Elijah Tangenberg is a senior at Houghton, majoring in political science with a minor in economics. After Houghton, Elijah says that he hopes to do work related to water supply and national security. He explains that some of the goal with this is to “try to help us live more sustainably, while also preserving most of our current uses for water.” Elijah tells me that he first started thinking about water when he was growing up in California. “I think that my dad unintentionally started a water management mafia,” he jokes, “it’s a thing that he got really into when we moved to California. He got a job with the Council for Watershed Health in Los Angeles. I spent most of my childhood talking with my dad about water issues—things he was looking at at work, really frustrating things that were happening with policy at work, really cool things that had happened and how they worked.” Even though water was something Elijah thought and talked about a lot growing up, he says he didn’t initially think of focusing on water as an area of study in college. “I was actually much more interested in international relations,” he says, “but I took a class with Doctor Ronald Oakerson my second semester of sophomore year, and when we started talking about water issues I suddenly started getting really interested.”
Elijah tells me that some of the unique challenges of water particularly appealed to him—such as public perception about feasible water supply solutions, balancing the expense of different methods, and how water behaves differently from other natural resources. “It does things that no other natural resource we use does,” he says. “Like for fuel, gas, whatever, you burn it and it’s gone, it’s some other form, it’s in our atmosphere, but we’ll never see it become oil or wood again. We can kind of guess how those processes work, and try to encourage them, but it doesn’t happen nearly instantly. For water, it just falls from the sky, goes through a river, goes through the ocean, and can be back above our heads the next day. It’s really flexible.”
In his spare time Elijah likes to work on his hobbies. He tells me about the three hobbies that he’s spent the most time on: journal systems, music, and reading ancient Japanese and Chinese poetry. Elijah explains that he got into haiku because of his cousin, and from haiku he made his way to ancient Chinese poetry. “Ancient Chinese culture is something that I’ve always been a little bit interested in,” he says. “Partly because of their culture’s relationship to government, but also natural spaces at the same time.” Elijah explains that the way the ancient Chinese related to their natural resources and to their government is often expressed in their poetry. “What the poems convey is this kind of embattlement between natural elements—this transcendence of nature, these divine forces—in connection to their relationship to government, their families, as well as their relationship to their selves. And all of those elements together have just really spoken to me as I’ve gone through political science, since frankly no other culture has poems about government—just even saying that makes people laugh.” However, Elijah says he thinks that connecting political science to art is really important. “Without the artistic element you lose a lot of creativity,” he says, “especially with natural resource policy, where you need to be balancing so many different needs at the same time, that really require really creative solutions—not just so that you can get to a really great outcome, but so that you can get to a survivable outcome. You need to have this respect for your subject that can only really be conveyed in art.”
When I ask Elijah if he has any advice for readers, he says that a practice he’s come to appreciate a lot recently is spending time with things that are difficult. “So,” Elijah explains, “if there’s a subject that’s really difficult for you, kind of daring yourself to spend time with it, and to really get to know it. For an English student that might just be a paragraph in an essay they’re writing that they absolutely hate. For a math student, that could be spending your time with an equation or a theorem that you do not understand. I think our instinct a lot of the time is just to get it done and get it out of the way as best we can. But I really find that reflecting on an object or reflecting on a place, an event, or a lesson, can be really enriching.” Elijah explains that the goal of the time spent with the difficult thing is not to accomplish something particular with it, but just to experience it. “Find an object, idea, lesson, something you hate,” he says, “and for about ten or fifteen minutes, just sit with it, don’t try to do anything with it, but just allow it to speak to you.”