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Professor Eshel writes that if Americans choose to reduce meat consumption, it would improve water quality, biodiversity, soil health, and food security, as well as slowing climate change.

The New York City–based podcast War on Cars covers urban livability issues, including the epic 100 years’ war between the car and the city. LA resident and “investigative comedian” Adam Conover ’04, who’s debunked accepted truths about cars in his TV series Adam Ruins Everything, talks to host Doug Gordon about how he enjoys riding LADOT’s DASH bus to work, how cars isolate Angelenos, and how comedy can help change people’s minds.

The annual McHenry Awards recognize exceptional young leaders who are working to protect and enhance the Hudson River Valley. Lindsey Drew CEP ’20, who is pursuing an MS in environmental policy at the Bard Center for Environmental Policy, was recognized for her work with the Woodstock Land Conservancy to assess and address impacts in Ulster County’s Sawkill Creek watershed.

Professor Eshel and colleagues found that if all Americans switched away from meat, it would have a significant impact on land use—eliminating the need for pastureland and reducing cropland by as much as 25 percent—and make the nation’s waterways dramatically cleaner.

By replacing meat with protein-conserving plant alternatives Americans could satisfy key nutritional requirements, while eliminating pastureland use and reducing 35-50 percent of the cropland currently needed for food production in the United States, says a new study coauthored by Bard College Research Professor Gidon Eshel. The findings, part of modeling study published in Scientific Reports, suggest that use of nitrogen fertilizer and greenhouse gas emissions would also be reduced, while only food-related water use would rise.

“While widely replacing meat with plants is logistically and culturally challenging, few competing options offer comparable multidimensional resource use reduction,” write Eshel and coauthors Paul Stainier, Alon Shepon, Akshay Swaminathan, all of Harvard University.

In their study, “Environmentally Optimal, Nutritionally Sound, Protein and Energy Conserving Plant Based Alternatives to U.S. Meat,” Eshel and his coauthors used a computer model to devise hundreds of plant-based diets to replace either beef alone or all three dominant U.S. meat types: beef, poultry and pork. Plant-based diets consisted predominantly of soy, green pepper, squash, buckwheat and asparagus. The authors’ goal was to model a range of plant replacement diets that were at least as nutritious, if not more beneficial, than the meats they replaced, while also assessing their environmental impact. Diets were modeled to exactly match the protein content of the meat they replace—13 grams of protein per day from beef or 30 grams of protein per day from all three meat types—while also satisfying 43 other nutrient requirements, such as vitamins and fatty acids.

Buckwheat and tofu jointly delivered a full third of the total protein of diets that replaced all meats, yet accounted for only 12 percent of the nitrogen fertilizer and water and less than 22 percent of the cropland needed to produce the meats they replaced. Soy contributed the most protein to beef-replacing diets, but accounted for only six percent of the overall nitrogen fertilizer needed to produce beef. Replacing meat with plant alternatives was estimated to save approximately 29 million hectares of cropland, three billion kilograms of nitrogen fertilizer, and 280 billion kilograms of carbon dioxide per year. Food-related water use was projected to rise by 15 percent.

Gidon Eshel is a research professor of environmental physics at Bard College. He earned a BA from Haifa University and MA, MPhil, and PhD degrees from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.

Bard alumna Joanna Letz focused on agriculture in California’s Central Valley for her Senior Project. Today, she’s putting unused urban space to use by growing organic flowers on rooftop plots in downtown Berkeley.

There are more than 7,500 miles and a seemingly unbridgeable cultural divide between Freeport, Maine, and Kolkata, India, but to recent Bard graduate Evan Tims, the differences pale in the light of a shared global crisis.

Alexandra Criscuolo developed the Kickstarter Environmental Resources Center, an information hub to help product creators on Kickstarter design for sustainability.

The study, led by biologist Gabriel Perron in collaboration with microbiologist M. Elias Dueker, both on the faculty of the Bard Center for the Study of Land, Air, and Water, shows that even small concentrations of the synthetic antimicrobial agent triclosan can disrupt freshwater microbial communities in favor of bacteria that are associated with human disease and antibiotic resistance.

Bard College senior Evan Tims ’19, a written arts and human rights major, has won a highly selective Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) for the 2019 summer session. This is the second summer Tims has been awarded this competitive scholarship. CLS, a program of the U.S. Department of State, provides recipients with overseas placements that include intensive language instruction and structured cultural enrichment experiences designed to promote rapid language gains. These 8-week programs are all fully funded, including the costs of tuition, visas, airfare, home stays, and a stipend for cultural enrichment/excursions. The CLS program offers foreign language study at sites worldwide in 14 languages identified as critical to United States national security and economic prosperity. The languages include Azerbaijani, Bangla, Hindi, Indonesian, Korean, Punjabi, Swahili, Turkish, Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian.

Tims will study Bangla at the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) in Kolkata, India. Spoken from the densely populated nation of Bangladesh to the Kolkata metropolis in the Indian state of West Bengal, Bangla is the seventh most spoken language in the entire world. With a population of 4.5 million, Kolkata is the largest city in East India and the third largest in India after New Delhi and Mumbai. In Kolkata, Tims will spend 20 morning hours per week in the classroom focusing on grammar, conversation, pronunciation, journal writing, and dictation language classes. In the afternoons, Tims will take a cultural activity class, such as singing, dancing, storytelling, cooking, or painting, and meet with his native language partner for Bangla conversation practice. Tims will engage in weekly local group excursions in order to explore the area, gain in-depth knowledge of culture and history, and meet locals from different backgrounds. Tims will also travel on one overnight excursion to Bishnupur. The summer study culminates in an independent project of his choosing, presented to his fellow classmates entirely in Bangla. During his stay, Tims will live with a host family to maximize language learning and the cultural immersion experience.

“I study Bangla because someday I hope to work in the field of climate change induced migration,” says Tims. “Bangladesh is facing numerous challenges due to its low elevation and large coastline. Additionally, I have a strong interest in Bengali literature and culture. I intend to pursue graduate research on the narratives and forms of expression in relation to a changing environment.”

CLS is part of a wider government initiative to expand the number of Americans studying and mastering foreign languages that are critical to national security and economic prosperity. CLS plays an important role in preparing students for the twenty-first century’s globalized workforce and increasing national competitiveness. CLS is a program of the United States Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. It is supported in its implementation by American Councils for International Education.
 

Students in Katrina Light’s Reimagined Farms in Reimagined Spaces class toured the Hudson Valley Farm Hub in Hurley, New York. This course is an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences offering in which students explore the intersection of agriculture, ecology, economics, and justice.

Traditionally, access to a good-quality education depends on where you live, level of income, and attainability of resources. Now there’s another barrier on the horizon, says Mateo: climate change.

Students in Bard’s experiential NYCLab will work with Just Salad to develop a 360-degree composting program as part of the brand’s latest sustainability initiative.

Daphany Rose Sanchez—BHSEC Queens alumna, Class of 2010—has been named to the Grist 50 list of top innovators for her work bridging affordable housing and energy efficiency.

The students’ water samples—collected from nearly 400 sites across the globe—were a main component of this year’s Citizen Science curriculum, which tackled urgent, present-day questions related to water.

Chelsea Mozen MBA ’15 joined the inaugural class of Bard’s MBA in Sustainability program in the fall of 2012 because she wanted to make clean energy a priority in the business world. Now she's heading up a first-of-its kind carbon offset program at Etsy, which she originally conceptualized for her Capstone Project at Bard. 

Blom treats the well-documented Little Ice Age of the 17th century “as an experiment in what can happen to a society when its baseline conditions, all ultimately dependent upon the weather, are shaken,” writes Miller.

Chelsea Mozen MBA ’15 joined the inaugural class of Bard’s MBA in Sustainability program in the fall of 2012 because she wanted to make clean energy a priority in the business world. Now she's heading up a first-of-its kind carbon offset program at Etsy, which she originally conceptualized for her Capstone Project at Bard. Last week, Mozen was featured in Bloomberg, Fast Company, and Wired for the carbon-neutral delivery program she’s leading. Etsy will now purchase carbon credits to compensate for the impact of its shipping operations, a bold move that Mozen hopes will shift the e-commerce industry.

During her time at Bard, Mozen held an internship with Etsy’s sustainability team, where she began to develop an idea for solarizing Etsy sellers. This way, the company could offset the pollution coming from transport and work toward their goal of net-zero emissions. Mozen proposed that Etsy use carbon finance to encourage their network of sellers, employees, and stakeholders to install solar energy in their homes. Etsy was looking to transition to 100 percent renewable energy by 2020 when Mozen pitched her climate strategy. After Mozen’s internship ended, she was hired full time as senior energy and carbon specialist.

Since then, Mozen has gone on to expand Etsy’s sustainability strategy. In her interview with a correspondent at Bloomberg, Mozen said: “The free shipping we’re used to actually isn’t free. When people think of the environmental impact from e-commerce, they immediately jump to packaging—but emissions from shipping has a big environmental cost.” She adds, “Even though we don’t directly control that shipping, we feel responsible for it because we’ve enabled it. We want consumers to know what responsible e-commerce can look like.”

Climate change experts have lauded Etsy and Mozen’s bold approach. Inquiries are arising about whether other businesses like Amazon will follow suit. “This is a solid move, and encouraging,” says Adam Klauber, director of sustainable aviation at the Rocky Mountain Institute (Wired).  “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.”

Learn more about Bard’s Graduate Programs in Sustainability.
 

Professor Eshel comments on new research published in the Lancet that calls for a low-meat, high-grain human diet in order to have a smaller environmental impact.

Established in fall 2018, the Bard Center for the Study of Land, Air, and Water is growing quickly to address environmental issues from the ground up—on campus and off.