Episode
Mike Schaedel - Restoring Balance to Fire-Adapted Landscapes
- Published
- Nov 28, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 4914
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Summary
Mike Schaedel is the Western Montana Forest Restoration Director for The Nature Conservancy, where he leads some of the most ambitious and collaborative forest restoration work happening anywhere in the West. Based in Missoula, Mike works at the intersection of science, community partnerships, and land stewardship—helping restore fire-adapted forests, reduce wildfire risk, and improve the health and resilience of landscapes across the region. Mike's career path is super interesting and anything but traditional. He grew up in Portland, fell in love with the mountains through rock climbing, and eventually landed in Missoula, where the combination of wild landscapes and a rich literary community drew him in. After earning an undergraduate degree in creative writing, he found his way into forestry and fire ecology through conservation corps work, hands-on restoration experience, and a graduate program focused on forest dynamics and fire. In this conversation, Mike offers a clear overview of how Western Montana's forests came to look the way they do today—shaped by millennia of tribal burning, transformed by railroad-era land grants and industrial logging, and altered further by a century of fire suppression. He explains why effective restoration now depends on combining mechanical thinning with prescribed fire and on working across ownership boundaries with partners ranging from local communities to tribes and federal agencies. We also discuss some of the innovative collaborative efforts underway in the region, as well as a memorable story of a prescribed burn that came together through quick problem-solving and deep trust. This is a rich, informative, and hopeful conversation about what it takes to restore forests at scale—and why the future of these landscapes depends on…