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Identifier
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BeugMike
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Title
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Mike Beug Oral History Interview
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Date
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1 September 2021
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8 September 2021
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Creator
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Mike Beug
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Contributor
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Eric Severn
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extracted text
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Michael Beug
Interviewed by Eric Severn
The Evergreen State College oral history project
September 1, 2021
FINAL
Severn: Mike, just start at the beginning.
Beug: The very beginning was May 18, 1944, in a hospital in Austin, Texas, when I shared a birth date
and roomed next to Linda Byrd Johnson.
Severn: Really?
Beug: My folks couldn’t get any medical attention because Lyndon Johnson was unknown in those days,
but Lady Byrd Johnson was already very, very rich and very, very famous. That was the beginning. It
was because my dad was in the Air Force—it was World War II—and he was stationed at Bergstrom Air
Force Base.
By the time I was two, the war was over, and my dad moved back, accompanied by my mom, to
Minnesota, where he’d been born, my mom had been born, and my younger brother was born. But
with no work, they moved out to Seattle right after that. I was just over two years old when we moved
to Seattle. We were in Seattle until about the end of the fifth grade.
Soon after he went to work for Boeing, but soon after they were on strike for a couple of years,
he had started building a house. He had the one-car garage finished and Boeing went out on strike for a
couple, three years, so we lived in that one-car garage.
He started college when I was in the first grade and finished in four years. When he got done,
he was able to accept promotions at Boeing. He graduated magna cum laude in economics, but never
actually used it. He stayed with Boeing, and we moved to Moses Lake. I went to two different
kindergartens, two or three different grade schools. I hated all of my teachers until the sixth grade
when we were in Moses Lake and my teacher was a man named Mr. Six.
The neat thing about it is as soon as he saw my name, he said, “Oh, I was taught by a Hilda Beug.
Are you related?” That was my great aunt. That was my first really good experience in school, because I
remember the earlier female teachers, they would hit my hand with a ruler, because I wrote lefthanded,
and they’d move the pen to the right hand. That didn’t work. They loved to sing these songs, like “Little
girls are sugar and spice and everything nice, and little boys are rats and snails and puppy dog tails.” I
took great offense at that.
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But they recognized me a bit because I was chosen to represent the school in, I think it was third
or fourth grade, in a Quizdown, which was a program broadcast out of Seattle, where one grade school
competed against another for prizes for the school. I managed to come in first for our school.
Severn: What kind of quiz was it, or quizzes? What kind of questions?
Beug: In junior high school, again, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to school. I wasn’t very interested in it.
At some point in junior high, I’d entered this statewide essay contest on the challenge of a conservation
in politics. When they had the award ceremony to announce that I’d taken first place in the state, one
of my buddies got up and said, “He’s fishing this week.” Because that was always much more important
to me than going to school. [laughter]
Severn: You win this essay contest in sixth grade.
Beug: It was eighth or ninth grade.
Severn: And you’re still living in Moses Lake. Is that right?
Beug: Yeah, we’re living in Moses Lake until—I started at Moses Lake High School, but just before the
first term was over, my dad got transferred back to Seattle, and then I went to Mount Rainier High
School, which was my second high school.
Severn: What was the essay on, if I can ask?
Beug: That essay was on conservation. I don’t really remember the details from a long time ago. I went
to Mount Rainier High School, and I was just there for half of a year. But right away, all the teachers
really cottoned on to me. I was almost expelled from high school in Moses Lake, but I got along really
well with the teachers at Mount Rainier.
In fact, my chemistry teacher, two things. Within a few weeks of being at the school, she gave
me keys to the building and the chemistry lab’s storerooms. I could come in on weekends and do
chemistry experiments, because I was already really fascinated with chemistry. I won a chemistry set in
a blueberry pie eating contest in the seventh or eighth grade. [laughing]
I loved playing with chemistry, and this teacher let me do that. Her name was Miss Berdan.
Years later, I was with Paul Stamets, an Evergreen graduate of some fame, and we were on Orcas Island,
and he wanted to go see his high school chemistry teacher, and it was Miss Berdan. We had the same
teacher.
Severn: Really?
Beug: Then I transferred to Chief Sealth High School, so that was my third high school. I think I lettered
in golf and tennis at the first high school, probably golf only at the second high school, and then golf only
in the third high school. That was one of my priorities. I rarely stayed in school. I would leave at the
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lunch hour and play golf the rest of the day. I typically skipped all my afternoon classes, but I would
come in early and help the chemistry teacher set things up.
I had a total of two years of chemistry and a year of physics and a year of calculus, plus I took a
special night class in Boolean algebra. I would do nuclear physics class at the University of Washington
on the weekends. It was this special thing where one student from each high school got to go to it.
Severn: Mike, in those high school years, what was it that initially attracted your attention to
chemistry? You were interested in it in eleventh grade or tenth grade or so?
Beug: I started chemistry in the tenth grade, so I took chemistry in the tenth and eleventh grade. By the
twelfth grade, I’d had two years of chemistry under my belt. I was going to be a chemist. One thing I
knew for sure, I was not going to be a teacher. It was all about being a chemist.
I didn’t have a lot of patience with school in general. I did enter another essay contest my junior
year. It was on the challenge of career and politics. I took second in the state on that essay contest, so I
attended the world fair for that award.
Severn: This is interesting, though, because you’re obviously, at an early age, showing this real talent as
a writer. You’re winning essay contests. Yet, you’re thinking as science. You want to be a chemist.
What is the thing that has your attention about chemistry?
Beug: My English teachers thought I was the worst student around. They hated me with a passion
because I didn’t have a lot of tolerance for all the grammatical rules. I had a pretty free-flowing way of
writing, and I enjoyed writing my way. They detested having to give me an A, but they had no other
option. [laughing] I got through high school. Actually, there were four of us. I was in a four-way tie for
first in my class of 650 students.
Severn: That’s interesting, too, because I am not a chemist, I am not super familiar with the sciences. I
am very much a student of the humanities. But you’re not interested in grammatical rules, yet you are
drawn to a discipline that is very much informed by a set of rules. We’re talking about the sciences. Do
you have any sense about what was going on there, what the attraction was? Was there a kind of
creativity that you saw in chemistry that you didn’t see elsewhere, or anything like that?
Beug: A, I loved to read. I read passionately. I was very interested in writing. I actually examined out of
the first year of chemistry and the first year of calculus at Harvey Mudd College, where I went to college,
so I was able to take extra courses in literature and history, so I always loaded up with as much
literature, history and economics as I could fit in my schedule. I minimized the sciences. I was just
determined to do chemistry. I was undeterred.
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But I remember writing an entire 20-page paper all in iambic pentameter. [laughter] I was
partly influenced maybe by my dad starting college when I was in the first grade. He would read Conrad
and other interesting literature aloud to us kids. He was working fulltime at Boeing doing graveyard
shift, and school in the days. But in the evening before he’d go to sleep to prepare for work, he would
read to us whatever literature he was doing. I developed this great love of literature, and appreciation
for writing, and writing styles, but left it at that.
Severn: Was the historical context of the moment when you were in high school, did that shape your
thinking about the sciences at all? This is the Cold War era, and there’s definitely a premium on the
sciences around this time.
Beug: Yeah, this is the Sputnik era, and so this race to catch up in the sciences, so there was a lot of
emphasis and support for people going into the sciences. But I also belonged to this group called the
Junior Agitators, a political discussion group where I remember for one of our meetings, we brought in
the chairman of the US Communist Party. We also brought in the founder of the John Birch Society.
Severn: Wow!
Beug: We caught hell for talking to the Communists and praise for talking to that frigging conservation
s.o.b. [laughter] So, I was politically active. The real surprise to me in high school, I was voted the most
inspirational athlete in the school. And I’m a golfer! [laughing] How did the jocks come together and
vote for me? [laughing] That was a total shock.
Severn: That’s really interesting. At this point in time, you were an essayist, you were an aspirational
golfer, and you were an aspiring chemist.
Beug: Yes.
Severn: And you were politically openminded. You were open to discussions with Communists at a
time when those kinds of discussions were not smiled upon.
Beug: To put it mildly.
Severn: Right. What was that discussion like?
Beug: The Communist was a frigging idiot. So was the John Bircher. One was so far left, the other was
so far right, that they were identical in their philosophy.
Severn: Totally.
Beug: I couldn’t really distinguish the difference between them. They didn’t impress a single one of us,
either one of them. Just total disgust for both.
Severn: But that in its own right—I don’t know where your thinking was before that conversation
exactly but recognizing at a fairly young age that political polarization tends to lead to simplification is
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formative in its own right, and in high school. A lot of people don’t arrive at that conclusion. It takes a
while.
Beug: Yeah. We had a thing in Washington called Boys State, so I was the school representative to Boys
State, about government. I never wanted to go into it myself, but I certainly studied it carefully and
informally.
Severn: The world of politics was on your mind then, too, very much so.
Beug: Very much so.
Severn: What started that? You’ve got chemistry, you’ve got your love of books. Where did your
interest in politics, policy, conservation—all that stuff—come from?
Beug: Who knows? [laughter] My parents were liberal. My grandmother had been a one-room-school
teacher, and then became the town librarian at the Carnegie Library in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, so
there’s that education background. But my dad had left home at 14, graduated from high school at 16,
married at 18 to a woman six years older, who was a high school dropout.
I had wonderful parents. At the same time that my dad was going to college, my mom got her
GED degree. Education was just part of our family life and what we talked about. My folks regularly
consulted with me about things and asked my opinion and honored my opinion.
Severn: That’s so important.
Beug: I was lucky with parents.
Severn: Okay. You’re in high school. Have you moved to Seattle yet? Are you back in Seattle?
Beug: Yes. We moved to Seattle halfway through my first year in high school, halfway through the
sophomore year. We first lived out by SeaTac Airport, and that’s why I was at Mount Rainier High
School. Then we moved into the West Seattle area, and I went to Chief Sealth High School for the last
two years of high school. So, three different high schools and three different chemistry teachers.
[laughter]
Severn: High school is done. You’re in West Seattle. What happens now? Where do we go?
Beug: It was time to apply to college. I had only planned to apply to one college—that was Caltech—
and my high school chemistry teacher thought that Harvey Mudd College would be a far superior choice.
He also said I really should apply to a third, just in case, so I applied to the University of Washington as a
backup.
I got the Sloan Scholarship at Caltech, and I got a nice scholarship at Harvey Mudd College, not
quite as good a scholarship as Caltech. The difference is Harvey Mudd is part of the Claremont College
system. There was Scripps College for women across the street to the south, and there was Claremont
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men’s college, there was Pomona College, so there’s this huge interesting and diverse environment, so
I’m really glad I chose Harvey Mudd.
I went there and I had a scholarship in addition to my Harvey Mudd Scholarship. I had a music
scholarship at Pomona College. They had me playing string bass, which I didn’t really like. I’m really a
cellist at heart. I played in the symphony, but I was able to take a minimum number of science courses
at Harvey Mudd. I took classes at Pomona College, classes in economics and other subjects; and social
sciences at Pitzer College for women; German literature auf Deutsch at Scripps College for women. I
took classes at all of the other colleges and took advantage of them. I was captain of the golf team,
which was a joint team between Harvey Mudd and Claremont men’s college, so I still kept up my golf.
At the end of my years at Harvey Mudd, the Dean of Faculty told me I had set one very
interesting record. I had made both deans’ lists every single semester as a student. The deans’ lists
were the mid-quarter failure warning, which I got every single semester, and the honors at the end of
the semester. [laughter] Because it usually took me a while to get around to buying my books.
Severn: Really? You would really walk that line? You’d be in a precarious situation mid-semester and
then you’d pull it together?
Beug: Yeah, and I managed to get myself an aeronautical scholarship and joined the Bates Program and
got to get my pilot’s license and the training toward a commercial pilot’s license. They were a little
reticent to take on a chemist because of all the time we have to spend in the lab. They chose 10
students a year to be in the Bates Aeronautical Program.
One of my two instructors, Iris Critchell, I just talked to her a couple months ago by the phone.
She’s just passed 100 years old. She doesn’t fly very much anymore, but she still flies. Still sharp as a
tack. She’s so famous that when Boeing passed away, she was given the Boeing Archives. When
Lockheed passed away, she was given the Lockheed Archives. Her picture hangs in the Pentagon for her
flight in World War II.
Severn: Wow.
Beug: She won a Bronze Medal in the 1936 Berlin Olympics in breaststroke for swimming. This
incredible woman. They became an extra family, Howard and Iris Critchell. Howard, the husband,
passed away about seven, eight years ago. My first book came out in 2014, so he would have passed
away in 2016, so it’s been five years ago. We would stay at their place.
The flying program was called the Bates Program, and the place where they had people stay,
they called the Bates Motel, which is in a wing of the house and is part of their house. My wife and I
spent a lot of time in the Bates Motel. It’s just another little typical in joke.
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That experience was amazing and formative. Then it was on to choosing a graduate school. I
was only going to apply to one school, and it was Yale. They told me, “You really need to apply to two
graduate schools,” so I applied to the University of Washington as a backup. I got the fellowship at Yale,
and Yale said, “Your fellowship is guaranteed for the first year.” But the University of Washington said,
“We were so desperate to get you after high school, we’re so glad you’ve applied again.” They
guaranteed me a full ride for my whole time, all the way through the PhD, where Yale only guaranteed
the first year, and after that, who knows?
I wanted to do a certain kind of highly theoretical work and I chose a thesis advisor. He
immediately switched projects to a biochemical project. I wasn’t too happy about that, but he had me
apply for a National Institute of Health fellowship. I had no idea how rare and difficult those were to
get, but I got it. That paid the rest of my graduate work, through to the PhD.
I did research on this enzyme called carbonic anhydrase. That leads up to what brought me to
becoming a teacher, which is a story. You want me to move to that now?
Severn: Sure, but I don’t want to press this too much. I just think it’s interesting. You have this really
wide, eclectic interests—golfing, flying, you also are a musician, you’re interested in literature, and you
are a chemist. This is all undergrad, grad school. If this isn’t the kind of way that you think about this
stuff, that’s fine, but do you find any through line for this stuff? Is there anything that brings this stuff
together for you, anything particular? Or is it this is just stuff you’re into?
Beug: It’s the broader perspective. It’s an integrated whole. I didn’t have a lot of patience with people
who are just focused on chemistry and that was their whole life, but I thought that was a good way to
make a living, and the living that I would want. I decided on that route and pursued it.
Severn: There really was for you, at a fairly young age, this sense of a broader constellation of how
things hang together in a certain sense. You didn’t want to just focus on one thing.
Beug: That’s fair, yeah.
Severn: Tell me how your dissertation led to teaching.
Beug: I was about a month short of finishing up my research, and then starting to write my thesis, and
my thesis advisor asked me to look at whether or not DDT and dieldrin inhibited the enzyme I was
working on, which is called carbonic anhydrase. In about a week, I went through the work, and said, “It
doesn’t inhibit it.”
But I was not yet an environmentalist. I had not been aware of the thought that the inhibition
of carbonic anhydrase by DDT and dieldrin was what was causing eggshell thinning in birds. When I
published the paper in Biochemistry, the editor said, “This is so important, it also needs to go into
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Science.” I submitted a short version of the paper to Science, and it was rejected, saying, “This isn’t
interesting. It’s well-known stuff.” A couple months later, there’s my exact paper in print in Science
with a different author, the author who happened to be the reviewer of my original submission.
Severn: Wait, the exact paper?
Beug: Exact. Word for word.
Severn: They just straight lifted your paper and stuck another name on it?
Beug: They put their name. They rejected it as of no interest, submitted it under their own name, and
got it published.
Severn: Oh, my gawd! That is sinister.
Beug: Science wasn’t going to do anything about it. I had a couple of Nobel laureates intervene for me,
and Science’s solution was to agree to publish the paper again, this time under my name, but no
explanation whatsoever. Just under my name.
This paper appears under my name, and Jeff Kelly, who got hired by Evergreen a couple months
before I did, contacted me and said, “Why are you publishing something that somebody else has just
published?” So, I was in this very weird situation, but I became the hero of industry. I was in Chemical &
Engineering News, I was in Newsweek magazine, as proving that DDT could not be causing eggshell
thinning.
As part of this, I had written to this prominent ornithologist at Cornell University and said, “I’m
confident what’s going on is not the carbonate transport that’s being inhibited by the enzyme, it’s the
calcium transport.” I suggested that he look into that, and I knew our lab wasn’t doing that sort of work.
This guy wrote back to my thesis advisor thanking him for the advice. My thesis advisor really reamed
me out. He said I should not have given any advice to this guy. We might have wanted to do this kind of
work ourselves down the line and I should keep my mouth shut.
I said, “The combination of those two experiences, I didn’t want to deal with teaching at the
university level.” I considered it too cutthroat and dishonest. I didn’t like my thesis advisor’s response,
nor did I like having a paper stolen. I also didn’t like how industry had twisted my work to use it to their
own advantage.
I canceled my industrial interviews, and I was the only white male in the whole 60-student
department who had even gotten an interview. I called up my undergraduate thesis advisor, and on the
spot, he says he’s going on sabbatical leave, and offered me a position running his lab for the year he
was gone at Harvey Mudd College. That was it.
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I also applied to Evergreen that year. It would have been the first year at Evergreen. I didn’t
even get an answer back from Evergreen, so I went down to Harvey Mudd, started teaching there on a
visiting appointment. I was there two months, and I was offered a tenure-track position at Harvey
Mudd, not just the visitor I had come on. I told them I would stay unless Evergreen offered me a
position. Again, no letters from Evergreen, no answers.
At Christmastime, I just flew up and presented myself, and talked to anyone who I could talk to,
presented some seminars. I was told how to finish my application. They wanted two letters from
students. I went back to Harvey Mudd, and I asked two of the freshmen to write for me, and the entire
freshman class wrote for me.
Severn: Wow.
Beug: I still didn’t hear anything from Evergreen. Months went by—in fact, almost four months went
by—and I went in. My pay was so low, I couldn’t even afford a house with air conditioning. We were
living in southern California.
I went in to see the Dean of Faculty and I asked for a raise. I wanted to afford a place where I
could at least have air conditioning. He said, “No,” and I quit. I resigned my position at Harvey Mudd on
the spot.
Severn: Without a job to go to.
Beug: And I walked out. My wife and I had talked. She said she would be able to get a research
position again at the University of Washington Hospital, and that’s what we would do. I was walking
back to my office and the chairman came out and said that Evergreen was on the line on the phone.
Ten thousand faculty had applied for a position, and they had hired Jeff Kelly a couple months
before me. Identical background, a Harvey Mudd graduate, but three years my senior. He was a senior
when I was a freshman. We knew each other because I’d started research as a freshman, which is fairly
unusual. I knew Evergreen would never hire me after hiring Jeff, so I’d given up. There it was.
Severn: You were pursuing Evergreen. You knew about Evergreen.
Beug: No, I knew about where Evergreen was, and that it was a small school, where it was close to
skiing, which I loved; steelhead fishing, which I craved; and fabulous mushrooming.
Severn: Your pursuit of Evergreen wasn’t necessarily about the project of Evergreen itself.
Beug: I didn’t have a clue.
Severn: You had ulterior motives.
Beug: I did not have a clue.
Severn: Got it. But you get it. You’ve got to go now. You’ve got to go do the thing at Evergreen.
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Beug: Right.
Severn: What was it like wanting to ski and fish and mushroom, and then showing up at this college that
you had no idea what the institutional project was about, and suddenly being confronted with all that
Evergreen is?
Beug: Pure fun. [laughter] It was fabulous. But they put me in the contract pool my first year. Quite
isolated. And there’s no Lab Building yet. I couldn’t be a chemist. I didn’t know anybody. I was
probably the only person that had no connection to other faculty that had already been hired, or to the
deans.
Severn: That’s right.
Beug: But there was one other person from Harvey Mudd, but that’s hardly a famous liberal arts school.
It’s probably the finest place in the country to get an engineering, chemistry or physics degree, but
hardly what you would think of as fodder for going to Evergreen.
Steve Herman found me almost immediately, and he was looking for my head on a platter
because he was the ornithologist. He knew of my work. We talked, and we designed this program
called The Ecology and Chemistry of Pollution. It was going to start my second year, and Steve and I
taught together.
We proposed it as a two-year-long program. There’s never been another one like it. It was a
total of eight quarters officially, and some students, nine quarters before we were done. We ran 12
months out of the year. We were immediately in the national news. We had students flying to
Washington, D.C. to testify at the cabinet level because of the work we were doing. Russell Train—I
think he was the second head of the then-new Environmental Protection Agency—came out twice to
meet with students. NBC News came twice with their lead anchors to talk about the work we were
doing.
We generated over a quarter of a million dollars in grants. But I was just completely consumed
with that, so for the next eight, nine quarters, I had virtually nothing to do with the other Evergreen
faculty or what was going on. It was just Steve and I doing our research, and our students.
Some of that is still going on because John Calambokidis founded a research collective in
Olympia and continued. He was working on marine mammals and the effects of PCBs on marine
mammals. It’s still there.
Severn: This was ’72?
Beug: Yeah, my first year was ’72-’73, so the ECOP program started in the fall of ’73. It ran for eight
quarters officially. When I came out, I was back in the contract pool, still not on a coordinated studies
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team. That’s when Paul Stamets and these other students showed up all together wanting to learn
more about mushrooms. I said, “Great.”
Severn: Mike, I have a proposal here. We’ve gotten through your past up to Evergreen. How do you
feel about pausing here, coming back, and doing basically Evergreen on?
Beug: Sure.
Severn: That’s a nice little stop, and then we’ll pick it up again. Does that sound good?
Beug: Okay. I filled in all this stuff you need from the pre-Evergreen?
Severn: You did, yes. I’m going to stop recording here.
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Michael Beug
Interviewed by Eric Severn
The Evergreen State College oral history project
September 8, 2021
FINAL
Severn: This is Eric Severn talking with Michael Beug. Michael, you’re in White Salmon again, correct?
Beug: Yes, I am.
Severn: And I’m in Seattle. We left off after you had taught your first program. One of the things that I
wanted to talk about this time around is from a fairly early age, you had this political awareness, this
social awareness. I’m wondering how your academic interests and this interest in social justice, political
awareness, was shaped or re-formed or—you can just fit in with Evergreen those first years for you.
Beug: I think it would best to say that it fit in well. I don’t think coming to Evergreen made a great
change in my approach or how I was thinking. Actually, the one shock to me that I don’t really talk
about publicly is how little sense of community there is and was at Evergreen, compared to the college
that I’d left, Harvey Mudd College, where there was a lot of genuine community. Faculty got together
regularly to talk. Evergreen was far more isolating, really. People were in their program, and it’s
become, I think, in recent years, far more isolating than it even was then. You’ve got your team, but
other than that, that’s your main interaction.
Severn: Interesting. I remember talking with Chuck Nisbet a few weeks ago and he made the point that
he thought literally the first year of Evergreen—the second year to an extent, but really the first year—
was a time of real connection, real community building. Faculty were talking with one another. There
was this real sense of trying to figure it out together. He said that he felt like after that first year, it
really changed a lot. That sense of community disintegrated a little bit. How does that square with
what you’re saying?
Beug: I came the second year, so I didn’t see the very first year. Then I was thrown into the contract
pool, not in a program. I was in a very different situation than would normally be the case. I was
literally the only person that came without connections to other people at Evergreen. Everybody was all
pretty deeply connected.
I knew one person who’d been a senior when I was a freshman at Harvey Mudd College. He had
the same training as me, and that’s why I was really surprised that Evergreen hired us both. They hired
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him first and me later. But he came from Reed, where he’d had four years of teaching experience
already.
Severn: What were the things to you that gave Harvey Mudd the sense of community that Evergreen
was lacking? I’ve actually never thought about this but there does seem to be—I can see how while on
one hand the program structure at Evergreen does foster community within the programs, but I can also
see how that can be very insular, too, and have all these little silo communities that don’t actually
engage. What do you think?
Beug: That was my impression was all these little communities that don’t engage. We built a strong
connection within your program, but not with other programs. That’s something in later years that I
worked on addressing with a number of colleagues, where we had at one point four programs that had a
joint lecture once or twice a week. We had a common base and then we went on our slightly different
directions.
For me, I was teaching Ecological Agriculture at that point, but we had a number of other social
justice-related programs, community development programs, and we all met together. We had
economists and historians and literary folks and scientists all together once a week. There would be
about 10 or 12 faculty in this joint lecture, and that, I really liked. But I don’t think that’s ever been
repeated.
Severn: Would the faculty seminar together with those larger programs? Would just the faculty get
together and talk about, what are you all reading, and that sort of thing? Or was it just you come
together and that was the moment of connection?
Beug: We came together, and we did not share faculty seminars because we had, for the most part,
different books that we were dealing with, so our faculty seminars would be around the books. Since
the books weren’t in common, for the most part, it didn’t make sense to do the faculty seminars
together.
Severn: Sure. You had a role in the Organic Farm, correct?
Beug: I did have a role in the Organic Farm—later on, not at the beginning.
Severn: What was that like working through that?
Beug: I got approached to teach in the program because, as a chemist, they needed somebody to teach
soil science. I’d never studied soil science, knew nothing about it, but I just stayed one chapter ahead of
the students. [laughter] It’s really chemistry and geology, which I knew a bit about.
Since I was four years old, my family had a garden. My wife’s family had a garden. As soon as
we were married, we had gardens. My grandmother used to give me a bad time. She said, “How can
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you be teaching Organic Farming or Ecological Agriculture? You’ve never been a farmer.” I would visit
the family farm in the summer. But it was really not about teaching people how to farm, but how to
build sustainable communities. That’s really what the Ecological Agriculture program is about.
Severn: You come back to this a lot. You’ve got all this other stuff that you’ve done, all these other
disciplines that you have your hands in, but this idea of sustainable communities, a broader sense of
social justice, this seems to be one of the larger themes that brackets most of your thinking. Is that
true?
Beug: I think so, yeah.
Severn: That does seem to be one of the ideals of Evergreen. That seems to end well with that for sure.
You had mentioned that you thought there wasn’t a powerful sense of community in those early years,
but that has even gotten a little bit more disconnected over time. What do you think those changes
were about, or are about?
Beug: I think a lot of the changes happened when we quit moving offices. When people moved around
and you had new—and more and more faculty quit coming to campus, except when they were teaching.
Every day of the week, I was there at around 8:00 in the morning and I was there till at least 5:00 at
night. Sometimes I’d be there half the night, too. I spent my time at Evergreen, but increasingly, I saw
my colleagues not spending their time at Evergreen. I found that pretty distressing, frankly.
Severn: They were just coming to teach and hold office hours.
Beug: Yeah, if they even held office hours at all. I know they were supposed to, but most doors were
just closed all the time in the later years.
Severn: Really?
Beug: Yeah.
Severn: I’m trying to get at those first five years that you were there. Were there any standout
formative experiences for you, things that happened those first five years that changed your perception
of what you were doing as a teacher, what you were doing within your discipline, and just how you were
thinking about all this stuff?
Beug: Hmm. Oh, I don’t know how to answer that one, I’m sorry.
Severn: That’s okay.
Beug: The thing I loved about Evergreen is getting together with people, coming up with new ideas, and
then teaching them, and teaching around those new ideas. As much as possible, I did something each
year as different as possible from what I did the previous year. For me, it was a tremendous ongoing
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academic experience and tremendous ongoing learning experience, so I focused on learning the things I
was going to be teaching and learning new things.
Severn: Did you feel like you were taking on the role of both faculty and student at Evergreen? I know
that some of the other faculty I’ve talked with, that’s one of the things that they appreciated about
most.
Beug: Yes. Absolutely. If I had taught somewhere else, I’d be teaching chem lab and chemistry all day
long. I went away and taught for six months at the University of Hawaii-Hilo and it’s very different. You
don’t get to do all the things that I got to do at Evergreen that Evergreen faculty get to do. For me, all
the different people I got to meet and teach with and work with were a very important part of life. I’m
really glad I came to Evergreen for that reason.
Severn: Here’s something that’s also been on my mind. I want to say it was the last time we talked we
had briefly discussed the idea of a hierarchy within a discipline. I think with the sciences, it’s a little bit
easier to articulate what that looks like because you have certain steps, certain foundational building
blocks, that you need to go through in order to get to the next place. With math, it’s fairly obvious. I
think with science, it’s fairly obvious. That’s a little bit more ambiguous in the humanities—what you
need to know, what constitutes a body of knowledge to do advanced work or something like that.
Beug: The interesting thing to me that I learned in teaching at Evergreen is how similar the arts and the
sciences are in the basic training you need, moving from beginning to advanced.
Severn: Tell me about this. This is fascinating. What do you mean, exactly?
Beug: I saw the same kind of progression. My oldest son majored in film and video, so I watched how
he went through. He did take a year off to take all science. My youngest son did a double major at
Evergreen and got two bachelor’s degrees, one in computer science and the other one in environmental
studies.
But they all had this really broad training that they built upon. One son is essentially a scientist,
the other is essentially an artist, but the progression was very much the same in moving forward in their
fields. Often, they were working with exactly the same faculty doing exactly the same thing, even
though one’s a scientist and the other is an artist.
They both worked with Bill Ransom and loved working with Bill Ransom, for example.
Severn: That’s really interesting. I guess I’d never really thought. I feel like there’s a sense within the
humanities where it’s about acquiring—one, you have to learn what the canon is, where the limits of the
body of knowledge are. That can take a lot of time. It’s difficult. I always just imagined that that was a
little bit straightforward in the sciences over the less abstract, but maybe I’m wrong about that.
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The other thing, too, I think acquiring a set of tools within the humanities always seemed like
there was just more—how to say it—the tools themselves were a little bit more easy to exchange. You
were working with trends, in a certain sense, and it seemed like maybe there was something a little bit
more concrete about what the tools were in certain disciplines within the sciences. Again, I’m not sure
that’s right. I’m just curious because I was thinking about this.
Beug: In both art and science, there’s some basic physical skill-building that goes on. I’ve talked a fair
amount about that with Terry Setter. I assume he’s still at Evergreen. I don’t know if he’s retired yet or
not. Just the progression that he expected his students to see within the art versus the progression or
what I expect the students to see in the sciences is extremely similar. I’d say the same with visual arts,
the painters, the people who are painting. There’s a lot of skill-building. You have physical skill-building
as well as the mental skill-building.
Severn: Yeah. I’m sorry to keep pressing this but is there a specific example? I think I know what you
mean but I’m not totally sure.
Beug: There’s a lot. At least in chemistry, the key to doing well in chemistry is being good at
mathematics, for example. You have to have a good, strong math skillset, and then chemistry comes
really easy. That isn’t something you would normally think about with chemistry.
I’m thinking about when I took some classes from Marilyn Frasca when I was a dean on drawing.
She’s an artist. She kept putting me off and putting me off. She finally had me come and it was a day
they were doing life drawings. She hands me this huge easel and some charcoals, and I had to sketch
models. I had a blast, but I’d never done anything like that. Never even thought about it. But then I
went on to take some classes from Marilyn and learned more about artists and how they perceive.
I have a brother-in-law who’s fascinating to be with. His art has hung in the National Gallery.
He’s been written up in the Italian art press. Just in talking to him, I see a lot in common with the way
scientists think and scientists proceed. It’s very different from when I’m talking with literature folks or
philosophers or sociologists.
Severn: Where it makes a lot of sense is in the visual arts especially. I can totally see a very clear skillset
that you build on. That makes a lot of sense to me. But I was just thinking, do you think you can say the
same thing about literary studies? Philosophy is maybe a little bit trickier because there’s such a built-in
historical trajectory that in a sense, it’s already there for you. You start here and you follow this
conversation. But literary studies are tricky, or even creative writing, or maybe history to a degree. Do
you think that what you’re talking about crosses over to those disciplines?
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Beug: Hmm. Those aren’t the kinds of questions I’ve thought about a lot. I’m very pragmatic, just in
getting from point A to point B. And not very philosophical. [laughing]
Severn: But you’re a big reader. You love literature. I don’t want to be presumptuous here but in
thinking about social justice, there’s obviously a pragmatic element to that, but also, there’s a built-in
philosophical, ethical, moral orientation to this work.
Beug: Absolutely. But when I’m studying Nietzsche—and I did like Nietzsche—it’s all so convoluted.
That’s why I abandoned it. Versus pragmatic. I’m very pragmatic.
Severn: But you don’t find a complicated novel convoluted. We were talking about this a little bit. I
want to say you mentioned Dostoevsky. I could be wrong.
Beug: I’ve read a lot of Dostoevsky.
Severn: Yeah, and I think you mentioned you really loved Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky may not be
convoluted, but he’s certainly not a pragmatic writer.
Beug: No, I take enormous pleasure in reading Dostoevsky’s work, Conrad’s work. Conrad’s work is
really deep. There’s a lot of layers and meaning there that I tend to miss, quite frankly. I was quite
shocked to realize some of the allusions that were in his work. By getting advanced placement as an
undergraduate, I filled all my courses and took overloads in the humanities and social sciences and
economics. I did not take extra courses in chemistry, physics and math. Playing in the Pomona College
Symphony was very important to me. It was a five-credit class for Pomona College students. It was a
zero-credit class for me, but I did it.
Severn: I don’t want to go off on too much of a tangent here, but I do find it interesting, and I think it
does pertain perhaps to certain things about Evergreen. But it seems like what you’re getting at is that
there’s a difference between a work of literature with depth, human depth, and abstract perseverating
that doesn’t really go anywhere.
Beug: Sort of like reading Kant. [laughter]
Severn: It depends on who you talk to.
Beug: That’s my opinion. [laughing]
Severn: Sure. Is that right? Is that what you’re saying? That there’s a sense with these novels, these
novelists. Part of what you appreciated about them is that they’re dealing with human depth. They’re
not doing this other thing that turned you off about philosophy over the years, where there’s this
perseveration that isn’t really getting at something other than itself. Is that fair?
Beug: Yeah, I think so.
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Severn: Okay. You have brought to your work, and it seems like, again, this interest in that humanity,
community, seems to be a big part of your orientation towards social justice and thinking about your
work in that context. Is that right?
Beug: It’s been increasingly so.
Severn: How increasingly? What are you moving toward?
Beug: I’m just increasingly alarmed about where this country is going, and the lack of community, the
rise of Trumpism. It alarms me tremendously the active attempts to end democracy in this country by
both the Supreme Court and the Republicans. I’m just horrified by what’s going on.
Severn: Yeah. Here’s a big question. Do you think that Evergreen as an institution is a good place to
prevent that kind of thing? Is there work going on there that’s—you know?
Beug: Obviously, I’m using Evergreen as an e-mail as one of the three e-mails that I monitor daily, but
the conversations that I see at Evergreen are just so far to the left. I’m way to the left, but people who
are very close to each other and should be very close to each other are beating themselves up over tiny
details, of not being left enough or whatever enough. That alarms me.
Severn: What do you think a healthy corrective to that would be, especially at a place like Evergreen?
Beug: If people were once again on campus and interacting with each other . . . I think human
interaction is incredibly important. Nowadays, I live a pretty isolated life. I have a pretty constant string
of both Evergreeners and friends coming to visit, but I don’t go anywhere anymore. I really value that
social interaction.
When I was still able to come to campus—I can’t because I can’t leave my wife long enough now
to do that—I’d just try to walk around and see old friends and visit. But if I found even one person to
talk to in the last couple of trips to Olympia, it would be a miracle. All I see is closed, locked doors as I
walk hallway after hallway in every building there. I still have better connections with a lot of the staff
because they’re there, but the faculty are gone. They’re absent. AWOL.
Severn: This is also pragmatic. Part of what you’re saying is just human encounter, whether it’s in an
institution or out in the broader world, that counts for something as substantial as some of these more
abstract ideas.
Beug: It tends to be humanizing.
Severn: Yeah, I think that’s very true, and that’s needed right now for sure. Mike, I’ll put the ball in your
court here. Is there anything else that you want to say about those first couple years at Evergreen and
your work? Obviously, this is a short interview, and we’re bringing it to a close, but if something else
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comes up for you in the next couple weeks, we can pick up where we left off. But is there anything else
in particular that’s on your mind?
Beug: I went through phases at Evergreen. I did a number of things. I served for two terms as Assistant
Director for Recreation. Those folks were shocked as hell wondering what they were going to do with a
scientist over there. They didn’t tell me that until the end when we had the going-away party. It was a
tremendous experience for me and for them both.
But the second and third year, when I was working with Steve Herman, we were doing incredibly
important national work, setting the groundwork in terms of environmental studies. My wife was very
active in the anti-nuclear movement and became—
Severn: Mike, can you tell me specifically what that work was so we can get it on the page here?
Beug: With Steven Herman, we were looking at the effects of DDT on forest ecosystems, the effect of
heavy metals on forest ecosystems, the effect of fluorides on forest ecosystems, like PCBs. We got a lot
of publications and generated a quarter of a million dollars in grant income, so that students had
summer stipends and could do research. It was important stuff, and it was recognized nationally.
But then, doing the next phase, I decided that rather than tell people, “These are things you
shouldn’t be doing,” I would switch to teaching about things they should be doing. That’s when I started
teaching Sustainable Agriculture, Ecological Agriculture, Community-Related Studies. I was still required
to teach chemistry roughly every other year. As often as I could, I did something else in the community
development area. Like Humans and Nature in the Pacific Northwest, this huge program with 120
students and this huge faculty team. That was a really important program to me and a heck of a lot of
fun.
Severn: This idea of rather than telling people what they shouldn’t be doing but instead offering what
they should be doing, is that how you were framing this?
Beug: Yeah.
Severn: Okay. I think that’s really interesting for a couple reasons. One, that’s a worldview, in a certain
sense. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s a way of dealing with the world and people that is different
than walking around criticizing people. Right?
Beug: Right.
Severn: But I also wonder if this shift that you’re talking about was significant in your thinking of
teaching? Pragmatically, yes, but also what you’re doing with students, if that was a turning point for
you?
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Beug: I think so. I think I became much softer edged in my teaching of the sciences. That made a huge
difference. I think I became a better teacher.
Severn: Students responded to that better. Is that what you’re saying?
Beug: Yep.
Severn: It think that’s really interesting. Is that something you talked about with the faculty, you
thinking this way, or was this something that was your own thing and you just had in your mind?
Beug: No, pretty much my own thing in my mind. But I would find faculty that inspired and that I
wanted to work with, and then we would teach together. Obviously, there was a lot of common interest
and commonality in our thinking. But I’ve never been really good about being explicit about those
issues.
Severn: The thing we’re talking about?
Beug: Yeah. It’s more of an implicit approach.
Severn: Interesting, so you feel like these are more intuitive shifts that down the road you tend to
articulate rather than immediately?
Beug: Right.
Severn: Do you miss those early years?
Beug: The most important years for me, I guess, would be the mid-years at Evergreen.
Severn: How come?
Beug: Because that’s when we still had pretty good community; when I still had artists next door that I
could talk to. They would be in their offices, and we could get together for coffee and visit rather than
the office closed and locked, which is what I saw more often in later years.
But by the middle years, that’s when I had started to soften my teaching and broaden my
teaching. Although I consider the two years with Steve Herman probably my most important
contribution to the world versus to Evergreen or building myself.
Severn: Mushrooms are getting a lot of press these days.
Beug: Yeah, huge. Huge.
Severn: They really are. What’s the deal?
Beug: Two things. One, I write about them and teach about them because I want to see people more
connected with nature; understanding the interconnections; recognize that we’re in the Sixth Great
Extinction event in the history of the Earth. We’ve lost one million species so far. We’re going to lose
many more, probably including all primates. All because we’re unwilling to deal with the massive
overpopulation of this country and unwilling to deal with sustainability issues.
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That’s my biggest concern right now. My original research was atmospheric chemistry as a
freshman in college in 1962, a long time ago. Now it’s—well, it’s not too late. It’s too late to avoid much
of the damage from global warming, but it’s driven by overpopulation. We don’t recognize that.
Nobody’s talking about that.
We’re so worried about anti-abortion, and the major religions still, for the most part, ban sex
education, ban contraception. They want their religion to overpower all others, and their people to
become the dominant people. Scientists are thinking, we’ll find a technological solution. We’ll grow
more food per acre, and we’ve succeeded. We went far beyond Erlich’s “population bomb” in terms of
population, but we have far less starvation than we had 40 years ago. But now we have Covid because
we have far fewer forests, far too many people. Covid is just like global warming. Massive
overpopulation has brought it to our doorstep.
Severn: Makes it easier to spread, transmission, all that stuff. Is that what you’re talking about?
Beug: Not only that but it’s an animal disease. We haven’t left the animals anywhere to live. We’re
interacting closely with them in every single environment.
Severn: Right.
Beug: I’ve got a 350-pound black bear hanging out half a block from my house. People see it almost
every day. The mountain lions are coming in and eating everyone’s cats. I’m living really close to
nature, and I realize there’s too many of us doing that. I’m one of them, it turns out, but at least I
moved here planning to farm.
I had my vineyard, my winemaking. I no longer manage the vineyard, but I’m here because I
started a vineyard in 1980 and was very proud of the wines I’ve made until two years ago when I just
said, “It’s time to hang it up.” We’ve just gone too far, and nobody is talking about the population issue.
I listen to Biden. I listen to everybody. It’s not there.
Severn: We’re moving away from Evergreen, but actually, at the risk of going on a tangent, I think this
intuitively to me feels like a fine conversation to end on, because it’s very relevant. But I think all I ever
hear about population is the problems of a declining birth rate in relation to the economy. There is
some talk about that, but that’s got nothing to do with what you’re saying. It’s very economically
focused.
Beug: Right. We need a declining birth rate globally. Look at the average age. Eighteen, 19 years old is
the average age in many countries in the world today. That’s a recipe for utter disaster, and it tells me
we’re not going to solve the global warming problem. Haven’t got a prayer.
Severn: You want to leave us with a happy note and good news?
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Beug: I’m incredibly excited about the traction my book is getting. It’s going to get more people out in
the woods and thinking about nature and connected to nature. That’s my public face. That’s what I’m
doing in public, but what I’ve been talking now about is why I’m doing some of these things, and the way
I’m doing it. I’m trying to give people an alternative. By giving them an appreciation for nature, I’m
trying to get them to think about, hmm, what are we doing to nature?
Severn: That’s important stuff for sure.
Beug: I found another new species last week. [laughing] I’m still discovering new things. At least once
a month, I find something new to science.
Severn: That’s something. I’m going to stop the recording.
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