Contributors
Contributed entries to this blog are welcome and encouraged. Please contact Sharon at terraveritas@gmail.com with your entry.
Regular Contributors include:
I came to the planning world relatively late in my career. Although I worked on forests that were planning in the late 70′s and early 80′s (as the Area Geneticist for the Winema, Fremont, Ochoco and Deschutes), I managed to avoid planning except for some silvicultural models. I was the Director of an NFS Genetics Lab in Placerville, CA for a couple of years, then went on a hiatus to the RPA staff (worked on the 95 RPA), then managed the McIntire Stennis research program for the Agency Formerly Known as CSREES, then back to FS R&D and then back to the National Forests in the NEPA shop in DC. Along the way, I happened to be working at the Office of Science and Technology Policy when the 2000 Planning Rule was being cleared, and worked on the 2005 Rule in the DC office. In the Rocky Mountain Region, we had three plans working under the 2005 Rule, and one combined with a BLM RMP that was under 82, switched to the 05 for about a week and then went back to the 82. But, fortunately for my sanity, I have done many other interesting non-planning things, which are in the link above.
My main other hobby besides this blog is music and especially church music. I am currently enrolled in the Benedictine Spiritual Formation Program at Benet Hill Monastery, Colorado Springs, Colorado.. so some of these ideas and language will come out in my posts and comments. Synchronistically enough, Jim Fenwood (below) and I, Friedman spent a month in alphabetically adjacent seats at the Kennedy School of Government Senior Executive Fellows Program in 2005, where Jim and I were taught by Keith Allred and I was inspired by his ideas and organization The Common Interest.
In the spring of 2009, I finished up a one-year detail as Acting Deputy Regional Forester, and made a decision to pursue some of the things that I never seemed to find time for during my 31-year career with the US Forest Service. I knew that I wanted to spend a couple of summers restoring a cabin built by my grandfather in central Maine in 1937. And I knew that I wanted to spend more time hunting, fishing, and sailing, and less time on the phone with the Albuquerque Service Center or slogging through some mandatory online training yet again. I also thought it might be interesting to occasionally work on projects such helping the Forest Service with the Planning Rule Science Forum.
Blogging about land management planning was not on my “spend more time on list.” The memory of devoting a big chunk of 1996 to debating the finer points of viability language for a draft planning rule that never got published and most people don’t know existed only reinforced this perspective. Not working for the Forest Service doesn’t seem to result in me caring any less about what happens on national Forests, though. So, here I am.
My perspective comes from time spent as a specialist, a staffer, and a line officer, at all levels of the agency throughout the South, in DC, and Northern California. You can all me a cynical optimist who believes in world peace, ivory billed woodpeckers, and a revised planning rule.
After nearly a decade of studying the forest management and policy in graduate school at Utah State University, I went to work for the Forest Service in the late 1970s, just at forest planning was gearing up.
For 29 years I worked as a frustrated and outspoken economist, operations research analyst and planning staffer. I retired in 2007. During my tenure I focused on land management and public policy viewed through the lens of complex, adaptive natural systems and complex, adaptive, and politically wicked social systems.
Before my Forest Service odyssey I did a short stint with Weyerhaeuser Corporation, looking at timber planning at their corporate headquarters.
I am also an environmental activist and a founding board member of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics.
I grew up in the rural Wisconsin village of Elkhart Lake, in Sheboygan County, surrounded by the Kettle Moraine State Forest, marshland and dairy farms. I’ve lived in Missoula, Montana since 1996 working on a variety of public lands issues. My love for forests and wildlands came from my family – dad was a house painter and mom was a nurse. Dad got one week vacation a year and it was always spent camping on public lands, mainly the Northern Highlands State Forest up near Boulder Junction or various spots in the Chequamegon and Nicolet National Forests. In addition to being a certified high school English and history teacher, I paid my way through college by working at a lumber company building trusses and even spent a summer as a wildland firefighter in Oregon. I’ve been curious about public lands issues for the past 20 years and am the director of the WildWest Institute. In my free-time I enjoy gardening, native landscaping, putting up food, hunting morels, elk and deer and, if you can believe it, playing the game of golf. Email: koehler@wildrockies.org.
Andy Stahl
Andy Stahl, a forester, is Executive Director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. Andy has worked for the USDA-Forest Service, Associated Oregon Loggers, National Wildlife Federation, and Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (now called Earthjustice). When he’s not raising two children on his 42-acre farm, he races bicycles. His non-racing accomplishments can be found here.
Char Miller
Char Miller became the Director of the Environmental Analysis Program and W. M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis at Pomona College in July 2009. Since 1981, he has been on the faculty of Trinity University (San Antonio), where he served as chair of the history department and director for the urban studies program, aad where he was awarded the Dr. and Mrs. Z. T. Scott Faculty Fellowship for Excellence in Teaching; was tapped as a Piper Professor by the Minnie Stevens Piper Foundation for excellence in teaching and service to higher education; and was selected as a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians. Other honors include: D. Honoris Causa (Humane Letters), Plymouth State University, 2005; Centennial Lecturer, USDA Forest Service, 2004-05; P. J. Roosevelt Lecturer, Theodore Roosevelt Association, 2004-05; and he is a Senior Fellow, Pinchot Institute for Conservation.
Miller’s recent books include Ground Work: Conservation in American Culture; Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism; Deep in the Heart of San Antonio: Land and Life in South Texas; and The Greatest Good: 100 Years of Forestry in America. As an editor, he has published a number of anthologies, including Water in the Twenty-First Century West; Fluid Arguments: Five Centuries of Western Water Conflict, 50 Years of the Texas Observer, and On the Border: An Environmental History of San Antonio. He serves as Associate Editor of Environmental History and the Journal of Forestry, is a Contributing Writer for the Texas Observer, and writes op-eds and commentary on environmental, political, and cultural issues for local, regional, and national media.
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