Q&A with sustainability director Rosalie Kerr ’97

BY ISABELLE HAN

The Dartmouth Rosalie Kerr ’97, the sustainability director at Dartmouth, is responsible for leading the College’s sustainability eforts and overseeing the College’s Green Energy Plan. The Dartmouth sat down with Kerr to discuss past, present and future sustainability initiatives at Dartmouth.

Can you tell me about current sustainability initiatives at Dartmouth?

RK: I think it’s an exciting time for sustainability at Dartmouth. One of the things we’re currently working on is called the “Our Green Future 2.0 process.” It is a report from outgoing College President Philip J. Hanlon to incoming College President Sian Leah Beilock, with a series of recommendations surrounding sustainability leadership and updated operational sustainability goals for Dartmouth. We are excited about the increasing interest in sustainability demonstrated by the incoming class. We just did admitted students’ weekend, and there are a lot of incoming ’27s who are super fred up about sustainability.

What are some of Dartmouth’s strengths in sustainability?

RK: First of all, we’re a liberal arts school and sustainability is a complex problem that requires more than one discipline. We’re also undergraduate-focused, and we have a strong history in experiential learning with undergraduate students, from our Foreign Studies Programs to lab-based classes like agroecology to just students doing really cool projects, such as the Big Green Bus, the Sustainable Living Center and the O-Farm.

Can you tell me more about the Dartmouth Green Energy Project?

RK: Dartmouth is a microcosm of any city because we have a lot of energy needs.

You can think about all of Dartmouth’s spaces — from Collis to the labs to the gym — that use tons of energy to keep them going. We have cold winters, meaning that we use the most energy then. So our cold, rural location presents some interesting challenges in providing sustainable energy. We are trying to fgure out how to provide energy in a low carbon way, and that means a total transition of our current energy system. The frst step is converting our energy distribution system from steam to hot water, and then generating that hot water in low carbon, highly efcient ways. The step after that is taking existing buildings and making them much more efcient.

What are some of the most pressing sustainability challenges that Dartmouth currently faces?

RK: Providing students with the incredible educational, research and living experience that we want in a low- or no-carbon way is challenging. Another challenge is feeding 4,200 to 6,000 students in a way that’s sustainable in an environment that doesn’t grow food year round and where food is expensive. Another really interesting challenge is waste. The recycling system in the United States is broken. The consumer-single-use orientation that we have functioned with in American society for the last 50 years is adding up. Landflls are flling up, and we can no longer export waste to China to be recycled or sorted. This is also true for Dartmouth. As much as Dartmouth students care about climate or care about sustainability, our sorting behavior is zero. If we audit any three trash bins on campus, we will discover that they’re not sorted at all. So how do we develop a system that takes into account human behavior, sustainability, cost and real-world circumstances?

How are these challenges being addressed?

RK: We always have really interesting initiatives that originate with students. Right now, a student intern is working on clothing waste — a small, but growing portion of the Dartmouth waste stream. Fast fashion has contributed to that; you can order a pair of leather pants and a mullet wig instantaneously on Amazon, and then throw that away after you wear it once to the event that you ordered it for. There’s also a student who’s working on both educating students about fast fashion and how they could avoid buying unnecessary clothing. We have students who are doing similar things with bikes, students who are looking at the waste system and a student who is really passionate about reusable cups.

How can interested students get involved in sustainability at Dartmouth?

RK: There are a lot of interesting courses that focus on sustainability. I’m meeting with groups from ENVS 12: “Energy and the Environment” who are doing projects connected to campus and these issues. There are fabulous faculty who are doing research in areas related to sustainability, and they all employ undergraduate students. From a co-curricular perspective, getting engaged in the Sustainability Ofce is one easy way to get involved in sustainability on campus. We have ofce hours every week with homemade baked goods, so it’s always an easy way for students to just stop by and chat about their passion projects. For example, Green 2 Go was originally a student initiative that came from a student who came to ofce hours.

What role do you see Dartmouth playing in the broader sustainability movement?

RK: We have an opportunity to contribute in really meaningful and distinctive ways because of our unique combination of strengths. We produce two really important things: scholarship, such as research, and our students. Our students change the world. They disproportionately control how resources are consumed and how decisions are made. I think we have an opportunity to bring our existing strengths to prepare our students to go do that in a way that transitions our planet to a low carbon, sustainable future.

What are some of Dartmouth’s long term sustainability goals?

RK: We have goals in each of six operational areas — water, waste,

SOURCE: OFFICE OF THE PROVOST landscape and ecology, energy, food and transportation. Reducing our carbon emissions to zero or near zero is our ambition from an operational perspective. We also have goals that relate to how we empower the community in which we’re situated. Dartmouth is obviously a huge part of the surrounding community. In each of those areas we are kind of whittling down how we take these recommendations and turn them into real goals that we can aim at. They all have to do with contributing to a brighter and greener future for the College, the Upper Valley and for the world.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Baltic LEAP FSP to run for the rst time this summer

to encourage students to seek out cross-cultural experiences, Fridays and weekends will be reserved for excursions in the region, according to Graham.

One of the excursions planned is a visit to Narva. Geographically, the town is located near the present-day Russian border, and Morse admitted she is “curious … to experience the feeling of looking at the empire from the outside.”

While the Baltic states preserve signifcant Russian-speaking minorities, younger generations — those who came of age after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 — are less versed in the Russian language, according to Morse. Given its proximity to the Russian border, Narva has retained a higher distribution of the Russian-speaking diaspora on average.

Morse stated that understanding “language politics” of the Baltics is a non-negotiable aspect of the program.

BY CHAEYOON OK

The Baltic LEAP, which stands for language, energy and politics, is a new interdisciplinary Foreign Study Program developed by the organizers of the suspended Russian FSP. It will run for the frst time this summer.

The program is run jointly by the East European, Eurasian and Russian studies department, the government department and the Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy and Society. Negotiations for the program initially began in 2019, according to East European, Eurasian and Russian studies professor Ainsley Morse.

Due to ongoing Russian aggression against Ukraine, the original destination for the program, Moscow, was deemed unsuitable in 2022. However, all of the major contributors to the original program were dedicated to fnding a new host, Morse said.

Over the course of the 10-week program, 16 Dartmouth students will travel to the Baltics — the countries of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia along the Eastern Baltic coast — and attend specially-designed modules at Vilnius University in Lithuania and the University of Tartu in Estonia.

Academic director of the Irving

Institute and Baltic LEAP lead organizer Amanda Graham reported that the team behind the Baltic LEAP wanted to maintain the original idea behind a program that would synthesize Russian language, governance and energy. As the program would be the frst to “braid” three disciplines together, the directors looked for applicants who embodied a similar “intrepid” spirit, according to government professor and faculty director Charles Crabtree. Kara Davis ’26, who has committed to go on the program this summer, said she is “very unfamiliar” with the Baltics as a region.

“It’s not every day that you get to go to the Baltics,” Sophia Wallace ’26 said. Wallace added that she has also committed to participate in the program this summer, citing the novelty of the region as a motivating factor in her decision to apply.

“[The Baltics] is not exactly a region that many of our students — or their families — would have experience visiting,” Crabtree said. “Many of our applicants would already be fairly drawn to trying new things. But [we wanted students] who were not just … jumping to try something new, but students who could fgure out ways to explore [discomfort] that could include and beneft everybody.”

The organizing team for the Baltic LEAP program landed on the Baltics for a number of reasons.

“[The islands], taken together, can be compared to a laboratory … for understanding how to navigate energy transitions [and] the cultural and political dynamics unique to the region,” Graham explained.

Crabtree described the program as timely because there is currently a lot of activity in the region pertaining to international relations and energy due to Russian aggression. He added that tracing the Baltics’ chosen course of action against Russian aggression would be a “once-in-a-lifetime experience for the students.”

Graham said she believes it is especially important that Dartmouth students experience the Baltics now.

“There are lessons that we can only learn [from the Baltics],” Graham said. “Because for geopolitical and energy security reasons, they’ve had to accelerate their transition to stymie the challenges with their oil and gas supplies coming from Russia.”

The program consists mainly of two separate four-week modules. During the frst half of the program, students will receive instruction at Lithuania’s Vilnius University. Following a weeklong stop in Latvia, they will fnish the remainder of the curriculum at Estonia’s University of Tartu.

Students will have a four-day workweek, during which they will be “fully immersed” in their studies in the classroom, according to Crabtree. All participants are required to take the course “Baltic History, Culture & Regional History” taught by Professor Morse and Professor Gronas in the East European, Eurasian and Russian studies department. From there, the students will diverge to take modules oriented around their chosen track.

Government students will be enrolled in “Politics of Democratization, Identity, and Regime Change in the Baltics,” and energy students in “Baltic Energy Systems & Transition Strategies.” According to Wallace, students on the Russian language track will take two Russian courses, in addition to the broad survey course on Baltic history and culture.

Morse said that the Russian language classes will be more intensive than the ones taught on Dartmouth’s campus, with four instructional hours per day compared to one in a standard Dartmouth language course.

The objective, however, is not for students to interact exclusively with others on the same track. In an efort

“[Students on the Russian language track] will be exploring, experientially, the Baltic postcolonial experience through language –– getting a sense for when Russian is welcome in public places and when it is less so,” Morse said. “We are confdent that locals will be kind and understanding about [language barriers], and I am quite excited to see what valuable and unexpected perspectives our students will gain from this mix of the familiar and unfamiliar.”

In similar fashion to the other experiential offerings planned, Narva has “something [of interest] for everyone,” Graham said. For energy students, this manifests in an examination of the underbelly of Estonia’s “robust” coal industry. Meanwhile, government students will get to observe a microcosm of postSoviet sociopolitical tensions. Finally, Narva will serve as a case study in how the Baltics “leverage and steward their local resources … to protect their people and their ways of life,” according to Graham.

Crabtree said he hopes that students will come away with a “renewed appreciation” of what they have previously taken for granted, since linguistic variation in the region will probably create some initial confusion for students.

“We’re so used to knowing everything and having all the information available at the tips of our fngers,” Crabtree said. “I would say there’s [something] soul-building about going to a place and being a little lost … and disoriented at times. Connection becomes valuable because it’s so hard to come by.”