Northlands' Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute helped transform Northwoods into a sustainable society

Chequamegon Bay on Lake Superior, the home of the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute

The day I arrived at Northland College, August 27, 1971, was the day the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute was born.  I dropped my stuff off at Mead Hall and said goodbye to my poor Mom who had car problems. I was anxious to hitchhike, fish and camp around Chequamegon Bay for the week.

I looked over at the front of the student Union where I saw a group of men in sport coats and women in dresses milling around like they were on a break. They were at Northland for an environmental conference that included Malcolm McLean, Robert Matteson, Mary Griggs Burke, Gaylord Nelson and Sigurd Olson.

At a meeting before lunch that day between Matteson, Malcolm McLean,  and Sigurd Olson., there they discussed Matteson’s idea of a Sigurd Olson Institute of Environmental Studies. I knew nothing about this at the time. But those discussions were to help set the path for the rest of my life.

Only a year before on April 22, 1970, Earth Day more than 20 million World War II veterans, housewives, student radicals, artists, accountants, scientists, labor leaders, autoworkers, civil rights activists, elected officials and me joined together demonstrating to show that protecting the environment is a core value of the human race. It came after the great boom in development following World War II had turned America’s rivers into sewers and shrouded its cities in air pollution. These conditions triggered the birth of a new movement as powerful as the industrial revolution in shaping civilization.

The day before Earth Day, Northland President Bob Cramer met with Samuel Johnson, the President of Johnson’s Wax to talk about Northland’s precarious financial situation. The Johnson family had long been Northland’s most generous donor. Some things haven’t changed. Ashland really isn’t close to any urban area. It’s hard to get to. Dick Mackey then director of admissions wanted to turn Northland’s physical location from a disadvantage to an advantage. Cramer proposed establishing the environmental studies program. Northern Wisconsin’s wilds and its relative isolation were an asset to the new program.

These were turbulent times for America and Northland. Campuses all over the country erupted when President Nixon approved an invasion of Cambodia. Only a month after the nation had come together for Earth Day, National Guardsman killed four students and injured 9 on the campus of Kent State in Ohio. Northland students and professors marched as well.

In March of 1971, DuPont closed its TNT plant at Barksdale between Ashland and Washburn and laid off 200 people. In those days the Washburn mayor and the President of the local bank were telling anyone who would listen that it was the protests and marches by Northland College students over the nitrate pollution in red-colored Boyd Creek coming out of the plant –Bloody Mary Creek—that prompted DuPont to close the plant that killed my father-in-law and two other workers nearly two decades before. DuPont officials repeatedly said it was a changing market and low-cost explosives that forced them to close the plant. But that didn’t stop local officials from pointing the fingers at college students as the culprits.

The Northwoods economy still depended on logging, pulpwood harvesting, papermaking and dairy farming. Mining long over, still was a part of the community’s identity. The Apostle Islands National Lakeshore designated only a year earlier had yet to become the tourism draw that it is today. Even for the people at Northland the new environmental studies program and the whole idea was still new. Bruce Goetz, who was appointed chairman of the new Environmental Studies Committee told me when we talked in August he had to look up the word environmental in the dictionary when offered the post.

Fifty years later Northland and the Sigurd Olson Institute are no longer viewed by Northwoods residents as outsiders. As Ashland mayor Matt MacKenzie told me in 2022 the futures of Northland and Ashland are inextricably tied together. The outreach engagement of the Sigurd Olson Institute is one of the main reasons.

Once Sig and Northland agreed to establish the institute Bob Matteson brought the skills he had learned over a long career as a diplomat in the State Department to build the financial support and program goals for the his new idea. Matteson, who grew up in Minnesota, had long had a second home on Lake Namakagon and he reached out to his many friends in the region including Mary Griggs Burke, Judson Bemis, and also distinguished residents who had second homes around the Lake Superior region in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan to back the endeavor.

At the same time I was just getting started as a student and an activist. Soon after I arrived on campus I joined others forming a student environmental organization: Action Group Against Pollution or AGAP. In March of 1972 I represented the group “Stop Sanquine,” which opposed the Navy’s massive submarine communications project in the Northwoods, at a meeting in Madison of the Wisconsin Conservation Council. I hitchhiked from Northland south to the state Capitol catching a ride most of the way with a bunch of college students campaigning for New York Mayor John Lindsey running for President.

A day later when I arrived at the meeting I met Martin Hanson, a friend and associate of Gaylord Nelson, who introduced me to Lindsey, Sens. Henry Scoop Jackson, Ed Muskie and Hubert Humphrey who spoke to the group. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship with Hanson who would soon to be a founding member of the Sigurd Olson Institute advisory committee.

Only a few days later Northland announced the formation of the Sigurd Olson Institute. As a freshman The Singing Wilderness was required reading, giving me an introduction to the writing and life of the man who philosophy was to steer my life. I had canoed the Boundary Waters with my father, uncle, grandfather and brother in 1967. There I heard the song of the loon, saw the shimmering blue of wilderness lakes and the rocky outcroppings of the northern shield. I returned in 1972 led by Goetz and his five-week class Geography of Lake Superior. We also hiked through the Porcupine Mountains in the UP.

When I returned to Northland in September of my sophomore year I went over to Malcolm Maclean’s office wearing an old t-shirt, wide bellbottom jeans and no shoes. I spoke for the other members of AGAP when I suggested Northland should change its practices in energy and water use to be more environmentally friendly. And shouldn’t Northland update its college seal and motto “A Highway Shall Be There?”

Malcolm was very patient. He appreciated the sentiment but thought it was a bridge too far. I wasn’t alone. In his history of the Institute, Matteson expressed Sig’s view at the time: “I feel as you about the old Northland seal; fine for its day but now I don’t know,” Olson said.

Just for the record, I’m glad we didn’t get rid of the seal or the motto.

I don’t remember why but soon after my discussion with Malcolm and my introduction to Bob Matteson, I and Karen Riva Murray, were invited to join Goetz and Kent Shifferd, my history professor, on the Environmental Studies Committee as student members. We got to hear about the institute’s plans and comment. We also were invited into the cocktail party at Malcolm’s house the evening of Sig’s kick-off speech of the Sam Johnson Lecture series. It was called “Challenge of the New Frontier.”

 There I met the men and women who had forked out their cash to make the institute a reality. Malcolm introduced me to Betty Hulings the daughter of the man who started Anderson Windows, Judson Bemis, whose company made wooden toilet seats,  Mary Griggs Burke, owner of Forest Lodge on Lake Namakagon, Wayne Mann, the Chequamegon National Forest Supervisor and of course, Sigurd and Elizabeth Olson.

When Sig got up in the Alvord Theatre that night in 1972 the overflow crowd gave him a standing ovation.

For me that speech became the foundation of my life and the last 50 years in the North Woods, in the mountains of the Northern Rockies, the forest and rivers of the Pacific Northwest, the Maine Woods and wild places in Canada, Russia and Africa.

Sigurd Olson, like me came from Illinois. The son of a Baptist minister, he moved to Ashland in 1912 with his parents. He spent his youth fishing, hunting and immersing himself in the wilds of the Lake Superior country. After high school he went to Northland for two years then on to the University of Wisconsin and finally the University of Illinois where he got his master’s degree in ecology.

He moved to Ely, Minn. where he taught biology at Ely Junior College, and ran an outfitting business into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. He began writing for outdoor magazines and rose to dean of the college in 1936. In 1947 he quit to take up writing full time and to dive into wilderness preservation work nationally. In 1956 he published The Singing Wilderness, which became a New York Times best seller. He wrote eight more books, and was presented with the highest honor in nature writing – the John Burroughs Medal from the John Burroughs Association. He also headed the Wilderness Society and was honored by the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, the National Wildlife Federation and the Izaak Walton League.

Once when I was talking with Sig and Elizabeth I told them I grew up on a farm in Illinois. Elizabeth said Sig was originally from Illinois but he certainly was not a farm boy. She grew up on a farm south of Ashland near Seely and the first time Sig came to work there he was a city kid without experience. Her father told him to put the yoke on the oxen to haul trees out of the forest. Sig put the yoke on upside down, she said laughing.  He gave us an embarrassed grin.

Sigurd Olson in his cabin at Listening Point in Minnesota (Sigurd Olson Institute)

When Sigurd Olson began speaking, his deep, powerful, engaging voice filled Alvord Hall. He spoke with a charismatic authority.

Sigurd Olson didn't direct his speech to the rich and powerful in the room. This long time conservationist directed his words to me and the hundreds of other students who were beginning our formal environmental education. We were the children of Earth Day. And his speech was passing the torch to the next generation.

But this great and gentle man was not evoking the images of direct action and protest that were a central part of the environmental movement of the early 1970s. He already was looking beyond the revolution that he and contemporaries like Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, David Brower and Gaylord Nelson had started.

Sig told us the idea of man's ethical responsibilities to land, wildlife and nature. We were a part of a larger natural community. Today these lessons are taught in the very early grades of school.

"We know," Sigurd Olson said, "that man is part of nature and cannot survive unless he becomes once more an integral part of it, that his hunger and discontent is a longing for the old simplicities and satisfactions, that we are in truth children of the earth."

The decision to seek a new relationship with nature was as important in the history of man, Olson said as the decision to plant seeds and domesticate animals, and to abandon life on the land and gather in villages and cities. And it would have as profound an impact on the lives of humans worldwide as the Industrial Revolution.

He told us to study and prepare for the hundreds of thousands of new careers that would result from the new environmental consciousness. And he underscored the importance of the choice we had taken.

"It is more than wilderness, more than beauty or peace of mind," Olson told us. "It is the survival of the civilization we have built and perhaps the survival of man."

And he warned of the dangers of over population, of the threats of uncontrolled industrial growth. He even talked about the greenhouse effect. The first major government report warning of the threat of global warming came on the first Earth Day. Federal climatologist J. Murray Mitchell released a report that day, widely reported on national networks, which said that air pollution was causing the world to get warmer through a “greenhouse effect,” and that it would cause the polar ice cap to melt and massive flooding within 200 years. That was 1970.

But climatologist Reid Bryson, who then headed the University of Wisconsin’s Environmental Studies Program told us in a Johnson lecture in 1975 his research showed the climate cooling. It wasn’t resolved in the scientific community until about 1988.

In his speech Sig didn't tell us to tear down the civilization that had been built in generations of human achievement.

"We know we cannot abandon our technology, but we can and must seek a balance between it and ecology," he said. "If we can accept the premise that there is a limit to growth, that population must be controlled, that our global ecology can be one of harmony, then we can look with confidence to our future. If we can use our enormous knowledge with the technology it has produced to work toward the preservation of the earth instead of its destruction, if we can change our priorities, achieve balance and understanding in our roles as human beings in a complex world, the coming era can well be that of a richer civilization, not its end."

I was one of the first generation of Northland students who through our ties to the institute, worked on protecting our place the Lake Superior Country. I collected snow for testing for asbestos that blew from the taconite mine across the lake, which was locked in a landmark pollution case.

Two of my classmates, Jed Walker and Paul Norris paddled and pushed a canoe down little 5 mile creek near Cable, where a developer planned to build a 25-acre lake. Their testimony in court became the foundation for a Wisconsin Supreme Court decision in 1975 upholding a lower court decision saying that the creek was navigable and therefore protected by the Public Trust Doctrine. This decision was a part of the reason the Penokee mine was stopped before it was tested in court.

What made the institute successful is it reached out into the communities and the North Woods and not simply on campus. It held workshops on land and water planning, it got grants to do local research projects. There is hardly a lake in the three states where Loon Watch hasn’t helped people protect the birds they love so much. The Apostle Islands School got kids into the backountry to gain a sense of wonder and awe. Just look at the work today of the Mary Griggs Burke Center for Freshwater Innovation.

 Our interaction with the institute’s outreach was directly tied to our education, something we all carried with us as we all went off into careers. For me it was environmental journalism. It’s been a great run.

I ran for my life in the firestorm at Old Faithful in the signal fires of the climate change in Yellowstone in 1988. Covering fires through the 1990sand 2000s I ran into fellow Northlanders like Richie Stavdahl, Kelly Martin and Gus Smith. I watched as the Edwards Dam was breached on the Kennebec River in Maine in 1999, opening up 17 miles to Atlantic salmon sea bass and a dozen other anadromous species that have been shut out since Nathaniel Hawthorne walked its banks. The day after the dam came down I canoed the free flowing stretch of the Kennebec an returned to canoe it again seven years later to see the river teeming again with life. In 2011, I joined Interior secretary Sally Jewell and hundreds of other conservationists, Indians and government officials at the ceremony beginning the removal of the Elwha Dams in Washington. The next day I flew to Maine and paddled in the strokes of Henry David Thoreau on the West Branch of the Penobscot River. Later that year a big dam was removed downstream, opening up yet another waterway to the fish that were once blocked off. The Klamath Dams in California and Oregon come out last year in an effort led by native Americans.

I watched as the first wolves ran into the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho in 1995. And a little more than a month later I was one of the first to hear free wolves howl in Yellowstone National Park. I watched brown bears patrol the shores of Kirilskoe Lake red -- with spawning sockeye salmon -- in Kamchatka right after the fall of the Soviet Union. I flew over what appeared to be an unbroken wilderness of thousands of square miles in Zambia with Earth First Founder Dave Foreman and Tom France,  whose father was one the original advisory board members. Then we met African villagers who lived there and were protecting the elephants, lions, and other game that lived around them because rich hunters and wildlife watchers paid them. I returned to Africa in 2019, this time to Mozambique. There I reported on how American entrepreneur Greg Carr had restored Gorongosa National Park after it had been destroyed by Civil War. When we rode a land cruiser up a muddy road to near the top of Mt. Gorongosa we went right through the main rebel stronghold. “Don’t worry, they known you are here,” said our guide about the rebels, who made peace a year later.

In my lifetime 109 million acres have been designated wilderness, including St. Peter’s Dome, which I climbed with Gaylord Nelson as he pushed for its preservation and the Apostle Islands Wilderness that now holds his name. Sigurd Olson drafted part of the original wilderness act that passed in 1964 and was one of its major advocates.

Most of this work came from the realization that Olson’s friend Aldo Leopold once recognized, "one lives alone in a world of wounds." It was ours and his generation’s attempts at the end of an epoch to save all we could and if possible to return conditions to a past pristine glory before it was sullied by modern man. We know now none of it is pristine and every foot has been touched by the human-caused climate change.

With biologists predicting as many as 20 to 40 percent of all species could be lost in this century, holding on to “every cog and wheel” we can will require us to move species around and to even engineer for them new habitats, something that today is both risky and expensive. But ultimately, we must think differently about how ecosystems and their inhabitants can survive the coming ecological bottleneck. Making such choices isn’t easy. Nor should it be.

In 2015 I watched as a thoroughly divided Congress approved protecting 276,000 acres of alpine meadows, thick forests and mountain peaks filled with wildlife habitat and the highest salmon spawning grounds in the lower 48 states. Protecting the Boulder-White Clouds was accomplished by a Republican Congressman Mike Simpson and it passed unanimously. This shows how powerful our movement has become. But today the movement for rewilding areas that are not pristine is growing.

Richard Louv, author of “The Nature Principle,” argues we can turn these areas into ecosystems that can bring nature to people and provide ecological services like filtration and carbon sequestration. These ideas are not new. Sigurd Olson said, in a talk called “Our Need of Breathing Space,” at a forum in Washington, D.C. in 1958:

“It is wonderful to have national parks and forests to go to, but they are not enough. It is not enough to make a trip once a year or to see these places occasionally over a long week end. We need to have places close at hand, breathing spaces in cities and towns, little plots of ground where things have not changed; green belts, oases among the piles of steel and stone.”

Louv, has turned his bestseller “Last Child in the Woods” into what he calls a new nature movement. His vision is not a rejection of technology or a back-to-the-land trend like the one that came out of the environmental movement 40 years ago.

Instead, he wants to tap nature to boost our mental acuity, creativity and health. At its heart, Louv’s movement seeks to replace the apocalyptic vision that modern society has created.

“When you ask many Americans, if not most, to conjure up what the future will look like, you get ‘Blade Runner,’ ‘Mad Max,’ or maybe Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road,’” Louv told me. “If that’s the dominant image of the future, then we’re in trouble.”

Now is the time for my generation and frankly the last two generations to pass the torch to a new cadre of environmentalists. They can learn from other successful  movements. We must remember no movement can succeed if its future is a place where people don’t want to go.

“Martin Luther King did not say I have a nightmare,” Louv told me.

Rhetoric Professor Brant Short at Arizona State University has studied both Louv and Olson’s writing and speeches. He recalls how Olson’s story of guiding business executives in the Boundary Waters. Olson tells how the longer the executives were away from civilization, the more they would begin to relax and regain their ability to smell the natural world and to hear the sounds of nature.

 “There is no doubt that Olson embraced the claim that "adults had a nature-deficit disorder" and it could be reduced through time in nature,” Short wrote me.

So as we go forward to carry as much biodiversity and civilization as we can carry through the climate bottleneck before us we will need Sigurd Olson’s guidance more than ever.

We will need more nature and more wildness than we have today. We will need wilds in places that are not wild today.

We will have to have more trails and portages to carry us to the deep, old grooves of our inherited collective memory that Olson knew.

For it is in our minds we will find the infinite frontier, a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert, as Isaiah wrote. Yes, And A Highway Shall Be There.

Even when Northland is gone.