University professor Ron Lovinger doesn’t view the Willamette riverfront as a canvas for potential growth, but rather a place of sanctuary and botanical beauty.
While the University ignores community disapproval and fights to industrialize the natural space along the river, Lovinger is busy fighting to protect it.
As a faculty member in the University’s Department of Landscape Architecture, Lovinger has seen the school evolve for more than 45 years.
He watched it change from an open-spaced campus where nature and education lived harmoniously, to what he perceives to be an over-crowded space where students are packed back-to-back, belly-to-belly.
In the fall of 1965, a fresh-minded Lovinger began teaching and inspiring the students here in Eugene. He entered the scene when talks of war, peace, love, nature and environment were at the forefront.
One of the first studio projects he tackled was envisioning the potential for the Willamette riverfront.
Alongside colleagues and students, Lovinger illustrated how the riverfront could become a botanical garden or developed into a public park used as a recreational area resource for the University.
Lovinger’s vision incorporated community and appreciation for the natural surroundings Eugene offered.
He aimed to protect the Willamette riverfront, a symbol of what some believe to be the lifeline of what it means to be a Eugene resident.
Meanwhile, he anticipated the immense future growth of the University and the potential that over the next 50 years, buildings would occupy almost all of the campus area. Which ultimately became a reality.
Almost 50 years later, the conflict of what the Willamette riverfront should hold is as alive as ever.
The University plans to develop the Willamette Greenway into large surface area parking lots and office buildings.
Opposing community members, students and faculty opt to protect the riverfront, and allow it to remain a natural public space.
From 1965 until now, Lovinger has been at the heart of this issue. Standing at the forefront of the argument against construction, many students and community members view him as the father of the movement to protect the Willamette riverfront.
Studying under and working alongside Lovinger in relation to the riverfront for the past few years, Connecting Eugene’s Paul Cziko explained the profound impact that Lovinger has had on the community of Eugene:
“His dream has been to put an ecological-educational garden along the riverfront to use for teaching, for bringing people to the riverfront, for co-existing with the river and our natural world for the next hundred, or even a thousand years,” Cziko said. “If we strove to accomplish even one-tenth of Ron’s vision for the riverfront, we’d have something that Eugene and the University would be proud of for generations to come.”
“It’s like the University of Oregon has become a shopping center. And I don’t think that’s who we are,” Lovinger said. “That’s not why I came here almost 50 years ago. To join this faculty, this place — this landscape.”
Each of Professor Lovinger’s words are perfectly articulated, but not rehearsed. Contrary to his intimidating nature, photos of him laughing with his grandchildren hang all across the wall of his office.
His voice slows and he leans back, looking me dead in the eye. This was no longer a call for arms, but instead a sobering subject of conversation.
“It’s your children, and your children’s children that are going to benefit from the preservation of these landscapes,” Lovinger said. “We have an enormous responsibility as stewards of the University, as a multi-generational moral institution, to safeguard these sacred places.”
Today, we can only hope that his passion and dedication will save our valuable natural spaces from becoming yet another shopping plaza: “The river has no voice, so we are the voice of the river,” Lovinger said.
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