It’s a pleasure to be here! Thanks so much for inviting me!
I was invited to share with you some reflections on my thirty-plus years in the fields of forestry and wildland fire management: specifically, what it means to be a leader.
As I tell you my story, I will draw on my own experiences while growing up. I will also draw on my career experiences and things I learned that inspired me along the way.
Forest Service Mission
Most of my career has been with state forestry agencies in Washington and Arizona. But as Chief of the USDA Forest Service, I will frame my story in terms of my agency now. Some of you have probably had dealings with us, hopefully as good neighbors in sharing stewardship for the land because that is my overarching theme for today.
As you probably know, the United States has about 766 million acres of forest land. Two-thirds are owned or managed by states, tribes, local governments, businesses, and private citizens. The Forest Service is entrusted with the care of another 20 percent, and we also assist the states and private forest landowners in sustainable forest management. In addition, we conduct high-quality forest-related research and development, and we make the results available to businesses, forest landowners, and other agencies and organizations worldwide.
The mission of the Forest Service is to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation’s forests to meet the needs of present and future generations. Our mission is unique in that our role is to help sustain forests across jurisdictions and to connect people to forests by meeting their needs. So what we do is to care for the land, and why we do it is to serve people. Thus, our motto: “Caring for the land and serving people.”
One Forester’s Personal Story
The Forest Service mission has always resonated with me. My personal passion is connecting people with their natural resources, and it started for me while growing up not far from here in Kitsap County, near Olalla. I was a very shy 9-year-old girl when my mom and dad built our family home on 10 acres of land. We lived in Tacoma, and my parents were fulfilling their dream of raising their family in the country so we could have a connection to nature.
My sister and I played in the fire-scarred old-growth cedar stumps. We also spent hours down at the creek, where we would cheer on the salmon swimming upstream to spawn.
When it came time to pick which trees would be harvested to prepare the building site, I negotiated each tree with my Dad. I would put my hands on my hips and proclaim that I was going to be a forester and a conservationist (I saw them as interchangeable) and we needed to carefully plan which trees to harvest.
And then we met Mr. John Kingsbury, who was out tending his tree farm across the country lane. He was always so pleasant, and he gave my sister and me a huge gift. He gave us access to our own learning laboratory … the tree farm, where we explored for hours, riding our horses and our little dirt bikes on the many roads and trails on the tree farm.
And that’s where my personal passion for the conservation of natural resources began: in connection with a family tree farm.
Those early experiences inspired me to study forestry at the University of Washington, and I worked as a Washington state firefighter during the summers. After graduating, I began a 27-year career with the Washington Department of Natural Resources. I became Washington State Forester and then Arizona State Forester before starting a new chapter with the Forest Service.
Years ago, the principal of my old high school in Gig Harbor invited me back to my high school to talk about my career before the entire school body. While thinking about what I was going to say, I felt the need to dig deeper within myself to share with these students my heart and my emotion and my passion.
I was a shy girl while growing up, and I had my fair share of insecurities. I had to study hard to get good grades, and I considered myself of average intelligence. I had a strong social and emotional connection with good friends who remain so to this day, so I was lucky in that way. I enjoyed intramural sports but I was not an athlete or class president or anything else that stood out during my high school years. I faced personal adversities during my high school years, including a physical disability and the death of my father in my senior year.
I also faced obstacles throughout my college years. It took me six years and four colleges before I received my degree in forest management. This was a time I explored myself and my world; maybe you can relate. Eventually I did follow my childhood dream of becoming a forester. By the end of the six years, I had gone to college in Europe, studied liberal arts, and come back full circle to really know that my passion was connecting people and natural resources.
I told the students in my high school that I have been to wilderness peaks where humans rarely go and where wildlife is not afraid of people. I have been the first woman choker-setter on a skyline logging system on some of the steepest slopes in the country. I have blasted fireline explosives in some of the toughest ground you can imagine. I have been sleep deprived as I fought forest fires with plenty of bruises and blisters and with cracked and bleeding skin from the soot and ash. I have known the true sense of camaraderie with my fellow firefighters in battle against a tough forest fire, and I have experienced the pain and sorrow of watching comrades lose their lives in the battle. I have experienced the joy of seeing a healthy new forest that I helped to establish rise from the ashes of Mount Saint Helens. I have been an expert witness in front of Congress. I have brought environmentalists and the forest industry together to get landmark forest health legislation passed. I worked with partners to bring the wildland fire community together behind the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy.
I have also mentored young professionals, starting community-based environmental education programs for our youth and leading the way for women in a male-dominated profession. Over the years, I did my share of boundary breaking in our male-dominated profession. I also navigated an unfamiliar culture, which is difficult for anyone but especially for women and minorities. Obstacles to diversity continue to this day, especially in the fire, forestry, and engineering professions. I am absolutely passionate about helping our agency to overcome them.
Finding Your Passion
All of this is easy to say, but none of it came easy, at least not for me. For many years, I have collected quotes and stories that have inspired me and given me hope in times of adversity. Martin Luther King, Jr., once said that “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” One measure of leadership is to translate those challenging times into opportunities. As J.C. Bell said, “When you are looking for obstacles, you can’t find opportunities.”
Success also hinges on finding your passion, and it must come from within. As Stephen Covey said, “Motivation is a fire from within. If someone else tries to light that fire under you, chances are it will burn briefly.” To excel at something, you have to be passionate about it. I feel very grounded in my passion of connecting people to their natural resources, and it has guided me throughout my career.
People are central to my passion. Nature is certainly part of it; restoring healthy, resilient forest ecosystems is what we do at the Forest Service. But we do not do it for nature per se but rather because we care about people. Great leaders are people of the heart with a wholehearted commitment to helping others. If there is one thing that I encourage people to remember, it is a tried-and-true motto that, time and time again, has proven to be the most important guiding principle in my life: “People don’t care what you know until they know that you care.” We can know everything about the lands we manage, but it won’t matter unless we connect those lands to the people we serve, including the people who live on the lands we manage and depend on them for their social and economic well-being.
That brings me to how we do our work at the Forest Service. If what we do is to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of forests and grasslands … if why we do it is to meet the needs of the people we serve … then how do we fulfill our mission?
The answer again lies with people. Leaders don’t accomplish great things by themselves; they need to inspire others with a vision and empower them to achieve it. And that inspiration starts with our own employees. Each of us is the living embodiment of what our agency stands for. All of us, collectively engaging with coworkers, partners, and the public, bring our mission to life. Our success depends on how we show up.
Given the magnitude of the challenges we face today—challenges like fire and fuels, like invasive species, like outbreaks of insects and disease—we simply can’t fulfill our mission alone. We do it by continually strengthening our ties to the community and sharing stewardship with others. We do it by making connections with the people we work with and serve.
Seeking Common Ground
I have seen the need for connecting with people at many points in my career. But one story stands out because it happened here in Washington.
In the 1990s, you will recall, the Pacific Northwest was torn by conflict over forest uses: Do people want salmon or timber? Do people want clean water? Outdoor recreation? We know that these uses are not mutually exclusive … but many people thought so at the time.
Washington found a solution through the Forests and Fish Law—in fact, this year Washington is celebrating the law’s 20th anniversary. The genius of Forests and Fish was that it cut through the Gordian Knot: it ended the zero-sum game of “I’m right, so you must be wrong.” Forests and Fish discovered common ground, a way of getting to yes:
- Yes, people want salmon. Salmon is our signature species here in the Northwest, vital to our regional culture and heritage. Salmonids depend on clean cold water and on good habitat in healthy streams and rivers, from the headwaters down to the sound.
and …
- Yes, we all live in woodframe homes, so we all need timber from sustainably managed forests, a green building material much better for the environment than concrete or steel.
and …
- Yes, most private forest lands are in family ownerships, and if we want to keep them forested and sustainably managed for generations to come, then we need to make sure that their owners can make sound investments with sustainable financial returns.
Twenty years ago, Forests and Fish struck a balance between these competing interests by saying yes … by validating all of the above.
Of course, the law was just a first step. I came in from the field as Washington DNR Assistant Division Manager for Forest Practices just as the emergency rules for the law were rolling out … and then there was the process of adopting the permanent rules and the development of a historic habitat conservation plan. It wasn’t easy. There were many long debates about the equitability and parity of Forests and Fish, especially for family forest landowners. This was recognized by the state legislature, and I was a part of standing up the first Small Forest Landowner Office.
All these years later, I am still very proud of Forests and Fish, and I thank those who led the way for their vision and foresight. Forests and Fish is a model for the nation, one of the largest and most comprehensive environmental measures in the United States, covering 60,000 miles of stream on 9.3 million acres of state and private forest land. It complies with both the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act; it protects Washington’s native fish and aquatic species as well as water quality through monitoring and adaptive management; and it accommodates private forest landowners, giving them surety on their lands and acknowledging the critical role they play in protecting and preserving values that all of our citizens share.
I took the lessons and the innovations from Forests and Fish into my position as Arizona State Forester and now into my role as Forest Service Chief.
One lesson is that watershed protection is vitally important because people need water to live. In the lower 48 states, 51 percent of our water supplies originate on forested landscapes, and 18 percent come from the national forests alone. More than 60 million Americans in more than 3,400 communities rely on the National Forest System for their drinking water.
Another lesson is the critical importance of forests. Our nation has about 11 million private forest landowners who own about 58 percent of the nation’s forests. They generate the lion’s share of the nation’s forest products, about 90 percent.
More than 260 million acres of private forest land are managed by about 10 million family forest landowners. Family forests are mostly at lower elevations, where they protect vital watersheds by buffering forests at higher elevations from residential areas. These lands are threatened by land use conversion to developed uses, so the Forest Service is working with partners to do everything we can to keep these family forest lands forested.
Growing Wildfire Risks
Forests are vital to families and communities. Forests are a broad social good, vital to our national prosperity, to the well-being of every American. All Americans, whether they own forest land or not, benefit from our nation’s forest resources.
And that means we are all in this together. The issues we face cross jurisdictions, whether they are water issues or other challenges. The challenges are on a landscape scale, and coming to terms with them takes an all-lands, all-hands approach.
Take wildfire, for example. 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, whether state, private, county, Tribal, or other federal. We are all in this together.
In the last two years alone, wildfires burned almost 19 million acres nationwide and destroyed more than 26,000 residences. Worse, more than a hundred people died in wildfire entrapments, often while fleeing their homes. Over the last few decades, the western fire season has grown at least two-and-a-half months longer, and we have seen the frequency, size, and severity of wildfires increase. Primary drivers are climate change, drought, hazardous fuel buildups, and the spread of homes and communities into fire-prone landscapes.
In fact, large parts of the West are in a “new normal of fire activity,” where a full suite of environmental, social, political, financial, and cultural factors drive outcomes in the wildland fire environment. The wildland fire system we have today is so incredibly complex that no single entity can do it alone—not the Forest Service, not the states, not any given fire department. We are all in this wildland fire system together.
The solution is to use every tool and authority we have to improve the health of America’s forests. The tools we have include timber sales, targeted grazing, herbicides in some cases, stewardship contracts, and prescribed fire. Our tools also include fire prevention programs, community wildfire protection plans, and Firewise practices for homes and communities to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire.
And we have made progress. In 2018, the Forest Service 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 20 years, creating jobs through a sustainable flow of forest products.
Shared Stewardship
But it still isn’t enough, so we need others to help us make a difference across the landscape. The Forest Service is committed to working with partners and landowners to accomplish work on the nation’s forests in the spirit of shared stewardship. We believe that joining together across shared landscapes and around shared values is critical for the future of conservation.
The reason is this: the scale of our work has to match the scale of the risks and the problems we face. For example, salmon face risks ranging from the oceans to headwater streams—and all points in between. If we want to have salmon, we need to mitigate the risks by working with partners at the appropriate scale. Forests and Fish is a great example of coming together to work at the right scale of the risks to our salmon fisheries.
Now we have an opportunity to match the scale of our work to the scale of the fire risks we face as well. In the past, our projects were randomly scattered across landscapes. If a severe fire came, the project usually worked: the fire dropped from the canopy to the forest floor, where firefighters could control it before it burned into homes and communities. But we had no good way of assessing the full scale of the risk and placing our treatments accordingly.
Now we have tools for understanding a whole range of conditions at landscape scales. Today’s megafires can travel for many miles to threaten homes, communities, and other values. The entire area at risk is called a fireshed, and scientists can now map entire firesheds, including all the federal, state, private, and other landownerships that collectively make up an individual fireshed. We can map the contribution to fire risk from each parcel of land, and we can use that information to forecast what might happen if we put various kinds of treatments here or there.
We can use the same approach for other kinds of threats, like invasive species. Through planning at the right scale based on the outcomes we agree on for shared landscapes, we can place treatments of any kind in a cost-effective way to achieve shared goals.
We propose to apply our new capacities through shared stewardship, with the states taking the lead. The states will convene partners to set broad priorities across shared landscapes for the outcomes we all want. Then we will come to agreements with communities and stakeholders on the right tools to use at the right time in the right places at the right scale.
The stars are aligned. The states have forest action plans that can serve to coordinate fuels and forest health treatments across planning areas that span jurisdictional boundaries. The states are uniquely positioned to convene stakeholders across firesheds to evaluate the wildland fire environment, agree on cross-jurisdictional planning areas, use tools to assess alternatives for managing fire risk, and set priorities for investments that will bring the most bang for the buck.
The Forest Service has already signed shared stewardship agreements with Washington, Idaho, Montana, and others. More agreements are on the way.
Modeling Shared Stewardship
Forests and Fish is an example of shared stewardship. The law produced a habitat conservation plan that brings together partners and stakeholders from across the landscape to address risks at the appropriate scale based on common values and goals. Forests and Fish was an early model for the kind of shared stewardship we need now across the nation.
Of course, stakeholders have many different interests and perspectives, and they often want different things. That’s okay. We need to be clear about that and accept it.
Yet we share the same landscapes, and we face the same challenges—challenges to forest health … to watershed health … to habitat for fish and wildlife … in the case of wildfire, to homes and human lives … I could go on. Leadership in forestry and fire management means putting aside our differences and finding common ground. A shared stewardship approach means “being in community” with others. It means taking better care of people, taking better care of our collective natural resources, and strengthening the economic vitality of our country.
I’ll leave you with one final quote.
In connection with Forests and Fish here in Washington, one of the partners who exemplified the spirit of leadership through shared stewardship was a Tribal leader. His name was Billy Frank, Jr., and he put it this way: “Be an advocate for each other. We need the timber, we need the animals, we need the fish. We need each other.”
Thank you.