Losing Control of Campus Landscapes

Speaker: Mark Bomford, Director of Yale Sustainable Food Program

This lecture examines the paradoxes of care and control in campus landscapes. Mark Bomford traces the tension between the ordered care of campus master planning and the improvisational care of grassroots agroecological experiment, showing how each constrained the futures that could be imagined. Using metaphors from Anna Karenina to Claude Shannon’s concept of informational entropy, he argues that sustainability emerges not from perfection but from surprise, multiplicity, and relational responsiveness. Case studies from the University of British Columbia and Yale demonstrate that when shared labor, student-centered pedagogy, and ecological complexity are foregrounded over metrics-driven control and efficiency, campuses can serve as laboratories for more just and adaptive futures. To “lose control” is not to embrace chaos but to resist foreclosure—to vivify the ecological and social futures of the university as open, relational, and delightfully, surprisingly weird.

This lecture is sponsored by the Environmental Studies Program and the University Ecologies.

The University Ecologies Project will hold two complementary events later that day:

Pollinator Garden Tour | 2:30-3:30pm | outside 574 Boston Ave, Medford

Please join for an introduction to the pollinator gardens, opportunities to join in, some Tufts Pollinator Initiative seeds, gear, and cider.

The Past and Future of the Tufts Pollinator(+) Initiative: a Roundtable | 4:30pm | Alumnae Lounge, Medford

A new, multidisciplinary collective that spans across the arts and sciences has recently taken over stewardship of the garden plots — while asking how we might expand them in new directions, including but perhaps going beyond hospitality for pollinators. Join us for a roundtable exploring the past and possible futures of the Tufts Pollinator Initiative, and land projects at Tufts University. We will be joined by leading urban ecologists, artists, and agrarians for a cross-thought conversation on the kinds of university ecologies that could yet emerge on our campus.

Panelists:
Nick Dorian, TPI Founder and Urban Ecologist at the Chicago Botanical Garden
Erin Woodbrey, New England-based Ecological Artist and Environmental Humanist
Mark Bomford, Director of the Yale Sustainable Food Program and Yale’s “Farmer-In-Chief”
Leslie Rogers, Multidisciplinary Artist and Textile Gardener at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts

Mark Bomford is the Director of the Yale Sustainable Food Program and was the founding Director of the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems at the University of British Columbia (UBC). His current research, in cooperation with the University of Oxford’s School of Geography and Environment, explores Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA), more-than-human ecologies, and enclosure in practice and theory. Mark belongs to settler family, raised on and off-grid in northern British Columbia on Treaty 8 territory. He farmed for a decade on the unceded ancestral territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people and currently lives, works, and vicariously farms on traditional Quinnipiac lands. He’s been interested in climate change and sustainable agriculture since the mid-1990s, exploring and attempting to work with its challenges and contradictions through physics, philosophy, art, agroecology, commercial farming, community activism, science and technology studies, and human geography.