Leader, teacher, advisor, mentor, supporter, motivator, and doer all describe Professor Stephanie Kaza, Director of the Environmental Program, who retires from UVM at the end of May 2015. Her many scholarly, teaching, service, and activist contributions leave an enormous legacy at UVM that reaches from the Environmental Program and the Rubenstein School to across the entire campus and has bought national recognition to UVM. With 24 years as a faculty member in environmental studies, she served the past seven years as the third Director of the Environmental Program, following the late Professor Carl Reidel (1972-1994) and Professor Ian Worley (1994-2008).
Stephanie spent her early life in Buffalo, New York and Portland, Oregon. Her interdisciplinary thinking originated with a BA in biology from Oberlin College, an MA in education from Stanford University, and a PhD in biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Stephanie began her career as a science and outdoor field educator in California, teaching informally at outdoor education centers and formally at high school and college levels. Later on, with a deepening interest in Zen Buddhism, she earned a Master of Divinity degree from Starr King School of Ministry.
In 1991, she left her longtime home in the West and moved east to Burlington and the University of Vermont where she carved a niche and made lasting impressions in the environmental humanities, campus sustainability, and faculty governance.
As a teacher of environmental humanities, Stephanie developed and taught courses that raised students’ awareness of environmental, social, and cultural values. “I encouraged my students to think philosophically but also in an applied way, to scrutinize the personal and cultural values behind the choices they make,” she explains.
Stephanie taught courses for environmental studies majors, spanning three colleges on campus, from the large core requirements, ENVS 1 and 2, to many intimate topical courses, such as Unlearning Consumerism; Religion and Ecology; Women, Health and Environment; and Environmental Justice. She was a passionate teacher, advisor, advocate, and mentor to countless undergraduate and graduate students. During her tenure, Stephanie advised over 300 senior capstone internships and theses and 19 graduate student research projects in the Environmental Program.
In her senior thesis, Rose Leshner (ENVS ’15) wrote in her acknowledgments, "I would like to thank Stephanie Kaza for giving me the opportunity to find and study what I am passionate about. Her unwavering support and guidance throughout my thesis and undergraduate career has instilled within me a profound admiration for her miracle working as a mentor and teacher."
Stephanie received the UVM Kroepsch-Maurice Excellence in Teaching Award in 2002 and the George V. Kidder Outstanding Faculty Award in 2011, both reflecting the breadth and enormity of her contributions to students and alumni through her teaching, advising, and lasting influence on their lives.
One of her proudest teaching achievements is the Students Teaching Students (STS) series, a unique tradition in the Environmental Program that Stephanie established in 1995. Following rigorous standards and with faculty advisor guidance, pairs of undergraduate students teach one to three STS courses (ENVS 197) each year, on topics ranging from mind and body wellness, ecopsychology, environmental justice, and community organizing and activism. Several STS courses have later been endorsed as part of the environmental studies curriculum.
Stephanie’s teaching philosophy embodies a “learning community” style of teaching for which UVM environmental studies courses have long been known. “We are all in this environmental work together and see each other as peers,” she explains. “We try not to limit ourselves to faculty as experts and students as learners. We all learn from each other. We want students to meet the world that is their world right now. Let’s take up this important work together.”
In addition to promoting graduate and undergraduate teaching, she has supported service-learning courses and the nurturing of undergraduate teaching assistants, part of the program’s culture for 30 years. At Stephanie’s urging, undergraduate teaching assistants are now part of the Rubenstein School introductory NR 1 core course.
A former student wrote in a thank you note to Stephanie, “From giving me the opportunity to TA for you to the (multiple) letters of recommendation you’ve written for me since – your support has impacted my life in such positive ways again and again. After trying on a number of different career paths, I find myself happily working for a small nonprofit dedicated to conservation and reforestation in the Peruvian Amazon. I likely would not be here were it not for my time spent working with you – so thank you so much for providing me with such an empowering undergraduate experience. You’ve created positive ripples in this world and have inspired myself and so many others to do the same.”
As Director of the Environmental Program, Stephanie expanded and stabilized the Environmental Studies curriculum, developed an advising protocol handbook, organized the program’s historical records, promoted faculty development, and instituted two new student awards: the Ian A. Worley Award for Creative and Independent Thinking and the Environmental Studies Summer Student Research Award. Another of her legacy achievements is the 2012 Environmental Program 40 Years prospectus, a 32-page vibrant booklet highlighting the 40-year evolution and milestones of the program since its inception in 1972.
As a leader in in the field of religion and ecology, Stephanie’s research centers around Buddhist environmental thought, and she plays a national role in applying Buddhist tools to deliver thoughtful foundations and actions for environmental work. She has published three books on the subject with Shambhala Publications starting with Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism (2000), the first real collection of writings about Buddhist environmentalism. She followed with Hooked! Buddhist Writings on Greed, Desire, and the Urge to Consume (2005), which has sold 20,000 copies. Her most recent book, Mindfully Green: A Personal and Spiritual Guide to Whole Earth Thinking (2008), offers a simple framework for taking up environmental action in real, practical, and effective ways.
In addition to five books, she has authored numerous journal articles and book chapters and delivered many keynote lectures throughout the U.S. Her most recent work investigates Buddhist philosophical perspectives on climate change. Stephanie balanced and interwove her teaching and scholarly work with her many service and activism roles on campus and beyond.
In 1995, Stephanie returned from the first Campus Earth Summit at Yale University convinced that UVM needed an environmental council to bridge academics and operations in campus environmental issues. She brought this to the attention of Larry Forcier, then Dean of the School of Natural Resources, and Ray Lavigne, then Vice-President of UVM Administration, who championed Stephanie’s proposal. In 1996, the UVM Environmental Council was born, with Stephanie as faculty co-chair, Ralph Stuart, then head of Environmental Safety, as staff co-chair, and graduate student Gioia Thompson as council staff. Under Stephanie’s guidance, the Council gained momentum, in its early years introducing student environmental internships; compiling Tracking UVM, an environmental report card on campus sustainability; and piloting the student Eco-Reps program in residence halls.
In 2008, the Council was transformed into today’s UVM Office of Sustainability directed by Gioia. Stephanie remained involved as faculty advisor and continued to advise graduate student fellows and Eco-Reps. She launched the Sustainability Faculty Fellows in 2009, a professional development program for UVM faculty, developed in partnership with the Environmental Program, the Center for Teaching and Learning, the Office of Sustainability, GreenHouse Residential Learning Community, and Shelburne Farms. The program engages faculty from a variety of disciplines to incorporate principles of sustainability into the UVM curriculum. The Fellows Program has served more than 100 faculty members, and the repercussions have been profound. As UVM Faculty Senate Vice-President since 2011, Stephanie worked with a Faculty Senate subcommittee to build support for the recently approved undergraduate general education requirement in sustainability. The subcommittee was mostly comprised of sustainability fellows.
Stephanie was also instrumental in persuading UVM Administration to join the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System (STARS). This campus sustainability rating system is a national certification and self-reporting mechanism for colleges and universities to measure their sustainability performance. Due to Stephanie’s efforts, UVM earned a Gold STARS rating and is now proudly publicizing campus efforts to minimize its environmental footprint.
“Much of what we have accomplished on campus has become a national model including STARS, Tracking UVM, and our Eco-Reps program. My top priority has always been to get top-level UVM Administration support, and I have been tremendously pleased with the favorable response and thoughtful decisions from the President and Provost Offices.”
Perhaps her biggest project and greatest triumph in faculty engagement was her work on Envisioning the Environment at UVM, a project charged by then new President Tom Sullivan and co-chaired with Associate Professor Beverley Wemple of Geography. Their 40-page final report, a culmination of weekly work group sessions and campus forums, included an inventory of UVM’s environmental education, research, and service programs and recommendations for improved efficiencies. After wide campus review, the report was submitted to the President and Provost in February, 2013.
The project has since borne fruit, including efforts to develop a new UVM Institute for Environment to “catalyze transdisciplinary research, nurture a community of scholars, and connect research outcomes to local and global decision-makers;” continued participation in STARS; ongoing work to coordinate environmental majors on campus; and a newly launched Studying the Environment at UVM web portal.
Stephanie has served on numerous committees and made many contributions to supporting diversity issues on campus, including two terms serving United Academics, and work on the President’s commissions on lesbian and gay rights and the status of women, to name a few. She recently received the UVM Women’s Center Outstanding Faculty Woman Award for 2015. Nationally, Stephanie has served on the Executive Councils for both the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences and the Council of Environmental Deans and Directors, helping to raise the profile of environmental studies across the country.
In honor of her leadership role in campus sustainability and in so many other environmental, social, and administrative arenas, Stephanie was recently awarded the 2015 UVM President’s Distinguished University Citizenship and Service Award honoring a faculty member who has devoted consistent, longtime, outstanding service to the UVM community.
"Professor Kaza's leadership and her many accomplishments across the UVM campus have brought together the efforts of faculty, staff, and students for a single cause — to constantly improve environmental sustainability at the University of Vermont and to hold ourselves accountable," acknowledges Rubenstein School Dean Nancy Mathews. "Her legacies have propelled the Environmental Program, the Rubenstein School, and UVM's environmental achievements into the national spotlight, helping the University to close in on its goal of recognition as a premier environmental university."
Stephanie plans to return to Portland, Oregon with her husband Davis Te Selle, an artist and printmaker. As avid cyclists, they purchased a house near two of Portland’s many bike boulevards. Although she will greatly miss the people she leaves behind, she will not miss Vermont’s winters! Stephanie looks forward to the next stage of her environmental career with new writing and teaching projects and with more time for biking, hiking, camping, and gardening. We can be sure, she will be celebrating the long springs, mild winters, and deeply ingrained environmental sustainability values that make Portland her home.