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08-15-2019: Conservatory Advanced Performance Studies alumnus Tomoki Park and second-year Vocal Arts Program student Margaret Tigue recently performed at Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts, as part of the Tanglewood Music Center's Festival of Contemporary Music. In a concert dedicated to former Tanglewood Music Center director of contemporary music Oliver Knussen, Tomoki Park's "sensitive" performance of Knussen's distinctive "Prayer Bell Sketch" was one of the highlights of the program. Margaret Tigue offered a very fine performance as a soprano soloist in Knussen's "Whitman Settings."
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08-14-2019: On Friday, August 9, the Class of 2023 arrived on Bard College’s campus for the Language and Thinking Program. The first-year students embark on their Bard education with this intensive introduction to the liberal arts and sciences. The central question of L&T 2019 is: What needs to be the case for things to be otherwise? Students will examine this question in classes supported by a series of speakers and performers, a film series, and an L&T coding component. Students will read Gertrude Stein on how both war and the arts became otherwise during World War I, and Aristotle on how citizens need to live for cities to be noble. They will hear James Baldwin, Etel Adnan, and Ursula Le Guin make the case for migration and exile, and they will argue about revolutions (and their preludes) with Thomas Kuhn, Edmund Burke, Euripides, Karl Marx, and Layli Long Soldier. We look forward to seeing new Bardians gathered in class around campus, writing, thinking, discussing, and continuing this Bard tradition.

08-08-2019: By replacing meat with protein-conserving plant alternatives Americans could satisfy key nutritional requirements, while eliminating pastureland use and reducing 35-50 percent of the cropland currently needed for food production in the United States, says a new study coauthored by Bard College Research Professor Gidon Eshel. The findings, part of modeling study published in Scientific Reports, suggest that use of nitrogen fertilizer and greenhouse gas emissions would also be reduced, while only food-related water use would rise.

“While widely replacing meat with plants is logistically and culturally challenging, few competing options offer comparable multidimensional resource use reduction,” write Eshel and coauthors Paul Stainier, Alon Shepon, Akshay Swaminathan, all of Harvard University.

In their study, “Environmentally Optimal, Nutritionally Sound, Protein and Energy Conserving Plant Based Alternatives to U.S. Meat,” Eshel and his coauthors used a computer model to devise hundreds of plant-based diets to replace either beef alone or all three dominant U.S. meat types: beef, poultry and pork. Plant-based diets consisted predominantly of soy, green pepper, squash, buckwheat and asparagus. The authors’ goal was to model a range of plant replacement diets that were at least as nutritious, if not more beneficial, than the meats they replaced, while also assessing their environmental impact. Diets were modeled to exactly match the protein content of the meat they replace—13 grams of protein per day from beef or 30 grams of protein per day from all three meat types—while also satisfying 43 other nutrient requirements, such as vitamins and fatty acids.

Buckwheat and tofu jointly delivered a full third of the total protein of diets that replaced all meats, yet accounted for only 12 percent of the nitrogen fertilizer and water and less than 22 percent of the cropland needed to produce the meats they replaced. Soy contributed the most protein to beef-replacing diets, but accounted for only six percent of the overall nitrogen fertilizer needed to produce beef. Replacing meat with plant alternatives was estimated to save approximately 29 million hectares of cropland, three billion kilograms of nitrogen fertilizer, and 280 billion kilograms of carbon dioxide per year. Food-related water use was projected to rise by 15 percent.

Gidon Eshel is a research professor of environmental physics at Bard College. He earned a BA from Haifa University and MA, MPhil, and PhD degrees from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.
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08-06-2019: The ability to fight bacterial infections with antibiotics has been a longstanding cornerstone of modern medicine, but widespread overuse and misuse of antibiotics has led to unintended consequences. A new paper in the journal Microorganisms coauthored by Bard College Assistant Professor of Biology Gabriel Perron argues that large-scale antibiotic pollution and the resulting antibiotic resistance are major public health problems that require significantly more research—that goes beyond data gathering to more interpretive studies that consider the overall impact of antibiotic pollution on humans and on the environment, in addition to its contribution to antibiotic resistance—as well as more coordinated large-scale policy interventions.

“Today, the evolution of microbial pathogens able to resist antibiotics treatments is seen as one of the most pressing public health crises,” writes Perron and coauthors Susanne A. Kraemer and Arthi Ramachandran, both of the biology department, Concordia University, Montreal, QC. “The sheer magnitude of the antibiotic pollution and resistance crisis, with the estimated deaths due to antibiotic resistance being 700,000 per year globally makes managing its social and economic fallout a global problem.”

In their review, “Antibiotic Pollution in the Environment: From Microbial Ecology to Public Policy,” Perron, Kraemer, and Ramachandran explore the spread of antibiotic resistance from hotspots of resistance evolution to the environment; outline the effects of antibiotic pollution (independent of resistance evolution) on natural microbial populations, as well as invertebrates and vertebrates; and review international polices aimed at mitigating the effects of antibiotics pollution. The authors write that, while the environmental component of this issue (e.g., environmental reservoirs of resistance genes and the likelihood of horizontal transfer of ARGs between pathogenic and non-pathogenic bacteria) has received an increased research interest in recent years, many dimensions of environmental antibiotic pollution and resistance are still unknown and require further research.

“Current research of environmental dimensions of antibiotic resistance often tallies up resistance genes found within an environment but gives little indication of the associated risks of transmission, and thus the potential impact on human health,” they write, stressing that antibiotic pollution also has the potential to affect human and ecosystem health directly. “On one hand, the effects of antibiotic pollution are expected to be especially disruptive in aquatic environments, where they can inhibit ecosystem functions and impact on organisms that are exposed throughout their life cycle. On the other hand, the presence of antibiotics in the environment and in animals could also impact on human health. While the effect of such exposure is unknown in humans, epidemiological surveys suggest that long-term exposure to antibiotics may lead to chronic conditions including obesity, diabetes, and asthma. For these reasons, it is imperative to consider the overall impact of antibiotic pollution on humans and on the environment, in addition to its contribution to antibiotic resistance.”

Perron and his coauthors contend that moving from data gathering to more interpretative studies will aid in developing more efficient policies. “Current policy schemes are focused on surveillance, but the scope of the crisis must eventually lead to forward-thinking policies,” they write, stressing that understanding antibiotic pollution and antibiotic resistance as a ‘One Health Approach’ (linking human, animal, and environment health domains) may aid in creating more societal engagement and ultimately more efficient policies. “Such policies need to evaluate direct risks of transmission posed by certain contaminated environments while at the same taking into account the complex patterns of inter-environmental transmissions that may exist. As antibiotic resistance and pollution is a global problem and especially rampant in the developing world, international cooperation, data-sharing and globally consistent policies are needed.”

Gabriel Perron, assistant professor of biology at Bard College and faculty member of the Bard Center for the Study of Land, Air, and Water, is an evolutionary biologist who studies the emergence of medically important traits in a broad range of microorganisms. His research uses a combination of real-time evolution experiments, genomic and metagenomic approaches, and field studies to understand how bacteria evolve antimicrobial resistance. Using different microbial systems, including bacteria such as Salmonella, Perron’s work seeks to understand the impact of human activity on the presence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in natural environments and its possible impact on public health issues. More recently, Perron has been also studying the impact of human activity on microbial communities found in Polar Regions.

To read the full paper, click here. For more information on the Bard Center for the Study of Land, Air, and Water, please visit landairwater.bard.edu.
 
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08-05-2019: President Botstein talks about the U.S. premiere of Erich Korngold’s The Miracle of Heliane, and why Bard is the perfect place to revive overlooked works.
 

"Bard is a great place because we are not interested in commercial performance. We want to make a contribution to knowledge and scholarship. We are interested in the future of music both in new music but also in the past.

If the past is only about 20 operas, then the future of the art form is going to be condemned. The way you tell the story of the past influences the way you tell the future. Our mission is not to compete with anyone but to show different repertoire." —Leon Botstein

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