Jakob Shockey

Executive Director, Board Member

Jakob is a professional wildlife biologist, entrepreneur, land steward, and storyteller. His work focuses on restoring the natural process and order of resilient habitat, its wildlife, and the complex interrelationship with humans. He has been working professionally in Oregon’s streams, rivers and wetlands for over a decade. He is the foremost authority in mitigating beaver conflicts with human infrastructure in Oregon, through his company Beaver State Wildlife Solutions. He has published research on the endangered Pygmy Three-toed Sloth of Panama, and worked for Washington Dept. of Fish and Wildlife, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Applegate Partnership.

Shortly after earning his BS from The Evergreen State College, Jakob pivoted from international endangered species conservation, to the often messier and harder task of working with the wildlife and people back home. In 2013, he returned to the rural landscape of his childhood in the Siskiyou Mountains of Southwestern Oregon, where he lives with his wife and their three children along the same creek he grew up swimming in. While Jakob remembers cannonballing into pools that teamed with young coho, that stream now goes dry every summer, and instead of swimming his kids play with powdery rocks. That shift in baselines for what is perceived as “normal” in just one generation has animated Jakob’s work. 

Jakob values community, truth, awareness, and grace. He is a clear-eyed optimist, working for resilient human and non-human habitat with tools like strong inference and evolutionary theory. He flies a paraglider, climbs big trees, volunteers with Search and Rescue, plays the fiddle, and once gentled a wild horse, which he took with him to college. As our Executive Director, Jakob brings a pragmatic rural perspective, a deep understanding of habitat restoration work, and an entrepreneurial optimism to our work.