What began as a small, student-led grassroots movement, Fort Lewis College’s Environmental Center on Saturday celebrated its 25th year as a community leader in promoting sustainability and environmental justice.
“It has served as home and refuge for so many people who care about environmental issues,” said Michael Rendon, a former coordinator of the Environmental Center who became mayor of Durango in 2010.
The origins of the center are generally attributed to FLC professors Don Gordon and Bill Romme, who worked with students in the late 1980s to establish a recycling program on campus.
“That inspired a lot of students who were really feeling they wanted to be more involved in environmental issues but didn’t have a club,” said Shan Wells, a media coordinator for FLC who also made a documentary about the center’s history for the 25th anniversary.
Wells said a sit-in near Pagosa Springs to halt the logging of an old-growth forest – the group of students became known as the Sand Bench 12 – solidified the activist movement at Fort Lewis College.
“It (the Environmental Center) grew out of twin ideas of activism on campus and out in the environment,” Wells said.
The group took a tiny office space in an attic above the old location of KDUR, the college’s radio station, in the Student Union. There, it evolved from a “quirky bunch of dedicated students” to a group highly involved in the community, Wells said.
Rendon took over in 2000 and focused on getting the word out about the Environmental Center and bringing environmental issues to the forefront.
“I felt like the campus administration thought of us as just kids picking up trash, and I don’t think the community knew who we were at all,” he said.
During Rendon’s five-year stint as coordinator, he estimated the group held more than 100 events and participated in countless partnerships with local businesses.
In 2006, when Marcus Renner became coordinator, the Environmental Center shifted focus to sustainable advocacy, assessing energy efficiency in school buildings, among other “academic” pursuits, Wells said.
The Environmental Center is now led by Rachel Landis, who emphasized moving into the sustainability sector when she took over in 2011.
Landis wants the campus to be carbon neutral by 2080 and have 20 percent of the school’s food locally sourced, all while graduating students who have the tools to enact environmental change.
“It’s about really changing values and policy,” she said. “And working with FLC students, learning what they care about and how to take action on that.”
Indeed, many FLC students who were involved with the Environmental Center have put their skills to use.
Brandon Francis, a 2015 FLC graduate, said the Environmental Center helped him learn that “if you want to help people, you have to get involved with community members from the top to the bottom.”
He works as a lab technician for New Mexico State University, researching the effects of the Gold King Mine spill, as well as the farmer’s training program at FLC.
Michael Remke, a 2012 FLC graduate, is nearing the completion of a Ph.D. at Northern Arizona University in forestry. He said the Environmental Center kindled his passion for environmental sciences.
“I think it was one of the more crucial links in developing a passion for my career,” he said. “It helped me connect personal life of an outdoorsmen and nature enthusiast to a career in research-based biology.”
And Clay Tomcak, a 2014 FLC graduate, is helping with gardening and food production in Costa Rica.
“It changed everything for me,” he said of the Environmental Center. “It provided me with a place to put to practice the ideas I have. It’s absolutely a hub for people to bring good ideas forward.”
And that is just a small sample of the thousands of students who have come and gone through the Environmental Center’s doors over its 25-year history. Landis said just last year, there were 9,068 volunteer student hours, which translates to more than $101,000 of work time.
The initiatives of the center are truly endless, Landis said. With the Real Food Challenge, which seeks to advocate locally sourced food to the Campus Garden Grown and Zero Waste efforts, the center is always looking for partnerships and ways to pursue a more socially just, ecologically responsible world.
“At the end of the day, if the EC is graduating students that later go on with the motivation and tools to enact social and environmental change, then we’re doing our job,” Landis said.
jromeo@durangoherald.com
