Michael Crawford is the northern New Hampshire land manager and burn boss for The Nature Conservancy. He manages properties from the Fourth Connecticut Lake Preserve in Pittsburg, near the Canadian border, down to Mt. Teneriffe Preserve in Milton. As a burn boss, Mike is responsible for all aspects of managing prescribed fires and his team on the ground. He began his career working for the Student Conservation Association, which connects young people to hands-on stewardship work. When he’s not exploring the North Woods, Michael enjoys working with his family on their 22-acre organic farm, hunting, and fishing.
I grew up in Pennsylvania in the ’80s, and my brother and I had a lot of free rein. We’d run around the woods, play GI Joe in a stream, and climb trees. We moved to southeastern Pennsylvania when I was 6, and it was more of a suburban area. We’d just find little stretches of tree lines between farmers’ fields that we would build forts in. I spent a lot of time with my dad and my brother going hunting and fishing and backpacking. That was a big part of my childhood and my teen years.
In my high school years, I was a bit mischievous – and I still am now. I got in trouble in school, but my biology teacher took a liking to me and took me under his wing. He could see my interest in the outdoors and wildlife. He set me on a path; he was a very early mentor for me. He got me involved in a macroinvertebrate project, and I studied macroinvertebrates along a section of stream that I would fish with my friends. We found this site where the outlet for a water treatment plant was degrading the water source. We got to go and present it in front of the town and ask for money and for a change in how the water treatment plant treated their water.
That was when I first started learning about conservation and how I could have an impact even as a high school student. One of my counselors had all the students fill out a career booklet where you mark things you’re interested in, and she went through it with my mom and was like, “I think Mike’s limiting himself. He says he either wants to be a forest ranger or a rock and roll star and he has no other interests.” I was really focused on the outdoors, and I felt very much at home in the woods and in all the elements. I think it really set me up to be okay being uncomfortable working in the field and still enjoy being outdoors.
After high school, I did a solo trip to Alaska to go backpacking in Denali National Park. It was a very eye-opening experience. It was my first time out West, and I made this connection. I wanted to get out and explore as much as possible. But I knew I had to go to school and work through that. I went to Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania and studied parks and recreation, focusing on natural resource management, with a minor in philosophy. I did my best to get through school as fast as possible. I wanted to just be out and about. For a few years I worked at Yellowstone National Park over the summers, just doing concessions, giving all my hours to whoever wanted them, just so I could go backpacking in my time off.
My last year in college, there were poster boards in the hallways for the Student Conservation Association (SCA). They had these little postcards that you would tear off and you would send it in for an application package. I did that and they ended up getting in touch with me, and I interviewed and got a job. I worked as a manager at a restaurant during the school year, so they were like, “Okay, you’ll make a great leader.” I had no clue what I was doing. They brought me on as a crew lead in Olympic National Park, Washington, to oversee a small crew that was part of a larger fire crew – a fuels crew. That was my first introduction to fire.
My supervisor was great, and he took me under his wing, so I stayed for another season as a park employee working for the National Park Service. I learned about fire effects monitoring, prescribed fire, and responding to wildfires, but there was always something that pulled me back to the East Coast. Of course, my family, but there’s also something to be said about your home landscape, like your habitat, and the forest you grew up in. It always had a strong pull for me. So I was a bit of a geographical yo-yo for a few years, going back and forth, trying to figure out where I belonged and also what I wanted.
SCA brought me on as a staff field leader for a crew in New York in 2005, between Albany and the Shawangunks, doing stewardship and prescribed fire. It was my first introduction to The Nature Conservancy (TNC). I liked how diverse the work was and found some great mentors, who were great coaches at work and just life coaches too. I felt at home there and in that atmosphere and with those folks. I did that for two years and then went out West again and worked as a hotshot for the Bonneville Hotshots for the Bureau of Land Management. That was an intense, eye-opening experience – definitely the most physically demanding job I've ever had in my life. Some extremely long days, sometimes 24-hour shifts, and I realized it was not for me, but I learned a lot from it. I made a bunch of money doing it and then had nothing to do, so I did some traveling.
During that time, I was like, “What am I doing? Where am I going?” I had this strong calling to figure out how to make a career with TNC, and so that brought me back. I worked for them between Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire for a bit, and then went out to Oregon with my now wife and tried to make it work out there. Eventually a mentor and previous supervisor called me up with an opportunity as a forest restoration specialist, doing stewardship and fire, and it landed me back in the Shawangunks, and I put roots in and started making a career out of it.
I started a series of courses to meet National Wildfire Coordinating Group’s standards back in 2003. They’re responsible for setting the national standard for fire operations. When I landed back in the Shawangunks, outside of the Northeast field season, I’d go down to the Southeast and work with their fire programs. It’s funny, I never really tried to have a career in fire, and actually I had kind of a hard time separating myself from it, because I wanted to do so much other conservation work, but it kind of kept coming up even when I tried to fight it. Fire is a small world, especially in the Northeast, so I think when you have it on your resume, they keep passing you off to the fire people on their team. In 2018, I became an Incident Commander Type 4, and in 2019, I became an RxB2 – or a burn boss. Being a burn boss changed my headspace around doing fire because it’s a much higher responsibility and liability. We very much work as a team, but it’s still a stressful thing to make the final decisions. It’s not always the fire itself that’s dangerous – someone could be injured by the equipment, or the traffic in the road, or the smoke. Making sure you’re keeping everyone safe, that they’re doing everything correctly, and that you’re giving them proper guidance can be stressful.
Eventually, my wife and I wanted to be closer to family. We had a daughter already, and a son on the way, and a job came up in New Hampshire. We made the move in 2016. Now I’m the northern New Hampshire land manager. We started a small organic farm on our 22 acres. My wife manages it, and I dig holes where she asks me to. We live right next to my in-laws, and the kids have a clear path that goes directly to their home.
I’m part of a great team, and I get to manage some beautiful properties, from central New Hampshire all the way up to the U.S.-Canada border. I get to be involved in restoration, volunteer engagement, and everything that needs to happen to manage a property – from trails to boundaries to working with adjacent landowners and partners.
There are two properties where I’m spending a lot of time right now: the Ossipee Pine Barrens Preserve and Green Hills Preserve. We’re starting to manage for southern pine beetle, being proactive to prevent an outbreak at Ossipee. We’re doing thinning projects to open up the canopy and we’ll come back in with fire to treat the understory to create the next cohort of pitch pine at the site. The fire work at Ossipee is energy-intensive. It takes a lot of time to write the plans, get the approvals, prepare the burn units, train staff, and conduct the burns.
At the Green Hills Preserve, our team is doing a lot with climate-resilient forest management. It’s exciting to learn about and think about managing to be resistant to pest and pathogens and playing with the idea of assisted migration. With restoration work, and land management in general, the results might not be seen within our lifetime, but hopefully we’re setting up the forests to be successful. Sometimes you have to ask, “Is this the right thing that we’re doing? Down the road, what will this look like?” I’m fortunate to be surrounded by a lot of intelligent people, and our decisions are very much based in science, so that can help with confidence.
I’ve been thinking a lot about legacy lately. I did a lot of jumping around the country, but I feel like the constant in my career has been mentorship. A lot of mentors early in my career got me to where I am today. It’s incredible to think about the amount of interns and crews who have come through and worked with us over the years, and it’s really rewarding to be a part of that and to think I taught them something – maybe how to do something or maybe how not to do something, but they learned from it and they’ve taken it with them. I love to work in the woods, and if I make an impact on the land, maybe that’ll be clear way after my lifetime. But with people you can see that impact in where they end up and the amazing work they go on to do in other places.
Maybe it’s just being a dad, but recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how as much as all these people might learn from me, I’m also learning from them every year. Whenever I work with someone new, I learn from them and try to grow myself. Thinking I’ve played even a little bit of a role in that feels like a pretty cool thing to hang my hat on. Most of my life I was asking so much from nature and the forest, and now I get to integrate myself and give something back. Even if what I’m giving back is small, it brings me a lot of joy. I feel good and I have a lot of pride in my work, and that’s worth millions of dollars in my mind.