Fred Swanson Oral History Interview, September - October 2016

Samuel Schmieding: Good morning, or actually good afternoon. This is Samuel J. Schmieding, OSU College of Forestry, here at the Forest Sciences Laboratory on Jefferson Street in Corvallis, Oregon, that's the U.S. Forest Service Forest Sciences Laboratory, with Frederick Swanson, retired U.S. Forest Service Emeritus Scientist. Is that how you usually like to be called, Fred?

Fred Swanson: Oh, that's an official title.

SS: Okay. We are here to do an oral history interview, one of a series that's been requested by the Pacific Northwest Research Station of the U.S. Forest Service, focusing on the Northwest Forest Plan, both the process of the plan itself, things that had to do with historical precedents, as well as the process of the plan as it's continued to be implemented and revised up to the present day. So, good morning, Fred, how are you?

FS: I'm real good.

SS: Okay, very good. And I will ask you, first of all, and we'll kind of target 00:01:00this toward this subject and shall we say, the Northwest forests, or the Northwest coniferous forest biome. Regarding forests, what was your childhood like about forests, big trees, and that kind of ecology?

FS: I grew up through fourth grade in Virginia outside of Richmond, and then in northern Delaware. And Delaware is big enough to have a north. I remember my father was very interested in trees of the forests he'd grown up in the northern peninsula of Michigan. So, we had trees in our yard, but I was not a really, botanically-oriented person. I had exposure to rock collecting on both my 00:02:00mother's and father's family sides. So, I can see my roots as a geologist in some of those experiences, not so much for forests.

SS: What do you remember though, about the forests of the Northeast, whether it be in Delaware or even later on in Pennsylvania?

FS: Well, in our home yard, we had a bunch of big trees and my father really liked them. There were some oaks and beeches. And I remember a Japanese couple had come and spent a year here in the Forestry Sciences Lab and working at the Andrews and Mount St. Helens. They took a trip around the country during their year, and my parents hosted them. Shigiyo Kobyashi said, "Oh, you grew up in an old-growth forest." And indeed, there were old trees, large trees, in our yard 00:03:00in Delaware. However, my father was frustrated in trying to cultivate a lawn underneath it. It was very shady, so we didn't have a real forest understory. So anyway, there were trees there and they must have had some subtle impact on me. But it was subtle.

SS: Kind of a take-off on what you said about the different perceptions of what an old-growth forest is. People here in the Northwest, we definitely have an idea of gigantic coniferous forests with multiple stories and under-stories. And how do you think our concept of what old growth is relates to other people that you've met in your career that would look at that in a completely different way, or in a much more altered way?

FS: Well, there's been a lot of interest in old growth. I think that in the history of the Northwest and the role of old growth in changing approaches to 00:04:00forest management, especially on the public lands, our Northwest history really rippled out and got people in other parts of the U.S. and across the world attentive to old growth and the great variety of old-growth forest types, even in our own region, as it's gotten a lot of attention. In fact, during congressional hearings, there would be criticism, well, the chief of the Forest Service was asked, "What's the definition of old growth, and he'd say, 'We've got dozens of them.'" And then there would be criticism of that response. Well, maybe it's not so clear what's old growth.

But anyway, it's been interesting to experience native forests and ancient 00:05:00forests in different parts of the world. In many cases, many places, they've been largely mowed down both by natural disturbance processes and by human activities. In our region, although we've mowed a lot down, there's still quite a bit of landscape with native forests.

SS: How would you define old growth in the Northwest, and how would you define it as a more general concept to extend beyond this biome?

FS: When I began working in the Andrews Forest, the science community talked about young as less than eighty years, mature as 80-200 years, and Old Growth as greater than 200. And that was sort of the rule of thumb we have. There's been a lot of work to look at the characteristics of old growth, and there are many attributes of old-growth stands, including nature of the standing and downed 00:06:00deadwood, and age classes, diameter distributions, distributions of shade-tolerant versus shade-intolerant species. But generally, and our impressions, I believe, are influenced partly by the distribution of the age classes that are out there and that are common. So, a lot of our native forests in the Forest Service landscape, which is a big chunk of the wild forest of the Northwest, are today about, roughly 500 years old, 400 to 500, and then 100 to 200. And then there are all the intensively-managed lands.

I've wondered how our perceptions of what's old growth and what's mature forest might have been as ecologists began to give them a close look, like in the '70s 00:07:00and '80s, if our distribution of forest-age classes had been more uniform across time, across the five, six, 700-year age span of the forest stands we have out there. Having them "chunked-up" in these couple of different age classes, made it pretty easy to say, greater than 200, which for the most part was greater than 400, looked very different from the mature age class, a lot of which was established after wildfires related to early Euro-traveler activities, homesteading, and so forth.

SS: When you were back in the Northeast, what's the first time you remember 00:08:00being in a big forest, whether it be deciduous or coniferous or some kind of a mixture?

FS: Well, our front yard in Delaware was sort of a big forest. And our family never really went out on forest-oriented traveling when we lived in the East. We did have family trips to the West, to Yellowstone, the giant sequoias and the Yosemite area, so that was the high school era for me, and I really appreciated those exposures to wild western landscapes. And of course, those are very impressive forests, especially the giant sequoias.

SS: Did you immediately see the difference in scale between the East and the 00:09:00West in terms of landscapes, perspectives, dimensions, the size of pretty much everything?

FS: Yeah, though I don't know I ever articulated that, but it was fully explicit in my mind. I definitely felt attracted to the West, from brief exposures on family trips, and then, particularly, as an undergraduate at Penn State going out on a geology summer field camp experience which involved a three-week trip, driving trip from State College, Pennsylvania, center of Pennsylvania, down to Roswell, New Mexico, and then north to Red Lodge, Montana, where we spent five weeks. The forests were not very big there in the Northern Rockies, and we were mostly going out to map geology, so we were looking for places where you didn't a lot of those damn trees in the way, which I had to deal with when I started working at the Andrews Forest after I had completed my graduate training in 00:10:00geology. I wanted to look at the rocks, I was supposed to be looking at the rocks, and the trees just sort of got in the way.

SS: Is this when you and Mike James were going through the Andrews?

FS: Yes. SS: And working for the [U.S.] Geological Survey in the early '70s? [Late '60s, actually.]

FS: Yes.

SS: So, when do you remember the first time that you saw, shall we say, the impacts of management on a landscape, forested or even in another context, like a huge open-pit mine or something that impacted you about how we use nature and how it is managed?

FS: Well, that's an interesting question because my mother's father was one of the leadership people. I think he was the treasurer of the Janesville, Wisconsin, Sand and Gravel Company. So, they had huge, basically, open-pit mines 00:11:00for sand and gravel in southern Wisconsin, which was being excavated for concrete and uses like that. So, they sent trains with dozens of cars of sand and gravel daily down to build O'Hara Airport [Chicago], for example. I was very interested in seeing that, and didn't think of it as environmental degradation or devastation. And then, my father's family from their family house, a very modest house, his father was a house painter in Ishpeming, Michigan, it looked across a lake at towers for the mine works for below-ground mining. Both of 00:12:00those on both sides of my family history; there was geological extractive resource development. In a sense, I don't think I had an environmental awareness.

SS: When do you think that started to develop in you, kind of a more modern sense of environment and management and impacts and the like?

FS: I don't really know. When I started working at the Andrews and I was interested and wondering about doing work in the Coast Range on logging and landslides, this was about 1972, I was interested in the impacts of logging on 00:13:00ecosystems and landslides and sediment production. I don't remember being appalled. I wasn't. I knew environmentalists. I was on the University of Oregon campus. It was hard to not know them. And I did do some, being a teaching assistant for classes on environmental issues and helping run discussion groups, things of this nature in the early '70s.

SS: What do you remember about the tenor of those discussions, I mean, that's a real turnkey point in the modern environmental age, when basically Earth Day and NEPA and all of the acts of the '60s meeting the acts of the '70s, and the popular culture shifting at the same time?

FS: Well, I was aware that stuff was going on and that there were protests being 00:14:00carried out in front of the Willamette National Forest office. In fact, Zane Grey Smith, who I still interact with, was forest supervisor. And I did go with another geology grad student and we did an assessment of Rock Mesa, which is a large, young, that is, maybe 1,500-year-old pumice flow, obsidian flow, within the Three Sisters Wilderness. We did a geological assessment which was to be used by environmentalists in their push to prevent extraction under the federal mining law, which could permit mining activities within wilderness areas. So, we 00:15:00went in and observed the quality of the pumice, and it had phenocrysts, mineral grains, and it wasn't very pure pumice and things of this nature. That was actually some technical geology work that I did with this other guy, Doug Stoeser, and which was going to be used by environmentalists. But I was not an active protester.

SS: Here's an ironic confluence of our own lives many years before we ever met, but when I climbed the South Sister with my Boy Scout troop on our "50-mile hike," we started by North Sister and went all the way down to Cultus Lake. We went to the top and I remember our Scout Master, who was no environmentalist [in modern sense], talking about the potential degradation of Rock Mesa right below 00:16:00the South Sister, about the same time you would have been doing those studies. So, an interesting little --

FS: Yeah.

SS: What do you think the background you had in the Northeast, then coming out here and basically your whole career being in the West with some global reach, and you've traveled all over and done work there - how do you think that contextual difference affected you as you developed as a professional, and in terms of perception and cultural and political issues?

FS: Well, this isn't a direct response to that, but I do think that it's been important within our research group that includes people like Tom Spies, an old-growth scientist/forest ecologist, and Warren Cohen, a remote sensing scientist, Gordon Grant, Julia Jones, and in the Andrews Forest today, Michael 00:17:00Nelson, who is our Principal Investigator, has a background as an environmental philosopher/ethicist. It's been very important to have people with a variety of backgrounds, a variety of world views, a variety of instincts, and trained in a variety of schools of thought in a disciplinary sense, and an actual university sense and so forth. It's been very important to have this diversity because I see some other groups where people sort of come through the same training regimen, and their academic intellectual kinship network chart and history is 00:18:00quite constrained. I think diversity has been very important, especially because of the fast-paced change of the issue environment in which we work.

So, I feel extremely fortunate to have a background as an easterner originally, but especially as a geologist that in the International Biological Program days, it was the luxury of time of some years under the "wild science" [terminology of Jerry Franklin] funding of NSF to the International Biological Program Coniferous Forest Biome. It was enough time and years for me to tie in with the group that included the stream people, particularly with Jim Sedell, Stan Gregory and others, and with the terrestrial people, particularly Jerry, then 00:19:00Tom Spies and others, so that we could find a common vocabulary and a common conceptualization of how forests and streams and landforms and geomorphic processes, the latter two being my bread-and-butter, sort of worked together. That diversity has been very important.

So, while I can't look at my own personal history and connect a whole bunch of dots from when I was a little kid building dams in a creek, as an environmental experimentalist, and I did that, but I don't see all those connections of dots that made it clear that I was on a trajectory that got me to where I am today and to the Northwest Forest Plan activities along the way. I think mostly it was a matter of flexibility and diversity of interests.

SS: Now, in your geology training, you were trained to be more of a research geologist, not an economic or applied geologist. Is that correct? Or did you get a little bit of both when you were going along the road?

FS: I ended up sort of being a geomorphologist, but I never really trained as a geomorphologist. So, it was just more of a general education. And then, applying it in the circumstances as they evolved.

SS: Whether you want to address this in education as you were in university, as undergrad and later in graduate school or after, when do you think you remember first hearing conversations about management, forestry, ecology, and the 00:21:00environment? What do you remember about how it was presented and how do you think that took you to what you became later?

FS: This isn't a direct response to that. But I do know that I got very interested in interdisciplinary work from the opportunity to go to the Bermuda Biological Station for a few weeks after my freshman and sophomore years at Penn State. There were a lot of grad students who were there for an NSF-sponsored workshop on organism-sediment relationships in an environment of modern [calcium] carbonate deposition. Actually, the oil industry had helped fund some of this because it had to do with formation of limestones which can be an 00:22:00important part of petroleum [-bearing] formations. Anyway, there were seawater chemistry people, biologists, marine biologists, and geologists, in both the faculty and the students, grad students, and here I was as a lowly undergrad. It was just really amazing to sense this interdisciplinarity. And I feel like that was a general theme, although it wasn't about forests and it wasn't about mountain landscapes. It was out in Bermuda in the middle of the Atlantic. The excitement of interdisciplinarity was really very cool.

Let me get back to, what's the crux of the question here? I want to get back to that.

SS: Right now, okay.

FS: In terms of becoming aware of environmental issues, that really picked up as 00:23:00a grad student in Eugene, which was a hotbed of environmental activism. Of course, there were a lot of other kinds of activism going on, like the Vietnam War that in some ways overshadowed that. But I did some teaching of classes about environmental issues as a grad student, on a TA-ship. I remember reading some papers like, was it Lynn White's paper, in Science about 50 years ago? This is about the 50th anniversary.

SS: His famous article, which I am forgetting the title at this moment.

FS: Yeah, and it was in Science and it had to do with how our Judeo-Christian cultural roots may have led to some disrespect for the environment. I was very 00:24:00interested in those kinds of issues. And also, as a grad student, I played an important role in leading a group of seven grad students who got an NSF grant to go to the Galapagos. I was aware of environmental degradation there as a result of introduction, intentional and unintentional, of different species such as pigs and goats and rats on different islands in the Galapagos. And how the Galapagos are a major place, have a major place, despite their remoteness, in Western culture, the history of whalers visiting and Melville writing about it and, of course, Charles Darwin. And I was very aware of the Darwin legacy. It's 00:25:00been very interesting to go work in South America for the last nine years and be reading Voyage of the Beagle about the places we are, Chiloe Island and other places. He observed Osorno erupt, and we were just working on Calbuco, which is a neighbor. We'd get up every morning and look at Osorno.

Anyway, I was getting exposed to these various environmental issues. But I'm intrigued to reflect that I was not a rabid environmentalist. Actually, there was a guy, Frederick H. Swanson, I am Frederick J., and there are many ways to spell Frederick and we spell them the same way, who has been an environmental history writer over in the Northern Rockies. Well, he was an undergrad at U of O, we interacted, and he was very active in the Wilderness Society. So, he was 00:26:00on the activist side, and even back then, and I feel like I sort of did this throughout my career, providing science information and perspectives to issues that ended up being or they were at that moment, highly-contested in society. And I was content to just put the information out and then let the chips fall where they may.

I've been thinking about that in the last few days because a good friend and colleague, Kathleen Dean Moore, a distinguished professor of philosophy and an amazing and powerful creative writer and public speaker, has been pushing hard, especially pushing scientists, and she's married to one, Frank Moore, retired distinguished professor of biology; she's been pushing scientists to be much 00:27:00more aggressive as advocates for dealing with climate change, for example.

That caused me to reflect on the history of our work at the Andrews where we did a decade of work on old growth, but we weren't thinking of it, at least I wasn't, and I wonder if Jerry and some other people were, as having an old growth protection advocacy dimension to it. I felt like we were just doing our stuff. But we dished it out in ways that could be understood by the public, including environmentalists, who went on to use it.

And I felt like, Kathy would like us to be pushing on climate change. Well, the Andrews is not a good stage for speaking to climate change issues because our long-term temperature records don't show much warming. If it were warming, and 00:28:00if the place was going to hell because of it, and we could demonstrate that scientifically, maybe we would be much more aggressive about the climate change issue. On the other hand, the threat to ancient forests and the spotted owls was the intensive and sustained logging. Our work ended up being pivotal, and this is relevant to the context of our discussion of the Northwest Forest Plan, because of that sustained long-term work on the nature of the native forests.

SS: When do you remember being, or let me rephrase it. When do you feel that you became an Oregonian and a Westerner in the sense that this was now your landscape?

FS: I didn't feel like I needed to do that. I wasn't trying to do that. It sort 00:29:00of reminds me of when I asked my poet buddy, Charles Goodrich, when could you, or when would you have told somebody that you were a poet? What does it mean to be something? And so, whether it's my dress, as is obvious right now, or whatever, I'm not into putting on, I'm trying to dress up as something whether that's by way of title, a behavior or something else. Maybe I'm not honest about that. But anyway, I have felt that I just came to immerse myself with the tools I have and the interests I have in this bio-region, and it feels natural to me. 00:30:00I feel a natural fit because I just love the mountains and the valleys, and just all the elements, the iconic elements. And I feel really blessed to have been able to do some thinking and communicating about the elements of the landscape.

SS: Now, you've talked about-

FS: And I feel much more natural and comfortable out here than I ever did in the East, although Julia and I, we continue to go to the East every summer because of this place that's been in her family in New Hampshire for 90 years. And we are engaged there, although not as we would be if we were residents, and we're 00:31:00very interested in the comparative aspects.

SS: Now, who would you say was the most important mentor you had at the University of Oregon?

FS: Well, I had an advisor in my graduate training, my dissertation, which was about gravel movement in a river. It was Sam Boggs. And I feel like I liked him, and I thought he was good guy, a good communicator, a good writer. But I actually got more excited about volcanoes and actually volcano ecology and that was in the Galapagos project which was mentored by Alexander McBirney. And so, he did have a big influence on me. Actually, I went on an expedition he led with twelve or fourteen geologists from around the world to east Greenland. It didn't 00:32:00have anything to do with the forest. But it was a wild and wooly and fun trip, and a chance to see something of Iceland, which also didn't have forests. So, those two guys, McBirney and Boggs were somewhat influential.

SS: What was the first work you did in the field here in the Northwest?

FS: I was-

SS: Either as a post-doc, doctoral student, or professional?

FS: I worked for the U.S. Geological Survey out of Menlo Park, California, in the Bay Area, as a field assistant after I completed my bachelors at Penn State. I worked the summers of '66 and '67 on the southern Oregon coast, mostly between Coos Bay and Crescent City. Mostly, we were working out of Port Orford and Gold 00:33:00Beach, up and down the coast looking for gold and platinum in uplifted marine terraces. There were U of O geologists, including Sam Boggs, and that's why I ended up going to U of O. We were studying gold in the river systems like the Sixes River. And there were Oregon State University marine geologists who were studying the off-shore, submerged beaches and other sedimentary deposits that had gold and platinum.

But I also got exposed to the logging history when working with Dick Janda, U.S. Geological Survey geologist and forest geomorphologist working in the redwoods 00:34:00country on the coast. Dick had an important influence on me and helped me a lot. He actually hired me to do some work on geology/forestry interactions down on the southern Oregon coast that sort of spilled out of my first U.S.G.S. field work there. Then my Ph.D. work was on gravel movement in the Elk River, and then, Dick hired me to do a project to look at geology, land ownership, land use, and erosion issues for the Elk and Sixes Rivers watersheds.

SS: How would you compare the battle over the redwoods, mainly up to the original park creation in '68, an analog to what would later happen up here 00:35:00where you have small islands of remaining old growth that people were trying to save in little bits and pieces, albeit for slightly different purposes. How would you compare that to the old-growth battles another two decades later up here in the Northwest, in Oregon and Washington?

FS: Well, it's very interesting because Dick Janda, as a geomorphologist for U.S.G.S., had a leading role in assessing the effects of forest practices in the Redwoods area, especially along Redwood Creek, which related to the establishment of Redwood National Park [1968] and its later expansion [1980]. There was a tremendous amount, perhaps the highest concentration of geomorphology research, certainly of forest geomorphology research, but maybe 00:36:00geomorphology research just in general, in that area, because of the high stakes, especially the high political stakes of trying to stop the tractor logging of monstrous old-growth coast redwoods in that incredibly erosive landscape of very erodible bedrock and soils with great amounts of precipitation. It's just really a bizarre and extreme set of circumstances.

Dick was on the advisory committee of the Andrews Forest for a while, and we did things at his instigation, such as various types of monitoring landslide movement and river channel change. Our system was really quiet relative to the 00:37:00one he worked in. So, that was fun to learn about other systems. Then, when Mount St. Helens blew up, Dick was front and center up there. In fact, my early connections and getting out on the land at St. Helens, was a result of connections with Dick through U.S.G.S. and Barry Voight from Penn State, rather than through my own employer, the Forest Service. The Forest Service was sort of freaked out about what was going on their own land. They were used to big fires, but they weren't used to eruptions, whereas the geologists were more tuned in on eruptions.

Anyway, I was getting a lot of exposure to these big issues and how tough that stuff was. And Dick had amazing stories, going in and working in Congress, helping to write legislation and things like that, staying up late and eating 00:38:00Big Mac's. And [Senator] Edward Kennedy would come in and he'd open his bar for him late at night, stuff like that. So, let's get back to the Northwest Forest Plan.

SS: Your first work as a post-doc was in the Andrews. Correct? And that morphed into what became a long career with the Forest Service. What would you say what your perspective was on logging, old growth, management, at that early point, and what were some of the critical nodes and learning experiences that took you to where you went later in your career? Let's say, that first decade, in the '70s?

FS: Well, I wish I'd written something about it, and had been journaling and diary-keeping, but I did not. I should probably go back and try to read some of 00:39:00my earlier writings to see what I can interpret. But I was very tuned in on the effects of logging and roading on sediment production, landslides, things of this nature. So, I was observing a lot of logging. You know, you really had to be careful when you went around a corner on a forest road. You had to anticipate that a fully-loaded log truck was going to come barrel-assing around the corner, or you're going to get squashed.

So, I was curious to watch it and learn how it was being done. At lunch time, I might sit on a stump and watch a yarding operation or watch timber fallers. And 00:40:00sometimes I'd talk with them, you know, if there's been some blow-down of a leave strip, I'd talk with them about it, on how challenging it was to cut in a partially wind-thrown patch of forest because you didn't know the stability of the [still standing] trees because they'd been banged up, and maybe the root systems were probably broken up.

I was really interested in that kind of stuff and how management-imposed disturbances were affecting the system. I wanted to learn about how nature had banged up the ecosystem because I was studying landslides, some of which occurred in native forests, or in the case of the large slow-moving landslides, I began to have reason to believe had been moving since well before there was 00:41:00any management presence in the landscape. So, my whole theme became how the imposition of a management regime altered the [non-human] disturbance regime. I wanted to be able to compare wild disturbance regimes with management-imposed disturbance regimes. What was the frequency of wildfires and big floods, and the nature of the land sliding and so forth, in relation to the effects of roads and cutting and broadcast burning? What were the frequencies and intensities of these different kinds of disturbances?

Some of my early writings, conceptually, in the latter part of the '70s, were about that. And that carried on and is manifest in the Northwest Forest Plan, I 00:42:00believe, in the work we had been doing on historic range of variability in the landscape management plans for the Augusta Creek area and for the Blue River area. The Blue River Landscape Management Plan was a direct response to an explicit assignment for the Central Cascades Adaptive Management Area [AMA], one of ten AMA's, to use an understanding of landscape history to plan the future.

SS: When you're talking about an AMA, you're talking about AMAs in the context of the Northwest Forest Plan and its language. Correct?

FS: The Adaptive Management Area.

SS: Right. FS: Designated with assignments in the Northwest Forest Plan.

SS: Okay.

FS: So, I described these ideas in the late '70s, but then they fomented and 00:43:00festered and were exposed to the world, and then, we were still working on them in the late '90s and well into the 2000's.

SS: When you were here in the '70s, and even into the early '80s, because that's when you were exposed to Mount St. Helens and that massive, "instant, clear-cut haircut" -- I don't know if those term have ever been used -- did that event get you really thinking about human anthropogenic disturbances in the sense of clearcutting continuing, and then something that dramatic and instant that was not anthropogenic, but was "natural?"

FS: I'd been working or done some work on volcanoes and volcanism before, 00:44:00especially my exposure to the Galapagos, visiting Kilauea, partly as training prep for going to the Galapagos, and then working on the bedrock geology of the Andrews. And so, those were volcanological activities before Mount St. Helens blew up. That St. Helens blew up sort of on my watch and in my back yard, was just a mind-boggling experience. You know, people would say, "Oh, look at what that volcano did, our clear-cutting is just pissing in the ocean, it doesn't make any difference."

But the Mount St. Helens experience has been very interesting and important. I 00:45:00can see, as Jerry Franklin has expressed in a variety of ways, two main lessons from the St. Helens experience that led into management ideas relevant to the Northwest Forest Plan. The first was the surprising amount of biological legacies out there, despite the landscape the first months appearing completely gray and devastated. There were still many nooks and crannies and niches, "refugia," where plant and animal life had persisted. In many cases, it emerged, but croaked because it didn't have the habitat or good resources to persist. But 00:46:00in a lot of cases, it did persist and it influenced early ecosystem development after the disturbance.

That was really critical for Jerry Franklin in the development of his New Forestry ideas. It's as important or more important to pay attention to what we leave on a site as it is to what we take away from a site. [For example-with logging] So, there had been a period of intensive plantation forestry which was all about simplifying the cropping for the crop, which for the most part around here was Doug-fir. But also, that was the period when the clear-cut controversies had been raging for a number of years, back to the Monongahela lawsuit time, and activities that led up to that.

Jerry put forward New Forestry, which got relabeled by various parties, and 00:47:00Jerry and Norm's now term as "ecological forestry." But that "aha" moment came from the biological legacies of early Mount St. Helens. And then, in the last decade or so, the very protracted, the biological richness, the diversity richness of the Pumice Plain, the area in front of Mount St. Helens, really triggered an "aha" moment, I believe. I'd be curious to ask him if there was a particular one, of the importance of the early successional stage of succession, early seral stage of succession. Jerry has been advocating for that, in part in 00:48:00the context of more logging on the federal lands, more intensive logging. [As advocated in Mark Swanson et. al. paper concerning early seral stage of succession.]

In the Northwest Forest Plan, implementation has been incomplete in some senses, such as logging of some native forest and at intensities that would create early seral habitat with lots of shrubs and herbs, with lots of fruiting and flowering [plants] that then supports the lepidoptera and other bugs that then get consumed by a wide variety of bird species and so forth. That's just one sort of food webs or trophic structures that can occur in early successional vegetation.

The "flash" [news] is the importance of the early seral stage, which is connected to industrial and federal management in different ways, has been 00:49:00tending to reduce in extent and diversity. Mount St. Helens pushed a focus on the value of the early seral stage, and then, Jerry's been trying to use it to get the implementation of the Northwest Forest Plan more in compliance with what the scientists had envisioned, particularly for the Matrix [zoning category in plan] lands.

SS: Are you mainly referring to the fact that like "survey and manage" [one management tool used in some NWFP areas] and various things, led to very slow process that was difficult to do, in practice versus theory?

FS: That could be one small facet of it. But there is a host of factors that have reduced the extent of logging. It's now mostly thinning in plantations. And 00:50:00the types of stands that get cut and the intensity of that cutting, how many trees are removed and how many are retained, and is the area opened up enough and disturbed enough by mechanical disturbance of the logging practices and/or any burning, so that the early seral plant communities can prosper and then support the animals.

SS: Now, during the '70s and '80s, leading up to what became the whole Northwest Forest Plan and the big studies that led into that process, you were at the Andrews. How do you remember that, not only the debate of what was called the Forest Wars, but management paradigms of Forest Service, changing dynamics within the Forest Service in how even the Andrews was managed, and its 00:51:00repurposing as an ecosystem science research site. How would you crystallize what that was in relation to what we're talking about with the Northwest Forest Plan and related issues? FS: The different people you'll interview will have had very different experiences that led to their relevance and hence participation in the Northwest Forest Plan. A central vehicle for me to become involved with what became the Northwest Forest Plan planning process and its aftermath, that continues today, a central vehicle for me, was the Andrews Forest. And so, here's some characterization of how that progressed. So, in the '70s, and I showed up in '72, we were a lot of fuzzy-faced post-docs and some faculty and 00:52:00other people.

SS: But this was U of O faculty then, right, or was it also?

FS: No, I was the only U of O [post-doc].

SS: Okay.

FS: There were a couple of U of O faculty. I rode in with Alan Keyes, a geology prof who got some funding to do the geologic mapping, and then that money went to Mike James and me as U of O affiliates. And then, there was George Carroll, an U of O prof, who did a lot of the canopy work in conjunction with Bill Dennison, an OSU prof. And so, there were a few U of O people, but it was normally OSU and PNW people out of Corvallis.

So, in the '70s, I feel like we mostly did our science. But I think it was probably at Jerry's instigation that we would have "short courses," maybe camp 00:53:00out for a week at a place called Gypsy Camp [in Andrews Forest]. But then, we were told that to use the term "Gypsy" was culturally inappropriate, so, then it became known as the "Camp Formerly Known as Gypsy." And we have some great black-and-white photos of the people, the science people and the people in the group, who were camping out and getting these field lectures about science. A bunch of those photos are in the Max Geier book Necessary Work, about the history of the Andrews.

And there were environmentalists, including John Bonine, who was (Possibly still may be) on the law faculty at U of O, and helped run the environmental law clinic there that does battle with federal agencies. And, we'd have evening 00:54:00discussions. And I remember Dave Burwell spoke; he was the forester for Roseboro Timber, which is a timber company up the McKenzie Valley and is responsible for a bunch of the big clear-cuts you see when you're up there near the town of Blue River looking at the hillsides above McKenzie River. So, there was a lot of open discussion with agency people and enviros, and industry people.

SS: How would you characterize those from what you can remember now?

FS: I don't remember them as heated arguments. I remember them as just wide-ranging discussions. Over time, we had a lot of wide-ranging discussions. Like in the early '90s, I remember we had a public event in Eugene in what I 00:55:00think had been a big high school right across from Hayward Field. [Likely Condon Grade School, now U of O building].

SS: Condon?

FS: We had a "New Perspectives" session, with public talks. And then we had public field trips [to Andrews Forest]. Especially during the Forest Wars period from the latest '80s through to about the FEMAT time, we had many field trips. And these, in agency terms, were "tech transfer," or technology transfer. Really, these were critical, open-ended public discussions about what the future of the forests could be. Where we'd been, where we are now, and where we might want to go in the future. And the makeup of these groups was quite diverse. Sometimes it would be just for one group, just for enviros or just for an 00:56:00industry group, who would come in, and sometimes it was a total mixed bag. Sometimes we facilitated it, we organized it, and sometimes it was requested of us, like members of Congress, something like that. Also, the Western Forestry and Conservation Association, which has its headquarters in the World Forestry Center in Portland, organized some of these trips. There would be people from as far away as British Columbia, and California, who were wondering what the hell was happening here with old growth and spotted owls, and how they might be "infected," affected and infected, by this.

So, anyway, the Andrews had this really important role as a forum, a field forum for discussing this. And I picture there being these really critical roles of 00:57:00the Andrews, including just the physical facilities themselves, where we pull in there and people could use the bathroom and maybe get a cup of coffee before we go out to our field stops.

SS: Is this before or after the modern campus we know at the Andrews was built?

FS: Yeah, most of it was before, when it was still the "Ghetto on the Meadow" in the terminology of a Park Service employee, a scientist.

SS: But, at least the bathrooms worked. Right? Kind of?

FS: Yes, yeah. And it showed an institutional commitment to be there for the long term, we're here for the long haul. We want to know how the system works. And we go out and have our field tours that generally would start with a 00:58:00200-year log decomposition site, basic science, then some examples of contemporary logging, including logging operations underway at the time. Sometimes we'd actually have a logger come and speak. And then we'd get up on the ridgeline and talk about landscape management issues.

SS: How could you characterize the, shall we say, the civility factor between competing interest groups?

FS: The most uncivil behavior I witnessed was by the defender of "old forestry," Bill Atkinson. He was the chair of the Forest Engineering Department [OSU]. We 00:59:00pulled into this operation where logging was occurring where eight trees per acre were being left in Mona Creek watershed, in the Slim Scout timber sale. This was about '91 or '92.

SS: So, as things were really heating up by this time, the Dwyer injunction?

FS: Yes. This is described in "The Guru" chapter, that's the name of the chapter, in William Dietrich's book, The Final Forest. It's a great page or so of a read, which represented "old forestry" represented by Bill Atkinson. There's a great publication written by him stating his position. New Forestry and old forestry duked it out, with Jerry representing New Forestry. Anyway, 01:00:00then we pulled into the logging operation at the end of the day, and he [Atkinson] put up a little placard that said "Insane Objectives equal Insane Forestry." We should have had a sign of that. And Stub Stewart of Bohemia Timber Company, you know, the great timber baron, out of Eugene/Springfield, he said to Lynn Burditt, the district ranger [Blue River RD] at the time, "They'll be Nuremburg-like trials for crimes against society because of what you're doing here." where they were trying to leave eight trees per acre for wildlife in the Slim Scott Timber Sale. Also, they were leaving downed wood, and stuff like that.

The conversations were often intense and people have very different opinions about what they were seeing. But the important thing, and this is what the 01:01:00Andrews provided, conversations could occur elsewhere, but the whole constellation of topics that could be addressed at the Andrews where there is science in a lot of cases and there was a lot of management experience, and the managers and scientists were elbow-to-elbow talking with these diverse groups, and we have done so many times. So, we were learning constantly. And in fact, it would be great if you could get Lynn Burditt on your roster here for the Northwest Forest Plan writing.

But anyway, the main point is to be having these conversations out there on the 01:02:00land, especially where there were examples of different kinds of management, past and present, where you could imagine the future, where you were hearing from managers, scientists, and the loggers themselves, and the conversations were so much richer than if you were in a courtroom, or if you were in some sterile meeting room, and you had posters and people were writing, saying things. SS: In other words, bar graphs and charts and all this.

FS: Yeah, this is, here's the forest and the forest is part of the conversation.

SS: What was the reaction from the traditional forestry people, whether it be industry or management, when the new ideas started coming in, not by advocates, but from scientists? And whether they were in the field trying to show them, in 01:03:00illustrations right here in front of you, whether it was in a board room or wherever, how do you remember the interchanges of those people with the new information, scientifically-based information, that was being presented them of why the old paradigm needed to at least be addressed, modified, or whatever?

FS: There were a variety of reactions from the industry folks, which, as you might well imagine, spanned the whole spectrum and in a way you could look at it as sort of through the "Kubler-Ross Stages of Grief." (Laughs) From total freak-out and denial through acceptance, and then really aggressively moving on and trying to provide a lot of leadership, on the question, "Where do we go from here," saying, "Oh, wow." We had some activities where a group of us, including 01:04:00some science people and some industry people, and I forget what we had in the way of environmentalists, we'd get together periodically and meet to discuss some of this stuff.

But then, we cut down all this old growth and cut it up into two-by-fours, then buried it in the walls of houses behind sheet rock. We have all this primo clear, tight-grained wood, out there in the walls. We squandered a lot of resource. The Japanese wanted to buy our raw logs and take them over back home to Japan and cut them into forty different products. And some of them had really high-end value. There was a great variety of perspectives. An interesting thing 01:05:00about the Mona Creek site we were just talking about, which is just outside the Andrews, and you're looking right east up into the Andrews and there are also the Three Sisters. That area was inside an HCA, a Habitat Conservation Area of 50,000 acres intended to serve as territory for twenty nesting pairs [spotted owl], as designated by the Interagency Scientific Committee on the Northern Spotted Owl.

What was your frame of reference? Was it "no cut" because this might be in the spotted owl conservation strategy and this was in an HCA? Was it "zero cut," or, if you're saying that to leave eight trees per acre which was happening in this 01:06:00timber sale which was legacied in from before [the Dwyer injunction], and the ISC strategy had not been adopted as policy, this was a proposal from the owl people, about what was the future of this site to be? Zero cut or clear-cut? Here [retention of 8 trees per acre] was some middle ground. Anyway, the potential futures were wide and totally uncertain. And the reactions were similarly diverse.

SS: When did you first hear about the northern spotted owl?

FS: Well, I was out working in the Andrews, maybe with Mike James in the early '70s, and we encountered Eric Forsman, this wild, crazy guy hanging out, living 01:07:00in a little camper that was dumped off the back of a pickup, and running around at might chasing his owls up and down these incredibly steep slopes. So, that's when I heard about that.

SS: And back then, you, nor Eric or anybody, had any inkling that this would become this cause célèbre of modern environmental history, at that time? He was just doing his master's thesis originally. Correct?

FS: Yes.

SS: If I remember right, it was the continuum going back to the Migratory Bird Act earlier in the century, then the snail darter and the Tellico Dam, then the whooping crane [Nebraska]. Those were the precedents that led into people saying, "Okay." Then the spotted owl got inserted into that dynamic within the 01:08:00Northwest Coniferous Forest Biome? [Endangered Species Act passed in 1973, central law on species viability thereafter.]

FS: One has to wonder if the principal motivations for what became the injunction, and then the Northwest Forest Plan, hadn't really been more around old growth or the disgruntlement of so much public resource going to the mill. It was a more of an old-growth issue than a spotted owl issue, but the spotted owl was convenient for stopping the logging of the old growth. I encountered people, like when I was back at Harvard Forest for a year or so, I encountered 01:09:00people, like some guy who came down from Maine, and David Foster [Harvard Forest Director], and he brought me into the conversation, who said. "Where can we find our spotted owl up here in Maine?" Or people from Sweden, who'd come talk with Tom Spies and others regarding some mosses or something, "What can we [use to save native forests]?" Or the people from Tasmania who are trying to stop the logging of their monstrous, ancient eucalypt forest.

SS: Save the wombat, right? Or what have you?

FS: Yeah. So, people are looking for their own "saving" species.

SS: What was your view on the spotted owl, its role as an endangered species, versus what maybe you're alluding to that the real reason was. It's the forest! It's the whole thing!

FS: Well, I love the forest, and when working with Peter Morrison, we were 01:10:00looking for super old growth. We were out there trying to find those 800-year-old trees. SS: Are you talking about in the Andrews or just in the general area?

FS: Well, we had a study area that included the Andrews, but ran across the upper Blue River and spilling over into the South Santiam drainage. So, anyway, I found that all very impressive. But like I said before, I wasn't trying to be an advocate for a policy outcome. And it wasn't because I was well-trained by 01:11:00the agency. I think it was because I felt that these are just amazing ecosystems and individual trees, and what's the soul of a 500 or 800-year-old tree, that has lived through so much? And so, we have had a big scientific workforce working on this and a lot of good storytellers. The information is getting out. A lot of storytellers within the science community, but especially other storytellers, photographers, poets, other visual artists and so forth.

I just feel that if the public can be informed, then I think their values will kick in. And so, I hated seeing stupid things done, but also, we use a hell of a lot of resources. I'm disappointed in the behavior of our society and our species. And I'm not going to say, it's corporate America's problem that we want to log so much, especially when you see how people live in other parts of the world and aren't anywhere near as consumptive as we are. I don't know why I 01:13:00wasn't more appalled at what I saw. I think part of it is being a physical process person and a "disturbance-ologist." I'm sort of accepting that "shit happens," you know, that a lot of disturbance occurs on the landscape whether it's by a volcano or human exploitation.

SS: Were any of the cuts in the Andrews, "later paradigm" examples on the Andrews, when they were still doing major cuts, but transitioning. Do you remember feeling more bothered over time as that became your home-away-from-home, your special place, not just scientifically but personally?

FS: Well, about the time I showed up, which was '72, the transition from the forestry research emphasis at the Andrews to the ecosystem emphasis was 01:14:00occurring right at that time. The level of cutting that had pertained in the '50s and '60s, which was a part of the agreement between the research station and the Willamette National Forest, that there be twenty-million board-feet per year cut, somehow that seemed to have faded from memory. I'd be curious to learn from Jerry and/or any documents you've uncovered in your Andrews history work, if there's any record of that.

I remember some discussion, and Jerry was the principal, that we were going to stop the timber sale program. We had a person in the position we now call our 01:15:00"research liaison," the forester on the local ranger district assigned responsibility to link with the research community. A lot of that was about five-year timber action plans and what are we going to cut.

SS: Which was part of your silvicultural program category. Correct? FS: It could be there, yeah. And so, there was cutting in new patches, patches of native forest, but there also could be thinning and there could be new experiments. So, like in '85, when we implemented Mark Harmon's 200-year log decomposition experiment, that involved timber sales to produce those logs to be put out to decompose or to put in streams in the stream component. And so, some of the early experiments in IBP in the early '80s, those and some others involved logging.

SS: You mean, early '70s for IBP, though -- ?

FS: Excuse me, in early LTER. [Early 1980s]

SS: Okay, sorry, I didn't mean to correct you.

FS: Like the Snowbrush Timber Sale. There was the logging in '75 for Watershed 10, which was a principal IBP experiment.

SS: And that was part of the paired 9 and 10 watershed work.

FS: Yes.

SS: One was treated [Watershed 10] and one wasn't [Watershed 9], or there were three different treatment within those two watersheds, if I recall?

FS: Nine is a control, not cut, and ten was completely clear-cut, but burned only up near the landing. Anyway, we did have some logging, but I think we were, this is the '70s and '80s and we were realizing that, "wow," we cut quite a bit 01:17:00of the landscape [since experimental forest was established]. And although it's 15,000 or 16,000 acres, there was a sense that this is a pretty limited piece of real estate. At that time, we expected all the rest of the surrounding area, was going to be mostly cut. So, we really backed off on the new logging. I remember some discussion or concerns about that because we were sort of locking up a hell of a lot of timber value.

SS: But you also had enough differential treatments within different contexts to be able to perform your ecosystem science and all sorts of comparative research 01:18:00on sedimentation, hydrology, etc., etc. Right?

FS: Well, we had plenty of subject matter.

SS: Right.

FS: We did have a couple of cases where we expected there to be logging to implement a study, and it did not occur for one reason or another. I remember at one point sketching out maybe a dozen or fifteen big studies, and thinking about if they proceeded from planning to implementation, would it involved logging or 01:19:00physical manipulation, and was it followed-up on by scientists. Also, how many stalled out at different points and which ones really prospered, and actually went on to be critical places for activities we never could have imagined in the first place, like Watershed 1 or Mark Harmon's log decomposition experiment, where the poets are more intensive users today than the ecologists probably are.

In the Watershed 1 case there are two classes of things going on there, as I think about them. One is to auger into greater detail about the internal plumbing, capitalizing on the circumstances provided by all that earlier work. 01:20:00And the second category is to take on wholly new kinds of work that wasn't imagined at the beginning, which would be like the air-shed component of the carbon-shed studies.

SS: Climate-change related things that you wouldn't have imagined in the '70s or '80s, necessarily?

FS: Well, the air-shed one could be viewed as climate change dependent. But then here comes climate change, and that imposes a new consideration on anything that's going on out there. So, that's a third category.

SS: The paradigm the Forest Service operated under for management was the 1976 Forest Management Act. And there was a 1978 update. Basically, it took eleven years for all forests of the region that became later impacted by the Northwest Forest Plan, to get all of their plans ready. Do you remember that era, did you 01:21:00take part in any of the planning or advising to the planning during the pre-Northwest Forest Plan era, that particular period? And you'd be dealing with the Willamette National Forest.

FS: That was a very critical step in the lead-up to the Northwest Forest Plan, the owl injunctions and so forth. We interacted with the Willamette Forest. We had research liaison people like John Cissel, and the Blue River Ranger District was very close to the supervisor's office [SO], although it was sort of 01:22:00idiosyncratic because of hanging out with the scientists. But still, there were quite a few people in the Willamette who were interested in what the science community was doing, and paying attention to us. Rolf Anderson was in the SO and in charge of the planning process. He was just a real nice guy, and actually, he and Cissel and I are all graduates of Penn State, so we could talk about the Nittany Lions, although those guys were forestry and I was geology. But, I felt like there was good respect and sharing. And so, the Willamette plan came out in '90. [Plan called for by 1976 NFMA]

SS: Oh, so it took twelve years for them to get that out then?

FS: Yeah. SS: Was there a reason for that? Was that because as the '70s, well, 01:23:00actually, the '80s were moving on, the owl started to enter the picture at many phases, legally, but also in planning, even though it didn't get the status that it would later. That was part of the reason, wasn't it?

FS: Well, I don't know for a fact. Rolf would be the person to ask, or Mike Kerrick, who was the forest supervisor [Will NF], and is still alive, living in Springfield. I think issues just kept getting more complex. The owl certainly was one, but watershed issues, too. And it's very interesting that the Willamette contracted with Stan Gregory and Linda Ashkenas, two OSU people and Andrews' principals in stream ecology, and very aware of riparian stuff and our 01:24:00whole theme of forest-stream interactions, all big with Stan. They worked directly with the Willamette, implementing an experiment, placing logs in streams and studying the effects on fish on south Quartz Creek where the Quartz Creek bridge goes through Roseboro land. And also, in the Andrews and nearby. It was another experiment that had some different log placements. ["Pool Complexity" study]

Stan and Linda had worked directly with the Willamette in running these experiments and presenting on lots of field tours along with the managers. And then, Stan and Linda were contracted to create, to write a riparian management 01:25:00guide that then became an appendix, I believe, to the Willamette Forest Plan. It's got a lot of science-rooted ideas in it because we'd been working on wood in streams and effects of shading and light levels on primary production and water temperature, and aquatic communities that produce the bugs that serve as food for fish and all of this kind of stuff, quite an integrated, ecosystem perspective of forest-stream interactions. And then how streams vary in their functioning from headwaters to large rivers, the River Continuum Concept, the dominant river ecosystem concept in that field. The basic paper on it came out 01:26:00in about 1980 by Robin Vannote and others, including Jim Sedell, has been cited something like 8,000 times, as you pull it up in Google Scholar, which is way up there in representations of influence on science thinking.

So, anyway, I think that guide, as crystallized in that document, was an important stepping off point for development of the Aquatic Conservation Strategy, as it became in the Northwest Forest Plan. I encourage you to ask Gordie [Reeves] for his take on that.

SS: Elaborating more on the planning process before the Northwest Forest Plan, what do you remember about what those plans contained or didn't contain, and 01:27:00some of the debates going on then, maybe were different then or foreshadowed what would happen later in the Northwest Forest Plan?

FS: Well, I wasn't deeply involved with the Willamette Forest planning process, although, I remember reviewing the Stan and Linda report. It's interesting, it was translated into Japanese. A buddy of ours [Futoshi Nakamura, professor at Hokkaido University], a leader in Japan of river management, had it translated and published into a small book. That's an interesting whole other story, because he was here during the Northwest Forest Plan period, and for two years, 01:28:00Futoshi Nakamura. He saw how scientists had roles at a big level, and he went back where the engineering erosion control approach had dominated river management in Japan for many decades, which simplified and engineered them. His big push since he was here in the early '90s, when he got back to Japan, was in bringing ecology back into the river world, river management world, and re-engineering rivers, re-naturalizing rivers.

So, in a way, that's a spinoff from the whole experience he had here where we 01:29:00were sort of agriculturalizing our wild steep forest landscape, and we now are trying to help it re-naturalize. There was this parallel activity that Naka had over there. We provided information, the science community around the Andrews, and others, provided information used in the Willamette National Forest Plan. Gordon Grant and I were contracted to do a big summary of all erosion data from the Andrews, both landslides and surface erosion, and experimental watershed sediment yield to put that in the context of the soil resource inventory unit system of the whole Willamette [NF], so that they could crank those monitoring 01:30:00and research study data into their modeling efforts.

One reason it took so long for the national forests to get their planning done, is a lot of science was going on and they were trying to crank it into the planning process.

SS: So, it's basically, the rise of the "ologists"?

FS: Probably, you might be able to say that. And they were being pressed, the national forest, were being pressed in various ways, probably including appeals of timber sales and things like that, to address all of these issues. And there were data out there and there were publications out there which the enviros would hold up to the managers to make sure the managers were paying attention to the science. We were providing science. And John Cissel, our research liaison 01:31:00around the time of the Willamette Forest Plan culmination [circa 1990], he had gone through the standards and guidelines, a long list, in the Willamette plan. And I remember him saying, "There are fifty-four of those standards and guideline I can directly link to research findings." There was a lot of linkage there.

SS: What was the role of Jerry Franklin at the Andrews, but also in terms of old growth and making it a cause célèbre by using science?

FS: Well- SS: People see him as an advocate sometimes, but I see him as a 01:32:00scientist who just happened to bring certain things to light.

FS: He's a very good speaker. He got to speak in many different forums. He was a prominent and awarded member of the Society of American Foresters, and was elected President of the Ecological Society of America. So, he had a foot in both the forestry camp and the ecology camp. You combine some of these attributes, and he was perfectly positioned to have the roles he had. A very critical step, I believe, was the 1981 publication, "Ecological Characteristics of Old Growth," this funky Forest Service publication which drew together the 01:33:00information and ideas, perspectives of a dozen or so people, many of whom had worked together at the Andrews in the '70s. And there were other people who hadn't been so involved, but were good, critical thinkers. For example, Everett Hanson, a forest pathologist, but a really cool thinker, general ecologist/biologist.

This is typical of Jerry's history - either himself or grad students he puts up like Mark Harmon or Mark Swanson [to spearhead synthesis writing projects]. Mark Harmon, for the log paper, dead wood paper, which has a couple thousand hits 01:34:00[citations in Google scholar]. Or, Mark Swanson, for the early seral paper that's pretty new, but it's getting a lot of hits. It hadn't been out long enough to get up there in the thousands. These are synthetic papers that raise ideas and perspectives which end up being very influential in the science community. And in the case of old growth, a lot of that was through the work of the environmentalist community.

SS: How would you characterize the difference between the environmentalist community then, thirty years ago, with that of today?

FS: Well, let me just finish my thought.

SS: Okay.

FS: Which is, the environmentalist community, using that term very broadly, 01:35:00through litigation, pressing legislators, everything from wildly illegal acts to working legal processes [e.g., tree sits and arson], but also in the arts and humanities, the Sierra Club coffee table books, the beauty of the old growth or the ugliness of the clear-cuts, and everything in-between.

SS: Fred's referring to Clearcut, a Sierra Club book, that is where our recording device is sitting on.

FS: The subheading [in Clearcut] is "The Tragedy of Industrial Forestry." So, anyway, there were many tugs on our empathy for ecosystems. This gets to a 01:36:00critical perspective which our philosopher colleagues, Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael Nelson, capture in their beautiful paragraph that's a statement of the basic syllogism for deciding how you want to live in the world. And I can't quote it completely here, but I know the first premise has to do with facts. Science is one of the sources of those facts of how the world is and how it will soon become. And the second premise is the enormous premise about our values of what we hold dear and what we want to hold onto. And from neither alone, but from the two together, we make our decisions about how we all want to live in the world.

The arts and humanities, hopefully will remind us of our values upon which we 01:37:00make our decisions about how to live in the world. And that was a very important part of bringing the old growth and spotted owl issues to the fore, broadly-speaking.

SS: So, how would you compare environmentalists from the '80s and that era, from what you see today?

FS: I don't understand that as a scholar, and there has certainly been a lot of interesting scholarship on it, including the study of very radical groups. But my impression is that a big factor in what's happened in the Northwest and internationally, has been the maturation of the environmentalist community, maturation and diversification. I think that in this region, consternation over 01:38:00aggressive logging of the public lands, especially old growth, went from working at the low level of appealing individual timber sales and establishment and expansion of wilderness areas, driven by the recreational community for certain areas like the Three Sisters and things like that, where, recreationists were probably the early environmentalists, in a sense. And then people got after the environment for its own sake, not just for its recreational sake, as well as more instrumental values of water quality and things of this nature.

So, there's been a great expansion of the scope and the toolkit of what might be 01:39:00broadly referred to as the environmentalist community.

SS: Did you feel, and we're talking right before the Northwest Forest Plan process started, and we're going to be transitioning to that immediately, did you feel that the plans and the practices on federal lands at that time in mostly national forests where you were more familiar with but there were interfaces with BLM and private, did you feel or did you know from statistical analysis that they were sustainable or not?

FS: Well, my perception is, and this is not a specialty of mine, so, I'm not a primary source, but our group was concerned about the role of big wood standing 01:40:00dead and downed dead, for example. And there was, like in '88, a lot of interest in landscape patterns and we were doing dispersed patch cutting on the public lands. Jerry and Richard Forman from Harvard worked together on the first paper in the first issue of a journal, Landscape Ecology, which has sort of become a classic paper about how if you chop up the landscape with dispersed-patch clear-cutting, the extent of interior forest habitat which is perceived to be the kind of habitat that northern spotted owls liked and perhaps a bunch of other creatures, interior forest habitat as distinguished from the habitat at the edge of a cut where there can be penetration of sunlight and wind and so 01:41:00forth from the open cut patch, which means there's an edge effect that penetrates into a patch of retained forest. Hence, the extent of interior forest habitat can be appreciably less than the extent of the forest patch of that type itself.

Anyway, we were questioning the dispersed-patch cutting approach, and there's actually some interesting work on dispersed versus aggregated cutting, stuff like that. So, there were various issues we were interested in from an ecological perspective at both the site level, like the deadwood, or the landscape level, like the patch-cutting patterns, that we thought were pretty 01:42:00near-term process problems. You know, we'd already cut a quarter or thirty percent of a lot of the Forest Service land with this dispersed patch cutting. And it wasn't going to take more than another couple decades of cutting before we'd really chopped it up a whole bunch, and then we'd get wind-throw around edges and a bunch of [other negative] feedback processes. So, we thought that something was going to have to give, but we didn't think it was going to happen as it did. And it happened in the flash of an eye and to a magnitude that we could not have imagined.

SS: Okay, the takeoff point for us is going to be the Seattle Audubon Society lawsuit [1989-90] which started the legal process that led to the big deal, the Northwest Forest Plan and everything else. What do you remember about the years 01:43:00before that and these issues in terms of the Forest Wars, before it became high profile, and then, what do you remember happening right during and after that lawsuit and the beginning of the injunctions, and how would you make that transition, or describe the transition?

FS: Well, I was down in the "boiler room." I was trying to help run the Andrews LTER program, which is a big and complex program, and I was trying to be team leader for our Forest Services research group, which had a lot of administrative responsibilities and sort of administrative overhead of going to meetings and doing all this kind of stuff. So, I was observing mainly by reading the 01:44:00newspaper and knowing that a lot of this foment that was going on, but it wasn't affecting me directly except insofar as we would have field tours. They picked up as Jerry began promoting New Forestry pretty hard [late 1980s], because a favorite spot for him to talk about it was down at the Andrews, although he was in Seattle and some touring spots were being developed that were easier for him travel-wise.

I knew a bunch of this was going on, but I was quite occupied. And I'd be 01:45:00curious to hear what kind of a response you get from other people in your interview set as to how much of this they could see coming.

SS: That's what I'm asking. I'm kind of saying, what was your sense of what was going on? There's this whole list of spotted owl-related activities and the Forest Service and the BLM were already trying to adapt to it, so was the Fish and Wildlife Service, but it hadn't risen to as high a level it would later on, and how aware were people of that in their various capacities, including yourself and the other people we're going to interview?

FS: Well, I could see that the heat, the burners were being turned up on the northern spotted owl, and also on old growth. So, a guy I mentioned earlier, Peter Morrison, and I, had been working on forest history in the mid-'70s, 01:46:00including looking for very old trees. He went on and started his own business and also worked for the Wilderness Society, and he was doing a lot of remote sensing of the extent of native forest, including old- growth versus mature and younger native forest, age classes for different national forests. He, by way of the Wilderness Society, ended up having better representations of the extent of old growth on national forests than the national forests themselves had. And these were being used in a very political way to try to push for protection of native forests.

And they had big reports, big format reports, with images of the extent of old 01:47:00growth. They and others had made maps of the extent of old forests on the Queen Charlotte Islands, for example, before logging, and then up to the date of the images. There's a copy of that map on the wall outside here. I heard them tell that these maps were then put out in taverns and other places in the Queen Charlottes, and people started getting "the picture." I mention that because I think in the realms of the spotted owl, as you just described, and the old growth, as I just described, and the forest-stream interactions and the well-being of salmon and pushing for salmon to be listed, different races and stocks of salmon and so forth, and water temperature problems like the issues 01:48:00down on the Umpqua and Steamboat Spring, Steamboat Creek, some of these issues on the fish front dating from the '60s. I think that the heat was being turned up in all of these thematic areas, which ended up converging through the lens of the Northwest Forest Plan for a new conservation strategy for the region.

SS: What do you remember specifically about the Seattle Audubon Society lawsuit, the injunction, the first one, then there was some congressional action, then there was the second injunction? What do you remember about that period and how these things unfolded in kind of a slow-moving tsunami, if you will, toward what became this massive thing?

FS: I don't really have much recollection. I'm sure I was catching it in the 01:49:00newspaper, but I was just caught up in trying to do my stuff, which ended up being entrained a little bit later on.

SS: So, do you remember reading the-excuse me, the Interagency Scientific Committee [ISC] report on the spotted owl?

FS: I didn't read it.

SS: You never read it?

FS: No, I didn't read any of all these things.

SS: Did you even know Jack Ward Thomas back then, or if you didn't, did you knew who he was?

FS: I certainly knew who he was and I knew that he was a synthetic guy and he was out in the east side. The east side, what happened on the east side and what happens on the west side, are two pretty different things.

SS: The dry forest versus the wet forest, the remote -- ? Yeah, the nature of it.

FS: Yeah.

SS: What do you remember about interagency interactions and collaboration back 01:50:00then? Because what came out of the Northwest Forest Plan in some ways, was very novel in that you had two agencies, the Forest Service and the BLM, which often didn't always work that well together or didn't have to, what do you remember about the interactions with those agencies before? And what's your view on how the Northwest Forest Plan process forced them to have to do in terms of collaboration?

FS: Let's see, the Forest Service has a large and strong research program, and the research branch and the national forest system land manager part of the Forest Service, splits immediately below the chief. BLM, on the other hand, didn't have a research organization. They did have Chris Maser, who was quite an 01:51:00interesting, productive and unusual guy. He didn't have a Ph.D. He was an extremely active guy, and was buddies with Jerry and some of the other scientists. He was very good buddies with Jim Sedell. I knew him, but didn't really interact with him that much. He was a very good collaborator, a strong collaborator with Jack Ward Thomas, probably because of their shared interests in wildlife issues and their tendencies to be synthetic.

I did interact with BLM people, but they tended to be soils people or landslide and fisheries people, because mainly it was related to logging and landslides and in the context of Coast Range business. And the BLM and the Forest Service 01:52:00had different approaches to assessing the potential for landslides and potential effects of logging on landslides, which could then go down channels and damage fish habitat.

Because of a chain of circumstances that are a little strange and convoluted, I ended up having to do a study of the Mapleton Ranger District and their efforts to leave patches of forest headwalls, which were the places where the landslides start, many of them. And so, I ended up dealing with BLM because of that. It's 01:53:00an issue that did surface in the Northwest Forest Plan, but there had been many issues about the legislation, FLPMA [Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976], that directs BLM western Oregon forest management. Western Oregon BLM forest management is different from [Forest Service management under] the National Forest Management Act, and so in fact, we've had repeated legislation, or litigation, about that because of the greater emphasis on logging in the BLM lands.

Now, where were we?

SS: We were just after the ISC Report, and I'm kind of trying to get you to talk 01:54:00about when you first become involved or became intimately aware of how big this was going to be? You know, the ISC Report, the injunction, leading toward more studies and reports on the owl, but still before, Bush is still in office and before the Clinton Summit, for instance. What do you remember about that period of time, '89 to '92, for instance?

FS: Well, '89 to '92, then we were, we were into the injunction. And that was sort of, "Holy shit, what happened," you know.

SS: I mean, it shut everything down. Right?

FS: It did. There were some sales that had been in the pipeline and they were 01:55:00able to be completed. But, we were having a lot of field trips. There was a lot of conversation about that and many field trips, and I'd be curious to go back and look at our field trip records. And there were a lot of communications. I sent you the Posy Busby record of the "Box Project" [about our record of] public communications [during that period].

SS: And these field trips involved politicians, planners, environmentalists, timber, everybody, right?

FS: All kinds of people. Major media, elected officials. There was a great deal of this critical public discourse, discussion about what the future of forests 01:56:00might be. I think some things like going to the Slim Scout Timber Sale and seeing that eight trees per acre could be left, and that they didn't all blow down immediately. We did some studies of some other green tree retention units that had been put in for different reasons in the Blue River Ranger District general area, and studied how much blow-down was there. There is a paper by Posy Busby and two other people, who were Harvard undergrads as research experience for undergrads at the Andrews working with me. We did some inventories, like on the blow-down thing. Because some people would say, "Oh, you leave those trees standing, they'll all blow down." Did they or did they not? What were some of 01:57:00the ecological consequences in these partial-cut units?

We did studies. We wrote reports. My impression is that this was important in gaining and giving validity to the idea that green tree retention could be practiced, which was prescribed for the Matrix lands in the Northwest Forest Plan. So, my impression is that both some of the practices that were occurring and the public discussions of them by this broad [Andrews] group influenced what was considered even possible to find its place in the Northwest Forest Plan.

Now, some of those practices are not continuing to be implemented, although they are in the policy document of the Northwest Forest Plan. For example, there is 01:58:00no logging now of the native forests, either greater than 100 [years] in the mature age class or in the old-growth age class, that are in the Matrix prescription where logging was expected to occur. It's not occurring now.

SS: What do you remember about the atmosphere of the discussions within the Forest Service, during the injunction, when things are basically shut down, and what was it like within the agency?

FS: Well, I don't remember about that. We were just trying to do our stuff, and that included the Augusta Creek project where we had been standing on a landing 01:59:00on one of these tours, that included in this case quite a few people from the forest industry. We were up there, we're looking at this 35 percent cut-over Mona Creek landscape, and somebody said, "Is this a good landscape or a bad landscape?" Judge Dwyer had just declared it an illegal landscape [spotted owl injunction], because it was a patch clear-cut piece of Forest Service land. So, we went back, Lynn [Burditt, Ranger- Blue River RD] and John Cissel and I and some others, and we worked with the idea of using this history of landscape disturbance to guide future management. That ended up being stuff we were 02:00:00charged to explore in our assignment [in the NWFP] as an Adaptive Management Area.

I don't remember a lot of conversation about consternation about what had happened. I just remember working like crazy to keep the LTER going and the research team going, and working intensively with John Cissel and Lynn Burditt on the Willamette in our research-management partnership. SS: How did it change your research program when all this stuff came down in terms of the PNW and this building, in particular?

FS: We were doing a lot of stuff that ended up being highly relevant and in support of Northwest Forest Plan sorts of activities. For example, our Augusta 02:01:00Creek work, which was outside the AMA [area], because the AMA hadn't been designated yet, it would be well to the south, but the Blue River District was ready to put some timber sales in there, so they wanted a planning approach. Some GIS-produced maps of different buffer widths the National Forest [Willamette] produced for the Augusta Creek landscape plan, were incorporated into the FEMAT report because those were the handiest maps to give visual image representations of the stream network density if we throw full tree-height 02:02:00buffers on it, and how much of the landscape it would gobble up, which became a pivotal issue.

Things that we had been doing, motivated in our context of being a venue for public, a forum for public discussion, led to the things that we did in our research management partnership, which fed technical information into the planning process, and, second, our research management partnership became, I believe, a model for what can happen within an AMA. So, it became sort of a model for AMA's.

SS: In addition to the research you're doing for the PNW Station, a lot of the 02:03:00work the Andrews was doing, also had a lot of relevance to everything that unfolded in the FEMAT process, and the plan itself. Correct?

FS: I think so, in a bunch of cases. You'll probably interview other people, and if you never say Andrews Forest, I think they'll probably never say Andrews Forest. So, because of the path that I've lived, I'm emphasizing the Andrews Forest because that happens to be the path into this process that I happened to have lived. But we did have a tremendous variety of things that were highly relevant, including other sorts of things, like Jack Lattin, who led the charge 02:04:00for fifteen or so years on the effort to try to identify as many invertebrate species in the Andrews as possible. This led to publication of a species list published by the PNW Station with the species names, their habitats, who they eat and who eats them, and the relevant references for these about 4,000 species [that occur in HJA-EF].

Then, in the FEMAT process, there was an effort to address the different groups of organisms and which if any of the species in these different broad taxonomic groups needed attention in the Northwest Forest Plan. So, then there'd be these 02:05:00specialist groups that would be brought in [to the FEMAT process] to provide that perspective. And so, guys like Jack and his buddies came in. They had broad regional perspectives, but also, they had been working intensively at the Andrews, so they had a very helpful forest and stream landscape ecosystem conceptual framework from which to speak. They weren't people who were looking only at bugs with pins sticking through them or bugs in vials. They had a broader ecosystem perspective into which to place their interpretations of how you might go from being a taxonomist to thinking about a regional conservation strategy, which is a huge, huge step of many scales.

SS: What do you remember about-

FS: Okay, it's almost 3:00.

SS: What do you remember about the summit being called?

FS: I wasn't very aware of that. I was tied up being a principal investigator [PI] of the Andrews LTER. So, when the summit actually happened, I was down in New Mexico at a [LTER] PI's meeting. But I was very aware of it and I saw some on TV, and it was on a Friday in April of '93. And so, I just decided to go back. I forget how I heard it, probably from Jim.

SS: Jim Sedell?

FS: Sedell, yeah.

SS: Who was one of the main people there?

FS: He was sort of the head of the aquatic section. I came back early from that 02:07:00Long-Term Ecological Research meeting, then went right into FEMAT.

SS: So, what were you told by Jim and Jerry and any other colleagues about the experience of going through that? [The "Clinton Forest Summit"]

FS: I don't remember direct messaging. I recently had the interesting experience of observing on a video that is in our display at the Special Collections and Archives Research Center up in the OSU Library, the video of Bill Clinton and Al Gore asking Jim and Jerry questions, and they're each responding. They both did 02:08:00great jobs, it was really cool. It's just mindboggling to see that level of presidential office attention to these issues. It's just really, really amazing. Ask Gordie about how he helped Jim prepare his remarks, because I've heard Gordie tell a story of Jim calling him up in the middle of the night, saying, "Oh, my God, I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow." Gordie and him driving up, and them working together to put it together, Jim's statement. And Jim was incredibly articulate in that circumstance. And he wasn't always the most articulate guy.

There were some other all-nighters. I remember, you know, on this floor, and Jim 02:09:00was in the corner office where Tom is now.

SS: Are we going forward to the 100 days after the Summit?

FS: Yes.

SS: And this, for the record, this is when basically a lot of the science that went into this document [FEMAT]. Correct?

FS: Yeah.

SS: Was produced, the FEMAT document, where you basically had a bunch of scientists together on one floor in the United Bank Building in downtown Portland?

FS: U.S. Bank Building.

SS: U.S. Bank Building, and you basically did a massive cram session for 100 days, or 90 days?

FS: Yeah. There was some point, I'm not exactly sure when, but I remember there was one night when Jim and I and a young lady who was a typist for us, we stayed here all night. This might have been Gang of Four time. So he could have this manuscript ready to take to D.C., get on a plane and go to D.C. the next morning. I don't know, it might have been Gordie and Katie Ferrell, me with Jim. 02:10:00And it might have been Gang of Four time [1991]. Anyway, there was some real bashing and crashing.

Anyway, I don't remember those guys talking about the Summit because I think it was all just happening so fast, you were on to the next thing, and you didn't have a chance, I didn't go down to the bar with them. You know, the Gang of Four people, they had time together on their flights, and traveling across the country and waiting in waiting rooms to get to talk to members of Congress, stuff like that. They probably had more ruminating.

SS: But you worked on stuff during that 100-day period. Correct?

FS: In the Bank Building, yeah.

SS: In the Bank Building.

FS: Not exclusively. Some people camped out there all the time. I was still trying to keep some things going down here.

SS: But how would you describe that, the atmosphere, the experience, the floor, [where everyone was working] in the "pink tower"? [Slang reference for building because of pinkish hue to exterior] What kind of war stories or interesting memories would have come out of that for you?

FS: Well, there are a lot. I'll list a few topics, and when I have more energy, come back and develop them. One was the amazing experience of seeing this stuff come together, and talking about tough issues. Are we going to use the word riparian when we talk about riparian reserves if we want them modified in their 02:12:00widths after watershed analysis? That's a very important topic I'd like to come back to because it's still playing out today. [Riparian buffers were widened during planning process.]

A second topic was a revelation, that in landscape ecology we did not have our thinking about river and riparian networks and road networks anywhere near as sophisticated as our thinking about vegetation patch-works. So, there were important differences between the character of the maps and the thinking in the realm of the terrestrial people in their cubby-holes in the pink tower, in their Dilbert cells, from the aquatic people, who had stream and riparian network maps. There were very big differences. I came back and I worked with Julia 02:13:00[Jones] over subsequent years to get students working on different projects on how road-nets and stream networks interact, relative to invasive species moving into landscapes, the routing of flood waters, or the routing of disturbances through the landscape.

We did FEMAT in '93, then we had the '96 flood. Ideas and issues and "aha" moments on networks and network-patchwork interactions in the FEMAT process, led me, Beverley Whipple and Julia, to do very different kinds of things than we would have done otherwise when the '96 flood occurred. It resulted in very important publications which have strongly influenced how people think about road networks and their effects on flooding, for example. And the FEMAT 02:14:00experience was critical.

There were other things that were quite interesting. Jim [Sedell] and Jerry [Franklin] became very close friends with Jim Pipkin, a Bruce Babbitt "henchman," a lawyer who was in the [FEMAT] process. And those personal relationships really played out in different and important ways. Pipkin is a really interesting guy. He had been a clerk in the Supreme Court and continued to interact with Supreme Court justices.

And it did feel like we were doing something important. It prompted different kinds of syntheses, including the whole concept of watershed analysis.

SS: Who came up with the idea to put you all together on one floor in a big building in a major city? Was that just a logistical practicality? How did that 02:15:00come about?

FS: I have no idea.

SS: I mean, but you only had 90 days supposedly to do it, right?

FS: Well, it started out, we were supposed to have 60 days, because of the timing of the expectation that Congress would take the product of FEMAT and convert it into legislation to be able to squelch the injunction. But quickly, it became evident that the Congress wasn't going to do that, Congress couldn't get its act together to do that. And also, there was some problem with some of the viability assessments, the way that was managed, and you'd have to get that story from Marty Raphael. That's not my area, and I didn't know that area, but 02:16:00that [politics] ended up in extending the process from sixty to something like ninety days.

SS: So, when people came out of that experience, did they feel like they'd just survived some gigantic storm?

FS: Definitely, and there's stories of people going to get help. Our daughter, at that time, seemed to be experiencing depression for a variety of reasons that I think I can understand now. So, I went to a counselor. And I talked with this counselor a bit, which I had made the contact through the federal system that was available to us. And I explained what I'd done, and the counselor said, "Oh, 02:17:00yeah, I heard about that." You know, because there had been a stream of people that were going there that had all kinds of personal issues because of the tension. "Oh, yeah, I heard you got, you had a guy who was the rock guy, and you had a guy who was the fish guy, you had a this and a that." And he said, "Oh, yeah, I know these people."

SS: Were people really stressed out during that period? I mean, there must have been some great camaraderie, but there also must have been some, you know, hair-pulling kind of stress moments?

FS: I remember a good, a very dear colleague, who just sort of crawled up in a ball under the desk one day; he couldn't take it anymore. And, you know, Jack Thomas' wife was dying of cancer. So, there was a lot of-

SS: Real life stuff?

FS: Real life stuff. I mean, the event itself was stressful.

SS: What role did the Gang of Four Plus Two, meaning Jack Ward Thomas, Jerry 02:18:00Franklin, Norm Johnson, John Gordon, and Jim Sedell and Gordie Reeves, have during that ninety days? Were they the leaders of the thing?

FS: As far as I know, they did-they ended up playing different leadership roles. I don't know that it was because they had been in the Gang of Four Plus Two, but that certainly helped. They were veterans of these larger processes where scientists are called upon to try to give input to very high-level policy formulation phenomena. [John Gordon was not at FEMAT.]

So, I'd like to quit, so I have a chance for my bike ride, but this is part of something big.

SS: Okay, we are signing off right now. We can leave this last instructional part out of the transcripts. But we will basically be taking off from the pink 02:19:00tower work session, and going on from that point.

[End of Interview 1/ Start of Interview 2]

SS: Good morning, this is Samuel J. Schmieding, Oregon State University College of Forestry. It is September 2, 2016. I am here with Dr. Frederick J. Swanson, Geologist, Ecologist, Scientist Emeritus, retired U.S. Forest Service. We're in his home in south Corvallis, and we are going to do the second half of the interview that we did the first half on a few days ago. So, good morning, Fred?

FS: Good morning.

SS: All right. And where we're going to pick up is basically where we left off last session, where we were kind of into the Northwest Forest Plan process, a little bit from the ISC through FEMAT, and after the Forest Summit with the Clinton administration. But we really didn't go into a lot of the details, so 02:20:00I'm going to ask you, Fred, again, to go into a little more depth about what you were doing, how it started to affect what you were doing at the Andrews Forest and at the Forest Sciences Lab, and with that whole team, as we went from the ISC through the FEMAT process, and the Forest Summit, which was right before that, and how it changed everything. What are the details that you remember about that process?

FS: Okay.

SS: Administratively and intellectually.

FS: To summarize some things I was trying to communicate in our previous part of the interview, I was deeply involved with the Andrews Forest. I had leadership responsibilities along with others as the leader of our PNW research team, which 02:21:00had a major, dominant role on the Forest Service science front at the Andrews, and also, I was Principal Investigator for the Andrews Long-Term Ecological Research [LTER] program. That's where most of our university participants at the Andrews connected.

And so, I knew ISC was going on, and I knew the Gang of Four and the Gang of Four Plus Two was going on, and then the Scientific Advisory Team and SAT work. I was aware of these because my buddies were doing it, Jerry and Jim Sedell, Gordie, and so forth, but I was totally immersed in what was happening at the Andrews, which included a great deal of leading field trips, co-leading them 02:22:00with academic and Willamette National Forest colleagues. And just a ton of communications, administrative and scientific activities, which didn't directly feed into those science input to policy processes of ISC, the "Gang," and SAT. But then, after the Forest Summit, on a Friday in April, the following Monday the FEMAT group convened, and I was included in that along with a bunch of colleagues, some of whom were and/or had been involved at the Andrews. And then 02:23:00this, the experience that I had was relevant in that context of creating the framework for a regional conservation strategy.

My contributions then were in the area of watersheds and geological underpinnings of variation and erosion issues across the range of the northern spotted owl, which was the geographic area that FEMAT addressed. So, I dealt with watershed issues. I also dealt with issues that gained the name "adaptive management" and "adaptive management areas" in the FEMAT process leading into the Northwest Forest Plan, because we had been doing that stuff at the Andrews for many years, and our close partnership between the land managers of the 02:24:00Willamette National Forest and the science community rooted at the Andrews.

So, regarding the Adaptive Management Areas [AMAs] FEMAT, I was relevant to that. I was also relevant to forest-stream interactions, because of my long history at the Andrews working on that topic, especially with the "stream team" like Stan Gregory, Jim Sedell, and others. That work was pivotal in thinking about the width of riparian reserves and things of this nature.

SS: Speaking specifically to that subject area, what is the "Riparian Forest Effect" streams as a function of buffer width, and how and why did the buffers end up becoming the width that they were in FEMAT and the final Northwest Forest Plan?

FS: This is an important issue, and an interesting one because it involved the 02:25:00intersection of the terrestrial world with the aquatic world. In FEMAT, as in a lot of places in the world, be they academic or federal agency science communities or whatever, the aquatic people tend to have one way of thinking about the world and reside in one set of institutional cubby holes, be they scientific societies or departments, the terrestrial people in another.

And so, two key topics that emerged in the FEMAT process of trying to create this regional conservation strategy. One had to do with the forest-stream interactions and the width of buffer strips or riparian reserves. And that can 02:26:00be viewed at the scale of a timber sale or a local stream reach, and then a second big issue is the interaction between stream and riparian networks that lace through the landscape and how they interact with the terrestrial forest patchwork of old forest or young forest, and good owl habitat or poor owl habitat, or one thing or another. So, this terrestrial landscape, we viewed as patches. Maybe of good interior forest habitat patches in a matrix of plantations, clear-cut, previously clear-cut areas.

SS: But to be clear for the record, we're not talking about "Matrix" designations as it was later called in the Northwest Forest Plan, we're just using matrix as a descriptive word there?

FS: I'm using matrix in a geometric sense, and not in the sense of the Matrix 02:27:00land allocation in the Northwest Forest Plan. So anyway, there are these two broad categories, the one you asked about, the two broad categories that pertain to the interactions of the terrestrial and the aquatic world, which were to be a key parts of the Northwest Forest Plan because they were both part of it. How we're going to connect these two parts of the overall landscape.

So, at the Andrews Forest, beginning in the mid-'70s, our research team started to do a lot of work on forest-stream interactions, the role of the forest in shading the stream, controlling light levels that can lead to water temperature increases which are detrimental to our cold-water fishes. So, light levels and 02:28:00affecting water temperature, light as it affects primary production in the stream to grow some plant material on the stream bed, which is a base of the food chain, and [the forest delivers] fine litter inputs, like needles and twigs and leaves [to streams]. Also, the delivery of big wood from the forest to the stream. Big wood in streams affects the structure of the ecosystem with many consequences for the aquatic creatures, including retention of spawning gravels and provision of cover for fish fry, cover to help protect them from predation by birds.

Over the course of our group's research efforts, we gradually recognized one 02:29:00after another, the forest's influences on streams. And then eventually, we began to learn about the influences on the stream back onto the forest, up into the forest. These were very rich concepts. But during FEMAT, a couple of us were trying to figure out a way to depict the spatial influence, the spatial aspects of these forest influences on streams. And so, there's a key figure in the FEMAT document that shows that. What it shows is the cumulative functional effectiveness of the forest on the stream for each of these influences. And that's sort of an influence, the thinking about how wide should your buffer 02:30:00strip be? [FEMAT's Aquatic Reserve zones]

SS: What were the original numbers they were tossing about, whether it be in the pink tower or at whatever phase in this whole process?

FS: The issue of leaving buffer strips along streams for the benefit of fish is one that goes back decades. For example, clear-cutting along, I think it was Steamboat Creek down on the Umpqua, a favorite fly-fishing stream, led to a lot of consternation, fisheries interests against forestry interests.

SS: How did that play out?

FS: I don't know the particulars, but I think it was back into the '50s. Gordie Reeves might be able to inform you about that. But there was this concern about 02:31:00leaving streamside forests. And the fisheries interests kept pushing for some to be left, and then more to be left, and the timber beasts wanted to constrain it. In the FEMAT process, different riparian widths were depicted on GIS printouts. It turned out that the easiest examples came from the work that was being done on the landscape management plan for the Augusta Creek area, which our Andrews team worked on as it was being led by John Cissel and others in the Blue River Ranger District, which has since been combined with the McKenzie District to become the McKenzie River Ranger District of the Willamette.

So, we developed this landscape management plan and our manager colleagues had GIS maps ready and handy. And so, you can find in the FEMAT document, like the Jim Sedell article in the Journal of Forestry issue that's all about the Northwest Forest Plan, one of these Augusta Creek maps in there. I just mention that because it's a representation of how our work in partnership between the land managers and the Andrews scientists provided ideas, concepts, information, images, and figures that could flow into the FEMAT and the Northwest Forest Plan process.

Anyway, with these maps, we could depict the extent of buffers within a riparian 02:33:00reserve, with different widths expressed in terms of a half a potential tree height [of reserve width], or a full potential tree height, or maybe make narrower buffers on the headwater streams which are much more extensive in the landscape, and wider buffers on the larger streams which generally have lower gradients, and they're wider and they provide a lot of good fish habitat. So, that figure which is a representation of many people's work on the different processes of forest stream interactions, that's an interesting representation.

SS: Giving a specific geographic place to illustrate this, let's go up to the 02:34:00Andrews, and from the main stem of the McKenzie, up to the Blue River and up to Lookout Creek, if you were going to just say, here's the buffer width within the plan for this area, what would it be for that area?

FS: The riparian reserves were to be at potential tree height for the upper parts of the basin. But they could be adjusted by land managers in their interdisciplinary teams after they had conducted watershed analysis, which was an interesting and innovative part of the Northwest Forest Plan. It directed forest managers to holistically look at a watershed's history and its capacity and biological and geophysical terms, to perform in the future based in part on 02:35:00interpretations of how they had performed in the past. And by perform, I mean what the fire regime had been, and the other disturbance processes and how they've been distributed across the landscape, the topography and other factors, interactions with wind and so forth. Also, the biological capacity with the distribution of plant associations and plant actors in the landscape.

And then also the aquatic system, what's the distribution of fish species as a function of position within the watershed and natural or human-imposed blockages to fish passage. With this pretty comprehensive understanding, there'd also be human components in the analysis, not just the biophysical ones that I just sketched. Then the agency would have a more corporate level maybe or individuals 02:36:00who were broad thinkers and had integrated this thinking in their own experience on the ranger district as employees of the ranger district, but this would be an effort to document this holistic thinking and have it as a sound basis for future management. And so, riparian reserves could be adjusted on that basis of that understanding.

Let me add an important point here that's a very general one. My impression is that the planning, the geography of plans, of the planning process, before the injunction and during the Northwest Forest Plan, was dominated by the project scale which would be an individual timber sale or a few cuts, and some road 02:37:00construction, quite localized. And the second scale of planning was at the national forest scale, which was mostly a political-geographic delineation. It seemed to me, that to address issues that were brought forward leading to the injunction, that motivated the FEMAT team to push for planning at the watershed scale as a natural geophysical-associated, biotic landscape scale, and at the range of the northern spotted owl, which is at a biologically-determined scale.

We shifted from more politically-set boundaries for planning, to more 02:38:00biophysical and geographic units for planning. That seems to speak to the point that you couldn't really do an analysis of the cumulative effects of management actions on species and processes of interests, if you weren't doing it at the appropriate scales. That's going to be a real principle in thinking about how ecosystems work and how to plan their management.

What if I go on and talk about the network issue, thinking about these riparian issues and that the general issue of how the terrestrial science and scientists 02:39:00and conservation thinking, what it would need to do to interact with the aquatic scientists' science and conservation thinking?

SS: The question that I was searching for that escaped my mind for a second there, is along those lines. Because when this was first going on, it was more terrestrial-based, especially as it related to the ESA, this is for the spotted owl, and then the fisheries got added, which caused a lot of consternation at the Forest Service and other agencies like, oh, my God, you've added a whole other thing. So, talk about that, but also in relation to what you were talking about, about the two, shall we say, sets of disciplinary scientists and other people working together, not working together, but coming together ultimately in this integrative way.

FS: As I get the picture, here's a sketch, and I wasn't present for a key part 02:40:00of it. And then, the more proximal part is my perception and response. I remember hearing a story that when the Gang of Four was meeting with George Miller, the Congressman from California about the Gang of Four activity, and their report was made to a House committee, there had been all kinds of issues stewing on environmental protection nationally, and especially in this region. The spotted owl had prominence, but certainly salmon, were really big and 02:41:00complicated, and many species and runs and so forth. And so, I heard that as the "gang" was leaving his office, he said, "And don't let some damn fish screw up the plan." I take his point to be, it'd be nice to deal with as many of these troublesome issues as possible in one conservation planning process or whatever it took to address these issues, rather than doing it in a whole succession of disjointed efforts.

And so, that's sort of what happened. The Gang of Four became the Gang of Four Plus Two, and the fish started to get rolled in [to NWFP planning process]. We see that in a real big-time way in the aquatic conservation strategy components 02:42:00of the Northwest Forest Plan, which includes the Tier 1 and Tier 2 key watersheds and all this kind of stuff.

SS: Explain the difference between Tier 1 and Tier 2, for the record?

FS: I won't try to do that because I'm not, I am decades removed from it. But a couple general points. The terrestrial people included the owl people, the "owl mafia," and the old-growth people. So, one of the charges, of course, you had to deal with the owl and the veterans of ISC and so forth. Right, they, those people all knew each other and they'd worked together for some years in these high profile - [synthesis studies/reports].

SS: You're talking about the team that Jack Ward Thomas originally led in 1991, called the ISC? [Interagency Scientific Committee]

FS: Yeah. So, there were the owl people, there were also the old-growth people. 02:43:00One of the charges was to have an interactive network of old-growth reserves. Those people had these patchwork maps that showed maps of high-quality owl habitat or high-quality old-growth areas, and they were sort of patchworks which you'd treat in a particular way in geographic information systems. And in the conceptual thinking in the landscape ecology of that day, which was much more advanced in some respects in terms of conservation planning, than for the types of maps and thinking that you saw in the cubby-holes in the pink tower of the aquatic people. All their maps were dominantly these network-structured maps, 02:44:00branching hierarchical networks of stream networks maybe with buffers of different widths shown on them.

Fairly late in the FEMAT process, it was important to think about how are we going to link the terrestrial and the aquatic. And how can we do that with greatest efficiency. For example, are the riparian reserve patches of forest going to count towards the extent of forest cover that the owl people might want to have in Matrix land allocations for dispersal of owls between Late Successional Reserves, for example, for gene flow. And so, how are we going to link the stream and riparian networks with the terrestrial patchwork maps and world views. And in landscape ecology, which was an emerging field, you know, it 02:45:00really was only a decade old or so. At the time of FEMAT, the dominant American book by Forman and Godron on landscape ecology was less than a decade old.

Network thinking was very immature relative to patchwork thinking, and we had not yet as scientists, landscape-ecologist scientists, figured out how to think about that interaction. That was a big "aha" moment for me. I've had a few "aha" moments in my career. In that case, it then led to some decades of science. When I came back and started working with Julia, we enlisted a bunch of grad students 02:46:00to work on network to network, like road-net, stream-net, and network patchwork-like stream network, clear-cut patchwork interactions in terms of movement of exotic plant species into the landscape, movement of floodwaters down through the river systems, and the effects of logging and roads on peak flow generation. The effects of disturbances like the landslides and gullying that occurred in the '96 flood, which we happened to be out there to observe. That was only three years after FEMAT to be out there and see this stuff going on.

Anyway, we enlisted student projects to gain much better understanding of how 02:47:00networks functioned in landscapes and interacted with the patchwork. So, this participation in FEMAT, for me, and seeing the differences in those maps, with this visual representation of this disconnect, was really stimulating and vital, and it influenced the science that I worked on for subsequent decades. It influenced work we did on roads, and then, roads became a big issue when the timber cut went down and the budgets for road maintenance went in the tank. There was a lot of interest then, in how we modify roads to reduce their connectivity with a stream network to reduce the apparent increase in peak flows, flood flows, as influenced by parts of road networks functioning as extensions of the stream network.

These were all things that I was involved with others, especially Julia, and grad students, on these network studies and flooding studies. She was principal author on a bunch of those, that I see just spilling directly out the FEMAT experience.

SS: Would it be fair to say that in taking into account, and realizing the actual 60-90, maybe 100-day period of time, really wasn't enough time to do original field science. But wouldn't you say that it might be fair to characterize that the original, shall we say, "new science" that came out of this process was actually in the synthesis itself, the fact that people were taking whatever they had before and they were synthesizing, so the collaborative 02:49:00aspects, the synthesis aspect was the original science?

FS: Well, there certainly was a lot of synthesis going on and some areas of work were much more mature than others. And yes, it was a very compressed period. And there was no going to the field. We did joke about, that we should really just pile in a van and go out and stand in a creek for a couple hours, and go stand in a clear-cut, and stand in an old-growth stand, and just get back close to the muse, and remind ourselves of what it is we're working on here. Well, we didn't do that.

But it's important to note that there was awareness, it's fair to say people were aware of the shortcomings of our ability to do what we were trying to do, 02:50:00because it was a hell of a big job. Practically no one, very few people, had thought about things in these ways across this scope of processes and organisms, and across the time scales we were asked to be thinking about, population viability for like fifty years. So, that was a big stretch.

On the other hand, there were some components of the plan that had the intent of encouraging continuing learning, adaptive management as a general concept of which had a well-established history at that time, although it's played out, been done differently in different arenas. The ten Adaptive Management Areas 02:51:00were intended to be places to learn about how to do the things put forward in the plan, including things like leaving, fifteen percent live tree canopy retention in the matrix cuts, for example. So, there was the adaptive management aspect of learning, and then there were things like the watershed analysis and having learning with more people across ranger districts and national forests and BLM districts, about how their world worked, and then dropping the management in on that.

So, there was an intent to encourage adaptation and learning along the way. We can ask how successful has that been. And we can see some ways that the ball has 02:52:00been dropped, like funding of Adaptive Management Areas was terminated gradually and fairly early, especially relative to the time scale of the processes.

SS: So, real quick, can I have you go a little bit more into for the record, what exactly is an Adaptive Management Area? What was the intent of creating that zoning system and those designations, and what that meant to be an AMA? What was the intent versus what happened in actuality?

FS: The adaptive management [concept] was put forward by Carl Walters and Buzz Holling and some others, back I believe, in the early '70s. It's probably got deeper roots. Attention to it has waxed and waned over time. But in its sort of 02:53:00formal sense, the idea is that you have large natural resource systems, fisheries, fish stocks, forest operations, for example, in water management systems like that of the Columbia River Basin. It's so big that you can't do replicated experimentation of the standards of an agricultural model with [replicated] treatments and controls and good, simple statistics. And the [studied] world is [being] lived in, and with the benefit of these places and the resources we extract from them.

So, the idea is that you think hard, you make a critical analysis, construct a conceptual model, and hopefully, a computer-simulation model, you address the problem spots, such as salmon passage of dams in up-river or down-river 02:54:00[directions], or both. Then you tweak the system, you adjust your management, and you monitor so you can see the results. You learn things. And you improve your models, go back and have another round of analysis, hypothesis formulation and manipulation, to learn. You monitor, you learn, and so that it's a continuing cyclical phenomenon and a process for dealing with large, complex natural resource systems.

Part of the point is to move from having an approach where there is rigidity, in the words of Buzz Holling, his "buzz" words, and the "Resilience Alliance" thinking, which is an interesting global phenomenon [community of people 02:55:00interested in these matters]. If you don't have an adaptive learning system where you're monitoring, learning, and adjusting, you get locked in, and the [local] communities get locked in and dependent on resource extraction, and the agencies that are doing the resource extracting get focused on efficiency of extraction. The ecosystem that is being tapped for these resources may get simplified, and the social systems and the biophysical systems may get brittle, rigid, inflexible, and vulnerable to disturbance. Maybe it's a big, widespread bark beetle outbreak in the biological or ecological side of the equation. Or maybe it's a spotted owl lawsuit on the social side of the equation. A system is brittle, intricately-dependent, not adaptive. And so, one could pose that as a 02:56:00model that has been described for other systems in the world in places like the book Barriers and Bridges by Gunderson, Holling and Light, Columbia University Press (1995).

We were trying to have an adaptive learning system be one of the outgrowths of the FEMAT process. Hence, an adaptive management chapter in FEMAT, and then, the ten Adaptive Management Areas were designated, distributed geographically to cover some of the biophysical range and congressional districts across the planning area. I believe the Andrews Forest-Willamette National Forest 02:57:00partnership, which was a research-management partnership, was one of the principal models for the Adaptive Management Areas. A second major model was the Applegate AMA [southwest Oregon], which was a community-agency partnership, not much research. The idea was to have these Adaptive Management Areas have research, have the agency, and have communities working together to learn how to do this stuff in this crazy world.

SS: The Applegate's in southern Oregon, correct? [Applegate River Valley]

FS: The Applegate is in southern Oregon. It includes both Forest Service and BLM land. I think it's about 500,000 acres, including mixed-ownership amongst agencies, but also private lands. There's a lot of people living within that area, whereas the Central Cascades Adaptive Management Area, which is about 02:58:00155,000 acres, and the Andrews is about ten percent of it. But there is nobody living inside that AMA, whereas people do live, active people, interested people, inside the Applegate.

SS: Using those two examples, why has the AMA program kind of fizzled out and maybe not done what in its full fruition it would have hopefully done?

FS: The AMA idea, I remember going to a lunch at the Oyster Bar next to the pink tower during FEMAT. I think Jerry and Tom Spies were there, maybe Norm Johnson. Somebody said, and I think it might have been Tom, we were talking about adaptive management as a process. And he said, "Well, in order to really get it 02:59:00to work, maybe we need to assign it to, you know to some scientists, and especially, to some district rangers." And so, they're evaluated on how they perform in managing Adaptive Management Areas. So, there's a real performance obligation.

I think that led to the setup of the ten. The two I mentioned, the Applegate and the Andrews [Central Cascades AMA], these are places that have passion, they had performance, and they were already doing it. The other eight, for the most part, I think of as "arranged marriages," and they didn't have much passion.

SS: In other words, they were put on the landscape, but there wasn't the context or the actors on the ground to necessarily help carry it out?

FS: People were maybe assigned to have done it, but the level of activity was 03:00:00way, way below what was happening at the Andrews and the Applegate. My impression is they just didn't have a critical mass of oomph, dollars, people, spirit. They didn't have this community that took pride in what it was doing, that worked together, and they had worked together for many years. It takes quite a while to get that going. So, budgets tightened, as the timber cut went down for the agencies and as budgets tightened, the AMA's were gradually whittled away and their support of them.

SS: What does that mean? The just weren't used, or they, the multiple uses for them, to borrow an old Forest Service phrase, were not practiced, they just kind 03:01:00of sat, not used in terms of timber cuts or whatever else?

FS: Well, places tried to do what they could with the resources they had. They were judged to be not worthy of the investment given the constrained resources. There were some studies of them by social scientists, which peeved me a little bit, more than a little bit. Sometimes I felt like, "hey," the agencies put more money into the social scientists than the AMAs, and to figure out why it isn't getting done more than they are investing in the getting it done part, the on-the-ground part. There was also concern the rules and the way the rules were being read for what you could do, were constraining the experimental 03:02:00opportunities. How could you prove or demonstrate or explore whether a buffer strip of a certain width was necessary to do the job you wanted to do, if you couldn't create some experimental treatment, impose some experimental treatments that would leave less buffer width?

And so, a fairly big deal was made of that. The thing that bugged me or concerned me was I felt like we never had a conversation that I heard about, are these doing the job they're intended to do? And I've never heard rationale for stopping support of them. It's just the bucks didn't appear in the budget.

SS: How would the Central Cascades and the Applegate compare to these other eight, where, I'm assuming there was activity, stakeholders interested, but could they be considered limited success stories, and/or do they still have enough funding to keep whatever was there going?

FS: I don't have the big picture. And I'm close to the end of my time with this, having been retired five years, and I'm not tracking all that kind of thing, although a lot of this was going on before I retired. My impression is that, on the Andrews front, we were able to get office, regional office money, for quite a while to support AMA sorts of activities. It's still a land allocation, but we 03:04:00weren't being supported under that name.

But right after the Northwest Forest Plan, as it was being enacted and right after it was enacted in the science community, there was a lot of effort, entrepreneurial effort in the science communities, to start new large-scale operational scale field experiments, let's say, of alternative silvicultural practices. We'd worked hard on the clear-cut, broadcast burn, plant to Doug-fir, thin, the old intensive plantation forestry silvicultural systems. Here, with the Northwest Forest Plan, New Forestry, New Perspectives, these various 03:05:00ecosystem management programs, these efforts to find a middle ground between clear-cut and no cut, leaving dead wood, leaving a mix of species, and leaving some live trees; these new forestry practices needed some careful investigation. Many experiments were started, and these were reviewed some years ago by Nathan Pogue and Paul Anderson. But gradually, those have [dwindled], monitoring measurements of those have been discontinued, I believe, just because the budget isn't there.

SS: Is this basically ideas that can be broadly considered to have come out of the New Forestry paradigms, Jerry Franklin's being the most well-known, but a lot of other people are following that lead, and then you were kind of doing tests on the method?

FS: Yeah, yeah.

SS: Okay.

FS: But, that type of work isn't funded much anymore as far as I know. And some of it was done for partial cutting in native forests. The agencies, BLM and Forest Service, are not logging in native forest these days. A lot of it was done in older plantations created by clear-cutting and broadcast burning in the early decades of the post-World War II "Timber Era."

SS: Okay, I want to take you back again. You may have said some of them, but I'll bring it up again. What memorable stories or experiences that you maybe haven't mentioned did you have from the whole Northwest Forest Plan process, 03:07:00going back to when you found out about it, the Pink Tower, knowing a lot of the players involved, any interesting anecdotes or stories, memorable things, humorous or otherwise, political stress and anything that's a colorful story that can really draw a really poignant picture of a particular dynamic or a moment or an event, or a realization process, etc.?

FS: Wow. My impression is that we were just working our asses off. But every now and then I'd sort of come up for air or I'd encounter somebody who would say something and maybe realize that we, this group, large amorphous group, was really involved in something that had some real historic significance. You know, 03:08:00giving a little overview, lunch-bag talk in the lab, and the guy who ran the chem lab just came up and just said, "Thank you so much for doing that. I'm just really wondering what's going on and I just really like hearing about it." So, it wasn't part of his job assignment but, he just was paying attention.

SS: How did that intense process that sucked so much energy out of several agencies, especially the BLM and Forest Service, what did that do to that year, in terms of what had been planned, versus what actually happened?

FS: I can't say. It just trumped, usurped everything. And we just were there 03:09:00working away, pell-mell. Then there was a hell of a lot of communicating that had to occur. I remember the supervisor of the Siskiyou National Forest, where I'd done work as a grad student and beyond, he had Gordon Grant and me come down and go out in the field with some of his staff, right after FEMAT, because I think he was perplexed and sort of angry.

SS: Who was that again?

FS: I don't even remember his name.

SS: Oh, okay.

FS: Anyway, it was just a lot of communicating that was going on. And of all the field tours we did, this wasn't Northwest Forest Plan specific, although it sort 03:10:00of was. We had a trip where we had Mark Hatfield out one day. It wasn't a crowd, it was Mark Hatfield, and it was really an impressive day. I wrote a couple paragraphs about it. I remember we were at the log decomposition experiment site, talking about the importance of long-term research and our sustained commitment to learning. Then, an owl hoots off in the distance. And he [Hatfield] says, "Wow."

SS: On cue?

FS: "I've been working on that bird for years and I've never heard one," he said. He obviously was very impressed. Then we walked down the trail and here 03:11:00was the owl. We heard a couple of additional hoots that did sound like they were getting closer, but I wasn't convinced it wasn't an owl biologist out there hooting himself or hooting with his tape recorder [to "call" birds]. But then here's a spotted owl perched in a small hemlock tree. Obviously, the Senator was transfixed. He said, "I'm a visual learner and this is a really powerful experience."

I mention that story because it represents several things. One is, it is so powerful to be able to communicate out in the forest and let the forest speak, and let our commitment to long-term learning and the managers' commitment to change as we learn new things, be represented by this work that we do that is 03:12:00represented there in the forest. The conversations you can have in the forest are totally different from the conversations you can have in a meeting room or a court room or a classroom. That's one of the reasons for our push to engage the arts and humanities as we've been doing now for fifteen years or so. [H.J Andrews Experimental Forest]

SS: So, what's your take on, you already mentioned Hatfield, but what's your take on the Northwest congressional delegation, Senate and House, and their role in either pushing through this part or blocking this part, and remembering that this is also the same time that the Andrews, got its big appropriation which permitted the modern campus to be built. This was happening at the same time, so 03:13:00kind of address both of those things.

FS: Well, considering the campus, we had visitors like Congressman [Les] Au Coin, and Mike Salsgiver, who was Chief Natural Resource staffer for Hatfield, visit in maybe '91 or something like that. They were there because we were talking about forestry issues. But they picked up on the dilapidated physical plant and that did help get us going on improving the facilities, which are now really great field facilities. But we acquired those in many ways, including an earmark on the congressional budget which was possible then, but also competitive processes in the Forest Service construction world, and also, from 03:14:00the National Science Foundation. So, it wasn't all, you know, being gifted, the monies.

But also, I think having decent facilities shows the commitment of society to long-term learning about these long-term and episodic processes. So, when we bring people there to talk about any issues, including contentious natural resource issues, the facilities themselves are speaking of societal commitment. So, let's see, what was the other part of your question?

SS: Well, just basically, what was the congressional delegation?

FS: Yes, that was really important.

SS: In relation to the forest plan, those issues. Basically, it's related timewise to what I just mentioned regarding the campus and the visits. But if 03:15:00you want to kind of break down your knowledge of Hatfield and Au Coin, and DeFazio [Peter], who was just starting his career, and any other personalities or presences in that world that had an impact on what was going to happen or did happen with the Northwest Forest Plan?

FS: That was extremely crucial that the Andrews had this long history of work on old growth, Eric Forsman's work on the spotted owl, but also all the watershed work, water supply for human use, flood issues, the forestry and landslides, stream ecology, management of plantations; all these many topics. We had an amazing string of visitors, which we have documented to some extent. There were 03:16:00at least three dozen members of Congress and their staff who visited in maybe six, eight, ten different visits over multiple years, and I think secretaries of Interior and Ag came by, and we'd have the state forester [Oregon] and others, because it [Andrews] had a smorgasbord of venues for talking about practically all the major issues. But, we didn't have salmon in the Andrews. We don't. But most of the major issues that were hot.

SS: But you had good facilities for meeting and for gatherings.

FS: So, that gets to something I've talked with you about on other interviews, and that is to work at Mount St. Helens and to work at the Andrews Forest, these 03:17:00are incredible stages for performance and communications. People will come to these places, a bunch. just because they're interesting places and they may have heard about them, or they may have read The Hidden Forest book by Jon Luoma, things like that. The stage is impressive and we've had a lot of good actors, good performers, good storytellers. So these places, they're also places for open discussion.

I remember one time when Lynn Burditt was the district ranger, we decided to have a VIP tour. We'd hoped to make this a regular event, where we invited the dean of the College of Forestry [OSU], the state forester, the head of Oregon BLM, and the [USFS] regional forester [R-6], that is, Oregon and Washington, of 03:18:00the national forest system, invite them to the Andrews for a day-and-a-half or so, a sleep-over. We'd give them a little show-and-tell, but not very much, and then we'd give them time to just interact with one another in that setting. Lynn actually ended up functioning as sort of a moderator for them, a facilitator, and then, they retained her as a facilitator at more meetings at some other places. But that was just sort of a public service, for forestry communicating to society through these forestry leaders in the Northwest.

So anyway, the congressional situation was such that we had members of our own 03:19:00delegation who would show up there. In one case, Peter DeFazio hosted the chair of the Natural Resources Committee that he, DeFazio served on. So, he had them come up to the Andrews. In a way, DeFazio was the host. So, different kinds of things like that were going on.

Then there was a very interesting case where a bunch of staffers from the House Appropriations Committee came out, maybe six or eight people, and we took them up on a ridge in the Hi-15 area where we could look over the Blue River. And we showed them this map that Miles Henstrom of the Willamette National Forest had produced in conjunction with Steve Eubanks, the ranger at Blue River [Ranger District], which showed the current cutting pattern of dispersed-patch cutting 03:20:00of about 25 percent of the area of the Cook and Quentin Creek drainages, and showed the next three decades with continued dispersed cutting, and then the next three decades, with aggregated cutting. And the question was, can we retain interior forest habitat as preferred by spotted owls and other creatures longer in the aggregated cutting system?

So, fragmentation, forest landscape fragmentation, were key words and concepts at that time. And so, we talked about "minimum fragmentation." This was 1988. We could not imagine that the cut level, annual cut level, would change. Hey, it was less than two years later until Judge Dwyer cut it all off. The staffers 03:21:00went back, and in the rider, I think it was Section 3.18 or something like that, 3.16, of the appropriations bill, it said that cutting will proceed on the national forests in the range of the spotted owl, but using minimum fragmentation. I believe this simple one-page scale black-and-white map, looking at the piece of real landscape across the valley, had a powerful influence on that section of that appropriations bill.

So, anyway, I bring that up. You have no idea where your comments and going to go. And if we go out into congressional circles, they may go somewhere that's important. A lot of time they just go into the big soup of ideas, most of which 03:22:00don't emerge to affect the real world.

SS: When the Northwest Forest Plan, well, let's say, when FEMAT got signed off, what do you remember people thought they had just accomplished, and how much did that resemble the final plan? I mean, Alternative 9 became the preferred model, but tell me how the alternatives, options shook out, until here's the plan to Congress and the President?

FS: I think you'll have to talk with Norm and Jerry about that. And for most people who were in FEMAT, I think they were probably like me. What happened with me was, wow, I still have this job going on and this family going on, I've got to go back and pay attention to them, and try to make up for the tensions that 03:23:00were created by this unexpected redirection of energy.

SS: Do you agree that Alternative 9, the preferred option, do you think that it was the best of all the ten options, I believe, there were? They were more early on, 43 or something, and they shook it down to nine or ten. Right?

FS: My guess is that it was the best. It wasn't the "green dream," but I just wasn't operating at that level. That was the level of Jack Thomas and Jerry and Norm and Jim Sedell. They were operating at that level. So, they'd go work for 03:24:00the White House. There were things that were added, like the "survey and manage" requirements for some hundreds of species, including some organisms that hadn't been identified yet as species by the science community.

This was a case that was imposed, I think, as a political call, and ask people like Jerry about that, in an effort to have the plan pass muster with Dwyer. If you made it looking too "squishy" on the environment side, Dwyer might say, "You 03:25:00didn't get there yet," which would prolong the injunction and create all kinds of other issues of political sorts and so forth. So, I'm presuming that option, what option was picked and how it was tweaked, that was going on a couple levels above people like me, and I don't really know what happened.

SS: And of course, Jim Sedell is no longer with us, as he passed away a few years back. But you were close to Jim, and I'm going to ask you a question about him. I would like you to reflect on him, maybe speak a little for him, but I'll ask you again right now. What do you remember Jim telling you about the process, the FEMAT process, the aquatics and the whole thing. What do you remember Jim 03:26:00representing this as being?

FS: Well, you know, I wasn't getting to see Jim very much because he was off and running in these other worlds. And so, it's been very interesting for me in the context of the display at the Special Collections in Archives Research Center at OSU Library where we have a running video of Jim and Jerry dialoging with Bill and Al, Clinton and Gore, in the Summit. And Jim gives a great statement on behalf of fish and rivers. Also, in the context of his memorial services here on 03:27:00campus, and in Washington, D.C. at the National Zoo, some video was played of an interview with him by Mike Furniss and Karen Bennett, in the Andrews Forest. He was sitting in the woods, and was far and away the most articulate I had ever heard him, about his overall motivations for working on rivers. And this was in the context of when he was, I think at that point, he was the Director of Pacific Southwest Research Station of the Forest Service.

So, Jim was really amazing, and he was totally committed to these large social 03:28:00phenomena. He went on to work in the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Plan, and then, many other big-picture activities.

Let's see, what-you had a more general question than just about Jim, didn't you?

SS: Well, I asked about how he characterized that to you?

FS: Yeah, I'm not-

SS: That process? FS: I can't really remember, other than, and I'm not sure who told me about it. Gordie, yeah, I think you should just talk to Gordie, although I don't think, you know, some of it will be Gang of Four Plus Two kind of stuff. But Jerry and Norm. I just don't remember. I'm amazed at how little I remember about it and I think a lot of it is not that I heard things and knew things, and 03:29:00forgot them, but rather that I was just, you know, hunkered in on the activities and scale of things that I was committed to.

It was quite amazing, though, to think of the whole FEMAT phenomenon, one, that our region was such an incredible powerhouse of talent, science talent, that could step up and do this kind of thing. I'm guessing there are whole other countries that don't have anywhere near this level of pretty senior talent across all of these disciplines, who have science roots, and yet they could take 03:30:00on this kind of high-level policy-relevant work and put a package together. A lot of that had to do with the leadership capacity and the synthesis capacity of people like Jack Thomas, Jerry, Jim Sedell, Norm Johnson, and then, a bunch of others at the next level, who have synthetic talents and instincts as well.

Then you look at how people were affected by this experience. It's like Tom Spies goes on and does the large CLAMS future scenarios project, and Stan Gregory, in conjunction with David Hulse, for example, at University of Oregon, large future scenarios projects, that look back at how the Coast Range, in Tom's 03:31:00case, and the whole Willamette River Basin in Stan Gregory, Dave Hulse, Willamette Basin Future's Project, with EPA funding. These are people who either directly experienced in Tom's case, or observed somewhat from a distance because they were academics in the Stan and Dave Hulse case, you know, took on these large futuring projects which there wasn't time to do in FEMAT, but they look back 150 years to how the landscape changed and then project fifty or more years into the future under more conservation, or more development, or under the current planning and current policies, to see how the world will change. I think things like FEMAT taking a detailed look at a big area helped inspire those 03:32:00people to go on and do that kind of work, which I doubt they would have done if FEMAT hadn't occurred.

SS: The original plan twenty years later; what do you think it got right, and what do you think it didn't get so right? Weigh its positive and negatives, both maybe how you thought at the time in your first couple years, when you were reflecting on all these issues, and now, twenty years later?

FS: That's so hard to say because there are important things that aren't dealt with for one reason or another in the Northwest Forest Plan. The intermingled and adjacent private lands. That's one. Two, climate change. Three, the barred 03:33:00owl. Four, how environmentalists would perform, and what they would manage to get done by way of, for example, stopping all logging on native forests.

SS: In other words, no matter what the intent of this was to be, a mitigated, more measured logging industry on federal lands or timber cuts, the kind of excessive use of litigation, just basically, in all places and all times, is what you're talking about? That strategy?

FS: This was continued and effective, from the same point of their objectives, the use of litigation. Then, what is the future of the public lands in the face 03:34:00of declining timber flow, as small as it is, from them. Will it be possible to sustain a land management workforce? Our fire policies, our willingness to invest in fire suppression, our willingness or unwillingness to invest in management that might reduce fuel loads, and of course, that varies hugely in its relevance across the region because of the fire regimes, the forest types and the climate, which are so varied across the region.

So anyway, it's interesting to look at the whole history of federal forest 03:35:00management in this region. A good fifty years, first half of 20th century, where it was mostly stewardship, then about forty years of the "Timber Era," and then now we're in our third decade of whatever it is, the "Biodiversity Era." Given some of these issues, like fire, climate change, limitations of cut level, and fund generation from timber sales, are these setting the stage for that the next cathartic re-imagination of what our relationship with the federal forest lands, are going to be?

SS: Lawsuits were brought by the timber industry based on the Federal Advisory 03:36:00Committee Act, or FACA, because there were non-federal people involved in FEMAT. Describe what you know about that process.

FS: It's interesting. FACA was a topic that I was hearing fairly often in that time period. I don't know anything substantive. I don't have any primary knowledge of what was going on with FACA relative to the FEMAT participants, except that people like Norm Johnson, especially Norm and Jerry, were key people 03:37:00who were academics. But they were both very key, especially Norm, who was special and worked in a capacity to calculate the timber yields under different options. But FACA was an issue in other cases, too, because how can we interact with the public in the context of operating an AMA, for example, things like that.

I haven't heard FACA mentioned in many years, but it did come up there. And it's very interesting to read the sidebars from many different points of view in the Journal of Forestry issue that deals with Northwest Forest Plan. Some of them think, why didn't you include the knowledge base of the most knowledgeable in 03:38:00the timber industry, in these deliberations? As though that would have changed the outcome. I don't think it would have changed the outcome, because Judge Dwyer was going to hold the preferred option, the plan, up against the Clean Water Act, the National Forest Management Act, and the Endangered Species Act. You know, the interests of a bunch of the social interests were not real relevant.

SS: In terms of the Endangered Species Act, northern spotted owl, marbled murrelet, or any other listed species, in this case, or in cases like this, do 03:39:00you believe that in prioritizing biodiversity over the traditional humanistic paradigm, that the ends justify the means, even with the fallout in the short-term, economically and socially?

FS: I believe that the way the laws were written, amazingly in the Nixon administration, apparently forced the hand of Judge Dwyer to accept an option that was very strong on the biodiversity emphasis. It seems like there was a 03:40:00larger societal commitment to that. And my guess is that the public would go along with how the federal forest lands are being treated today, which is very limited logging. The logging that is being done is mainly in thinning plantations. So certainly, there are people that are hurting in small towns, for example. How much would have been occurring anyway due to mechanization and...?

SS: International competition.

FS: Yeah, and Canadian timber and one thing or another. Julia and I went up on 03:41:00top of Carpenter Mountain last Sunday, and I looked out there on the forest land, and I see so little action on such a vast landscape. This is a pretty subtle, now increasingly subtle footprint, of the logging that occurred in the past. Maybe because I spent a couple decades out there being used to logging occurring, I sort of think that with our consumptive habits, we're sitting in a kitchen with all these beautiful wooden cabinets.

SS: Came from somewhere. (Laughs)

FS: I do feel we should be willing to face the consequences of our consumptive habits and not displace them elsewhere in the world. So, personally, I'd like to 03:42:00see the balance point shifted a bit towards more consumption. Now, more natural, you know, more logging.

SS: So, in other words, go back to, the pendulum has perhaps swung a little far in one direction, and the multiple-use needs to prioritize whatever, one of eight main uses that Pinchot and those guys came up with, a little bit more toward the "use" aspect again?

FS: I feel that way. And I feel like I see in literature from the environmentalist community, or I hear second-hand from people who've attended U of O environmental law conferences, this really inflammatory and unrealistic language about what's happening out on the public lands. Where are these people coming from? They didn't move out of the 1980s, or most of them maybe weren't born in the 1980s, or were just born. But anyway, I feel like public perception 03:43:00isn't very realistic.

I did want to say one other thing, to go back to the FACA thing.

SS: Oh, okay.

FS: During that process, and especially late in it and following it, there was a bunch of consternation from the industry, but also from some of the social scientists in the academic world, who were sort of very sympathetic towards the plight of the small, timber-dependent communities. If there had been some industry people and some social scientists who really thought that small communities were being hammered, I could see that we could have easily have had 03:44:00bad chemistry in the process. The time-frame [FEMAT] was short.

SS: If you added environmentalists, that would have really made the soup mucky.

FS: Yeah. The people that were called to be the main players were people who had experience in relevant topics and were used to working in groups, and were not going to be troublesome. So, I don't know that FACA wasn't about facts. But I think back about some of the people who were pissed because they weren't in the room, and I'm thinking, wow, you would have had a hell of a lot of difficulty 03:45:00getting things done.

SS: I'm going to make an analogy, an obvious one borrowed from academe, the Ivory Tower to the pink tower?

FS: Yeah.

SS: Is there a certain separation in that kind of dynamic? Obviously, it's kind of a cheap analogy, but a legitimate one to make. Do you think there's something to be said for that, even though these people had done a lot of their work in the field, and just happened to be together for that period of time? But, do you think there's a certain isolation from things out there that could lead it to be critiqued, aside from the FACA-type dynamic?

FS: Well, that's a very interesting point. And I have not thought about it that way. It would be interesting if you would ask some of the other people.

SS: I will.

FS: My perception is that-the agency scientists might be more used to working in 03:46:00a somewhat constrained environment, or working in a team setting, more than the academics, who have their own specialty and teach their own classes in their own area and have their own labs.

SS: A little more lone-wolfish.

FS: Yeah, and they pride themselves in being that way. This was an extremely unusual phenomenon to be so focused in such a short period of time under such pressure that was so high-profile because you were reporting to the White House, because you were working for the White House, because it involved all of these departments of the executive branch. So, I think there was that element. FACA 03:47:00was not designed to deal with that at all. This was just an unintended consequence with it, probably.

SS: This is just basically-

FS: A good one.

SS: A legal tool they pulled out because they weren't happy with what came out of the process, right?

FS: Oh, definitely. They wanted to overthrow the whole thing.

SS: So, none of the ten options were ones they would have chosen?

FS: Oh, I have no idea. Because there were a lot of people out there who might have considered themselves relevant who had a great variety in points of view. I'm sure a bunch of them were quite dissatisfied with Option [Alternative] 9.

SS: Who do you think was more unhappy with Option 9, environmentalists or timber industries? Let's go on each side of the pendulum potential swing.

FS: I have no idea. I don't know how you would try to determine that here, 22 years later. But, I'm sure there was a fair spread, especially in the environmentalist camp, because there were those who wanted no cut, period. Some of that got interesting play a couple years later when there was an escaped fire somewhere in the Southwest, and the Sierra Club or somebody was pushing for zero cut, even fuel-reduction treatments, and in very "burny" ecosystems. It looked 03:49:00like that, in conjunction with this fire that torched a bunch of communities distributed through some forest land.

SS: And you talking about the Biscuit [Fire] or -- ?

FS: No, it was way down in Southwest. SS: Oh, okay.

FS: Arizona or New Mexico. [500,000 acre fire-Mogollon Rim/White Mtns.]

SS: Oh, one of those. I know the ones you're talking about, as I was there.

FS: It just looked like the no-cut position was insensitive, so they backed off.

SS: Interesting.

FS: So, my point there was that this was sort of an end-type of a fairly broad spectrum of opinions, just within the environmentalist community.

SS: What is survey and manage, and how is that difficult in practice? And how do you think that led to some of the aspects of the forest plan [NWFP] being more 03:50:00difficult to implement than was actually planned for?

FS: Well, others could respond to that better than me, and probably a key person to ask that question of is Marty Raphael, as a wildlife guy. My impression is that in order to deal with different taxa groups, like invertebrates, or even mollusks, amphibians, specialty teams, and these would include academics, would be called in for a day or two run through a process related to viability assessment for their taxon. This was interesting, because here come these people, like the lichen people, "My pet species have never had a high profile 03:51:00before. I mean, it's always been about old growth or the spotted owl. What about my mollusks?" You know, my jumping slugs or something. So, they were so stoked that they got a chance to, if Big Jack's speaking for the owls and Jerry for the old growth and Jim [Sedell] for the salmon, they could speak for their lichens.

So anyway, there was a lot of interest in that. Lists were made of species that were likely to be adversely affected by continued logging of old, native forest. And "survey and manage" had to do with protocol, developing protocols, developing and using protocols for surveying, and managing these species. I think there were three or four hundred that are denizens of native forests. So, 03:52:00there was a hell of a lot of work on that by scientists, to learn more about the creatures so that there was a basis for knowing their range and figuring out how to survey for them. And then, the land managers, who had to go out and be able to do that, either with their own staff, their own "ologists," or with contractors. So, there was just a hell of a lot of work that was involved in that.

SS: Aside from owls and murrelets, the Endangered Species Act, the forest planning acts, the Clean Water Act, these legal paradigms and related things, to you, what are the moral and ethical centers of this whole debate? What is really 03:53:00important that's come out of that in those particular areas?

FS: Well, to me, there are a few principles, key interests. To go out and encounter a 500 or 800-year-old being, the most ancient Doug-firs we find up here in the Cascades, we have to respect them. Leave them. And many of them are in special places, where they may persist many more decades.

SS: Just think. They were seedlings when the Magna Carta was being written, for example.

FS: Right. So, there's that. And the other thing, as a geomorphologist and somebody interested in how the land changes and moves and so forth. The idea that we could go in and sort of treat it in an agricultural fashion in these 03:54:00very steep, and some cases, very unstable landscapes, as though they were corn fields, I think that that's crazy.

SS: In other words, challenging, if not exploding the agricultural agronomic model that held sway before?

FS: Yeah.

SS: Okay.

FS: Then the third thing is about the people? And is it morally justified to do no logging, if we're going to be a consumptive society? And where do you draw the line on that? How much land in wilderness areas are we going to have? How much non-wilderness wildland, how much intensive plantation forestry? That's a 03:55:00question of balance and distribution. And personally, I feel like we need to attend to that thoughtfully, and not just bring in one argument from the poor people of the town Sweet Home, you know. They used to be dependent on so-and-so, and now we've deprived them of that. You have to find ways to imagine a new future.

SS: Retrain them, whatever, have new jobs programs, things like that?

FS: Yeah. Find a new future because we aren't going to go back.

SS: Now, have you been involved in the monitoring and review processes, indirectly or directly?

FS: No.

SS: Now, taking the vantage point you have from your inner sanctum in the Central Cascades with the Andrews as a core, and you told me earlier about being 03:56:00up on Carpenter Mountain and looking at the change in the landscape, or the lack of activity that you saw compared to the first twenty years, how has forest structure and health changed after implementation of the Northwest Forest Plan, specifically looking at that area and maybe the greater McKenzie watershed, even spilling over into the Santiam?

FS: The amount of logging of native forests, from just afterwards to eight or ten years after the Northwest Forest Plan went into place, just stopped. There has been some thinning in plantations, and then the plantations have been growing up, growing back, but they're still out there on the landscape. They 03:57:00have different structure and composition than they would if they were in their pre-logging conditions.

SS: When was the last clear-cut that you remember being relatively close to the Andrews and that greater area, that you saw it actually happen?

FS: Well, there was this Slim Scout Timber Sale in '91 or so, but that had eight trees per acre. [Left in sale area]

SS: That's even before the plan was implemented, yeah.

FS: But after the injunction, so.

SS: So, nothing, really?

FS: You know, I've seen private land clear-cuts, like on the 1501 Road where we take our writers. ["Reflection Plot" in the Long-Term Ecological Reflections program.] That was about a dozen years ago. And then, there are the private land clear-cuts along the lower McKenzie.

SS: Is the Endangered Species Act, the owl, the murrelet, is that the real 03:58:00reason that we are doing these things, or are they more symbolic in a broader, more biodiverse process, than, shall we say when we focus on those charismatic species?

FS: Well, I don't have primary knowledge of that, but I think it-

SS: Your opinion on that, that whole dynamic.

FS: My opinion is that the bulk of the Northwest population, much of it, Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, Eugene, really didn't like having industrial forestry-style management going on in their forest lands.

SS: If you were going to describe a few of the big personalities that you really 03:59:00haven't addressed, how would you describe, for instance, a couple, or you can describe them all, the Gang of Four? How would you describe Jack, Jerry, John, Norm, and their roles?

FS: Well, their roles were huge and their personalities are pretty huge. They're really quite amazing people. They were hugely, they are hugely dedicated. And they were so suitably positioned institutionally, but especially in terms of persona for the roles they played.

SS: Big personalities?

FS: Oh, huge.

SS: Yeah. Did that sometimes lead to conflict within the "Gang," or were they driven by the mission to succeed and work together, do you think?

FS: Well, I think the latter. I don't know about conflicts. I wasn't close 04:00:00enough on the inside. A person like Gordie, maybe Marty, might be able to see that. But my impression is, in several ways and in several communities, including that small one of those four, they knew they were going such a big, important job, no one could take over and they needed to work together and support one another in a collective effort, and that they had quite different roles. And there was plenty of "glory" to go around.

I also think that the events have been interesting on our OSU campus, including 04:01:00thinking widely about the PNW Station people and a bunch of now USGS and other people. Now to cross into the liberal arts, and how the issues that this region has been wrestling with, are so big and diverse on a natural resources front, that there's room for everybody to perform. Although at times people, especially the old forestry people, the old guys in the [OSU] college of forestry, might have wanted to, you know, say, "This is our topic," except they were not, the old forestry guys were not federal forestry people. They were private-land industrial.

SS: How would you characterize, the OSU College of Forestry, and if Jerry told you some things about the University of Washington, the schism in those faculty 04:02:00ranks, and also how they both reacted to the forest plan?

FS: Well, let me complete the thing which I was saying.

SS: Okay.

FS: Which was that the issues were big and exciting, and so multi-faceted, that there was room for everybody to work on it and collaborate. And I think that helped.

SS: Even the traditional forestry guys?

FS: In making connections across campus. I'm thinking across the campus [at OSU in Corvallis]. SS: Okay, sorry.

FS: You know, Julia's over in geoscience, and there are fisheries and wildlife, and ag, the people in zoo and botany, but also philosophy and liberal arts, and creative writing. What was your question that I pushed aside?

SS: Oh, I wanted to know from your perspective, a little closer to the OSU College of Forestry.

FS: Oh, yeah, the old forestry people.

SS: Yet, the old forestry people were, and that battle is still there in one form, but how did they react to this new-fangled thing?

FS: Well, there were people who were really fighting it [fighting New Forestry for the sake of old forestry], like Bill Atkinson, head of the [OSU-COF] Forest Engineering Department, and this is epitomized, nuggetized, in his interactions with Jerry in the book, The Final Forest by William Dietrich, in the chapter, "The Guru." They went head-to-head, as I described previously. But, they [old forestry people] could grumble, and bitch and moan. But there wasn't anything 04:04:00they could do about it. They could make snide remarks, and maybe we were making snide remarks back, I don't know. Some of that was going on, but it didn't really affect people as far as I know.

I did have the impression that up at U of W, the University of Washington, that it was more, it might have been more virulent. And there might have been students who got caught in the cross-fire at times.

SS: Like, your dissertation is on "that topic," therefore, you're of that tribe?

FS: I don't know, and maybe that happened here, I don't know. But, say, I like that person's work, but I don't like their attitude. I would have liked to have had him on my committee, but I don't want to risk having him on my committee, if they're in conflict with my major prof. You know, I don't know if some of that might have gone on. And maybe it happened here, I just don't know. I wasn't in 04:05:00the thick of that.

SS: What's your sense in how this affected interagency dynamics, at least in the region, where you had such an intensive, necessary and legally-mandated, collaborative process? BLM and Forest Service would be the obvious two, but you could even include State of Oregon, and Fish and Wildlife [U.S. and Oregon], and agencies like that.

FS: Well, that was quite an interesting aspect of the whole phenomenon and I don't have much first-hand knowledge of it. SS: But that's why I asked you, for your sense of it?

FS: There was a big push to get agencies to work together and some structures were set up to make that happen. I think there were some forward steps, but 04:06:00also, I think there's been backsliding just as there has been backsliding in the effort to get the planning about management. As I mentioned earlier, we were trying to move it from the project, like timber sale, and the national forest geographic scales, to the watershed and the range of species, more biophysical scales. And I feel like we've backslided from that, as well, and as now national forest plan revisions goes forward and BLM does its own thing independently in western Oregon.

There was a push to get the agencies working better together, but I think they backslid. I don't know what the level of integration and interaction is today, 04:07:00and if it would be any different had there not been FEMAT. In the context of what had been the Central Cascades Adaptive Management Area, we called CCAMP, for Central Cascades Adaptive Management Partnership, that's made an effort to have quarterly or biannual meetings of researchers and BLM and Willamette Forest people across multiple ranger districts. So, there is some talking across department entities. But I don't know what extent is the outcome of there having 04:08:00been FEMAT.

SS: How do you believe that the Northwest Forest Plan has affected forest and natural resource planning in the United States, and how well does that model transfer to other biomes and ecologies?

FS: I don't really know, although you can see in the book, Bioregional Assessments, which was instigated by Sarah Greene and Peg Herring, and then Norm Johnson and me, and that was '95-'96 we were working on that. Well, the book didn't come out until '99 [Island Press]. There was a flurry there in the '80s and early '90s of bioregional assessments and conservation strategies around the 04:09:00U.S. To address different issues like the Everglades, or there was U.S.-Canada-Great Lakes Commission, and the Northern Forest Lands of Maine, and the California gnatcatcher, a bird species in the chaparral in the San Diego area impeding development of high-end homes. Then the Northwest Forest Plan area, the range of the spotted owl, and the Interior Columbia Basin Project, which is the big effort that Jack Thomas and Jim [Sedell] went over and worked on.

So, anyway, I think the Northwest Forest Plan, because of its high-profile and 04:10:00its complexity and it being so pivotal, you know, with the presidential attention and injunction and all that, it was really dramatic and big. I think that may have fueled efforts to do that kind of thing elsewhere.

SS: In other words, other big ideas, expansive?

FS: Regions, big regions.

SS: Right.

FS: Where there were precipitating circumstances. The Interior Columbia Basin one spilled out of the Northwest Forest Plan. Congressionals didn't like it because you're dealing with the Interior West, it was much more Republican-controlled, and they ended up sort of squashing it, although a tremendous amount of very interesting work was done. But it didn't really get to 04:11:00the point of making a conservation strategy.

SS: It's kind of hard to believe Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican. (Laughs) Any other memorable experiences or stories with your involvement with this that you haven't said for the record, anything you want to say that you may have jotted a few notes down here that maybe we haven't covered?

FS: Well, this interview has been interesting for me to reflect on the whole FEMAT and Northwest Forest Plan thing, which could be viewed as sort of a lens through which all these experiences of many people in this region, many scientists, this community I operate in, with all of these various forms of preparation, all sort of went through this lens and this tremendous energy 04:12:00expenditure of the FEMAT process, and then rippled out beyond that, affecting our careers. The kinds of work that gets done, like the future scenarios projects and the science projects, say, related to networks or the syntheses of the bioregional assessment efforts nationally, one manifestation being that book on that topic. And then how the science community was affected, how we were all affected in terms of not going back to the type of science we were doing before, but probably being much more likely to be involved in activities that have a political or policy or social nature and how that interfaces with the science 04:13:00efforts. So, I think that FEMAT and the Northwest Forest Plan period had a big influence on our region and our region's science community.

SS: Anything else you'd like to add?

FS: I think not.

SS: I think we're tied up. Thank you for the long two-session interview, and almost four-and-a-half hours on the record. Thank you very much.