Lessons from the Ancients
by Art McKee
Director, Andrews Experimental Forest

This month's speaker: Art McKee in his own words
Friday, May 15, 7:30 p.m. Rm. 100, Willamette Hall, UO Campus.

I grew up in rural Vermont in the 1950's, a landscape of diary farms and woodlots, in a small town with several sawmills. My mother's family had been local lumber barons who'd not weathered the great depression very well and lost most of their holdings, but not their interest in forestry. Early family programming had emphasized what we'd today call stewardship, and the Vermont social milieu had emphasized a community-level sense of mutual respect and support, a kind of do-no-harm and help your neighbor philosophy.

My higher education was all at land-grant universities, the U's. of Vermont, Maine and Georgia, with majors in botany, forestry, and ecology. At those land-grant schools, I had many professors who moved easily between basic science and its application in natural resource management. These were good role models, continually curious about how the natural world worked, and interested in applying that knowledge to resource management.

In the late '60s, I was lucky enough to have a research associate position with George Woodwell at Brookhaven National Laboratory. This coincided with the formation of the Environmental Defense Fund (Woodwell was a co-founder), and I had direct exposure to how basic research, in this case on the movement of pesticides and radionuclides in food chains, could form the foundation for new management practices, legal action, and legislation.

My next position was with Oregon State University as the site coordinator at the Andrews Forest for the multi-institutional and interdisciplinary Coniferous Forest Biome Project of the NSF-funded International Biological Program. The Biome Project at the Andrews Forest has evolved into our LTER (Long Term Ecological Research) Program, a continuing series of basic ecological studies of forests and streams in the Pacific Northwest. It has been very gratifying to see knowledge gained from that research form the basis for many changes in management of forests and streams, both regionally and nationwide.

In '76, I wrote the proposal which created the position I hold today: Director of the Andrews Forest. The basic goals of that proposal were to create an environment at the Forest which would foster interdisciplinary ecological research and ensure the rapid communication of knowledge with land managers and policy makers. The proposal sprung out of first-hand experience acquired during '73-'76 on a multiagency project where I worked with district-level federal and state land managers throughout Oregon and Washington who were eager for information that would improve management. Commonly voiced concerns were maintenance of long-term productivity and ensuring viability of species across the landscape.

Those concerns remain prominent today, and underlay the research program of the Andrews Forest.
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