UpFront
Excerpts, Exhibits, Explorations, Ephemera
I Will Come at You Like a Dog | Apocalypse Here |
Making His Pointillism | Bookshelf
UpFront
News, Notables, Innovations
Home Sweet Biome | The Little Stove That Would |
Matthew Knight Arena Opens | In Brief | PROFile: Richard Taylor
Around The Block | From Ken’s Pen
I Will Come at You Like a Dog
In 2008 Jere Van Dyk ’68 crossed into the dangerous tribal areas on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, penetrating a no man’s land where Western journalists hadn’t ventured for years. Then things went very wrong. In Captive: My Time as a Prisoner of the Taliban he tells the story of his forty-five day captivity, along with three guides, mostly confined in a one-room cell, where the following excerpt takes place. His captors hoped to exchange Van Dyk for money and prisoners held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay. Gulob is the jailer; a maulavi is an Islamic religious leader. Van Dyk has been a reporter for The New York Times, CBS News, and National Geographic. At the UO, he ran track for Bill Bowerman ’34; he will return to campus to deliver the School of Journalism and Communication’s 2011 Ruhl Lecture on Wednesday, April 20, in the EMU Ballroom.
Gulob turned on the cassette player. The sound of a young man, with a high, lilting voice, singing a cappella, filled the room. It was a Taliban recruiting cassette.
“It begins with women taunting men,” he said.
“Give us your turbans/give us your swords/we will give you our shawls if you do not go on jihad.” A young male chorus sang, the voices melodic and lilting, of women imploring men to fight. In Pashtunwali [the ethical code of the local people], if a man is a coward in war, his wife or mother will reject him when he comes home. A man has to be strong. “We must think of the orphans and the widows.”
On and on they chanted. It was hypnotic. After a while, Gulob turned the tape off and turned to Samad. “Can one person’s kidney work in another person?” he asked. Samad said yes. “I don’t think so,” Gulob responded, “because another maulavi’s son had bad kidneys, and he went to Islamabad to exchange them, and they haven’t worked. The news reported that a German in Herat had been kidnapped, and they’re demanding fifty thousand dollars. Why so little?”
Gulob answered his own question. “Maybe they have taken his kidneys.”
I didn’t like where I sensed this conversation was going. “Do you know that the artery that goes from a man’s leg to his heart sells for eighty thousand dollars in Islamabad? We will sell your arteries,” Gulob said. I looked down and ran my hands over my knees. I felt myself shivering, and my stomach tightened. “Razi Gul and I are old,” I said. “Young people’s arteries are better.” Everyone laughed, but I was scared. Gulob wouldn’t have brought this up if he or others weren’t thinking about it. A maulavi’s son needed kidneys.
The men talked about the price of body parts in Pakistan. I had read too many stories about boys being kidnapped in Afghanistan for their kidneys and being left for dead.
“Pakistan has some good doctors, but some of them are very cruel,” said Gulob. He gathered up our tea cups and the teapot. “If we have trouble getting the money, maybe we will sell your body parts.” He walked out the door.
The room was silent. I could feel the energy welling up in me. “If this is true, I am leaving tonight,” I said. They needed a hospital for this, Samad said. I said they didn’t. They could come here. They probably had doctors who supported their cause. I imagined a small, middle-aged man walking in the room carrying a satchel and the Taliban holding me down while he injected me with a sedative. He would wash my skin, cut me open and take out my kidney, and sew me up. I would lie in the cot bleeding to death, slowly, painfully. No. I couldn’t die in this dark, dirty cell. I had to get out of here. I got up and walked around the cell.
“We have to escape. I can’t die here,” I said. I kept repeating this. We would use the cord. I pointed to the clothesline over the pit and explained how we had to tie Gulob up or strangle him with it. “We may have to kill Rahman. We can do it at sundown. We have to get through the compound, get a rifle, and head west and try to escape over the mountains,” I said.
I laid out the plan. I had been thinking of it, and others, for weeks. None of them involved killing Gulob or Rahman, unless we had to. This was different. Gulob had crossed the line. I was afraid, but for the first time in weeks I felt alive and strong. I was no longer depressed. I was no longer a victim. I thought of the passengers on United Flight 93. They didn’t sit there. They acted. They had died feeling strong. That was the best way to go. They were the best of men.
* * *
“Don’t try to escape,” Gulob said. His face was six inches from mine, his voice low and growling. He was hunched over. He looked like a bear ready to pounce. “If you do, I will come at you like a dog. You won’t get anywhere. There are Taliban throughout this village.”
How did he know I had been talking about escaping? Daoud looked at me knowingly. There was a spy among us. That was why Samad was outside for at least ten minutes. He was talking with Gulob. That was why they no longer chained him to his bed. He had cut a deal with them [previously]. They had flipped him. Or he had been in on this all along.
I felt alone. I couldn’t trust anyone. I had no friends. I hated Samad. “If you try anything, it will be difficult for you,” said Gulob, his voice low and deep. “I want to resolve this as quickly as possible. God willing, the Taliban will allow you to be released soon. But don’t try to escape. Don’t try anything.”
Samad was boiling water on the bokhari. He asked to wash my clothes. Why would this man, who had just betrayed me, want to wash my clothes, as if he were my servant? Did he feel bad, or was he trying to lure me in so I would talk more? I didn’t care about my clothes. I was beyond caring. In fact, I preferred them dirty. Why wear clean clothes in this pit? I wanted them dirty when I fought Samad.
I didn’t want him to touch them. I had to admit, he was good. I was a fool to have trusted him. I had an excuse. I was afraid that Gulob would sell my kidneys, for starters. No, that was no excuse. I was afraid.
That night I lay in my cot, staring at Samad. I couldn’t see him; it was too dark. But when I closed my eyes I could see his face covered with blood. I lay there seething. He had betrayed me. I wanted to cross the room and beat him senseless. I was afraid I might kill him. I had never wanted to kill anyone before.
Apocalypse Here
A plague of Biblical proportions came perilously close to being loosed upon the Earth from a secret laboratory in the north-central Oregon compound of religious leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. The lab did succeed with its cold-blooded plot to indiscriminately poison local residents, affecting more than 750. These and many other stories are related in The Rajneesh Chronicles: The True Story of the Cult That Unleashed the First Act of Bioterrorism on U.S. Soil by Win McCormack, MFA ’78 (© 1987, 2010, reprinted by permission of Tin House Books, Inc.). The book is a collection of reports he wrote between 1983 and 1986 for Oregon Magazine; its introduction is excepted below.
The goings-on at this so-called commune were deadly serious, for it was there that the first act of bioterrorism in U.S. history—salmonella poisoning of citizens and officials of Wasco County—was plotted and launched. . . .
In his book To an Unknown God: Religious Freedom on Trial, legal scholar and former Washington Post reporter [and formerly the UO’s Orlando and Marian Hollis Professor of Law] Garrett Epps correctly identifies the two stages in the Rajneeshees’ assault on their perceived enemies in the outside world. The first stage involved the poisoning with salmonella bacteria of restaurant patrons in The Dalles, the Wasco County seat, in September 1984, in a test run of one component of their plan to take over the county government in the fall election: disabling opposition voters and preventing them from going to the polls.
When that stage failed, they embarked on the second stage, a plot to kill various people on an enemies list they had compiled. This list included Charles Turner, the then-U.S. attorney for Oregon, who was supervising an investigation of them for immigration fraud and other offenses, and Les Zaitz, an Oregonian reporter [and former Oregon Daily Emerald columnist and editor] then engaged with two colleagues in an extensive journalistic investigation of the cult spanning three continents. It was assumed at the time that the principal objective of Zaitz’s investigation was to nail down proof of the Rajneeshees’ direct involvement, abroad as well as in the United States, in more serious criminal activities, such as drug and currency smuggling and possibly even more sinister crimes.
In his chapter detailing the criminal evolution of the Rajneesh cult, entitled “East of Eden,” Epps’s central focus is on then-Oregon Attorney General Dave Frohnmayer, one of two main subjects of Epps’s book, which deals with various conflicts between church and state. Frohnmayer had also made the Rajneeshees’ enemies list, as a result of the lawsuit he filed calling for the dismemberment of Rajneeshpuram on the grounds that the intermeshing of Rajneesh’s religious foundation and the operations of the city violated the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Frohnmayer began his official attorney general’s opinion on the matter with a “sweeping discussion of religious freedom and the demands of a liberal, secular, democratic order in America.” In America, Frohnmayer wrote, “[t]olerance is not merely a moral virtue; it is a matter of constitutional policy.”
The story of the Rajneeshees in Oregon does raise serious questions about liberal democratic tolerance, and its advisable limits, far beyond the purely religious one. The seeming inability of various governmental entities to deal effectively with the numerous infractions and misbehaviors of the group—its skirting of Oregon’s land-use regulations and the land-use permits it was granted; its flouting of immigration law through obviously bogus marriages between foreign and American sannyasins; its systematic and cruel persecution of the residents of the nearby town of Antelope, of which it had taken control as a fallback if the city of Rajneeshpuram were declared illegal; its arming of commune residents with semiautomatic weapons while its leaders were issuing threats of violence against the surrounding community and law enforcement—suggested a bewildering and alarming paralysis in the American and Oregon political systems.
Such issues are explored in a 1987 senior thesis entitled “Antelope, Oregon and the Need to Revise Liberal Democracies,” by Rolf Christen Moan, a student in Harvard College’s social studies department whom I had the pleasure to advise on his project. My own analysis, which I freely offered him (as a former student in the government department there), was that the American political system is so fragmented, first between the national and local levels, and then, at each level, between different branches of government and entirely separate departments, that no one entity or political leader or official had the overall authority to confront the fundamental challenge the Rajneeshees presented. . . .
Another Harvard senior thesis of relevance here, also involving issues pertaining to the success or failure of liberal democracy, is “Four Types of Elitist Theory: Bentham, Nietzsche, Lenin, Mosca and the Elite in Liberal-Democratic Thought,” submitted to the government department in 1962 by David Braden Frohnmayer (it received a grade of magna cum laude, as did Moan’s). Twenty-four years after that submission, Frohnmayer, attorney general of Oregon, was asked by a reporter whether he thought Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh had sanctioned the poisonings his henchwomen carried out. Frohnmayer replied that his familiarity with the ideas of Nietzsche, which he dissected in his senior thesis, had helped him understand Rajneesh’s philosophy: “His philosophy is not incompatible with poisoning,” Frohnmayer said. . . .
In her book Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War, published in 2001, Judith Miller devotes the first chapter, “The Attack,” to the Rajneeshees’ bioterrorism schemes. Relying heavily on information provided to the authorities in 1985 by David Knapp, aka Swami Krishna Deva, ex-mayor of Rajneeshpuram, and Ava Kay Avalos, aka Ma Ava, a lab assistant to Ma Anand Puja, the Filipina nurse who oversaw the Rajneesh Medical Corporation and its bioterrorism program, Miller carefully reconstructs the project’s insane progression.
Before Puja, known at the ranch as “Nurse Mengele,” and Ma Anand Sheela, Rajneesh’s top assistant, decided on Salmonella typhimurium, a common agent in food poisoning, as the means to incapacitate voters in Wasco County, they contemplated using much more dangerous substances. These included Salmonella typhi, which causes often-fatal typhoid fever; Salmonella paratyphi, which causes a similar, less severe illness; Francisella tularensis, which causes a debilitating and sometimes fatal disease, and which was weaponized by U.S. Army scientists in the 1950s and is on the Pentagon’s list of agents that might be used in a biological-warfare attack on the nation; and Shigella dysenteriae, a very small amount of which can cause severe dysentery resulting in death in 10 to 20 percent of cases.
Puja placed orders for these pathogens on September 25, 1984, just as the Share-A-Home program to import thousands of street people into Rajneeshpuram to register them to vote in the coming election was gearing up. She also ordered antipsychotic drugs such as Haldol to control the street people while they were at the ranch. And she contemplated putting dead rodents—rats, mice, beavers—in the county’s water supply to sicken the populace. She apparently had particular confidence in beavers, because they carry a natural pathogen, Giardia lamblia, that causes severe diarrhea. Giardia lamblia had been prevalent at the Rajneesh ashram in India.
As related in [this book’s chapter] “Bhagwan’s Final Year” and in the afterword, “How Close Was Disaster?” when authorities raided the Rajneesh Medical Corporation after the Bhagwan’s September 16, 1985, press conference denouncing Sheela, they found the following books: Handbook for Poisoning; How to Kill; Deadly Substances; The Perfect Crime and How to Commit It; and Let Me Die Before I Wake. They also found articles on infectious diseases, chemical and biological warfare, assassinations, explosives, and terrorism.
Krishna Deva reported to authorities that when Sheela asked their “enlightened master” what should be done about people who opposed his vision, Rajneesh compared himself to Hitler and stated that Hitler had also been misunderstood when he sought to create a “new man.” Rajneesh informed them that Hitler was a genius whose only mistake was to invade Russia . . . .
How much farther . . . might the Rajneesh cult have traveled, if its course had not been interrupted? . . . At one point in her narrative, Miller focuses on the aspect of the Rajneesh story that has most haunted me for the last twenty-five years: the program to isolate a live AIDS virus that was underway in the biological-warfare laboratory at the ranch when the commune fortunately collapsed in the fall of 1985.
“Puja was also particularly fascinated by the AIDS virus,” Miller writes, “about which relatively little was known at the time. The Bhagwan had said that the virus would destroy two-thirds of the world’s population. For Puja, it was a means of control and intimidation. She repeatedly tried to culture it for use as a germ weapon against the cult’s ever-growing enemies. Her apparent failure was not for lack of trying.”
For an individual, opening a beverage can is a simple act that generally does not spark a great deal of reflection; but the same act, when considered on the national level, becomes a staggering statistic—an act of mass consumption so large it is difficult to conceptualize. Fostering this change of perspective is at the heart of Seattle-based artist Chris Jordan’s Running the Numbers exhibition, currently on display at the UO’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. Here, Jordan renders a version of Georges Seurat’s famous 1884 pointillist work A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, using images of 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used every thirty seconds in the United States. “I think of [these works] as a kind of translation,” Jordan says, “from the deadening language of statistics into a more universal visual language that might allow for more feeling.” The twenty large-format works on display through April 10 invite viewers to consider such numbers as the 24,000 GMC Denali SUVs sold in six weeks, the 2.3 million Americans in prison, the 426,000 cell phones “retired” here every day, the two million plastic beverage bottles used in the United States every five minutes, and the $12.5 million spent every hour from 2003 to 2008 on the war in Iraq.
• WEB EXTRA
Artist Chris Jordan shows us an arresting view of what Western culture looks like. His supersized images picture some almost unimaginable statistics—like the astonishing number of paper cups we use every single day.
http://www.ted.com
Still Rainin’, Still Dreamin’: Hall Anderson’s Ketchikan (University of Alaska Press, 2010) by (Robert) Hall Anderson ’81. This book “showcases one hundred of Anderson’s prize-winning black-and-white images, which collectively chronicle three decades of life in Ketchikan.”
Precincts of Light (Inkwater Press, 2010) by Henry Alley, professor emeritus of literature in the Robert D. Clark Honors College. “Set against the background of the Measure Nine (anti-gay rights) crisis in Oregon in the early 1990s, a brother and sister, both newly out, try to recover the lost affections of their children . . . [a] novel of continuously rich and poetic language.”
Reinventing Knowledge (W.W. Norton and Company, 2009) by Ian F. McNeely and Lisa Wolverton, both UO associate professors of history. “This is the perfect book for anyone seeking a quick and insightful introduction to Western civilization—an intelligent, provocative history of the institutions that preserve and disseminate information.”
Purely Alaska: Authentic Voices from the Far North (Epicenter Press, 2010) by Susan Andrews, MA ’83, and John Creed, MA ’83. “ . . . [F]rom harrowing survival adventures to tales of other exotic people, places, and cultures. This anthology captures some of these stories as told by rural Alaskans.”
Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California (University of California Press, 2010) by Daniel Martinez Hosang, UO assistant professor of political science and ethnic studies. “An important analysis of both the exact contours of white supremacy and the failures of electoral anti-racism.”
Abraham Lincoln without Borders: Lincoln’s Legacy outside the United States (Pencraft International, 2010) coedited by William Pederson ’67, MA ’72, PhD ’79. “Lincoln’s legacy, a practical alternative to Karl Marx’s philosophy, resonates across centuries with a contemporary, cross-cultural appeal among peoples seeking equality, human dignity, and development.”Alligators Under My Bed and Other Nebraska Tales (Clay Bridges Communications and Publishing, 2010) by James D. Hager ’69. “A true story of growing up in mid-twentieth-century rural Nebraska. Jim Hager weaves humorous, evocative, and educational stories from his childhood for generations of modern city folk, school children, and others like him who lived to tell their tales.”
Such a Pretty Face (Kensington Publishing, 2010) by Cathy Lamb ’89, MS ’90. “Lamb writes [the] story with humor and brutal honesty, and the result is an affecting portrait of one woman’s heroic journey from tragedy to her own version of happiness.”
Goethe’s Modernisms (Continuum, 2010) by Astrida Orle Tantillo ’85. “Tantillo explores Goethe’s role within the culture wars that have been with us for some time, his role as both a progenitor and a critic of modernity, and suggests how we might rethink aspects of our current policies, whether educational or fiscal.”
Josh Halliwick’s Madness: A Lighthearted Look at Schizophrenia (BookSurge Publishing, 2009) by Marty Weinstein ’83 and Bob Wyrick. A young man plagued by schizophrenia struggles against the disease to help a paralyzed friend. “Despite its serious subjects, the book has uproarious moments as the story of the well-intentioned Halliwick unfolds.”
It’s YOUR Future . . . Make It a Good One! (Personal Futures Network, 2010) by Verne Wheelwright ’56. The author “explains how to anticipate the future, how to explore alternative futures with scenarios, how to create a vision of the future, and how to achieve that vision.”
Captive Copyright 2010 by Jere Van Dyk—to be published in paperback by St. Martin’s Griffin in June. Published by permission of Times Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All rights reserved.
The Rajneesh Chronicles by Win McCormack. Copyright 2010 Tin House Books
UpFront
News, Notables, Innovations
CENTER FOR MICROBIAL ECOLOGY
OF INDOOR ENVIRONMENTS
Home Sweet Biome
UO scientists establish the Center for Microbial Ecology of Indoor Environments to study how sustainable building design can improve human health.
Last October, eighty-five children from Willagillespie Elementary School in Eugene contracted the norovirus, a nasty stomach bug that causes vomiting and diarrhea. A Lane County public health official said in The Register-Guard that there’s no way to stop it from spreading throughout the school. “It’s out there in the community . . . . You can get it from almost anything, a handrail, a doorknob . . . I don’t think you can contain it.”
Controlling infectious agents that lurk where we live is exactly what a group of UO professors plan to do. With a $1.8 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Jessica Green, an associate professor of biology, G. Z. “Charlie” Brown, an architecture professor, and Brendan Bohannan, director of the UO Center for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, will create the Center for Microbial Ecology of Indoor Environments.
Their aim is to design sustainable buildings that take into account how use, climate, and airflow influence various microbial ecosystems living in them and the health of humans who occupy them. Currently, scientists have far from a full understanding of the type or the abundance of microorganisms living on desktops, doorknobs, and bathroom paper towel dispensers. They have not identified bugs growing, living, and reproducing in the air. How these surface and airborne microbial communities interact with each other and are affected by architectural elements—for example natural and mechanical ventilation systems—is also unknown.
But scientists do know that poor air quality causes infections to spread where people gather. Schools, hospitals, offices, and cruise ships are sites where all-too-regularly outbreaks of bacterial and viral infections cause problems for the people in those environments. “Although humans in industrialized countries spend nearly 90 percent of their time in enclosed buildings, we know very little about the biology of the indoor environment,” says Green, an engineer turned biologist who will be the director of the center.
She believes that the shapes of rooms, their temperature and humidity, floor and wall coverings, furniture, natural and fluorescent lighting levels, and patterns of foot traffic all influence the growth and spread of indoor microbial communities, which includes airborne pathogens. And when ventilation systems are designed without consideration for this microbial miasma, they can inadvertently spread infectious agents. People can become infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), the swine flu, and the norovirus. Armed with a better understanding of the indoor microscopic world, Green hopes to improve sustainable building designs, including the creation of more energy-efficient, pathogen-resistant ventilation systems, to minimize the spread of airborne bugs. Saving lives is her ultimate goal.
Reaching that goal will require a multidisciplinary team, from molecular biologists characterizing microbial ecosystems—what Green calls “the built environment microbiome”—to engineers designing improved ventilation systems and architects constructing more healthful, sustainable buildings. “One of our great challenges will be to not only understand what shapes microbial biodiversity in the built environment, but how these complex microbial communities influence our health and well being,” Green says. “If we can design buildings to maximize the abundance of the many types of microbes we need and that are good for us, this would be truly cutting edge.”
The center’s innovation and potential to save lives impressed the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation enough to fund it. “The University of Oregon and Jessica Green have put together a first-class team of researchers to carry out a very ambitious research program,” says Paula J. Olsiewski, the program director in charge of Sloan’s indoor environment program. “Every major grant proposal undergoes a rigorous evaluation process and is reviewed by an independent panel of experts. In this case, the foundation’s scientific advisory panel enthusiastically recommended we fund the University of Oregon center. The possibilities for discovery are too great to ignore.”
With as many as a million bacteria per cubic meter in any given room, it’s not surprising that protocols to investigate built environment microbiomes are complicated. Initial experiments will take place at the Providence Milwaukie Hospital near Portland. To identify airborne microbes, UO scientists will collect air samples from rooftop exhaust fans in both occupied and unoccupied rooms. They will swab corresponding interior surfaces.
Using genetics tests, the center’s molecular biologists will characterize airborne and surface microbial and fungal populations for each space. Center architects will identify the hospital’s key elements—building and room geometry, window size and location, surface materials, and airflow rates from supply and exhaust fans—as well as inside and outside temperature and humidity.
The second phase of experimentation will add building function and geographic location into the mix. Researchers will repeat experiments in a variety of schools and hospitals in both Portland (mild temperatures with high humidity) and Bend (high and low temperatures with low humidity). Green and her colleagues ultimately hope to gather enough information to design animation software programs, allowing scientists and architects to visualize indoor microbial ecosystems.
Architecture professor Charlie Brown will be focusing on the link between the indoor microbiome and sustainable building design. He directs the UO’s Energy Studies in Buildings Laboratory, which develops energy-efficient components for sustainable buildings.
He’s particularly interested in optimizing building ventilation systems. Most buildings bring air in from the outside and either heat or cool it, he says. It’s an energy-intensive process, consuming 20 percent of commercial buildings’ energy. Brown wants to see that number significantly reduced by designing natural ventilation systems that will cut greenhouse gas emissions. “We have to save the planet, then save the people,” he says. His hope is that natural ventilation, by virtue of sustainability and reducing airborne pathogens, will do both.
With no other research group studying the influence of building design on microbial abundance and diversity, the UO’s new Center for Microbial Ecology of Indoor Environments is putting green architecture at the forefront of scientific discovery. The beauty is in the collaboration between biologists and architects, Brown says. “In the end, both biologists and architects will learn things about building design that neither group could have learned independently.”
—Michele Taylor MS ’03, ’10
Click here to hear an extended interview with Jessica Green.
STOVE TEAM INTERNATIONAL
The Little Stove That Would
Nancy Hughes is on a mission to change the world.
The idea came to her during a trip to Solola, Guatemala, with the Eugene-based Cascade Medical Team in 2003. She saw doctors treating children suffering from chronic upper respiratory infections and debilitating scars, mothers enduring back problems and hernias—all caused by carrying wood or cooking over an open fire in homes the size of a small bedroom. “A young Guatemalan woman with a baby on her hip came into the kitchen to ask, ‘Can you delay dinner? I want to thank the team,’” Hughes recalls. The woman had lost the use of her hands as a result of falling into an open fire as a child, and members of the team had helped to restore their use.
“She had been without the use of her hands for sixteen years. Everyone was bawling,” Hughes recalls. “But then I thought, ‘This is stupid. We’re coming down here for ten days to treat a problem we could be preventing.’”
The World Health Organization estimates that more than half the world’s population—three billion people—cook their meals over open fires, on makeshift stoves that smolder all day. Hughes, at sixty-eight, spends most of her waking hours working to change this—and solve a few other problems, including indoor air pollution, deforestation, and unemployment—in the developing world, by helping local residents manufacture and distribute safe and efficient stoves.
At first, Hughes volunteered with Helps International, the parent organization of Cascade Medical Team, in its efforts to supply stoves to Central America. She spent her own money to buy stoves to distribute. She approached Southtowne Rotary Club in Eugene (where she is a member) about sponsoring a grant to buy stoves; she also applied for grants from Carlos Santana’s Milagro Foundation and the Synchronicity Foundation. Even these efforts were not enough; she traveled to remote locations and joined other volunteers delivering the simple but life-changing stoves, going so far as to drag 100-pound stoves up steep muddy hills to the dirt-floored huts where they were needed.
The stoves were designed for safety, but they were difficult to move and weren’t entirely addressing the pollution or deforestation issues as well as they might. Frustrated, she wondered if there might not be a better, more sustainable way to help. Some “differences of opinion” with the director of Helps dampened her passion further. She was on the verge of quitting. But not for long.
Gerry Reicher, who taught cognitive psychology at the UO in the late 1960s and ’70s before leaving for organizational consulting work—and who Nancy calls “the brains behind the whole [stove] thing”—remembers that time. “There were a bunch of us trying to talk Nancy into continuing her work with stoves,” he says.
Another of the “bunch” was Larry Winiarski, who in conjunction with Cottage Grove-based Aprovecho Research Center (the name Aprovecho means “toward the best use”), had already been engaged for many years in developing stoves for the Third World. Using basic combustion principles, Winiarski, a mechanical engineer, had developed the “rocket elbow” design, which generates maximum heat from small amounts of fuel and creates little smoke, in 1982. Rather than pursue a patent, Winiarski made his design freely available—and the idea spread quickly.
On a trip to El Salvador in 2007, Winiarski met Gustavo Peña, who had lived in the United States and Canada during the country’s civil war (he left after being hunted by death squads) and who had what Winiarski calls “a very neat combination of skills.” The two men worked together to design a prototype for a new stove combining Winiarski’s earlier design with locally available materials and a surface ideal for the area’s foods. The result was the economical, lightweight, and portable Ecocina stove, which uses even less wood and creates less pollution than the rocket elbow. At Winiarski’s suggestion, Hughes visited Peña in 2007, with the idea of helping him to finance and build a factory.
Around that same time, an article appeared in the Lane County Medical Society newsletter about Hughes’ work with stoves “in memory of Duffy,” (her husband, physician George H. “Duffy” Hughes, who died in 2001). The article resulted in a series of serendipitous connections that led ultimately to a $10,000 check from the Milagro Foundation. In 2008, Stove Team International was formed.
With broad philanthropic support, Stove Team has already helped to place 12,000 Ecocina stoves in Central American homes. With business models created by Stove Team board members, four factories have been launched in the region. Factories in Mexico and Ghana will begin production this year. There is interest from the Philippines, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Afghanistan, Haiti, Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay.
“The stove is a tool that people use all day, every day,” says Hanibal Murcia, a Honduran stove manufacturer.
Murcia’s factory is a family enterprise, with his wife and son participating. “We have five employees, including three rural people. . . . I am paying local taxes and government taxes, but most important, we are having a positive impact on the climate conditions and social conditions in our region and on our planet.”
Murcia is grateful for Hughes, Winiarski, and other volunteers he calls his “new friends.” Their efforts, he says, are “a great example of work and love.”
Gail Norris ’62 is responsible for planning every aspect of a Stove Team volunteer trip. Norris, who majored in Spanish and French at the UO and now works both as a substitute teacher in Eugene and part of the year as volunteer coordinator for the Oregon Bach Festival, describes the experience. “You’re not on a vacation at all, except in perhaps the strictest sense of the word, which is to vacate your normal life. It’s a very rich experience. It will change the way you look at the world.” No suntan lotion and poolside novels here. “Guatemala alone needs two million more stoves,” Norris says. With her assistance, more than seventy-five volunteers have paid their own way to Central America to assist in Stove Team’s mission.
Roz Slovic traveled in November to Honduras with other Stove Team volunteers. “I like to travel and learn,” says Slovic, who retired in 2010 from the UO’s College of Education after more than fifteen years as a senior research assistant in the Department of Special Education and Clinical Sciences. “And this was truly a trip with a purpose.”
One day, the group arrived early in the morning at Hanibal Murcia’s factory. The structure is in a flood zone; one group built a loft to raise stoves off the ground while another group prepped the foundation and poured a concrete floor. Slovic spent a full day assisting a factory worker with stove assembly. Two women cut wires for stove inserts all day; several more served as Spanish interpreters.
In El Salvador, Peña has eighteen employees, sixteen in production and two in the office. He continues to assist Stove Team in training other factory owners. “I am determined to continue working with Stove Team International, so that the project grows up around the world,” he says. “There is no way to pay [back the help we have received] except to help others.”
Stove Team International recently began more actively pursuing connections at the University of Oregon—creating what Hughes calls a “brain trust”—in the fall of 2010. “There’s a huge amount of brainpower and resources there,” she says. She’s fostered relationships with the Holden Leadership Center and worked with students in Assistant Professor Gabriela Martinez’ documentary production class.
“I truly think Stove Team deserves to be supported in any shape or form,” says Martinez, who grew up in the highlands of Peru and has seen firsthand the negative effects of open fires. In 2006 she worked in the highlands of Guatemala producing a documentary, Respire Guatemala, on what she calls “the pressing problem” of indoor air pollution.
The Environmental Protection Agency Partnership for Clean Indoor Air (PCIA) will award Hughes its 2011 Special Achievement Award in Developing Local Markets. “We applaud your commitment to improving health, livelihood, and quality of life, particularly of women and children,” the award letter says.
“I don’t have to worry about a lot of things,” Hughes says. “I can just live, safe and secure—so what else should I do? Play golf? We are so bloody privileged—why shouldn’t I do this?”
— Zanne Miller, MS '97
Northwest-based Stove Team works to improve lives in Latin America.
ATHLETICS
Matthew Knight Arena Opens
A capacity crowd of 12,364 roared the men’s basketball team to a 68–62 win over USC on January 13, 2011.
Click here for more on the Matthew Knight Arena opening
For the first time, the UO earned a place in the top rankings of the 2010 Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. Of the 4,633 institutions reviewed, the UO appeared in the top tier of 108 universities awarded “Very High Research Activity” status.
Enrollment for the 2010–11 year hit 23,389, including 3,978 newly admitted freshmen and 1,497 transfer students, the largest newly admitted class of undergraduates among the OUS institutions. First-time UO freshmen in 2009 returned for a second year at an OUS-leading rate of 85.9 percent, an all-time high.
By fall 2012, the UO campus will be tobacco free, making it the first university in the Pac-10 to make such a transition. ASUO president Amelie Rousseau and University Health Center staff members actively campaigned for the change.
The UO celebrated back-to-back wins of the Bowerman Award, the track-and-field equivalent of the Heisman Trophy given each year to top male and female collegians. Five-time NCAA champion and world heptathlon record-holder Ashton Eaton ’10 won this year, following Galen Rupp ’09, who was the award’s inaugural winner.
Michael Moffitt will become the new dean of the UO School of Law. Previously at Harvard University, Moffitt joined the Oregon law faculty in 2001. He succeeds Margie Paris, who accepted the post in 2006 and will rejoin the law school faculty.
Top honors from the Oregon chapter of the International Interior Design Association went to both the John E. Jaqua Academic Center for Student Athletes and the HEDCO Education Building. The Jaqua center also won the 2010 Best Architectural Design Award from Engineering News-Record magazine.
The UO ranked among the top 100 best values in public colleges in the Kiplinger’s Personal Finance annual list, which evaluates more than 500 public institutions based on measures including admission rate, test scores of incoming freshmen, graduation rates, and cost. According to Kiplinger’s, the rankings spotlight schools that “deliver a stellar education at an affordable price.”
With their distinctive “O” logo design, UO Alumni Association specialty automobile license plates raised $35,000 last year in scholarship revenue for UO students.
PROFile
Richard Taylor
Professor of Physics
Courtesy Professor of Psychology
Director, Materials Science Institute
Member, Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences
At a social gathering during his undergraduate years, Richard Taylor made a discovery that has informed his teaching career. “Even as a student undergraduate, you didn’t want to necessarily admit that you were a physicist at a party,” he says. “I could tell that people were thinking, ‘What am I going to talk to this guy about?’ And I thought, ‘Why is it that for a subject I find so interesting—explaining the way the world runs—people don’t want to talk about it?’”
People love stories, he says, so thinking of his lectures as performances—“a bit like a rock concert, where you mix in the slow numbers along with the fast numbers”—Taylor uses a narrative format: He weaves some hard facts into a story line, eases off to let students digest information, then picks up the pace again. “I’m not a physicist because I love weird, hard equations; no one likes hard stuff,” he says. “You know, Paul McCartney didn’t need to have classical training to write great music. And you don’t need a PhD in physics for physics to be useful for you.”
Taylor’s research interests run the gamut from nanotechnology and quantum chaos to what he calls “the beautifully simple concept of fractals,” the fundamental building blocks of nature’s patterns. But, Taylor says, teaching is just as rewarding as his research. “My PhD students will go on to push the frontiers of physics,” says Taylor. “But I also teach about 750 students each year, most of them undergraduates, and they’re going to go out and spread the message that science is useful and interesting. That will also have a huge impact on society.”
Name: Richard Taylor
Education: PhD ’88, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom
Teaching Experience: Joined the UO faculty in 1999. Taylor has taught a broad range of courses at the UO and at institutions in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and across the United States. His research has informed undergraduate lectures in physics, art, and communication studies around the world and is featured in college-level educational DVDs.
Awards: At the UO, Taylor won both a Williams Fellowship for Innovative Teaching and the Thomas Herman Distinguished Teaching Award in 2010.
Off-Campus: Taylor enjoys distance running—he runs a half-marathon by the river every weekend. Originally from Cheshire, England, he also enjoys travel and has lived in five different countries.
Last Word: [From the movie Spinal Tap] “Have a good time, all of the time!”
—Katherine Gries ’05, MA ’09
Sustainable Spring
As the spring rains paint Oregon’s landscape a thousand shades of green, business leaders are learning new ways to ensure that their companies are operating in a similar hue. The UO’s Sustainability Leadership Program hosts an ongoing series of daylong workshops at the White Stag Block, including its twice-yearly Fast Track, a weeklong intensive series featuring five workshops in five days.
Daniel Medin, MBA ’05, who serves as director of corporate sustainability at Regence Group, is a recent recipient of the program’s certificate of completion, a professional development credential awarded to those who complete sixty-five hours of training. Beginning the program as a relative newcomer to the somewhat nebulous world of corporate sustainability, Medin was drawn to the program’s pragmatic nature and flexible structure, which allowed him to handpick those courses most applicable to his business’s needs.
That flexibility is an important one, as workshop participants come from a wide spectrum of workplaces, government agencies, and industries, from Whole Foods to Oregon Health and Science University to the Washington State Department of Corrections. Since the program began in 2003, more than 900 people from 400 organizations have attended one or more of the workshops.
The program is designed to provide working professionals with a foundation in the latest eco-friendly business practices and philosophies. Action-focused courses are taught by industry experts in an array of topics, from green building to land use to employee engagement to financing green initiatives. Medin reports that the workshops provided him with a valuable introduction to the breadth and vocabulary of the discipline, while offering a chance to network with professionals from other companies and professions engaged in similar work, the better to share resources and learn from each others’ mistakes and successes.
Today, Medin and Regence are working to reduce their business’s paper use (a heady task in the insurance field), while slowly but surely changing the way the company thinks about travel, technology, and purchasing. His time at the White Stag Block gave Medin an appreciation for the holistic nature of sustainability and its many direct benefits to a business’s bottom line. “I came back into my organization and started talking about [sustainability] really differently,” he says. “It’s been really good for us.”
—Mindy Moreland, MS ’08
March 7 Forming and Facilitating Sustainability Teams: Engaging and Training Employees
March 8 Navigating the Field of Green Building: Beyond Scorecards to Lasting Value
March 9 Sustainability Indicators and Assessment for Business and Government
March 10 Climate Policy, Carbon Credits, and Business Risk
March 11 Getting There: Transportation Strategies for Sustainable Communities
March 18 Equity and Sustainability: How to Balance Your Triple Bottom Line
March 25 Sustainability Performance Reporting: Principles and Guidelines
April 1 Sustainability by Design: Retrofitting our Cities, Communities, and Neighborhoods
April 8 Carbon Footprints, Step by Step: Tools and Methods for Business and Government
April 15 Water Sustainability, A to Z: Innovative Conservation and Management Techniques
See sustain.uoregon.edu for details, course descriptions, and registration information.
UO LIBRARIES
From Ken’s Pen
Kesey’s papers are a treasure of the UO Libraries—for now.
Ken Kesey ’57 chose to deposit his papers for safekeeping in the UO’s Knight Library Special Collections and University Archives beginning as far back as 1966. The collection now includes a vast stock of documents he generated from 1960 until his death in 2001: more than 100 boxes of manuscripts, artwork, collages, photographs, audio tapes, and correspondence. The UO has the opportunity to purchase the collection to make it a part of the library’s permanent holdings. If that doesn’t happen, the documents might leave the state of Oregon—acquired by another university or divided and sold into private hands. The final disposition of the Kesey papers is expected to be decided soon. For more information about the collection and to learn about how to help keep it at the UO, go to libweb.uoregon.edu/giving/kesey.html.
In the meantime, we present a sampling of excerpts taken from the collection. Italicized entries are from hand-written documents.
Working in the hospital
Can you believe it? Working full time for the first time in two years! The depths to which I have sunk are undiscernible.
Right now—or from 7:30 to 4—we are completing the four weeks of training at the hospital, with discarded texts and disregarded nurses. The first two weeks were spent on what is called the circle wards, or the better wards, wards where the men have enough marbles left to choose up sides and play the game, but these last two weeks we are being subjected to the vegetables, the geriatrics, the organs eating and organs shitting and pissing and moaning and coming on in religious tongues, creatures that need spooned puree and pablum, infants growing backwards, away from civilization and rationalization, back to complete dependence, to darkness, the womb, the seed . . .
Around the day room. All twisted out of shape by so many years. Ellis: with whatever it was that frightened him absolutely out of his mind, standing right before his aghast eyes, still gaping, horrified, outraged, and farting in his fear. Bewick: his face showing only a gnawed dissatisfaction, gnawed so deeply that he is finally and forever even dissatisfied with that, and only whimpers tearlessly. Pete: grinning, shaking his happy old head, limping spryly about in his pajamas, answering only one question—“Why’d you quit driving the truck, Pete?” “I was ty-urd. Fo’ tweny eight years, then I got ty-urd.”
Like old Buckly, who asserts, or answers when asked: “We had some fun, didn’t we? Sure, we gone have lots of fun.”
Or old Chartes, whose trigger question is “How is your wife?” and whose screamed answer is “F-f-f-uh thuh wife! F-f-f-k theh wife!”
You get to know them by their bits.
Maternick is tidy, is his bit. No one can touch him. He won’t touch an object another has touched. He strips if a towel touches him. He rubbed the hide off the end of his nose once after running it up against a patient who had stopped too quickly. He is tall, stooped, eyes lost under a cliff of a brow, rubbing his hands forever together, looks like an old time wrestler I saw once called the Swedish Angel. And he coughs violently whenever he smokes his daily allotted cigarette. “The smoke . . . dirty!” But he begs continually for cigarettes.
Writing as religion
Writing becomes more and more a religion with me as I realize more and more that this is what I’m going to be doing all my fucking life. (Make money any other way I can . . .) And until you completely relinquish yourself to this fatalistic inevitability your work cannot, in your own mind, rise to the importance it deserves.
Getting published
I just received and read my book. My book. You’ve got no idea what that phrase evokes. A cavalcade of pinwheel emotions. All the old, spangled, bright, and gaudy and (I love them) cheap emotions of the ego realizing its muscle and mind—the notions of fame, the flamboyant fantasies of parties in New York penthouses, skinny women with red capris and silver eye shadow leaning and coaxing from a satin bedroom, my portrait on the cover of Time looking stern, wise, and sexy—all of these daydreams that one toys with early, knowing that they must be toyed with early because (knowing this too, when pressed) there will come a time when they will have happened, or are never going to happen and daydreaming is no more fun because it is either remorse or nostalgia (which is candy-coated remorse).
The very weight of the book activating anew these old fireworks, along with one rather gloomy newcomer: A sudden, surprised self-consciousness and doubt, much like the self-consciousness and doubt that strikes a small boy who has been shouting, singing, turning elaborate conniptions to catch the attention of the world around him and realizes all at once that he has succeeded by some clever feat and lo! people are paying attention to him; what he says next must be weighed with a great deal more care than he gave to his previous demonstrations. He clears his throat, swallows, stands straight, and somewhat pompous . . . and lacking the desperately free enthusiasm of his boyhood proceeds to bore the hell out of his listeners.
Scribble #3
I reached the cigarette across to her and though the length of her arm would easily bring her hand to mine, it didn’t quite make it, and her hand groped a little asking me to make just a little more effort. These things do happen, don’t they.
Letter to John F. Kennedy
President Kennedy:
As one jock to another I’d like to point out that we are involved in a very weird game, where advances are made without possibility of touchdowns, where everybody bets at once and an error, or a knockout, is fatal to all opponents and the rounds, or the innings, are scored with the point system by millions and millions of judges. Our children will tally the final score.
To effectively play the game it is important to be continually aware of the attitude of all those judges, as well as their criteria for awarding scores or penalties: yards are lost each time a team advances, a foul is declared for not hanging on in the clinches, and a bean ball can cost a team the game. The penalty rules are severe but subtle and that which might at first look like a successful attack turns out to be a fumble. It is therefore safer, though maybe not so flashy, to stick to the bread-and-butter plays: yards are gained for every hungry man fed, for every sick man healed, for every captive man freed; points are scored for significant retreats from the line of scrimmage, and the game is always subject to be called at any time on account of peace.
I just thought I’d take the liberty to clear up some of these fundamentals with you; as always, chances for victory will be greatly enhanced by simply knowing the rules and keeping an eye on the ball.
Ken Kesey
The push
The point of plot being, naturally, to have one player carom off the second, bounce in precise pattern from one, two, three cushions, and go on to strike the third. It can all be calculated in advance by an electronic brain, and set to formula, needs only an exact push in a preconceived direction to bring about certain and irreversible results.
The trick is: the push. And even confined within their strict frame my dreams are still helter-skelter clatterings because of that one imponderable: the push.
On Finishing Sometimes a Great Notion
Finished my book and ran the bastard off the premises at pencil-point, sick to death of the sight of it and convinced that I have spent two years concocting from my crucible the most glorious, spectacular, outrageous, and super-colossal failure since Spartacus.
Learn more about Ken Kesey’s papers and how to help keep them at the UO
