With topics including the effects of ethnic Chinese migration on Tibet and the outlook for farming in Norway, Bates College students who have conducted projects abroad supported by the college’s Otis and Phillips fellowships will discuss their findings in evening presentations throughout October.

These events are open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-753-6952.

Two Otis Fellows talk about their projects starting at 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 6, in Skelton Lounge, Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave.

A presentation by Ellen Sabina, a senior from Newcastle, is titled To Kill a Whale: Exploring the Ties that Bind the Faeroes to the Sea.

Sabina traveled to the Faeroe Islands (also spelled Faroe), in the North Atlantic, where she explored the relationship between the Faroese people and the sea. Isolated and fiercely proud of their heritage, the Faroese depend almost entirely on the sea, yet find this relationship changing dramatically in the face of globalization.

Anna Skarstad, a sophomore from Pleasantville, N.Y., offers a talk called Farming in the Western Fjords of Norway: An Endangered Life?

Skarstad visited two traditional sheep farms in Norway’s western fjord region, one farm located high in the mountains, the other on a remote, mostly abandoned island. Exploring how these farms manage to thrive despite nature’s extreme impacts, she questioned the strength and profundity of the farmers’ relationship with their land.

Also in Skelton Lounge, three Phillips Fellows will describe their projects starting at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 8.

Seniors Anne Sheldon of Brookline, Mass., and Ilana Adler-Bell of Canton, Conn., present Empowerment Through Education: 10,000 Girls Program, Kaolack, Senegal.

As participants in the 10,000 Girls Program in Kaolack, the pair worked with seventh- and eighth-grade girls, focusing on English-language practice and a mapping project with the goal of expanding opportunities and understandings of the power of women’s voice, place and actions in the local-global communities.

Also a senior, Corey Pattison of Dedham gives a talk called Toward Autonomy or Assimilation: Addressing Tibetan Sinicization in a Global Era. Specifically analyzing the socioeconomic implications of the recently constructed Qinghai-Lhasa railway, this presentation examines the increasingly marginal status held by Tibetans within their own society, a status directly resulting from widespread immigration ethnic Han Chinese into the Tibetan Autonomous Region.

Two more Phillips Fellows present their fellowship-funded projects starting at 7 p.m., Monday, Oct. 13, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

A senior from Katonah, N.Y., Jacob Lewis gives a talk titled The Power of Pilgrimage: Finding Meaning on El Camino de Santiago.

He examined why people undertake the grueling pilgrimage on this network of roads that since medieval times has brought travelers from all over Europe to the Christian shrine of Santiago de Compostela. Covering more than 500 miles across most of northern Spain, the Camino leaves a pilgrim plenty of time to ask, “Why do people still do this? And what am I doing here?”

Clyde Bango, a sophomore from Harare, Zimbabwe, gives a talk titled Preserving Art and Culture at Taller Portobelo. Bango undertook a residency at the Spelman College Summer Art Colony at the Panamanian arts workshop called Taller Portobelo.

He looked specifically at the Congo people in Panama, African descendants who are working to document their language, music and other cultural practices. This year, under Arturo Lindsay, a Panamanian artist and art professor at Spelman, students explored bio-safe ways of constructing sustainable architectural structures.

Lina Kong, a sophomore from Rose Hill, Mauritius, presents her Phillips-funded research in a talk titled Crosscultural Study of Mauritian and Chinese Cultures through the Hakka Linkage at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 29, in Skelton Lounge.

Kong wanted to learn more about the Hakka culture, a subgroup of China’s dominant Han people, and compare the influence of that culture in a city of the new China and in Mauritius, with the ultimate goal of better understanding her own identity as a Hakka. She wants to raise awareness about the danger of culture loss due to acculturalism, where new immigrants tend to integrate the surrounding culture as quickly as possible.

The Philip J. Otis Endowment was established in 1996 by Margaret V.B. and C. Angus Wurtele to memorialize their son, Philip, a member of the Bates graduating class of 1995, who died while trying to rescue an injured climber on Mount Rainier. The purpose of the program is to encourage among Bates students the same concern for nature that Otis demonstrated. The student projects selected for this endowment are generally concerned with the relationship between humans and the environment.

The Phillips Student Fellowships were begun in 1999 by Charles F. Phillips, the fourth president of Bates, and his wife Evelyn Minard Phillips, with a $9 million endowment gift. These fellowships are granted to students who create exceptionally good international or cross-cultural projects that focus on research, service-learning or career exploration.

Michael Pollan, whose best-selling books scrutinizing the impacts of the “food-industrial complex” have fueled a nationwide fascination with Americans’ food choices, speaks at Bates College at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 27, in the College Chapel, College Street.

Titled In Defense of Food: The Omnivore’s Solution, Pollan’s address is open to the public at no charge. A reception and book signing will follow. The annual Otis Lecture, the event is made possible by the Philip J. Otis Endowment at Bates.

One of the most prominent advocates for changing the culture of eating in the United States, Pollan has expressed a food philosophy stunning in its reach and simplicity: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

In The Botany of Desire (Random House, 2001), the influential Omnivore’s Dilemma (Penguin Press, 2006), and this year’s In Defense of Food (Penguin Press, 2008), Pollan not only challenges us to ponder our diet, but reminds us of our dependence on the land for our sustenance.

In “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” he follows each of the food chains that sustain us — industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves — from the source to a final meal, while focusing on our relationships with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on. Each time Pollan sits down to a meal, he traces the origins of everything on the plate, revealing what we unwittingly ingest and how our taste for particular foods and flavors reflects our evolutionary inheritance.

His follow-up, “In Defense of Food,” is an indictment of a conspiracy of marketers, nutritional scientists and mass-producers of “edible foodlike substances” that, in the Western diet, has replaced food with nutrients and common sense with confusion. The result is what Michael Pollan calls “the American paradox”: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.

“Pollan’s critique of the American food industry and the plague of obesity, diabetes, coronary disease, cancer and untimely death for which it is largely responsible is comparable to the work of Rachel Carson as a contribution to the history of human self-destruction, for the food fabricators could not have done their work without our complicity any more than the environmental polluters could have done theirs,” Jacob Epstein wrote in a review of “In Defense of Food” for The New York Review of Books.

Pollan has received numerous awards for his work. “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” was named one of the 10 best books of 2006 by The New York Times and The Washington Post, and won the 2007 James Beard Foundation Award for best food writing.

Pollan grew up in Woodbury, N.Y., and was introduced to gardening by his grandfather. He attended Bennington College and received a master’s degree in American literature from Columbia University. He served as executive editor for Harper’s Magazine for many years and is now the Knight Professor of Science and Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

The event coincides with Nourishing Body and Mind: Bates Contemplates Food, a dominant theme of the 2008-09 academic year. Including a Web site, events and other programming, “Bates Contemplates Food” is an initiative to raise consciousness about the consequences of our food choices and, in particular, about Bates’ own efforts to feed the campus in a healthy, sustainable way.

The annual Otis Lecture at Bates is funded by the Philip J. Otis Endowment, established in 1996 by a gift from Margaret V.B. and C. Angus Wurtele in memory of their son, Philip, a member of the class of 1995 who died attempting to rescue injured climbers on Mount Rainier.

In recognition of Otis’ appreciation for nature, the endowment helps support Bates programs with an environmental focus, in particular those exploring the spiritual and moral dimensions of humanity’s relationship with the environment.

In Kongsfjorden on the west side of Svalbard, Will Ambrose (facing) and Kelton McMahon ’05 haul a dredge to collect Serripes groenlandicus and other clam species for McMahon’s thesis in 2004. Photograph by Glenn Lopez, SUNY–Stony Brook.

Professor Will Ambrose, a bearded biologist specializing in Arctic sea-floor ecology, is a pioneer in the science of deciphering the past — including past climates — by studying the annual hard-tissue accretions of organisms such as mollusks.

As an expert in sclerochronology, Ambrose has discovered a link between Arctic clam growth and regular shifts in the region’s climate. In short, Arctic clams grow more rapidly during regimes of warm and wet weather and less during cold and dry regimes. This sensitivity to climate change, says Ambrose, makes the humble bivalve a “sentinel of climate change.”

While Ambrose is collaborating on no fewer than five clamshell research projects at the moment, the scientific paper that detailed the initial findings of a correlation between climate change and Arctic clamshells appeared in Global Change Biology in September 2006.

Seen here is the cross section of a small portion of aSerripes groenlandicus shell, near the umbo, or hinge. The lines indicate annual growth: dark lines for slow winter growth; light areas indicate fast summer growth. For an image showing the complete shell, click the image above. Will Ambrose has discovered a correlation between growth and climate shifts. This image is a composite of 18 images produced by the College’s new Imaging and Computing Center using a Nikon SMZ 1500 stereo microscope. Collected in 1926, the shell’s actual length is 2.5 inches.

The paper emerged from work done three years earlier, when Ambrose dispatched divers to the bottom of a high Arctic fjord in the Svalbard archipelago, a popular Arctic research site about halfway between the Norwegian mainland and the North Pole. From the ocean bottom, the divers returned with four Greenland cockles (Serripes groenlandicus).

After encasing the shells in epoxy and slicing them apart, Ambrose and a team of scientists, including Kelton McMahon ’05, analyzed the growth bands. First, the team found that growth bands were indeed deposited annually. Then the team was able to correlate annual differences in shell growth with a measurement of Arctic weather oscillations known as the Arctic Climate Regime Index.

“What makes the work exciting,” says Ambrose, interviewed in his cluttered office on Carnegie’s third floor, “is that this is the first time in the Arctic that we’ve been able to track a large-scale climatic oscillation and see that large-scale regional event reflected in animals living on the bottom.”

While scientists have for decades analyzed growth lines in shells (Ambrose and others call them “trees of the sea”) in order to reconstruct past environments, the intensity around climate-change research has “really made the field of sclerochronology take off,” he says.

In this hot field, Ambrose’s research is distinctive for its location, on the Arctic continental shelf. “A lot of the work has been done at lower latitudes, mostly because it’s harder to get clams in the Arctic and there are simply fewer people available to help,” he says. “That’s why we’re ahead of the ball.”

If it’s true that Arctic clams grow faster in warmer weather (and grow faster when there’s less of a seasonal ice pack, another signal that Ambrose saw hints of), a simplistic response might be, “Great — fatter clams for walruses to munch on.” But, explains Ambrose, fat clams won’t offset the problems walruses are having due to less pack ice to rest on. And less ice will also affect tiny creatures inside the ice that are the first link in a food chain for polar cod, seabirds, and seals. And so on, throughout the Arctic food web.

These Serripes groenlandicus clams were collected in Storfjord at a site last visited by 19th-century Russian explorers. Photograph by Greg Henkes '08.

In the end, changes in water temperature and salinity (due to runoff from melting glaciers) and increased sea levels, leading to erosion and turbidity, will all take their toll on the Arctic ecology. “Ecosystems operate at the interface of physics, chemistry, and biology, with both complementary and contradictory interactions,” Ambrose writes in a forthcoming article predicting that “regional, and perhaps global, biodiversity will suffer.”

Until recently, Ambrose researched other organisms of the benthic community, such as bloodworms along Maine’s coast. A simple matter of funding helped bring bivalves into focus, as a Bates grant (from the Philip J. Otis Endowment) and an external one (from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute) helped purchase a pricey Isomet low-speed saw for preparing shell cross-sections. “Very expensive,” Ambrose says.

In researching the biological response of Arctic bivalves to climate change, Ambrose has depended on the interests and expertise of colleagues and students at Bates and abroad.

Geology professor Beverly Johnson, for example, has been invaluable in co-advising biology students so they can learn to use the College’s stable isotope ratio mass spectrometer, a tool to help identify the age and origins of molecules in various materials. Johnson herself has used the instrument to look at amino acids in dinosaur eggs, and it can likewise be used to tease out the chemical components of clamshells.

“I work with Will to understand how modern systems work,” says Johnson, “and then go back to old shells, using the geochemistry of shells from 125,000 years ago to reconstruct the environment.”

Ambrose also depends on Matt Duvall, who directs Bates’ new Imaging Center, to create elegant microscopic images of his clamshell sections that Ambrose calls “just incredible.”

Geology professor Mike Retelle, another Svalbard regular who specializes in reconstructing climates from lake sediments, has collaborated with Ambrose on researching climate-change information from fossilized Ice Age clams.

Beyond the sciences, Ambrose, Johnson, and Retelle belong to an informal North Atlantic Study Group on campus that also includes archeologists Gerald Bigelow and Bruce Bourque, historian Michael Jones, and political scientist Áslaug Ásgeirsdóttir. What started informal — an interdisciplinary coffee klatsch — has given rise to “North Atlantic Studies,” a thematic grouping of Bates courses, known as a concentration, under the College’s new general education requirements. “We represent an area of study, rather than just a bunch of us sitting around having coffee,” Ambrose says.

“It’s a truly special group,” Retelle adds. “The richness of discussion is such that the boundaries between disciplines disappear. The walls of the box dissolve. Will is a big part of that. As a model for an undergraduate institution, Will has really raised the bar.”

Ambrose himself is quick to point out that “students here are the ones driving the bus in terms of getting the work done.” As he speaks, Greg Henkes ’08 of Chapel Hill, N.C., is downstairs in the environmental geochemistry lab cutting shells and extracting organic material. Henkes’ senior thesis involves a study of 130 years of climate change in the Barents Sea and Svalbard using a historic Russian collection of Serripes groenlandicus. He will present his findings to an American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco.

Greg Henkes ’08, one of Will Ambrose’s thesis students, took this photograph at 3 a.m. on June 3, 2007, as the research shipLance heads through sea ice in Storfjord in the Svalbard archipelago, about halfway between the North Pole and Norway.

“It’s pretty incredible to be able to do this at Bates,” says Henkes. “It’s the way science is going,” says Ambrose of the collaborative nature of scientific enquiry, noting his international partnerships with colleagues at the Norwegian Polar Institute and the research firm Akvaplan-niva. “People aren’t doing their own little thing anymore.”

“That’s the way science should be done,” emphasizes Kelton McMahon, co-author of the Serripes groenlandicus paper. “In certain circles, it is. But a lot of people come from departments that don’t share data because they feel funding is in direct competition. Bates takes a very progressive approach to interdisciplinary research.”

McMahon is now working on his Ph.D. in a program co-sponsored by MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. His contribution to the clamshell research has been to use two gizmos — a New Wave Research UP213 laser ablation system coupled to a Thermo Finnigan Element 2 single collector field inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer — to measure the chemical components of shell samples. Ambrose et al. used changes in the ratio of strontium to calcium to establish that the external lines of the Greenland cockleshells were, in fact, annual growth lines. “If it wasn’t for Kelton getting us access to those machines,” says Ambrose, “the paper wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good.”

As he sits in his Carnegie office discussing his work — Ambrose also hopes to extend his sclerochronology research to coral in part because “they live much longer than clams” — he is eagerly awaiting a new shipment of Svalbard shells that he hopes will solve a quirk in his findings. Until recent years, Ambrose found that annual clam growth was high in years when the extent of Arctic ice pack, as measured each March, was low. But over the last several years, “growth didn’t track ice cover the way it did before. Something happened, but we’re not sure what,” he says. “Are the last four years unnatural? That’s why I want those new clams. It’s another four years of data that will help establish some baselines.” And baselines will help provide more answers, which will probably just beget more questions. It’s the wayscientific inquiry works. “People like simple answers,” Ambrose says. “Nature doesn’t.”

By Edgar Allen Beem

Freelance writer Edgar Allen Beem wrote about the College’s sustainability initiatives in the Fall 2007 issue of Bates Magazine.

Poet Mary Oliver, whose writing has won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, visits Bates College to read from her work at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Sept. 25, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Made possible by the Philip J. Otis Endowment, the annual Otis Lecture is open to the public at no cost. A reception and book signing will be held in the Olin lobby after the reading. For more information, please call 207-786-6135.

Oliver is firmly established in the highest realm of American poets. Her evocative and precise imagery brings nature into clear focus, transforming the everyday world into a place of magic and discovery. Her work, as her fellow poet Stanley Kunitz said, “is fine and deep; it reads like a blessing. Her special gift is to connect us with our sources in the natural world, its beauties and terrors and mysteries and consolations.”

Oliver’s many books include such poetry collections as No Voyage and Other Poems (1965) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Primitive (1983), and prose works such as Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse (1998) and Long Life: Essays and Other Writings (2004).

Thirst, a new book of poems, will be published by Beacon Press in October 2006.

Oliver attended Ohio State University and Vassar College. As a young writer, strongly influenced by Edna St. Vincent Millay, she wrote to the late poet’s sister and was invited to visit. For the next several years Steepletop, the poet’s country house in upper state New York, became her second home.

Subsequently Oliver moved to New York City, visited England for a year and then, in 1964, returned to the United States. She has taught at various colleges and universities, including Case Western Reserve, Bucknell, Sweet Briar College, the University of Cincinnati and Bennington College.

She lives in Provincetown, Mass.

The annual Otis Lecture at Bates is funded by the Philip J. Otis Endowment,established in 1996 by a gift from Margaret V.B. and C. Angus Wurtele in memory of their son, Philip, a member of the class of 1995 who died attempting to rescue injured climbers on Mount Rainier.

In recognition of Otis’ appreciation for nature, the endowment helps support Bates programs with an environmental focus, in particular those exploring the spiritual and moral dimensions of humanity’s relationship with the environment.

Three students have received Philip J. Otis Fellowships to support research into the relationships among individuals, societies and nature.

Six have been awarded Phillips Student Fellowships, providing funding for summer projects involving meaningful immersion in different cultures.

The 2005 Otis recipients are:

Lindsy Blazej, a junior from Dixmont, Maine. She will go to Europe to investigate “ecovillages,” settlements designed to support a full range of human activities with the least impact on the natural environment.

Carlos Challen Willemsen, a sophomore from Guatemala City, Guatemala. He will travel to the Peruvian Andes to visit the native Quechua people and study their relationships to the plant life around them and their traditional uses of plants as medicine and food.

Andrea Wolf, a junior from Nashville, Tenn. She will visit the Central Andes to study the traditional weavings of the Aymara indigenous group, examining how woven textiles symbolize Aymara cosmology and express the wider relationship of communities with the environment.

The 2005 Phillips recipients are:

Ainur Begim, a sophomore from Aktobe City, Kazakhstan, who will visit Britain and Greece to research the Panathenaic Festival, the most important religious festival in ancient Athens.

Jacob Bluestone, a sophomore from Huntington, N.Y. In Bolivia, he will teach and work with disadvantaged children, and he hopes to supply his students with disposable cameras to record life in their neighborhoods.

Arda Gucler, a sophomore from Istanbul, Turkey, who will investigate aspects of the World War I battle of Gallipoli through interviews with the families of Gallipoli veterans in Australia and New Zealand.

Tyler Paul, a junior from Great Falls, Mont. Paul will travel to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan to study the economic progress and national identity of these former Soviet republics.

Vanni Thach, a junior from Camden, N.J. She will go to Cambodia to explore her personal heritage and the history of Cambodia, especially its recent past and legacy of genocide.

Chelsea Tryder, a junior from Fryeburg, Maine. She will spend the summer at an orphanage for girls in Santiago, Chile, assisting with the day-to-day activities of the orphanage, teaching dance to the girls and working with them to create a mural.

Established in 1996 by Margaret V.B. and C. Angus Wurtele, the Philip J. Otis Endowment commemorates their son, Philip, a member of the Bates class of 1995. A park ranger, Otis died attempting to rescue an injured climber on Mount Rainier.

Otis was deeply concerned with nurturing a sense of responsibility for the natural environment. The Otis Endowment sponsors opportunities for study, exploration and reflection by students, faculty and other members of the Bates community. Each year a small number of students are selected as Otis Fellows to receive grants between $2,000 and $5,000 to support off-campus projects that explore an environmental and/or eco-spiritual topic.

Phillips Student Fellowships support students who design exceptional international or cross-cultural projects focusing on research, service-learning, career exploration or a combination of the three. The Phillips Student Fellowships, Phillips Faculty Fellowships and Phillips Professorships at Bates are part of the Phillips Endowment Program, an initiative of awards, honors and opportunities funded by a $9 million endowment bequest made to the college in 1999 by Charles F. Phillips, fourth president of Bates, and his wife, Evelyn Minard Phillips.

Franklin Burroughs, author of the acclaimed books Billy Watson’s Croker Sack (W.W. Norton, 1991) and The River Home: A Return to the Carolina Low Country (University of Georgia Press; first published in 1992 as Horry and the Waccamaw), visits Bates College to give the eighth annual Otis Lecture at 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 9, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

The title of Burroughs’ talk is Landscapes: The Mind’s Eye and the Inner Ear. Made possible through the Philip J. Otis Endowment, the lecture is open to the public at no cost. (Please note that the printed Bates Invites You calendar for March erroneously lists a second event at Muskie for this evening. In fact, the lecture by Liyakat Takim will be held in Chase Lounge at 7:30 p.m.)

The recently retired Harrison McCann Professor of the English Language at Bowdoin, Burroughs is nationally known as an essayist focusing on connections between human and natural histories.

For more than 20 years his essays have appeared in some of the most important American journals and reviews, such as The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review and Harpers Magazine. Many of his essays have been included in the annual compilation Best American Essays, and Burroughs is represented in the Norton Anthology of Nature Writing and various Maine publications.

Burroughs is known for the books The River Home recounting his 1985 canoe trip on the Waccamaw River in his native South Carolina; and Billy Watson’s Croker Sack, a collection of essays focusing on hunting, fishing and the rural life.

Burroughs began teaching at Bowdoin in 1968 following his work for the Ph.D. at Harvard University. He received his baccalaureate from the University of the South in 1964.

The annual Otis Lecture at Bates is funded by the Philip J. Otis Endowment, established in 1996 by a gift from Margaret V.B. and C. Angus Wurtele in memory of their son, Philip, a member of the class of 1995 who died attempting to rescue injured climbers on Mount Rainier.

In recognition of Otis’ appreciation for nature, the endowment helps support Bates programs with an environmental focus, in particular those exploring the spiritual and moral dimensions of humanity’s relationship with the environment.