20/20 Vision
From a cabin deep in the Oregon Coast Range to the shoulders of a Cascade volcano, the Spring Creek Project asks a difficult question: "How should we understand our relationship to nature?"
Terra Up Close
Finding Today
Steven Radosevich is a professor and graduate program coordinator in the Department of Forest Science at OSU. His research interests focus on plant ecology, sustainable forestry and agriculture, and the impacts and ethics of human land uses. He grew up on a farm in Tieton, Washington, in the upper Yakima Valley. Pruning an orchard, he writes, means making choices. "Good wood" refers to tree limbs laid on the ground, a result of choices that lead to a productive orchard.
In 1987, Franz Dolp found what he was looking for: a place where nature beckoned, about 40 acres of cutover forestland in the Oregon Coast Range along a quick running tributary to the Marys River. He felt inspired by the remaining moss-covered forest and a spring that emerged high on a mountainside. After buying the land, he built a wood cabin with tall ceilings and expansive windows. He planted more than 10,000 cedar, hemlock and fir seedlings. He loved this place and wanted it to inspire others.
“Maybe I should have asked not how we can bring wildness into our lives, but how we can remember to notice the wildness in every sweating pore, every stewed carrot, every solid step; in the morning air noisy with rain; in the reeling stars.”
Kathleen Dean Moore
The Pine Island Paradox, 2004
"He said he was planting an old-growth forest," says Kathleen Dean Moore, a friend and philosophy professor at Oregon State University. "He was investing in a future that he would never see, but he felt nourished by this land, and he felt a responsibility to nourish the trees. Every spring, he went out with a hoe to release the trees from the fallen leaves and encroaching brush."
Dolp, an economist and poet, died in 2004. Before his death, he worked with Moore to create a program that carries out his vision for the cabin to serve as a retreat for writers and naturalists. Today, operating out of the Department of Philosophy under Moore's direction, OSU's Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature and the Written Word brings poets, writers and scientists together to explore our relationship with the natural world. The cabin on Shotpouch Creek hosts retreats, meetings and other Spring Creek events.
Moore and her colleagues have taken their mission well beyond these mountains. Financed by a private donor, they have held gatherings and academic conferences in Corvallis and a public presentation attended by more than 1,800 people in Portland. With the U.S. Forest Service, they sponsor an annual poet's retreat at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest east of Eugene. Moore and Associate Director Charles Goodrich regularly lecture or give readings in the Northwest and throughout the country.
Their goal: philosophical clarity in our relationship to nature. "As a philosopher, I believe that ideas matter, that what people believe shapes the decisions they make," says Moore. "The more cogent and clear-thinking their ideas, the wiser their decisions will be. On the other hand, confusion or disagreement about the fundamental ideas of a practice lead to incoherent policies or stalemate.
"For example, what is a forest? Is it a commodity like a seam of copper? Is it a cathedral, a sacred grove? Politicians and forest managers are accustomed to consulting scientists for information that will help them make good decisions. But they less often consult artists and humanists who can help them understand what forests mean in the human experience — important information for those who would design forest policies in a complex and changing social context."
