Members of the Clark community help plant a Yoshino cherry tree at the 2018 Arbor Day celebration. Left to right: US Forest Service officer Dave Olson; International Programs director Jane Walster; Clark College president Bob Knight; and Clark College trustee Royce Pollard.

On April 11, Clark College celebrated tree planting and care at the annual Arbor Day celebration. Led by Clark College International Programs director Jane Walster, the ceremony took place on the northeast corner of Fort Vancouver Way and McLoughlin Boulevard.

The theme of this year’s event was “The Gift of Friendship.” At the ceremony, Clark trustee and former mayor of Vancouver Royce Pollard announced the gift of 200 new Somei Yoshino flowering cherry trees donated by Tatsuo Ito of SEH America, a Japanese manufacturing company in Vancouver. The new cherry trees—along with the 100 Shirofugen cherry trees donated more than 25 years ago—act as symbols of the college’s enduring friendship with Japan.

President Bob Knight accepts the Tree Campus USA award from U.S. Forest Service officer Dave Olson.

According to Tim Carper, a member of the Campus Tree Advisory Committee, 100 of the donated trees were planted prior to the ceremony, including 20 trees at Clark’s Columbia Tech Center location, and the college is determining where the remaining 100 trees will be planted.

At the ceremony Clark College was also awarded with the Arbor Day Foundation’s Tree Campus USA designation for the eighth consecutive year. Dave Olson of the U.S. Forest Service presented the award to Clark College president Bob Knight.

The Arbor Day celebration concluded with a ceremonial planting of one of the Yoshino cherry trees donated by Ito.

Photos: Clark College/Tim Carper

Clark College will host its fourth annual native plant sale on May 4 from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and May 5 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Natural Plant Center, the college’s greenhouse. Most plants are priced at $10.00 or less. Students will be available to assist customers with transporting plants to their vehicles.

The event is free and open to the public. Clark College is located at 1933 Ft. Vancouver Way, Vancouver, WA, 98663. The greenhouse is located on the east side of campus off of E. Reserve St., near the Orange 2 parking lot. Directions and maps are available online at www.clark.edu/maps.

All plants were propagated by Clark College biology and environmental science students. In addition to prepping these plants for sale, students have been propagating other plants in the greenhouse for use in restoration projects at various sites in Southwest Washington including the Columbia River Gorge, Trout Lake, and Clark’s future site in Ridgefield, Clark College at Boschma Farms.

This year the sale features a variety of native perennials and shrubs along with one tree species, Western Red Cedar. Shoppers will be able to choose from among 23 different plants, including Red-flowering Currant, Native Rose, Lewis’ Mockorange, Blanket Flower, Showy Milkweed, and Native Strawberry. Limited supplies of Trillium and Native Iris will be available as well. Many of these plants support the region’s pollinators and make for low-intensity gardening.

Proceeds from the plant sale go to support the college’s Science Consortium Fund, which helps cover the costs of a greenhouse coordinator and field studies classes. Students who participate in field studies visit places such as Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon and the Lava Beds National Monument in Northern California. Students pay $210 to $255 for four-day and ten-day trips to these locations, which would normally cost more than $1000 if not for the help of the consortium fund.

For more information about the sale or plants available, visit www.clark.edu/cc/plantsale or contact Erin Harwood, Clark College STEM Coordinator, at eharwood@clark.edu. Individuals who need accommodation due to a disability in order to fully participate in this event should contact Clark College’s Disability Support Services (DSS) Office at 360-992-2314 or 360-991-0901 (VP) or visit room PUB 013.

Clark College’s new STEM Building has a LEED Silver certification. Here are a few environmentally friendly aspects of the building and its construction:

• The building is cooled by water pumped from the local wellfield through a campuswide hydronics (water-based heating and cooling) system. This same water is used to heat the building with help from high-efficiency gas boilers, then is circulated back to irrigate the campus landscaping. This creates a “closed circuit,” where the water is continually pumped from, and then returned to, the land—a system that eliminates waste and reduces energy costs.
• Bike lockers on the lower level and a shower on the first floor encourage bike commuting.
• Bottle-filling stations on each floor allow students and visitors to eschew single-use bottled beverages in favor of reusable drink containers.
• The windows of south wall are made of double-paned glass filled with Argon gas and coated with a low-E value film to reduce the light and heat load. Additionally, metal sunshades block the higher sun during the hotter days of summer, but allow the lowered sun in winter to strike the glass directly and increase available natural lighting and heat. The sunshades also reflect light up into the corridors to reduce the need for artificial lighting during the day.
• Almost 99 percent of the construction waste was recycled.

Photo: Clark College/Hannah Erickson

Members of the community help plant a Black Hills Spruce during Clark College’s 2016 Arbor Day celebration. Left to right: Campus Tree Advisory Committee member Jim Wasden, Director of Facilities Services Tim Petta, retired groundskeeper Skip Jimerson, Vice President of Administrative Services Bob Williamson, and Washington State Forester Aaron Everett.

On April 13, Clark College celebrated nature at its annual Arbor Day event and tree planting.

The event, which was free and open to the public, featured the addition of a Black Hills Spruce to the campus’s beautiful 90-acre arboretum. This was just the most recent effort by the college to include all 50 state trees in the campus arboretum: The Black Hills Spruce is the official state tree of South Dakota. With the addition of this tree, the arboretum contains trees representing 40 states.

Starts of several more state trees were present at the ceremony; these donations are still too young to plant outdoors, but will be tended in the college’s greenhouse until they are ready to take their respective places in the arboretum.

Left to right: Campus Tree Advisory Committee member Tim Carper, retired groundskeeper Skip Jimerson, and Facilities Services employee (and Skip’s wife) Lori Jimerson.

The event took place at the southeast corner of the Frost Arts Center, near the north end of the Royce E. Pollard Japanese Friendship Garden. Jim Wasden, a retired member of the U.S. Forest Service and current member of the Clark College Campus Tree Advisory Committee, gave the keynote speech. Recently retired groundskeeper Skip Jimerson, who was instrumental in Clark’s efforts to include all 50 state trees, returned to campus to participate in the event and ceremonially shovel dirt onto the new tree.

The event featured the presentation by Washington State Forester Aaron Everett of the college’s Tree Campus USA designation by the Arbor Day Foundation for the sixth year in a row. Tree Campus USA colleges must meet rigorous standards in five separate areas to earn this designation.

The arboretum can be explored online at trees.clark.edu, which features an interactive, mobile-friendly map to view the locations of and access descriptions for most trees on campus. This includes a six-decade-old Scarlet Oak and the campus’s iconic Shirofugen blossoming cherry trees, the latter of which are celebrated each year at the college’s annual Sakura Festival.

Photos: Clark College/Hannah Erickson

“I believe we live now in a period of very great transition for human civilization,” said Dr. Hiroshi Komiyama as he began his presentation to a full Gaiser Student Center on October 28.

Titled “Beyond the Limits to Growth: New Ideas for Sustainability from Japan,” the far-reaching lecture began with the premise that the Industrial Revolution had triggered a massive increase in the gap between developed and developing countries—a gap that is now beginning to shrink, as developing countries begin to have access to the same technology and goods as developed nations, and developed nations begin to hit economic and environmental limitations to their growth. Japan, Dr. Komiyama said, began to encounter those limits earlier than other developed countries due to its limited size and natural resources.

“Japanese problems are the future problems of the world, I believe,” he said, going on to map out strategies he considered successful for combatting those problems, including aggressive pollution control measures; increased fuel efficiency; a focus on renewable and re-used resource; and social and technological changes to help keep older members of society active.

Dr. Komiyama is a prominent academic, scientist, engineer, and leading authority in global sustainability. President Emeritus of the University of Tokyo, his major fields of research include environmental engineering, advanced materials science, and knowledge sharing. He is also an advisor to the Japanese Government on subjects ranging from education to aging. In 2010 he founded the Platinum Society Network, dedicated to achieving a sustainable society that solves environmental, aging, educational, and economic issues.

A video of Dr. Komiyama’s presentation will be available on Clark’s YouTube channel by the end of November.

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Photos: Clark College/Jenny Shadley

Clark recently launched a new “Green Clark” web area to make it easier to share and learn about environmental sustainability at the college.

Attention, Green Penguins! Now there’s a great new way to learn and share information about events and resources at Clark College that support environmental sustainability. The college’s new Green Clark web page was recently launched to help centralize information for everyone–employees, students, and community alike–interested in knowing about options Clark offers to be more environmentally responsible.

To add a keyword to your event, simply add it in the “Search Keyword” field in the online form on ClarkNet. (Click image to enlarge.)

Are you organizing an event that you think belongs on the Green Clark page? It’s easy to add it to the page’s calendar feed. Just add the keyword “greenclark” (all one word, all lower-case) to the “Search Keyword” field of your listing on the online Events Calendar. (See highlighting in the image to the left.)

As a refresher, any Clark employee can add an event to the college’s online Events Calendar through ClarkNet. Once logged into ClarkNet, simply select “Tools” from the main menu, then scroll down to “College Calendar” and select “Add Events.” Once you’ve filled out the simple form, your event will be added to the college’s main online calendar, where it will be accessible to anyone visiting the website and will appear on the clark.edu home page when it becomes one of the two closest upcoming events on the calendar.

If you’ve already created an event that you think belongs on the Green Clark page, it’s easy to add the “greenclark” search term to your event–all you have to do is log into ClarkNet, select “Tools,” and then under “College Calendar” select “Update/Delete Event.”

International students make new friends in the International Student Lounge on the first day of fall quarter. Fall 2013 marks record enrollment for International Programs.

On Monday, September 23, Clark College opened the doors for its 2013-2014 academic year. The college welcomed 13,373 students on opening day, down slightly from fall 2012, when the college welcomed 13,927 students.

The start of fall quarter is always a time of new beginnings at the college, but this year is seeing a number of changes to the way the college enhances student learning. Some highlights:

• Expanded hours at CTC: For the first time, Clark College at Columbia Tech Center will be open for credit classes on Fridays. The expanded schedule will make it easier for residents of East Vancouver to complete their degrees entirely at CTC, without traveling to take classes on Clark’s main campus.
• Expansion into the Gorge: In response to demand from local businesses and residents, Clark College is offering college-level classes to the communities of the Columbia River Gorge through its new satellite location in the Wind River Education Center in Carson. Until now, residents had to travel 20 miles or more to attend the nearest community college—and that college is located out of state, in Oregon.
• New Phlebotomy program: Clark College has redesigned its Phlebotomy certification program and relocated it to specially configured classrooms and labs on the campus of Washington State University Vancouver in the college’s health care instruction building, which also houses the college’s Nursing and Pharmacy Technician programs.
• Bachelor’s degrees in Health Informatics : Clark College and Bellevue College have signed an articulation agreement that allows students at Clark to earn a bachelor’s degree in Health Informatics Information Technology (HIIT) from Bellevue through online and remote classes—without leaving the Clark College campus. “In our ongoing conversations with regional employers, we realized there was a need for Health Informatics Information Technology professionals and responded quickly to that need, but we also realized that there would be a need for students to take their education to the next level,” said Debra Ortiz, director of allied health programs at Clark College.
• Record number of Running Start and international students: Clark expects to see more than 1,770 students enrolled in Washington state’s popular Running Start program, which allows high school students to earn college credit for little or no cost. This number is a 5-percent increase over last year’s Running Start enrollment. Meanwhile, Clark is also seeing a record number of international students at the college this year. A total of 103 students from 31 different countries are attending the college this quarter.
• Mechatronics offers evening classes: Clark College’s state-of-the-art Mechatronics program will begin offering evening course, allowing workers to retrain for modern industrial jobs without leaving their current positions. This expansion is designed to boost the region’s economy; it was prompted by local businesses who wanted more opportunities to retrain their employees.
  

  Food carts make their debut on campus.

• New food carts serve campus while Culinary Arts program is on hiatus: Clark is discontinuing its Culinary Arts – Food program while it launches an ambitious new redesign of the program that will make it more responsive to modern culinary trends. Three privately owned food carts are supplying food service to the college while the program is overhauled. The college’s widely respected Culinary Arts – Bakery program will continue operating during this time.
• Water-bottle filling stations: Students and college administration have worked together to help preserve the environment by setting up water-bottle filling stations around the main campus, thereby reducing the number of disposable plastic water bottles bought and discarded at the college.