Since joining the CEL in March after completing a doctorate in forest ecology at Oregon State University, Bergen has been working with fellow CEL staffer Peter Houlihan on a Mellon Foundation-funded project to integrate environmental content across the curriculum. While Houlihan spends much of his time collecting data on campus, Bergen spends his days interpreting and translating the campus images collected from planes and satellites, mapping layers of the campus’s spatial and environmental data using geoprocessing technology (“glorified cartography,” Bergen says), and making all of the above accessible to those who lack his knack for technology.

Bergen is close to completing work on a curriculum unit based on the Kyoto Protocol adopted by 180 nations in 2001. By adopting this protocol, industrialized countries agreed to reduce their combined greenhouses gas emissions by at least 5 percent compared to 1990 levels by the period 2008–2012. The United States did not make commitment to this effort to reverse the upward trend in carbon emissions, but Bergen has created an interactive Web site that will help MHC make its own Kyoto commitment.

At the CEL web site, students will see maps of the campus, including their own classrooms, dorms, and hang-outs. By clicking on those buildings, students call up data on electricity use and resulting carbon emissions each hour, then calculate how much carbon they personally emit into the environment each term. Next, students can click on the unbuilt areas of campus (gardens, lawns, forests, the golf course) to see how much carbon is removed from the environment by grass, shrubs, and trees as a result of photosynthesis. Each student may claim a small percentage of that total and subtract it from her total carbon emissions. Finally, students can discuss ways to reduce their net carbon emissions or those of MHC as a whole. They might suggest additional tree plantings or use of cleaner or more efficient energy sources, such as solar or nuclear power, perhaps then considering complicating factors of economics or social concerns.

The project is ever-expandable, of course. A future layer of data might include emissions from hot water, heat, and steam. Another might account for emissions from cars, possibly even distinguishing types and efficiencies. The point is not to be comprehensive all at once, but to make a global issue very personal, Bergen explains. “We don’t want to overwhelm students with an enormous problem that will scare them away. We can bring a large, abstract issue like global warming down to a personal, immediate level. We can empower students by giving them a sense of their personal role in just one area of the problem.”

Bergen is more than a little familiar with the global scope of carbon emissions. While at Oregon State, he worked on a NASA-funded project in the Brazilian Amazon forests, looking at the ecology of the forest, projecting deforestation patterns based on development plans through 2020, and studying aboveground carbon dynamics in natural and altered landscapes—a balance (or imbalance) referred to as “carbon dynamics.”

Bergen will share his Brazilian research in a fall 2002 course called Amazonian Forest Dynamics. Having lived in Manaus, Brazil, for a substantial length of time over the course of his research trips, Bergen will be able to share personal experiences of a complex, surprising place, where high-speed Internet connections are more available than a glass of clean water, and where antidevelopment sentiment seems inhumane in the face of children suffering from malaria. Primarily an ecology class about how the forest evolved and sustains itself, the course will also touch on socio-economic issues of the forest, including deforestation, plans for animal reserves, the impact of a global economy, and its rapid loss of languages. Like the Web site for his Kyoto Protocol course unit, Bergen’s class is bound to be a layered and thought-provoking journey.

This profile is one of a series that College Street Journal will run on the staff of the Center for Environmental Literacy.