Kelly Burnett Oral History Interview

Kelly Burnett spent the bulk of her career as a research fish ecologist based in the Corvallis Forestry Sciences Laboratory of the Pacific Northwest Research Station. During the Forest Ecosystem Management Team (FEMAT) she served on the aquatics team with Jim Sedell and Gordie Reeves. She begins the oral history recounting her upbringing in Georgia, undergraduate education at the small liberal arts Berry College in that state, and then some experiences that prompted her to move to Oregon in 1983. After a series of temporary jobs on a wide range of topics in a wide variety of places in the Northwest, she found her way to employment with Reeves and Sedell in 1988 and began working on and supervising field crews, just as the Forest Wars were ramping up. Although she primarily had field crew and data management responsibilities, she reports quickly becoming involved in Sedell’s and Reeves’s work in the Gang of Four even as she was starting a PhD program at Oregon State University.

The conversation then returns to her early childhood in Georgia and a daily life of exploring the outdoors – muddy streams and lakes with big snapping turtles – in a pack of contemporaries. She describes gradually getting a sense of environmental degradation and going through high school without much direction until prompted by the prospect of skipping her senior year to go straight to college, thinking she would go into accounting, but was diverted by a biology professor. At Berry College she learned about farming and forestry as well as standard academic topics. Then a stint at Emery University led to field courses in the West, which prompted her move to Oregon where she worked in many parts of the state and at Mount St. Helens, where her views of roles of disturbances in ecosystems were greatly expanded. She also describes influential exposure to systems ecology thinking of Charles Warren, an OSU prof at the time.

Burnett describes her entry to FEMAT as a volunteer to help Jim Sedell in his roles after seeing him on CSPAN in President Clinton’s Forest Summit in April 1993. She reflects on her strong negative impressions of clearcutting and land clearing in Oregon when she first arrived and in the Southeast. She then speaks about learning about key species in the Forest Wars from specialists in Corvallis and how salmon became part of the science-input-to-policy processes culminating in FEMAT, and her experiences in FEMAT “beginning on day two or three.” She describes many tasks she worked on, especially on delineation of streams for spatial databases, and her collaboration with Andrews Forest researchers on the spatial aspects of how forests affect streams, which strongly influenced thinking about widths of buffer strips. She then turns to her own work in the Oregon Coast Range and some of the contrasts with the situation in the Cascades and Siskiyous, including the complexities created by mixed land ownership patterns.

This leads her to comment on the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) options, the all-lands perspective, and the Aquatic Conservation Strategy. Next, she discusses several key elements of the NWFP: Adaptive Management Areas, watershed analysis, ideas behind using site potential trees to set buffer widths, and other issues. This story is flavored with some recollections of interactions among personalities in the project. She discusses the transition from FEMAT through to the NWFP and on to managers who struggled to implement it in the context of complexities imposed by several laws – ESA, NEPA, FACA. She speaks of her beliefs about the attitudes of scientists nvolved in the process of crafting the NWFP and some of the repercussions of that engagement, such as an explosion of research on headwater streams. Burnett asserts that a key factor at the end of the Timber Era was the shift of burden of proof concerning environmental impacts of forestry operations – from prove the treatments will damage the environment to prove that they won’t. Also highly significant were the integration of the terrestrial and the aquatic perspectives and the importance of headwater streams to downstream aquatic ecosystems. She goes on to discuss the National Forest Management Act of 1976 and the short life of watershed analysis (a part of the NWFP) as the agency attempted to implement it and use if in forest planning. She notes that the rise of “-ologists” in the Forest Service was manifest at low levels all the way up to two chiefs: Jack Ward Thomas and Mike Dombeck. The conversation then turns to assessing implementation of the NWFP and its effects, which involved a debate between proponents of competing approaches.

Getting back to the land, Burnett discusses the accomplishment of assembling data on stream networks and habitat over the years after NWFP went into effect; this was foundational for planning and monitoring. Monitoring, she says, is showing that stream habitat conditions for salmon are improving, although the four H’s remain a challenge: harvest, hatcheries, habitat, and hydropower. She gives examples of stream habitat restoration measures, both active and passive, and the use of decision-support systems, functions of large wood in rivers, and aspects of the Survey and Manage system of the NWFP for the aquatic systems. She reiterates many points made earlier in the interview on topics such as shift of burden of proof and importance of headwater streams and taking whole landscape and watershed perspectives. She also raises new issues, such as roles of roads as lingering causes of watershed damage balanced somewhat by the watershed benefits from the decline in the rate of logging on federal lands since the 1980s. On the human impacts side of reduction of harvest levels, she speaks of her empathy for affected individuals, families, and communities. Turning to the human dimension of the workplaces she experienced directly, she speaks at length about being a young woman in male dominated worlds, and the importance of having women’s perspectives when dealing with natural resources issues – in science and in management. Burnett closes the interview with appreciative comments about Gordie Reeves and Jim Sedell and the opportunity to engage with all the activities surrounding the NWFP.