About Brooks

Brooks Mendell is the author of books including Loving Trees is Not Enough, Forest Finance Simplified, and Beaverball: A (Winning) Season with the MIT Baseball Team. As CEO at Forisk, he’s published hundreds of blogs and analyses related to forestry. As a fiction writer, he’s published speculative, mystery and science fiction stories.

An inductee in the Georgia Foresters Hall of Fame, Brooks started his forestry career while at MIT as an intern with the State Forester in Massachusetts. Later, he worked at a logging camp in Raymond, Washington, at a sawmill in Barnesville, Georgia, and at a National Park in Northern California.

At MIT, Brooks was co-Captain and co-MVP of the 1993 ECAC Champion Varsity Baseball Team. While he almost failed out of MIT as a freshman, he ultimately graduated with Academic All-American and NCAA Postgraduate Scholar honors. His experiences at MIT provide the basis for his book Beaverball.

At UC Berkeley, Brooks received a full tuition MBA Scholarship. While there, he was named an Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor for his work in Communication Skills, won the 20th Haas Speech Competition on Sustainable Business, and was selected by his classmates to deliver the MBA Commencement Address. During this time, Brooks began developing his book Loving Trees is Not Enough.

After earning a PhD in Forest Finance in two and a half years at the University of Georgia, Brooks received a Fulbright Scholarship to teach courses on forest finance and risk management (in Spanish) in Uruguay. In 2004, Brooks Mendell founded Forisk Consulting, an award-winning research firm that studies forest operations and timber markets.