1981 to Present
Forty-Six Years in the Field
Every catalog we ever printed.
Every year we said what we believed.
The Collection
Becoming SFS
Nearly a half century since the dream began. One argument made over and over, in different language each time: that the world itself is a better classroom than any building, and that the best way to learn about an ecosystem is to live in it alongside the people who already do. The catalogs are where SFS worked that argument out: conservation urgency in the eighties, the decision to stay in places in the nineties, systems thinking in the 2000s, applied research in the 2010s, reciprocity and identity in the 2020s. Each decade contributes a frame the next inherits and refines.
Reading them in order is a strange kind of time travel. You know which bets pay off. You know which ideas turn out to be the durable ones. The people who put these pages together had none of that: they had a typewriter, a P.O. Box, and a conviction that what they believed was worth putting in print. And somewhere in the reading you realize that one day someone will read the 2026 catalog the same way you’re reading the 1981 one (with the same unearned omniscience) and find parts of you quaint, parts of you right, and the whole of you earnest. The best any era can do is what the first one did: say clearly what it believes, put it in print, and go.
Taken together, they show what we have consistently valued: living in the places we study, staying long enough to build relationships there, and treating fieldwork as the core of the education.
1980s
Nine expeditions in 1981 become five permanent research centers by decade’s end. Underneath it ran a conviction: fieldwork teaches what classrooms cannot. In 1984, we invent the twelve-week semester abroad in environmental science, and coin “The World Is Your Classroom,” a line we have kept for forty years.
1981The Expedition Prospectus
(PDF)
1982Urgency and Transformation
(PDF)
1983The School Emerges
(PDF)
1984The Semester Invention
(PDF)
1985Science as a Verb
(PDF)
1986Five Continents
(PDF)
1987The Hinge Year
(PDF)
1987–88Permanent Bases Declared
(PDF)
1988–89Maximum Reach, Own Voice
(PDF)
1989–90Six Continents
(PDF)
1990s
Permanent centers settle into the places around them. Faculty become residents, not visitors; students become crew, not passengers. Kenya, Australia, Costa Rica, the Turks and Caicos Islands: long relationships with long-studied landscapes. The catalogs in this decade answer a simple question: what happens when a school decides to stay?
1990–91Peak Dispersion
(PDF)
1991–92The Honeyguide’s Call
(PDF)
1992–93The Dust Settles
(PDF)
1993–94The Anti-Marketing Manifesto
(PDF)
1994–95The Maximum Extent
(PDF)
1995–96Clayoquot and Koror
(PDF)
1996–97Seven Flags Flying
(PDF)
1997–98Member of the Crew
(PDF)
1998–99The Problem-Solving School
(PDF)
1999–00The Steady State
(PDF)
2000s
Twenty-five years in, we start sounding sure of what we believe. Twelve thousand alumni, and a vocabulary that now includes environmental justice, systems thinking, and climate. The catalogs stop describing courses and start articulating beliefs.
2000–01The Cruising Altitude
(PDF)
2001–02The Ten-Thousand Threshold
(PDF)
2002The Expedition Journal
(PDF)
2003The Compass on the Cover
(PDF)
2004Dear Student
(PDF)
2005The Silver Anniversary
(PDF)
2006The Elevator Pitch
(PDF)
2007After the Cyclone
(PDF)
2008The Climate Manifesto
(PDF)
2009The Web of Everything
(PDF)
2010s
Six new centers open: Bhutan, Tanzania, Panama, Cambodia, Peru, and Chile. By 2019 the catalog lists ten field centers, double digits for the first time. “Applied, user-inspired research” names a new idea of what the science is for, and a ground-up redesign that year places Rachel Carson across the opening spread.
2010Trekking the Middle Path
(PDF)
2011Communities Succeed
(PDF)
2012The Bird That Answered Back
(PDF)
2013Panama and the Smithsonian
(PDF)
2014The Double Expansion
(PDF)
2015Fourteen Thousand Feet
(PDF)
2016A Palace in Bumthang
(PDF)
2017A Memory of Elephants
(PDF)
2018A Tree Kangaroo Returns
(PDF)
2019Wild Patagonia: Fire and Ice
(PDF)
2020s
The 40th anniversary lands with an expanded sense of purpose: diversity and inclusion reframed as a generative force, student voices on the cover, climate as the central frame. Croatia and Italy open as our first European centers: twelve countries, the widest map since the 1990s. In 2025, the catalog says what the whole archive has been saying: “The World Is Alive. Step Into Its Story.” A year later SFS goes back to 1984 and swaps a single word. “The World Is Your Classroom” becomes “The Field Is Your Classroom.”
