779 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(10/09/13 4:00am)
Ruby and Roman each carried a white paper bag overflowing with freshly picked apples and a tooth-splitting smile last Saturday morning as they clambered to sit atop the stone wall in Adirondack Circle.
“I got a bunch of tiny little apple ‘thingies,’” Ruby said, drawing an apple smaller than her nine-year-old palm out of her bag.
Giving Ruby a boost with one hand, her mentor Greer Howard ’16, used the other to save an apple on verge of tumbling onto the sidewalk.
“Roman got bigger ones,” Ruby said as she reached into the batch of apples collected by her brother, who was running circles around a nearby tree trunk.
“I want to make apple pie,” Roman interjected, a honey stick between his teeth, while his mentor, Emily Funsten ’16, attempted to roll up his too-long sleeves before he ran away again.
Ruby and Roman have been coming to the College since last fall through the Community Friends program. The siblings spend two hours every week with their mentors, Howard and Funsten, swimming, making gingerbread houses, doing arts and crafts or playing games.
“They don’t really care so much what they’re doing,” said their mother, Gillian. “It’s just that they have a special someone in their life.”
Such is the aim of Community Friends, a volunteer mentorship organization that has matched over 2,000 College students with six- to 12-year-old children from Addison County since its inception in 1960. Originally run by the Counseling Service of Addison County, the program is one of the oldest service organizations involved with the College. But after budget cuts in 2002, the College took over the program, which has since been run through the Community Engagement office.
Nestor Martinez came to the College last year via an AmeriCorps VISTA grant to run Community Friends. He now works as the Program and Outreach Fellow in the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs.
Last year, Martinez visited eight of 18 elementary schools in Addison County to talk to guidance counselors about introducing children and families to the program. At one such school, Bristol Elementary, the guidance counselor brought Ruby and Roman into the program and from there the organization matched the two with Howard and Funsten.
“I don’t know why we were chosen,” Gillian said of her family’s involvement in the program.
This is nothing out of the ordinary for Community Friends. Mentees are often referred to the program by a guidance counselor, clinician or social worker without parent involvement.
“A lot of times guidance counselors sign kids up if they see problems at home or [if] the kids clearly need extra attention or a positive role model,” Samantha Wasserman ’14, lead student coordinator, said. “They might be acting out in school or they’re a little shy or they have some behavioral issues.”
Martinez added that more of than not, their families lack a role model.
“Especially for boys coming in, it’s usually a lack of a male figure, or at least a positive male figure,” Martinez said.
Parents can also apply on their child’s behalf, though these applications usually focus on activities and interests, rather than behavioral or social issues.
“Sometimes you do get kids from —and I hate to use this word — perfectly adjusted families,” Martinez said, specifying the reason parents sign their children up as a child’s interest the family does not have time to nurture.
Last year, for example, he received an application from a counselor in Bristol advocating a child who spent his weeks with his father and weekends with his mother.
“The father worked so many hours and wasn’t around a lot, and [the child] was really showing an aptitude for music,” Martinez said. “He wanted to find someone who could provide an outlet for music but also had experience working with children and when challenges arose could support him.”
A Perfect Match
No matter how the child becomes involved with Community Friends, the first step coordinators take is to match them with a mentor who has been through a similar application process. Wasserman said the mentor’s application and interview process work not as a critical assessment of the applicant, but instead aims to get to know the soon-to-be mentor find them a suitable mentee match. Rarely are students denied a mentorship position; the obstacle is generally one of logistical or scheduling difficulties.
Matching mentors and mentees depends foremost on transportation availability — coordinators need to make sure that either the mentor or the family has a way to reach the other. With this base covered, the matches are then based on common interests or activities, and the age and gender that the mentor specified in the application.
“It was pretty common practice to match males to males, females to females,” Martinez said. “Sometimes college-aged females with little boys, but never college males with little girls.”
And finally, the personal connection can be fostered. Though their first meeting is in the company of a student coordinator and the mentee’s family, the Community Friends pair is free to make their own fun and establish a unique relationship.
“It’s mostly an individual one-on-one program, which is something that makes it a really special and important relationship between the mentor and the mentee,” Wasserman said.
In addition to weekly pair get-togethers, coordinators also host several program-wide events and optional gatherings for mentors and mentees to get to know others involved in the program. Autumnal crafting parties take place in the fall, and the pairs attend a scavenger hunt-picnic event in the spring, but the paramount event has remained the J Term pool party. Though events like these do not appeal to all the mentees, the pool party usually draws the biggest number of party-goers — about half the pairs show up.
Wasserman has also been working to host more mentor-only events.
“[These events will] create a network between us college students to help each other and discuss the issues we’re facing in our matches,” Wasserman said.
Participation Fluctuation
Student coordinators have managed to bulk up the mentor-training program, which in the past has been insubstantial. The program now features a local speaker who addresses issues students might see in Addison County, a staff member from Community Engagement to discuss the guidelines of the program and small group discussions.
Wasserman said her focus is to increase the support and training for the mentors. Pushing to better educate mentors has proved a two-fold effort — the program first needs to recruit said mentors.
“Participation has waxed and waned over the years, depending on funding and on staffing,” said Tiffany Sargent, director of civic engagement, who has been involved with the program since 1985.
Lack of participation often results from the inability for students to find time in to take on a mentee; the responsibility consists of a two-hour meeting once a week and a minimum commitment of one academic year.
“More often than not, [students] continue [their relationships] beyond a year, but some do cut it off after a year,” Martinez said.
Most of the relationships end because of scheduling conflicts, though some end because the connections between mentor and mentee have not worked well.
Currently, there are about 65 active Community Friends pairs and a handful more pending. Last year’s final count was between 75 and 80 pairs, but Sargent guesses it ould reach 90 this year.
Thirty-seven children from Addison County, however, are still waiting for their mentees.
Clearly, the program is in need of volunteers and, as Wasserman, Sargent, Martinez and Howard all emphasized, the lack of male mentors in particular has posed a consistent problem.
“Females are just more willing to volunteer across the board,” Martinez said. “Perhaps females in general are more willing to be with children than males.”
Discrepancies between male and female participants have followed a common pattern throughout the years. Generally, 75 percent of the mentors are female.
This trend heavily affects the kids’ ability to be matched with a mentor; midway through last year, Martinez remembered, the waitlist was all boys.
The Power of Friendship
To Ruby and Roman, however, these logistics matter little – for them, it is just fun. Roman’s favorite part about spending time with his mentor is that he “always beat[s] Emily at tic-tac-toe. In really tricky ways.” Ruby settled on, “Mostly all of it.”
Though her fourth grade self may not realize it, Ruby’s childhood has been altered because of her involvement with Community Friends.
“Last year, Ruby had an issue, something had gone on with her family,” Howard said. “After I met with her, her mom texted me saying ‘Thank you, I don’t know what she would have done if she didn’t get to see you that day.’”
Connecting with someone of a different age, background and perspective can change the way a child matures. Many parents alluded to a noticeable growth in their children in the 2012-2013 survey, saying their self-assurance and sociability had developed and flourished.
“She was pretty shy when we first started meeting,” Wasserman said of her mentee with whom she has been paired for three years. “She’s much more confident than she used to be.”
Whether this is a direct result of a relationship with a college student, or just a product of growing up is hard to say, but there is no doubt that the relationships nurtured through Community Friends had a lasting effect.
During her time abroad last spring Wasserman exchanged emails and postcards with her mentee, and on her one-day visit to campus this summer, the pair got together.
“We’re very close at this point,” Wasserman said. “She’s something that’s really important to me here at Middlebury.”
Wasserman, Funsten and Howard all noted that they have learned and grown along with their mentees, too.
“Patience is a big part of it,” Howard said. “And being understanding.”
Mentors become indispensable role models for the children they meet, and their company carries much more weight than just catching falling apples or rolling up sleeves.
Though the program is not intended to provide a tutoring service, Martinez recognized the importance of mentors imparting the importance of schoolwork, recalling several mentee applications that requested the child be exposed to good study habits.
“I like them seeing the college environment,” Gillian said. “We live in a small town – Bristol – and a lot of people don’t go to college, so it’s good for them to be on a college campus and learn what a dorm is and all that stuff.”
But the mentor-mentee connection teaches much more than educational lessons. For mentors, the philosophy behind the program emphasizes the opportunity for mentors to burst out of the Middlebury bubble.
“It gets people away from the 18-22 age group,” Funsten said. “It gets them into a different mindset and it’s an outlet from school. It’s also nice to get involved in the community and to have a family that we know and are decently close to in Bristol.”
Understanding the surrounding community remains a goal of the Community Friends program.
“I think it’s really easy to be on campus in this very academic climate and to think of Middlebury College as Middlebury, Vt. and even Addison [County] by extension,” Martinez said. “The reality is that poverty is pretty prevalent and children in poverty are pretty prevalent, and it’s more of a challenge here because it’s rural.”
Though they might not realize it, mentors are often deeply affected by the people and places they encounter. When asked in their applications why they want to get involved in the program, most students cite their desire to work with children or recall their own experiences with mentors.
But Martinez pointed out that he would hear a lot of students say, “I didn’t think of the kind of life this kid is leading here as a normal scene.” He recalled a conversation with one mentor just after she met her mentee.
“She came to me and said ‘We visited them at home because the family didn’t have a car, and the house really smelled of smoke and [the mentee] smelled of smoke and I didn’t know what to do,’” Martinez said. “I think that was a shock for her, and that’s just part of each of their lifestyles.”
Though many applicants have experience working with children, most of these come through camp or school, which don’t involve behavioral therapy or intervention, said Martinez.
For both mentors and mentees, the program opens doors, teaches lessons and provides a meaningful connection that would not otherwise be made. While raising money or packaging food can greatly benefit people in need, mentors believe having a personal connection with someone creates an entirely new dimension.
“There’s a direct impact you have on these kids’ lives,” said Howard after Ruby had hugged her goodbye and gotten in the car with Roman and Gillian.
(10/03/13 12:24am)
How do we use the skills and opportunities we have to make the world a better place? Middlebury students revisit this question time and time again, from conversations in the dining hall to the “Careers for the Common Good” blog from the EIA. Hudson Cavanaugh ’14 has explored this question over the past two weeks in his column, “Warm Glow,” but his simplification of this question into pure economic terms neglects some important elements of this discussion.
The world in which we live is inherently complex and full of inequalities. Some work to better this world saves lives directly, like the expansion of medical care, and some indirectly, like working to mitigate the impacts of climate change. In the long-run, climate change will lead to extreme weather events, crop failure, and rising sea levels that will cost many lives and threaten many more, but in the short term, medical care has a greater impact.
Thus, while donations with the goal of immediate lives saved are undoubtedly important, working towards a more equitable and sustainable world requires both short and long-term investments. The benefits of these investments are difficult to measure, for they operate on a longer time frame and are therefore discounted; however, they are no less important.
Moreover, individual passions are indispensable in creating a long-term model for change. We often talk about exploring our passions, acknowledging that this love allows us to work harder than otherwise possible and sustain energy over long periods of time.
As Michelle Obama often said on the 2012 campaign trail, “real change is slow.” Perhaps the hardest lesson I’ve learned from engaging in climate activism is that real change is also exhausting. Passion spurns the determination that allows me to keep working. know I wouldn’t be able to put as much into investment banking as I can into political and environmental organizing because I wouldn’t feel the same gratification.
Cavanaugh addresses the idea of marginal utility of job decisions and accounts for morality; however, there are many nuances in this argument. While his example, Jennifer, who pushes JP Morgan toward social responsibility, may be working to push an unjust institution into socially responsible practices, her impact could still be overrun by what I would consider a net negative impact from investment banks. The Koch brothers donate money to environmental organizations like the Nature Conservancy and to cancer research; however, they make their money in the oil, gas and chemical industries and use much of it to lobby for lax environmental regulations, leading to cancer-causing contamination. They definitely do not break even on damage from their industry, despite their philanthropic habits. For an individual like Jennifer, her influence only can extend so far. Creating the large scale, systematic change required to dismantle the oppressive system reinforced by her employer requires a much greater movement with both internal and external pressure.
We see this dichotomy on our own campus with divestment. Our College educates many students who go off and do good in the world, often in environmentally friendly fields. But these efforts are hindered by the fact that our endowment invests in fossil fuels, allowing these companies to further maximize their profits by exploiting our planet’s resources with little regard for the social cost of carbon. We are not morally exonerated from investing in fossil fuels because we have a strong program in environmental studies. Indeed, that program should serve as a strong reminder for why we must divest our endowment and put our money where our mouths are.
Even if everyone were to give money in the most short-term cost effective way, paying careful attention to the ethics of their employer as well as the ethics of the organizations to which they are donating, we still need people on the ground working tirelessly to distribute malaria nets or vaccinate children. Change requires time as well as money, and in many cases, time can be more difficult to give.
Just as we cannot value the life of an American over the life of anyone else, we cannot simply treat people as numbers and base decision solely on cost-effectiveness. What is the point of saving a life if you cannot provide other basic human rights and needs like access to a livable environment free from containments? We must work together to create a safer and healthier global community, and this is a multi-faceted project. We do not want to eradicate guinea worm only to find that we have raised the global temperature beyond a salvageable threshold. Working to increase gender equality and education opportunities may not specifically save a life, but it will increase economic opportunities and quality of life for many future generations and could save children who are not yet born.
So do what you love and incorporate social responsibility into all aspects of your life. In the long run, following your passions will sustain you far longer than working in an industry for the sake of opportunity cost and will allow you to maximize your total good. We need all pieces of the puzzle — both short and long-term goals, effective and fulfilling giving practices, and time and monetary donations. Creating lasting global change takes time and effort on all fronts, and there is no single solution. We can only do the most we can in a responsible and thoughtful way to comprehensively address the injustices that surround us both abroad and at home.
(09/25/13 11:33pm)
Walk through the farmer’s market in Marbleworks on Saturday morning or drive down Weybridge Street past the edge of campus, and it is easy to see that Middlebury College is nestled in a community where food and the land are integral parts of daily life. From dorm room windows, students see pastoral landscapes of farms and mountains in every direction. One could buy into the notion that Vermonters never go hungry because everyone must subsist on kale and carrots grown from their own gardens. However, this romantic concept is not the reality of food security in Vermont.
As the state with the highest number of farmer’s markets per capita, Vermont has a well-developed local food system compared to other parts of the United States. However, “Local Food for Healthy Communities,” a new report from the Vermont Community Foundation, found that 13 percent of Vermont families struggle to put food on the table, one in five children will suffer from hunger in their lifetime and two thirds of adults are obese.
The Vermont Community Foundation sees these statistics as an opportunity for growth and their Food and Farm Initiative is working to end food insecurity and increase overall public health throughout the state.
“The Vermont Community Foundation’s Food and Farm Initiative works at the nexus of hunger, health, and the state’s agricultural tradition to connect all Vermont families with healthy, local food-regardless of where they live, what they earn, or how much time they spend cooking,” said Emily Jacke, the Vermont Community Foundation’s Philanthropy Associate.
The common misconception is that the burgeoning local food movement is reaching all Vermonters.
“More and more local food is becoming a part of [our] cultural fabric, but there are a lot of people getting left behind,” Jen Peterson, Vice President for Program and Grants at VCF, said. “We see our Food and Farm Initiative as a place to champion the efforts to address food security while we are having this thriving local food movement in Vermont.”
Over 40 percent of children in Vermont qualify for free and reduced cost meals. The VCF’s Food and Farm Initiative will begin in Vermont public schools by giving intensive support to Farm-to-School efforts.
“We want to create a system where every kid who wants a healthy meal can get one,” Peterson said.
By focusing on educating children about local food, VCF believes that the movement will have a systemic impact. Not only will feeding young children healthier food help them create lifelong healthy eating habits, but kids will take what they learn about local food home to their families.
Richard Berkfeld of Food Connects, an organization that brings healthy, local food to classrooms and communities, states that farm to school models are key to creating food system change.
“Building a good Local food system touches on a lot of issues really big now,” he said. “The environment and climate change, eating fresh, local food has a big impact on our health and the local economy… these are all tied together by Farm-to-School.”
The Vermont Community Foundation has found that most Vermonters want to make healthier choices for their families. Berkfeld knows that this will help the movement progress more efficiently.
“We are lucky so many people care about local food,” he said.
However, there are common barriers that get in the way of families choosing to buy local food. Low-income families view the cost of healthy food as a big issue and for many in rural areas there is not a grocery store close by. The Food and Farm Initiative will focus on creating policy that promotes accessibility and builds farmer’s markets that are more professional and reachable. Additionally, the Foundation believes that expanding Farm-to-School programs will help them reach the majority of Vermonters currently without access to healthy food.
Another key part of the initial plans for Food and Farm is a meat processing facility in Middlebury, which will help to distribute local meat to schools. Many members of the Middlebury College community are excited to see the town get involved in this progressive initiative.
Robin Weisselberg ’16.5, a Campus Sustainability Coordinator and an active member of EatReal, a club at the College, said, “Eating local foods is a great way to begin developing an awareness of where your food comes from, how it is produced, how it is processed, and who did all of that work so that you could nourish yourself today.”
Maeve Grady ’16.5, an active member of the Divest Midd movement and the Socially Responsible Investment club on campus is also in support of the movement.
“One great thing about the local food movement is that it combines environmental activism, awareness of nutritional health and food security,” he said. “I am excited to see this effort begin in our community.”
The Vermont Community Foundation’s goal is to create a “fair and just local food system,” Peterson said.
As connected as most Vermonters are to one another and to the land around them, it is no surprise that the solution to a community issue as deep rooted as food insecurity lies at the intersection of philanthropy, healthy eating and taking care of the planet.
(09/18/13 10:59pm)
On Aug. 28, students and faculty received an email from President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz with the subject line “Statement on Divestment.” The message read, “Ultimately, the call to divest raises a number of important questions that must be answered … At this time, too many of these questions either raise serious concerns or remain unanswered for [the Middlebury College Board of Trustees] to support divestment. Given its fiduciary responsibilities, the board cannot look past the lack of proven alternative investment models, the difficulty and material cost of withdrawing from a complex portfolio of investments, and the uncertainties and risks that divestment would create.”
After a year of a high-energy activism, intense debate and impassioned protest on the part of student advocates, it seemed that the door was closing on divestment.
But when asked about the future of divestment, Adrian Leong — a soft-spoken sophomore called “a rising star” by divestment advocates on campus — simply shook his head.
“Divestment is not off the table,” said Leong. “This email is certainly not a defeat. In fact, I appreciated how clearly [Liebowitz] laid out his questions, and I found his willingness to commit to stronger responsible investment principles quite encouraging.”
“As long as that willingness is there, divestment is still alive.”
A Tumultuous Year
Just under a year ago, on a Friday afternoon in October as students departed campus for fall break, an email with the subject line “Middlebury College Divests from War on Eve of Dalai Lama Visit” scrolled our inboxes across campus.
The email, announcing the College’s divestment of its endowment from war, was met with excitement from some students and confusion among others. But two days later, when Tim Spears, vice president for academic affairs, issued an email to all staff, students and faculty clarifying that the press release was a “hoax,” the campus started to buzz with speculation about what this might mean. And when five students published an open letter to the community “coming clean” for sending the fake press release, signed, “The Dalai Lama Welcoming Committee,” it became clear that this was more than just a prank, and the buzz surrounding the incident grew to a dull roar.
Greta Neubauer ’15 returned to campus last fall committed to continuing her work on socially responsible investment and determined to start a divestment campaign at the College. While she had some prior knowledge of the Dalai Lama Welcoming Committee’s press release before its dissemination, she was caught off guard by the momentum it created on campus.
“The fake press release was really powerful at that moment because there was such an element of surprise, and if they had done it at another time, it wouldn’t have had the huge effect that it did on the dialogue here,” said Neubauer. “It’s a tough thing, because on the one hand, it undoubtedly made a huge impact on divestment, because the administration felt compelled to respond and it changed the way in which the campaign unfolded. But it also didn’t follow the typical arch of a campaign, and I think that alienated some people early on. And then throughout the year we saw this increasing dislike of anything that looks like or sounds like activism on this campus. That’s a hard thing to work against.”
Even as the storm of controversy surrounding the press release and the ensuing public trial faded away, divestment took hold as a mainstream topic of conversation among the student body. The campus witnessed the divestment movement move from a niche concern among a select group of student activists to a full-fledged campus-wide debate — in the dining hall, the classroom, the trustee’s boardroom, and the front pages of the Campus.
The conversation was characterized by heated debates over the College’s moral responsibility, impassioned students citing the works of civil rights leaders and adopting the mantra of Bill McKibben’s oft-repeated reasoning: “If it’s wrong to wreck the climate, then it’s wrong to profit from its destruction.”
There was also a lot of work going on behind the scenes — students engrossed in late night conversations, preparing thoroughly researched reports to back up recommendations made to sober administrators and a boardroom full of trustees. And yet these conversations were punctuated by loud rallies, demonstrations of students standing outside Proctor or Old Chapel with megaphones, pots and pans, sporting the bright orange felt square that emerged as a symbol of the divestment movement.
The flashes of orange sent a message: this conversation was loud, it was in your face, and it was impossible to ignore.
Looking Towards the Future
Now, at the beginning of a new school year, the movement is pausing for a breath.
“There is a cool opportunity at the beginning of the year to stop and reflect on how we worked together last year,” said Neubauer. “Hopefully we can take some lessons from that and be able to move forward this year and be better for it.”
As some students have graduated and others have gone abroad, there has already been some room created for new voices.
“We have some new faces this year,” said Ben Chute ’13.5. “I think you’ll be hearing a lot more from some of our younger members — we have some rising sophomores and rising juniors who are some real powerhouses.”
Chute, now in his final semester in college, is the source of much of the movement’s institutional knowledge; he served as the co-president of the Socially Responsible Investing committee for two years before his appointment to Student Liaison to Investment Committee of the Board of Trustees last fall, and he speaks about his younger peers the way a coach might talk about his players.
“We have a lot of kids this year who are really smart activists. They’re very knowledgeable and they’re very pragmatic. We’ll see how this year shapes up, and it comes down to who is in the room.”
Leong, an environmental policy major, joined the movement only a few months into his first year at the College, and is on the younger side of the cohort of students.
“I hope that people will see our movement as a whole, and not just associate it with one group of people and just think, ‘Those are the kids that disturbed my sleep with their pots and pans.’ We’ve done so much more than that. I really hope that more people can share our vision.”
“What I see is being the most powerful tool for us in terms of convincing the administration is having there being a huge crowd swell behind this issue, and there being very visible signs of mass support from students,” said Kristina Johansson ’14. “That means making spaces that are really inclusive and finding ways for people to get involved, no matter what their ideology or methods for making change. Just creating audiences for great engagement.”
“My hope is that a lot of the action taken last year acted as a catalyst,” said Teddy Smyth ’15, a member of the Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investment (ACSRI). “Now we have enough momentum to be somewhat more pragmatic so that we can focus on the strategic vision of the divestment campaign. I think we’ll spend some time considering what actions need to happen versus what actions aren’t as essential; what would be distracting versus what’s necessary and practical.”
“That being said, we need to keep the conversation going in a public way,” added Smyth. “Last year, other people filled the role of making noise and of attracting public attention, and so I might need to do more of that this year, although its not necessarily my skill set.”
“I think we’re going to try to have a really public, visible presence on campus and be the source of a lot discussion,” said Jeannie Bartlett ’15 while discussing possible tactics for the coming year. “But I think one thing we’re really looking to do is connecting with Trustees and talk with them on an individual basis to discuss research, because I think that having that kind of more isolated and direct conversations is what, at this point, is lacking in the discussion.”
“The fact that we’re not divesting right not is obviously disappointing,” Bartlett continued. “The commitments [Liebowtiz] laid out in his email are wonderful and I care about them a lot, but they don’t achieve the political statement that divestment does.”
“But I am optimistic. And if they actually do those three things laid out in Liebowitz’s email, that would be the biggest win that SRI has ever had at Middlebury, by far. So its really exciting. And I’m going to work to make sure that those things do happen.”
(09/18/13 10:51pm)
Students pumped up their bicycle tires to participate in a social-media-focused campaign by Greenpeace encouraging bike-riding to raise awareness for the plight of the Arctic on Sunday, Sept. 15. The main objective of the event was to bring attention to oil companies who plan to drill for oil made newly available by the melting of Arctic sea ice. Simultaneously, the student organizers made connections to the Addison Natural Gas Project pipeline underway locally.
The group of 10 biked 1.5 miles to the Apple Fest at Shoreham Town Green. Event organizer Ellie Ng ’14 said it was also a day for students from disparate environmental groups to connect with others.
At the start of the bike ride, event organizer Adrian Leong ’16 explained how in 116 cities in 33 countries, Greenpeace Ice Rides are springing up everywhere. Middlebury’s was the only one in the Northeastern United States.
The Ice Ride event is somewhat of a departure from Greenpeace’s norm of nonviolent direct action.
“Recently Greenpeace has been trying to occupy more of the dialogue surrounding this issue,” said Leong.
According to Leong, the goal of the campaign is to raise awareness of the risks associated with arctic drilling through the use of social media. To this end, Leong and Ng were sharing photos of Middlebury’s official Ice Ride event on Facebook and Twitter.
Some students walking by Adirondack Circle commented on the cyclists’ send-off.
“I think it’s good initiative, the fact that they’re using popular media to get people to know about it and I think it’s a very smart way to go about issues like this,” said Joanne Wu ’15.
Jeannie Bartlett ’15, who cycled in the event, heard about the event from an email sent to the Middlebury climate campaign list.
“I wanted to come because it’s a beautiful bike ride and a fun thing to do on a Sunday, but also because these collective actions that take place across the country or across the world at separate locations can be really powerful because of the power of digital media now,” said Bartlett, citing 350.org as another organization that connects local events to a national movement.
Bartlett also said the day was an opportunity to remember the implications of melting polar ice caps.
“I think we need to remember that the melting of the Arctic isn’t just the melting of the Arctic, it’s also the rising and warming of the seas and many other things that will really directly affect humans,” said Bartlett. “Even though I think the Arctic as an ecosystem is important in and of itself I also think it’s really important for the impact it has on people.”
While several students on the bicycle route were veterans of campus environmental groups such as Sunday Night Group and Divest Middlebury, others were just there to ride.
“I heard about the event through an email,” Nathalia Gonzalez ’17 said. “I didn’t hear about a lot of people that said they were going but I figured, why not? It would be a really fun ride to go to an Apple Fest.”
Gonzalez said she had heard about Greenpeace before but did not know much about the organization or this particular campaign.
Ng said the problem with energy sources like oil and natural gas is that the power is concentrated in large companies and governments.
“With renewable energy like solar panels, wind farms, or biomass, it is more local and people have more power,” she said. The bike ride symbolizes this power to the people.”
The cyclists also encountered signs of another environmental policy playing out right in their backyard. Leong said they saw signs that read “Keep Cornwall Safe” and “Keep Shoreham Safe” on their route, referring to the plan by company Vermont Gas to run a natural gas pipeline through several Vermont towns.
“Along the road to Shoreham there were a few signs about the [Addison Natural Gas Project] pipeline,” said Ng. “As with the gas pipeline and energy issues around the world, in that sense, when we passed by those signs we felt connected to this global movement.”
Leong said that the argument in favor of drilling for oil in the Arctic, like the argument in favor of Vermont natural gas, does not make much sense.
“Drilling in the arctic is what we call a false climate change solution,” he said. “A lot of governments or companies say that drilling for gas or drilling for oil are transitional fuels and that’s the reason why they are drilling in the arctic, buying time for others to develop renewable energy. But we’re saying the transition period has gone already. We don’t have any capital to burn any more fossil fuels. We have to switch from fossil fuels to renewables now.’”
Leong said making a last stand for an unspoiled natural Arctic is what makes the issue so urgent.
“The arctic ice is melting and that is what is allowing the drilling and fishing fleets to go in,” said Leong. “[Ice Ride] is about people standing up and saying, ‘There are enough pristine environments being exploited in the world. The Arctic is the last one we want to preserve.’”
(09/12/13 3:58am)
As Kyle Finck reported for the Campus earlier this week, "a 2,977 flag memorial was ripped out of the ground in front of Mead Memorial Chapel shortly before 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 11 by a group of five protestors claiming that the flags were on top of a sacred Abenaki burial site." This coverage supplemented middbeat's original post, featuring the photograph above by middbeat's Rachel Kogan.
Both the community and country were quick to react through word and action.
A group of about ten students began replanting the flags in front of Mead Memorial Chapel by 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday evening; Anthea Viragh captured the photograph below from the reaction. Our upcoming issue (Issue 112, Number 2) will feature a story, gallery and podcast about these students and their effort to replace the memorial.
Late Wednesday evening, middbeat stated that Anna Shireman-Grabowski ’15.5 had "come forward to confirm her involvement in disposing of the American flags." The alternative news source posted the following statement by Shireman-Grabowski:
Today I, along with a group of non-Middlebury students, helped remove around 3,000 American flags from the grass by Mead Chapel. While I was not the only one engaged in this action and the decision was not solely mine, I am the one who will see you in the dining halls and in the classroom, and I want to take accountability for the hurt you may be feeling while clarifying the motivations for this action.
My intention was not to cause pain but to visibilize the necessity of honoring all human life and to help a friend heal from the violence of genocide that she carries with her on a daily basis as an indigenous person. While the American flags on the Middlebury hillside symbolize to some the loss of innocent lives in New York, to others they represent centuries of bloody conquest and mass murder. As a settler on stolen land, I do not have the luxury of grieving without an eye to power. Three thousand flags is a lot, but the campus is not big enough to hold a marker for every life sacrificed in the history of American conquest and colonialism.
The emails filling my inbox indicate that this was not a productive way to start a dialogue about American imperialism. Nor did I imagine that it would be. Please understand that I am grappling with my complicity in the overwhelming legacy of settler colonialism. Part of this process for me is honoring the feelings and wishes of people who find themselves on the other side of this history.
I wish to further clarify that members of the local Abenaki community should in no way be implicated in today’s events. Nor can I pretend to speak to their feelings about flags, burial sites, or 9/11.
Today I chose to act in solidarity with my friend, an Indigenous woman and a citizen of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy who was appalled to see the burial grounds of another Indigenous nation desecrated by piercing the ground that their remains lay beneath. I understand that this action is confusing and painful for many in my community. I don’t pretend to know if every action I take is right or justified—this process is multi-layered and nuanced. I do know that colonialism has been—and continues to be—a real and destructive force in the world that we live in. And for me, to honor life is to support those who struggle against it.
Please do not hesitate to email me or approach me if you wish to discuss this in person.
On Thursday morning, President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz released the following statement to the Middlebury College Community:
Yesterday, on the 12th anniversary of the horrific attack on our nation on September 11, 2001, a group of Middlebury students commemorated the loss of nearly 3,000 lives by placing American flags in front of Mead Chapel as they have done a number of times in the past. Sadly, a handful of people, at least some of them from our campus community, this year chose to desecrate those flags and disrespect the memories of those who lost their lives by pulling the flags from the ground and stuffing them in garbage bags.
We live in an academic community that fosters and encourages debate and discussion of difficult issues. It is also a community that requires of all a degree of respect and civility that was seriously undermined and compromised by this selfish act of protest.
Like many of you, I was deeply disturbed by the insensitivity of this act. Destruction of property and interfering with the rights of others to express themselves violates the standards of our community. The College has begun a disciplinary investigation of this incident.
There is always something to learn from differences of opinion. In this case, the disrespectful methods of the protesters overshadowed anything that might have been learned from the convictions they claimed to promote. We will not tolerate this kind of behavior.
On Thursday evening, a second protester named Amanda Lickers released a statement on Climate Connections, stating that she helped remove the flags from the grass. Lickers gave her reasoning in the posted statement:
i am a young onkwehon:we, a woman, a member of the turtle clan and the onondowa’ga nation of the haudenosaunee confederacy. i have been doing my best to be true to the responsibilities i have inherited through the gift of life, and the relationships i must honour to my ancestors and all our relatives.
for over 500 years our people have been under attack. the theft of our territories, the devastation of our waters; the poisoning of our people through the poisoning of our lands; the theft of our people from our families; the rape of our children; the murder of our women; the sterilization of our communities; the abuse of our generations; the
uprooting of our ancestors and the occupation of our sacred sites; the silencing of our songs; the erasure of our languages and memories of our traditions
i have had enough.
yesterday i went to occupied abenaki territory. i was invited to middlebury college to facilitate a workshop on settler responsibility and decolonization. i walked across this campus whose stone wall structures weigh heavy on the landscape. the history of eugenics, genocide and colonial violence permeate that space so fully like a ghost everywhere descending. it was my understanding that this site is occupying an abenaki burial ground; a sacred site.
walking through the campus i saw thousands of small american flags. tho my natural disdain for the occupying colonial state came to surface, in the quickest moment of decision making, in my heart, i understood that lands where our dead lay must not be desecrated. in my community, we do not pierce the earth. it disturbs the spirits there, it is important for me to respect their presence, their want for rest.
my heart swelled and i knew in my core that thousands of american flags should not penetrate the earth where my abenaki brothers and sisters sleep. we have all survived so much – and as a visitor on their territories i took action to respect them and began pulling up all of the flags.
i was with 4 non-natives who supported me in this action. there were so many flags staking the earth and their hands helped make this work faster. this act of support by my friends, as settlers, tho small was healing and inspiring. we put them away in black garbage bags and i was confronted by a nationalistic-settler, a young white boy who attends the college demanding i relinquish the flags to him. i held my ground and
confiscated them. i did not want to cave to his support of the occupying, settler-colonial, imperalist state, and the endorsing of the genocide of indigenous peoples across the world.
it is the duty of the college of middlebury to consult with abenaki peoples and repatriate their grounds.
yesterday i said no to settler occupation. i took those flags. it is a small reclamation and modest act of resistance.
in the spirit of resilience, in the spirit of survival
Throughout Thursday and Friday, the story gained national attention with various articles appearing on the Addison Eagle, Burlington Free Press, Business Insider, CBS, Daily Caller, Fox Nation, Indian Country Today Media Network, Inside Higher Ed, Times Argus, University Herald, and WCAX, in addition to a number of blogs, such as Breitbart. Many articles were filled with comments, condemning the protestors' actions. Further, WPTZ posted a video about the incident, while both the Huffington Post and Addison County Independent reached out to the College and community for additional comments.
Amanda Scherker wrote for the Huffington Post:
That said, Middlebury does not seem to have proof that the memorial had been placed on top of a burial site.
"It has never before been suggested that this is a Native American burial ground," Sarah Ray, the school's director of public affairs, told The Huffington Post via email.
Zach Despart at the Addison County Independent published the "Abenaki Response":
Don Stevens, chief of the Nulhegan Abenaki Tribe, called the vandalism “disgusting,” and believes the protestors were acting to promote their own political beliefs.
“We didn’t know anything about this and if we had we certainly wouldn’t have sanctioned it,” Stevens said.
He said that Abenakis do not publicize the locations of their burial sites in order to protect them, and that he has no knowledge of any such sites on the Middlebury campus. Stevens said that even if the site of the memorial had been a burial site, the American flags placed in the earth would not have been a desecration.
“Our burial sites honor our warriors and their bravery,” Stevens said. “Putting flags in the earth to honor bravery would not be disrespectful.”
Stevens served in the U.S. Army; his father fought in Korea and his son served in Iraq as a member of the National Guard.
On Friday evening, the College announced a series of events on "protest and civility" planned for next week. The announcement states, "the occasion for these meetings is the destruction of the 9/11 memorial earlier this week, but our larger purpose will be to consider together the responsibilities we have as an academic community to treat one another with respect and tolerance, even as we pursue political and social agendas that sometimes divide us."
The various sessions are as follows:
Professor of Religion Larry Yarbrough on Monday, Sept. 16 at 8:00 p.m. in the Mitchell Green Lounge at McCullough Social Space
Professor of American Studies and Director of the Center for the Comparative Study for Race and Ethnicity Roberto Lint Sagarena on Tuesday, Sept. 17 at 12:00 p.m. in Carr Hall Lounge
Professor of Religion James Calvin Davis on Tuesday, Sept. 17 at 4:30 p.m. in Carr Hall Lounge
Chaplain Laurie Jordan on Wednesday, Sept. 18 at 4:30 p.m. at the Scott Center
Professor of Environmental Studies Rebecca Kneale Gould on Wednesday, Sept. 18 at 4:30 p.m. in Coltrane Lounge
Professor of Political Science Erik Bleich on Wednesday, Sept. 18 at 8:30 p.m. in the Mitchell Green Lounge at McCullough Social Space
Professor of Economics and Faculty Director of the Middlebury Center for Social Entrepreneurship Jon Isham and Professor of Geography Kacy McKinney on Thursday, Sept. 19 at 4:30 p.m. at the Scott Center
On Monday, Sept. 16 Ben Kinney ’15, co-president of College Republicans, wrote to the Campus, "I just got an email from Public Safety that two boxes containing all of the stolen flags were just dropped off at their door anonymously."
On Monday, Sept. 23 the Student Government Association Senate released the following statement:
We condemn the method of protest utilized on September 11th outside of Mead Chapel. We believe it was highly disrespectful, destructive and in violation of the the Student Handbook’s policy on respect and community standards. We support the administration’s decision to pursue disciplinary action.
Many members of our campus community, including members of the SGA, have lasting and painful memories from that horrific September morning in 2001. These members viewed the protest as a highly offensive act. Whatever one’s feelings towards American policy and this country’s history, the lives lost on September 11th were those of innocent individuals.
The Senate also condemns the disrespectful, hateful and violent speech exchanged in the wake of the 9/11 flag protest. Much of this speech came from outside of the campus community. But some discussions on campus included unnecessarily malicious and personal attacks. This practice is also disrespectful, destructive and in violation of the the Student Handbook’s policy on respect and community standards.
Protest as a practice encourages valuable debate. Protest enables the exchange of critical ideas, the altering of opinions, and, eventually, change and progress. But as with all things, there are lines that one should not cross. We, as leaders of the campus community, want to foster a forum for productive exchange and dialogue. The protest on September 11th has absolutely no place in this forum. It is our hope that the student body will rise above the malicious actions and speech that have permeated our campus in the last two weeks and create an environment that fosters effective and respectful discourse in our community.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that. - Martin Luther King Jr.
(05/02/13 12:55am)
As homeowners in the area consider their energy bills, the questions of what fuel to use, whether or not it will be renewable and how much it will cost are constantly arising. Yet while some might save by switching fuel types, the strategy of using less energy overall by improving a home’s efficiency has become increasingly popular among environmentalists and cost-savers alike.
In January, Efficiency Vermont announced the Vermont Home Energy Challenge in the hopes that it would jumpstart the state’s push towards energy efficiency. In Vermont’s 2011 Comprehensive Energy Plan, the state outlined a specific goal of improving the efficiency of 80,000 homes by 25 percent before 2020. The contest promises a $10,000 prize for an energy improvement project to any town that manages to weatherize three percent of its homes by the end of the year.
“Seventy-seven towns have signed up from all corners of the state,” said Paul Markowitz, Efficiency Vermont’s community energy program manager. “We’ve had probably 250 or 300 volunteers who were trained to organize and reach out to their community.”
Four months into the challenge, however, the statistics are showing just how challenging the three percent target is for towns. While many town organizers have made great strides in encouraging their neighbors to make energy pledges — or written commitments to any number of energy-saving home alternatives — few towns have moved beyond five or 10 percent of their actual weatherization goal.
“In terms of the level of activity, it really varies,” said Markowitz. “We have some [towns] like Middlebury and Weybridge that have been really active in terms of engaging their residents and other communities that have been slower.”
Admittedly, places like Weybridge have the advantage of having small populations where three percent translates to only a handful of homes; a city like Burlington, on the other hand, needs to weatherize over 500 homes in order to win the cash prize.
Yet for many involved, this cash prize is secondary to the overall goal of addressing climate change by reducing energy-use at the consumer level.
“Personally, my commitment is to address climate change,” said Fran Putnam, the lead volunteer in Weybridge. “I really wanted to take another step and move out into the community.”
After the construction of a zero-net-energy home with her husband and working on offering different green energy workshops in Weybridge, Putnam decided to involve herself and her community of activists in the home energy challenge as a way to reach out to a broader range of community members.
“We signed up to enter the challenge in January,” said Putnam. “We have a very active energy committee in Weybridge [that] formed in October, 2011. We had already done some projects together and we were looking for a new challenge.”
The group had been successful in persuading workshop participants to make lifestyle and housing changes to benefit the climate in previous years, but attendance was consistently low.
“We were looking for a new way to get the word out and just at that time, Efficiency Vermont started the Vermont Home Energy Challenge and we said, ‘this is perfect for us,’” said Putnam.
As a result of these volunteer efforts, 38 Weybridge residents have made pledges to reduce their energy use in some way, and one resident has completed a full efficiency upgrade.
“This town is a great town to be working in because people are so receptive,” said Putnam.
The process involves a free initial audit from local volunteers, followed by a $100 professional audit, and then the project itself, which generally cost between $5,000 and $10,000 after state and federal incentives.
The main driver for most homeowners to pursue efficiency upgrades is the predicted savings on their heating bills. Most projects save around $1,000 to $2,000 a year on energy bills, depending on the preexisting level of energy efficiency.
While the return is certainly higher than what a savings account might offer, the amount of upfront capital required to move forward with a project has been prohibitive for some.
“Right now, we’re able to offer an incentive after a job is completed of up to $2,000, said Kelly Lucci, Efficiency Vermont’s manager of public affairs and communications, “but, unfortunately, it’s not going to [help] decrease the up-front costs for folks who are on the lower-income side of the scale, [yet] still make too much money to benefit from the weatherization program, which targets very low-income folks and provides those services for free.”
In addition to those who may not be able to raise the funds necessary for a project of this scope, there are many other kinds of Vermont residents who are not being reached through this home energy challenge. For instance, seasonal homes have been excluded from the competition, while renters and mobile home owners continue to prove a challenge for efficiency-minded folks in Montpelier and across the state.
In order for Vermont to see a quarter of its year-round homes weatherized by 2020, it seems likely that they will have to further address the high upfront cost of insulating and air sealing a home, yet in the meantime, Efficiency Vermont officials are hopeful that there are enough people out there who can raise the capital to get the ball rolling.
“There are a number of people who may be in a better position to make these investments than they think,” said Lucci, “and the idea is to mobilize these town energy committees and to work through VECAN [the Vermont Energy & Climate Action Network], knocking on doors, talking to neighbors, and explaining the resources that are currently available.”
“You do have to spend some money to do this,” admitted Putnam, “but we’re trying to motivate people to use less energy by helping them see that it makes sense financially.”
In Middlebury, Vt. volunteers like Laura Asermily have also put in a great deal of work to promote the town’s energy efficiency goals. In order to succeed in the competition, the town needs to weatherize 91 homes in contrast with Weybridge’s 10 homes.
Outreach efforts have included lawn signs, tabling, neighbor-to-neighbor dialogue and even a new show on Middlebury Community Television (MCTV) that shares testimonials from residents who have completed efficiency work and seen the savings it can create.
The outreach team has also looked to some larger businesses in town to join in with the project.
“We’ve approached Middlebury College and other large employers like Porter Hospital, but these things take time.”
Because the College operates huge number of residential buildings for faculty and students in town and because of its carbon neutrality pledge, it appears as though this would be a good match. Yet thus far, Asermily and her team of volunteers have not been able to bring the College on board.
“I approached the staff council and was able to present to the staff council what the home energy challenge was,” said Asermily. “I asked for their guidance about how I could get the word out to staff. They suggested that I come in to do a learning lunch, or to canvas faculty staff at the Grille; I tried to do that but I was declined.”
In spite of this small roadblock, Asermily hopes to continue to work with the College to address this need for efficiency upgrades. The College has set up a Green Revolving Fund of one million dollars to power energy saving initiatives as a result of Efficiency Vermont’s efforts in 2011, so it may be that this fund will someday provide capital for smaller home efficiency projects of this nature. The money will revolve as these capital-intensive energy project begin to pay for themselves in energy savings, allowing the College to put those savings toward a new initiative down the line.
“Vermont’s housing stock is among the oldest in the country, so there’s certainly a lot of potential to improve the efficiency of Vermont homes, and save a lot of money on heating bills,” concluded Lucci.
(05/01/13 11:26pm)
Jeannie Bartlett ’15
There were a number of things I wanted to add to my comments at the Student Divestment Panel that I didn’t get to, so I’ll add them here.
I’m surprised to feel the need for this first clarification: the shift off of reliance on fossil fuels is not just a nice goal to have, nor is it something society might forget about. I can see how here at Middlebury, where we feel fewer of the effects, it could be easy to feel that way. But climate change and fossil fuels extraction already impact the health, safety and prosperity of people around the world and their impacts will only increase with continued use. Seven years from now, when climate change has caused 75-250 million people in Africa alone to experience extreme water stress and halved yields for rain-fed agriculture, we’re not going to just forget about moving to renewable energy and reducing consumption. That water stress will make fossil fuels dramatically increase in price because of the intense water-needs of extraction and energy-generation. Climate change is going to become increasingly relevant, and renewable energy and efficiency are going to become increasingly logical and cost-effective.
Next, Ben Wiggins ’14 and Ryan Kim ’14 both expressed the need for undeniable proof that divestment will not hurt returns before they could support it. I agree that it would be unwise for the school to make rash investment decisions, but I don’t think that means we should wait for undeniable proof. If Germany had waited for undeniable proof of climate change, they wouldn’t have enacted climate legislation in 1995 and be generating 40 percent of their electricity from renewables today. No, they’d look more like we do in the U.S.: having refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, we continue to fail to pass climate legislation, we hand out $6.6 million per day in tax breaks to the five wealthiest fossil fuel companies and we generate two percent of our power from renewables. Sometimes waiting for undeniable proof means missing the boat.
Additionally, there is reasonable evidence that divestment will not carry a significant return penalty on the endowment. The Aperio study on the subject finds a 0.0101 percent increase in risk, with an associated 0.06 percent theoretical return penalty. But there’s also significant risk in staying invested in the fossil fuel industry. A study by HSBC shows that as much as 17 percent of the value of certain fossil fuel companies is at risk due to their valuation of reserves that will be “unburnable” when efficiency improvements and climate legislation are made. Studies by Mercer, the UN Environmental Program Financial Initiative and the Carbon Tracker Initiative among many others show a looming “carbon bubble.” I have seen no studies demonstrating that there would be a significant loss of returns associated with divestment, mostly just a sense of security in the status quo.
I went in and talked with Vice President for Finance and Treasurer Patrick Norton last week about what he would do if the College were to lose returns for any reason. As I expected, he was very clear about two things that would not be cut: financial aid and salaries and benefits for staff and faculty salaried less than $50,000 per year. Two places the College could cut back are in capital improvements, or in freezing salaries or reducing benefits very marginally for faculty and staff earning more than $50,000 a year. Obviously I hope and expect the school won’t need to make those cuts for any reason, divestment-related or otherwise. Nevertheless, those are cuts I find acceptable, and I take comfort in the dedicated protection of financial aid and lower-paid employees.
Finally, I want to highlight my hopes for the divestment movement. I hope Middlebury will announce its commitment to divestment, recognizing that the fulfillment of that commitment will take time, at the Board of Trustees meeting this May. I hope that schools and cities beyond the almost 18 already committed will be catalyzed by our decisiveness. The movement will spark conversations like the one Sunday night about our rights and responsibilities in this changing world. The media will continue to make that conversation national and global, reflecting mounting national pressure for climate change action. Individuals will become more aware of how their actions affect the global community. The media will stop citing the anti-clean energy, climate-denying messages of fossil fuel front groups, like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation that received $1.6 and $2.5 million respectively from ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers over the last five years.
President Obama will reject the Keystone XL Pipeline. Congress will pass climate legislation because fossil fuels will no longer be allowed to spend more than $400,000 per day lobbying and they won’t be allowed to make large campaign contributions. Congress will redirect its subsidies from fossil fuels to renewable energies. Employment will expand as the growing renewables sector creates more jobs than the increasingly mechanized fossil fuels sector had been. Coal-fired power plants will close and asthma and cancer rates will stop climbing in their surrounding neighborhoods. We won’t raise the global temperature that second degree Celsius.
Obviously the divestment campaign is only one of many tactics in a many-sided approach to reaching those goals. Reducing personal consumption, educating yourself and others, protesting injustices, calling legislators, voting and so many other forms of engagement are crucial.
Of course climate change is only one of many critical issues. But it is a defining issue of our generation and our world, and I believe divestment is a novel and persuasive tactic that has the potential to catalyze a lot of the changes for good I want to see. Please be in touch to continue the conversation with me.
(05/01/13 2:46pm)
On Sunday, April 28, the discussion of the divestment of the College’s endowment from fossil fuel industries continued with a student-only panel, featuring three students in favor of the movement with four students whose opinions ranged from strong opposition to measured skepticism.
The panel took place in Dana Auditorium, which was about half-full of community members, a stark contrast with the almost 300 attendees who filled the McCullough Social Space for the College’s first panel on divestment. The first panel on January 22 featured professionals in investment, finances and the divestment movement with opinions ranging from support to opposition of divesting the current 3.6 percent of the College’s $950 million endowment invested in fossil fuel companies.
The student panel on Sunday featured former Governor of Vermont Jim Douglas ’72 as the moderator and students Jeannie Bartlett ’15, Ben Wiggins ’14, Janet Bering ’13, Ryan Kim ’14, Zach Drennen ’13.5, Michael Patterson ’13 and Teddy Smyth ’15 as the panel participants. The panel lasted for over two hours.
Vice President for Finance and Treasurer's Office Patrick Norton began the evening with opening remarks noting that the “management of the endowment has grown increasingly complex” and stating that his hope for the panel was to have a “meaningful discussion” that would “give us an opportunity to hear diverse perspectives and a broad range of opinions.”
Bartlett, co-president of the Socially Responsible Investment Club (SRI) and a member of the Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investment, began the panel arguing for divestment, focusing mainly on the negative effects of climate change on the environment and how she believes divestment will help push a movement toward a healthier planet. She emphasized that as a college that preaches a green agenda, divestment falls in line with the College’s proposed eco-friendly practices.
“I think divesting from fossil fuels will align the school’s investments and practices with [its] mission,” said Bartlett.
“It’s imperative for our health and prosperity both now and in the future,” she concluded.
Smyth agreed with Bartlett’s arguments, saying that it is “morally wrong for us to profit from the destruction of our planet.”
Smyth cited strong student support for divestment, mentioning the results of this year’s Student Government Association (SGA) survey, which found that over 60 percent of the student body supports divestment and 24 percent are opposed to it.
“At this point, the question isn’t whether or not we’re going to divest, but when.” he said.
Bering, a self-described “environmental studies major who is skeptical of divestment as a tool for change” conceded that divestment “is the morally right thing to do,” but she questioned if divestment is addressing climate change in an effective way.
“It does not get people talking about and aware of the real issue,” she said. “They’re mostly talking about financial risk, not climate change. Divestment is a distraction.”
Bering, a Texas native, also argued that divestment is not a “national movement,” pointing out that one-third of the over-300 colleges that are currently a part of the movement are in California, New York or New England, and two-thirds would consider themselves on the west or east coast.
“We need a better movement,” added Bering, “and I think Middlebury is the perfect place to start doing that.”
Wiggins and Patterson also argued against divestment, but focused on the idea that the risk to the College’s endowment is too great to justify divesting from fossil fuels.
Wiggins expressed his belief that, while he agrees that “we need to pursue alternative forms of energy,” the endowment is too essential to the College’s running effectively to endanger its investment returns through divestment.
“I think the goals of the endowment are more important than divesting from fossil fuel,” Wiggins added, “and I think we need to wait until we can be assured that divesting will not have a significant impact on the size of the endowment.”
Echoing an earlier reference from Wiggins, Patterson also highlighted the importance of the endowment for funding financial aid, as he noted that for the 2012 - 2013 academic year, 42 percent of students are on financial aid with an average Middlebury grant of $36,277 per student.
In addition, Wiggins cited the complications that would come with having to divest. He stated that as the College is a part of a consortium under Investure — the firm that manages the College’s endowment — divesting from fossil fuels would require that the College either part ways with Investure or convince all of the other colleges and foundations in the consortium that they must divest as well.
Kim, a member of the Student Investment Committee, a student organization that invests about $355,000 of the endowment in stocks, also used economic reasoning based on his involvement and knowledge of the endowment’s investments to argue against divestment, which he feels is not currently a viable option.
“The energy sector has been doing exceedingly well,” said Kim, stating that his greatest concern for divestment is “risk and return.”
However, he did say that under certain circumstances, he would support divestment.
“If we can find mathematical proof that we wouldn’t incur undue costs in leaving Investure, then yes, I’m totally for [divestment].”
Drennen took a different angle in his support of divestment. While he said divestment was important for “the purpose of symbolism and the purpose of good investment practices,” he called for divestment from coal industries as an attainable first step.
“Not all fuels are created equal,” he said. “Coal has twice as much carbon per unit of energy as natural gas. I think it’s important to restrict the scope to something that I think can feasibly happen.”
After students on the panel gave their opening statements, they were allowed the opportunity to respond to and question each other. Then the audience was invited to ask questions of the panelists.
A number of audience members took this time to verbalize their own opinions on the divestment movement. In the majority of cases, these comments only weakly sought feedback from the panelists. All of the audience members who spoke seemed to be in support of divestment.
After the panel, President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz expressed his approval of the proceedings of the panel.
“It was very good. I thought that it did provide a good representation of points of view and that was helpful.”
The panel was videotaped, a copy of which will be sent to members of the Board of Trustees, giving them the opportunity to watch the panel before their meetings from May 9 - 11, during which they will discuss divestment.
Liebowitz did not outline any specific outcome he thought would emerge from the meetings.
“We’ll see what happens,” he said. “It all hinges on the Investment Committee’s presentation first and then our discussion [of divestment] on Saturday [May 11].”
(04/24/13 5:05pm)
We are a coalition of Middlebury College staff, faculty and students who stand in opposition to the Addison County Natural Gas project. The project will transport fracked gas from Alberta and continue Vermont and Middlebury College’s dependency on fossil fuels for the next half-century. We demand that Middlebury College meets our goals of carbon reduction through creating biomethane infrastructure separate from the Addison County Natural Gas project and by continuing to invest in conservation efforts.
Many Vermonters in communities along the route have been voicing their concerns about the impact of the construction on their property, their water supplies, the local ecology and the climate. We are in solidarity with these communities, as well as those affected by the damaging and irreversible effects of fracking at the point of extraction. This fossil fuel pipeline will impose on farmland, wetland and residential properties, and provide few economic benefits to those directly affected.
We believe that Middlebury College can stand together with Vermonters, united by a vision of an equitable and sustainable energy future achieved through a just transition that focuses on creating skilled long-term jobs through energy efficiency services and weatherization in order to reduce energy consumption overall.
As such, together we demand that Middlebury College publicly retract its statement of support from the Vermont Gas System’s filing to the Public Service Board and use its status as an intervener in the process to advocate for the interests of faculty, staff, students and administrators impacted by the short and long-term consequences of this project.
This letter was launched this week as a change.org petition and as of Tuesday morning had gathered almost 900 signatures from members of the campus community and beyond. If you want to know more about the process of fracking, there will be a screening of the movie “Gasland” in MBH 220 at 7:00 on the night of Thursday, April 25.
Middlebury staff, students and faculty against the fracked gas pipeline
(04/24/13 4:38pm)
As the Campus’s editorial staff pointed out last week, on April 3 the National Association of Scholars released a report titled “What Does Bowdoin Teach?” Authored by Peter Wood and Michael Toscano, and funded by Tom Klingenstein (a Williams College alumnus), the report attempts to systematically examine and reveal the various factors it sees as responsible for a supposed “fall from grace” of the American liberal arts college. The report also claims that Bowdoin’s institutional emphasis on sustainability is a product of the same kind of aversion towards what the authors see as the fundamental tenants of Western Civilization.
Wood and Toscano assert that the foundational underpinnings of “the Common Good” and general education at Bowdoin — “virtue and piety” — have been replaced with radical new cosmopolitan ideas of “social justice, transnationalism and sustainability.” While the report singles out Bowdoin, its derision of the school’s sustainability efforts are more a “one-size-fits-all” critique of environmentalism on the larger scale — and we should be worried. Here at Middlebury, we have claims to the oldest environmental studies program in the country, a commitment to carbon neutrality with goals loftier than Bowdoin’s and a mission statement that commits our curriculum to teaching environmental stewardship. For Wood and Toscano, these features of our community are not only ideologically misguided, but an apparent disservice to you and me.
What the authors see as the “sustainability agendas” that pervade dialogue at our colleges has apparently provided a detrimental distraction to our education. Wood and Toscano argue that where a liberal education had historically taught the development of “open-minded seeking of human excellence” and “great-souled men,” it now teaches “environmental literacy” within a larger intellectual climate uninterested in debating the value of what is taught. For Wood and Toscano, an environmentally-minded education comes at the cost of critical thinking abilities, rationalism and the ability to appreciate opposing arguments. I’m not sure they’re quite right.
The fact that learning institutions in our day and age are able to recognize the gravity of the problems facing our species serves as a testament to the vitality of the liberal arts. If critical thinking is about analyzing and weighing perspectives, then Wood and Toscano fail to see that sustainability and environmentalism represent the practical application of a cost-benefit analysis embodying the multi-epochal consideration of how human reason affects the world around us. Wood and Toscano are certainly right to point out that problems of collective responsibility like climate change will not be solved when ears are closed to alternative opinions, but they don’t propose solutions that will get us any closer to solving the problem. What they do offer is an appeal to the conservative ideals that perpetuate our inability to consider environmental issues with the weight they deserve.
Wood and Toscano’s fundamental criticism of Bowdoin lies in what they see as a failure to develop character in its students. The report claims that students are ill-equipped to confront what life has ahead of them because, like Middlebury, Bowdoin lacks a core curriculum that requires students to associate themselves with the intellectual pillars of western culture. Though the authors seem committed to the idea that American liberal arts have come to idolize diversity for diversity’s sake, they fail to acknowledge how the presence of a diversity of perspectives — western and non-western — can allow for the rethinking of how we apply the lessons that the western canon teaches. The principles underlying environmental and sustainability efforts worldwide — justice and equality — are the same principles that western culture has held near and dear throughout its history. Efforts to ensure that humans and other animals have a livable environment constitute no blind pursuit of the undermining of the individual as Wood and Toscano would have it. Rather, the movements seek to preserve the conditions that allow us to care about individual well-being and character development.
“What Does Bowdoin Teach?” concludes that self-restraint, self-criticism, moderation, “how to distinguish importance from triviality” and wisdom are some of the things lacking from a liberal arts education in this day and age. While all of these things seem to fundamentally motivate environmental education and sustainability efforts in American higher education, the authors assert that they can only come from an education committed to parochialism and tradition. If a college education today places an increased emphasis on cosmopolitan thinking, it is only because the problems that face our generation are cosmopolitan in nature and scope. Bowdoin and Middlebury College earn their classification as “liberal” precisely because they offer the opportunity to freely and dynamically craft conceptions not only of the good life, but the good environment.
(04/24/13 4:36pm)
A natural gas pipeline runs through my neighborhood in western New York. The only reason I know that is because, curious about the orange markers sticking out of the ground at a golf course we sometimes play at, I decided to check them out. There’s no obtrusive pipe sticking out of the ground. The same will be true of the pipeline that Vermont Gas would like to build through the state; it will be buried three to five feet under the surface.
This is the type of project that is incredibly easy to oppose without having an actual stake in the matter. As students we stand to benefit from access to natural gas. But that does not mean we cannot understand the perspective of Vermont homeowners and business owners who see this pipeline as a way to both save money and use cleaner fuel.
As with energy issues, this pipeline is not as simple as benefit and cost in a vacuum. We also have to consider the alternatives currently available. It is not as though, denied access to this natural gas, people will instantly elect to put solar panels on their roofs. Those are still an expensive investment, they can only produce electricity when the sun shines and Vermont winters are cold and dark. Instead, the thousands of people who would be affected by this project currently heat their homes and businesses by burning dirty fuel oil or expensive propane, the former of which emits 25 percent more carbon dioxide than natural gas. Both of these have to be delivered by truck, increasing the risk of an accident that leads to a spill or leak and burning oil in the process of delivery.
Natural gas would produce significantly fewer emissions at a significantly lower cost, saving homeowners somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,000 per year, a nontrivial amount in this era of economic stagnation. The savings would be even more for the types of businesses that Vermont critically needs to attract or maintain in order to keep the state’s population from melting away to warmer pastures. All told, the project is estimated to save Addison County residents and businesses $10 million annually.
I’m troubled by the lack of depth, balance or practicality that the dialogue about this pipeline on campus has shown. The Campus’s own article on the matter, two weeks ago, featured nine quotes by one student activist who opposes the pipeline — along with any other feature of a capitalist economy — and one quote from another student critic. Only a press release spoke for the other side. The repeated opposition to these types of projects has taken on the tenor of a particularly loud religion, the only type of religion truly accepted on this campus. But this is more than a symbol to latch on to. It is a real issue that will have real financial consequences for people. Every time environmentalists wrap our arms around an issue that makes us look indifferent to the concerns of people trying to get a job or pay their bills, we get further away from the type of national consensus that we need for concrete action to fight climate change.
We will never solve climate change by being against every type of energy development. Cleaner, cheaper energy is a good thing — the true difference between civilization and cave-dwelling. The way to motivate a shift to renewable energy technologies is to make them cheaper through continued innovation, economies of scale and, if necessary, government support. The activists who oppose this project in so-called solidarity with average people are ignoring the regressive short-term results if they prevail: higher heating and energy costs for working people.
Raising the price of energy is one of the surest ways to disproportionately tax poor and middle class families who are unable to invest in home upgrades or otherwise shift their consumption patterns during high price periods. Lowering the price of energy — by providing tax credits and feed in tariffs for renewables while, yes, making natural gas available — is one of the surest ways to stimulate the economy. If it has the side effect of reducing carbon emissions, as this project will, that’s even better. The benefits of this project far and away exceed the costs.
(04/10/13 4:44pm)
Four years ago, 35.5 percent of students reported cheating at least once. Ninety-seven percent of students who saw infractions did not report it. With few signs of improvement since 2009, it is clear that cheating, nonexistent peer proctoring and student apathy are still sickening the honor code, putting its long term health in danger.
The Honor Code Review Committee — two faculty members, two students and one member from Dean of the College’s office — is currently gauging the health of the code as they do every four years. The final report is due for release at the end of April.
Touted by tour guides to prospective students and signed by every incoming first-year, the academic honor code is designed to be the foundation behind the integrity of student work.
The most salient feature of the code is peer tutoring, in which both students who cheat and their peers who witness it are “morally obligated” to report the infractions, according to article three of the code.
But the strong data conducted during the last honor code review point to a fundamental problem undermining the code’s strength and effectiveness at the College: students are cheating, but neither faculty nor students themselves are willing to hold them to account. Numerous conversations with students, faculty and administrators have called into question whether the honor code can survive the status quo.
A STINGING REBUKE
This year’s review follows the committee’s contentious conclusions it arrived at the last time it was convened, four years ago. The headline recommendation was to remove language restricting faculty members from being present during exams, essentially killing the most visible feature of honor code.
Dean for Judicial Affairs Karen Guttentag described the privilege of taking un-proctored exams as a three-point agreement between faculty and students.
“The faculty agree not to proctor in exchange for students not cheating and proctoring each other,” said Guttentag, who served on the 2009 council and is heading this year’s review. “If one piece of that is missing, it doesn’t work.”
“We concluded [in 2009] that to a certain extent, neither of the student responsibilities were being help up. We could not in good faith continue this process.”
The recommendation was largely driven by a study conducted in the spring of 2008 by a student in the Economics of Sin, a 400-level class taught by Associate Professor of Economics Jessica Holmes.
Of the 484 students who responded, 35.5 percent admitted giving or receiving unauthorized aid on exams, papers, labs or homework some time during their four years at the College, according to data provided by Holmes.
Among the students who reported violating the honor code, 33 percent reported breaking it more than once a semester.
Student responses to questions on peer proctoring revealed that 63 percent of students witnessed violations more than once a semester. But only three percent of those who witnessed cheating actually reported the violation.
When asked why they did not report the violations, the most common responses were “not my problem/none of my business,” “do not want to be a rat or snitch,” and “so many students do it that it is unfair to single a few out or it would be hypocritical of me.”
“Of course I was dismayed but sadly, not surprised,” wrote Holmes — who served on the 2009 committee — via email. “I am in favor of having an honor code, but I don’t think the current honor code is effective (at least not for exams).”
Holmes expressed that if she served on this year’s committee, she would re-consider making “faculty presence” the default.
“Faculty can elect not to proctor exams if they so choose, but by changing the default, you remove the transaction cost associated with getting special permission to proctor,” she wrote. “This should increase proctoring which would better ensure the academic integrity of the exam environment.”
WHY NOBODY REPORTS CHEATING
Reporting honor code infractions can be a stressful process for both students and faculty. Students who report cheating must go in front of the Academic Judicial Board and face the person they have accused, which has become a challenging deterrent in a such a small community.
“There’s no carrot besides feeling good about your personal integrity, which is important, but hard to institutionalize,” said Bree Baccaglini ’15.5.
Professor of Mathematics Steve Abbott said he understands student trepidation with reporting their peers.
“It takes an emotional toll, there’s no way around that,” he said. “But if a student were to bring a case forward, their responsibility would only be to tell what they know. They don’t have to be a trial lawyer — it really is the system’s job.”
Abbott called the low peer reporting numbers “potentially scary,” and raised the possibility of changing the language in the code to make failing to report a peer cheating an actual violation in itself — similar to criminal complicity laws — instead of a moral infraction.
“If it became a violation for you not to say what you knew, it might be easier for people to report their peers,” he said.
Abbott said that the focus on enforcing the honor code across the faculty is “uneven.”
“There are instances of faculty members handling cases on their own and their reasoning is that their perceived impressions of the judicial process are unpleasant and inefficient and that the system doesn’t work,” he said. “But people who go through the process say it is fair, reasonable and difficult, but that it fundamentally works.”
Abbott chose to go through the Judicial Affairs Committee for all of the infractions he encountered and endorsed it wholeheartedly.
“In every case, things have gone in a positive way,” he said. “It has relieved me of having to be judge and jury.”
Holmes uses her experiences going through the Academic Judicial Board as a reminder to her students of the consequences of cheating.
“I also remind my classes that I have brought several students before the Judicial Academic Judicial Board for cheating and plagiarism over the years, and while it is not a pleasant experience for me, it is something I will do to uphold my responsibility. I warn them [cheating] is just not worth it.”
MAKING UP FOR PAST SGA BLUNDERS
The recommendation to strike the no proctoring clause was never implemented because of strong opposition from the Student Government Association (SGA), who asserted it would not pass the two-thirds student vote needed to make structural changes to the code. This led SGA, Faculty Council and Community Council members to hash out the current language of the code.
“I think both the faculty and the students came away from those meetings thinking they had won, which in essence is the perfect agreement,” said Guttentag.
A major aspect of the agreement was the establishment of a new cabinet post in the SGA dedicated to chairing the Academic Honesty Committee. Aseem Mulji ’11.5 was put in charge of the committee, according to faculty meeting minutes from May 13, 2009.
“He explained their goal to make the honor code more visible, and provide broader discussion of philosophical and practice issues,” read the notes. “Mr. Mulji stressed that students still care about the honor code and are committed to making it work.”
But the Academic Honesty Committee never materialized.
“It needs to be acknowledged that last time, promises were made that did not happen, but I’m hopeful that something really positive can come out of that,” said Guttentag, who praised this year’s SGA leadership. “There is no way that this can be entirely on the faculty and administration. Students need to take on shared responsibility.”
Current SGA President Charlie Arnowitz ’13 is trying to hold up the students’ end of the bargain. While he pointed out that the yearly turnover within the SGA results in promises easily falling through the cracks from one administration to another, he made no excuses for the 2009 SGA blunders.
“We’re going to do what wasn’t done in 2009, and do it better,” he said.
The result would be the Honor Code Student Committee, which Arnowitz is helping to create before he leaves office and will transition responsibilities to his successor.
Arnowitz said the goals of the committee would be to solicit student participation, conduct research on best practices at peer institutions with honor codes and find ways to involve the code into the broader student culture at the College.
“This is totally student driven,” he said. “We need to inculcate the honor code into everyday student life. One hard question we will have to answer is whether an honor code is worth it.”
Arnowitz said he had already received “a lot” of applications for the committee. But the SGA is fighting a pitched battle against what some see as student apathy about the future of the honor code.
On March 7, the SGA sent out an all-student email inviting students to attend a “community forum” surrounding the honor code with Collado, Guttentag and members of the SGA. But when the night came, only two students showed up — the Campus had three people covering the event.
While Arnowitz blamed the low turnout mainly on the remoteness of the Atwater location, he acknowledged the low turn out was “a little troubling.”
Failings on the part of the student body to uphold its end of the honor code — abysmal peer reporting, general student apathy and past SGA blunders — have led some faculty to question whether the honor code is nothing more than a first-year signature.
“I think students themselves have to decide if they want a strong honor code on campus — if so, then they should look for ways to create a student community that is not tolerant of cheating,” wrote Holmes in her email. “Perhaps students are content with current levels of cheating and enforcement?”
“I don’t think that’s the case, but maybe things have changed,” said Arnowitz, sighing. “It’s key to make sure students know what is at stake here.”
One of the main goals of the Honor Code Student Committee will be to show faculty and administrators that things have changed since 2009, according to Arnowitz.
Jackie Yordan ’13, who is serving on the Academic Judicial Board and the Honor Code Review Committee, said the key is to get students talking more about the code. She pointed to the It Happens Here campaign to promote awareness of sexual assault as a roadmap.
“We need to make the honor code as talked about as we have made the issue of sexual assault this year,” said Yordan. “We want the changes to come from students.”
The level of value placed on the honor code runs the gamut depending on the student.
“Having students take responsibility for their work is huge, because if you don’t take responsibility now in college, then why will you take responsibility for your work at any time subsequent?” said Ian Thomas ’13.5, who is on the Academic Judicial Board. “This is your last real opportunity to learn it.”
Baccaglini said that after First-Year Orientation, there isn’t enough follow up.
“I’ll run into tour guides in McCullough saying, ‘This is one of the hallmarks of Middlebury,’ and I’ll walk away saying, ‘Maybe it is, but I don’t know,’” she said. “Theoretically, students take it as an indication of trust from professors, but I’m hesitant to say students really care about it. Who here wakes up every day saying, ‘I’m so glad I go to a school with an honor code!’ Nobody.”
But Baccaglini said that both students and the College have a long-term interest in the code.
“I think Middlebury has an investment in keeping [the honor code] and that students, at least on an abstract level, do as well,” she said. “Every time I sign a test, I’m not bathed in the light of honor, but I think that students feel it’s a valuable part of our experience.”
POISONING THE WELL OF TRUST
Guttentag said that one of her primary goals this time around is to elucidate what she called “the real tangible costs of my cheating on you.” One tangible result is the loss of some faculty members’ trust in students.
“Many students assume that because of the honor code, professors have to inherently trust them,” said Guttentag. “But that’s not the way trust works.”
Abbott, the math professor who serves on the Honor Code Review Committee, was tapped to serve on the current committee because of what he described as “my unusually high number of encounters with [Guttentag] in the last two or three years.”
He estimated that he has had to bring five accusations of cheating to the judicial board over the past two or three years. While Abbott stressed that his experiences are not the norm among his colleagues, he acknowledged that the infractions have changed the way he grades.
“I do now approach grading in a mindset that’s more suspicious than I used to be,” he said. “And it doesn’t feel good.
“I have had experiences where I will see a solution by a student that surprised me in its elegance and ingenuity and the natural reaction to that as a professor is a sense of elation at the success of the student. Now that has to be filtered through a lens of, ‘Is this a real event based on this person arriving at a point of insight or did something improper happen to produce it?’”
Abbott is also attacking the notion some people at the College hold that cheaters are “only hurting themselves.”
“The freedom to think up the best possible assignment is dependent on the honor code working in some kind of robust way,” he said. “When you get out of that mode and start second-guessing whether or not the student’s approach to an assignment is an honest one, then you’ve given up something. Everybody loses.”
While Abbott is concerned about the vitality of the code, he repeatedly stressed his optimism in a bright future.
“Have I lost the rose-colored glasses? Yeah. But I don’t think we’re in a crisis. […] I haven’t gotten the feeling that we’re on some precipice.”
CHANGING PEDAGOGY
The affect cheating has had on faculty already depends greatly on whom you talk with. But even the most ardent faculty supporters of the honor code said they’ve changed their pedagogy in response to cheating.
“I’ve been a supporter of the honor code for decades,” said Charles A. Dana Professor of Mathematics John Emerson. “I’m happy to say that it’s been a very long time since I’ve had a plagiarizing issue with my students.”
Emerson’s perspectives come from a long involvement with the code, including stints as the chair of the Judicial Review Board and as the head of the Academic Judicial Board in the past. He said the effectiveness of the code can be enhanced by drawing attention to the importance of the Middlebury Honor System.
“It can be very constructive for any faculty member to take a few minutes at the beginning of a course to explain the relevance of the honor code as it applies to a particular course,” he said.
While Emerson always advises students that he will return to the classroom halfway through exams to respond to questions or provide clarification, he does not support making proctoring exams the default.
“Proctoring would change the psychology of the classroom,” he said. “My concern is that you don’t want to create a game where students try to cheat by outsmarting the teachers.”
Despite his unwavering support for the honor code, Emerson said that over the years he has adjusted his pedagogy by limiting the use of take-home exams.
“The reason I don’t offer take-home exams is because good people who care about honesty can still cheat if they are under enough pressure,” he said. “You get sick or you have a fight with your girlfriend and you still need to take that exam tomorrow and you are distracted and you panic.”
All of the faculty members interviewed recognized the immense pressure many of their students were under to perform at high levels and the importance of limiting situations where students might be tempted to cheat.
For example, Abbott refuses to give self-scheduled exams for multi-sectional calculus because of what he called math’s “ability to produce anxiety.”
But Guttentag said that even professors accounting for these situations is a cost of cheating.
“Instead of faculty saying, ‘What is the most engaging, creative way I can teach this material?’ they have to say, ‘How can I create a cheat-proof exam?’” she said. “You’re not getting the best pedagogy from your professors.”
IS PROCTORING THE ONLY ANSWER?
The answer — almost unequivocally — is no. For now.
“I don’t want to support a shift in the climate that surrounds an honor system,” said Emerson, who proctored students during his graduate years at Cornell University. “That was definitely a more negative climate than is the case here at Middlebury in my classroom when my students are taking tests. I treat students with respect and I think they know intuitively that I don’t assume that they want to cheat.”
Abbott said that while the code isn’t functioning at the highest level, restricting it would only make things worse.
“It really boils down to a sense that the honor code gets stronger when it’s put to use,” he said. “The best way to infuse it with meaning is to continue to invoke it by not proctoring. I think we’re better putting it to use than restricting it due to abuse.”
Administrators, faculty and students all agreed that dismantling the academic honor code would have negative consequences.
“Quite a bit would be lost without an academic honor code,” said Joseph Flaherty ’15. “You would lose the contract between students and faculty that says, ‘We’re going to treat our academic work with honesty and integrity.’”
“The culture would suffer for it,” said Guttentag. “I think the majority of students are behaving honorably and that the honor code is a point of pride for them.”
She said the administration is wary of creating a police state pitting students versus the administration.
“That’s not the kind of culture we want to have here and the relationships we hope to foster,” she said.
But at the end of the day, the health and fate of the honor code will rest with the students, something Arnowitz is acutely aware of.
“If the faculty and administration see students really making an honest effort in a way that is going to concretely continue next year, we will buy ourselves a couple years,” said Arnowitz. “But that by no means ensures that when I come back for a reunion in five years, the honor code will still be here.”
(04/10/13 4:26pm)
On April 5-7, five students attended the sixth annual Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U) conference at Washington University in St. Louis. The students were selected from a pool of applicants from colleges and universities around the world to participate in the event. The trip was sponsored by the Middlebury Center for Social Entrepreneurship (MCSE).
Founded in 2007, the CGI U conference was inspired by the structure of former President of the United States Bill Clinton’s Clinton Global Initiative, which brings together global leaders who are committed to facilitating change. CGI U draws the next generation’s leaders together each year to discuss and debate problems within five “focus areas:” Education, Environment and Climate Change, Peace and Human Rights, Poverty Alleviation, and Public Health. In order to participate in CGI U, educational institutions must commit to giving a minimum of $10,000 in funding to students for the implementation of CGI U-selected projects.
The five students who attended the conference, Rana Abdelhamid ’15, Rabeya Jawaid ’16, Betty Kobia ’16, Armel Nibasumba ’16 and Rachel Sider ’14, returned to campus feeling inspired by the weekend’s events, which included a plenary session titled “Getting off the Ground: Stories of Starting Up,” moderated by former President Bill Clinton and featuring remarks by Chelsea Clinton, as well as alumnus Shabana Basij-Rasikh ’11.
“It was super inspirational to be able to engage and build relationships with such incredibly passionate young people,” Abdelhamid said. “The entire experience just made me so much more optimistic about the future.”
To apply for a ticket to the conference, students had to submit a “Commitment to Action,” detailing a plan of implementation for a challenge of their choice that falls within one of the five focus areas. CGI U then selected 1,200 students to receive grants ranging to make their proposed commitments a reality. The five Middlebury students who participated in CGI U received funding in the form of two MCSE summer grants: a Davis Project for Peace grant and a MCSE fellowship.
Jawaid, who hails from Karachi, Pakistan, received $3,000 from MCSE to implement her Commitment to Action over the summer to provide deaf women in Pakistan with vocational training.
Jawaid worked with deaf Pakastani women two summers ago and wanted to continue her project, but lacked the necessary funding until now. Using her MCSE grant, Jawaid will purchase sewing machines to enable women to make and sell clothing.
“Before Middlebury, I knew I wanted to make a change,” Jawaid said. “But here there’s so much studying and it’s so busy, so [CGI U] is a great way for me to get back to what I believe in and get inspired again.”
Jawaid was impressed by the College’s commitment to CGI U, as the MCSE paid for her and the other students’ plane tickets and hotel fees.
“The school is really committed to helping students attend CGI U and carry out their projects,” she said.
MCSE Associate Director of Operations and Development Heather Neuwirth ’08 is excited that the students had the chance to participate in such a special conference.
“It’s a really important chance for our students to learn about projects of other like-minded undergraduate and graduate students,” she said.
The MCSE will be posting a recap of the CGI U conference for those who could not attend within the next couple of weeks.
(03/20/13 4:09pm)
Today the world faces a water crisis of unprecedented gravity. According to the U.N., 85 percent of the global population lives on the driest half of the earth and water is estimated to become scarcer with the projected increase in population. Yet as population expansion and development raise the demand for water, climate change rapidly diminishes its supply by melting the glaciers and snowcaps of the planet’s greatest freshwater reservoirs at record rates.
In light of this crisis, from March 14 to 16, the College’s Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs hosted its First Annual International Conference, titled “The Politics of Freshwater: Access and Identity in a Changing Environment.” The event brought together interdisciplinary scholars from national and international institutions to speak from varying perspectives regarding the processes that affect access to freshwater, such as climate change, land use, damming, privatization, commoditization and pricing. The symposium also focused on strategies to improve human interaction with vital freshwater around the world. The talks aimed to analyze these matters historically as well as with a view toward successfully addressing them in the present.
The symposium was co-sponsored by the Christian A. Johnson Economics Fund, C.V. Starr Middlebury Schools Abroad, the program in environmental studies, Franklin Environmental Center at Hillcrest, the departments of English and American literatures, classics, geography, political science and the Rohatyn Center.
Professor of Geography and Director of the Rohatyn Center Tamar Mayer, identified five reasons that the politics of freshwater was selected as the topic for the inaugural symposium. First, water is the source of life for all organisms on earth. Secondly, water serves as an important aspect of different cultural and national groups across the world. Third, the politics of water have sparked a great amount of conflict in recent years, and the possession of water has become an economic commodity as well. Fourth, the access to freshwater is an unmistakable source of conflict across boundaries and cultures as well as within local and regional situations. Finally, the UN has designated 2013 as the international year of water cooperation.
In her opening remarks, Professor Mayer elaborated on the purpose of these conferences.
“The idea is to have an annual conference on a global theme that can be discussed from multiple disciplinary perspectives and can both contribute to our International and Global Studies (IGS) curriculum and connect our campus to C.V. Starr-Middlebury Schools Abroad,” she said. “To this end, we have invited scholars from the social sciences and the humanities as well as policy makers and engineers in the field of water management.”
The symposium welcomed scholars and academics from Dartmouth, Oberlin, Wellesley, Colgate and Universidad de La Rioja (La Rioja, Spain).
The water symposium ties into one of the IGS spring capstone seminars concerning water, as well as to a teleconference on the same subject that Arabic students on campus have had with Middlebury students studying abroad in Jordan.
“We want to bring the entire campus to the Rohatyn Center through these events,” said Mayer. “We want the arts, social sciences and humanities to come together to talk about these issues.”
In the four days preceding the three-day conference, Middlebury students and faculty participated in presentations pertaining to water, featuring representatives from non-profit organizations and Middlebury and Monterey Institute of International Studies students and faculty involved in water research. Robert Hoesterey, Director of Strategic Development of The Eden Projects, spoke on Wednesday about his work in Ethiopia and Madagascar decreasing povery through deforestation projects.
On Thursday, photographer Edward Burtynsky gave a lecture about his exhibit “Nature Transformed,” currently on display in the Middlebury College Museum.
On Friday, the Robert A. Jones House hosted three different panel discussions, titled “Water Divided,” “Changing Water and Land Use” and “Water Territories,” with a number of visiting professors.
Two more panel discussions were held on Saturday, “Sustaining Multiple Uses of Water” and “Access to Water and Resistance.” The conference came to a close on Saturday afternoon with a summary and concluding discussion.
The organizers of the symposium, Mayer and Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Catherine Ashcraft, began planning for the event last July. They envision that the College will continue holding such annual interdisciplinary international conferences, and have chosen other global themes to discuss in subsequent years.
Professor Lina Abu-Ghunmi, from the University of Jordan, who gave a talk called “Grey Water Concept Toward Mitigating Water Shortage” and specializes in wastewater treatment, noted the significance of the symposium.
“We’re focusing on different scientific fields and bringing together economists, sociologists and engineers and looking at different situations all over the world,” she said.
Monterey Professor Pushpa Iyer spoke about “The Politics of Muddled Waters in Gujarat, India: Environmental, Economic, Social, and Cultural Influences.”
Iyer, whose expertise includes identity conflict and South Asia, said of the symposium, “This is wonderful. It’s the right size for meaningful interaction to happen. It gives us the opportunity to connect with scholars and really get to know their research.” With respect to the freshwater problems confronting the planet, she stated, “Sociocultural and political challenges dominate. Water is not just a resource that needs to be managed. It involves layers of complexity that make arriving at one solution hard, but these difficulties have to be analyzed to effectively deal with the issue.”
Marjeela Basij-Rasikh ’15 attended the symposium and believed that the conference was a crucial event to take place, especially in a liberal arts environment.
“It was very inclusive, encompassing even the social and spiritual aspects of water,” she said. “We care about the environment a lot on campus, so we need such insights from people who are experienced in the field. It allowed me to understand how individual participation matters and how I could take action. I encourage more students to take advantage of future conferences.”
(03/14/13 4:00am)
On Saturday, March 9, the 37th anniversary of International Women’s Day, around 50 female students and one male journalist filled the McCullough Social Space for ElectHer, a five-hour political leadership workshop designed to help women get elected into political office.
Each student at the event was nominated by a faculty member for their outstanding leadership skills. Over the course of the day female political leaders spoke to the students about the hurdles facing female political leaders and organized activities illustrating how to overcome them.
The idea for the event came from sophomore senator Rana Abdelhamid ’15. Abdelhamid was introduced to ElectHer after meeting Jessica Grounds at a young woman’s leadership camp two summers ago. Grounds, the executive director of Running Start, a nonprofit which inspires young women to run for political office, proposed ElectHer to get young women involved on their campuses.
“The program is based on the principle that women who run for office on campus are more likely to run for political office in the future,” said Grounds.
After Abdelhamid was elected SGA senator as a first-year, she began to notice a gender discrepancy across campus leadership positions.
“There was never another young woman running against me,” she said. “In fact, of the three women currently serving in the SGA, I am the only one who ran opposed. There hasn’t been a female SGA President in 10 years.”
Abdelhamid decided to work with Karin Hanta, director of the Chellis House, to try to bring ElectHer to campus.
“I was excited to come to Middlebury because I had met so many amazing women in D.C. who graduated from here,” said Grounds.
With the help of co-facilitators Alexandra Strott ’15 and Mandy Kwan ’15, Abdelhamid received a grant to host the event. She was able to bring to grounds and alexandra maclean, governor shumlin’s deputy chief of staff and secretary of civil and military affairs, to the College.
Maclean shared not only her some of her invaluable experiences with politics, but also an important strategy to help the women improve their political efficiency. “Imagine the type of speech you’d give if you were trying to convince someone you just met to vote for you in the timespan of an elevator ride. It’s got to be short, sweet and to the point,” Maclean said.
After breaking up into smaller groups to practice their “elevator speeches,” several of the students volunteered to perform them. Naina Qayyum ’15, a student from Karachi, Pakistan, spoke about her experience working with women’s health in Pakistan. She succinctly explained her reason for supporting her issue with the impromptu catechism, “the health of a woman is wealth of the nation!”
The last event of the day was a voting simulation, where the women had 10 minutes to run around campus and gather as many signatures as they could. The stakes were high — the winner received an invitation to a women’s leadership conference in D.C.
The reaction to this exercise was generally positive, though Rabeya Jawaid ’16, a first-year from Karachi, Pakistan, was frustrated by how little work she had to do to get a signature from the students. “How much work needs to be done if people don’t care about who they vote for?” Others echoed her concern.
But some students disagreed. An unnamed student mentioned that the activity helped push her outside of her comfort zone. “I’m usually shy, so I was really inspired by how receptive people were.”
All the women worked hard, but the prize went to first-year Laura Nubler ’16, who managed to recieve 75 signatures in 10 minutes. “I decided that I really wanted to win this, so I thought strategically, and realized that the library was the best place to get signatures.”
She found that she got votes most efficiently by giving a condensed elevator speech, explaining her passion for climate change. But ultimately, she admitted, “I was just running around begging everyone I saw for signatures.”
For Jawaid and Nubler, the event was an empowering experience. Jawaid, who ended up being the runner up in the simulation, said that she felt “super excited, because I want to run for office back in Pakistan. Although the political environments in America and Pakistan are very different, I know I can bring the strategies I learned here back to Pakistan.”
(03/13/13 5:10pm)
The banner brandished by the dozens of students marching down Storrs Walk last Monday read “Divestment is a tactic; justice is the goal.” There’s often a good deal of talk about the j-word in any number of settings — legal, environmental, social, economic, etc. — and I think more often than not, we take its meaning for granted. Specifically, taken for granted in the sense that we may actually have some concrete idea of what the word means. While this article won’t attempt to provide a complete account of the nature of justice, it will try to point the dialogue in the right direction.
The argument put forward by the divestment movement, as I see it, seems relatively straightforward: we shouldn’t contribute financially to the functioning of companies that engage in behaviors we consider ethically reprehensible. Alright, fair enough. But are “ethics” and “justice” the same thing? It’s a question that’s plagued the philosophical community in its entirety, and one that probably won’t be resolved anytime soon. One of the more popular conceptions of justice in the Anglophone world offers a contractual conception of justice: that is, relationships take on some quality of justice when two parties enter into an agreement or contract with one another, and each then obtains certain rights. People have come up with other conceptions of justice (see distributive justice, justice as fairness, justice as property, global justice; the list goes on), but this idea of contractual justice is simple and tidy enough such that I think it might take us where we want to go for now. Now if there’s something unjust about, say, investing in oil companies or arms manufacturers, we have just one of the tools necessary to pinpoint what that is.
Seeing as this is an environmental column, we’ll start with environmental justice, and how divestment could somehow right an unjust situation. Let’s say investing in fossil fuel industries is unjust because their entire business model rests upon the combustion of materials which results in the release of carbon dioxide, which contributes to climate change, which will raise sea levels to the point of jeopardizing coastal livelihoods. We may then say that this is an unjust situation because the person whose shoreline property is now slightly more a part of the shore than they bargained for never entered an agreement which said they were alright with rising sea levels. Or maybe there’s injustice because of habitat loss that occurs — one could argue that because humans and animals both inhabit the same planet, each has an equal right to a safe habitat, or some variation on that theme. It’s the same basic premise which is supposed to justify our endangered species laws and other environmental regulations. There are countless other examples we could propose, but half of the challenge seems to be actually proposing them in the first place.
One of the problems that arises when dealing with problems with justice — something on which I was fortunate enough to have an extended discussion with recent guest lecturer David Abram — is that our ethical and moral frameworks are generally limited by our vocabulary and our conceptions of how things relate to one another. Humans have a hard time acting ethically or including non-human nature within our systems of justice because our way of speaking about such things is inherently isolating and anthropocentric. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing — the whole “language” thing has helped our species along its way for thousands of years. However, it also seems like the same manner of speaking has also led to the kind of injustices we find within our own society. I was fortunate enough to be referred, by a friend, to recent JusTalks keynote speaker Tricia Rose’s TEDx talk regarding social justice from Brown University. Revealingly, she observes that one of the fundamental problems in trying to solve issues of justice is that it is generally pretty difficult to talk about structural problems within the contexts of the structures in which the problems arise.
I think all of this helps to show that many of the problems taken on by various groups — those working towards divestment, climate change, food, social and racial equality — can find a lot of common ground once we start working out what justice, conceptually, means. Greater dialogue between all of these groups might help iron out some of the wrinkles preventing us from ending up at the same ends, and increasing communication could enable us to speak more freely with one another about issues which, individually, we’re far less likely to solve. Aristotle conceived justice as a virtue naturally associated with friendship, and that the truest form of justice had a “friendly” quality. While it may seem simplistic, a bit of friendship and some more cooperation could be exactly what our community needs.
(03/13/13 4:38pm)
Throughout the spring semester, the Middlebury College Organic Farm (MCOF) will be making several changes to its current operations, including the introduction of chickens for eggs and meat, the allocation of plots of land to different student organizations and the incorporation of new seeds and farming techniques.
Perhaps the most notable addition to the farm is the chickens. Senior Co-Director of the Organic Farm Katie Michels ’15 said that this spring the farm plans to introduce 12 egg-laying birds as well as 40 chickens that will be raised for later consumption.
With the exception of honeybees in the past, MCOF does not keep any animals. The introduction of the chickens will mark the beginning of the farm’s animal product and by-product operations.
The farm received permission to bring the chickens to campus from the College’s Facilities and Services Office this spring, and three weeks ago they received an Environmental Council Grant to sponsor the project.
Michels said, “[The addition of the chickens] is mostly inspired by the idea that you can’t just produce vegetables. We need animals to eat vegetable waste and to fertilize the vegetables, so they’ll complete the cycle of the farm.”
In terms of other additions to the farm, the MCOF organizers have a project underway to introduce cultural gardens, new plots for student organizations on campus. The farm has been a frequent supplier to the College’s dining services over the years, selling bulk orders of products such as chard, basil and squash.
Michels expressed hopes that these changes will allow for the creation of a new educational space on campus for students interested in food and farm studies.
“We could just keep selling to Dining [Services],” said Michels, “But I think we have more potential as an educational space, and as a place to grow food for a school that’s really interested in food.”
In order to follow through with this mission, the farm plans to allocate plots of land — cultural gardens — to various student groups who show an interest. According to Michels, Hillel has already reserved a plot.
The farm’s staff would care for the gardens over the summer, and then in the fall, the farm will throw a cultural harvest festival where student organizations can cook from their garden “in hopes to create an outdoor community space to share food and conversation,” according to Food and Farm Educator Sophie Esser Calvi.
This project builds upon the farm’s outstanding partnership with Weybridge House, which has sourced its food from the farm since last summer. Farm organizers are also attempting to cement their relationship with Dolci, the College’s student-run restaurant.
Michels stressed the importance of the farm to Dining Service’s access to locally grown foods.
“We’re starting to grow nice lettuces, herbs and other specific things that Dolci uses frequently, so they can get it from us rather than from far away,” said Michels of the farm’s plans for the spring semester.
Not only is the farm expanding its presence on campus this spring, but the farm is also experimenting with new seed varieties and planting techniques. They have recently received a large seed donation from Renees Garden company, a seed distributor located in California.
“The farm is a place where we do what the students want to learn,” said Esser Calvi. “For instance, we will practice different growing methods. We are also growing different varieties of produce this year such as four different types of radish, beets etc. We’ll be doing trials and basically testing [the different] varieties.”
Farm volunteers will be working with many plants that are not typically grown in Vermont climates. According to Senior Co-Director Ari Lattanzi ’13, the farm organizers have hopes of finding a crop that can be grown in this climate with few losses. The directors of MCOF could then share these findings and advise other farmers in the area who do not have the ability to take risks with crop experimentation due to financial instability.
“We’re talking about trying several different techniques, maybe biodynamic farming, [which] is planting with the seasons and the cycles of the moon,” said Lattanzi of the new farming techniques. “[Another technique] is permaculture, a type of low-input farming that involves less interference in the lifecycles of the plants once they are established.”
“The farm will grow because there’s this new energy for a food and agriculture studies program, and there’s more land that we could expand into,” added Lattanzi. “We’re making sure the farm has something for everyone.”
(03/13/13 4:30pm)
Four students were arrested by police on Monday, March 11 at the northeast U.S. office of the TransCanada Corporation in Westborough, MA during a protest of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.
The students — Anna Shireman-Grabowski ’15.5, Jay Saper ’12.5, Sam Koplinka-Loehr ’13 and Lucy Whipps ’14 — had handcuffed themselves together with 21 other young people, who refused to leave the office when asked by police. All 25 were arrested. The youth group acted as part of a broader protest that included some 75 others.
“We’re here in solidarity with front line communities who are facing the health effects of the past, present and future as a result of the extraction, transportation and refinement of tar sands oil,” said Koplinka-Loehr in a telephone interview on Monday evening.
“We stand in solidarity with them, but are also here recognizing that all of our futures are affected by the tar sands when it comes to climate change,” he added. “And climate change knows no borders.”
Shawn Howard, a spokesperson for TransCanada Corporation, pushed back by email.
“This really isn’t really about Keystone XL, diluted bitumen, emissions or a substance that is in a particular blend of oil,” wrote Howard. “It’s about a group that wants to end the use of fossil fuels entirely.
“This publicity stunt will not provide an American construction worker with a job to provide for their family and their needs. It will not reduce global emissions or the continued need for fossil fuels in the United States. It will not improve the safety of moving a critical product to market,” he continued.
Howard suggested that TransCanada “agrees” with the President that a move to a less carbon intense economy is necessary, but suggested that it will “take decades” for this transition to occur. He noted that TransCanada has invested billions in wind, solar, hydro and nuclear facilities.
“TransCanada knows what these technologies can do today (and what their current limitations are), because we have invested billions of dollars in emission-less energy production,” he said.
At Monday’s protest, Shireman-Grabowski, Saper, Koplinka-Loehr and Whipps were joined by students from Green Mountain College, Tufts University, Brandeis University and Brown University as well as members of the Massachusetts Methodist clergy and community members. According to Shireman-Grabowski, the protest represented a “sharp escalation” in the non-violent tactics of the protesters.
At approximately 11 a.m. on Monday morning, the 100-member group walked up to the third floor of the northeast U.S office of the TransCanada Corporation. They carried a fake coffin featuring the words “our future” — a symbolic representation of the impact of the proposed pipeline. The group sang a eulogy, carried flowers and walked in procession.
Approximately one hour later, the group of 25 youth, who had refused to leave the building, were arrested and transported to a local jail. They waited in a communal cell before being released on $0 bail at approximately 8 p.m.
At that time, the students were informed that they would be arraigned in court in Massachusetts on Wednesday, where they would face charges of trespassing and disorderly conduct.
Though student arrests are not commonplace, the four are not the first to receive attention for controversial environmental activism in recent memory. As a member of the Youth Climate Delegation at UN climate talks in Durban, South Africa in 2011, Abigail Borah ’13 interrupted the international proceedings to express her displeasure with “obstructionist congress” and the inaction of President Obama on climate change.
Borah received a significant amount of press for the demonstration, including an interview with the New York Times.
“Something I’ve learned through my time at Middlebury is that people have all sorts of ideas of what activism ‘should be’ and what produces ‘change,’” said Borah. “Whether we agree with one another or not, it’s hard to argue that the courage it takes to stand up for what you believe in isn’t admirable. As young people, it’s our job to push the envelope and rally for the urgency and ambition that is required to achieve social justice.”
The arrest of the four students in Massachusetts came on the same day as the New York Times published an editorial calling on President Barack Obama to “say no” to the Keystone XL pipeline — a commercial venture that would see 830,000 barrels a day of crude oil shipped along an 875-mile pipeline from Alberta tar sands to refineries on the Gulf Coast.
“A president who has repeatedly identified climate change as one of humanity’s most pressing dangers cannot in good conscience approve a project that — even by the State Department’s most cautious calculations — can only add to the problem,” the editorial read.
While the students expressed a similar motivation, they took a different tone.
“This is environmental racism,” said Koplinka-Loehr. “Poor people and people of color are disproportionately affected by fossil extraction and refinement, creating generational health problems and death.”
Focusing on the College community, Koplinka-Loehr elaborated, “We need to talk about environmental racism at Middlebury, and it needs to be driving the way in which we think about our endowment. [We need to think about] who is actually impacted by our stocks the most. Why is that not a part of the conversation?”
Saper was critical of the study of environmental justice by the College’s environmental studies department.
“We’ve talked more about environmental racism today — just today — than we have at a place where there is the longest standing environmental studies program in history in America,” said Saper.
On the national stage, the group’s action joins a much larger chorus of dissent against the Keystone XL Pipeline.
In February, approximately 50 members of the College community attended the “Forward on Climate” rally in Washington, D.C. where they were met by approximately 50,000 other protestors. The event was the largest climate rally in American history.
To date, over 50,000 have signed a petition to resist the Keystone XL pipeline and thousands more have joined the Tar Sands Blockade in East Texas. Protestors there include landowners, climate activists, members of frontline communities and Native American peoples.
According to the blog “Funeral For our Future,” which provided information about Monday’s protest, March 16 - 24 will serve as a “week of solidarity” with Tar Sands Blockade protestors, during which groups across the country will target the offices of TransCanada and its investors.
(03/06/13 11:15pm)
My last column talked about divestment — how I believe that it has powerful symbolic value but that it must not be used as a substitute for personal or community-level changes that would directly reduce the amount of carbon emissions for which we are responsible. Although I appreciate Hannah Bristol ’14.5’s response, I can’t help but feel as though she missed the point entirely. Tellingly, she does not offer a single solution to climate change beyond talking to “folks.” At this point, education is not enough.
I am fully and painfully aware that we cannot solve global climate change by turning off our lights. But we also must not forget that those choices do have value. When I drive from my apartment downtown to Proctor dining hall in the morning, or crank up the air conditioning on a hot day or fly halfway around the globe to Australia, I am contributing to the problem of climate change by releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and increasing the demand for fossil fuels. That round-trip flight alone sent more carbon aloft than the annual car use of entire American families. Such choices should hardly be dismissed as trivial; to do so feeds into the gloomy fallacy that we are helpless against global warming.
I worry about the push for divestment or the protests against the Keystone pipeline not because they don’t have value, but because in these causes I see an unwillingness to accept personal responsibility for climate change. It’s not enough to point at others and cry “stop tempting me with this sweet, sweet gasoline.” Oil and coal companies are not forcing us to buy product that we do not want. I am the cause of climate change. You are the cause of climate change. Al Gore and George W. Bush, Bill McKibben and Rex Tillerson are all the cause of climate change.
The only way to break that cycle is to accept that the problem begins in our backyards. The iron grip of fossil fuels on the business of powering, heating and moving the population will only be broken by making the alternatives cheap and available. Instead, I see a national movement of environmental activists obsessed with negative action. William F. Buckley once said that conservatism means standing athwart history yelling “stop.” That’s a strategy bound to lose without clear alternatives. It failed to stop the implementation of healthcare. It’s failing to prevent marriage equality from spreading across the country. But it seems to me as though modern environmentalism has fallen into this same doomed strategy of screaming “halt” at the world around it.
In the meantime, Vermont is currently debating a bill to ban the construction of wind farms in a state high on outrage but short on alternatives. The Green Mountain State produces less of its electricity from wind and solar than states from North Dakota to Texas, and we have heard barely a peep from those who profess to truly care about climate change.
I know how much easier it is to oppose things than to build up the other options; I spent most of the fall election cycle endlessly mocking Mitt Romney. Creation is much more difficult than moral outrage. It requires far more time, money and energy. But when a patient has heart disease, it’s not enough to tell him or her to simply stop eating, smoking and drinking. To survive, he or she will need to replace steak with salad and smoking with exercise. Without substitutes, stopping bad habits would still be fatal.
This is how to beat climate change: couple cries for divestment with a push for investment in small business solar companies or startups that aim to scrub carbon from the atmosphere. Oppose methods of fossil fuel extraction that cause excessive harm to the environment, but at the same time, encourage research in zero-emission vehicles so that there is no market for those fuels. We are the majority. It’s time to stop acting like the opposition.
It’s time to put solar panels on our roofs, wind turbines behind our homes and hydrogen powered cars in our garages. It’s time to plant more trees and consider seeding the oceans with iron, locking away carbon dioxide in algal blooms. That’s the type of movement we need: campuses and communities, cities and states, deciding to do things differently — not to complain, but to build and not only to divest but also to invest. The amount of money at this institution could do an incredible amount of good invested in companies like Solar Mosaic or First Wind. All of these projects will need to be in somebody’s backyard. You’re welcome to start with mine. Can we have yours, too?
