In Hanjie the rules are simple. In this game of logic and creativity, the players, often working on medium-sized grids of 225 squares, use numbers on the rows and columns as clues to determine which boxes to shade. At first, the prospect of seeing a beautiful picture seems almost unfathomable. However, through patience and collaboration from every corner of the page, these small seemingly random squares gradually come together to reveal a masterpiece—one square at a time.
In a sense the efforts of Duke’s Climate Commitment are no different. The issue of climate change has proven to be a multifaceted one. One in which many parties play a role. However, with initiatives such as Duke’s Forever Learning Institute, the probability of tackling these issues becomes much clearer.
The logo of Duke’s Forever Learning Institute retrieved from their website.
Recently Duke’s Forever Learning Institute, an interdisciplinary educational program for Duke alumni, hosted Professors Norbert Wilson and Maiken Mikkelson for a compelling session on the impact of climate change on food and agriculture. Wilson, an agricultural economist and the Director of the World Food Policy Center at Duke, specializes in addressing critical issues related to food access, nutrition, and food security. Mikkelsen, a distinguished expert in physics, electrical, and computer engineering, explores the potential of nanomaterials to revolutionize agricultural processes, paving the way for innovative solutions in the field. Together, they explained how advancements in nanomaterials can improve food security and sustainability.
Throughout the session, Wilson emphasized the concept of food security. He began by clarifying the difference between “food loss” and “food waste.” Food loss occurs at the agricultural level. It refers to food that is produced but never reaches consumers, often due to challenges such as poor harvesting seasons, labor shortages for harvesting, or other natural factors. He describes the ways in which loss occurs across the board but disproportionately affects less developed countries. Wilson also explained how food waste occurs at the consumer level. He details how it goes beyond the waste of a product but is also a waste of the resources used to create that product.
Wilson illustrated the significance of these issues by drawing out the larger issue of food insecurity. Food insecurity describes an inability to access food or concerns about accessing food. In the United States 13.5 percent of citizens struggle with accessing food. This can lead to a number of negative health outcomes such as cardiovascular issues and diabetes. Food insecurity can also lead to behavioral and performance issues, particularly in young children.
Infographic about food insecurity retrieved from ECOMERGE.
This is where Mikkelson comes in. She described a term known as Precision Agriculture. In this, researchers observe and measure agriculture fields and extra data to see what resources such as water, and fertilizer is needed at each part. In this, they hope to retrieve good information through wavelengths as a means of getting a spectral fingerprint that supplies information about the crops. Mikkelsen describes her interest in leveraging nanomaterials to create lightweight, cost-effective hyperspectral cameras capable of capturing detailed spectral fingerprints of crops. She hopes that these materials can be employed around the world, and low resource settings to increase crop yields. The greatest roadblock in this would be the price and issues with widespread application. However, once applied it would hold the ability to detect key characteristics such as nutrient deficiencies, water stress, or disease presence.
Our world is wildly affected by climate change. Climate change and agricultural production hold a very dependent relationship and fixing one side holds the ability to correct the other. This is what makes the work and research of those such as Wilson and Mikelson all the more important. Their efforts show how we can utilize technology to not only enact social change but also reverse our climate issues. Their research highlights not only the urgency of addressing food security and agricultural sustainability but also the transformative potential of interdisciplinary approaches.
Just as the game of Hanjie reveals its masterpiece one square at a time, tackling climate change requires collective effort and patience. Each initiative, whether through advanced nanotechnology or policy-driven solutions, brings us closer to a sustainable future. Duke’s Forever Learning Institute serves as a platform to connect these ideas, inspiring action and innovation that can shape a better tomorrow—one step at a time.
Amid the constant drumbeat of campus events, much of the conversation turned toward the challenges we face in energy policy, security and transitions during Duke’s annual Energy Week, held Nov. 11-15.
On the second day, the Innovation Showcase featured not only startups making their pitches for clean energy and sustainable tech products, but students doing so as well.
Currently in its second year, Duke Design Climate is a new initiative between the Pratt School of Engineering and the Nicholas School of the Environment. It functions as a two-course sequence, in which students form groups to prototype and promote climate solutions after conducting market research.
As I made my rounds to the teams, I met a mix of graduate students and undergraduates with academic backgrounds ranging from engineering to economics to environmental science. The ideas they have aren’t purely theoretical: all are looking for sponsors or partners to help implement their solutions into real-world use. Here were some of the highlights:
Team ReefCycle is building from plants: Our first stop is named after the company whose product they intend to scale up. Initially, Mary Lempres founded ReefCycle to develop sustainable material for artificial reefs. Regular industrial production for cement requires intensive heating– burning of fossil fuels–releasing tons of carbon dioxide. ReefCycle sought to reduce this climate impact with a different method: their cement is plant-based and enzymatic, meaning its essentially grown using enzymes from beans. Testing in the New York Harbor yielded some promise: the cement appeared to resist corrosion, while becoming home for some oysters. The Design Climate team is now trying to bring it to more widespread use on land, while targeting up to a 90% reduction in carbon emissions across all scopes.
Team Enfield is uplifting a local community: Design Climate, evidently, is by no means limited to science. Instead, these team members intend to address an environmental justice issue close to home: energy inequality. Around 30-35% of Enfield residents live below the poverty line, and yet suffer from some of the highest energy bills in the larger area. Located a ninety minute drive east of Durham, this rural town is one of the poorest in North Carolina. Historic redlining and unfavorable urban planning are responsible for its lack of development, but now this team aims to bring back commerce to the area through microfinance. Once enough funding is gathered from investors and grants, the team hopes to provide microloans and financial literacy to spur and empower businesses.
UNC Libraries Commons
Team Methamatic promotes a pragmatic e-methane solution: This team is harnessing the power of sunlight to drive fuel production. Synthetic methane, commonly referred to as e-methane, is produced by reacting green hydrogen and carbon dioxide. “Currently, the power-to-gas process can be carbon neutral,” said team member Eesha Yaqub, a senior. “Sourcing the recycled carbon dioxide from a carbon capture facility essentially cancels out the emissions from burning methane.” However, this power-to-gas (P2G) process is an intensive one requiring high heat, energy, and pressure–hoops that might not have to be jumped through if an alternative process could break through the market. Professor Jie Liu and the Department of Chemistry have been working on developing a reactor that would conduct this same reaction without those obstacles. “[Utilizing] the energy from ultraviolet light, which is absorbed by a catalyst …makes the process less energy intensive,” Yaqub said.
Right now, the team has a small prototype, but one used for commercial generation would appear much larger and cost between $15,000 to $20,000. Their intended customers? Oil and gas companies under pressure to shift away from fossil fuels. If successfully scaled up, they predict this process would produce e-methane at a price of $5 per kilogram.
The size of the prototypeThe size needed
Analyzing living shorelines through Team Coastal Connect: If “Coastal Connect” sounds more like an app than a project name, that’s because it is one. This group is designing what one member dubbed a “fitbit for shorelines”: a monitoring system that brings data from ocean buoys to the phones of local landowners. While measurements in salinity and water level aren’t always telling for the average person, the app would contextualize these into more useful phrases. Is it currently safe to swim? It’ll let you know.
Moreover, it would also allow for the long-term monitoring of living shorelines. While we know this nature-based solution offers resilience to natural disasters and presents erosion, short-term fixes like seawalls are often built instead to continue allowing development up to the edge of beaches. The team hopes that ideally, providing concrete data on living shorelines would allow us to demonstrate their benefits and promote their implementation.
The Web of Science ranking of the world’s most highly-cited scientists was released this morning, telling us who makes up the top 1 percent of the world’s scientists. These are the authors of influential papers that other scientists point to when making their arguments.
EDITOR’S NOTE! — Web of Science shared last year’s data! We apologize. List below is now corrected, changes to copy in bold. We’re so sorry.
Twenty-three of the citation laureates are Duke scholars or had a Duke affiliation when the landmark works were created over the last decade.
A couple of these Duke people disappeared from this year’s list, but we’re still proud of them.
Dan Scolnic of Physics returns as our lone entry in Space Science, which just makes Duke sound cooler all around, don’t you think?
This is a big deal for the named faculty and an impressive line on their CVs. But the selection process weeds out “hyper-authorship, excessive self-citation and anomalous citation patterns,” so don’t even think about gaming it.
Fifty-nine nations are represented by the 6,636 individual researchers on this year’s list. About half of the citation champions are in specific fields and half in ‘cross-field’ — where interdisciplinary Duke typically dominates. The U.S. is still the most-cited nation with 36 percent of the world’s share, but shrinking slightly. Mainland China continues to rise, claiming second place with 20 percent of the cohort, up 2.5 percent from just last year. Then, in order, the UK, Germany and Australia round out the top five.
In fact, five Duke NUS faculty made this year’s list: Antonio Bertoletti, Derek Hausenloy and Jenny Guek-Hong Low for cross-field; Carolyn S. P. Lam for clinical medicine, and the world famous “Bat Man,” Lin-Fa Wang, for microbiology.
Through three compelling anecdotes, Emanuel showed us how environmental science and environmental justice can be viewed as a bidirectional relationship.
Ryan Emanuel (photo by Duke University)
Story one: After earning his degree in hydrology from Duke in the 90s, Emanuel pursued advanced studies in evaporation and carbon cycling. With an education, Emanuel began fieldwork — conducting studies and climbing tall towers (all the fun sciencey stuff). However, as a person from North Carolina’s Lumbee Tribe, he noticed the disconnect between his work and his community. He was acutely aware of a cultural emphasis on education –the expectation that you will use your education to give back to your community. He didn’t feel his work in hydrology was serving the Lumbee tribe’s interest, so he decided to change that.
Sean Jones from the Lumbee Tribe (photo by News & Record Final)
During his talk, Emanuel emphasized the significance of “accountability” and “motivation.”
“Examining our motivation can allow us to better understand who we are accountable to in our work… We are all accountable somehow, and we can be accountable in different ways to different groups.”
Understanding that his work had to be accountable for the Lumbee tribe, Emanuel became an ambassador for STEM in higher education. This new path enabled him to mentor youth with tribal backgrounds, prepare them for higher education, and even form strong relationships with them.
Story two:
The EPA says environmental justice is “fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people in environmental decision-making.”
Emanuel recognized that governments should be accountable for including the voices and opinions of marginalized groups — ‘all people’ — within their environmental decision-making. But Emanuel said there was a dissonance between these promises and reality. One example is the placement of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) where livestock are raised in confinement for agricultural purposes.
CAFOs in North Carolina are disproportionately located in communities of minority groups. Many issues arise from this, such as the pollution produced from CAFOs (air and water).
I was shocked to see the many ways that smaller, marginalized communities are affected. These issues are often relatively hidden — not surprising given that mainstream media usually focuses on large (easily observable) community-based discrimination.
Map of locations of CAFOs in North Carolina (photo by Jiyoung Son)
Emanuel began to look at the interplay between environmental science (observation, analysis, testing) and environmental justice (lived experience, regulations, fairness). He let go of the previous idea that environmental science only seeks to provide data and support to drive change in environmental justice. He began to ask, “How can environmental justice improve environmental science?”
Story 3: Combining his accountability for the Lumbee tribe with his hypothesis about the bidirectional relationship of environmental science and environmental justice, Ryan Emanuel began looking into the observably negative impacts of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP). Spanning over 600 miles, this gas pipeline will provide many benefits for North Carolina communities, such as lower costs, new jobs, and less pollution, according to Duke Energy.
Emanuel saw that the pipeline route went right through Lumbee territory, which could mean devastating effects for the community, such as health impacts and declining property values.
Proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline route (photo by SAS Blogs)
The crux of the issue lay in the negligence of project developers who failed to connect with the marginalized communities the pipeline would run through (such as the Lumbee). Tribal voices and input were completely ignored.
Emanuel helped prepare tribal leaders for meetings with corporate representatives and wrote a commentary on the need for the federal government to collaborate with the tribes they would be affecting.
Eventually, after years of lawsuits, the companies in charge of the project abandoned the ACP project. When I searched “Why was the Atlantic Coast Pipeline project canceled?” Duke Energy claimed the cancellation was because of “ongoing delays and increasing cost uncertainty, which threaten(ed) the economic viability of the project.” Other sources provide details on the legal challenges and criticism the project faced.
After the companies dropped the plan, they were quick to purchase forest land near the Lumbee tribe and begin the development of natural gas infrastructures that would allow for the storage of gas when the demand was low and the ability to release the gas when prices went up.
I found it quite impressive that Ryan was able to attend many meetings between the Lumbee Tribe and the company, without saying a word. The tribal council had asked him to only observe and not speak. During one meeting, a representative from the company that purchased the forest land said that they wanted to clarify that “pipelines are not disproportionately located in marginalized communities — they are everywhere.”
Emanuel began testing this hypothesis, eventually gathering enough evidence to statistically prove that there is a “spatial correlation between social vulnerability and pipeline density.” His findings gathered significant media attention and have even been expanded on to show the need for change and increased safety within pipeline communities.
Emanuel concluded by explaining that the principles of environmental justice can show us what questions we should be asking, who we should be asking them of, and who we should be keeping in mind when conducting research.
The statement Emanuel made that stuck with me the most was, “If we value examining problems from all angles, we have to pay attention to which perspectives are missing.”
Ryan Emanuel’s book (photo by The Magazine of the Sierra Club)
After Emanuel’s talk, I was surprised that I had never been introduced to this way of thinking before. It seems like common knowledge that focusing on justice and equity can improve how we investigate problems scientifically. However, it is not completely surprising that this information is not common sense, given the systematic issues within our country.
Emanuel’s book, “On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice,” dives deeper into these concepts about the relationship between environmental justice and environmental science. I believe this book would bring nuance to our world today, where there is a clear need for change and the uplifting of voices that have been quieted for so long.
A few blocks from Duke’s East Campus, there is a small building whose past lives include a dentist office, a real estate office, and a daycare. Now it is a museum.
A mural on the back wall of the museum, showing animals like the elephant bird at full size. Photo courtesy of Matt Borths, Ph.D.
Glass cases in the front room are lined with ancient fossils and more recent specimens less than 10,000 years old. Take Lagonomico, a creature that lived some 12-15 million years ago and whose name means “pancake,” in reference to the smashed shape of its remains. Or the tiny skull of a modern-day cotton-top tamarin. Even the enormous egg of an elephant bird, a ten-foot-tall bird that lived in Madagascar until it went extinct sometime in the last 1000 years.
A back room holds fossil discoveries still encased in rock. Special tools and scanning technology will reveal the creatures inside, relics of a very different world that can still yield revelations millions of years after their deaths.
These fossils are still partly encased in rock. Special technology like CT scans can reveal which part of a rock contains a fossil. The marks on the paper indicate where a fossil is located.
Matt Borths, Ph.D., curator of the Duke Lemur Center’s fossils, explained that while many fossil collections focus on a particular location, this one has a different theme: the story of primate evolution.
Lemurs, Borths said, are our most distant primate relatives. About 60 million years ago, soon after the extinction of the dinosaurs, the “lemur line and monkey-ape-human line split.” Studying both modern lemurs and their ancestors can give us a “glimpse of a distant past.”
An ancient lemur ancestor from Wyoming. Primates went extinct in North America over 30 million years ago.
Primates are a group of mammals that include humans and other apes, monkeys, lemurs, lorises, bushbabies, and tarsiers. Many primates today live in Africa and South America, but they did not originate on either continent. Primates are believed to have evolved further north and migrated into Africa about 50 million years ago. As the global climate grew cooler and dryer, equatorial Africa remained warm and wet enough for primates. Over time, apes, monkeys, and lemurs diverged from their shared primate ancestors, but not all of them stayed in Africa.
Africa is currently home to bushbabies and lorises, which are both lemur relatives, but most of lemur evolution and diversification took place in Madagascar, the island nation where all of the world’s 100 species of lemurs live today. “New World monkeys,” meanwhile, are found in South America. How did lemurs and monkeys get from Africa—which was at the time completely surrounded by water—to where they live today? Both groups are believed to have crossed open ocean on rafts of plant material.
Scientists have direct evidence of modern animals rafting across bodies of water, and they believe that ancient lemur and monkey ancestors reached new land masses that way, too. Mangrove systems, adapted to ever-changing coastal conditions, are particularly prone to forming rafts that break away during storms. Animals that are on the plants when that happens can end up far from home. Not all of them survive, but those that do can shape the history of life on earth.
“Given enough time and enough unfortunate primates,” Borths said, “eventually you get one of these rafts that goes across the Mozambique Channel” and reaches Madagascar. Madagascar has been isolated since the time of the dinosaurs, and most of its species are endemic, meaning they are found nowhere else on earth. When lemur ancestors reached the island, they diversified into dozens of species filling different ecological niches. A similar process led to the evolution of New World monkeys in South America.
Some of the species in this case went extinct within the past few centuries.
The history of primate evolution is still a work in progress. The Duke Lemur Center Museum of Natural History seeks to fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge through research on both living lemurs and primate fossils. This museum, Borths said, “brings basically all of primate evolution together in one building.” Meanwhile, living lemurs at the Lemur Center can help researchers understand how primate diets relate to teeth morphology, for example.
Paleontology is the study of fossils, but what exactly is a fossil? The word “fossil,” Borths said, originally referred to anything found in the ground. Over time, it came to mean something organic that turns to stone. Some ancient organisms are not fully fossilized. They can still preserve bone tissue and even proteins, evidence that they have not yet transformed completely into stone. The current definition of a fossil, according to Borths, is “anything from a living organism that is older than 10,000 years old.” Specimens younger than that are called subfossils.
Fossil Preparator Karie Whitman in the Duke Lemur Center Museum of Natural History. The grooves in the stones are made by air scribe tools, which are used to separate fossils from surrounding rock.
The Lemur Center does important research on fossils, but that is not the only component of its mission. Education Programs Manager Megan McGrath said that the Lemur Center weaves together research, conservation, and education in an “incredibly unique cocktail” that “all forms a feedback loop.” McGrath and Borths also co-host a Duke Lemur Center podcast.
Conservation is a crucial component of the study of lemurs. Lemurs are the most endangered mammals on the planet, and some are already gone.
Human and wildlife survival are interlinked in complex ways, and conservation solutions must account for the wellbeing of both. Subsistence agriculture and other direct human activities can decimate ecosystems, but extinctions are also caused by broader issues like climate change, which threatens species on a global scale. Humanity’s impact on Madagascar’s wildlife over the last several thousand years is a “really complicated puzzle to tease apart,” McGrath said.
A display case in the museum, including an egg from the extinct elephant bird and a seed from a mousetrap tree. The mousetrap tree relies on large animals to disperse its seeds. That role was once filled by now-extinct species like the elephant bird. Now humans and cattle disperse the seeds instead.
Some of the museum’s specimens are truly ancient, but others are from modern animals or species that went extinct only recently. Giant elephant birds roamed Madagascar as recently as a thousand years ago. The sloth lemur may have survived until 400 years ago. Borths puts the timescale of recent extinctions into perspective. At a time when modern species like the white-tailed deer were already roaming North America, Madagascar was still home to creatures like sloth lemurs and ten-foot elephant birds.
A model of a sloth lemur skeleton (center, hanging from branch). Sloth lemurs lived in Madagascar until they went extinct about 400 years ago.
A model of a sloth lemur hangs in the museum, but no one alive has ever seen one breathing. No one will ever see or hear one again. But a ghost of it may exist in Malagasy stories about the tretretre, a monster that was said to have long fingers and a short tail. The word tretretre is thought to be an onomatopoeia of the call of a sloth lemur, an animal whose own voice is gone forever.
Learn about these and other stories of our evolutionary cousins at the museum’s next open house on Saturday, November 23, from 1-4 PM.
In a world shaped by our destructive actions, art emerges as a voice, warning us of the consequences that lie ahead.
We live in a constantly evolving world. Looking at the geologic time scale, we can see the Earth’s changes that have marked new eras all the way from the Archean epoch, 2.5 billion years ago, to today, the Holocene epoch. But how do we know when we are transitioning into a new epoch? And what kinds of changes in our world would lead to this geologic time-scale transition? The exhibition Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University offers us answers to these questions with its four thematic sections, “Reconfiguring Nature,” “Toxic Sublime,” “Inhumane Geographies,” and “Envisioning Tomorrow.’
Ray Troll’s geological time scale
As we begin the exhibition tour, our well-spoken gallery guide, Ruth Caccavale, asks if any of us has ever heard the word “Anthropocene” before. After a short silence, she tells us the literal translation for Anthropocene is “the human epoch,” an appropriate word to describe the geological era we are in right now. Ruth continues to explain that, though not agreed upon when the Anthropocene epoch began (the main arguments being since the Industrial Revolution and since nuclear warfare), people believe the Earth is in a new era, one established by the fact that human impact is the greatest factor in determining the way the world is.
When the Anthropocene epoch was brought to the attention of the geological society, and after more than a decade of debate, they eventually declared that we were not in a new age, keeping us in the Holocene epoch. However, many still accept the term “Anthropocene” and explore what it means to be living in it. Among those exploring the implications of the Anthropocene epoch are the forty-five artists from around the world featured in Second Nature, who, through their photography-based art, expose the complex relationship of beauty and horror in our evolving world and show us how our world is truly controlled by our human impact.
Walking into the exhibit, I first notice the dismal yet meditative music playing quietly overhead. Ruth guides us through the galleries and stops us a considerable distance away from a black-and-white print. “What do you see when you look at this photograph?” she asks. “I see a mountain,” says someone in the crowd. “It looks overwhelming,” I add, noticing the heaviness of the mountain juxtaposed with the brittle buildings in front of it.
Travelers among Mountains and Streams from afar
Ruth then asks us to come closer to the photograph, and we all quickly notice that the mountain is not a mountain but instead a structure composed of skyscrapers and architecture.
Travelers among Mountains and Streams up close
Based on Fan Kuan’s famous painting from the Song Dynasty, Yang Yongliang, an alumnus of the China Academy of Art, created Travelers Among Mountains and Streams as a warning of what our world could look like if our need to urbanize and develop continued without governing. Yongliang is known for his dystopian recreations of traditional Chinese art, leaving his audience feeling both eerie and in awe. For me, the symbolism of having to step closer to the art to see the true meaning spoke to how it’s easier for people in power to overlook the environmental dangers of development, whereas once we stepped closer and could see each building in detail, we were put in the shoes of those living in urban areas who suffer the most from pollution and overcrowding.
We then made our way through the second section, “Toxic Sublime,” a collection of pieces that show how sometimes the most hazardous areas in the world can be the most beautiful. On the wall is a photo of the remains of a Russian church, buildings next to a nuclear testing site, and a crater from nuclear bomb testing made green to show residual radioactivity.
Danila Tkachenko’s Radioactive City, Contaminated Church, and Crater Formed after Nuclear Bomb Test
Next to it, is the photo of colorful ponds near a lithium mine in Chile. While the composition and colors scream “toxic,” I can’t help but admire the lure of it as well–an invitation to debate the ethics of turning tragedy into something tasteful.
Edward Burtynsky’s Lithium Mines #1, Salt Flats, Atacama Desert, Chile
Upon entering the third section, “Inhumane Geographies” (the theme I personally found most captivating), we are greeted by a somewhat overstimulating gallery of an orange and red island scene, with a singular purple and blue photo plastered in front of them. Sanne De Wilde’s Island of the Colorblind, told the story of a Micronesian community, who in the 18th century were devastated by a typhoon, leaving only 20 people alive. Among those left was the King, who began repopulating the Pingelap community. The King, however, carried the gene for color blindness, causing more than 10% of the Pingelap population today to be colorblind. Island of the Colorblind not only shows me how our environment and climate can truly change who we are, but it also gives voice to the Pingelap’s unique perspective on how color for them means something truly different–thus why Wilde chose to edit the photo in a way where chlorophyll (what makes trees green) creates a pink color in the photo.
Island of the Colorblind
As Ruth brings us to the final section, “Envisioning Tomorrow,” I am immediately drawn in by Aïda Muluneh’s collection of four photographs depicting women dressed in lavish blue and red clothing against the arid landscape behind them. As part of Afrofuturism, a form of science fiction art that explores the history and future of Africa and its people, Muluneh’s pieces challenge the stereotypes surrounding women gathering water in Africa. The pieces bring attention to the implications of women’s role in getting water, as it requires an immense amount of time and makes them vulnerable to sexual violence. Ruth also informs us that the artist grew up in Ethiopia and uses her art to emphasize the issue of water scarcity there. As my peers and I look at Muluneh’s colorfully piercing and empowering art, we can’t help but be speechless.
Aïda Muluneh’s collection
Regardless of whether or not the geological society accepts the Anthropocene as an epoch, we as humans need to open our eyes and understand that our actions have consequences, even if they may not affect us personally. We are changing the world… a lot. But if we can break it apart, we can also build it back up. Leaving the exhibit, I feel heartbroken for the ways we have torn apart our world, unsettled in the ways our destruction can still be beautiful, curious in how my environment has shaped me, and yet hopeful that we as humans can come together, acknowledge the wrong we have done, and begin to undo the damage. For those who may not understand how dire our situation is, studying the work of the 45 artists featured in Second Nature might be a good start.
From left: Courtney Lewis, Roo George-Warren, and Aaron Baumgardner at a Duke Gardens panel about food sovereignty.
“Larger mainstream society is so removed from their food,” says Courtney Lewis, a Duke professor and Cherokee Nation citizen. She recently moderated a discussion at the Duke Gardens about food sovereignty with two Catawba Nation citizens.
Roo George-Warren is an artist, educator, and eco-cultural restorationist, and Aaron Baumgardner is a basket maker, seed steward, and plant ecologist. Their conversation was moderated by Lewis, who is the Crandall Family Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Inaugural Director of the Native American Studies Initiative at Duke University.
What is food sovereignty?
“Most people… are more familiar with the term food security,” says George-Warren, but he considers that term insufficient “because technically that can be solved through Walmart gift cards.” Food sovereignty, in George-Warren’s view, encompasses bigger questions about cultural value, rights to seeds, and who performs labor involving food.
“How are we going to take control of our food systems on a systematic level?” he asks.
Baumgardner thinks about food sovereignty as a “community’s ability to take control of the entire food system and not have to rely on any outside factors.” That means asking questions like “Where’s the food coming from, and how’s the food getting to people’s tables?” as well as what food is on people’s tables.
Food sovereignty, Baumgardner says, is about the ability to take care of ourselves, even in a crisis, by controlling food production and distribution. “If we aren’t a food-sovereign nation, are we really a sovereign nation?”
Gourds in the Southeastern Indigenous Peoples’ Garden seasonal display area at the Duke Gardens. Some of the seeds in this garden were shared by Lewis, who got them from the Eastern Band of Cherokee, Cherokee Nation seed banks, community members, and her own garden. Photo by Duke Gardens volunteer photographer Sue Lannon.
How does seed stewardship relate to food sovereignty?
“The seeds are our relatives, and those seeds need to grow,” Baumgardner says. Certain plants hold great importance to the Catawba people, and efforts to “rematriate” their seeds helps ensure the plants’ survival now and in the future.
Seed stewardship, Baumgardner says, is about more than preserving seeds. It also involves actively using the plants that have been important to Catawba culture for generations, restoring a “relationship… of seed-saving.”
Corn, George-Warren says, has been grown by the Catawba for millennia. “We’re standing at one end of the last 500 years,” he says, “looking back at everything that has been lost and taken from us.” That requires mourning but also efforts to move forward.
Baumgardner sees value in blending traditional knowledge and western science. He mentions a partnership with Davidson College in which Catawba citizens and researchers at the college are collaborating on experiments with corn. There are records of Catawba people bending corn stalks back at a certain point in their development, and the work at Davidson is exploring whether that practice could help protect corn from fungus.
George-Warren discusses another program that distributes local produce to tribal families, serving 250-300 families per month. Such programs aim to increase access to local food and restore relationships between people and plants.
How does natural resource management relate to your work?
“I don’t think that that accurately reflects how our people see the world or our relationship to it,” Baumgardner says about the term “natural resources.” He explains that the Catawba language does not have a word that directly translates to “natural” or “resources.” The term resources, he says, “implies that something is to be used… that it has a finite purpose,” which is not how the Catawba have historically viewed the environment. And in a world not divided into “natural” and “unnatural,” that linguistic distinction wasn’t needed, either.
Baumgardner believes that natural and cultural resources should be intertwined and that relationships to food should “create space for ceremony, create space for thanksgiving.”
Land can be nurtured without viewing it as an expendable, finite “resource.” European settlers, Lewis says, viewed the Appalachian region as a garden of Eden. “The reason it was that beautiful,” she says, “is you had entire nations actually managing that forest.”
George-Warren references a false narrative that native peoples just have an intuitive or magical knowledge of the earth. That is “ludicrous,” he says—knowledge comes from experimentation, observation, and having lived in a place for a long time.
George-Warren describes himself and Baumgardner as “ecocultural restorationists,” working to preserve both culture and ecology. The idea that humans and nature are inherently divided, he says, plays into dangerous narratives: that humans are a “virus” whose “only role is a damaging one” and that we should “put nature in a glass box” to protect it.
“I hate both of those views,” George-Warren says, “because the reality is we are a part of nature… we can help it flourish.”
“We have to create the culture of caring about those things,” George-Warren says. “We want people to work toward that interspecies flourishing.”
Maggie Heraty, Senior Program Coordinator for the Duke Forest, shows students how to identify little heartleaf (Hexastylis minor) during a Duke Spring Breakthrough program in 2024. Photo credit Bill Snead, Duke University Communications.
For a few lucky people at Duke, a typical work day might include a walk in the woods. Take Maggie Heraty of the Duke Forest, for instance.
What is your job position?
As senior program coordinator for the Duke Forest, Heraty is involved in many projects. She manages two volunteer programs: the Herpetofauna Community Science Program, which collects data on reptile and amphibian populations, and the Forest Stewards Program, which divides volunteers into small teams to “monitor for the effects of recreation in the Duke Forest.”
Heraty is also involved with community engagement and leading tours, such as the annual tour of the Shepherd Nature Trail — which she describes as “one of our ‘core’ tour offerings” — along with a few other themed tours focused on flora and fauna, for instance, or a research tour about ongoing studies occurring in the Duke Forest. “Essentially,” Heraty says, “every season of the year we try to lead one tour… that’s just a free and open to the public tour.”
She also leads field trips or tours by request, such as for middle school programs, specific college classes, or Duke orientation groups.
What is your job like?
“Two weeks never look the same,” Heraty says. This week, she spent Monday and Tuesday wrapping up a Data+ project she’d been involved with this summer. Data+ is an interdisciplinary summer research program for undergraduate and graduate students. On Wednesday Heraty had a staff meeting and a meeting with the Nasher Museum of Art. The Duke Forest and the Nasher are planning a collaborative event focused on the Anthropocene to coincide with an upcoming exhibit at the Nasher called Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene. Later in the week Heraty would be reviewing reports from Forest Steward volunteers, and if time allowed, she would spend rest the of the week either quality controlling data from the herpetology project, helping update the strategic plan for the Duke Forest, or completing tasks for coordinating the Forest’s deer herd reduction program.
What is the deer herd reduction program?
Every year, from September to December, the Duke Forest partners with a select group of skilled hunters to reduce its overabundant white-tailed deer population. Historically, predators like mountain lions, black bears, and wolves kept the deer population in check, but “Humans have killed off all of the top predators in our ecosystem.”
“We now have coyotes who are making their way into this area and are kind of filling that niche a little bit,” Heraty says, but not enough to control an exploding deer population. The hunting program is a way to reduce it to healthier levels in the absence of natural predators.
Disease spreads more rapidly when the density of an animal population is too high, and the resources in an environment can only sustain a certain number of deer. Maintaining a more balanced deer population also supports plant diversity in the forest since having too many deer can decimate plants and slow forest regeneration.
What is the Duke Forest for?
The Duke Forest consists of 7100 acres in Durham, Orange, and Alamance Counties. It is managed by a staff of nine people, often along with a student intern or assistant. “We have a small, very dedicated team,” Heraty says.
The Forest was founded in 1931 and “has always been intricately linked with the university itself.” The primary mission of the Duke Forest is as a teaching and research laboratory in a “natural environment that is conserved and managed sustainably and that people can study.” Recreation and conservation are an “ancillary benefit,” but the Duke Forest is “not like your average state park or land conservancy.” Teaching and research are at the forefront of what the Duke Forest is for.
Researchers conduct many studies in the Duke Forest. Studies can be scientific, such as evaluating impacts of climate change or humans on the forest, but there are also studies on history, art, and engineering.
Heraty with the 2024 Duke Forest Herpetofauna Data+ team, showing off their project work. (Data+ teammates from left to right: postdoctoral research associate Sarah Roberts, PhD student Caroline Rowley, undergraduate student Harssh Golechha, Professor Nicki Cagle, and graduate student Qianyu Zhu). Photo credit Duke Forest staff; caption provided by Heraty.
How can people use the Duke Forest responsibly?
Balancing recreational use with the other missions can present challenges. The Forest Stewards volunteer program that Heraty oversees was created to help understand and address those issues. “The impetus for [the Forest Stewards program] was in the pandemic,” Heraty says, when people tended to “flock to outdoor spaces to get… a respite from quarantine.” That created a “huge uptick” in recreational use of the Duke Forest, which can have detrimental effects on land and ecosystems. The Forest Stewards act as “ambassadors” for the Forest and serve as “more eyes on the ground,” helping to notice and report issues like fallen signs or unauthorized trails.
Heraty says some of those unauthorized trails are established when people unknowingly follow incorrect directions on a hiking app. More people have started using apps like AllTrails and Strava, which can help people find and navigate new trails but can also lead to problems if someone follows an unauthorized trail while using the apps. Other users of the same app can then follow the same route.
To use the forest responsibly and avoid unauthorized trails or sensitive research sites, Heraty encourages visitors to refer to official websites and maps, which can both help you avoid getting lost and offer resources that “allow you to build more of a connection to the place that you’re visiting.” She suggests a free app called Avenza that lets you upload official Duke Forest maps ahead of time.
How does the Duke Forest balance the impacts of recreation with its other missions?
The Duke Forest encourages sustainable recreation while prioritizing research and conservation. “There’s always something intense happening in the world, and so going outside can be a respite for people, but also—sometimes there is a consumer mindset that happens there, where it’s just like, ‘I need to get in and get out… and never think about it again,’” Heraty says. “A culture that we’re interested in… instilling… is one where we all feel an actual connection to the land we’re living on.”
“Especially in our urbanizing and developing world… it’s really special that this place is preserved,” Heraty adds, and “engaging people in that stewardship mission is important.”
Heraty leads orientation training for Herpetofauna of the Duke Forest community scientist volunteers. Photo credit Duke Forest staff.
What is your favorite thing about the forest, or something that might surprise us?
“The things I’m constantly amazed by in my job are really when I get to interact with teachers or researchers,” Heraty says. There are “so many brilliant people who are learning and thinking about the land or the forest.” One study that’s happened since Heraty joined the Duke Forest staff in 2021 was a UNC archaeological dig along New Hope Creek studying indigenous life. You can learn more about this research project in this article or this video.
Heraty also enjoys education and outreach, especially outside in the forest itself. Part of her background is in on-the-ground conservation stewardship, so “whenever I do get to actually be in the woods in Duke Forest, that is one of my favorite parts.” She enjoys helping to “interpret what people are seeing,” like explaining that a piece of flagging tape represents a research study or showing someone how to identify a tree.
What do you do for fun outside of work?
“I love reading sci-fi and fantasy,” Heraty says. Right now she’s reading a book called “Black Sun” by Rebecca Roanhorse, which a friend recommended. She is also involved with grassroots organizing for social justice groups and enjoys indoor rock-climbing.
Look at the nearest window. What did you see first—the glass itself or what was on the other side? For birds, that distinction is a matter of life and death.
A dead red-eyed vireo above the entrance to the Brodhead Center at Duke. Every year, millions of birds die after colliding with windows. Buildings with lots of glass are particularly dangerous.
Every year, up to one billion birds die from hitting windows. Windows kill more birds than almost any other cause of human-related bird mortality, second only to feral and domestic cats. Both the transparency and reflectiveness of glass can confuse flying birds. They either don’t see the glass at all and try to fly through it, or they’re fooled by reflections of safe habitat or open sky. And at night, birds may be disoriented by lit-up buildings and end up hitting windows by mistake. In all cases, the result is usually the same. The majority of window collision victims die on impact. Even the survivors may die soon after from internal bleeding, concussions, broken bones, or other injuries.
Madison Chudzik, a biology Ph.D. student in the Lipshutz Lab at Duke, studies bird-window collisions and migrating birds. “Purely the fact that we’ve built buildings is killing those birds,” she says.
Every spring and fall, billions of birds in the United States alone migrate to breeding and wintering grounds. Many travel hundreds or thousands of miles. During peak migration, tens of thousands of birds may fly across Durham County in a single night. Not all of them make it.
Chudzik’s research focuses on nocturnal flight calls, which migrating birds use to communicate while they fly. Many window collision victims are nocturnal migrants lured to their deaths by windows and lights. Chudzik wants to know “how we can use nocturnal flight calls as an indicator to examine collision risks in species.”
Chudzik (back) setting up one of her recording devices on the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. The devices record flight calls from birds migrating at night. Image courtesy of Chudzik.
Previous research, Chudzik says, has identified a strong correlation between the number of flight calls recorded on a given night and the overall migration intensity that night. “If sparrows have a high number of detections, there is likely a high number migrating through the area,” Chudzik explains. But some species call more than others, and there is “taxonomic bias in collision risk,” with some species that call more colliding less and vice versa. Chudzik is exploring this relationship in her research.
Unlike bird songs, nocturnal flight calls are very short. The different calls are described with technical terms like “zeep” and “seep.” Chudzik is part of a small but passionate community of people with the impressive ability to identify species by the minute differences between their flight calls. “It’s a whole other world of… language, basically,” Chudzik says.
Chudzik can identify a species not only by hearing its flight call but also by seeing its spectrogram, a visual representation of sound. This spectrogram, from a recording on Adler Planetarium, has flight calls from four species. The x-axis represents time, while the y-axis shows frequency. The brightness or intensity indicates amplitude. Image from Chudzik.
She began studying nocturnal flight calls for research she did as an undergraduate, but her current project no longer needs to rely on talented humans to identify every individual call. A deep learning model called Nighthawk, trained on a wealth of meticulous flight call data, can identify calls from their spectrograms with 95% accuracy. It is free and accessible to anyone, and much of the data it’s been trained on comes from non-scientists, such as submissions from a Facebook community devoted to nocturnal flight calls. Chudzik estimates that perhaps a quarter of the people on that Facebook page are researchers. “The rest,” she says, “are people who somehow stumbled upon it and… fell in love with nocturnal flight calling.”
In addition to studying nocturnal flight calls, Chudzik’s research will investigate how topography, like Lake Michigan by Chicago, affects migration routes and behavior and how weather affects flight calls. Birds seem to communicate more during inclement weather, and bad weather sometimes triggers major collision events. Last fall in Chicago, collisions with a single building killed hundreds of migratory birds in one night.
Chudzik had a recorder on that building. It had turned off before the peak of the collision event, but the flight call recordings from that night are still staggering. In one 40-second clip, there were 300 flight calls identified. Normally, Chudzik says, she might expect a maximum of about seven in that time period.
Nights like these, with enormous numbers of migrants navigating the skies, can be especially deadly. Fortunately, solutions exist. The problem often lies in convincing people to use them. There are misconceptions that extreme changes are required to protect birds from window collisions, but simple solutions can make a huge difference. “We’re not telling you to tear down that building,” Chudzik says. “There are so many tools to stop this from happening that… the argument of ‘well, it’s too expensive, I don’t want to do it…’ is just thrown out the window.”
A yellow-bellied sapsucker collision casualty in front of the French Family Science Center last year.
What can individuals and institutions do to prevent bird-window collisions?
Turn off lights at night.
For reasons not completely understood, birds flying at night are attracted to lit-up urban areas, and lights left on at night can become a death trap. Though window collisions are a year-round problem, migration nights can lead to high numbers of victims, and turning off non-essential lights can help significantly. One study on the same Chicago building where last year’s mass collision event occurred found that halving lighted windows during migration could reduce bird-window collisions by more than 50%.
Chudzik is struck by “the fact that this is such a big conservation issue, but it literally just takes a flip of a switch.” BirdCast and Audubon suggest taking actions like minimizing indoor and outdoor lights at night during spring and fall migration, keeping essential outdoor lights pointed down and adding motion sensors to reduce their use, and drawing blinds to help keep light from leaking out.
Use window decals and other bird-friendly glass treatments.
There are many products and DIY solutions intended to make windows safer for birds, like window decals, external screens, patterns of dots or lines, and strings hanging in front of a window at regular intervals. For window treatments to be most effective, they should be applied to the exterior of the glass, and any patterning should be no more than two inches apart vertically and horizontally. This helps protect even the smallest birds, like kinglets and hummingbirds.
It can be hard to see from a distance, but these windows on Duke’s Fitzpatrick Center have been retrofitted with tiny white dots, an effective strategy to reduce bird-window collisions.
A 2016 window collision study at Duke conducted by several scientists, including Duke Professor Nicolette Cagle, Ph.D., identified the Fitzpatrick Center as a window collision hotspot. As a result, Duke retrofitted some of the building’s most dangerous windows with bird-friendly dot patterning. Ongoing collision monitoring has revealed about a 70% reduction in collisions for that building since the dots were added.
One obstacle to widespread use of bird-friendly design practices and window treatments is concerns about aesthetics. But bird-friendly windows can be aesthetically pleasing, too, and “Dead birds hurt your aesthetic anyway.”
If nothing else, don’t clean your windows.
Bird-window collisions don’t just happen in cities and on university campuses. In fact, most fatal collisions involve houses and other buildings less than four stories tall. Window treatments like the dots on the Fitzpatrick building can be costly for homeowners, but anything you can put on the outside of a window will help.
“Don’t clean your windows,” Chudzik suggests—smudges may also help birds recognize the glass as a barrier.
Window collisions at Duke
The best thing Duke could do, Chudzik says, is to be open to treating more windows. Every spring, students in Cagle’s Wildlife Surveys class, which I am taking now, collect data on window collision victims found around several buildings on campus. Meanwhile, a citizen science iNaturalist project collects records of dead birds seen by anyone at campus. If you find a dead bird near a window at Duke, you can help by submitting it to the Bird-window collisions project on iNaturalist. Part of the goal is to identify window collision hotspots in order to advocate for more window treatments like the dots on the Fitzpatrick Center.
Spring migration is happening now. BirdCast’s modeling tools estimate that 260,000 birds crossed Durham County last night. They are all protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. However, Chudzik says, “We haven’t thought to protect them while they’re actually migrating.” The law is intended to protect species that migrate, but “it’s not saying ‘while you are migrating you have more protections,’” Chudzik explains. Some have argued that it should, however, suggesting that the Migratory Bird Treaty Act should mandate safer windows to help protect migrants while they’re actually migrating.
“This whole world comes alive while we’re asleep, and… most people have no idea,” Chudzik says about nocturnal flight calls. She is shown here on Northwestern University, one of the Chicago buildings where she has placed recorders for her research. Photo courtesy of Chudzik.
We can’t protect every bird that passes overhead at night, but by making our buildings safer, we can all help more birds get one step closer to where they need to go.
For some people, the word “rainforest” conjures up vague notions of teeming jungles. But Camille DeSisto sees something more specific: a complex interdependent web.
For the past few years, the Duke graduate student has been part of a community-driven study exploring the relationships between people, plants and lemurs in a rainforest in northern Madagascar, where the health of one species depends on the health of others.
Many lemurs, for example, eat the fruits of forest trees and deposit their seeds far and wide in their droppings, thus helping the plants spread. People, in turn, depend on the plants for things like food, shelter and medicines.
But increasingly, deforestation and other disturbances are throwing these interactions out of whack.
DeSisto and her colleagues have been working in a 750,000-acre forest corridor in northeast Madagascar known as the COMATSA that connects two national parks.
The area supports over 200 tree species and nine species of lemurs, and is home to numerous communities of people.
A red-bellied lemur (Eulemur rubriventer) in a rainforest in northeast Madagascar. Photo by Martin Braun.
“People live together with nature in this landscape,” said DeSisto, who is working toward her Ph.D. in ecology at the Nicholas School of the Environment.
But logging, hunting and other stressors such as poverty and food insecurity have taken their toll.
Over the last quarter century, the area has lost 14% of its forests, mostly to make way for vanilla and rice.
This loss of wild habitats risks setting off a series of changes. Fewer trees also means fewer fruit-eating lemurs, which could create a feedback loop in which the trees that remain have fewer opportunities to replace themselves and sprout up elsewhere — a critical ability if trees are going to track climate change.
DeSisto and her colleagues are trying to better understand this web of connections as part of a larger effort to maximize forest resilience into an uncertain future.
The research requires dozens of students and researchers from universities in Madagascar and the U.S., not to mention local botanists and lemur experts, the local forest management association, and consultants and guides from nearby national parks, all working together across time zones, cultures and languages.
Forest field team members at camp (not everyone present). Photo credit: Jane Slentz-Kesler.
Together, they’ve found that scientific approaches such as fecal sampling or transect surveys can only identify so much of nature’s interconnected web.
Many lemurs are small, and only active at night or during certain times of year, which can make them hard to spot — especially for researchers who may only be on the ground for a limited time.
To fill the gaps, they’re also conducting interviews with local community members who have accumulated knowledge from a lifetime of living on the land, such as which lemurs like to munch on certain plants, what parts they prefer, and whether people rely on them for food or other uses.
By integrating different kinds of skills and expertise, the team has been able to map hidden connections between species that more traditional scientific methods miss.
For example, learning from the expertise of local community members helped them understand that forest patches that are regenerating after clear-cutting attract nocturnal lemurs that may — depending on which fruits they like to eat — promote the forest’s regrowth.
Camille DeSisto after a successful morning collecting lemur fecal samples.
Research collaborations aren’t unusual in science. But DeSisto says that building collaborations with colleagues more than 9,000 miles away from where she lives poses unique challenges.
Just getting to her field site involves four flights, several bumpy car rides, climbing steep trails and crossing slippery logs.
“Language barriers are definitely a challenge too,” DeSisto said.
She’s been studying Malagasy for seven years, but the language’s 18 dialects can make it hard to follow every joke her colleagues tell around the campfire.
To keep her language skills sharp she goes to weekly tutoring sessions when she’s back in the U.S., and she even helped start the first formal class on the language for Duke students.
“I like to think of it as language opportunities, not just language barriers,” DeSisto said.”
“Certain topics I can talk about with much more ease than others,” she added. “But I think making efforts to learn the language is really important.”
When they can’t have face-to-face meetings the team checks in remotely, using videoconferencing and instant messaging to agree on each step of the research pipeline, from coming up with goals and questions and collecting data to publishing their findings.
“That’s hard to navigate when we’re so far away,” DeSisto said. But, she adds, the teamwork and knowledge sharing make it worth it. “It’s the best part of research.”
This research was supported by Duke Bass Connections (“Biocultural Sustainability in Madagascar,” co-led by James Herrera), Duke Global, The Explorers Club, Primate Conservation, Inc., Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, and the Garden Club of America.
based and enzymatic, meaning its essentially grown using enzymes from beans. Testing in the New York Harbor yielded some promise: the cement appeared to resist corrosion, while becoming home for some oysters. The Design Climate team is now trying to bring it to more widespread use on land, while targeting up to a 90% reduction in carbon emissions 
