Environmental Studies Newsletter May 2005

Prof. Roopali Phadke and Prof. Chris Wells will be joining the Environmental Studies Department staff in August 2005. Roopali has filled the Environmental Studies Policy and Politics position and Chris has filled the Environmental History position.

Prof. Phadke received her Ph.D. in Environmental Studies in 2003 at University of California, Santa Cruz. In addition, she has a B.A. in Political Science from Wellesley College and an M.A. in South Asian Studies from Cornell University. She comes to Macalester after spending the last two year’s as a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Roopali brings to her academic work a range of political engagements with non-governmental groups including Cultural Survival, the National Wildlife Federation and ASHA for education. She currently serves as a Trustee of the International Honors Program (IHP), a study aboard organization affiliated with Boston University. For the Fall 2005 semester, she will be teaching the courses "Water and Power" and "Environmental Analysis and Problem Solving." For the Spring 2006 semester, she will be teaching "Science, Technology, and Citizenship" and "Sustainable Development and the Global Future."

Prof. Wells received his B.A. in History and English at Williams College, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in United States History in 2004 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Currently he is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Davidson College in Davidson, NC. He has taught at Davidson College in North Carolina and at Northland College in Wisconsin.

For the Fall 2005 semester, he will be teaching "American Environmental History" and "The Automobile and the American Environment." For the Spring 2006 semester, he will be teaching the courses "Consumer Nation: Twentieth-Century American Consumer Culture" and "Senior Seminar in Environmental Studies."

In future years, he will also offer courses on Environmental Justice, American Environmental Thought, Post-1945 American Environmental Politics, Urban Environmental History, and America and the Global Environment.

Author, teacher, activist, lecturer, Dr. Robert Bullard, was the 2005 Environmental Studies Distinguished Speaker. He met with students, faculty, and other interested parties during the day on April 19, and in the evening he made his presentation to approximately 120 people in the John B. Davis Lecture Hall. The title of his presentation was "Building Healthy Communities through Environmental Justice."

Dr. Bullard is an author, teacher, activist, lecturer and a widely acknowledged expert on issues of environmental justice and environmental racism. He has testified as an expert witness in dozens of civil rights cases over the past decade. He is the author of eleven books that address environmental justice, including Dumping in Dixie, an award winning volume that is a standard text in the environmental justice field and is the most widely cited book on the subject. First published in 1990, the third edition was released in 2000. Other recent works include Sprawl City: Race, Politics, and Planning in Atlanta (2000), Just Sustainability: Development in an Unequal World (2003), and Highway Robbery: Transportation Racism and New Routes to Equity (2004).

Dr. Bullard is currently Ware Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University.

Click here for a short clip of his presentation (QuickTime Player needed. Download for free.)

Dr. Vandana Shiva, noted Indian scholar, author, and activist, spoke to a group of over 500 people in the Alexander G. Hall Ballroom on March 30, 2004. Her presentation was titled "From Corporate Globalization to Earth Democracy.”

Dr. Shiva is internationally recognized for her contributions to the fields of women and the environment, biodiversity, biotechnology and intellectual property rights, and ecological issues related to agriculture. She is the author of more than a dozen books and over 300 papers in leading scientific and technical journals. Among her best known books are Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Survival in India; Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge; Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply; and her most recent book, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit.

Dr. Shiva combines sharp intellectual enquiry and effective activism. She is trained as a physicist with a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Western Ontario. She has been a visiting professor and lectured at universities around the world, including Mt. Holyoke in the U.S. and York University in Canada . In 1982 she founded an independent institute, the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in India, dedicated to high quality and independent research addressing ecological and social issues. She continues to serve as the Director of that Foundation.

This school year's EnviroThursday presentations attracted over 800 people. There was a wide range of topics presented and they included:

EnviroThursdays take place every Thursday during the school year in Olin-Rice 250 at 12 noon.

I am the new student purchasing assistant. The impetus for creating my job came from the Talloires Declaration, signed by Macalester in 2000, and by the Campus Environmental Issues Committee (CEIC). Working through the CEIC, Purchasing, Facilities Management and Environmental Studies departments, my job is to increase awareness of environmental issues at Macalester and pursue campus greening in all our purchasing decisions.

This semester, I have worked on Earth Week projects like a display on the environmental history of Macalester, tried out a composting program at Springfest, and began a campaign to reduce paper waste and close the cycle on recycled paper at the college. I spent the semester gathering data and compiling a report about paper flows through the school, and will begin implementing some of the recommendations detailed in it. My report will be available shortly on request by sending an e-mail to cleung@macalester.edu.

Prof. Brett Smith, Acting Chair

Much of my time this year was devoted to the search for and successful hiring of our two new tenure track faculty members, Roopali Phadke and Chris Wells. Many thanks are due to the faculty and student members of both search committees and to Ann Esson for making the process flow so smoothly; also thanks to Provost Dan Hornbach for his help in the search process and for his commitment to “close the deal” with our two outstanding new hires.

Another big chunk of my time was spent working with the Junior and Senior ES Seminars. In the fall, the Junior Seminar (Environmental Analysis and Problem Solving) focused on global climate change. Highlights included presentations by Mac faculty members Keith Kuwata (chemistry) and Kelly MacGregor (geology) and a field trip to the Bell Museum at the University of Minnesota to watch “The Day After Tomorrow” with commentary by local experts. As a final project, each student produced a research paper and a two page “fact sheet” on the potential impacts of climate change on selected U.S. National Parks. Several of these fact sheets are now posted on our web site.

The Senior Seminar focused on Saint Paul’s efforts to be a “sustainable city.” We produced a report called “Environmental Sustainability in Saint Paul” with analyses of city performance in 21 different topic areas such as open space protection, energy efficiency, transportation, etc. Each student in the class wrote several sections of the report. To see our assessments and conclusions, visit the ES web site.

A memorable event in the Spring Semester was an Earth Week visit to campus by Dr. Robert Bullard, author of Dumping in Dixie and many other books dealing with environmental justice. Dr. Bullard’s wonderful commitment to justice issues along with his great sense of humor made his visit quite memorable.

Another highlight for the year is that in its first year as a full fledged department, ES has significantly increased its number of majors. At present we have 43 declared majors, with 20 of them just recently committing as second year students. With the college’s commitment to ES now clear and with our two new faculty members coming, the future looks bright and exciting for our program.

Finally, I also taught the two courses that I have offered the most here over the past several years, “Globalization and the Environment” in the fall and “Sustainable Development and the Global Future” in the spring. These courses are cross-listed with the International Studies Department and attract students from a variety of disciplines. Given the continuing deterioration in our global ecosystems, it is gratifying to me to be able to teach these courses to students who may be able to make a difference in the future as they assume leadership positions in their professions and communities.

Prof. Jerald Dosch, Biology

Professor Jerald Dosch was a new addition to the Environmental Studies and Biology Departments this year. He taught courses in environmental science, ecology, and ornithology. All three of these classes will be offered again next year.

In addition to his ongoing avian studies, Prof. Dosch is currently working on expanding his research by branching out into tropical ecology. He recently began collaborating on a long term study of tropical forest regeneration in abandoned cattle pastures in Costa Rica. This summer he’ll return to Costa Rica for more field work and submit two publications related to heavy metal impacts on Common Loons in MN and a preliminary paper on seed dispersal in Costa Rica.

Prof. Dosch had a marvelous first year at Macalester and is eagerly looking forward to the next.

Prof. Keith Kuwata, Chemistry

Prof. Kuwata has helped with the ES program in a number of ways this past school year. He served on the search committee for a new environmental historian. This ended successfully with the hire of Chris Wells, currently a visiting professor at Davidson College. Prof. Kuwata also guest-lectured in Brett Smith's Environmental Analysis and Problem Solving class in the fall, giving a presentation on the chemistry underlying global warming. He has also continued his scholarship on chemical reactions in the atmosphere, publishing a paper in the Journal of Physical Chemistry A with two Macalester students (Erin Petersen '05 and Lukas Valin '05) earlier this year.

Prof. Kelly MacGregor, Geology

This year I taught several courses relevant to the Environmental Studies program, including Environmental Geology (cross-listed in ES), History and Evolution of the Earth, Glaciers and Climate, and Geomorphology. I was also the curator of an exhibit in the Olin Rice Smail Gallery entitled "Rivers of North America," which highlighted satellite images of river systems and important environmental and land use issues, including flooding, dams, and overuse.

I continue my research on sediment transport in the St. Croix River and submitted a proposal with Dan Hornbach (Biology) to the National Park Service to examine the effect of the St. Croix Falls Dam on sediment transport in the river. This research is motivated by the proximity of the dam to endangered mussel communities, and a decrease in the juvenile populations in this area. In addition, I have continued my work on Grinnell Glacier in Glacier National Park and have plans to return this summer to continue work on monitoring glacier motion and health. I have presented this work at several professional meetings this year with my student co-authors, including the American Geophysical Union national meetings.

Prof. Bill Moseley

Prof. Moseley taught his normal slate of cross-listed environmental studies courses this year, People and Environment (ES/Geog 232) in the fall and Comparative Environment and Development Studies (ES 477/Geog 488) in the spring. Both classes were replete with energetic ES majors who were a pleasure to work with. On the publishing front, Bill was pleased to have a guest edited special issue of the Geographical Journal on the theme of poverty and the environment appear in March 2005.

Bill will be on sabbatical during the 05-06 academic year. He received a U.S. Dept. of Education Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship in support of his research project entitled "Subaltern Agroecological Knowledge and Land Reform in the Western Cape Province, South Africa." The aim of the project is to explore the knowledge of farm workers regarding agricultural landscapes and their management in the Western Cape Province of South Africa; and to examine the extent to which these insights could be leveraged for sustainable land redistribution. Finally, Bill notes that he will be teaching a course in Carleton College's ES program during the spring 2006. This is part of a Mellon funded Macalester-Carleton faculty exchange program.

Prof. Sarah West, Economics

Environmental Issues in Latin America and the Caribbean, a book that Professor West co-edited with Aldemaro Romero (former Director of the Environmental Studies Program here at Macalester) is in press at Springer. The book is a non-technical interdisciplinary collection of 12 essays, each of which uses natural or social science methods. The essays analyze a representative set of environmental issues in Latin America and the Caribbean. They consider problems at international, regional, national, and local levels and examine current and historical environmental policy. The essays are organized according to theme and approach into five parts: conservation challenges; national policies, local communities, and rural development; market mechanisms for protecting public goods; public participation and environmental justice; and the effects of development policies on the environment. Contributors are researchers from Canada, Europe, Latin America, and the United States. This book serves as a reader for undergraduates or masters students in interdisciplinary courses, a rich source of case studies for courses within one discipline, and an example of cutting-edge analyses for the educated reader interested in environmental issues in general or specific to the region.

Professor West also published two articles on vehicle pollution policy. The first, "Equity Implications of Vehicle Emissions Taxes," was published in Journal of Transport Economics and Policy. The second, "The Cost of Reducing Gasoline Consumption," is forthcoming in the papers and proceedings of the American Economic Review. She presented this paper at the 2005 American Economics Association meetings in Philadelphia.