Bard College Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities Celebrates Launch of Saw Kill Watershed Community Database
The database is designed to expand in real time as the community surrounding the watershed continues to unearth historical information about the Saw Kill.
Bard College Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities Celebrates Launch of Saw Kill Watershed Community Database
Community members and Bard staff and students taking Saw Kill water samples at the Annandale Bridge, 2016. Photo by Laurie Husted
On Tuesday, February 24, at 7 pm the Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities at Bard College is presenting the first ever Saw Kill Watershed Community Database, a publicly accessible data tool housing datasets developed by community members, researchers, and Bard faculty and students since the late 1800s. Funded in part by the Hudson River Foundation, Bard Community Sciences Lab, and Hudson River Estuary Program of the DEC, the database is designed to expand in real time as the community surrounding the watershed continues to unearth historical information about the Saw Kill, and conducts community sciences in the watershed with efforts such as ongoing sampling. The database will be launched at a celebration held at the Elmendorph Inn at 7562 N. Broadway, Red Hook, NY, at 7 pm on Tuesday, February 24. The event is free and open to the public, with refreshments provided. “This project is like a love letter from Bard to the community we have been part of and served for over 100 years,” said Elias Dueker, associate professor of Environmental and Urban Studies at Bard. “Students, faculty, and staff are working side by side with community leaders to make the database as comprehensive as possible. We have found information in people’s closets, basements, paper files, art, photos, and stories. I don’t think there is anything like this project across the country, but I hope we can inspire other communities to rediscover how much they already know and study about their watersheds—just how much information is waiting there to help them step up to environmental challenges that seem at emergency-level today.” The project—a collaboration between the Center for Experimental Humanities, Bard Biology and Environmental Studies, and community groups including the Saw Kill Watershed Community, Riverkeeper, and Hudson River Watershed Alliance—represents over 50 years of Bard's commitment in nurturing community efforts to provide meaningful stewardship of the Saw Kill Watershed, which provides drinking water and recreation for both Bard and the surrounding region. By compiling all available information and ongoing environmental research about the watershed in one accessible repository, the project is intended to serve as a versatile resource: as a teaching tool for local schools, for new residents wanting to learn about their surroundings, for community members who may have concerns about what they are observing in the watershed, and to provide meaningful data required to inform policy decisions that would affect the Saw Kill and its communities. For more information, please visit: cesh.bard.edu/csl/saw-kill-monitoring-program
Post Date: 02-24-2026
Research by Bard Professor Gidon Eshel Featured in the New York Times
The article explored whether grass-fed beef was better for climate than grain-fed.
Research by Bard Professor Gidon Eshel Featured in the New York Times
Gidon Eshel, research professor of environmental and urban studies at Bard.
A study led by Gidon Eshel, research professor of environmental and urban studies at Bard College, was featured in the New York Times in an article exploring whether grass-fed beef was better for climate. The study, published last March in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that grass-fed beef did not hold a carbon emissions benefit compared to grain-fed beef. While grazing can store carbon in the soil, the study showed that this did not outweigh the methane that cows produce. “We wanted to see exactly how the numbers add up,” Eshel told the Times. “The bottom line answer is that they mostly don’t.”
Students in all divisions of Bard College can concentrate in Environmental Studies. The program is based on the conviction that our planet’s most urgent problems—including climate change, biodiversity loss, and the inequities of our built environments—call for holistic knowledge of both human and natural systems. The curriculum offers a grounding in core topics in environmental studies alongside cross-listed courses on topics from nature writing to urban geography, from food systems to contemporary Indigenous art, and from planetary thinking to local community engagement.
The College earned a STARS Gold rating and the MBA in sustainability was ranked the best green MBA by the Princeton Review.
Bard Earns Two Awards in Sustainability
Bard College has recently been recognized for its commitment to sustainability by two organizations. This July, the College earned a Gold rating from the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System (STARS). This nationwide group ranks colleges based on all aspects of sustainability on their campuses, from academic buildings to dining and events planning. Bard’s report included its participation in the Race 2 Zero Waste food scrap conservation program, where it placed first in the food organics Small College category.
Bard’s MBA in sustainability was also ranked the best green MBA by the Princeton Review for the fifth year in a row. The list is based on student ratings of how well their MBA “prepares them to address environmental, sustainability, and responsibility issues in their careers.” Bard’s MBA is based in New York City and utilizes a hybrid curriculum to prepare students for critical social and environmental challenges. “At a time when clean energy and climate change action, organizational justice, reducing plastics and toxic pollution, and enhancing the planet’s biodiversity are all under political attack, Bard remains the leading MBA focused on embedding sustainability as simply good business,” said MBA Director Dr. Eban Goodstein.
“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.