  The near-star environment around young stars is very dynamic with winds,
disks, and outflows. These processes are involved in star and planet formation,
and influence the formation and habitability of planets around host stars. Even
for the closest young stars, this will not be imaged even after the completion
of the next generation of telescopes decades from now and other proxies must be
used. The polarization of light across individual spectral lines is such a
proxy that contains information about the geometry and density of circumstellar
material on these small spatial scales. We have recently built a
high-resolution spectropolarimeter (R~13000 to 50000) for the HiVIS
spectrograph on the 3.67m AEOS telescope. We used this instrument to monitor
several young intermediate-mass stars over many nights. These observations show
clear spectropolarimetric signatures typically centered on absorptive
components of the spectral lines, with some signatures variable in time. The
survey also confirms the large spectroscopic variability in these stars on
timescales of minutes to months, and shows the dyamic bullets and streamers in
the stellar winds. These observations were largely inconsistent with the
traditional scattering models and inspired the development of a new explanation
of their polarization, based on optical-pumping, that has the potential to
provide direct measurements of the circumstellar gas properties.
