green news is good news

Read below for all the good green news that’s fit to print!

• Justine Quijada recently bylined an article for The Conversation, ‘Animism’ Recognizes How Animals, Places and Plants Have Power over Humans – and Its Finding Renewed Interest Around the World.
  
• Antonio Machado-Allison was recently quoted in an article in Dialogo Chino, Orinoco Belt: Venezuela Waiting on Oil Investment in Biodiverse Region.
• Helen Poulos recently co-authored three new papers: “The North American Tree-Ring Fire Scar Network”; “Low-Severity Wildfire Shifts Mixed Conifer Forests toward Historical Stand Structure in Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Texas, USA”; and “Climate and the Radial Growth of Conifers in Borderland Natural Areas of Texas and Northern Mexico”. Learn more about Helen’s Guadelupe fescue restoration project in the Chihuahuan Desert Borderlands in this Marfa Public Radio segment: Fescue Rescue: An Endangered Grass Embodies the Beauty, and Fragility, of the Sky Islands.”
• New research co-authored by Barry Chernoff shows that the Australian dingo probably descended from a wild dog rather than a domestic breed. Read all about Barry’s research in New Scientist.
• Welcoming Elan Abrell, Raquel Bryant, Kate Miller, and Rosemary Ostfeld to our ENVS faculty! Read more here! 
• Rosemary Ostfeld, assistant professor of environmental studies and founder of startup Healthy PlanEat, is running the Entrepreneurship Academy at the new Eastern CT Innovation Center. The center was purchased with $1.3 million from the state Bond Commission and will house the startup ecosystem for a 40-town service area.
• Congratulations to University Professor Antonio Machado Allison, who recently published Alto Orinoco, a new volume of the Academia de Ciencias Físicas, Matemáticas y Naturales (ACFIMAN) collection.
• Rosemary Ostfeld recently received a USDA award for her PlanEat startup. Read more at News@Wes!
• Helen Poulos is featured in a USGS “Eyes on Earth” podcast where she discusses wildfires and her remote sensing research data from ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS). Poulos and her collaborators studied the Arizona Pine Oak forest five years after a severe fire and learned that post-fire landscape had surprisingly high rates of water use.
• Congrats to Helen Poulos and her co-authors of three new published papers, including one with Michael Freiburger ’21:  Poulos, H. M., Freiburger, M. R., Barton, A. M., & Taylor, A. H. (2021). Mixed-Severity Wildfire as a Driver of Vegetation Change in an Arizona Madrean Sky Island System, USA. Fire, 4(4), 78; Briggs, M. K., Poulos, H. M., Renfrow, J., Ochoa‐Espinoza, J., Larson, D., Manning, P., … & Crawford, K. (2021). Choked out: Battling invasive giant cane along the Rio Grande/Bravo Borderlands. River Research and Applications; and Barton, A. M., & Poulos, H. (2021). Wildfire and topography drive woody plant diversity in a Sky Island mountain range in the Southwest USA. Ecology and Evolution, 00, 1– 18.
• Helen Poulos’s NASA-funded research on the 2011 Horseshoe II Fire in Arizona was highlighted on AZ Central. “In the face of increasing wildfire frequency, size and magnitude — due to both fire suppression and climate change — one of the key things we want to understand is how plants recover from fire, specifically high-severity wildfires,” said Poulos, a professor of environmental studies at Wesleyan University and the principal investigator of the study. “Understanding how plants use water is a really important step in understanding ecosystem recovery after a fire.” Read all about it @ NASA-Funded Study Uses International Space Station to Predict Wildfire Effects. 
• Congrats to our class of 2021 honors or high honors in environmental studies recipients: Sanya Bery (honors), Rebecca Lopez-Anido (high honors), Gabe Snashall (high honors), and Isabella Whiting (high honors)!
• Awardees have been announced for the 2021 Robert Schumann Distinguished Student Award. Established in 2007 by a gift from the Robert Schumann Foundation, the prize is awarded to an outstanding student or students who demonstrates academic accomplishment and excellence in environmental stewardship through work at Wesleyan or the greater Middletown community. This year’s honorees: Franny Lin, for her work at Long Lane Farm, and Cat Xi, for her work with the Sustainability Office and with the town of Middletown.
• Helen Poulos recently published a paper on Arizona wildfires. Read more about the project in this News@Wes article! 
• Congrats to the newest members of Wesleyan’s Gamma Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa: Lizzie Edwards (ENVS & ANTH), Cat Xi (CSS, ENVS), Franny Lin (ENVS, E&ES),  Maggie O’Hanlon (ENVS, GOVT) & Cameron Scharff (ENVS, PHIL)!

• Congrats to Mary Alice Haddad, John E. Andrus Professor of Government, chair of East Asian Studies and professor of Environmental Studies, on her new book: Effective Advocacy: Lessons from East Asia’s Environmentalists (MIT Press). From the publisher: How did environmental activists succeed in countries that favor business interests and are generally hostile to citizen-based advocacy? In Effective Advocacy, Haddad identifies and describes, with examples, five of the most effective advocacy strategies used by environmentalists in East Asia: cultivate policy access, make it work locally, make it work for business, engage the heart, and think outside the box.
• Earlier this semester, Wesleyan welcomed Rhiana Gunn-Wright, co-architect of the Green New Deal, for a virtual interactive discussion about political organizing and the formation of the progressive climate proposal. Read all about the event, co-sponsored by the COE, in the Wesleyan Argus.
• Congrats to Gabe Snashall ’21 and Helen Poulos, adjunct assistant professor of environmental studies,  co-authors of Oreos versus Orangutans: The need for sustainability transformations and non-hierarchical polycentric governance in the global palm oil industry. The manuscript has been officially accepted for publication in Forests, a peer-reviewed open access journal of forestry and forest ecology published monthly online by MDPI. Read more about the paper and its co-authors in News@Wes!
• Congrats to the 25+ students in Fred Cohan’s BIO173/ENVS260 course,  Global Change and Infectious Disease, who earned extra credit for having their essays on infectious disease prevention and COVID-19 published in news outlets nationwide! Fred will teach the course again in fall 2021. Read all about the students an their essays here!
• Helen Poulos and Barry Chernoff are contributors of a chapter to Renewing Our Rivers:  Stream Corridor Restoration in Dryland Regions, edited by Mark K Briggs and W.R. Osterkamp (University of Arizona Press). The book provides stream restoration practitioners the main steps to develop successful and viable stream restoration projects that last. Ecologists, geomorphologists, and hydrologists from dryland regions of Australia, Mexico, and the U.S. share case studies and key lessons learned for successful restoration and renewal of our most vital resource.
• Rosemary Ostfeld ’10 was honored by Connecticut magazine as one of 40 under 40 of the class of 2021! A visiting assistant professor of environmental studies and public policy here at Wes,  Rosemary teaches ENVS344 RenewableEnergy and Negative Emission Technologies, ENVS282 Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems, ENVS197 Intro to Environmental Studies, and CSPL239 Startup Incubator, as well as ENVS125 Community Gardening. She is also the founder of Healthy PlanEat, a service connecting communities to local  farms to provide healthy and sustainable food to all!