Fred Swanson Oral History Interview, November 1, 2013

Samuel Schmieding: Hello, this is Dr. Samuel J. Schmieding, Historian and Courtesy Faculty in the Forest Ecosystems and Society Department in the College of Forestry, Oregon State University. It is November 1, 2013, and I am in the Corvallis home of Dr. Fred Swanson, Emeritus Scientist, U.S. Forest Service, well-known geologist and ecosystem scientist, and long-time associate of the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, the famous ecological research site in the Western Oregon Cascades that is part of the National Science Foundation's Long-Term Ecological Research [LTER] system. This oral history interview is one of many such interviews that will take place with past and present researchers, administrators, land managers, policymakers and residents of the region near the Andrews Forest, one component of a broader history project focused on the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, the LTER system, ecosystem science, as well as environmental and scientific issues in general. Today we will be talking about a 00:01:00wide range of subjects that involve the Andrews Forest, Dr. Swanson, and his more than 40-year involvement with the institution. I want to thank you, Dr. Swanson, for taking time to meet me today. How are you this morning?

Fred Swanson: Good.

SS: All right, excellent. I always like to start these interviews with interviewees telling me where they were born and raised, or simply asking for a biographical sketch on their terms, however you wish to express it.

FS: Okay, I was born in 1943 in Wilmington, Delaware. And shortly thereafter, my family moved to the little town of Bon Air outside of Richmond, Virginia. I grew up there through fourth grade, and then we moved back to Wilmington, Delaware, where I did my schooling and growing up until I went off to college as an 00:02:00undergrad for four years at Penn State. And then I moved west and worked for the Geological Survey at Menlo Park, California, for a year before going to grad school at the University of Oregon.

SS: What was your childhood like back East, especially in relation to the natural world?

FS: Well, in Bon Air, with me as a little boy through fourth grade, we lived out in the country. I remember my mother telling me one day that we lived in a village. That stuck with me. And I had one friend there, a guy named Wendell Gaddis. We liked to roam around in the fields and woods near where we lived. And there were fields and woods, and places that had been abandoned farms. I remember some of the kinds of things we'd do like collecting box turtles and fishing in little creeks, and paying attention to snakes and things like that. So, I did have some connection with the natural world.

SS: And that would have been grade school age, correct?

FS: Yes.

SS: Right. And how would you characterize the ecosystem of your first hands-on experience with the natural world, now that you're well-versed in the science of that. But how would you express it today about the areas that you were playing in as a child?

FS: Well, I think that they probably experienced a conversion from forest to low-grade agriculture perhaps in the 19th century, or maybe earlier. But there wasn't active agriculture there. It was a landscape that had forests and streams. And so, but it wasn't big and wild forest. There were a few big trees. I remember my father, who had grown up in northern Michigan, was very attentive to trees, liked trees. I remember when some plumbers had used the crotch of a tree to help bend a pipe and sort of damaged the tree, and my father gave the tree some first-aid. So, there was an element of the natural world where we lived, but it wasn't a wild landscape such as we have examples of out here in the West.

SS: Now, how and when did you become interested in science or natural history? When did the childhood wonderment aspect change to something more, shall we say, intellectual?

FS: Well, I remember fishing with my father who was an avid fly fisherman, although we lived in places where fly fishing wasn't very available -- like the Mid-Atlantic states. So, he'd try to do that on vacation time. So that was one form of interaction with the natural world that I saw exhibited within my own family. But also, I began collecting rocks and that was because on both my father's side in northern Michigan and my mother's side of the family in Janesville, Wisconsin, rocks and geology were an important part of the local landscape. My father grew up in Ishpeming, Michigan, which was a mining town. And so, when we would go up there, I remember him taking me to visit neighbors who had amazing rock collections. Often, they were dominated by ore samples and crystals and things that would be discovered associated with the geology of that landscape, including what was available from mine tailings and things of that nature. I remember going rock-hounding with my dad at old mining sites. And then on my mother's side, her father was one of the people that ran the Janesville Sand & Gravel Company. Southern Wisconsin, which was a glacial outwash, is composed of sands and gravels. So, Janesville Sand & Gravel had these large open-pit gravel extraction processes going on, and at times they were shipping 100 train cars of gravel down to construct O'Hare Airport in Chicago per day, and during the Depression, there were stories of these guys having to load train cars with individual wheelbarrows and pushing them up planks. So that was a glacial outwash, and every now and then they'd find a Mastodon tusk, and I remember in the office of the company, there was a big fragment of a Mastodon tusk. And I remember my grandfather breaking off a chunk of that so I could take it home and put in my rock collection. So, I was getting some nature exposure, but not in a real "sciencey" sense. My science training in high school, I didn't come away with a whole lot that I can really put my finger on. I got some exposure to biology, certainly, no geology.

SS: So, going back to a little more philosophical question or area. What were your views on nature and the environment? You know, loaded words today with the cultural context, but how would you view nature and the environment when you were small? I mean, as you can best reconstruct how you might have seen it through the eyes of a child.

FS: Well, I remember enjoying being outside, and just exploring and playing outside. And I don't remember when I first heard the word ecology but I'm sure it was not, I don't think I ever heard it in my childhood. Partly, as a matter of the times and the circles that I was traveling in. Exposures occurred through things like fishing and just hanging out and wanting to build forts out of the scrubby woods and things of this nature.

SS: Now, you already described the ecology of, was it Delaware? Correct?

FS: Virginia and Delaware.

SS: Virginia and Delaware. Now, how would you describe its aesthetic?

FS: Well, the switch from Virginia, which was a sort of, had a rural feel to it, but it was gradually being developed.

SS: Was this the Piedmont area of Virginia?

FS: Yeah. SS: Okay.

FS: And in Delaware, when we moved to Delaware, then we moved into a more upscale suburban setting in northern Delaware. We were only about five miles from the Pennsylvania line, which was also the Mason-Dixon Line. And so, I do have recollections of being in the South and sensing that. But our yard, which is a pretty big lot, had some big, old trees in it. I had to rake the leaves and mow the scrubby lawn that my father struggled to maintain under the canopy of these rather large beech and oak trees. And it was interesting to me many years later, to hear from a Japanese friend, a guy who was spending a year in our group, and we've had quite a few visitors with extended visits, visitors from Japan in our research group. Well, this guy, Shigyo Kobayashi and his wife, went and were traveling around in the East and visited my parents, who were very happy to entertain them. And when he came back to Corvallis, he said, "Now, I see, you grew up in an old-growth forest." I certainly had never perceived it that way. And in some ways it was true, but it certainly wasn't a forest, it was a suburban landscape. But we did have creeks nearby, but they were polluted and we avoided them.

SS: This, of course, was pre-environmental age, so whatever was close to industry in those days, was close to industry [Pollution-point sources].

FS: Yeah. In this case, their streams were small and industry wasn't polluting those streams immediately, but there were probably poor septic systems and things of that kind.

SS: Exactly. Rural county area, yeah.

FS: One thing, in high school, I was very serious about running, cross-country running and track running. And I really loved running in the fall and running in the parks and other places where we would train or compete, and crunching through the leaves. And just the smells and the sounds and the colors, they're something I really appreciated.

SS: Now, how would you compare what you've described so far in Delaware and Virginia mostly, also a little bit filtered through your family in Michigan and Wisconsin, how would you compare the ecology and the aesthetic to the Pacific Northwest? If you were going to make a sketch of that in a comparison sense.

FS: Well, I really appreciate that my parents took our family on some travels. We went to Yellowstone and we flew out to San Francisco and went to Yosemite, and traveled around in northern California. Took the train up to Kelso-Longview, where we had friends who had been neighbors in Delaware, but then they had moved, and then the man in the family, he was in the Weyerhaeuser family and worked for Weyerhaeuser. And I remember, I think it was 1962, they took us up to Mount St. Helens, which really was my first exposure there.

SS: Spirit Lake?

FS: Yes. And I remember that we went to a tree on the shore of Spirit Lake, and there was a hand-crank phone. And you called over to a lodge, the Harmony Falls Lodge, and asked them to come pick you up in their motorboat. And you'd order up a family-style fried chicken dinner, and they'd come pick you up, motor you over there, you'd eat it, and then we walked back along the shore of the lake.

SS: You didn't get a chance to meet Harry Truman on that trip, did you?

FS: No, I didn't. I would have liked to. That was '62, I believe, which would have been the year after I graduated from high school. But I was really fascinated by the West. And the points of contrast include just the wildness, the sense of wildness, the big mountains, and the sparser, human population. Those were all features of the West that I was attracted to.

SS: So, was it more of the bigness and the scope, rather than a particular aesthetic or ecosystem dynamic, or was it a little of both, do you think?

FS: I think it was both. I was getting interested in expressions of the West Coast. This would have been in high school, and then, college at Penn State. Edward Weston, Kenneth Rexroth, and Gary Snyder, these people who were writing and photographing Western landscapes, and telling stories of life and with a western spirit, west coast spirit. And so those things fascinated me and they gradually were drawing my interest to the world view and the landscape.

SS: You may have never read Horace Greeley's "Manifesto to Go West," but, in essence, you were drawn to whatever that "West was for you. Right?

FS: Right. And a set of circumstances got me west, a lot of it around geology, a key sequence which will come up later in the interview. But as an undergraduate in geology at Penn State and most other universities, you had to go do a summer geology field camp. And our scene at Penn State was that you went and hopped in some old "carryalls." I remember one of our vehicles was a big, orange International Harvester Travelall called "Ferro Hippus" [as in iron horse]. And we drove from central Pennsylvania down to Roswell, New Mexico, and then, north to Red Lodge, Montana, over the course of three weeks, camping out along the way. We had some Iraqi students, I remember, they'd never seen snow before. We were camping up high in June in the far Southwest and we got snowed on at night. And it was really cold, froze their butts and blew their minds. But we were geologizing all the way and then we had five weeks of mapping activities at the Yellowstone Big Horn Research Association Camp on the flanks of the Beartooth Mountains outside of Red Lodge, Montana.

SS: Oh, yeah.

FS: At the entrance to, one of the entrances to Yellowstone. So, we went to many interesting places there for out projects, including up to 10,000 feet on the Hell Roaring Plateau on the way into Yellowstone through Cooke City, and remember being told that when the summer afternoon thunderstorms came rumbling through, if our rock hammers began to sing, we needed to put them aside and get a distance from them because it might get hit by lightning. So, that was a wild and wonderful experience. And then, from there with one other guy in the class, I hitch-hiked down to Reno where I met up with some college friends and we drove up into this part of the world. I remember, that was 1965, and there had just been the Christmas storm of '64.

SS: The flood?

FS: Yeah, and I remember going over the back road that comes out towards the Eureka-Arcata area over the Coast Mountains of California, and seeing this incredible flood damage and signs on trees well above the roads in a flood level. I thought, wow, this is wild country. And we came up to Junction City, I remember picking pole beans and staying in a ramshackle migrant worker place for a few days, and realized that was pretty hard work. But anyway, then the following summer, I had the great good fortune to get us into a special program that where you could be a field assistant for a U.S. Geological Survey geologist doing their field work. You could say what part of the country and what geological topic you were interested in, and they tried to match you up as best they could. That got me back out to Menlo Park, and the field area was along the southern Oregon coast from Coos Bay down to Brookings, and looking for gold and platinum and other heavy metals, primarily in the context of the Cold War, in beach sands, modern beach sands, uplifted beach sands and rivers. And there was an offshore component at Oregon State University. And then, the river component, the bedrock geology component, was people at the University of Oregon. So, that led me to go to the U of O and to geology there as a grad student.

SS: Now, going back to Penn State, why geology and who maybe was a real influential professor on you, and what do you remember in terms of the schools of thought of geology that you were trained in, and how you got tracked or attracted to that? FS: Well, I remember my parents wondering, asking me if I wanted to be an engineer. And my father, you know, was a chemical engineer. And I was sort of science-oriented, but I also was inspired by some English teachers in high school. And that fueled my interest in some of the writers that I mentioned before. And it's been totally amazing to me to come back around to them and actually get to interact with some of them, 40 and 50 years later. But I, and also my mother's brothers, who died quite young of TB, they'd both been lawyers and wondered if I wanted to be a lawyer. Well, in the end, I picked Penn State because it was about the right distance away and I was serious about my running, and I could run track and cross-country there. And I wasn't real academically-oriented. And so, I feel like I sort of slipped into geology from the get-go a little bit by default. There wasn't anything that was more interesting to me. And then I had to stick with it because I wasn't finding anything more interesting. And I started out and it had a lot of geochemistry and minerology, and geophysics and things like that. And it was only a summer field experience after my freshman year, and then, a duplication of that after sophomore year, that really convinced me that this is a cool place to be. And this was the experience of getting to go to the Bermuda Biological Station. My advisor at Penn State, Robert F. Schmalz, who was a very cool and interesting guy with a neat sense of humor, and I remember that he arranged so that I could go to the Bermuda Biological Station and take part as an underclass person in a grad student program that was sponsored by, I believe it was by the National Science Foundation, on organism-sediment relationships in a modern environment of carbonate deposition.

SS: So, in other words, you got some early ecological training in your geology from the get-go, then?

FS: Now, when I have encountered Research Experience for Undergraduate [REU] groups at the Andrews, I say, "I had an experience after my freshman year that launched me on a career of interdisciplinarity that is still deeply ingrained in me. I hope some of you will be shaped in the same way by your experience here." It was so cool. It was literally an immersion experience because this was a place where calcium carbonate was being deposited, and the petroleum industry was interested in this work. And I think my advisor had some support from them through the petroleum industry that made it possible to help me get over there to Bermuda where this former small hotel had been converted into a biology lab, and there were a few small ships. I remember one of them was the "Panulirus," which is the genus of lobster that is characteristic, common in Bermuda. And so, there were faculty and students, grad students, in sea water chemistry, biology, and their many calcareous organisms, algae, mollusks, etc., that made calcium carbonate skeletons, so that when they died, this would all accumulate and become sediment. So, there were sea water chemists, biologists and geologists, all working together. And we'd go out and, you know, dive into the subject matter.

SS: Literally.

FS: Yeah, and chase certain topics that included, diel variation and the processes related to sunlight and photosynthesis, and those things were changing on a 24-hour schedule. So, it was neat because you were conducting studies where you had to pay attention to the tides and the state of light and so forth. One of those students was Stephen Jay Gould, who was obviously an "out-there" guy at that time.

(Break in audio)

SS: Now, you already spoke about some of your experiences as a youth as you had in the natural environment back in Delaware and Virginia. Now, what impact do you think any of those experiences had on your later career professionally? Any particular incident, maybe even something that you didn't mention, something that was impactful to you as a child, or maybe something that made a negative impact on you, something you saw or experienced or were scared by?

FS: It's hard for me to pick out anything in the K-12 years other than just a natural enjoyment of being outside and being physically active outside. As I mentioned, there was some rock-hounding and there was some running outdoors. I enjoyed those things. I enjoyed the vacations to places like Yellowstone and Yosemite and seeing big landscapes. And hanging out a little bit around the Janesville Sand & Gravel Company. But that was as much about big equipment like trains and cement mixers.

SS: Just like we liked Tonka toys when we were kids, right?

FS: Yeah.

SS: Exactly. Now, how do you think the location of your formative years affected your views on science, ecology, and a career in geology/ecosystems science, especially that centered at the Andrews and within the LTER system? A real philosophical question, but maybe think a bit how that context may have affected your later development, intellectually and otherwise.

FS: Oh, I think the main thing is growing, probably growing up in a suburban community in a region where, although it was not in academics in a university sense area, it was there where many people who worked for DuPont and other chemical companies. There were a lot of engineers and people who were quite well-trained. And those were the guys, that had advanced degrees, and the women were very smart. And most of them had college degrees, and of course, they were stay-at-home moms. And there was a lot of attention to the school system and trying to have a good education, so you could go on to college. So, that was an important factor. But where I've ended up going professionally, I wasn't really being shaped much by that early history, I don't believe.

SS: At least, that you're conscious of.

FS: In specific ways.

SS: Right, okay. Now, how do you think the contrast between your home state environment and the Northwest affected your perspective, scientifically or culturally, on the Coniferous Forest Biome that is home to the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, and that composes much of the Pacific Northwest geography?

FS: Well, I wasn't getting exposed much in the way of coniferous forests back east as I mentioned. Our yard had these big hardwoods, hence, a lot of leaves to rake.

SS: But the question was, the contrast, how that might have affected you? Especially, when you talked about your youth, your trips as a youth, and then later with Penn State, getting exposed to that, how that contrast maybe stretched you, intellectually and imagination-wise?

FS: One thing about my whole career which I think about in the context of talking with either students at OSU or our young generation and our family about career paths, one thing that's really impressed me as I reflect back on my career path, is it has taken some very unlikely directions. And I could not have imagined the types of work that I have ended up being able to do when I was very young, because I had no exposure to it. For example, I didn't know any geologists, earth scientists, or ecologists when I was in the K-12 years that I recognized as such. And so, when I've talked with kids today, it's sort of like, wow, the world is changing even more rapidly now than it was in my time. So, I can well imagine that you are going to have jobs that you can't anticipate today because those jobs don't exist yet. And that's the way I felt like a lot of my professional life has gone. Just follow your nose, and let these interesting things happen, and be ready to create and react.

SS: Now, once again, going back to your formative years and the location, how do you believe the location of your formative years and experiences there affected your views on the concept of place, both scientifically and culturally? And I believe that you understand the difference between placed research in the scientific ecological sense and cultural concepts of place. So, if you can speak to either/or, or both of those subjects, that would be really helpful.

FS: I feel like I did have an early sense of place and wanting to be immersed in place. And the notion of immersion is one that has come into sharper focus for me just in about the last week. Having read a brief excerpt of a long interview in a writer's journal, the Writer's Chronicle, an interview with Jane Hirshfield, Zen poet of the San Francisco Bay area, who was a writer-in-residence at the Andrews. She talked about the sense of immersion she had in the Andrews Forest, and she wanted to carry through on it even to the point of jumping into the creek at, she said, 34 degrees. I'm sure it felt that cold. And I think that's a feature of the Andrews Forest, where you have trees 70, 80, even 90 meters tall, that are all draped in the lichens and mosses. And there's just this sense of being immersed in this massive forest ecosystem.

So, anyway, I have a feeling that I've really appreciated the natural world. From my youth and Delaware, for example, I was very intrigued by the work of the Wyeth family, Andrew Wyeth and his earlier kin and Jamie, his offspring. There is a beautiful area, Chadds Ford area in southeastern Pennsylvania. It was a very short drive from where I grew up. And now there's a very beautiful museum there, and I like going out in that kind of rural, rolling countryside. It does have some huge, old DuPont estates, so that the land has not been all highly-developed. Wyeth painted these images of, what could be viewed as rather bleak, often it's winter, autumn, and there may be people present or people not present in these images. But, you know, that is a depiction that sticks in my mind of that landscape. So, there's some topography, the Brandywine River, and there's art that expresses a sense of beauty of the landscape. And then there's this very deep Euro presence many centuries deep. So, out here in the West, our European footprint is not nearly as deep.

SS: Do you always feel that it was more in the, shall we say, almost like the 18th-19th century romantic European sense of wonder, and not in a primitivist sense of wonder, in how a lot of Americans have in the Post-Modern era, have an almost-primitivism, which is anti-European, consciously or unconsciously?

FS: I think that is true. As I spent more and more time in the West, on my own, the subject matter of my research of what have the landscape histories been, how Euro influence on the landscape has changed over time, and what was the interaction, engagement of the native people, with this landscape. These are things that I've studied, but I also am intrigued by them more of an aesthetic sense. It's interesting to note that just a couple days ago, I got a copy of this essay by a scholar-in-residence, Aaron Ellison, who is an ecologist at Harvard Forest. But he wrote this essay in the Landscape Journal. He goes back, looks back about 150 years of how early landscape painters viewed the landscape, how early ecologists viewed the landscape, and the notion of the balance of nature and how self-regulating nature might be perceived to be. He brings it up to the present, and includes photography, artwork and, actually, a histogram of tree ages in this piece of writing that includes an art history component. So, art, no, cultural understanding of the landscape in both artistic and ecological research senses. So, anyway, I think I've had a gut feeling or questioning and wondering about that for a long time. And so, it's been fruitful to me to have both an east coast and a west coast perspective, and the juxtaposition is intriguing and informative.

SS: What were, on some of those early trips, whether it be with your family or after Penn State, any of those, what were some iconic landscapes or land forms or something that just impacted you strongly and made you either think about something, or just shocked you with a sense of wonder?

FS: Well, I love landscapes. And I sometimes think, well, my favorite types of landscapes are volcanic craters. I like very primal places that are so difficult and challenging physically, that we can't go there or go there only with great difficulty. And every time I've gone to an amazing landscape, I thought, "You know, it'd be neat to build a career around that." And so, Bermuda was a wonderful landscape, not challenging. Some of the Western landscapes I encountered in my geology field course.

SS: The Beartooths? Yes.

FS: The Beartooth Mountains or this area where we had a mapping problem which is full of rattlesnakes over in Wyoming, a breached, doubly-plunging anticline, which is where the rocks were folded in such a way that, where there could be oil trapped at depth. And so, people were looking at the surface expressions of the geology and then trying to interpret what the below-ground expression was in seeking gas and oil. But also, then I got to go to the Galapagos and to Greenland on geology expeditions, and they were wonderful, amazing landscapes. As it is, I invested much of my career into charismatic, iconic landscapes, the Andrews Forest and Mount St. Helens. And right now in my retirement, I see a big part of what I'm trying to do is to honor those landscapes which gave me so much, and to help others adopt them as teachers. And I'll say more about this later in the interview, but it's amazing to me to think of how these places have been teachers, and I want to honor them. And also, these places are embodiments of our bioregional icons. You think of the Northwest, you think of volcanoes, active ones. And you think of ancient forests, fast, cold rivers and our science, and then the culture that we are now fostering around these regional icons. This is an important social dimension of what we're doing. And this is the jag that I'm on now, starting to realize this after working in these places for decades.

SS: Now, you partly answered your educational component of the interview here, but this is more general. And you can start with the university years or go forward with it. Who were some of your scientific heroes and role models as you developed intellectually? Like maybe a university professor, or a famous author, or a geologist from the past, or even a poet? I mean, give me kind of a little progression of how that went.

FS: Well, at the high school level, the teachers I remember most vividly are, were English teachers, although I wasn't a very good student. And I think what they instilled was an interest in literature. Julia [Jones, partner] and I talk about that now when we look across the spectrum of teachers that Gareth [son], age 16, a junior in Corvallis High School has, and which are cracking the whip and really putting a lot of focus on grades and are tough graders, so the kids are always on edge, and which tend to want to emphasize passion. We want to stimulate passion in these kids, or help them to express the passion they may already have. So anyway, at the high school level were two English teachers. In college, it was in the sciences and Bob, Robert F. Schmalz, was key because he gave me a chance to do some things.

SS: Your Penn State professor, right?

FS: Yeah, Penn State. Right from the get-go. I remember, the last exam of exam week was at night of, the last day. And I had read in The New York Times a little piece of filler, maybe two inches of column length about some group who was looking for meteorites in the desert of central Australia by driving Land Rovers with detection equipment on booms that stretched out from both sides of the Land Rover. And I thought, "Oh, I wonder if I could get to be a field assistant on that." I just wanted to go do something because I was really jazzed by this geology stuff. And I'd taken two courses from him. And so, I turned in my exam to him, and I said, "Hey, I --" or I'd gone to talk to him, that's what it was. I had gone to talk to him before the exam and I said, "I'm interested. Is there anything you can suggest? I don't actually have to make money. My parents would support me to do something like that." And so, I turned in my exam that last exam time, and he said, "I may have something for you." And then, that's how it developed to get to go to Bermuda. So, that was very influential for me. Then, there were some poets that I was reading, some of these west coast people. And a key thing in that work for me, was to get the sense that in the course of your daily life, and to me especially if I'm out in the wild, these little bits of poems will happen to you every day. So, if you can foster that sense, you can catch 'em better, recognize them.

SS: But was there a geologist that you were impacted by, or somebody that was a role model or an icon of history in geology?

FS: Oh, as my experience began to grow, I feel like I was more awed by the ecosystems and geosystems.

SS: Like, the Odums [Howard and Eugene] and -- ?

FS: Well, definitely, as I began to get exposed to ecology as a geologist.

SS: Because they were becoming who they were at that very time.

FS: Right. I was very interested in systems thinking, and certainly, their work was of interest to me in that regard. So that was as a grad student, I was getting exposed to that, and they were very current. And I was beginning to, as a grad student, I was getting quite interested in environmental matters, and environmental issues were really picking up.

SS: And that's when you were at the University of Oregon. Correct?

FS: Correct.

SS: Want to elaborate just a little bit on how you came to be at Oregon?

FS: Right. So, I was, as an undergrad at Penn State, this was like '65, early '66. The draft was operating.

SS: Vietnam?

FS: Wow, didn't want to go to Vietnam. There were teach-ins on campus and stuff like that. Berkeley was being weird. And I remember we had a big sit-in at the student union, in the administration building at Penn State. Our issues were not global, it was in loco parentis. And so, you know, just sort of provincial issues.

SS: Yeah.

FS: But, then we all got trucked down, all of us who were seniors, got trucked down to an Army base in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and we went through our physicals, and how that might influence our future. And I had a very quirky, lucky set of circumstances. Lucky from my perspective. That when I was running cross-country for Penn State, I was running down a steep hill and hit the bottom, and sort of jarred my back, I think. Then I had back pain issues, and I went and got x-rays and got an interpretation that I had some genetic malfunction, mal-form in my back, like an extra half-vertebra, and some of the vertebrae were fused. So, I took those x-rays to that medical exam. The doctor looked at them quickly, and I got a signed, I forget what it was, 1Y, which is not a complete exemption, that you were in a medically-impaired category. So that freed me from --

SS: The draft?

FS: The draft.

SS: Wow.

FS: So then, I got this opportunity to go, because I did okay in that field course in Montana, then I qualified for an opportunity to go work for the U.S.G.S. through a program that's in --

SS: That's in Menlo Park, correct?

FS: That's a major office and that's the one that I went to work in.

SS: Okay, got you.

FS: I said that I wanted to work on the west coast because my girlfriend at the time wanted to go out to San Francisco. And I wanted to work in marine geology, and my Bermuda experience had been around marine geology.

SS: Got you.

FS: So, they assigned me there, and then, I got to go do this work on the southern Oregon coast, and for a guy, Ed Clifton, who was a U.S.G.S. geologist. And that was a great opportunity. I met people through that experience that then helped me later in my career, including my connections into Mount St. Helens so I could get to go out on Day 10, May 28, 1980, and through a U.S.G.S. connection, rather than a Forest Service connection, although I was a Forest Service employee at that time. But anyway, I had thought I wanted to go into marine geology, and so I applied to a few schools, including Oregon State. But then after I'd gone out on ships a few times and got seasick, including at Bermuda, I realized that I didn't want to go and study an environment like sediment on the bottom of the sea, where my access was via a two-mile long cable and some funky sampling device down at the bottom you hope's going to work. Meanwhile, I'm up on deck throwing up. So, anyway, I wanted to get out and get closer to the world of my subject matter.

SS: You realized you were a landlubber?

FS: Yeah. So, that was a decision point in there. And then I met the two profs from the University of Oregon who were associated with this Geological Survey project.

SS: And what were their names?

FS: Sam Boggs, who ended up being my advisor, and Ewart Baldwin, who was the other one. So, I ended up going there. I had been a bit adrift at Penn State. I started out and performed very well for several years, and then my grades sort of went down after I quit running after sort of a run-in with the coach. But although I had more time, I had less attention. And so, my grades really suffered the latter years of my undergraduate career. So, I was looking to just do a master's and sort of after my year off working for the Survey, because I worked in Menlo Park between two field seasons and worked both field seasons, as well, for the U.S.G.S. I just wanted to get a master's and get my intellectual feet under me. But they offered me a Ph.D., a fellowship to work towards a Ph.D., an NDEA fellowship, National Defense Education Act fellowship. So, it was interesting that this is in the context of the Cold War. The U.S.G.S. project was about finding heavy metals so we were in a position to compete with the Soviet Union. And the fellowship that paid for most of my five years as a grad student was similarly for staffing of our nation with Ph.D.'s in the context of the Cold War. Anyway, I didn't really want a Ph.D., but it was recommended to me that I go for the fellowship. I did it. It was a crazy time with a lot of unrest, nationally. But I did it and I stuck with it.

SS: And what years were you at Oregon?

FS: I began in the Fall of '67, and I completed in '72.

SS: And did you stay at Oregon in a post-doc capacity for a while?

FS: And then I stayed at Oregon for another three-plus years as a post-doc with the International Biological Program [IBP]. So, all my colleagues were in Corvallis, but we worked at the Andrews. And I was closer to the Andrews from Eugene than is Corvallis.

SS: Now, we're going to go transition to the Andrews here soon, the first visit, that kind of thing. But first, say what you want in terms of disciplines, geology, ecosystems science, that apply to your development. For example, what were core theories and paradigms in your discipline, or in your case, I'll say disciplines, plural, that you embraced as a student, and have those remained foundational to your work, or has new evidence and career maturation produced paradigm shifts in your core beliefs about those original foundational paradigms, beliefs, systems, etc.? FS: It's been interesting to me to read all the questions you are using in this interview, and to think about my career in that context, in the context of these questions, like reference to paradigms and theories and so forth. Because I don't think of myself as operating very much in that regard. But maybe I just am lacking in certain self-awareness in this respect. But in my time as a student, for example, on the geology front, the major paradigm shift probably in all of geology scholarship history was taking place, plate tectonics. And I remember at Penn State with J. Tuzo Wilson, the Canadian who was pushing plate tectonics, showed up to give a lecture, and there was a lot of skepticism. This was in, maybe '64 or '65. And I remember, Robert F. Schmalz had raised in '62 in the general geology class, the issues that people were tussling with, such as, do we have an expanding earth or a contracting earth? And how could this be, for example, what were the strengths and weaknesses of the opposing hypotheses. So, actually, the Galapagos work that I and other grad students went and did in 1971, we framed in a plate tectonics context. We studied the geology of three islands distributed along a transect away from a spreading center. And so, we were proposing that they're getting progressively older the further away from the spreading center you go. And so, we did various uses of paleomagnetic stratigraphy and potassium-argon dating to try to look at the ages and other things. So, anyway, on the geology front, that was an important transition that was occurring that I was intrigued by, and it did influence the science that I ended up doing.

SS: How so?

FS: Well, it mainly was manifest in the design of the successful student-originated interdisciplinary research proposal to NSF that was successful. We got $35,000. And it took seven students to the Galapagos for studies of geology/volcanology, seismology and some plant ecology.

SS: And what year was this in?

FS: That was about '70.

SS: So, you were in the middle of your Ph.D. program at that point?

FS: Right. And this was not my dissertation topic. This was following my bliss, you know, following a passion. Because I was doing my dissertation on gravel movement in the Elk River, which was sort of a legacy of that "U.S.G.S. Southern Coast experience." And loving that landscape down there in picking a problem or project that would keep me there. But it was not, I've never published anything other than one abstract.

SS: From the Galapagos? FS: No, from the river [Elk].

SS: Oh, okay.

FS: Can a river sense the shape of pebbles, was the topic. But I got started on it, and I kept with it. Meanwhile, plate tectonics was erupting all around us. And so, I led the charge amongst our student group to go get that proposal written and we were successful. And we ended up, for $35,000, we ended up with a short article in Nature, and a substantive paper reviewing our geology findings for all three islands in the Bulletin of the Geological Society of America. One guy completed a Ph.D. based on that work, and then there was a master's on some of the plant work. So, that is a hell of a payoff.

SS: That was a very successful venture.

FS: It was. And it was interdisciplinary. The botanist that went on the trip, actually ended up working at the Andrews Forest. And it was sort of through that connection that was part of the --

SS: What was his name?

FS: Larry Pike and Bill Copeland, and Larry was a lichen guy. He did a Ph.D. at the U of O on lichens. And it was, that was part of the way that I found my way to the Andrews. But part of it was via the Galapagos. The Galapagos was a wonderful, mind-blowing experience. And I could see why Darwin's mind was blown.

SS: Had you read Darwin before you went?

FS: I took some books, did do some reading in The Voyage of the Beagle, as I am doing now for the work that Julia and I are doing.

SS: Are you talking about his notes from South America. Correct?

FS: Exactly. And we're going to some of the same places.

SS: You mean, the places where he found fossils at 14,000 feet that made him start to realize that the precepts of uniformitarian geology and, shall we say, historicizing the biological sciences, there was something to this?

FS: Right. We did not go to that place, but we did experience some of the weather on Chiloe Island and places like that, that he was talking about.

SS: Right.

FS: And most of our trips, and we're about to embark on Trip No. 6, most of them have taken us to Chaiten, the volcano that erupted in 2008, which is just across a big bay from Chiloe.

SS: Is that close to Volcan Osorno?

FS: Osorno is very close to the second volcano that we're working on, Cordon Caulle Puyehue, which is immediately to the east. And it began erupting, I think it was 2010 or '11. And so there, we're studying an ashed forest along the highway that crosses the Andes.

SS: By the way, fascinating segue. I really enjoyed that. Now, regarding the question that I asked you and you focused on geology, take the same question and apply it to ecosystems science and systems theories?

FS: Oh, right, right.

SS: You were talking about the Odums and you were telling me that even at this early age, even though you were in a geology track, you were already thinking about what became your career, an interdisciplinary geologist/ecosystems scientist. So, go back to that point.

FS: Right. So, the trip to the Galapagos, which was sort of mid or latter part of the middle-third of my Ph.D. program time at the U of O, the Galapagos included those plant ecologists, and I was interacting and hanging out with plant ecologists, and also, the Professor, Stan Cook, at the U of O, and sitting in on some of his class and getting exposed to the Odum's thinking, and there was some nice review, overview papers, I remember, in science and getting the bigger pictures of systems ecology. And also, I was sort of a TA, a teaching assistant, for a course that was given through the geology department for undergrads, a certain general course about environmental issues and human population growth, and taking care of the environment. This is the earliest '70s, when, leading up to the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act and similar laws, NEPA, and so forth. So, there was a lot of foment on those topics and a lot of interest in them. And I remember a little bit of activism on my part. Another geology guy and I went up and mapped and did some other investigation of Rock Mesa, which is a large pumice-covered dome that's only a couple thousand years old on the south flank of South Sister in a wilderness area, but there were mining claims on it. And there was a mining company that wanted to extract pumice for kitty litter in a wilderness area. So, we did sort of a technical take on it and wrote a report about it, although we weren't on the streets as some others were, protesting issues or advocating for, the French Pete addition to the Three Sisters Wilderness, things of that nature. It is interesting as very much of an aside. There was another guy living in Eugene at that time, Fred Swanson, Frederick H. Swanson. I'm Frederick J. I went over to Utah earlier this year and gave a couple talks, including about our arts-humanities connection with ecological sciences, and Fred Swanson showed up. And it was good to reconnect with him. He had been an activist for the Sierra Club in the earliest '70s in Eugene. So, every now and then, I get this reaction from a professor after Fred H. had appeared in the newspapers, saying, "Aren't we giving you enough to do here?" I guess, they thought we were one and the same.

(Break in audio)

SS: We're back on.

FS: So, anyway, I was getting exposed to ecological and environmental issues as a Ph.D. student, but it wasn't central to my focus.

SS: So, some of these ecosystems science ideas, do you remember that they were more just like loose-formed ideas that kind of grew gradually, infiltrating into your [mind], you didn't become a student of a particular school? There were just a general set of ideas that were informing your interdisciplinary perspective on science?

FS: I think that's true that I was assimilating by quite active osmosis.

SS: So, you were an inductive learner more than a deductive learner, in a sense?

FS: Oh, very much so. I just started to just make my way along with things. You know, when I retired, having done all of this work that was highly relevant to ecology and soil science and other things, including biogeochemistry, but not having really any formal training of any significance in any of them, I always sort of felt like, "Wow, I made retirement. I faked them all out for all those years." But a key point is my very good friend, Jim Sedell, who I met when I started working at the Andrews in 1972. And he was a part of our cohort of about half a dozen post-docs, which was a critical feature of the way IBP, the Coniferous Forest Biome part of IBP at the Andrews and out of the Corvallis scene. That was a critical part that we had all those post-docs, which was very distinctive from the dominant mode up at the University of Washington, the other center of the Coniferous Forest Biome. They were dominated by established old professors who would interact only as much as necessary to keep their share of the dollars flowing, whereas down here, we had these people at the post-doc stage. And we had some people with cool personalities and we could really click. So anyway, Jim had a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Willamette University. A year ago this summer, last summer, the summer of 2012, he was dying of cancer. Stan Gregory and I went and did some interviewing in his living room, and Stan was recording it on his tablet, but rather surreptitiously. So, we were very uninhibited in our conversation. We wanted to check out, confirm things with Jim as to our shared histories and his personal history. And so, at one point we said, "Well, what's the significance of you having an undergraduate degree in philosophy?" He sort of muttered, "Well, I wasn't trained." And my reaction was, "Yeah, you mean, you weren't constrained, you'd not been taught how to think about a lot of the ecological things that you got into." And Jim was well-known for wild thinking, there would, could be, sort of a blizzard. And if you were somebody who worked for him, you couldn't try to pick up on every thread, because here comes the next one and then the next one. But some of his ideas were extremely critical. In fact, the whole engagement of humanities and increasingly the arts in the Andrews program, which is now rippling out across twenty other sites of long-term inquiry that was really nucleated and kicked off by Jim back in about 2002. So, anyway, I think it pertained to me and it pertained to Jim and others in our group that we could roam free in our thinking. And we tried to play by a lot of the rules, but we also wanted to be open to let interesting things happen.

SS: How do you think that this happens to different people in science? Because you get certain people that, boy, they grab onto a paradigm that makes their career, and they'll fight to protect it to the death. But then you get other people who just kind of just weave their way through ideas and things and beliefs and different publications, and this career segue and tangent. How do you think that comes to be? I mean, that's just a general philosophical question, but since we're speaking about that issue, I'd like to get your answer on it?

FS: That question has a bunch of dimensions and I haven't really masticated the question very well. But I think there's clearly a personality dimension. Some people want things very prescribed and just to follow the rules and taking each little step one at a time. And other people operate by leaps of imagination and unlikely connection-making. So, I think there's just this personality dimension. A second factor is how well, how much opportunity does an individual have to express either of those or other instincts that they may have. Their setting may constrain them a great deal. They may be in a setting that is very inappropriate for their instincts, and that could be painful. I can see that now in some of the LTER 7 proposal planning where there are periods when the thinking needs to be very broad, and there are some people who just don't operate that way. And so, it makes for a challenge in group management where you're trying to do teamwork. You have to recognize that not everybody is going to perform the same way, and you have to find a way to benefit from the diversity within the team. I remember the first time I was getting into the IBP group, and there were some people, including a systems guy, and within the IBP group, and then some other people who were roaming around campus like Dave Bella, who were free-thinkers, and he's still roaming around campus.

SS: This is OSU?

FS: OSU.

SS: Okay.

FS: People who were thinking about, dynamics of group work and what it takes. The follow-through people, and there's these leap-of-faith idea people, and everything between. Another thing that point brings to mind is something that is manifest in our Andrews Forest program "history timeline." And that is, and I didn't realize it until we started to prepare that figure, and it's a figure that now is in many forms.

SS: And for the sake of the recording, explain very quickly what the timeline is, and then go back to your point.

FS: Well, we thought we should develop the notion of the timeline because this is a map of how things have changed over time in the group. Other sites have done similar things, and it can be used in web searching and a variety of other ways. But basically, it shows time since the inception of the experimental forest and some stuff that even predates that. On the horizontal axis are calendar years from 1948 to the present, and then, there are different bars that cross the timeline to show when different National Forest people, academics, and Forest Service scientists were involved in the project, the major leaders, and how they were distributed over time. Then for each of our research themes, we have dominant themes like vegetation studies, hydrology, small watersheds, wildlife biodiversity, other topics like that. And in most of those topics, we have a persistent measurement program - on vegetation plots, stream gauging stations, climate stations. But for each one of those persistent topics, the issues of the day, the issue du jour, switches every 5 or 10 years. And the point there is that we need to be attentive to the issue of the day, as well as attentive to, exercising the maniacal persistence of keeping the measurements program going. It's a very challenging type of program to run because you have these two complementary, but also competing instincts. And often, you have to be displaying the relevance to the issues of the day, over the long-term record, to help keep the long-term record going. And you have to be milking the long-term record to continuously display its significance, so you keep that going. So, that's other dimension of dealing with these different types of personalities at both the individual level, at the team level, and in the whole program.

SS: Going back. What thought or image did the term ecology or forwarding that to ecological science, elicit when you first heard it during your youth and higher education, and how has that evolved over time?

FS: Well, I think I didn't tap in on the notion of ecology significantly, until the grad student time. And that was in the ways I described earlier of starting to hang with some of the ecologists, wanting to include some ecologists in the proposal for that Galapagos project, because it needed to be interdisciplinary. And probably, the geology work, the geologic mapping and the volcanology, and, excuse me, the seismology, probably wasn't adequately interdisciplinary. But through reasons I don't remember exactly how I connected with Larry Pike and Bill Copeland, it might have been through the teaching assistantship for the environmental course, the general undergraduate environmental course, may have connected me to Stan Cook, and then to those other guys. So, anyway, that's when I started to learn about ecology and then I could connect it back to the Bermuda experience. But that had more of a sea water chemistry and sediment angle, and I wasn't exposed to it as an ecosystem question in that Bermuda experience. But that was sort of also seeding this interdisciplinarity.

SS: Now, did you see ecology or do you believe that ecology at that time for you was a scientific and descriptive term, or do you believe it also had, shall we say, culturally loaded, what we call, a "green" meaning? I mean, we're going back forty years or more, but what is your sense of how you perceived the word, the term, the meaning, its place?

FS: I don't remember trying to make a sharp distinction. And I do think it's a critical issue to make a clear distinction. And I'm faced with a writing project right now where I need to do that. But I think I perceived it in both senses that there was science, a science of ecology, but also that was highly relevant to these environmental issues which were being duked out in the marketplace, public marketplace of ideas.

SS: Now, how would you characterize your environmental ethic and philosophy at the, shall we say, early stage of your career? Let's call that your graduate student, post-doc transition IBP era. How would you describe it today? I mean, we rarely think of our philosophy and ethic when we're in the moment. It's always done reflectively. But still, how would you characterize that today?

FS: And that's a very interesting question. As I mentioned when I was a graduate student, I was doing some teaching assistant function, discussion group leader around readings for environmental, an environmental class. And I remember it as being very Eugene, you know, calling attention to the plight of the environment at the hands of human-fostered development.

SS: It was back when environmental studies were very much viewed as the environment as being victimized, and a passive actor. Right?

FS: Right. So, it's interesting to me, though, to reflect like on that Rock Mesa case where I and my buddy, Doug Stoesser, another grad student, went and tried to do a scientifically credible assessment of Rock Mesa's pumice blanket. How much might be there, what quality is it, how many crystalline phenocrysts are in it which might disrupt its properties to function as a clean pumice, and stuff like that. So, we were trying to be scientists, behave as scientists, and rather than really being out there with the banners on the street or the fire bombs. Actually, that's something that I carried on through the whole rest of my career, and the issue is still a hot one. What is the nature of advocacy by scientists? And there's a seminar series on campus this term on this topic. I wrote my opinion in a collection of opinions about that issue of advocacy by scientists, and I guess we'll get to that later. But I can see that my performance in some of those early experiences ended up being consistent with my performances throughout my whole career.

(Break in audio)

FS: Once I began working, after graduation in the Andrews in the context of the International Biological Program, one of the first things I published on was the effects of forest roads and logging on landslides, which was very much in the public eye and a hot issue. So, I did find that my work was relevant to society, and how I conducted myself within that context was very important. And as I learned, there are many points-of-view out there and you just do your work. You put the ideas out, and let the chips fall where they may.

SS: But going back a little bit further, recasting that question before we took that short break. In terms of ethics and philosophy, environmental ethics and philosophy, for whatever reasons, you would have probably never become an economic geologist, for instance, which is essentially is an engineer with geology skills. You were destined, for whatever reasons, to something else?

FS: Exactly. I've written about some of this relative to forestry issues, and I think we can see it in the history of approaches to forest land management in several different world views and value systems. There's the agricultural world view. We'll convert these native forests to plantation.

SS: The crop, yeah.

FS: Sort of like Douglas-fir plantations we're like draping like corn fields over this complex, steep, unstable landscape. A second world-view is a species conservation world view of conservation biology, and your approach to land management, forest land management, then is based on your perception of the habitat requirements of one or a few species. Then then a third world-view, which is the one that I feel most comfortable with, is one we'll call ecosystem dynamics, and that is nature banged up these ecosystems periodically with wind and fire and landslides. If we can manage them in some emulation of the natural disturbance regime, it will probably provide habitat for the species that we know about and all those that we don't know about, the native species, in the sense that native implies that these species have resided in this landscape probably for thousands of years, at least pre-Euro, into pre-Euro time, and that they had lived and were adapted to that disturbance regime. So those are three very different world views, and I'm of the third color. We have people with those different world views reside in different scientific societies and different departments on campuses and in federal research organizations, and these are different cultures.

SS: Now, I'm going to segue off to something you just said that's a little bit ahead in our question list. How have your views about the ethical responsibilities of the scientist and science evolved over time towards society and the "non-human" natural world?

FS: Well, I've had a long string of experiences in my career where the subject matter that I've pursued has been of public interest, from the mining of Rock Mesa, to effects of forest practices on watersheds and ecosystems, to how do we understand the eruption of Mount St. Helens and its ecological and watershed consequences. And then more recently, to why we should engage philosophers and creative writers and artists in these places of long-term inquiry. So, I feel like I've grown to increasingly feel that storytelling is what it's all about. Stories can be inspired by science. But as somebody who has had the good fortune in a way to be able to facilitate the engagement of people from other, from many disciplines, many world views, into these places like the Andrews and Mount St. Helens, to go visit these teachers, to feed them some perspectives from the stories that I've been able to learn through my own presence there or that people have told me on our many trips to these places, but also just to help provide opportunity for these people to go there and do their thing their way with their tools, and tell their stories their ways, that's been a really fun and rewarding way to operate.

SS: Do you see the irony in how you, a person who is a scientist who has done much of his work based on quantitative analysis, that you're advocating narrative?

FS: Well, it's interesting. For a while, I was quite interested in math and analysis of lots of data in my Ph.D. work, on gravel shapes and sizes in a river. I measured the orthogonal three axes of thousands of pebbles, and played around with them in the primitive computing capabilities that we had at that time where you had to take boxes of cards down to the computer center, have it run your program, only to go retrieve them, and be told there was a bug in there somewhere. But anyway, it's been most natural for me to not do things by really crunching the numbers. If you've got numbers, it's fun and important to crunch them, because often there will be surprises in the numbers. And I live with Julia Jones, who is great at number-crunching, and loves working with big spreadsheets of, for example, 60 years of stream-flow data, or climate temperature data or something.

SS: That's her narrative.

FS: Yeah. And so, I'm much more "loosey-goosey."

SS: Right, got you. Speaking of a question related to, okay, describe how scientific technology has improved at the Andrews. Oh, you know what, time out.

(Break in audio)

SS: When and how did you first hear about the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest?

FS: Well, that's an interesting story. I was helping a friend who was doing a master's thesis on some geologic mapping in southern Oregon in the Tiller area on the South Umpqua. We were staying at a guard station and it had a barn where there used to be pack animals, and it's in the Umpqua National Forest. A guy came up and we visited with him, and it turned out to be Jack Rothacher, who was a PNW hydrologist based out of Corvallis. At that time, there was the team up here in Corvallis that was running a set of experimental watersheds called Coyote Creek Experimental Watersheds, part of the South Umpqua Experimental Forest. He told me about that, and he told me about the Andrews. That was 1968, summer of '68, and then he sent me a publication about it because I expressed some interest. The publication was about Watersheds 1, 2 and 3 in the Andrews. I read that and was intrigued. And then it wasn't until four years later that I connected with the Andrews and began to work there, partly connecting through Larry Pike and Bill Copeland, and a professor at U of O named Alan Kayes who had a small contract to map the geology of the Andrews Forest, which was a project that Mike James, actually a master's student, and I worked on together. So, that's how I learned about the Andrews.

SS: Now, at that time, what did you know about experimental forests and long-term ecological research? FS: I didn't know anything at all.

SS: What were your first impressions of the region around the Andrews and the Lookout Creek Watershed? And you can address that ecologically, geologically, aesthetically, culturally, however you want to answer?

FS: Well, I remember going up there in March with some friends, some acquaintances. I think it was March, in the early spring of '72, anticipating some of this geologic mapping later that year, and I remember hiking up those long strip-cuts in the uppermost Lookout Creek area, and getting up on the ridge. And it was a warm, sunny day. I remember, we took our shirts off although there was a snow bank we were standing on. So, anyway, I thought it was a neat place. It was all covered with forest, so it was clear that it was going to be very difficult to map the geology because there was so little rock exposure, whereas like over in Montana and Wyoming where we had our field course, for example, there was a lot of beautiful exposure of the rock.

SS: So, your first impression was pleasant, but not overwhelming? In other words, you didn't have any inkling that this was going to be a place that where your career was going to be centered at?

FS: I did not have any inkling that I would still be working there more than forty years later. I'd been out in the Coast Range and other parts of the Cascades, climbed in some of the Cascades in the Three Sisters area, and Hood, and down at Shasta, and done teaching summer field camp down out of Ashland up in the Mt. Ashland area. So, I'd been up, out and about in Oregon. I didn't have an inkling that it was going to become so important to me.

SS: Now, regarding your first impressions of what it looked like, the ecology, tree-covered geology, things like that, and this is especially looking back at when the Andrews did not have, shall we say, the cultural and scientific cachet that it does today. I mean, it was a well-known experimental forest in that context at the time, but nothing like it is today. It was just another watershed in the beautiful Cascades, but nonetheless, it wasn't the "Andrews."

FS: Right.

SS: Like we know it was today, you understand?

FS: Oh, certainly. Yeah, it didn't have any facilities, in terms of bunk houses and office space and garage, a shop and so forth. None of that existed. The dwellings to stay in were a couple trailers at two different locations.

SS: Where were they back then, in '72?

FS: There was a trailer up the hill on the Blue River Ranger Station Compound.

SS: Where was that exactly, in the Andrews?

FS: Oh, it was --

SS: Below the Andrews, right?

FS: It was at the Blue River Ranger Station in the town of Blue River.

SS: Okay, right.

FS: And then there was a trailer at a trailer park right next to the covered bridge in the little community of Rainbow, along the McKenzie.

SS: So, there were no dwellings in the actual watershed that we know today?

FS: Correct.

SS: Was there any like line shacks or temporary dwellings or emergency shelters, or anything like that up there?

FS: Well, there was a place called Gypsy Camp, and I think some of the forest ecologists had a teepee in there. And then it was judged decades later that it was culturally inappropriate to use the term gypsy, so then it became referred to as "The Camp Formerly Known as Gypsy." But no, it did not have on-site facilities except for the gauging stations and the met stations. And I remember Eric Forsman was living up there for a while, and I think he had a camper that was off of a pickup.

SS: So, people like Jack Rothacher and Dick Fredriksen and even Roy [Silen], and some of those really early people, they stayed down in Blue River [town] back in the early days. Right?

FS: Correct. There were some houses on the Blue River Ranger District compound. One of them, I think, was a house for PNW Station people, and there was a small office and space used as a lab for initial processing of water samples, and those rooms were in the basement of the ranger station.

SS: So, you did have a rudimentary lab then at your disposal?

FS: Yeah, I didn't really register on it because I never used it. SS: How many roads were into the Andrews at that early time? Now, we don't want to go back to the '50s and '60s, but when you first went there, what do you recall?

FS: So, I first went there in '72. Well, most of the logging and roading had been done then. Most of the roading had already been done, as the deal to set up the Andrews Forest between the National Forest [Willamette] and the Experiment Station [PNW] included logging 20 million board-feet a year. It's documented in the Geier book [Necessary Work, history of the H.J. Andrews, by Max Geier] and the sources that he used. And then the logging really tapered off big-time once we really got going with the ecosystem research, with IBP and then LTER.

SS: So, the main roads were all built, though?

FS: Yeah. As of '72, it was, most of the existing roading was already in.

SS: Okay. Now, some of the roads got built later on to special research sites, little spurs, correct?

FS: Yeah, there was a little bit of that.

SS: Okay. What do you remember your first job was at the Andrews, your first project?

FS: The first project was to --

SS: The mapping project?

FS: Map the geology.

SS: Okay.

FS: Mike James and I worked on that. We had gaps in our mapping area, and we gradually realized that those were there because we were not seeing bedrock in place, and then gradually we began to recognize the large earth flows. We also started mapping other land forms, for example, valley floor land forms, alluvial fans, and we started picking up the small landslides. Ted Dyrness and people working with him, like Fredriksen and Al Levno, had mapped, had inventoried all the small rapid landslides, debris flows, debris slides, that occurred in the winter of '64-'65. And he did a really nice job of looking at how those were distributed with respect to rock type and soil type and slope steepness, whether they were from roads, clear-cut areas or forested areas, and if they were from roads, from cut slopes or fill slopes, and what was the volume of material moved?

SS: This was Ted Dyrness, right?

FS: Yes. And what was the destination of the material after it had moved. So, as Mike and I went out and beat the brush, we found other slides, some of which were probably '64-'65, and some of them were from other years. So then, we began to compile this record of the small, rapid slides, as well as doing the mapping of the large, slow-moving landslides which were generally forest-covered. So, that led to a '75 paper that I did with Ted, which moved beyond just that one winter storm [Two parts -- December 1964 and January 1965] to the whole 1950 to 1975 period.

SS: So, that was your first major publication on the Andrews?

FS: Yeah, that was. In '75, we got several publications out, and that was an important one.

SS: Now, we'll do a little more reminiscing. Tell me about some of your colleagues? The folks you met. Start telling me about the people and start telling me about some of the stories?

FS: Well, some of the most important people for me were Jerry Franklin and Jim Sedell. Jerry was our leader. He was teamed up with Dick Waring. Dick was a young faculty member at OSU and Jerry was a Forest Service scientist. It's a little mind-boggling to me to think about how young those guys were, leading this program. And Dick and Jerry had very different personalities and emphases. But Jerry was an important influence on me and I feel like I sort of rode his coattails for all these years. And in fact, bring me back to Jerry, but let me tell an anecdote about him. He teaches a field course that's basically driving around parts of the West with a group of 20-25 students from the University of Washington. In recent years, he's done this with Norm Johnson, so, a lot of it's about ecology and forestry. And especially when he's toodling around with Norm, it's about forest management issues, effects on communities. He may have community members, rangers, just agency staff and all kinds of people speak with this group. He especially likes scientists, so he'll take them to St. Helens and have Charlie Crisafulli take them out and jazz them up. He came to the Andrews this year, for example, and had Mark Harmon and me go out with them and Michael Nelson and a lot of other people.

One time, this might have been 8 or 10 years ago, I remember being out with this class, and we went up to Carpenter Mountain, the highest point in the Andrews, at the lookout there. Jerry told a story, because they were looking out at this landscape and you could see the patch clear-cutting and some of the roads, and he said, "You know, when I first came up here in the '50s, there wasn't, you couldn't see any cuts, you couldn't see any roads. I remember it was early in the season and I walked up the trail, up towards the lookout here, and I remember reaching the point of no return. No return in the sense that if I kept going and I wanted to turn around and go back, I was going to run out of light and I'd have to sleep out. So, I knew I was making a commitment to sleep outside by myself, and I had not been doing that, and I was a little uneasy about it. But I pushed myself to go out there and do that. By the end of the summer, I felt real comfortable doing that." And I said, "You son of a bitch, that's what you did to all the rest of us. You'd get us out on a limb with some big management idea, or we'd be out with some politicians or something, and we're just out there stretching beyond their comfort zone." But look at all the amazing things that happened because of it?" So, anyway, Jerry's been extremely important in demonstrating storytelling and bringing people together from many points-of-view. I remember, both he and Ted Dyrness, Franklin and Dyrness' book [Natural Vegetation of Oregon and Washington], that's from that year, I think it's '72, maybe it's '73.

SS: '73.

FS: '73; and which is still "the book" on natural vegetation of Oregon and Washington. They each said to me on separate personal occasions, "You know, I've worked hard to help bring other people into this place because I wasn't a good enough scientist myself, just in my own work." There was some humility there, but they worked hard to facilitate other people coming in. And so, I adopted that philosophy. Jerry is extremely important, and look what has happened as a result. And it's come into quite sharp focus for us. He and I have talked about it a couple times in the context of memorial services for Jim Sedell, because we've really had this amazing team. It included Jerry and Jim and Stan Gregory and other people, Dave Perry, and now there's Tom Spies, Julia [Jones] has an important role, and Sherri's [Johnson] in there now. She's got a different kind of role than some of these other folks. And so, it's just been really amazing this community that has really moved things along. So there's Jim, Jim Sedell. He was extremely influential to me. I'd been living down in Eugene with my wife at that time, and the dump we were living in was getting quite sketchy. This is '75, and Jim invited us up, Mary and I, up to have dinner with he and Ellen, and then, to give a talk to the stream team. I had done this job down on the Elk Sixes River country where I looked at the geology and geomorphology, and then forest ownership patterns which directly tracked the geology and topography, which then influenced the fish habitat, and Jim just loved those big arm-wavy stories. So, actually, that visit and the welcoming he gave us, induced us to move up here --

SS: To Corvallis?

FS: To Corvallis, and to integrate into the community more thoroughly. The very important thing there, was that the IBP era made it possible to bring a cadre of post-docs together, and permit them to synergize over multiple years and learn to communicate and to develop friendships, and really do the interdisciplinary work. Certain themes like old growth, and especially dead wood, dead wood in streams, these were points of interdisciplinary nucleation.

SS: And this is even before Mark Harmon was in the picture, right?

FS: Yeah. So, this was --

SS: Long before.

FS: You know, the '70s, mid-'70s. All three of our disciplines, forest ecology, stream ecology and geomorphology, had pretty much ignored deadwood, and in order to tell the stream deadwood story, we needed to understand forest dynamics, and we needed to understand stream ecosystems, and we needed to understand geomorphology. Anyway, that was really critical. So, when Mount St. Helens erupted, we were all ready to go with Jerry, Jim and me and a lot of other people, because we had this interdisciplinary concept, vocabulary, and especially, community, that was ready to rumble.

SS: Now, we're going to return to the St. Helens subject a little bit later in more detail. But I want maybe to have you share a little more about some of the people, Jack Rothacher, Ted Dyrness, Dick Fredriksen, some of those early people [HJA] that you still overlapped with. Maybe some of them were in their later years with the Forest Service or as research scientists, but maybe fill in the gaps with a little more personal details?

FS: Right. And I really hand it to Fredriksen and Rothacher and Al Levno and some of those other people, because they were Forest Service scientists and technicians. And a guy like Dick Fredriksen was a technician for a long time, and then, he went and got a Ph.D. along the way.

SS: In forestry or in biology?

FS: I think it was in forest science or forestry, and it [dissertation] had to do with water quality for some of the experimental watersheds. Anyway, the key thing was that they did with grace and openness, to accept the arrival of these shaggy post-docs and other workers up there, who came in from other kinds of cultures and started working at the Forest [HJA], even in the very places where they'd been doing the setup work, like Watershed 10. And they could have resented that, but they were very welcoming.

SS: Because they were more old-school guys, right?

FS: Yeah. SS: And you guys were, for lack of a better term, "hippy scientists"?

FS: You could probably say that. When you look at the black-and-white photos, some of which are in the Max Geier book, it's pretty shaggy.

SS: Well, it's the '70s, the early '70s.

FS: Yeah, it was the '70s. We were in the '70s. And so, that was really nice of them. Then Ted Dyrness, in particular, he was a soils guy. He was an earth scientist and was very helpful to me, to help me be able to integrate. That was the benefit of IBP and being able to hire some people, so people with unlikely, sort of tangential or peripheral disciplines, were given the time to find --

SS: To find your place?

FS: Find a place.

SS: Yeah.

FS: And that would be hard to accomplish today. Those kinds of things, I don't think are happening very frequently.

SS: Now, tell me a little about Jack Rothacher?

FS: Oh, I didn't know him very well, but he was a nice guy. He lived out in Woods Creek on the flanks of Mary's Peak. And he, I think, was the project leader at that time, the leader of the little Forest Service Watershed Unit that ran experimental watersheds at Andrews, multiple experimental watersheds there, watershed sets, and then also the Coyote Creek down on the Umpqua National Forest, and Fox Creek up on the Bull Run in the Mt. Hood National Forest, which is, Bull Run is the municipal watershed for Portland. So, this work was really important. What are the effects of forest practices on flows, stream flow, peak flows, low flows, water yield, and water quality. So, that's what those guys were into and they went to these watersheds on a regular basis and maintained things. So, Dick Fredriksen took me out on several occasions to some of these other locations. Also, there was Doug Swanston, and we have some papers, "Swanston and Swanson," and "Swanson and Swanston." He was a geologist here who had come down from Alaska, and we did some projects such as mapping the land forms and the erosion processes operating in places like Lookout Creek, earth flows in the Andrews, and the experimental watersheds, the Coyote Creek Experimental Watersheds.

SS: Didn't you also do some work in the Middle Santiam area, too?

FS: Yes, and we weren't just operating only in these experimental watersheds. I had students who were out doing landslide analysis mapping and so forth, in multiple places. Because on the one hand, we paid sustained attention to some places, but also, we needed to go out and test ideas in other parts of the world. So we did that regionally, including in the Coast Range, as well as the Cascades. And my Elk River Ph.D. dissertation work was done in the Klamath Mountains. So, each of these mountain types have different geomorphic stories and different interactions with forest practices. But then, the LTER, Long-Term Ecological Research program, has given us the opportunity to go and interact with other sites around the country. So, I've been very involved with, at times, with Luquillo [Puerto Rico LTER] and Harvard Forest [LTER], and a few of the others.

SS: Going back again to the early days; anecdotes, stories, humor, bizarre, to the culture, I mean, tell me some fun stories. There must have been some things, some knee-slappers, or things that you remember that you guys, if you get together, some of them are still not around, but you'd say, "Do you remember that time?" And you'd all enjoy, big, roaring laugh?

FS: Well, the person to ask that question of is Stan because he's a trickster, and he has some great stories about drinking and going out with Jim, and then, Bob Wissmar from the University of Washington. So, I wasn't socializing a whole lot in that kind of way.

SS: But even, not necessarily "party stories," but just stories about the culture of science and the logistics of being out there, and whether it be the winter or whatever time, during the floods. Any stories, especially in the early days, though, that were interesting, memorable?

FS: Well, a story, one story and I actually wrote a little blurb about it, that's in a book about old stories of Forest Service personnel that my buddy, Rolf Anderson, who is now retired from the Willamette National Forest, and I see in various ways, including through his role in the McKenzie River Trust, the land trust. Anyway, I heard the story, and you should ask Al Levno about it, about Dick Fredriksen and Al being out during the '64 flood. Al had these really thick, sort of like bottoms of Coke bottle glasses, and his glasses were fogging up all the time and he could barely see, and Dick sometimes had to hold him by the hand to lead him. And then, the storm was raging and there were big debris flows coming down Watershed 3 and piling big rafts of logs up on the road. There's an interesting photo of a big pile of logs, the road off of Watershed 3, in a little report that Dick Fredriksen wrote about that storm and the associated landslides. Loggers got up on top of one of the piles and started bucking up the logs, and were trying to get up to a logging operation where they had equipment up in the watershed, and get back to work. And then they heard this big rumble and the snapping of trees, as the next big debris flow came down. They hopped off the pile they'd been working on and the next big wad of logs came down in this debris flow and it banged into one they worked on, shoved that first pile into Lookout Creek and left a fresh one. And they decided to give up for the day.

SS: In other words, they might have been killed if they were on those?

FS: Oh, yeah. So, then Al and Dick had to wander their way out in a real round-about way, and they got down to the McKenzie Valley floor and it was in flood. They sort of waded their way down to a house a little bit downstream. Well, then in '96, this was right after the government shutdown. [1996 flood - to compare with 1964 flood].

SS: Sequestration's a later word.

FS: The government shutdown, orchestrated by the Gingrich Congress which had a "contract on America."

SS: Oh, it's "with" America. I know.

FS: No, it was on America. (Laughs)

SS: I know, I understand the joke.

FS: So, actually, that was really good for me because I was Principal Investigator of the LTER project at that time, and we were trying to write our renewal proposal, six years, for umpteen million dollars. So, I liked having my day job as a Forest Service scientist go away so I could focus on this other job. But then, we got it in. It had been in for only a couple days, and I think it was like February 2, it was due. And then Gordon Grant comes by and says, "Hey, I looked on the web. I can see that we've got a lot of snow up high. And I see the hydrograph on the McKenzie screaming upward, and I think, here comes a 'Pineapple Express' from Hawaii, a warm, wet, intense storm. And I think we're going to have a good frog-strangler of a flood here. Let's get out there." So, we picked up a few other people, including Beverley Wemple, a student of Julia's who was working on road hydrology at the time, and had instruments out there for measuring the hydrograph, and the water flowing through culverts. We went up there and spent several days during that storm, and it was extremely exciting and interesting. Gordon brought a video camera and took about 25 minutes of video at several places, including along Lookout Creek and the bridge over the mouth of Lookout Creek and the Watershed 3 mouth, which had been reamed out somewhat like had happened in the '64 flood. The gauging station had been wasted in '64 and in '96. We saw some big logs floating down the creek, Gordon's video-ing it, and we're there saying, "Oh, rip city! Hey, look, it's an aircraft carrier!" (Laughs) For these big logs coming down the creek.

SS: How did that one compare to the '64 flood from what you know of the evidence? Obviously, you weren't there in '64, but you've seen the pictures, you've read the reports, you've talked to the people that were there. How did it compare in intensity, scope, waterflow, etc.?

FS: To the best that we can reconstruct, it was probably fairly similar. '96 might have been a touch less in terms of flow. Our ability to measure discharge in those extreme events is compromised for various reasons. But also, the amount of sliding in the forest was similar in '96 and in '64. The amount of sliding from roads was about half in '96 of what it had been in '64. But in '64, we had all these freshly-made and in some cases, poorly-engineered and poorly-placed roads. And so, when they were reconstructed, and my guess is that they were reconstructed in somewhat more stable configurations.

SS: And you had culverts go under a lot of places. Correct?

FS: Yeah. And there were many fewer slides from plantations because the young plantations we had in '96 covered very little acreage.

SS: Well, your early cuts were at least regenerated to some degree by that time, correct?

FS: Yeah, right.

SS: I mean, you didn't have a bunch of bare ground with small plants and seedlings, right?

FS: Right, and it was really about, what the state of the root strength was probably. So anyway, there were some interesting similarities, but also there were some interesting legacies. For example, in Watershed 3, there were the big piles of old-growth logs that were flushed out of the multiple channels within Watershed 3 in '64. And hence, these big piles including massive old-growth trees. Well, in '96, the channel hadn't been recharged with very much big wood. And it had only 30-some years to do that. And so, most of the wood that came out in '96 was alder that had grown along the channel since the '64 flood.

SS: And got ripped out?

FS: Yeah, so there were these sort of legacies or shadows of the '64 flood.

SS: What impact did the '96 flood have on any of Mark Harmon's logs? FS: Mark Harmon's terrestrial log study was all high, not very dry, but high.

SS: So, he escaped most of that then?

FS: Right. But he did install a stream log decay component that involved something like ninety logs of alder and Doug Fir that were placed in a reach of stream where there, the left and right margins of the channel, and then the center, and then, spaced something like ten meters apart down the channel. Those logs were marked and then were moved in successive events. So that was anticipated.

SS: When and how did you begin to feel an attachment to the Andrews? First, as a natural place, and later to its human community, culture and activities, science and otherwise.

FS: Well, my work there, partly because I was coming up from Eugene, because I was a geologist, and just Mike James and I were doing the geologizing, and then we started mapping the landslides and I got into fire history, generally, with one other person. So, I spent a lot of time for multiple study objectives wandering around a lot of that landscape. And I really grooved on it. I just liked going on by myself or with one other person, cruising across the countryside and trying to puzzle out whatever the puzzles were that I was working on at the time. So, I really loved it. It was just a great place to go, and I still go there. And it's full of puzzles and they remain in spite of getting this new LIDAR imagery that gives us a spatial resolution that we couldn't have imagined.

SS: Kind of like a morphological picture of the tops of things, right?

FS: Well, you get returns from all levels of the forest including the ground return. So, a Japanese colleague, who a decade ago was here for a year, he's been coming back for about a month each summer, and we go out. And we went out this last August. It was just really fun, and to go out to all these places and in a sort of landscape immersion, in places where you figure nobody's been here before.

SS: Now, when did the culture of the Andrews start becoming a more mature culture? Was that after you started having placed residencies in the Forest, even when they were in old trailers?

FS: Oh, I think, there are sort of raucous "out-there guys" like Jim and Stan, and Jerry, and we'd "goon" Jerry. Jim would say to Jerry, "Hey, Jer, we're the best thing you got goin'!" [Referring to "Stream Team"] You know, so there was this sort of gooning.

SS: Yeah? FS: And camaraderie. We were trying to put our stories together, and when we had stories like "Wood and Streams," then we had to bump heads and put it together. And in a case like that, we weren't competing for territory with one another, we needed to come together. Jerry loved stories, and these stories had all these management implications and he especially loved that, as did Jim. So, I'd say, in '74-'75, we were really starting to hum. And like the "Wood and Streams" story really took off in '75, there was a big conference, "Logging Debris and Streams" and it was --

SS: Which is a negative context just because of the terminology, correct?

FS: Yeah, but this is a critical case. There's another place in here where you asked about the connection between, amongst policy management and science. And there are a number of "aha moments" in my sense of my career. A common theme to them is they became "aha moments" for scientists, setting us off on a research course that we had not imagined before, and with an intensity that we certainly didn't imagine. But they occurred in the context of interactions with management and policy people. The role of wood and streams in the context of dispute over should loggers be forced to remove wood from streams as part of their logging operations? That's a long story, and I have some stuff written about that; "Wood and Streams," and "State Forest Practice Rules." For example, the question, "Is this a good landscape or a bad landscape?" Back about 1991, this question led us into using historic disturbance regimes to plan landscape management; that's number two. Number three, is realizing that we needed to consider stream and riparian and other branching hierarchical networks, the network story in a way that's fully integrated with the forest vegetation patchwork. The "aha moment" came in the FEMAT, Forest Ecosystem Management Assessment Team process, immediately after the President's Forest Summit [Bill Clinton's 1993 meeting in Portland, Oregon to address management of NW forests].

SS: In the early '90s, correct?

FS: '93. That led directly into the Northwest Forest Plan. Anyway, there are these different "aha moments." And although we play things up bigtime in the NSF science realm, they also play policy and management roles.

SS: How was the structure of things back in the IBP days in terms of the program, who ran what, was it an organized program, was it a little bit of OSU, a little bit of Forest Service, a little bit of the IBP thing? How was that working out back then?

FS: Okay, that would be in the '70s. I was not central because, from '72 to '75, I was in Eugene, and then I came up here, and gradually got integrated, but my perception was that Dick and Jerry ran the show. Then they duked it out with the University of Washington people for bucks. And it's interesting that Jerry ended up going to the U of W, having been in mortal combat with them for quite a few years.

SS: Describe the combat. What do you mean by combat? A turf, program direction and philosophy, money, all of the above?

FS: Okay, let's remember where I was supposed to go with that on early organization. And the combat thing was based on as I understand it, Ted and Jerry were sitting on a stump saying, in the mid-'60s, "We need to get more people working here or this place might be disestablished." And so we've got to get some academics. A little bit later, they were talking; "Hey, there's this workshop on systems ecology." "What's that?" "Well, I don't know but maybe that's what we need to do." So, one of them went to this workshop. So, that led to getting into, trying to get into IBP. And so, then there was a competition between the Seattle people and the Corvallis people to be the Coniferous Forest Biome site. There was competition amongst them, those two groups, to get NSF-funded. Then the story goes, and Jerry has told this in places, and you may have it in your records, that the NSF said, "Either you guys get it together or there is no Coniferous Forest Biome." So, that set the stage for this continuing tension to compete for dollars within the Conifer Forest Biome pot.

SS: What was the location for Washington? That was not Wind River, or was it somewhere else?

FS: Yes, and that is a critical feature. Why did the Andrews scene and Corvallis, do what it did, and here we are today? And why did the Seattle scene, which was at Findley Lake, a fairly high elevation lake, do what it did? So, there was a lake component there and there was a stream component here. At the Cedar River Watershed, which is the municipal watershed for Seattle, they worked on plantation forests and glacial outwash managed forest, and we mostly did native forest. The stream [aquatic] people were highly cooperative. They're both wet, and one was lakes and one was streams, and they had a bunch of wild and crazy guys doing it. And so, when St. Helens operated, and there were lakes and there were stream issues there, they really came together. So, organizationally, my take is that Dick and Jerry ran the [Andrews] show.

This would be in the first half of the '70s. We all had our little projects, and then, we had to get together periodically, report out and be subject to NSF site reviews, and write pubs and internal reports and things of this nature. We were also pushed hard to take a systems approach to our work, ala an "Odom-esque" [Howard and Eugene Odum] approach; the way we'll understand these ecosystems is to define all the stocks and flows, and develop these "horrendogram" diagrams, which show how much carbon is stored in bark and fine roots and forest litter and foliage and so forth, and then, what are the fluxes found in litter fall and one thing or another. Do that for carbon and nitrogen and other elements, and water, and then model it, computer-simulation modeling. And so, the idea was to have synthesis in the form of large ecosystem models. I adopted that thinking in trying to think about sediment budgets and sediment routing. Some colleagues were doing that; da good buddy, Dick Janda, a U.S.G.S. guy working in the redwoods in the context of the initial establishment and later expansion of Redwood National Park, and some other people. And so, we actually got a little NSF grant and had a workshop on sediment budgets and routing in forest encashments, here in Corvallis in about 1979 or something, 1980, then, we published proceedings from it. I think it was fairly influential in people's thinking about how soil and sediment moves through watersheds. My interests were in how it does occur under natural disturbance regimes like wildfire, the role of root throw in landsides and all. You certainly can integrate that all into this picture. And how does it occur under managed disturbance regimes and versus natural disturbance regimes. And so, anyway, what was the question?

SS: We were just going through the IBP era.

FS: Oh, yeah.

SS: And kind of early days transition. I'm trying to get at what the transition was. I mean, the IBP obviously petered out for a variety of reasons. But it was the seed child to what became the LTER, the EER/LTER, right?

FS: Right, right. So, the succession for us was that IBP died a planned death, and then the EER, Experimental Ecological Reserve, was it turned out to be, sort of a bridging grant to keep our core functions.

SS: And there was never actually formal names that used the EER, it was just an administrative term between the IBP era and the LTER era, correct?

FS: It may have referred to a specific grant, but it was not something, that as far as I know, was for the network of IBP sites that would then become candidates for LTER.

SS: How many of the other IBP sites did you know personally or at least had significant contacts with the people from them?

FS: That is an interesting issue concerning how Forest Service research sites set the stage to be competitive for IBP, which in turn further set the stage to be competitive for LTER. So, the principals, Andrews, Hubbard Brook, Coweeta, the crown jewels. There are some other sites that may have had some of that, I am not sure about them, like Niwot, Shortgrass Steppe, and Pawnee Grasslands, out of Ft. Collins.

SS: In northern Colorado, correct?

FS: Yeah. Those are some of the principal examples.

SS: Now, what do you remember what the organizing ideas were back then? It sounded like you and other people were trying to find their way in this new science, and what does this mean? How do we define an ecosystem in terms of studying it scientifically, analytically, in a way that matters beyond, I'm just going to do this study and that study, and how do we integrate this stuff? It sounds like people were still trying to put it together, conceptually.

FS: That's fair. It's interesting to think about it. There was this push for a systems approach, defined stocks and flows, and controls on the valves in various parts of the system, and to move directly into simulation models. And that that would constitute understanding ecosystems.

SS: How influential were Likens and the Hubbard Brook people on what people were thinking back then?

FS: I think they were very influential. I've just been thinking about that recently. But before I go there, let me finish one thought.

SS: Sure.

FS: So, on the one hand, we were pressed to develop these simulation models and sort of synthesize our knowledge. And we did, and most, maybe all IBP sites, did produce synthesis volumes, books. And I think I have the IBP one in here for the Coniferous Forest Biome. So, there's a narrative synthesis, of sorts, with chapters by different groups of authors.

SS: Right.

FS: The stuff we did that was most impactful in conservation, stewardship, and even just thinking about how ecosystems function, was the deadwood work and the old-growth work, and these things were not a part of the charge.

SS: In other words, your mission or your directive, if you will, was not that?

FS: Correct.

SS: That came out of what you guys did and happened to do, and thought of and created out there in the place, the landscape?

FS: Right. And some of it was quite accidental. For example, that we happened to be working in old-growth native forest, rather than, say, mature forest. We were working a lot in the 500-year-old forest, rather than in the 120- or 140- [year] age class. That we happened to be working in old growth, was an accident of that decision in the mid-'40s to place the Blue River Experimental Forest, later renamed for H.J. Andrews, on the Lookout Creek Watershed, in part because it had a bunch of old growth in it. It was in the municipal watershed of the City of Eugene. The objective was to develop the forestry, the post-World War II forestry system, while attending to water quality issues, as directed in the Organic Act that set up the Forest Service at the turn of the century [20th]. All these things just sort of happened with these funny multi-decade lags. That we happened to work in old growth, we didn't crystallize that story until the end of that decade of the '70s. And then, it didn't move from being pre-relevant, irrelevant or pre-relevant to being hyper-relevant, for yet another decade. So that's a major story.

SS: Now, going over to Jerry and old growth, how did Jerry become Jerry, the "guru," the old-growth guy? I mean, it's a perfect segue for that right now. So, kind of go back and segue over to focus on him and that.

FS: Jerry's a guy who, now at year, something like 77, still takes 25 kids out, and he'll do it by himself for a couple-week field trip, sleep under the bonnet in his pickup truck in the back with his golden retriever, and get up in the morning and yodel to the trees. He's a passionate guy. And he likes telling stories, and he does a good job of it. He's got stories to tell and he has a lot of friends, who he chews stories over with. And he has a foot in both the forestry world and the ecology world. He was elected President of the Ecological Society of America. And he was given a prestigious Barrington Award for Outstanding Science Accomplishment by the Society of American Foresters. His middle name is actually Forest.

SS: Really?

FS: Really. I asked him about that. He said that he was called Gary for a long time. There was a story about the doctor who delivered him was probably a little tipsy, and he'd misspelled some stuff on the birth certificate. And then, he only got called Jerry later in life, maybe high school or college or something. I recorded that and I think I've delivered notes about that. Anyway, I think it's just a natural for him, this conspiracy of circumstances, which is just an absolute incredible confluence. And that he, things like the fact that he moved to the University of Washington, so he could speak as a professor rather than being a Forest Service scientist. And that he loved to connect with the power structure and work the political dimensions, and that the whole period, there's a paper that you should tune in on that was in a special issue of Bioscience. The title is "Scientists in Wonderland," which is a brief overview of science input to policy from the Maynard Agency, Scientific Committee for the Spotted Owl with Jack Ward Thomas, that led to the "Gang of Four" and SAT and FEMAT; all these different ways to give input to policy. And Jerry liked to intersect with the secretaries of Interior or Ag and the members of Congress and so forth. All these things just worked together. The stage of this bioregion, the issues it presented, and then, it all flowed out globally to Southeast Australia and partnering with David Lindenmeier, who is a powerful force there, and in North Europe and Scandinavia, and all this, it just --

SS: I mean, looking over his slew of his Forest Service publications and the inventory work, he was a machine from the '50s all the way through.

FS: Totally.

SS: I mean, his production was incredible.

FS: Totally.

SS: And I mean, they all seem like a lot of innovative ideas or at least project ideas going forward, just here, there, everywhere, just synergizing toward something. Is that a correct way to look at it?

FS: Yes. You should ask him how far out the horizon is on what he's doing. My impression is that it's not too far out there. In fact, when he and I interacted, we've had times where we' haven't seen things the same way. I'm usually backed off and am sort of looking at a much bigger picture.

SS: He's a bright light.

FS: Yeah, and he's framing things for the next step or the next two steps.

SS: Correct.

FS: It's been very fruitful to have our differences, and yet, share this affection and respect. And that isn't just between Jerry and me, but, also with Jim and Stan. I'm just thinking about it recently in the case of these memorials for Jim. We had this group that got together down and dirty, digging our soil pits or sampling the stuff in the stream with cold hands and all this, but then each person went on and went out and did all kinds of things and communications with the public and policy-makers, and working in different policy and management circles. It was highly diverse, yet highly complementary, and a bunch of us were disciples of Jerry. So, Jerry isn't very much older than most of us, he's, I don't know, only like seven years older than me, just a fairly small fraction of a generational difference. But he has always seemed a whole generation older than me, because he's been operating at such a high level from the first time I ever met him.

SS: How do you think his obvious energy and just enthusiasm and innovation, worked within the traditional Forest Service structure, especially back in the '50s and '60s when he was becoming Jerry, this engine of publications and research and ideas, and a team leader at a very young age? How do you think he was reacted to by the traditional "good-old boy network" of the Forest Service, even forwarding to your days? Fred, I want you to also segue into what you saw in terms of you guys starting to do ecosystem science within what was still a somewhat "old guard" Forest Service?

FS: Right. There's a very critical feature here. And I was just thinking about it and I was talking with Bernard Bormann on Monday as we drove up and back to St. Helens. He's the son of Herb Bormann, of Likens and Bormann. We were talking about what are the distinctive features of what we have experience in our careers that made possible what we've worked on. And that includes this dimension that you raise of working within sort of a paramilitary organization. I think we're 2,500 miles from Washington, D.C. This historically, was a big timber-producing region and this region had a lot of power. So, we're somewhat displaced from control. We're unusual, the Forestry Sciences Lab [USFS] on the OSU campus is unusual as a Forest Service research facility. It's the second largest research facility in the nation, second only to the Forest Products Lab [Madison, Wisconsin]. So, this is where a huge supra-critical mass of ecological and all other kinds of talent is located, and on a campus that is loaded with talent for dealing with natural resources, nested in this region, and it's become a hotbed for this kind of thinking.

And the Andrews Forest has a great position, the place is iconic. The forest is humbling and iconic. Our regional population took advanced courses in forest ecology during the Forest Wars. It drew tremendous attention to forest and rivers. The Oregonian has stories about, the natural resources and ecosystems, all the time. Places like Mount St. Helens and Andrews are bigger than any of us. They are flagships for the agency in terms of public profile. And also then, those of us who are Forest Service people have a lot of university play, and a place like our place operates at a very high scientific metabolism. Many Forest Service scientists are at sleepy little locations not on a university campus or not well-integrated with a university, and they're subcritical mass in a bunch of respects. Except for more limited subject matter like silviculture research of the southern pine or something. So, we just have been operating at a level which has given us a lot of latitude. And I see us as performers on these stages. So, Mount St. Helens is a stage, and we are performers, you understand. And we have stories.

Mount St. Helens is an incredible stage. A guy who was a former ecologist for the Forest Service, and then, for a long time a lead staffer for a House Appropriations Committee, brought a bunch of committee members up and arranged for the National Guard to take us around for a day in three Black Hawk helicopters, taking off from Portland Airport and flying into the crater. I mean, talk about opportunities for performance and storytelling. And so, we ran hard, and sometimes maybe loose. There was effort certainly to keep us under control. And Jerry, when he was the leader of the group, would say, "Well, maybe, you don't," you know, to administrators, "Maybe you don't want to ask too many specific questions about the way we're building facilities out at the Andrews. You might not like the answers." You know, when I took over, when he departed, I felt like we needed to have a different attitude, and make sure that they were seeing us as really integral to their programs, that is, the dean of the College of Forestry [OSU], and the station director [PNW] and the Regional Forester [U.S. Forest Service Region 6]. But, anyway, there was some playfulness in there, but and those were different times than today.

SS: But wasn't there some competition or even resentment against, obviously the ideas that became New Forestry and Jerry, and just the different ethic that's involved with pure science versus science in the pursuit of economic gains? I mean, there must have been tensions in there that you walked in on when you were in the '70s, and Jerry being the strong personality he was, etc., etc. I mean, that was present, correct?

FS: Well, I think some of those things were present. And certainly, we had field trips where there was open combat in a way. Not within our group, but --

SS: From the outside, yeah. And even from the College of Forestry, which was full of utilitarian foresters back then?

FS: Right, and these issues are still in effect.

SS: Still there, but it's not the same, the balance has shifted, I know.

FS: Yeah. Just it's that the "Old Guard" has to die out. But yeah, that was around. I never personally felt like somebody was trying to control the message or control what we did. We had this amazing spread from having substantial NSF dollars.

SS: Which gave you power and credibility, in that sense?

FS: Yeah. And --

SS: You weren't drawing from line item Forest Service budget stuff in other words, also?

FS: Not also. I mean, so we had this whole RD&A, Research, Development and Application spectrum, and the National Forest people were really key players. And that the selection of rangers and even supervisors on the Willamette, included attention, interest and partnering with the research community, which actually added substantially to their workload. You know, for somebody like Lynn Burditt, who was ranger at Blue River during the Forest Wars, and it is really critical for you to interview her, she really had a massive extra workload to do this stuff. And there were so many field trips with so many high-performing, really important people, members of Congress, staffers, major media, secretaries of cabinet-level departments and stuff like that. I felt like we did our stuff. And I didn't feel like we had to really battle to get to do our stuff, other than to just have the endurance to keep doing it.

SS: To keep plugging away, let us go back in time a bit. What about the locals when you first went up in the '70s? What do you remember about your interaction with them? I mean, you were staying down closer to Blue River, you weren't detached like the campus is now. So, there must have been some interaction. Who are these guys? And you were shaggy guys, and obviously, there's some of that, the Cougar Room was still at Blue River, and there was some interaction between the logging culture and the academic, urban hippy-types, and I just wonder what that was like?

FS: That's a little bit of a strange thing for our operation which came into sharper focus for me when the Adaptive Management Areas were set up. I picture that as there were 10 Adaptive Management Areas.

SS: That was in the '80s, though, right?

FS: Yeah, that was in the Northwest Forest Plan.

SS: Oh, '90s then, okay.

FS: That was '94 when that was signed as policy. There are ten of them, four in Oregon, four in Washington, and two in California. Two of the Adaptive Management Areas were archetypes for the whole set. There was the Andrews, which had a strong research-management partnership, and there was the Applegate down west of Ashland. And that is a large area, a mix of BLM and Forest Service lands, and a lot of private land in the Applegate drainage. Many people lived in that area, and that was the model for agency-public interaction, and they had some very astute and active public folks. We were supposed to have a public component, but we've had a hard time doing that for the Andrews because there are a bunch of little, unincorporated very-small communities along the McKenzie River, who are our nearest neighbors. Then you hit Eugene and Springfield, which is a big, rather detached place about 50 miles away.

SS: But back in the '70s, what do you remember, and even the early '80s, what do you remember about interactions with the people? I mean, you guys were there, they knew you were there. I mean, you knew people, right? You met people?

FS: Yeah, I can go there. Yeah, I never was party to many interactions. I mean, I'd go to the grocery store and I'd go to a gas station, and eat in the Blue River Cafe. And sometimes, we'd interact with Fred Banes, who was a logger who had a place up Blue River just from the mouth. You just go out of town maybe a quarter mile, up towards the dam. And he'd logged some land out there that then we did studies on, and it was traded over to the Forest Service. And then also, early on, I remember Jerry would bring a logger from, who was a forester for Rosboro Timber that owned a few tens of thousands of acres, I believe, up there in Quartz Creek, just on the south side of the McKenzie. Those big clear-cuts up there are Rosboro. Anyway, I felt like we had good relationships with those people.

SS: In the early days?

FS: Yeah.

SS: Before the Forest Wars?

FS: Yeah.

SS: And that changed things, though, didn't it?

FS: Well, there --

SS: With some people, anyway.

FS: Yeah. And in the early days of the Adaptive Management stuff, '95-'96, we had public meetings, including in the high school. But somehow, we just couldn't, we never did really connect on a sustained basis with local people. We did have many field trips, public field trips, especially in the '90 to '95 or '96 to '97 period. We had a public meeting in the New Perspectives [U.S. Forest Service program] era right in Eugene right next to the railroad track. And we had offered some public field trips. Then we'd have continuing public, critical public conversations about the future of the forests and forestry. And we'd have a Forest Service scientist, a Forest Service land manager, generally the ranger and the research liaison, and a university person, together showing our work to the public and having conversations. Some of that was actually studied by social scientists both in the earliest '90s, and then in the latter part of the 2000's. So, let's see, I wonder if we should --

SS: How would you describe the facilities research equipment and scientific capabilities of the H.J. when you arrived? And how did that improve during your tenure, and maybe you'd want to start and address this in sections for somebody with your longevity. And just kind of tell me what it was like in the '70s? What were the technological capabilities? What was the infrastructure scientifically and otherwise to support even connection to university (coughs), excuse me - database management? What were your capabilities? Now, obviously, you worked within the constraints of those days, but today, how would you look back on that?

FS: Yes. My own work did not rely on fancy instrumentation or data management because I was out and just trying to cruise the landscape and make observations and notes, and notes in notebooks and pinpricks on air photos, and make maps. So, like the facilities at the site, and in the supporting facilities nearby, like with the trailers and the lab, was really quite rudimentary. And it was a big step forward in around 1980 when we began to develop the headquarters site.

SS: So, the campus, where is it now, you started to have, it was still trailers, but at least it was a real facilities site?

FS: Yeah, it was right there. You could get under cover. It could be dry. And driving time to field sites was really reduced, which was good. And so, there was always a push to upgrade facilities, upgrade connectivity, and we continue to be pushing that all the time. It's just sort of a constant thing, connectivity from field instruments, meteorological stations or gauging stations, can we get real-time high-speed data delivery from the field to the headquarters site and then down to town.

SS: But that took quite a long time to actually have phone hookups, right?

FS: Yeah, and then to get a T1 line, and tie in. I mean, we had to deal with the National Forest system, and the National Forest-university interfaces can be troubling, you know, challenging.

SS: Now, what was at that campus, where the campus is now, what was there before there was anything, was it an open field or was it cleared?

FS: The Andrews Headquarters Site was, had been an old-growth forest, that then was clear-cut, and a plantation was established there back around '60, 1960, or something like that. And then about twenty years later --