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      Civil discourse project to launch at MIT

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      A new project on civil discourse aims to promote open and civil discussion of difficult topics on the MIT campus.

      The project, which will launch this fall, includes a speaker series and curricular activities in MIT’s Concourse program for first-year students. MIT philosophers Alex Byrne and Brad Skow from the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy lead the project, in close coordination with Anne McCants, professor of history and director of Concourse, and Linda Rabieh, a Concourse lecturer. 

      The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations provided a substantial grant to help fund the project. Promoting civil discourse on college campuses is an area of focus for AVDF — they sponsor related projects at many schools, including Duke University and Davidson College.

      The first event in the speaker series is planned for the evening of Oct. 24, on the question of how we should respond to climate change. The two speakers are Professor Steven Koonin (New York University, ex-provost of Caltech, and an MIT alum) and MIT Professor Kerry Emanuel from the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. Eight such events are planned over two years. Each will feature speakers discussing difficult or controversial topics, and will aim to model civil debate and dialogue involving experts from inside and outside the MIT community. 

      Byrne and Skow said that the project is meant to counterbalance a growing unwillingness to listen to others or to tolerate the expression of certain ideas. But the goal, says Byrne, “is not to platform heterodox views for their own sake, or to needlessly provoke. Rather, we want to platform collegial, informed conversations on important matters about which there is reasonable disagreement.” 

      Faculty at MIT voted last fall to adopt a statement on free expression, following a report written by an MIT working group. The project organizers want to build on that vote and the report. “The free expression statement says that discussion of controversial topics should not be prohibited or punished,” Skow says, “but the longer working-group report goes farther, urging MIT to promote free expression. This project is an attempt to do that — to show that open discussion and open inquiry are valuable.” 

      “It has the potential to generate lively, constructive, respectful discussion on campus and to show by example both that controversial views are not suppressed at MIT and that we learn by engaging with them openly,” says Kieran Setiya, the head of MIT Philosophy. Agustín Rayo, dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, thinks that the project can “play a critical role in demonstrating — to faculty, students, staff, alumni, and friends — the Institute’s commitment to free speech and civil discourse.”

      Apart from climate change, topics for the first series of events include feminism and progress (Nov. 9, with Mary Harrington, author of “Feminism against Progress”), and Covid public health policy (Feb. 26, with Vinay Prasad, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California at San Francisco). Organizers say they hope the speaker series becomes a permanent part of MIT’s intellectual life after the grant period. To amplify the work to an audience beyond MIT, the project organizers have partnered with the Johns Hopkins University political scientist Yascha Mounk and his team at Persuasion to produce podcast episodes around the speaker events. They will air as special episodes of Mounk’s podcast “The Good Fight.” 

      The Concourse component of the project will take advantage of the small learning community setting to develop the tools and experience for productive disagreement. 

      “The core mission of Concourse depends on both the principle of free expression and the practice of civil discourse,” says McCants, “making it a natural springboard for promoting both across the intellectual culture of MIT.”  

      Concourse will experiment with, among other things, seminars discussing the history and practice of freedom of expression, roundtable discussions, and student-led debates. Braver Angels, an organization with the mission of reducing political polarization, is another partner, along with Persuasion. 

      “Our goal,” says Rabieh, “is to facilitate, in collaboration with Braver Angels, the probing, intense, and often difficult conversations that lie at the heart of the Concourse program and that are the hallmark of education.” More

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      in Energy

      MIT junior Anushree Chaudhuri named 2023 Udall Scholar

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      MIT junior Anushree Chaudhuri has been selected as a 2023 Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall Foundation Scholar. She is only the second MIT student to win this award and the first winner since 2008.

      The Udall Scholarship honors students who have demonstrated a commitment to the environment, Native American health care, or tribal public policy. Chaudhuri is one of 55 Udall Scholars selected nationally out of 384 nominated applicants.

      Chaudhuri, who hails from San Diego, studies urban studies and planning as well as economics at MIT. She plans to work across the public and private sectors to drive structural changes that connect the climate crisis to local issues and inequities. Chaudhuri has conducted research with the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative Rapid Response Group, which develops science-based analysis on critical environmental issues for community partners in civil society, government, and industry.

      Throughout her sophomore year, Chaudhuri worked with MIT’s Office of Sustainability, creating data visualizations for travel and Scope 3 emissions as a resource for MIT departments, labs, and centers. As an MIT Washington intern at the U.S. Department of Energy, she also developed the Buildings Upgrade Equity Tool to assist local governments in identifying areas for decarbonization investments.

      While taking Bruno Verdini’s class 11.011 (Art and Science of Negotiation) in fall 2021, Chaudhuri became deeply interested in the field of dispute resolution as a way of engaging diverse stakeholders in collaborative problem-solving, and she began work with Professor Lawrence Susskind at the MIT Science Impact Collaborative. She has now completed multiple projects with the group, as part of the MIT Renewable Energy Siting Clinic, including creating qualitative case studies to inform mediated siting processes and developing an open-access website and database for 60 renewable energy siting conflicts from findings published in Energy Policy. Through the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium’s Climate Scholars Program and a DUSP-PKG Fellowship, she is conducting an ethnographic and econometric study on the energy justice impacts of clean infrastructure on local communities.

      As part of a yearlong campaign to revise MIT’s Fast Forward Climate Action Plan, Chaudhuri led the Investments Student Working Group, which advocated for institutional social responsibility and active engagement in the Climate Action 100+ investor coalition. She also served as chair of the Undergraduate Association Committee on Sustainability and co-leads the Student Sustainability Coalition. Her work led her to be selected by MIT as an undergraduate delegate to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change Summit (COP27).

      Chaudhuri’s research experiences and leadership in campus sustainability organizations have strengthened her belief in deep community engagement as a catalyst for change. By taking an interdisciplinary approach that combines law, planning, conflict resolution, participatory research, and data science, she’s committed to a public service career creating policies that are human-centered and address climate injustices, creating co-benefits for diverse communities. More

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      in Environment

      Governing for our descendants

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      Social scientists worry that too often we think only of ourselves. 

      “There’s been an increasing recognition that over the last few decades the economy and society have become incredibly focused on the individual, to the detriment of our social fabric,” says Lily L. Tsai, the Ford Professor of Political Science at MIT.

      Tsai, who is also the director and founder of the MIT Governance LAB (MIT GOV/LAB) and is the current chair of the MIT faculty, is interested in distributive justice — allocating resources fairly across different groups of people. Typically, that might mean splitting resources between different socioeconomic groups, or between different nations. 

      But in an essay in the journal Dædalus, Tsai discusses policies and institutions that consider the needs of people in the future when determining who deserves what resources. That is, they broaden our concept of a collective society to include people who haven’t been born yet and will bear the brunt of climate change in the future.

      Some groups of people do actually consider the needs of future people when making decisions. For example, Wales has a Future Generations Commissioner who monitors whether the government’s actions compromise the needs of future generations. Norway’s Petroleum Fund invests parts of its oil profits for future generations. And MIT’s endowment “is explicitly charged” with ensuring that future students are just as well-off as current students, Tsai says.

      But in other ways, societies place a lower value on the needs of their descendants. For example, to determine the total return on an investment, governments use something called a discount rate that places more value in the present return on the investment than the future return on the investment. And humans are currently using up the planet’s resources at an unsustainable rate, which in turn is raising global temperatures and making earth less habitable for our children and our children’s children.

      The purpose of Tsai’s essay is not to suggest how, say, governments might set discount rates that more fairly consider future people. “I’m interested in the things that make people care about setting the discount rate lower and therefore valuing the future more,” she says. “What are the moral commitments and the kinds of cultural practices or social institutions that make people care more?”

      Tsai thinks the volatility of the modern world and anxiety about the future — say, the future habitability of the planet — make it harder for people to consider the needs of their descendants. In Tsai’s 2021 book “When People Want Punishment,” she argues that this volatility and anxiety make people seek out more stability and order. “The more uncertain the future is, the less you can be sure that saving for the future is going to be valuable to anybody,” she says. So, part of the solution could be making people feel less unsettled and more stable, which Tsai says can be done with institutions we already have, like social welfare systems.

      She also thinks the rate at which things change in the modern world has hurt our ability to consider the long view. “We no longer think in terms of decades and centuries the way in which we used to,” she says.

      MIT GOV/LAB is working with partners to figure out how to experiment in a lab setting with developing democratic practices or institutions that might better distribute resources between current people and future people. That would allow researchers to assess if structuring interactions or decision-making in a particular way encourages people to save more for future people. 

      Tsai thinks getting people to care about their descendants is a problem researchers can work on, and that humans have a natural inclination to consider the future. People have a desire to be entrusted with things of importance, to leave a legacy, and for conservation. “I think many humans actually naturally conserve things that are valuable and scarce, and there’s a strange way in which society has eroded that human instinct in favor of a culture of consumption,” she says. We need to “re-imagine the kinds of practices that encourage conservation rather than consumption,” she adds. More

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      Exploring new sides of climate and sustainability research

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      When the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC) launched its Climate and Sustainability Scholars Program in fall 2022, the goal was to offer undergraduate students a unique way to develop and implement research projects with the strong support of each other and MIT faculty. Now into its second semester, the program is underscoring the value of fostering this kind of network — a community with MIT students at its core, exploring their diverse interests and passions in the climate and sustainability realms.Inspired by MIT’s successful SuperUROP [Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program], the yearlong MCSC Climate and Sustainability Scholars Program includes a classroom component combined with experiential learning opportunities and mentorship, all centered on climate and sustainability topics.“Harnessing the innovation, passion, and expertise of our talented students is critical to MIT’s mission of tackling the climate crisis,” says Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering, Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and chair of the MCSC. “The program is helping train students from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds to be effective leaders in climate and sustainability-focused roles in the future.”

      “What we found inspiring about MIT’s existing SuperUROP program was how it provides students with the guidance, training, and resources they need to investigate the world’s toughest problems,” says Elsa Olivetti, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor in Materials Science and Engineering and MCSC co-director. “This incredible level of support and mentorship encourages students to think and explore in creative ways, make new connections, and develop strategies and solutions that propel their work forward.”The first and current cohort of Climate and Sustainability Scholars consists of 19 students, representing MIT’s School of Engineering, MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, School of Science, School of Architecture and Planning, and MIT Sloan School of Management. These students are learning new perspectives, approaches, and angles in climate and sustainability — from each other, MIT faculty, and industry professionals.Projects with real-world applicationsStudents in the program work directly with faculty and principal investigators across MIT to develop their research projects focused on a large scope of sustainability topics.

      “This broad scope is important,” says Desirée Plata, MIT’s Gilbert W. Winslow Career Development Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering, “because climate and sustainability solutions are needed in every facet of society. For a long time, people were searching for a ‘silver bullet’ solution to the climate change problems, but we didn’t get to this point with a single technological decision. This problem was created across a spectrum of sociotechnological activities, and fundamentally different thinking across a spectrum of solutions is what’s needed to move us forward. MCSC students are working to provide those solutions.”

      Undergraduate student and physics major M. (MG) Geogdzhayeva is working with Raffaele Ferrari, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Oceanography in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, and director of the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate, on their project “Using Continuous Time Markov Chains to Project Extreme Events under Climate.” Geogdzhayeva’s research supports the Flagship Climate Grand Challenges project that Ferrari is leading along with Professor Noelle Eckley Selin.

      “The project I am working on has a similar approach to the Climate Grand Challenges project entitled “Bringing computation to the climate challenge,” says Geogdzhayeva. “I am designing an emulator for climate extremes. Our goal is to boil down climate information to what is necessary and to create a framework that can deliver specific information — in order to develop valuable forecasts. As someone who comes from a physics background, the Climate and Sustainability Scholars Program has helped me think about how my research fits into the real world, and how it could be implemented.”

      Investigating technology and stakeholders

      Within technology development, Jade Chongsathapornpong, also a physics major, is diving into photo-modulated catalytic reactions for clean energy applications. Chongsathapornpong, who has worked with the MCSC on carbon capture and sequestration through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), is now working with Harry Tuller, MIT’s R.P. Simmons Professor of Ceramics and Electronic Materials. Louise Anderfaas, majoring in materials science and engineering, is also working with Tuller on her project “Robust and High Sensitivity Detectors for Exploration of Deep Geothermal Wells.”Two other students who have worked with the MCSC through UROP include Paul Irvine, electrical engineering and computer science major, who is now researching American conservatism’s current relation to and views about sustainability and climate change, and Pamela Duke, management major, now investigating the use of simulation tools to empower industrial decision-makers around climate change action.Other projects focusing on technology development include the experimental characterization of poly(arylene ethers) for energy-efficient propane/propylene separations by Duha Syar, who is a chemical engineering major and working with Zachary Smith, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor of Chemical Engineering; developing methods to improve sheet steel recycling by Rebecca Lizarde, who is majoring in materials science and engineering; and ion conduction in polymer-ceramic composite electrolytes by Melissa Stok, also majoring in materials science and engineering.

      Melissa Stok, materials science and engineering major, during a classroom discussion.

      Photo: Andrew Okyere

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      “My project is very closely connected to developing better Li-Ion batteries, which are extremely important in our transition towards clean energy,” explains Stok, who is working with Bilge Yildiz, MIT’s Breene M. Kerr (1951) Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering. “Currently, electric cars are limited in their range by their battery capacity, so working to create more effective batteries with higher energy densities and better power capacities will help make these cars go farther and faster. In addition, using safer materials that do not have as high of an environmental toll for extraction is also important.” Claire Kim, a chemical engineering major, is focusing on batteries as well, but is honing in on large form factor batteries more relevant for grid-scale energy storage with Fikile Brushett, associate professor of chemical engineering.Some students in the program chose to focus on stakeholders, which, when it comes to climate and sustainability, can range from entities in business and industry to farmers to Indigenous people and their communities. Shivani Konduru, an electrical engineering and computer science major, is exploring the “backfire effects” in climate change communication, focusing on perceptions of climate change and how the messenger may change outcomes, and Einat Gavish, mathematics major, on how different stakeholders perceive information on driving behavior.Two students are researching the impact of technology on local populations. Anushree Chaudhuri, who is majoring in urban studies and planning, is working with Lawrence Susskind, Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning, on community acceptance of renewable energy siting, and Amelia Dogan, also an urban studies and planning major, is working with Danielle Wood, assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics and media arts and sciences, on Indigenous data sovereignty in environmental contexts.

      “I am interviewing Indigenous environmental activists for my project,” says Dogan. “This course is the first one directly related to sustainability that I have taken, and I am really enjoying it. It has opened me up to other aspects of climate beyond just the humanity side, which is my focus. I did MIT’s SuperUROP program and loved it, so was excited to do this similar opportunity with the climate and sustainability focus.”

      Other projects include in-field monitoring of water quality by Dahlia Dry, a physics major; understanding carbon release and accrual in coastal wetlands by Trinity Stallins, an urban studies and planning major; and investigating enzyme synthesis for bioremediation by Delight Nweneka, an electrical engineering and computer science major, each linked to the MCSC’s impact pathway work in nature-based solutions.

      The wide range of research topics underscores the Climate and Sustainability Program’s goal of bringing together diverse interests, backgrounds, and areas of study even within the same major. For example, Helena McDonald is studying pollution impacts of rocket launches, while Aviva Intveld is analyzing the paleoclimate and paleoenvironment background of the first peopling of the Americas. Both students are Earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences majors but are researching climate impacts from very different perspectives. Intveld was recently named a 2023 Gates Cambridge Scholar.

      “There are students represented from several majors in the program, and some people are working on more technical projects, while others are interpersonal. Both approaches are really necessary in the pursuit of climate resilience,” says Grace Harrington, who is majoring in civil and environmental engineering and whose project investigates ways to optimize the power of the wind farm. “I think it’s one of the few classes I’ve taken with such an interdisciplinary nature.”

      Shivani Konduru, electrical engineering and computer science major, during a classroom lecture

      Photo: Andrew Okyere

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      Perspectives and guidance from MIT and industry expertsAs students are developing these projects, they are also taking the program’s course (Climate.UAR), which covers key topics in climate change science, decarbonization strategies, policy, environmental justice, and quantitative methods for evaluating social and environmental impacts. The course is cross-listed in departments across all five schools and is taught by an experienced and interdisciplinary team. Desirée Plata was central to developing the Climate and Sustainability Scholars Programs and course with Associate Professor Elsa Olivetti, who taught the first semester. Olivetti is now co-teaching the second semester with Jeffrey C. Grossman, the Morton and Claire Goulder and Family Professor in Environmental Systems, head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and MCSC co-director. The course’s writing instructors are Caroline Beimford and David Larson.  

      “I have been introduced to a lot of new angles in the climate space through the weekly guest lecturers, who each shared a different sustainability-related perspective,” says Claire Kim. “As a chemical engineering major, I have mostly looked into the technologies for decarbonization, and how to scale them, so learning about policy, for example, was helpful for me. Professor Black from the Department of History spoke about how we can analyze the effectiveness of past policy to guide future policy, while Professor Selin talked about framing different climate policies as having co-benefits. These perspectives are really useful because no matter how good a technology is, you need to convince other people to adopt it, or have strong policy in place to encourage its use, in order for it to be effective.”

      Bringing the industry perspective, guests have presented from MCSC member companies such as PepsiCo, Holcim, Apple, Cargill, and Boeing. As an example, in one class, climate leaders from three companies presented together on their approaches to setting climate goals, barriers to reaching them, and ways to work together. “When I presented to the class, alongside my counterparts at Apple and Boeing, the student questions pushed us to explain how can collaborate on ways to achieve our climate goals, reflecting the broader opportunity we find within the MCSC,” says Dana Boyer, sustainability manager at Cargill.

      Witnessing the cross-industry dynamics unfold in class was particularly engaging for the students. “The most beneficial part of the program for me is the number of guest lectures who have come in to the class, not only from MIT but also from the industry side,” Grace Harrington adds. “The diverse range of people talking about their own fields has allowed me to make connections between all my classes.”Bringing in perspectives from both academia and industry is a reflection of the MCSC’s larger mission of linking its corporate members with each other and with the MIT community to develop scalable climate solutions.“In addition to focusing on an independent research project and engaging with a peer community, we’ve had the opportunity to hear from speakers across the sustainability space who are also part of or closely connected to the MIT ecosystem,” says Anushree Chaudhuri. “These opportunities have helped me make connections and learn about initiatives at the Institute that are closely related to existing or planned student sustainability projects. These connections — across topics like waste management, survey best practices, and climate communications — have strengthened student projects and opened pathways for future collaborations.

      Basuhi Ravi, MIT PhD candidate, giving a guest lecture

      Photo: Andrew Okyere

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      Having a positive impact as students and after graduation

      At the start of the program, students identified several goals, including developing focused independent research questions, drawing connections and links with real-world challenges, strengthening their critical thinking skills, and reflecting on their future career ambitions. A common thread throughout them all: the commitment to having a meaningful impact on climate and sustainability challenges both as students now, and as working professionals after graduation.“I’ve absolutely loved connecting with like-minded peers through the program. I happened to know most of the students coming in from various other communities on campus, so it’s been a really special experience for all of these people who I couldn’t connect with as a cohesive cohort before to come together. Whenever we have small group discussions in class, I’m always grateful for the time to learn about the interdisciplinary research projects everyone is involved with,” concludes Chaudhuri. “I’m looking forward to staying in touch with this group going forward, since I think most of us are planning on grad school and/or careers related to climate and sustainability.”

      The MCSC Climate and Sustainability Scholars Program is representative of MIT’s ambitious and bold initiatives on climate and sustainability — bringing together faculty and students across MIT to collaborate with industry on developing climate and sustainability solutions in the context of undergraduate education and research. Learn about how you can get involved. More

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      in Environment

      Benjamin Mangrum receives the 2023 Levitan Prize in the Humanities

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      Benjamin Mangrum, assistant professor of literature at MIT, has been awarded the 2023 Levitan Prize in the Humanities. This award, presented each year by a faculty committee, empowers a member of the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) faculty with funding to enable research in their field. With an award of $30,000, this annual prize continues to power substantial projects among the members of the SHASS community.

      Mangrum will use the award to support research for his upcoming book, which is a cultural and intellectual history of environmental rights. In the book, Mangrum discusses the cultural structures that have helped link rights language to environmental concerns. Mangrum plans to use the funding from the Levitan Prize for research into a chapter involving literary personhood.

      “Assertions of environmental rights are typically the result of pragmatic or strategic alignments between, say, naturalists and labor organizers or indigenous communities and governments,” he writes. “My book examines the compromises and conceptual negotiations that occur for ‘environmental rights’ to be a workable concept.”

      The notion of environmental rights can refer to the right of citizens to live in a healthy environment, but it can also include the attribution of rights to nonhuman entities. Such designation received increased attention when New Zealand gave the Whanganui River a legal identity, bringing the longest-running litigation in New Zealand history to an end. India has named rivers legal entities and Bangladesh has given all its rivers legal rights.

      “Personhood status was a compromise between the government and a group of Māori tribes who demanded recognition for the river based on past treaties,” Mangrum writes. “I’m interested in how these very different kinds of discourse — political rights, environmental science, indigenous culture, public health — have come together during the 20th and 21st centuries.”

      For the chapter, Mangrum explores the argument made by legal theorist Christopher Stone in “Should Trees Have Standing?” First published in 1972, Stone’s essay is a foundational argument in environmental law. Stone maintains that natural objects can be given legal personhood, an argument that is often cited in legal framings of environmental rights. Mangrum explores the literary dimensions of legal personhood.

      “I argue that the intellectual and cultural history of legal personhood shares unacknowledged debts to the evolution in theories of literary personhood,” Mangrum writes. “A reader’s attribution of personhood does not serve the same social and moral functions as the attribution of personhood to corporations and other nonhuman entities. However, I argue that modern ideas about literary personhood are cognitively homologous with legal personhood: despite serving different functions, these conceptions of personhood share conceptual structures and intellectual origins.”

      In one recently published article, he examines the language used by Rachel Carson and others in the nascent environmental movement. In 1963, Carson testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee on the threat of pesticides. It was considered a watershed moment for environmentalism, but notable also for intellectual history. Her use of the vocabulary of rights and her advocacy for environmental regulations in a public forum were significant forces in the institutionalization of environmental rights.

      Mangrum notes Carson’s claim of “the right of the citizen to be secure in his own home against the intrusion of poisons applied by other persons.” Carson uses the language of rights to introduce environmental concerns within the public sphere, but this language also has implications for how we understand our relationship to the nonhuman world.

      Before arriving at MIT in 2022, Mangrum taught at the University of the South, the University of Michigan, and Davidson College. He is the author of “Land of Tomorrow: Postwar Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism” (Oxford 2019), which examines 20th-century literary fiction and popular philosophy to understand shifts in American liberalism after World War II. He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. More

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      in Environment

      Victor K. McElheny Award in science journalism honors series on poultry farming and the environment

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      The Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT has announced that the investigative series “Big Poultry,” published by The Charlotte Observer and The Raleigh News & Observer, has been chosen as the 2023 winner of the Victor K. McElheny Award for local and regional journalism. This series of articles uncovered the wide-ranging, unregulated impact of the poultry industry in North Carolina — from odors to pollution to the predatory nature of poultry contract farming.

      The series draws from more than 130 interviews and involved extensive analysis of satellite imagery, industry finances, and state laws, among other data. It expertly merges personal stories and hard data and creates a cohesive and comprehensive deep dive into an underreported, but pervasive, phenomenon in North Carolina. The series has engaged tens of thousands of readers and sparked a debate about the poultry industry in the state legislature.

      “With remarkable enterprise and persistence, these reporters from the Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News & Observer penetrated the secrecy that obscures the scope and impact of thousands of industrial-scale poultry production farms in North Carolina, which together generate billions of pounds of unchecked agricultural waste,” a judge said of the series.

      “Big Poultry” was reported and written by Charlotte Observer investigative reporters Gavin Off and Ames Alexander and News & Observer environmental reporter Adam Wagner. The series was edited by McClatchy Southeast Investigations Editor Cathy Clabby and was supported by the work of News & Observer investigative reporters David Raynor and Tyler Dukes, and McClatchy newspapers visual journalists.

      “The Victor K. McElheny award recognizes the remarkable science reporting done at the local level by American journalists, and ‘Big Poultry’ is an outstanding example of that,” says Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT. “We are proud to honor this series, which raises such important issues and reminds us of the essential role of journalists in protecting our country by illuminating such problems.”

      The 2023 McElheny Award received a robust and diverse pool of submissions from around the United States. Also on the short list of finalists for the award are four other exceptional journalism projects: “Undermined,” a collaboration between Navajo Times, Santa Fe Reporter, Source New Mexico, Capital & Main, and USA Today that uncovered the link between uranium poisoning and increased vulnerability to the Covid-19 virus in the Navajo Nation; “Fighting for Air,” from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which examines the intersection of asthma with substandard housing and health systems; “When the Heat is Unbearable but There’s Nowhere to Go,” a collaboration between High Country News and Type Investigations, which exposed the impact of extreme heat on the incarcerated population of Washington State; and “There Must be Something in the Water,” published by the Minnesota Reformer, which investigated how the company 3M obscured the impact of chemical contamination in the water of Washington Country, Minnesota, and the ongoing health impacts of said contamination on the population.

      Named after the Knight Science Journalism Program’s founding director, the Victor K. McElheny Award was established to honor outstanding coverage of science, public-health, technology, and environmental issues at the local and regional level. The winning team will receive a $10,000 prize. The winners will be honored at the Knight Science Journalism Program’s 40th anniversary celebration on Saturday, April 22.

      The Knight Science Journalism Program extends a special thanks to the 2022 McElheny Award jurors: Jeff DelViscio (senior multimedia editor, Scientific American); Robert Lee Hotz (president, Alicia Patterson Foundation); Brant Houston, (Knight Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting, University of Illinois); Amina Khan (science editor, National Public Radio); and Maya Kapoor (assistant professor of English, North Carolina State University). The program also extends warm appreciation to the award’s screeners: Mary-Rose Abraham, Sebastien Malo, Wojtek Brzezinski, and Kelly Servick.

      The McElheny Award is made possible by generous support from Victor K. McElheny, Ruth McElheny, and the Rita Allen Foundation.

      A complete list of 2023 Victor K. McElheny Award honorees:

      Winner

      “Big Poultry,” by Gavin Off , Ames Alexander, and Adam Wagner (The Charlotte Observer and The Raleigh News & Observer)

      Finalists

      “Undermined,” by Eli Cahan (Navajo Times, Santa Fe Reporter, Source New Mexico, Capital & Main, and USA Today)

      “Fighting for Air,” by Talis Shelbourne (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

      “When the Heat is Unbearable but There’s Nowhere to Go,” by Sarah Sax (High Country News and Type Investigations)

      “There Must be Something in the Water,” by Deena Winter (Minnesota Reformer) More

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      MIT Center for Real Estate advances climate and sustainable real estate research agenda

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      Real estate investors are increasingly putting sustainability at the center of their decision-making processes, given the close association between climate risk and real estate assets, both of which are location-based.

      This growing emphasis comes at a time when the real estate industry is one of the biggest contributors to global warming; its embodied and operational carbon accounts for more than one-third of total carbon emissions. More stringent building decarbonization regulations are putting pressure on real estate owners and investors, who must invest heavily to retrofit their buildings or pay “carbon penalties” and see their assets lose value.

      The impacts of acute and chronic climate risks — flooding, hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, sea-level rise, and extreme weather — are becoming more salient. Action across all areas of the real estate sector will be required to limit the social and economic risks arising from the climate crisis. But what business and policy levers are most effective at guiding the industry toward a more sustainable future?

      The MIT Center for Real Estate (MIT/CRE) believes that the real estate industry can be a catalyst for the rapid mobilization of a global transition to a greener society. Since its inception in 1983, MIT/CRE has focused on the physical aspect of real estate, especially the development industry, and how the built environment gets produced and changed.

      “The real estate industry is now at the critical moment to address the climate crisis. That is why our center initiated this major research agenda on climate and real estate two years ago,” says William Wheaton, a former director of MIT/CRE and professor emeritus in MIT’s Department of Economics, who is leading a research project on the impact of flood risks in real estate markets.

      Producing high-quality research to support climate actions

      The work of scientists and practitioners responding to the climate crisis is often bifurcated into mitigation or adaptation responses. Mitigation seeks to reduce the severity of the climate crisis by addressing emissions, while adaptation efforts seek to anticipate the most severe effects of the crisis and minimize potential risks to people and the built environment.

      The fundamental nature of the real estate industry — location-based and capital-intensive — enables potential meaningful action for both mitigation and adaptation interventions. Exploring both avenues, MIT/CRE faculty and researchers have published academic papers exploring how chronic climate events such as extreme temperatures lower people’s expressed happiness and also disrupt habits of daily life; and how acute climate events such as hurricanes damage the built environment and decrease the financial value of real estate.

      “This ongoing research production centers on industry’s imperative to take action quickly, the real losses resulting from inaction, and the potential social and business value creation for early adopters of more sustainable practices,” says Siqi Zheng, a co-author of those papers, who is the MIT/CRE faculty director and the STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability.

      Building a global community of academics and industry leaders

      In addition to sponsoring research and related courses, MIT/CRE has created a global network of researchers and industry leaders, centered around sharing ideas and experience to quickly scale more sustainable practices, such as building decarbonization and circular economy in real estate, as well as climate risk modeling and pricing. Collaborating with industry leaders from the investment and real estate sector, such as EY, Veris Residential, Moody’s Analytics, Colliers, Finvest, KPF, Taurus Investment Holdings, Climate Alpha, and CRE alumnus Paul Clayton SM ’02, MIT/CRE blends real-world experiences and questions with applied data and projects to create a “living lab” for MIT/CRE researchers to conduct climate research.

      At an inaugural symposium on climate and real estate held at MIT in December 2022, more than a dozen scholars presented papers on the intersection of real estate and sustainability, which will form the basis of a special issue on climate change and real estate in the Journal of Regional Science. A “fireside chat” connected scholars and industry leaders in practical conversations about how to use research to aid practitioners.

      “Dissemination of research is critical to the success of our efforts to address climate change in the real estate industry,” says David Geltner, post-tenure professor of real estate finance and former director of  MIT/CRE, whose research group is working on climate risks and commercial real estate. “If we produce excellent research but it is cloistered in academic journals, it does no one any good. Similarly, if we do not work with collaborators to focus our research, we run the risk of investigating levers to reduce emissions that are of no use to practitioners.”

      Juan Palacios, coordinator of MIT/CRE’s climate and real estate research team, emphasizes that industry collaboration creates a two-way sharing of information that refines how research is being conducted at the center and ensures that it has positive impact.

      “More and more real estate investors and market players are putting sustainability at the center of their investment approach,” says Zheng. “A broad range of stakeholders (investors, regulators, insurers, and the public) have started to understand that long-term profitability cannot be achieved without embracing multiple dimensions of sustainability such as climate, wealth inequality, public health, and social welfare. Because of its unique relationship with industry collaborators and its place in the MIT innovation ecosystem, MIT/CRE has a responsibility and the opportunity to champion multiple pathways toward greater sustainability in the real estate industry.” More

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      in Energy

      Responsive design meets responsibility for the planet’s future

      by

      MIT senior Sylas Horowitz kneeled at the edge of a marsh, tinkering with a blue-and-black robot about the size and shape of a shoe box and studded with lights and mini propellers.

      The robot was a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) — an underwater drone slated to collect water samples from beneath a sheet of Arctic ice. But its pump wasn’t working, and its intake line was clogged with sand and seaweed.

      “Of course, something must always go wrong,” Horowitz, a mechanical engineering major with minors in energy studies and environment and sustainability, later blogged about the Falmouth, Massachusetts, field test. By making some adjustments, Horowitz was able to get the drone functioning on site.

      Through a 2020 collaboration between MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI), Horowitz had been assembling and retrofitting the high-performance ROV to measure the greenhouse gases emitted by thawing permafrost.

      The Arctic’s permafrost holds an estimated 1,700 billion metric tons of methane and carbon dioxide — roughly 50 times the amount of carbon tied to fossil fuel emissions in 2019, according to climate research from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. WHOI scientists wanted to understand the role the Arctic plays as a greenhouse gas source or sink.

      Horowitz’s ROV would be deployed from a small boat in sub-freezing temperatures to measure carbon dioxide and methane in the water. Meanwhile, a flying drone would sample the air.

      An MIT Student Sustainability Coalition leader and one of the first members of the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative’s Rapid Response Group, Horowitz has focused on challenges related to clean energy, climate justice, and sustainable development.

      In addition to the ROV, Horowitz has tackled engineering projects through D-Lab, where community partners from around the world work with MIT students on practical approaches to alleviating global poverty. Horowitz worked on fashioning waste bins out of heat-fused recycled plastic for underserved communities in Liberia. Their thesis project, also initiated through D-Lab, is designing and building user-friendly, space- and fuel-efficient firewood cook stoves to improve the lives of women in Santa Catarina Palopó in northern Guatemala.

      Through the Tata-MIT GridEdge Solar Research program, they helped develop flexible, lightweight solar panels to mount on the roofs of street vendors’ e-rickshaws in Bihar, India.

      The thread that runs through Horowitz’s projects is user-centered design that creates a more equitable society. “In the transition to sustainable energy, we want our technology to adapt to the society that we live in,” they say. “Something I’ve learned from the D-Lab projects and also from the ROV project is that when you’re an engineer, you need to understand the societal and political implications of your work, because all of that should get factored into the design.”

      Horowitz describes their personal mission as creating systems and technology that “serve the well-being and longevity of communities and the ecosystems we exist within.

      “I want to relate mechanical engineering to sustainability and environmental justice,” they say. “Engineers need to think about how technology fits into the greater societal context of people in the environment. We want our technology to adapt to the society we live in and for people to be able, based on their needs, to interface with the technology.”

      Imagination and inspiration

      In Dix Hills, New York, a Long Island suburb, Horowitz’s dad is in banking and their mom is a speech therapist. The family hiked together, but Horowitz doesn’t tie their love for the natural world to any one experience. “I like to play in the dirt,” they say. “I’ve always had a connection to nature. It was a kind of childlike wonder.”

      Seeing footage of the massive 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico caused by an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig — which occurred when Horowitz was around 10 — was a jarring introduction to how human activity can impact the health of the planet.

      Their first interest was art — painting and drawing portraits, album covers, and more recently, digital images such as a figure watering a houseplant at a window while lightning flashes outside; a neon pink jellyfish in a deep blue sea; and, for an MIT-wide Covid quarantine project, two figures watching the sun set over a Green Line subway platform.

      Art dovetailed into a fascination with architecture, then shifted to engineering. In high school, Horowitz and a friend were co-captains of an all-girls robotics team. “It was just really wonderful, having this community and being able to build stuff,” they say. Horowitz and another friend on the team learned they were accepted to MIT on Pi Day 2018.

      Art, architecture, engineering — “it’s all kind of the same,” Horowitz says. “I like the creative aspect of design, being able to create things out of imagination.”

      Sustaining political awareness

      At MIT, Horowitz connected with a like-minded community of makers. They also launched themself into taking action against environmental injustice.

      In 2022, through the Student Sustainability Coalition (SSC), they encouraged MIT students to get involved in advocating for the Cambridge Green New Deal, legislation aimed at reducing emissions from new large commercial buildings such as those owned by MIT and creating a green jobs training program.

      In February 2022, Horowitz took part in a sit-in in Building 3 as part of MIT Divest, a student-led initiative urging the MIT administration to divest its endowment of fossil fuel companies.

      “I want to see MIT students more locally involved in politics around sustainability, not just the technology side,” Horowitz says. “I think there’s a lot of power from students coming together. They could be really influential.”

      User-oriented design

      The Arctic underwater ROV Horowitz worked on had to be waterproof and withstand water temperatures as low as 5 degrees Fahrenheit. It was tethered to a computer by a 150-meter-long cable that had to spool and unspool without tangling. The pump and tubing that collected water samples had to work without kinking.

      “It was cool, throughout the project, to think, ‘OK, what kind of needs will these scientists have when they’re out in these really harsh conditions in the Arctic? How can I make a machine that will make their field work easier?’

      “I really like being able to design things directly with the users, working within their design constraints,” they say.

      Inevitably, snafus occurred, but in photos and videos taken the day of the Falmouth field tests, Horowitz is smiling. “Here’s a fun unexpected (or maybe quite expected) occurrence!” they reported later. “The plastic mount for the shaft collar [used in the motor’s power transmission] ripped itself apart!” Undaunted, Horowitz jury-rigged a replacement out of sheet metal.

      Horowitz replaced broken wires in the winch-like device that spooled the cable. They added a filter at the intake to prevent sand and plants from clogging the pump.

      With a few more tweaks, the ROV was ready to descend into frigid waters. Last summer, it was successfully deployed on a field run in the Canadian high Arctic. A few months later, Horowitz was slated to attend OCEANS 2022 Hampton Roads, their first professional conference, to present a poster on their contribution to the WHOI permafrost research.

      Ultimately, Horowitz hopes to pursue a career in renewable energy, sustainable design, or sustainable agriculture, or perhaps graduate studies in data science or econometrics to quantify environmental justice issues such as the disproportionate exposure to pollution among certain populations and the effect of systemic changes designed to tackle these issues.

      After completing their degree this month, Horowitz will spend six months with MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI), which fosters partnerships with industry leaders and host organizations around the world.

      Horowitz is thinking of working with a renewable energy company in Denmark, one of the countries they toured during a summer 2019 field trip led by the MIT Energy Initiative’s Director of Education Antje Danielson. They were particularly struck by Samsø, the world’s first carbon-neutral island, run entirely on renewable energy. “It inspired me to see what’s out there when I was a sophomore,” Horowitz says. They’re ready to see where inspiration takes them next.

      This article appears in the Winter 2023 issue of Energy Futures, the magazine of the MIT Energy Initiative. More