A Small Island Offers Big Lessons in Sustainability – State of the Planet

Far from the bustle of Columbia’s campus, a group of undergraduate students in degree programs managed by the Climate School Office of Undergraduate Programs recently journeyed to Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts, to explore sustainability through lived experience.

The Cuttyhunk Practicum, which began in 2024 as a partnership between Columbia and Barnard professors Jason Smerdon and Sandra Goldmark and the Gull Island Institute’s Classroom-To-Island initiative, offers sustainable development students a hands-on opportunity to examine what it means to inhabit a place well.

Designed to fulfill the program’s one-credit practicum requirement, the course invites students to explore sustainability at a local scale by spending three immersive days on Cuttyhunk Island, a small community off the coast of Massachusetts. “Sustainability is an applied problem,” said Smerdon, “and it is critical that we allow students to engage place-based learning as a means of understanding how local challenges and opportunities ultimately define specific sustainability pathways in a given location or community.”

Columbia students at Cuttyhunk. Photo credit: Rowena Wilson-Olivo

“It’s a fantastic course that brings to life the sustainable systems we’ve only read about, offering a rare chance to experience how a small island community puts those principles into daily practice,” said Charlie Nam, a sustainable development junior.

The course begins with a preparatory workshop on Columbia’s campus before students travel to the island. There, they engage with local leaders, members of the Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe, small business owners and municipal officials while participating in the daily rhythms of island life.

Columbia students at Cuttyhunk. Photo credit: Amy Chen

While learning about the facilities and operations of the island, students take on the full responsibility of planning, preparing and serving their own meals—a process that becomes an exercise in resource management and collective decision-making.

This integration of academic learning, physical work and shared governance encourages deep reflection, collaboration and emotional connection among students and with the local environment.

For the on-site instructors, this participatory model fosters not just environmental awareness, but also a sense of possibility and community. “In addition to working very hard and thinking very hard together, we are able to find real sources of play and enjoyment as a group,” said Ana Isabel Keilson, co-founder and co-executive director for the Gull Island Institute, underscoring the sense of agency that is critical for students entering the field of sustainability .

Gabriel Najum Spratt, an anthropology major with a concentration in sustainable development, said his favorite part of the class was learning about the oyster aquaculture at the Cuttyhunk Shellfish Farm with its founder Seth Garfield.

“In NYC, very rarely do we get to eat straight from the source. Pulling oysters out of the [farm’s] water and slurping them down right then and there was magical. Experiences like this accentuate a need for fresh food in urban areas,” he said.

Students learn about oysters. Photo credit: Jason Smerdon

These local experiences reflect the deeper question that anchors the course: What does it mean to live in a place well?

Rather than relying solely on readings, students are challenged to interpret the landscape, objects and ecosystems around them—experiencing the  island as its own living text and encouraging them to connect abstract concepts with concrete actions. On-site lectures explore the natural and human histories of the Buzzards Bay region, including the legacies of European-Indigenous encounters and contemporary climate adaptation efforts.

Through their time on Cuttyhunk, students come to see islands not just as remote locations, but as sites of convergence, offering unique forms of knowledge shaped by their community, ecological history and interdependence.

Through the course, students begin to understand sustainability not just as a global challenge, but as a deeply local, relational practice that reshapes how they learn, live and act in the world.

Immersed in the island environment, they begin to connect those insights to the urban landscapes of their own lives in Manhattan, reconsidering how they engage with sustainability in more intentional, grounded ways.

Keilson explained that it is rare for students, in the context of a liberal arts education, to experience a place in which all of its systems—water, power, waste, transportation, economic, social and economic—can be experienced on such a tractable scale.

“The structure of the three ‘pillars’ of our pedagogy (academics, labor and self-governance), allows students to collectively process what they are learning from a range of angles, which in turn enables them both inside and outside of the classroom to take real responsibility for their education—and for the impact that their education makes, now and in the future,” she said.

Through the course, students begin to understand sustainability not just as a global challenge, but as a deeply local, relational practice that reshapes how they learn, live and act in the world.

“The trip reminded me that any climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts I work on in my career should be grounded in, and learn from, place-based knowledge,” said sustainable development student Rebeka Tatham.

The trip was made possible by generous funding from the Denning Global Fellows in Sustainable Development Program and the Schwoeffermann-Menz fund.

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