2019 Internship Experiences

Emily Blackmer, MPP/MS ’20

• Type of Internship: Ford Internship
• Organization: National Forest Foundation
• Location: Missoula, MT
• Project: I’ve worked on two main projects. The first is carrying out a stakeholder engagement process with the local Missoula Ranger District of the Lolo National Forest. The aim is to build public support for a landscape-scale fuels reduction project that the District wants to implement in partnership with the state, the county, tribes, and private landowners. (Fuels reduction means removing brush, small trees, deadwood, etc. to reduce the risk of massive, severe wildfire, which happened here in 2017.) The second project has been developing a conservation finance training program with the Washington Office of the Forest Service. So I’ve been able to work with the agency on opposite ends of the management spectrum, at both the district level (the smallest management unit) and then also at the national level.

How did your work specifically help deliver social impact through this experience?

Many people around here a visceral reaction to any kind of active forest management, even if it’s thinning overgrown forests or using prescribed fire to reduce wildfire risk. With the Wildfire Adapted Missoula project, we’re trying to build understa

nding that the fire suppression policy of the past 100 years has also been a form of active management. Either we do some thinning now and have a few days of smoke from a prescribed burn, or massive fires end up completely out of control. If we can successfully build public support and then the Forest Service and other landowners can actually carry out the on-the-ground work to reduce fire risk, everyone benefits. We end up with fewer massive wildfires, which correlates to less smoke and healthier air quality, no more destroyed houses or communities, fewer firefighters putting their lives on the line. And we also get healthier, more resilient forest ecosystems, where fire is restored to its natural role. It’s a win-win.

Sadly, National Forests never have enough funding to do the preventative, risk-reduction work for fire that they need to do. So conservation finance is emerging as an important tool for accomplishing that. There’s been a really interesting example in Flagstaff, AZ, where voters approved a municipal bond to pay for fuels reduction on the local National Forest. NFF has been a key partner in another innovative project in California, which is actually an investment-based model that will eventually provide returns to investors that provided up-front funds to carry out forest restoration work. It’s pretty cool to feel like I’ve been working on the same problems from two angles, the bottom-up approach and the top-down approach simultaneously.

During your work on their training materials, what finance issues unique to conservation surprised you?

As a Ford School student, I’m always struck by how it comes back to policy. The conservation finance program will train Forest Service staff on how to use various finance tools — which can range from corporate partnerships to bonds to wetland mitigation banking — to get work done on our National Forests. But the whole need to use these finance tools comes from the fact that our federal government has underfunded the Forest Service for decades and decades, leaving a huge backlog of projects. And of course, the need for this work is only compounded by things like a changing climate, water scarcity in some places, one hundred years of fire suppression which left forests primed to burn. Increasing visitation and having more people into outdoor recreation is also creating a need, so it’s not just bad stuff — it’s fundamentally good to have more people enjoying our public lands! But the agency simply doesn’t have enough appropriated funds to do the work it needs to do. So instead of funding our agencies through traditional mechanisms, we’re leaving them on the hook to figure out all these alternative approaches. I think that in an ideal world, conservation finance tools could be a supplement to appropriated dollars, rather than a replacement for them.

How do you predict that this internship will affect your career path?

I’m interested in public lands policy and management, so having direct experience partnering with the Forest Service is super valuable. After this summer I have a much better understanding of the agency’s interests, challenges, concerns, how it’s structured, and just how it operates on a day-to-day basis. I think it will be very useful, practical experience, and hopefully prospective employers will also recognize that.

What advice do you have for future interns?

Take advantage of as many opportunities as you can! One of my goals for this summer was to volunteer for projects that sounded interesting and say yes when offered new opportunities. As a result, I’ve drafted a needs statement for a national grant program (because I said yes to an invitation for a random meeting!), and I’ve gone on a field trip to see a tree-planting site that NFF funded on a big burn area near Missoula. On Tuesday, I helped moderate a public meeting and afterward got a beer with the local Forest Service ranger. I also volunteered for a work day to help rebuild a lookout on top of a mountain, but that got canceled. Not bad for an internship!

Kyle Jarrett – Cattellyst Foundation