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Environmental Studies Department |
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Over 400 Attend EnviroThursdays The variety of topics of EnviroThursdays during the Fall 2003 semester attracted over 400 people to attend the presentations. The topics were:
EnviroThursdays take place every Thursday during the school year in Olin-Rice 250 at 12 noon. Environmental Studies Coordinating Committee The Environmental Studies Coordinating Committee has a few new members this year. This year's members are:
You can find out more about each member on the Faculty page.
Faculty in Action Professor Brett Smith was appointed Acting Director of Environmental Studies (ES) in June of 2003. This is a two year appointment. One of his first duties as Acting Director was to attend the annual meeting of the Conference of Environmental Deans and Directors in July in Keystone, Colorado, where he presented a poster on the Environmental Studies Program at Macalester and shared perspectives with other ES leaders from around the country. In September, he went with four other faculty members (including Provost Dan Hornbach) to a Project Kaleidescope conference on “Taking Advantage of New Opportunities in Environmental Science.” These two events provided an excellent introduction and background on the shape of ES programs around the country and the challenges that these programs face. One of Professor Smith’s main activities for the fall was working with the Environmental Studies Coordinating Committee to develop a formal request to Macalester’s Educational Policy and Governance Committee (EPAG) that ES be recognized as a full fledged interdisciplinary department. This would mean that the ES program would continue to be able to offer the ES major and would receive an additional faculty position. This request is currently under review by EPAG. This past fall, in addition to his usual offering of Globalization and the Environment, Professor Smith also taught Environmental Analysis and Problem Solving (also referred to fondly as “The Junior Seminar”), a class open only to ES majors. The class of nine focused on issues related to fresh water availability and quality, with a particular focus on drinking water quality in the Twin Cities area. This spring Professor Smith is teaching Sustainable Development and the Global Future and the Senior Seminar in Environmental Studies. The ten students in the Senior Seminar will work on two projects: assessments and recommendations regarding the Professor Lorin Hatch spent his summer conducting field work (late May through late November) at Square Lake in northern Washington county (just north of Stillwater, MN). He sampled lake water, plankton, bottom sediments, and the benthic fauna on Tuesday mornings in the lake deep spot (18 m). His Fall 2003 Research in Aquatic Ecology class (4 students) helped him with sampling and laboratory analysis. The class presented a poster detailing their research at the St. Croix River Research Rendezvous in October; two posters were generated later in the semester. The first poster (Juliana Castellano and Aaron Malone) examined trends in dissolved oxygen concentration and benthic invertebrate numbers, finding a negative relationship. The second poster (Will Conrad and Maggie Sandford) examined benthic invertebrates at a 10 m lake depth (plenty of oxygen) and at an 18 m lake depth (no oxygen). While bloodworms and annelid worms were more abundant at the oxic site, phantom midges were more abundant at the anoxic site relative to the oxic site. All three poster can be found in the Biology faculty hallway. He has just submitted a research proposal to the National Science Foundation based on this Square Lake research. He proposes to continue his work, focusing on a gradient analysis of the dissolved oxygen concentration (which goes from near zero near the deepest spot to relatively high at a 10 m depth). He'll also conduct laboratory experiments here at Mac on benthic invertebrate predation in both oxic and anoxic environments. If any students are interested in helping out (either in the field or lab), they're welcome to join him! He'll be starting monthly winter sampling with Aaron Malone in February, then weekly sampling once the lake thaws (mid-April). There are many possibilities for student research with regards to this project. Professor Kelly MacGregor, a new addition to the Geology Department at Macalester this year, has enjoyed getting to know a few of the folks in Environmental Studies! This past fall she taught two courses, both of which fulfill a science requirement in the Environmental Studies major. In "Rivers and the Environment," students learned about how rivers work, and spent time examining human influences on the Prof. MacGregor presented some of her research on sediment transport in the Prof. MacGregor is currently working on several publications, both in review and in preparation, related to her work on both rivers and glaciers. This summer she will be spending some time in the Prof. Bill Moseley had a very exciting fall in terms of scholarship, service and teaching. He saw two long-term writing projects finally come to fruition with the publication of African Environment and Development: Rhetoric, Programs, Realities (Ashgate, 2004) and Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial African Issues (McGraw-Hill/Dushkin, 2004). The first is an edited volume exploring the connections between African rural livelihoods, environmental integrity, and broader scale political economy. The second is a reader (containing a number of environmental themes) that presents contrasting views on 20 controversial issues in African studies. He is particularly proud of Katie Ashton (an environmental studies and geography double-major) who co-authored the instructor’s manual with me for the African studies reader. He was also busy during the fall term organizing and co-directing an Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) faculty workshop entitled Research and Pedagogy in Political Ecology: An Interdisciplinary Workshop on Environment and Development Studies. This two-day workshop was held at Macalester on October 24-25, 2003, and was attended by 20 faculty from Carleton, Colorado, Grinnell, Macalester, Monmouth, Ripon, St. Olaf and Gustavus Adulphus. Last but not least, it was (once again) a thrill to teach my advanced seminar on Comparative Environment and Development Studies: A Seminar in Cultural and Political Ecology during the fall. My People and the Environment course is also off to a great start this term. Good news filled Professor West's second half of 2003. First, on November 11, she gave birth to son Samuel West Robertson. According to reliable sources, he is super cute. Second, she learned that her paper, "Estimates of a Consumer Demand System: Implications for the Incidence of Environmental Taxes," (with Rob Williams from the University of Texas at Austin) has been accepted for publication at the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. This journal is widely considered to be the top journal in the field of environmental economics. The article will appear with three other papers from a series of conferences, "Empirical Advances in Environmental Economics," hosted by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The conferences included eight papers written by well-respected environmental economists. All eight papers were submitted to the journal; the four papers to be published are the ones that survived the journal's peer review process. She also received news of the publication of her monograph, Public Finance Solutions to Vehicle Emissions Problems in California (with Don Fullerton), (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Electronic Press, 2003), http://www.bepress.com/fullertonwest. This monograph presents the material from her dissertation (on the use of market-based incentives to reduce car pollution) in language suitable for policymakers and undergraduate students. Prof. West is working on a variety of ongoing research projects. For example, she recently finished a paper on how the burden of a tax on vehicle emissions would be spread across different income groups. And, a Summer 2003 Keck Grant funded student Sarah Oviatt, who did the first stage of empirical work on a project, "What Caused the Dramatic Increase in Sport-Utility Vehicle Sales?" Professor West will teach Environmental Economics and Policy in the fall of 2004. |
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