February 16, 2025

Environmental Studies Blog

Plants Out of Place in North Portland

A few distinctive features of our ENVS 400 situated section, and update on work so far

Author

Jim Proctor

situated section location map Boise-Humboldt neighborhoods and First AME Zion location, north PortlandThis spring, one of the three sections of our Senior Seminar, ENVS 400, is experimenting with a new approach, which we call a “situated section.” The situated approach is a key feature of interdisciplinary environmental research our ENVS students learn, but typically each ENVS 400 student selects their own situated context, corresponding to their capstone project.

What if a team of ENVS students works in a shared situated context with community members toward their Senior Seminar capstone outcomes?

That is the experiment we are piloting this semester in one section of ENVS 400, focusing on north Portland, and specifically the Boise and Humboldt neighborhoods, part of the broad Albina District known historically for a rich multicultural and Black heritage. I’ll offer a background on our work here, and then students will check in when they get time with their own observations. 

There are many potential advantages to this approach. Perhaps the key strength is that students build skills in community collaboration, devising environmental projects in response to felt community needs. This is just a one-semester undergraduate course, so we must be careful to choose projects that are doable, and potentially can be continued by students and the community in future.

What might be some possible senior projects in the Boise/Humboldt neighborhood? Well, in fall 2024 we asked members of the community!…and came up with quite a few possibilities. This document summarizes their initial priorities, then proposes three we considered with the community in late January, at a gathering hosted by First AME Zion congregation, the oldest Black church in the region. Along with the Boise Neighborhood Association, First AME Zion has been an active participant throughout the process, for which we are deeply grateful.

January meeting January community visit, First AME Zion congregationWe realized during our initial community meeting that  we had to focus our work, given relatively small section numbers and limited time. ENVS students participating in the section were also particularly attracted to one of the three projects we initially considered: Tree of Heaven, once introduced to North American landscapes as a desirable plant, but now often derided as an invasive species. To avoid some of the problematic connotations of terms such as “invasive” vs. “native,” we called our general project “Plants Out of Place.”

As an invasive species, the broad—we call them “framing” in our situated approach—questions one might ask of Tree of Heaven all point to its necessary eradication. But what if we approached Tree of Heaven in Boise/Humboldt neighborhood—what scholars think of as a hybrid object in a hybrid place—from multiple points of departure? That was our students’ initial challenge, for which I provided some broad framing question guidance in this document. Thus, Tree of Heaven in Boise/Humboldt neighborhood became a point of convergence for multiple big questions—biological, cultural, political, and others—they would explore in their capstone projects.

Student brainstorming Students brainstorming survey and interview questionsWhere are we at present? Each student is contributing something distinctive to our Plants Out of Place project, but they also are asking broadly common empirical research questions focused on Boise/Humboldt, and are thus coming up with a shared research methodology, including archival work, interviews and surveys, and field mapping of Tree of Heaven. We are currently finalizing this methodology, with fieldwork planned for two dates this coming week! We’ll also be hearing from old-timers in the neighborhood, to get a better sense of this rich and multifaceted part of Portland.

Once students get a breather from their common research, they may check in here with their individual and/or shared observations of Boise/Humboldt and their Plants Out of Place project.