SCA Founding President, Elizabeth Cushman Titus Putnam, visited a Dallas Crew.

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UCSC has given rise to Pulitzer Prize winners, Pew Scholars, All-American athletes, and National Academy of Sciences members.

Now the campus can also boast that it has a tree-climbing champion.

Staff tree trimmer Jessica Petrini won the women’s division of the Western Chapter International Society of Arboriculture Tree Climbing Championships, held June 13-15 in Elk Grove.

“I was totally amazed,” said Petrini, 34, of her win. “But really, it was just icing on the cake for me, because regardless of the outcome, I learned so much.”

Her interest started in high school when she joined the Student Conservation Association, a nonprofit that offers conservation internships and summer trail crew opportunities to more than 3,000 people each year. She volunteered on a wilderness trail crew, then was hired onto a crew in Idaho.

From: http://www.ucsc.edu/news_events/text.asp?pid=2299

Paul Bindel, SCA Mass Parks AmeriCorps 2008
We did not roll up our sleeves.
We proofed ourselves in plastic and walked
into the rain, to slough in rocks,

to upturn stones. We set them so they
would not wiggle. We imagined what lay
below a mossy corner, a foot of dirt,

by plunging our bars and craning our ears
for the pitch of the ting. We heard muddy
earth give a parting smooch with a schwack

as they rose above ground. We learned that rocks sing
when wet—from spring thaw streams,
from brooks, from a drizzling hour—flecks

of sedimentary sound. We ordered
muddy bogs with the roundest we could find,
and stacked their flatter kin up hills

and windy paths. We cursed
the winter frost for heaving fresh
layers in our way, then laughed,

and blessed it for the crushed
fill those heavy souls would provide.
We smashed our fingers, strained

our backs, and nuzzled our frames
against granite just to move it an inch.
We chose which roots to chop

with a mattock and which to let lie.
We used the sternest stuff for walls
to channel water down a hill, below a trail,

wherever we desired. Our wills were brought
upon the forms of earth and we found
the work firming, marking who we might become.

An SCA Community Crew turns an un-utilized strip of earth into garden beds, the future home of a planting of Sunflowers.

Our partners on this project are The Phase 4 Learning Center and Steel City Biofuels.

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June 2008 - Pittsburgh, PA

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This video made its debut at EarthVision 2008

“When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.”

John Muir, 1915

– from Scott Kinghorn, NPS

This is the gear, before it goes out to the High School Trail Crews.

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Faces of EarthVision - Thumbnails -or- Slideshow

by Tau I. Robinson-Farrar
After hearing a phenomenal presentation at the Department of the Interior, it was time to leave for our service projects. As we were making our way to the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens (the location for our service project) I asked Alex, a high school student from New Hampshire, how he felt about the presentation. Read the rest of this entry »