Elizabeth Wright-Ingraham was a visionary architect, leader, and educator. She founded the Wright-Ingraham Institute in Colorado Springs in 1970. The Institute was devoted to cross-disciplinary environmental education.
Set up as a non-profit, it offered a nine-week intensive summer course for graduate students. By 1971, the Institute had purchased 640 acres of grassland 30 miles north of Colorado Springs.
The area was known as the Running Creek Field Station. Institute students lived in temporary canvas and wood structures and shared in cooking and maintenance tasks. There was no electricity at the field station. Wright-Ingraham said that in such a rustic surrounding, students “became really attentive to the details of nature.”
Students from different educational disciplines learned from guest lecturers and each other as they explored philosophies of land use and energy planning. They wrestled with problems of conservation and preservation of natural resources.
Learn more about environmental education in the 1970s in the Wright-Ingraham Institute records at UW’s American Heritage Center