COA installs new president

BAR HARBOR, Maine --College of the Atlantic has formally installed David Hales as its new president.

A Sunday ceremony was held beneath a tent draped in the flags of the 51 nations and 47 states from which the school has drawn its students.

"We will attack despair with questions and the power of our creativity," Hales told school faculty, students, staff, trustees and other guests.

"We are the first generation of humans to have the realistic possibility to build a world that is sustainable and just. We must choose to do so," he said.

Hales said the college should prepare students "to shape the world in which they will live."

Located on Mount Desert Island, College of the Atlantic was founded in 1969 and offers one major -- Human Ecology.

Hales previously served as counsel for sustainability policy at Worldwatch Institute. He directed environmental policy at the United States Agency for International Development during the Clinton administration and served in the Carter administration as deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of the Interior.

He succeeds Steven Katona, a founding faculty member of the college who served as president from 1993 until his retirement in June.

As the inauguration speaker, Ambassador Frank Loy, who was under secretary of state for global affairs during the Clinton administration, called for linking the message of environmentalism to the nation's belief in itself.

Writer and producer Philip Kunhardt III, an alumnus from the college's first class, sounded a similar theme.

"We are people who care deeply about the natural world and its future and who seek the peaceful flourishing of humankind," he said. "And we are lovers of this small college on the coast of Maine which we believe has a profound role to play in healing the breach between humans and nature."