The interview of A.E. Wieslander is the first in a proposed series of oral histories dealing with the role of the University of California in the management of California's wildlands. For several reasons Mr. Weislander was an appropriate interviewee to launch this project. He was a pre-forestry student at the university from 1910 to 1914 and one of the energetic and committed Forestry Club members who promoted the establishment of UC's Division of Forestry in 1913. During his long career with the United States Forest Service at the California Forest and Range Experiment Station from 1926 to 1956, his office was on the university campus, and he worked cooperatively with the university's Agricultural Experiment Station and the Departments of Forestry, Soils, Botany, and others. Thus, his tie to the university was a close one. As the initiator and director for thirty years of the experiment station's extensive vegetation and soils mapping projects, his contribution to California's wildland management was pioneering and unquestionable.