Introduction 
urbulent times are coming our way. That’s what thoughtful and attentive writers, scientists and social critics are telling us, pointing to A 
My grandma was pink-skinned,
species extinctions, “peak oil,” climate change and other environmental, economic and social disruptions. 
dark-ey 
But what can we do about it? We still need to get an education, find a job, and make our way in the world. How can we adapt to a changing lik world when we still live under the old rules? Besides, if we don’t even know what changes are coming, how can we imagine what this just w altered world will ask of us? all journeys lead y W
Maybe changing our lives is so hard because we just don’t have enough good stories about how we might live and thrive on a very different she leapt oplanet.  We have some ideas about greener technology, but the greater work—imagining new ways (or reviving old ways) to think about with muscle and gracesuccess, happiness, and human thriving—has hardly begun. That’s why we need a rich fund of stories that bring our values and hopes past vanishing ftogether with our best scientific and social information to provide compelling narratives and meaningful options for embracing the future. 
past coThe stories don’t have to be rooted in fear or sacrifice.  Maybe wider involvement in raising food, caring for neighbors, and protecting and past clarestoring the environment will bring us a deeper sense of accomplishment and connection. Maybe greater thrift and more robust localized and the rods and lines of men. economies will actually lead to more complete lives.  While we may not know exactly what the effects will be from diminishing energy 
She knew about changesources and stressed ecological systems, can we all agree that learning to live more lightly on the Earth is good for animals, habitat, and as only a salmon can:people? 
ho This little booklet collects the best writings from OSU students who responded to our call for stories addressing what visionary Thomas must adapt from the wild dance of the oceanBerry called “The Great Work,” the effort to re-imagine humanity as the planet changes. We asked for some tentative answers—stories—to to the narro questions that we’ll need to address in order to thrive in changing circumstances: What makes people truly happy?  How will disrupted cell b patterns of life alter ideas about human happiness?  How will we nurture family and other close ties if opportunities to travel become more each step in its olimited? What is the relation of human thriving to planetary thriving? 
Hush 
We were heartened by the thoughtful, articulate, and creative responses we received from OSU students, and grateful to be able to share When m them with you here.  We hope you’ll savor these writings and join us in a continuing conversation on re-imagining humanity as the planet had spun me off with its o
changes. 

Rebecca Olson 
Rebecca is a creative writing graduate student and writing instructor at OSU. She lived semi-communally on a small farm west of Corvallis for a year and tended to a flock of turkeys, ducks, and cantankerous chickens. 
ubdivision 
Thin, slotted houses squeeze pads of gold across the street and onto the patio which marks our youth: beer cans and a quart of home-grown cherries. This is where we live as farm-life lovelies. 
Ducklings vibrate in promenade, urgent in the yard. It’s twilight. They rule this plot like first-grade gangsters: little chirps, heavy cool.  Something like us. 
Darkness folds up around our sleeping chickens, the basil, all the other bronzed goodness, like the pear tree between us and the cover crop system transforming clay into pumpkins. The truth is that we’re not 
priestesses on some island. Our landlord’s name is Jim. A lady jogs past our chicken slaughter with her kid in a high-tech stroller. 
In three years, this land will be eight new houses. He’ll bulldoze the kale. We plant peas in the meantime. Talk of goats, tattoos. 

Gina Meredith 
Gina has changed vocations and homes many times. Her present reinvention is as a senior at OSU/Cascades. A Liberal Arts major, she is 
drawn to communication and sustainability and believes that these two fields are vital pieces of the future’s puzzle. 
Cell by cell, scale by scale. Loo F 
ruition 
The smoke rising from my neighbor’s chimney has a familiar pungency to it. Not until it passes over the orchard do I recognize the smell as that of burning apple wood.      
My husband and I were the hunter gatherers that year. Daily forays into abandoned apple  orchards, shuffling up walnuts under wayward trees; gleaning roadside and mountainside alike.  All that was possible has now come to fruition. 
We test the stream that was the spawning ground of the determined steelhead and trout that lived and died on our side of the mountains. Easing into the waters, casting silent prayers and  tantalizing flies; the fisherman’s pas de deux. 
It was the steelhead that received the infusion of apple wood smoke. Fresh, pink, plump,  dripping marinade, the strips are reverently laid on the racks. We tend the smoky fire one, two,  three nights. Our lives are filled with the green, sharp smoke.      
We collect butter and cream in mason jars from the fresh milk delivered by a neighbor- left in our mailbox. Slip in a jar packed tight with dark, thick, sweet, smoked fish; messages from the Gods. 
Loaves of hot walnut bread, family, steaming bowls of squash, oozing butter, friends, spicy  brown apple sauce, bits of steelhead wreathing our smiles. We reach for each other’s hands  and close our eyes.         
nadromy 
My grandma was pink-skinned, dark-eyed, mind like a magnet. She knew just where to go: all journeys lead you back home. With that up-river faith she leapt over obstacles with muscle and grace past vanishing forests past cow-trampled banks past claws and beaks and the rods and lines of men. 

She knew about change as only a salmon can: how the body in its mutability must adapt from the wild dance of the ocean to the narrow creek bed cell by cell, scale by scale each step in its own time. 
Hush, she would tell me, When my own compass needle had spun me off with its own centrifugal force. 
Cell by cell, scale by scale. Look for the strongest current Follow that. 

Alexis White 
Alexis is a first year creative writing graduate student and writing instructor. Previous publications include The Atlanta Review, Burner Magazine, Dilate, and Carleton College’s Manuscript. 
yward 

Dylan McDowell 
Growing up on the Oregon coast, I have always been around nature and have loved learning about it and sharing that interest with others through writing or
llect butter and cream in mason jars from 
presentations. OSU has helped me build upon that passion and I am excited for what the next three years have in store for me. 
uce, bits of steelhead wreathing 
iding a Green Bike into a Greener Tomorrow 
I would like to start with a story from my home town. The story focuses around one man, John Mare, whose ideas would revolutionize Green thinking in a very literal sense. 
Mare is a short man in his late sixties. His wire-rimmed glasses perch below white tufts of eyebrows that match a graying beard and he always wears a smile open for conversation. Mare grew up in South Africa, went to college in the States, and has been a professor at multiple universities throughout his professional career as a Veterinarian. Now retired, he and his wife have spent their lives traveling, but have settled down in the small coastal town of Waldport, Oregon; population 2050. Waldport is a modest community with a struggling school system and many residents falling far below the poverty line. 
It was in this environment that Mare had an idea. Throughout his life Mare has traveled a great deal and seems to always go into a new situation with the question of “What can I take back to my own community from this new experience?” This question helped him notice an intriguing community bicycle renting program in Amsterdam over 30 years ago, and one in Tucson, Arizona where he worked as a Professor at the University. 
Since then, the South African has worked with the other foreign philanthropist Sentilia McKinley (who came to Waldport from the Pacific Kingdom of Tonga) to establish a similar program in Waldport. There was one major difference, however, in the fact that Mare’s program offered free bikes with no rental process or check-out system; just pure faith in the individual. 
Bikes were initially acquired from garage sales and donations, and painted a bright green color to symbolize sustainability. Each bike is equipped with a rope and the famous slogan on the seat, “If tied, don’t ride.” 
Every morning, Mare drives around in his matching green Honda Element in search of bikes throughout town. He collects the bikes over the course of a couple hours, and then returns them to the community center in town where there is a workshop operated by GED students in need of work. It is here that the bikes get inspected and then are placed outside for a new day. Over the course of the next 24 hours anybody can grab a bike and ride it around town, and when they’re done they simply leave it around town. Assuming the bike isn’t tied—as that signifies the rider will return momentarily—anybody else can take the bike from its new location and ride it to their heart’s content. Repeat as necessary until the next morning when Mare goes around and collects the bikes again. 
The question must be raised: how is this program successful? The answer is that Mare isn’t relying on money or collateral to ensure the bikes are taken care of. Instead, he is relying on an even rarer resource that most people wouldn’t dream of using: faith in the individual. 
“An important thing I want people to realize, is these bikes are not Sentilia’s or mine,” Mare said, “They belong to all of us; they belong to the community.” 
The simple lesson here is that people protect what they are a part of, and with Mare’s program the community was the project. The bikes were donated, students did the repairs and painted the bikes, and everybody helped however they could. 
It is time that we ride this idea into the 21st century. Portland is trying, but is hitting the brakes because of obstacles such as the installation of bike kiosks. There is a deeper problem here—and everywhere green initiatives are rising— and that is that Portland is trying to build the program for the community and not from the community. 
I have heard it said that foreign countries look onto the U.S. and discuss the existence of a population dubbed “They.” A separation has developed between the common man and the legislator or the scientist to the extent that we comment that “they” raised gas prices or “they” created a new drug. It is time that we take ownership of our country and change “they” to “we.” It is time we think like Mare and implement ideas not to glorify ourselves with the intent of helping others, but with the help of others with the intent of glorifying our community. 
I encourage all of us to go forward and ride a Green Bike into tomorrow in the hopes that we can take Mare’s message and apply it throughout the U.S. towards a more sustainable America. 
uffalo Road 

There is a road on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon that only the buffalo know. Evidence of their presence is clear: hoof prints, bones, and the faint smell of musk. There is little evidence of human life there. The asphalt, once black and smooth, is now torn; ravaged by time, the elements, and the weight of generations of migrating herds. In this landscape we were loud, human, and alien. We were invaders. 
However, we were not there to plunder. Our mission was to locate research plot points and collect data. That is why we began our walk into the forests. Our map, several years-outdated, showed a slightly meandering forest road that ran parallel to our data collection points. 
But in the road there was a locked gate. There would be little point in unlocking it; pine trees had long since crushed sections of the iron bars, chipping the green paint and allowing rust to invade the metal. Nature had 
Danielle White begun its headlong rush towards assimilating the gate into the wilderness. Like animals we crawled over the trees 
In my five years at OSU 
and the broken metal, further into the woods. 
I have felt that I have 
accomplished many things. I Downed trees littered the landscape. Their impact had cracked the asphalt and parts of the road had sunk into the have participated in student 
earth. For a mile we walked along the remains of the human road, skirting holes and ducking beneath tree trunks. 
clubs, traveled often, and 
And without realizing it we stepped onto dirt and grass. We were no longer following a human-made path and we 
I have challenged myself academically, physically, were no longer alone. and emotionally. I now 
That was when the buffalo saw us. The soft humph humph of their breathing was gentle compared to our sharp 
look forward to (hopefully) 
inhalation. We suddenly felt very small. Each humph we heard could have belonged to a creature weighing several 
graduating in June and beginning another list of thousand pounds. We felt defenseless. But then they began to run. challenges. 
Dozens of buffalo streamed out of the little valley, following a gully further west. And before we could stop ourselves we were running too. Against all logic we were running after dangerous animals. We began to  run faster, our breathing became heavier, increasing with the strain to keep up. We ran until the last buffalo was out of sight. It was as if for one brief moment we had taken a step back in time; back when every road was a buffalo road. 
We left several hours later. Back up the dirt path and then onto pavement. Back over the logs and over the gate. We went back to “civilization.” But we did not return “civilized.” Two hundred years ago our run with the buffalo would have been common. Instead of a spear, bow, or shotgun we had a compass and some clipboards. And it had felt so natural. Even reaching back a thousand years or more would have resulted in humans following buffalo. That one, brief afternoon taught us what has so often been forgotten: humans are a part of nature. 
There is a road on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon that I have walked. On the old forest road there is barely a human presence. The sky, which could be clearly seen from the road, is now being covered by trees; trees growing up through the abandoned asphalt and the buffalo path. In this landscape we were loud, human, and natural. We were citizens. 

Just Beginning 
If you are interested in reading more thoughtful writings re-imaging the future of humanity, we would happily recommend to you the following works: 
Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael Nelson, eds., Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet James Gustave Speth, The Bridge at the Edge of World Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans and Rachel Stein, eds., Environmental Justice Reader Freeman House, Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed; Always Coming Home Carl Safina, View from Lazy Point Kim Stanley Robinson, Mars Trilogy Gary Snyder, The Gary Snyder Reader 
If you are interested in being involved in the great work through sustainability activism or through creating the new stories for future prosperity, these two organizations would welcome your involvement: 
The Student Sustainability Initiative is the student-run, student-fee funded organization supporting student efforts to create a sustainable community at OSU through action, education, and opportunity. 
The Spring Creek Project is an trans-disciplinary program at OSU that brings together the practical wisdom of the environmental sciences, the clarity of philosophical analysis, and the creative, expressive power of the written word to find new ways to understand and imagine our relation to the natural world. 

Student Sustainability Initiative 	The Spring Creek Project 	
738 SW 15th Street, Student Leadership and Involvement 	101 Hovland Hall, Department of Philosophy 	
Oregon State University 	Oregon State University 	
Corvallis, OR 97333 	Corvallis, OR 97331 	
(541) 753-4072 	(541) 737-6198 	
oregonstate.edu/sustainability/ssi 	springcreek.oregonstate.edu 	
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twitter.com/osussi 		

This publication presented by the Student Sustainability Initiative and the Spring Creek Project on behalf of the OSU student body, and will be made available in accessible formats upon request. Please call (541) 753-4072 for more information. Special thanks are given to: Nathaniel Brodie, Morgan Dumitru, Jennifer Gervais, Charles Goodrich, Erin Harrington, Shawna Harvey, Ted Leeson, Kathleen Dean Moore, Larry Rodgers, Marjorie Sandor, Charlie Tomlinson, Brandon Trelstad, Tony Vogt, Jesse Weller, and College of the Liberal Arts.