Emily, Kevin, Ryan, Tyler, Abby, Elizabeth, William … these are the names of Bill Beck’s grandchildren. They are names that I hear often as Bill relays graduation and swim-camp stories after Greenbelt Finance Committee Meetings, or when he stops by the office to drop off a load of tomatoes from his voluminous garden.

To Bill, a board member of Greenbelt Land Trust from 2004 to 2010, his grandchildren are not only a source of pride, but they are a beacon of hope for the next generation – they hold the opportunity to pass along an appreciation for the natural world around us. Bill’s grandchildren who lived close enough were brought on rainy Saturday mornings to plant camas bulbs at Owens Farm, and took part in summer canoe trips down the Willamette River with Greenbelt staff and other board members.

Bill and Nan with their grandchildren, 2014

So, it was no surprise when Bill stepped into my office last month with a request … could he make a donation to make sure all of his grandchildren were members of Greenbelt Land Trust? And, while we’re at it, Bill suggested that we think about spreading the word to other grandparents … “if other grandparents want to help instill a sense of place and stewardship within the next generation, they might consider making a contribution in honor of their grandchild,” he said.

Reader … you will see why I love my job. I love my job because of people like Bill and his wife Nan Beck – always thinking of ways to help, to raise awareness for our shared responsibility to protect and steward our home here in the Willamette Valley.

Bill, Emily, and Nan at Emily’s graduation from OSU, June 2015

One of the grandchildren that I hear most about is Bill’s granddaughter, Emily Branigan. A recent OSU graduate, Emily’s work in fisheries at a young age is a source of pride and amusement for Bill. Emily was a regular at Greenbelt in her teen years, attending volunteer outings and hikes. Let’s catch up with Emily and see where she is today!

So, Emily – tell me about yourself. What have you been up to?

Well, I graduated from Oregon State University last June with a degree in Fisheries and Wildlife Science, and I’ve been working on seasonal fisheries jobs for several years.

How did you get into fisheries? Was it a field you always knew you’d go into?

Actually, when I arrived at OSU I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to pursue. I explored several departments and took a fisheries and wildlife introductory course. After taking an ichthyology class taught by Dr. Sidlauskas, I discovered how uniquely interesting fish are, and was hooked. I knew that this was what I wanted to major in, and I started to take any and every fisheries class I could manage.

I guess I always knew that I would end up in a field related to biology. I remember as a small child, my life goal was to be a marine biologist and save endangered species. I always dreamed of working in oceans, and started volunteering at the Oregon Coast aquarium as a high schooler. When I was a senior at OSU I took all of my classes at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, which was another amazing opportunity.

What seasonal positions have you been working in?

I’ve worked in Eastern Oregon monitoring the chinook salmon fishery on the Wallowa River, and with ODFW out of Adair Village doing snorkel surveys and educational outreach for kids. One of my most interesting jobs was in eastern Washington, conducting chinook carcass surveys on the Hanford Reach of the Columbia River. Our sampling helped to set the catch limits for the next year. I’d have to say – that was the best fish job, but you had to be able to handle the smell of hundreds of fish carcasses all day!

I am just now preparing to move to Enterprise, OR, where I’ve accepted a creel job monitoring the summer steelhead fishery on the Imnaha River.

“Carcass Crew’, 2015

Emily on the ‘Carcass Creww’, White Bluffs

You said you knew you wanted to ‘save endangered species’ as a young child. How did you learn about this work when you were young?

I was one of those kids who had a subscription to National Geographic Kids magazine since I could read. I think it was probably telling that I always wanted to play with stuffed animals over dolls.

Over the years I became exposed to the work of conservation and started to understand how the animals I loved were part of a larger, sensitive system. Once I started volunteering at the aquarium, helping with outreach and education, and volunteering for organizations like Surfrider, and Salmon Watch I really started to understand and appreciate the need for conservation.

Also, as a child I was exposed to nature, growing up in the Willamette Valley. My grandparents would often take us hiking or boating, and I especially remember a camping trip we took to Wallowa Lake. My grandpa has always really encouraged my interests, and brought me on volunteer days with Greenbelt.

Any parting thoughts?

While conservation has always been important to me personally, I think more people need to be thinking at the community level. We don’t have to only be concerned with thinking on a grand-scale about how we can help nature. Instead, we can help out in our own communities. My grandfather has helped me to think that way since I was a young child, and it’s an ethic that I look forward to passing along to the next generation.

Thanks Emily!

Winter arrives, shadows (where there are any) lengthen then yield to evening; it’s inside time. Put a log in the stove, pour a glass of wine, and settle down to a good read, like Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (which is, honestly, about neither cheese nor worms but a good read nonetheless.) And if you can find some, give yourself a few slices of Beaufort, probably the best cheese in the world. Bar none. Beaufort comes from the Savoie, a tiny region in SE France and one of the reasons why Beaufort is far better than, say, Cheez-Whiz (a cheese-food product we all know and love but one that is the result of the culinary equivalent of a science project) is because of worms. Cheez-Whiz has never come near a worm.

If you buy Beaufort in any of the market towns in France, you’ll need to select among a variety of types—spring, single pasture, summer, late summer, fall. Each varies according to the type of plants the cows eat and that depends on when those plants are available. The permanent alpine pastures between the tree line and the rocky peaks are home to over 60 species of forage plants—legumes, grasses, and others including a high density of orchids.  The thought of eating cheese made, in part, from orchids is pretty intoxicating. And those pastures are home to dozens of species of butterflies. In an astonishing confession drawn from the 1950s, one collector grabbed 38 different species from the area around Chartreuse—not far from Beaufort—in a single afternoon.  The pastures are never tilled, and grazing has been strictly controlled for centuries—more so now because many lie within conservation zones or National Parks.

We’ll get to the worms in a little bit, but not before we tour Beaufort’s neighborhood.  All the 18^th and 19^th century English luminaries visited the Chartreuse—Turner, Wordsworth, Ruskin. At the foot of the glaciated Alps and not as dramatic, it’s a series of limestone massifs framed by the Isere and Rhone rivers and, being limestone, riddled with caves, some holding the remains of thousands of cave bears that lived during the last two ice ages.  The exposed limestone massifs we walked through—the Dent de Crolles, for example, seem timeless. Its high alpine pastures are as fertile as they ever were—the nearby Carthusian monks in La Grande Chartreuse have been distilling the electric-green liquor that bears the name of their monastery since 1737 using roughly 130 different plants, most of which they obtain locally. Diversity is key.  Farmers move their stock from low to high fields in a seasonal rotation—and it’s those high meadows that account for the difference between, say, a spring cheese produced on low-lying pastures and the fall cheese borne from alpine herbs.  When we were tramping through late last September, we saw flocks of sheep and goats, and small herds of cattle on fields steep enough to be used for ski runs. Yes, oddly, many are belled so you can hear them in the fog long before you see them.  Think ‘Heidi’. When I asked why bells? invariably the answer was ‘protection against wolves’—there are also mastiffs living among the stock, which seemed a far more effective deterrent than bells.  But the pastures—steep, perennial, and fertile, are gorgeous. Even in late fall when morning frost covers the hills, you see crocuses in profusion. These too go into the cheese.

The green hillsides of Chartreuse, France

I couldn’t find a worm census despite wading through various scientific articles on French Alpine soil but I did learn that in the Chartreuse region, earthworms make up about 1% of the wild boar diet.  Boars are prolific, and because they eat bulbs and roots, they disturb the top layer of these alpine pastures. Some Swiss studies suggested that the abundance of worms in permanent alpine pastures (i.e. pastures whose soils are largely undisturbed (except for wild boars) and free from pesticides and artificial fertilizer) enable those areas to be roughly 70% more productive than their lowland counterparts. The connection between undisturbed soil and variety of forage plants—over centuries- is pretty clear. Worms are the key.

So now to worms.

The last book Darwin wrote—in 1881—was a paean to worms, and every gardener knows why. He calculated that each acre around his house in Kent contained  fifty-three thousand worms which contributed up to 18 tons of casting per acre to the soil every year. They unlocked soil for use.  This has been confirmed, although worm populations vary widely depending on local soils: Malaysian forests can have up to 600 thousand per acre, and New Zealand perennial pastures an unbelievable 8 million.  Unusually high populations of worms in the Indus, Nile, and Euphrates Valleys suggest that fertile soil is a powerful catalyst for human populations as well for plants. In the Chartreuse as elsewhere, the earthworm count in alpine pastures is tied to human activity— the decrease in grazing that results from building ski resorts and condos necessarily results in a decrease in worm population.

In the past 30 years, France has lost more than two million hectares of alpine pasture– a threat not only to worms but to the entire panoply of species their quiet industry supports—making alpine pastures one of the prime targets for conservation activities in the Alps. Save the worms. Eat more Beaufort.

Blog Post: Seymour House, GLT Board

In the last two weeks I have had the pleasure of hearing Charles Goodrich read from his work twice. If you do not know the writing of local literary hero Charles Goodrich … well, I will let that be forgiven for the moment. Homework item #1: Go pick up ‘Insects of South Corvallis’ (my favorite) to dip into on one of these stormy afternoons. (You’re welcome).

I’ve listened to Charles read many times before, but it was something in his delivery this time around that caused my eyes to well up and my throat to constrict. You know that feeling – when something someone says just hits you close enough to home that you feel like it was meant just for you.

The message that resonated so deeply is best described through Charles’ own essay ‘Reinhabiting the Valley’ A Field Guide to Being Here’ when he says:

Though I’ve only lived here in the neighborhood thirty-some years – shorter than the life span of your average carp – I would like to say a word in favor of making a long-term commitment to one’s place. I want to speak up for digging in, for putting down roots, for learning to alertly inhabit the land.

I grew up in the Willamette Valley, just south of Corvallis outside of Springfield in a one-store community of Mohawk. Years were spent wading along rivers, mulling over which tree to climb, or running from a snake-wielding brother or sister. I knew, even as a small kid, that this little cranny of the Willamette Valley we called home was unique and special.

In an increasingly transitory world I feel relieved by Charles’ message. Relieved because for years I was mobile, traveling between both coasts and into the high deserts of the Southwest. Relieved because staying still, appreciating one’s own place wasn’t always the ‘cool thing’. People move away from small towns, the allure of urban dynamism a tempting contrast to the placid routine of home. I am relieved to strip off the exhaustion of the transient life, and find comfort within the sweet sanctuary of this Valley home, from the river birch in my backyard, to the mossy Oregon white oak branch that I swung from as a child.

It is now hip to be home, and I’ll take it. I’m making a re-commitment to this place, settling in to the comforts of the wetness of winter, the ongoing battle between the dandelions and my front yard, and the compacted padding of needles underfoot on the Mulkey Trail.

When the Thanksgiving week approaches, you will find me nestled in a crook of the Mohawk Valley, thankful for this place and the people in it, and ready to take Charles up on his challenge to ‘dig in’ to our own little home here in the Willamette Valley. Who’s with me?

Post By: Jessica McDonald

Charles’s Essay: Reinhabiting the Valley, A Field Guide to Being Here can be found in Wild in the Willamette, the new publication from OSU Press.