Middlebury’s life-changing, world-shaping education is possible only when students from every background are able to participate in it. Providing the financial support necessary to attract exceptional scholars from around the country and the world and to keep them here is one of Middlebury’s top priorities.
“The whole time I was at Middlebury I was encouraged by the
fact that I was getting financial aid. People I didn’t even know
were investing in my education.”
— Carolyn Barnwell
Hometown:
Concord, N.H.
Major: environmental studies and sociology/anthropology with a focus on human ecology
Mentor: Jon Isham, Luce Professor of International Environmental Economics
“Jon Isham’s Conservation and Environmental Policy course was amazing. It helped me understand the importance of social capital—the ways people find connections, use connections, and fit in to different structures of social relationships—in solving environmental problems.”
Video: Changing Lives in Thailand
Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change, by Elizabeth Kolbert. “This book sheds light from different places in the natural world, and from labs and offices as well, on the issue of climate change,” says Carolyn Barnwell ’07.
Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen, by Anna Lappe and Bryant Terry. “This inspiring, informative cookbook is for anyone who wants to understand the importance of eating healthy, local, more sustainable food—plus it has music recommendations to go with the menus!”
www.npr.org/templates/story.php?
storyId=9657621 “NPR’s ‘Climate Connections’ site
has interactive maps, videos, and stories and news from around the
world.”
www.foodfirst.org “One of the increasingly critical issues resulting from climate change is changing resource availability and food security. This is the informative site of the Institute for Food and Development.”
Where in the world is Carolyn Barnwell? Even her best friends are hard pressed to answer that question right now. She could be in Tuvalu, New Zealand, Mauritius, Palau, Micronesia, Fiji.... She is spending this year traveling to some of the world’s most remote coastal communities to find out how they are coping with rising sea levels associated with global warming.
High
Water Warning
- Over the last 100 years, global sea levels have risen by 4 to 10 inches.
- Recent studies indicate they could rise by another three feet by the end of this century
- A three-foot rise would have a devastating impact on low-lying island countries, such as the Indian Ocean’s Maldives and Kayangel atoll in Palau (see above photo), which would be entirely submerged.
- Densely populated areas like the Nile Delta and parts of Bangladesh would become uninhabitable, potentially driving hundreds of millions of people from their land.
- A three-foot rise would wreak particular havoc on the Gulf Coast and eastern seaboard of the United States, threatening major cities.
Carolyn is one of 50 new graduates from American colleges who received Watson Fellowships this year. These fellowships are awarded to college graduates of unusual promise “in order to enhance their capacity for resourcefulness, imagination, openness, and leadership and to foster their humane and effective participation in the world community.” Each Watson Fellow spends a full year conducting independent research in a country where the student has not previously lived or studied for a significant length of time.
Floods due to rising sea levels could displace up to 100 million “climate
refugees” in coming years, Carolyn observes. “Do islanders
see becoming climate refugees as opportunity or exile? How do they
perceive the coming changes, and how do they plan to respond? I’m 
exploring
how and why islanders think about justice, maintain social networks,
and adapt as they battle the rising seas.”
Carolyn has always been interested in the environment—she was “the
Recycle Girl” at school from sixth grade on—but at Middlebury
she learned to think about environmental problems and solutions on
a larger scale. 
“Coming
to Middlebury opened my eyes to global issues. I became interested
in the links between environmental quality, human rights, and international
development, and I started looking for ways to work across international
boundaries to solve problems that affect everyone.”
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