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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

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February 2024

02-28-2024

Bard College Continues Switch to Geothermal

Bard College has commenced construction of a new state-of-the-art geothermal heating and cooling project that will replace the aging, fossil fuel–fired system currently in operation in the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Library. “Bard College has been an early adopter of geothermal, with some systems on campus dating to the late 1980s. It is the default for all new construction projects, and nearly 38% of the campus building area utilizes the technology. However, converting the rest of the existing building stock is an entirely new set of challenges, especially when infrastructure is 50 to 100 or more years old,” said Bard Energy Manager and Special Projects Coordinator Dan Smith. “We are excited to partner with Brightcore and to tap its technical and financial expertise for this crucial step on Bard’s path to achieve carbon-neutrality.” Brightcore is serving as the turnkey provider of the project, delivering a full scope of services, from the feasibility and design, drilling and ground loop installation, mechanical connections, incentive procurement, and upon completion, ongoing system performance monitoring. The Stevenson Library’s new geothermal heating and cooling system further progresses Bard’s mission-driven focus on sustainability efforts. Through its Office of Sustainability, the College has pledged to achieve carbon-neutrality by 2035 and has made significant and measurable progress in meeting that commitment.

Full Story in BusinessWire

Read More at ABC News

Photo: Seth Goldfine Memorial Field and the Charles P. Stevenson Jr, Library at Bard College. Photo by Peter Aaron
Meta: Type(s): General | Subject(s): Campus and Facilities,Environmental/Sustainability |

02-20-2024

Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking Hosts Conference on “Climate Change in the Classroom: Embracing New Paradigms” on April 26

Bard College’s Institute for Writing and Thinking (IWT) will host its annual April Conference and welcomes educators of all disciplines on Friday, April 26 from 9:30 am to 4:30 pm. This year’s IWT conference will focus on “Climate Change in the Classroom: Embracing New Paradigms.” The conference will be hybrid, and participants can join online or in person at Bard’s Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, campus. Participants can learn more about the conference and register here.

The rate and severity of extreme climate events can bring on a feeling of numbness and resignation rather than catalyzing responsive resilience in the classroom. How can we refocus the conversation from crisis to education and adaptation? The 2024 IWT April Conference will conduct a deep dive into layered and often contradictory pedagogies about the natural world. This day of shared writing and reflection invites participants to join together in small, interactive workshop groups in order to explore a range of written, audio, visual, and hybrid texts—on topics from manifest destiny to global climate strikes—that are creating a new ecology of education.

The day will feature a plenary conversation by two Bard colleagues on the topic of climate change in the classroom from the perspectives of the humanities and STEM, respectively. Visiting Writer in Residence Jenny Offill is the author of three novels, Last Things, Dept. of Speculation, and most recently, Weather, which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Eli Dueker is associate professor of biology and environmental and urban studies at Bard, codirector of the Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities, and head of the Community Sciences Lab.

Tuition fees are from $450 to $575, with Early Bird (before March 26) and Group discounts. Scholarships are available by application here. The IWT conference is Continuing Teacher and Leader Education 5.5 credit hours. Register here.

Photo: L-R: Bard faculty members Jenny Offill, visiting writer in residence, and Eli Dueker, associate professor of biology and environmental and urban studies, will hold a plenary discussion at the IWT April Conference “Climate Change in the Classroom: Embracing New Paradigms.”
Meta: Type(s): Event | Subject(s): Biology Program,Division of Languages and Literature,Division of Science, Math, and Computing,Environmental and Urban Studies Program,Environmental/Sustainability,Master of Arts in Teaching (Bard MAT),Written Arts Program | Institutes(s): Institute for Writing and Thinking |

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