Sterling Terrain V02 - Flipbook - Page 40
38 | Sterling College
Labor of Love
Written By
Kristie Kapp ‘80
I’m a huge supporter of Sterling and it has definitely influenced
my life. I give every year. I was in the Grassroots Program, so
only in Craftsbury for a year. Grassroots was a one-year program (now referred to as a gap year) in forestry, wildlife management, and agriculture. I was an impressionable 18 year old,
and the thinking and experiences that the instructors put forward had a major impression on me.
Sterling created a foundation for me that I launched from, as I
think it did for a lot of people. It helped us position ourselves in
the world and set expectations for a personal responsibility to
these big picture concepts.
I can still remember our discussions about the tragedy of the
commons, the 10-page article on it that Ned Houston gave
to us, the Sand County Almanac, and Barry Commoner’s The
Closing Circle, among others. I still have them on my bookshelf,
and I pull them out once in a while.
This was the ’80s. Having grown up in suburbia, this was a
whole new world. In my first week I had to decide if I was going
to be an Aggie (focus on agriculture) or a Woodchuck (focus on
forestry and wildlife). It was a tough decision to make in that
first week on campus. I went with Aggie.
The whole idea of organic gardening was very fringe – there
were these people in Pennsylvania that put out an Organic Gardening magazine, and that was about it. But I felt it was tangible and I could play a part.
I didn’t go into farming directly when I left Sterling. Land was so
expensive at the time, and the marketing for small farms was
non-existent – farms were going big. So when I left Sterling,
I enrolled at Warren Wilson in North Carolina and majored in
environmental studies with a minor in agriculture. I kept my
fingers in the soil as much as I could. At my core, I knew that
growing food was what I wanted to do. If I hadn’t gone to Sterling, I think I would have missed out on finding a crucial part of
what makes me whole. The dream at the time for me was 100
acres in Vermont.
While I was finishing my undergraduate degree, a former neighbor who was then in England, called me for help. She had married a farmer, was in her 60s, and wanted my help on their farm.
She knew that I had been to Sterling and had some sheep tending and lambing experience. The UK was going through a major
transition, with too many dairy cows, they were encouraging
more farms to buy sheep. England was paying people to buy
sheep. I graduated from college, went to England, and stayed
for a couple years. It was an amazing experience where I was
asked to manage this small flock and set them up for a solid
future in sheep farming.
Once I came back to the states, I ended up working for an environmental consulting firm. It was a job, but I didn’t love it. We
were trying to help people do these projects in the right way
but, in the end, they were still building housing developments.
I always tell my kids, it’s just as important to know what you
don’t want to do as what you do want to do. I decided I needed to see what other opportunities were available to me so I
enrolled in graduate school at the Yale School of Forestry and
Environmental Studies.
My next job was with Coastal Zone Management where I worked
with coastal towns on planning issues. My world included a lot
of permit reviews, but at home we had a big garden. By the
time I was married and had kids, we had an acre and a half here
in West Barnstable, Massachusetts. As my kids got older, I was
frustrated with work, and school wasn’t working for my kids, so
I decided that now was the time to go for the dream of homeschooling and growing.
The concept of living a livelihood came from Sterling. It is a
privilege to be able to pick a career but more important to know
what fuels you and to have the tools to live your life the way
that feels right. In my life, that means a life that isn’t separate
from the natural world. Sterling also showed me that hard work
can be intensely satisfying. Making money is important for lots
of reasons, but making money doesn’t leave you with a rich,
satisfied feeling.
I started with tomatoes and mesclun mix, and then I segwayed
into flowers, but that never fed me. Growing flowers is not as
meaningful as feeding people. And then came permaculture.
I had heard about permaculture, but one day someone put it
in front of me again, and I realized that it was a perfect way
to express my passion for agriculture (manipulating nature to
harvest a yield) and my profession of ecology, (understanding