Barnard College
EN-3: Student Life

-Barnard's Student Government Association (SGA) maintains a Committee on Sustainability to educate and inform the student body on matters regarding individual and campus-wide sustainable practices. The Committee is headed by the elected SGA Representative for Sustainable Initiatives. The Committee convenes weekly and action items are assigned to members to complete for the following meeting. https://barnard.edu/sga

-The Barnard/Columbia chapter of SproutUp NYC trains college students to teach critical concepts in environmental science and sustainability to first and second graders in undeserved NYC public schools. https://www.sproutup.org/about-1

-Barnard Outdoor Adventure Team (BOAT) is a student group that organizes outdoor activities around New York state. Such activities include excursions to city parks, day hikes, kayaking, and overnight camping trips. BOAT follows the principles of environmental justice and LNT.

-Barnard Community Garden maintains a garden bed between Barnard's Sulzberger and Hewitt halls. The group facilitates conversations surrounding sustainable agriculture, food equity, and local food production. The group hosts events to eat and celebrate the produce from the garden.

-Sunrise Columbia/Barnard is part of the greater national Sunrise Movement to combat climate change and create green new jobs in the process.

-Barnard Sustainability, the administrative department, offers employment opportunities to Barnard students. Responsibilities include assisting with sustainability assessments, monitoring waste management practices, and publicizing departmental events and collaborations. https://barnard.edu/sustainability-climate-action

-Barnard for 100% Renewable Energy is a student-led campaign that is organizing the student body around asking the College to make a public commitment to a transition to 100% renewable energy on campus by 2040.

Barnard has 7 working garden areas on campus.

-The Arthur Ross Greenhouse houses a variety of plants and supports research in STEM disciplines like biology, chemistry, and environmental science, as well as anthropology and ethnobotany, political science and biogeography, economic botany, education, and history. The greenhouse is maintained by student workers, faculty, and staff. The greenhouse seeks to incorporate greenhouse resources and green expertise with campus-wide efforts to achieve sustainability locally, and to understand plant-environment interactions on large and global scales. https://biology.barnard.edu/biology-news/arthur-ross-greenhouse-celebrates-20-years

-For Barnard faculty living on campus housing, there is a rooftop garden located in a mixed-use residential building (Cathedral Gardens). This rooftop garden hosts 5 raised plant beds and is run by Barnard faculty.

-There are three areas on campus run by members of the Barnard Garden club for edible crops: The first year quad garden boxes, the Diana Center Roof plot, and the Milstein Center terrace planter boxes. The group stimulates conversations about sustainable agriculture, food justice, and hosts events to share the produce grown.

The office of Campus Sustainability and Climate Action hosts eleven edible planters around campus that provide access to healthy produce and teach students about growing their own food.

Apiary:
-There is an apiary on the roof of Barnard Hall, where Professor Jonathan Snow and his student lab assistants (of the Biology department) maintain several hives.
https://biology.barnard.edu/profiles/jonathan-snow

-In the Fall of 2020 The Office of Campus Sustainability and Climate Action hosted a series of three Campus Conversations during October and November of 2020 with a Citizens’ Assembly that included 16 members from across the Barnard College community. The conversation series, produced in collaboration with the Student Government’s Committee on Sustainability, was attended by more than 100 students, faculty, and staff — from across many different departments — who discussed ways to refine the goals initially laid out in Barnard’s Climate Action Vision. https://barnard.edu/news/citizens-assembly-offers-next-steps-climate-action-and-sustainability

-In October 2021 the Office of Community Engagement & Inclusion hosted ""City Atlas Game Night with Energetic: The Board Game."" The event had a discussion around topics such as environmental justice, urban planning and green energy. Students then went on to play Energetic, where players learn what it takes to transform NYC energy systems to meet standards set in the Paris Climate Agreement by having to deal with challenges such as budgets, electricity supply, elections, and public opinion.

-In March of 2022, Barnard held a half day series of workshops for World Water Day entitled The Urgency of Water: Women, Climate, and Sustaining the World. https://barnard.edu/event/women-water

-In September of 2022, for Climate Week NYC, Barnard hosted ""Leveraging Circularity: Science, Business, and Community."" This event brought students together with NYC policy makers, leaders, and climate activists to explore the science of circularity as a critical tool for reducing global emissions and discuss powerful steps to put circularity into practice, elucidating clear and relevant steps toward meaningful action.

Ecological Imaginary, March 2022. An exhibition by Barnard Students, in celebration of Art in the Barnard Year of Science

Art and science have intermingled for centuries. The collaboration has never been more relevant as both art and science develop sustainable futures. This exhibition includes projects by Barnard students who allow technology and scientific inquiry to create political and material ground for their work. This exhibition deploys aesthetic ecosystems to demonstrate values common to both art and science: imagination, experimentation, and innovation. https://barnard.edu/events/ecological-imaginary

Climate Cinima At Barnard
- Movie Screening and Panel Discussion for the Movie "Watermark" (2013).

The Biggest Little Farm (2018)

Microplastic Madness with Panel Discussion (2019)

BOAT (Barnard Outdoor Adventure Team) is a student-run extracurricular club funded by the College. They organize and lead outdoor excursions, ranging from hikes and backpacking trips to kayaking. BOAT follows Leave No Trace principles.

All Barnard first year students take the courses First Year Seminar (FYS) and First Year Writing (FYW). The subjects and professors of FYS vary from semester to semester.

1. In Spring 2021, Logan Brenner taught FYS “Science and Society on Screen”

The description of the course is as follows:
When we turn on TV and go to the movies we are typically looking to be entertained. When it comes to science on screen is the purpose for entertainment or education? How do science-related movies and TV reflect but also impact society? Can movies and TV be used to discuss the complex intersection between science and society and how are they received by the public? To discuss these questions and more, we will analyze texts, including Silent Spring and Demon Haunted World and visual media such as Hidden Figures, The Twilight Zone, and Erin Brokovich.

2. In Spring/Fall 2021 and Spring/Fall 2022 Benjamin M Breyer taught FYW “Leaving Home”

The description of the course is as follows:
Globally speaking, natural disasters, long-term climate change, war, religious difference, and economic hardship have forced tens of millions of people to leave their homelands in the last hundred years plus. This class will examine the ways that writers have depicted the refugee and émigré experience as it pertains to settlement in the Mediterranean region during this time period. Course readings will include Ali Fitzgerald, Malika Mokeddem and Mohsin Hamid, among others, as well as documents relating to the current migrant crisis in western Europe. Some of the themes that we will discuss using the class readings are cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, multiple identities, and transnationalism

3. In Fall 2021 and Spring 2022, Quincy Jones taught FYW “Women of Color in Speculative Literature”

The description of the course is as follows:
“The Future is Female” except in science fiction, where it still looks pretty white and male. What happens when women of color take on such tropes as space exploration, cybernetics, superpowers, and the end of the world? How can women of color change the way we not only think of the future, but think of the present as well? In this first-year seminar, we’ll look at how speculative literature approaches the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, technology, and environmental concerns. Readings will include work from such authors as Octavia Butler, Franny Choi, Sam Chanse, G Willow Wilson, and Tananarive Due with potential critical readings from Lisa Yaszek, Charlotte E Howell, and bell hooks

4. In Fall 2021, Linn Mehta taught FYS “Writing and the Environment”

The description for the course is as follows:
“Beginning with the Popol Vuh, the Mayan myth of creation, which records the first moment of contact with the Spanish conquistadors about 1555, we will explore American nature writing up to the present. Description and interpretation of nature has shaped artistic representation from the very beginning of human history. We will look at indigenous narratives, at activist texts, and at writing and images from the Americas in relation to selected European works, moving from Crevecoeur’s “Letters from an American Farmer” (1765) to excerpts from Wordsworth’s “Prelude” in England (1798), which in turn influenced Emerson’s essay “Nature” (1836) and Thoreau’s writing in Walden and “Civil Disobedience” (1851). Twentieth century works include selections from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939); Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” (1962); and John McPhee’s “Encounters with the Archdruid” (1971). Painting, photography and films will be included, with images from the Hudson River School, photographs of National Parks, and contemporary environmental films. An essential element is the study of activist organizations alongside international collaborations (COP27), the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and issues of environmental justice. Finally, we will both write and analyze contemporary environmental journalism, including Bill McKibben’s “The End of Nature” and Liz Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction”

5. In Spring 2022, Monica F Cohen taught FYW “Imagining Social Justice”
The description of the course is as follows:
While George Orwell may have been right when he remarked that "history is written by the winners," imaginative literature is almost always preoccupied with the losers. This course investigates how representational writing wrests its central themes and rhetorical strategies from imagining the voices of the disenfranchised. We begin from the premise that such acts of representation substitute as forms of redress, whether a justice of retribution and restoration or simply a caring gesture of bearing witness. Units will feature "fallen women" plots, plots of economic injustice, plots of racial injustice, and vigilantism. Texts may include the "Hymn to Demeter," Sophocles’s Antigone, Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina, Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, examples of the American Western, the limited TV series Watchmen, and theoretical work by Ahmed, Fricker, Hartman, Ortner, Solnit, Spillers.

6. In Spring 2022, Sandra Goldmark, Barnard College's Director of Campus Sustainability and Climate Action, taught FYS “Change and Climate Change.”

The description for the course is as follows:
“Change and Climate Change explores how we spark, facilitate, and accelerate change - or block, impede, and slow it - on the individual, social, and planetary levels. In the context of the climate emergency and the vast global social and environmental changes it both brings and demands, this course asks: what is change, and how do we do it? Students will identify and characterize different change processes, and analyze strategies for adapting to, mitigating, accelerating, or shaping change. Readings and projects will explore activism, education, research, storytelling, and performances by scientists, artists, indigenous leaders, and activists including Paul Hawken, Ruth DeFries, Janine Benyus, Cynthia Li, Atul Gawande, Octavia Butler, Adrienne Maree Brown, Rosi Braidotti, Ian Hodder, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Elizabeth Kolbert, Naomi Klein, and Suzan-Lori Parks. Student projects will explore how natural and human systems shape and experience change and apply those lessons to the current climate challenge”

7. In Fall 2022, Michael Shelichach taught FYW “Reading the Future”

The description of the course is as follows:
How do we think about the future? Why do we develop the hopes and predictions that we do? How do present conditions and discourses inform, influence, or limit our sense of personal and political possibility? In this First-Year Writing course, we will explore conceptions of the future in 19th through 21st-century literary fiction. We will begin by close reading 20th-century short stories that evoke fears of the future on individual, social, and global scales. We will then turn to H.G. Wells’ classic novella The Time Machine and attempt to place its portrayal of the future in the context of late Victorian science and socioeconomics. Finally, we will consider how Jeff VanderMeer’s recent novel Annihilation reflects and responds to the accelerating climate crisis, and explore fiction’s role in helping us apprehend the potential for radical environmental disruption.

8. In Spring 2023, Michael Shelichach taught FYW “Reading the Future”

The description of the course is as follows:
How do we think about the future? Why do we develop the hopes and predictions that we do? How do present conditions and discourses inform, influence, or limit our sense of personal and political possibility? In this First-Year Writing course, we will explore conceptions of the future in 19th through 21st-century literary fiction. We will begin by close reading 20th-century short stories that evoke fears of the future on individual, social, and global scales. We will then turn to H.G. Wells’ classic novella The Time Machine and attempt to place its portrayal of the future in the context of late Victorian science and socioeconomics. Finally, we will consider how Jeff VanderMeer’s recent novel Annihilation reflects and responds to the accelerating climate crisis, and explore fiction’s role in helping us apprehend the potential for radical environmental disruption.

9. In the Spring of 2020, Orlando Bentancor taught a FYS called "Thinking the Ecological Crisis: A Latin American Perspective"

The description for the course is as follows:
“What is the origin of the notion of “natural resource”? What is the connection between past and present colonialism and the current ecological crisis in Latin America? And, what is the relation between cultural diversity and a sustainable economy? In this seminar, we will explore these questions (and more) by looking at the history of Latin America through primary and secondary texts, including Latin American Literary, philosophical, aesthetic, legal, political, and economic texts. We will read both canonical and non-canonical writings from the colonial and modern periods as well as indigenous literature. The course will place this tradition in dialogue with the most recent developments of eco-feminism, materialist ontologies, discussions of environmental justice, “deep ecology,” and the rights of non-human nature. Readings will be selected from Domingo Sarmiento, Jose de Acosta, Andres Bello, Domitila Barrios, Ivonne Guevara, Enrique Leff, Luis Sepulveda, Donna Haraway, Jason Moore, McKenzie Wark, Timothy Morton, Naomi Klein, and John Clark. Throughout the course, we will consider how indigenous ideals of solidarity, reciprocity, and emancipation offer an alternative to strategies of domination.”

10. In the spring of 2022, Melissa Wright taught: “Political Fare: Food ＆ Freedom - Philosophies and Fictions of Food and Freedom”

The description for the course is as follows:
“In Wretched of the Earth (1961), Franz Fanon famously writes that to “hunger with dignity is preferable to bread eaten in slavery.” Taking this provocation as our starting point, this course will chart the function of food and hunger in philosophical and political conceptions of freedom. From Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (1729) to the political-promise-turned-fiction of 40 acres and a mule following the U.S. Civil War, we will also examine the legal, historical, and literary representations of food at the heart (and belly) of the human story. Core texts will include Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (1963), Andrea Stuart’s Sugar in the Blood: A Family's Story of Slavery and Empire (2016), Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (2015), Vandana Shiva’s Manifestoes on the Future of Food and Seed (2007), Bong Joon-ho’s Okja (2017), and Andreas Johnsen’s Bugs (2016). Along the way, we will investigate how the shifting conception of the human as a political and ecological concept is defined in relation to hunger, farming, and animal rights”

The Barnard Design Center is an inclusive makerspace that offers weekly tool trainings, in-depth project workshops, and interdisciplinary studio space for students. Many events hosted by the Design Center are focused on teaching students how to re-use materials and repairing items.

2/1/23: Event titled “Healthy Building: Carbon and Chemicals” hosted by the Design Center

11/17/22: Event titled “Backstrap Weaving Using Zero Waste Fabrics with Cynthia Alberto” hosted by the Design Center

9/23/22: Event titled “Wood Repair Workshop” hosted by the Design Center

9/16/22: Event titled “Reusable Bag Making Workshop” hosted by the Design Center

2/25/22: Event titled “Jewelry Repair Workshop” hosted by the Design Center

2/4/22: Event titled “iFixit Tech Repair Workshop” hosted by the Design Center

12/12/21: Event titled “How to grow a field” hosted by the Design Center

12/5/21: Event titled “Clothing Repair Workshop” hosted by the Design Center

10/1/21: Event titled “Upcycled Tie-Dye Workshop” hosted by the Design Center

9/21/21: Event titled “Upcycled crochet bag workshop” hosted by Design Center

2/22/21: Event titled “Natural Dyeing at Home” hosted by the Design Center

11/13/20: Event titled “Sustainability with Sandra” hosted by the Design Center with Sandra Goldmark, Barnard College's Director of Campus Sustainability and Climate Action.

-The Office of Sustainability & Climate Action hires 8-10 students per year, who work on sustainability initiatives and outreach on campus. The office of sustainability also hires students to work the green move-out (Give and Go Green) and move-in (Green Sale) initiatives.

-The Arthur-Ross Greenhouse hires 8-10 student workers to help maintain the Greenhouse.

- Chartwells Dining Services provider offers a paid sustainability internship for students.

-Various academic departments, such as the Environmental Science Department, Biology, and Urban Studies hire students to work with professors as research assistants.