Students Win Prizes For Soil, Water Research

Three college students have been awarded $1,000 each for their environmental research. The prizes were awarded as part of a competition organized by the Adventus Group, a private bioremediation company.

Na Wei, a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was recognized for her study, "Anaerobic MTBE/TBA Biodegradation Under Different Terminal Electron Acceptor Processes." Manmeet Waria from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln was singled out for her presentation, "Field-Scale Clean Up of Pesticide Contaminated Soil with Combined Chemical and Biological Approach." The third prizewinner was Rosemary Carrol of the Desert Research Institute, in Reno, Nevada. Her presentation was entitled "Evaluating the Impacts of Uncertainty in Geomorphic Channel Changes on Predicting Mercury Transport and Fate in the Carson River System." The Desert Research Institute is an independent institution within the Nevada higher ed system that has some 500 researchers, staff and students working on research projects all over the world.

Adventus made the awards during the 23rd annual International Conference on Soils, Sediments and Water, which was held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. "These impressive young environmentalists all displayed superb thought leadership and presentation skills. Selecting the winning themes was extremely difficult, although the industry will surely be hearing more from these students in years ahead," said Dr. Fayaz Lakhwala, Adventus' director of engineering, in a prepared statement. Adventus, which is based in Freeport, Ill., works on soil, sediment and groundwater remediation worldwide.

Job Alert: Brown ES Center Director

Brown University's Center for Environmental Studies is looking for a new director. Its current director, Osvaldo Sala, a professor of biokigy, has announced that he plans to step down from the center next July. Sala is going to be the director of Brown's Environmental Change Initiative, an interdisciplinary research and education program.

According to a campus newspaper report, the center is looking for "a distinguished scholar with broad interdisciplinary interests in environmental issues" to head up its efforts. The CES is the focus for both Brown's environmental studies program and its community environmental initiatives, which have included a community garden.

But the change at CES seems to be coming at a critical juncture for Brown. The building in which the CES is housed, the Urban Environmental Lab, may be threatened by expansion on campus. The community garden has already been lost, although the center is promising to plant a new one in the spring.

The Environmental Education Two-Step

Let's face it: College is ridiculously expensive these days. Some kids are cutting the cost by doing the first year or two at a community college and then finishing their bachelors elsewhere. I've been seeing it in a few different majors, but not in environmental science or environmental studies. Until now.

Late last week, Hudson Valley Community College signed an official transfer agreement with the State University of New York Plattsburgh. Eighteen academic programs are covered by the agreement, including HVCC's associate's degree in biology. Students may apply its credits to a SUNY Plattsburgh bachelor's in biochemistry, biology, ecology or environmental science. And the schools, both of which are located in upstate New York in the Albany area, indicated that there would be more agreements forthcoming between them in the area of environmental science.

SUNY Plattsburgh currently offers majors in both environmental science and environmental studies. There are four degree options in the former, including both a bachelor's of arts and a bachelor's of science in environmental science, a B.S. in ecology and a B.A. with a concentration in environmental planning and management. The environmental studies major combines work in the sciences with courses in social sciences and the humanities. SUNY Plattsburgh also is home to the Center for Earth and Environmental Science, which houses its ES, geology and geography programs.

Lights, Camera, Action!

Al Gore did it, so did Leonardo DiCaprio. Now you can do it too: Make a documentary film about the environment. Better still, it will count toward your degree.

Professor Gregg Mittman has added two filmmaking classes to the roster this fall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. One traces the history of environmental films; the other is a hands-on class in making a documentary.

"I want to open up what we think is a good environmental film and how we might tell other types of stories to change our interactions and attitudes," Mitman said in a news release from the university. "Leonardo DiCaprio's recent film 'The 11th Hour' had so much gloom and doom. Good stories should mobilize our interests into actions."

His courses seem to be doing that. Trailers for some of the student films were shown on Friday night as part of the university's Tales From Planet Earth Film Festival. If you want to get a better idea of what's going on in Mittman's classes, check out the trailers here.

Sustainability Conference At Vanderbilt

I like citizen journalism more and more each day. It allows me to learn about events like the Net Impact Conference that is being hosted this year at Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management, and pass that learning along to you.

Net Impact, which was founded in 1993 by MBA students to foster socially-responsible business leaders, is using this year's conference to show what's being done by the business community on sustainability. It has brought together an impressive list of speakers from Yvon Chouinard, the founder of outdoor gear retailer Patagonia to John Replogle, CEO of Burt's Bees and Andy Savitz, author of "The Triple Bottom Line" to talk about subjects like the greening of the music and fashion industries.

The conference wraps tomorrow, November 3, but a group of bloggers from Owen has captured a lot of details about all of the proceedings here. Vanderbilt offers an undergraduate degree in earth and environment sciences as well as master's and Ph.D degrees in Environmental Engineering.

An "A" For Sustainability

Kudos to Harvard University, Dartmouth University, the University of Washington, Middlebury College, Carleton College and the University of Vermont! All of these institutions received an overall "A" grade on the newly released College Sustainability Report Card 2008.

The report card is published by the Cambridge, Mass.-based Sustainable Endowments Institute. It focuses, cleverly enough, on the 200 public and private universities with the largest endowments. The schools were graded in five categories: administration, climate change and energy, food and recycling, green building and transportation. Interestingly, the schools scored their highest grades for food and recycling, with 29% earning an "A" in that category. The report found that 70% of the schools buy food from local farms and that 64% serve fair trade coffee.

You can view the full report card--including the four schools that got overall failing grades--here.