Sasha Earnheart-Gold '04 came to Dartmouth with no course credits, no grades and no diploma.
Other Dartmouth students spent much of their high school careers yawning through their high-school biology and history classes, but Earnheart-Gold spent those four years founding an international apple tree planting organization and monitoring the feeding habits of great white sharks.
After a short stint in private school, Earnheart-Gold decided he could create a better learning environment himself.
Earnheart-Gold's small coastal hometown of Bolinas, Calif., an eclectic place full of old hippies and young surfers, provided him with all the resources he needed to plan his own education. A Shakespeare scholar, a linguist, a master horticulturist and others became his mentors and friends.
The automotive journalist who taught him to write had multiple sclerosis, but still wrote prolifically for magazines.
"Someone who was so physically handicapped was one of the most present people I know mentally, and one of the most humorous," Earnheart-Gold said. "I kind of became his hands and eyes, writing and editing with him. That was one of my English classes."
Even though Earnheart-Gold said one-on-one tutoring "could be a little lonely at times," he said it was a much deeper kind of learning.
Earnheart-Gold said his parents were perplexed by his choice, and his friends thought he was crazy.
"It's a pretty big leap, but I was very determined," he said. "It takes courage, but I think it pays off in the end. For some people it may not be right, but I think for me it worked out very well."
It may have worked out well, but Earnheart-Gold decided to embrace a more traditional educational experience for college. Without so much as a high school General Equivalency Diploma -- but more life experience tucked under his belt than most -- Earnheart-Gold finally sent off applications to colleges across the nation. He included letters from every person he worked with and wrote a 40-page biography of his experiences. Earnheart-Gold expected most of the schools to simply throw it away, but fortunately for him, Dartmouth didn't.
While planning out his own studies, Earnheart-Gold said he tried to forget everything he knew about education and reimagine it from scratch. The system he ended up designing for himself would often take him far from Bolinas, to the great-white shark infested waters in the San Francisco Bay, the Himalayas in Nepal and the jungles of Africa.
Earnheart-Gold first saw his first great white while in a 17-foot long Boston whaler off California's Southeast Farallon island, where biologists monitor the sharks' activities and feeding.
"One of these great whites came about halfway out of the water, and it was so wide I couldn't believe it," he said. "And it must have been as long as the boat. I think my knuckles are still white."
Traveling to Nepal at age 16, however, was what led to what Earnheart-Gold considers ones of his greatest achievements.
Hiking with some students through the Himalayas from Tibet to Nepal, he contracted three parasites and lost 20 pounds.
"Every day I would walk through the villages in the gorges of the mountains, and I would see these malnourished kids with bone-thin arms," he said. "I had seen this kind of poverty in other areas of Asia before, but I think being so ill myself, I could somehow relate in a more direct way."
Earnheart-Gold decided to establish a non-profit organization, Apple Tree International, to teach villagers how to graft apple trees and better sustain themselves. He has since established programs in areas of Bolivia as well.
Efforts have been halted in Nepal the last two years by Maoist fighting. Earnheart-Gold said he remembers walking down the road with an apple tree over his shoulder while the Nepalese military were air-dropping on either side of him. When the government established a shoot-on-sight policy after the 7 p.m. curfew, Earnheart-Gold decided it was time to leave.
It wasn't the first time Earnheart-Gold had put his life in jeopardy for his studies. While filming a documentary of tribal dancing in the jungles of Camaroon, Earnheart-Gold got a serious internal infection.
"I thought I was in my deathbed," he said.
Earnheart-Gold, now a fifth-year senior, is back to his old ways of traveling and independent study. He has been spending his time off-campus for his senior fellowship on "Legal Liability for Global warming," documenting the impact of global warming on the Inuit and Tuvulese peoples. So far global warming has endangered arctic animals and Inuit hunting -- a center-post of their culture -- and also has put the low-lying island nation of Tuvulu at risk of being flooded, he said.
"Air strips are buckling, houses are collapsing, permafrost is melting, and Polar bears might be extinct in the next few years," he said.
Earnheart-Gold is helping these peoples bring their problems to the industrial world's attention. He will be part of the Inuit Delegation to the U.N. framer convention on climate change in December.
