Harmony or the Moon
How do we want to live in relation to our world and what price are we willing to pay in pursuit of that end? In the Galapagos Islands these questions look quite different to those who see the islands as a place to live, a laboratory, a source of natural resources, or a tourism magnet. UO associate professor of journalism Carol Ann Bassett lived for a time on the islands and describes her experiences in Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin’s Cradle of Evolution (National Geographic Books, 2009). Bassett read from the book on campus in June.
In December 2007 I move to the town of Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz Island and rent a little bungalow just off Academy Bay. It’s a private house, surrounded by a white stucco wall. Its garden is graced with an almond tree and a feathery acacia with blossoms the color of fire. An alarm clock isn’t needed: Every morning at dawn, yellow warblers whistle down through the trees. The patio consists of black volcanic cinder mined from a cone on the other side of the island. From the terrace upstairs I can watch magnificent frigate birds circle the bay, pirating sardines from each other in mid-flight. Blue-footed boobies dive beak first into the turquoise waves, their bodies stretched out like daggers. During mating season, marine iguanas sometimes emerge from the bay and waddle like toy-size dinosaurs into the street, forcing taxi drivers on Avenida Charles Darwin to slam on their brakes. In the morning I can sit in my yard and watch lava lizards do pushups, or welcome Darwin’s finches so unfazed by my presence that they alight on the table and peck at my toast.
My house has tile floors, a beamed ceiling, and oval windows whose wooden frames open out into the yard. Their odd design means they can’t be screened. But it’s scorching hot in December, with humidity to match, so they remain wide open. I must admit I have had a lifelong aversion to mosquitoes: Their stings welt into the size of a dime and the itching can last up to ten days. To my horror, during my first few weeks in town, mosquitoes invaded my house and seemed bent on devouring me. Then the first rains came, and with them an onslaught of other insects. Tiny ants marched single file up my walls, hauling the lacy green wing of a beetle. Cockroaches the size of B-52 bombers emerged from nowhere. When darkness fell, flying ants entered through my unscreened windows by the hundreds, attracted to the lights. They didn’t sting, so I watched in fascination as whole colonies clacked around inside my rice-paper lanterns. When they began dive-bombing my computer and its lighted keyboard, I freaked. I ran to the kitchen and grabbed a can of odorless insecticide that the owner of the home had left beneath the sink. As I blasted away, winged ants fell to the floor in heaps. I plopped on the couch with my head in my hands, surveying the carnage. Then, looking up, I saw a small gecko emerge from a crack in the wall. I tried to shoo it away, but it was too late. The round-toed reptile had just nabbed a few ants with its lightning-quick tongue before vanishing, probably to die of liver failure.
What had I done, and how was I supposed to behave as a member of Homo sapiens in the world-famous Galapagos Islands? I’d been here less than a month and was already at war with nature. The irony is that all these unwelcome “house guests” were invasive species brought here from elsewhere, and they now pose one of the greatest threats to the islands. But wasn’t I also an intruder?
To protect my computer equipment, and my sanity, I installed two small air-conditioning units in my house. I justified this carbon footprint by convincing myself that my lifestyle in the Galapagos was more benign than my living pattern back home in Oregon. In Puerto Ayora I had no car; I walked or rode a bicycle. Nor did I have an oven, microwave, iron, dishwasher, fireplace, washer, dryer, or Jacuzzi. Even so, I had joined the ranks of those who had failed to adapt to this so-called garden of Eden.
With air-conditioning, the mosquitoes no longer entered my house. This was good: dengue fever had arrived in the Galapagos a few years earlier, and medical experts say it’s only a matter of time before West Nile virus and avian flu arrive. There is also the threat of canine distemper, a disease that can jump species from dogs to sea lions. In 2001 canine distemper killed most of the dogs in the Galapagos but did not affect pinnipeds.
As I looked deeper into these issues, I asked myself on a daily basis: Are the Galapagos really more special than other places? Or are they one example among many microcosms that exist on this fragile planet we call home? I had to conclude that they are unique. Scientists have now said farewell to the Holocene and have rung in a new epoch. They’ve dubbed it the Anthropocene—a human-dominated age in which urban industrial society has contributed to global warming, mass extinctions, the displacement of species and cultures, and the depletion of nonrenewable resources. The impacts, they say, are permanent; the course of evolution itself has been thrust into the great unknown.
The Galapagos Islands now stand at a critical crossroads: To heal and endure as one of the world’s most intact natural museums, or to lose most of their biodiversity to human encroachment, just as the islands of Hawaii and Guam have. As longtime naturalist guide and dive master Mathias Espinosa told me one day on Isabela Island, “This is our last chance to live in harmony with nature. If nature loses this battle then our species—Homo sapiens—is condemned to pack our backpacks and live on the moon.”
Life in the Fast Lane
The freedom, the power, the speed—cars are so cool. At the same time, these modern wonders accounted for the deaths of some thirty million people in the twentieth century—twice as many as died in World War I (civilian and military) and roughly 10,000 times the number of victims of the 9-11 attacks—according to historian Brian Ladd in his book Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age (University of Chicago Press, 2008), which explores humanity’s complex relationship with the car. Ladd, the UO’s Benjamin H. and Louise L. Carroll Visiting Professor of Urbanization, delivered this year’s Carroll Lecture, titled, “How Cars Conquered Our Cities.” A portion of the book is excerpted below.
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Image of Miss Agnes Gahan’s automobile, which ran over a boy on Jackson Boulevard in Chicago, Illinois, 1907.
“Only connect” is E. M. Forster’s famous motto from his 1910 novel
Howards End. In it, the obstacles to Margaret Schlegel’s ardent desire to maintain her life as a coherent whole often come calling in the motorcars that move restlessly in the background of the story. Not only do automobile trips disrupt Margaret’s struggle to make sense of the time and space of her life, they also seem to rupture whatever harmony still governs social relations, provoking rich motorists to brutal inhumanity as they treat other people as nothing but hindrances.
It is easy to dismiss Forster’s portrait of motorists’ coarse behavior as the grousing of another articulate reactionary distressed by the democratization of mobility. Cars, we might conclude, simply appealed to the sort of people Forster didn’t like—the very sort who ended up shaping the twentieth century. Yet the roadkill of history—technophobes mourning a lost world and snobs blustering about good manners—were never alone in their qualms. Even enthusiastic motorists like Louis Baudry de Saunier and Adolf Schmal were honest enough to admit that automobiles often brought out the worst in people.
The opening scene of Robert Musil’s monumental novel
The Man without Qualities, published two decades after
Howards End, plays out on a Vienna street in 1913. A strolling couple stumbles upon the commotion following an automobile accident that has left a man lying motionless after being run over by a truck. “Somewhere between her heart and her stomach the woman had an unpleasant feeling which she was justified in believing to be sympathy. After a pause, the man said to her, ‘These heavy trucks that they use here have too long a braking distance.’ With this the woman felt relieved and she thanked him with an attentive glance. She had probably already heard this term from time to time, but she didn’t know what a braking distance was, and didn’t want to know. She was satisfied to bring this gruesome event into some kind of order and transform it into a technical problem that did not affect her directly.” Her salvation lies not in connecting, but in dissociating. To focus not on the anonymous victim, nor even on his broken body, but on the technological conditions of his demise, enables her to evade the pain that confronts her. The arrival of efficient ambulance attendants completes the process of turning an automobile accident into an orderly and rational event, and the escape from emotional reality is sealed with the addition of some fantastic (and utterly spurious) numbers: “‘According to American statistics,’ remarked the man, ‘190,000 people are killed there annually by autos, and 450,000 are injured.’”
The novel experience of speed and dissociation was at least as thrilling as it was frightening. Just as Musil’s modern woman does not want to “connect,” the birth of the automobile coincided with an artistic modernism that often exalted (or at least was awed by) the disconnectedness of modern life, and automotive journeys stimulated the modernist imagination. In a 1904 story, the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck praised the automobile as a magical creature that enabled speed to conquer space. This reordering of time and space helped shape modern literature through its effect on Marcel Proust, who expressed his fascination with automotive travel in a 1907 article for
Le Figaro and later worked the same impressions into his fiction. The speedy automobile, this “giant with the seven-league boots,” yanked the veil from some of the mysteries of the countryside even as it compressed his impressions of places once observed only at greater leisure. The ever-changing view from a moving car showed him a new way of composing a picture of his world by juxtaposing multiple perspectives of once-familiar sights. (Virginia Woolf offered a similar observation in her 1928 novel
Orlando, written just after she acquired her first car: “the process of motoring fast out of London so much resembles the chopping up small of body and mind, which precedes unconsciousness and perhaps death itself that it is an open question in what sense Orlando can be said to have existed at the present moment.”) Soon after Proust discovered the automobile, the Italian futurists credited automotive speed with inspiring the dazzling blur of their paintings, and at about the same time this process of fragmenting and reassembling perspectives also gave birth to cubism. An explicit painterly nod to the automobile was the 1916 Matisse painting of a landscape framed by a car windshield. Nor can the birth of the motion picture be separated from the view through the windshield: the automobile turned the landscape into a movie at the very time that film cameras began to capture automotive speed.
Neither the flickering of memory nor lamentation for a lost world accounts for the way most people greeted the automobile. Hundreds of millions have chosen to obsess over, sacrifice for, and spend a great deal of their time in their cars. A good portion of common sense and decency advises us simply to respect their choices. Yet car critics, even if they refrain from condemning the foolish masses, remind us that automobility comes at a price—that stepping into a car means giving up something, which is presumably why Forster’s fears have kept creeping back during the past century, like the guilt that haunts a hangover. Forster was not alone in his belief that the motorcar was uniquely suited to express the arrogance of the rich, and the democratization of driving has meant that we can all aspire to be petty tyrants of the road. In the end, the driver’s sense of sovereign mastery and the bystander’s perception of inhuman arrogance are two sides of the same coin. The abhorrence of cars is inseparable from their appeal.
For the Birds
The vast open spaces of southeast Oregon draw thousands of bird watchers each year. In Afield: Forty Years of Birding the American West (Oregon State University Press, 2009), Alan Contreras ’82, J.D. ’85, reflects on the state’s most storied birding Mecca. Contreras is a past president of Oregon Field Ornithologists and edited Birds of Lane County, Oregon (Oregon State University Press, 2006) and Birds of Oregon: A General Reference (Oregon State University Press, 2003).
PHOTO COURTESY OF ALAN CONTRERAS
Contreras, in vest, and fellow birders at Kiger Gorge Overlook near Burns, Oregon
There is no place like it. The ultimate pilgrimage for Oregon birders and one that is immensely satisfying for anyone interested in the natural world, Malheur National Wildlife Refuge lies at 4,000 feet in the high desert at the northern end of the Great Basin. This area is sometimes thought of as an empty place, even a sterile place. The desert is neither empty nor sterile; indeed it is full of life adapted to its requirements. A place like Malheur, though, provides that crucial factor, that astonishing change agent,
water. In some years there isn’t much, in other years there is too much. Sir Stephen Spender described his life in the early twentieth century in an autobiography entitled
World within World. That title could as well describe the consequence of water in the desert.
I first saw Malheur in the late summer of 1970. Fabled Malheur was, at that time, characterized mainly by tall grass behind which even large languid birds could hide, and a disheartening number of mosquitoes, all of which behaved as though they had not eaten for weeks. Nonetheless my companions and I visited the northern part of the refuge and such delights as American Avocets, Black-necked Stilts, and Sandhill Cranes were photographed after a fashion, as were Black Terns and Willets standing on posts.
In that innocent time, birders (the term was then fairly new) had not yet begun systematically milking the groves of trees at the refuge for eastern vagrants [birds found outside their expected territory]. This tactic became standard procedure by the late 1970s and today it seems that each tree and shrub in the Sacred Grove at refuge headquarters has its own reputation as ancient as Middle Earth, and an accompanying proper name, e.g. The Morning Trees, The Spruce, The Hedge.
I missed a year or two of Malheur trips when I was in college but otherwise I have been to Malheur at least once a year, sometimes three or four times, for over thirty years. I have been there close to a hundred times. I will go there as long as I can. I will eventually go there permanently: my ashes will be scattered there. Why? What is so special about Malheur that brings me back to the mosquitoes, the dust, the hard water and thunderstorms? The only possible answer is “everything.”
There are, of course, the birds. It is likely that more species of birds can be seen and heard from the front lawn of Malheur headquarters than from any other single location where an observer can stand in Oregon, perhaps in the whole northwestern quarter of North America. Every migrant passerine species crossing the Great Basin, with a few exceptions that use only specialized habitat, stops in the horseshoe of trees that shelters the headquarters complex. Even some of the supposedly specialized species stop in—for example the Canyon Wren that spent a day exploring the roof of the bunkhouse. Every waterbird, hawk, owl, and hummingbird that passes through eastern Oregon is probably visible at some time from that same lawn, by virtue of the fact that there is a large pond right below the lawn and the shores of the lake itself are visible by scope in the distance.
The headquarters complex is an oasis in two kinds of desert, a rare situation that acts as a magnet for any bird passing through the region. It is an oasis of trees in a region dominated largely by sagebrush desert with a few alfalfa fields. It is also an oasis of land bordered on the north by what is, in some years, the largest lake in Oregon. Any bird crossing that lake from the north will see one large grove of trees on its shore and go there. Any bird starting to cross that lake from the south under adverse weather conditions may well change its mind and double back to the shelter of the grove.
What makes Malheur such a special draw for birders is that it is one of those places that is, as a whole, far greater than the sum of its parts. The parts alone take days to observe and enjoy, and even then it is possible to visit only a portion of the refuge complex. For many Oregon birders, myself included, going to Malheur is both a birding experience and a sort of spiritual retreat.
One reason that the refuge has this special place in many birders’ lives is that it is rather isolated, 300 miles from Oregon’s population centers, hemmed in on three sides by cliffs and hills, with the vast shield of Steens Mountain filling the sky to the southeast, providing part of the valley’s water from snowmelt. Away from the northern part of the refuge, many cell phones reach nothing and a person who chooses to be alone in the desert or valley can do so most of the year.
The Malheur Field Station, a collection of old Job Corps buildings and Eisenhower-era house trailers dropped in 1964 apparently from the sky onto bare sage desert a few miles from refuge headquarters, has a couple of phones in the main buildings, but the rooms and trailers rented by guests have no connections to the outside world. There are no televisions, no phones, no radios. Anyone who brings any of these with them will find that there is not much reason to have done so. The station added wi-fi service in 2007; whether that is a virtue remains to be seen, but I am cautiously optimistic.
Malheur in the fall has equal charms as a birding destination and a place for contemplation. For in the fall, if you go to the field station or any other reasonably isolated place, you will hear that rarest of sounds in our modern world: silence. An evening at the field station in late September, when most of the tourists have gone and only a few birders are around, can be a time of extraordinary beauty and quiet, when literally no sounds can be heard for many long minutes, even half an hour or more. There is just the sky, the sage, the backdrop of Steens Mountain, and the occasional rabbit passing by.
Thank You, Sir, May I Have Another?
Many of us can remember scenes or quote favorite lines from the film Animal House, shot on location in Eugene during the fall of 1977, but few of us can say we appeared in the movie. Martin Klammer ’80 recalls his days working as an extra on the Animal House set in this essay, “Inside the Animal House.” Klammer is now a professor of African studies and English at Luther College in Iowa.
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The late actor John Belushi, as John “Bluto” Blutarsky, getting make-up applied on the set of National Lampoon’s Animal House in 1978.Sometimes when I ask students to hand in their overdue writing assignments, I’m tempted to mimic Donald Sutherland playing the college professor in the 1978 movie Animal House. “I’m not joking,” he begs. “This is my job!”
I know the line well not because I’ve seen the movie a dozen times, but because I was in the room when he said it.
Thirty years ago I was an English major at the University of Oregon in Eugene, one of 2,000 student hopefuls trying out as extras in the film and hoping our Hollywood good looks would catch the eye of talent scouts. We were herded into the main hall of the student union and marched past a tribunal of casting personnel seated at a table, pointing us left or right like so many sheep and goats. I made it with about 200 other sheep, and I wasted no time asking why I was chosen.
“You’re tall and naïve looking,” the casting director told me. “That’s perfect for upperclassmen in the ‘good’ house.”
When I arrived that first day on the set—an actual fraternity with real frat boys coming and going as the lights and cameras were moved into place—my assigned “upperclassman” role changed at the mere whim of director John Landis. He was handing out beanies to four or five extras he thought would make good freshman pledges.
“Here, put this on,” he said to me, holding out a little blue-and-yellow cap.
“I’m not a pledge, sir,” I said. “I’m an upperclassman.”
“You’re a pledge now,” he said. I took the beanie and put it on. “You look great!” He slapped me on the shoulder, smiling.
For the first couple of days I helped fill in the background of the pretentious Omega House party where Douglas Niedermeyer introduces Pinto and Flounder to his frat brothers. I appear for a millisecond in the background when the door opens—“There! There I am!”—and a few seconds later at the party. I’m chatting with “fraternity brothers” and munching on what I think are hors d’oeuvres. Actually, the food was plastic, a fact I discovered only after mashing an especially rigid spear of broccoli.
At the end of the second day Landis told us four beanie-wearing pledges to strip to our underwear for an initiation scene. I was mortified. No one told me this was part of the job. I’d never been seen by girls in my underwear—not even my mom! I looked down at my tighty-whities. They were frayed at the waistband and, here I confess, a tad discolored. I considered telling Landis I couldn’t do it.
But then I thought, “Hey, what if this movie becomes famous? I could become famous—well, sort of.”
I walked over to the assistant director.
“Uh. I’d like to do this, but I don’t have the right kind of shorts.”
“Good gawd.” He gave me an exasperated look then walked over to the president of the actual fraternity where we were filming and commanded him to produce a pair of clean shorts. Within minutes I was sporting a pristine pair of briefs, courtesy of Mr. Fraternity President or some poor novitiate he coerced into forfeiting his undies. Students ask me if I appeared in Animal House in my underwear, and I tell them honestly, “No, not in my underwear.”
Fans of the film know this as the “Sir, yes sir, may I have another” scene. A young Kevin Bacon plays an initiate bent over in his briefs getting paddled by black-hooded brothers and asking for more. Four of us extras, two on each side, kneel motionless at attention, hands at our sides, eyes straight ahead.
During the shooting of this scene a lighting problem delayed us. While waiting for that to get fixed, I donned a winter jacket and sat protectively behind an empty couch. Like out of some wacky dream, just at that moment Julian Bond walked in and sat on the couch in front of me. He was giving a lecture that night and apparently had been invited to the set by John Belushi after having guest-hosted Saturday Night Live a few weeks earlier.
Not one to waste an educational opportunity, I introduced myself to Mr. Bond from behind the couch and began to engage him in a thoughtful political discussion, visible only from the waist up. We talked about apartheid and I remember asking him if he planned to run for Congress. He seemed to enjoy our chat, or maybe he didn’t have a choice. When Landis called us back to our places, I jumped up and peeled off the jacket, revealing my all-but-naked skinny white torso to a visibly shocked Julian Bond.
I worked ten days as an extra, earning about $250. I learned to drink coffee as a way to keep myself awake between the time we were asked to be on the set (7:00 a.m.) and when the stars arrived, several hours later. I made a few friends and learned how much of filmmaking is just standing around. I also learned to juggle from the actor Jamie Widdoes, the “president” of Delta House.
For my final stint I spent four days in the small town of Cottage Grove on the set of the parade scene. I’m one of the parade marshals in full military dress, though I’ve never been able to find myself in this segment of the film. During a break from the shooting, several of us “marshals” walked into a bar where World War II vets kept buying us drinks even though we kept telling them we weren’t really soldiers.
Several of the parade days were rainy, and during one storm about 300 of us extras found shelter in the Catholic church basement. Most of the extras were senior citizens, and soon a bingo game started up and I was designated as caller. I asked the seniors, “Do you want to play just for fun or for money?” “Money! Money!” they yelled as one. For that little gig keeping the masses happy I got to eat lunch in the actors line, a sumptuous spread of catered gourmet foods far superior to the boxed lunches we extras usually ate.
My notoriety didn’t end with the movie. Playboy later included a still photo of the underwear scene in its review of the movie. Yes, Dolly Parton’s on the cover, but I’m on the inside. I’d like to think I’m the only college professor in the U.S. who’s appeared seminude in Playboy. But then again, I don’t really know.
News, Notables, Innovations
MICHAEL MCDERMOTTMeet the Pres
UO president Richard Lariviere got his first day on the job (July 1) off to an early and busy start, meeting UO groundskeepers at 5:30 a.m. He made morning stops at The Duck Store, the Department of Public Safety, and the Student Recreation Center followed by a press conference, lunch with the Faculty Advisory Council, and a tour of a molecular biology lab in Willamette Hall. He hosted University and community visitors at a well-attended late afternoon ice cream social on the lawn behind Johnson Hall, then spoke to the crowd. In the evening, he and his wife, Jan, had about forty students over to their rented home (McMoran House, the president’s residence, is undergoing some repair work) to meet the new president and eat pizza.
You can read Lariviere’s blog about these events and learn more about him at his website,
president.uoregon.edu.
Landscape Architecture
An Idea Floats on the Water Road
UO students help revive a derelict Kyoto canal.
On a beautiful day in late March 2009, the city of Kyoto is celebrating the reopening of its historic Horikawa Canal. Sunlight sparkles off the returning waters, flowing once again out of Lake Biwa. The gleam on the water matches the beaming faces gathered around the large podium. This triumph connects representatives from all parts of the community. The mayor of Kyoto, government officials, city planners, and neighborhood groups have joined together, like the links in the chains that pulled the barges along the 1,200-year-old waterway. University of Oregon landscape architecture professor Ron Lovinger and his former student, Daisuke Yoshimura ’90, are here as two of those links. This restoration arose from ideas they generated in Lovinger’s summer Kyoto design studio.
ILLUSTRATION COURTESY UO SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND ALLIED ARTS / CREATIVE COMMONS PHOTO BY RYOSUKE HOSOI
Top: a UO student architect’s rendering of a revitalized Horikawa Canal in Kyoto, Japan. Below: a portion of the completed project. in 1978.
The new canal, a 4.4 kilometer-long rill of shining water, nestles in the bottom of the older watercourse. “It’s really the memory of a canal,” says Lovinger. At intervals, inviting steps lead down to the narrow stream, now flanked by walkways on either side. Next to the walks, the granite walls of the ancient canal rise up to street level. Overhanging willows and wide-spreading zelkova trees shade passersby. The granite rock that edges the new rivulet echoes in miniature the older massive walls above. Stones for both were mined from the same quarry with centuries in between. On dedication day, people stroll next to the water, children scream and splash, and vendors sell goods on the upper levels of the banks, their brightly colored flags snapping in the spring breeze.
This park is meant to be enjoyed throughout the seasons. In spring, blossoms of Yoshino cherry trees shimmer along the channel. The cooling waters offer a respite from hot Kyoto summers. Autumn colors are followed by the starkly evocative pattern of bare branches—a sheltered nature sanctuary in an urban setting.
Floating the Idea
The workshop that fostered this design had its beginnings in 1975. That year Lovinger first traveled to Kyoto and met the Reverend Tsuda of Daishen-in, Myoshinji Temple. Their enduring friendship was the foundation for the six-week summer studio design sessions. Each year, Lovinger brings UO landscape architecture students to Kyoto. They study traditional gardens and contemporary urban landscape issues. The students live in a fourteenth century monastery and focus on creating plans for city-enhancing projects—restoring the landscape of a temple, for example, or designing interactive playgrounds. The finished plans are presented to the city, graciously accepted, and neatly filed away for . . . the future.
Daisuke Yoshimura brought the canal restoration idea to the summer session when he joined the group as an undergraduate in 1989. Unlike his colleagues who were meeting a new culture for the first time, Yoshimura was returning home. His family has lived next to the Horikawa Canal for more than 300 years and he was born and raised there. For seven generations the Yoshimura’s stone masonry business had been served by the canal.
The history of the Horikawa Canal (
horikawa means
water road) and the rise of Kyoto are intertwined. Constructed 1,200 years ago, the canal was originally used for irrigation, as well as the transportation of timbers from the northern mountains. It was a source of clean water in the heart of the city. New industries for Kyoto, like textile dyeing and the Japanese tea culture, flourished along its banks. In 1895 the first tram car in Japan ran alongside the canal, and the main street of modern Kyoto is named Horikawa. But by the 1950s, water traffic had declined. The canal became a repository for sewer and storm-water runoff. Then all the flow was shunted away, the conduit drained. Yoshimura remembers playing as a young boy in the abandoned canal, hunting for tiny fish, bugs, and frogs in shallow rainwater pools. He says, “The canal was like a small natural oasis in the middle of the city.”
However, on that summer day in 1989, when Yoshimura took Lovinger to the banks of the canal, there was no sign of that oasis—no life left at all. The two men looked down on a dry concrete channel. Yoshimura said, “Let’s make this into a project.”
The summer studio didn’t take up the canal idea until 1996. In the meantime, Yoshimura had graduated with a bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture and married a fellow UO student, Diane Vaughn Yoshimura ’89. After four years in Kyoto, they settled in Carbondale, Colorado, starting Yoshimura Design, an architectural landscape firm. Each year, Yoshimura returned to Kyoto with Lovinger and the students. It took two summers to complete the canal restoration design. Because the waterway was so long, the plan drawing measured thirty feet in length, Yoshimura recalls. They presented the proposal to the mayor and city planners for review. And that’s where it would have been left—but this time, other forces were at work.
Water from the Ground Up
Yoshimura’s father, Seiji Yoshimura, was the director of a local community group working to see the area restored as parkland. Residents petitioned city hall. Family and friends and neighborhood groups donated money. The Rotary and the Lions clubs got on board. Support for the idea grew, but the project took off when government planners decided to hook the canal park restoration to a massive overhaul of the city’s infrastructure. Electricity, sewers, fiber-optic cable—all could be run in the bed of the old canal. The infrastructure cost $150 million and the canal restoration $18 million.
Lovinger had no idea the plans were going forward until two years ago, when he and Yoshimura received some of the contract drawings from Kyoto for a design review. Lovinger was skeptical. “I thought, my God, is this really going to happen?” A swift year later, the two men were invited to Kyoto for the festivities. Lovinger says, “I didn’t really believe it until the dedication.”
Lessons from the Water Road
The landscape workshops set an example of professional practice, Lovinger says. “We try as hard as possible to make students aware of public service to society.” Workshops allow these future landscape architects to engage in critical issues of urban planning. “You see something, you get on it. You don’t wait for someone else to do it.”
The Horikawa Canal restoration drawings were one link in a chain that brought the wishes of a community together, connecting pragmatic practicality with the beauty of the natural world. The same principles could apply in the United States. Why not connect infrastructure refurbishing with a mandate for creating natural beauty? Both serve the public. “Nature isn’t an object you can put a wall around,” says Lovinger. “It’s about connecting people to what is beautiful and exciting.” But more important, it’s about bringing life back to the city. Lovinger says, “What was desolate and dead becomes alive.”
—Mary-Kate Mackey
New Media
Glued to YouTube—Duck Style
Spend a little time exploring and a picture begins to emerge.
YouTube is known as a bastion of the goofy and mundane, home to sneezing pandas, thrift-store Jedis, and Diet Coke-plus-Mentos-equals-explosion. But search for “University of Oregon” and more familiar scenery appears on the screen: footage that might inspire nostalgia, or a certain Duckish pride. There are beautiful short films and documentaries here, crisply edited and stamped with the University seal of approval. But there’s DIY, hand-held footage too, which has its own particular grace. One video shows an oddly hypnotic stop-motion rendering of the walk from Hayward Field to McKenzie Hall. Another takes you to the center of the student section at Autzen, all yellow T-shirts and speakers-overloading noise.
Clockwise from top left: engineering fun with “climbables”; UO recruitment film, 1934; Street Faire attendees munching Dave’s Killer Bread; colorful chemistry; MC Stavitsky (AKA journalism professor Al Stavitsky) celebrating the success of Campaign Oregon; future entrepreneurs delivering “the elevator pitch.”
Of course, none of it is quite like actually being there. But then again, it’s all so immediate, right at your fingertips day or night, all free for the asking and without the need to wait for basketball season or to move back into a dorm or drive to Eugene. The University of Oregon is on YouTube. And it’s a good place to be.
It’s hard these days for the Internet-savvy to imagine a world without YouTube. But way back in early 2005, three PayPal employees noticed that the Internet lacked a quick and easy way to share videos. Nine months and one more Silicon-Valley-garage fairy tale later, YouTube.com was born, and immediately rocketed to a position of prominence in every web surfer’s procrastinatory arsenal. Today, YouTube is owned by Google Inc. (prompting the nickname “GooTube” in some circles) and is the third most heavily trafficked website on the planet.
The glory of YouTube, apart from its ability to mercilessly devour spare time, is its interconnectedness. The instant one video ends, a list of related videos pops up, low-hanging fruit for the eager mouse to nibble. One video leads to another, and then another, and soon you’ve fallen down the binary rabbit hole, wondering how on Earth a search for Rubik’s cube tutorials led you to something called “Advanced Cat Yodeling.”
But that same phenomenon can lead to amazing discoveries and unknown wonders. By searching for “University of Oregon” and repeatedly following one’s whims, a little conceptual map of the University experience begins to take shape. Thanks to enterprising student journalists and the ability to make video recordings on most cameras and cell phones, these days anything that’s noteworthy or unusual or entertaining on campus finds its way to YouTube. Protests and art installations, lectures and intramural matches, stump speeches and end-of-term performances. Sports highlight reels. Dorm pranks. Snow.
There’s the weird, the scandalous, the insightful, and the sublime. There are bikini model auditions, thoughtful interviews, sepia-toned archive footage, and stunning displays of athletic skill. There are student projects, made for classes or just for fun; parodied or parroted versions of sitcoms, news reports, music videos, and movie trailers. Students read the news in Mandarin, folk dance to German songs, interpret a Spice Girls classic in American Sign Language. Cheerleaders do handsprings, professors and grad students discuss their research advances, Pre wins another race, and a student, clad for unknown reasons in an inflatable cow suit, does a jiggly dance in the EMU amphitheater.
Added up, it is a reasonably apt portrait of what we all know and love and remember of the University, and our years there. It is a blend of the scholarly and the silly, the noteworthy and the mundane, the past and the present, and an understanding that the future may be stored here one day, too. And, most important, it’s a good place to explore, click on “play,” lean in, and smile.
—Mindy Moreland, M.S. ’08
A Walking Tour of the UO on YouTube
We begin with a delightfully stodgy sepia-toned film from 1934, a stentorian tour of the campus replete with extraordinarily precise details, including the construction cost of Mac Court: a whopping $203,604.
UO recruitment 1934
The UO’s YouTube is populated with dozens of paeans to the masters of the court and the gridiron, but here are also reminders of the awe-inspiring feats of strength and agility that other, lesser-known Ducks perform: check out the wushu team’s highlight reel.
Oregon wushu demo reel
Aspiring entrepreneurs give their “elevator pitch” in the atrium of the Lillis Business Complex. You may be just thirty seconds away from the Next Great Idea . . . or at least FratMart.
NVC Idea Elevator
This might be among the greatest homework assignments ever, once you understand that “experiments in spatial access structures” can be interpreted as “handmade playground equipment for adults.”
Climbables
Science! Oddly hypnotic science!
Experiment at the University of Oregon
Ever wonder what it’s like to play the Oregon fight song on a trumpet on the field at Autzen? Wonder no longer . . .
OMB pregame trumpet cam
Did you know that collegiate mascots have a competition every year in Vegas? Any guesses who won last year? Hmmm . . .
2008 Duck nationals skit
A candid look at students today, told through the eyes of one vendor at the semiannual Street Faire, complete with a cameo by Frog, everyone’s favorite joke-book peddler.
Street faire killer bread
And our last stop, a new addition, the lovely, silly, heartfelt film created to celebrate the close of Campaign Oregon. If you only watch one . . . this might be a good one.
U of O It's a Wrap!
Alan Dickman
Senior Instructor, Research Professor, and Director of the Environmental Studies Program
The late-October drizzle threatens to escalate into an early morning downpour as Alan Dickman, senior instructor in biology, coaxes a group of groggy forest-biology students out of a warm van and into the chill of the forest.
JOHN BAUGUESS
Their heavy boots make loud smacking sounds in the thick mud as Dickman leads the group deep into the damp woods. As they trudge in reverent silence, the trees become denser. They come to a stop, and Dickman’s voice rings through the centuries-old Douglas firs. The students furiously scribble notes as he talks about the forest’s genetic makeup, the movement of water in vegetation, decomposition, soil organisms, and long-term ecosystem change.
Dickman asks the students, most of whom are environmental science or biology majors, to look beyond the towering trees to closely observe the processes and structures that sustain life within the forest. “People often see old growth forests as unchanging,” Dickman, who directs the UO Environmental Studies Program, explains, “but really, the forests change, too. They just change at a different pace.”
The class hikes to several charred areas, black stumps rising above the ash-covered ground, witnessing firsthand the way fire affects the forest and various examples of post-fire growth. As the class hikes through the underbrush of the slowly healing forest, the greens and browns of the overgrown forest floor mix to create new colors, the smell of the damp moss and lichen wafts through the trees, and the sound of birds calling to one another echoes through the vast canopied expanse.
Each term, in addition to classroom lectures, campus tree identification walks, and a weekly lab, Dickman takes students on four weekend day-trips. He tailors the outings based on current forest conditions. In recent years topics have included climate change and the effects of forest management on Northwest salmon.
Leaving the woods at the end of the day, their boots soggy, backs tired, and notebooks full, the students possess a greater understanding of the ever-changing forest cycle.
Several of Dickman’s students have gone on to serve in the University’s environmental leadership program, where they work with local middle school students to inspire a passion for forest biology. Like the generational cycles they study in the ever-regenerating forest, the cycle of knowledge continues with each new group of students hooked on studying the sylvan environment.
Name: Alan Dickman
Education: Ph.D. ’84; B.A. ’72, University of California at Santa Cruz.
Teaching Experience: Member of the UO faculty since 1986. Curriculum director for Department of Biology, 1997–2006; director of the Environmental Studies Program since 2006.
Awards: UO Ersted Award, 1994; Thomas F. Herman Faculty Achievement Award for Distinguished Teaching, 2009.
Off campus: Dickman spends his spare time working in his vegetable garden, hiking, fly-fishing, and woodworking.
Last word: “Don’t miss the forest for the trees; the big picture is essential.”
— Melissa Hoffman
Fulbrights Aplenty
Six UO faculty members were named 2009–10 Fulbright scholars, including two from the Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management. Eight students received Fulbright student awards, the largest number of recipients in fifteen years. Fulbright funding supports international educational opportunities.
New Top Honor—“The Bowerman”
The U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association has chosen UO coaching legend Bill Bowerman as the namesake for a new annual award—equivalent to college football’s Heisman Trophy—to honor the nation’s most outstanding male and female track and field athletes.
Untempered Praise
Mary K. Rothbart, professor emerita of psychology, is the recipient of the American Psychological Foundation’s 2009 Gold Medal for Life Achievement in the Science of Psychology for her
“contributions to the development of the concept of temperament—the basic foundation of personality—[which] have been fundamental to the field of psychology.” Rothbart joined the UO in 1970 and retired in 2002.
Bach Festival Results
Ticket revenue from this year’s Oregon Bach Festival exceeded $439,000, a modest 12.5 percent dip from the record-setting season in 2008 and a 5 percent increase from ticket income in 2007. Three recent gifts worth a combined total of about $465,000 help position the festival on firm financial ground for 2010 and push the OBF’s Saltzman Endowment to $9.25 million, fast-approaching its goal of $10 million.
Research Park to Expand
The UO plans to break ground in August on an 80,000-square-foot building in the Riverfront Research Park to be occupied by the Oregon Research Institute (ORI) and the Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC). ORI, a nonprofit research center founded in 1960 by UO faculty members, conducts research and develops products focusing on adolescent depression, tobacco and drug use and prevention, chronic pain, and diet and exercise. EPIC, also a UO spin-off, consults with school systems nationwide to improve student transition to college. The $17 million privately funded building project will receive LEED silver energy-efficient certification and is scheduled for occupancy in September 2010.
