Senior seminar in environmental science tackles local ecological issues

Faculty and students constantly advocate breaking the so-called “Middlebury bubble” and exploring life outside the confines of the Middlebury College campus. The Environmental Studies Senior Seminar class (ES0401) is a course that every fall requires seniors in the Environmental Studies (ES) major not only study an issue of both global and local importance, but also to apply their respective skills to address the issue and foster real change.

Last fall, the ES0401 class chose to address the problem of arsenic contamination in Vermont’s private water wells. Their efforts culminated in a presentation before the Vermont State Senate in Montpelier on Wednesday, Feb. 9, where testified in favor of a bill that would establish government regulation of private drinking water wells to ensure that the Vermont residents that use them are getting water that is up to EPA standards.
Arsenic can have negative health effects when ingested, but it is naturally derived from Vermont’s bedrock and it can occur in high levels in the soil and in residents’ water wells. Professor of Geology Peter Ryan, instructor for the ES0401 class, has been collaborating with the Vermont Geological Survey since 2002 on projects designed deduce why there are such high levels of arsenic in Vermont wells. For years he has been asking the questions:

“What do people in this area know? Do they know about health department recommendations [for arsenic levels]?

“I didn’t know when we moved to Vermont to test our water … I talked to colleagues, Middlebury college professors who didn’t know anything about these recommendations that you should test because there could be uranium or arsenic in your well,” said Ryan. “Think about environmental justice: if you live in Burlington or you live in Middlebury your water is tested regularly for everything. So you turn on the tap at college and you can be pretty assured that its not exceeding EPA safety requirements. If you live in Burlington, if you live in the city of Rutland too. But 40 percent of Vermonters drink from their own private wells.”

When it came time to design the class project, Ryan saw the course as an excellent opportunity to pursue this issue. The planning process began months before the class actually started when Ryan and Diane Munroe, coordinator for community based environmental studies, began lining up community partners. Jon Kim, Laurence Becker and Marjorie Gail of the Vermont Geological Survey, Joanne Calvi of the Department of Health and Vermont State Senator Virginia Lyons provided the community support necessary to address local issues. They provided a framework within which the class could as they collected and analyzed data and extrapolated on potential solutions to the arsenic problem. By presenting the class with key questions that needed to be answered, the students could move forward with direction. The students were responsible for completing the majority of the work, totaling hundreds of hours according to Ryan, and community partners are now using their reserach directly in order to effect change in Vermont.

The most tangible change after this past year’s ES0401 is the creation of a practical bill that is primed to move from committee to the Senate floor. In 2003, Senator Lyons proposed a bill, S.110, calling for the establishment of stringent testing requirements for private wells of Vermont residents. According to the students’ final report, “S.110 was not enacted into law due to concerns around cost, information disclosure, barriers to property transfers, and burden of responsibility.” However, while the policy the students proposed maintains characteristics of S.110, it has two added components. First, the class’s policy proposals are supported by extensive scientific and cost research that was not available to Lyons in 2003.

“These students are grounded, they’re not coming up with things that are fiscally impossible to do. All the way through it they were saying ‘Is this something feasible?’ I think everything the students came up with is very practical,” said Ryan.

The students also approached the issue from a human-interest perspective, using the story of Bjorn Coburn, a five-year-old boy who suffered health problems and developmental impairment as a result of arsenic poisoning from two years ago.

“You can look at maps and charts but as soon as you have a mother and a little boy — that’s the human side of the story,” said Ryan.

The mother, Laurel Coburn, and Bjorn, spoke with the class at their presentation at Montpelier as well as supported them in their class efforts. Their relationship with the class not only brought to light the real-world importance of this bill to the state senators, but also empowered the students themselves.

“[I’ve realized] this is not just a class exercise in thinking outside of the box, it’s a class exercise in thinking outside of the box because people’s lives are at stake and because public health is an actual issue,” said Sarah Simonds ’11. “Whatever I do to analyze this will inform their decisions to make better health choices and that kind of influence and significance in a project is kind of startling.”

Preparing ES students for the work they will be doing in the future is a central objective behind this course. The ES senior seminar was established in 1988, 23 years after the creation of the ES major by Professor of Environmental and Biosphere Studies Stephen Trombulak. He hoped to create a collaborative and real world “capstone course” for ES students.

“My inspiration [for the course] was the recognition that the students majoring in ES would benefit from having a senior capstone course that (a) was interdisciplinary, (b) collaborative and (c) focused on the kinds of applications that resembled the types of research projects they would likely engage in after graduation,” said Trombulak.

The course has evolved to exceed Trombulak’s original hopes and expectations, as the kind of work these students do more than resembles real-world research projects. The first ES0401 class in ’88 was a key player in the creation of Middlebury’s own Recycling Center and later classes did work that, for example, resulted in changes to ACTR routes and schedules, formed a basis for creating a mosquito control district near Lake Dunmore and addressed fundamental environmental issues with Middlebury’s Biomass Plant.

The interdisciplinary and collaborative aspects of this course are emphasized through the bringing together of students specializing in a myriad focus areas to use their unique perspectives to successfully address an issue. It is clear how the combination of people is really essential to achieving class goals.

“One of the students was in literary or creative arts and was involved in creating a prototype pamphlet, which is really well written. The graphics are great — you look at it and it’s aesthetically pleasing. I [could] imagine it being done by an engineer,” said Ryan. “Writing and designing the survey gets into the social aspects the human psychology. [In addition] the policy group had some environmental policy people and some econ people: they know where to find information on environmental econ and they know how to process the information — stuff that I couldn’t’ even begin to do.”

Some students chose their focus for its easily applicable purpose in the world of environmental science, such as conservation biology or environmental policy, and were able to employ knowledge from their focus in the service-learning project.

“Economics is a powerful tool to help understand and solve environmental problems, but in the end markets work best when guided by strong public policy,” wrote Pier Lafarge ’10.5, an ES0401 student, in an e-mail. “Policy is about synthesizing information, and our class worked really well together to do just that.”

Other students, such as Simonds, who specialized in architecture, found their focus area to be relatively immaterial to the work they were asked to do.

“I think one thing we struggle with is how to design a project that will generate interest and tap the different skills that are at the table because we have many different foci in the major. So we try to be cognizant of that in the project design,” said Munroe, who works closely every year with ES0401 students as advisor and unofficial teacher.
The students agreed that the as a whole has provided them with a sense of completion to their career as Middlebury College Environmental Studies majors.
“I think [the ES0401 class] has been the pinnacle of my time here at Middlebury — that last semester — and its because it was a chance to make a difference and this class in particular made a difference,” said Simonds.  “Legislation and actual change in Vermont is coming out of what we did last fall and that’s something maybe no other classes at Middlebury can say for themselves.”