Employee Profile - Focus on Youth
Lauren Pidot
National Landscape Conservation System
Legislative Affairs
California State Office
Lauren Pidot grew up in an outdoor-oriented family in Hallowell, Maine. Her mother is a retired middle school teacher and her father is a retired natural resources lawyer. Her older brother is a lawyer for the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. and sometimes represents the BLM. Her younger sister works in Boston for a non-profit organization. Growing up with a caring, intellectual family, in a state where natural resources are still a pretty big deal, it almost seems she was destined to come to the BLM.
A Presidential Management Fellow, Lauren normally works in the National Landscape Conservation System office in Washington, D.C. She is on a field rotation to California through the spring. The majority of the time she works on legislative affairs and the NLCS in the state office, but she plans to spend some time in Arcata learning about how a BLM field office works.
In the Washington Office, she is a "utility player," doing pretty much whatever they need her to do. She has been the acting monuments and national conservation area lead; the designated federal official for the NLCS unit advisory committees; she did some analysis of NLCS partnerships; worked on budgets, manuals and information memorandums; and facilitated a workshop, among other assignments.
In high school, she became intrigued with how particular natural resources and areas can inspire such passion and conflict over how they should be managed. Since then, she has known that she wanted to do something in the environmental field.
She obtained a degree in government from Wesleyan University, then earned her master's degree in environmental policy at the University of Michigan.
She became interested in the BLM much later, after spending a summer working with the Sonoran Institute developing a poll to evaluate collaborative conservation initiatives. BLM was an active participant in the initiatives. She was impressed by the openness of the BLM managers and how they engaged in collaborative approaches to addressing divisive issues.
In her young life she has pursued opportunities to expand her experience. She interned for the Gulf of Maine Council on the Marine Environment in Augusta, Maine (June-Oct., 2003), the Five Rivers Environmental Education Center in Delmar, New York (Nov. 2003-Sept. 2004), and
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