Dave Lime, Interviewed by Steve McCool
 
Steve McCool:  I'm speaking with Dave Lime, who was a scientist with the North Central Research Station in St. Paul and later worked on the University of Minnesota faculty. He did a lot of early wilderness and wilderness related research. Dave, what we're particularly interested in are early experiences that contributed to your interest in wilderness and wilderness related research. How did you get started with Forest Service research and in wilderness?
Dave Lime:  I suspect most of my interest early was that I liked the out of doors. I grew up in Ohio and spent some time on the islands of western Lake Erie. I liked the solitude of going to places where there weren't many people around.
I liked to fish and had the opportunity to do it in Minnesota a couple of times as a kid. When I was looking for a dissertation topic at the University of Pittsburgh, for a variety of reasons I gravitated towards outdoor recreation and natural resources. I majored in geology for a while, and then switched to geography. How people related to landscapes, what turned them on, and what they liked and disliked, I suppose contributed to my interest.
I had parents that didn't care much about the out of doors. When I got interested in it, it was my escape. I'd read a couple of articles by Marion Clawson. Many people probably don't know who he was but he was an economist who wrote a couple of really interesting papers. One of them was called, "The Crisis in Outdoor Recreation," which might have appeared in "The Journal of Forestry." 
At any rate, this was around 1964--maybe 63 or 65. There was a boom in outdoor recreation. Clawson had described that phenomenon and then talked about the problems that went with it. I was trying to do a dissertation as part of my graduate work and this seemed like a pretty neat topic because it combined people with geography and landscapes. I read any of his work that I could get a hold of.
Steve:  He was one of the few people writing about this kind of stuff.
Dave:  There weren't many. References to who was doing this kind of work were basically unknown to me.
He wrote a book. I can't think of the name of it. It wasn't really big. I must've read that thing four or five times, thinking about doing some kind of project on outdoor recreation.
That was when I was doing my master's paper. I looked at recreational use of Corps of Engineers reservoirs in western Pennsylvania and northeastern Ohio. I found out such things as the agencies had no idea how many people used their facilities and resources. They didn't have any idea. They almost made up numbers. It seemed weird that there's all this demand and interest in visitor use of places, and they have no idea how they're used, by whom, and how many. That's a problem.
At any rate, I met Bob Lucas at the National Association of American Geographers conference in St. Louis. I knew a guy at Ohio State named Carlton Van Doren, who had done his PhD work in recreation. He, through a friend, got Bob Lucas and I together at the conference. Bob was a geographer from the Twin Cities in charge of a research program into wildland use of public lands. Bob and I hit it off. Within a few weeks I had an offer for a job to go to Minnesota.
Steve:  This was in what period of time? The mid 1960s?
Dave:  Yeah, it would have been 1966. That was a couple of years after the passage of the Wilderness Act. I had no idea what that was. There really wasn't very much literature. At the University of Pittsburgh there wasn't a forestry program that I remember. There was nobody in that department interested in natural resource issues like wilderness research.
My advisor was into water issues and water problems. He understood the Corps of Engineers stuff. We hit it off, but by June of 1967 I moved with our family to Minneapolis‑St. Paul and was immediately introduced to the Superior National Forest, which to me was like, I don't know, going to heaven.
I don't know where the connection with wilderness came in. It was just this was pretty neat country. I learned to canoe. Found out you could actually catch fish that weren't bullheads and carp from Ohio. Something about it excited me.
But I was also interested in getting a dissertation. At the time I went to Minnesota I really didn't have one in mind. Through the Forest Service research station, Bob Lucas, and other collaborators with Bob and the forestry program at the University of Minnesota—particularly Larry Merriam, the principal recreation professor, I decided to do something on recreational use in the Superior National Forest.
I'm not sure what led to what but I decided to work on auto access or vehicle access campgrounds on the Superior National Forest. After I'd seen them, the question I had was why were so many of these places heavily used when other ones were very lightly used in terms of occupancy rates.
For lack of a better project, that became my dissertation. In the process I found out that a lot of the people that used those campgrounds went into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, the wilderness adjacent to those campgrounds.
I was using the Boundary Waters some. It was wildland. But the idea of wilderness as a formal entity didn’t have much influence on me then.
Steve:  It was an evolution. You were a geographer interested in spatial relationships and the Superior National Forest. Then you started finding out that people that were using these campsites were actually accessing the wilderness. The study of wilderness, per se, or visitor use in wilderness was not something that you made an explicit decision upon, at least when you were starting to work on your dissertation.
Dave:  No, because wildland was wildland. What you called it was whatever. As far as I was concerned, everything north of Duluth, Minnesota was wilderness for a kid who grew up in an industrial small town in central Ohio. Maybe it brought back memories or connections to the time I spent alone on Lake Erie.
Steve:  At the time your principal collaboration was with Bob Lucas. Is that right? 
Dave:  He was my work supervisor.
Steve:  Were there other Forest Service researchers that you engaged with at that time.
Dave:  At that time, my only exposure was through the literature that I was exposed to, because I started in 1967--people like Al Wagar, Wilbur LaPage, and George Stankey, who was hired a year or so after I was hired. I didn't meet any of those people until a couple of years later.
There were some other university folks that were doing wildland wilderness kind of projects. Many or most of them had a connection with the Forest Service. I think Larry Merriam did, although he was connected to the Park Service as well.
Steve:  And there was Marion Clawson.
Dave:  Marion Clawson had written about the whole topic of the growing use of recreational areas, impacts to resources like trails and water quality, and potential impacts on wildlife, habitat, and whatnot. More and more people meant more and more congestion. And that was associated with traffic problems.
Bob Lucas, for example, in his research in the Boundary Waters, had shown that congestion and crowding were issues that, over time, and maybe even when the Wilderness Act was passed, were going to have to be addressed.
I got partway through my dissertation and the topic of crowding in the Boundary Waters, as the most heavily used wilderness in the country, was coming to the forefront. I knew when I started-- when Bob Lucas hired me--that eventually, if I stayed with the Forest Service, I was going to get involved in some way or another with wilderness use in the Minnesota canoe country.
I wasn't finished with my dissertation when I was already talking to Forest Service people about issues related to crowding and congestion in the Boundary Waters.
Shortly after the Wilderness Act passed—when Bob Lucas was at the Lake States Forest Experiment Station—he, along with people from the Forest Service, established a process to gather information about people who used the wilderness. A permit system was adopted where groups that went into the Boundary Waters had to document where they were from, how long they were going into the Boundary Waters, how many people were in their group, where they started their trip and so on. That data needed to be analyzed.
One of the first things I got involved in was trying to expand the use of data collected from those permits, so it would be more helpful to managers rather than just facts that are interesting to know, like how many people used the Boundary Waters this year and what was the average party size. You could really glean a whole lot more information by doing comparative analysis of different variables.
By the time we messed around with it for a couple different years, the Forest Service went from collecting about six or seven variables on visitor use to producing 150 different tables. For example, they could compare party size by entry point to find out which entries and areas of the wilderness were used more by large groups than by small groups.
Steve:  Dave, at this time you were focused on what was going on in the Boundary Waters. Is that right? You were greatly influenced by it because of the use levels, congestion, and the impacts that were occurring there. Your geography was pretty much, at least in the late '60s and early '70s, limited to the Boundary Waters. Is that right?
Dave:  It was because there was nobody else at the Station doing wilderness or wildland research. I was the only one.
Steve:  Because, at the time, Bob Lucas had moved to Missoula.
Dave:  He moved to Missoula.
Steve:  Then you began broadening the questions you asked. The carrying capacity article you put together in 1970 or '71. That was something that was influenced by the Boundary Waters work, I assume.
Dave:  It was, but I was trying to be, for lack of a better word, conceptual. Conceptual in terms of saying if crowding was a problem, what's the logical way to study it? And so what?
To deal with carrying capacity, managers needed to define the problem and define an acceptable condition or acceptable level of use which could be achieved. Then they needed to gather information to find out whether that level of negative impact had been exceeded. Were the levels of resource impact on campsites—something Larry Merriam and others in the College of Forestry were studying—and the ability to find solitude or enjoy a low level of use acceptable or not?
Bob Lucas and some others earlier had at least come up with ways to gather information to show that there are norms out there of the kind of experiences that people are looking for. It's not acceptable to say, "Come one, come all," which some agencies seemed to be promoting. "It doesn't matter how many people come. We'll figure out a way to accommodate them."
That was the argument I heard from talking to managers, some academic types and some researchers, "What's the big deal? We're there to provide opportunities for the public so it doesn't matter how many people come." To me, that didn't seem like a logical argument.
I think what the people who were doing this carrying capacity stuff were trying to arrive at was a way of thinking about a potential problem that was out there and how you might define the problem and then study it.
Steve:  I think one of the messages I'm getting is the stuff about carrying capacity, you and other people, Bob, George, and a couple others were writing about at the time, wasn't so much about finding a magic number. It was about a way of conceptualizing use management problems.
Dave:  It was about thinking about the problem.
Steve:  Let me ask you when you gradually started moving into talking about wilderness in your work, which you did in several papers in the 1970s. Was there a realization that, "Oh, I'm studying wilderness, and that's something unique" or was it more just that this is a problem that has to be solved. I’m studying visitor use that just happens to be occurring in wilderness?
Dave:  I don't think I thought about it, because when Bob Lucas left for the Wilderness Research Unit in Missoula, I was pretty much on my own to survive or not survive.
Locally there were people like you and other grad students, Larry Merriam and Tim Knopf, John Borchert in geography. It was obvious to me that the Superior National Forest had enough problems related to human use of wilderness that I could have done a whole career just with the Boundary Waters. There were so many problems to solve. It was more than just I could be involved in solving. It was easy to come up with topics.
I don't know if I'm answering the question the way you wanted.
Steve:  Let's ask it this way. It appears that your choice of topics to research was pretty much influenced by the kind of interaction and dialog you had with the managers.
Dave:  That's right.
Steve:  The research that you did had a very direct utilitarian value. There was a problem to be solved and you had the skills and interest to be able to help solve the problem.
Dave:  If they say there's a problem to be solved, you still have to think about how to study it and how the problem should be addressed. The whole time I was with the Forest Service, I felt I was very, very strongly influenced by problem solving through the forest. It started with thinking about the topic of carrying capacity and how to build on what other people had done before.
It just so happened that folks like George Stankey, Bob Lucas and others were thinking the same way--that carrying capacity had to be addressed by a new way of thinking. That led to LAC [Limits of Acceptable Change] which I wasn't directly involved with. But I always felt I was peripherally involved with it.
Steve:  Yeah, I think in some of those papers in the early '70s you were talking about the notion of acceptability.
Dave:  That's true, but I didn't have a cadre of folks to collaborate with, so I was more focused on what the Superior National Forest needs answers for. They were talking about everything from should we limit party sizes to try and reduce impacts on campsites and all the noise that comes with large groups getting together. When I started, I don't think there was a party size limit.
Steve:  No, not for a long time.
Dave:  There was heavy congestion on portages and public landings and competition for campsites. Something was going to have to be done to reduce the congestion on certain routes. A guy by the name of George Peterson, who was a civil engineering professor at Northwestern University, spent a year with us in the mid '70s.
In the late '60s, early '70s, he--as a user of the wilderness--connected with our experiment station. George and I worked on the whole topic of traffic flow in wilderness. If you knew how people traveled and where they camped and how long they stayed in the wilderness and all that, maybe traffic could be predicted and entry rates could be determined that would reduce travel congestion.
With very sympathetic and interested managers from the bottom to the top, that stuff was implemented. About 1972 or 1973, a whole bunch of decisions were made based on wilderness research for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area that I think had implications service wide. I am talking about entry rate, entry quotas, party size limits, the issue of acceptability of the public to banning cans and bottles in the wilderness.
We had a really responsive audience which I've always argued is critical if you're going to do applied research. It’s important to get onboard with the people who are the decision makers. They should be calling for the research and saying, "We can use it." I think there's been a real mistake—that a lot of the work done by researchers, including wilderness researchers, is just moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic. They're not solving problems where the solutions can be used. I don't know what they're doing.
I felt lucky--as somebody that wasn't in a big collaborative group—to have had such an interested and supportive set of management people that were willing and able and very interested in using research results to solve their problems. 
That affected my publishing. I didn't publish stuff on the congestion and crowding in the Boundary Waters, because I was spending most of the time meeting with them to talk about how the research should be used. That was a mistake by some people's definitions. If I had to make some errors, I sure vote for that over sitting in an office, dreaming up another refereed journal article. 
Steve:  I have a couple more questions for you. You mentioned Bob Lucas moving out to Missoula. That was in '67. During the year or two following that what kind of working or collaborative relationship did you have with Bob. Bob had hired George Stankey and later David Cole to work there. Did you work with those folks?
Dave:  I felt like I did, but distance is always a factor. They collaborated more with their own but Stankey and I wrote a couple of papers together. We put a bibliography on carrying capacity together. It was sort of for our own education. It got, I thought, quite a bit of interest. A lot of people found out there'd been an awful lot of stuff that had been written--and not necessarily in some real narrow focused discipline--that could be brought to bear on the topic of acceptability and managing for what was defined as quality resources and experiences.
I didn't think that bibliography would go anywhere. We put together a copy of it for some meeting or something that's almost a mimeographed document and there was a lot of interest in that. No, I felt there was a lot of collaboration. Certainly, I felt like I used them, the folks there, as direct colleagues. As I did through communication with folks like Al Wagar and Wilbur LaPage.
Steve:  When I look back over the history of recreation research, the major advances and where the leaps were made, they all seem to have one characteristic in common and that's collaboration between researchers and managers on a particular problem.
The research had a problem focus but researchers, like you and the people you just mentioned had a strong managerial focus. That's how they learned better what the problem was and the managers learned better what the researchers had to offer. Working together seemed to move the field much further ahead than when the researchers were sitting up in their ivory tower.
Dave:  I agree. It certainly did for me. In every discipline--I don't care if it's geography or rural sociology or history or whatever--there are people who see a relationship between what they might do and how it might get used, and that's critical to them. This contrasts with others who work, for lack of a better word, on basic knowledge or basic science. Whether it gets used or not is not their purpose.
I came from the group that said, "You better define the problem rather than have a solution in search of a problem." My observation and memory tells me that there was way too much of the latter that said, "Well, we have the solution. We have no idea what the problem is, but we certainly have the solution to what might be a problem."
I always felt, "You better define the problem first and then figure out the kind of information you need and how to present it so that it helps solve that problem." If you can do that, it's a win‑win deal.
Steve:  That's a lesson we really haven't learned very well in our field. There's too much separation of academia and managers when it comes to doing research on real world problems. But there's also a good case to be made for doing basic research.
Dave:  Sure there is.
Steve:  In terms of research that's going to change policy and management, that's where that collaboration, I think, is pretty essential.
Dave:  If I work for the Forest Service, I should be trying to help them solve problems. If I'm working for the university, you can make all kinds of arguments for what you're doing. The fact of the matter was, in my opinion, an awful lot of the folks that ended up in the academic world, dealing with wilderness and outdoor recreation, were supported by, worked for or got their start through Forest Service research.
Steve:  That's right. That was my history and that of many others.
Dave:  I remember when my project got expanded to do river related research on human use of water resources, we had a lot of outside research projects at universities. The students that were employed either by us or by the faculty in those universities now lead the field in recreation research. I think the history of Forest Service research is that those people really led the curve on the whole area of leisure and recreation research. There weren't hardly any universities that had outdoor recreation departments.
By 1980, most of the academic programs that had advanced were led by students that had come out of Forest Service research projects. That is a heck of a positive and a reason we should appreciate guys like Lucas, Wagar, LaPage and a few others who started this thing.
Steve:  This was when the Forest Service research was done with universities and it not only helped solve a specific problem in the short run, it also built the capacity institutionally in universities to have even more problem solving capacity.
One last question and that is what led to you deciding not to do any more wilderness research?
Dave:  I retired.
Steve:  You retired. You had it. You’ve done your thing.
Dave:  I felt like I was involved in "Wilderness research" my whole career because I never was involved in projects directly related to urban use of neighborhood parks or cemeteries as recreational open space. I always worked on resource based problems. At least I felt that's what I was doing even when I went to the University of Minnesota, and worked as research project leader for the National Park Service as a non‑park service employee.