Profile on Graf by A.J.S. Rayl

Will Graf was born and raised in Zanesville, Ohio, a steel mill town located in the Appalachian plateau in the coal country of southeastern Ohio. “I’m a mountain person, part of a simplistic Appalachian society, but from a very early age I was taught to appreciate the natural world,” he says. That Appalachian mountain life was enriched with summers working on a farm south of Cleveland. “It was a family farm, operated by cousins. We grew wheat and corn and had hogs and cattle and a small dairy herd,” he recalls. In splitting his childhood between a life in the steel town life and a life on the farm, he saw and lived “both spectrums.”

His parents, Lister Frederick Graf, a pharmacist, and Dorothy Ann Graf, a saleswoman, were hunters and anglers. They took young Will with them wherever and whenever they went in the forests and on the rivers of southeastern Ohio. “The rule in our household was if you hunt it, then you eat what you get. If you fish, you eat what you catch,” he remembers. “I enjoyed that part of it.”

Although Will never became a hunter or fisherman, he did take up landscape photography and became accustomed to the natural world. In fact, he’d inherited a deep affinity for it. “In the fall, we collected hickory nuts and walnuts and in the spring, wild mushrooms in the forest. That kind of experience, I think probably had a significant impact on me,” he says. “As I was growing up I could see the negative impacts of the coalmines and irresponsible farming practices, while my parents were teaching me an appreciation for the environment.”

It was an appreciation that guided Graf to his profession. For young Will, rivers represented adventure, in part because of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, in part the real life adventures of Lewis and Clarke on the Missouri and John Wesley Powell, who rode the rapids of the great Colorado River out West. For Will, it was the Muskingum River. “It was a place where you could put in a canoe and disappear for awhile,” he says. “The bank of the river was the boundary between the settled country and the mysterious wilds of the river. Being on that river, which actually is a fairly large stream, made me feel independent yet connected with history and the natural environment.”

In 1965, after graduating from Zanesville High School (the Blue Devils), Graf headed north for the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Getting into and attending that school—the institution that spawned environmental awareness and saw both Aldo Leopold, who created the country’s first Department of Wildlife Management, and naturalist John Muir pass through its halls—was important to him. “There was a prevailing opinion among some of us students that if you went to Wisconsin and were interested in fields like geography, geology, ecology, biology—you were an heir apparent to those traditions. The institution played a big role in my career,” he says. In fact, from an intellectual and philosophical point of view, he never left Madison.

At a campus known for its activism during the tumultuous 1960s, Graf saw both sides of the Vietnam War. With the draft a reality, he knew the odds, so he opted to go through Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC). “I don't second-guess people who burned their draft cards, but I didn’t,” he says. “My philosophy was: I cannot change the course of events, so I'll see if I can get something out of it.” He opted to wear a uniform one day a week. Strangely, the other six days he was hanging out with roommates who were demonstrating in the streets. Both sides of the spectrum, once again. “At Madison, the war protests eventually ended with the death of a student,” he notes. “My education in Wisconsin was at a university that was very liberal in the midst of a conservative state.” He didn’t realize it then, but he was honing what has become one of his most admirable assets: being able to see both sides of critical debates.

After earning his B.A., in physical geography in June 1969, Graf began working toward his master of science degree in physical geography with a minor in water resources management. He began teaching and worked as a research assistant in the department of geography, then the top-ranked geography department in the nation. Emerging from ROTC, he served as an air intelligence officer, 1971–1974, with the U.S. Air Force, lecturing at the Armed Forces Air Intelligence Training Center at Lowry Air Force Base, Denver, and working in aerial photographic interpretation and computer applications of geographic intelligence.

Rising to the rank of captain, Graf was permanently based in Denver, but served temporary duty in Vietnam, Hawaii, and Washington, D.C. In 2008, 35 years after being in Vietnam, he returned to that country, but this time as part of a group of researchers from the National Geographic Society who were working with Vietnamese environmental specialists. The war there had been a terrible thing, but Graf found a flourishing society and stunning ecosystems instead of conflict and loss. He concluded that sometimes, bad things turn can turn out well.

During his four-year service in the military, Graf managed to complete the work for his doctorate in physical geography, having gained on-the-job experience in fluvial geomorphology, hydrology, aerial photographic interpretation, and geographic information analysis. He was awarded his Ph.D. in August 1974 from the University of Wisconsin. With three degrees from Madison, he was a true Badger, and that moniker became his nickname. To this day, if you call “Badger” in his presence, he’ll turn around.

In 1974, Badger headed into Hawkeye country, as he accepted an offer from the University of Iowa to become an assistant professor. He soon moved up to associate professor of geography, and research associate at the Institute of Urban and Regional Research there.

When Arizona State University offered him an associate professorship, Graf decided to follow in his childhood mentors’ trails and go west, moving to Tempe in 1978. During his 22-year stay in the land of the Sun Devils, he became a full professor, then Regents professor, and a recognized expert on the rivers of the desert Southwest, particularly the Colorado River and the Rio Grande. He became known as a consummate field researcher, one who often worked alone in the deep deserts and canyon lands.

In 2001, Graf took up his current post as a USC Foundation Distinguished Professor at the University of South Carolina. By that time he had become internationally known and recognized as a river expert, and though he had worked in many regions, the humid Southeast with its forests, big rivers such as the Savannah, and coastal streams was less well-known to him. His first purchase in his new home was a kayak.

The location actually turned out to be ideal. South Carolina is an hour’s plane ride from Washington, D.C., where he serves on many high-level advisory panels for the federal government. Graf also enjoys “maneuvering inside the Beltway,” as he puts it, but he thrives in escaping back to the real world of a modest city in South Carolina and a comfortable home.

Graf’s work throughout the years has been funded by 61 grants and contracts from federal, state, and local agencies, ranging from the National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society, U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Los Alamos National Laboratory, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to cities, Native American tribes, and private companies. In the area of public policy, he has emphasized the interaction of science and decision-making, and resolution of the conflict between economic development and environmental preservation.

All told, Graf has taught more than 5,000 undergraduate students, while 37 Ph.D. and master’s students have completed their degrees under his supervision. He has served as consultant and expert witness in 30 legal cases related to environmental issues and management. He has served as a science/policy adviser on more than 35 committees for federal, state, and local agencies and organizations.

To date, he has given more than 110 professional presentations and published more than 140 papers, articles, book chapters, and reports on geomorphology, riparian ecology, river management, and the interaction between science and public policy. His seven authored or edited books include Geomorphic Systems of North America; The Colorado River: Basin Stability and Management; Fluvial Processes in Dryland Rivers; Wilderness Preservation and the Sagebrush Rebellions; and Plutonium and the Rio Grande.

Graf chaired committees that wrote “New Strategies for America’s Watersheds, Endangered and Threatened Species of the Platte River; “Hydrology, Ecology, and Fishes of the Klamath River Basin,” the second biennial report to Congress of the Committee on Independent Science Review of Everglades Restoration Progress; as well as two volumes on river restoration by removing dams. In addition to his current research with collaborators to assess the impacts of dams on Western rivers, he is presently working on Dam the Consequences: An Environmental History of Dams and American Rivers, a volume that is, he says “about two-thirds finished.”

Graf is a national associate of the National Academy of Sciences and at the National Research Council has been a member of the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources and the Water and Science Technology Board. He has served on the Committee on Glen Canyon Environmental Studies, Committee on Rediscovering Geography, on several committees overseeing science for the restoration of the Florida Everglades, the committee on sediment issues in the Missouri River, and numerous others.

In 1997, President Clinton appointed Graf to the Presidential Commission on American Heritage Rivers to advise the White House on river management. He presently serves on the Environmental Advisory Board to the chief of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“I am about my father’s business and my mother’s business,” he reflects. “That is, I think future generations ought to have that same opportunity that I had. It seems one of the great things we can do as a nation is to pass on the opportunity for future generations to make a choice about whether or not they want to value the natural systems. I am a positive thinker in that regard. If you consider the way we conduct our public business today with a certain sensitivity toward environmental quality, it’s a wholesale change from what it was in 1970,” he says.

“We're a nation of more than 300 million people. The law of large numbers suggests there are going to be plenty of people out there with divergent opinions, but I think people who are interested in high quality natural environments out-number those who think they are not worth preserving,” Graf posits. “When we encounter public disagreements about whether or not to pay for the cost of restoring and preserving environmental quality, my response is the same every time: show me the vote. More often than not, the result will be a vote for Nature.”

A.J.S. Rayl is a freelance science writer based in Malibu, Calif. She has written on assignment for a variety of magazines, including Air & Space, Astronomy, Discover, Reader’s Digest, and Smithsonian, as well as online ventures including the Planetary Society’s website, http//planetary.org.