The Center's unique remote location and highly qualified faculty with decades of experience in Northern research and education combine to provide a thoughtful and stimulating opportunity to investigate the environment, peoples, and processes of the Circumpolar North. 

The Center is located in Wolcott, Vermont, a short 15 minute drive from nearby Sterling College. Our northern New England location is actually a few miles nearer the equator than to the North Pole; however, this setting just under the Canadian border is subject to a climate that is far colder, during both summer and winter, than is normal for these latitudes. The Center site provides a natural subarctic laboratory on the periphery of an exceptional example of boreal forest and muskeg in northern New England. 

The Center sits at the edge of Bear Swamp, a rare remnant of the glacial ages. Tucked in a shallow basin amidst stands of balsam fir, red spruce, sugar maple, and paper birch, the swamp acts as a cold sink. As the boreal forest spread northward in the wake of the receding continental ice sheet some ten thousand years ago, Bear Swamp retained its subarctic character. Today, the swamp provides a glimpse of the far North. The sphagnum, heaths, and stunted black spruce trees found here are comparable to those of interior Alaska. Boreal chickadees and black-backed woodpeckers frequent the swamp, as do fishers, bears, coyotes, deer, and cold-hardy mice and voles. Bear Swamp's physical, biological, and climatological features compare to those found only much further north. Consequently, the Center's location provides an ideal and accessible environment for investigation of regions of Arctic geography and ecology.

The Center houses offices, a common room and kitchenette, seminar rooms, a laboratory, darkroom, computer room, and a unique library. Our library contains 4,000 volumes ranging in subject from sociology and anthropology to botany, zoology, and ornithology, from native art to northern film and literature. Students have access to a valuable collection of maps, government reports, documents, and monographs relating to northern research and exploration. In addition, we have an uncommon collection of more than 70 polar journals and periodicals, some of which date back to the turn of the century, as well as an extensive map collection and a herbarium containing approximately 10,000 specimens from throughout the northern world. Computers are available to students to type papers and reports. Access to the internet is also available from the Center.

Sterling College is conveniently located 8 miles from the Center in Craftsbury Common, Vermont, a classic New England village of white clapboard buildings clustered around the town common. The Sterling curriculum integrates research and discussion, field studies, culture and history, and the dynamics of human relations in a learning environment that combines solid academics with experiential, hands-on learning. Academic programs include:
- Northern Studies
- Outdoor Education and Leadership
- Sustainable Agriculture
- Conservation Ecology

With a strong internship program and Global Field Studies in Canada, Japan, India, Nepal, and Scandinavia, students learn about social ecology and environmental sustainability. The Sterling College campus offers fourteen buildings on 130 acres. In addition to the typical classrooms, labs, and computer rooms, Sterling College offers a small livestock farm, solar powered barns, over an acre of certified organic garden space, and woodland trails. Other facilities include greenhouses, a maple sugaring house, a 30' climbing tower, and a challenge course. The human dynamics of sustainable living are explored through community involvement both on and off campus. Community is vital at Sterling College and students play an important role in creating and sustaining Sterling's evolving community.

About Northern Studies

The polar regions include about one quarter of the land surface of the face of the earth, and nearly 98 percent of all fresh water is frozen in the polar ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland. Yet the polar regions contain less than one per cent of the world's population, and vast areas of the Far North and Antarctica are totally unpopulated. With the exception of the Amazon basin and some of the larger deserts, virtually all of the major wilderness areas in the world lie within the polar regions. 

The North, a land of boreal forest, arctic tundra, and frozen seas, is a place of extremes. Encompassing Alaska and Canada, Greenland and Scandinavia, and the vast reaches of northern Russia, the region contains about a quarter of the land surface on earth, some 15 million square miles. The northern seas contain some of the richest concentrations of marine life on the planet. Today, the North is home to only one percent of the world's human population, but it holds resources and wildlands that are essential to all of humankind.

In the North, the subtle and the sublime are starkly juxtaposed. Dwarfed tundra plants sprout flowers the size of push-pins in the lee of boulders dropped by glaciers long since passed. Strength and fragility exist together. Lichens and heaths survive the harsh conditions of polar winters, yet scars left by humans take decades to heal.

The North is both pristine and imperiled. Often called the last frontier, where wolves run with undulating herds of caribou, the region is being stripped of its mineral resources, and irresponsible development threatens to further this destruction. It is a place where the past and the future struggle to find compromise in the present. Indigenous people and traditional folkways face the pressures of industrial society and tourism.

A large proportion of the species of boreal and arctic plants and animals are of almost universal occurrence throughout the far North. In other cases, a complex of closely related species forms a circumpolar distribution pattern. Other features held in common by most Far Northern areas are a similar history of recent glaciation and a general similarity of climate and weather patterns. Because of the comparative uniformity of the Far Northern environment, information gained through research in one part of the Arctic or subarctic is often applicable to other northern areas thousands of miles away. In no part of the world is international cooperation in scientific efforts of more potential value than in the far North.

Although the polar regions have been commercially important as sources of furs, fisheries products, and a few minerals for hundreds of years, it is only recently that a general recognition of the potential economic significance of the polar regions has come about. Now, major discoveries and development in the polar regions increasingly impact the economy of the industrialized nations of the world.

The Alaska oil pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez is the world's largest engineering project, and current political initiatives to expand oil resources to the Alaska Wildlife Refuge are rife with controversy and potential. Canada's hydroelectric projects in James Bay have powered much of the Eastern Seaboard and displaced many native peoples. Iron, uranium, and other minerals in Canada, gold, coal and oil in Siberia, geothermal power in Iceland, and hydroelectric power throughout the far North are only a few examples of the invasions of the polar regions by modern technology.

The particular fragility of ecological balance in the Arctic makes it a prime laboratory for understanding temperate ecologies. For instance, during the last ice age most of Canada and the United States as far south as New York, Omaha, and Seattle were covered with glacial ice up to a mile or more thick. On the other hand, if the present glaciers were to melt, seas would rise 100 feet or more inundating many of the major population centers of the world. In the field of scientific investigation, the contributions to human knowledge made by scientists working in the Far North have often been disproportionately important, largely due to the nature of the North itself. The polar regions contain simplified and idealized ecosystems in which the relationships between organisms and their environment can often be elucidated in fine detail; from studies of this sort, general ecological principles have often emerged.

The far Northern environment offers many challenges, which must be met with intelligence and adaptability. Few people who spend long periods of time in the polar regions come away unmoved by the magnificence in which they have lived, even though they may have difficulty in articulating their feelings. Northern Studies provides an ideal discipline for rigorous, intelligent research in a demanding and rewarding environment.

Transfer Credit

Credit earned at Sterling College is expressed in semester hours. The transfer of any credits to another institution of higher education is always at the discretion of the receiving institution.  At a student's request, Sterling College will make every effort to communicate with these institutions so that they understand the nature of these programs.  On request, course syllabi, faculty qualifications, and other pertinent information are sent to those administrators making decision on credit transfer.  Sterling College may also accept credits transferred in from other institutions.  Students should speak to the Dean of the College about issues of transfer credit.

Accreditation

Sterling College is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges.

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