Gift Funds ES Chair At Dartmouth

Environmental studies is beginning to attract the big money. The latest example is at Dartmouth University, which has just revealed a $2.5 million alumni gift to endow a professorship in the field. The inaugural holder of the Richard and Jane Pearl Professorship in Environmental Studies will be Andrew Friedland, the current chair of Dartmouth's Environmental Studies Program.

According to Dartmouth, Friedland's research focuses on the effect of atmospheric pollutants on high-elevation forests, as well as on how our individual energy choices affects the environment. Friedland, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, has been on Dartmouth's faculty since 1987. He is also a co-founder of Dartmouth's graduate program in Earth, Ecosystem, and Ecological Sciences.

Dartmouth currently offers undergraduate majors in environmental studies and environmental earth sciences. It also offers both master's and Ph.D degrees in earth sciences.

Green Job: Bowdoin College

From time to time, this blog will take a look at jobs in environmental studies, both those for graduates and those on the campuses educating those students.

A posting went up on Thursday for the director of the Environmental Studies program at Bowdoin College. The job board note says the post, which will begin next fall, is for a candidate at the associate or full professor level and adds this: "The director will hold a joint appointment in the Environmental Studies program and a department appropriate to his/her disciplinary specialization."

That's because at Bowdoin, which is based on a bucolic campus in Brunswick, Maine, environmental studies is not a standalone major. The college calls it a "coordinate", which means that it expects it to be pared with one of the school's other offerings. The environmental studies department's home page says that students have combined ES with majors from biology to women's studies.

For those interested, the job posting is here.

Northern Michigan Plant Protest

Educating students about the environment can have unintended consequences: They can become more protective of the environment on their very own campus.

So it was this past week at Northern Michigan University. Students there are challenging the Marquette-Mich.-based institution's plan to build new dorms because the construction would destroy a native plant research project on campus. Student representatives met with NMU's president and brought along a petition bearing 900 names and information on future plans for the four-year-old native plant project. NMU offers majors in both environmental conservation and environmental science.

And the whole thing may be more than a bit ironic since the tag line on NMU's Web site is "Northern. Naturally."

The Young And The Greenish

There are plenty of colleges and universities across the United States that now offer environmental studies. But this week's New York Times had a piece on the environmentalism that's popping up in and around secondary school classrooms.

Things like greening buildings with solar panels, compact fluorescent bulbs and environmentally friendly cleaners, championed by groups like Grassroots Environmental Education. Or measures to ban the idling of car engines at school pickup point. The photo accompanying the story shows middle school kids planting a garden. Some secondary schools are taking it further, the story notes. Some of the schools recognized by the Maryland Association for Environmental and Outdoor Education assign environmentally themed readings for homework. Green California Schools will hold a summit and exposition for educators in Pasadena in December.

Of course, there are naysayers. Folks who can't see that there's room for an "e" in each of the so-called three "Rs". They probably don't recycle either.

WSU's Sustainability Smackdown

Not that long ago, college environmental events were as dull as a U.N. General Assembly session. Thankfully, somebody figured out that you can draw more people with a bit of fun. Like the "Sustainability Smackdown" taking place at Washington State University today.

Yes, there will still be lectures and presentations, but the three student groups sponsoring the event--the local Roots and Shoots chapter, the WSU Sustainability Club and the WSU Environmental Science Club--also want to see some fresh thinking on sustainability from students who might not have thought about it before.

There will be potentially be some green in it for the winners, and I don't just mean the plant kind. Smackdown attendees will vote to award $1,000 to the student group with the best sustainability idea. And students may also get a chance to participate in challenge issued by KEEN, the outdoor performance footwear and gear maker. It plans to award $150,000 in prizes to the best ideas or projects that support sustainability. The winners will be announced at the KEEN's Hybrid.STAND Festival in its home base of Portland, Ore., in June 2008.

Roots and Shoots, by the way, is a global environmental and humanitarian education program that was inspired by the work of primatologist Jane Goodall. More on its work later.

Professor Plastic Power

You may have heard that Discovery Channel is launching a network on environmental issues, Planet Green, next spring. But there are already intimations of what shows will be on the new network, like "Eco-Tech", which ran a segment last night that featured Alan Heeger, a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Heeger is already quite well known as one of the three winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2000. But his research into conducting polymers has led him to develop technology that stands to revolutionize the way we will all go solar. Without abandoning his work at UCSB, Heeger co-founded a company called Konarka Technologies, which makes its headquarters in Lowell, Mass., a town more known as a leader of earlier industrial revolutions than current eco-technology. No matter: Konarka is rolling out Power Plastic®, a photovoltaic material that basically puts solar power cells on flexible plastic, not glass. According to the Discovery Channel report, the technology stands to cut the cost of solar panels in half--if not more--while producing more power.

Universities have gotten very smart about helping professors commercialize their research. Look for a lot more breakthroughs like Heeger's in environmental technology for the mass market.

The University Of Vermont's 'Revolutionary Mind'

One of the best things about the green revolution now taking place on America's campuses is that it is demolishing the ivory tower. Academics are engaging the real world, and often in surprising ways.

Saleem Ali, an associate professor of environmental planning at the University of Vermont's Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, has been recognized by SEED magazine as one of eight "revolutionary minds" for 2007. According to the university, Ali has gotten India and Pakistan to sit down for talks later this year to turn the Siachen Glacier that straddles their border into a peace park. The park could be a place for both nations to cool their quarrels--and preserve the glacier's ecosystem in the process.

The award was revealed in the October issue of SEED, a relatively new magazine. But it is unfortunately not part of its online content.

Ali, who is also an adjunct faculty member of Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies, devotes his research to the causes and effects of environmental conflicts, as well as to using the environment as an agent for peace. In September, MIT Press published his new book, "Peace Parks: Conservation and Conflict Resolution".

University, College Win Livable Building Awards

The Center for the Built Environment at the University of California, Berkeley has chosen higher education buildings to be two of the three winners of its Livable Building Awards for 2007.

Carnegie Institution for Science's Global Ecology Research Center at Stanford University won for features such as a radiant cooling system that has helped to cut carbon emissions from building operations by 72%. Its wood doors were salvaged from old wine vats and it also has an energy-efficient water system.

Also a winner: The Kirsch Center at De Anza College and part of the credit for the award definitely belongs to the Cupertino, Calif., community college's own students. De Anza's student government earmarked $180,000 of its own funds for the center, which has gotten second-highest designation from the U.S. Green Building Council.

With green building so hot a topic on college campuses these days, it's perhaps not surprising that there was also a university among the seven finalists. Donald Bren Hall at the University of California, Santa Barbara was given an honorable mention.

Cool Heads At The Carnegie Institution

There's an interesting opinion piece in The New York Times this morning. Ken Caldeira, a scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, thinks it may be possible to cool the globe by shooting small amounts of sulfate particles into the stratosphere. He likens the strategy to the cooling that followed the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. It blasted large amounts of sulfate particles into the sky, which then reflected the sun's rays away from the Earth.

I'll leave it to others to discuss the scientific merits of Caldeira's proposal. The purpose of this blog is to look at where you can get an education in the environment, and the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology certainly qualifies as one of those places. Housed on the campus of Stanford University, it has offered research opportunities to undergrads, graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and their professors since 2002. You can check out some of its recent research topics here. For the post-doctoral crowd, its Web site notes an opening for an associate in global ecology to conduct research on permafrost feedbacks to the global carbon cycle. The application deadline was October 1, but the post is still up and it notes that later applications may be considered.