wings – coexist

green news is good news

April 15, 2021February 15, 2021 by Laurie Kenney

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

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.

vogel ’11 shares career path with wes students

January 20, 2021November 11, 2019 by stousi

The Careers in Sustainability panel, hosted by the Gordon Career Center, the College of the Environment, and the Sustainability Office on October 4, 2019, included Nora Vogel ’11, director of communications for Coalition for Green Capital. The College of the Environment graduated its first cohort of environmental studies majors in 2010. Below, an interview with Vogel ’11, one of the first students to ever major in environmental studies at Wesleyan.

Did you come to Wesleyan knowing you wanted to study Environmental Studies? What led you to the COE?
Nora Vogel (NV): I knew I was interested in science and the environment, and I was thinking about doing biology. I actually worked in Professor Sonia Sultan’s lab, which was an amazing experience. At the same time, it felt hard to stick to research science as a career path, when I felt that many decision-makers in the world aren’t listening to the perfectly good science that we already have. That’s what got me interested in communications and in the Science in Society Program (SISP). I wondered what makes people make decisions about things, and what makes them trust one source and not another one. I took a Media in Society class that dovetailed really well with that, along with some sociology classes. I took a philosophy class with Professor Joseph Rouse about objectivity that I loved; we went deep down the rabbit hole of whether objective truth really exists. I still think about it all the time. The great thing about SISP was that it gave me a way to fit those things together, and it ended up being directly relevant to the career path I ended up on.

sustainable agriculture with rosemary ostfeld ’10

January 20, 2021October 1, 2019 by jpwhite

This past Wednesday I had the pleasure of sitting in on a brand-new College of the Environment class, ENVS282: Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems. Taught by Dr. Rosemary Ostfeld ’10, the class focuses on the techniques and strategies that can be employed to make our farms and supply chains more sustainable, as well as exploring the effects of our consumption habits on the environment.

From left: Elizabeth Roff, Andres Arango, Harper Gambill, Randy Tyng, Mike Eustace, Kush Puri, Stephen Philipps, Kaitlyn McMullan, Rosemary Ostfeld, Deborah Eaddy, Samuel Peek, Olivia Weiss, Joe DeLollo, Drew Burnett, Leo Clibanoff, Noah Cohen.