Oregon Public Broadcasting

Oregon’s reputation as a green state has attracted economic investment, government grants - and increasingly, interested college students.

The quest to remain a leader in sustainability is a complex challenge for Oregon’s public universities. But as Rob Manning reports in this follow-up story, the sustainability effort at one of Oregon’s private universities is taking a different path.

Willamette University officials are happy to show off their latest sustainable purchase.

It's a forest. Or at least 300 acres of a forest.  It sits about 15 miles west of the Salem campus.

Joe Bowersox directs the university’s Center for Sustainable Communities.

Joe Bowersox: “First and foremost for us, it’s the educational mission that has to be our priority. So what we’re beginning to envision is what would a focus on sustainable forestry look like at a small, liberal arts university like ours?”

Sarah Doemling has some suggestions. She owns the adjacent 1200 acres of land here, known as the Zena Forest. Her family is in commercial forestry.

Sarah Doemling:  “My goal for the 20-some years that I’ve been here, our family’s goal was to make our belief that ecology and economy can go hand-in-hand, to have a model of that. I think we’re still working in that direction.”

But now, Doemling has a little help.

On this crisp fall morning, Willamette University students are measuring trees. They check the age, by using what looks like a big corkscrew to remove a core sample.

Next, senior Maria Savoca wraps her arms around a tree to find its width. She’ll wind up with a number called the DBH, the diameter at breast height.

Maria Savoca: “It’s always fun to DBH the bigger trees, because then you get to kind of hug the tree.”

But Savoca wasn’t always a tree-hugger. She says she had never heard of environmental science before attending Willamette. Now it’s her major.

Her tree-measuring partner, Laura Cattrall, says that’s her story, too.

Laaura Cattrall: “Yeah, I came into Willamette thinking I’d be psychology or a religious studies’ major. And it seems like a lot of the sustainability work that’s been going on has really been amplified in the last four years since we’ve been here. But I think that having this property, and the involvement in sustainability is really going to draw people into the university.”

Cattrall’s not the only one thinking that way.

Back on the Willamette  campus, vice president of admissions, Madeleine Rhyneer, is between recruiting trips. She says Willamette’s sustainability ethic is definately attracting students.

Madeleine Rhyneer: “There are lots of really good liberal arts’ universities in our country, and so you start to look for ‘what are the distinctive features that matter to me?’. Clearly this is an issue that resonates with young people, and increasingly it really resonates with their parents, as well.”

A few months ago, the National Wildlife Federation named Willamette the top college in the country for sustainability. That was before the university bought 300 acres of the Zena Forest.

Willamette officials won’t say what they paid for it, and as a private university, they don’t have to.

They did accept $5 million from the Bonneville Power Administration to include a conservation easement on the property. That limits what Willamette can do with its share of the forest.

But the University's Joe Bowersox says those limits are consistent with the sustainability goals.

Joe Bowersox: “In addition to those sort of restoration requirements, it prevents the property from moving into other types of uses, like sub-divisions, which is one of the things that’s really targeting these kind of unique ecosystems in the Eola Hills, this sort of oak savannah”

The forest opens up a few hundred yards from where students were measuring. The goal here is to bring back an oak savannah in years to come.

Karen Arabas: “So you’d be seeing widely spaced oak trees, if you looked up in the sky, you might see some of the canopy covered with oak tree, but you’d also be able to see sky.”

That's Environmental Science professor, Karen Arabas. She says the decades-long experiment in sustainability is perfect for Willamette.

Karen Arabas: “We have property owned by Willamette University, and a cadre of students coming through, we hope for a really long time, who can come out and help with that monitoring.”

And that means if a tree falls in this forest in the next few decades, there’s a good chance there will be a Willamette University student around, to hear it.