Talk about your humble origins. CSUN’s subtropical rain forest, exotic glamour queen of all the campus plant life, was not so very long ago a mere mound of dirt.

Jim Logsdon, Physical Plant Management’s (PPM) manager of grounds and events, knew her when. But where others saw just a patch of ground south of the University Student Union complex, Logsdon, PPM executive director Tom Brown and a team of dreamers three years ago imagined a lush green environment releasing large quantities of oxygen into the CSUN atmosphere.

Northridge’s subtropical rain forest answered a question that tantalized PPM staff, engineering faculty and students after construction of the campus’ 1 megawatt fuel cell plant. How to put to effective use the water and C02 that normally are waste byproducts of the plant’s generation of energy for the campus?

“C02 is not usually considered a benefit, but in this case it is,” said Logsdon, who supervised the rain forest planting. “We didn’t want to release it into the atmosphere, because that’s still putting a carbon footprint out there. So we came up with a way to utilize it.”

Logsdon pointed to the eight cooling towers that stand sentry over the rain forest’s roughly 14,000 square feet of moisture-loving, heat-tolerant plants—more than 4,300 in all. Each tower—imaginatively decorated by a student design team with rain forest animals such as turtles, big cats, lizards, caimans, snakes and insects—is encircled by a ring whose orifices stream C02 piped through a diffusion distribution system from the neighboring fuel cell to the rain forest microclimate.

“They love it,” said Logsdon of the fast-growing plants, one of which—a phyllostachys vivax “Aureocaulis” runner bamboo—grew 14 inches in 45 hours. “Through photosynthesis, they give us back the oxygen we need to breathe.”

Potassium chloride-rich water, another fuel cell operations byproduct, is collected in the plant’s 12,000-gallon gravity-fed tank and released to the rain forest via a unique gravity irrigation system developed by an inventive corps of CSUN College of Engineering students.

“This is not pump-fed,” Logsdon said. “The only thing that is electrical in the entire system is the controller that opens the valve that in turn opens each of the five different zones. In five or six minutes, I could [release] in excess of 750 gallons into the rain forest per zone.”

Student learning is, in fact, another byproduct of the rain forest/fuel cell project. “The students are doing a hands-on application of something that can work in the real world,” said Logsdon.

The forest’s abundance of bamboo—21 varieties among some 115 bamboo plants—also will benefit students. “We recognize bamboo is a usable resource,” Logsdon said, “extremely long lasting and durable.” A variety called “the weaver’s bamboo”—bambusa textilis—will be culled and the harvest donated to CSUN’s Art Department for art or furniture projects.

Chosen because of their ability to thrive in a subtropical atmosphere, the rain forest plants can put on a spectacular show when the most extravagant among them are in flower, such as bright red “Brilliantissima” (iresine herbstii), 14 shades of canna from “Mellow Yellow” to “Zulu Pink,” and the scarlet passiflora vitifolia with its purple ball dead center.

Like all the others, though, even the loveliest will have to fight palm, banana tree and kiwi vine for their place in the paradise of C02 and nutrient-laden H20. “We are going to let this thing find its own path,” said Logsdon. “It’s survival of the fittest.”

— Brenda Roberts

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