What turns the world?
The only answer is the wing of wind, a wildness
veering through the treetops, bending the birches.

—Cleopatra Mathis

On my desk, I have a scattering of damp leaves and needles newly exposed from the snow: birch, beech, sugar maple, red oak, white pine, and sumac. These are not from the branches of western trees, but eastern ones, as I have spent the last three months in New Hampshire teaching at Dartmouth College. The spring songs of tufted titmice and chickadees touch me with their strength and velocity emanating from such small feathered bodies. And I find the woods of New England deeply reassuring as one season passes into the next.

These particular woods are in Hanover and known as the Landmark Tract: 2,500 acres of wildness that are part of Dartmouth’s real estate holdings. My guide is a graduating senior named Daniel Susman, one of my writing students in the environmental studies program. He is tall and relaxed, but there is an intensity that burns through him in spite of his casual appearance. He is also an active member of the Dartmouth Outing Club (DOC), the oldest and largest collegiate outing club in the country, formed in 1909. I have learned the DOC maintains more than seventy miles of the Appalachian National Scenic Trail, and is the first introduction to the college for most of the incoming students. Dan organizes the five-day “First Year Trips” to Mount Moosilauke in the White Mountains for 1,000 new co-eds and 350 student volunteers. This is part of the Dartmouth tradition, and an alum who held his position in 1955 told him, “It is one of the most underpaid and underappreciated jobs you’ll ever have. It’s closer to organizing military operations in Afghanistan than recreational camping for individuals.”

With the map in hand, Dan shows me the trail we will be walking and exactly where we will leave the path and walk directly in the woods to the vernal pools. Hopefully, most of the snow will have melted. In the American West, as well as in the Northeast, March through April is known as “the mud season,” for good reason. We begin just across the road from the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Just to be out walking in the midst of birdsong is such a gift after the gray days of winter. This blue, cloudless day of overwhelming light is an embrace of optimism: Call it geographic relief from the depressing news pouring out of Washington, be it stalemates in Congress or our two wars, pick your choice, that carry on as though perpetual paralysis and conflict are the norm inside or outside our country.

What turns the world?

My response is wildness and imagination. Wildness as ex pressed through Thor eau’s wisdom, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” And wildness expressed in the imagination that fuels these extraordinary students who have become my mentors. Their leadership is both practical and visionary, at once.

Dan and two friends, Margi Dashevsky and Jonathan Wachter, met as freshmen through the DOC and their shared love of all things wild. They were environmental studies majors focusing on some of the critical issues of our time, such as sustainable agriculture, biodiversity, and climate change. They understood these as global issues with great complexities as they investigated them through scientific models and data, but they wanted more. They wanted to find the connection between their own lives and what they were learning in the academy.

“You can talk about these things ad nauseam,” Dan tells me as we are walking over snow patches melting into leaf litter. “But what are we actually doing to change how we live, to specifically reduce our carbon footprint, to grow our own food, and to protect these wild lands that remain?”

What these three students did was talk to everyone and anyone who would listen on the Dartmouth campus: from Andrew Friedland, chair of the environmental studies program, to Carol Folt, dean of the faculty, to the president of the college, at the time, James Wright. They organized, they strategized, and they took their power as students and used it to garner support for their vision. They were asking for a student residence on campus that could demonstrate how these values of living more sustainably could be practiced.

Their campaign began when they were freshmen in the spring of 2007. Their goal was achieved in the fall of 2008, when the Sustainable Living Center was created in the old “North Hall” on Choate Road just across the street from the library.

The inaugural nineteen students moved into the SLC, committed to sustaining values of experiential education, self-reliance, and a lifestyle of minimal environmental impact. They held weekly dinners featuring local organic produce. Up to eighty Dartmouth students regularly attended. And they opened their doors to workshops on such topics as energy alternatives and food preservation.

The activists have continued to build their vision of a sustainable Dartmouth with other founding members of the Sustainable Living Center, such as Marissa Knodel, who participated in the Big Green Bus’s consciousness-raising trek across America fueled by the waste of vegetable oil. Marissa stayed with us in Castle Valley, Utah, along with her fellow travelers. They parked their bus in Moab and began a conversation with our desert community, showing, through example, how creating a future that sustains people, the economy, and the environment through energy conservation, waste reduction, healthy food, and civic action is not only possible but necessary to a free society.

Donella Meadows, founder of the Sustainability Institute, would be proud of her legacy at this northern Ivy League college. She taught courses on sustainability at Dartmouth in the environmental studies department for twenty-nine years before “sustainability” was a household word. She wrote The Limits to Growth, a seminal text in environmental ethics published in 1972. Almost fifteen years ago, she said: “As I travel on the path toward sustainability myself and watch my friends travel on it, I keep thinking of a motto I once heard: ‘Change is not sacrifice.’ It is learning, staying awake, being alive, moving to new places. It requires every part of us, our rational minds and our loving spirits.”

She went on to say: “Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless. That is because they are intrinsically systems problems. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find courage to restructure it.”

Dan Susman and his friends at Dartmouth are finding that courage.

Last year, to mark the International Day of Climate Action, about forty students held a sit-in right outside the office of the president in Parkhurst Hall, protesting the fact that Dartmouth had not signed on to a nationwide plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on college campuses. They demanded a meeting with the new Dartmouth president, Jim Yong Kim (co-founder of Partners in Health). He was busy. The students wanted to talk to him. The president’s assistant said that they would schedule a meeting with the group the next day. Dan and friends said no. They were not leaving until he met with them on this day. And within the hour he did.

“We made a CO2 breathalyzer, and had President Kim breathe into it,” Dan says smiling, his long dark bangs hiding his vibrant green eyes. “We all agreed Dartmouth’s carbon emissions were too high.”

“And then what happened?” I ask as we leave the trail and find our way to the vernal pools, stepping over fallen trees and noting the ferns, already green, even in March. “President Kim listened to us, but he did not sign the pledge. He asked to meet with us again.”

“And?”

“We met with him the next morning and laid out our vision for sustainability on campus: on the administrative front, to organize and make a real commitment to carbon reductions; on the facilities side, to radically change the way we heat and power the campus; and on the education front, to train future environmental leaders to tackle issues of social, economic, and ecological sustainability.”

Dan paused, then smiled. “President Kim said, ‘Great,’ but he wanted more details and more numbers. We found the college could save from $226 to $621 million, depending on how fast oil prices rise, and reduce carbon emissions by 85 percent by 2030 if it invested in renewable technology and energy efficiency now. The projects we proposed included vastly increasing efficiency across campus by retrofitting old buildings and installing wind turbines, photovoltaics, and geothermal heat pumps. Nothing we proposed was radical; it was all technology that was proven twenty or thirty years ago. This impressed him, especially when the college is already having to cut $100 million from the budget for financial sustainability. He agreed to study the issue thoroughly and add sustainability as a sixth category to his overall vision for the college when he met with the board of trustees.”

“So what’s next?” I ask.

“We will continue to work behind the scenes,” Dan says as he continues to saunter through the damp forest. “President Kim said it himself, ‘There is no reason for Dartmouth not to be the greenest campus on Earth.’ ”

At a time when it is easy to fall into despair, at a time when the approval rating of the U.S. Congress is 10 percent, it is fair to wonder what hope we can find in the future of American leadership, but working with young people like Dan Susman and his fellow co-conspirators fills me with optimism. Margi Dashevsky is now living on Dartmouth’s organic farm and has just signed a contract to work with the Murie Center in Denali National Park, where she will be teaching environmental education to children. Both Margi and Dan continue to work with their former Sustainability Living Center roommate, Marissa Knodel, now Dartmouth Sustainability Initiative’s programs specialist, and Jonathan Wachter, who is being mentored by Anne Kapuscinski, the new Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of Sustainability in Science—all part of the environmental studies collaborative team to help create a cross-disciplinary minor in sustainability. This is a student community of change-makers. I am not just hopeful but inspired. And I believe there are communities such as these across America from Middlebury to Oberlin to Evergreen, and dozens in between.

Dan and I stand on the edge of the vernal pools, newly freed from ice, and we look for wood frogs or salamanders, but it is too early.

“Soon, this place will be alive with spring peepers and everybody else,” Dan says.

I recall a rainy night in the Adirondacks with another group of students at Paul Smith’s College who invited me to join them on “Big Night” and help ferry salamanders across the road so they wouldn’t get hit by cars as they migrate to vernal pools where they will breed. In the Northeast woods, depending on when the ground thaws, this amphibian migration occurs each year in early spring, on the first rainy night when temperatures are in the forties. We cradled yellow-spotted and blue-spotted salamanders in our hands and carried them from one side of the dark road to the other for what seemed like hours. Released, they joined with wood frogs, whose voices were more duck-like than frog-like. Mallards came to mind, a choir of them. This was more than a rescue mission, it was the privilege of aiding a millennial ritual, being in the service of a true rite of spring. And when a car did come, several students would stand in the middle of the road with their hands gesturing to stop—which the vehicle did for as long as it took until the salamanders were safely transported to the other side.

“Students don’t realize how powerful they are,” Dan says. “I think what we have learned is that the administration has to listen to us because ultimately, they not only work for us, the whole institution of Dartmouth depends on us. We pay them.” He laughs. “Well, our parents pay them.” He continues: “College campuses are a small-scale world.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“I mean that Dartmouth is a metaphor for our government and we, the students, are we, the people, and with a vision, hard work, and the capacity to convince enough people to work with you to implement that vision, the world can change.”

Dan and I walk back through the Landmark Tract, taking our time, stopping to note the glacial erratics, enormous granite boulders covered with moss; the beech tree that now bears the circular scars of blight; and the scat of a fisher, an animal I had never seen before. All this a stone’s throw away from the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Dan just completed a short film on these wildlands, beginning a new conversation on campus as to what the highest use of these lands might be.

I wanted to knock on President Kim’s door and talk to him about another kind of health care delivery system, one that doesn’t cost the American taxpayers money, or the Dartmouth students, for that matter. It’s called wildness, and it already has a public option called stewardship and wilderness protection. The students I have had the gift of working with these past twelve weeks are showing us the way.

At the end of our walk, I notice a familiar leaf, but am puzzled. I pick it up.

“Do you have aspens in the East?” I ask. “I thought there were only birches here.”

“We do,” Dan says. “That is a leaf from Populus grandidentata, or bigtooth aspen. I believe in the West, you have Populus tremuloides, or quaking aspen.”

“Thank you,” I say. “I am learning.”

Terry Tempest Williams is the author of “ The Open Space of Democracy” and, most recently, “Finding Beauty in a Broken World.” She is the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah.