What Can You Do With a Forestry Degree?

Video Transcript

Host Question:
What does someone in the field of environmental management do? What are some different types of paths, those different jobs within that broad field?

Guest Answer:
It does depend on what you focus on within this nature. If you’re focused on the hard sciences, bio ecology, forest ecology, you’ll definitely be doing work more on research of animal species, plant species, and you’ll probably be helping to maintain a forest or park or dealing with even invasive species in general to make sure everything stays healthy, if you like, decide to not focus on the hard sciences and go a different route like psychology, you could actually be working on helping scientists be able to communicate their work better to the public. That’s an issue. So you can actually help with human understanding of environmental science.

Guest Answer:
Forestry management, they manage public and private forested lands for economic, recreational and conservation purposes. So you might be inventorying the type, the amount and the location of the standing timber might have praised the timber as worth, negotiate the purpose in the purchase and draw a contract of procurement. A couple of different jobs might be working with the city as a forestry technician. You might be a natural resource specialist or an instructor. You could be a forest economist or a forest carbon modeling manager. There’s lots of options and opportunities out there.

Guest Answer:
There’s kind of a divide between either like government, so either state or federal and then the private industry. A lot of things you can do with force. You do. You can do like timber management. So if you want to work for a company, could be like an actual logger or you can be a Forester where you’re basically assessing the forests for timber sale. So we call that timber cruising where you’re just looking for, you know, assessing what could be sold to companies that make things out of wood. And there’s also consulting forestry. So you can consult for an A private agency or a private timber company and give them your insight onto their logging and their selling practices. And obviously, you work for the government. There is the whole fire management side of things. So you can be on the ground and kind of in the actual firefighting side. And there’s also fire behavior analysts. So people that will go to places after there’s been fire and to see how the landscape has been altered, stuff like that. I mean, you can go into environmental biology. So developing environmental conservation and wildlife management strategies for either forests or national parks, especially those that receive really high traffic. And you can be like a conservation or an easement specialist, basically working with public and/or private landowners for restoration efforts. You can do that anywhere. Basically, forests, wetlands, deserts also work in the more statistical side. So if you have a geographic information systems background, you can develop maps or analyze statistics and be more on the coordinating side. And there’s so much more I could go into, but those are some of the broad ones that I personally know, people that do and have looked into myself.

Guest Answer:
So I work in the compliance room. I’m helping a lot of industrial facilities, clean Water Act requirements, clean Air Act requirements, hazards requirements, requirements, a lot of laws and regulations. It’s kind of like me. I’m part engineer, part paralegal, part beach or part environmental guy. It’s a weird, weird industry. There’s also remediation. So where you go in to an area, you work for a contractor, drill company, whatever, and they’re like, hey, we actually it was gas station. We got to clean up this dry cleaner. You go in, you travel the road, go to every little town in the area, you drill holes, you do water tests, you pull samples in, you go in, maybe do some digging, pull all that nasty stuff out of the ground or your immediate that area that make it better.

Guest Answer:
You could end up, if we’re talking specifically about forestry, working either for a government agency like the forest service, like National Park service, fish and wildlife, the Bureau of Indian affairs, managing public lands, public forests. You could work for a private company, which they could be doing anything from managing tree farms, which have a very prescribed set goal of producing as much timber as sustainably as for as many years as possible. Or you could work in consulting where you might be working with small or medium sized landowners to help them improve the health of their course.

Guest Answer:
I had an internship at college that my boss was an environmental manager for the plant that I was working at and he was in charge of overseeing that. Every employee was following the guidelines that were from the federal government and the state government basically just ensuring that everything was going smoothly. But I also had a professor that was an environmental economist and he was upper manager at a company before became a professor. And his job was doing research with environmental economics with this company to look up grants that they were available to cut down on and et cetera. So it just really there’s a whole lot of different jobs that are available and environmental management. But those are just two that I know of.