Charles “Chip” Cartwright, a 27-year career Forest Service employee, blazed a path as the first Black employee to fill key leadership roles throughout the agency, including as a regional forester in the Southwest Region, where he oversaw national forests and grasslands in Arizona and New Mexico. Cartwright retired in 1997 and died Feb. 3, 2023.

“I had a dream. And my dream was to be a forest ranger,” Cartwright said in a 2021 Virginia Tech alumni interview. It was at the school, he said, “that my association with other forestry student and professors who told their stories of their work life and of their experiences of what it meant to work in the field, what it meant to be in the forest. . . that my dream images actually began to build.”

Only later, he said, did he realize the role he would play in forestry. Cartwright’s career led him from Oregon, to the Southwest, to the Intermountain and Rocky Mountain regions and, finally, to Washington, DC.

Cartwright grew up in Petersburg, Virginia, and like a lot of young adults, did not know what to major in when he enrolled at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg. A summer job with the Forest Service on the Saint Joe National Forest in Idaho changed his life, Cartwright told an interviewer in 1980. In that job, high atop a fire lookout tower on an Idaho mountain, he watched for fires and studied lightning.

“It was the summer after my freshman year in college,” recalled Cartwright. “My studies hadn’t been going well, and there was uncertainty in my life. That job gave me time to think. I was alone for five weeks and a long way from home for an inner-city kid. I had never been so much on my own.”

Returning to school with a stronger sense of self and what he could do, he “discovered the full range of natural resource management activities of the Forest Service, and decided I wanted a career with the outfit.”

He also knew he was going against the tide, “especially since forestry schools then were predominantly white.” In the alumni video he said he was one of 20 Blacks in a university of roughly 10,000 students.

In 1980, he recalled, “Counselors advised me against careers in natural resources and agriculture. The push was on for Blacks to enter engineering, physics and other technical areas. For many Blacks, agricultural careers carried the stigma of field labor left over from the slave days.”

Cartwright persevered. He graduated in 1970, but his chosen career had to wait. He was called to active duty with the U.S. Air Force, joining the Forest Service as a forester in 1973.

Just five years later, in 1978, he became the first Black district ranger, serving on the Conconully Ranger District of the Okanogan National Forest in Washington. At the time Cartwright said, “Right now, I want to be the best district ranger my skills will allow. By doing that, I can show young Blacks that natural resource management careers are possible for them. I don’t want anyone to overlook an exciting career like mine.”

Cartwright moved into another district ranger job on the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington before taking a position as legislative coordinator with the Intermountain Region. In 1988, 10 years after breaking the district ranger barrier, he broke another when he became supervisor of the Jefferson National Forest in Virginia.

Associate Chief Angela Coleman met Chip when he served as the forest supervisor. She remembers the positive impression he made on her during her first year with the agency.

“Chip Cartwright was my first forest supervisor. I had just left the newsroom and joined the agency as a public affairs specialist trainee. Chip worked right across the hall from me. He was very committed to ensuring a positive work experience for me on the Jefferson. He went out of his way to welcome and immediately immerse me in the incredible mission of the Forest Service. The sense of belonging I felt on the Jefferson made a difference in my decision to stay with the Forest Service for more than 30 years. Chip was part of that. I’m grateful for the early, but significant, role he played in my career.”

He would later serve as acting deputy regional forester—the second highest ranking officer in a region—in the Rocky Mountain Region before returning to the Intermountain Region, serving as acting deputy regional forester there as well.

In 1990, he became assistant director of Environmental Conservation, part of Chief Robertson’s keystone initiative New Perspectives—designed to move the agency into more inclusive forest ecosystem management. Two years later, Cartwright was named assistant director of Ecosystem Management for the National Forest System, the largest deputy chief unit in the agency.

Throughout his time in the Washington Office, Cartwright’s message on the value of diversity in maintaining the health of a natural ecosystem set the guiding principles for natural resources and organizational management in the Forest Service.

In the 2021 interview with Virginia Tech, Cartwright said that his experiences at school and his promotion to district ranger help to “place me in a position in which I could succeed. I learned to believe in myself, and I learned to open myself up for others who also believed in me. And the accomplishments that I made? They were not only for me, but they were for others as well.”

That, he said, spurred him to “learn that I needed to pay it forward. . . I needed to be able to play that same role for others who were looking ahead and maybe I was in their field of vision.”

Cartwright is survived by his wife, Daisy; daughter Shannon Miskowski; son Michael; brothers Bruce and Mark; four sisters, Brenda Cartwright Graves, Pamela Shield Cartwright Fleming, Debbie Cartwright Taylor and Angel Cartwright Christian; three grandsons, Levi, Micah and Josiah; and a host of nieces and nephews and grandnieces and grandnephews.