Nils Christoffersen

Executive Director, Wallowa Resources

Wallowa County, Oregon

8/24/2021

After Wallowa County lost 20% of its jobs due to its sawmills shutting down in 1996, Nils Christoffersen stepped up alongside other citizens to regrow the community. Now the Executive Director of Wallowa Resources, a local environmental stewardship and economic development nonprofit, Nils believes that if people didn’t step up to steer the community in a positive direction, some other boom-and-bust investor would have capitalized on the in-need populace by staking ownership over a new economy in tech, heavy tourism, or energy development.

What Nils and others had in mind for Wallowa County’s rural wellbeing was a new economic model that balanced the vitality of the community’s economy with its environment. They established a vision for a “stewardship economy” that creates jobs while respecting ecosystems or even actively restoring them. As Nils spoke to Westies on the Goebel-Jackson Tree Farm, the students looked around at an embodiment of that vision: a vibrantly diverse landscape on which the Goebel and Jackson families thinned and sold small diameter, dead, or downed trees to both protect against high-intensity fires and secure their retirements. Wallowa Resources is a collaborative conservation group, meaning that it works with partners like the Forest Service, the Nez Perce Tribe, Wallowa Land Trust, and private landowners to meet intersectional goals while building trust and resiliency at a local level. It’s easier said than done, Nils will tell you. There is no project that wholly meets each goal, and yet the community is empowered to make many important decisions themselves.

Nils encouraged Westies to look beyond the strict division between preservation and extraction. In his work lies “the third way,” a different strategy that roots itself in the particularities of his region’s peoples and non-peoples alike.

By Fielding Schaefer