ENVX Symposium Blog

Students responsible for ENVX 2025 during their twice-weekly meeting in Albany 104Student organizers in ENVS 245, Symposium Planning, have been working hard over the last month launching a new, exciting, experimental approach to our annual Environment Across Boundaries (ENVX) Symposium, featuring dialogue with the agricultural community toward environmental progress.

Students participating last fall in ENVX 2024 laid the groundwork for this year’s Symposium via a series of listening sessions, when we heard from members of our Lewis & Clark Community, and members of the Oregon agricultural community. We started to hear in fall that there is something they share, no matter what their political differences: a common love of land.

We wondered: in these times of heightened political divide, might environmentalists find common ground, and work toward progress, with those who similarly love, and work, the land? That is our exciting question and challenge for Symposium 2025.

Portion of ENVX language, from Symposium 2025 pageSo far, students have developed common language around our ENVX 2025 theme and process. It is not easy to develop wording that may work for everyone across political divides!…but they have found a professional way to convey their theme, “Common Ground: How We Can Engage Across Difference With a Shared Love of Land.”

They then brainstormed on a set of on- and off-campus contacts to whom they would reach out, with invitations to participate in a variety of ways this spring and fall. Here too, they worked hard to craft an invitation email template they could commonly use to maintain consistency in their communications. They also prioritized, from their initial list, key contacts who may play important positions in working groups or as facilitators (see overview for these roles). Invitation emails are going out just now as we speak!

One near-future goal among organizers is to get strong participation from both the Lewis & Clark and agricultural community in a Mar 2 “Farms and Food” field trip and conversation. This big event is coming up in only two weeks! Students in ENVS 245 will be joined by others in ENVS 295, Environmental Engagement, in planning the event, and are inviting students, staff, and faculty from across campus to participate. We are working with our agricultural contacts in the Willamette Valley to encourage those involved in farming or livestock operations to participate in the afternoon meal and dialogue.

We will check in again soon! What we are trying to do is admittedly ambitious, and we may not be one hundred percent successful on all fronts. But it feels good to be doing something positive, and working across boundaries toward environmental progress, in such challenging times in our country.