Middlebury Magazine » Maria Theresa Stadtmueller

Things That Happened, Things to Do — Week of April 15

Maria Theresa Stadtmueller — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:29:20 +0000

Our regular recap of goings on at the College and a look ahead to events on the horizon. As always, we hope to call your attention to items that captured ours and alert you to events that you won’t want to miss. If you have a news item that you think we’d be interested in, drop us a line at middmag@middlebury.edu.

Jay Parini weighed in at CNN.com on whether paper-grading software could replace the human, professorial version. The D.E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing drew on his 40 years of teaching (and paper grading) to limn the difference.

With a Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action in the wings, Professor of Political Science Erik Bleich wrote in Atlantic.com that “A collective, nationwide effort by private institutions can transform the debate about affirmative action.”
Cold stone seats and leaden skies fit the occasion. On Tuesday, April 16, Middlebury joined 300 venues worldwide marking the 50^th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” with public readings. The lunchtime audience sat in the wind at Gifford Amphitheatre as theatre professor Dana Yeaton first read the letter from the eight white Birmingham ministers who scolded that the freedom march was “unwise and untimely.” A tag team of 26 student and faculty readers then delivered the fruits of King’s mighty pen. Read the letter here.
The Spring Student Symposium kicks off Thursday evening with a keynote address by actor and alumna Cassidy Freeman ’05 and performances of all kinds. Friday is filled with visual art and architecture exhibits, oral presentations, and poster sessions. The range and sophistication of student work is mind-blowing. Plus it’s all very fun. The full schedule is here.
Boston Globe jazz critic Bob Blumenthal calls him “a jazz treasure.” Now a Middlebury resident, sax and trumpet master Miles Donahue will bring his quintet to the Town Hall Theater Friday evening. Everyone gets a free CD, too.
Earth Day is Tuesday, but since many Earthlings gotta work, the Middlebury Natural Foods Co-op will host a party on Saturday from 12-3 pm at the store on Washington Street. Live music, a seed and seedling exchange, stuff for kids. Not to mention our planet’s signature contribution to the Milky Way—food.

Hope and (Climate) Change

Maria Theresa Stadtmueller — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 17:19:02 +0000

Klyza gave a nuanced view of Obama’s first term and what might come next.

The question mark was key. In a recent talk entitled, “Change We Can Believe In?” Christopher McGrory Klyza, the Stafford Professor in Public Policy and professor of political science and environmental studies, parsed President Obama’s environmental record for progress, setbacks, and possible future action. Not surprising for the co-author of an award-winning book about recent U.S. environmental policy, Klyza went beyond a mere scorecard to suggest the subtleties of achieving any gains in the current political climate.

Klyza began by giving the full Orchard at Franklin Environmental Center some political context: Obama’s actions (or lack of them) must be weighed against his having taken office while the U.S. was fighting two wars and suffering the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Add to that a Congress that has been gridlocked—and worse—since 1990. Klyza quoted California Congressman Henry Waxman’s 2012 comment: “I have never experienced as much hostility toward the environment than exists in Congress today.” In fact, Klyza noted, recent studies show political party polarization has reached levels not seen since Reconstruction. “There’s virtually no environmental middle,” he said, referring to a graph of congressional environmental voting that showed red bars crowding the anti-environment extreme and blue bars crowding the pro-environment edge. Meanwhile, although most Americans support environmental protection, that support is too shallow to pressure politicians. “There’s support, but not salience,” he said.

Still, the Congress and Obama managed to pass two significant laws in the first term. The Omnibus Public Land Management Act consolidated 159 bills and produced the greatest expansion of the wilderness system in 15 years. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the stimulus act), invested $80 billion in energy efficiency, public transit, and renewables. What Congress and Obama didn’t pass was a comprehensive climate bill; in both the House and Senate climate and cap-and-trade bills died, Klyza said, due to overcomplexity and failed tactics. After Republicans took the House in the 2010 midterm election, Obama and the Democrats fell back into defending the “green state” from attack. (The “green state,” Klyza explained, is “the set of laws, rules, institutions, and expectations regarding conservation, pollution control, and resource management”—such as the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Forest Service, and the Antiquities Act.) That defense was successful, he said, quelling 39 anti-environmental riders attached to the House’s 2012 Interior-EPA appropriations bill designed to weaken greenhouse gas (GHG) regulation and vehicle fuel efficiency and to promote oil and gas leases in wilderness areas.

Klyza then considered some of Obama’s executive actions. His appointments of Lisa Jackson (EPA administrator), former EPA chief Carol Browner (energy czar), Van Jones (green jobs czar), and Steven Chu (energy secretary) were environmentally credible. When the EPA roused from its Bush-era slumber to respond affirmatively to the Supreme Court’s charge (Massachusetts v. EPA, 2007) that the agency determine if greenhouse gases are a “danger to public health and welfare,” the gates opened to stronger regulation of motor vehicle and power plant emissions.

For example, Klyza explained, California has the right under the Clean Air Act to seek a waiver from the EPA allowing it to require stricter motor vehicle emissions standards than those nationally set. The Bush administration denied the waiver; Obama granted it. A state and federal collaboration helped establish national greenhouse gas standards for cars and light trucks that translate into stepped limits of 35.5 mpg by 2016 and 54.5 mpg by 2025. Higher mpg standards for heavier vehicles were also established.

Klyza also noted that a 2011 rule requiring 90 percent cuts in mercury emissions from fossil-fueled power plants by 2016 resulted in utilities closing many older coal-fired plants (mercury pollution’s greatest source) rather than incur retrofitting costs. The EPA also tightened standards for other air pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, but in a major disappointment, Obama wouldn’t support ground-level ozone reduction.

Despite a gridlocked Congress, environmental progress continues through what Klyza called “green drift.” “Green state” laws often include provisions that require review and action based on the best available science, he said, giving the example of the health consequences of particulates. New data show that lower levels than anticipated can damage human health, which requires the EPA to adopt stricter air quality standards—unless Congress intervenes. Since gridlock renders that unlikely, stricter standards accrue. In this scenario, GHG could, through green drift, decline to levels close to what the defeated Waxman-Market climate bill would have achieved through 2020, but not beyond. Unfortunately, he noted, “green drift will not lead to the fundamental changes in the U.S. economy and society that are necessary to make far deeper cuts in GHG emissions.”

Reviewing several other advances, Klyza concluded that in light of first-term pressures, “Obama’s executive politics are making a difference.” But lack of real presidential action on climate change and land conservation left many feeling “the environment never seemed on the top of his to-do list.”

And the second term? Klyza found Obama’s actions hard to predict. Changes to the National Environmental Policy Act could put “some sand in the gears of polluters,” Klyza said, by allowing some lawsuits over greenhouse gas outputs; a spokesperson for the National Association of Manufacturers responded with, “It’s got us very freaked out.” It remains to be seen what Obama will do about the Keystone XL pipeline and other planned fossil fuel infrastructure, or leasing of federal lands for coal extraction, although Klyza considers it essential that issues such as Keystone and fossil fuel divestment have made it to the front page and popular awareness.

“So how do we influence the president to keep global temperature rise below two degrees Centigrade?” a student asked during the lively question and answer period. Klyza responded, “Ceaseless pressure, ceaselessly applied.”

Street Smarts

Maria Theresa Stadtmueller — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 19:51:50 +0000

Mapping Vergennes was just one step students took to suggest safer walking and biking routes.

What keeps residents driving around town instead of biking or walking to school, work, and errands? What could change those habits? Four environmental studies (ES) seniors spent a semester looking for answers by getting to know the people, traffic lights, and crosswalks of the City of Vergennes, VT. On a recent Tuesday evening they presented their findings—3 main causes and 18 recommendations for change—at a joint meeting of the Vergennes city council, planning commission, and recreation committee. A reaction from Shannon Haggett, chair of the planning commission, was typical of the response: “I was blown away by the quality of the work.”

Since the late 1980s, ES seniors have developed community-related projects for their capstone senior seminar, focusing on diverse topics such as land management, climate, energy, and water issues. Last fall’s “Cultivating Community Through Sustainable Transportation” resulted in a 52-page report, a highly professional presentation to Vergennes officials, and hopes that the research could be adapted to other Vermont communities.

The students who chose this project among several transportation-oriented options (18 seniors participated in fall semester’s ES 401) brought a cross-section of ES foci to the task: Aaron Kelly’s is policy; Jessica Lee’s is creative arts and dance; Angela Todd focuses on chemistry, and Carlton “Carly” Westling on biology. Their first concern was “Where do we start?”

Fortunately, the semester’s faculty advisor, Associate Professor of Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Environmental Studies Molly Costanza-Robinson, is an experienced guide in these seminars. “The transportation focus is newer to me, but I’ve been interested as a citizen for a long time,” she says. She also brought ideas from a recent research project in which she and faculty members from six other institutions visited European cities with model sustainable transportation networks. “I learned more about what’s possible and how it was achieved,” she says.

Working with the students and Costanza-Robinson was Diane Munroe, the College’s veteran coordinator for community-based environmental studies. Munroe’s many local and state-wide partners have come to welcome the collaboration—and results—a team of ES401 seniors typically achieve.

The seminar kicked off with a primer on transportation—intensive reading and discussion on such issues as equity, access to jobs, climate change, and a new federal transportation funding bill. That process, at least, was familiar student territory. As they moved toward fieldwork, familiarity gave way to many moving parts. The students set up selection criteria (resident density, number of nearby employers, etc.) that pointed to Vergennes as a workable site. Munroe’s contacts there and with the Addison County Regional Planning Commission were eager to participate. The students met with local officials and conducted detailed walking and mapping trips in Vergennes to measure its crosswalks and assess sightlines. There were days of surveys about residents’ transportation habits and their perceived barriers to biking or walking. They talked with mothers who struggled to push strollers along broken sidewalks and with shoppers too wary of traffic to walk to the nearby supermarket.

The students had some of their own apprehensions: “How do we organize all this?” and “How will we be graded?” Costanza-Robinson advised, “Don’t worry about the grades. Worry about the process. And don’t be afraid to flail around a bit. That’s where the learning is happening.” After many drafts, lots of feedback from their community partners and their advisers, and a particularly rigorous three-hour session with a white board, they started to clarify the issues. As Aaron Kelly notes, “We came in with an untarnished perspective, so we could offer creative solutions. The persistence paid off.”

So what drives Vergennes residents to drive? Three main themes emerged: safety, connectivity, and perceptions and habits. For example, the truck Route 22A turns into Main Street in Vergennes, and residents worry about not being seen, not having time to cross safely, and about being passed too closely on bikes; the city’s infrastructure doesn’t always let someone walk from here to there; and people perceive walking or biking as too time-consuming or unpleasant in extreme weather.

Matching these results with data from transportation studies and from local research by the county planning commission, the students crafted 18 recommendations ranging from simple (signage and enhanced stoplights) to more complex and costly (a connecting biking/walking trail on a former railbed). “We designed the recommendations to stand on their own,” noted Westling, “so the city could choose which they could afford without weakening the others.” All of their recommendations held multiple benefits—to residents’ physical health, a sense of community, or the local economy. “They knew they couldn’t sell this only on a ‘save-the-planet’ basis,” says Costanza-Robinson. “They had to show the many benefits of sustainable transportation.”

At the Vergennes meeting, the planners and council members raised fine points about town boundaries and state regulations. The students answered questions about streets and paths as if they’d grown up there. “It was so gratifying that they let us present our ideas,” said Jessica Lee afterward. The City Council’s budget vote this June will determine which changes to adopt and what might need outside funding (the report includes suggestions). The students’ success won’t be measured only in future crosswalks and bike lanes, however. As Westling said, “I remember the moment during this project when I realized, ‘this isn’t just what I’m learning in my class; it’s also how I should live my life.’”

Fracking: A Tale of Two Countries

Maria Theresa Stadtmueller — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 18:39:35 +0000

Journalist Dimiter Kenarov ’03.5 speaks on shale gas fracking in Poland and Pennsylvania.

Journalist Dimiter Kenarov ’03.5 has covered the hunt for a Macedonian serial killer and Baghdad’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal training program (think “Hurt Locker”) but says of his current assignment, “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” The young Bulgarian writer, now a resident of Istanbul, returned to Middlebury recently to talk about the complexities of “Shale Gas: From Poland to Pennsylvania” at the Franklin Environmental Center at Hillcrest. The widely published Kenarov is partially supported in this project by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, a clue to how combative the issue of drilling for this so-called “energy game changer” has become.

The affable Kenarov began, at the audience’s request, with a brief presentation explaining what shale gas is and how drillers recover it from rock through hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” Small-scale shale gas drilling has gone on for years, but new horizontal drilling technology puts gas on the leading edge of the “unconventionals,” or fuels (tar sands, ultra deepwater oil, coalbed methane, etc.) being developed now that supplies of the world’s “cheap and easy” fossil fuels are waning. One benefit of shale gas, he noted, is that it’s found worldwide and doesn’t require expensive exploratory drilling.

After Kenarov outlined some of the risks and costs, however, it was hard to understand why Poland was leading the shale gas charge in Europe and how the practice has already achieved such a foothold in the U.S. As Kenarov explained, horizontal fracking wells cover a large surface area. To force and keep open the shale fissures and release the gas within, drillers inject at high pressure from three to seven million gallons of fresh water per well, mixed with sand and toxic chemicals such as benzene and lead. Some of that water is then recovered as “flowback.” “Then what do you do with it?” Kenarov asked. Much of Pennsylvania’s flowback is sent for underground disposal to Ohio. “The water picks up 200 times the salts contained in seawater—in the Marcellus Shale [in the U.S. Northeast] it’s 3,000 times more,” he said. The water also carries as much as 1,000 times the safe drinking levels of radioactivity from its travels through the rock. Chemically tainted water from the wells can seep into underground aquifers; if pumped out and sent to standard water treatment plants, which are not equipped to decontaminate this flowback, the water seeps into rivers, water tables, and food chains.

Then there are the noise and air pollution of huge trucks needed to move water and drilling rigs; the methane released from the wells that cancels out natural gas’s comparatively modest carbon footprint; the quick decline of many of the wells, which prompts more drilling; and the pipelines extending for thousands of miles through previously scenic farmland.

In Poland, one word explains an enthusiasm countered by many other European countries’ fracking moratoriums: Russia. Poland’s longtime nemesis provides two thirds of Poland’s natural gas, and while gas comprises only 13 percent of Poland’s energy mix, many Poles want to make sure it’s “Polish gas.” The writer noted that only eight percent of Europeans overall support shale gas, but any Pole questioning gas development is branded a “national traitor” supporting Russian interests. Despite the U.S. State Department’s technical support for fracking in Poland, and the fact that the state, not farmers, owns subsurface mineral rights, “Poland doesn’t have the infrastructure,” Kenarov said. “The economy of scale doesn’t exist in one small country.” In response, Exxon has withdrawn its interests.

Scale limitation is not the problem in the U.S., where millions of square miles are mapped for fracking and half a million active wells exist. Kenarov described coming into Pennsylvania to report on fracking as “going into a mosh pit at a punk rock concert.” In northern regions of the state that lie over the Marcellus shale gas play, towns are dealing with higher crime rates, accidents caused by huge trucks, and tensions between neighbors on either side of the issue. Struggling dairy farmers who sold their mineral rights for additional income have found their supply chains collapsing as businesses shift to ride the gas wave. Vegetable farmers are either concerned about their water quality or are discovering that their customers, wary of toxicity, are buying elsewhere. (As Kenarov noted, thousands of contamination accidents caused by faulty well casings and other mishaps throughout the U.S. have been registered with the Environmental Protection Agency.)

Still, enough interests are benefiting that the shale gas drive continues (Audience members noted that Vermont is the first and only state so far to ban fracking). Kenarov commented as he showed aerial photos of vast expanses of well clusters that looked more extraterrestrial than Texan, “the scale of development is striking.”

Things That Happened, Things To Do: Week of February 18

Maria Theresa Stadtmueller — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 21:16:52 +0000

First African American to receive a degree from an American college or university (Middlebury, in 1823); first black man to serve in a state legislature. He was duly recognized as a distinguished citizen, but did Alexander Twilight’s contemporaries even know he was black? History professor Bill Hart shared surprising insights on VPR’s Vermont Edition.
In a joint wake-up call, seven students got up early last Saturday to present to the Board of Trustees their case for Middlebury’s divestment from fossil fuel companies. Student-run Middblog.com talked to the students about the experience.
Winter Carnival! Swimming! Diving! Hockey! Hoops! Check out recent Panther action.
Never mind the beltway intrigue on House of Cards. Students Anna Esten ’14 and Luke Carroll Brown ’14.5 have interned at the White House and worked on Elizabeth Warren’s hard-fought Massachusetts campaign. Spend lunchtime this Thursday with their tales of the power-hungry and learn if there’s a seat for women at the grown-ups’ table.
Mark Tercek, President and CEO of The Nature Conservancy, visits this week as Middlebury’s 2013 Global Environmentalist-in-Residence. He’ll work with students, visit classes, and give a talk Thursday afternoon about preserving “green infrastructure,” Nature’s Fortune: How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature.
Get your slam on Friday night as two forces for poetry performance converge in Dana at 8:00. Buddy Wakefield is a two-time Individual World Poetry Slam Champion (is there a belt?) and The Striver’s Row is a group of young performers (and high-end grad students) who’ve played both the Apollo Theater and the White House.
You think Mondays are hard for you? At least you’re not in a Russian prison, like Pussy Riot. Russia’s premier rock critic and fearless oppositionist Artemy Troitsky returns to Middlebury Monday, February 25, for a talk, “Enemies of the State: Pussy Riot and the New Russian Protest Rock.

Welcome to the Age of Humans

Maria Theresa Stadtmueller — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 15:46:22 +0000

Dr. Curt Stager visited Middlebury to talk about a new, long-term view of climate change. His book, Deep Future, examines the surprising shifts—and choices—we face in a human-driven era scientists are calling “the Anthropocene”: the Age of Humans.

Climate Pioneer Opens Social Entrepreneurship Symposium

Maria Theresa Stadtmueller — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 19:17:10 +0000

Billy Parish has shown that building a movement takes focused collaboration . “We never do anything world-changing by ourselves.”

Fresh from a coup in which his crowd-sourced solar energy investment company, Mosaic, Inc., sold out its shares overnight, Billy Parish gave the opening talk at Middlebury’s second annual Social Entrepreneurship Conference on January 24. An all-ages crowd at McCullough Social Space came to hear one of the founders of the youth climate movement speak about “Following Purpose”—lessons he’s learned building social movements and a business that allow changing the world to be your day job.

Parish opened by recalling two influences that changed his own life. One was a segment of Daniel Quinn’s book Ishmael, in which the title character explains to his pupil how our growth-based civilization, blind to biological limits, is as destined to crash as a flying machine built without an eye to aerodynamics. The second was visiting a shrinking Indian glacier and realizing the impact on water supplies for 400 million people downstream. “I realized there was no turning back,” Parish said. “I said to myself, ‘this is my life’s work.’”

Parish has co-authored a book to help others achieve their own such realizations and fulfill them. Thursday night he took the audience through the three biggest lessons he learned in creating change, detailed in Making Good: Finding Meaning, Money and Community in a Changing World (Rodale/Penguin, 2012).

Follow Your Purpose. “We so rarely talk with anyone about why we feel we’re here,” Parish noted, and asked listeners to write their own purpose (or what they think it is now) on the index cards provided. Audience members then stood and spoke out loud—and then yelled—their purpose statements.
Build on the Best. “We never do anything world-changing by ourselves,” said Parish, and related how he enlisted leaders such as Van Jones to advise his projects and attracted several 2008 presidential campaigns to promote climate concerns.
Go to the Root. The crushing defeats of the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference and U.S. federal climate legislation made Parish rethink his approach. Handing off his youth climate activism to successors, he took time (and the support of an Ashoka Fellowship) to examine the real barriers to achieving widespread clean energy adoption. He realized solar companies and potential customers faced capital shortages and ill-fitting financing structures. He co-founded Mosaic, his crowd-sourced solar investment platform, with the purpose of enabling “abundant clean energy for and by the people.”

Admitting that he’d had to learn the energy financing business “on the job,” Parish encouraged listeners to commit the necessary time to master their chosen areas of action. Meanwhile, at Mosaic, he said, the new solar projects the company helps to finance are creating larger numbers of people committed to renewable energy and to policies that promote it.

Click the link below to watch Parish’s talk.

Things That Happened, Things To Do: Week of Dec. 3

Maria Theresa Stadtmueller — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 20:23:21 +0000

That’s how we roll, baby! In what was reportedly the first such intercollegiate competition in the U.S., Middlebury log rollers peeled Skidmore 6-1 last week. Yes, the sport brought to Middlebury by the Hoeschler family of world-class log rollers (who also brought the logs), Lizzie ’04, Kate ’05, and Abby ’10, has gained traction at Skidmore thanks to brother Will Hoeschler ’14, who for some reason goes there. (He was the “1” in the 6-1). Danielle Rougeau, Middlebury’s Assistant Curator of Special Collections and Archives, coaches the group, teaches a packed J-term rolling class, and announces, “Competition was our final criterion to be considered a club sport.”
What Middlebury alumnus was the first African American college professor and college president? When was Middlebury’s student newspaper first dubbed The Campus? Under which president was the study of German introduced? (Hint: looks as if he shaved his chin but not his neck). Interesting info awaits you at the latest online selection from the digital archives, 1800-1916.
Get your carol on! The traditional Lessons and Carols (preceded by a carillon performance) ring in the Christmas season this Sunday at Mead Chapel, 4 and 7 pm). Meanwhile, Friday at 5:00 is a carol sing with François Clemmons and the MLK choir in Bi Hall—bring the kids. Friday night, the Middlebury Women’s Chorus performs at Axinn (cookies and cider, too); Mead Chapel’s got the D8 and Mischords, with Stuck in the Middle at Atwater Dining Hall.
If you prefer lots of hoops to five golden rings, there’s plenty of Panther basketball in town this weekend, as well as men’s hockey.
Saturday at 9, warm up and chill out with some Latin Jazz fusion by Mogani, a sextet featuring some of the area’s best musicians. They’re at 51 Main, with no cover.

Start-Ups, Vermont-Style

Maria Theresa Stadtmueller — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 16:28:27 +0000

Annie Rowell ’11. tending the production line at the Vermont Food Venture Center in Hardwick. (Photo: Connor Gorham)

Not all business start-ups incubate in the family garage. Gardens, kitchens, and J-term classes have inspired two recent Middlebury graduates and one student to explore the business side of improving local eating options and farmers’ bottom lines. Not surprising in this state, they often cross paths. Annie Rowell ’11 is the Farm-to-Institution Program Associate at the two-year-old Vermont Food Venture Center in Hardwick. While helping farmers process their fruits and vegetables, she sometimes teams up with David Dolginow ’09, who manages a new frozen vegetable line by Sunrise Orchards in Cornwall. And Suzanne Calhoun ’14 found Sunrise apples gave the perfect twist to several of her condiments, Suzanne’s Sweet Savories, which she cooks up at the Venture Center.

Annie Rowell ’11 was an internationally focused political science major—she speaks French and studied Arabic—when she realized the pull of her family’s Vermont farming heritage. While taking a closer look at the politics of food in her native Craftsbury, Rowell found a path into the food business. Associate Professor Bert Johnson, a specialist in local and state politics, helped her develop a senior thesis that held the lens of policy and economic change theories to Craftsbury’s proposed adoption of more locally sourced school lunches. “It was a really great experience studying my own community as an observer,” she recalls. A subsequent internship with the Center for an Agricultural Economy in Hardwick synched with the inauguration of its Food Venture Center and led to her current job. She still has a hand in the politics of food, especially through the state’s Farm to Plate strategic; but she also enjoys the physicality of production and “geeks out” over broccoli floret machines and vegetable wash conveyers that add muscle to the VFVC’s rentable commercial kitchens. “Our first year, we processed 1,700 pounds of bulk broccoli in a little under a day and a half; this year, we did 2,200 pounds in one day,” she recalls, scanning the data sheets she keeps in her office down the hall from the kitchen.

Annie Rowell ’11 (Photo: Leslie Rowell)

The VFVC offers professional equipment, food safety certification, and business know-how to entrepreneurs; Rowell also focuses on connecting farmers to schools, hospitals, and other institutions interested in serving what Vermonters grow. “This has been a huge production and data-gathering year,” she says. “It’s exciting what this means for Vermont’s future. For example, we know broccoli can grow well, and our equipment can process it well, and we have all this data to figure out institutional demand and how we can fill it.” Greater demand for local vegetables can mean more growing options for farmers. Rowell feels fortunate in her work, and not only because of the great aromas that waft into her office (”Yesterday was maple nuts—yum!”). “I can’t imagine having as much ownership elsewhere in what could be seen as an entry level position—doing the projections, managing relationships, and leading productions.”

As a student, David Dolginow ’09 was building environmental policy chops—working with the Sunday Night Group, taking a J-term class that crafted recommendations for Middlebury’s climate neutrality; he even took time off and worked at a Democratic lobby shop in Washington, D.C. The religion and geography major was co-teaching a J-term class on “Food and Justice in Vermont,” touring farms and hosting farmers to discuss their work, when he and one of those farmers, Barney Hodges ’91, started talking about the future of frozen vegetables. Hodges, the second-generation owner of Sunrise Orchards in Cornwall, wanted to diversify his orchard business using their added asset of a refrigerated warehouse in Shoreham. Two years later, thanks to a USDA grant, Sunrise and Dolginow are doing just that. Sitting at the orchard’s farmhouse dining table, Dolginow notes their progress: “Our vegetable operation is still small compared with apples,”—a yearly average of 5.5 million pounds of apples and 50,000 pounds of vegetables—“but that’s double last year’s total.”

The business end is a natural for Dolginow, who grew up around his parents’ jewelry store in Leawood, Kansas. The natural end he learned interning in the College’s organic garden, working at a local organic farm post-graduation, and canning the harvest in the Weybridge House kitchen with friends.

Dolginow’s helping Barney Hodges ’91 grow something new in Cornwall. (Photo: Amanda Warren)

“I remember thinking, ‘people en masse might not get back into home canning, so let’s do it for them, with the farms they want to buy from.’ That’s what we’re trying to do at Sunrise, and it seems to be working.” Dolginow calls Sunrise “a mid-tier supply chain partner” thanks to its two refrigerated box trucks, warehouse, and strong networks. “We buy produce from farms, move it to processors [like the VFVC], pick up the frozen products, and then warehouse and distribute them.” Customers include a network of 25 northeastern food coops and customers such as Middlebury, Fletcher Allen Hospital, and now food service giant Sodexo, which serves 10 million people a day in 7,000 institutions. Working the fine edge between price and volume, Dolginow says, it’s easy to see why the food industry has grown to such a scale. “Our solution is to work only with family farms in the northeast, period.” His job satisfactions? Chefs thrilled with their produce; a role in local food security; and the daily variety: “Produce is always changing—it’s tangible and dynamic, and that seemed a good use of my Middlebury College brain.”

They’re not your typical college-student road trips: driving from Maine loaded with 400 pounds of wild blueberries in your Outback; heading up to Hardwick to cook and can condiments at the Vermont Food Venture Center; making the rounds of farmers’ markets and coops to get people sampling your product. Suzanne Calhoun ’14 admits, “I have a high busy tolerance but I’m definitely pushing it.” What Calhoun is also pushing—tastefully—is reconnection with the fresh, clean flavors of fruits and vegetables in home cooking. Calhoun’s fledgling business, Suzanne’s Sweet Savories, features seven “piquant preserves” to liven up meals with tastes from tomato to carrot and pear to cranberry. Calhoun grew up gardening and canning with her family in Jericho, Vermont. Her desire to share those pleasures with others comes, in part, from her concern with the modern state of food: “We’ve become so disconnected from nature,” she says. “It really concerns me.” In contrast, a 6-year-old could recognize all the ingredients listed on Calhoun’s preserve jars.

Suzanne Calhoun ’14 sampling the fruits (and vegetables) of her labors in her Sweet Savories business. (They’re really delicious!) (Photo: Brendan Mahoney)

Kudos from hungry friends and family started Calhoun thinking about scaling up into a business, but, she says, “I didn’t know what was involved or where to go.” Spending J-term in the MiddCORE leadership immersion course answered many of those questions and helped her establish ongoing relationships with business mentors. After further feasibility homework, she scored a MiddChallenge Grant and the suggestion to check out the VFVC. There, she found more connections through Annie Rowell: High Mowing Seeds just down the road from VFVC had tons of great tomatoes used for their seed testing; Sunrise Orchards had surplus apples perfect for cooking. As Calhoun develops savvy about marketing and sourcing, she remains committed to working with local farmers. Meanwhile, after a busy first summer, company headquarters (her parents’ basement) is well stocked with preserves for distribution so she can concentrate on studying math, computer science, vertebrate biology, and music. Meanwhile, she’s thinking ahead to new products to reconnect people with real food.

Things That Happened, Things to Do: Week of 10/8

Maria Theresa Stadtmueller — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 20:20:55 +0000

Last week’s Fall Family Weekend brought everybody together for a full schedule of events and some brilliant foliage (and a little rain). Parents took in some Friday classes, after which our Middmag crew hit them with a pop quiz. Check their learning comprehension here.

The Panther women’s field hockey team has rolled over 11 schools on their way to a second-place ranking in NCAA Division III. Four shut-outs and school scoring records are just part of the picture.

Guest-blogging for Dean Shirley Collado, associate professor of education studies and head of Wonnacott Commons Jonathan Miller-Lane takes a minute for mindfulness. “Being in it rather than getting through it” sounds like a wise idea; Miller-Lane’s years of teaching and practicing Aikido show.

She’s won an Emmy and a Peabody and originated the New York Times‘s landmark “1 in 8 Million” series of multimedia profiles. Yeah, that’s what you can do with an art history major. Times multimedia producer Sarah Kramer ’97 opens this year’s Meet the Press lecture series with “Personal Narrative in the Digital Age” this Thursday, October 11, at 4:30 p.m. In Bicentennial Hall 220.

Maybe you couldn’t get tickets to see His Holiness the Dalai Lama this week. And you recalled the First Noble Truth: “Life is suffering.” But wait! Both the Friday afternoon talk for the College community (1:45) and the Saturday morning talk (9:30) will be streamed on the Web. You can watch it live or whenever. There will also be live video feeds for each talk at McCullough Social Space and Dana Auditorium—first come, first served. All free, everyone welcome.
Anyone—you, kids—eager to try traditional sand painting (“Rangoli”) to welcome the Dalai Lama can join in on the front steps of the Ilsley Public Library this Friday, 4 until 6 p.m.

How about a stroll through town Friday evening? From 5 to 7 p.m., the final Middlebury Arts Walk of the year will feature 35 venues; some artists will present works inspired by the visit of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Dalai Lamas—in History and in Person

Maria Theresa Stadtmueller — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 17:31:16 +0000

What is a Dalai Lama? And how is His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama different from (and similar to) the previous 13?

A week before His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s visit to Middlebury, a large audience at Dana Auditorium heard some answers to the questions, “What is a Dalai Lama?” and “Who is this Dalai Lama?” Professor William Waldron sketched the spiritual and temporal role Dalai Lamas have held since their rise to prominence in 16th century Tibet, adding insights about the particular life and role of Middlebury’s honored guest.

The title “Dalai Lama” itself suggests the complex history of Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism. “Lama” is Tibetan for “guru” or “teacher”; “Dalai” is Mongolian for “ocean.” The title is loosely translated as “Ocean of Merit” or “Ocean of Wisdom,” and Waldron explained how it harkens back to the Buddhist leaders’ patronage by Mongolian princes who ran—and defended—Tibet from the 13th through 17th centuries. Far from otherworldly spiritualists, these Buddhist lamas operated amidst Mongolian and Chinese political plays, with each power exercising control over Tibetans through their spiritual leaders.

Buddhism didn’t arrive in Tibet until the 7th century, and the monks who brought it from India were not entering a spiritual vacuum: practitioners of Tibet’s indigenous shamanic spiritual tradition, Bön, resisted the Buddhist influence. Originally armed pastoralists like the Mongolians, the Tibetans took to the Buddhist teachings of compassion. Bön and Buddhism ultimately developed a syncretic relationship, and during the four-century span prior to Mongolian political rule, it was the Buddhist monasteries who provided a stabilizing cultural force, serving as keepers of literacy and iconography, even lending money (similar to the role the Catholic monasteries played after the fall of the Roman Empire).

Waldron noted that while Dalai Lamas have for centuries wielded political and spiritual influence, it is the latter role Tibetans value most. Traditionally, the Dalai Lama is considered the reincarnation of the revered bodhisattva (or “enlightened being”) of compassion, Avalokiteshvara. Bodhisattvas cycle through many earthly lifetimes, delaying their own rest in nirvana in order to help liberate others from suffering. In the Tibetan Mahayana Buddhist tradition especially, Waldron noted, “the many bodhisattvas represent the potential for cultivating awakened properties within oneself.” This awakening, through meditation and other practices, allows a person to see reality without the ulterior motives and grasping of the ego; the awakened person is free to engage others with compassion and wisdom.

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama was a toddler in his mud-and-stone village when a lengthy, detailed process identified him as the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama. Given the restless time into which he was born, he went from a closely tutored child in a Lhasa palace whose only exposure to technology was an old film projector, watches, and a telescope to a world traveler who counts among his friends prominent scientists, philosophers, and religious leaders. (His own education demanded decades of studying scriptures and the highly advanced logic of Buddhism; he earned the equivalent of a Ph.D. in philosophy and is the author of dozens of books.)

And although Waldron noted that the 14th Dalai Lama “is not the first to be beleaguered by politics,” the politics that have beleaguered His Holiness are of a modern scale. Fearing for his life during the increasingly restrictive Chinese occupation of Tibet, he fled in 1959 and found asylum in Dharamsala, India, with many other Tibetans. As Pico Iyer notes in his biography of the Dalai Lama, The Open Road, “One in five Tibetans—more than a million—died of starvation or in direct encounters with the Chinese. One in 10 was jailed; all but 13 of the more than 6,000 monasteries in Tibet were leveled.”

While he has tirelessly engaged in efforts on behalf of Tibet’s autonomy, His Holiness recently abdicated his political role as his people’s temporal leader (Waldron noted that his traditional political authority lodged mostly in central Tibet, but that this abdication nonetheless changes “the religious polity of classical Tibet”). He remains active fostering Tibet’s monastic and cultural traditions in exile while calling for a “global ethics” that supersedes religion or culture to engage and develop what is common to all humans—kindness, responsibility, and compassion. Toward this end, he regularly hosts conferences in Dharamsala that pursue questions about cognitive science and meditation, Buddhist doctrine and quantum mechanics, and commonalities among religions. This self-described “simple Buddhist monk” doesn’t claim to have universal answers, and in fact, suggests that while Buddhism works for him, it may not be a good fit for others. As a quote from the Buddha displayed in the Dalai Lama’s home temple in Dharamsala says, “As one assays gold by rubbing, cutting, and melting, so examine well my words and accept them, but not because you respect me.”

Tickets to see His Holiness the Dalai Lama are now sold out. Live video feeds will be provided to both Dana Auditorium and the McCullough Social Space during both of his talks. Seating for these on-campus video viewing areas is free and open to the public, and is available on a first-come, first-served basis.

We will also be streaming the lectures live online. This link will be live a few minutes before the lectures begin: http://go.middlebury.edu/dlstream

Science Spoken Here

Maria Theresa Stadtmueller — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 19:49:20 +0000

Summer immersion at Middlebury extends beyond its renowned Language Schools. In another intensive learning tradition, more than 100 undergraduates have been conducting summer research in the sciences and humanities with their Middlebury professors. We visited five science labs in McCardell Bicentenntial Hall and met students and teachers working full-time on advanced scientific questions. Although the language they use can sound foreign (myristyltrimethylammonium, anyone?) they explained what they’re working on and how it could translate into everyday life—from carbon-neutral home heating to cleaning up toxic spills with a material right underfoot.

Feats of Clay

They’re highly toxic and as common as the gasoline that contains them: benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene, and xylene, or BTEX chemicals. Keeping them out of soil and water is essential for public and environmental health, but standard methods for chemical clean-up using activated charcoal are expensive. Professor Molly Costanza-Robinson and her environmental chemistry researchers are probing new ways to use clay, which is cheap—and everywhere.

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Professor Molly Costanza-Robinson (left) watches with Annie Mejaes as Malcolm Littlefield sketches the structures that make clay, BTEX toxins, and surfactants interact.

Malcolm Littlefield ’13 and Annie Mejaes ’13 are environmental studies majors with chemistry foci. It’s Littlefield’s second summer and Mejaes’s first in the lab with Costanza-Robinson. Environmentalists and chemistry enthusiasts since high school, the students will each do a thesis with her this year. “It’s super important for them to be here in the summer so they can develop the methods,” Costanza-Robinson says.

The project is new to this lab, and although others have shown that it more-or-less works, the available literature hasn’t explained the detailed chemistry behind the process. So the trio must experiment with ways to mix surfactants—soap-like substances—with clay to create an organophilic surface that will bind, or adsorb, the organic (carbon-based) BTEX toxins. Clay’s physical qualities—high surface area and dense packability—render it valuable in lining landfills. By chemically tweaking it with the right surfactants at the right levels, it could become what Mejaes calls “superclay.“ To do that, Costanza-Robinson says, “we’re digging in on the chemical level to understand how the surface properties and structure of the modified clay influence adsorption of contaminants. You want predictive capability so you don’t have to test every chemical in the world.”

Costanza-Robinson notes, “All my projects have a dual scope: studying fundamental processes in the lab and thinking about the real-world environmental applications.” After graduating next year, both Littlefield and Mejaes are considering working in environmental fields and then entering graduate school.

Taking a Bite Out of Lyme

Tracy Borsinger ’13 and Joe Damron ’13 both plan on medical careers. This summer, they’re researching a contributing factor to a disease U.S. physicians increasingly encounter—Lyme. Each student has seen the tick-borne illness‘s effects: Tracy’s brother and father in New Jersey both suffer from it, and during an internship in the emergency room of his Virginia hometown hospital, Joe helped patients who had come in with related ailments. “That’s the big picture,” says Damron. “Now we’re looking at the small-scale processes beneath it.”

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Damron and Borsinger at the bench. Each has seen the suffering Lyme can cause: “It gives great context to the bench stuff we do,” says Damron.

Their guide to Lyme’s biochemical scale is Professor Bob Cluss, who since 1988 has been investigating different properties of the disease’s agent, the spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi. Cluss explains their focus: “We’re looking at enolase, an enzyme the spirochete secretes outside itself. Enolase is a workhorse enzyme in metabolism, but it seems to have a ‘moonlighting’ or secondary function that helps it establish itself in a mammalian host and cause disease.” Borsinger and Damron are both new to Cluss’s lab, building the techniques they’ll use in their senior theses this year, including cloning genes and working with live organisms. For both students, controlling their procedures is key: “We’re both learning to set up consistent procedures so we can recreate conditions over and over,” Borsinger says.

The students are also learning the dynamics of their first full-time experience in a research lab. Cluss explains, “There’s so much to learn—the specific vocabulary, the literature, even getting used to one another.” As a veteran teacher, he can tell them what to expect: “It takes about a month to get your bearings. Experiments start to click, you feel your rhythm, and after six months, we’re complete equals—you’re bouncing things off me, I’m bouncing things off you. That’s the way science is—it’s collaborative.”

A Subtle Force in Physics

Microchips govern the accelerometers in your car airbags and tell your smart phone which way is up. If this kind of technology continues to shrink, quantum mechanical Casimir forces will come into play. While they’re negligible in everyday life, Casimir forces (aspects of the electromagnetic force) matter in microelectronics and nanotechnology, says Professor Noah Graham. As these forces interact with different shapes in devices, will they create greater precision or greater hazard? The answer hinges on a larger question Graham and his student researchers are asking: “How do light and matter interact?”

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How does light reflect off objects with different shapes? An experimental apparatus is set up to measure the Casimir force between a sphere and the planar substrate below. Though these forces were first theorized by Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir in 1948, computers weren’t robust enough to verify them until the 1990s. Photo courtesy of the Mohideen lab, UC Riverside.

For two summers, Aden Forrow ’13 and Bjorn Kjellstrand ’13 have worked with Graham on increasingly advanced versions of that question. Their scale is quantum-mechanical; their tools are equations and computers. Kjellstrand shares his “elevator” version of their research: “What happens when you shoot one particle at another? They don’t hit each other—they get really close and they scatter.” Scattering theory, says Graham, is a broad subject in physics and engineering and has many useful applications. Forrow adds, “We have equations we know are correct. We know what the rules are for interaction. If we have a new situation, what happens?” What they find can help calculate the strength and potential effect of Casimir forces.

Kjellstrand and Forrow both plan on graduate school. Meanwhile, this summer’s research and their senior thesis work will continue to advance this project, which Graham shares with fellow physicists at MIT, in Italy, and in Germany.

This is Your Brain on Trauma

Why do some trauma survivors overreact (or underreact) to events in daily life? By testing combat veterans and people who’ve survived motor vehicle accidents in his psychology lab, Professor Matthew Kimble and his student researchers are amassing evidence that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is neurophysiological—trauma actually rewires the brain. “You can’t fake brain waves,” Kimble says.

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“I’m interested in PTSD, and it’s great to be focused 100 percent on my work here," says Patrick Hebble (left) shown with Professor Matthew Kimble. "I’m excited to come in to the lab every day.” He’ll conduct his thesis research with Kimble this academic year and is considering medical school, research, or teaching.

Pat Hebble ’13 has spent several years in Kimble’s lab, working with subjects, analyzing a growing body of data on PTSD, and building critical skills for his thesis. “I can start to edit data and explain the results,” he says. “I’m having a blast.” Although Hebble has taken to research’s “many tasks and minute details,” not all students do; Kimble considers that an insight best attained while having the options of an undergraduate. “I have a subset of students who are in graduate school for neuroscience or clinical psychology; some who are medical doctors, and some who decide ‘research isn’t my cup of tea,’” Kimble says. “And that’s fine with me.”

Using an electroencephalogram (EEG) to map brain waves, and an eye scanner that records which of two photos a subject views first and for how long, the lab explores hypervigilance and attention—whether someone can tune out a distraction or becomes focused on it—and brainwave reactions to stimuli that range from expected to disturbing. While someone without PTSD typically has a large brain response to a sentence with a traumatic ending and a smaller response to an “expected” ending (e.g., The field was covered with bodies versus The field was covered with flowers), someone with PTSD has the opposite—they expect bad things to happen and are surprised when good things do. Fortunately, says Kimble, findings like these are prompting research on techniques to help PTSD sufferers recover.

The Silent Power in Rocks

One reason Julia Favorito ’14 studies geology is that “a lot of people don’t know about their surroundings, and geology is a tool to help them.” Vermonters will know more about theirs thanks to her summer internship with Middlebury Professor Pete Ryan and geologist Jon Kim of the Vermont Geological Survey (VGS). Through funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, the VGS is assessing the state’s potential for geothermal energy.

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Another day at the office: Favorito (center), Middlebury classmate Kevin Chu ’14 (left), and Eric Weber UVM’13 (right) take a break at an anticline in Bristol. They’re working in the field with geologist Jon Kim of the Vermont Geological Survey (not shown) mapping the state’s geothermal potential. Photo courtesy of Jon Kim, VGS.

Ryan explains, “When the temperature of groundwater is above 10 C (50 F), heat can be extracted from the water to heat homes, schools etc. One reason groundwater might be elevated above 50 F is higher-than-normal amounts of uranium and thorium in the rock.” Favorito, from Winchester, Massachusetts, works on a field team mapping the hills and mountains of Bristol and Starksboro for these formations and testing area wells for fractures and temperatures. While uranium and thorium in drinking water wells would need remediation, a geothermal well in their temperature range is a plus. Favorito is enthusiastic about geothermal: “There are so few environmental negatives—you have to get the technology right, but people can’t complain it’s ugly, it’s not intermittent like other renewables, and you can piggyback on structures already in place. Where can you go wrong?”

Spending summer outdoors working with a state geologist is an obvious job perk, and Favorito will also work with Ryan in the lab analyzing rock samples. She’s getting a close look at the subspecialties needed to parse the area’s complex geological history. “There are so many parts to it: structural geology to detect the fractures and where water’s recharging or leaking in a fault; geochemistry to analyze the radioactivity; hydrogeology to locate fractures.” Hydrogeology isn’t her forte, she says. “I like the statistics, but it’s hard to sit and wait for the probe to go through the well.” She does like the idea of going to graduate school, taking her skills to other parts of the world, and possibly teaching college geology. “Middlebury students are so passionate about what they’re doing—I’d like to teach students like that.”

Things That Happened, Things To Do: Week of April 30

Maria Theresa Stadtmueller — Wed, 02 May 2012 20:55:11 +0000

The world knows something new and surprising about black holes, thanks to Frank Winkler, the Gamaliel Painter Bicentennial Professor of Physics, and his international team of astrophysicists. Pursuing a rare transient X-ray source in the nearby galaxy M83, Winkler and colleagues knew they were on to something. Their results will appear in the May 20, 2012 issue of The Astrophysical Journal, and are online now.
Dwayne Nash ’99 was featured in two April issues of the Chronicle of Higher Education. The former prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office is in his fourth year of Northwestern University’s PhD program in black studies, researching racial profiling. The Chronicle stories include an interview about the Trayvon Martin killing in Florida and two stories on the interdisciplinary growth of black studies doctoral work.

Maybe you’ve read Kurt Andersen’s best-selling historical novels or his critiques of American culture; maybe you listen to Studio 360 on Public Radio International. Maybe you used to choke reading his and Graydon Carter’s snarky-licious Spy Magazine. Thursday afternoon at Dana Auditorium is your chance to hear him discuss “It Is the Most Radical of Times, It Is the Most Conservative of Times” as the Robert W. van de Velde ’75 lecturer.

That Paul guy from Liverpool who so totally rocks will perform here Friday night. Yes, Paul Lewis is back–with more Schubert! If you haven’t yet heard the personally unassuming and musically transporting pianist, do! If you have heard him, you know how lucky we are to be one of his concert stops—along with London, Tokyo, Florence…

London’s financial district is the setting for Serious Money, playwright Caryl Churchill’s look at greed, power, and politics. The Middlebury College Department of Theatre and Dance presents four performances, starting Thursday.

The Panthers come out swinging against Bowdoin in a baseball doubleheader, starting at noon this Saturday.

Has your refrigerator become a hurt locker? On Monday at 12:30, Gary Hirshberg, entrepreneur and founder of Stonyfield Farm, explains the dangers of genetically modified foods and his leading role in the consumer charge to label them. He’s also written the first consumer guide to GMOs in food.

Greater Exposure for Koch Brothers Exposed

Maria Theresa Stadtmueller — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 20:11:28 +0000

On the evening of April 4, just days after the film’s world premiere in New York City, Middlebury hosted a showing of Koch Brothers Exposed, the latest documentary by director Robert Greenwald (Wal-Mart: the High Cost of Low Price, Outfoxed, Rethink Afghanistan).

The subjects of the film are brothers David and Charles Koch, co-founders of Koch Industries, a $50 billion conglomerate (oil and gas extraction and pipelines, ranching, minerals, lumber, and paper) that is the second-largest privately held company in the United States. And, according to the film, they invest many millions of dollars to promote an “ideological vision that supports their financial self-interest.”

Kate Hamilton ’15.5 spent her first six weeks of college organizing the showing, and she succeeded in attracting a large audience of students, faculty, and community members to Dana Auditorium. Hamilton, who grew up in Washington, D.C., had already gotten her political feet wet with the 2008 Obama campaign. She said about the purpose of this event, “I wanted to enable an informed discussion about the impact of so much money in politics, particularly on how it will impact climate change legislation because most of it comes from such big oil tycoons.”

While the film itself featured an unrelentingly adrenal soundtrack and graphics reminiscent of cable news “crisis” coverage, it also presented a detailed picture of the Kochs’ influence.. (The Kochs are noted for funding political campaigns, the Tea Party movement, conservative and libertarian think tanks, as well as a number of cultural organizations, including Lincoln Center and the American Museum of Natural History.)

After the showing, Kate Hamilton kept the discussion going. Realizing that Middlebury’s Bill McKibben was interviewed for the film, and that he and political science professor Bert Johnson, a specialist in campaign finance, have different views of the Supreme Court’s decision in the landmark campaign financing case Citizens United v Federal Elections Commission, she had arranged and then moderated a discussion between the two.

Johnson addressed data on how campaign contributions may or may not have changed the election landscape, and McKibben provided an “on the ground” view of resistance to big money in politics.

To the question of whether corporations should have rights, Johnson answered, “I’ll be provocative; yes, they should. But so should the NAACP and the New York Times. The trick is not whether corporations ‘speak,’ but whether others can speak as well.”

Johnson also noted that since Citizens United, wealthy individuals have markedly increased campaign spending but corporations haven’t. More competition in the political sphere is beneficial, he said, and called for new means to finance campaigns that would assist non-incumbents.

What if each contender with a demonstrated popularity threshold received $500,000 to campaign, he proposed, adding, “asking taxpayers to spend $5 billion for more equitable campaigns sounds like a lot. But this is a country that spends $6 billion a year on potato chips.”

McKibben voiced deep misgivings with the notion of corporate personhood. “People are extremely complex—we have desires, we can remember ancestors, we have art,” he said. “That level of complexity isn’t possible for corporations. Corporations are good at one thing—making profits. That’s not a bad thing, except we’ve given them power it’s not in their DNA to exercise.”

Noting that the Koch brothers have promised anywhere up to $200 million to defeat Barack Obama in this year’s election in addition to their heavy funding to defeat climate protection, McKibben called on the public to develop “other currencies.” “You can’t believe what hard work this is,” he said, drawing from experience fighting the Keystone XL pipeline. “You have to spend months doing nothing else to counter the day-in, day-out activity they easily finance. We have to counter with our passion, creativity, and sometimes our bodies—they’ll always outspend us otherwise.”

After Johnson seconded this call for political involvement, Hamilton brought the evening to an end.

Things That Happened, Things to Do: Week of 3/26

Maria Theresa Stadtmueller — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 20:55:59 +0000

He was an at-risk teenager in Pittsburgh later named a MacArthur “Genius” for his lifelong work with his city’s disadvantaged, and last week the College announced that Bill Strickland will deliver the 2012 commencement address on Sunday, May 27. Strickland’s life took a hopeful turn when he learned the art of pottery in high school; he’s since helped tens of thousands of kids learn respect and motivation through the arts at MCG Youth and Arts Program. His Bidwell Training Center’s success in developing employment is a national model. He and the College’s honorary degree recipients promise an inspiring send-off for the Class of 2012.
Salon.com spent some time with history of art and architecture professor Pieter Broucke (who’s simultaneously director of the arts, ancient art curator of the Middlebury Museum, and Belgian) getting the low-down on a new photography exhibit. Broucke and Juliette Bianco, curator of Dartmouth’s Hood Museum, are sequentially hosting “Nature Transformed: Edward Burtynsky’s Vermont Quarry Photographs in Context.” The stunning images show the negative space left in nature by building with stone—“inverted skyscrapers.” The exhibit doesn’t reach Middlebury until February 2013, so whet your artistic appetite with Salon’s cool slide show.
J.D. Rothman’s Huffington Post blog, “The Neurotic Parent” humorously suggests starting the “college tour from hell” with a visit to Middlebury. While admitting it’s a fabulous school, she finds the distance from major airports a challenge to familial travel tempers. Only the strong survive, honey.
As we were saying about the strong, two Middlebury women just won Watson Fellowships for a year of international travel. Zaheena Rasheed ’11, a political science major and Davis United World College scholar from Maldives, will explore disciplined nonviolence in emerging democracies; Rhidaya Trivedi ’12, an environmental policy major from Toronto, will investigate how soot-free cooking stoves can improve health and lower climate impacts in developing countries. Rasheed and Trivedi were among the 40 fellows selected from a pool of 700 candidates.
Travelers of an earlier century are the focus of Baylor University history professor David E. Mungello’s talk, “Western Queers in China: Flight to the Land of Oz” on Tuesday, April 3 at 4:30. Drawing from his just-published book of the same name, Mungello will look at the allure China held for 19th-century western homosexuals. Many were able to escape their own countries’ repression to find intellectual, social, and artistic fulfillment in their new “Oz.” (Note: Here “Flight” plus “Oz” does not equal scary monkeys.)
Chill out Friday night with free jazz by the Bob Gagnon Trio at 51 Main. Vermont-born Gagnon counts among his influences such greats as Django Reinhardt and Bucky Pizzarelli. Bassist Nick Warner and drummer Bob Levinson will help funkify the proceedings. Starts at 9 pm.

Things That Happened, Things to Do: Week of 2/6

Maria Theresa Stadtmueller — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:14:47 +0000

On February 3 and 4, the “Febs,” plucky scholars who delay their entrance to Middlebury for a semester of precollegiate adventure, gathered with their families for a weekend of events celebrating the conclusion of their studies. A highlight was their signature “ski down” at the Snow Bowl. Four days later, the new crop of Febs arrived on campus and started their orientation. What’s so special about being a Feb? We asked, and they (the graduating ones) answered.

Tuesday, February 7, Bill McKibben accepted an invitation to Montpelier to weigh in on how climate change took a bad storm—Irene—and made it worse. The Middlebury scholar in residence, author, and activist told the House Natural Resources and Energy Committee that Irene fit “precisely with what the climatologists have been telling us to expect.” McKibben was invited to galvanize environmental action at the state level, especially since D.C.’s collective head is still firmly buried in the ever-warming sand.

Smart men can jump. Taking note of two unlikely top-ranked teams in Division III men’s basketball, Sports Illustrated profiled the upward trajectory of Middlebury and MIT. The Panthers’ recent 1-point, non-NESCAC loss to Keene State ended their 8 weeks as number one but hasn’t slowed the 21-1 team. SI tells how smart guys play and how Middlebury’s Language Schools helped Coach Jeff Brown’s recruiting. Yeah, it also talks about MIT. The Panthers travel to Trinity on Friday.
Green Drinks, not to be confused with one of those Lawn Smoothies served at health food stores, is a national movement encouraging people to talk environmental topics over liquid refreshment. Local folks meet at 51 Main the third Wednesday of the month from 5 to 7 p.m. Drink discounts, snacks, door prizes—and this month’s topic, “Green Burial.” Why just “look so natural” when you can be so natural to the very end? (Questions about the afterlife? Make it a double-header with the lecture below.)

Diarmaid MacCulloch was just knighted by the Queen. He’s the BBC’s tour guide to religious history, an author of blockbuster books on religion, and a professor of religious history at Oxford. He was making his way in the family business—Episcopal priesthood—but left because he refused to hide his gayness. “I would now describe myself as a candid friend of Christianity,” he says, saying that while he still respects the Church, “I live with the puzzle of wondering how something so apparently crazy can be so captivating to millions of other members of my species.” Doesn’t he sound like fun? Hear him discuss “Refiguring Christian history for readers and viewers,” on Wednesday, February 15, 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. at Robert A. Jones conference room.

This Valentine’s Day, have dinner with some jerk—of the Caribbean spice variety. 51 Main at the Bridge will be serving up island flavor on Tuesday from 5–10. Afro-Caribbean music starts at 8. The public is welcome, and reservations are a good idea. Hosted by Alianza Latinoamericana y Caribena. Here’s the menu.

What’s Next?

Maria Theresa Stadtmueller — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:22:34 +0000

Pic Walker '93, Executive Director, Alliance for Climate Education

As if to show the stakes in the winter term course, “Next Steps for the Youth Climate Movement,” the campus lawns outside Franklin Environmental Center at Hillcrest remained markedly bare and snowless. Inside, 16 students from around the world—Hong Kong, Singapore, Peru, Alaska, Texas, New York—discussed ways to bring new urgency to the climate issue. Guiding them was a Middlebury alumnus and climate activist, Pic Walker ’93, who has an enviable track record in motivating young people to tackle this difficult issue.

Walker is executive director of the California-based Alliance for Climate Education (ACE), which in two short years has reached more than one million American high school students with fast-paced and entertaining climate-science assemblies and opportunities to take action. In this J-term class, Walker reached beyond the parts-per-million facts of climate change—most of the Middlebury students were well versed in those—and concentrated on tools that motivate people to change their behaviors. From his years in the environmental trenches, and his MBA in sustainable enterprise from the University of North Carolina, Walker has learned to use a wide range of changemaking tools that borrow from business and meet people on emotional ground. His students would learn to grasp those tools and, by the end of the month, have their own project ideas ready to build.

Key among those tools is the story. One of the first class assignments was to read veteran civil rights activist Marshall Ganz’s essay on public narrative, in which he describes “the story of self, a story of us, and a story of now” as essential emotional motivators. Stories of challenges overcome, for example, can create anxiety, but they also illustrate values; change happens when the storyteller can annex that anxiety to hope rather than despair.

Each student wrote a personal story of overcoming a challenge, showing the choices made and the outcomes reached. Getting to know oneself in this way, says Walker, helps point a path to action. “Every change comes with a powerful leader,” he said, “and the lens of self shows us the lens of change.” Students also read business best-sellers such as Switch: How to Change when Change is Hard to understand the difference between the kinds of decisions governed by the heart and by the mind, and how to direct each of them.

And because they were at Middlebury, the students, about half of whom were first-years, had the chance to talk with climate leaders Bill McKibben and with older students whose climate work had taken them from Washington, D.C. legislative campaigns to an Indonesian project providing households with efficient soot-free cooking stoves. Their advice? Join the Sunday Night Group (the student-led environmental incubator where organizations such as 350.org began), find your niche, and don’t forget to have fun along the way. “Climate change is such a big issue that it’ll touch something you care about,” offered Ben Wessel ’12. “Let what you love guide you.”

That guidance is clear for Victoria Buschman ’15. Victoria is an Iñupiat Eskimo from Barrow, Alaska. Her people have thrived there for thousands of years, but climate change is now disrupting their daily life and the traditions that have sustained them.

Like many of the 3,500 villagers, Victoria’s grandmother lives in a wooden house on pilings to secure it above the permafrost. As the permafrost thaws and shifts, her grandmother’s foundation has cracked, leaving the house vulnerable to wind and cold—in fact, the whole village is moving. The sea is rapidly encroaching on the village’s 2,000-year-old burial ground. After an estimated 200-mile swim for solid ground, an exhausted polar bear collapsed on the village shore. Shifting ice has seriously impeded the Iñupiat traditional hunts on which they rely for food. “It makes me sad to hear climate change turned into a political issue,” she says. “Oil companies sponsor so much misinformation.” At the end of this course, however, she feels hopeful and ready to act. “I never thought about starting something on my own, but the class has helped me find myself and how I can take my place in the world.” When she returns to Barrow this spring she’ll begin an online advocacy group, Indigenous Culture and Climate Education—“a community of communities”—to connect indigenous people, whether in the Arctic or the tropics, whose ways and homelands are threatened by climate change.

Some student projects will take root closer to campus. Trevor Quick ’15 plans to build an online aggregator that matches interested people with activist opportunities. Courtney Devoid ’14 and her team are developing a climate education summer camp for kids. Stu Fram ’13 is drawing on his own experience of giving up meat last year because of livestock’s role in producing 20 percent of climate-changing gases. He, Maria Rojas ’12, Rafael Manyari’15, and several other friends are planning an information campaign for the dining halls on the environmental, public health, and nutritional benefits of a plant-based diet. “We’re working hard to ensure that our efforts don’t come across as dietary imposition…[We hope to turn] students into better-informed consumers and promote local food when fiscally and seasonally realistic.”

Time’s running out for action on climate change. Luckily, the timing for these students to activate their plans while at Middlebury is optimal: one of the class’s last meetings took place at the symposium inaugurating the new Center for Social Entrepreneurship. The Center’s training and grants programs join the real-world opportunities offered by Projects for Peace, MiddCORE, the Project on Creativity and Innovation in the Liberal Arts, Education in Action, and the Solar Decathlon in giving students ways to act on issues close to their hearts.

A Voice Heard ’Round the World

Maria Theresa Stadtmueller — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:52:25 +0000

Junior Abigail Borah’s father heard a report on NPR last December about an American student interrupting the UN climate talks in South Africa. When he heard the announcer refer to “her” impassioned appeal for action—and her eviction—he knew it was his daughter. Abigail spoke for her fellow attendees from the youth climate movement against political dithering and delays in Durban. The meeting moderator retorted, “No one is listening to you,” but the world media was.

Things That Happened, Things To Do: Week of December 5

Maria Theresa Stadtmueller — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 21:00:15 +0000

Our regular recap of goings on at the College and a look ahead to events on the horizon.

As always, we hope to call your attention to items that captured ours and alert you to events that you won’t want to miss. If you have a news item that you think we’d be interested in, drop us a line at middmag@middlebury.edu.

May Boeve ’06.5 was voted one of the Breakthrough 15 by YES! Magazine. The nonprofit publication marked its 15th anniversary of celebrating solutions to local and world problems by asking for nominations of individuals “who are shattering our sense of powerlessness.” Boeve made the list and the cover of the winter issue for her work with the international climate action group 350.org. Boeve traced her activism to finding fellow travelers during her Middlebury years and working with them to expand a worldwide circle of action. Her take on how to break through when faced with challenges: “Believe that the world can change, and commit to your part of the solution. Look at the world with clear eyes, but remain hopeful and celebrate! When you feel challenged, reach out and reach in.”
NESCAC’s just-released tally of Fall 2011 All-Academics includes 62 Middlebury scholar-athletes. To qualify for the honor, students must have reached sophomore status, play a varsity sport, and must have earned a minimum 3.35 grade point average. Go blue!
In other scoring, Panther men are playing way better hoops than the pros—and are ranked #1 in Division III with a 6-0 record.
Topics ranged from nuclear proliferation in Asia and the Middle East to CO2 controls in California as major publications sought input from faculty members at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Non-proliferation expert Professor Avner Cohen advised caution on any military response to Iran’s nuclear ambitions for Time Magazine online. Miles A. Pomper, senior researcher at MIIS, weighed in for the New York Times on the different views held by the U.S. and South Korea on the latter’s nuclear future. Associate Professor Jim Williams commented for the Huffington Post on whether California can meet its CO2-reduction goals. A paper he co-authored for the journal Science shows the task “formidable but not impossible.”
The Department of Music offers gifts to the public this week. All events are free and start at 8:00 p.m. On Thursday, Jazz Showcase performers turn the lower lobby of the Mahaney Center for the Arts into a jazz club; Friday, the Mendelssohn Quartet performs in Mahaney’s Concert Hall; Saturday, student vocalists fill the Concert Hall with art songs and arias.
Sunday, December 11 marks the 40th year in which the College and community have welcomed Christmas with the European tradition of Lessons and Carols. The program at Mead Chapel offers biblical readings for Advent and Christmas and carols for choir, organ, and audience. Each service—one at 4 p.m. and one at 7 p.m.—is preceded by performances on the chapel carillon. Laurel Jordan, chaplain; Emory Fanning, organ; and the Middlebury College Chapel Choir, Jeff Buettner, conductor. Free.
Maybe you get the blues this time of year. Maybe you’re not alone. Check in (for free) with blues harp master Charlie Hilbert and his friends at 51 Main on Thursday from 8 to 10 p.m. All better.

Food For Thought

Maria Theresa Stadtmueller — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 17:21:53 +0000

Food. It’s not just what’s for dinner (that is, if you’re one of the planet’s lucky ones)—it’s also a powerful learning tool. At an October 14 gathering during Fall Family Weekend, a panel of students, faculty, and parents in the food field discussed with a large audience how a proposed new food studies minor could enrich the liberal arts at Middlebury.

Moderator Pier LaFarge ’10.5, now a Washington D.C.-based climate analyst, asked those filling the Orchard Room at the Franklin Environmental Center at Hillcrest to consider how food creates connections. “It connects the problems of growing population and increasing pressure on resources; it also connects people with each other and with their landscape,” he said. LaFarge noted how Middlebury’s agrarian location and its commitment to projects such as local food procurement and the student-run organic farm made the study of food a natural fit. The panelists then amply illustrated his point.

Professor Helen J. Young, one of the faculty members shepherding the establishment of the new minor, emphasized that students had initiated and driven this interdisciplinary idea. Young, a botanist on the biology faculty, added that food-related course offerings could span anthropology, public policy, economics, biochemistry, literature, “and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.” She further explained that the minor would comprise five courses, among which an internship or research project would be essential.

English professor Daniel Brayton gave a sampling of food references in literary works, noting their subtle ability to denote social class. As a lifelong sailor, Brayton sees particular potential in teaching food studies through what he termed “greater Midd”—Middlebury’s additional sites, including its graduate school, the Monterey Institute for International Studies, located at one of the world’s great ocean ecosystems.

Two students spoke from personal experience about food’s potential to teach. Kate Strangfeld ’12 took inspiration from a J-term class on food justice in Vermont to help found Crossroads Café, a student-run restaurant in the former McCullough Juice Bar. “It’s been the biggest learning experience ever,” Strangfeld said. “I’ve seen how restaurants can affect health, culture, and the economy.” As for the value of running a restaurant while holding down a heavy liberal arts workload, she said, “I’m so happy I didn’t go to a big school with a nutrition major. Here I see food’s many impacts.”

For Janet Rodrigues ’12, helping build an organic garden at a South Bronx middle school showed how food can nourish children and their communities in the face of social inequalities. In planting and harvesting she, her three Middlebury classmates, and the school’s students and teachers had to handle issues such as soil quality and invading rats from an adjoining business.

“I never thought I’d be speaking on this kind of panel,” she said, commenting on food’s power to take someone in a new direction. Rodrigues and friends helped kids grow fresh vegetables they otherwise wouldn’t have had while offering them new ways to learn about plants and insects. It was also important, she noted, to reach kids through foods they enjoyed, that their families could afford, and that resonated with their cultures.

The two parent panelists drew from their own careers to offer insights on what kind of education is relevant in the business of food. Chris Granstrom ’74 (P’07, ’13) and his family turned from growing apples and strawberries to helping pioneer Vermont’s wine industry. Their Lincoln Peak Vineyard, just up Route 7 from Middlebury, has established an enviable reputation for fine wines via new, hardy grape cultivars. While Granstrom credited success in farming to a personal curriculum that includes “some construction, some wiring and plumbing, business planning and marketing,” he credited the liberal arts with being fertile ground for food careers. “A lot of the new, dynamic food businesses, farms or otherwise, are being started by liberal arts grads,” he said, adding that a study program should stay abreast of food-related issues and recognize positive case studies.

Echoing the fit between the liberal arts and food and agriculture enterprises, Ted Andrews (P’13) credited his formal education with bestowing an essential farming tool: “I learned how to learn,” he said. Andrews is the CEO of HerbCo, an organic herb farm in Duvall, Washington that will produce $50 million in sales this year. Throughout its growth, the company has continually innovated to maintain the safety and wholesomeness of its crops—part of the learning curve Andrews has mastered.

Granstrom and Andrews’s participation on the panel was part of Middlebury’s new “Parenting the Earth” series, initiated by the Franklin Environmental Center at Hillcrest. According to Dean of Environmental Affairs Nan Jenks-Jay, “Middlebury parents working in environmental and sustainability fields are invited to campus to share their knowledge and networks with students. Some of these connections have even generated internship opportunities.”

Based on the questions and comments that followed the panelists’ comments, it was clear that these two farmers were not the only parents in The Orchard convinced that food studies merited a place in the liberal arts. As a fitting final course to the discussion, everyone moved into the lobby for a lovely spread of local food.

Please note: While the food studies minor is still in development, it will be essential for each student to undertake an internship. Anyone who might be able to provide a Middlebury student with such an opportunity should contact Lisa Gates, Director, Center for Education in Action at lgates@middlebury.edu.

Stay tuned to MiddMag for more Fall Family Weekend coverage, including links to the President’s address to parents, as well as audio and video coverage of panels and discussions.

Tree Tour

Maria Theresa Stadtmueller — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 18:46:09 +0000

Is there surer proof that winter’s finally over than a budding tree? On Middlebury’s campus, trees both native and exotic survive into another spring thanks to the care, planning, and planting of the landscape services team, including horticulturist Tim Parsons.

Appreciation for these efforts isn’t limited to those lucky enough to spend time on campus. The Arbor Day Foundation recently awarded Middlebury its Tree Campus USA designation recognizing the College’s commitment to its trees and their aesthetic, environmental, and educational value.

Here are just a few of the notable trees Tim would like you to meet.

In Other Words

Maria Theresa Stadtmueller — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 19:34:04 +0000

On the classroom screen, TV journalist David Frost introduces guest Julian Assange and asks the beleaguered Wikileaks cofounder about extradition threats, leak sources, and conflicts between governments and journalists.

The 16 students scribbling notes aren’t preparing to analyze issues of free speech and national security. Instead, each is figuring how to interpret this conversation to a speaker of a target language. Within the classroom are native speakers of French, Russian, and Bengali, and the American students have brought their advanced skills in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. This is “Introduction to Translation Studies” and it isn’t just the overall J-term Gestalt that lends it a different feel.

For one, this is the first Middlebury undergrad class to focus on translation and interpretation (T&I) theory and practice instead of the workings of a particular language. (The primary difference between translation and interpretation? Text versus speech.) It’s also part of a recently launched minor in linguistics with expansion potential via collaboration with the Monterey Institute for International Studies (MIIS). The teacher, a seasoned professional translator and interpreter, Karin Hanta, is more familiar to the Middlebury campus as director of Chellis House, the home of many women’s and gender studies activities. A native of Austria, Hanta speaks five languages, has lived and worked on three continents, is a doctoral candidate in translation studies, has translated several books on topics such as Holocaust biography and German philosophy, and has written a dozen travel books for major German publishing houses to boot.

Questions arise as each student paraphrases Frost’s and Assange’s comments in English and then translates them: “I’m not sure whether Arabic would use ‘summit’ for a meeting,” says one. “OK, try and talk your way around it; could you use ‘conference’? ” prompts Hanta. “I don’t know the German for ‘extradition,’” says another. “Auslieferung,” Hanta offers. Each student evaluates his or her own progress with the translation; Hanta can fill in vocabulary for German, French, Portuguese, and Spanish, and fellow students of Chinese and Arabic also offer feedback. It’s not a language class, however, so the point is the process.

Hanta wanted to interest students in translation studies through a balance of practical issues, such as copyright and remuneration, and relevant scholarship. The view of the translator’s role has shifted since her own fascination with T&I began years ago. “Scholars often held that the translator should be invisible, subservient to the source text,” she notes. “Newer theories ‘dethrone’ the source and ask, ‘What’s the target text supposed to accomplish?’”

When those “texts” are advertising copy, the translator is expected to marshal marketing and cultural ken that will encourage business in the target country. Discussion of this growing field, “localization management,” gave Hanta one of several opportunities to bring MIIS experts into the class via Skype and videoconference. MIIS alumni are active in this area, translating for Apple and Microsoft, among others, making sure that a software icon makes sense in Russian and a technology term strikes the right note in Portuguese.

“Monterey’s a real gem, one of the best institutions at which to train for this work,” says Hanta, noting that career opportunities are burgeoning. It’s a point not lost on her students, several of whom entered the class considering T&I careers, and now feel they know where to go for personal advice and further training. And they’ve got a head start on the skills they’ll need. As Hanta says at the end of the Frost-Assange exercise, “What you’ve just done took me a couple of years of training.”