Tom Spies Oral History Interview, November 2, 2016

Samuel Schmieding: Good morning, this is Dr. Samuel J. Schmieding, Oregon State University, College of Forestry, Forest Ecosystems and Society Department. I am here in the office with Dr. Tom Spies at the Forest Science Laboratory in Corvallis, Oregon. Dr. Spies is a research forester and senior scientist, who has been more than 30 years with the U.S. Forest Service. And he has also been intimately involved with many aspects of forest science, forest planning, including the Northwest Forest Plan, which is the central subject, but not the only one, of this oral history interview, which is part of the Northwest Forest Plan Oral History Project sponsored by the PNW Station of the U.S. Forest Service. Good morning, Tom.

Tom Spies: Yes, good morning, Sam.

SS: Thank you for being willing to meet me.

TS: Yes.

SS: We'll start it off with the basic question, where were you born and raised?

TS: I was born in Menominee, Michigan, in 1951, and I was raised there until I went to college at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in '69.

SS: Now, where is Menominee?

TS: It's in Upper Michigan. It's just on the border of Wisconsin and Green Bay, about fifty miles north of Green Bay.

SS: Oh, so you're in the Upper Peninsula?

TS: Upper Peninsula.

SS: Okay. Is that close to Marquette?

TS: Yeah, we're south of Marquette, but Marquette's an hour or so away.

SS: Okay. Now, growing up in the great north lands, how would you say that your relationship was to the natural world as you were growing up? Did you fish a lot and hunt a lot, and hike? What did you do?

TS: Well, most of my orientation was on Green Bay, in the water, fishing, mostly spent in boats, all the time, swimming and water skiing, and some recreation in the forests. But really oriented there. My grandparents had a cottage and we lived on Green Bay, so summers were spent on the beach.

SS: Of course, Lake Michigan, right?

TS: Lake Michigan.

SS: Right.

TS: Green Bay is part of Lake Michigan.

SS: Right, right. Did you spend a lot of time on Lake Superior as well?

TS: Later, when I got older, I went up there, did some camping, and did my honeymoon on Isle Royale [National Park], backpacking.

SS: So, what experiences of youth did you have which helped create an interest in environmental issues, science, forestry, etc.?

TS: Well, interested in the environment, certainly just from being outside and playing all the time, and particularly, being on water and seeing, being on Green Bay and the Great Lakes. You'd see the lakes, the Great Lakes, are like this giant sort of uncontrolled experiment with invasive fish. I remember quite clearly, the period when invasive alewives or shad [fish] would come in. There was a period of time when they were invasive and came up through the Great Lakes through the seaway.

SS: St. Lawrence Seaway, and through Ontario and Erie, and that whole thing?

TS: Yeah, all the way up. There were several summers where there were with thousands of dead silvery shad on the beach, and we'd spend the time sort of 00:03:00burying them because they stunk. And we'd fish for perch, and then, the perch fishery collapsed, and then there was some other fishery that came along and then later on, much later on, the zebra mussel [invasive species]. So, as a youth I really saw the impact of human activity on the environment, and that made an impression on me. But regardless, I still enjoyed being out there.

SS: When you were young, did you see the evidence of the railroad, "cut-and-run" logging that happened in the Upper Midwest? [Late 1800s and early 1900s]. Do you remember any examples?

TS: Yeah, and I wasn't that focused on it. I knew my family's Spies Lumber Company, operated in Menominee from 1890 to 1920. And they were one of six or eight lumber mills in the Menominee area that were going full bore at that time.

SS: So, your family had a lot to do with what happened before then?

TS: Yeah, that was the times, and, you know, I didn't view it as a negative, I 00:04:00just viewed it, as that's what had happened. They cut the forest. They needed it. Chicago burned down [1871], and they needed the wood to rebuild Chicago. And so, at that time, I just saw it as an interesting piece of family history. But I didn't see it as sort of what my family has done to the forest. Because the forest has come back. Boom, it's coming back. I mean, it's not like it was, as it's full of aspen and maple and birch. The white pine were reduced quite a bit and are coming back. But for me, the area was fully forested and looked like a forest.

SS: So, the succession process has been dominated by deciduous broadleafs?

TS: Yes, aspen came back in many areas after the logging. But, since this is a northern hardwoods forest, other deciduous trees such as maple were part of the recovery forest.

SS: Instead of the traditional coniferous species?

TS: This was a northern hardwoods forest, which meant conifers were only part of the mix of tree species. Succession did not necessarily move to conifer domination as it does in the Pacific Northwest. But there was a period of planting of red pine plantations, so there are a lot of red pine plantations in the Upper Midwest that came in the '50s, '60s, or '70s [20th century]. It wasn't 00:05:00until I went to the University of Michigan that I began to get a better sense of the overall environmental history, and putting things in context.

SS: Now, you already mentioned Lake Michigan and other water-related places. What were some of the favorite places in general beyond those that you remember, camping, hiking, land-based, or what have you?

TS: Well, Isle Royale National Park. When I first did backpacking, it was up there. Sylvania Recreation Area [Upper Peninsula-Michigan] was another area that I went to in my teens. Our family didn't do much camping. We did a little bit of camping, but we weren't a big camping family. SS: Was it more of a hunting and fishing culture?

TS: It was, but my family was not hunters. They were into recreational fishing at that time. So, in the '50s and '60s, there was some camping, but it was 00:06:00nothing of a big deal. But we'd go across to Doyle County, Upper Michigan. Most of my interest when I was a youth, well, in addition to just playing outside, I was very interested in physics and astronomy. And so, I was very strongly interested in the sciences, and thought I would go into astrophysics or something like that when I went to the University of Michigan. So, I was not really that oriented at that time, as a primary career toward ecology and environmental issues.

SS: So, you were fascinated by the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo? [NASA]

TS: Oh, yeah.

SS: That was your --

TS: I was totally into the space program.

SS: You were into "The Right Stuff"? Correct?

TS: Yeah, right. I was totally into that part. I was really into astrophysics and theories on the origin of the universe. Was it expanding or contracting? Those were the things that where my intellectual curiosity was hooked. And it wasn't till I went to the university that my interest in science expanded into 00:07:00natural resources and ecology.

SS: Which probably also had something to do with the strengths that the University of Michigan had? Right?

TS: Yeah, right.

SS: Now, for your perspective as a youth, let's go back a little bit here. How would you describe the forests and ecology of your home state and region as a youth? What would have been your perspective and how would you have described that?

TS: I always had cousins down near the Chicago area. I'd go visit them, and I always felt very claustrophobic down there, because it would just be one run-on suburb into another. And I enjoyed going down there a little bit, but I never really enjoyed staying down there very much. I liked being on the edge, either on the edge of water or on the edge of civilization, which is what UP [Upper Peninsula] is not. Since there are not many people up there, you could easily find solitude. I worked for the Menominee County Road Commission [Michigan] some 00:08:00summers. We'd spend our time up in Menominee County driving backroads that were mainly swamps, cedar swamps, and heavily forested areas, with little or no development.

SS: Did you spend much time up in Canada?

TS: No.

SS: No, not really? Now, we've talked a little bit about the railroad logging dynamic, but that was as a historical point-of-reference. What experiences or places did you go to or had that made an impression on you as a youth about natural resource practices, good or bad, that you saw or made an impact on you? You mentioned the lake and the fish problem, and the invasives, but are there forestry or land-based things you recall?

TS: Not much. You know, I was in Boy Scouts. We went to Boy Scout camp and that was off in the forest. I enjoyed always getting out in the forest. But we didn't do, it wasn't like today. People hike a lot today. Outdoor recreation is a 00:09:00bigger deal than it was back then, I think, in the '50s. And our stuff was really oriented towards water and boats, so I wouldn't say that I had a particular opinion about the forests at that time, other than we had a lot of them and I liked to be in forested environments more than I liked to be in urban environments. I definitely felt better when there were fewer people around and there were more natural things in the landscape.

SS: So, you knew that you wanted to work "out there," whatever that meant?

TS: Not necessarily. No, I was not, again, I was much more into the, you know, into the physics and the sciences.

SS: Okay.

TS: I wouldn't describe myself as a naturalist. Well, I enjoyed collecting amphibians. I'd go out and collect frogs and toads, bring them back, kind of put them in terrariums and let them go again, or go find snakes. There was a lot of 00:10:00things in the beach there, the wild beach environment, and the shoreline where there was a lot of habitat. We'd collect crayfish. So, I was more interested in the sort of the natural things a kid could easily get to, and enjoyed going out and searching for snakes and amphibians. We used to catch chipmunks with little traps, and then bait them with peanuts. And we'd catch them, hold them for a while and then let them go. So, I was interested in animals in that respect, but not so much scientifically.

SS: How do you think the location of your formative years affected what you became later, and I'm talking about after Michigan [university] and your career development. How do you think the context of that affected you later on? TS: Well, I think, just being in Upper Michigan where the landscape is dominated by forests of various kinds and the wetlands and lakes, and relatively unmanaged 00:11:00wild areas. There wasn't a lot of forestry going on, so I wasn't able to see that up there. Because basically, the forests of the Upper Midwest are in a recovery period in the mid-20th Century. They had been heavily logged.

SS: Now, the logging pretty much had stopped by the '20s, because they had cut pretty much everything, right?

TS: Yeah, they cut pretty much everything. So, it's taken 100 years to get the forests to kind of come back.

SS: Right. Now, how do you think the contrast between your home state and the Pacific Northwest, where you've made a lot of your career, affected your views on managing coniferous forests that compose a large percentage of this region, the Pacific Northwest?

TS: Well, I think the key for me is the period of when I went to Michigan. That's where I began to be aware of the environmental issues and, of course, that was the time period of the Earth Day [April 1970] and the environmental 00:12:00awakening. I had some really inspired professors who shifted my scientific interest into natural resources. And in fact, at one point, I kind of got disillusioned with engineering and the sciences.

SS: The hard, physical sciences?

TS: Hard physical sciences and mathematics, partly because they were hard. You had to buckle down and study. There were many distractions in the 70s; drugs, protests against war, the whole counter-culture.

What was transformative for me--I got disillusioned with some of the hard 00:13:00physical sciences, and a bunch of guys and I dropped out of college for a semester and bought a 1950 Chevy fastback. And with a dog, we drove, made the "Grand West Trip." We went out to the Grand Canyon, we went to California, and we went up to the Sierra Nevada. It was in the Sierra Nevada that I decided, well, maybe I'll shift and go into natural resources.

SS: This was during which year of college?

TS: Probably my sophomore year.

SS: So, like between your first and second years, or something like that?

TS: Yeah, second or third, kind of in that time period.

SS: Who'd you go with again?

TS: I went with Gordon, Paul, but anyway, three other guys, and a dog.

SS: And this was your big adventure, huh?

TS: This was the big trip. We left in a snow storm in January out of Chicago, 00:14:00took Route 66 down to Arizona, and then worked our way up and went as far north as Crater Lake. Got into Crater Lake, and I remember seeing like fifteen to twenty foot snow drifts on either the side of the road. And I think that was pretty cool, and then we came back.

SS: Now, you said something about the Sierra Nevada making an impression on you. Was that partly because of the big trees like the Sequoias?

TS: It was just the whole, the grand landscape, and the big conifers. And we went to Big Sur, and the Grand Canyon, Crater Lake, places in between. So, this is where I think my sort of awakening or shift happened.

SS: You were probably getting your regular classes out of the way and were still focused on the physical sciences, but you were having doubts. And when you went out West, that kind of clinched it that you were going to shift gears, correct?

TS: Yes.

SS: What happened when you came back? You talked about inspirational professors.

TS: Yeah, and then I started taking [different classes]. I took a woody plants class with Barnes, Burton Barnes, who wrote a textbook on forest ecology, and Herb Wagner, who was a really inspiring botany professor, and they got me fired up. Because it was heavily field-oriented and for classes, we'd be out in the field doing a lot of field work around Ann Arbor. And there's still some very interesting areas there on some of the state lands where there's forests and things left. So, that really got me kind of shifted over into that path.

SS: And so, your undergraduate studies finished with a degree in -- ?

TS: It's actually wildlife.

SS: Okay.

TS: I did a lot of wildlife stuff. I got a little disillusioned with wildlife because I didn't like animal physiology and anatomy. But I took a lot of wildlife classes; on wildlife diseases, physiology, population ecology. But eventually, I found more affinity with the plants.

SS: So, how did you transition into a professional track, masters, doctorate, etc.? How did that go, and was that all at Michigan?

TS: Yeah.

SS: Okay.

TS: I had another experience as I finished my undergraduate degree at Michigan, and got connected with a turtle-tagging research project at a field station in Costa Rica. That was another boost to my interest in natural history and ecosystems and conservation, because it was down at a nesting beach in Tortuguero on the Caribbean side, and Archie Carr was a famous turtle conservation scientist in the Caribbean. He was the lead of this field station, 00:17:00and so we spent-

SS: Like an exchange program for students or?

TS: Well, it was a summer internship.

SS: Summer internship.

TS: They needed turtle taggers. You had to go out and walk these nesting beaches at night, and tag 250-pound turtles as they came up to nest in the sand. And so, you'd go out at night, walk the beaches without a flashlight, you'd see just a sort of a hint of a track of a turtle as it came out of the water. You'd follow the track up, wait till they finished nesting, and then you'd flip them over on their back, and then come back in the morning when you could see them to measure them and not disturb all the other turtles that were nesting. You'd measure them and tag them, flip them back, and they'd go back into the water and swim away.

SS: I take it, they probably didn't like this very much?

TS: Well, no. Well, flipping a 250-pound sea turtle on its back, that's often, it's like a wrestling match. You grab them by the flipper.

SS: Is there two people that do that?

TS: One.

SS: Oh.

TS: One. Could be two. But anyway, you'd sometimes end up with sand all over you 00:18:00because there'd be a lot of sand flying. Then, you'd flip them over and come back in the early morning, measure them and put a tag on them. Or, if they had a tag, you would write that down and measure them, as this was a long-term study. That was actually my first experience with long-term ecological research because they'd been tagging these turtles for twenty years. They had records of where they go all over the Caribbean and where these tags have been found.

SS: Where was that based out of, what university or institute?

TS: University of Florida-Gainesville.

SS: Okay.

TS: That was another transformative experience besides the trip, the experience out West. Then I came back for a while, and toyed with the idea of getting into tropical ecology, because Dan Janzen, who is a famous tropical ecologist, was at Michigan. That was another great teacher. He would have these five-hour labs Saturday morning for his tropical ecology class. They would just consist of him showing fantastic slides and telling all kinds of interesting stories about 00:19:00different ecological relationships and tropical systems between animals and plants, and between plants. He'd come in, drinking a beer and telling these fascinating stories. Then he'd have these really challenging exams that would force you to think about ecological interactions and evolution. That was another course that I took.

SS: Could you get away with drinking beers while being a professor because it was Saturday? (Laughs)

TS: I don't know. Yeah, he was his own guy. He did his own thing. So, it probably just didn't matter to him what the rules were.

SS: I guess, if you got enough whatever, moxie and credentials, you can probably do what you want. (Laughs)

TS: Right, but he was the only one. The students weren't drinking beers.

SS: Well, I wouldn't think so. No, they were doing other things before class, in that era anyway.

TS: That's right.

SS: So, was it a masters and then as separate doctoral track?

TS: So, then I went off and worked in Cleveland, and selling cameras, which was 00:20:00fun. That's where my wife was, and so --

SS: You met her then?

TS: Yeah, well, I met her in Ann Arbor before I went there, but she was from Cleveland.

SS: Oh, okay.

TS: So, I came back from tagging turtles, went to Cleveland, started applying to graduate school, applied just a few places, Minnesota and Ann Arbor. And got accepted both places, but Ann Arbor offered a little bit of financial support as a teaching assistant under Barnes.

SS: Was Samuel Dana still alive then? [Famous UM natural resources scholar]

TS: I don't remember if he would have been alive.

SS: I know we talked another time about the Dana Building and the presence of him, but I just thought I'd ask.

TS: Yeah, well, I got a Dana Award for writing at that time, so I knew of him. But I don't actually recall what his state of existence was at that time.

SS: Okay. So, anyway, describe your graduate studies, how that evolved, and how you went forward?

TS: So, my first graduate work, my masters, was on hybridization of European 00:21:00white poplar with the native big-tooth aspens and trembling aspens in southern Michigan. So, that was interesting, and was what actually got me into landscape ecology and humans, the effects of humans on ecosystems. Because what people did is they came from Europe to settle the Midwest, but they brought some of their favorite trees, and one of them was white poplar, which is very picturesque, really white trunks, and the leaves have a dark-green upper surface with a kind of fuzzy bright-white undersurface. They're planted around all in the valley, usually around old farmsteads. You could drive these state lands and see them. They're clonal, and they create giant clones. They sprout and create kind of a big stand of trees.

But they flower, most of them turned out to be females, they're dioecious, so 00:22:00there are two male and female trees. They flower, their flowering times kind of overlap with the bigtooth aspen. So that means the bigtooth aspen pollen will fall onto the flowers of the introduced white poplar and produce viable hybrids. So, then those hybrids actually will get started as seeds, blow out, so what I did for my masters was map the distribution of the hybrids relative to the parents. And you could see them, you know, really clustered and downwind from where these aspen trees were, and I did a whole bunch of greenhouse work on viability of the hybrids. And the hybrids actually grow pretty well compared to the native trees. So, that's what I did my master's work on.

SS: So, you got done with your masters and you said, okay, now what? You're going to do a Ph.D. for sure or did you take a year off?

TS: Yeah, no, no, no, I didn't take a year off.

SS: Okay.

TS: Well, I did, actually. So, I did take a year off, but I just decided to stay 00:23:00on because I enjoyed with working with Barnes.

SS: And they probably gave you more financial assistance?

TS: Yeah, there was more support. But we decided it was important for me to kind of get another perspective, rather than just sort of continuing to stay on. So, I applied for a scholarship to study forest ecological site classification in Germany. So, I spent a year in Germany, working with the Baden Wurttemberg Research Institute and a couple universities, kind of a mix of academic and research experience. Because the Ph.D. was going to be on ecological land classification, based on an approach that was developed in Germany that used indicator plants, soil, topography. So that was going to be the Ph.D. work, and that was going to be done in Upper Michigan. But before, or kind of in the 00:24:00midstream of that, I went off to Germany for a year and learned German, went out with some of the big names in ecology, Dieter-well, what was his name here-Ellenberg, Heinz Ellenberg, and folks like that, who were at GÖttingen (university], and I met with them and talked to them about my research. That was very interesting because that put me into having a perspective on European landscapes, which had been highly altered for thousands of years.

SS: Right.

TS: And then I got the Midwestern landscape, which was altered by Euro-Americans for maybe 150 to 200 years. And now we've got the Pacific Northwest, which is a shorter timeframe. So, that gave me another perspective, which was really helpful.

SS: Now, of course, you know, the origin of American forestry comes right out of German silviculture.

TS: Yeah, sure, that's true. SS: How do you, today, looking back, how can you 00:25:00see where the various strands of European silviculture, which they use that term still, and we use it less today over here, but how can you see how that merged with everything that you learning here and that came out later in your career?

TS: Yeah, you saw how intensive the management there was both in terms of, well, intensive in the sense of effort put into monitoring and they practically knew where every tree was on the landscape. And so, they put a lot of effort into it. But it wasn't some of the really intensive industrial management we have, although that certainly was there. But there were also interesting places where they were growing what they called "plantervalds," which have selection systems like a "managed forest," but it looked a lot like an old-growth forest because it had multiple layers, and it had big trees. The people loved to go out and 00:26:00walk in the forests there. Foresters were highly revered. They probably had higher status than some doctors. And that was largely because, if you wanted to hunt, you pretty much had to be a forester and have a chunk of ground that was under your supervision. And so, I saw forestry as a very different culture than we had here, and it certainly was intensively managed. There were also places where they were growing oaks on long rotations in the Spessart region. They managed them on a 250-year rotation, and managed them so they don't grow fast. They like the tight rings. There was a very different take on forestry, beyond the intensive industrial management perspective.

SS: Well, it's obviously an outgrowth of a completely different dynamic of scarcity that you have here in this continental country, versus, like I said, small countries that have been intensively managed. They learned the hard way a 00:27:00long time before we did, right?

TS: Yeah, right. But it's also a different culture, too. The people there were very tolerant and very supportive of forest management, whereas we're beginning to see in the '70s, some push back against that here in the States. So, I really saw a cultural difference in how people related to the landscape that was very interesting.

SS: So, take us back to Michigan and finishing your doctorate. What was your dissertation and your area of focus?

TS: The dissertation was about an old-growth landscape in Upper Michigan. It was owned by the Fisher Brothers (Fisher Auto Body), big industrialists, and McCormick, you know, agricultural equipment out of Chicago. McCormick Place, all those things. They had "playgrounds" in the upper Midwest and Upper Michigan, where they basically had the whole township that was their McCormick track, 00:28:00which is now a federal wilderness area, and Sylvania, which is a federal wilderness area, basically, six-by-six mile, huge areas, that were not logged. We did fundamental ecological research there, describing the relationship of the vegetation to soils and landforms. We did mapping, we walked all over the place, and did some pre-GIS work using photos and mylar, trying to understand relationships. But, it was all in the context of old-growth landscapes, and the thought was that if you really want to understand the relationships of vegetation to soil, you had to go to places where they'd been undisturbed for long periods of time. So, that you could get the effect of disturbance out of the equation and the plants had time to kind of adjust through succession to what their environment was.

SS: Who was your main professor?

TS: Barnes.

SS: Okay, still the same person. And how would you describe the concept of forestry at that time and how it was presented to you at Michigan, and how when you came out with your doctorate, and how you perceived the forest or the forest sciences and their role at that time?

TS: Well, certainly, I had classes in silviculture. We did a lot of field trips to see forest management and genetics. At one point, I did a lot of genetics, which gets you into fairly intensive forest management, and you see how tree breeding has been used to create new poplars or hybrids, or just genetically-improved trees. And trips down to Smokey Mountains to see remnants of the eastern deciduous forest down there, but also to see forest management. So, at that time, forest management and intensive silviculture, I didn't 00:30:00gravitate towards it so much at that time. I was influenced by an interest in basic ecology, and I felt there was probably a better way to do forestry that was more balanced, that had more ecological dimensions to it, rather than just intensive plantations.

SS: In other words, the old way of clear-cutting and plantations, but more effective plantations?

TS: That part, I was okay with that, but I felt there was a need for other ways.

SS: Right.

TS: I wasn't "anti-it," but always felt like that we needed a broader range of approaches in the landscape. So, my feeling was, if we better understood the ecosystems, we could better understand how to provide habitat and all these other things that you don't get if you just start managing through clearcutting and plantations. So, that's pretty much it, so I came back, so I was aware of 00:31:00this publication at the time.

SS: By the way, he's referring to "Ecological Characteristics of Old-Growth Forests," whose primary author was, Jerry Franklin, and there were a whole bunch of other people on there.

TS: Right, and I always thought the Northwest and what was coming out of here, was pretty cool stuff. So, I applied for jobs. I got one job interview down in Georgia, at University of Georgia. I gave it my best, but I was uncertain if I really wanted the job. Fortunately, they didn't offer it to me.

SS: And that was Forest Service, also?

TS: No, that was a university professor.

SS: The university, okay.

TS: Then a post-doc came up out here at Oregon State. Post-docs were a little new at the time, but it seemed like a good idea. And so, I came out on a post-doc here. John Gordon hired me, as he was department head at the time. Jerry Franklin was actually the person with the money and running the work, but 00:32:00it was sort of that same kind of cooperative effort. And so, my job out here was to go find old-growth forests and help move along an old-growth wildlife habitat research program that was funded by the Forest Service, to get a better understanding of habitat relationships.

SS: Now, what year was that?

TS: That would have been in '83.

SS: So, you landed out here right as the Forest Wars were-

TS: Just beginning.

SS: They were starting to build synergy and momentum, correct?

TS: Right. Yeah, as I talk about in the old-growth book, you know.

SS: And he's referring to an anthology that was edited and partly authored [co-edited with Sally Duncan] by Tom called, Old Growth in a New World.

TS: Yeah, and I talk a little bit about my Michigan history, and weave it into 00:33:00the introductory chapter. But, I came out here expecting it was going to be documenting the last of the old-growth forests, because they were going to cut them down. People asked me, "Why are you doing this, they're going to cut them down anyway. Why study them?" And I said, "Well, at least they'll have some knowledge of them in an archive somewhere in a database." So, I thought that was pretty much what was going on. SS: How would you characterize your environmental ethics and philosophy as you were coming into your professional career? End of Michigan, coming out here, how would you characterize this at that time?

TS: Well, I felt that there was value in having natural areas in places to help us understand how ecosystems worked. And so, I was very supportive of environmental protection kinds of things. I wouldn't say I came out here and was 00:34:00appalled that they were cutting the old-growth down. I thought, "Well, that's what they do, and this is what happens out here." I would say it's unfortunate, and I would always be looking for places, because can we have a place or two, give us one percent so we have a few natural areas left? I thought that would be great if we could have a few big watersheds, but I didn't at that time have a feeling like, wow, this is a travesty and they should shut it down and protect everything. I didn't feel like that was necessarily the way to go. But I felt like that it was pretty important to protect, to save some of the pieces.

SS: So, did your post-doc for, what, two years?

TS: Two years. I had a job offer to go back for an interview at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. And that suddenly prompted a job offer here after I got that with the Forest Service.

SS: Right.

TS: So, when that came along, I decided, wow, this place is too interesting. It would be nice to go back to, there was a challenge, because going back to the Midwest, that's where family was, there were a lot of considerations. But by that time I was kind of hooked on the big forests out here.

SS: So, you kind of fell in love with the Northwest, too, right?

TS: Yeah, I fell in love with the Northwest, and fell in love with the science environment here. There were a lot of ecologists, and a lot happening here. I felt like I'd dropped into my equivalent of a NASA program, but in the context of environment, because there were a lot of high-profile folks that had a lot of high-profile research. So, it was a very intellectually stimulating place in addition to being an interesting place.

SS: And you're talking about both the presence of the Forest Service, but also 00:36:00its close relationship with Oregon State University.

TS: Yeah.

SS: And all of its multi-faceted, not just forestry, but everything else that it represents in the sciences. TS: Yeah, Corvallis had just, you know, between the different programs at the university, the EPA, the Fish and Wildlife Service, a high concentration of ecologists here. And if you didn't know something about something, there was always somebody you could just call up and they would know more about it than you did, so it was a very stimulating place. That probably drew me as much as the natural environment.

SS: So, you're first hired. What was the job and what was the title?

TS: I was a "Research Forester," you know, GS-12 or something like that. And that was to continue work on old-growth forest ecology, basically.

SS: So, tell me about meeting Jerry Franklin? I suppose on some level, he mentored you like he did a lot of people. Tell me about Jerry?

TS: Well, I first met him when I came out for the job interview in November of 00:37:00'82, and gave a talk. I guess, it went over pretty well. He took me, showed me around, and it seemed like he was a nice guy, real personable. And I remember, I think the talk was like on a Thursday or something like that, and Friday night, there was the holiday party at Jerry's house. So, Jerry and all the minions were there. And so, I was invited to go to this party up in a nice house up in the hills in Corvallis.

SS: Were they little, yellow creatures like the minions in the cartoon? No. (Laughs)

TS: Yeah, but there's just a lot of people there. And a lot of people having a 00:38:00just good time. And so, there it was very interesting to kind of see the West Coast style, kind of more loose than Michigan folks.

SS: You still had a little of the "buttoned-down" feel back there, right?

TS: Yeah, oh, yeah, absolutely.

SS: And further east you get, it gets even more so.

TS: Yeah, right.

SS: Like, if you went to Yale, it would be very much so, right?

TS: Yep, yeah. So, then he offered me the job that night, which was a surprise, because I thought I'd have to go back and wait. But I got a sense of "this is it."

SS: That's a great party. (Laughs)

TS: Yeah.

SS: Have a good time and basically get your career given to you?

TS: Yeah, right. So then, I went back [to Michigan] and my wife Amy gave birth to twin boys.

SS: And your wife was still back there?

TS: I had to defend still. [Spies returned to Michigan to defend dissertation at time family was dealing with caring for twins. He drove out to Oregon later, and his wife and mother flew out to Oregon with twins.]

SS: Okay. So, you were still doing your doctorate. Right?

TS: Yeah, this was in early December.

SS: What was the title of your dissertation? I don't know if you said that.

TS: I can't remember what it was, "Ecological Land Classification." But it's 00:39:00here somewhere. Where is it?

SS: Tom is looking for his long-lost dissertation.

TS: Yeah, oh, here it is. "Classification and Analysis of Forest Ecosystems of the Sylvania Recreation Area." So, that's the Ph.D.

SS: All right, keep going.

TS: So then, I had to go back and defend, and the twins were born prematurely, two months early.

SS: That was a little dicey, huh?

TS: Yeah. So then, Amy and I decided I would come out in March to start the job. And so, I eventually got the kids home, I went out and found a place to live, then drove out in early March and ran into a blizzard in the Rocky Mountains, and got stuck in Laramie, Wyoming for a couple of days.

And so, we finally made it, and then, started working with Jerry and got the field crews going right away, getting out in the field in April and May to hire crews. We had to get out all over the place at Andrews and Wind River [experimental forests]. Jerry would take me out, I remember, he took me around to a few of the places that we were going to sample.

SS: You were working in old-growth forests? TS: Yes.

SS: Okay.

TS: We were sampling old-growth forests, but also younger natural forests. So, the question was, "what's the difference in plant and animal communities between an old-growth forest and a 100-year-old forest or a 40-year old post-wildfire forest." And these were all natural forests.

SS: In other words, the very things that became central to the Northwest Forest Plan dynamic. Correct?

TS: Absolutely, yes, right.

SS: Okay.

TS: So, that's where we were. He took me around and I remember saying to him, 00:41:00you know, I can't believe you get paid, we get paid, to work in these places, because we were driving up in the Columbia Gorge and these were just gorgeous places. And Jerry says, "Well, it's hard, but we've managed to make it work." But, yeah, so it was great working with Jerry.

SS: So, you've always been on the science end of things.

TS: Yeah.

SS: You've been one of the "ologists."

TS: Yeah.

SS: In the Forest Service. How much did you know about management, planning and administration from the perspective of the Forest Service, and how did you view that dynamic during the 1980s within the agency, as your career develops before the Northwest Forest Plan process started?

TS: I didn't know a whole lot about it, and then I got to sort of learn about it, because one of my jobs was to go to all these ranger districts and have them help me find areas of old-growth forest to sample. So, I had aerial photos and I would identify places on aerial photos that met our sampling criteria. Then I would go meet with the planners or the silviculturalists, and they would say, 00:42:00"Well, you can't go here because we're going to cut that next year, and that one's going to be cut the next year," so we needed areas that weren't going to be cut for three years. Because we were going to sample, it was a three-year program at that time. So, I began to learn about the planning process and what went on, but I didn't have much exposure to the Forest Service management like that until I got out here. SS: When did you first go up to the Andrews, and what did you do?

TS: Well, first thing when I came out for my job interview, I just rented a car and drove out there. And then, drove up to the Andrews and realized that, with mountains, you go up high enough, you run into snow. And then, driving on mountain roads was a little different than driving on flat ground around the Midwest. That was November or December of '82, but then I would have come in later, when I started working down there in the field crew in the summer of or 00:43:00spring of '83.

SS: Maybe we're ahead of ourselves here, but I'll bring it up anyway. How did you see the Andrews, which at that time was in LTER I, just starting to become a high-profile ecosystem science site, one that started in 1970 under the IBP program. How do you see the Andrews and what was going on there, and Jerry and Fred Swanson, and all those people who were central to what became ecosystem science in relation to old-growth forestry, and the application of scientific principles to forest management in the context of the Northwest Forest Plan? What did you see going on during those first few years that happened up there and similar places [reserves], you mentioned Wind River, in terms of what happened later?

TS: Right. Yeah, before I answer that, I just need to check.

SS: We're going to take a break just for a second here, and he'll answer this question later. Okay.

TS: The research at the Andrews was the center of the world in terms of old 00:44:00growth, understanding old growth, and the relationship to management. So, we have an experimental forest, and a long-term ecological research site where some really fundamental work is going on, on log decay or old-growth forest dynamics or stream ecosystems. And at the same time, you have management going on in it, around it and activities down on the Andrews that had been in cooperation with the managers [Forest Service].

SS: Because they were still doing cuts at that time.

TS: Right, they were doing cuts at that time. And so, at that time, part of my job was to go around and give talks to various managers on the ecology of old-growth forests. I remember going down to a Chinese restaurant in Eugene and giving a talk to, I don't know who it was, but the supervisor, Mike Kerrick of the Willamette was there, and others. I think maybe it was an SAF [Society of 00:45:00American Foresters] thing or some Forest Service meeting, and just showing lots of slides, talking about woody debris, the role of dead wood as an important process in ecosystems. And so, a lot of that knowledge, of course, came from work at the Andrews, and you know, the big question was how do we define an old-growth forest? So, it's the four or five parts of an old-growth forest, big, live trees, dead trees, canopy layers, special layers, that kind of thing.

SS: Continue, please.

TS: So, the Andrews was just the source of a lot of our understanding of old-growth forests and owls. So, it was the place to be. And it was a very stimulating place to go. I had field crews working there, so I got to learn, know the Andrews from that first summer, by doing basically sampling of forests 00:46:00in and around the Andrews trying to find forests, looking at other photos trying to understand where the old forests were, where the young forests were, and talking to managers.

SS: When you started introducing these, I won't call them novel, but ideas that were new to management.

TS: Yeah.

SS: At least in terms of equal consideration.

TS: Yeah.

SS: What do you remember the reactions or in general or can you cite a spectrum of reactions between the "good-old boy network" and "newfangled ideas," shall we say?

TS: Yeah, it was clearly, you know, the agency certainly at that time had, it's always had a can-do attitude, and so if you tell it to produce a billion board-feet, it'll do it. And so, there was clearly folks who didn't know what to make of this old-growth stuff or were opposed to the idea of it, or maybe they 00:47:00thought, well, you can have a few places where you're going to protect it, but we're going to convert all of it to plantations. I don't have a particular encounter, but I certainly remember that Mike Kerrick, the supervisor [Willamette NF], there were some lightbulbs that went off with him about this ecology of the forest and the role of dead wood. So, I felt like in that sense, I didn't feel like I was pushing, selling it in a real hard way, or trying to come up with a real prescriptive approach. I was just sort of describing what we were learning.

SS: Right.

TS: And I felt that this generally went over well. I don't recall any specific conflicts. The biggest conflict or pushback that I remember, I'm sure I had other ones, was when I went down to the talk at some environmental center down in Eugene, and got criticized by somebody in the audience for being a scientist 00:48:00who just measures everything and doesn't appreciate the broader spiritual values. I'd just convert everything to tons per acre or-

SS: In other words, stop being Gifford Pinchot and be John Muir. Right?

TS: Yeah, right. Don't give me all this science stuff, because, you know, don't just measure everything. It's more than something you can measure. But that was an interesting revolution. That got me thinking a little bit about, well, this is more than just figuring out the science, it's maybe more than a science issue. But it's really the science sort of a perspective.

SS: In the introduction to this book, you talk about the different values of an old-growth forest; the spiritual, the aesthetic, etc. Want to say a little more about that?

TS: Well, that's certainly something we always knew, but it wasn't something 00:49:00that we would often voice, because we were scientists. So eventually, as the social debates heated up, we began to see that it wasn't about how many slugs you'd find in an old-growth forest versus a young forest, it was really about values. In many respects, the owl was a vehicle to get at old-growth forests. If the owl had been a species of early successional forests, or if they were an endangered species associated with not enough disturbance, it probably wouldn't have had the place it had in the debates.

SS: Well, you have the double effect, shall we say, of a charismatic fauna in a charismatic ecosystem, right?

TS: Right, exactly.

SS: Does that make sense? Yeah.

TS: Exactly. So, yeah, I think the old-growth issues, they spanned the range, 00:50:00and we began to see that more and more as the debates kind of heated up.

SS: Even though we're talking about the era before the Northwest Forest Plan in the '80s, what did you learn during your, shall we say, formative science years in the Northwest, about management issues in the years leading up to the Northwest Forest Plan debate and planning process?

TS: Well, I learned that there were timber targets that were set, and that is sort of the management political realm. I learned the agency pretty much got its timber targets from Congress, who wanted a certain amount of wood produced, and then figure out ways to do that. I learned that there were, you know, the 00:51:00"ologists," and the timber side, and the timber side usually won and told the "ologists" what to do, what was going to happen. So, I learned about some of the internal structure of the agency, learned about how management decisions were made and how priorities were set towards timber, and what the role of Congress was in that whole thing.

I learned that if the Forest Service doesn't have a budget for cutting trees, they can't cut trees. And they don't just make a decision themselves, they do it in the context of plans influenced by the public and politicians who respond to the public. You'd drive around these rural communities in Washington and Oregon and see really run-down houses and poverty. But you would also see 00:52:00well-maintained schools and county buildings paid for by the return of timber receipts from the treasury to county governments.

I learned in the '80s that a lot of rural issues were important to Congress. So, that's why there was a lot of congressional federal government involvement in the debates, because there was a strong connection to the rural communities, where obviously it was about how much timber was going to be produced from the forest to support the loggers or the mills, whatever it might be. I began to see how the thing fit together from the bigger picture and priorities for timber management, how it kind of got passed down from the region to the districts, to 00:53:00the forests and down to the districts. And then, how the decisions were made, who was in the room, and who had clout to override the other perspectives.

SS: When did you see, or could you sense the intersection of environmentalism with traditional forestry practices and expectations? Did you see the conflict coming, the collision of NEPA, the Endangered Species Act, the growing power of environmental lobby groups and activist organizations, did you see that coming together, or did it kind of just boom, explode, and everybody had to then take note?

TS: Well, I could see pieces of it. I wasn't that involved in some of the higher-level environmental politics of things at that time. But you'd know big Andy Kerr [activist], you'd know who the folks on the environmental side were, 00:54:00you'd know the folks on the timber side. I really saw that. The other defining element was when I testified in Congress before a hearing of-I've got to find my document of one of the subcommittees of this.

SS: This was in the early 1990s, correct?

TS: Late '80s.

SS: Late '80s, excuse me. Before the Dwyer injunction, correct? TS: Yeah.

SS: Okay. Right, got you.

TS: So, I went back there. Dale Robertson was chief [Forest Service]. I was the key Forest Service science guy who was going to inform Congress about what old-growth was, what some of the issues were, and how we defined it. I remember 00:55:00the night before, Hal Salwasser [OSU-COF], who was back in D.C., I think he suggested we needed visual props, so I spent my night in a hotel room, drawing up a profile of forest succession.

SS: The old-style charts, right?

TS: Yeah, it was the profile. And it's still used these days in some of the publications.

SS: Yeah, okay.

TS: It's just little pen-and-ink drawings of old-growth trees and snags, little trees and big trees, and it gives you a sense of the whole sweep of forest succession.

SS: The days before PowerPoint, right? (Laughs)

TS: Yeah. Exactly. So, I drew that up, and that diagram was passed out to the congressmen. But before we went to the hearing, I was met the Chief [Dale Robertson] in his office, and we were talking about the strategy and what was going to be said. He turned to me and said, "So, you're going to be the guy that's going to help me discredit the Wilderness Society." And I thought, "Oh, crap, what have I gotten myself into here."

SS: Wow.

TS: So, I knew that there was some heavy-duty politics. I was there at the witness table with the chief, answering questions. I don't think I quite fulfilled his desire.

SS: How were you supposed to discredit the Wilderness Society?

TS: The problem with the Wilderness Society was that they were using remote sensing, and had estimates of how much old-growth forest there was. The Forest Service did not know. They could not say, and that was a big embarrassment to the chief. I remember after that hearing, he decided instead of taking a taxi back to his office, he was going to walk, because I think he got beat up pretty bad. And so, not too long after that I get back out here, suddenly, there is a 00:57:00lot of money available for remote sensing work in the Pacific Northwest.

SS: And that's when Warren Cohen started. [Remote-sensing expert]

TS: So, that's when I hired Warren. I hired Warren Cohen as a post-doc. I also worked a lot with John Tepley [National Forest System remote sensing person] at that time. Our role was to evaluate and develop a research program to provide a map of old-growth forests.

SS: But you were already doing that in a, shall we say, less high-tech way?

TS: Yeah, well, we weren't doing it from-

SS: A traditional field work kind of angle. Right?

TS: Right, we were doing the field work. But we couldn't produce a map. So, remote sensing was a new technology emerging at that time. Everyone wanted to see a map, and the agency [Forest Service] was a couple steps behind in terms of being able to do that. And so, that's a whole other branch of my career here, the remote sensing vegetation mapping aspect that connected to Warren Cohen, to 00:58:00Janet Ohmann, and that produced a whole ton of remote-sensing research.

SS: At that time, what was the remote sensing technology and the assets available?

TS: TM imagery. [Thematic Mapper]

SS: Okay, now did that also include LandSat, too?

TS: Thematic Mapping. Yeah, that's LandSat.

SS: Oh, LandSat, excuse me. Okay, right.

TS: Yeah, LandSat, and there was early LandSat. It was 80-meter resolution. And then there was, they were constantly coming up with new stuff, and then they went to TM LandSat 30-meter resolution.

SS: Now, by the time the Northwest Forest Plan dynamics started in the early '90s, where were you in that process in terms of mapping and completeness and resolution, and the intensity and accuracy of your data?

TS: Well, our job was to develop the research tools and evaluate the viability of remote sensing to do this. We weren't asked to actually map that. That was 00:59:00done under a contract to Pacific Meridian Resources, and that was another story. But we were tasked with evaluating how much could we really say about old-growth structure and composition from satellite imagery. That's where a lot of our papers were focused on, the scientific underpinning of the remote sensing. And so, at the time, we were more of a consultant in terms of the agency's production mapping program. SS: So, it was still about production?

TS: No, production of maps.

SS: Maps, okay.

TS: Yeah, not timber production.

SS: I was referring to production of timber. My mistake. Thank you, Tom.

TS: Yeah, but this was still about production, you're right. It was still about production, timber production.

SS: Right, so there's two forms of production. Okay.

TS: But this is now about, we need maps and we need wall-to-wall maps. We need 01:00:00to know where the old-growth is. That was just part of the Northwest Forest Plan and that kind of thing.

SS: Stop, let me make sure I understand. From your knowledge, how did federal, state and private interests intersect, collaborate or conflict, when dealing with areas involving mixed ownership and ecologies, at this time?

TS: I didn't have a whole lot of interaction with state and private lands during my time. The main way I got involved in that was the BLM checkerboard issues, which were constantly coming up. I can't remember the exact timing, but as part of a group, we did some evaluation of the ecological dimensions of the checkerboard ownership. There were always proposals to give the BLM lands to the Forest Service, or do some sort of a swap to get rid of this thing, partly 01:01:00because of the governmental efficiency of it, governance efficiency of having two different agencies, and then having this sort of blocked up [contiguous] rather than checkerboard [scattered] ownership. So, I didn't have a whole lot until after the Northwest Forest Plan. You know, we would see the actions on federal lands or private.

SS: We can revisit that a little bit more when we talk about the actual plan. I still wanted to kind of introduce it and see where you were at that time.

TS: Yeah, at that time, it was all a federal operation, a federal perspective.

SS: Now, because you weren't in planning, did you deal with environmental laws much during that first decade? You knew what they were, but they weren't essential to your work?

TS: Yeah, right. I mean, I didn't deal with NEPA. We heard of NEPA. You know, I didn't deal with the ESA, other than we knew about the owl and that kind of thing, but that wasn't really part of it.

SS: When did you first hear about the owl? I did bring in the 1985 book, Ecology 01:02:00and Management of the Spotted Owl in the Pacific Northwest, which is one of the first Forest Service publications on the subject. What do you remember about the owl as the '80s were progressing?

TS: Well, I remember Eric Forsman. I met Eric when I started my sampling under the Old-Growth Wildlife Habitat program. Eric had done similar sorts of vegetation plot sampling, and in the Coast Range. So, I met with him several times to learn how he did it because we were going to use some of what he did as sort of a template for how we did the old-growth sampling that went into what's called the "white book," which was-do you know the white book? That's an important book. It's right behind your head there. That one right there. Yeah, you can pull it out.

SS: Oh, no, I've got this actually. No, okay, yeah.

TS: Yeah, it's called the "white book." That's where a lot of my early research 01:03:00went into.

SS: It's called, for the record, Wildlife and Vegetation of Unmanaged Douglas Fir Forests, PNW Station Publication TR-285, May 1991.

TS: Yeah, I was a post-doc on that, and Marty Raphael was a post-doc on that.

SS: He was the murrelet guy?

TS: No, he was birds, bird communities in general.

SS: But he became the murrelet guy?

TS: Right, he became the murrelet guy. I don't think we did much with murrelets in that one because they not quite on the radar screen yet.

SS: Well, they were kind of added in the ESA context after the spotted owl had already been identified [as key species for ESA application].

TS: Plus, they're so hard to sample. And we weren't doing sampling at that point. [Murrelets] But, so I met Eric then. I would have known about the owls at the Andrews, and of course, the owl story was always sort of popping up in the newspaper. So, I can't remember a particular time when I just suddenly "discovered" the owl.

SS: How did it become the indicator species that it became?

TS: Well, I do remember that the first plot I took at the Andrews in the old-growth forest, this spotted owl sat and watched us measure vegetation, for like forty-five minutes. We were like, "Oh, there's the spotted owl," you know, and it was like checking us out.

SS: Saying, please do your work well. (Laughs)

TS: So, yeah.

SS: That's very symbolic, you know.

TS: It was. Anyway, I think my awareness of the owl was just sort of a gradual awareness, the politics of it and the whole question about the owl and different owl habitat designs. And, as I mentioned in the old growth book, Jack Ward Thomas wanted me to participate in this old growth, or in the spotted owl recovery plan committee, the science committee, that he was leading. And I said, 01:05:00"Nah, I'm too busy. Plus, with this whole sort of politics, I need to go out and focus on my research on vegetation." So, at that time, I still thought that the first priority for me was to make sure I finished up this old-growth characterization, the science part of it.

SS: Did you have any inkling that the spotted owl would become this iconic, not only ecological thing, but also a legal thing and a cultural thing? Did you have any clue that this would ever happen?

TS: Well, I sort of knew it was there, but I didn't know how far it would go. Yeah, I didn't. I don't think any of us thought in the mid-'80s that there would be such a wholesale tipping point like happened with FEMAT. I think we were thinking more about, okay, we need some habitat areas for owls, so we need to do this. We're going to have some timber production here, but it wasn't going to be this sea change.

SS: Now, how would you describe forest planning and policy in the Pacific 01:06:00Northwest in the decade before the Northwest Forest Plan process? Do you want to break again?

[Break in Audio.]

SS: Okay, we're on again.

TS: From my perspective, I was still largely focused on the science, thinking what the heck, let's leave the environmental politics to others, just as the whole building conflict in a series of lawsuits, protests and all those kinds of things, were occurring. And I felt like the scientists were the guys in the white hats. We were the ones who were going to deliver the sort of unbiased information about how the world really was working.

SS: So, there was the traditional forestry guys, and there were the people up in the trees?

TS: Right. We were going to provide an unbiased perspective on what was really 01:07:00going on. With that, some very well-informed person or persons, could decide how to have all of the above in some mix, because I wasn't feeling like, we just needed to stop all logging. I wasn't feeling like we needed to protect every area of old growth. But I do remember feeling like, the era of old-growth logging is ending. So, how are we going to get there, fast or slow?

SS: You just thought that the expectations of not only Congress but the Forest Service in terms of what their get-out-the-cut volume was, was really unsustainable in the long term?

TS: Well, I knew that there was not an unlimited supply of old growth and that eventually you'd run out of it. So, the question was, do you run out of it, and what's that transition period look like? I remember taking Mark Hatfield, who 01:08:00was Senator at the time, out to the Andrews, and Fred [Swanson] was along. I think we were out at maybe a log decomp site or something like that. And sure enough, another spotted owl showed up at that time, and Hatfield was looking at the spotted owl. And so, we rode out in the van with him, and it was, you know, interesting being in the van. I remember saying to him something to the effect of, "It's really a question of how do we transition out of the old-growth economy, whether it happens fast or slow, sooner or later." Because he was producing all these riders and things like that, and he turned to me and said, "You're exactly right." That what it's all about. He just knew the end was coming, it was a question of how you got there, fast or slow. We needed to start thinking in other terms. The era of old-growth logging was coming to an end.

SS: How would you characterize Mark Hatfield from what you knew of him?

TS: Well, that was my own personal interaction with him, but from what I read 01:09:00about his stuff, I had a lot of respect for the guy. I wish we had a lot more of that type of thoughtful folks on the conservative side, because I don't think we have very many of those any more. Look at who ushered in a lot of environmental laws in the 1970s. They came in under Republican administrations. SS: Nixon, Roosevelt.

TS: Yeah, yeah. And actually, this is a diversion, but.

SS: Tom McCall, anyway, yeah. [Oregon governor-many environmental laws at state level passed during his tenure in 1960s and 1970s].

TS: And actually, in terms of Forest Service budgets and research, I think we've often done better under Republicans, because they often see the value of producing things from the National Forest which then brings in money. But that's another, that's a whole other subject.

SS: Yeah, in a segue, you were saying about Hatfield. Could we continue along that strain a little bit?

TS: So, I began to see the issue as basically, that old-growth is going to run 01:10:00out, and this is where I began to interact with Norm Johnson and be aware of the larger forestry scene, which, i.e., means private lands and state lands. And recognizing that the private lands [and interests] really were pushing for timber from the federal lands, partly because they had cut their lands pretty aggressively, and were seeing a timber shortfall coming.

SS: Their rotation cycle vis-a-vis economics, etc., they weren't going to be able to keep up?

TS: Yeah, and they saw stuff [private land timber sources] coming online, but it was down further [away in time]. The Beuter report began to [surface that issue - John Beuter, OSU forest economics professor], that's where I first began to be aware of the whole timber supply issue, and the fact that there was a push to get [federal lands] timber to kind of keep them going until their plantations came back online. And so, that's where I began to see the connection between the private lands, the mills, and federal timber policy. That's where I began to see 01:11:00it. Then we began to sort of think about disturbance-based approaches. Again, we saw ourselves as the guys in the white hats providing the "third way," which is to deliver a strategy where you could use disturbance-based management as a basis for getting some wood, but providing habitat at the same time. And so, that was a lot of what we thought our contribution to the debate was.

SS: When did you start learning about the value of late successional, old-growth forests to ecology, whether riparian or terrestrial ecology? You obviously were seeing on a large scale what happens when you cut, this happens, it's there, but 01:12:00when did you start getting the science tied to it in terms of how it would affect water quality, fish habitat, erosion dynamics on hillsides, etc.?

TS: I didn't do that kind of work personally. I mean, I was aware of it through Dennis Harr's work or working in the Coast Range, but that's another chapter - the COPE program. That's where, after a lot of focus on the Oregon/Washington Cascades with old growth, there was a big research program called COPE, Coastal Oregon Productivity Enhancement program. And that focused a lot on riparian zones.

SS: That's what that acronym means. I've seen it. Thank you for clarifying.

TS: For me, that was another sort of important chapter in my research. And that got me into private lands a lot more. That was driving through them and seeing 01:13:00the Coast Range was lot more cut over, seeing the value of what happens in riparian zones. And so, that helped make some of the connection between the uplands and the riparian areas. Up to that point, a lot of the focus in the "white book," for example, is pretty much the riparian forests were there, but we were not really focusing on them then, very much. So, that got me much more aware of stream issues.

SS: So, the integration between terrestrial and aquatics started to come together in your mind, but I assume that was reflected by the greater science community as well.

TS: Oh, yeah, right. So, the work at the Andrews, of course, there was a lot of focus on the interaction of forests and streams. I didn't do at that time much on that front, I just knew of it from other work.

SS: Now, you talked about the "Ecological Characteristics of Old-Growth Douglas-fir" forest publication. What other key publications, whether it be a 01:14:00popular book, an environmental book shall we say, or a science book or articles started coming along, that would lead up to the momentum and the knowledge base about what old-growth forests were?

TS: Well, the "white book" is clearly one.

SS: Right.

TS: That really helped define the relationship, the community, the plant community and animal communities of old-growth forests, and how they varied across the region. So, that's an important one. I would say, Mark Harmon's big review of deadwood. I mean, it wasn't the whole old-growth forest, but it was an important component of old-growth forests. That was an important one. I wonder, other definitive publications....

SS: That's good enough. Based on my understanding of the history and general concepts and specific breakdowns of the different aspects of old-growth and canopy studies and edge effects, and all that kind of stuff, that really started happening in the '90s and beyond. Correct?

TS: In the late '80s, yeah. Deadwood studies certainly began before that. And then, canopy work. We started trying to do canopy work with remote sensing, using remote sensing to get at spatial patterns of canopies, just later in that time period. Edge effect work began in the '90s, and I was involved with that with Jerry Franklin. And there were some important papers came out of there. They were actually, some of them actually would have happened before the Northwest Forest Plan, because they were used in setting some of the buffer 01:16:00width guidelines for riparian areas, for example. Prior to the Northwest Forest Plan, we did a lot of work on edges and their microclimate effects at the Andrews and Wind River.

SS: Now, going back to Jerry Franklin again, what was "New Forestry" and when did people start calling it "New Forestry?" And what was his role and some other people's roles in bringing in this new paradigm?

TS: Well, Jerry's role is key, and Jerry's always been very good at identifying from a bunch of different facts and ideas, almost marketing them, and bundling them up into some simpler, more easily grasped ideas and concepts. New Forestry was this precursor to ecosystem management. They're all kind of swirling around. They all have real similar dimensions to them, but the names have changed in 01:17:00slightly different emphases. But New Forestry was this idea that you might leave some trees and leave some retentions, not just clear-cutting and planting plantations.

SS: Now, that was commonly referred to in the popular media, I know, in the '80s, but when did it start being used in the professional class for the Forest Service, immediately, or were they both about the same time?

TS: Well, it's not clear that it was ever used in the professional class. It was used very unevenly.

SS: Okay.

TS: Because the forest silviculturalists weren't running around and saying, "Oh, New Forestry, it's great." They were in many cases disparaging of it. The silviculturalists were some of the folks who were most resistant to change. They had a way of doing things, and renaming something that they already did like 01:18:00shelter wood or something like that, many of them didn't buy into that kind of relabeling of things or using techniques that didn't optimize or maximize timber production. So, any of these sorts of "New Forestry" or ecosystem management approaches where you're retaining habitat elements, deadwood, livewood, were often viewed skeptically. So, I wouldn't say that it was any of those ideas were fully adopted. Many of them were looked at it fairly skeptically, initially.

SS: And that wasn't just in the agencies, state and federal, but even in academia?

TS: Even in academia. In fact, we often felt that Oregon State was more conservative in that regard than the Forest Service was, that there were folks over there, professors, who just said that this is an abomination, these ideas 01:19:00are not good, they're heresy. (Break in audio)

SS: We're back on.

TS: But there was a lot of skepticism of some of these approaches from a traditional forestry standpoint. Because it was a whole new paradigm for forestry. It wasn't maximizing timber [output]; it was trying to get other values mixed in which didn't fit with many people's view. And a lot of the agencies, a lot of the scientists in the field, were oriented towards a timber production paradigm.

SS: It seems like anybody who deals with this dynamic and many other ones, should read Kuhn's, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. They could understand the process of how people hang on and fight, resist change, and then acquiesce. Then, the new paradigm becomes the "old" paradigm.

TS: Yeah, sure. That's right. It took a while in coming. So, a lot of the early 01:20:00New Forestry ideas I think were mainly just talked about in a small group.

SS: Now, how much influence did the timber industry have, from your perception, on federal and state agency planning before the Northwest Forest Plan era, and do you think it was like they had the ear [USFS], and they could just make a phone call, or was it more diffused than that?

TS: Well, I don't know from first-hand, I only knew as sort of just from-

SS: From what you know, though.

TS: From my impression, it was pretty strong. They would call congressmen up and complain, and then, the congressmen would talk to the Forest Service. That was my impression. I think a key change is when Congress was no longer seen as just focusing so much on rural issues and forestry issues when the economy of Oregon 01:21:00shifted and local power bases shifted to the urban areas, and focused on other elements of the economy.

SS: And that would have actually been happening in the twenty years before you got here probably?

TS: Yeah, that was a slow process. I think it was just sort of a tipping point eventually that happened in the '80s.

SS: A couple.

TS: Yeah, a congressman from, I think it was from Indiana, Jim something. Anyway, I can find it [looking for name]. He at that time got really interested in old-growth politics in the Northwest, and was out here proposing bills to protect the old-growth.

SS: Before the forest plan?

TS: Before the forest plan. And he would come out here on field trips and things like that. He was from Indiana, a congressman from the district, Jim, Jim Johns? I can find it.

SS: Not a high-profile guy, though?

TS: Well, no, he didn't last very long, as you could imagine.

SS: No. Not in Indiana.

TS: If you're from Indiana, you spend a lot of time in the Northwest working on old-growth issues. So, he proposed a bill to protect a lot of the old growth in the Northwest. And some Republican congressmen posed a bill to restore old growth to Indiana. So, then get rid of all the farms and bring the forest back. So, it was very much that sort of national politics.

SS: And the next thing, we're going to ban basketball at the high school levels. If you want to get really controversial. Yeah, the story of Hickory, or what was the actual high school? [Milam HS basis for Hoosiers' storyline]. That never really happened the way they portrayed.

TS: So, the industry certainly was a key player, but that faded over time.

SS: The U.S. Forest Service's national forests, individual national forests in the Pacific Northwest, took more than a decade to develop forest management plans based on the 1976 Forest Management Act. But once they were done in the '80s, they were immediately obsolete because of what was going on at the time, politically. What do you remember about that? I know you weren't a planner, but you heard about it, you saw it going on. Did you sense frustration, exasperation from inside the agency, from what you knew?

TS: Yeah, a little bit. I don't have a real strong memory of that issue with the planning rules or the plans, and the fact they weren't being implemented other than you would see the results of trying to implement them, and then getting 01:24:00sued for owl issues or other issues.

SS: Is this before the Audubon Society lawsuit which led to the Dwyer injunction, or do you remember? TS: I don't remember.

SS: You don't remember, right. But it was all about that same time, right?

TS: Yeah. Yeah.

SS: You sensed that there was a lot of frustration within the traditional planners and managers in the Forest Service?

TS: I wouldn't say I sensed frustration. I mean, it may have been there. I don't think that I noticed it.

SS: Because you were just still doing your thing?

TS: I was doing my thing and I was helping them out when I could in the regional office, but I didn't have a lot of interaction with planners to really know what they were thinking about, what they were trying to do.

SS: Now, do you remember the Seattle Audubon Society lawsuit over the spotted owl in 1989 that was actually the big legal event that led to the injunctions and everything kind of falling into place?

TS: I remember there were lawsuits. I don't remember [specifics].

SS: It was just one of many?

TS: Just one of many. I didn't really keep track of them.

SS: What do you remember about the formation of the Interagency Scientific Committee [ISC] which involved the U.S. Forest Service, BLM, Fish and Wildlife Service, and Park Service, I believe?

TS: Well, and SAT? [SAT and ISC were two scientific reports produced to give inputs to policy-makers and managers on natural resource management issues germane to forest management and old-growth issues].

SS: And the ISC, which was especially important, was led by Jack Ward Thomas. TS: Right, yeah.

SS: And what do you remember about that, because, obviously, that was in response to the lawsuits.

TS: Right, yeah.

SS: Regarding the one high-profile one [suit], filed by Seattle chapter of the Audubon Society [1989], what do you remember about that, and discussions going on that led to the formation of these massive interdisciplinary teams of science people that led to the forest plan?

TS: You know, on SAT, I was aware of it, but I wasn't involved, I don't think. I knew some folks were involved, a lot of our fish and wildlife folks. It was sort of focused on that. I was not that involved with SAT. I certainly was interested 01:26:00in it, and aware of it. My first involvement was with the Gang of Four exercise that came after SAT. I think it came after SAT.

SS: And that would be before this though, correct?

TS: Yes, right.

SS: Just for the record, the Gang of Four dynamic included Jerry Franklin, Norm Johnson, Jack Ward Thomas and John Gordon. Correct?

TS: Right.

SS: And they started doing work in the early '90s before?

TS: Before the Northwest Forest Plan.

SS: Before FEMAT [1993], the Northwest Forest Plan [finalized 1994-95], and all the stuff that happened.

TS: Yeah, that was a precursor, and I was involved with that. We were trying to map old-growth areas. I remember going and spending some time in a large area where they had brought in managers from the district levels who knew what the forest conditions were. There were big maps and people were laying out big maps and drawing on them and trying to identify reserve areas.

SS: Now, we're talking about the Gang of Four, right now.

TS: Yeah, right.

SS: I'm going to actually reword it here with what I'm talking about. In your recollection, what was the sequence of events that led to the creation of the team of scientists and natural resource managers, who did the research and compiled the early stuff that became the Northwest Forest Plan, FEMAT, all that stuff? And the Gang of Four was the original? Correct?

TS: Gang of Four. I'd have to actually sit down and remember that whole sequence. There was the owl recovery plan, the ISC Report. That was the first big one. [1990]

SS: Right.

TS: That's what Jack Ward Thomas did. He asked me to participate, and I declined.

SS: So, you didn't take part in that, okay.

TS: I didn't take part in the ISC. That's the spotted owl group.

SS: And that's the 1990 Report, I believe.

TS: I have it somewhere, and would have to look at it. There were so many of them. [Reports, teams, meetings, processes.]

SS: Oh, I know.

TS: And then there was SAT, Scientific Advisory Team, or something like that. 01:28:00And then there was Gang of Four. And then there was FEMAT.

SS: Tell me about Gang of Four?

TS: So, Gang of Four. I was involved in that one. I remember at that time, one of my contributions to FEMAT was the idea of Adaptive Management Areas. And I recall at the time of the Gang of Four, thinking we needed some areas designated for experimenting and trying out new things.

SS: In other words, what became incorporated into the Northwest Forest Plan later on as one of the land classifications?

TS: Yes, right, and so I was one of-not the only one, but I was one of the proponents of that. But I got that idea from the experience of the Gang of Four, seeing everything just being put into reserves or not, and then realizing that unless we had a specific designation for these testing areas, we won't be able to do that because they won't have a home; they won't be in a reserve, and they 01:29:00won't be in the managed areas. When FEMAT came along, that was one of my areas that I wanted to push, and FEMAT allowed for development of the Adaptive Management Areas. [AMAs]

SS: Now, what's the first interchange or meeting or dynamic or production out of the Gang of Four? What do you remember about how that came about and meeting and working with Jerry and Norm and all those guys?

TS: Well, that's a good question. My memory is pretty poor for that, actually. I'd have to jog it by looking at some description of the Gang of Four reports. I know we produced some maps. Do you have them there? (Interviewer brought NWFP-related subject documents & maps.)

SS: Want to look? Now, Tom is looking at "Alternatives for Management of Late Successional Forests for the Pacific Northwest," which was the first report produced by the "Gang of Four," Norm Johnson, Jerry Franklin, Jack Ward Thomas and John Gordon. He's looking at that now, so he can jog his memory and make an 01:30:00informed comment on it.

TS: Here's what I did. My philosophy through a lot of the '80s was to focus on the science and let the wars and all that stuff play out. But, I began to get pulled into it, largely because of mapping research we were doing with remote sensing and the mapping old growth, and the "Ecological Characteristics of Old Growth." [Publication] I was building my scientific understanding and wanted to focus on that. That's why I initially declined Jack's offer, because I felt like I needed to focus on this other stuff. Then the Gang of Four came along and they wanted to map old-growth forests, and that's where I felt I had something to offer from the work we'd been doing. So, my contribution was largely to help 01:31:00figure out how to map it, what the role of remote sensing was going to be, and then, beginning to think more and more about the whole, getting and spending more time thinking about the strategies of conservation alternatives. How do we actually propose alternative ways of doing things, besides just intensive timber management or reserve-based approaches. That's my contribution.

SS: And you'd already been working with remote sensing and Warren Cohen a little bit for about two years by this time?

TS: I hired Warren Cohen for the job as a post-doc, funded by the Forest Service [Region 6]. They paid for a PNW post-doc. We were trying to figure out how we could use remote sensing to detect old-growth forest characteristics. So, at 01:32:00that time, I worked a lot with the Forest Service "Forest Inventory and Analysis" program. John Tepley was the head of that. A lot of my interaction was with the region through their efforts to figure out where their old-growth was, and how we could help them do it.

SS: And how long did this process take? Do you recall?

TS: It was probably a matter of months, I don't recall. But there was, it was kind of the model for FEMAT in that they rented a big hall and brought a bunch of folks in from the districts of the national forests, who were experts in what the forest conditions were like. They had big sheets and were mapping things out in terms of-

SS: Where was it, was that here in Corvallis?

TS: No, it was up in Portland.

SS: Oh, okay.

TS: A key book, you were asking earlier about a key book.

SS: Or a publication of some kind, yeah.

TS: Or a publication and that would be. Oh, is it, The Fragmented Forest?

SS: Larry D. Harris.

TS: Yeah.

SS: Where is Larry from?

TS: University of Florida.

SS: That's right. He did some work at the Andrews, didn't he?

TS: Yeah, Jerry had him out for a sabbatical or something like that. That helped everybody out here think about landscape-scale strategies for conservation.

SS: So, anyway, we're-

TS: So, maybe, this might be a good time to take a break?

SS: Yeah, let's do. I'm fine, but I just kind of need to [work and lunch].

TS: My memory is that I was helping with the mapping largely through the work 01:34:00we'd done with inventory and monitoring stuff. That's where I really began to think we really needed Adaptive Management Areas, although adaptive management was not folded into the Gang of Four exercise.

SS: Right.

TS: And the Gang of Four didn't, I mean, it was out on the street for a few months, and then, bam, Judge Dwyer's decision came along and, soon after, the President [Clinton] decided to launch the FEMAT process.

SS: Clinton, and then you had the Forest Summit and all that jazz.

TS: Right, yeah. SS: We're going to take a break for lunch, and we'll come back to this in a while. The rest of the interview will be completely on the Northwest Forest Plan. Okay?

TS: Sounds good.

SS: Alright.

[End of Part 1, Start of Part 2]

SS: This is Sam Schmieding, back for the second half of the oral history interview with Tom Spies. We took a short lunch break. Before we stopped, we 01:35:00were talking about the Gang of Four report and Dr. Spies' kind of introducing the first phases of what became the whole Northwest Forest Plan process. Now, Tom is going to pick back up from the Gang of Four Report, and just kind of take us through the sequence of events as he best remembers them from that point going forward.

TS: So the Gang of Four was my first entrée into the science-policy interface. I had been working a lot on the science issues that obviously were related to it, old-growth forests, remote sensing to get a landscape view. But they were on the science side of things, and I'd kind of resisted getting into the policy 01:36:00dimension for various reasons.

SS: Did the experience earlier on with Dale Robertson, was that kind of jolting, or did that have anything to do with that?

TS: It was just a mistrust of it. It's like scientists, we're doing "pure" stuff. This other stuff is tainted by all kinds of things, and who knows what can happen?

SS: Right, you lose control when democracy gets involved. (Laughs)

TS: Yeah, it's clean and clear-cut, publishing statistics and things like that.

SS: Right, got you.

TS: I felt that [politics] was the realm of other people. My role as a scientist was to produce good, solid scientific information to support that [various subjects/processes]. I really had the view that in this big play, everyone had an important role to play. Now, if everyone was doing the policy or if everyone was doing science, then progress wouldn't be made. So, I really felt very much 01:37:00like my role was science, but eventually, the events kind of took over, with the lawsuits, the Dwyer decision, the Timber Summit, and all that kind of thing. But the Gang of Four kind of got my toes into the water on that front, and then, when the Timber Summit and FEMAT came along, I was pretty much ready to go. I then thought, "Okay, no more sitting on the sidelines, time to jump in." And so, that's what I did.

SS: Now, you were not at the Summit, correct?

TS: No.

SS: But did you see it on TV?

TS: Oh, yeah, we watched it.

SS: Right.

TS: It was a big deal.

SS: Some of your colleagues were there, I believe. Jim Sedell was there.

TS: Yeah, Jim was there, and actually had a speaking role, and there was Jerry and John Gordon and other folks. But certainly, the rest of us mid-level 01:38:00scientist types were not there unless they made a special effort to go there. So, when FEMAT came along, that was pretty exciting. The President has asked the federal scientists to come up with a plan to "save the world," save the owl and the old growth, and everything else in between.

SS: But you were given ninety days to do it.

TS: We were given ninety days. Well, we were like gunslingers. We said, "Yeah, you want a job done? You've come to the right people." We were definitely very confident that we could do it, and in particular I think the key to remember, FEMAT was built upon other work and didn't come out of the blue. It built upon the ICS, the "owl report," it built around the SAT Report, it built upon the Gang of Four, it built upon a good decade of science that was pointed in that 01:39:00direction with folks who were kind of oriented toward that way. So, we had a robust cadre of folks. I like to think that Jack Ward Thomas was smart, as he basically cornered the market on all the owl biologists in the world and they were all there, so there was very few who were left out. They were all on the bus. And so that, I think, was politically smart and it worked at least for a while. So, we were given sixty, well, initially given, sixty days.

SS: Oh, okay.

TS: And then we got an extra month.

SS: Oh, so it was sixty, then ninety, correct?

TS: Yeah, so I think it started at the end of April or the beginning of May, or something like that, and Memorial Day was kind of the target.

SS: How did it come about to place it in the "pink tower" and the whole "camping 01:40:00out thing" in Portland happened?

TS: I don't know the details and logistics, how they found the pink tower, but they needed a large space. They needed lots of rooms, so we had, there was sort of a hierarchy with some scientists having cubicles with their names on them, and there were meeting rooms. I know Jack and Marty were kind of the leads, and Marty was sort of a manager.

SS: Marty Raphael?

TS: Yeah.

SS: What was his role with the Forest Service at that time? Was he a biologist?

TS: Yeah, he was a wildlife biologist.

SS: Okay, all right.

TS: So, it was a moving target. There was always this discussion of the folks who were sort of the interface between us and the Clinton administration. Tom 01:41:00Tuchman and, my memory doesn't suit me very well. But there were several folks, Jim Lyons, I think was involved, who were sort of the interface, and the lawyers. There was always a question about what the lawyers said we needed to produce in terms of levels of certainty.

SS: You know, there's a whole book, and it's like part of the FEMAT report, just to explain the acronyms and terms coming from it [whole process.]

TS: Yeah, right.

SS: And the different liaisons and the entities.

TS: Right. So, there was a lot, and there's a lot that I wasn't privy to, but I could hear bits and pieces, like, for example, you'd hear we had to do these assessments of species viability, and rate them. We had this sort of expert opinion process where we were told that unless the assessments got to eighty percent, they wouldn't really hold up in court. In other words, if we had 01:42:00produced a scenario that had a 50/50 chance of saving the owl, the President didn't want to go forward with that. He wanted a scenario that would have at least an eighty percent chance. That sort of colored our perspective. And of course, in hindsight, it sort of introduces a bias in there because you know with a lot of uncertainty, an expert opinion, you know what the passing grade is. And so, if you come up with something that's seventy-five percent, you can think, well, maybe it's eighty percent. So, there was some interesting kinds of twists like that.

SS: Rounding off?

TS: Rounding errors, judgment. Any judgment, now in hindsight, was "expert judgment" in that was considered and still is considered a viable way to go when there's a lot of uncertainty and lack of knowledge. But it's also certainly very open to biases and effects of who your experts are, and who's in the room and 01:43:00who isn't in the room, when these decisions are made. So, I had a couple roles. I was pushed hard for an adaptive management effort and based on the Gang of Four. So, that effort got rolling, and I can't remember exactly how that kind of took over. I didn't lead it, but I was very strongly pushing for it and made sure that-

SS: And in terms of the policy of what adaptive management would mean, but also what the AMA areas were going to be. Both, correct?

TS: Yes, right. The whole, what does adaptive management mean? We've got "Adaptive Management Areas. Where should they be? How they'd be structured. My feeling was that with the approach we were taking, which was with these expert assessments of different plans, it was all based around the notion of developing alternatives, options for the President to consider.

SS: There was ten, weren't there?

TS: Yeah, there were ten, but they didn't start out at ten. We started like with three or four.

SS: Okay.

TS: And then people started adding on. There were a number of other proposals. There were folks that came in, Chad Oliver and a few other folks, came in pushing kind of a long rotation, what's called "high quality forestry," kind of a forester's version of ecological forestry, but with long rotations, as the way to go. Now, that was considered by the group, but eventually the powers-that-be and FEMAT, decided that there would not be an option built around that because they felt like they didn't think they could meet the eighty percent threshold on that kind of thing.

SS: Interesting.

TS: So, there was that. We were also told that, I think, and this is where my memory is foggy, but there was the definite feeling if we didn't produce options 01:45:00with reserves in them, they were not viable. The environmental community wanted reserves, and we needed to have some reserves.

SS: So, it wouldn't be viable ecologically, but also politically?

TS: Politically.

SS: So, the politics of the thing were even more primary than the ecology of the thing.

TS: Absolutely. The more I think about it, the more I see it as a political document that was heavily informed by science. I mean, that the broader scope of it was political. There was obviously a lot of science in there, a lot of effort done, and very good and honest and high-quality effort at the time to characterize the best available science relative to these options.

SS: Were the reserves the primary thing that had to be determined first before 01:46:00the rest of the-and I use the word matrix, not in the sense of the matrix lands [land allocation], but the matrix of how the lands were all put together, that was the first thing to fall? We had to determine where the late successional old-growth reserves were going to be. Was that the first?

TS: Well, that was part of it. We started out with Gang of Four and we had the owl habitat areas identified already, so owl areas were sort of already given. They were already a starting place. So, they were often the starting place for expanding the reserves.

SS: Okay.

TS: So, the idea was that, okay.

SS: So, you had the core or "rump" areas, if you will, to expand or whatever. Okay, got you.

TS: Yeah, but the owl was a heavy driver of the late successional reserves. The amount and distribution and spacing of the areas was strongly driven by owl criteria, although not exclusively.

SS: And how large they were in relation to other things?

TS: There was a sense they need to be large to withstand fires, and some of the ones down in southern Oregon on the Umpqua, with the southern and western Cascades ones made especially large because of their concern about fire occurring. We knew fire would take out some portion of these. The big question was how much redundancy and safety factors do we build into the reserves, given that we knew that things were going to happen. My main job was to be in charge of the old-growth assessment. For every option developed, that option included existing forest plans and a whole bunch of gradations of everything, from what was called the "green dream," which was sort of the "reserve everything," the 01:48:00green dream being the environmentalists' dream.

SS: Lock 'em up, lock it up.

TS: Yeah.

SS: In the words of the other side, lock 'em up, or how do they usually describe it? "Locked up," I believe is correct.

TS: Yeah.

SS: Right.

TS: So, there was a spectrum of options. And we were then asked to assemble experts in various areas, so there were experts on murrelets and owls and fish. And I assembled the experts. I was part of the group of some of the experts on old-growth forests and late successional forests. Then I had to develop criteria for how we would evaluate the old growth, the connected old-growth ecosystem. What does that mean? How would we measure that, and what would be some the elements of that? Then, once those elements are defined, we have to look at 01:49:00uncertainty and risk-rating relative to achieving those elements, and what does that mean. Then, bringing in folks and having panels where different options are presented.

SS: And this is all up in Portland?

TS: This is all up in Portland, yeah.

SS: Okay.

TS: It's the only time in my career that I've been paid overtime. We basically worked from dawn till way past, you know, into the night. Every night.

SS: Did you guys just have motels up there most of the time?

TS: Yeah, we were all up in motels. Occasionally, I'd drive back to Corvallis.

SS: To see your family? (Laughs)

TS: Yeah, I'd rather drive back early in the morning sometimes, to make sure you did not fall asleep and die on the highway. That was one of my main roles, doing that and producing the report on the old-growth ecosystems. SS: I've read some 01:50:00of the methodologies about average age and variation of species and all that. How did you really determine that? It's probably hard for you to even say now. Maybe give me a short answer of that.

TS: Yeah, right, well, there was- (looking at documents)

SS: Oh, right.

TS: So, there's these-

SS: Oh, that's your copy, correct?

TS: Yeah.

SS: Okay.

TS: There are different outcomes. The first question is, what are the outcomes? There are attributes to each. The abundance and diversity of old growth, processes and functions, connectivity, the spatial pattern in the landscape. Those are the characteristics we were looking at, and then, their outcomes. One 01:51:00outcome is late-successional old-growth abundance, and ecological diversity is at least as high as the long-term average. Outcome two is less than the long-term average, but within the range, so it's maybe within the range that was there before, but on the low end. Option three, it's below the range, but some provinces are within the range. Option four is old-growth low in abundance, maybe restricted to a few provinces or elevational bands. Just little pieces left across the landscape.

SS: Got you.

TS: So, that's the way the different options were laid out, and those are the outcomes that we had.

SS: In your area in terms of the late successional reserves?

TS: Yeah, right, and there were different outcomes for owls, and they are described somewhat differently for fish.

SS: And also, for the aquatic people, right, got you.

TS: For the aquatic, right. So then, here are the options. In this case, there were nine options. This is abundance, this is process, this is connectivity, and 01:52:00it would divide the world into moist provinces and dry provinces.

SS: And that would generally be east of the Cascade ridge [crest]. TS: East of the Cascades.

SS: Right.

TS: Then we had the teams rate for these different characteristics and the different options, what the likelihood of outcomes 1 and 2 were. So, outcomes 1 and 2, we were told, okay, this is where the lawyers came in and said you've got to have an outcome that looks viable, or it's not going to pass the lawsuits. If the President goes forward with an option, and the option has a forty percent chance of retaining old growth across the area, it's just not going to work, or the highest likelihood is Option 4, which is just little bits and pieces left across the landscape, that's not going to be good. So, the real standard was within the range or above the range of historical conditions. That was the target.

And so, then these tell us from the experts who were in, six or eight or ten experts in the room, evaluating these options, what their beliefs were about the likelihood of choosing an Outcome 1 or 2 for the abundance of old forest, for Option 1. So, Option 1, which was the "green dream" and was 86 percent, Option 2 was 92 percent, Option 4, 93, there was an option down here, Option 8 or Option 7, I can't remember which ones, were 66 percent. So, there's some variability. The ones that are 80 and above are highlighted. And again, that comes from the lawyers.

SS: Because of what you, well, what would pass muster from what the Clinton administration wanted, but also -- ?

TS: What the lawyers said they could defend in a lawsuit.

SS: Right, okay, interesting.

TS: So, yeah. SS: You were part of the team that developed the numbers and the 01:54:00map? The experts are different people. Right? Or were you one of the experts?

TS: Well, I was one of the-I can't remember if I was voting, but I was one of the experts as well.

SS: Okay, so you had dual duty. Got you.

TS: I was an expert leading the experts, for the old-growth part.

SS: Tell me some stories that you remember about your part of that process? I mean, you talked about the long hours.

TS: Well, one story, my main story I can remember, is the production of this graph right here.

SS: Which is on page IV-70 of the FEMAT report.

TS: Right, right. So, one question that we had was all about fire. What was fire going to do to this system? And we didn't have very good models. This is '93, 01:55:00before the Biscuit Fire [huge 2002 SW Oregon fire].

SS: That was ten years later, right?

TS: Yeah, we had one or two fires in the late '80s, but the Northwest is still in that period before we started getting hot and burning up with a lot more fires. But we knew fires were on the radar screen, we knew that they had a potential to take old forests that are in reserves. We needed, and across the whole landscape, to have some basis for doing that, for saying that. And so, John Tappeiner, who was a silviculture professor from OSU, and I, realized we needed to deal with it. So, we literally sat down, and on the back of an envelope, kind of penciled out what we thought would happen in the future. That's this graph right here. It was literally symbolic of what was going on. A 01:56:00lot of stuff was being done "by expert opinion," your best guess, given your knowledge of this. We didn't have a lot of models, we didn't have even a lot of data on what might happen.

SS: A lot of people would call that bootstrapping. (Laughs)

TS: A lot of it was just a guess and go kind of a thing. But we were the experts, right? So who better to guess than us?

SS: Yeah, but in sixty or ninety days? I mean, how deep could you go?

TS: You couldn't go very deep and we had to divide the world into two world regimes, the dry and the wet. And we weren't able to recognize all the nuances and variability that occurs between those two extremes. So, there were a lot of things that had to be done very quickly. So, John and I did this on the back of, I think we had an envelope, and were just drawing some lines and that just becomes this graph. It turns out that our estimates of what might happen relative to fire, we had some projections, and we had to project how much fire 01:57:00would happen over 100 years, which was like a crazy thing to do. So, we had to do that and we came up with some estimates of how much disturbance would knock out the forests over time. And it turns out that we're very close to what has actually happened.

SS: Speaking of the Biscuit Fire, how much of the reserves did that knock out?

TS: It knocked out a chunk of owl habitat for sure. SS: Yeah, because, that was a big, hot fire. [500,000 acres]

TS: Yeah, that was the biggest one we had in the Northwest Forest Plan area.

SS: Yeah, right. So, were things mostly collegial? I mean, were you guys like part of a team, but, or was it stressful, or was it...... How would you describe the emotional makeup of your team, anyway?

TS: Yeah, well. I was very collegial, I think.

SS: Well, you probably were, but yeah. But, I mean, you've got different personalities.

TS: But there were some, definitely some stress and different opinions at the sort of larger scale. And the big question was how many scenarios we would do. We started out with three or four and it got up to four or five, and then at the very end, I think we had eight or ten. At the very end, almost the last day, we decided this, we talked about a train wreck coming. Because we didn't have one [option] that integrated all the layers of protection. So, you could imagine we've got an owl group saying here's what we need, and a fish group saying here's what we need, the murrelet group saying here's what we need, and other species groups saying here's what we need, and an old-growth group saying, and 01:59:00you layer them up and it covers the whole place or it covers a larger map.

SS: In other words, more than?

TS: More than what you're seeing.

SS: I'm pulling out a map of which is Alternative 9, I believe.

TS: Right. SS: Which is what became the one selected. So, this map, these areas, were all, they covered more area?

TS: Well, in other options.

SS: If everybody wanted everything that they got, right?

TS: Yeah, so Option 9 [Alternative] didn't exist at that time.

SS: Right, right.

TS: So, we realized, there was a sense of, my God, we're going to layer these all up, and it's just going to not give the President much, many options at all, because it's all going to be protected. SS: And you can't do that, either.

TS: You can't because we're supposed to provide some wood. Protect everything as best we can, and then having done that, provide some wood. And so, at near the eleventh hour we realized that we really needed to come up with an integrated option that did a better job. For example, if you've got an owl area here, and a 02:00:00watershed protection area over here, can you find a watershed that both protects owl habitat and aquatic habitat, by making some adjustments. And in fact, if you do them independently, you get a lot of extra stuff, but if you do it in a more integrated way, there are ways that you can get multiple levels of protection.

SS: For different areas?

TS: In a same area, in a same area, so you don't have to have separate areas, you can batch things up. And that may then free up more area for the matrix or for timber production, or whatever it might be.

SS: Right.

TS: So, that was the thing that came at the very end of the process.

SS: So, there was a meeting of the minds, if nothing else, based on fatigue?

TS: Yeah.

SS: Or was it, did you really, literally see consensus coming out of the process and people having epiphanies or, yes, I see that, or--?

TS: Yeah, it was a group process, and some of the higher-level decisions about 02:01:00how many scenarios to go forward with or which ones to reject, I think that was an area of stress where there was a push to have Chad Oliver and other folks I mentioned, to come in proposing options that were not adopted. I'm sure that ruffled some feathers, outside and inside the group, but in the end, there was a sense of we've got to come up with an option that is more efficient. I think there was a widespread recognition of that although I can't say I know what everyone was really thinking about that.

SS: Now, these people, the people in the tower, what was it, about 100?

TS: Something like that.

SS: It was all science people, and some administration people. Right?

TS: There were all science people. There were a few managers, lower-level 02:02:00managers. But the higher-level managers were not allowed in, or if they came in, they had to wear a hunting vest, so they could be identified.

SS: That's right.

TS: Basically, I had some of the "ologists" from the forests and from the region [Region 6 of USFS] there, because they knew the biology and they knew the ecology. The feeling was, we don't want their supervisors standing over them saying, "Well, you don't really need to protect that much," you really should protect this, not that, etc. We didn't want them to be influenced by them.

SS: The principle of the secret ballot.

TS: Yeah, right.

SS: Yeah, so anyway, so you come up, so how did-well, in terms of how did it shake out for your portion of it on Alternative 9, what did you get and what did you not get that you wanted?

TS: I don't recall it in those terms. I think that I was concerned that the Andrews would get sucked into a reserve and we wouldn't be able to do anything there. We were watching out for research interests, both Wind River and the 02:03:00Andrews. And I thought the adaptive management areas were important. I wanted to make sure they were sited in places that you'd think would be good at least once we were familiar with them, and a lot of the area, we didn't know very well.

SS: Right.

TS: But, I don't recall having a strong feeling either way about one option over the other. I mean, I felt like something in the middle was probably good.

SS: When you say Alternative 9 is in the middle, but a little more geared toward more preservation, would that be a fair assessment?

TS: Well, you can look at the reserve area that they have. Let's see. So, here's 02:04:00the owl, Option 9, it's not the lowest, it's not the highest.

SS: That's what I mean, though.

TS: It's in the middle.

SS: Well, it's in the middle, but toward the high middle?

TS: Yeah.

SS: That's what I meant.

TS: Well, let's see. Here's nine, so it's not actually, this is not through the high middle in terms of reserved area.

SS: Oh, okay.

TS: It's actually toward the low.

SS: Okay.

TS: Toward the low end. This is I think the original forest plan, so these were or maybe some variant of those.

SS: So, this is the green dream up here at 1? Okay, I think so.

TS: Yeah. I mean, this highlights the-this is an important graph.

SS: This is page Roman numeral II-29.

TS: You're tasked with assessing the viability of groups of species of hundreds 02:05:00of species or processes across 25 million acres of land, in areas, most of which you'd never stepped foot in. You're looking at options that are described in various ways. And what basis do you make a decision? It's a lot of uncertainty. And the primary basis was the reserve areas, and how much of these areas was protected from logging? And, if a lot is protected from logging, then you assume that that's probably more likely to maintain the species we're talking about in this case.

SS: That makes sense.

TS: It makes sense, but what you don't know is the shape of this function. Is it linear? [i.e., a linear relation between reserve area and owl population] Or do you reach most of what you're trying to achieve by increasing the protection by ten percent or twenty percent. You get a lot of the way there, or do you have to 02:06:00go all the way to 100 percent to get there. This really points out that a lot of folks, most of the experts, felt that being sufficient was largely a function of how much of these areas were reserved in the different options. Now, there are many ways to describe the options. You could describe them by the standards and guidelines, what you could do in the Matrix, the rules governing the kind of forest management, the buffer widths, whole bunches of things. And in a sense, those are some of the nitty-gritty details, but those metrics are even harder to use to evaluate things, because it's hard to imagine how different thinning prescriptions affect forest structure over large areas and long time periods. But the thing that is easiest to put your head around, the simplest metric, is 02:07:00how much area is protected.

SS: Right. Because you don't even really know how the Matrix or the AMA areas are going to play out in practice.

TS: You don't know how they're going to play out, and you don't know about their relationships [with various factors]. When you've got hundreds of species, you don't know which species are really dependent on old growth or not. For example, somebody sees a rare bird species fly through an old-growth forest, but we don't know if it could be found in forests of other ages. There's a lot of uncertainty about the habitat needs of these things, and a lot of uncertainty about relative differences in the ecological functions between a 100-year-old forest, a 200-year-old forest or a 400-year-old forest.

SS: Right.

TS: We know that a recently clear-cut and sprayed plantation isn't going to do a whole lot for forest species. Well, what about an 80-year plantation where you've left a few trees for wildlife habitat?

SS: Selective cutting, yeah.

TS: Selective cutting, what about that? And so, I don't know about that, but I can you tell you, if you protect it all, you're probably going to save as much of it as you can. That was sort of the thinking.

SS: Okay. What's your feeling on the owl as an indicator species? I mean, it's a romantic fauna and it certainly is important, but it's just one species.

TS: It's not an umbrella species.

SS: Right, right.

TS: It may be for a few, but it doesn't do it for lots of species, particularly species when you're talking about fire-dependent systems, like the open old-growth [less understory] on the east side [Cascade crest]. It's a habitat for white-headed woodpeckers, but owls wouldn't be found there. But it's still got big-old trees.

SS: Right.

TS: Or early successional species. So, the owl is kind of wishful thinking. It's nice to have the idea that we can just simply protect some areas based on distribution of a single species. But that, I think, is wishful thinking.

SS: Now, the murrelet, how did that get tied in? Basically, one species was 02:09:00obviously the owl, and then the murrelet, also in terms of being an identifiable indicator species. How did it get tied into this whole thing?

TS: By listing, or potential for listing.

SS: So, it was just listing it? But it came in, in the early '90s after this had already started, correct?

TS: Yeah, I don't remember the exact timing.

SS: I'm not sure when it got listed, either, that's why I'm asking you.

TS: It must have been listed, it must have been on the radar screen because it was a separate entity.

SS: Yeah, I know it was on the screen, but I just wanted, in terms of how it got folded into this process, because most people, unless you're really up on this, they'd know, oh, I've heard the murrelet, but they wouldn't understand how it's tied into this whole process.

TS: All listed species get first priority, so if it was listed or considered for listing, then it was automatically on there.

SS: Right, and that's mostly Coast Range, though, right?

TS: Oh, yeah, coastal areas.

SS: Coastal areas, right.

TS: Within 75 miles.

SS: That's right, so that comes over to basically about here?

TS: Yeah.

SS: Okay, we're in Corvallis, that's what I thought. So now, the AMA and the Matrix areas, those basically were chosen after the reserve dynamics were set up pretty much, correct?

TS: Yeah, right.

SS: And it was kind of like, okay, we have --

TS: Protect the old-growth areas first, and then set up some AMAs that some of the Matrix is left, and those, the matrixes where you'd have, maybe I have some old-growth left, but it's not in big blocks, it's little pieces that are left. The other aspect is the late-successional, which confuses people because we call it late-successional old growth. But a late-successional in FEMAT actually refers to the forests that's younger than old growth.

SS: Right.

TS: And that was probably I think Jerry Franklin's push because there's a lot of forests in the, oh, 100 to 150-year-old [age-class] that exists in large contiguous blocks.

SS: Which would be considered late-successional, but not old-growth ,which is, 02:11:00what, 300-400 years or older? Correct?

TS: Two-hundred-plus.

SS: Oh, just 200, okay.

TS: Yeah, but late-successional, the terminology is very confusing. Because late-successional and old growth are the same thing. And so, late- successional should be called mid-successional.

SS: That is confusing, actually. Yeah.

TS: Yeah, late implies near the end of succession which is climbing to a climax forest.

SS: Which is also a misleading thing because of how we learned the limitations of that original model from Clements.

TS: Right.

SS: Yeah, on an agrarian prairie environment, anyway. Correct.

TS: Yeah, so one of the criteria for identifying the reserve areas was large, unroaded or uncut blocks.

SS: Okay.

TS: We had a number of areas that were not old growth, but were mature, 80 to 200 [years-old], but because the forest timber wasn't as big, the volume wasn't as large, they just hadn't gone in to log them yet. So, that was a realization 02:12:00or recognition that one of the criteria wasn't just old forest, but it was blocks of older or mature forest that were still intact.

SS: Right.

TS: That would become the old-growth in 50 to 100 years.

SS: Right.

TS: So, that was another dimension of it. So, then whatever was left over was the Matrix. Then there was always this, you know, I don't know how Norm and others did it, but there was always this sort of calculation of what would the timber volume be then. If you produced this much, what's the hit going to be on the volume you could get out of it.

SS: In other words, how the estimate that went into the actual Northwest Forest Plan where they had whatever it was before, we're going to shoot for this now, so it's diminished, but not, like two-thirds or whatever it was.

TS: Right. So, you'd put all your old-growth protection out there, all your 02:13:00standards and guidelines and what you can do, and then, you estimate how much volume and compare that against what volume you've been getting. Was that a big number or a little number, or it's going to be a lower number, but how much lower was it, and is it a viable number? That's probably where the crisis came at the end, by saying, well, if we overlay these, there will be so little volume left for timber production that it just won't be viable politically.

SS: So, you had to diminish the original reserve categories a little bit to get a final plan, right?

TS: Or make them more efficient. Say you still have the same level of protection in terms of rating of certainty about the outcomes. In other words, you're allowing the rating to go down a little bit, but you're still getting some minimum level of protection.

SS: You came out of the pink tower after ninety days, and the report went to 02:14:00where? To all the various agencies and the Clinton administration?

TS: Yeah, I assume so. I don't know, once this happened, everyone had just headed for the exits and didn't look back.

SS: They said?

TS: We're out of here, we're done with this kind of stuff. So, most of the scientists scattered to the winds and didn't look back. SS: Probably went to bed for a week. (Laughs)

TS: Yeah, that was the first thing they did. And then a lot of them just said, "We're done with this."

SS: I mean, who was it that was telling me, Gordie Reeves was telling me that, people were like sleeping under desks.

TS: Oh, yeah, that's true.

SS: You know, it was like a big "slumber party" half the time.

TS: Well, to me, it was like the last hours, like the ultimate term paper that you've waited till the end of semester, you know it's due tomorrow, and so we're going to stay up all night and finish this, even if our sentences at the end don't make sense. We're going to write as long as we can. But this is the 02:15:00ultimate term paper, but the grader is not the professor, it's the President. So, you get a very different sort of feeling. It's like, okay, I know this feeling. The last time I did this, I stayed up all night for my physics test, and I flunked it because I fell asleep.

SS: The point at which even large doses of caffeine don't help any more.

TS: Yeah, right, right.

SS: So, how did you feel about what you did in that period of time regarding your specific task that you were charged with?

TS: I felt really good about it.

SS: I mean, you felt like you really -- ?

TS: I felt like we stepped up and delivered, and we had done something that was groundbreaking, never been done before. It was a marriage of science and policy that I felt was worthwhile.

SS: The Clinton administration, did they ask for amendments and changes in the next few months before this was published and the final came out?

TS: Well, there was something that happened, and I don't know a lot of the 02:16:00details, but after this was produced, the survey/manage kind of came in afterward. My understanding, and it may not be correct, the "ologists" and this is just my view, and I don't know if it's true or not, the folks who work on the national forest systems side, the wildlife biologists and others, didn't like the fact there was still some old-growth being harvested. They wanted some additional protection. And that's where the "survey and manage" came from. [Guidelines to NWFP added after FEMAT]

SS: Oh, yeah.

TS: And that was not, and it ticked a lot of people off in FEMAT. I know Jerry and Norm.

SS: That the survey and manage was added?

TS: Added, because the idea was that the reserves used are what's called a 02:17:00"coarse-filter" strategy, we're going to have these large chunks of land, and they were going to account for all the hundreds of unknown species that we don't have any information about. ["fine-filter" strategy]

SS: And there's no way you could possibly do an inventory of it.

TS: Right, right, so we figure we're protecting seventy [species].

SS: Invertebrates and everything.

TS: Seventy-five percent of the remaining old growth, we assume that's going to be okay. But there were a lot of biologists who didn't buy into the coarse-filter approach. They were species-by-species folks.

SS: The "fine filter" approach?

TS: The fine filter approach. Usually, the general feeling is that you have a handful of fine-filtered species, and listed species [ESA], owls, murrelets, fish, and other less well-known species, are handled by the coarse-filtered approach. Well, the biologists didn't buy into that. They felt that they wanted more fine-filter, so they got hundreds of them. And that caused some pretty 02:18:00strong feelings.

SS: Now, was the actual survey and manage language and the definition of what that was, how was that added to the actual Northwest Forest Plan? TS: I don't know. I can't tell you.

SS: Yeah, because-

TS: Well, we were sort of out the door, things were happening behind closed doors and at other levels. There's a whole part of the Northwest Forest Plan that I just was not privy to at all and don't know what happened.

SS: Now, I believe Jack Ward Thomas said that "survey and manage" could be the death of the Northwest Forest Plan in terms of effective, realistic management.

TS: Yeah.

SS: I think he said something like that, yeah.

TS: Yeah, well, it proved to be one of the major reasons why there wasn't as much active management.

SS: On the Matrix and the AMA's. Correct?

TS: Yes.

SS: Okay, because basically, it put an unrealistic workload.

TS: A huge workload.

SS: I mean, and how are you going to survey and manage for everything?

TS: Yeah, and where do you get the experts to do it? You've got to go out, every piece of, every hundreds of species to look at, you've got to survey.

SS: Basically, it gives new meaning to the paralysis through analysis-type phrase, or aphorism.

TS: Yeah, right.

SS: But anyway, so you come out and you're finished with this. They do eventually approve Alternative 9?

TS: Yeah, it wasn't approved until there were lawsuits, I think, right away.

SS: From both the timber and the environmentalists, both sides?

TS: Yeah, right. So, we went for about a year, I think it wasn't till '94 that the judge finally ruled that it was good. SS: Dwyer?

TS: Yeah. I think it was Dwyer. But it was finally the judge who made the decision based on the appeals that FEMAT was sufficient to go forward. And so, 02:20:00we didn't know what was going to happen to FEMAT. We just delivered our report. And by the way, it wasn't peer-reviewed, it was just, you know, we didn't have time for that. It wouldn't happen these days. It was a fairly non-transparent process, really. SS: Yeah, you guys were literally in a closed building for the most part.

TS: Yeah, right.

SS: That wouldn't pass muster today, would it?

TS: No. But anyway, so we didn't know what was going to happen to it until I think a year later, when the judge finally ruled. I remember congratulating folks in the hallway here saying, well, finally, the plan has been approved. And then, and only then, did I feel like it was done, because it could have been tossed out again, and we could be asked to go back and redo it.

SS: The President signed off on it, and then you had the final report, a 02:21:00document sent to Congress, in early '95 or late '94? [Secretaries of Agriculture/Interior were signers on the Record of Decision]

TS: For the Record of Decision?

SS: Not the Record of Decision, the Final Report to Congress [NWFP], which was a different document than the Record of Decision, which is here, the green book [both are green], this one. Isn't it this here?

TS: Yeah, that's the Record of Decision. That's what I'm talking about.

SS: Right, right, that one. So, this one came out and then there was the publication that was --

TS: This one actually tells the managers what to do. This basically sets up the science and talk about the options. This translates it into sort of a decision document. This is not a decision document.

SS: No, the publication I'm talking about is the one that went to Congress.

TS: Yeah, I don't remember what that was.

SS: A green book, it's definitely an overview, and it's pretty good-sized. So, anyway, you were done, what's the next step? There's been so many new reviews 02:22:00and syntheses and how are we going to do the scientific analysis follow-ups. How and when did that process start?

TS: Well, pretty quickly. A lot of us came out of there, and after the initial euphoria of having done it and fatigue wore off, there was a feeling, at least on my part, that, man, we put a lot of science out there, but there's just not a whole lot of meat behind it. A lot of it's pretty much guessing.

SS: You mean, in terms of how you came up with that? TS: Yeah. And what do we know, assumptions that are made that we can't, I can't give you a paper that validates the assumption. And so, there was a feeling like we really needed to follow up, so that's where the course of my research changed. That changed it ninety degrees.

SS: So, a lot of your career since then, or at least a good portion of it, has been involved with research after the fact in response to-

TS: In response to the policy.

SS: To the policy, but also in response to things and challenges that you don't know that are there yet?

TS: Yeah.

SS: In other words, to improve the science?

TS: Yeah. So, Norm Johnson, Gordie Reeves and I, and a few other folks, got together and did what we called the CLAMS project [Coastal Landscape Analysis and Modeling Study] in the Coast Range. That was to really look at the whole land base. One of the feelings we had was, that we just looked at the federal lands, and almost pretended that private lands had no values at all. They could have been a parking lot or a jungle or something. So, we developed a research plan to look at all ownerships, and to try to simulate using a model what the future might be over the next 100 years, given policy changes that have happened with the Northwest Forest Plan.

SS: Right, got you.

TS: That was one follow-up, fortunately, the Clinton administration provided 02:24:00money. We had specific research money tied to follow-up work on the Northwest Forest Plan, and we had relatively good budgets back in those days. The other thing that came out of it was monitoring. And I played a pretty major role in the monitoring of it. It was tied to the adaptive management program. So, you can't do adaptive management unless you do monitoring to know what you're doing.

SS: Right.

TS: We spent a lot of the immediate post-FEMAT time developing monitoring plans and protocols the agencies would use to start measuring whatever.

SS: In the Adaptive Management Areas?

TS: No, for the entire area.

SS: For the whole area, okay.

TS: The Adaptive Management Areas were just places where special experiments could be done, but the effectiveness monitoring was across the whole area. It involved a lot of remote sensing work, but also inventory work. The owls that 02:25:00had these demographic study areas that were focused on landscape study areas. That was big, so following FEMAT, my two big areas of activity related to this was the science in support of monitoring and this multi-ownership view to try to get a better picture of how the entire land base affects biodiversity and timber production, which we did in the Coast Range.

SS: Of course, Gordie being involved, it seems to me like that's even more essential when you're talking about aquatics.

TS: Oh, yeah.

SS: Because everything flows downhill. Sediment, it doesn't matter where it comes from, and the biogeochemistry, it comes down, too.

TS: The watersheds are public/private mixes, so you can't just focus on the federal lands and hope to address watershed issues.

SS: Well, if you have some place that's completely abused upstream and there's federal lands here, well, that's going to affect the water quality and the sediment content down here?

TS: Yeah, right. As Gordie says, if you're trying to protect coho [salmon], they don't do very well on federal lands just because of the environment. They're much more of a watershed species, which includes private land. So, in efforts to maintain salmonids on federal lands, you're really trying to get blood out of a stone, given the potential of the federal lands to support some of the aquatic species.

SS: But isn't it also true because of a lot of the federal lands are, shall we say, further upstream in the watersheds past significant impediments, dams, etc. Wouldn't that be part of the reason in terms of salmonids, right? TS: Well, some of them, like coho, they like meandering, low-gradient streams.

SS: Okay, right.

TS: And back-channels, things that you wouldn't get in higher gradient streams.

SS: Okay, I see, I got you. TS: So, there's these intrinsic environments that are varied in their suitability for different salmon species.

SS: Do you feel Native Americans and their interests were adequately represented?

TS: Probably not. No.

SS: I don't know if there was tribal interests at the pink tower?

TS: There were some tribal stuff, but I don't really know a whole lot about how much they engaged.

SS: We're back on the record here, as we took a brief break. Tom's going to continue talking about the early monitoring efforts, and how that process was determined to take place, and basically how, five, 10, 15, 20 years, these different periods of time when reports were written up, but how did the actual program get started for the various areas [subjects].

TS: I think the monitoring effort, the Northwest Forest Plan monitoring effort, as it's called, was one of the most important and successful outcomes of the Northwest Forest Plan. It wasn't so much about outcomes on the land, but it was 02:28:00really about bringing in research-management partnerships to follow-up on the plan, to learn from the plan. The plan was supposed to be a living, dynamic document and entity. And the monitoring, there was owl monitoring, murrelet, aquatic, vegetation monitoring, there was social monitoring, there's tribal relations. So, there's a number of dimensions. And the fact that the agency [Forest Service] has been able to keep that monitoring program going over twenty years now is astounding, because it's very rare for a management agency to really have the willpower and the funding to try to figure out what's happening on the landscape, and whether their plans are working or not. So, the monitoring effort continued, the funding has gone down, but it's still been maintained.

It has also maintained a research-management partnership. So now, when we're working on this big synthesis, we have a lot of folks who are teamed up, we have information, and not just anecdotes about, what happened, did it work? Well, do we have any data? Nobody knows what happened, but we did something back then. We now have a lot of information about what actually happened, what the trend in old forests is, what's the trend in owl habitat or owl populations are, what's happened with "survey and manage" species. We have a lot of information to have a much more scientifically credible characterization of the state of the plan, the state of the national forests, right now. So, the monitoring, I think, is probably one of the most important things that happened outside of basically stopping the logging of old growth in terms of conservation strategy. SS: If you 02:30:00were going to, like say, 5-10-15-20 [percent], or however you want to break it down, how has the old-growth component increased since the Northwest Forest Plan was implemented? [Percent loss of area of old growth since the plan went into effect.]

TS: I mean, in terms of on the landscape?

SS: Yeah, on the landscape, what's the percentage increase?

TS: It's gone down.

SS: It's gone down?

TS: It's gone down. And we expected it to go down.

SS: Because?

TS: Because we expected fire.

SS: Oh, exactly.

TS: And we actually expected logging to happen. But it didn't really happen. So, it's not gone down as much as it might have. But it's gone down because of the age classes out there, the distribution of age classes. We essentially have a lot of forest that's over 200 years old in the old-growth bin, and a lot of forest that's under sixty years old in the plantations that were managed from World War II on. If you think of what happened on the federal lands, they really didn't start logging until after World War II big-time on federal lands.

SS: Not here in the Northwest anyway.

TS: Not in the Northwest, that's right. We're talking about the federal lands.

SS: Well, there was the problem of access with roads, for instance.

TS: Yeah, right, and so most of the roads.

SS: And the technology of harvesting the big trees.

TS: Right, a lot of that was on private lands. So, starting in about 1950, the agencies started to ramp up timber production. I think it was on the cover of Newsweek or Time magazine as one of the best, as the best agency in the federal government.

SS: The Forest Service? TS: The Forest Service practices then were an interesting contrast to now. At that time, they were thinking of somewhere in the neighborhood of an 80-year rotation, not quite industrial, but pretty aggressive timber management. And they were able to do that for about forty years until 1990 and all of the lawsuits, meaning they got through almost half of an 80-year rotation and that they probably cut with some exclusions, about 02:32:00forty percent of the landscape. A large part of the landscape was old growth. Right now, the landscape is either parts of the older forests that haven't been cut, or these younger forests. So, the old growth can only lose ground because it's going to get burned up and it's going to take another 100 years for any of that young stuff to become old growth, although that's not quite so.

SS: So, some of the management since then has been to try to create a facsimile or at least potential facsimile old-growth or late-successional forests, amongst the plantations? Correct?

TS: It's really to accelerate the development of old growth or to create some of the diversity that the plantations lack that you might have expected in, let's say, you had a plantation that's sixty years old. It might have been a 60-year-old post-wildfire natural stand. In that case, it would be more heterogenous, it wouldn't be uniform Douglas-fir, it would be a mix of 02:33:00Douglas-fir and some gaps, and maybe a hardwood or two here and there. So really, there's a trajectory of those plantations that there are, it's going to be another 150 years before they get to big-old trees like we've got now. But along the way, they can be diversified and their habitat value can be improved by doing that. That's the theory. But you can't literally get an old-growth forest out of a 60-year-old forest. You can't do it. Can't grow a 200-year-old tree in seventy years.

SS: Now, any significant differences between how you've been able to see the last twenty years between Douglas-fir, western hemlock, ponderosa, spruce, anything about it in terms of increase of one species becoming more dominant in certain areas?

TS: Well, I think the big issue that we didn't do a very good job with in the 02:34:00Northwest Forest Plan is the dry, fire forests. The Northwest Forest Plan had a very wet forest, western Oregon and Washington perspective.

SS: That's what I thought. And that's largely because of the owl?

TS: Because of the owl. And just because the issue was clear-cutting in these productive west-side forests.

SS: And the east-side forests are not nearly as productive? [timber/biological]

TS: Yeah, they're not. And so, the thing that a lot of people don't realize is that we've lost owl habitat on the west side to logging, but we've gained it in the 20th century to fire exclusion. By suppressing fire, we've actually created more owl habitat over on the east side now than there was in 1950 or 1920. So, it's a very interesting situation.

SS: Now, how dry can the owls survive in?

TS: Well, if you can grow grand fir and Douglas-fir, the owl will be there. 02:35:00Obviously, it's not going to live out in juniper, as the juniper doesn't have the forest structure.

SS: But in a ponderosa-dominant forest, it could?

TS: Yes. As long as the ponderosa has gone through succession, so it's become dense and multi-layered. And a lot of the-

SS: But the open savannah-type ponderosa, no, they wouldn't like that.

TS: No.

SS: Okay, got you.

TS: What's happened on the east side, and a lot of California, is that a lot of the forests that now have Douglas-fir and grand fir with ponderosa pine, used to be open. But now it's dense. And the owl likes that for the most part. So, that's I think the big change, and a big change landscape-wise is that there's been some wildfires that have taken out some owl habitat, like the Biscuit Fire. But the big issue right now is, is it really appropriate or suitable or viable 02:36:00to apply this sort of west-side, dense-forest, owl perspective, to these dry, fire-prone forests? And basically, the owl has benefited from an altered ecosystem there. So, if you were to really manage for the historic range of variability, that's one thing I think we got wrong. In our assessment of the historic range of variability, we didn't really do a good job in the dry forests. We recognized that they were a different beast, but we didn't realize how far out of whack they were.

SS: And part of the reason is the 90-day window?

TS: Yeah, the 90-day window. It was a rush job.

SS: Yeah.

TS: We didn't have time to sort of double-check things, and we didn't. It wasn't peer-reviewed, so there were a lot of things we missed.

SS: And that [dry side habitat] would have definitely been caught in the peer review. They would have said, what about that stuff over there?

TS: Yeah, that doesn't fit with this approach you're using.

SS: Got you. Now, how was the monitoring set up; I mean, the 5, 10, 15 and 20 02:37:00years, those are based on publishing horizons?

TS: Yeah, those are just sort of on the horizon.

SS: Did the monitoring work begin immediately, or was it one or two or three years?

TS: It took us a few years to develop a plan.

SS: Okay, that's what I thought.

TS: But, I spent a fair amount of time in committees developing a strategy for how we were going to do effectiveness [monitoring]. There was implementation monitoring, effectiveness monitoring, and validation monitoring. Effectiveness monitoring is the main one. So, it took a few years to kind of get that.

SS: So, probably by the late '90s?

TS: Yeah.

SS: You had a plan that had momentum and it had a logistical structure to it, shall we say.

TS: Right, yeah. Let's see, the folder that says Northwest Forest Plan Monitoring. Can you pull that whole thing out?

SS: All right.

TS: And here's, that's an early report.

SS: Tom is showing me reports from the earlier monitoring, for the record.

TS: And this document is the one I'm referring to. It came out in '99.

SS: Right.

TS: It sort of lays out a strategy and a plan.

SS: I actually have a copy of this, too. TS: Yeah, we spent a fair amount of time working on that.

SS: Okay, so tell me a little about the strategy and design of the effectiveness monitoring program for the Northwest Forest Plan? This is 1999, so this took a few years to develop, and obviously publish it.

TS: The plan was started and declared as viable in '94. Then, committees started meeting, trying to figure out how we can do the monitoring part of the adaptive management program, pretty much within a few months. It took a couple of years 02:39:00to figure out what was going on and get proposals for budgets and who would do what. So, that report was finally published in '99. But we probably pretty much knew what the plan was by '98.

SS: So, what do you think the best science has been that's come out in the various monitoring efforts, and where are the biggest holes and gaps?

TS: Well, some of the most interesting and best science is related to the owls, because that's partly where a lot of the money is. We put more into owl monitoring than anything else. Owl research and monitoring is a pretty large share of the research. And of course, all the stuff about the barred owl, the effect of the barred owl on populations of the spotted owl, trends in populations of the spotted owl, the demographics. That's pretty high-quality, 02:40:00interesting stuff. There are probably few other bird species certainly on Earth that have had this much knowledge about their demography over large areas over a long period of time.

SS: Do you think the barred owl is a threat to the Northwest Forest Plan?

TS: To the plan?

SS: Well, both, the spotted owl, but also the plan?

TS: I'd say the barred owl is a major threat to the goals of the plan.

SS: Right.

TS: So, that's one thing. And whether it's a threat to the plan itself, it could be considered to be a threat to the spotted owl itself. Some people then might say, "If the owl's gone, to have barred owls instead of spotted owls? That changes things. Why do we need the Northwest Forest Plan?"

SS: So, speak to the goals of the plan. In your opinion, what are and should remain being the goals of the plan?

TS: Well, I don't know what should be, but the goals of the plan at the time were, to protect species and ecosystems associated with late successional- old-growth forests. That includes the old-growth forest itself, the spotted owl and the murrelet, other species, aquatic ecosystems. And then having done that, 02:41:00provide some socio-economic values, in this case, some wood. But, the goals are largely based on dense, multi-storied late-successional forests and species that use those. They were not about early successional species, they were not about species that use open pine forests, and we estimate that something like a quarter of the Northwest Forest Plan, almost a third of the Northwest Forest Plan, is these dry, open [forests], that were historically open. Any dense forest there is an artifact of human activity.

SS: Now, the barred owl is kind of Darwinian dynamics in action.

TS: Yeah, well, it just shows you that God is having fun by saying, "if you guys make a plan, I'm going to show you that nature has other ways of doing things." Because the barred owl, I think it was a little bit on the radar screen, but it wasn't that much. And of course, there was so much of this focus on protecting for the spotted owl that, of course, we're also protecting habitat for the barred owl at the same time. That it just shows you that habitat is not alone sufficient to maintain whatever element of biodiversity you want. You also have to deal with biological interactions, either invasive species, diseases, or it could be some other biotic element that forest land managers have very little control over.

SS: Speaking of diseases, what major disease dynamics have hit since the forest plan that have altered the calculus or challenged assumptions? I mean, you've 02:43:00got the typical players, but has there been any big surprises?

TS: Well, there's been a Swiss needle cast in the Coast Range. That affects federal lands. There's been the Sudden Oak Death, which is more in California, southwest Oregon. Those are the main ones. I would say that they don't have a huge impact on the plan. They have an impact on the plan, but I would say at this point, they're not major ones.

SS: Now, the bark beetle's mostly on the east side, right?

TS: Yeah.

SS: Which is mostly the lands that you were talking about that haven't been as covered by the Northwest Forest Plan.

TS: Yeah, and the bark beetle has not been an issue, a lot of them are outside of the Northwest Forest Plan area. They haven't been a major element in the dynamics. Fire's been a major impact.

SS: Now, tell me a little about Adaptive Management Areas and why some of the 02:44:00goals haven't been met? TS: They've failed.

SS: Or they've failed. I'm trying to be diplomatic, Tom.

TS: Essentially, another way to say it is they were not fully successful.

SS: That sounds better, but I mean, the Central Cascades [AMA] is right there by the Andrews.

TS: Right.

SS: And just maybe talk about that as a specific example within the context of the whole idea?

TS: The idea was to have places you could actually try out new approaches on the ground, alternative ways of meeting the goals of the plan. So, maybe long rotations, maybe ecological forestry, whatever you want to call it. And they started out fairly well, but there were just a lot of problems. And some did better than others. A big problem was, I think, there were ten of them [AMAs] or something like that, to have the right people in place.

SS: Managers, in other words?

TS: Managers and scientists, and you need both.

SS: Have to be both engaged, too.

TS: They're both engaged. You can't just say, well, a manager walks into the office one morning and says, "Now, you're inside an Adaptive Management Area, you know, go for it." Unless that person was really into trying new things and experimenting and has a relationship with scientists, they're unlikely to want to just suddenly start doing something different. And so, there was sort of a human capacity part of it that's a problem. There was the risk aversion part of it. We hoped that the AMAs would be places where we sort of built them in to the risk assessment for the different options. So, we'd say, well, we're going to cut some bigger trees down here, but don't worry about it, because we've already 02:46:00factored that cutting of trees into the risk assessment and it's all fine. Well, you know, environmentalists don't care. To them, it's not about the science, it's not about whether some new approach can maintain these species. For a lot of them, anyway, it's about cutting old growth. And so, if the Adaptive Management Areas are designed to find new ways of cutting old-growth that maintains some big trees, but in the end it still doesn't look like an old-growth forest, then it's just, they're not going to. So, that was a big reason, the sort of the risk aversion, too.

SS: That would be like telling a pro-lifer that there's more humane ways to do an abortion, right?

TS: Yeah, right, exactly.

SS: So, exactly.

TS: Yeah, so there was that. There was funding. There was the risk aversion. There was the funding problem and then there was the human capacity problem. All of those, triple whammy on them. And now, in the Central Cascades, I think they had it a bit better than most because it had a research-management partnership 02:47:00already there.

SS: It was anchored unofficially to the Andrews, and at least that area.

TS: Yeah, right.

SS: So, you had engaged people, both at the local level in terms of the Forest Service management level, but also the science people who were right there hoping it worked. Right?

TS: Right, right.

SS: Or interested in the idea?

TS: Right, had people trying to find ways of getting something going on the ground. And that's what you need, you need committed people to make these things work. And most of them, you know, they might have had one or two people, but there weren't enough scientists. There were supposed to be scientists assigned to these things but it's like, okay, you are scientists and you've been assigned to this, but you've got fifty other things you're supposed to do there as well.

SS: Now, would you say this is also a case of, and this is, I've heard this so many times when I was doing work for the Park Service, as federal laws, well, most of the important environmental laws have been in place for a long time. But as their adaptations and actual applications start to become evident and what 02:48:00they mean to different managers in terms of having to fulfill the various clauses in these various things, and then you've got the environmentalists with the legal hammer waiting outside.

TS: Right.

SS: And it's like it creates a calculus of labor-intense impossibility, if you will.

TS: Right. SS: I think even produces a fatalism that goes, "geez, we can't do this. And so, I think that has something to do with it also.

TS: Absolutely. Well, it produces a risk avoidance.

SS: Right, that's what you were talking about.

TS: Yeah, we can do this, but there might be some appeals and it might tie up the project for a year or two, or we could do this, there's not much complaining about it. It might not change a whole lot on the landscape because it's a pretty minimal-type activity, or it might be in a place where nobody really cares that much, so let's do this because we can meet our acres treated or our timber 02:49:00production target here. Whereas if we go here, we could invest a lot in it, but we might not be able to do anything. I think that's a big part of what goes on the landscape. This means that efforts of restoration or building resilience or whatever you want to call it, are driven not by the best places to go ecologically necessarily, although that still occurs, but by where it's administratively feasible.

SS: So, what has surprised you the most, speaking first to your area, in the monitoring efforts over the last twenty years and what you've learned about the successes, the weaknesses of the original plan, but also just the on-the-ground 02:50:00ecology and the evolution of the ecologies and even the restoration efforts you talked about?

TS: Well, one of the things I already mentioned, which was the fact that the plan just isn't really designed to deal with the fire-prone landscapes. And we knew that, but just seeing it more and more, that's the case.

SS: What would be an adaptation strategy or addendum to the plan, if such a thing were possible?

TS: Well, one approach would be to say, in these dry forests we're going to maintain owl densities, and dense forests only in areas where they were historical. So, we're going to identify north-facing slopes and places that may cover ten or fifteen percent of the landscape, and that's where the dense forests are going to be. Everything else is going to be managed with fire, either wildland fire or prescribed fire thinning to create more resilient 02:51:00forests. The owl or other species that use those will just be moved into areas, their habitat will be areas that are historically where they occurred, which may be achieved by reducing the amount of old forest by a significant amount and not managing for old forests in a widespread way.

SS: Was it the B&B Fire, the one over up by Mount Washington? That one?

TS: The big one, yeah. SS: Isn't that something, what you're talking about, a fire?

TS: Yeah, the B&B, you could see it along the highways as you're going to Sisters or?

SS: Yeah, but it was on the east side mostly. Right?

TS: It was on the east side, right.

SS: Totally.

TS: Burned all the way up to the crest.

SS: Yeah, yeah.

TS: So, it was high severity in the crest where it-

SS: Now, how much of that was owl habitat? A small amount up high?

TS: The high part; no, not so much.

SS: No. Okay, okay.

TS: But the lower parts, there were lower parts. But the lower parts didn't burn 02:52:00as much with high severity. There were certainly some owl habitat areas that were knocked out by that fire. But the higher severity areas were a little higher than the owls. But, so, yeah, so what we learned from monitoring, we learned that the old forest is still declining a little bit.

SS: But you expected that for the reasons you explained earlier, right.

TS: But we expected that, right. Of course, the spotted owl-the barred owl story, and spotted owl population declines. That [spotted owl decline] was expected as well, but I think the strength of it and the pattern of it, is more than what was expected. What else? I think just being able to say what the relative contribution of how much has been lost to wildfire where it's happened. And we've lost some areas to wildfire, but not as much as some people might think. So, a combination of things.

SS: What about socioeconomics? Because for whatever reason, the timber harvest goals, even the diminished ones in the original plan which I think were 60 percent or 55, I'd have to look at it, of the actual traditional harvest rights, hasn't even been close.

TS: Yeah, no, no.

SS: And obvious-

TS: It's supposed to be a billion board-feet, instead of four billion.

SS: Obviously, you can't lay that all on the plan. There's automation, there's international market dynamics. How would you describe that, which I would categorize as a failure or an unexpected result, for it to be that low?

TS: I think one outcome from the plan, and this is related to this, is that it really wasn't about finding the best way to mix all this stuff together. I mean, the best solution was to protect all the old growth in the beginning, politically.

SS: Right, which happened.

TS: Which happened, but this only happened in a de facto way. There's no official policy. There's no statement from the regional forester that they've abandoned the goals of the plan to harvest old growth in the Matrix. They could still do that. There's no official policy change. It's just been what they've sort of done. One of the things I've learned, is the "plan as written versus the plan as implemented." It probably happens every time there's a plan. There's the plan that people write, and then as they get into it and realize what's working and not working, or things get promoted and other things don't. So, there is the plan as written and the plan as implemented. There's two different plans out there. It makes it difficult to talk about the plan, because you have to say, well, which plan are you talking about, the one we're actually implementing or the one that's written?

SS: Okay, why don't you describe the one's that's been implemented in terms of 02:55:00your areas of expertise?

TS: Okay, the one that's been implemented has much less timber harvest than it was proposed to do. It didn't do survey and manage monitoring as it was proposed to do. It didn't do adaptive management as it proposed to do. It may not save the owl population as it hoped to do. So, what's left? What's left is it stopped logging in old growth.

SS: So, if you wanted to say, what were the successes?

TS: It stopped the logging of old growth, which maintained habitat for many species. Otherwise, those forests would have been clearcut. And, it created a monitoring program that has been quite valuable in helping us understand changes in populations of various species, and in ecosystems.

SS: Oh, well. (Laughs) TS: Which is what the environmentalists wanted right from the beginning.

SS: I'm sorry, in all my classes, if my students got one out of five, they would fail.

TS: Yeah, right.

SS: Sorry, recording.

TS: Well, this is hardball politics and I don't know how many politicians are successful in one out of five, that's probably pretty good.

SS: Actually, you're probably right.

TS: Yeah, if you're a batter in the Major Leagues.

SS: Although it's, but although that is the "Mendoza line" in baseball, you know, that is .200.

TS: .200, right. So, yeah. So, if you're using batting, Major League batting is a measure of success for that, we're kind of close, in the margin.

SS: Okay, well, I'll give you that. How would you say that the Northwest Forest Plan and its follow-up work has improved upon, augmented, added to, the science of old-growth/late successional forests? Independent of just necessarily the goals of the plan, but in terms of adding to the science itself and old growth in the plan, which drove a lot of the focus.

TS: It has pushed us to try to better understand the historical disturbance regimes across the region. We now have a better understanding of the variability of fire history, particularly on the west side where the west side was sort of 02:57:00lumped into the wetter forest. The work of Fred's [Swanson] students, and I have been involved in some of it, really shows that fire was an important part of the local forests on the west side, and people have just sort of lumped them into this wet forest type that burned every 500 years with stand replacement [high severity] fires.

SS: Well, there's a big variation between even like northern and southern Oregon, for instance.

TS: So that's one area where I think we've learned a lot. We've learned, in terms of research, there wasn't a whole lot of research that was driven by the Northwest Forest Plan, except that involving, well, there's two areas. One is the remote sensing work. So, we know a lot more about forest canopies and 02:58:00patterns of old-growth forests. The work we did in CLAMS, that was supported by the Northwest Forest Plan, that gave us a better picture of the contributions of different owners in a multi-ownership landscape, and what the feds can do. We basically were able to show that, yeah, the feds are going to be good at producing old forests, but nobody is producing the hardwoods or some other important habitats that out there. So, the Northwest Forest Plan funding related to the Northwest Forest Plan, helped show the contrasts between federal management and management of other lands.

SS: One question I didn't ask earlier. The one thing that happened out of this is agencies which didn't often collaborate or cooperate were forced to.

TS: Right.

SS: How would you say when that came about, what did that do to the cultures of 02:59:00the two agencies and their willingness to dialogue and cooperate, and was that a temporary thing or has it continued in various forms?

TS: Well, there were certainly temporary elements to it. The main way it has continued is through the monitoring programs.

SS: That's what I'm saying, yeah.

TS: Jointly, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S.G.S., BLM, and EPA. In fact, the conference call I was on this morning, was about the regional executive team that meets periodically, that kind of coordinated effort; head of EPA, head of Fish and Wildlife Service, head of NOAA Fisheries, Forest Service, BLM, Park Service, etc. All those people get together periodically and share their information.

SS: So, these kinds of things really do help that.

TS: Yeah.

SS: Because they break down barriers, however artificial they are. And you get to know people and put a face on it. You become colleagues of sorts.

TS: Right.

SS: Yeah, okay. Now, I'm not sure we really addressed this, but how would you 03:00:00say forest structure and health in the Northwest has overall changed since implementation of this plan? And you talked about old growth and the numbers going down, but in terms of forest structure and health, which is a little bit more ecological, holistic question.

TS: We've had twenty years of forest change over 25 million acres. We've had some big fires. Fires returned to the Northwest during this time. SS: Climate change has something to do with that?

TS: Climate change, but you could imagine this cycle would have happened regardless of anthropogenic climate change. There are periods in the past in the Northwest, where fire was very common in the west side and the east side. Common, west side. That's certainly common in a lot of the forests of the Northwest Forest Plan area. But I can't say that happened as a result of the 03:01:00Northwest Forest Plan. It's just change that has happened at the same time as the Northwest Forest Plan. So, that's one area that has changed. But there's been incremental growth. There's been areas that were smaller, more uniform, have grown into multi-storied forest. Areas have been burned up by fires. So, small changes in structure, but not huge. What's happened is the lack of disturbed, lack of logging. Those are some major changes that have happened: losses of older forests to fire and gains of older forest from succession, but the gains have not fully made up for the losses from fire.

SS: So, that disturbance? [from logging]

TS: Has dropped.

SS: Right, okay. And of course, we've had twenty more years of growth.

TS: Yeah.

SS: And so?

TS: Everything else has incrementally gotten more.

SS: I think Gordie [Reeves] may have addressed this, but how has it affected the biogeochemistry of the stream habitats from what we know? The stopping of most 03:02:00of all of this logging on the federal lands?

TS: Well, it depends, certainly, there's probably more shade over the streams. I think a lot of the streams have gotten shadier, the forests have recovered along the stream areas.

SS: Right.

TS: And a lot of clear-cutting near streams sort of just didn't happen. So, a lot of streams have more shade.

SS: And the riparian buffers which were expanded from the original plan. They got like doubled in a lot of areas, didn't they?

TS: Yes. Extra protection of riparian areas and forest growth mean that streams have become shadier as tree heights grow.

SS: Right, right.

TS: So, yeah, it's increased stream protection, that's for sure.

SS: Now, what would you say the prognosis is for the future of old-growth-late-successional forests in the Pacific Northwest, from this point on looking forward?

TS: I'd say it's pretty good. But it's unlikely that it's going to be cut down on federal lands. And yeah, we've got climate change and we have fire. By 03:03:00basically the next fifty years or so, I think it's pretty good, barring some insect or disease that comes out of the woodwork, you know, a surprise that hits Douglas-fir, older Douglas-fir forests.

SS: Do you think a radical swing to the right politically could happen in a worst-case scenario?

TS: In terms of the politics?

SS: Yeah.

TS: I think it's going to be really hard to bring back the good-old days of cutting old growth. The mills are gone.

SS: Right.

TS: Most of the mills are gone. A lot of the workforce is gone.

SS: And even the mills that remain have been retrofitted for smaller logs, and "wood products," per se. Correct?

TS: Right, and then what we found in the science report is if you start pumping out a lot federal volume of timber on the market, prices are already are down because the recession or the lack of demand in Asia. You start pumping a lot of 03:04:00federal timber out there, it's going to push the prices down even further. So, I see it's really tough to go back to the old days of intensive timber management.

SS: Two questions related. What have we learned from the Northwest Forest Plan process regarding proactive management, and, kind of the other side of the coin, human limitations on managing nature?

TS: Well, proactive management, we've learned that restoration has tradeoffs. If you don't do something, there are effects. And if you do something, thinning plantations, you can increase habitat diversity, but you also reduce the amount 03:05:00of dead wood. So, you have to kind of pick your winners and losers by where you choose to do restoration. If you want more owls, keep fires out and make forests denser. If you want the forest to be resilient to fire and climate change, reduce the density and force the owls to go somewhere else. So, it's all about tradeoffs. I think we're seeing the tradeoffs a lot more than we used to. What was the other?

SS: And then, human limitations on managing nature. You already kind of referred to it when we talked about the-

TS: Well, the human limitations, I would say, the big one that I would say is that we might think we know what's going to happen. We might like to think we're so good at predicting things or not, but we don't. I mean, nobody would have predicted the barred owl, at least back then. So, we're at twenty-two years 03:06:00since the Northwest Forest Plan. If you go back to the Northwest Forest Plan and go twenty-two years prior to that, we don't even have any environmental laws yet. We haven't had the ESA, we hadn't had the National Forest Management Act. So, back then.

SS: You've got NEPA, but that's about it.

TS: Yeah, NEPA, but the Willamette was kicking out, they were trying to be a billion board-foot forest. They were like gung-ho. If you would have told them back in '70 or '71 that they're going to be shut down, all they're going to be doing is managing for owls, they would have looked at you and said, "Give me a break, what have you been smoking?" (Laughs) So, now, we're here, but twenty-two years from now when somebody, not me, even if we have a Forest Service twenty years from now, I mean, who knows what we got in twenty-two years? So, I think the plan sets some markers in time that force you to reflect back, particularly 03:07:00if you've got monitoring and you've got some goals that you wanted to maintain for twenty-two years or 100-plus years. It forces you to see how much social change can happen or biological change can happen in ten or twenty years.

SS: Exactly. How do you think the Northwest Forest Plan process has affected forest and natural resource planning in the United States? And you can even add in forest governance and things like that. It obviously was a paradigm-shifting event, and do you think it's a one-time wonder or you think it's created a model or at least a method? [for future efforts]

TS: I view it increasingly as an anomaly, as something that, it was just a perfect storm of conditions. I don't think that something like a big assessment where you get a bunch of scientists in the room and kick the high-level managers 03:08:00out, I don't think that's ever going to happen again, at least, not for a very long time. I think the model these days has to be much more open and transparent. Science has a role, but it's not the prominent player that it was back then. I think that was a unique, there was a crisis. The politicians didn't want to do it. Most politicians said, "Let's let the scientists tell us what to do. Let's avoid some of our responsibilities or let's shed some of the burden of making a decision."

SS: What has this taught you about, personally, about the limits of science, and maybe how people actually really decide things in the long-term?

TS: In the long-term, it's all emotional, kind of value-based things. And if science can line up with those, then it's used. I mean, managing the national forests is political. It's a political process, it's not a science process. 03:09:00Political process is about power, who controls it, and who makes decisions. And in the pursuit of power, truth doesn't matter, it's whatever, we've seen that so much in the last six months. So, if the science lines up with your version of the truth, then science is a great partner.

SS: If it doesn't, it's the enemy?

TS: If it doesn't, then, we're ostracized. So, you could get pretty cynical about it, but it's important to have science have a more modest role, so it's not seen as so political. You know, okay, the scientists are all Democrats, and of course anything Democrats want is bad, so anything the scientists say is because they're Democrats, and they just believe it [Hypothetical politicized 03:10:00viewpoint]. And so, it's important to have some distance, I think, or at least some of the scientists have to be a little outside the fray.

SS: Although I think there's a few Republicans in this building here, Tom.

TS: Oh, there are probably a few.

SS: Not many.

TS: Not many. And not many of the current variety of Republican.

SS: Yeah, what is that anyway?

TS: Yeah, yeah, right.

SS: But so, is there anything else, any memorable experiences or stories or capstone statements that you'd like to make? I mean, is there anything else? We've talked about all these subjects, Tom, and is there something else that was a perfectly profound experience or memory or a story, an interaction or a personality, that you would like to highlight? TS: Yeah. I'm trying to think. Just one observation is how much this has been noticed across the world. The 03:11:00Northwest Forest Plan and all of the old growth is known in Australia, it's known in Europe, it's known in many parts of the world in the forestry community and conservation community. So, it's a global, it's a global discipline.

SS: Now, what do your colleagues overseas think about what happened here?

TS: They've thought for the most part it was a good thing. They often wish that they had so much science involved in decision-making, because most of their decisions are, politicians don't even invite the scientists. They don't ask their advice. So, I think there's a feeling of great respect for the idea, even envy, that the scientists played such a prominent role.

SS: I think it's an illustration of how the pluralistic democracy dynamic of the United States can work in certain situations.

TS: Yeah, right, and I think it's better for it. And it doesn't mean that it was 03:12:00still not decided on values, but there's still some, I mean, but with science, we can view the Northwest Forest Plan as a hypothesis to be tested. And the early monitoring report is showing what has worked and not worked. So, now we can say, well, we thought this was going to work but it didn't work the way we thought it was going to work. But we now have science to support that. And the other thing is the Forest Service has had a history of using science. Gifford Pinchot set the tone and tradition of having a science-based approach to things. In terms of anecdotes, I'm trying to think, I'm not very good at anecdotes. It was always interesting to see Jack and Jerry kind of go at it. They were kind of like two gods, and weren't always necessarily on the same page.

SS: The Guru versus the-it'd be like Godzilla versus Megalon, right?

TS: Right, exactly. And then Norm, and Norm is kind of like Rasputin, kind of in the back way pulling his levers. Nobody really knows, but Norm's fingers are all over the place. And so, it's those kinds of things that were interesting to see. But I can't say I've got any real-well, here's one anecdote I've got. Okay, so, this CLAMS project.

SS: Which is the immediately after [NWFP] monitoring thing on the coast, right?

TS: The coast, yeah. The idea is that we're going to do this assessment of the multi-ownership landscape, and we're going to model how forest management is happening, the effects and all this. And the other thing we wanted to do is communicate the findings to the stakeholders. So, one of our presentations is to the Western Oregon Timber Supporters, which is basically a group of logger families in Philomath.

SS: Okay.

TS: So, we go over there and I'm presenting on this. In fact, I had a white coat on, talking about all the modeling we're doing and talking about all the stuff, what we're finding. Then, they knew I was part of the Northwest Forest Plan and we were using the model to evaluate how well the Northwest Forest Plan was going to work. Which raises another anecdote, but so, "Any questions?" A woman stands up in back and says, "Why do you base all your science on lies?" So, I was like, "Whoa, how am I going to deal with that question?" Clearly, it was all about the notion that somebody saw an owl in a parking lot or somebody saw an owl in this habitat, and it's not old growth. So, I said, "Well, in science, we don't call those lies, we call those hypotheses and we try to test them, and sometimes we're not sure if we believe them or not." But it was a very interesting 03:15:00interaction about how the public perceived what the scientists were doing, thinking they were just using their biases to create this plan. And part of the problem, of course, is that the plan got associated with the scientists. The scientists created the plan. And so, that-

SS: No, the politicians asked the scientists to create the plan.

TS: But the scientists gave them ten options, but we created all the options. We didn't create an option that was something else. And so, the heavy association of science with the plan cuts both ways. I mean, it may lend credibility to it, but it also puts the science at risk for being seen as just a bunch of people who are exercising their own values.

SS: Interesting. Tom, I think we're about wrapped up here. Let's make sure. One 03:16:00more thing about the twenty-year monitoring reports, which are -- ?

TS: Well, it's a science synthesis.

SS: Science synthesis reports, which is coming out right now, right?

TS: Which is coming out. It's out for peer review.

SS: Yeah, they're out to peer review right now. So, maybe a last statement about that, Tom?

TS: Just the interconnectedness between ecological and the social. The fact that if the Forest Service wants to do restoration activities and improve habitat for whatever [reason], it's going to need woods' workers to do it, it's going to need a budget to do it, it's going to need agency people who can plan that, it's going to need trust from stakeholders so they won't sue them if they're trying to do something. So, the plan now, to me, is this complex social-ecological system that's very difficult to disentangle the social and ecological parts. Not 03:17:00to mention the values that the plan sets as goals, because setting a goal of dense forest conditions in dry forests, just doesn't make sense ecologically, if you're talking about ecosystems. But maybe everything is just about putting every ounce of effort into maintaining the spotted owl, the rest of the world be damned, which I don't think is a good idea. But it shows you the problem with taking a single species and making that the prime focus across a large area. It might work well in some areas, but to work across a whole area, it has some limitations.

SS: Well, the way I always saw it was, it's always an easy target for the opponents of environmental goals to say, you value owls over people, when it's really an indicator species and symbolic of ecosystem health and long-term 03:18:00viability and sustainability, but that argument doesn't go over well in Philomath and Blue River and all these other places that have seen their economies and their societies changed. And the good-old days, are really the good-old days, and they're way in the rearview mirror now.

TS: Right, right. And whether things would have changed without the plan, I mean, eventually they would have run out old growth. The markets would have changed. The mills would have moved to smaller diameter stuff. Maybe the Northwest Forest Plan accelerated that by maybe ten years or fifteen years, but it could be that if we were able to run history back where the Northwest Forest Plan didn't happen, we'd be sitting now with less old growth on the landscape, but we'd still be in about the same position in terms of the future of forest management on federal lands.

SS: Okay, Tom. Thank you very much.

TS: Sure.

SS: Great interview.

TS: Yeah, yeah, thanks, Sam.

SS: All right. We are done and off the record here and we're signing off.