A mural in downtown Independence depicts the historical context of the community where Susana Rivera-Mills is studying Latino language and culture. (Photo: Frank Miller)

Her childhood comes back to her in fragments, like a half-forgotten dream. Treasured moments of comfort and love live in her memory alongside terrifying flashes of violence and hate. She was 8 when the civil war began stirring in the streets of El Salvador. As the conflict grew, it became an ever-present menace to the simple moments of ordinary life — moments like watching her mother press her uniform (a light-blue jumper and white blouse) so it would pass the nuns’ inspection at school. Playing with her rag doll, Esther, named for the grandmother who had sewn it with her own hands. Listening to her grandfather’s stories of a time when men wore suits and ties and tipped their hats to the ladies.

It was tragic enough that Susana’s girlhood was visited by war. It was frightening enough to flee her hometown of San Salvador on a dark night bundled in the backseat of the family Fiat with her little brother Fabio. And yet, as improbable as it seems, the hardest part was still ahead.

San Francisco, where the family took refuge with an aunt, seemed cold and impersonal. The glass-and-steel towers, frenzied highways and constant din made her homesick for San Salvador’s graceful 17th-century architecture, open-air patios and vendors selling tortillas and balloons along tree-lined avenues. The food affronted her palate: How could she stand to eat frozen potpies or peanut butter from a jar when she had so often dined on chile rellenos and plucked sun-ripened marañones right off the tree? Most jarring was the language she could neither speak nor understand. She mourned for her native Spanish.

She didn’t know it then — after all, she was only 12 — but her painful struggle to find footing in a strange land would become the cornerstone of her career. Today, Susana Rivera-Mills’ mission can be distilled into one driving idea: to create a place of belonging for Latinos in America. “Because of my own experience, I’m driven by a need to create a safe space where people can see themselves, where people can hear somebody saying, ‘You’re not alone,’” she says.

As associate dean of Oregon State’s College of Liberal Arts and founding director of the university’s new Center for Latino/Latina Studies and Engagement, CL@SE (pronounced claw-SAY), the immigrant who once struggled for identity uses the tools of social science to study the challenges faced by other Spanish-speaking immigrants and their descendants. From her platform as a professor of Spanish linguistics, she enlightens and inspires new generations of Latinos and Latinas. And, with her passion for advocacy, she has helped engage and empower communities from the American Southwest to the Pacific Northwest.

“It’s research, it’s teaching, it’s advocating, it’s learning,” she says. “I can’t separate them.”

Battles Within and Without

How do you understand war when you’re 8 years old? How do you make sense of angry demonstrations in the public square? Of slogans and placards demanding political reform? Of escalating threats and intimidation, gunfire in the streets, rumors of torture, neighbors disappearing without a trace?

When the pop-pop-pop of gunfire resounded too close to Susana’s school, the nuns would lead the girls into the chapel to wait out the violence. She felt safe in the sanctuary, where candlelight flickered warmly against wooden panels painted with images of Christ. The girls prayed and did their homework, sometimes waiting for hours before it was safe to go home.

But as the years unfolded, even home wasn’t safe. Armed men were extorting money from business owners like her father, who had a trucking company. It was just a matter of time, the family knew, before that threat would come knocking at their door just as it had for her uncle. A high-ranking official in San Salvador, he was assassinated on his doorstep as his wife and children stood helplessly by. Then there was the night Susana woke to the sound of windows shattering and bullets rattling on the roof. She remembers her mother’s screams. Susana cried “Mama!” as her mother pulled her from her warm covers and pushed her under the bed before sliding in close beside her. “Shhh, shhh, you must be very quiet,” her mother shushed her wailing child as bullets ripped through the house.

Amidst the violence, her father’s business foundered. Finally, he confronted the only option he had: He must get his family out of El Salvador. Susana, by then 12 years old, packed what she could fit into her small suitcase. The doll Esther and a teddy bear named Eddie could come, her mother said. The other toys must stay behind. Susana’s grandfather cried as she hugged him goodbye. Three decades have passed, yet her throat still tightens as she recalls the stoic, dignified man she called PapaGerardo weeping while his daughter, son-in-law and two youngest grandchildren loaded up the Fiat and motored into the night. The long-ago leave-taking rushes back to her in all its pathos. She pauses in her story, turning to look out her window in Gilkey Hall until she regains her composure. “I never saw PapaGerardo again.”

Betwixt and Between

The family thought their exile to the United States would be temporary, that any day the war would end and they could steer the Fiat toward home. Instead, things got worse in El Salvador. After a year, Susana’s parents let go of their dream to go back. They liquidated their remaining assets and moved north to Eureka, 100 miles south of the Oregon border. They took minimum-wage jobs at a plant nursery. Susana went to school. Summers, she worked in the nursery alongside her mom and dad.

Within six months, she was speaking English (“It just happened, sort of like magic,” she recalls) and was placed in the talented-and-gifted program. But the stress of the new life that had been thrust upon her — of being the only Latina in her class, of being responsible for little Fabio while her parents worked long hours at the nursery, of being the family translator in business transactions — filled her with resentment as she entered adolescence. Her parents may have given up on going back to El Salvador, but Susana never had. Not a day had passed during those seven years in California when she hadn’t pictured the house where she grew up, its low stone wall enclosing tropical plants and flowering trees noisy with parrots and songbirds. Hundreds of times she had imagined herself eating breakfast on the patio, sharing the just-picked fruit with the family’s pet turtles, iguanas and rabbits. She imagined, in short, slipping seamlessly back into her old life as a Salvadoran.

Over and over she begged her parents to let her go back. Fearful for her safety, they always said no.

Then in 1991 the war ended. A peace agreement was signed. Brushing off her parents’ worries, 19-year-old Susana wasted no time. She used money she had earned as a legal assistant for the State of California to buy a ticket to San Salvador.

Her older brother met her at the family home. Nothing looked the way she remembered it. The 3-foot wall was now a 12-foot fortress. The house seemed to have shrunk. Her old bedroom felt tiny and unfamiliar. Her brother took her to a musty room in the back of the house where her toys had been stored. Expectantly, she lifted the lid on a cardboard box. A puff of dust and mold choked her. Cockroaches skittered away from the light. She jumped back, shuddering. Her long-imagined homecoming was crumbling like a piece of newsprint left too long in the sun.

“That was probably the most transformative experience for me,” she says. “I thought I would be returning to what I remembered from my childhood. But instead, it was like hitting a brick wall. All of a sudden, the person I thought I was really wasn’t me.

“I realized that I wasn’t 100 percent Salvadoran. At the same time, I wasn’t an American from the U.S. — I wouldn’t be accepted there 100 percent. I would have to create a hybrid identity that made sense to me. I returned to the U.S., but I returned with a whole new perspective.”

A Poet’s Voice

In search of that elusive self, she went off to the University of Iowa to study business and physics. “I thought I wanted to work at NASA,” she says, smiling a little sheepishly. She soon switched her major to Spanish. But even as she started working on her master’s, she remained uncertain about her path. That changed in one serendipitous instant. A professor offered his students extra credit to attend a bilingual poetry reading on campus. Susana, running late, half-jogged to the small auditorium. She wedged herself into a standing-room-only audience at the back of the room. What happened next shifted the fault lines of her inner landscape. As the poet’s voice resounded through the crowd, Susana realized she was hearing the words of an immigrant like herself. The poet’s story was Susana’s story — a story that, until that moment, she thought no one else had lived. She started to sob.

After the reading, a teary-eyed Susana walked up to the poet. “You have no idea what you have just done for me,” she said. “This is the very first time I’ve heard anybody else talk about what I’ve been experiencing all these years. I had no idea anybody else knew what it felt like.”

As if the poet had passed her a baton, she ran full-speed ahead with her newfound insight. She earned a Ph.D. in Romance languages at the University of New Mexico, focusing on sociolinguistics — the study of the relationship between language and society. Step 1 in all her sociolinguistic studies is connecting with Latino communities wherever she goes.

“What motivates my research,” she says, “is my drive to understand communities of Spanish-speaking people — how do these communities navigate issues of identity, language loss, access to education? How do they create a place of belonging for themselves?”

A market in Independence offers goods from south of the border. (Photo: Frank Miller)

Even on a drizzly Sunday morning in November, Carniceria Mi Casita is hopping. The bustle of business begins on the sidewalk in front of the market, where a man brandishing a long fork tends a cast-iron barbeque the size of a battleship. As he flips the mounds of chicken and pork sizzling on the grate, a truck rumbles up to the curb. A delivery guy jumps out and starts unloading trays piled with pan dulce (Mexican pastries). Inside, a clerk banters in Spanish with customers as they browse the imported merchandise jamming the shelves, ceiling to floor — dried chilies in giant plastic bags, prepaid phone cards from Mexico Cellular and ATM Mexico, Barbie and SpongeBob piñatas, pickled cactus, hoja tamal (corn husks) by the dozens.

To the first-time visitor, it feels like slipping through a portal that drops you south of the border. Yet this blast of Mexicana thrives right on Main Street in Independence, an historic town southwest of Salem. For Susana Rivera-Mills, Carniceria Mi Casita is more than just one of the many Latino-owned businesses in Independence, which is 35 percent Hispanic. For the Oregon State researcher, the market is also a “point of contact,” a place where she and her students have connected with local Latinas and Latinos for a long-term linguistic study.

Over the past three years, her team has interviewed 125 residents at the market and at four other places — a Mexican restaurant, a housing complex for farm workers, a dress shop catering to Latinas and the Heritage Museum — about their personal and family histories as immigrants or descendants of immigrants. Now she begins the task of analyzing data, looking at patterns of language retention across generations to better understand how social networks shape those patterns.

“My research is about Spanish in the United States, but even more than that, it’s about understanding how communities of Spanish-speaking people navigate the complex issues surrounding loss of language,” says Rivera-Mills. “How does language affect their sense of belonging, their definition of community, their access to education?”

Language as Identity

Borrowing terminology from the environmental sciences, Rivera-Mills characterizes her work as the study of “linguistic landscapes” or the “ecology of languages.” She teases apart variables — age of arrival in the United States, educational attainment, indigenous roots, family cohesion and multiple language domains (school, church, bank, marketplace) — that determine whether Latinos retain their language and their ancestral identity as they create new lives in America.

The market called Carniceria Mi Casita stocks traditional products from south of the border, such as the pan dulce that Susana Rivera-Mills buys on her way to interview a local family. (Photo: Frank Miller)

“Susana’s research on language maintenance and shift during contact with the dominant culture is well regarded in the field,” notes Tobin Hansen, an OSU Spanish instructor who has participated in the Independence project.

It’s too soon to draw firm conclusions; it will take another year to crunch all the numbers. But the early findings from Independence have surprised Rivera-Mills, who has been doing sociolinguistic research for 15 years. They reveal a community that is holding onto Spanish for five and six generations, much longer than other Latinos she has studied in New Mexico, California, Arizona and elsewhere in Oregon. Spanish typically disappears by the third generation after arrival in the United States, as has been the pattern among European immigrants.

Recipe for Menudo

She attributes this robust language retention in part to Independence’s deeply rooted Latino heritage — passed down in the extended family, los padres to sus hijos, los abuelos to sus nietos — by hard-working, close-knit, tradition-loving families like the Oliveros.

On her way to interview the Oliveros, one of the oldest Latino families in Independence, Rivera-Mills swings by Carniceria Mi Casita to pick up some pan dulce as a thank-you offering. This morning, the meat counter displays hand-printed signs advertising panal (honeycomb) at $2.69 a pound and librillo (beef stomach) at $3.59 a pound — ingredients for making a traditional soup called menudo. And menudo is exactly what the family is serving to the stream of relatives that begins to arrive soon after church lets out. Amid the hubbub — a TV flickering, smart phones ringing, people coming and going — Rivera-Mills interviews family patriarch Felix Inocencio Oliveros, who, as a teenager, came to Independence from Texas with his family to help harvest 3,000 acres of asparagus. The year was 1961. For three years, they lived in a camp for agricultural workers.

Longtime Independence resident Felix Inocencio Oliveros shares his life story with Susana Rivera-Mills. (Photo: Frank Miller)

“The conditions were not the greatest,” he recalls, sitting at the dining-room table of his daughter Cristina. “But you have to deal with what you’ve got. You make the best of it.” Besides, there was a silver lining: He was making $1 an hour in Oregon, compared to the 25 cents he got in Texas, where his dad had been a farm worker since World War II.

Family stories like these, told in Spanish over steaming bowls of chili-red menudo, are the community’s cultural DNA encoded in a shared language. Rivera-Mills’ job is to translate human experience into scholarship and, once all the standard deviations have been run and the statistics compiled, deeper understanding.

“The research I do is engaged research,” Rivera-Mills says. “It’s not a one-way street. It’s a partnership between academia and the community to create shared knowledge. You give the community your ear and listen, listen, listen.”

Mary Crow leads a hike at Rimrock Ranch for the Deschutes Land Trust. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

When Mary Crow paddles her kayak on Sparks Lake near Sisters, she can hear the water draining into the lava tubes below. Listening to the water gurgle, thinking about the ancient eruptions that formed Central Oregon’s porous landscape, makes her shiver with wonder and delight.

Dave Bone can’t stop talking about the wild wolves he spotted in Yellowstone Park last summer. If he tells you the story more than once — about how the pack jostled and tumbled playfully on a meadow where bison grazed, unperturbed — he should be forgiven. His awe is boundless and unabashed.

Crow and Bone are lifelong naturalists. Only on the land do they feel whole. Harvard’s Howard Gardner, author of the theory of multiple intelligences, believes this bone-deep connection to the earth is innate. He calls it “naturalist intelligence” or “nature smart.” Just as some babies are born with special gifts for music or math, Gardner argues, others come into the world with an exceptional sensitivity to nature.

It is this gift, this abiding passion, that Oregon State University’s Oregon Master Naturalist program (OMN) was designed to embrace and extend. “We are building support for wise stewardship of the environment and deeper understanding of natural resource management,” says Jason O’Brien who coordinates the program for the Oregon State Extension Service. It is one of nearly 40 similar programs around the nation.

Crow and Bone are two of the first 46 participants to complete all 80-plus hours of training for OMN, which began as a pilot effort on the Oregon coast in 2010. An online curriculum gave them an overview of Oregon’s biology, geology and ecology as well as natural resources stewardship and management.  They then met face-to-face with university scientists and other experts for classroom instruction and fieldwork in one of three ecoregions: East Cascades, Oregon coast and Willamette Valley. (Additional ecoregions will be brought into the program pending demand.)

Instruction spanned every perspective: macro to micro, flora and fauna, volcanic and tectonic forces shaping the landscape. One Saturday, the coastal participants met on the headlands at Cape Perpetua. There, Bob Lillie, an emeritus professor in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, told them about geological phenomena like tsunamis and plate tectonics. Another time, the class convened at the Tillamook State Forest, where Frank Burris, an Extension watershed educator, and Glenn Ahrens, an Extension forester, delved into watersheds and riparian zones. Jamie Doyle, an educator with Sea Grant Extension, taught a class on Pacific Ocean fisheries and marine protected areas.

What the graduates do with their expertise looks different from place to place, person to person. One person might collect data as a citizen scientist, counting dead seabirds for COASST (Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team), for instance, or monitoring water quality for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. Another person might be a guide, leading interpretive hikes for the Deschutes Land Trust. A third might opt for hands-on stewardship, planting aspen seedlings or building beaver barriers for a local watershed council. People who are less physically active might greet visitors at an interpretive center or use their skills behind the scenes designing brochures, editing newsletters or updating websites.

Hooking into an existing organization — either a natural resources agency or an environmental nonprofit — is the common denominator for all Master Naturalists, who must volunteer at least 40 hours yearly to keep their certification.

“The program leverages the time and talents of highly capable volunteers,” notes O’Brien, whose degrees are in wildlife biology and natural resources interpretation, and who is himself a fervent naturalist. “It can be a huge help to private and public organizations, especially in times of tight budgets or when professional staff can’t accomplish all the services they’re mandated to provide. It’s an embodiment of the land grant mission — serving the needs of the public.”

Concord Elementary School fourth-graders learn about seeds and fall planting from Oregon Master Naturalist Maggie Thornton (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

MILWAUKIE – Kids may not love finding a squash on their dinner plate. But when that squash is growing on a leafy vine in their school garden, it can be an object of delight. “Hey, this looks like a UFO!” declares one fourth-grader at Concord Elementary School, holding up a white, disk-shaped squash called a patty pan. Exclaims another, “The tiny tomatoes hanging on this branch look like raindrops — like it’s raining tomatoes!”

Poetry in Motion

It’s as if a bunch of pint-sized poets have been unleashed on this autumn day in Milwaukie, a Portland suburb. The metaphors and similes are as plentiful as the tomatoes here in the Willamette Valley ecoregion. “This looks like a witch’s nose!” one boy says, holding up a red orb with a hooked protrusion. “Look!” a girl calls out, dangling five or six bean pods in front of her chin. “I have a beard of beans!”

Set loose in the school garden at harvest time, the students’ imaginations are on overdrive. But amid the chaos, the kids are learning about the art of gardening. Teaching them to pull weeds, prep soil and sow seeds for cool-weather vegetables is Maggie Thornton, an OSU alum and Oregon Master Naturalist participant. “I like the way the program ties everything together — vegetation, geology, climate,” she says. “It recaptures the idea of the citizen scientist.”

With a bucketful of tools and a pocketful of seed packets, Thornton attracts clusters of kids like crape myrtle attracts honeybees. Growing things is, for her, “just a very natural part of life.” She’s been gardening since she was old enough to toddle around the family plot in Bend where she grew up. So a few years ago when her daughter’s first-grade class was growing sunflower seeds in jars for a science project, she was taken aback by the kids’ astonishment at seeing seeds germinate and sprout for the first time. “It was shocking and sad to see how many of them had no idea how nature works,” she recalls. “I decided I wanted to help get kids outside and connected to the natural world.” As the marketing manager for a horticulture company, she started a program to help schools put in gardens.

Wrangling Weeds

She stands back from the hubbub to watch the fourth-graders dig seed troughs for packets of radishes and turnips, wrangle with stubborn weeds, and shriek over the occasional slug or daddy longlegs. “It’s amazing and gratifying to see their reactions,” Thornton says. “They’re so joyful. They’re so delighted to be outdoors.”

Some of the kids have even made the connection between growing veggies and eating them. “You can slice up that patty pan and fry it in butter,” one girl observes. “It’s really good!”

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At Lake of the Woods in Southern Oregon, Master Naturalist Dave Bone shares his love of wildlife with young campers. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

MEDFORD – One evening when he was 8, Dave Bone’s mom bundled him up against the cold, set him on a wooden sled and told him to hang on tight. Then, leaning into the night, she pulled the sled through the snowy streets of Greene, Iowa. At City Hall on 2nd Street, she brought the sled to a stop and took her son by the hand.

Unbeknownst to him, little Dave was about to become a member of Cub Scout Pack 26, which was meeting on the second floor of the old brick building. “This looks like fun,” he remembers thinking when he walked in and saw the cluster of boys in their blue-and-yellow uniforms.

Beverly Bone couldn’t have imagined that 55 years later and 2,000 miles away, her son still would be scouting. That fateful sled ride launched him on a lifetime of outdoor exploration, service and education. This Eagle Scout’s recent segue into Oregon Master Naturalists was just a logical extension of what he’s been doing for a half-century.

Animal Planet

One mist-gray morning in Southern Oregon, Bone is striding along the shore at Lake of the Woods when a flash of white catches his eye. “Bald eagle!” he calls out, pointing toward a reedy promontory. He quickly sets up his spotting scope as the bird unfolds its massive wings and lifts off, disappearing into the dense forest that hems the lake. “Hot dog!” he exclaims. Then, again, quietly to himself, “Hot dog.”

His excited reaction might suggest that this was his first eagle sighting. But Bone — a retired schoolteacher who taught science in the logging community of Butte Falls — has seen hundreds of eagles, “clouds” of snow geese and countless other raptors and waterfowl while tramping the mountains, valleys and wetlands near his Medford home.

While he loves birds, he’s an equal-opportunity wildlife enthusiast. Beavers, yellow-bellied marmots, flying squirrels — even the tiniest chipmunk and lowliest skunk — stir his sense of wonder even after many years as a Boy Scout camp administrator and, more recently, a volunteer at Camp McLoughlin on Lake of the Woods. Not content to stay inland, Bone also serves as a site captain and interpreter for Whale Watching Spoken Here (a program of the Oregon Department of Parks and Recreation) and as education chair for Shoreline Education for Awareness (a “friends group” of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service).

“Scenery is fantastic, but it’s the wildlife that makes it come alive,” he says. To emphasize his point, he reaches into the pocket of his rain pants and pulls out a clump of folded bills bound by a silver money clip, a gift from his wife, Bea. He reads aloud the inscription, a quote from the 1972 ecology movie Home. “If all the animals were gone, man would die of a great loneliness of spirit.”

The Wow Factor

Sharing nature has been his calling ever since earning his master’s in outdoor education at Southern Oregon University after he moved west with his bride, a native Oregonian. “The three key words in the mission of Oregon Master Naturalists are explore, connect, contribute,” he says. “Those are the same concepts I work with in the Boy Scouts. Taking people outdoors, guiding discovery, encouraging conservation — that’s what both programs are all about.”

For him, it all comes together in the astonished gasp of a wide-eyed child.  “I call it the ‘wow factor,’” he says. “It warms the cockles of my heart.”

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Oregon State University master naturalist volunteers Anne Marie Farell-Matthews and Philip Matthews cut open sacks of native Olympia oysters and spread them on a muddy flat at Oregon's South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve near Charleston. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

COOS BAY – Lots of people fantasize about appearing on American Idol or Wheel of Fortune. But Oregon Field Guide? Not so much — that is, unless you happen to be Anne Farrell-Matthews and Philip Matthews. Whether they’re heaving bags of oysters around a sandbar or hauling groundwater monitors across a salt marsh, this pair of Oregon Master Naturalists could easily imagine OPB TV host Steve Amen showing up with a video crew. For the Coos Bay couple, joining in on ecosystem science and restoration is that glamorous.

So how is it that this hip couple in their 40s gets all excited about red tree voles, beaver scat and shimmy worms? Why would a general contractor and a graphic designer get up at 5 a.m. to wade around in the muck trying to save native oysters? Why would a pair of avid surfers forego great waves to study physical oceanography and the Cascadia Subduction Zone late into the night?

Partly because the South Slough runs through their veins. Philip tramped these mudflats and salt marshes relentlessly as a kid, his Irish setter Britta beside him. Anne came to Coos Bay later, at 19, from landlocked Denver where her bedroom walls had been plastered with whale posters. Finally, she felt like she could breathe. Together, they’ve explored every twist and tangle of the slough, which became the nation’s first national estuarine research reserve in the 1970s.

The other answer is more cerebral. It has to do with making amends and taking ownership. It has to do with helping to heal the landscape they love, a landscape that has been stressed by overharvesting, pollution and population growth over the past century and a half.

Philip’s motives are particularly personal. “I’m half French, half redneck,” he likes to joke. Describing his mom’s family, the French side of the clan, as “extreme environmentalists,” he hammers home his point by saying, “My uncle once chained himself to City Hall to protect shorebirds from hunters.” It’s his dad’s side for which he’s now making atonement. “My dad came from people who took advantage of the environment — poaching, fishing for salmon with dynamite, some pretty serious abuses of nature,” he explains. “I want to help offset some of the negative stuff.”

Turning the Tide

One August morning just as the sun is displacing the moon, Philip and Anne are skimming across the slough in a skiff with a team of scientists, students and volunteers, all Velcroed into brown neoprene chest waders and slip-proof boots. They set anchor at a spit called Younker Point. Footprints of shorebirds trace trails in the wet sand as the team, working fast against the tide, digs up bundle after bundle of oysters for transfer to a new location as part of a NOAA-funded project led by the South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve. Restoring native Olympia oysters (Ostrea lurida) to the slough is the project’s long-term goal, and preliminary findings show that the oysters, transplanted from Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery in Tillamook, could survive and grow. But over time, excessive siltation turned out to be a problem at Younker Point, explains Dave Landkamer, an aquaculturist with Oregon Sea Grant, who’s helping with the oyster transfer.

“They’ve been suffocated in silt,” Landkamer says. “You can see by the ripples in the wet sand that there’s too much wave and tidal energy here for good oyster habitat. “
That’s why, after wrestling the mesh bags from the sand’s sucking grip, the team slings them into the skiff and another small boat for relocation. The morning sun is just cresting the treetops as the team speeds toward Long Island Point, a place where ancient shell middens are evidence of long-ago oyster beds. Alongshore, white egrets and blue herons stalk their prey. Cormorants circle overhead. Gulls cry out. A bald eagle rises from the pinnacle of a fir.

Out at the point, the team hurriedly stacks the bags to create a reef of oyster shells in hopes that the “Olys” will settle and spawn. This is just an early stage of longer-term studies. The National Estuarine Research Reserve Science Collaborative, which brings local stakeholders into its research process, is funding the next phase of the investigation. Someday, native oysters may once again be abundant in the South Slough.

Natural Mastery

As the team disembarks back at Charleston Bay’s boat basin, Philip’s face is smudged with mud. Anne is wet to the skin from the saltwater that “topped over” her waders. So it’s more than a little incongruous that their expressions fall somewhere between serenity and ecstasy. Clearly, getting sweaty, soggy and dirty is exactly what they signed up for when they chose to become Oregon Master Naturalists.

“I’m cold and I’m muddy,” Anne says with a huge grin. “And I had a great time!”

Then she adds reflectively: “Estuaries are the nurseries of the planet. If I can contribute in some tiny way to keeping them healthy, that’s what I want to do. After all, this is our own backyard.”

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Read more about Oregon Master Naturalists in Corps of Discovery.

Hikers tour Rimrock Ranch, which has been placed in a conservation easement for the Deschutes Land Trust. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

SISTERS – A group of hikers stands on the rim of Whychus Canyon, a steep V gouging the rangeland. The canyon’s exposed layers reveal 5 million years of geologic history. Far below, Whychus Creek glints among aspen and cottonwood whose leaves have turned the color of butter. Black Butte and Mt. Jefferson command the western horizon.

On this bright October day at Rimrock Ranch — where Red Anguses ruminate contentedly, saddle horses graze peacefully, and the breeze is as benign as a baby’s breath — guide Mary Crow is telling a story about the natural history of this protected place when someone calls, “Look!” Every face turns just as a golden eagle comes into view, soaring on wings as wide as a human is tall. Riding a thermal along the rimrock, its shadow skimming the yellow rock face, the bird is so close the hikers can almost touch it.

Trek Through Time

The eagle’s passage sets the tone for the next four hours — a magical trek into a landscape forged over eons by eruptions and floods, altered by early settlers and 20th-century engineers, and now being restored to ecosystem health by the Deschutes Land Trust, which is sponsoring the hike.

Guiding tours for the Land Trust has been, for years, an outgrowth of Crow’s passion for the land. As a lifelong adventurer in the East Cascades ecoregion, she has been getting to know these mountains, rivers and rangelands as she hikes, skis and kayaks. So when she heard about Oregon State’s new Master Naturalist program, this self-described “wannabe scientist” jumped at the opportunity.

“I always felt I had gaps in my knowledge,” says Crow, a retired librarian and former technician at Intel in Hillsboro. “Now, with the Master Naturalist program, I feel like I’m able to give more to the participants in my tours.”

As she leads the hikers — mostly retired professionals including a school superintendent, a geophysicist and a university professor — she points out the wind-sculpted rock towers called hoodoos that jut upward from the canyon walls. She talks about the Deschutes Formation, layers of sedimentary and volcanic deposits laid down between the Miocene and Pliocene, upon which Rimrock Ranch’s 1,100 acres sit. The Land Trust, she says, is removing juniper (which sucks up tons of water) and restoring Ponderosa pine (which smells like a caramel latte if you get close enough to sniff the bark). Native grasses are coming back as local “weed warriors” eradicate invasive plants.

At the bottom of the canyon, the hikers contemplate the creek that once ran thick with steelhead. Someday, Crow tells them, Chinook salmon and steelhead will once again swim and spawn in the Whychus, a Deschutes River tributary originating in the Three Sisters Wilderness and channelized in the 1960s to control flooding. It will reclaim its meandering path through the meadow as part of the Land Trust’s agreement with landowners Bob and Gayle Baker, who have put the ranch into a conservation easement for perpetual protection.

The sun slips past its zenith, and the group loops back toward the trailhead. Crow takes a whiskbroom from the backseat of her all-wheel-drive Toyota and shows the hikers how to brush their boots before heading home. It’s not dust she’s worried about. It’s invasive seed heads. “We don’t want these ending up over at the Metolius River,” she explains.

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Read more stories about Oregon Master Naturalists in the Corps of Discovery.

Oregon State staff and students round up beef cattle on the Zumwalt Prairie near Enterprise. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

The Black Baldies cluster inside the holding pen as if glued together, waiting. They know the drill. Quietly, a cowboy coaxes the cows toward the sorting shed, where they’re about to be artificially inseminated. One by one, they enter the “squeeze chute,” a hydraulic contraption that closes in around the animal to hold her steady. Over bursts of disgruntled mooing, a second man reads out a number printed on each cow’s ear tag as a research assistant records it in a ledger. Ranch manager Kenny Fite, wearing hot-pink latex gloves up to his elbows, administers the bull semen, which has been chilling in a giant vat of liquid nitrogen.

A few of the cows balk, but most endure the process with placid resignation. Cattle prods (“hot shots”) are forbidden here at the Eastern Oregon Agricultural Research Center in Union. Yelling, too, is verboten. Instead, Fite and his team gentle their cows into compliance. It helps that the chute’s design was inspired by Temple Grandin, the internationally renowned animal-behavior expert who gave several lectures at Oregon State in 2010. Her innate sensitivity to animals’ feelings and fears has revolutionized livestock handling.

“You have to remain calm and have patience,” explains Oregon State researcher Reinaldo Cooke, who frequently cites Grandin in his work at the other Eastern Oregon ag research center in Burns. Cooke’s cattle-handling expertise is in demand all over, garnering invitations to speak and consult across the American West and abroad.

“Cattle have their own temperament, just like people,” says Cooke, who grew up on the rangelands of Brazil. “Some are more prone to stress, which causes problems for health and reproduction.”

That’s why discovering ways to minimize stress in cattle is a research priority in Cooke’s lab. Handling by humans — vaccination, castration, insemination, supplementation, transportation, especially the long haul from ranch to feedlot — can suppress a cow’s immune system, depress her appetite and disrupt her hormonal balance. Studies show that a stressed animal is more likely to be a sick, scrawny, infertile animal — hardly the formula for business success if you’re a rancher or dairyman.

The stakes are huge. In Oregon, beef and milk ranked third and fourth, dollar-wise, among farm and ranch commodities for 2011. For these industries, together worth more than $1 billion, low-stress handling isn’t just a check-off box on the compliance list for animal-care protocols overseen by OSU’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (see “The Ethic of Care,” Terra, Fall 2012). It’s not even just the right thing to do for the animals. Humane, ethical care is critical to growers’ bottom line.

“In our industry if we were treating the animals bad, we would not be successful,” notes Dave Bohnert, director of the Burns research center. “The poor managers, the people who aren’t doing it right, aren’t going to be in business that long.”

When the subject of livestock abuse comes up, he frowns deeply. He recalls the notorious 2009 incident in California when hidden cameras captured a sick cow being pushed along a concrete floor by a forklift. The video went viral, playing over and over on TV for several news cycles — the animal-abuse equivalent of the Rodney King police beating. It sickened the nation. And it outraged Bohnert.

“All it takes is one or two bad events where you’ve got some bad employees or managers, where you’ve got downed cows that are being mistreated or you’ve got starved horses or cattle, and it’s a black eye for the whole industry,” Bohnert grouses. “But in reality, that’s a very, very small proportion of our industry.”

Red Tape for a Reason

If you drive east from Corvallis along Highway 20 into Malheur County — one of Oregon’s top beef-producing counties with 100,000 head — you might wonder how cattle can thrive here at all. Desert vegetation — sage, rabbitbrush, juniper, Ponderosa pine — stretches from horizon to horizon. Rain is rare. Frost is frequent. And grass is green for just over a nanosecond. For cows, that means eating dry, fibrous forage or hay much of the year. Out here, extra protein and other nutrients are essential supplements to the poor-quality grasses.

In Burns, Bohnert devotes much of his time to nutrition research, analyzing protein, fiber, nitrogen and mineral content to design optimal diets. So does Tim DelCurto, his counterpart farther east in Union. Rangeland ecology, too, gets a great deal of scrutiny at OSU. But whether the scientists are studying stress by measuring cortisol (a stress-triggered hormone), diet by analyzing ruminal fermentation (digestion), or ecology by tracking cattle via GPS collars, each study must pass muster with the university’s animal-care protocols.

There was some grumbling in the beginning, back when attending veterinarian Helen Diggs tightened up on reporting and spearheaded OSU’s accreditation review by the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care International (AAALAC).

“A few people had to be dragged to the table screaming, ‘I don’t know why I have to justify this!’” Bohnert recalls. “The new daily reporting system, I’ll admit, was something I initially felt was going to be a royal pain in the neck. Every day, I’ve got to log into it and let OSU’s attending veterinarian know that our animals are being cared for properly and everything’s OK. Sometimes it’s frustrating, the red tape you have to go through. However, I understand and acknowledge that we need to do everything in our power to make sure that OSU’s animals are treated properly and that we can document proper care. That’s just the cost of doing animal research.”

An Evolution in Attitudes

Teddy, a Black Angus with a white blaze on his forehead, looks formidable, weighing upwards of 1,300 pounds. Yet this hulking creature that could knock you flat with a well-aimed kick is scared of the dark. “Cows are just like big babies,” says pre-vet teaching assistant Erin Mason, who’s giving an animal-facilities tour on campus for students enrolled in ANS 121, Intro to Animal Sciences. Learning the stressors for cows — loud noises, dark places, sudden motions, unfamiliar routines — is Chapter 1 for anyone who wants to work with livestock.

In his left side, Teddy has a “cannula,” a surgically implanted rubber window something like a porthole. Through this porthole, the contents of his stomach can be easily accessed and analyzed for teaching and research. Given a choice, Teddy surely would prefer grazing on the open range to facing a clump of wide-eyed undergrads who are about to stick their arms inside his stomach. Still, as a teaching cow at OSU, he gets top-notch treatment in strict adherence to animal-care protocols. And soon, he’ll be residing in a new, high-tech facility equipped with the latest in Temple Grandin designs. Phase 1 of the James E. Oldfield Animal Teaching Facility on the Corvallis campus opened in the fall. Phases 2, 3 and 4 will be rolled out over the next several years.

Ballooning interest in Animal and Rangeland Sciences, whose enrollment has spiked four-fold since the 1990s, brings with it an evolution in attitudes in the department and across all disciplines that work with animals. One signal: A tenure-track position has been created to study the “human-animal bond.” Another sign: VM 739 (Veterinary Medical Ethics) and ANS 315 (Contentious Social Issues in Animal Agriculture) are now part of the curriculum at Oregon State (see sidebar). Perhaps the strongest indicator of Oregon State’s animal-welfare mindfulness is the flying-colors report conferred on the university by AAALAC along with whole-campus accreditation in March 2012.

“We’ve changed so much in Oregon since I came here in the late ‘90s,” says Bohnert. “I think there’s a bigger awareness. In our industry, in general, we realize that we want to minimize the pain and stress to animals.”

Researcher Aurora Sherman (left) and graduate student Pamela Lundberg use a Mrs. Potato Head toy to study girls' attitudes about female identity and roles. (Photo: Jeff Basinger)

Sex may sell everything from magazines to perfume, but the effects of pervasive sexuality in marketing and consumer products go far beyond the cash register.

In 2007, the American Psychological Association released a report — APA Report on the Sexualization of Girls — on the impacts of media displays of women as sexual objects. It summarized what psychologists know about how exposure to sexualized images harms children and teens — depression, lowered aspirations, eating disorders, lack of assertiveness, unhealthy sexual behavior, dissatisfaction with their own appearance — and offered recommendations to counteract them.

Two developmental psychologists at Oregon State University are exploring the consequences of sexualization for child development. A team led by Aurora Sherman is delving into girls’ career aspirations. She is asking how exposure to the impossibly proportioned but ever popular Barbie™ might affect their career choices. At OSU-Cascades in Bend, Elizabeth Daniels has focused on media portrayals of women in sports. Her studies contrast the effects of sexualized images with those that show women engaged in athletics.

Taken together, their results have implications for parents and youth organizations. They suggest that it takes media savvy and strong role models to promote healthy development in the face of what the APA calls “the massive exposure to portrayals that sexualize women and girls and teach girls that women are sexual objects.”

Choices for Girls

Among successful dolls, Barbie™ tops the list. The manufacturer, Mattel Inc., estimates that one is sold somewhere in the world every three seconds. According to the website barbiemedia.com, the doll’s inventor, Ruth Handler, wanted a doll that would expand opportunities for girls. “Barbie always represented the fact that a woman has choices,” she said.

When the APA report came out, Sherman remembers being startled on reading that so little research had been done on the influence of dolls on girls’ development. “If we’re going to have this conversation about sexualization, how can we overlook the most widely sold plaything on the planet?” she says.

Surprisingly, psychologists are only beginning to look closely at how dolls affect girls’ psychological health — their aspirations, self-confidence, body image and mood. And dolls are just one element of the popular culture that helps to shape attitudes and personality. TV, video games, movies, magazines and websites blare messages about what it means to be a woman or a man and what social expectations stem from gender.

“Toys are just one part of the socialization process,” says Sherman, an assistant professor in OSU’s School of Psychological Science. “But they are a very important part. Barbie displays adult features, and girls love to imagine what it would be like to be an adult.”

So, in looking at how dolls affect girls’ career choices, Sherman chose to use Barbie™ in her research. She and her collaborator, Eileen Zurbriggen of the University of California, Santa Cruz, (and chair of the APA task force that produced the 2007 report) designed an experiment in which 37 4- to 7-year-old girls were randomly assigned to play with either a Barbie™ or a Mrs. Potato Head doll for five minutes. The girls then answered a series of questions about career choices in 10 fields, five typically held by men and five by women.

The results showed that playing with Barbie™ had a clear impact on girls’ career perceptions. Girls who played with the Potato Head doll did not make a distinction between the number of jobs that girls and boys could do. However, those who played with Barbie™ tended to think that more careers are open to boys than to girls. “It’s difficult in social science to find an effect with this kind of treatment,” Sherman says. “I was astounded that after so short a time, the girls who played with the Barbie reported such an effect.” The team’s paper has been submitted to the journal Sex Roles.

The focus on youth is a change for Sherman who has specialized in health, social relations and aging. To find girls willing to participate, she worked with Corvallis-area families to explain the nature of the project. “Parents run the gamut from a strong dislike of Barbie to strongly liking her,” she says. “I was careful to remain neutral, so I didn’t inadvertently bias the pool.”

Sherman is continuing her work on the influence of dolls with support from the John C. Erkkila, M.D. Endowment for Health and Human Performance at Good Samaritan Hospital in Corvallis. Her focus is on the impact of sexualized dolls — Barbie™ as well as Bratz™ dolls (a more sexualized line of dolls made by MGA Entertainment) — on body satisfaction and self-esteem.

Sherman hopes to promote thoughtful discussion about the issues raised by these dolls. “Barbies are here to stay,” she says. “They’re a very loved, more than 50-year-old cultural icon. They’re very engaging dolls. They’re serving some kind of need for girls. So what can we do with kids and parents to minimize whatever the detrimental impact might be? If we’ve got a very well-beloved plaything, what can we do to make it work for us?”

Women in Sports

Athletics can build girls’ self-esteem and confidence, says Elizabeth Daniels, but media portrayals of female athletes can have the opposite effect. They fall into two categories: images of women performing a sport and images of female athletes in sexy poses. “Over the past four decades or so, researchers have studied how female viewers are affected by idealized images of women (i.e., thin, airbrushed, ‘sexed-up,’ etc.),” Daniels explains. “In general, these images make female viewers feel bad about their own bodies. Almost no research has investigated how female viewers respond to alternative images of women, e.g., female athletes depicted as athletes.”

At OSU-Cascades in Bend, Elizabeth Daniels (standing) leads an undergraduate research team of Brent Reynolds (left), Desiree Jackson, Taylor McGowan and Emily Clark. (Photo: Steve Gardner)

Sports is an important domain for youth and increasingly for girls. Since passage of Title IX in 1972, the participation of high-school girls in athletics has skyrocketed. Today, girls comprise 42 percent of all high-school athletes, and about 180,000 women play college sports.

Unfortunately, media often emphasize female athletes’ sexual, rather than athletic, qualities. For example, just before the winter 2010 Olympics, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition featured skiers Lindsay Vonn and Lacy Schnoor as well as snowboarders Hannah Teter and Claire Bedez in bikinis. Swimmer Amanda Beard appeared nude in Playboy. Tennis player Anna Kournikova is the only athlete to be named by For Him Magazine as the sexiest woman in the world.

Daniels speculates that profitable endorsement deals may influence some athletes. “Athletes have limited opportunities to gain endorsements, which are far more lucrative than their salaries,” she says. “The few endorsement opportunities that do exist for elite female athletes might require a focus on the athletes’ sexual appeal. Some female athletes may agree to participate in a sexualized photo shoot because of a lack of alternatives.”

In her studies, Daniels worked with high-school and college-age students. She showed them images of female athletes performing their sports, photos emphasizing their sexual qualities and sexualized images of models who are not athletes. She asked participants to respond in an open-ended format to elicit their opinions and feelings about the images. “An open-ended format opens up the possibility of responses that I could not have predicted,” she says.

Daniels found that both boys and girls tend to dismiss or devalue the athletic abilities of female athletes portrayed in sexualized images. In contrast, performance images of strong female athletes elicited a positive response. Both boys and girls respected these women’s strength and skills. Girls recognized the athletes as strong role models.

Taking Action

Images of women performing their sport “could be a powerful counterweight to the overly thin standard portrayal of females currently dominating the media,” Daniels wrote in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology. “As educators, parents, and social activists call for a change in the content of problematic media,” she adds, “there is a need to suggest alternative imagery such as female athletes depicted as athletes. My research provides the evidence that these images have a positive impact on youth.”

To help girls understand and counter sexual stereotypes, Daniels has shared her results with community and professional groups. She has worked with the Bend chapter of Girls on the Run, an international organization that pairs running with information about nutrition, emotional heath and other elements of healthy youth development.

Daniels has expanded her research beyond athletics. She has found, for example, that boys and girls make positive evaluations of images of accomplished women in business and the military.

She is currently examining how girls are judged on social media sites such as Facebook. To date, she has found that girls who use sexy profile photos are perceived negatively by other girls. They are in a tough position, she explains. “They’re inundated with all these media telling them to be sexy and hot, but they are still developing the cognitive skills to understand what happens if they do that.

“We need to have a counterweight to the negative idealized images that create so much dissatisfaction,” she adds. “We need to do a much better job educating youth and families about how to manage media in their lives and to cultivate positive attitudes toward the body.”

Renee Albertson (Photo: Lee Sherman)

Rain was pouring hard the day Renee Albertson first connected, face-to-face, with a marine mammal. She was a 7-year-old visiting British Columbia’s Sealand aquarium (Canada’s now-defunct answer to California’s SeaWorld) with her mom and dad. The daily show had been cancelled because of the downpour. The usual crowds were absent. As the soggy trio from Portland stood looking into a small tank, the resident killer whale surfaced. The young whale — a rescue named Miracle — was balancing a plastic ring on her nose. And she was looking straight at little Renee. Again and again, Renee tossed the ring. Again and again, Miracle brought it back, always to Renee.

“There was just a low fence around the tank, and you could literally reach over and throw the ring,” recalls Albertson, a Ph.D. student in Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute. “She kept coming back to me. It was a neat connection. It really made an impact on me.”

Dolphins in the Marquesas (Photo: Renee Albertson)

That childhood encounter fed Albertson’s ever-deepening fascination with marine science and led her, eventually, to join the international research team of Oregon State cetacean scientist Scott Baker. “Increasingly, I knew I wanted to help conserve these intelligent animals,” she says. “I just didn’t know how.” But with stubborn single-mindedness punctuated by moments of pure serendipity — fortuitous convergences she characterizes simply as “perfect timing”— she found her way into an elite circle of researchers who follow cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) to the farthest reaches of the Earth.

Portland to Polynesia

Albertson always loved biology. But the notion of making a living helping whales seemed unrealistic and out-of-reach. Chemistry — now there was a practical path to a career, she decided. After earning a bachelor’s in chemistry at Portland State University, Albertson took a job in an environmental lab analyzing water and soil samples. But lab work was, for her, too solitary. So she got a master’s in education at Pacific University and taught chemistry at David Douglas High School for 10 years. She loved teaching. But in the recesses of her mind, the eyes of the captive killer whale were still on her.

On the island of Hao in French Polynesia, villagers gave Renee Albertson a look at this jaw bone from a sperm whale. They agreed to let her sample the bone for genetic analysis. (Photo courtesy of Renee Albertson)

Then one day she heard about renowned whale researcher Michael Poole from a friend who had taken one of Poole’s whale-watching trips in French Polynesia. Poole had deeply inspired the friend, who encouraged Albertson to meet him. She was intrigued. “My friend didn’t realize that his whale-watching trip would end up being a life-changer for me,” Albertson says.

She emailed Poole, offering (begging, actually) to assist in his research during her summer break from teaching. “I never heard back,” she recalls. “I emailed and emailed and emailed.”

Finally, she sent one last message. She told him she was coming, regardless, and that if he didn’t need her, she joked, she guessed she would just have to spend the summer drinking martinis while writing lesson plans on the beach. Two days later, Poole’s name popped up in her inbox. His Ph.D. student wouldn’t be coming to collect samples that year, he explained, and it was humpback whale season. There was no money available for salary or living expenses. But if she were willing, he could offer her an unpaid internship.

When she got to the island of Moorea, Poole handed her not a life jacket but a notebook. Inside the fat binder was a photographic catalog of humpback whales’ tails. Poole tasked her with comparing the tails of recently sighted whales with those of previous years. “If you still like biology when you finish this, I’ll take you out in the boat,” Poole said. For two weeks Albertson “sat in a little beach cabana with a little magnifying glass, matching whale tails.”

She had earned her creds. Soon after, she was on the boat learning about dolphins, whales and conservation and helping Poole collect new whale-tail photos for the catalog. They also collected skin samples from breaching whales for eventual mitochondrial DNA analysis as part of her master’s research.

Posts From the Boat

The work led her to the University of Auckland, where Professor Baker had just accepted a new position as assistant director of the Marine Mammal Institute located in (how ironic is this?) Albertson’s home state of Oregon.

Renee Albertson and colleague Marc Oremus just published the first genetics paper on rough-toothed dolphins. Albertson, Oremus and whale researcher Michael Poole are known locally as the "French Polynesia team." Albertson says, "Believe it or not, it isn't that warm there, as our jackets illustrate. I was freezing most of the time on the boat!" (Photo courtesy of Renee Albertson)

Since joining Baker’s Cetacean Conservation and Genomics Laboratory, she has studied humpbacks in Polynesia and Antarctica, rough-toothed dolphins from Hawaii and the South Pacific, and multiple species of dolphins and whales in the Marquesas archipelago, a “hotspot” for cetacean diversity. She is coauthor on a paper about the population structure of rough-toothed dolphins recently accepted by the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology. “Even though they live in the open ocean, they live in very discrete communities,” she says of the findings. She has presented to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Scientific Review Group on the status and restructuring of marine mammal stocks. And she’s back in the classroom, this time teaching courses on the conservation and biology of marine mammals, both online for OSU and at the Hatfield Marine Science Center.

Visit Albertson’s blog for a day-by-day account of her most recent research expedition http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/marquesas/

Learn more about marine mammal studies through the South Pacific Wale Research Consortium.

For more information about education abroad opportunities for OSU students, contact the International Degree & Education Abroad (IDEA) office at 541-737-3006.

Waves from a powerful storm crash into the seawall at Depoe Bay, Oregon. (Photo: Erica Harris, Oregon State University)

If you love big surf, go to Depoe Bay on the Oregon coast during a winter storm. As swells rise and break offshore, winds whip ocean spray high into the air, but the waves move inexorably toward the harbor (the “world’s smallest navigable harbor,” reads a road sign), channel through rocks and, with a resounding shudder, launch a geyser over Hwy. 101. Enthralled tourists standing along the seawall sometimes yelp as they get a cold shower.

It all makes for good fun, but the pounding water carries a warning. Data from offshore buoys indicate that the largest waves are getting bigger. Coupled with slowly rising sea levels and the occasional El Niño, when warm waters pile up along our shores (as much as 19 inches higher than normal, due to thermal expansion), storms are eroding West Coast beaches and undermining bluffs at an increasing rate.

Examples of damage aren’t hard to find. In 2010, a series of El Niño storms “eroded the beaches to often unprecedented levels at sites throughout California and vulnerable sites in the Pacific Northwest,” said coastal geologist Patrick Barnard in a U.S. Geological Survey news release. Damage to a highway lane south of San Francisco cost $5 million to repair.

In 2006, residents of Gleneden Beach found their homes tottering on the edge of a cliff when a weekend storm removed nearly 20 feet of shoreline. In nearby Oceanside, during the El Niño of 1997-98, a 32-home development at The Capes was threatened by collapse of the bluff on which it stood. In southern Oregon during that winter, a storm breached dunes and destroyed Port Orford’s sewage treatment plant drain field. California coastal communities reported more than $100 million in property damage.

In the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Barnard and other West Coast researchers, including Peter Ruggiero of Oregon State University and Jonathan Allan of the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI), raised the likelihood of increasing erosion risk in a changing climate and added: “If these trends continue, the combination of large waves and higher water levels, particularly when enhanced by El Niños, can be expected to be more frequent in the future, resulting in greater risk of coastal erosion, flooding, and cliff failures.”

While beaches wax and wane seasonally in a complex dance between land and sea, recent erosion losses have left some Oregon communities more vulnerable to the next storm. DOGAMI’s beach monitoring program has shown that in Tillamook County, beaches have not recovered from the 1997-98 El Niño. They have eroded landward an average of 30 to 60 feet and, in some areas, up to 150 feet. Rockaway Beach alone has lost an estimated 2.5 million cubic yards of sand. At Neskowin, beach retreat has enabled storm waves to threaten homes, flood streets and undermine rock-reinforcement — a.k.a. “rip rap” — in front of the dunes.

Wrestling with Risk

“Neskowin is at the head of the pin in terms of coastal erosion in Tillamook County. The community wishes to be proactive in addressing this problem,” says Mark Labhart, chair of the Neskowin Coastal Hazards Committee and a Tillamook County commissioner. “OSU research papers and direct access to professors have been invaluable in providing factual data on what has been happening in the past and what we might expect in the future so the community, the county and the state can plan for the next steps.”

Waves crawl up against the lower level of a structure in Neskowin, Oregon, during a storm in January, 2008. (Photo: Armand Thibault, Neskowin)

At stake, he adds, are property values, roads, state park facilities and the relaxed quality of life for which the Oregon coast has become famous. Neskowin’s quiet, family-oriented character has lured vacationers for more than a century. According to local historical documents, Sarah Page and her husband settled on what was known as Slab Creek in the 1880s. She opened the first post office and called it Neskowin after she heard a Nestucca Indian refer to the creek by that name, meaning it had plenty of fish.

Today, the community has 408 homes (less than a quarter of which are occupied year around), a golf course and a condominium development, the Proposal Rock Inn. Nestled against Cascade Head to the south, Neskowin mirrors much of coastal Tillamook County, which has the highest percentage of second homes of all the state’s shoreline counties, according to the Oregon Coastal Zone Management Association (OCZMA).

Dedicated to protecting this idyllic enclave is a local group appointed by the county commission in 2009. The Neskowin Coastal Hazards Committee is composed of property owners and local and state officials and facilitated by Pat Corcoran, a coastal hazards specialist with Oregon Sea Grant. It has met with Ruggiero, Allan and other scientists. It has reviewed options (known as “Hazard Alleviation Techniques” or HATs) for reducing erosion hazards. With Corcoran’s help, it identified emerging research and delved into erosion processes and trends.

Working with Mitch Rohse, a planning consultant from Salem, the committee published a proposed legal policy in 2011 for counties to deal with the mounting risks: Adapting to Coastal Erosion Hazards in Tillamook County: A Framework Plan. Local planners and the county planning commission must review the document before it goes to the county commission for approval. Concurrently, the committee has raised more than $27,000 from private contributors, the Neskowin Homeowners Assn. and the Oregon Dept. of Land Conservation and Development for an engineering analysis of options and costs to protect the shoreline.

A first for Oregon, the draft framework plan calls on the county to adopt policies that help communities reduce their vulnerability to storm damage and erosion. Reflecting current state and local regulations, it draws from a variety of scientific sources, including former OSU master’s student Heather Baron’s 2011 thesis, in which she focused on “coastal hazard zones.” For her degree in Marine Resource Management, she evaluated the probability of erosion in each zone for 18 different climate change scenarios. Each scenario reflects a combination of risk factors: sea level rise, extreme wave heights and El Niño frequency and intensity. Her work builds on research by Ruggiero, Allan and their colleagues, who have used beach, wave and landscape data to define such zones along the Oregon coast.

If the plan were approved, properties in each zone would be subject to standards that reflect their vulnerability to the risk of future storm damage. Neskowin committee members expect that idea to generate debate over issues from development rights to property values. “Any time you put colored lines on a map that potentially affect property values, you get people’s attention in a hurry,” says Labhart.

Coastal Change

The threat faced by Neskowin and other communities doesn’t arise over night. It grows gradually from a series of seemingly harmless events, chief among them the construction of homes and condos and the seawalls that protect them. “A recent storm may have washed away a beach or destroyed homes lining the shore,” wrote retired OSU coastal oceanographer Paul Komar in The Sciences in 2000, “but merely blaming the weather is simplistic. Almost always, subtle factors have been acting over time to weaken the coast and make it more susceptible; the storm, when it comes, simply delivers the coup de grâce.”

Waves pound a beach and structure between Depot Bay and Boiler Bay on the Oregon coast. (Photo: Erica Harris, Oregon State University)

Neskowin’s case is puzzling, says Komar. When he started investigating erosion problems in the 1970s, Neskowin homeowners had problems with too much sand building up the dunes, blocking ocean views and even threatening to bury homes. “The change to erosion began with the 1982-83 El Niño and accelerated during the ‘one-two punch’ of the 1997-98 El Niño and storms of the following winter,” he says. Today, he adds, the community is a “classic example of ‘hot spot’ El Niño erosion. Normally during the next few years following an El Niño winter, we expect the beach sand to be carried back to the south by the ‘normal’ waves, but this has not happened yet at Neskowin, and it’s not clear why it hasn’t.”

Over the last decade, with support from Oregon Sea Grant and agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, scientists have been zeroing in on those subtle factors. Basic questions motivate them: How do coastal systems work? How do currents carry sand onto and off a beach, piling it up in some years and draining it away in others? Is sand accumulating on the coast or moving permanently into the deep ocean?

Just as importantly, they are providing communities like Neskowin with the knowledge to reduce property risks in the future. “We’re getting great data about the Oregon coast now. Compared to what we had 10 or 15 years ago, the observational data we have today are like night and day,” says Onno Husing, executive director of the OCZMA.

Citizens, elected officials and policymakers can see those data at the click of a mouse. Researchers regularly profile beaches from Gold Beach to Astoria and publish charts that show present and past sand heights relative to mean low and high water levels (see “Beach and Shoreline Mapping” at www.nanoos.org). They monitor wave heights and wave “run-up” on beaches. They estimate future flood risks and how many homes, roads and businesses are in harm’s way. And they meet with citizens to share the results.

Although the broad direction of changes over at least the last decade is clear, Ruggiero emphasizes that uncertainty casts a shadow over the likelihood that any home or community will suffer damage in the future. The range of estimates for climate change only adds to the difficulty of forecasting future risk.

Speaking of just one factor, increasing wave heights, he says: “Attributing it to climate change is very difficult. I don’t do that, but the bottom line is that the waves have increased over the last several decades, and that could be for a variety reasons. Any time you look way out into the future, uncertainty is huge.”

What is certain is that big waves will continue to hit the West Coast and attract sightseers to places like Neskowin, Rockaway and Depoe Bay. How coastal communities will adapt is an open question.

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Read a National Academy of Sciences report, Sea-Level Rise for the Coasts of California, Oregon, and Washington: Past, Present, and Future (2012)

The first lesson the elephants taught Ursula Bechert was that they had a sense of humor.

On her first day at the Wildlife Safari in Winston, Oregon, Bechert got soaked as she gave the animals their daily shower. The next day, she came to work wearing rubber boots, hoping to at least keep her feet dry. Noticing Bechert’s change in apparel, an elephant named Alice quietly drew water into her trunk while Bechert washed another elephant, slipped it into one of Bechert’s boots, and filled it with water.

Ursula Bechert, left, worked with elephants at the Oregon Zoo in 2000 (photo courtesy of Ursula Bechert)

“I swear she had the biggest grin on her face,” Bechert says, remembering Alice’s mischievous nature.

Bechert, director of Off-Campus Programs in Oregon State University’s College of Science, has spent much of her life in the company of animals. After fulfilling her childhood dream of becoming a veterinarian and working in small animal practice, she returned to school to earn a doctorate in reproductive endocrinology and completed her thesis while working with elephants at the Wildlife Safari, a nonprofit zoological park.

Driven by a passion for conservation, Bechert has worked with elephants and other species to manage animal populations and find effective solutions for conflicts that arise between humans and animals. Recently, she has been studying the effects of a new form of an immunocontraceptive vaccine known as porcine zona pellucida (pZP) in elephants and wild horses. The vaccine may help reduce conflicts by keeping animal populations in check. Her early results suggest that this new vaccine formulation may be an important tool to alleviate tensions caused by other controversial methods of population management.

“Originally, I wanted to help individual animals as a veterinarian,” Bechert says. “Through research, I realized I could impact entire populations. By working on population management tools like contraception, I now hope to help sustain animal populations in the wild. I don’t believe that we will have succeeded in saving a species if those animals only survive in captivity; we need diversity of species for healthy ecosystems.”

One Shot, 10 Years

To prevent conception in animals, pZP vaccines produce antibodies that block sperm from attaching to unfertilized eggs. While pZP vaccines have been used in the past to manage elephant and horse populations, the vaccine Bechert is working with is a unique formulation called SpayVac®.

In northern Botswana in 2003, Bechert and a team of researchers applied tracking collars to elephants. Scientists observed that after landmines were removed in Angola, elephants resumed migration through areas they had avoided during the civil war. Understanding elephant movements and habitat use can help minimize human-elephant conflict. (Photo: David Rogers)

Produced by Canada-based ImmunoVaccine Technologies Inc., SpayVac® has the potential to act as a multi-year contraceptive. Other pZP vaccinations require a booster four weeks after the initial injection and must be administered annually to remain effective, which Bechert says is more expensive and stressful for handlers and animals. A single shot of SpayVac®, however, has been demonstrated to be effective in other animal species for up to 10 years.

Bechert began working with SpayVac six years ago when she studied the vaccine’s effect on captive elephants in North America. As viable habitat and resources become more limited in many African and Asian countries, Bechert says, the incidence of human-elephant conflict increases, necessitating elephant population control.

“They’re competing over common resources like water,” Bechert says. “Some villages try to keep elephants out by creating biological barriers with chili peppers elephants don’t like.”

Managing elephant populations with a multi-year contraceptive could help reduce the number of confrontations and the need to cull elephants to control their populations, Bechert says. So far, SpayVac® has shown promise because pZP antibody concentrations have remained high in the elephants that were vaccinated, indicating that the vaccine is still active.

Through her research on SpayVac®, Bechert is working to find a solution to human-animal conflicts in the United States as well.

Wild Horses

In a recent study funded by the United States Geological Survey (USGS), Bechert led a team of OSU researchers in assessing the safety of SpayVac® for use in horses. Like elephants, wild horse populations are exceeding the carrying capacity of the land they inhabit. Horses roam freely in the western U.S. and have generated controversy as cattle ranchers feel they must compete with wild horses for land and forage for their cattle. Addressing the problem has been difficult because land managers, cattle ranchers and horse lovers disagree about how growing horse populations should be managed.

Wild horses on Bureau of Land Management range near Burns in southeastern Oregon (Photo courtesy of the Bureau of Land Management)

The federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) oversees management of horse populations and is struggling to find solutions that are effective and humane, Bechert says. Other methods of managing the wild horse population, which exceeded the BLM’s optimum management level by nearly 12,000 horses as of February 2011, include BLM roundups that capture and maintain horses in captivity or adopt them to individuals. Such activities, Bechert says, are an expensive and temporary solution to the horse overpopulation problem.

Just as Bechert believes SpayVac® could ease the tension between humans and elephants on the other side of the globe, she says the vaccine may be the best way to alleviate the competition between ranchers and horses over land resources in the U.S.

Starting in the spring of 2010, Bechert and a team of OSU researchers conducted a trial to determine whether SpayVac® could be effectively and safely used in horses. The study was completed last fall. While Bechert is currently in the process of publishing the results, she says their preliminary findings demonstrate no adverse effects to the general health of horses that received the vaccine, and results were promising.

In response to Bechert’s findings, the USGS began a five-year study of 90 mares in the spring of 2011 to observe the long-term effects of the contraceptive vaccine. While this study progresses, Bechert plans to publish the results of her work and apply for funding to support additional research on how the vaccine affects the horses’ ovaries and determine whether it is reversible. Understanding how the vaccine works and whether it can be reversed, she says, is important to effectively incorporating it as an effective management tool. If the USGS study goes well, Bechert says the BLM will likely begin to administer the vaccine in wild horse populations within the next five years.

Wild horses in a trap at the Warm Springs Herd Management Area near Burns in southeastern Oregon. (Photo courtesy of the Bureau of Land Management)

“I think this vaccine will do a lot to reduce human-animal conflict,” Bechert says. “Administration is easy and the vaccine is much more cost effective compared to other methods or products being used. I’m passionate about it for the animals, because from their perspective, getting one shot is much less stressful and easier than being rounded up and adopted or maintained by the BLM. I think SpayVac® will make a wonderful population management tool, and that really motivates me.”

Light spectra by artist Stephen Knapp illuminate a wall in the new Linus Pauling Science Center. In their research, scientists use spectra to detect and measure the abundance of chemical elements. (Photo: Theresa Hogue)

In 2011, the first Baby Boomer turned 65 — the leading edge of a wave that is going to change the country. By 2030 one in every five Americans will be older than that. People are already living longer, taking time to travel and to enjoy their families. Think gourmet cooking classes, fishing trips and art museums.

But they will increasingly face the diseases that now kill most people in the developed world: heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

They want answers and solutions. And in the future, many of those answers will come from a new research facility at Oregon State University, the Linus Pauling Science Center.

This new $62.5 million, 105,000-square-foot research and educational structure, just completed this fall, has arrived at an opportune time in American history. But its foundations were laid 94 years ago, in the fall of 1917, when a young student arrived at Oregon Agricultural College and enrolled in a chemistry course. Linus Pauling, OSU’s most accomplished alumnus, went on to win two Nobel Prizes.

“Linus Pauling revolutionized the fields of chemistry and molecular medicine, and this facility will be a working memorial to him, a great tribute,” says Balz Frei, director of the Linus Pauling Institute. “It will help further establish LPI as a national leader in the study of diet, optimal nutrition and micronutrients.

“Chronic disease prevention through diet and lifestyle is the future of medicine,” Frei adds. “And it’s for everyone, not just the elderly.”

Advances in health will come from better understanding of phytochemicals such as sulforaphane, a cancer-fighting compound in broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables. Other research focuses on vitamin D in enhancing immune function and fish oil in preventing fatty liver disease. New types of antioxidants and “anti-inflammatories” are also being investigated, such as lipoic acid, which may be key to getting the most out of life as we age.

Chemical Collaboration

The institute will share the new facility with the OSU Department of Chemistry. Specialists in analytical, materials and organic chemistry will work in close proximity to their peers in the health sciences and develop new strategies for disease diagnosis and treatment. “These new facilities house approximately $10 million in state-of-the-art transmission- and scanning-electron microscopes and nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers that will serve the entire campus,” says Vince Remcho, chemist and associate dean in the College of Science.

The new instruments were made possible by grants from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and partnerships between several of OSU’s colleges, the OSU Research Office and the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute (ONAMI).

Chemists in the new facility bring with them “an astonishing research track record, as measured by publication count, impact, external funding and intellectual property development,” Remcho adds.

Primary support for the center, which was designed to the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED silver standards, came from the Wayne and Gladys Valley Foundation – a $20 million gift – and another $10.6 million from Pat and Al Reser. Most of the research in the facility will be supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and NSF.

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.

Clothing designs get the sweat test. OSU professors Hsiou-Lien Chen, Brigitte Cluver and Leslie Burns test experimental fabrics and outdoor apparel on "Newton," a manikin that perspires through artificial pores. (Photo: Jeff Basinger)

He was right — but only partly. Beakers are just the beginning of science-based apparel design in the Department of Design and Human Environment (which also offers undergraduate degrees in interior design and merchandising management). In their investigations, students and professors employ such high-tech instruments as a scanning electron microscope for examining fibers and a $20,000 machine for gauging the moisture-management properties of fabrics. They use a wind tunnel for simulating thermal resistance of protective helmets under walking-speed conditions. They master CAD software (computer-aided design) for rendering functional items like ski boots and running shoes.

A manikin named Newton is the pièce de résistance of OSU’s apparel labs. Cast in carbon-epoxy and jointed at the elbows, knees, ankles, hips and shoulders, he looks a lot like the Tin Woodsman — that is, until researchers wrap him in an indigo-blue “sweating skin” to measure the thermal properties of clothing. They have used this $200,000 system, manufactured by Seattle-based Measurement Technology Northwest, to research everything from military helmets for Oregon Ballistics to adult diapers for a Japanese firm specializing in geriatric health care.

OSU prepares fashion designers who have special expertise in “functional” apparel — that is, clothing made of specialized fabrics for specialized purposes. In Oregon, that often means outdoor and athletic wear. But it can also mean apparel that ensures safety for the military and police, comfort for the old and infirm, and even sustainability for the planet and its inhabitants.

“We are not an art school,” emphasizes Leslie Burns, department chair. “Granted, we do have the fashion component, the aesthetic piece. But this is a research university, so our program is research-based. We focus on problem solving and commercialization of design.”

At the Industry Nexus

Researchers top up Newton's fluids through hoses in the manikin's eyes. (Photo: Jeff Basinger)

Many of the problems they tackle are quintessentially Oregon — that is, how to stay dry and comfy when you throw yourself headlong into the watery wilds of the Pacific Northwest. Oregonians’ full-tilt embrace of nature (bumping down hillsides on mountain bikes, shooting class-3 rapids in kayaks, tramping old-growth trails in boots and backpacks, plying fresh powder on skis or snowshoes) has created a fertile seedbed for active-wear entrepreneurs. Here was a captive market for high-performance gear that resists wind and rain, holds in warmth while wicking out sweat, weighs little but breathes a lot.

As far back as the early 1900s, pioneering firms such as White Stag (skiwear), Jantzen (swimwear), Pendleton (woolen sportswear) and Danner (boots) catalyzed an athletic and outdoor cluster in the Portland metro area that’s now 300 companies strong. Anchoring it are the world headquarters for industry giants Nike, Columbia Sportswear and Adidas America. KEEN, Korkers and Icebreaker are just some of the up-and-coming brands in the cluster. The Portland Development Commission (PDC) has named this sector one of its five “signature industries.” Aiming to create 10,000 new jobs in the next five years, the PDC is directing resources to its target industry clusters with an eye to drawing new talent and new investment opportunities to the city.

“There’s a wonderful quote from the PDC that goes, ‘What Hollywood is to the movie industry, Portland is to the athletic and outdoor industry,’” says Burns, who serves on the forum’s board. “There’s no place else like it.”

And OSU, boasting the West Coast’s only research-based apparel design school, is right in the middle of it all. “We’re the industry’s higher-education partner,” says Burns. “The PDC wants Portland to be identified as the worldwide hub for sustainable design — not just in athletic and outdoor but inclusive of all the sustainability aspects of Portland.”

Materials in the Raw

More often than not, when Hsiou-Lien Chen tells people she’s a professor in apparel design, they say, “Oh, so you sew!” “I tell them, ‘No, I don’t even know how to make a pillowcase,’” she reports ruefully. Stereotypes from the old days of “home economics ” linger, it seems, much to Chen’s chagrin.

Chen is not a seamstress but a fiber scientist. She studies the raw materials from which textiles are woven.

“I’m fascinated,” says Chen, “with environmentally friendly fibers.”

That fascination is easy to understand when you put your eye to the lens of an electron microscope. The internal structures of nature’s fibers — everything from silk, cotton and wool to flax, poplar and hops — zoom into view, magnified nearly 1,000 times. Some look like forests of battered drinking straws. Others resemble dried pasta or strands of DNA. Are the fibers long or short? Hollow or solid? Thick or thin? From these observations Chen can determine their strength, weight, durability, insulating properties and, ultimately, their suitability for textiles.

Chen’s research at OSU began with naturally colored cottons — those fluffy bolls that burst from the plant already tinted with pigment. Spanning an earthy palette from ochre and rust to moss green and even blue, they benefit Planet Earth by negating the need for chemical dyes. One intriguing finding: Instead of fading in the wash, these colors get darker.

She has gone on to investigate the properties of poplar fibers — those wispy, hair-like strands that float on autumn winds when seedpods burst — already being used by a German firm for insulating winter wear, comforters and sleeping bags. In a study that examined the physical, chemical and thermal properties of poplar, Chen and OSU apparel design colleague Brigitte Cluver found it to be an ideal alternative to synthetic insulation materials such as polyester, which is made from petrochemicals. “Evolution has provided poplar seed hair with several characteristics that enhance seed dispersal, both in air and on water: lightweight, fine, hollow and resistant to wetting,” the researchers wrote in Clothing & Textiles Research Journal in 2010. “This combination of characteristics is also the basic prescription for an effective bulk textile insulation material.”

Another of her subjects is flax, a super-strong fiber inside the stalks of plants that have been used for clothing in the past, but now are being grown mainly for their oily seeds. “The Willamette Valley has perfect weather for growing flax,” she says. “Here at OSU where we are doing research on making bio-fuels from oilseeds, the stems get burned.” She and a colleague are designing a machine that can quickly separate the sturdy fibers from the woody material that encases them. “We want to optimize the mechanical separation process,” she says, envisioning a potential patent on the horizon.

And then there are hops. A couple years ago, a consultant for Rogue Ales sent Chen an email probing the feasibility of extracting fiber from Oregon hop vines. “As you are likely aware,” he wrote, “hop vines and stems are in no short supply here in Oregon. At present, they are discarded, since it is only the strobile (fruit) that is used for brewing.” From a corner of her lab, Chen picks up a fat bundle of dried plant material and holds it to the light. Lamenting the waste of thousands of pounds of textile potential each year, she notes, “Hops fibers have the same chemical composition as cotton.”

From 4-H to Fashionista

When Leslie Burns was a girl growing up in Cut Bank, Montana, she couldn’t have imagined that her 4-H clothing club would lead to a career as a university department head, co-author of a widely used textbook (The Business of Fashion, now in its fourth edition), and researcher (investigating how culture influences design and consumers’ perception of products).

The latest feather in her cap was the Fashionista blog’s 2011 rankings of U.S. fashion schools, which put OSU among the top 20. The heady list included such elite institutions as Parson’s, Pratt and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Fashionista exists, in its own words, to “chronicle the fashion trail from the runway to the first Canal Street knockoffs.” OSU has mapped out its own path along that trail.

“Our program is a wonderful combination of science and art, function and fashion,” says Burns. “It has very much a target consumer orientation. If people aren’t going to wear it, we’re not going to design it.”

Talent for Threads

If there’s a “fashion gene” in human DNA, OSU apparel design students and alums have it. Almost to a person, they report loving apparel — the palette, the panache, the voice, the statement — ever since they could dress themselves. Amanda Grisham is one outstanding example. In October, the senior from Tigard won the Emerging Designer’s Competition in conjunction with Portland Fashion Week. Portland Monthly style editor Eden Dawn wrote on her blog that Grisham’s designs were “hands down some of the strongest of the show.”

Fortunately for them, they have ample opportunities to parlay their inborn passion into a profession. That’s because the vortex of the U.S. outdoor and athletic-wear industry is just 80 miles north of Corvallis. “Portland is recognized as the global hub for the athletic and outdoor industry,” according to the Portland Development Commission.

“There’s an enormous cluster of expertise in the Portland area,” affirms OSU alum Ron Parham, a public relations executive at Columbia Sportswear. Within that cluster of expertise, there are many alumni of the OSU apparel design and graphic design programs. Meet a few:

Kathleen McNally

Creative Director for Apparel, Columbia Sportswear

Kathleen McNally (Photo: Oregon State University)

Hometown: Portland
Beginnings: Started sewing her own wardrobe (and Barbie’s) in second grade

OSU Apparel Design: “The thing I liked best about the program was the freedom to tailor it to my strengths. I did a lot of independent projects.”
Previous Workplaces: Nike, Lucy Activewear, J. Crew
Current Trends: “Packability, compactability, ultra-lightweight”
Industry Cluster: “So many creative people move to Portland because it’s an outdoor nirvana. New York is the only other city with ready access to this kind of talent, especially talent so strongly oriented to the outdoors.”

Abby Windell Swancutt

Apparel Designer for Young Athletes, Nike

Abby Windell Swancutt (Photo: Oregon State University)

Hometown: Newport
Beginnings: Started revamping hand-me-downs in elementary school; designed her formals for high school dances
OSU Apparel Design: “The best thing about the program was that every professor knew me as a person and genuinely cared. They came to all my volleyball games. My favorite class was fashion merchandizing and marketing, where I learned that you have to get to know the customer inside and out. Your consumer’s your boss.”

Christine Cyphers

Global Sourcing and Manufacturing, Columbia Sportswear

Christine Cyphers (contributed photo)

Hometown: Portland
Beginnings: Grew up sewing, but also loved math; mom tried to steer her toward engineering. “Now I tell my mom, ‘You know what? You were right — we engineer clothing. Everything we do is math-related.’”
OSU Apparel Design: “OSU is a well-rounded education. It’s not just focused on apparel. It’s also about business — marketing, finance, international trade, foreign exchange. And it’s about science, like the chemistry of textiles and the carbon properties of fibers.”
Previous Workplaces: Pendleton Woolen Mills, Lands’ End
Current Trends: “Cotton prices and oil prices play into the bigger business dynamic. We’re always asking, ‘What can we do with the commodities that are available to us?’”

Lauren Stewart Ross

Sourcing Analyst, Columbia Sportswear

Lauren Stewart Ross (Photo: Oregon State University)

Hometown: Central Point
Beginnings: 4-H
OSU Apparel Design: Started college with K-12 teaching aspirations, but stumbled across an apparel course called “Appearance, Power and Society” and promptly switched majors. Study tours to Las Vegas, Europe and Hong Kong steeped her in the international nature of the apparel industry.
Industry Cluster: “In Portland it’s such a close-knit community that everyone knows everyone else. You can make great connections and build a great career here.”

Angela Snow

Director of Creative Operations and Macro-Trends, Nike

Angela Snow (contributed photo)

Hometown: Beaverton (a half-mile from today’s Nike campus)
Beginnings: Started by creating fashion illustration in grade school; mother sewed her designs for her to wear
OSU Graphic Design: “The program had world-class graphic design professors, which was enriching and provided a great education. I also did coursework in apparel design. It was a perfect combination of design disciplines.”
Current Trends: “We research patterns in macro-trend culture, innovation, technology, fashion, science and biometrics — we synthesize this information to help inspire and inform the design community.”

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See an October 2012 story about Oregon State’s apparel design program in the Portland Business Journal.

Skin cells work together in a deadly dance that leads to melanoma, a cancer that took the lives of more than 70,000 Americans in 2010 (Photo: Karl Maasdam)

Given this constant battering, there’s little wonder that skin ranks No. 1 on the American Cancer Society’s list of most common cancers. Many of the 1 million new cases diagnosed in 2010 were easily treated. But the most lethal form of skin cancer — melanoma — took the lives of 70,000 Americans. Unlike more benign forms of skin cancer, melanoma can metastasize aggressively, spreading into lymph nodes and other distant organs of the body if not caught and treated early.

For two researchers in the Oregon State University College of Pharmacy, the statistics are unacceptable. In a warren of labs tucked into the recesses of the college’s historic building, Arup and Gitali Indra are urgently seeking — and beginning to find — clues to predicting, preventing and stopping this hard-to-treat disease before it spreads.

“Malignant melanoma continues to evade modern curative efforts as a result of the complex and elusive nature of metastatic tumors,” the researchers write in the journal Pigment Cell & Melanoma Research. Their research, which explores the chemical and genetic mechanisms of melanoma progression “could hold therapeutic value when combating metastatic disease.”

Skin Deep

When people look at each other, they perceive skin as a smooth surface that ranges in tone from pale pink to deep brown, depending on ancestry. But beneath the pigmented surface is a complex layering of cell types, each with its own function. Graphic renderings of human skin, magnified and cut away, bear an uncanny resemblance to geologists’ drawings of rock strata. How skin, a complex multi-cellular organ, develops from a handful of stem cells, and how the various skin cell types interact and “talk” with one another with the aid of proteins that regulate gene expression, are the focus of the Indras’ research. They began collaborating in the 1990s at the Institute of Genetics, Molecular and Cellular Biology (IGBMC), one of the leading European centers of biomedical research in Strasbourg, France. Arup was a post-doctoral researcher, and Gitali was a Ph.D. candidate.

“I was totally into skin,” says Gitali, whose Ph.D. in molecular and cellular biology focused on head and neck cancers, which originate from epithelial cells — cells that form linings on many body surfaces, including the skin. Two years ago, the Indras, in collaboration with their colleagues in France and in the College of Pharmacy, announced a breakthrough in human head and neck cancers by showing that tumors in these areas contain a five-fold spike in CTIP2, a gene regulator thought to play a role in tumor growth. The Indras’ findings, published in the journal PloS One, could lead to the development of a promising new prognostic kit for fast, sensitive and accurate detection of head and neck cancer and some other epithelial cancers.

Melanoma is the Indras’ nemesis. But in order to tackle that baneful foe, the researchers (who are partners in marriage as well as in science) investigate the full spectrum of mammalian skin, from the fetal to the fatal — from embryonic stem cells to metastatic cancer cells, from normal function to inflammatory disease and life-threatening cancers. Wound healing is yet another window into the mysteries of melanoma and the mechanisms that drive it.

Among skin researchers, there’s a common saying: Cancer is a wound that never heals. “The processes of wound healing and cancer progression have similar pathways,” explains Arup, whose mentor in France was renowned scientist Pierre Chambon, whom he calls a “guru” in the field of gene regulation. “They overlap.”

Scientists long have known that melanoma takes hold in the body’s pigment-producing cells, which are called melanocytes (that is, producers of melanin, which gives skin its color and protects it against the sun’s ultra-violet rays). But that’s only part of the story, as the Indras have discovered. In the “microenvironment,” or the local neighborhood, of the cancer site, the researchers have recently identified other skin cells that play a key role. Called keratinocytes (producers of keratin, a protein found in hair and nails as well as skin), these “co-conspirators” are not just bit players in the genesis of melanoma. They’re lead actors.

How Tumors Begin

Skin cells conspire to set melanoma in motion.
Read more…

“These adjacent cells are actually the driver for the changes and malignant transformation in the pigment-producing cells,” Arup says. “So there are two avenues — the pigment-producing cells where the cancer develops, and the adjacent skin cells which ‘talk to’ the pigment-producing cells in the form of signals. They work in coordination. They are partners in crime.”
To study melanoma cells in isolation from their surrounding biochemical and molecular environment, therefore, is to miss the intricate series of related interactions that give rise to the disease, he stresses.

East to West

The daughter of a mining engineer in southern India, Gitali was a gifted athlete, winning glory in badminton and table tennis. Arup, the son of a marine engineer based in Kolkata (then Calcutta), was a talented young musician, studying sitar with Sangeetacharya Gokul Nag, a pre-eminent sitarist of the Vishnupur Gharana of Bengal (a traditional form of Indian music), and with a nephew of the legendary Ravi Shankar. But when it came time to choose careers, the couple report, both fathers steered their offspring firmly toward the sciences.

As his post-doc in France was winding down, Arup was invited to interview at OSU. Leafy Corvallis was an easy choice for the couple. The rimming mountains reminded them of Strasbourg’s picturesque Vosges range. The shadowed woods echoed the Black Forest. And the nearby ocean recalled India’s turquoise coastline. But it wasn’t just the natural beauty of the place that tugged at them.

“There’s so much collegiality here,” Gitali says. “It’s such a caring and loving community.”

When the lights burn late in the Pharmacy Building on the east edge of campus, chances are they’re illuminating the labs of Gitali and Arup (who is a self-confessed “workaholic”) as they follow the threads of the day’s investigations. For their recent “co-conspirator” research, they used cell cultures from both human samples as well as animal models that carry a mutation in a gene called Cdk4, an inherited predisposition to melanoma that has turned up in families in Norway, France, Australia and England.

Their studies, funded by the National Institutes of Health, have found that a protein called RXR-alpha in skin keratinocytes appears to protect pigment cells from damage and to prevent them from progressing to invasive melanoma. This protein co-operates with Cdk4 and suppresses the release of chemical signals to adjacent pigment cells. These signals can, in effect, promote and augment the abnormal proliferation of pigment-producing cells in laboratory mice. Not surprisingly, when the protein is removed or repressed, melanoma cells become aggressive and invade the animals’ lymph nodes.

However, the Indras caution, both the protective protein and pigment cells can suffer damage from chemical toxins or ultraviolet sunlight exposure in the skin cells, creating a “double-edged sword” in melanoma’s complex etiology.

The Indras’ findings could lead to promising new prevention tools down the road. The scientists plan to use their unique animal models to screen for novel natural compounds with anti-proliferative activity on cancer cells in collaboration with other medicinal chemists in the college.

“Better understanding this process will help us design new and novel strategies for prevention and, possibly, a cure,” Arup says. “This could be a predictive prognostic tool for discovering melanoma predisposition in humans. And that could lead to better and earlier diagnostics.”

Illustration by Thomas James

Those halcyon days of trusted family doctors, vinyl discs and hometown papers are being left far, far behind as the world hurtles ahead on ever-faster, ever-smaller, ever more potent computing devices. Just as the revolution in technology has given everyone 24-7 access to The New York Times, a ballooning blogosphere and personalized, portable playlists, so has it given patients and consumers a limitless gateway to health-care resources. Within seconds, we can find news, information and chatrooms on WebMD, the world’s largest commercial health-care website, or up-to-date medical research on PubMed, the open-access site of the National Institutes of Health. We can get data on every disease under the sun. We can access details about an ever-widening rainbow of capsules, tablets, potions, ointments and salves. And we can solicit feedback from fellow sufferers around the globe, sharing symptoms and comparing diagnoses.

Now, instead of blindly following “doctor’s orders,” patients can power up their iPad, Google their symptoms and join a chatroom for a different kind of “expert” opinion — that of ordinary people who have “been there, done that.” They can add a health-related “app” to their smart phone, or post their ailments on Facebook. (A story about a mom whose gravely ill 4-year-old was saved by a Facebook diagnosis went viral on the Internet.) They can ask their doctor for all sorts of new drugs being touted on TV — many of them designed for just-discovered diseases that seem to pop up as fast as new products for personal computing.

In this brave new world of “e-health,” there are bounteous benefits, says Kristin Barker, a sociologist at Oregon State University.

“I think the overwhelming trend of health information on the Internet is positive,” says Barker, who studies the impact of electronic technologies on medical decision-making and power dynamics. “It gives us access to information in ways that are unprecedented. It allows us to be more engaged in our own health-care decisions. It empowers us. ”

Sitting in her third-floor office in Fairbanks Hall, she laughingly admits to typing in her own symptoms on a regular basis, looking for clues to why her head is aching or her energy is sagging.

“I’m a little bit of what’s called a cybercondriac,” she jokes. “I’ll look up two of my symptoms — headache and fatigue — and I’m convinced I have a brain tumor.”

This tendency to inflate or misinterpret ordinary aches and pains is one pitfall of seeking health-care information online. Others include grasping at “disease” models for problems that may, in fact, originate outside the biomedical sphere, and letting anecdotal evidence trump verifiable science.

Illuminating these kinds of hazards is the focus of Barker’s research. While she readily acknowledges that the “doomsday scenarios” of the Internet’s early days — people self-diagnosing with disastrous results, or falling prey to online charlatans — have not materialized to any significant degree, she has identified certain trends that are cause for concern, both for individuals and for society at large.

The Loneliness of Fibromyalgia

A woman called Yolanda posts the following comment in a chat room: “What I find in reading others’ symptoms is that I’m not nuts, and this really is happening to me.” In other words, her pain is not all in her head. And there’s an important subtext: She’s not alone in her suffering.

You can sense the gratitude in her words. You can almost hear her sigh with relief as she types her thoughts into her computer and then clicks “send.” With that tap of her finger, she joins the millions of Americans who are turning to the Internet for an astounding range of health-care needs, from basic information to psychological support. Of the nearly 75 percent of adults who use the Internet, 80 percent have sought health-related information online, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found in 2010. That’s almost 60 percent of American adults. Their search topics range from health insurance and environmental health hazards to drug safety, chronic pain, elder care, memory loss and a host of specific diseases.

Illustration by Thomas James

Sometimes, this electronic activity results in what social scientists call “illness affiliation” — identifying with others who report similar symptoms. These collectives of sufferers, joined in a spirit of “illness camaraderie,” as Barker calls it, typically push the medical establishment to bless their shared experience with disease status.

Yolanda (a pseudonym) is a case in point. Barker found her on a website fictionally named “Fibro Spot,” a chatroom for sufferers of a modern-day syndrome called fibromyalgia, which afflicts some 6 million Americans. Launched and run by laypeople, Fibro Spot’s homepage was one of the top 50 highest-ranked pages among the 6.7 million hits Barker got when she searched online for “fibromyalgia.”

For 12 months in 2004 and 2005, the researcher “lurked” in the background at Fibro Spot, eavesdropping on the conversations of Yolanda and about 250 other visitors who posted comments to the website. (Although some social scientists question the ethics of online lurking for data collection, Barker argues that if the site is public and doesn’t require a password or membership to join, then it’s open for anyone to read. The known presence of a researcher would alter the dialog, she says, diluting its authenticity and, hence, its value to science.)

Yolanda, having recognized her own plight in the stories of other virtual group members, found affirmation that her cluster of symptoms, ranging from pain and tenderness to anxiety, insomnia and fatigue, must certainly indicate an actual physical illness.

“By writing and reading postings at Fibro Spot, participants transform a collection of symptoms into a unified entity,” Barker explains in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. “From the point of view of participants, shared symptoms, rather than objective medical evidence, substantiate fibromyalgia as an organic disease.”

Social scientists call this phenomenon “reification” — that is, inventing a real, material thing out of an abstract idea or belief that has been developed socially. In this case, the idea being reified is a perceived illness. But as Barker points out, just because people are reporting similar constellations of physical and psychological symptoms doesn’t mean there’s a biomedical basis for them. The aches and pains may be real enough, she grants. Their origins, however, may also lie in larger social forces that affect human wellbeing.

In the case of fibromyalgia, some research points to a central nervous system imbalance that causes hypersensitivity to pain. But medical science has yet to find a definitive source of illness. Social science, however, has given us perhaps the most telling clues to the disorder, according to Barker. Studies reveal that fibromyalgia affects mostly women (the ratio is nine women to one man), and that there is an overrepresentation of sufferers who fall on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.

To Barker, these demographics strongly suggest a social problem rather than a medical one. Fibromyalgia, she posits, is a classic example of a phenomenon she has studied extensively throughout her career: “medicalization.” She defines it as “the processes by which an ever-wider range of human experiences come to be defined, experienced, and treated as medical conditions.” In short, we are seeking pills and potions to fix problems whose solutions may well be non-pharmaceutical.

“I argue that the fibromyalgia diagnosis medicalizes a vast constellation of complaints that are associated with social, economic and personal hardships that characterize the lives of many women,” she says. “By focusing intently on gaining medical legitimization, Fibro Spot participants remain largely silent on the social circumstances in which suffering is grounded and experienced.”

Fibromyalgia is just one of the “contested diseases”— medically unexplained syndromes such as chronic fatigue, multiple chemical sensitivity and sick-building syndrome — being driven in large part by online connections among people like Yolanda and her fellow sufferers. Indeed, more than 10 million Americans have a diagnosis for a contested disease. Electronic “connectivity” and the collective validation of “lay expertise” that it fosters is “a potent element in contemporary lay challenges to scientific expertise and will become increasingly influential as online illness affiliation becomes ever more commonplace,” Barker and co-author Tasha Galardi, an OSU graduate student, write in the journal Social Science & Medicine.

Other examples of the “disease du jour” craze, such as “restless leg syndrome” and “low T,” are being propelled by drug companies pushing pharmaceuticals as “cures” for conditions that many physicians chalk up to normal aging, poor lifestyle choices (such as too much sitting around) or even, as Barker puts it, simply “part of the human condition.”

Illustration by Thomas James

These forces, which Peter Conrad of Brandeis University calls “engines of medicalization,” have shifted over the decades. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Barker says, doctors were in the driver’s seat when they redefined natural processes — especially ones related to women’s bodies, such as childbirth and menopause — as needing medical management. By the end of the last century, however, the pharmaceutical industry was the primary driver of the trend toward medicalizing experiences once accepted as normal vicissitudes of living. Riding right alongside the drug companies was the health-care consumer. Then the Internet arrived, creating the perfect platform for ramping up medicalization trends to breakneck speed.

“The transformation of medicine from being primarily professionally directed to being increasingly market-driven places the patient in a new role vis-à-vis medicalization,” Barker asserts, again drawing on the writings of Conrad. “It is increasingly the case that patients contribute to medicalization via their consumer ‘desire and demand’ for medical goods and services.”

When we latch onto organic explanations for troubles that are actually social in nature, Barker says, we lose the opportunity to find and address true root causes. “My concern is how electronic support groups may push for greater medical intervention when it’s not necessary, not effective and not in our best interest, either as individuals or as a society,” Barker says.

Warriors for Mammography

For Yolanda, chatting with her compatriots online gave her the gumption to tell off her skeptical physician: See? I told you so. You’re not so smart after all. Indeed, questioning traditional medical authorities is a hallmark of health care in many of today’s online communities. Barker’s Fibro Spot subjects, who were more than 90 percent female, were uniformly bitter about their physicians’ unwillingness to recognize fibromyalgia as a legitimate disease. “Idiot,” “bitch” and “clueless” were some of the virtual insults they hurled at their doctors while nursing fantasies of slapping them or kicking them in the shins. Their rage, clearly fueled by feelings of powerlessness, practically leapt off the screen. “Find a new doctor!” was their mad-as-hell advice to newcomers.

This rejection of doctors’ expertise and scientific findings, unheard of in the heydays of Rockwell and rock-n-roll, is at the heart of a firestorm that erupted on the Internet in 2009. This “populist uprising,” to use the words of Pew’s Susannah Fox, was triggered when a congressional task force issued new guidelines for breast cancer screening. The panel of independent experts, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, announced that it was rolling back earlier standards for routine screening. For 40-something women without any breast cancer symptoms or risk factors, the panel reported that routine mammograms don’t save lives and may, in fact, be harmful. And for women between 50 and 74, every-other-year scans are adequate, they said, thereby overturning earlier recommendations for annual mammograms.

The reaction from breast cancer survivors and providers was “swift and furious,” reported journalist Jennifer Goodwin on U.S. News & World Report’s “HealthDay” website. Within hours, the Internet was aflame with angry denunciations against the task force, which had based its new recommendations on rigorous, population-level statistical evidence.

This brouhaha “was a great illustration of how two worlds collide,” Barker told Goodwin for the U.S. News article. “On the one hand, you had the science that was saying mammography for women in their 40s might not be as effective as we thought, and on the other hand, you had the personal experiences of the women who believed they were saved by having a mammogram.”

What’s happening, she explains, is “a contemporary clash between scientific and lay ways of knowing.” These “two faces of medicine” (as Harry Collins of Cardiff University and Trevor Pinch of Cornell phrase it) are not only pitting patients against physicians, but also private wellbeing against the public good. In an era of scarce resources, unnecessary screenings shrink access and siphon funds that could be used for more effective, more equitable preventions and treatments for larger swaths of the populace.

“There’s a lot of overuse of health care that is unneeded and, in some cases, harmful,” Barker notes. “We have a right to be worried about not getting care we may need — that’s a real fear and one that should not be dismissed. But we also need to be afraid of getting health care we don’t need. Because somebody is profiting from it.”

The Image of Health

Even as they lose faith in their doctors, Americans are embracing certain medical technologies with the fervor of true believers, Barker says. Our infatuation with imaging machines that peer inside our bodies to see what’s wrong with us — CT scanners, PET scanners, MRIs — has exploded in recent years. High-tech imaging in emergency rooms, for example, quadrupled between 1996 and 2007, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). In doctors’ offices and outpatient clinics, imaging frequency tripled during the same time span, the CDC found.

Mammography, Barker suggests, along with these other high-tech imaging tools, has taken on the status of a “sacred technology” — something revered that cannot be questioned. Following the logic of sociologist Kelly Joyce of the College of William and Mary, who asserts that MRIs and the images they create “serve as totems and sacred objects” in the same way religious rituals and trappings do, Barker says the idea is an extension of the classic analysis in Elementary Forms of Religious Life by Emile Durkheim, who is widely recognized as the “father of sociology.”

Our faith in these technologies can blind us to the findings of science, Barker cautions. Despite the dramatic rise in imaging for injured patients in ERs, diagnosing life-threatening conditions has not improved correspondingly, according to a 2010 Johns Hopkins study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. As for mammography, research has found that for every cancer detected during routine screenings among 40-something women, nearly 2,000 mammograms are performed. The new guidelines were based on those findings. With no credible evidence linking more imaging with less mortality, the task force concluded that the risks (from radiation, false positives and follow-up interventions) were not justified for healthy, asymptomatic women.

Still, survivors and their supporters were outraged. Statistics, schmatistics! they lashed back. You’re talking about my life, my mother’s life, my sister’s life! Their passionate beliefs became amplified on the Internet.

Barker has enormous respect and empathy for the patients, survivors and consumers she calls “citizen experts” or “lay experts.” Anyone who has undergone breast cancer — or, for that matter, any life-threatening condition — attains a degree of expertise that has value and must not be discounted, she says. But she goes on to caution that when good science sheds light on questionable, wasteful or even harmful uses of medical personnel, equipment and money, connective resistance from stakeholders can be a dangerous barrier to good policy. That’s e-health at its worst. At its best, e-health can be a powerful fulcrum for balancing anecdote and science, private and public, individual and societal toward better health and greater wellbeing for everyone.

“When the Internet first came out,” Barker says, “it was a place where people went to get information. Then it started to be a place where people shared information. Now it’s becoming a place where people create information.”

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OSU’s Linus Pauling Institute maintains the Micronutrient Information Center, a popular online database of research-based information about vitamins, minerals and other micronutrients.

At Oregon State University, Ruder is pursuing master’s degrees in medical anthropology and in international public health. In Uganda she will combine these disciplines by studying cultural attitudes toward obstetric fistulas, a medical condition that affects 2 to 3 million women worldwide, mostly in developing countries. Fistulas result in incontinence and social isolation for women if left untreated.

“The roots of the problem are complex,” says Ruder. “Training traditional birth attendants would help. But there are deep cultural traditions at work.”

Fistulas can occur when any unnatural passageway opens up between two organs in the body. During childbirth, especially with girls whose bodies have not fully developed, prolonged pressure by the baby can damage the lining of the birth canal, leading to an opening between the vagina and the urinary tract or the rectum.

In collaboration with Terrewode, a nonprofit organization in Uganda, Ruder will interview birth attendants and fistula sufferers about their understanding of causes and preventive measures. As a member of OSU’s Reproductive Health Laboratory, her ultimate goal is to improve maternal health care for women in developing countries as well as the United States.

Ruder will work in the eastern Ugandan city of Soroti until the end of March, 2012, but it won’t be her first trip to Africa. In 1995, after receiving a bachelor’s degree in political science at the University of Arizona, she volunteered with a nonprofit group in Zimbabwe, the Kunzwana Woman’s Association, working with women on commercial farms and in mining communities. “Living conditions on the farms were terrible and tragic,” she says.

OSU master's student Bonnie Ruder, left, used her midwifery skills with Haitian women after the 2010 earthquake. (Photo courtesy of Bonnie Ruder)

That experience inspired her to move to Oregon and become educated in homebirth as a midwife. In June 2010, following the March earthquake in Haiti, Ruder volunteered for three weeks with Mother Health International in a birth center about two hours from the capital, Port-au-Prince.

“The Haitian women were amazing,” she says. “They were so happy and appreciative of the care.” Many would ride a motorbike from the mountainous countryside to the center to give birth. Because they often had other children at home, they would clutch the newborn in their arms a few hours later as they sped away for the jarring ride home. “It was not our ideal post-partum picture,” says Ruder.

On her way back to Oregon from Haiti, Ruder met Dr. Lewis Wall, a medical anthropologist and obstetrician at Washington University in St. Louis, who established the Worldwide Fistula Fund to serve women in developing countries. While at the university, Ruder also met Alice Emasu, a Ugandan woman and coordinator for Terrewode, an organization in Soroti whose aim is to empower women and support families.

With a $50,000 grant from the The Fistula Foundation, Emasu is addressing some of the cultural factors that lead to childbirth-related fistulas such as poor nutrition, lack of adequate medical care and child marriage. The organization will increase advocacy for treatment, prevention and social integration of fistula patients. Ruder’s ethnographic research will provide a better understanding of how Ugandan women and birth attendants view fistulas.

She explains that from a biomedical perspective, the condition is caused by “obstetrically obstructed labor,” but if local people don’t share that understanding, solutions to the problem may not be effective.

“I’ll ask women who have suffered from the fistula what they think caused it and what they think could prevent it. I’ll also ask those same questions of traditional birth attendants,” says Ruder. With Terrewode, she will evaluate her findings in light of existing approaches to preventing fistulas through education. In the long run, she adds, educating girls and empowering women may be the most effective public health option.

Ruder will travel to Soroti with her husband Eric and two children, Lucas, 8, and Soren, 11. Terrewode is not supporting her work financially, so she is raising funds to help pay for expenses for travel, translation and other activities.

_______________________

Ruder interviewed 17 fistula survivors in Soroti and working in the regional hospital. See a June 2012 story about her experience.

(Photo: Eppic Photography)

Oregon State University forestry scientists have a habit of redefining the conversation about carbon and forests. Professors Beverly Law, Mark Harmon and their colleagues have demonstrated that old-growth stands on the west side of the Cascades store as much carbon or more than that held in tropical rain forests.

In 2009, Law reported that forests from the San Francisco Bay Area to the Columbia River could theoretically double the amount of carbon they currently contain.

In 2007 and 2009, her research group determined that Pacific Northwest fires emit less carbon than previously thought. Most emissions were from combustion of the forest floor and understory vegetation, and only about 1 to 3 percent of live tree mass was burned.

Not surprisingly, tree cutting turns forests from carbon sinks to carbon sources. Law has determined that it may take 15 years or more for young trees to begin absorbing more carbon than is lost through decomposition of branches, roots and other dead material. She conducted her studies in ponderosa pine, and her conclusions were later confirmed in an international study of boreal and temperate forests.

Ameriflux Network

Now, Law has co-authored a national study concluding that forests and other terrestrial ecosystems in the lower 48 states can sequester up to 40 percent of the nation’s fossil fuel carbon emissions, a larger amount than previously estimated, unless a large drought or other major disturbance occurs.

Carbon dioxide, when released by the burning of fossil fuels, forest fires or other activities, is a major “greenhouse gas” and factor in global warming. But vegetation, mostly in the form of growing evergreen and deciduous forests, can play an important role in absorbing some of the excess carbon dioxide.

Widespread droughts, such as those that occurred in 2002 and 2006, can cut the amount of carbon sequestered by about 20 percent, Law and her colleagues concluded in a study that was supported by the National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy.

The research, published by scientists from 35 institutions in the journal Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, was based on satellite measurements and data from the AmeriFlux network, a system of nearly 100 carbon-monitoring sites in the Americas.

Not all of these data had been incorporated into earlier estimates, and the new study provides one of the most accurate assessments to date of the nation’s terrestrial carbon balance.

“With climate change, we may get more extreme or frequent weather events in the future than we had before,” Law adds. “About half of the United States was affected by the major droughts in 2002 and 2006, which were unusual in their spatial extent and severity. And we’re now learning that this can have significant effects on the amount of carbon sequestered in a given year.”

Climate Mapping

Such information is important to understand global climate issues and develop policies, the researchers note. This study examined the carbon budget in the United States from 2001 to 2006. Also playing a key role in the analysis was OSU’s PRISM climate database, a sophisticated system to monitor weather on a very localized and specific basis.

The period from 2001 to 2006, the researchers say, had some catastrophic and unusual events, not the least of which was Hurricane Katrina and the massive destruction it caused. It also factored in the 2002 Biscuit Fire in Northern California and southwest Oregon, which burned nearly 500,000 acres and was among the largest forest fires in modern U.S. history.

The research found that temperate forests in eastern states absorbed carbon mainly because of forest re-growth following the abandonment of agricultural lands, while some areas of the Pacific Northwest assimilated carbon during much of the year because of the region’s mild climate.

Croplands were not considered in determining the annual magnitude of the U.S. terrestrial carbon sink, because the carbon they absorb each year during growth will be soon released when the crops are harvested or their biomass burned.

The study was led by Jingfeng Xiao, a research assistant professor at the Complex Systems Research Center, Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space, at the University of New Hampshire.

“Our results show that U.S. ecosystems play an important role in slowing down the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” the researchers wrote in their conclusion.

Ø Online: See more about Beverly Law’s terrestrial ecosystem research at terraweb.forestry.oregonstate.edu/

Oregon State University Professor Scott Ashford measures ground upheaval during a visit to Japan following a major earthquake there. (photo courtesy GEER)

“Our mission is to get word out to the scientific community about what’s happened on the ground,” he says. As a geotechnical engineer, he is particularly interested in soil changes following an earthquake. His findings raise questions about the adequacy of building standards in the United States and abroad.

In the past year, Ashford has inspected the aftermaths of quakes in Chile, New Zealand and Japan. The work demands humility. Out of respect for people who lived through terrifying events, he warns younger colleagues to avoid expressing excitement over significant findings. “We’re amongst people who have had their lives ruined and are in upheaval,” he says. “Even though it’s exciting to see the things we’ve been doing research on in action, you can’t show any of that. It’s an emotional rollercoaster.”

And it demands a keen eye. Careful measurements of structural damage, landslides, soil liquefaction and shifted fault lines can help engineers to design more resilient structures. The whole point is to save lives and reduce the damage that will occur when the next Big One hits, a goal shared by more than a dozen of Ashford’s colleagues in engineering and geophysical sciences at OSU.

Buildings on Quicksand

Ashford has seen buildings torn in half as if they were made of LEGOs®, bridges demolished or jackknifed on their foundations and utility pipes squeezed out of the ground. One his team’s most significant findings came from the March 11 subduction zone earthquake in Japan, which caused soil liquefaction — wet sands, gravels, silts and fill materials turned into soup as they shake, with all the load-bearing capacity of quicksand — that surprised researchers with its geographic extent and widespread severity.

In order to gather evidence of this phenomenon, Ashford and his team looked for sand boils (small sand volcanoes) and lateral spreads — that is, shallow landslides triggered by liquefaction. Although they arrived only two weeks after the initial quake, cleanup was already taking place, erasing evidence in some locations, which is why GEER teams are sent in quickly after a major event.

“The data are very perishable,” he says. But the more evidence they can gather about how soil has altered during an earthquake, the better engineers will be at predicting the outcomes of future quakes.

Collapsed bridge in Santiago, Chile, after the 2010 earthquake. (Photo courtesy of Scott Ashford)

“We’ve seen localized examples of soil liquefaction as extreme as this before, but the distance and extent of damage in Japan were unusually severe. Entire structures were tilted and sinking into the sediments, even while they remained intact. The shifts in soil destroyed water, sewer and gas pipelines, crippling the utilities and infrastructure these communities need to function. We saw some places that sank as much as four feet.”

Parts of the West Coast of the United States are vulnerable to the phenomenon. They include Portland, parts of the Willamette Valley and other areas of Oregon, Washington and California. Around San Francisco Bay, for example, the U.S. Geological Survey categorizes most of the low-lying lands as having moderate to very high susceptibility to liquefaction.

Some degree of soil liquefaction is common in almost any major earthquake. It can allow structures to shift or sink and significantly magnify the structural damage produced by the shaking itself.

New Construction Standards

But most earthquakes are much shorter than the event in Japan, Ashford adds. The length of the Japanese earthquake, as much as five minutes, may force researchers to reconsider the extent of liquefaction damage possible in situations such as this.

“With such a long-lasting earthquake, we saw how structures that might have been OK after 30 seconds just continued to sink and tilt as the shaking continued for several more minutes,” he says. “And it was clear that younger sediments, and especially areas built on recently filled ground, are much more vulnerable.”

The data provided by analyzing the Japanese earthquake should make it possible to improve the understanding of this soil phenomenon and better prepare for it in the future. Ashford says it was critical for the team to collect the information quickly, before damage was removed in the recovery efforts.

“There’s no doubt that we’ll learn things from what happened in Japan that will help us to mitigate risks in other similar events,” Ashford adds. “Future construction in some places may make more use of techniques known to reduce liquefaction, such as better compaction to make soils dense, or use of reinforcing stone columns.”

The massive subduction zone earthquakes capable of this type of shaking, which are the most powerful in the world, don’t happen everywhere, even in other regions such as Southern California that face seismic risks. But an event almost exactly like that is expected in the Pacific Northwest from the Cascadia Subduction Zone, and the new findings make it clear that liquefaction will be a critical issue there.

West Coast on Edge

Many parts of that region, from northern California to British Columbia, have younger soils vulnerable to liquefaction — on the coast, near river deposits or in areas with filled ground. These “young” sediments, in geologic terms, may be those deposited within the past 10,000 years or more. In Oregon, for instance, that describes much of downtown Portland, the Portland International Airport, nearby industrial facilities and other cities and parts of the Willamette Valley.

Anything near a river and old flood plains is a suspect, and the Oregon Department of Transportation has already concluded that 1,100 bridges in the state are at risk from an earthquake on the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Fewer than 15 percent of them have been retrofitted to prevent collapse.

Based on reports by the U.S. and California geological surveys, this San Francisco Bay Area map shows areas with water-saturated sandy and silty materials that are susceptible to liquefaction if shaken hard enough. (Map courtesy of the Association of Bay Area Governments)

“Buildings that are built on soils vulnerable to liquefaction not only tend to sink or tilt during an earthquake, but slide downhill if there’s any slope, like towards a nearby river,” Ashford says. “This is called lateral spreading. In Portland we might expect this sideways sliding of more than four feet in some cases, more than enough to tear apart buildings and buried pipelines.”

Some damage may be reduced or prevented by different construction techniques or retrofitting. But another reasonable goal is to at least anticipate the damage, to know what will probably be destroyed, make contingency plans for what will be needed to implement repairs and design ways to help protect and care for residents until services can be restored.

The survey in Japan identified areas as far away as Tokyo Bay that had liquefaction-induced ground failures. The magnitude of settlement and tilt was “larger than previously observed for such light structures,” the GEER researchers wrote in their report.

Impacts and deformation were erratic, often varying significantly from one street to the next. Port facilities along the coast faced major liquefaction damage. Strong Japanese construction standards helped prevent many buildings from collapse – even as they tilted and sank into the ground.

Collaboration Is Key

The GEER team always pairs up with researchers from the country where they’re working. This not only helps them with cultural and language issues, but allows them to be guided by the hosting country’s scientists as to where it’s appropriate, and safe, to conduct their research. It is also a great way to foster international collaboration.

“You can develop strong personal bonds with someone spending a week together in the car doing an earthquake reconnaissance,” Ashford says. And it is those personal relationships that make the follow-up research collaboration possible.

During his trip to Japan, Ashford had to balance his own emotional reactions to the devastation. A colleague there showed him a video that hadn’t been aired on television. It was a shot of the water level rising on the Japanese coast as witnesses gathered on the shore, unaware of the danger. In a flash, the tsunami waves hit the coast, obliterating everything, and everyone, standing on the shore.

“We both teared up,” Ashford says. “It was very emotional to see that.”