John Rensenbrink
John C. Rensenbrink (August 30, 1928 – July 30, 2022) was an American political scientist, philosopher, journalist, conservationist, and political activist. He has initiated and helped found many organizations, the most prominent of which are the Maine Green Party (1984); the Green Party of the United States (1984–87) for both of which he was a principal founder; and CREA (the Cathance River Education Alliance) 2000 to the present, a hands-on ecological education project for local schools, schoolchildren and high school students in mid-coast Maine. Early life and education Rensenbrink was born in 1928 in rural Pease, Minnesota, one of seven children of Dutch-American farming parents. His mother, Effie (Aafje Kooiman), was born in the Netherlands; his father, John Rensenbrink, was the eldest son of Dutch immigrants. Rensenbrink and his brother Henry operated the dairy farm upon their father's untimely death in 1943. Unable to attend high school, Rensenbrink took a correspondence course conducted by the American School in Chicago. He left the farm in 1946 to attend Calvin College, an Evangelical college in Grand Rapids, Michigan; his mother and siblings moved to that city the following year. Rensenbrink studied history, English and philosophy at Calvin and was editor of the college newspaper during his junior and senior years. He graduated from Calvin with a BA in 1950. He then entered the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, focused primarily on political philosophy, and received a master's degree in political science in 1951. This was followed by a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the University of Amsterdam from 1951 to 1952. Thereafter, he studied at the University of Chicago, concentrating on political philosophy, American politics, and constitutional law, and completed his Ph.D. in political science from that university in 1956. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Technology and Utopia: the Structure of Freedom". Academic and other professional work Rensenbrink began teaching at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1956. After a year at Coe teaching history and international relations, he taught political philosophy and American government at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, for four years (1957–61). As he prepared for his first class at Williams in the summer of 1957, Rensenbrink met Carla Washburne in her father's College Bookstore in Williamstown. Carla was a rising Junior at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They married in June 1959, shortly after Carla's graduation. They moved to Maine in 1961. Rensenbrink taught political philosophy and history at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, for one year before taking a job in 1962 for three years as Education Advisor to the governments of Kenya and Tanzania, sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development. He and Carla and their daughters Kathryn and Margaret, (born in Dar es Salaam), aged three and one respectively, returned to Bowdoin College in 1965. Rensenbrink was promoted to the tenured position of associate professor in 1968 and to full professor in 1974. The Rensenbrinks' third child, Elizabeth, was born in January 1968. Rensenbrink spent the first six months of 1983 in