombie's continued academic interest in herpetology and wildlife conservation has offered two generations of Wofford students a chance to participate in summer field study in Asia, Africa, South America, Central America, Mexico, and the Southern United States. In the 1990s Ab developed a Biology 104 (affectionately called "critters" by the non-science major participants) and natural history courses he continues to teach in the biology department. Abercrombie's courses have proved popular and valuable for a group of science majors not so interested in pursuit of a medical degree and a large group of non-science majors interested in experiencing the natural world first-hand with Ab as guide. For years Ab's Human Ecology course has been popular and important for addressing many of the issues now common in the developing environmental studies program.

Retired government professor Jack Seitz began teaching his global issues course in 1981. He's taught it once a year since then. The first edition of his textbook The Politics of Development: an Introduction to Global Issues (Blackwell Publishers) came out in 1988. The second edition, now called Global Issues: An Introduction, came in 1995 and the 3rd in 2002. He is now working on the 4th edition and it will probably come out in 2006. Blackwell, a textbook publisher in the United Kingdom, has told him they would now like a new edition every four years. The book has been translated into Portuguese, Japanese, and Chinese, and it has since become Jack's main life-work.

With Terry Ferguson's arrival back at Wofford in '86 the college widened its variety of courses with an environmental emphasis even more. Ferguson, trained as an archeologist and cultural historian (with solid academic grounding in both the late archaic period and the historic iron industry of the piedmont) brought an interdisciplinary approach to the field geology courses Harrington had pioneered at Wofford in the 1960s. In the early 1990s Ferguson shifted in his interests toward many of the more "information based" technologies of earth science-including GIS-and introduced many Wofford students to these tools. In the last decade he has renewed his own field study in archeology and has worked with current Wofford students on several important late archaic sites in the piedmont.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s the biology department began to deepen its interests in environmental science as well as the old guard retired. George Shiflet, became chairman in 1987. Shiflet has a deep interest in environmental and tropical biology and works with his wife, Wofford computer science professor Angela Shiflet, on environmental modeling. Doug Rayner came to the college in 1989 from a successful career with the Heritage Trust Program in the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources where he worked on rare and endangered plants and ecosystems. His influential book, A Guide to the Wildflowers of South Carolina (USC Press, 2001), co-written with Richard Dwight Porcher, is much more than a field guide to the state's wildflowers. Instead it is a comprehensive guide to the ecosystems and ecology of the whole palmetto state. His fine work as a naturalist have worked hand-in-hand with his teaching of field courses in biology.

In 1995 Ellen Goldey joined the biology faculty after a successful stint as a toxocologist for the EPA. Her interests since coming to Wofford have included curricular reform efforts that foster disciplinary integration. "Seeing the Big Picture: Linking the Sciences and the Humanities" which received a $225,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, was funded in 2000. Within the scope of this grant she developed, with John Lane, a learning community linking biology and humanities courses called "the Nature and Culture of Water". Goldey's work in these areas has led to increased involvement with SENSOR (Science Educators for New Civic Engagement and Responsibilities) and, in 2004 she became the first scientist to serve on the ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) executive council and is instrumental with ASLE's choice of Wofford as the site of their biannual conference in the summer of '07.

In the late 1990s Dave Kusher also joined the biology faculty and brought interests and expertise in aquatic biology to the campus. Since joining the faculty he has led interims and field trips for his students to various coastal environments including the Baruch Institute.

In the chemistry department Don Castillo has shown a consistent interest in environmental science and offered various interims in the subject through the 1990s to the present.

In Economics John McArthur has established a deep interests in environmental economics and developed deep ties with PERC-the Property and Environment Research Center-a think tank in Bozeman, Montana, that focuses on market solutions to environmental problems. Several Wofford students have studied at Montana State as a result of McArthur's connections.

Sociologist Gerard Thurmond has shown an uncanny ability to integrate science, social science, and humanities. In the late 1990s, after years of adventure travel and hiking interims, Thurmond began to teach a course in environmental sociology, research ideas of wilderness in the Southern mind, and write personal essays about his experiences. In 2002 thurmond developed, with Doug Rayner, a learning community called "Thinking Like a Mountain," an exploration of conservation biology and nature writing, as part of the "Big Picture" NSF funding.

The late 90s saw Thurmond's work with Southern nature writing lead to a book he co-edited, with John Lane, The Woods Stretched for Miles: New Nature Writing from the South (University of Georgia Press, 1999). He has continued to write and publish essays combining natural history, personal experience, and scholarly reflection. He regularly publishes personal essays in fine journals and he is a summer or two away from completing New Southern Highlanders, a book-length personal narrative about Horace Kephart's legacy and the perceptions of wildness in the Southern Appalachians.

In Foreign languages, Laura Barbas-Roden has combined her interest in Central America and environmental justice to teach Spanish classes in environmental literature and write scholarly articles about key Latin American authors whose work reflects environmental concerns. She is a member of ASLE and has recently published an article in the organization's highly regarded journal ISLE.

Philosophy adjunct and Wofford graduate Kelly Lowry (with both a law degree and master's degree in environmental law from Vermont Law School) was hired in 2004 to teach a very popular 200-level Environmental Ethics course. Lowry will continue to teach this course and possibly expand his offerings in years to come.

Since returning to Wofford in 1988 I have taught a variety of courses with environmental themes. An early humanities class focused on environmental writers and many of his interims have taken students to landscape both exotic and local to explore natural and human history-the Everglades, the NC mountains, low state South Carolina's Black Creek, the Usumacinta River in Mexico from which he published a journal and photographs called Usumacinta River Journey in 1992. Since 1998 I have taught an English 102 section called "River Narratives" with readings of novels by Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, Norman McClain, James Dickey that includes a student research exploration of a local or hometown waterway.

In 1999 I developed, with Ellen Goldey, the biology/humanities learning community "The Nature and Culture of Water" with outside funding from the National Science Foundation ($225,000) and The Spartanburg Sewer and Water System ($48,000 over three years). In 2004 I also developed, with English professor Deno Trakas an exploration of Southern rural landscapes called "Cornbread & Sushi: The Rural South and Contemporary Literature' funded by a grant from the Watson-Brown Foundation (S75,500). In my environmental literature course, students read and reflect on authors from the nature writing "canon" and experiment in their own essays with many of the same styles as the finest natural history writers.

My own environmental writing has been published in two books of personal essays (Weed Time, Briarpatch press, 1992, and Waist Deep in Black Water, The University of Georgia Press, 2002) and a book-length environmental narrative, Chattooga: Descending into the Myth of Deliverance River (The University of Georgia Press, 2004). Also a poet, my suite of tree poems appeared with photography by Mark Olencki in The Hub City Writers Project's Noble Trees of the South Carolina Upstate (2003).

Also in 2003, my essay "Finding the Real in Real Estate" about the fight to stop development of a girl scout in Spartanburg won The Phillip Reed Award for Outstanding Writing about the Southern Environment from The Southern Environmental Law Center. Doug Rayner and Gerald Thurmond appeared as characters in that piece. Since the publication of Chattooga I have traveled widely and written extensively on the Southern environment, including three trips to Ossabaw Island to take part in the gatherings of a group of Southern nature writers now known as "Southern Nature." Gerald Thurmond is also a part of that group.

I have also has carried on, with my wife Betsy, the 1970s work of Fowler and Patton and helped draw attention to the Lawson's Fork with our editing of the Hub City Writers Project's Lawson's Fork: Headwater to Confluence by David Taylor and Gary Henderson. Betsy, executive director of Hub City, also planned and implemented an ambitious 4-day festival along the course of the creek to launch the book in the spring of 2000. The festival included two artists in residence, Janisse Ray and Wofford graduate David Scott, an orchestra performance, a gospel choir, environmental art, a blues concert, nature hikes, canoe excursions, and a combined ceremony by a Cherokee medicine person and an Episcopal priest to close the week of celebration. 6,000 people attended.

READING GROUPS, IMPORTANT CAMPUS VISITS,
AND ENVIRONMENTAL SEMINARS IN THE 1990S & BEYOND

In 1990 John McArthur moderated a semester-long faculty reading group (including myself and Abercrombie) that introduced the ideas of "free-market environmentalism" to the Wofford community really for the first time. Economist Terry Anderson visited campus to discuss his book by the same name. This was the first of several visits to Wofford for Anderson.

During the late early 1990s the Wofford Writers Series hosted campus readings by James Kilgo and Franklin Burroughs, authors of Deep Enough for Ivory Bills and Horry and the Waccamaw, two of the finest books of natural history prose about landscapes of the South. Later, in the middle 90s Kilgo also served as the Phi Beta Kappa speaker and both writers accompanied myself and Jim Proctor on an interim canoe exploration of Black Creek on the SC coastal plain in January of 2000. Burroughs also returned to campus two other times for panel discussions-first, in 1999 for a panel on southern nature writing with Janisse Ray, James Kilgo, and Upstate Forever's Brad Wyche, and again in 2000 for a discussion of coastal development called "Write the Coast or Write it Off," with Jan DeBlieu (Hatteras Journal and Burroughs medal-winning Wind) and Roger Pinckney (The Right Side of the River).

In the spring of 1999 environmental writer Barry Lopez (National Book Award-winning Arctic Dreams) visited the upstate and spent three days in Spartanburg. He did a reading at the County Library, a presentation at Wofford, and a reading in Greenville at the library. This was an important formative visit to the college because it placed us within the conversation about natural history and interdisciplinary teaching that was emerging nation-wide. Some of the ideas for the NSF grant came out of discussions with Lopez, as did a sense of the importance of local landscapes in college teaching soon after incorporated into planning for Wofford's learning communities.

The summer of 2002 three Wofford faculty (Goldey, Rayner, and Lane) were among a select group invited to attend a conference at Camp Chewonki on the coast of Maine to introduce The Earth Charter to higher education. The Wofford delegation joined schools all across the nation-Middlebury, Florida Gulf Coast University, The College of the Atlantic, among others. Speakers such as David Rockefeller, Thomas Berry, and Chewonki director Don Hudson spoke with clarity on the mission of higher education to help instill the values of the Earth Charter. Environmental writer and poet Alison Hawthorne Deming refered to
those gathered that weekend on the Maine coast as "cooridinates on a green map," and it should be noted here that Wofford was among them.

As a result of the Chewonki visit, Ellen Goldey hosted a day-long workshop in August 2003 funded by a grant from the Spartanburg Water and Sewer District at Wofford to introduce the technology of biodiesel to the college community and Spartanburg.

A massive and destructive ice storm in late November of 2002 gave Wofford a unique opportunity to create a series of environmental art pieces on campus. Called "A Tribute to the Trees" and curated by Dean of the Library Oakely Coburn, 10 community artists were given the debris from the ice storm-limbs, trunks, leaves, mulch-and commissioned to create sculpture that was displayed on Wofford's central lawn. The exhibition, including photography by Mark Olencki of the aftermath of the storm itself, opened September 1st 2003, and there was a symposium on September 9th, 2003 to discuss the nature of public art.

The reaction to this first environmental art exibit highlighted how aesthetically stunted the campus community really is when students vandalized the art and commented on how embarrassing it was to walk among these sculptures. The pieces stayed up until the end of October and the only one of the ten to find a permanent place on the grounds was a "war ax" that sculptor Winston Wingo created from branches and welded metal.

In early 2004 Wingo's sculpture was moved to the athletic complex and the football team now rubs it each time they run down the hill to Gibbs Stadium during a home game.

Finally, an important reading group, led by Terry Ferguson, met during the spring of 2005 to read Jared Diamond's Collapse. Many of those present at those meeting formed the core of the group who met in the fall of 2005 to discuss an environmental studies program for the first time. While discussing Diamond's book the group often commented on what someone might need to know to be "environmentally literate."

THE INTERIM:
‘80S, ‘90'S AND BEYOND

An inventory of interim topics from the late 70s and 80s until the present gives an idea of how fully environmental concerns have engaged our faculty, and by extension also the student body, and gives what I see as a valuable hint as to how popular an environmental studies program could be at Wofford.

In 1976 Ab Abercrombie began offering "Orienteering" interims and these were regular features throughout the late 70s and early 80s. In 1977 he offered "An introduction to Herpetology," the first in a long line of interims on natural history. Those same years Harrington continued his "Archeology Fieldwork" interims, and Duane Stober offered a "Camping Techniques" interim as late as 1977. Soon after this the P.E. was finally abolished as an academic department.

Strange as it may seem, Military Science was often the place to take interims with "adventure" and natural history content during these years-They offered "Adventure Activities (1977)," ‘How to Survive in the Wilderness (1978)," ‘The Everglades: A Rare and Endangered Park (1979)," "Discovering the Florida Keys (1980)," "Survival and Adventure Training (1982)," but by 1985 their selection became more predictable-‘Airborne, then and now," and "ROTC air assault training."

During the 1980s there also were interims on "Solar Energy," "The World of Birds," "Ecology and F-stops," "Early Naturalists of the Southeast," "Wofford and the Energy Problem," "Spaceship Earth," and "Woody Plants." Though on leave much of the decade to study wildlife biology, Abercrombie took students to the Everglades and in 1988 offered "Shade Tree Telemetry."

In 1986 government professor Linton Dunson offered "Study and Field Work in Natural History." In 1987 Castillo offered his "Environmental Issues" interim for the first of ten times in a row, and Terry Ferguson and Gerald Thurmond offered "Naturalist," an interim which began what for Thurmond would become over a decade of local hiking interims where students worked on observing nature, keeping journals, and writing natural history prose.

Around 1987 a foreign travel trend began which was not very common in interim up until this point-the "ecology and culture" developing world tour. Until the late 1980s there were a few, but not many, interim trips outside of Europe. In 1989 George Shiflet offered "The Natural History of the Galapagos Islands" and since then there have been dozens of opportunities for students to visit exotic landscapes offered by a growing core of interdisciplinary faculty lead by Shiflet and foreign language professor Nancy Mandlove but alos including faculty from biology, English, foreign language, and sociology professors have offered trips to Nepal, Costa Rica (numerous times), Belize (Wofford could almost open a campus there!), Mexico, Equador, Australia (several times), Hawaii, Trinidad, Tobago, Quintana Roo, Bonaire, Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia, and southern Africa. These trips have not ignored more traditionlal "cultural" activities but have exposed Wofford students to the "nature" of their destinations through visits to wildlife parks, trips down wild rivers, hiking on wilderness trails, discussion of global conservation issues on-site. Students and faculty have also interacted with dozens of "peoples and cultures" very different from their own.

THE GREENING OF WOFFORD'S BUILDINGS AND GROUNDS

In the summer of 1998 Wofford began to landscape the entire campus, the first major renovation of the grounds since the 1970s. By the early 2000s the landscaping of the 145-acre campus had added over 4,000 tree specimens in over 130 different varieties. In November of 2002, with remarks by president Dunlap, the Wofford String Ensemble playing Handel, and world-famous horticulturalist Michael Dirr leading the first "ceremonial tour," the Wofford campus was declared an arboretum.

The arboretum's mission, as stated in the official "self-guided walking tour" booklet is to enhance the natural beauty of the campus through continuous plantings, to promote environmental consciousness through conservation of plant diversity and restoration of an urban ecosystem, to educate and inform visitor, faculty, staff and students about noble trees found on the campus, to heighten community awareness of the importance of trees in rapidly developing urban areas, and to keep updated mapping and labeling records on all trees on campus. The planting continues today.

In the subsequent years the landscaping of Wofford's grounds has drawn much praise, but also some criticism, not because the results were not seen as beautiful or noble, but because of the choices made not to landscape with native plants, to create an irrigated campus and increase water consumption many fold, to remove a hundred mature, healthy hardwoods to create "vistas," to increase the use of pesticides and herbicides in care and maintenance, and to adopt what many see as an aesthetic associated with industrial parks and country clubs.

The landscaping at Wofford did create some drama. There was a famous battle over a Chinese ginkgo placed in front of Daniel Building then "murdered" by a minor league eco-terrorist. In 2001 English professor Deno Trakas wrote a one-act play called "The Old Man and the Tree" about an old professor in protest climbing into a large oak in the path of a new science building on a small college campus. The play by Trakas won a contest and was performed at a Lander University theater festival but never at Wofford.

Some might say, instead of "greening" the campus in 1998, the million dollar make-over of the grounds reinforced aesthetic and landscaping values that are now seen as obsolete on other more progressive campuses. As Timothy Egan says in a recent article, "The Greening of America's Campuses," in the "Education Life" special section of The Sunday New York Times on January 8th, 2006: "Colleges have long marketed their campus amenities, their rosters of scholars, their selectivity and study-abroad programs. To that list, add one more thing: their green credentials."

So far Wofford has little to offer in those "green credentials." The concept of "building green" at Wofford hasn't existed. Through the college building boom of the 1990s that continues today, short-term "affordability" rather than long-term "sustainability" has remained the value-system that drives new construction and renovation on the campus. At other leading regional institutions such as Emory and Furman, the campus now IS pedagogy. At Emory all new and renovated construction must adhere to strict "green building" standards, and at Furman several new buildings have been LEED certified (Leaders in Environmental and Energy Design) and even though Wofford discussed the idea in the summer of 2003, Furman students run their own biodiesel plant started with a $20,000 grant from the president's office. Wofford's administration is aware, but so far unsuccessful in moving the college toward sustainability of its buildings and grounds. There is a deep need for an environmental inventory, of buildings, ground, food service, recycling services, on the campus. Maybe the discussion of environmental studies program will lead to that important process.

One thing is clear: As we move into the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, Wofford buildings, grounds, and curriculum are still separate and unrelated parts of the campus, except for the arboretum. This marks one of the areas in which we still have a distance to go to catch up with our peer institutions. To become a truly "green" campus & community every decision made by board's facilities committee should adhere to Aldo Leopold Land Ethic: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

CONCLUSIONS: TOWARD OUR OWN ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES PROGRAM

In summarizing the "greening" of Wofford, I would have to say that we are pretty far along and we are in a position to pull an exciting, unique program together. We have a history here. The groundwork has been laid, and we have good people and good ideas. We need to develop a curriculum with clear goals and objectives. We need that "natural study area" near the college we've been in pursuit of since the days of Gibbs Patton. We need the administration to push for "green design" and sustainable decisions in food service, buildings and grounds. It's time to find a way to commit to coordinating it all. As Goethe was said to have uttered, "Begin it now."

Compiled in December 2005 from college catalogues, campus newspapers, phone interviews, brochures, speculations, personal notes, personal correspondence, visions, and dreams.