Society for Wilderness Stewardship Internship by Lauren Korn

Society for Wilderness Stewardship

I don’t know how the idea became lodged in my head, but for a few years now, I’ve thought that graduating from college meant that I would finally be free to explore Montana (my native state): its people, its physical and political landscapes, its history, and its role in determining my sense of place and my working definition of “home.” I still grasp tightly the idea of traveling around the state in my cherry-red Subaru, Roxanne, with my vintage Raleigh, Ramona, strapped to her hatchback, but I am learning – and will continue to learn in the course of this Spring semester – that my exploration doesn’t have to be and will not be limited to my post-graduate education. No, it has begun in the form of an internship with the Society for Wilderness Stewardship (SWS). I have taken these learning objectives and applied them to a project hardly-begun for the SWS. The project, which will be published under the Society’s new writing series NextGen Horizons in Wilderness and Civilization, will be a collection of articles – character sketches, really – gleaned from interviews I will be a part of this Spring. First, though, a bit about the SWS.

The SWS is an infant of an organization guided by principles based on professional wilderness stewardship practices. The group is “committed to working together with those interested in securing the highest level of professional practice [and works to] maintain an environment that fosters respect, participation, innovation, and the highest ethical standards of conduct.” Their philosophies are grounded in a belief in and a want for sound scientific practices, collaboration between disciplines, nurturing public trust in private and public organizations, and professional excellence among like-minded scientists, managers, educators, government and private conservation workers, volunteers, students, [and] the public.”

My own NextGen collection – under the working title, “They Came to Wilderness” – will be a collection of character sketches written with the purpose of illuminating the career paths and objectives of stewardship professionals. I have lined up interviews with individuals in the Forest Service, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribe(s), and former Wilderness & Civilization participants, as well as Montana cattle ranchers, co-operative farmers, and others – all to learn how their careers have changed, how their interpretation of the wilderness (or Wilderness) concept has evolved, and how Montana has played into their professional and personal identities. In order to adequately and purposefully execute these interviews, I sought the help of Dr. Alan Watson, a social scientist working at the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute here in Missoula, Montana. Watson recently presented a lecture to the Missoula public for the Wilderness Institute’s 2015 Wilderness Lecture Series called, “It’s Bigger than Wilderness: Transformative Realizations from Doing Wilderness Science.” The following is an excerpt from my response to that presentation:

Watson, I learned, studies the phenology of varying regions around the United States by translating quantitative and qualitative data collected in the field into what I will call here, environmental conflict resolution. His methodologies, especially in gathering qualitative data, can been seen as a literal bridge between wilderness and civilization; the interviews and surveys he conducts – both vital aspects of his duties as a social scientist for the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute – allow him and his colleagues to evaluate the social and physical effects of land use.

Dr. Alan Watson. Photo courtesy of the 

Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute

Watson’s job, like most, is a job overwhelmed by binaries: nature/society; knowledge/wisdom; untrammeled/uncorrupted landscapes; tracks/trails; storied/empty landscapes; land users/managers, etc. These dichotomous abstracts – they are, indeed, abstracts: social constructs of a perceived reality – all culminate, for Watson, in tradeoffs, in ultimate compromise. I left Watson’s presentation feeling the ambiguousness of these binaries. [. . .] He has come to value the uncertainty that has been a part of so many of the stories he’s collected; he has learned to embrace the discovery process of his research. Discovery and research seem synonymous with one another, but when you’re a researcher and an academic of Watson’s standing, discovery – in an exciting, aha! kind of way – becomes, I imagine, increasingly evasive. He is also acutely aware that everyone he encounters in the wilderness has a story to tell, and thus, has a perspective unlike any he has previously encountered.

After hearing Watson speak about stories he’s collected from the field, I felt it necessary to speak with him further regarding his aforementioned research methodologies.

Watson is an approachable character, despite his title and the seeming endless amount of information that he can deliver. He has a father’s mustache and a head of salt-and-pepper curls that are unexplainably inviting. Our two hours in his office on-campus flew fast, and the advice he was able to give me about the interview and survey processes have already proved invaluable. Beyond speaking to me about qualitative and quantitative research and analysis, Watson expressed a profound appreciation for the research process – an appreciation that stems from the art (and it is, indeed, an art) of asking the right questions. What is the most important question? I haven’t yet found it, but thanks to Watson, I know now where to look for it.

I am a creative writer (not this semester, it turns out; writer’s block is real, folks), and I so appreciate this opportunity to combine the practice of writing and the practice of storytelling with my deepening interest and investment in land stewardship. This internship will be, I can already tell, an instrumental beginning to my own discoveries in and of Montana, and will be, I hope, the catalyst for something great.

To learn more about the Society for Wilderness Stewardship, jump on over to:

 http://wildernessstewardship.org/

To learn more about the Wilderness Lecture Series, go to:

http://www.cfc.umt.edu/wi/education/lecture-series/default.php

And to learn more about the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute, visit:

http://leopold.wilderness.net/

Wilderness Institute Internship by Kaydee Borchers

For my Internship at the Wilderness Institute I will be working on some specific projects that are both long and short term throughout the semester as well as other smaller duties that will help things run smoothly in the Wilderness Institute. The larger projects include Wilderness and Civilization outreach, planning for the Freshmen Wilderness Experience, as well as the 40 year anniversary for Wilderness and Civilization Program.

Above is a scan of a Kodak slide taken by Bob Ream
during the first Wilderness and Civ trek in 1975.

My first project for the internship has to do with digging into the history of the Program. So far I have scanned photos from the first Wilderness and Civ. trek in 1975. Bob Ream has a collection of Kodak slides from that year and I got the privilege of browsing through them while converting them to digital files.

I am learning more about how the Wilderness Institute works as I spend time around the office. I am learning more about the Wilderness and Civ. program and what goes into making it happen. I am finding additional meaning to the program and appreciating the fact that it has not only survived but made significant difference for 40 years! I am learning all about the history of the program through interviewing alumni who are glad to help and have added to the stories in my mind about the program.

A photo take by Bob Ream while the students were
taking a load off on the Fall Trek, 1975.

The Interviews include a variety of questions that pull some interesting stores out of the program’s history as well as explain how Wilderness and Civ. helped these people become who they are. I will choose 5 or 6 of these alumni to feature on the Wilderness Institute webpage with a blurb and a photo. I will eventually represent the diversity that comes from the program by choosing the 5 or 6 that have all taken different paths in life. I will be interviewing people who are artists, scientists, activists, federal agency employees or maybe all of the above. I am thinking about doing a father daughter feature of my dad and myself on the alumni page because he was a Civ. student in ’83.

A potential profile for the Wilderness and Civ alumni
page  is my dad and me.  This photo was taken on a fun
day of fishing in the Narrows of Flathead Lake with
my dad, also Wilderness and Civ alumni, Bill Borchers.

Along with digging into some of the program’s history I have also been geared toward promotion of it for the future. Thanks to over a dozen class visits which put me on the side of the podium that I am rather unfamiliar with, I have gained communication skills. I also am becoming more familiar with techniques for outreach, from radio ads to stealthy poster distribution.

During classes last semester I gained a lot of passion and the internship has helped me follow through with inspiring people to do the same, even if they are not interested in the program I believe that through my enthusiasm I can inspire people to live it up and work hard. This internship has expanded on what I have learned in the wilderness and civilization program, specifically the history of such a program and what it’s all about.

I have been working on outreach primarily with Marie who has been working in the office as well. Marie and I are able to work very well together because we encourage each other to push ourselves and have high expectations for each other’s success. Because of this we can push against each other to get $hi* done! It doesn’t matter if it’s licking 500 envelopes to stuff the endowment proposals into or planning the 2015 Wild/Civ. spring campfire.

As this semester continues I will be learning about what goes into the planning of 2 projects. One is the planning of a program such as the Freshmen Wilderness Experience. The other will be planning the 40th Anniversary event. I am excited to contribute to these and put forth my ideas. My learning objectives for the remainder of the semester include those based around acquiring the knowledge of how a nonprofit operates as well as how the institute cooperates with the University of Montana and other agencies. I am also interested in learning as much as possible about outdoor education so I can be better prepared for my career after school in this setting.

Above is a photo of the most recent Wilderness and Civilization 

class taking a journal break in the sunshine. 

This photo is too great not to add to this blog. 

FOWL LANGUAGE by Lauren Korn

For some reason, I didn’t expect its blood to be warm. More than warm. Its blood was hot, and as it flowed down my hand – the hand that was wrapped around its neck – I was surprised. Hours earlier, I had been the one responsible for submerging this turkey’s already-dead companions in a hot water bath of 160 degrees; and now, being the one to nearly choke it, out of fear that it would struggle itself loose from my grip, being the one to slit – no cut; slit is too shallow of a word – its throat and hold its head while it bled out, while it died, was an altogether different experience.

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This year’s Wilderness & Civilization (WC) gang knew, in theory, what was in store for them come November. The WC program directors had more than alluded to our upcoming participation in the Thanksgiving turkey “harvest” at Prairie Heritage Farms, so as a vegetarian, I had had a few months to prepare myself for my role in the harvest on the 21^st and 22^nd of November.

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Prairie Heritage Farms (PHF) is a small farm near Great Falls, Montana on the Fairfield Bench, outside of Power, owned by Jacob and Courtney Cowgill. Hop on over to their website, and you will learn that the farm is family-run and a cultivator of organic vegetables, ancient and heritage wheat, lentils, a variety of other seed crops, and heritage turkeys – these turkeys – which are birds that a) are naturally-mating; b) have long outdoor lifespans; and c) have slow growth rates. One can compare these turkeys to factory- and commercially-farmed birds (which are none of these things) and see that PHF turkeys are happy and raised with care. The PHF website reads, “Our turkeys are more flavorful, juicier and just plain better than the factory-farmed ones you get at the grocery store. They're more expensive, yes, but they're worth it – not only because they're the best turkey[s] you'll ever taste, but also because they're raised with love and care.” This TLC is why PHF has sold every one of their turkeys every year they’ve offered them to the Montana public.

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Part One: The Killing Station

The Killing Station is more of an open shed situated between a large, closed barn and familiar amber waves of Eastern Montana pasture. There are two plastic, white buckets on the ground at the left of this shed, which sit directly under two metal cones. In the barn, the stomachs of one hundred and thirty-some turkeys, which were herded from the farm’s open fields a day earlier, are getting lighter and lighter. Because these turkeys are raised outside, they eat the grasses and the bugs that exist there; and because it is easier to process turkeys whose gullets and gizzards are empty of these foods, they are barricaded in the barn a day prior to slaughter.

Enter four students charged with the most physically challenging part of the process: catching the turkeys. Once the first turkey is caught and killed, it is evident that the remaining turkeys are, to some extent, aware of their fate. Cornering them seems to be the way in which most students are able to catch them. Me, though – I’m not able to catch a single one; the feeling of their weight and their frightened stiffness makes me anxious and hesitant, two things you cannot be if catching a live bird is your end goal.

Once caught, they are taken from the barn to the open shed and held upside down, one student containing their legs, another guiding their bodies through the aforementioned metal cones. Their heads are pulled through the smaller, bottom hole, their necks held firmly. With a steady hand, a knife is pressed to their jugular vein.

It takes a turkey somewhere around five minutes to bleed out.

Part Two: The Plucking Station

Once a bird is caught and killed, it is brought around the barn to the Plucking Station, which consists of: a scale on which the bird is weighed (this immediate weight is called its “live weight”); a large tub of scalding-hot water in which the bird is plunged for a minute and half – this bath allows its feathers to be easily pulled and plucked from its body; an automatic turkey plucking machine (what I will call a “turkey spinner”) that does exactly what it sounds like it does – at its best, it completely plucks the feathers from a turkey in a whirlwind of water and extremely fast rubber “fingers” or knobs; and a stainless steel table around which one to four people stand, plucking the remaining hangers on.

Part Three: Necking

Featherless, the turkeys are then carried from the Plucking Station to two large sinks where the necks are removed from the bodies. My participation at these last stations is limited to observation, so I’ve enlisted the help of Jacob Cowgill to explain these processes. (Matt Freeman, a WC student and KBGA college radio personality spent the weekend recording the harvesting process for a radio spot, and I’ve used his audio to paraphrase Jacob’s explanation about this processing stage.)

“You’re going to cut back towards the base of the neck. Here, you’ll find the trachea and the esophagus, held together by a membrane. Peel back the membrane, and you’re going to follow the esophagus to the crop (which is where food is pre-digested), and what you’re going to do is loosen the crop. You’re not going to take it out, you just want to get it loose. The crop is sort of hard to see, but it’s a sack – a thin sack – and it’s fairly tough, but it can break. You want to prevent that; you just want to loosen the membrane from the wall with your fingers. There, at the base of the crop, you’ll find the trachea. Clean up the skin here. Peel the skin off the neck. Cut off the neck. You’re going to save the necks; they’re put back inside the bird before they’re bagged. Finally, you’re going to want to cut off the scent gland. You’ll see some ‘yellow stuff.’ Clear that yellow stuff away.”

Part Four: The Evisceration Station

The turkeys are then transferred to the Evisceration Station, where they are gutted and given a final inspection. Here, any remaining feathers are plucked, and organs are removed and sorted; livers and hearts are saved, to be joined by the necks inside the turkeys before they’re packaged.

Part Five: Post-Processing

The turkeys’ legs are zip-tied together and they’re placed in coolers until they reach a temperature of forty-one degrees (or less). They are then put in a bag, which is placed in hot water in order to seal them. They are then weighed (given a “dead weight”) and transferred to the truck that will deliver them to the Montanans that bought them so many months prior to this weekend.

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There is a disconnect in the American food system. Many people are unaware of the production and processing methods that make a delicious Thanksgiving meal possible. So we, as a relatively conscientious group of university students, set out to learn what one of those processes consisted of. While doing so, we made sure to thank those that were “giving” us their bodies; as each throat released hot blood, and while each turkey struggled to survive the Killing Station – in a gesture meant to convey the heavy-hearted emotions most of us were feeling and the respect we had for their lives – we thanked them. We thanked them for being unknowing participants in our food system and thanked them for the transfer of energy from their living bodies into, theoretically, our own. In this sense, the weekend was not only an education in poultry processing and ethically-sound consumption, but it was also an exercise in mindfulness. 

I went into the harvest weekend believing that, should I be able to kill a turkey, I would or should re-evaluate my own consumption, re-think my vegetarianism. As it turned out, however, the weekend was lifestyle-affirming. I am still a vegetarian, but should I ever choose to drift back to my omnivorous self, I know that I will be an educated meat-eater, and I have no doubt that I will be a thankful one. Happy [Belated] Thanksgiving.