Undergraduate Summative Evaluation
 
The field of Sustainability studies does not exist. I forged my own path in an era when it has become crucial to do so. I believe working beyond the known paradigm is the only way to help shift it toward new, unlimited heights of consciousness. Hence, forsaking loans and the sciences, I hunted those aspects I deemed vital to the study of sustainability and self-sufficiency. The most crucial being not only the healing but the thriving of Spirit on all levels: from the plants, animals and land, through people, community and the built environment around us, to the deepest levels of my inner being. With a strong interest and ability in the sciences, specifically the study of Life, I commenced my academic journey majoring in Biology. However, struggling financially through the first year of generals, I enlisted and served in the Navy. Three years later, with Jane Goodall as my heroine, I resumed my prerequisites, this time toward Animal Behavior. Eager to learn from the animals how to live within nature, I quickly became disillusioned by science's unwillingness to leave the lab and consider consciousness. Realizing this conscious approach was not within the grasp of the System, I decided to track the knowledge my own way. First, I reasoned, I would need to know some basics about living with the land. For this, I researched accessible tribes of the modern day: Intentional Communities. Throughout a three-year journey, I learned holistic ways of living with the land and the importance of community. From my need to live within nature's spirit and her healing energies, a persistent thirst for Plant Medicines emerged. In Evergreen, with its green-conscious studies and independent learning contracts, I knew I had found a school capable of supporting both my studies of sustainability and my ambitious self-determination. I immediately met my Plant Medicine teachers, and embarked upon a 5 season apprenticeship. Not only were my needs to learn plant identification, medicine-making and wildcrafting met, my connection to the spirit and healing of nature continued to deepen. I learned to trust in the guidance of the plants and reveled in the discovery that my energy mimics the cycles of the natural world surrounding me. These studies also helped me to understand how native cultures sustained themselves within the context of the natural world. Through this exploration, I came to perceive that the holistic and closed-cycle principles of permaculture best answer the needs of today. From my Permaculture Design Course sprang a focus in water and bioremediation systems, the center of future projects and designs. It also revealed the next set of tools I would need to acquire on my journey: those of architecture. By the end of the course, I came fully and finally to the understanding that we need to choose our spots, reduce our footprint and our territory, and get to know everyone within that space as our tribe. It is this movement that will make the vital change. As I was unable to enroll fully in the first quarter of the Sustainable Design program, I devoted time to a self-therapeutic work: the stories and dreams of my life. How else can one expect to manifest a truly holistic way of life, in connection to each other and our world, without starting deep within ourselves? Through the process of organizing the structure of this body of work, I discovered themes, patterns and connections that helped me to understand the greater movements of energy weaving through my story. I brought this component to a close with a focus on Publishing; including the development of a web site for my paintings. This enabled me to get this work out beyond myself and into the greater consciousness. Through Sustainable Design, I achieved my goal to learn the effective design of structures that could sustain both people and the environment. I trained in designing according to: disassembly, the lightest ecological footprint, minimal energy use, natural ventilation, daylighting, and the co-habitation of plant life. This program, while re-affirming the need to close the wasteful cycles of our built environment, etched out a course of action for re-designing everything! In order to bring my undergraduate studies to completion, I focused my training on the physical skills needed to build my own home. Traveling to Mexico and Spain for this contract, I was awarded the Benjamin A. Gilman International Education Scholarship. I attained the skills to create shelter with my own hands, from materials available locally. In addition, I found myself pulling on the thread that had weaved its way through the entirety of this academic journey: design. Challenging myself to push the designs of my home to more density in a smaller space, they became poems: deceptively simple, entirely profound. I realized, we can solve the conundrums, and their effects, of our built environment "...if every act of building, large or small, takes on the responsibility for gradually shaping its small corner of the world" (C. Alexander, 1977, Pattern Language, page 3). I chose to focus my education on the design and implementation of growing my own food, making my own medicine, and building my own shelter within closed-cycle systems harmonious with the natural world. To these studies I hope to add transportation-without-petroleum. I will choose my spot and get to know everyone in it as my tribe. I will put these studies into service as I design and construct natural shelters and systems. Having accomplished this, I will be able to focus on the spirit work of painting and plant medicine. Independent from the prevailing structure of systems, I believe this path is the wisest investment I can make for my Self and my greater community. It is by placing ourselves within the context of our community, and the natural world of plants, animals and spirit, that we will thrive. It is then that the individual and collective spirit will rise to its fullest potential; the highest aim there is. We can truly create whatever it is we want to create. Natural Building: Abroad Saturday, June 21, 2008