Fred Swanson Oral History Interview, October 21, 2020

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

FRED SWANSON: Yes.

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

FS: Yes, you do.

SK: Perfect. All right. Okay, so now I'm going to begin with a brief little intro

FS: Yeah.

SK: So before we begin, I want to offer a brief summary as to why we are here today, as you know, there is currently a collection of oral histories in the Oregon State University's Special Collection and Archives Research Center titled "Voices of the Forest Voices of the Mills" and that collection consists of stories on people's personal backgrounds and how their journey has led them to the Andrews. It also consists of stories that illustrate certain political and cultural transitions, such as the transition away from the timber era to the conservation era and the planning for the Pacific Northwest forest plan. Finally, it discusses the overall culture of LTER. Today we are going to build from that by asking more direct questions about your personal philosophy and practice of science. And then scale up to the philosophy and practice of science on the community level. This interview will inform the writing of my master's thesis. My research questions ask: What are the traditions of science that 00:02:00characterize the Andrew's community and what are the philosophies of nature that underlie these different traditions? I'm here with Dr. Fred Swanson who completed his PhD in geology at the University of Oregon and began his work at the Andrews forest as a postdoc in the IBP era. Dr Swanson remained involved at Andrews throughout his career, facilitating the geology-ecology interface, serving in leadership roles, such as the principal investigator of the LTER program, and fostering the more recent interface across the arts, humanities and sciences, through the establishment of the long term reflections program. Thank you, Dr. Swanson for taking the time and talking with me today. So if you're ready to begin, the first collection of questions are in regards to your 00:03:00personal philosophy and practice of science. I'll inquire about your perception of an ecosystem and your personal take on scientific research, if you're ready to begin?

FS: Yes

SK: My first question I'd like to ask is, how would you define an ecosystem?

FS: I consider an ecosystem to be a collection of organisms, interacting with their environment. So ecosystem sciences is about the components and their interactions.

SK: So that entails both the biotic and the abiotic is that correct?

FS: Correct. And it can be tiny or it can be huge.

SK: Okay, multiple scales. How would you describe the nature of an ecosystem? Are ecosystems static or dynamic or are they chaotic or orderly, brittle, fragile?

FS: I consider ecosystems to be well, most ecosystems at least, the one's I'm interested in are quite dynamic and there may be rhythms and patterns within them, but they also can be very changeable.

SK: As a follow up question, what are some of the forces that make an ecosystem dynamic?

FS: Well, I think there are endogenous and exogenous forces. So there's change that is wrought by the processes and interactions going on within an ecosystem, over time, but also the ecosystems may have change agents and impinge on them in ecological terms. So we'll talk about disturbances. But as a physical process 00:05:00person, I think it's important to look at those disturbance processes in their own right. And so disturbance has too negative a connotation for my persuasion. But anyway, endogenous and exogenous drivers of change.

SK: And I know that in the history of ecology, there was a particular point in time when people perceived ecosystems to strive towards a static or complete stage. Is that correct, would you say that that viewpoint still holds or has that changed considerably today?

FS: Well, the systems that I'm most familiar with, the systems I work with including forest systems, I don't believe there's much belief in a climax state. 00:06:00You know, you may see successional processes and endogenous processes proceeding, and have a sense of successional trajectories, but disturbance events of a pulsing sort, fire, flood, or drought may trigger change. But also we're now very aware that the climate and the whole context is changing, atmospheric chemistry, ocean chemistry, as well as temperature and so everything is on the move. I think that's widely accepted.

SK: Can you describe your theoretical philosophical background and how that is applied toward your science?

FS: Well, that's an interesting question. I don't feel that I operate with an explicit theoretical or philosophical perspective. I did take philosophy of science courses one each as an undergrad and as a grad student. I've been interested in it for a long, long time. As I think will come out with the following questions, my own practice of science has been dominantly of a descriptive, observational, natural history sort. So, by subject matter and 00:08:00inclination, that's sort of where I come out.

SK: How would you describe your scientific style? So you were saying it's more observational rather than experimental. Can you elaborate a little bit on that?

FS: Having a background in geology, I'm interested in earth, and especially Earth surface processes and histories and I tend to think at broad scales and I am not presumptuous enough to expect to conduct experimentation at those broad scales. It's been interesting for me to learn about adaptive management and to 00:09:00undertake and collaborate with other scientists and land manager colleagues of the Willamette National Forest try to undertake an adaptive management project and you know about 30,000 acres with cutting patterns distributed over time with intensities that represent some emulation of the historic disturbance regime. So those are not experiments in the sense of standard agronomics, you know practices of having small plots that you really have a lot of control over, and you have multiple treatments that you apply randomly. So it's not experimentation in that sense, but there I have dabbled in some real world manipulations of the landscape to learn how it's functioning. For the most part 00:10:00I'm in the observational descriptive camp.

That's as a scientist, you know, as a research administrator leader, like in the context of a Long-Term Ecological Research Program at the Andrews, then I'm there to try and facilitate a broad portfolio of approaches and not hold one above the others. Because we have an interdisciplinary group and the disciplines have different cultures of philosophical approach to science, we're dealing with a big messy system and especially by dealing with it over time. Now we've had about 50 years of ecosystem research at the Andrews. and some of these studies, 00:11:00like the experimental watershed studies, began in 1952, so we're pushing off towards 70 years of presence and direct observation. Then we're in there with the whole system and we're part of it, and we're watching it over these longer timescales. Then the reconstruction work on fire history and landform history extends back, fire history about eight centuries back and it extends back in landform time scales for tens of thousands of years. Then the rocks, we're talking about tens of millions of years. So anyway, those are sort of the scales 00:12:00in which I try and operate, both as a scientist and as a science facilitator.

SK: You bring up some interesting points that I want to go back to. So adaptive management, if you could describe a little bit more about how that's distinguished from experimental. There's still, if I'm understanding this correctly, there's still some sort of manipulation of the land, but the learning process is more open ended. Is that correct?

FS: Right, this is a set of concepts. I think the concepts that have their roots in Carl Walters, and C.S. Holling from about 50 years ago. They were in British Columbia at that time, and it deals with large, complex, natural resource systems such as fisheries and forestry operations. Kai Lee wrote a seminal book, 00:13:00The Compass and the Gyroscope, for the Columbia River system. They're big and complex and they're not replicable and so there's a cycle of assessment and practice adaptive management. My impression is that institutions and communities of practitioners have a hard time keeping it going for very long. Certainly, much shorter time periods than the time scales on which the ecosystem or the natural resource system that they are trying to understand operate and the social context of laws and things like that. We have a real hard time keeping it 00:14:00going and we've certainly experienced that in the context of the Andrews. It's one of 10 adaptive management areas under the Northwest forest plan which went into effect in 1994. We had funding and we're supposed to do adaptive management projects. We undertook one, the Blue River Landscape Project, which I just mentioned. For about 30,000 acres, but we sort of have failed to extend it. Partly because of lack of funding, but also because environmentalists sort of took it down, because it involved cutting a forest. So anyway, I do believe adaptive management is an interesting and important ideal approach and it keeps getting invoked, but I can't point to a case where we've stuck with it for even 00:15:0030 or 40 years, which is a pittance relative to the time scale of the phenomena in question.

SK: If you could speak more about reconstruction work, I imagine that has a lot to do with your background as a geologist and a natural historian, is that right? And that type of work is specialized towards those fields, is that right?

FS: Yes.

SK: Can you describe that a little bit, so it's about reconstructing past physical processes?

FS: Yes, so a couple of the areas that I've worked on, have to do with say fire history, and that work began in the 70s, at a time when the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management were busy creating lots of beautiful stumps. The 00:16:00federal policy was to log the old growth and convert it to plantations and I was struck by these amazing records in the tree rings on the stumps. So I enlisted a series of students, to help with that work and, as I mentioned, we found trees up to over 800 years old. And other people did some of this as well. And so there have been about 10 landscape scale fire history studies using dendrochronology mostly counting on stumps, but also the higher quality work of taking increment cores and sanding them and then counting the rings in the laboratory under a microscope. Rather than crawling across a sappy stump and 00:17:00ants crawling up your sleeve and in the outer rings, you may have, you know 40 rings to the inch and you have a hand lens and you're trying to read them and it's very difficult to get a good reading. But, anyway, so we went around and counted tree establishment dates and also scars that we interpreted by their morphology to be of fire origin, and we could then reconstruct the patterns of fire over time and over space and we could find places that hadn't had a fire for 6, 7, 8 hundred years and other places which burn much more frequently, maybe every 75 years. So that's one form of interpretation of the past.

Then on the landforms we study the different types of landforms, which we can see in LIDAR or topographic maps or aerial photographs and then we have some dating techniques such as using the trees, a tree ring aging techniques or looking at deflection of roads by landslides, then we're constrained to the history of roading in that landscape. In using tree rings, then we're constrained by the history of fire and other disturbances. But also we have a little bit of Mazama volcanic ash from the eruption of Mount Mazama creating Crater Lake about 7000 years ago. So, if we see a blanket of Mazama ash, in a 00:19:00particular arrangement on some old landslide deposits, we believe that that landslide had created those landforms by 7000 years ago. We could see glacial glacially carved landscapes and from work elsewhere in the region, we know something about the time scale of that and we can use radiocarbon dating. So, you're, you're using a great variety of techniques that you have to build up over time, build up your perceptions.

This gets to something I was going to bring up a little bit later, but I'll go ahead and stick it in now. An important influence, in my thinking and my partner Julia Jones professor in geography, uses this in field course also, is the work of T.C. Chamberlain with a seminal paper on multiple working hypotheses, which 00:20:00you can apply in field observational circumstances. When you say, I'm starting to think that the world works this way, you know, in the fire history or in landform history or the geologic sphere, or a whole bunch of other things, but I want to keep my mind open to alternative explanations, so you hypothesize that this sequence of events happened, but it could also have been a different sequence, so there'd be hypothesis one, hypothesis two, and hypothesis three. And then you can ask if one is more likely than two and three. When I go around the bend and see another outcrop where I go over and that hillside and there's a rock pit over there and I'm going to see some rocks over there, I expect to see 00:21:00thus and so and it would argue in favor of hypothesis one, rather than hypothesis two or three. So it's important to not lock in on one explanation and then see every new piece of information, try to tweak it in your perception of it in such a way that it supports some favorite hypothesis. You need to stay open and stay critical.

SK: And so there would be maybe some circumstances with the multiple working hypotheses, where multiple of them are shown to be true or evident in your inquiry?

FS: Yes, in the course of your work. You may have alternative hypotheses and they are not resolvable. You tend to lean towards one or the other. And when you 00:22:00get a chance to learn something new about the system, you take it in. For example, when I was first working out at the Andrews on geology and the landforms in the 70s, we had very crude topographic information. We had an inch-to-a-mile topographic maps from the U.S. Geological Survey with 80 foot contours and you're under all this forest cover, almost 300 feet high, and the trees growing down in the valley say or water and better soil so they grow higher and the trees growing and the ridges weren't so high, and most of the maps were made as contours on the tops of the trees, rather than on the land itself because of the techniques that were used in the early map topographic map 00:23:00making. And so I did the best I could, working with some others, but then along comes LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) remote sensing technique which gives you a resolution down to a meter or two and all of a sudden, voila. It's like a naked landscape and all these deep...

SK: What year was that?

FS: I think the first one we got for the Andrews was about 2007. The technology existed earlier, we didn't get it right off the bat. So anyway, our views can change, our thinking in the Andrews and the history, you know, can change. This is a sort of a sidebar, drivers of change of ideas. You know, changes in 00:24:00science, new technologies, new techniques, new fads or themes, major disturbance events like the eruption of Mount St. Helens or the '96 flood, or now these fires that are really proximal and actually encroaching in the Andrews. That triggers a flurry of critical thinking, where you can sweep in bits and pieces of ideas and knowledge into more synthetic efforts catalyzed by a major disturbance. And the third driver of change falls in this societal realm, social forces of various sorts. So they're gradual changes, but then some changes will 00:25:00be punctuated, punctuations of abrupt change as some people have put it, you know, like being out in the '96 flood is like "decades of boredom punctuated by moments of chaos."

SK: And I also want to go back a little bit on the whole reconstruction approach. So that's sort of being a geologist has informed your approach to science. And I know from, you know, attending some geology lectures, is that the Earth moves quite a bit right when you sort of scale to the deep past and so I'm interested in how that's formed your perception of the right now? Do you see the world differently after your training as a geologist? How do you perceive the 00:26:00current state of things?

FS: Well, it's been interesting. I see it as the earth is a work in progress. It's always changing the you know plate tectonics, or, you know, the reversal of the magnetic polarity. I had a big indulgence in that as a grad student to go into the Galapagos and using paleomagnetism to try to interpret the geologic history of three volcanic islands there. In a really interesting case has been Mount St. Helens with its big abrupt monstrous eruption. And then interacting with ecologists and land managers and the public sector. So there was an 00:27:00interest in ecological re-storation and re-covery. And parts of the landscape were so profoundly changed that they aren't the Re-word. Re-hyphen word isn't suitable. [the land is not returning to a former state] It's a misperception unless it's very narrowly defined, you know. There's a lake that was here before and there was a population of fish species X in this lake, so we could restore the population of that species to that lake. So narrowly defined, you can go back, but for the most part, the world is marching on biologically and 00:28:00geophysically and there's no going back. We need to accept that. And so, this came up, even in the title of our first book on the volcano ecology of Mount St. Helens. We called it ecological responses to the eruption not ecological restoration or recovery or some re-word like that.

SK: Language is an important factor in how it shapes the way that we think about things.

FS: Oh, it's huge, and I always had a notion of that, but now that I have been hanging with the amazing writers for 20 years it comes home all the more. It's all the more clear.

SK: And then so with that perception of your reconstruction and long term 00:29:00history approach, how does that knowledge inform the future? How can that knowledge inform our future management and future perception of where the earth is going towards?

FS: I think that pertains probably in several ways. I haven't doped it out, say well here are three ways. But, you know, first of all, I think a big issue is to dispel false hopes. You know, we're not going back. Hey guys, we're not going back and we have to accept that. And so the question is, how do we move forward? 00:30:00I do believe that history gives us a lot of clues about how the world is likely to behave in the future. In fact, that's a major theme of some of the stuff that like Julia and Charlie Crisafulli, Mount St. Helens ecologist, and I've been on to when we've gone down to Chile for a dozen years now to visit sites where three volcanoes that have had eruptions since 2008 and then we can compare that with St. Helens. But, also, we've looked at a lot of the other records of volcano ecology around the globe, looking at what are common themes and what patterns and processes tend to be peculiar to particular types of eruptions or 00:31:00climatic and vegetation type contexts and things like that. So, I think we have a lot to learn from history, but we have to use that information judiciously and be open to surprises.

SK: Because patterns may demonstrate, but there's also a lot of irregularity and unpredictability as well. And so next question we've sort of touched on this a little bit, but maybe if we can explicitly talk about how have your disciplinary roots as a geologist influenced the development of your particular style of science? And then maybe if I can add because your particular trajectory is unique in that at one point, you turned to not just geology, but also the geology and ecology interface and how may that also inform your particular approach to science?

FS: I have those geologic roots and so that's heavy to observation. And like, if you're mapping geology in the Cascade Mountains and it is 98-99% covered with trees, you have to be a little loosey-goosey. I mean you're telling some pretty big stories without very much data. And so I think that's an important part of it. And I felt like I took my geologic instincts into geomorphology trying to 00:33:00understand the landform history in the Cascades and in the other places I've worked. And then I took the same perspectives into trying to understand and map the fire history. So, another thing because of my geologyness and tying in with the ecologists in the early 70s, I was trying to figure out how we could interface. And so I gave that some thought and made a table that had timescales from days to 10s of millions of years about half a dozen timescales 00:34:00sequentially. And then what phenomena are occurring in the geological and ecological worlds at each of these timescales. And then, if you're trying to think about geo-eco interactions, which is the dominant theme for me, you can start out at a particular time scale. You're not going to learn a lot if you're dealing with really fast processes in one realm and very slow processes in the other. You sort of need to get your thinking lined up at similar scales, but then also ask questions about what's happening at the next fastest or the next slowest scale of change in each of those realms and then how those things interact. I was thinking about this a lot in a time period when hierarchy theory 00:35:00was a major perspective in ecosystem science and there were some treatises on hierarchy theory. Back at that time, I was having this personal experience with it. How does my work on the geology with rocks millions of years old, how can I interact with these tree physiologist measuring dew point 10 minute intervals? So we were disjunct at time skills of interest, but then once we spend more time together, like with the stream ecologists and the forest ecologists on wood in streams and shaping stream ecosystems, we needed a geophysical perspective, we needed the forest ecological perspective, and we needed the aquatic stream 00:36:00ecological perspective. Then we had to come together and talk in the time scale of vegetation succession and flooding and all this kind of stuff.

So, that's been a really important thing for me in our group, because coming in as a geologist, I was sort of an outsider, but I tended to have a broad picture and I was very interested in hierarchy theory and systems ecology, which was big as International Biological Program was starting back in the 1970s. Systems ecology, I really grooved on those bigger integrative views of the world. And 00:37:00then I would try to make simple diagrams of how some of these interactions occur like forest-stream interactions of which large wood is one example, then we have multiple processes at that interface. The Andrews has been notable in how that work in that world of forest-stream interactions has grown, evolved, and new forms of interactions have been realized over time. It turns out to be very important in land management because if you're going to whack the trees in the uplands, how are you going to protect the aquatic resources? But it isn't just a protection thing because the aquatic ecosystem has taken a lickin' and kept on tickin' in the case of floods and fire and so forth. [The phrase "takes a 00:38:00licking and keeps on ticking" was part of an advertisement for a brand of wristwatch long ago.] So they're both basic and applied aspects to the work, which gets to your very last question.

SK: Yes, and so just a couple of follow ups. Do you mind giving your personal sort of definition of observational approach to science? I know we all have an idea of what that means, but I'd like to hear your perspective and definition.

FS: Well, I was intrigued. I asked you in our previous conversation about giving definitions of some of the terms here. So, preparing to have this conversation with you, I looked up Natural History, the term. And I think that's very germane to the whole LTER scene in general because this year we're 40 years into LTER 00:39:00and some sites are like the Andrews that it started in the (IBP) International Biological Program era [started a decade earlier]. So we're 50 years out, so we're living natural history. The work at the Andrews is more than a collection of finely tuned experiments. So I looked up natural history and it said it's scientific study, it's observational rather than experimentation and it's presented in popular rather than academic forms. So, experimentation in this rigorous sense, you know, as you tweak the ecosystem in some prescribed ways and 00:40:00see how it performs and you learn from that. So observational work does not involve that intentional tweaking with random assignment of treatments and replication, so forth. We do have experimental watersheds and I've done studies with them, but they don't meet rigorous standards of experimentation, but we still learn from them. So observation, you go out and observe and think a lot and argue, you know, and then talk it out.

SK: And what would you say the fields of ecology consist of? Is it a mixed bag or does it lean towards one approach over the other?

FS: I'd like to think it's a mixed bag and it's good to be mixed. You know, when I first started out, you know, the ecologists in the '70s say there was the term "physics envy". If we're going to make this a serious science, we have to be really experimental and that's the way to really learn about processes. And, as a matter of fact, one member of our group said that recently. And he was promoting certain kinds of experiments. Well, that's fine, but that isn't all we should be doing.

SK: That seems like a common trend across so many disciplines is the need to become more physics-like. I don't know why, but it's a common trend. You see, in both the social sciences and the natural sciences.

FS: Well, I'm very concerned about social sciences. We have a daughter who just got her PhD in human dimensions of natural resources. As she's trying to get some papers passed by her own committee and co-authors, there's all this stuff about you having to start paragraphs with theory, that theory says, "blank". Well, there seems to be excessive science envy in some of that way of communicating. So it's sort of concerning.

SK: And it's interesting because I would say that when your topic of study is something like an ecosystem or a culture, which is defined by an immense degree of unruly complexity. Right? So in that regard, maybe there are pros and cons in trying to apply a set of methods that are supposed to be for something that is reductionist, you know, which is the topic of what physicists study and what are some of the potential repercussions of that.

FS: Yes. And I'm certainly not attuned to the discussions of this topic in the social sciences and in anthropology. I think it's good to hear different points of view and have them all out there on the table and not get too uppity and 00:44:00wonky. That one is really going to lead to truth and the others aren't, I don't believe that for a minute, you know. But I would think it's good to have a diversity of approaches.

SK: Certainly, in terms of funding would you say that one approach is more favored than the other or is it evenly distributed?

FS: Well, that's a very good question. It all depends on where you're trying to get your money from. You know, having worked on the arts and humanities now for 00:45:00quite a while at the Andrews and viewing it more broadly and collaborating with some others in trying to get NSF funding for arts and humanities, historically, like 10, 20 plus years ago. In the 80s and 90s, we were getting a lot of money from National Science Foundation to do science-science, you know, and the more scientific it appeared, the more experimental, for example, the more modeling was incorporated, the trendy real science kind of stuff, the easier it was to get funding. Yeah, observational kind of stuff isn't as expensive and we sort of 00:46:00went ahead and did it anyway. Then, when something wild happens like the eruption of Mount St. Helens, most of us weren't up there doing any experimentation, a few people might have been doing some stuff. Just telling a story of what the hell happened is huge, observational stuff. So anyway, let's see, what was your question? I'm going to need to get a glass of water, juice or something.

Sk: Sure, should we take maybe between a five to 10 minute break?

FS: Sure. Five is fine.

SK: Okay, we'll meet back in five minutes.

FS: Okay. So, should I'll just leave this on.

SK: Yeah, I'll quit the recording and you could leave the video on.

SK: Okay, so before moving to the next question, I want to sort of ask and get into the nitty gritty. If you can define the difference of what makes observational, observational and experimental [science].

FS: Well, the key I think is manipulation of the world and of course that occurs in all kinds of ways. Observational work you're not manipulating.

SK: Okay so that's the key difference. Okay, so for you personally what is your strategy in developing a research question? How do you come to a research question.

FS: Boy. That's very difficult to answer. I do think that my brain is pretty 00:48:00adventuresome and I think my question is, maybe I always have the same question. How does the world tick? You know how, how is stuff working? But not in a physics kind of way. You know, I have science colleagues who will want to figure out what the shear stress is in this stream and will be doing calculations - back of the envelope calculations. That isn't my style. Also, like with the arts 00:49:00and humanities, for example, it's just, let's launch off and do some stuff in a different kind of way. And, usually, at an interface that we've not cultivated, you know. So I like interfaces and just go hang out in the interface and see what comes up, you know, so, geology-ecology, science-land management, biophysical science-social science, you know, I worked with social scientists, especially when we were in the forest wars. And now science-arts-humanities. So I don't feel very question driven, I'm just trying to figure stuff out.

SK: And it goes with your openness to surprises. Is that correct?

FS: Yes. Or like the Chile stuff on volcano ecology, it's adventure travel, it's going into new settings and in forming new relationships, collegial relationships.

SK: My next question, what are your thoughts in regards to objectivity and scientific research?

FS: Well, I do think we need to be objective and open and if we are collecting data, we need to do our best job in collecting quality data. Explaining how it was collected and sharing it, so that others can do with it as they wish. That's a big theme in LTER. And in the early days of LTER, it was very challenging to overcome cultural hurdles within the science community to have public dollars mean public data. These are not personal studies, although there are some protections for some time. For example, masters students, if they generated a 00:52:00bunch of data, they should have adequate time to publish it before it becomes public. So, anyway, I think we need to be objective and careful, but open.

SK: As a researcher, how do you use the scientific method to find the truth?

FS: Well, what's the truth? First of all, I hope that in what is the scientific method, I do think hypothesis formulation is important, but if you're dealing with something like long-term ecological research, having hypotheses that are falsifiable is just way too constraining for dealing with long range phenomena. 00:53:00So I think the practice of a scientific culture is important, and I wonder about, including the notion of the scientific culture in finding truth or more truthful stuff over time. Maybe it's like the earth or Mount St. Helens landscape. There's no going back to something or going to some truth; it's changing over time. But, if we use a scientific culture of critical thinking and open sharing of the foundational information, that's how we get to more truthful perspectives.

SK: So would you say that that truth as a concept is more fluid and it's a continuous process of trying to pursue truth?

FS: I think so.

SK: Alright, so my next question. Are there are laws of nature? And if so, can you define what a law of nature means?

FS: Well, I don't think in those terms, although I remember reading about it back in college days. So I do see laws as very helpful descriptions of 00:55:00relationships, the gas laws and things of this nature. They may be somewhat scale-dependent. They may work well at certain scales and not so well at others. So I think they are useful depictions of how the world works.

SK: And on a personal level, what are your overall motivations in science? Is it for curiosity? Is it for finding solutions? What is the purpose behind conducting science or doing science?

FS: Well, that's an interesting and important point to me, and especially during the forest wars, where there were battles over old growth and spotted owls and all this stuff. And I was a federal scientist. I wasn't supposed to be advocating for an outcome. Actually, I was okay with that. I think some people, 00:56:00passionate advocates, wanted to see people like me, a scientist, you know, advocating for old-growth or one thing or another. So, I've had this interesting career where it was possible to work on things where there was a lot of public interest and attention. I felt that relative to old-growth and natural ecosystems, they are powerful parts of the world. If you're interested in conservation, for example, I certainly have an interest in conservation, if we 00:57:00explain that this tree or this stand is 500 years old, 500 years since the last major fire and look how complex it is. I think the people in general will want to do the right thing. You know, they will want to take good care of it. So a lot of the things I've worked on, the effects of flooding, the effects of logging, roads, sediment, landslides, and aquatic habitat and all this kind of stuff, I was happy to just go try to figure out what happened and put it out there. In public terms, not wonky academic terms, although, I've published science papers, but be willing to tell straight stories and let the chips fall 00:58:00where they may. In terms of lawsuits or legislation or one thing or another. And so a lot of the things I've worked on, there's been a lot of real-world interest in them, like in the case of the volcanoes. You know, it's about public education and appreciation and learning. But then the work in the forests had a lot of conservation and watershed management implications. And I was fine with having some things that were just very basic, and other things that were applied and I really appreciate the American taxpayers for letting me do that.

SK: So your work sort of involves a spectrum.

FS: Yes. And I've always been very amazed at the stuff that started out very basic and ended up having some real world implications.

SK: Alright so that concludes our section on the personal level questions. Now in this next section, I want to move towards inquiring about different traditions and approaches of science on a community level and what role these different approaches contribute to the Andrew science community as a whole. And so I know earlier you spoke about part of your career at Andrews involving being a facilitator and a leader of where you have to coordinate between different approaches. I think you'll have interesting insights on the community level as 01:00:00well. So for my first question, what role does natural history play in the Andrews Experimental Forest and how has that changed over time?

FS: In the spirit of the definition that I picked up off the web, that natural history is scientific study that is observational rather than experimental and that is presented in popular rather than academic terms. I think natural history has been an important part of the Andrews work and our ecosystem has a lot of natural history manifest in it. That we have old growth that has recorded its own history in its tree ring records and a lot of other record keeping. I just 01:01:00think old growth is natural history, on the stump, on the hoof. And so, then I think that, as an earth scientist, natural history is a bigger part of my personal portfolio than probably anybody else in the science leadership [at Andrews]. But others have to do it too in their respective worlds. I hope that we always have a good dose of natural history. When we have big disturbance events, that brings natural history to the forefront because then we want to 01:02:00pause and say wow how unusual is this? Has this happened before? What happened in response to it? So that's part of having a long-term ecological research site.

SK: And natural history differs from more experimental or top-down approaches and in that it tells a specific story of a specific place. Would you say that's true?

FS: Yes, that is true. But then, especially, if we have things like detailed observational history of vegetation. So we have vegetation plots, all over hell and gone, you know, Cascade Head Experimental Forest on the coast and up the 01:03:00Rainier [National Park], and Olympic Peninsula [National Park], and so forth. And we also have experimental watersheds at some other locations, so these are long-term, rigorous, observational studies where we have plots or experimental watersheds, but then, as time goes by, disturbance events will happen and modify them. And so this becomes a form of a rigorous, observational, natural history type science, where our observation points, our period of direct observation is getting long enough that we're starting to see the effects of episodic events. And so there's this interesting blending of approaches.

SK: And would you say that the observational approaches still carry a great deal of importance today at the Andrews Forest as they have in the past? or is there a change occurring at all?

FS: That's a hard question to answer because I do feel, in general, the natural history types of work, that some people are concerned that they're being lost and being the old botany prof just isn't trendy anymore. Or, to have somebody in 01:05:00the faculty who, you know, led great field trips. There have been some efforts in invigorating natural history. So I think there are concerns that natural history in the training and observational science are sort of dwindling. I don't have a clear picture on that. I would welcome having some people with stronger natural history bent included within the Andrews program, but we've had a period of turnover of scientists and I'm not seeing much that are coming on.

SK: What about in the academic realm? Is there a diversity in trainings for students, aspiring ecologists and whatnot or would you say that there is prominently one approach emphasized over the other?

FS: I don't really know. I was never, you know, a full blown academic. With Julia, she teaches a field course, but only for four days and that's a course in natural history, the practice of it. But I don't think there's very much else offered out there. And because we have Andrews, she's trying to line up somebody as a successor who could lead a field course up there. You have the facilities, 01:07:00you have all of these stories, all of these places, and different themes. She does a different theme each year that she's taught it. So, it's just an ideal place to try to teach that kind of thing. And I hope it will persist.

SK: Yeah, I mean I think diversity is important because it touches on a lot of deep things in terms of how we derive knowledge. When you were talking earlier about how you come to a research question and it's about being out there and having the research question come to you, right? And so if in the other approach, you have your question already in mind, right? And then you go and seek it, is that so?

FS: This reminds me, the gratitude duet that I was representing science had with 01:08:00Alison Deming, the poet. We did it pretty much unscripted twice in public. Then we wrote some of it down and it's in the book Forest Under Story. We picked a topic and the one that I liked the best is patience. Alison thanks the scientists for being so patient in working on a particular problem or phenomenon for years and years, gradually pulling one layer of onion skin off after another to really get to the core of what's going on. I said I greatly appreciated the 01:09:00patience of the writers; I've gone out with them and we'd sit on the riverbank and we talk about stuff and I'd say, "Well, time to go, let's go look at some other stuff." The poet would want to stay. And I'd say, "Well, what are you going to do while you're here? Do you have a topic you're going to develop or something?" And they'd say, "I want to stay here; I want to wait for the forest or the stream to give me a poem." It was totally open ended patience. I'm thinking about grad students blowing down from Corvallis going out to their instruments, downloading the data, tidying it up, hauling back to the lab, or collecting a sample that's going into the cooler. "I gotta go right back to the lab and put it in the instrument or into the computer." You know, they could have had Sasquatch breathing down their neck and they never would have noticed. 01:10:00It's because our science focus can get like this [narrowly focused] and get totally instrumentation-bound, anyway.

SK: Yeah, it's interesting. It's interesting, even from my own personal experience, you know, I spent a lot of time reading about the Andrews Forest through books, through articles, and then the first time when you took me there and I walked out with this whole sensational, phenomenological experience of, "Wow, this is so different than reading from a book." So it's interesting. We have all these tools that help, but sometimes they actually may inhibit us from having the full sensory experience of what it is we are trying to understand.

FS: That's why it's so great having the artists and the writers.

SK: Von Goethe, the natural historian, he definitely loved science, but he also 01:11:00had some criticisms, he didn't like instruments at all. He thought that it got in the way of the sensory experience, which is interesting. I think there's definitely pros and cons to both right? As long as you don't lose one for the other. It kind of reminds me in your other oral history, something that you said that really touched me that I want to hear you talk more about was having the forest speak to you in terms of finding knowledge. Do you mind elaborating a little bit on that and what that means to you?

FS: Well, the forest doesn't use English. There's been a bunch of work on how forests affect people. In an interview I did with Jerry Franklin, he talked 01:12:00about how he talked to the forest. I said, "Well, did it talk back?" And he said, "Well, not really, but it was good to hear yourself talking out loud." So, anyway, I feel like when we've gone out there with groups, including these highly interdisciplinary groups, and to Mount St. Helens. These are such big powerful places and amazing things have happened in these places geophysically, ecologically, and human perception wise. And it's humbling and I feel like people are more open to communicating their feelings with one another, but, 01:13:00also, we can just feel at a loss for words because there is so much there - so many types of organisms doing so many things. And we've got a bazillion stories and that's only one of the bazillion of all the stories about all the things that are going on out there.

It's so humbling. I think that's a big part of it, it's physically humbling and that was a key discovery. This relates to your last couple of questions. You know, what was the big one of the big discoveries from the Andrews. And I think a major one is, "Wow, this is so incredibly complex and thoroughly interactive." 01:14:00All of these amazing components rippled through time with phenomena at all these timescales, and that was at a time when forest planning was all about viewing the forest as just a collection of trees that was growing to become two by fours. How simple can you get? Ideally no understory, no dead [wood], no this no that, you know. So they're just totally different things, but our vocabulary doesn't catch it. And so that's a very abstract concept. And yet, I think it was fundamental to stopping them from wacking that [old growth] all down. And that was, that was pretty consequential. So anyway, I forget what you asked. Oh, 01:15:00yeah. How does the forest speak to me? I think the important thing is to go out there and be quiet and with your eyes open. And so Lea Wilson's new art piece is now up in Peavy Hall here [on the Oregon State University campus]. And that's very interesting. The title of it is derived from a piece of writing from Robin Kimmerer [Listening to Water]. The title of Leah's piece is "Listening to the Forest".

SK: In our busy short term gratification world that we live in, that's a skill that we all of us need to relearn.

FS: Yeah you know, in our world instant gratification isn't fast enough.

SK: Alright, so to the next question. So we talked a little bit about natural history and observational approaches on the community level, but how about hypothesis-driven and experimental research? How has that contributed to the Andrews Experimental Forest and the science community and its successes over time?

FS: Oh I think, they've been very important. You know Mark Harmon's log decomposition study, for example, it does have replication and as time goes on, 01:17:00these experiments get used in different ways. I'm hoping you will be able to tell us from your past knowledge of philosophy of science, what are the valid space or constraints on hypothesis-driven research? If it's to be falsifiable, how can we do that in big, large-scale systems? So I do think that trying to 01:18:00formulate hypotheses, real hypotheses and not just throwing out something that's a throwaway. You know, hypothesize that a certain method could be used to do something, you know that isn't about the actual phenomenon. It's just your throwing the word hypothesis into a proposal, like a thesis or dissertation proposal. It isn't necessarily functional in a philosophy of science and learning context. So I think we should try to do those things, but it's actually very difficult, I think.

SK: Well, I think that a difficult component, which is a key component, is replication. Right? Replicate certain circumstances in the forest, which is undergoing constant dynamic change.

FS: You know, like working in an LTER network, generally leaders of sites go to periodic meetings and a site will host the meeting. So I remember going to the Shortgrass Steppe site outside of Fort Collins, [associated with] Colorado State University. You know, their vegetation had this stature [using fingers to show about one foot] or to Cedar Creek [LTER site] in Minnesota, where they were doing plots with different numbers of species within the plots. The plots might be two meters by two meters or something like that. They had grad students out there weeding them and installing stuff. They could go manipulate the system, but we've got big old trees, even in our plantations, they're still pretty damn 01:20:00big. So we do do experiments and have plots and treatments that are big, you know, for many acres, but it's big and it's messy. And if you're doing it for a long time, then you get a windstorm or you get heavy snow that brings the trees down, or a fire or one thing or another. So physical scale and temporal scale are big challenges. That becomes clear when you see what people are doing at other LTER sites where it might be more feasible.

SK: What role does ecosystem modeling or modeling in general have at the Andrews?.

FS: That's a very interesting question and there's long been a push to do 01:21:00modeling and some people do a lot of modeling, such as Mark Harmon. He does modeling, often in spreadsheets, where it's a big accounting process, but you have to come up with the equations for the parameter values for the decomposition rate and stuff like that. So you know Mark's is one kind of modeling. So we've never been really big on modeling. Some LTER sites, for example, do have a major model that they use in all kinds of ways at their site and elsewhere. And the site is partly known for that. But at the Andrews, it's 01:22:00been somewhat less prominent of an approach than at some other sites. A key thing I've sensed over the decades is people who are modelers like to crawl in their own little cubbyhole and just do modeling computer simulation modeling, or individual scientists may have models that they employ in their own work and there's been some effort at landscape modeling. But it's hard to capitalize on the investment in modeling if you don't have a good social setup so that the people who are not the modelers, but maybe the experimentalists and the 01:23:00observational scientists, can be interacting with the modeler over time, so there is group learning. We often do not arrange that socially to have good group learning. So that's an administrative community dynamics challenge.

SK: Do you think that the lack of modeling is solely a communicative and administrative challenge? Do you think the landscape also imposes challenges?

FS: I don't think the landscape imposes challenges, actually, you know, some of the modeling that has been of closest interest to me has been the landscape change modeling, and people have done future scenarios work. We did it for our 01:24:00Blue River Landscape Study and plan. So, we tried to simulate with the Northwest Forest Plan, how it would play out over the upper Blue River drainage outside the Andrews over the coming couple hundred years. Let's depict that and see how the different age classes of forests are distributed in time and space for the Northwest Forest Plan. And then we had this fire history based concept, the disturbance-based management scheme that had three different rotation lengths 01:25:00and levels of retention of live trees and we tweaked the riparian reserves. We made them skinnier, but then have some larger reserves and then we wanted to compare those two different landscape management schemes in terms of owls and water and distributions of forest conditions and all kinds of things. And so in that case, modeling was helpful.

SK: And then the final question for the section, are there any other approaches to ecological research that we have not discussed and what are their contributions?

FS: Well, I'm not coming up with any right now. You know, there's landscape 01:26:00pattern people. There's the tracking of spotted owls and their reproductive success and decline due to barred owls. I'm just sort of running through my mind some of the major pieces of action out there and then wondering, so like the owl tracking, if that's observational. You know, the real interesting thing is Julia's work on climate warming and the atmospheric landscape. So you can quiz her on that. But the cool thing is she tried to look for climate or a climate 01:27:00warming signal in the records from the meteorological stations, which is the place for you to expect to find the relevant records. However, because the forest grew around the met stations, they got cooler rather than warmer, but that was a shading effect. That's [warming] something that was going on, generally in the region in terms of climate change. So then she went to the records that the vegetation people and the bird people had collected on air temperature for completely unrelated reasons. In the veg plot records, which happened to be about 40 years long, she could see it [warming] and that was 01:28:00serendipity. It was observational, but it wasn't observational for the objectives that then the climate analyst was trying to use it for. So this is an aspect of having so many people doing so many things over such a long period of time in the same place, and having the data available for people to do creative things with. It's very, very powerful. So it's sort of observational, but it's, I don't know how to describe it, it's looking over the shoulders of people in another disciplines and then pulling out their data and doing something special with it.

SK: And I just actually remembered one more question that I wanted to ask you and that emerged from our discussion so far. As your role at a period of time as 01:29:00the facilitator between different people, different projects at the Andrews Forest, are there any moments or times where you saw either clashes between different philosophies of science or any some really cool sort of coordinated work or cooperation intersections between them?

FS: There have definitely been clashes. I think they were not science rooted. They were matters of poor personal behavior. People just being jerks. There's certainly times when people thought more money should go their way and that's a big challenge of LTER, because, although it sounds like a big pot, you're trying 01:30:00to have a lot of people involved. And so it takes a lot of altruism to participate, especially in leadership roles. So dealing with personalities is very challenging and an interesting thing about it is that it's a bunch of consenting adults. You have your home institution like the university or Forest Service research or the national forests that are very hierarchical systems. You know, the money and the direction sort of move down through the system, although it's sort of strange because, as a scientist, you want to have a lot of independence. So then you get NSF money from outside that hierarchy. So, very 01:31:00few people in a big in a community like the Andrews work for one another. They're in the different hierarchical systems with different cultures and then they get some money from in their home institution and then they may get a share of this NSF money and then in order to make it work, they have to play in the sand box together and not kick sand into one another's face. And we're not trained to do that kind of thing. So conflicts can arise.

SK: Has NSF influenced one approach over the other. Is it more 01:32:00experimental-driven? NSF as a culture?

FS: NSF itself is an amazing institution and it has a small number of people called program officers who run processes with the peer community. So most proposals are evaluated by peers in academia or other places. Some small proposals for quick hits like, oh, can we give money to tackle this question or this fire just occurred, may be reviewed by just a group of the program officers. So anyway, you're really dealing with your peer community. And so it is important to have your work look validly scientific and not be too woo woo. 01:33:00You know, so the arts and humanities, I don't think we've gotten any money directly from Andrews LTER to run that. It's been private money. So it's great to have that independence. I'm really impressed by how much we've accomplished without tapping much NSF money. I mean, NSF has made some contributions, like we've got some funding for a workshop across the [LTER] network on the arts and humanities and they hosted two art exhibits in their building and they had 01:34:00professional art exhibit installers come in. I actually went there and worked with those people. I mean, they get flown around the world to install the King Tut exhibit when it arrives in, you know, Paris or something. And here, these guys in the halls of NSF for the public hanging up these art pieces from LTER. It was so cool. I mean it blew my mind. You know, but anyway, um, I forget how I got onto that.

SK: Do you envision any chance that NSF would move towards being more supportive of that, as the culture of academia changes and we realize, more and more, the importance of not just interdisciplinary but trans-disciplinary collaboration. Do you think it's moving in that direction?

FS: No. You know we made a run at two proposals for certain kinds of grants to 01:35:00bring together communities of inquiry where it seems the time was right to do that. So you get a grant for four or five years and you can have a few meetings, then you write synthesis papers and you start collaborating where you've been doing things very separately, that occurs, for example, soil warming experiments in the US and in northern Europe. We applied for two of those early in the Trump era. We got positive reviews and actually our leader [Mary Beth Leigh, U Alaska-Fairbanks] had gotten a workshop grant that was hosted at University of Museum of Art and Environment in Reno, Nevada. It was an amazing meeting and 01:36:00facility. That set the stage to write these two proposals and they were highly positively reviewed, though in the end we didn't get them and in the end it was probably just too weird for NSF to do something at this time. Also, NSF had been encouraging some inclusion of the social sciences, but in the last few requests for proposals for [LTER site renewal grants], they've pulled back from that. So they're getting more sciency and conservative and use your long-term data rather than open up. I have written about how so many sites are bringing in the arts 01:37:00and humanities and dealing with the human dimensions of the conservation implications of their work. But they aren't doing much of it with NSF funding or they have to go do it with this other funding and there's an instinct in these communities such as ours to do more of it.

That's why I feel like we need to embrace you and your work, because you're going to help us know about ourselves. And I think this ought to go on at a bunch of sites. I wonder if it's going on at any other site, you know, philosophy and history of science inquiry. One comment: Denise Lach, now a 01:38:00retired professor of Social Science and Public Policy got some NSF money and she did a paper Lach et al. I think it's 2003 on advocacy in natural resource decision making. [title: Advocacy and Credibility of Ecological Scientists in Resource Decisionmaking: A Regional Study] It's in the Andrews pub [publication] list. She also went to some other sites and did interviews. I think in person and maybe via questionnaires at several other sites, but never published that work. Some of her co-authors may have published a little bit of it of Brent Steel. And it's the one that comes to mind. I think he has some pubs on our pub list. Anyway, it has to do with the conduct of scientists at LTER sites in natural resource decision making and how their conduct is viewed by 01:39:00environmentalists, attentive public and people who are more on the development end of the spectrum, and the scientists themselves.

And this is sort of related to your whole topic and you might even consider trying to contact Denise and get her impressions. The impression I got from her in a casual conversation was that the Andrews was unusual in how involved scientists were for public policy issues, which sort of relates to some of your questions and, you know, are you just doing wonky science or are you out there to serve the public?

SK: It also ties back to the question of how to use science to find truth or what is truth? Right? Are there different sorts of partial perspectives truths? 01:40:00It's interesting, the historical separation between disciplines that at the Andrews Forest, you have a unique situation where you're trying to bring this separation back into a whole inviting not just interdisciplinarity across the natural sciences, but also social sciences, arts and humanities. So I think it's interesting, you know, and how much does that open us up to understanding the natural world? When we invite all of these different partial perspectives into the story. It's an interesting thing to keep looking into overtime. Alright, so I have just a couple of concluding questions. What significant ideas have emerged from the Andrew's science community? How did the science of these ideas evolve in terms of questions and methods?

FS: Well, I address this a bit earlier, of just having a sense of the complexity of the forest, especially notable in juxtaposition with the nature of plantation forest, which we were busy and have been busily creating and managing. Then the nature of old growth, the nature of forest-stream interactions in the inextricable linkages between forests and streams. In the abundance of biological diversity, abundance of species, and different parts of the realm. Then right now we're starting to learn what the climate warming signal is and 01:42:00when it's coming from a seasonal and time of day perspective, which is a stepping stone to something that hasn't been done yet, which is trying to figure out what all the ecological responses may be in terms of organisms' responses or processes. So we're just doing all that stuff and it capitalizes on all the methods that have been used in the forest. Are there new methods or unused methods? I'm sure there are plenty of unused methods, especially with new technologies. For example, the air flow Julia has worked up a lot of the 01:43:00existing data, but it's a little bit of a catch-as-catch-can. It's difficult to understand the airflow in such a large three dimensional system, the whole forest. Then the arts and humanities, I consider that part of our inquiry. But I don't know where that's going to go. I probably said to you several times [that] part of the my feelings about where the arts and humanities can go is based on the patience of having seen how the old growth thing unfolded over 20 years. We worked in old-growth, not really thinking about it very much. It wasn't [explicitly] an old growth forest research program for 10 years [1970s], but 01:44:00then we summarized what we thought we knew in '81, and then [for] the injunctions didn't come down [to stop logging in federal forest lands of the range of the spotted owl] it for another decade. So I feel like they're going to be outcomes from the arts and humanities that I can't imagine. And I may live to see some of them, but I won't live to see most of them.

SK: Time will tell, I suppose. Alright, so for my final question. What do you see as the principles and motivating forces that drive the Andrews Forest as a community?

FS: I think it's just keep learning more and learning more. I haven't heard people actually say this, but I think, if you learn more in a place where we 01:45:00already know so much, the lessons can go even further. You can put them in a very rich context. And it's just a beautiful, beautiful place that I think sucks us in and we're all honored to get to work there. It's got a bigger karma that is bigger than any of us. So it's an honor and a big responsibility to work there. And I think the same about Mount St. Helens. Our contributions as individuals or teams of scientists have felt like the stream team. Our 01:46:00contributions are going to have a longer life because of being in those places and people look to those places for stories about some of these kinds of things. The identity with us as individuals may be lost. I see that you know the next generation will come along and sort of rediscover something and relabel it, but that just means that there's more momentum and refinement in the ideas. So these are some of my efforts to articulate why people come in and will stick with it. A lot of people come in and don't stick with it. They want to put their name on their stuff in a separate place so their name doesn't get lost or they can't 01:47:00handle the social dimension or one thing or another. So it's not for everybody.

SK: And then before we end. Are there any last, final thoughts that you'd like to offer or contribute?

FS: No, I just want to thank you for taking this all on. I'm very curious to learn from you and what you learn overall as you do this.

SK: Thank you as well for taking the time. I appreciate it.