ENHS Nature Trails Feb 99 Article 1

This month's speaker: Ed Alverson

Nature Trails conducted a brief interview with our speaker:

Were you interested in nature as a child?
I was interested in the usual array of childhood activities - camping, hiking, fishing, etc., but I was not really a junior naturalist. Because my family moved around a lot when I was growing up (California, Massachusetts, Washington state in the US; Iran, East Pakistan, Greece overseas) I had an interest in geography and how places and cultures in various parts of the world differed.

Parental influences?
My father is a civil engineer, and my mother has a lot of artistic talents. I can easily see how the two influences are combined in my interests in natural area management and ecological restoration.

Any nature hobbies? Family involved?
I had a lot of hobbies and interests, but the closest interests were things like dinosaurs and meteorology. I was not a person who kept snakes in a terrarium under my bed. Although we never lived in Oregon when I was growing up, on many occasions we went on camping trips to the Oregon dunes and Honeyman State Park near Florence. Now we take my daughter there to go swimming in Cleawox Lake and play in the sand dunes.

Early teacher influences?
In high school I was very interested in photography, and my view of the landscape was (and still is) strongly influenced by photographers such as Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, and Edward Weston. It turned out that my high school photography teacher also taught ecology and ornithology, and once in a while he would organize weekend field trips that students in all his classes were invited to participate in.

Formal education?
I didn't really start learning about natural history until I started college. My greatest teacher influences regarding natural history came from my undergraduate professors at the Evergreen State College, Al Wiedemann (botany) and Steve Herman (zoology). They co-taught a year-long program in natural history that included a very strong field observation component. All the students were indoctrinated into the Grinnell system of maintaining field journals, which Steve Herman had learned when he was in college at UC Davis. We were taught that we were connected to this long tradition of field naturalists (going back to Darwin and earlier) and that our field observations were potentially of real scientific value.
I remember buying my copy of Flora of the Pacific Northwest by Hitchcock and Cronquist at the beginning of the school year. When I leafed through it, the words made absolutely no sense to me. I was impressed by the voluminous amount of information contained within that book and concluded that it must certainly be the definitive, and completely authoritative reference on the flora of this region - essentially that everything that was to be known was contained in that book. Field botany became really interesting to me when I realized that my initial impression was very much wrong!

Memorable experiences, memorable travels?
In the early 1980's I spent summers doing rare plant surveys for the Washington Natural Heritage Program. It was a great opportunity to get paid to explore and identify plants. Because of that work, I was able to explore every corner of the state, including many places I never would have visited otherwise. I was able to get to know many rare plants in the field, but the most interesting finds were always the ones that I wasn't specifically looking for. In 1981, I rediscovered a species of phacelia, Phacelia lenta, that was only know from the type collection and had not been seen alive for over 100 years. The locality was only a few hundred meters from a county road, and was visible from the city of Wenatchee, but no one had taken the time or care to notice it.
Although I have traveled to many parts of the word, I think that it is most important to get to know our local regional landscape - to engage in what the outdoor writer Harvey Manning calls "low adventure" - rather than traveling to exotic places in pursuit of "high adventure" (such as trekking to Everest base camp in the Himalayas, to cite one of Harvey Manning's examples), which is so fashionable these days. Searching for rare plants in unexpected settings is definitely "low adventure"!
That having been said, I also have a strong interest in the flora of western China, because this is the home to the world's most diverse temperate flora, with amazing temperate rainforests and (unfortunately) huge human pressures on the natural landscape. The connection with Oregon is that the flora of western China is the best remnant of the "mixed mesophytic forest" that was distributed around much of the northern hemisphere during the Miocene epoch. Many genera of plants that are abundant as fossils in Oregon, but now extinct here, still survive as living plants in western China.

How did you get into your present line of work?
My current position is Willamette Valley Stewardship Ecologist for The Nature Conservancy. I have been in this job since 1991. Performing rare plant surveys in the 1980's made me realize how important it was to protect and manage natural areas as refuges for our native flora and fauna.
I moved to Oregon in 1986 to enter the graduate program in Plant Systematics at Oregon State University. While I was in Corvallis I took the opportunity to explore the Willamette Valley. I was especially interested in locating examples of native prairie and savanna habitats, which have all but disappeared from the valley due to the impacts of agriculture and development. So once I finished graduate school, it was a logical next step to work for The Nature Conservancy. But in reality, I also benefitted from a bit of luck and good timing.

What brought you to our town?
Destiny, I suppose. I actually almost moved to Eugene in 1985 when I was accepted to the Landscape Architecture graduate program at the U of O. But I ended up not entering that program, went to OSU instead, and had to wait another 6 years before I actually moved here.
One thing that I especially like about Eugene, and something that many people may not be aware of, is that there are an especially large number of regionally or globally significant sites for biodiversity within or closely adjacent to the City of Eugene. Some examples are the rare plant populations in Amazon Park and on Skinner Butte. Neither Seattle or Portland have this juxtaposition of rare species and rare native habitats within the urban context. This provides a great opportunity for the residents of Eugene to make a very significant contribution to protecting biodiversity throughout their own local actions. I tell people that yes, the tropical rain forests are very important, but no one else is going to protect native Willamette Valley species and ecosystems. Biodiversity conservation is a good example of the importance of that saying, "Think globally, act locally".

What are you going to talk about?
I am going to talk about the landscape of the Willamette Valley that existed prior to the arrival of Euroamerican settlers. This is an interesting story because the presettlement Willamette Valley was not an empty wilderness, but was strongly influences by the Native Americans, especially through the use of fire, for many thousands of years. Over that time period, the native flora and fauna in many ways became dependent upon those Native American influences. Once the Kalapuya people were forced on to reservations, the landscape began to change, in a variety of ways. Although we will never be able to restore the Willamette Valley to the way it once was, we need to understand this history if we have any hope of protecting the diversity of plants and wildlife that once prospered here.

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