UVM’s Gund Institute for Ecological Economics and Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources are hosting the seventh U.S. Society for Ecological Economics (USSEE) Conference. Academics, organizational leaders, students and other attendees will engage the theme of “Building Local, Scaling Global: Implementing Solutions for Sustainability.”

The conference’s final lecture will be free and open to the public.

As global concern grows about soil depletion, climate change, overconsumption, population growth, biodiversity loss — and a host of other pressures on planetary systems — ecological economics has been building a powerful body of theory and practice aiming to find ways forward toward a more sustainable future.

The conference will take a critical look at lessons about economic and ecological well-being learned in recent years at local, regional, and state levels--and identify solutions that can be scaled up.

Speakers and sessions

The conference will open Sunday, June 9, at 5:30 p.m., with welcoming remarks by Vermont Agency of Agriculture Secretary Chuck Ross, and Vermont State Senator Ginny Lyons.

On Wednesday, June 12, from 3:30 to 5 p.m., the final conference event will be a lecture and discussion, "Building Our Economy: Moving Past Rhetoric to a Just and Sustainable Future," with Riane Eisler and Nancy Folbre.

The lecture will be held in the Marsh Life Sciences Lecture Hall, Room 235, and is free and open to the public. Tickets are available through phone reservations, (802)-656-2943, or online registration.

Riane Eisler is the co-founder and president of the Center for Partnership Studies and the author of numerous books and articles, including the internationally acclaimed The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. Nancy Folbre is professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research explores the interface between political economy and feminist theory, with emphasis on the value of unpaid care work. In addition to numerous articles published in academic journals, she is the author of Greed, Lust, and Gender: A History of Economic Ideas.

Additional lectures and discussions during the conference will include international development specialist Robin Broad; environmental governance researcher Ashwini Chhatre; energy expert Cutler Cleveland; Nate Hagens, an authority on "peak oil" and resource depletion; Hal Hamilton, co-director of the Sustainable Food Lab; Cylvia Hayes, first lady of Oregon and leader of the Oregon Prosperity Initiative; UVM soil expert Fred Magdoff; Julie Nelson, a scholar of feminist economics; energy author Greg Pahl; ecological planning expert Bill Rees, who originated the "ecological footprint" concept; and Darcy Winslow a sustainability management expert from the MIT Leadership Center.

Gund leads

"Vermont and UVM are uniquely positioned to host the USSEE Conference," said Taylor Ricketts, director of UVM’s Gund Institute. "Vermont is a leader in alternative economic models and sustainability initiatives ranging from cooperative farming to alternative currencies. At UVM, our world-class academic community conducts research at the interface of ecological, social, and economic systems, and develops creative, practical solutions to local and global environmental challenges. "

“The Gund Institute has been a Vermont hub for transdisciplinary research and education on ecological economics for over a decade,” said Josh Farley, Gund Fellow and professor in UVM's department of Community Development and Applied Economics. “The USSEE Conference is a great opportunity to lay the foundations for an economic system dedicated to shared prosperity on a finite planet.”

The conference will cover more than 60 topics under three major implementing themes: Re-Building the Biophysical Base of Ecological Economics; Bridging Ecological and Behavioral Economics; and, Designing Social Policy and Education for the Anthropocene. The Biophysical Economics Association will hold their fifth  annual meeting alongside the USSEE in support of the theme around Re-Building the Biophysical Base of Ecological Economics.

Information, registration: uvm.edu/conferences/ussee/

For questions, please contact conference organizers at ussee13@uvm.edu.

In October of that year, Congress passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Four decades later, new research shows that the law is working.

Not only has the act “successfully prevented the extirpation of any marine mammal population in the United States in the forty years since it was enacted,” write UVM conservation biologist Joe Roman and his colleagues in a new report, but also, “the current status of many marine mammal populations is considerably better than in 1972.”

Their study, published online on March 22, in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, shows that population trends for most stocks of these animals remain unknown, but of those stocks that are known, many are increasing.

“At a very fundamental level, the MMPA has accomplished what its framers set out to do,” says co-author Andrew Read, professor of marine biology at Duke University, “to protect individual marine mammals from harm as a result of human activities.”

Restored roles

Some marine mammals, like endangered right whales, continue to be in deep trouble, but other populations “particularly seals and sea lions, have recovered to or near their carrying capacity,” the scientists write.

“We have seen remarkable recoveries of some populations of marine mammals, such as gray seals in New England and sea lions and elephant seals along the Pacific coast,” says Read.

“U.S. waters are pretty compromised with lots of ship traffic and ship strikes, big fisheries, pollution, boat noise, “ Joe Roman says. “And yet it’s safer to be a marine mammal in U.S. waters than elsewhere,” he says, due to the Act’s strong protections against commercial and accidental killing — what the law calls “take” — and its aim to maintain sustainable populations of mammals and their ecological roles in oceans.

“It’s important to evaluate such broad legislation,” says Caitlin Campbell ’12, an Environmental Sciences graduate from UVM’s College of Arts & Sciences, and a co-author on the paper.

“A lot of people think that the hard part was getting it passed through Congress, but in reality you have to make sure that big protective measures like this actually are effective,” she says. “This paper shows that this act is doing its job.”

The research team — Campbell; Joe Roman in UVM’s Gund Institute for Ecological Economics; Irit Altman from Boston University; Meagan Dunphy-Daly and Andrew Read from Duke University; and Michael Jasny from the Natural Resources Defense Council — gathered hundreds of data sets from around the world, including from NOAA, Canadian agencies, and the IUCN. Their goal was to get an accurate picture of population levels and trends of more than two hundred stocks of marine mammals from the Pantropical Spotted Dolphin to the West Indian Manatee.

The team concluded that for many of these animals there simply aren't enough data. For seventy-one percent of the stocks they identified, they couldn’t say which way the population was heading, up or down. “There isn’t enough research,” Roman says.

But for the ones they could evaluate, they found that nineteen percent of stocks were increasing, while five percent were stable and only five percent were declining.

Another fundamental conclusion of this research: “stopping harvesting these mammals, stop fisheries bycatch, stop killing them — and many populations bounce back,” says Roman. Marine mammals are long-lived “so it’s going to take decades, maybe longer for populations to rebound,” he says, “but it seems the trends are increasing.”

Beyond whale oil

In 1934, trends were definitely not increasing for right whales, when an international treaty banned hunting these nearly extinguished creatures. But other protections lagged, and by the 1960s many whales and other marine mammals — including some dolphins and seals — faced plummeting populations and the risk of extinction.

Yet in the early 1970s, the U.S. Department of Defense resisted legislation to protect whales and other marine mammals: they relied on sperm whale oil for use as a lubricant in submarines and other military engines, Roman’s team writes.

In one curious part of the complex negotiations at the White House, Lee Talbot, a canny scientist working for Richard Nixon, produced an affidavit from the DuPont Corporation stating that they could produce an artificial lubricant that could do the same job as the whale oil. This helped make the Pentagon more receptive toward whale-protecting legislation. In October 1972, the Marine Mammal Protection Act passed. This victory was also a key step toward the passage of the more forceful (though less ecologically oriented) Endangered Species Act that passed the next year.

Under these two laws, “countless tens of thousands of individual whales, seals, and manatees have been protected from harm since 1972,” the scientists write, “exactly as intended by those who crafted the legislation.”

In 1994, major amendments to the MMPA established a new framework for dealing with interactions between marine mammals and commercial fisheries, “which remains perhaps the most important conservation issue facing these iconic animals," says Andrew Read.

This new framework, relies on “a negotiated rule-making process,” Read says, looking for solutions to the incidental death of mammals in commercial fisheries. One of the strengths of the new process is that it “requires the direct involvement of fishermen, conservationists and scientists in the management process,” Read says.

Still, some deeply depleted species, like right whales, may never recover, and additional threats beyond direct killing remain. The Marine Mammal Protection Act has generally been ineffective in dealing with problems like increasing underwater noise from naval operations and other ships, new diseases, and depleted prey species in fraying food webs. “Existing conservation measures have not protected large whales from fisheries interactions or ship strikes in the northwestern Atlantic,” the team writes.

And this points to a new generation of challenges such as moving shipping lanes in whale feeding territory, slowing speed boats in manatee habitat, changing lobster fishing technologies and other fishing gear modifications, and continuing to improve ecosystem-based fisheries management. “That’s going to be hard and require real political will,” Joe Roman says.

Dona Brown, professor of history, will discuss the cultural politics of the first back-to-the-land movement and consider the legacy it bequeathed to movements in the 1930s, 1970s, and beyond. "Home, Land, Security: The Cultural Politics of American Back-to-the-Land Movements," the last of this spring's College of Arts and Sciences spring Full Professor Lecture Series, will take place Tuesday, April 9 at 5 p.m. in Memorial Lounge, Waterman Building.

Brown has been on the faculty in the History Department at UVM since 1994.  Her first book, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Smithsonian Press, 1995), explored the significance of the tourist trade in shaping New England's regional identity.  She has published widely on both tourism and American regionalism, and she was director of the Center for Research on Vermont from 2003 to 2006. Her latest book, Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), explores the long history of back-to-the-land movements in the United States.
 
A recording of the lecture will be made available soon on the College of Arts and Sciences media blog and eventually on the College of Arts and Sciences website.

Information: 656-3166.

Watch a video of the conference (Sanders introduces UVM participants at 26:42).

It was the down — tiny goose feathers — in his sleeping bag that prevented him from suffering a fate similar to the beer. Amazing feathers.

On that cold night (one of many in Bernd Heinrich’s famed winter ecology course), Thor Hanson wondered about another feathered creature also sleeping nearby: the golden-crowned kinglet. This bird weighs five grams, “about the same as a nickel or teaspoon of salt,” Hanson writes in his book, Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle.

High over his head, in the crook of a fir branch, the kinglet kept its body about 120 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the surrounding air. Without the uncanny microstructure of feathers — the most insulating material in the world — the bird would have died in a few breaths. Amazing feathers.

This is just one of dozens of feather-fascinated, perspective-altering stories that led Hanson’s book to be selected as this year’s winner of the John Burroughs Medal. Given in the past to such luminaries as Rachel Carson and Barry Lopez, it is considered the highest award for American nature writing.

Hanson traveled to the American Museum of Natural History in New York to receive the medal on April 1.

Bird feathers, people feathers

Hanson credits UVM’s Field Naturalist Program, and teachers like Heinrich, for helping to shape this book. “This could have easily been a narrow ornithological textbook,” Hanson says, “and yet it’s the broad perspective that is encouraged in the FN program that allows this book to be something that touches on everything from fashion to golf history.”

As well as flying dinosaurs, quill pens, outrageous ostrich-plume hats, the myth of Icarus (who donned feathers and flew too close to the sun), the feather money of Santa Cruz Island, pillows at the Pacific Coast Feather Company, and electron microscope images of water droplets on the barbs of a pigeon — Hanson’s book travels gleefully on a headlong pursuit of the origin, meaning and uses of feathers for birds and people. It even tells why flamingos are pink. Go read it to find out.

Field naturalist

Hanson completed his UVM degree in 2000, studying under Heinrich and other professors, including David Barrington, then went on to get his doctorate in conservation biology. He’s studied Central American songbirds, nest predation in Tanzania, and, as he writes, “the grisly feeding habits of African vultures.” He now lives on the San Juan Islands as an independent biologist and writer.

“This book is a curiosity-driven enterprise, rather than doctrinal,” he says. Which may be why it has attracted a substantial popular audience, and glowing reviews from the New York Times, Economist, Science and many other outlets.

And Hanson is not alone as a publishing success from the Field Naturalist Program. “The book publishing output from graduates of our small program — we graduate only four field naturalists per year — is in a league of its own,” notes plant biologist Jeffrey Hughes, who directs the program. Over the last ten years, graduates of the program have published at least fifteen books, Hughes wrote, one of which won the 2010 National Outdoor Book Award — and now the John Burroughs Medal.

Broad views

Glued together intellectually by a fascination with the intricacies of evolution, the narrative in Feathers caroms back and forth over what Hanson described to me as “the imaginary but very significant boundary we put between the natural world and the human world.” We can’t make feathers, which may be why we love them, collect them.

“Every culture and every home has feathers in it somewhere,” says Hanson, “and we use these for so many purposes. You start asking: why? And then you realize that the answers are the very same answers for why these things are so successful in nature,” — like supreme aerodynamics, unbeatable insulation, glittering beauty, perfect camouflage, the freedom of flight.

In asking many questions, Feathers offers an unabashed defense of natural history, with its tradition of generous observation of plants and animals in their habitats. Partly under the eye-popping insights of molecular biology, natural history storytelling has taken some hard knocks for too-little rigor and quantitative force — and too much teleological sentimentality. Hanson understands these criticisms, but pushes back.

“Natural history is where you frame your questions,” he says, and shape your experiments; it’s the broad view that lets the careful observer see the real connections in the world. “In the Field Naturalist Program we studied about connectivity between all the layers of a landscape, from bedrock to the soil to the plants to the creatures,” Hanson says, and this hunt for connections pulses through Feathers.

Feathered rainbow

For this book, Hanson reports from a dusty plain in Kenya where he watches vultures, with their featherless heads, dipping into the rotting carcass of a zebra; from sober shrines to natural history, including Yale’s Peabody Museum — but also from Las Vegas.

A low cinderblock building, just a few blocks off the city’s glitzy strip, might not seem the most promising field site for a conservation biologist. But Hanson followed many paths toward the meanings and uses of feathers, including the supply house of showgirls: the Rainbow Feather Company.

“When you need ten thousand plumes died hot pink,” Hanson writes, this is the only place in the world to go. Rainbow Feather “takes orders from clients as varied as Jubilee!, Cirque de Soleil, and Victoria’s Secret,” Hanson writes, while its retail shop, “must be the only place in the world where burlesque dancers regularly rub elbows with fly-fisherman and bow hunters.” Thor Hanson’s book lets readers rub elbows with an equally diverse cast of feathered characters.

The screening of “Vermont Energy Independence Day,” a forty-five-minute film, is scheduled for 4 p.m., Thursday, March 21, in Room 11 of the State House in Montpelier. It is free and open to the public.

Last spring, hundreds of Vermonters, including many UVM students, submitted short films about projects and ideas they had for improving Vermont’s sustainable energy future — these ranged from growing biofuels on Vermont farms to bike commuting in Burlington.

The video clips — some professionally made, some on cell phones — were gathered through a YouTube channel set up by Bright Blue EcoMedia, a non-profit company that includes Jon Erickson, interim dean of UVM’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, and Amy Seidl, a professor in UVM’s Environmental Program.

Cobbling together pieces of the shared video with narrative and music, the filmmakers present many Vermont people including teachers, students, and engineers, as well as political leaders and advocates including U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, Vermont Representative Sarah Edwards, and 350.org founder Bill McKibben.

To view a trailer of the film and for more general information on the project, visit www.march21st.org.

Spearheaded by Sen. Ginny Lyons, the event was designed to bring attention to the cause of recycling and waste management in the state and to spur discussion and debate about current and recent legislation related to those topics.

Act 148 of May 2012 bans the disposal of recyclables and mandates composting by 2020. In addition, some in the legislature wish to consider an expansion of the state’s bottle bill. 

“These are complex issues that benefit from discussion by stakeholders representing every interest,” Lyons said. “Creative artwork can stimulate our own creativity as we look for solutions to resource management and plastic water bottles.”

The press conference also brought attention to the Agency of Natural Resources mandate that all state buildings, including the State House, ban the sale of disposable bottled water products.

UVM enacted just such a policy in January 2013, which the bottled water sculpture was originally designed to celebrate. 

“Students asked the university as a public institution to commit to providing free, local tap water,” said Gioia Thompson, director of UVM’s Office of Sustainability. “Students are now used to filling their own bottles at the fountains retrofitted around campus, and staff have been finding new ways to keep people hydrated at large outdoor events such as graduation.”

“What UVM did was terrific,” said Agency of Natural Resources secretary Deb Markowitz. “We’ve taken first steps in state government. We look forward to doing more.”

UVM’s move to end the sale of bottled water began in 2008 and was spearheaded by Mikayla McDonald, a Natural Resources Planning major who graduated in 2010 and is now a climate policy advocate for the Vermont chapter of 350.org, a global grassroots movement that seeks to mitigate climate change. 

“We started this campaign because we witnessed student bottled water consumption generate so much unnecessary waste, which ends up in landfills, on our roadsides and in our waterways,” she said. “Not only is it more expensive, less regulated, and more harmful to the environment than tap water, but the consumption of bottled water allows corporations to privatize our vital public water resources. This, in my opinion, is simply wrong.”

The eco-sculpture was created by Beth Haggart, a sculptor and conceptual artist. She works frequently with recyclable materials and has taught at UVM since 2000.    

Haggart designed the sculpture during August and September. A team of three – Haggart and senior art majors Casey Smith and Ashley Roche – constructed it over the next two months with help from other UVM students.

The team constructed a modified version of the sculpture – originally an arch, the new structure has three columns – during January and February. 

“I hope people take this image home and remember it every time they reach for a bottled water,” Haggart said. 

Now, a huge study in Science shows that these wild pollinators—including flies, beetles, and butterflies—are more important than domesticated honeybees for boosting crop yields.

"Our surprising result is that native pollinators enhance production of crops, regardless of whether farmers use managed honeybees to augment pollination," notes University of Vermont biologist Taylor Ricketts, one of the study’s co-authors.

Setting fruit

The new study, published online on Feb. 28,  synthesized more than forty experiments from 600 farm fields in twenty countries — including one conducted by Ricketts, director of UVM’s Gund Institute for Ecological Economics. The key result: in every crop system studied, wild pollinators increased the number of flowers that set fruit, while honeybees did so in only fourteen percent of the crop systems.

"This suggests that honeybees do not — as popularly thought — replace the pollination services that native pollinators provide to crops around the world," Ricketts writes. Instead, pollination work by wild insects increased "fruit set" twice as much as visits from honeybees.

Also, pollination visits by wild insects and honeybees "promoted fruit set independently," the scientists write, so honeybees can supplement, but can’t replace, pollination by wild insects. The study, with fifty authors, looked at major crops — fruits, nuts, and grains — grown on every continent.

"Conserving pollinators and their habitats is therefore an important part of ensuring an adequate crop," Ricketts notes — underlining the limitations on finding domesticated substitutes for the wild species that provide benefits to people.

Wild farms

"Our study shows that losses of wild insects from agricultural landscapes impact not only our natural heritage but also our agricultural harvests," noted the study’s lead author, Lucas A. Garibaldi, from Argentina’s Universidad Nacional de Río Negro. "Long term, productive agricultural systems should include habitat for both honeybees and diverse wild insects."

One of the practices underlying these new findings is the separation of intensive agricultural landscapes from landscapes with greater biodiversity. "Our study shows that this separation can have negative consequences for pollination services," notes Alexandra-Maria Klein, a co-author from Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany—a problem that is "not buffered by honeybee management."

"We urgently need more research that informs but also involves the global and wider society," she says, “to explore novel management designs for agricultural landscapes." For example, farmers may find that restoring patches of more natural and wildlife-friendly land on their farms will increase yields.

But unlike nuclear weapons, the climate problem doesn’t sleep. It grows.

What to do? Asim Zia’s list of ways to reduce our accelerating output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide includes: respecting tropical forests, “dematerializing” consumption, re-directing waste streams into productive uses, and, “shifting to local, organic food systems,” he writes.

But, mostly, it will require getting off our fix to fossil fuels. Replacing energy and transportation systems that run on oil, gas and coal — with renewable sources — is an astoundingly complex task. And yet it’s the only way to avoid global climate catastrophe, he argues.

To get there will require more than voluntary targets and technocratic input, Zia believes. He has written a new book, Post-Kyoto Climate Governance, that calls for a deep re-thinking of our politics and economic assumptions, a clearer understanding of the cleavage between the developed and developing nations, and a shift away from expert-based international organizations, like the World Trade Organization, to “democratically anchored governance networks.”

In his book, Zia, an assistant professor in Community Development and Applied Economics and fellow in the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, ranges over several disciplines, looking for the causes of failure in international climate policy. And he’s looking for solutions. These may require dramatic new approaches, like global taxes, new forms of organized confrontation, and a willingness to reconsider reflexive attachments, he argues, like a belief in the benefits of free trade.

UVM Today spoke with Asim Zia about his new book, published on Jan. 28, by Routledge. We wanted him to lay out his map for developing new global climate governance, a post-Kyoto approach that, as he writes, “ confronts the politics of scale, ideology, and knowledge.”

UVM TODAY: We’ve known about the threats from climate change for several decades, but have made little progress. Why?

Asim Zia: We have made some small attempts at fixing this problem, but, so far, the efforts have been at the margins. There are institutions and practices that need to be fundamentally reformed for us to be able really tackle this problem.

My new book is about understanding those institutional and governance challenges. And it also looks into the last twenty years of the United Nations climate treaty negotiation process to understand what needs to happen next.

My fundamental conclusions are that we need to put up an international trade tax, and, secondly, we need to have an international carbon tax, at a global scale, and, thirdly — this is still questionable — that we need to reform the U.N. system.

How much time do we have to do this work?

In my recent NPR blog, we present the carbon budget that is available to us if we want to stop global warming below two-degrees centigrade. And that leaves us maybe seven years, maybe ten years. We are probably running neck-to-neck with the time we have left.

There’s a lot of new science and concern about blowing far past the two-degree target. Now I see reports about a “four-degree world.” Has four degrees becomes the new benchmark?

Maybe. At the beginning of the Doha round of negotiations, for example, the World Bank released a report on a four-degree centigrade world.

And then there have been a bunch of other papers saying that even if we take action now, it’s becoming unlikely that we’ll hold to a two-degree centigrade world unless we do some kind of reverse engineering or geo-engineering — which in itself is highly questionable.

Part of the problem is that the 1992 climate negotiations in Rio left the goal vague: that we, as a community of nations, should not cross dangerous thresholds in the atmospheric limits.

Those dangerous limits have typically been interpreted as two degrees centigrade. Some, like Bill McKibben or the groups doing planetary boundaries work, are focused on 350-parts-per-million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Some people talk about 550-parts-per-million — but it’s not necessary that 350 or 550 would translate into two degrees.

What I am trying to communicate in this book is that instead of fighting about these goals and targets, we need to reform institutions.

 For example?

For example, free trade. International free trade is an institution that has not been touched upon in any climate negotiations! International free trade is mandated under the World Trade Organization — which is, in itself, a big multilateral negotiation process at the global scale.

But, essentially, when you promote free trade of goods and services, it’s the “externalities” from the production of those goods and services that leads to the emissions of greenhouse gases.

Our global institutions since the end of World War II have been designed to perpetuate a production and consumption process that is leading to perpetual and increasing growth of fossil fuel-induced greenhouse-gas emissions. So, till the time that we reform these international institutions that are leading to the greenhouse gas emissions, we cannot deal with this problem adequately.

Challenge free trade? But that’s the quasi-religion of countries around the world. How does advocating for limits on free trade fit into real politics?

That’s really the problem here. I call it, in my book, the politics of ideology. There’s a free-market, free-trade ideology that is dominating the discourse in an institutional setting.

Or take the carbon tax. In the EU, the carbon tax has been aligned with certain green parties or some left-wing parties, so there is a radicalization of the discourse.

But if you look at it rationally, if you look at all the analysis, these coupled human/natural system computer simulation models will tell you that the carbon tax and trade tax have low transaction costs, and they would stimulate local markets.

This approach could revitalize local communities that are losing their vitality to grow, for example, local organic food. And this kind of food production is an important piece in this picture for reducing methane emissions and reducing carbon emissions from agro-industrial systems. Then there are energy implications. Decentralized energy systems could be promoted, like solar and wind and community-based energy systems, through taxes and institutional reforms. But that is not being talked about.

Whenever somebody mentions international carbon taxes someone else says, “Oh, that’s not politically feasible.” Well, why is that? It’s not really feasible because those lobbies have been able to hijack the discourse.

Taxes are sticks. For example, tobacco taxes have been successful in reducing tobacco use in this country. Similarly, gasoline taxes have been successful in Europe in improving the fuel economy of cars. These taxes are proven.

What’s wrong with carbon markets and “cap and trade?” Can’t those work within existing free trade arrangements?

Let’s look at deforestation. Twenty percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from tropical deforestation. I’ve studied tropical forests for the last nine years in many countries including Peru, Tanzania, Vietnam, Brazil and Indonesia.

These loose market mechanisms, like carbon markets and cap-and-trade and REDD+ have not been able to adequately deal with or stand against the free market mechanisms, which are causing the problem in the first place.

International free trade rules result in lifting a lot of environmental regulations that were put in place inside these countries to protect tropical forests. They’re now being deforested because of globalization of their markets. It’s not just the local timber mafias. The major drivers are the international agro-industries. You have all kinds of companies — mining, coal, Chinese companies, Canadian companies —  cutting down tropical forests, releasing greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

These cap-and-trade mechanisms, like REDD+, are still just starting to be negotiated and piloted in a few countries. But I am very skeptical about their effectiveness. It is just creating a new artificial market for carbon with the same problems as the European carbon market, which tanked after the global recession.

Cap-and-trade has only been successful in few isolated conditions, like the sulfur dioxide market in the U.S. — and that was successful because the market was clearly defined. We knew exactly which coal-fired power plants to tackle so you can do effective monitoring of those plants.

Global carbon markets, and cap-and-trade mechanisms like REDD+ and the U.N.’s Clean Development Mechanism were designed as experiments under Kyoto. We should acknowledge that that experiment has failed.

How much do your proposed governance reforms require a kind of human rationality, an enlightened self-interest, that seems in rather short supply when it comes to climate change?

There is this game theoretical perspective — that leads to this “prisoner’s dilemma” situation, which we are observing right now, where each actor tries to protect their own interests and the institutions are also designed in a way to protect individual interests — like the market economy, for example.

But the result is the tragedy of the commons: when everyone protects their own interests, at the collective level we are not able to protect anyone’s interest. The atmosphere is called the pure tragedy of the commons because it’s such perfect application of that idea.

Noboby owns it, and so we all dump our trash in it?

Exactly. That view is deterministic and tragic — and leads to a point where we are looking at not a four-degree-centigrade world but maybe an eight-degree-centigrade world by 2200, and we’re toast. It’s that sad.

Even if you look at some of the more advanced modeling applications, they suggest or recommend that high-greenhouse gas emitters, like the United States, not take any action but wait until the last minute, because then they’ll get a “better deal.” They are so cynical about that.

That model has limitations: it is probably good at describing one situation, but this kind of modeling is not good at setting norms, the value-based discussion that we need to have.

We should look to international cooperation practices and international norms that have been built over thousands of years of negotiations and wars. Climate change is a global-scale crisis that we cannot just keep under the carpet and say that this is going to happen sometime in the future. It’s happening now. It’s not going to be one country’s problem. If we have climate refugees, they are going to migrate. It will create security challenges like terrorism and economic destabilization.

What is it going to take for governments to change and adopt new approaches to climate?

This is a democracy. So there are always checks and balances, and that is one of the challenges in climate change. Historically, policy changes are incremental unless you look at revolutions like the Stalinistic revolution or the Iranian revolution. And the climate change challenge is that we need fast change, radical change, within existing institutions. A carbon tax, an international trade tax: these are radical changes.

The hope and need is to seek for quick change that doesn’t result in toppled governments and bloodshed?

Exactly. There will be some adverse impacts of carbon taxes and international trade taxes, but there are established compensation mechanisms that could be used to compensate people in vulnerable populations who are affected adversely.

But I don’t think that cost will be higher than the cost of not taking action. The cost of not taking action will be enormous in terms of mass migrations, extreme weather events, and just the sheer chaos that can be expected under an eight degree centigrade warmer world.

What are your personal hopes and fears about climate change?

I, myself, come from a developing country. Pakistan is very vulnerable. Both Pakistan and India are very vulnerable to climate change — and they have done the least to cause it, but they would suffer the most in the first fifty years or so.

I have been working there — and some of work is reported in this book — in setting up early warning systems, dealing with climate-refugee problems. If you look at the map, Pakistan is on both sides of the Indus River. The massive flooding in 2010 was part of the trend of more and more flooding during the monsoon season. If you look at the last sixty years of data, you can see that this is caused by climate change. So we are trying to understand the planning regime in Pakistan so that we don’t have more development in those regions which would be affected by floods or droughts.

That is very personal to me. I have been in the refugee camps. I have seen people who have been displaced for years. After 2010 floods, 20 million people were displaced and two million are still displaced today, after three years. I was there two months ago and visited a couple of camps. It’s very personal to me, because those are the people seeing climate change up front.

We need to tackle and reform those global institutions that are causing local problems. It’s not going to happen by just creating new markets — that’s my main message.

Close to midnight on February 16, forty-eight UVM students boarded a bus at the Davis Center circle -- along with Jon Erickson, the interim dean of UVM’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, and a professor in the school’s Environmental Program, Amy Seidl.

The students and faculty drove though the night to join about 40,000 other protesters at the “Forward on Climate” rally in Washington, D.C., the next day.

Described as the “largest climate change rally in U.S. history” by the Sierra Club, one of the event’s organizers, a main aim of the rally was to urge President Obama to reject the controversial Keystone XL pipeline expansion that would carry crude oil from Canadian tar sands across the United States to refineries in Texas.

“Obama owes it to his voters to uphold his promises about responding to climate change,” said UVM environmental sciences major Ruth Shafer '13, “Obviously there are many, many battles beyond Keyston XL, but this is a symbolic one.”

UVM junior Rachel Markey decided to attend the rally “because of the possibility of massive change,” she said. “Finally, there was one cohesive event to gain attention of not only the government, but America.”

Climate signs

They joined other UVM students in Washington, and another UVM professor, Cami Davis, some of whom had traveled on buses organized by the climate change activism group, 350.org. More than fifty UVM students in total attended the rally.

On a cold and blustery day, the protesters gathered near the Washington Monument and marched past the White House, carrying banners that read “stop climate chaos,” “the rich get richer and the poor get warmer,” and “green power to the people.”

One sign read “Support Sanders/Boxer climate change bill,” showing support for comprehensive climate change legislation introduced into the U.S. Senate on Valentine’s Day by Vermont’s Bernie Sanders and California’s Barbara Boxer.

One of the rally’s main organizers, Vermont writer and climate activist Bill McKibben, described the pipeline as “the fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet.”

Unconventional crude

Many climate experts are worried about tar sands because the difficult task of extracting and refining them emits substantially more greenhouse gases than conventional oil extraction.

NASA climate scientist James Hansen, writing in the New York Times, argues that if people extract and burn the oil contained in Canadian tar sands “it will be game over for the climate.”

These vast underground oil fields “contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies,” Hansen wrote, “global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction.”

Forerunners

The students felt uplifted by their fellow protesters, “not just college kids, but parents with their children, grandparents, all kinds of people,” said Ruth Shafer. “The energy was so positive, despite how dire the situation is.”

Erickson and the UVM students again drove into the night, returning to Vermont at 3 a.m. on Monday, President’s Day.

“My decision to attend the rally was backed strongly by (the Rubenstein School's) goal to help their students become forerunners and leaders on environmental issues,' said Rachel Markey. "I felt very supported by the school community and all of those who I attended the event with.”

Forty-three Isham was one of 14 rental houses on the street, which is at the heart of Burlington’s student neighborhood, to receive new totes in January free of charge. The complimentary totes were the brainchild of Gail Shampnois, director of UVM’s Student and Community Relations office, who conceived of the giveaway in partnership with members of ISGOOD, (for Isham Street Gardening and Other Optimistic Doings), an Isham Street neighborhood group.

They’re meant to address an issue that’s endemic to Burlington neighborhoods with a high percentage of multi-tenant rental properties, usually occupied by students: cardboard, paper, cans and plastic containers that come loose on recycling day from small, overstuffed blue recycling bins, covering streets, sidewalks, and front yards with debris.

“Wind will blow the recyclables out of the bins on the morning of recycling day, and trash ends up all over the street,” said Isham Street resident and ISGOOD co-founder Brian Cina, a musician and social worker.   

Shampnois, who organizes student neighborhood cleanups every year, had seen the problem first hand. But she learned just how vexing it was to non-student residents in a meeting with members of ISGOOD at the start of the school year. Recycling-spawned litter was one of the top issues the group hoped UVM could help them address.

Stifling criticism

Shampnois confirmed her hunch that the problem wasn’t student carelessness; in September, she made welcome visits to student-occupied buildings on Isham Street with Phil Hammerslough, ISGOOD’s other co-founder. When they spoke with students in a house with piles of litter in the front yard, Shampnois and Hammerslaugh stifled the urge to be critical and instead asked if the students’ one blue bin was adequate to handle their recycling needs.

“All of them said, ‘No, there are so many of us here, and it’s too small,’” she said. The blue bins have only a 15-gallon capacity.

“College students are environmentally conscious; they are trying to do the right thing,” said Ward, who regularly visits student neighborhoods to make sure landlords keep their rental properties up to snuff. “To not give them the proper size containers, you’re really doing a disservice.” 

Shampnois set to work finding resources to purchase larger capacity bins for the students. She knew the Burlington Department of Public Works had acquired a number of large recycling totes, in partnership with Chittenden County Solid Waste District. Thanks to the Waste District’s 30 percent contribution to the purchase price, the city was able to sell the totes at discount.

She raised the issue at a meeting of UVM’s Strategic Operations Group, and group member Joe Speidel, who directs Burlington city relations for UVM, said he had a small budget for projects like this one.

Speidel and Shampnois eventually bought 14 totes. If the program succeeds in reducing litter on Isham Street and she can find more funds, Shampnois hopes to expand it to Buell and Bradley Street in the future. The key to city-wide expansion, said Ward, who delivered all the totes to Isham Street, will be to get landlords to sign on and routinely purchase them. If the Isham Street pilot is effective, that will help the cause, he said. The discounted totes cost less than $50 each. 

The 43 Isham Street delivery, one of the last, demonstrated the city's support for UVM's initiative and for more widespread distribution of the totes. On hand to note the event was Burlington mayor Miro Weinberger.

The tote project could spawn other city-university cooperative projects addressing quality of life issues, Speidel said, who regularly works with Carina Driscoll in the Mayor's Office. The city and the university are working together to identify other resources to develop and pursue these initiatives.

Cina said he was grateful for the efforts to give students better ways to manage their waste. “It's another step in the right direction, so that we can change the culture of our block from a place where people just come to party without regard to their surroundings to an actual community,” he said.

For Fleming’s roommate Rex Craft, a junior business major at UVM, 43 Isham’s new tote will provide welcome relief. The house had so many recyclables, it was impossible to go the full week between recycling pick-ups without taking extra measures. “We had to take all our cans in garbage bags to the dump, because there was a lot of buildup with all of us in the house,” he said. “This was a nice little surprise.”

See videos of past speakers in the series on the Burack Distinguished Lecture website.

Information: (802) 656-2906.

As part of its inquiry, the group broadened its understanding of the task and expanded its focus from environment to environment, sustainability and health (ESH), areas with significant cross-college expertise. The inclusion of all three areas reflects, the group reports, a "systems approach that addresses the synergistic relationships necessary for long-term planetary and human well-being." UVM's areas of strength among these categories include: sustaining landscapes and watersheds, environment and society, promoting regional food systems and environmental health.

To arrive at these findings, the group held weekly public forums on a range of topics, where more than 50 faculty and staff reported on their units' contributions to environmental education, research and outreach at the university, as well as their visions for how to strengthen environment as a core theme of UVM's academic offerings. The work group also conducted interviews with UVM deans and and surveyed environmental education leaders at other institutions, including Stanford and Colorado State University.

Out of this effort, the Envisioning Environment work group created two sets of recommendations to focus and improve ESH efforts at the university: a set of "big idea" changes as well as a set of immediate action steps.

First among the "big idea" initiatives named in their report is the creation of a ESH institute or collaborative, correlating to the three areas where UVM has comparative depth and breadth of strength. Other "big ideas" include the creation of an ESH associate provost position; coordination of undergraduate curriculum in ESH; significant expansion of graduate support for ESH; and the creation of an "Environmental Commons," a physical hub and informative website for ESH activity, as well as a "one-stop office" for supporting environmental internships and research opportunities for undergraduates.



The report also names a number of immediate action steps, including: enrolling UVM in a national sustainability ranking program, the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education's Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System (STARS); appointing faculty leadership for implementing recommendations; approving and implementing general education learning outcomes for sustainability; creating an ESH marketing piece for prospective students; and converting the work group's inventory to a master list accessible for public review.

"The report represents our best efforts to gather input from across the university. We are impressed with the tremendous range of ESH work going on at UVM. This is an obvious place to invest in UVM's future," says Professor Stephanie Kaza, who co-chaired the effort with Beverly Wemple, associate professor of geography. "We are now in the 30-day public comment period requested by the president, so we invite members of the campus community and beyond to submit comments on our findings and proposals."

The full report is available on the Office of the Provost’s website. Comments may be submitted through Feb. 14 via the input form or directly to Stephanie.Kaza@uvm.edu. The Envisioning Environment work group will review comments and submit the final report, public input summary, and any report amendments to President Sullivan and Provost Low on Feb. 28.

Faculty members of the work group included co-chairs Faculty Senate Vice-President Stephanie Kaza, Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, and Beverley Wemple, College of Arts and Sciences; Bob Bartlett, College of Arts and Sciences; Breck Bowden, Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources; Alison Brody, College of Arts and Sciences; David A. Jones, School of Business Administration; Ernesto Mendez, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences; Matthew Poynter, College of Medicine; Taylor Ricketts, Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources; Donna Rizzo, College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences; Don Ross, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences; and Regina Toolin, College of Education and Social Services.

He notes Wordsworth, who was said to have walked some 180,000 miles, his study being ‘out of doors,’ his housekeeper was purported to say, and of John Muir: “His walks,” Manning says, “offered him deep insights into our relationship with the natural world, writing, “‘I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out until sundown, for, going out, I found, was really going in.’”

The piece is excerpted from Manning’s new book, written with his wife Martha S. Manning, Walking Distance: Extraordinary Hikes for Ordinary People. Read the story…

A series of speakers commemorated the significance of the new policy, and students sold refillable water bottles for $2 each and conducted taste tests of tap and bottled water.

But highlighting the event, perhaps, was the unveiling of an eco-sculpture made from 2,000 discarded water bottles gathered on campus and in the Burlington community that took seven weeks to build. 

Titled “Inherently Unstable and Prone to Collapse: A Monument to Waste,” the arch-shaped sculpture was conceived and designed by UVM Art Department faculty member Beth Haggart. Art majors Casey Smith and Ashley Roche assisted Haggart in the construction of the sculpture.  Other UVM students also helped with the assembly.

In addition to water bottles, the 10-foot high sculpture makes use of discarded bicycle tire inner tubes and scrapped cardboard.  

“I hope people take this image home and remember it every time they reach for a bottled water,” Haggart said.  

The sculpture will be exhibited in the atrium of the Dudley H. Davis Center on the UVM campus, where the event was held, over the next two weeks. 

Bottled water campaign began four years ago

The campus-wide effort to end bottled water sales at UVM began four years ago, spearheaded by the Vermont Students Toward Environmental Protection (VSTEP), a student run, non-profit organization created in 1988 to expand UVM’s recycling program and address environmental issues on Vermont campuses.      

Mikayla McDonald ’10 , who spoke at the event, and Marlee Baron ’11, both former VSTEP presidents and senators on the Student Government Association, were among the initial group of students to address the bottled water issue and started planning Bring Your Own Bottle days and informational tabling events.

The two students crafted bottled water resolutions that were passed by the SGA in the 2009/2010 academic year, after VSTEP gathered 1,200 signatures from UVM students in support of a resolution calling for a sustainable beverage system, surpassing the 10 percent requirement for an SGA resolution. SGA formally voted to approved the end of bottled water sales in the the fall of 2011.

Filling the gap with “filling stations”

To promote the use of refillable water bottles, UVM is converting 75 drinking fountains on campus to filling stations, which feature a spout to fill them, at a cost of about $30,000. Sixty-nine drinking fountains have currently been converted; the remainder will be completed before the start of the second semester in mid-January.

The filling stations are located at the busiest spots on campus, with a goal of having at least one per major building. Location decisions were also made with input from plumbers and custodians who noticed people trying to fill their bottles on fountains without fillers. Suggestions also came informally from staff and students.

UVM chose to retrofit existing water fountains, rather than purchase all new equipment, as some other campuses have done, because the cost was lower. A map of the filling station locations is available at www.uvm.edu/sustain/bottledwater.

UVM part of national trend

Ending bottled water sales on college campuses is one of the most prominent environmental causes students are adopting today, according to Emily Wurth, water program director at Food & Water Watch, a Washington, D.C.-based non-governmental and consumer rights group that focuses on corporate and government accountability relating to food, water and fishing. 

According to statistics compiled by the group, which helps campuses develop water bottle campaigns through its Take Back the Tap program, 60 colleges currently have bottled water campaigns under way. “The issue seems to really resonate with students,” Wurth said.

Only 22 campus have enacted full bottled water bans, as UVM has, according to the group. UVM is the first public university in the country to end sales of bottled water.

Food & Water Watch has documented 50 colleges and universities that have enacted full or partial bottled water bans.  Examples of partial water bottle bans include: banning departments from purchasing bottled water for faculty or staff; ending the use of student organization funds to purchase bottled water; or ending the sales of bottled water in certain venues like meal halls. 

In 2009, Washington University in St. Louis became the first known school to end the sale of bottled water and restrict the use of university funds to purchase it for meetings and events.  

Speakers at the event included Gioia Thompson, director of UVM’s Office of Sustainability, Mikayla McDonald, Ilana Copel, current VSTEP co-president, Tom Dion, chief operator for water in the Burlington Public Works Department, and sculptor Beth Haggart. 

In Lake Champlain, lake trout spawn at several reefs. Ellen Marsden, UVM professor of fisheries, has found extremely high densities of trout eggs and young fish (called fry) at these spawning sites.

But that’s where the happy story seems to end. Annual assessments of adult lake trout reveal that nearly all them are clipped; that means they were born in state fish hatcheries. There appears to be nearly zero natural reproduction of lake trout in Lake Champlain. That’s worrisome to biologists and fishermen—and expensive too.

Ellen Marsden and her students have been searching for more than a decade trying to figure out why. They’ve gone down in scuba gear and paddled in boats. This year, they got Zippy, a tiny orange submarine (or ROV for remotely operated vehicle) to help them in the search for answers.

This year’s graduates come from across the country and Canada.

Family and friends gathered at the John Dewey Lounge in UVM’s Old Mill building, where the graduates received words of inspiration, hope and reflection from Cynthia Belliveau, dean of UVM Continuing Education, the academic unit that launched and manages the program; Corie Pierce, a local farmer and program partner, who manages Bread & Butter Farm in Shelburne, Vt.; and Susie Walsh Daloz, director of the UVM Farmer Training Program. And, of course, there was no lack of local foods to fete the students.

Dean Belliveau delivered the graduation address.

She said: “This is an important moment – for you, and for our world. For you, it’s the beginning you have worked toward over the past six months. You have rolled up your sleeves and gotten to know our earth by cultivating, digging, weeding, harvesting, washing, packing, delivering, eating – and, most importantly, learning – learning how to grow and nurture a sustainable future. John Dewey, one of the university’s great thinkers, believed that to learn, we must do something in the world. You have done so.”

She recalled the students’ impressive projects, which included a weekly farmstand on campus and a partnership with Sodexo to provide fresh produce in the university’s dining halls.

Certificates were awarded by Susie Walsh Daloz, director; Laura Williams, program coordinator and farm manager; and Michael Meehan, assistant farm educator with the Farmer Training Program.

Williams noted that during the program, among other accomplishments, the students:

• Planted 153 varieties of vegetables, flowers and herbs.
• Met with 50+ farmers, agricultural specialists, professors and extension agents.
• Generated $19, 980 in sales through the Farmer Training Program CSA, Farm Stand, and wholesale accounts.
• Donated 4,535 pounds of food to the Chittenden Emergency Food Shelf.

“It was an incredible six months. Though this cohort of students came to Vermont with a wide range of backgrounds and skill sets, they shared a common passion and commitment to immersing themselves in sustainable farming,” said Walsh Daloz. “The learning environment was dynamic and rich, and I have no doubt this group will stay deeply connected as they take their next steps in creating a resilient food system across the country. We celebrate them, their accomplishments, and the change we know they will inspire.”   

UVM Continuing Education is currently accepting applications for the 2013 Farmer Training Program, which will take place May 2-Oct. 31, 2013. Learn more at the Farmer Training Program Website, or email farmer@uvm.edu.

The Farmer Training Program is a 6-month intensive, full-time program for aspiring farmers and food systems advocates. Participants leave with a Certificate in Sustainable Farming, a deeper understanding of agricultural management and small-scale farming, and the entrepreneurial skills to start their own operation.

About University of Vermont Continuing Education

Continuing Education (CE) helps thousands of non-traditional students continue their education at the University of Vermont. Through collaborations with the various colleges and schools, CE offers courses and programs to help students explore their options to advance or change their careers. Visit us online http://learn.uvm.edu/.

As philosophers are wont to do, he made his points Socratically, by asking audience members how they would react to a series of progressively thorny ethical dilemmas.

“There's a girl drowning in a puddle outside the Davis Center,” he began, gazing innocently at the audience. "Should you save her?" Of course, a woman near the front replied. “What if the puddle was very deep?” he added. Still yes. “What if it was burning hot, like lava,” he elaborated impishly. A nodding affirmative. “If it paralyzed you from the waist down?” Yes, again. “Is there any cost you would not pay?” he asked the impressively altruistic audience member with a smile, after pausing for effect.

Doggett's drift, in part, was to unpack an unspoken assumption behind an Economist cover story that had caught his attention titled “Feeding the World.” Unexamined by the magazine, Doggett pointed out, was the question of whether we should feed the world, especially when the many and varied costs of such an endeavor were taken into account.

“Everyone thinks you should save the child if there’s no cost,” he said, returning to his example. “It becomes significantly less plausible if you jack the cost up.”

But his real point was about the need for transdisciplinarity in addressing problems, including those related to the food system.

“Philosophy has nothing to say about what the costs are, but a lot to say about whether or not you should pay them,” he said. “Philosophy is important, but it’s not enough.”  For example, an agro-economist, like Doggett’s fellow faculty member Ernesto Mendez, might be a good partner in integrating the “should” and “how” elements of the Economist cover story.

Such transdisciplinary coalitions of the willing -- where to find them, how to build them, how to make them work – were the theme of the day at the symposium, titled “The Cultivation of Collaboration: Increasing Our Impact on the Food System.”

“That’s OK”

Partnerships can evolve almost serendipitously, said John Barlow, assistant professor of animal science, who spoke about a new transdisciplinary project he participates in that addresses artisanal cheesemakers’ ability to minimize food safety risks and understand consumer needs. The project's six-member team includes Cathy Donnelly in Nutrition and Food Science, an expert in foodborne pathogens, Jane Hill in Engineering, an environmental engineer who focuses on microbial activity, and John Conner, a communications and marketing specialist in CDAE.

Barlow met Donnelly through normal channels -- both are faculty members in the Animal, Nutrition and Food Sciences graduate program. But he met Conner at a new faculty oriention and Hill through the Vermont Center for Immunology and Infectious Diseases COBRE, which brought them together.

“Some of it was dumb luck and random chance,” Barlow said. “That’s OK. Another way to look at that is you’re watching and thinking about what’s going on, and identifying potential opportunities for future use.”

Power of partnering

The presentation given by Linda Berlin, director of UVM’s Center for Sustainable Agriculture, was all about the power of partnering.

Her project, which addresses how better to serve so called “food deserts” -- places where people, often of low-income, have limited access to grocery stores and limited transportation, and so are "food insecure" in a variety of ways -- is part of a large USDA research grant involving multiple schools, including UVM. 

The goal of the grant is to improve access to healthy food for underserved populations by better understanding what a regional food system means and how it works. The project encompasses nine communities in the Northeast, including Essex County in Vermont, focusing there on two independent grocery stores, including one in Island Pond.

Ultimate transdisciplinarity

In the last presentation of the day, Amy Trubek, associate professor of nutrition and food sciences, gave an overview on the new food systems master's, one of the most transdisciplinary programs on campus. 

Thirty faculty members affiliated with the program are doing many kinds of food systems research, she said, from the work Jane Kolidinsky, chair of Community Development and Applied Economics, is doing on obesity to work by Chris Koliba, director of the Master's in Public Administration Program, on food systems policy. Students can work with any faculty member in the program, which is both an opportunity and, given their large number, a challenge. Discussions are under way, she said, to improve ways for faculty and graduate students to find one another.

The symposium also included a panel of representatives from Green Mountain College, Vermont Technical College, and Vermont Law School on opportunities for cross-institutional collaboration. The symposium's keynote speaker, Wouter Van Hoven, who was to speak about African food security, was stranded in Boston by Hurricane Sandy. Diane Imrie, director of food services at Fletcher Allen Health Care, took his place. 

Doug Lantagne, dean of UVM Extension and interim director of the Food Systems Spire, was very happy with the symposium, which was attended by about 100 people, but is eager to do more.

“When you get people together to network, great things come out of it,” he said. “I have to figure out how to do that more frequently, not just at the Food Summit and the Food Symposium. That’s what I’m going to be working on -- more frequency and less logistical planning.”

While UVM has been collecting food waste from the dining halls since 1997 and diverts nine tons of food each week from the landfill, a new bicycle-based program is the first centralized effort to provide a composting alternative within departmental and program offices. Learn more in this video.

Jill Rosenblum Tidman ’94 keenly remembers the moment her worldview shifted in Professor Stephanie Kaza’s introductory environmental studies class. The alumna had grown up in St. Louis with a solid education and caring parents: “I felt like I kind of understood the world.” Yet, as the discussion in Kaza’s class that particular day homed in on a litany of environmental degradation, the barrage of bad news pushed her to a personal tipping point. “I got mad. I could not believe I didn't know the trajectory we were on. I felt cheated of information,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘If I don’t know this coming from my background, there’s got to be a lot of people who don't understand what is going on with the planet.'”

A philosophy major, Tidman rounded out her classes for an environmental studies minor and made a commitment. “It was very clear to me that there was nothing else for me to do in this life but to try to get the information out there, so that we have a chance of changing course. I felt a responsibility and there was no turning back.”

Post-graduation, that put Tidman’s career on a green course that included business, fundraising, writing, government, event planning and eventually promoting environmental causes through the arts. Her latest effort in that regard is Watershed: Exploring a New Water Ethic for the New West, an hour-long documentary she co-produced with Jamie Redford under the auspices of the Redford Center.

Restoring a river

Sweeping views of sinuous river and red rock canyon open Watershed as Robert Redford’s voice, a timbre that in itself evokes the American West, lays out the factual backdrop: “The Colorado is the most dammed, dibbed, and diverted river in the world… a machine supporting the needs of 30 million people.” And, perhaps the saddest fact of all — the Colorado now dries up some 90 miles short of its natural end at the Gulf of California. What’s a filmmaker to do?

“We felt like the best way to approach this was to really focus on the human dimension of the story through people who have a stake in the Colorado River Basin,” says co-producer Jamie Redford (Robert’s son). “Our action item is to return that flow to the Gulf of California and a baseline awareness story that people can connect to on a human level and on an emotional level is the best start to encouraging people to take action.”

Those human stories introduce viewers to a rancher in Durango, Colo., a county commissioner of the Navajo Nation in Shiprock, N.M., and a bike messenger in Los Angeles, among others. While they’re all bound by their dependence on the water supply of the Colorado River Basin, they’re also united by a sense of commitment and personal action. That positive slant, a light in the doom and gloom, is essential to the film’s power as a motivational tool, Jamie Redford believes. “We’re almost at a crossroads where the decision is are we going to throw our hands up and go into acceptance and denial or are we going to continue to do what we can?”

It’s an approach Tidman has pursued in the six years she’s worked on films with the Redford Center — making environmental issues relevant, human, and leaving audiences with both a sense of hope and a path for action. For Robert Redford, who has portrayed the likes of the Sundance Kid, Jay Gatsby, and Bob Woodward, environmental activist may prove to be one of his greatest roles. Film is his natural vehicle as he continues to leverage a movie star’s fame and fortune to create societal change. “He is incredibly supportive and very involved,” Tidman says. “All of this is happening because of who he is, his vision, his advocacy, and his belief that art really can have an impact on people through storytelling.”

Out in the world

At home in San Francisco these days, Jill and Wil Tidman ’95 are a very busy two-career, two-kids (Quincy, two; Stella, ten months) family. Wil, a psychology major and varsity soccer player at UVM, has worked in sports and entertainment marketing with Nike and Red Bull, and now runs media production for GoPro Camera. “It’s a fast-paced situation right now,” Jill Tidman says with a laugh, adding that working at home, working nights, and having relatives happy to visit San Francisco to babysit all help with the juggling act.

Her initial connection to the Redford Center came about through work on climate change in local government with then-mayor of Salt Lake City Rocky Anderson. When Sundance Resort hosted a national mayors’ conference on climate change, Tidman was brought in to brand the event and make it happen. A green poetry slam contest was among the initiatives she initiated that contributed to the conference’s success. And that would lead to her first film project with the Redford Center, an executive producer role in creating Fighting Goliath: Texas Coal Wars.

Now that Watershed is completed and lined up for screenings from Istanbul to Barcelona to Burlington, Tidman enjoys the satisfaction of seeing the work go forth, harboring no regret that she can’t make it to every festival, city, or campus where it’s shown. “For me, it’s much more fulfilling to know this is happening than to be there,” she says. “I like getting it done, making the most of it, figuring out ways to get this film out in the world and in front of people.”

Those who see Watershed will meet a young woman on an Outward Bound rafting trip passing through the hush of Echo Park at the confluence of the Green and Yampa rivers. With a tone that suggests equal parts wonder and betrayal, she says, “I was really shocked that the Colorado River does not reach its delta. I knew that there were dams, but I thought that people made minor changes without interfering with the river as a whole. I had no idea it was all gone before it reached where it should go.”

That sort of revelation is what it’s all about, as Jill Tidman well knows.

The day also featured a panel discussion on the impacts of purchasing local food with panelists from the Intervale Center, Black River Produce, Mad River Food Hub, Vermont Food Venture Center, Sunrise Orchards and Sodexo. 

UVM served more than 650 pounds of Vermont meat and vegetables alone. In all, about 15 suppliers throughout the state were represented, ranging from Putney Pasta in Brattleboro to Sugarman maple syrup in Hardwick. Menu choices ranged from orange and fennel porchetta with Vermont chevre polenta and roasted baby turnips at Brennan’s Pub to Vermont Highland Cattle Company meatloaf with Grafton smoked cheddar and gravy roasted rutabaga, mashed potatoes and local squash at Harris Millis.

UVM’s version of Food Day was designed to raise awareness among students of the university’s year-round commitment to local growers, as well as to celebrate and promote the benefits of local food, according to Caylin McKee, sustainability coordinator for University Dining Services, which spearheaded Food Day at UVM in partnership with the Real Food Working Group and Slow Food UVM. McKee graduated from UVM with a degree in environmental studies in May. 

“It's bringing awareness to the students about the initiatives we have, because sometime they aren’t seen,” she said. “It’s hard to label where the carrots in the soups are coming from every day, and tell people that we actually do have a significant amount of real food on campus. So it’s to raise awareness and to have a celebration. It’s the Earth Day equivalent for real food.”

Cara D’Anello, a first-year dietetics major, who ate a lunch of creamy butternut squash and apple soup made with Vermont ingredients at the Marché, resonated with the cause. Local food is “basically the only thing I can trust because you don’t know where your other food is coming from,” she said. “And it just feels like you’re closer to the community when you’re eating local food.”

Last spring UVM became only the fifth school in the country to sign on to the Real Food Challenge, committing to serve 20 percent “real food” – defined as locally grown, fair trade, of low environmental impact and/or humanely produced – by 2020. Currently, between nine and 12 percent of the food UVM serves is “real,” depending on the season and semester.

Food Day is a nationwide event that celebrates the movement for more sustainable, healthy and affordable food. Communities around the country host events to celebrate progress that has been made in the food system, as well as to discuss other changes that can be made to continue moving forward. The goal of Food Day is to promote ways in which food is produced with care for the environment, animals and the people who grow, harvest and serve it.

“But now I see how they’re connected,” she says.

Kai Parker, UVM class of 2013, stands in the rain outside Woodstock, Vt. He’s waiting for a shuttle bus with Laura Anderson, a post-doctoral researcher. They want to ask riders what they think of the “cow-powered” electric trolley that ferries people from the village out to Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historic Park: Is it useful? Why are you riding today?

A one-bus experiment in Woodstock, population 900 — using electricity generated by methane from local dairy farms — may not seem an obvious place to look for lessons on how the National Park Service might manage, say, the millions of people who pour in to see the Grand Canyon, or bumper-to-bumper traffic in California’s Yosemite Valley.

But Kai Parker can see how they are connected.

Hitting the data trail

Both students have had internships and work-study jobs in UVM’s Park Studies Laboratory run by professor Robert Manning. The lab plays a significant role in helping the National Park Service (and other land managers, like state governments) better understand what park visitors’ experiences are like — and what people want from visits to a park. “Their parks,” Manning says.

Both Spies and Parker have put in many hours at the lab over the last few years. And both got plum summer jobs — paid internships — working for the UVM lab at Olympic National Park last summer.

“The trees are twice as big around as in Vermont,” Parker says, with amazement, of his first-ever trip West. “I was not expecting to see snow-capped mountains in summer."

Jill Spies saw a listing for a work-study job: “enter research survey data into the computer,’” and was skeptical, she says, “but then at the end: might get a chance to go to national park over the summer.” And she thought: “I want to do that! I want the job!”

Each summer day at Olympic, the students would fill their packs with “a stack of surveys, print-outs, log sheets, and clip boards,” Spies says — and strap on a lawn chair and a poster tube filled with six oversized photographs.

Then they’d head out, alone, onto trails across the park, sit down in their chair in one of the most beautiful places in the world — and wait for other hikers to come along.

“Hi, my name is Jill. I’m here with the Park Service today surveying hikers about their experience,” was the standard opener, Spies recalls. And most people were “really friendly,” she says, “even if they’d just finished thirty miles.”

The goal: to ask hikers about their perceptions of crowding and access in the park’s many wilderness areas. In addition to the standard sociological questions on the survey, the students would show the hikers a series of Photoshop-altered images of places in the park. These would range from empty, to a few people visible, to a “ridiculous crowd,” Spies says. The hikers would be asked to score their feelings about how acceptable they found the differing levels of crowding, along with a host of other questions.

The data the students collected — the same information they painstakingly enter into spreadsheets as their work-study jobs back in Vermont — helps form a quantitative foundation for one of the lab’s many research projects on behalf of the National Park Service.

About ninety-five percent of Olympic National Park is designated wilderness — and the NPS is developing a new plan to guide its management. The visitor surveys collected by the students inform this planning work.

Bus route

Olympic National Park is not the only popular one: last year there were about 300 million visits to the U.S. national parks. “That’s a wonderful thing,” Bob Manning says. “But it presents challenges: how do you accommodate 4.5 million visitors to Yosemite National Park, squeezed into just a few months?”

Maybe with buses. The Park Studies Lab has led a series of studies of transportation issues in parks, including ones at Acadia National Park, Cape Cod National Seashore and Yosemite.

And one small study in Woodstock, at Vermont’s only national park unit — the 643-acre Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park — is exploring the value of a electric trolley from town out to the park. The goal: reduce automobile traffic while powering the trolley with Cow Power electricity made by Green Mountain Power from manure digesters that produce methane at ten Vermont dairy farms.

It’s a demonstration project called Transit in Parks, supported by the US Department of Transportation, and run by the Park Service to explore alternative ways to move people to and from parks that sometimes face limited parking, winding roads and overcrowded attractions.

Over the summer, the UVM park lab collected more than a hundred surveys from people who had ridden the trolley. But as Kai Parker stands near the bus stop, waiting in a pouring rain, no one gets off. Apparently, Vermont’s national park season is winding down. When the last trolley of the day pulls through the parking lot, it’s empty too. For Parker, who was hoping to talk with a few more riders, it’s a bit disappointing — but both Olympic glory and cold rain are educational.

Hard decisions

“When the National Park Service makes decisions about access it can be contentious,” Bob Manning says. “These are the icons of our country, and we all own them together.” So, a basic tenet of American democracy suggests, the managers’ decisions should be informed by the owners.

Which is why Manning and his students help turn the sometimes-vague, narrative opinions of people into hard scientific data. And it’s this data, earned with student boot-leather, that park managers can use to shape plans for, say, where and when to run busses, or how many wilderness camping permits to issue.

On your own

And the students, in return, have a better sense of how their academic training — in courses like Recreation Management and Introduction to GIS — connects to real-world management decisions and life after college.

“It’s one thing to sit in a classroom and learn facts, but it’s another to have someone push you out in the woods and say: you’re on your own for four days with no cell service,” Spies says. “Figure stuff out on your own.”

“We have so many people who are book smart,” Spies says. “I learned to be trail smart.”

Ethan Meginnes

Dozens of UVM students — many of whom are Parks, Recreation and Tourism (PRT) majors — have had internships over the years working in the Park Studies Lab with Manning. He’s been a professor in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources since 1976.

One of the students who came through the PRT Program was Ethan Meginnes, UVM class of 1989. “He was a shy, reserved young man,” Manning recalls. “But he blossomed during his internship. It seems to have been a formative experience for him.”

And now Meginnes gives back. He and his wife, Alexandra Loeb, have established a foundation that, among other gifts, has provided annual funding, for more than a decade, to support undergraduate interns, many of whom work in the Park Studies Lab and in the national parks.

The students’ experience seems to be changing their lives and getting them to think more deeply about conservation. “I’m seriously considering a career with the Park Service,” Spies says, “I’m not exactly sure what direction this will lead but I’m really interested in the question, ‘What are we going to do with our land?’”

“A stream of emerging knowledge about what the combustion of fossil fuels is doing to our planet,” she writes, “is joining a stream of emerging knowledge about what synthetic chemicals derived from fossil fuels is doing to our bodies.”

“Investments in green energy,” she continues, “are also therefore investments in cancer prevention.”

An acclaimed ecologist and author, Sandra Steingraber -- called “the new Rachel Carson” by the Sierra Club -- will speak on Wednesday, Oct. 24, at 5 p.m., in the Silver Maple Ball Room at the University of Vermont’s Davis Center.

Her address, “From Food to Fracking — Human Health and the Environment,” is free and open to the public.

Author of Raising Elijah

Steingraber is an internationally recognized authority on the environmental links to cancer and human health. Her many books include the celebrated Raising Elijah: Protecting Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis and Living Downstream (which prompted a documentary by the same name.) She is Scholar-in-Residence at Ithaca College.

UVM professors Amy Seidl and Stephanie Kaza, of the Environmental Program, organized Steingraber’s visit as part of the Dan and Carole Burack President’s Distinguished Lecture Series. In addition, Steingraber's visit to UVM is being funded by the CERES Foundation.

“Sandra sees herself as a ‘scientist in the public interest,’” UVM’s Amy Seidl notes, “a term that refers to her ability to read deeply into the scientific literature — endocrinology, ecotoxicology, engineering — and convey the risks of environmental contamination to the public.”

“In addition, Sandra readily makes familial connections between environmental issues and her role as a mother,” Seidl says. “This near-universal connection with her readers makes her work resonate with a wide range of people who support policies and actions that are protective of our bodies and the landscapes that we live in.”

Against fracking

Recently, Steingraber has become a leading figure calling for tighter regulation around hydraulic fracturing — “fracking” — a process of extracting natural gas from shale. Because she lives in New York State on the Marcellus Shale, a rich gas region, she has worked diligently to understand and publicize the health impacts of fracking, especially as they concern water resources and children's health.

“Her lecture is sure to cover this important and timely material,” Seidl notes.

Against Despair

Sandra Steingraber is well aware of “well-informed futility syndrome” — the paralysis that can set in as well-meaning people learn about the many toxins, extinctions and environmental catastrophes that might be heading our way.

Steingraber sees ways out of this paralysis — but they’re not simple.

“We are encouraged by popular media reports to read labels, consult websites, vet the contents of birthday party goody bags, shrink our carbon footprints, mix our own nontoxic cleaning products, challenge our school districts to embrace pesticide-free soccer fields and limit the number of ounces of mercury-laced tuna fish consumed by each child per week,” she writes in In These Times.

But we “correctly perceive a disconnect between the enormity of the problem and the ability of individual acts of vigilance and self-sacrifice to fix it. Awareness without corresponding political change leads to paralyzing despair.”

“Action is the antidote to despair,” she writes, “ and by action I do not mean shopping differently.” Instead Steingraber calls for a higher focus on human rights and organized political efforts for “abolition now,” she says, “of ongoing chemical contamination of our children and our biosphere.”

This is Jason Clay’s fundamental challenge to the world. And it’s the reason he thinks small-scale change in our food system won’t solve the problem.

“In Vermont and around the world,” he says, “business as usual and incremental change will not get us where we need to go.”

That’s why he’s a passionate conservationist who works closely with some of the largest corporations in the world — helping them re-imagine the ways they produce and purchase food.

“This increase in production is so dramatic,” Clay says, “that if we don’t find the right places and ways to grow food, the earth will be unrecognizable.”

Jason Clay will deliver the 2012 Aiken Lecture, “Feeding 9 Billion, Maintaining the Planet,” at the University of Vermont’s Ira Allen Chapel at 5 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 18.

The event is free and open to the public.

Seeking global standards

Jason Clay works for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) as the senior vice president for market transformation.

As one of the world’s leading experts on certification in the food system, Clay created one of the first ecolabels and helped develop standards for more than a dozen commodities, from soy to shrimp, that reduce the impacts of production.

“Right now, the single largest impact of humans on the planet is food and fiber production,” Clay says. “If we continue to expand production into natural habitat, there will be very little natural habitat left by 2050.”

His lecture will focus on understanding the most important of these impacts — as well as myths about food production. There are “key trends in population, income, consumption, urbanization and trade,” he says — worrisome trends — “that should give us pause.”

Clay’s goal is to create global standards for producing and using raw materials, particularly in terms of carbon and water. He has convened industry roundtables of retailers, buyers, producers and environmentalists to reduce the key impacts of growing many products including soy, cotton, sugarcane, salmon, mollusks, catfish and tilapia.

"We now have 10 to 25 percent of global production and buyers sitting at the table for each commodity," he says.

These gatherings and his visionary ideas are changing the way corporations — as well as governments, foundations, researchers, and NGOs — address risks and opportunities.

"There is no silver bullet that will allow us to freeze the footprint of food,” Clay says. “Every use of resources has impacts, but we must define which impacts are acceptable.”

Rainforest Crunch

Clay’s favorite flavor of ice cream is Ben & Jerry's Rainforest Crunch, which he helped create — with sustainably harvested ingredients— after meeting Ben Cohen at a fundraiser featuring the Grateful Dead.

“The issue is not what to think, but how to think,” Clay says.

Clay ran a family farm, taught at Harvard and Yale, worked at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and spent more than 25 years working with human rights and environmental organizations before joining WWF in 1999.

Clay studied at Harvard University and the London School of Economics, and received his doctorate. in anthropology from Cornell University. He founded the award-winning journal Cultural Survival Quarterly and is the author of more than 300 articles and many books including World Agriculture and the Environment.

In addition to his WWF role, Clay is the first-ever Food and Sustainability Fellow of the National Geographic Society.

Clay was honored with a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award this year.

UVM’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources will host Jason Clay’s visit to Vermont.

“No one has all the answers,” Clay says “but together we can solve this problem and leave our children a living planet."