I came to the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources (SNR) in the fall of 1964 as a Master of Forestry student, working under Dr. Grant Sharpe, who headed up the Forest Recreation program there, one of the few programs of its kind in theUnited States. Having completed my B.S. degree in Forestry (with a Wildlife Management option) at West Virginia University, I became increasingly interested in the human dimensions of natural resource management. It is worth noting that if one wanted tostudy in this area, recreation was really the only field in which to do so (excluding economics, which had a very narrow perspective on social science). Thus, it was natural that I chose to study with Grant, whose area of expertise was natural history interpretation. That fit me very well, because this was where my chief interests resided. Moreover, he taught the Dendrology course, which was designed in such a way that the faculty member gave the lectures, and the labs were taught by a teaching fellow,the only such position in SNR at that time. I was delighted when the offer to come to SNR also included the teaching fellowship in dendrology, since my love of nature focused heavily on the natural history of trees. I recall how I scrambled to find field sites for the outdoor lab sessions, which I had to do, because Grant pretty much left it to me to decide on teaching sites. As I recall, the lectures were organized by genera, and species within genera—the traditional way of teaching about trees at the time. The labs were then used to reinforce the lectures.
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