Screenings may have been underreported in part because Hmong women typically keep health decisions private. And while many Hmong have indeed been screened, those screenings tend to be one-time or occasional events rather than regular routines. “It is not enough to have been screened once,” says Jennifer Kue, who grew up in Portland’s Hmong community and conducted the study with Thorburn as a Ph.D. candidate. The risks are especially high among the Hmong, whose cervical cancer rates are some of the nation’s highest.

Another surprising finding: Hmong women make many health decisions independently of their husbands. “In our culture, we place a heavy emphasis on communal decision-making and it’s male-dominant,” Kue, now an assistant professor at Ohio State. “I would have expected men to have more influence.”

Pasteur learned about rabies by infecting guinea pigs, rabbits and dogs with the invariably fatal disease. In the 20th century, the search for a polio vaccine took the lives of millions of monkeys (rhesus macaques). AIDS researchers still rely on monkeys to understand how the immune system responds to HIV and why some (sooty mangabeys) harbor the virus but never develop the disease.

In her book, Experimenting with Humans and Animals, From Galen to Animal Rights (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), Anita Guerrini tells the story of the scientists whose achievements transformed medical care and of the controversies that erupted around the use of animals for science. “It’s about how this theme traces through the Western tradition and enters into the history of medicine,” says Guerrini, a historian and Horning Professor in the Humanities at Oregon State University.

Everyday Cruelty

Advances in medical knowledge and the debate over human and animal rights go back to ancient Greece and Rome. They surface again in 17th century England, a time “when dancing bears, bears fighting with dogs, cockfighting and all manner of cat torture were commonplace, and everyday cruelty to animals was the rule rather than the exception,” writes Guerrini.Scientists such as William Harvey, Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke experimented on insects, rabbits, birds, fish, deer and dogs (Harvey even dissected the dead bodies of his wife’s dearly loved parrot and his own father) in the name of science. Harvey’s success in describing the circulatory system “brought animal experimentation into the forefront as a scientific method,” Guerrini adds.

Guerrini traces the philosophical roots of arguments for and against vivisection (the cutting of live animals) and of the trade-off between suffering and knowledge. For example, Rene Descartes argued that animals lack souls and can’t suffer in the way that humans can, but few accepted this argument.

England passed the first national law to regulate animal research in 1876. It took the United States 90 years to follow suit with the Animal Welfare Act. “Up to then, we had always trusted scientists to do the right thing,” Guerrini says. In 1985, universities and other organizations were required to establish institutional animal care and use committees (IACUC) to enforce higher standards of inspection and care. Those years also saw the rise of citizen activism through groups such as the Animal Liberation Front and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Before coming to Oregon State in 2008, Guerrini served on the IACUC at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is now a member of OSU’s IACUC.

In her own research, Guerrini is completing a book on anatomical research in pre-French Revolution Paris and looking at urban animals in pre-modern Paris and London.

Scientists know that this scenario has happened repeatedly in the last 10,000 years and will do so again. Oregon State University geologist Chris Goldfinger calculates the chance of a major quake at 40 percent in the next 50 years off the southern Oregon coast. The frequency decreases as you move north, but the nearly 800-mile Cascadia subduction zone, where these quakes originate, could rupture anywhere. The last one wiped out villages. The next one will threaten cities and bring a regional economy to its knees.

Nevertheless, for most of us, the threat seems as likely as getting hit by lightning. We know it could happen, but we don’t take it seriously. It feels remote. “The paradigm shift among the citizens of the Northwest has not yet taken place,” says Bob Yeats, emeritus professor of geology at Oregon State and author of Living with Earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest.

As recently as 30 years ago, most scientists didn’t think a major quake could happen here. But, says Yeats in an upcoming book, evidence from coastal marshes, seafloor canyons, GPS monitoring stations and native traditions tell a compelling story: The western edge of North America is locked against another part of the Earth’s crust, the Juan de Fuca Plate, which is diving beneath us. Like wrestlers in mortal combat, they occasionally break their hold on each other and lurch into a new position. Geologists have given such events a name right out of Saturday night wrestling — “megathrust.” When it happens, the landscape vibrates like a bass drum. Seismic waves pulse through the crust for three minutes or more. Some types of soil liquefy and spread out. Bridge and building foundations get pushed out of alignment. Other soils could amplify the shaking from below, subjecting buildings, especially high-rises, to even more violent motion.

Lifelines

Scott Ashford has seen the consequences of these quakes in Chile, Japan and New Zealand: buildings and bridges tilted and broken like toys, beachfront tourist towns reduced to rubble, pipelines squeezed out of the ground like toothpaste out of a tube, businesses closed or forced to relocate.

“Many of Oregon’s lifeline providers have shared research needs, whether it’s to improve our ground motion predictions, to assess liquefaction potential of Oregon soils or to develop retrofit technologies for our legacy systems.”

— Matthew L. Garrett, Director, Oregon Department of Transportation

The Oregon State Kearney Professor of Engineering is determined to soften the blow when Oregon’s turn arrives. In 2010, after viewing damage from a megathrust quake in Chile, Ashford developed the idea for the Cascadia Lifelines Program, a consortium of Oregon businesses, government agencies and universities. The goal is to save lives and to shorten the time it will take for the state and the nation to recover.

“If you look at the effect on the people and at recovery, a key part of our resilience is lifelines,” Ashford says. “Electric power, natural gas, transportation systems, telecommunications, drinking water, sewer. And critical facilities like the Port of Portland and the Portland International Airport. All of these lifeline providers have common challenges to prepare for this next earthquake. None by itself has the financial ability to fund the research necessary. My vision is to pursue research of common interest to develop cost-effective solutions to mitigate the Cascadia earthquake.”

Members of the consortium already include the Oregon Department of Transportation, Portland General Electric, NW Natural (Northwest Natural Gas), the Port of Portland, the Portland Water Bureau and the Bonneville Power Administration. Ashford is lining up others as well. Among their concerns are building standards, landslides, communications and recovery strategies. But first up on their research agenda is an Oregon State study of soil liquefaction, the phenomenon that compounds the damage caused by seismic shaking.

Soil Sleuths

Soils are often named for the places where they’re found. California’s state soil is called San Joaquin. In Washington, Tokul soil is named after a community in King County. Oregon’s state soil is Jory, named for a hill in Marion County where a family of that name settled in 1852. For geotechnical engineers, another local soil poses a potential risk in a megathrust earthquake: Willamette silt.

With a texture midway between sand and clay, this remnant of the ancient Missoula Floods underlies much of the Willamette Valley. From McMinnville nearly to Eugene, bridge piers, roads (I-5, U.S. Highway 99) and pipelines run through or on top of Willamette silt. It carries railroad tracks and electric transmission lines. Large parts of Salem sit on it, as do Albany, Corvallis and Sweet Home. It is up to 130 feet deep in some places.

“We don’t really know anything about how Willamette silt responds to earthquakes,” says Ben Mason, an assistant professor of civil engineering at Oregon State. What he does know is that, as soils go, it doesn’t take much water for it to change from being dry and crumbly to taking on the properties of a liquid. “It has a low plasticity index. What that means is that it can liquefy during an earthquake,” he says. At least theoretically.

To find out for sure, Mason has collected Willamette silt from the Oregon State campus. Last winter, he and a colleague, Li Zheng from the Nanjing Hydraulic Research Institute in China (Li wants to know how earthen dams will perform during an earthquake), placed soil samples the size of hockey pucks in a device that simulates conditions deep underground. They subjected the samples to repeated, precisely controlled cycles of shaking. As a piston shook the sample, simulating seismic waves, sensors measured changes in volume and in water pressure inside the soil.

As the shaking continued, “the water pressure builds up, builds up and builds up and eventually the soil will act like a liquid,” says Mason. “And that’s when we say liquefaction happens.” In effect, he explains, soil structure breaks down, water oozes from pores where it had been bound and the soil turns into a mass with the consistency of pea soup.

We can see liquefaction in action when we walk on a beach, Mason adds. “If you run, you cause these minor liquefaction events. It’s a very dynamic load hitting the sand.” Water is forced out from between the grains and pools briefly on the surface. In contrast, water underground has nowhere to go. As Mason’s experiments show, pressure rises. The question is: Will it get high enough to trigger liquefaction? If it does and the soil happens to be on a slope, it can spread out, jeopardizing any structure that is in the way, such as a bridge pier, building foundation or pipeline.

Mason’s experiments are the first to be supported by Cascadia Lifelines Program funding. His lab is one of the few on the West Coast with the ability to subject soils to a wide range of precisely controlled earthquakes. His “cyclic simple shear” device can be programmed to mimic seismic waves with varying duration and strength. With accurate information about Willamette silt, engineers will be able to design structures that can minimize the damage from the possibility of soil movement caused by liquefaction. Engineering firms are already contacting him to test soil samples for project design purposes.

Buildings and Bridges

Most schools, city halls, bridges, commercial buildings and other structures in Oregon were built before the possibility of big earthquakes was taken seriously. “We don’t know how these buildings will perform (in an earthquake),” says Andre Barbosa, an Oregon State structural engineer. “We have a very rough idea. We know by year and type of construction, whether this or that building may behave well or not so well. But we don’t really know.”

Because seismic stresses were not even recognized in the state’s building codes until 1974, our infrastructure and architectural heritage are highly vulnerable. According to the Oregon Resilience Plan, a report produced by the Oregon Seismic Safety Policy Advisory Commission (OSSPAC) in 2013, nearly half of 2,193 schools assessed in the state have a high to very high potential for collapse. More than a third of the 2,567 bridges in the state highway system were built with no seismic considerations. All nine of Portland’s bridges over the Willamette were built before seismic codes were in force, although some have been strengthened.

But estimating vulnerability is only the start, says Barbosa, who specializes in structural performance in earthquakes. Engineers also need to evaluate strategies for retrofitting old structures and improving standards for new construction. Toward that end, Barbosa conducts experiments on building and bridge components in the Oregon State structures lab, which boasts the second-largest “strong floor” on the West Coast. It allows researchers to simulate earthquake forces up to 1 million pounds on frames up to two stories high. In a project for the Oregon Department of Transportation, Barbosa is evaluating the performance of high-strength reinforcing steel (aka “rebar”) to resist long-duration shaking.

That fills an important need in the Northwest where subduction zone earthquakes are likely to last three to five minutes or more. In contrast, crustal earthquakes, such as those along the famed San Andreas Fault in California, typically last 30 seconds or less. The difference adds up to higher demands on buildings, especially where the frequency of the seismic waves matches a structure’s internal characteristics.

“The main objective of our modern building codes is life safety,” Barbosa adds. “We design structures so that people can evacuate in case of strong shaking. The structure can vibrate back and forth, but it is designed not to collapse. That’s the life safety design approach.”

In addition to living in earthquake country, Barbosa has a personal connection to such events. He grew up in Lisbon, Portugal, which suffered a cataclysmic earthquake and tsunami in 1755. Geologists now estimate that it approached the strength of the 1700 megathrust earthquake in the Pacific Northwest. Since then, Portugal and the Northwest have experienced thousands of smaller quakes centered in local faults, but there have been no large events of the kind seen recently in Chile and Japan. “The problems we have in Portugal are the same as we have here in Oregon,” he says. “The return period for large earthquakes is very long. People just don’t remember.”

Nevertheless, Oregon is taking a leadership role in planning. Elsewhere, agencies and regions (the San Francisco Bay Area) have developed a holistic approach to resilience, but Oregon is the first to do so at the state level. “Through OSSPAC,” says Barbosa, “Oregon is doing something that is amazing.”

Sliding Slopes

When Michael Olsen pulls up a map of the Oregon Coast Range on his computer, he sees wide swaths of red dots. Each one represents landslide-prone areas identified through the highly accurate lens of a remote sensing technology known as LIDAR (“light detection and ranging”). The Oregon State civil engineer and Hoffman Faculty Scholar specializes in the emerging field of geomatics, which is land surveying on steroids. Geomatics practitioners analyze landscapes by combining remote sensing data (from the ground, the air or planetary orbit) and large spatial datasets for soils, vegetation, precipitation, streams and other features.

In the Coast Range, Olsen and his graduate students are assembling LIDAR data and layering it with what engineers know about the terrain. Working with the Oregon Department of Transportation, their goal is to estimate the likelihood of earthquake-triggered landslides near highways that link the I-5 corridor with coastal communities.

These mountains might be beautiful, but Olsen’s picture isn’t pretty. “The Coast Range consists of very loose soils that are of very poor quality. They don’t have a lot of strength to them,” he says. In an emergency, “barriers along these lifeline corridors would be a big problem. Even a small landslide can close down a road for a day or two.”
And it doesn’t take much to start Coast Range soils moving. Based on the locations of previous slides and knowledge of soil types, it appears that slopes as low as 10 to 15 percent are vulnerable to sliding. “That isn’t that much. It’s pretty scary that it’s that low,” Olsen says.

Landslides are hardly a new phenomenon in Oregon, but they are more common in some years than in others. The winter storms of 1996-97 generated an estimated 9,500 landslides, mostly in western Oregon. Scientists at the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI) have calculated that, while economic losses exceed $10 million in a typical year, they exceeded $100 million that winter.

Although all Coast Range roads pass through slide-prone terrain, some may be less vulnerable and easier to re-open than others. Such information, says Olsen, will help ODOT prioritize roads for earthquake recovery purposes.

A Statewide Effort

By coordinating these and other research investments, Cascadia Lifelines meets an important need for state agencies and utility companies and fills a critical niche in statewide preparedness efforts. Spurred by the state Legislature, scientists, utility companies and agencies are evaluating risks and identifying solutions to mitigate the most significant impacts of the next megathrust earthquake. Schools and other public buildings have been assessed, and retrofits have begun. Roadways are being ranked for vulnerability to landslides and bridge failures. On the coast, evacuation routes are being marked to help coastal residents and visitors escape the tsunami zone.

“Given the nature and wide-ranging impact of seismic activity, it is appropriate that a consortium of organizations engaged in building, operating and maintaining critical infrastructure in Oregon could work together to identify and address concerns about improving seismic resilience.”

— Grant Yoshihara, Vice President, NW Natural

In 2011, Oregon’s Earthquake Commission (aka the Oregon Seismic Safety Policy Advisory Commission or OSSPAC) assembled experts to lay out the risks and recommend a series of steps for the next 50 years. It released a final report — The Oregon Resilience Plan — last February. “The broad picture of what needs to be done is pretty straightforward,” says Ian Madin, chief scientist for DOGAMI and an Oregon State alum who helped to lead the planning. “We need to strengthen our infrastructure so that it physically resists the effects of the earthquake, so that it is either undamaged or easily repairable.”

Engineers know how to design earthquake-resilient structures, say Madin and Ashford. They can “harden” foundation soils to resist liquefaction and construct bridges and buildings that can survive shaking. Such measures carry a stiff price tag, but the return on investment can be positive. For example, says Ashford, after the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, earthquake preparedness steps saved $10 for $1 spent.

Power to Recover

Ultimately, recovery is about more than engineering. It is about assistance for a traumatized citizenry, strategies for keeping small businesses afloat, security to prevent looting, radio systems that will work after cell-phone towers and land lines go down and policies that allow restoration projects to be fast-tracked. In Chile, Ashford adds, electricity was crucial for recovery efforts. Water pumps in rural areas, for example, couldn’t even be tested until power was restored. In New Zealand, homeowners insure against earthquakes as well as fire.

The government helped businesses get back on their feet by creating a temporary mall out of shipping containers. Grants kept paychecks flowing to employees who otherwise would have qualified for unemployment. Some businesses provided food and fuel to employees’ families so that workers could focus on the job of rebuilding without worrying if their loved-ones were safe.

Individuals need to prepare as well. “I’m a big believer in personal responsibility,” says Ashford. He has installed an electrical generator port on his home, keeps extra medication on hand and fills his truck’s fuel tank when it hits half empty. “Every family needs to be prepared to be on their own for a few days. Every community needs to be prepared to be on its own. If you are expecting the government to come in immediately with assistance, it may take many days or weeks for that help to arrive.”

The grasslands of Inner Mongolia are giving way to desert as modernization forces nomads to give up their ancient herding practices.

In tune with nature’s seasonal shadings, nomads once roamed across the grasslands of Inner Mongolia on China’s northern frontier. For generations, bands of herders moved across the landscape — matching the dietary needs of livestock to the cycles of plants, striking an ecological and cultural balance.

But that ancient pattern is teetering, warns Oregon State graduate anthropology student Tom Conte, who lived with a group of herders while he studied their changing way of life. Pressure from encroaching modernization is threatening traditional patterns of migration and collaboration, he concludes. The grasslands that stretch forever under an endless sky are also stressed. The longtime symbiosis between grazing and growing, which mutually benefited lifeways, livestock and landscapes, is badly frayed.

Less Grass, More Sand

Bumping along a dirt track, it takes 45 minutes to reach houses outside the tiny village of Dashimo, where Conte stayed while interviewing herders for his master’s thesis. The sparsely populated landscape gives the impression of boundless space, a foreign sensation to a guy of Italian ancestry raised in the Bronx. “There’ve been times in history when an Italian has met with Mongolians — Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, for example,” he jokes. “This is more Joe Pesci than Marco Polo.”

The ground that surrounds Dashimo reveals a troubling ecological process that’s stripping vegetation from arid lands in Inner Mongolia and elsewhere around the world: desertification. Dashimo’s once-lush sea of grass is giving way to sand. A symptom of land privatization — a land-use policy implemented by the Chinese government in the 1970s — desert encroachment is undermining the livelihoods and traditions of herders, according to Conte.

“It’s important to study these things because they’re disappearing,” he says.“Studies show the desert expands more than 10,000 square kilometers a year in China.”

The issues surrounding grassland degradation are complex in this remote region, home mainly to ethnic Mongolians and a minority of Han Chinese (As a whole, Han Chinese comprise about 80 percent of Inner Mongolia’s population of almost 25 million). The herders are being pushed aside to make way for industrialization, mining and privatization, Conte explains.

“Originally the land was managed collectively, until the Chinese government decided to privatize,” he says. “Privatization worked really well in terms of agriculture. But pastoralism is different. Privately managed land has led to widespread degradation of the grassland. Animals eat everything, and the desert expands.”

Anthropology grad student Tom Conte found a system out of sync with nature. (Photo: Jeff Basinger)

It’s a tense issue in China. In 2011, a herder was killed by a coal truck as he was trying to stop a mining convoy that was driving across prairie land. His death sparked the biggest wave of demonstrations Inner Mongolia had seen in decades. The region is China’s largest coal producer. It’s also the largest supplier of rare-earth metals in the world — materials that end up in products consumed in the West, like smart phones, solar panels and wind turbines.

Many herders began settling about 20 years ago as the government forced them onto single plots of land that fail to meet all their animals’ needs. Families that once cooperated are now living separately. While some rent additional land where they can move their animals, the land policy, overall, spurs dangerous overgrazing, Conte says. “If you stay in one place, you exhaust the resources.”

But overgrazing is just one outcome of settlement. Another is the loss of traditional kin-based ties that bound herders and enabled cooperation in moving livestock to prime forage, a problem Conte is addressing in his research. “Herders believe that ecological degradation has increased and cooperation has decreased,” he sums up.

Lessons from America

The danger to the herders’ culture, as well as to the land, mirrors our own history, argues Bryan Tilt, Conte’s thesis adviser and an associate professor of anthropology. “The situation of minority populations in China is not unlike the American Indian story,” Tilt says. “Only in folks of this region, the changes are much more recent. There is an element of culture loss that’s happening.”

“We know a lot of people think the nomadic lifestyle is romantic because herders are tied to the land,” Conte says. “But it’s not just romantic. There are concrete data showing that the ways the people manage land is sustainable. And better. Different animals — goats, sheep, camels, horses, yaks — have different water and plant species preferences given the season. A lot of traditional ecological knowledge went into the decision of where to move and when.”

All of the herders Conte interviewed — those who have settled as well as those who still migrate — are feeling the strain in an altered landscape. “You can’t work with people and not have a sense of empathy or wanting to effect change for the better.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stories from the Past

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

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

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

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

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

Inspired to Reverence

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

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

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

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

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

Cub Kahn, center, leads Oregon State faculty in the development of hybrid courses. Participants in the spring Learning Community included Kathy Greavesleft, who teaches family development and human sexuality, and Margie Haak, who teaches chemistry. (Photo: Jeff Basinger)

Nationally, college faculty have been experimenting with hybrid courses for many years, but they are only now gaining traction in standard curricula, says Kahn, an instructional designer for Oregon State University’s Extended Campus and the Center for Teaching and Learning. Test scores and grades show they are at least as effective as traditional classrooms. Moreover, they appear to help students prepare more effectively for class.

“Think of education as a whole — what is it? Is it just the transfer of information? If that’s the case, then Harvard has a problem, and all other universities have a problem too.”

— Eric Mazur, physicist, Harvard Magazine

“If you walk into classrooms today, you’re likely to see someone reading PowerPoint slides to students. In 10 years, if you walk around the hallways, you’ll see something substantially different,” says Kahn. “Nobody will be talking about hybrid courses. They will be the norm.”

Teaching in this fashion requires a sea change in academia. The hallowed “sage on the stage” tradition — an instructor who lectures uninterrupted for 50 minutes or more, students who sit passively and take notes — is giving way to a more interactive process leavened by Wi-Fi and the Web. The shift pushes against centuries of ingrained pedagogical practice, so Kahn leads OSU faculty members in their own course of study. Through collaborations that he calls Learning Communities, instructors are creating hybrid courses that fit their teaching styles and disciplines.

The move to hybrids is only one example of a broader trend at Oregon State. As one-way information delivery moves online, face-to-face classes are getting recharged. Students are engaging in debates, creating videos, building three-dimensional models, visualizing ideas and even reviewing each other’s exams. Instructors roam the room and vary the pace by challenging students to solve problems or address questions in small groups.

To advance this vision, a new classroom building is on the drawing boards, one that will offer unusual room arrangements and a hub for faculty who want to conduct research on new teaching methods (see “Flexibility to Learn” sidebar).

Activist Students

Jon Dorbolo directs Oregon State’s Technology Across the Curriculum program and was recognized by the Center for Digital Education (an educational research institute in Folsom,

California) last fall as one of 50 Top Innovators in Education. He works with faculty members on methods for stimulating student engagement. “Ultimately what we work for academically,” he says, “is for our students to see themselves as scholars. Not as passive recipients of information but as active scholars, researchers.”

Teaching, he adds, is an example of the scientific method in action. “Every lecture is a hypothesis. An instructor goes in there saying, ‘I’m going to communicate in this fashion, with the expectation that what I’m doing — the examples I’m giving, the analogies I’m using, what I’m drawing on the board, the questions I ask — is going to have an effect on the learner. If they (the students) pay attention and follow along with me, by the end of this, they ought to be different than they were before.’”

Measuring student learning is typically done through exams, which Dorbolo calls “this blunt and unsatisfying instrument.” Ultimately, evidence of teaching effectiveness, faculty members say, lies in the ability of students to think creatively and apply new knowledge.

The foundation for this new approach comes down to how people learn. “We have to allow the integration of knowledge,” says Kay Sagmiller, director of the OSU Center for Teaching and Learning. That requires active engagement in an environment in which students feel welcome, safe and confident. “Our challenge is to figure out how to open up the hearts and minds of those in the classroom to integrate what we offer into their existing knowledge,” she adds.

“Many faculty members don’t want to talk to a sea of faces. They prefer to engage with each person,” adds Dedra Demaree, assistant professor of physics who studies instructional methods in introductory courses. In her research, she has focused on how her own teaching affects student engagement. “My general philosophy is that I want to be able to quantify things so I can measure outcomes. But,” she says, “there are a lot of deep things you can’t get to by measurement.”

Classroom as Studio

While Demaree teaches first- and second-year students in lecture halls, she has also designed a classroom — a “physics studio” — that invites student participation. Instead of facing forward in rows, students work together at round tables. They get out of their seats to demonstrate concepts on electronic displays positioned around the room. A low-friction floor enables them to experiment with phenomena such as momentum and inertia.

With her graduate student team, Demaree analyzes videos of activity in class to understand what students actually do as she leads a discussion. She wants to know if they are disconnected or partially or fully engaged and how they are engaging in and interpreting discourse in the classroom. The team complements those analyses with interviews of students to delve deeply into the learning process.

Demaree’s group has shown that even small unintentional cues from the instructor can make a big difference for students. For example, in two separate sections of a class, Demaree gave two different messages about her expectations. “I told one section, ‘Remember this course is for everyone, even if you’ve never had physics before. We should all be able to reason through the process.’” To the other group, she said, “We started this on Friday and you should already know the answer.” Her explanation stimulated engagement in the first group and depressed it in the second. “The difference in engagement was phenomenal,” she says.

Pushing this educational shift, adds Kahn, is communication technology that students already know and trust. From laptops to smart phones to tablets, students have many opportunities to get information and exercise their brains. “Students are quite adept at accessing information. They’re going to use these devices no matter what. Why not try to get them to use those tools to accomplish the learning outcomes of the course? For better or worse,” he says, “they’re going to educate themselves.”

“In general,” says Sagmiller, “we underestimate how complex teaching and learning and assessment are. It’s exceedingly complex. It’s hard. Anybody who thinks it’s easy should stand up in a classroom of 600 undergraduates and give it a go and see how that feels. Or be held captive in a classroom with 35 kindergartners.”

Engagement Across the Curriculum

Many Oregon State faculty members are challenging their students in new ways. Here are a few examples from across campus.

Applets for Algebra. Scott Peterson wants students to think mathematically, not just to memorize formulas. He teaches introductory algebra, a fundamental course for most students. Online, he provides applets, software that allows students to visually perform mathematical tasks. Two of three weekly classes are spent in active exploration of algebraic concepts. In weekly lectures, he prompts students to discuss problems. He monitors conversations and tracks solutions through a rapid response system known as a clicker. He uses the results as a springboard for deeper discussion. About 2,000 OSU students take introductory algebra every year. Next fall, all sections are scheduled to adopt Peterson’s methods.

Roaming with an iPad. Devon Quick typically has 500 to 600 students in her introduction to human anatomy and physiology class. Like Peterson, she uses clickers, and she posts her lectures and other materials online for students to review. During class, she roams the room with an iPad. Using software from Doceri.com, she draws and manipulates images on a screen at the front of the room. She may hand the iPad to a student to demonstrate a concept. In surveys, 88 percent of her students have indicated that they like her use of the iPad and feel it makes the class more interactive.

Hybrid Versus Traditional. In two sections of Introduction to Psychology (300 or more students), Kathy Becker-Blease compared a hybrid to a traditional teaching approach. Each section used the same classroom, time of day, learning objectives, textbook and exam questions. Through quizzes, exams and homework scores, Becker-Blease found that student learning was equivalent. She also works with textbook publishers who offer online “diagnostic quizzing.” Students get immediate feedback as they answer questions, and instructors see how individuals and the class as a whole perform. Becker-Blease says students come to class better prepared. She is planning research to analyze the effectiveness of this approach.

Collaborative Testing. Tests need not be a cause for jitters. Engineering professor John Selker’s high-tech secret: two pens with different colors. After students complete their tests with one pen, he hands out the second and has them work in groups to identify mistakes and come up with the right answers. Students get full credit for their initial work in the first color and partial credit for writing corrections in the second color. By working out solutions with their peers, students fill in knowledge gaps and strengthen peer relationships. “At last,” says Selker, “the smartest student is also the most popular!”

Video Demonstrations. An engineering course, Strength of Materials, focuses on the forces that push, pull, bend and break everything from steel to carbon fiber. To help his 230 students master the mathematics and the concepts, Joseph Zaworski created 35 short online videos. Playable on any device from desktop computer to mobile phone, they allow students to pause and review as often as necessary. Between classes, students review videos and read the textbook. Class meetings include quizzes and team-based problem solving. Zaworski uses software from TopHatMonacle.com to monitor student responses and address common concerns.

The care and feeding of thousands of trout and salmon at OSU’s Salmon Disease Lab are the solemn responsibility of fish biologist Ruth Milston-Clements. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

It was dinnertime at the Milston-Clements home. The hubbub of feeding a 6-month-old baby and a hungry toddler was at full clamor when a ringtone interrupted. Handing off the jar of creamed spinach to her husband, Ruth grabbed her cell phone.

“Hello?”

“Ruth, we have a broken pipe.”

As manager of Oregon State’s Salmon Disease Lab, Ruth Milston-Clements is on-call 24/7. With a network of alarms protecting the facility’s 25,000 research fish from disasters both natural and human (power outages, floods, equipment malfunctions, vandalism), she’s accustomed to running out the door at odd times. It happens once a month, on average.

So this dinnertime call seemed fairly routine. A researcher had accidentally backed her truck into a water pipe supplying 30 fiberglass tanks full of fingerlings, the caller reported. Quickly, an onsite technician cranked down the valve to stop the flow. He then rigged a fix that should hold till morning. However, the margin of error between life and death is, for a fish, as thin as a fin. “Without water flow or oxygen, the fish will suffocate in about 20 minutes,” says Milston-Clements, a fish biologist who grew up in Lancaster, England. In her field, there’s no such thing as an excess of caution. So, after tucking her little girls into bed, she spent the next few hours at the lab helping to construct a temporary backup system in case the quick fix failed before morning. It was after midnight when she finally flopped into bed.

The 3 a.m. ringtone blaring from her nightstand jolted her upright. “My heart started beating really loud, and I was hyperventilating,” she recalls. The electronic message from the lab’s security company read: Zone 1, low water. “This is the worst! This is what I’ve been dreading! Thousands of fish could die!” she moaned to her husband as she threw on her sweats and rubber boots and headed out once again.

In fact, no fish died that night. The second alarm turned out to be a minor malfunction unrelated to the burst pipe. But the adrenaline rush highlights what’s at stake in a live-animal research facility.

Crabs Count, Too

Of the 600,000 animals used in Oregon State’s research and teaching programs, 80 percent are aquatic species. Most of these half-million water dwellers are housed in fiberglass tanks on and around the Corvallis campus or at a research hatchery in the Alsea River Basin. Some live in simulated streams or raceways. Still others are on display in touch tanks or seawater aquariums at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport. They come in outrageous colors and preposterous designs: pouty, big-eyed rockfish in shimmery golds and coppers; pincushion-like sea urchins bristling with purple spines; a giant Pacific octopus, its suction-cupped arms undulating around a bulbous orange body. The charismatic Chinook salmon, the elusive black prickleback, the tendrilled basket star, the diminutive zebrafish — more than 400 species in total — all are members of Oregon State’s aquatic animal community.

The care and feeding of thousands of trout and salmon at OSU’s Salmon Disease Lab includes disinfecting brushes after each tank is scrubbed to avoid cross-contamination. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

The vertebrates among them are subject to the rigorous protocols of humane treatment laid out by the AAALAC (Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care International) and overseen by OSU’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (see Terra, “The Ethic of Care,” Fall 2012; and “Caring for Cows,” Winter 2013). But the ethical distinction between the spined and the spineless has blurred in recent years. In the same way that the animal-care ethos for rodents and livestock has evolved, so have sensibilities for aquatic animals of all kinds. Just ask Tim Miller-Morgan. In his two-decade career, OSU’s aquatic veterinarian has witnessed an ethical sea change.

Take the case of the ailing crustaceans, for example. Miller-Morgan was moonlighting at the Oregon Aquarium a few years back when he noticed that the spider crabs were lethargic and droopy-mouthed. In the old days, he says, a sick crab would have been euthanized. “The attitude was, ‘It’s only an invertebrate; let’s just get another one.’” But instead of discarding the crabs, he drew their blood and discovered a bacterial infection. He treated the animals with antibiotic injections and medicated feed. “Typically, this wasn’t something that was done,” says Miller-Morgan, who also serves as backup veterinarian for OSU Attending Veterinarian Helen Diggs. “But now we understand that we shouldn’t look at these animals as disposable. We brought them into captivity, and we have an obligation to keep them as long as we can, as close to their natural lifespan as possible — or even longer.”

It’s today’s students, he says, who are driving the new morality. In the aquatic-medicine classes he teaches at OSU’s College of Veterinary Medicine, questions about animal welfare are top-of-mind among the Millennials, also known as Gen Y. “Eight or nine years ago, students started telling me, ‘We’d like to hear information on what we know about fish welfare, how we assess welfare, what do we know about pain?’ That was a new thing.”

He hears the same kinds of queries from students enrolled in the aquarium science program he helped develop at Oregon Coast Community College. It boils down to a centuries-old debate among philosophers, scientists, veterinarians, farmers, ranchers, aquarists, and pet owners: What is our obligation to captive animals?

For researcher David Noakes, the answer is crystal clear. “We have an inordinate responsibility,” says Noakes, who directs the Oregon Hatchery Research Center run jointly by Oregon State and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW). “We need to go to extraordinary lengths.”

It’s the Water

Because of the extraordinary lengths taken by Noakes and his staff, international scientists flock to the research center on Fall Creek, a tributary of the Alsea River, which ripples prettily through a mixed woodland of fir, aspens and big-leaf maple. From faraway nations like Japan, China, Iceland and South Korea, they come to conduct studies on the secrets of salmon navigation, the impact of temperature on sexual maturity, the ability of steelhead to negotiate woody debris, and other hot topics in fish biology. “This is the only place on the planet that has everything in one location for salmonid research,” explains Joseph O’Neil, a senior ODFW technician who lives onsite at the hatchery. “It’s the No. 1 destination in the world.”

If O’Neil were to tell you that water is the most critical component for fish husbandry, you might be tempted to say “duh.” But “water” doesn’t come close to conveying the complexity of the systems that support research fish. When O’Neil says, “Fish need water,” he’s not talking about any old water. Whether it fills a 50-gallon fiberglass tank full of Coho smolts, a 40,000-gallon simulated stream stocked with brook trout, or racks of incubation trays, flushing a million salmon eggs at a rate of five gallons per minute, the water O’Neil is talking about is some of the world’s most pampered. Pumped mainly from Fall Creek, this water may be treated with UV sterilization, carbon filtration or aeration so it’s free of viruses and bacteria. O’Neil’s also talking about precise temperature regulation matched to each species’ native environment and each animal’s stage of life. Eight miles of underground pipe circulate up to 2,500 gallons of freshwater a minute and return it to Fall Creek.

Out here in the Siuslaw National Forest, where the nearest town is picturesque Alsea, population 1,153, things do indeed go wrong. The power fails when gale-force winds howl through the hills; the property floods when biblical rains push the creeks beyond their banks; outdoor tanks crack and pipes rupture when branches crash to the ground. The staff takes pride in being able to improvise a solution or jury-rig a repair for just about any piece of equipment, even amidst the wildest squall, wettest deluge or blackest night.

How to Ship a Fish

In Oregon State fish circles, they’re known as “The Two Carries.” The self-described “guard dogs” of OSU’s zebrafish lab, Cari Buchner and Carrie Barton make a solemn commitment each morning when they punch in their pass codes at the high-security building across the river from downtown Corvallis. Tens of thousands of lives hinge on the skill and vigilance of these fish-husbandry professionals.

Cari Buchner, co-manager of the Sinnhuber Aquatic Research Lab, tends the tanks. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

Barton and Buchner are co-managers of OSU’s Sinnhuber Aquatic Research Laboratory. The species they oversee — a type of minnow that has been dubbed the “new lab rat” for its growing popularity among biomedical researchers — multiplies fast, matures quickly, shares important disease processes with humans, and rapidly regenerates certain body parts and organs. Best of all, it’s transparent during development. Researchers can see what’s happening inside, literally.

For these reasons, zebrafish make great animal models for medical and environmental research.
“The water here is probably cleaner than most people drink at home,” Buchner attests. That level of purity applies even to water flowing into the staff restrooms, toilets included. If you are granted a visit to Sinnhuber, expect this email in your inbox: “Due to our biosecurity protocols we need to ask that you refrain from any contact with other aquatic species, labs, water sources — especially home aquariums, pet stores and outdoor fish habitats — for 24 hours prior to your visit.” Once you arrive, anticipate being asked to sanitize your hands and slip sterile booties over your shoes.

No one here is taking any chances of jeopardizing the lab’s highly specialized, technically sophisticated, razor-edged enterprise: raising fish that are free of the pathogen Pseudoloma neurophilia, rampant in the commercial aquarium trade and common in many research facilities. “Every fish in this room will be tested for that specific pathogen,” says Buchner. Newly arriving fish are raised, spawned and rigorously tested in a quarantine chamber before their offspring can join the general population.

These uniquely healthy zebrafish are in demand not only at Oregon State but also at other labs. So a couple of years ago, Sinnhuber decided to sell them on its website at a nominal cost. But safely shipping live fish is as tricky as it sounds. The package has to be double-bagged, foam insulated, heat controlled and hand-delivered on the tarmac for transfer to the airplane. For months, Barton and Buchner worked with FedEx, testing various containers and running multiple mock shipments, climaxing with a battery of bumping, shaking, dropping, crushing and tumbling trials.

“The container has to be 100 percent secure,” Barton explains. “It has to hold up even when someone says, ‘Oops, that box fell off the forklift.’” (All this TLC comes at a price, ranging from $50 to $500 for U.S. shipments to $1,700 for international deliveries.)

Soon after becoming a Certified Research Fish Shipper, the lab passed a harrowing real-life test when a container of fish en route to Australia got held up in customs during the hottest part of the summer. Despite an extra five days of travel, the fish arrived in perfect health and were spawning within a fortnight.

Fish Food a la Carte

A “happy tank” is the gold standard in a fish lab. When Ruth Milston-Clements lifts the lid of a tank and sees the sleek, silvery smolts schooling round and round in vigorous uniformity, she can rest easy. But if the fish are “dancing” or “flashing” or “looking a bit itchy,” she immediately calls in the lab pathologist. The telltale signs of trouble recently showed up among some rainbow trout. A scale swipe revealed a parasite called Gyrodactalus. She treated the tank with a hydrogen peroxide solution and monitored the fishes’ behavior every 10 minutes for an hour. They revived. Happy tank.

Carrie Barton, co-manager of the Sinnhuber lab, feeds Artemia nauplii, a juvenile form of brine fish, to zebrafish schooling in a stock tank. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

Fish like it when someone lifts the lid on their tank. That’s because it usually means mealtime. Over at Sinnhuber, the two Carries show off their brand-new commercial-grade kitchen where they concoct customized diets to researchers’ specs.

The proteins, carbs, oils, vitamins and minerals are tightly calibrated for optimal animal health. For many studies, researchers order special formulas. One of those researchers had a terrifying jolt a week before Christmas when he discovered his supply of custom fish food wasn’t going to last through his experiment. So while most people were baking gingerbread cookies and fig puddings, Barton was down at the lab whipping up an emergency ration of experimental fish food. “I went into my superhero mode,” Barton says with a satisfied grin. She saved the day — and the study.

“Basic care for aquatic animals is much more intricate than it is for most mammals,” she observes. “It’s really a science unto itself.”

Women in Pabna, rural Bangladesh, carry drinking water in large containers. (Photo: Molly Kile)

Fighting a war of independence should be turmoil enough for a small country, but in 1970, the people of Bangladesh also had to deal with a deadly cholera outbreak. This water-borne disease threatened the country’s plentiful surface water and put public health at risk. To solve this crisis, the government, together with international aid agencies, dug thousands of wells. But the clean water they hoped to deliver created a new crisis, what one researcher calls the largest mass poisoning on the planet.

Fast-forward 20 years. Symptoms of arsenic toxicity were beginning to appear in the population. Skin lesions were misdiagnosed as leprosy and led to social exclusion. Worse, skin lesions are a potential precursor to cancer.

Molly Kile, an environmental epidemiologist at Oregon State University, and her Harvard mentor David Christianie first traveled to Bangladesh in 2003 to study the health effects associated with arsenic in drinking water. “Our efforts have largely been understanding the epidemiology (of arsenic exposure) and the human health risk associated with it,” says Kile. She first traveled to Bangladesh as a doctoral student at Harvard and has returned more than 20 times.

Molly Kile studies the health impacts of environmental contaminants. (Photo courtesy of Molly Kile)

Scientists know that exposure to high levels of arsenic can lead to cancer, but Kile, an assistant professor in the College of Public Health and Human Sciences, wants to know how the metal affects other aspects of health, such as reproduction and child development. Local groups, she says, can effectively translate her results into disease prevention, but many participants in her research are among the most vulnerable in the country.

“By and large, the populations that are affected by arsenic in Bangladesh are the rural populations,” she says, “and about 60% of Bangladesh lives on less than $2 a day. So these are places of absolute poverty.”

Reproductive health effects stem from the fact that the toxic metal crosses the placenta and exposes the fetus. Low birth weight and spontaneous abortions have been associated with arsenic exposure in utero. Kile also uses genetics to look for variations among individuals that increase or decrease susceptibility to skin lesions.

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of arsenic is its invisibility. “You can’t taste arsenic. You can’t smell it, you can’t see it, you have no idea its there unless you test for it,” she adds.

Binding Arsenic

Not being able to detect arsenic by sight or taste has raised the stakes for communities that lack the resources to test or treat their drinking water. Kile’s favorite way to test for arsenic in people may come as a surprise: the human toenail.

Toenails are composed of keratin, which contains chemical combinations of sulfur and hydrogen called sulfhydryl groups. As arsenic in the body binds with these sulfhydryl groups, it accumulates in the toenail.

“So keratin is mostly sulfhydral, as is your hair,” says Kile. “Any inorganic arsenic that is circulating in your body will want to bind to a sulfhydral group. So your toenails, your hair, and even your skin all come into equilibrium with the arsenic in your body. You can take a toenail clipping, and you get a lovely integrated exposure of what that person has been exposed to.”

Molly Kile met with residents of Dhaka Community Hospital to discuss her studies of arsenic exposure. She and her team ask what concerns people have and recruit participants in their research. Their findings are then shared with the community. (Photo courtesy of Molly Kile)

Kile calls the health crisis in Bangladesh a preventable disaster. Arsenic was known to be present in large parts of western Asia, but that wasn’t considered in the 1970s when the country transitioned to groundwater.

“And it was seen as the public health triumph of its day, only to find out that it’s now the largest mass poisoning on the planet,” says Kile. “That’s one of the messages of this: This was completely preventable.”

Research elsewhere suggests that as exposure declines, skin lesions may go away with time, but such studies are still in progress.

Despite Kile’s start with arsenic being half-a-world away, the issue isn’t so far from home. She calls Oregon “arsenic country” and has been conducting water-testing workshops in communities east of the Cascades. In the United States, technology can remove arsenic from drinking water. So far, there have been no arsenic-related health problems recorded in Oregon.

“It really is across Oregon,” she adds. “Eugene, Salem…and across the border too. This is a Pacific Northwest Issue.”

Scientists estimate that up to 100 million people are exposed to elevated levels of arsenic in Bangladesh alone. Whether you are drawing from a well in Bangladesh or Oregon, researchers like Kile are racing to fully understand the impacts of this invisible contaminant.

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Listen to a podcast with Kile.

For more information about arsenic in drinking water in Bangladesh:

D. van Halem, S. A. Bakker, G. L. Amy, and J. C. van Dijk, “Arsenic in drinking water: a worldwide water quality concern for water supply companies,” in the Journal Drinking Water Engineering and Science, 2009,

Manouchehr Amini; Karim C. Abbaspour; Michael Berg; Lenny Winkel; Stephan J. Hug; Eduard Hoehn; Hong Yang; C. Annette Johnson; “Statistical Modeling of Global Geogenic Arsenic Contamination in Groundwater,” Environ. Sci. Technol.  2008, 42, 3669-3675.t © 2008 American Chemical Society

Chowdhury, M. A. I., Uddin, M. T., Ahmed, M. F., Ali, M. A. and Uddin, S. M.: How does arsenic contamination of groundwater cause severity and health hazard in Bangladesh, J. Appl. Sci., 6(6), 1275-1286, 2006

Heidi Igarashi studies the “sandwich generation,” parents who care for their adult children as well as their own aging parents. Listen to a podcast with Igarashi. (Photo: Nick Houtman)

For many first-year college students, going to a new school represents “leaving the nest.” They are now responsible for housing, bills and their own education. But according to Heidi Igarashi , a research assistant at Oregon State University, most are still in their parents’ nest and will be for several more years.

“Parents used to expect that their kids should be financially independent by 22,” she says, “but now the majority of them say 25. There is a longer run up to adulthood.”

Igarashi, a doctoral student who works with Carolyn Aldwin, professor of human development and family sciences, recently published a study looking at parents who support both adult children (ages 18 to 30) and their own elderly parents. She found that while parental support may benefit maturing adults, things get more difficult when they care for the older generation.

“The idea of the empty nest is based on this probably antiquated idea of the life cycle where you get married, have children, your children grow up, ‘leave the nest,’ and the parents are there to ride out those last periods of time. ‘Empty nest,’” she adds, “applies to some people but not many.”

It is simply taking longer for young adults to take flight. That trend shows up in a variety of ways, from education to insurance.  For example, Igarashi points to an increased interest and a need for further education in graduate school.  Health insurance has also changed. Prior to 2010, states had varying rules on dependency for health insurance purposes. Now federal law says a child can remain on a parent’s insurance until age 26. Igarashi attributes these cultural changes to the nest being full longer.

Igarashi found that most parents were happy to support their children for longer periods of time. Parents, she suggests, are simply continuing what they had been doing. However, she also looked at them as caregivers for their own parents. This type of caring is increasingly common. The average couple has more parents than children. But that doesn’t mean it is always received with ease. Igarashi calls this type of support “caring up.” On the generational ladder, the older you get, the higher on the ladder you are.

Caring Up Is Hard to Do

“Caring up is hard on everyone. The midlife folks were very happy to provide care up, but it came with this burden, feelings of angst, anxiety, uncertainty. Not only for themselves, but for their parents too.” Some elderly parents had Alzheimer’s, and some were bed ridden. In these circumstances, feelings of anxiety are natural, she adds.

Igarashi did her study during the economic recession of 2008-2009. Shortly after she published her results, the PEW Research Center released a similar but separate study that added more detail. PEW found that in 2012, 47% of midlife adults (ages 40-59) were supporting a child, while they were also taking care of a parent older than 65-years-old. Pew Researchers referred to these individuals as part of a “sandwich generation,” meaning they provide both care up and care down the generational ladder.

Despite any feelings of potential burdens, Igarashi’s study found that during these changing economic times, being a “sandwich generation” may not be a bad thing. Young adults get the support they need to take flight from the nest when they are truly ready, whether for educational, financial or other reasons.

“In our society we tend to really value autonomy and independence, and hold it almost paramount to almost anything else,” says Igarashi. “What our study indicates is that it’s really interdependence that may become really important, especially in this changing socioeconomic world where you really need other people around you to really work together.”

Most college students fit into the category of nestlings learning to fly. While the job market will continue to create challenges, Igarashi provides encouragement that parents are willing to assist their children during these changing times even while assisting parents of their own.

Co-authors on Igarashi’s study include Oregon State professor Karen Hooker, Deborah P. Coehlo (OSU-Cascades) and Margaret M. Manoogian (Western Oregon University).

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See Igarashi’s report, “My Nest Is Full”: Intergenerational relationships at midlife, in the Oregon State University Scholar’s Archive.

See the PEW Research Center study on mid-life adults: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/01/30/the-sandwich-generation/

“Each campus is allowed to nominate four students for the award and for the first time, all four students nominated by OSU were recognized by the national Goldwater selection committee,” said Kevin Ahern, director of undergraduate research at Oregon State.

The one- and two-year scholarships cover the cost of tuition, fees, books and room and board up to $7,500 per year.

The four awardees are all students in the University Honors College and the College of Science. They are:

Helen Hobbs (Photo: Kevin Ahern)

Helen Hobbs, a junior from Butte, Montana, is majoring in biochemistry/biophysics. She is a two-time participant in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute program and is currently researching the molecular basis of aging with professor Tory Hagen. She aspires to a research career.

Thomas Pitts (Photo: Jill Wells)

Thomas Pitts, a junior from Ontario, Oregon, is majoring in math and conducts research in mathematics education and theoretical mathematics, with an emphasis on algebra and number theory. He has worked in OSU’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates Program in Mathematics and studies under professor Tevian Dray. His goal is research and teaching at the university level.

Justin Zhang (Photo: Kevin Ahern)

Justin Zhang, a junior from Beaverton, is majoring in biochemistry/biophysics. He has worked with associate professor Jeffrey Greenwood since his freshman year studying glioblastoma, a type of malignant brain cancer. Zhang has done internships at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Sloan-Kettering. He is looking forward to a research career in human health.

James Rekow (Photo: Jill Wells)

James Rekow, a sophomore majoring in biochemistry/biophysics from Portland, works with associate professor Andrew Buermeyer on mechanisms of DNA repair and mutation relating to colon cancer. He has been involved in undergraduate research since his freshman year, including an internship at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. After attaining his Ph.D. in Environmental and Molecular Toxicology, Rekow plans to conduct research in genetic toxicology and teach at the university level.

“The Scholarship Program honoring Senator Barry Goldwater was designed to foster and encourage outstanding students to pursue careers in the fields of mathematics, the natural sciences and engineering,” said Board of Trustees Chair Peggy Goldwater Clay in announcing the awards. “The Goldwater Scholarship is the premier undergraduate award of its type in these fields.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sacred River

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

Swami Ramdev (Photo: Wikipedia)

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

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

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

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Listen to a podcast with Stuart Sarbacker here.

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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See more stories from the 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.

Connections to Asia are expanding. They encompass a wide range of activities including academic conferences, student exchanges and faculty collaborations. They focus on business, engineering, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, wood science, music and more.

The university’s growing international influence is fueled by student recruitment through INTO OSU as well as by direct enrollment in many of our leading research-based graduate programs, says Provost Sabah Randhawa.

“OSU enjoys a strong reputation in Asia and is cited as one of the top 150 universities in the world in international ranking programs,” Randhawa adds. “Many top universities in the region are eager to partner with us for student and faculty exchange programs and global research initiatives.”

Business
The Global Business Analysis Group is working with Dalian University of Technology and the City University of Hong Kong in China and with Yonsei University in South Korea. Researchers are focusing on supply chains, sustainability, business law and operations management.

Apparel and Aging
With colleagues in China, Taiwan and South Korea, Oregon State researchers are exploring cross-national consumer behavior in the domestic and international textile and apparel industries.

Earthquakes and Tsunamis
In Indonesia, Oregon State researchers are working with scientists on the historical record of earthquakes and tsunamis. The subduction zone just west of Sumatra is similar to the Cascadia subduction zone off the Oregon coast.

Music
For the past 12 years, Oregon State’s Department of Music has conducted an exchange program with the cultural ministry of Henan Province in China.

Pharmaceuticals
Oregon State scientists are participating in the search for new antibiotics with colleagues in China, Indonesia, South Korea and Thailand. In Indonesia, they are identifying novel compounds with antimicrobial benefits.

Environment and Agriculture
Air quality, dam construction and agricultural crops are under study byOregon State and Chinese colleagues. They have documented the impacts of polluted air and dam construction. Agricultural scientists have focused on grass seed, forage crops and livestock.

Illustration: Teresa Hall

I get to call myself a scientist because I’ve got a Ph.D. in oceanography, but is that a prerequisite? No. Before there were “scientists,” even “ordinary people” did science. They learned to grow crops and domesticate animals. They associated the heavens with the seasons and events on Earth. Keen insight into plant properties, animal behavior and weather patterns is what gave early Homo sapiens the evolutionary edge in a dangerous world. Today, we call this native environmental acuity “traditional ecological knowledge.” It’s citizen science at its most fundamental.

In Oregon and across the continent, citizens contribute immeasurably to the scientific process. Bird watchers document changes in the abundance and range of bird species through the annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count. Amateur astronomers working from their backyards discover comets and supernovae. School children analyze streams, lakes and coastal waters, learning fundamental scientific principles as they provide valuable data to their communities.

Strength in Numbers

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 during low tide at Oregon's South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve near Charleston. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

Nevertheless, a vast pool of data gatherers can be a boon to researchers doing large-scale studies. Increasingly, scientists and research organizations are enlisting and training regular folks. Citizens are measuring rainfall, counting insects and monitoring the annual life-cycles of plants. For these kinds of studies, there’s no way that scientists can collect the mountains of data that tens of thousands of binocular-wielding volunteers can capture in a single day.

Oregon State’s newly launched Oregon Master Naturalist program (see “Corps of Discovery“) represents another type of citizen science, one that centers on education and outreach. People with a bent for exploration and a love of their local environment are meeting in person with scientists, usually university researchers, to learn about their own ecoregions. After 80-plus hours of training that takes place online, in the classroom and outdoors, these Master Naturalists are ready to extend their knowledge to the broader public as volunteers with local nonprofits and state agencies. Oregon’s is one of about 40 similar programs nationwide.

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

Also, to the non-scientific observer, research often verges on the edge of being esoteric, so the citizen scientist can be an important link between the specialist in the field and the public. The urgent scientific challenges of our day require not only informed decision-makers but also a mobilized citizenry. Scientists use rigorous methods to conduct experiments, but their findings alone will not solve problems or shape policy. State and national agencies, city planners, county commissioners, lawmakers at every level of government and, ultimately, voters will decide whether and how to act upon the science.

That may be the most powerful promise of citizen science. A citizenry that is not only scientifically sophisticated but also personally committed is our best hope for collective action on behalf of a healthy planet.

Vitamin B1 (thiamine) helps plants resist such scourges as bacterial leaf blight and “rice blast,” big problems in Southeast Asia. At the same time, people whose diets are dependent on white rice often suffer from thiamine deficiency.

Enter Oregon State researcher Aymeric Goyer, a plant biologist in Hermiston. The genes that synthesize vitamin B1 in rice are Goyer’s focus. He is collaborating with Pamela Ronald of the University of California, Davis, to develop plants that over-express these genes. Bumping up thiamine and, along with it, disease resistance would mean less pesticide use and greater yields, Goyer says.

A new study at Oregon State is designed to help clarify the risks. A multidisciplinary team of researchers at the Corvallis and OSU-Cascades campuses is monitoring 100 preschoolers in both communities, looking at chemical exposure and children’s behavior, particularly their ability to self-regulate, a key to school readiness.

“Given the fact that the numbers of children with neurological and cognitive disabilities is on the rise in the developing world, many have hypothesized that exposure to chemicals may be a contributing factor,” says Molly Kile, the public health environmental epidemiologist who is leading the study.