The Biscuit

Hello, Alumni!

Online Registration is up and running for Coming Home Weekend 2004, and registration brochures have gone out in the mail. We hope that you will be able to make it this year to our better-than-ever events during the weekend.  You can also view a list of who's coming to alumni weekend; we'll be updating this page as more folks register.

Local hotels are also offering discounts to alumni, and our local sponsors - including alumni businesses Coyote Joe's and Goodman Law Firm - have enabled us to offer each participant their very own "I Love Prescott College" t-shirt.

Please let me know if you have any questions about the weekend, and thanks to everyone who has sent in photos for the slideshow. It's going to be great!

Rachel Yoder

Director of Alumni Relations
ryoder@prescott.edu
toll free 1-877-350-2100 x 4502
local 928-350-4502

Alumni Feature

Alumni Involved in Anti-Logging Activism in NW

PC alumni pose in front of a demonstration slice of an ancient Douglas Fir commercially logged in the Willamette National Forest last year.

Back row: Justin Rohde (RDP '02) Laurel Sutherlin (RDP '00), Amy Johnson (RDP '01)

Front row: Becky White (RDP '00), Lisa Shelton (RDP '03), Jay Leavitt (RDP '02), Liz Faller (RDP Faculty), Matt Dusek(ADP Student), Nathan Pundt (RDP '02)

On July 6th, eight PC alumni and PC faculty-member Liz Faller found time for a group shot at a rally in downtown Medford, Oregon. This rally was one episode in an on-going campaign to save the wild Siskiyou Mountains from the largest commercial timber sale on public lands in US history. The "Biscuit Fire Recovery Project" was designed by the Bush Administration to salvage wood products from the area affected by the Biscuit fire complex in 2002. If not stopped through lawsuits or direct action, this project would log 370 million board feet of trees on more than 19,500 acres (over 30 square miles) of the Siskiyou National Forest. That's enough log truck loads to line up end to end from Canada to Mexico on the west coast! $40 million of taxpayer revenues would be wasted as over 6000 acres of old growth reserves and 8000 acres of inventoried roadless forests were logged.

Many PC alumni are playing active roles in the grassroots campaign to stop this destructive logging plan. Laurel Sutherlin (RDP '00), Nathan Pundt (RDP '02), and Becky White (RDP '00) spent the month of April touring the west coast in a biodiesel bus operated by the Oxygen Collective, a non-profit organization they helped found in 2002. The "Fire and Forests Roadshow" took them as far south as Stanford University in California and as far north as Bellingham, WA before returning to southern Oregon. Ten collective members gave a dynamic multimedia presentation to curious crowds in universities and other venues, sharing natural history of the Klamath-Siskiyou bioregion, highlighting the ecological role of fire in the region and the potential damage inflicted by post-fire salvage logging.

Justin Rohde (RDP '02) and Lisa Shelton (RDP '03) are working for the Siskiyou Project, an environmental organization working to protect the Siskiyou Wild Rivers area from the Biscuit timber sale and for permanent protection of the area. Lisa has been surveying timber sale units and is currently touring Wisconsin and Michigan with the Doug, a 420-year-old Douglas Fir tree (same as in photo) to get media attention and support for the roadless rule. Justin has been designing web pages and newsletters for the project. Previously he documented widespread police abuse in Miami, Florida during the Free Trade area of the Americas conference, and his work now appears in the movie, The Miami Model, now playing across the country. They have
taken up the sport of salmon snorkeling, swimming with the fish.

To find out more, connect with old friends, or to help save your public lands, check out www.o2collective.org and www.siskiyou.org. You can also call or write to both your senators; tell them to protect the important national treasure that is the wild Siskiyou Mountains of southwestern Oregon and to oppose the legislative rider proposed by Sen. Gordon Smith (R-OR) that could bypass environmental laws or public input. NO SALVAGE LOGGING IN THE BISCUIT! SAVE THE WILD SISKIYOU!

Class Notes
Visit the Class Notes website to read all the new postings this month, and/or post your own message.

Rob Baumert, ADP '03

After working for almost 3 years at the Highlands Center for Natural History while going to school, I have recently started a new job as an Environmental Scientist doing Environmental Remediation throughout the surrounding Vegas area. I have been going through quite a bit of training over the last month and have slowly been getting to know about the various projects that I will be working on and the procedures involved with the work. It has been very exciting learning a new career with the possibility of new and great opportunities.  Photo: Rob, center, at graduation with step-father Ralph Bedford and mother Yvette Bedford

More Class Notes...