Willits, California
Telephone: (707) 459-0576
Fax: (707) 459-0255

Email: wsmith@ra.org

Walter Smith is lead auditor and senior technical specialist for the Rainforest Alliance. Walter has 17 years of experience in logging, training and forest resource management and 16 years of experience in Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) forest management and chain-of-custody certification. From 1973 to 1990, Walter worked in a sawmill, felled timber and owned and operated at small contract logging firm in northwestern California. In 1982 he founded a timber faller training program at a local community college. He served as the director and principle instructor for the evening and weekend training course until 1985. In 1990 he co-founded a small non-profit called the Institute for Sustainable Forestry (ISF).

Walter was the ISF's forest management certification program manager (which began three years prior to the founding of the FSC). He was a founding delegate of the FSC and on the original FSC International Principles and Criteria Working Group in 1992/1993. He served on the FSC Pacific Coast Working Group from 1996 to 2002. Walter began working with Rainforest Alliance in 1995. He has worked on forest management and chain of custody assessments and audits in Canada, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Nepal, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Vietnam and all regions of the United States.

Additionally, Walter is a principal instructor for the Rainforest Alliance FSC Certification Assessor Training Program in North America and Asia and has had ISO 14001 lead auditor training. He has served on several forestry policy boards at the county and state level in California, USA. Walter is the co-author of Forest Certification in Sustainable Development: Healing the Landscape with ecologist Chris Maser.