Renewable ocean wave energy seems like a natural. It promises jobs for Oregon and carbon-free power for the nation. It can reduce our dependence on foreign oil and contribute to economic development. But before we can realize that potential, we need to be careful to find a balance. In an ideal world, offshore wave energy buoy arrays would be placed where they don’t constrain fishermen and crabbers and or harm fish and marine mammals. We need to do enough research to know that sea life — and the people who depend on it — will not be compromised.

Illustration by Chris Buzelli

As I coordinate Oregon State University’s government relations in Washington D.C., I work with OSU faculty members — some of the nation’s top experts — in marine ecology, coastal geophysics and wave energy engineering. Oregon Sea Grant adds strong relationships with community groups and the fishing industry. It’s no exaggeration to say that OSU is regarded as the national thought-leader in marine renewable energy. The university uses its deep knowledge and expertise to assist Congress and federal agencies in shaping policy, defining research areas in marine energy and advocating for necessary funding levels.

Renewable energy is both a national and international priority. In 2005, when the 109th Congress wrote and debated the Energy Policy Act, OSU researchers were publishing papers on wave energy. Both OSU and Congress saw the potential of this research and included the creation of marine renewable energy centers in the bill. Our advocacy effort included strategizing with policymakers and providing expert testimony. Much work by key individuals at OSU and in the office of former Rep. Darlene Hooley and her staff led to the creation of these competitive U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) centers.

While the establishment of the DOE centers was a significant accomplishment, it took a few years of strong advocacy with DOE and Congress to appropriate funding. Once that was done, OSU researchers partnered with the University of Washington to respond to requests for proposals. Ultimately OSU was awarded one of only two national centers, the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center (NNMREC). NNMREC’s goal is to lead the nation’s research in marine renewable energy with OSU focusing on wave energy and with UW working on tidal. The initial DOE award was a commitment of $6.25 million in federal funds over five years.

In 2010 OSU worked with Capitol Hill to develop a broad marine renewable energy policy. The result is HR 6344, the Marine and Hydrokinetic Renewable Energy Promotion Act of 2010. This bill contains authorization of marine renewable energy-related programs ranging from research and development to commercial application and includes increased authorizations for test centers, including NNMREC.

In addition, with leadership from the Ocean Renewable Energy Consortium, of which OSU is a member, the DOE budget for ocean renewable energy programs grew from $10 million in FY 2008 to $48 million in FY 2010. Over those years, NNMREC has competed for and won additional DOE funds.

This isn’t the only area in which OSU has been active in Washington. When the House Science and Technology Committee was marking up a nuclear energy research and development bill, we helped to refine some of the provisions. We are often called upon to provide input on national policy matters with significant budget implications. In recent years, OSU faculty members have provided expertise on forestry, climate change, agriculture, fish and wildlife, the oceans, nanotechnology and aging.

OSU leadership in these areas and our advocacy for key federal research budgets is helping to address national priorities. These initiatives have the additional benefit of supporting students who have opportunities to participate in groundbreaking studies that will achieve balance in our approach to renewable energy. OSU experts are shaping the nation’s research agenda for years to come.

Now, with help from the fishing industry, hydrographic contractors (David Evans and Associates and Fugro), the State of Oregon and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Chris Goldfinger is leading a $7.3 million mapping project that will pinpoint rocky reefs, depressions and navigational hazards. The Oregon State University associate professor of oceanic and atmospheric sciences says the new images will help fishermen, scientists and coastal managers who need to manage marine habitats and to develop better tsunami models.

Over the next two years, two vessels out of Newport — OSU’s Pacific Storm, captained by Bob Pedro, and the Michele Ann, captained by Bob Eder and Geogon Lapham — will help researchers collect detailed images over more than 34 percent of the seafloor out to the state’s three-mile limit. The project will expand existing coverage with a half-meter resolution, including 75 percent of rocky reefs, depressions and boulders.

Goldfinger led an earlier effort to map Oregon’s territorial sea, using existing data on seafloor habitats identified in thousands of bottom samples and soundings. The map and many other marine spatial layers are available online. New products from this project will be distributed through the same Web site.

For more about the mapping project, see this OSU news release:

New Funds Will Help Create Oregon’s Most  Accurate Seafloor Mapping System, August 12, 2009

To support ocean research at OSU, contact the Oregon State University Foundation.

Both companies have licensed Oregon State University technologies and are benefitting from OSU’s University Venture Development Fund (UVDF). Launched by the Oregon Legislature in 2007 to stimulate research commercialization, the UVDF gives Oregon residents a 60 percent state tax credit for their gifts.

Inpria, one of the startups, has developed a new way to create thin films for displays and other large-area electronics using low-cost printing processes. OSU professors Douglas Keszler and John Wager are among the company’s co-founders.

According to Andrew Grenville, Inpria co-founder and president, UVDF money helped the company leverage funding to explore new markets for its landmark LCD display technology.
Life Microsystems is capitalizing on research by two scientists in OSU’s Linus Pauling Institute. Carole Jubert developed a low-cost method for isolating pure chlorophyll from Oregon spinach. George Bailey has shown that chlorophyll can bind with toxins in the body, reducing DNA damage and potentially preventing disease.

Life Microsystems has isolated a more stable crystalline form of ultra-pure chlorophyll, which typically sells for more than $100 per milligram due to its susceptibility to degradation.

Scott Gustafson, a veterinarian and CEO of Life Microsystems, is partnering with OSU professor John Mata to isolate and concentrate other beneficial compounds from Oregon agricultural products, such as black raspberries.

For more information about spinoff companies, see these OSU news releases:

From Printed Electronics to Chlorophyll from Oregon Spinach, OSU Venture Fund Powers Startups, July 20, 2009

Tax Incentive Program Funds Six Oregon State Research Projects, August 19, 2008

To support the University Venture Development Fund at OSU, see this Web site.

“These are competitive, highly ranked projects for which funding would not have been available otherwise,” says John Cassady, OSU vice president for research. “They employ our students, research technicians and faculty and enable us to purchase services and supplies, stimulating the economy even further.”

Economic stimulus funds contributed to OSU’s best ever $252 million in research grants and contracts last fiscal year. According to the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, ARRA provided the largest single increase in funding for basic research in history, $21.5 billion nationwide.

More electricity from sunlight is the goal for Alex Chang, right, and his thin-films student research team of (left to right) Nate Edwards, Debra Gilbuena and Wei Wang. (Photo: Karl Maasdam)

Since coming to Oregon State University a decade ago, Chih-hung “Alex” Chang has made research his passion as well as his profession. The associate professor in chemical engineering has two patents and six more pending. With other OSU faculty and students, he has helped to create two companies, Nanobits LLC and CSD Nano LLC. His work on what scientists call thin films — nanometer scale chemical layers laid down with drill-team precision — holds the promise of new coatings for eyeglasses and a new generation of power producing solar cells.

In 2004, the National Science Foundation recognized Chang with a prestigious Early Career Award. He has received additional NSF research grants and support from the Department of Energy, Sharp Laboratories of America, ONAMI and Oregon BEST.

OSU’s University Venture Development Fund has also been critical to his research. The fund supports technology with commercial potential while providing a hefty Oregon tax credit to donors. It delivers a direct shot in the arm for research leading to new products.

Alex Chang’s dad was an engineer, but Alex nearly took another direction as an undergraduate at the National Taiwan University. He considered becoming an artist.
In fact, art runs in the family. His brother Chih-wei followed in their father’s footsteps with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, but he decided not to continue that career. After graduating, he moved to New York City and studied fashion illustration.

For Alex, research held stronger appeal. At the University of Florida, he studied an emerging alternative to silicon for photovoltaic cells known as CIGS thin films. He collaborated with fellow graduate student B.J. Stanbery, a CIGS photovoltaics pioneer who recently founded a new company, HelioVolt.

At OSU, Chang and a student research team envision electricity generating solar collectors built into windows, roofs and other building parts. Debra Gilbuena, a double master’s student in business and chemical engineering, puts it this way: “How cool would it be if you could put solar cells on all the windows in all the skyscrapers in a city and collect energy?” Gilbuena, who co-holds a patent for an electrochemical sensor, works in Chang’s lab and serves as a chief technology officer for CSD Nano.

Thin-film solar cells — whether made of silicon or the CIGS metals copper, indium, gallium and selenium — typically consist of six or more layers to maximize light absorption and sustain an electric current, says Chang. His team is developing printing techniques to replace more expensive vacuum production methods. Chang has already used an inkjet printing-based process to make high-mobility thin-film transistors.

With new techniques, Chang’s goal is to lower cost and chemical use while maintaining high efficiency. Based on a market analysis by Gilbuena, Chang expects demand to be high. “We need to demonstrate good efficiency. There’s no doubt there will be commercial interest,” he says.

For more about energy research by Chang and other OSU scientists and engineers, see Expanding Our Energy Portfolio in the 2008 president’s report.

To support energy research at OSU, contact the Oregon State University Foundation.

Kevin Ahern writes one or two new "metabolic melodies" every term. He has inspired comments from students as far away as Ukraine and Croatia. (Photo: Karl Maasdam)

Like most teachers, Kevin Ahern savors the smile on his students’ faces when they suddenly get it. He remembers having those bright “ah hah” moments in school only too well.

But Ahern, who teaches introductory and advanced biochemistry classes to many of Oregon State University’s pre-med students, has another reason for wanting to drive science into his students’ minds. “These kids will be treating me sometime. I don’t want to have one of them as my physician and think, ‘oh man, you got a D in my biochemistry class.’”

Ahern’s own expertise is in viruses, and he holds a patent for a laboratory technique called “boomerang DNA amplification.” He has written regular columns for Science magazine and other publications and directs OSU’s annual Howard Hughes Medical Institute summer research program. But it’s his unusual teaching style that has earned him a reputation among students at OSU and even among distance-learners in Europe and Asia.

Despite admitting that he can’t carry a tune, he composes and sings his own “metabolic melodies” to make a memorable point. At the end of class or in the middle of a lecture, Ahern will break into songs like “B-DNA” (to “YMCA”), “Glucagon is Coming Around” (to “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”) and “When Acids are Synthesized” (to “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”).

Posted on YouTube

His copyrighted compositions have been recorded by students (listen to “We All Need Just a Little ATP” and “The Ribosome“) and professional singers, including Corvallis musicians Neal and Barbara Gladstone. Versions have been posted on YouTube and are available free at http://www.davincipress.com/metabmelodies.html.

A self-described ham who loves melodies, Ahern breaks into an off-key number at unexpected times in his classroom. And the reaction from his students? “You just saw this look that went across the crowd, ‘look, he’s gone nuts,’” he says. But they laugh and applaud and have told him later that the catchy tunes help them to remember arcane facts.

Whether his students go on to the Oregon Health & Sciences University in Portland (where OSU contributes a large share of entering classes) or hold policy-making positions in state or federal agencies, Ahern wants them to be well-equipped. It’s not just for technical proficiency. Inevitably, whether as physicians, administrators or policymakers, they will have to deal with controversial topics such as genetic engineering, animal cloning or nanomedicine. He wants their opinions to be grounded in facts.

These topics may generate varying points of view among students, but Ahern gives his graduates the ability to do more than work in a laboratory. “They need to talk the talk, and they need to understand the language,” he says. “I think my songs tap a musical part of the brain and help them do that.”

For his source of inspiration, Ahern credits a gifted math teacher in Fowler, Illinois (population 200) where he grew up. To hear him tell it, young Kevin had gotten in with the wrong crowd at school. He wasn’t doing the work he was capable of, and his parents were exasperated. His math teacher did something that no one else had done: He explained the meaning of the equal sign. “It resonated with me in a way that is difficult to describe. I never had to study for another math class in my life.”

Kevin Ahern sings one of his “metabolic melodies” in this podcast with Celene Carillo, OSU Web Communications.

A list of Ahern’s songs from “Biochemistry Pie” to “I’m a Little Mitochondrion” is here.

“I realized pretty quickly that they weren’t left over from a clambake,” marine geologist Erwin Suess recalls wryly.

Far from being beach-party cuisine, the mega-shellfish evidenced one of the most stunning discoveries ever made in ocean science. Superheated water seeping from deep-sea volcanic rifts, discovered near the Galapagos Islands during a 1977 expedition led by OSU oceanographer Jack Corliss, jolted the fields of marine chemistry and geology. The implications for scientists’ understanding of heat exchange and geochemical balance across the planet were profound. Even more startling was the host of outlandish creatures found thriving in the sulfurous, sunless depths.

These mysterious species – the gargantuan clams, red-tipped tube worms, ghostly crabs and other weird residents of the ocean’s hydrothermal vents – rocked biology to its core. Animals subsisting on gasses instead of sunlight had never been imagined, let alone witnessed from the portal of a manned submersible. These “chemosynthetic” organisms, scientists realized, could hold clues to life’s very origins in Earth’s ancient chemical soup.

“Here were animals living in the dark, in warm and chemical-laden water streaming out of the earth. It was as if these organisms had been left behind as the rest of the planet evolved toward the sun.”

— Joseph Cone,
Fire Under the Sea

On Their Shoulders

These discoveries underpin the work of a whole new generation of researchers in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences (CEOAS). When Ph.D. candidate Brandon Briggs, for instance, hunkers over his microscope to study methane-making and methane-consuming microbes from the ocean’s subsurface biosphere, he is carrying on the legacy of Corliss, Suess and dozens of other marine geologists, physicists, chemists and biologists who, over the program’s 50-year history, have elevated COAS into one of the nation’s top-three oceanographic research institutions (along with Scripps and Woods Hole).

“I was drawn to the interdisciplinary nature of the research here,” says Briggs, whose passion for environmental microbiology took hold in his home state of Idaho. “You have to understand math, physics, chemistry and geology along with the microbiology. You have to be able to converse with people in all the different disciplines.”

Briggs’ research is anchored in a COAS discovery closely related to hydrothermal vents: ocean floor “cold seeps.” First located in 1984 at the Cascadia Subduction Zone by Suess and Professor LaVern Kulm, the cold-water vent systems leak methane and other carbon-rich fluids from decaying life forms buried in subsurface sediments. The seeps support their own unique collections of “extremophiles” – organisms that exist in ecosystems devoid of light or oxygen. The gasses not only feed such oddities as the “seep tubeworm” (which can live 250 years) but also play a role in another deep-sea anomaly being studied by Briggs under the advisement of geomicrobiologist Rick Colwell: gas hydrates.

Caged in Ice

Methane in ocean sediments can, under certain conditions of temperature and pressure, become locked into a lattice of water molecules to form ice-like structures. Once thought to exist naturally only on Saturn’s moons, hydrates have been found not only in ocean deposits around the globe but also in polar permafrost.

As a potential energy source, hydrates have gotten the attention of the U.S. Department of Energy, the agency funding Briggs’ and Colwell’s research. But the researchers warn that exploiting this resource must be approached with great caution. That’s because methane is a potent greenhouse gas and hydrates are highly unstable; their gaseous “guest” molecules escape rapidly when the “host” latticework melts. This poses serious worries for environmental science, Briggs says. A runaway greenhouse effect could be triggered if hydrate fields were disturbed by earthquakes, rising ocean temperatures, changing sea levels, deep-sea oil drilling, melting permafrost or ocean-floor mining, releasing massive amounts of trapped methane, the researcher explains.

“When temperatures rise, hydrates release their methane,” he adds. “There’s evidence that methane from hydrates may have been released into the atmosphere the last time Earth was really hot, about 55 million years ago during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.”

Examining core samples from Hydrate Ridge off the coast of Newport, Oregon, as well as from Canada’s Vancouver Island and India’s Bay of Bengal, Briggs is documenting microbial distribution using DNA analysis and studying biochemical pathways of microbes living in and around hydrates. Of special interest is the balance between microbes that make methane and those that use methane, the latter providing a brake on the accumulation of this gas in the environment. One central question is: If the rate of methane production were to speed up because of, say, rising temperatures, could the methane users keep up, or would they become overwhelmed and lose their buffering function?

“We’re interested in the amount of methane produced in deep marine sediments, what controls the rate of methanogenesis, and how that biogenic methane factors into the global carbon cycle,” says Colwell, a member of OSU’s Subsurface Biosphere Initiative who came to the university in 2006 from the Idaho National Laboratory.

The answers may help scientists predict harmful off-gassing from melting hydrates. They may also guide decisions about carbon sequestration and energy exploitation in the ocean.

“I’m motivated to find answers to the pressing questions of global climate change,” says Briggs.

Already, his research into the microbes’ biochemical pathways is yielding intriguing findings. He has, for instance, identified microorganisms living in “biofilms” – “slimy, pinkish-orange” coatings of bacteria – feeding on methane 60 feet deep in Indian Ocean sediments. “To have that amount of biomass that deep in ocean sediments is surprising,” Briggs says. “This hasn’t been reported anywhere else.”

On the Web: Exploring extreme deep-sea habitats has become a passion for Brandon Briggs and other students in Rick Colwell’s lab. Learn more here

Rancher Doc Hatfield (left) grills up a sampling of range-grazed, hormone-free beef for grocery store customers, a personal touch that helps to set Country Natural Beef apart from factory-farm meat and to build trust among consumers. (Photo courtesy of Country Natural Beef)

The search for sustainability is creating some strange bedfellows.

Take, for instance, Country Natural Beef. In the Oregon-based meat co-op, cattle ranchers — known for their fierce independence — have forged surprisingly strong alliances with other ranchers across the West. Even more improbably, these no-nonsense traditionalists are collaborating with progressive health-food aficionados, animal-rights advocates and environmental activists.

The unlikely partnering of 120 ranch families with the likes of national retailer Whole Foods Market (the co-op’s biggest customer), Northwest restaurant chain Burgerville (whose slogan is “fresh, local, sustainable”) and renowned animal-compassion expert Temple Grandin (a scientist at Colorado State University) represents a growing business trend, according to Oregon State University business professor Zhaohui Wu.

“Country Natural Beef is an example of a trust-based model where relationships are driven by shared values,” say Wu, who specializes in sustainable business practices and supply-chain management. Notions like “trust” and “values” may sound a bit warm and fuzzy to the ears of a financier. But a growing body of research suggests they can effectively cut transaction costs and boost profits. Basing business dealings on close and “voice-based” relationships (that is, talking things over) rather than on written contracts is the alternative to the typical American “arms-length” transaction in a fragmented supply chain, says Wu.

In the mainstream beef market, business is determined by producer costs, but prices soar and sink erratically as commodity traders bet against future supply and demand. In contrast, Wu explains, consumer values provide stability for the natural-foods niche. This highly discerning customer base demands strict synchronicity with the shoppers’ philosophical beliefs: holistic rangeland management, stress-free cows, connectedness to the land, fair labor practices and additive-free meat traceable to its source. They’re willing to pay a premium for a product that reflects their deeply held beliefs.

Trust and collaboration among producers also make for more nimble decision-making, essential in a rapidly changing marketplace. Co-op members control beef supply cooperatively and negotiate stable pricing with buyers. The volatility and unpredictability that can devastate independent ranchers is minimized. Wu even has a term for cooperation among competitors: “co-opetition.” He is the lead author on this topic in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Operations Management.

Wu and Professor Mellie Pullman of Portland State University studied 30 member ranches of the beef co-op’s network, traveling to some of the range’s most remote reaches, from Frenchglen to Hell’s Canyon. They interviewed people at every link in the supply chain, from pasture to feedlot to slaughterhouse. They talked to the co-op’s customers, as well, including New Seasons grocery stores and Bon Appetit Management Co.

They learned that sustainability practices flow like an unstoppable flood inside a values-based business model. Pressure from the co-op’s customers in 2008 pushed distributor Fulton Provision company (owned by food-services giant Sysco) to undergo a third-party audit of waste management, worker conditions, water and energy conservation and transportation by the Food Alliance. The result: Fulton now runs its trucks on biodiesel, recycles packaging materials, salvages wood pallets, re-circulates water and uses more energy-efficient machines.

Values-based approaches can be the salvation for struggling mid-sized and family-owned operations, argues Wu. In the late 1980s when Country Natural Beef was launched as Oregon Country Beef, family ranches were endangered. “Many small ranchers were in dire straits under a combination of factors: mounting pressures from dieticians to eat less red meat, a popular perception of the abuse of public land by over-grazing, rising interest rates and wildly fluctuating commodity beef prices,” the professors assert in their case study.

In the two decades since the co-op formed, it has “evolved into a key player in the natural beef industry,” the researchers say. Country Natural Beef has the power to sustain not only the landowners but also the land for generations to come.

A glossy ebony sculpture from East Africa — a gift from her students — symbolizes the values Ilene Kleinsorge nurtures and rewards: initiative, professionalism, innovation, discipline and, above all, the entrepreneurial spirit (Photo: Karl Maasdam)

Do you know what this is?” the three students asked as they presented Ilene Kleinsorge with a smooth, black sculpture. She looked at the carved figure, a trio of human forms holding an orb aloft.

“Sure, it’s ebony,” replied Kleinsorge, dean of the OSU College of Business.

“It’s us!” exclaimed the students, who had brought the gift from East Africa. “It’s us, changing the world.”

As she tells the story, Kleinsorge picks up the carving and holds it lovingly. “This,” she says, “is why I get up in the morning.”

As holder of the Sara Hart Kimball Dean’s Chair, Kleinsorge’s greatest satisfaction comes from investing in talented, motivated students like these members of OSU Students in Free Enterprise, a student organization that helps local and global communities through entrepreneurship education. Their trip to Arusha near Tanzania’s Mt. Kilimanjaro to meet with founders of a micro-enterprise program arose from initiatives she has launched with funds from her endowed position and other discretionary dollars.

“I’m investing in students who want to invest in themselves,” she explains. “I look for students who take initiative, who are professional and focused in a disciplined way. I leverage my social network and resources to help them.”

Ranging widely in focus — from business models in developing nations to virtual project management in multinational companies — Kleinsorge’s initiatives share one common denominator: the entrepreneurial spirit.

“Having access to discretionary dollars allows me to be entrepreneurial within the institution,” she says. “It gives us the opportunity to dream and aspire to better things, even in this budget environment.”

In an economy changing at lightning speed, driven by technologies that become obsolete almost as fast as firms can get them installed, the college must be agile, able to anticipate trends, pivot with the times, “explore and experiment”— words Kleinsorge uses frequently. In this hyper-dynamic world of global commerce, teams located all over the planet meet in cyberspace through “distributed workgroups.” She’s passionate about preparing OSU students to compete.

“In multinational corporations, projects move forward 24/7,” she notes. “The project never sleeps. Our students have to be able to work in virtual environments.”

Other initiatives she has funded with donors’ support include: the annual ethics debate at the University of Arizona; the OSU student investment group’s visit to New York City’s financial district; time and tools for faculty to design and pilot new courses; virtual project management with students in India; and the Business Network, which brings women students and women professionals together for monthly meet-ups and mentoring.

“I’m purposefully diverse in what I’ve chosen to invest in,” she says.

In everything, Kleinsorge is driven by a staunch commitment to quality, originality and accountability. Nothing less will suffice in today’s competitive climate.

“I believe,” she says, “that our national imperative is for creativity and innovation.”

For more information about supporting the College of Business, visitCampaignforOSU.org, or call the Oregon State University Foundation, 800-354-7281.

OSU immunotoxicologist Nancy Kerkvliet and research technician Sam Bradford use a flow cytometer to analyze cell response to chemical exposure. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

Dioxin, the chemical pollutant made infamous by Vietnam-era defoliant Agent Orange, has long been known to suppress immune function in humans and other animals. Surprisingly, this dangerous side effect has a scientific silver lining. While studying the toxin’s health effects, researchers discovered the genetic pathway to immune system malfunction. For people who would actually benefit from suppressed immunity — those suffering from autoimmune and allergic diseases — this clue may lead to better therapies.

With $1.8 million in funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, OSU toxicologist Nancy Kerkvliet and colleague Siva Kolluri are investigating a genetic mechanism that turns immunity on and off — the aryl hydrocarbon (AHR) receptor — in search of a non-toxic compound that activates immune-cell regulation. If found, this compound could lead to a new generation of treatment options for victims of lupus, type-1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis and other diseases.

Learn more about OSU’s ARRA-funded research in human health, climate change, the oceans and education here.

New blue pigments developed in Mas Subramanian’s chemistry lab have attracted commercial interest. (Photo: Karl Maasdam)

An ancient quest for the perfect blue ended in a hot furnace in OSU’s Department of Chemistry — totally by accident.

A blue pigment that is both safe and stable eluded the Egyptians, the Han Dynasty and the Mayans. The French developed cobalt blue in the 1800s, but it contains carcinogens. Prussian blue releases cyanide. Other pigments break down in hot or acidic conditions.

So when Professor Mas Subramanian walked through the materials science lab just as a student opened a white-hot furnace and laid eyes on manganese oxide samples being tested for electromagnetic properties, he stopped in his tracks. “They were blue—a very beautiful blue,” says Subramanian. At nearly 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the manganese oxide ions restructure into an unusual “trigonal bipyramidal coordination.”

The intense blue compound holds promise for a heat- and acid-resistant pigment free of toxins. Many of its potential applications — inkjet printers and automobiles, for example — could never have been imagined by those earliest seekers of the perfect blue.

Jack Barth is a leader in ocean monitoring. (Photo: Jim Folts)

Ocean science is confronted with many unknowns about the intricate interplay of physics, chemistry and biology in Earth’s vast oceans. In this era of climatic flux, better understanding of sensitive ocean systems has taken on new urgency.

OSU oceanographers Jack Barthand Murray Levine are refining and testing an innovative sensing system designed to track trends in temperature, current velocity, salinity, nitrates, dissolved oxygen, suspended particle load and chlorophyll concentration. Known as CAPABLE (Coastal Autonomous Profiling and Boundary Layer System), the gear, which is moored to the seafloor, must hold up to battering from ferocious seas as it collects data and monitors coastal oceans in real time. The project, supported by $884,252 from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, includes mechanical and software upgrades along with four field tests over two years.

Learn more about OSU’s ARRA-funded research in human health, climate change, the oceans and education here.

Watch OSU electrical engineer Ted Brekken explain the need to modify the electrical grid.

As wind turbines and solar arrays sprout up across the landscape, an urgent challenge arises: How to capture all that alternative energy for the electrical grid. Wind velocity and solar intensity vary wildly as weather changes and as seasons shift — fluctuations that are often out of sync with power demand.

With $399,973 in funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, OSU engineer Ted Brekken is tackling the problem by investigating scaled-up energy storage systems to even out the variability of wind energy generation. Such systems — which he likens to giant batteries — would “buffer the peaks and valleys in wind farm production,” he says. Wind energy thus would become “more predictable, more forecastable.

Learn more about OSU’s ARRA-funded research in human health, climate change, the oceans and education here.

Strands

Personal recommendation software

Product Lines (Source: Office of Technology Transfer; Illustration: Gavin Potenza)

Corvallis, Oregon

Fizzy Fruit

Carbonated strawberries and grapes
Portland, Oregon

Clear Shape Technologies

Design-for-manufacture technologies
Santa Clara, California

Smart Desktop

Desktop usability recognition
Seattle, Washington

Redrover Software

Spreadsheet quality control
Corvallis, Oregon

Columbia Power Technologies

Ocean wave energy
Corvallis, Oregon

NuScale Power

Nuclear energy
Corvallis, Oregon

Inpria

Printed electronics
Corvallis, Oregon

Life Microsystems

Chlorophyll and bio-compounds
Corvallis, Oregon

Azuray Technologies

Semiconductors for solar energy
Tualatin, Oregon

Accessible Information Management

Services for persons with disabilities
Corvallis, Oregon

Precision Plant Systems

Optimized agricultural production
Corvallis, Oregon

Some of the other technology companies working with OSU

Apex Drive Laboratories,

Electric motor technologies, Portland, Oregon

CSD Nano

Thin-film technologies, Corvallis, Oregon

Home Dialysis Plus

Kidney dialysis, Corvallis and Portland, Oregon

Mtek Energy Solutions

Micro-channel reactors for biodiesel, Corvallis, Oregon

Nanobits

Nanotechnologies, Corvallis, Oregon

NWUAV Propulsion Systems

Engines for unmanned vehicles, McMinnville, Oregon

Peregrin Power

Electronics for extreme environments, Wilsonville, Oregon

Ruminant Solutions

Microbial products, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Transdigita

Internet connectivity services, Corvallis, Oregon

Trillium Fiberfuels

Wheat or grass straw for ethanol, Corvallis, Oregon

Xtreme Energetics

Solar energy, Livermore, California

Forest landowners are beginning to take advantage of emerging carbon credit markets while scientists confirm details of the forest carbon cycle. (Photo: Eppic Photography)

As Arctic ice thins, sea levels rise and glaciers recede, Ken Faulk takes stock of his trees in the Oregon Coast Range. Last summer, he began measuring his stands of Douglas fir and white oak by pounding plastic pipes into the ground to mark the centers of circles nearly 30 feet across.

Working steadily in the soft twilight under the forest canopy, he recorded the height and diameter of every tree in each circle. It took him five days to cover 40 acres, but Faulk didn’t mind. He regards trees with the experienced eye of a man who loves the woods. “I saw old friends I hadn’t seen in a long time, trees I remembered, that I had taken an interest in. It was of value to me for that alone,” he says.

He sent his data to Oregon State University forest modeler Greg Latta, who analyzes carbon offset policies for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Latta calculated that Faulk’s Douglas firs, planted in 1980 by a previous owner, were growing fast enough to absorb more than five tons of carbon per acre annually, an amount equivalent to that generated by a car driving more than 35,000 miles.

Faulk’s forest isn’t unusual. The process, known as carbon sequestration, occurs everywhere that plants grow. As they absorb carbon dioxide from the air during photosynthesis, trees store part of that carbon in branches, stems and roots. Not all species are alike. The oaks come in a poor second to the firs, and on Faulk’s land, they absorb only about one ton per acre.

An OSU College of Forestry alumnus and the son of a Tacoma millworker, Faulk has seen the woods from every angle – independent logging contractor, Weyerhaeuser forester, Oregon Department of Forestry inspector and now president of the Oregon Small Woodlands Association. The nonprofit organization’s 3,000 members own about 16 percent of Oregon’s 30.5 million forested acres. With help from OSU Extension, the American Forest Foundation and other organizations, OSWA has created a company, Woodlands Carbon of Salem, Oregon, to create access to carbon sequestration markets.

By the end of December, Woodlands Carbon had signed up 11 landowners who agreed, like Faulk, to tally the tons of carbon being sequestered by their woodlands. More importantly, according to OSWA’ s Mike Gaudern, it had assembled nearly 20,000 tons of carbon credits and was seeking buyers for them. Unlike with other commodities – two-by-fours or bags of wheat – you can’t take a ton of carbon home and put it in the garage. But by paying landowners to lock carbon away in the woods for a period of time, buyers can offset their own carbon emissions.

“We need to look for ways forest resources can mitigate or ameliorate undesired climate change.”

— Hal Salwasser, Dean, College of Forestry

The hope is that carbon credits can provide a boost to financially struggling landowners who are facing growing pressure to convert their lands to other uses. If Gaudern and Faulk succeed, they won’t be the first. Such deals have already been struck in California, Michigan and elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest.

An Appetite for Carbon

Oregon has long been the nation’s mother lode for softwood lumber, but if carbon sequestration is the goal, Faulk and other forest landowners are in the right place. OSU researchers have determined that forests here are among the best in the world for absorbing carbon dioxide, the gas linked to global warming. Old-growth stands in the Coast Range and west side of the Cascades store as much or more carbon than tropical rain forests, according to studies by OSU forest scientists Mark Harmon, Beverly Law and their students. Moreover, Law and her team have found that there is enough capacity to theoretically double the amount of carbon currently stored in forests stretching from San Francisco to the Columbia River.

“Many of the mature and old forests are on public lands, so they are uniquely positioned to act as carbon reserves,” Law told a U.S. Senate subcommittee chaired by Oregon Senator Ron Wyden November 2009.

To Faulk, more capacity for carbon means opportunity. “Scientists are telling us we need to draw the carbon dioxide level down as quickly as we can,” he says. “And that’s what we’re aiming to do here. Whether we can find some buyers who will accept that concept is our next challenge.”

It is just one of many hurdles confronting forest owners and scientists who are still coming to grips with what it might mean to put a price on forest carbon. At present there is little consensus. While professional forestry groups develop standards for inventorying carbon, economists are highly skeptical that, without national carbon emissions limits, carbon-credit markets can work. Forest ecologists are evaluating the carbon consequences of forest management practices and have barely begun to consider the influence of a changing climate. And forest products engineers have shown that wood can both store carbon for long periods and reduce carbon emissions by replacing other energy-intensive building materials such as concrete and steel.

Global Accounting

“If you’re going to make policy decisions to reduce carbon emissions and to mitigate by picking up carbon on the land, you need to measure these processes and ask, ‘Are we even coming close to what we think is going on?’” says Law, a Professor of Global Change Forest Science. “‘What is the ultimate effect on the atmosphere across the globe?’ That’s a big task.” (Note: Law is a member of a National Research Council committee that released a report, Verifying Greenhouse Gas Emissions, March 19. Download a PDF of the report here.)

Law seems undaunted by big tasks. In 1996, she joined scientists planning a new national network that monitors the exchange of carbon dioxide between forests, shrublands and other biomes, with the atmosphere. The goal was to track carbon flows across the country – from the maple, spruce and fir of New England, to the Ponderosa pine and aspen of the West. She suggested that sensors needed to be standardized and calibrated regularly so that data could be compared and analyzed nationally. “I spoke a little too much and became the science lead,” she says, a position she holds today for the international AmeriFlux network. Law also advises climate science programs run by the federal government and the United Nations.

Closer to home, she and her OSU colleagues manage three AmeriFlux sites in Oregon – two west of Sisters and another on land owned by Starker Forests Inc. along the Marys River near Philomath. They complement atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration measurements at three other locations – Newport, Marys Peak and Burns – that capture changes as air flows from the coast to the Great Basin.

Hardly a molecule moves at AmeriFlux sites without being detected. Instruments monitor weather, sunlight, heat and moisture. They track carbon in the soil, water, atmosphere and even water flowing through tree sap. Data flow every half-hour via cell-phone networks to Law’s lab on the Corvallis campus where she and her team monitor the instruments. They use the data to calibrate computer models that evaluate how carbon dioxide flows in and out of the forest and how carbon remaining in the forest changes at local, regional and national scales. Scientists will need such models to achieve the most ambitious result of the recent climate talks in Copenhagen: a program to cut carbon dioxide emissions in half by 2050 and to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, particularly in tropical rain forests.

Meanwhile, the OSU professor and her collaborators have produced groundbreaking studies of Pacific Northwest forests. Some of their findings:

Fires produce less carbon emissions than previously thought. Even in a high severity fire, only about 10 percent of above-ground live carbon stocks are burned. About 60 percent of burned carbon comes from litter on the forest floor, underlying duff and mineral soil, and most of the rest comes from snags and other dead material. Less than 1 to 3 percent comes from the trunks of live trees, somewhat lower than the fraction commonly used by scientists who produce national estimates of fire emissions.

Like all living systems, forests constantly send carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere, but most of it, about 70 percent on average, comes from the soil (roots and microorganisms), not tree stems and foliage.

Still, most forest carbon is stored in the soil, and 15 to 25 percent of soil carbon is long-lasting fire-produced char.

Disturbance

When it comes to carbon, Mark Harmon describes the forest as a leaky bucket. As carbon pours into the bucket through photosynthesis, it constantly leaks out through other processes, mostly decomposition and respiring plants and microbes.

It’s no different, he adds, than a bucket of water. “People tend to think that a leaky bucket can’t hold water. Well, that’s not true at all. It can, and it does. As long as there’s something coming into the bucket and the leaks aren’t mammoth, some water will accumulate. The more you pour in, the higher it will rise. The more holes you have, or leaks, the more it will go down.”

The holder of the Richardson Chair in forestry has specialized in two parts of forest carbon cycle: dead wood and the disturbances that produce it. Logging typically leaves large amounts of branches and other unsaleable material on the forest floor. In past years, much of this so-called slash was burned to “clean” the site. Harmon’s research has showed that as this wood decays, it fertilizes the regenerating forest. Leaving slash on the ground not only benefits young trees, it saves money by eliminating unnecessary work.

However, decomposition sends carbon back into the atmosphere. Harmon and Law have shown that for 15 years or more, the amount leaving a harvested site outpaces what young trees can absorb. Eventually, rapidly growing trees catch up and reverse the flow, resulting in the high rate of carbon sequestration that is occurring in Ken Faulk’s forest. But, says Harmon, forests must go through a massive carbon release before they reach that stage. “You just can’t get to the mountain peak without going through a valley,” he adds.

Harmon and colleagues demonstrated this process in a landmark study published in the journal Science in 1990. In the late 1980s, some scientists had proposed replacing old-growth forests, thought then to be stagnant, with carbon-hungry youngsters that would take more carbon out of the atmosphere. Together with OSU colleague William Ferrell and Jerry Franklin of the U.S. Forest Service, Harmon reported that replacing old-growth with young stands would in fact pump more carbon into the atmosphere, even accounting for the carbon stored in wood products. It could take at least 200 years, they concluded, for the regenerating forest to store as much carbon as the old-growth.

“You look at a tiny young forest and a massive old forest and ask which one stores more carbon. It doesn’t take much to figure this out, although it’s taken some people a really long time,” Harmon says. It’s an argument that continues to the present day and has continued to motivate research by Harmon and his students on tree mortality, decomposition and the carbon consequences of harvesting systems.

Green Wood

The carbon story doesn’t begin and end in the forest. In fact, the benefit of wood as a “green” building material goes beyond its ability to sequester carbon. It also serves as an alternative to more fossil fuel-intensive products such as aluminum, steel, concrete and plastic. “If you don’t look at what it’s displacing, you miss a big part of the story,” says Jim Wilson. “You have to look at the whole life cycle.”

For the last decade, the OSU wood scientist has worked with a national organization, the Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials, or CORRIM, to follow the carbon trail for wood and other industrial materials from cradle to grave. With public and private funding, CORRIM has conducted life-cycle analyses of wood products industries across the country, from softwood lumber and plywood in the Pacific Northwest and South to hardwoods in the Northeast. It has analyzed wood flooring, particle board, laminated timbers and even the adhesive resins used in engineered wood products.

A 2009 CORRIM report, Maximizing Forest Contributions to Carbon Mitigation, notes that harvesting trees more slowly to increase carbon storage in forests would be counterproductive. That’s because a smaller supply of wood products would lead builders to substitute materials that require more energy to produce, thus leading to larger carbon emissions from fossil fuels. Over time, according to the CORRIM model, the use of wood to displace other building materials keeps more carbon out of the atmosphere than would be solely stored in the forest ecosystem itself if no harvesting was done.

To reach that conclusion, Wilson and his colleagues compared typical wood-frame houses to homes built with steel framing and concrete blocks. They also assumed that wood would come from “sustainably managed” forests, not old-growth. “If they aren’t sustainable, it’s not going to work,” Wilson adds.

“The CORRIM study suggests that when we take a comprehensive look at building materials, including total energy consumption, global warming, air and water emissions and solid waste disposal, wood turns out to perform better in most categories,” Wilson says in a 2009 report, Building to Benefit the Environment, by the Oregon Forest Resources Institute.

Pork Bellies

Andrea Tuttle, board member for the nonprofit Pacific Forest Trust (PFT), put it bluntly in a recent public radio interview: “Anything you can do with a pork belly, you can do with forest carbon, in terms of cash sales, derivatives, hedge funds, portfolio mixes. It’s a legitimate product now.” The trust has arranged to sell carbon credits from a mixed redwood and Douglas-fir forest in northern California to politicians (Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi), utilities and even commodities traders. It predicts that the Van Eck Forest in Humboldt County will store an additional 500,000 tons of carbon over the next century. Spurred by California’s climate change program, buyers have already paid nearly $2 million for 185,000 tons of carbon credits, according to Christine Harrison, PFT communications director. In December 2009, national energy supplier Green Mountain Energy was selling Van Eck carbon credits for $19.95 per ton.

Despite this success, economists find the idea of a carbon market hard to swallow unless there is a government policy imposing emissions limits. “Carbon is not like pork bellies,” says Andrew Plantinga, OSU professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics. “Since people can derive the benefits from carbon sequestration without paying for carbon credits, there are powerful incentives for them to free-ride on other people’s purchases. Unless there are restrictions on emissions, the incentives for anybody to buy carbon credits are weak.”

Even with emissions limits, a market for forest carbon suffers from three major problems, he explains. The first, known as “additionality,” stems from the fact that trees sequester carbon just by growing. Landowners need to demonstrate that their actions will cause the forest to store more carbon than it would have done on its own.

Second, he adds, carbon credits aren’t permanent. If a contract ends and landowners are free to harvest their forest or convert their land to another use, much of that carbon can be released back into the atmosphere.

Third, carbon credits can reduce tree harvests in the short term and lead to less wood available for paper, construction and other uses. That may raise prices and give other landowners an incentive to harvest their trees earlier. This so-called “leakage” problem also puts carbon back into the air.

In an analysis for The Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements, Plantinga and Kenneth R. Richards of Indiana University suggest an alternative: an international treaty that places national limits on forest carbon emissions and requires regular accounting of carbon stocks across the globe. Such a system could avoid the pitfalls of a project-by-project approach, which was adopted in the Kyoto Protocol.

“We need to look at forestry at as broad a scale as possible,” says Plantinga. “We need to count everything. We should have a way of looking at all of the forests in the United States and relative to a (carbon) benchmark that we all agree on, determine if they go up or go down.”

A national cap on carbon emissions could provide an incentive for utilities and other emitters to buy carbon credits, such as those offered by Woodlands Carbon and Green Mountain Energy. Plantinga is currently studying the potential for policies based on emissions caps to meet the problems posed by carbon markets.

OSU news releases:

January, 2010, “Effects of forest fire on carbon, climate overestimated”

July, 2009, “Forest fire prevention efforts will lessen carbon sequestration”

July, 2009, “Northwest forests could store more carbon, help address greenhouse issues”

January, 2009, “Warmer Climate Causing Huge Increase in Tree Mortality Across the West”

January, 2007, “Nitrogen study may improve accuracy of ecological predictions”

To support the OSU College of Forestry, contact the OSU Foundation

Drawing on a lifetime of ups and downs and knowing that overreacting is not only futile but can be physically harmful, many elders make a reasoned appraisal of events that allows them to stay balanced, says Aldwin, a specialist in stress and aging who has done a number of longitudinal studies with elders, many of them combat veterans.

“Older people simply appraise situations differently,” she notes. “Wisdom tells them when to just let something go or laugh it off or say, ‘It’s in God’s hands’.”

Significantly, the toughening effects of trauma aren’t only psychosocial. Researchers have turned up clear health benefits to what Aldwin calls “stress-related growth” or “post-traumatic growth,” such as more robust immune systems and better heart-attack survival rates.

“To me, coping with stress is the crux of mental health,” Aldwin says. “Stress is ubiquitous. We’re all going to have bad stuff happen to us. What trauma does is show you what’s important – that is, if you can learn from it.”

Carolyn Aldwin's research reveals the power that stems from successfully coping with stress. (Illustration: Santiago Uceda)

Carolyn Aldwin has been privy to countless untold secrets, heartbreaking stories from war zones, hospital wards and prisoner-of-war camps. People from all walks of life have confided their everyday problems and their worst nightmares to her.

“I talked to someone who was a lawyer at the Nuremberg Trials,” she says. “I’ve talked to people who’ve committed murder. I’ve talked to people who’ve lost children to cancer. I’m very humbled by the things people tell me.”

Aldwin, a professor in OSU’s Department of Human Development and Family Sciences, has interviewed thousands of people across the United States, many of them combat veterans, for longitudinal studies of aging. Her findings have shaken up conventional notions about stress and trauma across the lifespan.

“When I was in grad school in the ‘70s, old people were viewed as frail, lonely, depressed and beset by overwhelming stresses and losses,” says Aldwin. “We’ve since learned that stress is fairly constant across the lifespan — that no stage is necessarily more or less stressful than another. What does change as we age is the way we view our troubles and the way we deal with them.”

Events as horrifying as 9/11 or as threatening as today’s tottering economy take on new perspective when seen through eyes that witnessed the Battle of the Bulge or the Great Depression. Aldwin continues to explore coping strategies through her research and to share what she learns with students. She currently teaches a University Honors College class, Coping with Stress.

Double Puzzle

At Leisure World, Carolyn Aldwin stuck out like a sore thumb. The blond, blue-jeaned 29-year-old researcher, crashing temporarily at her uncle’s townhouse, was easy to spot among the silver-haired retirees.

But this newly minted Ph.D. in the field of aging and adult development was thrilled. For her, the sprawling retirement community in Irvine, California, was a big metaphorical petri dish. Eager to discover how elders cope with life’s stressors, the young social scientist spent the next few months talking with her neighbors (average age: 78) about their struggles and worries. Scientists were just beginning to study stress-related health risks, both physical (high blood pressure, immune system suppression, heart disease) and mental (anxiety, depression). The impact of coping strategies on health and well-being was mainly theoretical at that point.

Certain puzzling patterns popped up early on. First, despite their seeming vulnerability to loss and illness, elders tend to report less stress in their lives. “If late life is supposed to be such a miserable time, why are old people reporting fewer stressors than younger people?” Aldwin wondered. This is Paradox One.

Second, most adults find positive aspects — the proverbial silver lining — in even the most wrenching events. This is Paradox Two.

“As a developmental psychologist, I believe events are connected, rather than being discrete, isolated episodes,” Aldwin says. “I wanted to investigate the ways people draw upon earlier experiences, even traumatic ones, when coping with current problems or crises.”

Teasing out the truths behind these two paradoxes has been Aldwin’s driving motivation in the decades since Leisure World. How, she wanted to know, did a soldier whose buddies perished on the battlefield convert that searing trauma into psychosocial strength over time? How could watching one’s child die of cancer mitigate the ill effects of daily stress down the road?

Ask the Right Questions

Aldwin turned up one crucial clue to the first paradox in her Leisure World study. Researchers, she discovered, were asking the wrong questions. The standard survey instrument for major life events was loaded with younger people’s milestones and struggles — marriage, parenting, military service, divorce, unemployment, incarceration. By broadening the questioning, Aldwin found that elders face not fewer stressors, just different ones. It turns out that as people age, they fret less about themselves and more about loved ones. These indirect stressors — a grown child’s job loss, a spouse’s move to a nursing home, a sibling’s struggle with Alzheimer’s — Aldwin calls “network” stressors.

She designed a new survey instrument, the Elders Life Stress Inventory, to account for them.

The new survey, however, failed to resolve the paradox. Instead, the question mark shifted from the amount of stress to the response to stress. With the new instrument, older subjects were reporting life stressors roughly equal in number to those of younger subjects. Yet still they claimed fewer worries. When prodded — “Certainly, you must have some problems”— one man parsed the wording for Aldwin. “I don’t have problems,” the octogenarian told her. “I have concerns.” The biggest of these concerns was his 90-year-old sister suffering from dementia and living alone in New York City. She refused to move, despite his entreaties. So he settled into a philosophical stance (“There’s nothing more I can do”), thereby keeping his emotional equilibrium.

This ability to stave off stress derives from what Aldwin calls “perspective.” Having survived the slings and arrows of life for 60, 70, 80 years, elders often are able to step back and assess new challenges with a steadier gaze. As one man told her, “Once you’ve watched your 20-year-old daughter die of cancer, it’s hard to get really upset about other things.”

Silver Linings

Aldwin and her adviser at the University of California, Irvine, Dan Stokols, both should have grown up to be drug-using dropouts — that is, if you believed the psychological research literature of the 1970s and 1980s. Each had lost a parent in childhood, and delinquency was the expected outcome for kids so bereft. Sitting together in Stokols’ office one autumn afternoon, these two highly accomplished PhDs wondered aloud how they had defied expert predictions. Maybe, they speculated, those predictions were off-base. After all, it was known that geniuses often had older parents who died. Other emerging evidence suggested that remarkable resilience was not only possible, but actually common, in the wake of tragedy. Their curiosity evolved into a research thread.

“We started asking, ‘Are there circumstances under which stress can have positive effects?’” she recalls. “This was a very radical notion at the time.”

No formal, quantitative studies existed then. But the trauma literature from records of tragic events turned up promising leads for further research. In tragedy’s aftermath, many victims reported closer community ties, increased mastery and heightened altruism. The extraordinary lives of many Holocaust survivors, such as Nobel laureates Elie Wiesel and Daniel Kahneman, also seemed to refute the view of trauma as inevitably and irretrievably damaging to the psyche.

To explore this intriguing phenomenon, Aldwin added one question to the 1,000-subject Normative Aging Study then under way in Boston: Was there anything in your earlier life that was useful in helping you deal with a current problem? She was stunned by the response — not so much because 80 percent of the respondents said yes, but because they identified serious, even horrific, occurrences as teachable moments. Battlefield traumas came up often for this population of men, who were mostly veterans of the Korean and Second World wars.

“One guy said, ‘I was shot down at Midway in the Pacific,’” Aldwin recalls. “‘I spent three days bobbing in a lifeboat while the battled raged around me. I thought, if I can survive this, I can survive anything.’” Midway became the yardstick against which he measured every tough spot he faced in later years.

Another veteran said he watched three commanders die on the European frontlines. Being next in rank, he was promoted on the battlefield. He managed to lead his men to safety. Ever after, he gauged life’s challenges against that life-or-death test of his mettle.

Over and over, Aldwin heard this story. Even the fiercest conflict in a boardroom or a courtroom is manageable after you’ve faced down death on the battlefield, the old soldiers said. Psychologists call the phenomenon post-traumatic growth or stress-related growth. “This is not to suggest that combat is good — not at all,” says Aldwin, who has taken flak from colleagues for suggesting that anything positive could come out of the horrors of war. “Trauma has long-term effects. But the guys who were able to find benefits in their military service — whether it was unit cohesion or believing in the mission — were much less likely to exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Aldwin found similar results in another Boston study, the Health and Personality Style Survey. A majority of subjects, 70 percent, reported that trauma led to positive outcomes including closer family ties, better coping skills, more positive values and deeper spirituality.

Observes Aldwin: “Older people understand that problems are finite, that grief is time-limited. They also know that letting yourself get upset when you have a chronic illness like hypertension can trigger a cascade of harmful physiological responses.”

To support the OSU College of Health and Human Sciences, contact the OSU Foundation

The Hatfield and McCormack ranch families of Brothers, Oregon, have partnered with OSU for generations to improve rangeland ecology. (Photo: Mark Reed)

Winds gust lightly over the meadow, riffling the grasses and sage, carrying the sonorous tones of Angus, Hereford and Tarentaise mothers lowing at their calves. The tableau looks ripped from a TV commercial or a Hollywood set, all daubed with wildflowers and rimmed by junipered hills under cirrus skies.

But this isn’t the invention of a Madison Avenue ad agency, some “pastoral fantasy” spun by Big Agribusiness to fool consumers.

This is the real McCoy — or McCormack, actually.

The McCormack and Hatfield families of Central Oregon are known far and wide for their leadership in eco-friendly ranching. Patriarchs Doc Hatfield and Bill McCormack, whose ranches sprawl side-by-side across 100,000 acres near the one-pub town of Brothers, are charter members of a wildly successful company called Country Natural Beef. In just two decades, the co-op has grown from 14 Oregon families to 120 ranchers across the West and Hawaii. Their beef, pastured on grass and fattened in a feedlot on a pure vegetarian diet before slaughter, provides an alternative to factory-farm meat — the kind that’s been pumped with antibiotics and plumped on growth hormones, as highlighted in Food, Inc., the highly praised but controversial 2009 documentary on industrial food production.

“That’s what sustainability is all about — it’s land, people, dollars, and putting it all together.”

— Doc Hatfield

The co-op, which posted sales of $50 million for 2008, isn’t making the ranchers rich. Rather, it pays the bills and keeps the ranches solvent. And that’s OK, because money isn’t the true bottom line out on these semi-arid plains. It’s respect for the life-sustaining land. For 30 and 50 years, respectively, Oregon State University has helped the Hatfields and McCormacks hone that ethic of respect through cooperative research. In return, scientists have been granted nearly unfettered access to vast watersheds and rangelands for study.

Catch and Release

One blistering morning in July, Doc Hatfield’s black motorcycle kicks up a froth of dust along Bear Creek Road. He’s on his way to meet a group of ecologists, activists, government agents and grad students touring a long-term research site on his acreage. While waiting for stragglers to arrive, Hatfield sets his silver helmet on the seat of the BMW and snaps a few photos of a cow-studded pasture. He’s excited about its mid-summer lushness. Clearly, science-based management strategies are making a difference.

“If you’ve got good native perennial grass cover on the upper slopes, the rain soaks into the ground where it drops instead of flowing off in a gully washer,” he explains to the group gathered on the gravel road. “That stored water then flows subsurface, forming groundwater reservoirs and making the meadows wetter. That means it’s still green on the 10th of July instead of just dry cheat grass.”

This optimal water cycle is what OSU rangeland hydrologist John Buckhouse calls “capture, store and safe release.” Buckhouse, one of the stalwarts in the multigenerational bond between the university and the Central Oregon ranching community, has spent much of his 35-year career investigating the impacts, both positive and negative, of cattle on high-desert ecosystems. One winter, with the mercury hitting 20 below, he sat on the ground at Bear Creek every day for a month, insulated in long johns and “lots of woolens,” recording observations of streamside grazing behavior. Another early study asked the question, How many seasons should sown grass seed grow before you graze the pasture? Common wisdom said two years. The answer turned out to be much more complicated.

“We discovered that nothing is the same everywhere,” says Buckhouse. “That has been our mantra ever since. You have to manage on a site-specific basis — what we call a prescription basis. If you come up with a prescription that works in Brothers, Oregon, and try to apply it in Missoula, Montana, you’re probably going to be wrong.”

From Tales to Data

Buckhouse’s magnum opus is a longitudinal study devised to help Oregon ranchers catch, retain and put to use more of the region’s scant precipitation. Key to the study is the western juniper, a native tree that, in the absence of natural fire, has encroached on millions of high-desert acres. Through its dense web of roots, the juniper takes up great gallons of water. The surrounding grasses die back. Rains rush over the bare earth, sweeping away tons of soil. Fifteen years ago, there was lots of local folklore about the rangeland’s power to heal and regenerate after juniper was removed (stories like, “Gosh, I cut down a bunch of trees over at Salt Creek and a spring popped up the next year”). But there were no hard data on a watershed scale. So Buckhouse and his colleagues designed a “paired watershed” study to test the effects of a fire-mimicking treatment for halting juniper encroachment.

The experiment compares two 400-acre drainages at Camp Creek straddling the Hatfield High Desert Ranch and public lands overseen by the Bureau of Land Management. One parcel, Jensen Canyon, serves as the “control” site — that is, it has remained untouched by the researchers. The other parcel, Mays Canyon, is the “treatment” site for juniper removal. High-tech instruments, including ultrasonic sensors and devices for remote monitoring via satellite, were installed by then-graduate student Michael Fisher and Crook County Extension scientist Tim Deboodt. Data on groundwater levels, stream velocity, snow depth, rainfall and other indicators are collected around the clock.

After 12 years of baseline data collection, young juniper trees (those that took root after Europeans arrived in the mid-1800s) were cut from Mays’ upper elevations. Downed branches were left on the slopes at diagonals to impede runoff of precipitation — a paltry 13 inches a year on average.

The results have stunned everyone. Four years after the cutting, streams that were ephemeral (flowing only after a storm) are now intermittent (flowing in tandem with recharged groundwater). Springs are gushing where once they were just gurgling. Erosion, as indicated by the depth of gullies and sediments, has slowed. And, judging by increased numbers of seed heads per clump of grass and reinvigorated species of native perennials, the improved water dynamic is translating to healthier forage. That, in turn, means more robust habitat for birds, deer, elk and other wildlife.

This ecosystem perspective is what Hatfield values most from his long-time association with OSU.

“Understanding the holistic watershed — how it all works together — has helped us improve our grazing strategy,” says the 70-year-old rancher. “That’s what sustainability is all about — it’s land, people, dollars, and putting it all together.”

Time Travel

Before you venture off Highway 20 onto the rangeland, you can grab a burger, a Bud Light and a fill-up at the weather-beaten Brothers Café. If you’re hauling a horse, you can water it at Brothers Oasis, the equine-friendly rest stop right next door.

After you leave the crush of cars and commerce in Bend 40 minutes behind, the desert can at first be disorienting in its stillness — unnerving, even, in its seeming limitlessness. For an urbanite traveling this trackless landscape for the first time, the McCormack ranch house is a welcome sight when it rises up at road’s end 20 miles from the highway.

The house, whose solid-juniper timbers once grew in the nearby hills and draws, was built a few years ago (30 friends and family framed it in one weekend) to replace the homestead where Bill moved with his parents and lived for seven decades. (Once when he was buying a pickup truck in Portland, the salesman got confused at McCormack’s answer on the loan application to the question, How many years at your current address? “What does this mean?” the salesman demanded, pointing at Bill’s penciled response, 68. “I guess he thought it was a joke,” the rancher recalls with a chuckle. “He’d never heard of anyone living in one place for 68 years.”)

Time has a different quality on the range. It stretches out long and slow, like the landscape, and curves beyond the visible horizon. Bill’s dad, who bought the family’s first 3,000 acres in 1943, counted time, not in months and years, but in seasons and generations. Among his descendants is 19-year-old Tyler. This fourth-generation McCormack, sitting beneath soaring pinewood beams with his cowboy hat poised on his knee, carries within him the genes of an Oregon pioneer — his great grandfather, a homesteader who herded sheep across the state’s south-central reaches.

The McCormacks’ intergenerational ties extend even to the family alma mater. Tyler is a Beaver, like father Jeff, grandparents Bill and Donna, and both great grandparents (class of 1923). It was Tyler’s grandfather who first welcomed OSU scientists onto his creek beds and pasturelands for study. Since then, the ranch has been a living lab for investigations on everything from watershed contamination to sage grouse habitat. The McCormacks’ ranch, like the Hatfields’, is also an open-air classroom during field trips for rangeland ecology majors.

Tyler, an agribusiness major, got his initiation into Country Natural Beef last summer when he conducted an “in-store” at a Whole Foods Market, the co-op’s biggest customer. Next to the meat counter, he fired up a hibachi and passed out samples to shoppers. “I sold a hotdog to a vegetarian,” he boasts with a grin.

These product demos let customers not only taste natural beef, but also meet ranchers face-to-face. Each ranch in the co-op has “adopted” one or two stores. Some stores run videos of their adoptive ranch so that consumers can make a visual and, they hope, emotional connection to the source of their pot roast or T-bone.

“Whatever we have to do, whatever we have to learn to keep the land sustainable for the next generation — that’s top priority,” says Tyler’s mom, Runinda “Nin” McCormack. Her voice catches with emotion. “We realize that if we don’t do it right, our kids won’t have the opportunity to come home to the family ranch and participate in something so great.

“That’s why we’re here.”

To support the OSU College of Agricultural Sciences, contact the OSU Foundation

The problem became clear to Sunil Khanna one hot, humid day in 1993 in a northern Indian village near Delhi. He was sitting in Dr. Mahavir Singh’s office, preparing to interview the local physician, when someone interrupted them.

It was a man, frantic, looking for someone to perform an ultrasound on his wife.

“Ultrasound is not available at this clinic,” Singh told the man. “But I can refer you to a nearby specialty diagnostic clinic that has ultrasound. Tell me, when would you like your appointment?”

“As soon as possible,” the man said. “The other doctor already said it was too late.”

“Is it so? How late is it?” Singh asked.

“It’s my wife’s fourth month,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s too late. I will speak to a doctor next door. You can come at 10 in the morning. We will take care of your problem,” said Singh.

“How long does the procedure take?” he asked.

“It will only take an hour,” the doctor told him.

“And if we need to get an abortion?” he asked.

“That will also be an hour,” the doctor said.

The man’s tone — and Singh’s — indicated that the procedures were routine. As the discussion unfolded, Khanna felt a growing sense of unease.

Slideshow by Celene Carillo; photos by Lakshman Chandra Anand and courtesy of Sunil Khanna.

In fact, the man next told Singh he already had two daughters. And if this child was to be a third, they would almost certainly abort her. Once the prices were settled (about $36 for the ultrasound, $24 for the abortion), the man left, and Singh turned to Khanna to resume their interview, as if nothing momentous had taken place.

Later, as he was interviewing parents and measuring boys and girls at the village school, Khanna started hearing shadowy suggestions that female-selective abortion was happening in the village. Occasionally, women mentioned village girls who had been born — and ones who hadn’t. Or they mentioned “other women” who had undergone abortions. But never had the practice been revealed so frankly as it was that day in Singh’s office.

Son Preference

This story appears in Khanna’s book, Fetal/Fatal Knowledge: New Reproductive Technologies and Family-Building Strategies in India (2009, Wadsworth Publishing Co.). Before he interviewed Singh, he spent two months in Shahargaon (a pseudonym he created to protect the identity of his subjects) studying how the cultural practice of son preference affected child growth and development. Son preference, he says, reflects a patriarchal system that “ensures the inheritance of family name, property and decision-making power in the male line.”

What occurred in the village was a turning point for Khanna, now an associate professor of anthropology at Oregon State University. The stories he heard set him on a path to confront practices ingrained through centuries of tradition. Today he specializes in the cultural circumstances that affect women’s health.

By 1995, Khanna turned his attention entirely to the practice of using sex-selective screening and abortion as family-planning tools. And he found significant evidence that it was widespread, not only in Shahargaon, but nationally. From 1993 to 2003, Khanna collected census data among the dominant Jat ethnic group in Shahargaon. He found not only an imbalance among males and females in the village but a declining trend in sex ratios of females to males, even as the Jat population was increasing.

He also found that families in both rural and urban areas were less inclined to care about the sex of their first child, but if that child was a girl, they would test the second pregnancy. One of the major differences between educated urban parents and uneducated rural parents was access to contraception. Women in rural areas were more likely to have more children, as well as more abortions, to reach the desired number of boys and girls.

Tradition and modern technology often clash, Khanna points out in his book, but in this case, they are complementary. “What I found is that traditions of son preference are being realized through technology. And technology is being used to perpetuate that tradition,” says Khanna.

A Growing Disparity

Although abortion has been legal in India since 1971, the use of prenatal screening to determine the sex of a fetus has been illegal since 1996. Still, the sex ratio in the northern Indian state of Haryana, surrounding Shahargaon, is 861 females per 1,000 males. “Imagine the complication of implementing a law that makes female sex selective abortion illegal in a country where abortion is legal,” says Khanna. “Doctors have to be on board not to use ultrasonography to identify the sex of the fetus. Ultrasonography machine sellers must be on board to not sell machines without registering with an agency. And parentts must be on board that they will not seek this kind of information.”

Girls, says Khanna, are often seen by families as economic liabilities. Even though dowries have been illegal in India since 1961, the practice is still widespread nationally. And doctors have their own coded language when it comes to sexing babies. Often doctors will tell parents they are very lucky if the baby is a boy — and to start saving money if the child is a girl.

Shahargaon was the perfect place for Khanna to perform his study. Over the past 20 years, the ancient village of about 1,400 has been engulfed by the city of Delhi and its approximately 15 million people. The village has retained its autonomy and rural ethos, only due to an archaic rule that protected its residential boundaries. Its narrow lanes, fragrant with charcoal smoke and crowded with old buildings, are evidence of that character.

Still, Delhi encroaches.

“This is a rural enclave stuck in the middle of this roaring metropolis where everything is happening, and where you can find Nike and Adidas shoe stores, McDonald’s and open access to the Internet,” Khanna says.

You can also find clinics where ultrasound technology is available. It was this intersection between old and new that intrigued Khanna. Shahargaon’s size, too, meant that Khanna could understand everything that was going on in the community. But what really clinched the deal for him was how receptive Shahargaon’s leaders were to his being there. “They were very inquisitive to what I was doing and why I was there,” Khanna says. “But at the same time they were open to it.”

Over time, Khanna won the trust of villagers as well. But it did not come easily. During his first visit, his research assistant often had to conduct the interviews while Khanna waited outside villagers’ homes. It wasn’t until two years after his visit to Singh’s office that Khanna felt comfortable bringing up the subject of female-selective abortion directly.

“It was terrifying to bring up this topic, risking that I would be thrown out of the community. It was only through establishing long-term, significant relationships that you begin to ask them,” Khanna says.

Stories To Be Told

Later, though, women insisted on having him in the house. They would ask Khanna to make sure his tape recorder was working and asked him to play back portions of their interviews so they could be sure. They wanted to be heard.

Ultimately, Khanna’s goal is to raise the status and role of women in Indian communities. “Khanna’s work exemplifies one of the pioneering long-term community studies that go beyond just examining the contentious issues from an academic perspective,” says Dr. Sunil Mehra, head of MAMTA Health Institute for Mother and Child, an Indian non-governmental organization. “Instead, his work involves building community-level opinions against this practice and developing meaningful linkages among key stakeholders in the community, government agencies and non-governmental organizations.” MAMTA provides reproductive health care to impoverished women and, through Khanna, maintains a formal working relationship with OSU.

In Oregon, Khanna’s research also finds its way into the classroom, where he relates his experiences in undergraduate anthropology courses on South Asia. His graduate students are studying access to abortion services in the state, in addition to son preference among Indian immigrants in the United States and Canada. And Khanna has completed several projects on the availability of health care to uninsured Oregonians.

“I continuously strive to produce knowledge that is meaningful and relevant to real people doing real things,” Khanna says. “My research and teaching allow me to engage in a continuous and critical conversation between the ‘theoretical’ and the ‘applied’ contexts of my discipline.”

Options for Women

In India, Khanna hopes to generate a community dialog that will help parents think differently about daughters. Such discussions, he adds, could influence policies on female-selective abortion.

Meanwhile, community leaders in Shaharagoan have encouraged people to talk openly about the reproductive and emotional consequences of female-selective abortion. They have highlighted the disproportionate sex ratios that result from the practice. Leaders have also been able to set up support for women experiencing domestic violence or intense pressure in their homes to have abortions. Khanna plans to implement this approach in both rural and urban areas.

“I want to develop programs, which are state or federally funded, but which are sustainable, so that people can look at their daughters not as financial liabilities, but as assets. And to think of them as equal to their sons in terms of ability and income potential,” Khanna says. “This project has been one of the most challenging and fulfilling experiences of my life.”

OSU News release, March 2007, “OSU researcher: Sex-selective abortion issue in India needs a ‘culturally relevant’ approach”

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

Sonny Ramaswamy

Sonny Ramaswamy, an agricultural leader from Purdue University, became dean of the Oregon State University College of Agricultural Sciences in August. He directs the Oregon Agricultural Experiment Station and succeeds long-time OSU dean Thayne Dutson, who retired from the position in 2008.

An entomologist, Ramaswamy has studied the reproductive biology of insects and plant-insect interactions, conducting applied research on insect pests affecting wheat, cotton, beans, other row crops and trees.

OSU’s nationally top-ranked programs support Oregon’s agricultural industries, which last year posted record sales of $4.9 billion. Overall economic activity is estimated at $25 billion annually from cattle, dairy, nursery crops, fruits and berries, wheat, grass seed and other sectors.

Ramaswamy is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Entomological Society of America.

Follow Sonny’s observations on his blog.

To support agricultural research at OSU, contact the Oregon State University Foundation.