As deputy director of the Forest Stewards Guild, Amanda Mahaffey supports programs including Women Owning Woodlands, Foresters for the Birds, and the North Atlantic Fire Science Exchange. Through that work, Mahaffey sees her role and the role of the Guild as one of community building, of bringing people together to work toward good, ethical forest management. Amanda earned her forestry degree from the Yale School of Forestry (and also holds a master’s degree in choral conducting from the University of Southern Maine) and is an officer of the Maine Prescribed Fire Council. She has lived in the Pine Tree State since 2004.
There were woods near where I grew up in New Jersey. Mills Reservation is nearby, and there’s a protected reservoir and a hawk lookout there. I would be out on my bike or on foot with friends in the woods. I guess I was outdoorsy for your average northern New Jerseyan, but eventually I realized I wanted to be around more trees and fewer people. My family spent time in Maine during the summers. I felt at home in Maine, and it was part of what inspired me to pursue a forestry career here. I also grew up in a very ethnically diverse town, so I bring a personal passion to instilling diversity, equity, and inclusion in my work today.
My undergraduate studies were in geology and music. I’ve always had a passion for the sciences, but microbiology and chemistry are not my favorite cup of tea. Geology made sense to me, but trees grow on a time scale I can wrap my head around. And that pushed me toward forestry as I was finishing my undergraduate degree. After graduating from forestry school, I worked in a variety of jobs: forestry technician on industrial lands, intern at a science nonprofit, environmental consulting, timberland transactions, and coordinating a regional conservation partnership. I sometimes wondered where this would lead me. When I joined the staff of the Forest Stewards Guild 10 years ago as its Northeast Region director, all of these experiences coalesced as an ideal foundation for the work I do today. My boots-on-the-ground experience enables me to connect meaningfully with foresters, firefighters, landowners, and others who care for our forests.
Along the way, I also earned a Master of Music degree in choral conducting. This skill set has actually been essential to my work of bringing people together, sometimes combining disparate voices, to produce a positive result. I’ve always enjoyed singing. I’ve been singing pretty much my whole life. For eight years I conducted a youth choir, the Wescustago Youth Chorale in coastal Maine. That was a ton of fun. I like to tell people that if I can wrangle a group of teenagers, corralling a group of foresters is no problem. In music and in forestry, I really get a kick out of orchestrating and implementing an impactful learning experience.
The Forest Stewards Guild is a national organization of forest stewards who practice and promote ecological forestry to benefit forests and communities. In the Northeast, many of our members are working on public and conservation lands, and with family forestland owners. Guild staff support forest stewardship in the areas of forest climate adaptation, fire science and management, and woodland owner outreach. I organize workshops of all kinds to bring people together in a fun, outdoor learning environment to address these forest stewardship needs. Everywhere across the landscape, there are communities of people passionate about forest stewardship. In my work, I have the privilege of bringing these people together to help bring about positive change for our forests.
Women Owning Woodlands is a national program, supported by the U.S. Forest Service, which started as a web-based resource for women landowners. A group of mostly women leaders – professionals in natural resources – were charged with populating the website with timely, relevant content. In October 2017 we had a retreat for a group of women leaders in forestry from across the country, the WOWnet professionals. From that retreat, we started a network of these professionals who are providing outreach to women landowners. The U.S. Forest Service gave additional funding to the Forest Stewards Guild to facilitate the network. That has turned into these amazing connections between women professionals, some who have had a program for a number of years and have good lessons and experiences to share. In other parts of the country, it’s brand new, and they want to get something going and can learn from the more experienced WOWnet leaders.
We just held a virtual conference for women woodland owners, and that was so exciting. We had all of these amazing women professionals from the national WOWnet network who led and facilitated very engaging, interactive virtual workshops and discussions. We had women landowners from across the country – over 300 of them. It was so cool to be in a breakout room and have a woman from Minnesota ask a question and connect with someone from Wisconsin, whom they wouldn’t have met otherwise.
Another big thing is women’s chainsaw safety workshops. Chainsaw safety, especially for women, is a really important topic. There are some things that are unique to women. For instance, when you wear a hardhat, do you put your hair in a ponytail – up or down? Gloves and boots are not often sized for women. Chainsaws can also be kind of a hook for getting women excited to learn more about their land. When you get 15 women coming to a weekend workshop and really digging in and learning chainsaw safety fundamentals and getting practice using their chainsaws – they’re ready to go take on the world. They feel ready to go to a saw shop and ask for help, or call a forester to help them learn about their woods. By offering these workshops, we’re really getting more women out and active together and building community.
Often when we offer WOW workshops, we’ll partner with a local organization. For example, in Vermont, the NorthWoods Stewardship Center is a great central hub. They offer lots of other stewardship programs, and if a woman comes to a WOW workshop hosted by NorthWoods, she’s more likely to come to other workshops. This helps connect women to a local partner and keep them engaged in stewarding their woodlands. We also try to connect with state outreach foresters in our workshops – so a county forester in Vermont or a district forester in Maine or an extension forester in New Hampshire. They’re essential, fundamental partners for all that we do.
Foresters for the Birds started in Vermont through a partnership with Audubon Vermont and the Vermont Department of Forest, Parks & Recreation. Some of the people initially involved – Steve Hagenbuch, Mike Snyder, Nancy Patch – are Forest Steward Guild members. The Guild has helped facilitate bringing the program started in Vermont to other landscapes. We started Forestry for Maine Birds in 2013. Sally Stockwell from Maine Audubon and I and our colleagues from Maine Forest Service and Maine Inland Fisheries & Wildlife talked with the people involved in Vermont as we translated the program for Maine. Vermont has primarily northern hardwood forests as compared to Maine, which is a bigger landscape with northern hardwood, northern mixed woods, spruce-fir, and oak-pine, and more of an industrial landscape. The Guild has supported folks in Rhode Island, North Carolina, Minnesota, Michigan, and Oregon in developing Foresters for the Birds programs. What started in Vermont has really spread and become super popular. That partnership between foresters and wildlife biologists is really, really important to the success of the program.
Climate change is the biggest overarching challenge to our forests. That plays out in how trees are growing and reacting and responding, and in how forestry operations take place. How has a stand of trees reacted to invasive plants or pest? How would we do a timber harvest differently because of that? And how does this affect local economies? How do we keep the mills fed? How do we find that balance between growing bigger, stronger, older trees and keeping them healthy and also having markets that can sustain that through time? Finding ways to balance all of those things under this changing climate umbrella – there are a lot of twists and turns, a lot of unexpected things. In the forest, climate change is impacting all of those elements of how forests grow, how we harvest them, how the markets are doing, and how people interact with the forest. The Guild partners with the Northern Institute of Applied Climate Science and the University of Maine’s Forest Climate Change Initiative, among others, to help adapt our forests to the changing climate.
I really love Maine’s spruce-fir forest. Coastal spruce-fir is beautiful, and I get little glimpses of that where I live in Midcoast Maine. Really, I love anywhere where there’s good, beautiful, spruce-fir forest. It’s something about the smell of the trees and the feel of the evergreen needles under your feet and just the way the forest grows. It’s a happy place for me.
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