On a recent weekday Anne Kapuscinski, a professor of sustainability science in the Environmental Studies Program at Dartmouth College, and two assistants, Ashley Bae and Alex Sitek, are doing work in a new aquaculture lab in the basement of a barn on the Dartmouth Organic Farm, four miles north of Hanover on Route 10.
The farm is high on a bluff overlooking the Connecticut River, which is apt given that Kapuscinski, who came to Dartmouth in 2009 after 25 years at the University of Minnesota, has spent her career working on issues involving fish, including salmon conservation, aquaculture, genetic engineering and the role of hatcheries and dams in maintaining or hindering fish populations.
With the support of a $500,000 grant from the USDA, Kapuscinski, Environmental Studies professor Pallab Sarker, as well as a research team that includes Bae, Sitek and Emily Donaldson, are working on how to solve some fundamental problems facing aquaculture, which is the world’s fastest-growing food industry.
For the first time in human history, roughly half of the fish that people consume comes from aquaculture, Kapuscinski said.
One of the challenges facing aquaculture, in an era of diminishing and degraded natural water resources, is how to breed farm-raised fish in a way that is environmentally sustainable. This means looking at water use, and what to feed the fish.
Kapuscinski, Bae and Sitek are peering into two large, blue plastic fish tanks, each containing 150 immature Nile tilapia which swarm hungrily when small brown pellets of fish food are scattered into the water. By volume, tilapia is the second most-farmed fish in the world, after carp, Kapuscinski said.
The tilapia excrete into the water what look like long thin white threads, which turns out to be their waste. And it’s what happens to that waste that is part of a larger story about designing smart, efficient, forward-looking environmental systems and policy in an era of scarcer natural resources and climate change.
The goal “on a global scale is to use water as conservatively as possible and to keep water clean. We want to have ways to clean waste so that if it’s discharged to the environment, it’s clean water,” Kapuscinski said.
An old well on the property furnishes the water used at the farm and the lab. Pipes bring water into the fish tanks, and also bring waste water from the blue fish tanks to green plastic tanks that filter out the fish feces and other undesirable bacteria. Every 10 days, about 30 gallons of waste water is released to a septic tank on the property. That in turn is pumped out sporadically, and is brought to a sewage treatment plant in Hanover.
The formal name for the tank set-up is “recirculating aquaculture system,” which is a long way of saying that the blue and green tanks, and the interconnected warren of pipes, are designed to both hold fish, and to clean and reuse the water in which they swim.
In total the lab contains 12 tank set-ups, each with a 185-gallon-capacity. Currently only two of the 12 tanks hold fish, but that will change in the months to come as the team sets up different experiments with the tilapia.
One of the objectives, Kapuscinski explained, is to come up with a diet that both meets the nutritional needs of tilapia, and can be produced sustainably. Much conventional fish food contains fish oil and fish meal extracted from sardines, anchovies and mackerel, which are being harvested at such a high rate from the oceans that by 2040 it will no longer be economically or environmentally feasible to fish for them, Kapuscinski said.
So Kapuscinski and the team of researchers are looking at using different combinations of micro-algae as a tilapia feed that would replace, or greatly reduce, the percentage of meal and oil in fish food.
“If we get this to work, the idea would be that down the road you could raise micro algae, and use it to feed farmed fish,” Kapuscinski said.
In the lab the researchers will eventually conduct chemical analyses of both the tilapia feed and the waste, to see which feed combination works best in putting flesh on the fish, while minimizing fish waste.
And if they can develop a certified organic diet for fish, that has further applications, Kapuscinski said. Filtered fish waste could then be used as fertilizer on organic fields, which could, in turn, limit the flow of nutrient run-off into such natural bodies of water as rivers, oceans, lakes and streams.
Over the course of her career, Kapuscinski has thought long and hard about environmental systems, from the small system of the Dartmouth lab to the biggest system of all: the Earth, and its climate. How do natural systems work together? How are humans part of these natural systems, and how have they affected them, for good and ill?
And what can humans do to respond to the increasing threat of an unstable climate, which is bringing rising seas, heat waves, drought, flooding and more intense storms and wild fires?
The past two years have broken records for the warmest temperatures, and this year also looks to break records as the warmest since humans began tracking daily temperatures in the 19th century.
“Individually we didn’t mean to do anything wrong but we’ve been using the atmosphere as our dumping ground,” Kapuscinski said.
Kapuscinski, who has short dark hair and wears glasses, needs no prompting to speak with focused conviction about our duty to preserve a stable climate that can assure the future existence of all life on Earth. She can explain climate and the environment in terms of both macro and micro.
That intensity may partially explain why, last October, she was named the fourth chair of the board of directors of the Union of Concerned Scientists, which was founded in 1969; she is the first woman to hold that post.
Her curriculum vitae is a long list of accomplishments: a scientific adviser to the U.S. secretary of agriculture (under three administrations), U.S. Food and Drug Administration, World Health Organization and Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N.
She also serves on the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, and the Committee on Fisheries Advisory Working Group on Aquatic Genetic Resources and Technologies. And she is researching integrated food-energy systems in the dairy industry.
In an email, James McCarthy, the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography at Harvard University, and Kapuscinski’s immediate predecessor as chair of the board of the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote that Kapuscinski is “widely accomplished in scientific research, she is a superb teacher and mentor, and she is highly respected for both her openness to new views and her wise judgment. Importantly, Anne also has a long history of commitment to the use of rigorous science in societal decisions that will lead to a healthier planet and a safer world.”
Last December Kapuscinski attended the Paris Climate Change summit as an observer. And this month she chaired the “Changing Climate, Changing Minds” seminar, held recently at Dartmouth, which addressed the threat of global warming.
The intention of the Dartmouth seminar, Kapuscinski said, was to further encourage the public, not just the scientific community, to act to mitigate the effects of climate change, rather than becoming paralyzed by the enormous challenge of tackling it.
“It’s about what people can do individually and collectively to help shift our society to much lower carbon emissions. It’s something everyone can play a role in. We’re in this together,” she said.
Kapuscinski grew up in the 1960s and 1970s on Glen Cove, Long Island, on the North Shore.
In an era when children’s afterschool and weekend activities weren’t as closely supervised by parents as they are now, Kapuscinski frequently rode her bike by herself, and fell in love with sailing, earning enough money from babysitting, gardening and other jobs to buy herself a Sea Snark styrofoam sailboat. By bicycle she could be at a Long Island beach within 15 to 20 minutes, Kapuscinski said in an interview at her college office. (She is on sabbatical this term.)
All of this figured into her eventual career. Nature, she said, “was a place of solace for me.”
Kapuscinski graduated in 1976 from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, and earned her master’s and Ph.D. at Oregon State University, with a concentration in fisheries and aquaculture.
What she learned from being and working outdoors was that humans, whether they realize it or not, are “involved as an integral part of nature.”
This lesson is something she stresses to her students at Dartmouth, pointing out that even in a garden-variety college office like hers, such mundane objects as bookshelves, binders, pamphlets, desk and carpet have some relation to nature. The wood that made the desk, the wood pulp that went into the paper, the wool or cotton that went into the carpet.
“If you can have some contact with nature, it taps into a love for beauty and life. It feeds into your sense of interconnection,” Kapuscinski said.
The importance of interconnection, and of thinking through the science of solutions to climate change, is partially why the college recruited Kapuscinski to be its first Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Sustainability Science.
“She was hired to provide leadership at Dartmouth in the field of sustainability science which is an area that connects basic research in environmental science with applications in addressing sustainability challenges in the world,” said Richard B. Howarth, chair of the Environmental Studies program.
“She’s brought a lot of message energy as well as her own personal energy,” said Andrew Friedland, a colleague in the Environmental Studies Program.
Helping lay people to see the connections between science, faith and activism, is also why Kapuscinski chaired the recent Dartmouth seminar on climate change.
Although careful to point out that she is not technically a climate scientist, Kapuscinski is well-versed enough in the issue to deliver the good news, the not-so-good news and the “Here’s what we do about it” news.
“I am much more motivated when I have a sense of hope, but I don’t want to be a Pollyanna about it. There’s urgency. We have to act now,” she said. “For us to have a two-thirds chance to keep warming to 2 degrees centigrade, we have to drop emissions by as much as 70 percent by 2050.”
The longer the delay in doing so, the steeper and harder it will be to return to a lower level of greenhouse gas emissions. And even if humans are able to reduce emissions, or go into so-called negative emissions, Kapuscinski said, “that doesn’t mean everything is going to be hunky-dory.”
However, if people can move past feelings of despair, helplessness and denial, Kapuscinski said, they can make the adaptations in their own lives that will help alleviate the effects of climate change, as well as pushing them to push governments to enact laws that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
One of the themes that emerged from the Dartmouth seminar on climate change was that people from different faiths can play their part in mitigating climate change. There is a tradition in the U.S. of religious leaders and communities playing a significant role in moving the needle forward on such social issues as civil and gay rights. And science and religion are not necessarily mutually exclusive, Kapuscinski said.
The fact that such religious leaders as Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama are taking a stance on fighting climate change is, Kapuscinski said, “a very healthy development.”
There are other grounds for cautious optimism, Kapuscinski said.
China, the leading emitter of greenhouse gases, with the U.S. coming in second, is making enormous investments in solar and wind power.
In February of this year, two U.S. Congressmen from Florida, one a Democrat, the other Republican, announced that they had formed a bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus to educate other members of Congress on climate change’s impact on “our economy, security, environment and infrastructure.”
In July 2015, more than 12 of the Fortune 500 companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Walmart, General Motors, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, Goldman Sachs and UPS, signed the American Business Act on Climate Pledge, pledging to reduce their emissions, increase low-carbon investments, and deploy more clean energy.
The Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a group of some of the globe’s leading business people from China, Africa, Europe, the U.S, Africa, Japan and India, including Bill Gates, George Soros and Jeff Bezos of Amazon, is working to speed up research and investment in reliable, affordable energy that does not produce carbon.
In a similar vein, We Mean Business is a coalition of international organizations that, seeing economic opportunity, is working to move to a low carbon or net-zero carbon economy. And there are hundreds of grass-roots, bottom-up efforts to reduce carbon emissions at the town, city and state levels that are going ahead despite years of dysfunction in Congress.
But that doesn’t mean that humans can afford to be complacent, Kapuscinski said.
She finds fault with much of the media for its so-called false balance in its reporting of 20th and 21st century climate change. There is, she said, ample scientific evidence, signed on to by a majority of scientists, documenting the human role in producing the greenhouse gases that have led to warming global temperatures and extreme weather events.
There aren’t enough stories in the media, particularly television news, about climate change, Kapuscinski said, and they don’t always go far enough in making the connection between political upheaval and natural events that are exacerbated by climate change. She pointed, by example, to a major drought in Syria which led to food shortages which contributed to the political instability that has led to the current civil war.
Further, Kapuscinski said, “there’s an exciting shift going on in the clean energy economy,” that merits more media coverage. The number of American homes with solar panels grew by 1,000 percent between 2006 and 2013, and there are now 170,000 solar jobs across the U.S., she said.
A sharper media focus on the growth of clean energy technologies would help the public to “realize that we can address climate change while tapping into those very American values of innovation, and being leaders in innovative enterprises,” Kapuscinski said.
Why some Americans continue to deny that human activities have led to climate instability is due partially to misdirection and obfuscation by fossil fuel corporations, Kapuscinski said.
Earlier this month such major newspapers as the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times reported on a release of documents by the Center for International Environmental Law, in Washington, D.C., which suggested that the fossil fuel industry knew as long ago as the late 1950s that the release of carbon into the atmosphere had the potential to alter the Earth’s climate.
But there’s also the tricky aspect of human psychology itself, which, when confronted with the enormous challenge of mitigating human-induced climate change, may just look away or pretend that nothing is happening. Fear can be a powerful spur to action but it can also lead to the head-in-the-sand approach.
But that may be changing. A recent Gallup poll found that 64 percent of Americans declared themselves very concerned about climate change.
Now that people are beginning to see the effects of climate change in their own communities, Kapuscinski said, she hopes that it will move them to take the kind of concrete steps that can nudge the U.S. toward a more comprehensive national policy, including a tax on carbon emissions.
As a teacher, she said, she has a responsibility to younger people who are going to inherit a planet that could well be transformed in some fundamental ways by human-induced climate change.
“I feel a love for this generation. I want to help them to go out and solve some very complex problems,” she said.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.