The Pringle Falls Experimental Forest

The summer is warm and sunny in Corvallis, but my travels draw me east. Over and past the Cascades is an open land where the cold sparkling waters of a river flow north, and the sweet smell of Ponderosa pine blends with the fresh scent of lodgepole — the Deschutes National Forest. My one-person tent is packed in the back of a white state-owned pick-up truck with the essentials: a sleeping bag, a GPS unit, a camera, some protein bars, lots of buffalo jerky, a “Rite in the Rain” notebook and a pencil, a brown backpack, a bright orange hard hat and a soil corer.

In the late afternoon, I arrive at the Pringle Falls Experimental Forest and set up camp. The Forest Service cabins are nestled next to the gurgling and gushing Deschutes, whose French name means “River of the Falls.” The sounds of the rapids downstream bring a sense of calmness to my spirit. At the campsite, the ground is laden with pinecones, and the pine drops (Pterospera andromedea) expose themselves above the dead needles, branches and other forest litter. I unpack my gear and prepare for an early start out to the field sites the next day.

Mixed stands of Ponderosa and lodgepole pine dominate the Pringle Falls forest.

As you might guess, this isn’t the typical camping trip. I am embarking on an expedition. As a graduate student in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University, I am exploring something that lurks in the soils of Central Oregon — a fuzzy microscopic fungus that colonizes tree roots and might predict the future of the forest.

But why is the future of the forest at stake, and why dig underground when we are concerned about trees? The answer lies in the effects that organisms have on one another in a forest ecosystem. Like intricate underground machinery, fungi connect life-giving nutrients in the soil to roots that transport water and food to tree trunk, branch and leaf. Trees connect to climate and wildlife in an environment that evolves over time.

In the near future, scientists expect that climate will change and our forests will adapt. Tree zones will shift and a valuable tree species in the Deschutes National Forest — lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) — is predicted to decline. This change will affect people as well. Native Americans used the long, straight and lightweight poles to build teepees. Today we commercially harvest lodgepole for telephone poles and fences. Big-game animals, such as deer and elk, use lodgepole as habitat.

Pine drops

Researchers at Oregon State University suggest that, as the climate warms, lodgepole pine will decline in the Pacific Northwest by the end of the 21^st century. As a result, Ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) may be able to migrate into lodgepole zones. But this migration is dependent on the distribution or co-migration of mycorrhizae (fungi that live on tree roots), which are largely unexplored in Central and Eastern Oregon. The question is: Will this migration will be successful?

To answer that question, it helps to know a little about an ancient relationship. Scientists think that mycorrhizae, the fungus colonizing tree roots, evolved with land plants. Fungi and plants have been together since the Devonian period, which began more than 400 million years ago. External root fungi, otherwise known as ectomycorrhizae, form a sheath on the exterior of tree roots. These artful fungi form symbiotic, or beneficial, relationships with their host. Once colonization is complete, they send out filaments, which mine the soil for water and essential nutrients such as nitrogen.

Ultimately, it comes down to a trade that the tree host must submit to: The tree provides carbon, in the form of sugars, to the fungus in exchange for nutrients. The relationship is essential for the host and fungus to have the highest degree of success in the ecosystem — in this case, an ecosystem that I have the privilege to explore.

Getting to the core

The author takes a soil core.

The morning sun is bright in Central Oregon, but the air is cold and crisp. On my drive to the field sites, I can see the white peaks of Three Sisters in the distance. I pull the truck into the first site, take out my maps and venture out into the forest.  My leather boots softly crunch on the dried pine needles covering the soil. I pound my soil corer into the ground making sure to take a sample of the top 15 centimeters  (about six inches) of soil. I take in the smell of fresh earth, as I unscrew the metal corer to reveal a rich brown cylindrical soil core made up of pumice, fine roots and the mycorrhizae, too small to be seen with the naked eye. I dump the dirt, fine roots and all, into a Ziploc bag and place it in my backpack for analysis.

In the lab in Corvallis, I use molecular technology, such as DNA tests, to identify the root fungi of Ponderosa and lodgepole pine. I extract DNA, compare it to mushroom DNA in a database and identify the suspects. Like a detective, I name the species and unearth the world that had lain unexamined beneath the soil. And suddenly, this underground community is less of a mystery.

Russula

Cortinarius

My analysis reveals a diversity of species: Cenococcum, a black crusty fungus that doesn’t form mushrooms; Rhizopogon, which often forms subterranean truffles; and typical mushroom producers Cortinarius, Russula and Inocybe. It also reveals that the fungal community connected to Ponderosa pine and lodgepole overlap. That means that, when it comes to soil biology at least, Ponderosa will have a high chance of survival if it migrates into a lodgepole zone.

As the climate warms and the tree zones shift, the forest where we recreate and connect with nature may not be as we remember it. The warming climate might diminish one valuable member of the community, but forests know how to persist. By looking at underground fungi, we can determine whether trees have the potential to migrate into new zones and succeed. In the future, the smell of lodgepole pine might be absent from the breeze and the long skinny poles will be no more. Instead, the presence of underground fungi suggests that we might become immersed in the rich mahogany bark and sweet scent of Ponderosa.

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Editor’s note: Maria Garcia is a master’s student working with Jane E. Smith, research botanist in the USDA Forest Service. Garcia’s research is supported by the Forest Service and by a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Animal Planet

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

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

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

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

The Wow Factor

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

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

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See more stories from the Corps of Discovery.

Lynn Carlon, research technician at the Eastern Oregon Agricultural Research Center in Burns, soothes every cow with a head scratch following a vaccination. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

Making ethical choices about animals can be a philosophical high-wire act — a precarious balance of practicality and principle. Weighing practical needs against “normative ethics” — right or wrong, good or bad, just or unjust — requires more than a handbook of do’s and don’ts.

“The institutional protocols — the laws, regulations, policies — provide a framework, but a lot of situations are subject to interpretation,” says OSU Professor Jill Parker, a large-animal surgeon who teaches Veterinary Medical Ethics to second-year veterinary students. “Decisions need to be based on a reasoned decision process.”

For students eyeing careers at clinics, biomedical labs or other veterinary enterprises, ethical skills count as much as finesse with a syringe, a scalpel or a stethoscope. Through role-play and case studies, Parker pushes her students to challenge their assumptions. In one scenario, for example, fictional researchers at a make-believe university are using pigs to develop heart valves for humans. Parker’s students pretend to be various characters, such as university researcher Dr. D. Zyne and heart patient B.D. Hart. The scenario is further complicated by hypothetical animal-rights protesters.

Across campus in Animal and Rangeland Sciences, Matt Kennedy wades into equally uncomfortable territory when he teaches Contentious Social Issues in Animal Agriculture. The course, which draws 200 students yearly from majors as diverse as engineering and art, tackles such hot-button issues as agri-terrorism, horse slaughter, wolves versus livestock, gestation crates for pigs, genetic engineering and the history of the animal rights movement.

“We educate them to look at the facts before the emotions,” says Kennedy, who manages the Campus Swine Unit and Steer-A-Year program. “Our goal is not to sway them to one side or another, but to let them make their own decisions through critical thinking.”

If transportation planners and environmental protection agencies could join hands early in the process, costly delays could be avoided and sensitive ecosystems could be better protected. Enter a powerful new tool designed by researchers at the Institute for Natural Resources based at Oregon State. Using the Integrated Ecological Framework, planners can address the requirements of the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act from Day One instead of bumping up against them when the project is already moving ahead.

“Particularly for wetlands and endangered species, regulatory conflicts and delays largely result from transportation planners and regulators having insufficient, incomplete or poor-quality data,” say OSU researchers Lisa Gaines, interim director for the institute, and Jimmy Kagan. “This new tool will help speed up transportation projects while beefing up environmental stewardship.”

Further testing and refinement of the tool is under way with continued support from the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, which is looking ahead to rolling the framework out nationally.

Voracious red-ranger chickens cleaned out the bugs from this leaf litter, says Betsey Miller (Photo: Julia Rosen)

“Aw, no bugs!” exclaims Betsey Miller after meticulously pouring over a wheelbarrow’s worth of decomposing leaf litter and manure. “The chickens are doing a great job, but it’s still fun for us entomologists to find insects once in a while!”

A pen of praiseworthy red-ranger chickens peck away at the grass a few yards away, devouring beetles, larvae and weeds with single-minded perseverance. Their fiery plumage stands out against an emerald backdrop of spring foliage, like a premonition of rosy fruit to come.

Miller and her colleagues at Oregon State University (Extension and Department of Horticulture) brought the pest-seeking fowl to La Mancha’s Brooklane Organic Apple Orchard in Corvallis to conduct a pilot study on the use of free-range poultry for biodynamic pest control. Here, the birds move through the leafy rows of apple trees inside open-air enclosures known as “chicken tractors,” mowing down unwanted vegetation with the efficiency of weed whackers, hunting every apple maggot out of its earthen den and growing into succulent, free-range broilers in the process.

Poultry vs pests

The agricultural mentality of the central Willamette Valley, with its patchwork of small organic farms, vineyards and burgeoning local meat scene, makes it an ideal place to test out such an unconventional approach. While commercial apple growers rely heavily on the application of pesticides and herbicides to control orchard conditions, organic growers have limited options. Says Miller, “we are trying to find a way to manage insects that is more affordable and less labor intensive for these farmers.” To achieve this goal, they designed the first experiment in the state to use outdoor chickens, putting them to use in a synergistic approach to small-scale agriculture. Asked how this unusual project got off the ground in the first place, Miller says, “people here want to see agriculture go in a different direction.”

Scorched Earth, chicken style. (Photo: Julia Rosen)

The collaboration between a small poultry operation and an apple grower is a case in point. Travis Witmer of TnT Farms in Philomath handles the 150 birds at Brooklane. He explains, “I could never raise this many birds on my small plot of land. I do have to drive out here every day, but other than that, the workload and the costs are the same.” Miller and Witmer hope that this pilot study may serve as inspiration for other local chicken farmers to rent out their birds to orchards with pest problems — the same way a plumber offers his services to fix a clogged drain. So far, the results look promising.

As with most agricultural endeavors, the key to success lies in perfect timing. “To comply with organic standards,” explains Miller, “Brooklane cannot apply manure within 90 days of harvest.” Since chickens are veritable fertilizer factories, this means they have to be off the premises — and hitting the farmer’s market — by June. Witmer put the chicks out in mid-March, the perfect time to start raising broilers before the summer heat sets in, and one of the most critical times for apple pest control. Overwintering maggots start to stir in the soil as the winter chill retreats. This year, however, they will awake to a much more hostile orchard than the one their progenitors knew the previous fall.

But how does Miller know if the birds can hold up their end of the bargain? Miller plans to conduct vegetation surveys before and after the birds pass through an area to quantify their ability to control weeds. However, all you need to see their success is a pair of eyes. The spots where the tractors stood for a day or two have literally been grazed down to bare soil and remain that way for weeks. Weeds harbor harmful insects and compete with fruit trees for nutrients, but suppressing their growth requires labor-intensive mowing or the application of herbicides. Or, as it turns out, a dozen roving bands of ravenous red rangers.

No ordinary chickens

To determine how well the chickens manage insect populations, Miller and colleagues have come up with a clever plan. They add several hundred benign pest lookalikes to a heaping pile of leaf litter and put it inside the chickens’ pen. Only 24 hours later, they sift through the remains and count the survivors. In control studies where the litter sits out overnight but never sees the voracious fowl, they recover 99% of the decoys they plant. However today, after a night inside the pen marked by a blaze of orange polka dot ribbon, the researchers can’t find a single bug in this heap of fragrant humus.

Red rangers mean business (Photo: Julia Rosen)

The staggering efficiency of these birds stems from the fact that they are no ordinary Cornish Crosses, the most common breed of broiler chickens. “You could leave a Cornish Cross out here for a week and it would just wait by its trough for you to bring more feed,” laughs Witmer. Red rangers, on the other hand, were bred to hunt. Descendents of the original foraging bird, the aptly-named freedom ranger, red rangers leave no leaf unturned during the 12 weeks it takes them to mature. Plus, boasts Witmer, the rangers recently won an informal blind taste test among pastured poultry farmers in the Willamette Valley by a unanimous vote. Not bad for a working bird!

However, many questions remain. Will the birds eat beneficial insects too? Will researchers be able to detect decreases in deleterious coddling moth populations? And will the laying hens they put out in the autumn help further drive down pest problems?

It’s too early to say, but Miller is hopeful. “Our goal for this year is to work out the kinks so that we can do bigger projects in the future.” This might include splitting the orchard in half, with chickens working a wide swath of trees instead of the few rows they tackled this year. Or monitoring apple yields and the percent of damaged fruit from year to year now that the chickens are on the prowl. With more solid data under their belts, Miller and Witmer hope to share their findings with farmers through Extension, at small-farm conferences and with apple growers’ groups.

In any case, they plan to keep at it. “What motivates me,” explains Miller, as she looks up from a sieve full of decomposing detritus, “is to find elegant solutions that persist through time.” As the birds dive into a new batch of bug-filled compost, they demonstrate the point she makes next: “We just have to set this machine in motion and stand back.”

The future of organic apple production? (Photo: Julia Rosen)

Dylan McDowell will spend six months studying wildlife management in Africa. (Photo courtesy of Dylan McDowell)

In the place where Dylan McDowell grew up, wildlife meant sea lions, sandpipers, salmon and passing pods of spouting whales. Where he’s going this summer, wildlife means something else entirely, something reminiscent of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, exotic and fearsome: wildebeests, jackals, baboons, leopards, warthogs. And rhinos that have been poached nearly to extinction.

These are the beasts McDowell will encounter when he travels to Africa for six months of study and research, first with Nyati Conservation Corps in Zimbabwe and then with SIT Study Abroad in Tanzania.

But wild animals aren’t his sole interest. Humans captivate him, too. “I feel it’s my responsibility as a person to explore and embrace different cultures,” says McDowell, who’s working on two degrees at Oregon State University, one in K-12 education and the other in fisheries and wildlife.

Giraffes at the Cawston Block in Zimbabwe (Photo: Dylan McDowell)

In McDowell’s coastal hometown of Yachats, skin-color variations had more to do with degrees of sunburn than with ethnic or racial diversity. “There was only one African-American student in my high school,” McDowell says, sounding a little regretful. He wants to fill that cultural gap in his education. So he’s heading to Africa not only to study wildlife conservation but also to meet African people and learn firsthand about their values, their politics, their struggles, their aspirations.

“I like looking at things through different lenses,” McDowell explains. Which might explain why he gravitates toward the junctures of disparate fields — for instance, the nexus of science and public policy, his current passion. The program in Tanzania fits that passion to a T. “The program focuses on wildlife conservation and political ecology — basically, how people interact with the environment,” he says.

So although his research is on rhinos, it’s as much about the humans who kill and sell the endangered ungulates for their horns, believed to be an aphrodisiac in some Asian societies. It’s also about the people who protect the massive horned animals, which are being reintroduced to the Serengeti where they have been wiped out.

“Tanzania is one of the poorest countries in the world,” says McDowell. “There’s a lot of money in the rhino trade.” Noting that Africa is “still trying to recover from European hegemony” of earlier decades, he argues that to take an American perspective on the rhino issue is to miss the social, political and cultural context in which the poaching occurs.

Endangered rhinos must co-exist with people in some of the world's poorest countries. (Photo: Engineers Without Borders, Oregon State University)

Besides interviewing rangers and local residents about the rhinos, McDowell will live with members of the Maasai tribe, camp out during a four-week safari and take classes in Swahili.

McDowell may not have had many cross-cultural experiences growing up in Yachats, but he did get plenty of cross-species interactions at the Oregon Coast Aquarium as a volunteer and later as a part-time guide and an aquarist. He became acquainted with puffins and octopi, whiskered otters lolling in their artificial habitat and ethereal jellyfish pulsing in their tubular tank. He even kissed a sea lion named Leah. “Very fishy,” is how he describes the marine-mammal’s smooch, for which tourists happily paid extra as part of a behind-the-scenes tour.

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Follow McDowell’s travels through his blog, Under the Baobab Tree.

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

Caitlyn Clark's enthusiasm for ecological research wasn't deterred by her trip to mosquito-infested Manitoba arctic tundra (Photo courtesy of Caitlyn Clark)

On her first-ever research trip, Caitlyn Clark trudged up and down hundreds of spongy hummocks spanning miles of arctic tundra, all the while swatting at giant mosquitoes and scanning for hungry polar bears. She was in Manitoba to collect data about the habitats of boreal frogs and stickleback fish for Earthwatch Institute Student Challenge Awards Program.

For a lot of people, the bumpy, buggy, beary expedition would have been their last-ever research trip. Clark, though, was enchanted. Having to sign a polar bear release form — and then spotting three of the great white predators within the first 10 minutes of arriving at the campsite — was an adrenaline rush. And those monster mosquitoes? They just made everything more amazing. The swarms of juicy bugs brought out hordes of insect eaters, which in turn enticed the meat eaters.

“There’s a huge mosquito population that bursts forth,” says Clark, who was a student at Lakeridge High School in Lake Oswego when she went to Manitoba. “We had to wear full mosquito-net gear and Deet up every morning. It was ridiculous. But the wildlife just erupts. The food web is so pronounced!”

After 10 days on the tundra, her rudder was set.

“I knew that I could do this for the rest of my life,” recalls Clark, now an Oregon State University Honors College sophomore. Her grin telegraphs her delight. “I love research.”

Lough Hyne in County Cork, Ireland, is home to plants and animals that are unique to the Emerald Isle.

But she wants her research firmly connected to solutions. That’s why she chose OSU’s Ecological Engineering program, whose focus is on “optimizing the interface between humankind and the environment,” according to its homepage.

“The mindset of the program is systems theory, understanding how all the pieces interact so we can find more natural ways to solve problems,” she says.

Solutions will be top-of-mind for Clark this summer on the rocky shores of County Cork, where she’ll be studying purple urchins in Lough Hyne, the nation’s first marine reserve. (A “lough” in this sense means a bay or inlet.) One of four American students chosen for the International Research Experiences for Students (IRES) project in Ireland, Clark will be looking for clues to the plunging numbers of urchins, which are key members of tidal-pool communities. The suspect list is topped by the invasive brown algae, Sargassum muticum.

“We’ll be looking at threats to the community structure of the lough,” says Clark, who will be the youngest member of the IRES team and one of only two American undergrads. “We’ll be trying to figure out why the urchin population is declining — is it predation? Do they need more sheltered areas? Is the algae making the rocks too slippery for the urchins to attach?”

Once those questions are answered, Clark’s devotion to solutions will come in: “Is there anything we can do to fix it and, if so, should we step in?”

Caitlyn Clark has conducted research as part of Sarah Henkel's lab at Oregon State's Hatfield Marine Science Center. (Photo courtesy of Caitlyn Clark)

Purple urchins like these on the West Coast of the United States will be Caitlyn Clark's focus in Ireland this summer. (Photo courtesy of the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans)

Already, Clark is a seasoned marine researcher, collecting baseline data on bottom-dwelling organisms for Professor Sarah Henkel at OSU’s Benthic Ecology Lab/Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center. Before flying to Ireland, Clark and her teammates will spend five days at an orientation workshop in the Coos Bay area at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology, run by the University of Oregon. But first, she’ll be navigating Oregon rivers as a raft guide for Oregon State’s Adventure Leadership Institute during the early summer months.

Clark is eager to see the “dramatic landscape” of the Emerald Isle. But as a native Northwesterner, she can be tough to impress. When she first saw the boreal forests of Manitoba, she remarked, “These trees are pretty short.” The scientist leading the trip turned to look at her. “You’re the one from Oregon, aren’t you?” he said.

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

Robert Zemetra leads Oregon State's wheat-breeding program. (Photo courtesy of Robert Zemetra)

Still, the Oregon State University wheat breeder doesn’t regret his decision to create new plant varieties for a living. “Between getting to teach, working with students at a university and doing the wheat breeding, I can’t think of a better job,” he says.

Wheat growers have gotten a good deal too. Since 1993 when he was a professor at the University of Idaho, Zemetra has led the development of nine new strains of soft white winter wheat. In more than two decades of wheat-variety improvement, efforts by him and his colleagues have enabled farmers to produce more grain and earn more money as they’ve supplied products to millers, bakers and even noodle makers in the United States and abroad.

It’s the kind of achievement the architects of the land grant university system envisioned when they passed the Morrill Act 150 years ago. When he signed the bill into law, President Abraham Lincoln called public universities an investment of the people’s hope, support and confidence. (For details on the political history of the Morrill Act, see Milestones in the Legislative History of U.S. Land-Grant Universities)

A Timeline for Oregon Wheat

Starting in the Willamette Valley, wheat farmers grew crops that fed miners in California’s gold country and fetched top dollar in East Coast markets. Today, Portland, Oregon, ships more wheat than any other U.S. port.
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Zemetra takes that mission seriously. “Our primary thrust is to improve the productivity of wheat cultivars, so we improve profitability for wheat growers,” he says.

Matchmaker

In 2011, the native of California’s San Fernando Valley accepted the endowed Warren Kronstad Wheat Research Chair at Oregon State. He followed in the footsteps of former OSU wheat breeder James Peterson who is now vice president for wheat research at Limagrain Cereals in Colorado.

As a researcher, Zemetra is matchmaker, data collector and analyst. He marries existing wheat strains to produce stronger offspring that resist disease and thrive in Northwest soils and climate. He evaluates new varieties for traits such as their ability to resist disease (stripe rust, Pseudocercosporella foot rot and Septoria leaf blotch, among others), straw strength (will plants remain standing in a stiff Northwest wind?) and grain quality.

“You can think of disease resistance as a form of insurance to prevent loss,” he says. “Losses can occur through lost yield because of disease, or if farmers have to pay for fungicide treatment. It’s an ongoing battle.”

One of his primary adversaries is a tiny fungus, Puccinia striiformis, which causes a disease known as stripe rust. On wheat leaves, the organism erupts into orange blisters and diverts the plant’s energy from making grain to the care and feeding of more fungus. It reduces grain production and can kill plants outright. Moreover, it can evolve rapidly, creating a moving target for researchers who need to make sure that wheat varieties have the right genetic characteristics to stay ahead of the disease.

Front Lines

Stephens wheat, a popular variety introduced by legendary OSU wheat breeder Warren Kronstad in 1978, was highly resistant to stripe rust, but in 2000, the fungus evolved new races, Zemetra explains. Stephens became partially susceptible and gave way to other varieties such as Foote (named for Oregon State’s first wheat breeder, Wilson Foote), Goetze (particularly useful in the Willamette Valley) and ORCF 101 and ORCF 102, herbicide resistant Oregon State cultivars, which now dominate wheat acreage in Oregon and Washington.

“Disease resistance is being overcome a little faster in some lines. Some races (of the fungus) are more aggressive. The challenge is making sure we have resistant lines for the growers. We’d like to reduce their use of fungicides,” says Zemetra.

Maintaining wheat production is a collective effort. Zemetra’s breeding research proceeds as a cadre of scientists on the OSU campus in Corvallis and at OSU Agricultural Experiment Stations and Extension offices test new varieties in small plots and work directly with farmers to evaluate plant performance under commercial growing conditions.

The quality of new varieties released to the industry can be measured by the traffic on Zemetra’s phone. “Farmers aren’t shy. If I release a variety that’s good, I don’t receive many phone calls,” he says. “If anything goes wrong, I hear about it right away.”

Fortunately, his first year at Oregon State turned out pretty well. In 2011, Oregon wheat growers achieved their highest yield per acre (81 bushels) and highest revenues ($521.5 million) ever. Collecting data in the rain had a silver lining for the new OSU scientist.

Haley Ohms (Photo: Lee Sherman)

A river runs through Haley Ohms’ life. Actually, a whole bunch of rivers. So spending the summer hip-deep in fast-moving water will feel familiar to the Oregon State University graduate student — even if those cold, tumbling waters flow on the other side of the Pacific Rim. The fish will seem familiar, too. The Dolly Varden, which she’ll be studying in 10 woodland streams on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, is a cousin of steelhead and rainbow trout, the topic of her master’s thesis in the Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Sitting at her computer, she pulls up a photo on the screen. “This is the Dolly Varden,” she says, pointing to the underwater image of a moss-green fish speckled in red. “See how it’s spotted? It’s very similar to a trout.”

Photo courtesy of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game

Fish is a subject she knows well. After all, you don’t sit atop a 30-foot tower in Alaska counting sockeye salmon at a rate of a million a month without getting really conversant with them. She was an undergraduate at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, when she took the tower-sitting job with the state Fish and Game Department, hopping a float plane from King Salmon to Bristol Bay and living in what she calls a “cabin-slash-shack” for two summers monitoring sockeye runs in the Egegik and Ugashik rivers.

But her kinship with fish started even earlier as a kid in Alaska. She was in her mid-teens when her dad, living out a lifelong dream, began taking summers off from his electrician’s job, bought a “bowpicker” boat, and took up gillnetting for Chinook and sockeye in the Copper River and for pinks and chums in Prince William Sound. She started crewing for him at 15.

At Oregon State, Ohms has spent two years learning the secrets of steelhead and trout in nine streams and rivers up and down the West Coast, places like Pudding Creek in California, Big Ratz Creek in Alaska, East Fork Trask River in Oregon and Secesh River in Idaho. Now she’s about to add Japan’s Sorachi River and its many tributaries to her growing list of study sites. She’ll be looking at the role of water temperature in the maturation rate of the Dolly Varden during her fellowship, jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. The Sorachi River, she explains, contains tributaries with two distinct thermal regimes: cold, groundwater-fed systems and systems fed by warmer surface water. That duality makes it a perfect place for an experiment, a readymade setting for studying the impact on fish of cold versus warmer habitat.

Photo courtesy of Fisheries and Oceans Canada

To get her data, she’ll be “electro-fishing” — sending a low-voltage electric pulse into the water, which stuns the animals and sends them floating to the surface. She’ll then net them, weigh and measure them and, finally, squeeze them, gently, to see if any eggs or sperm come out. “It sounds cheesy,” Ohms says, laughing. “But it’s the only nonlethal, low-tech way to tell if the fish are sexually mature.”

The timing of maturity in fish is critical to the survival of their offspring and, ultimately, of the species. “The males need to mature at the same time the females return to spawn,” says Ohms. “The females need to lay their eggs so they’ll hatch at the optimal time, not when the river’s frozen over or flooding. It’s a delicate balance.”

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

Zachary Dunn, a student in ecological engineering, coordinated a trip by OSU students to Kenya. (Photo: Lee Sherman)

How far would you go to help someone get a glass of clean water? Zachary Dunn knows exactly how far he’d go: 9,000 miles. And that’s just one trip, one way. By summer’s end, Dunn and fellow Oregon State University students had traveled almost 36,000 miles — greater than the Earth’s circumference — to help bring drinkable water to Lela, a tiny farming community in Kenya.

So why would engineering students fly halfway around the planet from bucolic Oregon to struggling East Africa, not once but twice? Why would Dunn say that contracting malaria on his first trip was a “small price to pay”? Why would he shrug off a State Department travel warning about terrorism and piracy in the region?

“In Lela, women and children walk up to three miles a day carrying 40-pound buckets of water,” explains Dunn, who grew up in Albany, Oregon. “I’ve seen kids as young as five with buckets on their heads. It’s a feat. They don’t complain. But the loss to productivity and education is huge.”

It’s not despite the chasm between the Kenyan village (where waterborne disease is common) and his Oregon hometown (where pure water flows from faucets and fountains at the twist of a wrist) but because of it that Dunn joined the OSU project in 2010 to survey water sources, test water quality and commission a groundwater survey. He and a student team headed back to Lela in July to help spearhead drilling a well and installing a rainwater catchment system.

“We all have a common fate,” says Dunn. “These kinds of projects can help shape the future of the world. It benefits all of us. It’s a win-win.”

During the dry season, women and children in Lela walk about three miles to get clean drinking water in a nearby town. (Photo: EWB-USA, Oregon State University)

That all-embracing, planetary vision is what led to Dunn’s participation in OSU’s chapter of Engineers Without Borders USA (EWB-USA), which is dedicated to the vision of a world in which all communities have the capacity to meet their basic human needs. And it’s that vision that steered him to the Ecological Engineering program for his undergraduate work. The program, he says, is based on “systems theory,” the notion that everything is connected and, thus, solutions must be holistic.

“I’m interested in redefining the relationship between humans and the planet,” says Dunn, who describes himself as a “born tinkerer,” always tilting toward problem solving even in childhood.

The Lela Women’s Water Committee linked up with EWB-USA when they were looking for a partner on their quest for a better life. “We only partner with communities that have identified a need and have asked for help,” says Dunn, who will start graduate studies in public policy this fall.

The other EWB-USA requirement: The project must be sustainable. “A huge number of wells in Africa are in disrepair,” Dunn notes. “Many communities do not have the capacity to maintain them.”

That’s why EWB-OSU’s team of six (five students and one professional mentor) recommended a hand pump for Lela’s new well. Other power-source options, such as diesel or solar, cost too much to maintain or are targets for theft. With guidance from faculty and a groundwater expert from engineering firm CH2M Hill, the students have researched everything from the compressive strength of concrete (for the foundations under rainwater storage tanks) to the reliability and availability of pumps.

Zach Dunn celebrated with members of the women's water committee in Lela, Kenya, after completing a water project for the community. (Photo: Justin Smith)

In Kenya, Dunn and his team stay in a “simba,” a house made of wood and mud with a corrugated metal roof, on the land owned by village elder Charles Olang’o. The elder’s son Paul is the translator for the Oregon State engineers. A fast friendship has formed among the Kenyans and the students.

“We have a really special bond with Lela,” Dunn says. “Charles calls me his son; Paul calls me his brother. They are very gracious people.”

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Read updates and see photos of the Oregon State students’ work in Kenya.

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

Phil Mote directs the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

It’s important to ask the right questions about data used to reach a conclusion. Are there gaps, either geographically or through time? Were robust statistical methods used to determine if a specific event was indeed unusual? Peer-reviewed research has shown that short periods of cooling can easily be embedded in longer-term warming trends; it’s simply a statistical fact in a time series with a positive trend and a variable system.

Recent cool weather notwithstanding, Oregon has undergone a substantial warming trend over the last 50 to 60 years. What are now considered exceptionally cool seasons were normal 75 to 100 years ago, and seasons now considered normal were exceptionally warm in the same period. If one arbitrarily selects the climatically insignificant period of 5 to 10 years, one can incorrectly conclude that there is no evidence of warming. But further research also shows reasons for the slight decline in global (and Oregon’s) temperatures: A combination of La Niña (when eastern equatorial Pacific sea surface temperatures are 3 degrees to 5 degrees Celsius cooler than normal) and solar minimum (a low point in solar activity) temporarily overcame the gradually increasing effects of greenhouse gases.

Globally, 2011 was the warmest La Niña year ever. Research clearly points to a resumption of the warming as the recent spate of La Niñas wanes and as the solar cycle moves toward maximum. In short, rigorous research tells us so much more than the comparison of averages over arbitrary lengths of time.

The larger point that concerns me is how easily many people dismiss rigorous research in preference for subjective observation. Both are valid ways of adding to the sum of human knowledge, but sometimes the results of research can be counterintuitive and can even contradict what we see with our own eyes.

Take, for example, the patient whose doctor tells him he has a treatable form of cancer. If he feels fine, should he rely only on his subjective feelings? Would he be wise to conclude that his doctor is in “the cancer camp” and wait for clear physical evidence before doing anything?

Or what about the roofer who tells a homeowner that her roof is badly worn and could start leaking in the next storm. Would she be wise to dismiss him as part of the “leaky-roof camp” and ignore him until she actually sees the water trickling through her dining room ceiling?

Why do some of us so flippantly dismiss scientists studying the health of our only planet? Why argue against taking prudent steps now?

Some people may wish that global warming is nonsense. So do I. But I have to accept the evidence provided by thousands of honest, hard-working scientists, meticulously documented during the past 120 years, that says otherwise.

— Phil Mote is the director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute

"Smoking food represents something significant and steeped in time and practice," says Stuart Harris. "A lot of things, when burned, produce smoke. However, when the fire and smoke is started with matches and newspaper verses primitive ember and bark dust, in my experience, they are different and seem to produce different smoke. Essentially, the fire gives meaning to the quality of the smoke produced." (Photo courtesy of Anna Harding)

“My first memories are of smoked buckskin and eating smoked meat,” Harris says. “I also remember as a very young child sitting on the floor of one of our cultural centers near my mother and her friends and sisters where the smell of smoke was as real and regular as the smell of coffee in the morning.”

Though smoking food has long been part of Native American culture and, as for Harris, can recall memories of family and community, scientists are questioning the safety of this centuries-old practice. A team of researchers led by Oregon State University scientist Anna Harding is collaborating with the CTUIR to determine whether smoking food may expose tribe members to dangerous levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).

Pollutant Exposure

PAHs are created by combustion of organic materials and can cause cancer and respiratory diseases in humans. The combustion of oil, coal and gasoline can create high levels of PAHs in industrialized areas, but rural populations can also be exposed to PAHs through wood fires, which are traditionally used to prepare grilled and smoked foods.

“It is important to engage in collaborative research with tribal communities, because the tribes may have disproportionate environmental exposures relative to other populations in the U.S.,” Harding says. “Tribal communities often do not have the resources necessary to conduct the research that is necessary needed to identify exposures that may adversely impact health.”

Anna Harding examines the public health consequences of environmental processes. (Photo courtesy of Anna Harding)

Harding specializes in public health and is co-director of OSU’s School of Biological and Population Health Sciences in the College of Public Health and Human Sciences. She has worked with members of the CTUIR Department of Science and Engineering since 2002 to assess subsistence and environmental exposure among tribal members.

 Partners in Science

Her work with the tribe, Harding says, is a partnership. Researchers focus on health issues that tribal members want to explore. The goal is to provide the tribe with knowledge that can help them determine how to limit health risks without encroaching upon important cultural traditions.

“We are interested in helping the tribes develop their own scientific capacity to investigate the problems that are most important to them,” Harding says.

Harding suggested studying PAH exposure to the CTUIR, and when the tribe expressed interest in the project, she and her research team submitted a proposal to obtain funding, which resulted in a grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Science’s Superfund Research Program in 2009. The collaborative research with the CTUIR community is one of a number of funded projects and research cores within the Superfund Research Program at OSU.

Stuart Harris participated in the study of pollutant exposure and wore an air sampler while smoking food. (Photo courtesy of Anna Harding)

Though Native Americans have been practicing traditional methods of smoking food for thousands of years, Harding says the health effects of many native traditions, including smoking food, have never been analyzed. Studying the PAH exposure associated with smoking food, Harding hopes, will help the CTUIR evaluate their PAH exposures and design risk reduction strategies, if needed, that are protective of public health.

Health Benefits

Residents of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, near Pendleton, Oregon, smoke their meat in tipis and smoke sheds where food is slowly cooked over a hearth stoked with chunks of wood. Members of the tribe may be exposed to high levels of PAHs through inhalation while they are smoking foods, Harding says, and by eating smoked foods.

Harris, who is the director of the CTUIR’s Department of Science and Engineering, says he believes the results of the study will help the CTUIR continue traditions while making the best decisions for tribe members’ health.

“The process of preparing food for storage through the winter remains the same in this ancient tribe as well as throughout the world in similar indigenous communities,” Harris says. “Knowing about the details about the exposure of PAHs can serve only to help guide us to make more informed decisions related to this common and time-tested practice.”

To determine the level of PAH exposure caused by preparing and eating smoked food, researchers evaluated air on the reservation as well as inside the food smoking structures. They collected air samples from inside the smoking structures and urine samples from individuals who had spent time smoking food in the tipi or smoke shed, and also took samples of smoked food.

The samples collected throughout the study are being analyzed in labs at OSU. To evaluate the PAH content, researchers extract particles from the samples with liquid solvents and use the processes of gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to separate and identify the different chemicals in the particles, isolating the PAHs.

While the samples are being analyzed, members of the research team will continue to work with the tribe to assess other environmental exposures, Harding says. Collaborating with the tribe, she adds, has allowed the researchers to learn about Native American culture while studying the community’s health.

“We’ve all learned from working with the tribe,” Harding says. “They have their own traditional environmental knowledge and we have learned a great deal about how their environment and their health are connected. It’s been eye opening for me to better understand tribal traditions.”

McKibben described the grassroots climate campaign 350.org, which he started in 2009 with seven students at Vermont’s Middlebury College, where he is a distinguished scholar. The campaign has coordinated more than 15,000 rallies in nearly 190 countries. He also told of circling the White House with thousands of fellow activists and spending three nights in a Washington, D.C., jail to protest the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

(Photo: Larry Pribyl)

Between this and other events on campus — including a workshop sponsored by OSU’s Spring Creek Project and a local-foods breakfast prepared by Gathering Together Farm — McKibben sat down with Terra magazine’s Nick Houtman and Lee Sherman to talk about the urgency of climate action worldwide. Below is an excerpt from that conversation.

TERRA: From your perspective, how does Occupy Wall Street intersect with climate-change action as a people’s movement pushing back against corporate interests?

McKibben: I went down to Occupy Wall Street very early and got to speak through the grand human microphone. And the thing I said was: “I’m very glad you’re here. Wall Street’s been occupying our atmosphere for the last 30 years. It’s about time we returned the favor.” You know, we can’t get anything done on climate change because enormous corporate power blocks action, time after time after time.

TERRA: Do you see a coalition forming between occupiers and environmental activists?

McKibben: You know, it’s like when we circled the White House to protest the Keystone pipeline a couple of weeks ago, and then Occupy Portland circled the federal building in Portland. It’s not like there’s some central Occupy headquarters that you call up and say, “What do we do next?” It’s an expression of a mood. And that mood is tired of being pushed around by major corporate power. It’s not working, and the climate is the perfect example of that. We’re literally entering into a time when the planet itself is not going to work for people anymore. It’s not even that we can’t break our addiction to fossil fuel, because as people, we’re capable of it. The problem is that fossil fuel companies can’t break their addiction to the quantities of money that fuel generates.

TERRA: What is the role of research universities in advancing the agenda for environmental clarity and stability?

(Photo: Larry Pribyl)

McKibben: It’s been really important that hard science has been applied to climate change in a huge, serious, sustained way. Probably more human intelligence has been directed at trying to understand this than just about any other scientific question. Thanks to research at universities above all, and for the work of federal government agencies like NASA, we’ve managed to understand this problem. In a short period of time it’s crunched difficult problems in atmospheric chemistry and physics. It’s given us a workable consensus on what’s going on. That’s an enormous triumph. The scientific method has worked remarkably well.

The part that hasn’t worked is the political method. Where we’ve failed as educators, as citizens, is in taking what we know and turning it into public policy. All the economists and policy people and everybody else have been saying the right thing to politicians, explaining the many ways that they could be working on this. It just hasn’t happened very much, especially at a federal level, because the power of the fossil fuel industry is so great.

So, that’s really our work — our responsibility as citizens — to take care of that. Outside of the classroom, we’ve got to build a movement big enough to make these guys do it. And that’s what we’re trying to do.

TERRA: Scientists often are hesitant to be advocates. They worry that they’ll lose their credibility as objective researchers if they advocate for a position. What do you think about that?

McKibben: I think that’s understandable. And I think it’s also a little too easy. I think it’s sometimes a cover for the fact that scientists, in personal terms, aren’t very comfortable engaging the world outside the lab. I completely understand it. I’m a writer by trade. My goal would be stay in my room and type; that’s how I like to engage the world. But there are situations desperate enough that one would change one’s M.O. a little bit. And I’m very glad to see more scientists stepping up and doing that.

If it wasn’t for the bravery of Jim Hanson at NASA — his willingness to state plainly what’s going on, to go to jail to back it up — I don’t know where we’d be. And I noticed when we were doing this mass civil disobedience in Washington, there were more scientists joining in, some of them untenured research scientists. That takes a lot of bravery.

But on the other hand, you know, if you’re spending half your life out in Greenland calculating how much ice is being lost, who better than you to have the credibility to stand up and say it? I mean, if you don’t say it, then what’s the point of doing the research in the first place?

(Photo: Larry Pribyl)

TERRA: OSU’s Spring Creek Project is dedicated to bringing scientists together with poets, writers and musicians to talk about issues like climate change across disciplines in order to reach different segments of the population. The idea is that not everyone responds to science.

McKibben: You know, 350.org is this huge campaign that takes its name from scientific data, so we’re not at all afraid of science. In general, I find no problem with people anywhere in the world understanding the basics of the science. I think we sometimes overstate how difficult or complex it is.

On the other hand, environmentalists have done much better appealing to the left side of the brain — the half that likes bar graphs and stuff — and not so well appealing to the side that deals well with art and music and things like that. That’s why we’ve made a big effort to incorporate tons of that stuff into 350.org. Much of our work is based around images — these beautiful images of thousands of rallies and demonstrations around the world. We did this giant art project last November with 20 pieces of art so big you have to look at them from satellites to really understand them. It involved thousands of people. Just yesterday we released a song in five or six African languages for this project called Radio Wave — bringing in one radio station at a time, north to south across Africa, to arrive in Durban, South Africa, right when the big UN Climate Conference is kicking off there.

TERRA: Here in Oregon people who are addressing environmental change in their communities tend to ask very practical questions — you know, sea level rise in a beachfront community that is causing waves to crash through their front windows. Most people don’t see climate change as the source, or global warming as the issue to address. They want to protect their property from erosion, period.

McKibben: Yeah, of course. It’s always easiest to think about things just locally, and that’s good. But what we’ve come to understand in recent years is the scale of change and the pace of change that we’re now kicking off. We’re not going to be able to adapt past a certain point. So people better start thinking further upstream and figuring out that we’ve got to stop putting carbon into the atmosphere. If we don’t, then we’re out of luck.

(Photo: Larry Pribyl)

TERRA: We’re closing in soon on 400 parts per million (CO2 in the atmosphere). So where do you find hope in thinking we could turn this around and even begin to move back toward 350?

McKibben: There are plenty of times when one doesn’t have an enormous amount of hope. But I am cognizant of the fact that there is a big and growing movement out there. We had a big win when we stopped this Keystone Pipeline. For one, the oil industry didn’t get its way. And second, the power of people willing to get arrested was sufficient to at least slow them down. Obviously, we can’t fight this fight little-Dutch-boy style, plugging one leak after another. But, we’re learning some lessons about how to build movements and how to take these guys on.

TERRA: How do you see China and India dealing with those issues?

McKibben: In China, the die is largely cast in certain ways. They’ve built an immense amount of coal-fired power plants. India is less so. They’re much further down the curve and there’s more chance for serious intervention. In both cases, we should be moving quickly to aid them with serious technological help to allow people, especially in India, to leapfrog past fossil fuel.

They’re also doing many things right — far righter than we are. I just did a big piece for National Geographic on China and energy. And, look, the Chinese have installed about 60 million of these solar thermal arrays for hot water. For a quarter of a billion Chinese, when they take a shower at night their hot water is coming off the roof. That’s about 25 percent of China. In the U.S., it’s less than 1 percent. The technology is simple. The payback is fast. You tell me why it’s not getting used.

TERRA: Do you see regional differences in perceptions of climate change? For instance, the Pacific Northwest has a pretty benign, temperate climate. We don’t have serious droughts or hurricanes. So the signs aren’t right in our face yet. It’s a problem because people don’t necessarily see it happening around them. But it can also be an opportunity because we have time to adapt if we get busy right now.

McKibben: Well, here’s the thing: There’s no place that’s going to do very well with this kind of change. I mean, we kind of thought we were sitting pretty in Vermont. It’s kind of benign and out of the way. But half the state damned near washed away from the hugest rainfall we’ve ever experienced, by far. It was just wracking — and expensive. So, it can happen here, too. There’ll always be places like Oregon that will temporarily benefit, like during this horrible drought in Russia. They had to stop all grain exports to the rest of the world, and the price of wheat goes through the roof. And, suddenly, if you’re a wheat farmer in Eastern Oregon, you’re sitting pretty for a while. But look at the computer models and you’ll realize you’re a coin flip away from that drought being right where you are.

TERRA: Here in the Northwest, there’s a lot of work going on with federal and state agencies. For our cover story, we’ll reflect on the application of the first Oregon Climate Assessment Report released about a year ago by our Oregon Climate Change Research Institute.

McKibben: The Northwest is really important for many ways. One, it’s ahead of much of the rest of the country in trying to do something about the environment. Two, this stretch of the Pacific is an important place to serve as a cork in the bottle to keep large amounts of energy from coming out of the middle of the continent and heading toward China. I was up in Washington State not long ago, where they’re trying to stop these proposed coal ports along the coast, which would take all the coal out of Wyoming and Montana and ship it to China. There may be a similar plan for Oregon at some point, too. And I was just up in Vancouver, B.C., where they’re trying to stop more of these pipelines out of the tar sands. You know, you guys are kind of the wall between a lot of bad, dirty energy and China. And so it’ll be an important place for people to be organizing hard.

TERRA: On the subject of population, how important is the correlation between population growth and carbon concentrations?

McKibben: At this point, it’s not the biggest driver of climate change. We’re going to see another 2 billion people in the next 50 years. It’s not going to be easy to deal with; the planet’s already strained at 7 billion. But in climate terms, most of the population increase will happen in places that are so poor, the incremental amount of energy they use is small. We forget how wide the gulf is. I mean, the average American uses more energy between the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve and dinner on January 2 than the average Tanzanian uses in the course of a year. So you can have a lot of Tanzanians before their energy consumption mounts up very much. One of the great tragedies of climate change is that it happens hardest in places that caused it the least.

So, yeah, population growth is important for many reasons, and climate change is one of them. But the biggest driver of climate change right now is places whose population is relatively stable but whose consumption is starting to rise toward the American level, China being the obvious example.

And it must be said that we’ve done a better job than people thought about dealing with population growth. You know, the average woman 30 years ago had six children. That number is 2.4 now and falling fast. And it’s because we figured out what to do — to educate women and to empower them. Fertility rates predictably go down dramatically. And, that’s what we’ve got to keep doing — make contraception available and accessible, and educate people enough that they have some control over their own destiny.

See a video of McKibben’s November 17, 2011, Discovery Lecture at Oregon State University.

But climate? We look to patterns of wind, temperature and precipitation. You can’t use a compass to tell you if it’s going to rain, but scientists have known for many years that climate and the Earth’s magnetic field move in similar fashion. They don’t understand if they are related and, if so, why.

The JOIDES Resolution in port at Ponta Delgada, Azores. IODP Expedition 339, Mediterranean Outflow. (Photo: John Beck, IODP/TAMU)

Stranger yet is where Chuang Xuan, a postdoctoral scientist at Oregon State University, is looking for clues to solve this mystery: the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Xuan has joined an expedition on the research ship JOIDES Resolution to drill deep into the seafloor where the Mediterranean Sea flows into the Atlantic. It is there, he says, that thick sediments deposited by the Mediterranean’s outflow may have preserved variations in climate along with the magnetic history of the planet.

The expedition is part of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), an international research program in which OSU scientists have played a leading role.

According to Xuan, the combination of high sediment accumulation rates and the type of sediment may yield excellent paleomagnetic records — good enough to record small geomagnetic changes that scientists call “excursions” — as well as high-quality paleoclimate data from the same sediment sequences. He plans to study correlations between the two types of records to see whether and how geomagnetic field variation and climate change might be connected.

Chuang Xuan (Paleomagnetist, Oregon State University) and Carl Richter (Paleomagnetist, University of Louisiana) discuss the results of their testing. Expedition 339, Mediterranean Outflow, of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program. (Photo: John Beck, IODP/TAMU)

A member of OSU’s Paleo-and-Environmental Magnetism Laboratory in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, Xuan studies the process that causes deep-sea sediments to be magnetized. By deciphering past variations in Earth’s magnetic field, he works to understand the causes and consequences of geomagnetic change. He uses magnetic records from Arctic sediments for paleoenvironmental and stratigraphic applications. He also develops software to process large volumes of paleomagnetic data on sediment cores.

Xuan received his Ph.D. in geology from the University of Florida in 2010. He earned his master’s in applied mathematics in 2005 from China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, where he also received his bachelor’s in geology in 2002.

See weekly trip reports, photos and other information about the expedition.

About IODP

The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) is an international research program dedicated to advancing scientific understanding of the Earth through drilling, coring, and monitoring the subseafloor. The JOIDES Resolution is a scientific research vessel managed by the U.S. Implementing Organization of IODP (USIO). Together, Texas A&M University, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, and the Consortium for Ocean Leadership comprise the USIO.  IODP is supported by two lead agencies: the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology. Additional program support comes from the European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling (ECORD), the Australian-New Zealand IODP Consortium (ANZIC), India’s Ministry of Earth Sciences, the People’s Republic of China (Ministry of Science and Technology), and the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources.

When Cristina Eisenberg and her family moved to Montana in 1994, they received a warm welcome from their neighbors. On the first night in their new log cabin, they were greeted by the sonorous howls of nearby wolves.

“I had never heard wild wolves before,” Eisenberg remembers, “It was an incredibly comforting sound, a familiar sound…I felt like I’d been listening to them all my life.”

Cristina Eisenberg has performed much of her work in the Canadian Rockies. (Photo: Alana Eisenberg)

The wolves’ wails awakened a deep curiosity in her. “It was a lot different than the way wolves sound in the movies. It was almost like an ancestral remembering of a sound,” she says. She wasn’t afraid. She was intrigued.

Her desire to learn more about these animals led her to Oregon State University, where she is pursuing a doctorate in forestry. While studying with OSU conservation biologist Bill Ripple, Eisenberg focuses on how predators influence the flow of energy within ecosystems. At the center of her study is the ancient and antagonistic relationship between wolves and humans, a topic that has taken her on a journey from classical literature to the far-flung grasslands of the Rocky Mountains.

Ancient Attitudes

In the Northwest, old animosities have been rekindled as wolf packs have begun to return to the region. Oregonians had poisoned, shot and trapped the last native wolves by the 1940s. Now small wolf packs are recolonizing their ancestral homeland. According to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, there are currently five wolf packs in Oregon. A lone gray wolf appeared near Crater Lake National Park at the end of October for the first time in over 70 years. Oregonians’ reactions to the wolves’ return have been mixed. Naturalists cheer their arrival, while ranchers worry about the safety of livestock.

Eisenberg understands why wolves can make us nervous. As she explains, wolves are self-willed and powerful creatures. They don’t respect human boundaries. They’re big. They kill. They resist our ability to confine and control them. Wolves personify an intrinsic human fear of wildness.

Cristina Eisenberg is the author of The Wolf's Tooth: Trophic Cascades, Keystone Predators and Biodiversity, published by Island Press in 2010. (Photo courtesy of Cristina Eisenberg)

These fears, Eisenberg explains, have driven us to drastically transform the North American continent. Over the last two hundred years, humans have altered North American ecosystems by cutting down forests, killing large predators and extinguishing forest fires. Conservation biologists term this intentional, human alteration of their natural environment “dewilding.”

“Dewilding means to take away those things that humans don’t think that they can control, like fire; deep, dark, tangled forests; and predators,” Eisenberg says. Dewilding, she adds, destroys the natural system of checks and balances that regulates the relationships between predators and prey.

Through her research, she has explored how human fears of wolves, fire and forest have shaped our management of ecosystems. She traces our modern beliefs about wolves back to ancient attitudes. Greek and Roman naturalists, including Aristotle and Pliny the Elder, wrote books depicting large predators as the embodiment of wilderness. The Romans feared both wolves and fire for their powerful, uncontrollable natures.

Europeans, she found, strengthened this link between wolves and wildness. During the Middle Ages, wolves were deemed wyldeor, the “self-willed beasts.” Again, wolves became intrinsically linked to human perception of wilderness. For a more modern view, Eisenberg turned to 20th century Swiss psychoanalyst Karl Jung, who studied how humans had internalized a fear of wildness. According to his theories, wolves perfectly fit the universal “predator” archetype: powerful, vigorous and wild. Myths and stories, such as “Peter and the Wolf,” encouraged predator removal and reinforced this archetype. When the Europeans came to North America, Eisenberg says, they carried these beliefs with them, cleared forests to create farms and killed wolves to protect their homes.

Over time, these activities greatly weakened western North American ecosystems, she adds. She learned that in 1935, fifteen years after wolves had been eradicated from the state of Washington, ecologist Olaus Murie reported that the elk population had exploded on the Olympic Peninsula. Murie observed that the elk herds had over-browsed the vegetation in their habitat and prevented the growth of new foliage. Without new trees, there was no shelter for small birds, rodents and plants. Similarly, in 1998, ecologists Michel Soule and Reed Noss concluded that over-browsing by elk had led to the disappearance of beaver from Yellowstone National Park. Numerous species which had attracted Americans to the West had dwindled due to dewilding.

Gray Wolf captured by a remote camera in Waterton Lakes National Park (Photo courtesy of Parks Canada and Cristina Eisenberg)

Driven by fear, says Eisenberg, Americans had dewilded the West without realizing the full consequences. “We thought that we would prosper if we made the continent a safe place to be. We did all of this with the best of intentions, not understanding what we were doing. It‘s counterintuitive that these big scary forces of nature — wolves, fire — are exactly the things that we need to have full, resilient ecosystems.”

Restoration Through “Rewilding”

As a conservation biologist, Eisenberg hopes that she and others can counter human dewilding with natural “rewilding.” The term “rewild” is used by conservation biologists to describe intentional human efforts to restore damaged ecosystems. Rewilding, Eisenberg says, supports North American ecosystems by promoting wildlife management policies that protect intact systems and stabilize weakened ones.

Her field work takes her to the vast grasslands of northern Montana, where she counts elk, collects wolf scat and measures aspen growth. In the meadows that she has studied, Eisenberg has found that aspen trees are returning to their areas of historic abundance. Over the years, her research has shown that the presence of wolves can transform meadows back into forests by reducing the browsing pressure on young trees. She also studies how other factors, such as the occurrence of wildfires, contribute to ecosystem health.

As wolves return to the western United States, the biodiversity of these ecosystems appears to be increasing, as shown by the research of ecologists such as OSU’s Bill Ripple. These findings give Eisenberg hope that humans can repair the ecological damages incurred over the past two hundred years. “Knowing what we do today about how beneficial wolf presence is to whole ecosystem processes, it is in our best interests to allow wolves to settle as many places as is practical,” she says.

Ultimately, Eisenberg is confident that humans can live peacefully alongside wolves. While her historical studies have shown her the challenges of wolf and human relations, she believes that humans can overcome their historic fears. Our primitive ancestors, she explains, co-evolved to live with large predators. “I believe we can coexist with far more wolves than we may think in places like Oregon and thus help realize the full ecological benefits of this natural recolonization.”

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Learn more about top predators and their influence on trophic cascades in High Alert.

Read Eisenberg’s reflection on studying wolves, On Red Owl Mountain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interviews in the Smoke

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Out of Compliance

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time for the Opera

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A descendant of the King Island community, OSU anthropologist Deanna Kingston leads a team documenting the island's natural and cultural history. (Photo courtesy of Deanna Kingston)

King Island, a two-and-a-half-mile long garrison of rock jutting up out of the Bering Sea, is now uninhabited. But Native Americans lived there for centuries and created a rich culture that still survives among the King Island community on the mainland. Kingston is interviewing native elders from the community as part of a National Science Foundation-funded effort to document the cultural ecology, biogeography and the traditional ecological knowledge of the island.

“All I was looking for was just a list of names,” she told an audience May 2 at Oregon State University’s Center for the Humanities, “but whenever they talked about a particular name they told a story about it.”

An anthropologist, Kingston saw those stories as research questions.

“We’re going with the assumption that if they created folklore about it, that bird must have been important in some way to the people,“ she said. “Why it is important is the question I want to answer.”

Crested and least auklets, King Island (Photo: Kim Nelson)

To help her, Kingston brought in Kim Nelson, an ornithologist with the OSU Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. Nelson was excited because the King Island colonies of auklets, murres and kittiwakes had not been previously studied. “It’s a significant colony,” she said. “It has hundreds of thousands of birds. Nobody has done any research on the island.”

Most of the academic literature concerning the island’s wildlife has to do with the walrus and seals that the islanders hunted. But the stories that Kingston documented showed that the migrating seabirds living on the island from spring to fall also played a large part in the lives of the inhabitants.

Spring brings seabirds and a welcome respite from a diet of marine mammals. King Islands ate both the meat and the eggs of birds. So happy were the islanders to see the first arrival, the snowbird, that stories about them credit the birds with creating people.

Similarly, cormorants, the last birds to leave in the fall, also feature prominently in King Island stories.
Kingston and Nelson documented these stories along with the native bird names and colony place names and created a guide to the birds of King Island.

Kingston is conducting a similar effort on the island’s flora with OSU biologist Jesse Ford. She hopes to include fisheries and marine mammals if funding will allow.

Kim Nelson is co-author of an online book, Guide to the Birds of King Island (Photo courtesy of Kim Nelson)

For Nelson, the experience changed how she will work in the future. Nelson told the audience that involvement with local indigenous peoples will be part of her approach to new study sites from now on. “Ornithologists hunted for Marbled Murrelet nests for a hundred years,” she said. It wasn’t until after they were located in coastal old-growth forests that scientists found artwork by local Indians showing the birds nesting in trees, not the offshore cliffs where ornithologists had been looking.

“They knew,” she said, “but nobody bothered to ask them.”

Finally someone is bothering to ask.

On May 13, 2011, Kingston and Nelson gave a talk on their King Island research at the Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Ecosystem Sustainability Conference at OSU.

But Yeats, an emeritus professor in geosciences at Oregon State University, has been mapping fault lines for more than 40 years and can tell you when a quake is overdue. And he can tell you what areas of the world are most likely to suffer the greatest impact when one occurs.

Robert Yeats has led public workshops in earthquake-prone areas around the world.

So it wasn’t a fluke when Yeats told a reporter from Scientific American last year that Port-au-Prince straddled a time bomb, not a week before a magnitude 7.0 earthquake devastated the city. Yeats drew his conclusion from decades of mapping fault zones around the world and from understanding that when builders ignore geological processes, things can go horribly awry.

“I don’t have any second sight. It’s something anyone working on this problem would be aware of,” says Yeats. “It’s just a question of, ‘Do you keep that to yourself, or do you tell people about it?’”

Yeats has crafted a good portion of his career around telling people about it. Consider it his personal mission, but Yeats isn’t into doom. He’s wants to make sure that people recognize the danger and do something about it.

That’s why he wants people to participate in the Great Oregon ShakeOut, the first statewide earthquake drill on Jan. 26. Yeats helped champion the event to increase the public’s awareness of what a major earthquake would be like. But his involvement runs even deeper than that. The ShakeOut might not have come to Oregon at all if it hadn’t been for OSU researchers, including Yeats, who in the mid-1980s were among the first to suggest that Oregon is subject to massive subduction zone earthquakes.

79 and Active

Yeats, who is 79 years old and still active in earthquake research, has played a key role in the field. His technique of using oil-well data to map faults in three dimensions has provided the Northwest with a more detailed look at the extensive, active fault network in the region. It also gave Yeats a niche in mapping faults worldwide: No one had used the wealth of oil-well data to identify volatile seismic areas.

His outreach work has been passionate and consistent for more than 20 years. He has written books about earthquakes for non-scientists. He’s taught students from California to the Northwest about earthquake risk. He’s advised governments and community groups. He’s made sure his findings and practical advice have received news media attention.

Meanwhile, Yeats’ protégés have made groundbreaking discoveries. To date, he has mentored more than 50 graduate students. Among them is OSU professor of marine geology and geophysics Chris Goldfinger, whom Yeats advised during the latter’s graduate studies at OSU. Goldfinger has used Yeats’ mapping techniques in part to demonstrate that the Northwest has experienced repeated, significant earthquakes over the past 10,000 years — and that we will experience them again. Goldfinger also models the paths that tsunamis could take if they strike the Northwest coast after a major Cascadia subduction zone quake.

“A lot of scientists stay detached from the meaning of what they do, and from the outcome. Bob didn’t have that barrier,” says Goldfinger. “I like the personal model that makes everything tie together and be more relevant to what you do every day. And Bob’s still doing that.”

Another of Yeats’ former students is Andrew Meigs, OSU associate professor of geology, who is carrying on Yeats’ 30 years of work in the Pakistani Himalayas.

Yeats finds hope for the future in OSU research on earthquake and tsunami awareness. “OSU is really a leader in this arena,” he says. It leads to practical applications: tsunami evacuation plans and earthquake resistant bridges.

Yeats has been so important to his students that 30 of them donated a total of $500,000 to create an endowed professorship in his honor.

Get Ready and ShakeOut

Saving lives is what the Great Oregon ShakeOut is about, and that’s why it’s important to Yeats.
On Jan. 26, thousands of people throughout Oregon participated in a drill to help them understand how to prepare for, respond to and recover from a catastrophic earthquake. The National Science Foundation, Federal Emergency Management Association and U.S. Geological Survey sponsored the event.

For Yeats, though, it isn’t enough. He wishes every Oregonian would participate. But considering that the last major Northwest earthquake occurred more than 300 years ago, it’s not only easy for people to overlook the threat, it’s nearly impossible for them to conceive of it.

At the Cascadia subduction zone, the Juan de Fuca plate dives beneath North America (illustration courtesy of the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries

“We had a really bad one in 1700, but that was forever ago to most people here,” Yeats says. Jan. 26, in fact, was the 311th anniversary of that big quake, which was so strong, it is believed to have altered the physical makeup of the Oregon and Washington coasts to a stunning degree. Written records from Japan, which was hit by a 30-foot tsunami, and geological evidence on the Oregon Coast detail its severity.

And that’s what Yeats wants people to understand. Severe earthquakes like that don’t just happen once in a region. They happen repeatedly, and the key to minimizing damage and casualties is realizing that the Northwest is a region rife with seismic activity — and being ready for it.

In other regions, the threat may feel real because large earthquakes have happened more recently. Californians have photos of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which led to a fire that devastated the city. They have images of the Cypress Street Viaduct collapsing in 1989’s Loma Prieta quake branded into their memories. They have their own experiences with waking in the night to shaking. It’s why more than 6 million California residents were expected to participate in their ShakeOut.

1971, San Fernando Valley

California earthquakes, in fact, were instrumental in Yeats’ transformation from geologist to messenger. In 1971, he was teaching at Ohio University after working as a petroleum geologist for Shell Oil in southern California. In February of that year, a catastrophic earthquake struck the San Fernando Valley, where he had thought of relocating his family. “It just shows how fate works,” Yeats says. “If I had moved there, my wife and children would have all been there, in their house. And possibly in danger of losing their lives.”

It made Yeats think of all the mapping data he and others were amassing for the oil industry, and using it to determine where the most volatile fault lines were throughout the world. For the next three decades, mapping faults in three dimensions became Yeats’ specialty. It carried him to a department head position at Oregon State in 1977 and around the world, from New Zealand to Afghanistan to Japan.

But Yeats began to wonder if publishing papers and discussing his findings with the scientific community was enough. “I realized what we did — mapping faults — people needed to know about, whether it’s the citizens of Port-au-Prince or the Oregon Coast,” Yeats says. “Because we have a hazard there, and we have to take it seriously and do the preparations necessary so people won’t get killed.”

Once the scientific community understood that there was an earthquake hazard in the Northwest, a conclusion in which Yeats was instrumental, he began to educate the public. He sent the message through news releases and talked to reporters about the potential for Cascadia subduction zone earthquakes. In the mid-80s, he was raising public awareness of earthquake problems in a region that was relatively quiet, unlike California.

Yeats created an undergraduate course at Oregon State called “Living with Earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest.” He taught students how the Northwest’s earthquake vulnerability was discovered and how society responded to that threat when it came to state legislation and to the practical aspects of daily life such as building codes and insurance premiums. The class also taught students how they could respond individually and within their communities to the threat.

Eventually, his notes turned into a book of the same name, published by the OSU Press in 1998. “The book, now in a second edition published in 2004, focuses on getting people to do simple things,” Yeats says. “Bolt older houses to the foundation. Make sure there’s a wrench near the intake valve on your gas meter. Have a disaster plan.”

Although Yeats wrote the book for students, it reached a wider audience: legislators, high school principals, local officials and emergency managers. And it’s still in print, just as his class is still being taught online and in the classroom. Yeats recently gave a copy of the book to the city manager of Bend, Ore., a city that straddles an active fault line.

In 2001, Yeats published the even more ambitious, “Living with Earthquakes in California.” The book describes how California admitted to its “earthquake problem” and helps communities and individuals to prepare.

Yeats also talks to local groups and consults with cities all over the region about infrastructure and new development projects. He’d like Oregon to catch up with California in terms of seismic awareness. “Oregon has upgraded building codes, but we still need to do what California has done and make an inventory of unsafe buildings. Oregon has not done that,” Yeats says.

2011, Cannon Beach to Kabul

But towns in Oregon, such as Seaside and Cannon Beach, regularly conduct tsunami drills with elementary school students. Statewide, and the Department of Geology and Mineral Industries is taking the lead in raising earthquake awareness. “I’d say the general person on the street is aware that we’re in earthquake country. When I first came here, that wasn’t the case,” Yeats says. “Oregon’s had some real leadership, but we have a long way to go.”

Yeats says he can get through to some people, but alerting the public to a potential danger isn’t the same as telling them about a danger that has a date, time and place. And telling people doesn’t mean they’ll listen. It’s a dilemma he’s faced throughout his professional career. It’s human nature, Yeats says, to be unable to appreciate a threat that seems abstract, or that might happen centuries into the future. It’s a little like the children’s book character Chicken Little warning that the sky is falling.

“You ask people the same questions you’d ask the president of Haiti a week before the quake: ‘You’re on a fault running outside your city. It’s going to go. It’s going to kill a lot of people.’ But they say, ‘Is it going to happen during my term of office? You’re not sure? Thanks for your time.’ Can you blame them?” he asks.

Yeats persists in this frustrating mission because, he says, “People are responsive, but the general public has to be reminded, and you have to keep reminding them.”

His latest book, Active Faults of the World, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2011. The book is part of an international collaboration to create an online worldwide active-fault database. With it, Yeats hopes he can help prompt officials in other earthquake “time bomb” spots — Kingston, Jamaica; Tehran, Iran; Kabul, Afghanistan; Karachi, Pakistan — to take precautionary action. He hopes his message reaches people before it’s too late.

Researchers at Oregon State University – who in the mid-1980s were among the first in the nation to suggest that Oregon is subject to massive subduction zone earthquakes – have helped define the faults placing Oregon residents at most risk, supported efforts to boost building codes, and more recently have studied earthquake disasters all over the world to identify what makes the difference between tragedy and survival.

“It’s been a long struggle to convince Oregonians that these risks are real, that it will happen here and we have to prepare for it,” said Bob Yeats, a professor emeritus of geology at OSU and international leader in earthquake science and history. “Earthquakes can’t be predicted with any precision, but they can be prepared for, we can save lives, and the Oregon ShakeOut is a great thing to help raise the awareness of what we should do.”

That preparation, OSU experts say, should be reflected in everything from personal knowledge to homeowners analyzing the risk areas in their own residences, disaster plans, community infrastructure, well-enforced building codes, zoning considerations and better public awareness of risks.

Yeats wrote a book published in 2004, Living with Earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest, which outlines in more detail many of the same issues that will be explored in the Great Oregon ShakeOut.

The catastrophic event a year ago in Haiti provides perhaps the most vivid illustration of earthquake disasters, and a 7.2 magnitude earthquake in southwest Pakistan on January 19 was a reminder of the Earth’s near-constant tectonic activity. But these events are just some of many and can have markedly different results.

• In 2003, an earthquake of magnitude 6.6 occurred on a strike-slip fault near Bam, Iran, which was constructed largely of aging mud/brick structures. Almost 90 percent of the buildings were destroyed and almost 40,000 people died, nearly one out of every four residents.

• A few days later, the San Simeon earthquake in California hit on a reverse fault with magnitude 6.5. No buildings with even partial seismic retrofitting collapsed, and only two people died.

“We saw essentially the same thing with the recent 7.1 earthquake in New Zealand, where they have strong building codes and no one died,” Yeats said. “And of particular interest for us in Oregon should be the Chilean subduction zone earthquake last February, which was huge at magnitude 8.8 and is quite similar to what we may expect on the Oregon Coast during its next subduction zone quake.”

According to Scott Ashford, professor and head of the School of Civil and Construction Engineering at OSU, Chile is actually a case of what Oregon should aspire to.

This image shows the general motion of Pacific Northwest landforms as the terrain is squeezed and moved by tectonic forces. (Graphic courtesy of Rob McCaffrey, Bob King and Suzette Payne, Portland State University)

“Because it has had subduction zone earthquakes with much more frequency than the Pacific Northwest, the buildings, roads and infrastructure in Chile are actually more earthquake resistant than here in Oregon,” Ashford said.

“There was loss of life in Chile, but all things considered they did pretty well in maintaining what I think of as their lifelines, the roads, bridges, power supplies and other things that you most urgently need in a disaster,” he said. “We haven’t made the progress in that area that we should, and I think we’re already starting to forget some of the lessons and awareness we had just a year ago after the Chilean quake.”

Ashford said a good first step would be to assess all of the state’s vulnerabilities in the event of a major earthquake, and then prioritize which areas to tackle first with whatever funding can be made available.

Things could be worse, and in many parts of the world they are. Later this spring Yeats will publish another book, Active Faults of the World, which will explore the many cities around the world which have the potentially disastrous combination of poor construction practices, heavy population and major, active earthquake faults. Ranging from Kabul (Afghanistan), to Karachi (Pakistan), Istanbul (Turkey), Tehran (Iran), Caracas (Venezuela), and Kingston (Jamaica), there are many more tragedies waiting to happen.

The good news, OSU researchers say, is that Oregon, like Chile, does not fit that desperate category – but that’s not saying there isn’t room for improvement.

“As this statewide drill illustrates, we’re just now beginning the type of widespread, public education about earthquake risks and preparation that we’ve needed for a long time,” Yeats said. “That should continue permanently, but there’s also more that could be done.”

Among possible improvements, the OSU researchers said, might be:

• Crustal faults in Oregon, aside from the Cascadia Subduction Zone, should be better identified;

• It could be required that the sites of proposed construction be evaluated for earthquake fault and landslide hazards, as is done in California;

• The landslide risks associated with earthquakes should also be better considered in housing, road and infrastructure decisions;

• More attention should be paid to “lifeline” infrastructure such as electricity and gas supplies, water and sewers, roads and bridges;

• Existing programs of seismic retrofitting should be encouraged and expanded;

• More work could be done with LiDAR sensing technology to identify faults and landslides, which is available in Western Oregon through the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries;

• Efforts should be expanded to educate not just residents but also tourists on the Oregon Coast about the risks and disaster plans associated with subduction zone earthquakes and resulting tsunamis. Many of those who died in the Chilean earthquake were tourists on summer vacation.

Although the subduction zone earthquake issues have gotten most of the recent headlines, Yeats said, the risks from crustal faults in the Pacific Northwest should not be underestimated. The Corvallis Fault runs right underneath a local high school and through residential areas. The Portland Hills Fault runs through downtown Portland. It’s not known whether either of these faults is active or not.

Similar crustal faults underlie both Tacoma and Seattle, the other two major urban areas in the two states, and in one case near Seattle a major public works facility is being built right on top of a fault.

“There are people all over the Pacific Rim who understand and have prepared for earthquake disasters they know will happen,” Yeats said. “Now we’re gaining a better understanding of those risks here in Oregon and Washington. There’s still a lot to do, but it’s a good start.”