On Saturday, Sept. 27, CCAT pulls out all the stops for its 30th birthday bash with a full day of events. Workshops will be held from 1 to 4 p.m., including bio remediation, local habitat restoration, natural paint production, composting 101, industrial recycling, and bike winterization. CCAT staff will lead guided tours of the group’s recently renovated house, while children can play in the kids’ zone. A silent auction, prize drawing, historic presentations and a hard-plucking bluegrass concert with the Compost Mountain Boys round out the day.
Leading up to Saturday’s events is CCAT Week with 5 days of activities planned to help celebrate the venerable campus institution. Beginning Monday, Sept. 22 through Friday, Sept. 26, students, staff, faculty and community members are invited to take part in a week’s worth of presentations ranging from Monday’s transportation workshop to Thursday’s waste management session. All activities begin at 6 p.m. in the Buck House on the HSU campus, with more information available at “CCAT’s Web site”:http://www.humboldt.edu/~ccat/about2.php
“CCAT week is an awesome opportunity to get CCAT out there and let the campus and community know what we do,” says Azad Zandi, one of the group’s trio of co-directors.
Thirty Years in the Making
CCAT started in 1978 as a student project sponsored by HSU’s Youth Educational Services. Two years later students from CCAT took up residence in the Buck House, which they still occupy today in the house’s modified form – a ground floor has been added while the original structure makes up the second story.
With assistance from Professor Peter Lehman of the Schatz Energy Research Center CCAT quickly grew into its roll as a demonstration house. A long history of student-lead projects aimed at improving the house’s energy efficiency began with a retrofit to improve the house’s heating and cooling effectiveness and continued through 1991, when, with the addition of a solar energy system and windmill, the Buck House was taken off the grid. Ten years later construction of the Behavioral and Social Sciences (BSS) Building prompted CCAT to tie back into the energy grid, but the group never stopped working on ways to make the house more efficient. Student ingenuity lead to things like a bamboo grove, which produced materials used in one of the site’s many out buildings, an experiment in straw bale construction, an expansive green house and more.
From 2004 to 2007, CCAT was located in the Jenkins House to make way for construction of the BSS Building. With the move came the loss of many of the group’s former projects, but it also created opportunities to expand outreach to the campus and community and focus on the educational part of their mission.
In that vein CCAT offers workshops almost every day of the week with topics like green construction, herbalism and organic gardening classes.
In October, 2007 a rededication ceremony marked CCAT’s return to the Buck House, which, in addition to a new basement, was decked out with energy efficient windows, a solar water heating system, home-made VOC free paints and plenty of ingenious student projects that are the hallmark of this organization.
The group plans on making the most of their new location and looks forward to a few more decades of showing HSU and the community at large how to live a sustainable life through thoughtful design and education.