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Contents
- Barbara Sellers-Young
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Index
- Barbara Sellers-Young
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5 - Hunter Noack: In a Landscape
- Barbara Sellers-Young
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Summary
The moving experience of artistic expression, and the immense beauty of the wilderness. Art in Nature,
Wonderlust ToursI am sitting in a wooden chair on the partly covered porch of a cabin at the historic Miller Farm that is an extension of Bend's High Mountain Desert Museum. I am wearing a pair of wireless headphones so that I can hear pianist Hunter Noack against the backdrop of a thunderstorm. Suddenly, there is a flash of lighting and a crack of thunder. Another flash of lighting followed immediately by thunder and then an onslaught of rain. As I listen to the music through the headphones, I try to remember exactly how many seconds exist between lighting and thunder to determine the storm's closeness. I think about leaving but note that no one else is leaving, so I focus on the music and reflect on a concert in a landscape as a combination of stormy weather, the music coming through the headphones and the landscape of this nineteenth-century farm at the edge of the Cascade Range. I also consider how different the experience at the Miller Farm is from hearing Hunter Noack play on Oregon's State Capital Mall in Salem on a quiet summer evening. On that evening, I walked around and listened to the music through the headphones as I contemplated the green landscape of the mall, the rows of cherry trees and the bronze golden-leaf statue of Oregon's pioneer on top of the Capital building. Contemplating both experiences, I reflect on the communities of people across Oregon who have attended Hunter Noack's IN A LANDSCAPE concert since 2016 in such diverse places as Crater Lake, Warm Springs Indian Reservation, Columbia Gorge, Smith Rock State Park and the farm home of Oregon's legendary writer Ken Kesey. I realize my experience of the landscapes of the Miller Farm and the Capital Mall will now be firmly identified with the sounds of a piano (Figure 10 ).
Bend, Sunriver and the Cascades: From Timber to Creative City
Hunter Noack's life might be described metaphorically as taking place in a landscape of central Oregon combined with the landscape of classical music. Born in 1989, he was raised in Sunriver.
8 - Salem’s Gaiety Hollow: Lord and Schryver Landscape Architects and the Conservancy
- Barbara Sellers-Young
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Summary
Lord & Schryver gardens are characterized by a formal structure—defined by hedges, fencing, and pathways—planted with flowering trees, shrubs, perennials, biennials, and annuals to achieve an informal charm.
Ruth RobertsSalem, the state capital of Oregon, sits astride the Willamette River in the north-central part of the Willamette Valley with the Coast Range to the west and the Cascades to the east. The original inhabitants were the Kalapuya people who had lived in the mild climate of Willamette Valley for thousands of years as hunters and gathers who considered “humans, animals and the land as interconnected.” The yearly life of the Kalapuya moved with the seasons. In the spring, they moved across the valley floor harvesting camas and hunting migratory birds. With the heat of summer, they moved to the foothills where men hunted and women picked and preserved wild cherries, elderberries, blueberries and hazelnuts. The coolness of the fall brought on a period of burning the prairie and harvesting of acorns. The cooler temperatures of winter caused them to return to their large cedar bark and plank lodges. As Boag notes, “The Kalapuya's continuous cycle of seasonal movements among various eco-systems of the valley is one indicator of stability in the human environmental relationship.” The landscape was changed following the establishment of a Methodist mission by Jason Lee near the Kalapuyan village of Tchimikiti in 1841. Settlers followed dividing the land into plots and plowed the fields following styles of land use that they had evolved east of the Mississippi. The Kalapuya people were moved in 1855 to the Grande Ronde reservation that is still located between Salem and the coastal community of Lincoln City.
Elizabeth Lord (1887–1976) and Edith Schryver's (1901–1984) joint venture of a landscape architecture business entered into the history of Salem in 1929. Their visual aesthetic was the European influences from their training at the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture in Groton, Massachusetts. In their 40 years of practice, their design style influenced over 200 gardens throughout the Pacific Northwest. They lived and ran their business out of a house on Mission Street in an area referred to as Gaiety Hill which was then and is still today on the edge of Salem's business district.
7 - Willamette Valley’s Sanctuary Stage
- Barbara Sellers-Young
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Summary
Sanctuary: a place of safety
The introduction to this volume quotes the 2011 James Irvine Foundation published report titled Getting in on the Act. It is included again as the report's observations are fundamental to the changes that have taken place in the arts throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.
We are in the midst of a seismic shift in cultural production, moving from a “sit-back-and-be-told culture” to a “making-and-doing-culture.” Active or participatory arts practices are emerging from the fringes of the Western cultural tradition to capture the collective imagination. Many forces have conspired to lead us to this point. The sustained economic downturn that began in 2008, rising ticket prices, the pervasiveness of social media, the proliferation of digital content and rising expectations for self-guided, on-demand, customized experiences have all contributed to a cultural environment primed for active arts practice. This shift calls for a new equilibrium in the arts ecology and a new generation of arts leaders ready to accept, integrate and celebrate all forms of cultural practice. This is, perhaps, the defining challenge of our time for artists, arts organizations and their supporters—to embrace a more holistic view of the cultural ecology and identify new possibilities for Americans to engage with the arts.
Essentially, the Irvine report was documenting the consequence of an intense political engagement in which many visual and performing artists around the globe became committed to creating art that represented the identity and expressed the concerns of a community. In terms of theater, this activist performance form is an extension of the engaged theater of German director and playwright Bertolt Brecht (1893–1956) and the performance methods of Brazilian Augusto Boal (1931–2009), whose performances broke the fourth wall of the proscenium and encouraged the stage as a space of community dialogue. As Cohen-Cruz points out, “theater is not a self-contained entity but rather gains meaning in context, integrated into people's lives.”
This chapter traces Daniel Stone and Tinamarie Ivey's evolution of an approach to theater in Oregon's Willamette Valley that builds on the performance theories of Brecht and Boal that they refer to as “sanctuary theater” or in terms of its company name, Sanctuary Stage. Merriam Webster Dictionary notes that sanctuary is a political concept derived from the Latin sanctuarium with a history primarily associated with worship.
14 - Climate Change, Sustainability and Artists in the Land of Eden
- Barbara Sellers-Young
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Summary
This we know: the earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
Chief SealthBefore Oregon was a territory or even a destination on the long trail, it was an idea. And the idea—an Eden where people prospected not for gold but for a better life— became the lifeblood that nurtured the Beaver State until the end of the 20th century.
Ed MadridKlamath Falls, Oregon-based environmental writer Emma Marris suggests there is a tendency for Oregonians to mythologize Oregon as having retained its nineteenth-century designation as the Land of Eden. She argues, “We must temper our romantic notion of untrammeled wilderness and find room next to it for the more nuanced notion of a global, half-wild rambunctious garden, tended by us.” As she notes, the romantic view does not take into account our impact on the planet. Ecologist Erle Ellis further describes our impact,
Seven billion people, Two billion more on the way. Intensifying agriculture. Accelerating urbanization. Increasing resource use per person. Atmosphere, climate, and oceans altered by industrial pollution. The ecology of an entire planet transformed by human action. This is the new normal. We live in the Anthropocene, a new period of Earth's history defined by human influences so profound and pervasive that they are written as a new global record in rock.
A corresponding view is held by visual artist Monte Shelton’s Key Element (Figure 23). Influenced by growing up visiting Oregon's diverse landscapes, during summer family adventures, Shelton comments on Oregon's current state through the iconic skeleton key, a symbol of opening. In this case, the opening is the influence of humans in the Anthropocene. Painted during the forest fires that swept Oregon in September of 2020, Shelton explains the painting's symbolism,
Initially, I chose to suspend the Key in the center and create a horizon with a purple violet sky. It was at this stage of the painting that the Willamette Valley was struck with multiple historic wildfires. The sky was an ominous red orange color that darkened the sky in the middle of the afternoon.
Frontmatter
- Barbara Sellers-Young
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Acknowledgments
- Barbara Sellers-Young
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List of Figures
- Barbara Sellers-Young
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10 - Ashland: Angus Bowmer and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
- Barbara Sellers-Young
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Summary
Civic entrepreneurship is the free contribution of time and effort to a project for the greater good of society without expectation of financial benefit. Self-expression, opportunity for creativity and to give back to the community is the motivation; reputation is the reward and social capital is the byproduct.
Henry EtzkowitzAngus Bowmer (1904–1979), founder of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in his biography As I Remember Adam, describes his years growing up as a member of a musical family engaged in the country newspaper business in which his grandfather started 16 newspapers throughout the Pacific Northwest. His grandfather's process as Bowmer describes it was to move into an area with an old press and immediately through the newspaper start advocating for a new road or “some other project which would bring the community together in support of the common good.” Eventually, the newspaper's advocacy became a factor in new businesses starting up as people begin to develop an identity as a community. “The citizenry would take on a feeling of pride in the identity of their community. New folk would move in, houses would be built and there would emerge a new town.” The establishment of a new town was the signal to Bowmer's grandfather to pack up and move on to the next place.
Bowmer learned from his grandfather an approach in which cultural institutions, such as a newspaper, could be the creative force in a community. It was an approach he would use in 1935 to establish the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in the small town of Ashland in southern Oregon. The difference between Bowmer and his grandfather is that Bowmer stayed in Ashland and set a public engagement in motion that would create a theater enterprise that in 2021 would cover four acres of Ashland in three theaters with an annual audience of 400,000, employ 675 and have an annual budget of 30 million dollars. His efforts resulted in Ashland, a small community of approximately 21,000, to be the site of one of the largest regional theaters in the United States and the home of the most noted performing arts institution in Oregon. Bowmer's initiative is an example of what business researcher Henry Etzkowitz refers to as civic entrepreneurship in which there is alignment between humanistic, social and commercial entrepreneurship.
12 - Sitka Center for Art and Ecology
- Barbara Sellers-Young
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Summary
I think that programs which are incorporating environmental with science, arts, music, really meshing those together in a big weaving is really what the world is about anyway.
Frank BoydenTwo-and-a-half hours south of Astoria there is a headland formed by the upthrust of underwater volcanic basalt flows with views of the ocean and the Salmon River estuary called Cascade Head. The grassy headland is home to an endangered species of butterfly, the Oregon Silverspot, that only exists in four other locations in the world. The headland prairies are covered with native plant species—paintbrush, goldenrod, blue violet, streambank lupine and two rare wildflowers—the Hairy Checker Mallow and the Cascade Head Catchfly. Cascade Head is also home to elk, deer, coyote, snowshoe hare, bald eagle, great horned owl, red-tail hawk and the peregrine falcon (Figure 20).
Sitting looking out over the landscape, I contemplate that for thousands of years this was the home of the Nechesne a branch of the Tillamook tribe who built permanent log plank villages along the estuary and temporary summer shelters at fishing and berry picking sites. They were outstanding craftsmen who created sea worthy dugout canoes and designed detailed baskets that could be used for a variety of purposes including cooking. The promontory of Cascade Head was also a vigil site for Nechesne who on spirit quests climbed to the top to fast and dream.
Dreaming continues to be an integral part of Cascade Head through the back-to-nature movement that was an fundamental part of Oregon in the 1970s. Artists Frank and Jane Boyden participated in this movement by starting an Oregon Coast summer camp for children. Their initial goal was to teach children how to deeply observe the many faceted environment of the Oregon Coast. Ultimately, they established a community on one acre donated by rancher Mike Lowell where artists and scientists living and creating in a natural environment could be in conversation with each other. The couple's vision to establish what would become the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology overlapped with Mike Lowell's goal to protect the Cascade headland and integrate it with the Cascade Head Experimental Forest that had been established in 1935.
9 - Eugene and the Oregon Country Fair
- Barbara Sellers-Young
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The Country Fair channels the communal, carnivalesque spirit of the Age of Aquarius, but over the years it has evolved and developed into something a bit more mainstream, a bit less narcotic and yet an event unique unto itself: a distinctly Northwest dream of utopia, a self-sustaining alternative village gripped by a kind of kaleidoscopic Renaissance spirit, where folks give free reign to their artsy-craftsy eccentric selves. The Fair, in this sense, is not only kid-friendly; it brings out the kid in us all—playful, awestruck, devious, voracious, a bit dirty behind the ears and full of boundless curiosity.
Eugene WeeklyOregon State and Lane County Fairs
The Oregon Country Fair is often described as a new cultural event of the late twentieth century. Yet as historian Lila Perl notes, “In their oldest and simplest form, fairs were a means of bringing people together to trade, by bartering or by buying and selling. Commerce and communication sprang from the primitive fairs of prehistory.” Fairs have been a way of life in the United States since King George II advocated in 1745 that the town of Trenton, New Jersey, hold one to promote its agricultural products. In fact, beginning in 1860, the big event in the life of those living in Oregon was the State Fair sponsored by the Oregon State Agricultural Society and held in Salem, the capital city. The art-rich Oregon Country Fair is a reflection not only of this centuries-old fair tradition but integrates a specific aesthetic twist and focus on sustainability that has been integral to the cultural history of Eugene.
In the late nineteenth century, families traveled by wagon and train to the Oregon State Fair for the opportunity to spend a week camping outside the State Fair's grounds and visiting with distant friends and relatives. “Fair-goers carried with them everything they would need for the entire week of camping. Flour, sugar, rice, coffee, with dried fruit for pies and home-made jams and jellies, home-based bread, fried and roasted chickens, baked ham, cakes and always the big coffee pot and the syrup keg.” Participation at early State Fairs was based on gender. Men visited farm and stock exhibits, machine sheds and farm equipment and later in the day the race track.
11 - Astoria’s FisherPoets
- Barbara Sellers-Young
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Summary
Astoria is surrounded by the beauty of the forest, mountains, three rivers and the sea. Because of its steep hills and beautiful Victorian homes, Astoria has been called the Little San Francisco of the Pacific Northwest.
Astoria Chamber of CommerceThe February day is cold and windy. My car's window washers try to keep up with the driving rain that makes visibility uncertain. I stay focused on the road ahead of me as I drive along the coast highway toward Astoria, Oregon's first city and home of the FisherPoets festival. From the warmth of my car, I am reminded of Lewis and Clark's response to Oregon's northwestern coast during their winter encampment of 1805–06. Lewis and Clark and the 33 members of the Corps of Discovery lived in 50’ × 50’ Fort Clatsop (named for the Clatsop tribe) located near today's Astoria and surrounded by the forests and wetlands of the Youngs River estuary. Unlike the Clatsop, who were in their clothing style and longhouses adapted to the climate, the men of the Corps of Discovery got sick from the constant cold and wet. Lewis had intended to stay at Fort Clatsop until April but decided to leave early “to get out of the place” as the men were increasingly physically and emotionally debilitated by the climate.
Fur trader John Jacob Astor's expeditions (for which Astoria is named) had a similar experience. In order to expand the reach of his American Fur Company, Astor sent expeditions by ship and land to set up a site at the mouth of the Columbia River. His ship the Tonquin, captained by Jonathan Thorn, arrived in the spring of 1811. Once landed, they built, despite the rain and mud, Fort Astoria, on a hill overlooking the estuary of the Young and the Columbia Rivers. This was the first American settlement in the Oregon Country. Notwithstanding an adequate supply of food from the abundance of fish, deer, elk and root vegetables that were often supplied with help from the Clatsop, the men were so depressed by the constant rain that three of them deserted thinking they would escape to the Spanish missions a thousand miles to the south.
Landscape Two - Columbia Gorge and Plateau
- Barbara Sellers-Young
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Landscape
The Columbia River Gorge began evolving 12 to 17 million years ago at the same time as the Cascade Range was forming. The most dramatic changes in the Columbia River Gorge took place at the end of the last Ice Age when the Missoula Floods cut the steep walls that exist today and left layers of volcanic rock exposed. The Gorge is 7,993 feet deep. The Columbia River is 1,243 miles long with a drainage basin that extends into seven states in the United States as well as British Columbia. Sixty sizeable rivers or streams flow into the Columbia River. The largest is the Snake River in northeastern Oregon with a watershed of 108,000 square miles (Figure 7).
Situated south of the Columbia River Gorge, the Columbia Plateau is a consequence of extensive lava flows. Seventeen million years ago a rising jet of lava, referred to as the Yellowstone hot spot, traversed five miles underground and sent lava flowing from a series of 10 to 25-mile-long fissures in northeastern Oregon. “Lava flooded from the cracks and spread out across the landscape burying forests, filling streams and forming dams that in turn caused impoundments or lakes much like cake icing fills the imperfections of a surface.” Other fissures and related lava flows continued for more than a million years and traveled 400 miles along the Columbia River from eastern Oregon to the coast. The sea stacks of Oregon's northern beaches are the remnant of the Columbia River basalt flows.
A variety of wetlands, such as potholes, marshes and meadows, are found throughout the Columbia Plateau. A crust of blue-green algae, lichens and mosses protects and enriches the soil. Aromatic shrubs such as sagebrush and bitterbrush offer good browsing to a wide range of wildlife from Sage Grouse and Pygmy Rabbits to Mule Deer and Rocky Mountain Elk. Forests of Ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir grow from the foothills of the Columbia Plateau to the surrounding mountain ranges. Extending from the Columbia Plateau are the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon. They are made up of several mountain ranges including the Ochoco and Maury Mountains, the Greenhorn Range, the Strawberry Mountains and the Wallowa Mountains.
Introduction: Art, Environment and Metaphor
- Barbara Sellers-Young
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Summary
The sixth of February, 2020, brought a convoy of trucks driving through the streets of Salem and around Oregon's capital building honking their horns as an indication of their presence. They were organized by a group called Timber Unity that represents Oregonians who work the land as foresters, loggers, ranchers, truckers, miners, fishermen and farmers. They and their representatives were in opposition to the proposed cap-and-trade climate legislation that they believed would negatively impact their livelihoods. Their protest represented a cultural divide between the increasingly population dense areas of the cities along the Interstate 5 (I-5) corridor from Portland to Eugene and the rural less populated landmass of Oregon from the small towns along the Pacific coast to the river valleys of southern Oregon to the Cascade Range of central Oregon and the high desert and range land of eastern Oregon. Each honk of a truck was a reminder of Oregon's history as a resource-based economy from the time that the Indigenous groups settled the land 15,000 plus years ago through the arrival of fur traders and settlers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The following September on Labor Day weekend of 2020 a wind storm swept through Oregon's drought-ridden forests along the western Cascade Range downing trees and power lines and setting off the worst set of fires in the Oregon's history. The fires killed at least 10 people, burned more than 1,000,000 acres and destroyed hundreds of homes. Major population centers along the I-5 corridor from the suburbs of Portland to Salem and Eugene were threatened. The cities of Talent and Phoenix in southern Oregon were destroyed as well as towns along the Santiam Highway between Salem and Bend. Hazardous smoke was in the air for two weeks and people were cautioned to stay indoors. When the rain returned, the residue from the fires cascaded down the hills and mountains creating long-term problems for drinking water, and the denuded hillsides were at a risk for landslides. Scientists commenting on the situation suggested that in an era of global warming fires should not have come as a surprise.
The forest fires of September 2020 reignited the battle lines that have been the history of Oregon's decades-long environmental debate.
Landscape One - High Desert Basin and Range
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The desert instructs that if we spend all of our time trying to force our version of things on what is actually taking place to make our tracks (and namesakes) permanent, we will destroy where we live, literally and metaphorically, as well as our chance at experiencing what is commonly referred to as happiness.
Ellen WaterstonLandscape
Lush forests, towering mountains, plenty of rain and misty fog are the general image of Oregon. The High Desert, located primarily in Harney and Malheur Counties, has a total population of less than 50,000 in the 20,125 square miles in which 75 percent of the land is owned by the Federal government. New York Times travel writer Suzanne Carmichael wrote, “Oregon's remote high-desert country is a little-known and remarkably diverse region that covers nearly one-quarter of the state. Wind-seared desert and lush wetlands border stunning geologic formations; pelicans and trumpeter swans fly over pockmarked lava beds, and dry winds sweep through ghost towns where sheepherders used to spend the winter months.”
The terrain of the High Desert was formed by a series of lava flows that consistently erupted from miles-long vents from 10 to 30 million years ago. The consequence is that the area has been consistently pulled westward in a continuing geologic process that eventually causes earthquakes. The result is a series of Basins or valleys separated by mountain Ranges—Alvord Desert to Steens Mountain, Lake Albert to Albert Rim, Summer Lake to Winter Ridge. Divided into a southern region and a northern region, the southwest region is part of the Great Basin and the southeast is the lower Owyhee River watershed. The region averages 15 inches of annual rainfall; the Alvord Desert in southeast Oregon in the shadow of the Steens Mountains receives a bare 7 inches of rain each year (Figure 4).
There are a few places in the High Desert, such as the Jordan Craters lava field, where volcanism occurred as recently as 3,000 years ago. The continuing geological influence of the deep sources of underground heat accounts for the High Desert's geothermal resources, including Alvord Hot Springs, Lakeview's Hunter Hot Springs, as well as those located near Vale, Oregon.
1 - Environmental Activism, Arts and the Land of Eden Landscape One: High Desert Basin and Range
- Barbara Sellers-Young
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Have you ever suffered from the cheerless winters of Minnesota?
Come to Oregon, where we have no extremes of heat or cold.
Have the drought and grasshoppers of Kansas eaten you out of house and home?
Come to Oregon, where a failure of crops was never known.
Have you ever been struck by an old-fashioned Dakota Blizzard?
Come to Oregon, where the hardest storms are but a lullaby in comparison.
Have you ever been caught in the path of an Iowa Cyclone?
Come to Oregon, where cyclones and subterranean dug-outs are unknown.
—Newspaper Advertisement of Oregon Land CompanyJudd and Beach point out in Natural States that Oregon's cultural and environmental imagination is part of an evolving narrative “of cherished rural values like open space, clean air and waters, natural scenery, quiet surroundings” that is a perpetuation of the image of “Ouragon—the fabled land of promise.” For example, in 2019, 2.9 million Oregonians camped in Oregon's state parks managed by six National Park Service units, two national monuments, 13 national forests, 47 wilderness areas, one national historic site and two national historic trails. In fact, 52.9 percent of Oregon is federal land. There are also 256 state parks, including camping at 58 parks. Additionally, each city and county includes numerous parks. For example, Oregon's largest city Portland has 10,000 acres of parks and natural areas. Each of these parks and forest sites are managed by a cohort of park rangers and park personnel that care for the park's plants and animals. This includes protecting them from fire.
The forest fires of September 2020, as noted in the introduction of this book, sent a shock wave across Oregon communities. Throughout September and into October, the newspapers across the state ran a series of articles that initially documented the attempts to stop the fires, while later articles covered the devastation to homes, towns and the coveted forest landscapes. The community of sustainability activists felt a specific loss in the death of Oregon environmental icon George Atiyeh who lived in a burned over area of Opal Creek. Nephew of the former governor of Oregon, Victor Atiyeh, George was in the 1970s an advocate for Opal Creek, home to one of the last roadless, uncut forests in the Oregon's Cascades.
Landscape Five - Rogue River Valley
- Barbara Sellers-Young
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Landscape
The Klamath Mountains of southwestern Oregon are a result of some of the earliest conjunctions between exotic terranes and the North American plate. The mountain's geologic history has evolved several distinct ecological communities, including temperate rain forests, moist inland forests, oak forests and savannas, high elevation forests and alpine grasslands. The variety of animals include mountain lions, black bears, bobcats, lynx, raccoons, martens, fishers, beavers, grey fox, red fox, northern flying squirrel and deer. Bird species include golden eagles, bald eagles, pileated woodpecker, band-tailed pigeon, several hawks including goshawks, several large owl species including the spotted owl. The numerous mountains, streams and rivers form a major spawning ground for fish.
The Rogue River Valley was formed as a relatively isolated enclave west of the Cascade Range along the north side of the Klamath Mountains. The Rogue River defines the valley and flows from the east and the Cascade Range through deep canyons in the Coast Range and to the Pacific Ocean at Gold Beach. Historically, the valley was characterized by a mild climate with a long growing season that was especially good for fruits, nuts and herbs. The Rogue Valley and the Klamath Mountains contain extensive forests of Ponderosa pine, Douglas-fir, madrone, manzanita, oak, incense cedar, white fir, Shasta red fir and a diverse mix of shrubs. Along the Rogue River, there are willows, red alder, white alder, black cottonwood and Oregon ash. Boating down the Rogue River, you are greeted with an abundance of flowers—fox gloves, rhododendrons, evening primrose and elegant lilies. Boat trip up the Rogue River provides amazing scenery with Bald eagles flying overhead and deer wandering along the top of the canyon walls. These forests were the center of the timber industry in southern Oregon throughout much of the twentieth century.
Community and the Arts
The population of the original 9,500 inhabitants of the Rogue Valley included speakers of Takelman, Shastan and Athapascan languages to the west and along the coast. Following a series of conflicts, fewer than 2,000 Indian survivors were counted on the reservation in 1857. They moved to either the Grande Ronde or Siletz reservations.
6 - Portland’s Elisabeth Jones Art Center and Signal Fire
- Barbara Sellers-Young
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Summary
Portland leads the U.S. in “green-living” indexes, and Portlanders have become poster children for urban growth boundaries, public transportation, cycling, recycling, and green architecture.
Richard SpeerDriving north on Interstate 5 to Portland, I see Mt. Hood dominating the sky line. This mountain, which is only 20 miles east of the city, is a designated active volcano that has consistently erupted over the last 500,000 years. “In fact, geologic studies of the Mount Hood region have identified products of numerous local volcanoes that post-date the great floods of basalt lava (the Columbia River Basalts) that flowed down ancestral valleys of the Columbia River between about 16 and 15 million years ago.” The other dominating geographic feature is the flow of the Willamette River into the Columbia.
The initial name given to the area of today's Portland was the Wapato Valley, a reference to the root-based food that was a staple (also called Camas). This included Sauvie Island the 24,000 acres to the west of the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers. Wapato Valley inhabitants were organized as distinct villages that shared a common language and culture. The chief of a village was wealthy from the trade along the Columbia and Willamette Rivers and often had more than one wife and many slaves. The Wapato Valley people lived in multifamily red cedar plank houses that had a central hearth and individual family sleeping berths along the walls. “Wives were preferentially from outside villages and were not related by blood to their husbands. Marital ties carried economic rights with them, creating socioeconomic networks that tied villages together.” They used basalt to create tools for everyday life—bowls, pestles, mauls, and axes as well as anthropomorphic sculptures from small amulets to public monuments. The majority of the residents of the Wapato Valley died during the early eighteenth century from diseases brought by the fur traders (Figure 12 ).
In 1846, Francis Pettygrove, arrived, built a business and gave Portland its name after the city in his home state of Maine. Portland's water-based location made it an ideal transit center for those moving agricultural and lumber products from the Willamette Valley to the ports of San Francisco, Seattle, and those in Asia via the Columbia River and the open waters of the Pacific Ocean.
2 - The Murals of Vale: Gateway to Oregon
- Barbara Sellers-Young
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- Book:
- Artists Activating Sustainability
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 10 January 2023
- Print publication:
- 11 October 2022, pp 49-60
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- Chapter
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Summary
The smells riding on the wind conjured up some of her best memories—hayrides, days at the fair, corn feeds at the Legion Hall with freshly picked corn boiling in huge galvanized tubs, fresh tomatoes and ripe melons.
Nancy Judd MinorVale near the Idaho border was fashioned, as were other geographic areas of eastern Oregon, by a number of young volcanoes that erupted about 3 million years ago and covered large areas with lava flows of fluid basalt. The remains of the volcanoes are a series of faults that contain warm or hot ground water that bubbles up and sometimes mixes with local streams and rivers across eastern Oregon. The geothermal aquifer in the Vale area covers approximately 40 acres along a major fault zone. The aquifer discharges into the Malheur River primarily through hot springs with probable additional discharge through the stream bed below river level. These hot springs were a draw for groups beginning with the small roving bands of Paiutes and in the eighteenth century the travelers on the Oregon Trail.
The landscape around Vale is semiarid with limited rainfall but when the rain does come it can create major floods as it did in 1925 and 1957. Two irrigation projects, the Vale Project of the 1930s and the Bully Creek Dam Project on the Malheur River of the 1960s, controlled for potential floods and opened new land to farming and ranching. In the 1970s, there was a large-scale rangeland rehabilitation program of replanting versions of wheat grass and rotation of grazing to mitigate the extensive damage done by overgrazing. Today, a variety of row crops are grown in the valley with dairy cows and beef cattle in the low hills. Each week there is a livestock auction in Vale.
Vale (population around 2.000) is noted for being the first stop in Oregon for settlers on the 2,170-mile Oregon Trail. A memorial to the trail, Keeney Pass Interpretive Site, named for early resident Jonathan Keeney, is on the outskirts of the city center. This designated Oregon National Historic site provides an opportunity to take a less than mile walk along the dusty terrain of the original wagon ruts of Keeney Pass and read along the way stories of the Oregon Trail.