Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet will be next year’s Life of the Mind common reading selection for UT freshmen.

“I invite the campus community to join the Class of 2017 in reading the book and participating in the discussion and related activities that will be held in the fall,” said Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Susan Martin in announcing the book’s selection.

Now in its tenth year, Life of the Mind is part of First Year Studies 100, a zero-credit, pass-fail class that gives students their first taste of college studies and requires them to complete online lessons on alcohol awareness, financial literacy, plagiarism, technology, civility, and succeeding at UT.

Before arriving on campus, freshmen are to read Eaarth and complete a written response. During Welcome Week, students will hear McKibben speak and attend a small-group discussion session led by a UT faculty or staff member. More details on McKibben’s visit will be announced soon.

Intending to select a book about sustainability for the 2013–14 academic year, Life of the Mind coordinators assembled a committee of faculty, students, and staff to select this year’s book. Although they considered a variety of nonfiction and fiction books, committee members said they chose Eaarth, published in 2010, because it was “clear and direct,” “a really powerful book,” and “accurate, timely, well-written, and well-researched.”

“McKibben’s name is synonymous with climate change,” said John Nolt, philosophy professor and member of the book selection committee. “It will be a huge benefit to our students to get to hear him speak.”

UT debuted its new sustainability major this year, making it one of the first large universities in the Southeast to offer such a program. The interdisciplinary curriculum is intended to equip students to be change makers in producing a sustainable society and environment.

UT is also well known across the nation for its student-initiated campus environmental fee, which funds sustainability efforts on campus.

Ruth Darling, assistant provost for student success and First Year Studies programs, said Eaarth should have wide appeal on campus.

“The theme of Eaarth relates so well to what UT represents and how we are thinking about sustainability,” she said. In connection with this theme, First Year Studies is partnering with the Institute for a Secure and Sustainable Environment and the Tennessee Valley Authority to support a service-learning workshop for faculty planning to teach FYS 129 seminars that focus on some aspect of sustainability. More information about this opportunity and other initiatives, including Life of the Mind programming, will be posted soon.

McKibben has written ten books, including The End of Nature and Deep Economy that have helped shape public opinion about climate change, alternative energy, and the need for more localized economies.

McKibben formerly worked as a staff writer at the New Yorker and is a contributor to Rolling Stone, the Atlantic, National Geographic, and the New York Review of Books.

McKibben formerly worked as a staff writer at the New Yorker and is a contributor to various magazines, including Rolling Stone, the Atlantic, National Geographic and the New York Review of Books.

He has received Guggenheim and Lyndhurst Fellowships, as well as the Lannan Prize for nonfiction writing in 2000.

He is a scholar in residence in environmental studies at Middlebury College and lives in Vermont with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, and their daughter.

Life of the Mind committee members were Darling, committee chair; Chris  Cox, professor and associate department head in chemical and electrical engineering; Paul Erwin, professor and director of the Department of Public Health; Joanne Logan, associate professor in biosystems engineering and soil science; Thura Mack, library professor; Mike McKinney, professor of environmental sciences and director of UT’s new sustainability major; Nolt; Nate Sanders, professor in ecology and evolutionary biology; Tricia Stuth, associate professor of architecture; Stella Bridgeman-Prince, assistant director, Student Success Center; Melissa Shivers, assistant vice chancellor, Student Life; Michael Croal, graduate student in public policy administration and First-Year Studies graduate teaching assistant; and undergraduate student members Evan Ford and Elisabeth Spratt.

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C O N T A C T :

Amy Blakely (865-974-5034, ablakely@utk.edu)

In the eastern US, ants are integral to plant biodiversity because they help disperse seeds. But ants’ ability to perform this vital function, and others, may be jeopardized by climate change, according to Nate Sanders, associate professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Sanders and his collaborators have received a grant for nearly $2 million from the National Science Foundation to examine the cascading effects of climate change on ant communities and the ecosystem functions they provide.

“Ants are critically important to most ecosystems,” Sanders said. “They eat other insects, circulate nutrients, increase turnover in the soil, and move seeds around.”

Five meter-wide, open-top chambers on the ground of the forest. Air is circulated through the tubes and raised by blowers into the chambers.

Sanders and his colleagues are testing the effects of climate change on ants by heating up patches of forest and tracking how the ants respond. Inside Duke Forest in North Carolina and Harvard Forest in Massachusetts lie twelve five-meter wide, open-top chambers. Air temperature is incrementally increased by half a degree Celsius in each chamber for a total of a six-degree changes and ant behavior observed.

The researchers, led by Katie Stuble from UT and Shannon Pelini at Harvard Forest, noticed dramatic changes in the ants’ daily activity in each chamber.

“If the temperature increases by just a half a degree Celsius, the most important seed-dispersing ants basically shut down,” said Sanders. “They do not go out and forage and do the things they normally do.”

Stuble observed that, on average, the ants foraged for about ten hours a day at normal temperatures. When temperatures were raised just a half a degree, the ants stayed in their nests underground and foraged just an hour.

The absence of ants’ seed dispersal and nutrient cycling could have profound influence on biodiversity. For instance, it is believed that more than half of the plants in the forest understory of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park rely on ants for seed dispersal. Ants are found in ecosystems everywhere but in Antarctica and Iceland.

The researchers’ goal is to provide information about the effects of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystems.

“We know that climate change is happening,” Sanders said. “Lots of models make predictions about how biodiversity is going to respond. It will either respond by adapting, moving or going extinct. If you can’t keep up with climate change, you will go extinct.”

Sanders and his team will collect data through 2015. He is collaborating with colleagues from Harvard University, North Carolina State University, and University of Vermont. The project began in 2007 with funding from the Department of Energy. The team’s papers can be read at http://web.utk.edu/~nsanders/.

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C O N T A C T :

Whitney Heins (865-974-5460, wheins@utk.edu)

Nate Sanders (865-974-5231, nsanders@utk.edu)