N i c h o l a s Sc h o o l of t h e E nv i ro n m e nt s p r i n g 20 1 4

dukenvironment

Reshaping DecaDes-OlD

scientific ThEory

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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 Sky Alibhal, Zoe Jewell, Alexa Bach-McElrone MEM’03, Tawnee Milko MEM’12, and Shannon Switzer MEM’15Photography Jared Lazarus, Scottee Cantrell, Les Todd, Charlotte Lee, Svavar Jónatansson, Garth Lenz, Jeff Orlowski, Tad Pfeffer, Judy Rolfe, Brian Silliman, Stephane Wear, John Griffin, Emily Legout, James Nifong, Gaelin Rosenwaks and Scott TaylorWeb Editors Stephanie Thirolle and Brian Johnson

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dukenvironment spring 2014

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 2014 The Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University

Cover PhotoAmerican alligator eating a blue crab in a marine salt marsh. Photo by James Nifong

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cover storyAdministrationWilliam 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

Erika S. Weinthal, Associate Dean, International Programs

Scottee Cantrell, Associate Dean, Marketing, Communications and Strategic Engagement

James Haggard, Associate Dean, Finance and Administration

Kevin McCarthy, Associate Dean, External Affairs

Karen Kirchof, Assistant Dean, Career Services

Sherri Nevius, Assistant Dean, Executive and Distance Learning Programs

Cynthia Peters, Assistant Dean, Academic and Enrollment Services

John Robinson, Assistant Dean, Information Technology

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

Marcia Angle MD’81, Durham, NC

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

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

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

Vandana Dake Alliance Architecture PLLC, Durham, NC

Steven Elkes Manor Briarcliff, NY

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

Abigail Field Gerry T’02, New York, NY

Peter Layton Blackthorne Capital Management, Whitewater, WI

Anne Brownson Mize WC’68, Anne Mize & Associates, Seattle, WA

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

Barbara C. Smit T’79, Gladwyne, PA

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

Bradford Stanback T’81, Canton, NC

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

Shelli Stanback Canton, NC

Allison Taylor T’84, Stemens Corp., Washington, DC

Mark S. Trustin Attorney at Law, Durham, NC

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

John Warasila Alliance Architecture PLLC, Durham, NC

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

Leslie Jamka MEM’99, Cardno ENTRiX, New Castle, DE (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 CouncilKirsten Cappel MEM’04, U.S. EPA, Washington, DC (President)

Courtney Lorenz MEM’06, Skanska USA, Durham, NC (President-Elect)

Leslie Jamka MEM’99, Cardno ENTRiX, New Castle, DE (Past President)

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

Patrick Bean MEM’08, King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center, Saudi Arabia

Nick DiLuzio MF’10, Newfields, Atlanta, GA

Julia Elmore MEM’06, USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service, Raleigh, NC

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, EnerNoc, Boston, MA

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, Berkeley, CA

Margaret Peloso MEM’06, Vinson & Elkins LLC, Washington, DC

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

Paul Quinlan MEM/MPP’06, ScottMadden, Raleigh, NC

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

Stewart Tate MEM’96, The Shaw Tate Group, Charlotte, NC

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

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

Sara Lindenfield MEM’15, Student Representative

Megan Hayes MEM’15, Student Representative

RESHAPING DECADES-OLD SCIENTIFIC THEORY

Marine Lab’s Brian Silliman Finds Simple Things Have Huge Impacts on How Salt Marshes and Coastal Ecosystems Work

Nicholas School and E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation Launch New Initiatives

Changes in Ocean Circulation Focus of $16 Million Project

Smartphones: Powerful Tools for Science Education

5,900 Natural Gas Leaks Discovered Under Washington, D.C.

Photographer James Balog Receives Duke Leaf Award

PERSONALLY SPEAKING: Monitoring Endangered Species Without Further Endangering Them

Parting Thoughts

ExTRACTING OIL FROM SAND IN CANADA

QUEST FOR A CONFLICT-FREE DIAMONDStudent and Clarity Project Co-Founder Rachel Lichte Travels to War-Ravaged Sierra Leone to Take on the Problem at its Heart

DukeEnvent Aims to Unlock Aspiring Entrepreneurs’ Potential

Duke Startup Challenge to Offer $10,000 Prize for Best Environmental Startup

Bass Connections Program Tackles Complex Issues

THE ART OF ExPLORATIONGaelin Rosenwaks MEM ’04 Applies a Creative Lens to Bring Science to Society from Some of the Most Remote Corners of the Planet

CAREER MATTERS: Show Me The Money! Valuing Sustainability Expertise

DUKE ENVIRONMENT HALL OPENSThere’s Still Time—and Several Ways—for Friends of the Nicholas School to Make Their Mark

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news//students 20-27

dean’s forum 17

news//alumni 28-32

giving 33-34

calendar 35

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BY TIM LUCAS

Reshaping DecaDes-OlD

scientific ThEory

Marine Lab’s BRian silliman Finds Simple Things have huge Impacts on how Salt Marshes and Coastal Ecosystems Work by Tim Lucas

theRe aRe snails in BRian silliman’s BOOts, muD splat-teReD acROss his waDeRs, anD slices fROm cORDgRass leaves On his aRms. As he pushes deeper into the waist-high grasses, shells crunch underfoot and something darts through the shadowy water below. A crab perhaps. Or maybe a snake or baby alligator.

He stops, shifts for better footing in the spongy soil, and bends to get a closer view.

Silliman is in his happy place.At age 40, Silliman, who joined the

Nicholas School faculty last summer as Rachel Carson Associate Professor of Marine Conservation Biology, is among his generation’s most astute observers of salt marsh ecology.

His meticulously executed field stud-ies have reshaped decades-old scientific theory about how salt marshes and other coastal ecosystems work, the roles animal communities play in them, and human impacts on them.

Since 2001, he’s published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers; co-edited two books; won awards from the National Science Foundation, the Andrew Mel-low Foundation, and the American Society of Naturalists; and been named a David H. Smith Conservation Fellow at The Nature Conservancy and a visit-ing professor at the Royal Netherlands Society of Arts and Sciences.

It’s heady stuff. But today, as he intently scans the surrounding marsh grass for signs of unusual activity, Silli-man is focused on something closer at hand. He’s searching for inspiration.

“When I’m looking for a new proj-ect, I jump into the field. If I observe something happening that, theoretically, shouldn’t or couldn’t be happening, I’m hooked,” he says. “I’m drawn to things that seem to run counter to expecta-tions.”

It’s a path he’s followed since his undergraduate days at the University of Virginia, when, at the end of his junior year in 1994, he turned down a summer law internship to take part in a National Science Foundation Research for Under-graduates program in a salt marsh on the Virginia coast.

“I majored in history and environ-mental science and intended to go to

Marine Lab’s BRian silliman Finds Simple Things have huge Impacts on how Salt Marshes and Coastal Ecosystems Work by Tim Lucas

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law school, but didn’t want to look back on the NSF program as a missed oppor-tunity,” he says. “I’d never been to a salt marsh before. The idea of doing field re-search appealed to me and spending the summer at the coast also sounded good. So I went. And it changed my life.”

GETTING HIS FEET WETHis first assignment in the NSF program was to come up with the research proj-ect he wanted to conduct.

“In field work, you have to use what the environment provides,” he says, “so I walked out into the marsh and looked around. I figured I could either work with the snails that were filling my boots or the crabs that were constantly under my soles.”

Silliman was particularly intrigued to notice that periwinkle snails, the most common animal species in eastern U.S. salt marshes, were climbing up and down the leaves of many cordgrass plants.

“They were feeding on the grass in an unusual way, cutting the leaves with their teeth and eating fungus out of the cuts,” he explains. “This puzzled me. Marsh grasses were considered invin-cible—so tough and fibrous that they

were inedible while alive. According to what I had learned in class, animals weren’t supposed to be eating them. Yet I was observing the most abundant animal in the marsh doing just that. So I asked: Are these snails affecting the growth of the grasses? Answering that became my summer project.”

Using wire fencing from a local hard-ware store, he built a cage around a plot of grass to prevent snails from getting in. At the end of the summer, the grass inside the cage towered over unprotect-ed clumps nearby.

“It was like a monster Chia grass pok-ing up in the middle of the marsh. The cage had protected it and revealed that snails were exerting top-down control of the marsh. That was very novel,” he says. He proudly presented his findings and hypothesized that the snails could strongly regulate cordgrasses’ growth. An outside reviewer brought in by NSF to evaluate the students’ projects believed he was wrong and challenged him on it.

“He politely pooh-poohed what I had done,” Silliman recalls. “So I got excited and knew I had found something neat, and decided that instead of going to law school I would stay on and go for a PhD

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in ecology to prove my observation was right.”

After completing a master’s degree in environmental science at Virginia in 1999, he headed north to Brown University to pursue a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology under Mark Bertness, one of the world’s leading salt marsh ecologists. There, Silliman built upon his initial observations about snail-grass interactions to conduct a broader study of the role animals play in marsh productivity.

His findings upended prevailing scien-tific theory.

“By showing that crabs and other marsh predators inhibit the snails, which in turn inhibit the grasses, I was able to demonstrate that marsh produc-tivity and health are not just controlled by nutrient availability. Animals play a role, too,” he says. “Field experiments I conducted in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia showed this was not just a localized phenomenon.”

Silliman’s discovery of this simple “trophic cascade” implied that overhar-vesting of snail predators—including commercially harvested species like blue crabs—might be an important but previ-ously unrecognized factor contributing

to the massive die-off of salt marshes that was occurring across the southeast-ern United States

The research yielded another surprise, as well.

It turns out that the snails were farming fungus on the marsh grass. By cutting the grass with their teeth, they were creating an environment inside the cuts where invasive fungi could establish themselves and grow. It was the first example of fungus farming in a marine environment beyond insects, and it suggested that these snails were actively increasing their species’ odds of survival by generating their preferred food source, not just eating whatever they found.

“This was a previously undemonstrat-ed ecological mechanism through which grazers in a marine ecosystem exert top-down control of plant productivity,” Silliman says. “Clearly, these organisms were doing more than we gave them credit for.”

A BROADER FOCUSSilliman’s research under Bertness at Brown yielded two peer-reviewed publications in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and established him as a young ecologist to watch.

A subsequent paper, published in Science in 2005, less than a year after he completed his PhD, confirmed his stature.

By then, the massive die-off of southeastern salt marshes stretched from Louisiana to Georgia. Hundreds of thousands of acres of vital marsh habitat had been lost. Because the die-off coincided with a severe region-wide drought, many experts assumed the drought was to blame.

Based on his studies of the trophic cascade and the effects of overgrazing, and his knowledge of marshes’ natural resiliency, Silliman suspected it wasn’t that simple.

“I investigated and discovered the dead marshes were teeming with snails,” he says. “There were 2,000 to 3,000 snails per meter square. You couldn’t even see the ground in some places.”

Some scientists theorized that the snails were attracted to the dying grass, but field studies Silliman conducted in

the following months suggested other-wise. His work showed that as drought killed off some grasses within a marsh, snail populations began congregating in the remaining live patches. When they achieved critical mass in these patches, they killed this grass, too, and then spread to new areas of grass, which they also killed.

“It wasn’t just the drought,” he says. “We found that salt stress and snail stress are additive. When drought reduc-es water flow and increases a marsh’s salt content, plant growth is reduced by 50 percent. If you add in snail overgraz-ing, plant growth is reduced by another 50 percent. It’s a 100 percent loss. You have a dead ecosystem.”

It was the first time any research had shown that climate stress could trigger runaway consumption by grazers in any marine ecosystem.

Follow-up studies over the next four years in salt marshes in Chile, Brazil and Argentina proved the phenomenon of grazer control of marshes and overgraz-ing wasn’t isolated to the United States.

“We showed that you could no longer hold up salt marshes as trophy ecosys-tems that were controlled only from the bottom up by nutrients, or as systems that could handle just about anything humans or nature threw at them,” says Silliman, who by this time was a tenure-track member of the biology faculty at the University of Florida. “Marshes are resilient, but they have a breaking point.”

LESSONS FROM LOUISIANAFive years after the publication of his groundbreaking Science paper, Silliman turned his attention to another massive die-off of salt marshes. This time, how-ever, there was no question of where to place the blame.

“I remember watching the first news reports about the BP oil spill and feeling sick when I saw the oil washing up on Louisiana’s marshes,” he recalls.

To assess the damage and see if reme-diation efforts would work, he applied for $200,000 in funding from BP as part of their legal settlement. His team was on the ground in Louisiana three months later. They focused their study in marshes along Barataria Bay on the state’s southeastern coast, where some

of the heaviest oil came ashore.“It looked like a thick black belt

stretching for miles along the shoreline. You could see the grasses underneath it were dying and decaying,” he says. “Their roots were dissolving, leaving nothing to hold the soil in place.”

With little time to waste, Silliman set two chief goals for his team’s research. First, they would establish to what extent the oil spill was accelerating the loss of the region’s marshlands, many of which were already rapidly disap-pearing as the result of erosion. Second, they would document how long the oil-induced die-off continued, and what factors sped or delayed the regrowth needed to slow future erosion.

By measuring erosion over the next two years at three heavily to moderately oiled sites in Barataria Bay and com-paring it to erosion in three unaffected marshes, they found that oiled marshes in the bay were receding by about 10 feet a year—about twice the rate of non-oiled marshes.

“Doubling the rate of erosion is huge, especially in an area where you have rapid erosion taking place already,” notes Silliman. “If there had been a hurricane after the spill, the losses and erosion would have been even worse.”

The accelerated erosion lasted for about 18 months. By then, enough roots and grasses had regrown on exposed marsh flats just behind where the oil hit to establish a new line of defense.

Silliman and his team published their findings in PNAS in late 2012, just months after taking the final measure-ments.

It was important to get the paper out as quickly as possible, he explains, because it challenged one of the major theories of marsh ecology. Past studies on how salt marshes respond to oil spills had been done in small patches in marsh interiors, where the oil was introduced to test plots by the researchers. Those studies suggested marshes could recover relatively quickly. But in this case the spill affected around 45 linear miles of marshes, and the oil landed on the much more vulnerable edge of the marshes, where rapid erosion was already occur-ring.

“This taught us a lesson,” Silliman says. “Using small-scale tests to predict

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how an ecosystem will respond to a di-saster like an oil spill has serious limita-tions. We need to scale up our research. Location and scale really matter.”

PROUD TO BE A DUKIEIn 2013, Silliman left the University of Florida to join the Nicholas School fac-ulty as Rachel Carson Associate Profes-sor of Marine Conservation Biology at the Duke Marine Lab in Beaufort, N.C.

Although he earned his undergradu-ate and masters degrees at a rival ACC school, and was raised in Louisville, Ky.—where, rumor has it, they play bas-ketball, too—he jumped at the chance to become a Blue Devil.

“From a professional perspective, the history of the Duke Marine Lab was a huge draw. It’s one of the most influ-ential marine science institutes in the world,” he says. “And from a personal perspective, how could I say no? I come from a big basketball family. My uncle, Olympic gold medalist Mike Silliman, played with Coach K at West Point.”

The proximity of Beaufort to the ma-rine environment doesn’t hurt, he adds. His office in the newly opened Orrin H. Pilkey Research Laboratory overlooks Beaufort Inlet and the Rachel Carson National Estuary. And in off-hours, he and his wife, Stephanie Wear, lead scientist for coral reef conservation at The Nature Conservancy, love exploring local marshes, creeks and beaches with their children, Parker, 7, and Leah, 4. “Parker loves snakes and reptiles, and has even caught alligators with me, and Leah loves to collect shells and marsh plants,” he notes with pride.

Despite moving his lab and family more than 650 miles from Florida to North Carolina, the pace of Silliman’s workplace productivity hasn’t slowed.

He’s preparing to teach two courses at the Marine Lab, one on marine ecology and the other on Caribbean ecology and conservation, taught partly in the Carib-bean. He’s assumed duties as director of the Certificate in Marine Science and Conservation program for undergradu-ates. And 10 new studies of his, many conducted with former students at Flor-ida, have been published or accepted for

publication. They include a study in the online Journal PLOS ONE that used in-novative imaging technologies to reveal novel insights into the foraging behavior of alligators, and a paper in PNAS last December that—once again—reshaped scientific theory by showing that it’s quality, not just quantity, of species diversity that matters when it comes to enhancing how well a marsh ecosystem functions.

A lot of his findings may sound like simple common sense, he acknowledges with a laugh. Of course the quality of species diversity matters. Of course animal communities play important roles in marsh functioning. Can anyone be surprised that the size and location of test plots matter?

“These things should surprise no care-ful observer. But they do,” Silliman says. “That’s what I love about field research. The most creative things, in hindsight, often seem the simplest.”

Tim Lucas is senior writer for Dukenviron-ment magazine and is the Nicholas School’s director of marketing communications.

IMAGES

P4 Clockwise from top left: Brian Silliman in the marsh in Beaufort, N.C., Photo by Scott Taylor; Silliman on the rocky shore of Argentina where average wind speeds are ~ 45km/ hr, Photo by Stephanie Wear; Periwinkle snail farming fungus on a marsh grass leaf, Photo by John Griffin; Blue crab swimming in the marsh at high tide and reaching out of the water to grab and then eat a marsh snail, Photo by Silliman; 11-foot American alligator entering a fully marine salt marsh creek to forage on fish, sharks and rays, Photo by James Nifong. Center: Baby marsh snails hiding from predators in the furls of dead leaves, Photo by Silliman.

P6 Top left: Silliman in the marsh in Beaufort, N.C., Photo by Scott Taylor. Top right: Silliman with alligator captured in a mangrove creek in Florida. A satellite tracker was fastened to the gator before release, Photo by James Nifong.

P8 Top: Experimental manipulation of invasive marine algae to test how it impacts fisheries, wave attenuation and native diversity, Photo by Aaron Ramus. Bottom: Silliman and colleagues exploring the rocky shores of the Bahamas in his annual tropical marine ecology course, Photo by Marc Hensel.

orrin h. Pilkey research Laboratory opening this May

Brian Silliman’s office is in the newly

opened orrin h. Pilkey research

Laboratory at the Duke Marine Lab.

overlooking Beaufort Inlet and the

rachel Carson National Estuary,

the Pilkey Lab has faculty, research

and common areas as well as a class-

room designed for courses that

use molecular techniques.

Research collaborations, graduate student projects, and a graduate-level course taught by legendary scientist E.O. Wilson are among the initiatives that will stem from a landmark agreement signed by Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment and the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation.

“I am so excited about this new partnership. By pooling the school’s strengths in environmental research and teaching with the foundation’s expertise on biodiversity—and the extraordinary leadership and vision of E.O. Wilson—we will create a unique and powerful force for the enlightened stewardship of the planet,” says William L. Chameides, dean of the Nicholas School. “And, for our students and faculty: what an incredible opportunity.”

Says Wilson, “Our agreement with Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment is an extraordinary advance for the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Founda-tion’s mission, and, given the school’s

tremendous respect for the biodiversity research leadership of his colleagues at the Nicholas School,” says Paula Ehrlich, president and chief executive officer of the Wilson Foundation. “He is thrilled to have this opportunity to engage with faculty and students, and to advance the foundation’s mission to promote a cul-ture of biodiversity stewardship through this agreement.”

The E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Founda-tion (www.eowilsonfoundation.org) was founded in 2006 and is inspired by Wilson’s lifelong work to foster a knowing stewardship of our world through bio-diversity research and education initia-tives that promote and inform worldwide preservation of our biological heritage.

Widely hailed as the father of the modern field of sociobiology, Wilson is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has been awarded a U.S. National Medal of Science, the Carl Sa-gan Award for Public Understanding of Science, a TED Prize, and two Pulitzer Prizes for general nonfiction, among more than 100 other high honors. In addition to authoring more than 430 peer-reviewed scientific papers, he has written numerous best-selling books on science and society, including Letters to a Young Scientist, On Human Nature, and The Social Conquest of Earth. In recognition of his achievements, he has been named one of the century’s lead-ing environmentalists by both Time and Audubon magazines. He is University Research Professor Emeritus at Harvard University.

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national leadership in environmental science, an opportunity to bring biodiver-sity studies to the level of capability in research and education they deserve.”

Under the agreement, Wilson will teach one course a year at the Nicholas School, beginning with the one-credit course “Environment 590: Biodiversity and the Meaning of Human Existence” he taught this spring. Plans are in the works to make the course available to a worldwide audience on iTunesU.

Additionally, the Wilson Foundation will be based as an independent foun-dation at the Nicholas School, with offices in the school’s new home, Duke Environment Hall. The foundation will work closely with the school’s faculty and students to advance the cause of biodiversity through education, research and outreach.

“Dr. Wilson grew up in the South and has a warm affection for the Duke com-munity. He received an honorary doctoral degree from Duke in 1978 and has

IMAGES Top: E.O. Wilson Photo by Beth Maynor Young.Left: E.O. Wilson at Duke lecture by Jared Lazrus, Duke Photography.

Nicholas School and E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation Launch New Initiatives

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Oceanographers from Duke University, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institu-tion and the University of Miami have received $16 million in grants from the National Science Foundation for the deployment of a new observing system in the subpolar region of the North Atlantic. The observing system will measure the ocean’s overturning circulation, a key component of the global climate system.

The five-year initiative is part of the $32 million, U.S.-led Overturning in the Subpolar North Atlantic Program (OSNAP). International collaborators include scientists from Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and the Netherlands.

The goal of the program is to simulta-neously measure the surface ocean cur-rents that carry heat northward toward the Arctic Ocean and the deep ocean currents that carry cooler waters south-ward toward the equator. Together, these currents form the overturning circulation that plays a role in redistributing heat from the equator to the poles. Recent modeling studies have shown that changes in this circulation would have a critical impact on temperatures and precipitation in North America, Europe and Africa.

“In addition to measuring the variabil-ity of the ocean overturning, OSNAP is strongly focused on understanding what factors create those changes,” says Su-san Lozier, the international project lead and a physical oceanographer at Duke’s

Nicholas School of the Environment. “For decades, oceanographers have

understood the overturning circulation to be highly susceptible to changes in the temperature and salinity of surface waters in the subpolar North Atlantic. With increasing ocean temperatures, and increased ice melt that impacts the salinity of the surface waters, it is timely to establish just how climate changes might affect the strength of the overturn-ing circulation,” Lozier explains.

Likewise, the OSNAP array affords the opportunity to study how overturn-ing changes impact the environment. OSNAP measurements will facilitate the study of how changes in the northward flow of warm water affects the reduction of Arctic sea ice and the shrinking of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

Duke, Woods Hole and Miami ocean-ographers, along with their international partners, will deploy moored instruments and sub-surface floats across the subpo-lar North Atlantic during the summer of 2014. The measurement period will last until 2018.

The OSNAP program was designed at an international workshop Lozier led at Duke in April 2010.

In addition to Lozier, principal U.S. investigators of the new program are Amy Bower, Fiamma Straneo and Robert Pickart, scientists in physical oceanography at Woods Hole Oceanographic, and William Johns, professor of meteorology and physical oceanography at the University of Miami.

CHANGES IN Ocean Circulation FOCUS OF $16 MILLION PROJECT

That smartphone in your purse or pocket isn’t just for viewing movies and check-ing Facebook. By putting data collection, visualization and learning in the palm of your hand, it’s helping to transform science education and open up unprece-dented opportunities for citizen science.

That’s the message of a persuasive new peer-reviewed commentary pub-lished by two Duke University faculty members in EOS, the weekly magazine of the American Geophysical Union.

“With more than six billion smart-phones and mobile devices being used worldwide, this technology presents enormous possibilities—especially for the environmental sciences,” says Zackary I. Johnson, Arthur P. Kaupe As-sistant Professor of Molecular Biology at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environ-ment.

In the commentary, Johnson and fel-low Duke Marine Lab faculty member David W. Johnston share detailed exam-ples of some of the ways they and other geoscientists around the world are using the small but sophisticated handheld devices in the classroom, lab and field.

“We’re using them to search textbooks and reference works; share lab protocols; access notes and teaching tools; record real-time field data; take measure-ments and images—the list of functions grows with each new device or app,” says Johnston, assistant professor of the practice of marine conservation and ecology. “The new Android smartphone has a thermometer, compass, gyro, GPS,

barometer and proximity sensors—all in addition to its standard audio, video and photo interfaces. It’s crazy what these devices can do now.”

In an undergraduate-level ocean eco-system course Johnson teaches, students use smartphones to take photos of ocean color. Using the phones’ sensors and data processing tools, they can break the color of the water down into its three primary colors and develop algorithms to calculate algae populations in that part of the ocean.

“This is exactly the same as what sophisticated satellite imagery does. Only now, students can do it with their smartphones,” Johnson says. “They are functioning as very low Earth-orbiting satellites.”

Graduate students in Johnston’s ma-rine mammal courses use a smartphone app to measure an equally challenging environmental parameter: distance to objects. Measuring these distances is a fundamental way scientists measure spe-cies populations in the ocean. It tradi-tionally involves expensive equipment

with considerable error associated with the measurements. Using an advanced view-finding app called Theodolite (http://hunter.pairsite.com/theodolite), students learn how do it in less time with less error.

“Examples like these make a strong case for how smartphones and mobile devices fit into the best practices way of teaching,” Johnson stresses. “They help us be more effective teachers through increased emphasis on experiential learning.”

Johnson and Johnston’s work is funded by a National Science Foundation grant and Duke’s Innovations in Teaching in an m-Environment program.

Smartphones:Powerful Tools for Science Education

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More than 5,893 leaks from aging natu-ral gas pipelines have been found under the streets of Washington, D.C. by a research team from Duke University and Boston University.

A dozen of the leaks could have posed explosion risks, the researchers say. Some manholes had methane concen-trations as high as 500,000 parts per million of natural gas—about 10 times greater than the threshold at which ex-plosions can occur.

Four months after phoning in the leaks to city authorities, the research team returned and found that nine were still emitting dangerous levels of methane. “Finding the leaks a second time, four months after we first reported them, was really surprising,” says Robert B. Jackson, a professor of environmental sciences at Duke who led the study.

The researchers published their find-ings in January in the peer-reviewed jour-nal Environmental Science & Technology.

“Repairing these leaks will improve air quality, increase consumer health and safety, and save money,” Jackson says. “Pipeline safety has been improving over the last two decades. Now is the time to make it even better.”

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 explosion hazard, natural gas leaks also pose another threat: Methane, the primary ingredient of natural gas, is a powerful greenhouse gas that also can catalyze ozone for-mation. Pipeline leaks are the largest human-caused source of methane in the United States and contribute to $3 bil-lion of lost and unaccounted-for natural gas each year.

Jackson’s team collaborated with researchers from Boston University and Gas Safety Inc., on the new study. The team mapped gas leaks under all 1,500 road miles within Washington using a high-precision Picarro G2301 Cavity Ring-Down Spectrometer installed in a GPS-equipped car. Laboratory analyses confirmed that the isotopic chemical signatures of the methane and ethane found in the survey closely matched that of pipeline gas.

The average methane concentration observed in the leaks was about 2.5 times higher than in background air samples collected in the city. Methane levels in some leaks were as high as 89 parts per million, about 45 times higher

than normal background levels. The team also measured how much

methane was coming from four individual street-level leaks. “Methane emissions from these four leaks ranged from 9,200 to 38,200 liters per day for each leak—that’s comparable to the amount of natural gas used by between 2 and 7 homes,” says Duke PhD student Adrian Down.

Last year, the team mapped more than 3,300 natural-gas pipeline leaks beneath 785 road miles in the city of Boston. “The average density of leaks we mapped in the two cities is comparable, but the average methane concentrations are higher in Washington,” says Nathan G. Phillips, a professor at Boston Univer-sity’s Department of Earth and Environ-ment and a Nicholas School PhD alum.

Co-authoring the new study with Jackson, Down and Phillips were Charles W. Cook and Kaiguang Zhao, of Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment; Robert C. Ackley of Gas Safety Inc.; and Desiree L. Plata of Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering.

Funding came from Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment and the Duke Center on Global Change.

5,900 Natural Gas Leaks Discovered Under Washington, D.C.

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Award-winning nature photographer James Balog, who was featured in the acclaimed documentary Chasing Ice and has exhibited work in more than 100 museums and galleries worldwide, is the recipient of the 2014 Duke LEAF Award for Lifetime Environmental Achievement in the Fine Arts.

“As a photographer, James Balog inspires us to action for the environ-ment through both shock and awe. His shocking pictorial record of change in the Arctic brings home the realities of climate change in a way that scientific facts and figures cannot. His awe-inspir-ing documentation of the beauty and grandeur of the natural world can reach deep down into our very being and pro-foundly connect us to the natural world,” says Nicholas School Dean William L. Chameides. “The LEAF Award selection committee was impressed not only by Balog’s artistry, but also the scientific significance of his work and the visceral emotional punch it can deliver.”

Best known for his dramatic photos and time-lapse videos documenting the rapid melting of ancient glaciers as a

result of climate change, Balog has been a leader in photographing and artistically interpreting the natural environment for three decades. He and his Extreme Ice Survey team were featured in the inter-nationally acclaimed 2012 documentary Chasing Ice and in the 2009 NOVA special Extreme Ice. He is the author of ICE: Portraits of Vanishing Glaciers and seven other books.

The Duke LEAF has been given an-nually in April since 2009 to an artist whose work lifts the human spirit by conveying our profound connections to the Earth, inspiring others to help forge a more sustainable future for all. Past recipients are Robert Redford, Jackson Browne, Barbara Kingsolver, John Sayles and Alexander McCall Smith.

In addition to his museum and gal-lery exhibitions, Balog’s photos have been published extensively in National Geographic and other major magazines. He has been honored with many awards, including, in recent years, the American Geophysical Union’s Presidential Cita-tion for Science and Society, a 2010 Heinz Award, and an honorary Doctor

of Science degree from the University of Alberta. In 2009, he served as a NASA representative at the United Na-tions Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen.

“It is hard to see the effects of chang-ing climate,” Balog has said, “but when ice melts people intuitively know what that means. Melting glaciers are the most visually dramatic manifestations of climate change on the Earth today. If everyone could hear the story the ice is trying to tell us, there’s no way we would be having an argument about whether humans are causing climate change. We are.”

Photographer James Balog Receives Duke Leaf Award

IMAGES Top Left: Balog at Jøkulsårlon, Iceland, March 5, 2005. Photograph by Svavar Jónatansson/Extreme Ice Survey.Top Right: Balog installing time-lapse camera at Columbia Glacier, Alaska, May 2007. Photograph by Tad Pfeffer.Bottom: Balog at minus 30 degrees F, Disko Bay, Green-land, March 3, 2008. Photograph by Jeff Orlowski/Extreme Ice Survey.

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MONITORING ENDANGERED SPECIES

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by Zoe Jewell and Sky Alibhai

It had been an average day at work: an 18-mile hike in desiccating 100-degree heat, navigating by VHF radio transmitter through scorched woodlands and around rocky outcrops favored by deadly black mamba snakes. Our quarry had evaded us, and, exhausted, we were about to call it a day.

Just then the wind changed. The red dust rose in a huge cloud, momentarily suffocating us. And she was right in front of us: An agitated mother black rhinoceros with a newborn calf hugging her side. She snorted furiously. Less than a heartbeat later, she put down her enormous head and charged.

A rhino’s one-ton bulk belies a fantas-tic agility, turning radius and speed. We blundered behind a tree—the standard bush emergency exit—and registered only a thundering grey flash as she and her calf blurred past us, deep into the Mopane woodland. It was one of many close calls. (Image 1)

This particular rhino was a survivor. It was the early 1990’s, and South and East Africa’s black rhinos were being poached for their horns at unprec-edented rates. Field stations around the country were filled with rhino skulls, each with a bullet hole and jagged cra-ters in the nasal and frontal bones where desperately poor locals had hacked the horns off with a machete. (Image 2) They were paid by middlemen who profited by shipping the horns to the Far East for use in traditional medicine.

We had been asked by the Zimbab- wean Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management to help assess the extent of this problem and perhaps contribute to a national conservation

strategy for Zimbabwe’s rhinos. Zoe had recently graduated from Cambridge Uni-versity, U.K., and was beginning a veteri-nary career. Sky had a tenured position lecturing in zoology at the University of London. We’d been running a project on small mammal population dynamics in eastern Zimbabwe, and had the monitor-ing expertise and a willingness to stay on and help address this challenge. What did we have to lose?

Our first posting was the remote and beautiful Sengwa Wildlife Research Institute in northwest Zimbabwe, ac-cessed by a bumpy grass airstrip covered in rabbit dugouts. The field station was a low cluster of British Colonial buildings perched on a majestic plateau in the middle of nowhere. The officer in charge had a collection of poorly contained venomous snakes. Our first season was spent walking transects to count signs of rhino. We were often called back to base because National Parks employed a shoot-to-kill policy for poachers, and both sides were armed with Russian AK-47s.

Desperate measures were required, and, at huge cost, the parks department decided to launch a new conservation strategy to radio-collar and de-horn each black rhino in Zimbabwe. Four Intensive Protection Zones were set up for black rhino protection, and we were deployed to the Sinamatella, in Hwange National Park. We stayed 10 years, collecting data on births, deaths, collaring epi-sodes, immobilizations and distribution of each animal in this 580-square-mile area. We had wonderful help from tire-less Earthwatch volunteers, students and colleagues. In the end, we had gathered an unprecedented database on black rhino demographics. Over the following

year, we carefully examined these data to see how the conservation strategy was working.

The results were truly alarming. Not only were radio collars failing at an unacceptable rate, but female black rhino fertility was being compromised. Females immobilized more often (for repeated collar re-fitting) had fewer calves. The conservation strategy was not just ineffective, it was actually counter-productive.

So we published...and were damned! Nobody wanted to hear that the new strategy wasn’t working. We were hauled up to defend ourselves in front of the Zimbabwean Department of National Parks and ostracized from the rhinoc-eros monitoring community. Since then, many other researchers have published on the negative impacts of invasive monitoring techniques, although this scholarship is rarely discussed in the scientific press.

Meanwhile, we began to look for a better solution to keeping track of these animals without disturbing or immobiliz-ing them. Paradoxically, one answer had been staring us in the face all along: footprints.

Every day, on our walks through the bush, we were accompanied by an expert tracker, usually a member of the Ndebele tribe. These men had, like many indigenous peoples living amongst wildlife, grown up tracking. Their senses were finely tuned. They could spot a rhino footprint from the back of a Land Rover travelling at 25 miles per hour along a bumpy dirt road. They could hear the chirp of an oxpecker on the back of a rhinoceros a kilometer away. They could smell rhino urine on bushes. They knew which trees rhino liked to lie under

Indigenous wisdom combined with cutting-edge technology

WIThOuT FuRThER ENDANGERING ThEM:

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during the heat of the day. They could tell exactly where a rhino had gone by the shrubs it browsed, and even knew the order in which it had browsed them. We’d ask the scout, “Where do you think the rhino is?” He’d laugh and point to the ground.

Above all, they could identify individu-al rhinos from their footprints. (Image 3)

This made us think about morphomet-rics. Feet, and therefore footprints, vary by species, of course, but like finger-prints, they also vary by individual. But it’s complicated, because each foot-print an animal lays down has a unique character and structure determined by surface, wind direction, gait, pace and light direction. Then of course each animal has four feet to consider. All this had to be taken into account if we were to stand a chance of identifying individu-als from their footprints.

Before the dawn of digital technology, we spent a summer inhaling dust and waiting to be trampled to death as we kneeled over footprints, tracing them on acetate. Then Agfa came to our rescue and donated four first-generation digital cameras. We were back on track! We dis-covered JMP data visualization software from SAS Institute and were able to cus-tomize it with the help of the software’s developers. Working from our digital pho-tos, this wonderfully flexible tool enables us to identify footprints at the species, individual and age-class levels, using a statistical model that provides levels of accuracy greater than 90 percent. In this way, we’ve been able to mesh cutting-edge computational analytics with some of the wisdom gleaned from millennia of human experience.

Two years ago we came in from the conservation wilderness. We had learned

of the wonderful work that Stuart Pimm’s group is doing at the Nicholas School to reverse the catastrophic loss of biodiversity. Stuart invited us to visit his research family. His group looks at global and landscape scale species conservation issues. We help fill in the detail of those pieces for the big picture. In 2014–15, we’re offering a course on non-invasive monitoring techniques, using JMP software and supported by Duke’s Africa Initiative. It will also feature a field course in Namibia where students can learn from San bushmen, at an Academy for Ancient Skills. To the best of our knowledge this combination will be a world-first.

WildTrack, which we founded in 2004, is a 501(c)3 organization dedicated to developing and applying better monitor-ing tools for endangered species. We have partner projects and collaborators all over the world, with studies of Amur tigers (Image 4) and giant pandas in China, mountain lions in Texas, black rhinos and cheetahs in Namibia and tapirs in Brazil. In the Research Triangle of North Carolina, we’re collaborating with North Carolina State University on the development of automated image segmentation for FIT (Footprint Identi-fication Technique), talking with Duke medical doctors about the possible use of FIT for identifying premature babies, and working with colleagues from the Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh to adapt FIT software for quantifying herbivory in rainforest canopies. Of course, we continue our software devel-opment and enhancement with JMP at

SAS, which is located nearby in Cary.We’re also investigating new tools for

our non-invasive toolbox, such as using trace DNA from footprints and deploy-ing drones to find trails of Amur tigers in northeast China.

Biodiversity is a resource worth an estimated $40 trillion a year, and moni-toring biodiversity is now arguably the biggest global challenge we face. Our joint 50 years of experience in conserva-tion monitoring has convinced us that good ethics in conservation promote bet-ter scientific outcomes. If the techniques we use harm a species we study, then our data simply can’t provide reliable in-formation on numbers and distribution. Non-invasive approaches are not only more cost-effective and humane, but can also engage and revive the amazing tra-ditional ecological skills of local people before they, like the species they share space with, are lost forever.

All Image courtesy Zoe Jewell and Sky Alibhai

FOR MORE www.wildtrack.org WildTrack working with Amur tigers in China: youtube/Qy6u91gzMjg

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Sky Alibhai, a wildlife biologist, and Zoe Jewell, a veterinarian, are visiting research scientists at JMP software, a division of SAS Institute, in Cary, N.C., and at the Nicholas School of the Environment. They founded WildTrack in 2004 in response to interest in the research community in non-invasive techniques for monitoring wildlife.

dean’s forum

much fun, and so deeply satisfying.Despite some bumps in the road,

perhaps most notably the Great Reces-sion, the period of my deanship saw significant progress for the school. In studies ranging from flame retardant exposure in children to humpback whales in Antarctica, from fracking in Pennsylvania to the economics of fish, our faculty continued to push the envelope of understanding while inform-ing public policy. There was nothing new there; the Nicholas faculty has always been the world’s best. There also were major changes. We hired 28 regular rank faculty, increased our professional degree student body by 30 percent while raising the GRE scores and GPAs of our matriculants, and we are about to move into two new buildings—the Pilkey Center at the Marine Lab and Environ-ment Hall on the Durham campus. We built much stronger ties to the corporate sector with new certificates in sustain-able systems analysis and environmental entrepreneurship and innovation, and a reinvigorated concurrent degree program with Fuqua. Notably, 38 percent of our graduates from 2012 found employment in the private sector. Perhaps most sig-nificant is the shift in the school culture from one that emphasized divisions and disciplines to one that hews to a shared vision and mission.

I am most proud of the fact that over the seven years of my tenure as dean, the Nicholas School graduated almost

1,000 students—some as PhDs and most with a Master of Environmental Management or Forestry degree. What an amazing group of young men and wom-en—with know-how, the passion, and the commitment to change the world. Al-ready many of them have begun to make their mark and move the sustainability needle a bit in the right direction.

My time as dean has been, without question, the high point of my profes-sional career. I am so grateful to the entire Duke community, but especially to the Nicholas School faculty and staff, my Administrative Leadership Team and our wonderful Board of Visitors, as well as the incomparable Duke leadership for giving me the opportunity to lead this great school, forgiving my mistakes and showing me the way to the successes.

Alas, even wonderful times must end. Like most academic programs, the Nicholas School is a work in progress. And given our mission to create knowl-edge and leaders of consequence for a sustainable future there is much to accomplish. My decision to step down at this juncture is based on my conclusion that a change in leadership represents the best path forward to meet our chal-lenges.

William L. Chameides is dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and Nicholas Professor of the Environment

by William L. Chameides

For much of the world, spring is a time of renewal and new beginnings. But in academe, it also brings a sense of time growing short. With the academic year winding down and plans for graduation underway, the spring can be a bitter-sweet season. This is especially so on commencement day, when we see our newly minted graduates accept their diplomas, bid us adieu, and embark on their new lives far from campus and our classrooms and labs.

This spring is a particularly bittersweet time for me. On June 30, I will step down as dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and join the entire Nicholas School community in wel-coming a new dean. This graduation, not only will I bid adieu to the class of 2014, I will also bid adieu to the title of dean and all that it implies.

I came to Duke seven years ago with little idea of what a deanship at Duke and more importantly a deanship for the School of the Environment entailed. I was confident of two things: the future trajectory of our planet is unsustainable, and the Nicholas School of the Environ-ment, with its world-class faculty and unique graduate programs, was one of the best places to be if one wanted to turn that trajectory in a more favorable direction. I was not wrong in that assess-ment. I had not anticipated the job to be as challenging as it turned out to be. I also was surprised, and pleasantly so, to find the deanship so all-consuming, so

PARTING THOUGHTS

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feature

Fact-Finding TripExTRACTING OIL FROM SAND IN CANADAIn a remote area of Alberta, Canada, in the boreal forest and wetlands are the Athabasca Oil Sands (or Tar Sands, depending on which group you are talking to about them). In this area, more earth is being moved than probably anywhere else in the world to extract oil from bitumen-laced sand. To get to it, oil producers have to cut down the forest, remove tons of peat and sand, and heat gallons of water to strip the sand and upgrade it. Contaminated water used in the process is then discharged into tailings ponds to settle out. Oil too deep to be extracted this way is brought up using an in-situ process that involves injecting steam, solvents and hot air into the sands. A small Nicholas School fact-finding team went to Fort McMurray, the heart of Canada’s major oil production hub, in late fall to get an up close view of this oil extraction process and its impacts, and to get some water samples for potential research by Avner Vengosh, professor of geochemistry and water quality, and his team. Canadian photographer Garth Lenz joined the team this fall and shot these photos of the mining and in-situ opera-tions, and of the tailings ponds. Photos by Garth Lenz; center right image by Scottee Cantrell.

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Student and Clarity Project Co-Founder Rachel Lichte Travels to War-Ravaged Sierra Leone

to Take on the Problem at its Heartby Shannon Switzer MEM ’15

QuEST For A CoNFLICT-FrEE

DiamOnD

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EvEry yEAr, MorE ThAN 2 MILLIoN PEoPLE TIE ThE kNoT.

That equates to millions of diamonds being placed on the hands of newly engaged people each year. Historically, many of these diamonds have come from countries torn by civil wars, or have been mined by disenfranchised, sometimes enslaved, workers.

So what is a star-struck lover to do if he (or she) doesn’t want to support such a corrupt system?

Until several years ago, there were few environmentally and socially sound options.

But Nicholas School graduate student Rachel Lichte MEM/MBA ’14 is work-ing to change that.

Lichte has co-founded Clarity Proj-ect, a start-up that sells conflict-free diamond jewelry. The company seeks to recast the diamond industry as a driver of development and prosperity in impoverished mining communities. They craft fine jewelry with diamonds that meet high social and environmental standards, using a portion of profits to support community development.

Lichte established the company in 2009 after several of her friends be-came engaged. Her friends knew about conflict diamonds and wanted an alternative, but became discouraged and frustrated when they couldn’t find one.

Realizing there was an unmet need, Lichte joined forces with some childhood friends and formed Clarity Project.

“Despite the high value of diamonds, many mining communities remain in extreme poverty,” she says. “We knew the system was broken, and people were suffering because of it.”

Earlier efforts to curb international trade in conflict diamonds through sanc-tions and third-party certification had fallen short of their goal, she explains. One of the most promising of these ef-forts, the 2003 Kimberley Process Certifi-cation Scheme, had been deemed ineffec-tual by several non-profit organizations including Human Rights Watch and Global Witness. The groups cited the dif-ficulty of tracing a diamond’s true origin as well as the ease with which Kimberley Process papers could be falsified as the reasons for the program’s failure.

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A different approach was needed.To learn how they could help,

Lichte and her start-up co-founders Jesse Finfrock, Shane Rogers and G. Ryan Asin made multiple visits to small-scale mining operations in the diamond-rich, war-torn West African country of Sierra Leone, and met with lawyers and members of mining com-munities across the region. What they saw and learned convinced them that ignoring the situation or wishing it away would simply make it worse.

“Whole communities depend on in-come from these small-scale mines. We realized if we wanted to make a differ-ence, we would have to engage with the industry and change it for the better,” Lichte says.

Lichte, a Northern California na-tive, is in her third year in the MEM/MBA program at Duke, a joint degree between the Fuqua School of Business and the Nicholas School of the Environ-ment. She helped found Duke ENVENT, a student-led environmental entrepre-neurship group, and has spent the last few years juggling school responsibilities while building her start-up.

This has meant spending months on the ground in Sierra Leone, in chiefdoms like Kono, where much of the most brutal conflict in the nation’s recent civil war was concentrated. Rebel forces exacted a heavy toll on local commu-nities in Kono, which to this day has Sierra Leone’s highest percentage of amputees—war victims who had limbs chopped off by rebel forces. In addition, all but six schools were destroyed dur-ing the conflict.

Employing translators, Lichte spoke with local NGOs, “community mam-mas,” and diamond miners to glean more information about the current situation.

Through their initial investigative work, the team found that in addition to serious social issues, the artisanal mines, which account for 20 percent of the nation’s diamond industry, also cause significant environmental degradation.

When digging for diamonds, miners often remove the nutrient rich topsoil and layers of sand and clay beneath it and discard this “overburden” in nearby rivers, leaving behind deep pits that are abandoned and can quickly fill with

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water once mining ceases. These pits increase the risk of accidental drowning, and create breeding grounds for malaria and schistosomiasis, a parasitic infection that can damage internal organs and impair children’s growth and cognitive development. The unsustainable mining practices also leave behind large swaths of barren and agriculturally unproduc-tive land.

Despite the overwhelming scale of the environmental and social problems, it was clear to Lichte and her partners that if they could make small changes, they could have a big impact—even if a local supply of sustainable mined diamonds didn’t yet exist.

“We realized that we had to start somewhere, and if our first attempt was the best thing on the market, that was a good place to begin. Then we could keep refining it from there,” she says.

Because there were no socially or environmentally responsible mining operations in Sierra Leone, Lichte and per partners decided they didn’t want to source their first diamonds from that area. Instead, they worked closely with the Fair Trade in Gems and Jewelry to source gems from the Liqhobong Diamond Cooperative, a women’s co-op in Lesotho, and to track down reclaimed gold from U.S. sources.

And their prototype ring was born. Clarity Project has since sold dozens

of rings, and according to Lichte, their greatest challenge is now scaling up the operation and converting its legal status to one that will allow them to keep up with demand and do the greatest good back on the ground in Sierra Leone.

To ensure that the communities providing the gemstones they use are earning a more equitable chunk of the $7.7 billion global diamond market, Clarity Project has teamed up with local nonprofit Shine on Sierra Leone (SOSL) to donate all of their net profits to fund SOSL projects.

Although net profits from each ring are modest, collectively they add up. An average one-carat sustainable diamond ring can sell for around $15,000, depending on the gem’s cut, color and clarity as well as the ring design

To date, the company has contributed net profits from its sales to four adult literacy programs and funded teacher

salaries at the Muddy Lotus Primary School in Kono, supporting education for more than 1,000 primary schools and 300 adult students.

She and her colleagues are now switching the company’s legal status from an limited liability corporation (LLC) to a c-corporation—a distinction that means its profits are taxed at the corporate levels. They are also shifting Clarity Project’s giving model. This will allow the company to begin investing in operating its own diamond mines in Sierra Leone, and incorporating all the knowledge they’ve gained thus far about running a socially and environmentally responsible artisanal mine.

Customers say they appreciate both the beauty of the rings Clarity Project sells, and their social and environmental benefits.

“The quality and design of the ring is amazing. I’ve received so many compliments on it from friends, fam-ily and complete strangers,” says Jenné Greene of Redwood City, Calif. Greene says that while her fiancé felt buying a conflict-free diamond was important, she hadn’t been aware of the social and environmental issues related to diamond mining prior to receiving the ring. “I think it [conflict-free] is important now that I have been educated about the process,” she says.

Despite having growing numbers of happy customers like Greene, there is still much room for Clarity Project to grow, Lichte says.

“If the company does scale up to a vertically integrated supply chain, there’s potential for it to make a signifi-cant difference for both consumers and miners,” she says.

Clarity Project’s future plans include working with a third party certification through the Diamond Development Initiative based in Canada. They also hope to work closely with organizations like LifeAfter Diamonds, a nonprofit that helps teach miners a variety of professional and personal skills, from the value of having a savings account to the importance of reclaiming soil for agriculture after mining ceases.

By working on the ground to help train the miners, Lichte believes Clar-ity Project can directly invest capital, knowledge and resources back into the

community, rather than just dollar bills. They also will know the exact condi-tions under which their diamonds were mined.

Many of the innovative practices she hopes to integrate into Clarity Project’s operation were honed through her classwork at the Nicholas School. She cites ongoing work with her adviser, Erika Weinthal, an expert on conflict and environment, as well as a course on soil resources, taught by Dan Richter, professor of soils and forest ecology, as being especially influential.

“From Dean Chameides to human rights activist John Prendergast, the network through the Nicholas School and Fuqua has been game-changing for Clarity Project,” Lichte says.

Shannon Switzer MEM ’15 is a member of the Duke Environment blogging team and is a Nicholas School communications assistant.

IMAGES

P20 Clockwise from top left: A worker hand sifts for diamonds in a shaker; Rachel Lichte, December 2013; Sierra Leone landscape deforested and eroded from decades of surface diamond and gold mining along the river.

P21 Top to bottom: Clarity Project engagement ring, photograph by Beth Armsheimer; Amputee Football League game in the capital city of Free-town; Artisanal diamond miners washing diamond-iferous gravel in a mechanical jig; Lichte talking with a Paramount Chief about Clarity Project.

P22 Top to bottom: Students at Muddy Lotus Primary School, an initiative of the CA-based organization, Shine on Sierra Leone; Downtown Koidu Town, the largest town in the diamond mining region of Kono District, with a mountain of overburden from a large-scale diamond mine in the background.

All Image courtesy Rachel Lichte; portrait of Lichte by Duke Photography.

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For many people, the term “entrepreneur” calls to mind an elite group of visionaries, born with business savvy, blessed with brilliant ideas and guided by unerring instinct for recogniz-ing an opportunity and seizing it.

DukeENVENT, a new student-led group out of the Nicholas School of the Environment, aims to dispel this misperception.

Its goal is to show that anyone with a promising idea and a lot of determination can be an entrepreneur—just by doing. You don’t have to be the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg.

“We want to lower the barriers to entry for people who are interested in entrepreneurship, but don’t think they have that grand-slam idea or the resources to take it to the next level,” says DukeENVENT’s president Jack Beuttell MEM/MBA’14. “Part of our goal is to persuade people that being an entrepre-neur is not a skill you’re born with or a badge you earn at your first funding event. It’s more about doing—acting on an idea—and the process of personal development that follows.”

Beuttell and four fellow student entrepreneurs from the Nicholas School and the Fuqua School of Business formed DukeENVENT last spring with $1,500 in seed funding from the Nicholas School’s Dean’s Office and held its first meeting in February. At that time, more than 50 other Duke students, staff members and faculty members had expressed interest in taking part.

“Existing courses and clubs at Duke address many of an aspiring entrepreneur’s needs, but not all of them. We’re look-ing to fill the gaps with an emphasis on peer support and social activities like networking sessions,” Beuttell explains.

A centerpiece of the group’s outreach will be informal “ide-ation” sessions where anyone with an idea—or even the seed of an idea—can make a one-minute pitch to a panel of 10 peer evaluators.

“These are ‘spitballing sessions’ where the evaluators are other faculty and students who provide immediate feedback

that helps refine an idea and get up the curve faster,” Beuttell says. “This process builds confidence, commitment and mo-mentum.”

Throughout the year, DukeENVENT will work closely with the Nicholas School’s Environmental Innovation and Entrepreneur-ship (EIE) Center to co-host talks by visiting experts and entre-preneurs, and to hold networking opportunities where students can learn about internships or job openings at local start-ups.

“DukeENVENT is a community of entrepreneurs who share an interest in addressing environmental and social problems, so our primary emphasis is fostering environmental entrepre-neurship. But people whose ideas have no other connection to the environment may find inspiration in our community, and we welcome them,” Beuttell notes. “This is about cultivating a mindset and culture where everyone can be entrepreneurial, and providing a framework and venue for people to express that characteristic.”

Jesko von Windheim, professor of the practice of environmen-tal innovation and entrepreneurship and director of the Nicho-las School’s Environmental Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center, is DukeENVENT’s faculty advisor.

In addition to serving as DukeENVENT’s president, Beuttell is co-founder of the sustainable agriculture start-up AgImpact Capital, a scalable farm incubator that employs a risk diver-sification approach to launch and sustain beginning organic farmers.

The group’s vice-presidents are Dan Chow MEM/MBA ’15 and cofounder of the student startup Refrackt; Rachel Lichte MEM/MBA ’14 and cofounder of the student startup Clarity Project; Josh Seidenfeld MEM/MBA ’15 and cofounder of the student startup Energy Medic; and Isaac hacerola MEM ’15 from the Nicholas School and MBA ’15 from the UNC Kenan-Flagler School of Business.

DukeENVENT Aims to Unlock Aspiring Entrepreneurs’ Potential

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ated a synthetic DNA-based tracer for fracking fluids, is led by students or recent alumni of the Nicholas School, Pratt School of Engineering, the School of Law and the Fuqua School, Rhee notes. Other interdisciplinary startups include:

• Refrackd, which has invented a vacuum membrane distillation system that treats water from fracking sites so it can be reused

• Clarity Project, which markets conflict-free gemstones and reinvests profits back into poor mining communities (see story, page 20)

• AgImpact Capital, a scalable incubator that uses risk diver-sification to launch and sustain beginning organic farmers

• Energy Medic, a revenue-based model to deliver reliable electric-ity to hospitals in the world’s poorest regions.

The Duke Start-Up Challenge (www.dukestartupchallenge.com) was founded in 1999 to help Duke’s entrepreneurial community flourish. All students, faculty and staff can enter the competition. The overall winner receives $50,000. A variety of track prizes are also awarded, including a $10,000 Clean Energy Prize, sponsored by the Duke Energy Initiative.

Teams entered in the fall and pre-sented their three-minute “elevator pitches” to judges in mid-February. Ten semi-finalists were then given stipends to help them refine their ideas through a Summer Innovation Program. Winners will be announced at summer’s end.

The Duke Startup Challenge will offer a new prize in 2014.

The $10,000 Nicholas School Prize for the Environment will be awarded to the student-led startup that shows the greatest promise for addressing environ-mental issues and promoting sustain-able use of Earth’s resources.

“We consider this an investment in the future,” says William L. Chameides, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment.

“Our mission as educators is to produce leaders who have the knowl-edge to understand the complexities of today’s environmental challenges; the practical skills to devise solutions; and the real-world acumen to use markets and public-private partnerships, as well as non-profit enterprises, to achieve the desired outcomes. Sponsoring this prize is one way to further that mission,” he said.

Student-led teams from all schools at Duke, not just the Nicholas School, are eligible for the prize, Chameides stresses.

“Great ideas come from all fields of study. The environment is an interdisci-plinary concern; the best environmental solutions usually are, too,” he says.

Some of the most promising student-led environmental startups in recent years have evolved from interdisciplin-ary efforts, notes Howie Rhee, lead advisor to the Duke Startup Challenge and managing director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Fuqua School of Business.

Base Trace, a start-up that has cre-

Duke Start-up Challenge to Offer $10,000 Prize for Best Environmental Startup

dukenvironment 26

by Shannon Switzer MEM ’15

A number of students and fac-ulty at the Nicholas School are benefiting from a new university-wide initiative that encourages

interdisciplinary collaboration to address a constellation of complex global prob-lems.

Bass Connections, launched with a $50 million gift from business magnates Robert and Ann Bass, creates teams and comprehensive educational pathways to address five focal areas: Brain and Soci-ety; Information, Society and Culture; Global Health; Education and Human Development; and Energy. The teams are drawn from all ranks of the university community—undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral associates, and faculty—and, importantly, from outside the world of academia.

According to Susan Roth, vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke, there has been a long-standing commit-ment to interdisciplinary approaches at Duke that gained momentum when it was formalized in the 2006 Strategic Plan. “Bass Connections represents a forward-looking tripartite mission of col-laborative scholarship, cross-disciplinary

education and engagement outside of the university,” Roth explains.

Several of the Bass Connections focal areas play to the strengths of the Nicho-las School. William Pan, assistant profes-sor of environmental health, is leader of one of the longer standing projects in the Global Health area called Environmen-tal Epidemiology in Latin America. The project has been in existence for several years now, with funding last year from Bass, and has gained new dimensions with each iteration.

“We currently study heavy metals, human health and environmental change, so the funding translates to around 20 students being trained in environmental epidemiology, hydrology, land cover change, toxicology, and biogeochemical cycling,” Pan says. Not only did partici-pating students gain in these fields, but they also used their fieldwork to collect data for four master’s projects or theses and three doctoral dissertations, accord-ing to Pan.

One of the students who developed a masters project from the team’s work was Jessica Cain, a Master of Environ-mental Management (MEM) student at

the Nicholas School in the Ecotoxicology and Environmental Health track. She met Pan through a work-study position with the Duke Global Health Institute, where he also is affiliated.

“One day he asked me if I wanted to go to Peru. I thought he was joking. He wasn’t joking,” Cain recalls. Several months later, she found herself in Lima at the Navy Medical Research Unit undergoing epidemiology training before heading to the Amazon rainforest region of Madre de Dios for six weeks of insect collection in “la selva” (the wilderness).

According to Cain, prior to their work, no one had conducted vector collection in this the region. This meant there was a missing link in understanding whether the local human population was con-tracting insect-borne maladies like ma-laria, dengue and leishmaniasis in their own communities or when they ventured to surrounding communities. The mos-quitoes and sand flies the team captured for analysis could help solve this mystery and inform a disease prevention plan.

“Being able to put human faces to the data we collected was the most impactful part of this project. It helped me not lose

news//STuDENTS

Nicholas School Faculty and Students Work with Duke’s Bass Connections Program to Tackle Complex Global health and Energy Problems

work with the Duke University Greening Initiative.” She also cites spending time outside the classroom in the Durham community as one of her favorite aspects of the project.

“The Bass Program has been quite rewarding, as it allows unconventional collaboration and allows us to get into the field and provide experiential learning for the students,” Southwell says.

That seems to be the consensus program-wide, according to Susan Roth, who has helped shape Bass Connec-tions from its infancy. This enthusiastic feedback may explain why in its second round, the number of project teams funded has increased from 37 to about 50, with a third of the projects continu-ing from the first round, in an expanded form.

Hallie Knuffman, director for admin-istration and program development for Bass Connections, who works closely with the faculty and academic leaders involved in the program, sees this growth as a testament to the program’s unique design.

“Bass Connections is such a complex and comprehensive program that sup-ports—and requires—deep collaboration across the university, and builds upon Duke’s rich history of interdisciplinary re-search and education. The interest we’ve gotten from faculty and students in just

the first few months has been remark-able,” Knuffman says.

With this kind of support and momen-tum, the program seems to be leaving an indelible mark on Duke’s approach to bridging academia and real-world challenges—an approach that has always been embraced by the Nicholas School and that bodes well for future Nicholas School involvement in the program.

Shannon Switzer MEM ’15 is a member of the Duke Environment blogging team and is a Nicholas School communications assistant.

IMAGES

P26 From left to right: Laura Mistretta sorts through insect samples during entomology training; Charlotte Lee and Axel Berky give a dental hygiene “charla” to school children and their mothers in one of the sampling communities.

P27 From left to right: A young girl in Atalaya plays with gloves while learning about the re-search process; Mosquitos under the microscope while the Bass team learns species identification.

Photos by Charlotte Lee.

sight of why I was doing it,” Cain ex-plains of her time in the Peruvian jungle. “Plus, growing up I’d always wanted to be Indiana Jones, so wading waist-deep across rivers was the realization of a childhood dream.”

But not all of the Bass Connection project teams head to far-flung places; many conduct their work right here in Durham. This is true of the team work-ing on the project titled Communicating about Energy in the Triangle headed by adjunct professor Brian Southwell. Faculty and students, including four from the Nicholas School, work with the nonprofit Clean Energy Durham to determine what is the most effective way to communicate information about energy efficiency and energy savings to low-income residents. The team recently hit the streets of Durham to conduct in-terviews with both low-income residents and building managers and owners.

Team member Kristina Ronneberg, a Nicholas School MEM student concen-trating in Global Environmental Change, says she’s learning techniques to influence individual and collective behavior that she’s been able to apply to other areas of student life. “Understanding the psychol-ogy of behavior is really important,” Ronneberg explains, “and through back-ground research for our interviews, I’ve learned methods I can now apply to my

dukenvironment 28

news//ALuMNI PROFILE

THE ART OF ExPLORATIONGaelin Rosenwaks MEM ’04, Applies a Creative Lens to Bring

Science to Society from Some of the Most Remote Corners of the Planetby Tawnee Milko MEM’12

dukenvironment 28

Gaelin Rosenwaks first set foot on Antarctica during a research expedition with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institu-

tion studying the overwintering patterns of Antarctic zooplankton. Two months cruising the rough Southern Ocean may seem like an impressive feat in itself, but for Rosenwaks MEM ’04, it was the culmination of a lofty personal goal to visit all seven continents before she turned 25. She was 22.

In the decade since that trip, Ros-enwaks has conducted fieldwork on more than a dozen scientific expeditions from the Bering Sea to Southeast Asia, investigating many critical marine issues including ocean acidification, the Deep-water Horizon oil spill and overfishing.

But now her eyes are locked on a different but no less formidable goal: harnessing the power of modern media to communicate the experience of these often-remote expeditions, and the sci-ence behind them, to the general public. In 2008, she founded Global Ocean Exploration Inc., a company dedicated to bringing expedition research science to homes and classrooms through film, photography and writing.

“My goal is to educate people about the ocean and marine resources so they have the tools and understanding to make informed choices,” Rosenwaks says.

In this era of global climate change, strained fisheries, constant pollution and degrading coastal environments, many scientists believe that such education is sorely needed. Yet the scientific commu-nity as a whole has long been chastised for its ineffective communication with the public—the very constituency fund-ing many researchers’ projects through such tax dollar–driven programs as National Science Foundation grants.

As a result, in a stringent economy, often science has found itself on the chopping block.

“Science doesn’t have a constituency,” says Jeremy Mathis, supervisory ocean-ographer at the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. “We need to do a good job of communicating to soci-ety the value what we’re doing has, both at a pure science level, but also from an

economic and societal impact level.”As both a scientist and visual artist,

Rosenwaks aspires to do just that. Her expedition video footage has gone into the development of a broadcast feature film about Arctic Salmon migration, and she has guest starred as a scientific consultant and angler for the National Geographic Channel television series, Fish Warrior.

NO PLACE WAS OFF-LIMITSA desire to develop her own understand-ing of the world around her—and the oceans, in particular—kindled at an early age.

Spending part of her youth near Virginia Beach, Rosenwaks caught her first fish when she was three, and became SCUBA-certified at 14 so she could better explore the colors and diversity of life beneath the waves. Her father traveled internationally as a visiting professor of medicine, and when he taught abroad, he brought the entire family along.

She recalls how she and her family would explore remote locations in Indo-nesia after her father lectured in Taiwan.

“It made all of the world very ac-cessible. No place was off limits,” she says. “The places we went were largely unknown. There certainly wasn’t a guidebook to many of the places. You just went there and figured it out.”

While studying biology at the Uni-versity of Pennsylvania, Rosenwaks attended an undergraduate summer program at Duke’s Marine Laboratory in Beaufort, N.C. She still sings praises about her time in marine mammal ex-pert Larry Crowder’s conservation biol-ogy class and exploring the beaches and estuaries of Core Sound. (Now an ad-junct professor at the Nicholas School, Crowder is director of the Center for Ocean Solutions in Monterey, Calif.)

Duke always was at the back of her mind afterward, and when it came time to weigh the options for marine-based Masters and PhD programs, Duke quickly became a frontrunner.

“If I hadn’t attended the Nicholas School, I probably would have been in a purely science-based program,” she says. “But instead I got an amazing multidisci-plinary education that included policy and economics, which has helped me going forward to be a good communicator.”

The winter of her first year, she be-came heavily involved with the Bluefin Tag-A-Giant program, operating out of the Duke Marine Lab. Led by Stanford University’s Barbara Block PhD ’86, one of the world’s leading experts on the physiological ecology and evolution of large pelagic fish, Tag-A-Giant scientists electronically tag and study the migratory movements of northern Bluefin tuna.

Rosenwaks remembers first meeting Block during a day of Bluefin tagging. It was a “trial by fire” in cold, rough seas, but Rosenwaks already had become acclimated to such conditions during her Antarctic expedition. At day’s end, Block invited Rosenwaks to conduct her Masters Project research on Bluefin tuna.

“Gaelin had a special sensitivity to what was happening in the natural world,” says her Masters Project advi-sor Dick Barber, Professor Emeritus of Biological Oceanography. “She could see that the tuna—like she herself—is not hardwired to follow a given track without any deviations.”

A SINGULAR REALIzATIONSuch a notion aptly summarizes Ros-enwaks’ career path. After graduating from the Nicholas School’s Master of Environmental Management program, Rosenwaks was accepted for doctoral study at Duke, but decided to postpone it, continuing her work with the Tag-A-Giant program. It was on one Bluefin tagging cruise off the North Carolina coast that she experienced her “ah-ha moment.”

“I thought, so many good, capable scientists already are working hard to answer the big questions the media’s posing, like, ‘What’s going to happen with climate change?’ ‘What’s happen-ing to world fisheries?’ ” she says. “So I said to myself, ‘They don’t need another person to do the science. They need a conduit to help communicate what they’re doing to answer these ques-tions.’”

That singular realization launched Rosenwaks’ career in science photojour-nalism.

Returning to her hometown of New York City, Rosenwaks studied at the In-ternational Center of Photography. She

THE ART OF ExPLORATION

dukenvironment 30

news//ALuMNI wrote as often as she could, publishing such articles as the Green Planet Series, which appeared in Canadian newspa-pers and described the state of the coun-try’s oceans. When former Woods Hole colleague and advisor Carin Ashjian asked her to accompany her on an up-coming Bering Sea ice expedition in an outreach and communications capacity in 2008, Global Ocean Exploration Inc. was born.

Any given day in the field will find Rosenwaks filming footage of her client research team at work, photographing and blogging about the day’s activities, connecting with media outlets, and Skyp-ing into classrooms to share the science of the expedition with schoolchildren. She makes a point of interviewing everyone on the ship—a great morale booster—and even lends a hand with data collec-tion and analysis.

“If someone’s slaving over their computer unable to figure out how to crunch their data properly, I’ll step in and say, ‘Can I take a look at it?’ And often I’m able to help because I had so much data experience from my time both at Duke and Woods Hole,” she says.

Overcoming technical difficulties is only one component of the challenges facing seafaring scientists. Oceano-graphic expeditions can last anywhere from several weeks to several months; extreme weather, endless days of open seas, and a demanding, highly physi-cal and often round-the-clock sampling schedule round out the demands placed upon research crews.

“I find I never sleep on expeditions because there’s just so much I want to do. I never want to miss something,” Rosenwaks says. “When in the Arctic’s 24-hour light, I constantly work.”

Simply maneuvering through a re-search vessel can be an undertaking, and Rosenwaks details the efforts required to navigate the passageways of the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Healy during two research trips above the Arctic Circle: travel between the ship’s lab and the galley requires opening and closing five heavy steel doors, designed to help keep the boat airtight. Reaching the bridge involves even more doors, as well as climbing five steep flights of stairs. For a 5'2" woman, it can be an impressive

dukenvironment 30

workout. “I think the bottom line is knowing

your limits and knowing when you can’t do something,” she says thoughtfully. “I don’t know that I have very many limits, but I certainly know what I can and can’t do.”

At an expedition’s end, Rosenwaks returns to New York, where she edits video footage and photos from the trip and provides them to client scientists like Jeremy Mathis. Mathis hired Ros-enwaks to accompany his research team from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks to the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas to document their work on ocean acidi-fication in the Western Arctic Ocean, a project on which Mathis was chief scientist.

“Gaelin makes that connection between the science that’s being done and answering questions that are going to have a real impact on real people’s lives,” he says. “With her presence and her participation in the programs, it just increases the effectiveness and qual-ity that comes out of it by an order of magnitude.”

Mathis has incorporated Rosenwaks’ work in presentations to the National Science Foundation. Her photos and videos add a humanizing element to slides otherwise filled with bar charts and Excel graph plots, he says, contrib-uting to his ability to “communicate the science in a really relevant way.”

THE “FISH LADY”Through Global Ocean Exploration, Rosenwaks also has embarked on a more personal mission to increase awareness of an issue near to her heart: the connection between overfishing and people’s insatiable appetite for seafood throughout the world.

Global Catch: Portraits of a Precious Resource, a photographic journey ex-ploring global fish markets, was exhib-ited this spring at the Liman Gallery in Palm Beach. Rosenwaks captured images of fish markets from Japan to Hong Kong, showing how different cul-tures approach fish and the ocean as a marine resource. She hopes to compile the work into a book, all in the name of helping the public to understand and ap-preciate the intrinsic value of the ocean and its resources.

Her outreach work is already paying off in unexpected—and career-affirm-ing—ways. Months after guest starring on National Geographic’s Fish Warrior, Rosenwaks was visiting Turkey with her brother when a man who worked in a nearby market recognized and approached her. Calling her “the Fish Lady,” he excitedly recounted the epi-sode of Fish Warrior on which she had appeared, which, coincidentally, had just aired locally.

“I had my wife watch it,” he told her enthusiastically. “I wanted her to see that women shouldn’t be afraid of being in the wilderness and going on expedi-tions.”

The moment was a profound example of the impact a single person’s message could have on someone literally on the other side of the world. “It was really amazing,” Rosenwaks recalls. “It shows how important it is to have not just pos-itive male role models on TV, but also women doing things that are uncon-ventional in so many cultures—things we take for granted here in the U.S., because we have every opportunity.”

“ExPLORATION IS AN ATTITUDE”Rosenwaks is no stranger to bursting traditional gender stereotypes. A U.S. Coast Guard licensed boat captain and NAUI- and PADI-certified rescue SCUBA diver, Rosenwaks also spends her limited free time rock and ice climbing, angling, and snowboarding extreme backcountry terrain. She also is a fellow of the Explorers Club and Royal Geographical Society, century-old professional organizations dedicated to the scientific exploration of land, sea, air and space, and in 2012 became Secretary of the Explorer Club’s Board of Directors.

Both exploration communities have provided her with a strong network of like-minded individuals, most of whom face the same challenge of financially supporting their passions and desire to make the planet a better place through exploration.

“Making it all work can be really difficult,” Rosenwaks acknowledges. “But nobody at the Explorers Club thinks you’re crazy when you say you want to go to the Arctic in the middle of the winter. Instead, they say, ‘Oh, I’ve

done that; you should go.’” Fellowship within the elite groups

has given Rosenwaks the opportunity to carry the Explorers Club Flag on two expeditions to the Arctic, an honor granted to club members going on expe-ditions to locations unknown to science or conducting research that is ground-breaking or unusual for that geographic area.

“Exploration is really an attitude,” she says. “No matter where you’re trav-eling, it’s the questions you ask when you’re there that make it exploration versus travel, and that holds for trying to understand a place from a scientific viewpoint as well.”

“I always want to learn more, so wherever I’m going, I’m always asking those questions and delving farther in. Wherever I go, I’m exploring.”

And, thanks to a cameras, computers and communications savvy, Rosenwaks is providing the rest of the world the chance to experience the science—and art—of exploration right along with her.

TAWNEE MILKO MEM’12 IS THE NICHOLAS

SCHOOL’S COORDINATOR FOR THE NICHOLAS

AMBASSADOR INITIATIVE AND AN ALUMNI

BLOGGER AT BLOGS.NICHOLAS.DUKE.EDU/

AGGREGATING_AUTHENTICITY/.

IMAGES

P30 Clockwise from top left: Gaelin inside the NyC-based Explorers Club, of which she is a member; The uSCGC healy cuts through the sea ice in McClure Strait in the Northwest Passages; Gaelin tagging white sturgeon on the Frasier River, British Columbia, Canada; The CTD is deployed to collect water samples and data in an ice-covered Beaufort Sea aboard the uSCG Cutter healy; A tank filled with wild-harvested marine ornamental fish in hong Kong, part of Gaelin’s project, Global Catch: Portraits of a Precious Resource.

Portraits of Rosenwaks by Judy Rolfe. All other images courtesy Gaelin Rosenwaks.

dukenvironment 32

news//ALuMNI careermatters

fined “sustainable,” coordinated phil-anthropic outreach, built the team, etc. But, the skills involved in those pursuits dilute the most obvious and fundamental value—if the business doesn’t suc-ceed then nothing else will either. If I had marketed myself specifically as a communications specialist, I may have been awarded a small portion of the total contract. But, speaking about driving growth and recognition (both critical for new entities of any type) allowed me to use my same skill set to take on a much more substantial role and command a bigger salary.

I will be honest, in a world described by often-ambiguous intangibles (sustain-able/green/eco/organic), it is a lot easier to quickly pinpoint a specific skill you have (i.e., policy or GHG analysis) versus jumping into the value of the big picture.

Despite the challenge, I suggest you strive to pinpoint value instead—what someone is really willing to pay/hire you for. Value may be defined by aligned ideals (you may not be the most expe-rienced candidate, but if your personal mission is completely in sync with that of your employer or client it will save them significant time and money in the long run). Or, value may be defined by the process (i.e. helping the vice president of facilities turn their dying sustainability program into a corporate pride point by scaling the successes of one factory and creating a new standard operating procedure). Either way, com-municating your value is a much more personal discussion than listing your skill set.

Not sure how to do this? When speak-ing to a potential employer, client, or customer, use these five tips for devising a message that will truly resonate and demonstrate your value to their program:

1. USE PLAIN ENGLISH. Avoid any possible confusion—or unin-tended controversy—and go right to the heart of the matter.

2. BECOME A DOCTOR. Not literally. Diagnose the pain points of your employer or client, and speak to those—often very personal—needs versus distinct skills. Someone may advertise for help with a specific task, but look deeper for the ‘why.’ Are they completely swamped, working long days and would love to make it home earlier? Is the company reorganizing and they are worried about job security? Has their organization not secured a significant grant in more than a year? What can you do to help them?

3. KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER/ CLIENT/EMPLOYER. Once you know them, speak to their needs and desires not your own (with one exception, see #4). Show that you know where they are and describe how you can help assuage their pain—or take them in a new direction if you think it warrants that. Simultaneously dem-onstrate you care, you’re aware, you’re smart, and that you’re a solution-finder.

4. THINK BIG! Many of us have similar training and skills on a résumé. No one has your particular ideas or passion. Speak from the heart. Explain what you really want to do—even if it sounds crazy—and phrase it in terms of your employer’s or client’s needs. Honesty and intelligence resonate.

5. BE SUCCINCT. This is the second Career Matters by Alexa Bach-McElrone MEM ’03, who is founder and principal of Bach-McElrone Consult-ing, a strategy and communications firm driving innovation and leadership in sus-tainable business.

by Alexa Bach-McElrone MEM’03

“So, what exactly do you do?” After a decade as a sustainability

advisor to nonprofits, small businesses, corporations, government agencies and entrepreneurs, I still answer this ques-tion weekly. I’ve learned to skip most of the ambiguous language and, instead, speak in terms of my true value to an employer or client, because ultimately, that is what makes the most difference to my career development and to the fulfillment I feel in my work.

WHAT DO I MEAN? Last year, I drove strategy for a social enterprise that went from fledgling to top 10 in their realm in less than a year.

Yes, I directed communications, de-

SHOW ME THE MONEY! VALUING SUSTAINABILITY ExPERTISE

by Laura Ertel

On April 10, the Duke University community is celebrating a major milestone: the grand opening of Duke Environment Hall, the new home for the Nicholas School of the Environment and the hub of environmental activity on campus.

To involve as many friends as possible in this historic event, we are asking our alumni, friends and the larger Duke community to participate in the creation of our new home—and to literally leave their mark on this extraordinary new facility, says Kevin McCarthy, Nicholas School associate dean of external affairs.

As one of the first programmatic buildings on campus to earn LEED Platinum certification, Environment Hall stands as a bold statement of Duke’s commitment to leadership in forging a sustainable future through research, education and practice. From the rooftop solar panels and innovative climate control and water systems, to special windows that moderate light and heat, to an organic orchard and sustainably designed landscap-ing—every feature has been selected to ensure that Environ-ment Hall meets the highest standards for sustainable design and energy efficiency.

All of these features are “wired” into an advanced monitoring system that continuously senses and communicates environ-mental conditions and resource use within the facility, enabling students and faculty to experiment with new ways to align oc-cupants’ behavior and environmental stewardship. As a result, Environment Hall is a living laboratory as well as a model for other facilities, at Duke and beyond, McCarthy says.

Environment Hall will, for the first time, bring together the Nicholas School’s interdisciplinary community of faculty and students under one roof. With space for classrooms, student study areas, computer labs, faculty and staff offices and meeting rooms, and an environmental arts gallery, it will be an inspirational venue to learn, interact and apply skills and knowledge.

Most importantly, Environment Hall will support and enhance Duke’s highly ranked educational programs that prepare future leaders of consequence in environmental science, policy and management, McCarthy says.

Opportunities for The Nicholas School community to support Environment Hall at many levelsBecause we want everyone to be a part of achieving this mag-nificent milestone, we’ve created opportunities to contribute at a variety of giving levels. With your contribution, you will have a chance to, quite literally, leave your mark on Environment Hall, McCarthy says.

• Help build the building itself—and name a space as a lasting legacy. Many leadership giving opportunities are still available. For instance, with a gift of $100,000, you can underwrite the building operations display, sustainable landscape design, or the bridge to the hall’s entrance. For $50,000, you can under-write the potting shed; for $25,000, one of our faculty offices; and for $10,000, one of the student common areas. In each case, the school will recognize your generosity though a plaque in that space. Pledges can be made over a three- to five-year period.

• The Nicholas School community can make their mark while sup-porting the activities taking place inside Environment hall. This building will require significant operational funding to keep it running day-to-day. Your gift at any level, when combined with others, can provide support to maintain and strengthen the features that make this living laboratory thrive, such as provid-ing supplies for the rooftop garden; enhancing learning with innovative technology; maintaining the sustainable landscaping surrounding the building, and offering experiences that ready students for environmental leadership.

LAURA ERTEL IS A FREELANCE WRITER LIVING IN DURHAM, NC.

giving

Duke Environment Hall OpensThere’s Still Time—and Several Ways—for Friends of the Nicholas School to Make Their Mark

dukenvironment 34

giving

MAKE YOUR MARK

• All gifts of at least $25 to the Environment Hall campaign will be recognized in a donor recognition area within the building.

• By contributing $250 or more to the Environment Hall Campaign before June 30, 2014, your signature will be inscribed on a specially commissioned piece of art that will be permanently and prominently installed in the art gallery in addition to the above recog-nition. Donations are accepted anytime for the building campaign, but to have your signature placed on the specially designed piece of art, your gift must be received before June 30.

• If you contribute $1,000 or more, we also will recognize you with a permanent plaque located in the Great Auditorium (100 available) in addition to the above recognition.

TO MAKE YOUR GIFT ONLINE visit nicholas.duke.edu/giving/ giving-overview and look for Give to Nicholas. For questions or more giving opportunities, contact the Nicholas School’s Office of External Affairs at 919-613-8003 or giving@nicholas.duke.edu.

‘IN GOOD TIME’Stone by stone, a striking new arched wall, “In Good Time,” rose slowly at on the grounds of Duke Environment Hall, the new home of Nicholas School of the Environment.

Designed by Vermont stonemason Thea Alvin to be both a visual counterpoint to the modern steel-and-glass building and an informal gathering place for the Nicholas School community, the 160-foot-long undulating wall is located near the main public entrance of Duke Environment Hall, facing Circuit Drive. It is made of hand-laid, mortared stone from the Duke quarry. Alvin and her partner, sculptor Michael A. Clookey, completed work at the end of February. See additional photos at nicholas.duke.edu/rockwall. Images of “In Good Time” by Les Todd.

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 2014 The Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. Produced by the Nicholas School’s Office of Marketing & Communications. Nicholas School of the EnvironmentDuke University • Box 90330 • Durham, North Carolina • 27708-0330, USA • Tel 919.613.8004 • Fax 919.613.8719 • www.nicholas.duke.edu

calendar

April April 9-10 DEL-MEM VIRTUAL MASTERS

PROJECT PRESENTATION

Online (web link TBD)

Contact: The DEL Program, 919-613-8082 or

del@nicholas.duke.edu

April 10-12 SPRING MEETING OF THE NICHOLAS SCHOOL

BOARD OF VISITORS

Location: Duke Environment Hall

Duke University West Campus

Contact: Robin Geller, 919-613-8186 or

robin.geller@duke.edu

April 11 10:30-3:15 p.m. ALUMNI BACK-TO-CLASS

Location: A158 LSRC

Contact: Tawnee Milko, 919-684-1121 or

tawnee.milko@duke.edu

April 12 8 a.m. 5TH ANNUAL DUKE FOREST PINE CONE

PACER 5K

Durham Division, NC-751

Contact: Office of the Duke Forest,

919-613-8013 or dukeforest@duke.edu

April 12 2 p.m. DUKE LEAF AWARD CEREMONY

James Balog, Honoree

Griffith Film Theater, Bryan Center

Duke West Campus

Reception following ceremony at

Duke Environment Hall

Contact: Nancy Kelly, 919-613-8090 or

nkelly@duke.edu

April 12 3:30 p.m. LEAF RECEPTION AND DUKE ENVIRONMENT

HALL OPEN HOUSE

Duke Environment Hall (Circuit Drive)

Contact: Nancy Kelly, 919-613-8090 or

nkelly@duke.edu

May May 1-2 BEAUFORT MASTERS PROJECT SYMPOSIUM

(COASTAL ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT

STUDENTS)

Repass Center

Duke Marine Lab, Beaufort, N.C.

Contact: Sarah Phillips, 252-504-7531 or

Sarah.Anne.Phillips@duke.edu

May 4, 1 p.m. THE ORRIN H. PILKEY RESEARCH

LABORATORY DEDICATION CEREMONY

The Orrin H. Pilkey Research Laboratory

Duke Marine Lab, Beaufort, N.C.

Contact: Nancy Kelly, 919-613-8090 or

nkelly@duke.edu

May 8-9 DEL-MEM MASTERS PROJECT SYMPOSIUM

AND PLACE BASED SESSION

Location: A158 LSRC

Contact: The DEL Program, 919-613-8082 or

del@nicholas.duke.edu

May 10 9 a.m. NICHOLAS SCHOOL RECOGNITION CEREMONY

FOR GRADUATE AND PROFESSIONAL DEGREE

CANDIDATES

Keynote Speaker: Robert Bonnie MEM/MF’94

Undersecretary for Natural Resources and

Environment USDA

Circuit Lot (lower level), Duke University

West Campus

Contact: Nancy Kelly, 919-613-8090 or

nkelly@duke.edu

May 11 10 a.m. UNIVERSITY COMMENCEMENT ExERCISES

Wallace Wade Stadium, West Campus

Contact: Academic & Enrollment Services

919-613-8070 or

admissions@nicholas.duke.edu

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