SOEI News

SONWA children's winning book covers

SOEI Announces Best in Children’s Nature Books 2018

SONWA Children's Book Awards

The Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award committee has awarded author Sigrid Schmalzer and illustrator Melanie Linden Chan top prize in children’s literature for Moth and Wasp, Soil and Ocean: Remembering Chinese Scientist Pu Zhelong’s Work for Sustainable Farming. The awards, given for best nature writing in 2018, were announced today in time for Earth…

Winning book covers of Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Awards

SONWA Book Awards Announced

Best in 2018 Nature Writing

For the third time in its twenty-seven-year history, Craig Childs has been awarded the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. The SONWA committee has selected Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America as the best in nature writing for 2018. Childs was awarded SONWAs in 2007 for The Animal Dialogues and in…

Kids at Stockton

SOEI Receives $500K for Stewardship and Land Conservation

A retired orthodontist with a strong conservation ethic donated $500,000 to the Northland College Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute to expand youth outdoor programs and forest ecosystem research and restoration. Donald Nelson of Northfield, Minnesota, had a twenty-five-year career as an orthodontist at the Mayo Clinic before moving to Northfield, Minnesota. Although he has no direct…

aerial view of trees

Sit Simply, Get a New Perspective

Mentoring Urban Youth for Conservation Leadership

Evan Coulson, Bro professor of sustainable regional development, tells a story worth remembering.  He was managing the rock climbing and rappelling site at Bob’s Rock in the Chequamegon-Nicolet Forest this…  Read More

Sigurd Olson leaning on tree

12 Personal Items of Sigurd Olson

At the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute

On October 21, 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed into law the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act. Sigurd Olson, who attended Northland College from 1916-18, had a lifelong relationship with…  Read More

Happy Anniversary, LoonWatch

THE LAKE WHERE YOU LIVE

If you live on a lake, or even if you don’t, your favorite wild creature might well be a loon. I’ve often wondered: What benignly demented sort of deity would…  Read More

Northland College alumnus Tiffany Kirsten stands with fellow activists along the border of Texas and Mexico

Birds and the Border Wall

Tiffany Kersten ’10 Tiffany Kersten first became hooked on birds at age twelve, after witnessing a flock of thousands of dancing sandhill cranes in a Wisconsin cornfield. She currently is…  Read More