Bev Law Oral History Interview, January 5, 2018

ELIZABETH THORLEY: Today is January 5, 2018. I'm here with Dr. Bev Law of the Forest, Ecosystems, and Society Department at Oregon State University. We're at the Valley Library. Today we're going to talk about her research, particularly as it pertains to climate change, but I'm going to start out with your background. Where were you born?

BEVERLY LAW: I was born in St. Paul, Minnesota and grew up on the lake there and I lived outdoors pretty much. All they had to do was ring a bell to get us to come in and eat and that was it.

ET: What did your parents do?

BL: My father was a manager and traveled a lot, and my mother had artistic talent and taught art in her early years. In addition, I think the major influence on me was my grandfather. We come from a family of centenarians, so I have learned firsthand stories about what it was like to live in Minnesota in 00:01:00the 1800s from my great grandmother who also lived to 109. But he was a friend of Segrid Olson and he taught me. He took me in the woods and explained how elements moved through forests and how trees dying wasn't such a bad thing because that provides food for the next forest.

ET: So, you had an early interest in forestry as a child? Did you foresee yourself going into forestry as an adult?

BL: I saw myself as being someone who stayed outdoors all the time. I loved birds. I still do and just walking through forests and hearing the sounds, seeing animals, and I've done some long, month-long trips into Yellowstone and Rocky Mountain National Park where I winter camped and cross-country skied and got to see bison in the winter. There have been some great experiences in my life, outdoor experiences.

ET: What influenced your decision to attend college?

BL: I knew I was a restless person and my parents knew early that, okay, this person's going to be work because I asked too many questions and so I wanted to go further. I always wanted to go further and I found ways to do it. I had a 10-year hiatus where I worked as a researcher and I thought what the heck? Why not go get the masters and Ph.D., so I went straight through to Ph.D.

ET: You did your bachelors at the University of Florida.

BL: Yeah, the University of Florida and it was in forest resources and conservation. I learned about ecological modeling back in the '70s as well as how forests are managed intensively down in the southeast U.S.

ET: Did you participate in undergraduate research?

BL: Yeah, I did. Well, I did a lot of things on the side, but I had to. I had to put myself through school, so I worked in research on soils and on physiology of 00:03:00small trees and how they were impacted by drought and hot soil temperatures.

ET: Where did you end up going after you graduated? You mentioned a 10-year hiatus.

BL: Yeah, so I worked for AT&T for a while and so I worked with a lot of corporations and I learned how corporations operate, how some are really fantastic and how to talk to people in corporations at different levels. From there I worked at the University of Florida in research and helped masters students. Then I came to Oregon and worked at the EPA on acid rain and on developing the forest health monitoring program for the U.S. Forest Service. So that is actually something that came to fruition the forest services implemented.

ET: What was it like working for the EPA at that time?

BL: It was great. The EPA had such a great cadre of high-quality people working 00:04:00on acid rain, really had their hearts in it. I learned then how to write for staffers because this is Washington, D.C., staffers. The would send requests for information that only gave you maybe 6 hours to 24 hours to respond to. We called them fire drills and we had to gather information very quickly and write it in a way that staffers would understand it.

ET: What influenced your decision to return to school and pursue a Ph.D.?

BL: At EPA that was right when we had just launched the forest health monitoring program. There was a lot of development time that went into it, spent a lot of time in Washington, D.C. But at the time that we got it launched I thought, okay now I've got to go on. I've got to keep moving and Dick Waring at OSU, I used to edit for him.

He'd always bring his manuscripts over to me at EPA, found somebody who would edit for free. It turns out I had met him when he came down to speak at the 00:05:00University of Florida and he kept pushing me to go back, too, under him and so a project came up, a NASA project, and I worked on that on my Ph.D. It was a transect. I still work along this transect from the coast to the desert.

ET: You were in the forest science program, right?

BL: Mm-hmm [yes].

ET: What was the culture of the program like at that time?

BL: There were a lot of high-quality ecologists that were well-known internationally. It must have been 10 or more, 10-15, 20, well-known ecologists. Their literature is known everywhere, and so it was a wonderful environment to learn in. I picked the hardest people for my committee and across a broad range of fields so that I could learn a lot more from them aside from classes and that was worth it. It has changed since then. They're not that many of us left.

ET: Did you teach as a graduate student?

BL: Yes, actually I did. It was forest ecosystems and it was on the carbon water 00:06:00and nitrogen cycling in forests. Dick Waring, who was my major professor, went to NASA headquarters for 2 years of my 3-year Ph.D. so I ended up teaching his classes while he was gone. That was also a good experience and I had to come up with a lot of my own materials for that. I didn't do I entirely alone. It was always a co-taught class, so I learned from a great person then, too, and same with my postdoc. I taught forest atmosphere interaction class micrometeorology.

ET: And your postdoc was at OSU?

BL: At OSU, yeah.

ET: Why did you decide to stay in academia?

BL: Because I think I've always been an entrepreneur. I've always been somebody who wanted to run things and lead things. I looked at my statement from undergrad and I'd said I want to be in a think tank or leading a big research 00:07:00program or research institute, and I've pretty much followed that path.

ET: So, it sounds like you've always been interested in a policy component to your research?

BL: Yeah. I've always thought you can do basic science but also build on that to make it policy-relevant, because after all it's tax payers' money. I think we owe it to the country to do some good with that and translate it.

ET: You've also been affiliated with the College of Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences?

BL: Mm-hmm [yes].

ET: It sounds like there's overlap between those two departments in your research?

BL: Yeah. So, on that, there was a project that I did in my postdoc, another NASA-funded project. When Dick Waring was gone I took the lead on that project for the ecosystem portion of, but I had to learn the atmosphere portion. So Mike Unsworth, who is an atmospheric scientists here and recently retired, was my 00:08:00advisor and while I was working on that project I learned so much about the atmosphere, vegetation atmosphere interaction. I already had a graduate course on this, but I ended up co-teaching that course and then doing that for my research, so I crossed fields. I've always crossed fields with remote sensing, modeling, observations. So, satellite observations, field observations. I've always combined all of those elements to do the best to understand what's happening in forests.

ET: And you're the director of Terra Pacific Northwest Group?

BL: Yeah, the Terra PNW. A group of us that all of these people retired now we had a very large EPA star project that had a huge field component and that doesn't happen anymore and so I was the PI, the principle investigator on it, as 00:09:00I have been on most of my projects and that was following on looking at the carbon that goes into forests and water that cycles between the forest and the atmosphere and it had those components I just mentioned of remote sensing and satellite data on forests and using that information to train models and then map what's happening to forests and that one was over all of Oregon. We just published those data. It was 20 years of my data collection that we published. We're so proud that finally got somebody to do this and help me with it. So, 20 years of data from hundreds of plots in Oregon and California, and those data are used to parametrize or feed into a model to tell you how a different species reacts to different climate variables.

ET: Can you talk about how the technology has changed over your career in terms 00:10:00of capturing that data?

BL: I think the micrometeorology has been the biggest one. We were on the forefront of that. When I started working in that at Harvard Forest a group of us, a small group, got together who were funded to do this. Following my postdoc my first grant I was the PI on it and we decided we needed to organize and so we said we needed to try, it's better than having individual sites but be able to compare results across sites. These are towers that go above the forest and they have these measurements of eddies in the air and carbon dioxide and water concentrations. From that we understand what's cycling between forests in the atmosphere. That was really important because now a lot of those sites, we have about 20 years of data and we're seeing the climate effects on these forests. 00:11:00We're seeing it in our observations. So, there are about 20 in the U.S. and 20 in Europe that often get into these synthesis papers where everybody's looking at it in a different way to look at what is happening in forests and how they're responding and different parts of forests are responding. But it's not just forests. We do forests, grasslands, shrublands, agricultural crops, and had a recent project where we're still wrapping it up but it is on the Oregon urban, suburban, agriculture, forest regredient of how carbon is going into the atmosphere. Are forests taking it up? What are crops doing? In addition to all of these towers that we've had in Oregon for that rapid response that accumulate over a year's timeframe and multiple years we also have high precision carbon dioxide measurements at the tops of really tall towers, 280 meter tall towers, 00:12:00mountaintops, and these are used in global analysis of atmospheric carbon dioxide and the contributions to it when we separate what's fossil fuel, what's vegetation, what's ocean uptake?

ET: Is that a part of the AmeriFlux network?

BL: That's part of the NOAA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations, program, but it's also part of the global observation program, the World Meteorological Organization and we're helping them develop this for other countries as Europe and the U.S. do it. But the other one, AmeriFlux, that's the one that we started in the cold winter at Harvard forest, where we said we need to organize and I was saying where we need central questions, science questions that we're all going after and consistency of measurements and comparability across sites. I opened my mouth too much, and I became the leader of the program. We grew from about at that time 10-20 sites to over 100 in North 00:13:00America and South America and it continues today. I ran that for about 11 years, so running it meant keeping the scientists engaged, herding cats, working together. But also, it meant keeping the world of scientists together and trying to make this something that could last for many, many years and it would be our best observation of what is happening in ecosystems with climate change. I did that for about 11 years but I'm still on the science steering committee now. It's run out of a Lawrence Berkeley Lab, but they just maintain it. I did all the hard part of database development with Microsoft's assistance as well as the strategic plan that's still live. It's still relevant today, and all the things that it takes to organize science. That's been a great experience, too.

ET: How do you, I don't know if there's an easy explanation of this, but how do you differentiate between carbon sources when you're gathering that kind of data? Say from humans versus-?

BL: Yeah, this is where it gets complicated. But there are ways. For instance, on our very tall towers we measure carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide and carbon monoxide sources can be automobiles or wildfire and so we're able to separate that out. We've used some of the observations from our AmeriFlux towers to train this earth system model. Once we train the earth system model, we predicted that carbon uptake by all the vegetation over the whole surface.

We did kind of a small scale demonstration of what can be done globally and to 00:15:00get an idea of how many systems of measurements do you need to resolve this and reduce uncertainty. So, we used those flux towers to train the models and then when we have this spatial estimate of where the sources and sinks are, that's kind of prior thing we have the atmospheric carbon dioxide and we say this is what we think is the vegetation part. We combine that information to see where is the model having problems or where does it do well and by integrating those we really reduced uncertainty in those estimates over a region. We did this over Oregon and it's being used as a demonstration to show what others can do.

ET: Has anthropogenic climate change always been a part of your research with carbon exchange?

BL: [Nods].

ET: When did that enter the picture?

BL: It's kind of funny because I think back to what happened in the '70s when I 00:16:00was a student and I was doing physiology work and I was building a chamber. This company made a chamber for measuring this gas exchange at a small scale, in this cubette they called it. This little box. It was made from big leaf plants and it didn't work on converse so I was redesigning it for my advisor and I was trying different sizes and fan speeds and other things like that. When I open it up for ambient, so the atmospheric carbon dioxide, that ambient measurement, I'm watching the readings. It kept going up. I'm going what is this pattern? I realized there was a stoplight not far away and it was C02 coming from the cars. Then I went oh my gosh it's going over 400 every time the stoplight stops all these cars. I thought how do we deal with this when you have these sources all around where you're trying to get clean observations of the general response of 00:17:00plants? That was early on, but all the way through I kept paying attention to C02, so I know what it was then and it was about 365 parts per million, something like that. Now it's over 410, globally. That's the global average. So, once I was seeing it at that very small scale I started learning more about how it is a global problem and then I wanted to learn more about that and bring that into my research. Well, how are the plants going to respond if it's like that all the time?

ET: Can you talk about how modeling technology or language has changed through your career? What you're using in the early part versus now?

BL: The early part, we were developing really simple models. Through my Ph.D. it was a light use efficiency model. It starts with how much light is coming in and so what is the maximum potential photosynthesis that could occur with that 00:18:00light. Then you bring in other climatic factors. If it's dryer, those pores that take up carbon dioxide close down and they can take up less. Seeing if it's hotter, they can't use the carbon that they've taken up. They lose some of it. So, there's some of that that goes into what we were doing that simple modeling and even during my Ph.D. we started working with a model that's kind of brought in a hydrology model into it. It was based on these measurements that I've got to say that I always hoped they would go away. I did these in my undergrad and we're still doing it today, and it's called predawn water potential with emphasis on predawn. I've been out there many mornings starting at 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning. Now I'm not doing it. It's my students and it's like a right of passage. You've got to do this, we did it! But it was a measurement that told us 00:19:00how much drought stress were these trees going through. We used that in the models, so it was a stomatal conductance model. Then there are the famous guys who developed a good stomatal conductance model and a good photosynthesis model and then it grew and grew. Now we're working with earth system models that have maybe, I don't know, a thousand or more lines of code, maybe 10,000. So many lines of code. It's the earth. It has an ocean component, atmosphere, land component, water flow, lateral flow if you want to have that component in model. It's called a community land model. It was developed out of national NCAR in Colorado, and National Atmospheric Research-Climate Atmospheric Research, something like that.

Anyway, this model is a bear and we describe it as a big ball of string like 00:20:00that giant one that's in the Midwest. We're just pulling strings. Fixing it. Fixing different parts of the model. When you fix it here, something else goes wrong and so you're constantly-we just spent five years developing improving the fire model and improving drought sensitivity in the model. Our improvements as well as the projecting beetle response to climate, as we put a beetle model into it. It hadn't been in there before. The fire model was meant for a global model. It wasn't for regional applications. As NCAR has said to us, we've pushed the model as far as anybody or farther than anybody has gone with it to try to bring it down to regional scale analysis. Not only the inputs but how the model functions, such as lightning strikes and so forth. We meet often with this group to say here's where we are in these model developments. After we've done the 00:21:00testing they decide shall we bring it in to main stem of the model or one of the branches and that's why it's called the community model. We all work together. Nobody could possibly work on all of the parts all the time themselves. So, we've been working with this model now since about 2006 or '08, somewhere around there. It's advanced to the point that it's applicable regionally. Now we're doing these projections of what will happen to forests and shrublands and other ecosystems under future climate conditions. What will mortality due to fire look like? Where will that happen and when? How about mortality that's just due to drought? It could be chronic drought or extreme drought. You could have a really bad, hot, dry summer that impacts those forests for a few years if you're working with forests and then in addition you can just have this chronic drought 00:22:00where it's just hotter and dryer in general over a lot of years and those are the things we're trying to tease out and get the model to do is predict mortality better. When are trees doing to die in the future? Where are they going to die and what are we going to do about it?

ET: What is the importance of predicting mortality in particular?

BL: It's more, ecosystems so much relies on our picture of where forests should be and what they should look like. When you start impacting some species that are more sensitive than others, you're changing the whole dynamic of that ecosystem. You're losing animal species. They have to move somewhere or they die. My biggest concern is what's going to happen to the animals? What will happen to birds if they start losing habitat? It's not just a climate effect. It's also what are we doing to modify these systems to serve ourselves, and that 00:23:00includes largescale cutting or frequent cutting of forests and changing the species next to very few species. We're impacting biodiversity in a big way and we're moving into that in our research of what does that mean in the future. A lot of what we do relies on animals, everything. Our water comes from the watersheds of forests. They hold water, they filter water and hold the water and how will that affect water availability in the future? Those are the things we're going after is the effects on water availability and biodiversity and we've always suspected that by just we know this from observations. I was also involved in a group that wrote a letter about how biodiversity has been impacted over the last 20 years and we said that we've got to do something about this. We've lost something like 50% of the bird species already in my lifetime. I'm 00:24:00just floored by that. I grew up hearing all these different birds. Rachel Carson was right. Anyway, that's why or where we're going with this. We want to be able to head it off. We want to be able to help people figure out how do we minimize our impact without too much impact on humans and too much impact on everything else. It's about minimizing impacts and modifying our behavior. We have to do that. Our population's climbing to 9 billion in my lifetime and I'm going to grow to over 100 years old. I'm going to be seeing things and I'm going to say why didn't you do something about it? There have been many people who have been trying to at least provide the information so that we can be better informed about what we might be able to do.

Policy takes about-10% of their decision making is on the science. That's got to 00:25:00improve because we're heading to this place that we don't want to. Nobody wants to go there. I think I see the urgency now and in our annual meetings 30,000 scientists in American Geophysical Union all meet in December and when all the fellows, I'm an AGU fellow, when we've all gotten together in a big meeting room and had speakers, like Jerry Brown came to speak, we see the urgency. We feel it. It's no longer, well if I just keep cranking out the science maybe somebody will grab it. We've got to communicate it better.

ET: You've written about forests carbon sinks. Can you talk about how forests store carbon?

BL: Forests store carbon in their wood, in their leaves, live and dead wood, and in the soil. Oregon and Pacific Northwest, this is where carbon is king. These 00:26:00forests not only can live to 1,000 years or more of age, they keep in taking up carbon every year. They don't stop taking up carbon. But they can store it for hundreds of years in the live material and the dead material. These forests in general have long clear stems and they were around with fire. There here still after 600, 800 years, and we do have a lot-not a lot-but we have that in our plot data where there are trees that old and they've lived through fires before and made it. It's because of that thick bark and their branches are way high so the flames don't get to them. You can store it for hundreds of years in the forest and why not keep it there? It takes no effort other than to protect them. I don't mean all forests. There are so many, about half of the forests in Oregon 00:27:00are privately managed and now they're on a 4-year rotation, meaning they cut them every 4 years, even though they could live to 1,000 years. Recent analysis we did was we showed if you just increase that harvest cycle, let them live for another, you know, until about age 125 and that's where productivity peaks in these forests out here. It doesn't mean it stops again, it's just where that rapid ascent slows down. If they allowed that to happen, we would be storing so much more carbon in these forests. That means carbon that's in the forest is not in the atmosphere so they're doing the work for us. Stop cutting them down and really rapidly putting that carbon into the atmosphere. That's what happens with bioenergy, etc. We've developed a life cycle assessment where we track the carbon once it leaves the forest. We can tell you how much over time, maybe by 00:28:002025, 2050, 2100, how much carbon has gone into the atmosphere from our uses. It's commonly thought that it stays in buildings for a hundred years and then it's awash, but that's not true. If you talk to contractors, the architects who are designing buildings into the future, they're designing them to last 40 years, 45 years. My own childhood home that was beautiful on lake with Andersen windows torn down to the foundation and a big giant house was built there. That was at 50 years of age. That house was torn down. Where did that wood go? A lot of it goes into landfill and then it decomposes. It doesn't just stay there. We track it through all of that. We have probably the most robust, if not the most robust, one of the most robust life cycle assessments to do this tracking and 00:29:00that's what needs to be done so we not only track what's happening the forest but what's happening once it leaves the forest. We're looking at it from the forest perspective and from the atmospheric perspective.

ET: What kind of responses have you gotten from individuals in land management agencies when you talk about managing forests as carbon sinks, as opposed to how they're currently managed?

BL: It's funny, when you talk about the research branch they get it. But in some of the agencies they have in management and applications they're not communicating or they're not listening to each other. Or, they are, and some of the people who might hear the science won't accept the science and they're going the way of let's just keep thinning forests because we need the money.

As it turns out, with one of the agencies it's kind of fund money. It's money 00:30:00that actually supports staff. They have an incentive to thin forests. It's not related to what does it do for forests. It's what is it doing for their staff. That's kind of a tough position to be in. It's interesting like the Starkers locally are foresters and we've worked, we have a tower on their land. It got clear cut so we had to take the tower down because it no longer represented the age of forests that we had and it was a large area. Nonetheless, they were still interested in hearing what we're finding out. I think one of the things that we and others have influenced is saying, you know it's not going to be the species that, there are going to be winners and losers, and your best bet like in stock market is to diversify. But some of the species in that might be more resilient 00:31:00to drought and do some mixes of species like that. They've done that. They have areas where they've experimented previously, and I've seen right in the area that they've cut they have maybe 12 species in there. That's fantastic. They got the message.

ET: What are ways in which forest nutrient cycles can be changed or disrupted by global climate change?

BL: The way trees use carbon when they take it up in photosynthesis is they need enough nitrogen. There's this carbon, nitrogen linkage. They need enough nitrogen to be able to use that and assimilate it into tissues. They get the nitrogen from the soil. When there is increased atmospheric C02 it does have an enhancement effect. We've seen that. We just published this in Nature where 00:32:00we're seeing this in our flux sites, where the increased carbon dioxide is the largest influence on the increase in carbon uptake by those forests, mostly because of the photosynthesis. There are two things going on. Photosynthesis is taking it up. Respiration is putting carbon back in the atmosphere. It's just the cost of doing business. Carbon dioxide happens that way but if you only model for the carbon dioxide, the enhanced carbon dioxide and you don't account for nitrogen limitations then you're going to way overshoot on the estimate of how much photosynthesis will occur in the future. The other thing is when you harvest frequently you're reducing and then moving that material. Most of the nitrogen is in the leaves and the roots, but there's also nitrogen in the main stems and in the branches. If you harvest more and more frequently, you're reducing the nitrogen in the forest. That's what happened in the southeast. When 00:33:00I did my bachelors down there and my research down there, that was maybe in the second rotation of their forests or third rotation of their forests in the early '70s and mid '70s, but now they have to fertilize 2 to 4 times during their harvest because they've completely depleted the organic layer in the soil, and it's sand, and that's what they need to do. Now it's a crop, it's like an agricultural crop. Well, what's wrong with that? Nitrogen, N20, nitrogen dioxide is now, it's also a long term greenhouse gas and it's much more powerful than carbon dioxide. Now you're adding this long term gas into the atmosphere at a much faster rate than we were before. This might happen with crops too. We don't know, but there are people who are working on that more specifically and work on all the other vegetation. We do also work on crops, but I don't work on the 00:34:00nitrogen part of that story. That's a big concern. There are major long-term greenhouse gases. I worked on a national research counsel committee's document for the national academies on those effects, how to quantify and verify greenhouses gas emissions for treaty agreements, or international agreements. We had to remind them of that. The biggest concern is the N2O that's going to the atmosphere from crops because of the additions to the crops. That's a big concern. There are methane emissions that has become more recently exposed and that was from those kinds of measurements that I was telling you we were doing on our tall towers. We have methane measurements in those too. This company down in California discovered that when they were-he took me on a drive and showed me see these spikes? In this case it was in methane.

He was showing me they have screen on the car, we're riding in a Prius and we're 00:35:00measuring as we're driving south of San Francisco. We went by these big tanks that stored gas. We thought maybe we'd be capturing methane from that. But, no, there might have been a little background but we're seeing giant spikes. It turned out it was the pipeline for methane that ran from San Francisco down south. It turned out all of their joints leaked. Now that's become a big deal. Those who are methane-they usually burn off methane at oil wells? They need to do something about that because that's a very powerful greenhouse gas. A lot of these things have evolved. It's not just about carbon dioxide. We've had to think about the nitrogen component, methane and other gases that are the long-lived gases. I got a little off topic on that, but it really is one of those things where I'm always thinking about the forest or the land based response and how that might be impacting things and I'm thinking about the atmospheric issues. We're finding more of this, why?

ET: Could you talk about your work on disturbance in terms of releasing carbon into the atmosphere and comparing human disturbance, like logging, versus natural disturbance, like naturally occurring wildfires?

BL: Yeah, this was something that's a paper that's going to come out in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It's something we've been working on for a very long time. It turns out that, and we did this analysis for Oregon but we're doing it for all the western U.S., it turns out that first of all about in Oregon 83% of the above ground biomass mortality in forests is due to harvest. Only about 8% is due to fire. This is from 2002-2012. About 9% due 00:37:00to beetles, or it's reversed. Beetles less. We don't have as much here as we do-so we did this over the western U.S. First of all, it was just through observations. For the whole western U.S. about 50% or more of the above ground biomass mortalities, that means all the wood above-ground biomass, is from harvest. It is the largest impact both at our state level and at the regional level and the beetles and fire are minor when it comes to the carbon that's lost. Fire isn't what people think. When you see all that smoke it's mostly water vapor. Everybody gets alarmed and you see pictures in the press. And it really is sad to see fires burn and see what happens, but in terms of carbon it's not that much carbon goes into the atmosphere. We did things like we went in after fires and worked on a lot of fires. We first take, we measure how deep 00:38:00did the char go in the trees. The bark, like we were saying, the bark on these trees really protects them. The moisture in the trees protects them. There is not as much carbon that goes into the atmosphere from fires as people think, too, and not as much is lost when you think about, well, all the people down in the southeast where I used to live. They used to char their fences to preserve it. That's pretty much what it does. It's sort of like a rind that forms around the trees when they burn and that takes a while to flake off. Decomposition really doesn't start going until the wood hits the ground, but again it stays there for 100 years. You have to look at the amount of carbon and where it goes over time. From the land management perspective, if harvest is the biggest cause for mortality, then that means when you take that out of the forest it's putting 00:39:00it into those rapid pulls, like what's used for paper. There's short lived products and then there are longer lived products and so it goes into the atmosphere much faster than it would from the forest. But this one that the paper's that's in review, we're basically showing how we need to lengthen the harvest cycles, protect larger areas. This is climate mitigation when you're trying to reduce the impacts of climate change. Reduce the amount of carbon that's going into the atmosphere and increase the amount that's stored in forests. You don't do it by fertilizing them more because of the nitrogen issue. You don't want to make them too dense, because they might be competing for water then. But you could add reforest areas that were previously forests, that means less than 50 years ago.

A lot of times there are fields where people just let them-they abandon the 00:40:00fields or they're used for something else. Those could be reforested. Then there are areas that could be afforested and that would be non-forage or non-food crops. We've run scenarios and showed where if you took maybe 150,000 hectors of non-forage, non-food grass crops. They're only used for grass seed and we would aforest those and then we would reforest those other areas and then we would lengthen those rotations of the forest when they cut 80-125 years that we could increase the amount of carbon stored in forests significantly over Oregon. It's a lot more likely to find that over other regions, but, again, Oregon and Washington and California all the way up to Alaska, southeast Alaska, that's where carbon is king. It's the biggest storage, temperate rainforests, storage 00:41:00of carbon and it's often been ignored in that sense, that this is a place where you would if you're thinking over a larger scale, like a politician in Washington, D.C., would, what you do is you should have more protected area in these large forests that really do a good job of taking up carbon and keeping it there.

ET: So, it sounds like land management decisions post disturbance, those are pretty important decisions when it comes to storing carbon.

BL: Yeah, extremely important to think about carbon like a currency. If you store it there and there will likely be offset programs. California started one. Oregon is thinking about it, so is Washington, of helping by subsidizing people like private forest landowners to just keep the carbon on the ground, keep it in the forests and that would mean that lengthening the rotations or setting aside 00:42:00land that will just stay that way. Those are actions that are likely to occur in forward thinking areas and they should occur in this region. You can't tell people what to do but we can say this is what happens if you do do this. This is an option and this is a way to get there.

ET: Can you talk about how bioenergy plays a role in carbon sequestration and maybe compare the Pacific Northwest to the Southeast?

BL: Sure. I had gone to Washington, D.C., and I was asked what were my thoughts on, this was President Obama's climate action plan. It was about using renewable resources, but before then I had started thinking this is in the mix, this is what people are talking about. I wanted to see assessments of what is the life 00:43:00cycle assessment of how much carbon goes into the atmosphere from wind, solar, and from bioenergy? Other people are working on the other two and I have the results on that. They're pretty much the way to go, wind and solar. But when we started looking at our results from different levels of thinning from bioenergy, we did this in Oregon, we did light thinning. Just for over the forested area in the state and areas where you might have fire more frequent. That would be the dry systems, like Ponderosa pine. We ran one that was economically feasible and one that was for bioenergy production as something that had to be done and so that it was something to maintain the systems. We're still doing that. We're doing this now for the Boardman facility. Not for them. We know that they want 00:44:00to change. It's the last coal fire powered plant in Oregon and they want to change to another source. So, I'm on the Oregon global warming commission, the science technology committee. We've been informing them. They're energy people. The head of it has a hat for each one of these groups that he meets with. I said when I look at it, and look at our results, you end up with more emissions from using bioenergy, net emissions to the atmosphere, than you would from using solar, and I would say the no brainer is to go solar if you had to choose. We've interacted that way. I've actually like talking with energy folks because they do want to find solutions that are feasible. So, we've done repeated analyses and one was more observation based. That was our first Nature paper.

Then we did another one that was using the observations to train the model and 00:45:00run it into the future. So we have climate effects. The only areas we would thin are areas that might be impacted by forest. Then we've improved on that even further. We're doing this for the whole western U.S. and we used Oregon as our pilot study on that. So, when you're doing those levels of thinning, though, and just doing the forests that might be vulnerable to mortality from fire, or from drought, that bioenergy use of that wood for bioenergy still produced more emissions than just leaving in the forest. The difference there is that bioenergy uses the wood immediately, so it goes into the atmosphere immediately. The previous scenarios that we run for the life cycle assessment are based on what people are actually doing. How much is going into saw timber? How much into paper? How much into bioenergy? This recent run, we just ran residuals, 00:46:00residues. If forests usually they'll cut the tops off and the branches off and leave them on site but if they use that for bioenergy what does that mean for emissions? It still ends up being a net emission to the atmosphere and we run out of residue. That means they'd have to go farther and farther away to get those residues. We'd have to go into Washington and it still won't supply even half of what that facility needed. It's a 570 megawatt facility. It's not enough. It's not sustainable. That's what they're worried about. If they're planning out for the next 30 years of this new facility, we're going no you're going to run out in 20 years, 10 years. That means they're going to end up using other wood. What do they end up using? They'll start thinning the forest more than they have been. We've done all that and we've quantified this for Oregon and now we're doing it for western U.S. and that'll be done in a couple months. 00:47:00I worked in the southeast U.S. and saw-these have been in crops for a number of years, those forests there, the pine forests, southern yellow pine. They were on the short cycle of maybe 20 years. Well, they put some facilities down in the southeast and they needed wood but it's not just to serve the U.S. I think there's a lot of confusion. People think this makes us energy independent. You hear these words all the time from politicians. It's not being used for that. It's being shipped overseas to Europe and so you have a carbon cost from the shipping. You have a carbon cost from trains bringing wood from everywhere and trucks. That's carbon into the atmosphere. That's probably the next one we'll do because I'm very familiar with those forests is run that scenario with our system model and then running it through our life cycle assessment on what 00:48:00happens with it. Some other people have done some kind of analysis on this first analysis and they're concerned about what happens to the forest there. They have flown over these areas and taken photos of the facilities and then nearby forest and they were harvesting bottomland hardwoods. Bottomlands hardwoods are very special in the southeast. That's where wildlife travelled along and lived along the waterways. These trees are very old and it took them very long time to get that old. They're harvesting beautiful old hardwoods and using it to make pellets and shipping them overseas to burn and go into the atmosphere, which is a perverse incentive. Why would you do this? It's been this claim and you'll see at the federal level a claim of carbon neutrality that bioenergy is carbon neutral as saying it's okay, it's okay. The trees will grow back rapidly. No 00:49:00they don't grow back fast. They just don't. They won't grow fast enough and furthermore you're having somebody else that didn't cut their lands pay for the carbon you removed from that property. It ends up when you look at this and really quantify it it's really bad news in terms of atmospheric carbon dioxide because nobody's accounting for what's directly being burned nor the carbon that's being used to produce this material. Wood is not as efficient as other materials. You have to burn more of it. One of the things you have to do is dry the wood. So, that's heat. They heat to 250 to somewhere around 300 degrees. Guess what that took? Energy.

So, what do they do for that energy if they have those facilities distributed near forests to reduce their transport costs, you know so they have to take less 00:50:00trips because it weighs less. Half of weight-not half, but somewhere around 25% of the weight is water. It takes a lot of heat and a lot of energy to do that. They burn more trees right there to dry it down to take it to a facility. If they air dry it, it's not so bad. That's what you see in the southeast, there's just wood trees everywhere. Whole stems piled and fanned out air drying and then the most efficient, the people who do energy work have shown it's the most efficient thing is to dry, is to torrefy it, but they're not thinking about the emissions from that. They're only thinking about what's the most efficient way to get the wood to where it's suitable in this carbon-like flakey like material that you would burn for energy. There's a lot more processing that's involved that has a lot of carbon associated with it. So, it's also a problem at the international level. I've been in an IPCC expert meeting where I was asked to 00:51:00explain this to them. I said, you've got to track the carbon. You've got to know what's being used for bioenergy. When it leaves the forest, everybody, every country needs to do this. Then they will realize just how bad it is because we can use our LCA and we can use it anywhere in the world and show how much carbon that's adding to the atmosphere. Then what's worse about it is their incentives for this as an alternative energy. They're getting paid to add more carbon to the atmosphere. It's a perverse incentive. Why am I railing on it? It seems like a very simple thing for us to head off, but scientists have now written many letters and the politicians are ignoring it. So, I think they have some of their own interests involved that might be affecting that. We wrote our own Oregon 00:52:00senators, people from all over the world, and then just people from Oregon and said it is not carbon neutral. It's adding it to the atmosphere. These are people who are concerned about climate change, but they are willing to look the other way. That's bad. Sometimes I think we need more scientists in the policy. I think we have one Ph.D. in congress right now. We need more.

ET: You mentioned your work with Oregon Global Warming Commission and you also testified before congress and senate. How has your experience in communicating science to politicians been and what do you-?

BL: I have a lot more, let's see, satisfaction talking with their staffers. Their staffers are sponges for information and many of them are just really 00:53:00talented people. They understand what you're saying. They pick it up. When I went to Office Management & Budget they had a lot of climate scientists there and we were in a big boardroom and these guys knew how when I said the probability of this happening-they know probabilities because it's what they do. A lot of statistics there and they were climate people. So, when we would talk about the probability of fire versus the probability of harvesting and how that affects the carbon to the atmosphere they were soaking it up but when you come to the politicians and I talked with our state politicians-I won't name names, but they will say jobs, jobs! They'll have their-what they say to the public in general is what comes out of their mouth. They're not really saying what they think. So, it's trying to get them to look at you and listen and really think 00:54:00about what this means over the long term. If we lose these forests because of other reasons are making it worse, what do you think it's going to mean in the next 20 to 50 to 100 years? It's going to be your legacy. I'll be here. Again, getting blamed for it. Because I'm the only one alive. There's just a few of us left.

ET: How has-I guess reflecting back on your experience communicating science in general have you changed as a science communicator over the years or do you think about it differently? You mentioned a sense of urgency now.

BL: Yeah, a sense of urgency. Yeah, I mean there are some of the things like okay when you're testifying to congress, and when I did this was during the Bush administration, most of it, and also the Obama administration. Both of them.

What a stark contrast and when congress was dominated by one party versus another. It's a cat and mouse game and having taken a law course and being 00:55:00around lawyers a lot I know how they operate and so you know when you're trying to be trapped. You have to think a few steps out in front. Not everybody did this. There were great people that were just writing and listening and soaking it up. Barbara Boxer from California. They were really listening so you might have half the group that's really listening and half the group that's trying to make you look like an idiot, trying to ruffle your feathers, trying to take the information and twist it in their direction and then the cameras are running and they want to be caught on camera as saying something for whoever paid them, whoever is paying them. My father's often said they need to wear badges like NASCAR drivers who is paying you and the size of the badge is relevant to the size of the funding that they get. There's a lot of that and so when you go in 00:56:00there you have to know this is what happens. A lot of people go there and are very disillusioned by it. I figured if I could just reach a few people it matters, and so I think you have to talk to people at many different levels. This goes back to when I was working with AT&T. I learned how to talk with people at different levels of the organization to see how they get information, what information and how they'll deal with it, how to describe it and then talking across organizations and people who really want to do something about it and sometimes it's really gratifying. Other times you think oh my gosh I just wasted three days. You can't let that stop you and you can't get disillusioned by it because who knows better about this than scientists? I have a colleague who's just retired who's often said they trust economists, politicians trust 00:57:00economists better than they trust earth system scientists. Which is amazing because our models are much more complicated than the economics models. You'll often hear oh we forgot to put that in the model and then we had this giant economic crash, but why would they trust economists when their models are so simplified, so simple compared to what we work with? We are really our worst critics. We're always trying to reduce uncertainty in our estimates, always and we're always looking at what we're finding and trying to be very honest and direct about what we're finding. That's what disillusions a lot of people is they still won't listen, but you can't let that stop you. We're really the people who know this the best. If somebody listens then we might get somewhere. 00:58:00Somebody listens and that matters.

ET: How did you get involved with the intergovernmental panel on climate change?

BL: I was invited to expert meetings, so one was on disturbance and that was in Geneva, Switzerland. We were trying to figure out what kind of observation systems we needed. It was early on to really do these kinds of estimates of how forests are going to be disturbed and how they're going to respond to future climate and how they might influence future climate. I was on that expert panel and this goes back I think about all the things that I've done to build towards this when I was working on developing the forest self-monitoring program for the U.S., I was thinking about what is the network of observations you need and what are all the tools that will use those observations to give you a really good picture of what's going on, a much better picture than we are now. So, I've been on several of those IPCC expert panels. We're invited to help them learn how to 00:59:00improve methods that might have to span, you know I had plan A, B, and C depending on the capabilities of each country. Some of it was in the countries that have more capabilities, like satellites, the U.S. and Europe and other countries like Brazil, how to take those observations and use them and get a picture of what's happening to forests. So, once your name is in there and they see what you've done and I've written a manual on protocols for observations. That thing is being used a lot. It was published by the FAO, the Food and Agricultural Organization, and so it's things that I've published, methods and then people who have read my papers and say hey this person might be able to contribute.

It's a very broad organization. Thousands of people have contributed to 01:00:00understanding all that's going on. It's so complex.

ET: Now I'm going to move on to some broader questions on climate change. What were your earliest conversations on climate change like and how have they shifted over time?

BL: Earliest conversations-wow. I don't even actually know when [laughs]. I'm trying to think. When did we first start talking about it? I mean there are some things that I noticed when I was pretty young growing up that some things were changing. Most of the things I noticed that were changing were due to human influence in other ways, but I think that first it's more of just direct observation that like when we were running our Flex towers that group of 20 of us over the U.S. that had these towers measuring above ecosystems and we were 01:01:00seeing changes in the photosynthesis and the net carbon outtake from the atmosphere in particular because that's the direct measurement that we're making and then while we're doing that when we see this whole number of net carbon uptake we had to figure out well what's responsible for that in all these parts? We started measuring phenology and then we started seeing that spring was coming 2 weeks earlier. We'd have our annual meetings and I'd go spring came two weeks earlier this year and somebody else in the southeast: it happened here, too! It happened here, too! Now that somebody had started about 6 years ago, he was hearing all this in our meetings and we've got to get better at this phenology measurement. We need something that you could process like an image and process the same way and it's continuous measurement and he started putting these webcams up on all of our towers. At Harvard, they have this record now of the 01:02:00seasonal phenology images every, I think every month or it is continuous. They're not just monthly. I think it's every day and then select good images that aren't all fog or something. You can see those images and how they're processing they have about like 6 years of data now and they're starting to take that and say how is this changing in these different areas and how is that associated with climate? Phenology is an integrator of all these climate influences is temperature and water availability, growing degree days, how light it is out. You can be warmer and not light enough and not take as much carbon, but if it's warmer in a season and there's enough light it might be taking up a lot more carbon from the atmosphere. Anyway, those are some of the things that we've done out of this and it will go much farther than this. Satellites do fly 01:03:00over and they might get better at quantifying phenology but they don't come by very often. You either get one resolution or another, temporal or spatial resolution. You have to give something up. But I think they'll get better at tracking this and like right now we see it's a simple index. I did a lot of remote sensing in my Ph.D., but they can show the greening up around the globe. NASA has done a beautiful time series and showing the globe spinning and the colors changing seasonally, so anyway.

ET: Can you speak about the community of climate change researchers here at OSU and maybe how the institution facilitates that research?

BL: Yeah. Research tends to happen organically. We have a big idea and I'm one of those big idea people and then I thought okay what do we need to carry this 01:04:00out. When you start digging down and trying to solve the question or figure out the answer to your question you start seeing, oh I need a climate modeler. I need somebody that knows soil processes that can help us improve the soil model. You start thinking about all the kinds of skills that you need. In most cases, though I have people from all over the U.S. who work with me, but we have a cadre of people here at OSU. We have climate modelers and so there are people working in different areas, like oceans, and people are working on estuaries and how carbon is moving into estuaries as you get more runoff from the land and it goes out in the rivers to the ocean, there's more sedimentation and people measure blue carbon here at OSU.

We keep saying we have to work with each other but I don't have a blue carbon component yet. I might do that, but we wrote a proposal. There was one we wrote 01:05:00to NASA to quantify this off the Gulf of Alaska where we wanted to see, because it's braided. There's just a lot of water moving in first order streams and taking carbon to the ocean and we don't know how much is ending up in sediments and how much is just recycling. We have a lot of those skills here at OSU. OCCRI, the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute, before OCCRI existed, I worked as part of the Center for Analysis on Environmental Change out of the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences. We were provided seed grants for groups to think about how do we get the right people to work on these ideas. That was a great experience for me and then OSU decided to have a climate along with some state funding, climate research institute, and Phil came along, Phil Mote, and they have a group there. What helped me is what we ended up saying I 01:06:00think the climate modelers are getting the climate wrong. Future climate, when you come in from the ocean from the west, the whole west coast, I think it's not right because we're not able to-when we look at the data we pull the data out and run these and see what's happening in the climate data and the future and what it's saying for the past to the present and we're saying I think it's not getting it right because we're not able to predict how highly productive these forests actually are. Then the climate science would say okay we need to look at that or we need to look at atmospheric circulation and how that might change in the future off the coast or does that regime change? They're not ready for us. A lot of times a part moves faster than another part. We're always begging the climate scientists to catch up to us on a regional scale and they're wanting to know more of the feedbacks, so a lot of times it's a really energizing because 01:07:00you're finally getting people who should be spending all of their time instead of us trying to do everything, we have downscaled the climate data. We have done a lot of the testing ourselves, but we need the climate people to do that so they can figure out how they can improve the data inputs. So, it's organic. It was useful when you have an organization that when I'm writing, I'm doing all the big thinking. I'm tunneled down and I can't think about anything else. When it's really hard on me is having to come out and just deal with filling out forms online and doing budgets. I do budgets really well. I've done that since I was at AT&T and since I was working on acid rain. I've always worked on budgets and big budgets, millions of dollars in budgets. But I don't want to do that. I've got to work on the science part of it. It would be really nice if OSU could take a much bigger role like they do at some other institutions and so I try to 01:08:00tell research office this is what we need. We need somebody to take this off our hands because we're competing against other institutions who have these people who just handle all that for them so they can think. So, anyway, that's what it takes to have a winning proposal is having a minds working together on this and people-one colleague calls it's like jazz. When you get the right group of people together and they're going oh and this, oh and this, oh and we can do this. No we can't do that. Your minds are just joining and it's really exciting when that happens because you think okay, now we've got it. We've got something that's really important to do and we've figured out how to do it.

ET: How do you foresee, if you're concerned about this being an issue, coping 01:09:00with diminished funding for climate change research during the Trump administration?

BL: Well, we've been through this before. Those of us who have been through this before think just hold your breath and we'll be, sooner or later, we'll be in a better position. There's been a general, actually, flatness of funding across agencies for many years so that we have fewer and fewer staff to help us on these projects and help us get there faster. We're always trying to be more creative about how we go about it. There's some institutions that they have more endowments, so those universities that don't, like OSU doesn't have as much for research. We don't have many foundations funding research. We need to get better at that. That's something else that I think has to happen.

We've been through it before and we find ways to still get work done and I've 01:10:00often described it as we work like stock brokers. We work and work and work and I'm still working like a teenager, nights and weekends trying to get this information all the way through to publication and then communicating. It's hard on us and when I hear congressionals at hearings saying oh you're just in it for the money. We just laugh. You can't laugh when you're talking to congress but it's right! If I was in it for the money I'd be somewhere else. It's not about the money. It's about understanding what's happening and trying to improve lives, all life.

ET: What policy changes would you like to see happen within the U.S. as it relates to climate change?

BL: I think that it's not just policy, but I'll get to that in a minute. The 01:11:00policy changes would be to get smart and see what's happening and not make the problem worse. They could incentivize storing carbon in new forests. Big people buying up lands that's not going to compete with food and water and other issues and putting that back into forests. The incentives could be shifted from other areas to storing carbon forests and to subsidize solar and I think that's going to be a primary source of energy. We'll see, however, but we'll see but I think solar is probably the best way to go right now. We might have some new 01:12:00discoveries that find other sources of energy that are not so impactful. It's funding that kind of research. We don't have much R&D in companies but one that stands out right now is we wish we had more of us like Tesla, Elon Musk, the work that he's doing. He's jumping, he's hurtling, jumping over steps to get places much faster than others. That should incentivize others to be able to do that and see this is a great opportunity what's happening now. It's a great opportunity for people to think very differently. It's paradigm shifts. It's those who have the minds to make paradigm shifts, we're going to get out in front. Everything else is going to be the buggy whip. It's just going to be irrelevant. We'll get there but we need more people like that and more corporations that will put the effort into R&D instead of just focusing on the 01:13:00stockholders to take us there. There are ways. There are people who found ways. They've increased the competition and that might drive things towards the right direction to go. The policy makers are going to be the followers. The people and the industries will be the leaders and it's unfortunate but at least they could for now shift their subsidies to the winning routes that we see forward.

ET: What changes to public education do you think help Americans better understand climate change or maybe change their behavior?

BL: There are people who say, that think education is not going to go anywhere. Well, it does. I lived in the south. I know what it's like when the teachers are buying books, and I'll tell-I had a friend when I was in college, or lived in Athens, Georgia, and I was doing research there on soils. She was buying books 01:14:00for her class because they didn't have enough books for the students. They didn't have the right books for the students. She was asking for advice, what are the good books? I think the web has helped us a lot in discovery of good literature and it's really been a proliferation of good literature out there that could be used in education. We're also having these online courses for people who can't, you know for college if you can't afford to go maybe all four years. I envision that maybe half of their coursework will be done online. Education is really important. We need to do a much better job of it. There are a lot of new classes that are being developed. I have a class that's on global change and it's really on, it covers not only the topic itself and what's happening in oceans and atmospheres and to wildlife and to everything.

They're having to learn how to communicate and it's using the Leopold program 01:15:00methods. For the students who really grab onto it, I see some who have become wildly successful in their careers in helping communities find solutions and they've gotten funding to do that. There are different ways of teaching the teachers and then teaching the students and do it in novel ways and it's happening. It's happening very quickly. I think that education component has been really good and is getting much better. There are many of us who talk about what will universities look like in the future and I do see fewer buildings and more of the labs because that's what you need to be there for is the immersion, the labs and being in the environment you can't just do everything online, but the basic things you can do online. I think universities will be different. 01:16:00Right now, they've gone the corporate route where industry determines what we learn in a lot of the fields. I don't think that's the right way to go because it could go retro on the time. Just for some of the areas it could go retro instead of looking forward. You have to be careful about that. They are helpful in many ways. But in some ways, it's slowing progress. I think there are a lot of people who are trying to figure out how to do this and now there are people who are working on making their online courses or their in-class courses available online. There are some good programs for people who are older and retired and want to learn and people like my father. He's learning a lot from me and I thought it was wonderful to hear that he'll go out for dinner and start explaining things to the waitresses. There's learning in many ways. We have to 01:17:00get better at the education. I think education is not all that great in some areas. Amazingly for the U.S. to have such poor education in areas like in math and science compared to other countries. When I see what they're-I hire the best and the brightest and a lot of them come over from Germany and China and Korea and other places in Europe and Italians. They had much better mathematical skills than the number of people that we're turning out with those skills to do earth system modeling. The kinds of high level analysis, we do neural network analysis. The U.S. does need to improve education. It's usually an afterthought. If funding in states is reduced it comes out of education a lot of times. We've just got to change that. It has to start all the way from K-12 on up.

ET: Are you hopeful about the future of the planet in the context of climate change?

BL: I guess for me I'm really, really hopeful because I'm going to be here and I want it to be the environment that I love not something that is so totally changed that I have to migrate from here to somewhere else. I'm a survivor and I think that's in my blood and it's in generations of Laws to be survivors. My great grandmother was in basement all winter. Their house burned down and she lived in the basement in Minnesota and winter and survived, she and her daughter. We're survivors. We know these stories and so I'm forever hopeful that we'll find a way. The human race will realize we have a higher calling and that higher calling is the moral responsibility to protect this planet for the future.

ET: Alright, well that's the conclusion of our interview.

BL: Okay.

ET: Thank you for participating. I appreciate it.

BL: You're welcome.