In addition to her many accomplishments in Washington state, Sally Jewell served as U.S. Secretary of the Interior under President Barack Obama from 2013 to 2017. In nominating Jewell for the post, President Obama said, "She is an expert on the energy and climate issues that are going to shape our future. She is committed to building our nation-to-nation relationship with Indian Country. She knows the link between conservation and good jobs. She knows that there's no contradiction between being good stewards of the land and our economic progress; that in fact, those two things need to go hand in hand." Raised in Renton, Jewell began her career as a petroleum engineer before switching to commercial banking, became Chief Operation Officer of Recreational Equipment Inc. (REI) in 2000, and served as REI's President and CEO from 2005 to 2013. In this November 2024 interview with HistoryLink contributor Mayowa Aina, Jewell talks about her early fascination with Washington's forests, the many economic and environmental lessons learned during her professional career, and her vision for the future of forest land management.
Childhood Camps
Sally Jewell: I'm an immigrant. I was born in England in 1956, born in London. And for the first three years of my life, I was between London and Bristol as my father was a young doctor. My mom had been a nurse midwife and that's where they met, at the hospital. And my sister, born a year before me, just 13 months apart. And then I had a little brother who was born six weeks before we immigrated to the United States. So my dad came first in summer of 1959 to do a fellowship at the University of Washington. And the rest of us came in December of 1959.
And when my dad got here before the family arrived, he asked people at the hospital at UW Medicine, what's now UW Medicine, what people did around here. And he was told that they hiked and they camped. And he said, "Well, I don't know how to do that. How do I do that?" And they said, "Well, you go to this little store, REI, which was above the Green Apple Pie Market on Pike Street in downtown Seattle at the time, 1959. And he joined, so he was member number 17249 ...
And we started camping at a very early age. I was both a Campfire Girl and a Girl Scout at the same time, which people were like, "What? That's Brand X. How can you do that?" Well, I just liked to be involved and just enjoyed the company of other people in the outdoors, and then just exploring and learning. The most memorable trips of my childhood were led by, they were these camps, and it was an organization all the kids hated the name of: Northwest Gifted Child Association. Right? And it's like, "Oh, can't you just call it Explorers or something?" Like, ugh.
But Mrs. Black led these trips ... And so she has a dozen kids like 9, 10, and we're camping out by Mount Rainier in Silver Spring Campgrounds where I broke my arm on the way back. And then we're camping out in Eastern Washington, and we have grad students from the UW, and they're teaching us about their specialty. So that first week was the scientific names of all the trees and how to tell them apart; which I don't remember all the scientific names, but some of them. But the conifers as opposed to the deciduous and how you tell them apart. I remember just massive trees or you're trying to put your arms around with all your friends and you couldn't even have the circumference of the tree. That stuck with me. I just remember she was brilliant. She'd go by the Oberto beef jerky factory and she'd get the little end bits in a big white bag. And if you got the name of the tree right, she'd flip you a piece of beef jerky. So I developed a taste for beef jerky because of Mrs. Black.
But it sticks because she makes learning fun. And I think that was very influential in me in terms of paying attention. It was scientific names of trees, and then it was meteorology in Eastern Washington with the clouds and naming all the types of clouds. And there was a boy who was a closet entomologist collecting bugs with a milk bottle that had cyanide in the bottom so he could take the bug and kill it and then pin it out. So he's doing this in the campground. We did another year where we went to Obstruction Island, which had no buildings on it at all, and we built a primitive campground and we did marine biology and topographical mapping, so geology or GIS, early GIS. And then the third year we hiked across the Olympic Mountains, Anderson Pass, Dosewallips out to Graves Creek and talk about old growth trees and forests. It's just stunning. So those are really, really impactful.
Keenly Aware of Trees
SJ: My first forest was probably like the backyard. Our property was, I don't know, maybe half an acre, three-quarters of an acre. It was a big city lot in Renton, but full of trees at the time. So, they let me try and dig my own swimming pool in the backyard. That was kind of a mud pit, but we were able to run around in the woods and climb trees. Big cedar trees, fruit trees, a walnut tree. That was where we did the zipline. And I just was a climber, a tree climber all the time, so always in the woods. Didn't have to be old-growth forests, just any woods, I was in a tree. Fell out of a tree when I was 9 and broke my wrist pretty severely. But I'd say it was kind of part of my DNA.
And actually, I started skiing actually because I broke my wrist and because my dad was a doctor; professional courtesy doctors didn't charge each other, but we had insurance. So, my doctor gave me a check for $50, which might've been a million dollars as far as I was concerned when I was 9. And so I gave it to my parents and said, "I want to learn to ski." So as soon as I recovered from breaking my arm, I took ski lessons. But one of the things that was most memorable from that was these white patches of clearcuts up along Snoqualmie Pass. It's kind of like, "Why? Why do they have this white patch next to this green patch? What's going on?" And of course, that's part of our checkerboard legacy. But yeah, I was pretty keenly aware of the trees and then keenly aware as I got older that some of the trees I'd taken for granted were no longer there.
Lessons in Banking
SJ: First I worked on the Alaska Pipeline in a manufacturing plant in Tacoma on the tideflats. So, I got to know kind of the manufacturing side and also a little bit about the oil and gas side. And that was when I was an engineering student. When I graduated, [husband] Warren and I both did, we both had mechanical engineering degrees. So we went to Oklahoma to work in the oil fields. Oil and gas took us from Oklahoma to Colorado. And then we basically realized that oil and gas wasn't found in pleasant places in the world, particularly for women. I wanted to work in offshore structures. I wasn't allowed on any offshore structure in the world except for basically one platform in Norway where they allowed women. Everything else was a hundred percent closed to women.
And so we're like, "Well, there's things you can change and things you can't change. Why don't we move back to Seattle?" Which we both enjoyed. Warren wasn't from here. He grew up in Southern California, but he went to school here. And so we said, "We want to have a family. Let's do it close to family." So that's what brought us back here.
We both interviewed for the job that I got, which is always a little bit awkward, but he's a great sport. Anyway, that was to be an engineer at a bank. Seafirst Bank, was doing all kinds of energy lending. And Rainier Bank, which I went to work for, wanted to do that, but they didn't know what they were doing. So I started off in oil and gas, but I said, "Well, will you teach me how to be a banker?" And they said, "Well, we're making you a banker now because we don't have any business to pay your salary, so go make some loans." I was like, "Ah, I don't know what I'm doing." So it was steep learning curve, but I learned over time that I was happiest at a steep learning curve.
One of the reasons the bank hired me as a petroleum engineer in 1981 was because you had interest rates that were very high. But the impact of those interest rates meant that Boeing was dying because people couldn't afford to finance the airplanes that they wanted to buy. I mean, obviously not dying, but it was really struggling. Then the timber industry was struggling because nobody could get into houses. And the seafood industry was struggling because there was a botulism scare because a lot of the salmon in those days went into cans, and the cans had a pinprick and they got infected, and they had to basically throw away a whole harvest of salmon.
So the only industry that was borrowing was oil and gas. But you develop an understanding of these other industries that are native to this area and the ups and downs and the sawmill closures and what happens in those small communities. And all of that was being impacted during the time of the high interest rates. So it started off with being more extractive industries. But then because I did not support a lot of the bad energy loans that were made, they promoted me ultimately to be the senior loan administrator, which is, I worked for the chief credit officer, but I had the legal lending limit of the bank under my signature. So while I was the direct banker for the oil and gas companies and Native corporations in Alaska and things like that, I was a credit administrator wanting to understand the other industries we banked. So I went to sawmills and fish processing plants and catcher processor vessels for the seafood industry. And developed a really deep appreciation of the economic impact of those industries; but also the environmental impact of those industries in a way that ... There are trade offs.
Banking is a hundred miles wide and a quarter of an inch deep. But you get a sense of how all these things fit together and you also get a sense of understanding and appreciation for rural communities and what drives them.
Planting Seeds at REI
SJ: I joined the inaugural board of the Greenway Trust in 1991. Because I was on the board as a banker showing up in our meeting, impressing in my banker business suit, sitting across the table from Charlie Raines with the Sierra Club with the oldest fleece known to man and Mary Norton, who is a activist from Snoqualmie. And we all developed great relationships with each other and respect for each other. But the Greenway connected me to REI and they asked if I would join their board. And I joined the board in 1996.
So I'd been on the board for four years when they said, "Will you come and be chief operating officer? We think we need your skill set." I remember saying early on, "Okay, so what is our footprint on the environment? We got a bunch of people that like to climb mountains. Well are those peaks that people are bagging sacred sites to tribes? The fuel we're spending in our Subarus and four-wheel-drive vehicles to get up there, are we accounting for that? What about the products that we make and what's the impact on the planet?” So we really began a deep dive into sustainability and saying, "As a member-owned cooperative, our members need and want a healthy environment. Are we part of the problem or are we part of the solution? And how do we make sure that we understand what we are and then we migrate to be part of the solution if we're not part of it right away?"
As a member-owned cooperative, you've got kind of a gift and a curse I guess. The gift is you can really think long-term. And early in 2005, I think my first board retreat after becoming CEO, or at least after it being announced that I was going to be CEO, we spent on what are the major trends that are going to influence our business 25 years in the future? So the five were globalization with international trade and where things are manufactured and things and dependencies in different parts of the world; demographic shifts in the population. Urbanization, people are moving to cities. How do you bring the outdoors in people's everyday lives? And then climate change and technology were the other ones.
So, demographics ... you used to joke with terms like pale, male and stale, meaning older, white, fit, outdoor-oriented, no material diversity, not working on that in a conscious or in a really methodical way. It's not like there wasn't consciousness, but REI's member was aging every year that I was aging and I was the average age. And I thought, "Well, this is not a recipe for success." It's like, "If we're going to survive, we must reach communities we're not reaching in a way that resonates with them, not that resonates with us." And so, we worked hard at REI to engage young people. Young people spending a lot of time in technology. There's a lot of pressure on school performance and things, not a lot of time to get out in the outdoors. There's a lot of organized youth sports that keeps kids from doing other things. So REI did a lot around engaging youth, but I felt like we reached half a million kids through this Promoting Environmental Awareness and Kids program that we developed in concert with Leave No Trace. And we had a backpack full of curriculum that was fun and had tents and boots and things that kids could set up and taught about the web of life and the interconnectivity. But it was like planting a little seed.
But if that seed never got watered, it never went anywhere. So then we were doing other things like Sierra Club's Inner City outings and deeper programs, YMCA's Bold and Gold programs. REI was supporting those and, for those kids, a few hundred a year, it was pretty immersive. And if they were oriented that way, they might become lifelong outdoor enthusiasts, but it was too small. So that, really impacted what I did when I got to Interior because Interior had scale.
Making a Large-Scale Impact as Interior Secretary
SJ: Well, first it's not a job I sought out. So it's not like I'd been thinking, "Oh, if only I was Secretary of the Interior, these are the things I'd want to do." No, I was happily leading REI and really was a dark horse that came from out of nowhere because I didn't even know and I didn't advocate. And when it did get on my radar, people were like, "Well, are you talking to people?" And I said, "No." I said, "President Obama has this Rubik's cube he's trying to put together and he knows who I am and if he wants me, great. And if he doesn't want me, I totally understand. I got a great job. So no, I'm not going to try and advocate."
Anyway, two things that I really took into Interior that I wanted to influence. One was climate change. I mean, as REI worked hard to understand our carbon footprint, to understand the footprint of our products, to work with others because sustainability is a team sport, there's still ... you lack scale for impact. Interior had scale. The impact of climate change was everywhere I saw. I looked, it was on the landscapes, it was on our public lands. It was the disasters we were having to mitigate for or adapt to. We were in a position to be able to do something about it, both in terms of leasing land that had only ever been leased before for grazing and mineral and oil and gas development to lease it for renewable energy or to say, "Which areas are really critical habitat that should never be developed because of the changes happening with climate change?" So, protecting lands like the Arctic Ocean and now the Western Arctic, if it doesn't get undone.
Management of the forests in a more sustainable way. Growing trees sequesters carbon. And that's good. And that is an important thing to think of when you're looking at what's the value of forests. And even on the climate-change side, following up on things that Ken Salazar my predecessor had done on renewable energy. So maintaining the momentum then, but in terms of respect for different communities, also a big priority on upholding trust and treaty obligations and really forming authentic relationships with tribal communities and learning from them and trying to address that.
So two lanes I would say that I brought were one was around climate change and doing something about it. And second was really around youth, and it was the need for a continuum of engagement. And we called it basically "play, learn, serve, work." So play was like, how do we welcome kids into parks that are close by or open spaces that are close by in a way where parents aren't worried about stranger danger? So how do you support that? I raised money privately. So American Express Foundation through one of my colleagues, David Jail, raised $2 million. We put it into the YMCA as an organizing organization in 51 cities across the country to work with the public land managers, state parks, city parks, county parks, national parks, wildlife refuges because YMCA already serves 6 million children a day in daycare, but most of them didn't have outdoor experiences. So how do we leverage their desire to do that. So that was "Play."
"Learn" became every kid in a park or now every kid outdoors, which was codified by Congress, and my successor tried to get rid of it. It's the free pass for every fourth grader in America to all the public lands because they're learning laboratories. And so we help the land-management organizations focus on that fourth, fifth grade age so that they could concentrate their programs more effectively. And then we followed up with every kid in the park pass. So that was "Learn."
And "serve" was working with the land managers to open the doors to have a youth volunteer conservation corps or paid conservation corps like the Student Conservation Association, American Conservation Experience. There's 350 of them around the country and a lot of them take kids from cities and urban areas and have them work in the outdoors. And that absolutely is life changing. They'll be out for three weeks, six weeks, 12 weeks in the outdoors doing work. Earth Corps here in Seattle, amazing organizations, worked with Greenway on re-greening hillsides and repairing old logging roads and all of that. That's very life changing.
And then "Work" is opening up work experiences that were never on these kids' radar to begin with. So you begin to change the face of who's a forest ranger and who's in the outdoors and who belongs. So, those were a couple things that were really a priority for me.
Finding Common Ground as Interior Secretary
SJ: I met 50 senators because of the confirmation process. And what I found was that people made assumptions about me because I was an Obama administration nominee, because I was from Seattle, which is as I jokingly say, the upper left corner of the left coast. They made assumptions that I was going to be like a strident environmentalist. And yet when I talked to them as an engineer, as someone that had been a petroleum engineer working in the oil field, as someone that had banked cattle ranches and feed lots and manufacturing plants and sawmills, you begin to develop common ground because you begin to develop a personal relationship with someone where those assumptions are quickly dispelled. And I think that was very helpful to me.
But I'd also say that that experience helped me not make judgments in the same way. And so for example, working on wildland fire, which is a huge consequence of climate change and where we are. And it's also a consequence of invasive species like cheatgrass, which is a huge problem in the Great Basin and the Great Plains from this introduced species. It's so prolific. I see it everywhere I go, even in Washington state now. And it enables fire and it bounces back really quickly and the native species get wiped out. So I learned a lot by talking to ranchers ranching the land, and they're like, "Here's what I'm doing to try and support the native forbs in the sagebrush, and this is really working. So rather than setting aside these lands for protection, I think you could be working more closely with the cattle ranchers on how we nurture these landscapes so what's good for the bird is good for the herd."
So those respectful conversations are really helpful. I'd say with tribes in particular ... I went to a tribal visit and I'm being pulled out to the next visit. And I said after that trip, "Don't ever schedule me for a tribal community and book my schedule tight like this." I could tell even, and I'd done some banking with Native communities both in Alaska and down here, and I said, "It is disrespectful to leave." And it's not like the tribal communities aren't well aware of your schedule and the demands on your time. But I learned very early on that it felt very disrespectful to me. And even in my first week on the job, I think I had, I don't know, maybe eight tribal leaders asked to meet with me. I met with them and they basically were standing around the table and they're praying for me and I kept sobbing and they're sobbing. And it's like you begin to really feel the importance of the role and also the hurt of generations. So, I don't know quite what in my background has helped. Maybe it's a bit of all of the above, but when you deeply listen and people feel listened to, it just changes the game.
The Mountains to Sound Greenway
SJ: I joined the inaugural board of the Greenway Trust in 1991, and it was formed really because of the awareness brought by the Issaquah Alps Trails Club and a couple of curmudgeons, Jack Horning, who was on the Greenway board, and Harvey Manning. They said that I-90, which had been built, it was probably the '60s, and it became a magnet for development, as interstates always do, or roads always do, but particularly interstates. And so they could see in Issaquah the Issaquah Alps, Cougar Mountain, Squak Mountain, Tiger Mountain, maybe others. Cougar Mountain was already being developed up the slopes. These were their places they used to hike. They wanted it for themselves. So there's a selfishness about that, but it's also an awareness of, "Hey, if we don't pay attention to connectivity of corridors, and health of watersheds, and connected forests for animals and things like that, we're going to end up with it nibbled away, and then we won't have anything like what we had before." So how do we retain the character and the ecosystems that have really been kind of what this area is known for?
It was really the Trust for Public Land that recruited Jim Ellis to this inaugural effort on the board. And he went to the titans of industry because that's the way Seattle worked at the time in Jim's generation. It was like half a dozen people who pulled the strings of the city. And he'd cleaned up Lake Washington and done so many other things. It's like when Jim Ellis asked you, you'd go, at least if you're of that generation. So he did that with the banks. That happened with Weyerhaeuser. So Charlie Bingham was an executive vice president at Weyerhaeuser. It happened with Boeing as well. He called Bill Gates at Microsoft. Bill didn't put in money for a while, but ultimately, Microsoft was a pretty big supporter. All of these companies put in money.
And so he called the president of the bank that I worked for, John Mangels. John Mangels said, "We'll give you the money, but I don't have time to join your board. But I've got this young whippersnapper," which was me, age 34-ish, "And I don't have the time, but she'd be good." And Jim put people on the board. Phyllis Lamphere had been a Seattle City Council member. Mary Norton, who was a very quiet, introverted veterinarian from North Bend that was just a steady advocate. Johnson Meninick from the Yakama Nation was on the board, maybe not from day one, but pretty early on. Brian Boyle was the Public Lands Commissioner. He was involved, and Bob Rose was his deputy, I think. And Bob was very, very engaged in the Greenway, as have pretty much, maybe to lesser degrees, as have pretty much every Commissioner of Public Lands for Washington state since it was founded.
Terry Wallgren was from Cle Elum. He was a banker, and he had one of the toughest jobs because dealing with landowners in Eastern Washington that wanted timber back, they wanted mills back, they wanted mining back, and they wanted to see truck stops and other development. And people like Doug McClelland, who later became the president of the Greenway and worked for the Department of Natural Resources, he started on the technical advisory committee. So you brought people together to learn from each other, and we had historians and less tribal members than we should have had. I think it wasn't for lack of trying, but it was for lack of trust and also just inertia. People did not ... Sort of fine if tribal members conformed to the Western way of thinking, but were we listening, I think we could have done a better job. Anyway, that’s kind of the genesis.
It was a big tent. I remember saying to Jim when he was recruiting me to begin with, and we didn't know each other, I said, "Jim, this feels like a 25-year project." He said, "Yes." Kind of like, "Whoa, that's a lot to sign up for." And I had two little kids. My kids were like 5 and 6 or 4 and 5 when this started. And this was a real learning curve, but it was a learning curve in an area that I really loved, that I'd known since childhood, that I'd seen the changes on the landscape since childhood. And it was ... I can't say it was like, "Whoa, thank God I got asked to join this Greenway board." It's kind of like, "Okay, how am I going to fit this in? What value can I add?" And that's kind of how it got started.
And what I learned from Jim was just the importance of bringing people together to find common ground to understand where each other was coming from. The first opportunity I had in to join an environmental organization as a volunteer was the Mountains to Sound Greenway. And there probably was no single experience on the volunteer side that was more valuable to me as Secretary of the Interior than being on the Greenway board.
Lessons from the Greenway
SJ: There are still a lot of private lands. They can be used for development. There are areas where they should be developed, but there are areas that shouldn't be ... The first land acquisition, which was the Rattlesnake Ridge, which would have been developed into houses. And Jim called Weyerhaeuser and said, "What is your business? Are you growing trees, or are you developing real estate?" And they said, "We're a tree-growing company," so he convinced them to sell that Rattlesnake Ridge, which is immediately south of the North Bend exit. All of that would have been houses going up the side, like you see in Cougar Mountain. And so there's things like that that were very exciting, where I could see the change of generations and the changes of how things were done, but also Jim's efforts to hold a mirror up to companies and individuals and say, "What do you want the future of this area to be like?"
So if you've got species that need to migrate north to south like cougar and bear and elk and other ungulates, and you've got this ribbon of asphalt known as I-90 that bisects that, you did the wildlife crossings. On the east to west, you've got these little corridors that connect trails. You can get from the Issaquah Alps, you can get across the Greenway, you can go to the East Lake Sammamish Trail for your bicycle. You can do all these things which make this a very livable area, but it doesn't preclude development. You can have Snoqualmie Ridge develop, which was very controversial and the Greenway was involved and supported it. But Jim in particular with Weyerhaeuser and Quadrant Homes said, "How can you cluster?" So this is more of an urban village. You have your mega-mansions around the edge, but you have townhouses and alleys and places where you can build a school and kids can walk to school and you can be smart and irrigate your golf course with gray water. You can do all these things. You can consolidate for Metro service that gets you into downtown. And so there are developments that have happened and continue to develop.
Talus is another one. They had two things. They wanted to develop two housing areas with a river that bisected it. And the Greenway said, "That's great, it's lovely." And they were going to have an easement for a trail through that. But if you move this other housing development below that, you'll have the same amount of riverfront. You'll have the same clusters of the two, but you'll leave this wildlife corridor open so the wildlife can go through there without interruption because if they're going through housing development, they won't go or there'll be wildlife-human conflict. So that I think is smart development that can happen and is happening. And the Greenway, by knowing more about how the ecosystem needs to work together, can be smart about that development. And there's talk about how do we do that along Stevens Pass and how do we do that along Highway 410 and toward Mount Rainier, so still plenty of space to develop.
And I guess the lesson from the Greenway is exactly that. That is, the Greenway has never been against development. It's always been around thoughtful development and understanding what's happening in the ecosystem and how do you balance that.
Thoughtful Engineering at Grouse Ridge
SJ: Grouse Ridge is a terminal moraine from a glacier from the Ice Age. So a glacier comes down and it pushes a giant load of rock basically in front of it, and then it stops, and then the glacier retreats and there's this ridge, and it's right at Exit 34 on the north side of I-90 and you see a flat-topped ridge. Huge amount of gravel deposits in that ridge and behind that ridge that's owned by Weyerhaeuser. And so they wanted to sell it. It's worth hundreds of millions of dollars. So they worked with the Greenway early on and said, "We've got this," the third runway was being built at Sea-Tac. They needed a huge amount of gravel for that. This was a source for that. Weyerhaeuser wanted to develop this. The Greenway was in the middle of this sort of firestorm of people not wanting it developed in North Bend and Nancy Keith was head of the Greenway. And by getting people together and saying like, "What do you really want?" They pulled together, I think a really good compromise, which is, "Okay, Weyerhaeuser, we understand that you're a publicly traded company and you need to have value for your shareholders, and this gravel has value and there's gravel need for a growing area, whether it's the third runway or housing developments or roads or whatever. Grouse Ridge is really part of the character of the mountains. So leave Grouse Ridge, please. Don't put a logging or a gravel road right down the middle of it. Don't go out through Exit 38 because you've got a multiple stream crossings. Can you put a conveyor that is screened from the highway and then your processing facility, which is close to Exit 34 for trucks sunk down a bit with the lights pointing down so that you can transfer the gravel as it's mined by conveyor down to there without it being a visual impairment. And then as you mine from the back toward the ridge, can you reclaim the land as you go? And because you've taken the value out, first of the trees and then of the gravel, as you reclaim that land, donate it to King County as open space." So that's what we ended up doing.
It was a compromise. And that's the sort of thing where it's like, how can you understand the company that owns it, what the laws are, what they're allowed to do, what you'd like them to do? Is there kind of a compromise that will enable King County to have open space that's really critical to it over time that greens up these landscapes. And so if you drive I-90, and you see Grouse Ridge, it's just a carpeted green hillside with trees, but it's got a conveyor that runs right down the middle of it at a slant and ends up at that processing plant. You didn't know there was a big gravel processing plant just east of Exit 34. You don't know it's there because it's shielded.
The Future of Forest Land Management
SJ: I don’t think we can solve the challenge of climate change if we don’t find economic ways to do that. So, a price on carbon is a good way to start. We’re paying forests for carbon but we’re not charging ourselves for the carbon we put in the atmosphere when we burn fossil fuels – we should be. So carbon markets are the first step. They sequester carbon but ancillary benefits like habitat and water quality and water retention and clean air all come along as a result of that. So we’re beginning to see ecosystems-services values, particularly in the form of carbon, that provides another revenue source that a company or a nonprofit or whatever can manage the forest because they have the carbon revenue, but without that it’s pretty tough.
So, looking at the emergence of the ecosystem services as an important part of what forests do is why I joined the Green Diamond Board. In the southeast where Green Diamond is active as a timber-management organization, they’ve got a partial ownership, but basically they’re managing lands for long-term investors like pension funds. They lease land there for hunting. So someone will have his own little campsite and he’ll lease that from Green Diamond and it’s his own private little area to go hunt deer or whatever else. They’re also now looking at, can they do some solar installations? Can they lease, they do lease land already, for cell towers? Are there ways to make forest economic beyond just saw longs? If you can supplement with some of these ecosystem services, or you can supplement by creating a market for low-value wood products, which in part is done by thoughtful policies that actually align the interest of the environment, then I can see a path forward to sustainability that also maintains economic opportunity in rural communities and recreational opportunity.
I didn’t set out looking to go on the Green Diamond board but I’ve respected the company and its leaders for some time and I’ve known them over a number of generations, so it’s been fun to learn. You know I’m a business person in terms of what my career has mostly been, with four years in government, to get a greater appreciation for that and lots of nonprofit work and you begin to see how this whole ecosystem of different facets of our democracy and civil society fit together and how they need to fit together to create a future that’s economically successful and environmentally sustainable. Where those things are aligned in terms of their interest that’s kind of the holy grail for me because unless we do that, I don't think we get to where we need to be with regard to climate change and having a sustainable environment.
Forest Management and Economics
SJ: You cannot move logs very far, or forest products very far and still have it be economic, and that's the problem. So, even in an area where you might have sawmills, so you can do saw logs and some other smaller log operations, what do you do with the chips and the slash? And they end up, if they're relatively close to a mill, being burned for cogeneration to drive the electricity that operates the mill.
So, in the Greenway, you've got a multifaceted challenge. You've got, in some cases, Forest Service in particular, but also some DNR lands, you've got way too high a density because we've suppressed fires for years, and we've over planted and not thinned. And so those become very, very dangerous in a drought year, where you could have a forest fire. But it is expensive to thin those forests to make them healthy again, and without a market for a smaller tree, or a thinned forest, pre-commercial or commercial thinning, even, commercial meaning you can sell some of the logs as saw logs, and pre-commercial thinning, meaning there may be some milled product, but for the most part it's not, it's low-value wood products, it's going to be an expense to take it out, rather than a revenue source. So it's difficult, and it almost has to be subsidized, or you chip that forest products and leave it in place. So you're still reducing your fire risk, even though there's chips on the ground from what you've taken out. It's probably more economic to do that than it is to try and move them to someplace. So it's hard.
The Transition to "Working Forests"
SJ: Really where I began to learn about public land management and the different expectations people had for public lands was with Doug McClelland from the Greenway board, who was working for DNR, and one of the areas under his stewardship was Tiger Mountain. And so Doug took members of the Greenway board that wanted to go on a tour of the Tiger Mountain State Forest, and he talked about the different types of logging practice, where you're doing thinning for forest health, and you may do some selective logging, and ultimately you'll do a clear cut. You're raising money for schools and DNR money for the state, but during the time that the forest is growing and even when you're reconstituting it, you can do it in a way that protects critical habitat, and ecosystems, and so on.
But I can’t ... I mean I didn't have the perspective that I have now of my work with tribes, but I can't imagine the feeling of sort of violation when your old-growth forest and the diversity of that old-growth forest is taken away from you at the hands of chainsaws, and mule crews, and trains, and other things back in those early days. And of course, those lands were given through the checkerboard process to encourage the railroad development, and that's where a lot of these family businesses got their start. And so I have a much more nuanced perspective and just kind of a pit in my stomach about what that must have felt like.
But also, I've worked with some tribal members, and I had a nice conversation with TJ Greene, who's the head of the Makah, and they do commercial logging out on the Olympic Peninsula, and they also do a lot of traditional practices. And you can't wind the clock back, but you can say, "How do we honor our traditions and do it in a way that also supports our livelihood in the world that we live in today?" So I think there's been an evolution of forest practices that have learned from the mistakes of the past, which are helpful, and the riparian setbacks and erosion control. And I would say you're still looking at monocultures for the most part, as opposed to mixed forests. But even that I'd say is evolving in some places. At any rate, that's where working forests for me came from, in terms of understanding them. And also seeing the hurt when factories shut down or mills shut down, or even today when low-value wood products, like chips, could be used for biofuels, and could be used for pellets, and could be used in more of a circular way than they are because there isn't a market for it.
Forest Service began to evolve its practices, and in the Greenway in particular, it went from being oriented toward logging, to oriented toward long-term land management. There's a mandate for both the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service that's called a Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield mandate. And so it was that multiple-use meant grazing, logging, mining, oil and gas development. It didn't mean renewable energy development until the Obama years. But the sustained-yield part was kind of ignored. And so the Forest Service and others had been harvesting old-growth trees in particular in a way that was not sustainable and it had really damaged the ecosystem. So that changed. And now I would say the Forest Service has more of a sustainable-yield mandate. And also as the area urbanizes, people need houses and things, people also need breathing space. And one of the things that happened during the pandemic in particular was people got out into their forests and began to appreciate those forests and the recreation went up like crazy as people went to seek solace in nature. And I think that's part of who we are as human beings. Even with changing ideologies in the administration or in Congress, we do look at forests differently than we used to.
