Our Dedicated Team of Environmental Advocates
Work to Conserve Washington State's Legacy Forests
for Generations to Come.
Brel Froebe
Senior Strategic Advisor
Brel Froebe’s involvement with CRF started in 2021 in a successful effort to cancel the “Upper Rutsatz” timber sale above the Middle Fork Nooksack river, and since then has been working with communities across Western WA to build the legacy forest movement.
They received an MA in Urban Education and Social Justice at the University Of San Francisco, and have spent the past decade facilitating youth-led action through restorative justice, critical pedagogy, art, and outdoor education. Brel lives in the occupied Lummi and Nooksack territory of Whatcom County, and is passionate about doing what they can to protect the surrounding forests and watersheds through advocating for statewide ecological forest management.
Daniel Harm
Communications Director
As one of the founding Board Members, Daniel helped launch CRF in late 2021. Since then, Daniel has been strategically involved in the Legacy Forest movement - participating, learning, organizing, educating, and growing the movement’s momentum. As the new communications director, Daniel’s goal is to create educational action campaigns that help WA State move towards improved older forest policies and ecological forest management at a watershed and landscape scale. His favorite saying is, “Old Growth is the Future!!”
With thirty years of experience climbing and exploring remote hard to access backcountry, Daniel is deeply connected with the ecosystem landscapes of the Pacific Northwest. Over the last years he’s been actively involved in the Legacy Forest movement, Daniel has helped create influential media campaigns, including a well-received film he spearheaded on ecological forestry, starring legendary forester, the grandfather of Old Growth, Dr. Jerry “Forest” Franklin. If you haven’t seen this film, it is worth a watch!
Our Board of Directors
Mary Jean Ryan
Board Chair
Mary Jean Ryan is former Chair of the Washington State Board of Education, and a former City of Seattle executive. She also served as a Senior Non-Resident Fellow with the Brookings Institution. She is a skilled public policy professional, experienced fundraiser and nonprofit executive. In recent years, she has been working in cooperation with the Northwest Watershed Institute to advocate for permanent protection of legacy forests surrounding Dabob Bay in Jefferson County where she resides.
She is also a Founding Board Member of the newly created non-profit, Stewards of Washington State Lands. She is a passionate conservationist and committed to working to change the policies that govern the management of Washington State forestlands. She is a graduate of Georgetown University and holds an MPA from the University of Southern California. In addition to her board duties, Mary Jean helps the CRF team with fundraising, financial management and legislative strategy.
Mark Boyar
Board Member
Mark Boyar is a graduate of Stanford University and a former product manager for a medical software company. Mark formerly served on the boards of the Cascade Land Conservancy, the Washington Trails Association, the King County Conservation Futures Advisory Committee, and has been a Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust board member since 1995. Mark is an advocate for conservation in the Snoqualmie Valley and Central Cascades and has worked on many public land acquisitions, including the 2014 Alpine Lakes Wilderness expansion and the ongoing restoration of the Middle Fork Snoqualmie Valley.
Mark helped organize the Upper Snoqualmie Cooperative Weed Management Area and King County citizen science "Weed Watchers" program and is motivated by the threat that invasive weeds pose to habitats worldwide. In addition to his board duties, Mark helps the CRF team with GIS mapping and a variety of other analytic investigations.
Eirik Steinhoff
Board Member
Eirik Steinhoff has a PhD in English from the University of Chicago, and teaches or co-teaches critical and creative reading and writing (among other things) at The Evergreen State College in Olympia and in prisons in WA and NY. He was editor of the Chicago Review from 2000 to 2005 and co-editor of Black Box: A Record of the Catastrophe (2015). His essays have appeared in Arcade, Counter-Signals, Floor, and Postmedieval.
In 2009, his translations from Petrarch’s Rime Sparse appeared as Fourteen Sonnets (Albion Books), and in 2018 a collection of pamphlets he circulated in the vicinity of the Oakland Commune was published as A Fiery Flying Roule (Publication Studio/Station Hill). Most of his teaching and research in recent years has revolved around the question, “What needs to be the case for things to be otherwise?”
