All posts by Jessica McDonald

Meg Campbell, Conservation Hero

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There could be worse legacies than a bald hilltop with a stunning view preserved for all to enjoy.  As she recalls how that legacy began, Meg Campbell’s blue eyes twinkle.  We meet for lunch at the local bakery as the spring rains rattle the windows and begin to split open the buds on the hillside’s trees.  Unlike her eventual partner in the enterprise, Charlie Ross, she hadn’t been terribly interested in land conservation at first although she had long been an active volunteer in the community.  Charlie Ross had visited Europe in the late 1960s and brought home a vision of a green necklace of open space around Corvallis and Philomath, Oregon.  At the top of his list of target properties was an open hill with a commanding view of the community and the WillametteRiver to the east and south, and the CoastRange to the north and west.  “Charlie took me up to Bald Hill on a cloudy morning,” Meg remembers.  The clouds were going by below us, moving on over to the coast.  It was just idyllic and I finally understood what Charlie was talking about.”  Land conservation efforts in the mid-Willamette Valley had just gained a dedicated champion.

Charlie Ross convened a group of interested people and the first board of the Greenbelt Land Trust was elected in 1989.  They drew up the list of sought-after properties, modeled after the original list Ross had begun twenty years earlier.  “That was a fun thing to do, decide which ones we were going to concentrate on,” Meg laughed.  Soon after, Meg became the second president of Greenbelt Land Trust.  She quickly faced her first test of leadership in 1990.  The fifty-four acres of land at the summit of Bald Hill went up for sale.

“We just ran across an ad in the paper and thought, this is on our list! Of course there was deep discussion to decide whether to plunge right in and do that because we didn’t have any money.  It took several meetings for everyone to say OK, let’s do it.  I still remember the fear and trembling.”  Fear and trembling notwithstanding, the board took the plunge.

Greenbelt Land Trust purchased the property in part with a loan from the Nature Conservancy in Portland.  “Not something they usually do,” Meg recalls.  Undeterred, Meg approached TNC and made her pitch.  “I think they just decided well, you started a land trust, that’s good.”  To pay back the loan, the Greenbelt Land Trust sold off two house lots on the west side of Bald Hill, and began fundraising in the Corvallis community in earnest.  “It took us a while to really get things started,” she remembers.  “We did a lot of putting things out on the tables at festivals so that people would begin to know what Greenbelt Land Trust was.  People were really open to the idea.”  Greenbelt raised the needed funds and eventually deeded over the remaining forty-one acres to the city of Corvallis in 1993.  It remains one of the most heavily visited parks in a city known for its open space, and the focal point for further land conservation efforts today.

When asked how the Trust managed to acquire the skills they needed to raise money, negotiate easements, and buy and transfer land, Meg makes light of the work.  “Everybody on the board had some experience and they all took certain responsibilities they felt comfortable with.  At every board meeting, we would decide who would do things.  We were very small and didn’t have any staff, so at that time I was also the secretary.  I would send out the meeting minutes immediately with the things people had agreed to do highlighted.  We were very efficient.”

They also were efficient about taking advantage of other resources, particularly those offered by the Land Trust Alliance.  “They gave good, solid advice,” Meg recalls.  She and other board members traveled to attend the Land Trust Alliance’s rallies, which featured hands-on workshops for the skills land trusts need.  Meg Campbell dove right in.  “From writing easements, to fundraising and hosting Board meetings in her living room – Meg did it all. It is a rare thing, to find people who willingly go the extra mile to realize their vision. Where would we be without people like Meg Campbell in the world?!” says Jessica McDonald, Greenbelt Land Trust’s Development Director. The trust continued to add to its portfolio of properties, although the Bald Hill purchase remains the one Meg Campbell is most proud of: “It took the most courage.”  Meg served as president until 1995 and remains active although in a lesser role.  She is now in her late eighties.

When asked what advice she would give to a new land trust starting out, she simply smiled. “Courage,” she said.  And then the interview is over.  A local mosque is holding a tree-planting event to promote peace, and Meg Campbell plans to be there to lend support.

 written by Jennifer Gervais

Cold Snow & Floods

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In January 1973, Becca and I, two cats and our dog Isaac piled into a 1959 white Pontiac station wagon and left North Carolina for New England.  For some reason that I cannot remember, we ended up in Cabot, Vermont, a small community in the northeastern part of the state.  We moved into a poorly heated apartment in a19th century building next to the Cabot Creamery and spent two months huddled next to an ancient radiator as the temperatures plunged to -30 below and snow accumulated on our door step.  We were not well prepared for a Vermont winter.  Our next door neighbor, obviously a Vermont native and used to dark frigid winters, kept busy by playing and singing (off key) “Over the Rainbow” on her piano for much of day.  We soon learned that you needed to bring your car battery inside so it joined the five of us near the radiator.   During one particularly cold morning drive, the Pontiac’s odometer (with a high pitched squeal) gave out after the needle swung wildly between 20-110 mph and froze. Nearly all New England towns regardless of size had libraries and Cabot was no exception so Becca and I spent our evenings reading while wearing our stocking caps and long underwear.  We soon moved to Prickly Mountain near Warren, Vermont and shared a unique house designed by a group of architecture students. Prickly Mountain evolved into a community of houses designed and built by disaffected architects. In 2006, Bloomberg Businessweek described the product of all this unconstrained creative energy as “wedges sticking this way and that, cantilevered bridges to nowhere…and oddly positioned window, skylights and decks.”  The Vermont frigid winter of 1973 with abundant ice and snow soon led to a chaotic spring where the aptly named Mad River in the nearby Sugerbush Valley ran wild and flooded communities nestled along its banks.  The following Fall, Becca and I and the animals soon left for the coast of Maine to start a different chapter in our lives.

The snows that fell in the mid-Willamette Valley on December 6th, 2013 accompanied by single or below zero temperatures for 4 days has led to an interesting adaptation in my community of Corvallis.  We (Corvallis residents) don’t usually think of snow as something that persists much after it initially falls.  Typical Corvallis snowfalls are very transitory and, if we get some accumulation by lunch, it is usually gone by dinner.  This snowfall was different.  I look outside my office window and, by gosh, 5 days after the snow event much of the white stuff is still on the ground.  Initially many in the community were confused and did not know the proper behavior.  Many seemed to be determined to act as if nothing happened so continued to drive, bicycle and walk as if the snow and ice were not present.  This behavior led to some chaos.  I watched numerous drivers rush past stop signs, regardless of on-coming traffic, for fear that their vehicles might get stuck at intersections.  I held my breath as bicyclists wobbled through snow drifts and dodged sliding vehicles, and pedestrians with headphones crossed streets directly in front of trucks that slipped and slid to avoid hitting them.  However after this initial chaos, the community seemed to adapt and drivers displayed much more caution, pedestrians waited patiently before crossing streets, and some avid bicyclists decided to walk instead of riding their bikes through roadside snow banks.  On Saturday, Becca and I strapped on our skis and spent several hours on the trails around Bald Hill. For the first time in my memory, I observed more cross country skiers than hikers on these trails.

November 1861 was a month of abundant rain in the Willamette Valley.  The moisture created heavy snow packs in the high Cascade and Coast Ranges.  A warm spell accompanied by heavy rain in early December melted much of the snow and resulted in a massive flood that swept away many emerging communities along the Willamette River and its tributaries.   Following this momentous flood, the winter of 1862 was notable for severe cold weather.   By mid-January 1862, Seattle and Olympia were covered in two feet of snow for weeks and temperatures plunged below zero.  The lower Columbia River and the Willamette River between Oregon City and Portland were closed by ice and skaters were reported on the frozen river.  Newspaper accounts remarked on the loss of human life and the economic damage related to livestock that perished in the cold and floods, the loss of wheat and other grain swept away in warehouses, and the lack of communications as navigation along rivers and roads became difficult. It was also reported that during and after the severe weather events, the communities and people in Oregon came together in mutual support and, that because of this cooperation, these communities became stronger and achieved a measure of self-reliance and a more distinctive identity.  We are expecting rain and warmer temperatures later this week and the snow will be gone, but what I hope that our community will become slightly stronger because we adapted to changing conditions and became a little more self-reliant.

A Human Place

Blog, Outreach,

Bologna is a veiled city, a hidden city, a layered city. It shows up in the pages of Byron (home of “popes, painters, and sausage”), in Dickens (“There is a grave and learned air about the city, and a pleasant gloom upon it. . . .”); Mozart played the organ in the cathedral of San Petronio (the oldest organ still in continuous use—dating from the late 15th century), and a young Michaelangelo carved figures to ornament St. Dominic’s tomb. It is everywhere heralded—even in Hell where Dante compared its famous (and famously leaning) Garisenda Tower to the giant Antaeus. Dozens of miles of covered porticos line narrow cobbled streets, opening suddenly on little squares and oddly angled churches—or constricting by increments before closing off entirely in a wall or bricked-up arch. Other walkways appear through distant doorways, interior courtyards wink from behind gated entrances. Dark brick towers rise suddenly around a corner and disappear a few paces later—at one point Bologna had nearly 200 of them, of which only a dozen or so remain. Two at the heart of the old city have become its emblem, although one had to be shortened to 40 meters on account of the hazard its precipitous lean presented. Wherever you walk, you are seeing just the surface—a door opens revealing a garden, a long narrow alley suddenly lines up as you stroll past and trails off into darkness, a shuttered shopfront for some reason is now open to disclose a small gallery.  It’s all glimpses and gleanings. Time too veils Bologna—faded fragments of old frescoes emerge on church walls, a face, maybe a hand or glove; eroded carvings, coats of arms, escutcheons, heraldic devices, Madonnas and saints adorn outmoded doorways, facades, balustrades, capitals and columns. Mottos and messages from the past, remembering names long forgotten, dates and insignia worn to traces reach out through graffiti and slogans. A Miles Davis poster (itself a relic) is stuck to the battered oak door of the 13th century Castiglioni gateway: the temporal free-fall whispers this too shall pass.

It’s been going on for centuries, millennia. Bologna is the quintessential city, a monument to our shared desire to live among our own kind, to shape and re-shape our environment. Nearly everything you see, smell, and hear is the product of someone’s intent, someone’s art, or a byproduct of someone’s actions (e.g. the 3-a.m. Vespa shrieking down a deserted alleyway). Even Bolognese trees reveal this intentionality: surprisingly, the most popular is the gingko, (very tolerant of urban environments) and many are huge, but hardly native, snatched from time to ornament what must fade. In such a throng, most of nature is forced to the margins (and the market stalls) or out of the city altogether, yielding to pigeons and (in summer) mosquitoes. From our tiny north-facing balcony I saw a solitary sparrow (in 10 days) hopping about the patchwork backyards beneath our flat.  The dogs you see in cafés and stores pace their entire lives on ancient pavement—as do their owners. A thoroughly human place; it’s like living in a vast and slightly chaotic house large enough to generate weather.

Back home last night I woke to a treefrog’s timeless aria in the gutter outside our window. Better even than Mozart on a well-built organ in the cathedral of San Petronio, and hopefully more lasting.

A Willamette Future

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In 1962, the KGW reporter, Tom McCall presented the television documentary “Pollution in Paradise” with the opening lines “clean water and clean air are imperative to life itself.”  The documentary was a powerful message to the citizens of Oregon that the degradation of our waterways was impacting the health and welfare of our state.  The film focused primarily on the 13th largest river in continental United States, the Willamette River.

Now over 50 years later, it is time to reflect back on this river that once nurtured an extremely rich and complex collection of species and habitats.  Humans have hunted black-tailed deer and Roosevelt elk in the bottom-land hardwood forests and open grasslands along the shores of the Willamette River, dug camas bulbs from wet prairies in the river floodplains, collected freshwater mussels from the River sediments, and harvested steelhead trout and Chinook salmon from some of its fast-flowing tributaries for thousands of years.  More recently, we built cities next to the Willamette River, constructed massive dams in some of its most important tributaries, heavily rocked miles of shoreline embankments, filled-in many of the River’s numerous side channels and sloughs, and discharged industrial pollutants and urban sewage along many of its reaches.  There are predictions that 4 million Oregonians may be living in the Willamette Basin by 2050 and most of these citizens will likely settle near the River or its tributaries.  Perhaps many in the Willamette Valley gave up on the River because the restoration challenges seemed too great, but some like Tom McCall, viewed the challenges as opportunities and initiated regulations and policies that led to altering how we use the River.

Stan Gregory, David Hulse and some of their colleagues in 2002 proposed a challenge to the citizens living in the Willamette Basin in their Willamette River Basin Planning Atlas: “How does the Basin accommodate many more people without losing the qualities that attracted people to live in the Basin.” This remarkable Atlas is a blueprint for the future of the Willamette River and was a result of a comprehensive analysis of historic, current, and future trends in the Willamette Basin.  Oregonians were offered a choice that if they desired to pursue a future of a healthier Basin with clean rivers and streams, and habitats for native fish and wildlife then they needed to pro-actively begin the steps of mending the land and water.

Since the publication of the Atlas, there has been an extraordinary amount of progress in protecting and restoring the Willamette River systems through an informal partnership of funding organizations such as the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board, Meyer Memorial Trust, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and Bonneville Power Administration, and non-profits such as land trusts, SWCDs and watershed councils.

Nearly 4000 acres of Willamette River floodplains have been place in permanent protection, and many other private lands have landowners committed to restoring riparian forests and creating better passage for fish.  In the last few weeks, Greenbelt Land Trust purchased an amazing property next to the Willamette River that contains towering cottonwoods, giant maples and ash, and many side channels that fill with water and fish after winter and spring rains.  This acquisition was one small step to fulfilling the future vision described in the Atlas.

In Praise of the vernacular

Blog, Outreach

Yes, it’s Latin—with a wide spectrum of shades. Wendell Berry speaks of the need to find a vernacular when we speak or write, the duty to use those references and habits of thought so that we are intelligible to our neighbors and, more particularly, to ourselves. Berry came upon this in the poetry of William Carlos Williams, a doctor and denizen of Rutherford, New Jersey. In what he calls “The Struggle Toward a Credible Language”, he details the challenge of speaking from where we are. And while Rutherford, New Jersey was a far cry from his own pioneering roots in rural Kentucky (we simply cannot picture Berry sporting a bow tie like Williams), the need was the same: as Edgar notes in the deep shadows of Lear’s death, we must “speak what we feel”; feeling comes from our particular present, not our sense of decorum.”

The vernacular gives voice to innumerable years of  place and our sense of being rooted in it. With our mobility and speed, we easily adopt a global, polyglot perspective, and there are good reasons to do this—we lengthen our reach, we bring the far-flung into our orbit, or enter a world others have made. But as our own William Stafford warned,

“If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.”

Honoring the vernacular led Hopkins to favour words sprung from Anglo-Saxon soil over more Latinate constructions—a feature of his poetry that drives students to distraction and the rest of us to the Oxford English Dictionary. But at the same time it taps into strong, if obscure, currents of our identity. Like a well or spring, language draws from a deeper source, responds to forces we ignore or dispraise at considerable peril—Stafford ends his poem:

“the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.”

So. What signals do we give to this place that itself gives us voice? Are they clear? Even a distinct maybe is far better if it’s honestly felt than a false yes or an uncertain no. Our signals are not confirmed to the verbal—they are seen in the way we scan this particular horizon, in the way we adapt our lives to the place that matters in the most immediate sense.  Hopkins witnessed (as did his contemporaries—like Hardy, who made no secret of his dismay) over the coming age of machines and the rending of the earth that seemed to bear the brunt of iron, and sought solace in the unquenchable rejuvenation of creation despite our inroads.

“Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things. . .”

Yet we have made much further inroads than he could have imagined, inroads that intensify even now, as if to seal up the voice of the place and its vernacular. I doubt even Hopkins could imagine a time when the ‘dearest freshness deep down things’ could ever pack it in and call it quits—that was not consistent with his faith in Providence.  But we cannot easily accept, given what we know about our ability to transform our place, this assurance. For those of us living in this time of radical—even global—change, the darkness around us is deep.

What these witnesses share is a concern for who we are and how we see ourselves. Shorn of the fir-clad hills and the oak savannas, absent the returning salmon and the red berries of fall hawthorns, how will we speak our vernacular? Will we adopt some meta-language—without reference to place, without location, without a sense of where we speak? Will it matter that we stand beside the Willamette looking over fields of ryegrass and stands of alder, working lands as well as back-channels of the river? It seems our duty now is preserve our vernacular for those yet to learn the language lest we ourselves fade before our time.