Oregon Humanities

The Stuff of Life

Kathleen Holt

In Lorrie Moore’s short story “Agnes of Iowa,” from her excellent collection Birds of America, the main character, while a foreign exchange student in Copenhagen, is confronted by a Danish man who asks her, “The United States—how can you live in that country?” Moore writes: “‘A lot of my stuff is there,’ she’d said, and it was then that she first felt all the dark love and shame that came from the pure accident of home, the deep and arbitrary place that happened to be yours.”

When I first read this story shortly after it was published ten years ago, this line appealed to me because of the humor of the imagined moment: a young girl who is left to inexpertly defend her country comes up with the best explanation she can. On one level, yes, home is merely where our stuff is. But on later readings, the second part of the line profoundly resonated with me: “the dark love and shame” of being where you are from. And this year, as I edited this issue of Oregon Humanities, the combination of the two concepts raised an alarming question, one that I’d been considering for years, though most often obliquely: is being American, at its very core, about owning a lot of stuff?

As many of the essays in this issue suggest, there does seem to be an irresistible—and sometimes terrible—link between our identities as Americans and consumers: Louise Bishop references last year’s awful episode in which a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death by shoppers on Black Friday (page 29). John Frohnmayer describes attending his first and only shareholders meeting and declares that “capitalism, if it continues in its present form, will destroy us” (page 26). John Campbell posits that America’s obsession with consumer goods can be traced back to the Reagan era, but concedes that there is also something physical and elemental about consumption (page 17).

Indeed, it’s difficult to categorically decide that the acquisition of material goods is something that is solely cultural and always negative. Other writers in this issue look at these subtle intricacies of consumerism, collecting, and hoarding. In particular, John Holloran explores materialism as a problem of disenchantment with things that have the potential to be imbued with meaning and soul if only we remembered their origins and stories (page 12).

The effort to find the Moore book so that I could quote from it here was telling: I spent a Sunday afternoon digging through box after box full of nonessential items that we’d packed away as we remodeled our house. After a few hours, I finally found a box unhelpfully marked “books and stuff” at the bottom of a stack in the guest-room closet. In the box was not only this book, but also a handful of other favorite books, a set of wireless headphones, one of my daughter’s coloring books, a Spanish-English verb conjugation book, and a stack of unsent holiday letters from 2006.

For a moment, I felt like an archaeologist, elated but puzzled by the found items laid out before me. This box had clearly been packed in haste, a last-minute sweep of a room that brought all of these disparate items together to be buried in the same resting place. Until now, I’d not noticed the absence of these things in my daily life and, in fact, was surprised to realize they’d been missing at all. But they were, each of them, important enough to me that, in the frenzy of packing, I’d put them in a box rather than in the trash or giveaway pile. In some cases, it was the creation of the item that meant something. In other cases, it was the symbolism or potential usefulness of the item that spared it. It was good to have that moment to remember and reflect—before I packed them up and put them away again.

My Brother, the Keeper

A woman tries to understand her brother's need to hoard.

Dmae Roberts

I just saw my little brother, Jack, digging through a Dumpster at our neighborhood grocery store, and I pretended I didn’t know him. He was in the dirty, torn clothes he likes to wear for what he calls “collecting.” Sometimes his flannel shirts and fleece jackets are hanging in shreds on his thin, middle-aged frame. I know he doesn’t eat well, even though I buy him food, and every time I see him, he looks thinner. Though he can afford a haircut, he lets his hair grow long and stringy; when he perspires, it clings to his face and the old, thick glasses he wears.

When I moved him from our mother’s home in Eugene, where he’d lived until her death three years ago, to a nice one-bedroom house around the corner from me in Portland, I naively thought that in new surroundings his behavior would change. I’ve begged, cajoled, and criticized. But he won’t stop. Jack doesn’t dig through Dumpsters for income: collecting is his joy, his passion in life, one I’ll never understand.

Back at home, sitting at my cluttered desk, I fight the urge to phone him and ask again why he won’t stop. I’ve done my research, read about disposophobia—the fear of getting rid of junk. I’ve rationalized that Jack isn’t as bad as the people you see on the news who hoard dozens of small animals in their homes; he’s just a pack rat with a strong compulsion. A year ago, I took him to counseling, but after eight weeks of sessions, the mental health expert concluded, much to my frustration, that Jack was too old to change his behavior and that I needed to stop getting upset about it. That made me angry—but I knew Jack wasn’t the only one in the family with a problem.

When I got married ten years ago and my husband moved into my small bungalow, we labored over how to fit his stuff into my two-bedroom house—one of the bedrooms was my dedicated office. For a while, the dining room became my husband’s office and dressing room, but then the house got so crammed that he built a two-story garage; my office was on top. It was heaven to have all that space. Four years later, the garage is stacked full of home-remodeling supplies and boxes I cleared out of the basement. In my office I have three desks, each one piled with paper because I hate filing. Business cards and small writing pads are stashed behind my computer monitor because I haven’t figured out what to do with them. Every time I begin to clean up, an urge to travel suddenly overtakes me: I long for a nice clean hotel room without piles of stuff lying around. The only problem is that I always come back home to face the clutter again.

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Goat

Coming to terms with the physicality of consumption

John R. Campbell

Mornings, on my way to work, I see him. A domestic billy goat, white, standing stoically near Highway 99, alongside his igloo goat-house. He’s tethered in a rural backyard, posted to keep the blackberry vines at bay.

One spring day, I pull off the road for a visit. Close up, the goat is smaller than I expected, scrawnier and more vulnerable-looking. He’s understandably uneasy, too, not knowing my intentions. He begins to fidget, and then to nod. He drops his horns. He lifts a cloven hoof and opens his mouth halfway.

I sigh and turn away. I can see there will be no understanding between us.

In the early 1980s, I lived for a time near Crescent City, California. Called “Depressant City” by some of the locals, it’s a small coastal town just south of the Oregon border. Like most coastal communities, its timber and fish economy has suffered over the years. Add to that the fact that the entire downtown was destroyed by the 1964 tsunami, and Crescent City is a ragged testament among rugged coastline, redwood forests, and convoluted mountains.

At my rented house north of town, second-growth redwoods towered all around, and at the margins of the woods, blackberries thrived. Each morning I picked berries for my yogurt, out near the double-wide, where my landlords lived. And of course I’d say hello to their goat.

I can’t quite remember his name. It might have been Oscar, or Herman—a human name, in any event, as the landlords were fond of him. And why not? The goat did his job. He ate everything in his path, most notably the blackberry vines, some of which were thick as lariat rope. The goat ate slugs, redwood fronds, dog food, shriveled grapes. He ate old brown lettuce. I’d feed him scraps—he was indifferent, but hungry.

This was the Reagan era, when Americans were instructed to trust their futures to the affluent, whose wealth would surely trickle down to the masses. I trace some of our current obsession with consumer goods to that time, when the gap between the rich and the poor widened into a chasm. While the rich acquired unprecedented wealth, the middle class aspired to improbable luxuries and became riddled with debt. The poor, of course, were more and more estranged from the material American way.

At the time, I taught high school English to the children of second- and third-generation welfare families. In my crowded classroom, I read James Baldwin to Anglos, most of whom were either angry or asleep. I read Shakespeare to bemused Yurok and Tolowa Indians. It was my first year of teaching, and I hadn’t yet learned the dynamics of rural poverty. I remember being surprised when someone started a petition to have me fired for teaching D. H. Lawrence.

Exhausted, and puzzled by my own inexperience, I’d go home and stare out my picture window, just sit and gaze. The yard was an amphitheater ringed by trees, and in the clearing stood that goat, chewing all day at the world.

In his very demeanor, the goat seemed to mock my idealism. His was an animal acceptance of circumstances. His world was circumscribed, severely, by the radius of his tether, and he took it all in. Calmly. Disinterestedly. Often he took it in literally, ingesting it, digesting it, then pooping it out in little pellets. What was it about his presence that absorbed me? Was it a direct physicality, was it a coming to terms with the world as it is, unselfconsciously?

For much of my life, I’ve craved some version of that purely physical presence, as a balm, perhaps, for injuries incurred in more abstract battles. The irony is that I already hold such presence, if only I could come to realize it. That construct, my ego, battles with the world, while that gift, my body, dwells here most naturally—is dying here, too, but what could be more natural than that?

The goat consumes. Most anything. But he does so out of a purely physical need. His desire, unlike mine, demands no moral compass. An animal quelling hunger does exactly what’s required. Even “gluttonous” animals are merely storing protein and fat against the likelihood of future scarcity.

The old nature deity, Pan, was half goat, half man. It was said that anyone who actually saw Pan in the wild would experience emotional duress, would “panic” in the presence of the god. Now, twenty centuries after Thamus proclaimed that the great god Pan is dead, I experience a curious reversal. I seek Pan’s presence, or at least, the locus where a goat and a man might meet. Rather than panicking there, I feel a calm that is strangely familiar. The goat is alien to me, with his acerbic voice and his odd, rectangular pupils. But the goat is akin to me, too. We are subject to the same imperatives of nature. Fellow subjects provide what mere objects cannot—a sense of belonging in a shared and autonomous world.

Belonging: the state of being comfortable in a place or community. As opposed to belongings: the things people own or have with them.

We were once subservient to fickle gods, who demanded certain machinations. We appeased those gods with sacrifices, with lambs and goats. And we thrived. Still, look around—our hard-won prosperity is periodically threatened by forces we barely apprehend. What to do now? What to sacrifice?

I want to trust in personal sacrifice as a better, secular version of the old sacrificial ritual. I want to believe that we’re not completely ensnared by superficial desires. That American individualism might accommodate a greater good.

And it may be so. There are those who do with less for the sake of their families, or, according to an environmental ethic, for the sake of the earth. There are those who choose right livelihood over purely monetary concerns. But let’s face it, for many of us, personal sacrifice is an anathema. Even those who offer their time and money to family, community, or church are loath to give an inch when it comes to material goods. Drive a less-prestigious car? Downsize my rambling house? Why shouldn’t I have a big-screen TV, as big a screen as I can possibly manage? I like my images big, my reality in high-definition. I want to be rewarded for my virtue, for my sweat. And the rewards that consumer goods offer satisfy me, if not deeply, then at least tangibly. They are quantifiable. They’re visible. They signal an affluence owed to me, don’t they?

Yet in the midst of these desires, a more elemental craving recurs. We’re visited by weather, by sunlight, by bare winter ground and luxuriant summer growth.

It’s a strange dynamic, this craving for physical presence. How can I crave what I already have? Maybe I’ve come to define a possession as something bought and owned, rather than something inherently held. Maybe I desire possessions as imitations of a presence that wholly suffices. But possessions don’t sate desire so much as they stimulate further yearning. It’s hard to sit still among them.

Altars to Hephaestus

In praise of materials and materialists

Charles Goodrich

Hephaestus, the Smith-god … is ugly and ill-tempered,
but all his work is of matchless skill.

Robert Graves, The Greek Myths

I’m sweating copper in my shop, making a railing of copper pipe for my son’s new loft bed. I’ve cleaned, fluxed, and fitted a copper elbow to the pipe. Now I open the valve on the propane bottle and strike the spark tool, and the blue flame pops to life. It licks the pipe fitting till the metal blushes purple, ocher, and gold. When I touch the solder to the hot copper, the silver wire melts and quivers into the fitting. More solder drips off and solidifies in small pearls on the shop floor. The hiss of the torch and the acrid smell of the flux are as pleasing to me as the sounds and fragrances of cooking.

I close the valve on the torch and the flame expires. Now a fresh quiet coexists with the crackle of the fire in the tin woodstove. I move over to the stove and hold my cold hands up to the metal chimney. I’m a bit dizzy from the gas, and as I look about me, the shop swims a little.

What a restless place my shop is. The cheap table saw that dominates the center of the floor is littered with copper fittings, pipe cutters, coils of solder. On the wall above the workbench, saws, hammers, and C-clamps hang in disregard of their red-painted silhouettes. In the far corner, pieces of cedar, fir, pine, oak, and maple lumber in varying lengths and dimensions lean together in a jumble against the wall. Two dozen cans of paint squat glumly on shelves beside the door. On the windowsill, agates, shards of obsidian, and the jawbone of a deer are stitched together with spider silk. Despite the cobwebs and layers of dust, nothing feels settled in the shop; everything seems to strain toward its potential, as if each chunk of lumber, all the screws and nails, even the scraps of metal under the workbench wanted to be assembled into something a human would use, something lovable.

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Beyond Individualism

How capitalism is destroying America

John Frohnmayer

Several years ago, I went to my first and only shareholders meeting. Organizers laid out cookies and orange juice for the handful of us who showed up, but they were careful to conduct all business, receive the proxies, and conclude the voting before we got a chance to talk. When the microphone came to me, I asked if the fund was concerned that executives in companies it helped finance were making 435 times what the average worker makes. They weren’t. Their reasoning was that they had to get the best leaders, and to get the best they had to pay the most. Social justice was not in their portfolio; their only charge, as they saw it, was to make money for their shareholders.

“The best” have shown us what they can do. Their ships burn in the harbor, and we wonder if there is any economist in the world who knows what the hell is going on. Maybe George Soros, who predicted such a meltdown in his 1998 book The Crisis of Global Capitalism, knows: “Market forces, if they are given complete authority, even in purely economic and financial areas, produce chaos and could ultimately lead to the downfall of the capitalist system.”

I would put it in slightly different terms: “growth for growth’s sake” is the ideology of the cancer cell. And the illness is built into the bones and sinews of capitalism. The corporation has unlimited life and, legally, has all of the privileges of a citizen but few of the responsibilities. Corporations don’t have to serve in the military. They don’t get called to jury duty, and they don’t have to be good neighbors. The corporate model is designed to maximize profit and minimize responsibility. In short, corporations don’t go to church.

I have come to believe that capitalism, if it continues in its present form, will destroy us. It will destroy us physically because the earth cannot withstand present levels of consumption, let alone expansion. Just think of the carbon load when India and China have as many cars as we do. Capitalism will destroy us economically because it makes a virtue of the vice of greed. The resulting wealth inequality causes social unrest, famine, health crises, terrorism, and insecurities throughout the world. Adam Smith’s invisible hand is giving us a single-digit gesture. The philosophy of unfettered self-interest is incompatible with justice, compassion, and, indeed, with freedom. And capitalism will destroy us spiritually because the accumulation of stuff does not make us happy. All we get from accumulating stuff is the insatiable craving for more stuff, most of which ends up in the landfill.

So here is the pickle we find ourselves in: the market is in the toilet, people have lost their jobs, and companies have stopped buying inventory, so more suppliers have gone down the tube and the government is heaving sacks of money out of airplanes to try to help because 70 percent of our economy is based on buying stuff. The first rule of economics is that everything is connected to everything else, so if we are to bumble our way out of this mess, we have to consider a few more values like equality, spiritual happiness, community, and pluralism. The preamble of the Constitution purports to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, and promote the general welfare, so shouldn’t our economic policy have some relationship to these goals?

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Under a Spell

Our disenchantment with stuff

John Holloran

Fall 1995: My studies had taken me to Germany, to Goettingen, the university town outside of Hanover, midway between Frankfurt and Hamburg. We were planning to invite friends—some German, some American—over for a traditional Thanksgiving meal. I knew I would have to plan ahead—German merchants don’t like surprises—so I checked with the local Frischgefluegel (poultry store) and discovered I could indeed order a six-kilogram turkey—_ein Truthahn_. I then did the rounds from one half-timbered storefront to the next in search of stuffing mix because when I was a child, making stuffing meant buying a crinkly plastic bag full of dried cubes of bread, replete with a packet of seasoning. Within the walls of the old town, I couldn’t find anything close—not even at Ewerts, the swanky imported-foods store where I’d go to buy Thai and Indian spices. Nein, not unless I wanted to buy several boxes of Semmel Knoedel mix. I’d have to start from scratch.

Those were the days before easy Internet searches, so I made my way to an English-language bookstore and found a new and horrendously expensive copy of The Joy of Cooking. Standing in the aisle, feeling conspicuous, I found a simple recipe for stuffing and tried to commit it to memory. For most of the rest of the ingredients here, too, I’d have to improvise. Though the recipe called for dried, bottled herbs, I found fresh sage at the farmers market, bought fresh celery root (celeriac), onions, butter, and a big loaf of freshly baked Italian bread.

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Belonging in Belongings

From photographs to virtual reality, media technologies have changed the way we shop and live.

Louise Bishop

The Christmas shopping season of 2008 began with death by shopping when, at the 5:00 a.m. opening of a Long Island Wal-Mart, an onslaught of customers fatally trampled a store guard. It happened on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, so-called not because of its potential for deadly stampedes, but because the day’s relentless shopping frenzy ostensibly puts retailers into the black for the holiday season. Still, the Christmas shopping rush isn’t supposed to include death as part of the equation.

The tragedy can’t help but make one wonder: what drives Americans to shop and buy? There are, no doubt, plenty of explanations for why Americans are often considered the world’s ultimate consumers. What is it that makes us susceptible to a sometimes-mad desire for belongings? I propose an idiosyncratic history of the reasons why we Americans shop—and shop so much—as well as how the Internet plays a role in changing the very nature of these shopping habits for the next generation.

The common uses of the word “belongings” and its root, “belong,” refer both to the feeling of belonging and to the stuff we own. In the fourteenth century, the primary meaning of the verb “belong,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was “to go along with or accompany, to be appropriate, or to pertain to.” At that time, “belonging” had less to do with material objects than with dependency or membership, relationships between people. In fact, the word “belongings,” in the sense of “stuff,” doesn’t appear in English until the nineteenth century.

If you believe, as I do, that how language is used can both reveal and create behavior, then you might agree that, since its inception in fourteenth-century English, “belonging” points to a central feature of our emotional selves: we want to belong. A sense of belonging shapes self-understanding and confers a sense of place in the world. Belonging satisfies a deep, recurrent desire to integrate and affiliate with others. But at the same time, we also crave individuality.

Our self-understanding moves dynamically between these two desires: to individuate and feel our individuality, and to belong to a group or groups. Sometimes our desires for both group and individual identity overlap, as exemplified by the trope of the rugged American individual—the loner cowboy, for instance, a stereotypic staple of American books and movies. Ironically, these media—movies perhaps more than books—trade on group experience to successfully implant admiration for radical American individualism. Another example: think of the intensity with which teenagers insist on their individuality, then wear identical styles and fashions in their high school corridors or yearbook, learning from magazines, television, radio, and the Internet. In both of these examples we catch a glimpse of the role media play in modern identity.

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Control Freaks?

Why some people collect stuff

Mark Perlman

It all began for me in fourth grade when I started collecting stamps. Then, as a teenager, my path after school always seemed to go by the record store, and I’d come home with a few used LPs of Beethoven or Brahms or Mahler. My mother would exclaim, “No more records!” but to no avail. The advent of CDs made this habit worse, and I now face another dedicated CD shelf. And, yes, I still have all the LPs—- shame on you for even wondering. I’m a collector. I also have a pile of a hundred or so beer coasters of all brands and shapes that I acquired when I was a student traveling through Europe. I don’t really drink beer anymore, and I have no real interest in the coasters, but the stack is a reminder of the good old days. Even if I don’t look at them, and even though they’re not in any way valuable, I can’t just throw them away.

People collect a wide variety of stuff, from stamps and coins to autographs and arrowheads, toys, guns, dolls, rocks, jewelry, antiques, baseball cards, matchbooks, cars, art, houses, and much more. Why do they do this? What would make otherwise normal people search far and wide for an elusive and obscure item to add to an already-bulging collection? The items collected don’t have to be valuable or beautiful to be collectible—for every collector of rare and valuable coins or fine art is someone who collects interesting but common rocks or leaves of various shapes or beer cans of the world. There are also as many people who seem to simply lack any hint of the urge to collect, and who think collectors are nutcases who waste vast amounts of time, energy, space, and money on utter trivialities.

Collecting is different from other methods of accruing stuff. It’s not gathering and storing, as one might do with food or clothing or household tools. It’s not saving nuts and bolts, or envelopes or empty boxes, just in case they have a future use. It’s not accumulation—say, of junk mail or old newspapers—that one just hasn’t gotten around to going through and organizing or throwing out. And it’s not hoarding, like having twenty-seven years’ worth of newspapers taking over all the space in your house. With hoarding, piles of stuff can end up rendering living spaces unlivable, or keeping them from serving their normal purposes. Hoarding is a serious psychological disorder related to obsessive-compulsive disorder, and it can have tragic consequences, as exemplified in news stories of people who hoard animals in terribly filthy and unhealthy conditions. But even avid collectors are rarely hoarders, unless their collections leave them no room in their homes to live.

My beer coasters don’t count as a collection. I don’t sort them, study them, mount them, or do anything else with them. They’re just stuff I keep. Same for the teddy bear I have had since I was a baby, the one Grandma sewed back together when I must have tugged on it too hard. These are keepsakes that I have a sentimental attachment to and can’t bring myself to get rid of. Even inheriting someone else’s collection might not count as a collection of one’s own. Say you inherit Grandpa’s old automobile license plates or Grandma’s Hummel figurines. Even if you don’t care much about either license plates or figurines, you may just hang on to them out of sentiment or loyalty—but at some point, if you get the right offer or run out of room, you may try to sell them or give them away.

So what makes collecting different from other methods of accruing stuff? Collecting is far more careful and systematic. Collectors collect very specific things and methodically pursue the items they seek. (Though some collectors have multiple collections of different types of things.) On building a collection, the collector is proud of it (unlike the hoarder, who is ashamed of his or her hoard). Collectors sort the things they collect, study them, read about them and the context or history they are related to, and learn about the world through them. Collectors often gather to talk to others who collect the same or similar items. Collectors keep lists and have catalogs of their collections. And collectors take pains to preserve the items they collect, either by storing them in boxes, or, more elaborately, by carefully mounting or encasing them. Collectors think of themselves as the guardians of items that other people might not view as valuable. It is a noble and often thankless task to preserve and guard a It all began for me in fourth grade when I started collecting stamps. Then, as a teenager, my path after school always seemed to go by the record store, and I’d come home with a few used LPs of Beethoven or Brahms or Mahler. My mother would exclaim, “No more records!” but to no avail. The advent of CDs made this habit worse, and I now face another dedicated CD shelf. And, yes, I still have all the LPs—- shame on you for even wondering. I’m a collector. I also have a pile of a hundred or so beer coasters of all brands and shapes that I acquired when I was a student traveling through Europe. I don’t really drink beer anymore, and I have no real interest in the coasters, but the stack is a reminder of the good old days. Even if I don’t look at them, and even though they’re not in any way valuable, I can’t just throw them away.

People collect a wide variety of stuff, from stamps and coins to autographs and arrowheads, toys, guns, dolls, rocks, jewelry, antiques, baseball cards, matchbooks, cars, art, houses, and much more. Why do they do this? What would make otherwise normal people search far and wide for an elusive and obscure item to add to an already-bulging collection? The items collected don’t have to be valuable or beautiful to be collectible—for every collector of rare and valuable coins or fine art is someone who collects interesting but common rocks or leaves of various shapes or beer cans of the world. There are also as many people who seem to simply lack any hint of the urge to collect, and who think collectors are nutcases who waste vast amounts of time, energy, space, and money on utter trivialities.

Collecting is different from other methods of accruing stuff. It’s not gathering and storing, as one might do with food or clothing or household tools. It’s not saving nuts and bolts, or envelopes or empty boxes, just in case they have a future use. It’s not accumulation—say, of junk mail or old newspapers—that one just hasn’t gotten around to going through and organizing or throwing out. And it’s not hoarding, like having twenty-seven years’ worth of newspapers taking over all the space in your house. With hoarding, piles of stuff can end up rendering living spaces unlivable, or keeping them from serving their normal purposes. Hoarding is a serious psychological disorder related to obsessive-compulsive disorder, and it can have tragic consequences, as exemplified in news stories of people who hoard animals in terribly filthy and unhealthy conditions. But even avid collectors are rarely hoarders, unless their collections leave them no room in their homes to live.

My beer coasters don’t count as a collection. I don’t sort them, study them, mount them, or do anything else with them. They’re just stuff I keep. Same for the teddy bear I have had since I was a baby, the one Grandma sewed back together when I must have tugged on it too hard. These are keepsakes that I have a sentimental attachment to and can’t bring myself to get rid of. Even inheriting someone else’s collection might not count as a collection of one’s own. Say you inherit Grandpa’s old automobile license plates or Grandma’s Hummel figurines. Even if you don’t care much about either license plates or figurines, you may just hang on to them out of sentiment or loyalty—but at some point, if you get the right offer or run out of room, you may try to sell them or give them away.

So what makes collecting different from other methods of accruing stuff? Collecting is far more careful and systematic. Collectors collect very specific things and methodically pursue the items they seek. (Though some collectors have multiple collections of different types of things.) On building a collection, the collector is proud of it (unlike the hoarder, who is ashamed of his or her hoard). Collectors sort the things they collect, study them, read about them and the context or history they are related to, and learn about the world through them. Collectors often gather to talk to others who collect the same or similar items. Collectors keep lists and have catalogs of their collections. And collectors take pains to preserve the items they collect, either by storing them in boxes, or, more elaborately, by carefully mounting or encasing them. Collectors think of themselves as the guardians of items that other people might not view as valuable. It is a noble and often thankless task to preserve and guard a collection.

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New board members

The OCH Board of Directors elected the following three new members at its February 2009 meeting:

Ed Battistella of Ashland has served as professor of English & writing at Southern Oregon University since July 2000. From 2000 to 2006, he also served as dean of the School of Arts & Letters, and in 2007, he was the university’s interim provost. Battistella is coeditor-in-chief of Wiley-Blackwell’s online journal Linguistics and Language Compass and is the author of several books, including Do You Make These Mistakes in English? The Story of Sherwin Cody’s Famous Language School (Oxford University Press, 2008). He has contributed to Oregon Humanities magazine, most recently in the fall 2008 issue on the theme of civility.

Vickie Fleming of Redmond is currently the superintendent of the Redmond School District in Central Oregon. Prior to this, she served as the deputy superintendent for Susan Castillo, the current state superintendent. Fleming has also managed the Mid-Willamette Education Consortium at Chemeketa Community College, youth corrections education programs at Hillcrest and MacLaren facilities, and special programs for Willamette Education Service District. She has also led early childhood policy development for a former Oregon governor.

Rich Wandschneider of Enterprise has served on the Editorial Advisory Board of Oregon Humanities magazine since 2007. Wandschneider is the founding director of Fishtrap, Inc., an educational nonprofit that promotes writing and writers in the West. Fishtrap is headquartered in Wallowa County, Oregon, where it produces conferences, workshops, lectures, and classes. In 2008, Wandschneider stepped down as director but continues to work on the campaign to build a new Alvin Josephy Library of Western History and Culture and to establish a Fishtrap Endowment. He writes a regular column for the Wallowa County Chieftain and has written for the Oregonian, High Country News, Portland Magazine, and High Desert Journal.

OCH has an open call for nominations to its Board of Directors posted on its website.

Inside Food Fray

A Portland State University professor makes science more accessible to the general public.

Liz Crain

Between 2002 and 2004, Lisa H. Weasel, associate professor of biology at Portland State University, traveled the globe, from Zambia to Switzerland and from India to Thailand. Along the way, she met with biotech industry officials, agriculturalists, and horticulturalists, and researched everything from conventional plant breeding to the ethical dilemma of patenting genes from living organisms—all field work for her new book Food Fray: Inside the Controversy over Genetically Modified Food. But a passport wasn’t always required for her research.

In 2008 Monsanto began pushing genetically modified sugar beet seeds to farmers in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Since then many farmers and concerned community members throughout the state have been pushing back, concerned that cross-pollination will contaminate their organic sugar beets, table beets, chard, and other vegetables. This is a particularly sensitive issue since Oregon produces 90 percent of the nation’s beet seeds. A lawsuit is currently in motion as Oregon farmers and citizens ramp up awareness of Monsanto’s actions. This is one of several cases that Weasel writes about in her book.

Weasel isn’t your stereotypical sequestered scientist—always in a lab coat conducting highly specialized research published in esoteric scientific journals. Although she has training in molecular biology and developmental biology, she also has a very strong social perspective that she brings to her work. According to Michael Murphy, biology department chair at PSU, what sets Weasel apart is that her “multi-dimensional approach really encompasses a wide range of topics. I’d say she forces people to think a little more broadly than they maybe otherwise would.”

Since moving to Portland in 2000, Weasel has taught PSU courses on everything from an introduction to general biology, to an advanced course on food ethics and sustainability, to a popular class for non-majors on genes in society. Describing this last course, Murphy says, “This is one of those courses where you take a lot of important issues in biology and place them in the context of society. It deals with real issues that confront people on a daily basis.”

Although Weasel clocks in plenty of hours at the lab and in the field, she also loves to garden, write, cook, and support local grocery cooperatives. Her well-rounded life has led to a grounded and, in many ways, socially enlightened approach to science.

Weasel arrived at Harvard in the mid-1980s as an undergraduate in the wake of the recombinant DNA debates. Five years later, as a newly matriculated molecular biology graduate student at the University of Cambridge in England, the human genome project was just beginning to foment. She’s been confronted with hard-hitting scientific ethics and equity issues since she set out to study biology. “As a result, I’ve done a lot of work with gender issues in science and feminist science studies,” she says, “particularly looking at how we can broaden science both in terms of who participates and the kinds of questions that we ask.”

After receiving a National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award (a prestigious long-term NSF grant for junior scholars) in 2001, Weasel plunged headlong into research on global ethical debates surrounding biotechnology. Her initial NSF research was concerned mainly with human cloning and stem cell research, but once Zambia made worldwide headlines in 2002 by refusing genetically modified food aid, she shifted gears.

It’s not too common for highly regarded scientists to broadcast what they don’t know, but Weasel isn’t afraid to. “When I started this research [for Food Fray] I really didn’t even know which foods were genetically modified,” she says. “I had familiarity with the techniques and background but I didn’t know how they were being used. I think it’s important that throughout all levels, people learn more [about genetically modified food]. I would really like to see some truly objective, unbiased public interest awareness campaigns run by the USDA or the EPA with the intention of informing people.”