The other work is interesting, but it doesn’t necessarily touch on Crater Lake except for maybe Waldo a little bit.
I think I’ve just about covered my involvement in the Crater Lake story as far as going back to when I first started there in ’67 and to the present. I do have a few concluding remarks, and I’ll try not to repeat what I’ve said, but I do have some comments to bring this to an end. I may have said some of these things earlier, but I’d like to reiterate them for emphasis.
One is that I was really quite disappointed in the response I got from the Park Service after I notified them that sewage may be a problem. As you and I discussed at lunch, my impression was that the Park Service would be quite receptive to any information that helped it to better manage the park. That’s why they had me working down there to do research and alert them to potential problems. I was quite disappointed, if not surprised, at the response I received.
Another unfortunate experience was my perception that the Park Service was trying to discredit my work. That’s my own impression, I don’t have any proof that they were doing this. I just had that feeling at meetings and wherever I went to present papers. Proving someone wrong is OK, but in doing so you don’t want to discredit the person. To suggest that I am not qualified to make those statements, or to state that my work lacked certain integrity, amounted to someone discrediting my work. It was disturbing because to me, that is not something that good scientists do in debating an issue, they don’t try to discredit their opponent. The game is to argue one side or the other using information either side has generated. Maybe no one will be able to conclude anything, but free debate involves this give and take. To me the Park Service’s attitude was a lack of respect [for my work] and it just embittered me further. I’ve talked with people who have had this experience at other national parks. I find it hard to understand why certain people in the Park Service resisted this so much. I’ve speculated about the possibility that people at the park and in the regional office had been involved in the sewage episode of 1975. No one wanted any mention of sewage, so it was treated with a lot of alarm. There was a reluctance to discuss it, or even suggest that it was happening.
