Spring/Summer 2002

Choose from the following selections:

• From the Director (see below)
• Cover article: "Amazing Year for Awards and Honors!"
• Articles by/about faculty and staff
• Articles about students
• Articles about alumni

  ---

  Bittersweet Vine

  Editor
  Ibit Getchell
  Writors- Editorial Assistants
  Kat Shultz '04, Dianne Pratt
  Contributing Writers
  Sara Katz '03, Johnny Kinney '02, Katie Moss '01, Neil Ryan '03, Ian Worley, Rick Paradis

  Published by the Environmental Program at the University of Vermont, The Bittersweet,
  153 So. Prospect Street, Burlington, Vermont 05401-3595. (802) 656-4055 http://www.uvm.edu/~envprog
  Feedback, submissions to: Ibit Getchell, Student Services Coordinator.
  E-mail: egetchel@zoo.uvm.edu

  ---

  From the Director

  We are in a time of change and stability, a time of celebration and new commitment. We celebrate the careers of Jean Richardson, Carl Reidel, Bill Eddy and Colette Paul wishing them all the best in their retirements-busy as they all are, of course! We celebrate awards to Tom, Stephanie, Ibit, Elaine Vidal, and S’ra DeSantis, whose accomplishments ring throughout the campus and state. We celebrate all students whose hard work brought them honors, degrees, skills, outlooks, and life goals. We celebrate the good works of our community here and far, maintaining an eternal vigilance, making a difference in our personal places, and united in the resolve emblemized in the Earth Charter.

  Transition continues, and should be complete with our last tenure-track position to be filled. Seth Appiah-Opoku is settled at the University of Alabama. Amy Seidl and Kit Anderson are moving to other opportunities. Meanwhile, Dianne now shepherds our budgets. Hector and Cecilia have joined the faculty and Saleem and Jon will begin this fall--thanks to the tremendous work of chairs Stephanie (three years and one to go!) and Tom, and all search committee members.

  Stability extends beyond the reconstitution of a permanent faculty. The campus continues to grow environmentally. Stephanie’s visionary leadership and Gioia’s savvy and ability to make things happen have created a university-wide, productive Environmental Council. Environmental Science has survived its growing pains and soon a unified ENSC major will emerge. Through the explosive expansion of environment at UVM in the 1990’s, our role began to change, and needed new clarity. While our mission has not changed (it is rich with advocacy and action-see it on our website), we have a refined responsibility to this campus. We represent the richest, most comprehensive interdisciplinary perspectives, the most holistic of outlooks, and the most steadfast commitment to meaningful, paradigmal change. In curriculum and scholarship this is most evident in our total integration of the humanities and international activities. Here we lead and are expected to lead. We search this fall for an individual to solidify our humanities expertise, a doer, perhaps with Third World or poverty perspectives.

  In this time of change it is appropriate to call for a gathering of the clan. With 1,140 graduates around the world, and since there is still much to do, we will convene a reunion in late April 2003 to meet old friends, share stories, and thoughtfully provide wisdom and guidance for our mission and future. We are already into a new millennium, and the future is before us--again. Earth is wondrous and wounded. We have work to do. We’ve done well, we must do better. With change is the opportunity for new commitment. Let us do so with dedication, courage, insight, urgency, and peace. ~Ian