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The CIS Major

My CIS Proposal

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"The plain fact is that the world does not need more successful people. but it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as our culture has defined it." David Orr

"Migration increases with years of education. The fact itself however raises the question of whether colleges and universities, currently focused on specialized, disciplinary expertise, need to become more oriented toward their own places. If they taught what it means to live in their own places, would it make a difference?" Alan Thein Durning A Place on Earth

There was little doubt in my mind when I began my education at St. Olaf that I would study the natural world.  The difficulty arose in clarifying a specific aspect of the environment on which to focus.  The connections are many.  I could not separate the human experience from faith from science from politics--how could I isolate myself in a discipline when everything around me seemed to come together--causal, connected, confusing.  Mostly I wanted to write and read, to study fish and people.  I wanted to cultivate what I felt was a calling to give the Western landscape back to the world, to find what was fulfilling, what was alive in me and alive in the world.

I have always loved to read and many authors have been invaluable in my journey.  Many of these authors weighed in on my questioning of specialization in education.

What I came away from this wondering with was that disconnection is half the battle.  Not being able to see that what we eat, where we live, what we buy, and what we pray for all have their effect on the health of the world weakens our ability to do anything about it.  I wanted my education to be an exploration of the connection between the way we live in the world and the state of the world, between my own story and the human story.  I wanted to major in connections, in homecoming, in fish and people.

I discovered a St. Olaf Department that offers a major in connections. The Center for Integrative Studies allows students to develop a major proposal that combines courses from various departments, independent research, and internship experiences in a unique major adapted to the student's personal interests. Within this major I was able to take classes in a variety of departments. I was influenced by many different professors and classes, but it was putting all the pieces together which has done most to enlarge my vision of the world.

I wrote a major proposal entitled "Watershed Restoration: A Paradigm for American Liberation." I had a sense that dams and salmon decline were only one version of a story we all know. It is also the human story. And so my major understands these two realities to be intertwined, threads of the same rope. What we do to the fish we do to ourselves.

I have long thought that we Americans think too little about the immense gift we have been given simply to be born—born in a country still wild, a country where the human spirit is unbound, the possibilities limitless. In a time where the language of patriotism has been co-opted by those who would see anything but a truly free and happy people, I am compelled to speak about America, and for the wild hearts of its people. One day the Chinook salmon might be gone and those that come after us will know her only in the world of words. So I speak to all who will listen, in the hope that our blood and sweat and tears will not have been in vain.

We have forgotten what it means to be free people. That we think now only of amassing wealth and keeping ourselves secure in lives of isolated hopelessness is evidence of our self-inflicted oppression. We live unnatural half-lives, weighted by inertia, building walls around ourselves that we largely do not see. There is less joy, less sensation. Possibility is shoved into some dark cranny in our imagining and we do not seek it out.

We must learn how to be alive again. Until we rediscover the wonder at simply being and the vastness of possibility what is wild and human in us will be shackled and mute. We must remember courage and audacity, pick up the discarded search for meaning and connection. We must be ever vigilant in the face of our forgetfulness, lest we wander forever in the darkness of our own shadow.

Until we discard the paralyzing perspective of fear and allow ourselves to be energized by an earnest trust in the world—we will live as though we were meant only to build up and tear down statues to false gods. I do not wish to live in a cage of my own making nor in the vaulted prisons of society. Not when I know we are a thinking and wild people—a people who can realize any reality we desire. It is that easy to be transformed. And so I speak to all people who are awake. I speak to all people who sense the universe within them and cannot find the key. Look behind you and in front of you, where there are dams tear them down.

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