Bard College Hosts Symposium on PCB Contamination and “Bomb Trains” Threatening the Hudson/Mahicantuck River on April 11
On Friday, April 11 from 10 am to 4 pm in Olin Hall, Bard College will host“The Fate of the River,” a symposium centered on two major environmental threats facing the Hudson/Mahicantuck River—high levels of PCB contamination in the river and “bomb trains,” overloaded freight trains carrying Bakken shale oil and unidentified chemicals along the eroding west bank of the river. Students, faculty, staff, and members of the Hudson Valley community are welcome to attend for all or part of the symposium.
Alexandra “Sasha” Skochilenko ’17, Bard and Smolny College alumna and Russian artist who was imprisoned in 2022 for opposing the war in Ukraine, will speak at Bard College Berlin on Monday, April 7. Her talk, How a Bachelor’s Degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences Helped Me in Jail, which will take place from noon to 3 pm EDT and be accessible via Zoom, will be moderated by her academic advisor, Ilya Kalinin, of Smolny Beyond Borders and visiting scholar at Bard College Berlin and Humboldt University.
Grace Miller-Trabold ’26, a junior art history and visual culture and human rights major at Bard College with a concentration in Latin American and Iberian Studies, has been awarded a Projects for Peace Grant for $10,000 by the Davis Foundation. Miller-Trabold’s project, “Connecting Threads: Reciprocity and Gratitude as Pedagogies of Peace in Oaxacan Textile,” will provide resources for youth workshops on Indigenous Oaxacan textile traditions, which will take place in Oaxaca, Mexico, and in Poughkeepsie, New York.
CCS Bard, Classroom 1025:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Suki Kim (2023-24 Keith Haring Chair in Art and Activism) is an investigative journalist, a novelist and the only writer ever to have lived undercover in North Korea for immersive journalism. Kim’s NY Times bestseller Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite (Penguin Random House) is an unprecedented literary documentation of the world’s most secretive gulag nation during the final year of Kim Jong Il’s reign.
Bard College Hosts Symposium on PCB Contamination and “Bomb Trains” Threatening the Hudson/Mahicantuck River on April 11
Bard College will host“The Fate of the River,” a symposium centered on two major environmental threats facing the Hudson/Mahicantuck River. The symposium will take place on Friday, April 11 from 10 am to 4 pm in Olin Hall at Bard College. “The Fate of the River” will call attention to high levels of PCB contamination in the river and “bomb trains”—overloaded freight trains carrying Bakken shale oil and unidentified chemicals along the eroding west bank of the river. General Electric’s dumping of toxic material in the river over 30 years and its subsequent clean-up between 2009 and 2015 that did not meet agreed upon environmental benchmarks has resulted in the river’s high levels of PCB contamination. Continuing PCB contamination causes human health risks, ongoing extinction and disease to fish and wildlife, and damages river ecosystems, wetlands, ground water, and soil. The other symposium topic is the environmental threat of “Bomb Trains” carrying highly explosive fossil fuels, which if derailed, spell catastrophe in impacted communities.
The purpose of this symposium is to facilitate public discussion informed by science, environmental law, and best citizen advocacy practices and to explore how members of the community can effectively address and work together to curtail these threats. Morning presentations will be followed by an afternoon panel and public discussion. Members of the Hudson Valley community are welcome to attend for all or part of the symposium.
Key speakers include writer, filmmaker and adventurer, Jon Bowermaster; Associate Director of Government Affairs at Riverkeeper Jeremy Cherson MS ’15, who is working to advance Riverkeeper’s priorities in Albany and Washington; Senior Staff Attorney at Food & Water Watch and Bard faculty member Erin Doran; public health physician and Director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at SUNY Albany David O. Carpenter; and lawyer Florence Murray, whose practice specializes in traumatic brain injuries and wrongful death actions, civil rights violations with severe injuries, trucking collisions, and railroad derailments—such as the one in East Palestine, Ohio.
“The Fate of the River”symposium is the first in a series of public discussions entitled Environmental Injustice Across the Americas that focuses on state-sanctioned pollution, the poisoning of water, destruction of the commons, and the fight for justice. “The Fate of the River” is cosponsored by Bard College’s Human Rights Program, Center for Civic Engagement, Center for Environmental Policy, Environmental Studies, and the Office of Sustainability.
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“The Fate of the River” Symposium Schedule Friday, April 11, 2025 Olin Hall, Bard College
10:00–10:10 am Introduction to “The Fate of the River” symposium 10:10–10: 35am Introduction and screening of Jon Bowermaster’s film A Toxic Legacy about General Electric’s contamination of the Hudson/Mahicantuck River 10:40–11:00am Jeremy Cherson, Associate Director of Government Affairs, Riverkeeper 11:05–11:25 am Erin Doran, Faculty in Environmental Law, Bard Center for Environmental Policy, and Senior Staff Attorney, Food & Water Watch 11:35–11:55 am David Carpenter, Director of Institute for Health and the Environment, SUNY Albany Noon–1:00pm LUNCH BREAK 1:05–1:25 pm Eli Dueker, Associate Professor of Environmental and Urban Studies, and Director of Bard Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities 1:25–1:40 pm Introduction to and screening of Jon Bowermaster’s film Bomb Trains 1:45–2:05 pm Florence Murray, Partner of Murray & Murray Law Firm, represents stakeholders affected by the toxic aftermath of the 2023 derailment of a Norfolk Southern train in East Palestine, Ohio 2:15–2:35 pm COFFEE BREAK 2:40–4:00 pm Panel and Public Discussion: “Next Steps Toward a Healthier River”
Refreshments graciously provided by Taste Budds and Yum Yum of Red Hook.
Post Date: 03-31-2025
Sasha Skochilenko ’17 to Give Talk on April 7 at Bard College Berlin
Alexandra “Sasha” Skochilenko ’17, Bard and Smolny College alumna and Russian artist who was imprisoned in 2022 for opposing the war in Ukraine, will speak at Bard College Berlin on Monday, April 7. Her talk, How a Bachelor’s Degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences Helped Me in Jail, which will take place from noon to 3 pm EDT and be accessible via Zoom, will be moderated by her academic advisor, Ilya Kalinin, of Smolny Beyond Borders and visiting scholar at Bard College Berlin and Humboldt University. Skochilenko had been imprisoned in March 2022 for the act of placing anti-war leaflets, disguised as price tags, on goods in a grocery store in Saint Petersburg. In 2024, she was released along with other political prisoners as part of a larger prisoner swap between Russia, the United States, and several European countries. She is a 2025 recipient of the Bard College Award.
In her talk, Skochilenko will discuss her studies in anthropology at Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and how this experience shaped and strengthened her anti-war stance. She will also reflect on her courtroom speech which explored the value of life and reconciliation in times of war and conflict, and how these ideas helped her survive imprisonment.
Bard Student Grace Miller-Trabold ’26 Awarded Davis Projects for Peace Grant
Grace Miller-Trabold ’26, a junior art history and visual culture and human rights major at Bard College with a concentration in Latin American and Iberian Studies, has been awarded a Projects for Peace Grant for $10,000 by the Davis Foundation. Miller-Trabold’s project, “Connecting Threads: Reciprocity and Gratitude as Pedagogies of Peace in Oaxacan Textile,” will provide resources for youth workshops on Indigenous Oaxacan textile traditions, which will take place in Oaxaca, Mexico, and in Poughkeepsie, New York.
“The preservation of these textile traditions, despite colonization and the imperialization of global capitalist markets, exemplify a cultural resilience that is rooted in communal practices which emphasize belonging, presence, and peace,” Miller-Trabold writes in her proposal. “The artistic medium of textile is inherently peacebuilding as it cultivates a multigenerational, community centered experience that is grounded in intentionality, gratitude, and reciprocity.”
Grace will organize and host two weeks of art workshops for youth in Teotitlan del Valle, Mexico, who will work with the Zapotec community on textile traditions and practices. The small artworks they produce will travel back to the US with Miller-Trabold, who will then facilitate workshops for youth groups in New York to collaborate on these projects at educational institutions in Poughkeepsie, using the same traditional dyeing and weaving traditions, before those collaborative works are returned to Oaxaca. The project aims to create spaces of peace across national borders and across generations in which textile traditions that incorporate ancestral Zapotec ecological knowledge and artistic expertise can be continued and shared.
She “will work closely with farms and gardens in our community to grow plants suitable for use as dyes,” said Paul Mairenthal, the director of the Trustee Leader Scholar Program at Bard, where Miller-Trabold developed her project. “Her project is about history, tradition, memory and community building through textiles. It has a lot of great possibilities.”
Projects for Peace, a Davis Foundation initiative facilitated by Middlebury College in Vermont, is a global program that partners with other educational institutions to identify and support peacebuilders and changemakers across college campuses. Every year, 100 or more student leaders are awarded a grant in the amount of $10,000 each to implement a “Project for Peace” anywhere in the world. To learn more, visit: middlebury.edu/projects-for-peace