Vicki Christiansen served as the nineteenth Chief of the U.S. Forest Service from 2018 until 2021, leading efforts to sustainably manage national forests and grasslands while addressing climate change and advancing equity within the organization. Before joining the Forest Service, Christiansen spent 26 years with the Washington State Department of Natural Resources. She started her career as a wildland firefighter and ended it as the State Forester. In this June 2025 interview with HistoryLink's Elisa Law, Christiansen discusses the intersection of people and forests during a period of what she calls "holistic enlightenment" in forest conservation, which brought about the 1986 Timber Fish Wildlife Agreement and the 1999 Forests and Fish Agreement. Christiansen discusses her role in the Forest Service’s National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy. She also speaks about staying authentic in a male-dominated field and her own life motto: "People don't care what you know until they know that you care." This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Growing Up in the Woods
Vicki Christiansen: I was born in Tacoma, Washington. We lived in a very traditional Tacoma working class neighborhood. And we had a cabin out on the Long Branch Peninsula and we'd spend every weekend at the cabin on the beach. And when I was 9, my parents purchased 10 acres of forest land in Southern Kitsap County, Olalla, Washington, and we built our dream home.
I was drawn immediately to how a forest worked. We had Purdy Creek, an anadromous fish stream, on the property. My sister and I would watch the salmon come up the stream to spawn. We'd give them blessings because we knew they were on their last legs and going to do the circle or renewal of life. We had the Five Springs 500-acre tree farm across the road, a working forest tree farm that still exists today. And Mr. Kingsbury, the owner, gave my sister and I access to the tree farm through the gates to ride our horses and even our little motorcycles. And we were seen as the junior forest rangers to look for dumping or other things that might be going on up there.
Then our property itself was a primarily second-growth forest, but the original old-growth stumps still existed that had the crosscut saw marks and they had fire scars on them. And my dad would sit with me and we’d talk about the fires that came through at the early part of the century. I was just fascinated. How did all of this connect?
Who knew that I'd grow up and spend really my entire adult life [working in forestry]? Starting as a wildland firefighter for the Washington Department of Natural Resources and ending as chief of the U.S. Forest Service that dealt with wildland fire, both the good fire and the extreme fire that causes harm to people. The paradox, we call it the fire paradox.
The Intersection of People and Forests
VC: Generally, I think a deep connection with nature and with forests is probably uniform across the profession. For me, it was the intersection of people and forests and people and natural resources because I think we know that there's a lot of values around our natural resources and they're quite diverse. They can be different, and they can be controversial. And so, I didn’t really shy away from that. My whole career was trying to find that common ground.
In my first 15 years, I wanted to be connected to the place, meaning the forest, the community, the landscape. I wanted to be directly where the intersection of people and forests were. So, I went higher up in positions, but I was still place-based, whether that was a unit forester or a district manager with Washington DNR and I did not want to go into headquarters 'cause then you're dealing more directly with policy and budgets and the legislature and all of that. I wanted to be out. But then I realized I could build on that experience because I was so connected to a place and the variety of issues and values people had around forests.
A Microcosm of Purpose
VC: I was district manager in the Hood Canal area. We had just recently passed a State [Trust] Lands Habitat Conservation Plan, and we had significant recreation on the Tahuya State Forest in particular. There were over 200 miles of what we called "user-built trails." These were folks that really used these trails, adopted the trails. They were motorcyclists, equestrians and mountain bikers. And many of them were braided through salmon-bearing streams. And we just couldn’t not have some evaluation of them. And it was a time where those recreationists didn't particularly like that the DNR foresters were coming in. We'd coexisted, we did our forest land management, they did their recreation, they cared for their trails. But it was contentious at first.
In the long-term it's the three bottom lines. We needed our ecological processes to be sustainable. We needed their recreation, their societal goals to be sustained. And we needed to be able to economically, for the long haul, manage these trust lands, and we needed to look at it together.
Long story short is that we built so much trust that they actually applied the standards of what trails should remain or what trails should get rebuilt outside of riparian areas. And then they had the ownership in this. Then they helped us go raise the funds to do the relocations.
The local high school was trying to do experience-based learning, and we started a Students in the Watershed program. So, the North Mason High School came out and actually monitored our sedimentation that we were trying to prove. We had reduced the sedimentation into the streams from relocating these trails, and it was a whole connection of the users that loved and stewarded these lands for a long time.
We just had upped our game a little bit to be more conscious of the long-term sustainability of this use and then the next generation being strongly a part of this work. If there was any magical moment for me, it was all those connections. My purpose is connecting people with their natural resources for a more sustainable and equitable world, and that’s a microcosm of that purpose right there.
The Journey to Forests and Fish
Vicki Christiansen discusses the industrial growth era and expansion of the West in the early part of the twentieth century.
VC: We all know: in Washington state the vast West was open. A forest economics professor used to say: "There was a clearance sale on timber." They thought we’d never run out. And then as we went into the environmental and the stewardship era of forests in Washington, I’m proud to say Washington state, led by the Weyerhaeuser Company in 1941, established the first tree farm.
I graduated from the University of Washington College of Forest Resources in 1983, so it was in the era of that more holistic enlightenment period. There had been the environmental laws of the '60s and '70s put in place. So, there was the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, et cetera. But it was the era of looking at more holistic, cumulative effects and all of that. And with that went finger pointing: "You are not doing enough for the fish." "You’re keeping me from having a viable business in my forest land investments." And: "You are not providing enough access for my recreational experiences." Whatever it would be. And it was Billy Frank Jr. (1931-2014), a wise person that said: "We can have it all. We can have the fish. We can have the forest. We can have the wildlife, but we need to do it in a different way." And that started the Timber Fish Wildlife talks.
There were, I think, over 40-some meetings they had. You have got to leave, figuratively, your weapons at the door. There were standards of how you come together. There were some very tough conversations. But in the end, the leaders before me set the way that this is not the easy button. It’s hard. But in the end, we can all listen to each other and find our common ground and figure out how to make it in a better way.
And so, the Timber Fish Wildlife Agreement was just that. It gave us practice. It started to set up the adaptive management process: how we learn by shared science, how we adapt because we don’t know everything that’s going on in the forest environment and the ecosystem and the waterways and the wildlife and the biodiversity. But we’re going to learn together.
And that set us up for the Forests and Fish law. And to be a part of a historical Habitat Conservation Plan for all state and private lands of Western Washington and the eastern slopes of the Cascades is amazing. I knew it at the time, but it wasn’t till I rose into the national level that I said: "Washington's pretty unique and I’m pretty proud."
What Makes Washington Forestry Unique
VC: I know I’m biased. We [people in Washington] have some of the most iconic public lands, national parks, and national forests, namely. We do have some important national fish and wildlife preserves and a little bit of Bureau of Land Management lands.
And the incredible trust land story we have in Washington. Most of my career was with Washington DNR, being a trust land manager. But I also regulated and did wildland fire for all of the forests - the state and private forest lands - in the state. And Washington and our trust land story is also unique in that not only did we keep and manage the trust lands that were granted at statehood to help this new state, build schools and universities and penal institutions, and what is necessary to run a government. But Washington actually added to our state trust lands. I think it's over almost nearly a million additional acres. And these cutover lands that I talked about over a century ago that the companies at the time would just move on, wouldn’t replant them, wouldn't pay their taxes.
Washington took them back or paid a nominal fee of 50 cents to a dollar an acre and turned those into trust lands for the counties that they're in. So, the counties that have trust lands have a significant, sustainable, ongoing revenue source. So, the Washington Trust land story is quite unique.
Washington's been a real leader in urban and community forestry. The tree canopies and most all of our city or ordinances are really important. And how we bring green spaces to our local government parks, our state parks, our state DNR trust lands, and all the way to our federal public lands.
And they're intermixed through a lot of these collaborative processes. Private forest lands are a very important part of our economy of Washington. And we have evolved as we've needed to evolve. We don't see the pulp mills that we used to see, but we see emerging mass timber. And Washington State Legislature passes legislation that encourages building some of our public institutions with mass timber that uses far more climate-friendly ways of building compared to concrete and steel. We sequester the carbon in this mass timber for so much longer. So, Washington, we're not just a rural state. We have our rural and we have our very dense Puget Sound region and Spokane. And I think we've done really good in integrating our growth management to be mindful that our working forest lands are really a critical part of the way of life in Washington. We are the Evergreen State and a leader in making sure that we have those lands - whether they're public or private - for future generations.
The Fire Paradox and a National Wildland Fire Cohesive Strategy
VC: Traditionally most people, and myself included, think that forest fires are not a good thing. They can create harm to people, they can create destruction to property, and they can destroy valuable investments. And all of that is true. But you have to think about fire as a really important natural part of many of our landscapes, particularly in the West, even in Western Washington. Fire is a part of these landscapes.
What kind of fire intervals we have: They might be much longer intervals where fire is needed to clean out dense forests. They might be 100 years or 200 years in Western Washington. In many of our dry forest types in Eastern Washington, fire is needed every 10, 20, 30 years. And you look back in the traditional ecological knowledge that the Native Americans had, and they used fire significantly. They knew where they needed to burn the meadows to get their critical berries and medicines. And they knew how to keep the dense brush down, so we didn't have the catastrophic [fires], what we call the crown fires that burned through the tops of the trees. And we interrupted all that as we developed this country.
And, the first chief of the Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946) is credited with a lot of things, but he is also credited with the 10 a.m. policy that said, after the Big Burn of 1910, all fires will be put out by 10 a.m. the next morning. Meaning all fires are bad. We can’t let fires get big and destructive.
And it's a little more complicated than that. We've built communities in areas of our forests that, like I say, fire's a natural part of that. So that's the fire paradox. And I had to grow into that fire paradox myself, particularly because the first 27 years of my career, I was in the State Department of Natural Resources and I protected other people's land, right?
Even the trust lands paid a fee for the Department of Natural Resources to protect their lands, as did the private forest landowners. So we did aggressively put fires out. Now as our weather patterns have changed, as we've gotten more density in the forest.
We'd get dispatched to large fires for not much more than seven days early in my career. And then easily ten years later, it was always a 14-day assignment, and then you’re supposed to get a day of rest, but they could be 21-day as assignments. So, fires are getting more complex, more dense. By the time I was state forester here in 2006, things had gotten pretty tough.
And just to set the other part of the context, the federal land managers -- Forest Service, Park Service -- they are land manager and fire manager on the same piece of ground. So, they can make some of those trade-off decisions. Oftentimes, they're wherever the dense forests that hadn't been burned or hadn’t been thinned would create these large catastrophic crown fires. And, of course, fires know no boundaries and burn into another jurisdiction. And fires in 2006 burned off of the national forests and onto state-protected ground, and we do a cost-share. Whoever's ground it's on, that effort pays for the fire. I had to go back to the Legislature. I had a certain amount of budget for fire suppression, and I had to go back to the Legislature in a recession and ask for a significant amount of a supplemental budget. It's a very uncomfortable place to be.
And I can remember being on that diocese and they were telling me, those legislators: "How was I, the new state forester going to fix the Forest Service from allowing these fires burning off of their ground? How was I going to help protect the wildland urban interface?" And I can remember having this moment of thinking about turning behind my shoulder. "Who’s going to come rescue?" And I realized, there isn't anybody.
And just like I told the story about Billy Frank Jr. and other leaders, I said: "I've got to set a different tone. I can't just keep pointing the finger. Because is it a changing climate? Is it drought? Is it build-up of communities right next to forests without much fire scaping or shaded fuel breaks around these communities? Is it our lands, particularly our federal lands, that are not doing enough active management and managing the fuels?" Yes, it’s all those things. We’re all responsible for a piece. And some of it is beyond our control: the changing weather patterns, et cetera. And I said, "There has to be a different way."
I was newly assigned to the National Association of State Foresters [Fire Committee]. That's the collection of state foresters that deal with our counterparts at the Washington, D.C., level of the federal agencies. And I was assigned to the fire committee. That was the big committee at the time. And you usually don't, as a new state forester, get assigned to that committee. But I went in there and I was pretty bold and I said, "We can't just keep pointing fingers because that's going be repeated out on the fire ground. It is being repeated. That’s not going to keep our people safe, the community safe, or sustain our natural resources, why we exist." I'm giving you this just from my vantage point. There were others that agreed, and that started a dialogue that became the National Wildland Fire Cohesive Strategy.
Now we have a cohesive strategy in this nation about fire, realizing there are differences. States are required by law to extinguish fires, but we need to support the federal lands where they can use fire. We need to move the momentum where private landowners are willing to have fire as one of the tools to create more resilience. How we help what we used to call "fire risk communities." We even changed the language to say how we create "fire-adapted communities." Instead of saying: "You're at risk, the government's going to come save you." We want to help you become fire-adapted and those kinds of things. There's a lot to the cohesive strategy and there are different versions.
I went on to be the state forester of Arizona and then the deputy director of fire and aviation for the Forest Service during all these threads of developing the cohesive strategy. So, I really did see it from several angles. So, just like a nation we've evolved around fire, I personally evolved around fire as well.
What is the "Washington Way"?
VC: I'll tell you a little story. There’s a great work being done in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest. There are some conservation bonds being led so they can accelerate, in addition to the federal monies that are coming in, to do the thinning and the resilience work. You need to treat 30 to 40 percent of a landscape so it can have more natural fire behavior to keep it out of that catastrophic fire behavior. So, we're really trying to focus, right? We started this strategy when I was still chief, and the Okanogan-Wenatchee [National Forest] is one of the forests that was prioritized. But to even accelerate that [the forest reliance work] more is utility districts. These folks that care about where their water comes from are advancing some financing to do the work up front, and then they'll get paid on the back end because they won’t get the loss of these forests from catastrophic fires. That's the simple way to talk about it.
So, I was invited over to give remarks at basically the celebration of this new conservation finance [bond]. And I told the folks, I said, "As chief, you’re not supposed to have a favorite national forest. There are 154 national forests in this nation." I said, "But everybody's from somewhere, and I’m really proud to be from here, and to be a part of how Washington figures things out. And you all are in the center." And when I told them that I fought fire in that forest -- I was a fire line blaster, a particular way we get fire line in quickly on really harsh ground. I went on as state forester, did some things to support their collaboratives that they were forming, and then as I was deputy chief and chief. I knew they were ready and so when we had some year-end funds I could send it out to them because I knew they were ready and they had done the work. And there was a question about: "Really, you even notice us?" And I said, "I couldn't be successful in the halls of Congress and back there in the administration unless I had a place to connect to and work to connect to."
So, the Washington Way is that we've had some tough challenges and we work through them, and they're not easy and they're not all perfect solutions. You keep learning and you keep building. And you keep learning and you keep building. And you build a bigger coalition as we go along.
Women in the Forestry Field
VC: I was not the first wave of women in the field of forestry. I stand on their shoulders. But I was in the earlier days, certainly, and it was still novel and unique, particularly as you went up a rung and you were a woman that supervised all men. Those kinds of things.
I certainly was passed up for positions in the early days. Again, the next notch of leadership positions because I wasn't aggressive enough. I didn't fit the mold and I walked a fine line. I didn't assimilate just to be one of the traditional - in my particular case, assertive- aggressive as "male" as I should be. I was me. But on the other hand, I didn't lash out at it either. I just tried to weave my way through and bring the value that I brought.
Like one of the absolute life mottos of mine, and it's just a silly play on words, but it means so much to me, is: "People don’t care what you know until they know that you care." So, in forestry, there’s a lot of knowledge exchange you're trying to do. But for me, I needed to make a connection. I needed to show somebody: "I care about what you think," or "I care about your experience." I don't mean "care" like you wear your heart on your sleeve, but showing care. Leading with your heart and your head. And over time, folks started to see the value that I brought, and I got confidence in the value that I brought of bringing people together, showing some empathy in either my teams that I led within the organization, or, certainly, in the community.
So, do I wish I would’ve spoken out more about some behaviors that were not necessarily super appropriate? Yeah. Now that I have more confidence, I have more skill. Yes. And so that’s what brought me to the time I did take over as Chief of the Forest Service. It wasn't at the tail of controversy. It was right in the smack heart of it.
Advancing Equity at the U.S. Forest Service
VC: The chief before me had a long career at the Forest Service. He had made some choices ten years prior that were not understanding the power dynamic between a supervisor and employees.
It was during the time of a lot of societal questions about women and trust in workplace relationships, the "Me Too" movement. So, the chief stepped down, retired suddenly. And I did not want to be chief, but the Secretary of Agriculture came to me and asked me to be interim chief, and he only told me once to fix the culture of the organization. So, we took several actions. We needed to hear people and their real experience.
So, there's a practice around safety, particularly in wildland fire, but I think many industries where you have a stand down. If you have a major safety issues, you stand down. You think about it, you talk about it, you do some correction. We reversed that and we called it a ‘stand up’ for each other throughout the entire agency over one month’s time. We couldn’t do it all in one day, but we had a "stand up": creating space where folks could stand up and talk about their real experiences in a safe way. Because I always said, we can’t fix what we don’t know.
For me, personally, yes, I was a female in a male-dominated profession. But there's so many others in the non-dominant groups that needed to be heard and understood. And it was going to make us better as an agency because we serve all Americans and we can’t serve all Americans if we exclusively keep our blinders on and have one way of seeing things and cultures.
So, it was a lot of heart work, a lot of tough work. And I needed to address it at the very top to hold them accountable for these practices of creating a safe and enriching work environment for all people. Now, did that get some attention into the other parts of our sectors in the industry? It did. I can’t say that I did direct work beyond the Forest Service, but to this day, I give speeches and tell people about our experience.
