| by Mark C. Anderson

News Stories

Langholz, Jeff
Professor Jeff Langholz surveys the Carmel River where it meets the Pacific. His work on clean water extends from access for the world’s human populations to tributary health.

Ariana Alva Ferrari never thought a Middlebury class on drafting policy memos would ultimately lead her to a remote rural village in Peru, allowing her to pursue a long-held—and deeply personal—public health mission. 

It would’ve sounded as outlandish as, say, pulling clean drinking water from thin air.

But her odyssey to a distant Peruvian town of 300 did in fact happen, and precisely because of a clean water breakthrough being advanced at the Institute under the leadership of environmental policy professor Jeff Langholz

“It fired me up to take on wicked problems and make the most of the time I’ve got on this planet,” said Alva Ferrari. “The immersive projects I was part of during my time at MIIS had a huge impact on my life. … I am happy to say, thanks to those experiences, I am able to move the needle a bit.”

The Future of Water

Langholz has made safe, clean, and reliable water access the focus of a professional career that reads like an adventure novel. He has also served as a Fulbright Scholar in South Africa, worked as a salmon rancher with a nonprofit hatchery in Alaska, logged time as a rice farmer with the Peace Corps in West Africa, and done extensive consulting across five continents with the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Langholz introduced his clean-water work to a wider audience at last year’s campus open house for prospective students with a talk titled “The Future of Water Is Closer and Better Than You Think,” which feels like required viewing in an increasingly water-insecure world. 

As part of the presentation, he highlighted a number of decentralized ways to capture life-sustaining moisture—and keep using it—like gray- and black-water recycling, rain harvesting, and atmospheric water generation. 

The last proves most stunning, and happens by deploying generators of scalable sizes to extract potable H2O from the atmosphere—at volume, using renewable energy, and doing it affordably—and then recycling it indefinitely.

Accessing water, not from traditional government pipelines but private sources—and particularly capturing “water from the sky”—seems hard to imagine, which Langholz acknowledged with the John Stuart Mill quote, “Every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption.” 

But rewind just a little, he continued, and the same skepticism once surrounded now-ubiquitous—and democratized—innovations like solar power, ride-sharing, and online streaming. 

“The best thing about ‘sky water’ is that it’s available at all places on Earth, at all times, for all people,” he said. “It’s there for the taking.”

The Next Generation Is Driving Forward Technology and Policy

Langholz’s students have pursued a number of projects related to this area, from fog harvesting (with a device called the FogLog) to financing infrastructure for rainwater harvesting systems (Rain Returns), two projects that made the finals of the Startup Challenge Monterey Bay

He also spotlighted an atmospheric water generator which won him and Middlebury graduate student Maeve du Toit MAIM ’19 the $50,000 Innovator of the Year prize from the same contest. 

Alva Ferrari’s contributions took a different path and harmonized with her desire to help places like her native Peru, where 16 million people lack access to clean water. 

While taking Langholz’s class on policy memos (IEPG 8506), she selected the World Health Organization as her target audience and water management in Peru as her focus. 

Given that Lima, her hometown and Peru’s capital city, has more than 16 million people—nearly half the population—without access to clean water, she channeled added inspiration and investment. 

“This personal connection motivated me to dig deeper into the problem and move past desk research,” she said. “I wanted to get hands-on experience, so I decided to do an immersive project in Peru, where I could hear directly from the people who were facing these water challenges.”

Ferrari’s GSIPM-directed study proposal allowed her to conduct the study and earn credit. 

With her Middlebury classmates, she traveled some 1,360 miles to Lima, then to the desert of Paracas, then into the Amazon jungle of Iquitos, and finally to a tiny town called Ayacucho, where new rain catchment systems have changed lives. 

Experiential Learning Trip to Peru

Environmental policy students learned about water capture systems by conducting interviews.

Across 30 interviews with various stakeholders, including property owners, community members, officials from the national water authority, policymakers, and NGO staff, they documented how fresh water prevents illness and empowers women to provide for their families.

“There community members, especially women and girls, used to have to travel long distances to fetch water for their basic needs, which took up a lot of their time but also had wider effects on women’s safety, girls’ education, health, and family income,” said Alva Ferrari. “I got to know their stories, daily struggles, and dreams, and it was a touching and enlightening experience—these connections turned the project into something more than just an academic task; it became a deeply human journey.”

Alva Ferrari’s South American trek fits into ongoing efforts at the Institute to test, study, and share clean water technology. 

“We’re conducting research and practice highlighting bright spots and creating good examples of implementation,” Langholz said. “From that emerges policy and grant support—we’ll win or lose this quest based on policy, and our graduate students are working on this around the world.” 

Langholz emphasizes that the work of Middlebury students—like Sydney Samples MAIEP ’21, a program manager at the Water Research Foundation in Denver—is crucial and continuing. 

“The future is here right now, harvesting existing and accessible clean water and recycling it forever,” he says. “Our students are actively advancing a global revolution.”

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    Professor Kristina Gjerde Honored along with Singapore Ambassador Rena Lee

    | by Pace University

    At a time when unprecedented marine heat waves warm 40 percent of the oceans, and much life at sea is endangered, the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University is proud to recognize two distinguished women for their leadership negotiating the world’s first legal agreement to safeguard biodiversity in the high seas. The 2024 Elisabeth Haub Award for Environmental Law and Diplomacy will be jointly awarded to Singapore’s Ambassador for International Law, Rena Lee, and Senior High Seas Adviser to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Kristina Maria Gjerde. Professor Gjerde teaches Marine Law at the Middlebury Institute each January, and we are so proud of her accomplishment!