The Kenney Center's
recent food drive, “Care to Share,” collected a total of seven large boxes of
non-perishable food from the campus, donating two to Bethesda House and five to
Schenectady Inner City Ministry's food pantry.
“I would like to thank you all for your donations of
non-perishable food and personal care items,” said Sarah-Jo Stimpson '05, who
organized the event with a number of students and staff.
The two food pantries were most appreciative of the items received from the seven-week drive because their supplies
had been depleted by demand from a severe winter, fires and the recent
mudslide, she said.
Richard Bopp, an expert on the PCB
contamination of the Hudson River, will speak on
“Mercury Deposition in New York
and New Jersey: From Geochemistry
to Policy” on Thursday, April 22, at 7 p.m.
in the Nott Memorial.
His talk, which is free and open
to the public, is sponsored by the College's Environmental Studies Program, the
Environmental Awareness Club and the Minerva Committee.
Bopp, associate professor of earth
and environmental sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, studied
chemistry as an undergraduate at MIT, and has a Ph.D. in geology from Columbia
University. For the past 20 years
he has conducted research on various aspects of contaminant geochemistry in the
Hudson River, its tributaries, and other natural waters
of the Hudson Basin.
His research group at RPI uses
analysis of dated sediment cores to study the sources and distribution of PCBs,
pesticides, dioxins, PAHs, and trace metals. They also study atmospheric
deposition of contaminants, and in situ dechlorination of PCBs.
Bopp has been involved in several
major contaminant issues including the PCB problem in the Hudson,
dioxins in Newark Bay,
and disposal of contaminated dredge spoils.
His talk is the last in the
College's Environmental Studies lecture series titled “Environmental Science
and Public Policy.” Environmental advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. opened the
series. Orrin Pilkey, an authority on the protection of coastlines, also spoke.
Naturalist
painter and author James Prosek will demonstrate his watercolor techniques on
Tuesday, April 20, from 1:30
to 4 p.m. in Room 301 of the Biology Department at Union College's Science and Engineering Center.
He
also will give a slide lecture of his work and travels at 4:30 in Room 215 of the Arts Building.
Both
events are free and open to the public. They are sponsored by Union's
departments of biology and visual arts.
This
occasion commemorates the first visit to Union College by noted naturalist painter and author John James
Audubon in 1844.
His
work forms a travelogue and fishing memoir. The New York Times calls Prosek the “Audubon of the fishing world.” His
latest book, Fly-Fishing the 41st: Around
the World on the 41st Parallel, recounts his experiences, which in his
words “reflect the people, places, and fish I encountered on my trip. Since all
of them are connected to the latitude of my origin, 41 degrees north, they bear
some connection to myself and my feelings about home.”
Among
other accomplishments, Prosek was portrayed on the front page of a newspaper in
Paris, France after catching a record 50-pound catfish from the Seine River.
A
native of Stamford, Conn., Prosek is a 1997 graduate of Yale University with a B.A. in English literature. His artwork has
been exhibited at Galerie Larock-Granoff in Paris; the Cincinnati Museum Center; the Union League Club, New York City; and the Evansville (Ind.) Museum
of Arts & Science among others.
He has
published five books, which will be available at Union.
His paintings are represented by Gerald Peters Galleries in New York and Santa Fe.
Further
information, call (518) 388.6714 or visit Prosek's website at www.troutsite.com.
Andrew McCabe
'03 checked in by phone on Monday morning from Great
Smokey Mountains
National Park, exactly 203.8 miles
into his walk on the Appalachian Trail.
He started the 2,160-mile trek in Springer
Mountain, Ga., on Saint
Patrick's Day. He hopes to reach Maine's
Mount Katahdin by mid-October.
In the early going, he took a
total of three days off to treat some blisters, a job that required huge
quantities of antibiotic ointment, athletic tape and moleskin, he said.
Since then, however, things have
been going well, except that “the ups and downs are brutal,” he said. He just
finished a steep ascent and descent of seven miles each, he noted.
On Sunday, he passed the highest
point of the A.T., Clingman's Dome at the border of Tennessee
and North Carolina. “It's all
downhill from here, so to speak,” he said.
He expects to reach Hot
Springs, N.C., and the end of
the Great Smokey
Mountains in about four days. He is
carrying his food and gear in a pack, picking up supplies along the way.
A steady rain was falling on
Monday morning, and heavier rains – up the three or four inches – were expected
later in the day, he said.
One thing he has avoided so far is
a trail name, a moniker that “through hikers” often give each other. One hiking
companion is “Spin Cycle” (he washes his t shirts frequently). Another is
“Subway” (he mistook a sandwich franchise in one town for an underground
train.).
“It'll come,” McCabe said a trail
name. “It's just a matter of time.”
McCabe, who last spring won the
Daggett Prize for best conduct and character, graduated with a major in
computer science and minors in math and economics. He was perhaps best known on
campus as president of Student Forum. He was a founder of Geisel House, a theme
house that promotes childhood literacy. He also served on Student Affairs
Committee, Theme House Consortium, the selection committee for the House System
Implementation Committee and as an admissions interviewer and panelist.
Helen Vendler, A. Kingsley Porter
University Professor of English and American Language and Literature at
Harvard, will give a talk “How Emily Dickinson Shapes Her Plots” using a
selection of several poems on Thursday, April 22, at 3:45 p.m. in the F.W.
Olin Center
Auditorium, Room 115.
The talk, sponsored by the English
Department, is open to the public.
Copies of the poems are available
in the English department and will be distributed at the lecture.
Seamus Heaney has described
Vendler as “the best close reader of poems to be found on the literary pages” (The Observer), while A.O. Scott has
offered this explanation of Vendler's unique power as a “reader”: “Vendler
writes less as a scholar (though her learning is prodigious) than as one
impelled by the special pleasure she finds in poems to trace each instance of
that pleasure to its source” (The Nation).
In addition to an immense number
of published essays on the poetry of scores of poets, Vendler has published 17
books (almost all with the Harvard University Press) on poets writing in
English from the 16th to the 21st century, including
volumes such as Part of Nature, Part of
Us, unanimous choice for the National Book Critics Circle Award in
criticism, and acclaimed book-length studies of Shakespeare, Herbert, Keats,
Stevens, Yeats, and Heaney.
