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(01/21/16 12:25am)
Distrust of scientific experts is widespread in the United States. It fuels the anti-vaccine, climate change denial and creationist movements, to name only a few of its most noticeable consequences. Why is there pervasive distrust, when is it justified and what can scientists do to combat it? The George Nye and Anne Walker Boardman Professor of Mental and Moral Science Heidi Grasswick explored these questions on Wednesday, Jan. 13 in a lecture titled “In Science We Trust! – Or Not? Developing a situated account of responsible trust in scientific experts.”
Grasswick began by exploring a number of cases of scientific distrust. A growing number of parents in the United States have stopped vaccinating their children after a now discredited report linked the MMR vaccine to autism, despite the reassurances of the medical and scientific communities. Close to 25 percent of Americans do not believe that global warming is real.
“Scientists are often surprised or dismayed when their work is met with distrust or rejection by members of the general public,” Grasswick said. “As far as they are concerned, they are engaged in the most robust form of knowledge generation available. They are the experts on their topics, and it seems to follow that non-experts should follow what they have to say. Furthermore, since sound policy making needs to based on sound science, it’s deeply worrisome that trust in science is not widespread.”
However, because the scientific community sometimes makes mistakes or acts irresponsibly, distrust can be warranted. For instance, during the Tuskegee syphilis experiment from 1932 to 1972, scientists studied the effects of untreated syphilis on hundreds of black men even after penicillin was discovered as a viable treatment. Thalidomide, a morning sickness drug, was given to tens of thousands of women during the 1950s, causing thousands of infants to be born with malformed limbs. Even the people most trusting of the scientific community often roll their eyes at trending diets and seemingly arbitrary nutrition suggestions.
“While widespread distrust in science is worrisome, what’s perhaps more worrisome is that epistemologically distrust in science can be understood to be well grounded,” Grasswick said. “Although scientists are rightly concerned about scientific distrust, they should be even more concerned that despite their best intentions, scientists are not always as trustworthy as they suppose. There may be times when people are too trusting. This is where my interest lies as an epistemologist.”
Grasswick then made a case for developing a better understanding of responsible trust and when and why the public should trust scientific experts. She explained that ideally, trust should match the trustworthiness of the provider, and that it is important to focus on what makes a provider trustworthy.
Some scientists and philosophers believe that the solution is the information deficient model, which claims that distrust will decrease when we increase scientific literacy, either by teaching people about specific scientific issues or about the scientific method. This way, the theory goes, people have enough knowledge to judge data and evidence and determine the trustworthiness of a source for themselves.
While Grasswick agreed that increasing scientific literacy is important, she noted that other forces are at play. Psychologists have long known about motivated reasoning, the idea that, given the same information, people with opposing ideologies will interpret data differently, searching for evidence that reaffirms their preexisting beliefs. Grasswick also pointed out that lack of knowledge does not necessarily cause distrust; rather, distrust can occur when the scientific community does not understand a group’s concerns.
Grasswick placed more importance on understanding the idea of a trustworthy testimony, and defined a few components of trustworthiness.
“Someone listening to a testimony will judge whether or not the expert is competent and sincere,” she said. “The sincerity requirement indicates a relationship between the speaker and the hearer, and an attitude toward the person with information. When the knowledge in question is significant to the hearer, the relationship must be more robust to support the depth and breadth of the person making themselves vulnerable.”
The idea of trustworthiness being interpersonal opens up the possibility that different populations could have varying levels of distrust based on their historical interactions with the scientific community. The experience of being marginalized or subordinated could contribute to the warranted distrust of a community. Therefore, it is the character of institutions, and not necessarily the quality of the knowledge they generate, that inspires trust from people.
Emphasizing that the purpose of her presentation was to raise important questions, Grasswick stressed that every issue differed from one another.
“It’s obvious to me that scientific literacy is not the simple solution, because trust in the information is not all that is required,” Grasswick said. “More attention needs to be paid to differences in situation, and whom we are trustworthy to. We need to think about the legacy of the injustices in the history of science. And we definitely need to make sure there are no more failures of trust, or keep their numbers down because they can do huge damage. It gives us one more reason why racism and sexism and other forms of prejudice need to be eliminated from the practice of science.”
(01/20/16 11:57pm)
On January 7, Governor of Vermont Peter Shumlin delivered his sixth and final State of the State address, in which he reflected on his successes in office — and the challenges that lie ahead for Vermont. Shumlin has elected not to run in the upcoming gubernatorial election, ending his five year stretch as governor.
In the hourlong address, Shumlin maintained a proud and defiant tone.
“We started at the trough of the Great Recession, unsure whether we’d be able to build back,” he said. “Soon after, Irene struck. We were down and we got knocked down again. But we stood back up.”
In the beginning of his speech, Shumlin outlined what he saw as the most important goals for the state: a dynamic economy, an improved education system, a renewable energy policy, a reformed criminal justice system, and affordable and effective health care statewide.
Of these issues, Shumlin first addressed the economy. “We added 17,600 new jobs in the last five years,” he began, “and have grown per capita incomes at or above the national rate every year I have been Governor. That has never happened in Vermont’s history.”
Shumlin also described an “agricultural renaissance” that has accounted for 4,400 new jobs in Vermont.
“In the past two years,” he said, “I’ve had the privilege of moving the Best Cheese in America award from one Vermont farm to another Vermont farm. Take that Wisconsin.”
Shumlin warned, however, that without effective education reform, this economic recovery could be hindered.
The biggest problem for most employers, claimed Shumlin, was their inability to find “trained and educated workers to help them grow. They know that our success in moving more low-income Vermont kids beyond high school will determine their success.”
Accordingly, Shumlin’s new budget will include a grant of 250 dollars to every college-bound Vermonter, and 500 dollars for every low-income college-bound student.
The governor also announced a new education program, called Step Up, which will fund a semester of free courses and support services for first generation and low income students.
Shumlin also warned that failing to address climate change could threaten to derail this economic recovery.
“The most tropical Christmas in memory,” he warned, “reminds us that climate change threatens the Vermont we love, from our ski season to our lakes. That’s why we are working so hard to move to green, clean renewable energy that is creating jobs, reducing power rates and putting money in Vermonters pockets while we do it.”
That Vermont has more clean energy jobs per capita than any other state, and solar power has replaced nuclear as the primary energy provider during peak energy hours, are two facts that Shumlin pointed to as indicators of progress.
Yet Shumlin pushed the envelope further, urging legislators to follow California’s lead and send him a divestiture bill.
“[Pollution] sickens our children, creates acid rain, dumps mercury on our forests and in our lakes and increases greenhouse gas emissions,” Shumlin said.
In what he described as “a page right out of big tobacco,” Shumlin slammed ExxonMobil for their complicity in climate change and their efforts to obscure the truth.
“Vermont should not wait to rid ourselves of ExxonMobil stock,” he said. “It has been clearly documented that since the 1980’s, ExxonMobil’s own scientists have long known about the dangers of global warming, and chose to conceal that from the public.”
Shumlin then addressed opiate addiction in Vermont, a topic to which he dedicated his entire 2014 State of the State address. At the time, he said that opiate addiction was a threat to Vermonters’ very way of life.
Shumlin launched a closing salvo at the FDA, which he described as the very root of the problem: “In 2010, we prescribed enough OxyContin to keep every adult in America high for an entire month; by 2012 we issued enough prescriptions to give every American adult their own personal bottle of pills ... The $11 billion-dollar a year opiate industry in America knows no shame.”
In response to this overprescription, Shumlin sought to set a limit at the number of pills patients could bring home after a procedure, to expand ‘take back programs’ to reobtain painkillers, and to prevent addicts from acquiring drugs outside state lines.
Next, Shumlin widened his attack to include not only the FDA and painkillers, but the illegality of marijuana. Citing the state’s relative success in regulating medical marijuana, Shumlin advocated to end the “era of prohibition that is currently failing us so miserably.”
Shumlin explained that he would insist that five things must occur if he were to sign a bill legalizing marijuana. They include finding a way to keep the drugs out of the hands of underage kids, a tax low enough to still wipe out illicit drug networks, using the revenue from legalization to expand treatment programs, increasing law-enforcement capabilities vis-a-vis impaired drivers, and a temporary ban on edibles.
Shumlin used his concluding remarks to address a moral issue facing the state: the acceptance of Syrian refugees.
“I believe Vermont must not abandon its long heritage of being a welcoming state to those who are escaping unimaginable horror to seek a better life,” he said.
“We are blessed to live in a state where so many reject fear and hatred and I pledge to continue to work together with President Obama, our refugee resettlement community, clergy, volunteers, and our mayors to make our state a beacon of hope and hospitality to Muslims, to our Syrian brothers and sisters, and to all who seek to build a better life right here in Vermont.”
He then thanked the Vermont people for the opportunity to serve as governor, and stepped back from the podium.
(12/10/15 4:08am)
So great is the sadness of our times. The recent shootings in Colorado Springs and San Bernadino brought to light a disturbing fact; in the United States this year there have been more days with mass shootings than not in the United States. From Beirut to Kenya to Lebanon to Paris to Syria, the global community is no less spared from violent attacks grounded in racial, cultural and religious discrimination, the need for resources and the desire for power.
Our own campus environment mirrors the turbulence of the world, confirming once and for all that we do not in fact live in a bubble. Just think — if we are so separated from the rest of the world, why does our campus possess the same forms of ingrained racism and widespread mental health concerns that permeate the “outside?” Whether we want to believe it or not, we are firmly grounded in this world and if we are to garner any hope for addressing these challenges, it’s high time we open our eyes and acknowledge the structures of injustice upon which they’re based.
This is essentially the mission of Middlebury’s divestment campaign. Put another way, we at DivestMidd seek nothing if not to raise awareness of the rampant yet often ignored human rights violation of unprecedented proportion: climate injustice.
You may ask – what is climate justice? In short, over the last 300 years, developed nations industrialized via fossil fuel extractive economies. By some disturbing fate of geography, the result of this industrialization – floods, drought, rising seas – have disproportionately affected poorer nations in the global south.
The same goes for the home-front. The consequences of the fossil fuel industry’s actions here in the U.S. – in terms of pollution and economic vulnerability spurred by the all-consuming boom-and-bust nature of extraction – are disproportionately placed on poorer Americans and people of color.
And while rising sea levels, drought and warming temperatures – not to mention the imperialistic practices of the fossil fuel industry itself – have moved into developing countries and stripped the world’s least resourced and most marginalized communities of their lands, livelihoods and cultures. The wealthier countries who caused these devastating effects have done next to nothing. The future of our planet and global peace are threatened as a result.
And nowhere is this more poignant than in Syria. Beginning in 2007, Syria entered a period of severe drought. This period of draught caused the price of food to double and forced millions of small farmers to abandon the countryside for Syrian cities already overcrowded with more than a million similarly desperate Iraqi refugees.
Syria’s representative to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization feared the situation was contributing to a “perfect storm” that could destabilize the country,and desperately pleaded for foreign aid. Yet, the United States and the rest of the global community remained largely unmoved by the Syrian’s appeal. And while the atrocities of Bashar al-Assad’s regime likely trump the destabilizing effects of the drought in terms of causing the war in Syria, it’s probably “not a coincidence,” as Secretary of State John Kerry recently noted, that the war was preceded by four years of failed rains, which scientists cite as a result of human-induced climate change.
Upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, Wangari Maathai, the first African woman and the first environmentalist to receive the prize, proclaimed that: “there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground.” At no time has that shift been more necessary than now. Our actions to promote global peace and environmental stewardship must match the gravity of the injustices at hand.
Thus, as we move closer to accomplishing the goal of carbon neutrality, let us celebrate this truly incredible accomplishment, which I may say was a project originally conceived of and designed by a group of student environmental activists. And then let us go forward with the awareness that the severity of our time demands that we move beyond a singular focus on our own “carbon footprint.” In this way we are called to a greater level of responsibility to the global community – the cause of climate justice.
Much of this work begins with awareness about what exactly constitutes climate injustice. In this pursuit, DivestMidd is working closely with President Patton and other members of the administration to bring a series of speakers to campus to educate the community on how we can better align our investments with our environmentally and globally minded values and take new actions to address structures of social and economic oppression that have paved the way for climate injustice.
Our hope is that these forums will spur a broad campus conversation on how we can better work to address the climate crisis by shifting the paradigm of our conception of environmentalism to ensure a just transition towards a sustainable future.
The movement we imagine calls for planetary awareness – the realization that we are all inextricably linked. We seek to address the root structural causes of climate injustice – rampant inequality, the pervasive notion that some lives matter more than others and the idea that the wealthiest can continue to deplete our world’s finite resources at a tragic pace and treat the atmosphere like a garbage dump. It is no coincidence that six of our world’s top 10 wealthiest corporations are involved in fossil fuel extraction.
Some may question whether this movement will be successful. Can we sustain a global climate justice movement, essentially a global movement for justice at its core? A part of me fears the task is too large for us to hold. Even feminist leader Gloria Steinem conceded that women’s liberation would necessarily have to wait until black power was won, though we still seem to be waiting for both to arrive today. From the Chartists and Owenites in Industrial England to the Communist revolution to Occupy just a few years back, movements that have sought such large scale structural changes often fail to achieve their goals.
But a larger part of me fears even more that we don’t have a choice not to try and build this movement, no matter how much we may fail in the process. The seas will rise, disease – spurred by warmer temperatures – will spread rapidly into already vulnerable regions, the rich will continue to profit from the extraction of the poor’s land and labor and the global south will find the consequences of climate change exacerbated and even more difficult to overcome through adaptation. The global north is also now feeling the effects of climate change to an increased degree. This is everyone’s fight. This is not charity. Undoubtedly, we must try to build a successful climate justice movement.
The gravity of our call becomes even more urgent upon the realization that the leaders charged with protecting human society and the planet are doing – this seems to be a trend – next to nothing. The UN climate conference in Paris will likely conclude – for the 21st time since 1992 – without a binding, and therefore effective, commitment from the world’s most powerful countries, who also happen to be the largest emitters. This is because world leaders know a binding treaty is impossible considering Senate Republicans in the U.S. – largely financed by the fossil fuel industry – have vowed to block a binding treaty and any monetary commitment to aid the most affected and least resourced countries in efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change.
As an institution of higher education and a self-proclaimed environmental leader, we are called to inhabit the fullest conception of these identities. Let us see the climate crisis for the human rights violation that it is, and match the urgency of this crisis through grassroots mobilization around education, political change, economic redistribution, restorative justice, socially responsible investment and yet unborn ideas that will enable us to transition towards a more just and sustainable world.
(12/10/15 2:29am)
This year, a US national security report labeled climate change as “an urgent and growing threat to our national security.” While climate change is a natural occurrence, there is much evidence to show that humans have greatly increased the rate of climate change. This increased rate is largely due to the increase of atmospheric greenhouse gases, released by human activity. Greenhouse gases essentially trap heat in the lower atmosphere, which contributes to a rise in temperatures. Climate change is a global issue, one that will affect every corner of the earth. The College has been one of many institutions of higher education to take a leading role in addressing climate change.
A Goal of Carbon Neutrality
On May 5, 2007, the Trustees adopted the Resolution on Achieving Carbon Neutrality by 2016. Carbon neutrality is defined as net zero carbon emissions, which requires that an institution “remove” as much carbon dioxide equivalent from the atmosphere as it emits.
In the resolution, the Trustees wrote that “a goal of carbon neutrality for Middlebury College by 2016, while challenging, is feasible through energy conservation and efficiency, renewable fuel sources, technology innovations, educational programming and learning, and offset purchases after all other feasible measures have been taken.” With 2016 right around the corner, it is time to consider where the College is on its quest for carbon neutrality, and what can still be done to further its environmental mission.
The Climate Action Plan (CAP), adopted in 2008, targeted heating and cooling, electricity, vehicles, college travel, and waste minimization as areas in which the College could reduce net emissions to progress towards carbon neutrality. At the time of the report, heating and cooling made the largest contribution to emissions at 89 percent, travel and vehicles came in a distant second at nine percent, and electricity and waste accounted for only one percent of emissions each. Since the CAP went into effect, the College has made strides to reach carbon neutrality and reduce emissions in each of these areas.
Waste
Emissions from decomposing waste comprised only one percent of the College’s total emissions in 2008. These emissions result from waste decomposing in landfills or being burned, both of which release greenhouse gases.
All of the College’s waste is already sorted in the recycling center, recycling as much as possible.
Recommendations to further reduce waste included integrating waste minimization and sustainable practices into the residential life system, and creating a service requirement for first-years in the dining halls or recycling center to develop an understanding of the waste generated by the College.
To address emissions from waste, the College has increased signage promoting sustainable practices on campus and conducted campaigns to raise student awareness about waste. However, the student body is still largely unaware of the College’s waste because the waste management is so far removed from students. Though educating the student body would be valuable, the low level of emissions from waste have, understandably, ensured that it is not a top priority.
Vehicle Emissions
Vehicle emissions and emissions from travel make up another nine percent of the College’s greenhouse gas emissions. Travel and vehicle usage are necessary for the function of the College, and so these emissions cannot be eliminated within the confines of modern technology. To reduce emissions from travel, the CAP advised increasing education about the impacts of travel, stressing videoconferencing as an alternative to traveling and upgrading the vehicle fleet to more energy efficient vehicles.
Since 2008, the College has seen an increase in greenhouse gas emissions from waste and air travel, but a decrease in emissions from mobile combustion (which include road vehicles and construction equipment).
In 2007, the College estimated that it generated 137 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MTCDE) due to solid waste. By 2014, that number had increased slightly to 153 MTCDE. Emissions from air travel increased more dramatically over this same period, from 1381 MTCDE in 2007 to 2346 MTCDE in 2014. Emissions from mobile combustion have decreased from 408 to 370 MTCDE.
In light of the increasing size of the student body, it is admirable that emissions from waste and mobile combustion have not risen significantly. Air travel is a much larger contributor to the College’s emissions, though, and yearly emissions have increased by almost 1000 MTCDE since 2007.
The College has certainly made progress since 2007, but student awareness about emissions is still lacking and emissions from air travel have increased dramatically.
Electricity
Emissions from purchased electricity accounted for only one percent of the College’s overall emissions in 2008. By 2014, this figure had risen to almost seven percent. This increase in percentage was largely due to a decrease in net emissions from heating and cooling. However, emissions from purchased electricity did rise from 676 MTCDE in 2007 to 864 tons in 2014.
Of the 22 million kilowatt hours of electricity the College uses each year, 20 percent is cogenerated on campus by turbines connected to the central heating plant. The remaining 80 percent of the College’s electricity is purchased from Green Mountain Power (GMP). This purchased electricity accounts for the greenhouse gas emissions from electricity, because the electricity the College purchases from GMP is not necessarily from carbon neutral sources.
Until 2013, 70 percent of Vermont’s power came from nuclear energy, which is carbon neutral. Much of the rest of the state’s electricity came from hydropower, another source of clean energy. The Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, which supplied most of Vermont’s nuclear power, shut down in late 2014. The Entergy Corporation, which operated the power plant, cited economic reasons for closing the plant. Consequently, GMP has had to purchase electricity from other sources.
GMP predicts that only 55 percent of its fuel mix in 2015 will be renewable, coming from nuclear and hydroelectric sources. The other 45 percent will consist mainly of “system” power, which comes from various sources, including fossil fuels. In calculating carbon emissions from purchased electricity, the College must consider the ultimate source of its electricity.
Since 2007, carbon emissions due to purchased electricity at the College have risen by 188 MTCDE, nearly 30 percent. Though only a small contribution to the College’s overall carbon emissions, the College should continue to investigate ways to reduce these emissions. To help reduce net emissions from electricity, the CAP recommended conservation as well as investigating alternative energy sources, such as wind and solar power.
In 2012 the College installed a small 143kW demonstration solar system near McCardell Bicentennial Hall, which consists of 34 solar trackers. In total, the system produces about 200,000 kilowatt-hours annually: one percent of the College’s total electricity consumption. The system generates enough electricity to power Forest Hall.
Solar power is inherently renewable, and thus an excellent option to offset the College’s energy usage. However, current solar technology is not conducive to power generation at the scale necessary for the College. The College should continue to pursue conservation and other efforts to reduce overall electricity usage.
Heating and Cooling
The largest contribution to the College’s carbon emissions comes from heating and cooling. In 2008, heating and cooling constituted 89 percent of the College’s emissions. Most of the emissions came from the combustion of no. 6 fuel oil to heat and cool buildings; the College was burning about 2,000,000 gallons per year, which released 23,877 MTCDE in 2006-07. Another 2,009 MTCDE came from the combustion of no. fuel oil, and 623 from propane.
The CAP clearly stressed the need to use carbon neutral fuel sources to heat and cool the campus if the College is to reach carbon neutrality by 2016.
The College’s $12 million biomass plant, opened in 2009, was a major step toward reducing net emissions from heating and cooling the College. The biomass plant burns wood, which the College considers a carbon neutral fuel source because the same amount of carbon dioxide is absorbed by the trees as is released in combustion. The plant utilizes a process known as biomass gasification to combust woodchips, which is much more efficient than traditional methods of burning wood. The heat generated from this combustion is used to make steam, which is piped throughout the campus to meet the College’s heating and cooling needs.
While the net emissions from the biomass plant are zero, this does not mean it has no emissions. The emissions from the plant are somewhat lower than those from burning fuel oil, and emissions resulting from chipping and transporting the wood to the biomass facility are not factored into the assessment of carbon neutrality.
Unfortunately, the biomass plant is not large enough to meet all of the College’s heating and cooling needs. In addition to biomass combustion, the College still burns 640,000 gallons of no.6 fuel oil each year. To address this issue, the College is undergoing a switch to burning bio-methane instead of fuel oil.
The use of bio-methane was made possible by the approval of the VT Gas Addison Rutland Natural Gas Project (Phase 1). Bio-methane is chemically equivalent to natural gas, and is produced by the digestion of organic waste.
A spur on the new natural gas pipeline from Colchester, VT to the Addison and Rutland area will allow the College to easily transport bio-methane to campus. The bio-methane will be produced offsite, at a local dairy farm. The use of bio-methane to phase out fuel oil is very important because the College considers bio-methane a carbon neutral fuel, and thus its use will greatly reduce the College’s net emissions from heating and cooling.
The College has also made strides to reduce emissions from heating and cooling by improving building efficiency.
In 2007, a survey of buildings at the College indicated that 53 percent of the square footage on campus performed well below current energy code standards. Since then, the College has had two buildings receive Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum certification, and is seeking LEED Gold certification for Virtue Field House.
The College’s efforts have resulted in a 66 percent reduction in net emissions from stationary combustion sources, such as boilers, heaters and ovens, since 2007. From 2013 to 2014, the College emitted a net of only 8,996 MTCDE due to stationary combustion, as compared to 26,509 MTCDE in 2006 to 2007. However, biogenic emissions — those due to combustion of biologically based materials (wood) — from 2013 to 2014 were 21,658 MTCDE. This is not counted in the College’s assessment of net emissions from stationary combustion because it is considered carbon neutral. Though the College may exclude these emissions, the carbon neutrality of biomass combustion is disputed by many.
Our Carbon Footprint
In 2014, the College reported gross emissions of 8,996 MTCDE from stationary combustion, 370 from mobile combustion, 864 from purchased electricity, 2,346 from air travel, and 153 from solid waste. This amounts to total emissions of 12,729 MTCDE. The College also included reductions of 10 MTCDE due to purchase of renewable energy credits (RECs), 550 from carbon offsets purchased, and 9,905 MTCDE from sequestration due to college-owned lands. In all, this amounted to a reported net emissions of 2,264 MTCDE.
The College’s many efforts, especially the switch to bio-methane for heating and cooling, will further decrease the net carbon emissions for 2016. If necessary, the College can purchase carbon offsets in order to meet its goal. In assessing its greenhouse gas emissions, the College employs a custom tool tailored to its needs. It is worthwhile to note that other methods of assessing emissions may yield drastically different results.
Carbon neutrality, though an important step for the College, is by no means an end goal. As 2016 draws closer, it is time to begin discussion of the next steps. The College should continue to demonstrate leadership by further reducing its environmental impact.
The College’s quest for carbon neutrality came about because of the actions of a dedicated group of students, faculty, and staff, who challenged the College to adopt an ambitious goal. Those students have long since left Middlebury and ventured into the world; now, it is our turn to take up the mantle, and push the College to new heights.
It is easy to look at the issue of climate change and give up because it is so daunting, but every great change begins with small actions. It is unrealistic to expect that everyone will consider the gravity of this issue and take action. I hope, however, that we will continue to consider the impact of our actions, from reducing the use of vehicles to turning out the lights. As you go about your daily life, take a moment to consider the following question: What can you do to live more sustainably? Every action, no matter how small, makes a difference.
(12/10/15 12:17am)
Although Vermont is over 3,000 miles from Paris, Vermonters are not letting the distance silence their voices on climate change action. Since the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference began in Paris last week, Vermonters have been engaged in many capacities. Some rallied locally, others went to the State House, and still others, including Governor Peter Shumlin, were invited to speak in Paris.
Right here in Middlebury, 55 to 60 people gathered in Triangle Park on Saturday, Nov. 28, just two days before the start of the Paris climate summit. People attended this rally from as far away as Montpelier and Waitsfield, hoping to send the message that people are watching and expecting results from the climate summit in Paris. They held signs with phrases such as “Middlebury Vermont Supports Paris Climate Talks” and “Climate Justice Now!”
One more elaborate sign read, “This pump temporarily closed because Exxon-Mobil lied about climate (#exxonknew).” The protestor was referring to the exposé this fall, when Exxon-Mobil intentionally funded climate change deniers and hid company research supporting climate change in the mid-1980s.
On Monday, Nov. 30, a coalition of environmental groups gathered at the State House in Montpelier to deliver 180 boxes—containing 25,241 postcards—from supporters of carbon tax in Vermont. Organizers of this event planned for it to coincide with the start of the Paris climate talks, seizing the international event as a catalyst for state-level climate action.
“Our thoughts are with the global leaders who are making important decisions for all of us. But we can’t leave all the work to them. We have to do our share also,” said Fran Putnam, the chairwoman of the Weybridge Energy Committee and a member of Energy Independent Vermont.
Last year, legislators in the House introduced “carbon tax” bills, proposing a tax on fossil fuels sold in Vermont, including gasoline, oil and natural gas. The bill has met strong opposition from both sides of the aisle.
Republican Chairman David Sunderland believes that the carbon tax bill shows that Democrats in Vermont are “profoundly disconnected with the realities of struggling Vermonters.” Opponents of the tax also point out that a carbon tax will cost the consumer the same amount, regardless of income, and will not affect the producers of fossil fuels. The tax could raise gas prices by 88 cents over the next 10 years. Proponents of the tax insist that a carbon tax could mean lower sales tax on other items.
The proposed carbon tax bill calls for a tax on fossil fuels and the creation of an Energy Independence Fund, which would help subsidize home weatherization, solar panels and air source heat pumps. The program would also create jobs in the process.
On Dec. 3, about 150 people attended a debate on the carbon tax. The debate pitted Paul Burns, executive director of Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG), and Professor John Erickson, from University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, against Rob Roper and John McClaughry, President and Vice President of the Ethan Allen Institute. The institute is “Vermont’s free-market public policy research and education organization,” according to their website.
Don Randall, President and CEO of Vermont Gas, issued a statement expressing support for climate action in Paris. He explained that increased use of natural gas in Vermont has cut carbon emissions.
“The decline in U.S. carbon emissions has been attributable largely to the displacement of higher-emitting fuels by natural gas,” said Randall. “Here at home, Vermont gas continues to bring the choice and opportunity of cleaner, more affordable natural gas to more Vermonters,” he said.
He concluded his statement by pledging to “reduce emissions, increase energy efficiency and expand alternatives such as renewable gas from landfills and dairies.”
Vermonters’ engagement with the Paris climate talks is not confined within state boundaries. Governor Shumlin himself is attending the Paris climate talks as a panelist to discuss Vermont’s renewable energy plans.
“The White House had reached out to us to talk about what states are doing to make a difference,” Shumlin said. “Vermont’s got a great story to tell.”
On Dec. 2, Shumlin was on a panel called “The Subnational (State and Provincial) Foundation for Action” hosted by the Georgetown Climate Center. The panel included other leaders from places in North America that are creating clean energy policies, including Quebec, California and Washington.
Shela Liton and Senowa Mize-Fox, representatives of the Vermont Workers Center in Brattleboro and Burlington, are also attending the Paris climate talks. Linton and Mize-Fox are part of the 100-plus person delegation called “It Takes Roots to Weather the Storm,” a collection of grassroots leaders from dozens of communities in the U.S. and Canada that have been impacted by climate change.
“From Paris to Montpelier, we’re seeing politicians push false solutions to climate change like fracking and carbon trading,” Mize-Fox said in a news release. “We need to recognize the leadership and strategies coming from social movements at the grassroots, who understand the interconnections between racial, gender, economic and climate justice and are calling for system change, not climate change.”
Lastly, as the Paris climate summit comes to a close, Vermonters will fill five buses reserved by 350Vermont and head to Boston on Dec. 5. There they will participate in a rally “to call for bold climate solutions that create jobs, justice and climate action together,” Central Vermont Climate Action stated in a press release.
While the Paris climate talks are a good catalyst for international climate action, the negotiations will by no means result in a comprehensive solution or an end point.
“As the United Nations Climate Conference closes in Paris,” Central Vermont Climate Action’s press release states, “we know we will need to keep building a massive grassroots movement for real climate solutions to move away from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.”
(12/02/15 9:20pm)
The College joined more than 200 colleges and universities nationwide to sign the American Campuses Act on Climate Pledge to demonstrate support for strong international climate action. President Laurie L. Patton sent the College’s pledge to the White House on Nov. 10 in preparation for the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris from Nov. 30 through Dec. 11.
The pledge reads: “As institutions of higher education, we applaud the progress already made to promote clean energy and climate action as we seek a comprehensive, ambitious agreement at the upcoming United Nations Climate Negotiations in Paris. We recognize the urgent need to act now to avoid irreversible costs to our global community’s economic prosperity and public health and are optimistic that world leaders will reach an agreement to secure a transition to a low carbon future. Today our school pledges to accelerate the transition to low-carbon energy while enhancing sustainable and resilient practices across our campus.”
According to a press release from the White House, all the institutions signing the pledge have already undertaken significant steps toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions, increasing campus sustainability and resilience and incorporating environmental action into academic programs.
One of the goals outlined in Middlebury’s pledge is to displace the remaining use of fuel oil (approximately 650,000 gallons per year) with carbon-neutral biomethane gas from a manure digester on a nearby diary farm. Furthermore, the College promises to “continue exploring ways to add new sources of renewable, carbon-neutral electricity sources to power the campus.”
Dedication to sustainability has been an official part of Middlebury’s mission since 1995, when trustees established a set of principles and objectives for the campus. As of today, Middlebury is on track to achieve full carbon neutrality by the end of 2016. The College has already reduced emissions of greenhouse gases by 50 percent from the 2007 baseline. One of the major milestones toward achieving carbon neutrality was the completion of the $12 million biomass gasification plant, which was installed in 2009.
The pledge also cites the ways in which the College regularly engages in a number of different environmental initiatives and projects. The campus-wide recycling center and compost operation, for example, diverts about 65 percent of waste from landfills each year. In 2012, in partnership with local developers, the College installed solar farms on and off campus, which provides five percent of electricity on campus. In addition, students competed twice in the US Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon competition. The student-led projects to design and build single-family residential homes operating on only solar electricity and heat finished in fourth and eighth places in 2011 and 2013, respectively.
In addition to college and university campuses, about 81 American companies signed a similar climate pledge to show their support for international climate agreement ahead of the Paris conferences.
(11/19/15 4:37am)
The topic of this column — the death of the divestment movement — may appear strange, given that it is coming on the heels of The Campus’ editorial endorsement of fossil fuel divestment a few weeks ago, and moreover, because I am, as avid readers of my column know, an active leader in the Middlebury divestment campaign.
(11/19/15 1:07am)
Because of our remote location, Middlebury students do not often get to directly interact with organizations that they study, especially for majors who study those who currently hold great power. Members of the Environmental Studies and Food Studies curriculums enjoyed an exception to this last Tuesday, Nov. 10, in the form of a lecture titled “A Growing World Population and Creating Sustainable Communities: What role is crop biotechnology playing?”
In the lecture, two representatives from the agribusiness giant Monsanto spoke to students, faculty and community members about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture. Monsanto is the leading American producer of genetically modified (GM) seeds, which makes up the bulk of its revenue, and is also a huge pesticide manufacturer, giving it one of the most directly relevant perspectives on issues of biotechnology in agriculture. The talk was given by Dr. Phillip Eckert, an academic engagement lead and former dairy scientist at the company. He was supported by Monsanto scientist Michael Spenzer.
The talk was primarily sponsored by the Environmental Studies curriculum and in particular by William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Food Studies Molly Anderson. Anderson is strongly opposed to many of Monsanto’s practices and beliefs about GMOs, but she sponsored the talk on the basis that “it is important for students to understand both sides of the genetically modified crops argument.” She wanted to present Middlebury students with Monsanto’s side of the GMOs argument, and plans to follow this lecture with other talks addressing the controversy over biotechnology in food from other perspectives.
As the title of the talk made clear, Monsanto’s side of the issue is that GM crops are necessary for feeding a growing population. They also argued that biotechnology would help make agriculture sustainable, citing studies arguing that GM crops reduce land use and carbon dioxide emissions. Eckert argued that this reduction in emissions is made possible primarily because of how some GM crops do not require tilling (which releases carbon sequestered in the soil) and also because they “decrease the number of cultivation passes” that pollution-emitting farm vehicles need to make to spray crops with pesticides and herbicides.
Finally, Eckert argued that biotechnology could help agriculture adapt to climate change. Climate change has decreased the arable land available per person, increased the range of pests and made crops vulnerable to hostile weather, increased drought and natural disasters. In Monsanto’s vision, crops should be selectively modified to increase yields, promote better nutrition and adapt to changing conditions.
The presenters were careful to acknowledge that biotechnology cannot solve food insecurity on its own. Eckert noted that a huge amount of food waste in developing countries comes from a lack of infrastructure, saying that “the solution is not always to just double crop yield.” Poor transportation infrastructure and inadequate storage infrastructure and techniques prevent many crops from getting to market and the failure to sync markets with harvests prevents food from reaching the table.
Eckert also took great pains to portray crop biotechnology as safe. He did not make a blanket statement that all GM crops are necessarily safe for human consumption, but that they are “safe when proven to be.” He contended that the long vetting process that new biotechnology is subjected to by both Monsanto and governmental regulators, which takes an average of 13 years and $136 million per product, ensures that no unsafe products reach the market. This argument drew considerable ire from the audience, who raised concerns about research linking pesticides that are used with pesticide-resistant crops (namely Monsanto’s Roundup and other glyphosate-based pesticides) with cancer, hormone issues, and danger to wildlife.
The presentation met with a deluge of questions from the audience, enough that Eckert was only able to finish two-thirds of his talk. One of the most important questions the audience had about the talk was also the most basic: what was Monsanto even doing at Middlebury, a tiny college that also happens to be a bastion of the environmental movement? Both Anderson and Eckert argued that they were in the business of repairing Monsanto’s reputation. The presenters, two jovial scientists, were not what one usually associates with Monsanto, a name that conjures up images of a shadowy megacorporation manipulating policy through an army of lobbyists. But the choice of representatives seemed aimed to recast Monsanto as a progressive, scientific company instead of a self-interested agribusiness giant.
“Their charge was clearly to get people to feel better about Monsanto,” Anderson said. “They were very carefully not argumentative up there.”
Both presenters and audience members played fast and loose with the various types of GM crops and their many purposes. Audience members and Monsanto representatives were sometimes talking about different GM crops with different purposes or about entirely different applications of biotechnology. For example, in response to claims that GM crops were important for addressing global hunger, an audience member questioned how for aesthetic purposes, like apples that do not brown, helps promote food security. Some audience members were particularly critical of how the presenters never explicitly broke down the distribution of uses of GM crops. Anderson and one audience member accused the presenters of not adequately addressing the fact that most GM crops are engineered for pesticide resistance instead of to adapt to a changing climate or a growing demand for food.
“I didn’t like how they evaded some topics,” Anderson said. “Something like 95 percent of crops that are being used around the world that are being genetically engineered are pesticide-resistant crops, not pest-resistant crops; they aren’t being engineered for the things that [Eckert] talked about.”
The fact that many GM crops are engineered specifically to be pesticide and herbicide resistant was displayed briefly on a slide but not explained by the presenters.
Additionally, there was confusion of Monsanto with the broader GM crops industry, with presenters and audience members implicitly or explicitly attributing the ills or benefits of biotechnology in general to Monsanto specifically. Spenzer pointed out that the aforementioned genetically modified apple is not made by Monsanto, for instance. As he noted, “most genetically modified seeds are not made by Monsanto, but [Monsanto] became a byword for the issue.”
Anderson also criticized what she saw as deliberate obfuscation of the definition of genetically modified crops by the presenters. She argued that they confused hybridization (also known as crossbreeding), which is credited with producing high-yield and drought-resistant crops that enabled an explosion in agricultural productivity in the 20th century, with biotechnology, or the direct insertion of a small piece of DNA into an organism.
“In many ways they tried to make [what] biotechnology [is] less clear,” Anderson said. “For example their assertion that we’ve been genetically engineering crops for ages is a little bit of a red herring. We have been genetically modifying only if you think of crossbreeding things that can naturally cross in nature as genetic engineering, but we certainly haven’t been taking a gene from a fish and putting it in a tomato for ages.”
(11/04/15 7:28pm)
The “million gallon question,” or more accurately, the “640,000 gallon question,” is one of the most significant obstacles in the College’s quest for carbon neutrality by 2016. According to the Climate Action Plan adopted in 2008, 89 percent of the College’s greenhouse gas emissions comes from heating and cooling buildings using a steam-based system. Although the opening of the biomass plant in 2009 reduced the College’s annual consumption of no. 6 fuel oil by roughly 1,350,000 gallons, there still remains 640,000 gallons per year required to meet the College’s heating and cooling needs. Given that this Vermont winter is unlikely to be significantly milder than last year’s (climate change doesn’t happen on that kind of time-scale), how can we either reduce or replace the emissions from burning all this oil?
In order to address this “640,000 gallon question,” the College identified two potential solutions in 2008: the construction of an additional biomass facility, and the use of biodiesel in place of fuel oil to generate steam.
An economic, environmental and social analysis of these two options revealed the construction of a new biomass plant as the better path. Economically, the CAP identified biomass as more affordable given the high cost of production of biodiesel. Biodiesel could also pose an environmental problem because greenhouse gases emitted during the production of the fuel (from fertilizers, irrigation and transport) might exceed those absorbed from plant growth. Furthermore, the growth of corn for biodiesel contributes to deforestation and rising global food prices.
However, a complete switch from fuel oil to biomass also has its own problems. A new biomass plant would be expensive. Energy generated using biomass also takes more time to come online and take offline compared to fuel oil. This makes it difficult to respond to changing demand for steam. Another issue was sustainably sourcing all the woodchips needed to replace 640,000 gallons of fuel oil. The College would also need to account for the greenhouse emissions of transporting the woodchips.
Then in 2010, a far better option was identified: bio-methane produced from cow manure. Originally, the gas would have to be produced offsite by manure digesters on local farms, trucked to a facility near campus, then piped underground to the central heating plant. The use of bio-methane to meet heating and cooling needs has many positive implications for the College’s environmental impact. Methane, or natural gas, has the highest ratio of energy to carbon dioxide output of any fossil fuel because it has the highest density of hydrogen-carbon bonds. In comparison to other fuel oils, combustion of methane releases about 25 percent less carbon dioxide. In addition, the purified gas contains fewer impurities, such as sulfur and nitrogen, than fuel oil, so burning it produces fewer pollutants.
With the construction of the VT Gas pipeline, the College will be able to pump bio-methane (which is chemically equivalent to natural gas) into the pipeline. The biomass plant would be connected to the larger VT gas pipeline, rather than a direct pipeline running from the farm’s digester. So while the biomass plant might not necessarily be burning all bio-methane all the time, the College would be paying VT Gas for all the natural gas it uses as if it were bio-methane. VT Gas would then pay the dairy farms for their bio-methane contribution.
However, the construction of the VT Gas pipeline is still controversial. It will be transporting fracked gas from Canadian tarsands. Fracking also has noticeable environmental impacts on water quality. Despite the controversy of the pipeline, its construction will have an immediate impact on the College’s goal of carbon neutrality by serving as transport infrastructure for the biomass plant.
(10/21/15 8:38pm)
For five decades Middlebury College has been an outstanding leader in promoting environmental studies and international studies and in adopting sustainable operating procedures. Laurie Patton has shared with me her commitment as the College’s new president to build on and extend this admirable record of leadership. Toward this end, she would like to work in partnership with trustees, student groups, and concerned faculty and staff in an effort to identify next steps. This is a sound approach that all in the College community can support. Regarding next steps, this letter highlights one especially significant opportunity. We are at a pivotal moment in the national and international debate over the urgent need for a transition to a clean energy economy. Middlebury has the ability to influence the outcome of this critical debate by taking a public stand with a commitment to join the growing fossil fuel divestment movement. A decision by the College to divest should be viewed primarily as an act of moral and educational leadership at a time when industrial-technological civilization has lost its way and must reinvent itself.
I write this letter as a former Middlebury faculty member who taught at the College for close to three decades, served as dean of the college in the Olin Robison administration, and chaired the College’s Environmental Council during the mid-1990s. My courses included the study of environmental ethics, global ethics, and religion and ecology. I also write as a trustee and former chair of the board of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF), an international grant making foundation that has joined the fossil fuel divestment movement as part of an effort to align its investment policy with its mission and program goals. The Divest Middlebury campaign has set forth a compelling argument, and I write in support of the students who are leading this important initiative.
Scientists working in the field of climate change have turned on the alarm bells. Human development practices, especially the burning of fossil fuels, are altering the conditions on Earth that have made possible the development of civilization over the past ten thousand years. If humanity does not act with all deliberate speed and reduce its global greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050, the consensus among scientists is that the ecological, economic and social damage and disruption could be catastrophic and irreversible. The most vulnerable are the hundreds of millions of people living in poverty, but no one’s life will be unaffected. Already the negative effects of climate change are being felt by communities around the world. In addition, human development patterns have caused a tragic decline in the planet’s biodiversity and natural beauty, and ongoing global warming will accelerate this process.
Since action on climate change is about preventing immense harm and promoting the common good, it is first and foremost a fundamental moral issue. With the risk of dangerous consequences growing with every day of delayed action, it is also an extraordinarily urgent moral challenge. In a recent declaration, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican in Rome stated the matter succinctly: “Human-induced climate change is a scientific reality, and its mitigation is a moral and religious imperative.” A growing chorus of religious leaders, including Pope Francis, the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, and the Dalai Lama, fully support this view. The new Encyclical Letter of Pope Francis on the environment, “Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home,” and the Pope’s addresses before Congress and the United Nations clearly and forcefully highlight the ethical and spiritual dimensions of the environmental crisis and climate change. In response to the initiative of Pope Francis, 333 Rabbis have signed a “Rabbinic Letter on the Climate Crisis.”
This year could be a turning point when the world community forms the necessary global partnership and commits to the collaborative action needed to reduce and eliminate carbon pollution. In December heads of state from the 193 governments that are party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will meet in Paris to finalize a long delayed, legally binding climate change agreement. The goal of the negotiations is to elicit commitments that will cumulatively prevent global warming from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius since the pre-industrial era. Achieving an effective and equitable agreement in Paris is fundamental to protecting Earth’s ecological integrity, promoting human rights, and fulfilling our responsibilities to future generations. However, again and again governments controlled by short term economic and political interests have failed to address the problem of global warming. Building pressure from civil society, including from leaders in science, religion, education and philanthropy, can make a critical difference.
With the demand for change growing, governments are searching for a way forward. China and the United States, the two largest carbon polluters, have together made meaningful commitments, and many other nations have joined them. However, the commitments made to date fall far short of the reduction in emissions needed. At a special summit meeting on sustainable development this past September, the United Nations issued a path breaking declaration on “Transforming Our World” that adopts seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with 169 targets, which envision the full integration of the environmental, economic and social dimensions of the sustainable development agenda. The SDGs call for radical change, and if governments are serious about achieving the SDGs, a strong UNFCCC agreement is mandatory. By joining the divestment movement, Middlebury College can help to send that message and register its concern that governments be held accountable for fulfilling their obligations under the agreement and expand their commitments in the future as necessary.
The divestment movement has grown dramatically over the past year. A recent study, which was commissioned by the Wallace Global Fund, has found that 436 institutions have made a commitment to divest from fossil fuel companies, representing $2.6 trillion of investments—a fifty-fold increase. These institutions include the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund and two of the largest pension funds as well as foundations, colleges, universities, NGOs and religious institutions. Recognizing the significance of these developments, the Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, Christiana Figueres, has called for more institutions to divest from fossil fuels and invest in clean energy as a way to build momentum going into the Paris climate change meeting. (Clarification regarding the $2.6 trillion of investments is needed, because in some cases the institutions involved are limiting their divestment to coal or to coal and tar sands oil or to some but not all fossil fuels companies.)
College and University trustees have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure that their institution has the financial resources to fulfill its educational mission, and they are rightly concerned to maximize returns on endowment investments and minimize risk. In pursuing its commitment to divest from fossil fuels, the RBF has adopted a phased approach, eliminating investments in coal and tar sands first followed by a gradual elimination of all fossil fuels in a fiscally responsible manner. The goal of the RBF is to be completely divested of fossil fuels by the end of 2017. The Fund’s trustees have not found it necessary to alter their long standing commitment to preserve the purchasing power of the endowment. Middlebury should be able to divest from fossil fuels over several years without suffering reduced investment returns. Moreover, divesting could produce higher returns, because the fossil fuel energy sector is facing complex problems and risks. In addition to the precipitous collapse in the price of oil over the past year, which has caused some firms significant loses in market value, the big oil companies face the long term problem of stranded assets. Preventing global warming from exceeding two degrees Celsius will require leaving most of the known coal, oil, and gas reserves in the ground. In short, the transition to a clean energy economy will in all likelihood make fossil fuels a high risk investment. Many financial institutions are following this situation closely, and the Carbon Tracker Initiative is providing investors with the tools to measure economic risk associated with fossil fuels.
It is also important to recognize that renewable energy is rapidly becoming competitive with fossil fuels on cost and that corporations are coming to the realization that cutting their carbon footprint through improved efficiency and a shift to renewables is both possible and profitable. There is a global coalition of corporations that have committed to the long term goal of operating entirely with renewable energy. The New York Times reports that among the companies that have recently joined the coalition are Goldman Sachs, Johnson & Johnson, Proctor & Gamble, Starbucks, and Walmart. The transition away from fossil fuels to renewables is underway in spite of efforts by the big oil companies to prevent it and deny it. The only question is whether the transition will happen fast enough to prevent global warming from pushing the biosphere over tipping points that involve high risk. In a September Op-Ed, the president of Siemens, Joe Kaeser, announced that his global industrial manufacturing company has pledged to become carbon neutral by 2030, and reflecting on the challenge and opportunity before the business community he writes: “We have the technologies, we have the business incentive, and we have the responsibility. Now all we need is the commitment.” A decision by Middlebury’s board to divest will reinforce this message to corporate leaders, many of whom are listening with a new level of concern for the future of the planet, the global economy, and their companies.
Some argue that it is hypocritical for an institution like Middlebury to divest when the college and American society at large continue to be dependent on fossil fuels in so many ways. Is it hypocritical for someone who is addicted to cigarettes but knows that smoking is harmful and cancer causing to divest from all tobacco company stocks? Divesting is a way to help all of us wake up to the real dangers created by our addiction to fossil fuels and make the change to a cleaner, safer, more secure world.
When the RBF board and its investment committee, which includes both trustees and outside experts, began to consider joining the divestment movement, they were working with a highly skilled and successful investment manager. However, given the way its operations were structured, the investment manager concluded that it could not accomplish the goals that the RBF had set for divestment. Consequently the Fund was forced to change investment managers. Making the change has been a demanding process, but it has worked out well and the Fund now has investment managers with the expertise and flexibility that it requires. In short, there are very good alternatives, if Middlebury finds itself contending with the same kind of problem that faced the RBF.
Apart from major educational issues, as a general rule, it is not the responsibility of a college board of trustees to consider taking an official position on the many issues under debate on campus, and only under exceptional circumstances when there are very compelling moral reasons to do so should a board use divestment to support a protest movement. However, climate change is not just one environmental issue among many others or just a political issue. It is one of the defining issues of our time, and the choices made in response to the challenge will profoundly affect the lives of all Middlebury students and the future of life on Earth.
Middlebury College is a highly respected leader internationally in the field of education and a decision by its president and board of trustees to join the expanding fossil fuel divestment movement will be an act of responsible global citizenship consistent with its mission. It will have a significant impact, inspiring other institutions to support the transition to a clean energy economy and contributing to the outcome we all hope for in Paris.
Steven C. Rockefeller
Professor Emeritus of Religion
Middlebury College
October 12, 2015
Steven C. Rockefeller has had a career as a scholar and teacher, an environmental conservationist, and a philanthropist. His research, writing, and teaching have been focused on the fields of religion, philosophy and ethics. He has had a special interest in the transition to a sustainable future and the development of a relational spirituality and a global ethic for building a just, sustainable and peaceful world community.
Professor Rockefeller is professor emeritus of religion at Middlebury College, Vermont, where he taught from 1970 to 1998 and also served as dean of the college and chair of the religion department. He received his bachelor of arts degree from Princeton University in 1958, his master of divinity from Union Theological Seminary in 1963, and his doctorate in the philosophy of religion from Columbia University in 1973. He is the author of John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (Columbia, 1991; Peking University, 2009) and Democratic Equality, Economic Inequality, and the Earth Charter (Earth Charter International, 2015). He is the co-editor of two books of essays, The Christ and the Bodhisattva (SUNY, 1987) and Spirit and Nature: Why the Environment is a Religious Issue (Beacon, 1992). His other publications include over fifty essays that appear in a variety of books and journals.
Professor Rockefeller and Professor John Elder organized and directed at Middlebury College in 1990 the Spirit and Nature Symposium that included the Dalai Lama and was filmed by Bill Moyers for public television. In the mid-1990s, Professor Rockefeller chaired the Middlebury College Environmental Council. Under his leadership, the Council prepared and submitted to the College president “Pathways to a Green Campus” (1995), a comprehensive environmental report on the state of the college with 22 recommendations. Professor Rockefeller served as president of the Demeter Fund, which created the Charlotte Park and Wildlife Refuge in Vermont overlooking Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountains. He is the founding president of the Otter Creek Child Care Center in Middlebury, Vermont.
For over thirty years Professor Rockefeller has served as a trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, an international foundation with grantmaking programs in democratic practice, sustainable development, and peacebuilding. From 1998 to 2006 he chaired the RBF board of trustees. Among the other boards and commissions on which he has served are the National Commission on the Environment (organized by the World Wildlife Fund), the National Audubon Society, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, and the Council of the UN mandated University for Peace in Costa Rica. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Over the past two decades, Professor Rockefeller has been actively involved in the Earth Charter Initiative, which in and through extensive worldwide, cross cultural dialogue has endeavored to identify and articulate shared values that provide an ethical foundation for the emerging global community. From 1997 to 2000, he chaired the Earth Charter international drafting committee for the Earth Charter Commission. A final version of the Earth Charter—a declaration of global interdependence and universal responsibility with fundamental principles for creating a just, sustainable and peaceful world—was launched by the Earth Charter Commission at the Peace Palace in The Hague in 2000. From 2000 to 2010, Professor Rockefeller served as co-chair of the Earth Charter International (ECI) Council. The ECI Secretariat is based at the University for Peace in Costa Rica and has affiliates in 73 different countries. The Earth Charter has been translated into over 40 languages and endorsed by over 5,000 organizations globally, including UNESCO and the World Conservation Congress of IUCN.
Professor Rockefeller lives with his wife, Professor Barbara Bellows Rockefeller, in Pound Ridge, New York.
(10/21/15 8:32pm)
One year ago, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund divested $860 million from the fossil fuel industry. Now it’s our turn.
The philanthropic fund bears the well-known name of John D. Rockefeller, philanthropist and founder of Standard Oil, the company we now know as ExxonMobil. His heirs’ uncoupling from the fossil fuel industry and entrance into the ranks of over 450 institutions that have divested from fossil fuels works to fundamentally shift the way we think and talk about the fossil fuel economy. Steven C. Rockefeller and the other trustees of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund have established that it is simply not enough to promote green innovation; it is imperative to challenge our implicit support of an industry that profits off of the world’s most marginalized communities.
It is well established in climate science and public discourse that there exists an excess of fossil fuels on this planet. Our atmosphere and well-being as a globe will be compromised beyond remediation long before the planet’s fossil fuels are depleted. What isn’t often enough remembered is that the fossil fuel industry knew ¬¬well before the general public that their product was destroying the planet. Indeed, ExxonMobil executives made strategic decisions as early as 1981 based on the established connection between fossil fuel extraction and climate change.
Instead of using early knowledge of climate change to propel research into clean energy or create an awareness of the large-scale dangers of an extractive economy, ExxonMobil chose to fund climate change deniers in an effort to protect the company’s profits. As people across the world labored to extract oil and gas, the majority of the company’s profits funneled back into the United States.
This is where we come in. Not necessarily because we want to be involved, but because we must be involved. We as a nation have been drawn into this conversation by burning oil from across the planet and exporting the effects of our consumption back across the globe. The United States comprises about four percent of the world’s population and as of 2008, we emit about 19 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide. As an institution, we pride ourselves on our efforts towards “sustainability.” With our carbon neutrality goal, we eschew consuming fossil fuels on campus and yet when considering our endowment, fossil fuels are not seen as detrimental to our “greenness” but as diversity in our portfolio.
Here in Vermont, we do not yet feel the most dramatic effects of climate change. Rising sea levels affect island and low-lying nations, volatile “booming” and “busting” economies affect those communities closest to extraction sites, pipelines commonly cut across the lands of those without the resources to fight back. Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called climate change “the human rights challenge of our time” and he’s right. While we, Middlebury students, reach for “global citizenship,” we neglect the true impact of our consumption. As we reinforce “our commitment to integrating environmental stewardship,” as outlined in our mission statement, what do we overlook?
Middlebury is seen as an example of sustainability around the world. We have the luxury to build a biomass plant or go carbon neutral independently from the national energy infrastructure. “Go green yourself” is our message to the world, but our solutions are not accessible to most. The fossil fuel industry is so entrenched in our national and global infrastructure that it prevents a green and just transition for the vast majority of the world’s population. Middlebury’s accomplishments in green technological innovation are laudable, but as a privileged leader on the global stage, it is our obligation to not only improve our own energy consumption but to challenge the credibility of the industries that exploit and perpetuate our global dependence on fossil fuels.
(10/19/15 4:34pm)
Issues of environmentalism and racial justice are inextricably linked, proclaimed Van Jones at his keynote speech for the Environmental Studies 50th Anniversary last Thursday night. Jones, an acclaimed environmental and human rights activist, is best known for his efforts to provide opportunities for people of color in under-resourced, inner city communities with access to jobs in green energy infrastructure development. Much of Jones’ recent efforts work to address the monstrosity that is our country’s military industrial prison complex through legislation to reduce the number of incarcerated nonviolent offenders and cut the prison population by 50 percent over the next decade. In short, the prison system seeks to profit from the enslavement of people of color.
If able to survive passage through our ever corrupt political environment, Jones’ plans would result in a drastic cut in governmental funding for the prison system and open up funds which could instead be transferred to green job programs benefitting people of color who have so long born the brunt of the broken prison system.
The large crowd – composed of students and community members of all stripes, cheered elatedly for Jones’ plans and I too, was overjoyed, in part because of the parallels I identified between Jones’ work and my own as a divestment organizer. For those unfamiliar with Divest Middlebury, we are a group of student activists who seek to compel Middlebury to withdraw all of its investments in the top 200 fossil fuel companies and, similar to Jones, reinvest this money in ways that will support the growth of a more sustainable economy.
But when I speak with people about the need to divest our holdings in the fossil fuel industry I don’t receive the same response as Jones did regarding the divestment of funds from the prison system. Many tell me that divestment is “too negative.” For me, this response signals not the ineffectiveness of divestment as a strategy to instigate action on climate change, but rather the great work we still have to accomplish in stigmatizing the fossil fuel industry so that people will cheer for fossil fuel divestment as they cheered for Jones’ call to transfer money away from the prison system.
Thus, here is the truth of the fossil fuel industry – according to research completed by the Carbon Tracker initiative, the fossil fuel industry has five times more carbon dioxide in their proven reserves than the atmosphere can absorb in order that we may stay below the conservative two degrees Celsius marker, which is largely accepted as the threshold for calamitous changes in our climate. The fossil fuel industry shows no qualms towards burning these carbon reserves and the wave of environmental injustices that will result, such as displacement of millions of people of color in the global south.
What’s more, the fossil fuel industry has sought to hinder the debate about climate change through the promotion of disinformation on their own accord and by membership in trade organizations that work to diminish the findings and suggestions of university researchers and policy experts who have built overwhelming consensus around the idea that the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as a result of the combustion of fossil fuels has and will continue to result in incredibly destructive changes to our climate and must therefore be mitigated immediately.
For an institution of higher education, the fossil fuel industry’s disinformation campaigns should feel especially disgusting and convince us even more of divestment’s importance. As Harvard professor Naomi Oreskes writes: “Why should universities invest in an industry that has deliberately sought to undermine the knowledge that we have produced?”
With this view of the fossil fuel industry, I’m hard pressed to imagine someone who would not deem Middlebury’s divestment campaign, along with the national divestment movement, as partaking in a “positive” step towards changing our culture’s conception of the fossil fuel industry, which proves especially necessary when we realize its most abhorrent of practices – the exploitation of communities of color through the placement of refineries and other health hazards related to the extraction and production of fossil fuels in their neighborhoods. In light of these injustices divestment provides me with the hope that we can rip the fossil fuel industry of its social license to exploit the health and livelihoods of marginalized communities in the same way that the prison system has been dethroned of its license to incarcerate people by virtue of their race and then deem them disposable, a casualty of our throw-away society.
But this is not to say the injustices wrought by the fossil fuel industry are not inextricably connected to those caused by the prison system. Indeed, that was Jones’ whole point, and many of our “reinvestment” options for the divested funds that we take out of the fossil fuel industry are in line with his green jobs programs as I will discuss more in a later column.
(10/07/15 9:36pm)
Two of the areas targeted by the 2008 Climate Action Plan (CAP) to help the College reach carbon neutrality were waste management and travel emissions. At the time of the plan, travel and waste accounted for 10% of the College’s greenhouse gas emissions. The CAP laid out a variety of recommendations for how the College could reduce emissions from these sources, including increasing public awareness and promoting conservation.
Since the CAP was adopted in 2008, the College has made progress in some aspects. How has the College progressed in waste management and travel? How it can still improve? Carbon Countdown examines.
The least significant contribution to greenhouse gas emissions comes from waste. Waste from the College decomposes in landfills or is burned, which releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. This source of emissions is responsible for only 1% of the College’s emissions. The College already sends all of its waste to the recycling center, where it is sorted and, if possible, recycled. In addition to these efforts, MiddShift — a College group advocating carbon neutrality — suggested, among other things, that the College integrate waste minimization and sustainable practices into the residential life system, and create a service requirement for first-years in the dining halls or recycling center to develop an understanding of the waste that is generated by the College.
While there have been campaigns to raise student awareness about food waste at the College, such as Weigh the Waste, during which volunteers collected and measured dining hall food waste before students cleared their plates on the carousel, sustainability is certainly not stressed in the residential life system. Overall campus awareness about waste management is minimal. How the College deals with waste is far removed from the student body; this does not encourage students to think about the waste they generate. Students may be aware of recycling and composting, but rarely go out of their way to help recycle or compost waste. The College manages its waste well, but still needs to increase awareness about waste and sustainability, and encourage the student body to think more about its impact.
Vehicles and emissions from travel account for another 9% of the College’s greenhouse gas emissions. As the CAP makes abundantly clear, these emissions cannot be fully eliminated within the confines of current technologies. Travel for academic, administrative, athletic, advancement, admissions, student services and visitor purposes will still be required, and will necessarily result in greenhouse gas emissions.
However, emissions from travel can be reduced, if not eliminated. The CAP details several strategies by which this can be achieved, including increasing education about the impacts of travel, stressing videoconferencing as an alternative to traveling and upgrading the vehicle fleet to more energy efficient vehicles, such as hybrid cars. It is important to note, however, that the College does not include travel of students studying abroad or faculty and staff commuting to work in its calculations of emissions due to these sources. Including these sources could dramatically change the assessment of greenhouse gas emissions due to travel.
Since the CAP was adopted in 2008, the College’s greenhouse gas emissions from waste and air travel have increased, but emissions from mobile combustion have decreased. In 2007, the College estimated that it generated the equivalent of 137 metric tons of carbon dioxide due to solid waste. By 2014, that number had increased slightly to 153 metric tons. Emissions from air travel increased more dramatically over this same period, from 1381 metric tons in 2007 to 2346 metric tons in 2014. Emissions from mobile combustion (which include road vehicles, as well as construction equipment) have decreased from 408 metric tons to 370 metric tons.
In light of the increasing size of the student body, it is admirable that emissions from waste and mobile combustion have held even or declined. Air travel is a much larger contributor to the College’s emissions, though, and yearly emissions have increased by almost 1000 metric tons since 2007. According to data from the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment (ACUPCC), this increase in emissions is offset by sequestration from college-owned land. While the College has made progress since 2007, student awareness about emissions is still lacking and emissions from air travel have increased dramatically. As the College approaches carbon neutrality in 2016, there is still much room for improvement in these areas.
(09/30/15 9:36pm)
This past week I witnessed multiple students, clad in full business attire, walk silently out of the room in the middle of class. At first I was confused (was there some mid-day ball I was missing?) but then remembered abruptly what week it was; so did the two men sitting behind me as a second student left the room. One whispered to the other, “that’s our competition.”
(09/24/15 1:31am)
In February 2015, a U.S. national security report called climate change “an urgent and growing threat to our national security.” Over the past two decades, climate change has become an increasingly important topic in the United States and across the world. Researchers have demonstrated the far-reaching effects of increasing levels of greenhouse gases and have pointed to more extreme weather patterns, such as the California drought and Hurricane Irene in Vermont, as signs of what is to come if climate change is not addressed. As issues involving climate change have risen to prominence, colleges and universities across the country have begun to develop more sustainable practices and promote conservation on their campuses.
In 2004, the College joined other leading higher-education institutions when the board of Trustees passed a resolution to reduce emissions by eight percent from 1990 levels by 2012. Then, in October 2006, the Trustees approved funding for a new biomass plant which would help the college achieve the eight percent emission reduction. In response to this development, students and faculty began advocating a new, more ambitious objective for the College: carbon neutrality. Thus, in 2007, amidst growing awareness about climate change and the effects of greenhouse gases on our atmosphere, the Board of Trustees approved a resolution to achieve carbon neutrality by 2016.
What is carbon neutrality? The fancy term you hear tossed around so often means net zero carbon emissions, achieved by balancing emissions with carbon sequestration and, usually as a last-ditch effort, by purchasing carbon credits.
To reach carbon neutrality, the College developed a “Climate Action Implementation Plan,” adopted on August 28, 2008. Focusing on areas like heating and cooling, electricity and transportation, the plan detailed several strategies for the College to reduce its footprint and shift toward carbon neutral energy sources. One of these strategies includes the construction of the new biomass plant, which reduced the College’s dependence on #6 fuel oil, and pursuing opportunities for renewable energy sources. In addition to suggesting alternative energy sources, the plan calls for efficiency upgrades of campus buildings in compliance with LEED guidelines.
Since the plan went into effect in 2008, the College has made progress in its quest for neutrality. In February 2014, Jack Byrne, the Director of Sustainability Integration, released an update stating the College’s carbon emissions for FY13 were 50% below 2007 baseline emissions. Byrne attributed this progress to the biomass plant and “numerous energy efficiency projects the College has completed over the past several years.”
Despite the College’s progress, it is not the first institution of higher education to approach carbon neutrality — not even the first in the NESCAC. In 2013, Colby College announced that it had achieved carbon neutrality, thanks in part to its own biomass plant. Colby College joined the ranks of three other small colleges, including Green Mountain College in Vermont, that have become carbon neutral.
Carbon neutrality remains an important goal for the College. When the class of 2016 arrived, they were touted as the “Carbon Neutral Class.” During their orientation, students learned about carbon neutrality and were encouraged to get involved with the initiative. Now, with the 2016 deadline drawing close and the Carbon Neutral Class nearing graduation, it is time to reflect on where we are. What has the College done to reduce its carbon footprint? What can still be done to improve the sustainability of the College? Every other week, this column will explore answers to these questions and more. Will the College actually be carbon neutral by 2016? The Carbon Countdown will help you decide.
(09/17/15 8:43pm)
Summer is a time for reflection. A moment to consider who we are and how we have changed after experiencing the fever dream that is a Middlebury semester. For me, this meant taking a hard look in the mirror and coming to the conclusion that I’m not too happy with some of the choices I’ve made and patterns I’ve fostered over the last half year.
It goes without saying that last semester was a difficult one for many on Middlebury’s campus. We struggled with the untimely death of a peer and the invisible pain of countless others. We grappled with the challenge of achieving “success” at an elite college and, more, having to define that term for ourselves.
I was dangerously sleep-deprived, valued my friendships less than their worth and forgot to live in the present. What’s worse, I felt weak and ashamed for struggling with my sense of self. I felt as if spending time on “personal” issues of balance and body was somehow selfish, a product of first-world privilege.
Who am I to worry about the correct pro- portion of schoolwork time to socializing time when people in our world’s poorest countries are being displaced as a result of climate change and Syrian children are washing up on shores dead due to violence and a global shortage of compassion?
I believed that you could either care about the internal world or the external one. I chose the latter, spending my time writing about environmental injustice and immigrant rights and advocating for Middlebury to divest from fossil fuels. History, let alone our present society, confirmed my assumption.
The 1960’s countercultural movement was divided into two camps. While the politically oriented “New Left” marched in opposition to the Vietnam War, the “New Communalists,” who held no trust in the power of political activism for social change, fled to the countryside to create self-sufficient communities, believing a truly egalitarian society could only manifest itself through a collective transformation of consciousness.
And more recently, in 2008, environmental activist Van Jones bemoaned the environmental community’s inability to unite as a single movement, writing, “Leaders from impoverished areas like Oakland, California, tended to focus on three areas: social jus- tice, political solutions and social change,” while those “from more affluent places like Marin County (just north of San Francisco), San Francisco and Silicon Valley had what seemed to be the opposite approach,” focusing more on “ecology, business solutions and ‘inner change.’”
My hyper-political beliefs are undoubtedly influenced by the fact that I did indeed grow up in that mecca of political activism, Oakland, CA. But it wasn’t until I returned there for a brief hiatus at the end of summer and reflected more intensely on how I want to approach this new semester that my blindly political beliefs changed, or rather morphed into something more true to their core.
Almost subconsciously I began repeating the mantra, “The Personal is Political,” a phrase I likely picked up from a feminist documentary but never understood beyond a basic level. I did some research and discovered the phrase was first used in the title of a 1969 essay by radical feminist Carol Hanisch.
In the essay, Hanisch addresses criticism of “consciousness raising groups.” These were discussion groups that popped up around the country in the late 1960s for women to share their personal, and otherwise unheard, experiences in patriarchal society. They discussed issues such as workplace discrimination, housework, the family and abortion, issues with political dimensions that had been previously been ignored by the dominant New Left groups of the early 1960s. Opponents, mainly women who considered themselves “more political,” considered “consciousness raising discussions” to be nothing but meaningless “therapy” and “personal” work. Hanisch sought to dispel this notion, instead asserting that “consciousness raising discussions” were themselves a form of political action that united women to fight male supremacy as a movement, rather than blaming individual women for their oppression.
A year before the publication of her essay, Hanisch put the sentiment of “consciousness raising discussions” into practice by protesting the Miss America pageant. She argued that women are oppressed by impossible standards of female beauty, including the contestants. Though Hanisch’s Miss America protest had some strategic flaws, the concept – that the personal truly is political – is powerful, and one which I propose we adopt and sustain throughout the year.
As I advocate for President Patton and the Board of Trustees to divest our endowment from fossil fuels, I will work hard to see the ways in which the fossil fuel industry not only exploits the environment of low-income communities and people of color, but also creates a toxic political culture that holds politicians captive to the fossil fuel industry for campaign donations and distracts those politicians’ from building local renewable energy sources. This energy could fuel a new environmentally sustainable, just economy with the capacity to better support my neighbors.
(05/07/15 2:52am)
Last Thursday, US Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont announced that he would run for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. He will be challenging former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who, so far, is the only other major candidate in the race. Though he has formally announced his bid, Sanders will kick off his campaign in Burlington on May 26.
“I am running for President of the United States because America needs a political revolution,” wrote Sanders on his Facebook page on April 30. “We need a government which represents all of us, and not just a handful of billionaires. In this campaign, we won’t have the support of the big-money interests, Wall Street or the military-industrial complex. That’s why I need you to join me in an unprecedented grass-roots effort.”
Sanders announced his campaign at a news conference on the Capitol lawn. In a brief speech, Sanders identified the 3 major issues he intends to address: growing economic disparity, excessive spending on political campaigns, and climate change.
The most central issue to Sanders’ campaign is the growing gap in income in the U.S. and the inability for many working families to support themselves.
“We can’t continue having a nation in which we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major nation on earth, at the same time as we’re seeing a proliferation of millionaires and billionaires,” Sanders said in his announcement speech.
Specific problems that concern Sanders on the topic of economic disparity are the exorbitant cost of college, the stagnation of wages, increasing wealth among the wealthy and the rising cost of healthcare.
“The second issue directly related is the fact that as a result of the disastrous supreme court decision on Citizens United [vs. Federal Election Commission], we now have a political situation where billionaires are literally able to buy elections and candidates,” Sanders continued. Sanders’ campaign fund pales in comparison to that of his competitor, Clinton. Sanders prefers to take donations from citizens, rather than corporations, to show that his campaign is a grassroots effort, not corporately funded.
OpenSecrets.org is a website run by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that researches the effect of money on politics and makes information about it publicly available. According to OpenSecrets.org, Sanders’ top 3 campaign contributors throughout his career have been the Machinists/Aerospace Workers Union, the Teamsters Union, and the United Auto Workers. In contrast, Citigroup Inc., Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Lehman Brothers have been among the top 10 contributors to Clinton throughout her career.
Sanders’ campaign received $1.5 million in donations within 24 hours of announcing his bid for president. Sanders lives his ideals about keeping money out of politics. The bottom of his campaign website reads, “Paid for by Bernie 2016 (not the billionaires).”
Finally, Sanders addressed the importance of taking climate change seriously and acting accordingly.
“We have a Republican Party with virtually few exceptions that does not even recognize the reality of climate change, let alone that it is caused by human activity, let alone that the scientific community tells us this is the major global environmental crisis that we face,” Sanders said. “And I want to see this nation lead the world in transforming our energy system away from fossil fuel, to energy efficiency and sustainable energy.”
Coming from Vermont, Sanders is well-poised to make this claim, as Vermont has actively tried to increase green energy use and reduce fossil fuel consumption.
In the realm of foreign policy, Sanders has emphasized that he opposed the war in Iraq, something that Clinton supported. Sanders supports President Obama’s use of sanctions against Russia regarding Ukraine. However, Sanders opposes Obama’s view on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Sanders opposes TPP because of its negative effect on jobs of American people and favoritism toward corporations.
Sanders is also a strong supporter of gay marriage.
“It’s time for the Supreme Court to catch up to the American people and legalize gay marriage,” Sanders said in a press release. In 2000, he supported the legalization of civil unions in Vermont and in 2009 he supported the legalization of gay marriage in Vermont.
Sanders began his political career in Vermont in 1971. During the 1970s, Sanders ran under the anti-Vietnam Liberty Union Party, a non-violent socialist party in Vermont that still sends candidates to several elections statewide. Sanders won no offices with this party. After this point, he proceeded to run as an Independent until now when he has entered the race for Democratic nomination.
From 1981 through 1989, Sanders was mayor of Burlington. From 1991 to 2007, Sanders served as a US Representative from Vermont as an Independent. He is now on his second term as junior senator from Vermont. With 24 years of experience in the House and Senate combined, Sanders is the longest serving independent in Congress.
Sanders engaged in various jobs before his career in politics. Upon graduating from James Madison High School in Brooklyn in 1959, Sanders attended Brooklyn College, but then transferred to University of Chicago. During college, Sanders was active in the Civil Rights movement and graduated in 1964. After graduation, Sanders lived on an Israeli kibbutz, then moved to Vermont. In Vermont, before getting into politics, Sanders worked various jobs such as carpenter, film-maker and writer.
Because of his small campaign budget, lack of experience in foreign affairs, and populist, (sometimes considered socialist) persuasion, many believe he stands no chance against Clinton, a more moderate, high profile and amply funded candidate.
(05/06/15 9:24pm)
Twenty-nine years ago, the Middlebury College Board of Trustees stood on the right side of history when they voted to divest from the South African Apartheid. The College was one of over 150 campuses across the country to divest from companies doing business in South Africa – the leading ethical issue of the time. Now, Middlebury College is at a crossroads and has the chance to once again stand on the right side of history by divesting from fossil fuel companies. Climate change is the defining ethical issue of our generation. The College has the opportunity to make history once again, or to be vilified by it.
Middlebury College prides itself on its practices of environmental stewardship and its innovations in institutional sustainability. The College started the first environmental studies program fifty years ago this fall, helping to kickstart an era of environmental policy and legislation the likes of which our nation had never seen. The College was an incubator for programs of recycling and composting far before these issues reached national prominence and gave rise to 350.org, one of the fastest-growing environmental justice organizations in the world. The College also plans to go carbon-neutral by the end of 2016 and is well on its way to achieving this admirable goal.
However, the College’s investment in fossil fuel companies jeopardizes its reputation as a champion of climate justice by profiting from the exploitation of the environment and marginalized communities. Professor Emeritus of Religion Steven Rockefeller –yes, a member of the Rockefeller family that made their fortune on oil – wrote during his time here that the College should “avoid investments in businesses and products that are inherently unhealthy for human beings or that threaten serious environmental harm.” Rockefeller wrote these words twenty years ago, yet they still remain true today. As long as the College’s endowment is invested in fossil fuel companies like Exxon and BP, it is actively contributing to a system that threatens the future of our planet.
From UC Berkeley to Harvard, students on campuses around the country are asking their administrators whose side they are on: the side of the fossil fuel companies who feed on the Earth and its people like parasites to maximize economic success, or that of the new generation calling for a just transition to a greener future. Arrests of students at Yale University and University of Mary Washington show administrators that this fight is about something much bigger than the institutions we attend. And people are noticing. Just in the past month, Syracuse University, the Guardian Media Group and Prince Charles have committed to move to fossil free investments.
With the quest for carbon neutrality nearing its completion, we have to ask – are we truly carbon neutral if we are invested in fossil fuels? It is time for Middlebury to rise up and once again do what is right over what is easy. It is time to change the system that perpetuates social and economic inequalities. The environmental movement is always evolving and can no longer be an elitist movement that only wealthy white folks can access and engage in. It has shown its ability to bridge gaps of race, gender, generation and wealth as it has spread across the world. Climate justice is a global issue, one that affects all people.
It is our responsibility as Middlebury students to be at the forefront of this battle. Students have organized here to usher in peaceful change in the past, and I know that this will happen again. Through education, thoughtfulness, organization, passion and hard work, we are fighting to create a movement that will be larger and longer than the four years we spend in Addison County. So the question remains: whose side are YOU on?
Vignesh Ramachandran '18 is from Fremont, Calif.
(04/22/15 6:00pm)
Each year around this time, the Campus turns its focus to the upcoming Student Government Association presidential election. Unlike last year, there will be competition for the position and a field of strong, well-rounded candidates has emerged. Each one has come to the Campus office to present their platform and to take questions from our editorial board. Though each candidate brings much to the table, there is one who stands out above the rest: Caroline Walters.
A newcomer to the SGA but a veteran leader, Walters boasts an impressive resume. In 2011, Caroline co-founded International Energy Alliance, a non-profit organization that works with high schools in the U.S. and China to raise climate awareness. Over the past three years, she has organized conferences in China and has begun the process to team up with similar-minded organizations here at the College.
Her position with the IEA, her role as Vice President of Friends of the John Graham Shelter in town and her work in the mail center have all demanded much of her extracurricular attention during her time as a Middlebury student. Though these experiences all took place outside of the Crest Room, we believe that the analogous leadership, teamwork and management skills she has fostered on her way to the ballot make her more than qualified for the job of SGA President.
Although Walters has not participated in Middlebury’s SGA thus far, it is important to note that she is not entirely out of the SGA’s loop. She has attended a number of meetings in person and read the minutes for every meeting this year in preparation for this election. Nevertheless, some may point to her dearth of experience in the Senate as a drawback. We, however, see it as an advantage. Walters brings a fresh perspective and an undeniable enthusiasm to shake up the SGA.
Shaking up the SGA is sorely needed at the present moment. Nearly all of the candidates who visited the newsroom expressed their disappointment in the lack of leadership and results this year. The editorial board could not agree more. In the view of many students, this year’s SGA has accomplished less than any student administration in recent memory. Previous years have seen the creation of MiddCourses, progress on internships for credit, the launch of the We the Middkids petition site, the implementation of a Pass/D/Fail option, and the funding of orientation trips for first-years. This year? A Proctor printer is what most students would point to as the biggest accomplishment.
In light of this and a slew of uncontested races (including SGA President and Student Co-Chair of Community Council) last spring, the SGA is quickly becoming a running joke on campus. It makes sense, therefore, why several candidates have positioned themselves as “SGA outsiders” to combat the image that they will be a continuation of an SGA on cruise control.
In a time where the majority of students feel that their representatives are not living up to their title or are otherwise inaccessible, one of the things that impressed us most about Walters’s vision for next year is her strategy for student outreach. Although this week saw the first SGA Coffee Hour, the effort is too little, too late. In a refreshing change, Walters wants the student government to take an active interest in its various constituencies – going to club meetings, holding more frequent and flexible office hours and increasing visibility in places like the dining halls, sports games and large school events. In effect, she means to bring SGA to the students rather than making the students come to the Crest Room.
Another plus in her platform is a student-developed website, Midd Connect. Aiming to increase convenience when shopping for course textbooks and when coordinating ride-shares to major cities, Walters’ website will help students conserve two of their most precious resources: time and money.
Furthermore, Walters takes compassionate stances on some of the most difficult issues at the College today: sexual assault and mental health. She, like the other candidates, is aware of the present dissatisfaction with on-campus resources for these problems and has plans to bring about positive change for each one.
Here, however, the Campus would like to note that although we are endorsing Caroline Walters, it is imperative that whoever wins the race shall increase resources to survivors of sexual assault and those suffering from mental or emotional stress. That being said, we have faith in Walters’ abilities to tackle these issues; in particular, her willingness to work with others seems to be one of her strongest assets as a leader.
When looking for partners to accomplish goals that matter the most to our community, Walters’ running mates might just be the best place to start. Including Ilana Gratch and Josh Berlowitz would be a great way to bring their knowledge of the inner workings of the SGA to her team. The board believes both of these candidates to be outstanding individuals who would do well as SGA President. Nevertheless, change starts at the top and Walters’ go-getter attitude and new approaches are the best bet for revitalizing the SGA. At the same time, she can also rely on the experience of reelected Senators to fill in any gaps in her knowledge.
Additionally, we would like to endorse Durga Jayaraman in the race for Student Co-Chair of Community Council. The editorial board was impressed by Jayaraman’s enthusiasm and sense of duty to Middlebury’s student body; she explained to us how she decided to run for Community Council Co-Chair upon realizing that she was the person best-suited for the job. We believe this to be true.
Jayaraman has experience serving on Community Council and understands both the opportunities and limitations inherent in the role. She also brings a multifaceted perspective as Co-Chair. An international student, woman of color and member of many different campus organizations, Jayaraman can represent many aspects of the College’s community. Examples of her leadership and involvement also stand out: she is the president of Palmer, has led diversity initiatives through the SGA Institutional Diversity Committee and reviews sexual misconduct through the Sexual Assault Oversight Committee. Such a range of experiences will serve her well as the Co-Chair of Community Council, which deals with issues that cut across many sides of the campus community.
For all the reasons above, the Campus editorial board enthusiastically and confidently endorses Caroline Walters and Durga Jayaraman as the best candidates for SGA President and Student Co-Chair of Community Council.
(04/16/15 1:31am)
“The more we understand the world, the more voice we have in shaping it.”
These were the words of a young student of Kevin Murungi ’01, Director of Human Rights and Foreign Policy Programs at Global Kids, who returned to the College on April 9 to deliver the Spring Symposium’s annual keynote speech. In his speech, this theme of global understanding was highlighted as Murungi shared the story of his journey from Nairobi to Middlebury to his current work in Global Kids, a non-profit education organization, and the incredible stories that he is helping other students write for themselves.
Murungi began his lecture with a broad grin.
“I’m an educator, so I like to connect with my audience,” Murungi said.
Education was one of the driving forces in Murungi’s young life. He grew up in Nairobi, Kenya, “the best city in the world.” (“Where else can you see giraffes on the city skyline?”) Murungi’s parents and older siblings studied at American universities; international perspective was highly valued in his family.
Murungi headed to Middlebury with excitement, a feeling that was hardly dampered even when he was pulled aside in the U.S. airport for a “random” security check. This event would foreshadow the presence of social injustice in Murungi’s surroundings, as well as his eagerness to address it.
Initially, Murungi believed he would study biology, but three hours of lab per week convinced him otherwise. He turned, on a whim, to political science, and Introduction to Comparative Politics with Professor Emeritus of Political Science David Rosenberg soon became his favorite class.
Murungi recalled how this subject really struck a chord with him.
“I am a Kenyan, [from a country where] speaking up against social injustice was tantamount to speaking out against the ruling elite.”
Even then, though, the significance of a major in political science didn’t weigh heavily in his mind. It wasn’t until a light-hearted conversation with Rosenberg, in which Rosenberg suggested Murungi major in political science, that his life took an unalterable course towards political science and social justice.
One of Murungi’s strongest messages to students was to fully appreciate their advisors.
“Relationships with professors at Midd are critically important,” Murungi said. “Don’t take them for granted.”
His advisor, James Jermain Professor Emeritus of Political Economics and International Law Russell Leng ’60, taught Murungi’s favorite undergraduate course: International Law and Organization. The combination of theory in the classroom and social injustice in his home country spurred Murungi to engage in social activism at the College. He helped plan an annual African Symposium, which still occurs today.
Furthermore, when racial injustice surfaced in the Campus, he was at the forefront of protests against it. During one of his undergrad years, the paper published a racist ad featuring a picture of three black men with the title “Thugs, Gangsters, and Hoodlums.” The backlash was ferocious, and Murungi recalled how the ad “stirred in him a desire to face injustices.” Even in Vermont, he was made aware of “what it meant to be a black man in America.”
Murungi’s leadership at Global Kids since 2006 enables middle and high school students from underserved areas of New York City and Washington, D.C. to learn about international policy, participate in the democratic process, and become change-makers in their communities. Many of the students come from schools whose dropout rates are 50 to 60 percent, yet students who participate in Global Kids summer programs have a 96 percent college acceptance rate.
Additionally, at Global Kids students are expected to spread their knowledge within their communities. For example, students in NYC are at the forefront of a proposal to mandate elementary school climate change education.
In his lecture, Murungi imparted his deep admiration for the “cultural competence” of the students he works with. His proudest moment at Global Kids was taking five students to Kenya in 2009, where they assessed the role of youth in human rights campaigns.
After the speech, he shared that, at Global Kids, the point of departure is always the students and their stake in the projects.
“All I can do is...provide the tools for them to access their global citizenship,” he said, just like the College did for him.
Murungi’s story comes full circle; he inspired a Global Kids participant, Amosh Neupane ’18, to apply to and attend Middlebury. Neupane shared his admiration for Murungi and the positive impact of his GK summer building green roofs in NYC public schools.
“Global Kids was/is the perfect after-school program — a combination of an academic support group, a mentorship and college counseling program, and a stage for youth empowerment,” Neupane said. “Perhaps the most important thing I learned in Global Kids was to unbridle myself and face my fears with confidence. Mentors like Kevin guided me through this process of development.”
Other students were equally impressed with Murungi’s social work in an environment that engages kids and his humility in recounting the opportunities he provides to children.
“[His speech] had just the right amount of cliché, but it was also real,” Leo McElroy ’18 said.
“I had lunch with him, and he’s a very low-key, very comfortable guy,” Kyler Blodgett ’17 said. “I’m glad he didn’t transform and button-up in his talk; he was the same relaxed guy.”
