George Stankey, interviewed by David Cole on April 25, 2017
 David Cole:  George, why don't you tell us a little bit about how you came to be working with Bob Lucas on wilderness issues?
George Stankey:  As I've thought about where this interest really came from, I have a hard time really pinning it down. I was an undergraduate at Oregon State in their department of geography. I had a strong interest in natural resources. When I had started college, I had actually majored in fish and wildlife, and for one reason or another, had moved away from that into geography.
My interest in recreation led me to recreational geography where I first came across Bob Lucas' name. He had already published some of his early work, which had been the basis of his dissertation at the University of Minnesota.
David:  Did your interest in recreation come from a personal avocation?
George:  Yeah, I think that's some of it. I remember we used to do a lot of things with my folks, with some friends, did a lot of hiking, camping, and so forth, fishing. As I try to reflect back, I think that's probably where the nub of this interest arose, still pretty unfocused.
I think that when I was an undergraduate, and I stayed at Oregon State to get my master's degree, people would've probably described me as being, "Oh yeah, he's one of those recreational geographers."
My master's thesis was about recreation planning methodologies.
David:  Did they have a recreation geographer at Oregon State?
George:  Not really. There was one professor who had a vague tie, but it was marginal at best. There was no real core of expertise or emphasis there.
I had, frankly, never thought about going on for a PhD. The summer I finished my undergraduate degree, I worked up in Washington in a regional planning office which I kind of liked. I think I probably thought, "Oh, this is probably what I'll end up doing the rest of my life--working in this kind of a place."
I came back down to Corvallis, did my master's degree. That went well, and went fairly quickly. There was faculty support for me saying, "You know, you ought to think about going on for a PhD." I started thinking about it. Everyone who's been through that always says, "Oh, my god, what do I have to do? I'm not smart enough. It’s too hard," etc.
I fired off a few letters based on recommendations for graduate school, one of which was to Michigan State in East Lansing. I'll be candid. I ended up picking theirs because they gave me the most money for a graduate assistantship.
Plus, I knew there were some other attractive people on that campus, particularly Michael Chubb, a Brit who had already appeared in the recreation literature and was in the geography department. He was also a faculty member in the department of resource development, which was headed up by a guy named Raleigh Barlow at Michigan State.
I went to Michigan State, launched my career, and spent two academic years there. Then, as often happens in life, a fortuitous event occurred.
As an aside, just before I retired, a friend of mine in the wildlife program at Oregon State University asked me if I would talk to his graduate students about my career. He wanted me to talk about working in natural resources as a social scientist. I said I'd do that. In fact, I entitled my little talk as "A Stranger in a Strange Land" because it was living in a different culture, a different language, different worldviews, and what have you.
At the end of that, one of the students raised his hand. "Dr. Stankey", he asked, "What was the strategy you had when you started out, to get from where you were when you started out, to where you are now?" I told him maybe it's just me, but I have not lived my life by laying out a linear and predictable strategy. Things happen, and you grab them or you don't and you move on.
Anyway, one day I was coming down the hall and the chair of the department, Larry Sommers, came out of his office. He said, "Oh, I've been looking for you. I have a letter here from Bob Lucas over in Minneapolis‑St. Paul. He's looking for someone to work over there in that program that deals with the Quetico‑Superior Country." Something along those lines.
He made me a copy of the letter. I thought, "Well, why not?" I sent off a letter. Eventually, Bob got back in touch with me by correspondence. We bounced letters back and forth about interests. Finally, he said, "I think the best thing would be for you to come over, so we can sit down face to face and talk about this."
David:  Would this have been 1966?
George:  This was in 1967, probably midyear 1967.
I did. I drove over to Minneapolis‑St. Paul and in the morning met with Bob at the Lake States Experiment Station. We get there and sit down in Bob's office. He says, "Well, before we talk about anything, I have to tell you, there's been a big change."
I remember thinking to myself, "The job is gone or something like that. You're not going to offer it." He said, "I've just been notified that I'm being transferred to start a new research unit. It's going to be in Missoula, Montana, dealing with wilderness management."
He said, "Right now, as far as our discussions go, the thing to think about is, I have authority to hire somebody to work for me in Missoula. I also have authority to hire somebody to replace me here in Minneapolis."
Every time I've related this story, I've always made the point, after a nanosecond of reflection, I said, "Well, Missoula sounds real good to me." I had been to Missoula. I also knew the reputation, weather‑wise, of Minneapolis‑St. Paul, and that didn't have much appeal for me. "No," I said, "I think Missoula sounds really interesting." He said, "Fine."
He wanted to know where I was in my doctoral program and what my interests were He said that one of the first things he would do when he got to Missoula was to prepare some sort of a broad problem statement around which the mission of the wilderness management unit would be focused. He said it would just be myself and you or whoever else I hire. He said these are very broad problem areas but it gives us some idea of the scope of what we might do. He said, "As I get that drafted, I'll let you have a copy." We had a pleasant exchange, but no promises were made at the time and I ended up driving back to East Lansing. I felt pretty optimistic.
David:  Obviously you guys must have had shared interests. What was the nature of those shared interests?
George:  I was attracted to Bob’s work on the ways in which perceptions affect how humans use, value, and understand the environments around them. I had gotten very interested in the body of work that had come out of the University of Chicago in the '60s, the Gilbert White group there looking at the perception of natural hazards, for example. Also, while I was at Michigan State, we had some visiting faculty who were well aware of Bob's work. Julian Wolpert was one of those people. I think Julian had been at the University of Pennsylvania, but he knew Bob pretty well and really liked the work he'd been doing. He spent a quarter or so at East Lansing. I had a chance to interact with him quite a bit, and he encouraged my work.
I had written some class papers, projects for individual classes, around the issue of the role of perception, and particularly as it related to recreation in general and wilderness in particular. Julian Wolpert had shared one of those papers with Bob. I think that was probably what gave me a leg up though I didn't realize this until later on.
Looking back on my time at Michigan State, it was a really good time because of the interesting cadre of fellow graduate students from all sorts of disciplines. It was really a collegial environment. I wasn't a big fan of East Lansing but I had a wonderful time in the educational institution.
That was matched by the fact that we had a great faculty, and one in which there were not only the kind of traditional academic and professional links between graduates and the faculty, but also social. Again, it was very collegial and I often thought this is a great way to work. People who have very disparate interests nevertheless are interested in what you're doing and vice versa. 
It was in early 1968. The only thing I had heard from Bob Lucas was "Well, I'm on my way," or "I'm in Missoula." Then I got a letter from the station headquarters in Ogden, Utah, saying, "You've been selected."
David:  Did you apply?
George:  Yeah. I had to fill out some stuff. I think one was the old standard form SF171 or whatever the hell it was. Yeah, I had sent that in as part of a standard package, but there was, for example, no full interviews or anything like that.
I don't even recall if Bob called. It was just that, "OK, we understand you'll be done with your classes in June, and at some point make yourself available in Missoula." So I did.
When I left Michigan State ‑‑ this would have been in early June of 1968 ‑‑ I had finished all my course work and got my language stuff out of the way, but I still had the dissertation to do. Bob recognized that my first priority should be finishing the dissertation, before moving on to other sorts of documents and outputs for the Forest Service. He also suggested that the problem analysis he had written for the research unit ought to include topics that would be acceptable to my academic masters as well as what we would be looking for, too.
David:  In other words, why don't you wait until you start working here before we decide what the dissertation is going to be on?
George:  Exactly. He had sent me some early drafts of what he had been working on. I had always been intrigued with his dissertation and the subsequent policy issues that came out of that. I thought there was a conceptual link between his work and things I had done as a graduate student and would enjoy doing further work on. 
When I got to Missoula in June of '68, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me now, I picked the issue of carrying capacity to work on and immediately began working in earnest to craft a detailed study plan.
David:  Had you been studying capacity at Michigan State? 
George:  Yeah, I did, particularly after I interviewed with Bob in the fall of '67. I was fairly optimistic that this could work out and recognized that I needed to get serious about what I was going to do. 
The reality, however, was that little work had ever been done on capacity from a social point of view. Bob's work broke in new territory, but there had not been a lot of subsequent work either on conceptual frameworks or methodology. So I was looking at a wider literature than just in the field of recreation and wilderness.
I had my work cut out for me when I got to Missoula. At that time, the Missoula lab was a very small place, probably 20 scientists there, mostly foresters, wildlife biologists and a couple of engineers. Bob and I, as social scientists, had very different perspectives and interests. 
The other person who was on the scene at that time, who I found a great colleague and friend was Sid Frissell. Sid had come from the University of Minnesota. He had come after Bob had arrived but before I did. Bob immediately got me connected with Sid and we spent a lot of time talking. We went out on one of my first backcountry trips into what was called the Lincoln backcountry at that time. It’s now the Scapegoat Wilderness. I began to rely on Sid because Sid had a strong, biological background that complemented Bob's social science expertise. I started thinking about ways to bring these two components together.
I went through over probably the next year ‑‑ it wasn't quite a year ‑‑ getting my study plan prepared. It was not without its blood, sweat and tears. Eventually, Bob was happy with the plan and signed off. I went through the organizational approval process and then had to start getting things like surveys prepared, picking out study areas and so forth. By June of '69, we were in the position where we had the survey instrument. It'd been through the Office of Management and Budget approval process, which was another interesting educational experience for me. We hired seasonal help to work with that.
David:  You must have also gotten approval from the Michigan State academic folk.
George:  It was interesting because when I left Michigan State I had not decided who would be my major professor. Mike Chubb hadn't finished his dissertation yet and was struggling to get through and there was no other obvious choice. I ended up being graciously and helpfully taken on by Professor Ian Mattley--a Soviet specialist with strong interest in natural resources.
I had taken several classes from him and got to know him pretty well. He stepped in, signed the papers. I made sure I kept in touch with him, "Here's where I'm at right now," and most of his responses were, "OK, great. Looks like you're doing fine." That summer of 1969 was my launch into the field side of things.
By September, we had data from our four study areas. One of the other interesting issues, and I reflect on this occasionally, I faced a major data processing challenge with all that data and there simply wasn't much available at that time.
This was well before SPSS and similar kinds of things. I think a friend of mine knew a friend in the business school who was interested in programming. I hooked up with this guy who was developing one of the early forerunners of an SPSS kind of data package.
Another problem was the lack of computing capacity in Missoula. The only place it was available was in Helena in the State Highway Department computer banks, which this guy had negotiated access to but only on Saturdays.
We would work all week in Missoula getting the data together. This was when data was on cards. Then we would get up on Saturday morning at seven o'clock, drive over to Helena, get a couple extra cups of coffee and then be there until five o'clock that night. There was a technician from the Highway Department to help out but there were lots of aborted efforts.
But we did it. With the analysis complete, it became a fairly typical story of grinding out the chapters. I had increased my contact at that point with Michigan State because the first product was going to be the dissertation. Mike Chubb was more involved now as a committee member. 
David:  Were there other people you want to mention as influences?
George:  I've already touched on the traditions of Gilbert White and Bob Kates and some of those people were important. At Missoula, it was primarily Bob and Sid. 
The other person who I made early contact with was the person who replaced Bob at St. Paul--David Lime. Dave was a University of Pittsburgh graduate in geography, He had worked in the Boundary Waters. Dave was a great source of local knowledge about the Boundary Waters as well as an important professional colleague to bounce ideas off and so forth. We spent a lot of time on the phone. Or in those days, written correspondence back and forth. He'd look at drafts of stuff I was doing. 
I didn't have much contact with any of the other folks in Forest Service recreation research. It was almost too early. Wilber LaPage was back in New England. I'd always enjoyed reading Wilber's stuff but he was, in a sense, too far away to be much of a direct influence on me. It was primarily Bob.
The other person I got introduced to in 1969 was Perry Brown. Perry was in Logan at Utah State. One of our assistant directors, Blair Hutchinson, came by my office one day. We were chatting and out of the clear, blue sky, he says, "There's a guy down at Utah State you probably would enjoy interacting with, Perry Brown." That's how I almost accidentally made a connection and contact that I maintain even today.
David:  How did you transition from the dissertation to Forest Service work?
George: By early '70, I had got my dissertation whipped into shape and I defended it later that year. Now my work shifted to making my work available in published outlets as well as disseminating results through face‑to‑face meetings with managers. In the early part of my career I spent a lot of time on the road, interacting with resource managers. 
One of the people who had appeared on the scene in Missoula was Dick Joy. Dick was the wilderness specialist in the regional office in Missoula. He'd been a district ranger and was well respected in his side of things. He'd go on the road with both Bob and I, on field trips and interacting with managers. He was instrumental in helping set up and attending workshops and trainings from the district level on up to the region.
I discovered that I really enjoyed that kind of interaction. The face‑to‑face kind. I always enjoyed writing. That was not a downside of my job but I did enjoy interaction. The other thing, which struck me early on is that people like Bob and myself, within the network of the Forest Service, were a rare breed.
David:  Because you were social scientists?
George:  Yes. At that time, you could literally count the number of social scientists in the Forest Service on one hand.
This was my introduction to something that would follow me the rest of my life. I found that people with a variety of concerns, problems and challenges facing them—often having little to do with recreation or wilderness—would call, come by and ask "Can you tell us what we should do here?"
So it was an interesting and exciting time. Again, we're talking about the early/mid‑'70s, the increasing recognition of the social side of natural resource management. This was a time when I first confronted the issue of whether I had a professional obligation by virtue of my academic background and training and perspective as a social scientist to try to help respond in a constructive manner to other demands--beyond just recreation. We were a wilderness management research unit and money allocated to us was supposed to be spent on wilderness management--or that's the theory. But what happens when people come and say, "I've got this issue," for example, "regarding public participation in decision making," or, "regarding management of fire"? 
We ended up trying to do both. We'd try to be honest to the budgetary mandates and procedures but also to be responsive to a wider range of issues. That was a very exciting part of the job. There was always something fascinating going on.
David:  Coming back to your personal interests, how central was your interest in wilderness, which can then be nested within recreation issues more broadly, which can then be nested within the whole range of social science? How did that change over time?
George:  I always had a visceral connection with wilderness as a topic. I still think it's an important, relevant concept in the larger fabric of the affairs that humans face. I still look at the Wilderness Act and development of the wilderness system around the world as something of international repute and significance. 
I was fortunate very early to start getting tapped for opportunities internationally. It was exciting. I started getting inquiries from other countries. That made it even more difficult to set my own personal boundaries? There's only so much time, so much energy to do everything. But I kept the bulk of my effort for the first dozen or so years on wilderness, even though I found myself reaching out into some other areas, some of which I was quite interested in, some of which, not so much.
David: Tell me about your interactions with John Hendee.
George: When John Hendee first appeared in Seattle, we had some interaction and I remember sending him my study plan and I got a great review back from John. That would've been 1969 or 70. He was following up on work that he had done in the Cascades with other folks in the Northwest. His research program ‑‑ he was the project leader in Seattle ‑‑ was focused on semi‑primitive recreation. He worked in wilderness given his level of personal interest but he very quickly moved on to a range of other things.
He was the one who in the 70s raised the idea ‑‑ initially with Bob and later with me – that we need a textbook for wilderness managers. Bob and John were never compatible. John had a monstrous personality and Bob was a more retiring person in that sense. But I had several meetings with John about the book. He and I attended the SAF meeting in New York City, where John announced that he had found a publisher for the wilderness book -- Macmillan Publishing. It'd be an exaggeration to say I was just green at this sort of thing. I had no idea. But John and I went over to Macmillan and we spent a couple of hours with an editor. They were quite interested in doing a wilderness book, so we signed some papers. 
It wasn't long after I got back, that I discovered that we couldn't do this. Fortunately, Macmillan realized that we couldn't do it and wrote it off. To say we dodged a bullet is an understatement.
Then we entered into some discussion with the government printing office as to whether they'd be interested in the book.
As we put the outline for the book together, we realized that one of the important chapters in a book like that would be a series of principles to help natural resource managers, in general, and wilderness managers, in particular, work through problems. This became something that interested me the rest of my career. One of the most powerful tools to give people is a framework for thinking about problems because you cannot anticipate or predict all the things that are going to come up.
One of the things that struck me was an increasing recognition that wilderness management was a challenging arena for managers to work in. It deserved more emphasis, more attention and more resources to help do well.
Even with that, big challenges to wilderness management lay outside the wilderness. There were two levels. One was that we can try to manage a wilderness based on our best understanding of what a wilderness is supposed to be, but it will always be profoundly affected by external land uses, access patterns, resource uses and so forth. It was clear that lots of management problems that were driving wilderness managers to stay awake all night were a product of decisions made in other functional areas by the other organizations all together, public or private.
The other issue that struck me was in a political system like we have – a Western democracy -- the future of wilderness was dependent on what you did across the much wider spectrum of activities. It's an equity issue. I became convinced that there's no way you can protect and defend a viable wilderness system if other sectors of that system are corrupt or unfulfilled. If we don't meet the needs of people in the inner city, etc., you can't do it. This will not work in a political system like ours. Eventually, the pressure will crush it, to everyone's great detriment. That may have been, when I first started thinking, "Where do my interests really lie here?" I don't think it was ever really that explicit. Just this growing conviction that we need to look at a broader canvas.
David: Tell me more about this broader array of issues. 
George:  I came to realize that the management challenges we face are not just technical problems. They're social and political. One of the descriptions of those kinds of problems was always, "They don't really have any answers. They only have more or less useful solutions for dealing with them." In a complex and diverse kind of society, that means nothing will be satisfactory to everyone. We have to frame it within a broader democratic system.
Probably one of the first major places that happened was public participation. We had a national recreation research meeting in Phoenix, where we heard management folks say, "Boy, there's this growing demand for public..."--they didn't even have a very good phrase for it -- public connections, interaction, public relations, those were terms you'd hear a lot.
We had a daylong discussion about this, and there was tremendous resistance to the idea of doing this. I remember sitting in a cafe at night, and one of the Washington office folks took the stool next to me. He told me, "That stuff, we can't do that." I said, "Why not? What's the problem?" He said, "Because there are legislative prohibitions against us spending money on public relations." I thought, "That's interesting," that in his mind, the notions of public relations and public involvement, as it more generally is understood, are synonymous.
After the meeting, Bob and I, Hendee and a couple NFS people put together a budget proposal to the Forest Service for a fairly intensive and short‑lived research effort on public participation. It had several components to it, developing a sounder conceptual framework for what was the role of public involvement versus other management issues, and also the very practical problem of how to process the huge amounts of information that come in? I forget how much money we asked for, but it was a lot. It was probably six figures, and we got $11,000.
We did a national road trip. We went to every region and set up interviews with people across the ranks of NFS about the problems they were facing, how they were responding, challenges, etc. That resulted in a major report to the chief's office.
The second thing we spent time on was how to process all that stuff. This largely pre‑dated computer technology. John Hendee and Roger Clark made the breakthrough and developed a system, which came to be known as Codinvolve, which used the old punch cards that you literally, manually separated using long knitting needles. It worked. It was the sort of thing that untrained people, at a district level, could make work. 
After that, Roger and I put together a proposal to hold a national training session, which was funded by the chief’s office. We ended up in Seattle for three weeks. We had four or five people from every region and the Washington office. Everyone had to bring a case study from home. We helped everyone build their own systems for their case study and learn how to do it in the future. It was an exhausting kind of a session, but it really helped a lot of people, which was tremendously rewarding for us. Again, it also represented my drifting away from wilderness.
David:  We've been talking a fair amount about how your interests have broadened beyond wilderness. Is there anything you want to say about how the work you did in wilderness evolved in the period of time between when you finished your dissertation and when your interests became much broader? You also talked about Dick Joy and increasing interaction with NFS. To what degree did those interactions influence the directions you went?
George:  I was lucky, in the sense that the time we began working in the wilderness arena happened to coincide with the increasing rise of individuals in management, be it NFS, BLM, or National Park Service, who really saw wilderness as a major opportunity, responsibility, and professional challenge. They were, in fact, leading the charge for increasing knowledge of this complex system of wilderness and how to deal with it.
We were already starting to become a little bit worried about the fact that –despite the attention we were giving to social issues in wilderness -- ecological issues, which were equally important, were not getting attention.
I found myself getting interested in fire, probably because across town we had the Northern Forest Fire Lab. There was a lot of interaction between the Forest Sciences Lab on the campus and the Fire Lab. As issues of fire management and some of its social dimensions became apparent, people called up to say that they were going to have a meeting to talk about smoke or fire or questions of trying to use fire as more of a management tool. We need to understand significant social and political consequences associated with these issues, so can you come out and just give us your thoughts? We developed ties with people like Bob Mutch. Mutch was a creative, innovative kind of guy, as was Jim Brown and others out there.
I got interested in the issues of fire management, and how to build better understanding of and support for a more natural role of fire, particularly in an organization which had a history of fire suppression. That led into some interesting work I did with Steve McCool on public knowledge about fire. We discovered that knowledge levels were higher than we presumed they'd be. There were deficits in some critical areas, and many of those areas of low knowledge could be directly traced to the information programs put out by the agency. We needed to be careful about the message we were putting out there.
David: What were other interesting things that happened in the early days?
George: Bob and I got a call one day from the station saying, "There's gonna be a guy coming out to spend six months or more at the lab. The chief has asked, as a favor, that you provide him with an office and access to yourselves." It was John Krutilla, from Resources for the Future. Krutilla had just finished a grinding period in his professional life. He had testified in an ongoing battle about the proposed High Mountain Sheep Dam in Hells Canyon. John, in that episode, had raised major, really earth‑shattering kinds of arguments about the value of conservation. He needed a break so his bosses told him, "Why don't you go off to Missoula, take your family, and spend six months and get your head back together?" 
I was aware of John as a figure in the literature, but he was a tremendously stimulating guy who was interested in the work we were doing. He read my dissertation and was well aware of Bob's work. He said, "I think there are some things we can do with this."
This led to the early work on use of computer simulations for mapping use patterns and interactions, as a technical tool for use in the capacity arena. Then a couple of his associates, Mordechai Shechter and Charlie Cicchetti, came out and also spent time with us.
That led into the development of some management systems in some parks and forest wildernesses, and important breakthroughs that were well beyond our capacity. We just didn't have the intellectual or other resources to work at that level. It was also important verification that what we were doing was important and useful.
The other key persons on the NFS side that then appeared were Bill Worf and Tom Kovalicky. I had met Tom early in my career, probably before I finished my dissertation. At that time, he was the resource assistant on the Pinedale Ranger District down on the Bridger Wilderness. I had gone on a horseback trip down there. Tom was one of those people who immediately impress you as somebody who's got a great mind, as somebody who's going to go places.
Bill was really an important person, because he was one of the key Forest Service persons who developed the Forest Service’s interpretation of the Wilderness Act. He was a forceful, good thinker, and very supportive. Although often critical, he was a mind to be reckoned with. Again, our ability to do our work was very much supported by those kinds of people. They helped us build increasing support for studies related to the importance of understanding recreation use in wilderness, the patterns of use, and total amounts.
We identified flaws in the recreation use data that was coming out of wilderness and ways that we might get on top of it. That, in turn, led me into some early work on rationing and the problems of over‑use. I developed another collegial relationship, from the academic world, with John Baden. John was a very interesting guy, a political scientist by training. He and I had mutual interests in the area of rationing -- how do you ration, and how do different rationing technologies affect different people, serving certain people well and discriminating against others. 
This led to field studies in Southern California, in the San Jacinto and San Gorgonio wildernesses. I went down to both and worked with managers as they developed rationing plans. Despite the tendency to think that rationing use was going to be nothing but trouble and a source of problems, we built programs that the public generally understood and supported. 
David:  You mentioned Tom Kovalicky. I remember Tom as being a catalyst for our work on the limits of acceptable change. He wanted the Bob Marshall to be recognized as a flagship for wilderness management and asked us what can we do that's innovative? I can remember a meeting in Kalispell with you and Bob and Randy Washburne. Maybe Margaret Peterson was there. We ultimately ended up deciding, "Let's develop the concept of limits of acceptable change." 
Some of the big things that you worked on were conceptual frameworks, things like the Recreation Opportunity Spectrum and The Limits of the Acceptable Change. What recollections do you have about developing those concepts?
George:  Thanks for bringing that up. My memory cells are fused. Probably the earliest point at which I'd say, "Oh, yeah. That's where LAC started," was in a piece that Sid Frissell and I did for an SAF meeting in Hot Springs, Arkansas. To be fair, Sid was the first person I recall using that notion.
David:  It came up in his master's thesis, actually.
George:  I remember that paper we did for the SAF meeting was the place we first started saying, "Can we put a bit of meat on the bones of this notion? Because I think there's an important notion here." It was driven by simple recognition of the inevitability of change in the presence of use, the need to think that out, and to accept that.
There were still lots of people who said, "We want to manage to a no‑impact standard." The response was, "Well, you could. You could do that, but it's basically a de facto decision to prohibit use," or something very close to that. At any rate, that was the earliest paper we developed.
Just an aside, I can remember there was widespread—though not universal -- adverse reaction to that notion at the SAF meeting. I remember being challenged by a couple of Forest Service administrators, after the talk, about the whole idea. I'm not entirely clear why.
When we finally got around to drafting what became the General Technical Report on LAC, it really helped that we complemented the conceptual discussion with a hypothetical example that showed, "Here is how it would play out." 
LAC was clearly a notion which resonated. There was a powerful logic to it that managers seemed to grasp. They could see the ways in which they could use the framework to develop their plan. And not just the managers. It was also supported by user groups. I was always surprised about the positive response to LAC as I traveled around, and not just within the Forest Service environment, but in the other natural resource agencies and overseas.
I talked earlier about the importance of laying out frameworks to help people think about problems. They provide a structure, a logic, and then, from that, you have a rationale. If somebody attacks it, that's OK, that's going to happen. But with a framework, you can show people how you got to the decision you did. 
We had some enthusiastic proponents, who became important players. Jerry Stokes on the Flathead. Steve McCool spent a year as a recreation staff officer on that forest. I always thought that was a neat thing for both of them, for Steve as well as for the Forest Service, working with the people who became practitioners and advocates.
When research laid out something, there were often those who said, "Well, that's a research idea. But here, in the practical, real world, those things aren't going to work." Having people like the Jerrys and the Tom Kovalickys ‑‑ those on‑the‑ground advocates – was key to success. 
David:  Is there anything else you want to say about how your interests and work evolved?
George:  As I said, I did drift from my wilderness roots. Very largely this was due to my increasing interest in things like integration. I became, much to my own surprise, increasingly interested in the political institutional aspects of resource management, mainly because it struck me, that's where our programs rise and fall. It's within those political and social institutions.
Fortunately, again, there were important people. Hannah Cortner, from the University of Arizona was somebody who I enjoyed interacting with, as well as Margaret Shannon at the University of Washington.
One of the most momentous events in my professional life occurred in '95. At that time, I was working at Oregon State as a professor, and I became involved in what was known as FEMAT-- the Clinton or Northwest Forest Plan. It was one of those classic cases of, if I had known at the beginning what I knew at the end, I would've never gotten involved. It was just a brutal, grueling undertaking. 
About 30 of us went to Portland. The Clinton White House announced that we had 60 days to present a plan. I worked, as many people did, 90 consecutive days—12 to 16 and near the end, 24 hours a day. People collapsed. People got ill. There were divorces. It's just hard to believe that people can go through that.
David:  Was that personally gratifying?
George:  It was at one level. Like a lot of those kinds of experiences, later on, you reflect on the insights you gained that you never would've had otherwise. But if you had asked me at the time I was in it, I would have said, "What the hell?"
Among other things, it highlighted to me the enormous challenge that we glibly associate with integrated management. We were integrated in the sense that around a big room, you had 15 different disciplinary folks. But we spoke different languages, used different conceptual models, often had fundamentally different world views and saw entirely different landscapes.
We had 60 days to solve a problem that's been with us for a century. But still, I was proud of the product that we were able to produce--the chapter we wrote on social science. We provided some important insights into what the issue was, why it was so challenging and why we were unlikely to be successful because it wasn't woven into what you might call the institutional fabric.
One of the ideas that came out of FEMAT that I found appealing was adaptive management. I ended up spending at least a modest amount of time on the notion of adaptive management because there was profoundly little understanding of what it meant, other than just the label. I knew there was a body of work on adaptive management. I wasn't particularly familiar with it. I found myself digging into that. I found it an intellectual challenge and really interesting. 
Then I got interested in things like institutions and how social processes work. I helped develop a better understanding of the core idea of adaptive management, as well as the issues you were going to have to deal with to successfully implement it – particularly in an environment which is inherently risk‑averse.
David:  Thinking back, what did you do that gave you the most gratification or that you felt was most influential or that you're most proud of?
George:  When you first contacted me about doing this, I got to thinking back, it's always easier to be, "I’m glad I don't do that anymore." But in fact, what came to me was, I'm pleased with the decision I made, either explicitly or implicitly, long ago, to go into this field. I don't have any regrets. There were little bumps along the way that I could've done without --like FEMAT. But by and large, I found it an exciting career.
One of the things that struck me as I thought about this was how lucky I was to have had such a network of supportive, interested people. Yourself and others. By and large, I always got on well with the small niche of people we had who were in the recreational research program.
I really enjoyed my interaction with a lot of the managers. I learned a lot from them. We developed a positive, collegial environment. I remember responding to someone who asked me, "What do you do?" I said, "I work with the wilderness and the nation is the template I've got to work with.
David:  Internationally too.
George:  Yeah. People go, "Wow, you travel." There are downsides of traveling. I'm glad I don't do it anymore. But still, the opportunity to go places, to see issues, to interact with a range of people.
In terms of substance, my career was such a positive experience. All the involvement work we did. The capacity work. Later on, some of the more integrated work on institutions. They were all really positive kinds of things. But I have been able to walk away from it. 
David:  One of the really cool things, I think, is being able to be a pioneer in something and part of it is just being in the right place at the right time. Getting in early in wilderness science and then even in the broader application of social science to natural resources management.
When you come along much later in the development of something, it's different. You have a lot of precedents to work with but I think it's pretty magic to be able to be part of a real pioneering effort.
George:  It was. Early on, we struck up ties with the Montana Wilderness Association, a local, state‑wide group. We became regular attendees at their meetings and they were very happy to have us come to those kinds of things. It's just part of that overall collegial environment. I dealt with people in the Sierra Club at the national level. To be working in this field was such a privilege.
It's funny ‑‑ this'll be my last comment ‑‑ I remember coming back from Eastern Montana once and Bob and Dick Joy. I remember driving along, the sun's starting to go down and I look out the window, "Man, how did you get to be so damn lucky?" On top of everything else, I loved living in Missoula.
David:  Driving down the Blackfoot River, watching the sunlight bounce off...
George:  Yeah, and I thought, you should pay to do this sort of thing. But as I said, I was really ‑‑ I hope ‑‑ appreciative of the extraordinary opportunity, which, as we both have said, is, in some ways, a stroke of luck.
If I'd have blown off Bob Lucas’ letter. He probably mailed 100 of those. Why should I bother? Those little moments in life, we think, whoa, that could've gone this way or that.
David:  Could've gone many different ways. On the other hand, we took advantage of the opportunity.
George:  Yeah, that's right. All you do is try to be clever.