Melody Starya Mobley was the first Black female forester hired by the U.S. Forest Service, where she worked for 28 years. She was also the first Black woman to graduate with a B.S. in forest management from University of Washington. Melody lives in Virginia, where she continues to volunteer and champion efforts to make diversity and inclusion central to the organizations that she is a part of.
I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. My mother was a single parent, and we didn’t have much money. There were the three of us kids, and my mom. She was a nurse and worked a lot. When she had time, she would load us into her little ’63 Falcon and take us out in the country. We’d stop and look at a stream or rocks or admire leaves in the fall. We’d do anything that didn’t cost money and would teach us science. She loved science. My first love really is zoology, not forestry. I can’t think of a time that I didn’t want to work with animals. I didn’t know I would be a forester. But the forest was my sanctuary and still is. When I’m in a forest, I feel like that’s my church. I feel so close to my God, I just love it.
I always liked an intellectual challenge. I skipped some grades in elementary school and ended up graduating high school before I was 18. And that was fine, but my social skills were well behind my academic skills. I went to study zoology at the University of Louisville, but I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t a good student there. I’d stay out late and drink. I wasn’t even 18, let alone 21. There’s alcoholism in my family, and I knew that I needed to take myself someplace where I would have to be more responsible. If I stayed, I knew I wouldn’t make anything with my life. So the year after Bruce Lee died, in 1974, I decided I would just pick the college he attended. I just loved Bruce Lee’s philosophy and still do to this day. I moved across the country and went to the University of Washington in Seattle. The major there was wildlife biology not zoology, but it was similar to what I was studying before.
I went to a Society of American Foresters meeting and met Lyle Laverty from the Forest Service. Later he told me that he knew right away that he wanted to hire me. I was very excited. I needed a permanent job. My mom had passed away and now my grandmother was ill. I changed my major to forest management. It was a difficult decision because I love animals so much. But for me, family comes first, so I switched my major and started on the path to becoming a forester. The classes were boring, and wow, I struggled. But I hung in there!
Working that first summer in 1977, I fell in love with forestry. Unknown to me, I was the first Black female forester in the Forest Service. I didn’t know that I was a pioneer at the time. I had an orientation that summer to everything the Forest Service does. I just loved everything about it – from planting trees to laying out timber sales to climbing trees in order to collect cones. I was so thankful to the Forest Service for the opportunity.
My first big project was laying out progeny test sites in the Skykomish Ranger District in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest in Washington. I really enjoyed that. I love genetics. I got to do more silviculture and to think about tree improvement. It was mostly looking at phenotypic characteristics and selecting trees that were “super trees”: ones that looked better, stronger, healthier than the others around them. Then we collected the seeds. The nurseries grew seedlings from them, and we planted those and tracked them, standardizing everything so we could tell if it was actual genetic superiority and not just better growing conditions from one to the next. I liked that job because you had to think. I did reforestation and worked on prescribed and wildland fires there too.
After that, I went on to work three jobs in the Cleveland National Forest in southern California, outside of San Diego. I was a public affairs forester there. I worked with the media, making sure that they knew about our actions and the activities that were going on. I managed the visitor information center, and I worked with wildland fires there, too. I got to live in a big enough city and it was wonderful to be anonymous. I love to work outdoors but live in a city. As a woman and a person of color, it’s hard to live in some of the places that I lived when I was in the Forest Service. Outside of the forest, you get a town of 100 to 200 people. It’s like living in a fishbowl, and everyone can see you and comment on what you’re doing all the time, talk about you, especially if you don’t look like them.
There were very few people of color in these small towns I was often in, and it was difficult to be so far from my family. I endured terrible kinds of abuse during my time, both physical and verbal. I’ve written about it elsewhere and am working on a memoir now. A lot of people had thoughts on what a Black woman could or couldn’t do. Some of the things really turned me off to the experience, and I carry a lot of pain from that. The bad often outweighed the good, but there were good things, too.
My favorite part of working in California was being in the Descanso Ranger District near the Laguna Mountains. We laid out the first sanitation cut for a fungus that gets into the trees and kills them, and I got to write the prescription for that and the first 5-year timber treatment schedule for the entire forest. I loved managing the visitor information center, where I could set the stage for everyone to feel welcome, not just a few people. I did a lot of ecosystem classification and got to learn all about soil, which was wonderful. But I did so much moving after that. In Florida, I managed a 32 million board feet timber program and managed wildlife including threatened and endangered species. From there, I moved to Washington, D.C., and then Nevada, where I was the deputy forest supervisor, and then back to D.C. I was awarded an Intergovernmental Personnel Act assignment that allowed me to serve short assignments in Chile and Tanzania.
I was with the Forest Service for 28 years. I do a lot of volunteer work now and I find a lot of satisfaction in that. I live now in northern Virginia. I was a commissioner of forestry and natural resources for Arlington County and that was really stimulating. I’m on the board of directors for Virginia Native Plant Society, and I’m the chair of their Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice (DEIJ) committee. Diversity is so important, and we need DEIJ roles – they are so essential. I am deeply concerned about these kinds of positions going away. I go to the Forest History Society, under the leadership of Tania Munz, to feel hopeful. She really cares about the history of all of us in forestry, not just white men. It is wonderful the way she gets materials and collections together to keep track of history. Chris Gibbons, who owns American Green Consulting, put together a tool kit for organizations for creating an equitable and inclusive workplace, and I worked on that. Efforts like that make me more hopeful. And I’m still always reading and learning. I love James Herriot’s works, and I always keep up with learning new silvicultural practices. I like reading about new techniques, the best management practices and new technology.
The Forest Service is made up of a lot of departments and a lot of good people. It’s the leadership I challenge – there needs to be a cultural change. Right now, there’s an African American chief, Randy Moore. And that’s great, but just putting a person of color in one position does not change the culture – there is still so much that’s challenging in the agency: being a woman, being a person of color, being someone with disabilities. There has to be a critical mass of people who really care about creating change. DEIJ and criminal violations need to be reported, not kept secret, and people need to be held accountable. I asked the Forest Service a few years ago how many Black women were hired as foresters now, because I was curious. The agency said I had to file a FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request. Because of this stonewalling, I eventually went to my senator. I think this information needs to be more readily available: you need to track those kinds of things to know if you’re making progress. The answer then was six – only six Black women working as foresters. So adequate progress is not being made.
I still go into schools and urge kids to consider a career like this, to become a forester, to go into the Forest Service. Sometimes people wonder why – given some of my experiences. But I give them tools: have good mentors, document incidents, use people as resources. I had great mentors every step of the way: Stew Pickford, when I was in college, who was my fire professor, and Lyle Laverty, who hired me. To this day I keep in touch with some of the mentors I’ve had almost all my career, and I’m 66 years old!
At the end of the day, I just feel so grateful to have the opportunity to help. More than anything, I want to make a positive difference in our world. I think being a resource for people does make a difference. I love to give whatever I can: my time, my energy, my knowledge, my money. Being a pioneer as a Black woman forester – maybe the universe put me in the position to do that so that I can tell others my story. I don’t want to say that to blow my horn, but so that people can see me and hopefully think, “If she can do it, I can do it.” With all the challenges we face today, we need the best and the brightest minds, and that means we need all kinds of diversity and people from all backgrounds.
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