News and Events

The Montgomery Place Fall Salon Series, Renewable Energies: Balancing Outputs and Historic Landscapes, presents two sessions highlighting how a local community balances the implementation of renewable energies within an historically significant landscape. Session 1: Solar Energy takes place on Tuesday, November 12, 3–5 p.m. and Session 2: Hydro Energy, on Tuesday, December 3, 3–5 p.m. Programs are free and open to the public. Seating is limited; registration required. For more information and to register send an email to [email protected] or call 845-758-7505.

“The Town of Red Hook has areas that have been recognized locally, statewide, and nationally both as a scenic region, and for having significant historic architecture, landscapes, and viewsheds,” says Emily Majer, Town of Red Hook historian. “These attributes, along with the firm commitment to agriculture and open space, are character defining features of the town which contribute to the quality of life, and economic vitality. Consequently, it is important to be sensitive in the placement of ground and roof-mounted solar panels in designated historic districts and on historic structures, and to protect the viability of important agricultural land and built structures within the town.” Local Law 143-37 “Solar Energy Systems” spells out what kind, size, and placement of array is allowable in each zoning district in order to maximize the utilization of this renewable energy source, while preserving the historic and bucolic nature of the town. 

“Small-scale hydropower was historically an important energy source in this area that may see a resurgence as we work to reduce our dependence on fossil fuel-based energy sources that are driving the climate crisis,” says Robyn Smyth, assistant professor of environmental and urban studies, Bard College.

The Town of Red Hook is home to the Hudson River National Historic Landmark District, the most prestigious designation of historic resources in the nation.
 
Panel Speakers

Session 1: Solar Energy
November 12, 3–5 p.m.
Emily Majer ’95, Town of Red Hook historian and deputy mayor, Village of Tivoli
Audrey Friedrichsen, land use and environmental advocacy attorney, Scenic Hudson
Jeff Irish, vice president, SunCommon
Moderated by Ben Hoen CEP ’06, research scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Session 2: Hydro Energy
December 3, 3–5 p.m.
Emily Majer ’95, Town of Red Hook historian and deputy mayor, Village of Tivoli
Jan Borchert, head of hydro facility design and permitting, Current Hydro
Tracy Brown, restoration manager, Connecticut and New York Northeast Coldwater Habitat Program, Trout Unlimited 
Weston Davey, historic site restoration coordinator, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation
Moderated by Robyn Smyth, assistant professor of environmental and urban studies, Bard College

For more information and to register send an email to [email protected] or call 845-758-7505.

“When fires raged across Brazil this summer and deforestation rates reached startling highs, users began downloading a small German search engine in a modest effort to counteract the devastation,” writes Drozdiak. “Ecosia GmBH, a Berlin-based alternative to Google, donates as much as 80% of the profit it makes from running ads alongside search results to plant trees around the world.”

Eban Goodstein, director of Bard’s Graduate Programs in Sustainability, says putting the planet and its inhabitants before profits “is an incredible paradigm shift” for business schools that have long trained their students to maximize shareholder value. Bard’s MBA in Sustainability bakes sustainability principles into every class rather than simply offering sustainability electives as many business schools do. “In theory, you don’t want to have a sustainability department. The goal should be to make sustainability part of the business model,” says 34-year-old Nour Shaikh MBA ’16, a vice president at ING Financial Services.

James Beard Award–winning Chef Sean Sherman, Oglala Lakota from the Pine Ridge reservation and founder of the company The Sioux Chef, is committed to revitalizing Native American cuisine. Chef Sean comes to the Fisher Center to discuss The (R)evolution of Indigenous Food Systems of North America, Tuesday, October 29, in the LUMA Theater at 5 p.m. The talk will be followed by a question and answer period and book signing. Admission is free; to reserve tickets and for additional information visit fishercenter.bard.edu or call the Fisher Center box office at 845-758-7900.

Through his research Chef Sean has uncovered and mapped out the foundations of the indigenous food systems through an indigenous perspective. His book, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, earned a 2018 James Beard Award and was a top 10 cookbook of 2017. He has become renowned nationally and internationally in the culinary movement of indigenous foods and is leading a movement to completely redefine North American cuisine.

Copies of The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen will be available for purchase in the lobby of LUMA Theater courtesy of Oblong Books. In addition, Ken Greene from Seedshed will be showcasing Haudenosaunee crops grown in the Native American Seed Sanctuary, a collaborative initiative with the St. Regis Mohawk tribe Seedshed and The Hudson Valley Farm Hub.

This event is sponsored by Bard College’s Center for the Study of Land, Air and Water, American Studies, Environmental and Urban Studies, Bard Farm, Bard Office of  Sustainability, Experimental Humanities, The Bard Center for Civic Engagement, Trustee Leader Scholar Program, and Oblong Books. The Fisher Center’s presentation of the event is in tandem with the upcoming Live Arts Bard Biennial, Where No Wall Remains: An International Festival About Borders, November 21–24, 2019.

Chef Sean Sherman, Oglala Lakota, born in Pine Ridge, SD, has been cooking across the US and Mexico over the past 30 years, and has become renowned nationally and internationally in the culinary movement of indigenous foods. Chef Sean has studied extensively to determine the foundations of Native American indigenous foods systems to bring back a sense of Native American cuisine to today’s world. In 2014, he opened the business titled The Sioux Chef as a caterer and food educator in the Minneapolis/Saint Paul area. He and his business partner Dana Thompson also designed and opened the Tatanka Truck, which featured pre-contact foods of the Dakota and Minnesota territories.  

In October 2017, Sean was able to perform the first decolonized dinner at the James Beard House in Manhattan along with his team. His first book, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen was awarded the James Beard medal for Best American Cookbook for 2018 and was chosen as one of the top ten cookbooks of 2017 by the LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, as well as the Smithsonian Magazine. This year, Chef Sean was selected as a Bush Fellow, as well as receiving the 2019 Leadership Award by the James Beard Foundation. The Sioux Chef team of twelve people continues with their mission to help educate and make indigenous foods more accessible to as many communities as possible through the recently founded nonprofit North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS). Learn more: natifs.org.

The Fisher Center develops, produces, and presents performing arts across disciplines through new productions and context-rich programs that challenge and inspire. At once a premier professional performing arts center and a hub for research and education, the Fisher Center supports artists, students, and audiences in the development and examination of artistic ideas and perspectives from the past, present, and future. The organization’s home is the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry and located on the campus of Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley. The Fisher Center offers outstanding programs to many communities, including the students and faculty of Bard, and audiences in the Hudson Valley, New York City, across the country and around the world. The Fisher Center illustrates Bard’s commitment to the performing arts as a cultural and educational necessity. Building on a 150-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders.
 

Plans to build barriers in New York Harbor were set in motion by Superstorm Sandy, which in 2012 barreled up the East Coast, killing 72 people in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast and causing $65 billion in damage. To protect the metro area’s people and property from future Sandys, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has devised five possible schemes for erecting walls to hold back the sea during future catastrophic storms. But environmental advocates say such storm surge barriers will do nothing to shield against expected sea level rise from climate change and—judging by the impact of barriers elsewhere—may even destroy the ecological integrity of harbors they’re meant to protect. Science/nature writer and Bard alumna Elizabeth Royte ’81 talks to stakeholders on both sides of the debate.

Katie Boyle talks with Jon Bowermaster about Patagonia’s two-day stop at Bard to repair damaged clothing as part of their Worn Wear cross-country initiative. Their visit to Bard takes place in conjunction with a community sustainability exhibition, with students working to repair bicycles, furniture, and smartphones. Patagonia chose Bard as a tour location because the Bard MBA in Sustainability students performed well in a case competition at Stanford a couple years ago, creating a proposal for how Patagonia could go carbon neutral by 2025. Bard MBA beat competitors from top-notch business schools like Yale and Wharton to place second. The event put Bard on Patagonia’s shortlist for the Worn Wear Tour. Boyle is the director of enrollment and marketing at the Bard Graduate Programs in Sustainability and Bowermaster is a visiting lecturer in Environmental and Urban Studies at Bard, teaching a class this semester on Multimedia Environmental Storytelling.

Bard College, supported by New York State Energy Research and Development Authority’s (NYSERDA) REV Campus Challenge, announced today the launch of a new website to be a centralized, public resource for exploring sustainable micro hydropower in New York State. The website also documents this process for the Saw Kill Micro Hydropower Project on the Bard Campus, including the installation of real-time water quality monitoring equipment.

The website is organized to streamline and standardize the process for evaluating and implementing a potential micro hydropower site responsibly. The site breaks down the requirements for assessing, implementing, and maintaining a micro hydropower system. Using the Saw Kill Project as an example, lessons learned are provided as a resource for landowners, local governments, and researchers alike.

The MicrohydroNY website will be updated on a regular basis with news about the Saw Kill Project and changes that affect micro hydropower in New York State. Visitors are encouraged to explore the website and sign up for direct emails from MicrohydroNY at microhydrony.org.
 

On Thursday, October 10, Bard College features author Isabella Tree presenting her new work Wilding: returning nature to our farm (New York Review Books, 2019), winner of the 2019 Richard Jefferies prize for nature writing and chosen by Smithsonian as a top 10 science book for 2018. The event takes place at 5 p.m., in Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center. Admission is free and no reservations are necessary. Books will be available for purchase at this event courtesy of Oblong Books & Music.

The event is sponsored by the Bard Center for Civic Engagement, Office of Sustainability, Environmental and Urban Studies Program, and Lifetime Learning Institute.

About the Author
Isabella Tree writes for publications such as National Geographic, Granta, and the Guardian, and is the author of five nonfiction books. Her articles have been selected for the Best American Travel Writing and Reader’s Digest Today’s Best Non-Fiction, and she was Overall Winner of the Travelex Travel Writer Awards. Her latest book Wilding: returning nature to our farm charts the story of the pioneering rewilding project in West Sussex where she lives with her husband Charlie Burrell. Forced to accept that intensive farming on the heavy Sussex clay was economically ruinous, they decided to step back and let nature take over. By introducing free-roaming herbivores—proxies of the large animals that once roamed Britain—the Burrells’ degraded agricultural land has become a functioning ecosystem again. In less than 20 years, wildlife has rocketed and numerous endangered species have made Knepp their home. The Knepp experience challenges conventional ideas about our past and present landscapes, and points the way to a wilder, richer future—one that benefits farming, nature, and us.

For more information about the book, visit nyrb.com.

For more information about the author and Knepp Castle Estate, visit isabellatree.com and knepp.co.uk.

In this podcast Associate Dean of Civic Engagement Brian Mateo talks about his involvement as a Climate Reality Leader and how it’s shaped his ideas about climate change activism; climate migration in Afghanistan, Central America, and the United States; and how to get through to climate change deniers. “Sometimes I feel like the conversation is only about emissions,” says Mateo, “and there's so much more than that. I want to be able to see politicians and world leaders talk more about the people who are being displaced, talk more about food scarcity, talk about how we’re building communities. Lowering emissions is very important, but that's not the only driving part of the conversation.”

The New York City–based podcast War on Cars covers urban livability issues, including the epic 100 years’ war between the car and the city. LA resident and “investigative comedian” Adam Conover ’04, who’s debunked accepted truths about cars in his TV series Adam Ruins Everything, talks to host Doug Gordon about how he enjoys riding LADOT’s DASH bus to work, how cars isolate Angelenos, and how comedy can help change people’s minds.

The annual McHenry Awards recognize exceptional young leaders who are working to protect and enhance the Hudson River Valley. Lindsey Drew CEP ’20, who is pursuing an MS in environmental policy at the Bard Center for Environmental Policy, was recognized for her work with the Woodstock Land Conservancy to assess and address impacts in Ulster County’s Sawkill Creek watershed.

Professor Eshel writes that if Americans choose to reduce meat consumption, it would improve water quality, biodiversity, soil health, and food security, as well as slowing climate change.

Professor Eshel and colleagues found that if all Americans switched away from meat, it would have a significant impact on land use—eliminating the need for pastureland and reducing cropland by as much as 25 percent—and make the nation’s waterways dramatically cleaner.

By replacing meat with protein-conserving plant alternatives Americans could satisfy key nutritional requirements, while eliminating pastureland use and reducing 35-50 percent of the cropland currently needed for food production in the United States, says a new study coauthored by Bard College Research Professor Gidon Eshel. The findings, part of modeling study published in Scientific Reports, suggest that use of nitrogen fertilizer and greenhouse gas emissions would also be reduced, while only food-related water use would rise.

“While widely replacing meat with plants is logistically and culturally challenging, few competing options offer comparable multidimensional resource use reduction,” write Eshel and coauthors Paul Stainier, Alon Shepon, Akshay Swaminathan, all of Harvard University.

In their study, “Environmentally Optimal, Nutritionally Sound, Protein and Energy Conserving Plant Based Alternatives to U.S. Meat,” Eshel and his coauthors used a computer model to devise hundreds of plant-based diets to replace either beef alone or all three dominant U.S. meat types: beef, poultry and pork. Plant-based diets consisted predominantly of soy, green pepper, squash, buckwheat and asparagus. The authors’ goal was to model a range of plant replacement diets that were at least as nutritious, if not more beneficial, than the meats they replaced, while also assessing their environmental impact. Diets were modeled to exactly match the protein content of the meat they replace—13 grams of protein per day from beef or 30 grams of protein per day from all three meat types—while also satisfying 43 other nutrient requirements, such as vitamins and fatty acids.

Buckwheat and tofu jointly delivered a full third of the total protein of diets that replaced all meats, yet accounted for only 12 percent of the nitrogen fertilizer and water and less than 22 percent of the cropland needed to produce the meats they replaced. Soy contributed the most protein to beef-replacing diets, but accounted for only six percent of the overall nitrogen fertilizer needed to produce beef. Replacing meat with plant alternatives was estimated to save approximately 29 million hectares of cropland, three billion kilograms of nitrogen fertilizer, and 280 billion kilograms of carbon dioxide per year. Food-related water use was projected to rise by 15 percent.

Gidon Eshel is a research professor of environmental physics at Bard College. He earned a BA from Haifa University and MA, MPhil, and PhD degrees from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.

Bard alumna Joanna Letz focused on agriculture in California’s Central Valley for her Senior Project. Today, she’s putting unused urban space to use by growing organic flowers on rooftop plots in downtown Berkeley.

There are more than 7,500 miles and a seemingly unbridgeable cultural divide between Freeport, Maine, and Kolkata, India, but to recent Bard graduate Evan Tims, the differences pale in the light of a shared global crisis.

Alexandra Criscuolo developed the Kickstarter Environmental Resources Center, an information hub to help product creators on Kickstarter design for sustainability.

The study, led by biologist Gabriel Perron in collaboration with microbiologist M. Elias Dueker, both on the faculty of the Bard Center for the Study of Land, Air, and Water, shows that even small concentrations of the synthetic antimicrobial agent triclosan can disrupt freshwater microbial communities in favor of bacteria that are associated with human disease and antibiotic resistance.

Bard College senior Evan Tims ’19, a written arts and human rights major, has won a highly selective Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) for the 2019 summer session. This is the second summer Tims has been awarded this competitive scholarship. CLS, a program of the U.S. Department of State, provides recipients with overseas placements that include intensive language instruction and structured cultural enrichment experiences designed to promote rapid language gains. These 8-week programs are all fully funded, including the costs of tuition, visas, airfare, home stays, and a stipend for cultural enrichment/excursions. The CLS program offers foreign language study at sites worldwide in 14 languages identified as critical to United States national security and economic prosperity. The languages include Azerbaijani, Bangla, Hindi, Indonesian, Korean, Punjabi, Swahili, Turkish, Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian.

Tims will study Bangla at the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) in Kolkata, India. Spoken from the densely populated nation of Bangladesh to the Kolkata metropolis in the Indian state of West Bengal, Bangla is the seventh most spoken language in the entire world. With a population of 4.5 million, Kolkata is the largest city in East India and the third largest in India after New Delhi and Mumbai. In Kolkata, Tims will spend 20 morning hours per week in the classroom focusing on grammar, conversation, pronunciation, journal writing, and dictation language classes. In the afternoons, Tims will take a cultural activity class, such as singing, dancing, storytelling, cooking, or painting, and meet with his native language partner for Bangla conversation practice. Tims will engage in weekly local group excursions in order to explore the area, gain in-depth knowledge of culture and history, and meet locals from different backgrounds. Tims will also travel on one overnight excursion to Bishnupur. The summer study culminates in an independent project of his choosing, presented to his fellow classmates entirely in Bangla. During his stay, Tims will live with a host family to maximize language learning and the cultural immersion experience.

“I study Bangla because someday I hope to work in the field of climate change induced migration,” says Tims. “Bangladesh is facing numerous challenges due to its low elevation and large coastline. Additionally, I have a strong interest in Bengali literature and culture. I intend to pursue graduate research on the narratives and forms of expression in relation to a changing environment.”

CLS is part of a wider government initiative to expand the number of Americans studying and mastering foreign languages that are critical to national security and economic prosperity. CLS plays an important role in preparing students for the twenty-first century’s globalized workforce and increasing national competitiveness. CLS is a program of the United States Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. It is supported in its implementation by American Councils for International Education.
 

Students in Katrina Light’s Reimagined Farms in Reimagined Spaces class toured the Hudson Valley Farm Hub in Hurley, New York. This course is an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences offering in which students explore the intersection of agriculture, ecology, economics, and justice.