Organic lifestyles come to campus In honor of earth day

State-of-the-art Sustainability, Health and Safety program brings green practices to MHCC

Reed Shackelford
The Advocate

While hugging trees, riding bikes, and buying organic products might seem eco-friendly to some people, the students of MHCC’s Sustainability, Health and Safety program know the real meaning of being green. And having one of the most unique and diverse sustainability programs west of the Mississippi might be the reason.

“The variety of knowledge that we’re getting is amazing,” said sophomore George Lee. “There’s no other program like it around.”

	Javid Mohtasham

The Sustainability, Health and Safety (SHS) program offers students an in-depth, diverse and interwoven curriculum that sets it apart from any other environmental science program on the west coast. Covering topics like carbon footprints, hazardous materials, sustainable living, the environment, ecology, water treatment, industrial hygiene, natural resources, alternative energy, health, safety, risk management, and environmental engineering, just to name a few.

The curriculum of the program is designed and taught by program director and instructor Javid Mohtasham with a simple philosophy in mind: “Greenness comes by observing all of it, not only one aspect.”

“With sustainability, health and safety, you have to do them all at the same time in order to be effective and really green,” says Mohtasham. “For example, if your work environment is not healthy or your work environment is not safe, you can’t be green, because you’re not sustainable.”

This merger of philosophies along with the diverse range of subject matter separates Mt. Hood’s program from any other environmental science program in the country.

“It’s one of a kind,” said Mohtasham. “Honestly, what they learn they will not learn at any four-year colleges. The SHS program is the only academic program where graduates qualify to apply for jobs in lots of (different) fields, while this is not the case for any other academic program within any college or university across the Pacific Northwest or even the nation.”

Many students acknowledge this fact, based on the variety of applicable on-the-job knowledge and tools they receive.

	Reed Shackelford/The Advocate The location of the future sustainability and community gardens on the MHCC campus.

“He (Mohtasham) really focuses on what he thinks is necessary,” said sophomore Tyler Handy. “He’s not going to teach a whole bunch of extra stuff, but if we did have questions that we wanted to know more about then he would go more into depth.”

“It (the curriculum) is all encompassing for the needs of the field,” added Handy about the program. “It’s not enough to just study chemistry or just study the environment, but also how it correlates with the safety aspects and the safety regulations along with environmental regulations and how just knowing both and being able to put them together is really beneficial for the student to be an employee in a variety of fields.”

But while the program may be strong, Mohtasham admits it’s not a golden ticket to employment. “I would not say to a student that when you leave this program the job comes to you on a silver platter, but if you want a job, the job exists. Because at this time and age, with the direction we are going there is no way that any company or organization can claim that they don’t care about health, safety, sustainability and environmental issues.”

This point is echoed by Eve Tahminciogel, a reporter from MSNBC, that within the next decade there will be over 3 million new “green collar” jobs across the country, with as many as 100,000 in the next several years alone.

A key element of the program’s education comes from guest lectures set up by Mohtasham’s wide range of contacts in the field. Lecturers ranging from top people from the DEQ (Department of Environmental Quality), to the head of OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), to environmental engineers, all of whom donate their time because of how important and progressive the program is, according to Mohtasham.

“The best thing is, he (Mohtasham) has guest speakers come in from the fields so we get the first-hand knowledge of what is going on out there,” said Lee. “It’s done a good job of preparing me. I mean, we’ve had the best people from each field come in and teach us.”

“My program without the help of professionals,” said Mohtasham, “would not be in existence today.”

Besides tackling the idea of sustainability in the classroom, Mohtasham and the SHS program are responsible for bringing MHCC to the forefront of hands-on sustainability training with the advent of a biodiesel fuel lab and the sustainability and community garden at MHCC.

The two projects, both envisioned and designed by Mohtasham and his students, are aimed toward helping make MHCC a sustainable campus, as well as make the program “‘it’ in the Pacific Northwest” for sustainability training.

“With my ego, I would like to see the program be like something you would see at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) or Harvard,” says Mohtasham.
So far, so good.

“To a degree, we are the first college in the state of Oregon which is going to have a biodiesel training facility on the campus,” said Mohtasham.

“I got the idea at a meeting in February, 2006 about the concept of sustainability. I heard from one of the attendees at the event that they were talking about their cafeteria and that they wanted to make it to be completely self-sufficient and become ‘green’, and all they were concerned with was vegetable oil.

“And then it clicked to me that vegetable oil can be converted into what? Bio-diesel.

“What I did is I took this idea back to my class and I told them ‘I need your help to make this dream into a reality.’ Then six of my students (James Schutten, Tyler Fisk, Nathan Watson, Chelsea Bartlett, Regalada Lombardi and Frank Hyatt) started to get together with me and we started to come up with a proposal, a design plan,” said Mohtasham. “They were really the founding fathers. Without their help, I would not have been able to do what I did.”

After just under a year of the then-administration mulling the idea over, Mohtasham got a helping hand from the college’s then new Chief Operating Officer Michael Wolfe.

“He was very, very gracious and accommodating. He removed that obstacle that was ‘don’t do anything, forget it, we don’t want to do anything.’ He was the one that sat down with me and paved the road and made that project into a reality. If it wasn’t for Wolfe, (Director of Facilities Management) Richard Byers, and (Associate Director of Facilities Management) Russell Johnson, none of this would be possible.”

And now the dream is a reality.

“Right now everything is ready but we have not produced or made any bio-diesel. The plan is to have some sort of collaboration with the cafeteria, as well as (the restaurant) Geno’s and all of those other places around campus and collect their oil and then convert it to bio-diesel. The culture behind this, in specific, is to become some kind of training center for the public.

“We plan to open this with a celebration on May 14,” Mohtasham said.
Along with the realization of the plan hatched by former students, current SHS students are working on a sustainability training tool of their own: The sustainability and community gardens.

“Several of my students are heavily involved in that project. Tyler Handy, George Lee, Susan Baker, and Dave Morgan, and these people are helping me out with the design and the clean up and all of this,” said Mohtasham.

On site with the bio-diesel fuel lab, located next to the horticulture and fisheries building, the garden takes up the lot behind the green houses and half of the main green house.

“I thought, why not take over those two spaces, the green house and land behind it, and turn it into the community or sustainability garden. And it could become some kind of a training garden for students,” said Mohtasham.

Lee said the program was originally a task overseen by the Green Team, but after a year or two of no progress, the college turned the project over to Mohtasham and his students.

“The college gave Dr. J (Motasham) this project to see if students in his program wanted to take on designing and choosing where the garden would be. So we did that as kind of a final project,” said Handy about how the task came to them.

The group of students was given the task of designing the garden and a proposal to show the administration in the fall of 2008.

“I thought it went well, everybody seemed interested in it,” said Lee about the meeting. “We got the go ahead, now we’re just waiting on the weather.”
Mohtasham said, “we are working right now with Facilities, and Facilities is accommodating us to be able to work and make the whole thing ready.”

The goal is to make the project 100 percent sustainable, involving green practices and the school’s programs.

“We are hoping that we would be able to drag the cafeteria into this scene as well. And then the cafeteria could use that piece of land to plant different kinds of

vegetation that they would be able to use in the cafeteria for the food services. Instead of going outside (of MHCC) they could use that facility,” said Mohtasham. “And as well we can use that facility for the little kids in the new day care facility the school is planning to build.”

This type of multipurpose approach is what highlights the project and program itself.

“The kind of wish list that I have for the sustainability gardens in a realistic world is too expensive, and we decided that if we want to wait for that wish list to become reality it may take another couple years,” said Mohtasham. “We are hoping that we can start at least some of the planting this coming spring to show some kind of activities going on over there, and then each term we can do some upgrades and then within the next one or two years hopefully it becomes the jewel that we are hoping for it to be.”

Once the “jewel” is completed, the community garden project, along with the bio-diesel fuel lab will work together to be the trademark of the SHS program, and a clear step toward making the campus a sustainable entity.

“I think that it (the program) might really be on the school’s interest to appear as a green college or environmentally concerned college campus,” said Handy. A concern that might take more weight with the changing world.

“Javid (Mohtasham) has done a great job with the program,” said former MHCC student and environmental engineer Steve Wesley. “I graduated before he came, but I come back to do guest lectures, and its obvious that his students are well-educated. The program covers so much more than when I was here.”

For more information on Sustainability, Health and Safety, contact Dr. Javid Mohtasham at 503-491-7440.

.