Jan and Greg Bernu are a lot of things. They’re married alumni of our forestry program, and they’re both established forestry professionals often working on the same issue from different perspectives in the industry; however, their lives have not always been so tightly intertwined.
Jan was born in Nebraska and grew up in Southern Minnesota. Her father was a biology teacher, and the whole family would go camping and travel up to Duluth to watch the bird migration—especially the hawks. She started college at the University of Minnesota-Duluth undecided on her major, but she knew that she enjoyed the outdoors. It wasn’t a natural love of the outdoors that got her into forestry; it was the convenience of being able to register first for classes because forestry was considered a pre-professional degree at the time. “I started taking classes and the more I got into it, the more I liked it.” She helped kick-start the Urban Forestry program here at the University of Minnesota, which supplemented her traditional forest management degree with an urban forestry background.
Greg grew up in Robbinsdale, Minnesota, which he likes to point out was home to many professional wrestlers, including his classmate Curt “Mr. Perfect” Hennig. His father’s family was from Northwest Minnesota, and his mother was from the Iron Range, so the whole family spent much of their time up north.
He wanted to be a pilot, so he tried Navy flight school. When that didn’t work out, he thought about the float planes called Beavers that he had seen up north, and figured there might be a way into aviation through the Department of Natural Resources. He switched majors from engineering to forestry, and took off, so to speak.
After graduation, he took a variety of short-term appointments as a tree inspector, did forest inventory work for a Minnesota paper company, and headed to the Black Hills with the USDA Forest Service between the two. Eventually he went even further west and collected data in Utah and New Mexico for the national forest inventory while living primarily out of a camper. Today, people on Instagram call that lifestyle #VanLife, but it’s not for everyone. “I realized I didn’t want to live in a camper forever, so I went back to school for engineering.”
Unlike today’s job market where foresters are in very high demand, Jan said that “Foresters were a dime a dozen when we graduated, and it was really hard to find a job.” She worked for the cities of Duluth and Minneapolis Parks Departments for a few months but these were seasonal positions. Then she picked up a contractor position and enjoyed it very much; however, the contracts were only a few months or a year long, so she bounced around a bit between cities like Zimmerman, Preston, and Saint Cloud.
Greg was back in the Twin Cities on Thanksgiving in 1986 when one of his friends suggested going to ChiChi’s Restaurant to meet up with a bunch of other forestry alumni. That’s where Greg and Jan hit it off. Jan said, “I found him kind of interesting at that point. I got his phone number, and his mom answered and called out, ‘Greg, it’s a girl!’”
Jan had been working with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency for a couple of years, but she wasn’t exactly loving it. She found herself doing field work at a landfill site and thinking about her future. “I thought I can’t do this for the rest of my life. Greg told me one night over a burger and a beer that I was cranky and needed to quit my job, so I said, ‘Yep, sounds good to me,’ and that was that.” She left the landfill and started off on her consulting career.
That brings us to the present where Greg is the Land Commissioner for Carlton County. He manages 73,000 acres of tax forfeited trust lands on behalf of the county board, among several other duties. “We are a department of two, and you are looking at half of them.” Sometimes it’s administrative work, other times it’s political work when the legislature is in session, and there’s plenty of field work to go around at the end of winter when loggers are finishing up timber sales. “I really like getting out and meeting with the loggers,” he says, but he enjoys nearly all aspects of the job. “I don’t even mind the politicking that much, to be honest.”
Jan is the owner of an independent forestry/land management consulting company, Two By Forestry (TBF), that works with a variety of private and public entities but specializes in working with private landowners. Her role has morphed over the years and includes everything from tree planting, pruning, administering timber sales, and conducting timber damage appraisals to writing project plans and woodland stewardship or forest management plans for private landowners. “Those plans are probably some of my mainstay activities. I call myself a Jan of all trades, but now I can be more selective about what I want to do.” Jan has also recently found herself working more with conservation easements as landowners become more interested in them.
Jan and Greg set appropriate boundaries between their work. “If she’s doing anything in Carlton County, I abstain from all work related to it,” Greg said. “I can’t even give the impression that I’m giving preference to someone.” They do sometimes use their different perspectives to inform each other’s work. Jan often works with private landowners, while Greg works frequently with public land and legislators. Being able to consider how a legislative policy might be received by private landowners or how an individual management decision might affect nearby county forest land is valuable to both of them. Jan said, “Although we do talk about a lot of other topics, we spend a great deal of time talking about forestry and environmental issues of one sort or another. It’s great to be able to share your passion with someone who feels and understands things the same way.”
What do they think about the future of forestry? Greg advises forestry students to take a business class and learn conflict management skills. Students will need to understand the budgets involved. “You’re always going to get in an argument with someone, and they’re not going to see it your way. You’ll need to get it figured out.” Jan’s main passion is working with private landowners, especially the landowners who want to learn about their land and how to keep their woods thriving. She has been involved with the Minnesota Woman’s Woodland Network since the early days of the organization, and hopes to inspire and support women joining the forestry field as well as women landowners. “At the end of my forestry career, I hope that I’ve left my little corner of the world a better place—one tree and forest at a time.”
The Forest Scene newsletter is published biannually in the spring and fall, featuring stories and updates from the Department of Forest Resources. Readers can download issue 27 of Forest Scene as an interactive PDF that is fully tagged and compatible with most screen readers, or read the individual stories here in a web-based format.