photo by Michael Sipe
NEW WAYS TO MOVE
Transportation Research Center rolling along
Lisa Aultman-Hall pauses to make clear her point that ensuring bridges don’t fall into rivers is very important work. She is, after all, a civil engineer. But she’s also director of UVM’s three-year-old Transportation Research Center and, as such, she’s making the case that transportation research not only includes engineers studying sturdy spans, but also many other issues.
“Transportation is all about the economy, community, quality of life,” Aultman-Hall says. “It’s about building the right system—a system that works for everybody. It truly is this trans-disciplinary field.”
Major federal funding—$16 million secured by former Sen. James Jeffords through the national highway bill—provided the underpinning for UVM’s Transportation Research Center in 2005. Though there are sixty centers across the country for the study of transportation, UVM’s is one of just ten funded at the top level. Appropriate to Vermont, UVM’s TRC focuses a good deal of its research on transportation issues that are particular to a rural landscape and northern climate.
Aultman-Hall, who signed on as director at UVM in August 2006, headed up a transportation center at the University of Connecticut and welcomed the opportunity to shape a national research center from the ground up. Another key attraction was the University’s commitment to finding solutions to complex transportation issues through interdisciplinary work.
A stalwart bike commuter herself, Aultman-Hall rattles off the challenges involved in acting locally to make a difference globally on an issue such as climate change. If one simple solution is to reduce the number of single-occupant vehicles on the road, making that happen depends on everything from lifestyle to land use. It’s a particular challenge in a place like Vermont where urban-scale mass transit often doesn’t make sense. “We need to have the community at the table to consider, ‘Well, what can we do without taking too big a cut to our quality of life?’” Aultman-Hall says. “It’s an incredibly complicated system.”
Among other research efforts, the transportation center’s first years have focused on five signature projects that range from looking at sustainable transportation for tourism to emissions and performance of alternative vehicles in northern climates. Faculty from the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences are part of the research efforts to be sure, but they’ve joined with less likely partners—sociologists, economists, and faculty from the College of Medicine and Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources. Some of the center’s most recent funding, approximately $1 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation, will support a workforce development project to help create innovative programs to attract and retain skilled workers in the transportation sector of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.
While the UVM TRC’s outreach supports Vermont and other New England states, the research efforts promise to find answers with application on a national scale. The center is also carving a niche within the University, helping educate undergrads and graduate students on transportation issues and continuing to spur research grants essential to the University’s funding mix.
Online: uvm.edu/transportationcenter.
[ENVIRONMENT]
APPALACHIAN SPRING
In the quest for coal, more than 1.5 million acres of Appalachia have been strip-mined, whole mountains removed, trillions of gallons of toxic slurry left behind, and communities devastated. Not exactly a promising place for a new green economy to arise.
Or maybe it is.
For his startling and bold proposal, Compre- hensive Design for a Carbon Neutral World: The Challenge of Appalachia, John Todd, a research professor in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, was selected as the winner of the first annual Buckminster Fuller Challenge. He accepted the $100,000 prize from the Buckminster Fuller Institute at a ceremony held in New York City this summer.
To develop his proposal, Todd—who was named a “Hero of the Earth,” by Time Magazine in 1999—drew on the concept of ecological succession. Over time, damaged land can rebuild soils, support pioneer plants and grasses, then shrubs, fast-growing trees, and finally, a mature forest. Todd has taken this classic idea of ecology and applied it to the human economy.
“Deep in nature’s operating instructions is a model of future economic development,” he writes in his proposal, “and these instructions can guide us as we seek new ways of living,” in the mountainous coal-laced region that extends from Pennsylvania to Alabama.
Todd’s proposal outlines four stages of recovery and development. In the first, healing is the primary focus. Drawing on his extensive experience with “living machines”—biological technologies that echo natural systems to produce clean water and environmental clean-up—Todd foresees plant-based systems that will detoxify the vast lagoons of coal slurry in the region, build new healthy soils, and yield raw products for economic purposes.
In the second stage, reforestation begins. Some reclaimed land will be dedicated to short-rotation fast-growing woody crops to be harvested for biomass. Other long-standing forests will capture carbon from the atmosphere, slowing global warming.
In the third stage, the economic benefits of the biomass emerge. “Already suitable Appalachian wind sites have been discovered that can provide competitive sources of energy,” Todd writes, “paired with another renewable energy source like woody biomass from willows and poplars, a viable energy system can be developed.”
In the fourth stage, succession is at work not just in the land but in human communities and management of the land. Initially, philanthropic organizations would purchase damaged sites and shepherd their recovery. These restored lands would be passed along to new capitalized corporations that would develop forestry and other businesses there. Then, following their mandates, these companies would divest the land to employees and qualified land stewards, restoring an ownership culture to impoverished communities. Finally, the process would begin again on other newly acquired lands.
This replication process could extend far beyond Appalachia, presenting a method for increasing carbon storage in soils around the world and a model for reclaiming “coal-fields from Afghanistan to areas of Poland and Eastern Europe where coal has been extracted in devastating ways,” the prize jury wrote. Because of its sweeping scope, the jurors felt that Todd’s proposal embodied the vision of social transformation sought by Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), an architect, author, and futurist best known for designing the geodesic dome.
Summing up a core belief that guides this proposal and much of his innovative work, Todd says, “Nature has had three billion years to experiment. So why shouldn’t we learn from that about how to go about our business now?”
[OBJECT LESSON]
USE YOUR HEAD
Dr. Robert Williams knows the wisdom of protecting one’s head. Involved in a serious cycling accident in 2001, Williams suffered internal injuries but stepped away with no head trauma thanks to his bike helmet. That experience inspired the doctor, an avid skier and snowboarder, to lead an effort to get more people into the helmet habit on the slopes.
PHAT (Protect your Head at All Times and Protect Your Head on All Terrain) is a youth-oriented campaign launched in 2002 by Williams, associate professor of anesthesiology and director of the Snow Sports Research Team at UVM and Fletcher Allen. Piloted at Smugglers’ Notch and expanded upon at other Vermont ski areas, PHAT has shown great promise in making skiing safer. “A lot of heartache, not to mention millions of dollars spent on medical care and rehabilitation expenses, could be prevented by the simple act of strapping on a helmet every time a skier or rider hits the slopes,” says Williams.
[AGRICULTURE]
THE OMNIVORE’S PACKED HOUSE
If Michael Pollan was hungry to deliver his message about the inevitable links between what we eat, sustainable agriculture, climate change, and health, he came to the right church. On June 10, Ira Allen Chapel was packed with believers, along with a few skeptics; overflow seating was beyond capacity. Shut out, the intrepid even stacked bricks from a nearby construction site for a boost to a window view. This despite the relative calm of summer campus, crazy heat, and a tornado warning.
But as Pollan, journalist and author whose books include The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and this year’s best-selling In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, had said in a prior telephone interview, Burlington is one of the centers of gravity in the burgeoning local food movement. Yet his pull here, as well as the level of knowledge and enthusiasm he met from consumers, food producers, and public officials, had a power that surprised even him.
“My big impression,” Pollan said after his return to Berkeley, where he is professor of journalism at the University of California, “was the intensity of the passion around this issue. I knew it was a place with a lot going on, but I wasn’t prepared for the passion.”
Pollan’s public talk fell under the auspices of the Aiken Lecture Series, but his visit to Burlington was also an opportunity to meet with members of the Vermont Food Systems Leadership Policy Institute (VFSLPI), a new think tank of sorts that draws on experts throughout the University and state to conduct research and propose policies to make Vermont’s food system more sustainable.
“We need to get across to people that this is a crisis,” Pollan told VFSLPI invitees. “We’re not going to deal with climate change until we deal with food.” How America grows food, how America eats, how America confronts health, they are all of a piece, Pollan said. “Unsustainable is not a word that just means we don’t like it,” he emphasized. “We will run out of food… Can organic feed the world? One answer is, we sure haven’t tried.”
The institute, the brainchild of Rachel Johnson, former dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and Cynthia Belliveau, dean of Continuing Education, grew out of the three-year-old Food Systems Leadership Institute funded by the Kellogg Foundation, in which UVM collaborates with Ohio State University and North Carolina State University. While the focus of FSLI is more on large-scale farming, the new Vermont institute will have a smaller, more local focus.
The sustainability movement, Pollan argued, has traditionally been a grassroots, almost amateur cause that’s taken place outside of academia, which he sees as both its great strength, and increasingly a weakness. The new farm legislation, his prime example, he considers a failure. “We were bought off,” Pollan said. “We need to professionalize the leadership to take it to the next level.”
That’s the mission of VFSLPI, beginning with an effort to create a sustainability model on campus, an effort Pollan heartily supports. “You have this wonderful case study,” he said. “It brings everybody into relationship and it gets you past talking. The University has enormous buying power and it’s such a national issue—how institutions are going to fit into this movement. To the extent that (UVM) can develop a workable model, I think that becomes a big contribution.”
Can a small state with rocky soil and a cold climate lead American agriculture in other directions? Michael Pollan thinks it’s possible. “The world is watching,” he said.
[STUDENT LIFE]
NICARAGUAN JOURNAL
PSS, ENVS 195
“Agro-Forestry in Central America”
For a week in May, seven students studied on campus with Ernesto Mendez, assistant professor of plant and soil science. For two weeks in June, the class went into the field working under the direction of UVM alums Chris Shanks ’99 and Michael Blazewicz ’99 at Finca Bona Fide, a farm on Ometepe, a volcanic island in Lake Nicaragua. Journal excerpts and illustrations by Grace Weaver ’11 offer a glimpse of the experience.
Central America’s all-purpose farm implement.
Evening’s entertainment: We gathered around Chris’s laptop to watch the “Jungles” episode of Planet Earth. Sitting under the thatched roof of the farm’s open kitchen, huge moths and other bugs thumped against the light of the screen. Kind of like “Jungles” in 3D.
Returned from planting our coconut palms and found the battery drained on my camera. Consolation: I have lots of self-portraits to take home of the local kids who were watching our stuff.
Beans and rice—Meal #16.
After a day of travel by van and ferry, we arrive at our campsite on Ometepe. Eddie looks around and says, “This is no joke. We’re in the middle of the @*#*in’ jungle, man.” And he says it again and again and again…
[VERMONT]
HELLO MY NAME IS
Though most students rolled out of town after finals in May, the campus scarcely quieted this summer. Instead of undergrads, the Davis Center and other campus locales bustled with mathematicians, captive insurance experts, and nematologists, to name a few, as a steady stream of academic and professional conferences summered in Vermont.
The Green Mountains in leaf, downtown Burlington in swing, the region has long boasted attractions likely to lure conference attendees. But the resource of the new Davis Center as conference headquarters, coupled with improved campus housing options, are quickly turning UVM into a prime destination.
“My vision is for UVM to become the premiere conference and events location in the nation within the collegiate market in the next seven years,” says Shane Cutler, director of conference and event services. He adds that UVM tries to attract conferences that fit within its green vision, overall mission, and institutional values. “We’ve already exceeded our initial goals. We market ourselves as a place where conferences attendees can learn, eat, and sleep in a green environment.”
Based on bookings for the next five years, which includes return engagements by all of the organizations that came in 2008, the Davis Center and its staff hit all the right chords. Matt Konetschni, director of educational programs for the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, who is responsible for booking CASE’s seventy-plus conferences each year, visited UVM in 2007. “As soon as I saw the campus and its facilities I went ahead and locked in future dates because I had no doubt they would be booked once other conferences came here,” he says.
Utilizing campus resources over the summer makes good financial sense for the University, of course, and the economic impact ripples into the community. Bruce Seifer, assistant director for economic development in the City of Burlington’s Community and Economic Development Office, notes that the new student center at Champlain College and recent private business development in the city have also been a boon.
“They’ve had a huge economic impact on the entire area (estimated at $250 million annually and rising),” he says. “Many of these people come back to visit, eventually move here, or even start a business. The impact is immeasurable.”
COLLEGE CHARTS
1
Vermont’s rank among New England public universities evaluated by the Center for College Affordability & Productivity. UVM was eighteenth among all publics and sixtieth among all universities nationwide. The key criteria: “Do students like their courses? How successful are they once they graduate?” Source: Forbes.com.
3
Rank among the “10 Coolest Schools,” in an article lauding college and universities for their environmental commitment. Source: Sierra Magazine.
5
The College of Medicine’s rank for quality in primary care training among the nation’s 126 medical schools. Source: U.S. News & World Report’s 2009 edition of America’s Best Graduate Schools.
7
Rank among public universities on a list of the fifty U.S. colleges whose bachelor’s degree graduates earn the highest salaries.
UVM was fortieth among all schools in the top fifty. Source: BusinessWeek.com
18
Rank among the top thirty public universities for success in placing students in the nation’s most prestigious medical, law, and business graduate programs. Source: Wall Street Journal.
[3 QUESTIONS]
PROFESSOR HELENE LANGEVIN
Dr. Helene Langevin, a research associate professor of neurology and licensed acupuncturist, explores the molecular mechanisms responsible for the therapeutic effects of practices, such as acupuncture and massage, which manipulate the connective tissue. She recently published basic science research on an important finding regarding how stretching connective tissue can improve the body’s response to injury and help maintain functionality. She and her colleagues are currently looking at connective tissue in people with and without low-back pain.
Q: What is connective tissue and what did you learn about it in your Journal of Cellular Physiology study?
A: Connective tissue is found between muscle, fat, and skin throughout the body. It’s organized like a multilayered sandwich—the loose tissue in the middle is the meat and mayonnaise and the thicker connective tissue on the outside is the bread. When there’s an injury like a tear or sprain, the meat can get stuck to the slices of bread. If you stretch connective tissue, it will remodel. This concept is well known in physical therapy. In our recent study, we observed the effects of stretching versus no stretching on the production of collagen during the healing process following a small connective tissue injury. We found that the stretching group produced less of a particular molecule that can cause fibrosis (an excessive development of scar tissue). This is an important possible mechanism for how all sorts of therapies—acupuncture, physical therapy, massage—work. Gentle stretching could reduce harmful fibrotic responses without the use of drugs.
Q: Your low-back pain research is the first of your studies to focus on a clinical condition. What kinds of questions are you hoping to answer about connective tissue in this research?
A: We are in the middle of our low-back pain study; we’ve tested one hundred participants so far. It appears that in the people with low-back pain, the connective tissue becomes thicker and disorganized in the lumbar area. We want to find out how their connective tissue got thicker. Our hypothesis is that if a person is initially injured with back pain and inflammation, he/she doesn’t move as much. Since connective tissue needs to move and stretch to be healthy, we think this lack of stretching leads to the development of abnormal connective tissue in people with chronic low-back pain.
Q: How have the scientific and medical communities responded to your use of western medical research approaches to study the underlying mechanisms at play in the eastern practice of acupuncture?
A: The scientific and medical communities have on the whole been very welcoming of this research. Although we initially focused on the mechanism of acupuncture, our investigations took an unexpected turn when we found that the acupuncture meridians mapped out in ancient Chinese texts were related to connective tissue. The eastern traditional medicine systems teach us to look at the body as a whole and emphasize connections. When we found that acupuncture needling induced connective tissue cellular responses that were previously unknown, we soon realized that we were exploring uncharted territory. Very little is known about basic connective tissue function. If we can understand the role of connective tissue in the development and treatment of chronic pain, this would have significant clinical implications far beyond acupuncture. I see our research program as a two-way street: while we can use science to demystify alternative treatments such as acupuncture, we also are always looking for insights from these treatments that can be applied to basic science research. Scientific knowledge is accumulating at a phenomenal rate, but has a tendency to remain compartmentalized, which is an important limitation in our understanding of health and disease. The very nature of connective tissue is that it connects all the parts of the body to each other. Perhaps a better understanding of connective tissue will help us connect the dots of how the body works.
—Interview by Jennifer Nachbur
[FACULTY FOCUS]
photo by Rose Murphy
SECOND LANGUAGE
The David Scrase most people know is a button-down-shirted scholar talking verb conjugations and German literature. Then there’s his other side. During the summer months, he’s apt to be working at the lathe in the basement of his island home in Chebeague, Maine. What few people know is that the British-born Vermonter is an accomplished wood-turner with a passion for swirls, spalting, and nuanced grains. Though he downplays his skills, his clientele is growing, in part through the upscale galleries that display his work, but mostly by word of mouth. He’s likely to take on “almost anything,” he says, from pencil boxes to tables, using whatever material comes his way. He finds burls and driftwood here and there, and friends keep a look out. Pruned limbs and fallen tree trunks have a way of appearing at his door.
The physicality of it all might seem a welcome respite to a largely cerebral career—Scrase retires his faculty post in the German and Russian Department at the end of the academic year. But his interest in wood goes back to when he was six or seven. “My first interest was certainly not intellectual,” he insists. “It was practical, and I was firmly convinced that I would become a woodworker.” Returning to the craft, he says, is like going back to his childhood. “For me, the physical and intellectual, the emotional and the philosophical, they are all linked. In a way I think it’s Goethian. Everything overlaps, and nothing proves that more than language learning, because language reflects all aspects of existence.”
—Diane Foulds ’73
If you are an Abenaki kid from far northwestern Vermont, if Burlington is “the big city” you have never traveled to, chances are that visions of college life and career versus job are not forces that ground your sense of self.
“I was told every day of my life, ‘You’ll never amount to anything; don’t get your hopes up,’” says Katy Sartwell, now a counselor at UVM’s annual Summer Happening program for Abenaki adolescents, an event she’s attended since eighth grade. Sartwell is now a sophomore at the University of Maine at Farmington where she is double majoring in political science and environmental planning and policy. Her packed summer agenda includes running youth leadership workshops.
Before UVM’s expanding intervention, which began more than two decades ago at the request of tribal leaders, the pessimism with which Sartwell grew up was founded in stark reality. According to Ken Maskell, Abenaki outreach program coordinator at the University, in the mid-1980s, the dropout rate was 40 percent in ninth grade and up to 70 percent by the senior year. Only three percent pursued postsecondary education.
But that’s changed. The University launched Summer Happening to expose Abenaki students to college life, offering opportunities to develop relationships and increase their comfort level on campus. The event combines cultural activities, leadership skill development, and academic workshops.
Even with the success of these summer initiations, it was clear that three inspirational days for some two dozen teens can’t compete with the poor odds of success, especially for students facing the greatest economic and social challenges. UVM responded in 2000 by creating Maskell’s position, a job in which he spends four full days a week at Missisquoi Valley Union, a high school that draws 21 percent of its student body from the Abenaki community. Maskell spends a fifth day on campus in the ALANA Center, making connections with faculty and staff and supporting Abenaki students who have matriculated to UVM, a population that didn’t exist before he arrived.
For Maskell, who is Abenaki himself, the work is clearly a passion. He serves in any capacity that will move a kid toward college. Though he’s sent students to many institutions, Maskell strongly encourages them to attend UVM, in part so he can keep an eye on them, have lunch with them, help them navigate any rough spots.
“Ken comes to campus with kids who have been accepted, following up throughout the summer, helping make sure all your grants are in place,” says Ashley Sullivan ’12. “It’s awesome how UVM is working collaboratively with our community.”
The numbers prove the point. As of June 2008, the Abenaki student dropout rate had fallen to three percent, lower than the Vermont average. More than 40 percent of graduating seniors will be seeking postsecondary education. But the ultimate impact comes from what Maskell and others hear from the kids themselves—they have a deep desire to return and work in the community. “To come back,” Maskell says, “and be part of the solution.”
[BOOKS & MEDIA]
THE ODD COUPLE
Scholar tackles fabled Russian love story
Autumn 1992, while conducting research for his dissertation in Russia as a Fulbright Scholar, Douglas Smith ’85 took a break from the books to play tourist at Kuskovo, a palace on the edge of Moscow. It was there, in the museum’s guide book, that he first learned about the story of eighteenth-century lovers, nobleman Nicholas Sheremetev and his serf Praskovia Kovalyova, one of the great opera singers of her time, known as “The Pearl.” The unlikely couple had side-stepped the rigid class lines of imperial Russia to carry on an affair and eventual secret marriage.
“Part of me wanted to quit my dissertation and write about them,” Smith recalls, “but I had done too much work on the dissertation and figured that a story of forbidden love would not endear me to my professors and colleagues back at UCLA, so I filed it away.”
Nearly a decade later, with his doctoral work soundly behind him, Smith returned to the scintillating Russian tale and began the research and writing that culminated this year in his new book The Pearl: A True Tale of Forbidden Love in Catherine the Great’s Russia (Yale University Press).
Though he tells his story like a novelist, Smith grounds his work in painstakingly researched details. Readers see the palace’s interiors, from cabinets containing fossilized frogs and part of a Babylonian mummy to the Flemish tapestries hanging on the walls of the reception room. To ensure the accuracy of the weather on important dates in the story, Smith dug through the archives of the St. Petersburg and Moscow gazettes. On one research foray to the Hermitage Museum he discovered never-before-studied documents, which, among other things, revealed new details from their secret wedding.
When the artifacts were not forthcoming, Smith employed alternate strategies to bring the story to life. “When I would work, I would like to play music from the composers that she sang, from the operas she performed, as a way of trying to get myself in a sort of spirit or connection with her and her world and the music.”
Smith is the most recent in a long line of writers who have recounted the tale of Nicholas and Praskovia. His interpretation falls somewhere between the highly romanticized, love-conquers-all trope common among some other tellings and the notion that Nicholas was just another “evil, lecherous serf owner,” an interpretation that was popular during the Soviet period. “I hope I’ve come up with something that’s a bit more nuanced,” he says, “that recognizes the complexity of the story and doesn’t reduce it to an overly simplistic narrative.”
Smith will visit UVM this fall to deliver a public talk about The Pearl on Monday, November 17 at 4 p.m. in Memorial Lounge, Waterman Building.
—Amanda Waite ’02 G’04
[BRIEFS]
Fine Just the Way It Is
Annie Proulx, Scribner
“Brokeback Mountain” author Annie Proulx ‘69 revisits the hardscrabble lives of Americans living in the West in her latest collection of short stories. Fine Just the Way It Is, the third volume of her Wyoming Stories series, follows multiple generations of cowboys, ranchers, and homesteaders trying to survive in desolate country. A master of the form, Proulx is the winner of two O. Henry Prizes and appears in most anthologies of American short stories. Her 1993 novel The Shipping News earned the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award.
The Green Sparrow
Mike Gordon, Rounder Records
Taking a rare break from touring, Mike
Gordon ’87 poured much of 2007 into writing and recording his latest album, released in August. Though the versatile Gordon handles much of the instrumental work himself, a number of guest artists, including Trey Anastasio and Page McConnell of the erstwhile Phish, appear on various tracks. Says Rolling Stone: “Gordon strikes a solid balance between his jones for experimentation and the type of straightforward jam-band anthems that have always appealed to Phish heads.”
EatingWell for a Healthy Heart Cookbook
Philip Ades, professor of medicine
Countryman Press
Learn from preventive cardiology expert Dr. Philip Ades, professor of medicine, how to live longer by modifying your diet. This cookbook, featuring 150 recipes proven in the test kitchen of Vermont-based EatingWell magazine, offers a simple plan for eating healthier foods, primarily by replacing “bad” fats with “good” ones. More than twenty years of research funded by the National Institutes of Health stands behind Dr. Ades’s recommendations for a heart-healthy diet.
