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Mount Nittany Conservancy Surpasses $15,000 in its 2023 Centre Gives Campaign
Thank you to all who contributed to the Mount Nittany Conservancy’s 2023 Centre Gives campaign! We were grateful to surpass our $15,000 fundraising goal thanks to the support of 78 donors. We set many records for our Centre Gives participation this year. We achieved 50% growth in gifts over 2022’s total of $10,330, and we…
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Celebrating Centre Foundation’s 40th Anniversary and Mount Nittany’s Future
The Mount Nittany Conservancy has partnered with Centre Foundation for many years. Centre Foundation stewards more than $200,000 in Mount Nittany-focused endowments thanks to the love and generosity of so many across so many years. These endowed funds produce annual revenue that contributes toward the all-volunteer Mount Nittany Conservancy’s annual budget. Centre Foundation provides the…
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Mount Nittany Conservancy Surpasses $10,000 in its 2022 Centre Gives Campaign
Thank you to all who contributed to the Mount Nittany Conservancy’s 2022 Centre Gives campaign! We were grateful to surpass our $10,000 fundraising goal thanks to the support of 55 donors. Although our total number of 55 donors was down this year compared to 2021’s 70 donors, our total raised this year of $10,330 marked…
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‘Rewilding’ Mount Nittany and Avoiding ‘Improvements’ to Nature
Ars Technica reports on a recent study on “rewilding” released by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. What is “rewilding”? The International Union for the Conservation of Nature defines rewilding this way: Rewilding: the process of rebuilding, following major human disturbance, a natural ecosystem by restoring natural processes and the complete or near…
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Paul Clifford on Penn State nostalgia, Mount Nittany, and Old Willow
Paul Clifford, chief executive officer of the Penn State Alumni Association and associate vice president for alumni relations for Penn State, recently wrote in his Penn State Alumni Association “Insights” column on Penn State nostalgia, Mount Nittany, and Old Willow: Nostalgia is defined as a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for…
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Conserve Mount Nittany with a Centre Gives 2021 Gift
Mount Nittany is yours, and your gift today (before 9pm!) will help conserve the Mountain in its natural state for all to hike and love. We founded the Mount Nittany Conservancy with the conviction that Mount Nittany should be preserved from deforestation, development, and defacement forever. We believe that Mount Nittany should always be a…
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Tom Smyth, In Memoriam
Penn Stater Magazine memorialized the late Tom Smyth in its July/August 2020 issue with this profile. Mount Nittany’s Tom Smyth Overlook is named in his honor.
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‘Do you know the origin of that word, saunter?’
John Muir, as quoted in The Mountain Trail and Its Message in 1911: “Hiking—I don’t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains—not hike! Do you know the origin of that word, ‘saunter’? It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages…
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Dr. & Mrs. Joab Thomas’s Square Inch
I’ve been spending some time recently on scanning a few boxes worth of early Mount Nittany Conservancy archives that Ben Novak provided to me. As the Mount Nittany Conservancy’s founder and first president, Ben was instrumental not only in the organization’s major land preservation and fundraising efforts throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, but also…
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Our Founders Were Real
Evan Pugh was Penn State’s first president. It’s great if you happen to know of Evan Pugh. In fact, it’s likely that knowing about him already puts you in the minority among students and alumni. But just knowing this bit of raw information isn’t worth much in and of itself. It’s available to anyone curious…
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Arts Fest is Itself a Work of Art
In the slower summer months in Happy Valley, Arts Fest looms large on the calendar. The Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts has been a special time of year for many decades, since its earliest days as a student-initiated celebration on up through the singular tradition it has become today. It’s no stretch to point…
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How Penn Staters Can Encounter Their Heritage
“To Thy Happy Children / Of The FutureThose Of The Past / Send Greetings” This is the inscription that the University of Illinois’s Alma Mater statue bears for the curious passerby. It’s a perfect encapsulation of everything a place of learning exists to achieve—bringing the reality and wisdom of the past alive in the present, so it can do the…
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Why Mount Nittany is on Every Penn Stater’s Bucket List
I wrote the following for Onward State in The Magic of Mount Nittany to introduce The Story of Mount Nittany and to speak to why Mount Nittany tends to be on every Penn Stater’s bucket list: In “The Legends of the Nittany Valley,” folklorist Henry Shoemaker records some of the American Indian and settler stories…
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If ‘the World is Flat,’ Then Mount Nittany and the Nittany Valley Matter More Than Ever
In The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Friedman’s central insight is that globalization and Information Age technology work in tandem to diminish the distinctiveness and importance of location—of physical place. Nearly a decade after his book’s 2005 release, this “world is flat” thinking has seeped into almost every pore of…
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Introducing ‘Conserving Mount Nittany: A Dynamic Environmentalism’
What are the things we care to conserve? I’ve been fascinated by the idea that there are certain things we can preserve through time, keeping safe from change, passing along from generation to generation—and yet keep them as living parts of our lives, rather than mere artifacts. In families, heirlooms serve this role. They’re not…
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