Annual Newsletter – 2023

A Publication of Macalester’s
Environmental Studies Department
November 2023

Letter From the Chair

Dear Friends of Environmental Studies,

Welcome back to campus! Last year was a great one for the Department of Environmental Studies, and after the relative quiet and slowness of summer, it was a real pleasure to welcome students back to campus, where the pace has picked up considerably!

We are delighted to have Anika Bratt continuing in the department for another year as the Wallin Postdoctoral Fellow of Environmental Studies. We’re also very happy to report that Stotra Chakrabarti, who was a full-time visiting faculty member in the ES Department last year, has moved into a tenure-track position in the Biology Department, where he will continue to offer a variety of classes that are cross-listed with ES. We are lucky to have them both here.

Last year we graduated 31 majors and 11 minors, making us the 8^th largest department on campus. Of the 2023 graduates, 10 had interdisciplinary emphases and 21 had disciplinary emphases, with Biology and Economics the two largest concentrations.

I also want to congratulate our student award winners from the class of 2023. Dheera Yalamanchili won the ES Citizenship Award; Alexandra Jabbarpour and Vivian Powell were the co-winners of the ES Scholarship Award; and Ahmed Abdala Ahmed and Joseph Mogul both won the Environmental Justice award. Congratulations as well to Valeska Fresquet Kohan and Madeline Medina, who both wowed us with their ambitious honors thesis projects. A heartfelt thank you to all of these students for their work and the impact that they had on the department and the school. A special thanks as well to Francesca LoPresti and Mariko Yatsuhashi, who are serving as student representatives to the department this year. Mariko is also serving as the department’s anti-racism fellow. I encourage you to be in touch with her (and with ES faculty) with your ideas and aspirations, and to look for communication from her about how to be involved in the peer mentoring program and other opportunities for engagement that she is organizing.

Finally, I will give my annual plug for you to read the updates shared by each faculty member in this newsletter. Our department boasts an exceptional team of faculty and staff. You know firsthand what they all contribute in the classroom and in the office, but you might not know as much about the rest of their professional and personal lives. Truly, they are a remarkable group.

And so are you! If you’d like to share your own latest adventures and achievements, we would love to hear about them. If you find yourself near the office, please don’t hesitate to drop by to talk.

Chris Wells
Chair, Environmental Studies

Prof. Christie Manning Wins Two Awards

In September 2023, Prof. Christie Manning was a Trustee Award winner.  The Trustee Awards were created by Trustee Steve Euller ‘71 in 2013. The fund is used to provide awards of $5,000 to faculty members (typically 5 per year) who demonstrate exemplary achievement in teaching, scholarship, and/or service to the Macalester or professional community. Trustee Awards are open to faculty who are tenured, tenure-track, or in the NTT series.

Also in May 2023, Christie was honored with the Disability Services Champions Award.  This award recognizes the faculty, staff and students who are “champions” of disability awareness and advocacy at Macalester.  These individuals exemplify inclusive practices, promote disability awareness and diversity in a wide variety of ways, and are strong advocates for physical and programmatic access at Mac.

Congratulations Christie!

Environmental Studies Student Award Winners

The 2023 Environmental Studies Student Award winners are:

• Environmental Studies Citizenship Award Winners – Dheera Yalamanchili ’23
• Environmental Studies Scholarship Winner – Vivian Powell ’23 and Alexandra Jabbarpour ’23
• Environmental Studies Justice Award – Ahmed Abdalla Ahmed ’23 and Joseph Mogul ’23

These Environmental Studies majors also won awards in 2023:

• Tala Tabishat ’23—Global Citizenship Award and Presidential Leadership Award
• Ahmed Abdalla Ahmed ’23—Presidential Leadership Award
• Joseph Mogul ’23—Servant-Leader Award
• Dheera Yalamanchili ’23—Civil Discourse Award

Year in Photos

Sustainability Update

By Megan Butler, Sustainability Director

It has been a busy year for the Macalester Sustainability Office! The office had its 15th anniversary last February. We commemorated the “sustain-iversary” with cake, chocolate-chirp cricket cookies, and a celebration featuring the free swap, a fix-it all free for all, a MacShare sale, and bikes! The office is looking forward to helping Macalester make continued progress towards its sustainability goals in the next 15 years as the college implements new carbon neutrality initiatives outlined in the recently approved comprehensive campus plan. The Macalester bike team has also been busy helping the campus community to decarbonize their commute this year by maintaining a library rental fleet, giving the campus bike shop a makeover (come check it out!), and offering bike-riding and bike repair courses.

Macalester won several awards in this year’s campus race to zero waste including the case study competition which featured a partnership between the sustainability office and athletics to promote both reuse and school spirit by giving away donated Macalester SWAG from the free swap at games. With these accolades as inspiration, the Sustainability office is doubling down on our efforts to achieve zero waste. This year, three sustainability office student employees, Oliver-Madus Bond, Abbie White, and Lorenna Graham have also taken ATLAS fellowships with the Post Landfill Action Network (PLAN). Over the next year the ATLAS fellows will be working with departments across campus to outline a path towards reaching our zero waste goals. The office has also recently welcomed two new Minnesota GreenCorps Members Zizanie Bodene Yost and Blake Olson to our team. Zizanie and Blake will be serving at Macalester for 11 months and will be working alongside the PLAN fellows on zero waste initiatives. Finally, Macalester recently received a food recovery grant which will help us reduce food waste on campus while tackling food insecurity on campus and in our local community.

As the new Sustainability Director here at Macalester, I am humbled by the passion and commitment of Macalester students, staff, faculty and alumni when it comes to sustainability. You make us better. I am also inspired by the commitment to community that I see throughout campus from the food access work being done by MacShare and the campus community gardens, to the eagerness of students to organize and get their hands dirty converting turf to native plantings, to the student sustainability workers that labored tirelessly all summer to sort move-out donations for incoming students and community members in need. Thank you for the good energy. I look forward to the year ahead!

EnviroThursday

There were 15 EnviroThursday presentations during the 2022-23 school year with over 527 in attendance.

• “Nature, Wealth, and Pollution:  Redlining Roots and Legacies in the Twin Cities Metro Area” by Prof. Anika Bratt, Prof. Hannah Ramer, Prof. Mary Heskel, Ahmed Abdalla Ahmed ’23, and Alexandra Jabbarpour ’23
• “Narratives of Environment and Sustainability Shaping Environmental Education in Coastal Ecuador” by Neela Nandyal, PhD Student, Comparative and International Development Education, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
• “38^th & Chicago, Re-Envisioned:  Determining the Future Design of George Floyd Square” by Alexander Kado, Transportation Planner, City of Minneapolis
• “Role of Science and Religion in Wildlife Conservation in India” by YV Jhala, Dean of the Wildlife Institute of India
• “Challenging Environmental Injustice” by Roxxanne O’Brien, Activist-in-Residence at Macalester, 2022-23
• “Working Across Lines: Resisting Extreme Energy Extraction” by Corrie Grosse, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University
• “Tackling the Ecological and Environmental Justice Challenge of Algal Blooms” by Anika Bratt, Wallin Postdoctoral Fellow, Environmental Studies, Macalester
• “Sweat Together:  Public Pleasure” by Stephanie Lindquist, Artist-in-Residence, Media and Cultural Studies, Macalester
• “In Search of a Darker Wilderness” by Erin Sharkey, Cultural Producer, Writer, Arts and Abolition Organizer, and Cultural Worker based in Minneapolis on Dakota land.
• “What Worlds Will We Create? Orienting Our Scientific Praxis Toward Liberation” by Jennifer Nicklay, PhD student in Land and Atmospheric Science, University of Minnesota
• “Climate Change and its Impacts on Indigenous Peoples of North America and Africa” by Samuel Akinbo and Mskwaankwad Rice, University of Minnesota
• “Passage” by Regina Agu, Artist
• “Openlands: African American Heritage Water Trails Project” by Lillian Holden, Education and Outreach Coordinator at Openlands
• Environmental Studies Honors Presentations – “How Do Highways Affect Racial Disparities in Air Quality” by Valeska Fresquet Kohan ’23 and “Examining the Role of Place Attachment in Climate Justice Engagement and Jewish Relationships to the Environment” by Madeline Medina ’23
• “Spirituality and Ecology: (Re)Membering Black Women’s Legacies” by Ebony Aya, Program Manager for the Jan Serie Center for Scholarship and Teaching, Macalester College

You can read more about these presentations on the EnviroThursday home page.  Click on the Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 links. EnviroThursdays take place every Thursday during the school year in Olin-Rice 250 at 12 noon.

Environmental Studies Faculty News

Prof. Louisa Bradtmiller

Louisa began the last academic year by attending the triennial International Conference on Paleoceanography in Bergen, Norway, just as classes were starting. She taught three courses in the fall – The Earth’s Climate System, a first year course on Climate and Society, and her co-taught course (with Prof. Sarah West in Economics) on the Economics of Climate Change. In the spring she taught Paleoceanography, which included a fun and successful lake coring trip to Holland Lake in nearby Lebanon Hills Regional Park. Students used the material from the trip for semester-long projects. Over the summer Louisa worked on several different research projects, writing grant proposals and generating preliminary data for future proposals. She also took several trips with family, and enjoyed some down time in Minnesota after a busy year.

Prof. Anika Bratt

Anika Bratt taught Ecology and the Environment last fall for the second time. She also organized a symposia as part of the EnviroThursday seminar series, ““Nature, Wealth, and Pollution: Redlining Roots and Legacies in the Twin Cities Metro Area” featuring faculty and students at Macalester who have studied the origins and impacts of redlining. She has also continued developing an interdisciplinary and community-focused research project studying artisanal and small-scale gold mining in rural Kenya. She co-authored three publications in 2023 in the journals Ecosystems, Water Resources Research and Aquatic Ecology. Following the birth of her son in December, she was on parental leave for the spring semester.

Prof. Jerald Dosch

This fall Jerald started his 20th year at Macalester with continuing roles in both the Environmental Studies and Biology Departments as well as continuing to serve as Director of Macalester’s Ordway Field Station (Macalester’s “other campus”). His 2023-24 teaching schedule includes Outdoor Environmental Education (OEE) and its lab as well as Ecology and the Environment and its lab.  Jerald’s very excited to welcome hundreds of elementary school children back to Ordway for field days this autumn at which the Macalester OEE students teach the children.

Jerald again spent this past summer working at Ordway conducting ecological research and land management activities.  It was wonderful to share those experiences with Mike Anderson and four Macalester students again.  You should consider applying for one of the Ordway positions for summer 2024.  Ask Jerald for details.

Prof. Christie Manning

This year, Christie is teaching Psychology of Sustainable Behavior, Psychology and/of Climate Change, and the Environmental Leadership Practicum in the fall. In the spring, she’ll teach Environmental Justice and Environmental Classics.

Christie had a fun summer of research with a small group of students- Rachel Campbell, Minori Kishi, Ahmed Abdalla Ahmed, Madeline Medina, and Marshall Roll.  The group planned a climate storytelling workshop in collaboration with Jothsna Harris of Change Narrative, a local nonprofit dedicated to increasing Minnesotans’ capacity for action against climate change. The workshop was both a meaningful experience and a great research success. We learned that participation in climate storytelling impacts nearly all of the psychological predictors of engagement in collective climate action.

In addition to her research with students this summer, Christie also helped write a book: Fostering Sustainability in Higher Education: Amplifying Change by Understanding Human Behavior in Organizations, which will be published by Springer in 2024.

Prof. Dan Hornbach

This is Dan’s last year on Macalester’s phased retirement. He continues to conduct research on freshwater mussels. He has been working with folks from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and Pollution Control Agency to better understand the factors that control the distribution and abundance of mussels throughout MN. He published a paper with folks from these institutions entitled “Freshwater Mussels, Ecosystem Services, and Clean Water Regulation in Minnesota: Formulating an Effective Conservation Strategy.” He also published a paper with researchers from the UMN St. Anthony Falls Lab and the USGS entitled “Distribution pattern of Zebra Mussels (Dreissena polymorpha) in White Bear Lake, Minnesota: a spatial scale analysis.” He also recently gave a presentation at the St. Croix River Rendezvous, sponsored by the Science Museum of Minnesota, on the effects of small dams on mussel population. The paper he published with Mac student Shannon Hahn in 2022 on mixing patterns in small ponds has already been cited 12 times – not bad for only being out a year!

Dan continues to spend time with his 6 grandchildren in Chicago, IL, and Durham, NC. Hiking in the mountains of NC and spending time on the shores of Lake Michigan while visiting family is one of the great benefits of being in phased retirement.

Prof. Christine O’Connell

Christine spent this last year on research sabbatical, and had the opportunity to dive into a set of collaborations between Macalester and the Tropical Responses to Altered Climate Experiment (TRACE), an in-situ field warming experiment located in the eastern part of Puerto Rico that is run by the US Forest Service.  TRACE is the world’s only experiment that is not only warming a tropical forest, but also asking how changing hurricane regimes are interacting with climate warming to shift the ecology of these ecosystems.  During Summer 2023, Christine collaborated with three CSR students who spent the summer in Puerto Rico measuring soil greenhouse gas emissions and designing and conducting their own independent research projects in the field.  We had a blast and gathered some really exciting data about the carbon cycle on a changing planet!

Christine is still working with TRACE (and will be this summer – look for opportunities in the winter if you’re interested in collaborating!) and is also continuing a collaboration with an upcoming drought manipulation experiment at the Luquillo Long-Term Ecological Research Station in Puerto Rico.  During her sabbatical she also analyzed data from older projects, including from a project looking at how Hurricane Maria impacted carbon storage and forest functioning in a rainforest in eastern Puerto Rico and, more generally, how more frequent hurricanes might change tropical forests.

After over a year away, Christine will finally be back in the classroom teaching in the spring and can’t wait to see some familiar faces again and meet students who she hasn’t crossed paths with yet!

Prof. Roopali Phadke

Roopali had a busy teaching year, followed by a quiet summer spent writing two articles and one grant proposal. She continues to teach the senior capstone course (Environmental Leadership Practicum) and Environmental Politics & Policy. This past Spring, she also offered Energy Justice for the third time. This advanced course combines the study of energy systems, focusing on electrifying the grid, with attention to energy democracy. Students in the course partnered with the Citizens Utility Board to study in the impacts of utility rate increases over the last decade. Roopali also continues her research on the Mississippi River. Roopali has also taken on a couple of additional roles on campus this year, including serving as Associate Director of the Center for Scholarship and Teaching and supporting Macalester’s Mississippi River Grant from the Mellon Foundation.

Prof. Chris Wells, Chair 

Chris is now in his second year as department chair. His favorite part of the role is getting to connect with a steady stream of new majors. This fall he is teaching US Environmental History and Environmental Classics, and in the spring he will teach U.S. Urban Environmental History and Consumer Nation: Twentieth-Century American Consumer Culture. His new book, Nature’s Crossroads: The Twin Cities and Greater Minnesota, which he co-edited with George Vrtis, the environmental historian at Carleton College, is finally out, which means he’s open to suggestions about what he should work on next!