Cindy Mitchell is the Chief Financial Officer and Senior Director of Public Affairs at the Washington Forest Protection Association (WFPA) in Olympia. In this May 2025 interview with HistoryLink’s Elisa Law, Mitchell discusses her early interest in the natural world as a child in California, her education in Washington, her career path at the WFPA, and the mentors who guided and encouraged her work. She reflects on the history of the WFPA and the significant policy issues and achievements that the organization helped shape. These include the Timber Fish Wildlife Agreement (1986), the spotted owl controversy (1980s and 1990s), the Northwest Forest Plan (1994), the Forest and Fish Agreement (1999), and the Habitat Conservation Plan (2006). In this interview, Mitchell also considers the effects of wildfire on Washington forests and forest management policy and ponders the future of forestry.
Cindy Mitchell: I was born in Long Beach, California, so I spent my life in Southern California on the beaches, and it was always a recreational event when we went to the forest, and that was in the mountains of Big Bear, in Southern California, and that was my relationship to the forest.
Living in track homes, in Southern California, seemed unrealistic to me. It seemed plasticky. It didn't seem like it was real. And when we went to Illinois to the cornfields where my grandmother lived, small town, no fences and beautiful homes, it seemed like just a more natural relaxed lifestyle. And I always enjoyed that freedom and the connection to nature. I was always trying to have some form of a garden or animals and a greenhouse, and I always tried to create that natural world in the backyard of our suburban homes. But I always wanted to work with nature. And I ended up working with the trees.
I started college and then I thought, you know, might be better to move north and get out of the hubbub, if you will, of Orange County. There's just a lot going on and a lot of different values than my own. I wanted to be connected to nature and I wanted to be connected to industries that really made a difference. And so I moved up here right out of high school, and I didn't intend to, but I ended up here at WFPA [Washington Forest Protection Association], working for the forest industry, and that was almost serendipity, I think. Because that wasn't my trajectory, but I always wanted to work in something with natural resources because that seemed to be the most realistic and meaningful in the world. So I moved north with family that I had known and started college up here and started working at WFPA.
Early Days at Washington Forest Protection Association
CM: I remember working with my dad who laid plumbing. When you go to plumbing sites, there's the wood framing. So we were always working around lumber, and I loved the smell of it, but I never thought about where wood came from. I never thought about that as an industry. Lumber came from the store as far as I was concerned, and my dad laid the plumbing for all the homes that were being built in Southern California.
So it was funny to me that I stumbled into the back room, the mail room, right out of high school and started working for this organization that I later learned was about growing and planting trees.
A friend was leaving their job in the mail room. And so I went in over the weekend and learned what the job was, and I was hired three days, four days after I interviewed. It was then Stu Bledsoe (1922-1988), and he said, "We'll give her a try. You know, it looks like she has a lot on the ball." But I didn't know what the organization was about. I just knew that I needed a job.
I started Olympia Technical Community College, a couple of months after I moved to Washington and I finished my degrees up here. The first was an accounting degree, and then at the University of Washington, a business degree. Then at Pacific Lutheran University, an MBA. And then later in my career, more recently, I have a mental health counseling master's from St. Martin's [University].
Early on I had moved from the back room into the accounting office, and at a very young age, and I was doing accounting for many years. Because I was working and going to school, it took a little longer to get through all my degrees. And over time, as my capabilities were recognized, I kept getting into more and more things like communications, research policy, and became sort of a shortstop. If there was something to be done, I would be willing to jump in and try it. So my career evolved here from just doing the accounting to, ultimately, my title is Senior Director of Public Affairs, so it deals with communication and policy issues.
Brief History of WFPA
CM: Well, it evolved from a firefighting organization in 1908. In the '50s it started to focus on forest policies and physical health, insects and disease, things that were affecting the health of the forest. If you look at 1908, when WFPA was founded as Washington Forest Fire Association, we were laying railroad tracks. We were putting up fire watch towers. We were putting out fires. And in 1908, I think maybe the first vehicle drove through Mount Rainier. We're back in the days where we didn't have automobiles all across the board. And then we go through so many different things, world wars, depressions, pandemics. I mean, just tick off the list of all of the events that have occurred. And there's a group of people that came together to find solutions in common. And this isn't an association. This is, this is a group of competitors. These are all individual timber companies that compete against each other. Yet we find a way to come together through the last a hundred and some odd years, to look at the issues of the day, and we address them proactively, and we adapt.
So when WFPA left the firefighting business in the '50s, the Department of Natural Resources took it over, and we became focused much more on the health of the forest. And then we became focused on policy. Stu Bledsoe took the association's location in Seattle down to Olympia in the mid-70s. He said, "This is where your biggest impact is going to be, in the policy, regulatory decision-making. If you think the bugs are bad, wait till you get some policies from people that don't know anything about you."
And what I didn't know at the time, because I was working in the mail room, but Stu Bledsoe and Billy Frank Jr. (1931-2014) were negotiating how to stay out of court and to work together and collaborate on forestry and salmon issues. And I just was getting wind of it, you know, being in the mail room. I didn't quite understand all of the policies we were dealing with, or the issues, but I could tell that Stu and Billy were having some really good conversations because I'd hear about it a lot.
Billy would walk into our office constantly, and he would just be a bright light and he'd say, "Hey, how are you?" Or he'd usually say, "God damnit, it's good to see you." But always it would be joyful when he would walk in the door. And he would say hello and recognize every single person, even someone like myself, who had little to do with what he and Stu were talking about. I remember Stu presenting to our executive committees about how we would be much better off if we were collaborating than going to court because the tribes were winning every single court case.
The private forest landowners, the state of Washington, and the treaty tribes came to an agreement on how to manage the forest because they knew that we all had the same thing in common, that we wanted a healthy forest, we wanted healthy fish runs, we want healthy wildlife in the state. And that was the basis for the Timber Fish Wildlife Agreement.
Stu Bledsoe's mentorship
CM: I later learned that he was a mentor to almost everybody, and especially young people who were trying to get their footing. And he's the one that brought me from the back office to the front office. His good friend, Norma Catlin, who was doing the accounting, she ended up with liver cancer.
I had been working with her, and Stu encouraged me to keep working. So he supported me, and I learned the books from her and was down at her hospital bed learning. This was before we had a real good computer set up. So a lot of it was by hand, the big old ledgers. And Stu was continuously supporting me and promoting me, to do more, to do better, and giving me the opportunity. So I always feel like he gave me legs to stand on. And I don't know where my career would've gone if I wouldn't have had such a good mentorship from him. He had an untimely death shortly after the Timber Fish Wildlife Agreement
Then it was his real good friend, Bill Jacobs, who saw us through those very tumultuous, spotted owl times. But after that, Bill Wilkerson came in, and he came in with a vision and an ethic that I didn't really understand. His way of going about it, with Jim Waldo (they both worked at the same law firm) was that we're going to negotiate, we're not going to go to court.
And with Forest and Fish, his mantra was "we're going to do our fair share." We're gonna do what we need to do to protect the fish and water. So that was always his stance, and he had such a clear vision about making a negotiation with all the stakeholders to protect fish and water in timberlands.
Policy Deep Dive and the NW Forest Plan
CM: Issues at the time became the listing of the northern spotted owl [as a threatened species]. And with that, I started to take on more of the policy research. And I deeply, deeply dived into the northern spotted owl and mostly what our state was gonna do in response to that.
So there were biweekly meetings of a subset of the State Forest Practices Board that was talking about how is the state gonna respond to the spotted owl listing. That was my first real big endeavor when it came to policy work, and I continued to do the accounting after that. So I was doing both.
If you were to look at the maps that show where the spotted owl protections are, you'll see the federal government overlay and you'll see private habitat conservation plans where individual private landowners make long-term agreements with the federal government. And then the state had its own rules, so they all fit together as a landscape that protects the spotted owl. You'll maybe remember how big of a deal it was. President Bill Clinton (b. 1946) came out to Portland and hosted a round table. And out of that was the Northwest Forest Plan.
Because I'm a numbers person, I looked at our statewide timber harvest (and we have it from 1900 to 2024), and right before the spotted owl was listed, under President Carter there was double-digit inflation. Mortgage rates were double-digit, and buying homes was challenging. So President Carter upped the harvest on U.S. Forest Service lands, and mainly they were harvesting them at a very unsustainable level. And I'm sure that's what the pushback on protecting endangered species started from, because it was way too much. So looking at the ramp-up in timber harvest, during those times, we were probably harvesting 8 billion board feet in Washington. After the Northwest Forest Plan was put into place, we were harvesting about 10 percent of that on the federal forest.
So the Northwest Forest Plan reduced federal harvest across the three state range by about 85 percent. And it continued to reduce from there from other environmental protections. In Washington and Oregon we're the number one and two lumber producers for the nation. So it reoriented the whole timber industry. A lot of people lost their jobs. A lot of rural communities weren't able to sustain their economy because it was based on multiple uses of the federal forest, which included timber harvest. But there was a lot of controversy around any harvest. So it became quite a raucous time called the "owl wars" at that time.
We all looked at each other and said, "Boy, the Endangered Species Act is very powerful and it can just stop in your tracks, the ability to harvest your land." Like all of a sudden there was an injunction on all the timber harvest.
So Bill Clinton also put in the Endangered Species Act Section 10, which is the long-term Habitat Conservation Plan. What that is, rather than the Endangered Species Act just being a stop sign, it's a way for industries - could be construction, could be utilities, could be forest landowners - to create a 50- to 100-year plan. So you could have economic activity and protection of the endangered species. So because he put that into the Endangered Species Act, many of the companies developed these long-term plans.
Forest and Fish
CM: What was coming up as the next endangered species was the salmon, and that was in the mid-90s. That spurred on the Forest and Fish negotiations, which were basically TFW [Timber Fish and Wildlife Agreement] phase two, to talk about how are we were gonna get ahead of protecting the endangered fish and impaired waters.
So private landowners, many of them developed a habitat conservation plan. The Department of Natural Resources, under Jennifer Belcher (b. 1944), developed a habitat conservation plan for a hundred years. And then the Forest and Fish negotiations became a Habitat Conservation Plan in 2006. This time, instead of it being like TFW, where it was celebrated at the legislature, but not turned into law, it became a law: the Forest and Fish law. In 1999, our former executive director Mark Doumit (1961-2021) was in the House, and he was one of many legislators that passed the Forest and Fish law that embodied this negotiation on how we have protections for fish and water across nine million acres of state and private forests and 60,000 miles of streams.
These timber-planning cycles are a hundred years. They're not just the next six months or what's the next product that's gonna come out. You can't plant a tree now and cut it tomorrow. It's gonna be 50 years from now or more. And so having these long-term agreements works well with the resource, and it works well with the planning cycle, not just for timber, but for tribes. Look out seven generations, you know? Is the resource gonna be there for their kids?
Where I really became aware of what was going on was with Bill Wilkerson, who was here from the mid '90s to the mid 2000s, and we reoriented all of our work at WFPA around how are we going to put the right technical science policy groups together to focus on such a large plan.
And so the whole organization at WFPA reoriented into technical groups that were focusing on certain things such as: what does our road system look like? How many fish passages are being blocked? How many roads don't have the integrity to withstand a storm, so they wash out and down into a creek? If they're blocking culverts down the way, then the fish can't get up.
So they're looking from a science point of view, what do the streams need? What do fish need? What's the pool riffle ratio? What is the litter fall? What is the large winding debris? It was really this major scientific look at how can timber practice and harvest protect these species?
I have to bring in Governor Gary Locke (b. 1950) because he passed the statewide salmon recovery plan for all sectors to do their part to protect fish as the primary footprint for environmental health. And that would be our health too. One of the things that we had to first educate on the Forest and Fish law was: How does the forest relate to fish? And it's a no brainer to many people who are in the natural resource world, but it wasn't automatically recognizable amongst the voters. When we would look at public opinion polling, they would say, "How is this connected? Fish don't grow in trees." Well, they forgot that water flows through forests.
Forest Management into the Future
CM: So it's been 30 years since President Clinton negotiated the Northwest Forest Plan, and we have a very large federal landscape footprint. We're not talking about national parks, monuments, wilderness areas. We're talking about the US Forest Service land that was designated to be managed for multiple use. Now we're 30 years later and those trees are dying. And that is, in part, due to not managing, suppressing wildfire, and having drought type conditions or climate change type conditions. There's too many. They call it "stems per acre" or trees per acre, that creates its own drought where trees compete for water. Or in the winter time, the freeze doesn't happen as cold as it could to kill the bugs, so the bugs live rather than die off.
And if you were to look at an aerial view, you would see lots of red forests, lots of extreme wildfire. And we know that wildfire is part of the natural cycle, but when it's catastrophic, it gets up into the crown of the trees. It doesn't just burn low on the ground and clean out the brush and the dead and dying trees. It gets up into the crown and then it runs through the crown. At that point, the fire is burning so hot, it's melting the soil and you end up with a glassy crust on the soil. So unless you break it up, there's no seed that's gonna penetrate, and water just sheets off. So we've been seeing this catastrophic wildfire over the past 10 plus years. We have a chart that shows that federal forest has declined 80-some-odd percent in management, and the mortality has increased 225 percent.
Now, that's the federal landscape. All forested landscapes are having the same climate change type effects and drought effects and weather that's not freezing cold enough to kill the bugs over winter. And yet, private forest landowners manage about 80 percent of their footprint and their annual mortality is 14 percent per acre.
So there is really a cause and effect relationship to actively managing the forest, or doing prescribed burning, where you can burn the fire low to the ground and get rid of the dead and dying brush. So it's not a hard concept when you get into fire. There's too much fuel in the forest. And with drying conditions, there needs to be trees removed so it won't create what they call ladder fuels, which are dead and dying trees that allow the fire to race up into the crown.
So I'm looking at our state and the timber harvest since 1900. We're at the lowest level since the Great Depression, 1932. We need to be managing our forest, not just for the health of the woods and infrastructure and jobs, which is primarily what WFPA is about, but also for the health of the forest.
Let me put it another way. What's in the future? If the climate is drier, warmer, it will support a different tree species that's more drought-resistant and it may not support as many trees on an acre. So we have many, many scientists looking at this and we try and not politicize the idea that we're managing forest for society. Lumber is primarily what we do, but the whole point is to reduce our footprint of climate emissions, and using lumber and wood is gonna give you a lower footprint. It's actually the building sector that emits the most carbon in the world. I think it's 40 percent when you add up everything that goes into building. And so one thing to do is use wood to reduce that footprint, that carbon emissions. It's a natural product grown by the sun. It's not mined, it's not smelted, it's not fired up. It is wood that we grow from water and soil and sun, and it's the most natural way to utilize our forest while balancing out the protections for our environment. And I just think it's a great industry. I'm glad I landed here.
