Fred Swanson Oral History Interview, November 26, 2013

Samuel Schmieding: Good afternoon, this is Dr. Samuel J. Schmieding, Courtesy Faculty, College of Forestry, Oregon State University, here in the home of Fred Swanson, Senior Forest Service Scientist, long-term member of the Andrews Experimental Forest and LTER system. We are here for Interview 3, part three of an interview session that started back on November 1, continued on I think the 15th, and now we're going to try to wrap it up today. So here we are in the home of Dr. Swanson, and we're ready to go. Fred wants to start by saying something, and then we'll return to our questions and subjects that we're going to cover.

Fred Swanson: One aspect of the interview process that I think would be useful to someone looking at the history of LTER would be to, in the course of the interview such as this one, to ask about the personal profile of the 00:01:00individuals, how they conduct their work in terms of the research they do, their education, educator activities, their public outreach activities, the nature of their partnering with land managers, the various forms of connection they have with policy-makers. These are all the types of components that our program as a whole has, and then, individuals have different profiles across these and other categories. And that is relevant, I think, to looking at how the Andrews has worked over the years. I'm especially intrigued and impressed by how many of the senior people, just going way back with Jerry Franklin and Jim Sedell and Stan 00:02:00Gregory, Tom Spies, myself, Sherri Johnson, and Julia Jones, each of these people, have had major areas of activity in each of these arenas. And it's especially interesting to see how strong and diverse have been the connections with policy. So, anyway, those are somewhat unusual features, I think, of the group over time.

SS: With a take-off on what you just said, which actually is covered in separate questionnaires, but you're kind of providing a synopsis question cluster answer, if you will.

FS: Yeah.

SS: Why don't you take off on that and how you would analyze or perceive or think that the group is the same or different from any other working group in 00:03:00this kind of research, and just kind of go from there.

FS: Well, I can't judge very well how our group compares with other groups such as other LTER sites, because I'm immersed in our group and I don't have a studied analysis of either ourselves or others. But from various sources of information and perspectives, I think we've been unusual, that is, the Andrews Forest and Willamette National Forest partners, we've been unusual in the diversity and intensity, and protracted nature of our connections with management and policy. And a bunch of that's by design, and a bunch of it's by 00:04:00strange circumstance beyond our control.

SS: Wouldn't a lot of that basically come out of the unique historical positioning of the Andrews, some of the important work that came out of the Andrews regarding forestry, old growth, endangered species, etc., and the timing of when the institution was maturing, its scientists becoming names, and the science becoming noted, with, shall we say, post-environmental age politics of land management, all those things coalescing at one time?

FS: Certainly, that's true. I agree graduate students have, this has been very important as well, in with that. Also, our roles as educators in dealing with undergrads, and especially, terms of carrying messages to the next generation, but also being stimulated and challenged by these fresh, young minds. Another 00:05:00facet as a group and as individuals is the diversity of our research efforts. We have people who try to do experiments, experimentalists. We have some significant amount of modeling, although perhaps less so than a lot of other programs. And then we have had quite a bit of descriptive work including by people who are dominantly not historians, such as myself, who is trained as a geologist. So, we have this mix of research styles. And we've been unusually intensive inter-partnering with the land managers, and that's been very, very fruitful, including learning points that we need to address on the science front because we can see the bigger world through the tasks of our land manager 00:06:00colleagues, who have to deal with people with competing objectives for the public lands. It pushes us to think more holistically than we would as reductionist scientists. Also, public outreach has been an important part of our work, both at the Andrews and Mount St. Helens, because there's been a lot of public interest. And I sort of feel like many of the citizens of our region sort of deserve a degree in forest ecology, having been students of forest ecology for a few decades by all the newspaper coverage of the conflicts. So, as a group and as individuals, we've got action going on in all these arenas.

SS: Now, granted, you are immersed in the Andrews. You are immersed in coniferous forest ecology, etc., but you are connected. You know people in the system, LTER. You're a worldly person in your perspective. What is your 00:07:00perception of how the Andrews may be different for whatever reason, than maybe some of the other LTER sites that you know very well, regarding some of these important points that you just brought up?

FS: Based in part on comments from Denise Lach, who led a research project with NSF funding to do some analysis, both by site visits and by questionnaires of other LTER sites, following up on a pilot study they did at the Andrews, and Denise has said that our site is unusual in terms of the connections with policy and management. I do think that that was partly of our making, but also partly 00:08:00of the history of circumstances and confluences that you just mentioned. In some respects, I expect we're quite similar to other LTER sites. Some sites like Coweeta may be the most similar in terms of having a strong Forest Service component connected with LTER, and a Forest Service component that is attentive to communicating with land managers. There's a fair amount of Forest Service land in the Southeast and those "Coweetans" have tried tech transfer in the Forest Service sense. Some of the other Forest Service sites like Luquillo and Hubbard Brook and University of Alaska-Bonanza Creek, the land management on the 00:09:00public lands is much less intensive than it has been in the Northwest. And so much less extensive. So, for various reasons, I think we've been particularly busy on that front.

SS: Now, it seems to me the Andrews started to really come of age in terms of a mature institution that you could make a straight line from today, going back in the 1980's, the early 1980's, when the campus, even though they called it the "Ghetto in the Meadow," the old trailers, started to move into where the campus is today, the general area, started to develop a place, a culture, an administrative ethos that was on-site. And this is the same time that all these 00:10:00issues you're talking about were, shall we say, fulminating in their early scientific, political and economic realms, and the cultural realm as well. What do you remember about the '80s leading up to the '90s, and the Forest Wars, and then the Forest Plan [Northwest Forest Plan] kind of being the climax or however you want to characterize it, in terms of what you said about policymakers and the centrality of the Andrews, and just talk about that however you wish to talk about that.

FS: Well, I do feel like we had preparatory activities in the '70s. And I remember Jerry Franklin leading us in those activities. I remember a visit by the then-member of Congress, oh, damn, his name is slipping me right now. Actually, I think, Peter De Fazio had been a driver for him. And in the '70s, I 00:11:00remember he came to visit, and Jerry coaching us, "Keep it simple. You need to be able to make your points in one short sentence." And there was some comment about him wearing a toupee, so when he went up in helicopters, he wouldn't wear a helmet because he was afraid his hairpiece would fall off. But also, more importantly, he was interested in increased utilization of logging residues, you know, deadwood after cutting. And for energy.

SS: Waste products, as previously thought. Correct?

FS: Waste products or large, woody debris or whatever.

SS: Right.

FS: And residues, that was a common term at that time. And actually, there was a Forest Service research unit who worked on that topic. And I remember that we 00:12:00were getting serious about the role of deadwood in the ecosystem at that point and its importance.

SS: And this is right before Mark Harmon hatched his idea and it became a reality. Correct? Or, during the time when he was starting to consider it as a Master's student?

FS: It was starting to lead up. This was the lead-up to proposing the log decomposition experiment in the first LTER proposal. But this was still some years before that.

SS: Okay.

FS: So anyway, I remember some early cases of beginning to interact with policy folks. We did have some four- or five-day campouts at the camp area in the 00:13:00Andrews that was called Gypsy Camp, and then we're told that that was inappropriate, so it became called the "Camp formerly known as Gypsy." And some of the early camping before we had facilities, you know, the early IBP era would occur at that site. But then we'd have gatherings of people, some industry people, some environmentalists. I remember we had some people from the U of O Law School. And our science staff, our post-docs and our faculty, would give raps out in the woods on the different topics that we were studying. And then we'd have campfire discussions, including about what some of the management implications would be on topics including old growth and deadwood, and then just basic biology, mycorrhizal fungi, and all kinds of things. Those were really 00:14:00interesting, and fueled some of our interdisciplinarity by listening to one another give raps out in the woods, and then interacting with diverse groups. So, we had many forums in which we practiced telling our stories, and that was during the '70s, and that continued to some extent during the '80s. Then during the '80s, we were busy trying to implement the first stages of LTER, a fair ways into the '80s, then NSF started pushing the network to function as a network, that began as a collection of independent LTER sites.

SS: Well, the first group was seven, right, six or seven?

FS: It was either five or six.

SS: Five or six, right.

FS: So, many of the sites that became IBP sites, some of those sites had deeper 00:15:00histories as experimental forests. And then, many of the sites that had been experimental forests, then got to be IBP sites. That left them well-positioned. It gave them a competitive advantage in being successful in proposing LTER projects because they'd already been, they'd developed an interdisciplinary team that could function as a community and collaborate, and write an integrated proposal, including previous serious attention to data management, information management, so that the culture of data management and data sharing was beginning to emerge already. There was infrastructure that was taking shape at these sites, and it made them all prepared to get going with doing the actual science. This is all sort of stage-setting, social and other infrastructure stage-setting.

SS: When do you remember the term "old growth" first being used in your career?

FS: I don't have a sharp memory of that. My impression is that it didn't come into very sharp focus until Jerry convened a group at Wind River, it was a group of about dozen people that led to the 1981 publication, Ecological Characteristics of Old Growth. I do remember us distinguishing the different age classes. For example, work Jim Sedell and I were doing on wood in streams, and George Lienkaemper, who did a lot of the mapping and the field work on the wood and streams. We went to streams that had different wildfire histories, so we had 00:17:00mature age class, 120-year-old stands, and at that time we called them 450-year-old stands. And then we did some work in clear-cut areas. So, we were paying attention to the different age classes and how that affected streams, including wood loading and light levels and things of this nature. That was in the mid-'70s. But then, it was the late-'70s that Jerry got us going on that publication. Actually, it might have taken up to two years to get it completed. I remember him mentioning that he completed it in a hotel room in Tokyo when he had some time to focus on it.

SS: I seem to remember reading old growth mentioned in literature as far back as the '50s, but not in the way that it was referenced later, and even foresters using that term, occasionally.

FS: Right. There's some very interesting discussions about the term "old growth" and alternative terms in the book, Old Growth in a New World, edited by Tom Spies and Sally Duncan, I think it was 2009. Norm Johnson and I have one chapter early on, and we mention some of the different terms that have been used, "large saw timber," that H.J. Andrews and Cowlin and others had used in the inventory of the Forest Resources of the Douglas Fir Region [1940], old growth, and some other terms. And then, there's a very interesting page or two of the essay, the 00:19:00chapter in that same book by Andy Kerr, describing in quite interesting ways how the environmentalist community sorted between primeval forest, old growth, and ancient forest. So, that's worth a look in terms of use of terminology and intentions in selecting terminology.

SS: But old growth did not become the culturally-loaded term until the '80s and into the '90s, when it became a political hot button subject often connected to the spotted owl and that whole issue related to the Andrews?

FS: Right, I think that's true.

SS: Concerning Jerry, being the supposed "guru" of old growth and so central to 00:20:00that dynamic and "New Forestry," how central was Andrews to the spotted owl science and what came after?

FS: The spotted owl work was Eric Forsman's work, and working with his advisor, Charles "Chuck" Meslow. As I heard the story, and it would be good to get it from Eric, the straight story, he was out at some guard station in the Cascades and he heard a spotted owl, and began a conversation. Or I heard another story that someone had spotted one in the Watershed 2 area on the Andrews, and Eric and this person had gone out and found one. So, he was intrigued, and then 00:21:00pursued a Master's, and became a Ph.D. on the Spotted Owls, starting in the Andrews. I remember encountering him up there. He was staying in a little camper that had been put off a pickup and perched on the ground, and would go out at night and roam the steep, wet hillside tracking his owls. And so, it has those roots in those places with the abundance of old growth and that landscape was an important factor. But then, the attention grew over time to the full range of the spotted owl. In fact, the Northwest [Forest] Plan is for the range of the spotted owl from San Francisco to the Canadian border, and it dribbles over onto the east side of the Cascades. And so, the Andrews was a seed-bed for discovery 00:22:00about spotted owls through the critical work of Eric, who's still really involved in that. And there's been a whole cascade of other studies including its predators and competitors, Great-Horned and Barred Owls, and then its prey and working the food web.

SS: So, how do you see the Spotted Owl as a symbol of cultural and political importance, and then also its actual physical, biological, ecological importance and reality? How do you look at that differentiation?

FS: Well, of course, it was pivotal in the lawsuits and that it became listed. And was pivotal in the context of the National Forest Management Act regulations 00:23:00and the Endangered Species Act. It played this hugely critical role which was really quite amazing, given how such a small number of people in this region have ever seen one. It's a fairly cryptic creature.

SS: Well, you've got to go out at night or really early in the morning if you want to have a good chance to see them, correct?

FS: Right, and it's best to go out with somebody who knows how to hoot them in, and can carry on a conversation with them. So that's very interesting. Old growth, on the other hand, those big-old trees are standing there and aren't so cryptic. It is amazing to think about a 500-year old organism, and is it okay to 00:24:00cut down, kill such an organism? These are images and notions that I think have been very important in influencing the shift in policy relative to old growth, from cutting it down to protecting what's left. And because they can really trigger our imaginations and raise fundamental questions about values because of the distinctive features, the ancientness and so forth, of these organisms. And then it's interesting that one of the charges in development of the Northwest Forest Plan, what became the Northwest Forest Plan, was to design an interactive network of old-growth reserves across the range of the spotted owl.

You know, the cumulative work at Andrews, including not only old growth and northern spotted owl, and forest stream interactions and the role of dead wood in streams and forests as a source for, which profoundly influenced the riparian rules, these factors, plus other factors of thinking about landscapes and how landscape structure may influence ecological phenomena, the extent of interior forest habitat in light of micro-climatic edge effects where you've cut openings in the form of clear-cuts into an otherwise nearly continuous, mature forest landscape. All these notions, the landscape notions, river network notions, road ecology and road hydrology notions; all played into the design ideas in various processes leading up to the Forest Ecosystem Management Assessment Team [FEMAT], 00:26:00which started on the Monday after President Clinton and Vice President Gore's Forest Summit the previous Friday, in April of 1993. That FEMAT team that then did that work and incorporated all these ideas and the Andrews group, was very instrumental in the research and public discussion of these ideas. And a lot of field trips and in other contexts, then influenced how the ecological planning at this regional scale was framed. What we will pay attention to and what we did not pay attention to, which is really, equally very amazing, two big things that were not addressed in the Northwest Forest Plan.

SS: Planning for the Forest Plan. Right?

FS: Right. One was, the group, the FEMAT team, was supposed to not pay attention 00:27:00to private lands. We were in the Gingrich Congress, and although remote sensing could show us what was happening on private lands, which could be influencing what was happening on the public lands relative to things like spotted owls, we couldn't' pay attention to it. But that's probably okay because the plate was awfully full for things that clearly had to be paid attention to. And the second big thing that was ignored was climate change. And that, too, was big and gnarly and the plate was already overflowing.

SS: Climate change was just starting to move into more of a central political, cultural realm, by the mid, late-'90s?

FS: Yeah.

SS: I mean, the Forest Wars kind of preceded that moving into popular culture, the discussion that we see now?

FS: Yeah.

SS: Okay. Now, going back to the '80s and the '90s, and the whole Andrews program, talking about outreach politics, culture, what do you remember about relationships with any local communities or traditional land users? How it was before then, during and after then, in terms of how it changed in terms of attitudes, reactions, impressions, acceptance of what the nerdy scientists on the hill were doing, versus, all of a sudden, what you're doing is affecting our livelihood? You know, all those kind of conversations and perceptions about how that may have changed during that time.

FS: Unlike a place like the Applegate, which like the Andrews and on a much 00:29:00larger area, became Adaptive Management Areas under the Northwest Forest Plan, in the Applegate there was a strong community component. The research component was much less prominent in the Applegate. But we [HJA] did not have a strong and continuing interaction with local publics. We did have interactions through the land managers to the Willamette National Forest. A lot of those folks were local citizens and we did interact with them on a continuing basis, and we did have many field trips. So, one analysis of the period from the late '80s to deep into the '90s to look at the roles of the Andrews, should really examine our log of 00:30:00field trips. And we have kept records of those. And when they were, who came, what the nature of their group was. Was it a public group, was it an academic, a student group, media, policymakers, one thing, industry people, enviros, a mixed-bag? So we had many different kinds of field trips, and local public members were part of that. In some cases, we intentionally engaged them and actually assessed their reactions. So, there were some documentation and actual social science analysis by people like Mark Brunson in the early '90s, and Bruce Schindler and Angela Mallon, who did a master's with him. And so, we engaged the 00:31:00local people on field trips, through field trips, and then assessed their responses in some cases. Also, we had some public workshops in the Eugene/Springfield area on water topics, flood-related or water supply-related, and fire topics. The Willamette National Forest science liaison people helped organize those. And so, we had many forms of interaction with the local people. I never felt like I was in a position of continued interaction in such a way that I could see that certain people moved from friend to foe, or it was sort of hard to read. Although one interesting little sidelight was Stub Stewart.

SS: Stub Stewart?

FS: Stub Stewart, who was a timber baron from Bohemia, and a benefactor to OSU, including LaSells Stewart Center. He played roles on, I believe, the advisory board for the Forest Research Lab of OSU College of Forestry. Anyway, we encountered him in multiple contexts through the Alumni Association, like on a big Mount St. Helens early post-eruption field trip, organized or hosted by the president of the university where they wanted to give their high-roller donors unique experiences. That was a wild trip, but that's another story I won't go into right now. But anyway, we'd go to Andrews on various topics, and I remember Stub Stewart said to Lynn Burditt, then ranger at the Blue River Ranger 00:33:00District, when we went on one of these trips that started in the Andrews, basic science, log decomposition site, and then made our way to an active timber sale where eight trees per acre were being left, the Slim Scout Timber Sale in the Mona Creek drainage immediately west of the Andrews. This was a really-critical forum for public discussion showing examples of the idea of green tree retention and leaving some deadwood on the land, and Stub said to Lynn, "You know, there'll be Nuremberg-like trials for crimes against society for leaving these trees and this deadwood in the cutting unit."

SS: Nuremberg trials?

FS: Nuremberg-like trials for crimes against society.

SS: You mean, in other words, by not using all the possible?

FS: Right. Ironically, this area was in a Habitat Conservation Area put forward 00:34:00by the Inter-Agency Scientific Committee on the Northern spotted owl. So, what was your frame of reference? Was that land locked up in an owl reserve, or was it free and clear for traditional cutting. That was still in limbo at that time. However, Stub Stewart then returned a few years later with his U of O Ducks tailgating buddy, Judge Michael Hogan, who has ruled on --

SS: Who, he was the owl guy, wasn't he?

FS: He was a federal judge. He was not Dwyer. [William]

SS: Oh, right, right.

FS: Who held the injunctions?

SS: Yeah, Dwyer was the main guy.

FS: I still have my U.S. District Court ball cap that Judge Hogan gave a couple of us when we went out. Stub wanted to go out and see where we've been 00:35:00experimenting with the Blue River Landscape Plan, what we're doing, and some thinning practices and plantations in the Blue River Landscape Plan where there was some thinning, partial cutting, occurring in native forests. Because he wanted to make sure that Michael Hogan knew there was some intermediate ground between locking it up and whacking it down. So, in a way, that was --

SS: His own way of evolving perhaps a little bit?

FS: That's the way I read it.

SS: Well, that's very interesting. That's very interesting. But there was a time, and perhaps some people still believe that, but especially back when these things were hotter then, the scientists on the hill, the Andrews people, were associated with being "in cahoots" with the environmentalists?

FS: Well --

SS: In certain popular cultural arenas, correct? Correctly or wrongly, but 00:36:00still, I think I've heard that being said before.

FS: Yeah, this is an important issue. Some people, and my impression, was the College of Forestry perceived us as an old-growth research program. And it's been said by some of the traditionalists there, that the national forests and the Andrews Forest research programs, are not about "active forestry." In fact, this has been a current topic recently, and that we're all about old growth. And yes, we did have an important role with old growth, studying it, describing it, and making suggestions about how to manage for some old-growth attributes. But I'd like to think that we were studying many different topics, some of them involved with active management, such as the Blue River Landscape Study, which 00:37:00is really a study about how are we going to log the Upper Blue River Drainage in a particular way, using history as the guide. But, I feel like we were there to do our work and put out the information as we saw it, interact with our land manager colleagues, who could incorporate new information from their practical experience of management. From the science-inspired stories, they could incorporate those lessons and perspectives in their active management. Then together, we could participate in public discussion. There were aspects of what we were doing that the environmentalist community liked, and aspects they didn't like.

And the same thing pertained to the industry side. I remember a case where some 00:38:00guys for an environmental outfit came to talk with Art McKee and me, and they had been doing an analysis of small areas that could be considered roadless and be put forward for wilderness. They wanted to report to us how they found some patches in the ground in the Andrews Forest that they'd like to put forward as wilderness. Art and I were very unenthusiastic about the idea, because we do have land use zoning with the larger blocks of unlogged and unroaded land which we want to retain in that state and not compromise their native forest qualities so that appropriate studies could occur. But we didn't want it to be made wilderness. So, these people were surprised because they thought that that's what we were really working for.

SS: Because you were "enlightened" science people, and you must be on our side, correct?

FS: Right. So, that kind of stuff, perceptions, and what I would consider misperceptions, have occurred over time. It came home sharply for me in the '96 flood case because the land-sliding that occurred and the roads that were taken out and so forth, you could use all that as, in terms of damning past-forest practices. Then there were issues in the North Santiam River [Related to 1996 flood] that we were involved with, the water quality problems the City of Salem had because their treatment plant couldn't handle the level of turbidity which they asserted was coming off of Forest Service lands and into Detroit Reservoir. However, Salem had to shut down its water treatment plant before the Corps of 00:40:00Engineers released turbid water from the Detroit Reservoir [During 1996 flood]. They had to shut down because of turbidity coming off private lands downstream of Detroit Reservoir. Anyway, there were a lot of complicated issues arising from natural processes and the history of forest land use in Forest Service and non-Forest Service lands in the Cascades around the '96 flood. Environmentalists were pushing hard to place greater restrictions, here two years into the Northwest Forest Plan on implementation of the plan, based on water quality issues, especially for the cities that drew their water from Cascade lands that included Forest Service lands. These environmentalists went to city councils 00:41:00such as Eugene to try to get them to pass position statements against any further logging on the Forest Service lands.

Anyway, I felt like our job was to interpret as much of this as clearly as possible and put it forward for public understanding, and it needed to be quite nuanced. And there were aspects of the story that environmentalists could see as nice weapons to use in advancing their positions, but also other parties could use this information to advance their positions. We were there to do our studies and let the political chips fall where they may. So, that's what I see our business as being.

SS: Although I would venture that if you did a survey, anonymous or otherwise, of people's political-cultural positions, you would probably find a decidedly 00:42:00progressive ilk among most of the people that have done science at the Andrews. Would that be correct to assume that that's most likely true?

FS: That's a hypothesis. I don't know.

SS: It's a question.

FS: It's a very good question. I would be very interested to learn. And we have never done anything that really constituted a careful study of that.

SS: It's just merely an educated guess based on my knowledge of academic society and learned people in general in the modern American context. That's all. Just a guess, an educated one.

FS: Like I say, I'd be very curious to know. It's very interesting that some of our group members now post-date the timber era, and post-date the Forest Wars. 00:43:00And so, their "normal" is very little logging on the federal lands, and they don't have to worry about going around a corner [on a forest road] and having a big log truck bearing down on them, as was the case in the old days. So, I also think that the current situation with Jerry Franklin and Norm Johnson leading the charge, especially on BLM lands the last few years, in cahoots with the former Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar with his blessings for BLM land, BLM being in Interior, their belief that a significant amount of logging should be occurring on Forest Service and BLM lands. I have not quizzed Jerry as to what 00:44:00his actual motivations are, how much of it is, well, we live in wooden houses and we should accept environmental consequences of our consumptive habits. How much of it is the feeling that, it can be done without undue and illegal impact on the environment. I'm not sure where even Jerry stands. But I do think that some people, such as myself and Tom Spies, which we go back fairly far in our histories, and I think we're open to some level of logging on public lands. So, I expect that there's a variety of opinions.

SS: And when I mean progressive, I'm talking not about all social issues, I'm 00:45:00talking mainly about environmental issues.

FS: Yeah, yeah.

SS: I mean, there's a spectrum of issues in the progressive realm and some people have conservative views where they're a progressive liberal on other things, you know, within that realm.

FS: Yeah.

SS: Now, one of our central questions from our main question list for all people. OSU and Forest Service co-administration of the Andrews can be held up as a model for effective inter-institutional management and science. However, early in the H.J.A.'s history, this was not always the case, as early generations of Forest Service managers had goals often at odds with what we consider today to be the concept of a "Research Reserve." During your tenure, how would you characterize these dynamics and the evolution of that relationship between land managers and the research community as you moved through the '70s, '80s, '90s, to the present? I mean, there's been quite an evolutionary process there.

FS: Right. It's quite interesting. We have the three institutions, the research 00:46:00station [Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station -- or PNW], Forest Service national forest [Willamette], and Oregon State University. We have very different cultures, one to the next. Early on, like in the '50s and some of the stuff Max Geier documents in his book, Necessary Work, early on, there were some conflicts between the research station scientists, science people, and the national forest, and some of that may have been at the level of individual personalities. But for a long, long time, there has been a collaborative sense. The important thing about having three partners, partner institutions, and 00:47:00especially now that the enterprise has had so much impact in history, is that we have turnover of deans [OSU College of Forestry] and station directors [PNW], and forest supervisors [Willamette] and regional foresters [Region 6]. And so, it's sort of a constant matter of keeping people up-to-date and breaking them in, but hopefully, it's seen as a significant enough institution with enough history that we can ride through those changes. Hopefully, those kinds of leaders will not be wanting to have the demise of the program on their resume. So that's been a real plus. But in general, I feel like the intensity and 00:48:00diversity of research management interactions has varied over time, in part due to shifting personalities, but also due to the larger societal context. For example, from the late '80s when Steve Eubanks was ranger at Blue River through the period when Lynn Burditt was ranger at Blue River, the "Forest Wars" were going on and there was a tremendous flow of visitors including secretaries of Ag and Interior, and media people.

SS: Senators, Congressmen?

FS: Yeah, we had several dozen members of Congress and staffers come through in small and large groups. That was an extremely critical period when the Forest 00:49:00Service scientists, land manager leaders, and key academic people, and the liaisons amongst us, would go out there. We'd be out there, elbow-to-elbow, talking with these diverse groups about what we were doing on the science front and how the managers were exhibiting, demonstrating future management schemes for dealing with the forest. And so, a tremendous amount of bonding. We were on the hot seat together, and bonding occurred in those circumstances.

We're into a bit of a quieter period now. I expect it may pick up again. I have written about this with colleagues, including the second author on the paper, 00:50:00Steve Eubanks, that former district ranger, in a PNW publication, about how to do this kind of work. And we talk about five stages of interaction between the science and management communities from active antagonism, through increasingly closer interaction, to the form of interaction that we have at Andrews where the science community helps the managers do some of their jobs, the management community helps the scientists do some of their jobs, and then together, the two groups get together and do communications activities and applied studies that neither could do alone. And so, that's a very rich interaction. So, we have some experiments and studies that are deep in their second decade now, for example. So, anyway, it's been a long history.

SS: How about the OSU side of that equation? You were focusing more on whomever 00:51:00is doing science up there, Forest Service or OSU, and the Forest Service. What about the OSU side of things? Especially, coming back to where you had, you know, some of the statements made about, like Mark Harmon's experiment idea. "That's the dumbest F-ing idea that I've heard," blah, blah, blah, and on from there. But you've had, obviously had deans and personalities and even the cultural tussles within the [OSU] College of Forestry which are still going on between utilitarian foresters and whatever else is out there. And so, characterize that, kind of answer the question, but focus on that a little bit?

FS: Right. As far as what goes on at the Andrews and discussions of the future of forestry based on those discussions conducted in the context of displaying the long-term commitment to learning, is represented both in the facilities 00:52:00themselves and in the experiments on the ground, and in the discussions that occur in those contexts, and then going to demonstrations of possible future practices. OSU people figure prominently in all of those at the faculty level, and the students. We like bringing students in on this, so then they can sort of get a sense of the front lines.

SS: The summer is when they pour in mostly, correct?

FS: Right, though if a Ph.D. student is --

SS: Well, that's a little different, but I'm talking about undergrad, yeah.

FS: Right. So, as you say, there is some bi-polarity of cultures within the College of Forestry which erupts periodically. And I think the culture is of several sorts, the cultural distinctions. One is a "utilitarian" versus more of 00:53:00a "preservationist" and "conservationist" emphasis. Another is the culture of engineering as distinguished from the culture of ecological sciences. A culture of engineering being one of, we have clients, they have issues, we'll use our engineering tools to help them solve their problems. Whereas in the culture of ecological sciences, it's let's go out and figure out how the system's working, and then see where that leads us in terms of thinking about what we do with the information we acquire through our studies. So, those issues are present. They're still present today. And it's interesting to look back at half a dozen or so little, cathartic events that have occurred over the past decades, such as fighting over the use of pesticides in the forest, or salvage logging or the 00:54:00Biscuit Fire, or one thing or another that cause these eruptions periodically.

(Break in audio)

SS: How would you describe the facility's research equipment and scientific capabilities of the HJA when you arrived, how did that improve during your tenure there, and how did the amenities or lack thereof affect the level of scientific work, as well as the community and even recruiting and/or keeping scientists, especially in the early days when things weren't so nice? So, kind of just look at that whole continuum and track it from your history and where we are right now.

FS: I showed up on the scene in '72, and there was a trailer at Rainbow and a trailer up the hill from the ranger station [in Blue River] where people could stay overnight, and then there was some camping in the Andrews. And also, there 00:55:00was an office which was used in part as a lab for the PNW folks at the ranger station. So, that pertained during the '70s. Then in '80, the development of the headquarters site with first, Job Corps junker trailers, including doublewides, came in. And then there was the story of having PNW Station funds to build some roof structures over some of those trailers because there was concern that wet snow could collapse them. There was the story of the owl crew member who stepped in the tub to take a shower in a small trailer, and the tub fell through the 00:56:00floor. And that was in the period around 1990 when there was the term, the "Ghetto in the Meadow," which had been conveyed by Tom Stolgren, I believe it was, who is a National Park Service scientist [Stolgren] on the Sequoia- Kings Canyon [National Park]. Art McKee would know. Then we passed that quip, "Ghetto in the Meadow" to Les AuCoin [Oregon Congressman] when he visited with Mike Salsgiver, who was lead natural resource staffer for Senator Mark Hatfield. Salsgiver and AuCoin came by for a visit to talk about forestry matters, and then he [AuCoin] got an earmark, a congressional earmark, to begin development of some of the facilities. Also, Art McKee and Jerry and others got some 00:57:00funding, construction funding, from NSF. And gradually, we started to get construction funding money, facilities money through the Forest Service research construction process. So, gradually, during the '80s, the facilities grew and improved.

SS: Now, there was a warehouse ["Gray Barn"] of some kind built in the '70s, wasn't it there, before, or was that the '80s?

FS: I'm not sure of the particulars on that. I suggest you talk with Art, who was there and central to guiding that development. And there was a bunch of key stuff in the late '70s and early '80s that Art and Jerry were working on intensively, and I was not at all involved in that. But they were really getting it together. That really was wonderful and important and facilitated bringing 00:58:00people together. As I mentioned, the earlier facilities had people dispersed and that wasn't very good. I was living in Eugene at the time, so I was just driving up for day jobs, with some camping out and some staying in the trailers. But that limited the interpersonal interactions. But then we gradually built the site and had more interactions.

SS: What were the scientific capabilities on-site before the modern facilities were built, as you were putting in an amalgam of trailer-type facilities with shelters like you were talking about. Wasn't there one of those that was kind of a dry lab? I mean, at one time, you had a lab before the modern facilities were built?

FS: I don't really remember that. I wasn't using labs, so I don't remember the 00:59:00particulars of that. There were various shacks to accommodate some of the early needs. And then, we did have the meteorological stations and they were scattered at various places. And then there were the gauging stations on the three sets of experimental watersheds.

SS: Now, where did Art McKee stay before there was a facilities in there, did he stay in Blue River in the early days?

FS: He had a home in Blue River with his family.

SS: Okay.

FS: And he had one in Corvallis, and then he moved back up there. The facilities, we worked our way up to having about 70 beds, and we got a slug of 01:00:00money and that permitted us to contract out the construction of the cafeteria and the laundry and other stuff in that building. And we recently, within the last couple of years with NSF and research station dollars and some private donations, were able to complete what we call the "Green House," which is a very nice new building.

SS: Like an arboretum or?

FS: No, it's green in an environmental sensitivity sense.

SS: Oh, in a sense of solar and --

FS: So, the upper floor --

SS: Light carbon imprint, all that kind of stuff?

FS: Yeah. It's very well-insulated and set up to do monitoring of energy efficiency and things of this nature. It has a one-bedroom apartment unit and a studio apartment on the first floor, and the upstairs has a residence for Mark 01:01:00Schulze, the Forest Director. And so, now we've had visiting scientists and writers staying there. We've built out all that we can accommodate there in terms of water and sewage and things of this nature, and it is a very fine facility. We do have sort of a continuous effort to improve energy efficiency and just keep things going. So, it's sort of a Motel 6. It's not real fancy, but it's really quite nice. And it's great to have some of the diversity of use that we've had for instruction, training programs that agencies run, various kinds of 01:02:00public meetings, and our arts and humanities stuff uses it as well as the research program.

SS: Now, the facilities that you have now was basically due to an act of Congress. You had congressional people come there and key people liked what you were doing, and basically found real money to build what became the campus. Correct?

FS: Well, it was a mix. There were some congressional earmarks, and then, there was going through formal competitive processes, both Forest Service construction, and National Science Foundation facilities construction. So, there was a mixture of them.

SS: What was the sequencing of what was built in the original early '90s, 01:03:00building of that?

FS: The early '80s?

SS: No.

FS: Or when we moved from the junker trailers?

SS: When you moved from the junker trailers to what we have now. I mean, the planning started happening in the late '80s, early '90s, it was funded, and then you started having construction of these major facilities. Correct?

FS: Right. Well, it extended from about '80 forward. So, I think it's best to talk with Art to really get that because I don't have the chronology.

SS: What do you think was the most important part about upgrading the facilities? I mean, what did that say, what did that do for the HJA as an institution, scientifically and culturally?

FS: Well, I have really felt that having these nice facilities really demonstrates the commitment to long-term learning, and it means that the 01:04:00institutions are committed collectively to doing that. And so, there's this big message that the facilities carry. It remains a very frustrating and difficult challenge to keep the facilities funded. I struggled with it for a long time, and now Sherri Johnson is the lead PNW scientist who has to struggle with it. And you start the fiscal year and you don't have a budget, and then you hear you're going to have to cut a bunch from the previous year, and you're worried about keeping the lights on and keeping --

SS: The roof from leaking?

FS: Yeah. Just keeping the place functioning and keeping the staff funded. We do 01:05:00have user fees and everybody pays user fees, including ourselves. And that is important, but there's a tricky balance there. You don't want to charge so much people don't want to go there, but you don't want to charge so little that you can't support the program, or you might be seen as being really competitive with commercial enterprises in the neighborhood. So, that's a constant struggle to keep the facilities going. But the facilities are damn important in both a practical sense and in the symbolism that they carry.

SS: In terms of something that we talked about very early in the first interview, I believe, the physical place. I mean, the Andrews is a watershed, but it's also an idea. But then, there's this campus with the nice facilities that's part of the culture of place. Tie all those together with a focus on what we're talking about right now, because the human community coalesces there and a 01:06:00lot of things happen in that place that isn't "the Forest," that study is the place of dispersal and rest and reflection, and study in some cases?

FS: Well, I think the "Forest" itself is extremely important, and it's very interesting, that in a 30-second walk, you can come out of a meeting room or a library or the computer room or a bedroom, and you're in the midst of this beautiful old forest. We do so many things in the old forest, and the old forest is a very powerful influence. It's humbling. It's magnificent. It's incredibly complicated. And many people are comfortable in it, especially right there close 01:07:00to the headquarters site. But there are also some people who aren't so comfortable in it, and this has really come home to me recently in interacting with some of our visiting writers and reviewing some of the large body of written works, some of which include the descriptions of how it took an individual writer such as Scott Slovic, a whole week to get up the gumption to walk out on a big log spanning the stream. I think that is sort of metaphoric for people getting out in the woods. Then Julia Jones, well, Julia describes taking her field course out, which she has now taken out for something like 20 years before the beginning of fall term, and turning the students loose on a field problem off the trail. Some of these kids are new to the region, they've never been off the road, they've never been off the trail. They go out in this 01:08:00incredibly complex place, including this past September when it rained every day, and really trying to wrap their heads around the place.

So, it's very interesting in the case of visiting writers, but it could be to visiting policymakers or all kinds of people. They have to engage physically to get out into the place, but they also have to engage intellectually and emotionally with it. Those are big issues, especially for people for whom it is quite foreign. However, the headquarters site is right there, it includes all of these facilities. They're quite adequate to most people's tastes. And so, I think that helps make that connection. You're just so close to standing in a 01:09:00place that feels so primary, you know, so "nature." And you have the sound of the stream and you have these huge trees with all of these bugs and epiphytes and everything. So, I think that juxtaposition has been very important.

SS: How does the facilities at the Andrews compare to some other LTER sites that you happen to know in terms of facilities? Bonanza Creek, Niwot Ridge, Coweeta, Hubbard Brook, I mean, there's a host of them, but ones that you may know?

FS: Well, you have an incredible spectrum, from the urban ecosystems of Baltimore and Phoenix, to these field locations like Andrews. In the Andrews case, Mark Schulze is the only person who has scientist credentials and who is a 01:10:00permanent resident, whereas places like Coweeta, they have a Forest Service laboratory that is right there at the forest. Hubbard Brook, I think is more like the Andrews model without having a large, permanent science staff on-site. They have some technicians, as we do at the Andrews, who are on-site. You know, a place like Niwot, you know, is up on top of the Rockies.

SS: You can't stay up there.

FS: Right, you've got to come down a-ways. Luquillo has facilities on-site.

SS: Bonanza has facilities close, right?

FS: They're somewhat close, but not very good. In fact, I don't think they have 01:11:00a lab or offices on-site, you have to drive to it. You know, Niwot, or Toolik Lake, on the north slope of Alaska, there's a bunch of old trailers along the Pipeline Highway. And I think that's a seasonal use case.

SS: I would think so.

FS: As is McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica. So, it's quite varied. Sevilleta out of Albuquerque has some nice field facilities. But there again, they're only an hour or so away from the University of New Mexico campus, so that people are really residing on campus. I think there's a useful distance to have. The Andrews is an hour-and-three-quarters [from Corvallis]. That's a bit long, but you can go do it in a day and have good interactions on-site in a day. But if it were two-and-a-half or three hours, then it would be really tough to do it in a 01:12:00day. [

SS: Now, another question that, of course, I'll ask John Moreau and Art and other people about this, the evolution from what you can recall about instrumentation, gauging stations, etc., the hardware in the forest [Andrews]. Obviously, funding is another issue there, but also practical matters of maintenance, where to locate in relation to a multitude of different disciplines and studies?

FS: Right, so there's been a long history of installation of various observation systems. So, there are a lot of vegetation plots. And especially during the '70s, Jerry Franklin was instrumental in leading the charge in establishing a lot of "reference stands," hectare-scale plots for all the standing trees, and 01:13:00then later downed wood and various other things that have been, these plots have been established and are monitored over time. They are set up within the different plant associations which are arrayed then across the moisture-temperature field of the Andrews, and more broadly across the region, there are plots that satellite research natural areas within, you know, ten to fifteen miles of the Andrews. And then out at Cascade Head Experimental Forest on the Coast, and Olympic National Park, and Rainier, Sequoia-Kings Canyon, and so these various vegetation plots are widely distributed.

Also, Ted Dyrness set up, in Watersheds 1 and 3, in the cutting units, vegetation plots, before logging occurred, and they have been tracked since 01:14:00then. So, these are incredibly vital, long-term records. We've had some meteorological stations and there have been points-in-time when those were reevaluated by our climate committee to see if we were sort of catching the range of climatic conditions within the Andrews, and we're trying to run those gauging meteorological stations to high standards, although it's tricky business and it's labor-intensive and challenging because of our wet snow and transient snow conditions. And so, it's tough to keep that going. Also, for the reference stands, for a long time we were measuring the air and soil temperature. These have been important records that have been analyzed in terms of the climatic 01:15:00landscape of the Andrews and how topographic shading and cold air drainage affect the patterns of micro-climates across the Andrews.

And then the gauging stations have, of course, been very important there at the experimental watersheds, plus Mack Creek and lower Lookout, and then there's also one on upper Blue River. And so, there's been research on how those systems, the hydrologic systems, are functioning. In some cases, we have long-term records of precipitation and runoff chemistry. And then some other kinds of observations. So, there's a lot of forest researcher "trash" out there.

SS: Kind of almost like you'd say space junk above the stratosphere. Right?

FS: Right. But it's scattered around out there, and sometimes it's good that 01:16:00we've left it there so we can go back and figure out exactly where people have doing things earlier, and in some cases, repeating measurements to assess change in the system or to use new instrumentation.

SS: Now, the first hardware to go out there would have been in the early '50s on Lookout Creek, correct, lower Lookout Creek? Wasn't that the first gauging station?

FS: Yes. The U.S.G.S. put that in around '50. It may have been in relation to beginning to interact with the [Army] Corps of Engineers in what ultimately became a system of reservoirs for flood control and other uses.

SS: Now, the U.S.G.S. Flume was a little different animal. Correct?

FS: Yes, that was very much a special case. And Dick Iverson, an incredibly 01:17:00talented scientist with the U.S.G.S. in Vancouver, sort of engineered that project. He's unusual in bringing together large-scale experimentation with great skill in simulation modeling, computer modeling, mathematical modeling, and field studies. So, he arranged for that to be installed about 20 years ago, and he had something like $270,000 worth of funding to build that 90-meter long, 31-degree slope, massive concrete structure. The work has continued annually and with all kinds of experiments, and some really outstanding publications, 01:18:00including one that was award-winning, the major geomorphology "publication of the year" some years back from the Geological Society of America for a big monograph he did on that work. So, we're really pleased to have that going on there.

SS: How long is that thing, about 150 feet, 200 feet?

FS: It's 90 meters. So, it's getting up towards 300.

SS: Okay, almost 300 feet. Now I'm going to go conceptual here, interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinary has been invoked for some time in academic circles including within the LTER system and at the HJA. However, taking a popular concept and turning it into something that can be applied in useful and effective ways is not always easy. How has the HJA, and by extension, the LTER system, done in terms of integrating the various disciplines, first 01:19:00with the earth sciences extending to the social sciences, and more recently to the humanities? Why is this important?

FS: Right, I see my whole career as working interfaces. And as I mentioned earlier, when I got that early experience at the Bermuda Biological Station which was highly interdisciplinary after my freshman and then sophomore years at Penn State as an undergrad, it just seemed so cool, and it was so interesting. I came in as an earth scientist and began to collaborate with ecologists, and we hit it off and we found subject matter that we could work on at the interface of our disciplines. It did take me some conscientious work, including drafting up 01:20:00this table where I had all these time scales from days to millions of years, and then, what was going on geologically and ecologically at each scale. And I was thinking hierarchically. That helped me to sort of map out what types of subject matter were compatible in the geo-eco intersections. So, that was fun. We did that in the '70s. We partnered with the land management community. Of course, some of that had been going on at the Andrews since the earliest '50s, but then it picked up and continued, and then it got very intensive in the Forest Wars period. That was also when we began the social science work between the biophysical sciences and the social sciences because it was so much about values and perceptions. And so, that biophysical/social science, another interface.

Then beginning in 2000-2002, the connection with the humanities really picked up at the initiative of my good buddy, Jim Sedell. That has just taken off and just been incredibly cool, and I never could have imagined that it has become what it has. You know, between Mount St. Helens and the Andrews, I think we've had 80 or 90 writers-in-residence and scholars-in-residence, and a really rich body of work and a lot of attention, and it's helped to influence a lot of other sites where people have been doing this kind of work. Most other sites are doing visual arts and performance, whereas we're strong to creative writing and philosophy. But there's been really neat stuff. And then in the last few years, 01:22:00we've been starting to pick up on artists-in-residence and arts collaboration.

So, I think it has been extremely important to broaden the scope of interdisciplinarity. A whole other program was the ecosystem informatics program that Julia was principal investigator on, which brought together people from the environmental sciences, computer science, math, and electrical engineering, in terms of instrumentation arrays. So, we've really had a rich experience and everybody likes going to the Forest [Andrews]. Even the mathematicians, and they have this tradition in Europe of going out and talking about great unsolved, postulates, walking in the Black Forest. So, it's been a very welcoming 01:23:00environment. And because I now realize that our activities, our old-growth work and Eric Forsman's spotted owl work and the Mount St. Helens work, were characterizing, framing public perceptions of these regional icons. So, our activities, even science activities, then you carry them through the arts and humanities and you see it in spades. This is a cultural undertaking.

SS: Conceptually, what are the positive aspects of interdisciplinarity and what are the potential negatives, philosophically and in application, or maybe I should say, difficulties?

FS: Well, the difficulties are in finding funding. We've been very fortunate 01:24:00that there's private funding on the Spring Creek front from a private endowment of the Shotpouch Foundation for the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature and the Written Word. On the Ecological Reflections front, we've been very fortunate through Jim Sedell, followed by John Laurence, followed by Cindy Miner, to have PNW Research Station funding.

SS: Support?

FS: Yeah, year-by-year. But this doesn't fall neatly in the purview of NSF or NEA or NEH, although we would like to find ways to try to get funding maybe from combinations of them, collectively, or relevant to them all, but we don't fall one-to-one squarely, in one of those bailiwicks. The reason it's important, I 01:25:00think there are a whole bunch of reasons. One is the Forest Service is charged with learning. Society has made a commitment to learning in places like experimental forests and ranges and the National Volcanic Monument [Mt. St. Helens]. And we've invested lots of money in using the tools of science to learn, but it's entirely appropriate, and I think a responsibility to use these other tools, other ways of knowing, to learn from these wonderful places. And so, there's an agency responsibility. It's fun. The future well-being of these places and our environment as a whole will depend on our sense of values and our sense of place. That's important to appreciate that, and the arts and humanities 01:26:00can help in a big way with the values part of deciding how we should live in the world. Any decision about how to live in the world should be based on a practical premise of how the world is and what it may become based on the tools of science and experience, the practical experience of people working the land. And a second premise concerns our values, what we hold to be of value and worthy of keeping in the future, and this is the world of the creative writers and artists, and philosophers, can help us with the moral reasoning just as the scientists are custodians of the scientific method. With both the facts and the 01:27:00values, then we can arrive at a conclusion about how to live in the world. So, that's the reason for bringing in the arts and the humanities.

SS: Now, modern society and the science in general have evolved over the last century-plus from an atomistic to a more holistic perspective. This has something to do with how ecologists and ecosystem scientists define the environment and their study subjects. How do you define a landscape, and how has the study of ecology in terms of landscapes and management of landscapes changed both science and land management?

FS: Landscape and landscape ecology are really-critical terms, elements of that way of thinking about the world, have quite deep roots in geography and maybe 01:28:00wildlife biology, and a variety of fields. Landscape to me concerns viewing a system at a scale where there are elements of it, patches or pieces of a river network that differ in various properties, but you're viewing this mosaic of pieces. And you're concerned about how the pieces interact and how the larger landscape functions and the role of pattern on processes. You can view a landscape, as in terms of atom up. You know, you may have a certain amount of carbon-per-hectare for the three types of landscape units that are present, and you make an estimate of the whole by just adding up the pieces, weighting them 01:29:00by the relative areas. Or you can think about how stuff moves along gravitational flow paths, flow of water, water-borne sediment and chemicals, and landslides and other things that follow gravitational flow paths. Or even think about stuff that doesn't, that moves around but doesn't follow gravitational flow paths, like creatures that are responding to open areas and forested areas, and so forth. So, there are a lot of ways to think about landscapes.

Landscape ecology became defined as a field in the U.S. in the mid-'80s by Richard Forman at Harvard Graduate School of Design, and he wrote the book, Landscape Ecology. Really, he was importing a lot of ideas from Europe. It was interesting to us, as Jerry became good buddies with Richard when he was back at Harvard Forest, and then others of us have become friends with Richard. And 01:30:00Richard came out to visit, and I remember we introduced him to landscape ecology issues in our region, like the distribution of old-growth patches and plantations, the whole forest fragmentation issue, and how creatures like the northern spotted owls or great-horned owls may be different and responding differently to different landscape patterns. Jerry had a student, Jiquan Chen, who did work on the microclimatic edge effects of canopy openings, penetrating into residual patches of interior forest habitat. So, all these are different examples of landscape ecological stuff that was displayed in spades out on the land in our region. Also Mount St. Helens and wind throw around cutting units in 01:31:00the Bull Run Watershed. I remember when Richard was here, we went up to Bull Run with him.

The picture of the European case of landscape ecology was strongly cultural, and the New England case where Richard was drawing a lot of examples was a little more natural landscape, but also rather cultural. And whereas out here, we have steep lands, highly active landscapes with wildfires, logging, volcanic eruptions, big wind storms. We have really-big, dynamic, complicated landscapes. So, it was so natural to put a lot of attention to it out here, both in a basic sense and in an applied sense.

I actually had two really important "aha moments" in the landscape arena, and they both interestingly occurred in sort of the policy-management connection 01:32:00world in FEMAT, realizing that we hadn't figured out how to integrate the network view of the stream and riparian parts of the landscape with the patchwork view of all habitats and old-growth patches. We needed to integrate them, and that led to a couple decades of work on networks and landscapes, and network/patchwork interactions.

The second "aha moment" came when we were up on a ridge in Mona Creek, and an industry guy said, looking down at a landscape that was about a third patch clear-cut, "Is this a good landscape or a bad landscape?" And we didn't have a good answer. But we went back, we, the Willamette Forest people, myself and a few others, and came up with our ideas of use of the historical wildfire pattern to guide what became the Blue River Landscape Plan, and the Augusta Creek Plan before it. So, landscape thinking has been extremely important for our group. 01:33:00And this is a case where the landscape was our teacher and forced us to address it.

SS: Very good. Now, resiliency theory has been applied in many ways in many different disciplines over the last one to two decades. How do you define resiliency theory in terms of ecosystem science, and what are its benefits theoretically and in application?

FS: Well, I've been very interested in the Resilience Alliance and the thinking that Buzz Holling and others have put forward. And I've been especially intrigued by some of the writings such as Holling's introduction essay in the 01:34:00book, Barriers and Bridges [1995 Columbia Press], where he talks about different natural resource systems which entered periods of crisis due to either social disturbances, collapsed fisheries, or insect infestation in forest landscapes that have been simplified by intensive management. I find those very intriguing notions, and I sense that our region is a prime example where intensive management, including the "Timber Era" on the public lands, and the dependence of local communities on industry, sort of conspired to tighten the knot of relationships which then became vulnerable in our case to spotted owl 01:35:00injunctions as a social disturbance, more so than a real biological disturbance. That created a paradigm shift and a crisis period, and the nature of science and scientists varied greatly from before, during, through during, and then into after. And I actually have written a couple papers about these diverse roles of scientists. So, I'm very interested in that theory and its possible application. I now sense that we are in a new period of maybe pending crisis or transformation. And I think that some of our current practices are not sustainable due to various reasons. So I'm very keen to be observing this and I 01:36:00hope that our group will position itself to play useful roles, but especially to understand in real-time what's happening. And I think resilience theory will be relevant. A key point is to try to get us so that we can have more learning institutions and be less convulsive in our transformations from one management paradigm to another.

SS: Going to that point, what are some of the major scientific and cultural paradigms that have affected the conceptual framework for ecosystem science over the last 40 years? And you can even extend that into land management and the other issues that you and the Andrews have been involved with.

FS: I think a principal response would be that we went from somewhat of an agricultural world-view with trying to put plantation forests out there on our 01:37:00steep, high-relief landscapes. It was a sort of an exploitation and intensive plantation management point-of-view. And then gradually, we shifted to more of an ecosystem management world-view where we want to capitalize on our understanding of how ecosystems work in a whole bunch of senses, including productivity, bio-geochemistry nitrogen cycling, as one area. A second one is protection of aquatic and hydrologic resources. A third one would be the animals dependent on habitat. So, all the ecological services stuff, though I much prefer the point of view as articulated by Robin Kimmerer about thinking about a 01:38:00balanced relationship with the natural world. Ecological services just applies to what we get, but we need to be thinking that with those gifts come responsibilities, and reciprocity and the notions of honorable harvest. But anyway, let's see what, I lost my --

SS: You were talking about cultural and scientific paradigms.

FS: Right. So, a big shift in broadest terms was from the utilization paradigm to more of an ecosystem management stewardship paradigm where we can't extract some resources, but we might be best off in a long-term resilience perspective and sustainability perspective, to capitalize on the ecosystem processes that are going to feed our interests in terms of keeping native nitrogen-fixers in 01:39:00the ecosystem and attention to deadwood and things of this nature.

SS: Regarding the study of climate change, what in the Andrews program has addressed that or followed the things that are happening in relation to climate change on the local level?

FS: Climate change is a really interesting issue. It's interesting because of the larger scope of public discourse about it, conflicted as it is. And that also to be somewhat familiar with what's going on in other parts of the world, both from the general literature, but also from our LTER colleagues, like the high latitudes people, northern latitudes, Toolik and Bonanza Creek up in 01:40:00Alaska. In those systems where streams and lakes and snow cover, and soil, frozen soils, all of these components of the landscape are hovering around the freezing temperature. So, you warm things up not very much, and they're getting a lot bigger dose of warming effects than we are. And you push the extent in time and in geography of water from solid to liquid form, you profoundly change how everything's operated. And loss of sea ice and shortened duration of ice cover on lakes, and melting of permafrost, all these things are profoundly changing the system.

Julia's been doing a lot of analysis of our long-term climate records, 01:41:00month-by-month over the years, and it's hard to find much of a [warming] signal from our met stations. So therefore, we haven't found much of a signal in any of the biological stuff that we're observing. At this point, my impression is that we don't have a strong signal in our landscape.

SS: But even with the dynamics of changing the hydrological regime relating to snowpack and melting patterns and things like that?

FS: Some of that it may be beginning to show up, especially as you go outside the Andrews proper and you go to higher elevations, the SNOTEL sites and stuff like that. So, there are some signals that are starting to show up in this region. You know, I do believe climate change is occurring. In fact, Julia and I 01:42:00were just talking about, you go to the Mauna Loa CO2 record, the Keeling record, which is so monotonic, it's so progressive. But when you go from that, and then you take into account how the climate is changing. That's just the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. And you have ENSO and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and North Atlantic Oscillation. Then you have these various complexities imposed by atmospheric and oceanic change, heat stored here and there, and so forth. Then you bring things down towards the local level and you have cold air drainage and complexities of storms, some of which perhaps somewhat responsive to El Niño and other things, and it gets really noisy. In some places, the signal is pretty strong like that at high northern latitudes, 01:43:00and in other places, it isn't so strong. The noise is still very strong. So, I believe it's happening and I believe it's going to show up in spades, but it really hasn't shown up in spades yet. But we have to be very careful to look hard for it, and think hard about what the consequences may be.

This is a distinctive feature of a place like the Andrews Forest and other LTER sites. It's remarkable how few places there are, even in the rich U.S. where we have what we have at the Andrews. That is, pretty long-term records of climate and stream flow and atmospheric chemistry and vegetation dynamics. They're not nearly as long as we would like. They're just barely along to begin to see a signal. We have long-term records of drivers of change, and then, of some responders to change, like some of the veg stuff and fire history and things 01:44:00like that. So, we need to be doing a careful synthesis of the portfolio of these observations, and if things are not changing at least yet, we need to be clear about that. And if some things are changing, we need to be clear about that. Because there's been some tendency in scientific literature, to go find cool examples where dramatic changes are occurring. And the literature has a lot of that.

SS: And conflate it to representing the whole?

FS: It is natural to do that. And so, I do think we have, a really-critical role. But, I think back to the Forest Wars and we were beginning to worry about this stuff then. Now, I posit that we're going to have a big change. But my 01:45:00guess is, it's going to be driven by social forces more so than by environmental climate change itself. Climate change anticipation may factor into the policy changes, but that may be mostly socially-driven.

SS: That segues perfectly into this next question. How do you define long-term today, taking from LTER, and how did you define long-term when you started doing ecosystems science, and in comparison to your training in geology, long-duree, in geologic time. How do you conceptualize that and look at it within your human timeframe, your professional timeframe, what you do considering the ethical and moral responsibilities of a scientist, and how do you look at that, how do you frame that?

FS: Well, from having started out as a geologist, I'm used to thinking about, the real long-term, and thinking multi-scale and scales nested one within another. And so, when something like the Long-Term Ecological Reflections program comes along, every great journey begins with a single step. It'd be great if we had 50 years of records or 100 years of records. We don't. So, let's start and generate one and see where it leads us.

Also, as an earth scientist or earth historian, I am very comfortable with the challenges and the prospects for doing retrospective work using land form 01:47:00analysis or tephrochronology or dendrochronology or seeing archival work done. Each one has its strengths and its limitations. I also believe in long-term record-keeping and long-term experiments, and then seeing new people come in and do new pieces of work with new questions and new tools set in the context, and benefitting by the context of the long-term study sites such as the vegetation plots and the experimental watersheds. So, I'm happy to call the Reflections program long-term, although it's only 20 years, and LTER, a long-term program, although it's only 33 years, about to turn 34.

SS: Now, putting it strictly in the social and political realm, many cultures, 01:48:00countries, nation-states, do not have the luxuries that you find here in North America, in terms of having a relatively free society, constitutionally guaranteed, supposedly, to speak what you want, to study what you want, and lack of wars in recent history that have impacted the landscape, destroyed the society, overturned the government. How do you feel the responsibility of, shall we say, the North American tableau, the place, to be able to do that where a lot of places don't have the resources, the stability, or what have you?

FS: Well, I am acutely aware of the luxury we have had to do this long-term 01:49:00work, both at the Andrews and at Mount St. Helens. I have been thinking about it and writing about it. Even this morning, I was writing on Chapter 22 for the Mount St. Helens Year 35 book, and I'm looking at the Table 1.1 in the Mount St. Helens Year 25 Springer book, Dale- Swanson-Crisafulli, and the place of Mount St. Helens in this page-and-a-half of probably a hundred publications on post-eruption vegetation studies, where Mount St. Helens figures so prominently. And at the Andrews, too, our publication record is very hefty. I've gone out with people from other countries and I've thought, "You know, more has been invested in 65 years at the Andrews in science than has been invested probably 01:50:00in environmental sciences in the whole of that country." And I look across the system of 40-some countries who are participants in the International LTER [ILTER] network. This is a great affirmation. Scientists and funding institutions in these other countries say, "Hey, we want to do this long-term ecological research stuff." And it takes quite a confluence to make it possible to happen. It takes a land base with a commitment to research, but also providing enough access. It's a tough balance between access and protection for research. You have to have a land base that's dedicated. You have to have some sustained funding. You have to have staffing with a culture and a belief in 01:51:00doing it, and infrastructure support such as information management. And you have to have the support of society. So, you have to have an outreach program so that society will understand it and its importance.

So, I think we have a huge responsibility, and it blows my mind what we have been able to accomplish. It isn't nearly as much as we would like to be able to accomplish. We'd like to have better funding for it and not have to scratch and claw for institutional support all the time. But like I say, seeing it in juxtaposition with other countries, who are trying mightily, but having much less success in getting it done because of impediments of science culture, stovepipe disciplines, or lack of institutions comparable to NSF and Forest 01:52:00Service research, that would fund this. So, it's a big responsibility. And so, I've been putting in a lot of effort to talk about this programmatic dimension and that's why the history of our program project that we're working on this very instant, is really important.

SS: A plug for, a question for my discipline. Thank you. I was going to ask this at the end, but I'll plug.

FS: Well, let me just add to that. The National Science Foundation in recent years has invested hundreds of millions of dollars, about half a billion dollars, in the NEON program alone, but also additional hundreds of millions of dollars in the Critical Zone Observatory Network and some marine counterparts to long-term observation and research networks. And in 33 years of work in the LTER network, the successes of LTER have helped fuel establishment of those other 01:53:00networks. But there are also lessons to be learned of what has been successful and what has been less successful in LTER, including and especially, I believe, the community, the culture. And I don't feel that those lessons have been carefully investigated by historical analysis, and I don't think they have been conveyed and incorporated into development of some of these other networks where investment in "widgets" may be predominant, but investments in community that needs to go along with that. And so, there are certain things within LTER that have helped establish and foster a community of a couple thousand scientists, professors, students, in an open culture through things like the All-Scientist meetings that foster a highly-dispersed small world network of interactions.

SS: History can be thought of as a genre, a method, and a discipline. Despite this flexibility, the multiple definitions of what it is, and potentially can do, ironically enough often leaves it without a home, even in light of modern academic culture's stated desire to become more interdisciplinary. Why do you believe this is so, what can be done to overcome this, and can history, especially environmental, be a unifying integrator within the complex LTER system?

FS: Well, by virtue of its title, long-term, history is absolutely essential to the Long-Term Ecological Research program and a Forest Service enterprise like an experimental forest. It's all about history. It's creating history. Today's work is tomorrow's history. But I think it's interesting that LTER has made a 01:55:00conspicuous commitment to information management on the research project history and environmental monitoring history, you know, the studies about the studies, the biophysical and social science studies. But what I feel like LTER has not been very conscientious about, is keeping the records and analyzing the records of program history. There have been some interesting efforts to do that, including the book, Big Ecology, by Dave Coleman, who is a veteran scientist, but we need real historians to do this work, too. So, I think this project for 01:56:00us and I hope this project for the Andrews, will help trigger more work of this sort across the other LTER sites. And in keeping with some of the efforts like the core areas, the Five Core Areas of LTER, it'd be nice if there were some commonality of approaches across the LTER sites to facilitate down the road inter-site comparative analysis. So, I'm hoping that more of this inventory archiving and analytical work, and then investment in further recordkeeping such as these oral histories, which is retrospective, but also the prospective recordkeeping. I hope we can get our act together and do a more organized job of this across LTER, because I think it's incredibly valuable to the other U.S. 01:57:00systems of networks, research and monitoring observation sites, but also to networks in other countries.

SS: Speaking to the Andrews but also likely a lot of the other sites, the LTER sites, you have a 33-year history at the Andrews, soon to be 34. Some of the other sites were original, some of them came online over the last 10-20 years. There's a generation, maybe even overlaps of two generations there, of senior scientists, leaders, grad students, however the culture and the generations move through. How do you see the future, in light of what we just talked about, about archiving history, awareness of your own past, all of that kind of stuff, and even at just the Andrews itself going forward? Why is that important and how do 01:58:00you see in general the next generation building on what you've done with this first 30-some year period of time?

FS: Well, it's interesting the different models that the different LTER sites provide. Some have had a single principal investigator for the whole time. Others have turned over that leadership role. Our site has turned it over. And I know when Jerry left in '86 or so, people would say, "Is there life at Andrews after Jerry?" But we have had a series of PI's. So, there's this issue of keeping a multi-age class participation, so we don't get out there with just a bunch of old farts and have the program die out because the next generations 01:59:00aren't coming on. I'm at an interesting juncture here for the LTER 7 proposal writing of trying to be helpful, especially in terms of how the historical information that I can convey because I lived through it, might be useful in planning this proposal, but standing way back from the proposal preparation, so I don't get in the way. Anyway, other people who left roles as principal investigators or co-PI's created even more distance. I'm still sort of attached. But anyway, I think it's important for LTER to change. It has to evolve. Our environment, our issue environment, our societal environment, is constantly 02:00:00evolving, and we need to achieve that tricky balance between persistence in the long-term work, but still being attentive to the issues of the day. And so, I'm very excited to have the arts and humanities stuff, and then this program history work bring new elements into our work. We have to be very attentive to make sure that the baseline program, the basic science baseline program continues to function at a high level, one that justifies funding from NSF.

SS: Okay, just straight off the top simple, right here, my questions tend to be long sometimes. What do you believe that could be improved at the Andrews? Programmatically, or in any way you want?

FS: I would like to see us strengthen our relationship with the land management 02:01:00community, which has been a little bit in a down, in a quiet period, a lot having to do with shift of personnel, and also, the limited scope of the forest's [HJA] management. Now, people in the research side are very involved with the proposal preparations, are absorbed in that. I'd like to see some cranking up of our staffing on the science front, and then, having close counterparts on the national forest front. On the science front, I'd like to see some people who are more involved with current management issues and 02:02:00silviculture and forestry operations, things of this nature. And then have one or two of those people have counterparts on the management side. So, that's one area.

SS: How about within the LTER system, same question?

FS: I'm not that up-to-date on the whole LTER system because I'm somewhat more peripheral to it than I was in the past. I would like to see more embrace of the arts and humanities, and I'm very impressed by the number of sites that have some engagement with it. That's a very hopeful sign. But I would also like to have us at the Andrews, model ways in which we can have deeper engagement of 02:03:00arts and humanities, and connect it more powerfully with our science programs so that it'll be seen as part of our whole endeavor. And get NEA and NEH and private sources committed to more sustained funding so that more sites can function as these major pivot points of cultural participants, cultural citizens in our respective home ground in our regions.

SS: One takeoff question off what you just said. There is theoretical science, often called basic science, and applied science. How would you define these categories? Where do you place your work and how much basic science at the Andrews transitioned from the first to the second category? And philosophically, what ethical responsibilities do you think should be considered by scientists 02:04:00and science, practicing theoretical research in relation to social needs?

FS: I have long felt, and it came home especially acute 25 years ago as the Forest Wars began to unfold, that our scene runs a complete RD&A spectrum, research, development and application, where we have basic research, which are like Mark Harmon's log decomposition experiment on the NSF/LTER front. Then we have applied studies that the land managers and the science communities instigate and conduct together, and then our land manager colleagues modify their practices and put new ideas on the ground. And then together, we bring people out and discuss things. So, I believe that there's great power in that 02:05:00working that full spectrum, and I hope that we can continue to do that. And because of our charismatic ecosystem and because of public attention, including that fueled by conflict within our region about the fate of these public lands, we've got a great stage on which to perform these learning and communications activities.

SS: Now, there are likely some items we haven't discussed in this interview. Can you think of anything that we haven't covered that you would like to address, and more generally, what maybe would be some lasting memories and relationships that developed out of your time at the Andrews that we haven't talked about yet, something that you would want on the record?

FS: Well, from going out so many times frequently with visitors, whether they're from programs that want to do this kind of thing, like recently, some Canadians 02:06:00trying to build an LTER-like program with funding from a philanthropist who had this dream, or going out with creative writers and artists, or all kinds of people, I just realize how great it's been to have had these experiences, and how many of these experiences working in these places, and how many stories I have accumulated, and practiced telling with these people. So, I do have a ton more stories. And I know I need to find ways, either orally or in writing, to begin to capture them. And I also want to encourage my buddies, other Andrews veterans, to begin writing down their stories, as sort of first-person storytelling as distinguished from this sort of interview thing. And so, I think 02:07:00I'd like to tell my stories in a slightly different context, and because I think they're cool and they're interesting, and go forward with that.

SS: Very good, I think we're finished.

FS: Great.

SS: Thank you. Congratulations, seven hours and fifteen minutes. [For three interviews, collectively.]