Aurelia Butler

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  • 175 Shares199 Views

    in Environment

    Celebrating a decade of a more sustainable MIT, with a focus on the future

    When MIT’s Office of Sustainability (MITOS) first launched in 2013, it was charged with integrating sustainability across all levels of campus by engaging the collective brainpower of students, staff, faculty, alumni, and partners. At the eighth annual Sustainability Connect, MITOS’s signature event, held nearly a decade later, the room was filled with MIT community members representing 67 different departments, labs, and centers — demonstrating the breadth of engagement across MIT.

    Held on Feb. 14 and hosting more than 100 staff, students, faculty, and researchers, the event was a forum on the future of sustainability leadership at MIT, designed to reflect on the work that had brought MIT to its present moment — focused on a net-zero future by 2026 and elimination of direct campus emissions by 2050 — and to plan forward.

    Director of Sustainability Julie Newman kicked off the day by reflecting on some of the questions that influenced the development of the MITOS framework, including: “How can MIT be a game-changing force for campus sustainability in the 21st century?” and “What are we solving for?” Newman shared that while these questions still drive the work of the office, considerations of the impact of this work have evolved. “We are becoming savvier at asking the follow-up question to these prompts,” she explained. “Are our solutions causing additional issues that we were remiss to ask, such as the impact on marginalized communities, unanticipated human health implications, and new forms of extraction?” Newman then encouraged attendees to think about these types of questions when envisioning and planning for the next decade of sustainability at MIT.

    While the event focused broadly on connecting the sustainability community at MIT, the day’s sessions tracked closely to the climate action plans that guided the office, 2015’s A Plan for Action on Climate Change and the current Fast Forward: MIT’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade. Both plans call for using the campus as a test bed, and at “A Model for Change: Field Reports from Campus as a Test Bed,” panelists Miho Mazereeuw, associate professor of architecture and urbanism, director of the Urban Risk Lab, and MITOS Faculty Fellow; Ken Strzepek, MITOS Faculty Fellow and research scientist at the MIT Center for Global Change Science; and Ippolyti Dellatolas graduate student and MITOS Climate Action Sustainability researcher shared ways in which they utilize the MIT campus as a test bed to design, study, and implement solutions related to flood risk, campus porosity, emissions reductions, and climate policy — efforts that can also inform work beyond MIT. Dellatolas reflected on success in this space. “With a successful campus as a test bed project, there is either output: we achieved these greenhouse gas emissions reductions or we learned something valuable in the process, so even if it fails, we understand why it failed and we can lend that knowledge to the next project,” she explained.

    Later in the morning, an “On the Horizon” panel focused on what key areas of focus, partnerships, and evolutions will propel the campus forward — anchored in the intersectional topics of decarbonization, climate justice, and experiential learning. To kick off the discussion, panelists John Fernández, director of the Environmental Solutions Initiative and professor of architecture; Joe Higgins, vice president for campus services and stewardship; Susy Jones, senior sustainability project manager; and Kate Trimble, senior associate dean for experiential learning shared which elements of their work have shifted in the last five years. Higgins commented on exciting progress being made in the space of renewables, electrification, smart thermostats, offshore wind, and other advances both at MIT and the municipal level. “You take this moment, and you think, these things weren’t in the moment five years ago when we were here on this stage. It brings a sense of abundance and optimism,” he concluded.

    Jones, for her part, shared how thinking about food and nutrition evolved over this period. “We’ve developed a lot of programming around nutrition. In the past few years, this new knowledge around the climate impact of our food system has joined the conversation,” she shared. “I think it’s really important to add that to the many years and decades of work that have been going on around food justice and food access and bring that climate conversation into that piece and acknowledge that, yes, the food system is accountable for about a quarter of global greenhouse gases.”

    Throughout the event, attendees were encouraged to share their questions and ideas for the future. In the closing workshop, “The Future of Sustainability at MIT,” attendees responded to questions such as, “What gives you hope?” and “What are we already doing well at MIT, what could we do more of?” The answers and ideas — which ranged from fusion to community co-design to a continued focus on justice — will inform MITOS’s work going forward, says Newman. “This is an activity we did within our core team, and the answers were so impactful and candid that we thought to bring it to the larger community to learn even more,” she says.

    That larger community was also recognized for their contributions with the first-ever Sustainability Awards, which honored nominated staff and students from departments across MIT for their contributions to building a more sustainable MIT. “This year we had a special opportunity to spotlight some of those individuals and teams leading transformative change at MIT,” explained Newman. “But everyone in the room and everyone working on sustainability at MIT in some way are our partners in this work. Our office could not do what we do without them.” More

  • 75 Shares119 Views

    in Security

    Titanic robots make farming more sustainable

    There’s a lot riding on farmers’ ability to fight weeds, which can strangle crops and destroy yields. To protect crops, farmers have two options: They can spray herbicides that pollute the environment and harm human health, or they can hire more workers.

    Unfortunately, both choices are becoming less tenable. Herbicide resistance is a growing problem in crops around the world, while widespread labor shortages have hit the agricultural sector particularly hard.

    Now the startup FarmWise, co-founded by Sebastien Boyer SM ’16, is giving farmers a third option. The company has developed autonomous weeding robots that use artificial intelligence to cut out weeds while leaving crops untouched.

    The company’s first robot, fittingly called the Titan — picture a large tractor that makes use of a trailer in lieu of a driver’s seat — uses machine vision to distinguish weeds from crops including leafy greens, cauliflower, artichokes, and tomatoes while snipping weeds with sub-inch precision.

    About 15 Titans have been roaming the fields of 30 large farms in California and Arizona for the last few years, providing weeding as a service while being directed by an iPad. Last month, the company unveiled its newest robot, Vulcan, which is more lightweight and pulled by a tractor.

    “We have growing population, and we can’t expand the land or water we have, so we need to drastically increase the efficiency of the farming industry,” Boyer says. “I think AI and data are going to be major players in that journey.”

    Finding a road to impact

    Boyer came to MIT in 2014 and earned masters’ degrees in technology and policy as well as electrical engineering and computer science over the next two years.

    “What stood out is the passion that my classmates had for what they did — the drive and passion people had to change the world,” Boyer says.

    As part of his graduate work, Boyer researched machine learning and machine vision techniques, and he soon began exploring ways to apply those technologies to environmental problems. He received a small amount of funding from MIT Sandbox to further develop the idea.

    “That helped me make the decision to not take a real job,” Boyer recalls.

    Following graduation, he and FarmWise co-founder Thomas Palomares, a graduate of Stanford University whom Boyer met in his home country of France, began going to farmers’ markets, introducing themselves to small farmers and asking for tours of their farms. About one in three farmers were happy to show them around. From there they’d ask for referrals to larger farmers and service providers in the industry.

    “We realized agriculture is a large contributor of both emissions and, more broadly, to the negative impact of human activities on the environment,” Boyer says. “It also hasn’t been as disrupted by software, cloud computing, AI, and robotics as other industries. That combination really excites us.”

    Through their conversations, the founders learned herbicides are becoming less effective as weeds develop genetic resistance. The only alternative is to hire more workers, which itself was becoming more difficult for farmers.

    “Labor is extremely tight,” says Boyer, adding that bending over and weeding for 10 hours a day is one of the hardest jobs out there. “The labor supply is shrinking if not collapsing in the U.S., and it’s a worldwide trend. That has real environmental implications because of the tradeoff [between labor and herbicides].”

    The problem is especially acute for farmers of specialty crops, including many fruits, vegetables, and nuts, which grow on smaller farms than corn and soybean and each require slightly different growing practices, limiting the effectiveness of many technical and chemical solutions.

    “We don’t harvest corn by hand today, but we still harvest lettuces and nuts and apples by hand,” Boyer says.

    The Titan was built to complement field workers’ efforts to grow and maintain crops. An operator directs it using an iPad, walking alongside the machine and inspecting progress. Both the Titan and Vulcan are powered by an AI that directs hundreds of tiny blades to snip out weeds around each crop. The Vulcan is controlled directly from the tractor cab, where the operator has a touchscreen interface Boyer compares to those found in a Tesla.

    With more than 15,000 commercial hours under its belt, FarmWise hopes the data it collects can be used for more than just weeding in the near future.

    “It’s all about precision,” Boyer says. “We’re going to better understand what the plant needs and make smarter decisions for each one. That will bring us to a point where we can use the same amount of land, much less water, almost no chemicals, much less fertilizer, and still produce more food than we’re producing today. That’s the mission. That’s what excites me.”

    Weeding out farming challenges

    A customer recently told Boyer that without the Titan, he would have to switch all of his organic crops back to conventional because he couldn’t find enough workers.

    “That’s happening with a lot of customers,” Boyer says. “They have no choice but to rely on herbicides. Acres are staying organic because of our product, and conventional farms are reducing their use of herbicides.”

    Now FarmWise is expanding its database to support weeding for six to 12 new crops each year, and Boyer says adding new crops is getting easier and easier for its system.

    As early partners have sought to expand their deployments, Boyer says the only thing limiting the company’s growth is how fast it can build new robots. FarmWise’s new machines will begin being deployed later this year.

    Although the hulking Titan robots are the face of the company today, the founders hope to leverage the data they’ve collected to further improve farming operations.

    “The mission of the company is to turn AI into a tool that is as reliable and dependable as GPS is now in the farming industry,” Boyer says. “Twenty-five years ago, GPS was a very complicated technology. You had to connect to satellites and do some crazy computation to define your position. But a few companies brought GPS to a new level of reliability and simplicity. Today, every farmer in the world uses GPS. We think AI can have an even deeper impact than GPS has had on the farming industry, and we want to be the company that makes it available and easy to use for every farmer in the world.” More

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    in Environment

    Study: Smoke particles from wildfires can erode the ozone layer

    A wildfire can pump smoke up into the stratosphere, where the particles drift for over a year. A new MIT study has found that while suspended there, these particles can trigger chemical reactions that erode the protective ozone layer shielding the Earth from the sun’s damaging ultraviolet radiation.

    The study, which appears today in Nature, focuses on the smoke from the “Black Summer” megafire in eastern Australia, which burned from December 2019 into January 2020. The fires — the country’s most devastating on record — scorched tens of millions of acres and pumped more than 1 million tons of smoke into the atmosphere.

    The MIT team identified a new chemical reaction by which smoke particles from the Australian wildfires made ozone depletion worse. By triggering this reaction, the fires likely contributed to a 3-5 percent depletion of total ozone at mid-latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere, in regions overlying Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Africa and South America.

    The researchers’ model also indicates the fires had an effect in the polar regions, eating away at the edges of the ozone hole over Antarctica. By late 2020, smoke particles from the Australian wildfires widened the Antarctic ozone hole by 2.5 million square kilometers — 10 percent of its area compared to the previous year.

    It’s unclear what long-term effect wildfires will have on ozone recovery. The United Nations recently reported that the ozone hole, and ozone depletion around the world, is on a recovery track, thanks to a sustained international effort to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals. But the MIT study suggests that as long as these chemicals persist in the atmosphere, large fires could spark a reaction that temporarily depletes ozone.

    “The Australian fires of 2020 were really a wake-up call for the science community,” says Susan Solomon, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies at MIT and a leading climate scientist who first identified the chemicals responsible for the Antarctic ozone hole. “The effect of wildfires was not previously accounted for in [projections of] ozone recovery. And I think that effect may depend on whether fires become more frequent and intense as the planet warms.”

    The study is led by Solomon and MIT research scientist Kane Stone, along with collaborators from the Institute for Environmental and Climate Research in Guangzhou, China; the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research; and Colorado State University.

    Chlorine cascade

    The new study expands on a 2022 discovery by Solomon and her colleagues, in which they first identified a chemical link between wildfires and ozone depletion. The researchers found that chlorine-containing compounds, originally emitted by factories in the form of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), could react with the surface of fire aerosols. This interaction, they found, set off a chemical cascade that produced chlorine monoxide — the ultimate ozone-depleting molecule. Their results showed that the Australian wildfires likely depleted ozone through this newly identified chemical reaction.

    “But that didn’t explain all the changes that were observed in the stratosphere,” Solomon says. “There was a whole bunch of chlorine-related chemistry that was totally out of whack.”

    In the new study, the team took a closer look at the composition of molecules in the stratosphere following the Australian wildfires. They combed through three independent sets of satellite data and observed that in the months following the fires, concentrations of hydrochloric acid dropped significantly at mid-latitudes, while chlorine monoxide spiked.

    Hydrochloric acid (HCl) is present in the stratosphere as CFCs break down naturally over time. As long as chlorine is bound in the form of HCl, it doesn’t have a chance to destroy ozone. But if HCl breaks apart, chlorine can react with oxygen to form ozone-depleting chlorine monoxide.

    In the polar regions, HCl can break apart when it interacts with the surface of cloud particles at frigid temperatures of about 155 kelvins. However, this reaction was not expected to occur at mid-latitudes, where temperatures are much warmer.

    “The fact that HCl at mid-latitudes dropped by this unprecedented amount was to me kind of a danger signal,” Solomon says.

    She wondered: What if HCl could also interact with smoke particles, at warmer temperatures and in a way that released chlorine to destroy ozone? If such a reaction was possible, it would explain the imbalance of molecules and much of the ozone depletion observed following the Australian wildfires.

    Smoky drift

    Solomon and her colleagues dug through the chemical literature to see what sort of organic molecules could react with HCl at warmer temperatures to break it apart.

    “Lo and behold, I learned that HCl is extremely soluble in a whole broad range of organic species,” Solomon says. “It likes to glom on to lots of compounds.”

    The question then, was whether the Australian wildfires released any of those compounds that could have triggered HCl’s breakup and any subsequent depletion of ozone. When the team looked at the composition of smoke particles in the first days after the fires, the picture was anything but clear.

    “I looked at that stuff and threw up my hands and thought, there’s so much stuff in there, how am I ever going to figure this out?” Solomon recalls. “But then I realized it had actually taken some weeks before you saw the HCl drop, so you really need to look at the data on aged wildfire particles.”

    When the team expanded their search, they found that smoke particles persisted over months, circulating in the stratosphere at mid-latitudes, in the same regions and times when concentrations of HCl dropped.

    “It’s the aged smoke particles that really take up a lot of the HCl,” Solomon says. “And then you get, amazingly, the same reactions that you get in the ozone hole, but over mid-latitudes, at much warmer temperatures.”

    When the team incorporated this new chemical reaction into a model of atmospheric chemistry, and simulated the conditions of the Australian wildfires, they observed a 5 percent depletion of ozone throughout the stratosphere at mid-latitudes, and a 10 percent widening of the ozone hole over Antarctica.

    The reaction with HCl is likely the main pathway by which wildfires can deplete ozone. But Solomon guesses there may be other chlorine-containing compounds drifting in the stratosphere, that wildfires could unlock.

    “There’s now sort of a race against time,” Solomon says. “Hopefully, chlorine-containing compounds will have been destroyed, before the frequency of fires increases with climate change. This is all the more reason to be vigilant about global warming and these chlorine-containing compounds.”

    This research was supported, in part, by NASA and the U.S. National Science Foundation. More

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    in Environment

    Nanotube sensors are capable of detecting and distinguishing gibberellin plant hormones

    Researchers from the Disruptive and Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision (DiSTAP) interdisciplinary research group of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, and their collaborators from Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory have developed the first-ever nanosensor that can detect and distinguish gibberellins (GAs), a class of hormones in plants that are important for growth. The novel nanosensors are nondestructive, unlike conventional collection methods, and have been successfully tested in living plants. Applied in the field for early-stage plant stress monitoring, the sensors could prove transformative for agriculture and plant biotechnology, giving farmers interested in high-tech precision agriculture and crop management a valuable tool to optimize yield.

    The researchers designed near-infrared fluorescent carbon nanotube sensors that are capable of detecting and distinguishing two plant hormones, GA3 and GA4. Belonging to a class of plant hormones known as gibberellins, GA3 and GA4 are diterpenoid phytohormones produced by plants that play an important role in modulating diverse processes involved in plant growth and development. GAs are thought to have played a role in the driving forces behind the “green revolution” of the 1960s, which was in turn credited with averting famine and saving the lives of many worldwide. The continued study of gibberellins could lead to further breakthroughs in agricultural science and have implications for food security.

    Climate change, global warming, and rising sea levels cause farming soil to get contaminated by saltwater, raising soil salinity. In turn, high soil salinity is known to negatively regulate GA biosynthesis and promote GA metabolism, resulting in the reduction of GA content in plants. The new nanosensors developed by the SMART researchers allow for the study of GA dynamics in living plants under salinity stress at a very early stage, potentially enabling farmers to make early interventions when eventually applied in the field. This forms the basis of early-stage stress detection.

    Currently, methods to detect GA3 and GA4 typically require mass spectroscopy-based analysis, a time-consuming and destructive process. In contrast, the new sensors developed by the researchers are highly selective for the respective GAs and offer real-time, in vivo monitoring of changes in GA levels across a broad range of plant species.

    Described in a paper titled “Near-Infrared Fluorescent Carbon Nanotube Sensors for the Plant Hormone Family Gibberellins” published in the journal Nano Letters, the research represents a breakthrough for early-stage plant stress detection and holds tremendous potential to advance plant biotechnology and agriculture. This paper builds on previous research by the team at SMART DiSTAP on single-walled carbon nanotube-based nanosensors using the corona phase molecular recognition (CoPhMoRe) platform.

    Based on the CoPhMoRe concept introduced by the lab of MIT Professor Professor Michael Strano, the novel sensors are able to detect GA kinetics in the roots of a variety of model and non-model plant species, including Arabidopsis, lettuce, and basil, as well as GA accumulation during lateral root emergence, highlighting the importance of GA in root system architecture. This was made possible by the researchers’ related development of a new coupled Raman/near infrared fluorimeter that enables self-referencing of nanosensor near infrared fluorescence with its Raman G-band, a new hardware innovation that removes the need for a separate reference nanosensor and greatly simplifies the instrumentation requirements by using a single optical channel to measure hormone concentration.

    Using the reversible GA nanosensors, the researchers detected increased endogenous GA levels in mutant plants producing greater amounts of GA20ox1, a key enzyme in GA biosynthesis, as well as decreased GA levels in plants under salinity stress. When exposed to salinity stress, researchers also found that lettuce growth was severely stunted — an indication that only became apparent after 10 days. In contrast, the GA nanosensors reported decreased GA levels after just six hours, demonstrating their efficacy as a much earlier indicator of salinity stress.

    “Our CoPhMoRe technique allows us to create nanoparticles that act like natural antibodies in that they can recognize and lock onto specific molecules. But they tend to be far more stable than alternatives. We have used this method to successfully create nanosensors for plant signals such as hydrogen peroxide and heavy-metal pollutants like arsenic in plants and soil,” says Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT who is co-corresponding author and DiSTAP co-lead principal investigator. “The method works to create sensors for organic molecules like synthetic auxin — an important plant hormone — as we have shown. This latest breakthrough now extends this success to a plant hormone family called gibberellins — an exceedingly difficult one to recognize.”

    Strano adds: “The resulting technology offers a rapid, real-time, and in vivo method to monitor changes in GA levels in virtually any plant, and can replace current sensing methods which are laborious, destructive, species-specific, and much less efficient.”

    Mervin Chun-Yi Ang, associate scientific director at DiSTAP and co-first author of the paper, says, “More than simply a breakthrough in plant stress detection, we have also demonstrated a hardware innovation in the form of a new coupled Raman/NIR fluorimeter that enabled self-referencing of SWNT sensor fluorescence with its Raman G-band, representing a major advance in the translation of our nanosensing tool sets to the field. In the near future, our sensors can be combined with low-cost electronics, portable optodes, or microneedle interfaces for industrial use, transforming how the industry screens for and mitigates plant stress in food crops and potentially improving growth and yield.”

    The new sensors could yet have a variety of industrial applications and use cases. Daisuke Urano, a Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory principal investigator, National University of Singapore (NUS) adjunct assistant professor, and co-corresponding author of the paper, explains, “GAs are known to regulate a wide range of plant development processes, from shoot, root, and flower development, to seed germination and plant stress responses. With the commercialization of GAs, these plant hormones are also sold to growers and farmers as plant growth regulators to promote plant growth and seed germination. Our novel GA nanosensors could be applied in the field for early-stage plant stress monitoring, and also be used by growers and farmers to track the uptake or metabolism of GA in their crops.”

    The design and development of the nanosensors, creation and validation of the coupled Raman/near infrared fluorimeter and related image/data processing algorithms, as well as statistical analysis of readouts from plant sensors for this study were performed by SMART and MIT. The Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory was responsible for the design, execution, and analysis of plant-related studies, including validation of nanosensors in living plants.

    This research was carried out by SMART and supported by the National Research Foundation of Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence And Technological Enterprise (CREATE) program. The DiSTAP program, led by Strano and Singapore co-lead principal investigator Professor Chua Nam Hai, addresses deep problems in food production in Singapore and the world by developing a suite of impactful and novel analytical, genetic, and biomaterial technologies. The goal is to fundamentally change how plant biosynthetic pathways are discovered, monitored, engineered, and ultimately translated to meet the global demand for food and nutrients. Scientists from MIT, Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory, Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and NUS are collaboratively developing new tools for the continuous measurement of important plant metabolites and hormones for novel discovery, deeper understanding and control of plant biosynthetic pathways in ways not yet possible, especially in the context of green leafy vegetables; leveraging these new techniques to engineer plants with highly desirable properties for global food security, including high yield density production, and drought and pathogen resistance, and applying these technologies to improve urban farming.

    SMART was established by MIT and the National Research Foundation of Singapore in 2007. SMART serves as an intellectual and innovation hub for research interactions between MIT and Singapore, undertaking cutting-edge research projects in areas of interest to both Singapore and MIT. SMART currently comprises an Innovation Center and five interdisciplinary research groups: Antimicrobial Resistance, Critical Analytics for Manufacturing Personalized-Medicine, DiSTAP, Future Urban Mobility, and Low Energy Electronic Systems. More

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    in Environment

    Creating the steps to make organizational sustainability work

    Sustainability is a hot topic. Companies throw around their carbon or recycling initiatives, and competing executives feel the need to follow suit. But aside from the external pressure, there are also bottom-line benefits. Becoming more efficient can save money. Creating a new product might make money; customers care about a company’s practices and will spend their money based on that.

    The work is in getting there, because becoming sustainable can seem simple: Establish a goal for five years down the road, and everything will fall into place — but it’s easy for things to get upended. “There is so much confusion and noise in this space,” says Jason Jay, senior lecturer and director of the Sustainability Initiative at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

    His work is to help companies break through the confusion and figure out what they want to actually do, not merely what sounds good. It means doing research and listening to science. Mostly, it requires discipline, and because something new — be it a product, process or technology — is being asked for, it also takes ambition. “It’s a tricky dance,” he says, but one that can result in “doing well and doing good at the same time.”

    Play video

    It’s about taking steps

    Three steps, to be exact. The first, which is the crux, Jay says, is for a company to focus on a small set of issues that it can take the lead on. It sounds obvious, but it’s often missed. The problem is that companies will do either one of two things. They’ll take an outside-in approach in which they end up listening to too many stakeholders, “get pulled in a million different directions,” and try to solve all of society’s problems, which means solving none of them, he says.

    Or they’ll go inside-out and have one executive in charge of sustainability who will do some internal research and come up with an initiative. It might be a good idea, but it doesn’t take into account how it will affect the facilities, supply chains, and the people who work with them. And without that consideration, “It’s going to be very difficult to get the necessary traction inside the company,” Jay says.

    What’s needed is a combination of the two — outside perspectives coupled with insider knowledge — in order to find an initiative that resonates for that company. It starts with looking at what the company already does. That might show where it’s making a negative impact and, in turn, where it could make a positive one. It also involves the C-suite executives asking themselves, “What do we want this company to stand for?” and then, “What do I want my legacy to be?”

    Still, it can be hard to envision what change can look like or what actions might have an impact. Jay says this is where a simulation tool like En-ROADS, developed by MIT Sloan and Climate Interactive, can help explore scenarios.

    But it’s ultimately about making a commitment and allowing an iterative process to play out. A company then discovers its true focus might be something less flashy. Nike early on, for example, found that a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions was sulfur hexafluoride gas in the Nike Air bladder. When they re-engineered it, they ended up with inert nitrogen and a stronger material that was aesthetically cool and lightweight for the athlete. That didn’t come in one brainstorming meeting. It meant doing research and looking at what the science says is possible. It’s not quick, but it also shouldn’t be, if the goal is to take real, measurable action.

    “Cheap talk leads to cheap things,” Jay says. 

    Play video

    The next two

    Deciding what matters is key, but nothing materializes without establishing concrete goals. This is where a company “shows the world you’re serious.” But it’s a place where companies slip up. They either set weak goals, ones they know they can easily reach, so there’s no challenge, no accomplishment, “no stretch,” Jay says. Or they set goals that are too ambitious and/or aren’t backed by science. It could be, “We’re going to be net zero by 2050,” but how exactly is never answered.

    Jay says it’s about finding the sweet spot of having a reasonable amount of goals — like two to four — and then have those goals feel like a reach, yet possible. When that balance is right, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People stay motivated because they experience progress. But if it’s off, it won’t happen.

    “You need that optimal creative tension,” he says.

    And then there’s the third step. Companies need to find partners to make their sustainability programs succeed. It’s the one part that’s most overlooked because executives continually believe that they can do it alone. But they can’t, because big initiatives require help and expertise outside of a company’s realm.

    Maersk, the global shipping company, has a goal of replacing fossil fuel with green fuels for ocean freight, Jay says. It discovered that green ammonia could make that happen, and it was Yara, a fertilizer company, which best understood ammonia production. But it could also be a startup that’s working on a promising technology. Sometimes, as with moving to electric cars, what’s needed are political partners to enact policy and offer tax breaks and incentives. And it might be that the answer is collaborating with activists who have been pushing a company to change its ways.

    “There are strange bedfellows all around,” Jay says.

    Know how to tap the brake

    All the steps circle back to the essential point that becoming sustainable takes a committed investment of time, money, and patience. Starting small helps, especially in a corporate culture that tends to move slowly. Jay says there’s nothing wrong with going from zero projects to one, even if it’s a small one in a specific department. It allows people to become accustomed to the idea of change. It also lets the company establish a framework, analyze results, and build momentum, making it easier to ramp up.

    The patience part can be hard since there’s a rightful sense of urgency involved. Companies want to show that they’re doing something, and want to affect climate change sooner rather than later. But Jay likens it to building a skyscraper. The desire is to get it up fast, but if the foundation is shaky, everything will crumble.

    “What we’re trying to do is strengthen that foundation so it can reach the height we need,” he says. More

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    in Environment

    Aviva Intveld named 2023 Gates Cambridge Scholar

    MIT senior Aviva Intveld has won the prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship, which offers students an opportunity to pursue graduate study in the field of their choice at Cambridge University in the U.K. Intveld will join the other 23 U.S. citizens selected for the 2023 class of scholars.

    Intveld, from Los Angeles, is majoring in earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences, and minoring in materials science and engineering with concentrations in geology, geochemistry, and archaeology. Her research interests span the intersections among those fields to better understand how the natural environments of the past have shaped human movement and decision-making.

    At Cambridge, Intveld will undertake a research MPhil in earth sciences at the Godwin Lab for Paleoclimate Research, where she will investigate the impact of past climate on the ancient Maya in northwest Yucatán via cave sediment records. She hopes to pursue an impact-oriented research career in paleoclimate and paleoenvironment reconstruction and ultimately apply the lessons learned from her research to inform modern climate policy. She is particularly passionate about sustainable mining of energy-critical elements and addressing climate change inequality in her home state of California.

    Intveld’s work at Cambridge will build upon her extensive research experience at MIT. She currently works in the McGee Lab reconstructing the Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene paleoclimate of northeastern Mexico to provide a climatic background to the first peopling of the Americas. Previously, she explored the influence of mountain plate tectonics on biodiversity in the Perron Lab. During a summer research position at the University of Haifa in Israel she analyzed the microfossil assemblage of an offshore sediment core for paleo-coastal reconstruction.

    Last summer, Intveld interned at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Homer, Alaska, to identify geologic controls on regional groundwater chemistry. She has also interned with the World Wildlife Fund and with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. During her the spring semester of her junior year, Intveld studied abroad through MISTI at Imperial College London’s Royal School of Mines and completed geology field work in Sardinia, Italy.

    Intveld has been a strong presence on MIT’s campus, serving as the undergraduate representative on the EAPS Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. She leads tours for the MIT List Visual Arts Center, is a member of and associate advisor for the Terrascope Learning Community, and is a participant in the Addir Interfaith Dialogue Fellowship.

    Inveld was advised in her application by Kim Benard, associate dean of the Distinguished Fellowships team in Career Advising and Professional Development, who says, “Aviva’s work is at a fascinating crossroads of archeology, geology, and sustainability. She has already done extraordinary work, and this opportunity will prepare her even more to be influential in the fight for climate mitigation.”

    Established by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000, the Gates Cambridge Scholarship provides full funding for talented students from outside the United Kingdom to pursue postgraduate study in any subject at Cambridge University. Since the program’s inception in 2001, there have been 33 Gates Cambridge Scholars from MIT. More

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    in Environment

    Taking the long view: The Deep Time Project

    How would we design and build differently if we learned to live at multiple time scales? How would human communities respond to global challenges if the short-term mindset of contemporary life was expanded to encompass new dimensions of past and future — diving into the depths of geological history and projecting forward to imagine the consequences of our actions today?

    These are questions that Cristina Parreño Alonso addresses in her practice as an architect, artist, and senior lecturer in the MIT Department of Architecture. Her field of research, which she has termed “Transtectonics,” explores the cultural and environmental implications of expanded temporal sensibilities in architectural material practice. A building, Parreño argues, is a “material event,” part of a process of construction and deconstruction that is shaped by the past and directly impacts the future — an impact that has become all the more apparent in the epoch of the Anthropocene, in which humans have become the dominant force influencing the physical composition and regulating systems of the planet.

    Parreño’s classes at MIT have included design studios that position architecture in relation to geological processes, and historical surveys of building practices that embrace traces of time and rhythms of maintenance. She recently devised a new class, 4.181 (The Deep Time Project), which launched in fall 2022 with the support of a 2022 Cross Disciplinary Class Grant from the MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology (CAST), in addition to the d’Arbeloff Fund for Excellence in Education.

    Learning deep time literacy

    “The course proposes that architects must develop deep-time literacy if we are to become true planetary stewards,” says Parreño. “Rather than attempting to identify solutions, the course is intended to provoke new ways of thinking that lead to greater accountability — a recognition that we, as architects, are intervening in something larger than ourselves, and that the consequences of our actions extend far beyond the timescales of our human lives and civilizations.” The class, which was offered to master’s students in the School of Architecture and Planning and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, culminated in a series of “material essays” that seek to bring deep time into contemporary consciousness. These multimedia projects — which include physical prototypes, text components, sound, and video  — are on display until March 24 at the Wiesner Student Art Gallery.

    “Being part of the exhibition has made me realize the advantages of belonging to a collective that recognizes the urgency of addressing the idea of time at different scales,” says architecture master’s student Christina Battikha, whose material essay “Plastic Time” imagines a future when plastic is integral to the geological structure of the Earth. Envisioned as a jagged plastic “rock,” the sculpture interprets the ubiquitous synthetic material as a natural phenomenon, a human-made product that far outlasts a human lifespan.

    Taking the form of a clay “Rosetta Stone” inscribed with multiple languages, architecture student Tatiana Victorovna Estrina’s material essay explores how the evolution of language impacts the built environment. “My project identifies a gap of imagination in deep time research,” she explains. “The installation became a futuristic exploration of opportunities for the adaptive relationship between the human body and its prosthetic additions of language and architecture.”

    Provocative perspectives

    “Developing the class here at MIT grants us the capacity to hold conversations across disciplines,” says Parreño. “That’s all the more necessary, because deep time literacy requires a very holistic way of thinking; it raises awareness of the fact that we are inherently interconnected, and makes it clear that we can’t afford to operate in compartments.”

    This attention to interdisciplinarity is exemplified by the guest speakers invited to share their ideas with the class, each providing a new way of accessing the deep time paradigm. Among the speakers were Marcia Bjornerud, a structural geologist and educator who argues that a geologist’s temporal perspective can empower us to make decisions for a more sustainable future. Richard Fisher, a senior journalist at the BBC, and Bina Venkataraman, journalist and author of “The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age,” both shared their experiences of engaging the public in the perils of short-term-ism and the positive effects of taking the long view in daily life. The historian of science Jimena Canales provided a philosophical background to the conundrums of time perception, citing the renowned debate between Albert Einstein and the philosopher Henri Bergson.

    Alongside these large-scale thinkers and academic researchers were practitioners who directly apply planetary perspectives at a local level. Joseph Bagley is Boston’s city architect, investigating the layers of time that constitute the urban fabric. Faries Gray, the sagamore of the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag, advocates for Indigenous ways of knowing that recognize the continuity between human cultures and the living history of the land. Together, these different ways of relating to deep time offer a toolkit for contemplating a concept too large to be held in the human mind.

    Thinking through art

    Parreño’s own way of conceptualizing deep time is informed by her artistic and philosophical inquiry into the paradoxes of time, tectonics, and materiality. Exhibited at the Schusev State Museum of Architecture in Moscow, her installation Tectonics of Wisdom focused on the typology of the library as a way of demonstrating how architecture is intertwined with geological and civilizational history. Carbon to Rock, shown at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, explores new artificial manipulations of the geological timescales of the carbon cycle, rethinking igneous rocks as a resilient material for high-carbon-capture architecture. In addition, Parreño has published several essays on the subject of deep time for journals including Strelka Magazine, Log, and JAE Journal of Architectural Education. Her work as a writer and theorist is complemented by her art installations — or material essays — that serve as a research methodology and a means of communication.

    Likewise, the exhibition component of the Deep Time Project is a way of giving thoughts physical form. Estrina’s installation was initially prompted by the need to communicate the presence of buried nuclear waste to future generations — or even future species. Battikha’s sculpture is a response to the vast buildup of plastic generated by cycles of supply and demand. However, rather than making value judgements or condemning human actions, these works are intended to disrupt conventional patterns of perception, experimenting with longer-term perspectives that have the potential to change ingrained assumptions and daily habits. “There needs to be a paradigm shift before we can effectively address the enormity of the challenges ahead,” says Parreño. “The Deep Time Project is about taking a step back, reframing these problems in ways that will allow us to ask the right questions.” More

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    in Environment

    Q&A: Tod Machover on “Overstory Overture,” his new operatic work

    Composers find inspiration from many sources. For renowned MIT Media Lab composer Tod Machover, reading the Richard Powers novel “The Overstory” instantly made him want to adapt it as an operatic composition. This might not seem an obvious choice to some: “The Overstory” is about a group of people, including a wrongly maligned scientist, who band together to save a forest from destruction.

    But Machover’s resulting work, “Overstory Overture,” a 35-minute piece commissioned and performed by the chamber ensemble Sejong Soloists, has come to fruition and will have its world premiere on March 7 in Alice Tully Hall at New York’s Lincoln Center. Opera superstar Joyce DiDonato will have the lead role, with Earl Lee conducting. On March 16, the piece will have its second performance, in Seoul, South Korea. MIT News recently talked to Machover about his original new work.

    Q: How did you get the idea for your new work?

    A: I’ve been a fan of Richard Powers’ novels for a long time. He started out as a musician. He’s a cellist like I am, and was a composer before he was a writer, and he’s also been deeply interested in science for his whole career. All of his novels have something to do with people, ideas, music, and science. He’s always been on my radar.

    Q: What’s compelling to you about this particular Powers book?

    A: “The Overstory” is made up of many stories about characters who come together, improbably, because of trees. It starts with short chapters describing characters with relationships to trees. One is about a family that moved to the Midwest and planted a chestnut tree. It grows for 150 years and they take pictures every year, and it’s at the center of the family until it gets cut down in the 1990s. Another guy is in a plane in Vietnam and gets shot down, and his parachute gets caught in a tree right before he hits the ground.

    One character is named Patricia Westerford and she’s a scientist. Her life work is studying the forest and trees, and she discovers that trees communicate — both underground, through the roots, and through the air, via particles. They’re much more like a network than they are static, isolated objects. Her whole world is discovering the miracle of this network, but nobody believes her and she loses her tenure. And she basically goes and lives in the forest. Eventually all the characters in the book come together to preserve a forest in the Northwest that’s going to be destroyed. They become connected through trees, but in the book, all their lives are basically destroyed. It’s not a happy ending, but you understand how human beings are connected through the natural world, and have to think about this connection in a radically new way.

    Every single character came alive. The book is just a miracle. It’s a great work of art. Immediately, reading it, I thought, this is something I want to work on.

    Q: How did you start turning that into an operatic composition?

    A: I got in touch with Powers soon after that. Richard knew my music and answered immediately, saying, “I’d love to have you do an opera on this, and let’s figure out how.” I started working on it just before the pandemic. Around that time he came to Harvard to give a lecture, so he came here to my office in the Media Lab, and we got to chat.

    Generally novels leave more room for you to decide how to make music out of them; they’re a lot less scripted than a movie or a play, and the many inner thoughts and asides leave room for music to fill in. I asked Richard, “Would you be interested in writing the text for this?” And right away he said, “Look, I’d like to be involved in the process, but I don’t feel equipped to write a libretto.” So, I went to Simon Robson, who worked on “Schoenberg in Hollywood” [another Machover opera], and we started working and checked in with Richard from time to time.

    Just about that time the ensemble Sejong Soloists, who are based in New York and Seoul, offered to have their string orchestra collaborate on a project with a theatrical aspect, which was new for them. I explained I was working on an opera based on “The Overstory,” and I felt we could explore its themes. I could imagine the string instruments being like trees and the orchestra being the forest.

    The next thing I did was contact my favorite singer, Joyce DiDonato. She’s such a beautiful, powerful singer. I did an opera in 1999 for Houston called “Resurrection,” which was based on Tolstoy’s last novel, and we were casting the main female character. We did auditions in New York, Los Angeles, and Europe, couldn’t find the main character, and finally the head of the Houston Grand Opera said, “You know, there’s this young singer in our apprentice program who’s pretty special, and you should hear her.”

    And sure enough, that was Joyce. It was her first major role. We hadn’t done another project together although we remained close over the years, but I called her and said “Joyce, I know how busy you are, but I’ve got this idea, and I’ll send you the book. It’s great and I’d love to focus on this one character, would you consider doing it?” And she said she’d love to, partly because sustainability and the environment is something she really cares about.

    Q: Okay, but how do you get started writing music for a piece when it’s based on a book about trees?

    A: I began with two things. Musically I started with the idea of creating this language for tree communication. I was inspired by this idea that one of the reasons we don’t know about it is it’s underground, it’s low, it’s spreading out. I’m a cellist, and I’ve always loved music that grows from the bottom. When you play the cello, in a lot of the great literature, you’re playing the low part of a quartet or quintet or orchestra, and often people don’t quite hear it as the most prominent thing.

    The second thing I did was start making this text. Which was hard, because it’s a big novel. It’s a 35-minute piece where Joyce is at the center. When she starts, she just talks, for a minute, and then little by little it turns into song. It’s her sharing with everybody what she learned, she brings you into the world of the forest. In time, there’s a crisis, they’re destroying the forest, and as she says, they’re tearing out the lungs — tearing out the mind — of the world. The last part of the piece is a vision of how the trees need us but we need them even more.

    Q: I don’t want to push too hard on this, but the composition sounds parallel with its subject matter. Trees are connected; an orchestra is connected. And then this story is about people building a connection to nature, while you want the audience to feel a connection to the piece. How much did you think about it that way?

    A: I was thinking about that pretty consciously, and I really tried to make something that feels very still and simple, but where there’s a lot going on. It feels like it’s living and moving. The piece starts out with solo instruments, so at first everybody’s doing their bit, then they all join in. The strings make a rich ensemble sound, but in the last section every single instrument has its own part — I wrote an individual part for all these string players so they’re kind of weaving in and out. Musically it’s very much constructed to lead people through a forest that is both diverse but connected together.

    I also enjoy using electronics to add another dimension. In this piece I’ve tried to create an electronic world that doesn’t necessarily remind you of electronics, except for one part where machines comes in ripping the forest apart. But mostly the electronics are blended with the orchestra in a way you might not always notice. The sound and feel, hopefully, will appear more natural than nature.

    Q: You also seem to have clearly identified a story with real operatic drama here, unusual as it may be.

    A: The emotional transition that happens is the awareness of what the forest means, and in your gut what it means to protects it, and what it would mean to lose it, and then a glimpse of what it might feel like to live in a different way. I think the contribution someone like myself might be able to make is to change attitudes, to think about our limits as a species and as individuals. Technical solutions alone aren’t going to solve things; people’s behavior somehow has to change. A piece like this is a way of having the experience of crisis, and a vision of what could be different.

    Q: Here’s something a lot of us want to know: What’s it like working with Joyce DiDonato?

    A: She’s one of those rare people. She’s completely direct and honest and lives life to the fullest. Joyce, I mean, thank God she has the best voice you’ll ever hear and she’s at the top of her game, but she also thinks about the world and ideas, and she did a whole project a few years ago performing a repertoire around the world about war and peace, to jolt people into a new understanding. Every project she’s involved with, she cares about the characters and she’s in it all the way.

    For this piece we did a bunch of Zoom sessions and tried things out. And she’s fantastic at saying, “To make that phrase the best you can for my voice at this point in the piece, would you consider changing that one note?” She has incredibly precise ideas about that. So, we worked musically on every detail and on the whole shape. What a pleasure! She also came here to MIT. She hadn’t been to the Media Lab, so she spent two days here at the beginning of August with her partner. She was so open to all the students and all the ideas and inventions and machines and software, just in the most gracious and truly excited way. You couldn’t have had a better visitor.

    Q: Any last thoughts about this piece you want to share?

    A: In my music in general, I’m pretty voracious at combining different things. I think in this project where it involves the natural world and the language of trees, and the language of melodies and instruments and electronic music, there may be more elements I’ve pulled together than ever. The emotional and even musical world here is larger. That’s my story here: These elements require and invite new thinking. And remember: This is just the first part of a larger project. I hope that you can hear the full “Overstory” opera — perhaps with trees growing in a major opera house — in the not-so-distant future! More