Transcripts
Sea Power
We need a lot of energy to power the world (0:37)
Annette Von Jouanne: "Well shortly after I arrived here in 1995, Alan and I began discussing the amazing opportunities available for ocean energy extraction. And, also, how Oregon State University and the State of Oregon is strategically positioned to really develop ocean wave energy technologies."
Alan Wallace: "We need a lot of energy to power the world, but it only takes a small fraction of the total available energy in the ocean to do that. Now it has been estimated by researchers in Europe that if we could take 0.2 percent of all the energy in the ocean, that would do the job."
Inside the permanent magnet linear generator (0:31)
Annette Von Jouanne: "Inside the permanent magnet linear generator, we have a magnet shaft that has high density magnets that is stationary. That will be anchored to the seafloor. Surrounding that shaft we have a buoy, which has a coil wound on the inside. By Faraday's Law, when a coil slices through a magnetic field, voltage is induced, so we're directly converting the linear motion of the waves to electrical energy."
Surviving Pacific Ocean storms (0:58)
Emmanuel Agamloh: "Survivability is really important because these are expensive devices. You want to put them somewhere and you want to wake up tomorrow and they are still there. You first of all want to make sure that they really survivable to high seas. And, also, you want to make sure that the materials that you use withstand the corrosive environment."
Annette Von Jouanne: "Part of our research is to really optimize the control of the wave energy devices. But also to be able to determine what wave energy conditions are NOT good for the wave energy device."
Ken Rhinefrank: "When the storms are too great, we might design systems where the buoy is actually winched underwater to be in a safe environment; where it might actually still be able to generate power, but be either partially or fully submerged, as compared to its normal operating condition."
Oregon at the top of the list (0:33)
Roger Bedard: "In 2004, EPRI conducted a wave energy feasibility definition study. For six states in the United States, we've looked at the wave energy resource and we've looked at the technical feasibility. We've looked at the economic attractiveness of a commercial wave plant in those six states. We found that Oregon was right at the top of the list. Oregon has a very good wave energy environment and has the local coastal load and transmission distribution facilities required to distribute that energy."
Local impacts — welders, fabricators and boats (0:30)
Tony Shacher: "The wave energy devices are gonna need to be built in-house, somewhere near wherever they're placed. This has a huge impact on the local economy because this brings skilled wages, and they're living wages; they're not just your minimum wage jobs. These are, you know, metal workers, they're fabricators, installers. This may give a new lease to life to some of the fishing boats that haven't seen much service in the last couple of years, because the need will be there to transport these devices offshore, and to bring them in for service when it's necessary."
Community involvement — the Port Liaison Project (1:29)
Flaxen Conway: "Although some commercial fishermen are very used to working with researchers and some researchers are very used to working with fishermen, that's not true, generally, community to community.
The role that Oregon Sea Grant has played in this has been one of kind of the neutral convener. We're very well known as being connected to the marine community, to the commercial fishing community. We've been connected to them for years, helping them to improve commercial fishing and deal with coastal issues. So it stands to reason then that when the Northwest Fishery Science Center thought about having a project like this and they thought about how could we build these bridges between these two communities, that Oregon Sea Grant could be a temporary bridge, until a bridge would automatically exist between the two communities.
Commercial fishermen are part of a community of interest, which is the fishing community which many times has no geographic boundaries. It goes many, many miles in many directions. But they're also members of their own geographic residential community where they live. And they, you know, raise their kids there and their grandkids, and that kind of thing. So they are very interested in how this project is going to help Oregon's communities, you know, through jobs and energy and, you know, helping to stabilize communities that have gone through transitions because of changes in other natural resources, like logging and farming and that kind of thing."
20/20 Vision
The Pine Island Paradox (3:22)
Toward an Ecological Ethic of Care
From The Pine Island Paradox (2004)
By Kathleen Dean Moore
I'd been standing in the tide pools so long that the turban shells and periwinkles around my boots had grown red antennae and hairy, blue-tipped legs. In the evening quiet I could hear them tiptoe away, tapping tentatively over the stones, the rustle of hermit crabs soft like the beginning of rain. The tide was slipping in, silver now under the purple sky, herding my children back towards camp. Bending so close their foreheads almost touched, they leaned down to tuck their pant legs into their boots.
I think the ethic of care is not only about relationships among people. After all, we are born into relationships, not just with human beings, but with the land — the beautiful, complicated web of sustaining connections that Aldo Leopold calls the "biotic community." Don't I value also my connections to the natural world — the deep biological connections that create and sustain me, the emotional connections that root me to land and anchor me at sea? And doesn't this kinship have moral consequences too?
"All ethics so far evolved," Aldo Leopold wrote, "rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts," a community that includes "soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively, the land." We humans value our connections to the natural places that create and sustain us. The sudden awareness of kinship to the earth fills us with joy, and when we find ourselves away from the places we love, we're sadder, somehow reduced.
This web of emotional and biological relationships calls for acts of commitment. Right ways of acting are those that nurture, enhance and celebrate healthy webs of connection among all the members of the biotic community. "Sing our love for, and obligation to" the land, Leopold advised, and it's important to notice how quickly obligation follows on the heels of love.
I'm moved by the way the ethic of care and Leopold's land ethic lean toward each other, both gleaning more wisdom from the human experience of loving and being loved. Both ethics respond to the sadness of separation, the disquiet people feel to be dangerously or unhappily apart whether the separation is from families and communities, or landscapes and ecosystems.
I think the ethic of care has it right: The care we feel for people is the ground of our moral responsibilities toward them. And I think Aldo Leopold has it right: Our moral responsibility to care for the land grows from our love for the land, and from the intricate, life-giving relationships between people and their places. Then doesn't this follow, that our moral calling must be to remit and cherish healthy webs of connection, not only to people, or not only to land, but also to families, human communities, landscapes, and biotic communities — all our relations.
What we need next is a new ethic. Call it an ecological ethic of care, call it a moral ecology. It's an ethic built on caring for people and caring for places, and on the intricate and beautiful ways that love for places and love for people nurture each other and sustain us all.
In Endless Song (10:16).
1. Ghost Lake
Ghost Lake trail forges through the blast zone where the forest took the full force of the Mt. St. Helens eruption. Spruce and fir lie where they fell, as if an army of trees, fleeing, had pitched on their faces in the direction of their flight. The blast rolled over them, scorched their limbs, crackled their skin, pressed them into the ash. Ranks on ranks of shattered tree trunks, half-buried in stones, reach out with broken limbs. The blast must have flanked the mountain and charged down the hillside, burning the slope to bedrock. Then the ground fell out from under the trees, dropping them in a slag heap of pumice and slash. This is where we're hiking, my friends and I, across this grey and ruined land toward a pond pierced by snags.
My friends are singing. They astonish me. They laugh as they sing, dredging their memories for the words to an old hymn.
Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing.
There is the wandering coyote, kicking up dust as it licks for ants and defecates a twist of ash. There are the facts of spider silk tingling in green moss, and blanketing lichen, and beavers trooping down new river courses to chew willows nourished by elk born in ash and dust. There must be a lesson here too, and is it this? … that no matter how fragile and finite small lives may be, no matter how we grieve foresight of our own deaths, life itself is a powerful force that will not be turned away. But how can we take comfort in that, we mortals who cling to the significance of small lives?
2. Horse Ridge
We've pitched our tents in pumice on a north-south spine. Snow-crowned Mt. Adams floats on forests to the east; to the west, Mt. St. Helens stands raw and grey. As daylight drains off our camp, pink light collects in the cracked bowl of the volcano. One by one, we set down our coffee cups and gather on the ridge to watch. The pink cloud glows above lavender cliffs and dims the rosy distance. At a sudden rumble of rock, we shout and scramble for binoculars to watch rubble roll down the caldera's flank. A dust plume boils up, bursts red, and pulses over the rim. The last of the light shafts through broken rock, flickering in the smoke.
I've seen paintings of Creation that look like this — a red gleam moving over smoking stone. And I've seen imaginings of the end of time that look just the same — grey rock seamed with fire, rising smoke, falling darkness, nothing left of life except a handful of human beings lined up at the edge of Destruction, unable to speak.
The smoke stays with me in my dreams. In the dark before morning, low rumbling shakes me awake. Light strobes the side of the tent. An eruption? I'm on my knees at the door. But it's lightning that crashes between the mountains. Thunder rolls again, and I unzip the tent. The broken side of the mountain, that shattered tooth, fills the doorway. A bolt of lightning shoots from the crater almost to the moon, half hidden behind glowing clouds. The tent fills with light. Thunder shakes the ground under my knees. Should I run down the road to the landing and bring up a van to protect us, all the beautiful, pyroclastic minds of my friends?
One. Two. Three. I count the seconds to gauge the distance of the storm and turn my head to judge its direction. Making camp on the highest ridge for miles around had seemed like such a good idea. The lightning might pass to the north. It might not.
In the morning, I pull on a rain slicker and climb out into a cold, wet day. Dawn floods under purple clouds that dash lightning onto the mountains to the north. Wind-driven rain rivers down the road. But sunshine pours over clouds on Mt. Adams, and when we gather for breakfast, a meadowlark sings.
Under the flapping tarp that shelters the picnic tables, a geologist is hanging onto the tent poles to keep the whole structure from winging across the valley. With his free hand, he gestures toward the crater. "Lightning creates the conditions for life," he says. "The gas cloud over the 1980 eruption was full of lightning — up, down, every which way. The lightning charged the nitrogen in the ammonia and ozone. So when the ash finally fell from the cloud, it was full of the nitrogen that would fertilize new plants." Here on the volcano, I no longer understand the difference between destruction and creation.
The scientists among us can hardly contain their excitement at the ecological possibilities of the eruption, what they call this great "biomass disturbance event." Disturbance kicks the world into motion. What had been stagnant, the mature stands of fir and pine, is booted into new life. What had been simple is now complex. What had been monochrome is now a hillside of purple lupine and orange butterflies. What had been silent now chatters and sings.
Destruction, creation, catastrophe, renewal, sorrow and joy — these are human projections onto the landscape, the ecologists say. What is real, they say, is change. What is necessary, they say, is change. Suddenly, there are new niches, new places to grow and flourish — ponds, landslides, rocky hillsides, a great profusion of edges where beetles troop over stumps, huckleberries emerge from snowbanks, astonished pocket gophers dig into the sun.
"Meadowlarks!" an ecologist exults, sweeping his arm toward the expanse of lupines and corn lilies under the storm. "Where else can you find meadowlarks on a mountaintop?"
This biomass disturbance has made a new place for birdsong. I understand that. But at what terrible cost to nestlings burned in their nests, the sudden silence where there had been hungry peeping? Lord knows, I'd like to see the world the way ecologists do. If all of us thought of death as change rather than catastrophe, could we blunt Earth's edge of sorrow? And isn't this a source of hope, that the forces of nature turn death into life again and again, unceasing?
Again I heard them chant,
Above Earth's lamentation,
I hear the sweet though far-off hymn
That hails a new creation.
But sometimes I can't hear the hymn for the crying of small birds in the back of my mind.
3. The Trail from Donnybrook
Climbing the trail from Donnybrook, I take small steps across a landscape of falling, this mountain in the process of falling down. It scares me to walk the trail, one jogging shoe on a rock that must only yesterday have fallen from the mountain, the other on a slope of pumice that trickles down the hill. If I slip, there is nothing that will hold me. The little flower called 'pearly everlasting' clings to the rubble by what roots? By what hope against reason? And how can it deserve this name — everlasting — with one root in dribbling rubble, the other under a new-fallen stone?
Putting one foot in front of the other across this scratch in the cliff, I lift my hand to block the view of the distance below me to Spirit Lake. The lake lies as still as the silence after a car wreck — that still, except for floating tree trunks, bare and grey. They slowly rotate in the wind that curls around the cliff. How do we walk these skidding paths across the edge of an earth that is tumbling around us? I can hear it go — the clink of cobbles down the face of rough stone. Every step spills sand and stone and bends fireweed to the ground.
I thought I would learn peace from the mountain. Acceptance. I thought I would find comfort in the tenacity of life precariously rooted in constant change. I thought I would learn grace, which is only this: balance as the world slides away under my feet. Instead, I learned how different I am from a mountain, which is not afraid to fall.
Tumbling rocks shake me, body and soul. Cascading down, leaping over rimrock, filling the valleys, the stream of pebbles shakes the belief that human lives are the measure of time. They undercut the conceit that humans are the center of creation, our hopes and sorrows a special concern of the Earth's. And what do they say about human pride, the confidence that global events are under human control, that we might understand and dominate the earth? Ha. The mountain laughs. Ha, a great explosion of ash and steam, jolted by lightning.
But then there is this: Would we fear loss so desperately, if we didn't have such a love for the Earth and its life, for our own lives in the midst of indifferent laughter? Would we be afraid of the silence of a robin, if a robin's song didn't mean so much to us? Would we be so afraid of our own deaths, if we didn't love life so urgently? Maybe fear of losing it all can lead us to a place of rejoicing, a recognition of how deeply we value the living, changing world, how lovingly we cling to our place in it.
How should a person live in a world that erupts catastrophically, sliding down and down? On the flank of this big volcano we call Earth, how should a person live? I don't know for sure. But this, at least, is important: Especially when I'm afraid, to be open to wonder. Especially when I'm grieving, to be amazed by beauty. To rejoice at the inevitability of change and the urgency of life, the power of the Earth that flows out from its center and gathers all life back into its fold. And especially when I'm caught up in my human-scaled sense of time and significance, to remember that my life is part of the endless flow of fiery rock. To be astonished and grateful. My life flows on in endless song, the hymn says. How can I keep from singing?
Into the red zone after the eruption (1:38)
Well, I've had an ongoing relationship with the mountain since before she blew. Our house looks out north from Portland to the mountain, our bedroom window. So Mount St. Helens would be the first thing that I saw when I woke up for over 40 years. And of course it was the beautiful Fuji cone to start with. And then we had the eruption, and we had a front row seat on the eruption. It was an enormous event in my life, that eruption. I kind of hope it's the biggest thing I will ever see. So with a couple of friends, Henk Pander and Ron Cronin, artist and a photographer, we wangled our way into the red zone a year after the eruption; I can't remember if it was September or October. So I was here when it was at its most terrifyingly destroyed looking, when this world here, all these flowers and willows and little trees, it was all gray. It looked dead. It was devastation on an enormous scale. One had to think of Hiroshima and things like that. And then realize the size of this was just out of proportion.
The way St. Helens runs things (1:08)
Even after a few months, even so soon, there would be in this endless devastation of dirty gray ash, there would be little tiny vetch flowers or a pearly everlasting poking through. Or under the shadow of a log, would be a seedling tree. You saw even then — this is not the end of the world. Although it looked like it. This is a process. This mountain has done it before, and she'll do it again. And it's the way St. Helens runs things. She takes them apart and puts them back together. It is wonderful to come back and see how, it never occurred to me how fast the re-growing of living things would be, that in 25 years we have basically a green landscape again. Wow. I didn't know that. That was great.
Scientists and artists belong together (1:03)
Scientists and artists belong together. The whole myth of the two cultures is much exaggerated. Scientists and poets are trying to describe the world as accurately as they can do. And the scientists do it more in mathematical terms. That's their big tool. And for poets, the big tool is the language of the emotion. But the two things, they need to fertilize each other. And this is a wonderful example of what happens when you let scientists and poets really talk. Not lecture at each other but just talk together. And there have to be silences. Which is something we don't often allow each other, ourselves.
Rare butterflies proliferate in the Monument (1:58)
I have two strong connections to this landscape. I've written a book about the area immediately east of us, within a very few miles, called the Dark Divide, Washington's biggest unprotected wild area. It's a book about Bigfoot and about encounter with the magnificent and ancient and very powerful traditions of Sasquatch among the Native Americans and among our modern culture. It has to do with the idea that if the land becomes so tame that we can longer even imagine the idea of something like Bigfoot, then we've lost something profound, whether or not Bigfoot ever walked.
But I've also written books and spent a lot of time concerned with butterflies. I've studied the distribution of Washington butterflies for a long time, and they often enter my poems, my fiction and my essays. Just the other day, our first day here, I noticed that a plant that I had been seeking, especially this season, for which there are only two records in the Washington State Herbarium, was absolutely proliferating along the roadsides and up some of the pumice plain valleys of this monument. I was completely unaware of that. And there is a special butterfly connected with that plant that I have been seeking. I found it on the plant. (Speaker's note: There are several special, blue butterflies connected with that plant, a couple of which I have been especially seeking. On this visit, I found one of them on the plant.) Which is exciting both because it is many, many miles west of where it's ever been found before, west of the Cascade crest for the first time, which perhaps only a few of us care about, but it's also exciting because it means not only did this rare Washington plant survive the blast then proliferate in the aftermath, but a butterfly that is specifically attuned to living on that plant also survived in this outpost. And it gave me a much stronger realization of the resilience of the system under this enormous alteration of the eruption. So that's the concrete thing that I'm taking away. A better understanding as a biologist of what this episode in Mount St. Helens' life has meant for the plants and animals here.
Dimensions of landscape and imagination (1:58)
I've been deep into the Dark Divide back and forth, across and around. I don't know it well, but I know it enough to know that there is much more there than I can possibly grasp or even ask. But at Mount St. Helens, many of us tended to paint it in kind of a monotone, and I don't mean just because the landscape was a monotone of pumice and downed trees and Spirit Lake. We have that image in our minds. But also something of a monotone of our thinking about it, many of us who have not worked up here very much. Probably because of that term "blast zone." Many of us, even biologists, geologists, who who haven't been here very much, have tended to think of it as kind of an eraser on blackboard, starting from scratch. Those who have worked here in depth have shown that's very much different from the actual facts on the ground. They have found that so much more did in fact survive and inoculate the further growth and evolution here (than most of us imagined).
But what that means to me, a person who has spent some time up here both before and after the 1980 eruption, is that…If the biological dimensions are so much greater here after the blast than we knew, what about all the other dimensions here? What about the, yes, spiritual dimensions, but also the dimensions of imagination, that goes far beyond the butterfly that I can catch and show to people and release and put a dot on a map, that that butterfly occurred here. That's a fact.
What about the things that are not so easily encapsulated in (new) fact? What about the way in which the black caddisflies that area hatching at Meta Lake inform the Vaux's swifts that are flying out of the snags to feed on them? And both of them refract into our eyes and our minds and our imagination in ways that we can't possibly even measure at this point. And this can proliferate through every species that is coming back here and every shift of wind and every scent and every mood of the mountain..
The cultural lessons (2:00)
The long term and the changes over time are just really critical in the work in science and in the humanities in understanding the lessons from a place such as this. For example, the early emphasis in the St. Helens landscape was on death and destruction and rescue, a focus on people who were killed, properties lost, things of this nature. And the public attention was on vulcanology, geology, through that period and picked up even to a greater level after some of that early death and destruction and the headlines of disaster had abated a bit. And then the ecological story has begun to unfold as we can see around this landscape. Especially as we can hear from people who were here in the early days. As visitors and scientists have been doing their thing as they visited. And now people are quite impressed by the amount of change and revegetation and development in lakes and streams. Now maybe we're at a point where we're ready to move a step further and be more explicit about the cultural lessons, the lessons drawn through the methods of the humanities, the poets and philosophers and essayists, how those folks with their views and skills learn from this landscape. Maybe as a society of this bioregion we can strengthen our volcano culture, our perceptions of the relationship to nature and this amazing landscape.
The story is still unfolding (1:31)
The story is still unfolding. There were phenomena we observed in the early days and months and few years that ran their course and passed on to other processes. We're still in the very early stage of response to the 1980 eruption. Parts of the landscape responded quickly. And other parts will have a very protracted response. One purpose of holding field gatherings among field scientists and scientists and writers is to encourage new folks with new skills and questions to come and examine the landscape and see what's happening today because things are unfolding today that we didn't anticipate in the early days after the eruption. We didn't have the tools to address certain questions. And the stage of the ecological responses hadn't developed to the point that we could study some things that are really smacking us in the face today saying, "study me." For example, the controls of groundwater and surface water patterns on the development of plants and animal communities in front of the volcano or out in part of the blast zone about seven miles from the crater.
