for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word

           The challenge of the Spring Creek Project is to bring 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 re-imagine our relation to the natural world. Spring Creek’s website:  http://springcreek.oregonstate.edu
           The Spring Creek Project organizes creative gatherings of people in public places to imagine new ways of thinking about, and thus acting in, the world. Spring Creek-sponsored events have included everything from informal conversations between poets, philosophers, and scientists to nationally recognized weekend symposia, from theatre and musical performances to writing workshops to field trips.
           Spring Creek also sponsors the development of new courses that cross all boundaries, bringing together OSU students and townspeople, science and the humanities, professors and practitioners, to study together in forests and along rivers, and, by these confluences, to understand the connections that explain and sustain us in the world.
           And  Spring Creek offers two residency programs. The Collaborative Retreat at Shotpouch Cabin is a two-week residency in the Oregon Coast Range.  The Andrews Forest Writers' Residency is a one-week writers' retreat in the Cascade Range.

Long-Term Ecological Reflections: 2003 - 2203

           In a program that will continue for two hundred years, writers visit sites in the forest to create an ongoing record of their reflections on the relation of people and forests changing together over time.
            Long-Term Ecological Reflections is a collaboration between the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature and the Written Word, a program in the Department of Philosophy, Oregon State University and the Andrews Forest Long-Term Ecological Research Program; and the Pacific Northwest Research Station, USDA Forest Service.
           In all of our programs, writers are encouraged to visit designated study sites for reflecting on and writing about the forest and their relation to it. These writings, which will form a collection spanning hundreds of years, will be gathered in permanent archives at Oregon State University, and are accessible via the web-based Forest Log.

Charles Goodrich ©2010