It’s a real pleasure to be able to join you for this year’s meeting! Thank you so much for inviting me!
For me, being with the State Foresters is a kind of homecoming to a place where I find common purpose and shared values. I feel energized by the opportunities, relationships, and creativity in this room.
At the Forest Service, our teamwork, or what I like to call kinship, with the state forestry agencies goes back for more than a century, to a time when we faced daunting challenges together. At the turn of the 20th century, our nation faced widespread forest loss and the challenge of sustainable forest management … the challenge of watershed protection … the challenge of wildland fire.
Together, we still face some of these same challenges today and more, and I will do everything I can as Forest Service Chief not only to sustain but also to strengthen and deepen our bonds.
Many of you know me. My personal passion is connecting people with their natural resources, and it started for me while growing up in Washington state … studying forestry at the University of Washington and becoming a Washington state seasonal firefighter … then serving for 26 years with the Washington State Department of Natural Resources.
I finished my career at the Washington State DNR as State Forester, then went on to serve as State Forester in Arizona before taking a job with the Forest Service. I served in various capacities in the Forest Service’s State and Private Forestry mission area, including as Deputy Chief. Last year, I was named as Interim Chief … and now Chief.
In all my years as State Forester and as Deputy Chief for State and Private Forestry, I never missed an opportunity to attend the annual meeting of the National Association of State Foresters, and I deeply regret having had to miss the meeting last year. Please know that I am fully committed to our partnership and that I completely understand, from firsthand experience, how vital state forestry agencies are to the future of America’s forests. The Forest Service cannot fulfill our mission to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation’s forests without you. We are all in this together, working to help people continue to get benefits from forests across the nation.
We all know that the practice of forestry is critically important to our nation. Forests clean the air; they store drinking water for millions of Americans; they contain wildlife habitat; they furnish recreational opportunities and sacred places; they are home to historic sites; and they are a renewable resource, giving people the products and jobs they need to live. For all these reasons and more, we have to do everything we can to improve forest conditions across the nation. That is one of the challenges facing the Forest Service today—finding ways to increase active forest management.
Other challenges have to do with the safety of our employees, especially our firefighters, and with creating a safe and respectful work environment where we value differences in backgrounds and perspectives as an organizational strength. For the past several years, the Forest Service has been reexamining our culture, and we are committed to change. Values are at the core of who we are today, values of service and conservation … but also values of interdependence, diversity, and safety. Relationships are also at the core of who we are, where we are experienced by our partners and by the people we serve as trustworthy, caring, respectful, inclusive, curious, and responsive.
And we especially want that to be true for the State Foresters because you are more to us than just partners. To that end, I have set national priorities for the Forest Service, including being a good neighbor and sharing stewardship across landscapes based on common goals.
Being good neighbors means recognizing the rights, values, needs, and perspectives of partners and stakeholders across the landscape. It means working with our neighbors through collaborative efforts to improve forest conditions. It means recognizing our interdependence and showing up as trustworthy, caring, and respectful.
None of us can succeed if we focus inward on our own concerns; the Forest Service can’t succeed if all we do is focus on National Forest System lands. We need to work with partners, landowners, and the people we serve to improve the condition of the nation’s forests, both public and private, in the spirit of shared stewardship.
The forest management challenges we face are as great as ever before. With respect to fire alone, our nation has over a billion burnable acres of vegetated landscapes, most of them naturally adapted to periodic wildland fire. About 80 million acres on the National Forest System overall are at risk, and about a third of that area is at high risk. Hundreds of millions of acres of other lands are also at risk. We are all in this together, and we need to use every tool and authority we have to improve forest conditions.
On the National Forest System, we are making a concerted effort to restore resiliency and reduce risk. The tools we have include timber sales, targeted grazing, herbicides in some cases, stewardship contracts, and prescribed fire. Our collective tools also include fire prevention programs, community wildfire protection plans, and Firewise practices for homes and communities to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire. As you know, we are all in this together through the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy.
Congress has given us new authorities. For example, we now have expanded stewardship contracting authority for up to 20 years. With partners, we are working to develop new markets to treat the many acres of small-diameter trees that need to be removed to improve forest health, and our new 20-year contracting authority will attract the needed investments in biomass and smallwood processing.
We have also expanded the use of Good Neighbor Authority with states where we can pool resources for treatments on federal lands and adjacent lands. We now have 214 Good Neighbor agreements in 38 states. Thanks to all of you!
We have also proposed a revised rule for carrying out our obligations under the National Environmental Policy Act. Our proposed new rule will allow us to step up the pace and scale of our on-the-ground work to improve forest conditions and meet the needs of the people we serve. At the same time, the new rule would fully engage the public in our decision-making processes, apply the best available science to our work, and use the newest information available as we make decisions.
Another area of improvement is in wood innovation and forest products modernization—bringing our forest products work into the 21st century by aligning it with modern needs, opportunities, and technologies. Scientific breakthroughs and new technologies are opening up areas of opportunity for biomass and smallwood utilization, such as biofuels, mass timber, and nanotechnology.
And we have made clear progress in using our new tools and authorities. In 2018, we treated nearly 3.5 million acres through timber sales and prescribed fire, the highest levels ever. We sold 3.2 billion board feet of timber—the most in 21 years, creating jobs through a sustainable flow of forest products.
But our mission at the Forest Service extends beyond the national forests. More than a century ago, under visionary leaders like President Theodore Roosevelt, we decided as a nation to leave a legacy of forests and grasslands for our children and grandchildren. We developed methods and models for the sustainable use of America’s forest resources across landownerships … on state and federal lands, on tribal lands, and on the private lands that comprise the majority of the nation’s forest lands.
Today, we share a belief that forests are vital to families and communities … that forests are a broad social good, vital to our national prosperity … to our well-being as Americans. All Americans, whether they own forest land or not, benefit from our nation’s trees and forest resources.
The Forest Service’s mission, what we do, is to sustain the nation’s forests and grasslands based on sound science and good data. The why we do it is to sustain people’s lives. And the how we do it is by being good neighbors and sharing stewardship with others.
The State Foresters in particular help us deliver the what, the why, and the how. You are so much more than partners to the Forest Service. You are kin, collaborators, colleagues, and allies in conservation.
So today, as you begin to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the founding of NASF, I want to renew our agency’s commitment and my own personal commitment: the Forest Service will do everything we can to sustain, strengthen, and deepen our bonds, for the benefit of generations to come.
Thank you again for inviting me to be with you today.