Hello. My name is Kirsten Boesen and here is a little bit of my story. While growing-up I moved quite a bit, but I consider my hometown to be Bloomington-Normal, IL. Just this past May I graduated from Augustana College, a small liberal arts college in Rock Island, IL. I majored in Anthropology; played on the women’s varsity soccer team all four years; interned at World Relief, working with refugees; interned at Putnam Museum, helping create a new Refugee and Immigrant exhibit; and was part of a volunteer and social based sorority, Sigma Pi Delta.
At Augustana I discovered how much I loved being outdoors when I got involved with the college’s Farm2Fork club and Wesley Acres Produce club which focused on growing vegetables for the cafeteria, supporting the local farmer’s market, and fundraising for an environmentally friendly truck that would be used to transport the vegetables to the cafeteria.
I became a camp counselor at an Adventure Camp in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in South Carolina. I brought middle school aged kids on 37-mile excursions which included mountain biking, canoeing, and backpacking. Since this summer I have continued to have a drive to work within such context. Summer between sophomore and junior year, I headed up to the Cascades and did trail maintenance, and, of course, loving the experience. And that leads me to where I am now: doing trail maintenance at Klamath National Forest with an SCA crew!
Working for the Student Conservation Association is a great experience for me; giving me the opportunity to learn more about what I am passionate about; nature. The SCA is going to help me improve my park ranger skills, help me gain greater knowledge of the outdoors, give me a good foundation for pursuing a combined career in forestry and anthropology, and, for the time being, it will nourish my zest for the outdoors. Over all, I agree with Aldo Leopold in his book, A Sand County Almanac: “A land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration, management, and us of these ‘resources’, but it does affirm their right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state,”. I resonate with this idea of land ethic and want to practice and live by it; fighting for the right of nature to have a continued existence in its most natural state.
