Sightings | Alumni Profile
A Tale of Two Foresters
Graduating 53 Years Apart, Randy Boggess and Paul Trianosky are Sterling Representatives of Their Classes at Duke p.3
Boggess followed a path then that would be difficult for someone without a PhD to pursue now, teaching courses in forest ecology, forest soils and silviculture, directing graduate student research (including PhD students), and continuing his own research. By 1968, a full professor for several years, he became head of the Department of Forestry, a position he held until his retirement in 1973.
During this time, Boggess presided over a change in curriculum that echoed what would happen at Duke a few years later." The forestry curriculum was traditional and somewhat narrow," he says."We wanted to give students an opportunity to branch out into secondary fields." According to Gary Rolfe, a former Boggess student who is now a professor emeritus at the university," Randy gave the department an ecological flavor. This had been a traditional production forestry department, but he took a much broader view." Wildlife biology was added as a minor, and more requirements in biology and ecology were added to the degree requirements.
"It became more of a liberal education," Boggess says."It was the best thing I did at Illinois."
Paul
Trianosky
A bridge between forestry and conservation
When Trianosky started at Duke, he was invited to an icebreaker cookout
in Duke Forest. When he pulled out a steak to throw on the grill, he noticed
that half of the grill was covered by foil-wrapped packets of vegetables—from
the environmental students—and half was reserved for meat. The steak he
slapped on the grill was pretty lonely. He hadn't outgrown his forestry
roots.
"That was my introduction to the School of the Environment and the dichotomy between the forestry and the environmental students," he says."It was a little bit like East meets West." But he says that they got past the culinary divide and shared great experiences and camaraderie.
Before he ever entered Duke, Trianosky was looking for ways to secure his dream of a job with The Nature Conservancy (TNC). He talked his way into a job in the organization's Chapel Hill office the summer before starting classes, and then he talked the School of Environment into using his fellowship money to let him keep that job. That's how he ended up with an inside track when he applied to be a field ecologist for TNC's West Virginia chapter in 1993. Although his qualifications were not typical for that position, he promised that if the organization hired him for the soft-funded position, he would find a way to make it perpetual. Within a year, he was managing a seasonal field crew and a budget in excess of $100,000.
The outreach skills he used obtaining funding for that team served him well; he became West Virginia state director in 1994, running a board, raising money, and supervising a growing staff and budget. By the time he moved to Tennessee in 2002, he had tripled the chapter's income and operations budget, and the staff had grown from four people to 12.
But with the expansion, his job took him farther away from the conservation work he had envisioned. That, and his wife's desire to move closer to her family in North Carolina's Blue Ridge, led him in 2002 to a position managing conservation programs for TNC in Tennessee.
From that job, he was promoted to the position of director of forest conservation for TNC's southern U.S. region, coordinating relationships with federal agencies, not-for-profit organizations, and the forest industry, and helping to manage large-scale conservation projects and research in the region. He takes pride in having helped to broker a deal in which 10,000 acres of undeveloped Alcoa land in North Carolina and Tennessee would be preserved in exchange for the relicensing of four of the company's hydroelectric facilities. It's the kind of work he dreamed about when he decided to move from a traditional forestry career to one in conservation.
photo captions: Randy Boggess; Duke Forest historical photo; Paul Trianosky