Author Barbara Kingsolver presented Sweet Briar’s 2013 Waxter Environmental Forum. Photo by Meridith De Avila Khan.

Writer Barbara Kingsolver charmed an audience of more than 600 people in Murchison Lane Auditorium Thursday night with the same grace and humor she uses to hook readers.

Kingsolver presented Sweet Briar College’s 2013 Julia B. Waxter Environmental Forum, an annual lecture series focusing on environmental concerns. The much-loved and critically acclaimed author of 14 books brought her own words to life as she read from her latest novel, “Flight Behavior.” The story explores the central question of why different people look at the same set of facts about climate change and reach different conclusions.

First she explained that she’d been trying to figure out for two or three years how to write about the thorny subject. The answer came to her when she awoke one morning with a vision. She imagined millions of monarch butterflies landing in the hollow behind her home in southern Appalachia, thousands of miles from where they are supposed to winter in Mexico.

In short, she begins with a dramatic effect of climate change and builds the narrative around how her characters interpret what has happened. Kingsolver is trained in ecology and evolutionary biology and has always sought to teach her readers about the natural world.

“I have this idea that there are lots of people who probably would like to know stuff about science but they don’t think they want to. So, this is my sedition. I put it in novels,” she said.

The premise has to be plausible, of course, and the science has to be real.

“Now we’re getting into an interesting area of what fiction is and what it does, because I wanted everything in my novel to be true even though it’s not, it hasn’t happened,” she said. “I want my readers to be able to trust me that everything I’m telling you is accurate even though I made the whole thing up.”

Kingsolver was aware that her audience included about 60 participants in Sweet Briar’s annual Creative Writing Conference for undergraduate students — promising writers from colleges around the country. For them, she had this advice: Be smarter than all of the characters in your book.

So, in addition to exhaustive study of the literature on monarch butterflies, she did primary research. She visited the overwintering colonies in Mexico and she went to the lab of Lincoln Brower, a research biologist at Sweet Briar and one of the world’s foremost experts on monarchs.

It was Brower and his wife, Duberg Professor of Ecology Linda Fink, who gave Kingsolver the confidence that the extreme natural disturbance she describes in the book is theoretically sound. They also reviewed the manuscript for the scientific details.

“That made me really happy because I felt safe sending this into the world, that I haven’t written anything that is stupid,” Kingsolver said.

Kingsolver says her books don’t try to make a moral point. Rather, she creates a world in which she hopes readers will hang out a while, exploring the questions it raises for themselves. As a scientist and a novelist, she can speak to readers on opposite sides of issues such as climate change.

This is important, she says, at a time when we have big environmental questions to think about and decisions that can no longer be postponed.

“Talking across those divides is the most useful thing we can possibly do,” she said.

The event was streamed live and may be viewed at sbc.edu/live. Read the Lynchburg News & Advance coverage here.

— Jennifer McManamay

Bill Waxter

William D. Waxter III, husband of the late Julia Baldwin Waxter ’49, died Feb. 11, about seven months after his wife passed away last summer. “Bill” and “Judy” Waxter were generous supporters of Sweet Briar and created a fund to establish the annual Waxter Environmental Forum. The forum features notable speakers and experts who focus on environmental issues and concerns that affect today’s world. 

A full obituary appeared in the Baltimore Sun on Feb. 20.

A pride of lions is on the move in late afternoon in Kruger National Park. Photo by Professor Rob Alexander.

By AMANDA WISZ KEENER ’08

It’s not uncommon for the work of Sweet Briar researchers to impact audiences far from home. Rob Alexander, professor of economics and environmental studies, hopes folks in South Africa are paying attention to his latest research.

Alexander, a wildlife economist, studies the economic incentives behind human behaviors that contribute to global species decline and endangerment. This year, in collaboration with former Sweet Briar assistant professor of economics Joseph Craig and researchers from the wild cat conservation group, Panthera, Alexander published a study in the South African Journal of Wildlife Research titled, “Possible relationships between the South African captive-bred lion hunting industry and the hunting conservation of lions elsewhere in Africa.”

Lions are among the most coveted big-game African trophies. According to the study, hunters visiting southern and East Africa pay $1,800 to $3,200 a day for two- to three-week safaris and the chance to shoot a lion. Up to half never encounter one. Those who book trips in South Africa, however, may spend thousands less and, 99 percent of the time, head home with a trophy after a few days. How? The latter participate in “put-and-take” or “canned” hunting, which takes place in an enclosed compound stocked with captive lions bred to be hunted.

Researcher and photographer Rob Alexander captured this photo of a male lion in South Africa’s Kruger National Park.

About 90 percent of South African lion hunting is canned hunting, but the practice remains highly controversial. It’s unpopular among animal welfare groups such as the Humane Society and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, which recently co-sponsored a petition to list the lion as endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. An IFAW commentary described canned hunting as “the cruel practice of containing animals (mostly lions) to fenced-in areas, with animals often drugged or sedated and conditioned to trust humans.”

Some also see canned hunting as detrimental to South Africa’s tourism image. Earlier this year, the international activist group, Avaaz, launched an ad campaign throughout Johannesburg Airport calling for an end to the practice. The South African government ruled in 2010 that lions not be hunted for the first two years of life, but the law was soon eliminated by a Supreme Court ruling.

In 2010, more than twice as many lion trophy exports came out of South Africa than from the rest of Africa combined. How a ban on canned hunting in South Africa would influence wild populations throughout the rest of the continent remains unclear.

“Would there be a sudden surge in demand for wild lions?” Alexander asked.

One argument asserts that hunting captive-bred lions should remove the pressure from wild populations. Another claims that canned hunting increases demand for bones of both wild and captive lions in Asia, where they’re used in traditional medicine.

Alexander joined his longtime collaborator Peter Lindsey of Panthera to bring some clarity, and data, to the controversy. The two had published a paper together in 2006 gauging the potential of wild lion hunting to create incentives that promote habitat and wildlife conservation in several African countries. This concept was supported in a study Lindsey published this year that was met with debate from animal rights groups.

Rob Alexander

Alexander, who is also an accomplished wildlife photographer and has traveled in Africa, tries to remain unbiased.

“It’s something I’ve found to be ironic,” he says. “I’m not a hunter, but as a conservationist, I’m willing for our society to do these things for the sake of conserving the land and the animals that live on it. I have to acknowledge the positive role hunting plays in conservation.”

He and Lindsey saw the potential for a ban on canned hunting to increase danger for the species and its habitats throughout Africa. “This is not just an animal rights issue,” Alexander said. “There is a whole different question about conservation of wild lion populations.”

To determine if canned and wild hunting are related, Alexander and the Panthera researchers asked if the two industries share overlapping markets. They designed and administered a survey to hunters and operators at hunting expos in the U.S. and Germany. The survey helped them compare several aspects of wild and canned hunting, including length of the hunt, hunter success rates and impressions about the two types of hunting.

Alexander brought Craig into the study to work on the statistics and technical aspects of the analysis. This was the first project the two economics professors had worked on together, and Craig’s first environmental project.

“It was really cool for me to work outside of my normal niche,” he said.

His main question was simple: “How responsive are people to changes in lion hunting costs?” Answering the question was not so simple. “Getting accurate data in pricing in Africa is almost impossible,” he said.

In the end, he had too few observations to make statistically supported conclusions. Craig conceded that it’s unlikely any hunting company would agree to the invasive study that would be necessary to really answer his question, because they fear bad publicity.

The survey data did uncover strong trends. Nearly all hunters who had been on wild hunts (96 percent of those surveyed) said they would not be interested in a canned hunting trip. It’s possible the differences in cost and time needed for the two types of hunts create two disparate markets, and those who can take wild hunting trips, already do. The survey also revealed, however, that 20 percent of hunters who have gone on canned hunts would consider trying a wild hunt. According to the study, such a shift could have a big impact:

“Owing to the large size of the captive-bred lion hunting industry, even if a small proportion of the market was transferable, the increase in demand for wild lion hunts could be significant if the hunting of captive-bred lions was ever prohibited. A shift of 20 percent of the captive-bred market could lead to an increase of 42.9 percent in the demand for wild lions.”

“If we did have a ban,” Alexander says, “it would be very important for governments of African countries to exert more control over hunting.”

He is quick to note that this study is preliminary. Still, he hopes it will invite people to consider the relationships observed and take precautionary steps, responding to changes in demand rather than dangerous changes in lion populations.

Donahue, who teaches American environmental studies at Brandeis University, will focus on the “Wildlands and Woodlands” vision for forest conservation in New England, which can be found at wildlandsandwoodlands.org/vision/vision-new-england.

According to the website, New England forests are at a turning point, with forest cover beginning to decline in every New England state. The vision calls for a 50-year conservation effort to retain at least 70 percent of New England in forestland and keep it permanently free from development.

Donahue is working on a version of the plan for the entire Eastern U.S., which he will discuss as part of his presentation.

“I’ll start with a little land history of 18th- and19th-century agricultural clearing and logging, followed by forest recovery and farm decline in the 20th century,” he said.

His talk will also include a related subject: food. Drawing from his work on “The New England Good Food Vision 2060: Healthy Food and Sustainable Farming,” Donahue explores some of the practical questions behind sustainability.

“We hear a lot about the virtues of ‘eating locally,’ ‘food security,’ and a ‘regional food system,’ but what might that really look like on the ground?” he asks.

Donahue has won numerous awards, including the 2000 Book Prize from the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities for “Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farms and Forests in a New England Town” (1999). His book “The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord” (2004) won the 2004 Marsh Prize from the American Society for Environmental History, the 2005 Saloutos Prize from the Agricultural History Society and the 2004 Best Book Prize from the New England Historical Association.

Donahue is an associate professor of American environmental studies on the Jack Meyerhoff Fund. He teaches courses on environmental issues, environmental history and sustainable farming and forestry. Donahue holds a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from the Brandeis program in the history of American civilization. He co-founded and for 12 years directed Land’s Sake, a nonprofit community farm in Weston, Mass., and was director of education at The Land Institute in Salina, Kan.

The event is free and open to the public. For more information, please email rambers@sbc.edu or call (434) 381-6483.
Contact: Janika Carey

He works two pans, a queue forming behind him. Into the sizzling butter goes half a cup of beaten eggs — plucked that morning from his movable henhouse at Polyface Farm in Swoope, Va. — then a handful of pungent Campbell County goat cheese. He folds one side over, and turns the cooked omelet onto a paper plate for a waiting diner.

Salatin talks as he works, explaining that adding water to the eggs lets them steam while cooking, making them moist and “more forgiving in the pan.” They look good — bright yellow, just slightly browned — although he isn’t going for visual perfection with his omelet assembly line. He is making a point.

The dinner, attended by Sweet Briar students, a few faculty and guests, preceded Salatin’s Jan. 31 evening lecture, “Folks, This Ain’t Normal,” in Memorial Chapel. The presentation is based on his latest book by the same title, in which he argues that the way we eat today — foods loaded with unpronounceable additives and transported 1,500 miles from farm to fork — is an aberration.

It’s so far removed from “historical normalcy” that he believes we cannot sustain our current food production systems long term. He isn’t suggesting we abandon technology, but predicts we must inevitably return to a model closer to that of our agrarian past.

He says we can start now by getting back into our own kitchens, which was the idea behind his cooking demonstration for the students.

“The point is we’re told all the time that ‘I don’t have time to cook and I don’t have the money to eat good food,’ ” Salatin said, adding he intended to show how the crowd could “eat like kings” for about $1.50 per person.

In truth, the full menu also included associate professor of environmental studies Rebecca Amber’s homemade breads, artisanal cheeses, and chili made with meat from a local farm and beans, peppers and tomatoes from Amber’s garden.

Salatin brought legally obtained raw milk and pure “cold-squeezed” apple juice ($6 a gallon, roughly equal to the cost of Coca Cola, he said) from a Shenandoah Valley farm to wash it all down.

“I want you to just enjoy the richness of the taste,” he told his listeners, who included several students in Bonnie Kestner’s course, “Nutritional Challenges of the 21st Century.”

Kestner, a faculty co-sponsor of Salatin’s visit with Ambers, covers his “beyond-organic” farming methods in the class through Michael Pollan’s “Omnivore’s Dilemma,” which is required reading.

Salatin is the second-generation owner of Polyface Farm near Staunton. The family-run operation produces beef, poultry, pork, eggs and rabbits using a pasture-based rotational system designed to continually regenerate healthy soil and keep the land lush and productive.

The hens that produced the eggs for dinner, for example, are moved daily into pastures freshly mowed by the cattle that occupied it the day before. There, they roam freely for tender new grass shoots and scratch among the dung for bugs, scattering nutrients and sanitizing the soil.

Environmental science senior Stacy Ludington has no doubt these methods yield a better omelet. “They were fluffier and a deeper yellow than store-bought eggs. Quite tasty,” she said.

Cost is a different matter. Salatin’s eggs are reasonable at $4 per dozen, but Ludington says she doesn’t eat much meat because she’s picky about where it comes from and as a student can’t yet afford to buy local.

“I can’t wait until I make enough money to put my dollar where I truly feel it belongs, in the hands of our local farmers who care about what products they put on our tables,” she said.

“I plan on being an urban planner when I leave Sweet Briar and I’ll be looking for ways to adjust and incorporate Salatin’s techniques to urban farming. Shall be a challenge, but rewarding.”

Contact: Jennifer McManamay

Assistant Professor Tom O’Halloran is co-author of a paper just published in a highly regarded environmental science professional journal, Global Change Biology. O’Halloran, who joined Sweet Briar’s environmental studies department this year, was part of a team at Oregon State University, where he was a postdoctoral researcher.

The team investigated the albedo effect, a phenomenon that can alter the climate impact of major forest disturbances responsible for increasing the amount of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere. The researchers focused on wildfire, insect outbreaks and hurricanes and concluded that the albedo effect, which controls the amount of energy reflected back into space, can mitigate or worsen the climatic significance of some of these events.

In some cases — mostly in boreal forests with significant snow cover — increases in reflectivity can provide cooling. If the area disturbed by fire or insects is large, this cooling can substantially offset the increase in global warming that would otherwise be caused by these forest disturbances and the release of greenhouse gases. In other cases where the ground itself is unusually dark, albedo decreases can magnify concerns about warming.

Wildfires are not the only disturbance that significantly alters surface albedo, this study concluded. Insect outbreaks and defoliation by hurricanes can also change surface reflectivity, with effects on climate as great as those caused by carbon dioxide release from the disturbed area.

“On a global scale, warming caused by increased carbon dioxide still trumps everything else,” said Beverly Law, a professor in the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society at Oregon State University. “On a smaller or local scale, however, changes in albedo can be fairly important, especially in areas with significant amounts of snow, such as high latitudes or higher elevations.”

Albedo is a measure of radiation reflected by a surface, in this case the surface of the planet. Lighter colors such as snow reflect more light and heat back into space than the dark colors of a full forest and tree canopy.

“This decreased absorption of heat by the land surface is a local atmospheric cooling effect,” O’Halloran said. “This was clear in one case we studied of trees killed by mountain pine beetles in British Columbia.

“In areas with substantial snow cover, we found that canopy removal due to either fire or insect attack increased reflected radiation and approximately offset the warming that would be caused by increased release of carbon dioxide. However, we haven’t been able to measure the full impact from the current beetle outbreak, which could take decades to complete.”

This complex phenomenon would be much less in lower latitudes or areas without snow for much of the year, the researchers said. It relates primarily to boreal or colder mid-latitude forests, such as the Canadian insect outbreak over 374,000 square kilometers of forest.

“The impacts of insects on forest carbon dynamics and resulting changes in albedo are generally ignored in large-scale modeling,” Law said.

The study also found that forest disturbance does not always cause an albedo increase. When Hurricane Wilma in 2005 partially defoliated more than 2,400 square kilometers of a mangrove forest in the Florida Everglades, it exposed an underlying land surface darker than the previous forest canopy. In that case, an albedo decrease effectively doubled the warming impact of released carbon dioxide.

All of the forces studied in this research — fire, insect attack and hurricanes — are expected to increase in severity, frequency or extent under climate change scenarios, the scientists said. In the United States alone, these events affect 20,000 to 40,000 square kilometers of forest a year. If Earth system models are to be accurate, this makes it important to more accurately incorporate changes in albedo.

Globally, forest disturbances are a major factor in the carbon cycle and greenhouse gas warming. They can instantly switch forests from carbon sinks into carbon sources for two decades or more. In cold regions where forest recovery is slower, albedo increases can persist for 100 years.

This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, and used data from both the AmeriFlux Network and NASA MODIS sensor on the Terra satellite.

Under gray skies Thursday afternoon, seniors in Tom O’Halloran’s advanced environmental science lab hoisted a roughly 10-foot weather station tower and began installing an array of meteorological instruments. The station will record air temperature, wind speed and direction, humidity, and precipitation, along with a few extras including soil moisture and temperature and radiation levels.

Trying to evenly seat the tower’s three legs into ferrules bolted to a concrete pad, Virginia Butner concluded that jumping up and down on the support members was having little effect.

“I don’t think the tower even notices,” said Butner, a transfer day student from Madison Heights.

They did level it out and, satisfied of its sturdiness, two of Stacy Ludington’s classmates spotted her while she climbed to the top to connect the lightning ground wire and the anemometer, which measures wind speed.

Butner eventually traded places with Ludington and discovered she wasn’t tall enough to see a built-in level on the radiation monitor she was attaching to the end of a boom. Mattie Witt, another local student from Bedford, rummaged through their truck for a mirror. Failing to find anything reflective there, she handed her wristwatch up to Butner.

“It’s a Fossil,” Butner said approvingly, and then, “I can see it,” with even greater enthusiasm only to ponder aloud which way to turn the leveling screws.

When the station is complete, an on-board computer called a data logger will transmit the information every 60 seconds to an Internet-connected laptop housed in a nearby shed. In addition to displaying live weather conditions on Sweet Briar’s website, O’Halloran hopes the Weather Underground will carry the feed.

O’Halloran, an atmospheric scientist, sited the station in the middle of an open field. Wireless Internet access is a challenge and he will have to wait a few weeks for equipment to be installed before going online. The advantage is highly accurate data with no trees or buildings to impede sun or wind. And the shed already had electrical service.

The Internet connection is the only piece of the project the students aren’t responsible for, from soldering and running cables to writing instructions for future students. Each of them will write a users manual for one instrument, said Caroline Sorensen, a double engineering and environmental science major from New York.

The Campbell Scientific weather station was purchased to support ecological and environmental research with a National Science Foundation grant obtained by the biology and environmental studies programs. The instrumentation and the data it collects will be useful to students across the sciences for both classroom experience and research, and to the larger community. Farmers will be able to check soil moisture, for example, and biology students can measure sunlight absorption at the surface.

O’Halloran also anticipates it will be a boon to his students. Teaching climatology in the field presents obstacles, he says.

“You can’t go out and grab the atmosphere. The only thing you can do is measure it. What’s so nice is this is a platform where we can keep adding more instruments,” such as ozone or particulate monitors, he said.

O’Halloran is new in the environmental studies department, which includes the environmental science major. Department chair Rebecca Ambers welcomes his expertise.

“Atmospheric science is hugely important within the scope of environmental science, given the problems of climate change and air pollution that the global ecosystem now faces,” Ambers said. “We are delighted to have Tom with us this year because he brings this new dimension to our department.”

The college will announce when the weather data come online at sbc.edu.

Being the tallest in the class, Alexis Rukenbrod ’12 was elected to collect a sample to demonstrate what the LI-6400 can do.

Hopping onto a concrete bench in front of Guion Science Center, she stretched to pluck a leaf from as far up the redbud’s canopy as she could reach. The leaf had to be exposed to full sun, because the object of the day’s lab was to compare photosynthesis, transpiration and respiration rates in plants as levels of light and carbon dioxide concentration change.

Before it was over they would collect data points on sun- and shade-adapted foliage from the redbud tree and from ornamental sawgrass to demonstrate how species that use different “photosynthetic pathways” respond to environmental conditions. To do so, they had the favor of using a $60,000 piece of equipment belonging to the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center.

Thomas Mozdzer, a Smithsonian Institution postdoctoral fellow, demonstrated how the device works as a guest lecturer in biologist Zoe Smith’s Conserving Ecological Interaction class. Some of what he hoped to accomplish was to familiarize the students with the sophisticated, but commonly used machines that biologists and environmental scientists use in the field.

LI-COR’s LI-6400 Portable Photosynthesis System uses infrared radiation to measure plant gas exchange from a leaf sample placed in its chamber. The LI-6400 is a souped-up model capable of controlling environmental factors that the plant is being exposed to. By imposing changes in temperature, light and carbon dioxide levels, the machine provides insight into the plant’s metabolic needs — nearly instant readouts indicate when photosynthesis and transpiration rates are optimal, i.e., when the plant is happiest.

One benefit to this feature is understanding how rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere affects particular species. Through the “miracle of the LI-COR 6400,” Mozdzer said, scientists can predict how well plants will deal with global change years from now.