Author Chris Bolgiano To Speak On Appalachian Forests March 19, Read From Her Works March 20

Chestertown, MD, March 7, 2003 — Washington College's Center for the Environment and Society announces the next event in the popular Journeys Home Lecture Series. Author and environmentalist Chris Bolgiano will speak on “The Appalachian Forest: A Search for Sustainability,” Wednesday, March 19, 2003, at 7:30 p.m. in Easton's historic Avalon Theatre. On Thursday, March 20, she will also give a 12:30 p.m. luncheon reading from her works, titled “A Field Guide to Home,” at Washington College's O'Neill Literary House. Tickets are required for the Avalon Theatre lecture. The Washington College event is free and open to the public, and a complimentary lunch is included, but seating is limited. Please call 410-810-7151 by March 13 to reserve a place.

Bolgiano has spent years studying the globally unique Appalachian Forest. Through slides and readings, she will tell the stories of people and places that illuminate what “sustainable” really means in our postindustrial woodlands. Born in Germany, Bolgiano grew up in the Washington, D.C. suburbs and received an undergraduate degree in history and a graduate degree in library science from the University of Maryland. She currently serves as adjunct professor for rare books and manuscripts at James Madison University while pursuing her freelance writing. She has written travel articles for the New York Times and The Washington Post, investigative reports for a wide variety of environmental magazines, and nature essays for various anthologies. Her first book, Mountain Lion: An Unnatural History of Pumas and People (1995), examined the interactions between cougars and people across North America. Her second book, The Appalachian Forest: A Search for Roots and Renewal (1998), recounts the natural and cultural histories of the southern Appalachian region, and garnered a prize from the Southern Environmental Law Center. Bolgiano continues to explore how modern society can achieve harmony with the natural world and has just finished a book on sustainable forestry called Living In The Appalachian Forest.

Journeys Home is collaboration between the Center for the Environment and Society, Adkins Arboretum, Eastern Shore Land Conservancy, and Maryland Center for Agro-Ecology, Inc. Tickets to the Avalon lecture may be purchased at the door or by contacting the Adkins Arboretum at 410-634-2847.

To learn more about educational events and program sponsored by the Washington College Center for the Environment and Society, visit the center online at http://ces.washcoll.edu or call 410-810-7151.

Stirring The Mud And The Mind: Author Explores Landscapes And Human Imagination February 5th And 6th

Chestertown, MD, January 10, 2003 — Washington College's Center for the Environment and Societyannounces the next event in the popular Journeys Home Lecture Series. Author Barbara Hurd, Ph.D., will speak Wednesday, February 5, 2003, starting at 7:30 p.m. in Easton's historic Avalon Theatre on “Praising the Mess: Landscape and Imagination.” She will also read selections of prose and poetry centering on the theme of her latest book, Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination, at a lunch, talk and book-signing Thursday, February 6, 2003, at 12:30 p.m. in Washington College's O'Neill Literary House. Tickets are required for the Avalon Theatre lecture.

In addition to Stirring the Mud, Dr. Hurd is the author of a volume of poetry, Objects in this Mirror, and a book on caves, forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin. Stirring the Mud was inspired by Maryland's own swamps and wetlands, and is both a physical and mental journey through these vital environments often pushed to the margin of human attention or inexorably altered for our use.

Dr. Hurd's essays and poems have appeared in numerous journals including Best American Essays, The Yale Review, The Georgia Review, Orion, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, Audubon and others. She is the recipient of a 2002 NEA Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction, four Maryland Individual Artist Awards for Poetry, winner of the Sierra Club's National Nature Writing Award, and a finalist for the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction and the PEN/Jerard Award. Dr. Hurd teaches creative writing at Frostburg State University in Frostburg, MD, where she also co-edits the journal Nightsun.

Journeys Home is a collaboration between the Center for the Environment and Society, Adkins Arboretum, Eastern Shore Land Conservancy, and Maryland Center for Agro-Ecology, Inc. Tickets to the Avalon lecture may be purchased at the door or by contacting the Adkins Arboretum at 410-634-2847. The Washington College event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited. Please call 410-810-7151 by January 27 to reserve a place.

To learn more about educational events and program sponsored by the Washington College Center for the Environment and Society, visit the center online at http://ces.washcoll.edu or call 410-810-7151.

Experiencing Place: Journeys Home Lecture Series, Washington College Welcome Author, Advocate Tony Hiss

Chestertown, MD, March 14, 2002 — The "Journeys Home" Eastern Shore Lecture Series welcomes author and environmental advocate Tony Hiss on Wednesday, March 27, 2002, speaking on "The Experience of Place." The talk will be held at the Historic Avalon Theatre in Easton, MD, starting at 7:30 p.m. It will be facilitated by Robert B. Anderson of Sustainable Strategies, Centre Hall, PA, advisor in strategic services regarding food and agriculture marketing. Tickets are $10 per individual, half-priced for students.

Hiss also will present the lecture, "Landscapes that Work: Beyond the Experience of Place," at Washington College on Thursday, March 28, at 5 p.m in the College's Norman James Theatre. The lecture is sponsored by the College's Center for the Environment and Society and C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience. The presentation will explore the value that we place on the natural world and give new insights into how those values translate into vibrant, safe and environmentally sound communities.

Hiss became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1963, and since 1994 has been a Visiting Scholar at New York University, first at the Taub Urban Research Center, and now at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. He is the author of eleven books, most recently Building Images: 70 Years of Photography at Hedrich Blessing and The View from Alger's Window: A Son's Memoir.

His other books include the award-winning The Experience of Place, a work generally credited with originating the concept, "sense of place." He also authored (with Robert D. Yaro) A Region at Risk: The Third Regional Plan for the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut Metropolitan Area (with Robert D. Yaro), which received front-page coverage from The New York Times in 1996. His forthcoming book, From Place to Place, about solving America's transportation and sprawl problems, has received underwriting grants from four foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Hiss wrote the vision statement for Amtrak's new Great American Station Foundation, launched in December 1996. He also wrote the report that, at the beginning of the 1990s, launched New York State's 100-mile-long Hudson River Valley Greenway initiative, and was part of the 1997-1998 Metropolitan Initiative Project, sponsored by the President's Council on Sustainable Development. Hiss consults frequently on changing regional growth patterns and on imaging the future through alternate development scenes, threats mapping, ecostructure mapping, and environmental simulation. Hiss lives in New York City with his wife, novelist Lois Metzger, and their 10-year-old son, Jacob.

"Journeys Home" is co-sponsored by the Washington College Center for the Environment and Society, the Adkins Arboretum, the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy, the Wildfowl Trust of North America and the Maryland Center for Agroecology. Information and tickets can be obtained by contacting Andrew Stein, Center for the Environment and Society, Washington College, 410-810-7151; or Ellie Altman, Executive Director, Adkins Arboretum, 410-634-2847.

Author Susan Stranahan To Speak On Sense Of Place On The Susquehanna River

Chestertown, MD, February 14, 2002 — The Washington College Center for the Environment and Society and the Journeys Home Eastern Shore Lecture Series present "A RIVER JOURNEY: THOUGHTS ALONG THE WAY," a lecture by Susan Q. Stranahan, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of "Susquehanna: River of Dreams" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). The talk will be held Thursday, February 21, at 5 p.m. in the College's Hynson Lounge.

Stranahan will explore how the Chesapeake Bay region's sense of place migratedup the Susquehanna River and finally took root there. "The result," she writes, "has been an awakened fondness for and protectiveness toward the river and its watershed. It was my good fortune to watch it happen."

Until recently, Stranahan was a staff writer at The Philadelphia Inquirer, where she covered regional and national environmental and conservation issues for more than two decades. In 1979, she covered the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident, and her articles were the major component in the entry that won The Inquirer the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting. She has received several state and national journalism awards, including the Pennsylvania Wildlife Federation's Conservation Communicator of the Year, and has written articles for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Audubon, Time, Fortune, and Mother Jones. She is working on a second book and freelances articles for several national publications.

Stranahan also will appear Wednesday, February 20, 2002, at 7:30 p.m. in the Historic Avalon Theatre in Easton, MD, as part of the Spring 2002 Journeys Home Eastern Shore Lecture Series co-sponsored by the Center for the Environment and Society, the Adkins Arboretum, the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy, the North American Wildfowl Trust, and the Maryland Center for Agro-ecology. Her February 20th lecture, titled "Finding the Way Home," will address her early recognition of the tremendous sense of place that exists on the Chesapeake and the benefits of such deep-rooted identity with a region. She will be introduced by Frances Flanigan, former Executive Director of the Alliance for Chesapeake Bay. Ticket prices for Journeys Home are $10 per individual lecture. Student tickets are half-priced.

To learn more about this or other events sponsored by the Center for the Environment and Society, visit the center online at http://ces.washcoll.edu or call 410-810-7151.

See the Chesapeake through Ebony Eyes: Chantey Singers Share the Black Heritage of the Bay

Chestertown, MD, November 7, 2001 — Washington College's Center for the Environment and Society and Center for Black Studies present "Ebony Eyes and Voices on the Chesapeake," Thursday, November 15, 2001, at 8 p.m. in the College's Norman James Theatre, William Smith Hall. The event is free and the public is invited to enjoy an evening of song and history of the African Americans on the Chesapeake Bay.

Although a little known tradition today, much like gandy dancers on American railroads, singing was used by the black fishermen of the Chesapeake to coordinate their work on the Bay's menhaden boats. In the early 1990s, a group of retired menhaden fishermen from Virginia formed the Northern Neck Chantey Singers to preserve this musical tradition and to recreate for public audiences the traditional worksongs that the all-black menhaden crews sang. The Singers met with immediate acclaim from area residents of the Northern Neck of Virginia for whom chanteys were a distinctive regional tradition.

The Singers' performances generated public demand for a recording of these songs, so in 1993 they recorded "See You When the Sun Goes Down: Traditional Worksongs of Virginia Menhaden Fishermen." Revenues from sale of the cassette are divided equally by the Reedville (VA) Fishermen's Museum and the Northern Neck Chantey Singers. For more information on the Singers, visit www.virginia.edu/vfh/vfp/chanteys.html online.

The Singers will be joined by Vincent O. Leggett, president of the Blacks on the Chesapeake Foundation and author of two books, Blacks on the Chesapeake and The Chesapeake Bay Through Ebony Eyes. Since 1984, Mr. Leggett has worked to document and to preserve the history of African Americans living and working in the Chesapeake Bay's maritime and seafood industries, and has organized exhibits and delivered lectures throughout the region.

The Singers also will appear Wednesday, November 14, 2001, at 7:30 p.m. in the Historic Avalon Theatre in Easton, MD, as part of the 2001 Eastern Shore Lecture Series "Journeys Home: People, Nature and Sense of Place," a subscription series co-sponsored by the Center for the Environment and Society, the Adkins Arboretum, the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy, the Horsehead Wetlands Center, and the Maryland Center for Agroecology. To learn more about this or other events sponsored by the Center for the Environment and Society, visit the center online at http://ces.washcoll.edu or call 410-810-7151.

College Hosts Christopher Tilghman, Author of Mason's Retreat, October 18

Chestertown, MD, October 8, 2001 — The Washington College Center for the Environment and Society and "Journeys Home: An Eastern Shore Lecture Series" present a reading with commentary by Christopher Tilghman, author of In a Father's Place and Mason's Retreat, on Thursday, October 18, 2001, at 5 p.m. in the College's Hynson Lounge. The event is free and the public is invited to attend.

Tilghman is the author of two collections of short stories, "In a Father's Place" and "The Way People Run," and the novel Mason's Retreat, which tells the story of an expatriate Eastern Shore family that returns to its old Chesapeake Bay estate on the eve of World War II. Noted for his ability to set scene after scene with remarkable sensitivity to both sense of place and characterization, Tilghman has had stories anthologized in "Best American Short Stories" and other collections, and has been translated into ten foreign languages.

The recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship and Whiting Writer's Award, Tilghman was previously Writer-in-Residence at Emerson College in Boston, MA, and now teaches creative writing at the University of Virginia. He and his wife, the writer Caroline Preston, live near Charlottesville, VA, with their three sons.

Tilghman also will lecture Wednesday, October 17, 2001, at the Historic Avalon Theatre in Easton, MD, speaking on "The Pull of the Land: Place and Imagination." Starting at 7:30 p.m., the lecture is part of the 2001 Eastern Shore Lecture Series "Journeys Home: People, Nature and Sense of Place," a subscription series co-sponsored by the Washington College Center for the Environment and Society, the Adkins Arboretum, the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy, the Horsehead Wetlands Center and the Maryland Center for Agroecology.

For subscription information on the Journey's Home Lecture Series or for information about other programs sponsored by the Washington College Center for the Environment and Society, please visit ces.washcoll.edu or call 410-810-7151.

Environmental Writer Melds History, Place and Nature

John Hanson Mitchell to Read from His Works September 20

Chestertown, MD, September 4, 2001 — John Hanson Mitchell, author of Ceremonial Time: Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile and the recently published The Wildest Place on Earth: Italian Gardens and the Invention of Wilderness, will read from his works on Thursday, September 20, 2001 at 5 p.m. in Washington College's Hynson Lounge. The public is invited to attend.

Mitchell's first book Ceremonial Time, published in 1984, was the outcome of a choice to live in a place that was typical, little noticed and unhallowed, while chronicling the changes that have taken place there over the past 15,000 years. Ceremonial Time was followed by Living At the End of Time, Trespassing, Walking Towards Walden and The Wildest Place on Earth.

In the introduction to his book A Field Guide to Your Own Back Yard, Mitchell summarizes his view of environmentalism and ecology: "There is a popular belief abroad in this country that holds that the most interesting things in the natural world can only be found in faraway places or specially designated areas. That is to say, in order to experience nature you must get in your car and travel somewhere—either to a national or state park or to some official nature preserve. The nearby, that closer wilderness of the backyard and the vacant lot, is, according to that belief, entirely devoid of interesting forms of life and not worth exploring. This field guide sets out to discount that theory."

In a recent interview, Mitchell acknowledged a connection to the Eastern Shore that helped to inspire his approach to environmental writing: "My father, in the 1930s, inherited a 700-acre farm on the Eastern Shore, in Maryland, and then sold it all off because of problems. It was the depression and very tough to make a living on the farm. My father left the farm and rented it to a tenant farmer. That man killed himself and his wife on the property, and after that my father vowed never to own land again. So I grew up with this mixed feeling toward land--on the one hand interested in how land can anchor you to a place, but on the other hand feeling that nobody can ever really know or own a place, and that every piece of land is full of stories."

Mitchell also will lecture on Wednesday, September 19, 2001 at 7:30 p.m. at the Avalon Theatre in Easton as part of the 2001 Eastern Shore Lecture Series "Journeys Home: People, Nature and Sense of Place," a subscription series co-sponsored by the Washington College Center for the Environment and Society, the Adkins Arboretum, the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy, the Horsehead Wetlands Center and the Maryland Center for Agroecology.

For subscription information on the Eastern Shore Lecture Series, call Dr. Wayne H. Bell, Director of the Washington College Center for the Environment and Society, at 410-810-7171, or the Adkins Arboretum at 410-634-2847.

Speakers Series Focuses on Region's Sense of Place

Chestertown, MD, August 8, 2001 — The Historic Avalon Theater in Easton, Md., will host a 2001 Eastern Shore Lecture Series entitled "Journeys Home: People, Nature and Sense of Place." The presentations will explore the value we place on the natural world and give new insights into how those values translate into vibrant, safe and environmentally sound communities.

"Journeys Home" is a subscription lecture series co-sponsored by the Washington College Center for the Environment and Society, the Adkins Arboretum, the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy, the Horsehead Wetlands Center and the Maryland Center for Agroecology.

The schedule of presenters for Fall 2001 is:

Wednesday, September 19, 2001

John Hanson Mitchell: "Inventing Place"

Author of Ceremonial Time, Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile, and other books melding history, environment, and place around his home in Massachusetts. Mr. Mitchell freely admits that visits to his Eastern Shore roots were the origin of the values he has developed about people, places, and things environmental.

Wednesday, October 17, 2001

Christopher Tilghman: "The Pull of the Land: Place and Imagination"

Mr. Tilghman's first book, In a Father's Place, is a set of stories set against natural landscapes of North America, including Maryland's Eastern Shore. The novel Mason's Retreat is about an expatriate Eastern Shore family that, on the eve of World War II, returns to its old estate on Chesapeake Bay. He is noted for being able to set scene after scene with remarkable clarity and sensitivity.

Wednesday, November 14, 2001

Northern Neck Chantey Singers: "Songs of Our Life, Songs of Our Sea"

A live performance of narrative and songs by a troupe of retired menhaden fishermen from Reedville, VA. Their cassette recording, See You When the Sun Goes Down, contains a selection of the chanteys they sing, traditional work songs that all-Black crews sang to coordinate the raising of their fishing nets. Performance organized in cooperation with the Blacks of the Chesapeake Foundation, Annapolis.

Ticket prices are $30 for the fall component of three lectures, or $10 per individual lecture. Student tickets are half-priced. All presentations will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Historic Avalon Theatre, Easton.

For further information, contact Dr. Wayne H. Bell, Director of the Washington College Center for the Environment and Society, at 410-810-7171.

Ecologist to Speak on Balancing Human and Natural Systems

Chestertown, MD, March 26, 2001 — Dr. Stephen Kellert, professor of social ecology at the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, will speak Thursday, April 19, 2001, at 7:30 p.m. in the Litrenta Lecture Hall, Dunning Hall, Washington College. Dr. Kellert will address the topic "Connecting Human and Natural Systems: The Importance of Healthy Natural Processes and Diversity in Human Development and Society." The lecture is free and open to the public.

Dr. Kellert's work focuses on the connection between human and natural systems with a particular interest in the value of biological diversity and its conservation. He has authored over 100 publications including Kinship to Mastery: Biophilia in Human Evolution and Development (Island Press, 1997); The Value of Life: Biological Diversity and Human Society (Island Press, 1996); and The Biophilia Hypotheses (with E. O. Wilson, Island Press, 1993), a work that explores human values in conservation biology and nature. His earlier work, Ecology, Economics, Ethics: The Broken Circle (with F. H. Bormann, Yale University Press, 1991), highlights his interest in environmental ethics that has made him a major figure in conservation biology.

Dr. Kellert also will speak on Wednesday, April 18, 2001, at 7:00 p.m. at the Avalon Theatre in Easton, Md., as part of the 2001 Eastern Shore Lecture Series. His talk is titled "Values of Nature, Sense of Place, and Human Well-Being." The Eastern Shore Lecture Series is a subscription series co-sponsored by the Washington College Center for the Environment and Society, the Adkins Arboretum, the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy, the Horsehead Wetlands Center and the Maryland Center for Agroecology.

For subscription information, contact the Washington College Center for the Environment and Society at 410-810-7171 or the Adkins Arboretum at 410-634-2847, or visit http://ces.washcoll.edu.