Reimagining Forestry in the Digital Age: An Invitation to the Old Guard and the Next Generation
Welcome. I’m JR Washebek. I grew up in the Forest Service—wilderness ranger, trail crew lead, YCC builder, conservation educator—and I still count it as home. I’ve worked at every level of the agency from district to headquarters, including in the Office of the Chief, where I shifted operations remote, digitized workflows, put forest planning on a data lifecycle, strengthened financial accountability, and supported the 2020 transition. As the agency’s first AI Program Manager, I also launched GenAI pilots for public comment analysis, automated financial reporting, augmented remote sensing, and built AI literacy. I left an agency I love to continue its mission from a new vantage point: as EPIC’s Senior Fellow for AI & Ecosystem Management, I help forests adopt augmented digital tools, modernize permitting, and grow a workforce that braids fieldcraft, datacraft, and statecraft. My aim is to carry the craft and ethics that shaped me into the next generation of forestry—and build the operating system that lets good ideas land, bridging boots and dashboards, axes and algorithms.
Forestry has always been a public promise more than a profession: a promise to hold fast to places that outlive us, and to pass them forward in better condition than we found them. The promise was kept, for a long time, by people who could do nearly everything a landscape demanded: fight fire at dawn, mark a timber sale by noon, fix a water bar before dusk, and make peace at the grange hall after dark. Today, this legacy of conservation runs strong in forestry organizations where images of the quintessential ranger still proudly display the profession’s iconic tools: a crosscut saw, a horse, a map, and a reputation earned by sweat and steady judgment. The role was inherently one of blended, complementary skills.
Over the past half‑century, our systems grew more complex and our skills more specialized, and with that specialization came power: better science, stronger safeguards, clearer rights. It also brought distance.
Today’s foresters face a simultaneity of change—driven by powerful, hotter, drier, more variable conditions; megafire coupled with post-fire flooding; invasive species and shifting ranges; rising recreation pressure; a polarized information sphere; and a new suite of digital tools whose impact depends on how they’re governed and by whom. As we ask more of land management than ever before, we have a chance—and an obligation—to braid the blended forester’s ethos back into a modern craft.
This message is for the foresters and forestry organizations shifting their focus toward a more disruptive future. The pressure you feel is real, and the challenges are many—legacy IT that clearly can’t keep pace with the volume of data and the cadence of decision-making; processes built for a world of incremental—not rapid—change; workforce pipelines misaligned with the skills we needed yesterday; a recruiting environment where technologists can’t see themselves in our job descriptions; political terrain where federalism is less a hierarchy than a web of power shared between states, Tribes, counties, utilities, and NGOs; and cultural resistance in our field born not of malice but of the simple fact that people can’t connect to a picture of the future they cannot see.
Each of those barriers is also laden with opportunity. If we present a coherent vision of what the forester of the 2030s actually does—and the tools, ethics, and organizational scaffolding that make that work possible—we can attract new talent, modernize practice, and hand the next generation something worthy of their best years.
Our starting point should be respect for the craft and its evolution
Traditional fieldcraft is non‑negotiable. Feeling a slope in your bones, knowing when a breeze turns treacherous, reading a stream’s temperature in the shade pattern of its banks—these are not just easy-to-sentimentalize skills of yore; they’re the means of safety and real stewardship. What needs to change is not the value of fieldcraft but the contexts in which we apply it. In the Pinchot era, the forester’s “system” was the forester.
Today the system is socio‑ecological, digital, civic, all at once—often in ways that don’t always fit neatly into traditional categories. The new forester learns to move comfortably across these intertwined domains, and figures out how to embrace where the boundaries blur. First, fieldcraft remains the spine of the work: prescribed fire, silviculture, hydrology, road maintenance, habitat restoration, and the quiet diplomacy of place‑based relationships. Secondly, datacraft becomes routine, not exotic: sensors that read soil moisture and stream temperatures, lidar‑derived fuels layers, environmental DNA (eDNA) for early detection, decision aids that summarize public comments and flag anomalies, and digital ecological twins that hold the history and the forecast of priority watersheds. Put simply: shared, well-governed data is the connective tissue that makes outcomes-based and adaptive ecosystem management actually work—turning observation into accountable action. Third, statecraft grows into its full measure: navigating law and policy; honoring sovereign rights and traditional ecological knowledge; sharing power across jurisdictions and communities; explaining uncertainty in ways that build trust rather than fear; and making plain that diverse governance bodies and their jurisdictional boundaries exist to safeguard people, rights, and places—not simply to stand as barriers to ecological treatments. None of these domains replaces the others; the craft is the braid.
If that sounds novel, it's actually mostly a return to our roots. Our profession has already lived through several major skill evolutions. The Multiple‑Use era pushed foresters to balance timber, range, recreation, water, and wildlife in a single head. The NEPA-era taught us to write and to reason in public, to document purpose and need, alternatives and effects. GIS dragged us from acetate and Mylar into the pixel age, while GPS moved the map from the hood of the pickup into the palm of the hand. Collaborative planning and stewardship contracting widened our circle of co‑producers. These waves of change weren’t just about tools and technology, though—they had flesh and blood impacts. The Incident Command System professionalized wildfire operations and proved that doctrine, practiced daily, saves lives.
For executive leaders—the “old guard” still in the saddle—this is your last and most consequential hiring window
Why? Because a demographic wave of retirements over the next few years will lock in leadership pipelines, culture, and operating habits for a decade or more; the people you hire now will become the trainers, mentors, and first movers of the next era. You’re being asked to restructure the workforce under considerable pressure, and with finite resources. The natural impulse will be to recreate what you know, to rebuild the organization you trusted because it worked in your hands. Resist that impulse long enough to consider what the next forester must do on day one.
They must design and sequence treatments not as isolated projects but as portfolios that lower risk across boundaries, time, and sometimes competing imperatives. They must be able to interrogate a model without worshiping it, to know when a fuel‑moisture map is guidance and when it is gospel. They must handle public input at the scale of modern engagement—thousands of public comments, multiple languages, conflicting values—while also staying accountable for the human judgment that machines can never replace. They must treat data not as a byproduct but as public infrastructure, with provenance, consent, and access rights that are explicit. They must earn public trust by showing their work in plain language and by changing course when evidence and communities demand it. And they must still lace boots, dig line, flag a unit, and call an audible when wind and terrain conspire. That is not a unicorn; it's a forester with a deliberately blended skillset—and an approach to the work—we can champion and grow right now.
Recruiting such people, however, requires us to describe the work honestly. The role must look familiar to digital natives because the job itself is a fluent integration of code and creek, algorithm and axe. When a candidate who has built open‑source tools or trained models reads our posting, they should recognize that their craft is in service to a mission. When a graduating firefighter with a drone license and a knack for hydrology imagines their next decade, they should see a clear route to becoming a district steward of information systems. The cultural bridge we need is built less by telling young people to love nature, and more by showing them that their skills unapologetically belong here.
Legacy processes and IT are often cast as immovable obstacles—they’re actually design prompts
The time we lose to brittle workflows and document gymnastics is time we steal from the field and from communities. Modernization here is not a shopping list of apps; it is process surgery. Map a permitting pipeline, instrument it, and remove the friction that adds no value. Standardize where we can—templates, model cards, shared data schemas—so local discretion is preserved for the parts of the work that genuinely depend on the eccentricities of place. Build public‑facing dashboards that display project status, monitoring results, and the “why” behind decisions, not just what they are. And automate drudgery under human review—comment clustering, routine calculations, document formatting—to spend the time saved on engagement and adaptive monitoring. The point is not to digitize the past, but to free up capacity for the future.
The political context has changed as well. Federalism today is a network—and not always an easy one to navigate
Shared stewardship with states, Good Neighbor Authority with counties, co‑management with Tribes, partnerships with cities, utilities, and insurers, philanthropic capital combined with appropriations—these are not side projects but the architecture of modern land stewardship. The new forester is at ease in this networked landscape. They convene rather than command. They translate between the languages of policy, science, finance, and lived experience. They can sit with a state forester and community health director and make a credible case that the prescribed burn is as much a public health intervention as a fuels treatment since it reduces the probability of hospital‑adverse smoke events. They understand that data rights and Indigenous Data Sovereignty are not footnotes but first principles. In this sense, the changed nature of federalism is an opportunity to scale collaboration and outcomes without scaling bureaucracy.
Leaders who want to hire their replacements can make three moves quickly without waiting for perfect conditions
First, write for capability rather than classification. Describe the role as a braid of fieldcraft, datacraft, and statecraft, and recruit explicitly for potential to grow across that braid. Hire someone who can lead a burn and someone who can tune a model, then cross‑train them; better yet, find the person who is already both and pay them like it. Second, design apprenticeships that pair a field season with an analytics residency and a stint in public engagement. The message to candidates is simple: here, we grow professionals with blended, evolving skillsets—and we do that on purpose. Lastly, show your work in the open. Post your process maps, your model cards, your after‑action reviews. The people you want are reading; so let them see that this is a place where learning is a feature, not an apology.
For allies cultivating the roots of this movement in educational spaces, there’s a parallel opportunity here
Specifically: refresh core curricula to reflect the braid (fieldcraft + datacraft + statecraft); stand up joint agency-university apprenticeships and co-ops; offer microcredentials in data ethics, fuel analytics, and participatory design; create field data studios where students and practitioners build open tools together; and expand mid-career reskilling pathways and fellowships that move technicians into leadership without losing what made them good in the first place. Credentials in forestry (and adjacent fields) can also evolve to signal clear demand needs—the needed braid of cross-disciplinary skillsets—rather than the silos those skills have long inhabited. Continuing education can weigh ethics, data rights, and participatory methods alongside mensuration and fire behavior. And early‑career professionals can be invited to contribute to open tools and shared protocols that reduce duplication and expand access. If we decided to truly treat knowledge as a commons—arcross training, fieldwork, upskilling, reskilling, and lots of other contexts—we will shorten the time between innovation in one forest and standard practice in the next.
I’ve seen firsthand how this plays out from more than one vantage point: field operations where a good call in shifting wind matters more than any plan, executive meeting rooms where structures and incentives make or break the craft. There are also places where lived experience helps connect the dots: contracting and procurement that reward learning rather than lock‑in; process mining that reveals where permit timelines grow without improving outcomes; and governance frameworks that respect Tribal Ecological Knowledge and data sovereignty by design, not by exception.The point is that today—given both the dynamism and the scope of threats to our forests—we must adapt the ways we train and learn to those threats. In practice, that means braiding fieldcraft, datacraft, and statecraft into daily habits, and making learning visible so others can reuse it; that’s how we shorten the path from insight to action and from action to trust.
We don’t need to persuade everyone all at once
We need to build the next visible rung on the ladder of change—a handful of districts where the work looks like the future and results speak for themselves. Choose a watershed and commit to a digital twin that integrates monitoring, planning, and public engagement. Stand up a daily stewardship rhythm that blends weather, fuels, recreation intel, and community concerns. Automate one painful step and redeploy the time saved to listening and learning. And—crucially—publish the patterns and learnings so others can adapt and refine them in near real-time, rather than reinvent them time and again. This is how a profession evolves; quietly, competently, and in the open.
The forests will keep changing. Our choice is whether we change with them intentionally. The Pinchot‑era ranger would recognize what matters in this moment: practical courage, respect for place, and service that outlasts a single career. The forester of the next decade is recognizable to the ranger of a century ago: still a generalist, still accountable to place, still measured by whether people and ecosystems are safer because they showed up. The difference is that today’s generalist carries a different kit. The tools are different; the promise is the same. If this picture resonates—if you can see yourself hiring for it, training into it, or doing it—I invite you to join us in shaping it. Share your ideas, bring your skeptics and your early adopters to the same table, and let’s schedule a listening session to learn more about your needs.
Let’s write the next chapter in forestry together—so the people who follow us inherit not only healthy forests, but a craft equal to their care.
