College of the Ecstatic
Eli Nixon as horseshoe crab.
By Terry Tempest Williams
“I am ecstatic to be here,” I recall a student saying to me on my first visit to COA.
From that day forward, I have called College of the Atlantic, “College of the Ecstatic.”
My husband Brooke and I had been invited by Steven Katona and his wife Susan Lerner for a tour of the college in 1999. Steve was president of COA, as well as being one of its founding faculty members as a biologist.
The setting was impressive, a learning community on Mount Desert Island devoted to human ecology with a shimmering view of the Atlantic Ocean from campus. We had just come back from an inspiring lunch when a puppet procession led by large, imaginary animals and comical birds was underway. We followed the procession through the woods. At its helm was the creator—Eli Nixon ’99.* We were led by the beasts down trails to the small cove as panels of text soared from the pines above and were pulled dripping from the bay by way of zip-lines. A wild band of horn players accompanied the pageantry with music composed by another student, Nikolai Fox ’00. Word had it that various students trained in forestry and agro-ecology were now draped in paper maché receiving theater directions from Eli. It was all a grand, feral pageant: an epic Battle Between Hope and Fear.
Later that afternoon, we listened to students speak about their senior projects. The puppet theater we had experienced outside was expanded inside as Eli spoke of art as a vehicle for social change capable of illuminating our relationship with Nature, interconnected and interrelated. As they spoke, the field of human ecology was cracked wide open. I not only saw a brilliant student courageously engaging with the world with their original vision, I saw a leader who transcended categorization. They not only spoke about what was possible, but necessary through igniting the imagination.
I asked Eli if they would come with their band of puppets from College of the Ecstatic and accompany me to Fire & Grit, the Orion Society’s gathering of writers, educators, and public policy makers to be held at the National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.
Eli accepted the invitation. A month later, we organized an artistic coup.
As an invited writer, I had been given 30 minutes to speak. I yielded my time to Eli and their troupe without warning government officials. A revised Battle Between Hope and Fear with banners flying across the auditorium ensued. They brought the house down. These students from COA bypassed rhetoric and touched the heart. One of the lasting images for all of us was seeing the dignified Barry Lopez dancing with a 10-foot tall carrot as he wore the paper maché husk of a rhinogahog.
Today Eli Nixon continues their work as a cardboard constructionist and educator, activist, and creator of magic in schools and community centers around the country. After two decades, we are back in touch and once again, Eli has agreed to collaborate. We will gather at Cape Cod on a beach with Harvard Divinity School students and discuss Eli’s new book, Bloodtide: A New Holiday in Homage to Horseshoe Crabs. It will be another portal of possibilities we can walk through together.
I think of Samantha Haskell ’10, a young agrarian who is now the owner of the revered independent bookstore, Blue Hill Books. She has not only built on the bookstore’s solid tradition of being smart and savvy, she is activating an intellectual community of care within the next generation of residents and readers in Hancock County in Blue Hill, Maine.
Samantha writes:
As students, our line was always, “Human ecology is everything,” which is both hyperbolic and true. The context of the human’s relationship to the environment is all-encompassing, particularly in the anthropocene, but it also includes us as conscientious observers. The concept is expansive, overwhelming, and liberating; find the thing you’re most interested in, whatever it may be, rest assured it is relevant, and now explore it deeply, critically, thoughtfully. This is human ecology in action.
For me, it was rural communities. How do we define a sense of place? What brings us together? This became courses in landscape architecture, American literature, ornithology, and environmental law. Then an exploration of the communities near national parks around the world. After graduating, it bloomed into running the independent bookstore in my hometown, and becoming president of the local land trust. I hope that I’m helping to advance and meld those traditions today in the place that I love.
And close to home in my own state of Utah, I think of Ky Osguthorpe ’19, who is now the government grassroots liaison for the Utah Rivers Council. We met recently at the Save Our Great Salt Lake rally. Like Eli and Samantha, Ky is passionate about her work, even as it involves embracing grief alongside her love as she witnesses the Great Salt Lake disappear into a horizon of salt.
Ky writes:
The air of mystery around human ecology is intentionally cultivated by professors, their courses, and the inescapable final assignment of the school, the Human Ecology Essay. This assignment gives students an opportunity to define human ecology, a seemingly odd task for students who have ostensibly spent four years studying the subject.
Like most of my peers, I had a difficult time figuring out what to write. I ended up writing my essay about leaving Mormonism and feeling isolated, stuck in a chasm between people who hate the LDS church and those who belong to it, and trying to figure out what kindness meant through it all. I equated human ecology to the rivers that flow between such chasms. I wrote, “To seek connection is to participate in human ecology, to believe, in the face of deep canyons, that there exists something exciting, something dynamic and stochastic between the world’s stubborn monoliths of false certainty.”
So here I am, an ex-Mormon, river-loving human ecologist. I look at the impossibly high walls on either side of myself, feel the depth of the chasm in which I stand, and remember that between towering evils, good and truth reside in meandering cracks.
This is why College of the Atlantic is singular—passion gives rise to hope where students can put their love into action. “It’s an Ivy League education that cares about our relationship to the Earth and all its inhabitants in all its diversity,” Steve Katona, now president emeritus, told me so many years ago. I see this same kind of leadership continuing through the exuberance and generosity of spirit with President Darron Collins ’92 and COA’s committed faculty and staff.
The testament to being awake, alive, and engaged in this liminal moment of climate collapse and a global pandemic resides in the pragmatic vision of our young people. Eli Nixon, Samantha Haskell, and Ky Osguthorpe are examples from the COA student body and alumnx who are not only “finding beauty in a broken world” but creating beauty in the world they find.
On this 50th anniversary celebration of College of the Atlantic, I still see this small college on Mount Desert Island as College of the Ecstatic, where the embodied intellectual life at COA encourages each student to become their highest and deepest selves, be it through a pageantry of puppets, owning an independent bookstore in rural Maine, or protecting the shrinking Great Salt Lake in the climate of now.
