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Hugging Trees Printable Version PRINTABLE VERSION
by melanie mae, United States Jul 15, 2004
Environment   Interviews
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Tuesday July 13, 2004
9:00-10:30am, Black Cat

Purpose: To collect a variety of useable drafts about SOEI and its faculty, staff, and students for PR, special events and the website.

Stacy wears GO BIG GREEN to inspire the green in everybody.


1) Where did you grow up and how old are you?

Stacy Shaf is from Sioux Falls, SD and she is 22. Northland College seemed an interesting choice although she really had no plans to go to school. She actually looked at a few colleges and chose Northland because it had free admission.

Stacy was pretty impressed with her canoeing trip around the Flambeaux Flowage for Freshman Orientation and highly believes that “Northland should have and entering trip and an exiting one.”


2) How did you become interested in activism?

Stacy was in high school when she realized she was empathetic about animal rights, (so she became a vegetarian) and was against the strip mining at the Black Hills. In 1854, treaty rights with local Sioux were broken and the Black Hills became touristy. This had affected her father who became vehement. She could see the rights and wrongs in everything in her community and hung out with the same “counterculture.” (“It’s no longer a counter culture, its practical”). But, her father was her main influence in her empathy and environmental activism with animals and the earth. Her father died when she was young and she felt a lot of injustice and saw a lot of injustice at a young age. She also began reading books about feminism, African American rights and slavery issues, such as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Some of her other favorites are: “George’s Marvelous Medicine,” “Aquamarine,” and authors Alice Walker and Tony Morrison.


3) What are your passions? How have you taken your passions to your work at SOEI?

Stacy has belief in an eastern related thought, a universal calm, found through mindfulness of interrelationships. She sees disconnect between God, humans, and nature, no harmony between relationships. Her inner passion is to work on harmony through projects such as urban forestry. Her main goal through that venue is to improve life for everyone in the city; the balance of nature and the needs of man.

4) What are some of your favorite projects there?

The Johnny Elmseed Nursery and the Elm Research Institute are Stacy’s favorite projects. Through these projects, they are raising 24 elms that are cloned to resist the Dutch Elm disease. For the local community to purchase these trees to line the streets they have to be five feet tall and 11/2 inches thick or they won’t survive. Northern WI used to have an identity to elm trees, once having massive elms that would canopy and tower over its streets. Now the projects would like to introduce elm back to Northern WI.

She would like to see a community approach to welcoming the elm back as something its citizens would like to pay for like clean water. She wants the community to recognize the true value of trees through the elm projects.

Stacy loves working at the SOEI because she can work with three-fourths of the cities projects and get to know everyone, from public to private entities.

5) Where can you see SOEI and Northland College in say, 5 years…or 10 years? What is your vision for them?

“In order to be true innovators and true leaders and forge solutions, you have to have true ideas.” Stacy would like to see technical engineering appropriate for energy and environmental leadership.

People want to find ways to use sustainable agriculture, when they don’t have a working knowledge. People come here to gain that knowledge to free themselves of a lot of burdens and to bring that sort of freedom in their lives. Nature is giving, not a “Heart of Darkness” scary deep place.

6) Where do you want your experience to take you in the future?

“Environmentalism…whatever that means… is a small movement in each community that you can be part of.” Stacy sees herself engaged in a community, programming others to look at the world in a different way through dog sledding, walking naked in the desert, or just by simply looking at the moon a lot.

7) Why did you want to work at SOEI?

Stacy began working on the Horizons newsletter her freshman year, fall 2000. She started in the PR department and really loved communication through writing and reading. She enjoyed managing “Meditations” and choosing which articles were going to be the news of the day.

Stacy had the need to work as a self-supporting student, and SOEI was the place to do it. It had the quiet atmosphere that she liked, a little secret hide-a-away not many people know about. She feels the Northland and Chequamegon community is great, owing much to Michael Gardener. His love of the Lake and care of the surrounding watersheds has given her a vision and direction more than anyone in her life.

“There is a lot of work at SOEI, as long as you keep up with it. Never punch through something, be patient. Get on the front end, take control.”





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Thank you
melanie mae | Nov 2nd, 2005
SOEI is going to be teaching more of this kind of work.

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