For Immediate Release

April 22, 2025

SYRACUSE—United University Professions, the nation’s largest higher education union, held an Earth Day celebration April 22 to defend the groundbreaking scientific and environmental research taking place at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and reject the new administration’s freeze on billions in federal scientific and environmental research grants.

SUNY ESF faculty, students, local union members and environmental activists and supporters came to the small campus sandwiched between Syracuse University and the JMA Wireless Dome and rallied on the Moon Patio near the F. Franklin Moon Library.

The event, titled “In Defense of Science, In Defense of ESF,” spotlighted SUNY ESF’s leadership in sustainability and ecological innovation and focused on the crucial importance of public investment in advancing research that benefits communities and ecosystems across New York and beyond.

Three SUNY ESF researchers—Andrea Feldpausch-Parker, Robert Malmsheimer and Jennifer Goff—spoke about their work and the important research being done at SUNY ESF. They said the federal research funding freeze—ordered in January by the Trump administration and subsequently blocked by federal judges—is impacting research grants at SUNY ESF.

Malmsheimer, a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of Sustainable Resources Management, focuses his research on forest carbon and public policy and biomass energy and biofuels. Goff, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry directs a lab that examines how environmental stressors, warming and fire impact microbial populations.

“As the only SUNY campus entirely focused on the environment, ESF creates a rare space where faculty and students across disciplines can easily work together to solve problems like environmental pollution, climate change, and conservation of endangered species,” Goff said. “A hallway conversation can turn into a federally funded research team, and undergraduates aren’t just sitting in lectures — they’re going outside and leading research studies that shape how we understand our environment. But at a time when federal funding is being frozen or delayed, the greatest threat to this vital work isn’t the chaos ripping through Washington, D.C., it’s in Albany. If the state of New York continues to pull back support, it’s not just SUNY ESF that loses — Central New York loses, the next generation loses, and this planet that we live on loses."

“Earth Day should be a celebration of the environment, the steps we’ve taken to preserve it and the work we will do to sustain it,” said UUP President Fred Kowal, who spoke at the rally. “Instead, we find ourselves in a battle with the new administration, which has launched an assault on science that has included gutting federal funding for research that could lead to life-changing and lifesaving breakthroughs in health care, energy, technology and the climate. We are compelled to fight, for necessary federal research funding and for the academic freedom to teach about climate change, climate justice and climate science.”

Most of SUNY ESF’s research funding is derived from federal and state agencies and programs, which include the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

ESF researchers are at the forefront of combating climate change by developing high-yield, fast-growing willow biomass crops as a renewable energy source. Other projects include studying the impacts of urban heat islands on disadvantaged communities, the revival of the American Chestnut tree, on-site detection of polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and the invention of a system that removes ammonia from wastewater for use as fertilizer.

Pivotal ESF research into acid rain in the 1970s and 1980s has influenced national environmental policy and positioned the small college as a leader in ecosystem science and atmospheric pollution.

Speakers also spoke out against the new administration’s attacks on higher education and academic freedom—including the freedom to teach about climate change and attacks on funding for climate science.

They addressed the need for more direct state aid to ESF, which is facing a $6.6 million budget deficit. A total of $277 million in direct funding for campuses was included in the last two state budgets, but the SUNY Board of Trustees—which decides how the money is apportioned to campuses—has favored SUNY’s university centers, leaving ESF and 16 other campuses with multimillion-dollar shortfalls.