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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

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Bard MBA Alumna Spearheads Innovative Climate Push at Etsy

Brooklyn, New York — Chelsea Mozen MBA '15 joined the inaugural class of Bard’s MBA in Sustainability program in the fall of 2012 because she wanted to help rewire the world with clean energy. This month, one year after graduation, Chelsea joined Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson and other team members at the company headquarters to announce a bold, near-term commitment by the Internet retailer to achieve carbon neutrality. The company pledged to transition to 100% renewable electricity by 2020 and grow a thriving, carbon neutral marketplace in the months, years, and decades to come.

At the heart of Etsy’s climate strategy is a revolutionary approach to solar development that Mozen began to design while interning with the company as a Bard MBA student. In her capstone MBA project at Bard, Mozen developed an idea for solarizing Etsy sellers as a way to offset the pollution coming from transporting goods to customers, which Etsy estimates accounts for 95 percent of its climate footprint.

After her internship, Etsy hired Chelsea into a new position as senior energy and carbon specialist. Over the last two years, working as part of a team at Etsy and with external partners, including the solar firm Geostellar, Chelsea helped shepherd her capstone vision into reality. In the new pilot program, Etsy will utilize verified emissions reductions from the solar installations to work toward the goal of net zero emissions. Etsy sellers will receive discounts for the solar systems in exchange for the offsets, which will be priced at the social cost of carbon.

Mozen credits the capstone process at Bard as giving her the time to puzzle through the many obstacles leading to today’s announcement. "Etsy’s mission is an ambitious one: to reimagine commerce in ways that build a more fulfilling and lasting world," said Mozen. "Being a part of a supportive and creative academic community while developing the initial structure for the Etsy Solar pilot program was not only essential to its success, but also brought us closer to achieving our mission."

Mozen continues to dream big. In her volunteer time, she has been working on a multiyear project to bring community-owned wind power to rural communities in Oaxaca, Mexico. "What I love about Etsy Solar is that it’s really about shared value creation for our community," said Mozen. "By working together we can drive responsible solutions to our collective impact."

—

The Bard MBA in Sustainability is one of a select few graduate programs globally that fully integrates sustainability into a core business curriculum. At Bard, students work in collaborative teams learning how to build businesses and not-for-profit organizations that combine economic, environmental, and social objectives into an integrated bottom line that creates both healthier businesses and a more sustainable world. Graduates of the Bard MBA are transforming existing companies, starting their own, and pioneering a new paradigm of doing business that meets human needs, protects and restores the Earth's systems, and treats all stakeholders with justice and respect.

Photo: Chelsea Mozen MBA '15; courtesy Etsy
Meta: Type(s): Alumni | Subject(s): Environmental/Sustainability | Institutes(s): Bard MBA in Sustainability |

04-22-2016

04-12-2016

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04-04-2016

Bard College Students Organize Nationwide Conversation on Climate

As part of the Bard Center for Environmental Policy’s Power Dialog, thousands of high school and college students will meet with state officials to discuss the U.S. pledge to cut emissions 30 percent by 2030.

Join the conversation on social media. Follow @ThePowerDialog on Twitter and the Bard Center for Environmental Policy on Facebook. Use the hashtag #PowerDialog2016 to see news from Power Dialog meetings across the country.

During the week of April 4, as part of the Bard Center for Environmental Policy’s (Bard CEP) Power Dialog initiative, thousands of college and high school students will meet with officials in 20 states to explore policies that could help meet the United States’s pledge—made at the Paris climate summit last December and as part of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan announced last August—to reduce emissions by 30 percent by 2030.

“The United States is the world’s biggest global warming polluter behind China, and we are the biggest per capita climate polluters,” says Bard CEP graduate student Rebecca Chillrud, a lead organizer for the Power Dialog. “Last December in Paris, for the first time, the United States and China both pledged to cut global warming pollution. In turn, the U.S. commitment to reduce emissions by 30 percent by 2030 will depend in significant measure on what happens in state capitals around the country.”

For the past nine months, Chillrud, fellow Bard CEP student Meredith Lavalley and bard environmental and urban studies undergraduates Maggie Berke ’17 and Xaver Kandler ’18, have been working with students across the country to catalyze a nationwide conversation about state-level action on climate change. Power Dialogs are scheduled for 20 states, from Alabama to Washington, during the first week of April. Students from over one hundred colleges and universities will meet with top state officials in charge of cutting global warming pollution. Kandler has been helping to organize the New York event, scheduled for Tuesday, April 5, at SUNY Albany. More than 250 students will meet with top officials including Richard Kauffman, chair of energy and finance for the governor, and Jared Snyder, deputy commissioner, Office of Air Resources, Climate Change and Energy.

“We will bring the voice of students and those who will be most affected by climate change in the coming decades,” says Kandler.

“The world is so interconnected now that a small group of students can really make a difference on a national scale,” said Bard CEP Director Eban Goodstein, in praise of the students’ work. “Our team helped catalyze serious climate conversations in Alabama and Arizona, Vermont and Virginia, involving more than one hundred colleges and universities and thousands of students. Great work.”

Photo: Xaver Kandler ’18, Bard CEP graduate students Meredith Lavalley and Rebecca Chillrud, and Maggie Berke ’17. (L-R)
Meta: Type(s): Student | Subject(s): Environmental/Sustainability,Politics and International Affairs | Institutes(s): Bard Center for Environmental Policy,Bard Undergraduate Programs,Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities |

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