Introducing Lowell Wyse, PhD: TTF’s New Executive Director
Some good stories start in the middle.
This one starts on a rainy day in February 2019, when I first met Sarah Low in a Tacoma coffee shop. Sarah had recently created the Tacoma Tree Foundation, and I was dying to know more.
I was back in Tacoma on my summer vacation, which only makes sense if you know that I was living in the Southern Hemisphere at the time! While officially I was occupied with teaching writing and literature for a Florida community college in Lima, Peru, I was still spending a lot of time thinking about Tacoma, the meaning of place, and the future of the urban forest.
In 2016, I had created a group called Tacoma Needs Trees, a grassroots effort to call attention to what I described as Tacoma’s urban forest crisis. After working on the City of Tacoma’s Environmental Action Plan and serving on the Sustainable Tacoma Commission, I had become convinced that the biggest need I could tackle in the local community was better urban forest policy that would make Tacoma a more beautiful and sustainable place. When I announced a launch party and a series of community meetings for a local tree group, so many people showed up to get involved. It was official: people knew that Tacoma needed trees!
Flash forward to late 2020: After over three years in Peru, I returned to Tacoma and reconnected with Sarah. There was so much happening with Tacoma Tree Foundation—from tree planting events and Spanish language radio programs with VT Radio Universal, to tree giveaways and webinars on topics like environmental justice and the amazing madrone tree! And just as important, there was funding from partners and donors who were recognizing the importance of the foundation’s mission and the strength of its strategic plan. It was all so exciting that I had to get involved! I became a board member last year and transitioned to a supporting staff role several months ago.
Now, as Sarah announced in the last newsletter, she and the Board of Directors have entrusted me to lead the next phase of Tacoma Tree Foundation’s development. This comes as the result of a long progression—not only in my personal journey from academia to urban forest policy and nonprofit leadership, but also in the conversations we as staff and board members have been having about how to keep this momentum going.
It has been amazing to connect with so many of you in the past few months! And you’ll be hearing more from me in the weeks ahead, as I share our vision for a healthier and more equitable urban forest. I am so excited about this new phase and so grateful to be involved. Thank you for being part of our community.
Lowell
An English professor turned urban forest advocate, Lowell Wyse, Ph.D., is the executive director of the Tacoma Tree Foundation. For over a decade, he taught college writing, literature, and environmental humanities, focusing on the many ways that social and environmental issues overlap. His scholarship resulted in the book Ecospatiality: A Place-Based Approach to American Literature, published in 2021. In 2016, he founded a community group called Tacoma Needs Trees, to call attention to the urban forest crisis in Tacoma, where tree coverage is the lowest of any city in Western Washington. Lowell’s love of place is informed by his family farm in Michigan, the Kansas plains, the Colorado mountains, the Hopi high desert, Chicago’s Rogers Park, and the Pacific coast of Lima, Peru. He now lives in downtown Tacoma.
