Tuesday, April 9
Ocean Acidification: What’s It Got To Do With Oysters?
Dr. Libby Jewett P’13.5 & P’16.5, Director of NOAA’s Ocean Acidification Program
The Orchard, Franklin Environmental Center 103
4:30p
Dr. Jewett will speak about the other big change being caused by the rise in atmospheric CO2. Ocean Acidification refers to the change in ocean chemistry which is already causing harm to marine ecosystems.
Sponsored by the Program in Environmental Studies and Franklin Environmental Center
Thursday, April 11
Stories from the Wilderness
Sylvia Johnson ‘00.5, documentary filmmaker
Howard E. Woodin ES Colloquium Series
The Orchard, Franklin Environmental Center 103
12:30 – 1:20p
Bring lunch to enjoy during the talk
How can film and visual storytelling be used to protect our wild lands and promote conservation? Last year as a Film Fellow with the National Park Service, Sylvia, along with several other filmmakers, was on a mission: to go into National Park Service Wilderness and bring back stories from the wild. Braving the elements, they produced “America’s Wilderness,” an NPS web series that celebrates the beauty and value of designated Wilderness areas while challenging stereotypes about who enjoys these protected places and why.
Thursday, April 11
Plastics, bisphenol A (BPA), and research credibility: When a scientist collides with industry and the media
Dr. Patricia Hunt, School of Molecular Biosciences, Center for Reproductive Biology, Washington State University
MBH 216
4:30p
When a mistake in an animal facility resulted in the accidental exposure of her mice to the estrogenic chemical bisphenol A (BPA), Dr. Hunt’s research career took an unexpected turn. During the past 15 years she has conducted studies of the reproductive effects of BPA exposure. Her findings have placed her in the media spotlight and in front of state legislators and federal agencies. She will detail her journey and her struggle to maintain her scientific integrity in the face of industry attacks on her research and her own growing concern about bisphenol A and similar chemicals.
Sponsored by the George B. Saul II Lecture Fund, Biology Department
Thursday, April 11
Rebuilding the Foodshed: Higher Education’s Role in Creating Sustainable, Just, and Humane Food Systems
Robert A. Jones ’59 Conference Room
7:30 – 9:15p
Real Food Week Keynote Speaker Philip Ackerman-Leist, author of Rebuilding the Foodshed and Up Tunket Road, is a professor at Green Mountain College, where he established the college’s farm and sustainable agriculture curriculum and is director of the Green Mountain College Farm & Food Project. He also founded and directs the college’s Masters in Sustainable Food Systems (MSFS), the nation’s first online graduate program in food systems, featuring applied comparative research of students’ home bioregions. He and his wife, Erin, farmed in the South Tirol region of the Alps and North Carolina before beginning their sixteen-year homesteading and farming venture in Pawlet, Vermont. With more than two decades of “field experience” working on farms, in the classroom, and with regional food systems collaborators, Philip’s work is focused on examining and reshaping local and regional food systems from the ground up.
Monday, April 15
The Arab Role in Mediterranean Gastronomy
Robert A. Jones ’59 Conference Room
7:30 – 9:30p
A lecture by Clifford A. Wright, cook, food writer, and research scholar specializing in the cuisines of the Mediterranean. He is the author of ten cookbooks, including A Mediterranean Feast, the winner of the James Beard/KitchenAid Cookbook of the Year and Best Writing on Food awards and nominee for the International Association of Culinary Professionals? Cookbook of the Year in 2000. The New York Times has recognized Wright as one of the most innovative cooks in America in its ?Cooks on the Map? series and praised him for his style of emphasizing regional Mediterranean home cooking with its historical background. He writes frequently for Saveur, Fine Cooking, Gourmet, Bon Appetit, and Food & Wine. He also wrote all food entries for Columbia University’s Encyclopedia of Modern Middle East. Wright’s scholarly approach to food writing is rooted in his successful career in the field of international affairs, beginning as a researcher at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, then as a staff fellow at the Institute of Arab Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and finally as the Executive Director of the American Middle East Peace Research Institute.
Sponsored by Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs, Middle East Studies Program, Pardon Tillinghast Endowment Funds, European Studies Program, Academic Enrichment Fund, Departments of Arabic, Classics, French, History, Italian, Environmental Studies, and Cook Commons
Wednesday, April 17
National Conversation on Democracy and Climate
Twilight Auditorium 101
7:00p
Be part of a nationwide screening of the powerful film The Island President, the best movie about climate change of the last few years. The film will be followed by a live webinar with film director Jon Shenk, Former UN Deputy Permanent Representative to the Maldives, Thilmeeza Hussain, and Midd alum and Executive Director and Co-Founder of 350.org, May Boeve. The discussion will be moderated by the Director of the Bard Center for Environmental Policy and Bard’s MBA in Sustainability, Eban Goodstein, and is sponsored by The C2C Fellows Network and the The Bard Center for Environmental Policy.
The Island President links the struggle for democracy and human rights with the fight to stabilize the climate. This is the exact challenge facing us right here in the United States. Billions of dollars in fossil fuel money is corrupting our democracy and poisoning the future.
Wednesday, April 17
Real Food Week Panel
Axinn Center 229
7:30 – 9:00p
In this panel discussion, professors, faculty, and community members will discuss the economic, geographic, and social components of local food purchasing, particularly as it relates to an institution like Middlebury College.
Friday, April 19
ES Senior Theses Presentations
New this year – ES seniors will present their senior theses work at the Spring Student Symposium (session times are not yet confirmed).
Katie Anderson – Symbionts, Cyborgs, and Other Companions
Adviser: Dan Brayton
Jeff Jaehyuk – Neoliberal Norms of Development and Water Injustice: Case Study of Fiji and Bali
Adviser: Kemi Fuentes-George
Brian Clow – Integrated Landscape-scale Conservation Policy in Vermont
Adviser: Christopher McGrory Klyza
Now through April 21
Exhibit: Nature Transformed – Edward Burtynsky’s Vermont Quarry Photographs in Context
Mahaney Center for the Arts, Museum of Art, Christian A Johnson Memorial Gallery
Burtynsky’s iconic photographs of the quarries of Vermont are explored within the context of the geological and social history of the area, including in particular the Italian immigrant stoneworkers in the granite quarries near Barre. This exhibition was organized by the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College and generously supported by Raphael and Jane Bernstein/Parnassus Foundation and Laurie Jean Weil DVM in honor of her parents, Jean and Bucks Weil, Dartmouth Class of 1935. Supported at Middlebury by the Christian A. Johnson Memorial Foundation and Friends of the Art Museum. Free
Wednesday, April 24
Film screening: Chasing Ice
Followed by discussion with James Balog, photographer and founder of The Extreme Ice Survey
Dana Auditorium
7:00p
In the spring of 2005, acclaimed environmental photographer James Balog headed to the Arctic on a tricky assignment for National Geographic: to capture images to help tell the story of the Earth’s changing climate. Even with a scientific upbringing, Balog had been a skeptic about climate change. But that first trip north opened his eyes to the biggest story in human history and sparked a challenge within him that would put his career and his very well-being at risk.
Chasing Ice is the story of one man’s mission to change the tide of history by gathering undeniable evidence of our changing planet. Within months of that first trip to Iceland, the photographer conceived the boldest expedition of his life: The Extreme Ice Survey. With a band of young adventurers in tow, Balog began deploying revolutionary time-lapse cameras across the brutal Arctic to capture a multi-year record of the world’s changing glaciers.