Diane Vosick Interview
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Today is July 17, 2001. My name is Jennifer Kern, and I'm happy to be here in the Cline Library with Diane Vosick, who currently serves as senior program representative at the Ecological Restoration Institute here in Flagstaff, Arizona. This interview is part of an ongoing project entitled "Fire on the Plateau," and my colleague Robert Marvin Garcia Hunt is also present in the room.
Kern: Well, first let me thank you, Diane, for coming in, and your time.
Vosick: Absolutely.
Kern: Would you start off just by telling us a little bit about yourself, where you grew up, and a little bit maybe about your education?
Vosick: Okay, I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and I have a master's degree in geography and a B.A. in liberal studies. My liberal studies undergraduate work was done at the Evergreen State College, which is an alternative college. I spent a lot of time doing field biology at that college. At the graduate level I actually was in geography, but I did most of my work in public policy. I find myself in Flagstaff in part through a very interesting series of events. I've spent most of my career as a lobbyist. I started out in Minnesota, lobbying for the National Audubon Society, a coalition of fifteen chapters there. I did my graduate work actually, was interested, after lobbying for a while, about the fact that there was so little really good information that was out there and forming some tough science-related issues that I wanted to find out if I could do a master's project that would actually help a state agency with the problem. Wound up that I lucked into some funding to be looking at soil erosion and the impact it was having on the environment, since Minnesota is a farming state. [I] spent three years doing that project and ultimately developed a handbook for local government officials to assess the damage in their counties due to soil erosion. It was full-cost accounting for lost recreational values, and things of that sort.
As I was wrapping up that job, I moved to Washington, D.C.—my husband took a job there—and I worked with a consulting firm on farm-related conservation issues. A job came up at the Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit conservation group, that was a lobbyist job working on the agricultural conservation policy issues, and it was right up my alley, and so I was lucky enough to get that job. So I worked as a lobbyist at Congress for several years. Then my husband became president of the Grand Canyon Trust here in Flagstaff, so we moved again. And I found myself in the absurd position of lobbying Congress from 2,000 miles away, which has both its benefits and its problems. (laughs) And so the Nature Conservancy actually wound up offering me another job, which was to direct nationwide what they called eco-regional planning and conservation. And that was a Conservancy project ongoing that's designing a portfolio of conservation sites for the entire nation. And the goal is much like Noah's ark. It's an attempt to make sure that everything we have right now is conserved in some way, that we have viable populations of those animals, and that they will persist for generations into the future. So it's constructing a Noah's ark, but with habitat, not just the animals.
That was a great job, and I'd still be doing it if you could get there from Flagstaff, but running a national program out of Flagstaff was just impossible. Consequently, the job came up at the Ecological Restoration Institute, and it felt like it was exactly up my alley, because it was both working on representing the program to a variety of decision-makers, community people, like the officials, but also it was trying to restore a landscape. And I had learned through my work at the Nature Conservancy there was not a single conservation plan that was done that didn't call for a major need for restoration. And so this is one of the grandest restoration experiments out there, so I felt like it was a natural segue to participate and see, okay, can we do this.
Kern: So can you give us a definition of what ecological restoration is?
Vosick: Ecological restoration is an attempt to restore the natural processes that allow an ecosystem to function. And let me explain for the ponderosa pine forest, the major driver, the trigger that makes the trees grow, that makes the animal component, the habitat, the whole thing, is that we're dealing with a system that was accustomed to low-intensity fire. Fire was the big defining thing. It helped promote the grasses, it suppressed the pine trees, it was the function, the process that helped keep the forest functioning in its evolutionary framework. In the last 140 years we've disrupted that by taking away the grasses through grazing, by logging in the forest in such a way that we took out the oldest dynamic trees. We suppressed fire, so that the natural framework for the forest was removed.
As a consequence, we've wound up with a much denser forest, a forest that has, if you look at the biodiversity of a ponderosa pine forest, the real story is in the grasses, the wildflowers, and the shrubs. There are 600 species that are represented in that layer. The trees in the Southwest are between ten and fifteen species. So the real diversity is in that plant layer that when you have a forest closing with ponderosa pines, you are actually usurping or forcing out those plants. And then of course all the associated animals with those plants. And so we've changed the system.
We aren't knowledgeable enough—I mean, in the face of nature you have to have tremendous humility, and we can't develop an instruction manual for bringing back worms, for bringing back certain butterflies. We just don't know. But we do know that if we bring back fire, the forest will begin to heal itself, and will support those systems that will hopefully bring back these species that should be there.
Kern: So what's the number, more or less, of plant species that's now thriving in the forest here?
Vosick: I can't tell you that statistic for sure, but I can tell you that in areas where we have just dense trees, you're dealing with two species in the forest—in general. You've got ponderosa pine and you maybe have one grass underneath those trees. But there are whole areas of the forest where you can walk and not see anything growing on the forest floor, because the trees have out-competed for sunlight, for water, and there's no chance for other things to be there.
Kern: So what's a healthy relationship between the plant species and then the ponderosa pine?
Vosick: Well, it goes back to the forest structure. And that's what we try and do with the various prescriptions we're using, or treatments, out in the forest for trying to reestablish fire. Remember that the big goal is to reestablish fire. But to be able to do that safely, we have to thin trees, because they're so dense right now, that if you would just—and Wally Covington, who's worked on this for twenty-five years, has shown, as have other researchers, that in many places if you just reintroduce fire, you kill everything. Or the reverse is that you could kill the older trees, but the younger trees wind up surviving. So it was as a result of that research that led people to realize that they had to, in fact, cut trees and burn to try and get the system back operating again. So the desired condition is based on what people believe happened, the way the forest looked prior to about 1860. And that was a forest of clumps of ponderosa pine with grasslands interspersed. And that is what we're trying to achieve in terms—you've asked about the relationship: that's the relationship we're trying to achieve.
Kern: So what was the research that brought you to the point to say that this is now a healthy prescription?
Vosick: Well, it's based on this idea of establishing a reference point. So what happens is that a point in history is designated as an approximation of what the natural system would have looked like. And so the treatments that we develop are based on trying to thin, perhaps not exactly to the number of trees per acre that existed historically, but thin sufficiently that we can burn, and then the trees can reestablish clumps and do things like that. So it's based on what it looked like historically, in terms of how we do the thinning. We try and thin so that there are clumps, and so the grasses can get reestablished.
It's important to note, though, we've had a lot of changes since 1860, and those have to be accounted for in these forest treatments. For example, you have certain wildlife that frankly may not have been here in abundance in 1860 but are now. And they require, perhaps, that thicker forest for cover. In addition, consideration has to be given for all the human beings in the forest now. So you have to be thinking about your prescriptions in a big context, so that you know that deer or turkey have a place to go for refuge while you're doing the thinning. So it's a big complicated puzzle, and you have to think about this section of the puzzle, but it does relate to this section of the puzzle. And so you've got to constantly be looking at the bigger issues as you design your treatments.
And the other important thing is, there's no one-size-fits-all. On the landscape there's tremendous variability: a rocky site, a swale, various other factors, certain soil characteristics, wetter places. You're just going to wind up that historically there may have been more trees here because they were desired conditions for growth. And perhaps fewer trees over here. And what we try and do is read the landscape, and also configure the treatment to meet what the landscape was historically.
Kern: Can you tell us about some of the projects that the ERI is currently working on?
Vosick: Yeah. I think the most important project right now, from an immediate people concern issue is the Fort Valley and Grand Canyon Forest partnership project, which is attempting to do ecological restoration as well as protect the city of Flagstaff against the unnatural wildfires that exist today because the forest is too dense. And what's interesting about that is it requires a very interdisciplinary approach. We're a science shop, but all the science in the world isn't going to get you there if the people don't agree with what you're doing. And so Fort Valley and the Grand Canyon Forest Partnership has provided the opportunity to bring science to bear on developing treatments; do it in a collaborative manner that considers both the community needs, the agency needs, the environmental community needs, as well as understanding the economic drivers that will make this successful and possible for the future.
Kern: Who or what are some of the members of the Grand Canyon Partnership?
Vosick: The Grand Canyon Forest Partnership has a wide variety of members. It includes the Coconino National Forest; a lot of land management agencies, because they all have a hand—they have the ultimate responsibility for how this land looks. We're talking about the Forest Service. The interface area we're looking at is 180,000 acres. The Forest Service is in charge of 104,000 of that acres. So the emphasis has been placed on the Forest Service acres. And so Coconino National Forest is there, the Grand Canyon Trust Environmental Organization is there, as well as the Nature Conservancy, and Northern Arizona Audubon. Our Chamber of Commerce is there because of both the importance, I believe, of the recreational opportunities provided by the forest. Nobody wants to be a Los Alamos, that's not going to bring tourists back to visit and generate income in a small town. And we are a recreation-based community, when you look at the economic drivers.
Let's see, there's Arizona Game and Fish representing the wildlife issues. And Arizona State Lands, which has a lot of ownership in the interface as well. Coconino County is represented. The USDA; the Natural Resources Conservation Service is there; and various NAU researchers, including engineering and people who can do economic workups to help develop some viable economic solutions as well. So it's a really wide contingent of people.
Kern: So before a project is allowed to begin on a physical front, does every member of that organization have to vote yea or nay?
Vosick: I can't answer that precisely. The partnership itself is an informal entity. The formal entity is the Grand Canyon Forest Foundation, which is a nonprofit foundation that is a 501-C3, and manages the funds for the partnership. So the partnership itself is a collaborative process where there isn't exactly one leader. There is staff for it, and staff has the meetings. There's a management committee, and then the broader group. The management committee considers things and then brings them to the whole group. But I'm not our formal representative on that committee, so I don't really know the voting structure. I think, though, that one of the goals has always been that each person at the table represents a different niche in the solution; and therefore, to the extent that there is a lot of equality in the decision making, that's a very important component. What I'm trying to say is you don't just see one group saying, "We control this." The staff of the partnership keeps the meetings going.
Kern: Can you tell us about the structure of the Ecological Restoration Institute, and a little bit of history about the institute?
Vosick: Okay. As I mentioned earlier, the institute is really the brainchild of Wally Covington. He's been at NAU since the seventies. He's an expert in ponderosa pine ecology. He's an ecologist, and has studied the role of fire in the ponderosa pine ecosystem for his career. And in fact, he was one of the early people to predict that we were going to see worse and more abnormal fires. He started predicting that a while ago. And unfortunately, that prediction has borne fruit. His other concern is that he sees this as an ecosystem that's endangered by the absence of low-intensity fire, and that needs to be reintroduced, and it needs to be reintroduced soon, a window of fifteen to thirty years. And so Wally has been advancing these ideas for a while as a professor over in the Forestry School.
And then he established perhaps five years ago, six years, the Ecological Restoration Program, because it's not just about trees, and he wanted to advance the whole notion that this is an ecological problem. And from there, in February of 2000, the Arizona Board of Regents established our program as an institute. And the institute is really a three-legged stool. Our three primary functions are research, education, and outreach. And one of the reasons I think we've been successful in capturing so much funding is because of our three-legged approach. The research we do is geared towards what we need to know, not just what we'd like to know. So in other words, we're looking at the land, and the land managers' needs, to find what research needs to happen.
From the educational standpoint, we are at the university here, Northern Arizona University. We engage both undergraduates and graduates actively in the work that we're doing. We pay them to participate. We give them hands-on restoration experience. They've been in the woods, they know what it takes. So it's an important part of professional development for students here on campus. Although we do not offer a major, we offer an emphasis area to enhance areas of their major.
And then the final leg of the stool is outreach. And that probably sets us apart more from other academic institutions than anything else—and that is that we actively try and translate our science into the words that decision-makers, land managers who are doing this work, and community members can understand.
Kern: So what type of outreach programs are there?
Vosick: We have a person on our staff, Doc Smith, who spent, I believe it was thirty years in the Forest Service. He's retired, he's a fire guy, knows a lot about fire. And Doc does a lot of work with the agencies to try and let them know what we're developing, and to train them in the field, to talk to them one-on-one, to make presentations, so that the land management agencies are talking to someone who knows their culture very well, and someone who they can trust. And that's one aspect. So we're really actively promoting this to land management agencies.
We do conferences, we do publications. Wally last year was published in Nature in the "Commentary" section, one of the most prestigious journals out there in science, talking about the need for restoration and the need for the reintroduction of fire. We do science programs for kids. We try and hit the full gamut of audiences. In early August Wally will be taking Gale Norton, secretary of Interior, and Senator Kyl, and several other members of the Arizona congressional delegation—perhaps with some luck Deb Oz [phonetic], chief of the Forest Service—out to one of our principal restoration sites. And Wally gets requests to do this all the time, because he can talk about science in ways that everybody can understand.
Kern: So now with the new administration having just come in, how has that affected, have you seen a change?
Vosick: Because of the recognition that really came to light last year with the terrible wildfire season, everyone is aware that there is a serious problem out there. And frankly, it's been very bipartisan, the interest in the issue. Bruce Babbitt, the former secretary of Interior, is as equally concerned about the problem as Senator John Kyl, who's a Republican. And actually, they've both helped the institute quite a bit. In addition, it's not a partisan issue. It cuts across everything, especially when you start considering the danger posed to people's lives and property.
Kern: When you're actually out performing thinning, doing your thinning processes, is that usually the responsibility of the land management agency, to do the physical thinning, or is there a contract system set up?
Vosick: In most cases it is the land management agency that does the thinning. We have crews, county crews, and we have student crews that can do.... Our student crews will go out and set up the science on the site: what needs to get measured, the plots, the various rigorous design you need to be able to develop scientifically credible information. But the actual marking, we can do the marking. However, in most cases it's done by the land management agency because they have the greatest responsibility. And there have been experiments—it would be worth your while to talk to someone from the partnership—I can give you names afterwards—because they've actually done the hands-on managing the whole thing, and they could give you more details about at least here in our community how it's done. But generally speaking, it's done by the agency.
Kern: And is there a market for the byproducts of those trees? Could you talk a little bit about the struggle to find that market, if there is one?
Vosick: Sure. Generally speaking, the answer to that is no, and we wouldn't be in such a complicated mess right now if the answer was yes. But there are several components to this that bear discussion. And it kind of starts like this: There are people that hope that there will be commercially viable products from restoration that can help fund restoration and motivate a new paradigm for businesses that are using smaller—we're not talking about industrial forestry anymore—we're talking about smaller, community-based opportunities for wood product utilization. And what we're discovering in that arena, there are emerging technologies and emerging opportunities, and we're at the cusp. What has happened in the past is that we have not had a guaranteed supply of wood coming out of the forest to allow a private investor, or provide the confidence to a private investor to capitalize something.
But what's happening now with the current congressional interest in forest thinning—and it is important to understand that forest thinning is not necessarily restoration, and there's an important distinction there, and we are always advocating for restoration in most cases, but it relates to the second part of this discussion I'm going to go to. But anyway, what we're seeing this year is a breakthrough in the supply issue. And we think with the breakthrough in the supply issue, we can be looking more aggressively at biomass production, energy production, using forest products, and as well other uses of small-diameter wood. That includes pallet making, various small home construction things. There are even people figuring out how to use a two-inch pieces of wood to create veneer and other things. So what's happening is that as soon as we know there's supply, entrepreneurial interests will beef up—and we're already seeing that.
But the second issue is that of sort of the social, philosophical, and cultural issue that we are at an interesting point in the history of forestry in our country, where there are many people angry about the past model of forestry which was basically an agricultural model of cut trees and replant them. Some would be so narrow as to say with little care for the environment or wildlife resources, the whole gamut. Those people are very concerned about old industrial forestry happening again. And they generally just have taken the tactic that anything commercial—and by that definition, is anything that generates money from removing trees from the woods—should not be allowed. And so what we've bumped up against is that grave concern. And actually, the partnership is working very hard to address that, and to be only thinking in appropriate-sized technologies. But nevertheless, when there are appeals and attempts to stop some of this work, a lot of that comes from the community that is worried about the economic issues, and whether or not if you find a marketplace for the small-diameter timber, you'll just recreate a model from the past that has not worked to restore forest health.
Kern: You mentioned an appropriate size. What is an appropriate size, or what is a cap that the ERI will not go over?
Vosick: The ERI doesn't have a firm position on that. That would be a better question for someone from the partnership, because they are really balancing, they are really looking at the whole picture and trying to balance the economic interests. I can tell you that some of the technology currently being explored include doing a small energy generation plant, either here on campus or over at Camp Navajo. And I can't remember the number of acres that would be required to sustain it. We've looked at pallet manufacturing. There are various people expressing interest with a variety of different uses for the wood. But generally we're not looking at an old Wyerhauser kind of model here. We're talking about small businesses.
Kern: How would you go about securing supply to a small business organization? How does that work?
Vosick: That's a better question for the partnership. We're a science shop, so we are peripheral to those issues.
Kern: Could you go over the difference between thinning and restoration?
Vosick: Yeah. Thinning to accomplish wildfire protection generally focuses on cutting trees and taking out trees that might provide a ladder from a fire on the ground to move into the crown. And it doesn't necessarily attempt to achieve a clumpiness, or to even go back to look at what it looked like in the past. It's really focused on thinning trees to provide fire protection. And ecological restoration is looking at achieving the full services that a forest can provide. In other words, we're interested in all the outcomes that relate to the forest ecosystem. We're interested in enhancing the plants that create the real workhorse of biodiversity for the forest. We're interested in thinning to clumps, which was the natural structure of the forest. We're interested in seeing restoration of impacted swales and hydrology—the water aspects of the forest. So we're looking at a more comprehensive solution that not only gets at the problem of wildfire—because ours does, ours diminishes that threat of wildfire—but it also is looking at the other controversial and difficult issues confronting the forest, and that's forest health. We have degraded forests not only because they're—you know, associated problems with a degraded forest are beetle infestations, increased disease, reduced water supply, a whole bunch of important issues that need to be repaired if a forest is going to survive, and if we, as people, are going to continue to benefit and enjoy.
One of my favorite ones, really, is looking at restoring the forest, too, to support the wildlife that uses the forest. If you look at the trends in animal biodiversity, it's just downward, despite the Endangered Species Act, despite many of the things that have gone on in the last thirty years. It's very disconcerting that we keep losing. And the only way we're going to stop losing is if we create the habitat structures that permit those species to rebound. And so we're looking at that tough issue as well.
Kern: How do you balance the decision making in terms of thinning a whole structure where you might have—I've heard a lot about the white squirrel population. So how do you balance trying to restore....
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Kern: ... and the wildlife habitat?
Vosick: Well, you know, the honest answer is that there are going to be winners and losers. People are very temporal-centric, they're in this time, and they think that the number of deer and elk that are here right now are actually the way it should be. But historically, they were present in lower numbers. And it's interesting, because if you look at elk, there's a consequence of having so many elk out there right now. They are impacting aspen, they're impacting the grasslands. They are, in fact, in some cases, just equal to cows when it comes to sort of looking at the impact they have on the herbaceous land, the plant, the wild flower, the shrub layer. We care about wildlife and we design these prescriptions to accommodate wildlife. We think about the goshawks, we think about the bears, we think about the squirrels. There is an important question, though. I agree, it's a constant balancing act between people issues and perhaps non-science-based issues and science issues. And we run into that a lot. The only thing I can say is that to do this correctly and intelligently, you need to be looking at your whole landscape, so that you know that if you're thinning here to create a historic forest structure, and you know that's not going to be great for bears, you need to know that within a bear's home range they have refuge areas that they can go to. But what's important to realize is that the stuff that should be here evolved for thousands of years with low-intensity wildfire and the forest structure we're trying to accomplish.
Kern: So after a certain area is restored, is there a fencing-off, or is there a block of cattle, elk? How do you ensure that those grasslands are going to be able to thrive?
Vosick: That's a social issue that isn't resolved. I think the rule of grazing and whether or not to reintroduce cattle, things like that. Up at Mount Trumbull, which is north of the Grand Canyon where we have our largest restoration site, the cows are taken off during the restoration while the grasses get reestablished. And that is helpful to regain some of that herbaceous layer. Now, the intensity with which it's put back on the land is a land management decision—they control the permits.
Kern: So do you, or did your position as a lobbyist come to the table?
Vosick: Actually, I'm not a lobbyist anymore. I represent the program. And when Senator Kyl calls us up, I'm there, but I don't act as a formal lobbyist anymore, in terms of just pushing promotion of a particular issue in Congress. It's more just providing information, and being at places that we need to provide information, but a contrast to being a full-blown lobbyist is great. (laughter)
Kern: Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Vosick: I do this (unclear). Well, you know, if you're a lobbyist in Congress, you're cultivating a lot of people all the time. You're always there, you're providing them information without them asking for it. You're just trying to promote a particular position. And we've primarily responded to requests. That's a little different. That's a little less proactive—at least from the legislative standpoint. Now, from the public standpoint, we are promoting the need for restoration. And that's a little different, and I'm thinking kind of legalistically in the terms of lobbying. You're not a lobbyist when you're educating the public and trying to provide information to the public. So we do try and get our message out there, and we work actively to do it in the various decision-making niches that exist. But I think of lobbying strictly in a congressional sense, and we're not doing that.
Kern: Could you tell us a little bit about some of the new grants that you've won?
Vosick: Yeah. Last year, because of the intensity of the wildfire issues and the problems that we've confronted, Senator Kyl did us a great service by trying to advance the work that's being done in Flagstaff—which is used as a national model—through providing some additional dollars to our program. Actually, a significant amount of money to both our program and to the community of Flagstaff. So we received a grant, a federal appropriation of $8.8 million. But well over a third of that money is out the door to other partner agencies that are doing treatments here on the forest periphery. For example, a huge chunk of that has gone to the Grand Canyon Forest Partnership to try and develop a working—to help jump start an economic activity that can use this material. So that's one aspect. Five hundred thousand [dollars] went to the Coconino National Forest to get their treatments done in the urban periphery of Flagstaff.
Then a significant amount of that money has gone to funding researchers to answer the big questions, because when we start talking about the 30 million acres of degraded forest in the Intermountain West, that's a huge scale of operation, and there are still many questions that remain, especially with regard to wildlife, about the restoration treatments, how to configure them, and what the impacts are. And so a lot of that money has gone out to answer, as I said, oriented towards what we need to know, not what we want to know, to try and answer those questions that permit us to be thinking about what they would like to refer to as an operational scale operation. So that's where a lot of the money's being spent.
Kern: Can you talk about some of the projects that are being researched?
Vosick: Sure. You asked about cattle earlier. We do have one project by NAU researcher Tom Sisk [phonetic] that is analyzing grass responses and restoration, looking at grassland restoration. And he's looking at the full gamut of cattle grazing, elk grazing, whole bunches of issues related to reestablishing grassland; because we don't really know what the stocking levels should be, either for even the wildlife or for cattle. And so he's analyzing that as an important issue. We have assisted researchers looking at goshawks, which are a sensitive species in the Southwest forest. And what sort of treatments will minimize impacts or avoid impacts to goshawks. There is a lot not understood about goshawk behavior, despite all the attention the animal has had paid to it.
We're looking at operational issues that relate to exotic species. When we went out in the woods, you saw that that exotic species response to forest restoration. That is of grave concern to us, and how you minimize.... That's one of the post-1860-you-have-to-put-it-in-the-modern-context issues, when you start looking at trying to restore the forest, because now you have all these exotic species that invade, trying to understand what their role is, how they come in, what can out-compete them if you're going to do some reseeding. Basically, how do you enhance the native species that should be there, and create the conditions to allow them to out-compete the cheat grass which is just an Intermountain West serious problem.
Kern: What is cheat grass?
Vosick: Cheat grass is an exotic species, which means an invasive exotic, which means that it doesn't belong here, and it was brought in, perhaps, by Europeans. I don't know exactly where it entered. I could talk about Dalmatian toad flax, another one we saw—the long stalk with the yellow flowers on top. Dalmatian toad flax was introduced in this country in the 1950s, and it was brought here as an ornamental plant to grow in gardens. And many of these invasives—not the grasses so much—but many of the flowering species were brought in as ornamentals. Purple lustripe [phonetic] is a good example in the East and Midwest, as something that was brought in to be put in gardens, and it just leaped out of gardens and has become a big invasive plant.
So cheat grass, I don't know when it was brought in or how it was brought in, but unfortunately it's very aggressive in its establishment, and burning only helps it. So once it gets a start.... And wildlife, cattle, they don't like it. So there it sits, out-competing all these species that wildlife need, and nothing wants. So these are huge, huge important issues. And it gets brought in, the vectors we're bringing in are pretty unbelievable. It gets brought in on the hubcaps of trucks. It comes in on your socks, and as ridiculous as that sounds, those are the ways it gets introduced when we're doing stuff. Maybe seeds got somehow lodged in a chain saw. But it's just really passive ways like that, that these things get moved about. And so these are important things to be thinking about.
Kern: So is there research going on to study how to remove those?
Vosick: There's a lot of attention. Actually, at the national government level there [is an] interagency task force now, because of the huge degradation that's happening. What often happens with these invasive species is that they stay at low levels for a long time, but then once they really get established, they start increasing exponentially. And that's what we're seeing with a variety of these plants, leafy spurge. We're also seeing them as people move and conditions change. They're moving, for example, leafy spurge is moving down the Intermountain West. Then you start to see it get established and move, and start invading other areas. It's a huge issue.
Kern: Do these species compete with the ponderosa pines as seedlings?
Vosick: Not the pines, but they do compete with the grasses. As I told you, sort of a working biodiversity of the forest. They can't out-compete those. Some of them go away, like mullein, which was the soft leaves that you saw—it has soft leaves on the ground and then a big stalk and a seed head. What we're finding is that right after the initial treatments, they can come in very aggressively. But as other things become established, they'll actually diminish over time. But there hasn't been enough research on understanding how you can basically set up systems to out-compete these exotics, so that you can enhance those native plants, because in a healthy system—theoretically, at least—in some healthy systems the natives which know how to live at that site should be able to out-compete those invasive species. So it's a matter of figuring out how to deal with that. And many people believe—this was a huge issue for me at the Nature Conservancy that I worked on, actually, when I was doing agricultural policy lobbying, because you actually get an incredible number of bedfellows with environmental groups when it comes to exotic species, including cattlemen, farmers, and other people, interestingly enough. And this was just a huge issue for us at the Nature Conservancy, because some of the great minds—you know, Wilson, as an example—have said that invasive exotics, both animals and plants, are the second-biggest threat to native biodiversity in our country, behind habitat loss. So it's a big one.
Kern: Does the institute have relationships with other universities in terms of trying to stimulate some of the programs?
Vosick: We have intellectual relationships with other universities, we exchange information, we've collaborated with other individuals. In terms of a formal arrangement with other universities, I'm not sure, I think we may have one project we're collaborating on. But like I said, other than working directly with other professors, with other expertise, we don't have formal programmatic relationships.
Kern: And are there internship programs?
Vosick: We employ a lot of students to do a variety of things. We have twenty undergrads right now that are funded through us, and they do a senior project, and they spend a whole year on their senior project, doing something related to restoration. I'm working with a student that's a business major, and I'm trying to get her set up with the Grand Canyon Forest Partnership so that she can spend twenty hours a week over there, working on economic issues and her business degree. So we really view restoration as an interdisciplinary activity, because it's not just science: it's economics, it's a lot philosophy, it's many things. And so we invite students from across the university to do senior projects. In addition, we have student workers and interns, and then in the summer we have, I think it's up to thirty people on crews going out and setting up the research. So we're a good place for students—especially students who need funding, which is just about every student! (laughs)
Kern: Tell us a little bit about one of your typical days.
Vosick: I have a great job. I would have to say there's no typical day. I actually describe myself variously as both cheerleader and utility infielder, if you know baseball. In other words, I have to just pick up whatever goes flying. (laughs) And so, for example, right now I'm spending a lot of time on the tour that Senator Kyl will be putting together, and developing a briefing book so that.... Senator Kyl is an unusual legislator in that he's extremely well-steeped in the science of forest restoration. And he is great to work with, because he constantly wants to bring people out and educate them—and not just the four bullet points that are so typical, but he really wants people to understand. So we're developing material for this tour of our research that's both understandable but meaty enough that you can really understand the issues. So I've been working on that today, but I've also been working on a presentation during Forest Festival Week that will go on here for "K" through third-graders.
There's various administrative work that I do that relates our program to other units within the university. That's something I'll do. I have a staff person working on something we're calling the source book, which I'm very excited about, which hopefully will be published next fall. And the source book will be an exploration of all the issues related to ecological restoration in the Southwest. So we will have a chapter on trees, we'll have a chapter on philosophical concerns, we'll have a chapter looking at wildlife responses. And what each chapter will do is synthesize the knowledge that we have on that particular topic right now, and also provide references for, say, the best fifteen papers in the field today. So that this can be a guide picked up by whether you're a land management agency, an educated public member—this isn't really geared for someone with no familiarity, but it's geared for someone who's educated enough that they can pick up something and understand it—cares enough that they can pick it up. Hopefully it will be used for courses as a compendium of information. And so we're quite excited, and I have a staff person, a writer, working with me on that—he's coordinating the project.
So it's various kinds of communication tools. I spend a lot of my time relating to the various communities, whether they be the town, the university, people who would read this book—and "K" through three, which sometimes have far more wisdom than we have, because they're still seeing that world very pure.
Kern: Is there a program that....
Vosick: We have a K-12 coordinator who works primarily with teachers to develop educational modules for all age groups. But we're actively involved in something that Flagstaff has, which is called the Festival of Science. I don't know many other communities that spend two weeks just providing science opportunities for people in the community. And we're really lucky, because we have a lot of science here in town: We have Lowell Observatory where Pluto was found—well, it was already out there, we just happened to come across it. (laughs) We have the Ecological Restoration Institute. We have many strong environmental programs on campus, which is one of the great points of Northern Arizona University is the fact that we have great science programs here, so they get represented. We have a really active environmental community. The Grand Canyon Trust, Audubon, Sierra Club—we just have tons of active environmentalists in the community. They participate and offer things. Basically anyone associated with science. Museum of Northern Arizona. Everybody, the community collaborates, pulls stuff together. And I know for my kids in public schools they get a little passport, and their homework is to attend, say, four events, and they can get their passport stamped, and they summarize what they learned. So it's a pretty neat community effort, and we participate in that.
Kern: Could you tell us a little bit about the summer camp program, the week-long camp that the ERI sets up?
Vosick: You know, if there is, I'm unaware of it. And I bet you that Blake is the person doing it, and I can't answer that. Is it out at Camp Colton?
Kern: Where it actually is I don't know, but I found the information at your website.
Vosick: I bet it relates to Camp Colton, which is an environmental facility out in Hart Prairie, and I bet that's Julie Blake's area, and that's one I'm not familiar with—which speaks to the fact that we are growing, and there are a lot of things going on, on particularly the school educational side, that are handled by other people, and I'm not fully aware of what they're doing. I could find you more information if you're interested.
Kern: Okay. How many folks are actually working right now, with ERI?
Vosick: We have—I'm trying to think, because it's grown quite a bit—but we have (counts) four faculty, and then we have a lot of what we call affiliated faculty that we work with, or we consider the faculty working on research questions funded by last year's federal appropriation to be associated with us. So we feel like our reach is much bigger. We actually try and set up students—we have twenty faculty that we call mentors of students, and that's one of the Ecological Restoration Institute's activities with students, is we try and have a mentor for them, and match them up with someone in their interest. So we have a lot of associated faculty, but four that are on our payroll. And then we have probably twenty staff, and they do everything from the person I described, Doc Smith, whose job it is to do the outreach to agencies; to people like myself that are the utility infielder (chuckles); to people like Gina Vance, who's our education coordinator. She works with the students at NAU to get them fit nicely into the program. She spends a lot of time just doing the one-on-one student stuff that makes a difference. And then we have Bonnie Holmes, who's a communication person and works a lot with things like the Forest Festival, which we have in the spring, and the Festival of Science in the fall, and things like that. So we have a really diverse group of people.
Kern: Is Bonnie the media relations....
Vosick: Yes, she is, she's communications, and she does TV, and we were recently on the news. When the Leroux Fire happened, we had to evacuate a crew of researchers out of the fire area because they were up there, setting up plots. Unfortunately, we think—I haven't spoken to them since the fire—but some of our plots burned up and some never got set up, which is too bad, because it's lost information. But those researchers were brought into the high peaks by packing their stuff on llamas. And so when the fire happened, our crew got covered, and they had footage of the llamas taking their stuff into the high alpine area, and that's the stuff Bonnie pulls together—good human interest stuff about our work.
Kern: Why llamas? I have to ask.
Vosick: They're very long on packs. Llamas are really great pack animals. They don't disrupt the ground like a horse or a mule, and apparently their food needs are less, and they'll go to the bathroom in one spot, so if you're worried about exotic species coming in, or other things, you can deal with that. I don't have personal familiarity with them, but they make a great pack animal. There are actually llama outfitters here around Flagstaff and across the Intermountain West. I have a friend that rented a llama. I mean, they train you how to work with the llama, and then she and her mom, who was seventy-five, backpacked in—not riding the llamas, but their stuff is on the llama. I don't think people ride the llamas. (laughter)
Kern: Let's see, does the Ecological Restoration Institute conduct any type of marine biology or biotechnological studies?
Vosick: No. We were funding people who look at water issues that relate to the Southwest ponderosa pine forest, but that's not an area of primary focus.
Kern: Where would you like to see the institute go? What kind of future do you hope for the institute and its work?
Vosick: I hope that we figure it out. I mean, you can't ever really figure it out because nature's so much bigger than anything, but you know, if you care about sharing the planet with the other species here and don't think people should be the only driver, then I hope that we're successful in restoring developing approaches to the Intermountain West, and restoring the ponderosa pine forest so that we can get ahead of the extinction curve, so that we can actually do right by the forest, and reestablish its natural functions and the animals and plants that should be there. I think it's our responsibility as stewards.
Of equal interest to me is that I have kids and they should be able to go into the forest and enjoy it, not be threatened by it, and see the full Noah's ark out there. So I feel like we owe it to future generations. So we've got this quest in the ponderosa pine forest, but I hope we can continue to expand our efforts to other systems, and continue to work on the restoration that's required to make the planet function, to help the planet function well.
Kern: Are most of the other forest systems in a similar status because of wild game, because of grazing, and fire suppression?
Vosick: Yeah. I think that's an accurate statement. They're not what they used to be, and so yeah, I think about long-leafed forests of the Southeast. They've been fragmented down to.... It's a very endangered system. Going back to my work at the Nature Conservancy, so many of our aquatic systems are seriously threatened. We've done so much to them, altered them so much, that they aren't functioning the way they should be. There just wasn't.... When I was director of the eco-regional planning program we had divided the country into sixty-five units, discrete units that were defined by biological characteristics and physical characteristics. The best example is the Sonoran Desert. You get a fixed idea. That's an ecosystem, the Sonoran Desert. There wasn't a single plan—I was there when we had twenty-five finished—and there wasn't a single plan that didn't call for restoration.
And it was a tragedy, it was very poignant to see certain people present their plans, like the Northern Tallgrass Prairie, which is in Minnesota, North and South Dakota ecosystem. And it's sort of, if you've read Laura Ingalls Wilder and the whole [Little] House on the Prairie stuff, that's Laura's environment. Well, there's less than 4 percent of that landscape left. And when we analyzed what was left, only 3 percent of it had the ecological integrity to persist. In other words, it was either big enough, or fire could be reintroduced, or it just wasn't so pummeled that you were just actually—it may have had a plant there, but it was checking out. Three percent. That's essentially an extinct ecosystem.
And so restoration's the future in terms of trying to reestablish species and also, I think, to provide for a healthy environment for people, long into the future. We can't ultimately be the only species on the planet. There's going to be a problem. (wry laugh)
Kern: Yeah. Do you have other career ambitions? Is there something else in your mind, down the road, that you would like to do?
Vosick: I like high-leveraged activity. I think one of the great insights Wally Covington has had is that he thinks operationally. He's thinking about science as it applies to the Intermountain West—not just his back yard. That's a high leverage approach to the problem—especially when you can, as we do, transfer the science directly to the land managers who are responsible. One of the highest leverage ways, I think, personally, there is to get stuff done is through public policy. And so I would like to run for public office at a future date. But that path still remains to be found. But to me, that would be the best.
Kern: Why?
Vosick: Why? Because you can—think about some of the great things that have been accomplished through public policy. Think of the Endangered Species Act, or of the National Environmental Policy Act, which now, for all its warts and wrinkles, at least we think before we do. I think about the Voting Rights Act, go back to the programs of FDR, and the fact that some of the greatest securities provided people were done by high leverage public policy. And consequently I think you can create great change that you may not even recognize in the day that you do it, or within the ten years that you do it, but boy, sometimes a hundred years out, you've really accomplished a lot. And so that's why.
Kern: Well, Robert, do you have some questions that you'd like to ask?
Garcia Hunt: (unclear, far from microphone) tribal policies (unclear) tribal partnerships.
Vosick: We're actively working with tribes. Our best example right now is with the Kaibab Paiute Tribe north of the canyon. And boy, Carmen Bradley, who's the tribal chair up there, is just an amazing woman. They have fire issues and ecological issues up on their reservation, including they have three villages, and....
[END TAPE 1, SIDE B; BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE A]
Vosick: ... this year. And that's both setting up science, but they're receiving funding through the federal grant as well, to do fire protection in the village. But also to start restoration on a hundred acres. And they have a real interest in ecological restoration. The tribes are very interested in cultural issues related to the systems as they existed. And subsistence issues with degraded ecosystems, but if you bring them back, traditional uses can be brought to bear. I think about medicinal plants, for example, and how on some of the reservations the medicinal plants are in decline. This is the kind of thing that can help in terms of those indigenous uses of plants. So we are actively involved with the Kaibab Paiute, both for people protection and for the science. And our hope is to continue to expand our work with other tribes. The tribes are already on top of this in some places. I think it's the White Mountain Apache are already doing forest restoration. So the tribes are on this, and to the extent we can continue to help them, we want to do that.
Kern: In general, do you get favorable public support of your projects?
Vosick: That's a really good question. I would say we're controversial because we have an interesting history. Up until about 1996, 1997, the Sierra Club and others were fully behind restoration: they understood the issues, they understood the ecological response issues, which we continue to promote, that if you really want to save biodiversity, you've got to restore the forest. So we agreed conceptually with all members—I would say the vast majority of environmental groups. However, when it came down to actually cutting trees and doing the heart surgery, if you will, to get there, then groups like the Sierra Club became unhappy and have not been supportive of our work. They understand conceptually where we're going, and they agree conceptually with what needs to happen, but there's also—I don't want to interpret them, they just don't agree with cutting trees like we do.
And then there are the commercial logging groups that because thinning takes wood away that can be used commercially, they have accused us in the past of trying to reestablish the industrial style logging, which is just not true. So yes, we've been controversial. But we (unclear) consider ourselves environmentalists.
Kern: Just to go back to the Sierra Club for a minute, I know that you had said you don't want to interpret their philosophy, but are you aware of the way that they would like to go about restoring? because you said they are conceptually in agreement.
Vosick: Here in town, the Sierra Club is the dominant member of a group called the Southwest Forest Alliance. And the Southwest Forest Alliance is—what's the word I want?—they're a coalition of a whole bunch of groups, including Audubon chapters and others. And their mission, originally, as they came together around that time in 1996, 1997—perhaps even earlier, I don't really know—was to help develop forest prescriptions that would get towards restoration.
And they have a place that they've actually worked on a community-based approach, over in I think it's Catron County—anyway, near Silver City they've been working to establish a restoration area, small study area. They never joined the partnership, but they remained interested and involved in the work of the partnership. We, in the past, Dr. Covington actually has helped them get funding for their work in the forest. What has happened, however, is that whereas for a while they were interested in developing forest prescriptions, they've made the decision not to do that anymore.
And part of it, I think, is the difficulty of once they get out there and see how hard it is, they realize that they're as vulnerable to criticism as we are, once the trees start getting cut. And recently, they just made this decision in the last month or two, to say that they're not going to be associated with forest cutting anymore, even though they put a prescription out in the forest. It took them a year-and-a-half to develop it, making us all—we offered them all kinds of scientific expertise to help them do it. They basically marked an approach out there, and they helped mark half of it. They left. They feel that the rest of the marking didn't achieve the results they wanted in terms of the marking, so they've taken their name off the treatment.
It's just very interesting. I think that they realize that this is incredibly hard to do, and they have been interested in participating, but have now become uninterested in participating—at least in a figuring-out-the-solution sort of way.
I think environmental groups in this day and age kind of come down to the stop groups—they're really good at stopping stuff, and that's great, and we need people out there that are really good at stopping bad stuff.
But then there are solution-oriented groups. And to be actually figuring out how you work with the various members of the community, that are not just the environmental community members, but understand the responsibilities of the land management agency that needs some livelihood, whether it be small use of stuff coming off the forest—which I don't think making money off of small-diameter timber that we need to get out, should be illegal. It's kind of counterintuitive to me that that's a problem.
In any event, to figure out all the difficult things that a solution requires, some groups don't have the capacity to do that. I think we're seeing major concerns, seeing the Grand Canyon Trust and others at the table trying to create the solution. Perhaps we're seeing some of the groups deciding that the solution is very hard to realize. And that may not fit comfortably with the way they operate. Or they can't afford the expertise. Or because it takes a certain capacity to be able to do that too.
Kern: I've got one more question. Back to the commercial logging, the commercial aspect of restoration. Are there any land management agencies that have taken a stand, or wanted to actually produce some of the byproducts themselves?
Vosick: The preferred approach for the agency is to contract [to send?] an area. They sell that contract, of course. I'm sorry, in the old model, the Forest Service, companies would buy the timber from the Forest Service. And so the timber generated income for the federal government, and of course they trucked it off and made probably five times what they paid for it on the stump as they cut it. However, now, nobody wants the stuff. So we've actually had to pay people through stewardship contracts to remove things and take it away, because there's no economic potential for it. Congress isn't going to want to do that forever—you know, subsidize forest thinning. And so consequently it's smart to be thinking about some income-generation from restoring the forest that doesn't drive the restoration.
One of the really unique, neat things about the partnership is they recognize this. What they've tried to do is set up a system so that what the forest needs, in terms of its forest treatment, is defined by the ecology of the forest: What does it need? What is the science base? What is the ecological basis of what we should do there? Not being driven by, "Well, we need to make fifty bucks off the forest," but "What does the forest want?" And conceptually they've tried to figure out if there's a way to have the science prescriptions bring the wood out, but once the wood's out and divorced from what happens in the forest—because that was the sad thing of the past, it was how many bucks per acre you can pull out of the forest, not in fact what the forest necessarily sustains. And so once you divorce the economic driver from the forest prescription, then what is the problem of selling that wood and allowing it to be used?
And the firewall, that's the menacing thing. How do you create the firewall so that the economic drivers aren't driving what happens in the forest? And I think that's the fundamental issue here. And perhaps even the no-cut people, they're kind of spiritual people that just don't believe in cutting trees. And I respect that. That's how they feel in their hearts, and that's really important. But then there are the no-cut people because they just don't want—it's an economic-social agenda. Those folks, I would hope that if you could create that firewall, would appreciate the need for restoration while allowing some income generation, because we have to be realistic in this world. And the U.S. taxpayer isn't going to want to forever fund forest restoration.
(laughs) It's very complicated. I hope I've made it clear.
Kern: You've made it very clear. (unclear) clear, and I have it for now. We all have it for now.
Vosick: If you want—just a point of information here—if you wanted to really explore the Native American issues, Thom Alcoze, who is funded through our program, is working with the Kaibab Paiute. He's Cherokee, and he would be a great person for you to interview, because he really knows what's going on in the restoration community among the Native American population. So I just suggest Thom. [See interview conducted with Mr. Alcoze for this project on July 24, 2001.]
Garcia Hunt: (inaudible)
Vosick: Well, he's on sabbatical. I'll tell you, we lead dumb lives, you guys. When you become faculty, you get three months off in the summer, and every seventh year you get a year with 60 percent of your pay. That's a good deal! So he's on his sabbatical, but scheduled to be back on August 1. And he's around. Do you have his cell phone number, because that's the best place....
Garcia Hunt: (inaudible)
Vosick: Yeah. And if you decide you want to talk to him, I'll see if I can't shake him loose too.
Kern: When is the senator and the secretary of Interior and all those folks heading into town?
Vosick: August....
[END TAPE 2, SIDE A; BEGIN TAPE 3, SIDE A]
Today is July 20, 2001. My name is Jennifer Kern, and I am happy, once again, to be here with Diane Vosick from the Ecological Restoration Institute, where she serves as senior program representative. We are here in the Cline Library, working on a project entitled "Fire on the Plateau," and my colleague Robert Marvin Garcia Hunt is also present in the room. We're going to be asking Diane a few more questions, because we just got that information at the end of the last interview that she was actually a firefighter.
Kern: Could you tell us how you got linked-up to the job that you had?
Vosick: Desperation was one of the key factors. I had just graduated from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and wanted to stay in Washington. My work had been in the area of biology, and I saw no employment on the immediate horizon, but I knew that seasonal work with the Forest Service and Park Service would be things I'd be interested in. And so I applied for a job in the Shelton Ranger District, which is south of Olympic National Park, in the Olympic National Forest. I was actually hired for brush and disposal work, to treat areas that had been cut. But I now understand that we were really just an assemblage of bodies that they kept busy in anticipation of the fire season.
Kern: So did you know that as you went and applied, that there was a possibility of fighting fire?
Vosick: We did know that. And it was an interesting time, too, because we really weren't trained, so they would send us out on the units to do stuff. We did prescribed burning on the units as part of our job, but unlike today, there wasn't a high degree of training for the variety of things that you did.
Kern: Can you tell us, just for the record, when that was?
Vosick: [That was] 1977.
Kern: So when you started off on your first day, were you given some firefighting equipment, a uniform?
Vosick: No. As a brush and disposal crew, we were just told we needed a certain kind of boot, which it was our responsibility to buy. And we had no uniforms. We were basically just out in the woods. I don't remember if we had to wear hard hats or not, but we were given polaskis and told to go to work either digging line around areas they were about to burn, or moving slash around, or for a while I actually went around and evaluated fuels. I was the assistant to a person who was evaluating the amount of fuels that they had on the unit. So it was pretty interesting. Sometimes got sent out after rainstorms to check for smokes, to see if something was cooking.
Kern: Did you work in large teams or small groups?
Vosick: When I was on crew, I think our crew was ten, and then we had—I can't remember that specifically—it was ten with our leader, or ten and then the leader. But we did have a crew boss who was a former smoke jumper, and he was a really great guy. We had three women and seven men on the team, and he respected us all equally. He was really good that way.
Kern: And so even with an ex-smoke jumper you never had any fire training per se?
Vosick: No. And when I look at what people get now, and the equipment they have, it's radically different. We did have Nomex shirts when we fought fire. And when we went to a fire, we were issued stuff, if I recall that correctly. And so that's when we got equipped to actually fight the fire.
Kern: Do you recall the first actual fire that you got called out to?
Vosick: Yeah, it was very exciting, because it was in Olympic National Forest, and Olympic National Forest is the nation's temperate rain forest, so it doesn't burn very often there. And we were brought in because it was burning. And I will never forget the fact that we were bused in, and we were just put on the line immediately. And we got put in an area where there was big stuff burning, and we were digging line, and we were pretty unseasoned. And I recall this place where the fire was just moving quickly through the forest, and our crew boss saw that we were just not digging line fast enough. And I'll never forget how he just got in front of the line and just ordered us to dig in, and he got us through the area really fast. But I think we were all beneficiaries of his experience.
Kern: And so what kind of tools were you using?
Vosick: Pulaskis. And then we had the unfortunate position, because we were a brush and disposal crew, of doing mop-up after the fire, which is the worst job. I think on that one we were night crew, which was even worse, because it was just twelve hours of in the middle of the night, looking for smoky areas to be putting out. It could be bleak at times. And it was really dark in the rain forest.
Kern: Did you stay for a number of nights? Were you camped?
Vosick: Yeah. I can't remember how long we were there, though. It's been a while. It was several days. And then I was on two fires that summer. The second one was in Idaho, and what was exciting about that one is we were all always wanting to go on fire, because the money was just fantastic. You got hazard pay until it was contained, and you got time-and-a-half. I mean, you just got a lot of money. For starving students, that was just manna from heaven. And so we were put on alert and had no idea where we were going. This was typical. Every time we were put on alert, we were just given an amount of time, and we had no idea where we were going. And when we left the district, they said we were going to the airport, which got us really excited, because that meant we were going somewhere else. And then when they took us into the terminal, they were putting us on an Alaska Airways jet, and that summer, Alaska was burning a lot, and we thought, "Yes! we're going up to Alaska!" But actually, we went over to Idaho. (laughter) I think it's Rangerville or Grangerville. Anyway, we wound up fighting fire there.
And that was pretty exciting too, because on that particular fire, we were put out in an area where there were big ponderosa pines, and they had burned at the base. And we were in this area, it was just our crew doing—we were basically doing mop-up, and we heard a tree crack, and everybody started to run. One person in particular, when they ran, their hard hat came off, and this tree came down right where their hard hat had landed. And at that point, our crew boss, who was not a passive guy by any means—I guess to be a smoke jumper you really can't be—he called up the fire boss and he said, "We are in peril here, and until someone comes and looks at this situation, my crew's on the road." And so they immediately came, and they got a sawyer in there, one of these guys who can take down the really big trees, and then we continued. But we had a great experienced boss that, boy, I think had it been otherwise, for a bunch of people that were basically untrained, it could have been a problem.
Kern: Did anyone ever complain or request a little more training?
Vosick: You know, I think we were just kind of crazy twenty- and twenty-one-year-olds, kind of immortal at that age, and you just think you'll weather the storm. But I recall feeling, as I went through this, and quite frankly wondered who was making decisions, when and where, it made me realize I would probably be a poor candidate for a place like the military where you don't really see the authority making the decisions.
Kern: Could you tell us about the physical test that you took?
Vosick: At that time—and it's radically changed now—we just had to take a step test. You just had to qualify, your recovery rate had to be good enough to qualify for crew. And fortunately, I made the cut. That's pretty neat. I mean, you had to be in physically good shape. That was the one thing that they were pretty good about. But I'd say in our crew there were several men that were not as strong as women, and I think that actually helped a lot.
Kern: Would you do a physical training every morning, or some sort of exercise routine?
Vosick: No. Do they do that now?
Kern: Most of the places that we've gone to visit, they have about a forty-five [minute] or an hour workout every morning.
Vosick: Really?! Wow.
Kern: That was engine crews and hotshots, so I don't know.
Vosick: Those are the serious fighters. Our training was about forty-five minutes to an hour in a truck, driving out into Olympic National Forest (laughs) and getting out and swinging polaskis. (laughs)
Kern: Was there ever a point where you got real tired or exhausted and would say, "Hey, I can't do this anymore"? You had an authoritarian figure (unclear).
Vosick: No, I think we all took our job really seriously about.... I think that sometimes when we were back, just doing brush disposal, people got fatigued and would slack off a little bit. But in terms of being on fire, I remember everybody rose to the occasion, your adrenalin's pumping. But I do remember on the nighttime mop-ups that you'd just be exhausted by the end of the night. You'd want to just sit down and get lost in the darkness if you could. But our crew boss kept on us.
Kern: And were there ever any tensions or uncomfortable [times] in regards to the minority of women?
Vosick: I don't ever remember that. We had a good group of people. I remember several of the people there also were from Evergreen, and Evergreen's an alternative college, so we had this interesting mix of kind of hippies and hard core. (laughs) It never really resulted in a problem, but I think the fact that there were men from Evergreen and everything, that it just worked out well. No one was going to hassle us.
Kern: And when you would actually go out to the fires, and you would mix with other crews, was there ever a little sense of competition?
Vosick: No, I don't remember.... I mean, I think they were still at that time kind of struggling with the fact that women needed a different kind of privacy than men, with showers and things like that. It wasn't without its joking and things like that, but I really have positive recollections of the experience. The funniest night I had in a fire camp was the night where we were served absolutely unrecognizable food. At that time—they don't do this anymore, I don't think—but back then they had these big garbage cans, and they just boiled water in them, and they threw in these frozen packets of food. And you could only identify them by color. And so you'd get a green one, a yellow one, and a brown one. I'll never forget, this trading started happening around dinner, "I'll swap two yellows for a brown" kind of thing. And it just got to ridiculous proportions. It was very funny.
Kern: But you always were well fed?
Vosick: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Kern: And how did your family react, or your friends at the time, when you said, "Oh, here, I'm going off to the fire now"?
Vosick: You know, I think we were all just into big experiences. Probably my parents were totally freaking out, but they had given up years ago. (laughter) I usually told them I'd been on a fire after I'd been on a fire. I had eight roommates at the time, we were renting a big house right on Puget Sound, and half of us were on fire crews, so it wasn't a big deal.
Kern: And it was primarily economically motivated?
Vosick: Well, I was interested in being outdoors. And also, once you've been in the federal government, even as a temporary, it just helps you get a job again. And at that time in my career, I could see myself working for the National Park Service, or Forest Service, or some other federal land management agency. So it was also, for me, a career toehold.
Kern: And so then after that summer, where did you go?
Vosick: I had that kind of wonderful dance lesson experience you have right out of college and had a degree nobody wants. (laughs)
Kern: (inaudible)
Vosick: Exactly. I'm trying to think, what did I do? I actually wound up working in the.... Let's see, I had a variety of jobs, including working in the Minnesota Legislature. I went back home and spent a year doing that, and also doing a lot of volunteering with land management agencies, trying to find a job, and kind of working in a bookstore, doing various things, just to piece it together. And then in the summer of 1978, I got a job. Because of my work in the Forest Service, I got a job as a naturalist on Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park, which was a great job.
Kern: What did you do there?
Vosick: I was a naturalist, and so I led talks—gave talks, led walks, told people they couldn't feed the deer—things like that. (laughs) The Hurricane Ridge area is a scenic area that's a destination in the park, so you're dealing with a lot of people just driving up, getting out of their cars and looking out to see what they can see. A lot of people issues, as well as being a naturalist.
Kern: So were there ever contemplative moments when you thought that summer, "Maybe I'll go back to the fire line"?
Vosick: You know, it never—I knew I didn't want to do forestry, quite frankly. And so my orientation really moved over to the national park. One of the things that was very distressing to me, being on the Olympic National Forest, is that that is one of the worst case examples of how awful forestry was in the late seventies. They were clear-cutting areas. Shelton Ranger District could not keep up with replanting, so there were terrible erosion problems. And it just made me feel bad to be working on these areas that had just basically—well, they'd been clear-cut, steep slopes, no chance of replanting for a while, or doing anything to stabilize. And I got kind of turned off.
Kern: And was that before there were acts that would prevent clear-cutting at that time, 1977?
Vosick: It actually was getting worse by that time. The early eighties were the years of the highest cut. And so it was just accelerating at that time. So there would have been NEPA passed in 1973, but I don't know how well it was applied at that time. But it was not good for the forest.
Kern: And amongst folks that you might have worked with, somewhere back in 1977, was there an attitude that those are trees and it's a product and it's okay that we're clear-cutting?
Vosick: I think for the people that were Evergreen students, they were all kind of appalled. And I think for a lot of other people it was just a job, and they didn't think about it. I don't ever remember—we were just kind of a grunt work crew, so I remember discussing it among my peers, but I don't—nobody paid attention to us, if we had tried to talk to someone about forest practices. We were all pretty ignorant, too. I mean, we just didn't like what we saw, but we were not very well-informed at that point.
Kern: So have you ever had thoughts of going back out to do some work on fire?
Vosick: Yeah, this year actually. (laughs) And last year when things were really cooking. Like I said, I really enjoyed being involved with fighting fire. It was a great summer in my life. I was actually thinking about getting my red card this summer, but wound up the two weekends that were required to do it, I was busy, but I couldn't do it. But maybe next year!
Kern: And there's no fear? I mean, now you're a little older, you have children. There's not a fear factor?
Vosick: Only to the extent my self-preservation instincts are very well honed. (laughs) And rebelling against authority wouldn't bother me (unclear, laughing) circumstances anymore. But no, I actually think it's dangerous work, but a lot of time it also isn't. The real dangerous times—I don't know how to describe it, but the majority of time you're not putting yourself in a perilous position. It's just interesting. My primary interest is just being on burns, too, when we're doing prescribed burning and forest treatment, which is the right thing to be doing.
Kern: Do any of the members of the ERI work on lines when there's prescribed burns?
Vosick: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Absolutely we have people. I think most of our students have red cards.
Kern: Will they get placed on the Fort Valley (unclear) fires?
Vosick: You know, I don't know the logistics of qualifying them to do what. They're not federal employees, so I don't know if they could be pulled together as an emergency crew or not, because now there are issues of training—you can't just.... There was a time they'd just go pick up people to fight fire, but now I think fire training, if I understood correctly, was two weeks, two full weeks, and that's why it was for people that were working—it was a two full weekend commitment.
Kern: You'd be ready to do it again?
Vosick: Oh yeah. Yeah. It was really interesting.
Kern: Well, thank you for giving us some input on that. We appreciate it.
Vosick: Yeah. This was fun.
[END OF INTERVIEW]