Board & Staff

Board President

Retired USFS Forest Fire Chief, NPS Prescribed Fire Manager

Home base: Eugene, OR

Mike is a co-founding Board member of FUSEE. Originally from Northwest Arkansas, he attended Carleton College in Northfield, MN, where he received an undergraduate degree in Chemistry. He received his first wildland firefighting “red card” as a volunteer in the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1984. His first land management post was as a Park Naturalist at Mt. Rainier National Park in 1987. He was on an NPS hotshot crew and started one of the first NPS Fire Use Modules, acting as its Module Leader from 1995 through 1998. Mike was the Deputy Fire Chief while working eight years at Yosemite National Park between 2001 and 2009. In 2009 Mike moved to Humboldt County and served as Deputy Fire Chief of the Six Rivers National Forest and finished his federal career in 2015 as the Interagency Fire Chief for the Inyo National Forest and Bishop BLM in Bishop, CA. Mike continues to assist with large fire management as a Fire Behavior Analyst on one of California’s incident management teams, and is a Burn Boss and Fire Planner for community-led prescribed fires in the Willamette Valley, working with nonprofit watershed restoration groups and Indigenous cultural burn practitioners. Mike is also an instructor in the Wildland Fire Certificate program at Lane Community College in Eugene, OR.

Board Secretary

Owner-Operator, Southwest Adventures

Home base: Santa Fe, NM

Tom Ribe is a co-founding Board member of FUSEE and a long-time public land and national park advocate based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has his MS in Environmental Studies from the University of Oregon and has worked in interpretation and fire for the National Park Service at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, Yosemite, and Bandelier National Monument. He is author of Inferno by Committee: A History of the Cerro Grande Fire and the Rise of New Mexico Megafires, published June 2010. He is Executive Director of Caldera Action, advocating for National Park Service management of the Valles Caldera National Preserve and works on a variety of issues related to national parks and personal health.

Board Member

Retired USFS Smokejumper

Home base: McCall, ID

Joe is a co-founding Board member and former president of FUSEE who served as a wildland firefighter for the USFS for 25 years. The majority of his career was as a smokejumper out of the McCall base. He was a Regent's Fellow at U.C. Berkeley where he earned a Ph.D. in forest entomology. He later earned a law degree from the University of Idaho Law School. Joe is a writer, cartoonist, urban farmer, outdoor adventurer, and fire philosophizer.

Board Member

Ph.D. Student

Home base: Eugene, OR

Meredith is a PhD student at the University of Oregon studying social and cultural dimensions of land management. As a white non-Native person, she thinks about the politics of allyship and settler colonialism in fire management. She is a Research Associate with the FireGeneration Collaborative, a volunteer with Willamette Valley Fire Collaboration, and a teacher seeking to engage students in enacting a more socially and ecologically just world. She has a B.S. in Forestry from UC Berkeley and an M.S. in Forest Ecosystems and Society from Oregon State University. Before graduate school, she was a Forestry Aide for CAL FIRE and an Environmental Educator with the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History. During her graduate studies, she has worked on applied social science research in collaboration with the InterTribal Timber Council, the Ecosystem Workforce Program, and the Watershed Research and Training Center.

Board Member

Natural Resources Director, Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians

Home base: Logsden, OR

Angela is a Siletz Tribal member from the coastal rainforests of Oregon. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Oregon State University before moving to Idaho to work as a wildlife biologist with the US Forest Service. She later acted as director of the Stillinger Herbarium at the University of Idaho for three years during her graduate program. She joined the Nez Perce Tribe as a project biologist while finishing her PhD, and for many years, worked to safeguard treaty rights, conserve old growth forests, restore degraded ecosystems, and provide wise stewardship of the lifesources of importance to the Nimiipuu.  She has now returned to her homeland as the Natural Resources Director for the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians.  She hopes to grow a vibrant fire program there that combines the best of cultural stewardship with modern wildland fire science.  Angela has had a long engagement with federal land management policy including two appointments to federal advisory committees with the US Forest Service.

Board Member

Master’s Student

Home base: Eugene, OR

Eve is a development professional with deep roots in the Lane County nonprofit sector. She earned her B.S. in Planning, Public Policy, and Management from the University of Oregon and has since worked alongside community organizations in nonprofit development, volunteer engagement, and donor relations, with a focus on forging philanthropic partnerships that strengthen communities. She has hands-on experience recruiting volunteers and coordinating restoration efforts in rural communities affected by wildfires. Living in communities where fire management is a hot topic inspired her commitment to advancing modern fire management and Indigenous fire stewardship. Eve is currently pursuing her Master’s in Nonprofit Management and remains dedicated to education and advocacy that foster ecosystem resilience and mitigate climate change impacts. When she isn't working in the community, she spends her time backpacking in the Cascades, playing music with friends, and exploring her creativity through art.