Fred Swanson’s career has had two phases: First, ecosystem science in forested, mountain landscapes and then, beginning in 2000, collaboration with creative writers and artists in residence at the Andrews Experimental Forest and Mount St. Helens volcanic eruption zone.
The science has been conducted as a research geologist and disturbance ecologist since 1972 with the Pacific Northwest Research Station of the US Forest Service and professor (courtesy) in the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society, Oregon State University. A deep curiosity about how Nature works drives his studies centered at the geology-ecology interface, including interactions of physical processes, such as fire, flood, landslides, volcanic eruptions, and forestry operations, with forest and stream ecosystems in mountain landscapes. Much of this work has taken place at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in the Oregon Cascades, Mount St. Helens, and elsewhere in the Pacific Rim. As part of the highly-interdisciplinary Andrews Forest research community, he has participated in intensive, two-way, science-management collaborations with National Forest staff, and also engaged in policy-making processes, such as formulation of the Northwest Forest Plan in 1993-1994. Major interests are reflected in titles of co-edited or co-authored books: Sediment Budgets and Routing in Forested Catchments (1982, USDA Forest Service), Bioregional Assessments: Science at the Crossroads of Management and Policy (1999, Island Press), Road Ecology: Science and Solutions (2002, Island Press), and Ecological Responses to the Eruption of Mount St. Helens (2005, Springer). His science publications are available on the Andrews Forest webpage and in Google Scholar. Swanson is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Geological Society of America, and a Bullard Fellow at Harvard Forest.
A keen interest in advancing public understanding and appreciation of the wonders of Nature in charismatic landscapes, such as ancient forests and active volcanoes, led Swanson to promote arts-humanities-science interactions at Andrews Forest and Mount St. Helens through the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word and the Long-Term Ecological Reflections program. The overall intent is to increase the scope of resonant science-arts inquiry in wildlands, and, in the words of Spring Creek Founding Director Kathleen Dean Moore, “to find new ways to understand and reimagine our relation with the natural world.” Since 2004 more than 110 writers and artists have been in residence at Andrews Forest, and much of their work is available in The Forest Log on the Spring Creek webpage. Participants at Mount St. Helens gatherings of writers and scientists included Gary Snyder and Ursula Le Guin. Some of the resulting works are presented in the books In the Blast Zone: Catastrophe and Renewal on Mount St. Helens (Oregon State U. Press 2008) and Forest Under Story: Creative Inquiry in an Old-Growth Forest (2016, U. of Washington Press). To encourage art-science interactions at other sites of long-term ecological inquiry in the US, he published several articles on the topic. Swanson is a Senior Fellow with the Spring Creek Project.
