Blue Ridge Country July/August 2021 - 48

FOREST SERVICE CAREER COMES FULL CIRCLE
Long Way Home to the Forest
JaSal Morris wants to protect the Cherokee National Forest-and inspire minority youth to do the same.
By NANCY HENDERSON
I
n Puerto Rico in the early 1990s,
just as the area was regenerating
from the devastation of Hurricane
Hugo, JaSal Morris spent his days
atop a stunningly beautiful mountain
in the only rainforest managed
by the USDA Forest Service.
" You could find yourself in the
clouds, " says Morris, 57, now forest supervisor
for the Cherokee National Forest
in Cleveland, Tennessee, where he
lives with his wife, Sandra. " You could
feel the mist of the clouds when you got
up into higher elevations. It's one of the
places I treasure having the opportunity
to work. "
From coastal South Carolina to the
peaks of the Blue Ridge and the western
grasslands, Morris treasures each step of
his 33-year career with the Forest Service
and the people he's met along the way.
One of the agency's first Black administrators,
he has, through hard work and
a willingness to take on new challenges,
become a role model for minority youth
seeking to follow in his footsteps.
As a boy, Morris often played in the
wooded areas behind his family's rural
home in Martinsville, Virginia. But it
never crossed his mind to pursue a degree
in wildlife or forestry; instead, he
built on his various retail jobs and majored
in business administration at the
historically Black Saint Paul's College in
Lawrenceville, Virginia.
He joined the Forest Service in 1988,
as a summer student in the budget department
at George Washington National
Forest. A year later, he was hired
fulltime to procure contracts, manage
48 BLUERIDGECOUNTRY.COM
information technology and handle human
resources issues. The latter suited
him especially well; he was, after all, a
people person.
" In that side of the career, you start
to see it all and you learn to deal with
people as they are, with no preconceived
notions. You get them as they come, "
Morris says. " It was an interesting type
of position. You never know what you're
going to get the next day. "
Back then, there were few Black forest
supervisors. " At least
I didn't see
them, " he says. " Over the years, that has
changed. Our numbers have greatly improved
as far as folks in leadership, but
we always continue to strive for more. "
Morris soon left Virginia to work as a
human resources specialist for the Forest
Service in Mississippi, Puerto Rico,
Alabama and Washington, D.C., then
as an equal employment specialist in Atlanta
before heading to South Carolina
in 2001. For eight years, he served as administrative
officer in the Francis Marion
and Sumter national forests, where,
among other things, he worked on civil
rights issues, from diversity training and
Equal Employment Opportunity issues
to outreach in low-income communities.
Although most of his tasks kept him
indoors, he made a point to get outside
and mingle with his boots-on-theground
colleagues, marking timber and
measuring fish in the streams. " I wanted
to understand, when I was going out and
recruiting for the positions, what that
meant other than just seeing some words
on the paper. "
For 12 years
starting in the early
1990s, Morris garnered a different type of
firsthand experience with the Southern
Region's Type 1 Incident Management
Team, handling logistics for professionals
battling wildfires and assisting FEMA
after hurricanes. Fire season kept him
busy making sure firefighters in western
and southern states had the supplies
they needed, from water hoses and other
equipment to showers and meals.
After a one-year detour to the Southern
Research Station in Asheville, North Carolina,
in 2010 Morris became second in
command at the Chattahoochee-Oconee
National Forest. As deputy forest supervisor,
he not only dealt with budgets and
human resources, but with recreational
concerns and prescribed burning in the
pine-forested north Georgia mountains
and the central part of the state.
After nearly 25 years with the Forest
Service, Morris finally reached the top
of the management chain in 2012 when

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Blue Ridge Country July/August 2021

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