It was supposed to be the inaugural year of the Young Women’s Wildland Fire Career Camp. Billed as a free, multi-day, hands-on learning experience for women and non-binary people between 16 and 20 years old, the camp was scheduled to take place in Redmond over spring break next month. The event was a joint effort between the nonprofit Discover Your Forest — a stewardship partner of the Deschutes and Ochoco National Forests and Crooked River National Grassland — and the U.S. Forest Service.
“This camp offers a fantastic opportunity for young women to explore the diverse career paths available in wildland fire,” Emily Curtis, wildland fire education coordinator at Discover Your Forest, stated in a press release from December. “We’re committed to fostering diversity and inclusion within the fire service, and this program is a crucial step in empowering the next generation of female firefighters.”
Now, that “crucial step” is canceled for this year, and the future of such programs remains uncertain. It’s another fallout from President Donald Trump’s day-one executive order blitz, which included a directive mandating that federal agencies eliminate DEI offices and positions, as well as abandoning “equity-related” projects. In addition to canceling the March event, Curtis said Discover Your Forest’s other work helping to manage thousands of Forest Service volunteers in Central Oregon, running interpretive programs for youth education like field trips at Lava Lands and providing natural resource internships is in danger of being canceled, too.
“As a nonprofit partner of the USDA Forest Service [U.S. Forest Service] for 29 years, Discover Your Forest operates all our programs free of charge, which is made possible by grants, donations, memberships and federal funding through agreements,” Curtis wrote in a statement to the Source Weekly. “Since the current administration came to power, money allocated through these agreements has not been paid out and many agreements have been put on administrative pause to be reviewed at the national level. As a result, we’re facing difficult decisions on staffing, operations and programs.”
Hailey Windsor, a 26-year-old who participated in a similar woman-oriented wildland firefighting training in Vale, Oregon, last October, said that canceling training like the Young Women’s Wildland Fire Career Camp is not just a hit to women — it’s also a hit to wildland firefighters broadly and the nation’s ability to combat the growing wildfire crisis.
“It strikes me as ridiculous in a time where there’s a known wildland firefighter shortage, and there’s been increasing coverage of the ways in which it’s really hard on people to be a wildland firefighter in a long-term career sense, it’s ridiculous to do anything that would potentially keep someone who’s interested and cares about this from getting to do it,” Windsor said.
According to the Forest Service, approximately 13% of wildland firefighters are female— a growing percentage, but still small compared to men. Meanwhile, the need for a ready-trained workforce of firefighters grows each year as the West sees increasing fire activity during the summer months, and a regional push for more intensive preventative forest treatments ahead of those dry, hot days.
Last year in Oregon, nearly 2 million acres burned across the state, a historic amount. And, experts predict that the frequency, intensity and number of conflagrations will continue to increase as the climate continues to warm and dry.
Windsor said that despite her training and certification, she’s not considering a job in wildland firefighting anymore, though she is open to finding volunteer work. The field — and her place as a woman in it — is too uncertain.
“If I have this [wildland woman training camp] on my resume, does that make me a DEI hire?” she said. “Does just being a woman make me a DEI hire? I never would have considered myself a DEI hire if I’d gotten a job this time last year. That wouldn’t have crossed my mind, but now it definitely does.”
As of Friday, Feb. 21, a lawsuit challenging the legality of Trump’s executive order was granted a preliminary injunction by U.S. District Judge Adam B. Abelson to bar portions of the order related to canceling federal contracts with DEI components and requiring government contractors to certify they do not engage in DEI practices that violate anti-discrimination laws. It’s not clear how that injunction, or an eventual ruling in the case, would impact programs like the ones Discover Your Forest operates.
This article appears in The Source Weekly February 20, 2025.
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This sucks.
This Spring and Summer is going to be very interesting. 192 million acres went up in flames in Oregon last Summer. Oregon received a bailout in funding to fight all those fires from the Feds. Say goodbye to your kicker, forever. We are going to left with contractors and the States around us for help with fighting fires. Enjoy your fresh air while it lasts. This State is going to continue to burn to the ground and Donald and Elon will watch it burn.