At tiny Northland College in Ashland, on the shores of Lake Superior, most if not all students have a compost bucket in their dorm room or apartment. Once or twice a week, community residents, in addition to students, come to campus with buckets of food waste to dump in the enormous campus composter, which turns it into nutrient-rich fertilizer. The liberal arts school with about 580 students is…
Xcel Energy is expanding solar options in Wisconsin through their Solar Connect Community project. They already have more than forty community “solar gardens” nationwide, making Xcel’s community solar garden program the largest in the nation. The company has built or is building three “solar gardens” in…
Northland College has a big problem: not enough leftovers. Students at the school have been combining food waste and organic materials like leaves, wood chips, lawn trimmings and cardboard since 1993 and converting what could have become a stinking mess into rich, black, earthy compost. A state-of-the-art…
For the past three summers, Northland students have helped to monitor bat populations on National Park Service properties throughout the Great Lakes region. Acoustic bat detectors—designed to record ultrasonic bat calls—are placed at a multitude of predetermined locations each year. The Great Lakes Inventory and…
East Boston is situated on the front line of climate change. Made up of five islands joined by landfill, East Boston is a peninsula that connects to Boston proper by two underwater automobile tunnels and an underwater transit tunnel. Located within a recognized flood zone, the…
This past summer Nile Merton ’15 returned to campus to finish a project he started as a student, updating the rain garden at the Larson-Juhl Center for Science and the Environment. At the same time, across campus, junior Shelly Ray started plans for a rain…
Carl Sack ’06 has always loved maps. As a teenager, he got into orienteering, which uses detailed topographic maps, and he was hooked for life. “I loved picturing the landscapes they showed to find the fastest way across wild country.” At Northland College, Sack would stare…
