Student Synergy

I started my Earth Day weekend at Evergreen State College as a panelist in the sustainable business session for their annual Synergy conference. My co-panelists were Karen Nelson and Stanley Stahl of the renound Fertile Ground Guesthouse in Olympia, Karin Kraft who works for the Washington State Department of Ecology in environmentally preferable purchasing and green building in the Hazardous Waste and Toxics Reduction Program and is chair with the Sustainable Communities Roundtable of South Puget Sound, and Marie Poland from Womenrock Productions who also served as moderator (check out the Your Money Matters Coupon Book they put together). It was a great group with a lot of audience participation. And I must say, I was totally diggin the Evergreen campus. It changed a lot since I last visited probably over ten years ago. Lots of big, modern cement buildings and several buildings that were uber modern and totally green. Very nice indeed.

I also got a chance to catch up with an old friend, Health Smith. I'd met Heath ten years ago at a Wildlife Society conference in New Mexico. Back then we were both students trying to figure out where our interests in wildlife would take us. Today, ten years later, we got to see just where that was. Health is now working at the UW Center for Conservation Biology on several projects that use dogs to track scat (yes, that's poop) that aids genetic research utilized for wildlife management and conservation efforts. The Center was started and continues to be run by Dr. Sam Wasser one of the coolest, most amazing people I know. Very cool stuff. Makes me miss my fieldwork days. Hopefully, I'll get back to fieldwork myself someday soon.