Faculty & Community Notes “Want to help save the humpback whale? Pick up a camera and start taking pictures,” says Allied Whale fluke matcher Gale McCullough. So begins the CNN piece, “How Flickr Can Help Save the Whales,” posted after a conversation with citizen scientist Gale, following her appearance at the Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine in late October. John Anderson, the William H. Drury, Jr. Chair in Ecology and Natural History, is the treasurer of the Natural History Network, whose primary goals are to articulate and promote the value of natural history and promote the individual and collective practice of natural history. The network has created a multimedia website and recorded some of John’s comments at http:// histories.naturalhistorynetwork. org/conversations.
On Great Duck Island, John supervised the research work of Aly Pierik ’14, Kate Schlepr ’13, Robin Owings ’13, Matt Dickinson ’12 and EcoLeague student Amanda Posey, thanks to support from the National Park Service Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit and the Drury Research Fund. In addition to their own research, they were studying the impact of sea-level rise on Maine seabird colonies. In the fall, students Jordan Chalfant ’12 and Anna Stunkel ’13 studied migratory songbirds and raptors on Great Duck as Acadia Fellows, a joint program of the park service and COA. Kate, Matt, and Amanda are presenting their work as singleauthored papers at the international Waterbird Society meetings in Annapolis in November, along with 46 | COA
John, who will present a summary access path, and completing various building and painting jobs. of the sea-level rise study. Molly Anderson, the Partridge Chair in Food and Sustainable Agriculture Systems, along with Suzanne Morse, Elizabeth Battles Newlin Chair of Botany, accompanied seven COA students to Witzenhausen, Germany, for a Future of Food Summer Academy, where they cofacilitated an interdisciplinary session. Molly also planned and is conducting a distance-learning course, “Redefining Food Systems Efficiency,” with participants from Germany, England, Finland, South Korea, Argentina, Ghana, India, and COA. The course focuses on innovations that are promoting greater sustainability in food systems by sharing what people are doing from seed to sewer in students’ respective geographic regions. Molly also submitted an invited paper to the Journal of Rural Studies, “Beyond Food Security to Realizing the Right to Food in the US.” Meanwhile, she writes, “we are honing down the strategic goals for an integrated COA farms plan and starting to use the new Peggy Rockefeller Farms for vegetable production, permaculture fruit production, research, and a public access trail.”
In August and September, COA’s Ethel H. Blum Gallery exhibited an installation by Nancy Andrews, faculty member in time-based art. The installation, Beauty Sleep, featured drawings, video, giant Rorschach blots on fabrics,
sculpture, and a 1950s educational film loop of a man calling, “Fear, Rage, Love,” and writing those words on the chalkboard while a large white rat runs through a wire maze. Her latest film, Behind the Eyes are the Ears, was screened in July at the Maine International Film Festival. Nancy also presented the talk “Changing Course,” about her current work as part of an evening for Maine-based artists and others seeking to explore new ideas and approaches to creative change. It was sponsored by Artists in Context and the Maine Arts Commission. The gathering launched AIC’s effort to highlight and connect creative practices in Maine that intersect with fields such as health, nature, Thanks to the endowment from the and justice to offer new ways of understanding and acting upon the Peggy Rockefeller Farms, Molly seemingly intractable issues of our was able to hire Neil Oculi ’11 and time. Adelina Mkami ’11 to work on the farm doing soil analysis, starting a The Wooden Nickel, written by vegetable garden, repairing and faculty member in literature and moving fencing, mapping pastures creative writing Bill Carpenter, has with GPS, establishing a public been optioned for film by Mitch