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dukenvironmentis published twice a year by the Nicholas School of the EnvironmentEditor Scottee CantrellArt Director Amy Chapman BraunSenior Writer Tim LucasContributing Writers Lisa M. Dellwo, Tawnee Milko MEM’12, Ellie Peters T’13, Sarah Gillig Sunu MEM’14Photography Megan Morr and Les Todd, Duke Photography; Scott Taylor; Peggy Morsch; and Kelly RioloWeb Editors Stephanie Thirolle and Brian Johnson

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need to get in touch with dukenvironment?subscribe (free) Visit us online at nicholas.duke.edu/dukenvironment or e-mail dukenvironment@nicholas.duke.educhange of address E-mail dukenvironment@nicholas.duke.edu or call 919.613.8111editorial comments E-mail Scottee Cantrell at dukenvironment@nicholas.duke.edu

© Copyright 2013 The Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University

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AdministrationWilliam L. Chameides, Dean

Lincoln Pratson, Chair, Division of Earth and Ocean Sciences

Dean L. Urban, Chair, Division of Environmental Sciences and Policy

Cindy Lee Van Dover, Chair, Division of Marine Science and Conservation, and Director,

Duke University Marine Laboratory

Prasad Kasibhatla, Senior Associate Dean

Robert B. Jackson, Associate Dean, Research

Erika S. Weinthal, Associate Dean, International Programs

James Haggard, Associate Dean, Finance and Administration

Kevin McCarthy, Associate Dean, External Affairs

Scottee Cantrell, Assistant Dean, Marketing and Communications

Susan Gerbeth-Jones, Assistant Dean, Information Technology

Karen Kirchof, Assistant Dean, Career Services

Sherri Nevius, Assistant Dean, Executive and Distance Learning Programs

Cynthia Peters, Assistant Dean, Academic and Enrollment Services

Board of VisitorsJ. Blake Sullivan MF’89, Sullivan Forestry Consultants Inc., Americus, GA (Chair)

Virginia Reynolds Parker T’80, Parker Global Strategies LLC, Stamford, CT (Vice Chair)

Benjamin S. Abram E’07, Wyland Capital, Menlo Park, CA

H. Ross Arnold III T’67, Quest Capital Corp., Atlanta, GA

Roberta B. Bowman, Duke Energy Corp., Charlotte, NC

David B. Brewster MEM’00, EnerNOC Inc., Boston, MA

R. Jeffrey Chandler T’84, Rose Grove Capital, New York, NY

Philip N. Froelich Jr. T’68, Froelich Education Services, Tallahassee, FL

Abigail Field Gerry T’02, New York, NY

Peter Layton, Tallgrass Group LLC, Arlington Heights, IL

Cindy Harrell Horn, CP Management Co., Woodland Hills, CA

Peter Layton, Tallgrass Restoration LLC, Schaumburg, IL

J. Curtis Moffatt T’73, Van Ness Feldman PC, Washington, DC

J.K. Nicholas T’89, B’96, Chelsea Clocks, Chelsea, MA

Michael R. Parker, Parker Global Strategies LLC, Stamford, CT

Rebecca Patton T’77, Palo Alto, CA

Edward M. Prince Jr. L’93, G’93, Neustar Inc, Sterling, VA

Truman T. Semans Jr. T’90, B’01, Green Order Inc., New York, NY

Barbara C. Smit T’79, Ardmore, PA

Neil Smit Jr. T’80, Comcast Cable Communications, Philadelphia, PA

Fred J. Stanback Jr. T’50, Salisbury, NC

Frederick Vosburgh T’72, PhD’78, Physical Devices LLC, Raleigh, NC

John Warasila, Alliance Architecture PLLC, Durham, NC

Vandana Dake, Alliance Architecture PLLC, Durham, NC

Charles T. Wegner IV T’79, The Jel Sert Co., West Chicago, IL

Michael W. Pentony E’87, MEM’96, National Marine Fisheries Service, Glouster, MA (Ex-Officio)

Tim Profeta MEM/L’97, Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, Durham, NC (Ex-Officio)

William K. Reilly, Aqua International Partners, L.P., San Francisco, CA (Ex-Officio)

Alumni CouncilLeslie Jamka MEM’99, Hazardous Substances Research Center, Manhattan, KS (President)

Kirsten Cappel MEM’04, U.S. EPA, Washington, DC (President-Elect)

Gregory Andeck MEM’05, Energy & Climate Environmental Defense Fund, Raleigh, NC

Patrick Bean MEM’08, Southern Company, Birmingham, AL

Nick DiLuzio MF’10, Atlanta, GA

Julia Elmore MEM’06, Piedmont Conservation Council, Asheboro, NC

Charley Finley MF’67, Verbatim Editing, DAA Representative, Richmond, VA

Christopher Frangione MEM/MBA ’02, X PRIZE Foundation, Playa Vista, CA

Sudha Gollapudi MEM’06, Sol Systems, LLC, Washington, DC

Shannon Lyons Green MEM’04, Lenfest Ocean Program, Pew Charitable Funds, Washington, DC

Jim Hildenbrand MEM’12, Durham, NC

Marian Keegan MF’82, Hemlock Farms Community Association, Lords Valley, PA

Jonathan Kelsey MEM’97, NOAA Office of Legislative Affairs, Washington, DC

Daniel Kolomeets-Darovsky MEM’10, The Selestos Group Inc., Durham, NC

Margaret Athey Lawrence MEM/MA’03, Owings Mill, MD

Ye Lin MEM’12, Aramark, Durham, NC

Courtney Lorenz MEM’06, Skanska USA, Durham, NC

Mark Pfefferle MEM’88, National Capital Park & Planning Commission, Silver Spring, MD

Paul Quinlan MEM/MPP ’06, Durham, NC

Emily Duncan Rodgers MEM’06, Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, The Woodlands, TX

Cynthia Van Der Wiele MEM/MF’98, Cynthia Van Der Wiele and Associates LLC, Durham, NC

Kevin Wheeler MEM’99, Consortium of Ocean Leadership, Washington, DC

Jack Beuttell MEM/MBA’14, Dual Degree Student Representative

Clayton Avent, MEM/MBA ’15, Dual Degree Student Representative

Michelle Yuan, MEM’14, Student Representative

Sarah Zoubeck, MEM’13, Student Representative

Godparents of InventIon?• NICHoLAS SCHooL GRADUATES TEAM UP To DEVELoP

WoRLD’S FIRST TRACER FoR FRACKING FLUIDS • VoN WINDHEIM HoPES To INSPIRE FUTURE ENVIRoNMENTAL

ENTREPRENEURS• KERSEY STURDIVANT BRINGS ENERGY— AND A NEW

PERSPECTIVE—To DUKE MARINE LAB

Africa’s Savannahs—and Their Lions—Declining at Alarming Rates

Weather-Making High-Pressure Systems Predicted to Intensify

Certificate Programs Give Students a Competitive Edge New Study Finds Thousands of Natural Gas Leaks in Boston

LearnInG by doInGXAVIER BASURTo BELIEVES STUDENTS AND CoMMUNITIES FIND THE BEST SoLUTIoNS WHEN THEY FIGURE IT oUT THEMSELVES

An open Letter to the New Head of the EPA

Blogs.Nicholas.Duke.EduDuke Environment and Alumni Blogging Teams opens Window on the Nicholas School and on the EnvironmentSIDEBAR: List of Blogging Team Members

Nicholas School Students Take Advantage of Duke’s Green Grant Fund to Support Sustainability Projects

LEADING THE DRIVE FoR SUSTAINABILITY AT HARLEY-DAVIDSoNSIDEBAR: Improving the Environment from Within the World of Industry

Link UpStay in Touch with Nicholas Alums and Students Through LinkedIn and Find out About the Latest Back to Class opportunities

Career MattersExcelling by Improving Your Strengths

LIVING oFF THE GRID oNLY oNE BIG STEP oN A SUSTAINABLE PATH FoR BRAD AND SHELLI STANBACKSIDEBAR: Stanback Gift to Provide Funding for Duke Environment Hall Solar Array

Duke Environment Hall Construction Update

New Effort Aims to Raise $150,000 for Student Internships as Legacy to Three Fallen Classmates

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news//students 20-23

dean’s forum 19

news//alumni 24-28

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Les todd photos

BY TIM LUCAS

If necessity is the mother of invention, Justine Chow and Jake Rudulph might be its godparents.

Chow and Rudulph are 2012 Nicholas School graduates who lead a young company called BaseTrace. Operating on a modest budget out of a 200-square-foot lab in Research Trian-gle Park that doubles as their corporate office, they’re working to develop and market the world’s first synthetic-DNA-based tracer specifically designed to detect if fluids used in a controversial natural gas extraction process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, end up in drinking water.

Because the DNA can be synthesized in a near-endless variety of sequences, the tracer could make the fluids used at each individual gas well identifiable, ending disputes about the source of any subsequent contamination in nearby water supplies.

It’s an ambitious undertaking for a small start-up, but Chow and Rudulph are confident their team can pull it off.

“We’re completing lab tests on a tracer prototype now, and aim to conduct field testing with an industry partner and roll this out commercially before the end of 2013,” says Chow, 25, who has served as BaseTrace’s chief executive officer since she, Rudulph and

three fellow Nicholas School Master of Environmental Management (MEM) students—Adam Rigel, David Roche and Paul-Harvey Weiner—launched the company last summer.

In fracking, large volumes of water, sand and chemicals are injected deep underground into gas wells at high pressure to crack open hydrocarbon-rich layers of shale rock and extract embedded natural gas. Shale gas com-prises about 23 percent of natural gas produced in the United States today. The federal Energy Information Ad-ministration estimates it will make up almost half of the nation’s gas produc-tion by 2035.

As the pace and geographic extent of shale gas production grows, so too have disputes whether fracking fluids and flowback water from well sites are contaminating nearby drinking water supplies.

And that, the BaseTrace team say, is where their tracer comes in.

“By showing if groundwater contami-nation is, or isn’t, due to fracking fluids from a specific company’s well or wells, our tracer can help protect communities and companies alike,” says Rudulph, 25, BaseTrace’s chief technology of-ficer. “We believe it can be a real game changer in the fracking debate, at a time

when more states are moving to legalize the process but state budgets for water monitoring are shrinking.”

Part of the technology’s appeal is its simplicity. Production and drilling companies would simply have to order a tracer containing a unique synthesized DNA sequence and mix it into their fracking fluid before the fluid is pumped down a new gas well.

“A thimble-full of the tracer will re-main detectable, even when mixed with millions of gallons of fluid,” says Chow. “By creating a DNA signature for each individual well, we’re essentially creat-ing a fingerprint that allows us to track and identify any contamination from it. We can even track multiple wells at the same time.”

Samples of flowback water extracted out of a well after it’s been fracked would be collected by independent field testing contractors and sent back to BaseTrace for analysis, to verify that the production company has mixed the tracer into its fluid.

Nearby groundwater samples could then be collected and analyzed to deter-mine if the frack fluid is migrating into water supplies.

Drilling and production companies would pay a subscription fee to Base-Trace for the service, along with a fee

nIchoLas schooL Graduates team up todeveLop WorLd’s fIrst tracer for frackInG fLuIds

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for each test that’s conducted. Others—including regulatory agencies, environ-mental NGOs or landowners—could also hire out the testing service “for a very nominal fee,” Chow says.

“We’re not taking sides,” Rudulph emphasizes. “We believe our technology provides an accountability and liability tool that benefits everyone.”

A growing number of states require or strongly encourage companies to use tracers and other best management practices, he notes. Voluntarily comply-ing with—or exceeding—these safe-guards would demonstrate a company’s commitment to environmental stew-ardship, and help it address regulatory and community concerns. This could be especially valuable for firms seeking access to drilling leases where there are local barriers to entry due to groundwa-ter concerns.

“In states where hydraulic fracturing is already occurring, there’s a lot of en-thusiasm for this technology,” Rudulph says.

BaseTrace’s work has been backed by a $20,000 investment from Raleigh-based Cherokee Investment Partners, as well as $10,000 from the Nicholas School’s Environmental Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program and $5,000 from the Duke Startup Challenge.

In 2012, the company was invited to present its technology at the Council for Entrepreneurial Development’s Tech Venture Conference in Research Trian-gle Park, and at the South by Southwest Eco Conference in Austin, Texas, where it won an Innovation to Inspiration Award recognizing it as “a promising start-up that has the potential to change the world.”

Influential science reporter Andy Revkin of The New York Times is watching with interest, too. He spot-lighted BaseTrace’s DNA-based tracer, along with a nanoparticle-based tracer under development at Rice University, in his widely read blog, “Dot Earth,” this January. Revkin wrote, “… the most promising new concept I’ve seen on the water-pollution front is introducing a well-specific tracer in fracking fluid … It’s great to see young innovators push-

ing hard to turn great ideas into businesses.”

Like many great ideas, BaseTrace’s decision to use synthetic DNA for its tracer was born of necessity.

As an MEM student, Chow had pur-sued her interest in green energy devel-opment by founding the Duke Drilling, Environment and Economics Network and doing a summer internship with the Environmental Working Group on landowner issues related to hydraulic fracturing. But when she decided to focus her Masters Project on a compara-tive analysis of the hydraulic fracturing fluid tracers being used by companies—a topic that seemed to her “to be central to the whole fracking debate” —she ran into an unexpected roadblock.

“There were none,” she recalls. “Not even one. I was stunned.”

Determined to salvage at least part of her Masters Project premise, she scoured the scientific literature for suitable alternatives and eventually zeroed in on a DNA-based hydrology tracer that had been developed in the Netherlands.

“It was being used for a different purpose, but it struck me as promising,” she says.

After graduation, Chow, who has a background in wet lab biology and economic policy, recruited Rudulph, Rigel, Roche and Weiner to launch a start-up and pursue the technology. Each team member brought a different and vital expertise —Rudulph in global information systems (GIS) and systems modeling; Rigel in start-up manage-ment; Roche in environmental law; and Weiner in sustainable business opera-tions.

They developed their own DNA tracer and tested it using samples of fracking fluid and flowback water.

The tests confirmed Chow’s hunch that, after some proprietary high-tech tweaking to alter its structure and ren-der it inert, synthetic DNA would make a reliable and resilient base material for a hydraulic fracturing fluid tracer.

Since then, subsequent tests at BaseTrace’s lab in Research Triangle Park’s First Flight Venture Center, an incubator for early-stage startups, have

further validated the choice. The tracer, which requires only a few short strands of DNA, is inexpensive to produce and easy to track. It can withstand the extreme underground conditions associated with fracking and drilling, including high temperatures, shear, increased salinity and exposure to high concentrations of heavy metal ions. It also can survive for up to two months when exposed to ultraviolet light levels that simulate those found in surface impoundment ponds where compa-nies typically store flowback water for recycling.

Acing the lab tests, however, is only the first hurdle the BaseTrace team must clear before its hard work starts to pay environmental and economic dividends. It next has to prove the tracer works in the real world. Make-or-break field tests, to be conducted with an industry partner, are slated for later this year.

There’s also the not-so-little matter of money.

Scaling up production and market-ing a new product requires capital. Lots of it. Investment pitches, fundraising and grant-writing occupy much of the team’s time these days, and belts are being worn tightly to stretch BaseTrace’s seed money as far as possible. They’ve become adept at finding lab equipment on clearance or, when necessary, making it themselves. “You wouldn’t believe what the catalogs charge for this stuff,” Rudulph says, as he demonstrates a homemade, but fully functional, stir plate he fashioned from salvaged com-puter parts and other assorted odds and ends for just $6.

By mutual agreement, neither Chow nor Rudulph, who work full-time at the company, nor their three co-founders, who currently work part-time, draws a salary yet.

“But hopefully soon,” Chow says, with a flicker of a smile in Rudulph’s direction. “I have full confidence in our team.”

Rigel, who will graduate with dual MEM and Master of Business Admin-istration degrees in 2013, is BaseTrace’s chief operating officer. He brings real-world business experience, gained

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through prior work in weather market start-ups and the renewable energy sec-tor, and a summer internship as a busi-ness development analyst at industry giant SunEdison.

Roche, who will graduate with dual MEM and Law degrees in 2013, is Ba-seTrace’s general counsel. He deals with the regulatory side of things, interpret-ing fracking legislation state by state. He’s worked as a legal intern at Envi-ronmental Defense Fund and Earthjus-tice, and is editor-in-chief of the Duke Environmental Law and Policy Forum.

Weiner, who graduated in 2012 with dual MEM and Master of Engineering Management degrees, has extensive experience in developing sustainable business operations, grant writing, and identifying new technologies to reduce private sector environmental impacts in a cost-effective manner. He serves as the company’s chief financial officer.

“This time a year ago, none of us—except maybe Justine –—imagined we’d be leading a startup to develop a hydraulic fracturing fluid tracer,” says Rudulph, who, in addition to his GIS and systems modeling skills, also has experience in biogeochemistry, climate science and hydrology.

“I was a career-track academic and happy about it,” he says. “But when you have this type of idea popping up, it would be foolish not to jump in and go with it.”

TIM LUCAS IS SENIoR WRITER FoR

Dukenvironment MAGAZINE AND

THE NICHoLAS SCHooL’S DIRECToR

oF MARKETING CoMMUNICATIoNS.

BY SARAH GILLIG SUNU MEM ’14

For Jesko von Windheim, the lab is fun, but taking the technology developed in the lab to the rest of the world is even better.

Starting this fall, he began bringing his expertise and enthusiasm for market development to the Nicholas School of the Environment as professor of the practice of environmental innovation and entrepreneurship and director of the school’s new Environmental Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center.

A big part of his focus was to start working with students and faculty to help them identify markets and find novel applications for new technologies.

Ultimately, von Windheim hopes the new center and the Environmental In-novation and Entrepreneurship Cer-tificate Program he’s directing will give students the tools they need to under-stand marketing concepts and leverage that understanding into future jobs and product development. (To find out more about the school’s certificate programs, see related story on page 12.)

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inventionvon WIndheIm hopes to InspIre future envIronmentaL entrepreneurs

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“What I like almost more than any-thing is when a student comes back and says, ‘Oh, I just got this job and I was really able to show what I knew because I learned about business development in your course’,” he says. “That’s so huge.”

Like many of the Nicholas School environmental entrepreneurs he teaches and mentors, von Windheim didn’t start out with a head for business. He wanted to be a scientist. It wasn’t until he was earning a PhD in chemistry from the University of Guelph that his career focus started to shift gears.

“Even though I enjoyed being in the lab, it wasn’t as interesting to me as try-ing to find applications for what I was doing,” he recalls.

A postdoctoral position with Jef-frey Glass, then a faculty member in electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University, led von Windheim to a job at Kobe Steel and also to the MBA program at the Univer-sity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was there that he began to acquire the skills needed to create applications and identify markets for the technology he was working on in the lab.

“I got my chance to go out and see what I could do,” he says.

After that first opportunity with Kobe Steel, von Windheim continued to focus on business development. He served in leadership roles for a number of technology start-ups, including Uni-tive Electronics Inc., Cronos Integrated Microsystems, and Nextreme Thermal Solutions.

When his former mentor Jeffrey Glass joined the Duke University Pratt School of Engineering faculty in 2003 as profes-sor of electrical and computer engineer-ing and the Hogg Family Director of Engineering Management and Entrepre-neurship, von Windheim began teaching courses at Pratt and the Fuqua School of

Business on marketing, entrepreneurship and startup operations.

Having one foot in the entrepreneurial world and one in the world of academic research suits him to a T, von Windheim says.

In addition to his new role at the Nicholas School, he has been working with Nirmala Ramanujam, director of Duke’s Tissue Optical Spectroscopy Laboratory, to launch the Duke-based start-up Zenalux Biomedical and develop the Zenascope spectroscopy system, a technology that measures chemical and physical information in opaque samples.

One of his goals for Nicholas School students is to give them opportunities to work with start-ups like Zenalux.

“When you’re in an entrepreneurial environment, there is no script written. You’ve got to understand the value to the customer,” he says. Students “get a real sense of hey, if I wanted to go out and do this on my own, if I had a little company, how I would actually go out and execute this.”

The interdisciplinary nature of the Nicholas School is a key asset in von Windheim’s view.

“I’m a big believer in diversity of thought, particularly if you want to find a way to create value in this world,” he says. “If you go at that challenge the same way that everybody else is going at it, it’s highly unlikely that you’re going to find something special. When you look at the thought processes that come through Nicholas, people are highly focused on sustainable practices and so-lutions to our problems, and I strongly believe that’s going to have a huge im-pact on the world going forward.”

SARAH GILLIG SUNU MEM’14 IS THE

NICHoLAS SCHooL’S CoMMUNICATIoNS

ASSISTANT FoR 2012-13 AND LEADER oF

THE DUKE ENVIRoNMENT BLoGGING TEAM

BY SARAH GILLIG SUNU MEM ’14

Kersey Sturdivant is a busy guy. Thanks to the McCurdy Visiting Scholar pro-gram at the Duke University Marine Lab, he’s bringing his energy and drive to the Duke University Marine Lab, along with Wormcam, an innovative new way of looking at the ocean floor.

Wormcam is an underwater camera that Sturdivant developed while earn-ing his doctorate at Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS), working with Robert Diaz, professor of marine sci-ence. It provides scientists and students with images of physical and biological processes as they occur in real time on the ocean floor.

A benthic ecologist by training, Sturdivant comes to the Marine Lab from the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary, where he served as research coordinator. His research background is in hypoxia, a condition where the lack of oxygen in marine waters and sedi-ment leads to environmental problems, from fish kills to dead zones.

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kersey sturdIvant brInGs enerGy— and a neW perspectIve—to duke marIne Lab

As a McCurdy Visiting Scholar, he’ll have the opportunity to spend up to a year with scientists and students at Duke to explore coastal hypoxia issues.

It’s very important to be at “a really good institution that does really good work but (where) the people are very open and there’s a really tight sense of community,” Sturdivant says. “The ambience of the Marine Lab very much mirrors that.”

While at the Marine Lab, Sturdivant is continuing his research on the causes and effects of hypoxia on local and global ecosystems and economies, and he’s hoping to explore how hypoxia affects the way worms’ bodies function in sediment, and how that impacts their ability to tolerate lower oxygen levels.

Wormcam will continue to play a role in Sturdivant’s research. The device can be left on the ocean floor to take pictures of the sediment layers, providing a look at processes that are often hard to visualize.

“Think of it as an ant farm, but an ant farm in the actual natural environment that’s as minimally invasive as possible,” Sturdivant explains.

Sturdivant and undergraduate Lucy Ma T’14 are using Wormcam to look at how chemical cues from prey species of crustaceans, such as crabs, affect be-havior. But while they’re looking at that, Wormcam is simultaneously helping them to get data on how the crustacean behaviors are affecting other species that live in the sediment.

Wormcams have been deployed in the Gulf of Mexico, where Sturdivant is part of a research group assessing the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on coastal Louisiana. The cameras are helping the team look at how oil on the seafloor changes the behavior of the animals that live there and affects the chemical composition of the sediment.

You can follow the progress of Worm-cam on Twitter at #Wormcam.

Sturdivant, like his invention, is doing some multitasking. While continuing his research on hypoxia, he also is hoping to teach while at the Marine Lab. And in his spare time, he’ll be working on a book about the application process for graduate school in the natural sciences and thinking up ways to develop more applications for Wormcam in the classroom.

“If you talk to people, even scientists, and ask them, ‘what does bioturba-tion look like in real time,’ most people haven’t seen the actual way the sediment works and turns over and the high level of activity that occurs,” he says. “(But) any time anyone views a Wormcam movie, they’re just like, ‘holy cow, I can’t believe this is what goes on!’ So I think that has a lot of application for expand-ing people’s knowledge.”

The nature of the McCurdy Visiting Scholars program allows the Marine Lab faculty to be strategic in selecting young scientists from disciplines that might not currently be represented in Beaufort.

“It’s a real chance for the Marine Lab faculty to try out ideas. We haven’t had a benthic ecologist of Kersey’s ilk for some time, so it’s nice to have that on the island again,” says Cindy Van Dover, director of the Marine Lab and a former McCurdy Visiting Scholar.

SARAH GILLIG SUNU MEM’14 IS THE

NICHoLAS SCHooL’S CoMMUNICATIoNS

ASSISTANT FoR 2012-13 AND LEADER oF

THE DUKE ENVIRoNMENT BLoGGING TEAM.

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about 75 percent of afrIca’s savannahs and more than tWo-thIrds of the LIon popuLatIon once estImated to LIve there have dIsappeared In the Last 50 years

news//schooL

About 75 percent of Africa’s savannahs and more than two-thirds of the lion population once estimated to live there have disappeared in the last 50 years, according to a study published in the December issue of the journal Biodiver-sity and Conservation.

The study, led by Duke University re-searchers, estimates the number of lions now living on the savannahs to be as low as 32,000, down from nearly 100,000 in 1960. Lion populations in West Africa have experienced the greatest declines.

“The word savannah conjures up vi-sions of vast open plains teeming with wildlife. But the reality is that mas-sive land-use change and deforesta-tion, driven by rapid human population growth, has fragmented or degraded much of the original savannah. Only 25 percent remains of an ecosystem that once was a third larger than the conti-nental United States,” says stuart pimm, Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment.

Pimm and his colleagues used high-resolution satellite imagery from Google Earth, coupled with human population density data and estimates of local lion populations, to map areas still favorable to the big cats’ survival.

They identified only 67 isolated areas of savannah across the continent with suitably low human impacts and densi-ties.

Of these, only 10 spots were deemed to be “strongholds” where lions have an excellent chance of survival. Many of the strongholds are located within national parks.

None of the strongholds are located in West Africa, where human populations have doubled in many countries over the last 20 to 30 years. The new study suggests fewer than 500 lions remain in this region, and they are scattered across eight isolated sites.

afrIca’s savannahs—and theIr LIons—decLInInG at aLarmInG rates

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“Existing maps made from low-reso-lution satellite imagery show large areas of intact savannah woodlands. Based on our fieldwork in Africa, we knew they were wrong,” explains lead author Jason riggio, a former member of Pimm’s lab who is now a PhD student in ecology at the University of California at Davis. “Using very high-resolution imagery we could tell that many of these areas are riddled with small fields and extensive, if small, human settlements that make it impossible for lions to survive.”

“Giving these lions something of a fighting chance will require substantial increases in effort. The next 10 years are decisive for this region, not just for lions but for biodiversity, since lions are indi-cators of ecosystem health,” says andrew Jacobson, a member of Pimm’s lab.

“This research, which is the most comprehensive assessment of lion num-bers to date, is a major step in helping prioritize funding strategies for saving big cats,” says co-author Luke dollar, a former graduate student of Pimm’s and now the grants program director at National Geographic’s Big Cats Initiative. “Of the estimated 32,000 to 35,000 lions, more than 5,000 of them are located in small, isolated populations, putting their survival in doubt. The re-search will help us better identify areas in which we can make a difference.”

To arrive at their new population estimate of between 32,000 and 35,000 lions, the research team organized an international group of experts to system-atically evaluate all existing data on lion numbers in Africa, including those by local “user communities” such as hunt-ing organizations. Previous estimates had placed the number of lions remaining on the savannah at between 20,000 and 40,000.

African savannahs are defined as areas that receive between approximately 11 to 59 inches of rain annually.

The research was funded by National Geographic’s Big Cats Initiative, a long-term effort to halt the decline of big cats in the wild through assessment efforts, on-the-ground conservation projects, education and a global public-awareness campaign.

High-pressure systems over oceans, which largely determine the tracks of tropical cyclones and hydrological extremes in much of the northern hemi-sphere, are likely to intensify this century, according to a Duke University-led study.

The study’s findings suggest that as summertime near-surface high-pressure systems over the northern Pacific and Atlantic oceans strengthen, they could play an increasingly important role in shaping regional climate, particularly the occurrence of drought and extreme summer rainfall, in coming years. The study was published online in nature Geoscience during the fall.

Wenhong Li, assistant professor of earth and ocean sciences at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, and colleagues used climate model simulations to predict future changes in the strength of the annually occur-ring North Atlantic Subtropical High, also known as the Bermuda High, and the North Pacific Subtropical High.

According to the simulations, these high-pressure systems will intensify over the 21st century as a result of increasing greenhouse-gas concentrations. The simulations suggest that an increase in the land-sea thermal contrast—the difference between ocean and land heating, as Earth’s climate warms—will fuel the systems’ intensification.

Li’s co-authors on the new study are Laifang Li, a PhD student at Duke’s Nicholas School; Mingfang Ting of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University’s Earth Institute; and Yimin Liu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Atmospheric Physics.

They used climate model simulations from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report and 40 years of atmospheric cir-culation data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts for the months of June, July and August to conduct their research.

the abstract Is onLIne atwww.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v5/n11/full/ngeo1590.html.

Weather-makInG hIGh-pressure systems predIcted to IntensIfy

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news//schooL

BY SARAH GILLIG SUNU MEM’14

Students at the Nicholas School now have more options than ever for cus-tomizing their Master of Environmental Management (MEM) degree, thanks to four certificate programs.

Certificates are offered in Geospatial Analysis; Sustainable Systems Analysis; Environmental Innovation and Entre-preneurship; and Community-Based Ecosystem Management.

Each is designed to help students develop and hone skills that are in high demand in today’s workplace.

“The nice thing about the certificates is that they emphasize a specialty and show that a student has followed a fo-cused series of coursework. That makes them much stronger and more competi-tive in the marketplace,” says Jennifer swenson, director of professional studies and assistant professor of the practice of geospatial analysis.

All four of the certificate programs require students to complete 12 credit-hours of specialized coursework and fieldwork in the topic area. Fieldwork is often done as an internship or team project. The aim, says Swenson, who oversees the four programs, is to give students an opportunity to gain firsthand experience applying classroom learning to real-world challenges.

GeospatIaL anaLysIsThe Geospatial Analysis Certificate was the first to be offered back in the early 2000s, just as geographic information system (GIS) technologies were begin-ning to rapidly transform many fields of environmental science.

The program requires students to take Fundamentals of GIS Technology, the introductory course; a specializa-

tion course such as Conservation GIS; Geospatial Field Data Collection; and Advanced GIS or Satellite Remote Sensing. It also requires them to use GIS analysis in their Masters Project.

“The goal was to allow people to show off the skill sets that they learned while at the Nicholas School,” says patrick halpin, associate professor of marine geospatial ecology, who directs the geo-spatial analysis certificate program. “We felt like it could be hidden in someone’s transcripts that they took four or more courses in (this) particular skill area.”

“Students who have completed the GIS certificate have been wonderfully successful in the workforce,” Swenson notes. “Employers immediately can tell the difference between students with the certificate compared to students with a more limited exposure of say, one GIS course.”

Buoyed by the success of the Geospa-tial Analysis Certificate, the Nicholas School launched its second certificate program, in Sustainable Systems Analy-sis, in 2011.

sustaInabLe systems anaLysIsMEMs who sign on for the Sustainable Systems Analysis Certificate need to be ready for an intense project management experience working on projects for big-name clients such as Dow, REI and Lowes, says Jay Golden, associate profes-sor of the practice of sustainable sys-tems analysis, who directs the program.

On the first day of class in their first semester, MEMs form project teams and take on real-world problems with their corporate partners.

“I’m very candid up front, it’s a lot of work for the students, and it’s stressful for them. I ask the company leadership to (treat) the student team just like (it would treat) a consulting team, so the students get that experience, and it’s a lot of work,” Golden says.

The payoff, he says, comes when stu-

EDGECompetitive

CERTIFICATE PRoGRAMS G i v e S t u d e n t S a

dents who have completed the certificate enter the workplace. The experience they’ve gained working side by side with corporate partners and clients gives them “a competitive advantage over their peers across the country,” he says.

The Sustainable Systems Analysis Certificate includes courses in Sustain-able Systems Theory and Drivers, Envi-ronmental Lifecycle Assessment, and a capstone independent project.

envIronmentaL InnovatIon and entrepreneurshIpThe school’s third certificate program, in Environmental Innovation and Entre-preneurship, also is designed to give students a competitive edge.

It combines classroom instruction, one-on-one mentoring and start-up expe-rience to help students gain the business and leadership skills needed to develop and market new technologies and solu-tions to society’s most pressing envi-ronmental problems. An incubator fund will provide seed money to help launch promising student start-up ideas, says Jesko von Windheim, certificate director and professor of the practice of environ-mental innovation and entrepreneurship.

Students enrolled in the program must complete courses on Environmental Mega Trends; Entrepreneurial Practice, Marketing, and Finance; and an intern-ship with a start-up.

See related story on page 7 for more information on this certificate.

communIty-based envIronmentaL manaGementThe most recent addition to the certifi-cate options is the Community-Based Environmental Management Certificate.

Launched in fall 2012, it is designed to provide a formal program sequence for students “who have recognized the need to involve communities and people, and consider that aspect of changing the environmental world and promoting conservation,” says Liz shapiro, certifi-cate director and assistant professor of the practice of environmental policy and management.

“The idea is for students to come out the other end steeped in the foundation-al theories and practices of community organizing and community-based envi-ronmental management,” Shapiro says.

Students who fulfill the certificate requirements “will have completed what amounts to an in-depth internship with a community-based organization,” she says. “They will have developed a client project for a community-based organiza-tion that they can show (prospective) employers, using the skills learned through the certificate program.”

What the future hoLdsAs the Nicholas School certificate programs gain more and more notice from students, working professionals and employers outside of Duke, demands are increasing for expanded offerings.

“We actually get people who contact me wanting to know about coming to

certIfIcates are offered In GeospatIaL anaLysIs; sustaInabLe systems anaLysIs; envIronmentaL InnovatIon and entrepreneurshIp; and communIty-based ecosystem manaGement.

Duke just to do the (geospatial) certifi-cate,” Halpin says. “I have to tell them no, it’s part of the master’s program.”

He and the other faculty members who direct certificate programs have resisted calls to offer their curricula to non-stu-dents as stand-alone short courses. “We feel people should have the substance and content of the MEM degree and then use the certificate program as a skill set to augment the degree,” he says.

That philosophy will guide the devel-opment of any future certificate pro-grams, says Swenson.

“We want to focus on certificate areas that exemplify and highlight unique things that are our strengths at the Nicholas School,” she says. Student and faculty interest also will be critical in determining if and when new certificate programs come on line.

“Student interest drives a lot of things here,” Swenson says. Many MEM students come to the program from the workplace, bringing real-world perspec-tives. When they interact with faculty members on research and applied ap-proaches to environmental problem-solving, “it makes for a rich synergy,” she says. “Sometimes the faculty are the pioneers, and sometimes the students come in with ideas, and little by little the program continues to advance and be at the cutting edge.”

SARAH GILLIG SUNU MEM’14 IS THE

NICHoLAS SCHooL’S CoMMUNICATIoNS

ASSISTANT FoR 2012-13 AND LEADER oF

THE DUKE ENVIRoNMENT BLoGGING TEAM.

for more:GeospatIaL anaLysIs: nicholas.duke.edu/geospatial/sustaInabLe systems anaLysIs: sites.nicholas.duke.edu/sustainablesystems/envIronmentaL entrepreneurshIp: nicholas.duke.edu/entrepreneurshipcertificatecommunIty-based envIronmentaL manaGement: nicholas.duke.edu/communitybasedmanagement

pat haLpIn Lab ImaGes

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The City of Boston is riddled with more than 3,000 leaks from its aging natural-gas pipeline system, according to a new study by researchers at Boston (BU) and Duke universities.

Their findings were in the November online edition of the peer-reviewed journal environmental Pollution.

The new study came in the wake of devastating fires fueled by natural gas during Hurricane Sandy. Potential dam-age to gas pipeline pressure regulators, caused by flooding in Hurricane Sandy, raised ongoing safety concerns in New York and New Jersey.

The researchers report finding 3,356 separate natural gas leaks under the streets of Boston.

“While our study was not intended to assess explosion risks, we came across six locations in Boston where gas concentrations exceeded the threshold above which explosions can occur,” says nathan phillips, associate professor in BU’s Department of Earth and Environ-ment and co-author of the study. Phillips received his PhD from Duke in 1997.

Nationally, natural gas pipeline failures cause an average of 17 fatalities, 68 injuries, and $133 million in property damage annually, according to the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. In addition to the explo-sion hazard, natural gas also poses a

major environmental threat: Methane, the primary ingredient of natural gas, is a powerful greenhouse gas that degrades air quality. Leaks in the United States contribute to $3 billion of lost and unac-counted for natural gas each year.

“Repairing these leaks will improve air quality, increase consumer health and safety, and save money,” says co-author robert b. Jackson, Nicholas Professor of Global Environmental Change at Duke. “We just have to put the right financial incentives into place.”

Phillips and Jackson’s teams col-laborated with industry partners robert ackley of Gas Safety Inc., and eric crosson of Picarro Inc., on the study. They mapped the gas leaks under Boston using a new, high-precision methane analyzer installed in a GPS-equipped car. Driving all 785 road miles within city limits, the researchers discovered 3,356 leaks.

The leaks were distributed evenly across neighborhoods and were associat-ed with old cast-iron underground pipes, rather than neighborhood socioeconomic indicators. Levels of methane in the surface air on Boston’s streets exceeded 15 times the normal atmospheric back-ground value.

Like Boston, other cities with aging pipeline infrastructure may be prone to leaks. The BU and Duke research-

ers recommend coordinated gas-leaks mapping campaigns in cities where the infrastructure is deemed to be at risk. The researchers will continue to quantify the health, safety, environmental, and economic impacts of the leaks, which will be made available to policymakers and utilities so they can work to replace and repair leaking natural gas pipeline infrastructure.

Lucy hutyra, assistant professor and max brondfield, technician, worked with Phillips on this study at BU. At Duke, PhD student adrian down, postdoctoral researcher kaiguang Zhao, and research scientist Jon Karr assisted Jackson with his research.

The study was supported by the Barr Foundation, Conservation Law Foundation, National Science Foundation, Picarro Inc., Boston University and Duke University.

neW study fInds thousands of

naturaL Gas Leaks In boston

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LEarNiNg by DoiNg

XAVIER BASURTO BELIEVES STUDENTS AND COMMUNITIES FINDTHE BEST SOLUTIONS WHEN THEY FIGURE IT OUT THEMSELVES

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dukenvironment 16

BY TIM LUCAS

as a teacher, XavIer basurto refraIns as much as possIbLe from provIdInG ansWers to hIs students. “We mostLy Learn by doInG, not by havInG others teLL us What to do,” he eXpLaIns, “so I try to traIn students hoW to be Independent thInkers Who can Generate questIons and pursue ansWers on theIr oWn.

“I’ve found that if they have an incen-tive to solve a problem themselves, they come up with different, and sometimes better, ways to tackle it than I might,” he says.

It’s a strategy Basurto, assistant profes-sor of sustainability science at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, be-lieves can be used to help solve environ-mental problems outside the classroom as well.

For more than a decade, he’s inves-tigated ways communities manage their environment and avoid the social, economic and ecological dilemmas that can occur when common-pool natural resources are depleted, such as when fishermen catch too many fish from local waters or loggers harvest too many trees from public lands.

Much of his work has focused on un-derstanding why some indigenous fishing villages along Mexico’s Gulf of Califor-nia have sustained their local fisheries while others have failed.

“It’s a complex issue,” Basurto says. “How do you manage a resource that doesn’t belong to anyone in particular, but which everyone in a community has a right to use?”

Economists call the overexploitation of public resources “the tragedy of the commons,” a phrase coined in 1968 by ecologist Garrett Hardin, who illustrated the problem with a fable of farmers, each acting rationally in his own self-interest, who collectively allow their herds to overgraze and ruin a shared pasture.

Experts frequently prescribe one of two solutions. The first is to create an external governing body to impose rules on how the resource must be managed and set limits on how many fish, trees or other resources the community can

harvest. The second is to sell the manage-ment rights to a corporation, which, in theory, then has an economic incentive to manage the resource more wisely.

But there is a third, sometimes overlap-ping approach, Basurto says: Empower local groups to create and enforce their own strategy for a fair and sustain-able use of the resource through village councils, informal agreements or other community-based means.

“With privatization or government intervention, there’s still an underlying assumption that big government or big business has to step in and ‘clean up the mess’ because the locals don’t know any better; they can’t organize themselves,” Basurto says. This can lead to manage-ment plans that bypass local social systems, knowledge and traditions, and alienate community members who feel their rights have been usurped and their own interests are no longer being served.

“You can’t just ram some rules or policies down a community’s throat and expect it to work,” Basurto says emphatically. “You need to give them a sense of autonomy in how the problem is solved. There has to be an avenue for them to come together as a community and set rules, voice concerns and resolve conflicts.”

A growing body of evidence, includ-ing studies by Basurto and one of his mentors, the late Elinor Ostrom, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for her work, demonstrates the benefits of the community-based approach. The studies show that in the right circum-stances, local solutions can be just as effective as outside intervention, with fewer of its inherent drawbacks.

The key, says Basurto, is giving the community an incentive to make a solu-tion work.

LESSoNS FRoM THE SERIIn the case of fishing communities, one of the best incentives can be to give them territorial rights to their local fishing grounds.

Fishermen who are granted these concessions are likely to be more willing to protect their turf, limiting outsiders’ access to it and, ultimately, reducing the risk of overfishing. Even though they may only fish for one of two species of economic importance, all species living in their territorial waters could

potentially benefit. Mexico’s Seri fishery is a case in point.The Seri are a nation of native people

who live along the Gulf of California. They have territorial rights to fish for pen shell scallops and other marine resources in ancestral waters in a shallow channel between Tiburon Island and the Sonoran mainland on the gulf’s eastern shore.

“The Seri are very proud. They are one of the few indigenous groups the Span-ish failed to dominate,” Basurto says. “When they realized outsiders, mostly from villages down south, were coming into their fishing ground, and threaten-ing their fishing stocks and their rights of self-determination, they decided to solve the problem on their own.”

Putting aside internal disputes— centered mostly on family divisions—they agreed on a tribe-wide strategy to monitor and control outsiders’ access to the fishery.

Their action appears to have had a beneficial ripple effect. By guarding their bivalve fishery, the Seri might be protect-ing other populations, too. Snappers and other species that live in the channel and its nine mangrove forests seem to be rebounding and doing better than in other areas of the Mexican coast, where communities cannot control outsiders’ access to local fishing grounds.

“Identifying the social, biological and physical factors that are key to the Seri fishery’s health gives us a basis of com-parison to identify where else the condi-tions for successful community-based approaches for managing common-pool resources might exist,” Basurto says. “There are more than 50,000 fishers in communities in the Gulf of California. Helping sustain their health could have a big long-term benefit.”

“In an increasingly globalized world coping with global change we need to better understand what kind of gover-nance systems enable people to sustain their livelihoods,” says Marco Janssen, senior sustainability scientist at Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability. “The work of Xavier Basurto shows that giving local com-munities property rights on their marine resources empowers them to create their own regulations. Such a self-governance improves adaptive capacity to the social and environmental disturbances those communities experience.”

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A BRoADER PERSPECTIVELessons learned from the Seri fishery can be applied to a broad range of common-pool resources, Basurto notes. He cur-rently is using them to investigate ways to manage biodiversity in the national parks of Costa Rica.

“In this case, the parks are the com-mons,” he explains. “The Costa Rican government used to be very centralized in its management of them. They then switched to a regional approach, with each region having some autonomy to decide how to manage its own parks. Some regions have benefitted in terms of conserving biodiversity; others haven’t. I’m trying to figure out why. How have decisions made by each park’s rangers and staff to manage resources within its boundaries affected the outcome?”

Basurto’s students—doctoral, master and undergraduate alike—are apply-ing the lessons far afield, too, on issues ranging from wetland mitigation partner-

ships in Alaska and marine conservation in Honduras, to novel approaches for reducing plastic marine debris in coastal North Carolina.

“Students constantly surprise me with their ideas and insights,” he says with pride. “You never know where it’s going to lead. I view them as colleagues from whom I learn a lot.”

Basurto values give-and-take with students so much that in the Nicholas School courses he teaches on policy analysis of the commons and communi-ty-based conservation, there are few long lectures and no tests.

“I don’t consider them effective ways to teach, or to gauge what a student knows,” he says. Instead, he assigns heavy reading loads and requires students to prepare and present a brief synopsis or memo of what they’ve learned nearly every class. Spirited discussions usually follow.

“I find it much more rewarding, and revealing, to engage with students when

they have invested a considerable amount of time and effort wrapping their heads around a particular issue,” Basurto says. “We all get more out of it.”

Annual field trips to the Seri fishery—offered each April as part of a short course he teaches on community-based marine conservation—are another cor-nerstone of his teaching style.

“To really understand common-pool resources and community-based conser-vation, you have to get on the ground and immerse yourself. Learning from a community provides a much more pow-erful and useful cultural perspective than learning about it,” he says.

Students who take part in the field trip ride side by side with fishermen in their boats, and explore the region’s reefs, islands, mangrove forests and waters with local biologists, resource managers and conservationists—who provide dif-fering views of the problems being faced there and the best solutions for them.

The students discuss community poli-

“I’ve found that If they have an Incen-tIve to soLve a prob-Lem themseLves, they come up WIth dIffer-ent, and sometImes better, Ways to tack-Le It than I mIGht,”

“I fInd It much more reWardInG, and reveaLInG, to enGaGe WIth students When they have Invested a consIderabLe amount of tIme and effort WrappInG theIr heads around a partIcuLar Issue,”

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tics and economics with Seri leaders and community members; camp on the beach for three days with Seri families; try their hand at free-diving for scallops; and take a cooking class with fishermen’s wives to learn how to cook what has been caught. In between the activities, there are daily reading assignments, blogging assign-ments and group discussions, the best of which, Basurto says with a grin, take place over dinner or around a roaring campfire.

This year, with $20,000 in extra fund-ing from the Nicholas School, Basurto has been able to extend the trip’s length to 17 days and expand its study area to fisheries on the Baja side of the gulf. He’s also been able to offer scholarships to three Mexican students to join the class.

“Last year, a couple of Seri students came and interacted with us and it was great,” he says. “They brought a new perspective to our students’ experience.”

In addition to funding from the Nicho-las School, Basurto’s research receives support from the Christensen Fund, the Walton Family Foundation, the World Wildlife Fund and the National Science Foundation.

BoRN To BE WILDBasurto grew up in Mexico City and lived there until he was 18, but he never felt at home in an urban environ-ment. He preferred to spend time at his grandfather’s farm near Tuxpan, on the Veracruz coast.

“My grandfather was kind of a natu-ralist,” he says. “His farm was strik-ingly different from typical ranches. He planted trees and enjoyed wildlife. I loved walking on the beach there, watching the ocean and the fishing boats.”

To pursue his interest in nature, Basurto majored in marine resource man-agement and biochemical engineering at

the Institute of Technology and Higher Studies of Monterrey’s coastal campus in Guaymas, Sonora.

“Without knowing what the commons was, I started studying conservation and working with local fishermen and researchers over the summers,” he says. “I got to see the issues we were learning about in class from their perspective.”

He gained added perspective in 1997, when he spent his senior year as an ex-change student at Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada.

“Newfoundland was a terribly interest-ing place to be at that time,” he explains, “because the cod moratorium was in force. I saw firsthand the consequences of overfishing: 20,000 fishermen were out of work and on unemployment. Some of them took classes with us at the univer-sity. When we’d discuss overfishing or other marine resource issues, they’d cut through the bull and explain stuff in real-world terms.”

He stayed in Nova Scotia that summer to work at a scallop aquaculture farm, where he pulled and cleaned mussels and scallops eight hours a day.

“I wanted to immerse myself in the culture and see what it was like to make a living off marine resources,” he says. “Every muscle hurt. It was very formative.”

After returning home, Basurto co-founded Comunidad y Biodiversidad, one of Mexico’s leading grassroots nonprofits focused on marine resource is-sues, and began working closely with the Seri and other small fishing communities along the Gulf of California coast.

“It was incredibly challenging,” he says. “I soon realized that to more deeply understand how people interacted with their environment, I needed a better grasp of the issues.”

Leaving the beach behind, he enrolled

at the University of Arizona and earned dual master’s degrees in natural sciences and public administration, and a PhD in public management with a minor in cultural anthropology. It was here that he met Elinor Ostrom and began working with her on the complex interrelation-ship of social and biophysical factors that affect how communities govern their resources. She eventually became part of his doctoral committee and offered him a job as a visiting scholar at her renowned Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University.

After two years at the workshop, dur-ing which he authored two studies with Ostrom, he joined the Nicholas School faculty as assistant professor of sustain-ability science at the Duke Marine Lab in Beaufort, N.C.

“It’s a great fit,” he says. “The caliber of faculty and students here is remark-able. The community is tight-knit. There are outstanding opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration. And the environment isn’t bad either.”

He and his wife Rocio (her name means “morning dew” in Spanish) love exploring the area’s beaches, sounds and barrier islands with their daughters, So-fia, 10, and Ghita, 8. Most days, Basurto commutes to work from their home in Beaufort by bike, but on days when he has a bit more time, the 39-year-old avid outdoorsman slips his kayak into Taylors Creek and paddles down Beaufort Inlet to his office.

“You can maintain a close connection with nature here,” he says. “For me, that’s a daily reminder of why I do what I do. People ask why they should care about fisheries. The answer is simple. Wherever you live, your life is influenced by the ocean whether you eat fish or not. We’re trying to identify what factors contribute to the health of the ocean, and how fishermen play a role in this. That’s something we should care about.”

TIM LUCAS IS SENIoR WRITER FoR

Dukenvironment MAGAZINE AND

THE NICHoLAS SCHooL’S DIRECToR

oF MARKETING CoMMUNICATIoNS.

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DEAR NEW EPA ADMINISTRAToR,Congratulations and good luck in your job. Given the sundry calls for EPA’s dis-memberment during the last campaign, I suspect you’re going to need it.

You’ve got some big shoes to fill. Some have expressed disappointment

that Lisa Jackson, in her nearly four-year tenure as EPA Head, wasn’t able to make good on the lofty expectations many had for the environment when president obama took office in 2009. But I don’t buy it. True, Congress failed to pass a climate bill. But you can’t blame Administra-tor Jackson for that. Once the legislative pathway for addressing climate change was blocked, she very effectively led the charge on Plan B: using EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate the emissions of greenhouse gases.

Under her leadership, EPA completed an “endangerment finding,” that green-house gases “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future genera-tions.” It brokered a deal with the auto industry to boost fuel efficient standards for the nation’s fleet of light-duty cars and trucks to 54.5 mpg by 2025. And it proposed CO

2 emission rules on new power plants that will effectively allow no coal-fired power plants to be built without carbon capture and storage capability.

Now it’s your turn at the helm of the agency charged with protecting our na-tion’s environment. No doubt you’ve got a lot on your mind. Please allow me to pro-pose three items for your consideration.

1. coal ash: time to get off the fenceCoal ash is an issue that has languished for decades. Jackson promised action on it before she even officially became EPA administrator. Yet, here we wait.

The problem? The United States pro-duces lots of coal ash, the toxic detritus from burning coal. In the last three years, we’ve generated about 130 million short

tons of the stuff annually. Much of the ash is dumped into stor-

age ponds and landfills. That’s not safe. It’s time to designate coal ash as hazard-ous waste subject to federal standards, rather than maintain its status quo as non-hazardous waste subject only to state laws.

Such a determination has been long in the making. In the waning days of bill clinton’s presidency, EPA almost des-ignated coal ash as a hazardous waste, but backed down. Then in early 2009, following the massive coal ash spill at the Kingston Fossil Plant in Tennessee (which sent more than one billion gallons of toxic coal-waste sludge into nearby lands and waterways), renewed mo-mentum began to build. Incoming EPA Administrator Jackson promised that a decision was forthcoming. Instead we got one delay after another.

It’s now almost four years later and EPA is still on the fence. Meanwhile, research study after study continues to add to the body of evidence showing the harmful effects coal ash has on the environment.

Time to get off the fence and make a call on this one.

2. pull a tsca rabbit out of the hatIn the words of your predecessor, the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) is “failing to get this job done … not only has TSCA fallen behind the industry it’s supposed to regulate, it’s been proven an inadequate tool for providing the pro-tection against chemical risks that the public rightfully expects.”

While an estimated 80,000-plus chemicals are circulating in the market-place these days, only nine are regulated under TSCA—five existing chemicals and four new ones. That cannot be right. We urgently need a new law. One such possibility, introduced by sen. frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) and known as the Safe

Chemicals Act of 2010, languishes in the legislative ether that lies between committee approval and Senate debate.

Is it the right law? Would another law be better? I don’t know. But I do know action is needed. And it’s not just scien-tists like me who think so. In September, a national poll of small-business own-ers found that “most business owners explicitly support government regulations of the products companies buy and sell, and nearly three out of four support a proposed reform of the Toxic Substances Reform Act requiring manufacturers to show their chemicals are safe.”

So business is on board. The Ameri-can people are on board. Seems like the time has come for EPA to figure out a way to work with Congress to get some-thing passed that makes it more difficult for dangerous chemicals to get into the products we buy and, ultimately, into our families’ homes and bodies.

3. Go one giant step further on co2

Administrator Jackson made a significant advance in our country’s effort to reign in carbon dioxide emissions by proposing a rule to limit those emissions from any new plants.

But what about existing plants? Take the plunge—propose CO2 emission rules for existing power plants that will, in the short term, force closure or significant refits for our nation’s dirtiest and least efficient plants, and, in the long term, wean us off coal-fired plants without carbon capture and storage capability.

So there you have it, EPA Administra-tor, my modest list of three action items for your consideration. Get all that done and finished, and think of all the energy you will have for other challenges. Did anyone mention a carbon tax?

William L. chameides is dean of the nicholas school of the environment and nicholas professor of the environment

AN oPEN LETTER To THE NEW HEAD oF THE ENVIRoNMENTAL PRoTECTIoN AGENCY BY WILLIAM L. CHAMEIDES

dean’s forum

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BY SARAH GILLIG SUNU MEM ’14

The magazine you hold in your hands is one way that the Nicholas School seeks to reach the broader global community. But the communication efforts don’t stop there.

Even in just the past 10 years, enor-mous changes have occurred in how humans communicate with each other. No longer tethered to landlines and paper, we are able to interact with and share in-formation in new ways, providing unique opportunities for the advancement of knowledge about the world we live in and the environmental issues we face.

One of the ways that the Nicholas School has chosen to engage the public is through sponsored blogs that provide a window into our community.

Blogs are a uniquely personal forum for communication, and each of the 17 individual blogs currently hosted on the Nicholas School site are as individual as their authors. (The school also supports student travel and internship blogs on the same site.)

Topics range from environmental sci-ence issues, to student events, to examina-tion of the choices we as humans face in our daily lives. Chronicling everything from the momentous (EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s campus visit) to the mun-dane (which carbon footprint calculator is more accurate?), Duke students, alumni,

faculty and staff have been encourag-ing discussion, raising awareness, and representing Duke to the greater global community through their blogs. As the Nicholas School Office of Marketing and Communications launches the new Nicholas School Ambassador Initiative (see story page 28), blogging will continue to play a key role in reaching out to both prospective students and alumni.

The Nicholas School blogging program was developed by the Communications Office in 2007 as a way to further shape the school’s identity and provide prospec-tive students with an easily accessible stu-dent perspective on the Nicholas School experience.

Alum and former blogger David Palange MEM ’09, now a sustainabil-ity associate at SCS Global Services in Oakland, Calif., found as a second-year that new students would recognize him because they had read his blog when they were making the decision on where to attend graduate school.

“I think the most important part is that the student blogs provide a window into the everyday experiences of students at the Nicholas School that you can’t capture in a brochure or an info session. There is such a plethora of activities, and exposure to so many different subject areas and experiences. It’s exciting for prospective students to know about all the opportunities open to them at Duke,”

Palange says. Palange recalls blogging about interesting classes, NASA sustain-ability research, and Duke basketball while at the Nicholas School.

The Duke Environment Blogging Team, a more formal iteration of the original ‘From the Trenches’ student bloggers, represents a cross-section of the Nicholas School community and includes MEMs from four different concentrations, an MEM/MF, an MEM/MBA, a DEL-MEM, a PhD., a B.S. and an A.B. Each student has their own blog, and has chosen a broad theme for their blog’s content.

In addition to student bloggers, there are five alumni bloggers providing insight on life after the Nicholas School, and Dean Bill Chameides’ blog, “The Green Grok,” which tackles a wide array of environmental science and sustainability issues.

Blogging helps them improve their writ-ing and analytical skills, these bloggers say, and also gives them a platform to communicate to audiences they might not otherwise have a chance to interact with.

“As a scientist who has spent most of my career writing for a science audi-ence, blogging provides great freedom,” Chameides says. “I can write in my own voice, I can include humor or sarcasm which would be out of place in a science paper, and I can blog on whatever inter-ests me. It has been a lot of fun.

“Much of the public is confused about

Blogs.Nicholas.Duke.eDuduke envIronment and aLumnI bLoGGInG teams opens WIndoW on the nIchoLas schooL and on the envIronment

blogs.nicholas. duke.edu/

scanfor more

a variety of issues related to the environ-ment. They often feel passive or power-less, and the info they get from people who understand climate science tends to be very bleak and flat, somber. But I think people like to smile and laugh. So even with issues as threatening and serious as climate change, it doesn’t hurt to find a little humor. I try to reach the lay audience in a way that gets to them, through humor,” he says.

Alumni blogger Nicole Carlozo MEM ’12 says that blogging encouraged her to attend more functions while she was a student at Duke.

“It definitely made me seek out events and experiences that I might have passed over if I wasn’t involved,” she says.

Carlozo also has found that blogging helps her to articulate what she’s doing in her position as a NOAA Coastal Envi-ronmental Management Fellow. “I write blogs when I’m unsure about how to talk with others about my work. It’s an exercise in translating and communicat-ing that work to people who don’t see the every day nitty-gritty of it,” Carlozo says.

Honesty and individuality are a key part of the blogging program at the Nicholas School, and the independent voices of the student bloggers set it apart from other environmental schools.

Former student blogger Tali Trigg MEM ’10, now an energy analyst for the International Energy Agency in Paris, France, found that his candid perspec-tive on his experiences drew prospective students to his blog. During his time on campus, Trigg remembers blogging about Camp Out, the COP15 United Nations Convention on Climate Change in Co-penhagen, and other current events, both on campus and off.

“I tested the waters by being critical of what we were seeing. I would not have been comfortable just extolling the virtues of the school, but our job was to give an honest impression of life at the Nich School. First-years came to me in my second year and told me that part of the reason they came was because of the blogs I’d written. The blogs are powerful because they’re honest,” Trigg says.

SARAH GILLIG SUNU MEM’14 IS THE

NICHoLAS SCHooL’S CoMMUNICATIoNS

ASSISTANT FoR 2012-13 AND LEADER oF

THE DUKE ENVIRoNMENT BLoGGING TEAM.

student bLoGGers

christine chen mem’14 Water resources managementChristine’s tea room

emma vaughn mem’14 ecosystem sciences and conservationA Graduate Student’s Guide to Conservation

megan fork phd env program, year 1 heffernan Labin PhDeep

amanda Giddon t’15 environmental sciences and policy, media studies minorinsects and the City

Jack beuttell mem/mba’14 entrepreneurship and ecosystem sciences and conservationeat Good Food. Be kind. tell the truth.

Liseth manrique Zeder deL-mem’14Livin’ La vida Loca

alex osteen mem’14 energy and environmentrenewable thinking

kevin he b.s.’13 environmental sciencestorchlight

sarah Gillig sunu mem’14 coastal environmental managementtidebook

aLumnI bLoGGers

nicole carlozo mem’13Flying Fish

stuart Iler mem’12Sustaining Society

tawnee milko mem’13Aggregating Authenticity

emily myron mem’13Amplifying voices

Jennifer Weiss mem’13the Confused environmentalist

Duke.eNviroNmeNt.BloggiNg.team

JIm WaLLace photo

dukenvironment 22

news//students

BY ELLIE PETERS T’13

Reusable food containers in the Great Hall on the Duke University main campus. Shower timers to conserve water in East Campus dorms. The Duke Campus Farm.

These are all initiatives led by stu-dents, faculty or staff to help make Duke a more sustainable campus, and they might not have happened without the support of Duke’s Green Grant Fund.

Established in 2005 by Tallman Trask, Duke’s executive vice president and treasurer, the fund makes $50,000 seed grants available each year to support a wide range of sustainability projects that benefit the Duke and Durham communities.

Some of the most innovative project proposals have come from graduate students in Nicholas School of the Environment.

Tena Rytel MEM ’13, is helping to identify ways to reduce energy use in two of Duke’s most iconic landmarks—Cameron Indoor Stadium and the K Center.

Rytel, who loves sports, applied for the Green Grant funding to support her Masters Project, in which she is looking at ways the sports world can leverage its mass popularity to help boost public awareness of, and support for, environ-mental sustainability.

“Sports is so influential and such a powerful tool to reach a wide audience,” she says. “The sports world has incred-ible influence on the market in that they can say ‘give me a biodegradable bottle or I will buy from someone else’.”

As part of her Masters Project, Rytel used Green Grant funding to attend a conference in Seattle sponsored by the Natural Resource Defense Council and Green Sports Alliance, a nonprofit orga-nization that helps sports teams, leagues and venues in their efforts to go green.

At the conference, Rytel learned how organizations from all areas of sports and sports management were taking steps to reduce their carbon footprint. Most of the discussion was focused on waste management and recycling diver-gence composting.

What she learned inspired Rytel to

nIchoLas schooL students take advantaGe of Duke’s Green Grant Fundto support sustaInabILIty proJects

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look into the energy use of sports facili-ties around Duke’s campus and to con-duct an energy audit of Cameron Indoor Stadium and the adjacent K Center.

Originally furnished in 2008, the K Center is a multi-use building with an event hall, a basketball court, a weight room, two video-editing rooms, an au-ditorium to watch videos, an academic center with offices, and a kitchen. One of the challenges with multi-use facilities such as the K Center is that some aspect of the building is always in use, which makes traditional means of energy con-servation difficult to employ.

To conduct an energy audit, she inter-viewed every person who works in the K Center to learn how many hours each day the building is used, which rooms are used the most, who uses them, how they are used, and what their specific lighting needs are. She also documented the number and types of lights in the facility and whether they have motion sensors.

Based on her findings, she’s now investigating several options that could reduce energy use significantly.

One option is to switch out the old incandescent and fluorescent lights with energy-efficient LED ones. Making the switch could reduce total lighting-energy use by more than 75 percent. But there is a hitch. The current lights in the K Center have a color-rendering index of 65 while the proposed LED lights have a color-rendering index of upwards of 90. (Color-rendering indices measure a light source’s ability to reproduce colors

faithfully as compared to how they ap-pear under natural, or ideal, light.)

Switching the lights would make col-ors on the practice basketball court in the K Center appear much different than they do on the court in Cameron Indoor Stadium—potentially affecting the Blue Devils’ performance in games.

One possible solution to this quandary would be to replace the lights in both venues. Rytel is now waiting to hear if this is possible.

She’s also researching window coating options that could be used on many of the K Center’s large windows to better insulate the building and minimize heat and cooling losses.

Next up on Rytel’s to-do list is an economic analysis of these proposed changes, including what their costs would be, how much money they would save in the long run, and what the payback period would be. Her work has caught the attention of Duke’s Facili-ties Management Department, which believes her research may have valuable applications on other multi-use build-ings across campus.

Rytel’s project is an example of a large-scale undertaking that’s being sup-ported by the Green Grant Fund. But the program also supports smaller-scale sustainability initiatives as well.

Taylor Gelsinger MEM ’13 and Ali-son Huyett MEM ’13 used Green Grant Fund support to bring the Wild and Sce-nic Film Festival to the greater Durham community in November 2012.

The traveling festival provides a

showcase for nature documentaries and environmentally themed adventure films, and is very popular on the college circuit. At many stops, it serves as a fundraiser for campus environmental groups and programs. (At Duke, it benefited the Nicholas School’s Environ-mental Internship Fund.)

In 2011, student organizers held the festival on Duke’s campus. But for 2012, Gelsinger and Huyett wanted to reach a wider audience.

They applied to the Green Grant Fund to underwrite the cost of renting the Durham Arts Council PSI Theatre in downtown Durham as a venue for the festival. Their decision to hold the festival at the theater, which is directly served by the Bull City Connector bus, made it convenient for members of both the Duke and greater Durham commu-nities to attend—and ultimately translat-ed into greater support and visibility for the festival and the student internship fund it benefits.

“A lot of things that are ingrained in Duke sustainability were started with help from the Green Grant Fund,” says Casey Roe, the university’s sustainabil-ity outreach coordinator. Projects such as those being done by students like Rytel, Gelsinger and Huyett have “really helped us turn ‘greening the campus’ into more than just a catchphrase.”

ELLIE PETERS IS THE NICHoLAS SCHooL’S

UNDERGRADUATE CoMMUNICATIoNS

INTERN.

dukenvironment 24

BY LISA M. DELLWo

It takes 45 minutes for Matt Redmann DEL-MEM’11 to get from his home in Waukesha, Wisc., to the plant outside Milwaukee where he works. For some people, a daily commute of an hour and a half would be onerous. But for Matt, for most of the year, it’s pure pleasure.

That’s because (except in snowy win-ter) he’s riding his Harley-Davidson gloss black Street Glide motorcycle to work.

When he gets to work, he doesn’t leave motorcycle culture behind, because his job is at Harley-Davidson Motor Company’s powertrain operation, a plant where engines and transmissions are manufactured and then shipped to other U.S. factories for final assembly into bikes. Matt is the environmental manager there.

It’s a dream job for someone who has had a love affair with motorcycles since he was a kid watching Evel Knievel on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. It’s also the culmination of his years of education and professional experience in the field

of environmental management.Matt’s work at Harley-Davidson is di-

vided into what he calls “three chunks”: first, ensuring compliance with mu-nicipal, state and federal environmental laws, particularly involving air and wa-ter pollution; second, working to reduce emissions even below mandated levels; and third, figuring out ways of avoiding those emissions altogether.

A good way of understanding these three priorities is thinking about the fate of a simple piece of paper, he explains. “Number one is not to throw it out the window, because that’s illegal. Number two is to send it to recycling instead of putting it in the trash. Number three is to avoid needing or generating the paper in the first place.”

Paper and other kinds of waste are on his mind as he completes a project to im-prove the plant’s recycling performance. After experimenting with a number of prototypes, they’ve recently installed three-in-one containers with signage indicating where to put office paper, cans and bottles, and actual trash. The latter,

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he says, has been much reduced; now, less than 10 percent of the plant’s waste goes to the landfill, and the extra mate-rial going to recycling centers generates a bit of income for the company.

REDUCE, REUSE, AND RECYCLE—IN A MANUFACTURING SETTINGWhile the recycling containers address office and mealtime waste, most of his projects involve the energy- and water-intensive manufacturing process. Case in point: the dime-sized pieces of aluminum waste that were coated with “cutting coolant” to protect tools and materials from the extreme heat generated during processing. These waste chips are now put through a “chip wringer,” a sort of centrifuge that spins off the coolant. The coolant is reused, and the scrap aluminum fetches a better price in the recycling market, because it is cleaner than before.

Matt also has worked with other employees to reduce energy consumption in the furnaces that heat-treat the steel for gears and countershafts and in the

powder-coating process, which applies special finishes to powertrains.

If it seems like it could be a hard sell to get industrial workers interested in “green” concepts like recycling soda cans and industrial waste, Matt draws on his nine years of familiarity with the plant and its workers and on the leadership principles he learned in the Duke Environmental Leadership/Master of Environmental Management (DEL-MEM) program.

DEL-MEM is a low-residency pro-gram at the Nicholas School designed to keep environmental professionals on the job while studying for a degree. Matt completed the degree in two intense years while working fulltime and also staying involved with his family: wife, Ginny, and three kids now aged 14, 12, and nine.

“What a terrific program. I was able to keep my job, keep my fam-ily commitments and get an advanced degree in my field from one of the most prestigious schools in the world, Duke University.”

LEADERSHIP IS LIFE-CHANGINGThe leadership component of the pro-gram has been life-changing, both at work and in his personal life. “Leader-ship is more than being in command,” Matt says. “The sign of a good leader is being able to put yourself aside to help others succeed.”

“Another thing this program made me realize is that there’s a lot to learn, things I can learn from other people. I’ve learned to ask questions, be humble.”

This is key, because to know how to prevent waste and pollution, he has to learn how and where it is created in the company’s manufacturing environment. “I get some of my best ideas from people on the shop floor,” he says. “I am very lucky to be working with some of the best people in manufacturing.”

It helps that Harley-Davidson as a company has a strong environmen-tal ethic. As Matt explains, riders are interested in experiencing beautiful landscapes, and the company appreciates the role it can play in preserving them by reducing air and water emissions.

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top, from left: matt redmann talking with ken nowak and michele anderson about new recycling centers; redmann with finished harley-davidson powertrains.

dukenvironment 26

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These days, Matt’s Harley riding is limited to those long commutes. With his cellphone and other electronics turned off, he just enjoys the ride and leaves the pressures behind.

Yes, even a Dream Job is hard work, and he takes equally seriously his family and other responsibilities. He and Ginny raise their kids with three strong em-phases: academics, athletics and artistry. Weekends are full of soccer, basketball, hockey and lacrosse, or marching band, jazz and ballet performances. Matt has coached teams and indulged his inner D.J. by choosing the music that airs between plays at his son’s hockey games. During the years he was studying for his master’s degree, he tried to juggle these roles along with work, classes, and homework. “There’s no doubt—I wouldn’t have been able to accomplish that degree without Ginny’s help,” he says.

His kids have inherited Dad’s strong environmental commitment and love of the outdoors. He continues to hope that the world in which they are adults will have changed for the better, and he believes that the solutions to environ-mental problems can come from within industry, with leadership from American companies like Harley-Davidson and General Electric. “American manufac-turing,” he says, “can make products in a more sustainable method. Then these methods can be taught elsewhere in the world” He adds, “Industry is the social norm for changing the future.”

His personal goal? “I hope to work myself out of a job—creating a plant where there are no emissions, no waste, all input, and no outputs other than what the customer wants to pay for: a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.”

LISA M. DELLWo IS A HUDSoN VALLEY WRIT-

ER SPECIALIZING IN NATURE, ENVIRoNMENT,

AND FooDWAYS. HER MoST RECENT ARTICLE

FoR Dukenvironment WAS “THREE REA-

SoNS To BLoW UP A DAM AND TWo WAYS

To Go ABoUT IT,” A PRoFILE oF NICHoLAS

SCHooL FACULTY MEMBER MARTIN DoYLE.

}Valeria Orozco is a “mind for hire.” A manager at the global consulting firm Accenture, she connects clients in the government, corporate, and nonprofit sectors with best practices in sustainability.

She brings to her work a deep knowledge of environmental science and how it relates to business, policy and economics. That’s what she learned at THE NicHolaS ScHool of THE ENviroNmENT aT DukE.

THE NEw facE of buSiNESS aND THE ENviroNmENT

meet VAleriA OrOzcO

nicholas.duke.edu/ alumni/orozco

find Out mOre

© Judy rolfe photo

}As a sustainability manager at Ocean Spray, Kristine Young MEM’09 looks for ways to make cranberry products using less water and less energy. It’s good for the environment and good for the bottom line.

She brings key skills in land management and life cycle analysis to the job. Where did she learn these skills?

The Nicholas school of The eNviroNmeNT aT Duke.

the neW face of buSineSS and the environment

MEEt KrIstInE Young

nicholas.duke.edu/ alumni/young

fInd out MorE }A lifelong motorcycle enthusiast and outdoorsman, Matt Redmann has his dream job: environmental manager at Harley-DaviDson Motor Company’s powertrain operations. “I wanted to take my passion for environmental management and apply it to a brand I really admire.”

To improve his scientific knowledge and leadership skills, he chose the online master’s degree from The Nicholas school of The eNviroNmeNT aT Duke.

The new face of business and The environmenT

Meet MAtt RedMAnn

nicholas.duke.edu/ alumni/redmann

fInd out MoRe

© Peggy morsch Photo

}From lightweight tablets to stadium-sized data centers, Dell’s technology solutions are more environmentally responsible because of the team led by Scott O’Connell, director of environmental affairs.

Scott is a proud graduate of the NicholaS School of the eNviroNmeNt at Duke, where he learned that businesses can and should take the lead in championing sustainability.

the New face of buSiNeSS aND the eNviroNmeNt

meet SCOtt O’COnnell

nicholas.duke.edu/ alumni/oconnell

Find Out mOre

© russell rinn photo

improvinG the environment

from Within the World of Industry

Nicholas School alumni have gone on to sterling careers in government—at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the United Nations, and the City of Atlanta. They populate nonprofit organizations such as Environmental Defense Fund, World Wildlife Fund, and the Peace Corps.

What is perhaps not as well known is that they also work for environmental change in the employ of some of the world’s major corporations and consumer brands. In an effort to raise the aware-ness of Nicholas School in this context, The school has launched a hybrid adver-tising/web campaign entitled The New Faces of Business and the Environment.

Four ads in Duke magazine have introduced the broader Duke community to Nicholas School alumni who work in corporate, consulting, or manufactur-ing settings. The ads contain QR codes that, when scanned with a smartphone, connect to a longer profile on nicholas.duke.edu.

The alumni profiled so far are Kristine Young, MEM’09, sustainability manager at Ocean Spray, Matthew Redmann, DEL-MEM’11, environmental manager at Harley-Davidson Motor Company’s Pow-ertrain Operations, and Valeria orozco, MEM’03, manager at Accenture Sustain-ability Services. Look for Scott o’Connell MEM’01, director of environmental affairs at Dell, in the Duke magazine edi-tion coming out in May.

The campaign is part of the school’s new Nicholas Ambassador and Alumni Engagement Working Group initiatives. (See page 28 for story on the LinkedIn project and page 20 for a story on the school’s blogging program, which are both part of these initiatives.)

BY RHoNDA SARMENTo

“I love my job. I get to do what I am good at every day.”Do you agree with this statement? If you don’t, then you are not

alone. I often hear students and alumni say that they lack skills or tal-ents or need to improve in some areas. But by focusing on weaknesses instead of strengths, they often prevent themselves from excelling in areas they do the best and enjoy the most.

Perhaps educational psychologist Donald o. Clifton says it best—“Don’t waste time trying to improve on what you are average at, focus on what you are good at and then get better.”

Clifton, a past chairman of the educational research firm Gallup, is considered the father of Strengths-Based Psychology. Through his studies he has determined that the most successful CEOs focused on improving their strengths—not on getting better at their weaknesses.

According to his book, Soar with Your Strengths, the popular notion that fixing weaknesses in individuals and organizations will make each of them stronger is false. Focusing on weaknesses creates average employees and organizations, the book says.

When thinking about your long-term goals and career journey, focus on your talents. When you are applying for a new role, trying to expand your current role or seeking a new position that brings you greater satis-faction, ask yourself these four questions:

• What am I truly good at doing?• When I am working, what do I enjoy the most?• What positive feedback have I received from past supervisors?• If I am focusing on my weaknesses, I am preventing myself from doing what?

Your answers may lead you to discover that your talent is in organiz-

ing events and staying calm when things don’t go as planned. Or you may find that you have a knack for connecting with others and in facili-tating consensus during group discussions. Or perhaps you are always hungry for more knowledge and are a constant source of information. Do you want to uncover your talents? Here is one place you might start: StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath. I’ve used this book and found it to be a great tool that helped me identify what I was looking for in a career.

Remember: Don’t focus on gaining experience in areas that will make you minimally competent—focus on making your strengths better and you will truly excel.

RHoNDA SARMENTo IS THE NEW SENIoR CAREER SERVICES SPECIALIST. YoU

CAN CoNTACT HER AT RHoNDA.SARMENTo@DUKE.EDU.

career matters

EXCELLING BY IMPROVING YOUR STRENGTHS

nicholas.duke. edu/alumni

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dukenvironment 28

BY TAWNEE MILKo MEM’12

Are you on LinkedIn? Did you know the Nicholas School has created a group on LinkedIn where you can take part in dis-cussions with fellow alums and students, find out about job postings or join an alumni subgroup in your area?

If you haven’t taken a look at the site recently, go back again. The Nicholas School has been working to make it easier for alumni and students to share articles and advice and to hook into subgroups for job postings and regional groups. And if you haven’t joined, now is the time. You just have to become a LinkedIn member at www.linkin.com.

“LinkedIn has become the home for our alumni connections—whether those are alumni-to-alumni, student-to-alumni, or staff-to-alumni,” says karen kirchof, assistant dean for career services. “As such, we’re encouraging everyone to join up to take advantage of the career tools and opportunities to connect that LinkedIn offers us.”

With more than 200 million members, LinkedIn ranks among Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as one of today’s most widely used social media platforms, and it is the only one among them purposed entirely toward facilitating professional branding and networking.

To join the Nicholas School’s LinkedIn network, Nicholas community members must create or have a LinkedIn profile. The group can be found through search-ing LinkedIn groups for “Nicholas School of the Environment” and requesting group admittance.

NEW SUBGRoUPSNo longer are jobs and discussions mixed in together. You will find “discussions” on the main page and “jobs” in its own subgroup. Kirchof and other Career Services staff frequently update the job subgroup’s postings.

“By dividing out different areas of our LinkedIn site to career-focused groups, networking groups, and general discus-sion hubs, we have been able to provide more efficient and effective platforms for us all to communicate,” said Kirchof.

The general subgroup page —found under the Nicholas School group’s “More” menu—is also home to new Re-gional Alumni Networks, which provide a forum for alumni in specific geographic regions to find and more easily commu-nicate with each other. Current students also can use these subgroups to tap into regional career networks and connect with alumni in fields of interest.

Since the networks’ formation earlier this year, four alumni networks have blossomed—those in Boston, Washing-ton, D.C., Atlanta and the North Caro-lina Triangle area. They are managed by alumni Jim hildenbrand MEM ’12, patrick bean MEM ’08, Nick DiLuzio MF’10 and Greg andeck MEM ’05. Forming alumni networks is a project of the school’s Alumni Council and the school’s new Alumni Engagement Working Group. Alums interested creat-ing a network in their area can contact tawnee milko at tawnee.milko@duke.edu for information.

If you are a Nicholas School LinkedIn group member, you can join or leave any of the subgroups without modera-tor approval. The school welcomes your participation in or starting of discussion thread conversations within the entire group and subgroups.

BACK To CLASSThe LinkedIn retooling project is only one of several new projects the school has launched to create better engagement with and for alumni through its Nicho-las School Ambassador Initiative and its Alumni Engagement Working Group. Other projects include the Back to Class faculty/alumni series, which provides online and in-person opportunities for alumni to learn about environmental is-sues, research, policy, leadership, trends and tools, and the new advertising/web campaign The New Face of Business and the Environment running in Duke magazine (see story, page 26).

“As a MEM alum, I think it’s impor-tant that we provide opportunities for our alumni to stay connected with the Nicho-las School,” says sherri nevius, MEM ’00, assistant dean for the Duke Environmental Leadership program. “Offering a chance for our alumni to come ‘back to class’ or engage with faculty and their peers on topics specifically selected to appeal to them does just that and serves as an in-formal continuing education opportunity.”

Alums should tune in to LinkedIn and email to stay up-to-date on new Back to Class sessions and other alumni engagement projects as they progress. Membership on the school’s group site is open only to Nicholas School students, alumni, staff, faculty and donors.

TAWNEE MILKo, MEM’12, IS THE NICHoLAS

SCHooL’S CooRDINAToR FoR THE NICHoLAS

AMBASSADoR INITIATIVE AND IS AN ALUMNI

BLoGGER AT BLoGS.NICHoLAS.DUKE.EDU/

AGGREGATING_AUTHENTICITY/.

stay In touch WIth nIchoLas aLums and students throuGh LInkedIn and fInd out about the Latest back to cLass opportunItIes

linkup

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giving

LivinG oFF THE GRID iS onLy one BiG Step on a SuStainaBLe path FoR BRAD AND SHELLI STANBACK

meGan morr photos

dukenvironment 30

BY SCoTTEE CANTRELL

As we made our way up Beaverdam Val-ley north of Canton, N.C., we hooked a right on Long Branch Road, and headed straight up Newfound Mountain for a mile on the gravel road to Brad and Shelli Stanback’s house, hoping all the while that we wouldn’t meet a car (or bear) coming down. There wasn’t room.

Off our right side, the edge of the road pitched steeply down a hillside for-ested with birch and basswood—terrain rugged enough that we might have ex-pected to find a rustic log cabin without running water or electricity when we got to the top. Instead, we found a beautiful, white stucco house that was very much like the mountain it conformed to, and it most definitely had running water and electricity.

But there were no electrical wires strung up the mountainside to power it and the water was gravity-fed into the house from a spring higher up. Brad and Shelli are among a quarter-million-plus residents in the United States who live off the grid, providing their own electric-ity through solar power.

That’s why we were coming to see them: we wanted to get a glimpse of what living off the grid looked like and find out why they chose to take this path and what it might mean for others who might want to do the same.

What we discovered was that living off the grid meant so much more to them than the hardware that makes it happen. To a large extent, going off-grid was a big step, but only one among

many they have taken to live their lives sustainably and in balance with nature.

It is that point Shelli wanted to be sure that a story about them would convey: You don’t have to be them or have a house on top of a mountain to live off the grid and take sustainable steps to have a more balanced life.

Balance in their lives starts with the two of them: they balance each other.

A former member of the Nicholas School Board of Visitors, Bradford G. Stanback T’81 is a restoration ecologist and philanthropist from the Stanback family in Salisbury known for their support of environmental causes and for Stanback Powders. If you google his name you’ll find it connected to the return of the American Chestnut, once the most important tree in the eastern United States.

This quiet man with a good wit also holds an MBA, but his passion is “put-ting back the missing pieces” in our environment. You will more likely find him reading a technical manual trying to figure out how to return the vulner-able bobwhite quail to his property of 1,300 acres than the latest novel on the bestseller list.

On the other hand, Shelli Stanback would more likely be reading something on how meditation or yoga helps you find calm in the midst of our increasing-ly stressful and technological world. An elegant artist, she grew up in Minnesota in a family that came by environmental-ism naturally: it didn’t have labels in her family—they just did it. “While I was growing up, most of my ecological edu-

giving

cation took place on a lake my grand-father and great uncle had preserved before I was born,” she says.

She went to school first at the College of St. Teresa in Winona, Minn., to learn art therapy, and then graduated from Goddard College after studying integra-tive movement with some of the cutting-edge educators in the field.

Now Shelli is the driving force behind OM Sanctuary in Asheville, a non-profit wellness retreat center that aims to help people find balance in their lives through holistic education. To jump start the project, she and Brad provided funding to help purchase the historic Richmond Hill property along the French Broad River that is being restored for OM. They also have provided inspiration for keeping a section of the property as a natural preserve and for several greening initiatives.

Brad and Shelli crossed paths on environmental causes a couple of times—without realizing it—before they met and married 18 years ago bring-ing together Brad’s technical focus with Shelli’s artistic one.

Their balance of art and science is evi-dent in the house they built. You enter through a massive wood door—carved with a woodland scene—into a multi-level, high-ceiling living space, with vines and flowers sculpted on the walls. The house itself hugs the mountain.

“I like the stairs,” Brad says. “We live in the mountains. The terrain is shaped that way and our house is that way too. Outside, it’s up and down; it is the same inside.”

The advantage of this is it allows warm air to climb up the stairs to the top, the sun and light coming in through multiple windows and a greenhouse on the south side. This passive solar design, Brad says, was the crucial piece in mak-ing their energy plan work.

“The passive solar design is what re-ally works best here,” says Brad, “With-out any backup heat, the house will stay 55 to 60 degrees inside at an elevation of 4,000 feet in the mountains.”

The rest of their formula for creating an off-the-grid lifestyle has involved a varied mixture of technology, nature and lifestyle adjustments.

FoR ELECTRICITY

• Solar photovoltaic panels to generate electricity

• Batteries to store the excess electricity• A backup propane generator to kick

in when there is no sun and the bat-teries are low

FoR WATER & SEWER

• Hilltop spring that gravity-feeds wa-ter into the house and a backup well to provide water in times of drought

• Solar panels to heat the water• Septic system to handle waste

To GENERATE HEAT

• The Sun• Radiant floors (added after the house

was built) with solar-heated water• Hybrid, super-efficient wood stove

as backup heat• Attached greenhouse for passive

solar heat

To CoNSERVE ELECTRICITY

• A simple green-yellow-red light monitor to alert them to battery charge status

• Insulated honeycombed window shades

• LED lights in most of the fixtures• Super-insulated refrigerator• Energy-efficient appliances• Double-paned window glass

• Always have to monitor the weather• Always have to monitor battery

charge levels and adjust use of heavy energy users such as the toaster oven and hair dryers

• Throughout the day, have to open and close off rooms and blinds as the house heats and cools

• Have to wash and dry clothes on a sunny day

• Have to occasionally sweep snow off the solar panels

• Have had to live without a dish-washer (although technology changes might make it possible now).

Making those lifestyle adjustments—particularly when they had four children in the house—hasn’t always been easy. When the sun hadn’t come out for a couple of days and the battery monitor showed yellow—meaning battery stor-age was low—there was a risk that the propane generator would start up if one child made a piece of toast or another dried her hair.

And once the generator kicked on, it would run for several hours until the batteries fully charged—essentially ne-gating gains made by living off the grid.

“It is a good message for our children to know how much energy consumption it takes in order to use a curling iron or hair dryer or toaster oven,” says Shelli. “If they are not paying attention and they do these things when it is not sunny, the generator comes on, and the energy consumption is obvious.”

If you ask Shelli why it’s important to her to live this way, she talks about it be-ing more real, more stable, more in tune with nature. A snowstorm can knock out the power down the road, but they are fine.

“I feel so much better living the way we do. Even if we have to do the extra work, I think it helps us stay more bal-anced in who we are,” she says. “And by doing it—even though I don’t always want to—we are healthier people. The quality of life we have feels better.”

Independence is another way of saying the same thing, and that is one of things that Brad appreciates. But Brad probably would advise someone else—someone who wanted the independence of using solar panels to provide electricity for his or her home, but who didn’t live in an area where it was difficult to run power lines—to stay on the grid.

“In some ways it’s better because you don’t need a large bank of batter-ies, maybe just a small bank in case the power goes out,” he says. And most importantly, “If you are connected to the grid and you generate more electric-ity than you need, you feed that back into the grid and it displaces coal that is burning somewhere else.”

Other things they would recommend to those who want to live more sustainably?

“Change all your lightbulbs to LEDS. Do an energy audit of your home,” says Shelli. “Take a look at your appliances

TECHNoLoGY AND Nature

A FEW oF THE

Lifestyle adjustments

pg. 30 top, from left: storage batteries; hybrid wood stove; three valves and a pump regulating and circulating hot water for radiant floors. 2nd photo down from top: center large white box converts power from 48 volt dc stored in batteries to 110 volt ac for wiring throughout the house; super insulated refrigerator.

dukenvironment 32

giving

Brad Stanback T’81 and Shelli Stanback of Canton, N.C., have made a signifi-cant contribution to provide funding for the rooftop solar array on the Nicholas School of the Environment’s new home, Duke Environment Hall, now under construction.

The gift advances the Nicholas School’s current $55 million cam-paign—part of the universitywide $3.5 billion Duke Forward fundraising campaign—which includes making Duke Environment Hall a LEED Platinum-

certified building and a living lab for students as key priorities. The building is scheduled to open in Fall 2014.

Plans for the system include an inno-vative combination of photovoltaic pan-els and solar thermal units to provide renewable electricity and hot water to the 70,000 square-foot building, which will provide classrooms, computer labs and offices for faculty and administra-tion. Cost of the system will be around $500,000. Performance information from the solar array will be fed into an

advanced monitoring system that can be used by faculty and students for research and teaching.

The Stanbacks, who live off the grid and work to maintain a sustainable life-style (see story, page 29), say that it is important for the Nicholas School to have a building that reflects its environmental mission, and they are invested in contributing both to that and to educating students.

“The students who come through the school are our next generation. If

and fixtures: there are good low-flush toilets now. Reduce phantom loads by using power strips for your television and computers.”

“One of the first things we did is put LED nightlights through the house—they are only 1.2 watts each. With LEDS, you can go all over the house at night and still see safely without turning on lights,” says Brad.

When Brad and Shelli first came to the top of their mountain, it was a wind-swept, overgrazed pasture with little natural wildlife in sight. You might say it was “out of balance” and missing the pieces to restore that balance.

“We drove five miles up Beaverdam Valley to get to this mountain, and there

hadn’t been beavers here in 100 years,” says Brad

Even though beaver populations have expanded across North Carolina, it has been hard for them to return to the mountains because their habitat had been destroyed.

So 15 years ago, Brad planted native plants and bigtooth aspen—a favorite of beaver—in a bottomland cow pasture with a muddy creek running through it. Now he has a thriving beaver popula-tion, beaver ponds and wetlands. And other changes he has made have brought back bear, bobcats and the deer popula-tion. Higher up the mountain, he has Scottish Highland cattle (they look like Ice Age bison) and a primitive breed of

sheep keeping the pastures clear until he can reforest with blight resistant Ameri-can Chestnuts, his passion.

Putting back missing pieces, restoring the balance, why is this important? Brad talks about how the American Chest-nut is the poster child for this concept. This really big tree with its rot-resistant lumber and consistent nut crops used to make up 25 percent of the diverse East-ern Forest before it was wiped by blight in early 1940.

“There is so much value just in that one species for humans and wildlife. And I think, to a lesser extent, it’s the same story for other diminishing species, just not as pronounced or convincing,” Brad says, sitting at a beautiful round

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they experience what it is like to live sustainably, they start to understand its importance,” Shelli Stanback says.

Brad Stanback is a restoration ecolo-gist and philanthropist, with a strong focus on restoring the American Chest-nut. Shelli Stanback is the driving force behind OM Sanctuary in Asheville, N.C., a nonprofit educational wellness retreat center.

With the Stanbacks’ gift, the Nicho-las School now stands at $32 million toward its goal. For more information

on the campaign go to dukeforward.duke.edu/Nicholas or contact Kevin McCarthy, associate dean for external affairs, at kevin.mccarthy@duke.edu or 919-613-8003.

table made from recycled chestnut lumber.

Brad and Shelli have worked hard to restore the balance, and put back the missing pieces. They can now excitedly produce photos of bear, bobcat and wild turkey that have found homes on their property once again. They are even happy to have the deer back that were not in evidence when they arrived.

“We are all impoverished by having these things missing,” says Brad.

They want everyone to understand that it is possible for all of us to do the same, even if we can’t build a mountain-top home and undertake all the steps needed to make it self-sustaining or to put back the missing pieces. Just take

small steps, Brad and Shelli say, and they will lead you in the right direction.

SCoTTEE CANTRELL, THE NICHoLAS

SCHooL’S ASSISTANT DEAN FoR

MARKETING AND CoMMUNICATIoNS, IS

EDIToR oF Dukenvironment MAGAZINE.

“Without any backup heat, the house will stay 55 to 60 degrees inside at an elevation of 4,000 feet in the mountains.”

Jared LaZarus photos

dukenvironment 34

new effort aimS to raiSe $150,000 for Student internShipS aS LEGACY To THREE FALLEN CLASSMATES

giving

The Nicholas School has launched a new undertaking to raise $150,000 to increase support for international internships and summer research for students through the Kuzmier-Lee-Nikitine (KLN) Endowment Fund.

The $150,000 goal would double the size of the fund, which marks its 20th anniversary this year.

The KLN Fund was established in 1993 to commemorate three tragic losses. In 1992, recent Master of Environmental Management (MEM) graduates Kerrie Kuzmier and Pavlik Nikitine died when their plane crashed in a Costa Rican rainforest. The same year, a third classmate, Steve Lee, died of leukemia.

All three were bright, idealistic environmentalists who wanted to help change the world. Kerrie was working to integrate ecotourism with environmental preservation in Costa Rica. Pavlik was helping Wildlife Conservation International manage a wildlife preserve in Bolivia. Steve had been a Peace Corps forestry specialist in Paraguay and hoped to continue working to promote sustainable development in the region.

Classmates, friends and family members established the KLN Fund to celebrate their lives and help other students perpetuate their ideals.

Since then, 65 Nicholas School students have received KLN Fund grants to support international internships and summer research on six continents and in 22 countries. Many of the projects have focused on promoting ecotourism, sustainable use of natural resources, environmental equity, social justice and environmental education in developing countries. Although the grants primarily are awarded to MEM and Master of Forestry students, doctoral students also are eligible.

“The KLN Fund was created through the generosity of more than 150 alumni, faculty, staff and friends giving a gift in an amount that was meaningful to them. I would like to encourage members of the Nicholas School community today—includ-ing alumni who benefited from the KLN fund and other grants to pursue international projects—to do the same,” says Karen Kirchof, assistant dean of career services.

“Not only does your gift help to continue an amazing legacy, but it is desperately needed to maintain the total amount of internship grant money available to our students,” Kirchof says.

You can make a donation online at www.nicholas.duke.edu/giving/kln-fund. You also can learn more about Kerrie Kuzmier, Pavlik Nikitine and Steve Lee, and some of the amazing international internships and summer research the KLN Fund has supported over the years.

For more information, contact Mike Gulley in the Office of External Affairs at (919) 613-8187 or michael.gulley@duke.edu.

April aprIL 13 8 a.m.4th Annual Duke Forest Pine Cone Pacer 5Kdurham division, nC-751Contact: office of the duke forest, 919-613-8013 or dukeforest@duke.edu

aprIL 18 6:30–11 p.m.Spring Soireedurham armory220 foster St.durham, n.C.Contact: nancy Kelly 919-613-8090 or nkelly@duke.edu

Maymay 2-3Beaufort Masters Project Symposium (Coastal environmental management students)repass Center, duke marine LabBeaufort, n.C.Contact: Lauren Stulgis252-504-7531 or lauren.stulgis@duke.edu

may 10 8 a.m.–5 p.m.DEL Masters Project Symposiuma158 Levine Science research Center (LSrC), duke CampusContact: the deL program919-613-8082 or del@nicholas.duke.edu

may 11 9 a.m.Nicholas School Recognition Ceremony for Graduate and Professional Degree CandidatesKeynote Speaker: david yarnold, chief executive and president of the national audubon SocietyLSrC Great Lawn, duke CampusContact: nancy Kelly919-613-8090 or nkelly@duke.edu

auG. 4-9Ecological Society of America 2013: 98th Annual Meetingminneapolis, minn.Contact: 202-833-8773 or esahq@esa.org

mark your calendar for the following dates and monitor our website at nicholas.duke.edu for additional events

our environmental commitmentPrinted on Utopia 2XG paper, manufactured with electricity in the form of renewable energy (wind, hydro and biogas), virgin pulp from certified sources, and a minimum of 30% post-consumer recovered fiber. © Copyright 2013 The Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. Produced by the Nicholas School’s office of Marketing & Communications. Nicholas School of the EnvironmentDukeUniversity•Box90330•Durham,NorthCarolina•27708-0330,USA•Tel919.613.8004•Fax919.613.8719www.nicholas.duke.edu

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