Presented by the Alumni Association and its Elected Board.

Location: Junior Common Room (JCR), Pritzker Student Center & accessible virtually via Zoom (see webinar details below)

Panel discussion highlighting the work of St. John’s alumni in the areas of sustainability, environmental justice, equity, education, and consulting. The panel will be convened over Zoom to allow maximum attendance of both panel and fellow Johnnies, and will be screened on the Santa Fe campus for Earth Day attendees.

Moderator
Jane McManus (A93), Executive Director, Seton Hall University Center for Sports Media

Panel

• Susann Bradford (SF89), Associate Attorney, Greenfire Law, PC (environmental justice/law)

• Emily Brock (A94), Principal Consultant and Senior Manager, ERM Corporate Sustainability & Climate Change (sustainability consulting)

• Sarah Beltz Bodor (A94), Director of Policy and Affiliate Relations, North American Association for Environmental Education (environmental education)

• Melanie Santiago-Mosier (A00), Equitable Energy Transition Advisor, The Nature Conservancy (environmental equity)

• Sarah Schoedinger (A92), Senior Education Program Manager, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (environmental education)

Zoom Details:
You are invited to a Zoom webinar.
When: Apr 22, 2023 10:30 AM Mountain Time (US and Canada)
Topic: Johnnies in Environment & Sustainability Panel

Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89601002221?pwd=RkdtendCZGZ4ZjhnVzQ5Vk45djFNUT09
Passcode: SJCSJC

Location: Grassy Knoll, near Santa Fe Hall and Weigle Hall

Yoga with Annie!

Annie’s yoga classes are a holistic practice into deeper embodiment. Focusing on anatomical and energetic alignment within the breath flow, Annie encourages practitioners to tap into their own visceral richness and integrative strength. Annie is delighted to share the practice of Prana Flow Yoga with the intent of providing a balancing, empowering, and creative experience, enabling participants to leave class connected into their core radiance. All levels welcome!

Location: Meet at the visitor’s parking circle to walk to the trailhead.

Nanette Phillips, Santa Fe Student Support Coordinator, will lead a morning hike on the Atalaya Trail, with a meditation.

Location: Solar array installation site, near Visitor Parking Lot A

By 2024, the Santa Fe campus will be able to generate 100% of its electricity consumption with photovoltaic panels. Our “100 percent solar” initiative will bring the campus closer to carbon-free and will save greenhouse gases equivalent to 167 homes’ electricity use annually.

This initiative was made possible by two anonymous alumni philanthropists and the Class of 2019’s inspiring 100% participation in their senior class gift that catalyzed our campus energy audit. Learn more about St. John’s Santa Fe’s sustainability initiatives.

Location: Peterson Art Gallery, Pritzker Student Center

The Peterson Art Gallery will be holding open hours for their current exhibition “Beyond the Lens: Photography from St. John’s College.” This exhibition consists of photographs taken by the St. John’s College Photography Club.

Location: Dining Hall, Pritzker Student Center

All campus visitors are welcome to dine alongside students in the Dining Hall in the Pritzker Student Center, where you can find a wide array of cuisine, from international, vegetarian, and vegan fare to made-to-order hand-pressed sandwiches, salads, juices, pasta, and stir-fries.

Santa Fe’s dining provider was unanimously selected by student representatives for the quality and freshness of their food; their wide options for healthy, vegan, and vegetarian cuisine; their food sourcing practices, which include a strong commitment to sustainability and local growers; and their ethical company culture and management practices.

Lunch can be purchased for $10 per person. Visit Sage Dining’s website to see today’s menu.

Location: Meem Library Placita

A gift from the Class of 2004, St. John’s Armillary Sphere is the only functional Brahian-type sphere in the world, used for hands-on observation in the study of Kepler, Copernicus, and Newton. Tutor Emeritus Bill Donahue will lead participants in making actual observations as we gain a deeper understanding of how this instrument led to “revolution” in the study of the Heavenly Spheres.

St. John’s student clubs are hosting Earth Day-themed activities and displays oriented around sustainability, environmentalism, and an appreciation of nature. Visitors and students alike are welcome to take a stroll around campus to enjoy the natural beauty surrounding us and learn more from student clubs about how to be more mindful citizens of our planet.

Presented by Student Life.

Location: Junior Common Room (JCR), Pritzker Student Center

Stewart Udall left a profound legacy of conservation and environmental justice as Secretary of the Interior during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Udall called on all Americans to move away from our emphasis on economic growth and consumerism and toward quality of life, and a new politics centered on beauty, frugal living, appreciation of nature and the arts, and a recognition of the Earth’s limits. This feature documentary reveals in depth the period during the 1960s and 1970s when the environmental movement in America came of age, showcasing the victories and defeats with which Udall was intimately connected. More at: stewartudallfilm.org.

This talk was made possible by the Carol J. Worrell Annual Lecture Series on Literature.

Location: Great Hall, Pritzker Student Center

For most of human history knowledge was kept alive through our relationships to each other and to our environments. Storytelling and scripture did not live on the page but in boats of breath, buoyed between generations. Our most important information was nested in oral narrative vessels compelling and flexible enough that they could reliably sail through cultural collapse, disaster, and climatological pressures. In oral cultures and the historical oral traditions, we see narratives that are intimately responsive to their environments and concerned with right relationship to land. What happens when we start writing our stories down so that they can no longer evolve? What happens when we shift from breath to text, from direct relationship to land to abstracted marks on a static page? When we uproot knowledge from its ecosystem – its map of relationships – it becomes more vulnerable to misinterpretation and misuse. What if oral culture’s cultivation of resilient community, narrative plasticity, and environmental embeddedness is exactly what we need to look to in an age of ecological peril? We cannot return to the folk traditions of our distant ancestors. But we can reclaim knowledge as inherently relational and environmentally situated.

What if we could reclaim narrative as a way of rooting back into a resilient multi-species network of beings with more feral suggestions on how to dismantle paradigms of domination? The type of stories we are called to write and tell now are probably somewhere closer to composting. We live in a culture that is remarkably good at abstracting itself from waste and off-loading it onto the marginalized communities least responsible for its creation. We cannot simply decide that civilization and patriarchy are toxic and then reject them. Instead, we can take responsibility for our entangled inheritance of bad stories through the transformative power of rot. On the compost heap, nothing is exiled. Beliefs and epistemologies never designed to touch, inappropriately combine in the moist refuse pile, fermenting into soil that can grow something freshly adapted to our dire circumstances. Let us reroot our favorite texts in their original environments to recover the ecological wisdom they were built to transmit.

About the Speaker
Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Her first book of essays, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine, was published in November 2022. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels, The Madonna Secret, will be published in August 2023. Subscribe for her newsletter at sophiestrand.substack.com and follow her work at sophiestrand.com and on Instagram: @cosmogyny.

St. John’s student clubs are hosting Earth Day-themed activities and displays oriented around sustainability, environmentalism, and an appreciation of nature. Visitors and students alike are welcome to take a stroll around campus to enjoy the natural beauty surrounding us and learn more from student clubs about how to be more mindful citizens of our planet.

Tucked into the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, St. John’s College Santa Fe sits on 250 acres in the most beautiful part of our city. The campus’s native and ornamental trees and shrubs provide many eco-system services for people and animals. They beautify the landscape, provide shade, and provide food for pollinators. Because St. John’s College boasts an exceptional diversity of trees and shrubs, the campus has been designated an arboretum. Starting at golden hour, this tour is a leisurely stroll that traverses the campus to identify tree species. The tour starts at the Visitors’ Circle and is led by Jeff Clark, Landscape Supervisor of St. John’s College. Please wear appropriate footwear for walking on uneven terrain. The walk is just shy of one mile and will take approximately one hour.

Location: Great Hall, Pritzker Student Center

In 2023, we are moving climate change activism past the alarm of impending loss, and past preemptive mourning for that loss. We are now listening for points of hope, for places where human restorative efforts are making a difference, even identifying symbiotic relationships between humans and the Earth. Going forward, let’s focus on the good we can do. Let’s celebrate the efforts of those finding success in restoration and sustainability. Let’s be brave and turn away from cynicism, depression, and nihilism, and rather seek out soundscapes of hope. Through music, Alaskan composer Matthew Burtner (SF92) expresses a post-humanist philosophy based on listening to the natural world as music. His work advocates for being outside, for feeling the animism in the environment, and for listening to the many geophonic and biophonic voices of the world. EcoSono Ensemble was formed in 2012 for the premiere of the world’s first climate change opera, Auksalaq. Since then the group has performed around the world and been featured on several albums of climate change music. This concert spotlights music from EcoSono’s forthcoming album, Soundscapes of Restoration (Ravello Records/Parma/Naxos) including the album single, The Dreams of Seagrasses which will be released worldwide on Earth Day 2023. The concert also highlights Burtner’s songs from Auksalaq. Finally, the concert will feature the premiere of Burtner and Mona Kasra’s work “Dwelling in the Enfolding” for ensemble and video, which was previously released for planetariums and VR immersive headsets.

About the Ensemble
The EcoSono Ensemble creates interactive earth music with a collective of diverse musicians, artists, scientists and activists from around the globe. As a branch of the EcoSono Institute, this ensemble integrates ecoacoustics, technology, environmental exploration, cross-disciplinary collaborations, cultural exchange and environmental activism into artistic output and virtuosic instrumental and vocal performance. EcoSono pursues commonalities between interdisciplinary music creation and ecological awareness often blurring the lines between installation, field research and performance.