Kerstin Lange G’03 grew up in a city in northwestern Germany, far from the highly militarized border called the Iron Curtain that divided her home country in two during her youth. She knew little about the people and the country on the other side of that border – the German Democratic Republic, better known as East Germany.  

Lange grew up in particularly dynamic times, an inquisitive person who grew to wonder about the people, landscapes, and cultures around her. She pursued both anthropology and environmental studies as an undergraduate, focused on learning about the complexities of the world around her in multi-faceted ways, and then found her way to her first master's degree to keep deepening her knowledge.

She approached her second graduate degree slowly. After a long period of consideration that included many field walks and conversations, she found herself enrolled in UVM’s Field Naturalist Program, honing her skills for seeing, interpreting, and communicating.

Lange became a writer and a commentator for Vermont Public Radio. Some ten years ago she decided to focus her curiosity and skills on her home country, seeking to understand -- and write about -- the social and ecological dimensions of the Cold War border that had divided Germany, and what reunification had meant.

We got to catch up to learn about the path that had brought her to UVM and where it’s led since then — a path that came to include a nearly-1,400-kilometer bike ride to immerse herself in learning, her time writing “Phantom Border: A Personal Reconnaissance of Contemporary Germany,” based on that experience, and what she’s doing now.*

Below is a transcript of that conversation, lightly edited for clarity and length.

University of Vermont Foundation:

We are so grateful to you for having kept us aware of your book and for making sure the UVM community knows about your work. Thank you!

There are so many themes in your book, around ecology and the natural world, the human community, politics, history, geography, even the topography of the area you’re talking about.

This made me think that you must be a deeply curious person. Can you tell us about your childhood and where that curiosity first took form?

Kerstin Lange:

Well, I grew up in a city in northwestern Germany, and for the purposes of this book, that “western” part is an important detail. I knew very little about East Germany. I didn't know anybody there. I had barely seen the border. It just didn't really feature in my life very much. That changed dramatically on November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall gave way to peaceful protesters. Boom! That really brought history to life for me. As far as the natural world, one thing that became something of a throughline for me is a connection, on a gut level, with the landscape.

I often note that northern Germany is very different from Vermont, it’s almost completely flat terrain, and also quite different from the landscapes I explored for my book.

My hometown, Bremen, is a big city that has about as many people as all of Vermont. It was a really urban environment, and as a child did not really learn to relate to the ecology, like to identify birds or trees beyond some very basic categories.

It now seems fairly crazy, but I had to go to college to learn some of this, and I really credit one environmental studies professor in Binghamton. You know, I felt like, oh, I had to go to college to learn to tell one tree and bird from another. In my view, that should be part of kindergarten!

UVMF:

I’m glad you at least got that introduction to trees and birds!  From there, how did you end up at UVM?

Kerstin:

As an undergraduate, I majored in anthropology and environmental studies. It was through an anthropology friend and through one of my environmental studies professors that I became interested in birds. And that led to an interest in the woods and to natural history, to questions like how does all of this [sweeps her arm in a circle around her] work? Things I wondered like, what kind of plants and animals and rocks are here, and what forces shaped the landscape we see today?

I had no end to my questions.

It was through my birder friend that I heard about UVM’s Field Naturalist Program, and I thought, ‘Wow, that sounds pretty amazing.’

I found out the field naturalists were offering field walks for people, and I got connected with them and I met Jeffrey Hughes (then-director), Alicia Daniel (then-co-director) and Walter Poleman, who now directs it.

It was a slow approach: I thought about applying to the program for something like 7 years because I had already spent a lot of time in academia getting my bachelor’s and master’s degrees.  I just wanted to do something else for a while. But I went on those field walks fairly frequently and learned a lot that way, and then one year I decided to apply.

UVMF:

What do you remember of the early days in the program?

Kerstin:

One thing that stands out is that they get you into the real world pretty quickly. I remember that within maybe two weeks of starting we were sent to the Marsh-Billings National Historic Park to offer suggestions to the park’s superintendent, who of course knew way more about all this stuff than we did.

It was a powerful way to get us really thinking and taking it seriously, and to figure out, well, how do we talk about these really complicated things about the landscape and the people on it, and how they interact?

In retrospect, I can say that the program really helped me think about how to translate what we were learning and seeing to people who are not in academia. And so that became very important to me — to not just talk to scientists, but to be able to talk and write about these things in a way that “normal,” non-academic people can understand. That's kind of stayed with me and still feels meaningful.

One of the requirements for graduating from the program was the “popular article” assignment. For that, we had to get a short piece published in either a newspaper or magazine — but definitely not a scientific journal. That particular piece, a 2005 essay called “Plants and People: Questions of Place and Belonging” ended up being published in The Valley News, which was very satisfying because I knew it was read by people who were interested in what I was writing about (our local landscapes). I also liked the thought of being part of a larger conversation, outside my own head.

From there I somehow got into writing commentaries for Vermont Public [Radio], and later essays and articles for other publications, like Northern Woodlands, the Montpelier Times Argus, and SAPIENS magazine.

And I really think this all came out of my time in the program at UVM. So it’s still a pretty big part of my life.

UVMF:  

You’re describing an approach that crosses academic and social borders here at UVM, in Vermont more broadly, and then went back home with you to Germany and the research that would become “Phantom Border.” Can you talk about that?

Kerstin:

What ultimately led to the book was a story I heard on the radio about the former border strip and that it had become a nature preserve called the Green Belt (Grünes Band in German). Amazingly, over 1,200 rare plant and animal species have been documented there — species that could barely survive in the rest of the landscape. But in the deadly border strip they found a refuge.

I was fascinated by this irony of history and I wanted to find out more. I found somebody who could show me around a little bit and then I guess it just didn't let me go. Over the next few years I kept visiting different places along the Green Belt, and I realized that I wanted to see the whole thing, and I had the idea to use a bicycle to do an expedition along this almost-900-mile long border.

The idea was to see what's left of the border installations and see the Green Belt, and to learn what all of that meant. And I wanted to meet people who had lived with the border during the Cold War, and to conceptually take the border as a metaphor and see how the reunited Germans were doing.

It's almost embarrassing in retrospect to say that it was almost 20 years after the Berlin Wall came down that I really ever thought about what had become of the border that had divided Germany.

Like for a lot of people, the important thing to me was that the border was gone. The fall of the Berlin Wall, which made the longer border obsolete, was a big deal in my life.

Watching the scenes of people dancing on top of the Wall, hugging strangers, laughing and crying, I was aware that this was history that was being lived by real people. That these were real people who were alive along with me right now, not people in history books. That was really energizing.

UVMF: 

It sounds like that practice in both nature observation and in communication among diverse human communities came to be really relevant.

Kerstin:

Definitely. For one thing, I learned that the organization that oversees the Green Belt has done a lot of the heavy lifting to get it all organized. That is not an easy thing to do with Germany being made up of 16 federal states, and conservation being a state thing rather than a federal government thing.

That organization — BUND, for German Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation — has done an amazing job, working with people to convince them early on to preserve this strip of land as a feature in the landscape, this place that had been a brutal border that people were really sick of.

This could have totally backfired. Early on they were very good at putting out the message: “Borders divide, nature unites,” and to present the Green Belt as a living memorial to those who suffered and died there. That is still very meaningful to me.

And then there I was on my trip, paying attention to the Green Belt and the biodiversity — in addition to trying to process all the human and societal dimensions. But they intersect, of course. For instance, one thing I came to learn about the ecological strand of the story is that the reason the biodiversity took hold there is not only because people were removed by brutal means for 40 years (because one could think that, oh, take out people and then nature thrives, right?), but something particular about the border strip itself that promoted biodiversity.

This is of course not anything that the people who designed the border strip or the border guards who were stationed there, that was not what was on their minds. But the effect was that the land in this narrow border strip was largely kept open and there was also enough structural diversity that really benefited the species of birds who need an open landscape to survive. These would not be able to survive, for example, in a cornfield, because they can’t see the insects that they depend on for food. So, there was open landscape, no fertilizer, no pesticides — a very rare occurrence in an otherwise highly intensive agricultural landscape.

There's kind of a poster-child bird of the Green Belt called the whinchat, and that bird needs perches to sit on and to see the insects that it needs for food. And it wouldn't be able to do that in a dense cornfield or, you know, other parts of a heavily, industrialized agriculture. And so those birds did very well in the border strip.

What that tells me is that even though it would be easy to think of us humans as pretty much just agents of destruction, that maybe this shows that if we understand what the conditions were that the border created, maybe we can relate to the natural world in ways that actually promote biodiversity.

We humans often think of “pure nature” as an ideal, meaning “nature” as something totally separate from humans. I do think there need to be places where humans are not the boss, where ecological processes prevail. But seeing our overall impact, I think it is important to understand how what we do in nature affects things like biodiversity. To see ourselves as part of nature.

I mean, it's kind of our lifeline. We can only understand these things if we actually know what's around us ecologically.

I started my expedition because I was so pulled in by the ecological story. And then I realized that the societal and human story is a big part of it. And since I am, by training, both an anthropologist and a landscape/ natural history person, I felt like, OK, so I'm going to try to put it all together. And that became the book — and it’s the basis for the talks and conversations that are still going on around the topic.

UVMF:

We always love to ask when we talk with alumni: what are your wishes for current students and alumni considering a path like yours?

Kerstin:

I think it is really valuable to have people who look at landscapes, at nature, keep a long view. Thinking about things like what was here before us? How did this come to be the way it is now? and what might that mean for the future?

It's very easy to cut down a tree that was there hundreds of years before my little human life. And so that of course applies to everything.

We don't get to decide or tweak the laws of nature. So I find that it is valuable to have people who can have this long and rather large view, and to inform policy decisions in whatever role where people with that training end up. Whether they become teachers or researchers or enter the political world. I think that is a valuable contribution because it's so easy to ignore that. And so even though the Field Naturalist Program is a small program, I feel like, wow, the people that come out of it really have something to offer.

* You can hear Kerstin speak on October 19, 2026 at Burlington Cohousing (email Cheryl Carmi for details) and on October 21, 2026 at OLLI Montpelier.

Learn More:

• About the book: Phantom Border. A Personal Reconnaissance of Contemporary Germany

• About Kerstin: KerstinLange.net

• Kerstin’s author page with the Vermont Humanities Council 

• Kerstin's Spring 2026 Class Note

• Another transdisciplinary Field Naturalist Program author Jeffrey Hughes

  
  

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