News and Events

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."

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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.
 

The Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation has awarded a $5 million dollar leadership grant to the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies to support a scientific study, being done in partnership with Bard College, that seeks to reduce Lyme disease in neighborhoods. Research will be carried out in collaboration with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, New York State Department of Health, and Dutchess County Department of Behavioral and Community Health. If successful, the project will revolutionize Lyme disease prevention.

Bard College professor Brooke Jude has led a research team that includes students in the Bard biology program, at Al Quds Bard College in the West Bank, and at several Hudson Valley schools. This investigation of bacterial species in the local watershed was recently published in a citizen science–themed issue of the Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education. Researchers worked to determine the prevalence of violacein-producing bacteria, which potentially limit outbreaks of an invasive fungus that leads to a decline in the amphibian population. The secondary school students gathered water samples, after which the college students—Yegor Dukashin and Kelsey O’Brien from Bard, and Raneem Jo’Beh from Al Quds—worked to identify the samples. Local students participated from Red Hook High School, Linden Avenue Middle School in Red Hook, and F.D. Roosevelt High School in Staatsburg.

For the past nine months, four Bard students have been working with students across the country to catalyze a nationwide conversation about state-level action on climate change. Now, during the week of April 4, 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. 

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.”
 

During the week of April 4, the Bard Center for Environmental Policy will host The Power Dialog, a national event in which thousands of students will meet with top officials in more than 30 states to discuss climate policy. Participants will head to their state capitols to talk about state-level action to help meet the U.S. climate commitment of a 30 percent cut in global warming pollution by 2030. The Power Dialog gives students a voice in critical decisions that will determine their future and the future of the earth.

Dot Earth highlights Bard CEP's Power Dialog, a series of meetings between students and policymakers on April 4 about supporting the Clean Power Plan and Paris climate commitments.

Elizabeth Royte '81 wrote the cover story for the March issue of National Geographic on how one third of global food is wasted, and the people who are working to change that.

Bard CEP's April 4 Power Dialog is a step to include more students in policy decisions that will affect their climate future, writes Eban Goodstein.

Ralph Nader interviewed environmental writer and Bard alumna Elizabeth Royte '81 on why vultures are critical to the ecosystem.

Bard MBA in Sustainability student Alistair Hall takes a look at proposed new certification guidelines for sustainability professionals, arguing that they will hamper, not help, the growing industry.

The week of April 4, Bard CEP is organizing The Power Dialog, a series of conversations in every state capital among students and top state regulators about the EPA’s Clean Power Plan.

Jedamiah Wolf, alumnus of the Bard Center for Environmental Policy, coauthors this examination of how and why Congress removed sustainability concerns from the 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

This fall, students from Tom O’Dowd’s Environmental and Urban Studies Practicum on Sustainable Trail Design teamed up with the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference Long Distance Trails Crew in Bear Mountain State Park, New York. The students helped with a relocation project of the Appalachian Trail on the southwest side of Bear Mountain.

By Sarah Wallock '19

In collaboration with Bob Fuller, Andrea Minoff, and Marty Costello
Photos by Andrea Minoff and members of the Long Distance Trails Crew

This past October, students from Tom O’Dowd’s Environmental and Urban Studies Practicum on Sustainable Trail Design teamed up with the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference (NYNJTC) Long Distance Trails Crew (LDTC) in Bear Mountain State Park, New York. The students helped with a relocation project of the Appalachian Trail on the southwest side of Bear Mountain.

In this EUS Practicum, the students study how to implement sustainable sidewalks, pathways, and trails into communities and the complications that may arise. The class spent the semester learning about the design of trails and the effects of proper and improper trail construction. The class works with Amy Parella, director of Bard’s Landscape and Arboretum program, and Laurie Husted, Bard’s sustainability manager, as well as local trail experts from Red Hook, the Winnakee Land Trust, and the National Park Service. They research and present on trails at a local and global level.
  
Usually the students work on the college’s trail system or nearby on the Tivoli Bays trail system, trails in Red Hook, and rail trails in Kingston, but they chose to travel 70 miles south for this project. Tom O’Dowd, executive administrator of Environmental and Urban Studies, instructed the class to elect somewhere where they could go and make a difference on a more regional level. The class came up with the idea to go to Bear Mountain and made all the arrangements. 

Bard students Evelyn Buse 16’, Isaiah Chisholm 16’, Hannah Conely 17’, Rock Delliquanti 16’, Clara Duman 18’,  Duncan Routh 17’, and Yuejiao Wan 17’, along with Caroline Francisco, a friend from Yale, worked closely with the LDTC. The LDTC is a collection of volunteers dedicated to the construction and rehabilitation of foot trails along the Appalachian Trail, Long Path, and Highlands Trail in New York, west of the Hudson. The LDTC crew leaders Chris Reyling, Erik Garnjost, and Bob Fuller instructed students how to design a sustainable, aesthetically pleasing, and natural-looking trail. They demonstrated the use of equipment so students could relocate rocks to clear the trail. They crushed rock with sledgehammers and dug dirt from a borrow pit to landscape the final trail.
 

Bob Fuller, Wendi Wan, Chris Reyling, and Duncan Routh work together to move a rock.

When asked about how this trip related to their EUS course Hannah Conely replied, “We spent a lot of time discussing how different methods of trail building and different design features could be applied to fit specific terrains, soil types, and other aspects of trails.” Rock Delliquanti added, “The section of the trail we were replacing had been washed out and eroded from foot traffic. We moved a several hundred pound rock with a system we learned about in class, and we saw how this trail was being laid out and how this problem was being worked through.”

The Environmental and Urban Studies students were impressed by the intricacies of trail construction and the hard work required to create safe and beautiful trails. Conely reflects, “It was an incredible day, the people who we worked with were fun and very knowledgeable. I was shocked at how much we could help. We were doing work that needed to get done and even though it was our first time we felt quite useful.” Delliquanti added, “It made me really appreciate how much effort goes into these things. And these guys were hilarious and made such a great team. Especially because it's all volunteer and they want to have fun and get the job done so their attitude was infectious.”

Bob Fuller demonstrates trail construction practices to students.

 

According to the LDTC, the Bard students’ work was greatly appreciated. The New York-New Jersey Trail Conference has partnered with parks to create, protect, and promote a network of more than 2,100 miles of public trails in the New York metropolitan region. This contribution not only helped the LDTC’s mission but it inspired the EUS students and brought together members of the campus community with their neighbors in the Hudson Valley.  

Research Professor Gideon Eshel argues against the construction of high-voltage power towers across the Hudson Valley, citing environmental and economic concerns, as well as unproven need.

Eban Goodstein, director of Bard's Center for Environmental Policy and MBA in Sustainability, will speak from Paris for the National Climate Seminar, a biweekly, dial-in conversation and podcast.

A study authored by Bard professor Gidon Eshel shows that grass-fed cattle may be worse for the environment than cattle from industrial feedlots.

Bard senior and Environmental and Urban Studies major Nicole Leroy reviews Bard's remarkable, coordinated progress toward local, sustainable dining on campus.

Students who stop for a bite at Bard's Manor House Cafe look out the windows to a field where an ever-increasing amount of the produce being served on campus is sustainably grown by their peers.