News and Events

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Al-Quds Bard Students Win Regional Entrepreneurship Competition for Company Developed in OSUN Network Collaborative Course Led by Bard MBA Faculty

CleanPalCo, a company created by students at Al-Quds Bard, has won the award for Best Student Company for 2021 in a regional competition throughout the Arab world. Ahmad Hijawi AQB ’23 and several colleagues launched the company, which produces sustainable building materials, after developing the concept in the Open Society University Network collaborative course Social Entrepreneurship. The course is cotaught by Alejandro Crawford and Eliza Edge MBA ’20 of the Bard MBA Program.

CleanPalCo addresses the problems of pollution and a lack of building supplies in Palestine by using discarded rubber tires, stone waste, and water to produce useful household products such as bricks, tiles, and rubber flooring for Palestinian municipalities.
 

Post Date: 12-10-2021

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Bard CEP and MBA in Sustainability Director Eban Goodstein on How Gen Z Is Mobilizing the World to Fight Climate Change

Gen Z is taking to Twitter and “EcoTok” to mobilize and educate around climate change. Professor Eban Goodstein, director of the Center for Environmental Policy and Bard MBA in Sustainability, believes this new generation of activists could change the equation on climate action. “I work with young people who have decided that this is the life they want to lead. And there’s no place I’d rather be,” Goodstein says. “This is an extraordinary moment in which we’re living, where people all across the world have tremendous agency to influence the course of the planet, the future of humanity, and millions of species on the earth.” Undaunted by partisan divides and political gridlock, Goodstein believes youth activists have an integral role to play in climate action.
 

Post Date: 12-07-2021

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Bard’s March 2022 Worldwide Teach-In on Climate and Justice Receives Swift Grant Award from Lever for Change

Bard College and the University of Waterloo teamed up to win a Swift Grant award from Lever for Change. With this support, the two universities will expand their online Worldwide Teach-In on Climate and Justice in March to engage students and faculty members from all disciplines in countries in Africa. The collaborative project aims to reach more than a million students from all over the globe to learn about climate change, climate solutions, and climate justice. 

The Worldwide Teach-In is a project of the Graduate Programs in Sustainability at Bard College in conjunction with partners worldwide and the Open Society University Network’s Solve Climate by 2030 Project. For the past three years, OSUN’s Solve Climate by 2030 has been supporting globally coordinated education about the climate crisis. The project has engaged hundreds of colleges, universities and high schools– from Malaysia to Minnesota, and from Austria to Alabama– in discussions of climate solutions, across the curriculum. Targeting participation by a million students across the planet, the Worldwide Teach-in on Climate and Justice event on March 30, 2022 is perhaps the most ambitious component of the project yet, advancing a three-hour teach-in model that maximizes student involvement through faculty leadership. 

“As educators, there is nothing more important than engaging students across our campuses in this extraordinary moment in which we are living,” says Eban Goodstein, director of Bard Center for Environmental Policy and director/faculty of Bard's Graduate Programs in Sustainability. 

Lever for Change is a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation affiliate, whose mission is to unlock significant philanthropic capital and accelerate social change around the world’s most pressing challenges. In May 2021, Lever for Change introduced the Swift Grants fund, aimed to provide small grants to Bold Solutions Network members for collaborative projects. This fund provided an outlet for the world’s top problem solvers to leverage expertise and join forces to find creative solutions in their fields.

Lever for Change received proposals for innovative, collaborative projects addressing climate, health, and refugee support. In total, they selected five projects. Over the next year, each team will use their $25,000 Swift Grants to implement their respective projects.

Post Date: 10-03-2021

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Environmental Performance of Blue Foods: Professor Gidon Eshel and Colleagues Examine Sustainability Impacts of Aquatic Food Sources for Nature Cover Story

Research Professor Gidon Eshel, who teaches primarily in the Environmental and Urban Studies Program at Bard College, has coauthored a paper in Nature that provides the most comprehensive estimate to date of the environmental performance of blue food (fish and other aquatic foods) and for the first time, compares stressors across the diversity of farmed and wild aquatic species. The study reveals which species are already performing well in terms of emissions, freshwater and land use, and identifies opportunities for further reducing environmental footprints.

Read the Paper in Nature
Nature Story on Blue Foods
Learn More about Blue Food Assessment

Post Date: 09-19-2021

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Biology Professor Felicia Keesing’s Research on Disease Risk and Biodiversity Loss Cited by Guardian Article on US Covid Origins Report

“Since the evidence is by now overwhelming that long-term human activity is accelerating the emergence of novel pathogens and increasing the risk of pandemics, the question investigators should really be asking is: did some recent, one-off event such as a lab accident exacerbate the already high and growing risk of spillover of a virus with pandemic potential caused by a decades-long shift towards industrialised farming and the wildlife trade?” writes Laura Spinney in the Guardian, citing Keesing’s April 2021 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) paper.

Post Date: 08-28-2021

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Kingston Air Quality Initiative Detected Potentially Dangerous Levels of Fine Particulate Matter (PM2.5) from Western Wildfire Smoke in Late July

Smoke from large wildfires burning in the western United States and Canada led to potentially dangerous air quality conditions in the Hudson Valley in late July, according to the Kingston Air Quality Initiative (KAQI), a collaboration between the Bard Center for the Study of Land, Air, and Water and the City of Kingston. Sensors on the roof of the Andy Murphy Neighborhood Center on Broadway in Kingston—and confirmed by street-level monitoring in Kingston and on the Bard campus—showed significantly elevated levels of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) for several hours on July 20 and July 26. Although the levels didn’t exceed the 24-hour EPA standard of 35 ug/m^3 (micrograms per cubic meter of air), readings were found to be as high as 70 ug/m^3 for several hours at multiple locations. New York State issued air quality warnings for the entire state that week.

“Being able to track real-time effects of climate change-related disasters on local air quality is a powerful tool supporting Kingston's efforts to become a sustainable and climate-adapted community,” said M. Elias Dueker, assistant professor of environmental and urban studies at Bard College and director of the Bard Center for the Study of Land, Air, and Water. “While wildfires are predicted to continue in the West, and we may not be able to prevent the smoke heading our way, we can do work to limit our own contributions to poor air quality locally, including car exhaust and wood burning. These actions are not just good for the planet, but good for ourselves and our neighbors. Our Hudson Valley air is precious and we must protect it.”

PM2.5 is made up of microscopic particles that are the products of burning fuel, and is released into the air through exhausts from oil burners, gas burners, automobiles, cooking, grilling, and both indoor and outdoor woodburning. PM2.5 particles are so tiny they stay suspended in the air for long periods of time, allowing them to travel long distances before depositing. When these particles are inhaled, they can enter the bloodstream through the lungs, creating or exacerbating health issues. Several studies have shown that PM2.5 produced by wildfires or by burning wood is more dangerous to human health than that produced, for example, by vehicle emissions. A study from UC San Diego Scripps Institute was released very recently showing the PM2.5 emitted by wildfire smoke results in up to 10 percent more respiratory admissions to hospitals than other sources of PM2.5.

KAQI’s monitoring efforts over the past year and a half have focused on a regional assessment of air pollution from fine particulate matter (PM2.5), as measured from the roof of the Andy Murphy Neighborhood Center on Broadway in Kingston. While KAQI’s first year of monitoring found that levels of PM2.5 rarely reached dangerous thresholds as regulated by the EPA, this summer has been a different story, going beyond local fuel combustion. Smoke plumes from the fires raging out west have been travelling across the continent over the past few weeks, resulting in hazy skies and prompting several air quality alerts in the midwest and northeast. As wind and temperatures pick up out west and worsen fire conditions, the effects will likely continue to be felt in the Hudson Valley as air packets over burning areas travel east and eventually deposit from the upper to lower troposphere, affecting the air quality at ground level. Dueker said that wider-scale community and neighborhood-level monitoring are on the horizon.

The Kingston Air Quality Initiative began in January 2020 as a partnership between Bard’s Community Science Lab and the City of Kingston Conservation Advisory Council’s Air Quality Subcommittee to conduct a first-ever Kingston-centered air quality study. Since then, Kingston residents and Bard College students, staff, and faculty have conducted air quality monitoring in both indoor and outdoor environments. Bard’s air quality monitoring program is supported by the Open Society University Network Community Science Coalition, which works to bridge the gaps between climate-adapting communities and academic institutions. For more information on KAQI and specific details on the wildfire monitoring, please visit landairwater.bard.edu/projects/kaqi or kingston-ny.gov/wildfires. To get involved, please contact Eli Dueker at edueker@bard.edu.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(8/3/21)

Post Date: 07-29-2021