It was 4:30 a.m. on a weekday last January, a few hundred yards from the western border of Yellowstone National Park. The temperature had dipped to 20 below, and everything for miles seemed asleep beneath a thick blanket of Montana high country snow. It was at this unlikely hour, at this unpleasant temperature, that Sue Nackoney '95 found herself dangling 30 feet in the air. She hung there, in climbing harness and swinging chair, from a tripod constructed of lodgepole pine tree trunks.

Nackoney, along with companions from the Montana environmental group Buffalo Field Campaign, had erected the tripod in the middle of a road to block the transport of Yellowstone Park bison to a nearby slaughterhouse. By mid-morning, Nackoney would be arrested for her act of civil disobedience, the tripod dismantled and six buffalo hauled away by Montana's State Department of Livestock.

While she was at Colby, this may not have been how Nackoney planned to use her biology degree. But for her, science, passion and environmental activism go hand in hand. "It can sometimes be hard to say what civil disobedience accomplishes," Nackoney said. "You may not immediately stop what you're trying to stop. But instead what you're saying is bigger--that your freedom, the most valuable thing people have in this country, is something you're willing to sacrifice for the sake of something else."

Nackoney spent the last two years volunteering for the Buffalo Field Campaign, serving as spokesperson. In this role she employed her biology background to rebut Montana's policy of killing buffalo that roam across Yellowstone Park borders. The state fears the bison will transmit a disease called brucellosis to beef cattle, endangering its valuable livestock industry. Critics argue that the risk of brucellosis transmission is almost non-existent and that wild bison should roam freely.

"What Montana doesn't understand is that the park boundaries are not the boundaries of a complete ecosystem, and buffalo can't be confined to certain areas just because that's what feels safe to people," Nackoney said. "I think this is about a real fear of wilderness. It's an institutionalized fear, a cultural fear, and it's endemic to the West."

Nackoney has long been fascinated by such intersections of people and nature. As a biology major, Nackoney focused her studies on the relationship between humans and the environment.

The last few months have seen a shift from Nackoney's direct-action work to a less controversial form of environmental activism--membership in Arbor Eden, a 22-acre cooperative farm outside Portland, Ore. People in a nearby community buy shares of the farm, where Nackoney and her partners grow organic produce. The farmers provide shareholders with a box of food a week and donate vegetables to soup kitchens and the needy. In addition, Nackoney is working on an environmental education program, in which children visit the farm and surrounding forest.

"I feel like I'm using my biology degree quite a lot in trying to do sustainable agriculture," Nackoney said. "And I feel like all the work I've done is pretty integrated. Whether it's helping the buffalo or working on forest protection or raising healthy food, those things are all connected for me."

–Matthew Testa '91