Hunting in the Middle Ages was an integral part of court etiquette, as depicted in details of a wool tapestry called “Boar and Bear Hunt.” (©Victoria & Albert Museum, London)

Why would binoculars be an essential tool for a scholar of Renaissance literature during a study tour of Europe? What does crawling around on a castle floor have to do with researching the writings of Shakespeare and Spenser? Why would a professor of 15th- and 16th-century poetry and drama desperately need a therapeutic massage after a day of intense investigation? The answer is tapestries.

Massive, intricate, otherworldly weavings called “arras” were commissioned by European royals and nobles to adorn the walls of their palaces and estates. Peopled with life-sized figures depicting scripture, myth and legend as well as hunting, falconry and winemaking, they brought color and life to drab, drafty halls. But adornment was only part of the purpose of these colossal works of art, says Rebecca Olson, who has spent more than a decade studying their role in literature and, by extension, in Renaissance society.  They also reinforced power and inspired loyalty by evoking tradition and royal status.

“I use the analogy of Kindles and e-readers and how they retain some of the elements of an actual book.”
— Rebecca Olson

“These tapestries were everywhere,” says Olson, an assistant professor in the Oregon State University School of Writing, Literature and Film. “Besides the magnificent large-scale hangings, there were smaller, cheaper versions adorning humbler settings. They were as ubiquitous as TV is today. They had practical uses, educational uses, political uses. You can’t really understand Renaissance literature unless you understand how they were used and how people thought about them.”

Crafted of wool and threaded with strands of silk, gold and silver, the most impressive tapestries sometimes unfurled 30 feet long and soared 15 feet high, all the better to awe, educate and even intimidate the viewer. Studying them can be a workout. Olson once slid herself along the cold stones of Hampton Court Palace to view the underside of an arras laid out on a rack for repairs. To examine details at the top, she often resorts to peering upward through a pair of binoculars. After days of scrutinizing every last detail, she can wind up with a serious crick.

“Just to look at them is very physical,” says Olson. “You’re moving because you can’t take them all in at once, so you’re craning your neck, you’re bending down, you’re walking up to look closely, you’re stepping back. My neck often hurts quite a bit.”

Stories from the Past

The first arras hangings she saw with her own eyes were in the banquet hall of England’s Hampton Court Palace. Even as frayed and faded as the massive tapestries were, she found them enchanting, particularly the heroic scenes depicting the labors of Hercules. The 500-year-old weavings felt like silent emissaries from Shakespeare’s era. As she gazed on them — realizing that the Bard’s contemporaries had sat among these very hangings eating, drinking and watching live actors perform — her arms prickled with goose bumps.

“Boar and Bear Hunt,” detail. (©Victoria & Albert Museum, London)

In the years since, she has discovered a rich — and largely overlooked — literary and historical presence for the arras, which she documents in her upcoming book, Arras Hanging: The Textile that Determined Modern Literature and Drama (University of Delaware Press, in press). The arras was, for instance, central to one of Shakespeare’s most dramatic scenes: Hamlet’s stabbing of Polonius. In Act III when Lord Polonius plots with Hamlet’s mother and stepfather to hide behind a tapestry to eavesdrop (“Behind the arras I’ll convey myself”), he makes a fatal mistake. Hamlet, hearing the hidden voice, thrusts his sword through the arras (translated as a “curtain” in some editions), killing Polonius.

“The idea of a prince damaging one of these very expensive tapestries really makes us wonder about Hamlet’s sanity in that scene,” Olson says. Modern audiences, she adds, would fail to grasp the import of his action without the historical context. “It’s like when a rock star smashes his expensive guitar. It has real shock value.”

In Book III of Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queen, one of the great classics of Renaissance literature, the writer devotes 18 stanzas to the virgin warrior Britomart’s night in a room draped floor to ceiling with arras tapestries (“For round about, the wals yclothed were With goodly arras of great majesty, Wouen with gold and silke…”). On the tapestries were bawdy scenes of debauchery and sensuality, which Spenser introduced to contrast with Britomart’s chastity.

Inspired to Reverence

For the rich and the royal, arras hangings were status symbols. They depicted ancient stories of valor and virtue. Often designed to inspire viewers to be braver and better, they also were instruments of political propaganda and puffery. King Henry VIII favored images of King David in an attempt to associate himself with the great biblical figure. Queen Elizabeth I lined her outer chambers with woven figures of small size, yet as the visitor proceeded toward her inner chambers, the figures got bigger and bigger. “They were supposed to make you feel smaller and smaller, so by the time you got to the queen you just felt tiny,” says Olson.

Boar and Bear Hunt.” (©Victoria & Albert Museum, London)

Olson’s research has taken her to the Tower of London and to the National Archives of the United Kingdom, where she scoured ancient ledgers and inventories for clues to ownership and transport of arras hangings. She also has found evidence that tapestries were used to teach a young prince about the Battle of Troy, and that queens gave birth in chambers swathed in weavings.

As important as the woven images is the literary symbolism embedded in the act of weaving. Olson points out that the words “text” and “textile” derive from the same Latin roots texo and texere — “weaving” or “to weave.” Even though the loom has largely disappeared from daily life, the metaphor (to weave a story, spin a tale, follow a narrative thread) has survived all these centuries, cropping up in our most advanced communications lingo (the Web, the Net, an email thread).

Just as many moderns cling nostalgically to bound books of paper and ink, Olson notes, medieval Europeans would have felt attached to stories told upon the tactile surface of a weaving, even as the printing press was beginning to push the technology.

Environmental philosopher Michael P. Nelson gamely copes with “ginormous” mosquitoes and gobs of “moose grease” as he necropsies a moose on Isle Royale in Lake Superior. (Photo: John A. Vucetich)

When Michael P. Nelson talks about his work, he mentions carcasses and cadavers to a startling degree — startling because Nelson is not a physician or a veterinarian or even a biologist. He’s a philosopher. So at first glance, necropsy seems an odd topic of discourse.  But it starts to make sense when you notice that Nelson’s office is in Oregon State’s College of Forestry, not the College of Liberal Arts where universities typically house their philosophers. And, as the only philosopher ever hired to lead one of the National Science Foundation’s 27 Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites — in this case, OSU’s H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest — Nelson again defies tradition.

“We started the search assuming we’d end up with some sort of ecologist, hydrologist or biophysical scientist,” recounts John Bliss, the associate dean of forestry who led the hiring process. “I knew we’d turned a corner when the ecologists on the committee stopped me in the hall to say things like, ‘Maybe a philosopher is what we need!’”
With -ologists already well represented, they opted instead for Nelson’s novel viewpoint. “Michael brings a philosopher’s logic to complex problems, unencumbered by disciplinary straitjackets,” Bliss says.

Mind Over Matter

To understand these discrepancies, you have to go back to Nelson’s hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin, where, in a high school anatomy class, he saw a dead body laid out on a steel slab. “I thought that cadaver was the coolest thing in the world,” he recalls. But once he got to college, the study of biology struck him as tedious. Too many equations to solve, too many chemical reactions to memorize. In contrast, he found himself relishing his philosophy classes. Ideas like the moral imperative and the inherent nature of being quickened his imagination. He soon switched majors and began to ponder the world on a cerebral rather than cellular level.

Michael P. Nelson

His fascination with biological systems, however, never went away. Eventually, this man whose mental petri dish was awash in syllogisms instead of cell divisions circled back to where he started — to that raw, physical nexus of life and death that is a carcass. It happened about a decade after he earned his Ph.D. at England’s Lancaster University, the cradle of environmental philosophy. By then, Nelson was teaching at Michigan State University, where he met John A. Vucetich, co-director of a long-term, multidisciplinary study of predator-prey dynamics. Vucetich invited Nelson to visit the study site: a wild, isolated, mist-wrapped island in Lake Superior. Nelson was enchanted. Soon he became the “resident philosopher” for Wolves and Moose of Isle Royale.

Which is how, in 2005, he came to be kneeling beside a pile of bones and sinews where wolves had devoured a moose. Every summer, Nelson participates in collecting biological samples, including scat and skulls, for DNA analysis and pathology studies. Now in its 55th year, the project has tracked the dynamics between wolves and moose over a timespan unprecedented in the annals of predator-prey studies. Surprising insights into island biogeography and wildlife management are emerging from the mists.

“What I really like about my work, is that it exists at the edges of disciplines.”

— Michael P. Nelson

Sting Like a Bee

In front of a crowd, Nelson moves nimbly, like a boxer, on the balls of his feet. An aura of great energy emanates from his face and hands. It’s clear that he’s in a hurry to push his thoughts outward. Planet Earth is, after all, poised on the cliff of calamity, he says during a joint presentation on ethics and climate change with OSU conservation philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore. He and Moore challenge the scientists in the audience to couple their facts (climate models, data sets, statistical analyses) to their values (as parents, as community members, as global citizens). It’s time to kick the advocacy taboo to the curb, the two philosophers exhort, arguing that meaningful action arises only when facts (“what is”) are welded to values (“what ought to be”).

To drive home the urgency of curbing fossil fuel use, Nelson cites sources as diverse as “Genesis” and Dr. Seuss. At last year’s meeting of LTER scientists nationwide he did a riff inspired by The Lorax. This scholar of striking contrasts can recite playful couplets one moment and the next, dare scientists to rethink the most basic assumptions of their careers.

“Look, we don’t know how to create careers in science that fully empower scientists,” Nelson tells a roomful of researchers. “What we do know is this: Everything has changed. You have taught us that. You should ask yourself some questions: Are the old forms of scientific practice working? Or do you need to create another path? What does it mean to be a scientist now? You are studying systems, ecosystems; you know about the necessity of connections. Live what you know. That’s integrity.”

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Read more

See details about Michael Nelson’s teaching, books, ongoing projects and affiliations.

Predator and Prey, a Delicate Dance, The New York Times, May 8, 2013

Wolves Teach Scientists Their Limitations, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 1, 2013

Stuart Sarbacker teaches on the theory, history and practice of yoga at Oregon State University. Listen to a podcast with Sarbacker.  (Photo: Theresa Hogue)

For many people, yoga is a form of relaxation. But in India, the birthplace of the exercise, yoga is beginning to stretch beyond the boundaries of one’s self and into the ecological realm. A new movement called “Green Yoga” encourages men and women who practice yoga — called yogis and yoginis — to strive for bettering their environment.

Green Yoga was pioneered by an influential Indian figure, Swami Ramdev. Stuart Sarbacker, assistant professor of philosophy at Oregon State University, has studied Ramdev, who hosts a daily show in India combining yoga and activism. He has attracted some 250 million viewers of all ages.

“Part of what drew me to study Swami Ramdev is this notion that inner transformation should be reflected outwards in some sort of transformation of the external world,” says Sarbacker. This idea is paramount in Green Yoga as well.

“What happens on the mat, so to speak, should translate into a transformed relationship with the world. That transformation may be reflected through personal choices, such as choosing organic foods, or it might mean buying a yoga mat made from natural rubber instead of plastic,” Sarbacker adds.

But Green Yoga doesn’t stop at consumer goods. Ramdev has used the practice to establish landmark status and protection for the heavily polluted Ganges River. Previously it was believed that the Ganges could not become dirty despite the dumping of untreated sewage and chemicals. But through non-violent protests and Green Yoga, Ramdev has created awareness for the river in both the people and the political leaders.

Sacred River

“One of the things that interests me very much is the idea that the Ganges historically was viewed as inherently pure. For most Hindus, it is in fact a Goddess, Gunga,” says Sarbacker. “Instead of thinking you can put whatever you want in the Ganges and she will always be pure, the discourse has shifted more towards what are we doing towards our sacred river, to our goddess by pouring our waste into it?”

Swami Ramdev (Photo: Wikipedia)

Sarbacker has written extensively on the theory, history and practice of yoga and is looking into the relationship between spirituality and environmental philosophy. He has focused specifically on Ramdev. “I’m using ethnographical and anthropological methods to create a snapshot of the development of a particular institution and really the life of a particular teacher, at a certain moment in time.”

Sarbacker wonders if Ramdev will next champion the topic of climate change in India. With the Ganges River being fed by receding glaciers, the water system is at risk, yet little attention has been brought to this issue. Whether Ramdev’s prominence will be sufficient to tackle it is yet to be determined, however with a stardom that has been compared to Oprah’s, he is in a position to do so.

Sarbacker is a certified yoga teacher in addition to being a professor. In spring 2013, he will teach a course at Oregon State about Green Yoga with an ecological consciousness.

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Listen to a podcast with Stuart Sarbacker here.

Parum Aqua Flora

Artist statement — Sidnee Snell.

I was originally attracted to the lacy quality of sections of Angelicque White’s photograph. However, as I began to work with it, a floral image began to appear. Although I have no idea whether the plankton should be considered flora or fauna, I decided to follow that theme. The result is Parum Aqua Flora.

Corvallis, Oregon 2012

For other works submitted to the Art of Plankton show, see Forms from the Sea.

Ken Krane, nuclear scientist and emeritus professor of physics, Oregon State University

The term “God particle” tends to rankle physicists. The flippant reference to the recently discovered particle believed to be the Higgs boson was coined by Leon Lederman, the former director of the Department of Energy’s Fermilab and Nobel Prize winning physicist. But, says Ken Krane, nuclear scientist and emeritus professor of physics at Oregon State University, had it not been for the name, the discovery might not have generated such headlines in July. It was good, he adds, to see physics in the news.

It’s no exaggeration to call the discovery momentous. In July, two teams working at the world’s largest atom smasher (the Large Hadron Collider at the European Center for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland) announced independently that they had strong experimental evidence for the existence of the Higgs. In an interview shortly after the announcement, Krane explained what scientists found, what it means for their science and why it matters to the rest of us.

Krane chaired the Oregon State Department of Physics from 1984 to 1998 and has written or edited nearly 20 books and monographs, as well as dozens of research articles. The American Association of Physics Teachers recognized his exceptional teaching by awarding him its Millikan Medal in 2004.

Terra: What did the physicists at CERN find?

Krane: Every time we bang particles together like we do at CERN, we create dozens of new particles. These are not particles in the sense that we ordinarily think of them. They live for a definite but very brief time and then decay into a multitude of other particles. We don’t see the original particles that were produced, but what we see is all the decay products that must live long enough to make it into the detector where they generate signals that we can record. If you add up all those signals, you can get to the mass of the particle that was created. So you need to be fairly sure you’ve captured everything. And then you’ve got to be fairly sure of what the background (random fluctuations of energy) is in that region. And that’s what they’ve done.

In this record of a proton collision at CERN, muon tracks are red, and electron tracks and clusters in the LAr calorimeter are green.

The result is a particle with a mass that is nothing special in terms of particles we normally deal with. It has about half the mass of a uranium atom. Not insignificant, but it’s not a huge massive particle in a realm that’s not been explored before.

Scientists talk about “a five-sigma result.” That’s five standard deviations (five times the average distance between all data and the mean), and that’s pretty secure, strong confirmation that this is a real observation, not just some random event. In my experiments in a very different area, if I were to see a peak on a background that is five standard deviations above the background, that’s a peak (evidence of a particle), not a fluctuation of the background. By analogy, in a random distribution of men with an average height of 6 feet with a standard deviation of 2 inches, someone who is 6’10” would certainly stand out.

Terra: What does it mean for physics?

Krane: We know an elephant is more massive than a mouse, and we understand why. The mass of a body is basically the total mass of all the atoms of which the body is composed, and there are more atoms in an elephant’s body than in a mouse’s body. At a more fundamental level, we understand why a single atom of a heavy element such as lead is more massive than a single atom of the lightest element, hydrogen. The mass of an atom is essentially the total mass of all its constituent protons and neutrons, and the lead atom has about 200 protons and neutrons while the hydrogen atom has only one. So a common way of understanding the mass of an object is on the basis of the masses of its constituent parts.

Particles have their particular masses because of how they interact with the Higgs field.
— Ken Krane

Unfortunately this type of logical reasoning breaks down at the most fundamental level. The electrons in an atom are members of a family of three particles that are “elementary” in the sense that they have no internal structure and can’t be taken apart into still smaller entities. The electron is the lightest member of this family. The other two members are 200 and 3500 times as massive as the electron. Why do these three particles have different masses? Why these particular values? And where does their mass come from if it can’t be accounted for in terms of constituents? This is the question that particle physicists have been trying to answer by searching for the Higgs particle.

In 1964, British physicist Peter Higgs proposed that the universe is filled with a force field now known as the Higgs field and that particles get their masses by interacting with this field. Each different particle has a different strength of interaction with this field, which results in the different masses for the particles. According to this explanation, particles would otherwise be massless, but they get their apparent masses by interacting with this gooey field, much as an object that flies effortlessly through air is more sluggish in traveling through water.

In theoretical physics, each type of force (gravity, electromagnetic, nuclear, etc.) can be accounted for through a force carrier, which is a type of particle called a boson. The force carrier for the Higgs field is known as the Higgs boson, and its observation would amount to a verification of Higgs’ hypothesis and the first step for scientists to be able to study the origin of mass. Now instead of throwing up our hands and saying, “Particles have their particular masses just because they do,” we can now say, “Particles have their particular masses because of how they interact with the Higgs field.” The latter explanation gives scientists a basis for a deeper understanding of the way the universe works, and it enables new experiments to study this interaction and achieve a better understanding of how mass originates.

The standard kilogram is housed at the International Bureau of Weights and Standards near Paris. The National Institute for Standards and Technology in the United States maintains an official copy.

From a scientific point of view, the concept of mass is not terribly well understood, nor is the standard of mass well defined in terms of measurable quantities. A century ago, we replaced other unit standards in physics, the standard second and standard meter, with very precise atomic standards. Originally the meter was based on two scratches in a bar kept in a vault in Paris. Everybody else could take their bar and compare it to the standard bar. That’s how standards of weights and measures were done.

Now, we’ve replaced the standard for length with an atomic wavelength and the standard of the second with an atomic frequency, and if you look at the dozens and dozens of basic standards in physics, they’ve almost all been replaced with very precisely determined atomic standards, except for mass. The standard of mass is this kilogram sitting in a glass bell-jar in a vault in Paris. We don’t yet have a way of going from that standard mass to an atomic mass.

Terra: What did it take for physics to arrive at this point?

Krane: The Large Hadron Collider (the “hadron” family includes particles such as protons and neutrons that interact through the so-called “strong” force) is a circular racetrack 17 miles long buried in a tunnel more than 500 feet below the border between France and Switzerland. It was designed to smash together beams of protons traveling in opposite directions around the circle at speeds in excess of 99.999999% of the speed of light. The accelerator, which began operating in 2008, was designed to optimize the search for the Higgs particle. It was built at a cost of approximately $9 billion by an international consortium of nations, because such a large project is beyond the science resources of any one nation. The European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), which operates the accelerator, includes several thousand scientists and engineers on its staff. Many more thousands of scientific visitors travel to CERN to participate in experiments.

The Large Hadron Collider was constructed by a consortium of nations to explore the fundamental nature of the universe at the subatomic level.

There are two detector systems at the LHC. Each reported results supporting the existence of the Higgs particle. The construction and operation of these detector systems involved in excess of 5,000 scientists from more than 30 countries and 200 universities and scientific institutes.

Terra: Why does it matter for society?

Krane: Science is a human endeavor, first of all. It is an indication of our desire, manifest for three millennia since the ancient Greeks first speculated about the existence of atoms, to achieve an understanding of the fundamental nature of matter. Our instincts as human beings push us toward a deeper understanding of nature. Just like small children, scientists are always asking “why?” and seeking answers.

The discovery of the Higgs field probably offers no cure for any disease. Nor will it solve the energy crisis or contribute to reversing global warming. But it does advance our understanding of the way the universe works at the most fundamental level.

In the 19th century, little was known about atoms or the ways that atoms combined to form chemical compounds. The development of the Periodic Table of the Elements showed that many thousands of chemical compounds could be understood on the basis of fewer than 100 basic building blocks, the chemical elements. And that understanding in turn led to successful theories of atomic structure and to the development of new chemical compounds and electronic devices that are now essential to our lives.

The situation was similar for particle physicists in the 20th century. Out of a complicated array of thousands of “elementary” particles came an underlying order called the Standard Model, which consisted of 6 “light” particles called leptons, 6 “heavy” particles called quarks, 4 field particles called bosons that are the carriers of the different forces by which the particles interact (electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear forces), and the Higgs boson. All of these components of the Standard Model have been observed in laboratories except the Higgs boson. It is the last remaining “element” of the Standard Model that is needed to complete our understanding of the fundamental nature of matter.

Even though the outcome of the research may have no immediate practical applications, the research leads to technological developments that benefit society. Research in high-energy particle physics has produced advances in the technology of particle accelerators, which are used for medical diagnosis and treatment. The need for better imaging of the results of particle physics experiments led to the development of devices that are now widely used in digital cameras. Complex particle physics experiments require advanced computing hardware and software. Computing techniques developed for these experiments are now being used to map the human genome and to search for new molecular structures that could be used to develop new types of medicines. The need to share large data files among international teams of particle physicists led to the development of the World Wide Web. In support of accelerators such as the European facility where the Higgs was observed, industries that build components, including superconducting magnets, computer systems and particle detectors, develop more efficient manufacturing and testing techniques that result in improved consumer goods.

Completing the Standard Model isn’t the end of particle physics. It’s not like people won’t be interested in it any longer and the graduate students will be going to other projects. There are still lots of interesting things to be found out there.

Physicists have identified 12 building blocks that are the fundamental constituents of matter. Our everyday world is made of just three of these building blocks: the up quark, the down quark and the electron. This set of particles is all that's needed to make protons and neutrons and to form atoms and molecules. (Image courtesy of Fermilab)

There are some other wrinkles that have been thrown into the Standard Model recently. The model was originally based on particles called neutrinos (three of the “light” particles in the Standard Model) having zero mass. That’s not true any longer. In the last 10 or 20 years, we’ve learned that neutrinos have a very, very tiny mass, but definitely not zero. The basics of the Standard Model don’t include neutrinos with mass. So already we have to fix it up because we don’t understand neutrino mass (and it’s not yet clear if the Higgs mechanism could be applied to give mass to the neutrinos).

Another mystery concerns the nature of “dark matter” which comprises about 25% of the universe (in addition to 5% ordinary matter and 70% “dark energy,” which is even less understood). Dark matter has mass and is affected by gravity, but it’s not composed of anything like ordinary matter, so it’s not there in the Standard Model. If you put things together in the Standard Model, you get the protons and neutrons of ordinary matter, and dark matter isn’t composed of protons and neutrons.

Another puzzle is why the Higgs mass has the particular value that it does. The Higgs particle can explain the masses of the other particles, but calculations of the mass of the Higgs particle come up with values many orders of magnitude bigger than the actual value that it seems to have, based on this discovery. So again, the models have to be fixed up to bring the Higgs mass down to this actual value.

Terra: This discovery is one of many that have changed our understanding of the subatomic world in the past several decades. How has your view of physics changed over the course of your career?

Krane: The quark model was introduced in the 1960s when I was a graduate student. Previous to that, there was a list of hundreds and hundreds of particles. There was no way of categorizing them or understanding them. Now we can talk about the substructure and interactions that produce these particles. You can understand the way these particles form groups and families, like the way you can talk in chemistry about compounds of halogens because they have certain characteristics and certain valences, and they form compounds in certain ways.

The other thing that I get excited about in the time since I was a graduate student is the coming together of astrophysics and particle physics, which were very separate realms. Astrophysics has become a precise experimental science in the last couple of decades, where we can now measure things to two or three significant figures. We can pin down the age of the universe within 1 percent and other parameters as well, such as the temperature of the universe, in the same way.

I mentioned that there are three members of the electron family. Each of these is paired with a member of the neutrino family, and there are also three pairs of quarks. Why do they match up and why only three? Should we build a big accelerator to find out if there’s a fourth generation of electron-like particles? The answer to that is “no.” We know that because the evolution of the early universe would have been measurably different if there had been four members of the electron family and four pairs of quarks. The early temperature would have been different. The early composition would have been different.

And the present composition, determined by its early evolution, would be different. Today we can study such characteristics of the universe as the relative amounts of helium and hydrogen or the relative amounts of deuterium (“heavy hydrogen”) and ordinary hydrogen, from which it can be concluded that there almost certainly cannot be another generation of electron-like particles or neutrinos. So there is no point in building an accelerator to search for such particles.

There are now numerous university research programs known as “particle astrophysics.” The two separate fields, one dealing with the very small and the other with the very large, have been joined into a new research specialty. Somehow, the theory of elementary particles is at some point going to have to work in the neutrino masses, which is an astrophysics discovery, and they’re also somehow going to have to include dark matter, which is another.

Someday in some accelerator we’ll be able to smash things together and create dark matter, whatever it is. The particle physicists will have to go to work to do those experiments and interpret those experiments and put the results into the framework of the Standard Model. It’s remarkable to see how these two fields have come together and have common goals in understanding the universe.

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Learn more about Oregon State research in nanoelectronics, photovoltaic and magnetic materials, biophysics, and computational and theoretical physics.

Scientists confirmed and updated their findings in papers published on August 1, 2012.

Read the July 4 announcement from CERN about the particle believed to be the Higgs boson.

Watch a video produced by CERN to explain how physicists came up with the Standard Model.

Cooking and sharing food connect OSU artist Julie Green to family and Midwestern roots. (Photo: Ha Lam, courtesy of Whole Foods Market)

In 1997, Julie Green had just moved to Norman, Oklahoma, when she sat down to read the local paper with her morning tea and toast. As she was looking at the column of news from around the state, she was riveted by an item describing an execution that had happened the previous night.

The column said a man, whose name Green does not recall now, died at 11:59 p.m. by lethal injection and that, at the time of death, his legs shook and his eyes became glassy and closed to a crescent. The story ended simply: “And his final meal was six tacos, six glazed doughnuts and a cherry Coke.”

“I was stunned,” Green says. “Of course, I had heard of last words. But I hadn’t heard last meals described in such detail.”

A newly hired artist in the University of Oklahoma’s art department, Green began clipping all the execution notices in The Norman Transcript. Oklahoma has the highest execution rate per capita in the United States, so she often was clipping several items per week. At the time, she wasn’t sure what she would do with this information. She only knew she felt compelled to keep collecting them.

“I collected the menus for a while, and I can’t really pinpoint why — it just bothered me,” Green says. “The meals brought me into this issue. I grew up in a family of wonderful cooks, and there was a lot of tradition with meals passed down through generations. And the idea of a meal whose purpose is not to sustain life, or be shared, but seems to have this other symbolic meaning, just compelled me.”

An Idea Is Born

When she accepted a position in the Oregon State University Department of Art in 2000, she began The Last Supper, a project that would translate her feelings into a public statement. Her first piece was a portrayal of those tacos and doughnuts that had caught her attention in Norman. Expressed through blue mineral paint fired on white porcelain plates, the series now has more than 500 pieces depicting last-supper choices by death-row inmates.

The work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, most recently at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. The Corvallis Arts Center plans a show in early 2013. National news media including Ceramics Monthly, Gastronomica and National Public Radio have featured The Last Supper, as has Dark Rye, an online magazine produced by Whole Foods Market. OSU-Cascades artist Henry Sayre has included text and images, as well as Green’s narrative tempera paintings, in the 2012 edition of his textbook A World of Art, published by Prentice-Hall.

At Oregon State, Green teaches painting, drawing and contemporary issues in art. In 2011, she received grant support from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Its prestigious award is given to only 25 contemporary artists a year to acknowledge painters and sculptors nationwide who create work of exceptional quality.

Green paints The Last Supper plates in her studio in a cozy historic bungalow in Corvallis, which she shares with her husband, artist Clay Lohmann. Every month or two, she loads newly painted plates into a dish rack and drives a slow half-mile to the home of artist and collaborator Antonia “Toni” Acock, who fires them in her ceramics kiln.

Green applies blue mineral paint on white porcelain to create each plate. (Photo: Ha Lam, courtesy of Whole Foods Market)

At home, Green is a warm hostess, welcoming guests with a pot of tea and a delicious dessert freshly baked, or a bowl of fruit picked from the trees and raspberry vines on their property. She attributes her hospitality to Midwestern family roots. Born in Japan to a naval officer father, she grew up in Des Moines and received both her undergraduate and graduate degrees from University of Kansas.

“My art was always encouraged, but I am from practical people,” Green says. “My grandmother taught in one room school house and my mother taught home ec before she had children. I could sew before I could walk.” Home crafts – sewing, cooking, quilting – were an essential part of Green’s household.

“I never saw the difference between museum art and quilts,” she says. “Perhaps that is why the plate project, and combining conceptual ideas with very basic visuals, is something that doesn’t intimidate me.”

As a college student, Green worked with Roger Shimomura, an acclaimed artist with more than 80 pieces in permanent collections around the world. Shimomura’s paintings and prints have decidedly political overtones that address Asian-American sociopolitical issues. He has followed Green’s development of The Last Supper.

“It’s important work; important because it deals with subject matter that no one else has dealt with in such creative terms,” Shimomura says. “Not only is it original, but it is well-crafted, thoughtfully considered and politically forthright. Good work that takes chances politically always draws attention.”

Green has said in media interviews that she plans to add 50 new plates to The Last Supper project each year until capital punishment is abolished. Does she ever worry that she has over-committed herself as an artist to such an overwhelming task?

“I did say I would continue until capital punishment is abolished, and I meant it. But if I felt like I wasn’t doing the project justice or I wasn’t connected to the work, I would take a break,” she says. “Because this is work that has to be meaningful; it can’t be me just going through the motions. I have to honor the painting and honor the memory of these people.”

Devotion to Story

In order to keep the project fresh and herself creatively inspired, Green spends six months per year working on The Last Supper plates. She devotes the rest of the year to her narrative paintings that are less well-known but for her, just as essential.

“Contemporary issues inspire me, and it comes out in my other work,” Green says. “I need that break from the plates, and I need to express myself in other ways.”

Green’s narrative paintings often have a whimsical tone. For example, in the summer of 2011, she painted a series of iPhones collected from friends and colleagues. More recently, she has started a series depicting figurative imagery on decorated plates, mostly drawn from memory.

One of Green’s signatures is her use of egg tempera, a painting technique that uses colored pigments mixed with egg yolk as an emulsifier. Known for their rich colors and durability, tempera paintings survive from the first century A.D. Green is one of the few art professors on the West Coast to teach this style.

Tala Madani, a 2002 OSU alumna, took an egg tempera workshop with Green and also accompanied her on a trip to tour art facilities in China. Madani is an Iranian-American artist who has gone on to international acclaim and splits her time between New York and Amsterdam.

“My art was always encouraged, but I am from practical people,” says Julie Green. (Photo: Ha Lam, courtesy of Whole Foods Market)

“Visually her work is very subtle, you get wheeled in and suddenly you don’t know what hit you,” Madani says. “Personally I respond strongly to Julie’s other works, her surrealist imagery and translucent paintings with egg tempera have always struck a very strong chord with me.”

Green has just finished another batch of The Last Supper plates, which includes a group from Virginia, the state with the second highest annual execution rate after Texas. When she began the project, she received last meal documentation through the prisons through fax or mail. Now, last-meal menus are often posted online, and she can be painting a plate within 24 hours of the execution.

National Survey

In 2005, she received a fellowship at the OSU Center for the Humanities, which allowed her to delve more deeply into the history and sociopolitical consequences of last meals. Along with a research assistant, Green contacted every state that had capital punishment and asked questions such as: Do you have a final meal? What is its purpose? What are the rules (do you allow restaurant meals, what is the spending limit)? She found many states have a $20 maximum spending limit; others, like Oregon, with fewer executions, don’t limit the amount.

“Many prisons I called said that meals were given for ‘good behavior,’” Green says. “If you don’t make a scene, you get a meal. And others had some interesting traditions. For instance, in Louisiana, your family can join you for the last meal.”

Texas, which accounts for more than a third of all executions in the U.S. since 1976, eliminated last meals for death row inmates in September 2011, after a state legislator called the meals a waste of money. The irony, Green says, is that most inmates have very simple requests, such a hamburger and fries or a slice of pepperoni pizza.

“In part it is because many of the inmates are from lower income backgrounds and that maybe is the meal they want,” Green says. “Many pick comfort food items, things they associate with home. They don’t have time to digest it anyway, and it’s not as if the meal is meant to sustain them. So what they do with it is their choice, I think.”

The OSU Center for the Humanities has awarded Green a fellowship to write a book titled The Last Supper in 2013.

Green is starting a new group of plates on which she repeatedly paints the words “Declined last meal.” That is what the documents she was sent from Virginia claimed the prisoners wanted.

She says it is perhaps best she didn’t know what she was getting into when she clipped that newspaper column while having her morning tea and toast in 1997. Maybe if she had known, she would have never jumped into the fray. But now as meal notices keep coming in from all over the country, the sense of urgency is as great as ever.

“Once I started, and I saw that this was a way to humanize those who have been portrayed as monsters, by making visual something we all share — the love and comfort of food — I couldn’t stop,” Green says. “It opened my mind and made me an activist, so my hope is that this work somehow does that for others.”

__________________________

See a review of Green’s project on The Salt, National Public Radio’s food blog.

Ancient Blood Brothers

Like the “sloth moth,” which lives only in the fur of the ambling two-toed and three-toed mammals, the “bat fly” exists only in the fur of the winged, cave-dwelling mammals. Now scientists know that the flea-like, blood-sucking fly has been hanging around with bats for at least 20 million years. That’s because an unfortunate bat fly became entombed in a sticky glob of tree sap eons ago and has been there ever since, preserved in the solidified amber. Bat flies coevolved with bats, explains one of the world’s leading amber experts, OSU zoologist George Poinar Jr., who discovered the fossilized fly in the semi-precious stone from the Dominican Republic.

Reported in this week’s issue of the journal Science, the findings could lead to new understandings about the molecules that drive processes in biology, medical diagnostics, nanotechnology and other fields.

X-ray reflections between the black and green lines hold useful information but are typically discarded. (Image courtesy of Andy Karplus)

Like dentists who use X-rays to find tooth decay, scientists use X-rays to reveal the shape and structure of DNA, proteins, minerals and other molecules. As X-rays pass through the lattice of atoms, they reflect distinctive patterns, and scientists use those patterns to determine what atoms are present and how atoms are bonded to each other. However, some data are typically discarded because of concerns over quality. In particular, data derived from edge regions of the pattern — although very important for understanding the details of structure — are often overwhelmed by the random errors associated with measuring a weak signal in the midst of a lot of background noise.

Oregon State University biophysicist Andy Karplus and his colleague Kay Diederichs at the University of Konstanz in Germany have now proven that useful information can be gleaned from data that have up to about five times the noise levels that have previously been considered acceptable. “The criteria that have been used in the past are way too conservative,” said Karplus. “These data that people have been throwing out are actually good.”

The bottom line for crystallographers is the accuracy of their molecular models, those physical representations of the arrangement of atoms. The better the model, the better it will predict the pattern created by X-rays passing through a molecule, and the better it will be for guiding the development of new drugs and nanotechnologies that operate at the molecular scale. Although the first X-ray diffraction pattern was recorded 100 years ago and the first protein structures were determined 50 years ago, scientists have struggled to find statistical methods to connect data quality and the accuracy of their models.

This chart offers proof that data at the edges of X-ray reflection patterns contribute to model accuracy. (Image courtesy of Andy Karplus)

The new method may be the most important conceptual advance in the past 20 years in how these data are used in modeling, the scientists said. In 1992, statistics were developed to ensure that models were not biased by randomness or “noise.” The new method carries that further by showing how data from parts of the measurement where noise becomes stronger can still provide information that makes the model more accurate. It also allows scientists to see directly where the model is limited by noise in the data and where the model is a better estimate of molecular structure than experimental data.

“The question is, ‘Where do we cut it off?’” said Karplus, whose research focuses on protein structure and stability. By adding data at incremental steps and showing how the model improved, Karplus and Diederichs showed that scientists had been cutting off their analyses too soon and discarding data that could sharpen their view of molecular structure.

“The big impact on the field will be that every structure determined from here on out will be a little more accurate because people won’t throw away data that are OK. If you have a crummy image of the protein, it will get a little sharper. If you have a good image of the protein, it will also get a little sharper,” added Karplus.

For example, he noted, some enzymes work in concert with water molecules embedded within their structure. However, it takes data at a certain level of detail (about 2.6 angstroms) to discern exactly where water molecules are suspended between the atoms of an enzyme. If X-ray data at that scale were being discarded, it could mean that the scientists are not able to conclusively demonstrate the presence of water and thus cannot properly understand how the enzyme works.

While the method will be an important step for X-ray crystallographers, Karplus and Diederichs think that other physical sciences may also find ways to benefit from this type of data quality analysis. They also discovered that one branch of science has been using this type of statistical analysis for many years. The field of psychometrics — the analysis of data from psychological tests — has used a similar technique called the “Spearman-Brown prophecy formula” to determine the minimum length of such tests.

Andy Karplus

Kay Diederichs

Karplus and Diederichs have worked together off and on since 1985 when Karplus was an Alexander von Humboldt post-doctoral fellow in Germany. In 1997, they published a paper demonstrating that certain statistics used in analyzing X-ray crystallography data were misleading, but few crystallographers have adjusted their practices since that time. In 2011 during a sabbatical leave, Karplus visited with Diederichs in Germany to develop the new method. “Now that we know that very noisy data are useful, this will presumably enable still further improvements as it stimulates new software development to do a better job of handling such weak data,” said Karplus.

The paper is also the subject of a Perspectives piece in the same issue of Science by Phil Evans of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. The research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Illustration by Teresa Hall

Like a bunch of teens left unsupervised, humans have been running amuck ever since crude oil first gushed forth on a Pennsylvania farm in the 1800s. Our 200-year-long “fossil-fuel party” has made modern life possible but has fouled the environment and ignited catastrophic changes in Earth’s climate.

“We’re like juveniles throwing a big party,” says OSU’s Allen Thompson, an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy. “The house is a mess, the goldfish are dying, the plants haven’t been watered. We’ve screwed up everything.”
As we awaken to the sobering consequences of unfettered consumption, we can take several tacks, Thompson argues. We can give in to despair or denial. We can continue trying to mitigate damage by cutting carbon emissions. Or we can begin adapting to our radically altered world.

Thompson doesn’t suggest for a minute that we shouldn’t do everything in our power, personally and politically, to curb greenhouse gas emissions. But, as he notes in a rueful tone, international mitigation efforts have so far failed to slow the trajectory of worldwide warming. Even if nations suddenly clamp down, there’s enough carbon dioxide already wrapping the planet to alter conditions for thousands of years.

Choosing Optimism

Thompson admits to bouts of anxiety about where we’re headed. As an undergrad at The Evergreen State College, where he was part of a “very liberal, environmentally minded, progressive set of young nouveau-hippies,” he first read The End of Nature, Bill McKibben’s now-classic book on global warming. It has haunted him ever since. But rather than succumb to hopelessness, he set about constructing a philosophical framework for at least a limited form of optimism.

Our best chance for bequeathing to our children an intact planet and an ethical society — a “life worthy of human dignity” — is adaptation, Thompson has concluded. When he talks about adaptation, however, he’s not talking about girding seaside towns against storm surges or planting drought-resistant crops (although those kinds of measures certainly are needed). Rather, he’s talking about nothing less than a radical transformation of our humanity. Our current idea of adapting to climate change is too limited for a ravaged world; it’s more akin to “coping” or only reducing vulnerability, he says. Besides, the strategies we typically put forward — exporting new energy technologies, for example, or sending money to poor nations for desalination plants — while helpful, too often are also effective at preserving or extending the very economic framework and consumer culture that created the climate crisis in the first place.

So if we hope to flourish in this human-dominated geologic era (which scientists like Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen are calling the “Anthropocene”), we must reinvent ourselves, Thompson argues in Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change: Human Virtues of the Future, a new book of essays from The MIT Press that he co-edited with Jeremy Bendik-Keymer of Case Western Reserve University. We must redefine what it means to be a good human, both individually and collectively.

Ecological Identity

“Adapting to new conditions really means changing yourself,” Thompson says. “The scale of change we’re facing with global warming is unprecedented in human history. It will put a tremendous strain on our social orders and our governmental patterns. It will threaten our very mode of civilization. We have to start rethinking not only our individual character traits but also our institutions so we can move toward a new global ecology. It is crucial that we think of human excellence ecologically.”

In a few short millennia, the human species has altered its mother planet irrevocably. Just as we are the only animals capable of such profound impact, so we are the only ones capable of reparation and restoration. In this fact lies our greatest duty, says Thompson.

“Humanity now has the role of managing the global biosphere,” he writes. “We were neither designed nor destined for this; only the contingent course of history has made it so. … Human beings are now managers of the planet in the sense that collectively our actions determine the basic conditions for the existence of all life on Earth.”

Illustration by Teresa Hall

I remember when I felt that the climate change workshop would go well. After a period of planning and preparation, our Oregon Sea Grant team arrived in Port Orford not knowing how the diverse community group would respond to the issue of a changing local climate when we were all actually face to face. So, after introductions and a brief discussion of some overall goals, our team explained why and how to make a “concept map” — each individual’s simple diagram of how he or she perceived a particular idea — in this case, the local effects that they were concerned about and that they thought might be linked to a changing climate.

For about 10 minutes, the group worked on their own concept maps and then put post-its next to each other on sheets of poster paper. As we all looked at the array, the 10 community members — a schoolteacher, fisherman, mayor, city manager, environmental leader and others — saw that they held both concerns in common and some that were individually distinct. Through discussion, we rearranged the post-its into clusters until everyone was satisfied with the way their concerns had been sorted.

“Everyone’s ideas are up there” … “no one’s excluded” … “we’re beginning to see an overall picture,” said members of the group. Bingo. With contentious issues such as climate change, a good place to begin is to have each voice within the group be heard.

This isn’t the end-point, of course, but it does highlight what’s often missing from national discussions of climate change and what can happen in a small group context in a workshop: actual two-way communication, listening respectfully, contributing respectfully.

Know the Audience

We started listening long before the face-to-face meeting. Like other professional communicators and similar climate programs on campus, including those of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute, my Extension, education and research colleagues and I use methods such as surveys, focus groups and interviews with target populations before we start engaging them on the substantive issues — what a particular community may want to do around climate change.

From our 2008 surveys of coastal decision makers in Oregon and coastal property owners in Maine, for example, we learned about not only what information related to climate effects they thought they needed, but also what personal attitudes and other behavioral factors they held that were influencing their actions and intentions to act on information. Without understanding those attitudes and beliefs, we wouldn’t really know what information might be directly useful or how best to present it. In both states, one communication tool we used was short videos that specifically addressed concerns the intended viewers expressed. (Follow-up surveys confirmed their value.)

Focusing on the decisions that individuals and communities feel they need to make to address a recognized problem yields a much more constructive conversation than does focusing on global warming itself, we find. No surprise there, really: if coastal residents are concerned about flooding, that’s tangible and relevant to them. Whether people caused it by increasing use of fossil fuels that led to global warming is, for most, an abstraction — and an invitation to argument.

Public Opinion on Global Warming

Americans certainly have differences on the subject, which puzzles some people. How do we explain that despite about two decades of scientific pronouncements about global warming and the environmental, economic, and social hazards that it presents, just 63 percent of Americans now believe that global warming is happening? Only 50 percent believe it’s mostly caused by human activities, and that percentage has declined 7 points since 2008, even while global greenhouse gas emissions have increased, according to an ongoing study by Yale and George Mason universities (nationwide survey of adults conducted by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication in November 2011).

Clearly, if “getting the word out” about the science was the only determinant of whether Americans believe the science about humanity’s contribution to global warming, we’d have higher percentages believing than 50%. But, of course, the calculation that each of us makes with the myriad of topics that are presented to us daily is far more complex than if we were blank sheets walking around waiting to be filled by indisputable facts.

If the understanding and framing are used to promote respectful dialogue, this seems like good manners. If they’re used only to construct persuasive “messages,” however, this seems just like more of the same one-way monologue.

We’re all drowning in information and in competing claims on our time, making attention the scarce resource, as psychologist Herbert Simon observed way back in 1971 (“Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” in Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore, MD, The Johns Hopkins Press). Before we turn up the volume on this or that “communication” about science, then, a good first question would be, have we dialed into the right frequency that the other party is tuned to? Guessing isn’t good enough. As a recent federal government report about climate communication pointed out, “there’s no such thing as an expert in communication, in the sense of someone who can tell you ahead of time (i.e., without empirical study) how a message should be framed, or what it should say.”

Hence the research that we do on the populations we hope to work with. Beyond the empirical research and specific communication strategies we employ as a result, our team uses tools from behavioral and decision research to guide our efforts. Still, I agree that gaining others’ attention by focusing on concerns of importance to them and providing information that helps with their decisions are worthwhile, even if they are missing part of the challenge. What is to be done — if anything — about the 25% of Americans in the Yale/George Mason research who are “dismissive” or “doubtful” about global warming — and who may be actively hostile, even in the face of the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists?

Values Before Facts

Probably the first thing to recognize is that for all of us — except maybe the climate scientists themselves — every new science “fact” is not a fact of our direct experience but rather one received from someone else. Thus, either we have to collect evidence about it or accept the words of others. “So, just like any other kind of fact,” as researcher Dan Kahan of Yale mentioned during an interview that’s part of our Communicating Climate Change podcast series, “your beliefs are going to be influenced by your values in exactly the same way as any other kind of belief that you might form.” (see a transcript of Kahan’s remarks)

Those who do believe scientists tend to have one set of “cultural” values, according to Kahan and his colleagues in the Cultural Cognition Network, while those who don’t, typically have another set. So, for example, if today’s fact appears to undercut other deep-seated value beliefs that are far more important to you than the fact du jour, what do any of us do? We tend to discount the “fact.” So don’t expect all Americans to suddenly believe any particular thing.

What one does with this insight to improve science communication is a topic of intense interest and discussion among communication researchers and practitioners. (Indeed, the National Academy of Sciences is holding a conference to discuss the “Science of Science Communication” in May.) Many advocate using an understanding of others’ values to frame scientific information in a way that’s congenial to those others. If the understanding and framing are used to promote respectful dialogue, this seems like good manners. If they’re used only to construct persuasive “messages,” however, this seems just like more of the same one-way monologue.

Being sensitive to the other person, curious about them, attempting to understand them and what they think about the topic of the communication, and responding to them thoughtfully as they engage the conversation — we know this works in our personal lives. It’s not the end, but it may be a way forward. Even with communicating about climate change.

That is about to change.

Joseph Spatafora, a botanist at Oregon State University, sits in front of a computer system that will store the data that he and an international team generate as they sequence the full set of chromosomes for 1,000 fungus species. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

A new study headed by Joseph Spatafora, an Oregon State University professor of botany and plant pathology, will use powerful new tools of genomics to learn more about fungi. Spatafora and an international team of scientists will sequence the full set of chromosomes for 1,000 fungus species, creating at least two reference genomes for each recognized family within the fungal kingdom.

This project builds on the knowledge created by a previous 10-year study called Assembling the Fungal Tree of Life, also led by Spatafora. That study helped to develop a classification system of fungi from around the world and paved the way for creating a reference encyclopedia of what fungi exist, how they are related, what they do and how they do it.

“With this genome encyclopedia we’ll have access to the playbook of fungi,” Spatafora said, adding that the playbook is important to carbon cycling, food science, environmental cleanup, human health and more.

Species Unknown

There are an estimated 1.5 million species of fungi, yet only about 100,000 species have been described. Spatafora credits recent advances in gene sequencing technology that will make it possible to unravel genetic details with speed and accuracy.

“We’ve used fungi for so many services to society for centuries without much knowledge about how they are assembled at a genomic level. Think about what we can discover with this powerful knowledge,” he said.

The 1000 Fungal Genomes project is one of 41 projects funded through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute whose purpose is to enable scientists from universities and national laboratories around the world to explore the hidden world of microbes and plants for solutions to major challenges in energy, climate and environment. Spatafora leads an international team of researchers, including Jason Stajich at University of California at Riverside and Igor Gregorlev of the DOE Joint Genome Institute.

Masters of Life

Fungi have an enormous impact on life and ecosystem functioning, as decomposers, pathogens, and essential components of the global carbon cycle. They are capable of degrading almost any biological material as well as many synthetic compounds. Therefore, fungi are useful in the development of alternative fuels, carbon sequestration and bioremediation of contaminated sites.

In order to harness this potential, the 1000 Fungal Genomes project will build a reference library as a foundation for accurate analyses of the enormous volumes of data that will be created through genomic research.

Tricholoma cf. terreum grows on a forest floor in Oregon’s Coast Range. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

Fungal species to be analyzed will come from at least five science centers around the world, including University of Missouri at Kansas City; University of Arizona; USDA Center for Forest Mycology Research; USDA Northern Regional Research Laboratory; and the Centraalbureau voor Schimmelcultures Fungal Biodiversity Centre, the Netherlands.

The first year of the five-year project focuses on some of the most diverse classes of fungi that have been studied so far in these culture collections. As the project matures and as knowledge grows, the research will expand to include questions of sampling strategy, curation of data, research and analytical protocols, training and publications.

See more information on the 1000 Fungal Genomes project.

“Many of the people who spoke to me that week were elderly widows whose husbands had died because they were uranium miners,” says Richards, “but many of the Navajo didn’t speak any English. They didn’t know what they were mining. They weren’t alerted to any of the health effects.”

As a peace activist, Linda Richards has been inspired by Linus Pauling's legacy. (Contributed photo)

At the time, Richards was a journalist traveling across the United States with the Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament. After she spent a week listening to the Navajo elders, she was inspired to dedicate her life to educating others about nuclear issues.

“When I listened to the elders speak,” Richards says, “they asked me to tell people about what I had learned about their disproportionate exposure. They wanted to have a voice in discussions about nuclear issues.”

Over the past twenty-five years, she has worked to raise global awareness of the importance of nuclear fallout, the mining of indigenous lands and nuclear disarmament. Her visit to the Navajo Nation ultimately inspired her to pursue a doctorate in the History of Science Program at Oregon State University.

“My whole goal,” Richards explains, “is to open a space for indigenous people to speak in their own voices about their experiences and their own feelings.” To help that happen, she wants to organize national and global conferences to build connections between indigenous people, environmental historians, scientists and educators. Richards hopes to use her role as an educator to start conversations about nuclear issues. Already, she has used her passion for social justice to break down historic barriers and unite people across the divide of nuclear politics.

Today, Richards is finishing her doctoral degree by writing a dissertation on the disparities in radiation safety and environmental justice. In addition, she is teaching a class on science and politics and developing a curriculum to teach undergraduates about nuclear history.

Human rights, she says, are intimately connected to the history of nuclear technologies. “I want to bring these subjects together, because, in people’s lives, they are connected,” she says. To Richards, it is especially important that college students learn about nuclear history, so that they have the knowledge to make decisions about issues such as disarmament, waste disposal and energy.

Safe Space for Dialogue

Richards recognizes that, as an academic and an activist, she holds a certain set of beliefs on nuclear issues. As a teacher, she strives to create a safe, open atmosphere for all of her students. “My approach has always been that I want to make a safe space to hear from everyone,” she says. “As a teacher, I feel very comfortable saying who I am and listening to other people about who they are and what they think. I want people to feel comfortable and valued.”

Indeed, over the years, Richards has connected to many people across the political spectrum in her work towards world peace and environmental justice. “I’ve found that you get a lot more done when you work with people who aren’t of the same mindset as you and when you learn from people.”

In 2007, as part of her master’s capstone course in non-profit management at Southern Oregon University, Richards worked with Major Travis Lee to establish a veteran’s resource center at the college. The Ashland community was surprised to see a peace activist collaborating with a soldier, but Lee and Richards were connected by their compassion for veterans. That year, Oregon U.S. Rep. Greg Walden awarded them the Outstanding Citizenship Award.

Richards has also worked closely with scientists and engineers at OSU’s Radiation Center. “I have had really wonderful relationships with people at the nuclear engineering department, and I value those relationships because I learn so much,” Richards says. “The nuclear engineering department sponsored one of my favorite seminars, ‘Getting to Zero’, where they invited nuclear experts in to discuss disarmament.

“I really believe that all of us have the best intentions here,” she adds. “We might think there are different ways to get to the same goal, but figuring out how to work together so that we can move forward is very important to me.”

The Pauling peace and public health legacy converged with Navajo culture in 2011 when Linda Richards arranged for Navajo elders to visit the Pauling archives at OSU. From left: Chris Petersen (OSU archivist), Oliver Tapaha, Elsie Mae Begay, Linda Richards, Jeff Spitz, Perry H. Charley (Photo courtesy of Jill MacKie)

Richards serves as an active member of the Nuclear International Research Group, an academic organization with public policy makers, historians and environmental scientists. And she continues to work with members of the Navajo community to raise awareness of the uranium contamination on Native American lands. She has traveled to three Oregon universities and to Arizona with three Navajo people: Elsie Mae Begay, an elder; Perry H. Charley, a uranium contamination scientist and professor at Diné  College; and Oliver Tapaha, an OSU Ph.D. graduate (ABD) in Education. Together, with filmmaker Jeff Spitz, they speak to audiences about the contamination of Navajo lands, as seen in the film “The Return of Navajo Boy.”

A Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leadership Fellow (awarded locally by the Oregon University System) and an American Chemical Foundation Doan Fellow, Richards also has attended international meetings in Europe, Japan and Canada and visited communities, such as Hiroshima, that are still affected by nuclear issues. For her extensive research in the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Special Collections at OSU, she was been named a Resident Scholar. In November, Richards and fellow OSU Resident Scholar Mina Carson will travel to Paris to deliver their papers on Ava Helen Pauling and the nuclear fallout controversy.

Despite all of the sickness and suffering she has seen, Linda remains amazingly positive. “We are all trying to create a world that we can live in and we are proud of,” she says. “History brings us all to the table, so we can talk. It’s not judgmental. I think if you bring in a lot of the different histories that people have created, you can find a way to move forward.”

Villagers work together to transplant rice into the paddy in late spring. (Photo: Jenna Tilt)

The young Chinese laborer was desperate. Like millions of other migrant workers in China’s dash to industrialize, he had left his home and family to work in a factory in the rural interior. Now, environmental officials had closed the zinc smelter in Futian where he worked, and without a job, nearly out of money and separated from his support community, he knocked on the door of the inquisitive American who had been conducting interviews in the village. He asked the foreigner if he could help him with another job or a bus ticket back home. Then he broke down in tears.

“I suspected that he was just looking for money,” writes Bryan Tilt in his 2010 book, The Struggle for Sustainability in Rural China. Tilt, who was a University of Washington graduate student at the time, told the man to come back later and consulted with his landlord, Li Jiejie. She had an extensive family network throughout the region, the arid foothills of southern Sichuan Province. Eventually, Jiejie helped Tilt find the man a job carrying mortar at a construction project. The pay was less than half of what he had made at the smelter.

The laborer’s problems were not unusual. Workers like him, China’s so-called “floating population,” have transformed the Chinese countryside by operating make-shift mines and factories, often living with their families in industrial compounds fouled by coal smoke, polluted water and other wastes. In the 1980s, more than 100 million people moved from agriculture to industry — the largest employment shift ever recorded.

When Tilt, now an Oregon State University anthropologist and a Fulbright scholar, first visited Futian in 2001, it was a poor isolated village of rice farmers. Most residents call themselves Shuitan zu, literally “rice paddy people.”

The local government had built an industrial compound that housed facilities for smelting zinc, washing coal and producing coke for a steel mill in Panzhihua, the region’s largest city. Flush with revenues from the factories, the town had constructed new cement buildings with storefronts and a six-story high-rise office building faced with white tiles to house municipal offices. On a small stream, it erected a dam to produce electricity.

This prosperity came at a price. Acrid coal smoke choked the industrial compound and wafted over homes and farm fields. The stream, a tributary to the Yangtze, ran black with effluents. Children played in slag heaps and other refuse from the factories.

“Piles of coal and ore-slag lay strewn about the factory compound,” writes Tilt. “When it rained, pools of black industrial sludge collected in ruts and potholes in the road and in villagers’ courtyards and gardens.”

Interviews in the Smoke

Tilt had come to Futian to talk with villagers, workers and government officials about their attitudes toward development and pollution. His goal was to reach a deeper understanding about environmental values in China and to learn how people responded to problems and sought redress for damages.

Bryan Tilt interviewed workers in this zinc smelter. It was closed in 2001. (Photo: Bryan Tilt)

For anthropologists, fieldwork means interviews, so Tilt visited people in their homes and offices, scribbling hurried notes in English and Mandarin, which he speaks fluently. (“As an anthropologist, you really can’t understand people except through their language,” he says.) He created questionnaires and asked villagers to fill them out. Enveloped in coal smoke with a handkerchief over his mouth, he interviewed workers in the factory compound.

Although he would have preferred to use a tape recorder to document his discussions, he found quickly that people were reluctant. “People don’t want to talk into tape recorders,” he says. “Recent political history has told them that doing things on the record can be dangerous.”

At times, the conversations were casual and relaxed. Residents honored their guest with refreshments before talking about more serious matters. “In China, you don’t just show up and start doing your work and start pushing your agenda. You eat and you drink. There’s an expectation that you socialize together,” Tilt says. In Futian, Tilt was often served a homemade liquor called bai-jiu, a drink that challenged his palette. “It was like gasoline, only less tasty,” he says.

Conventional wisdom about a society’s attitude toward the environment holds that in the early stages of development, nature takes a back seat to more pressing needs, such as food, warmth and shelter. And yet what Tilt found during his fieldwork was that local farmers and townspeople, most of whom lived in houses with dirt floors and made the equivalent of less than $500 a year, put a high priority on clean air and water.

It wasn’t just a matter of treating nature as sacred. Although traditional Chinese religions (Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism) regard humans as intimately linked to the environment, farmers told Tilt that pollution reduced their crop yields and made the stream unusable for irrigation and livestock. Other residents complained that the coal smoke and black water made them and their children sick.

“These are people who rely on the land to make a living. If their crops fail, they’re done for. That’s a very pragmatic basis for an environmental value,” says Tilt.

Out of Compliance

In fact, it was pollution of agricultural water that broke the back of Futian’s industrial enterprises. In 2000, a group of farmers appealed to local government and to regional environmental officials to have the factories closed.

Two years later, as the pollution continued to spew from the industrial compound, the farmers took a page from environmental activists in the West and called in the media. A TV reporter used a hidden camera to record the owner of the zinc smelter saying that his factory was too profitable — to himself and to the village — to be closed. A month later, environmental officials issued a written order closing the factories for noncompliance with emissions standards.

During the dry season, farmers carry fodder home for livestock to eat. (Photo: Jenna Tilt)

“It’s often the case that wealth and privilege are a way of buffering yourself against some of those risks,” says Tilt. “These people were on the front lines. They didn’t have those buffers.” To underscore the point, he notes that he and his wife Jenna bought bottled water to drink during their visits to Futian. Most residents did not have that luxury.

“So a lot of what I found ran completely counter to that idea that you need to reach a certain level of economic development before you even care about environmental issues,” he adds. “I think the reason is that these are people who, precisely because of their low socioeconomic position, were directly experiencing the impacts of a local pollution problem.”

In fact, Futian had only recently solved what the Chinese call wenbao wenti, the “warmth and fullness problem,” says Tilt. Many older residents remembered the famine during the Cultural Revolution, when people ate grass from steep, dusty hillsides above the town alongside their livestock (a time some sardonically referred to as “the era of green shit”).

Time for the Opera

Today, they don’t go hungry. They grow more than enough food — rice, vegetables, pork, chicken, beef — to feed themselves and to supply markets downriver in Panzhihua. Satellite TV dishes have even appeared outside some of the ubiquitous mud-walled houses (“I like to watch the Beijing Opera,” one woman told Tilt). In the busy morning market, villagers shop, chat with each other and play mahjong.

Tilt’s interviews show an unexpected divide among people based on where they lived and worked. Whereas many farmers and townspeople objected to the pollution, most factory workers like the young man who had knocked on his door thought that it was harmless or, at worst, easily remedied. They constantly downplayed the health risks, says Tilt. “They had been doing this work for years with no problems. They didn’t worry about it,” he adds.

Nevertheless, a woman who worked in a local health clinic told Tilt that factory workers often came to her complaining of respiratory problems and difficulties breathing. “There is nothing really that we can do for them,” she said.

While closing the factories may have cleared the air in Futian, it also left workers without jobs and the owners deep in debt. Tilt got to know some of the workers and spent his free time with the owner of the zinc smelter, Mr. Zhang, a retired college-educated school teacher who had sunk his life savings into the enterprise. The local government had attracted him to the area with promises of rich natural resources and tax breaks. Now he felt betrayed.

Before he went to China, Tilt considered the factories to be “faceless entities plotting to destroy the environment. They weren’t like that,” he says. “They were people like you and me who were trying to do right by their families. They were trying to make a living. They were doing it under tremendous uncertainty. The political and economic climate in China can change, turn on a dime. If the Party comes out with a new policy and it affects you, you’re out of luck. So there’s a Wild West mentality where, you gotta get what you can get now and move on.”

The factory closures in Futian have been repeated across the country, evidence that environmental protection is being taken more seriously in China. Tilt expects to see continued progress as the government invests in pollution control and alternative energy technologies.

“China is kicking our butts on renewable energy technology,” he says. “It’s because the central government has decided to do that. They have a plan to spend $800 billion on wind, wave, solar and hydroelectric. They are putting a lot of energy, initiative and money behind developing these technologies. And we are sitting around going, ‘Who should take the lead on this?’ Guess what, 10 years from now, they’re going to have all the capacity, and we are not.”

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OSU anthropologists work in Oregon and around the world. Every summer, the Archaeology Field School offers opportunities to literally dig into Pacific Northwest history. See more about faculty research and educational programs in the Department of Anthropology.

A member of the southern Sichuan extended Li family and author of a book on minority cultures discusses his research with Bryan Tilt. (Photo: Jenna Tilt)

He majored in Asian Studies at Utah State and focused further on environmental issues and values as a University of Washington graduate student. With its emerging environmental problems, China seemed like a logical place to study the tension between environment and economy at the grass roots. However, his first experience in the industrial city of Harbin in Manchuria didn’t go well. “I had so many doors slammed in my face, I couldn’t get the work done,” he remembers.

It took a phone call to his adviser in Seattle and a connection to a research colleague at the Sichuan Nationalities Research Institute in Chengdu to open the door in Futian. Within a few frenzied days, he was doing interviews in the village.

In 2012, Tilt and his family (OSU faculty research associate Jenna Tilt and their children Avery and Miriam) will return to China. With support from a Fulbright Scholarship, Bryan will conduct interviews in Yunnan Province to investigate how people balance hydropower and dams with values such as biodiversity, community preservation and sustainability.

Working with OSU faculty colleagues Desiree Tullos (Biological and Ecological Engineering) and Aaron Wolf (Geosciences), Tilt has contributed to a decision-making model for future dam construction. In the current work, they are focusing on the Mekong and Nu (Salween) rivers.

Under the guidance of volunteer docent Harry Tomson, the touch tank at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport captivates Noah Goodwin-Rice, left, and his mom Cait Goodwin. (Photo: Jim Folts)

Science museums like the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland aren’t new. But the strength of their impact surprises even museum expert and advocate John Falk, a professor of science education and renowned proponent of “free-choice” (beyond school) learning.

“Overall, the results were staggering — much more positive than I could have imagined,” says Falk, who led the multi-year study of visitors to the California Science Center in Los Angeles.

Not only did thousands of visitors and their children report learning a lot about science and technology from the museum, but they also got a big boost in long-term interest. Many of them could even define the term “homeostasis” after viewing an exhibit where a 50-foot-tall animated puppet named Tess explained the biological process.

One of the takeaway messages: Classrooms are only one source of science learning.

“It has long been assumed that formal schooling is the primary mechanism by which the public learns science,” explain Falk and his coauthor Mark Needham in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching. “But in recent years there has been a growing appreciation for the fundamental role played by the vast array of non-school science education institutions.”

Hard data on the role museums play in science learning gives momentum to the growing free-choice movement. Museums and other programs outside the K-12 system exist as “launching points” that inspire people to seek more understanding and explore on their own, says Falk.

“Many people have believed that such institutions could do this,” he adds. “But this study provides some of the first definitive evidence that it works.”

Neebinnaukzhik Southall wants to use graphic design to further the cultural reclamation under way in Native American communities. (Photo: Frank Miller)

Today, the senior in OSU’s Graphic Design Program and the University Honors College goes by Neebin and is combining her passion for line, texture, color and pattern with an exploration of her own story and heritage. “Graphic design is about bringing beauty to little things, elevating them in some way,” she says. “I see a cultural reclamation going on, and I feel like graphic design can be a part of that.”

Despite the emerging pride that she sensed in Native communities, Southall was concerned with what she found in her studies. In preparing for her senior project, she saw that Native Americans were poorly represented in professional associations and other parts of the graphic design world. “It’s a voice that seems lacking. I wondered why. When I started my research, I didn’t know any big designers who are Native Americans,” she says.

Through her exploration, she discovered the work of Victor Pascual (Navajo and Mayan), Mark Rutledge (Ojibway) and the Buffalo Nickel Creative, cofounded by Ryan Red Corn (Osage). She also found work by white designers that presented Native cultures in a sensitive and powerful way.

Powerful Meanings

Inspired by these examples, she has set out to combine contemporary design with traditional motifs in her own work. For her senior project — Then and Now: Asserting Anishinabek Identity Through Indigenized Apparel — she is creating designs for clothing (T-shirts and hoodies) that echo traditional symbols from her mother’s people, the Chippewas of Rama First Nation in Ontario, Canada. Anishinabek is the collective name for Native people of the region, and the thunderbird and underwater panther carry powerful meanings for them. These symbols appear in Native beadwork and quillwork. Her immediate goal is to respectfully integrate such images with modern forms that appeal to a young generation.

“Neebin approaches every project with a fire and intensity,” says Andrea Marks, associate professor in the Department of Art’s graphic design program and Southall’s mentor. “She’s very proud of her heritage and she has brought that with her from the beginning. It’s been interesting to see how she threads that into her projects.

“I can see the passion she has for her culture and wanting to give something back and empower young people. She is very secure in who she is,” Marks adds.

Inspired by Experience

In addition to Chippewa on her mother’s side, Southall traces her ancestry to Iroquois and European cultures from her father. Being of mixed ethnicities has been both a struggle and a gift, she says, since she has felt a need to clarify her personal identity and to bring people together despite their differences. And she recognizes that design inspiration for Native people has come from other cultures (European religious art, Persian rugs) as well as indigenous experience.

Southall hopes to bring her spirit and design skills to the Chippewa of Rama First Nation tribal center or to another organization that promotes Native American culture, such as the Smithsonian Institution or a Native American educational foundation.

“I have a heart,” she says, “for moving forward in a positive way and strengthening people.”

Deanna Kingston, OSU Dept. of Anthropology (photo taken in 2006)

The official launch of the King Island Place Name website Monday afternoon in the Memorial Union was the culmination of a decade of research led by OSU anthropologist Deanna Kingston, whose ancestors were among the walrus hunters who once populated the now-deserted Alaskan island.

The personal and professional magnitude of the project came to life as the site was projected on a screen before a gathering of colleagues, family members, students and friends. An interactive map of the tiny island in the Bering Sea was dotted with nearly 200 place names that have been collected and documented by researchers working with elder natives who grew up on the island. Audio clips let users hear native speakers pronouncing the words in a dialect of Inupiaq. The site also features a gallery of thousands of photos documenting the plants and birds native to this place where tusked pinnipeds were hunted for centuries on massive ice floes during winter months. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation.

Kinsgton’s mother, son and uncle were on hand to celebrate the site’s unveiling, as were a legion of students and collaborators. Kingston, who wore a jaunty hat in place of the hair she has lost during her battle with breast cancer, choked up when she thanked the people who have worked with her tirelessly to save the linguistic and geographic history of this unique place.

“I told myself I wasn’t going to cry,” Kingston said, smiling sheepishly. “I guess I should just cry and get it over with.”

You can view the website at www.kingislandplacename.com.

Read “The Ice Sages,” a 2007 Terra story about the King Island community and Kingston’s research.

Lewis’ approach to film was the subject of Leading Man, a feature in the fall 2009 issue of Terra.

Illustration by Santiago Uceda

As winter ends, readers transition from overstuffed chairs bathed in lamplight to chaise lounges drenched in sunlight. One of summer’s purest delights is reclining poolside or riverside, lost in a well-told story. Books are also essential summer companions for travelers and trekkers, birders and explorers, scholars and thinkers.

OSU Press – Oregon’s only academic publisher – has released a number of intriguing titles in recent months, including several by Oregon State University faculty members. Consider the list below when planning your summer reading.

For a catalog and ordering information, see http://oregonstate.edu/dept/press/.

History and Social Science

Race and Science: Scientific Challenges to Racism in Modern America. Paul Farber and Hamilton Cravens. 2010.
Edited by Paul Farber, OSU Distinguished Professor of History of Science Emeritus, and Hamilton Cravens of Iowa State University, this is a collection of essays from leading voices in law, history, history of science, botany, and the social sciences exploring the roots of and the scientific challenges to racial essentialism – the notion that a person’s racial identity and characteristics define everything of importance about them. During the course of American history, scientific theories have been used to legitimate racial ideas that in turn have been important in creating and interpreting the law. These essays illuminate the roots of this belief and present case studies that explore how and why natural and social scientists have challenged these racist views.

The Environmental Justice: William O. Douglas and American Conservation. Adam M. Sowards. 2009.
From the late 1940s to the mid-1970s, American conservation politics underwent a transformation. Adam M. Sowards, a professor of history and the University of Idaho, tells the previously untold story of how Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas’s passion for nature helped to define the modern environmental movement in Oregon and the Northwest.

Cultural Studies

Mexicanos in Oregon: Their Stories, Their Lives. Erlinda V. Gonzales-Berry and Marcela Mendoza. 2010.
Erlinda Gonzales, professor and chair in OSU’s Department of Ethnic Studies before becoming director of Casa Latinos Unidos de Benton County, and Marcela Mendoza, interim director of Centro LatinoAmericano, shed new light on the stories and lives of mexicanos in Oregon: why migrants come to Oregon fields, construction sites, and warehouses; what their experiences are when they settle here; and how they adapt to life in the United States.

Massacred for Gold: The Chinese in Hell’s Canyon. R. Gregory Nokes. 2009.
In 1887, more than 30 Chinese gold miners were massacred on the Oregon side of Hells Canyon, the deepest canyon in North America. In the first authoritative account of the unsolved crime, former longtime editor of The Oregonian R. Gregory Nokes unearths the evidence that points to an improbable gang of rustlers and schoolboys as the killers.

Oregon and the Northwest

Another Way the River Has: Taut True Tales from the Northwest. Robin Cody. 2010.
A collection of the finest nonfiction by acclaimed author Robin Cody. “This remarkable Northwest book is a rare gift – worth owning and sharing,” says Craig Lesley, author of Burning Fence and Winterkill.

Eden Within Eden: Oregon’s Utopian Heritage. James J. Kopp. 2009.
Oregon has long been a destination for those seeking new beginnings. The state has been home to nearly 300 communal experiments, from the Aurora Colony to Rajneeshpuram. In the first book to survey Oregon’s utopian history, James Kopp of Lewis & Clark College tells the stories of religious and Socialist groups of the 19th century to ecologically conscious communities of the 21st century.

Sustainable Living

To the Woods:  Sinking Roots, Living Lightly, and Finding True Home . Evelyn Searle Hess. 2010.
The true story of Evelyn Searle Hess, who, in her late 50s, walked away from the world of modern conveniences to build a new life with her husband on 20 acres of wild land in the foothills of Oregon’s Coast Range. It is a tale of adventure, inspiration, and living life in concert with nature.

Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists Are Changing American Cities. Jeff Mapes. 2009.
In a world of increasing traffic congestion, a grassroots movement is carving out a niche for bicycles on city streets. Jeff Mapes, a longtime reporter at The Oregonian, explores the growing bike culture that is changing the look and feel of cities, suburbs and small towns across North America.

Nature

Afield: Forty Years of Birding the American West. Alan Contreras. Illustrations by Ramiel Papish. 2009.
Eugene resident, birder and author Alan Contreras recounts his lifelong bird-watching experiences. Sprinkled with comments from ornithologists and early explorers of the West, the essays offer elements of natural history, personal memoir and adventure travel.

Oregon Fossils: Second Edition. Elizabeth L. Orr and William N. Orr. 2009.
This revised and expanded edition by William and Elizabeth Orr, director and collections manager of the Condon Collection at the Museum of Natural and Cultural History at the University of Oregon, includes a record of all known fossils in Oregon going back 400 million years, along with collecting localities by country, age, rock formation and published source.

To support the OSU Press, contact the OSU Foundation.

Mexican farm workers pose in camp, Hood River. (Photo: Braceros in Oregon Photograph Collection, University Archives, OSU Libraries)

It started with Salvador, the patriarch. In 1959, he left his wife and children near Guadalajara, Mexico, to work the fields of California. Salvador Castillo was a Bracero — one of more than 4 million who came to the United States from Mexico under an agricultural worker program that lasted from 1942 to 1964.

Salvador’s journeys would continue for the next 10 years, some under the Bracero program, some not. Although the first trip would remain the most profitable and his absences tore at his family’s fabric, Salvador left an impression of the U.S. that would forever change his family’s path.

“Salvador went back to Mexico the first time and told his children that this was the golden land of opportunity, that it was a unique place where, if they worked hard enough, they could carve out a better life,” says Tasha Galardi, a senior in sociology who interviewed Salvador and three generations of his family.

Using the Castillos as a case study, Galardi explored the long-term effects of the Bracero program on Mexican families and how their experience fit with immigration theories.

“I was studying the Bracero program as a starting point for the whole family’s migration to the U.S.,” says Galardi. She found that most of Salvador’s family members who live in the U.S. still maintain strong ties to Mexico, so much so that they lead full lives in both countries. “Everyone who has legal status here spends part of the year here and part of the year in Mexico. It’s as though they have one foot in each country.”

She also found that such close ties create a sense of obligation to family back “home.” The Castillos still send money to relatives and friends in Mexico. And often, as in the case of Salvador’s son, Raul, they bring family members to the U.S. to work and help sponsor them for citizenship.

“Raul came here, moved to Alaska, bought a fishing boat and has employed many of his family members over the years. He came with the expectation that he would work hard and be financially supportive. And his success has cascaded to the rest of his family,” says Galardi.

Galardi’s project began with a trip to the Valley Library’s University Archives. There, she met archivist Larry Landis, who maintains a collection of 102 photos of Bracero workers in fields and camps. Landis needed an oral history to accompany the images and asked Galardi to interview a Bracero in his late 80s — Salvador Castillo.

“I love doing life history interviews. Everybody has a story, and those collective experiences make up who people are and why they do what they do,” she says.

The interviews were emotional for Salvador’s family, particularly for his children. They told Galardi about what it was like to wait for his letters. The first thing they did when they opened them was to look for money. “They were incredibly poor,” says Galardi. “It was so hard for all of them.”

Galardi plans to apply for OSU’s graduate program in human development and family studies. “This project was interesting to me because it was an example of how immigration policies have fractured families. I’m interested in studying ways to strengthen families of many underrepresented groups and finding out which programs work.”

See Oregon Public Broadcasting’s documentary on the Bracero Program.

To support research in the College of Liberal Arts, contact the Oregon State University Foundation.