The Eco League is a five-college consortium consisting of Alaska Pacific University

Alaska Pacific University

Alaska Pacific University is a small liberal arts college located in Anchorage, Alaska, that emphasizes experiential and active learning...

, Green Mountain College

Green Mountain College

Green Mountain College is a coeducational private environmental liberal arts college located in Poultney, Vermont, in the USA.Green Mountain is located in the Vermont countryside, at the foot of the Taconic Mountains between the Green Mountains and Adirondacks.The College has a core set of courses...

, Northland College

Northland College (Wisconsin)

Northland College is a small, coeducational, liberal arts college in Ashland, Wisconsin, USA. Founded as the North Wisconsin Academy in 1892, the college was established in 1906. Originally affiliated with the Congregational Church, the college remains loosely tied to the Congregational Church's...

, Prescott College

Prescott College

Prescott College is a private liberal arts college in Prescott, Arizona, founded in 1966. It is a non-profit organization which has an undergraduate body of roughly 800 students, and an average student to faculty ratio of 7:1 in on-campus classrooms...

 and College of the Atlantic

College of the Atlantic

The College of the Atlantic, founded in 1969, is a private, alternative liberal-arts college located in Bar Harbor on Mount Desert Island, Maine, United States. It awards a bachelor's degree solely in the field of human ecology, though with a variety of emphases. The college is small, with...

. The consortium is unique, in that each college is in a different geographic area. Alaska Pacific University is in Anchorage, Alaska

Anchorage, Alaska

Anchorage is a unified home rule municipality in the southcentral part of the U.S. state of Alaska. It is the northernmost major city in the United States...

. It is the only college in an urban center. Prescott College is situated in Prescott, Arizona

Prescott, Arizona

Prescott is a city in Yavapai County, Arizona, USA. It was designated "Arizona's Christmas City" by Arizona Governor Rose Mofford in the late 1980s....

, making it the only southwestern campus. Northland, a Midwestern campus, is situated in Ashland, Wisconsin

Ashland, Wisconsin

Ashland is a city in Ashland and Bayfield counties in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. The city is a port on Lake Superior, near the head of Chequamegon Bay. The population was 8,695 at the 2010 census....

. Green Mountain College is in Poultney, Vermont

Poultney, Vermont

Poultney is a village in Rutland County of the U.S. state of Vermont. The village is entirely within the town of Poultney. The population was 1,612 at the 2010 census...

, a small town situated in rural Vermont's Green Mountains

Green Mountains

The Green Mountains are a mountain range in the U.S. state of Vermont. The range extends approximately .-Peaks:The most notable mountains in the range include:*Mount Mansfield, , the highest point in Vermont*Killington Peak, *Mount Ellen,...

. College of the Atlantic's ocean-front campus is situated on Mount Desert Island

Mount Desert Island

Mount Desert Island , in Hancock County, Maine, is the largest island off the coast of Maine. With an area of it is the 6th largest island in the contiguous United States. Though it is often claimed to be the third largest island on the eastern seaboard of the United States, it is actually second...

 in Down East Maine

Maine

Maine is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the east and south, New Hampshire to the west, and the Canadian provinces of Quebec to the northwest and New Brunswick to the northeast. Maine is both the northernmost and easternmost...

, directly adjacent to Acadia National Park

Acadia National Park

Acadia National Park is a National Park located in the U.S. state of Maine. It reserves much of Mount Desert Island, and associated smaller islands, off the Atlantic coast...

. Despite a wide variation in acceptance levels and academic ratings, all five colleges have strong programs in Environmental Studies

Environmental studies

Environmental studies is the academic field which systematically studies human interaction with the environment. It is a broad interdisciplinary field of study that includes the natural environment, built environment, and the sets of relationships between them...

. The essential beauty of the consortium is the ability to experience learning in virtually every major biome

Biome

Biomes are climatically and geographically defined as similar climatic conditions on the Earth, such as communities of plants, animals, and soil organisms, and are often referred to as ecosystems. Some parts of the earth have more or less the same kind of abiotic and biotic factors spread over a...

 of the United States.

The Eco League was created in response to a student call for better academic collaboration and mobility. This call was first articulated by students at Prescott College who in 1996 founded the North American Alliance for Green Education, an earlier consortium and non-profit originally envisioned and founded by students at Prescott College

in 1996. The Eco League exchange program was based directly on a student exchange system that was first designed and negotiated by the NAAGE institutional founders.

External links

• Eco League official website
• North American Alliance for Green Education