Michael Beasley, B.A.

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.