North Cascades Institute: Connecting People & Landscape
By Scott Stolnack
Newhalem, Washington - Seven kids
from Mrs. Johnston's sixth-grade class were sprawled on a tarp
at the base of a 500 year-old cedar, drawing pictures of plants
and animals on wedge-shaped slices of a large round puzzle. Rugged
mountains rose up all around them. A few dozen paces away in
the swift-flowing Skagit river, thousands of salmon were spawning.
One kid drew a dipper-a kind of bird that 'flies' underwater in
fast-flowing streams hunting insects; one drew a slug; another,
a beetle. Others drew mammals, flowers, trees, fish. Then they
put all the puzzle pieces together to form a map of the earth.
"What would happen if there were no more insects?" asked
Paula Ogden, Education Specialist for North Cascades National
Park. She took a cloth and erased the beetle from its wedge of
the map.
"The birds that eat bugs would die," said one eleven
year-old girl. She erased the birds.
"The flowers wouldn't get pollinated," said a boy. He
wiped away the flowers.
"If the plants died," another girl volunteered, "then-then
there wouldn't be any oxygen and everything would die." All
the other pictures, all gone.
Mrs. Johnson's class got the message: each part is important,
and we're all connected.
The kids, from Mount Vernon's Lincoln Elementary in Skagit County,
were on a three-day "Mountain School" expedition, one
of several educational programs of North Cascades Institute, a
non-profit organization that works to deepen the connection between
people and the natural world.
Imagine a classroom where the teachers are salmon, cedars, eagles,
and glaciers as well as naturalists, artists, writers, and mountaineers.
Where the classroom is 11 million acres of forests, shores, and
mountains; and where kids and adults develop and refine a sense
of intimacy with, and stewardship for, the land.
Saul Weisberg had such a dream, back in the mid-1980s. Saul,
then a climbing ranger for North Cascades National Park, began
North Cascades Institute with four other friends-all outdoors
educators and wilderness guides. Now, more than 15 years later,
trim, bearded, and bespectacled, Saul is still the organization's
visionary as well as its Executive Director.
NCI is perhaps best-known for its field seminars, which are usually
located in wilderness settings or rustic lodges. These adult
seminars, with an average class size of around twelve, are taught
by wildlife biologists, artists, geologists, writers, and other
experts. Participants can study edible plants, traditional basket
weaving arts, landscape photography, backpack in search of wolves
or kayak in search of orca whales, learn how to write natural
history essays, analyze glaciers or sketch wildlife.
Although many NCI programs take place in North Cascades National
Park, and the Institute leases space in the Park headquarters,
NCI is a separate, non-profit school guided by a Board of Directors
and Advisory Council.
"We started off with the seminar
program, and after a few years, we realized in some ways we were
preaching to the choir," Saul told me from his office in
Sedro-Woolley. Framed posters of butterfly wings and beetles adorn
his walls. Field guides and ecology primers line his bookshelves,
and an old wood-shafted ice axe serves as a temporary paperweight
on the credenza behind his desk.
The people who took NCI seminars, Saul said, were already passionate
about the landscape. So Saul and the rest of NCI asked themselves,
"Who are we not reaching? And the obvious answer was young
people."
In the camping-based Mountain School, students learn about ecosystems,
cultural history, and conservation. Last year, 800 students from
school districts in Skagit, Island and San Juan Counties spent
two nights in tents at the Newhalem Campground in an old-growth
forest along the upper Skagit. They might have thought they were
just having a good time walking in the forest, writing in their
journals and drawing pictures, but they were also learning about
natural processes, cooperation, and biodiversity.
Another program, "Girls on Ice," teams teenage girls
with female mountaineers and glaciologists for a week of wilderness
backpacking and "geological research focusing on glaciers
as indicators of climate change, as water reservoirs, and as erosive
forces in alpine terrain," according to NCI's program catalog.
Soon, through a unique partnership with public and private groups
such as the National Park Service and Seattle City Light, construction
will begin on a multi-million dollar "Environmental Learning
Center" on the shores of Diablo Lake in the heart of North
Cascades National Park.
Funded largely from Seattle City Light's relicensing agreement
for its power-generating dams on the upper Skagit-and a vigorous
fundraising effort by NCI-when the environmentally friendly center
opens in 2003 it will house around sixty people, and provide classrooms,
a library, and a community center. It will be the base of operations
for Mountain School and other NCI programs-though many of its
field-based programs will still operate elsewhere throughout the
North Cascades.
In another partnership, the Institute has recently teamed with
Western Washington University to create a Master of Education
program in natural science and science education. The objective
of the two-year program is to create environmental educators and
professionals who leave the program "not just knowing great
natural history and teaching skills, but also knowing how to read
a budget and write a grant so they can go out and be leaders,"
Saul Weisberg said. The program, which began last June, accepts
ten students each year.
In the past decade and a half, NCI has helped 50,000 adults and
children deepen their relationship to this place we call home.
With an annual budget of around $1 million, and partnerships with
public agencies and other groups throughout the region, NCI's
brand of outdoor education seems to resonate with a great many
people.
Many have encouraged NCI to expand from its home territory, and
grow into other regions. But Saul feels strongly that NCI is intimately
connected with the North Cascades, and should stay put. He's willing
to offer plenty of advice, but he believes that an organization
must be deeply rooted in its own landscape rather than transplanted
from elsewhere.
"One of my dreams is that every ecosystem has an NCI in it,"
he said. Almost two decades after starting NCI, Saul is still
dreaming. Let's hope his latest dream comes true as spectacularly
as the first.
NCI can be reached at (360) 856-5700, ext. 209 or at http://www.ncascades.org
Scott Stolnack can be reached at sastol@compuserve.com.