News and Events

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.

Researchers in northern Kenya have found only benefits in combining moderate numbers of cattle and wildlife, including reduced tick populations and higher-quality grass.

“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’” These words from Martin Luther King Jr. are the call to action behind the nationwide Day of Service that takes place on the King holiday. Over 200 Bard students, along with staff and faculty members, took those words to heart as they volunteered with organizations across the Hudson Valley for the College’s Ninth Annual MLK Day of Engagement. The event expanded this year, with volunteer opportunities taking place throughout the holiday weekend, as well as a mini-conference on civic engagement on campus, and a community fair in cooperation with the Red Hook Community Center. The weekend's events were organized by the Bard Center for Civic Engagement, the Office of Sustainability, and the Citizen Science Program.

MLK Day of Service activities expanded this year. In previous years, Bard's service projects have taken place on the Saturday before Martin Luther King Day. This year, the program shifted to focus events on the holiday itself, in alignment with national organizing and celebration. Related events occurred all weekend, however.

A keystone of this year’s day of service was the Red Hook Community Fair, “Beyond Recycling: Repair, Re-Use, Rethink and Commit to Community.” More than 30 Bard students participated at the Red Hook Community Center in a day that included sustainable crafts, cooking and science activities, and opportunities to sign up to volunteer with local organizations.

The organizers also added “Commit to Action,” a mini-conference in Olin Auditorium. Led by local organizers and campus leaders, participants chose from 15 workshops aimed at helping them commit to action in 2019. Making a yearlong commitment was a theme of this year’s MLK Day of Engagement. Organizers emphasized the many ways students could be involved with on- or off-campus groups beyond the holiday weekend. Facilitators focused on helping students build skills to effect change. Workshops included “Literacy for Adolescents: Tutoring as Social Change” and “Getting to Climate Drawdown: The Campus as Learning Lab.”

The conference also featured a panel of local leaders in a conversation that connected their personal stories with their civic action. Panelists included Matthew Martini, Northern Hudson Valley regional representative to the State Comptroller’s Office; Sarah Salem, Poughkeepsie Common Council member; Leslie Tracey, cofounder of the Hudson Valley African American Business Council; Rev. Giancarlo Llaverias, Dutchess County legislator; and Cammie Jones, assistant dean of civic engagement at Bard College.

Bard students worked at more than two dozen sites over the long weekend, ranging from Tomorrow, Tomorrow Animal Rescue outside Hudson to the United Methodist Food Pantry in Red Hook. On Saturday, Bardians continued an annual tradition of donning work gloves and hauling old TVs, stereos, computer towers, and other electronic waste for Red Hook’s E-Waste Day.

In January, Bard science outreach kicks into high gear in conjunction with the Citizen Science program, culminating in a flurry of events around the King holiday. Science outreach activities take place all year through Bard’s Center for Civic Engagement, in which student leaders conduct STEM games and experiments in the Hudson Valley school districts. Volunteers and engagement fellows from CCE gave lessons to local children in conjunction with other student-led science activities around this year’s Citizen Science topic: water.

Read more about the day’s events on the CCE website.
 

Multimedia artist Julia Christensen took video cameras to Lake Erie to document the ice that keeps the lake healthy—and what its absence could mean in the future.

Bard MBA student Alexandra Criscuolo was featured in Forbes for her work at Kickstarter developing a one-stop-shop of resources on how to assess and adopt sustainability efforts.

The two-story prefab, designed by MB Architecture, is home to Bard’s Center for Experimental Humanities.

Study, Reported in the Journal Nature Sustainability, Led by Felicia Keesing of Bard College and Brian Allan of the University of Illinois

A study of 3,588 square kilometers of privately owned land in central Kenya offers evidence that humans and their livestock can, in the right circumstances, share territory with zebras, giraffes, elephants and other wild mammals—to the benefit of all.

The study, reported in the journal Nature Sustainability, focused on Laikipia County in central Kenya.

“Laikipia County hosts 10 percent of Kenya’s wildlife, but none of the country’s national parks or preserves,” says University of Illinois entomology professor Brian Allan, who led the study with Bard College professor Felicia Keesing. “Most people depend on livestock for income and almost 70 percent of the land is devoted to large-scale ranching or pastoralism.” 

As human populations increase, so does the pressure to expand agricultural and pastoral areas into grasslands now dominated by wildlife.
 Wildlife tourism is another source of revenue for landowners, however, as the area hosts exotic white and black rhinoceroses, Grevy’s zebras, and painted dogs, notes Keesing.

“This is leading some to remove traditional barriers between livestock and wildlife because there are benefits to having multiple sources of income,” she says.

There are big potential downsides to allowing livestock and wildlife to share territory, however, the researchers say. Wild cats sometimes prey on domestic animals. Wildlife and livestock may compete for water and grazing resources. They also can share diseases, including tick-borne infections like East Coast fever, Q fever, and bovine anaplasmosis.

“There is no greater diversity of tick species anywhere on the earth than in eastern and southern Africa,” Allan says. “And many of the ticks are host generalists, meaning they’ll happily feed on a cow, a gazelle or a zebra—and they’ll also bite humans.”
 To determine the ecological and economic effects of raising livestock on territory also used by wildlife, the researchers surveyed tick abundance, vegetation, and the dung of large herbivorous mammals on 23 Laikipia County properties during July and August in 2014 and 2015.

“We identified the ticks and sequenced DNA of tick-borne pathogens to identify infectious agents associated with the ticks,” says Keesing. The team also interviewed managers and owners of each property about the type and abundance of livestock on their land and the percentage of revenue derived from wildlife tourism and livestock operations.

The researchers found that the practice of regularly spraying cattle with acaricides, which kill ticks without directly endangering birds or other creatures that feed on ticks, dramatically reduced the number of ticks in the grazed areas.

“Reducing the number of ticks is one key part of a strategy to reduce the transmission of tick-borne diseases,” says Keesing. “These diseases can sicken and kill people, livestock, and wildlife, which is particularly devastating in a vulnerable ecosystem experiencing many competing demands.”
 About 16 percent of the ticks collected at the study sites carried at least one bacterial or protozoal infection, the scientists found. There was no difference in the proportion of infected ticks found on properties devoted entirely to wildlife and those where wildlife and livestock were integrated. Tick abundance, however, was 75 percent lower on integrated properties than on those hosting only wildlife.

Livestock- and wildlife-related income accounted for more than 70 percent of revenue for the properties studied. Wildlife abundance was highest on properties with moderate densities of cattle—but not on land supporting sheep and goats, the researchers found. There was also less green grass on livestock-only and wildlife-only properties than on land shared by both, and the quality of the forage was highest on integrated lands.

These findings suggest that certain management practices can enhance the viability of livestock operations while also maximizing wildlife abundance and health on the same lands, the researchers say.
 “It has been the attitude of conservationists that conservation lands must be kept secure and undisturbed from human uses, including livestock production, and I can sympathize with that perspective,” Allan says. “But our data are starting to suggest that there could be circumstances where livestock-wildlife integration can work—for the benefit of all. A productive savanna ecosystem may be the perfect place to try it.”

“This project demonstrates that research on the complex interactions of natural and human systems can foster innovative management strategies to preserve environmental quality and economic productivity,” says Tom Baerwald, a program director for the National Science Foundation’s Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems program, which funded the research. “The findings are applicable in many parts of the United States and in other regions around the world."

The National Science Foundation and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign support this research.

For more information, visit dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0149-2.

The study, reported in the journal Nature Sustainability, was led by Felicia Keesing of Bard College and Brian Allan of the University of Illinois.

Fog transports microbes over long distances and deposits them in new environments, according to the new study.

The MBA in Sustainability program at Bard College has won a competitive bid to deliver an on-site, low-residency graduate business degree to a cohort of future energy sector leaders from the New York Power Authority (NYPA), the largest state-owned electric utility in the United States. Between 10 and 15 NYPA employees will begin the two-and-a-half-year, part-time program in February 2019, with a graduation date set for May 2021. Courses will be taught one weekend a month at NYPA’s offices in White Plains, and online two evenings a week. The curriculum features a yearlong lab course in mission-focused consulting, in which students will work in small teams on two semester projects for NYPA partners in marketing, finance, operations, or strategy. bard.edu/mba

Goats have worked summers since 2016 at Bard’s Blithewood Estate, preserving the scenic view by eating invasive weeds on the uneven slope.

On Saturday, October 6, Bard College, in partnership with Rose Hill Farm and the National Young Farmers Coalition, presents the Montgomery Place 2018 Salon Series on Agriculture. The event will gather farmers, community members, scientists, legal scholars, journalists, and business people to explore a multitude of issues related to establishing a thriving regional agriculture system. Speakers will address, among other questions: Can the Northeast feed itself? If so, should it? What are the environmental, social, political, and other costs and benefits? The discussion takes place from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Bard College: The Montgomery Place Campus, River Road, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Admission is $18, with reduced prices for farmers and students, and is free for Bard students. Registration is required. For more information and to sign up, visit theagriculturesalonseries.splashthat.com.

“The focus of this event, regional agriculture, is of great immediacy to the Hudson Valley and surrounding communities, as well as to other areas within 150 miles of any North American urban center, potentially encompassing about 15 percent of the high-quality cropland in North America,” says Gidon Eshel, research professor of physics at Bard College and Agriculture Salon Series program curator. “The speakers, recognized leaders in their respective fields, all have interesting, unique angles on the issue. Perspectives they will bring to bear on the problem include legal, conservation/land access, financial/monetary, economic, ecological, environmental, racial/gender, and equality/justice. This one-day event looks to promote a vigorous and productive dialogue on local agriculture.”

In addition to Eshel, speakers include:
Ruth DeFries, Denning Family Professor of Sustainable Development and professor of ecology, evolution, and environmental biology, Columbia University; member, National Academy of Sciences; and 2007 MacArthur Fellow
David Gould, head of investor relations, Amerra Capital
Tamar Haspel, food and science journalist; author of the Washington Post monthly column “Unearthed”; and Cape Cod oyster farmer
Leah Penniman, codirector and program manager, Soul Fire Farm; author, Farming While Black
Eric Posner, Kirkland & Ellis Distinguished Service Professor of Law, Arthur and Esther Kane Research Chair, University of Chicago; member, Committee on International Relations
Steve Rosenberg, senior vice president and executive director, Scenic Hudson Land Trust; board member, Land Trust Alliance
Steffen Schneider, director of farming operations, Hawthorne Valley Farm; senior director, Institute for Mindful Agriculture; president, Biodynamic Association of North America

Located on River Road, Annandale-on-Hudson, Montgomery Place, a 380-acre estate adjacent to the main Bard College campus and overlooking the Hudson River, is a designated National Historic Landmark set amid rolling lawns, woodlands, and gardens, against the spectacular backdrop of the Catskill Mountains. Renowned architects, landscape designers, and horticulturists worked to create an elegant and inspiring country estate consisting of a mansion, farm, orchards, farmhouse, and other buildings. The Montgomery Place estate was owned by members of the Livingston family from 1802 until the 1980s. In 1986, Livingston heir John Dennis Delafield transferred the estate to Historic Hudson Valley, in whose hands it remained until 2016, when Bard College acquired the property. For more information, visit bard.edu/montgomeryplace.

The event, “A Celebration of Blithewood Garden: 115 Years of Beauty on the Hudson,” includes a lawn party, garden tours, and a panel discussion.

Dalia Najjar ’14, general manager of Palestine-based Farouk Systems, has secured a $1 million agricultural grant for local producers/farmers to expand regional sourcing.

As a Bard student, Letz traveled to five countries to study the effects of globalization on small farmers. Now she’s turned her passion for growing local and organic into the thriving Bluma Farm.

The seasonal exhibition focuses on some of the insects and diseases that are endangering trees across the Northeast.

Kathy Hipple has coauthored the report “The Financial Case for Fossil Fuel Divestment,” which concludes that fossil fuel investment is risky and not likely to pay off in the future.

When Tierney Weymueller first came to Bard for Language and Thinking, she was struck by how much was happening on campus. "I remember during L&T just being so amazed that we would go to hear the orchestra, then to the museum on campus, and then to go see a play. There were just so many different things going on all at once in this space. . . . I remember that being really exciting."

Tierney grew up all over, and has lived in New Mexico, Ireland, and Canada, among other places. Bard's programs in dance and environmental science attracted her from the start. She had always lived in cities, and was pleasantly surprised by the beauty of the campus and her growing love for the Hudson Valley area.

At first, Tierney decided to pursue both dance and environmental and urban studies. But she had an eye-opening experience taking a class with Eli Dueker that focused on science accessibility. She decided to major in EUS with a focus on communications. Her academic work has centered around “how to make science accessible to people, or how to make it interesting, relatable, and transparent.” At Bard, Tierney made time to be involved with the Dance Program by taking dance classes and performing in other students' Senior Projects.

Taking the Water course with Professor Dueker cemented Tierney’s interest in science communication and environmental education. For Tierney, the class was “a perfect blend of scientific components and the various social issues around water. . . . We did group experiments, and my group worked at a farm in Red Hook. Our project was water colony testing, but then we also ended up organizing a tree planting and working with this farmer. I got to see how environmental science could be more holistic: it wasn’t just me in the lab by myself; it was a way of addressing social issues that I was interested in, kind of like this whole package."

Tierney has interned with the Saw Kill Watershed Community. There, she attended the monthly community meetings and assisted in organizing their water monitoring program. During her time at Bard, Tierney's involvement with the community helped her “understand that this whole outreach and communications side to science is ultimately what I’m really excited about.”

She also worked in the Eel Project. Every spring the glass eels migrate up into different tributaries of the Hudson. Using a net at the Bard Field Station, volunteers count the number of eels and then set them free.

Last summer, Tierney taught on the Hudson River sloop Clearwater. The Clearwater is an environmental education vessel, originally built by Pete Seeger, that sails up and down the Hudson. People go onboard to learn about the ecology and history of the river. The Clearwater focuses especially on educating young people so they’ll gain a new appreciation for the river and learn to protect it.

Tierney's Senior Project was an environmental oral history about people who work on, live near, and otherwise use the Saw Kill. She conducted interviews exploring people's relationships to the river and historical or ecological knowledge about it, and then wrote stories about the Saw Kill from these different perspectives.

In 2018, Tierney received three awards from the College: the Hudsonia Prize (shared with Elinor Stapylton), awarded by Hudsonia Ltd. to a student showing promise in the field of environmental studies; the Patricia Ross Weis '52 Scholarship, awarded to talented students in the social sciences who uphold Bard's values by ensuring a strong community; and the Rachel Carson Prize, honoring an outstanding Senior Project in environmental and urban studies that reflects Carson's determination to promote biocentric sensibility.

"The best part about Bard," Tierney observes, "is how your classes and activities connect to the community around the College. I have loved getting to know people in the Hudson Valley. Like the Saw Kill Watershed Community and the Clearwater staff—I’ve just gotten to know this group of people that’s really invested and active in this area. That has also become my community outside of Bard." She adds, "Without the professors here, I wouldn't have realized how this kind of work is really important to me. I wouldn't have known that this kind of community outreach around science exists; so it’s really exciting. . . . I love this area. The Hudson River—adore it. The fact that we can, as students, walk through the Tivoli Bays—I walked that walk every day last summer."

Tierney is now traveling through Europe with her two roommates from her first year at Bard. In the fall, she will begin work for the World Ocean School on board the historic schooner Roseway.
 

Television star and Bard MBA student Megan Boone is working to transform how business is done and create a new, sustainable story about how our culture and economic system can work for everyone.

The global environmental impacts of meat and dairy farming are far more damaging than previously thought, a new study shows. Professor Eshel weighs in on the results.