ENHS Nature Trails April 2000 Article 1

This month's speaker: An interview with Pat McDowell

WERE YOU INTERESTED IN NATURE AS A CHILD?
Yes, I lived in the country (outside of St. Louis, Missouri) until age 10, and spent most of my time outdoors. Also, I lived in view of the Missouri River which was continually fascinating to me. When I was 10, we moved to south Florida, which introduced me to an entirely different landscape and ecosystems.

PARENTAL INFLUENCES?
My parents and other close relatives were not academics but they were quite nature-aware. As a child I was introduced to gardening, soil, useful wild plants, farming, etc.

MEMORABLE TRAVELS?
My parents were great travelers, and they took us to many parts of the U.S. and Europe. I loved looking at all of these different kinds of landscapes. The western U.S. was, of course, particularly interesting to a future geomorphologist.

HOW DID YOU GET INTO YOUR AREA OF SPECIALIZATION? WHERE DID YOU GET YOUR TRAINING?
In school I was drawn to both math/science subjects and the visual arts. In college I combined these interests by majoring in architecture, and I received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. I continued there for my Master of City and Regional Planning degree. This was in the early 1970s, right after the emergence of environmentalism (e.g., the first Earth Day). In my masters program I emphasized environmental planning. At that point, I felt limited in my ability to do environmental planning because of my lack of scientific training. A friend said, why don't you look into Geography? I started the Ph.D program in Geography at University of Wisconsin-Madison without every having had a course in geography. In my doctoral work I focused on geomorphology and soils, and my dissertation was on the Holocene history of a stream in Wisconsin and how the river system had responded to past climatic changes.

WHAT BROUGHT YOU TO OUR TOWN?
I came to UO in 1982 as an assistant professor in Geography.

WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO TALK ABOUT?
The focus is how human activities over the last 200 years have affected the channel and riparian zone of the Middle Fork of the John Day River in northeastern Oregon. This river still supports chinook salmon; bull trout and steelhead are listed as threatened in this system. The Middle Fork has a human history that is fairly representative of much of the West -- mining, ranching, timber harvest. I will focus on the timing and effects of different human activities over the last 200 years. I will try to make the point that habitat degradation is not an inheritance from distant past activities but continues in our recent activities. This has implications for how we should approach restoration of Columbia River salmon habitat in the near future.

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