Onyx Fall-Winter 2017

BY WILLIAM RILEY

he’s in a meeting. As the faculty member who directs the major and minor in environmental science program, he is often meeting with the Greening The Woods committee, the Sustainability Club (Olivia Swickard? She’s the president.) or students who are working to understand how the biodiversity of Le Fer Lake has changed since the lake was drained and dredged to repair a failing dam. Or he may be working with students in Woods Core classes to develop sustainability projects that leave a great impact on campus. But the turtle? He’ll be there. He’s been there long before Tarasi arrived nearly two years ago. The stories about the turtle are apocryphal at this point. Like who the turtle is: he’s either named Watson or Crick, there used to be a Watson and a Crick but one of them died when they were very young and nobody is sure which died and which lived. This turtle is still thriving, though. There’s something about these Woods that sustains. dad

What is it about these Woods that sustains? It’s the people. When Swickard was a first-year student, she joined

When she graduates next May, Olivia Swickard will likely not devote her career to sustainability. She will not discover a new way of recycling plastics or study the effects of trash on Midwestern ecosystems. A human services major and psychology minor, she simply doesn’t have the training to study these topics scientifically. Instead, Swickard will do what she’s always done at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College: change the way those around her think about sustainability. Confused? Then you don’t know Swickard or the incredible sustainability initiatives underway at Saint Mary-of-the- Woods College. dad To get to the office of Assistant Professor Dennis Tarasi, Ph.D.—the one with the posters of invasive species covering the famous cinderblock walls of Hulman Hall—you first have to find the turtle. Finding the turtle and finding his office will not guarantee that you’ll find Tarasi. The smart money is that

the Sustainability Club to have something to do and people to meet. She remembers her first Wabashiki cleanup—an annual Sustainability Club event where members meet at Dewey Point in West Terre Haute to clean up the Wabashiki wetlands preserve— as eyeopening. “When we left that day, there was a dumpster full of odd items, stuff like tires and needles,” she says. she returned to her Le Fer

When

Hall room that evening, she thought about the experience. “You see videos of turtles with straws in their noses and animals losing their homes. It got me worried that we might one day lose our homes if we don’t do something.” Thanks to the small campus size and an affirmed value of sustainability, Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College makes it easy for students to do something, even if that something isn’t easy in and of itself. Swickard, now president of the Sustainability Club, has helped to lead

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