A tangled web of beauty and cruelty
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Imago Theatre’s The Black Lizard returns to the stage ARTS & CULTURE PAGE 6
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PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY THURSDAY, OCT. 4, 2012 | VOL. 67 NO. 11
Students Professor takes one small step gear up for Cameron Smith builds his own protest, space suit activism MATTHEW ELLIS VANGUARD STAFF
Political group outlines vision Inspired by the recent student protests in Quebec, Canada, a small group of Portland State University activists has set out to mobilize students and their potential as a prominent political force. The group is known as StAC, short for Student Action Coalition, and intends to act on issues like tuition hikes and student debt. At first, near the end of spring term in June, the number of people attending the meetings hovered in the 20s. Now that fall term is underway and more students are back on campus, StAC is gearing up for the coming year and hopes to attract new members. “We want to bring back a spirit of
Americans have had a presence in space since 1961, when Alan Shepard first crawled into a tiny metal capsule and left Earth. Since then, the U.S. government has been responsible for taking each and every astronaut there. Cameron Smith wants to change that. For the past three years, Smith, a professor of anthropology at Portland State University, has been building a pressure suit he plans to take up to 50,000 feet to what NASA calls “space equivalent conditions.” In addition to the suit, Smith is in the beginning stages of a plan to build an open-air balloon that will carry him into the lower stratosphere. While some may find this work strange coming from an anthropologist, Smith simply sees it as the next step in hominid evolution. “We take a lot of control over our own evolution, and one of the ways
See ACTIVISM on page 5
See SPACE SUIT on page 2
JOSH KELETY VANGUARD STAFF
MILES SANGUINETTI/VANGUARD STAFF
CAMERON SMITH, a PSU anthropology professor, works on space suit he’s building.
A living laboratory New green roof installed on Cramer Hall CASSANDRA MOORE VANGUARD STAFF
MILES SANGUINETTI/VANGUARD STAFF
CONSTRUCTION on the ecoroof above Cramer Hall began Sept. 22.
Austin Hudson, a graduate civil engineering student, would like to fly over Portland State and not be able to tell the Park Blocks from university building rooftops. “I’d like to see green roofs everywhere,” he said. That’s why he is part of a student group, Engineers Without Borders, that recently built a green roof on Cramer Hall. The installation of the 1,920-squarefoot green roof began Sept. 22. A crane lifted 20 planter boxes, sized 8 by 12 feet, and giant bags of soil onto the roof, making a living laboratory that will host many different classes. Green roofs range from lightweight, 3-inch ground covers to humanaccessible parks. The soil atop Cramer Hall will not exceed 6 inches, and the plants will mostly be small grasses and succulents called sedums, a common ecoroof crop. Edible thyme and wild strawberries will make up 5 percent of the rooftop. Theo Malone, a member of EWB, said Cramer Hall won’t be a food-producing rooftop garden, but
that might be a goal for future green roof projects. “Typically, ecoroofs aren’t food producing. Not yet,” Malone said. “I say ‘yet’ because someday they will be.” Malone is one of the few graduate students involved with the project. “We will be testing native and nonnative plants side by side to determine their efficacy on ecoroofs [in Portland],” Malone explained. Students will also determine what soil types are most effective and least expensive. The soil in each planter box varies in unit weight—some have more organic matter and some are lighter and mixed with more perlite, a highly-permeable volcanic material common in store-bought potting soil. Another benefit of green roofs is how they control stormwater runoff and help to prevent sewer system overflow—common in Portland until the completion of the $1.4 billion Big Pipe project last year. The planter boxes have three main components that help control stormwater runoff. When it rains,
water seeps through the soil and through a thin geosynthetic material beneath, which holds soil in but lets water out. Below that is a waffle-like slab called a geomembrane. The geomembrane both protects the roof and allows water to drip freely from the boxes so it can trickle across the roof into storm drains. The rate of flow will be slower having gone through the planter boxes, reducing the risk of sewer system overflow. The water’s temperature will also be warmer, which is better for the waterways it will end up in. “Fish don’t like water that is too cold,” Hudson said. Along with the Big Pipe project, the City of Portland is hoping to control water flow with smaller projects like green roofs and bioswales—a mechanism that both controls the rate of flow into storm drains and filters out pollutants. Because the weight of a green roof can exceed engineering limits, Cramer Hall had to be inspected first. The wall surrounding the rooftop is shorter than the Occupational Safety and Health Administration allows, See ECOROOF on page 2