Posted on 04/01/2025 9:18:58 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Sarah Myers has always loved the outdoors.
Growing up in Vermont and New York, the 33-year-old spent summers camping, canoeing and hiking in the Adirondacks with her family. So when it came time to pick a career, "I knew I wanted to work in land management," she tells CNBC Make It.
Myers now works as a forester where she ensures the continual growth of forests, works on timber sales and helps manage fires during fire season.
"I love the sense of history you get in the forests," she says. "I love the idea that these trees have been here for generations and they'll outlive me."
In 2024, Myers made $92,100 working in federal land management. She lives in Hot Springs, South Dakota, with her partner. Here's how she's built her nature-focused career and how she funds her life in the Midwest.
Getting into forestry was no easy feat.
Myers has a bachelor's degree in natural resource management from Cornell University and a master's in geographic information science from Penn State. While she was still at Cornell, a mentor told her that to qualify for a federal position she should expect to do "about six to eight years-worth of seasonal positions," she says.
That was exactly the path she ended up taking.
Myers held five seasonal positions, each lasting four to six months, between 2013 and 2017. She worked throughout the Northeast and northern Great Plains, as well as a winter in Alaska, earning about $15 an hour, she says. Her duties included measuring tree characteristics like species, age and height.
"Seasonal work is hard because you're not settled anywhere," she says. "You're living out of suitcases and what you can move in your car."
In January 2018, she landed her first permanent position as a forester in Colorado and moved...
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
CNBC. One of the “avoid reading at all costs, lest one’s intellect be totally dissolved” group.
Phhhhht.
Cornell and Penn State, how much is her student loan debt?
And help to screw over private landowners for $92k/yr.
LOL - not many trees in that video. She probably has nicknames for all of them....
she ensures the continual growth of forests, works on timber sales and helps manage fires during fire season
Ridiculous
And to make her job easier, they forced the shutdown of just about all the sawmills within that region.
Can her and every single one of them in that rrgion.
Turn the management of that trust over to the local counties.
Sure sounds like she is way overpaid for what she does.
What exactly has been her product, what outcome justifies such a high pay, where is the return on investment for counting trees all day and picking up a few sticks?
Sounds like an overpaid tree hugger to me. I prefer we use trees for all the uses the Creator meant them to be used for. Not for Federal employees to stand around in the forest babysitting them and hoping they don’t get the Los Angeles fire treatment when the wind blows. The U.S. Government wasn’t meant to be a jobs program. We’ve got the Job Corps for that.
I think being a forester would have been fun.
Manage fires means she picks up her radio and says, look we have smoke over there, something any 15 year old can do who loves hunting.
Probably on unemployment the other half of the year, so was making twice as much as quoted.
But still, aren’t we overpaying if we can hire people away from $15/hr jobs?
I personally had to educate a federal “forester” about messuring a deck of wood by the cord.
She had no idea how it was done and she was moving to Northern MN where the majority of logging is managed by using that method.
They get brainwashed at college, get their peice of paper saying they are foresters, and out they go. They know NOTHING.
You should have bought some land and managed it. DOGE, you have a call on line 1.
“ I knew I wanted to work in land management,“. = I knew I wanted to get in other peoples business.
One knows they have really hit the ‘Career Life Lottery’ when your dream job, happens to pay nearly $95K a year, AND you know how to do the job with proficiency and inner joy!
Mine was a different story, but I still enjoyed the adventure of my college years, and wouldn’t trade the life experience for some other choice available back then.
If you show them a road they can tell you where the water-bars and culverts go. They might still wash out, but, hey...job security.
Exactly.
Land management, as in Bureau of Land Management, where folks can call in the FBI to kill farmers.
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