Ecologue

“Sand, Silt, or Clay? Texture Says a lot about Soil”, an article written by Kym Pokorny, explains the different textures of soil and how it affects your garden. Avid gardeners in the Willamette Valley know the challenge of trying to produce a thriving flower or vegetable garden in our clay soil. It’s important to know […]

Brought to you by Micco Emeson, the Living Lab Coordinator for Landscape for SSI. Landscape Maintenance Insights Wintertime approaches, and so do a plethora of opportunities for landscaping and gardening activities on the OSU campus. Winter is when many perennial plants lie dormant, shedding their leaves and maintaining cellular processes via stored energy reserves which […]

OSU Extension’s innovative Neighborhood Sustainability Stewards volunteer program engages the local community in climate change actions on a household level.  Program goals are: to engage the general public in a climate change conversation, to give the public tools to lower CO2 emissions on a household level, and to provide skills to live sustainably in a […]

Amy Kordosky received an SSI Travel Grant of $250 to travel to Costa Rica during OSU’s Spring break and participate in a construction & renovation project in San Jose. She wrote up a blog post for the Ecologue to describe her experience and provided a few pictures. ________________________________________ Ten engineers from Oregon State University, including […]

The OSU Sustainability Office and Energize Corvallis have teamed up to help answer some burning questions. Did you know that by placing a 6-inch pan on an 8-inch burner you are wasting about 40% of the heating energy being used to prepare food?  …or that properly inflated tires save about 3% of your fuel use, the […]

At OSU, we have been celebrating Earth Day ever since the first one in 1970. But we’re too hardcore for just one day of observance of this amazing planet we live on, so we celebrate for a full week! Hence: Earth Week, a week of fun and educational activities geared toward raising environmental awareness and […]

Northwest Earth Institute discussion courses are a popular way to engage in locally-relevant conversations about the topics of our time.  More than 130,000 people worldwide have participated in their discussion courses! Beginning April 2, a Global Warming: Changing Course discussion group is starting in Corvallis at the Unitarian Fellowship Hall, NW Circle and 29t St.  […]

To geographers, “sense of place” refers to shared perceptions among a group of people used to describe unique characteristics of a specific area or region. Experiencing a sense of place involves personal attachment to a community and/or bioregion. For example, I live in Corvallis and have an attachment to university here, to the people here, […]

Summer is upon us!  The wildflowers are blooming and the (native) grasses are getting taller.  As seasons change so does the way we use energy and water.  Even though OSU strives to become a more efficient user of energy and water we still have a large footprint overall.  In the winter, OSU uses lots of […]