“Camping, hiking, fishing, boating…My parents raised me to be an adventurer,” says Skye McKinnell, a senior environmental science major from Salem, Ore. It didn’t take long for her to realize that she wanted a career where she could work outside.
Benjamin and Rianna Isaak-Krauss bring a unique perspective to the 2018 cohort of Merry Lea’s Sustainability Leadership Semester (SLS): they are seminary students rather than undergraduates. The married couple will graduate from the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS) in 2019 with credits from the SLS on their transcripts.
Read about the first seminary students and the first Tanzanian to live at Merry Lea's Rieth Village; see how the Kinderforest program has grown and keep up on staff transitions. Our public programs and our nearest town round out the mix.
How do you know the right time to retire? Luke Gascho, Merry Lea’s executive director, has asked this question of friends.
Living in a rural area is a new challenge for some students who take the Sustainability Leadership Semester at Merry Lea Environmental Learning Center of Goshen College, Wolf Lake, Ind. For Rheannon Starr, Merriam, Ind., it is a chance to get a different perspective on her home community which is just ten minutes away.
The Enchanted Forest at Merry Lea Environmental Learning Center of Goshen College, Wolf Lake, Ind., makes Northern Indiana a bit more magical each autumn. The nature center offers children and their favorite adults a night hike where animals talk. Friday and Saturday October 26 and 27, 7 to 8:30 p.m. are the 2018 dates.
Merry Lea’s Dr. Joel Pontius is a student of foraging. Whether he’s leading students on the Sustainability Leadership Semester’s canoe trip or boating on Alaska’s Cook Inlet, Joel has his eyes peeled for wild foods and his ears attuned to stories about them.
We begin a series looking at Merry Lea's place within its surrounding human community. The Merry Lea Sustainable Farm figures heavily in this issue. Also find out who became a master bird bander and who went to Alaska; who received a gift of honey and who gave time to help with sorghum.
Merry Lea’s master’s students prepare ecosystem presentations for their Natural History course. Throughout the course, they’ve each studied a particular locale, learning the species found there and the ways the ecosystem changes over time. Andrew Beal and TJ Rayhill kicked off the presentations with a look at areas near the Glacial Retreat Center.
It was not your typical pasture walk. Cows, chickens, nut trees, fruit trees, grapevines and raspberries were all sharing the same five acres at the Merry Lea Sustainable Farm (MLSF), Wolf Lake, Ind.
