Rooted in the basics: An interview with Jenny Ramstetter

Sophomore Noah Strauss Jenkins sat down with biology and environmental studies professor Jenny Ramstetter last February to discuss climate change, statistics, forest reserves, and the Afromontane vegetation of Ethiopia.

Noah Strauss Jenkins: So how do you like the snow?

Jenny Ramstetter: Love, love, love, love the snow. I’m so happy. I saw Eric Dennis (’14), who studied at Marlboro College and grew up in Marlboro town, come flying down a hill on skis the other day, when we had very little snow. And I thought, I so want to do that, but I don’t want any broken bones. He came flying around the OP, I mean flying. So, I love the snow, and I brought my skis today. I have no time, but I’m so committed to the idea that I put them in the car in case something got freed up.

NSJ: I get that. I put my snowboard in my car once winter happens, and it kind of stays there.

JR: You just never know.

NSJ: This winter has been really weird—is this normal? I feel like this happened a few years ago.

JR: Well, I remember back in 1989, the first year I taught fulltime, the winter of ’89. I was housesitting for the MacArthurs, and there was no snow. It was very cold, but no snow, and it was so depressing. Compared to last year, which stunned me with the amounts of snow.

NSJ: So nice—I was loving it last year.

JR: Me too, so much.

NSJ: I’ve been thinking a lot this winter about if this warm weather is really messing things up, ecologically speaking.

JR: With climate change it’s very hard to attribute cause and effect. It’s just like human health in a way: you may be exposed to some conditions of not enough sleep or this, that, or the other thing, and how do you know that was the cause of this illness that you then got next. Similarly, how do we know that this winter is a symptom of climate change? I think the answer is we don’t, but I think we can look globally and we look at the extent of winter ice-cover in the arctic and we can point to trends. And we can say, “This is not good.” You know, it’s going to have impact on all nonhuman species, and it’s going to have huge impacts for us, notably in our minds. Some people and places are going to be affected sooner that others. What you can look at is global average temperatures, and they’re just going like this (hand sloping up). So we might not be able to attribute, you know, El Niño, which is a different phenomenon, as having a certain impact and we might not be able to say this winter’s warm temperatures, yesterday’s warm temperatures, are absolutely due to climate change. However, I think we can feel one-hundred-percent confident that the worldwide trend that has been going on for decades is without a doubt caused by human pollutants in the form of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

MSJ: Do you see any things going on locally that you feel like are connected to climate change?

JR: We’ve got a lot of things going on with the global environment so it’s hard to say any specific thing. But I think one of the things that’s being looked at a lot is bloom times. We have sometimes hundreds of years of data for a particular plant species, in a particular location. And we can say that it starts to bloom on average between April 22 and April 28, and we see that shifted back to between April 15 to April 20. And if that’s consistent, then you start to say there is a trend… same thing with birds returning in the spring, we’re starting to get whole new mixes of species. You run into things with invasive species as well. I think there are these general trends you can see. Can I see anything specific in Marlboro? It’s hard to say. I would say that cardinals didn’t used to be here at all and they didn’t used to hang around in the winter.

NSJ: People feeding them too…

JR: Yeah there’s people feeding them. There is just the invasiveness, if you will, of the species. It could be that, but it could be some climate change. So you have to add a huge number of things up just as you do with human health. It would be easy to point a finger here and there and say this causes this. Take the whole package!

NSJ: You studied in France, right? Where were you?

JR: I was in Montpellier, which is southern France, Mediterranean. I was just telling my biology class about some of the plants I studied there. I was able to go there on an agricultural grant. There was a lab that was studying Medicago, which is alfalfa, and that’s where all the native species of alfalfa evolved. Anything that we have in cultivation originally came from those native species there. So they were interested in some of the characteristics and the pollination particularly, which I studied a lot. Then I had my own interest because there were some species that were really quite rare, and haven’t spread, and then there’s one species that is on every single continent with the exception of Antartica. So there are probably differences in their biology that have allowed them either to spread through the world or to remain pretty restrictive.

NSJ: Wait, what’s alfalfa?

JR: Alfalfa is a plant that is used as a feed, particularly for cows, and its really important. We have a hard time growing it in Vermont—it’s a little too cold and wet here for it to be happy—because, think of it as being of Mediterranean origin, where it’s hot and dry. It does well through drought conditions. So it’s grown throughout the United States, throughout the world really, as a valuable forage. Cows in particular, horses—we don’t eat it. It’s a legume, so you would recognize it as a little miniature pea.

NSJ: What work were you doing in France? What research?

JR: Conservation was my main interest. I thought, here are these species that are very crucial to our agricultural system because you want that genetic diversity that’s in those, and then I had this real interest in rare and common plants. Just from a basic standpoint, what makes it rare? What makes it common? And then apply that to conservation because it is often the rare things that are in trouble. But what they really wanted from me was help do crosses between two perennial species and see what kind of offspring we came up with, because I had pollination experience.

NSJ: So they were just looking for new varieties?

JR: Yeah, they were interested in what the possibilities were. To be honest, I traveled there with someone who had a big research grant and his connections were kind enough to get me an actual bonafide position there. So it was sort of me bringing my interests and saying this is what I really want to do, and them saying this is what we need to have done—so I did a combination of those things. I had a one full summer and then I had another summer; it wasn’t really much time to come to anything conclusive. And I think that’s what everybody does as a scientist: it’s rare to get some major conclusion. It’s more that you’re a piece of the puzzle contributing to the overall.

NSJ: And then, why did you come back to Marlboro?

JR: It was very interesting because at that time when I was doing that research project in France, I really thought I knew where I was headed. I had done research as a graduate student, and I just couldn’t fathom teaching. That was in part because I’d been a teaching assistant for a few years at the University of Montana, which is a small university yet you had big classes. I taught labs, and most of the students didn’t want to be in those labs.

NSJ: So it was a turn off?

JR: It was definitely a turn off to teaching. I had some wonderful, lovely students I still remember, but the vast majority of students didn’t want to be there, they had to take the class. And the same thing happened, only on a larger scale, at UMASS Amherst, where I did my PhD. I remember I had this litany, which was students saying to me, “What do I have to do to get an A,” “What do I have to do to pass this class” and my favorite which was, “Do I have to know this?” I was like, what? You don’t want to learn? So at that point—after six, almost seven years of teaching—that I thought, well the plants are just there, and I want to be involved in conservation, and I care about them, and they are crucial to our existence to others. I’m gonna stick with plants and research. And then I got a letter while I was in France from John Hayes, who was the former chemistry teacher, and longtime dean of faculty, and dear friend of mine, and my teacher at Marlboro. They had finally got the money for a second position in biology so John said, “Wouldn’t you come and teach just while we conduct this search?”

NSJ: Whoa, that was pretty sneaky.

JR: I thought about it for a while, and then I said to him “I gotta be here for my research, can we work out my schedule?” Because he wanted me to full-time for the whole year, and I really couldn’t be gone that long, so I said what about full-time for one semester. So I came the spring of ’89 and taught (class names). And at that point people were saying you really ought to apply for the permanent fulltime position, and I thought “really?” Because I convinced myself that I didn’t want to do that, but then I taught some classes here, and I was like: that’s what learning is about, that is what teaching is. I was learning from the students as they learned form me. So I was like, okay, I’ll do this.

NSJ: Well, you remember that kind of learning from when you were a student here.

JR: Well, I did, but it had been like six, seven years of that other kind of teaching. I had never stopped believing that Marlboro was a wonderful place, but I just didn’t see myself teaching. I never imagined, it never occurred to me, that I would teach again at Marlboro, it never crossed my mind.

NSJ: That’s amazing. That’s awesome.

JR: Yeah it was. It was one of these fortuitous things.

NSJ: How do you feel like Marlboro has changed since you first started working here?

JR: Wow, that’s a big question. I guess I would start with what hasn’t changed. One is that we’re still getting students, faculty, and staff who want to learn, and are eager to learn. As I said, it’s as much on the part of the faculty as it is on the students. That’s the solid that has remained across those years. What has changed, I think, is we have many more staff members. I came at a time when Tim Little, who was a history professor, was also the dean of admissions. So imagine a faculty member being dean of admissions. I was late to register, because I had just come back from a trip, and I walked into the dining hall and Tim said, “Hello Jennifer, I’m Tim Little.” And I was just like, how does he know my name? I mentioned it to him later and he said, “Well you were the last student on campus to register, so you were our last name.” But still there was that “I know you, I care about you” kind of thing, and I think that still goes on. I loved Luis ’s email that was sent out after there were some stolen medications. It had all that compassion—there was just something about it—and to me that’s really Marlboro. It resonates with me.

NSJ: what classes are you teaching right now?

JR: Right now I’m teaching Plant Reproductive Biology, which is particularly looking at pollination biology: how particularly animals and insects move around to plants and the energetics of that. What does it mean for the animal, what does it mean for the plant that are producing a lot of resources to attract animals? And then the second half of the semester will be on seed dispersal, seed production, and fruit production and dispersal, and all the things in the ecology of that. So that is an intermediate-level course. The other thing that I’m teaching is a seminar on water, it’s an environmental studies seminar and we’re focusing on water. I intended for it to be as interdisciplinary as possible, so if somebody is interested in poetry, somebody is interested visual arts, anything goes. It turns out there are a lot of sort of science-ecology folks, but I do have one student who is deeply immersed in ceramics and has always been interested in the chemistry of ceramics and how water plays a role in it. And then he also sort of has a philosophical bent going, and a Japanese way of thinking about the importance of water, and I was like “yes!” We’ll get that all in there.

NSJ: Are you bringing other faculty in?

JR: Yes, Amer (Latif) might come in when we have some of the religious, philosophical dimensions. William (Edelglass) as well. Actually, last year in the Intro to Environmental Studies class that I taught, Jean O’hara came in and she did a two-session segment on her familiarity with some water issues in the Pacific Northwest, and a play that came out of that. So I want to do those kinds of things. We also have a collaboration going on that involves the Vermont Performance Lab and the Marlboro Elementary School, were they’re doing a unit on water conservation, and so there’s going be a performance of dance and the other work that those students are doing. They often do poetry as a part of it.

NSJ: Water’s a big one

JR: It’s so huge. It’s so huge. It’s life.

NSJ: The snow coming now is really nice.

JR: It is, it changes how I feel walking into the woods. How I feel changes, it’s miraculous. There’s this wildness, this calm that comes over, and it’s just…it’s a primal thing.

NSJ: Definitely, for sure

JR: One of the other classes I’m doing involves students that have been in my forest ecology class, and last semester’s environmental studies class, plus a Plan student. We’re trying to get some traction for the notion of setting up a forest reserve, if you will. There’s a chunk of land that we own—about half of our forested land—that was taken out of a program called the Use Value Program. And what that program does is it gives you property tax break for having a forest management plan in place, and you have to harvest timber off your land. Over the years, actually starting back in 2004, a group of faculty said you know as a college we should also advocate for the notion of what the ecosystem can do in the absence of this pretty significant human disturbance. We won’t see it but in 200 years we’ll have an old growth forest out there, big trees, a lot of standing snags. So we’ve been working over the years in fits and starts to get traction.

NSJ: That’s so cool!

JR: I think it will take the form of a Town Meeting resolution. I’m really excited about it, and various students are excited about it. The other thing I’m doing this semester, which is just a small piece, is in Jim (Mahoney)’s statistic class. I may go in at some point and talk about “on the ground”: here’s what it’s like for a Plan student to work with a collected data set. If you’re a senior on Plan in the biological sciences, you might encounter something like this. Which would be really different from something in psychology, or sociology, or anthropology. Each of our fields sort of approaches things differently, yet we have this need for statistics that we’re all using. The aha moment came for me when I actually gathered data, and then I felt like a kid in a candy store. I thought: “This is so exciting! How can I present? What does this mean?”

NSJ: I’ve never taken statistics…

JR: It’s basically about having information that’s numerical, and how do you interpret that? So if you’re looking at the efficacy of how well Echinacea works in helping you get over a cold, you know, how would you figure that out? So let’s say we get a group of 30 Marlboro students here and 30 Marlboro students there, and we’ve got this 30 taking Echinacea and that group taking nothing, you can say something about how well Echinacea works. You’ll have to have some quantitative measures, and could be something as simple as the number of people who get sick, but then you have to define what sick is. Then you say, well 38 percent of people got sick in this group and 45 percent got sick in that group—well 38 is different from 45, but it that difference statistically significant? Based on what your sample size, you can run a statistical test that says there’s is only a 5 percent chance, and that’s usually the standard we got by, that that difference was due to chance. And you say, yeah that’s a real difference. It’s not a huge difference but it’s real. Or you’re statistics might show you that there’s no significance, that there’s too much variation in there and there’s no real tell from this sample size. Maybe if we had a bigger sample size, or a better study. But anyways that’s what statistics tells you.

NSJ: I probably should check it out.

JR: it’s neat when you’re reading the newspaper, someone is throwing around percentages and numbers and saying oh this is a big deal, and you’re like wait a minute show me your P-value.

NSJ: I’ve thought about that a lot when reading about economics and stuff.

JR: Could be economics, could be politics…

NSJ: This might be kind of a dumb question, but I was wondering if there’s anywhere in the world that you would want to go study plant life?

JR: I’m so happy you asked me that question because I was going to insert it even if you didn’t ask. The place is Ethiopia. My children were born there, so we took a trip back last December/January a year ago, and it was amazing, just amazing. Two years before that I had a fellow, his name was Getachew Tadesse, and Ethiopia’s changing coffee agro-eco systems is his specialty. I connected with him while I was on sabbatical, I really wanted to connect with someone who was doing research in Ethiopia, and I have this intense interest in agriculture and what we refer to as agro-systems, so agriculture mimicked after natural systems. Coffee first evolved in Ethiopia—that’s where it was from—and I saw coffee growing in the wild. You go into a forest and there it is just growing among the other trees. I was just stunned.

NSJ: Wow

JR: The other thing that I was stunned about was this vegetation called Afromontane. We were in a place that very same day which is over 14,000 feet, and it was the second highest point in Ethiopia. There was a broad expanse of this Afromontane vegetation, so you’re in a tropical/sub-tropical nation but you go up to over 14,000 feet and all of a sudden there’s this vegetation. I don’t know if you’ve been to the top of the White Mountains or Mount Mansfield or any of those, where there is alpine vegetation.

NSJ: Yeah, definitely.

JR: It’s like that in sub-tropical Africa, just stunning. And the pressure for people trying to survive there, just trying to stay alive each day, are enormous. So there are all sorts of socio-political factors that come into play, and I’ve just developed this great belief in what’s good for the environment is good for people. It’s good for people as long as it’s rooted in the basics: is there clean water, is there clean air, and do we have the diversity of plants and animals, because ultimately that’s what we’re dependent upon. The primary point of this field visit was taking my children. A couple times they were like, what is this, is it all about you today? And I said yep, yep, it is and you will like it too. My son was the one who spotted what’s called the singing wolf, which only occurs two places in the entire world, the Simien Mountain and the Bale Mountains. And he spotted one. He doesn’t think it’s as amazing as I do, but maybe someday he will.

NSJ: Do you plan to go back?

JR: There was this researcher at the university there, at the herbarium, who specializes in different groups of plants. He travelled with us for four days and then he went back to Addis, which is the capital, and talked to friends about my interests and what we were doing. And he was like, “We’ve got to get a collaboration. We’ve got to get Marlboro students over here.” They already have a collaboration with Cornell University, and it feels like how can we compete with Cornell, but they want us. They believe in the kinds of things that I was describing that we do here. It’s a very long way, it’s expensive to get there—those are the two main obstacles to overcome in my mind. But I would really like to be engaged with students and other faculty member to figure out how that would happen.

NSJ: Are you still doing any work in research locally with rare plants?

JR: I am. I’m a member of what’s called the flora advisory group, and up until last year I was also a part of the state endangered species committee. The flora advisory group thinks a lot about plants that are rare in Vermont and have trouble. What’s really exciting is there’s a bill in Vermont legislature to add protection to habitats that support rare plants or animal. It sounds really fundamental and basic, but that’s not already there. Animals I think already garner more support this way. Like they already close off the nesting habitat for peregrine falcons—there’s a lot more oomph to that than there is to harming a plant habitat. So theoretically you could actually alter the habitat that a plant needs as long as you don’t physically take that plant. You could cut all the trees around that it’s dependent upon, and the law in the state of Vermont couldn’t touch you. But this is an opportunity to say this is a critical habitat for this plant, or this animal, so I’m really excited about that. It sounds like it’s going to go through the house real easy but the senate could be a big problem. But it’s exciting that’s it’s being drafted. It’s heading to committee, which is great.

NSJ: That’s so cool

JR: The other thing is doing a little bit of field work in the summer on rare plants and I’m going to be a participant in a pollinator conference, on endangered pollinators, that’s going to take place at the ECHO Aquarium, which is in Burlington. It’s during spring break, but I’m hoping to take a couple students if they’re still around. They have some national experts—one international person is coming in—so they’re the keynote speakers, and then I’m part of more of a symposium afternoon session. Which reminds me, I’ve got to get on that and get a team of people to help me out with that. Thank you for reminding me.