Were you more attuned to the different administrations because you worked here?

I think so. Primarily it made a difference in the funding that the Lab got. And that was I think a direct influence of administration and leadership in the country.

You've already sort of touched on changes in perceptions of the Forest Service over your time here. Do you have any more to say about that or maybe expand it a little bit to up until the time you retired? I guess you just spoke about the spotted owl and the cutting the forests in Alaska.

It was the Tongass forest maybe, yeah.

Did you see perceptions of the Forest Service change for other people?

Yes, I think it was certainly---I think the average person maybe didn't care on way or another and a lot of them pooh-poohed the whole thing but I think it did change the image of Smokey the Bear and the good things the forests had to offer. But I don't know, you know, everybody wants something different from the national forests, it isn't a very clear cut issue actually. So I can sympathize with the clear cutters and the many other problems. I don't know I haven't thought that much about it [recently], but I know the image has changed.

I guess my next question was going to be do you see it changing currently?

You know I'm not watching it that carefully but I guess the one thing that did hit Wisconsin in last week's State Journal, I mean the big issue was the closing of more paper mills. It had gone from a time that they were on top of the world [in the '90s] [laughs] to---it's just so sad to see with all those jobs lost and having to close down [the mills]. But I guess this was built in obsolescence of their equipment and it just would be so expensive to change, that was one thing. Secondly, the cheaper pulp that they are growing on plantations in Brazil, Australia, the far east so it's not an easy problem and certainly with environmental constraints, which should be there and have been very lax in being enforced in the mills, I guess it was inevitable that they'd collapse.