Bates’ ninth annual Clean Sweep, a “garage sale” of usable goods donated by departing students, raised a record $21,400 in proceeds that will be divided among local nonprofit organizations.

A community tradition, the sale on June 20 drew swarms of eager bargain-hunters to the college’s Underhill Arena, on Russell Street.
“More than 100 volunteers from 14 organizations spent over 1,000 hours collecting, cleaning, organizing and pricing items for the sale,” says Julie Rosenbach, event organizer and the college’s environmental coordinator. “Items filled the arena — we had more than 90 tables full of stuff, plus rows of lamps, furniture, appliances and electronics.”

Items donated by Bates students and other members of the college community also included sporting goods, housewares, books, toys, clothes and shoes.

Bates is one of a number of colleges and universities nationwide that benefit both local nonprofit organizations and the environment by selling useful possessions donated by students as they head out at the end of the academic year.

The sale both keeps unwanted possessions out of the waste stream and raises money for the organizations. Nonprofits supply volunteers to help staff the event, and in return receive a share of the proceeds proportionate to the amount of time volunteered.

The beneficiaries of the event were: the Caleb Garden Club; Common Ties Mental Health Services; First Universalist Church, Auburn; the Justice, Ecology and Democracy Collective, Greene; Life Center; Literacy Volunteers-Androscoggin; Lots to Gardens; Maine Fair Trade Campaign; Maine People’s Alliance; New Beginnings, Inc.; the St. Andre Home; the Share Center, Auburn; Somali Bantu Community Association; and TriCounty Mental Health Services.

Last year’s sale raised $11,897, divided by 14 local nonprofit organizations. The total for 2007 was around $18,000.

For the first time since the mid-1990s, Bates’ lush summer plantings will include a garden dedicated solely to providing food for Dining Services.

A raised bed on the lawn between Commons and Central Avenue will supply herbs to season Dining Services’ offerings. The project is the result of a Short Term collaboration between Bill Bergevin, the college’s longtime landscape coordinator, and Molly Mylius ’11, who helped Bergevin build the herb garden as part of her environmental studies internship.

The idea for a campus “victory garden” was in the air during the fall and winter, perhaps inspired by the yearlong Bates Contemplates Food initiative, which has examined issues around the nation’s food systems and Bates’ own dining and food-sourcing practices.

Mylius was among a group of students talking about a garden early in 2009. Around the same time, Dining Services Director Christine Schwartz and Camille Parrish, learning associate in the environmental studies program, were also discussing the idea.

Mylius, who is designing an interdisciplinary major around environmental studies and politics, raised the victory garden idea when she went to discuss her E.S. internship with Parrish. “I told her that I enjoyed gardening and I thought it’d be really cool if Bates had a garden,” Mylius says. As a matter of fact, Parrish replied, that idea was in the works.

“The fact that I was like, ‘Oh, me too!’ sort of sped it along,” says Mylius.

Mylius knew her way around a garden when she arrived at Bates. At home in Anchorage, Alaska, her mother grows ornamentals, including native wildflowers, and all kinds of produce (Molly favors carrots and strawberries).

While heat-loving crops like corn and eggplant fare poorly in Alaska’s climate, “some vegetables do really well because of the long days,” she says. “In the middle of summer, it never gets completely dark.

“Some plants love that. Every year the Alaska State Fair even features an exhibit with world-record-breaking vegetables.”

She adds, “I’m definitely a big supporter of local food, and it doesn’t get more local than your back yard.”

In the first weeks of Short Term, Bergevin and Mylius removed sod from a site near Commons along Central Avenue. They used heavy timbers, recycled from a fence recently removed from the north edge of campus, to build a frame for the 15-by-25-foot raised bed, and filled it with topsoil and compost.

They started planting herbs during the week of May 18. Basil and parsley seedlings are growing, dill and cilantro seeds are in the dirt and mint will go in sometime the week of Memorial Day. Once the plants get established, Dining Services staff will be able to simply step out the door and pick fresh herbs as needed.

Still in the discussion stage is a Bates vegetable garden, with a possible location being on Bardwell Street where a Bates-owned house was demolished last summer.

These aren’t Bates’ first ventures into raising its own produce. Dining Services created a vegetable garden in the yard at 161-163 Wood Street in the middle 1990s that is now used by Lots to Gardens, a community organization founded by Kirsten Walter ’00. Produce from this well-tended plot occasionally finds its way into Commons, but most is used for Lots to Gardens’ own projects.

For her environmental studies internship, Mylius has also worked with Schwartz on compiling a directory of the local vendors that supply foodstuffs to Bates. The directory Web site will feature a map showing Bates purveyors.

Her Short Term experience has taught Mylius how complicated gardening is and expanded her respect for Bergevin’s work. Also, she says, “a lot of my classes are comprehensive — a world view of problems. It’s really interesting to see them on a local level.”

“The internship is 200 hours, and so for Short Term that equates to 40 hours a week. So, it’s more hours than most Short Term classes, but it’s flexible and it’s fun,” she adds. “I get to play with dirt all day.”

— by Doug Hubley, with Kelly Cox ’11

Kirsten Walter ’00 and Ben Ayers ’99 didn’t register for traditional wedding gifts — eschewing the deep-sided pie dish, $17.99 at Macy’s — but instead asked friends and family to contribute to a barn-raising at their ca. 1800 farmhouse in Leeds, Maine.

The photo below and slide show at left show the gift being given. For two days prior to their Sept. 15 wedding — held in the completed barn — scores of family and friends, including some three dozen Bates alums, gathered to raise the frame and enclose the new building.

The raising culminated weeks of framework that commenced in earnest when barn designer Brad Morse ’99 arrived in August. He, along with Ayers and father-son neighbors Bruce and Nat Bell, formed a core team that cut the hemlock, milled the timbers at Bell’s farm, and cut the frame behind the brick farmhouse.

As the gift of time, expertise, and funds grew large, the couple got uneasy about not being able to give back, “other than some homemade jams,” says Walter with a smile. Guidance came from two mentors, Gloria and Gregg Varney of nearby Nezinscot Farm, who said this: “Asking for help is the biggest way to build trust.”

The truism resonated with the couple, whose careers involve building communities by building trust — she as founder of the urban-agriculture nonprofit Lots To Gardens, he as project director for the dZi Foundation, serving Himalayan communities. “We decided to accept everything that was happening,” says Walter, “and to feel incredibly honored by the trust, community, and friendships it helped us build.” [Slide show]

By H. Jay Burns

Borealis Breads founder Jim Amaral and food activist-author Mark Winne are among Bates College alumni featured during March events relating to the Nourishing Body and Mind: Bates Contemplates Food initiative.

All these events are open to the public at no cost.

First on the menu is a lecture about the impacts of globalization on poverty, food security and nutrition by Cornell University professor Per Pinstrup-Andersen at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 2, in Pettengill Hall’s Keck Classroom (G52). The talk is sponsored by the economics department.

Two weeks later, Bates alumni involved in food production and nutrition in Maine discuss a variety of issues in a panel presentation at 4:30 p.m. Monday, March 16, also in Pettengill Hall’s Keck Classroom (G52).

Moderated by Anna Bartel, associate director of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships at Bates, the panel comprises Borealis Breads founder Jim Amaral ’80; Maine farmers Steve Hoad ’72 of Windsor and Nicolas Lindholm ’86 of Penobscot; and Kirsten Walter ’00, director of the St. Mary’s Nutrition Center of Maine. The event is sponsored by the Bates Contemplates Food Planning Committee.

Finally, food activist and author Mark Winne ’72, gives a talk titled “Food Justice and Good Food — When Shall the Twain Meet?” at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 30, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St. A reception and book signing follow in the Benjamin Mays Center, 95 Russell St. This event too is sponsored by the Bates Contemplates Food Planning Committee. For more information, please call 207-786-6336.

This academic year, inspired by the opening of a new dining Commons and a $2.5 million gift supporting the use of organic, natural and farm-fresh foods, Bates launched Nourishing Body and Mind: Bates Contemplates Food. The initiative explores the ramifications of our food choices and spotlights Bates’ own award-winning sustainable food-service practices.

• Monday, March 16 at 4:30 p.m.
• Pettengill Hall’s Keck Classroom (G52).

Sarah Davis '10 (center) with NASAP growers at the Lewiston Farmers' Market.

If soup makes the soldier, as Napoleon Bonaparte said, it does a pretty good job shaping students, too.

Issues around food have an unusual teaching potential, a power rooted in one simple fact: everybody eats. And its branches reach out to nearly every corner of the human endeavor.

At Bates, the topic of food tends to invoke “issues of stewardship and sustainability, writ large,” says Anna Bartel, associate director of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships. “And poverty and social justice, because there’s no escaping the fact that food is huge in terms of social inequity.”

That scope holds true for the community activities, both volunteer and academically driven, that the Harward Center funds and coordinates year-round.

For instance, this past summer Sarah Davis ’10 worked for a Maine-based nonprofit, administering the Lewiston Farmers’ Market and helping immigrants learn the ways of American farming.

Meanwhile, Ariel Garfinkel ’08 taught kids in Lewiston where food comes from and how to cook it. Also working with youth was Andie Bisceglia ’09, who spent her summer at the Hillview apartments running a program for Lots to Gardens — an agency, founded by Kirsten Walter ’00, that uses gardening projects to strengthen community and support local young people.

For all three, the summer work illuminated the studies that awaited them when autumn came around. In her Harward-funded position with the New American Sustainable Agriculture Project, Davis guided farmers from Somalia and Guatemala in getting their produce to market. “I learned so much about the people that I worked with,” she says.

The work gave her “a first-hand perspective on the idea of difference” — a perspective valuable to her self-designed major exploring issues of difference and conflict in a context of social justice.

As a vehicle for teaching, food is distinctively useful as an exemplar across disciplines. “Pedagogy functions on the assumption that we start where people are and push them to someplace new,” Bartel says. “And everyone can start where they are with food. So pedagogically, it’s really powerful.”

All the more so given today’s mass critique of the food-industrial system. “Food and sustainable agriculture are perfect examples of readily identifiable areas where ordinary citizens can actually do a fair amount of research,” Bartel adds.

“There’s a lot of good information out there,” she says. “People can move from problem identification to problem solving, to living in a set of commitments that promote sustainable answers. And that, right there, is the model of what we think liberal education is doing in the world.”

“I came to Bates just wanting to be an environmental studies major,” but not knowing how many directions that might take her in, says Bisceglia. “There’s just so many options. And I think farming and local food combine them all.”

By Doug Hubley, photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen

View slide show: The Wedding Gift

Kirsten Walter ’00 and Ben Ayers ’99 didn’t register for traditional wedding gifts — eschewing the deep-sided pie dish, $17.99 at Macy’s — but instead asked friends and family to contribute to a barn-raising at their ca. 1800 farmhouse in Leeds, Maine.

The photo below and slide show at left show the gift being given. For two days prior to their Sept. 15 wedding — held in the completed barn — scores of family and friends, including some three dozen Bates alums, gathered to raise the frame and enclose the new building.

The raising culminated weeks of framework that commenced in earnest when barn designer Brad Morse ’99 arrived in August. He, along with Ayers and father-son neighbors Bruce and Nat Bell, formed a core team that cut the hemlock, milled the timbers at Bell’s farm, and cut the frame behind the brick farmhouse.

Ben Ayers '99 hammers pegs on Day One of the barn-raising as neighbor Kevin Hudner, an experienced timber-framer, steadies the beam.

As the gift of time, expertise, and funds grew large, the couple got uneasy about not being able to give back, “other than some homemade jams,” says Walter with a smile. Guidance came from two mentors, Gloria and Gregg Varney of nearby Nezinscot Farm, who said this: “Asking for help is the biggest way to build trust.”

The truism resonated with the couple, whose careers involve building communities by building trust — she as founder of the urban-agriculture nonprofit Lots To Gardens, he as project director for the dZi Foundation, serving Himalayan communities. “We decided to accept everything that was happening,” says Walter, “and to feel incredibly honored by the trust, community, and friendships it helped us build.”

By H. Jay Burns

Lewiston is the first Maine city to garner the coveted honor in 40 years. The last winner was Auburn, in 1967. The other nine 2007 winners named in a two-day event held in Anaheim, Calif. are: Flowing Wells, Ariz.; Santa Rosa, Calif.; Sierra Madre, Calif; Hollywood, Fla; Polk County, Fla; Dubuque, Iowa; Barnstable, Mass.; Clinton, N.C.; and Hickory, N.C.

Lewiston’s “innovative thinking and contagious enthusiasm contributed to the success of its efforts,” wrote Gloria Rubio-Cortes of Denver, Colo., president of the National Civic League, in a July 16 letter to the Lewiston Sun Journal. Rubio-Cortes cited the community’s “collaborative problem solving” as the distinguish feature in making it a “‘stand-out’ city in which to live, work, play and raise a family.”

The “All-America City” selection process requires cities to feature three key initiatives that dramatize civic engagement and opportunity. Named a finalist in 2006, Lewiston narrowly missed winning the award last year, but returned with a streamlined presentation to garner the highly coveted designation in 2007.

This year, Lewiston’s team of civic activists featured the work of Lots to Gardens, a Lewiston-based nonprofit founded by Kirsten Walter, Bates Class of 2000, as her senior thesis. Walter now serves as director of Lots to Gardens. In addition, Ari Rosenberg ’06 works as a Lots to Gardens employee, and Bates students continue to staff the youth development and community gardening activities every year.

Also featured in Lewiston’s award-winning presentation were the Lewiston Youth Council’s efforts against teen drinking and Empower Lewiston’s advocacy of the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income residents.

“The college is proud of maintaining a rich and ongoing partnership with Lots to Gardens,” says David Scobey, the Donald W. and Ann M. Harward Professor of Community Partnerships and director of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships. “Lewiston is a valuable resource and educational laboratory for Bates, given the college’s community engagement,” Scobey said. “Bates both contributes to and benefits from Lewiston’s community energy and creativity.”

Lots to Gardens maintains organic vegetable beds in two downtown Lewiston neighborhoods. Although one evening a week residents work together in the gardens in exchange for produce, the Lots to Gardens youth crew directs and performs most of the gardening, from designing the beds to site prep, from planting to harvest.

Field trips to local farms are also part of the program that bases its summer focus on youth leadership and development. All of the rules and standards for the workplace are developed by the crew to strengthen self-esteem, responsibility and an appreciation for teamwork, in addition to providing practical experience and a summer income. Lots to Gardens looks for participants at the Lewiston and Auburn high schools, in local transitional-living programs and among people fulfilling community service commitments.

This summer, Lots to Gardens joins hands with Green Horizons, the Bates College Museum of Art exhibition that explores the concept of environmental sustainability. Prominent artists from Maine and the world join in an adventurous attempt to provoke conversations around the questions: What is green? What is sustainable?

The project transcends traditional exhibition practices by reaching outside the museum walls to site-specific works that include two collaborations with Lots to Gardens, including a fruit orchard to be planted in the former Franklin Pasture in downtown Lewiston. Andrea Bisceglia ’09 of Durham, Conn., and Molly Ladd ’09 of Somerville, Maine, will produce a project designed to raise awareness of the importance of trees on campus and in the community.

Associate Professor of English Kimberly N. Ruffin, joined by artist Seitu Kenneth Jones and park ranger Bruce Barnes, will work with Lots to Garden director Walter ’00 and community groups associated with the Lewiston nonprofit to create Sighting and Sounding Sustainability, an exploration of culturally relevant crops that will be planted in a garden by community members. The group will also create a Shrine to the Collard Green in and around the museum.

With its centerpiece a giant painting that depicts Brooklyn after millennia of global warming, an exhibition exploring the concept of environmental sustainability opens on June 9 at the Bates College Museum of Art, 75 Russell St.

Green Horizons will present prominent artists from Maine and the world in an adventurous attempt to provoke conversations around the questions: What is green? What is sustainable?

This dynamic project will transcend traditional exhibition practices to include collaborations with writers and choreographers — including participants in the renowned Bates Dance Festival — and will reach outside the museum walls to site-specific works such as a fruit orchard to be planted in downtown Lewiston.

Sponsors of the exhibition, which closes Dec. 9, include the Synergy Fund, the Maine Arts Commission and the LEF Foundation. Admission to the exhibition and to museum events is open to the public at no cost.

For more information, please call 207-786-6158 or visit the museum’s Web site.

In addition to Alexis Rockman, whose 8-by-24-foot painting Manifest Destiny depicts Brooklyn under water and has been exhibited nationwide, Green Horizons participants include internationally renowned environmental artists Agnes Denes, Chris Jordan and David Maisel; such Maine artists as photographer Mark Silber, hay sculptor Michael Shaughnessy and the agitprop Beehive Design Collective; and commissioned collaborative works involving visual artists, Bates faculty and students. (See a condensed list or a detailed list of exhibit participants.)

“We’re not trying to define sustainability,” explains museum director Mark Bessire. “We’re trying to ask what it means.”

“The word seems to be overused — used for marketing, to convince people of things, to make people feel better. There’s a certain amount of hypocrisy connected to its use,” he explains. “So we wanted to bring forth works of art that questioned sustainability and created a conversation among the many disciplines of a liberal arts college.”

“Rather than us having a very defined vision and going out and making that, it’s been us talking to people about our idea and having them help us determine what vision is appropriate,” adds Anthony Shostak, the exhibition’s curator and the museum’s education curator.

Here are a few examples from the exhibition:

– Images of two of Denes’ land reclamation projects, including Wheatfield — A Confrontation, for which the artist grew wheat on a site in New York City;

– Jordan’s strangely beautiful renderings of high-tech waste products, such as discarded cell phones;

– A project in which Swiss artist Anne-Katrin Spiess will document the steps she must take to render her Maine visit carbon-neutral;

– An initiative to raise awareness about trees, produced by two Bates students in collaboration with the local nonprofit Lots to Gardens, that will involve the planting of fruit trees in downtown Lewiston;

– In Sustainable Wardrobe, clothing made by a Bates student from locally produced fibers and recycled natural fabrics.

– A public art project along the Androscoggin River exploring themes of community history and place-making, organized by the college’s Harward Center for Community Partnerships and a Boston sculptor;

– A performance project set at Bates’ Lake Andrews and created collaboratively by the Bates Dance Festival, the acclaimed PearsonWidrig DanceTheater and composer Robert Een.

“When people walk into this show, we definitely want to have this more cluttered nonlinear feeling,” says Bessire. “It’s going to be a huge painting, a huge garbage heap, a bicycle trying to create energy, a huge sculpture of hay, massive photographs.”

“It’s going to be messy.”

The $2 million Synergy Fund, created at Bates by donor Lee Smith, has provided major support for Green Horizons. The fund, Bessire explains, is designed to use visual culture as a catalyst for productive and probing exchanges between academic disciplines and between campus and community. While Synergy has supported other museum projects, he notes, “Green Horizons is the first major exhibition made possible by the Synergy Fund to examine its topic in such depth and breadth.’ ”

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‘Green Horizons’ participants and projects

An environmental studies major at Bates with a concentration in environmental geology, senior Rachel Booty is researching soil contamination by heavy metals — primarily lead — for her thesis. In particular, she’s investigating the impact such contamination makes on urban living. Her research has involved testing plant and soil samples from the downtown gardens run by Lots to Gardens, the community garden program that Booty works for, and comparing them to control materials taken from test gardens on campus.

From the perspective of Lots to Gardens, lead contamination poses a peculiar dilemma, she says.

“To folks who are interested in having gardens right next to their apartments, which we’re really trying to promote, it’s hard to say, ‘We really want you to have a garden, but you can’t go digging in your soil,’ ” Booty explains. Fortunately, there are ways to ameliorate the contamination.

Lots to Gardens has built raised beds filled with clean soil and has planted crops, such as onions, that take up contaminants and can then be disposed of safely. Sunflowers and begonias have also proven helpful, as has adding large quantities of composted vegetable matter. (Another senior, Dana DiGiando of Jameston, R.I., is participating in an experiment in Portland using spinach to absorb lead from the soil.)

Bates has enabled Booty to take her background in working the land to a whole new plane. For her thesis project, she has worked with Assistant Professor of Geology Beverly Johnson and Assistant Professor of Chemistry Rachel Austin. “The two departments have just been fantastic,” she says.