STILL

the MOST

INTERESTING

Class in the World!

36TH REUNION!!!

MAY 20-22, 2022



 

 

Please update your contact information and profile in TigerNet!

 

Please update your contact information and profile in the Class Directory!

 

Keep Scrolling for Information About ...


  • Orange and Black Day 2024!!!
  • Reading Glasses Book Club
  • 2025 California Mini-Reunion
  • Climate Corner

 

BUT FIRST - PAY YOUR $50 TAX-DEDUCTIBLE 2024-25 CLASS DUES !!!

 

*REMEMBER - CLASS DUES ARE COMPLETELY SEPARATE FROM ANNUAL GIVING!

 

Dues not only constitute a pledge

of your continuing membership and engagement in the Class of 1986,

but they also subsidize off-year Reunions events, both in person and virtually, both in Princeton and around the globe.

They also help us to include classmates who might otherwise be unable to go back to "the best old place of all".

 

The matching challenge may be over, but it's never too late to pay your dues. We will continue to go green, so no more dues requests in the mail.

Please take a moment to pay your $50 tax deductibleclass dues - just click here

 

If you prefer to mail a check, make it payable to Princeton Class of 1986 and mail to

Els Paine, 415 Ridgeview Road, Princeton, NJ 08540

 

AND SECOND - UPDATE YOUR TIGERNET PROFILE!!!

 

We send all Class communications through Tigernet 2.0,

so if you would like to receive them at a different email address, or change your subscription settings,

you must make the changes HERE yourself. Unfortunately, we can't do it for you.

 

We're always looking for fun facts about classmates for Class Notes in the PAW.

Please let us know if you have something unusual, exciting, or noteworthy going on in your life!

You can submit news HERE.

 

Please let us know if there's an event in your area that you'd like to invite classmates to attend. We'll include in in a future newsletter!

 

 

AND THIRD - SUBMIT YOUR NEWS!!!

 

Peter Wayner, our new interim Class Secretary, is always looking for news about classmates for our Class Notes in the PAW.

Please let us know if you have something fun, exciting, or noteworthy going on in your life!

 

You can submit updates HERE or HERE.

 

 

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ORANGE & BLACK DAY 2024!!!

 

 

UPDATED REGIONAL GATHERINGS

  
 

 

 

Atlanta - Friday 10/18
Orange & Black Day/Brown game watch party
6:30pm
Pour Taproom - Beltline
661 Auburn Ave NE, Atlanta, GA 30312
Hosted by the Princeton & Brown Clubs of Georgia
RSVP ASAP HERE

 

 

 

 Boston - Tuesday 10/22
6:30 - 8:30pm
Dunn Gaherin's Pub
344 Elliot Street
Newton, MA 02464
Hosted by the Class of 1985. All Boston area alumni invited!
 
 

California Bay Area - 3 Events!!!
Saturday 10/19
Orange & Black Day Party
2pm
Sylvan Park
600 Sylvan Ave
Mountain View, CA 94041
Hosted by SF Bay Area Alumni - RSVP HERE

 

 

 

Sunday 10/20
Princeton Women's Network NorCal
Orange & Black Brunch
11am-1pm
Home of Linda Ellenberg Rafferty '87
1913 Whitecliff Ct.
Walnut Creek, CA 94596, USA
Registration and more information HERE
Bring food or drink to share

 

Saturday 10/26
Orange & Black Day/Harvard Game watch party

12 PM

Local Tap

600 3rd Street

San Francisco, CA 94107

Hosted by Dave Hicks '86 and David Ogden '89

Click HERE for details

Invite your area PU friends!


 
 
 Colorado - Thursday 10/24
Orange & Black Day Happy Hour
5 PM
New Terrain Brewing Co.
16401 Table Mountain Pkwy
Golden, CO, 80403
Hosted by Roberta Connor Spray, Tracy Winfree,
and Margaret Reidy Pfleuger
 New York City - Saturday 10/26
3-5pm
Orange & Black Day/Harvard Game watch party
Phebe's Tavern - Back Room
359 Bowery
New York, NY 10003
Hosted by Elisabeth Rodgers '86 - PLEASE RSVP BY 10/18
HERE
 

 


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Reading Glasses Book Club

 

Monday, October 28, 2024 

 

8:00 PM EDT

 

Zoom link

 

Once again, the '86 "Reading Glasses" Book Club will join incoming students in reading and discussing President Eisgruber’s Princeton Pre-read selection for the Class of 2028. This year's book is The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI by Fei-Fei Li.

 

Dr. Li’s book describes the journey that took her from her native China first to Parsippany High School, then to Princeton, and eventually to international recognition as one of the world’s leading computer scientists. After developing technologies that enabled a breakthrough in computer image recognition, she has become an advocate for a “human-centered” artificial intelligence that benefits society. She ties together her personal and professional narratives by suggesting that, in life and in science, some of the most generative thinking happens “on the borders, where ideas are forever trapped between coming and going, explored by strangers in strange lands, insiders and outsiders at the same time” (p. 317). The Worlds I See both illuminates the exciting potential of scientific discovery to transform our world and highlights the profound ethical and policy questions that accompany rapid technological change.

 

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SEE YOU NEXT SUMMER IN OJAI, CALIFORNIA!!!

 

Mini Reunion Early Registration Perks! 

 

Classmates who register early on or before October 22, 2024, (Orange & Black Day) will receive a complimentary bottle of wine or cider shipped to their home in time for Thanksgiving! These are featured labels from our upcoming “Tour de California” guided wine tasting – just one of the curated events included in the beautiful Ojai Valley next summer.

 

Space is limited and some 86ers have already registered, so please visit www.86mostinteresting.com and make your $300 deposit today. Beach party, golf outing, coastal hiking, and morning yoga are also on the agenda.

 

Sign up now!

 

 


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Climate Corner

 

Saving Our Waterways, One Dam At A Time

 

by Leila Philip

 

Water – too much causing catastrophic floods, too little resulting in crippling drought, rising seas erasing coastlines - and dwindling supplies of national groundwater. Environmental challenges from climate change are greatly magnified because of our damaged river system. But here’s the good news... A small, North American animal has been hard at work, addressing all of our water problems. Now that animal, caster canadensis, the North American beaver, needs our help to keep at it.

 

My recent book, Beaverland, sets out to show our long social history with beavers and how central they are to the health of the river network -- that vast circulatory system which pulses water throughout the continent. By building their networks of dams, beavers create a rhythm of ponds, wetlands, and beaver meadows which not only result in structures we can see, but set in motion ecological, biological, hydrological and geomorphic processes which profoundly impact the ecology and function and thus health of the river system. For eons, the 400 million beavers that lived throughout North America helped manage our waters.

 

The new paperback edition of Beaverland comes out in a time when there is much to celebrate in Beaverland. In the past months since the book first went to press. “Beaver believers” are moving from the fringe into the mainstream. Government agencies, Federal and state employees, tribal governments, and state legislators are joining nonprofits, scientists, individuals, ranchers, farmers and other landowners in new partnerships with the shared goal of harnessing what beavers do to help restore river systems and create watershed resiliency.

 

With equal ambition, a team at Google Earth is working with scientists to upload images of beaver damming complexes in order to train Google Earth to identify them. Using artificial intelligence to locate, map and count the beaver damming complexes of North America would greatly aid current research projects looking at fire and flood resiliency and as well as the biologic, ecologic, hydrologic and geomorphic impacts of beaver dams and canals.

Slowly but surely, the values of beavers in the landscape, are becoming more widely, particularly in economic terms. For years most farmers and ranchers out West fought beavers on their land. Recently a farmer who once proudly reported killing 90 beavers in one summer called up an environmental consultant after reading the article he had given him about the water gains of beaver wetlands on grazing lands with a blunt question: “How many beavers did you say you could get me?”

 

But these gains have happened in a dark backdrop. In May 2023, the United States Supreme Court adopted a new and narrow standard for deciding which wetlands and waterways of the nation were entitled to protection under the 1972 Clean Water Act. A five-to-four majority overruled science (and Congress) in a decision which has left seventy percent of the river system without protection from development, pollution, and destruction.

As we watch the impacts of accelerating climate change, knowing that floods and fire and drought and rising seas and erasing coastlines all have to do with our problems with water, the decision seems nothing short of delusional. To only protect the visible waters of a river system is as foolish as thinking we will stay healthy if we only lather on skin cream and brush our hair.

 

Wetlands, which beavers create, are called the “kidneys” of the river because they cleanse its waters, while deep below in the hyporheic zone, where soil and water mix, complex geochemical processes begin, and a world of microbial life travels.

 

We say water is life, but our story with water is more directly personal; water is not just life, water is us. Humans are composed of roughly 97% water. The human body contains 60,000 miles of arteries, veins and capillaries. If we unfolded each tuck of the origami of our lungs it would cover a soccer field. We don’t question this vast circulatory system that keeps us alive even though we can’t see it. Everything would change if we could accept the fact that a vital part of the river network is circulating with waters we also cannot see.

 

For beavers to thrive and do the valuable work they do helping mitigate some of the worst environmental challenges accelerating with our accelerating climates - wildfire, drought, flooding, biodiversity loss and dwindling supplies of groundwater - they need streams to live in, all those tributaries, which for the most part are no longer protected by the Federal Clean Water Act.

 

The Supreme Court decision puts the burden on states, local communities and individuals to do all we can to protect our river system – which includes that stream and brook behind your house, and the swampy area too. You can find out about the river system where you live by going to the EPA website How’s My Waterway, which will tell you which watershed you live in and the condition of its waters. Then do what you can on a local, state and national level to help protect it. You can start by contacting your local conservation commission and watershed protection group. If you are lucky, you might already have some beavers living nearby.

 

Two young beavers created a beaver pond in just a year on the steam system near my house in northeastern Connecticut. What was interesting about this site was that they did not dam up a flowing current. They built a dam across a pinch spot in a relatively dry area, then kept extending it as water began to fill. Eventually their pond complex would extend to a series of 3 dams. Their beaver dam complex actually enabled subsurface water to fill a shallow area between the drumlins, reconnecting an area of the stream system that had been dry for decades. Now millions of gallons of water have restored the hydrology of that area and it is once again a free-slowing stream. This is just the water we can see. Every beaver pond has about 3x as much water stored beneath it, a “sponge” of water that the river draws upon in times of drought and uses to help slow down and absorb floodwaters, enabling more water to enter the acquifer, cleansed and ready for our use as a recharged water supply.

 

So why am I hopeful? In the months since Beaverland has been out and I’ve been traveling the country giving talks and speaking to environmental groups I’ve been amazed, encouraged and deeply inspired by the grassroots activism that is rising up across this country as citizens take part in protecting their local environments, supporting the work of beavers, who create wetlands that cleanse our water supplies.

 

#theleilaphilip