Gund Institute Podcasts

Christian Cooper. George Floyd. John Muir. Systemic racism. Cancel Culture. In this moment of racial reckoning, how do we call ourselves out in order to call ourselves in? What does "keeping it real" look like in this moment? Our loftier ideals won't matter if we don't deal with the truth on the ground. No matter how rigorous we are in our articulation of diversity and sustainability, our good intentions don't necessarily translate into real change if we haven't dealt with the underlying issues. We need to go beyond what is academically sanctioned. What does total transformation demand? Are we ready?

Carolyn Finney, PhD is a storyteller, author and a cultural geographer. She is deeply interested in issues related to identity, difference, creativity, and resilience. Carolyn is grounded in both artistic and intellectual ways of knowing - she pursued an acting career for eleven years, but five years of backpacking trips through Africa and Asia, and living in Nepal changed the course of her life. Motivated by these experiences, Carolyn returned to school after a 15-year absence to complete a B.A., M.A. (gender and environmental issues in Kenya and Nepal) and a Ph.D. (where she was a Fulbright and a Canon National Science Scholar Fellow).

Carolyn's first book, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors was released in 2014. Recent publications include Self-Evident: Reflections on the Invisibility of Black Bodies in Environmental Histories (BESIDE Magazine, Montreal Spring 2020), and The Perils of Being Black in Public: We are all Christian Cooper and George Floyd (The Guardian, June 3rd 2020). She is currently doing a two-year residency in the Franklin Environmental Center at Middlebury College as the Environmental Studies Professor of Practice.

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In this talk, Dr. Mads Almassalkhi presents an overview of how power engineering and energy systems modeling and optimization can play key roles to support large-scale integration of renewable generation to enable a clean energy future and mitigate climate change.

According to the United Nations, numerous scientific reports, and the majority of Americans, climate change is a global challenge that should be prioritized. One major path forward to mitigate climate change is to install lots of new renewable generation: wind turbines and solar PV arrays. However, as seen in Hawaii, California, and Vermont, having lots of renewables and can impact reliability of the electric grid. In fact, the grid must become more flexible and efficient to absorb the windy and sunny days and more responsive to unexpected events.

Mads Almassalkhi is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Biomedical Engineering (EBE) at the University of Vermont, director of Vermont's new center for sustainable, resilient, and autonomous systems (VECTORS), and co-founder of tech startup Packetized Energy. His research interests lie at the intersection of power systems, mathematical optimization, and controls and focus on improving responsiveness, efficiency, and resilience of power and energy systems.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has affected many aspects of society and the environment. Seafood and fisheries are potentially particularly vulnerable to such a shock event given the highly globalized trade of seafood, the seasonal nature of many fisheries, and their dependence on restaurant sales. In addition, data on production, trade, and demand for seafood is often only released many months after when they might be useful to manage an emerging event. In this talk, Gund Fellow Easton White combines novel data sources with more classic indicators to present a holistic picture across the entire seafood production pipeline.

Dr. Easton White is a quantitative marine ecologist working to solve problems in ecology, conservation, sustainability, and ecosystem management. His current projects include designing protected area networks, building tools to optimize species monitoring, studying the impacts of COVID-19 on seafood and fisheries, and modeling coupled socio-ecological systems. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of New Hampshire.

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In this talk, food systems researcher Dr. Teresa Mares explores the idea of social sustainability as she highlights the contributions of farm and food workers in building more sustainable food systems, both locally and nationally.

Teresa Mares is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Vermont and Associate Director for the Food Systems Graduate Program. Her research has focused primarily on issues of food access amongst immigrant communities in the United States. She is the author of Life on the Other Border: Farmworkers and Food Justice in Vermont (UC Press: 2019). She is currently developing a new ethnographic project examining the production and consumption of hemp and hemp-derived projects.

In her talk, Dr. Mares revisits the work of feminist food scholars Patricia Allen and Carolyn Sachs, who called our attention to the social dimensions of sustainability. Thirty years later, a three-pillar understanding of sustainability is now the norm, and yet, the rights and needs of food and farmworkers continue to be denied and dismissed.

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There is growing scientific consensus that substantial changes to consumption behaviors are needed to reduce the global burden of disease and achieve more sustainable food systems. These changes include, but are not limited to, shifting towards dietary patterns that emphasize plant-based foods and limit animal-source proteins, and reducing food waste. In this talk, Dr. Emily Belarmino discusses individual food-related pro-environmental behaviors and the context in which people engage in these behaviors. She will introduce research projects examining food-related pro-environmental behaviors among US consumers during the COVID-19 pandemic and consumers' and health professionals' knowledge and beliefs related to dairy and plant-based sources of protein.

Gund Affiliate Dr. Emily Belarmino is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences and faculty in UVM's Food Systems program. Her research program in public health nutrition explores two primary areas related to sustainable food systems: (1) sustainable dietary patterns and (2) food and nutrition security among at-risk populations. She has a PhD in public health and policy and postdoctoral training in community nutrition.

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Crop evolution under domestication is a process that continues today in many parts of the Global South for numerous crops, driven by smallholder farmers growing native varieties of crops. They provide an "evolutionary" service to society by sustaining crop evolution that generates the broad and novel genetic variation necessary for crops to adapt to change, fundamental to achieve sustainable agricultural and food systems.

Current agricultural development strategies and related policies sponsored by international and national development and research organizations, as well as private companies, are based on promoting higher crop productivity while discouraging crop evolution. In this talk, Gund MacMillan Scholar in Residence Mauricio Bellon discusses the need to rethink these strategies to find the right balance between high crop productivity and the delivery of evolutionary services to agriculture and food systems.

Mauricio R. Bellon is an independent scientist and Honorary Fellow at the National Commission for the Use and Knowledge of Biodiversity (CONABIO), Mexico. He received his MS and PhD in ecology from the University of California, Davis and his undergraduate degree in agronomy from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico. His research focuses on the reasons, incentives and dynamics of crop diversity in agricultural systems-both at the inter-specific and infra-specific levels-in the developing world.

Previously, Mauricio was Coordinator of Studies on Agrobiodiversity at CONABIO. Before this he was Principal Scientist and Programme Director, Diversity for Livelihoods Programme, at Bioversity International (Italy). He also has worked for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT, Mexico), the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI, The Philippines) and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He is a member of the Mexican Academy of Science.

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In this talk, Eugenia (Gina) South critically examines the links between place and health, including the impact that structural racism has had on neighborhood environments. Using urban nature as a case example, this talk looks at the links between nature and health, and the experience of research in vacant lot greening as an example of action-oriented, community relevant scientific inquiry.

Eugenia South is Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Penn's Perelman School of Medicine, as well as the Faculty Director for the Penn Urban Health Lab. As a physician-scientist, her broad vision is to improve health and quality of life for residents in low-resource and Black communities through both research and clinical work.

Eugenia's work on vacant lot greening has been published in JAMA Network Open, PNAS, and AJPH, as well as been covered by national and international media outlets such as the Washington Post, NPR, and Time Magazine.

Urban areas produce about 75% of greenhouse gas emissions from final energy use but occupy a small land area on Earth. How can cities be part of the climate solution? In this talk, Gund Institute Advisory Board Member Karen Seto draws on the IPCC 5th Assessment Report to discuss how urban areas can mitigate climate change as well as highlight key knowledge gaps.

Karen Seto is the Frederick C. Hixon Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science at Yale University, School of the Environment. A geographer and urban scientist, she is an expert on contemporary urbanization, especially in Asia. Her research focus is how urbanization will affect the planet. She has pioneered methods to reconstruct urban land use with satellite imagery and has developed novel methods to forecast urban expansion. She is currently co-leading the urban mitigation chapter for the current IPCC 6th Assessment Report and co-lead the same chapter for the IPCC 5th Assessment Report, published in 2014. She is co-editor-in-chief of the journal, Global Environmental Change.

Climate change is increasing the challenge, and urgency, of finding agricultural management solutions to address water quality concerns and improve resiliency on farms in Vermont. Innovative solutions in how we manage soil, water, and nutrients hold much potential for improved outcomes, but we do not fully understand the effects of conservation practices and their tradeoffs.

Gund Affiliate Joshua Faulkner is a Research Assistant Professor and coordinates the Farming and Climate Change Program in UVM Extension's Center for Sustainable Agriculture. He does applied research and outreach on soil, water, and nutrient related issues across the state and region, and works with farmers on practices and innovative solutions to improve management of these resources and enhance farm resilience to climate change. He has a BS from Virginia Tech and an MS and PhD from Cornell University. He grew up on a beef farm, and currently has a small pastured pork farm business.

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Floodplain inundation maps provide insight into ecosystem services and help communicate flood risk, yet existing maps are spatially limited and difficult to update.

In this talk, recent Gund Postdoctoral Fellow Rebecca Diehl discusses how her team developed a probabilistic, low-complexity floodplain mapping tool capable of identifying flood inundation extents relatively rapidly and applied it to the Lake Champlain Basin in Vermont. The resulting maps help describe patterns of phosphorus retention on floodplains and are informing Vermont's Functioning Floodplain Initiative, a multi-disciplinary initiative to develop a mapping and tracking tool for protecting and restoring floodplains and wetlands.

Rebecca Diehl is a Research Assistant Professor in the Geography Department at UVM. Her research is motivated by the need for science-based tools to assist in the management of rivers and watersheds. Currently, she is focused on building an understanding of the functioning of floodplains in Vermont using terrain-based models and a network of monitoring sites.