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Hannah Arendt Center and Bard Athletics Hosted “Spring Cleaning” of Bard Campus

After an hour of picking up trash, the dedication organizers and volunteers put in was enough to leave the whole campus community inspired.

Landscape Firm Tom Stuart-Smith Joins Blithewood Garden Rehabilitation Project

“After almost a decade of planning for Blithewood’s return to glory, I’m thrilled to be collaborating with Tom Stuart-Smith’s team to rethink and refresh Blithewood’s plantings,” said Amy Parrella.

Landscape Firm Tom Stuart-Smith Joins Blithewood Garden Rehabilitation Project

a lush green garden with Italianate architecture

Bard College’s Friends of Blithewood Garden and the Garden Conservancy are pleased to announce that the firm Tom Stuart-Smith, a renowned landscape design practice with an international reputation for making gardens that combine naturalism and modernity, will be commissioned for the planting plan phase of the Blithewood Garden rehabilitation project.

Once the current architectural rehabilitation phase at Blithewood is complete, the Stuart-Smith team will help reimagine the garden and the surrounding landscape to fit seamlessly into the space. The team will coordinate with the preservation architect and review historical records, photographs, and prior reports to inform the new design. They will also work with Bard College to integrate educational and opportunities for students and the broader community throughout the process. Once complete, Blithewood’s landscape will be Stuart-Smith’s only public garden in the United States.

“After almost a decade of planning for Blithewood’s return to glory, I’m thrilled to be collaborating with Tom Stuart-Smith’s team to rethink and refresh Blithewood’s plantings,” said Amy Parrella, director of Horticulture and Arboretum at Bard. “Gardens are dynamic living art works that are at their best when they are reinterpreted from a current lens, while still maintaining their cultural and design integrity.”

“The most enduring historic gardens continue to evolve,” said Pamela Governale, director of preservation at the Garden Conservancy. “By engaging the renowned landscape practice of Tom Stuart-Smith, we are embracing a living future for Blithewood—one that honors its past while reimagining its plantings for challenges of the decades ahead. This is preservation not as stasis, but as cultural continuity. The restoration of Blithewood Garden is a powerful example of what happens when visionary institutions and world-class designers come together to steward a nationally significant landscape.”

Blithewood Garden is considered a nationally significant Beaux Arts, Italianate garden with significant connections to the evolution of American landscape design and is one of the few intact Hudson River estate gardens that remain from the Gilded Age. Situated on a steeply sloping bluff approximately 130 feet above the Hudson River, Blithewood is a 45-acre section of Bard’s campus that was once part of a historic estate comprising a manor house, outbuildings, drives, gardens, lawns, and meadows. Bard College has partnered with the Garden Conservancy, a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to preserve and share America’s gardens, on the restoration of Blithewood Garden.

Blithewood Garden is open to the public from dawn to dusk every day. For more information, visit https://www.bard.edu/arboretum/gardens/blithewood/

Post Date: 04-02-2025

Bard College Hosts Symposium on PCB Contamination and “Bomb Trains” Threatening the Hudson/Mahicantuck River on April 11

Bard College will host “The Fate of the River,” a public symposium centered on two major environmental threats facing the Hudson/Mahicantuck River, on Friday, April 11 from 10 am to 4 pm in Olin Hall at Bard College.

Bard College Hosts Symposium on PCB Contamination and “Bomb Trains” Threatening the Hudson/Mahicantuck River on April 11

Fog moving over the Hudson River at dusk.

Hudson/Mahicantuck River. Photo by Jon Bowermaster

Bard College will host “The Fate of the River,” a symposium centered on two major environmental threats facing the Hudson/Mahicantuck River. The symposium will take place on Friday, April 11 from 10 am to 4 pm in Olin Hall at Bard College. “The Fate of the River” will call attention to high levels of PCB contamination in the river and “bomb trains”—overloaded freight trains carrying Bakken shale oil and unidentified chemicals along the eroding west bank of the river. General Electric’s dumping of toxic material in the river over 30 years and its subsequent clean-up between 2009 and 2015 that did not meet agreed upon environmental benchmarks has resulted in the river’s high levels of PCB contamination. Continuing PCB contamination causes human health risks, ongoing extinction and disease to fish and wildlife, and damages river ecosystems, wetlands, ground water, and soil. The other symposium topic is the environmental threat of “Bomb Trains” carrying highly explosive fossil fuels, which if derailed, spell catastrophe in impacted communities.

The purpose of this symposium is to facilitate public discussion informed by science, environmental law, and best citizen advocacy practices and to explore how members of the community can effectively address and work together to curtail these threats. Morning presentations will be followed by an afternoon panel and public discussion. Members of the Hudson Valley community are welcome to attend for all or part of the symposium.

Key speakers include writer, filmmaker and adventurer, Jon Bowermaster; Associate Director of Government Affairs at Riverkeeper Jeremy Cherson MS ’15, who is working to advance Riverkeeper’s priorities in Albany and Washington; Senior Staff Attorney at Food & Water Watch and Bard faculty member Erin Doran; public health physician and Director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at SUNY Albany David O. Carpenter; and lawyer Florence Murray, whose practice specializes in traumatic brain injuries and wrongful death actions, civil rights violations with severe injuries, trucking collisions, and railroad derailments—such as the one in East Palestine, Ohio.

“The Fate of the River” symposium is the first in a series of public discussions entitled Environmental Injustice Across the Americas that focuses on state-sanctioned pollution, the poisoning of water, destruction of the commons, and the fight for justice. “The Fate of the River” is cosponsored by Bard College’s Human Rights Program, Center for Civic Engagement, Center for Environmental Policy, Environmental Studies, and the Office of Sustainability.

“The Fate of the River” Symposium Schedule
Friday, April 11, 2025
Olin Hall, Bard College

10:00–10:10 am Introduction to “The Fate of the River” symposium
10:10–10: 35 am Introduction and screening of Jon Bowermaster’s film A Toxic Legacy about General Electric’s contamination of the Hudson/Mahicantuck River
10:40–11:00 am Jeremy Cherson, Associate Director of Government Affairs, Riverkeeper
11:05–11:25 am Erin Doran, Faculty in Environmental Law, Bard Center for Environmental Policy, and Senior Staff Attorney, Food & Water Watch
11:35–11:55 am David Carpenter, Director of Institute for Health and the Environment, SUNY Albany
Noon–1:00 pm LUNCH BREAK
1:05–1:25 pm Eli Dueker, Associate Professor of Environmental and Urban Studies, and Director of Bard Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities
1:25–1:40 pm Introduction to and screening of Jon Bowermaster’s film Bomb Trains
1:40–2:00 pm Jeremy Cherson, Associate Director of Government Affairs, Riverkeeper
2:00–2:20 pm Florence Murray, Partner of Murray & Murray Law Firm, represents stakeholders affected by the toxic aftermath of the 2023 derailment of a Norfolk Southern train in East Palestine, Ohio
2:20–2:40 pm COFFEE BREAK
2:40–4:00 pm Panel and Public Discussion: “Next Steps Toward a Healthier
River”

Refreshments graciously provided by Taste Budds and Yum Yum of Red Hook.

Post Date: 03-31-2025

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Bard College Receives Three-Year Grant from NYSDEC to Hire Goats to Help Clear Invasive Plant Overgrowth from Historic Blithewood Manor Landscape

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) has awarded Bard College a three-year Invasive Species Rapid Response and Control Grant that will support a plan to use goats to clear invasive plant overgrowth from a 1.5-acre hillside near Blithewood Manor.

In order to maintain scenic views from the gardens and grounds of the estate, the hillside vistas must occasionally be cleared of vegetative overgrowth, a process that is complicated by steep slopes and irregular terrain, and, in recent years, the appearance of fast-growing invasive plant species that are displacing native meadow plants and need more frequent removal. The hillside has quickly become dominated by the invasive Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) and Common Reed (Phragmites australis) as well as Japanese Knotweed (Fallopia japonica). As a sustainable alternative to fossil fuel-emitting mowers, weedwhackers, and chainsaws, Bard successfully experimented in summer 2016 with contracting a local herd of goats to graze and clear the northern vista. The hillside was enclosed with temporary fencing, and the herd remained for several weeks until all vegetation was stripped.

“The goats do what they love best—eating brush, being outdoors, and standing on hills—requiring only daily fresh water, and some human assistance to topple the Ailanthus that have become too tall and thick for the goats to topple themselves,” says Bard Energy Manager Dan Smith, who comanages the project with Horticulture Supervisor and Director of the Bard Arboretum Amy Parrella. “The DEC grant will enable us to continue and expand this project and sustainably address invasive plant species and maintain these historic vistas,” added Parrella.

The $56,920 DEC grant will provide cost-share funding to host the goats for the 2017, 2018, and 2019 growing seasons, and to expand the area grazed by the goats to the southern vista, increasing the area of impact by 50 percent. The grant also includes funding for student stipends to assist with daily watering and monitoring of the herd. At the end of the third season, the vistas will be rehabilitated with stump grinding, grading, and seeding with native wildflower mix to restore the hillside to pre-invasive conditions.

Photo: Photo by Daniel Smith, 2016
Meta: Subject(s): Arboretum and Horticulture,Environmental/Sustainability,Grants,Office of Institutional Support (OIS) |

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Bard College Celebrates Martin Luther King Day with Volunteer Projects

On Saturday, January 14, more than 260 Bard College students volunteered with Hudson Valley organizations for the College's 7th Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Engagement. The day's events, organized by Bard’s Center for Civic Engagement, take place as part of the nationwide Day of Service that marks the King holiday. Volunteers around the country respond to Dr. King's call, "Life’s most persistent and urgent question is: 'What are you doing for others?'"

Bard students worked at more than 30 sites, ranging from Historic Hudson River Sloop Clearwater and Red Hook Public Library to Planned Parenthood. Students also participated in an E-Waste project where the Town and Villages of Red Hook and Tivoli, together with the Red Hook Conservation Advisory Council and Bard Office of Sustainability, hosted an electronic waste collection day for their residents.

Volunteering on the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater. Photo by Joe Fitzgerald

Members of Bard's student-led TLS project Brothers at Bard also led a science project with Kingston High School students for elementary school students from nearby Rhinebeck, New York. The activities ranged from dissecting owl pellets to discovering and identifying bones, as well as testing sound physics and constructing lava lamps. Volunteers and engagement fellows from Bard's Center for Civic Engagement prepared lessons in conjunction with other student-led science activities taking place throughout the month in local school districts.

Read more about the day’s events on the Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Engagement blog.

Writers and editors with Oblivion Magazine lead a workshop on coded language in the news. Photo by C. Azemar

Photo: Students work on landscaping at Bard's Montgomery Place Campus Credit: Photo by Joy Al-Nemri
Meta: Type(s): Event | Subject(s): Education,Environmental/Sustainability,Student,Wellness | Institutes(s): Bard Undergraduate Programs |

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