Thursday, May 15, 2025 | 4:30 pm – 5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 | Field Station
Would you like to learn about nature, talk to biologists and bio-geochemists from Bard and Hudsonia, and hear about trends in American Eel populations and the outcome of other Field Station projects? You're in luck! Come to the Field Station's end of the year celebration (after the Eelebration for Saw Kill Eel Project volunteers).
Hannah Arendt Center and Bard Athletics Hosted “Spring Cleaning” of Bard Campus
After an hour of picking up trash, the dedication organizers and volunteers put in was enough to leave the whole campus community inspired.
Hannah Arendt Center and Bard Athletics Hosted “Spring Cleaning” of Bard Campus
Over 40 volunteers showed up for the campus-wide Spring Cleaning event. Photo by Julián Donas Milstein
The Hannah Arendt Center (HAC) and Bard Athletics joined together last weekend to organize a campus-wide “Spring Cleaning” event. Working quickly in anticipation of the upcoming admitted students weekend, fellows at the HAC and student athletes gathered supplies and began recruiting volunteers to clean up across Bard’s Annandale campus, drawing more than 40 volunteers to help. The large turnout came as a pleasant surprise to the organizers, with volunteers covering six zones across the campus, picking up everything from abandoned soccer balls to discarded Kline dishware. And yet, after an hour of picking up trash, the dedication organizers and volunteers put in was enough to leave the whole campus community inspired. “It’s not usually work that makes people proud,” one of the fellows later remarked.
Post Date: 04-08-2025
Landscape Firm Tom Stuart-Smith Joins Blithewood Garden Rehabilitation Project
“After almost a decade of planning for Blithewood’s return to glory, I’m thrilled to be collaborating with Tom Stuart-Smith’s team to rethink and refresh Blithewood’s plantings,” said Amy Parrella.
Landscape Firm Tom Stuart-Smith Joins Blithewood Garden Rehabilitation Project
Bard College’sFriends of Blithewood Garden and the Garden Conservancy are pleased to announce that the firm Tom Stuart-Smith, a renowned landscape design practice with an international reputation for making gardens that combine naturalism and modernity, will be commissioned for the planting plan phase of the Blithewood Garden rehabilitation project.
Once the current architectural rehabilitation phase at Blithewood is complete, the Stuart-Smith team will help reimagine the garden and the surrounding landscape to fit seamlessly into the space. The team will coordinate with the preservation architect and review historical records, photographs, and prior reports to inform the new design. They will also work with Bard College to integrate educational and opportunities for students and the broader community throughout the process. Once complete, Blithewood’s landscape will be Stuart-Smith’s only public garden in the United States.
“After almost a decade of planning for Blithewood’s return to glory, I’m thrilled to be collaborating with Tom Stuart-Smith’s team to rethink and refresh Blithewood’s plantings,” said Amy Parrella, director of Horticulture and Arboretum at Bard. “Gardens are dynamic living art works that are at their best when they are reinterpreted from a current lens, while still maintaining their cultural and design integrity.”
“The most enduring historic gardens continue to evolve,” said Pamela Governale, director of preservation at the Garden Conservancy. “By engaging the renowned landscape practice of Tom Stuart-Smith, we are embracing a living future for Blithewood—one that honors its past while reimagining its plantings for challenges of the decades ahead. This is preservation not as stasis, but as cultural continuity. The restoration of Blithewood Garden is a powerful example of what happens when visionary institutions and world-class designers come together to steward a nationally significant landscape.”
Blithewood Garden is considered a nationally significant Beaux Arts, Italianate garden with significant connections to the evolution of American landscape design and is one of the few intact Hudson River estate gardens that remain from the Gilded Age. Situated on a steeply sloping bluff approximately 130 feet above the Hudson River, Blithewood is a 45-acre section of Bard’s campus that was once part of a historic estate comprising a manor house, outbuildings, drives, gardens, lawns, and meadows. Bard College has partnered with the Garden Conservancy, a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to preserve and share America’s gardens, on the restoration of Blithewood Garden.
Bard College Hosts Symposium on PCB Contamination and “Bomb Trains” Threatening the Hudson/Mahicantuck River on April 11
Bard College will host“The Fate of the River,” a public symposium centered on two major environmental threats facing the Hudson/Mahicantuck River, on Friday, April 11 from 10 am to 4 pm in Olin Hall at Bard College.
Bard College Hosts Symposium on PCB Contamination and “Bomb Trains” Threatening the Hudson/Mahicantuck River on April 11
Hudson/Mahicantuck River. Photo by Jon Bowermaster
Bard College will host“The Fate of the River,” a symposium centered on two major environmental threats facing the Hudson/Mahicantuck River. The symposium will take place on Friday, April 11 from 10 am to 4 pm in Olin Hall at Bard College. “The Fate of the River” will call attention to high levels of PCB contamination in the river and “bomb trains”—overloaded freight trains carrying Bakken shale oil and unidentified chemicals along the eroding west bank of the river. General Electric’s dumping of toxic material in the river over 30 years and its subsequent clean-up between 2009 and 2015 that did not meet agreed upon environmental benchmarks has resulted in the river’s high levels of PCB contamination. Continuing PCB contamination causes human health risks, ongoing extinction and disease to fish and wildlife, and damages river ecosystems, wetlands, ground water, and soil. The other symposium topic is the environmental threat of “Bomb Trains” carrying highly explosive fossil fuels, which if derailed, spell catastrophe in impacted communities.
The purpose of this symposium is to facilitate public discussion informed by science, environmental law, and best citizen advocacy practices and to explore how members of the community can effectively address and work together to curtail these threats. Morning presentations will be followed by an afternoon panel and public discussion. Members of the Hudson Valley community are welcome to attend for all or part of the symposium.
Key speakers include writer, filmmaker and adventurer, Jon Bowermaster; Associate Director of Government Affairs at Riverkeeper Jeremy Cherson MS ’15, who is working to advance Riverkeeper’s priorities in Albany and Washington; Senior Staff Attorney at Food & Water Watch and Bard faculty member Erin Doran; public health physician and Director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at SUNY Albany David O. Carpenter; and lawyer Florence Murray, whose practice specializes in traumatic brain injuries and wrongful death actions, civil rights violations with severe injuries, trucking collisions, and railroad derailments—such as the one in East Palestine, Ohio.
“The Fate of the River”symposium is the first in a series of public discussions entitled Environmental Injustice Across the Americas that focuses on state-sanctioned pollution, the poisoning of water, destruction of the commons, and the fight for justice. “The Fate of the River” is cosponsored by Bard College’s Human Rights Program, Center for Civic Engagement, Center for Environmental Policy, Environmental Studies, and the Office of Sustainability.
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“The Fate of the River” Symposium Schedule Friday, April 11, 2025 Olin Hall, Bard College
10:00–10:10 am Introduction to “The Fate of the River” symposium 10:10–10: 35am Introduction and screening of Jon Bowermaster’s film A Toxic Legacy about General Electric’s contamination of the Hudson/Mahicantuck River 10:40–11:00am Jeremy Cherson, Associate Director of Government Affairs, Riverkeeper 11:05–11:25 am Erin Doran, Faculty in Environmental Law, Bard Center for Environmental Policy, and Senior Staff Attorney, Food & Water Watch 11:35–11:55 am David Carpenter, Director of Institute for Health and the Environment, SUNY Albany Noon–1:00pm LUNCH BREAK 1:05–1:25 pm Eli Dueker, Associate Professor of Environmental and Urban Studies, and Director of Bard Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities 1:25–1:40 pm Introduction to and screening of Jon Bowermaster’s film Bomb Trains 1:40–2:00 pm Jeremy Cherson, Associate Director of Government Affairs, Riverkeeper 2:00–2:20 pm Florence Murray, Partner of Murray & Murray Law Firm, represents stakeholders affected by the toxic aftermath of the 2023 derailment of a Norfolk Southern train in East Palestine, Ohio 2:20–2:40 pm COFFEE BREAK 2:40–4:00 pm Panel and Public Discussion: “Next Steps Toward a Healthier River”
Refreshments graciously provided by Taste Budds and Yum Yum of Red Hook.
Post Date: 03-31-2025
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May 2012
05-30-2012
What would it take to make faster computers and more efficient solar panels? Jesse Kohl '07 is looking for answers at the crossroads of nanotechnology and clean energy.
Bard won the food composting division of the national Recyclemania contest, beating Middlebury and Princeton. The college has also signed a contract to eliminate most delivered water bottles on campus and replace them with inline filtration.
Bard College has been awarded an exploration grant of $50,000 from the Henry Luce Foundation through the Luce Initiative on Asian Studies and the Environment (LIASE) for the project Slow Water: Rivers and Community in Asia.