This article can be found in
Communities
Magazine in the Fall 2000 issue.
The
snow stops
just as we reached the summit meadow. Sun streams through the snow-clouds,
illuminating the
old-growth conifer forest on Trillium Mountain. I look back to see the last
student emerging from a fairy forest of ancient manzanita and dwarf oaks. We
look down into the canyon at the trailhead 800 feet below where we began hiking
an hour earlier. After hiking the first of four miles, it was time for an early
lunch and a check-in. We sit in the sun on our jackets amid a sea of wildflowers
sparkling with snow dust, sharing our observations of the natural world around
us.
Several
students from various colleges across the country get acquainted as they eat
lunch and absorb the panoramic view. They are beginning the Dakubetede
Environmental Education Programs (D.E.E.P.) Ecostery, a residential
interdisciplinary field quarter curriculum accredited through Antioch
University. For the next eight weeks these students will experience total
immersion in community-- creating their own learning community in an intentional
community setting at Trillium Farm.
At the
summit we turn our attention from the forests clinging to the north slope of
Trillium Mountain to the west where the Little Applegate River flows through its
winding canyon, hidden behind a tangle of ridges. Around to the north, grassy
slopes rise steeply up to the higher ridges of the proposed Dakubetede
Wilderness. Ridges and canyons of the higher country stretch eastward across the
headwaters of the Little Applegate River to the snowy peaks of the Siskiyou Crest.
One student
notices a cabin roof emerging from the oaks on the next ridge to the east. Students can see other Trillium cabin roofs on the ridge top and on the south
slopes above the river. I explain how most of the buildings at Trillium are in
the next canyon beyond that ridge. There, Birch Creek flows through several
ponds and tumbles over waterfalls, around groves of trees, and across meadows
before dropping into the canyon over a 30-foot waterfall into the Little
Applegate River canyon. With three miles to go, we start walking again, tuning
into the diverse ecosystems gracing the landscape here in the arid rain-shadow
of the Siskiyou’s highest peaks.
We introduce
new students to the Ecostery program by guiding them to Trillium Farm via a
four-mile hike through the wilderness. The idea originated when a former student
described Trillium as the kind of place she’d be thrilled to have as the
destination of a three-day backpacking trip. Hiking in to their new home
immediately helps the students begin to develop a sense of place, nurture a
respect for the value of this powerful wilderness habitat, and recognize the
threats to its unique biodiversity.
By
the time we reach our destination, the students understand that Trillium Farm, a
former trout hatchery, is a historic homestead surrounded on three sides by
thousands of acres of federal wildlands.
The ponds, creek, river, forests,
woodlands, meadows, and grasslands comprise a diverse landscape that provides a
wonderful classroom for learning about ourselves as community in place. They also know our motto:
“Wilderness is our classroom, Nature is our teacher.”
What
is the real purpose of an
intentional community, and what positive role can it play within the local
community, county, watershed, bioregion? For the last 25 years over 100
community residents have pondered this question at Trillium Farm. These
collective ponderings have distilled into our two crucial goals or
“intents,” which I believe can apply to any intentional community seeking to
play a positive role in their local region.
Our
first intent is to maintain and enhance the quality of life in our habitat,
which we embrace by organizing our neighbors in this sparsely populated canyon
to fight federal government plans for opening the surrounding wilderness to
large scale commercial helicopter logging operations. We have found that working
locally on such quality-of-life issues builds a larger community as the
neighbors appreciate our commitment and understand our motivations.
Our
second intent is education. People are often drawn into intentional community
because something special happens there. A community may have evolved especially
effective bodywork, high-yield gardening, innovative building techniques, or a
particularly inspirational spiritual path. Just as parents want to teach their
children all the great things they’ve learned, intentional communities often
perform an educational role, spreading the word about that something special
they do well.
As
a lifetime environmental activist, I see how education involves and empowers the
first intent, to defend habitat. Active education is the crucial process to
inform people about imminent threats to their quality of life, possible courses
of action to mitigate the threats, and the potential consequences of failure.
Here at Trillium, an accredited higher education program has both renewed our
community internally, and has brought us into a well-regarded position as
activists in our watershed.
OUR
COMMUNITY began 25 years ago with
12 partners: five young couples and two single men. Relationships strained under
the new stress and pressures of moving onto a remote homestead, consumed as we
were by cleaning up and restoring the land and building gardens, cabins, and
water systems. We accomplished much, but as a community we were unable to reach
a balance between those who desired dependable incomes from “regular” jobs
off the land, and those who depended on the riskier income of music, crafts, or
seasonal work.
In
1979 half the original partners left. I experienced how our having begun
Trillium School, a preschool through high school, helped heal the fabric of our
community after this split. That same year, other community members also started
a natural food store in the rural hamlet 13 miles down river, and organized an
environmental group in our watershed. These three projects provided jobs for
community residents and involved substantial educational outreach activities to
the local community. Trillium grew and thrived for a few years as we all became
teachers in one or more “classrooms”.
Several
years later, a similar but more serious split developed in the community between
those with regular incomes and those who wanted the community to support their
physical needs while they continued to develop incomes from arts, crafts, and
seasonal work. Over half the community, most with regular incomes, decided they
would rather Trillium become a neighborhood, with the land divided into
individually owned parcels. Frustrated by the impossibility of reaching
consensus on this issue, they threatened legal action to dissolve the community. Those of us who wanted to continue as a community dug in and refinanced the land
so the others could leave, and they did.
During
the wrangling, I reached for education as a limited solution, offering to
rehabilitate the abandoned two-story octagonal schoolhouse from our 1979 school
if I could create a residential university program here. I had long since grown
weary of commuting to town to teach, and was eager to work with students in the
best classroom of all: our beautiful organic homestead surrounded by thousands
of acres of wilderness. Desperately looking for something to agree on, our
fractured community passed consensus on my proposal with surprisingly little
discussion. Thus Dakubetede Environmental Education Programs (named for the
people native to our watershed) was born. With over half the community gone, I
wondered how the remaining half would fare in rebuilding community at Trillium.
Within
a few years a severe flood forced more community issues to surface as we faced
an overwhelming workload to recover from flood damage. This led to a third
community split as most of the remaining residents left to pursue goals outside
community. I soon realized that I wanted D.E.E.P. to provide enough students to
both generate a sufficient income, and bring a diverse group of new people to
embrace community life at Trillium.
The
Ecostery Foundation of North
America defines an “Ecostery” as a place, a center, a facility, stewarded
land, and Nature sanctuary, where “ecosophy” (ecological wisdom &
harmony) is learned, practiced, and taught.”
When I first read that definition many years ago, I realized that a large part
of the original vision of Trillium was to be an “Ecostery.” Soon the
residential academic program evolved into the “D.E.E.P. Ecostery,” fully
accredited through The Heritage Institute of Antioch University.
If
we could host a group of college students and/or continuing education school
teachers at Trillium for a two-month Ecostery program, what five courses would
best comprise the curriculum? I developed our curriculum around what we would
look for in prospective Trillium residents. (See “The D.E.E.P. Ecostery
Curriculum at end.)
Evolving
Trillium Community as an environmental education center seems to be working. My
wife Susanna and I are growing a new community of former and future Ecosterians. Two full-time and four part-time residents form the core residents at Trillium,
with a population that fluctuates with seasonal interns, students in the spring
and fall quarter Ecostery sessions, summers, when the community swells with
former students and friends; and winters, when it’s quiet with just a small
family.
We
live the dream of enhancing and rehabilitating the land and physical
infrastructure at Trillium around the vision of an organic permaculture
ecovillage on the edge of the wilderness. One former Ecostery student wrote:
“To interact with elders who spend their lives doing what you propose to do
with yours lives is an incredible opportunity.”
While Susanna and I are hardly elders, this kind of response is one of
the rewards of educating in community. Students see and live what we are doing
here, and then want to take a similar path for their own lives.
What
does the education program look like? A typical Ecostery day in the fall quarter might start with students rising
early and having breakfast together in the octagonal schoolhouse where they live
and study. Some students may step into the morning sun and continue the previous
day’s project of keying out some of the diverse shrubs growing along the edge
of the meadow. Other students head down the trail along Birch Creek, past the
dome (a meditation space and classroom), between twin ponds, past the llamas
corrals, through the playground and garden to the cedar barn, a study center
where they work on papers and check email. At 10 a.m. we convene in the garden
circle for a check-in, and a student shares the poem she wrote during a
tree-sit. We spend the morning working in the garden, taking time for some
birding, identifying whether certain insects are pests or helpful garden
partners. Discussions range from communication skills in community to the
practices of deep ecology in determining how and where to shop for food.
After
lunch we head down to the river where a student gives an oral report on aquatic
ecology while we watch water ouzels dipping underwater. We end up in a
discussion about how clearcut logging in the upper watershed makes the river
more vulnerable to sedimentation that can smother the eggs of salmon and
steelhead. Two students report about an educational display they’re creating
for a local environmental group to clarify the relationship between logging
forests and the resulting spring floods caused by premature snowmelt in the high
country. Before breaking for dinner with Trillium residents, we head back to the
cedar barn, where a student shows us progress on the Web site he’s building
for D.E.E.P.
When
Trillium resident Laurel Sutherlin was an Ecostery student here, he wrote:
“This sort of education is unique: all encompassing, and intense in its
laid-back style. The unconventionality and loose structure can make me forget
this is school. When I step back and think about it, I am learning a huge
amount, more real, worthy, useful and practical knowledge than any classroom
could hope to produce. Each conversation leaves me with a fresh perspective and
much food for thought, each experience makes real a different issue, each
problem resolved is a lesson.”
Our
philosophy of intertwining education and community life exemplifies the
suggestions made by David Orr in Ecological
Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World (Island Press,
1994):
“Education
in the modern world was designed to further the conquest of nature and the
industrialization of the planet. It tended to produce unbalanced,
under-dimensioned people tailored to fit the modern economy. Postmodern
education must have a different agenda, one that is designed to heal, connect,
liberate, empower, create, and celebrate. Postmodern education must be
life-centered.”
Dinner
begins with a circle as each
person shares from their heart. Organic vegetables from our gardens compose much
of our hearty vegetarian dinner. After washing dishes, the students hurry back
to the cedar barn to spend the evening studying. Trillium residents remain
behind, sipping tea in the community house, and discussing the garden, a
potential new resident, and our schedule of upcoming events.
Susanna
and I excuse ourselves a bit early, as she’ll leave at 7 a.m. for the
50-minute morning drive to her job teaching high school in town. We stop by the
cedar barn on our way home, where all but one student pass on our offer of a
moonlight walk through the garden--the rest being enthusiastically on an
academic roll! That one student comes arm in arm with us into the garden. It’s
quite cold and the stiff wind blows giant golden leaves out of the bigleaf
maples. Clouds race across the sky in thickening masses hinting at snow
tomorrow. It turns out that the one student needed this time to open up about
some personal issues. We talk in hushed tones under the swaying trees as we walk
up the canyon. The wind and moonlight collaborate in a shimmer of sparkles
across the surface of the twin ponds. We stop in the dome to light some incense
and pray together, then walk up to the school and kindle a fire in the
woodstove. We hug goodnight, then Susanna and I begin the long hike up to our
ridge-top cabin, giving thanks for the opportunity to grow community and
environmental learning in this wonderful setting.
The
D.E.E.P. Ecostery Curriculum
Natural History of the
Dakubetede Wilderness (5 science credits): The first step in developing a sense of place is to learn about the flora,
fauna, ecosystems, and human history of the place. We connect with nature
through a deeper understanding of its physical manifestations and biodiversity.
Applied Conservation
Biology: Protecting and Restoring Biodiversity (3 science credits): With that deeper understanding of nature, we learn about strategies to
counteract the threats to biodiversity, and to protect and strengthen the power
and balance of the natural world. We defend our habitat, our quality of life,
and our sense of place through education and organizing with our local
environmental group. Love where you Live; Defend what you Love".
Environmental Ethics:
Practicing Deep Ecology (3 humanities credits): Connecting with nature, and working to protect nature, forms the foundation for
learning to develop our own personal code of ethics, a biocentric guide for our
decisions of lifestyle as members of the planetary community. Do our personal
choices help or hinder nature, and by effect, humankind?
Community Studies:
Ecostery as Intentional Community (3 social studies credits): The global marketplace, toxic culture, consumer society, and increasing
destruction of nature all require a paradigm shift in our concept of community. Here we explore how intentional community can serve as an experiential and
educational setting for an Ecostery.
Creating a Wilderness
Education Center (3 education credits): Many educators dream of finding an old camp, lodge, or farm to outfit as an
environmental education facility. Trillium is all three, located on a remote
historic homestead and former trout hatchery. Here we learn how to plan and
perform the physical tasks and academic organization necessary to create a
center for environmental education as an aid for our transition to a postmodern
world.
