As her family grew and endured a health crisis, Shelley Jordon underwent her own transformation from still-life painter to animation artist. (Photo: Jan Sonnenmair)

When Shelley Jordon was a little girl growing up in Brooklyn, she got in trouble for pulling her mother’s books off the shelves and drawing in the white spaces. Her need to create was so strong that she couldn’t resist, despite knowing her mom would be angry.

Many years later as an adult reeling from the news that her husband had a brain tumor, Jordon followed a similar urge. She printed out his MRI scans and started painting on top of them, covering them with her brush strokes, using personal imagery to come to grips with her fear.

“It was like going to a new country,” she says. “It was a whole new world of visual subject matter that I didn’t know existed, and it was my husband’s brain. It was visually exciting to me and at the same time a living document of the reality of our situation.”

Jordon, a professor of art at Oregon State University, has been an artist ever since she can remember. Painting has been not only her life’s work but also a lifeline during difficult times. Through trauma and transition, she has drawn from personal experience, but the feelings she captures are universal, grounded in the daily events that we share with the people who are closest to us.

Her early focus on still lifes took a dramatic turn with the uncertainty of her husband’s condition. Interpreting objects on a canvas was no longer enough to express her day-to-day feelings. She needed her pictures to move, to express a reality that was not fixed and a future that was in doubt. Adapting her work to a life in flux, she transformed herself over a period of several years from a renowned still-life painter to a creator of award-winning hand-painted animated movies.

“Shelley has recently embarked on an exciting new direction, exploring animation, installation and video in works that introduce a very moving type of content – the vicissitudes of human relationships,” says Sue Taylor, a respected art critic and historian at Portland State University. “This seems a pivotal point in her career, almost a reinvention of her artistic interests, and it will be fascinating to see where these experiments will lead.”

Well Known for Still Lifes

Before Jordon’s domestic life was upended by her husband’s illness in 1995, she had earned a national reputation as a creator of still-life images. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, she worked steadily, focusing on the objects in her daily surroundings. Her work was featured in a one-person career retrospective at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. Other exhibits followed: the Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum, the Northwest Biennial in Tacoma, Washington and galleries in San Francisco, Chicago and New York.

And then, everything changed.

Jordon, her husband David and their young daughter Clara were in Italy where Shelley was teaching as a visiting professor. Her husband fell ill, and they came home to Oregon early, only to receive the news about his brain tumor that was to refocus their lives.

“Thankfully everything worked out okay, and he is fine now, but that period from diagnosis to recovery really blew me open. And I started doing work as much as to keep myself sane, but also it took me down an entirely different path,” Jordon says.

Jordon began drawing on her husband’s MRI scans, layering image on top of image. “Drawing on them, I was thinking of previous traumas, and it made me think about how [with] each new trauma we re-experience previous traumas. Part of what was going through my mind was, I was thinking of the possibility that my daughter would not have a father, and I thought about the fact that I didn’t have a father growing up, and I made all those connections.”

Jordon started grasping for something new but didn’t yet know what she would find. In her grief and anxiety, she couldn’t even think about painting a vase, a flower or a rooftop.

“I didn’t want to even look at those then. And I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” she says.

Shaken to the Core

In the spring of 2009, Jordon was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome when an earthquake struck the city. Aftershocks occurred every night for a week. The result for Jordon is perhaps her darkest and most accomplished work to date, a six-minute animation called Terremoto (“Earthquake” in Italian) that combines images from Roman mythology and history with an unsettling, jittery feeling. It is set to music by composer Kurt Rhode, who was also at the academy in Rome.

“Every night the room started shaking and my heart was pounding, and I soon couldn’t tell if it was an earthquake or my heart pounding anymore. One trauma brings up another trauma. These ideas of trauma, the illusion of safety, the fragility of human life are all very important for me,” she says.

Those themes show up in another animated installation that Jordon exhibited in May 2010 at Marylhurst University. “Morning Coffee” was part of the Motherlode exhibition for Mother’s Day. Jordon set a small breakfast table with linen, a morning paper and a cup of coffee. On the surface of the coffee appear moving, painted images culled from her personal life and from the news. A viewer might see an image of Michael Jackson and then a grocery list.

“What intrigues me about Shelley Jordon’s recent work is how it uses video animation to build on her paintings’ exploration of still life and family story,” says Terri Hopkins, director and curator of The Art Gym at Marylhurst. “Morning Coffee in particular is very successful in the way it integrates video and sound into the still life tableau.” (In 2007,The Oregonian named Hopkins one of the region’s most influential persons in the art world.)

Jordon’s recent success comes at a time when everything else in her life seems to have aligned. Her family, now living in a beautiful old home in northwest Portland, is healthy, and she continues to teach a full load of classes at OSU, including painting and a contemporary issues class for art majors that she helped to design.

“Thankfully, the old model of the genius artist who didn’t have to work very hard is very outdated now,” Jordon says. “Art students now understand that you need a plan. There are DIY (Do It Yourself) models of artists who find a way to make a living by working for nonprofits, interning at or starting their own gallery, curating, or like me they teach, do research, and find time to create art that fulfills their creative drive.”

She also paints herself as a student – now learning video software programs such as Final Cut Pro and getting help from both her art students and students in OSU’s New Media Communications program to gain the technical skills she needs to accomplish more sophisticated animation. After teaching for 25 years, Jordon is both learning from her students while imparting her own knowledge of traditional painting techniques. And now, it would seem, the sky, creatively speaking, is the limit.

“In New York where we all lived in small, cramped spaces, I had this reoccurring dream where I would open up a door, and there would be this whole room in my apartment that I didn’t know existed,” she says. “This is how all of this has felt internally for me. There was this door I had never opened before, and once I opened it, there was this incredibly huge space of unexplored creativity waiting to be tapped.”

A New Journey

Jordon’s newest project is just starting to take shape. Tentatively titled “Anita’s Journey,” the artist found inspiration in the incredible journey of her husband’s now-deceased mother, Anita Greenstein, who spent her childhood hiding from the Nazis in Berlin during World War II.

“His mother was six-years-old when they went into hiding and the entire family survived and ended up settling in Portland,” she says. “I want to explore Anita’s point of view, what it might be like to be this little girl hiding in various locations, from a coal storage warehouse to various basements.”

In June, Jordon traveled to Berlin to research “Anita’s Journey” with the help of awards from OSU’s Center for the Humanities and Valley Library as well as the Oregon Arts Commission. Before she left for Berlin, she received an international honor: The Jerusalem Cultural Fellowship named her one of four fellows for a pilot program for artists to work in the historical city. The Oregon Jewish Museum, which exhibited “Family History” in 2009, had nominated her (Read more about her fellowship experience here.). Also joining her were acclaimed novelists Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss; choreographer Reggie Wilson; and New York urban planner Joshua Sirefman.

In Jerusalem, Jordon met other artists, including filmmakers and animators who attended an exhibit of her work. Among those were Paul Vester, co-director of the experimental animation program at the California Institute of the Arts.

“Shelley has a sense of humor. This and her life experience, together with the connections she makes between traditional drawing, animation and technology, informs her work in unexpected ways,” Vester says. “She is treading here a relatively new path, that of the animation artist.”

The trips to Berlin and Jerusalem gave Jordon the creative freedom to visualize the place where her husband’s mother was hiding from the Nazis and the time to start shaping those ideas into her next animation. Again, she comes back to the importance of family, and the connections that shape people into who they become.

“Clara was three when her grandmother died, so she never got to know her and know the person she was,” Jordon says. “Not only is this an incredible story of resilience, and trauma, but it is the story of my daughter’s grandmother told from her point of view when she was a little girl.”

To support the OSU College of Liberal Arts, contact the OSU Foundation.

Geography of an Artist

Shelley Jordon grew up in a working class Brooklyn neighborhood. Raised by her single mother, she doesn’t remember any artists in her family but was praised for her artistic talents by teachers early in her education.

She received a college scholarship to attend the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where she focused on illustration. After receiving her master’s degree in fine arts from Brooklyn College in the late 1980s, Jordon said she was offered three full-time teaching positions – one in Chicago, one in California and one at OSU.

At the time, Jordon said she didn’t know where Corvallis was on a map. She felt like a fish out of water in a small community and after a few years started looking at Portland.

“I’m an urban person; I need to be in the city,” she says. “I remember driving around in what is now called the Pearl District and saw a sign for the Irving Street Lofts. It said, ‘Artists: Live/Work.’”

Living in a loft with no closets but what Jordon describes as an “amazing raw space with fantastic light,” she had the freedom to paint in what would become her defined style for many years. Jordon was an acclaimed painter of still-life images, many of which were up to 12 feet tall.

Jordon met her husband David in the laundry space of the building and soon, both her personal life and her career came together.

“When I moved from Manhattan to the loft in Portland, the paintings got bigger, and gradually the compositions changed, became less compressed, and the skies became more open,” she adds.

The paintings from this period include “Sweet Delicata,” a piece on permanent display at OSU’s Valley Library. Jordon has never worked from photographs as some still-life painters do. She has always used what was around her, so as she moved physical locations, her paintings changed.

“Any of my paintings that I look at, I know where I was not only internally and emotionally, but also geographically,” she says.

Simulated tsunamis crash into scale model buildings at OSU's O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Lab, the nation's largest tsunami test facility. Engineers have run tests with the Oregon coastal communities of Seaside and Cannon Beach (Photo: Frank Miller)

It may come like it did the last time, in the middle of a cold and blustery January night. Suddenly the ground will begin to shake, windows will shatter, bridges collapse, the electricity will go out and parents will frantically try to find a flashlight and dig sleepy kids out of bed, ignore everything else and run – because they know they only have minutes before the water arrives.

Even worse, it may come on a warm and breezy summer afternoon in July, when tens of thousands of visitors fly kites, build sand castles and play fetch with their dogs on one of the most beautiful stretches of coastline in the world. The rumble and shaking on the crowded beaches will quickly be replaced by a receding shoreline as the water eerily slides away, and people will start to run, anywhere they can, to get to higher ground – because they know the water will soon be coming back.

It will be scary, it will be destructive, and it’s going to happen, reasonably soon. People will talk for generations to come about the great subduction zone earthquake and tsunami of ____. Fill in the blank with a date; science can provide some guidance, but no one knows for certain when it will be.

Pat Corcoran, a coastal hazards outreach specialist with Oregon Sea Grant, is mindful of these risks and calls the disaster that’s waiting to happen “arguably the greatest recurring natural hazard in the lowest 48 states.” That’s about right. Subduction zones – like the Cascadia Subduction Zone that lurks just off the coast of the Pacific Northwest – produce the most massive earthquakes in the world. And their “up and down” ground motion triggers tsunamis, one of the most deadly ocean wave events in the world.

Like Clockwork

The problem is, at least in the United States, these events don’t happen very often. In fact, until the mid-1980s, scientists didn’t think great earthquakes and tsunamis were caused by Pacific Northwest fault zones. Then some pioneering research by the U.S. Geological Survey, Oregon State University and others began to unravel some ancient mysteries. Scientists found that not only do they happen here, they occur pretty regularly, about every 300 to 500 years on one part or all of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, which runs 700 miles from Cape Mendocino in California to Vancouver Island in Canada. The last event was pinpointed because the enormous tsunami it created raced all the way across the Pacific Ocean to Japan, where written records were kept. It occurred here about 9 p.m. on Jan. 26, 1700.

“The Native Americans at the time of the last subduction zone earthquake in 1700 had a rich oral history surrounding earthquakes and tsunamis,” Corcoran says. “One tradition encouraged people to weave long ropes. That way, the saying went, following the earthquake a person could tie one end of the long rope around a tree and the other onto their canoe in order to ride out the tsunami waves.”

It’s now 2010, more than three centuries later. The newest studies produced by Chris Goldfinger, an OSU marine geologist and one of the world’s leading experts on the Cascadia Subduction Zone, indicate that there’s a 37 percent chance of a partial rupture of the zone within the next 50 years, an event that could be similar in magnitude to the earthquake just experienced in Chile.

“Perhaps more striking than the probability numbers is that we have already gone longer without an earthquake than 75 percent of the known times between earthquakes in the last 10,000 years,” Goldfinger says. “And 50 years from now, that number will rise to 85 percent.”

So it’s coming soon, possibly tomorrow. Possibly in 10 years. A better than one in three chance within the next 50 years. But no one knows for sure, and that isn’t going to change. With existing science, earthquakes cannot be predicted with precision; we can only prepare.

But Are We Prepared?

A few years ago, local residents in Cannon Beach, Oregon, were pondering that question, as they followed the developing science on subduction zone earthquakes and worked with officials from the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries on evacuation maps for the anticipated tsunami.

Preparation for a tsunami, in this context, would be defined as people knowing what to do, where to go, getting to high ground and having the time to do it. Jay Raskin, a longtime resident, community leader and local architect, didn’t like what he was hearing.

“Around then, the scientists were describing and updating the potential risks for an earthquake and tsunami caused by the Cascadia Subduction Zone,” Raskin says. “We talked about the distances we needed to go, how high the water might get, where high enough ground was, the bridges that probably would be destroyed.

“And then we’re thinking, oh darn, this strategy of getting to high ground might not work for everyone,” he says. “For some people there just might not be enough time. We needed another option.”

Then Hurricane Katrina struck, and another lesson was offered to the Cannon Beach residents. In the aftermath of the storm, not only had the devastation of coastal communities been enormous, but there was no functioning city government, no working facility to help rebuild.

A Sunny Day at the Beach

Cannon Beach is a small coastal community a little south of Seaside, Oregon. It’s butted up against coastal headlands and stretches for several lovely miles along the Pacific Ocean coast. Most of its 1,700 residents live within a few blocks of the beach, and about half of them, and 75 percent of the businesses, reside within a tsunami inundation zone. But it could be much worse. On a peak summer day, up to 12,000 people may crowd the beaches around Cannon Beach. The city presents a microcosm of an issue that affects a vulnerable shoreline about 900 miles long.

Tsunami Evacuation Building

In addition to a tsunami response plan, the city needed a new city hall. So Raskin and others had an idea. Why not build a structure that could survive a tsunami, stand above the incoming water, give local residents and visitors a safe place they could run to on short notice, save many lives, and also serve as a base of operations after the disaster to help the city recover and get back up and running?

It was the comparatively new concept of “vertical evacuation” to escape a tsunami, and it was a good idea. Two problems: No structure of that type had ever been built in the United States, and in the few places in the world where such structures had been built, such as Japan, none had yet experienced a tsunami. So as an engineering challenge, this was literally uncharted water. Also, it would cost more. A design has now been created for a new 10,000-square-foot structure, and it’s estimated to cost around $4 million, about double the cost for a more conventional building.

But the issues are real, and the Cannon Beach residents knew it. They had watched the devastation from the Sumatra earthquake and tsunami in 2004, where 230,000 people died, most of them not from the earthquake, but rather the tsunami. The geology of that region is nearly identical to the Cascadia Subduction Zone.

“After the Sumatra earthquake, I saw on television this scientist from Thailand, who had tried years before to convince local authorities to put in warning buoys, but no one did anything,” Raskin says. “He was in tears, he considered it a personal failure.”

“That struck me hard,” he says. “I was a city councilor at the time, I knew we faced the same issues, and I didn’t want that to happen here, to have to say years later that we knew all about this but didn’t do anything.”

For a nearby subduction zone earthquake like the one expected on Cascadia, warning buoys are not really the point. The earthquake itself will give any informed person all the warning they need, and only minutes will be available to get to high ground before the water starts rising and just keeps coming – an event Raskin likens to “a sneaker wave on steroids.”

The Real Enemies: Time and Transportation

So last May, at the Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory at OSU, a small model of the proposed new city hall building at Cannon Beach was being hit by simulated tsunamis repeatedly, to help address some of the questions. It’s not fancy, essentially a square structure on stilts, but very strong and with a sturdy foundation. But how strong is strong enough? What will be the effect of debris, such as floating cars, slamming into the pillars? OSU was helping Cannon Beach to answer those questions, in research supported by the National Science Foundation.

“We have to know just how strong this building has to be, so the community can build something that will work, but at the same time keep costs as low as possible,” says Dan Cox, an OSU professor of coastal and ocean engineering. “Some buildings may slow the force of the waves before they hit, for instance, and other debris may cause additional impacts.

“In engineering, this is new territory. We’re just scratching the surface of everything we need to know, but these studies should give us a higher degree of confidence in what we build, and in the process our students are learning how to build structures of this type for the future.”

Other work to aid Cannon Beach is also under way at OSU. Harry Yeh, the Edwards Professor of Coastal and Ocean Engineering, one of the world’s leading experts on tsunamis, has been involved with the community for years to help it address concerns, design the new structure. He is now working on an evacuation plan.

“We know we can build a structure that will survive an earthquake and tsunami, and could serve as an emergency shelter,” Yeh says. “Strong, reinforced concrete buildings can stand up to that, we saw that in Indonesia in 2004. And pretty much everyone agrees this structure would be good to have. But it will cost more, so to make this feasible, we have to figure out the best way to balance cost and function.”

The initiative in Cannon Beach is unique, and if implemented, will be the nation’s first structure designed specifically to survive an earthquake, resist the forces of a tsunami, and hopefully save lives. OSU has worked closely with state and federal agencies, as well as private companies, to make this happen. The result could form a model, both physically and inspirationally, for many other coastal communities that face similar concerns. And community support so far, Raskin says, has been reasonably strong. People have raised some fair and intelligent questions, but almost no one is advocating the status quo. Funding support may ultimately be sought from both local, state and federal levels and the private sector.

But Cannon Beach is one small town, on one short section of beach. The earthquake on the Cascadia Subduction Zone, when it happens, could be one of the great geologic events in world history, affecting three states, some of British Columbia, major cities and many millions of people. That’s a big problem, which goes well beyond the issue of the expected tsunami.

Living in the Quake Zone

Are we prepared?

OSU researchers are doing what they can. Earthquake and tsunami simulation modeling is being done in several Oregon sites. A course has been created and is being taught on “living with earthquakes.” OSU researchers have worked with the Oregon Department of Transportation to simulate tsunami loads on coastal bridges. Scientists have gone to Sumatra, to American Samoa, to Chile, to the sites of all the recent major subduction zone earthquakes and tsunamis in recent years to learn whatever might help.

To further explore these questions, Scott Ashford and Solomon Yim from OSU were part of a group supported by the National Science Foundation who went to Chile this past spring after the February 8.8 magnitude earthquake — also on a subduction zone similar to that of the Pacific Northwest. Yim, a professor of civil engineering, led a team of tsunami, structural and geotechnical engineers and surveyed damages to ports, coastal buildings and bridges. Ashford, professor and head of the School of Civil and Construction Engineering at OSU, said the group wanted to learn as much as possible about what had happened, what worked and what didn’t.

Chile, even more than the United States, has experience with subduction zone earthquakes. They happen with more frequency there, and a massive 9.5 event in 1960 was the largest earthquake ever recorded. Because of that, they have modern and aggressive building codes, as good or better than those in the Pacific Northwest, and much better than those used when many of the urban structures in Oregon and Washington were built 30 or more years ago.

“Part of what was striking about the Chile earthquake was the geographic extent of the damage. It was spread out over an area essentially from Seattle to Medford here in the U.S., and from I-5 to the coast,” Ashford says. “The damage itself, as you often see with earthquakes, was variable. Some areas were very hard hit, others much less.”

Chile, Japan and New Zealand – like the U.S., all situated on the notorious “ring of fire” around the Pacific Ocean – have some of the best seismic design standards in the world, Ashford adds. Engineers in Chile were able to observe certain types of architecture, often square, unimaginative buildings, that tended to resist damage much better than more innovative and irregular designs. But it still wasn’t good enough.

“In Concepcion, all the bridges from the south were collapsed or out of commission; people were cut off,” Ashford says. “You would see people living in tents, staring at the building they used to live in but afraid to enter it even for a few minutes to get their belongings, fearing it would collapse. And of course in the areas hit by the tsunami, the damage was just devastating; it was really heartbreaking.”

Engineer for Resilience

Oregon and Washington, Ashford says, face even greater devastation in the future. “We’re going to get hit worse than Chile did; I suspect much worse. We have many large buildings in our cities that were built in the 50s, 60s and 70s that will not do well in the earthquake.”

A prime lesson Ashford says he took away from the recent Chilean experience is to preserve the lifelines: electricity, gas, water, communication and transportation, as well as critical facilities like hospitals, fire stations and schools.

“What we need here is resiliency, to provide the infrastructure for rescue, relief, and recovery efforts that will enable Oregon to bounce back from such a disaster,” Ashford says. “Like the proposed city hall at Cannon Beach, that will save lives and give you something to build around.”

Ashford sees OSU as the logical institution to lead that effort. Working with the Oregon Department of Transportation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, utility companies, cities, and other agencies, OSU has the engineering and scientific and management expertise to help coordinate preparation for a major disaster, to build in that resilience that can literally mean the difference between life and death after a major disaster.

Fortunately, there may still be time to accomplish a great deal. Oregon Sea Grant’s Pat Corcoran noted that “we are the first modern generation to intellectually understand that we will experience great earthquakes and tsunamis.” The next event could happen tomorrow, but it also might not be for 30, 50 or 100 years. If so, that could offer a pretty good window of opportunity for public education and outreach for both local residents and tourists, community preparations, new and better building designs, sustained research programs, replacement of aging and dangerous structures. All of that is possible and many of these issues can be addressed if everyone involved — government, universities, agencies, people — work together to create a safer future.

But there’s a lot to do and only a limited time available to do it. Because a massive earthquake is coming that will destroy homes, buildings, roads, bridges and infrastructure across the Pacific Northwest. And a massive tsunami is coming with waters that will sweep ashore with deadly force. They are coming. We know that.

Are we prepared?

No.
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See a, April 2012 video about tsunami preparedness by Tom Bearden, National Public Radio.

Watch Risky Business in the Northwest on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

For information about supporting research and teaching through faculty endowments, contact the Oregon State University Foundation, 1-800-354-7281 or visit CampaignforOSU.org.

In his quest to discover new antibiotics and cancer-fighting drugs, Taifo Mahmud is studying bacteria that originated in black-water ecosystems on the other side of the world. Click on the link above to listen to a podcast. (Photo: Karl Maasdam)

Taifo Mahmud opens the incubator and, picking up the stacked petri dishes one by one, raises them to the light. Each round, lidded container displays a colorful pattern pocked or sprayed across the agar. The researcher points with pride to the branching abstractions of yellows and rusts, oranges and greens, the visible etchings of billions of microscopic bacteria multiplying in his Oregon State University lab.

In these microbial colonies collected from the rich, dark soils of Indonesia’s equatorial rainforests, he foresees nothing less than a healthier future for humankind. From them he has isolated compounds that could become the basis for new antibiotics and drugs to fight cancer.

“Microorganisms have yielded most of the therapeutic agents that have revolutionized modern medicine,” says Mahmud, a medicinal chemist in the College of Pharmacy who specializes in natural products. “Since the 1940s when soil bacteria were first identified as producers of antibiotic substances, over 10,000 biologically active compounds have been isolated from these organisms, including over 3,000 antibiotics.”

Their waters stained by tannins from peaty soils, "black-water" rivers like this one meeting a muddy tributary on the island of Borneo are rich sources of novel medicinal compounds. (Photo: Don Lyon)

The microbes in OSU’s Pharmaceutical Science lab, which are undergoing tests or “assays” that will determine their power to heal, originated halfway around the world in one of Earth’s biodiversity hotspots, the Indonesian archipelago curving between the Indian and Pacific oceans. In the steamy jungles of Borneo, Sumatra, Papua and hundreds of the nation’s smaller islands, there are unique ecosystems alive with undiscovered organisms: “black-water” rivers. Black water, not to be confused with muddy water, is transparent but tinted, like tea, by tannins leached from peaty soils. Its acid level is like vinegar’s.

A native of Indonesia, Mahmud was eager to investigate the pharmaceutical promise of black-water ecosystems. So he reached out to Dwi Andreas Santosa, director of the Indonesian Center for Biodiversity and Biotechnology, in pursuit of samples. Santosa dove in – literally. On Kalimantan (the Indonesian part of Borneo), home of the rare Kalimantan orangutan, Santosa and his research team donned swimsuits to collect soil from the beds of the Pangkoh Lima and Sungai Kala black-water rivers.

Since the 750 microorganism samples were delivered to OSU in 2005, Mahmud and his colleagues Mark Zabriskie and Phil Proteau have turned up a number of compounds with the power to fight infections and shrink tumors. As a result, diseases ranging from malaria to melanoma are a little bit closer to being scourges of the past.

Germ to Germ

It seems paradoxical, fighting bacteria with bacteria. Yet scientists have long known that these ubiquitous, single-celled microbes have the power to heal as well as to infect. Their curative properties reside in substances they produce in their natural environment to ward off threats or to communicate with each other. Researchers call these substances “secondary metabolites,” meaning they’re not essential to maintaining life but instead serve secondary functions.

Isolating these substances, analyzing their chemical structures and identifying which ones are “bioactive” – potent against infections such as tuberculosis (TB) and malaria or even against cancer – is Mahmud’s life’s work. As a child in Sumatra, Mahmud loved hanging around the clinic where his father practiced medicine. He got to know the TB patients with their hunched postures and rail-thin frames. The dispensary with its bottles of sulfa and tetracycline was as familiar to him as his mother’s kitchen. When time came to choose a career, health care seemed an easy fit. It was his father who steered him toward drug discovery.

“As a doctor, my father worked very hard but could only help 30 people a day, maximum,” Mahmud recalls. “He told me, ‘If you do pharmaceutical research and develop drugs, you can help millions of people every day.’”

Medicine from Dirt

Here’s another puzzle: Can soil really be a source of health? But making “medicine from dirt,” as one website puts it, isn’t really so outlandish when you remember that penicillin was derived from a fungus. Plants, too, have long been known to have medicinal properties. The hunt for herbal curatives was the focus of Mahmud’s doctoral work at Japan’s Osaka University, where he isolated compounds from potentially bioactive species identified by shamans in rural villages. But plants are bulky. Many pounds of leaves, bark and roots must be collected, dried and transported for laboratory research. Marine invertebrates such as sponges and tunicates are another source of healing compounds. But they, too, are unwieldy. Microbes, in contrast, can fit into minuscule spaces by the millions (a quarter-teaspoon of soil contains about 40 million bacteria).

Mahmud likes the practicality of using bacteria. But the work is no less laborious just because the organisms are microscopic. As a practical matter, the lofty quest for a viable drug requires a long, painstaking slog in the lab.

To the outsider, Mahmud’s lab is a bewildering jumble of scientific gear. It’s a place where mysterious, multihued liquids in test tubes and flasks are furiously agitated in orbital shakers. Where shelves are jammed with jars of culture media (the agar ingredients on which the bacteria grow) labeled with the names of such familiar nutrients as soy, potato, yeast and malt. Where microbial strains with unpronounceable names are subjected to technical procedures like spectrometry and chromatography.

It’s on the posters festooning the laboratory walls where the essence of the research starts to become evident. Diagrams of the microbes’ molecular structures, their honeycombed hexagonal cores and trailing side chains of smaller molecules, are the graphic representations of the lab’s findings. As the isolation and manipulation of these complex chemical structures advances, Mahmud and his colleagues move another step closer to lifesaving breakthroughs.

“The original extract contains hundreds of compounds,” says Mahmud. “It’s like when you make a cup of cappuccino – you have sugar, you have lactose, you have caffeine, you have everything in there. If you want to isolate one compound, like the caffeine, you have to separate it from everything else. We split the extract into fractions and keep narrowing down the target until we get a pure compound.”

Once a promising anti-infective compound has been isolated, the researchers clone its genetic “backbone” – its structural blueprint – and then manipulate the genes to create improved versions. They also send samples of the compound to the Oregon Translational Research and Drug Development Institute, a public-private signature research center, for more tests. Anti-tumor compounds are sent to the National Cancer Institute for further study. The compound’s chemical properties and structure are also entered into the Natural Products Library, a searchable database.

“Scientists have sequenced nearly 1,000 bacterial genomes,” Mahmud says. “One bacterium has the capacity, based on its blueprint, to produce 10 to 20 or even more different compounds. In the lab, we try to push them to produce at the highest capacity.”

Novel Compounds

A number of brand-new compounds have turned up in Mahmud’s black-water samples. Among them are six novel metabolites, which the OSU researchers have named “panglimycins” after the river Pangkoh Lima where they were collected. Seven additional new compounds called “limazepines,” a growing group of antitumor antibiotics isolated from soil bacteria, were recently found as well.

As described in the Journal of Natural Products and the Journal of Antibiotics, each of the new compounds takes a different form in lab tests – from colorless crystals to yellowish powders, oils or “needles.” Outward color and texture sometimes give clues to underlying molecular structure.

Finding novel compounds such as these is just the first step on a long journey to a viable drug – a journey that can take decades.

“Even if we find a bioactive molecule, the pharmaceutical companies have to do a lot of testing and clinical trials before they can market it,” says Mahmud. “We’re basically at the beginning of the whole process. The compound we isolate today may not become a drug for 20 years. We’re realistic enough not to get frustrated.”

To support the search for new life-saving drugs in the College of Pharmacy, contact theOSU Foundation.

Swainson's thrush is a common visitor to the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest where Matt Betts and his students are recording birdsong. You can listen to its call here. (Photo: Greg Lavaty)

Recording the subtle syllables, notes and motifs that distinguish one bird species from another requires some pretty sophisticated gear. But for OSU researchers, collecting audio data in an old-growth forest last summer was a walk in the park compared with analyzing it. “It’s a lot of data,” reports Jed Irvine, a faculty research assistant in the OSU Bioacoustics and Machine Learning group.

Confronted with a terabyte of digital sound from the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Irvine and a team of students in the College of Engineering are building a website that will let them borrow the ears of experienced birders to identify avian singers. These IDs will then be used to “teach” computers how to distinguish a robin from a Swainson’s thrush or a tree swallow for a study being led by forest ecologist Matt Betts.

The terabyte gets its name from the Greek word tera, meaning “monster.” The etymology is apt. Trying to grasp the size of a terabyte – a trillion bytes of computer data – is like trying to wrap your mind around the number of water drops in Crater Lake or sand grains on Cannon Beach. Besides their monstrous size, these audio files may contain all sorts of extra sounds, from streams to airplanes to distant highway traffic. Also complicating the task of automatically recognizing bird sounds is the fact that birds can sing in regional “dialects,” and some even mimic other species.

Where the Birds Are

“The bioacoustic team is developing software that will automatically identify bird species – perhaps even individual birds – so that we can assess population distribution on an ongoing basis,” Irvine explains. Then, without a hint of irony, he adds, “It’s a lofty idea.”

An amateur birder himself, Irvine came up with the idea of creating a website that would allow birders to upload bird images and audio for annotation and discussion. The bioacoustics and machine learning problem being worked on by professors Xiaoli Fern and Raviv Raich was a perfect task for the Web, Irvine says. Once the website was ready for the first round of user testing, he asked local birders to test-drive the site by listening to sound clips online and then posting species IDs for each clip. By the end of June, he had gotten 85 identifications from about a dozen volunteers.

In the next phase of website development, he hopes to make the experience of using the site as close to the experience of “birding by ear” as possible. Each online session will be designed as a “birding trip” into the forest, where volunteer birders can employ their knowledge of birdsong to further the goals of science.

“The next iteration will be more interesting,” says Irvine, who started birding with his dad as a kid in New Jersey. “We want to make the site addictively fun for birders, so that we can get as many bird sound snippets identified as possible.”

Visit the site at http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/bird.

In the tropics of Costa Rica, this violet sabrewing hummingbird is helping researchers understand the effects of forest fragmentation on ecosystems.

A thrush’s melody, warbler’s trill and sparrow’s chip-chip-chip form the musical backdrop for a hike in the woods. When birds sharing a forest patch all sing at the same time, the cacophony suggests the jumbled chatter of a human social gathering, with competing tones and pitches. In the din, distinguishing among species of warblers, for instance, or tracking individual chickadees is tricky. Scientists who study birdsong call this the “cocktail party” problem. Further muddying the forest sound-scape is background noise: rushing wind, splattering rain, crashing branches, foraging animals. Making sense of this audio hodgepodge can test a biologist’s mettle.

Matthew Betts is not deterred.

The OSU researcher is taking an innovative approach to recording birdsong in old-growth and second-growth forests. About a dozen microphones recently installed in Oregon’s H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest are capturing the calls of bird communities from high in the canopy to low in the understory. A parallel study is under way in New Hampshire’s experimental forest, Hubbard Brook.

Concerned with widespread reports of declines in bird populations, Betts is developing new ways to analyze trends in biodiversity. “We’re looking at the distribution of 40 or 50 species across the entire elevation gradient at each experimental forest,” explains the assistant professor of forest landscape ecology. “We want to know why species live where they do. Why do some species cut off at 1,200 meters yet others persist higher? Is it competition among species? Is it vegetation that’s driving that relationship? Is it climatic? It’s basic research, but it has big implications for how we predict the effect of climate change on animals.”

Matt Betts

Birds by Bytes

Gathering acoustic data digitally, he says, has big advantages over the current practice: putting people in the woods to count birds, song by song. Still another technological advance – artificial intelligence – will streamline the analysis of the electronic data. By employing smart computers that can “learn” to sort ambient noise from distinct species sounds, a team of computer scientists in OSU’s Ecosystem Informatics Program is translating the recordings into signals that can be read by computers. Betts and his collaborators hope to push forest ecology to a new level of efficiency and sophistication.

“We spend an immense amount of time and money every year surveying birds with technicians,” Betts says. “The overall idea of setting up microphones in the forest was, wouldn’t it be cool if we could have cheap, long-term data?”

But Betts’s investigations don’t stop there.  His research program, which has taken him and his graduate students all over Central and North America – from pollination experiments in Costa Rica to molecular studies of migratory birds in New Brunswick, Canada – has chalked up a lot of firsts: first to influence warblers’ nesting choices with recorded sound. First to put radio transmitters on tropical hummingbirds. First to test continental-scale geographic-dispersal patterns in the chemistry of feathers.

Each study launched from the Betts Forest Landscape Ecology Lab, no matter how far-flung geographically or out-front technologically, has one overarching goal: to isolate the effects of habitat loss, landscape fragmentation and climate change on biodiversity and species persistence (survival over time).

Betts cites a 2010 report from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature showing that steep declines in populations of birds, mammals, amphibians, plants and invertebrates are continuing across the planet, despite some successful efforts at conservation.

“Habitat loss and fragmentation are known to be the primary cause of species extinctions worldwide,” he notes. “With thousands of species verging on extinction, discovering how animals respond to habitat degradation and disruption is urgent if we hope to reverse the trends.”

By opening all sorts of new windows onto avian behavior – such as using LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology in a recent habitat study with Woods Hole Research Center – Betts has become a noted innovator in the field of landscape ecology.

“Matt’s research on the response of bird populations to forest fragmentation has served as a critical guide for many young and aspiring ecologists,” says Benjamin Zuckerberg, a research associate with the Citizen Science Program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.  “Using advanced statistical approaches, he has made significant contributions to the study of ecological thresholds and breeding-site selection in forest birds. Land managers and policymakers, as well as graduate students, appreciate his ease in communicating complex scientific concepts.

“Most importantly,” Zuckerberg concludes, “the results of Matt’s research emphasize the role of landscape ecology in natural resource conservation.”

Lab-Rat Bird

In the hardwood forests of New Hampshire’s White Mountains lives the black-throated blue warbler. Nesting in low-growing shrubs, this abundant warbler is easy to find and count, making it a favorite subject for East Coast ornithologists.

“The black-throated blue warbler is the lab rat of eastern avian demography,” jokes Betts, who first studied the species as a post-doctoral fellow at Dartmouth College.

These handy birds have given Betts surprising new insights into the purposes and powers of song. Wondering how birds choose nesting sites, Betts and a team of researchers from Wellesley College and from Queen’s University and Trent University in Ontario, Canada, recently ran an experiment to see whether, in essence, they could “trick” the warblers into picking poor places by making them think other warblers favored those spots. The scientists played electronic warbler songs at 54 White Mountain locations – scrubby areas with scant cover that warblers normally would bypass. But having heard their species’ songs broadcast as they flew over in the late summer, many returning warblers chose the sub-par nesting sites the following spring. In fact, more than 80 percent of first-time breeding males settled in the bad habitat, Betts and his colleagues reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

“We were very surprised,” Betts told Science magazine’s blog, ScienceNOW. “It was almost as if we’d attracted a spotted owl (secretive old-growth dwellers) to a parking lot.”

Taking cues from fellow warblers is a shortcut to scoping out optimal breeding grounds, Betts explains. It’s a behavior that can aid the species’ adaptability to rapidly changing landscapes.

“The approach this bird uses can be very efficient in allowing individuals to find new habitat quickly when old habitat has been lost or degraded,” he says. “We’re developing a library of species that use this nest-site selection strategy, which may make them less sensitive to environmental changes than species that are poor at finding new habitat.”

Flight Paths

The green hermit hummingbird of Central America weighs over three-tenths of an ounce – approximately the heft of a good-sized chickadee. By hummingbird standards, that’s huge. (In contrast, the Pacific Northwest’s ubiquitous rufous hummingbird tips the scale at just one-tenth of an ounce.) The green hermit’s heavyweight status makes it a prime candidate for tracking by radio transmitter because although the transmitter weighs less than one-hundredth of an ounce, it’s too heavy for the tiny rufous to carry on its back.

Betts and Ph.D. student Adam Hadley wanted to investigate hummingbirds’ travels through the rainforests of Costa Rica to help explain why pollination levels around the world appear to be dropping. In particular, they wondered how fragmented forests – patches of trees left stranded amidst areas cleared for roads, crops or timber – affect the flight patterns of the iridescent, curved-billed pollinators.

“Recently, people have started realizing that landscape configuration, especially fragmentation – how habitat is distributed – can be quite important for some species,” Betts explains.
So in the winter of 2008, the researchers glued miniature transmitters to 19 green hermits with false-eyelash adhesive and then monitored the birds’ movements for several weeks until new feather growth made the transmitters fall off. In the journal Biology Letters, the scientists reported that the birds adhered closely to  forested corridors in the landscape, clinging to treed areas while avoiding open patches devoid of cover – even when that meant flying longer distances. Not only are the longer distances potential stressors for the birds, but the avoided patches may miss being pollinated, thus losing plant diversity over time.

“We don’t yet know for sure if pollen dynamics are being disrupted by forest fragmentation, but we think so,” says Betts. “Our hummingbird research suggests that maintaining riparian corridors of forest between patches could be quite important for pollination dynamics.”

Heroic Triumvirate

Betts’ heroes – three titans of biology, Edward O. Wilson, Ernst Mayr and Paul Ehrlich – all began their careers studying animals (ants, birds and butterflies, respectively). But over time, they extended their inquiries to such sweeping scientific questions as the mechanisms of evolution, Earth’s ecological thresholds and the origins of human nature. All became active in the political sphere, advocating on behalf of the planet’s long-term survival.

While not presuming to share the lofty status of these science superstars, Betts imagines his career taking a similar beyond-the-lab trajectory. For him, however, public-policy work will be a homecoming of sorts. As an undergraduate – motivated by his childhood wanderings among the woods of New Brunswick – he aspired to conserve the forests where so many mysteries were secreted. So he studied political science. He soon realized, however, that if he hoped to influence policy, he first needed grounding in the fine and complex details of ecosystems – in what he calls the “micro” sphere of forest management and conservation. So he went back to study biology and ecology.

Still, it’s at the policy level where discoveries give rise to action. Betts sees himself looping back more strongly to the macro sphere as time goes by. “It can get very frustrating doing science when you’re just pumping out scientific papers and nobody’s paying any attention to it,” says Betts, who serves as OSU’s representative on Oregon’s State Forest Advisory Committee, which provides input to the Oregon Department of Forestry on forest management issues. “That’s what drew me to the College of Forestry, actually. There’s this potential link between basic research and applied work, and then translation into some kind of action.”

If science can, for instance, reveal how fragmentation affects animals – as opposed to simple habitat loss – the findings can guide decision-makers in tangible ways.

“We have the power to design landscapes in different ways,” Betts notes. “Losing the same amount of habitat, developers or foresters could decide to leave wildlife corridors, or they could decide to leave a single big patch instead of making four little ones. It becomes pretty important when thinking about the persistence of species.”

Still, he says, doing science – even stopping for a minute to enjoy a warbler’s stirring call – can be a satisfying refuge from the contentious political arena.

“Basic research is nice because it doesn’t depend on people that much,” he admits. “So if I’m depressed about the rate at which my findings get turned into policy, at least I’m finding out some interesting things about nature. That’s good in itself.”

To support forest ecology research in the OSU College of Forestry, contact the OSU Foundation.

OSU forestry student Steve Ashley has spent six summers fighting forest fires in Central Oregon. (Photo courtesy of Steve Ashley)

Which of Oregon’s abundant tree species can provide not only logs for your vacation cabin but scented oil for your afternoon massage and flavor for your evening cocktail? Juniperus occidentalis, western juniper. This hardy species – which is endemic to the dry, rocky grasslands east of the Cascades – has heartwood that is both beautiful and enduring, fragrance that is coveted for soaps and lotions, and berry-like cones that give gin its characteristic taste (indeed, the word “gin” is derived from the Dutch word for “juniper,” genever or jenever).

Despite its potential market value, this high-desert native is viewed mainly as a worrisome invader across much of Oregon’s rangeland. Its dense roots suck up gallons of water, stealing scarce moisture from sagebrush, grasses and streams. Habitat for wildlife and forage for livestock are becoming lost or degraded. Ranchers are fighting back, downing the trees with chainsaws and tractors. Much of the wood remains where it falls, unused.

From Logs to Lotions

Transforming juniper from problem to profitability is the vision of OSU forestry student Steve Ashley. Cultivating new markets for juniper products could benefit not just Oregon’s ranchers but also its mills, builders, landscapers, furniture makers, garden centers, retailers and enterprises in specialty niches such as essential oils, craft distilleries and animal bedding, he says. And then there’s the growing demand for sustainable energy. Juniper is a vast source of biomass just waiting to be tapped, Ashley asserts.

So what’s getting in the way? That’s the question Ashley explored for his senior thesis in the Wood Science and Technology program with guidance from his adviser, Scott Leavengood, director of OSU’s Wood Innovation Center. For the young man from Albany who spent boyhood summers working on the 700-acre Prineville farm where his grandfather grew mint, alfalfa and sugar beets, it’s more than just an academic question. He is constantly drawn back to the sage and rimrock and dry, desert winds of Central and Eastern Oregon. For the past six fire seasons, he’s been back out among the junipered hills battling wildfires with the U.S. Forest Service.

“Since I was a kid helping out on my grandpa’s ranch, I’ve seen the juniper grow up and take over,” Ashley says.

Reviving Ecosystems

An estimated 6.5 million acres of private and government lands in Oregon are classified as juniper savanna or juniper forest. That’s up from just 1.5 million in the 1930s. Suppression of wildfires on rangelands has allowed young seedlings to survive and flourish in recent decades. Yet despite the abundance – and landowners’ eagerness to be rid of it – juniper occupies a very small place in Oregon’s wood-products industry. Typically a short, limby tree that tapers sharply and has a swirling grain pattern, juniper is not ideal for mills, which are geared for long, straight-grained, knot-free logs, Ashley says. With only one large-scale juniper mill in the state – the nonprofit REACH (Rehabilitation, Employment and Community Housing) mill in Klamath Falls – transportation costs and logistics hinder large-scale logging.

Harvesting presents its own set of hurdles. Scattered widely and randomly across the landscape, juniper doesn’t lend itself to efficient logging like dense stands of, say, Douglas fir or ponderosa pine, Ashley explains.

But none of these impediments is impossible to overcome, according to Ashley. In his study, he makes recommendations for expediting the western juniper market, including using alternative harvesting methods such as mule or horse logging and creating a “value-added” product such as wood chips right on the harvesting site.

His vision for juniper in Oregon centers on its “green” assets.

“The ecological effects of removing western juniper have yielded great results in increasing stream flows and native grasses,” Ashley says. The ranchers he interviewed have seen “drastic ecological changes” after cutting juniper on their land. In fact, one of those ranchers, Bill McCormack of Brothers, told Ashley that “the grasses seem to grow overnight” as soon as the juniper is cut down.

Besides reviving ecosystems, harvested juniper can be used in all sorts of green products, from long-lived fence posts and landscape timbers that don’t need to be treated with chemicals to pellets for woodstoves to biofuels for energy generation.

Down to Business

For the juniper market to take off in Oregon, however, landowners, mill operators and government agents need to reach a meeting of the minds on how to move it forward, Ashley says. This “communication triangle,” he insists, must collaborate more closely to benefit all stakeholders. In the meantime, he plans to seek investment capital for a start-up company where he can put his extensive juniper knowledge to work.

“The public needs to be re-educated about western juniper,” he says. “They may be very interested in juniper products because the harvest restores ecosystems and yields ‘green’ products. Anything green is selling these days.”

To support student scholarships, contact the OSU Foundation.

Marsha Lampi brings the discipline of a long-distance runner to her research in bioengineering as well as to OSU cross-country and track. (Photo: Jan Sonnenmair)

By Nick Houtman and Darryl Lai

Marsha Lampi runs for distance – 5,000 or 10,000 meters in track, 5,000 or 6,000 meters in cross-country. The former Lincoln High School student from Portland enjoys pacing herself but is always looking to improve. “I usually think, if only I had done this or that differently, I could have run a little bit faster,” she says.

This summer will take the Oregon State University athlete, a junior in bioengineering and the University Honors College, further than she has ever gone, at a pace that surprises even her. She is one of two-dozen students from around the world who have been accepted into an eight-week internship at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (known as the EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Lampi will work in the Hubell Laboratory, which specializes in research on biomaterials, drug delivery and tissue engineering. It’s a great fit for a student who is setting her sights on med school or biomedical research.

Lampi’s laboratory experience at OSU has prepared her for the challenge. Last summer, she worked in OSU’s Howard Hughes Medical Institute undergraduate research program on a subject of great interest to runners: the fluid that lubricates knees, hips and other joints. Under guidance from Willie “Skip” Rochefort, associate professor of chemical engineering, Lampi looked at how proteins in this so-called synovial fluid affect its ability to help joints absorb shock.

She credits Rochefort and the College of Engineering for giving her the opportunities and academic support she needed to qualify for the Swiss program. “Dr. Skip has been there every step of the way to help me,” she says. “He made me think about the big picture.” As a result, she developed the confidence to apply to internship programs (Berkeley, Stanford, MIT and EPFL) that she didn’t think would accept her. No worries: She got into each one.

“I chose to do research at the EPFL because of the international opportunity of working with people from around the world,” she says. Although she speaks fluent Spanish, she is looking forward to learning new languages and the by-ways of an unfamiliar country.

Rochefort says that Lampi is one of the best students that he has mentored at OSU. “She has the talent to go a long way and the desires to make an impact on people’s lives, both with her research and as a role model in both her professional and personal lives. She is possibly the most disciplined and organized student, with a huge capacity for work, that I have met in my 17 years at OSU!”

Lampi has served as a mentor for other students in high school and at OSU. In her own family, she looks to her older brother (an engineer) and sister (in med school) for inspiration. “They showed me I can do whatever I want,” she says.

Despite her new surroundings, Lampi will continue to work on her running in preparation for the fall cross-country season. And she’ll have additional support through her coach, Kelly Sullivan, and the OSU Athletics Department, which has arranged for friends to meet her in Switzerland.

To support student scholarships and the University Honors College, contact the OSU Foundation.

Experience Oregon’s beauty and bounty through OSU research

Take a hike! Summer may have arrived a bit late in the Pacific Northwest, but you can make up for lost time by exploring public demonstration gardens, old-growth forests, wetlands, agricultural field days and an archaeological dig through OSU’s Summer of Science Google map. Each listing on the map includes directions and a description of what you’ll find.

View Oregon State University Summer of Science in a larger map

Illustration by Santiago Uceda

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

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

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

History and Social Science

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

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

Cultural Studies

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

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

Oregon and the Northwest

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

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

Sustainable Living

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

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

Nature

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

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

To support the OSU Press, contact the OSU Foundation.