News and Events

Upcoming Events

5/15

Thursday

4:30 pm – 5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Field Station

Field Station End of Year Celebration

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).

RSVP
Contact: Emily White
E-mail: [email protected]

Sustainability News

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.

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

a lush green garden with Italianate architecture

Bard College’s Friends 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.

Blithewood Garden is open to the public from dawn to dusk every day. For more information, visit https://www.bard.edu/arboretum/gardens/blithewood/

Post Date: 04-02-2025

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

Fog moving over the Hudson River at dusk.

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.

“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: 35 am Introduction and screening of Jon Bowermaster’s film A Toxic Legacy about General Electric’s contamination of the Hudson/Mahicantuck River
10:40–11:00 am 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–1:00 pm 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

Sustainability News by Date

Results 1-1 of 1

October 2021

10-03-2021

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.

Photo: Bard College solar array.
Meta: Subject(s): Awards,Bard Graduate Programs,Bard Network,Community Engagement,Environmental/Sustainability,Grants | Institutes(s): Bard Center for Environmental Policy,Bard MBA in Sustainability,Center for Civic Engagement,OSUN |

Results 1-1 of 1

News and Events

Upcoming Events

Field Station End of Year Celebration

Sustainability News

Hannah Arendt Center and Bard Athletics Hosted “Spring Cleaning” of Bard Campus

Hannah Arendt Center and Bard Athletics Hosted “Spring Cleaning” of Bard Campus

Landscape Firm Tom Stuart-Smith Joins Blithewood Garden Rehabilitation Project

Landscape Firm Tom Stuart-Smith Joins Blithewood Garden Rehabilitation Project

Bard College Hosts Symposium on PCB Contamination and “Bomb Trains” Threatening the Hudson/Mahicantuck River on April 11

Bard College Hosts Symposium on PCB Contamination and “Bomb Trains” Threatening the Hudson/Mahicantuck River on April 11

Sustainability News by Date

October 2021