Podcast: Strengthening America’s Forests with 

Chief Tom Schultz

<sup>Dan Lambe [00:00:05]: 
Real stories, real change, rooted in the power of nature. You're listening to Unearthing Optimism from the Arbor Day Foundation. 

Dan Lambe: 
As a note to our listeners, this episode with Chief Tom Schultz was recorded in December 2025.  

Dan Lambe [00:00:23]: 
Hi, I'm Dan Lambe. Today, we're honored to be joined by Tom Schulz, the 21st Chief of the US Forest Service, a leader responsible for stewarding 193 million acres of national forests and grasslands, guiding a workforce of more than 30,000 people and shaping the future of America's relationship with its public lands. US Forest Service is a longtime partner of the Arbor Day Foundation, and we're thrilled to have Chief Schulz here for a conversation about leadership, stewardship, and the future of our country's forests. Chief Schulz, welcome to Unearthing Optimism. It's great to have you with us today. We appreciate it. 

Chief Tom Schultz: 
Thanks, Dan. I appreciate the opportunity to visit with you and your audience. I thought it might be valuable to start by just talking about your job. And at the Arbor Day Foundation, we've gotten to work with a lot of chiefs of the Forest Service over the years, and I know what a big job it is. It's a vast job. But I'm guessing that you bounce into people at dinner parties or get-togethers, and when people find out your title is Chief of the Forest Service, they probably have to say, one, what an interesting title, and two, what the heck does the Chief of the Forest Service do? So do you mind, for our listeners, sharing how do you explain your job? What do you do as Chief of the Forest Service? 

Chief Tom Schultz [00:01:45]: 
So we've got about 30,000 employees. We've got national forests in 44 states. We've got a research and development program. But I think day to day, day in and day out, I am typically meeting with either employees or constituents, external folks, all around the country. I travel, in many cases, three weeks out of the month, if not sometimes four weeks out of the month. But if I do go out and I meet with external parties, I always make sure that I spend time on that local forest, and we'll go on a hike. We'll meet employees, whether it's fire crews, whether it's recreation staff, timber staff, you name it. But it's always an opportunity to be grounded to the work that we do. And that's the focus that I try to bring to this job is the work and the accomplishments that we achieve throughout the course of the year. 

Dan Lambe [00:02:38]: 
Well, I know it's a huge job, and it's a huge balancing act. Have you always had this pull to forests? Has that always been what you wanted to do in your lifetime, work in the forestry space, or was there some other calling early on and you ended up in forestry? 

Chief Tom Schultz: 
When I think back, when I initially was in college, I was planning for a career in the military. So I would say no, it's not always been a vision or a goal of mine. I went in the military for five years, did ROTC in college. And then it was during that period of time that I was trying to figure out what a next path might be. And I had grown up in the East, was in Scouts, had spent a lot of times running around the Occoquan, recreating, fishing, hiking, just playing as a kid. Goshen Scout Camp was an area down around Lexington, Virginia I would spend a lot of time at. But anyhow, just always had an appreciation for the outdoors, but didn't necessarily think I was going to, say, work in the outdoors.</sup> 

<sup>Chief Tom Schultz [00:03:51]: 
And then it kind of evolved. So when I got out of the military, ended up moving to Montana, where my wife's from. Worked for the Department of Natural Resources in Montana for about 15 years. And that kind of getting into that role there really spurred where I went with things. 

Dan Lambe [00:04:07]: 
I know that you have had a diversity of experiences, which is one of the values that brings you to this role as Chief of the Forest Service. And you talked about your experience in nature. Was that just you exploring through Scouts? Was your family an outdoors enthusiast family? 

Chief Tom Schultz: 
Yeah. So it wasn't so much my immediate family, but my grandfather was big into nature. He was a Scoutmaster for probably 30 years. I think that's where it started for me. I remember looking at his bookshelf as a kid, and he had copies of books by Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold and just back in the '70s, and that was kind of where he was interested. Broad Creek, Maryland, is where he spent a lot of his time outside, but he also carved ducks out of wood and always had an appreciation whenever we went fishing or anything, whether it was at the ocean or in lakes. He just always had an appreciation for nature. And I think that's where, for me, it probably started there. And then subsequent to that, I think as I got older, when I got married, my father-in-law was a big sportsman, and we bow hunted together in Montana and just hunted and hiked all over. 

Chief Tom Schultz [00:05:29]: 
They live in the Bozeman area, so the Gallatin National Forest was an area that we would hunt and fish and play in. So I had a lot of experiences in Montana that I think grew that. But as a young kid, I would definitely say my grandfather was the one that got me interested in the outdoors. 

Dan Lambe: 
Do you still have some of those ducks that he carved? 

Chief Tom Schultz: 
Oh, yeah. His favorite duck was a mallard duck, yeah. 

Dan Lambe: 
That's really a cool story. Thanks for sharing that. 

Dan Lambe [00:05:44]: 
So you mentioned Gallatin, and I'm just going to talk about some forest restoration work because at the Arbor Day Foundation, we've been planting trees with the US Forest Service for a long time. But it was in 1990 when we started following the Yellowstone fires and the Gallatin fires. And since that time—with the U.S. Forest Service, we've planted more than 55 million trees in 70 different national forests, and we couldn't be more proud than to be working with the U.S. Forest Service on those projects. We've planted many more trees on other private and public lands around the country and around the world, but across the country, we're seeing more and more need for restoration for a variety of reasons, whether it's from fire or disease or other challenges. 

Dan Lambe [00:06:29]: 
Why do you think it's, and you and I have talked about this, but why do you think it's so important for us to continue to replant when we can in some of these key areas? 

Chief Tom Schultz: 
Yeah, Dan. So to me, it's not an if, it's a we need to. If we're going to have forest in the future, we need to replant. A lot of forests will regenerate naturally. But what we're seeing right now is with some of the stand replacement fires that we've had, and I'll just give an example. So the state of California in the last four years has burned about four million acres. And you look at some of the impacts of those fires, and the fire I'd like to talk about is the Caldor Fire, which is on the El Dorado Forest. 2021 burned about 235,000 acres. Half of that fire was stand replacement. So you just don't automatically get back regeneration naturally. And then what happens is, typically, when you have a big fire like that, you have grasses and weeds and forbs, and brush comes back in. And if you don't get the reforestation done immediately, you're going to have a brush field, and that's what we're seeing in many cases. So if we don't do post-fire recovery, and we don't treat the ground and prep the soils, we won't have forest back. I've seen forest near Billings, Montana, north of Billings. Stand replacement fires tore through there. Those forests are gone. They have not come back. They convert to rangeland in many cases.

Chief Tom Schultz [00:07:53]: 
So based on the ecotype, the precipitation, and the need, in many cases, to have artificial regeneration and planting, we need that. If your question is why do we need to plant, because if we don't in some of these areas around the country, we will not have forests come back. It's that important. 

Dan Lambe: 
You mentioned Billings. Do you have any anecdotes to share of your first-hand experience after some of these disasters come through? 

Chief Tom Schultz: 
Yeah. I think I go back to the Caldor Fire and just what's happened in California. So like I mentioned, we've burned four million acres. There's 20 million acres of national forest in California. Four million acres have burned in just the last four years. We've had two fires in excess of a million acres. In Idaho, we had the Murphy fire in 2007. It was lighted as a range fire, but that was over 700,000 acres in south central Idaho. Fires at that scale are not typical fires. A big fire you would think might be 30,000, 40,000 acres. Million-acre fires, multiple million-acre fires in the last five years in California is not a common natural occurrence. And then when you see what the impact is, not just to the landscape, but to the communities, the people. 

Chief Tom Schultz [00:09:10]: 
And those communities that have been impacted by fire tend to be very opinionated on the need to ensure that we mitigate wildfire through fuels reduction strategies to protect their communities in the future. So it has all kind of impacts. It affects-- We have human fatalities. We have homes that are burned to the ground. We have watersheds that are impacted where you have water that is no longer clean. You have power to communities is interrupted. It has significant impacts in many cases. And then it really does impact the people on those landscapes in terms of how they see things. Seeley Lake in 2017 in Montana, which is north of Missoula, that area had tremendous fires. That town was at risk of being completely burned over. Luckily, the firefighters caught the fire before it did. 

Chief Tom Schultz [00:09:58]: 
But the impacts of smoke to that community, like in terms of people breathing in smoke. Smoke is a terrible health hazard for people, and people don't talk about it enough. Forest Service has done a lot of research of the impacts of smoke to human health. So it affects people. It can affect your life, it can affect your livelihood, it can affect your property. It affects the forest, but not just the people side of things, but the wildlife side of things. So we had reduced harvest on the El Dorado Forest in that area where the Caldor Fire burned in 2021 by about 70% over the last 10 years to protect spotted owl habitat. They're called PACs, P-A-C-S. And that area, when it burned, like I mentioned, half of that fire was stand replacement. We burned up about half of the spotted owl habitat. 

Chief Tom Schultz [00:10:44]: 
So the impact, there always seems to be this presumption that somehow nature just moves away and doesn't get impacted by the fire, but that's not the case. So it affects the human population and also affects the natural environment as well. And tying into your last question, when you look at the landscape about the need for activity, we've estimated about 112 million acres out of 193 million acres nationally that is at risk of either high or very high risk of catastrophic wildfire around the country or has tremendous insect disease issues that will likely cause those stands, which are these forested areas, to be dead within the next 15 years. So almost two-thirds of the national forest system is at risk of some sense of mortality in the foreseeable future. 

Chief Tom Schultz [00:11:33]: 
So what can we do? And we talk a lot about active management, but active management is a way to mitigate the impacts of those increased fuels, the dense stands, the conditions that are out there on the landscape, the hotter, drier conditions that we have in many cases. But we need to act in forestry, and forest management is a tool. And it's not just forest management, but it's also range management. So we also look at grazing as a part of our strategy for active management. 

Dan Lambe: 
Well, I know you're trying all kinds of unique tactics and policies, not only to manage the forest, but also to restore the forest. But in the name of optimism and hope, what is it over the next 10, 20 years that gives you an optimism that we can get this right and we can make a real difference? 

Chief Tom Schultz: 
What gives me hope is the partnerships. We are changing attitudes and minds. And when I see the people that we work with, the Arbor Day Foundation, the American Forest Foundation, National Forest Foundation, Wild Turkey Federation, Mule Deer Foundation, the groups go on and on and on that we work with, both on the reforestation side. And then I start looking at the communities that we work with. You can see communities that historically may have had a lot of concerns about seeing forests managed. And when I say manage the forest, I'm talking about thinning the forest, cutting diseased trees, or even taking out commercial trees in many cases. But people had reluctance to do that, but now they can see the science behind that and protecting those communities and protecting those forests long term.</sup> 

<sup>Chief Tom Schultz [00:13:05]:
But to me, the optimism is the fact that we've had more and more partners step up and contribute time and funding to get the work done. And to me, there's a tremendous alignment between many of our partners and the work that needs to be done. I've made these comments before, but a lot of people tend to focus on, oh, there's disagreement in how we manage forests. Most of it, there's not a lot of disagreement in how we manage the national forests. And there are some groups that do fundamentally disagree, but I would say that's a minority of interests out there. The vast majority of people value the National Forest System. They do not want to see catastrophic wildfire. They want communities protected. They want forests to be healthy. They want to recreate in the forest. And there is a lot of alignment and a lot of support for the National Forest System, both internal to the forest and external. So it's the partnerships, Dan, that really drive that home for me in terms of the optimism. 

Dan Lambe: 
We say at the foundation that forestry is a team sport, and I've heard you talk about how the Forest Service is in the relationship business. I love that phrasing, and I believe it, and I see that in your team members looking for complementary partners to make things happen. There is a fantastic community of organizations, large national organizations, and those local community organizations, like you mentioned, that are making a huge difference. I'd love to hear an example that you might have of one of those relationships in play, whether it's with a nonprofit, whether it's with a community organization, whether it's with just some local government. Whatever it might be, where you're seeing that positive action in play really making a difference on the ground. 

Chief Tom Schultz: 
It's across so many spectrums. I could talk about The Nature Conservancy actively standing up prescribed fire programs across the West, where they're investing in that. I could talk about the Wild Turkey Federation, where we've got a keystone agreement where they're actually out there actively reducing fuels across the landscape. I could talk about the Arbor Day Foundation and the reforestation efforts. It's the tribes. The tribes have been tremendous partners in terms of cultural burning efforts and then managing their own lands and wanting to support the management of the National Forest System. The states have been great partners. 

Chief Tom Schultz [00:15:25]:
My own experience in Idaho is that a lot of people have heard the term good neighbor authority, and that's where the states have been given congressional authority to assist in the management of the National Forest System, as well have tribes, as well have counties. And when we talk about the work that the states are doing or the tribes are doing, it's not just about commercial timber sales. And if anything, what we see is there's more restoration activities, pure restoration, where it's creating habitat for fish and wildlife, replacing culverts that are fish barriers, those kind of things, improving road systems. But most of the contracts that the states have stepped up to do, it's to do the work that the Forest Service is challenged to get done, either with budgetary constraints or just some of the length of time it takes us to do the contracting. 

Chief Tom Schultz [00:16:17]: 
But partnerships across the board, the forest could not be managed. The other great example I'll give you, we haven't even really talked about recreation yet, but we have probably close to 170 million visitor recreation days a year on the National Forest System. And we have over 82,000 volunteers that support us in the management of recreation on the National Forest System. 

Dan Lambe: 
Let's talk about that a little bit more. I know recreation is a big part of what you're paying attention to, and it's such an important part of inspiring people and making people aware not just of the beauty of the forest, but the functionality of the forest. Can you tell me a little bit more about how recreation is an important way to connect people with the forest and just really an appreciation of conservation in our forest lands? 

Chief Tom Schultz:
Yeah. No, Dan, it's a great question. So there's two things I'll bring up. One is the most permitted use we have in the National Forest System is grazing, about 40%, but the most use we have is recreation. So most people know the National Forest System through recreation. I don't care if you hunt, which I do, if you fish, which I do, if you hike, if you camp, if you're a backcountry horseman, if you like to work in the wilderness, if you want to just go for a day hike or camp. That's how people, in many cases, know the National Forest System. 

Chief Tom Schultz [00:17:40]: 
And to your broader audience, a lot of people probably don't differentiate many times. What I experience when I come out East a lot of times is people don't know the difference between the national parks, the Bureau of Land Management, the national forests. They know about public lands, and maybe they understand there's a difference between public lands and private lands, which there is. But it's such an opportunity for people to get out. We talk about living healthy lives and the importance of the National Forest System in exercise and finding a way to get away from the noise and congestion of driving in traffic. We've had national forests that are within 60 miles of Houston, of Phoenix, of Tucson, of LA, San Francisco. You pick those big cities, and we've got national forests, and there's a lot of use. People want to get out. They want to see the national forests. They want to recreate, and the use is increasing over time. 

Chief Tom Schultz [00:18:33]: 
The other user group that I want to mention is veterans. We have several programs with veterans groups. So when veterans come back and they may have PTSD, and there's certain programs out there to get them out in the national forest system that we partner to enable them to get back and get some relief from some of their symptoms as a way just to reintegrate them back into society. So the national forest provides all kind of opportunities for people to recreate, whatever that recreation might be. It could be motorized recreation. Maybe you want to take a UTV out, or you want to be on a snow sled, whatever that might be, or an e-bike or a mountain bike. But people want to recreate, and there's many different ways to recreate on the national forest. And we know it improves their health, their wellness, their mental health, and their physical health. 

Dan Lambe: 
Let's dive a little bit. I know you're a busy person. You talked about how much you're traveling. I know you've got a lot of demands on your calendar, but I'd love to hear from you where your learning is happening today. Oftentimes, my best way of learning is just listening. If I can be on the ground with folks hearing their first-hand experiences, sometimes at a conference, maybe a podcast. But what does learning look like for you today, Chief Schultz?

Chief Tom Schultz: 
For me, I'm a Stephen Covey fan, and habit five is seek first to understand, then to be understood, right? And it is about listening, and it's about meeting people where they're at, not where you're at. So that's why I don't want people necessarily have to come to DC to meet me. I want to meet them where they're at, and I want to meet them-- I'd much prefer to be out in the forest or whatever the rangeland. We have 20 grasslands, where the issues are most important, meeting people where they're at, and I think that's a key piece. Even as we think about now where the Forest Service is located, we're a field-based organization. And the secretary has been great to work for and work with, but she's made it very clear that we're going to be even closer to the American public. And so being out there among the user groups, among the people, the employees, the folks that use the forest, meeting them there, whether it's visiting sawmills, whether it's going on a hike on one of the trails, Pacific Crest Trail, Appalachian Trail, you name it, meeting people where they're at that are using the forest, that's where I want to meet people, and listening and understanding their issues. Reading is always a good avenue, but for me, I like the first-hand experience of meeting people and hearing directly from them. 

Dan Lambe [00:20:59]:
I feel very similarly. It's just a more intimate way to complement some of the research you might be able to hear about, knowing you've been traveling so much and meeting with not only Forest Service staff members, but community members and others. Any anecdotes from over the last few months of one of those key conversations you had that just stopped you in your tracks with an aha moment?

Chief Tom Schultz: 
Yeah. Something we haven't talked about is disaster recovery. So in October of 2024, Hurricane Helene came up the East Coast. It had tremendous impacts in the states of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia. And I did a trip down there here about four or five months ago. Met with folks in Georgia, met with folks in North Carolina, and then in Virginia. And you look at the impact of the hurricane on landowners, forest landowners, people that recreate. Just to put this in perspective, the town of Asheville, North Carolina, they had 36 inches of precipitation in 24 hours. Even today, Downtown Asheville is still impacted by that hurricane and the flooding that occurred. 

Chief Tom Schultz [00:22:07]: 
So being on the ground and seeing our employees administer the disaster funds that were received by Congress to improve that situation and help restore roads and trails, habitat, helping those community members. We probably had several months of employees that were in Asheville that had no power, no water. So that community, you don't get that by watching the news. You don't get that by reading the newspaper. When you go out on the ground and see those communities first hand and talk to the employees that lived through that experience, and how they sent their, and people that could send their family members away, and they stayed there to help the town, that has had an impact on me. 

Chief Tom Schultz [00:22:50]:
The Forest Service has a tremendous responsibility, again, people don't realize this, to administer disaster recovery funds, and that's from anywhere there's disasters. It could be wildfire disasters, it could be flooding, could be hurricanes, tornadoes. But seeing the impact to landowners from Georgia up to Virginia, seeing the impact to recreation, forestry, that has had an indelible mark on me in wanting to help those communities to the best that we can.

Dan Lambe: 
We are a big part of disaster recovery work as well. It all started for us back after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. We started helping to restore and replant and distribute trees to communities, not just forests, but communities also along the Gulf Coast, and we're helping to plant 10 million trees in the areas affected by Hurricanes Helene and Milton. And I have had the opportunity to be in Asheville as well, and it's sobering to see the damage. But also, my experience is any time I go to those communities, the resilience and the determination to bring those communities back to life, and trees and forests being a part of that, it's just inspiring, and it just makes us want to dig in even harder to help make it happen. I'm guessing you have experienced the same kind of thing as you visit, not only with Forest Service personnel, but just community members, just that determination and resilience. 

Chief Tom Schultz: 
Dan, you're spot on. We talk a lot about resilient forests, but it's the people that live in those communities that are truly resilient, right? And I'm a believer that you don't really talk about the forest without the communities, and they're hand in hand. And what you'll hear me say a lot, if we have a healthy forest, in many cases, we have a healthy community. So those communities and those forests go hand in hand. Unhealthy forests that aren't managed, that don't provide jobs have impacts on healthcare, education, the economy of that local area. When we have a hurricane or tornado that comes through there, if we don't go in and help recover those areas, it will impair those economies of those communities and towns. So the forest is critical for so many reasons. But for that community health, and that community aspect, you can't emphasize it enough. And the term the Forest Service has typically used has been community stability. That's one of the pillars of the Forest Service is to ensure that we provide opportunities for economic engine to be a part of what's going on on the landscape, and that it provides a stability for the community. And you see many communities where the national forest can be 70, 80, 90%. Those communities can't tax. They're impacted. Maybe years ago, there were lots of jobs and opportunities, and you've seen that wither away. So the secretary has been very clear that our focus is to ensure that we work with rural America and act in ways that provide opportunities for rural America to grow. 

Dan Lambe [00:25:52]:
I'm going to pivot here and turn us to a conversation about service. You had talked about how you served in the military. It feels like this might be a value of yours in a lot of ways, but the word service is part of the agency name, the US Forest Service. What does that word mean to you personally? 

Chief Tom Schultz: 
For me personally, I look at service as kind of like a vocation. It's a calling to do something bigger than you. And in particular, for me, it's doing something to benefit others that may not have a direct benefit on me. And it could be in your community if you work at a food bank. It could be that you're driving someone to church. It could be that you're helping a community recover after some disaster event. For us in the Forest Service, we have a motto, caring for the land and serving the people, and you think about that. Serving the people means providing the opportunities for them to enjoy their public lands. It's not the Forest Service lands. These lands belong to the American public. And the service component of that for me is that we want to afford them the best experience that we can. And in many cases, we need partners just like Arbor Day Foundation to deliver that service that people want. People want to see healthy forests. They want to know that we have trees that are being planted and growing into the future so that their kids and their grandchildren are going to see those forests at some point in the future. So service is providing those opportunities for others, and it's directly contributing and giving back to the community. 

Dan Lambe [00:27:29]: 
And for you personally, it seems like something that it isn't just about the Forest Service. I feel like it's you, Tom. This is a core value of yours as well. Is that right? 

Chief Tom Schultz: 
It definitely is. In my personal life, I have been in many different service roles in my communities, whether it was coaching soccer, volunteering in Boy Scouts, serving at church, but yeah, it's a core value of mine. You bet.

Dan Lambe: 
We find at the foundation some of our best partners are those who have kind of shared values with us, and commitment to service excellence is one of our values as well. We also think about positivity and optimism, and we see a lot of momentum in the forestry space today. A lot of challenges, no doubt about it. We've talked about some of those challenges already. But what gives you confidence today about the future of our country's forests? 

Chief Tom Schultz: 
So much of what is written just in the news in general is negative. You almost have to go looking for positive news, and I'm the kind of guy that if there was a good news network, which I think there probably is, I tend to be optimistic, not in a Pollyanna-ish sense, but I think if you are going to lead people and you have a negative view all of the time and you're just down about things, people don't follow you. People don't want to be alongside you and go where you're going. So I think for me, what gives me optimism is that we are doing good things. We are getting things done. We had probably one of the most successful years in the Forest Service that I've seen in a long time, and that's been in a sea of change. But when you look at the fire season that we had, we had more fire starts than we've had over the last 10 years by 12% on average. We burned half as many acres. We've reforested this past year over 285,000 acres, which is the most we've done in probably over 20 years of reforestation. When you look at the timber that we've sold in an active management strategy, we exceeded our goals by probably a couple hundred thousand board feet. On the fuels work that we've done this past year, we treated over 3.3 million acres to protect communities and reduce fire hazards. 

Chief Tom Schultz [00:29:41]: 
So what gets me excited is where we're going. There's an opportunity in kind of reframing and restructuring the agency to address things that have been problematic for many, many years. One of my favorite books, and I say this a lot, is "The Forest Ranger." Herbert Kaufman wrote the book in 1960, and it's a study on culture on the Forest Service. And it talked about the Forest Service, their very strong culture back in the '50s and up until the early '60s, and the idea was that the ranger, the district ranger who was that local line officer, had a lot of autonomy and authority to make decisions, but they had to be in alignment with some of the direction from the Washington office. So the premise behind the book is that with some sideboards and some clear direction that was over time reinforced, that you could afford discretion locally to that local line officer, and those people were embedded in the communities. Right. They knew the people. They worked with them. They were trusted. Back to the term of service, they served those communities. 

Chief Tom Schultz [00:30:45]: 
And what I've seen over time is that as we've built more bureaucracy, which we have, we have gotten away from some of that, and then we move people around a lot to promote them. So our focus is getting back to basics, addressing some of those frustrations. We're looking at the regulations that we have, the directives that we've issued. So we're trying to clear the deck and allow for people that are closest to the ground, the men and women that are working on the ground, to make the best decisions that they can, getting that local input, working with other landowners, community members, and so forth to do the work. 

Dan Lambe:
So that's what drives me. That's what gets me excited about, optimistic about the future. And when we talk about the change in that light, when people understand that it would take the Forest Service upwards of eight to nine months to hire a seasonal employee. Think about that. So if you were applying for a seasonal job, it could be up to nine months to get hired by the Forest Service, and nobody thinks that's a good thing. And then we tell our employees, "This is an opportunity through this effort we're going through to revisit our processes and streamline them and make better decisions locally." It gets people excited. 

Dan Lambe [00:31:47]:
I love to hear your optimism is rooted in action. It isn't just naive optimism, it is action, and I love that you're leaning into the people of the Forest Service to help reinforce that optimism and positivity, because there are amazing people working in the Forest Service, no doubt about it. I'm curious, Tom, since you've been in this job, what's the biggest surprise you've had as Chief of the Forest Service? 

Chief Tom Schultz:
I get that question a lot. So I've worked alongside the Forest for probably 25 years, working for states and industry, those kind of things. So I feel like I know the programs pretty well, and I understand that. I'm aware of where the Forest are at, but the piece that has been the biggest learning opportunity for me really has been the employees. We talked about service before, but I've worked in the military, I've worked for state government, I've worked in the private sector, and nowhere have I seen the passion and the commitment to the job that I've seen in the Forest Service. When I see that commitment, and it's borne out in many, many people in what they do and how they do it, that's what gets me excited. And that's what's opened my eyes probably more than anything is just the passion and the drive and the commitment that so many employees have for the work that they do. And many of them will tell you, "It's the best job I've ever had. It's the job of a lifetime. It's a dream job." I hear that a lot. 

Dan Lambe [00:33:08]:
I've seen that passion. I've seen that commitment. And like I mentioned, we're proud to get to work with a lot of your team members all around the country. Tom, one of my questions I ask folks at the end of every podcast is there a favorite tree, favorite tree story, tree memory that you have that you can share with our listeners? 

Chief Tom Schultz:
Yeah. So my favorite tree is the western larch. It's a deciduous conifer. My story, though, is I've got two stories to share with you. This one is about western larch. So I used to work in Montana, and so there is an area called Bear Canyon that is just east of Bozeman, and there's state land down there that is managed by the state of Montana. And there is actually a stand of western larch that was planted years ago. Typically, you do not find western larch that is east of the Continental Divide. So to me, if you go down there in Bear Canyon and you look for that stand of western larch, you will find that there's a stand there. It's pretty cool. So that to me is exciting. 

Chief Tom Schultz [00:34:11]:
But a funnier story, I used to work for Department of Natural Resources in Montana. We were up in the Swan Valley one time looking at a project that we were working on, and it was probably two feet of snow on the ground and we were walking through. And the Swan Valley is north of Missoula, south of Kalispell, just a little bit east of the highway there. And we were walking back, and there's a wildlife biologist with us, and she was very interested in bats and birds and things, and she said, "There's bats in these trees under the bark." And I'm like, "There is no way there's a bunch of bats under the bark." So we're walking, and we're trudging through, and we had lunch and burned a stump, and there we go, and she takes a little hatchet and breaks away some bark. I think it was a grand fir tree. No kidding, these two bats just go zipping out of this tree, and I about fell over. I'm looking, there's no way that she's going to just randomly select a tree and randomly cut away some bark and these bats are going to fly, and it happened. So I kind of got a kick out of that. So that was one of my fun tree stories out there is seeing bats under the bark in the Swan Valley. 

Dan Lambe:
That's great. Tom, thanks for your time. Thanks for your leadership. Thanks for your partnership and your passion and your service. Grateful to have your time today. Just thanks for everything you're doing to help create healthier, stronger forests across the United States. 

Chief Tom Schultz:
Thanks, Dan, and we really appreciate the partnership of the Arbor Day Foundation. Thank you.

Dan Lambe [00:35:45]:
That brings us to the end of today's conversation. A heartfelt thank you to Chief Tom Scholz for sharing his insights, his experiences, and his commitment to the people and places that make up our national forests. If today's episode moved you or inspired you, we hope you'll subscribe, leave a review, and share the show with a friend. Until next time, keep planting those seeds of hope.</sup>