26 August 2010
Greening the Greeks at UC Berkeley
By: Nate Seltenrich, East Bay Express
Where does the drunken frat brother leave his empty beer can? At Cal, the answer has traditionally been the trash bin — if not the neighbor's bushes — because almost none of the 31 fraternity houses have been regular recyclers. Yet things have begun to change. A frat house recycling program instituted earlier this semester by a pair of ambitious sorority sisters has put a dent in the load of cans, bottles, and cardboard that Cal's fraternities send to the dump every week.
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Posted by Pinar Aybar at 2:34
30 April 2010
CNR Students Win Prestigious Scholarships
Congratulations to Emma Tome, a junior double majoring in Environmental Sciences and Geography, who was named as a recipient of the Udall Scholarship for 2010, and to Larry M. Cai, a junior majoring in Molecular Toxicology and minoring in Music, who was named as a recipient of the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship for 2010. CNR is proud of these outstanding young scholars.
The Udall Scholarship awards $5,000 to sophomore- and junior-level college students committed to careers related to the environment, tribal public policy, or Native American health care. The Udall Foundation seeks future leaders across a wide spectrum of environmental fields, including policy, engineering, science, education, urban planning and renewal, business, health, justice, and economics. 80 scholarships are awarded nationwide.
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Posted by Eva St. Clair at 6:10
15 February 2010
Prof. O'Hara wins 2009 Forestry Achievement Award
Professor Kevin O'Hara received the 2009 Forestry Achievement Award from the Northern California Society of American Foresters for his work with the College's Forestry Club and Society of American Foresters Student Chapter.
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Posted by Eva St. Clair at 8:57
11 May 2003
Agroecology Exchange Program Brings Interdisciplinary Study to US, Brazilian Students
by Malgorzata Wozniacka
For five Brazilian students at the College of Natural Resources studying sustainable agriculture, and for their four Berkeley counterparts in Santa Catarina, Brazil, Fall semester 2003 was spent learning not only about farming, but also about each other's cultures.
The students were part of the US-Brazil exchange program in agroecology funded by the Department of Education-FIPSE and Brazil's CAPES, which brings together a group of students, educators and researchers from the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Nebraska; and two Brazilian Universities, UNICAMP and Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina.
Agroecology is the study of agricultural systems that are productive but also resource conserving. The students in Berkeley and in Brazil audited classes and worked in interdisciplinary teams to study the various social, cultural, economic and environmental aspects of sustainable agriculture.
According to Miguel Altieri, Berkeley professor and program coordinator, the students' focus is on organic agriculture and small farming. This is important, because sustainable agriculture is key for combating rural poverty, enhancing food security, and conserving natural resources. Altieri has been doing research in agroecology since 1981 and will participate in the exchange program again next year.
The exchange program puts an emphasis on practical learning. At Berkeley, the five Brazilian students visited both organic and conventional farmers and concuted research on agroecology as part of the program in order to better understand California agriculture.
All of them admitted to being surprised.
"It's a market-oriented, industrial system of agriculture here," summarized Marcos Alberto Lana, 22. "In Brazil, the most important thing is not only to produce for the market but to also to provide food for your family. It's about food security, while here it's only about profit."
For the Brazilians, who hailed from the south of Brazil which is known for small farms, the most jarring aspect of the big-farm system in the US was its lack of ties to the community.
"The concept of agroecology is not just about not using pesticides. It's also a social issue," said Lana. "People in the U.S. think more about money, so there is big pressure to specialize."
During a visit to a farm in Fresno, the students were surprised that the only crop the farmer grew was cotton. He bought everything else from the store - a practice unheard of in the south of Brazil.
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Posted by Eva St. Clair at 1:31
13 December 2004
Survey: Undergrads give Cal high marks
by Bonnie Azab Powell
BERKELEY – Everybody knows that UC Berkeley is a top-ranked research university. (If you haven't heard, a London newspaper recently decided we're No. 2 in the world.) And everybody also knows that for Berkeley undergraduates, that means a miserably impersonal education with large lecture classes conducted by teaching assistants, since professors are locked in their labs – right? Well, no…at least not according to the actual students.
In fact, 84.3 percent of Cal students in a massive annual survey declared themselves "somewhat" to "very" satisfied with their overall academic experience at Berkeley. On question after question about the details of their education, the positive responses outweiged the negative.
College of Natural Resources offers small-college benefits within a large research university
Of the 9,595 undergraduates who responded to the 2004 University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES), 53.5 percent had taken classes in the past year (either "occasionally," "often" or "very often") with a professor who knew the respondent's name. Only 16.2 percent of respondents had never been called on by name; 30.2 percent had rarely had that experience. Nor were those professors invisible outside of class: more than half of respondents — 54.6 percent — said they had met with faculty members in person (such as during office hours), either occasionally, often, or very often in the past year, while 15.2 percent had never done so and 30.1 percent had done so rarely.
Browse the full results of the 2004 University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES)
The image of the chilly research factory is just one of the under-examined stereotypes about UC Berkeley that this large, detailed survey puts to rest annually. In an article earlier this year, called "Bye-bye, Berzerkeley: Surveys provide a peek at the real UC Berkeley students," we wrote about how the 2003 UCUES dispatched many long-held social stereotypes, such as that all Berkeley students were activist liberals who studied all the time, and confirmed at least one: this campus does indeed embrace cultural and religious diversity.
The 2004 UCUES doesn't show any significant changes on these points, but since this year's survey added a number of new questions, there are new insights to be found. A somewhat surprising example, given Berkeley's reputation for civic engagement: large numbers of UCUES respondents said they were "not that well-informed" when it came to campus issues and politics (53.1 percent), California state issues and politics (48.1 percent), or international issues and politics (43.3 percent). Only on the topic of national issues and politics did a sizable percentage (41.2 percent) consider themselves "well-informed"; another 37.6 percent admitted to being rather clueless on national matters as well as local.
That may or may not be related to where UC Berkeley students find their news. Most respondents said they get their information primarily from the Internet (including online newspapers). Over a third, 37.7 percent, turn to the Web every day and another 27.8 percent several times a week for news, versus the 7.8 percent who watch televised national news daily and the 17.4 percent who do so several times a week. The most popular online news sites are CNN, The New York Times, Yahoo, and MSN/MSNBC (see box, right). The Daily Cal apparently trumps the San Francisco Chronicle and other national newspapers in popularity: 48.4 percent of respondents said they read the "campus newspaper" every day or several times a week, compared with 26 percent for "other print newspaper."
Poli Shy majors
UC Berkeley undergraduates seemed to have moved slightly to the left politically in the year since the last UCUES survey. Of the 7,967 students who answered the political beliefs question, those who identified themselves as "liberal" accounted for 46.5 percent of respondents, compared with 42.2 percent last year. The "far left" contingent also saw a slight bump, from 6.1 percent to 7.9 percent. Those with "middle of the road" political beliefs went from 39.4 percent to 34.5 percent, while the portion identifying themselves as "conservative" and "far right" went from 11.8 percent and 0.5 percent to 10.5 percent and 0.6 percent, respectively.
The Office of Student Research was able to analyze these results further, tracking individual (but anonymous) respondents, and confirmed that this slight shift to the left appears to be consistent across all class levels. For those 3,374 Berkeley students who answered the political identification item both this year and last year, 69.9 percent had not changed their political stance, while 11.5 percent had inched right and 18.6 percent had moved left. But nearly all (95.1 percent) of those shifting their views had only moved one step over, for example, from "middle-of-the road" to "liberal."
Despite this being an election year, students' political beliefs once again did not exactly translate into action. Although 16.9 percent characterized their political views as "very strong" and another 48.9 percent called theirs "strong," the overwhelming majority of respondents had not participated in a single political meeting or rally (62.8 percent), protest or demonstration (73.4 percent), or political campaign (81 percent) in the past year. Fewer than 5 percent of respondents had participated in any of these political activities "often or very often." One should take this with an enormous grain of salt, however; responses to the UCUES questionnaire were collected from March to August of this heated political year, so we'll never know how many students went on voter registration drives after giving their answers.
Only 35 percent of respondents said that both of their parents were born in the United States, while 54.2 percent said that neither parent had been.
Still, at the time the survey was conducted, 73.6 percent were registered to vote, while 11.9 percent said they were not registered because they weren't citizens. As we discussed last year, many Berkeley undergraduates are first-generation Americans or permanent residents: only 35 percent of respondents said that both their parents had been born in the United States, while 54.2 percent said that neither parent had been.
Want 2 talk f2f?
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Posted by Eva St. Clair at 8:40
11 November 2009
Insect Museum Launches “Essig Brunch†on Fridays
[the stick insect Epidares nolimetangere from the rainforests of northwest Borneo, taken by Yu Zeng, a student in IB]
Instead of a big fuzzy panda bear beckoning as the symbol of the WWF (World Wildlife Fund), how about the giant flower-loving fly, or better yet, the California night-stalking tiger beetle? Images of iconic creatures such as the panda are commonplace in our society, and like many of our most venerated animals (think dinosaurs, puppies, and birds), they are vertebrates. But when’s the last time you heard of a “Save the Bugs†campaign, or a movie about a cartoon millipede? Why this bias against the spineless? It could be because it’s a lot easier to cuddle with a cat or dog than a hairy pine borer (it’s a beetle), or because we ourselves are vertebrates, and, well, we like us and things similar to us. Whatever the reason, Berkeley’s entomology students are on a mission to gain a little respect for the insects and other arthropods that dominate the earth, and their first salvo is the creation of a no-spines-allowed seminar series.
If popularity was measured in terms of pure diversity, the insects would be prom queen. With 1 million documented species and an estimated 9 million more awaiting discovery and description, insects comprise half of all the known biodiversity on Earth. The University of California’s own Essig Museum of Entomology houses over 5 million of the Berkeley Natural History Museums’ 12 million specimens. One of these museums, the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ), runs a highly successful seminar series dubbed “MVZ Lunch†on Wednesday afternoons, drawing guest speakers from around the world to discuss their research on ecology and evolution. And while the entomology students enjoy attending these talks, they have decided to answer with a seminar of their own in order to bring a little taxonomic parity to the table.
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Posted by Eva St. Clair at 2:00
05 October 2009
CNR Student Helps Keep Water Fresh in Uganda
CNR student David Dinh is helping rural Ugandans to have access to safe drinking water.
"In every home in Uganda, drinking water is traditionally stored in a clay pot and culturally, there is a tremendous preference for this method of water storage. Unfortunately, water stored through this method can become quickly contaminated from repeated hand contact," Dinh writes. Because of the need for safe water storage, Dinh has helped to create improved clay pots with plastic spigots. They are "an affordable, accessible, and culturally appropriate safe water storage approach for rural Ugandan communities, " says Dinh.
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Posted by Eva St. Clair at 1:39
25 July 2008
Get Research Experience at CNR
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Posted by Eva St. Clair at 4:44
15 August 2007
Two CNR students win prestigious WWF fellowship
Two CNR students are among 16 undergrads from around the nation that have been selected to participate in the 2007 Nissan-World Wildlife Fund Environmental Leadership Program.
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Posted by Cyril at 9:59
02 February 2007
"Young Bear" Mayra Ceja honored for service to her community
Mayra Ceja, a senior environmental economics major, has had a busy four years at Cal.
As well as being a full time student, she has worked at the College of Natural Resources since her freshman year, founded the Phi Nu Xi Sorority, volunteered for CalSo and the “fresh faces†student blog, and spent ten to fifteen hours per week working to help under-served high school students get into college.
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Posted by Cyril at 0:57
26 January 2007
Call for entries: Create an inspiring climate-change video
Enter the Treehugger.com "Convenient Truths" contest to create an inspiring video about ending climate change!
The contest offers great prizes valued close to $30,000, and the inside scoop is that there have been very few entries so far, so the odds are in your favor!
The contest is endorsed by former Vice President Al Gore, who called it "a great way to spread the word and bring the issue into our daily lives."
Entries should be 1- to 2-minute original videos on everyday solutions to climate change. Winners will be selected based on how inspiring, pragmatic and compelling they are.
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Posted by Cyril at 0:56
30 November 2006
Tours begin of eco-friendly "green apartment"
Four Cal students living in a new "Green Apartment" demonstrate sustainable living. The apartment is the latest addition to an expanding effort by the Green Room Committee to educate the campus community about recycling, water and energy conservation and about purchasing decisions.
EEP major Desirae Early explains the "Green Apartment"
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Posted by Cyril at 4:04
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