In an April 19 lecture at Fordham’s McGinley Center Commons, Steven Cohen, Ph.D., executive director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, will discuss the nation’s evolution from preservation to sustainability. The talk, which is free and open to the public, will also cover topics related to renewable energy, the sharing economy, and technological advances.

Cohen’s lecture, “Building Sustainable Cities and Living Sustainable Lifestyles,” is part of a series of events for Earth Month, organized by the Bronx Science Consortium, a partnership between the University, the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG), Bronx Zoo, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and Montefiore Health System, and co-hosted by Fordham’s Office of Research.

Though Earth Day is officially on April 22, the consortium has dedicated the entire month of April to environmental literacy.

The consortium’s Earth Month began on April 5 with a presentation about securing funding for scientific research, led by Walter L. Goldschmidths, vice president of and executive director of the Office of Sponsored Programs at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. That same day, the University also held a research forum with guest chair Brian M. Broom of the NYBG. Fordham’s Bronx partner, the Bronx Zoo, hosted a Nature Club Family Event and Bronx Zoo Quest on April 8, which aimed to connect families to nature through activities in different locations around the zoo.

Some remaining events of Earth Month include:

• The NYBG’s dazzling garden exhibition of the artwork of American glass sculptor Dale Chihuly on April 22; On the same day, the garden will also host an Earth Day procession and behind-the-scenes tours of its Plant Research Laboratory, among other Earth Day-centric activities. On April 28, the NYBG will present a science-humanities seminar.

• The Bronx Zoo’s “Earth Fair” on April 22, which will feature products and services that are environmentally friendly; On April 29, the Bronx Zoo will host its annual 5k run/walk Run for the Wild.

Ron Jacobson, Ph.D., associate vice president in the Office of the Provost, said the series of Bronx Consortium events encourages the local community to work together for the good of the environment.

“It’s an opportunity for Fordham scientists and students to interact with other world class institutions in the Bronx,” he said.
(Earth photo by Bruce Irving, Creative Commons)

In the United States, Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs have successfully offered farmers financial incentives to employ pro-environmental practices, including the removal of land from agricultural production.

Though these programs have prevented billions of tons of soil from eroding and have reduced nutrient pollution from fertilizers, inefficiencies in their cost effectiveness have held them back from achieving more.

Marc Conte, PhD, assistant professor of economics, has created a research study that aims to improve efficiency in PES programs through better program design. He has received a 4-year grant of $498,641 from the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI), which is overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, to carry out his work.

With a collaborator from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Simanti Banerjee, PhD, Conte will focus specifically on issues within the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which pays farmers to retire land from producing crops for a minimum of 10 years.

Conte’s study will address inefficiencies that arise in the CRP because program managers never know the exact cost of the change in behavior for each farmer. As a result, farmers may receive larger payments than they would actually need to implement changes in their land use. As well, they may be paid for practices they would engage in even without the program, such as no-till production, which reduces erosion of fertile topsoil and allows the nutrients of crop residues to leach into the soil.

The CRP has implemented auctions to create competition among farmers for payments, which lessens farmers’ ability to exploit their information advantage about the cost of alternative management practices. Conte aims to examine how these auctions can best be designed to achieve maximum efficiency and ultimately create a balance between economic activity and ecological sustainability.

“We’re going to use our developed understanding of human behavior to see how changes in the auction design—auction format as well as individuals’ tendencies to seek peer approval—are going to affect auction performance,” he said.

Conte and Banerjee will run a series of experiments with both farmers and undergraduate student volunteers who will engage in auction scenarios on computers.

“It’s going to be a combination of having students participate in the auctions in the lab at our different universities and then looking to see if there is any effect of experience and knowledge about how the CRP is run and how farm management actually occurs when we have farmers participate in the same auction,” said Conte.

In a time of worsening environmental dilemmas alongside concerns about fiscal austerity, Conte believes efficient management of government programs—the goal of his own study—is essential.

“In this environment, it’s very important to be able to provide policy-relevant economic research that can provide guidance to the facilitators of these types of government programs to ensure that their funding doesn’t continue to be reduced, because there are huge positive potential welfare gains from effective programs,” he said.

–Nina Heidig

The event, “Fashion + Sustainable Development + Women’s Empowerment,” brought together designers, models, academics, and fashionistas for a runway show and panel discussion about the unique ways that the fashion industry is embracing sustainable practices and improving social and environmental conditions.

The event was sponsored by the Institute for Women and Girls at the Graduate School of Social Service (GSS) and hosted by Lyn Kennedy Slater, PhD, a clinical associate professor at GSS and creator of the popular blog The Accidental Icon.

“GSS and the sustainable fashion movement share the goals of environmental, economical, and social justice, and the realization of human rights and the empowerment of women and children,” Slater said. “When one comes to a conversations about similar issues from different perspectives, new and creative approaches to solving social problems can emerge.”

In her introduction to the event, Veronique Lee, merchandising director for Modavanti, said that fashion is the second largest “dirtiest industry” in the world, coming in just behind the oil and gas industry. Besides producing large amounts of toxic dyes and chemicals, the fashion industry is a significant consumer of natural resources and is notoriously wasteful.

The industry is in need of major overhaul to meet the global challenges we face, Lee said.

“We’re seeing this revolution happen with cars and with food, and now it’s time to start impacting our awareness of how we get our clothes, where they come from, and who is making them,” she said.

Nearly a dozen designers were present for the runway portion of the event, which showcased clothing and accessories that were sustainably made and ethically sourced. Models wove through the aisles of Pope Auditorium wearing clothes made from recycled water bottles and fishnets and sporting artisanal jewelry made by Alaskan and Peruvian natives.

Several designers emphasized that through their brands they aim to make positive social as well as environmental change. Panelist Chid Liberty, owner of the fashion company Uniform, said that for every purchase made, the company donates a school uniform to a child in Liberia.

“It’s about human, environmental, and financial well-being,” said panelist Amy Hall, director of social consciousness for Eileen Fisher. “This means [products or initiatives]that have the lowest environmental impact possible, the greatest social impact possible, and enough financial return to make that work possible.”

Lee recommended that consumers be mindful of what they are buying. Modavanti, she said, created a badge system to make it easy for consumers to tell whether the items they purchase are eco-friendly and ethically sourced. Smartphone apps can also help buyers research products and brands.

Most importantly, Lee said, don’t underestimate the power that consumers—particularly women—have in revolutionizing fashion. According to Forbes, women control $20 trillion in annual consumer spending, making them the largest market opportunity in the world.

“Women have enormous control through their purchasing power and influence, and it’s increasing,” Lee said. “Women can change fashion—the companies are listening.”

The panel was moderated by Jeff Trexler, associate director of Fordham School of Law’s Fashion Law Institute, and included:

• Amy Hall, director of social consciousness for Eileen Fisher;
• Rebecca van Bergen, executive director of Nest;
• Debera Johnson, executive director at the Pratt Institute; and
• Chid Liberty, co-founder of Liberty & Justice.

By Stevenson Swanson

One of the highlights of Pope Francis’ five-day visit to the Philippines in January was an open-air Mass in Tacloban, a city of more than 200,000 people that had been devastated by Typhoon Haiyan in November 2013. He told the crowd of several hundred thousand gathered at the airport that he came to Tacloban because he wanted to express his closeness to “our brothers and sisters who endured suffering, loss, and devastation.”

He did not talk about the environment or climate change, issues that are important to him and have been sources of much speculation since he announced they would be the subject of an encyclical—reserved for a pope’s most important teachings—later this year. Then again, he did not really need to mention them.

After all, his trip to the city had been moved up and shortened because of an approaching storm, and the Mass was held in a drenching downpour with high winds. Like everyone else there that day, the pope wore a poncho.

“The environment was front and center,” said Henry Schwalbenberg, PhD, director of Fordham’s master’s degree program in international political economy and development (IPED), who was there with some of his students. “He was trying to help people deal with the suffering in their lives that was caused by an environmental event—in the middle of a tropical storm.

“The organizers offered him the choice of saying Mass in a tent, but he refused the indoor option. I think the rain and the storm were right on for what he wanted.”

Slapping Nature in the Face

Weather is not the same thing as climate. Single weather events such as Typhoon Haiyan or Hurricane Sandy, which wreaked havoc on the U.S. East Coast in 2012, cannot definitively be attributed to climate change. But scientists who study climate patterns over longer periods of time predict that extreme weather will increase in the future as a consequence of the rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere. Climate-change skeptics still dispute that, but atmospheric greenhouse gases are undoubtedly rising. And the pope has made it clear who he thinks is responsible for the increase.

“Mostly, in great part, it is man who has slapped nature in the face,” he said in a press conference during his flight to the Philippines. “We have in a sense taken over nature.”

It is perhaps not surprising that the man who took the name Francis when he was elected pope—after Francis of Assisi, patron saint of the environment—would make environmental issues a priority of his papacy.

“He’s changed the tone of the conversation within the church and gotten the attention of people who might not have paid attention to this issue,” said Paolo Galizzi, a clinical professor at Fordham Law School who specializes in international environmental law and human rights.

But what in the pope’s background and training accounts for this dedication? And what can be expected when his encyclical is issued, probably in the early summer?

One place to look for the source of the pope’s dedication to environmental issues is in his training as a Jesuit, according to Chris Lowney, FCRH ’81, GSAS ’81, author of Pope Francis: Why He Leads the Way He Leads (Loyola Press, 2013). Lowney notes that one of the spiritual exercises that originated with Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, is to “find God in all things.”

“I can easily see how the pope’s Jesuit formation reinforces the idea that we are stewards of God’s creation and that God is somehow present in all of creation,” said Lowney, a former Jesuit seminarian and investment banker who now chairs the board of Catholic Health Initiatives. “So, therefore, we have a duty to look after it responsibly.”

Christiana Peppard, PhD, assistant professor of theology, science, and ethics at Fordham, agrees that Francis’ devotion to nature has a theological basis, but it also has an ethical component based on who’s responsible for environmental problems—and who suffers most from the impact of those problems.

“Climate change, which is driven predominantly by highly developed states like the U.S., tends to disproportionately affect the poor,” said Peppard, author of Just Water: Theology, Ethics, and the Global Water Crisis (Orbis Books, 2014). “And they didn’t cause the problem in the first place.”

The Inequality of Climate Change

Although in recent years China has become the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, the bulk of the greenhouse gases that have accumulated in the atmosphere were the product of the industrialized nations of Europe and, especially, America. Yet many of the countries that will be hit hardest by the effects of climate change are developing nations where large swaths of the population live in poorly built housing and the infrastructure to resist or respond to disasters is rudimentary at best.

“If you are living on a dollar a day or less, it’s very difficult to deal with everyday realities such as feeding your family, let alone things like flooding that’s caused by climate change,” said Galizzi.

Josh Kyller sees this challenge play out daily in his work as the emergency coordinator for Catholic Relief Services on the Philippine islands of Leyte and Samar, where he oversees a staff of about 300 people working to help residents rebuild their lives. He recites the grim statistics of Haiyan’s destructive power in the area: Thousands perished, and 10 million people were displaced.

The outpouring of international relief and Filipinos’ eagerness to rebuild has led to significant progress in the recovery, but Kyller and his staff are still helping 100,000 households in efforts to rebuild homes, provide clean water and proper sewage, and reduce exposure to future disasters.

“Tacloban is a kind of boom town,” said Kyller, a 2011 graduate of Fordham’s IPED program, who was with Schwalbenberg and his students at the pope’s Mass in January. “But there’s still a long road ahead.”

Concern for the poor and vulnerable has been a constant theme in Pope Francis’ life. But his positions are not that different from those of his immediate papal predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who wrote extensively about poverty and economic justice, according to Peppard, although Americans may not associate them as strongly with such issues because of the U.S. church’s focus on the pontiffs’ positions on reproduction and other social issues.

“Pope Francis’ teachings are not new. They’re being articulated anew by him,” she said. “But no one has written an encyclical focused on the environment. That is new.”

Schwalbenberg said that the pope is likely to link environmental degradation and economic justice in a way his predecessors did not. “I think Francis’ emphasis will be to wed the environment very tightly to a preferential treatment for the poor.”

As for the expertise that will underpin the encyclical, Francis is likely to draw on the information presented at a four-day workshop on sustainability issues that was held at the Vatican last May and brought together several dozen scientists, theologians, philosophers, and economists, including four Nobel laureates. He is expected to issue his encyclical in June or July because he wants to increase the odds that it will make an impact on the next round of international climate negotiations, which will take place in Paris in November.

The Pope’s Political Critics

Although the exact contents of the papal letter are not known, that has not stopped what Peppard calls preemptive criticism of the encyclical, prompted at least in part by the pope’s occasionally sharp remarks about what he has called “unfettered free-market capitalism.”

Last fall, for example, he addressed a global group of grassroots organizers, saying that an economic system centered only on money would “plunder nature” to sustain “frenetic” levels of consumption. “Climate change, the loss of biodiversity, deforestation are already showing their devastating effects … from which you, the humble, suffer the most.”

Taken as a whole, his critics say, Francis’ views amount to socialism at best, communism at worst. In their view, the free market, far from being the source of inequality, is the great engine that will pull the world’s poor out of misery.

“Pope Francis—and I say this as a Catholic—is a complete disaster when it comes to his public policy pronouncements,” Stephen Moore, chief economist of the Heritage Foundation, has written. “On the economy, and even more so on the environment, the pope has allied himself with the far left and has embraced an ideology that would make people poorer and less free.”

The encyclical and Francis’ addresses to the United Nations and U.S. Congress, both of which are set to take place in September, are unlikely to persuade conservative critics such as Moore or deeply entrenched climate-change skeptics such as Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), who last February brandished a snowball in the Senate chamber to dramatize the cold winter in the nation’s capital, decrying what he called the “hysteria” about global warming.

“If the overwhelming science hasn’t been able to persuade you, I am not sure what else can happen to convince you that climate is a problem,” said Galizzi. “Having said that, the encyclical has the potential to reach people who don’t pay attention to these issues.”

Schwalbenberg agrees. He cites the example of a Connecticut businessman he knows, whom he describes as “a very devout Catholic” who’s not interested in the environment. “But because the pope is talking about it, he’s going to think about it.”

An Expansive View of Life

Theologically, the encyclical could also be a way to redefine what constitutes a “life” issue for the Catholic Church.

“It will be an opportunity to see that there’s more at stake in Catholic ethics in the 21st century than reproduction, abortion, and euthanasia,” Peppard said. “If the church is concerned about life, that need not be a selective lens.”

But what about results, such as a firm commitment by the nations of the world to reduce greenhouse emissions when they meet in Paris?

Given the complexities of getting so many countries, with their varying national interests, to agree on anything, the odds may not be in Francis’ favor. On the other hand, he is a singular figure, the leader of a worldwide institution with 1.2 billion members but no national interests to defend, no reelection campaign to wage.

“He has won great credibility by his example of humility and his reputation as a truth-teller who speaks plainly. So few politicians nowadays can speak with that same credibility,” said Lowney. “He would seem as well-positioned as anyone to win a hearing for the issue of how we steward the Earth.”

—Stevenson Swanson is a freelance journalist who has written about religion, the United Nations, and the environment, among other topics.

The 15-foot high, 800-pound tree was one of several dozen American Elms, Red Maples, Northern Red Oaks and Japanese Maples being grown in a former orchard at the Louis Calder Center in Armonk. Many perished as a result of the high winds and heavy rains of Hurricane Sandy. But several pin oaks survived, and this one was transported to the Bronx campus to take up a new home.

Fordham’s Facilities Management and the United Student Government’s (USG) Sustainability Committee orchestrated the planting. It marks the University’s inaugural participation in Tree Campus USA.

Launched in 2008 by the Arbor Day Foundation, Tree Campus USA is designed to help colleges and universities promote tree conservation and act as a catalyst for fostering student engagement.

Gerardo Galliano, campus operations manager in Facilities Management, said he hopes more events such as this one, in which ceremonial shovels of dirt were heaped on the root ball after a front loader lowered the tree into a hole, encourage the University community to recognize the importance of tree conservation.

“It also allows students and administrators to participate in something in what would normally just be a facilities function,” he said.

Marco Valera, vice president for Facilities Management, said the planting was part of the University’s ongoing tree conservation efforts. The 90-acre Rose Hill campus is home to about 500 trees, including a 270-year old American Elm that the University is lobbying to have listed on the National Register of Big Trees. He noted that this is a great way to celebrate Earth Day, which falls on Wednesday, April 22.

The University also established an official tree advisory committee last month, submitted a comprehensive campus tree conservation and action plan, and dedicated annual expenditures specifically geared towards tree/forest conservation efforts on campus. Friday’s planting was part of an Arbor Day tree planting observance that will take place annually.

Nick Rapillo and Katherine Sitler-Elbel, freshmen at Fordham College at Rose Hill, joined two other students at the planting.

Rapillo, a Trumbull, Connecticut native whose interest in the environment was sparked by membership in the Boy Scouts, has picked environmental studies for his major. He also hopes to double major in urban studies.

“I’m hoping to combine the environmentalist ideas in urban areas, so this this kind of event fits that,” he said

Sitler-Elbel, an environmental science major, moved to New York from Dallas because she said she wanted to live in a place that is “more progressive” in environmental issues.

She led a student service-learning project that surveyed the neighborhood adjacent to the Rose Hill campus to identify empty plots along sidewalks and roadways where a tree once stood. Students identified 20 spots within a mile-long loop where trees could be planted; they plan to submit the information to the city’s Million TreesNYC program.

“People underestimate trees’ importance,” she said, noting the benefits of shade and oxygen they provide. “People see the, and they think they look nice, but they don’t realize how much they give back.”

When we think about issues of sustainability, such as water shortages or mineral depletion, we tend to think of them as huge, planet-wide phenomena.

But if you’re a fisherman in Micronesia whose catch is shrinking every day thanks to the effects of global warming, the global becomes the personal in very distressing ways.

Just Sustainability: Technology, Ecology, and Resource Extraction (Orbis Books, 2015) a new book co-edited by Christiana Peppard, PhD, assistant professor of theology, science, and ethics, brings together the personal and the planetary in a series of 30 essays from 20 countries from six continents.

It’s a topic Peppard is well acquainted with, having recently published Just Water: Theology, Ethics, and the Global Water Crisis (Orbis Books, 2014).

The volume is the third in a series commissioned by the Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church. The previous volumes tackled the history of Catholic theological ethics and feminist theological ethics. Peppard’s co-editor was Andrea Vicini, SJ, associate professor of moral theology at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry.

For this volume, Peppard and Vicini solicited original writing from scholars across the globe; the result is a series that is not dominated by North American voices.

“We tend to dominate discourses, whether it’s about environmentalism or public policy or sustainability of economics, so many volumes are very North-American-centric in their perspective,” Peppard said.

The writings are split into three sections. The first consists of 1,500 word long stories about local issues such as the aforementioned overfishing in Micronesia, and extractive mining in the Congo. The second breaks down political/economic structures or tendencies that inform and shape many of the issues that people are facing, such as neo liberal economic policies and advances in technology. The final chapter features essays that link it all back to Catholicism.

“They range from theological analysis of fossil fuel energies and what might be theological justifications for moving toward renewable energies, to much more traditional reflections on what being a global church means in the 21st century,” Peppard said.

Justice is the constant theme running through the book. It’s a concept for which Catholic theology has had plenty to offer, going all the way back to the writings of 13th-century scholar St. Thomas Aquinas.

“We want to ask, what does a just sustainability look like, and how is that enriched and deepened locally and globally by drawing on this variety of catholic and conceptual resources?” Peppard said.

“Understanding ourselves and our responsibilities as fundamentally earthly creatures is entirely appropriate to the task of Catholic theology.”

The sleek black sedan seen quietly ferrying Fordham juniors and seniors to and from Hughes Hall was a Tesla S60kw, an electric car that travels 300 miles on a single charge.

The visit was part of “Sustainable Business Foundations,” a class taught by Michael Pirson, Ph.D., assistant professor of management systems at the Gabelli School of Business.

The class, which is the foundation of a sustainable business minor that is open to both Fordham College at Rose Hill and Gabelli students, surveys the principles of sustainable business around 3 P’s: Planet, People, and Profit.

“We use a theoretical basis for sustainable business and invite companies that represent those to come speak to class. The final assignment for the class is to come up with a sustainable business idea and write a business plan around it,” Pirson said.

Whereas past company representatives have addressed students from the confines of the classroom, the Oct. 1 class was a little more hands-on. As Steve Treacy, a senior at Gabelli who works as a product specialist for the 10-year-old San Carlos-based car company, gave students rides around campus, other students peppered Tesla ownership specialist Jeff Cuje with questions about the company.
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Tesla’s Jeff Cuje takes questions from Fordham students outside of Hughes Hall. Photo by Patrick Verel

Cuje explained how the S60kw, which has a base price of  $70,000, can be charged overnight at any home with a 240-volt connector, at a public charging station, or at one of the company’s “Supercharger” stations opening around the country.
And even though many homes still get their energy via coal-fired plants, Cuje said that, in the long run, it’s still cleaner than cars with traditional internal combustion engines powered by oil.

In addition to Tesla, Pirson has hosted representatives from companies such as Whole Foods, Eileen Fisher, and Green Soul Shoes. Tesla embodies the challenges that sustainable businesses face when tackling issues of transportation and energy, and their advertising model is an example of how many sustainable businesses follow unique paths.

“They’re doing it all word-of-mouth, which is a great strategy because it doesn’t cost as much,” he said.

John McConnell, a senior at Gabelli majoring in finance entrepreneurship, counted himself as a fan.

“The idea of finding a car that runs on a sustainable energy source is not going away, so Tesla is really at the forefront. A lot of other companies have electric models, but that is not their core competency. Tesla’s core competency, as far as what they’re making, is electric cars,” he said.

“It’s really a forward-thinking company.”

After graduation, McConnell hopes to work for a company that is focused on solving the problems of today with the future in mind. General Electric’s “Ecomagination,” program, for example, examines companies’ products to see how they might be replaced with something more sustainable.

“Some of them aren’t textbook-sustainable products,” he said. “Fluorescent light bulbs, for instance, aren’t really good for the environment; they just use less energy. But I want to be part of a company that’s looking to solve those issues,” he said.

On March 23, 2012, Scientific American wrote:

“Lyme disease may surge this year in the northeastern United States and is already spreading into Canada from a confluence of factors including acorns, mice and the climate.”

And then? Nothing happened.

“Everybody last year was predicting that we were going to have a terrible Lyme disease season, and it turned out that we absolutely did not,” said Thomas J. Daniels, Ph.D. “If you look back at our tick index for that period of time, we never got above a five. In really bad years, we can get up to a 10. We just didn’t have the ticks last year.”

Daniels, an associate research scientist and co-director of the Vector Ecology Laboratory at the Louis Calder Center Biological Field Station in Armonk, N.Y., said the working theory for the unprecedented crash in the population of the black-legged tick, Ixodes scapularis, was the unusually warm winter that year.

“Ticks normally take a break in the wintertime. They take their cue from the environment, and if it is cold enough, they shut down. They’re pretty hardy animals. They essentially sleep through the winter,” he said.

“When it’s not as cold as it normally is, there’s probably some threshold below which they become inactive, and above which they’ll stay active. With an animal that’s this small and has a limited amount of energy to survive on while it’s looking for a host, not having that time to take a nap can be harmful.”

When it came time to hunt down Ixodes scapularis last summer, researchers at the center recorded the lowest numbers since sampling was first begun in 1987: less than one tick every 100 meters.

Daniels and Richard C. Falco, Ph.D., co-director of the Vector Ecology Laboratory, are writing a paper on the findings now; preliminary results were reported at Fordham College Rose Hill’s annual undergraduate research fair in April in a poster titled, “And Then There Were None: Where Are All The Ticks This Year?”, presented by Rose Hill junior Jenna Petronglo. Also contributing to the study was Graduate School of Arts and Sciences doctoral student Justin Pool.

A full analysis of the die-off will only be done after this year’s sampling is complete. Researchers don’t know, for instance, whether they witnessed a complete crash of the tick population, or if it was simply the nymphal stage, which is the one responsible for most Lyme disease cases.

So far, Daniels said it looks as if this year’s sampling will be bigger than last year. What that means is not clear, but he said that changes are afoot. Among the less encouraging changes is an increase in the number of pathogens that Ixodes scapularis can carry.

For instance, in addition to Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterial agent that causes Lyme disease, Ixodes scapularis has recently been found to also carry another bacterial agent, Borrelia miyamotoi. This is in addition to the agents that cause diseases such as Anaplasmosis and Babesiosis.

“The system that had been fairly well understood as far as when the ticks are active, what pathogens they host, what the infection rates were for those pathogens, the timing of Lyme disease season —all of that seems to be in a state of flux right now,” Daniels said.

“A lot of it, we think, has to do with the fact that the world now is not the world of 25 or 30 years ago.”

The world’s climate is endangered by a surplus of carbon being belched into the skies by the burning of fossil fuels, but Graciela Chichilnisky, Ph.D., said there is a profitable way to stop it.

Chichilnisky, the UNESCO Professor of Mathematics and Economics at Columbia University and the founding director of Global Thermostat, delivered the keynote address at the second annual Climate Change Economics and Energy Finance Symposium, held at the Lincoln Center campus on March 1.

The daylong conference brought together experts from academia, industry, government and the financial sector. Panel discussions addressed issues related to climate change economics and scientific evidence, renewable energy, clean technology and alternative energy sources.

Chichilnisky noted that the existential threat to humans posed by rising global temperatures is real, but that a solution will only come when a there is a fundamental shift in values. She termed it an “Oscar Wilde” moment—so named for Wilde’s quip that economists “know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Western economics’ emphasis on competitive markets, optimal growth theory and cost benefit analyses actually disconnect the present from the future and people from resources, she said.

“Suppose that we destroy all the trees in the United States tomorrow morning and we make toilet paper? What happens to the economy?” she said. “Employment goes up, the G.D.P. goes up, everything is better. Why? Because toilet paper has a market value [while]trees do not.

“That’s exactly what Oscar Wilde was trying to say,” she said.
The carbon market—a.k.a. emissions trading—is already underway in the State of California, which has installed the nation’s first compulsory carbon market where businesses are being taxed based on their emissions.

“California is a very influential state. They are not doing this for fun. They’re doing it because they think they’re going to make money, and they’re going to make money the way the Chinese are making money,” she said.

Chichilnisky wrote the regulations for the carbon market that were included in the Kyoto Protocol, which was adopted by 160 nations in 1997 and ratified by all but the U.S. in 2005.  That carbon market is currently trading $200 billion a year and has reduced 30% of European Union emissions and has transferred $50 billion of clean energy projects to poorer nations to support private clean energy projects.

It has a net zero cost to the economy because, at the end of the day, some people pay, and some people receive money, she said.

On Thursday, she signed copies of Saving Kyoto (New Holland Publishers, 2009), which describes the effort more in depth.
Global Thermostat, Chichilnisky said, hopes to take advantage of the changing dynamics of energy consumption that will ideally reward those who are cleaner over those who are dirty.

Using equipment currently being tested at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Calif., GT captures carbon from the air using a chemical process. One of the byproducts of the process is CO2, which can be used for everything from cement production and petroleum extraction, to biofuels. Mixed with hydrogen, it can even be used to create synthetic fuels, she said.

“A carbon negative solution means that the more energy you produce, the more carbon you reduce. Sounds impossible? Yes, it sounds impossible, but it isn’t,” she said.

“You can use it with solar plants, which don’t emit any CO2, or nuclear plants, because the CO2 comes from the air, and you will never run out of CO2, because we are injecting 30 gigatons a year.”

Chichilnisky acknowledged there are real challenges ahead, particularly since there are powerful interests backing fossil fuels. But she expressed hope that owners of coal and oil-fired power plants will see how profitable it can be to take carbon from the air and return it back to the ground.

In 2009, she authored a proposal to the U.S. Department of State for the funding of a $100 billion grant for a Green Climate Fund that would cover the cost of converting power plants around the world over the next 15 to 20 years; it was accepted in a modified form.

“Now we have to link it to a source of funding from the carbon market,” she said.
That likely won’t happen, she said, until there are proven technologies to make money while building carbon negative power plants.

Environmental Science is an interdisciplinary science major that will provide students with a solid foundation in scientific principles and their application to the environment, said Donna N. Heald, Ph.D., associate dean for science education at FCRH.

“This major will prepare students to be scientists,” Heald said of the environmental science major. “The emphasis is on a variety of science courses. It has a rigorous curriculum using an integrated systems approach that combines concepts and methods across the fields of biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics and environmental science.”

Following the solid scientific grounding in the first two years, upper division students will be provided specialized courses such as applied statistics, tropical ecology and environmental chemistry. They will be required to complete and independent science research project on an environmental topic or an internship at an environmental firm or government agency.

“It allows students to choose electives that will be tailored toward their major,” Heald said. “As a faculty, we are pretty excited to offer an interdisciplinary major. I was at an event recently and a potential student and his father mentioned they were glad to see this major offered at Fordham.”

The Environmental Policy major will offer students a multidisciplinary course of studies focused on the social values and policy dimensions of environmental issues, such as climate change.

It is a first in Fordham’s history, said John Van Buren, Ph.D., director of the environmental policy program and professor in the Department of Philosophy.

“The program reflects Fordham University’s mission of ‘men and women for others’ and ‘respect for the environment’ in that students are given the opportunity to serve the greater good in the areas of ecological literacy, citizenship, stewardship, sustainable development, environmental justice and future generations, effecting positive change in a world governed by complex scientific, social, economic, political and ethical interactions and processes,” Van Buren said.

The environmental policy major, which replaces the environmental studies minor, will include courses in philosophy, natural science, anthropology, history, economics, political science, design, literature and theology, as well as real-time New York City internships and study-abroad opportunities to gain international experience.

“In the past, the environmental studies minor has graduated 15 students per year, who have gone on to successful graduate studies and careers in environmental areas of philosophy, natural science, medicine, engineering, law, government, business, architecture, urban planning, education, communications and media, and not-for-profit public organizations,” Van Buren said.

The forum, “Green Cities of the 21st Century: Harmonizing Natural and Built Environments,” was presented in conjunction with the United Nations’ World Habitat Day, which occurs annually on the first Monday of October. While the global observance took place in Luanda, Angola, forums like Fordham’s were organized around the world.

The theme of this year’s program was “Harmonious Cities,” and from the very beginning, organizer Harold Takooshian, Ph.D., professor of psychology, predicted that it would be an optimistic gathering, rather than a recitation of well-known urban ailments.

“First the bad news; for over 600 years, large cities worldwide have been associated with many negatives: congestion, pollution, crime, cost of living, poverty, housing, education, health care and social disorganization,” Takooshian said.

“Now the good news; here in New York City, we sit in what some not only regard as the world’s greatest city, but the greatest city in the history of the world,” he continued.

The experts—who addressed the forum in 10-minute blocks—touched on subjects both concrete and conceptual. While Susan D. Kaplan and Louis Nowikas touted the progress of green building in Battery Park City and the Hearst Tower, respectively, Julie Newman, Ph.D., director of sustainability at Yale University, talked about the roles that universities play in promoting sustainability.

Ellen D. Grimes, an architectural designer and assistant professor of architecture at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, detailed her plans for ecological experiments at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, a 19,000-acre preserve opened in 1996 by the U.S. Forest Service at the former site of the U.S. Army’s Joliet Arsenal.

“In any landscape restoration, we’re inventing new worlds. We change our sense of scale and landscapes, instead of seeing one perfect view. We have to see time in many dimensions, and we also have to see the environments in many dimensions as well, very small and very large,” Grimes said.

“We have to develop a very different sensibility about green. It’s not about the natural versus the artificial. It’s about the artifice in nature, and the way that it changes itself over time, and that dynamism is something we hope to capture in the projects at Midewin,” she said.

Rich Sanford, a representative to the United Nations, New York at Instituto Qualivida, meanwhile, delighted participants with television commercials of the 1972 Honda Z600, a precursor to the Smart Car, of which he is an avid proponent and whose use he said should be considered when rethinking transportation issues.

“It’s optional; it’s possible, and rather than vilifying just for the fact that they’re vehicles, I think that we can embrace them and resituate them,” he said.