Name
Dorian Fougères
Job Title
California Program Manager
What did you do prior to working at NFF?
I mediated public policy disputes over water, forest, agricultural, and wetland resources throughout California, including serving 3 years as the Director for the Center for Collaborative Policy’s Southern California Office.
What inspired you to work for our National Forests?
I spent several years in my prior job working with numerous forests in (USFS) Region 5, pioneering and learning – through a lot of mistakes and disputes – about planning and implementing projects “at the landscape scale”. Working for NFF lets me continue this work in a way that let’s me focus my attention on a single major effort, and play the critical role of program manager therein.
What sorts of things will you be working on at the NFF?
My primary responsibility is managing and mediating the new Lake Tahoe West Restoration Partnership, a massive inter-agency, science team, and stakeholder effort to restore 80,000 acres in the western Lake Tahoe Basin. I will also be supporting a small number of other NFF endeavors in California, like the nascent Tahoe-Sierra Regional Resilience Initiative. For NFF as a whole, I will be working with two colleagues (Vance Russell and Rebecca Davidson) to examine how we are supporting the Forest Service to address climate change throughout the National Forest system, and assess how we might strengthen our practice.
What is your favorite National Forest memory?
There are so many. Perhaps the most recent standout memory occurred two years ago when my brother, who has two little children at home, flew out and met me at Sierra National Forest for five days of backpacking in the Dinkey Lakes Wilderness, to belatedly celebrate his 40th birthday. We hadn’t gone backpacking together in several years, and the swimming in alpine lakes, non-stop birding, and granite peak-bagging was a true delight.
What National Forest would you like to visit?
I’d love to get up to the Modoc. I’d say that I’ve been all over California, though only skirted this remote northeastern corner of the state.
