Allan Houston

I am located in the Department of Forestry, Wildlife and Fisheries in Knoxville, but live and work on the 18,400-acre Research and Education Center in western Tennessee. There, I manage the forests and wildlife, including timber sales and hunting clubs for deer and turkey and ducks. I conduct research, or have been involved, in all manner of natural resource questions in forestry and wildlife, ranging from quail, beavers, deer, coyotes, hawks, ticks and tick-borne disease, small mammals, mesopredators ... to short rotation woody crops for carbon sequestration, domestication of hardwoods with development of pedigreed orchard stock and artificial regeneration (primarily oak) leading to enrichment of developing natural stands, and crop tree release in mid-rotational stands. I teach a UT senior-level silviculture course for forestry students at Ames. I am author and co-author of well over 100 scientific articles and have given hundreds of professional and public presentations. Nearing the end of my career, I have had a fine time, with the mix of managing timber and wildlife and people, involvement in research centered on things I am vastly interested in, teaching, public education, and all the while in the presence of people with expertise beyond my own and with that the continual learning and the provocation of ideas ... it all just suited me; and I am blessed to have been partly the builder of such a ranging program. Out of all of that, from dealings with logger to scientist, I find myself with a fair amount of experience and am occasionally startled to find I have a firm technical and from there philosophical opinion based in what I, by golly, think I know. Opinions are a dangerous thing, mostly.