Martin Raphael Oral History Interview, November 14, 2016

Samuel Schmieding: Good afternoon, this is Dr. Samuel J. Schmieding, Oregon State University College of Forestry. It is November 14, 2016. I am at the Forest Sciences Laboratory just south of Olympia, Washington, U.S. Forest Service facility, and I am here doing an oral history with Martin G. Raphael, Ph.D., Emeritus Senior Scientist, Wildlife Ecology Team, 31 years with the U.S. Forest Service. We are doing an oral history today focused on the Northwest Forest Plan which is part of the Northwest Forest Plan Oral History Project. We will also be talking about Marty and his career, kind of biographically-centered; how he got into science, how he got interested in nature, but also how he became a wildlife biologist and how that applies to the Northwest Forest Plan and his specialty regarding the Forest Plan, which is the marbled murrelet, one of the important endangered species that were listed and 00:01:00included in that particular plan. So, good morning, Marty?

Martin Raphael: Good morning, good to be here.

SS: Thank you for meeting with me. And I will basically start out like I do with all interviews. Basically, where were you born and raised?

MR: Well, I was born in Denver, Colorado, moved to California when I was seven. My dad was an engineer and got a job at UC-Berkeley on the faculty, so we moved to California, and I grew up in the Bay Area of California, stayed there through high school, and went to my first round of college at Sacramento State, which is not too far from the Bay Area. At that time, I had no idea what I was going to be doing. I thought maybe I should be an engineer just like my dad. But it turned out, I didn't really enjoy that. Ended up graduating in social sciences, because I had changed majors like five times while I was at Sacramento State. 00:02:00Not knowing what I wanted to do, I kept trying different things. Social sciences were a way to combine units from lots of different things. Then, I worked in a steel mill for several years, and in the process of doing that, the environmental movement came about. There was the first Earth Day, I got excited about the environment, and my wife said, "You should go back to school and study ecology." I thought, "Oh, I can't do that." And she said, "You should try it." So, I applied to Berkeley and was accepted in a new program they had called "Conservation and Natural Resources." So, I went back to Berkeley and started over essentially, and got a second bachelors while I was there.

Then, while I was there, I got involved with a professor in the entomology department named Donald Dahlsten. He was involved in biological control of injurious forest insects, and one of those biological controls was 00:03:00cavity-nesting birds, who eat a lot of bark beetles and things. Dr. Dahlsten was saying at the time that these cavity-nesting birds depended on dead trees, dead trees were important for wildlife, and I got interested in that. And so, after working with him for three years in his lab after I got my second bachelor's, I applied for grad school at Berkeley, and then started that study with cavity-nesting birds there. My first research project was on relationships between snags, dead trees and cavity-nesting birds, all under the mentorship of this Professor Dahlsten. I sort of put him as the guy responsible for getting me into this field in the first place.

SS: Now, were you working in coastal areas or the Sierra area?

MR: Sierra.

SS: On which slope?

MR: On the east side. My graduate work was just north of Lake Tahoe on the east 00:04:00side of the Sierra Nevada in the Truckee area, a really beautiful spot.

SS: Okay, right by Squaw Valley and all that jazz?

MR: Yeah, just north of there. So, I went to this place called Sagehen Creek Field Station, and they had these permanent plots that had been set up and had been studied right after a big fire had come through. There was an opportunity to resurvey those plots and look at birds in the area that had been burned, and compare that with areas where it had not been burned. And my study was to look at the numbers of dead trees that were still on these plots, and then to follow them over time to see at what rate they were falling, or whether new ones were coming on-line, and how that affected the birds. So, I did that for several years and ended up getting a Ph.D.

SS: From Berkeley also?

MR: From Berkeley, yeah. So that was 1980 by the time that happened. I went back 00:05:00to school in 1972.

SS: After your first bachelors?

MR: After my first, right. SS: Sacramento State. The Hornets? Right?

MR: Yes. I got that degree in 1968, and worked in the steel mill like I said. Then I went back to school in '72, graduated in '74, then started in '76.

SS: On your Ph.D.

MR: Yeah.

SS: So, going back a little further, were you more or less an urban kid, or did you have experiences out in nature when you were young, that made an impact that perhaps you reconnected with?

MR: That's exactly what happened, because I didn't really realize it at the time, but it was always the natural sciences that interested me. I loved to go out and go on frog hunts or snake hunts, or check out ponds and look for salamanders.

SS: This would have been like in the East Bay area?

MR: Yeah. We had this little creek in our neighborhood. This was in Lafayette, 00:06:00California, which is just over the hill from Berkeley.

SS: Is that by Concord and Walnut Creek and all that?

MR: Yeah. So, if you go east from the Berkeley area, the first town you get to is Orinda. That's where my wife is from. And then Lafayette, then Long Creek, then Pleasant Hill, and then Concord; it's this whole string of communities. So, we were in Lafayette and we had this really cool creek that was just two blocks away from our house. And we'd build rafts and float down the creek, then we'd hunt for western pond turtles there, and they'd have hatchlings every year. We'd catch these little turtle hatchlings. We had just a fantastic time looking for snakes, lizards, whatever it was, but it never occurred to me at the time that this would be what I would actually study for a living. And then, when I went back to school and started in this conservation program, I just realized this is what I like. And so, where I'd always been kind of a C student in college, I 00:07:00started just thriving. When I went back to Berkeley, I'd get straight-A's, and just really into what was going on. So, it was really fun. And I realized, oh, yeah, that's what I want to do.

SS: So, do you remember any family vacations where you went to like, especially spectacular landscapes or places or that also fed into this love of nature in terms of how it applied to your professional development?

MR: I think so, because my dad used to like to take us on these trips, and I remember while we were still living in Denver, so I was probably five years old, we went through Bryce Canyon National Park, and I still remember those sandstone, sculptured cliffs, and rock formations. He would buy me books about dinosaurs, and so, I was one of these dinosaur-loving kids, too. We took a trip 00:08:00to back east and went to one of the big natural history museums there, saw the skeleton of Tyrannosaurus Rex, and I just thought that was the coolest thing ever. So, there were experiences like that when I was really young, that probably made a big difference once I finally settled down.

SS: Was there a special attraction to birds or ornithology or particular biological species, groups or anything?

MR: No, I really was into snakes and lizards growing up.

SS: Like a lot of boys.

MR: Yeah. They were the best. And I remember catching gopher snakes. That was always my favorite. One key experience. My dad knew I was interested in that stuff, so he took me to Berkeley and introduced me to Robert Stebbins. Robert Stebbins was a herpetologist and was the curator of herpetology at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, and he wrote the "Field Guide to Western Reptiles and Amphibians." He took me to his lab, Stebbins showed me around, and then released 00:09:00a sidewinder [rattlesnake] on the floor, and had us stand up on the museum display cases while this sidewinder was buzzin' around. Then, he actually gave me a king snake that I got to take home, so that was just the coolest thing.

SS: A live king snake?

MR: Yeah, a live king snake. I don't know why he had that or why he was giving it away, but he gave me a king snake and I had it for years.

SS: As a pet?

MR: Yeah. That was while I was in high school. And so, after all that time at Sacramento State, I ended up back at Berkeley, took a course from Stebbins called "Natural History of the Vertebrates," and I just thought, "Oh, this is so cool. I remember this." And he really liked the little report I did. When I was working for Dahlsten, one of his studies was putting up nest boxes to study mountain chickadees because the chickadee was another bird that fed on these injurious insects. So, I was involved with helping to monitor what was going on 00:10:00with these nest boxes. You'd run up, put your hand over the opening to the box, and then reach in and get the birds and band them. That actually started my interest in birds. Then, when I went home, I had one of his nest boxes, and I hung it on a tree in our back yard when I first went back to school, and the chickadees nested. This was a different species of chickadee, it was chestnut-backed, instead of mountain. It was nesting in there, and I recorded the daily development of the nestlings and stuff, and wrote it up for my report for that Stebbins class. He gave my report rave reviews. They used it as an example in the library for other students to look at in succeeding years. The feedback I got from doing that just really, it was a big thrill.

SS: Do you ever remember in your family home or other places, seeing books, for 00:11:00instance, at my family home, we had some of the famous Audubon illustrated books that stimulated me in birds, not professionally like it did for you? But even when I got older as a professional historian, some of the famous scientific illustrators, Catesby in the Southeast and Cook's illustrators on his world travels. Did you remember those kinds of visions?

MR: We didn't have any of that. We had engineering books and we had nursing books, because my mom was a nurse. And I used to love looking at her nursing books and pictures of diseased people and injuries and things. I thought that was the coolest thing. But no, we didn't have any kind of natural history books at all, and I never knew anything about that until I went back there, you know, started over at Berkeley. Then I got into the field guides and going out bird watching.

SS: Now, when you were doing your doctorate, what were some of the special places that you did your work, and what were the aesthetics of the places?

MR: Well, that Sagehen Creek Field Station was really cool. It was a small 00:12:00facility with these tent cabins that you would stay in. It had a cook facility and these classes would come in.

SS: This is the place on the other side of Tahoe, right?

MR: Right. It's an experimental field station, at that time run by the University of California. Now, it's a [U.S.] Forest Service experimental forest, so it's got a different status. [University of California Reserve and U.S. Forest Service Experimental Forest - Sagehen Station has dual status.]

SS: Is it on the north side of Tahoe or the east side?

MR: Well, it's north, about 10 miles north.

SS: Close to Mount Rose on the north side of the rim there?

MR: If you were to take Highway 89 out of Truckee heading north towards Sierraville, and then to ultimately Quincy, it's along that road. Not near Mt. Rose, but it's further up toward the crest. It's closer to Donner Lake and those areas.

SS: Now, what do you make of the contrast between the ecology of both Colorado, 00:13:00and also, central-western California, and up here in the Pacific Northwest? How would you describe the contrast between those, if you were going to talk about your evolution of perceptions of places and ecologies?

MR: Well, the main thing here is the stature of the trees and the diversity of plants, just the whole biomass thing. I mean, these forests are so much bigger than anything I've experienced in the Sierra Nevada, and I spent five years in Laramie, too, before I came out here. This place is just amazing, with these gigantic trees and the moss-covered limbs, and the epiphytes that are growing all over everything. It's so diverse. And then, I wouldn't say that the bird diversity isn't greater. It's pretty much the same but, a few different types of things, but it's mostly the nature of the forest that is just so different.

SS: Even though you lived close to the redwoods, and the sequoias were down 00:14:00there in the south-central Sierras, those did not impact you like later on, professionally, when you're in the Northwest, the bigness of the forests up here?

MR: Yeah, because we did go to Sequoia when I was a kid. We went hiking and backpacking down there, so I'm sure that made an impression on me too, all these huge trees. But I lived around the smaller, "normal" kind of trees in the Sierra Nevada, and so it made a big difference being up here and being surrounded by these cool, moist, huge tree environments.

SS: You were obviously studying the science, but what important management principles or concepts in land and natural resource management and conservation, were you also exposed to at that time, because you were obviously learning the 00:15:00science then, but you became something different as you developed as a professional. What did you learn, what were your perceptions, and how would you represent your developing beliefs back in your university days, especially graduate school, when you were really coming of age intellectually into what you became?

MR: Well, I was surrounded by a certain sort of the conservation ethic. Professor Dahlsten was into biological control. That's different than spraying pesticides. They had the typical foresters who were cutting trees and spraying insecticides, and then you had the conservationists that were looking for ways to manage biodiversity, to look for environmentally friendly ways to solve environmental problems. That's the environment that I really grew up in and was looking at, and I was sort of surrounded by this conservation ethic. That sort has shaped my thinking ever since.

SS: You brought up Earth Day early in the interview. What do you remember about that and just what you thought that meant? And did you realize what an 00:16:00earth-shaking paradigm shift it was? Or, was it that you just thought it was really cool, and then you just followed where that led you in terms of that cultural ethos?

MR: Yeah, well, I'm not quite sure of the sequence. But there's the famous picture of the earth rising above the moon that was taken during that-

SS: Apollo 8.

MR: During the Apollo mission. And so, the combination of that image of our blue earth, and the fact that that's it, you know, that's our planet, and then this conservation ethic, it just said we've got to do what we can to take care of this place.

SS: Because that was one year [2 years] before the first Earth Day. It was '68 or '69 when "Earth Rise" was shot, the name of the famous photo. [Taken by Apollo 8 astronauts during mission].

MR: Yeah.

SS: But, I mean, a lot of people had that same thing happen, I believe.

MR: So I think the combination of those events made me think, well, maybe that's 00:17:00a way that I can contribute. We need to take care of this Earth, and Earth Day sort of put a focus on that important need. And a way to do that is to learn how ecosystems work and to try to study these things and see if there's something I can learn about it and apply to them.

SS: But, when you were studying the science at Berkeley, did you think that you were going to basically be a science/manager or did you think you were just going to be a scientist?

MR: I thought I was going to be some kind of a scientist. I didn't know about management. But I was taking those conservation courses, and I was around a guy who was involved with managers. He started bringing me to meetings of the Western Forest Action Council, something like that, looking at ways to change the way forests were being managed to take advantage of natural predation as opposed to spraying insecticides. So, that's what got me into the idea of 00:18:00applied science, and then maybe there's a way to be a scientist, but doing it in a way that would lend itself to solving actual management problems. SS: Now, going back even further, reflecting back on the childhood, your adolescence, and early professional development in school, do you remember seeing any event or practice environmentally, good or bad, that made an impression on you, good or bad, like a clear-cut or, like, in Santa Barbara, there was the big oil spill? Things like that?

MR: You know, I can't think of any big singular event. I did go to a big oil spill and treated oiled birds. And I'm sure that had an influence. There was one just north of San Francisco near Stinson Beach, and a group of us went out there and were spreading detergent on the birds and trying to clean them up, and I saw the impacts of it.

SS: When would this have been?

MR: It was while I was at Berkeley, so it was in the early '70s. I can't remember exactly when.

SS: Was it a tanker that hit ground?

MR: Yeah. Yep.

SS: Okay, interesting.

MR: That was one event. Then, when traveling with Dahlsten to these different agricultural fields where they were spraying insecticides; that had an impression on me for sure. And then when we were talking about these forest insects, I just remember he kept talking about this idea, well, you can show with insecticides and it kills a lot of insects, but you can't show that it's having an impact on survival of the trees, and that's what really counts. That always made a big impression on me that these pesticide advocates would say, "Oh, look at all the insects we killed," but they can't show you what sort of benefits it is having on the forests. And so, I thought, "Well, we've got to 00:20:00look for ways to actually show some kind of benefit of this procedure versus another one."

SS: When did you read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring?

MR: Right about that time.

SS: Because in '62, it came out early, but you were not of that age yet.

MR: Nope, but when I was at Berkeley and we were talking about all these things, that book was front and center. When we talked about when I was with Dahlsten talking about insecticides; that was one of the books that was sort of like required reading. So, yeah, that had a big effect, too. Because that was right when they were talking about banning DDT as well, and Robert Risebrough was doing his studies showing egg-thinning in eagle and falcon eggs [effects from DDT].

SS: When they started realizing how it was traveling through the food chain and causing all these problems.

MR: Yeah, accumulating. So, we had guest lecturers that would come. There was this guy, I can't remember his name now. He was a professor at Davis [Univ-Cal] 00:21:00and big DDT advocate, and he said, "There's nothing wrong with DDT." And he would stand up in front of the lecture hall and eat DDT. (Laughs) And say how great it was. No, he was a crazy guy.

SS: So, obviously, you could see where that was, as you were coming of age in terms of having a conservation ethic.

MR: Yeah.

SS: Now, you finished your doctorate, and it was in, remind me again?

MR: It was in "Wild Land Resource Sciences," which was actually wildlife biology.

SS: Okay, and what was your dissertation?

MR: Well, it was on the use of standing dead trees by counting nesting birds in the Sierra Nevada. It was on snags and birds.

SS: So you really connected before you even knew who these people were or you were colleagues of them, Jerry Franklin, Mark Harmon and all these people, who are incorporating the whole idea of dead, decaying snags as an essential part of the forest ecosystem?

MR: Yes, it just fit right into where my studies have been. When Jerry's talking about, he used to call "messy forestry," where you're leaving all these remnants of the old forest, dead trees, downed logs, and all this stuff, it was just the 00:22:00right kind of stuff that I had been studying, and I totally understand what he's talking about.

SS: So, you get out in what, 1980?

MR: Uh-huh.

SS: Ph.D. Okay, what are you going to do? What's your track, and did you go right to the Forest Service, or did you go to academia for a while?

MR: I actually stayed on and did a post-doctorate for a while. It was doing this counting nesting bird study, and part of that had been funded by the Forest Service, so the regional office in the Forest Service, Region 5, and the guys there had gotten to know me, and there was this burgeoning interest in old-growth forests, due to Jerry's work, primarily. One of the values was about old forests vs. younger forests, and so Region 5 was interested in funding a study to look at wildlife populations in different age classes.

SS: And Region 5 was California?

MR: It's the California region headquartered in San Francisco.

SS: Right, correct.

MR: But it covers all of California.

SS: Right.

MR: So, they gave the university some funding to do the study and I was the post-doc who led it. So, we went and moved up to northern California in the Willow Creek area and I designed and carried out a four-year study of wildlife populations in age classes of Douglas-fir forests. So, we looked at everything from middle-aged to really old forests, and we studied everything in those forests. We sampled birds, amphibians, reptiles, small mammals, larger mammals. We did the whole gamut.

SS: So, when did you get your first exposure to the murrelet?

MR: That wasn't until a lot later.

SS: But that is in their range, though?

MR: It is.

SS: I mean, on the coastal side of things, right?

MR: I knew nothing about murrelets then.

SS: Interesting.

MR: I'd never-

SS: Never even heard of the bird? MR: No, and they were flying over me at the 00:24:00time, and it was a bird I was unaware of.

SS: And they might have even bombed you a couple times.

MR: Could have. Totally could have. So, that study lasted until 1984, and the last year, I ended up working in the lab of another Forest Service scientist named C.J. Ralph, and he was at this lab called the Redwood Sciences Lab in Arcata, California. So, when the field work ended on my old-growth study, I went to Arcata and he provided lab space for me there, and gave me a spot to do the analysis of the data and to start writing up reports from it. So, I got to know the Forest Service research environment through him. There was another guy named Jerry Verner, who was down in Fresno, another really top-notch scientist who was involved with spotted owls and also other forest birds. Those two guys kind of 00:25:00mentored me in this Forest Service research culture, and I started getting interested in that kind of profession or place to work.

SS: A real quick segue. How would you compare old-growth redwood with old-growth Douglas-fir?

MR: Well, they're really different. Old-growth Douglas-fir is covered with epiphytes, it's really kind of diverse and there's lots of different understory plants, and stature is sort of similar to redwoods, of course, a little bit bigger. But redwoods are real simple in comparison. I mean, they tend to be just redwoods and not much else, actually.

SS: Is that bio-geochemical or canopy dynamics or -- ?

MR: I don't know. Part of it has to do with just the microclimate they're exposed to. Some of the redwoods are in a little bit dryer forest. It's warmer and dryer down in California than it is up here.

SS: Right.

MR: And they have a more of a Mediterranean influence, whereas the maritime 00:26:00influence up here with all the fog and the moisture that flows in. So, part of it has to do with that, I think.

SS: Okay. So, how did you get involved in the Forest Service? Obviously, you've been exposed, you're interested in this kind of work.

MR: Yep.

SS: How did the transition happen?

MR: I'd gotten to know these Forest Service researchers and I realized, there's a place where you can work, the research branch of the Forest Service. I knew I really wasn't interested in becoming a professor and teaching. I wasn't that thrilled with giving lectures all the time, but I loved doing research. So, I realized that I could do that kind of a career, and I started watching for jobs in Forest Service research. And sure enough, a few came open, so I started applying to those. And it turned out that one of my fellow grad students at Berkeley, a guy named Hal Salwasser, was with the Forest Service at the time, and he was back in Colorado. What was he doing? He was the National Wildlife 00:27:00Ecologist for the Forest Service, but he was located in Ft. Collins, Colorado. He knew about this job opening at the Rocky Mountain Station out of Laramie, and he made a big push to get me into that job. So, I applied for it, and he was a big supporter.

SS: Of course, he ended up becoming a big figure at Oregon State University [Dean of OSU College of Forestry], too, where I work now.

MR: He was a name and he was involved with that whole huge controversy with the Donato study [Dan Donato, Ph.D. student in College of Forestry] of salvage logging and that stuff. But yeah, he was quite the character. We used to call him "Senator Sal."

SS: Really?

MR: He was always the political type, just a real glad-hander and back-slapper, the opposite of a lot of the rest of us, but he was a character. He was huge in my development.

SS: How so?

MR: Because he really helped me get into that job. He was a huge proponent, and 00:28:00he would have been in San Francisco when I had done this old-growth study. So, he was the one that actually provided the funding that I was working under. He knew me really well, so when he went to Colorado and saw this opening, he said, "Ah, Marty would be perfect for it." Because they wanted to expand their work from just deer and elk to looking at non-game species as well, and taking a broader look at wildlife, as opposed to just the hook and bullet type [fishing/hunting]. He thought I would be perfect for that and it was my interest.

SS: Which is just really another way of saying one of the many aspects that we see across our society, science, management, otherwise, activism, where the humanistic focus was being challenged, if not overturned, by a more holistic, ecological ethic and perspective?

MR: There you go. That's well-stated.

SS: And so, now you were out of Laramie. Is the station up in the Big Snowies? ["Snowy Range" is highest part of Medicine Bow mtns.] MR: It's the Rocky Mountain Research Station, Laramie Sciences Laboratory, on the edge of the Medicine Bow Mountains, which is the University of Wyoming's research station.

SS: The Medicine Bow, excuse me, right. What is the elevation there, about 9,000 feet or so? [Research station, not Laramie]

MR: No, it's about 7,200 feet or something.

SS: So, what work did you do there, and how did that figure into how things started to evolve as your science career in the Forest Service proceeded?

MR: Well, a few things. I had that exposure to nest boxes through Don Dahlsten's work. So, I did a nest box study and put up several hundred nest boxes in this forest. Well, it turned out, there was this opportunity to study contrasting watersheds. This is in the Medicine Bow Mountains. One watershed was being harvested with these little, tiny patch cuts, because they thought snow would accumulate in these openings and the surrounding trees would protect them from 00:30:00being blown away by the wind, which is a huge factor there where the wind just scours these hills. But if you do small openings in the forest, the snow can accumulate, and therefore be available for subsequent runoff in the spring, so it would be a way of managing water. So, they wanted to do an experiment where one watershed was cut over with these little, tiny patch cuts and the other one would be left alone as a control.

SS: Your typical paired-watershed type study.

MR: Yeah.

SS: I mean, with whatever the subject and your goal happened to be, right.

MR: Correct, so this was a perfect chance to see what the wildlife implications of that kind of management would be, so we did a whole bunch of different things there. One was this nest box study with chickadees. Another one was an American marten study, which is a forest carnivore, and we started catching martens and putting radio telemetry [sensors] on them and looking at their movement patterns in the cutover area versus the un-cutover area. Then, we just did a bunch of bird transects and small animal transects where we put out sample plots and counted. We did a real thorough study. I was there for five years and this was all pre-treatment there. The treatments weren't going to happen until, let's 00:31:00see, 1990, and I was there from-

SS: Meaning, the logging [treatment], right?

MR: When I was there, it was all pre-logging, so I was doing this comparison before anything happened.

SS: And what was the forest type there, the dominant type?

MR: It was subalpine fir and lodgepole pine.

SS: Okay, but these weren't really, were these merchantable timber?

MR: Yeah.

SS: Okay, they were big enough for that, okay. Would this have been considered an "old-growthy" kind of forest of that ecology?

MR: Of that ecology.

SS: Yeah, I mean, I'm not comparing it to the big-

MR: Nothing like old-growth here.

SS: I mean, and I don't even want to use the word climax, because that's out of favor and too simplistic, but more or less, a facsimile for an old-growth kind of forest?

MR: It was mature forest.

SS: Mature forest or late-successional, would be a better way of calling it.

MR: Yeah, and it was quite variable. I mean, on the drier areas, it was 00:32:00lodgepole pine, on the moister areas it was engelman spruce and sub-alpine fir. Really kind of interesting, really nice, beautiful area. But I put in all these different plots and hired big crews, and we sampled that stuff every year. Then, there was the opportunity to come back here.

SS: But what was the big lesson out of that? I mean, if you were going to take away something, what was the big thing you learned or that took you forward and you learned from that?

MR: Because none of the treatments happened, what I really learned was the research techniques, just sort of honing my methodological skills, and being able to apply sampling methods to problems. I mean, I saw a big variation in the wildlife response to these different forest types within this general ecosystem. 00:33:00But nothing huge emerged because the real lessons didn't happen until later when the treatments went in.

SS: Did they do comparative type treatments, like a clear-cut, strip cuts, etc.? MR: No, this one was just, it was strictly these small patch-cuts.

SS: Just patch-cuts, okay.

MR: Designed to create augmented water. Hey, you know what, I need to take a quick restroom break. (Break)

SS: We just took a short break. We're going to continue, and Marty's going to move from where he was talking about his work at Laramie, and where that led to the next step in his career.

MR: While I was at Laramie, simultaneously, there had been a study that had been started to look at the same type of thing I was doing for this post-doctoral study. This was a large effort with multiple scientists studying wildlife in 00:34:00different seral-age classes of Douglas-fir forests. It was called the Wildlife Habitat Relationships Program, and Len Ruggiero was a scientist here, actually located at the Olympia Lab, who was leading this effort. It was a program within the Pacific Northwest Research Station, and the station director at the time was a guy named Charlie Philpot.

Len had always wanted to go to the Rocky Mountains. That's where he really wanted to be. He wasn't that happy here in the Northwest. I was in the Rocky Mountains, and my wife and I were really interested in the West Coast, because we grew up sailing, we met sailing, and we loved to be out on the water and being close to the marine environment. It was something we wanted to do. We had grown up on the West Coast and this is where we figured our home really was. So this opportunity presented itself for the two of us to literally switch jobs. 00:35:00Len would take over what I was doing, and I would take over what he was doing, and we would just trade places because we were at equivalent levels within the research branch. So, in 1989, that's what we did. We literally switched. And this guy, Philpot, who was the director, was totally in favor of it because he wanted to keep doing the type of work that had been going on here. The wildlife program was just winding down, but they were going to follow-up with additional work on the spotted owl and other species associated with old forest. And so, they wanted a scientist to keep pursuing that work.

SS: So, you arrived in 1989 at the height of the "forest wars"?

MR: Yes.

SS: And it was a year before the Seattle Audubon Society, actually the year that they filed the suit that led to the Dwyer injunction. So, tell me about you arriving into this milieu as a scientist, but also the political situation that you would soon find yourself involved in. MR: So, this controversy over 00:36:00management of old-growth forests was reaching its peak. But I felt well-positioned to sort of participate in this discussion, because I had this history of having worked in old forests and comparing wildlife and old to younger forests back in those post-doc days. I was looking at wildlife, a broad suite of different wildlife species in Laramie, and was totally immersed with just looking at the big picture and seeing how forest management affected wildlife. So, it looked like a perfect chance to sort of continue pursuing the line of work that I had started in. And it was just really thrilling, you might say, to be involved with something that was gaining such high notoriety and public attention. To be in the midst of something that was really perceived to be important, was kind of awe-inspiring and a little scary in ways, like, you 00:37:00know, I didn't want to screw it up. But it was exciting.

SS: How would you compare the politics of the Rocky Mountains to here in terms of forest management? Obviously, less merchantable big timber there perhaps, but still, just a much different environment.

MR: It was. And so, I went over there to study so-called non-game wildlife. But the environment was all about game wildlife. Deer and elk were what people were interested in there. So, I felt a little bit out of place. I didn't find a real strong support for the work I was doing, even though the managers realized it was important in terms of public perception.

SS: Because you weren't focused on megafauna, right?

MR: Correct.

SS: Okay.

MR: Correct. In terms of the politics of forest management, like you were saying, it wasn't as big a deal there. There wasn't as much money in forests, in 00:38:00logging and timber values, not as much as here. Actually, the management of the forests for some of these other species, like deer and elk, is a bigger deal. Still, there was a big emphasis on timber there. Logging was a big deal, just nothing compared to the way it is out here. So out here, this long history of clear-cutting and the mega-money that was involved in these communities totally dependent on logging, that's really different than the way it was in Laramie where there wasn't quite such a tight connection between the fate, the economic fate of these local communities and logging operations.

SS: You were also on the interface between ranching country and the mountains, and it was a much different dynamic.

MR: Exactly. Yeah, grazing was a much bigger deal over there than out here. SS: And I guess, too, if you were talking about environmental degradation issues in 00:39:00the Rockies, especially down further south in Colorado, it would be more with mining and hydrological impacts of unregulated activities, or even old tailings that hadn't been treated or packed, you know, the long-term effects on watersheds and the like?

MR: Right, and energy development was another big thing. So, oil and to some extent coal, but not so much, but especially oil development, was big back there, or becoming big. There was a lot of concern about that.

SS: So, you came to this lab we're at right now.

MR: Yep.

SS: This was the place you came right to?

MR: This is where I moved to, right here.

SS: Okay, so what was your first job? What were you charged to do? Your position and what was your first task, shall we say?

MR: Because the old-growth study had wound down, the first thing was to oversee 00:40:00these developing demographic study areas for the northern spotted owl. Eric Forsman [leading owl biologist] was here at this lab at that time, too. So, he was leading the owl work and I needed to help him establish new study areas and get those up and running, because there was a big interest in looking at the detailed demography of spotted owls.

SS: But this was before the injunction?

MR: Yeah, this was right before it. But those studies, the first of those had started in 1985, so they had a bit of a history going. There was continuing that, and there was the interest in forest carnivores. I had gotten this experience working with martens back there [Rockies]. And so, we started a similar study here looking at martens. Pretty much the day I arrived, I started 00:41:00getting involved with the management side of things, and starting to get involved with environmental impact statements that were being developed around forest management alternatives. So, like within two years after I arrived, I jumped in and started working with the national forest managers on those things.

SS: What was your understanding of the Endangered Species Act, the definition of an indicator species, the politics of it? I mean, what did you understand when you came here, and how quickly did you come to understand things on a deeper level?

MR: Well, I knew that it was tremendously important. We had the National Forest Management Act [1976], and I was operating under a sense about the viability requirements under the National Forest Management Act. So, that was sort of upper-most in my mind. Totally aware of the Endangered Species Act, because we 00:42:00were already contending with listed species here and there. I wasn't studying them per se when I was in Laramie, but I knew about them because there were other species like the Wyoming toad and others, that were having a big impact on ranching operations there. And of course, when I got here, it's a whole different thing.

SS: And of course, the snail darter and the Tellico Dam, and the whooping crane in Nebraska, these were all precedent-setting in the '70s in terms of the ESA listings, and how it would actually become politicized.

MR: Right, and do you remember the Peripheral Canal? It was this whole thing in California about what was called a peripheral canal, which was a major issue, as water resources were a big thing there, and still are, of course.

SS: Is this somewhere down in the San Joaquin Valley?

MR: Yeah, this is the San Joaquin, the Sacramento River Delta.

SS: Right.

MR: They needed to get water from north to south, as L.A. was running out of 00:43:00water. They needed more water, and one way to do that was build a big canal.

SS: A cross-basin transfer.

MR: Yes, around the periphery of the San Joaquin Delta, and to take water from north to south. But there were these huge issues about the impacts that this would have on all these native fishes. When I was at school at Berkeley, I convened a whole lecture series on the Peripheral Canal, and had speakers come in from the water resource and fisheries communities, and other places, to talk about the ramifications of a peripheral canal, the good things about it, and the bad things about it. So, these kinds of environmental controversies are part of my background, for sure, starting with the insecticide controversies that I mentioned earlier.

SS: So, you had a lot of knowledge of all the issues surrounding the political hot-button issues?

MR: Well, I knew about how these things kind of work. I didn't have totally in-depth knowledge of every one of them, obviously, but I was certainly used to them in a contentious environment, and trying to apply science to help inform decisions that were being made. That was my big interest.

SS: Tell me about meeting Eric and learning about the spotted owl, which is obviously the big symbolic species, but just what you learned from him and how he portrayed that dynamic?

MR: When I was working in northern California on this post-doc, they were just starting a spotted owl research project in the same vicinity, at the Willow Creek Study Area. I lived in Willow Creek. Alan Franklin, another researcher working with a guy named Rocky Gutierrez, a faculty member at Humboldt State University, who had this spotted owl project that was just starting. I realized, 00:45:00they're going to do the spotted owl work, and I'll study everything else. But I kept interacting with those guys, so I became aware of spotted owls and went out with their crews when they were surveying for owls at night. And the whole time I was doing that, I kept hearing about this guy, Eric Forsman, who had developed the original techniques for studying spotted owls, and he was the first one to really start understanding the relationship between spotted owls and old forests.

He was kind of this [icon], just like Jerry Franklin, who I always wanted to meet. I always wanted to meet Eric Forsman, and I hadn't actually met him until I came back. I was never at a meeting with him the whole time I was at Laramie, or after I left northern California, because I kept working on data from the California days, as I was still involved with old-growth forest data. But I had just encountered him, and then, it turned out, here I was working with him 00:46:00directly, when I came back to the lab [Olympia]. It was really great. And what he was doing were these detailed demographic studies. I'd done work where I was basically counting things, doing inventories and estimating population sizes. But I'd never done any demographic work where you're estimating vital rates of species, like what's their annual survival rate, what's the rate of the fecundity, and the number of young that are being born.

SS: The more sophisticated matrix-type studies of different factors, right?

MR: Exactly, exactly. So, he exposed me to that. But also, at the same time, there was a guy, Barry Noon, who was at Humboldt State at the time I was around. He was a population biologist, and he helped introduce me to those concepts. When I came back, he was a scientist with the Pacific Southwest Research Station working out of the same lab that C.J. Ralph was in. Shortly after I arrived, I 00:47:00think I mentioned that I got involved with the Forest Service's environmental impact statement, and we were trying to understand what all this population data meant. I was relying on Eric and Barry. They educated me on how to interpret what these vital rates for owls were about, and how do you use those rates somehow. So, that was a huge, expansive, intellectual eye-opener for me.

SS: Now, a lot of the studies that had been going on, Eric started his work during his master's program in the '70s down in the Andrews Forest, and around Oregon. This work developed, and of course, the "Forest Wars" started, and as they played out in the '80s, there were all kinds of efforts by the Fish and Wildlife Service, by the Forest Service, to decide how and when and where to list them. Correct?

MR: Uh-huh.

SS: And there were a lot of debates over that. And I believe the [U.S.] Fish and Wildlife Service was rather late in coming to that determination, and the Forest Service came first. Was that correct?

MR: I don't know for sure about that. I just remember all the different ways and attempts to try to manage for spotted owls, and this whole evolution of protected areas.

SS: What's your understanding of how they were trying to do it in the '80s, before the injunction, when they were trying to come to grips with doing individual national forest plans under the 1976 National Forest Management Act, and then, falling short of being able to meet the ESA and listing requirements, which I believe is why none of them flew? Intentional metaphor, I guess, for birds. So, what was your understanding of why those fell short of what people thought would pass legal muster?

MR: Well, it's vague at this point. But in those days, they were managing individual owl pairs, and they hadn't come up with a broad ecosystem approach to 00:49:00their management, yet. They had what were called SOHA's, Spotted Owl Habitat Areas, which are individual patches of forest around known activity centers of the owls. But environmentalists just kept challenging these management plans, saying they are not sufficient. These owls depend on old forests, and you're not really protecting old forests, you're just protecting these individual patches around the birds, and it's not going to work. So, they kept challenging these forest plans on that basis, and they would prevail in court every time. It became obvious over those years that a broader approach was needed. Eventually, that led to the ISC [Interagency Scientific Committee] report and the subsequent - [Northwest Forest Plan process, Gang of Four, etc.]

SS: Were you involved with the ISC report?

MR: No, I wasn't. Just tangentially, just helping facilitate some of the work.

SS: That was the one led by Jack Ward Thomas, correct?

MR: It was led by Thomas. That's when he first really dove into this whole thing.

SS: Now, he was over in eastern Oregon at that time?

MR: He was in eastern Oregon. He had done some early pioneering work, it was called a WHR program, Wildlife Habitat Relationships. And for the first time, we are looking at habitat requirements of all the species, all the vertebrates that occurred on these forests, and developing a system for the managers to tally what habitats were being used by each of these species, and which ones they might have on their lands. But his [Thomas] main field of expertise was in deer and elk, primarily elk. He had the Starkey Experimental Forest, and they were doing this really neat study of activity patterns, movements of elk within this fenced-in area. He was a big-game biologist primarily, but he had done this really fantastic stuff to bring in information on everything else. He was just really effective, a hustler, and could get things done. It was just amazing to 00:51:00see him in action. All these walls would just crumble in front of Jack Thomas.

SS: He had a strong personality?

MR: He did, and he could relate to people. He could sell himself and his expertise like nobody else.

SS: How do you remember reading the ISC report, knowing Jack and his work and force of his personality, and how that affected things going forward, from the ISC report through everything [1989-95], from, we're looking at the FEMAT report here, the Record of Decision, and everything else. How would you describe that process, not just regarding the owl and the murrelet, and we're going to get to that [murrelet] in a minute, in terms of just the idea of endangered species, but also biodiversity, the health of the forest? Do you want to give a little sketch of that?

MR: Well, it was earth-shattering. It was just the boldest proposal that had ever come out for managing forests for anything other than timber. Because this 00:52:00was the first time when big areas of land were proposed to be set aside for a conservational objective, as the number one objective. It started out, like I was saying, with these little patches of forest around each individual owl, and suddenly, here's this plan to make these big land areas that would support clusters of owls, and at the same time, provide benefits to everything else dependent upon those old forests. Unfortunately, with the ISC report, there was no real assessment of how other species would really fare, so that sort of came later. But it was a major paradigm shift. It was a whole, new way of thinking. Managers freaked out. They said, "How can we set aside this much forest, it will ruin us." Conservationists said, "This is the best thing ever. We need to go in this direction."

SS: And the timber interests freaked out even more?

MR: Oh, yeah, totally. Because you can just see, the timber volume would plummet as a result. What they had tried to do was, we're going to have these big conservation areas, but everything in between, it subsequently became known as the "Matrix." [Zoning category-Northwest Forest Plan] The Matrix would be available for timber harvest. Environmentalists didn't like that. They didn't want to see any old growth harvested, but the "owl mafia," as it was called then, said we can afford to let some habitat go in the short-term to provide economic benefits, because of the long-term benefit afforded by creating these large reserves, which we are modeling. What the modeling shows should be sufficient to allow for a long-term persistence in owls, if we have these large patches with multiple pairs of owls that can interact and recolonize and reproduce. It was a huge, huge change in the direction of forest research. But 00:54:00there was a need, if they were going to implement this, to do an environmental impact statement, and that's where problems arose. I was working with, not with ISC, but I was working with the EIS group. And so, I helped them.

SS: Is this what eventually became the EIS report for the spotted owl, which came out in '92 or '93?

MR: I think it was '92.

SS: It was before the Clinton Summit in Portland? By the way, just for the record, the Clinton Summit happened in April of '93?

MR: Uh-huh.

SS: April or March, but anyway.

MR: I worked with the national forest people. They were Kathy O'Halleron, who was then forest ecologist on the Olympic [National Forest], Kim Mellon, now Kim Mellon-McClane, biologist with Mt. Hood [NF], but she was also sort of a 00:55:00regional ecologist. There was a whole team of us that sat down to do an evaluation of the implications of the ISC report on all the resources that have been, what's the word? It's not status and trends. I can't remember the terminology they used. But anyway, it's the effect to the environment. At the same time, partly a result of the Gang of Four report in which they did a viability assessment on other species associated with various alternatives [management], and in that viability assessment, it was determined that a lot of those species would not have a high likelihood of persisting in the future, because this plan, although maybe good for the spotted owl, wasn't necessarily good for those other species. That final EIS came out, it was challenged by the 00:56:00environmental litigants, and they pointed out that these other species had a low-to-medium probability of persistence under the National Forest Management Act. We needed to provide for viability of all species associated with the forests.

SS: And then, after FEMAT-well, or maybe after Record of Decision, because it [survey and manage] was in there, the "survey and manage" provision was added to answer concerns about all the species. Correct? Not just the "charismatic megafauna" or whatever you want to call the owl and the murrelet and the more "sexy" creatures.

MR: Correct. Yeah, you're right, so there was a whole process that led to that, and I was deeply involved with that whole process. But anyway, there was a challenge by the environmentalists, and that's what led to the Dwyer injunction. So, they saw that the viability requirements for these other species was low-to-medium and needed to be high, and they prevailed in court. So, the plan, 00:57:00although great for spotted owls, wasn't going to be great for these other species, and so you needed to do something.

SS: And this also included aquatic species, correct?

MR: Yeah.

SS: Salmon and other things, not just commercial, but all species.

MR: Right. So, that's what then led to the big injunction that kind of brought to a grinding halt, all forest management. That's what led Clinton to step in. He made a few phone calls and talked with Jack Thomas. They came up with a charter, a plan to come up with a broader assessment that would fully address these other species at the same time, with the charge that now, the idea is we want to provide for viability of everything associated with old forests, not just spotted owls. So, the charter is in the first few pages of this document.

SS: He's pointing to the FEMAT report.

MR: Yep. I don't know what pages it's on, but there is a charter for the FEMAT group.

SS: You mean, what basically Clinton charged them to do?

MR: That's pretty much in the preface to the FEMAT report. That set the stage for doing management on a broad scale, addressing viability requirements for all species associated with old forests. More importantly, it was sort of like that was the primary directive, and then, while doing that, be mindful of the need to provide for economics and social well-being and the needs of timber-dependent communities. But it was like you had to do the ecological requirements first, 00:59:00and then, to the extent possible, meet the requirements for these other important dimensions.

SS: So?

MR: So, we talked about, we convened this group called "Ecological, Economic and Social Assessment," in which we needed to assess not only ecology, but also economic assessments.

SS: You're talking about how you planned the FEMAT report?

MR: Uh-huh.

SS: Now, were you at the Clinton Summit?

MR: I was nearby. I wasn't in it.

SS: But did you watch it on television?

MR: Yeah. We were there already because we had the charter, and were underway. All of us were in the meeting room [PNW Station] while the summit was going on. We were all in Portland and watched it.

SS: Did you realize the gravity of this, when a sitting president made it one of his first missions to fly out to a region?

MR: Yeah.

SS: And actually, it was a campaign promise of his during the campaign. And he said, "I'm going to follow up," and he did. And what do you remember about your 01:00:00impressions, something like, wow, this is happening?

MR: Yeah, it was awesome because, I just couldn't believe it, here is the President of the United States asking us to do this work. He's coming out here to talk about doing this work, and meeting with a group of scientists to set it in motion. Once we started, we were constantly having visits with Secretary [Interior] Babbitt or staff from the White House, who were constantly meeting with us and seeing how things were going.

SS: Was it Espy, Mike Espy, who was with Agriculture? [Secretary]

MR: Was he the guy then? I'm not sure who [Sec. of Ag.] was then.

SS: There were a couple shifts there during the early part of the Clinton years. MR: I know we met with Espy. But I remember we met with him when there was an SAT report that we had done before this happened. Espy was the guy we briefed. I 01:01:00think he was still Agriculture Secretary, but I'm not positive though.

SS: So, you were involved with the FEMAT?

MR: Uh-huh, oh, yeah. [Raphael was a deputy leader on FEMAT]

SS: Tell me about that. First you were charged, you were given sixty days, and then they said, we'll give you ninety days, still kind of ridiculous. [Thirty days added to create alternative acceptable to White House.]

MR: Kind of ridiculous.

SS: Kind of a short time. But tell me about your role in that, your perceptions, but also share some memories of the whole process, the "pink tower" [U.S. Bank Building] in Portland, and that whole thing.

MR: Right. I was the deputy leader. Jack was the overall leader of the group. I was the deputy leader, and my job, I was sort of like the ramrod that was helping make sure all the little parts came into play, so that we convened the meetings we needed to convene, that we got the experts we needed to get. I just helped shape the actual day-to-day operations, whereas he was sort of the intellectual-spiritual guidance of the whole effort. I was like the "little-doer" guy.

SS: You were the gopher.

MR: Yeah, I was the gopher. Right.

SS: And so?

MR: And we all were brought into that "pink tower." We actually moved there.

SS: For the record, the pink tower is the U.S. Bank Building in downtown Portland, people affectionately call the "pink tower." [pinkish hue color]

MR: We rented a whole floor, it was the 14th floor of the pink tower. We had the whole thing to ourselves, and it was guarded so nobody else could come in there without the right credentials to get in. And all these people, I mean, there were like 60-100 of us working in there at any one time. And people like Jerry, you know, a big professor at the UW [Univ-Wash.] at the time, and he was down there almost on a daily basis. He wasn't there as much as some of the others, but a lot of us were there full-time.

SS: Some of you guys were sleeping under desks.

MR: Some of them were. They rented apartments for everybody nearby. I was living in a little apartment building just a few blocks away. Nowadays, you'd never get 01:03:00permission to pay for the per diem and everything else it would take for these people to come together. You'd never get them to be able to break away from their current jobs and focus 100% of the attention on this. I always view this like I was doing my Ph.D., as it was one of the few times in my life when I could totally focus on a task, because we were basically given the right and authority to just drop everything else. We focused on that completely because of the timeframe we were under. You couldn't just do this as another duty as an aside.

SS: What was the reaction of you, Jack, other leaders, or anybody, when you heard sixty or ninety days? Do you remember some of the "really" reactions?

MR: Right, like how can this possibly happen?

SS: But realizing, okay, we've got to do something, how did you [You, Jack, 01:04:00others] plan to make that possible?

MR: We started with kind of a rough outline about, "here are the things we needed to do." At some of these first meetings, we could be in these all-hands meetings right off the bat, and there was kind of a core group there. We had all these different teams. We had a terrestrial team, an aquatics team, a silviculture team, and economics team, a social team. We'd get the team leads and deputies from each of those to get together, and we'd say, "Okay, if we're going to do this, what are the pieces we need to have?" "Well, for the terrestrials, we need to convene some sort of way to assess viability for all these species." "Well, which species?" "We have to figure out what all the species are, so we have to come up with a list." What are all the species associated with old forests? So, there were all these tasks we started lining up there that had to be done, and each one of them was really big. But we just focused and worked there, you know, it was 16-hour days typically; get up there 01:05:00at breakfast time, stay till dinner, go out to dinner, come back and work there after dinner.

SS: Were the pizza delivery guys nearby real busy?

MR: No, we didn't really have that. SS: No, none of that? Okay.

MR: There's a million restaurants around that building and we'd just range out, get something, and then come back.

SS: They must have got to know you though, all the staff [at restaurants]?

MR: They did.

SS: Oh, you're one of those guys.

MR: Yeah, so, anyway.

SS: Now, what was -- ?

MR: I was lining out all these tasks, and we knew this is going to be hard, but we put together outlines, so like, here's the things we need to do, and we made a flow chart, like a Gantt chart or whatever it's called now, that showed a timeline. And we had to flesh out these alternatives. That was number one. We had to come up with a range of alternatives, and what would these look like? And if we had those alternatives, then we had to come up with a way of describing 01:06:00environmental conditions under each alternative, and we'd have to have a way of forecasting and describing vegetation conditions now, but also out into the future. Because we knew that this was a 100-year plan, we had to look at how these species would fare from now to 100 years into the future, so we had to have some way.

SS: Projection model, if you will?

MR: Exactly. In those days, we didn't have all of the sophisticated tools we have now to do vegetation modeling.

SS: You didn't have the software or computers where you can do these incredibly complex, serious number-crunching tasks in an instant.

MR: Yeah, but it [computer revolution] was starting, so we had GIS then.

SS: Okay.

MR: It was kind of rudimentary, but we had GIS. We had really good spreadsheet data and stuff like that, but we didn't have vegetation maps that covered the entire wall-to-wall area. The first sort of Landsat vegetation imagery, we had contracted with an outfit called Pacific Marine and Resources, and they did a 01:07:00really crude map by today's standards, but they did an old-growth map based on satellite imagery, the first time that had been done. There were a lot of pioneering things that were developed in this effort, and it was amazing that we did do all those.

SS: It's almost kind of a loose analogy to wartime. War is war, but a lot of really interesting things -- medical, technological, etc. -- come out of these intense survival efforts, shall we say, of conflict between societies. MR: Like the viability assessments where we convened these panels of experts to come in, because we didn't have data on populations of these species or how they were related to habitats and how their habitats would change, we'd have to get experts to do these sorts of mental processes. But it couldn't just be a kind 01:08:00of, oh, let's sit around and talk about it, we had to have a structured process. So we developed a really tightly-structured process for eliciting the opinions of these people, scoring them into a reputable sort of tool, protocol or toolkit, summarizing the data and then portraying it. And we came up with a really cool scheme for doing that at the time. It was a struggle, though, because trying to define these alternatives was no easy task. First of all, what are we trying to accomplish and how do we assess these different tradeoffs so we could have more of this and more of that, and could sort of push more toward timber volume and less toward timber volume. How do we do that?

SS: Riparian buffer sizes?

MR: Yeah. What are those buffers? We kept trying to pin people down. If you're saying we're going to have buffers, what are they? How big are they? How much of 01:09:00the land area would these buffers cover? Nobody knew. And the aquatic guys would change their minds on a daily basis. Well, we're going to have buffers that are a site potential tree in size. No, we're going to have two. No, we're going to have one. No, we're going to have a half. We kept struggling. But we've got to pin it down because if we're going to do these assessments, we have to know. Also, we have to have a way of describing what it is.

SS: And there has to be some scientific basis, not just what sounds good?

MR: Yeah. The scientific basis became a figure [illustration] that, you see it all the time now, but it's a figure showing the width of the buffer, and then on the y-axis, was the probability of these different things; wood delivery to the stream, and various attributes a riparian buffer would cover, like shading of the water to provide cooler temperatures. And that led to an ultimate decision, 01:10:00we're going to draw the line right here and it's going to be one site potential tree on intermittent streams throughout the system. Once we had that, then we could kick in a description of what the alternative was, including that component. Then that led to our being able to do the viability assessment, and led to an assessment of how these species would fare. All that stuff got summarized in here [FEMAT rept.]

SS: When did you realize that sixty days wasn't enough? (Laughter)

MR: Right from day one.

SS: You're already preparing your story of how to ask for thirty more days? MR: Yep. I know one of the big things that happened toward the end, was the White House kept coming back, because as we were getting close, we had these different alternatives.

SS: Is this when you had the final ten, or was this when you still had that big group, wasn't there like sixty or seventy?

MR: Oh, no, there were never that many. I mean, there were lots of -

SS: Sixty or seventy ideas? Not alternatives. I'm using the wrong terms.

MR: Yeah, there were lots of ideas about what each one of them would look like, and they had to coalesce into a real fixed alternative with a firm description of what each one of them was. That took a long time to coalesce down to what an alternative was. And then, there were some alternatives that sort of emerged at the very last minute, "Alternative 9" being one of them. [Alternative 9 was ultimately chosen]

SS: So, anyway, I kind of segued or interrupted you a little bit when you were talking about the White House getting back to you about alternatives?

MR: I'm probably jumping ahead. So, we ended up with this list of alternatives and they [White House] came to us and said, "Alright, which is the best one? Which one do you guys want to see?" And Jack was really good about saying, "That's not our job. We're describing the implications of each of these on various resources, but it's not going to be our job to tell you which one to pick. That's your job." That was a real important distinction, and he was really 01:12:00good about articulating that. And that sort of served as a foundational principle ever since, that we, as scientists, aren't telling managers what to do. We're just saying, here's the information to inform the consequences of these different choices you have. And that's our role in providing that information.

SS: The issues were already so hyper-politicized, did you sense any kind of perceived bias beyond science and objective data, and some kind of assessment based on that could be seen as problematic, on many fronts?

MR: It could, but we also realized that there are many ways you could interpret these data and our choice isn't necessarily any better than anybody else's. We know what the consequences are, but which consequence does society think is more important? Would you rather have higher viability [species] or higher timber 01:13:00volume? And one time, I drew up a figure and it showed each alternative as a dot, and on the x-axis were acres of forest protected, and on the y-axis was our viability index, and they lined right up. So, the higher the number of acres protected, the higher the viability. Well, which one are you going to pick? You either go for high viability or medium viability, it's up to you. Somewhere along that sliding scale, and it's a social decision. The higher you go toward viability, the lower you go toward timber volume, and it's a direct one-to-one tradeoff, basically.

SS: How did Alternative 9 become the preferred alternative?

MR: Actually, lot of that was the influence of Jerry Franklin, because he came up with the concept of Adaptive Management Areas. That provided this thought that we could have kind of a compromise alternative out of those we had. One 01:14:00alternative was called the "green dream," which would protect all existing late successional forests. That was Alternative 1. We had Alternative 7, which was the one that allowed for the highest volume of timber harvest based on the recovery plan for the owl, which was essentially mimicked on the ISC report. So, the ISC led to the recovery plan, and that's what the whole and the EIS had been based on. Anyway, that one allowed for the most volume. Alternative 9 was a bit in-between. It was a kind of a compromise, but it had this additional feature Jerry had come up with, these Adaptive Management Areas, which would be these big reserve areas set aside to provide for long-term experiments to test out alternative approaches to forest management, and to evaluate how resources were used. [Alternative 9 also included merging key watershed with Late Successional Reserves (NWFP categories) to the extent possible - i.e., efficiency in achieving aquatic and terrestrial objectives on the same land base. See NWFP interview with John Gordon for more on subject.]

SS: Essentially, what he'd been working on and what was by then called the "New Forestry" concepts or paradigm, which meant experimenting with different 01:15:00treatment methods and conservation dynamics. Correct?

MR: Yeah.

SS: Okay.

MR: That said, here's one that allows for some flexibility with testing new ideas and seeing how resources respond to those ideas, and it had some appealing characteristics. The fact that it was sort of a compromise in terms of the amount of the size of these reserve systems, that it had this promise of adaptive management and change into the future as we learn new things, and was a little more sensitive to variation in management in the drier versus the wetter forest; all those things kind of were part of Alternative 9 that made it attractive to the managers. Plus, he [Franklin] really liked it, and he had the ear of many of the congressional people.

SS: Well, he was at the height of his, shall we say, "guru status" at that time. 01:16:00[Due to Franklin's expertise in ecological forestry and high profile role.]

MR: Yeah, Congress loved him, and they would always ask his opinion on these things. Jack said, we're not going to tell you what our choice was, but Jerry didn't have any problem talking about the choice, so I'm sure he had a lot to do with extolling the virtues of Alternative 9 back east.

SS: How did the marbled murrelet get added? How and when?

MR: Well, it was there right from the get-go.

SS: Okay.

MR: If you look at the charter, it specifies.

SS: Are you talking about the charter for FEMAT?

MR: The charter for FEMAT.

SS: But it wasn't in ISC?

MR: No.

SS: That's why I'm asking.

MR: ISC was strictly a spotted owl plan.

SS: I should have clarified in my question, that it was the whole process, the continuum. I know it was in here [FEMAT].

MR: So there was ISC, and then there was a problem with other species, low viability ones, so then there was the Scientific Analysis Team, SAT, which is the report you don't have here. But it was another one that Jack led. I was the deputy leader of that one, too. That's where we did the forest, the first formal 01:17:00viability assessment of marine to different kinds of forest management options. In that report, we looked at all species, including marbled murrelet, and on the marbled murrelet side, we brought in a special murrelet working group, people who had started to study the murrelet. And they brought in a set of tentative management guidelines for the murrelet. Let's see, the murrelet was listed in '92, so I think it had just been listed. [At time of SAT].

SS: So, it was very recent, and the owl had been listed in different years, depending on the agency, but it had been listed officially [ESA] by then.

MR: In '90, yeah.

SS: '90? MR: I think.

SS: Okay, yeah.

MR: Either '90 or '91.

SS: All right.

MR: So, the murrelet came along shortly thereafter, with the idea we needed to provide some special management considerations for murrelets to be in that SAT report. Then we had FEMAT, and in FEMAT, in terms of the viability assessments, 01:18:00we focused on the listed species. So, providing habitat that would allow for viable populations of the spotted owls, that would allow for viable populations of the murrelet, and then insofar as nesting habitat is concerned. Because here is a sea bird [murrelet] that used the ocean to feed, but the trees to breed. And so, it was the nesting habitat that was going to be under the jurisdiction of these alternative indices. So, it was spotted owl, marbled murrelet, anadromous fish, and other species associated with old forests. Those groups were explicitly listed as things we needed to take care of and keep track of in this process.

SS: And so, Alternative 9 was accepted?

MR: It was selected as the preferred alternative.

SS: Preferred alternative, and that was incorporated into the Record of Decision, Standards and Guidelines? [1994 rept. to implement NWFP]

MR: Yeah, except in the interim, when there was a final EIS.

SS: Right. Tell me about the EIS.

MR: In the Final EIS, there was this evaluation of the effective environment, and a detailed look at all other species associated with these old forests. And under Alternative 9, there were species whose viability was still at this medium to low level. The lawyers who were working with us from the [U.S.] Department of Justice said it's not going to work if we have a plan that is not providing for higher viability in these other species. We needed to do something to provide higher assurances for those species as well. So, during the development of this final EIS, there was, I forget the exact name of the group, but it was a "species assessment group." And there were some of us scientists involved with that group as well, and I was one of them. What we did was say, what would be needed in order to raise the viability levels for those species that are 01:20:00otherwise at high viability? And that led to this whole set of potential mitigations. There was this whole list that was developed. We just did report after report after report, and summary after summary after summary. But we ended up with this matrix of all these mitigations, like increasing the width of riparian buffers, providing for greater amounts of downed wood during harvest operations, allowing for higher retention of green trees in clear-cuts; just a whole bunch of different things that, each one was designed to provide something essential to the long-term persistence of each of these 990 other species associated with old forests that needed additional protection. So, there was this big matrix [not zoning category], and then, Alternative 9 was tweaked to 01:21:00provide for these additional mitigations.

SS: Are you talking about the Matrix, as the land [allocation] was called, or are you talking about a matrix in a different sense?

MR: I'm talking about like a computer matrix now, a different sense.

SS: Okay, got you. I just wanted to be clear for the record.

MR: Let's call it a spreadsheet. It was a spreadsheet that had-

SS: Continue.

MR: So, we had a spreadsheet. The EIS has these appendices, and one of the appendices is this spreadsheet that shows all the different mitigations, and there were like thirty of them. Then, the species were all in rows in this spreadsheet, and there was little digits that showed that this species is benefitted by that mitigation, or this one or that one. Then we did a synthesis of all that stuff and developed a reduced set of mitigations that together would provide reasonable assurance of likelihood of persistence of these other 01:22:00species. That became the real embodiment of option [Alternative] 9, which is different from the one that was in FEMAT. Jack and Jerry and other people were livid about this. They just felt like, and Jack's expression was, "Alright, we just pulled off the greatest train robbery in history, and now you're going around stealing their watches and jewels." So, he thought it was just, like trivial, to screw around with all these other mitigations when we'd had this huge plan.

SS: And isn't that also what led Jack to say that he thought that "survey and manage" might be the death of this thing, in terms of it being an effective plan, especially in terms of meeting the timber projections?

MR: Yeah.

SS: Okay.

MR: He was really upset about it. All those mitigations, and "survey and manage" became the embodiment of those mitigations. And one of those big ones was to look for where, when all else failed, look for where the species occurs and come 01:23:00up with a management plan to address the needs of those species. Survey and manage. So, that was the last item that provided, that bumped those species up from medium to low viability, to high viability, to put them in place. But yeah, economically, it was a real killer, because it made it almost impossible to meet the timber [cut level], as they call it, PSQ, Probable Sale Quantity. We had an estimate of X billion board-feet that would emerge out of [Alternative] option 9, but by the time you later did all these other mitigations, that plummeted to a much smaller number than what was originally promised.

SS: Returning to the pink tower and that whole experience, do you have any stories or memories of Jack or Jerry or any meetings or humor, anger, I mean, just memorable things that happened out of that very unique moment in natural 01:24:00resource management history in this country?

MR: Oh, yeah.

SS: I mean, anything else that you remember that is worthy for the record, for a number of reasons?

MR: I don't know.

SS: R-rated or otherwise. (Laughs)

MR: I remember one time, we did allow a reporter, and, I can't remember her name. She was an environmental reporter for the Oregonian, a really good one. She ended up working with NPR, maybe it was Elizabeth Arnold. I think it was Elizabeth Arnold.

SS: She's still with NPR, isn't she?

MR: She might be. She kind of dropped out of sight for a little bit. No, it wasn't Elizabeth Arnold. She did stories on this, but no, it's another one [possibly Kathy Durbin]. Anyway, this is toward the end, and he [Jack Ward Thomas] allowed her to do an interview. He was talking about the gravity of this, the awesome responsibility all of us had in putting forth such a bold plan, and well, we're saying we are just "quaking in our boots." But that got 01:25:00translated by some of our team to "quaking in our Birkenstocks." We just loved that expression, "We're quaking in our Birkenstocks." And we started posting it up all over the place. And we had little posters made out of it. It was just the funniest thing ever. (Laughs)

SS: That's perfect, actually.

MR: It was really good. I also remember there was a lawyer who was challenging FEMAT and this whole process that worked for the Oregon Forest Industries Council. God, his name is escaping me, too. I wish I could remember it.

SS: Because that's the pro-industry group, correct?

MR: Yeah, the pro-industry group. And he got, under some sort of FOIA, got a hold of internal emails that had been circulating among all of us during the process, and pulled up one where one of our members, her name was Pat, was saying, "Why can't we just pick the `green dream'?" And this was a letter from 01:26:00her to Jack and they picked this up and then talked about it in court. Here's this email proving that this FEMAT team just wanted to save all the forest and they were interested in nothing else. You know, "why can't we have the green dream?" [Environmentally-friendly alternative]. That came back to haunt us over and over and over again.

SS: Without help from Russian hackers, by the way.

MR: That's true.

SS: I had to throw that in. Sorry, for the record there. (Laughs) So, but you were basically cloistered, it was science people almost exclusively. Right?

MR: It was, almost exclusively.

SS: There was some administration people? Not really, right?

MR: Not really.

SS: Didn't they have to wear special uniforms, like upper management and other "big shots" that had to come in, almost like they were a traffic cone walking through the room?

MR: They had a special credential and permit to go in that building, and the 01:27:00managers were not part of it. There was this whole thing that this was going to be a science-based effort, managers have just screwed it up to this point, and we need to focus on science. Because if we bring the managers in, this is going to be too hard, as they're going to impose all these things, put sideboards on thinking and they'd have these blinders on, and wouldn't be open to radical, new ways of managing. So, the decision right from the get-go was supported by the administration. And I mean Clinton, that this is going to be a science-based effort developed by scientists. That was a huge decision with big implications, and never has been done since. From then, it's always been a joint science and management partnership.

SS: Could you sense the tension, though, from the outside?

MR: Oh, definitely.

SS: Or did you get calls and emails?

MR: No, everybody was suspicious of what we were doing, and would come to the managers later on, who started talking about, or sort of giving updates, but you 01:28:00could tell, they were worried, "Oh, my God, these people are just going to kill us." And, "what are you doing?" But, really worried about how life was going to change, which it did drastically, everybody's life changed. The Olympic [National] Forest went from a big timber forest to essentially zero timber, because everything was in reserve on the Olympic Forest. Had they been involved, that never would have happened. They would have said, "Oh, no, we've got to have at least this and that and the other thing." So yeah, I'd wake up at night thinking about that, "Oh, my God, we're completely changed the direction of forestry in the Pacific Northwest." The Pacific Northwest, the timber "bread basket."

SS: Well, at least post-World War II.

MR: Yeah, right.

SS: I mean, it's interesting to think about the history of the U.S. of how forestry and conservation kind of jumped across from the East to the upper Midwest, and the dynamics of scarcity and the cultural shifts kind of followed 01:29:00each other, and then of course, it really crystallized in the post-modern era with the environmental age, when you had a paradigm shift across, philosophical, cultural and political lines. Not just in select areas, and a much more limited humanistic-centered, shall we say, paradigm.

MR: Yeah, and you think of nationally, for that period of time, the Pacific Northwest was producing all the wood. And now it's like the Southwest U.S., so there's this huge shift in economic balance that resulted. Yeah.

SS: So, you come out with this; the Clinton administration signed off on Alternative 9? [Bottom line was to get Judge William Dwyer to sign off that plan met standards of the ESA.]

MR: Yes.

SS: What was the initial fallout or positives, depending on which crowd you're speaking about, basically, when this came out? [NWFP-Alternative 9]

MR: Right.

SS: What do you remember about reactions within the Forest Service, but also the broader community, including timber interests and environmentalists?

MR: Well, there was an immediate lawsuit, of course, as the timber industry filed suit right off the bat.

SS: Day one, probably.

MR: Huh?

SS: Day one, probably, or almost.

MR: Day one, the minute it came out. Then the environmental community, we just heard scores of people on the environmental side saying, "Fantastic, this is what we've been needing and this is what we wanted." And so, they became, what's called, a "friend of the court." They defended along with the Forest Service, and were our co-defendants in what was going on.

SS: Right.

MR: We all then participated as witnesses as the court proceedings went through, called upon to testify and talk about aspects of this plan, and what we were 01:31:00doing. There was all kinds of legal maneuvering that happened right after this came out, and we were all involved with that. Then, there was tons of work to translate all of this into actual on-the-ground practice, and to determine what does it really mean. What did you mean by this? What did you mean by that? What does it mean, fifteen percent? How's that fifteen percent distributed? Is it all in one spot or is it spread out all over?

SS: This is the what-ifs for the timber interests, right?

MR: Yeah, and the environmental side. Both. But also, all the managers. The managers needed to know, how we actually do this, and what they were supposed to do now. They needed help in interpreting what the intent was within these documents, to put in practice. So, for years afterwards, there were a bunch of us constantly involved with various committees and projects to provide additional guidance. It went on for years and years.

SS: Any particular dynamic or even case you can speak about, that you remember testifying about, or a particular incident, dynamic or a challenge that was particularly memorable, or illustrative of something important?

MR: The ones I remember are ones I wasn't involved with. But remember, I mentioned Barry Noon, who was one of the scientists involved with the ISC report. Those lawyers had grilled him, because a lot of the basis for the reserve design was work that he and his colleagues had done modeling spotted owls and how they would respond to various sizes of these reserve systems. The idea that came out of the modeling was that you needed to have somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen pairs, an area of land large enough to support fifteen or more pairs that would be able to interact with each other, to assure reproduction, adequate fecundity and persistence.

But the lawyers got a hold of that and were trying to grill him on, how could you just say that that is true? And they were trying to get him to make these on-the-fly calculations about-I forget exactly what it was, like, if you have a survival rate of .85 and fecundity of .25, what would be the lambda, the rate of population growth that would emerge from that. Barry would say, "I'm not to just calculate something on-the-fly here in front of you, it's too easy to make a mistake. Well, it's not that hard. I mean, you have this number and you multiply this one times that one, and you get a result, and what's that result? "I'm not going to say, I'm not going to do it." I just loved how he was so adamant and just didn't allow himself to get pushed around by these lawyers to try to come up with something that could then be maybe proven to be wrong later, or something and about having a chance to go back to his lab and do it right. So, 01:34:00that was really cool. I'll never forget that series of episodes.

SS: So, the Record of Decision, Standards and Guidelines comes out in '94, I believe?

MR: Yeah.

SS: And then the final report to Congress and the President, came out in early '95, essentially, a published, crystallized version of this. So, actually, we're going to take a little break from that. I want to go back to that and talk about how the science and monitoring dynamic that came after that, but I'd like to go back to the murrelet. Tell me about this bird. I mean, why is it important? We know it's a sea bird, it's kind of on the western side of this whole greater region. Just tell us about the murrelet?

MR: Well, it's a really mysterious bird. And you may know that scientists and 01:35:00ornithologists had known about the murrelet for centuries. They'd see this bird out on the water, but no one knew where the heck it nested. So, they called it the fog bird, because sometimes they'd see it sort of disappearing into the fog, but they had no idea where it went.

SS: Did it have a reputation among old mariners and stuff like that?

MR: It was a well-known bird in the oceans.

SS: Okay. MR: It was well-described. Audubon described it and showed it, they have this illustration of a murrelet standing on a rock, of all things. Joseph Grinnell, a famous ornithologist and zoologist from U.C. Berkeley, described his efforts to try to figure out where the murrelet went to nest, and he never did have any success with it. It wasn't until 1974 that the first murrelet nest was actually discovered. So, here is this bird that we've known about essentially as 01:36:00long as ornithologists have been around, but in 1974, the first nest was discovered, and it was discovered by accident. A tree-climber was pruning limbs on a tree in Big Basin Redwoods State Park in California [east of Santa Cruz], cut off a limb, and there was this web-footed bird sitting on the branch that he was about to cut. He knew enough to collect it and show it to an expert, and the guy said, "That's the marbled murrelet." And then they realized that's where we need to look for them, and then they discovered that's where it nests.

But everything about that bird, the reason the nests took so long to find is that the birds do everything they can to hide themselves. They fly into the forest at night. They fly back out before dawn. They have cryptic coloration, they're sort of dark brown colored, and they blend right in with the branches of the trees. Their eggs are inconspicuous. They don't build big nests or anything. 01:37:00So, it's almost impossible to find the nest of it unless you really know where to look.

SS: Who is their biggest predator?

MR: Well, at different stages of the life cycle, there are different predators. So, on the adults, bald eagles are probably the most frequent predator, but peregrine falcons and cooper's hawks, sharp-shinned hawks will grab them, great-horned owls will. But the biggest mortality effect is nested depredation, and that's jays and crows primarily, that find the eggs.

SS: Scavengers, right, right.

MR: And they do it, the thought is, they're not searching for murrelet eggs, they just happen to see them.

SS: What is the average height of their nests usually?

MR: A hundred feet.

SS: So, pretty far up?

MR: Yeah, so they nest way up in the trees.

SS: Spruce and fir both?

MR: Conifers in general.

SS: Right.

MR: Almost zero nests in any kind of hardwood tree. There has been one nest in a maple that had been discovered.

SS: Was that because of height, because the other trees are higher?

MR: It may be having to do with the nature of the limbs, as having horizontal limbs is really important, because they lay an egg, and it's a single egg on a limb. They sort of scrape out a little depression in whatever epiphytes are there, moss that might be developing on the limb. So, it's a real important feature in their nesting habitat. They are only able to lay one egg at a time, and it's on those horizontal limbs, so conifers are the ones that provide that kind of limb, generally. You would think there would be odd situations where a hardwood might do that, but they don't pick hardwoods. The trees are generally huge in stature, but there have been nests known in smaller trees.

SS: How far from the coastline usually do they like to nest? How far inland?

MR: It varies north and south along the range. First of all, this tree nesting 01:39:00behavior is the murrelet in the Pacific Northwest, but as you get further north, they start nesting on the ground, especially when you're in Alaska in the Aleutian Islands, where they also occur. There are no trees and there, the nests would be on the ground. And then it becomes kind of a mixture in northern Alaska, and it then becomes more and more strictly tree nesting as you get into our area.

SS: And then their predators change, though, when they're on the ground though, obviously.

MR: Oh, yeah. So, they fly at different distances away from the coast to nest, in this area in Washington, up to fifty miles inland. When you're down in California toward the southern part of the extent of their range, it's more like ten to twenty-five miles. So, we think it has to do with the extent of the fog zone. It's that foggy, moist environment that provides the epiphytes that help augment the nesting capability on these limbs.

SS: Do you think it's also a camouflage, recognition of the camouflage?

MR: Not so much, I think it's really just having the right --

SS: Or cover, shall I say, would be better.

MR: Well, cover's an important attribute.

SS: I mean, the cover of fog.

MR: I don't think that's it.

SS: But it's the moisture and the plants that result from that dynamic. Yes?

MR: The thing is that they nest at all distances away from the shore up to this fifty-mile limit, so they'll nest sometimes fairly close to the marine environment, sometimes very far. But in the studies I've done where we've put telemetry on the birds and actually found their nests from the telemetry, all of the birds we found nested deep within-well, we caught birds around the Olympic Peninsula, in the waters on the outer coast of Washington, and then the Hood Canal and Strait of Juan de Fuca. So, we've captured birds in waters surrounding the Olympic Peninsula. Where they nested was deep within the Olympic National Park. To do that, they flew over lots of what looks like suitable habitat, 01:41:00private land and forest land, but they went way into the park. Why they do that is a bit of a mystery. Why do they pass over apparently suitable habitat to get further away? One thought is that because nest depredation is such a big thing, that there are fewer predators in some of these more inland higher elevation forests than lower elevation areas further down.

SS: Well, you're closer to more human-impacted areas where you might have higher scavenger population densities, correct?

MR: That is a big factor. These jays and crows are attracted to the human activity because humans leave behind other foods that they like to eat. Where there's more people, there's more crows. And so, yes, there is a higher risk in areas around human habitation. So, that's definitely part of the situation as well.

SS: What's their life expectancy average?

MR: Probably five years, but they live up to ten to fifteen years. There have 01:42:00been zero studies of birds in captivity that show the full extent of their life history, but just given a bird that size, and what you'd expect for a bird that size.

SS: What is their average size, male and female?

MR: They're 200 grams, which would be a little bit smaller than a robin, let's say. A male is 220, females are about 200.

SS: And how long before the young leave the nest? A single egg, right? MR: So, the egg takes thirty days of incubation, then, thirty days of fledgling development. So, sixty-days total. The thing that's interesting, they start at different times of the year, so it's what's called asynchronous breeding where some birds will start in, start laying an egg in April, others in May. So, you end up with this progression of nests throughout this longer breeding season, 01:43:00sixty days at a time, but at different starting renewals.

SS: Now, Alternative 9, let's go from that. How did the comparative protection measures in areas and geographies compare between the owl and the murrelet, in terms of how good this was for either or for both?

MR: Well, first of all, the murrelet range is a subset of the spotted owl range.

SS: They do cross-over quite a bit.

MR: I mean, they overlap, yeah.

SS: Totally.

MR: Yeah.

SS: Because the spotted owl goes right to the coast in some cases. Correct?

MR: Right. So, the range, the extent, the boundary of the Northwest Forest Plan, is the range of the spotted owl. That's how it was defined.

SS: Right.

MR: Within that range, the coastal half of it is marbled murrelet, potential 01:44:00marbled murrelet habitat. The big difference, for spotted owls, their whole life history is in the forest, so they nest in the forest, they feed in the forest. Everything they do is within a home range that's totally contained within the forest. With the murrelet, it's commuting back-and-forth. It's feeding in the ocean, and then it's commuting in, only to nest. So, the habitat requirements are, it's a nesting habitat requirement within the forested lands. There's nothing about foraging. Whereas, spotted owls, there is a consideration for where they forage.

What happens, for example, is in the southern part of the range where spotted owls forage on woodrats a lot, woodrats actually reach their peak abundance in cut-over forest that has a real strong brushy component, where if you haven't used insecticides and haven't done all these treatments and just let a recently cut over or burned area recover, it becomes a really diverse, early seral system. That's really good woodrat habitat. So, spotted owls there do really well where there is old forest for nesting next to young forest for foraging, 01:45:00young as well, as it has that brushy cover. For murrelets, the brushy stuff is really bad because not only is it not nesting habitat, but it's an area that supports higher numbers of especially jays, that like the insects and berries in the brushy areas.

SS: What do they like to eat? What are their favorite foods?

MR: Of the murrelets?

SS: Yeah, I didn't ask that.

MR: They eat small-sized fishes that would include sand lance, juvenile rock fish, anchovies, and herring.

SS: Smelt?

MR: Yeah, they'll take smelt. Not a big one in their diet, in the studies that have been done, but their big one is sand lance, that's like the key, and then capelin, is another one. But then the so-called candlefish, these little long, narrow fish like if you picture an anchovy, that's their thing. What's interesting about them is they'll catch and bring to the nest, one fish. They're not like some other sea birds that load up with like ten fish, and bring it to 01:46:00the nest and dump a whole pile on the chick. It's one fish.

SS: Fly twenty-five miles with one fish?

MR: So, they'll go out there, they'll fly fifty miles with one fish and give it to that chick, and then fly back and get another one the next night, so it's really something.

SS: In other words, they're in great shape. (Laughs)

MR: The energetics of that bird are really amazing because it's a diving sea bird, so its body design is oriented toward swimming underwater. It's not really highly maneuverable in the air, but yet, they fly tremendous distances, and manage to maneuver in the forest to land on a little limb in the dark, which is a pretty good feat. Navigationally, I don't know how they do it. Nobody knows. But they find that limb and land on it. Some people say they crash land into it, because like I said, they're not really maneuverable, and they don't have really a good ability to take off.

SS: Because they're really meant for diving for fish? Right?

MR: Yeah, exactly. Their body is really designed for that. And yet, they have 01:47:00this ability to fly tremendous distances at really high speed, too, so they're fast flyers. They're one of our fastest birds out there.

SS: Almost like a swallow, correct?

MR: Oh, way faster.

SS: Faster?

MR: Some of the water fowl and band-tail pigeons are the only other birds that fly that fast. So, one of the ways we studied murrelets, is with radar. We put radars out, these marine-like radars mounted on truck, and go to a drainage, set up the radar, start it spinning, and watch for the blips of birds flying in on the radar signature. And when you see a whole series of blips moving at really fast speed, then you know that's likely to be a murrelet. If it's a straight line and really fast, it's a murrelet.

SS: So, how do you capture them?

MR: Well, you have to go out on the ocean. You go on a boat. Hopefully, it's a boat that has the right kind of a bow that doesn't make a lot of noise, but you sneak up on them on the water with a salmon net. And you pull them in underwater 01:48:00and lift it [the net] up under the bird and then scoop them out of the water. You've got to go out in the middle of the night, in total blackness. If there's a high moon, it doesn't work, because they see you coming. And it's really hard to do, but that's the only successful way. Now, you can catch them with mist-nets, too. You put out these nets like you use for other birds, and if you can find a flyway that they're likely to occur in, you can string a net across and catch them or suspend these things out on the water. But it's really difficult. The more consistent way of doing this, is this dip-netting technique, what it's called when you just go out with a net. I love doing that, by the way, it's really fun.

SS: You still do it?

MR: I haven't for a couple years now. The last time I did it was, 2000, well, it's been a lot of years now, 2008. We are about to start another study this 01:49:00coming summer where we're going to do it again.

SS: So, where else does the murrelet appear in the world?

MR: The marbled murrelet?

SS: Or relatives, close relatives.

MR: The marbled murrelet is found from southern California, the Santa Cruz area, up to the Aleutian Islands, strictly along the Pacific coast. There is a long-billed murrelet that occurs over in Japan that sometimes occurs here.

SS: So, it's the Pacific Rim, basically.

MR: Yeah. And there is the "ancient murrelet," that is mostly in Canada, but a little bit down here. And there's other murrelets, but the marbled murrelet is a West Coast bird. Can we take another break?

(Break in Audio)

SS: Anyway, we're going to pick up again after a brief break. And Marty's going to continue on talking about murrelets and life cycles and the like.

MR: Yeah, so its life, its ecology, is pretty much set by the need to be 01:50:00cryptic, meaning to hide really well and avoid the risk of the loss of its nests, because it only lays one egg a year. The loss of that one egg is sort of devastating; it's done for the year. There is some evidence that they can re-nest if one loses an egg early. But most of the time, they just have one shot each year, so their reproductive rate is really low. And as a result, their recruitment rate is really low, and that's one of the reasons why the population seems to be declining over time.

SS: Now, vis-à-vis the lawsuit situation, how many lawsuits were there over murrelets in comparison to spotted owls, or did they just kind of generalize about any of the listed species?

MR: Yeah, it was kind of generalized. The primary impetus for those early lawsuits was the spotted owl, and the marbled murrelet didn't feature at all in those early days. Now, a lot of the lawsuits are coming out about the murrelet. 01:51:00So, because we have this huge plan with a spotted owl focus, there's a little more attention on murrelets because there's some areas that are sort of a gap in the distribution of the birds where the federal lands are insufficient to provide for habitat over the long-run, like southwest Washington. Like you can see right there [on map], this whole area has no federal land. That's the place where the murrelet occurs right along there. There's no federal land. It's all up to the state and the private lands. If those habitats aren't protected in various ways, there could be big gaps in distributions of the birds that could have long-term negative effects.

SS: I'm going to use the term "matrix," not to describe Matrix lands in the Northwest Forest Plan, but in terms of the matrix or matrices of different management components; state, private, federal. Is the one that you're describing in southwest Washington the biggest gap, or are there equally problematic ones as you go down into Oregon and northern California?

MR: Well, there's a big gap that occurs in southwest Washington and also one in northern Oregon. Then you have the Siuslaw [National] Forest and a big batch of federal lands in central Oregon. Then there's a little bit of a gap as you get toward California again. And then when you leave San Francisco, there's no more federal land.

SS: Until down in Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara, right? Down that way?

MR: Right, and then you have some state parks that are a big part of the habitat, such as Big Basin State Park down in Santa Cruz. But, it's outside of the jurisdiction of the Northwest Forest Plan because it's outside of the range of the spotted owl, so there's no forest plan protection for that part of the range between Santa Cruz and San Francisco.

SS: What's the communication dynamic between state foresters and federal foresters regarding these kinds of issues, from what you know? You're up in Washington here, but you know about Oregon, too, and California.

MR: For one thing, there was a science assessment done for murrelets in 01:53:00Washington, and in that assessment, the state did everything they could to build on the protections of the federal lands. So, wherever state lands were close to federal lands, that became an area where maybe there was the best opportunity to provide for murrelet habitat, because it would build on to federal protections and create an opportunity for a bigger patch of habitat, state lands juxtaposed with federal. There was a lot of interaction between federal and state biologists developing those strategies.

In Oregon, there hasn't been quite that same level of interaction and cooperation. Also in Oregon, there hasn't been such commitment to protection of murrelets as there has been in Washington. The Washington DNR is just in the process of developing a long-term conservation strategy for marbled murrelets, 01:54:00and they did a big assessment to evaluate the viability implications -- just like the FEMAT report -- different reserve strategies for murrelet habitat in Washington and evaluate how murrelets would fare under each of those [options]. They're just finishing that work. They're going to be doing an EIS on it pretty soon. But the environmental community is all lined up ready to file lawsuits and challenge the state on their protections, thinking that it's insufficient protection of habitat to ensure viability of murrelets. They've been really active in challenging the state DNR on the things they propose to do for murrelets.

SS: Traditionally, even in the environmental age, state agencies have tended to be much more industry-centered than federal agencies, at least since the '60s or '70s? Right?

MR: Right.

SS: Post-1970.

MR: So, even if it's not industry-centered, the state lands have a big fiduciary 01:55:00responsibility to provide money from these trust lands for schools and universities.

SS: Exactly.

MR: And so, they have a huge interest in maintaining the economic benefits of logging forests in Washington on state lands. That's a big deal. So it makes it really difficult to envision increased protection for murrelets at the risk of reducing funds to schools. It's a huge issue.

SS: Monitoring was required by the Northwest Forest Plan and associated laws, and includes three main components: implementation, effectiveness, and validation. How would you describe these concepts in their application to the components of the Northwest Forest Plan regarding old-growth late-successional forests, aquatic habitats, riparian systems, the spotted owl and marbled murrelet, and the continuum of other, shall we say, threatened or endangered 01:56:00species or habitats?

MR: Well, there's a lot to that question. First of all, in the decision that Dwyer made upholding the Northwest Forest Plan, he specifically said that with this plan, we are upholding this decision so long as you do what you said you were going to do, which includes effectiveness monitoring so that you know the plan is doing what you said it was going to do. To the extent that if that monitoring were to cease, then we'd have to revisit whether the Northwest Forest Plan really is meeting the standards of law. So, it was built right into the court decision, and that put a lot of impetus on the agencies to continue monitoring. Because it's been a huge program, a multimillion dollar program which is unprecedented in natural resource management, to invest that much in a monitoring effort. So, as you could tell from these various reports, that these monitoring plans are involved.

SS: Yeah, the one you're looking at is the fifteen-year. And there was also -

MR: Well, this is the actual monitoring plan. (Reviewing NWFP reports)

SS: That's the one that came out in '99. Correct?

MR: There was a whole group of teams, and each team produced one of these reports.

SS: Either the spotted owl, the murrelet, old-growth late successional forests, aquatic, etc.? [Subjects for U.S. Forest Service teams/reports on NWFP.]

MR: Yeah, "etcetera" pretty much ends there, though, because there was never a monitoring plan for other associated species. SS: The survey and manage stuff?

MR: Yeah, there's no monitoring associated.

SS: For the mollusks and slugs and invertebrates and all the other stuff?

MR: Effectiveness monitoring ended with the listed species and aquatic systems, and the late successional old-growth system. Biodiversity was an important component of the plan, but that monitoring never really developed. So, that's been the struggle ever since. These things are really expensive, and it's been a 01:58:00struggle every year to fund them. There have been attempts to cut it back, and some of those attempts have been successful. For example, murrelet monitoring that I'm intimately involved in, we started out monitoring every one of the so-called conservation zones. There's six zones defined in the recovery plan for the murrelet. Five of those occur within the Northwest Forest Plan area; Zones 1 through 5. Zone 1 is the Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan De Fuca, Zone 2 is the outer coast of Washington. And then Zone 3 is Oregon. Zone 4 is southern Oregon and northern California. Zone 5 is down in the San Francisco Bay. Each of those was meant to be an area of inference where we would design the scheme to provide an estimate of the trend of the birds in each of those zones. Then you could add them all together and look at the overall trend within the Northwest Forest Plan area.

We started out monitoring each of those zones every year. That went on from the implementation of our monitoring efforts in 2000, so it took like five years to get it designed and under way. Starting in 2000, we were monitoring every year, but in 2012, the manager said, "Something's got to give, this is all too 01:59:00expensive. What can you do to make it cheaper?" And we said, "Well, if you really had to, you could revert to sampling very other year, and just have a little bit coarser scale of inference on these population trends." They did implement that. So, now we're doing every other year instead of every year. In the owl case, they have always been after the owl people to drop some of the big demographic areas, and they've resisted, resisted, and still resisted, but yet they still come.

SS: So, they're still doing it every year?

MR: They still do it every year on every one of the areas, yeah. But it's the most expensive of the monitoring schemes; really, really expensive.

SS: Well, I think it's obvious, the reasons why. I mean, it's the symbolic 02:00:00animal, from public perception and legal paradigms. It's "the one." And so, it would make sense.

MR: Yep. SS: And they're afraid if they use too coarse of a filter, there will be more wiggle room, legally and scientifically. Right?

MR: Yeah. So, there was a time a little while back where they were saying maybe there was a cheaper way to monitor. Let's go do the monitoring, but maybe in a different way. Instead of doing these mark, recapture, actual banding efforts, we could do something based on what's called occupancy modeling, where you just go out and see if the bird is there or not, and then track the proportion of the areas you sample, whether the bird's there, and see if that proportion changes over time. So I designed, along with our group, a test of an alternative monitoring scheme. We did this work in 2010 or '11. We laid out a grid and did 02:01:00random sampling within that grid to detect birds or not detect them. Did this as a pilot study, but then we computed the costs of doing that work with the idea that it would be cheaper. Well, it turned out that it wasn't cheaper. It was almost as expensive to do that work as the existing plan, and so we thought maybe there was a cheaper way, but it turned out there wasn't a cheaper way. So, they're going with the status quo for now, but we'll see. It's a constant pressure to reduce the cost because they claim they can't afford it, which I'm sure is true.

SS: So, obviously, it's a much different bird than the spotted owl, definitely, greater, harder to capture, range, whatever. Did you ever get to know a bird, or a pair? Like for instance, Eric had "Fat Broad." [Injured female spotted owl 02:02:00Eric Forsman rescued, kept as family pet for decades.]

MR: Yeah.

SS: Did you ever have a name for one that you got to know, so to speak? MR: No. But I have been able to catch them and handle them, so that's as close as I came. We never see these birds again.

SS: So, it's just once. You only have the telemetry to know where they go?

MR: So, we've caught the birds one time, and then we follow them by flying in an aircraft and picking up their signal from the beeps on the transmitter.

SS: Have you ever set up some remote camera systems?

MR: We have.

SS: You have? For instance, like they've done with the owl?

MR: Yeah. We have video footage of a nest and the adults flying in and leaving a fish for the chick, the chick gobbling it down, really cool. So, when we did this telemetry study, we got some nests, we put video cameras on trees, and Tom Bloxton (Raphael's assistant at time) went to where the nest tree was.

SS: And were they motion-sensor activated?

MR: No, they were just constantly on at certain times.

SS: Okay.

MR: We ran it on a cycle. We'd shut it off during the day, but run it at night.

SS: When they were active flying, right?

MR: So, we've got a lot of video of birds flying into nests, really neat stuff.

SS: That is pretty cool.

MR: Yeah, I mean, it is really cool.

SS: So, tell me about the tracking. We talked about 1999, now we're coming up on twenty years, at least from the forest plan, and the monitoring, maybe fifteen years? Right?

MR: Yeah.

SS: Okay, tell me about the amount and distribution of marbled murrelet nesting habitat, the change in overall abundance and reproductive rates of the murrelet, and predictive relations between the murrelet and nesting habitat conditions in the forest plan area. So, you can kind of have a real scientific assessment of trends, futures, etc.?

MR: So, we've been doing these surveys, every year since the year 2000. We have a pretty good picture now of how the population bounces up and down from our estimates, bouncing around from year to year. And they are highly variable. We 02:04:00published a paper showing a really strong negative decline, from the year 2000 to 2010. Then we made the mistake of continuing to work, and the next two years, the population was a bunch higher. The trend that we saw completely disappeared. So, anyway, at this point now up through year 2015, the data showed that in Washington State, numbers of birds were declining over time, especially within the Puget Sound part of the range, less so in the outer coast part of the range.

SS: Would that be considered from increased anthropogenic change and impacts of demography and human activity?

MR: Well, it could be. We've done a lot of work to try to understand what's driving this, and my opinion is, it's habitat change actually, loss of habitat.

SS: But this is habitat on non-federal lands, correct?

MR: It's on both, but it's primarily non-federal. The rate of loss on federal lands has been about two percent over a twenty-year period. It's been about 02:05:00twenty percent on the non-federal. So, ten times higher rate of loss. And on the non-federal lands, the loss is because of continued logging. On the federal lands, it's where fire and natural disturbance happens. It's all protected from logging essentially, but you still have wind throw that comes in and knocks over the potential nesting habitat, and then fire. Not so much up north here, but down south, like the Biscuit Fire [SW Oregon], which was in prime murrelet range that took out a big chunk of habitat.

SS: That must have killed a lot of birds?

MR: Don't know about killing the birds.

SS: I didn't mean, wrong question. That must have destroyed a gigantic amount of habitat?

MR: A big chunk of habitat. And you can see a signal in their habitat trend, it just takes a little jog down in the Oregon part of the range, because of that one fire. When you look at the rates of loss up and down the coast, back on the population story, the population seemed to be more or less stable. There's a lot 02:06:00of fluctuation, but they're more or less stable. There's no trend we can pick up in Oregon and California. In Washington, there's a downward trend at a rate of about 4.5 percent per year. If you look at total acres of habitat lost, it's the greatest in Washington, intermediate in Oregon, and lowest in California. If you look at amount of habitat in relation to the numbers of birds, there's a really strong relationship, so that you can plot a curve that shows numbers of birds and acres of habitat and come up with almost like a straight line. The more habitat there is inland, the more birds you see off-shore. But within those areas off-shore where the birds are abundant, their actual day-to-day distribution is totally dependent on where the forage fish are. So, they're using fine features of marine environment to move around within a narrow range. 02:07:00But the concentrations of birds are where they're within commuting range of the habitat that they use. So, it's a real interesting relationship.

SS: Regarding changes in fish populations, we've had population crashes and problems with salmon and other species, and fishing moratoriums are finally being lifted along the coast. I mean, they're not taking the big fish, but the whole ecosystem is affected, the population and food chain. How has that affected the murrelet, their food sources, and ability to increase or decrease their populations?

MR: The short answer is, I wish I knew. It's because we don't have good data on the fish these birds are using. We have inferences we can draw from environmental conditions that probably affect forage fish populations. It's things like sea surface temperature, what's called upwelling, where offshore winds blowing across the surface of the ocean bring up cold water from down deep, and that's nutrient-rich and provides for the food chain that leads to the 02:08:00forage fish. And we've looked at upwelling patterns in relation to where the birds are. None of those things are good predictors of numbers and trends of murrelets. The thing that's a good predictor is the amount of nesting habitat and its trends. But there's definitely something there, because they are foraging out in the marine environment. We have one little piece of data from one part of the range off of the Willapa Bay Area, which is in southern Washington, where we actually do have really good fish data over time. And it's very intriguing that we see the same pattern in fish of downward trends, from 2000 to 2015, and the shape of that downward trend is the same shape we see in the murrelet trend. It's very suggestive then, that changes of fish could be helping to drive the changes in murrelet populations. But that's the only place 02:09:00we have the right kind of data.

SS: The bigger fish, the ones they don't feed on, but they're an indicator of an ecosystem shift or change or shock?

MR: It could be because I've also done work where I've looked at numbers of murrelets in relation to number of salmon returning to the Bonneville Dam where they do a total count of fish every year, and there's a really strong correlation between murrelet abundance and Chinook salmon abundance. Chinook salmon move up and down the same part of the coast where the birds forage and are feeding on a lot of same fish, so there's reason to think they could be responding to some of the same patterns.

SS: They reflect or mirror the other. Not necessarily a cause-and-effect in terms of how they affect directly the ecosystem dynamics, but they're mirroring each other in terms of how they see their own survival and food resources, right?

MR: Yeah, right, so that's very intriguing. But another intriguing thing is, if you look at spotted owl trends, the population and decline in spotted owls are steep in Washington and less steep in Oregon and California, just like 02:10:00murrelets. But the spotted owls have nothing to do with fish. They're responding only to forest conditions.

SS: Or now, to barred owls. MR: Well, yeah. And is there some reason why we see that same pattern? And now that you mention barred owls, there's a longer history of barred owl occurrence in the northern part of the range than in the southern part of the range. So, that could be part of it, but there could be some underlying changes in the forest environment that are also contributing to the faster rate of decline up north than south. So, that's kind of intriguing.

SS: What has surprised you most about what you thought, your theorems, your assumptions, your premises, going into the monitoring period, because really, that's when you learned was after this went into effect, I mean, really learned. What was the most surprising thing or something that confirmed what you thought 02:11:00you were maybe going to find?

MR: Well, this whole relationship about numbers of birds and amounts of nesting habitat, was the biggest shocker to me. I first found out when we did the radar studies, because we put these radars into drainages and it turned out when we really looked at the data, that the count of numbers of birds flying up into these big river drainages was totally correlated with the amount of habitat that you could count up within that same drainage. I thought, whoa! Because here's this bird that spends all its time on the water foraging, and I thought it was the marine environment that was going to be the main driver, and that the forest was going to be sort of a secondary thing. But every time we looked at the relationship, it's the terrestrial nesting habitat that keeps popping up as the best predictor.

SS: So, you've never found for like a big correlation between El Niño dynamics or -- ?

MR: Nope. In upwelling? I mean, there's some patterns there. Another really 02:12:00interesting thing we found was, the San Juan Islands, this whole group of islands up there. [Between Washington state and Vancouver Island, B.C]

SS: The San Juans, correct.

MR: Yeah, we've done a lot of surveys around the San Juan Islands, and then in the outer coast. It turns out the San Juan Islands can be viewed as a safety net for these birds. When things like upwelling doesn't occur the way it's supposed to and forage conditions are bad on the outer coast, that's what's called the California current system that runs up and down the coast, they can always go to the San Juans where it's tidally-driven and the food production is sort of there, year after year after year. It may not be as great as it is in the outer coast, but at least you can count on that. So, those years where El Niño has been really strong or upwelling has failed, the birds flood into the San Juans, and we see these huge spikes in numbers of birds around the San Juans on those 02:13:00particular years. That has been really interesting and fascinating to me. I never would have predicted that the San Juans would be this kind of place.

SS: What's the populations you see up here, you know, Bellingham in to the North Cascades area? Is that much less because you've got the Vancouver Island buffer of this, and this is -- ?

MR: Well, first of all, the birds that occur here are constantly moving over into the Vancouver Island area. And so, they're not U.S. birds, they're international birds.

SS: They're Canucks, yes.

MR: And they totally show everything. So, it doesn't even show Vancouver Island there, but that's an important part of the world for marbled murrelets.

SS: Right.

MR: But numbers of birds in general increase as you go north. When you get to Alaska, they are ten times more abundant than they are down here per unit basis, maybe because there's way better densities of fish up there. That's my theory.

SS: What about up there? They have their own sets of cutting controversies, the Tongass [National Forest], and all that. What have found up there, relational 02:14:00stuff to habitat, or has it not been studied enough?

MR: Well, it hasn't been studied that well. But the population does seem to be declining up there as well, and it's presumably because of the loss of habitat due to logging. With the Tongass Plan, a lot of logging has ceased, and there's special protections for murrelets along what they call the fringe habitat where they nest in the forest that's right along the coast. That's been largely protected now. So, what they haven't done is the kind of work we've done to track habitat change over time. We've got estimates that show how a habitat has changed year-by-year-by-year from the start of the forest plan [NWFP]. They don't have that up north. They just have survey data of murrelets, and we can see that there has been a decline, but we don't have really good data on changing forest habitat up there over time.

So, we can surmise that a lot of that change is because of the effects of past 02:15:00logging. But it could be a foraging fish situation, too, and I just don't know at this point. Like I said, it's really intriguing that the number of birds per unit of nesting habitat is ten times higher up there. So, it means that somehow that same amount of nesting habitat supports ten times more birds. Well, is that because they pack in more tightly? I don't think so. I think it's because there's better foraging, and that there's a higher carrying capacity because of greater numbers of the forage fish up there. And that's a question I'm hoping that we can figure out a way to answer.

SS: And it would seem that their theoretical range in terms of the forest, would definitely have to be closer to the coast because of the different climatological elements. Because, when you get up above 1,000-1,500 feet, you're in the snow zone. [In Alaska]

MR: Yeah, it's all ice and snow.

SS: And so they cannot go too high, that's obviously the reason there. What's their temperature range? What can and cannot they tolerate?

MR: I don't know an answer to that. They occur in the Aleutians where it's, you know, iced over much of the year.

SS: So, that's likely low, yeah.

MR: So, they manage to survive and over winter in these really cold areas, but I couldn't tell you what their tolerance is.

SS: But you're going to find probably even a slightly different sub-species up there with different adaptational capabilities?

MR: You would think, but no.

SS: No?

MR: When you do genetic studies and compare Aleutian Island birds to everywhere else, they're pretty similar. Now, it turns out there is a bit of a genetic difference in Aleutian versus everything else. There's a little bit of a genetic signal in the Santa Cruz birds versus this whole central area. But everything in southeast Alaska all the way down through San Francisco Bay, is pretty much genetically what they call pamic, which means indistinguishable.

SS: Okay.

MR: The Aleutian ones do have a little bit of a difference. But how that translates into behavioral or adaptational differences, we don't any clue about. 02:17:00We just know that there's a little bit of a difference in genetic patterns.

SS: Okay. Now, how has and will climate change affect the marbled murrelet's habitat range and populations, in your view? Have you seen it already and what do you figure in the future might happen?

MR: Well, it's really hard to predict. But the main thing that's likely to happen is changing of these patterns of upwelling, and we know that upwelling has a huge effect on the entire food chain. Upwelling is driven by winds. The winds are driven by the low-pressure systems that develop on the western Pacific. Climate change is going to likely affect the development and persistence of these low-pressure systems, which will ripple all the way through the food chain. But exactly how that's going to be expressed, is really hard to predict. You see some climatologists give one direction with a lower expression 02:18:00of these low-pressure systems, and others say no, it will cause a higher expression. And the same with the resulting cascading things like El Niños, La Niña. They really can't pick which way that's going to go. But something is going to change as a result of climate change, we just don't know exactly how. But it definitely will cascade itself to the murrelets because of the effects on the food chain.

In terms of nesting habitat, a little bit less certain about that. It turns out, well, most projections I've seen about forest change in relation to change in climate, are pretty minimal for the coastal belt where the murrelets occur because it's buffered by this marine environment. We don't expect to see big changes in the type of forest cover the murrelets use over the foreseeable climate change future scenarios. So, nesting habitat shouldn't be affected that 02:19:00much, but foraging habitat potentially dramatically affected and with confident changes in the birds.

SS: This is not on my list, but it just came to mind; have you ever considered the legacy of an event that happened many years ago that dramatically affected coastal stands of big trees, the Columbus Day wind storm of 1962 [Typhoon Freda, degraded Cat. 3 storm, intersected with storm to north, created most powerful wind storm in NW history - 120-180 mph.]

MR: Yeah.

SS: I mean, have you ever figured that into your model, or just how does that figure into it? I mean, it was such a massive thing on the coast.

MR: Well, it figures in an indirect way, because the forest that we see now that we measured in all the monitoring, is a result of those past episodes. A lot of it in this area has what would be called a high-severity, low-frequency fire regime. So, when a fire does occur here, it's a big one. But it's a very low frequency thing, so like every, the fire return interval is maybe 200-250 years. 02:20:00So, these big fires have, you know, there's ancient fires that you can find signals of those on the Olympic Peninsula. But there haven't been any really big ones in recent years as the forest that we see now has all recovered from many of those large high-severity [disturbance events].

SS: And the same for the wind storm I was talking about, too, right?

MR: Yeah, right.

SS: Yeah.

MR: So, there's going to be some bit of a signature of the change of the forest from those early events, but it's sort of recovered from those now. But we have seen a signal of the more recent wind events that happened, I think it was like 2008 there was a big one that occurred along the western coast.

SS: Seven.

MR: 2007.

SS: I know because I was moving up from Arizona, and I had to delay my departure because I had a high-profile truck. I thought that I should wait a day or two because I might be vulnerable-and this is inland, too.

MR: Well, we can see that. When we look at the year-to-year change in forest cover for the off-coast of Washington, we look at our little graphs and you'll 02:21:00see a blip that year. It happened that while we were doing the monitoring there was a blip downward in murrelet populations shortly thereafter. I thought, "Whoa, that's amazing. It really signals, there's a real response to that change in wind pattern."

SS: Right.

MR: But as it happened, the population came up the next two years after that. So, that little effect disappeared. That was just coincidence it turned out. But, yeah, there are a lot of these events that are definitely going to have an effect.

SS: I would venture a guess the biggest impact, and nobody was studying this back then, from the Columbus Day wind storm, was the fact that all the salvage logging that followed, and all the roads that were built to enable that to happen, are still there, or maybe some of them have been closed by now. But that's to me, a legacy.

MR: That is a legacy. And roads create edges, edges create opportunities for some of these corvids, so there could be a continuing effect of depressed 02:22:00numbers of successful nests because of ongoing effects of these increased corvid numbers. Corvid numbers have increased dramatically on the West Coast over time, in general, and that's one contributor. Increased human habitation is another contributor. There are a lot of reasons for that, but those things can have a rippling effect. We often talk about the ghost of past timber harvest as something that we continue to see today. The harvest isn't continuing now at the same rate it used to, but the landscape has completely changed because of all the harvest. I mean, we still see it on satellites all this area of clear-cut logging that occurred in the '90s. It's going to take decades for them to recover. That's a lingering consequence that we see in the murrelet numbers. It's one of the reasons the murrelet was listed in the first place was because of what was presumed to be a tremendous loss of murrelet numbers as a result of all that past work.

SS: Especially in the Siuslaw, correct?

MR: Oh, yeah.

SS: I mean, that was-

MR: In the Olympic Peninsula, too. We used to have a picture of that satellite image around here.

SS: Do you want me to go-here, I'll hold it for a second. Again, I didn't have it. [Looking at image/map on table]

MR: I was saying this satellite image is very dramatic. You can clearly see the relatively undisturbed part of the Olympic Peninsula that's continued within the Olympic National Park where the national forest lands surrounding it are kind of a salt-and-pepper appearance on the satellite from all the clear-cuts that are on those lands. And then, of course, the private lands outside of the national forest which is heavily cut over, especially on the West Coast where the Quinault Indian lands are. They've pretty much clear-cut all of those in decades past. So, yeah, it shows right up on the satellite image.

SS: Now, comparing the pre-Northwest Forest Plans and practices versus post, how 02:24:00would you characterize the sustainability of either paradigm in the different ways that you have to compare, ecologically and economically? How would you describe that dynamic?

MR: Well, a huge difference, obviously, between ecological and economic. Economically, the rate of harvest in those pre-'90s areas wasn't going to be sustainable over the long run because they were going to run out anyway. They'd already cut, some estimates say, up to ninety percent of the old forest up to that point, with only ten percent remaining. That's variable, of course, from different parts of the range. But obviously, that pattern wasn't going to be sustainable over the long run, and those communities were going to be going through these kinds of wrenching changes anyway, it was just a matter of when.

SS: Your typical world history, over-extraction, primary product economies, 02:25:00always in boom-and-bust cycles.

MR: Yeah.

SS: And it's not just privy to the United States and forestry in the Northwest, but yes, correct.

MR: On the economic side, yes, unsustainable practices. And now, the rate of harvest, it's a really low rate, but it's obviously going to be sustainable over time. That's a rate that can, there's plenty of opportunity for replenishment of those lands to replace those that are being harvested at the rate they are now. Ecologically, of course, it's a completely different universe these days. We have set in motion long-term growth and increase in the amount of these late successional old-growth forests. They're going to be increasing for the next 100-plus years. We won't actually see the Northwest Forest Plan reach its 02:26:00potential for that many years, because right now, we're still recovering from the clear-cuts of the '90s, and they're only, what, thirty years old, twenty years old? So, it's going to take forests 100 to 250 years to attain the stature of these old forests. And so, the forest plan won't look like what the forest plan looks like on a map until that many years have passed. Putting a line on a map doesn't change the ecology of the system. It just sets in motion a different set of trajectories for the land.

SS: Now, what do you say about criticisms that say the plan did not respect the rights of traditional communities that relied on timber harvest? And even though that may not have been the intention, that is how it played out, and that didn't include just management and planning, but also lawsuits and the whole dynamic, even within Matrix and Adaptive Management Areas.

MR: Well, as I said before, when we looked at those different components, ecosystems, ecological, economic and social, we were attempting to provide some measure on each of those dimensions, but the ecological had sort of become the primary one. So, after you meet the ecological goals, then meet the economic and social goals. That only allowed for a small fraction of what these communities had been enjoying up until that point. But there was a huge attempt to at least be cognizant of that and provide every opportunity possible for those economic and social influences. And there was a whole other component that a guy named Jim Pipkin [assistant to Sec. of Interior Bruce Babbitt] had put together which was, I forget the acronym for it now, but the whole sort of community support system that provided for payments to timber communities in lieu of receipts from 02:28:00logging. So, there was an economic subsidy that was put in place. There's that, and that was helping. The job market changed dramatically, obviously, from timber jobs to other jobs associated with the environment. So, that was a big shift from logging to other sorts of jobs, and that was a big part of the monitoring plan that evaluated those changes as well.

So, some of those communities have had a tough time of it. You know, a classic case being Forks [Washington], which was almost totally timber dependent, and now has had to provide twilight tour opportunities or something. But yeah, I don't know what to say about that. It's not going to be the same as it was for 02:29:00any of those communities.

SS: No. Do you think though, if "Survey and Manage" had not been there, and like it [NWFP] was implemented like it was originally designed, do you think that it might have been better?

MR: A little bit. But, it wasn't a huge impact. Because the big impact was the reserve system. I mean, that took out eighty-five percent of those lands and put them into a reserve status. Survey and Manage only applied in that intervening Matrix, which was at most fifteen percent. So, it's a relatively small piece of the picture, but it was one factor that led to not being able to meet the original "Probable Sale Quantity" [in NWFP]. What's forgotten though is that probable didn't mean guaranteed, it meant probable. And it was subject to all the various things that would have to be done that would result in actual sales being performed. But there's no doubt that it was less than originally 02:30:00anticipated, and "Survey and Manage" was one contributor to it being less than anticipated. Another was that all these layers of protection meant that the Adaptive Management Areas that had been envisioned, were never able to really able to get off the ground because there were just too many constraints. Every time you tried to set up a big experiment, you still had the ESA and Endangered Species Act, requirements to maintain. You had anadromous fish, conservation strategies to meet, and all these different constraints and you just couldn't do the things that were originally envisioned in providing all this flexibility and ways to experiment. It just didn't happen.

SS: What major AMA's that didn't work out were in the murrelet range? Probably in the Siuslaw, would be my obvious thought about that.

MR: Yeah, or Cispus [near Mount St. Helens in Washington], and there was one on the Olympic, too. I don't actually know. I didn't look at it.

SS: Okay.

MR: I never got involved with those AMA's per se, so I wasn't involved with 02:31:00that. SS: Let's talk about the twenty-year review. Encapsulize the twenty-year review that's, well, it's coming out or it's been, it's out.

MR: I think they're all out. Maybe the riparian one hasn't quite been published yet, but it's done.

SS: Now, tell me about the twenty-year review regarding your two areas of expertise, the endangered species, the birds, the murrelet and the owl, and you can speak for Eric. He's going to be interviewed in three weeks, but you can at least give your take.

MR: Well, the owl populations are faring more badly than we anticipated. We thought that in twenty years we'd start to see an uptick in the amount of habitat, and there would be a stabilization of owl populations. But we really thought that it's going to be take three to five decades before that amount of habitat started to really start showing a net increase, and that still seems 02:32:00it's going to be the case. However, in twenty years, the stabilization or what the reduction in the loss of habitat is, everybody is now aware, it hasn't resulted in a stabilization of owl populations. The decline is getting worse. In the case of the owls, it's now declined throughout the entire range, whereas before, it was just in the Washington part of the range, and pretty weak evidence of decline elsewhere. Now, there is pretty strong evidence of decline elsewhere, with the strongest decline in the Washington part, especially up in the Cascades, like the Cle Elum area, where the birds are almost completely gone.

So, the protection of habitat hasn't arrested the decline in spotted owls, and the biggest culprit right now does seem to be the interaction with the barred owl, and hence, these big experiments now to do direct intervention and kill the 02:33:00barred owls and see how the spotted owls respond to the removal of the barred owls, which does seem to be having an immediate positive impact on spotted owls.

SS: What do you have to say about the ethics of that?

MR: I'm conflicted about it. I don't like it. In a lot of ways, it's [species competition] a natural phenomenon. I mean, there is the argument that human activity has exacerbated the rate of movement of the barred owls across the landscape from east to west. And I can't refute that. It's quite possible humans have had something to do with providing opportunities for that to happen. But to a large extent, it's sort of a natural range expansion facilitated perhaps by climate change and changing forest cover over time. But here you have two birds that both in the biology of things have a right to exist, and we just happened 02:34:00to put an endangered species emphasis on the spotted owl, and the barred owl isn't endangered. So, it's the one that has to go. But humans have a long history of doing that. We constantly are removing birds, too, that depredate agricultural crops. We've killed starlings by the millions. We kill all kinds of birds that are interfering with our economic development. We tend to do that.

SS: We extinguished the passenger pigeon.

MR: Yeah. That's a real extreme.

SS: Yeah.

MR: So, I sort of view it as a natural ecological process. I actually think that eventually those two species will co-exist, but they -

SS: Do they ever cross-breed?

MR: Yes, they do.

SS: Okay.

MR: It's not a huge factor, but they do. And they call them sparred owls, spotted-barred owl hybrids. And there are even instances known of viable offspring from those hybrid pairs. And those offspring have in turn bred and 02:35:00produced offspring. So, it's an effect, but Eric and others tell me that it's not been a huge effect, that it has a measurable thing but changes in habitat and changes in just barred owl displacement are the real effects. Hybridization is fairly small. For the murrelets-

SS: Is there an analogous competitor or dynamic that's in play at all?

MR: For murrelets? Yeah, I mean, this expansion and the increasing number of these corridors.

SS: Right, that's what I said.

MR: It would be sort of analogous, driven in part because of human activity and increased introgression of people out into these previously undisturbed landscapes. That may be one of the big drivers of long-term population change on 02:36:00into the future. That we will have to see. We think that, and we have this working hypothesis that says, because we've seen this strong relationship between amount of habitat and numbers of birds, that when we start seeing a net increase in habitat rather than a net loss, as we've seen up until now, when that time comes, we're expecting to see an increase in murrelet populations. If it turns out we don't see that increase when habitat increases, then that's going to change our understanding a lot, and it may turn out that then we need to really focus on the marine environment because that may turn out to be what's holding populations back. But right now, our hypothesis is that we have yet to see the benefits of the forest plan because habitat is still on the decline. But when it starts increasing, then it will be different.

SS: Describe some of the relationships and personalities of people that you've known and worked with during this whole thing. I mean, obviously, Eric Forsman 02:37:00is somebody that comes to mind, but also members of the Gang of Four. Just any other memories or reflections on the people you've known, the experiences you've had, the mentors you've had, the friends you've had. I just want more of a capstone kind of answer.

MR: Well, I've had the privilege of working with a whole lot of people during this whole process. One guy that I worked with the most intimately was Richard Holthausen, if you run across his name. He was a co-leader of the terrestrial group in this FEMAT exercise, along with Chuck Meslow. But "Holt," I really liked him, and he was just such a good writer, such an articulate guy. Whenever we did this work, he was always the guy that came up with these really good ways of expressing what our results were, and how to ask good questions. He retired and moved away, so I haven't had a chance to work with him in many, many years. 02:38:00But that was one of the most influential characters that I had the chance to work with.

Eric was always the guy I admired as being the natural historian. He just knows so much about the biology of these animals, and he loves the animals so much. I mean, you get a real sense of a spotted owl is not just this creature with a lambda of .65 and a survival rate of .3, but it was the bird that, you know, flies down and ate a mouse right out of his hand. And weighed, whatever it weighed. And he's just a cool guy to be out in the woods with, and see everything he knows about plants and animals.

The other character I worked with over the years is Bruce Marcot. He's also a part of this whole effort. I've known him for a really long time, and he's actually a part of the team I supervised for a time. And he's one of these 02:39:00genius guys, a true Renaissance man, who sort of knows something about everything. He's not only a really good sort of theoretician, but he's like Eric in being this natural history savant. He knows plants, he knows animals, and he knows fungi, you name it, he knows about it. And what's really intriguing about him, is he also has this website that is the most complex, convoluted thing you could ever imagine. It's just a multi-faceted deal where he'll have poetry that he wrote on one wing of it. He'll have word games he plays on another, where he does mnemonics and switches words around. What's the expression when you have one word and then you rearrange the letters for another word?

SS: Anagrams.

MR: So, he does amazing anagrams and writes whole stories with anagrams. Then he has musings and philosophy. Then he has photography. He's an excellent photographer. Then he has astrophysics and speculates about astronomy and 02:40:00physics and the universe. An amazing guy. So, I've worked with him on all this stuff. But it's amazing how that in the social dynamics, you have a guy like Bruce who has all those amazing capabilities, but in working with people, he's completely polar opposite of someone like Holthausen, who just communicates so effectively with everybody he works with.

And then, of course, having had really the honor to work with Jack Thomas closely for all those years though, was amazing.

SS: Tell me about him a little bit more. I never met him, unfortunately.

MR: Well, he's a totally bigger and larger-than-life character, if there ever was one. I had the chance to travel to India with him on a couple of occasions. So, I was around him for days and days on end. And what was really hilarious about him, is he loved to tell stories about himself. He was always the star of 02:41:00these stories. And he would just, every time we'd run into a new group of people, he would start his series of stories that featured him. He would be going, and it's almost like we would have words for his stories, like one of them was, "fine figure of a man." Well, here comes a "fine figure of a man," we'd all snicker to ourselves. But he had this story where, I don't know, I can't even remember the story nowadays, but the kind of the punch line, "Well, he was a fine figure of a man." And it was Jack walking down this trail. You know, this huge guy, and he was the fine figure of a man. But he would tell that story every time we'd run into a new group. It was just hilarious.

But he had a charismatic character. People would just love to sort of flock around and listen to him talk. And he talked about everything. He did this one lecture about being a professional, being a professional wildlife biologist, and presenting yourself like a professional. So, here I am in jeans. He would hate 02:42:00that. He thought when you were at a meeting, you needed to dress appropriately, and when you gave a talk, wear a tie and wear a jacket. Look like a professional and be professional. And it had a huge influence on me because I was sort of this raggedy-ass field guy, and I got to know him and realized, hey, this is unprofessional. We are excellent professionals here, and I sort of spiffed up my act a little bit when I was subject to his influence.

He would envision things and make them happen, and nobody else could do it the way he could. So, like this whole FEMAT thing, we had to buy computers. Well, in the Forest Service, if you want to buy a computer, you're going to go through this technical acquisition process. You have to justify, you have to do all these hurdles. It's almost impossible to buy a new computer, especially a fancy one. We did this somehow, he produced computers for everybody way beyond the limits that are normal. We had to live in that pink tower area. [Downtown 02:43:00Portland, Oregon.] You normally can't just go and stay for three months at a time in some remote location. But he found a way to make that happen. You had to pay all these contracts to get these outside experts in, and university professors to have them. He somehow managed to make it happen. I just thought it was the most amazing thing in the world to see him operate.

And just before he ever started this, he had that Starkey Experimental Forest, and that involved putting a big fence and maintaining it around whatever it is, 20,000 acres of forest, and it was a huge undertaking.

SS: It's in the Blues, correct?

MR: Yeah, in the Blue Mountains. He built that thing and kept it going. And then managed to sell it, to not only the Forest Service, but the Congress, who was funding the Forest Service, and to keep the funding going to this day. I mean, his influence. So, he is a character that I definitely will never forget. Just the greatest. I mean, a great biologist.

SS: What took him, actually? What was his health problem?

MR: Pancreatic cancer.

SS: Just like Jim Sedell?

MR: Yeah. He had kind of a remission. Pancreatic cancer is usually really bad, really fast.

SS: Like Jim?

MR: Yeah. In Jack's case, he got it, and then, he had sort of a recovery period, and stabilized, and went for a few years. Then it hit again and he went pretty fast. The last time I saw him actually was at a memorial service for Hal Salwasser. Jack came up and here's this little skinny person, and Jack's a big guy.

SS: He was like 250.

MR: 250 to 300 at some point. But maybe around 250.

SS: How tall was he?

MR: Somewhere around six-two or four. SS: Okay.

MR: Yeah, because Hal was more like six-four, and was a little bit taller than 02:45:00he is. But yeah, so when I saw him at Hal's thing, he was just skinny as could be, and on a cane. Still really alert, totally the same mentally, but it was shocking to see him. I just couldn't believe it. So, that was maybe six months before he actually died. I had a chance to go up to the Starkey where they had a memorial service among his friends and close colleagues, and it was really neat how everybody told me stories about Jack, and sat around. He was definitely a well-loved character. He was really something.

SS: How about Jerry Franklin?

MR: You know, Jerry, I never got to know that well. Jerry was impressive because of the way he could articulate things, and had the ear and could express things to Congress, especially. He was really good at that and they just hung on his every word. So, he had a huge, he still does have, a huge influence. He and Norm 02:46:00Johnson both. They're just continuing to influence the way things work. Like the new Oregon Land Management, the BLM's revised land management plan [including O & C lands], a lot of it is driven by the ideas that Jerry and Norm have. A huge influence.

SS: Norm and he are very close friends, but they're also close colleagues.

MR: Yeah, they work together all the time.

SS: In retrospect, how much of the Northwest Forest Plan has been about science, and how much has been about politics?

MR: (Laughs) Well, the whole thing's developed on science.

SS: Right.

MR: But what to do with it afterwards? It's all politics. And how it's going to fare in the future is all politics, too. And you know, the influence of the plan has waxed and waned with the changing administrations. So, with the Bush [George W.] administration, the Northwest Forest Plan started to have less and less influence, and there was talk about sort of dismantling it. And then, Obama came 02:47:00back, and the thing sort of came back into prominence again. Right now, they're still talking about pushing forward with the plan. There's no desire to dismantle the plan. But who knows under the Trump administration, if there's going to be a big change.

SS: Is there a genuine trepidation within the Forest Service? This just happened. [2016 general election, less than one week before interview] MR: This just happened and I haven't had a chance to talk to any of my colleagues about it. But I imagine that that there is. I imagine there is.

SS: Yeah.

MR: Certainly, on the science side there is.

SS: Well, even going back to Reagan, the research budget was slashed for federal agency as a general rule. With Interior and Agriculture and what have you.

What have we learned from the Northwest Forest Plan regarding proactive management as well as the human limitations on managing nature?

MR: Proactive management. I think we are not very good at that right now, and we haven't learned enough to do it well. And it's subject to so much debate. For example, there is this huge issue now about managing to reduce risk of a stand-replacing fire. And this whole debate in biology about how fire is presenting us such a big risk to future habitat conditions for things like spotted owls, that we need to go in and proactively manage right now to reduce that risk at the expense of perhaps damaging current habitat for these species in the hopes of producing better habitat out into the future. And we debate and debate and debate. And we've had precious little science to inform which way to 02:49:00go. We've tried to do things, we've done like simulation modeling and all that stuff. But then every time we do models, then you start worrying about how realistic these models really are and do the results of these models reflect reality. We see a huge difference now. The industry people think we need to go in there and start proactively managing right now. The skeptics say, they're just looking for a way to get the harvest out and using an excuse that there's this huge risk of fire and the only way they can get timber volume is to say they're doing it to reduce fire hazard. The environmental community, I mean, the timber community, is saying that it's true, there is this huge risk and if we don't do something now, we're going to have even worse conditions out in the future.

So, there's a big tension in that regard. And in fact, I'm involved with an effort right now with the California spotted owl to try to come to grips with 02:50:00that problem as we speak. But there isn't a really good large-scale design to try to come up with testable programs to really inform that debate. And it's a really important one because there is reason to be skeptical about whether these risks are being exaggerated or not and that fire risk isn't as bad as people say. But at the same time, when you look at some of these models, fire-risk models, that are saying there really is a big problem looming there, especially in that part of the range where you have high-frequency, moderate-severity fire that could be torching a lot of habitat over time, you think, my gosh. That one is really big.

SS: It seems to me that the trust issue is central here, or the lack thereof.

MR: That underlies all of this.

SS: But also, the timber industry is paying, shall we say, for the sins of their 02:51:00forefathers. You know, the excesses. And the environmentalists, who have, certainly their religiosity and piousness, which is not so tolerant at times, but they also have evidence for some of that, too. And so, it seems to me that those both are in play.

MR: That's exactly right.

SS: Now, how do you think the Northwest Forest Plan has affected forest and natural resource planning in the United States? And you can substitute forest governance in there. And how would you think it transfers or doesn't transfer to other biomes and ecologies? And let's just keep it in the North American context.

MR: Yeah, I was immediately thinking of other continents even.

SS: And if you want to extrapolate to that, that's fine.

MR: Well, we've had people from Australia, from Europe, who see what's going on with the Northwest Forest Plan, and see that as a model of how to achieve conservation objectives. But what they are amazed by is the commitment of resources to make it happen. Because they see the wisdom in managing this way, 02:52:00but they don't see any way to fund it. And how we've managed to fund something this big over so many years and to do the monitoring that's required to really see if it's working the way it has, it's been a model for entities throughout the United States but others throughout the world, but I don't that anybody else has been able to come up with the same commitment to try to implement the way we have.

SS: It seems to me it's only able to be considered in developed countries where 02:53:00you have the resources and the infrastructure governmentally.

MR: Yeah, that's very true.

SS: In Peru, where my wife is from, it's obviously a much different ecology, especially on the forestry side of the things in the Amazon. You don't have clear-cuts, you have rare, exotic hardwoods and selective cutting, and it's a much different dynamic. I think it seems like a temperate zone type of thing, developed-economy zone. I mean, the Australian dynamic is much different with eucalypts and things like that. It would seem to an odd match, if you're going to be literal about it, except maybe in the concepts loosely applied maybe?

MR: That's true. But even in some of the developing countries, and I don't know how you want to rank India in that, remember, I told you about these trips to India we made. But part of the reason for that was to try to export some of our concepts of forest management to their forests. And they're really keen to take that on. They can't set aside huge tracts like we have, but they can bring principles of conserving biodiversity within the areas they do manage, and say, we have these indigenous people, who depend on the forests for non-timber forest products, we need to find ways to meet their needs while providing the diverse forest structures that are needed for the diverse wildlife that they have there where it's, orders of magnitude more diverse than what we're used to seeing. But 02:54:00they were trying to learn from us and trying to adapt some of our techniques into their forests as well. So, even in those countries that aren't nearly at the level of economic development we are, they're still trying to gain from our knowledge and manage their forests with a little bit of help from us.

SS: What's the most important thing you personally have learned from this whole process around the Northwest Forest Plan, and even your move up here to this area and your life being here? The big question. (Laughs)

MR: I mean, to me, the biggest thing was just the opportunity to be involved with something that earth-shaking, so to speak. The most important thing I did throughout my whole career was being involved with this effort, seeing the results of science go into crafting how land management on a huge scale can take place. And to actually use science to change the way we do things, to achieve 02:55:00these ecological objectives. To me, that was just an amazing experience and definitely the high point of my whole career. All that stuff I did was sort of leading to this effort in a way.

SS: Well, that could not be a more perfect ending to this fantastic interview. Thank you very much, Marty.

MR: Oh, you're very welcome.

SS: And this is Sam Schmieding, Oregon State University, signing off.

MR: And Martin Raphael, ex-PNW Research Station, signing off, as well.