Hello from Northampton, where the days are still warm and the evenings are delightfully cool, signaling the coming autumnal season. It has been an exciting and productive summer at Smith, and we are delighted to showcase some of the fantastic work of our staff, student interns and faculty fellows in this newsletter. Even as we face climate instability, rising temperatures, and biodiversity loss, our work continues to be a source of inspiration and hope as we tackle challenging problems in innovative and thoughtful ways. Read on for more stories and images, from artistic endeavors to landscape interventions to embracing the circular economy. Join us in celebrating our collective successes.
Beth Hooker
Administrative Director of CEEDS
Updates from Underground: Smith Geothermal and Davis Meadow
The Davis Meadow Restoration, pictured above, was completed over the summer. It is located above Smith’s first geothermal well field, with 72 geothermal boreholes to a depth of 850 feet. This transformation, following the strategic initiatives of the Landscape Master Plan (2022), includes meadows, low-mow grass lawns, numerous native plantings and multiple areas designed to improve and expand outdoor social spaces. These landscapes are designed to increase biodiversity through a mixture of local plant species which supply food for songbirds and wildlife and sequester carbon in deep root systems.
Campus as Classroom
Though traditional academic programs were on pause for the summer months, there was no shortage of discovery underway on campus, through CEEDS internships and faculty and student research.
Six Smithies joined the CEEDS staff this summer to make some discoveries of their own. JD Kim ‘27, Molly Neu ‘25, Sasha Kracauer ‘27, Sarah Bragdon ‘25, and Flora Meeker ‘25 all brought their intellectual curiosity and talent to the environmental and sustainability work underway at CEEDS. They worked with Smith’s Dining Services to refine Smith’s definition of “local” food. They worked to clear invasive plants from sites at MacLeish Field Station for important faculty research on mountain magnolia and Baltimore checkerspot moth. They sorted, organized, and curated more than 6 tons of materials from Smith move-out to be ready for our first ever SmithCycle Thrift shop for move-in this fall. They built a new woodland trail at MacLeish, a meditative link between the existing trail system and a sculptural element of a year-long exhibition by Moroccan artist Younes Rahmoun called Here, Now hosted by the Smith College Museum of Art from August 30 2024- July 13, 2025. The interns reflected on their own first-year experiences to plan an inspiring CEEDS orientation session. They brought creativity and curiosity to their work, applied their experience and knowledge to team projects, and left a lasting impact on CEEDS and Smith. We end the summer so proud of these future leaders. Thank you, JD, Molly, Sasha, Sarah, and Flora!
CEEDS is also proud to highlight the work of professors Jesse Bellemare (Biological Sciences), Amy Rhodes (Geosciences), Judy Cardell (Engineering) and their student teams through our faculty fellowship program this year (pictured in order below). From “best possible boreholes” to taking a detour off the “escalator to extinction,” this crew of leading thinkers and do-ers are paving the way to ecological resilience and smarter energy systems as our campus works towards realizing our sustainability goals.
Closing the Loop
Smith has identified two key waste streams that are not actually waste at all: compost and cast-off dorm items from student move-out. Both hold a lot of value when we manage them well.
This summer, CEEDS invested time, energy and resources to keep many of the materials shed by students during move-out in May on campus for another life in a version of a “circular economy” called SmithCycle Thrift. Through the process, we learned that students are endlessly creative in decorating their rooms. Some themes? Twinkle lights, fake plants and edgy artwork. Over hundreds of worker-hours and through many dusty sneezes, our summer team of hearty staff, interns and volunteers cleaned and organized the space into a welcoming thrift shop. We were thrilled to have a team of three Smithies staffing SmithCycle Thrift in the basement of Scales beginning on August 22nd, restocking the inventory for every wave of student arrivals through September 5.
Did you know that Smith’s compostable food waste gets “depackaged” at Vanguard Renewables (Agawam) in a machine made up of rotating hammers affectionately called “Thor?” Once the packaging has been removed, the nutrient-rich waste is delivered to one of Vanguard’s partner dairy farms in Massachusetts, including Barstow’s Farm in nearby Hadley where it is combined with waste from Barstow’s dairy herd in an underground aerobic digester. At an optimal temperature of 102 degrees F, the microbes in the digester break down the waste and produce renewable energy. Byproducts from the digester are used as an important soil amendment that supports the growth of corn and hay that is used as animal feed for the dairy cows. It is a wonderful cyclical system, starting with our compost on campus and ending with some of Barstow’s signature ice cream.
In early July, Finicky Farms delivered a herd of 150 goats and kids to a future site of botanical climate research at MacLeish. The goats had an important mission in mind: take time to chomp the roses. Multiflora rose grows, along with bittersweet and autumn olive, along the edges of fields where songbirds congregate and deposit seeds from the fruits they have eaten in their travels. MacLeish Field Station happens to be a perfect location for key climate research and nature-based climate solutions, making the eradication of these invasive species an important landscape management goal for CEEDS. The goats did their job and chewed down the bittersweet and autumn olive while they were at it, but left behind complex root systems that will become an ongoing management project for Field Station Manager Paul Wetzel.
Paul has balanced his landscape work at MacLeish with time in CEEDS hosting a series of strategic planning workshops with professors, students, staff, alumni and administrators to explore the future of MacLeish. These sessions also informed our work with C&H Architects to complete a feasibility study and conceptual design plan which includes upgrades at the existing field station and new facility designed to host diverse programming, project-based learning, and improved access to the entire site. The MacLeish Field Station Strategic Plan will be released this fall and will highlight accessibility, student wellness and the infrastructure necessary to support liberal arts research and education. The strategic plan and the conceptual design work provide an innovative model for liberal arts field stations of the future.
Building the Network
Associate Director of CEEDS Joanne Benkley grew up in the hills of Hawley immersed in a vibrant natural world. The species and systems that shaped the farm she grew up on were, and still are, her community. With humanity rapidly approaching global limits, it is important, like Joanne, to take some time to learn from the relationships we find in natural systems.
Joanne has found that the arts and humanities are a way for us all to reconnect with our natural roots. This summer she traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, to present her work running Arts Afield, CEEDS’ unique liberal arts field station program, at the annual conference of the International Sustainable Campuses Network (ISCN). At ISCN Joanne found a network of sustainability officers who were hungry to learn new ways to balance the traditionally STEM-heavy sustainability model with the arts and humanities in order to define a more engaging and accessible path to a sustainable future. After a full conference program at ISCN, Joanne was an invited guest to the Smith Club in Geneva. There she again shared about Arts Afield and was in turn delighted to make new connections and learn about the good sustainability work underway with the leadership of Smith alumnae in Switzerland.
Back at home in Northampton, CEEDS is thrilled to welcome Heather Rosenfeld as the new Director of the Spatial Analysis Lab (SAL). Heather has a PhD and MS in Human Geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BS in Geophysical Science and BA in History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science and Medicine from the University of Chicago. Heather has had roles in teaching, mentoring and research in academic and non-academic settings, including in the environmental science and policy program here at Smith, the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group (MGGG) Redistricting Lab at Tuft University, and the US Environmental Protection Agency. Heather is excited to collaborate with Spatial Data Specialist Kala’i Ellis whose drone work was highlighted in Smith news this summer. Welcome, Heather!
Sustainable Events: Impactful and Impact-free
Imagine attending a campus event characterized by a spirit of belonging, fresh and delicious local ingredients, and almost no landfill waste, designed for universal access. Sounds like the kind of event you’d like to attend, right? It also sounds like the kind of event that Smith’s Events and Catering teams would like to host, and over the past year, CEEDS has worked with Events, Catering, Facilities and the Food Rescue Network (a student-initiated and -run organization that redirects surplus food from Smith to communities who need it) to make Sustainable Events the norm instead of the exception. This fall, students or employees who host an event can keep their event “green” by following these tips from CEEDS and clearly communicating their goals in event reservations. Early adopters of these strategies have reported great success with their events; congratulations to the hosts of the events pictured below (Conway Center, Conference Center and MacLeish Field Station)!
After Smith
It’s a big and changing world out there, and Smithies graduate ready to make their mark. The Lazarus Center is a wonderful resource for students on campus to find career opportunities, and our alumnae network is unmatched. The best spot for students and alumnae to connect? Join the Career Connect platform hosted by the Lazarus Center, Also, send stories of finding your way in the world of environment, ecological design and sustainability to ceeds@smith.edu to be featured in a future CEEDS newsletter!
