Emily Mugerian assists Leah Vucetich in pouring a casting of a moose print on Isle Royale. Photo: Madison Chomsky

By Andy McGlashen
amcglashen@gmail.com
Great Lakes Echo
July 20, 2009

One night shortly after Michael Jackson’s death last month, as mourners’ stereos pulsed with Billie Jean and Beat It, Emily Mugerian was on a craggy island in Lake Superior, training her ears to an unfamiliar note.

“I heard the wolves one night,” said a beaming Mugerian, a pre-med senior at Michigan State University.

She and 10 other students were camped on Isle Royale National Park for a weeklong outdoor philosophy course offered by MSU.

“It was a whole week of personal growth,” Mugerian said.  “I’m just more aware of my actions, and I hope that continues.”

That’s just the reaction that instructors Michael Nelson and Lissy Goralnik hope for.

“Good classroom experiences of any kind are supposed to change us,” said Nelson, an environmental ethicist at MSU.  “In environmental education, people say there’s something important about learning in the outdoors, with your feet on the ground, and what we’re trying to do is test that hypothesis and put our finger on what that is.”

Philosophy is “a very indoor pursuit generally,” and the challenges of organizing outdoor classes within the routines of academia make them rare, Nelson said.   Very few other universities offer similar courses, he said, Oregon State and the University of North Texas among them.

Goralnik, a doctoral student with a master’s degree in creative writing and years of outdoor leadership experience, compares students’ writing before, during and after the trip to see how their thinking about nature has changed.

“Is it important that students want to recycle after an environmental class?  Of course,” she said.  “But is it more important, is it a deeper shift if they develop a love for the natural world?  We believe it is.”

Ryan MacWilliams talks with Ranger Valerie about his project. Photo: Madison Chomsky

The students agree.

“If you want people to care about the environment, they have to experience it,” said Jess Rogner, a senior studying human biology and studio art.  “And it’s going to become more important for people to be in nature, because we’re losing that experience.”

Isle Royale is the least visited park in the country, but the one to which the highest percentage of travelers return.

A highlight of the trip, the students said, was their time with researchers involved in the island’s wolf and moose study, which at more than a half-century is the longest-running predator-prey study in the world. They also enjoyed occasional encounters with the moose.

“It’s pretty amazing, because it’s a one-of-a-kind study,” said Rogner.  “And being that close to moose, and they’re just hanging out?  It was incredible.”

The course involved much more than gazing at wildlife and scribbling in journals, Goralnik said.

Students read and wrote reactions to dozens of essays on environmental philosophy before the trip. Their days on the island were packed with informative hikes and intense discussions.  They each gave presentations about the park’s natural or human history, and had to turn in final projects – among which were a song and an interpretive trail guide – shortly after returning home.

Then there were the challenges of living in a designated wilderness area: cooking outdoors, learning to tolerate mosquitoes, walking a quarter-mile for water.  Just getting to the park meant a long drive to catch a ferry at Grand Portage, Minn., which, as Nelson put it, “isn’t exactly on the way to anywhere.”

Beyond its physical rigors, the course forced students to wrestle with philosophical problems as easy to get lost in as the island’s interior.  Does wilderness, for instance, exist in nature, or is it just an invention arising from our belief that we’re separate from nature?

This was no island idyll.  The instructors’ heady intellectual brew prompted hard, sometimes frustrating work.

“That’s what we learned,” Mugerian said. “That some questions don’t have answers.”

A moose drinking in Washington Creek on Isle Royale. Photo: Madison Chomsky

That can be daunting, the students said.

“But they shouldn’t just give up and say ‘Oh, that’s too hard,’” said Nelson.  “There’s a tendency in education to assume that answers are ready, and the result is that we think opinions are easy to come by.  But the important thing is that beliefs and opinions have to be earned.”

Island life also meant a week without the Internet; the group heard about Michael Jackson from a park ranger two days after he died.

But no one suffered withdrawal from regularly updating Facebook profiles.

“It was awesome being disconnected,” Mugerian said.

Rogner agreed: “I could finally think clearly for a long period of time.”