Class of 1980 Student Project Fund Awards

The Class of 1980 and the Office of Development and Alumni Services are happy to announce this year’s awardees for the Class of 1980 Student Project Fund, with sincere thanks to all the students who put in the time and effort to develop and submit a slate of excellent proposals. Out of the 18 submissions, the following 10 projects received Class of 1980 funding:

Students often ask about where to take their compost. With few options available to them, this workshop will provide more composting opportunities to the F&ES community, and more importantly, will teach the skills needed to build inexpensive tumblers in the future. The tumblers that will be built in the workshop consist of a 55-gallon plastic drum on a horizontal axle with a perforated PVC aerator mounted inside. Three of the tumblers will be placed at school buildings for the use of students, faculty and staff.

The 4th Annual Environmental Film Festival at Yale (EFFY) will take place April 9–15, 2012. The festival aims to foster meaningful discourse and incite social change and environmental stewardship throughout the Yale community and beyond. In light of its mission, the festival will showcase incisive, cutting edge films that raise awareness of current environmental and related social issues. Films are coupled with a panel discussion or Q&A session with the filmmakers, professors and other experts on each subject matter. All the events and screenings are free and open to public. Last year, the festival received approximately 300 submissions from filmmakers all around the world. The event attracted around 4,000 people, almost 50% up from the previous year, making it the world's largest student-run environmental film festival.

Student interest in food and agriculture issues has grown dramatically in recent years, but there are no curricular offerings that provide an overview of the policy elements of the U.S. food system. This independent study will ground itself in the United States 2012 Farm Bill, and will speak to the wide range of issues that make up this important piece of legislation. Sample topics include, but are not limited to: subsidies, conservation programs, food access, international trade and farmworker rights. Discussion of these factors and how they come together to make up the landscape of federal food policy will benefit many students with a wide array of food-centered interests. The course will be open to all F&ES students and lectures will be public.

The F&ES community will benefit from the purchase of four outdoor tables and 12 chairs to be installed on the front plaza of Kroon Hall to replace non-industrial furniture donated in 2011 by a student. The stopgap furniture attracted lunchers, loungers, collaborators and visitors, invigorating the outdoor space and creating a well-loved public gathering spot in the lap of beautiful Kroon Hall.

This popular and growing tradition at F&ES began in 2008. The Class of 2012 looks forward to the opportunity to reflect, reconnect, learn and celebrate in the company of one another before graduating and dispersing to all corners of the globe. During this all-inclusive three-day Class of 2012 event, graduating master’s and doctoral students will participate in a variety of activities designed to build on our knowledge, skills, friendship and class camaraderie. The event will include both celebration and structured events for skills building, networking and solidifying a class identity. The event encourages us to think of ourselves as an alumni cohort and envision the influence and relationship we would like to have with F&ES as the graduated Class of 2012. We will invite participation from the Alumni Association, members of the Class of 1980 and members of the Class of 1994 to share how they built a culture of alumni engagement.

This purchase will bolster the multimedia storytelling capabilities of F&ES students by acquiring a kit of professional quality audio, photo and video gear. SAGE Magazine will manage this equipment, making it available to both SAGE staff and the broader F&ES community. The level of storytelling skill and creativity among the F&ES community is impressive by any measure. Providing access to such tools will allow for production of high-quality multimedia content that will help garner attention for the ideas, stories and research of F&ES students. Potential projects that might benefit from access to multimedia equipment include:

• Recording student-organized conferences and editing speaker interviews
• Producing an audiovisual slideshow to accompany a SAGE story online
• Video footage from research done abroad to make a documentary film
• Student produced major video or audio piece for a master’s project

An in-depth panel will be convened for discussion and robust conversation on the development of the Pebble Project, North America’s largest copper and gold deposit located near the headwaters of Bristol Bay, Alaska. Proposed as an open-pit mine with a “no net loss” policy for fisheries, the project has met
opposition by Bristol Bay residents and seasonal salmon fishers who depend upon the health of the watershed and Bristol Bay ecosystem for income and subsistence. But is this merely an issue of salmon vs. gold? Students will show the award-winning documentary Red Gold, which addresses a cross-section of social and environmental issues surrounding the development of the proposed Pebble Mine. Then they will host a panel discussion to hone in on the implications of “no net loss” for Bristol Bay and explore the linkages between activism and responsible resource development.

The initiation of a turtle trapping and education project in New Haven, led by F&ES’s Reptile and Amphibian Naturalist Alliance (RANA) Student Interest Group, will be a means to introduce New Haven community members to local fauna and urban ecology, and also act as an attempt to collect data on populations of turtles in an urban ecosystem. Turtles are useful educational tools because they are relatively easy to trap and can be handled by inexperienced people with little disturbance to the animal or their habitat. It can be difficult for urban populations to experience nature; offering community members the opportunity to handle native turtles in New Haven will provide a fun and educational solution to this problem.

A visit to the Forest Products Laboratory (FPL) of the U.S. Forest Service in Madison, WI, will permit a tour of the former Yale Tropical Hardwoods Collection, and workshops with FPL staff on their research. F&ES students need to learn about the link between forest management and wood anatomy. This field trip will reconnect students with F&ES’ tropical wood heritage through a visit to the Yale collection and through a tour of the FPL facilities to learn about their other collections and research. Dr. Alex Wiedenhoeft, the wood anatomist at FPL, has agreed to host the group for two days, and is coordinating speakers on topics including using wood anatomy for determining legality of timber imports and promoting lesser-known timber species.