Oral history interview with Greg Goodwin [includes transcript], September 29, 2005.

              GREG GOODWIN INTERVIEW
Ecological Oral Histories Course (MLS 599)
Collection number: NAU.OH.2005.111.1


[BEGIN AUDIOTAPE 1 (2005.111.1A), SIDE A -- preliminary discussion not transcribed] 

Bendell: My name is Justin Bendell. I’m with the Cline Library at Northern Arizona University, and we’re conducting an ecological oral history with Greg Goodwin. This oral history will be part of a larger series on environmental change on the Colorado Plateau. It’ll be held at the Special Collections Section of the Cline Library, in Flagstaff Arizona. [Today is September 29, 2005. The videographer is Curt Craig.] Greg, how are you? 

Goodwin: Good. 

Bendell: Good. [discussion of background sound not transcribed] I guess a good place to start would be at the beginning, to sort of flesh out the longer story. I was wondering about your childhood, maybe where you grew up, and such. 

Goodwin: Okay, I grew up in Northern Wyoming, in a small town called Greybull. It’s up near the Montana border. Most of it was spent on kind of a small farm, I guess, out between--near another little town called Shell, at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains. I spent most of my time in Wyoming, before I came here, and went to school in Wyoming, and transferred down here. 

Bendell: Was it in Wyoming where you first developed an interest in the realm of biology? 

Goodwin: Growing up, out kind of on a small farm, with a lot of wildlife around, I always enjoyed the out of doors. When you grow up in that kind of an environment, it’s just real conducive to becoming interested in wildlife. We had a lot of wildlife there. Wyoming, even still today, is a pretty lightly populated state. When I was growing up there in the fifties and sixties, it would have been even much lighter populated than today. So not a lot of people around, not a lot of development. It was just a great place to learn about the outdoors. 

Bendell: Were there any influential people at that stage in your life, to help steer you in your career trajectory? 

Goodwin: Not that I can really think of. Just having the outdoors around me pretty extensively all the time is I think what probably got me interested. 

Bendell: Okay, so your career trajectory was sort of self-developed, self-nurtured in a way? 

Goodwin: It sort of was. As I remember, in my high school days I used to do these career counseling things where you would fill out all these questions, and they would kind of tell you, I guess, what kinds of careers you might be suited for. Mine would come out something with biology or forestry, usually. So it seemed early in my life I was ... 

Bendell: Predestination. 

Goodwin: destined to be in this type of field. 

Bendell: I’ve been informed that you were one of the first, if not the first, wildlife biologists with the Coconino. Is that accurate? 

Goodwin: No, actually I wasn’t the first. I transferred down here when I got out of school at the University of Wyoming. I went to work for the Rocky Mountain Station, which is the research arm of the Forest Service. I worked there for four years, and then I transferred to Flagstaff in 1977, to the Coconino, and there was a biologist in place at the time. I was sort of an assistant, I guess, to that position. Later on, things sort of grew and became organized a little bit differently. And there was actually a biologist before him, so I guess I was probably the third biologist on the Coconino. 

Bendell: Needless to say, I can imagine being a biologist in a sea of forest scientists could be an interesting experience. Was there anything interesting about that arrangement, being surrounded, or was it a comfortable situation? 

Goodwin: From my perspective, the Forest Service was always kind of an uncomfortable place to work, a difficult place to work. If you were in those resource areas that weren’t considered the traditional resource areas, like range, fire, and timber--those were the big programs where most of the people worked. And that’s how the agency basically began. And I did start my career with the national forest system when I came to Flagstaff, at a time when there were very few people around like wildlife biologists and hydrologists and soil scientists--these kind of specialty fields. They were just sort of beginning to come in. Whenever you come in like that to a well-established large organization with a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of old cultural values and so forth, it’s very, very difficult to assimilate in there. And you never--I don’t think I ever really did, I never felt like I was really at home, I guess, in that organization, even up until the time I retired. 

Bendell: So was that a career-long period where there was never that sense of belonging? 

Goodwin: Yeah, I think mostly, although as time went on, the wildlife program did expand a bit, and we started putting some biologists out in the districts. We hired a botanist and a fisheries biologist. The program expanded, but it was still a very small percentage of the program, the money, the personnel. And also things like wildlife are always viewed as a constraint. When it comes to, say, wildlife and timber, or wildlife and range, wildlife is typically looked at in a very negative light in the agency, because it tends to constrain other things--tends to maybe force changes in those other kinds of activities, more traditional things, and that’s viewed by a lot of people as being very negative. And when you’ve got a lot of people that are working in those areas, something that might constrain them some more was typically viewed in a bad way. And that, I think, was typical, although it became less and less over time. It was still pretty typical right at the time I retired. 

Bendell: By wildlife constraining more traditional activities, would that be like endangered species and those types of situations? 

Goodwin: It was across the board. Certainly endangered species was always one that was very contentious. But even things that are relatively common, like, say, elk. When we would go out and look at a proposed timber sale from the wildlife standpoint, we might identify some areas that might be valuable elk hiding cover, or thermal cover, or maybe it was a calving area. And these might have to be handled differently--maybe some more trees left, than they might have normally wanted to cut. Or it might restrict things. If it was a calving area, that might mean they can’t go in there and do any activities until midsummer, when the calving activity is over. So all these things are kind of viewed as impacting how things could be done or might be done. And so it’s really across the board with just about everything. 

Bendell: That gets me to thinking about wild populations in general. Over your ten years with the Coconino National Forest, I was wondering--I guess we can speak of elk first--if you sensed or noted any significant changes in the way that elk reproduce, and their population distribution over the course.... 

Goodwin: Absolutely. I came to Flagstaff in 1977, and I retired in 1998. And over that time period, [there were] tremendous changes in the elk population. Maybe I could just add this: We had a native elk, Marion’s [phonetic] elk, which probably became extinct sometime in the early 1900s. You look through the literature and the old journals and accounts, early surveys of this area, it would appear that the native elk were certainly not common in this area--there may have been very few of them, in fact. But around 1912 or so, when the elk were brought down from Wyoming and released, they’ve been very successful, coupled with other kinds of things that have gone on over the years, like construction of waters. They have these stock ponds well distributed across most of the landscape. Wildlife [trick?] tanks. There’ve been a lot of other things that have gone on to promote wildlife. And it was, for the most part, a great success, especially when we think about elk. And elk populations up into the late 1980s and early 1990s reached an amazingly, I think, in my opinion, amazingly high population level--to the point that we could certainly notice out on the ground, degradation of habitat, [which] we felt were pretty strongly related to elk populations. Game and Fish has been reducing elk populations, I think, since probably the mid 1990s. But I suspect we still have localized areas where there’s a lot of elk use.

In my time now, in the last few years out on the forest, working as a volunteer for the Nature Conservancy, [I] continue to see specific areas in aspen and willow that are being impacted negatively by elk populations, which are still fairly high. So yeah, elk has been, on the one hand, a great success story, in terms of wildlife habitat improvement and wildlife management in the Southwest, but it also comes with tradeoffs. There’s certainly been some, I think, negative aspects of it as well. 

Bendell: Thinking of elk, I’m aware that a strong elk population would probably allow for a decent amount of predation by lions--at least younger elk, possibly--and other predators. I was wondering, because the elk are exploding, does that comment to some degree on the lack of predators to sort of influence the population? 

Goodwin: I think very much so, yeah. Historically we would have had, in this area, right around Flagstaff, we would have had grizzly bears, you would have had wolves, even an occasional jaguar. And it’s likely that grizzly bears probably did, and wolves did exert a predatory influence to help keep populations down. And of course the habitat conditions were probably different in terms of water availability and so forth. And then the early population estimates indicating that elk were probably very few in number up here, would certainly suggest that there was probably a fair amount of predation going on, and that elk populations were maintained at a pretty low level. And recent research from Yellowstone is clearly demonstrating behavioral changes in elk when you reintroduce wolves, and how they hang out, or don’t hang out, in selected habitats, which is a very beneficial thing for the landscape. And now that we have no predators, we can also expect elk to hang out or concentrate and utilize areas more extensively and for longer periods of time, than perhaps they would have if they were on the lookout for wolves to come along. 

Bendell: Interesting. You mentioned that Arizona Game and Fish has begun to reduce elk populations. Would that be through just like expanding the hunting permit? 

Goodwin: The way Game and Fish deals with managing populations is primarily through the number of permits that they issue each year for hunters: where they issue those, and the time of the year that they’re issued. And so you can very much affect population levels by the number of permits that you issue each year. They know approximately what kind of hunt success they’ll have. And [there are] pretty good models on predicting what kinds of populations will result after you have certain permit numbers. 

Bendell: I know that elk can compete, because they sort of share the same grazing areas as mule deer, to some degree. Has the increase in elk affected in any way the mule deer populations? 

Goodwin: That’s a good question. I think it’s one that’s been discussed a lot over the years. And I don’t know that there’s a really clear answer based on looking at the science of the issue. Anecdotal anyway, from my perspective, when I look at information about populations of elk and mule deer, it does seem to me that there’s a possible relationship, because as you see elk populations increase, increasing through the seventies and eighties, deer populations began to decline about the same time. That’s certainly not any hard evidence, but it would suggest that there could be a relationship there. Deer populations are still much lower than they were a number of years ago. 

Bendell: Interesting. Moving from the woodland species, an important species in this region that comes to mind is the pronghorn. I’ve heard a lot of talk of pronghorn decreasing in number--for one, because of habitat encroachment and other things. Have you seen a shift, or have you worked in that realm before? 

Goodwin: When I very first got here in--well, I guess I should say it was kind of interesting, or ironic, I guess, that we’re still asking this question, because when I came here in 1977, I hadn’t been here but a few months, and I had to go to a public meeting over at NAU to talk about coyote control using aerial gunning and an old poison called 10-80. It was in response to wanting to get pronghorn or antelope populations back up. So the question’s been going on for a long time. I really don’t know what the relationship is with habitat, for instance, out on Anderson Mesa and pronghorn. It seems to be a very complex and difficult question to answer. It’s been researched a lot. I wasn’t as involved in that as I have been in some other things--other than I’m aware of the various attempts, at least since the seventies, to improve or to get the pronghorn population back to a higher level. And most of the approaches that were tried early on were through coyote control. There was some research suggesting that coyotes had enough of a predatory affect on pronghorn fawns that kept population suppressed. And that’s probably about all I can really say about pronghorn. 

Bendell: Fair enough. Stepping out of the grasslands and back into the woodlands for a moment, one of my favorite animal species--in fact the mountain lion--has been controversial in Arizona lately. I was in Tucson a couple of years ago for the Sabino Canyon boondoggle. And up here, I’ve heard reports of people doing research on Anderson Mesa and elsewhere. But I was wondering if you’ve noted any changes, and if you are familiar with the mountain lion and its behavior up here on the plateau? 

Goodwin: A little bit. In all of my time on the Colorado Plateau, I have seen only evidence of lions here and there. So it’s not anything that I’ve seen a lot of, both in my professional career and the time I spend out hiking. Lions just seem to be there and I don’t know whether there’s more or fewer. I suspect that they’re probably about the same as they’ve always been--just as the population of people grow and there’s more of us out and about, the possibility of a lion encounter increases a little bit. But I’ve never had an encounter, so.... 

Bendell: They’re notoriously elusive creatures. 

Goodwin: They are! They are. 

Bendell: I guess looking at wildlife in general on the plateau, could you surmise a most pressing concern for wildlife populations, given development and various environmental issues that are occurring in the 21st century? 

Goodwin: Well, I think it’s probably multiple things. These are very complex issues. At least as it relates to, say, forest types, like ponderosa pine, which is where I spent most of my working career, you’d have to talk about things like the long history of fire suppression; and you’d have to talk about livestock grazing; and you’d have to talk about continued human population growth; and the tremendous increase and the kinds of recreational activities that we engage in, and how many acres we manage to influence in our recreation activities. I suspect those are probably the biggest ones that come to mind. 

Bendell: You mentioned working in ponderosa pine. Was yours a vegetation type of focus? Or I guess that’s where you did most of your studies. What areas on the Coconino were you most involved in? Were there any particular places or areas? 

Goodwin: Yeah, I think I would probably have to say mostly in the pine type. Personally, my primary interest has always been in plants, in particular rare plants and unique plant communities. Of course Arizona’s a great state to live in if those are your primary interests. And so when you live in the Flagstaff area, you can’t help but be drawn to places like the San Francisco Peaks and riparian areas, streamside or stream-related communities, like Oak Creek Canyon. But also, a number of the small springs around. I’ve always enjoyed the high elevation coniferous forest and alpine habitat--limited amount of alpine habitat in Arizona. And also, the North Kaibab and Grand Canyon is probably where I would spend most of my nonworking time if I was going to be out in the woods or out in the backcountry. 

Bendell: You just segged [i.e., segued] very nicely into the botanical realm, what I wanted to talk about next. I know you have a strong interest in the riparian communities, and I guess maybe we can focus on that for a little while. Maybe if you could tell a story or explain changes that you might have seen in riparian communities--for example, Oak Creek Canyon or others--during your tenure with Coconino. 

Goodwin: Okay. When I came to Flagstaff, I think some of the recent science that had been done had really begun to strongly show how valuable these riparian areas were for birds, and for a whole variety of other wildlife species--just the diversity and the numbers were pretty amazing. Issues have been arising since the sixties and seventies over water use in Arizona and water development. So there were those issues. And at the time, there were proposals to do what was called free adaphyte [phonetic] control, which was basically to clearcut cottonwood forests along riparian areas as a way to increase the amount of flow. And that had kicked off this issue, I think, in the early seventies, and was still sort of floating around when I arrived. These areas tend to concentrate livestock. This is where it’s cool, shady, and there’s water. Herbaceous plant production associated with these is quite remarkable. And so just as when we go out to go somewhere and recreate or hang out, we would chose to go by a creek, so do things like cattle. When I arrived, it was becoming a bitter issue. And when we started looking at the condition of riparian areas on the Cononino National Forest in the seventies and early eighties, it was pretty apparent that these livestock concentrations over the years had really caused a significant impact, for probably quite a few years, and went beyond vegetation. It went into changes in channels, and deepening of channels, and just some pretty substantial impacts. And of course virtually all of the small springs on the entire Coconino National Forest, as probably every national forest in the Southwest, those little springs--and the big ones as well--have all basically been developed. We used to call it "improved." You improve it by putting in a spring box and piping the water away. Just about every spring has been eliminated in terms of any surface flow or any riparian habitat that was with it. Any rare or endemic plants or animals that were there would be long gone.

And I think through the eighties and into the nineties, a lot because the issue became very substantial, a lot because we attempted to address the issue through the land management planning process, and in the Coconino National Forest Land Management Plan, the riparian standards and guidelines were fairly strong, and meant to be, on purpose. And I think we began to see some recovery in riparian areas. There’s certainly, I think--I’m out and about these days, I still see a lot of impacts here and there--certainly more recreation impacts now than there used to be, with people camping, and campground development, and mountain bikes, and the whole host of recreational activities that this larger and larger booming population in Arizona wants to get out and--particularly in the summertime when it’s hot down in the desert, people come up here. And riparian areas are certainly a great place to spend the weekend. 

Bendell: I would agree there. But I can see the impact threatening, if it’s in high doses. You mentioned the riparian policy development. Would you say that it allowed for decreased grazing in the riparian areas, and therefore inducing recovery? 

Goodwin: Yeah, I think what it did was, it kind of set in motion some sort of a set of guides that would say, "This is what we want the riparian area to look like, and where we want to go with it." And then through the allotment management planning process that the range management people did, when an allotment would come up for a review, then they would be obliged to look at those standards and guidelines in the forest plan, and apply them certainly to the degree that they could. And that, I think, changed the ways that some areas are grazed, and it allowed for some of these areas to be fenced to exclude grazing. It allowed for maybe some certain pastures in an allotment maybe to be excluded from grazing. And I think it certainly was kind of a big starting point. I think it probably had some effect, and I think many riparian areas are in better shape today than they were before the land management plan was completed. 

Bendell: You had mentioned that small springs were "developed," quote unquote. Were those small springs developed for human use in towns?, or I was wondering what those were used for, where that water was diverted to. 

Goodwin: Springs are actually pretty fairly common, even though it’s a very dry state. Springs are quite common. Most of them tend to be quite small. We do have some really large ones, like Fossil Creek and Page Springs. Many, many springs scattered around, and most of them are very tiny--some of them just a few drops. I read somewhere a few months ago that back in the late 1880s, I think, the governor of Arizona was quoted at the time as saying that there’s a home now, and water developed at virtually every water source in the state. And I think that tells us that early on, people were developing these things, probably for their own use, because they were settling the area. So they would find a water [source], and they would need water for domestic use. And so they would develop the spring, which usually meant some sort of a catchment structure, like a spring box. And then they would traditionally pipe it somewhere, into a holding tank, or into a cabin or something. And also they would pipe it to these troughs. You can still find remnants of these old troughs where they would take a log, literally, and hollow it out, cut it in half and hollow it out. And then we had the appearance of metal troughs. So they’d been developed for a long, long time, and probably most springs were developed very early--certainly by the early 1900s we probably had, just about, development on every spring. And they were developed always in such a way that it was done at the spring source: Where the water emerged from the ground is where the spring box or that development was put in, rather than, say, down the flow a little ways, where you could have maintained some of that willow, or that little wet meadow habitat. They pretty much tried to get every drop of water from the system, and I think they probably did most of the time. 

Bendell: And so the springs hearken back to the frontier days, even? 

Goodwin: They do. They do, yeah. Some of them now have been modified maybe for some wildlife use, but they were primarily, I think, first done for domestic human use, and then that followed with ways to water livestock that people would have depended on as they first settled the area. 

Bendell: Speaking of spring recovery, I was wondering if you played any role over the course of your time with Coconino in the Fossil Creek issue, in that recent recovery. 

Goodwin: No, that was pretty much all done after I left. When I was still working, the very initial discussions had begun about the relicensing of that power plant down there, through FERC [phonetic--also need to spell out what the acronym stands for]. And I was in on some initial discussions, and kind of some of the initial ideas on what we might be able to do with it. But then I retired in 1998, so managed to take an early retirement. And so I sort of missed out on all the Fossil Creek stuff. 

Bendell: Oh well, it still turned out to be a good thing. 

Goodwin: Yes, I think so. 

Bendell: Looking at riparian areas in terms of the degradation that occurred due to livestock and other things, I was wondering if there were any exotic species, botanical species, that were most prominent in riparian communities in Arizona, and if those species continue to be a major problem. 

Goodwin: I’d have to think about that for a minute. I’ve been volunteering with the Nature Conservancy for the past almost five years now. This past year or so, I’ve been spending a lot of time helping out at Hart Prairie Preserve, trying to provide some conservation science and biology into what’s going on out there. And in digging around through the literature about the wet meadow out there, it becomes really apparent that a species like Kentucky bluegrass is somewhat of a problem out there. When you asked that question, then it reminded me that since Kentucky bluegrass was rather fresh in my mind, that when we started a lot of this riparian inventory and survey work, it continued into the--I guess, when it was in the late eighties, early nineties, we were doing cooperative surveys of all these streams and wet meadows with Game and Fish. There’s a lot of these high-elevation wet meadows along the Mogollon Rim on the Coconino, and I suspect over on the Sitgreaves portion as well, that have remnant stands of bib willow. And most all of these meadows are dominated by Kentucky bluegrass, which is a non-native, sod-forming species, which has dramatically changed those high-elevation meadows. I think it’s probably excluded many of the native species, and it’s probably affected the stream channel and water flow through those systems. And that’s probably, in my opinion, at this point one of the more dramatic examples of plant species that’s really affected many of the higher-elevation systems. And these would be the wet meadows, which we don’t think of a lot. I think in Arizona when we tend to think of riparian areas, the first thing that comes to mind is things like Oak Creek Canyon--a fairly large stream, at least by Arizona standards--in a canyon, heavily armored. By "armored," I mean rocky stream bottom, stream channel. And that’s compared to these handfuls of these high-elevation meadows, 7,000 up to about 8,500 or so feet, where they have small springs that kind of meander through these grasslands. And these are tiny spring systems, with these shallow perched aquifers. That’s where I really notice a lot of Kentucky bluegrass problems. 

Bendell: Would you say that Kentucky bluegrass is focused on the San Francisco Peaks area? 

Goodwin: No, it’s very extensive at any site probably from around 7,000 feet up, that is the least bit of what we would call a wet meadow type. If there’s a little bit more moisture in there, then the wetter areas are going to be almost completely dominated by Kentucky bluegrass. 

Bendell: Interesting. I was thinking about aspen when you mentioned bib willow. There’s been a lot of talk about aspen, because there’s been some major losses. I know Woody Mountain in this region has lost a vast majority of its aspen. Are you familiar with the ecology of aspen, and could you comment on the changes that have occurred in those populations? 

Goodwin: Yeah. I’ve been interested in aspen, I guess, since I got here. It’s kind of a fascinating species. In my estimation, from just the last however many years I’ve been here, observations, [there are] definitely smaller amounts of aspen. But more so, I think when you walk around through those aspen stands, what I’m struck by are two things: one is the lack of root sprouting. Or perhaps I should say that the ungulate use impacts--be they elk, deer, or cattle--on these root sprouts that come up, you very seldom can find any that aren’t browsed severely. 

And then the other thing I’m always amazed about is the conifer understory that’s come in underneath of those aspen stands. With fire suppression in place for the last hundred years or so, that’s allowed those conifers to come in under the aspen. And with the browsing we’ve had over this same period of time, continually suppressing those root suckers, what we’re ending up with now is relatively old aspen stands. They only live to be 120 years or so. Very old aspen stands that have extensive understories of conifer, and have little age-class diversity of aspen, and few new individuals coming into the population. And I think that literally it means that in the next twenty to fifty years we will see significant--and I mean very significant--reductions in the amount of aspen. A good example is up around Snow Bowl, if you go up there and walk around. Currently you can see extensive Douglas fir under those aspen stands. In many cases, the Douglas fir is not very far from being about the same height as the aspen. They will eventually replace that, and it will become basically a pure Douglas fir community, and the aspen will just be an occasional tree here and there. So I think it’s going to be very dramatic, unfortunately. 

Bendell: Do you think there’s any hope that with some adapting management policies we could offset or reduce the threat to the aspen? For example, fire suppression, sort of reversing those policies, or doing something to reduce the numbers of elk? 

Goodwin: I think that there are things that can be done. It’s just a matter of scale at this point. The Forest Service has, in the past, been doing some burning in aspen, doing some other treatments like not doing certain kinds of cutting. Where we’ve had some wildfires, like for instance on the north end of the Hockerfer [phonetic] Hills, which I think was in 1996, burned an extensive area of aspen. And I think in its typical fashion after a fire, it sent up many thousands of stems per acre. And it was recognized at the time that elk browsing on those right after the fire would be a significant problem. And so much of it was fenced, with a seven- to eight-foot-high elk-proof fence. However, a lot of that fence was damaged each year by trees falling on it, and people cutting it to get wood. It was very difficult to keep it up, and as a result I think they probably had some minimal success in certain spots on that burn, where there’s going to be some more aspen. But it’s certainly going to be much less an [aspen] area than it was prior to the fire. And I think that’s the problem--that’s the difficult part of dealing with the elk question. Wally Brower [phonetic] used to refer to it as an "ice cream plant." You know, it’s one of those things like in human terms, we all love ice cream, and we’ll drive out of our way to have an ice cream cone. We certainly don’t need it to survive, but it’s one of those special, really-tastes-good kind of things, and we’ve always suspected that that’s kind of how elk--and also cattle--reacted to these aspen sprouts. The problem then is that if you don’t have an awful lot of aspen on the landscape, if you have a fire, the amount of elk use in there could be too much, whether the population is 3,000 or 300. Either one would be too much for a small area to handle. And since elk are fairly widely distributed on the Coconino, and in fairly large numbers, aspen is not widely distributed. In pretty small amounts, anything like that is going to attract even a handful of elk, and that might just be too many. I know in recent years I’ve seen, from being out, and from visits with Forest Service people, they’ve begun to take the approach that the best way to manage aspen, at this point in time, is probably to fence it, to exclude things--which is very expensive, and it’s very difficult to maintain. Obviously that’s going to, across the landscape, probably not affect huge numbers of acres--just small pockets here and there. 

Bendell: I guess moving from aspen to another plant that’s been in the news lately because of major losses--that’s the piñon pine in the P.J. [i.e., piñon-juniper] country. I think some of that, or a lot of it, the vast majority being the result of bark beetle infestation, which was because of drought, if I recall correctly. Do you have any hope for piñon pines? Are you familiar with that plant? 

Goodwin: Well, a little bit. I think that when you go out and drive around, there are certainly pockets around on the forest where there’s been, I think, a significant percentage of the piñon pine is now dead. A lot of it’s related to the drought, and I suspect some of it’s related just to the fact that, again, fire suppression. Some of those areas may be a bit more dense than they were historically, in terms of standing trees. There’s no question that [unclear] where we had piñon-juniper, a lot of these areas that we would have called piñon-juniper are now going to be primarily juniper woodlands. But I suspect that over time they’re probably going to begin to come back into these areas. It’ll take a long time, but I think so. 

Bendell: Do you have faith that the drought is going to be receding a bit to allow for that? 

Goodwin: I don’t know. But I think the bigger question is global climate change, and what that’s going to mean. I suspect that what will probably happen is we’ll see the piñon-juniper woodland begin to move up more in elevation, and perhaps expand over time. I mean, it’s not, I think, from what I read and what I see in global climate change models, it’s not unreasonable to think that in the not-that-far future, that Flagstaff may be sitting in a piñon-juniper woodland, and no longer a ponderosa pine forest. 

Bendell: Have you noted any signs of that on the plateau, in your experience? 

Goodwin: Not really, I guess. The change is going to be very slow. It’s just been the last, I suppose, five to ten years I’ve even hardly been aware that that was an issue to be thinking about. And so I guess I really haven’t really noticed at this point, but I know that would be very slow, and take place over the next probably few hundred years. 

Bendell: Yeah. That’d be strange. I’d like to go back to fire suppression for a little bit. Working in Coconino with a bunch of forest scientists during this period where fire suppression has become understood as a strong influence on ability for forests to survive, and the ability for understory to grow in pine communities--how was it in the Coconino with forest scientists, in terms of being there when the fire suppression idea/paradigm sort of got shifted? Was that a.... Let me rephrase this. Was there anything significant about that, in terms of the way it influenced your work? 

Goodwin: For a long time I think fire has been understood to be a natural part of the ponderosa pine forest. The question, I think, always revolved around a couple of things, and one is, early, of course, in the history of the Forest Service, fire was put out, I think, for a couple of reasons. One was to protect people’s homes and other property on the forest. But also I think it was kind of viewed in those days as if you did some burning you could potentially lose the timber value of an area. You’d lose that logging value. And over time, that, of course, I think began to change a bit. But then the question kind of became, "Well, how do we introduce it back into the forest now, which has dramatically changed? And just what kind of a forest do we want out there? What should the forest really look like?" Because I don’t think people really knew very well just what that forest should look like. And so a lot of the changes I think came about as people began to understand how to use it and where to use it, and what the forest should look like. And I think there was always a fairly basic understanding that fire had to play some role. It was just taking that shift from--making that jump from strictly a protection mode to a management mode. And for some people, I think that was very hard. There’s a lot of people in agencies that really enjoy, and really feel strongly about the protection and firefighting and things like that. But I think over time they have moved into the--we’re still protecting things, now we’re implementing fire, rather than just fighting it as much. And in my opinion, it wasn’t that big of a jump, I guess, for most people. 

Bendell: Do you think that’s a result of concepts like ecology and ecological restoration, instead of being sort of a fringe thing, becoming more mainstream and accepted, [unclear] land ethic? 

Goodwin: Yeah. I think absolutely. I think people became more and more aware, for a variety of reasons, some of which, of course, were the big fires we were having. That catches people’s attention real quickly. The Dude Fire--I don’t remember [the date], somewhere back in the nineties, below the Rim, around Payson, burned a lot of homes up. It was a huge fire, and I think that was certainly--at least it appears to me that was one of those major altering events where I think it really made people begin to think about we can’t just fight fire, we’ve got to really incorporate it, and incorporate fire management, and a number of other things.

And then, yeah, a lot of the work, like here at NAU, and ecological restoration, and understanding historic forests, and things like that I think have contributed quite significantly. And I think the other thing that you have to keep in mind is that Smokey Bear is undoubtedly one of the most successful campaigns of marketing, or whatever you would call it--information campaigns--that was ever done. And it’s extremely successful. And I think Smokey Bear also perhaps convinced a lot of the people in the public that fire was bad, period. So it was a job well done, but perhaps a job too well done. And I think a lot of it was also educating the public enough that they would understand that these areas need to burn, and we’re going to have to put up with some smoke now and then, and we need to put money and resources into this kind of thing--rather than just waiting for it to happen. 

Bendell: Perhaps they need to change Smokey’s attitude? "Smokey for restoration," "Smokey for controlled fires." Speaking of fires, in Coconino, from ’77 on--’77 was the Radio Fire, was it not? 

Goodwin: Uh-huh, yes. 

Bendell: And from then on. I was wondering if there was a fire where you saw the greatest significant change in the Coconino in terms of vegetation type or damage or invasive species. Was there any one fire that stands out in your career as something that was different from the others? 

[END AUDIOTAPE 1 (2005.111.1A), SIDE A; BEGIN AUDIOTAPE 1, SIDE B] 

Goodwin: Probably only two, I guess I would mention. And I would mention the Radio Fire only because we were living at the base of Mt. Elden at the time, and we got evacuated. So that was my first personal experience with a fire nearby. We could see it right out the window, and spent the night at a motel. And I had also done a little bit of hiking around on the backside of Mt. Elden, where there was a pretty spectacular mixed conifer--Douglas fir, white fir, ponderosa pine--forest, up in there. And that was completely gone. It was just a barren landscape. It’s pretty dramatic. And that was probably the first real significant wildfire, and the damage thereafter, that I’d ever seen. I’d seen and worked on a couple of fires up in Wyoming. When I was a graduate student, I worked for the Forest Service and got to see a little bit of the damage from fire, and related to fire. But in the Northern Rockies, just small areas of lodgepole pine, which is very adapted to fire, just didn’t look anything like what this very hot, roaring fire through the ponderosa pine looked like in the Southwest.

The other thing I would mention again--I guess would be back to that Hockerfer Fire in 1996, was a huge fire. It was very hot, and that area out there of extensive aspen was one of the areas where we used to go to kind of hang out and spend time. A spectacular aspen forest in there. Completely eliminated almost the entire area of aspen. A lot of it did come back, but most of it will probably never come back, because of the failure of the fences and the amount of elk browsing allowed in there. 

Bendell: Sounds like the two fires that were most significant had a close--you had a relationship with the area prior to the fire. 

Goodwin: Exactly, yeah. 

Bendell: You mentioned you did your graduate studies at University of Wyoming. Did you do your whole tenure of academic training at Wyoming? 

Goodwin: Yeah, I did. I got a bachelor’s degree in wildlife management, and then I couldn’t find a job, so I went back to school and I got a master’s degree in zoology. While I was there, I got to know the research wildlife biologist, a guy named Loren Ward [phonetic], who was working at the Rocky Mountain Station there on campus. And I was doing my thesis field work in an area that he got some funding to do some additional work. So he literally called me up one day and offered me a job, so that was pretty neat.

Yeah, so then I went to work on an elk and mule deer research project--basically before I was even finished with my thesis, I was out working. Then I did that for four years. 

Bendell: So you did start your career particularly in studying wildlife (

Goodwin: Right.) but it seems like your passion tends toward botany. 

Goodwin: It’s always been in plants, I guess. Even my thesis work was related to a food habit study of mule deer. I was curious as to what they were eating in a certain area. When I first came to Flagstaff, the issue, or I guess the whole arena of rare plants was just coming to light, because the Smithsonian had put out a list of rare plants across the United States, and this was kind of the initial process of including plants under the Endangered Species Act. And the Coconino, as do most areas in the Southwest, has a lot of endemics, a lot of unique plants. One of the things I got very interested in when I very first came here was taking that list and finding out where these plants were, and just what kind of condition they were in, and attempting to find more to really understand if they were rare or not. And this had sort of come, too, from when I worked on that research project up in Wyoming for the Rocky Mountain Station. I was involved in some vegetation studies up there related to things to do with elk and mule deer and snow fences. So I just always enjoyed plants, and I took a lot of plant taxonomy in college. So it just seemed like a natural to come here then and work with rare plants. It certainly was an opportunity and a need, I thought. 

Bendell: Is there a greater endomism of plants on the Colorado Plateau? You mentioned that there was a strong population of rare plants or endemic plants. Is there more so here, than in a place like Wyoming, where you did research? 

Goodwin: Yeah. As far as I know--I can’t cite any numbers, but I know if you look at the Colorado Plateau in its entirety, clear up into Southern Utah and even a small portion of New Mexico and Colorado, I think that that ecoregion probably has a higher, if not the highest rate of [unclear]ism than anyplace, perhaps outside of coastal areas, in North America perhaps. And I’m not familiar with, say, areas in Utah, but I’m pretty familiar with Northern Arizona. I was surprised when I got here, after being in Wyoming--very surprised at the number of endemic plants that we had: not even considering the Grand Canyon, but just considering the Coconino National Forest. Quite a large number of endemic plants. At the time, and I think probably to some degree today, there’s still little known about many of them. 

Bendell: So you don’t think that those populations have declined severely? Or if so.... 

Goodwin: It’s really hard to say. There is some monitoring of a few of the populations that goes on. But it’s just really hard to say, with the changes that have gone on: fire suppression over the years, and livestock grazing which now has somewhat been reduced, but also elk grazing has been on the increase over the last couple of decades. So there’s just not enough really monitoring of any rare plants to speak of, except for a handful of species to really know. And I don’t know what the science really tells us about those. 

Bendell: Speaking of elk grazing, I was wondering, given that the forests have--Coconino, for example, started to do burnings to counter the effects of fire suppression. And now elk are an increasing problem. Do you think in the near or distant future there’s even the slightest hope that there might be a reintroduction of some type of predator that once existed here? Or if it’s even feasible, if there’s even enough space for a wide-ranging predator like the grizzly, for example, or wolves. 

Goodwin: I think that in the case of grizzlies, I think it’s very, very, very unlikely. I just don’t think the public support would be there for putting grizzlies back in this part of the country. I think there’s certainly a distinct possibility, depending on the political situation and the politics of the country at the time, that wolves could be brought back here. It seems to be, I guess depending on who you talk to, it seems to be either successful or unsuccessful over in the White Mountains. But it’s certainly been very successful from the ecological standpoint in Yellowstone National Park. We had wolves here at one time. I think they could be here again, but it’s probably a pretty small chance. 

Bendell: We’ll see. I guess we’re going to have to stop for the tape, so we’ll do that now, and then continue, if you feel like it. 

Goodwin: Sure. 

Bendell: We’ll take a little break and get some water or something.

[END AUDIOTAPE 1, SIDE B; BEGIN AUDIOTAPE 2 (2005.111.1B), SIDE A] 

Bendell: You just briefly mentioned your work with the Nature Conservancy. We haven’t really touched on that much, you mentioned the [unclear] willow stuff. We talked a lot about your experience with the national forest, but I wonder if you could elaborate more on the volunteer work you’ve done, and exactly what that’s entailed over the past few years. 

Goodwin: Okay. I’ve been volunteering for the Northern Arizona Program of the Nature Conservancy. I guess it must be coming up on about five years. I left the Forest Service in ’98, as I described it, I guess, because I was just so worn out. It’s a very contentious environment to work in. At the time I left, I was the wildlife range and watershed staff officer, which was mostly a program administration kind of a job. There was a lot of litigation going on, and a lot of budget problems. So when I had the opportunity to leave, I did, and just sort of hung out for a couple of years, and spent a lot of time in the Grand Canyon and so forth, swearing I would never go back to land management planning or land management, period--anything to do with public land management. The politics and so forth was just very difficult.

But after a couple of years, since it really is my passion in life--conservation--I happened to run into a person named Shelly Silbert [phonetic], who at the time was the head of the Nature Conservancy. I’d known Shelly ever since she’d come to Flagstaff. She asked me--I ran into her at Late for the Train, having coffee, and she said, "Have you ever thought about volunteering?" So a couple of weeks later I was in her office. I really have enjoyed it. It’s a great organization. I can’t say enough good about it or the people that work for it. It provided me an opportunity to kind of get back into the whole conservation arena, but to do so more on my terms, I guess, because I could say, "Well, I’ll work on this, but not this," and I could sort of pick and chose.

To start with, they needed some help. The Conservancy was working with the Babbitt family on acquiring conservation easements. They had just recently acquired easements on the Cataract Ranch, and they were potentially looking at finding a way to acquire the easements on the Espey Ranch, which is right next door. And they needed someone to go out and do kind of an assessment of the ecological values of that particular ranch. And so that is where I started. And since then I’ve continued to work on that, and I’ve worked on strategic planning for the Northern Arizona Program, and done some training of their volunteer naturalists, and led nature walks. A few weeks ago we did a fall floral workshop that I put on for the public and for members out at Hart Prairie. So it’s just kind of a whole wide variety of things that I attempt to help them with here and there, provide a little.... Since I have a lot of experience in that area, it’s something I can help with a little bit here and there, anyway. So that’s what I’m doing. I probably average seventy, eighty hours a month--sort of a half-time, nonpaying job, but a lot of reward. 

Bendell: Sounds like a nice respite from what sounds like sort of a frustrating period at Coconino. 

Goodwin: Yeah, it is. It really is. It’s a very different environment, coming from a federal agency, a rather large bureaucracy, very politically influenced; and going to a smaller nonprofit, very biology-conservation-science oriented organization that really doesn’t deal in conflict or litigation, that likes to bring science to the table in discussions. And I find that a wonderful environment to work in. 

Bendell: Speaking of the national forest again, and that experience, I was wondering, I’ve heard that at first a lot of the big management agencies would sort of focus on their own discipline, very limited in scope. Over the years, there’s been more of an embracement of interdisciplinary work. I was wondering if you noticed that, or if that was true in Coconino. 

Goodwin: I think that’s true. The agency for a long time was primarily white men that were--you know, they’d come up through the ranks of either being a forester or having something to do with cattle, cattle management. Or the fire, battling wildfire end of things, which was kind of a militaristic organization within the Forest Service. And those were the people that sort of dominated the landscape in the agency for a long time. But some things began to happen in probably the 1970s, 1980s--things like the National Forest Management Act, which sort of required almost legally that NEPA [National Environmental Protection Act] decisions be made using an interdisciplinary approach. Forest Service, really, at that point, didn’t have very many of these people. And so they started bringing them in. And that’s when I came in, literally, was sort of in that first wave of these specialists. The old-timers would call us the "ologists." We came in, and once you start bringing in people like that, then the discussions change, and budgets change a little bit, and issues come up, and things like that. So that sort of then required us to deal a bit more with some of those resources. It wasn’t fast, it took a very, very long time. But over the years, many of these specialists became more of a factor on the forest, and more of a player. But we used to always say, too, as these ologists, that the Forest Service lived under, managed under this multiple use kind of approach. But we always had to recognize that some uses were more equal than others. Some of us that were working in areas that were probably destined for a long time not to be huge programs, or certainly on the same footing as some of the larger programs. 

Bendell: I’m wondering if there was ever a change or shift in policy in the forest, while working with the Forest Service. Was it ever influenced by what was happening in D.C., in terms of presidency? Or were there any notable shifts based on the shift of administrations, or was it more of a slower policy-based.... 

Goodwin: There’s a big shift depending on the administration. And I was always amazed. You think of the size of the Forest Service and the size of the federal government, and the things that have to be dealt with on a national level by the Congress. But I was always amazed at the amount of influence and the amount of control that those people had over the Forest Service. And most of it’s done through the budgeting process, how they allocate money and the instructions that they issue with how that money can be used or not used. And they can exert control down to a very, very minute level. And so yes, presidents and the secretary of Agriculture in the case of the Forest Service, were extremely significant in terms of how policy and how things--not perhaps large policy, things like the National Forest Management Act which was an act passed by Congress. Those things tended to change on a slower pace or rate. But when it comes to internal policy about how the agencies operate, and how funding is done, and how it’s distributed, there’s a very significant effect with changes of administration--absolutely. 

Bendell: Given your experience with Coconino, I was wondering if you could think of any highlights, some of the most positive moments you might have had working there, refreshing experiences. 

Goodwin: Well, this probably sounds a little corny, but you always have to say, and it’s always true, that I worked with a lot of really dedicated people. And in terms of all of this, the other wildlife biologists and fisheries biologists and botanists and hydrologists that came into the forest. These people were very dedicated and very professional. It was just some real high points in working with a lot of those people--even what might appear to be a real small project here and there, it was just something I’d have to say was certainly a plus. And I’ve maintained contact with a number of those people, even today.

I think in broader terms on the landscape, we certainly did have some success in the area of riparian management. I think we did make--I used to feel pretty good that we had made some headway.

And I always felt good about--and this is certainly very dependent on your viewpoint, but I always felt very positive about what we did, and where we ended up in terms of spotted owl management. It was a very contentious issue, certainly constrained the timber industry. And I was in on literally the location of the first spotted owl nest on the Coconino National Forest that had been documented in probably the fifty or so years prior to that. And we learned what we could about that. I gave a presentation at the Wildlife Society meeting. I think that was somewhat related to kicking off the whole issue of what we have for spotted owls, and what their habitat needs were, and where we would eventually end up with owl management. And I view that, in my career, as a pretty significant, positive thing. Obviously, if you worked in the logging business, you probably didn’t. We could certainly talk about that issue, too, about what impact spotted owls really had, or didn’t have, on timber management.

And also I was involved with the goshawk management guidelines, and other species that came along, as kind of an issue related to old growth coniferous forests. And I was involved, kind of on the periphery, of the guidelines that were put together and published--played only a small role in that. But it was also a very significant piece of work. And those two things, the spotted owl and its listing, and the guidelines that the region came out with for goshawk, I think were very significant in changing really how forest management was done--be it right or wrong, good or bad, however you might view it, it certainly changed the.... It refocused the discussion on some other things. It made the debate a bit broader scale, and not just about what kinds of timber volumes we could get, or what kind of allowable cut we might have out there. It focused more on a landscape and an ecological basis, and I think that was a very positive thing for the long-term health of the coniferous forests in Northern Arizona. So I always felt really pretty good about those.

And then also, I would throw this out, too: and that’s this whole thing of snags. When I first came to the Coconino in the late seventies, the Forest Service had a policy that basically every snag was cut down--it was a hazard to fall on somebody or it was a hazard from a lightning strike. And there’d been some research done by a professor named Russ Balda [phonetic] at NAU who had clearly documented the amazing value of these trees. And it was quite surprising how difficult it was to take that research information in the late seventies and convert that into some management changes or guidelines. I remember after the Radio Fire, I was asked to write a set of--to provide some input on the salvage sale. They were going to go in there and salvage, go in and cut these dead trees for timber, and I was asked to write some wildlife guidelines. And so I went through the latest science publications, and looked into the snag research, and talked with Dr. Balda. So I came up with some stuff and sent it off to the forest supervisor. A few days later, my phone rang, and it was the timber staff officer, the guy that headed up the timber program. He asked me to come into his office. So I did, and he held up that letter, and he asked me if I wrote it, and I said yes. And he said, "Well, go...." And I won’t say it, but it was a four-letter word. So that was my introduction to trying to get new things and change in the Forest Service. It took a long time to get to the point where we recognized that snags had some value, and to come up with some guidelines. That was another area where I think I feel a little bit good about it. I think we raised the awareness. We did some stuff with Woody Woodpecker, and we did some public service announcements. And I gave a lot of programs in schools, and I can remember out at Camp Colton one time--I had been going out there about once a week--and I finally went out there one night, and this little girl saw me getting up to give my talk, and she said, "Oh, no, it’s not the snag thing again!" So I figured, well, I must have made the rounds. And I felt pretty good that maybe some people now appreciated the value of a dead tree. (chuckles) 

Bendell: Flagstaff area has the most snag-educated populace in the country. 

Goodwin: Could be, yeah. Could be. 

Bendell: What kind of species do find their homes in snags, or take advantage of snags? Woodpeckers.... 

Goodwin: Yeah. Well, you know, it’s just a fascinating thing to look at. We’ve got these hosts of species, mostly woodpeckers, that excavate these holes in these trees every year. And they’re migratory species, and when they come back in the spring, they make a new cavity every year. Just part of the breeding cycle, I guess. You know, pound your brains out on a tree to make a hole. But they use that, and then the next year it’s abandoned. And so I guess we probably have eight or ten species of what they call primary excavators up in the Flagstaff area, that excavate these holes. The next year, then, there’s a whole host of other bird species that come along that can’t excavate their own cavity, but that’s the only place they nest: nuthatches, bluebirds, violet green swallows. Even things like the sparrow hawk or the American kestrel, small owls, all nest in these. If you think about it, it’s a great place to have a nest, with the physical protection you have against predators, protection at night from the cold. And a species like pygmy nuthatches even use them throughout the winter, spending the night in there, large numbers of them packed into these holes to stay warm. So they’re a really significant resource from the wild habitat standpoint.

And I might also mention then that most all these birds that utilize these snags for nesting are insectivorous, and there’s certainly a role that they’re playing in predation on insects out in the forest itself. I think it was John Muir who said everything’s connected to everything else. I don’t think that’s exactly how he said it, but that’s certainly true in the case of that dead tree out there. It’s connected to a lot of other things. 

Bendell: If I remember correctly, there was a snag management symposium or something [sponsored by] the Wildlife Society? 

Goodwin: Yeah, there was. You must have done a little research. Yeah, I was president of the Arizona Chapter of the Wildlife Society one year, and we decided that maybe we’d try and hold a symposium and bring people together to talk about snags, and try to summarize the latest research. And there was beginning to be a fair amount of research going on in other parts of the country--most notably, the Pacific Northwest. And so we did, we organized a symposium, we got the Forest Service research people to sponsor it and publish it. We held it at NAU--I’ve forgotten the year. But I know it was published. We brought together quite a cross-section of people. And it was sponsored by the Wildlife Society and NAU. There has been a couple, I think--certainly a lot of other work that’s been done on snags after that, too. But that, I think, was probably the first real compilation of snag information from a biological standpoint. 

Bendell: That brought in people on a national scale, people from all over? 

Goodwin: Yes, all over. People from back east and the Pacific Northwest, and across the Southwest. Yeah. 

Bendell: Did you enjoy your experience as the Wildlife Society president? 

Goodwin: I did. It was an awful lot of work. I was quite surprised. First you would serve as president-elect, which sort of functioned like a vice-president, I guess. You’re supposed to sort of learn the ropes. Then when I took over as president for a year, I was really shocked at how much time it took, and how much work it was, particularly because we were putting on a national symposium, and I ended up doing sort of a lot of the grunt work. Since I was here and it was being held at NAU, I had to do a lot of the organizational stuff, and make arrangements for everything from coffee, to getting the thing published. So I did have a lot of help. Some other Wildlife Society people, a guy named Jerry Davis and Richard Ockenfeld [phonetic], who’s now with Game and Fish--and was then, as well--were instrumental in helping to pull this together. 

Bendell: Here’s a question regarding Flagstaff. You’ve been here for a while, so you’ve been able to see the progression of growth, sort of the Phoenixization of the community. (

Goodwin: Uh-huh.) Do you have hope that Flagstaff might be able to maintain some kind of sane growth policy, and keep from becoming sort of like some of the other sprawling Arizona municipalities? 

Goodwin: Well, I certainly hope so. One of the reasons we live here, and one of the reasons we still live here, is that it seems to be a fairly progressive community, and one that’s certainly perhaps more environmentally aware and more environmentally sensitive than most. And I think that’s been certainly a plus for me and the values that I hold. But growth is certainly inevitable, and this is a fast-growing part of the country.

The one thing I think that--I don’t know how many people realize it, but Flagstaff is completely surrounded by national forest, and so growth can be a bit difficult for the community, because national forest lands cannot just be purchased. There have been various strategies through land exchange where people have acquired national forest land adjacent to the community for development. But that, in a way, is going to be a physical constraint on growth. I suspect that’s probably not going to change for a while. That would be potentially a political solution at higher levels. But I think we’ll still see a lot of growth. It certainly changed a lot from when I got here. When we came in 1977, I think the population was probably around 25,000. We came here from Laramie, Wyoming, and Laramie was probably about 17,000 or 18,000 at the time, so we thought we’d come to a bigger city. And it’s certainly more than doubled in size since we’ve been here, and growth just seems to be pretty steady, and never seems to slow down. So I think, yeah, it’ll continue. The land constraint will be an interesting issue, as well as the water, I think, in the not too distant future. There’s only so much land within the confines of the private land that’s not national forest, that’s within the city limits that can be developed. I think we’re going to run out of that soon. 

Bendell: Getting back to one thing you mentioned before, the significant role you played in the spotted owl management. I found it fascinating. Talk about contention! The wildlife biologist in the U.S. Forest Service putting on a campaign in favor of the spotted owl. Did that foster animosity towards you from within the ranks, or did it end up being a relatively diplomatic process? 

Goodwin: Well, it sort of depended on at what level you were dealing. When we first started doing, after we found the one, we started doing some more survey work. And the region got together a team of people to begin talking about what we might do for spotted owls. As you would develop any kind of a guideline, again that would be viewed as a constraint. If you were going to say, "Well, we need to find these nests, and we need to put some sort of a buffer around the nest to protect it from being cut," then you’re right back in that contentious environment, you’re constraining somebody else, and threatening budgets and jobs and so forth. So pretty much at all levels it was a very contentious, very difficult issue for a number of years, and there was some litigation over it as well.

I will say this, that at least on the Coconino, most people were very professional. There were some that weren’t. You know, I would find cartoons cut out of things that were making fun of wildlife biologists and spotted owls and things. I’d find those cut out and laid on my desk, and not know who put them there. I would find e-mails of things like that. But I think that was a small group of kind of the hardcore people. For the most part, I think people just sort of reacted as you think they would, to change, and it was pretty slow.

The Flagstaff community, however, kind of surprised me. I will say that. It didn’t really become a huge issue in town. I don’t know exactly why it didn’t, but it was never a huge issue in the community. It was with the logging community that was here in town, and the sawmill folks--obviously it would be with them. But it just didn’t seem to be that big of an issue. And I do remember one day at the office--we had our office over on Greenlaw--and we had some protestors that were out in front of the office marching around in a circle and holding up the traditional signs that they used to hold up in the Pacific Northwest--you know, "You can’t wipe your ass with a spotted owl." But come to find out, Van Stone Container [phonetic] had bused those people over from the White Mountains, and the local people really weren’t too terribly interested. So I don’t think that by the time that happened, that the Flagstaff community was all that much of a logging town, and people, I think, recognized at that point that they’d seen those huge ponderosa pine logs out there in that yard over the years. A lot of people, I think, were realizing that this is just not a sustainable way to go with these big trees, and this was probably inevitable. Since it is a fairly liberal community, environmentally-oriented community, it didn’t seem to be a huge issue. So from that standpoint I know a lot of biologists in other parts of the country would have personal threats against them, and things happen at their personal homes, and things like that. And we never had anything even minutely like that happen in Flagstaff. 

Bendell: Surprising I guess, the spotted owl thing, a lot of steam was lost after the Pacific Northwest blow-up, there was so much back and forth, and so much energy on both sides, and galvanization of movements pro and con. (

Goodwin: Uh-huh.) At that time, I’m surprised that didn’t happen. 

Goodwin: Well, I think by the time it really got started here, there’d been enough press about the issue, and people sort of knew what was probably coming. And also, the timber industry was winding down, so to speak. They might dispute that, but certainly in my estimation what I saw out there was beginning to kind of wind down. I mean, it was getting harder and harder to go out, and for the Forest Service to find areas where you could harvest these big ol’ thirty-inch ponderosa pine. The smaller stuff, that ten-, fifteen-inch diameter stuff just wasn’t marketable to the local timber mills. We were in the middle of land management planning, and we were really beginning to see just how much of that older stuff was left. In my estimation, we were down to the point of arguing the spotted owls versus the last, say, 10 percent of the big stuff that could be economically gotten to. That would be stuff outside of canyons and wilderness areas.

The timber industry would probably say something different, and they did in the press at the time, but we knew from a lot of the data that we had, and dealings with the timber side of things, production side of things in the Forest Service, that things were beginning to slow down a bit. It just wasn’t going to continue at that pace. And the spotted owl just sort of came along, was kind of the catalyst to make it happen, and sort of got blamed for it. But it wouldn’t have gone on much longer anyway, I don’t think. 

Bendell: Do you see a role that timber will play in the future of Coconino National Forest or Flagstaff, in the way that it played in the past? 

Goodwin: I don’t think it’ll ever be what it was in the past. What it was in the past was production: you had a mill where you had a lot of employees, and you were out cutting fairly large trees that had a lot of economic value for lumber, hauling them into town and milling them, and shipping them out. And I think at this point--at least up and through, I suppose ten years ago, or so--it seemed to me that we were really in a timber production mode, versus ecosystem approach, or more of an interdisciplinary ecological approach to management. And unfortunately we swung clear to the other side, with now not being able to deal with harvesting the smaller stuff, and really being able to look at the forest as a whole. Where we used to looking at basically just the big stuff, now there’s hardly a mechanism to look at it at all. But I do think that eventually--and there’s some signs of it now with some small companies coming in, that may be able to make use of the smaller diameter stuff. But I think there certainly is a need for viable timber.... Well, I shouldn’t say timber. That has always implied to me a product. Viable forest management, where you’re taking out a certain number of trees of a certain size on an annual sustained basis. And the economics behind that, I have no expertise in, and I know that’s been a difficulty, finding a way to do that. But I think that’s probably where the future lies, if somebody can figure out a way to make an economic return off of those. But I don’t see the lumber mill type of situation, where we’re harvesting big trees that were coming back. 

Bendell: Not looking just strictly at the trees and timber, imagining in the future the way maybe the plateau or the Coconino National Forest would look, do you have any ideas how it might be shaped in the future, given things we’ve discussed? 

Goodwin: I have a few ideas. I think two things will shape it--and probably pretty dramatically in the next twenty to fifty years--and that’s water, either the lack of, or figuring out additional ways to get water. And the other one is recreation, just because of the population growth. People like getting out. We find more and more kinds of recreation that we didn’t used to have. Certainly larger numbers. And more and more it’s fossil-fuel-based vehicles, whether it be motorcycles or ATVs or SUVs. I don’t have any numbers, but I suspect the amount of [unclear] population of backpacks has gone down, and the percentage of the population that rides motorcycles has probably gone up significantly. That will require areas to be developed for recreation. A good example is the cinder hills, where it’s been basically developed and managed for off-road hill climbing kinds of stuff. I might add there’s an endemic plant out there in the cinders. 

Bendell: Is that the penstemon? 

Goodwin: That’s the penstemon cludiai [phonetic]. And it’ll require a lot of additional trails, mountain bike trails, horseback riding trails, skiing opportunities not only downhill but Nordic type skiing. Now we have to have groomed trails, maintained areas. Campgrounds: we’ll have to have more and more campgrounds as Phoenix explodes in growth. Those people need someplace to come on weekends--especially in the summertime. Everybody comes. They don’t come with a pack on their back, they come pulling an RV-type trailer and there have to be campgrounds big enough, and enough slots for them to get into. And I think we’ll continue to see an explosion of that over the next period of time. And that, I think, will dramatically change the landscape--particularly in some of those unique areas, like riparian areas is a good example. 

Bendell: You mentioned water as the first one. And of course water and recreation are tied--the more people around, the more water that is required. But water on its own, we’re in the desert, the water wars have been constant. I even read an article recently about how Arizona will be the first to lose its portion of the Colorado River because of political mumbo jumbo that occurred in the past. Do you perceive water impacting the Flagstaff area in the same way that it could affect places like Phoenix or Tucson, or are we removed from that immediate threat? 

Goodwin: I think it’ll affect us a lot as well. And I think we’ve already seen that with water restrictions and programs to get people to get away from lawns. I think we’ll continue to see that. I know that Flagstaff relies heavily on groundwater, which is expensive--very expensive to drill, and these are very deep wells. I think for the short term, at least from what I’ve read in the paper, it appears that probably there’s sufficient water to sustain growth for a while. I have no idea how long that aquifer’s going to be able to take the pumping that it’s taking now. Phoenix, I think we’re seeing already dropping water tables and the City of Phoenix buying farming land to acquire the water. There’s not too many more massive federal taxpayer-funded water projects that can be put out there so people can have lawns and golf courses and swimming pools.

But you know, again, early when I was in my career, when I came to Flagstaff, I went to a riparian symposium. I’d only been here a couple of years, I guess. At the end of the symposium, we had a speaker who was some--I can’t remember who he was, probably some politician or someone in the state water arena--and the question came up, even back then, about water development. And his kind of off-the-cuff comment was, "Well, there’s always Canada." And I suspect that depending on how valuable that water becomes, anything is a possibility. I mean, a pipeline from Canada I’m sure is not totally too far out there. Once water gets that valuable, I’m sure.... So I don’t know exactly what kind of a constraint it will be on growth, but I think what we’ll see is just real efforts at development, and developing water, and pumping of groundwater. It’s going to affect, I think, the entire Southwest pretty dramatically. Obviously, we’ve known that since John Wesley Powell was here. (chuckles) 

Bendell: I never heard the "tapping Canada" water scenario before. I had heard of the idea of diverting from the Columbia River, but I know that that’s still floating around in some people’s minds. But the Canada one.... Wait and see there.

I was wondering, Curt, if you have anything off the top of your head that I might have missed. Any questions that were in your brain? 

Craig: (inaudible) Grand Canyon (inaudible) 

Goodwin: I didn’t have any role in that at all. That was just sort of getting started when I retired. I had no role in it whatsoever. 

Bendell: And that was the Grand Canyon.... What was it? 

Goodwin: The Greater Flagstaff Partnership? Yeah. I’m familiar with it from what I read in the paper, and I know the Nature Conservancy is a member of that. And so I’m just aware of it, probably as most of the public is. 

Bendell: Do you have anything you’d like add? I’m pretty drained of questions. 

Goodwin: That ought to do it, I suppose. 

Bendell: Well, that was a great interview, you have lots of information, lots of experiences. It was a pleasure, so thank you. 

Goodwin: Well, thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]