Meet our Guests: David Schmidt and Spenser Shadle

David Schmidt and Spenser Shadle

CEO, CFO Heartwood Biomass

Wallowa, OR

8/24/21

David Schmidt and Spenser Shadle are two affable entrepreneurs whose timber mill, Heartwood Biomass, is redefining the timber industry by building a web of symbiotic relationships between environmental, community, and economic interests.

In Wallowa County, fire suppression over the past century has led to unnaturally dense forests susceptible to catastrophic wildfires. Thinning of small diameter trees is widely accepted as a necessary fire mitigation practice. Unfortunately, standard timber mills are designed to process old-growth trees and thus are mechanically and financially unable to take on forest restoration projects.

By processing small diameter trees from fire suppression projects into poles, firewood, and woodchips, Heartwood Biomass creates a niche market for sustainable forest management. While showing Semester in the West around the mill, David charismatically proclaimed, “I see humans as part of the landscape.” This sentiment guides David and Spenser’s philosophy of creating economic opportunity to incentivize healthy landscapes. They hope the mill will help move the community away from an extraction-based economy and toward one that promotes the stewardship of both natural resources and local jobs.

By Josh Matz

Meet our Guests: Nils Christoffersen

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