News and Events

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.

Bard College is one of five local institutions that are leading the way in environmental education and on-campus sustainability initiatives.

Sarah Goldberg ’20 and Lucy Faulkner ’20, leaders of the TLS Project Harvesting Justice, spoke with Mariel Fiori ’05 during her show on Radio Kingston. (Starts at 1:23:30)

The annual prizes recognize student stories focusing on innovative business solutions that advance the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Extending the definition of food loss to include inefficient dietary choices, a new study quantifies the benefits of plant-based diets versus animal-based diets for food security.

Extending the definition of food loss to include inefficient dietary choices, a new study quantifies the benefits of plant-based diets versus animal-based diets for food security. The study, published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), is coauthored by Bard College Research Professor Gidon Eshel. Animal based foods require more resources per unit product (gram, calorie, or gram protein) than plant-based foods. Since resources allocated to feed production for livestock yield less human food compared with what they could have yielded if they were instead used for plant-based food production, allocating resources to animal-based food production constitutes an effective food loss. Alon Shepon and colleagues quantify this “opportunity cost” by estimating the amount of food that could be produced if animal-based items were replaced by nutritionally at least comparable plant-based items in the U.S. diet.

The authors found that plant-based replacements could produce 2- to 20-fold more protein per acre than beef, pork, poultry, dairy, or eggs. The authors further estimate that replacing all animal-based products in the mean American diet with plant-based alternatives would allow increased food production sufficient to feed approximately 350 million additional people, or 110 percent of the current U.S. population. This putative added food availability handily exceeds potential food availability gains by elimination of conventional food losses, mostly spoilage, leaky supply chains, or post-retail waste.

Gidon Eshel is research professor in environmental science and 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.

More coverage at Phys.org: “Food waste: The biggest loss could be what you choose to put in your mouth”
 

Professor Eshel’s latest study shows that a single change in food habit could dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) has awarded Bard College a $64,000 grant to help develop a campus energy master plan (EMP). Working with Ecosystem Energy Services, Bard will evaluate its current and future energy footprint and create a roadmap for achieving the College’s goals of campus net-zero energy and carbon neutrality by 2035. A key goal of the plan will be to evaluate how to contain and/or reverse the rise in consumption, costs, and emissions, with a focus on the opportunity to convert equipment that is due for replacement with high-efficiency alternatives. The plan will review Bard’s existing geothermal systems and their potential expansion to existing buildings and new construction. The grant, through NYSERDA’s REV Campus Challenge Technical Assistance for Roadmaps Program, includes $4,000 to support an internship for a graduate student from the Bard Center for Environmental Policy.

“For more than two decades, Bard has been using geothermal systems to access the stable temperatures in the ground for heating and cooling buildings. We are grateful to NYSERDA for the chance to evaluate how we've been doing, whether we can convert existing buildings to using ground-source heat pumps, and how to wisely incorporate them into future buildings,” said Laurie Husted, chief sustainability officer in the Bard Office of Sustainability (BOS).

Dan Smith, BOS energy manager, added, “geothermal systems use electricity but are much more efficient and sustainable than conventional systems that consume fossil fuels, and we can further reduce electricity consumption by adding complimentary renewable energy sources—something NYSERDA has helped us with through funding for solar panels and, more recently, through funding our investigation into the use of micro hydropower.”

“Colleges and universities play a pivotal role in helping the state meet its ambitious energy goals set by Governor Cuomo,” said Alicia Barton, president and CEO, NYSERDA. “Investments like these made through the REV Campus Challenge help ensure campus and community resiliency and build a cleaner, more sustainable energy future for generations to come.”

For more information about sustainability initiatives at Bard, visit bos.bard.edu/energy-facilities-and-climate.

NYSERDA’s REV Campus Challenge promotes clean energy efforts by recognizing and supporting colleges and universities in New York State that implement clean energy projects and principles on campus, in the classroom, and in surrounding communities. For more information, visit nyserda.ny.gov/All-Programs/Programs/REV-Campus-Challenge.

Ecosystem Energy Services, based in New York and Boston, is an award-winning engineering firm focused on the design and delivery of high-performing energy projects. For more information, visit ecosystem-energy.com.

Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with concentrations in more than 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; nine early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 158-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to the liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.