Alumni Profile: Nathan Badger (BBT '24)

Nate Badger (BBT ‘24) had never been to New England before he arrived at Penikese Island this past May. The dramatic change of scenery from his hometown of Boise, Idaho, was initially striking. “I was in totally disparate environments, you know, from an island to 3000 feet in the mountains,” he said. But as it turned out, finding connections between the Rocky Mountains and Buzzards Bay was not so difficult. “You had people drawing very similar conclusions to relationality in each place.” 

A junior studying History at the College of Idaho in Caldwell, ID, Nate has long been interested in land ethics. But Gull’s three pillars of labor, academics, and self-governance were an exciting hands-on approach to the liberal arts. During his three weeks on Penikese as a student in the Buzzards Bay Term, Nate found himself immersed in a community that was interested in similar questions – about the liberal arts, about place, and about how to live well. 

“It’s given me an academic voice,” he reflected. “Getting that opportunity to spend three weeks with people and just talk about those topics, I mean, that was the most exciting thing for me.”

The Buzzards Bay Term brings together a cohort of 8-10 undergraduate students to ask critical questions for our current era of climate change: what is the right relation to a place? To our non-human cohabitants? And how can we live well in a time of profound ecological transformation? While living together on Penikese Island for 3+ weeks, students learn from faculty members and each other in a unique, interdisciplinary seminar that blends arts, social sciences, and the natural sciences. Learning continues outside of these seminars as students participate in daily labor projects and self-governance meetings. 

One of Nate’s favorite memories from the island came when his cohort spontaneously decided to bake a cake, no birthdays required. “I forget who started the cake, but when I found out, I said, ‘Let's make some homemade whipped cream!’ And then people went and picked flowers,” he laughed. “And so we all brought our own ingredients and made the most beautiful cake.”

Now back in the mountains, Nate has carried lessons from Penikese with him to class and beyond. He’s even more committed to the liberal arts, which “are not only interesting, but they're wholly necessary.” And as Nate understands it, the types of problems that can be addressed in seminar are the most urgent ones. “I don't see how you can tackle climate change or the political climate we have now without the liberal arts,” he says. “I don't see how we would survive without it.” 

Both on Penikese and back home in Idaho, Nate remains interested in how people respond to the scale and pace of environmental change around them. He’s been staying busy, working with the local government on developing anti-trust legislation to regulate unfair prices in the booming housing markets in Boise. This fall, inspired by Gull, he also co-founded The Placer Institute, with friend Conner Klein, to bring place-based education to his hometown in a period of immense change. The Institute collaborates with the Jim Hall Foothills Learning Center and the Idaho Environmental Education Association to host weekly labor and seminar sessions about land ethics to groups of local high schoolers. 

“[In Boise], we have a full identity built on being a city surrounded by nature," he says. "But what do you do when that nature is being picked away at every single day, and you can see houses encroaching on the foothills? …We sort of maintain our identity when at the same time it's going away, and there's this refusal to acknowledge the changes that are happening.” 

While the idea for the Placer Institute formed while he was out for a walk on Penikese, pursuing this project in Boise has brought new life to familiar questions. “These questions are so place based, but also so universal… The question of, ‘how do you inhabit a place well’ applies to any place, but it has different nuances in any place that you're at.”

Ultimately, the impact of his time at Gull has been broader than he expected, even more than spurring new projects and gaining confidence in class. “I'm realizing that what I do with my life could be so much more impactful than what I thought about previously,” he said.

“It helped change me as a student, as a person, in a good way.”

Applications for the BBT 2025 program will open in mid-December at gullisland.org/apply. Sign up for our newsletter to receive notifications about Gull Island Institute’s 2025 programming!