Steve McCool, interviewed by David Cole on February 28, 2018
 
David Cole:  Steve, tell us some about your early experiences—what got you interested in being a researcher, interested in wilderness, and doing wilderness research.
Steve McCool:  I was raised in southern California in Orange County,15 minutes from Disneyland. I really didn't like it that much. I liked to go to the beach. I liked to go surfing. When I had a chance, I would drive out to the desert to visit Joshua Tree (now a national monument) or go up into the mountains ‑‑ Saddleback Mountain just right behind my house ‑‑ and poke around. I'm not sure why, but I started doing that.
David:  At what age?
Steve:  As soon as I could drive, 17 years old, 18, 19. That's about when I started doing that stuff.
David:  Did you do outdoors stuff before that age?
Steve:  Yeah. I was in the Boy Scouts. I went camping. My first camping trip with the Boy Scouts was a disaster. My dad gave me his equipment from World War II ‑‑ a big duffle bag and those kinds of thing. It was way too heavy for me. I remember an Eagle Scout carried my stuff for me.
Then, at about the same time, my mother became very interested in going camping. We'd go camping up on the eastern side of the Sierras. My dad did not like it, because he felt he had slept on the ground enough during World War II. He wasn't at all enthusiastic, but my mother won out on this. We would go camping and we did that for several years.
My love for the outdoors came from that camping combined with being a Boy Scout. I was very active. I never made it to Eagle Scout or anything like that, but I loved to go camping when I was a Scout as well as with the family. We used to hike all over the place.
When it came time to go to college I had to do a year at Santa Ana College, because our family was unable to send me to a four‑year college or university.
During that year, I communicated with a variety of colleges and I decided to go to University of Idaho. We had been on a vacation through Idaho and it was remote from southern California. That was fine with me. I went into forestry. I spent a lot of time out of doors. My summer job was not with the Forest Service but with the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a forester trainee. I loved every minute of it. I did everything. Put in tag lines for roads. It's not the high point of my career doing that. I marked trees for timber sales and got in trouble a few times for doing that.
David:  Did you go to Idaho knowing you were going to be in forestry, or was that something you decided after you got there?
Steve:  No, that was specifically what I wanted to do -- go into forestry. I loved it all. We had our summer camp. We stayed in canvas tents. I thought that was great.
When I started my senior year of college in Moscow, my advisor, Howard Alden, got me involved in a project that he had got a contract for – to write the outdoor recreation plan for Idaho. From that experience, I knew I wanted to go to grad school in outdoor recreation. My job with him was pretty much doing statistical work. He suggested I should think about Minnesota, because Bob Lucas was there.
David:  Wow. Bob Lucas wasn't somebody that was in the department at Minnesota, he was just somebody in St. Paul?
Steve:  Yeah he was there – in the building next to mine—at what was called the Lake States Experiment Station at that time. Because there wasn't anyone on the faculty in outdoor recreation, my initial adviser was Don Duncan. He was the assistant dean or something like that. He had an interest in recreation but shortly after I got there he moved to another university
Then shortly thereafter, Larry Merriam came. He was from University of Montana and did his dissertation in the Bob Marshall. He became my adviser. The first year or two I didn't do anything work‑related to wilderness, but then…
David:  Were you in a master's program or did you go directly into a PhD program?
Steve:  I was in a master's program. I wrote a series of papers for my degree rather than a thesis, which I later regretted. It would have been better for me to write a thesis so I would have a complete project to talk about, to write about, or to expand upon.
When Larry came there was really only one other grad student who was interested in recreation. Tim Knopp was his name. Unfortunately, he passed away in the '80s. When Larry got a contract from Bob Lucas and the Lake States Station to do an inventory of impacted campsites in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, Tim and I did the field work which was two summers of work. We paddled around and measured visitor impacts on campsites. The first summer I worked with Tim. Then he went on to other things and I worked with some other people.
David:  Can you remember what years those were?
Steve:  It was '66 and '67. We did measures of impact on campsites. I think it was one of the first studies to do that. If I dug in my basement, I could probably find the original notebooks on those campsites.
David:  This was before Larry Merriam did those studies where he established new campsites and measured how rapidly they were impacted?
Steve:  Yes.
David:  This was one of Merriam’s first studies of campsites in the Boundary Waters, but after the work that Sid Frissell had done with Don Duncan?
Steve:  Yes, right. I helped in establishing those new campsites. I went around and put up all the registration signs at all the campsites. I was involved in that, but I wanted to do something more in the social science arena, so I kind of fell into the Boundary Waters work on visitor attitudes.
David:  As a forester, you could easily have gone into the biological realm or the social science realm. What was it that pushed you towards the social one?
Steve:  I was very interested in the people-environment interface. At that time, activity in this arena was just beginning, more so in the social sciences, although also in the biophysical sciences in terms of campsite impacts and things like that.
I was just interested in the people side of things. We received funding from the Forest Service, from the Lake States Forest Experiment Station. Charlie Cushwa was the project director at that time because Bob Lucas had left for Missoula by then.
This was the beginning of '68. My dissertation was on attitudes of visitors to the Boundary Waters about various management policies -- some of which are irrelevant now. But timber harvesting was still occurring in the Boundary Waters, for example, presence of roads, and so on.
It was about the role of outfitters in influencing people's attitudes. The outfitters were having an influence on visitor attitudes -- not in an attempt to persuade people, but in terms of providing information.
David:  How did you gather the information? Did you use mail‑back questionnaires or interviews?
Steve:  It was interviews. I did interviews at the access points, as people returned from their trip into the Boundary Waters. I did that for two summers.
David:  Would you have been as happy doing that in a non‑wilderness, if that had been the opportunity that surfaced?
Steve:  I don't think so. I had the experience the previous two years of canoeing all over the Boundary Waters. I did probably a thousand miles of canoeing. That really taught me, and I had all this predisposition anyhow from my early history, I just loved that, being in that environment.
Then I got married the first year of field work in 1968. As soon as we could we went on a canoe trip into the Boundary Waters, because during my research I couldn't do that. We loved being in Northern Minnesota. We had a great time. We lived one time in a broken down resort—in a cabin. The next year we lived in a more active resort north of Grand Marais. That's how I got into wilderness. 
For a couple of years afterwards, I was at Wisconsin State University in River Falls, where there wasn't much opportunity to do research. It was a teaching institution. The department chair got some money for working on the Apple River -- a little north of River Falls where the University was located. It had a lot of inter‑tubes floating down it and there were a lot of management problems associated with it.
I really didn't get back into research in wilderness for quite a long time – until I moved to the University of Montana. My first job was at Wisconsin State University. Then I moved to Utah State University where I did some work with the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management in places like Arches and Zion National Park. That could have been called wilderness related, but they were not designated wilderness. 
When I was at the University of Minnesota, not only did I have this project that was funded by Bob Lucas, I took a class from Bob Lucas. I think I'm probably the only researcher around today who took a class from Bob Lucas. During that class and some of the other adventures that I had, particularly in the Boundary Waters with Bob we became good friends, lifelong friends. We didn't see each other all the time, but we had that friendship. Then Bob, when I got to the University of Montana, started funding work to get me involved.
David:  When did you come to Montana?
Steve:  It was the 1st of January of 1977. From then until a little after Bob retired, he funded most of the research I did. It was always great to see him. We had a lot of fun when we did the Bob Marshall visitor study back in the '80s. He and I would drive around the exterior of the Bob, replenishing questionnaires at the entrance points to less known places where we couldn't afford to have a person there to sample visitors. We got to know each other. He was a friend and a colleague.
David:  Was he much of an intellectual influence on your thinking during the period up until you came to Montana? What other people were intellectual influences in the years before you came to Montana?
Steve:  One would have been Rich Shreyer, who is gone now. Rich was also a good friend. He had an incredible brain. He was very stimulating.
David:  That was mainly after you moved to Utah State?
Steve:  Yeah, right. He moved there after I got there. Rich Shreyer, Bev Driver, Perry Brown, I worked with all those people. Not in a way that other people did, but I learned from them. I was at some of their meetings and things like that, but I never really had a project with them except for Rich.
David:  These are mostly after you got your PhD?
Steve:  Yeah. I got my PhD in 1970 when I was at Wisconsin State University. I had to get this thing finished.
David:  In that period when you were working on your PhD, who were the main mentors? Larry Merriam was your senior adviser.
Steve:  Larry and Dave Lime. Dave was working on his PhD with the Forest Service at the same time, so we spent a lot of time talking about each other's dissertation work. He was in the building next door. Rick Knopf was there at the same time, so he had some influence.
Perry Brown didn't get his dissertation until 1972 or '73. It was after that he re-joined the faculty at Utah State University. We did a number of projects together that, again, didn't necessarily deal directly with wilderness, but were projects that dealt with management of people in back‑country situations.
John Hunt was another person who influenced me. He was at Utah State University. John's approach to life and his way of dealing with relationships, and so on, was an influence in the early days. 
I was really very lucky in the early parts of my career, and then later. The people that influenced me had a tremendous impact. Perry was always there. The three others that really had an impact on my life were George Stankey, Roger Clark, and David Cole. Those people were always challenging me. You challenged me often, David.
Another person who had an influence, but I didn't see frequently, was Bill McLaughlin at the University of Idaho. I think there are other people that I just can't remember.
My students, once I got to Utah State, and particularly at Montana, when I got graduate students, they were often challenging me. That's one reason why I stayed with the university -- to have that interaction, because they were very challenging.
David:  Talk more about getting involved in wilderness work at Montana. 
Steve:  There was this Wilderness Management Research Project that was going on and I liked what was going on. I thought that Stankey and Lucas at first, and then later you, were providing a great environment, a stimulating intellectual environment for making progress on things.
I had very close relationships with Stankey and Lucas in this whole arena. When I was at Utah State, not so much. I obviously knew who Lucas was, I knew who Stankey was but I hadn’t met him very often. It wasn't until I came to Montana that he really began to have an influence on me.
We worked in white‑water river management in the '70s when I was at Utah State, and then here in Montana. I did a lot of work with white‑water managers on use allocation and limitation, and those kinds of things. I liked being in those environments. The people that were working in those environments were very dedicated to them.
David:  Those rivers and parks are all wonderful places to be, interesting places to work. Sounds like moving to Montana, having Lucas and that whole group there, made it easy to shift back to working in wilderness. Was there a time when you realized that studying wilderness is something unique, that was different in any way from those rivers and those parks?
Steve:  I would say experientially it was different. I would say that the issues, mainly the challenges that people were faced with, were very similar to rivers. They faced the same questions, how much change is acceptable, and so on. Structurally, I viewed a lot of these as similar. The legal context and the social context were different, which meant the solutions – the resolutions to those problems -- had to be different.
Anyway, in Missoula, talking with you, Bob and George stimulated my interest more in wilderness. When we started doing the visitor study in the Bob – in about 1982 -- that's when I became really interested. In '83 or so, I started going into the Bob -- backpacking, that kind of stuff. For a number of years, my close friend Steve Martin, one of my students, and I went into the Bob, the two of us. Occasionally, there'd be a third person coming along. We did that for 10 or 12 years. 
David:  Bob Marshall is your favorite place? What is the Bob Marshall to you?
Steve:  Bob's a very important place in my life. It's been a few years since I've backpacked into there, maybe 10 years. I feel I've been so busy the last few years, it's hard to get time. I love going in there, I love going into the North Fork of the Sun River ‑‑ it's such a special place.
My connection with the Bob is spiritual, the landscape, not the Bob per se, but the landscape. It is more spiritual than recreational. The only time it's really recreational is when I'm cooking pancakes in the morning, and when I'm fishing. That's recreational. The rest of it's a very spiritual connection. It's a very favorite place for me.
I can think of other places, like in Brazil, going up to Jaú National Park on the Rio Negro. It's a five‑million‑acre park, and the only way you can get there is by boat, six or seven hours, and that's to the boundary. You can't really get into the place, because it's inaccessible. It's a very thick forest, plus there are all kinds of critters in there that would like to nail you. I love to go to Jaú. I go there when I can, a couple of times a year. Of course, it's in a motorized boat, because otherwise it would take days and days to get there. There are a lot of beautiful places that I like, but the attachment is not there with many places.
David:  Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about the wilderness research topics that you worked on. I guess one of the questions here is, how did you decide which ones to work on? Just a few minutes ago, you talked about how early in your career, getting 12 months' salary was part of the challenge. Given that, how did you choose which topics to cover? Then, a somewhat related question -- can you trace some arc to the work that you did that connects them, and how did subsequent work build on earlier work? Big question.
Steve:  This is a really good question. It's a really difficult question. Some people have an arc that is very definitive and explicit. I have done a lot of different things in my career, and I don't regret doing any of them. There was a little departure in the late '80s to work specifically with the tourism industry, but I learned a lot from that.
One dimension I worked on had to do with the notion of satisfaction. When I read the literature, I felt that conceptually as well as methodologically, there were a lot of problems with the satisfaction literature. Everyone is always satisfied, it appears. Yet, if you go deeper, you find they were often dissatisfied. The measures of a 10‑point scale never pick up this dissatisfaction. I tried a couple of other things and ways, and actually did pick up dissatisfaction with their experience, yet when rating it on a 10 point scale, their level was very high. People that were highly satisfied overall were actually dissatisfied with some things. I did not do much research on this, but in terms of talking with managers, providing building capacity, technical assistance, and stuff, I still lean on that. I've learned from that.
The other one was some notions about visitor experience based on Bev Driver and Perry Brown’s work, along with ideas from Rich Shreyer and Rick Knopf that I thought were very useful. These ideas about experience may not have been the most theoretically sophisticated ideas. More recently, researchers have increasingly thought about place attachment as a way of thinking about experiences. But is that enough? I thought for managers to know what people were expecting, what kind of experience they wanted would be very helpful, and place attachment and experiences are different dimensions of an experience. How does understanding of attachment to place influence management?
David:  Do you think that's just because any time new concepts and theories are developed they're fairly fuzzy and descriptive, and it takes some time before they become more sophisticated and clear?
Steve:  I'm not sure that place‑attachment approach ever got there, but I have to admit to you that I haven't looked at that approach for a long time.
David:  Seems like there's still a lot of people working on that.
Steve:  Right. If I were to give a talk in a workshop on place attachment, I do not know what I would say to managers about how they could use the concept to change their management in a manner that would provide better‑quality experiences. When I looked at the idea of place attachment -- and there had been quite a bit of people working on this -- it seemed like there were multiple studies that weren't getting very far. It's just like in the work I do now. This isn't central to what I do, but the whole notion of community‑based tourism. There are probably 10,000 studies of that. But there's no coherence or synthesis of what that means. This is quite common to a lot of our concepts. No one is making an advance. Can I read a book and conclude that "Yeah. Look at the theories here. This is a great advance." There are thousands of these anecdotal kinds of studies. I'm not here to criticize these different domains but we need to synthesize at some point. I think the notion of place attachment is really important, but does it help us make advances in managing a place better? 
When you guys started talking about limits of acceptable change ‑‑ when I started hearing about it – those ideas sparked another arc. I didn't invent limits of acceptable change (LAC), but I've been able to apply it in many different situations and apply the concepts. I think LAC and the recreation opportunity‑spectrum (ROS) concept are probably the two most recognized tools for managing visitors. The social part of this is one of the two best ideas to come out of all this work.
When I talk about LAC, I've had Forest Service people say, "Can you point me to an LAC plan that's ever been completed?" Before I can answer, they would say no, so it's a complete failure. Then I answer, "But that's not the idea. The idea is the way of thinking." "What do you mean, the way of thinking?" In that one sense LAC has been a great idea.
The idea that I think comes out of this, the great advance, is changing our thinking, not the specific process. Many managers still are not willing to accept this. I still talk about it. I use it as a teaching tool in planning courses to people. To people outside the United States who think very differently about this, this helps them understand.
It's not that I'm trying to say, "You should use LAC. You want to use it to help you see what decisions you have to make. You're making these decisions already." They'll say, "What do you mean?" I'll say, "Well, you're making a decision about standards when you say it's too crowded or there's too much impact. This is just explicating what you're already doing."
Outside of the United States they are much more interested in this than managers inside the United States. That's my feeling.
David:  That's interesting.
Steve:  How many times do I get invited to go talk to the National Park Service about visitor management? Zero. How many times do I get to go to Croatia, Poland, Brazil, or South Africa? Many times. I talk about this approach because they're open to new ideas, whereas here there's a strongly held paradigm of management. That paradigm is so tightly held that, when you say something that's different, they don't even hear you say it. That's pretty strong criticism of where we're at in our management. 
This arc involves thinking of ways to strengthen management. Using some of the ideas of ROS and LAC worked out pretty neat in several projects I did shortly before I retired. Like up in Canada where the Canadians said, "Yeah. We need to get some indicators. We need to figure out what we can do."
In all this I never told people what they should do. I just said, "Here. We can share some ideas." I think that was pretty well received. Since 2007 and particularly when I was going to Africa, but more so since I've been in Brazil, all these ideas have coalesced into a pedagogical philosophy as well as a substantive philosophy. What kinds of content should be in a public‑use or visitor‑use planning course? I think it's worked out. This whole experience of me wanting to get into a wilderness of some kind has helped me think more broadly about the kinds of challenges other kinds of areas are faced with. 
This is really good, David. I like doing this. You're making me reflect on things.  In all this experience of doing these very different things, I'm very comfortable in talking about tourism. I can talk about it with some depth. Not the details like marketing and so on, but some depth or whether it's wildness or wilderness or whether it's a management regime. I think that has really led to me being able to articulate this experience in a variety of environments and places. I'm very fortunate.
David:  That's wonderful. How do you pass that on?
Steve:  Through the courses.
David:  Mainly one‑on‑one in classes and stuff where you can basically engage people who want to learn and share ideas and stuff? 
Steve:  Yeah. These are protected‑area managers. They're adults. They will want to learn. They're enthusiastic about learning. In many of their parks public use was prohibited. Now they're saying, "We can have public use." They want to do this. They see the need and opportunity. Many of them see the need to make connections between the Brazilian natural heritage and Brazilians for a couple of different reasons. One of which is the strategic reason of gaining political support for the park. They don't have designated wilderness there.
Initially, they were strangers who became colleagues who became friends.. They may come up with a crazy idea. That is critical thinking. In my courses there are three objectives. Number‑one objective is critical thinking. The second is to develop competence in conceptual skills. The third is to develop confidence in decision‑making. You give people that and they'll come up with something totally unrelated to what you were talking about. They'll say, "Thank you for the course and look what I did in my management of a protected area]." 
David:  Let's shift. You worked for the Flathead Forest for a time. What was that? How did that factor into your arc?
Steve:  This experience probably changed the arc quite a bit. I worked from '85 to '86, a year, as the Staff Officer for Recreation and Wilderness. The basic idea there was to complete a visitor management plan for the Bob Marshall Wilderness based on limits of acceptable change. That planning process had very intimate involvement of the public.
In the process we had a number of meetings with the public. They still meet once a year, the group that we established in the early‑1980s. I think it must be one of the longest running public‑engagement processes in wilderness or maybe even natural resources. It's very informal, so it doesn't get a lot of recognition. Many of the people that were there in the '80s are still there. It started in '82 by Jerry Stokes, who was the person in front of me. I replaced him for a year. It was a great experience for me to be in the Forest Service as well as facilitating this process.
This changed my arc quite a bit in terms of being much more aware of how the Forest Service works, what it was like to be on the other side of the desk, and it changed my pedagogy for teaching in the university system. We no longer sat, at least for my senior‑level courses, in rows of chairs. We sat in u‑shaped formation with tables in front of people, which was difficult I think for the students to get adjusted to at first. Then they liked it. It really just changed my whole way of thinking about wilderness. It deepened my experience with and my feelings about wilderness. As the staff officer, I took probably half a dozen trips into the Bob Marshall just in that year.
Anyway, that experience had a tremendous effect on me in understanding agencies and how they work and their bureaucracies. Some of the people were really committed to wilderness. Other people really didn't care unfortunately. I hate to say that. It also deepened my commitment to a system like LAC that really could help managers make decisions if they wanted to spend the time to make decisions that way. There were times when sitting behind a desk wasn't the most pleasant thing, but overall, I had a great time doing that, having that experience. I often refer back to it. 
David:  Here's another topic. This is actually one that you brought up for these interviews as being interesting, which is talking about the collaborative collegial atmosphere of working with the Wilderness Management Research Program which you, I think, thought was pretty unique and important.
Steve:  Let me talk a little bit about that. Here we had the three Forest Service scientists. They had money to do their projects, and they had a little bit of extra money. What they did was have projects that they asked a number of university faculty to engage in. I was lucky that I was in on some of them. It was a great impetus to a lot of wilderness research for universities mainly around the United States. I saw a lot of people coming through Missoula to visit the Wilderness Management Research Project. Because people in this unit had this idea of working with other people, they could get more done with limited funds and that really had a great effect.
Rather than having three scientists, you had many more scientists working on wilderness. Maybe not full time, but they were interested and wanted to work in this arena. In my mind that was a great model. I've recommended it in a couple of other places. They'll say, "Well, how can we get a research unit going on this?" I say, "Well, if you can get just a couple of scientists."
They would often respond: "No, we need five or six" or something like this. "Oh, just get a couple or three." Then spend the money on university faculty who want the money and who would want to do research in this arena because you get this synergistic effect of all these people working on it.
Even if it's just part‑time, they come to the meetings. They report on things. They have discussions. They get stimulated. They get inspired, whatever. Then they go out and maybe do some neat work.
I think the philosophy of the Wilderness Management Research unit in those days was really an important part in advancing our knowledge about wilderness. Whether it's the biophysical impacts ‑‑ of course there was just you, and then Jeff Marion came along ‑‑ biophysical impacts or the social side and the integration of those, how we can put those things together.
If it had been a different philosophy, I think the whole unit would have been a failure, actually. There would just been a couple or three people in their silos.
David:  I agree that it's a good model. It seems to me like it's a fairly common model. I wonder if there's some reason why it worked particularly. It could be personalities. The thing that I think back on now that I didn't realize so much going through it was the degree to which this was really pioneering so everything was just starting. You're filling a vacuum. I wonder if a lot of the reason why it seemed to work fairly well was because of that situation. I don't know if you have any thoughts on this.
Steve:  I haven't thought of it in that particular way, but you're right. I think people when they talked about wilderness back then they said, “I don't have any references to look back on." There are just a few.
David:  You're filling a vacuum in an empty...
Steve:  Here's something to build knowledge around. Now you're causing me to think about what we're doing in Brazil. There, they don't have a literature to draw upon. They've got a lot of scientists. They've actually got quite a group of people that are interested. It's a lot of academics. The central management agency the Chico Mendes Institute has a research wing, but it doesn't do anything like we're talking about here. It's all biodiversity. How many different plants and animals do we have? That kind of stuff. It's not even management of those.
Several years ago, a group of us in this community of practice decided to put together an edited volume in English, rather than Portuguese, to have wider dispersion accessibility for researchers outside of Brazil, to know what Brazilians are doing, to make more of a basis for talking about things.
There is a gap there. Then there was a gap here. There wasn't much of a literature. I'm trying to think, the first Wilderness Science Symposium, the one in Fort Collins, it produced two volumes.
Then in 2000, we had the Wilderness Science Symposium in Missoula and produced five volumes. We went from two to five, developing a science around the notion of wilderness.
David:  A science. Just listening to you talk about Brazil, the phrase you've used multiple times is "community of practice." What it's made me think is maybe one of the things that was unique about the Wilderness Management Unit was that they were intuitively central to a community of practice that was developing. They weren’t using the phrase “community of practice,” but that’s how I felt when I joined George and Bob here with all their academic and manager connections. That sense of community was relatively unique and part of what we were talking about here.
Steve:  I think this integration if you will, or collegiality, or whatever, was also pretty critical. In my mind, I think I mentioned a little while ago that advances like ROS and LAC, they were advances because it was a collaborative effort between managers and scientists. 
David:  Our Bob Marshall demonstration project was a huge manager/science collaboration, and then all the different kinds of science.
Steve:  There wouldn't have been the advance had there not been that collaboration. We didn't have that term, community. I know that when we were going through the LAC process, and having our meetings with the various district resource assistants, we'd go up to Lincoln or wherever. I always looked forward to that. I always looked forward to talking with the managerial staff. There were exceptions, but most of the time it was good. It was tough talk at times, but it was always positive and forward‑looking. Even some of the very practical oriented people from the management side were making major contributions to how we could take LAC and apply it in the Bob.
This collegiality, this interaction with the management, it forced scientists to respond to managerial needs. You had these three personalities, you guys, the three of you, were very sensitive to those. You could have said, I'm not interested in this. 
I remember being in Montenegro a few years ago. Because they have essentially the same grizzly bears, European Brown Bears and wolves there, I asked them, "How many do you have?" Just out of curiosity I was interviewing the park system director. He says, "We don't know." I said, "Well why don't you go to the university here and ask if they've got a graduate student that'd like to go out and count wolves and bears?" He said, "We've done that, and they have no interest at all in any organism above the scale of a cell." Well in the United States you'd have 50 volunteers to go do this. That isolation, fortunately, did not exist. This is part of this whole collegiality of thinking that people in a variety of domains have something to contribute, some kind of knowledge.
It doesn't have to be formal empirical knowledge, it can be experiential knowledge. And you respect that. To me, I'm thinking now, of course, putting words into my experience that I never had at the time, that this was why the project was so well‑respected, and so productive, and so central to expanding our knowledge of wilderness both in the social and the biophysical domain.
David:  I think there are a lot of other research projects that have money that they can give to academics to work on projects with them. That similarity is there. But I think that what we did was create more of a community of practice than is commonly the case. That might be a lot of what we're talking about here. 
I think we're kind of winding down here. Is there anything else you want to talk about? Whether you do or don't, other questions would be, are there any projects that were the most fun that you ever did or are there things that you are most proud of?
Steve:  I think one of the central things that I look back on that changed my life professionally was being up on the Flathead for a year, and that involved the application of limits of acceptable change during that period. It gave me a foundation – a basis on which I could think more about the future and have a better relation to what other people were thinking, being a little bit more tolerant of other people.
Obviously, I thought working on my dissertation was an important dimension of my life, working up in the Boundary Waters. In two years I got to see a lot of the Boundary Waters. I got a chance to really enjoy camping and dealing with inclement weather and things like that.
David:  Mosquitoes.
Steve:  Mosquitoes, yes. Lots of mosquitoes. 
This experience of being asked now to do a lot of things...You go from information and knowledge eventually to wisdom. I don't know if I really have wisdom, but that's what it feels like, because all I do is talk to people. I don't do anything.
It's great to see people happy and excited about some things that we talk about. I think basically I am the luckiest person in the world. I get to work with incredible people who are doing really neat things in absolutely fantastic places. What more could you ask for.
David:  Sounds like that's a perfect place to end the interview.