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Produced in Association with the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard, the Biennial Continues May 4–7, 2023

Festival Features World Premiere Performances from Kenyon Adams in Collaboration with Omar Tate, Osayi Endolyn, and Ambrose Rhapsody Murray; Tara Rodríguez Besosa; Tania El Khoury; and Kite

Festival Is Part of the Fisher Center’s Milestone 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground

The Fisher Center at Bard presents four world premiere performances for the second half of Common Ground: An International Festival on the Politics of Land and Food, curated by the artist Tania El Khoury, who serves as Director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard (CHRA), and Fisher Center Artistic Director and Chief Executive Gideon Lester. Common Ground—the 2022-2023 iteration of the Fisher Center LAB Biennial, for which the Fisher Center commissions new work that grapples with some of the most pressing questions of our time—has gathered artists whose practices engage with food sovereignty, climate change, and land rights. The concluding offerings in Common Ground’s international program, which began last fall at harvest time, take place at the beginning of the growing season, May 4–7. Multiple artists here emphasize food’s fundamental relationship to communion, sharing food with audiences/participants as a core facet of their new works.

New works play out through various modes of inviting interaction, providing opportunities to collectively imagine together a more equitable, sustainable, and healthful future. Interdisciplinary artist Kenyon Adams, collaborating with chef and artist Omar Tate (Honeysuckle Provisions, Netflix’s High on the Hog), James Beard Foundation Award-winning food and culture writer Osayi Endolyn, and visual artist Ambrose Rhapsody Murray, creates a “blues Eucharist” with COMMUNION: a ritual of nourishment and commemoration (May 5–7). Architect, activist, and farmer Tara Rodríguez Besosa’s Somos OtraCosa (May 5–7) introduces audiences to the queer homestead OtraCosa—in the mountains of San Salvador, Puerto Rico—through an installation and decolonized living manuscript. With Memory of Birds, Tania El Khoury builds a sound installation in the trees around the Fisher Center, evoking the imprint of political violence on contested lands (May 4–7). In Aǧúyabskuyela (May 4–7), Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist and composer Kite (MFA ’18) explores the practice, amongst the Lakȟóta people, of sharing cakes with images of the deceased in frosting at funerary wakes—and considering various forms of loss with guest speakers. (See below for descriptions and schedule of each project.)

For complete Biennial information visit the Fisher Center website or call 845-758-7900.

Beyond the programming presented in person at the Fisher Center, the 2022–23 Biennial is truly global, as the subjects of foodways, seed preservation, and the right to access food and land are inherently interconnected. International editions of the program have been held in Colombia, Palestine, and South Africa—curated by Juliana Steiner, Emily Jacir, and Boyzie Cekwana, respectively. These three international programs are supported by the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard (CHRA). Documentation from these programs will be on display at the Fisher Center during the festival, with an in-person curator’s panel (May 6). 

Videos of video works commissioned by CHRA on the politics of food from Ama Josephine Budge, Brian Lobel with Season Butler, Alexandre Paulikevitch, and Emilio Rojas with Pamela Sneed will be on display throughout the festival.

The fourth edition of the Biennial, Common Ground, kicked off in October 2022. Fall programming included the U.S. premiere of When [Salmon Salmon [Salmon]], a trilogy of performative installations from the acclaimed Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe), tracing the effects of salmon farms on multiple ecologies, and the world premiere of The Belly is a Garden, a performance and walk through the cultivated Bard Farm and the wild spaces that surround it with celebrated seed keeper, artist, and chef Vivien Sansour, created with live artist Adrienne Truscott as dramaturg.

Common Ground follows the 2019 LAB Biennial, Where No Wall Remains, the first that Tania El Khoury and Gideon Lester curated together, which focused on borders—political, personal, and geographic—as sites of significance and contention. That festival moved beyond the walls of the Fisher Center to include a land art project by Emilio Rojas, who used the traditional “three sisters” crops to grow a vast map of the U.S./Mexico border at the Bard Farm, and a site-specific dinner in a former church, created by Mirna Bamieh, who traced the history of ingredients and dishes forgotten or erased during the occupation of Palestine. Those two projects resonated in the sociological, political, geographic, and historical context of the Hudson Valley, an agricultural region undergoing swift gentrification while still containing areas of significant poverty and even food apartheid.

The Fisher Center LAB Biennial is a curatorial platform that reimagines the Fisher Center as a site for performance and installations. Art works are installed in backstage areas, rehearsal studios, even storage rooms, to create a playful dialog with Frank Gehry’s building, and inviting audiences and artists to engage with it in unconventional and surprising ways.  Previous editions of the biennial have included The House is Open (2015) which explored the dynamic relationship between the visual and performing arts worlds, and We’re Watching (2018) which focused on surveillance.

The 2022–23 biennial is also inspired by the various social and political initiatives happening in the Hudson Valley, some of them on BIPOC-run farms that are experimenting with sustainable and equitable farming practices, often rooted in indigenous practices of seed preservation and in collaboration with the original stewards of the land.

Gideon Lester, Artistic Director of the Fisher Center, said, “The subject matter of the 2022–23 Fisher Center LAB Biennial is both vast and timely, encompassing questions of ethics, politics, history, science, and aesthetics. We’ve commissioned some of the world’s most imaginative artists to address these urgent concerns. Taken together, the wide-ranging works they’re creating for Common Ground will provide audiences with a complex, multi-dimensional opportunity to explore foodways, land politics, and their central importance in sustainability, social justice, and climate action. The festival is a thrilling demonstration of what’s possible when the Fisher Center collaborates with the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts and a reflection of Bard’s commitment to sustainability, advocacy, and support for marginalized communities in the region, and to the study and implementation of new directions in regenerative farming practices and food science.”

Tania El Khoury, Director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard, said, “Common Ground is about connections: between different species; between our food and art practices and the land on which we are settlers; and in between artists and seed and food activists across the U.S., Colombia, Palestine, and South Africa.”

Spring 2023 Common Ground Schedule and Descriptions

Kenyon Adams
COMMUNION: a ritual of nourishment and commemoration
World Premiere

May 5 at 8 pm
May 6 at 8 pm
May 7 at 4 pm

Sosnoff Stage Right
Live Performance

In what ways does a meal distinctly allow commemoration, and also provide nourishment? And where are the joy-working and life-sustaining spaces of the future?

COMMUNION: a ritual of nourishment and commemoration is a participatory “blues Eucharist” – inspired by Kenyon Adams’ early experiences in the Black Protestant churches of his childhood in the Southeast region of the United States. In collaboration with chef Omar Tate (featured in the Netflix series High on the Hog), writer Osayi Endolyn (The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food: A Cookbook), and visual artist Ambrose Rhapsody Murray, Kenyon is creating an offering to the audience, with poems, prayers, movement, music, and food. The ritual applies the distinct paradox that imbues a Eucharistic meal: the partaking of which is simultaneously a commemoration of death as well as a claim of unity with that which cannot die or be diminished. COMMUNION seeks to construct new spaces and traditions of testimony and witness.

This work is part of the artist’s own reckoning with death in the pandemic and the ways it has disproportionately affected BIPOC communities, as well as the ongoing violence against black bodies within American society. COMMUNION is the second installment of a ritual trilogy, WATCHNIGHT: WE ARE ALMOST TO OUR DESTINATION. The first part, Prayers of the People, was presented by the Fisher Center in 2018, in collaboration with the Hannah Arendt Center.

All tickets $25
$5 tickets available for Bard students through the Passloff Pass

Tara Rodríguez Besosa
Somos OtraCosa
World Premiere

May 5 from 5–7 pm
May 6 from 1–6 pm
May 7 from 1–3 pm

Sosnoff Backstage
Interactive Installation

Architect, activist, and farmer Tara Rodíguez Besosa is creating an installation and resource center to introduce the public to OtraCosa, an off-grid DIY queer homestead in the rural, mountainous community of San Salvador, Puerto Rico. For the past year Tara has been mapping and cataloging the species and food systems of OtraCosa, creating a decolonized, living manuscript of the different human and non-human exchanges that provide nourishment, healing, and life. Tara, inspired by the Drake Manuscript, is creating their own decolonized version of a living manuscript, handmade by them on the farm. Throughout the festival Tara will guide audiences through the installation and its manuscript, inviting us to explore the principles and practices of OtraCosa and those who steward its land.

Free and open to the public

Tania El Khoury
Memory of Birds
World Premiere

May 4 from 5–7 pm, on the half-hour
May 5 from 5–7 pm, on the half-hour
May 6 from 1–6 pm, on the half-hour
May 7 from 1–3 pm, on the half-hour

Fisher Center Lawn
Interactive Sound Installation

Memory of Birds is an interactive sound installation in trees, in collaboration with a trauma therapist and migrating birds. The work explores political violence that gets buried in the soil of contested lands. Through a  guided somatic experience, Memory of Birds transforms into a work that eats itself, designed to be forgotten.

Limited Capacity
All tickets $10
$5 tickets available for Bard students through the Passloff Pass

Kite (MFA ’18)
Aǧúyabskuyela

May 4 at 7:30 pm, with guest Corey Stover
May 5 at 6 pm, with guest Lou Cornum
May 6 at 6 pm, with guest Jolene K. Rickard
May 7 at 2 pm, with guest Alisha Wormsley

Veterans of Foreign Wars Red Hook Post 7765
30 Elizabeth St, Red Hook, NY
Transportation available from the Fisher Center, check website for schedule.
Live Performance

Sharing cakes at funeral wakes is a practice common amongst the Lakȟóta people; often these cakes have an image of the deceased imprinted in the frosting. Kite, an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist and composer, explores this tradition in a performance in which she decorates funerary cakes made from local indigenous ingredients while speaking with friends, relatives, and elders about traditions, kin, land, and species they have lost. As we face death in the world, Kite hopes to turn towards protocols for mourning to process the death of beings, human and non-human. Cake and coffee will be served.

All tickets $10
$5 tickets available for Bard students through the Passloff Pass

More Common Ground
in Colombia, Palestine, and South Africa
LUMA Theater Lobby
 
Common Ground also includes three international programs, curated by Juliana Steiner (Colombia), Emily Jacir (Palestine), and Boyzie Cekwana (South Africa), supported by CHRA in collaboration with students and faculty at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotà, Al-Quds Bard College in East Jerusalem, and University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Documentation from these programs will be on display at the Fisher Center during the festival.
 
Common Ground Curators Panel
May 6 at 1 pm
Resnick Studio
 
CHRA Video Commissions on Food Politics
Works from Ama Josephine Budge, Brian Lobel with Season Butler, Alexandre Paulikevitch, and Emilio Rojas with Pamela Sneed
LUMA Theater Lobby
 
CHRA has commissioned international artists to create digital commissions on the politics of food. First released online in 2022, these four videos will be on display during the festival.

Common Ground: An International Festival on the Politics of Land and Food is presented as part of the Fisher Center’s 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground, which features genre-defying new visions for dance, theater, opera, and public discourse and culminates with the groundbreaking for a new performing arts studio building designed by Maya Lin (October 2). The Fisher Center’s new 25,000-square-foot building which will offer artists at all stages of their careers vastly expanded room to explore as they build works from the ground up.

Funding Credits

The Fisher Center LAB Biennial has received grants from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the Educational Foundation of America, in support of COMMUNION, and the Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts.

Kite is a 2022 Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck Artist-in-Residence.

The Fisher Center’s 20th Anniversary Season is dedicated to the founders of the Fisher Center who have cultivated extraordinary artistic experiences—past, present, and future. We honor the memory of Richard B. Fisher, a true champion of the arts and Bard College, and his visionary leadership.

The Fisher Center is generously supported by Jeanne Donovan Fisher, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, the Advisory Boards of the Fisher Center at Bard and Bard Music Festival, Fisher Center and Bard Music Festival members, the Ettinger Foundation, the Thendara Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. Fisher Center LAB has received funding from members of the Live Arts Bard Creative Council, the Lucille Lortel Foundation, and the Fisher Center’s Artistic Innovation Fund, with lead support from Rebecca Gold and S. Asher Gelman ’06 through the March Forth Foundation.

A special thank-you to all who have made this special season possible. Thank you for your contribution to our artistic home.

About Fisher Center LAB

Fisher Center LAB is the Fisher Center’s artist residency and commissioning program, providing custom-made and meaningful support for innovative artists across disciplines. Since its launch in 2012, Fisher Center LAB has supported residencies, workshops, and performances for hundreds of artists, incubating new projects and engaging audiences, students, faculty, and staff in the process of creating contemporary performances. LAB strives to provide artists with the environment, resources, and funding they need to experiment, dream, and fully realize their artistic potential. Where possible, Fisher Center LAB builds long-term relationships for artists, powering their work by taking on administrative and producing support of their practices and companies. Productions developed by Fisher Center LAB often premiere in the annual Bard SummerScape festival and frequently tour around the country and across the world.

A new project to further connect Bard’s Montgomery Place Campus to main campus, supported by a $40,000 grant from the Hudson River Greenway, won approval from the Red Hook Town Planning Board. Now, Bard may “move forward on the construction of a pedestrian and cyclist path” connecting the two, writes Victor Feldman for the Daily Catch. The path, which will be ADA compliant, is part of an overall effort to make Bard’s trails and paths more accessible. “This is a very ambitious effort,” said Amy Parrella, director of grounds and horticulture, when the project was first announced and detailed to the Red Hook Town Board in 2022. The project is on track to begin construction in the fall of 2023.

Through a global initiative led by Bard College, more than 250 colleges, universities, and high schools worldwide will engage students and teachers in 40 countries to move from “Climate Despair to Climate Repair.” Now in its fourth year, the Global Teach-in is meant to help participants move from despair to determination, working together to change the future. 

On Wednesday, March 29, Bard will host its own teach-in from 5–8 pm in the Bertelsmann Campus Center. A free, low-carbon dinner will be provided alongside “People and Planet Working on Climate Repair,” a panel discussion led by Professors Felicia Keesing and Eban Goodstein. The evening will culminate in discussion groups focused on climate solutions. In addition to the teach-in, 40 Bard courses will integrate climate discussion into their classes this week, and on March 30, a Climate Game Night will be held in Kline Commons.

The Worldwide Teach-in is a project of the Graduate Programs in Sustainability at Bard College in partnership with educators across the world. The project has received support from the Open Society University Network, Lever for Change, an affiliate of the MacArthur Foundation, and the United States Embassy in Kyrgyzstan.

Bard College is pleased to announce that it has received a $26,532 grant from the New World Foundation and the Partners for Climate Action Hudson Valley for the project “Bard Bee-Lives: Making Space for At-Risk Pollinators.” Managed by Laurie Husted, Chief Sustainability Officer at Bard, the project was the result of a student proposal by Quincy Ross and Masha Kazanstev and developed in the spring of 2022 in an Open Society University Network (OSUN) social entrepreneurship practicum: Leading Change in Organizations.

The project will transform a twelve-acre cornfield into a pollinator habitat on Bard’s Montgomery Place Campus, and will support pollinator health, cultivate biodiversity, support sourcing and propagating native seeds, build soil health, and manage invasive species. It is a critical early step in the “Pollinate Now” initiative, a bioregional strategy for habitat restoration in the Hudson River Estuary Watershed, developed by Partners for Climate Action Hudson Valley together with Landscape Interactions. 

The “Bard Bee-Lives” project is designed to attract and sustain a wide range of native bee, butterfly, and moth species that are currently at risk of local extinction in the Hudson Valley. Bard is committed to properly implementing the site-specific design and to continue the long-term habitat management required of this effort, with the hope that the varied habitat meadow will eventually be self-sustaining with limited intervention. The list of native plants and the site design developed during the project will be publicly shared, allowing for it to be replicated throughout the region at different scales.

“This new pollen, nectar, and habitat-rich plant community will support more than 100 species of pollinators and will strengthen the ecosystem services this plot of land had previously lost as a cornfield,” said Amy Parrella, Director of Horticulture and Arboretum at Bard. “This will also be a native planting and bee nesting demonstration site for residential homeowners, landscape professionals, and farmers.”

The New World Foundation is rooted in a long tradition of advancing ever-compelling challenges to economic equity, democratic rights, and civic participation in the United States. As a national community foundation, it aims to strengthen community-based organizations and local leadership, working from the bottom up to build coalitions around issues that converge in place, creating alliances locally and building movements nationally. Partners for Climate Action Hudson Valley is an organization which develops programs, gives grants, and offers strategic and operational consulting in order to combat barriers to local ecological action. 

For the third year in a row, the Bard MBA in Sustainability Program has been ranked as the Best Green MBA in the Princeton Review’s 2023 Business Schools rankings. Bard also moved up in the top 10 list for Best MBA for Nonprofits, to the no. 2 slot in the United States, surpassing the MBA programs at Harvard, Columbia, and Georgetown.

The honors were based primarily on a survey of more than 17,800 students enrolled at 224 MBA programs during the past several academic years. The student survey asked students more than 90 questions about their school's academics, student body, and campus life, as well as their career plans.

Alua Samat ’25, a Bard College student and activist for sex education, partnered with four other students from Bard and the American University of Central Asia (AUCA) to create Not a Shame, an online game which is being designed to be a resource for teenagers across the globe. In development as part of the online OSUN Network Collaborative Course Social Entrepreneurship, the game will differ from other existing sex education games in that it seeks to be more accessible to communities with specific cultural sensitivities and needs, and where global languages such as English or Russian are not widely spoken. Samat has collaborated with others for years to combat the stigmas that surround sexual education for teenagers. Reliable information on sex and family planning are sparse in Kazakhstan, where she is from, and young people can be left with no options but to learn from dubious online sources presenting inaccurate or harmful material, a contributing factor to the rate of teen pregnancy in Central Asia, which is over six times higher than in developed countries. Not a Shame intends to serve as an approachable and trustworthy information source which can be adapted to help teenagers in their local languages and with accompanying narratives that are relevant to their lives and cultures. 

In December 2022, it was announced that Samat’s team would be awarded a prize of $1,500 in the annual pitch competition sponsored by Bard’s MBA in Sustainability. Bermet Suiutbekova, the group’s instructor at AUCA, said that the game “will bring a positive change to Central Asian countries. With the help of $1,500 in prize money from the competition, the team is planning to release the beta version of the product in June of 2023 and go to market in July of 2024.”

As part of one of 26 women-led projects in 17 countries, Associate Professor of Biology Brooke Jude will participate in a project to regenerate natural fabric dyeing processes with traditional Moroccan weavers as part of a Daughters for Earth grant awarded to Around the World in 80 Fabrics. “These grants, totaling over $600,000, are a part of our mission to deliver critical resources into the hands of the women on the frontlines of climate action,” says Daughters for Earth of this year’s grant winners. Professor Jude will lead microbial dye foraging alongside our natural plant dye research as part of a team that “will bring together traditional weavers, researchers, designers, textile experts, scientists, anthropologists, and businesswomen to create sustainable dyeing processes that Ain Leuh Women's Cooperative can use.” The cooperative, which was founded by local women in the Atlas Mountain region of Morocco, has used traditional weaving techniques to support their families for decades. Today, because of the pressures of demand from global trade, synthetic dyes are used more frequently, produced with chemicals that impact weaver health and the environment. The collaboration between the Ain Leuh Cooperative, Artisan Project, Around the World in 80 Fabrics, the Microbe Institute, and Bard College will help to create “an open-source natural dye, plant, and microbial resource book with a map and dye recipes,” with the goal of improving the health of Ain Leuh weavers and the health of the local ecosystem.
 

The growing field of sports sustainability is only about 15 years old, writes Bret McCormick for Sports Business Journal, and professionals find their way into those jobs from dozens of entry points. Aly Criscuolo, who graduated from Bard’s MBA in Sustainability program in 2019, is currently sustainability and corporate social responsibility director for New York Road Runners (NYRR), a running nonprofit that organizes several activities and races, including the New York City marathon since 1970. Criscuolo’s capstone project for Bard focused on making triathlons more sustainable, and now she leads NYRR’s efforts to make their races, as well as its internal functioning, more environmentally sustainable. “If I had walked into my role at New York Road Runners without that MBA experience, I would not have known what to do on my first day,” she said. “The education, the hands-on experience, walking in on Day One, I knew exactly where to begin, what my first six months would look like. I had the confidence as well, which I would not have had without the MBA.” As sustainability becomes more of a priority in the business world, higher education will need to meet the demand for more graduates with training and expertise in the field. 

Associate Professor of Environmental and Urban Studies M. Elias Dueker, Associate Professor of Biology Gabriel G. Perron, and Bard biology graduates Daniella Azulai ’17 and Mary Reid ’21 have copublished a new study, “Bacteria communities and water quality parameters in riverine water and sediments near wastewater discharges,” in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Data. ​​Over five months, they monitored microbial contaminants relating to the treated water outflow of the wastewater treatment plant operated by Bard, which releases into the Saw Kill, a tributary of the Hudson River and also the source of fresh water for the campus. This is the first of many datasets and research papers that they hope to publish on Bard’s water system. Preliminary data analyses provide insight into the impacts of watershed-wide usage of the Saw Kill as both drinking water source and treated sewage receiver. Future use of this dataset will include a focus on endotoxins and antibiotic resistant bacterial genes, water contaminants only now gaining broader attention in water quality and microbiological sciences.

All of the sampling was conducted as a joint Bard Summer Research Institute project between Dueker’s lab and Perron's lab in summer 2015. Lab members included: Marco Spodek ’17, Beckett Lansbury ’16, Yuejiao Wan ’17, Pola Kuhn ’17, Haley Goss-Holmes ’17. Coauthors Azulai and Reid worked on this project both as undergraduate and post-baccalaureate students.

“This project demonstrates the power of community asking scientific questions, and academia–students, faculty, and staff–being able to help answer those questions through careful observational and applied research,” said Dueker. “Our hope is that this database serves as a tool for researchers and communities around the world trying to respond to stewardship challenges in a science-based and community-accessible way.”

“Each year, thousands of pounds of solid waste is created at the end of colleges’ academic years. But, several area schools are taking steps to reduce that total,” writes Saba Ali for the Poughkeepsie Journal. Local area college students have worked to collect, sort, and donate items that can be used by others, and colleges like Bard are beginning to institutionalize such sustainability efforts for future generations. “Bard College tries to match up the items that may be needed in the community, such as donating binders, which are distributed to the Red Hook Central School District, or used towels to an animal shelter. The college also ends up with anywhere from 60 to 100 abandoned bicycles each year, which are donated to organizations in Red Hook and Kingston.” Many donations also go to Bard’s Free-Use Store and Bard Food Pantry.

As the world contends with a looming famine crisis, Gidon Eshel, research professor of Environmental and Urban Studies, rejects the narrative of inevitability, offering pragmatic solutions to save millions from going hungry. In the short term, the global livestock feed stockpile of “over 250 million tons of wheat, barley, oats, and other cereals” could be redirected to “lifesaving human food,” Eshel writes for Bloomberg. Long term, reductions in the consumption of beef could accomplish similar ends toward more efficient utilization of wheat and grains. Regardless, famine is not a foregone conclusion, Eshel argues, but rather one that the world, collectively, is choosing. “If, as predicted, millions will soon go hungry, it will not be a ‘Putin famine’ but a readily preventable famine of choice, arising because the people and leaders of wealthy nations have decided that preventing it is too inconvenient,” he concludes.

Bard Senior Vice President and CFO Taun Toay Discusses the College’s Sustainability Efforts in an Interview for DOE’s Better Climate Challenge “Decarbonization Download” Series

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recognized Bard College for committing to reduce portfolio-wide greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% within 10 years and to work with DOE to share successful solutions and decarbonization strategies. As a partner in DOE’s Better Climate Challenge, Bard College is one of only 50 organizations across the U.S. economy that are stepping up to the Challenge and driving real-world action toward a low-carbon future. As a place of higher education, Bard College’s campus and buildings are its biggest carbon footprint. Bard is the only small liberal arts college in the country that is converting its built environment to carbon neutral as a Better Climate Challenge partner. 

Bard College has set ambitious pollution reduction goals including to cut energy use in campus buildings through efficient lighting and HVAC retrofits, to eliminate fossil fuels by converting to geothermal, to generate 10% of electricity with on-campus solar (and micro hydropower), and to purchase off-site renewable electricity for the remaining 90%. This will be supported by Net Zero design goals for all new construction. As Bard College undertakes this challenge, DOE will support its efforts with technical assistance, peer-to-peer learning opportunities, and a platform for the organization to demonstrate its commitment to being part of the solution to climate change.

“Better Climate Challenge partners like Bard College are committing to decarbonize across their portfolio of buildings, plants, and fleets and share effective strategies to transition our economy to clean energy,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “Their leadership and innovation are crucial in our collective fight against climate change while strengthening the U.S. economy.”

“Colleges and universities should take leadership roles on such pressing issues as global climate change,” said Bard College President Leon Botstein. “We’re gratified to be working with the Department of Energy as we move forward with our ambitious goals, and we encourage others in higher education to follow suit.”

“Bard is pleased to join a who’s who of 80 global companies committed to mitigating climate change. As an early adopter of geothermal and narrowing in on our carbon neutrality target, Bard is the only college to represent higher education along with four universities throughout the nation to be a first mover with the DOE,” said Taun Toay, senior vice president and chief financial officer of Bard College.

“Decarbonization Download: 5Qs with Bard College” is a video interview featuring Toay discussing Bard College’s sustainability goals, including the development of a Climate & Energy Master Plan that will provide a roadmap to transform campus infrastructure from being dependent on fossil fuels to being operated on 100% renewable energy. Watch the interview here.

In March, Bard College also launched the Worldwide Teach-In on Climate and Justice, a flagship event organized by the Graduate Programs in Sustainability (GPS) at Bard College, with support from the Open Society University Network. Bard’s Worldwide Teach-In on Climate and Justice brought together climate-concerned educators and students at universities and high schools from around the globe for bottom-up conversations about changing the future. Building on a foundation of more than 300 participating organizations this year from Liberia to Colombia, Taiwan to Vienna, and Florida to Alaska, the teach-in organizers hope to engage 1,000 colleges, universities, and other institutions next year, targeting at least 100,000 participants worldwide.

The DOE Better Climate Challenge is the government platform that provides transparency, accountability, technical assistance, and collaboration to identify decarbonization pathways and provide recognition for leadership across the US economy. The Better Climate Challenge builds on over a decade of DOE experience through the Better Buildings Initiative. Through Better Buildings, DOE partners with public and private sector organizations to make commercial, public, industrial, and residential buildings more efficient, thereby saving billions of dollars on energy bills, reducing emissions, and creating thousands of jobs. To date, more than 950 Better Buildings partners have shared their innovative approaches and strategies for adopting energy efficient technologies. Discover more than 3,000 of these solutions in the Better Buildings Solution Center.

The town of Red Hook has moved to stage two of the Audubon certification project, developing a vision plan with action items to support sustainability in areas including agriculture, economic development and tourism, public safety, and transportation. The sustainability designation project is being led by Chief Sustainability Officer at Bard and Chair of Red Hook’s Conservation Advisory Council Laurie Husted and Nick Ascienzo of the Ascienzo Family Foundation. “It’s such a difficult thing to define. We have a system to do it in higher education. It was exciting to think we could look at this as a municipality,” Husted said.
 
“What I think about as we celebrate our progress is that we inherited decisions that were made before we were born, and we are passing on a legacy to people who aren’t born yet,” said Erin Cannan, vice president for civic engagement at Bard. “What do we want this moment to mean for them?”

In 2021, Maya Whalen-Kipp MS ’20 was awarded a John A. Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship by the New York Sea Grant. One of 74 chosen for the 42nd class of Knauss Fellows, Whalen-Kipp began her one-year fellowship in February 2021, working as the marine and energy interagency coordinator for the DOE Wind Energy Technology Office and Water Power Technology Office. “Through the Knauss Fellowship, I have gained hands-on experience in understanding how innovative technology gets funded by the federal government and am working with phenomenal people who are thinking very critically on how we can support a just renewable energy transition,” said Whalen-Kipp. “My experience here is valuable for my professional career transition from environmental academia to real applications of ocean renewable energy development. I hope to now continue in the field for the foreseeable future.” 
 
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Bard College’s Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing is pleased to announce the appointment of Beate Liepert as Visiting Professor of Environmental and Urban Studies and Physics. Professor Liepert, who joined the Bard faculty in January 2022, focuses on environmental physics, with a specific research goal of pursuing local solutions to the global issue of climate change. Her research interests include micrometeorology, air pollution, and community-based science.

Dr. Beate Liepert is a climate scientist who pioneered research on the phenomenon of “global dimming,” a decline in the amount of sun reaching the Earth’s surface, which has implications on the planet’s water and carbon cycles. She comes to Bard from the Seattle area, where she worked for and founded start-ups in the clean tech and insure tech fields, and was a lecturer in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Seattle University. The start-ups included CLIWEN LLC, a climate, energy, and weather consulting concern; and Lumen LLC, a company that developed design solutions for solar cells. She also served as a research scientist at True Flood Risk LLC in New York, NorthWest Research Associates in Seattle, and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. Her work centers on basic questions of climate variability, from interannual to centennial time scales. Research interests also include taking measurements of aerosols and solar radiation and investigating climate effects on ecosystems.

Additional activities have included serving as editor for Environmental Research Letters, a UK-based journal; proposal review panelist and proposal reviewer for the National Science Foundation; presenting at more than 50 international conferences and university colloquia; and authoring reviews and articles for journals including Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Climate, Frontiers, International Journal of Climatology, Nature, Science, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, and Global and Planetary Change, among many others. She has been interviewed on CNN and numerous international TV broadcasts; was a featured scientist in the BBC documentary Dimming the Sun, which also aired on PBS; and was profiled in a “Talk of the Town” essay in the New Yorker. Professor Liepert is the recipient of the 2016 WINGS World Quest “Women of Discovery” Earth Award and in 2015 she delivered a Distinguished Scientist Lecture at Bard on “Dimming the Sun: How Clouds and Air Pollution Affect Global Climate.”

Diploma, Institute of Meteorology and Institute of Bioclimatology and Air Pollution Research, Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich; Doctor rer. nat., Institute of Meteorology, Department of Physics, Ludwig-Maximilians University; postdoctoral research scientist, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University; certificate program in fine arts, Parsons School of Design.

The Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities at Bard College is pleased to announce the findings of the Kingston Air Quality Initiative (KAQI) after its first two years of research and data collection, as well as the availability of a new dashboard so that people in Kingston can access real-time information about their air quality. 

KAQI began in January 2020 as a partnership between Bard’s Community Science Lab and the City of Kingston Conservation Advisory Council’s Air Quality Subcommittee to conduct a first-ever Kingston-centered air quality study. Since then, Kingston residents and Bard College students, staff, and faculty have conducted air quality monitoring in both indoor and outdoor environments.

KAQI’s main monitoring efforts focus on a regional assessment of air pollution from fine particulate matter (PM2.5), as measured from the roof of the Andy Murphy Neighborhood Center on Broadway in Kingston. PM 2.5 is made up of microscopic particles that are the products of burning fuel, and is released into the air through exhausts from oil burners, gas burners, automobiles, cooking, grilling, and both indoor and outdoor wood burning. PM 2.5 particles are so tiny, they stay suspended in the air for long periods of time, allowing them to travel long distances before depositing. When these particles are inhaled, they can enter the bloodstream through the lungs, creating or exacerbating health issues. The World Health Organization (WHO) states that “Small particulate pollution has health impacts even at very low concentrations–indeed no threshold has been identified below which no damage to health is observed.”

After two full years of monitoring, KAQI found that while many signs point to Kingston’s overall air quality being decent, conditions do sometimes reach unhealthy levels for some individuals, and there is certainly room for improvement. 

Two important measures of PM2.5 air quality are the annual mean standard and the 24-hour average standard. For the period of measurement, Kingston met both the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) and the WHO’s annual mean standard. While the city was well below the EPA’s standard, it was much closer to the WHO’s stricter standard. For the 24-hour standard, Kingston met the EPA’s criteria, but was over the WHO’s 24-hour standard. For context, as of 2019, 99% of the world’s population was living in locations that do not meet the WHO’s air quality standards. 

Long term trends can only really be evaluated on a multi-year time scale. These first two years of monitoring will provide a baseline for KAQI’s monitoring efforts in the next few years, and allow them to assess how Kingston particulate matter pollution levels are changing over time.

You can see these findings and more detail at the Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities website: https://cesh.bard.edu/kingston-air-quality-initiative-kaqi/.

The Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities at Bard College, in collaboration with KAQI, has developed a dashboard that allows Kingston residents to access real-time information about their city’s air quality. The current PM2.5 and PM10 conditions are shown and interpreted, and one can see the air quality sensor’s reading from the past 12 hours. A separate page allows users to explore the hourly readings of particulate matter from the whole Andy Murphy Neighborhood Center dataset.

The dashboard can be found at: https://tributary.shinyapps.io/AMNC_live/

“KAQI is an important model for ways that academic institutions can contribute concretely to the communities who surround and support them,” said Eli Dueker, Director of Bard’s Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities. “We are combining serious efforts to monitor long-term air quality in Kingston with tools that allow us to put the data in front of residents in real time and give them feedback about what is going on in their city today.”

“This Kingston Air Quality Initiative monitoring project is such an important step that Kingston is taking toward assuring that its residents will breathe clean air into the future. This project responds to the need for both regional and neighborhood monitoring so that all residents’ air quality is taken into account. That the initiative focuses on PM 2.5 is especially important,” said Judith Enck, former EPA Regional Administrator.

Emily Flynn, City of Kingston Director of Health and Wellness, added “As we know, air quality can have significant impacts for respiratory infections, heart disease, stroke and lung cancer, and more severely affects people who are already ill. We applaud the work of the Center for Environmental Science and Humanities at Bard and thank them for their work here in Kingston.”

“Through the Kingston Air Quality Initiative dashboard, the Bard Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities has provided a valuable tool to the City of Kingston and its residents: the ability to assess the health hazards posed by air pollution in real time. The long-term trend data recorded will be a resource for decision makers to see the patterns of air quality within the city and to understand the impacts of local changes on air quality.” said Nick Hvozda, Interim Director of the Ulster County Department of the Environment.

These figures demonstrate daily pm2.5 averages for 2020 and 2021. Each point represents a single day, with vertical lines representing the range of variation in hourly readings that day (if no vertical line visible, the variation was smaller than the graphic point). The blue line provides a smoothing line to give a sense of seasonal trends.

For more information or ways to get involved, visit https://kingston-ny.gov/airquality  or https://cesh.bard.edu/kingston-air-quality-initiative-kaqi/

Last week, as Bard College students gathered with faculty and staff to talk about climate solutions, they joined tens of thousands of students worldwide doing the same. The Worldwide Teach-In on Climate and Justice brought together climate-concerned educators and students at universities and high schools from Liberia to Colombia, Taiwan to Vienna, and Florida to Alaska, for bottom-up conversations about changing the future.

Bard alum Karianne Canfield ’20 helped facilitate a teach-in session on “Dealing with Climate Depression.” Following the discussion, a student said that this was the first time they had felt empowered to address their deep anxiety about the planet heating up, and what it meant for their future.

Dr. Eban Goodstein at Bard, one of the directors of the global teach-in, said, “We are living at a moment of extraordinary agency, with the tools at hand to solve the energy half of climate change by 2030. The teach-in is moving young people from despair about climate change to engagement.” He added: “As voters, volunteers, interns and in their career choices as artists, activists, scientists, or business people, young people are working to stop climate change.”

The Bard College headline event began with a “low-carbon” dinner and a dance performance. Over the next three hours, 25 faculty from multiple disciplines joined students in discussions including “Climate and Justice,” “Climate Stories and Songs,” “Climate Science: What You Need to Know,” and “Food Systems and Climate Solutions.” Students also learned about New York State’s ambitious climate law, and were invited to provide public comment.

In the Philippines, there were teach-ins at eight different locations. Adrienne Hangad, who helped organize an event at the Open University in Manila, was most engaged with the discussion about women and climate solutions. Prompted by a pre-teach-in discussion noting the absence of a climate change “anthem,” a team of Filipino organizers composed a powerful song, “Change Climate Change,” that was played at the event. 

In Kyrgyzstan, climate workshops were held at 15 sites across the capital city of Bishkek. And from April 20 to 21, there will be an Africa-wide teach-in based in dozens of cities and towns, organized by the African Network of Young Leaders for Peace and Sustainable Development.

Commenting on her teach-in experience, Sofía Gómez, a student from Bogotá, Colombia, said, “I'm a strong believer in a mandatory class on climate change in schools and universities. This information allows us to open our eyes to how close we are to the climate crisis.” Khadija Ghanizada, a Bard student, added, “The teach-in was a window of hope for students. Most students I interact with are scared of climate change but also skeptical of the authorities and the work they are doing to mitigate it. We talked about how to push those in power to do their job in combating climate change.”

Building on a foundation of more than 300 participating organizations this year, the teach-in organizers hope to engage 1,000 colleges, universities, and other institutions next year, targeting at least 100,000 participants. “There are tens of thousands of climate-concerned educators around the world,” said Project Director Goodstein. “The teach-in provides a global platform for us to work together, to equip the rising generation with the tools and mindset to solve the climate crisis.”

The Worldwide Teach-In on Climate and Justice, and Bard’s flagship event, is a project of the Graduate Programs in Sustainability (GPS) at Bard College, with support from the Open Society University Network. GPS degree programs include MS degrees in Environmental Policy and Climate Science and Policy; the MEd in Environmental Education, and the MBA in Sustainability, ranked the #1 Green MBA for 2021 and 2022, and among the top 10 MBAs nationwide for Nonprofit Management for both years by the Princeton Review. 

Tyson Foods utilizes between nine and 10m acres of farmland – an area almost twice the size of New Jersey – to produce corn and soybeans to feed the more than 2 billion animals it processes every year in the US alone, according to new research. Speaking with the Guardian, Bard EUS Research Professor Gidon Eshel said the scale of farming needed to produce animal feed contributes to many of the environmental problems of large-scale agriculture. These issues include changes to soil and the natural flow of water, the way solar energy relates to the earth, and disruption of plants and animals. Pollution from fertilizers and pesticides are another big concern, and the risks of contaminating drinking water and harming ecosystems. There is a significant opportunity cost in growing feed crops. “If you produce 100lbs of corn and feed it to beef, you get 3lbs of edible beef. Because of this, using land to grow feed crops instead of food [for humans] is incredibly questionable – it’s wasteful,” he said.

Bard College has received a $150,000 grant from the George I. Alden Trust to acquire an upgraded gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer in order to support the continuity and growth of ongoing curricular and research projects within the Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing at Bard. This new instrument, with its expanded analytical capabilities, is an essential component of the five-year infrastructure and instrumentation plan created by the Chemistry and Biochemistry Program. 

“We are so grateful to have this support from the Alden Trust. Continuing the essential analytical capacity of our labs is important. And with this funding, we are able to expand the range of experiments that are possible, providing many more opportunities for interdisciplinary teaching and research at Bard,” said Associate Dean of the College and Associate Professor of Chemistry Emily McLaughlin.

Gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GCMS) provides the technology to separate mixtures, and to identify and quantify pure compounds and individual components of mixtures for applications ranging across scientific disciplines. At Bard, this type of instrument has been central to the science curriculum for over 25 years. The acquisition of an upgraded gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer impacts the undergraduate teaching and learning experience in substantial ways—including in research and curricular work in chemistry, biology, environmental studies, and Bard’s Citizen Science Program, in which all first-year students take part. 

The enhanced capabilities of the new GCMS will facilitate ongoing and new collaborations among faculty and students, including the ability effectively sample aqueous environmental samples for volatile organic compounds (VOCs).  The GCMS has been a central part of analytical chemistry at the College, resulting in work presented at local, regional, and national conferences and manuscripts published in peer-reviewed journals.