Cameron Crump is currently the Forest Resources Division Manager at the Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR) where she leads the Silviculture, Informatics, and Habitat Conservation Plan sections for 2.1 million acres of forested state trust lands. She graduated from the University of Washington’s College of Forest Resources with a BS in Forest Management and from the Department of Asian Languages and Literature with a BA in Chinese Language and Literature in 1997. After working at Simpson Plywood as a data analyst and at UW’s Center for International Business Education and Research as a program assistant, she decided to return to study and completed her MS in Forest Products & Marketing at the UW’s Center for International Trade in Forest Products (CINTRAFOR) in 2001, where she researched the market opportunities for North American non-structural softwood products in China.

Her road from UW to DNR has been a circuitous one and has included both private and public sector experience, including with the Washington State Legislature. Her experience has been varied with roles outside of natural resources in human resources and information technology.

Directly after completing her Master’s, Cameron worked for Fletcher Challenge Forests (later renamed Tenon), a vertically integrated New Zealand forestry, timber, wood products manufacturing, and distribution company. She held various positions in data and supply chain analytics, forecasting and modeling, and consumer marketing and merchandising at their New Zealand headquarters in Auckland and US headquarters in Baltimore, MD. After multiple divestitures and reorganizations, the company 10 years later was only one manufacturing facility in New Zealand. It was time to find another opportunity and with Cameron’s children now reaching school age, she and her husband wanted to be closer to family on the west coast.

Cameron joined the Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA) in the International Marketing Program where she organized trade missions and promoted Washington agricultural products in international markets. She then led the Fruit and Vegetable Inspection Program, working closely with USDA and foreign delegations to develop and operationalize inspection protocols to minimize the risk of exporting invasive pests and keep international markets open.

After five years with WSDA, Cameron had a unique opportunity to work at the Department of Enterprise Services as the state’s Chief Recruitment Officer working to develop the state’s employee value proposition to attract qualified candidates to state work. The program was defunded after just nine months there, and she pivoted to another unique opportunity as Deputy Director of LEG-TECH, the legislative branch agency that provides IT support to the Washington State Legislature. In this role, she learned about custom software application development and the infrastructure required to support the technology solutions which facilitate an agency’s mission. She also got a behind-the-scenes perspective on the legislative process and how decision makers develop policy.

While these experiences outside of natural resources were fascinating, Cameron missed forestry and knew that she belonged there. She left the Legislature after six years and has been in the Forest Resources Division Manager role at DNR since 2023. She enjoys bringing together all of her past work experience and applying them to the challenges of balancing economic, ecological, and social objectives in land management; creating and supporting custom IT systems to support teams in the field; conducting implementation and validation research; and managing operations at the state nursery, seed plant, and seed orchards.

Cameron met her husband, Seth, during her Master’s studies 25 years ago. Seth is a middle school coach and they often discuss the parallels between coaching and management. They have two daughters – Trott is a freshman at The Evergreen State College and Pippin is a sophomore at Capital High School in Olympia. In her free time, Cameron enjoys rowing and simply relaxing with her family.

Q&A with Cameron Crump

SEFS had the opportunity to chat with Cameron about her experience and discuss some of the ways soon-to-be graduates can use the skills they’ve honed at SEFS to launch a career.

Students graduating this year from environmental/sustainability fields may be feeling a little unsure of the best path forward. What advice or reassurance can you offer?

CC: Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr once wrote, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” The current tension between climate change and natural resource management mirrors tension 30 years ago between the Northern Spotted Owl and logging communities and tension over 100 years ago between industrialization and depletion of natural resources. The rhetoric is particularly heightened at this moment in time, but it is not new. There are opportunities and careers across the public and private sector for professionals in the environmental and sustainability fields. I would encourage everyone who sees the current situation as an attack on their chosen field or values to reframe it as a challenge to balance multiple objectives.

Environmental and ecological objectives are important. Social and cultural objectives are important. Economic objectives are important. If you find yourself dismissing any one of the three, then you are limiting yourself intellectually and professionally. There are a multitude of opportunities for those willing to doggedly seek solutions which balance all three.

As the conversation becomes more polarized, it is increasingly important to take a deep breath and a step back and ground yourself in the scientific process you have learned during your studies. Critically interpret the data you have and don’t assume a conclusion or hope for a result. Find solutions based on fact and not emotion. There are organizations, public and private, who value fact-based decision making. Find them and your work will be meaningful.

It is also important to be willing to work in a field that you may not have anticipated working in. With so much uncertainty in traditional natural resources career paths at the moment, be willing to look outside of them and develop skills that you can take back to a natural resources role in the future.

How have you seen the job opportunities in forest sciences/forestry fields change and adapt over the years? Have you been surprised by any adaptations in your field?

CC: When I was an undergraduate, I had a forest management/engineering internship with Rayonier Timberlands where I conducted field work and assessed the potential for applying GPS to land management. Access to GPS satellites was still heavily limited by the military. To utilize GPS in the field, you had to carry around a giant backpack and long antenna to get any kind of reading. If you were on a north facing slope, forget it … all of the satellites orbited the equator, and you would get no signal at all. Signals were questionable under a closed canopy. Resulting GIS mapping of the data you collected was not great. This has been one of the biggest changes that I have seen – the use of GPS and GIS in land management. Now, you can get accurate coordinates under forest canopy with a mobile phone/tablet in all but the most remote locations. You can mark the center of an inventory or research plot with a GPS coordinate rather than a 10-penny nail.

Additionally, the use of remote sensed data such as aerial imagery, Lidar, and drone imagery has changed how we monitor the land and measure changes over time. Forestry and land management used to be for people who didn’t like technology, now it is a basic job requirement.

Can you point to any specific experiences that you had at SEFS that helped you early on in your career? Maybe some type of preparation that you hadn’t expected to be so instrumental?

CC: Professor Barney Dowdle taught a class about the economics of conservation. There were major forest fires in Washington when I attended my first day of class with him. The class came to order and Prof. Dowdle stood in front of the expectant students and boomed, “TREES…if you cut ‘em, they can’t burn…” After a moment of shocked silence, the class erupted into an argument with him over whether all forests should be harvested before they burned in catastrophic wildfire.

Throughout the ensuing weeks he would make the most provocative statements that dared the class to challenge him. In answer to investing in alternative fueled vehicles, he would say, “Fossil fuels are an unlimited natural resource.” In answer to questions about the value of sustainability in resource management, he would say, “Why should I care about my grandchildren? They don’t care about me.” Prof. Dowdle was an economic purist and expressed everything in black-and-white economic terms. There was no winning an argument with him. I learned a lot from him about economics (a brutal science), but more so, I learned to listen to someone that I found abrasive and knew was trying to garner an emotional reaction. I learned to listen for the root concept in the shock value and to seek to understand that concept especially when faced with a seemingly ridiculous position. This skill has been critical in every position I have held.

You have a mix of private and public sector experience. How have these industries shaped your experience and honed your skills? What are the pros of the private sector? Pros of the public sector?

CC: My experiences in both the private and public sectors have given me perspective and a balanced view of the different missions and motivations and constraints of public and private organizations. While those missions and motivations may be different, they all have at least one common goal in natural resource management – sustainability. Private companies may have an economic objective, but they also want to be operating in 100 years, requiring sustainability. Public agencies have core missions to manage natural resources for the benefit of current and future generations, requiring sustainability. The conflict arises around what sustainability looks like and how to implement it – however, if we can always ground the conversation in the common goal of sustainability, we can find balance in multiple objectives.

The private sector can be more flexible and nimbler in its operations – easily pivoting where it makes investments and in implementing new processes. This also means that they can be early adopters of innovative technology and have the latest equipment.

The public sector tends to be more rigid in its processes and documentation requirements – public bureaucracy is all about public accountability. However, public sector agencies typically have strong missions and enabling legislation that can give real clarity to the work that you are doing.