2/05/20
NORTH ADAMS, MASS.—Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) announces the third event in its spring
Green Living Seminar series will take place on Thursday, Feb. 13. The talk, “Road
Salt: The Problem, the Solution, and How to Get There,” will be given by Vicky Kelly,
environmental monitoring program manager at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies
in Millbrook, N.Y.
This and all subsequent Green Living Seminars will take place at 5:30 p.m. on Thursdays
in room 121 of the Feigenbaum Center for Science and Innovation on the MCLA campus.
The theme of this semester’s series is “Environmental Pollution,” and all talks are
free and open to the public.
Road salt is an emerging pollutant in snow-belt regions. In the talk, Kelly will cover the history of its use, where we find salt in the environment today, some co-occurring issues related to road salt, such as lead in water, and how to reduce road salt pollution without sacrificing safety.
Kelly manages the Cary Institute's Environmental Monitoring Program, which includes monitoring climate as well as air, precipitation and stream water quality, solar radiation, phenology, and the behavior of water in the landscape. Data from the program have been used to understand the dynamics of road salt and the effects of climate change on precipitation chemistry.
Kelly’s current projects include the effectiveness of road salt reduction practices, the impact of climate change on plant and animal life cycle events (phenology), and monitoring of water at the landscape scale.
This semester’s Green Living Seminar events will take place through April 16, 2020. Following Kelly’s talk on Thursday, Feb. 13, the next Green Living lecture will be on Thursday, Feb. 20, when environmental analyst Matt Reardon will present “Water Quality in the Hoosic River Watershed.”
Each semester, the MCLA Green Living Seminar Series hosts lectures by local, regional, and national experts organized around a central theme related to the environment and sustainability. The 2020 series is a presentation of the MCLA Environmental Studies Department and the MCLA Berkshire Environmental Resource Center.
Podcasts will be posted online following each presentation at www.mcla.edu/greenliving. For more information, visit www.mcla.edu/greenliving or contact Elena Traister at 413.662-5303.
