Barbara Bond Oral History Interview, February 19, 2020

SARA KHATIB: Hello. My name is Sara Khatib, and this research is for my master's thesis. The research involves the history of different traditions of science at the Andrews Forest and the philosophical perception of nature that underlie these different traditions. I would like to ask you a few open-ended questions regarding these topics. I expect the duration of the interview to take up to one hour to complete but maybe up to two hours depending on your interest and knowledge. Would you like to participate in this interview?

BARBARA BOND: Yes, I would like to participate. Thank you.

SK: Alright. I want to inform you we can end the interview at any point you wish to do so. Just please inform me right away if you no longer want to participate and the interview will immediately end. Do I have permission to record this interview?

BB: Yes, you have permission.

SK: Alright. Just before we begin, I want to offer a brief summary as to why we are here today. As you know, there is currently a collection of oral histories in the Oregon State University Special Collections and Archives Research Center titled, "Voices of the Forest, Voices of the Mills." That collection consists of stories on people's personal backgrounds and how their journeys have led them to the Andrews Forest. It also consists of stories that illustrate certain political and cultural transitions, such as the transition away from the timber era to the conservation era and the planning for the Pacific Northwest Forest Plan and it discusses the overall culture of LTER. Today we are going to build from that by asking more direct questions about your personal philosophy and practice of science and then scale up to the philosophy and practice of science on the community level. This interview will inform the writing of my master's thesis, where my research questions ask 1) what are the different traditions of 00:02:00science that characterize the Andrews community, and 2) what are the philosophies of nature that underlie these different traditions?

Today I'm here with Dr. Barbara Bond, a former Principal Investigator for the Andrews Experimental Forest, and her expertise is in physiological processes, especially water and carbon relations at whole-tree and forest ecosystem scales. I want to begin, before getting into the questions that I had sent you, let me just try to get both these screens up so I can see you as well. If you can offer a brief summary of your training as a forest ecologist. A little bit of background, since that is not currently present in the oral histories.

BB: Okay. I am going to precede that by just saying after listening to you and your introduction I want to interview you and find out how you got to where you 00:03:00are and I'll do what you need, but I really wish it was the other way around because you really intrigue me. But, okay, so I'll try to keep this brief. I think that a lot of my colleagues who end up in forest ecology grew up in areas in pristine forest and they were drawn to it from childhood. I'm not that person. I grew up in a coastal town in southern California and my only desire was to go to the beach every day and play in the waves and read novels and I was passionate about reading. As a young person, I gravitated especially to mathematics, but also to the sciences, physical sciences, chemistry, even more than biology. Again, I think that is a little different early background than 00:04:00many of my colleagues. I went to college at the University of California Irvine and started out as a math major, because again math was my first love, and after about a year and a half, I noticed that my friends who were studying other subjects were, the way they applied that, especially in biology they were going out in the world and touching and feeling plants and animals, whereas I was sitting indoors with a book. I still loved the math, even more than I loved biology, but I loved the doing of the process that my friends were doing.

I switched majors to biology and kind of split that between ecology, because I loved being outdoors, but frankly, I didn't like the academic side of ecology. 00:05:00Again, probably different from many of my colleagues, because to me it was so descriptive, and I was far more interested in sciences that where I thought there was more fundamental discovery. I moved into genetics at that time. I still love, love, love genetics as a discipline. I ended up, my undergraduate degree, with a focus in both genetics and ecology and I went for initial graduate training, which I didn't finish, to UC Davis where I enrolled in a Ph.D. genetics program in evolutionary genetics, which very much had an ecological component to it.

I was very young: 21, 22 years old, absolutely not mentally prepared for the 00:06:00rigors of a Ph.D., dropped out and this was an era, and I think you probably know enough about history to know that the era of 1968 to mid 1970s was politically traumatic. I dropped out and just kind of wandered around for a while. Ended up a few years later getting teaching certification, because I knew I needed to have a way to employ myself and ended up getting certified to teach secondary school, taught junior high school for a few years, went crazy because I yearned for science again. I finally enrolled in a real graduate program that fit me and I was mature enough to be able to handle it. I think by then I was in my late 20s, early 30s in, ecology at Oregon State University, so I had moved up 00:07:00from California and that was a real revolution to me, to my way of thinking, because I could do the process that I loved, which was being outdoors and wandering around, but also do some really fundamental, more mathematically-oriented, physiologically-oriented, process-level science that also really appealed to me.

I did a master's degree having to do with leaf-level physiology in conifer forests and kind of bounced around after that. I won't give you all the gory details, but ended up just loving the physiology part of it, loving the being outdoors part of it and ended up years later much older than average, I think I 00:08:00was 38 when I started a Ph.D. program in the Department of Forest Science at OSU. Part of what was awesome for me then was getting connected with a set of mentors that respected me. I guess that's the best way to put it. Just as a sidestep, this was also a huge transition of the previous decade of the welcoming-ness of women into this kind of discipline. I was never prevented, as many women older than me were prevented, from going into graduate school. Nobody's ever told me no you can't do this, but nobody never told me yes, we 00:09:00really want you to do this. That's a really different thing. When I started in my Ph.D. program it was in an environment where people said we're really impressed by you. We think you can do well. I never heard that before and I look at my female students now and younger colleagues and I think they just expect to be helped and respected. I was blown away to be respected and it made all the difference to me, truly. I did a Ph.D. in the Department of Forest Science at OSU and had a lot of mentors to help me, particularly Richard Waring who is, I don't know, have you interviewed him? I'm sure he must have done an oral history.

SK: Yeah.

BB: He's a big name in the Andrews. He taught me so many things. I didn't always 00:10:00like him, I have to say. Sometimes he just drove me crazy. But he was an amazing mentor, and I had a lot of other really good mentors at that period of time, too. I went ahead, got a Ph.D. during the time that Dick Waring was very involved with NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and he was not then working at the Andrews at all, but had gravitated using remote sensing using light aircraft to doing remote sensing. I really gravitated to that. I found quite exciting because it was a lot of process-level science. There was a lot of scaling of what we knew about leaf-level physiology into canopy-level, if not global-level, implications, so my early career as a scientist involved a lot of that kind of thinking, in part also because NASA was 00:11:00spending a lot of money supporting ecological science. I think many of us, as scientists, tend to go not just where our hearts are, but also where we can get funding. That's one of the things I always recommended to my students. Your heart can cover a lot of base, so go where you can be supported in your work and remote sensing definitely did that for me.

I also at that time, my Ph.D., another huge mentorship opportunity that meant a lot to me, I did a dual major in Forest Ecology and Plant Physiology. I was required in that dual major to do a course in radio isotopes, which I thought was not going to be useful. That was an era in ecology that, I don't know 00:12:00whether this is something that is part of your world, but stable isotopes were just becoming a really important focus for ecological research and so Dick Waring, my mentor, encouraged me to walk across campus, go to a guy in oceanography who was using stable isotopes to study oceanography and he did a one-on-one tutorial just with me for many months where together we learned how to apply stable isotopes into ecology, which was new then. He asked me to do a little project and so Dick Waring, my major professor and I, decided hey let's just see what's going on with stable isotopes in trees and Dick took me out to eastern Oregon where he took a shotgun, shot a bunch of foliage out of trees and 00:13:00we just for fun decided to look at isotopes in trees of different sizes and it turned out they were dramatically, statistically different. The question of why set us off onto an inquiry that was at the time ground-breaking. I know right now it has become dogma, but at the time it was absolutely not accepted within physiology that the size of an organism could affect how its leaves functioned and the stable isotopes suggested that it did.

I got seriously into that at the same time as I got into remote sensing, was able to get some funding from the National Science Foundation to pursue that. Again, money is everything. I spent, this would be the late '90s, but it's the early part of my Ph.D. career doing some incredibly exciting, what ended up I 00:14:00think groundbreaking research, and at the same time, again, the kind of positive feedback I got from my colleagues saying, wow this is really great, reinforced my sense that I belonged there. When you feel like you belong somewhere you just want to do it more and more and more because it feels so good and you know you can make a difference. I loved that. For several years I supported myself as a scientist, as a soft-money scientist, is that a term you're familiar with? Soft-money scientist means I was still associated with the same department where I got my Ph.D., but I didn't have a formal appointment. I'd finished my Ph.D.

I was there. I wrote some grants. Through those, and they were successful, and I 00:15:00got some money that supported me, and I got an appointment as, I don't know, adjunct professor. I don't even know what I was called at the time, but I kept writing proposals and getting money and doing research and I had very little responsibility other than that because I didn't have a formal appointment. That was a lot of work but a very exciting time. Then a lot of personal changes happened in my life. I was very insecure writing those proposals. A windfall happened to me, that my department head had been asked to directly appoint another man who was in my position directly into a professorial position. My department head knew that he could not possibly get the university to accept 00:16:00that, because, all of a sudden, white males were not the very best thing anymore, and there was a lot of pressure, thank goodness for affirmative action, and so my professor called me in and said what if we at the same time as this man give you a direct appointment to a tenure-track position? I said, yeah [laughs]. I'll take that. This is connected with the Andrews. Part of the expectations that man gave me as a hired, tenure-track professor was to do the lump of research at the Andrews Forest, which I had not been doing. It was my job expectation and I thought, sure. If you're paying me a salary and you want 00:17:00me to do work at the Andrews, I will work at the Andrews. Of course. I had no research questions or anything. It's just yes, of course, there's trees there. I'm working on trees, and I'll figure out something to do.

I'm rambling on too long, Sara. Tell me if you want me to speed this up.

A side story here to going to the Andrews is, and I've been meaning to tell you this later on, but in my opinion one of the more interesting developments at the Andrews was that early on, of course Jerry Franklin was the guy who was just really in charge. I'm sure you're familiar with that. But in the very early years of forming the LTER program, in the early years of IBP, Dick Waring was right there with him, the two of them working very closely together with very different worldviews, and that's your thing, apparently, is worldviews. Dick is 00:18:00very process-oriented, very physiologically oriented. Jerry has always been more structure and characterization, especially of old growth. The two of them philosophically did not always get along, but they did some of, in my opinion, the best science that ever happened at the Andrews together because it brought both of those perspectives together. But as time went on, Jerry stayed at the Andrews. Dick found a lot of other things to go to. By the time I came into the fold with Dick Waring he wasn't associated with the Andrews Forest at all. Although he's a very mature, polite man, and would never say anything negative, it was clear that there was a little bit of good riddance in his mind that he was on to greener pastures and let them do their stuff there. When I, this is 00:19:00like a decade or more after Dick parted to do other things, when I moved back into the Andrews it was a really interesting world for me, because most of the people who were working there were progeny, if you will, of Jerry Franklin, and I was an offspring of Dick Waring with a different view. I was definitely welcomed into the fold, very much so. Nobody said, "Hew, we don't like the way you think you've got to get out of here", but I did have a very strong sense that "these people" [air quotes] did science differently than I had been trained to do science. But, again, they welcomed me in.

I got like $6,000 from Mark Harmon, who was then PI [Andrews LTER grant Principal Investigator], to set up a little project and then I did some other 00:20:00things and those projects scaled up. I think maybe I'm at the end of the prologue, because I've gotten myself into the Andrews. I've told you my background and maybe we're ready to go onto other questions. What do you think?

SK: Yeah, that was really, really good informative information. I just want to follow up on a couple of clarifying points, if I may.

BB: Sure.

SK: Do you mind explaining-I'm aware of the contrasting worldviews of Jerry Franklin and Richard Waring, but in your own words do you mind getting a little bit more in depth in explaining what you mean by structure versus processes? Just explaining that or defining that.

BB: Yeah. I'll try. I don't know if I'm going to get there in a really good way. 00:21:00If I think if you were to ask Dick Waring back in the day when they were working together what characterizes, say, [of] an old growth forest [stand out] to you? He would talk about what the leaf area index is, how much foliage there is per unit ground area, what the photosynthetic ability of that was, what the growth rates were, what the efficiency was per unit sapwood area of leaf area, and where the carbon went, a lot of interest maybe in relating nitrogen composition of foliage to its carbon relations, very much biogeochemical process with a focus on the big autotrophs, the big trees. I think at the time if you were to 00:22:00ask Jerry, even now, and most of his people about old growth forests, or the streams, he would talk about the dead and dying large trees, the processes of fire coming into a forest and how new trees grow after the fire and the processes of a developing forest and what that forest looks like through different age classes and age groups, maybe what the distributions of different species are, maybe relationships between the animals in that forest and how they interact with trees, but it's very much, oh and deadwood on the ground, for 00:23:00sure, very much these are the characteristics, if you're going to go out and touch and feel everything, and especially watch it through time, because he's very time oriented, whereas Dick is far more what's the carbon assimilation per unit ground area per unit leaf area and where does that carbon go and how much nitrogen do you need? Then later on for Dick and me it would be well, if there's a drought, how does that affect that carbon assimilation and the water use and what is the implication to the species composition of the forest because of that? Those are examples, not definitions, but does that help?

SK: Yes. Certainly, it does.

BB: Together, Dick and Jerry published a paper in Science in late '70s, '79 I 00:24:00think, "Characteristics of Old Growth Forests in the Pacific Northwest," or something very much like that. I think that paper is one of the best examples I can think of, of the comingling of two very, very smart people who think really differently but work together. [Waring, R. H.; Franklin, J. F. 1979. Evergreen coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest. Science. 204: 1380-1386]

SK: That was published, was it, in what year 1970-?

BB: I think it was 1979, but I can follow-up and, that in Science.

SK: Great. So then at that this points we can transition to our first section of questions which will focus very much on your personal philosophy and practice, which you touched on a little bit, and we'll get more in depth on that.

BB: Sure.

SK: I want to start with asking you how would you define a forest ecosystem 00:25:00and/or ecosystems in general?

BB: Okay, so first I want to thank you very much for giving me these questions in advance, because if you had asked me that out of the blue I would've wanted so much to give you some amazing, personal definition and I realize I very much like classic definitions of an ecosystem as just the assemblage of all the living things in a set place and that abiotic environment that they're in and there's no set size or physical limits on that. You define that according to your interest. An ecosystem is very real. I'm looking out my window. I live 00:26:00within a south-facing oak forest ecosystem, and I love it very much. It's real. But the concept of ecosystem, like the concept of almost everything in science, is artificial. Whenever, and I know I'm going to get back to this with other things we talk about, we have to define terms, but we can also get so hung up with semantics as we define those terms and that can really get in the way of creative thinking. Anyway, an ecosystem is just a bunch of plants and animals, living things, microorganisms in the abiotic environment that they're sitting in.

SK: That's an interesting point that you bring up, so to clarify-in ways, concepts are tools, right, and they help in terms of communication and finding common grounds for thinking about things but also, they become dogmatic in the sense that we just forget to think outside of them, is that-?

BB: Yes. Or, if I'm looking, it's that old adage about I'm looking at the elephant's foot and you're looking at the elephant's trunk and we have an argument about no, it's like this and there's these thorny nails on it and no, it's like this. It's pliable and it moves around. But it's all those things, right? It does such a disservice to ourselves if we get hung up with how we think differently rather than that, oh well that's interesting, yes, it's all the same thing and I'm just looking at a different part of it.

SK: Great. Thank you. How would you describe the nature of an ecosystem? What are its characteristics, and some examples are is it static? Is it dynamic? Or is there order or is it just pure chaos? Are they very resilient? Are they fragile?

BB: Yes. Yes. Yes. All of the above [laughs]. I don't know how-I can't imagine 00:28:00coming to any other conclusion than all of those things. When I read this at first, again, I have this background in genetics and evolution and in evolution there is a concept of punctuated equilibria that has guided evolution through all of evolutionary history that there are these times of stasis and times of chaos. The greatest change, and often we would call that in reflection, advancement, happens after a period of chaos. Scientists sit within a particular focus of space and time and so we tend to get hung up with their own little bit 00:29:00of space and time but an ecosystem, I we could just sit like in my oak forest or if I could just watch this change over millennia, there would be times of massive chaos and times of great stasis and that's the best I can do. Systems are all of the above and I think scientists who are close to it, sometimes have difficulty explaining to others that a chaotic event is not bad. It's just normal that you can't have a system that doesn't go through chaotic events and then become stable again, but many people are very uncomfortable with that.

It's hard to explain to people who don't do that - that that's okay. It's okay. 00:30:00A total destruction really is okay, if there's renewal. That renewal might not take it back to the same point. It might go to a different point altogether, again using the analogy of evolution, human beings would never be on this planet if whole, massive systems of organisms hadn't died out because of some catastrophe. Does that analogy make sense?

SK: It does. It's interesting because it makes me think about the dialectic between science and culture, and specifically ecology and culture. I feel like culturally we haven't really been, we're not really adept at facing uncertainty and facing change.

BB: That's one of my fundamental, core beliefs. One of my core beliefs is that 00:31:00we all need to be comfortable with uncertainty and the more comfortable you are with uncertainty, the happier you're going to be and the better you're going to be able to live in your world.

SK: That's interesting and it seems like that might be a potential cultural revolution occurring in our outlook on the world. I think that it parallels a lot with science as well and our perceptions of nature. Correct me if I'm wrong, in previous stages in ecology an ecosystem was depicted as a bounded thing.

BB: Yes, sure.

SK: You had an idea of a climax stage, right?

BB: Sure. Yeah. That's an evolution in thinking and scientists who came up with those concepts, it's not wrong, but we had to go through that developmentally in order to come to some different levels of understanding. I agree with you completely.

SK: This term punctuated equilibria-it's about through time there are moments of order, and they shift to moments of chaos and it's this irregular pattern?

BB: Exactly. Again, to me I'm probably more comfortable with the idea even in evolution than I am in ecology. I think ecologists, Fred Swanson in particular, are definitely starting to embrace this sense that massive disturbances happen and that's normal and then there's change and at any one time it might look like things are static, but actually it's just a period of time between disturbance events. Those disturbance events in ecology are analogous to, I guess, what in 00:33:00genetics and evolution we call punctuated equilibria. That punctuation is a disturbance, which often in evolution is mass extinction.

SK: Interesting. This also, I think, ties a lot with the current existential crisis that we're all facing of climate change, the idea that there's not necessarily a return point but [hands gesturing in flowing motion].

BB: Oh yeah. Just to go off on a tangent, since you mentioned that. I personally have a lot of difficulty putting my own thinking down because sometimes I think of climate change just as one of another in a series over billions of years of massive event that was brought on by people on themselves and people may end, 00:34:00human beings may end up suffering from it a lot. But if I put myself in the seed of whatever exists a few billion years from now looking back on it, it will be an interesting little story about how this little species on earth that didn't last all that long destroyed itself. I can't help but think of it in that way, even as I think it's appalling what we're doing to each other in the here and now.

SK: But it's also another chapter in the story.

BB: Yeah. It really is. It really is. Even as I think it's awful, it's also maybe inevitable and normal.

SK: But yet we're not equipped to perceiving change and uncertainty, to tie back to our earlier-

BB: It is so true.

SK: Great. When you were talking about your background, one of the first things 00:35:00that you mentioned was your draw towards mathematics. I'm wondering in terms of that initial early interest early on in life, as well as your interest towards the physiological aspects of ecology, how do you think those interests and your training in those interests influence your theoretical and philosophical approach to science?

BB: Well, obviously, it all gets wrapped up into who I am and what I am. I like discovery. I just really like discovery and I like discovery that is on a pathway to understanding how things work, how things work always intrigues me a 00:36:00lot more, and, so, that's the physiology part of it. I'll go beyond that, rather than just what is there. I think there are a lot of people who love and good for them because we need that, understanding what what's is there and how there changes over time. I'm just really interested, and I think it's innate. I think it's almost like saying having brown hair versus blonde hair. That's not better. It's just different. I like, well how does that work? Huh. That's interesting. When I told you the story about the stable isotopes that was just an observation that came out of needing to do something with stable isotopes and never expecting that anything would really come out of it. Once there were some 00:37:00differences, I can't help but say, "Wow, why?" Those stable isotopes are there or because of some functional differences in the leaves that we were sampling and I just, I'm just drawn to those questions of how does that work? How does that work? Maybe I can draw some analogies. When I was a very small child, I taught myself to knit. I watched old ladies knitting and I got a book, and I got some knitting needles and I just really wanted to know how you could create this thing with these two sticks. Then later my mom had a sewing machine. She didn't like to sew. I don't know if you've ever looked at a sewing machine, but it's just crazy that this needle comes down and this bobbin comes around and it loops 00:38:00and it connect things. I just, I probably was only about 6 or 7 at the time, but wow. How does that work? That kind of thing has always just really driven me. It isn't necessarily the natural world. It often isn't the natural world. It's just, whew how does that work? Even if somebody has a very different opinion than I do about something, I want to know how did you come to that conclusion? I like to know how things work. That's not a philosophy. It's just something innate in me.

SK: Do you mind explaining what you mean by that's not necessarily the natural in terms of like it's not necessarily inherently having these functions or purposes, is that what you mean?

BB: Yeah. I'm not sure. Maybe you could try to rephrase what you just said, and 00:39:00I'll try to listen really hard and get the right wavelength here.

SK: I'll step back a few sentences. You describe the how and why versus the what. The how and why is the analytic and the what is more of the descriptive minded. But then you said the how and why is not necessarily the natural world. So, if you mind explaining that point.

BB: Oh. I didn't say, ah. Good. Thank you. I might have said it's not the natural world, but I didn't mean to say that. I meant that my interest of the how and why apply to the natural world, but they can go into many other realms than just ecological interactions or biological interactions. I'm trying to think of an example.

Again, a good example of something that wouldn't be necessarily ecological would 00:40:00be again somebody coming up with a different opinion than I have and wanting to know please explain to me how you came to that conclusion? I like to know the roots of things. The hows of things. It includes both the natural world and other phenomena that may be outside of what we think of as ecology or biology or nature. I think that sometimes I'm apologetic about this, I'm not as singularly an ecologist as many of my colleagues are. I love ecology, but what I really love is inquiry and I ended up applying that in an ecological context which it was the best career ever. But I think I could have been pretty darn happy doing 00:41:00that in many other areas.

SK: Thank you. Then, what about how this approach or philosophy is applied in practice? For instance, usually the descriptive is equated with a more observational approach.

BB: Yes.

SK: Then analytic is potentially experimental but also modeling has [SK inaudible].

BB: Yes.

SK: How would you describe your style in terms of practice?

BB: Certainly, myself personally, I lean very, very strongly over to the experimental and modeling side of things, no doubt about it. I don't think 00:42:00science as a whole benefits from people just like me. I very strongly feel, and this probably gets back into the Andrews culture that we all desperately need these different ways of thinking in order to come up with a full picture of what's going on. I just don't-back to what I said about Dick and Jerry coming up with that paper. Neither one of them would have done that on their own. They need that cross-fertilization of ideas and it's rare in academia to have an environment that forces the people who think these different ways to get together. Again, I'm not sure I was comfortable at first at the Andrews just because of that, but I'm a died-in-the-wool believer now that that is what it 00:43:00takes to come up with really good, useful science, answering important questions. I didn't exactly answer. Again, I think it's all of the above. No double, I personally lean very, very strongly to the physiological, experimental side. Most of my colleagues when I started out at the Andrews did not, except for those people who were in biogeochemistry. There was a legacy of excellent biogeochemistry research: Phil Sollins, and some others that was experimental and very much functional before I came. There was nobody when I started that was asking questions about the autotrophs of plants that were more functional. I 00:44:00felt alone at first, but it ended up being a very good thing.

SK: I think, too, the really unique aspect of the Andrews as a community is all these diverse [audio cuts in and out].

BB: I think it's true of other LTERs, but maybe I am biased, but I really do think the Andrews has done a better job than most in blending those different ways of thinking and accepting those different ways of thinking. It is a perfect example of diversity; diversity takes so many different kinds of tones. This is diversity in scientific thinking and diversity brings strength. There's just across the board, whether it's cultural or biological or anything, diversity is 00:45:00more likely to cause disruption, but it brings strength. Did I answer that completely?

SK: Yes, certainly. If I could just probe a tiny bit further, too, because correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like the general trend, especially after Waring left, is most people were in the descriptive camp, of the observational camp, right?

BB: That's my sense. Except for the biogeochemistry group.

SK: Right. As somebody who leans towards the experimental, do you mind explaining what draws you towards that and what you feel like the benefits and what makes experimental work, I suppose, and what contribution does it have for your personal, scientific understanding?

BB: Right. Again, I think there is some degree an innate component, like some 00:46:00people have blonde hair and some people have brown hair or blue eyes and brown eyes, and whatever. Some people are male. Some people... there's just something innate. I innately ask how does that work? That's not better than what's here but that's what I do. It's how my mind works. Your question was not that, though. It was, why? Why do I think that way?

SK: Well, what are the benefits of an experimental-what do experimental approaches offer to science as an enterprise?

BB: Well, it's, of course, again, in the context of it's all really important. I don't think one can do good experimental work without a whole lot of fundamental 00:47:00descriptive work to be playing with and to feed into that. In my view, they kind of toggle back and forth. I often in what I do see that the experimental inquiry follows the more descriptive. That's actually not true. It's more that they kind of go back and forth and back and forth. You can't possibly, I don't think, ask good questions for experimental work unless you have a great deal of fundamental understanding of the descriptive aspect of what you're working on, because, again, back to that stabilize isotopic example I gave you. I could never have 00:48:00posed good questions about what ended up hydrologic functional differences as a function of size if I hadn't had that just descriptive, if you will, huh: big trees have a different isotopic composition than little trees do. That's totally descriptive. What the experimental work gives you an opportunity to do is to pose questions about how and determine and to sort out whether your explanation is likely to be true or not. I guess this is part of the philosophy that I love, you never achieve truth. You only approach it. Just as in punctuated 00:49:00equilibrium, the same things happen with truths in science. You go along a certain way, and you believe that certain things are true and then something happens. Oh, my Lord. There's DNA and it can copy itself with each generation it splits itself and it just changes everything. It just changes everything. Experimental approaches give you the opportunity to pose a question and find out whether different possible answers are likely to be true, and it's powerful. It's really powerful, but it doesn't work on its own.

SK: They're inherently linked, then.

BB: Yeah.

SK: To jump down a couple questions and I'll go back because you touched on this 00:50:00so I think it would be good to segue. As a researcher how do you use the scientific method to find truth? Or what would you even define as truth in science?

BB: I found that a fun question. I told you that I used to teach junior high school science. Of course, scientific method is something that you do. I learned a lot about the scientific method or the dogma of scientific method in trying to teach it to junior high school students. I taught them the whole you come up with a hypothesis, you come up with a good test and then you find a-I found out through watching children do this what a big crock it really is unless you're able to take them much more deeply than that. Just posing a hypothesis, like the 00:51:00way it often ends up people follow these set steps of scientific method, and you know you've got to have a hypothesis so your hypothesis basically becomes your best guess at what you think the outcome is going to be of your experiment. So often people do the experiment in their mind first, then they come up with here's what I think the experiment is going to be. That's my hypothesis. Then you're usually right because you design your experiment to show your hypothesis is true. It really looks like you're following the scientific method. I have serious reservations about "the scientific method" [gestures air quotes in sarcastic tone] because I think that it can be applied so poorly and at the same time that method of inquiry which, you know, the philosopher's Karl Popper and whoever else, came up with these ideas and they're very useful, but it's not a 00:52:00one-size-fits-all thing. It depends on what you want to do. It seems to me, and it always has seemed to me since I've been a mature scientist, that what's really important, what's fundamental is the good researchable question. That's what's hard. That's what is really hard is coming up with the really good, answerable questions. Then the scientific method is coming up with elegant ways to attempt to show whether alternate explanations or alternate answers are or not true. Following some rote routine just makes people trip up, but, fundamentally, if you try to come up with a good question, try to come up with potential answers to that question, try to come up with ways to determine which 00:53:00answers are likely to be true or not likely to be true it's a very, very, very powerful thing to do. That appeals to me. That's where my thinking goes.

SK: What about the concept of truth, which you touched on a little bit, in science? What do you think is truth?

BB: Well, that's a lovely question, especially in light of the politics we've had in the last few years and the changing truth. Yeah, I think that in an ideal world a very good scientist knows there's no such thing as absolute truth, but that the greatest goal of your work is to come close to that, but to be willing to change, be willing to say, "I thought this was true and here's evidence, 00:54:00strong evidence, that it's not true and so I'm going to start exploring ways of changing my thinking." It's like that's what you and I were talking about earlier about stability, about uncertainty. Truth, to a degree, is uncertain, but that is very different from posing alternate facts, which is what our previous administration was doing. It's adhering to the truths that the best evidence of the time supports and being absolutely willing to say, that was wrong because the evidence is different. Part of the experimental method, I think, is coming up with evidence to help you change your truth. Does that make sense?

SK: It does. That makes a lot of sense. So, then that kind of requires a degree 00:55:00of flexibility, right?

BB: Of course. You have to be flexible. You have to be flexible about being willing to change your truth, but I think we should be absolutely inflexible about the idea that we need to seek truth. We need to seek truth and to adhere to the truths that the best evidence supports, rather than the truths that are most convenient. That makes me think again of a political thing, of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, like climate change is an inconvenient truth and people are denying that truth because it's really inconvenient. All the evidence points to human-caused climate change. Maybe somebody can come up with some other explanation, and I'm willing to listen to that and I think all good scientists 00:56:00should be willing to hear other evidence. As long as through preponderance of evidence points in some direction, we just have to be willing to accept that no matter how it fits with our other dogmas.

SK: Then your point earlier, too, is interesting, with the way that you described it as similar to the concept of punctuated equilibrium, but also punctuated truths, right?

BB: Yeah. I never had said that before, but I actually really like that. Because if you look at the history of science we've gone through periods of time where we think certain things, well, later on you talk about laws and we had times, the mechanical world where we knew F=ma as always true and then Einstein comes along and wait a minute it's true within this sphere of time and space, but you get out somewhere else and there's something else that takes over. We have to be 00:57:00willing to go, "Whoa that's hard to grasp but it's true."

SK: To continue with that, what are your ideas about, what do you believe that there are laws of nature? What are your ideas about that?

BB: I think I just quickly went into my thinking about that. By the way, I just love this. I love this style of thinking. Thank you so much. I haven't had a conversation like this in a really long time and it's so much fun. I'll go back to what I said earlier about not getting too hung up with a definition, like in science books there's: this is a hypothesis; this is a law; this is a theory and they put definitions on them. I think you get in trouble when you are hard and fast about definitions. But I think there are natural phenomena that we can 00:58:00expect to always happen, always, always, always happen in our sphere of time and space. I think that in physics the mechanics, the mechanics laws in physics are some of the best I can think of. Gravity, for example. You drop something and it's going to fall. It's going to fall at a very predictable rate. That is a good law. But you get out into space-time continuum and curved space and it is different. So, that law isn't an always law. It's just a law that always works for us. I like the notion of laws of nature as long as we qualify that it is within our sphere of time and space. That's not a definition.

SK: What about in the living world? In ecology?

BB: I'm going to answer that, but I just remember something else I wanted to share about laws when you posed that and I was reading it here, and that is that I think the word "law" is unfortunate because outside of science people interpret that the way that we have political laws, like somebody sets this law. If we say there's a law of nature many people's minds go to the fact that there is something that created that law, that there is like a god, maybe, or some conscious entity that set the law.

I do think a lot of people think that way and that creates a lot of misunderstandings between scientists and non-scientists because really that law is there because of the way that matter interacts with itself and how it got 01:00:00started, like at the very origin of the universe, is a really big question but it does. It isn't necessarily because some thing or maybe something did, but I don't think we need to have a conscious being that creates a law for the law to be there. But the public doesn't understand that, or a lot of the public doesn't. That's my little segue.

In biology, sure, yeah, so, if a law, as I was just saying, are things that we can predictably think are always going to happen under a certain set of circumstances sure there are laws. Laws-males and females reproduce. They don't 01:01:00always, any pair of them are not going to reproduce, but offspring happens when males and females comingle. I think that's kind of a law. I'd have to think about putting that together in a better sense. In most circumstances, death happens. There are organisms that don't die, but most organisms do die, and we don't know exactly why and that's something that I was exploring near the end of my career, is the inevitability of death because I think it's fascinating. I think death is pretty much a-it's fuzzy on the corners, but it's a good general law of nature. Things die. I could think of a lot of other ones, but yes there 01:02:00are laws of nature. Change happens. There's a good one. Change will happen. Things may not change right now, but they always will eventually. Yes, there's laws in biology and in ecology. I think we are, in ecology especially, more bounded by general principles rather than laws, that things that usually happen rather than always happen.

SK: That in-between. Would you like to take a 5 to 10-minute break at this point?

BB: I'm good to go on these questions for a while. I'm actually really loving it. I'm really-I told you this is way more fun than I was even anticipating.

SK: Good. I'm glad. Here I'm going to-alright. A couple more questions for this section, to go back: what are your thoughts in regard to objectivity in scientific research?

BB: Right. Again, I just love these questions. I decided that what I think about objectivity is it's similar to a truth, that it is an ideal that we aspire to, but never actually achieve. It's a good goal, but no human being can be totally objective, but we to try to be. I guess that's the best-I guess I would add to that that science works best when we are objective to a point. No, I don't 01:04:00really believe that. Never mind. I don't think I believe that. I think we should try to be objective, but the passions that we bring about the world do inform what we choose to study and the vigor with what we choose to study. That's not objective. That's totally non-objective, like if you just love big old trees, like I do, just love them. That's not objective. I just love them. That's going to make me approach my work with a different level of passion. That's a good non-objective sense, but in terms of the questions we ask that goes back to being willing to change our mind about a truth because we have to stay open to new ideas, which is I guess the part of being objective.

I bungled that, but that's the best I can do.

SK: Then, the next question, which in my opinion is one of the most important questions, what are your overall motivations, like why do this work? Why do science? Is it for curiosity? Is it for real-world solutions? What is the incentive behind it?

BB: Right. That is like saying are you a good person or-I have to be, admit to what I view in myself as a personal feeling. I am much more driven by seeking truths than I am by solving real-world problems. But I wish I were more driven by solving problems. I admire that, but the way I work is that I just like 01:06:00answering questions.

SK: Answers are very important, in my opinion. I also sometimes, like with philosophy, too, a lot of people kind of think what's the point? We have all these issues we need to be addressing. But I think it is all connected, right?

BB: Yeah, it is. It is. Again, I guess it's why we need to have lots of different people working in groups together who are bringing those different kinds of emotions and perspectives. I remember having a huge disagreement with a colleague who maintained that unless a particular scientific endeavor was going to lead to a, she used the term, useful. Useful. Another colleague used the term usable in contrast with useful that science that wasn't useable or useful was 01:07:00not good. I fall back on all of the inquiry that people have done, like Darwin even, that wasn't useful or usable in the moment, and, fundamentally, just changes our perspective on how everything works. I'm not sure I agree with that idea that any inquiry has to be useful or useable in the moment, because we can't anticipate. Nevertheless, there's stupid science to do and there's-and I don't think we always know, but if somebody, well, I can't think of examples of bad science, because it probably could end up good. But I do think there are important questions and non-important questions, and the important questions 01:08:00aren't necessarily improving humankind at the time that they are explored. They're fundamental questions that we should-maybe astronomers are really good at having a handle, they've got that cornered, that figuring out how many planets are there and how fast do they move? Is there life somewhere else? They're just asking these really fundamental questions. The public doesn't seem to have a problem with those questions, but if somebody just wants to know is this species of fish different from that species of fish and is it going to die out for some reason, a lot of the public doesn't like that. I don't know. I'm not answering your question very well.

SK: No, I think you are. There's also, I think, a spectrum, right, between 01:09:00curiosity, or I've heard people term it big science versus applied. I feel like they're connected via a law or something.

BB: So connected. They are so connected. I am more of a basic scientist. Basic scientists really need the applied scientists to take their little things that they come up with and explain it and use it in the world, but the applied science, obviously, you give up basic science or fundamental... it's like in industry having R & D, Research and Development. You can't have a good business without a component of R & D that's going on in developing new ideas for the future. I really do like the notion that basic science often provides the grist for the mill of future applied science.

SK: I think that's really a good answer.

BB: Even if it just explains how evolution, how monarch butterflies turn different colors in industrial England and how and why did that happen and what is the fundamental internal force? That's just basic, fundamental science that just makes our world better, just like a piece of art or a piece of music makes our world better.

SK: That's interesting that-I wasn't going to ask this question at this, but because you brought it up-something recently at the Andrews Forest in the early 2000s was the emergence of the Arts and Humanities Program. What are your thoughts about the presence of Arts and Humanities and the interface between science and Arts and Humanities?

BB: I could hardly be a stronger enthusiast than I am of blending those 01:11:00entities. Before I became involved with the Andrews, I had a really strong sense all my life that good science was a work of art. A really good scientific endeavor or a really good scientific, mathematic proof-I think that's where I first came across that notion-is just like a beautiful painting or a beautiful piece of music. They're just the same. It's a creative, beautiful, intrinsically beautiful endeavor. It's art. It always frustrated me that it was hard for me to communicate with my artist friends how that that beauty was exactly the same to me. A beautiful proof in math is exactly the same as a beautiful painting or a beautiful composition.

In the blending of arts and sciences in the Andrews, that's not the take quite that they have on it, but that's okay. I think it's more using the arts as a way of viewing the world that views from a perspective that's different from our scientific inquiry. The first application of that or fundamental application which is to have, especially people who are writers, but also visual artists, come in periodically to the same place over and over and over again and write pieces from their own disciplinary perspective over time. That is an incredibly valuable way of pursuing the world, of observing the world. I love it. I just love it. I love it that artists and scientists cohabitate, if you will, at the 01:13:00Andrews and talk with each other and brush elbows together and they speak to each other. I don't think we quite yet have a common language. I think we all have a common ability to perceive the beauty of the forest and just appreciation of each other for our differences. But I don't think, for example, that I could show a poet a really beautiful scientific proof and get that person to sense the beauty the way that I sense that beauty. I wish it was possible to do that. I don't think right now it is. Maybe that's an evolutionary process in people that we'll get to eventually. Likewise, I don't think I can quite grasp some of the beauty of the poetry the way the poet can. I can appreciate it. But I don't 01:14:00think I quite grasp the really deep beauty. Nevertheless, I trust it's exactly that same internal feeling that just goes oh, that's so gorgeous.

SK: That's awesome. It's kind of, too, just like you say that they're both similar in the sense that you're taking the world in and then experience it and interpreting it and then producing a product, right?

BB: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. They're both, and I think in both worlds we have this very human sense that what I call the aha discovery moment that in any kind of discipline, and it's a very personal sense. I'm sure a brain scientist could say, well that's your endorphins just going crazy in your brain. But we hit something in our discipline that makes that little explosion of those brain 01:15:00chemicals go and it just feels so good because we see something that's different than what we saw before. That is, you asked about motivations, that's a huge motivator in science that you get that, to draw another analogy-long distance runners run because those endorphins come in and they love that. I think scientists get those moments where they get this like wow! This works! It feels so good!

SK: That's awesome. Okay, so then, from here, I want to transition into the next section in which there's going to be quite a bit of overlap, but the focus will be more towards the community level at the Andrews.

BB: Yes. That's good and so I want to share a disclaimer at the beginning of this that I have a brain impediment with names. When we get to the point of 01:16:00community and names of people, and this is not just being older, but it's partially that, even when I was the lead PI of the Andrews, I was working with an assistant who's still there. She's amazing: Lina DiGregorio. I don't know if you've met her. She learned whenever we got around people to be my break and always say, so-and-so it's so good to see you! Because I just don't remember names of people. I'll do the best I can.

SK: Sounds good. Alrighty. What role does natural history play in the Andrews Experimental Forest?

BB: I'm not a natural historian myself. I can't imagine functioning in a 01:17:00community like the Andrews without a lot of really good natural historians. We rely on them for the basic observations of the world that a lot of experimental scientists can be so caught up with their own little stuff they're working on they don't necessarily see. In my case, I have not gravitated to the natural history in part because I just don't remember names of things. I can, oh yeah, there's the that over there, but a natural historian typically names things. Just by naming you remember what's where and the naming of things, I think we all know that from primitive cultures, is massively important in getting a 01:18:00connection with things. Darwin was a natural historian and through his just massive observations and naming things came up with a lot. He kind of spanned across a lot of ways of thinking, but natural history just as applied science, just as the arts are an important part of the community. You can't have that solid community without those different components.

SK: I like that point too that you made in that in the process of naming things we become acquainted with it and then we establish fluency with it.

BB: Yes, and so the natural historian then can introduce me as a non-natural historian here let me introduce you to so-and-so. Hi, so-and-so, nice to meet you. I wouldn't necessarily meet so-and-so and name so-and-so on my own.

SK: What about observational approaches? What role do they play at the Andrews Experimental Forest? What do they offer?

BB: You're right. This is kind of ground we've sort of already covered. We can't formulate those really good experimental questions without a lot of observational background that brings strength to the question. Otherwise, they're flimsy questions. You got to have them. That's fundamental to Andrews more than most kinds of research because it is set up to be observational over time.

That's also, I think, one of the biggest tensions of work like the Andrews. So 01:20:00much money is going into those observations. It really does come down to economics. At what point, what is the best balance between putting your resources into continuous observations versus doing, answering questions with those observations? I don't have a good answer for that, but I want to share with you, because it came to me while I read your questions, one of the mistakes I made as a PI that I am most unhappy with myself about. That is that when I was coming up with a budget for LTER-6, we called it, I ended up not funding an observational line of research involving insects. We just couldn't afford to do that with some of the other cool things we wanted to do. I let that go and I let 01:21:00the researcher who had been doing that stop those and that work involved just observations at the same place, going back monitoring what insects were there, how they were changing. Then, about 3 years ago, there was this awareness that started to grow, maybe a little more, that worldwide we are having a massive population crash in insects all over the world. That's exactly what the Andrews is designed to be able to look at. Is that happening here? Are we seeing a crash in insect species here? I contacted the guy who had been doing that research, and I said, you know, I think you have a perfect NSF proposal here. You could probably get a whole lot of money to explore whether or not this global crash in insect species is happening here. He said, "Yeah, but you cut off my funding." It's true. I did. I did. I feel so bad about that. That just is in illustration 01:22:00of that conflict between, if you put all your eggs in the observational side, you're not doing the experimental side and answering questions. You need a balance and that balance itself is dynamic, and I didn't do it perfectly and I don't think anybody does. I don't think, you know, looking toward the future what that balance is.

SK: Right. That's interesting. Thank you for sharing that story. Then, what has hypothesis-driven, and experimental research offered to the Andrews Forest?

BB: Right up there is one of the components that you need to have. Again, that's my orientation and my bias without a group to just kind of drive things only 01:23:00that way. I'll share with you an experience I had as a reviewer of LTER proposals. This is probably a decade ago. I was one of the people that was selected by the National Science Foundation to read proposals by other LTER programs and decide who should be funded and who shouldn't and why. About half of us as reviewers were LTER scientists. The other half were people who were ecologists doing other kinds of research. One of those other people was a very well-known woman ecologist, excellent work. She said, of course, we all know money is really hard to get in science and she said why should we be funding research in LTERs that isn't as good and doesn't pose as exciting questions as 01:24:00other researchers are doing outside of the LTER? We should not be maintaining LTER just because it's always been there and continue it, because they've got these measurements. LTER scientists need to justify each time they do a proposal why this is important. Well, some LTER scientists say it's important because some day this legacy of information is going to be really useful. That's very dissatisfying to experimentalists who are competing for that same pot of money. Again, I don't have an answer of what the right balance is.

But I know that an LTER group that only does measurements just in case this is going to be useful for the future is not meeting its obligation, one that just took all of its budget to do experimental science and gave up that legacy and 01:25:00that ongoing measurements wouldn't be useful either. The really hard thing as the lead PI is to do both, is to find some theme, some way of justifying your continuing just measurement for measurement's sake, and yet pose some overlying, overarching experimental question on top of that that in the next 6 years, yes, we are going to do experimental work. The justification for the ongoing measurements is not just for this 6 years of experimental work. It's for the future. But if we don't use it in the here and now, we're not living up to our obligation to our fellow scientists to do good science in the here and now. It's just really the same answer I've given to everything else: yeah, we need it all, but maybe with a few examples of why it's all important.

SK: And putting it in context as well. So, one that we haven't talked much about but it's the last question in this section, is both ecosystem modeling and modeling in general. What are your thoughts on modeling and has modeling contributed to the Andrews Experimental Forest and to ecology in general and if so, how?

BB: Right. Well, let me just start by saying I perceive, and this is artificial as a separation, but there are two fundamentally different kinds of modeling. One is something I lean to more, which is more process-level modeling which is a model that takes individual little components of a larger process and puts them together into something that attempts to simulate the underlying forces and 01:27:00processes that go on in a phenomenon. The other is a type of modeling that takes a lot of measurements of historical change in many different places and attempts to recapitulate that. A classic example would be growth and yield curves for forest productivity and to say in this kind of site with this kind of climate here is the change in productivity that we expect with this kind of tree based on past measurements, but there's no process involved. It's just putting together lots and lots and lots of observations into this is what's normal and here are the statistical boundaries around what we observe. It's observation versus experimental.

My own experience is with the process-level modeling far more, so that's what 01:28:00I'm going to restrict this to, and I think that process-level modeling has been probably, well, that's going out on a limb here, but probably more important than any other approach we have taken in ecology in the past couple of decades. It's just unbelievably important to do that because it is only through process level ecology that we can predict what might happen in the future with change and we can't do an experiment on the kind of scale we'd like it. People do experiments of testing, say, like a tree or a few trees and adding CO2 or changing the temperature and saying what are you going to do to trees. That's absolutely fundamentally different than what happens over a biome or even on a 01:29:00global level, if things change. We can't do that experiment and the only way to do those experiments is through process models. I think my own field of physiological ecology is one of the very best examples of how models have transformed thinking. Very, very best physiological ecologists that I knew when I started would be the folks at Stanford: Hal Mooney and a few others that were studying especially desert plants initially and how do they work and how do they function? As that group at Stanford moved from the '80s maybe into the '90s, and then certainly into the next decade, they started to take the little processes that they understood from individual plants and scaled up.

Now most of those graduate students that had studied with those people are doing 01:30:00global models using a lot of the same fundamental processes that we thought we understood from the 1980s, and they are part of the many, many, many teams across the world who are trying to predict what happens under different scenarios of climate change. Is this as usual? Or CO2 changing by this much or temperature changing by that much? It's gotten way more complex because oceanographic scientists and atmospheric scientists and others have gotten involved, but I can't think of anything that's happened in ecosystem ecology that's more important than that change to be able to predict what's happening and it's only through models. What we've learned is that no model is right. Everyone is wrong, but you can start to achieve some consensus by doing multiple 01:31:00modeling and see what 15 different models predict and then you take the average of those and make a model so that the way that the thinking is going is truly amazing. It's out of my grasp. I don't do that sort of thing, but I think it is more important than anything else we're doing.

SK: Pardon me, because I don't have much knowledge of this topic myself, but I'm just curious, with the historical modeling you said a lot of that is propped up by observational data, right, and historical data? What goes into the process of developing a process-level modeling in simple terms, if you can?

BB: Yeah. That's a really good question. In answering that I will tell you that I learned more about physiology of plants by reading the code that someone else 01:32:00had written for a process-level model of how a tree goes and assimilates carbon and uses water than I ever did any other way. It was one of those aha moments. Oh, my God, it really is all connected, and this is how it works! This is so cool! Of course, all of the little pieces were wrong. Your question wasn't quite that. It was how do you go about it. I think you start to go about it based on the little bits that you know and some of the first physiological models that I know, and this would be, so one of Dick's students, Steve-I told you I don't do names, Steve [Running] at Montana who has retired recently, started at the same level of thinking that I would start at of this is how photosynthesis works under these temperatures and this amount of light and we can predict for each 01:33:00leaf how much carbon it brings in. You have this little set of codes: here's the temperature. Here's the light capture. Here's the sunlight. Here's the sun angle. You produce carbon. Then you need something, okay, how is carbon distributed within that tree? Then you need to have somebody else's experiment, and these process-level modelers are reading experimentalist's papers to understand what are the fluxes of carbon and what governs them. Then you put that in. Somebody else is, yeah, but this leaf is not receiving the same light as that leaf, and then there's a whole other discipline of how the physical characteristic of leaf display within a tree affects the shading and the partial shading and then you realize, but, no, this model's now getting too complex because we can't model every single individual leaf. You start to say, well, on 01:34:00average, then there's...and it's just this trial and error of bringing in these little components that are always wrong, always an approximation to what the real world is doing that started out really, really simple back probably in the 1970s or so, and ultimately got more and more complex of bringing in, well, let's not just look at individual trees, let's look at the whole forest. Because what this tree does isn't nearly as important. A lot of people started worrying about light distribution through a canopy and how individual trees will die as they grow and get shaded. Then the biogeochemistry starts to come in. Yeah, but, when the leaves fall, how do they decompose and what's the timespan of that and what are the moisture requirements or whatever else.

Biogeochemistry really early got built into some of those process level models. As people started thinking more globally, they started thinking about atmospheric processes of, oh, just say, like if a forest is cut 20 miles away, this is an over-simple example, it's going to affect the way clouds are bringing moisture to this forest. There's more moisture that's coming here if it's not falling over there. The atmosphere component starts bringing in. That's why the modeling becomes ultimately, in many cases, so multidisciplinary, and it's always wrong. It's always an approximation. But it's always getting better.

SK: The model itself is dependent on a process of trying to tweak.

BB: Yeah, the model is a way, well, the ones I like, are ways of putting 01:36:00together understandings of multiple disciplines into a simulated whole that nobody can do on their own.

SK: Great. I have just a couple of concluding questions.

BB: Okay.

SK: What significant ideas have emerged from the Andrews science community and how did these science ideas evolve in terms of both questions and methods?

BB: Yeah. I think that most of the really significant [ideas] that came out of the Andrews preceded my joining that group. There's a lot of really good stuff that goes on right now, but the really fundamental understanding of structure and function of old-growth forests, of how watersheds work, of understanding 01:37:00some of the early experiments, even before the LTER program, of harvesting trees in watersheds and seeing how the watershed responded, both in terms of the chemistry as well as the water and the temperature, so that, in addition to understanding how watersheds work, it set a precedent for watershed-scale research that wasn't only at the Andrews, but the Andrews was one of the very first places where, and Hubbard Brook as well, where that kind of scale of ecological thinking started to go on.

The IBP [International Biological Program], the contribution, again before the LTER program, the thinking about how different biomes come to be and where they 01:38:00are and how they function differently. It's huge. It's just huge and we just accept it now as dogma. It's just huge what that group did. Obviously, the spotted owl and other organisms that, and functions, that are part of old growth. I don't think anybody had an idea that different developmental stages of forest were so important to animals before then. The fundamental biology is just how the growth stage of the forest and the biota within it go together. The implications to forest management are unbelievably huge, as well as cultural perceptions about science. I'm sure you're into that. I'm sure lots and lots of 01:39:00other people have shared with you extraordinarily important things that came out of the Andrews at that time. I came to the Andrews in the late '90s and became lead PI in the early 2000s. I would say that the true breakthrough wow research during my time and subsequently in ecosystems hasn't approached what it was then. What has happened at the Andrews is more setting a precedent for, again, this multidisciplinary conversation that I don't believe has quite produced the aha moment yet. I'd like to trust that it will. The blending of the arts and the scientists I'd like to trust that it will. I think that all that is happening 01:40:00now - maybe like Darwin going out and looking at the different animals in the Galapagos and noticing their similarities and differences. It's observational, and the real product of that, I hope, is yet to come.

SK: Time will tell. Great. My final question is what do you see as the main principles and motivating forces that drive the Andrews as a community?

BB: That drives science in general? Let me see how you actually wrote them. Yeah, I didn't attempt to take notes on that because they're not always pretty. Scientists in general are driven by a pretty 50-50 combination of money and 01:41:00opportunity versus basic desire for inquiry. What keeps the Andrews going as a community without a doubt is the fact that there's money there as long as the National Science Foundation supports with money and even more so as long as Oregon State University and U of O and other institutions give atta boy, atta girl [verbal support] for participating people will be there. I think that's huge. That's at least half of it. I think a lot of people love, love, love, love, as I did, the chance to have conversations like you and I are having, although I think our conversation is even better, but the monthly meetings at the Andrews Forest are analogous to what any academic department does of having 01:42:00seminars, but they're very different because they're drawing people from all over campus who do different things. We share different perspectives. If you like that diversity, and a lot of us do, it's a really lovely thing to be involved with. It just feels good.

SK: Right. Thank you.

BB: I think there was something else that I wanted to share that I wanted to get back with. We talked about briefly about scientific questions, about coming up with good questions. I didn't explore that completely the way I wanted to with you, which is my sense that it's like the adage it takes a community to raise a child. It also takes a community to help refine really good questions. The way I approached science for most of my career, I had this notion of what I call back 01:43:00pocket ideas. I very rarely would pursue a scientific question or even write a proposal until it sat in my back pocket and aged for a while. By aging, that means that periodically I'd pull out that question, when I'm especially in a group of other people that I really trust and love and love talking to. Most of us as scientists get this community of, I mean it's just a really feel-good community of folks that we think are really smart and think differently than we do, and my favorite part of being a scientist was what I thought of as sitting around a table with other really smart people and pulling an idea out of my back pocket and say, "Hey guys, I've been pondering this. What do you think about this?" My group of people were folks I knew that I could trust and weren't going 01:44:00to steal the idea and take it somewhere else and we could just sit around, maybe that table was actually a campfire, and we were passing a bottle of wine around or maybe we were in a meeting somewhere and having dinner, but it's the same idea. You're sitting around-it's the best part of science-being able to come to the table with a bunch of really smart people and having them accept that you are one of them and you can share your ideas and they help you massage them. I think it's better than anything. The good feelings it gives you is unbelievable.

SK: That's great. Thank you so much. Before we conclude, are there any other final thoughts that you want to contribute?

BB: I know I'm going to think of a bunch of them after we close. But I really want to hear your story.

SK: Alright, so let's see here. I'm going to finish that. Let's see here. This 01:45:00interview will be deposited with the Oregon State University Library Special Collections and Archives Research Center for preservation and access. SCARC's commitment to open access includes the release of contextualized interview content online, the recordings of the data will include personal identifiable information, such as the video and the audio recordings. I will not modify the recordings, for instance publish, republish or adapt, but deposit them as-is. The interviews are deposited upon the request of members in your community to maintain a record of the history and practice of science within the Andrews Forest community. Are you willing for this interview and its derivatives, including a transcript and an interview transcript to be made available online?

BB: Yes. I am.

SK: Once the interviews are deposited into OSU archives they will be posited 01:46:00there indefinitely. The release of this data will be revocable, however, upon request.

BB: Okay.

SK: Right. Okay.

BB: Good.

SK: Great.