• Royce Fellowship
Sophie
McKibben

Concentration 

History

Award Year 

2015
Call of the Wild: Human Settlement in the East's Biggest Wilderness

Faculty Sponsors: Lukas B Rieppel and Beth Taylor

New York State's six million acre Adirondack Park is distinguished not only by its size, but by the fact that it is both publicly and privately owned, making it a pragmatic model of conservation. Sophie investigated the economic genesis of human settlement in the Park to understand how people came to inhabit and ultimately preserve this corner of the natural world. Through archival and primary source research, she investigated six towns, each representative of a major industry within the park: logging, titanium mining, iron mining, hemlock tanning, garnet mining and tourism. Through the auspices of North Country Public Radio, she produced a series of radio pieces, complemented by written narratives housed on the radio station's website, to make her findings accessible to a wide audience.

Sophie is currently the FRONTLINE Podcast Producer at WGBH in Boston, MA.