Ara Erickson - Vice-President, Corporate Sustainability at Weyerhaeuser

Ara Erickson is Vice President of Corporate Sustainability at Weyerhaeuser, where she is accountable for the development and implementation of the company’s comprehensive sustainability strategy, including three areas where the company is in a unique position to participate: working forests contribution to climate change solutions, the role of sustainable products in ensuring housing for everyone, and support for thriving rural communities. She serves as a board member for American Forests, the oldest national nonprofit conservation organization in the United States, is a founding steering committee member for the Women’s Forest Congress, and uses her voice to be an advocate for sustainable, working forests.

Ara is an authentic, compassionate, and driven leader, best known for building partnerships through collaboration, transparency and honest communication. Prior to Weyerhaeuser, she served as Director of the Green City Partnerships program with a regional conservation organization, Forterra, and as a forest-based researcher, environmental consultant and educator. She received her M.S. in Forest Resources from the University of Washington and her B.S. in Resource Management from the University of California, Berkeley.

Ara Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss:

• The development of Weyerhaeuser’s sustainability strategy
• How timber harvesting is done sustainability 
• Weyerhaeuser’s forest carbon credit principles 
• Plans for achieving emissions reductions goals by 2030
• Advice and recommendations for sustainability professionals

Ara’s Final Five Questions Responses:

What is one piece of advice you would give to other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? 

I think all of us in sustainability are here because we're passionate about sustainability, but primarily there's also something that drove us here. For me, I'm passionate about forestry and forest and these products that make our lives so much better. We get warm, cozy homes to live in, we hope, and I've been able to channel my passion for sustainability and forestry at the same time. So I always recommend finding the thing that you get excited about and want to be part of, whether that's outdoor recreation or literature, whatever it might be, and then channel sustainability through that passion. 

What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? 

I love that sustainability is finding its way into all the nooks and crannies inside companies, whether that's company level strategy or employee volunteering programs or community involvement. That it is so broad and that can make it really complex, but I just love that I'm seeing sustainability showing up in so many levels of companies now, and so many very important decision making levers and places where employees feel really connected to it and communities are directly impacted. To me, that feels like sustainability has reached the point where people are recognizing how important it is to help drive strategy and help drive outcomes for both their own employees and and their communities. 

What is one book you'd recommend sustainability leaders read? 

I have one sitting on my desk right now that I just started to read. I'm about a quarter of the way through it and it's been wonderful so far. It's called Chief Sustainability Officers at Work: How CSOs Build Successful Sustainability and ESG Strategies and by Chrissa Pagitsas. It's a great compilation of an incredible amount of leadership from all different types of companies on how they've been able to drive these strategies in their companies. 

What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? 

I have a set of things that I rely on a lot. One of them is just the basic Strunk and White old book which has been around for a long time. But as sustainability professionals we really need to know how to write compelling pieces that are clear, so I always have that in my toolkit. I also think it's really important for us sustainability professionals to be able to take care of ourselves and make certain that we still have the energy to keep doing our work well, whatever that means for our daily practices of self care. I personally do a lot of meditation and journaling in the morning and tea drinking in order to really help settle me into a space where I can be really productive and impactful when I show up to my job.

Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the work being done at Weyerhaeuser? 

We have a full website at www.weyerhaeuser.com. At www.weyerhaeuser.com/sustainability we have tons of information and resources, great examples that we talked about today like the principles documents and our carbon record. There's some fun videos on there as well. Then there's a ton of information about forestry in general that's put out by some organizations like the National Alliance of Forest Owners, and there's a great tool that the American Wood Council has created that's about fiber sourcing and where your wood comes from. You can actually type in the grade stamp of the lumber if you happen to buy a piece of lumber and find out the region it comes from. Those are both sites that we've really helped generate a lot of the content for and fed materials to so that people can be learning about these incredible forests and the products that come from them.