Forest Chief Started Out as a City Dweller

Gloria Brown, the new head of the Los Padres National Forest, is accustomed to defying expectations.

Just ask the Oregon sheriff who flagged her down years ago as she was driving through a tiny town. No, she told him, I’m not lost: I’m the new acting district ranger for the Silver Lake District of the Fremont National Forest.

“I tell you no lie: His jaw dropped. He was stunned. It must have been 40 seconds before he could recover and give me a feeble, sweaty-palm handshake,” she recalled.

The two later became good friends.

After 30 years in the U.S. Forest Service, Brown says she takes such reactions in stride. After all, black women from the city generally don’t sign on with Smokey Bear and those who do rarely attain a position of authority.

Brown, 53, is an exception. Last week, she took over as forest supervisor of the sprawling Los Padres, a swath of coastal California that stretches 220 miles and covers nearly 15% of the land in five of the six counties it touches.

The move takes her from Oregon’s Siuslaw National Forest, a breathtakingly verdant 1,000-square-mile area at the epicenter of the conflict between environmental activists and the timber industry. Both sides credit her for bringing them together -- if not as the best of friends, then at least as enemies willing to compromise.

In the Los Padres, she faces battles of a different kind. Forest officials, headquartered in Goleta, are under pressure from companies that want to drill for oil and gas, from protesters of the Adventure Pass entry fees and from the more than 1.5 million visitors a year who want to hike, bike, hunt, party, picnic, roar down off-road trails and generally love the land to death.

“But the natural system is so much more resilient than we ever give it credit for,” said Brown, who ran a Forest Service interpretive center amid the volcanic devastation of Mt. St. Helens. “The people issues will be the ones that require more savvy.”

Brown has grappled with her share of people issues.

When her husband was killed in 1981 by a drunk driver, she was left with three children and a pile of bills.

“You could have opened up the ground beside him and laid me in there and I would have been fine,” she said. “But my children were 9, 11 and 12. I don’t know how I did it, but I had to get into survival mode. There was no choice.”

Brown grew up in Washington, D.C. Married at 18 and widowed at 30, she had been taking night journalism classes at the University of Maryland, hoping to become a TV reporter. To get herself through school, she was churning out routine, “only-you-can-prevent-forest-fires” news releases for the Forest Service.

Brown lost the house and the car -- but she kept a tight grip on the job that one day might offer her family hope.

Over the next two decades, she poured herself into work. She moved her family seven times and took a sabbatical to study forestry at Oregon State University. She did a stint with the Bureau of Land Management, learned the ins-and-outs of oil-and-gas leasing and took increasingly responsible jobs at forests in the Northwest.

In 1999, she was named supervisor of the Siuslaw National Forest, becoming the first African American woman to hold such a post in the agency’s 94-year history.

Minorities have not been major players in the Forest Service. About 4% of the agency’s employees, including four of 115 forest supervisors, are African American. A 1999 class-action lawsuit accuses the Forest Service of discriminating against black employees to maintain a “white frontier image.” It has yet to be settled.

“For many who brought the suit, the issue is very real,” Brown said. “But if I’d called foul when I didn’t get the first ranger job I applied for and then waited for the process to work, I could be another decade behind. My action isn’t to join a group and file suit; my action is to find a way around the obstacles in my path.”

The Siuslaw, a rain forest full of trout streams and environmental conflict, was prime territory for finding another way.

Once one of the most intensively logged forests in the Northwest, it was the focus of epic battles over the spotted owl and clear-cutting. Logging restrictions imposed during the Clinton administration hit the forest hard.

Seeking middle ground, she sought support from people who had been at each other’s throats for years: forest activists and timber executives.

The Siuslaw now exceeds the logging production that had been set for it under a federal management plan.

In the Los Padres, officials have been taken to task for tolerating sexual harassment, for allegedly destroying Chumash relics and cracking down on the employees who complained, for shutting down campgrounds and bringing up the prospect of oil and gas drilling. Finding a middle ground will test the skills Brown said she developed in her early training as a journalist.

“It’ll take some extreme listening,” she said.