In the spring of 1965, I graduated from high school and looked forward to the end of my formal education. After four years of being force-fed information for seemingly no purpose other than regurgitation for exams, additional schooling was on the bottom of my list and the last thing I wanted for the next four…
In the fall of 1937, Sigurd Olson converted a one-car garage located in front of his Ely, Minnesota, home into a simple writing studio that he called “the shack.” Olson spent many hours writing in the shack, and over the years it accumulated a rich assortment of items significant to Olson—old fishing hats, pipes, photos,…
In a 2003 press release, the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute announced that it was expanding its nature writing award to include a category focused specifically on children’s literature. As noted in the From the Archives installment from October 23, 2022, the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award was created in 1991 to support and encourage…
It’s just a short walk from the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute through the streets of Ashland, Wisconsin, to the shoreline of Lake Superior’s Chequamegon Bay. Since its founding, the Institute has recognized the unique value and wonder of Lake Superior, and the fall 2002 issue of the Institute’s Horizons newsletter featured a number of its…
We usually think of a highway as straight. But the reality is, highways are full of twists and turns (along with the occasional bear or state trooper). My journey started with the image of a red canoe on a postcard, something rather useless in the metaphor but important in my relationship with Northland—and perhaps others’…
The proceedings booklet for the September 2000 Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute workshop titled “Northern Forest Restoration: Shaping a Vision” opens with a lengthy excerpt from Michael Van Stappen’s essay “In Praise of Yellow Birches.” Early in the excerpt, Van Stappen notes that before the Great Cutover, “giant yellow birches over a hundred feet tall and…
Beginning January 1, 2023, Chad Dayton will serve as interim president of Northland College, succeeding President Karl Ivan Solibakke. Dayton is not new to the College, however. He first joined Northland College’s Board of Trustees in 2015, and was board chair from 2018 through 2022, meeting with administrators regularly long before being appointed interim president.
Sigurd Olson was born on April 4, 1899. One hundred years later, in 1999, the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute celebrated the anniversary of Olson’s birth with two initiatives that recognized his lifelong devotion to wilderness. The first initiative was the preparation and publication of a fifteen-page pamphlet titled A Voice for Wilderness: Northland College Salutes…
In September 2021, the Northland College Mary Griggs Burke Center for Freshwater Innovation convened a Water Summit titled “Aversion to Diversion: Groundwater, Bottled Water, and the Great Lakes Compact.” Following the summit, the Center released a white paper that put the hydrogeology of the region’s artesian resources into a statewide context while making several specific…
On June 21-22, 1994, the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute hosted the Robert E. Matteson Brule River Workshop: Sustaining the Brule River Ecosystem, Past, Present, and Future. This event marked the revival of an Institute activity known as “problem-solving workshops.” Institute records show that the revival of these workshops was initiated by Jane Matteson in a…
