Faculty Directory

Interview with Paul Butler

 Recent Teaching History
Applied Geology: Hazards and Resources, Spring 2001
MES Faculty, Fall-Winter-Spring 2000-2001
Hydrology, Winter 2000
MES Faculty, Fall-Winter 1999-2000
Landscape Processes: Shaping the American West, Spring 1999
Applied Geology: Hazards and Resources, Winter 1999
Introduction to Geology, Fall 1998

Recent and Current Areas of Interest

When, in the summer of 1998, geologist/hydrologist Paul Butler was asked what he was up to lately, he said: "Well I decided to take the summer off and just do contracts and internships."
"You call that taking the summer off?"
"Well it's less regimented than usual."

Further inquiry revealed that both Paul and his students were enjoying the benefits of a couple of years of hard work in academic programs and in the field. "Evergreen students love to do field work!" says Paul. "No matter how crummy the weather, if they have something to do that is real, they love it." Learning enough from lectures, books and hands-on-the-instruments field work to make a prediction of the periodic incidence of flooding of the Deschutes River, for example.

Community-based learning is Paul's style. This summer, a number of his students are working on a Department of Ecology study of coastal erosion, a study that will be on-going for several more summers. While students love to do field work, their internship sponsors love the work Greeners do that has been taught by the geology group.

To be working on coastal erosion, at this stage of his career, kind of closes a circle for Paul. His real love is rivers but he grew up surfing the California coast. How did he get from surfing to rivers and then from rivers to Geology professor?

"To be perfectly honest with you, I graduated from high school; I went to a community college just as the Viet Nam War was heating up; and I had no clue as to what I wanted to do. My way of choosing a major was to go through college catalogs and look for the ones with the fewest and easiest prerequisites. I was getting nowhere. I ended up going into the Air Force for four years. I was an enlisted man working on airplanes and I realized that if I didn't get an education, some dope was going to be bossing me around for the rest of my life until I became one of those kind of dopes bossing a few other young punks around."

So Paul went back to school. His brother was studying geology and told Paul that his courses were really interesting. So Paul gave them a try. That's when he got really interested in rivers. "I had no experience of rivers, other than just the aesthetics. I wasn't really a fisherman, I wasn't a whitewater kayaker yet. So I started academically studying rivers before it became a personal passion--sort of backwards to the way most people do stuff. This sounds kind of trite but my whole life is rivers. It's what I do academically. It's what I do recreationally. As far as I am concerned, it can't rain enough."

There are a number of ways Paul make the boundaries between his academic life and the rest of life fluid. One of the pleasures of his academic life is to be able to introduce students from other regions to the Pacific Northwest (this may explain in part why his students are impervious to wet weather). At a geology conference some years ago, he learned from an English teacher that a large number of his fellow geologists believe the best writing about geology is done by journalist John McPhee. And Paul includes global warming maven, Bill McKibben, evolution theorist Stephen J. Gould, and his own advisor, Luna Leopold, on his reading lists for students. In fact, Paul uses geology texts as much for teaching critical thinking as for a source of factual information. The text itself is discussed as much as the content, and Paul meditates on graphs and tables. Says Paul, "I really like to include discussions of how human activity comes in conflict with natural processes. You know, as a society, we think we can almost engineer a way out of any problem. Working against nature that way is so counterproductive that if you know how the system works you are in a much better position to set policy and think about effective management. I'm interested in wilderness areas, I'm interested in natural processes independent of humans, but I also want the students to appreciate the relationship that humans have with their environment and how they put themselves in harm's way because they don't know how the natural system functions. That is something that comes into almost all my programs."

This takes us to what aspect of Paul's teaching his student's might have to forgive, his tests. Paul will not test to see if the reading has been done: he assumes that. His tests ask to apply their learning. Paul has actually been known to ask questions to which there may not be a right answer.

Interview by Pete Sinclair