Connecting Communities & Nature
by Courtney Brousseau
Britt Olson, environmental education graduate student, and Steve Colony, senior civil engineer for the City of Seattle, examine the site map of the Environmental Learning Center.
Between the dizzyingly high peaks of the North Cascades, sounds of hammers, saws, backhoes and bulldozers pierce the still mountain air. Construction is in full swing on a new school in the mountains - the North Cascades Institute's Environmental Learning Center.
Britt Olson, a Western Washington University graduate student, shielded her eyes against the sun's glare as she gazed up at a steel support sticking out of a concrete platform. Olson works as the link between the construction process and the public, educating citizens about the site that will open in fall 2003. The center will consist of 18 buildings for classes, housing and dining.
"When I first came, there were a few building pads, which is where the old houses used to be," Olson said. "But everything else was forest. It all looked the same. The first thing I noticed was all this fencing that came up. The fencing was to protect the trees, which is a very important message that (NCI) is trying to get across - the reduced site disturbance."
A few moments later, a massive bulldozer illustrated her point. It churned and chugged up the construction road. The driver, hard hat slightly askew on his head, eased the machine's steering wheel to the left to avoid running over a tiny, 2-inch-tall Douglas fir sapling. It trembled slightly in the machine's noisy wake, but, unharmed, settled back into place on the dusty road.
Saul Weisberg, executive director and founder of NCI, said the institute's goal is to connect community to nature.
"It's critical to develop a sense of home and have that place be more than a house or your school or a business," he said. "Our mission is to restore the environment. It's not merely environmental education. We have a conservation mission and education is our tool."
Weisberg created NCI's predecessor, the Shuksan Institute, in 1983, because of a desire to conserve and restore the environment of the Northwest through a combination of education, volunteer opportunities and nature exploration.
"(NCI) began as the Shuksan Institute because for us (Mount Shuksan) symbolized the place so well and because we'd spent so much time on its glaciers and summit," Weisberg said. "However, most of the world, even in the Pacific Northwest, doesn't know the mountain or where it is, so what was an important symbol to us did not resonate with other people."
While the name changed, NCI always focused on the North Cascades ecosystem, he said.
"This was the landscape we loved and which we knew best," Weisberg said. "It seemed an obvious choice at the time and it has served us well for the past 16 years."
Since its conception, NCI has grown from two part-time employees to 14 full-time employees, and from a budget of $35,000 to more than $1 million annually, Weisberg said. Originally, the institute only offered a few seminar programs. Now it boasts 12 program areas and 60 faculty members that teach courses throughout the year on everything from winter bird identification to San Juan Island botany.
"We're not an advocacy organization, so we don't litigate, don't regulate and don't buy land," he said. "But in some ways, we're the most radical of all. We're trying to change the landscape."
Many people working at NCI believe that being outside and enjoying the natural world is necessary for a person to learn and eventually care about nature. The opening of the learning center will further this idea.
NCI offers summer camps for young people, volunteer stewardship programs, teacher workshops, seminars for adults and natural history retreats, NCI marketing coordinator Bob Langan said. NCI also offers community resources like publications for educators and naturalists.
But, this year, the ELC is one of NCI's biggest projects. Olson said many groups are involved in the construction. The Henry Klein Partnership, located in Mount Vernon, Wash., is in charge of construction. The National Park Service owns the land, rents it to NCI and performs maintenance. Seattle City Light provides funding for the project.
When Diablo Dam was relicensed in 1991, SCL was required to lessen the dam's impact on the native fish.
"(SCL) had to do some sort of mitigation, and that was in the form of this environmental learning center, which I believe is possibly the first of its kind," Olson said. "Usually mitigation means planting trees somewhere else or restoring habitat for fish. So this is a different type of mitigation."
Olson said the project benefits the community by involving multiple groups.
"It's a statement of sustainability," she said. "Granted, it's a development, but we're trying to work as best we can with the environment and reducing the amount of impact we have on the environment."
Don Burgess, the center's director, said as a part of lessening construction's impact on the environment, the center's design incorporates nature-friendly construction methods.
The site once housed a restaurant on Diablo Lake. After the restaurant closed, the building's platforms remained. NCI chose the site because they could lessen the environmental impacts by using the location of the old building.
Also, in order to protect specific trees and wildlife areas, construction workers placed fencing around the sensitive areas, Olson said.
Perhaps the most vivid example of NCI's pursuit of sustainable architecture is its move to acquire a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating.
Olson said LEED, established by the U.S. Green Building Council, certifies building projects in one of four categories: certified, silver, gold and platinum. NCI is working towards a gold rating, the second highest.
The gold rating involves the completion of 36 different criteria from a range of categories including reduction of disturbances and water use, as well as the use of certain materials and resources like certified wood.
"The trees are coming from certified forests that go through a very extensive process to demonstrate that their forestry comes from using sustainable techniques,"said Steve Colony, senior civil engineer for the City of Seattle.
Olson said cedar trees from Bellingham's River Farm and Oregon will become siding on many buildings after being logged using sustainable practices.
"The cedar site is being logged using helicopters, so they're taking individual trees and pulling them out rather than using the usual slash and burn or clear-cut logging," Colony said.
The goal is for 90 percent certified wood to be used on the site, Olson said.
NCI hopes to use the ELC as a hub to get more people to enjoy nature.
Until the center is complete, the NCI staff will continue their daily routine. But, no matter how much the institute expands in the future, Weisberg said NCI's mission will always remain the same.
"I think all of us at NCI - staff, board, instructors and friends - are committed to our mission for the long haul," he said. "Core values remain just that - at the core of who we are and what we do."
Senior Courtney Brousseau studies environmental journalism at Huxley College. She has previously been published in the Western Front, Ecotones and The Planet Magazine.
