Environmental Studies

Schwartz Outdoor Leadership, Beebe Room

This program will bring together practitioners and experts in the environmental justice movement who will focus on the interconnected issues of environmental health, and conservation politics. Speakers and participants will also explore and discuss the importance of equity, inclusiveness and diversity for the future of the environmental movement and social change.

Angela Park will be the keynote speaker. Ms. Park is the founder and executive director of Diversity Matters (soon to be Mission Critical), a Fellow of the Sustainability Institute's Donella Meadows Leadership Program, and author of Everybody's Movement: Environmental Justice and Climate Change. Ms. Park is a writer and a consultant to non-profits, governments, foundations, and companies. Much of her work focuses on the integration of social, environmental, and economic issues, and she is a leading expert on equity and diversity in the environmental field in the United States.

This symposium is free to Bowdoin students, staff, and faculty. A $10 registration fee to cover lunch is asked of other participants.

REGISTER HERE.

For more information please contact Rosie Armstrong, 207-725-3396, rarmstro@bowdoin.edu.

CO-SPONSORED BY the Departments of Africana Studies, Earth & Oceanographic Science, Gender & Women's Studies, Government & Legal Studies, History, Math, Philosophy, the Asian Studies Program, Environmental Studies Program, the McKeen Center, and Sustainable Bowdoin.

Are you interested in learning more about a career in the alternative energy field - from wind power to solar and hydro? Join three Bowdoin alums for pizza and a discussion of their work in the alternative energy field. They will also talk about how they got into the field, and give advice to students.

They have experience in financing, regulatory compliance and environmental assessments. There will be plenty of time for Q & A's and informal discussion with the panelists.

Bowdoin Alums:

Trevor Peterson '02, Project Manager, Senior Wildlife Biologist, Stantec Consulting
Katie Chapman '07, Project Manager, EDP Renewables
Abriel Ferreira '10, Pricing and Product Manager, Competitive Energy Services

Co-sponsored by Career Planning and the Environmental Studies Program

Many on campus have expressed interest in learning about the proposed Solar PV project that the college intends to build on Bowdoin's new property at Brunswick Landing and the Farley/Watson roofs. We will have a representative of SolarCity, the project developer, on campus from 3- 4 p.m. on Wednesday, February 19th.

This opportunity is open to all interested faculty, students and staff so we are hoping many of you will have the opportunity to come hear from them about the project first hand.

The event will be in Main Lounge/Moulton Union at 3:00 p.m. There is no formal agenda, just an opportunity to hear about the project and ask questions!

Making a Difference in the Private Sector: Careers in Corporate Sustainability

Panelists include:
Kevin Bright: Sustainability Coordinator, Colby College
Amy Hattan: Corporate Sustainability Officer, Thornton Tomasetti
John Rooks: Sustainability Consultant, President and Founder, The Soap Group
Brad Bowers: Plant Manager, Oakhurst Dairy

Moderated by Katye Charrette- Emerging Professionals Committee, U.S. Green Building Council

Careers in green building are many and varied. Join us to hear from professionals about their careers in Corporate Sustainability. The Green Careers Series is a fun, casual way to learn about green careers and pick the brains of folks who are working in the field. After a moderated discussion with panelists, there will be ample opportunity for Q&A and conversation.

This program is a project of the Emerging Professionals Committee of the U.S. Green Building Council, Maine Chapter, and hosted by the Bowdoin College Career Planning Center and the Environmental Studies Program. Questions? Call 725-3396.

BOWDOIN MARINE SCIENCE SEMESTER, FALL 2014
Information Session-Wednesday, Feb 19 7:00 pm
Kanbar Hall, Room 107

* Immersion semester for juniors and seniors
* Taught at the Coastal Studies Center on Orr's Island, Harpswell Sound
* Four courses in module format, field and lab experience, independent research, Marine biodiversity, biological oceanography, benthic ecology, molecular ecology & evolution
*Tropical field trip to Baja California

Interested? Come to informational meeting this Wednesday Feb.19, 7pm, Kanbar Hall, Room 107

Or contact Dave Carlon, Director of the Bowdoin Marine Lab, dcarlon@bowdoin.edu

"Volcanoes and the Great Dying:  The End-Permian Extinction", a talk by Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Mineralogical Society of America Distinguished Lecturer.  Around 252 million years ago the Siberian flood basalts intruded into and erupted onto the Siberian craton, producing about three million cubic kilometers of lava.  The flood basalt event is among several possible causes for the end-Permian extinction, the largest extinction in Earth history.

Did you know that Bowdoin will offer a Marine Science Semester at the Coastal Studies Center Fall, 2014?

Learn more Wed. 2/26 from 4:00-5:30 from Dave Carlon (marine lab director) and Sarah Kingston at the Smith Union Marine Science Semester Table

The Marine Science Semester will be an immersion program consisting of 4 courses taught at the Coastal Studies Center in module format, and will include field, lab, and independent research, and a filed trip to Baja CA.

The courses offered Fall 2014 will include: Marine Biodiversity; Biological Oceanography; Benthic Ecology; and Molecular Ecology & Evolution. and a field excursion to Baja, CA.

See the Bowdoin Marine Laboratory webpage for more information.

Questions? Contact Dave Carlon, Director of Bowdoin's marine laboratory at: dcarlon@bowdoin.edu

This screening and discussion will explore Jean Painleve's "scientific-poetic" films. These dreamlike short films reveal the wonder of sea creatures, presenting their social lives as a challenge to human conventions. Organized in conjunction with Sarah Childress's documentary film course and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art's exhibition Under the Surface: Surrealist Photography.

Speakers include: Sarah Childress, Visiting Assistant Professor of Film Studies; Janet Gannon, Lab Instructor at the Bowdoin Scientific Station of Kent Island; Marko Melendy, Bowdoin's Animal Care Supervisor; Andrea Rosen, Curatorial Assistant, Bowdoin College Museum of Art; and students in the Spring 2014 course "The Reality Effect: Documentary Film."

Bring your lunch and join us for this conference call with the Bard Center for Environmental Policy, and Micha Tomkiewicz,of Brooklyn College.

Micha Tomkiewicz is professor of physics at Brooklyn College; professor of physics and chemistry in the School for Graduate Studies of the City University of New York; and director of the Environmental Studies Program and the Electrochemistry Institute at Brooklyn College. Previously, he was divisional editor, Journal of the Electrochemical Society (1981-91); chairman, Energy and Technology Division, the Electrochemical Society (1991-93); and member, International Organizing Committee of the conferences on Photochemical Conversion and Storage of Solar Energy (1989-92).

Join Andrew C. Isenberg, historian of the American environment, the American West, and the encounter between natives and settlers, to discuss his recently published book, Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life (2013). A popular culture icon, Earp remains a legendary hero and a "beacon of rough justice in the tumultuous American West" in cinematic battles against organized crime in the 1930s, communism in the 1950s, and, most recently, al-Qaeda. Yet as Isenberg uncovers in his book, the Hollywood Earp is largely fictionalized-and imagined by Earp himself. As Earp tried to reinvent his reputation and cover up his lawless past, Isenberg writes, "He donned and shucked off roles readily, whipsawing between lawman and lawbreaker, and pursued his changing ambitions recklessly, with little thought to the cost to himself, andto others."
An engrossing account of the man and his enduring legend, Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life is a resounding biography of a quintessential American figure that questions the way in which individuals, with the help of Hollywood, can rewrite their own legacy.
Join Professor Isenberg on Thursday, March 27 at 7:00 PM in the Shannon Room (second floor, Hubbard hall) at Bowdoin College. This lecture is sponsored by the Bowdoin College Lectures and Concerts fund and the Department of History, with support from Biology, Environmental Studies, Government and Legal Studies.

We are all familiar with the sights, sounds, and smells of incomplete combustion whether from a diesel bus at the corner of a busy intersection, a backyard barbeque, or a neglected piece of toast in the toaster-oven.  Each of these ‘plume events’ is comprised of a complex mix of particulate and gas phase species whose chemical composition, phase, and concentration vary dramatically across tight spatial domains (~ meters) and fast temporal scales (~ seconds). Over the past decade, the development of real-time, quantitative, field-deployable instrumentation has provided a more detailed characterization of the physical and chemical properties of near-field combustion emissions. In this seminar I will present results obtained with two recently developed mass spectrometry tools; the Soot-Particle Aerosol Mass Spectrometer (SP-AMS) for measurement of refractory (black carbon, metals) and non-refractory (organic and inorganic) particulate matter and the Total Gas phase Organics (TGO) instrument for measurement of intermediate and semi-volatile organic gas phase species. Results from three combustion systems will be discussed: a Haitian cookstove, a gas-turbine jet engine, and a medium duty diesel engine. Collectively, the air quality and climate impacts of these combustion systems span local, regional, and global scales, further motivating the continued development of analytical techniques such as those introduced in this talk.

Scott Hamilton Kennedy comes to Bowdoin for a discussion and screening of his 2008 Oscar-nominated documentary The Garden. Kennedy's film tells the story of South Central Farm, a community garden and urban farm in Los Angeles. When the landowner decides he no longer wants the farm on his property, the working class families who created and work on South Central Farm protest - confronting a web of backroom land development deals, green politics, and corruption.

Indiewire says of The Garden: "(the film) exposes the fault lines in American society and raises crucial and challenging questions about liberty, equality, and justice for the poorest and most vulnerable among us."

Includes appearances by Danny Glover, Daryl Hannah, Willie Nelson, and Joan Baez.

The Garden website

Sponsored by Lectures and Concerts, the Film Studies Program, the Environmental Studies Program, the Latin American Studies Program, the Center for the Common Good, the Africana Studies Program, and the English Department.

Contact the Film Studies Program at 725-3552 for more information.

As a documentary filmmaker, David Conover has spent twenty-five years on some of the most extreme coasts on earth, sharing his eclectic explorations and innovations with a camera.

Weaving clips and personal stories, Conover's talk is an inter-disciplinary visit to that dynamic zone between land and sea; from Newfoundland to Madagascar, Svalbard to the Galapagos, analog past to the digital future.

Encounters include an around-the-world voyage with geneticist Craig Venter, an excavation of the pirate Captain Kidd's ship, and a paddle with the extinct Great Auk.

Conover is Bowdoin's 2014-15 Coastal Studies scholar and will be teaching courses in the fall and spring semesters of next year.

Sponsored by the Film Studies Program. For more information, call 725-3552.

Dan Kahan is the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology at Yale Law School. In addition to risk perception, his areas of research include science communication and the application of decision science to law and policymaking. He is a member of the Cultural Cognition Project, an interdisciplinary team of scholars who use empirical methods to examine the impact of group values on perceptions of risk and related facts. In studies funded by the National Science Foundation, his research has investigated public disagreement over climate change, public reactions to emerging technologies, and conflicting public impressions of scientific consensus.

For more information and to view the full Spring 2014 Common Hour schedule, please visit: Events and Summer Programs: Common Hour

Leda N. Kobziar University of Florida Associate Professor of Fire Science & Forest Conservation

Her research interests include: the efficacy of fuels reduction and prescribed burning treatments in forest restoration; predicting potential fire behavior and severity; using dendrochronology to determine historical fire regimes; and the relationships between fire, fuels management, and soil carbon efflux.

The lecture will be delivered by Steven F. Hayward, currently the inaugural visiting scholar in conservative thought and policy at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

From 2002 to 2012 Professor Hayward was the F.K Weyerhaeuser Fellow in Law and Economics at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC, and senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco. He holds a Ph.D in American Studies and an M.A. in Government from Claremont Graduate School. He writes frequently on a wide range of current topics, including environmentalism, law, economics, and public policy for publications including National Review, Reason, The Weekly Standard, The American Spectator, The Public Interest, the Claremont Review of Books, and Policy Review. He is the author of a two-volume narrative history of Ronald Reagan and his effect on American political life, The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980, and The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counter-Revolution, 1980-1989 (CrownForum books).

The evening is sponsored by the John C. Donovan Lecture Fund, which was established at Bowdoin College in 1990 by family members, professional colleagues and friends of John C. Donovan. Donovan served as Bowdoin's DeAlva Stanwood Alexander Professor of Government from 1965 until his death in 1984. Established through the leadership of Shepard Lee, Bowdoin Class of 1947, this fund is used to support lectures in the field of political science.

Protracted droughts and scarce water resources combined with internal and cross-border migration have contributed to the securitization of discourses around migration and water in much of the Middle East. This presentation will examine how Israel, Jordan, and Syria frame issues of water, climate change, and migration as national security concerns in different ways. Dr. Weinthal and her colleagues identify two different framings of the water-climate-migration nexus, depending on whether migration is largely external or internal. In Israel and Jordan, concern with influxes of external migrants elevated migration as a security issue in part through impacts on already-scarce water resources. In Syria, where severe drought in the early 2000s prompted large-scale internal migration, officials downplayed connections between scarce water resources, drought, and internal migration, part of a broader pattern of rural neglect.

Dr. Weinthal specializes in global environmental politics and natural resource policies with a particular emphasis on water and energy. The main focus of her research is on the origins and effects of environmental institutions. Her research on water politics in conflict regions (e.g. the Gaza Strip in the Middle East) focuses on how the environment might be harnessed for peace building.

Dr. Weinthal is Associate Professor of Environmental Policy and Associate Dean for International Programs at Duke University, Nicholas School of the Environment. She earned a PhD in Political Science from Columbia University.

Co-sponsored by the Government Department and Environmental Studies Program with support from the John C. Donovan Lecture Fund.

How will we power our cars in the near future? Join three panelists from different perspectives to explore the issue. Ben Burke is a geologist with Noble Energy, Inc., a natural gas company; Mark Rosenblatt is an adviser to and founder of several different organizations that work to open the transportation market to competitive fuels; and Tom Twist is a sustainability officer for the Chewonki Foundation who is responsible for all renewable energy advancements on the400 acre Chewonki campus.

Matthew Wilson's presentation draws parallels between the rising consumer-electronic sector associated with personal activity monitors and the rapid visioning of smart urbanism. He interrogates developments in interoperability and propriety, competition and habit, fashion and surveillance. He addresses the social-cultural and political implications for this refiguring of spatial thought and action as well as the capacities reinforced and developed through the implementation of these technologies and techniques.

Matthew Wilson is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning and Design at the Graduate School of Design and Visiting Scholar at the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University and Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Kentucky, where he co-directs the New Mapping Collaboratory. Matt holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Washington. His website is http://matthew-w-wilson.com.

Calling all creative writers, environmentalists, conspiracy theorists, and lovers of words:

Join Sarah Braunstein, Novelist and Coastal Studies Scholar for a half-day writing workshop at the Coastal Studies Center Saturday, May 3 from 11:00-4:00.  Only 20 spaces are available for Bowdoin students. To reserve a spot e-mail:bowdoincoastalstudies@gmail.com with your name and Bowdoin ID number

Open to Bowdoin students free of charge, lunch (board transfer) and transportation provided.