Susan Jane Brown

The federal public lands initially were managed for custodial uses by the predecessors to the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, the federal land management agencies that collectively steward approximately one third of the nation’s lands.  Later, the national policy of federal land disposal and the rise of the Progressive movement again changed the purpose for which national forests and public lands were managed, ushering in an era of multiple-use management that persists today.  But there are cracks in the multiple-use foundation: climate change, the biodiversity crisis, wildfire risk, population growth, and burgeoning recreation pressures on federal lands increasingly indicate that “multiple-use," which promises to be all things to all people all of the time everywhere, is a concept whose time is now passed.  Given the political and environmental upheaval now facing public lands and the institutions tasked with conserving them, now is the time to learn from the past and develop new approaches to land stewardship.

Speaker Biography

Susan Jane Brown –Principal and Chief Legal Counsel, Silvix Resources

Susan Jane Brown is Principal and Chief Legal Counsel of Silvix Resources, a nonprofit environmental law firm with more than 20 years of experience in federal forest law, policy, and collaboration with a mission of using those tools to advance the conservation, restoration, and stewardship of western public lands.  Her primary focus of litigation is federal public lands forest management, but her practice includes cases involving the Endangered Species Act, National Environmental Policy Act, National Forest Management Act, Oregon and California Lands Act, and other land management statutes. Brown is a former Co-Chair of the National Advisory Committee for Implementation of the National Forest System Land Management Planning Rule and of the Northwest Forest Plan Area Advisory Committee, and has served on the Federal Advisory Committee for the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program. She teaches Forest Law and Policy to upper division law students at Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon and is heavily engaged in collaborative forest restoration in the Upper John Day Basin in eastern Oregon.