Environmental Studies

Dance, music and visual arts event, panel and reception to honor Earth Day & the Arts. Earth Day 2019 Nourishing Change Through the Arts will be an approximately three-hour event with live music and dance performances, artistic displays, and a panel discussion with students and local artists followed by an informal reception. Art will address the theme of all living beings - including humans in relationship to the Earth and our changing climate. All programming will be engaging and participatory when possible and choreographed to flow, literally, like water throughout the entire venue.

Environmental Studies Department Reception for Graduating Seniors and their guests

“Science and conservation in the largest and deepest UNESCO World Heritage Site on Earth: The Phoenix Islands Protected Area” by Randi Rotjan, Research Assistant Professor at Boston University.

EVENT LOCATION: Franklin Environmental Center, front porch

Meet at the front porch of the Franklin Environmental Center to join the very popular Campus Tree Tour led by passionate Middlebury horticulturalist and tree expert Tim Parsons. Learn fun facts and hear stories about various trees around campus. Tim will also explain how he manages our rural Vermont campus as an urban forest. Stick around after the tour to help with a tree planting and enjoy fresh local donuts and cider.

“Beyond the Green New Deal” by Stan Cox, research fellow in Ecosphere Studies at The Land Institute.

In The Green New Deal and Beyond, Stan Cox argues that we must support the Green New Deal but must also, by law, put an impermeable ceiling on the national fossil-fuel supply, one that rapidly lowers year-by-year, reaching zero in the near future. That will require planned allocation of resources among economic sectors and fair-shares rationing of energy for households. Clearly, this will also require deep transformations of our economy and society.

The climate crisis confronts each of us, including and especially young people, with urgent questions and bewildering choices about how to live, what to learn, where to go, what to do, and who to be at this momentous historical crossroads. Building on Naomi Klein’s Margolin Lecture from the previous week, this event will bring together students and faculty to discuss how and why college (i.e. what we’re all doing right now) might matter, or might come to matter, as we confront increasingly turbulent planetary futures.