The Significance of Forests in the "Heart of Western Oregon"

Sarah Altemus-Pope is the Executive Director of the Southern Willamette Forest Collaborative (SWFC) in Oakridge, Oregon. SWFC is one of 26 forest collaboratives located in Oregon. The goal of SWFC is to find common ground among different groups to initiate restoration practices that benefit both the forest and the relationships those groups have with the forest. The collaborative participates in projects that include stewardship work, collaborative landscape planning projects, and the creation of meaningful engagement opportunities for the Oakridge community with the extensive forested lands that surround this small rural town. For more information on the collaborative and the work that they do, please visit the  Southern Willamette Forest Collaborative  website.

Oakridge is a town located in the midst of Oregon's Willamette National Forest, or in "the heart of Western Oregon" according to Sarah. With approximately 4,500 residents, this rural community and the surrounding area are encompassed by large trees. It is here where local forests are characterized by masses of tall, old-growth Douglas-firs, ponderosa pines, and western red cedar trees, among others, as well as lush understories. Oakridge has a mild climate and a range of wildlife that depend on habitats found within these forested lands, including elk, deer, mountain lions, and even wolves, according to Sarah. There are five rivers that surround the Oakridge area as well as multiple peaks nearby, and diverse trails can be found sprawling throughout the national forest. The forested areas near the city have experienced dramatic wildfires and extensive timber harvesting in the past, but over the past couple of decades, Oakridge has shifted to a tourist-based economy and outdoor recreation destination where people spend time enjoying nature. 

In the past, the Oakridge community was a timber dependent rural city, with the majority of local jobs duly related. With the collapse of the timber industry in the mid-1990s, there was a shift in the economic connection between the community and the forest. At the time, most of the community members were reliant on jobs created by the timber industry. Over recent years however, the link between the Oakridge community and the forest has shifted as the economy converted to represent more of a tourist-based connection to the forest due to the significant recreational potential Oakridge's forested surroundings provide.

Sarah Altemus-Pope spent her younger years living in Oakridge. She left for a while to work around Western United States and in Washington D.C. After years of being away from her hometown, Sarah's life path led her right back to Oakridge. Sarah tells us that “what's attracting people to move to these areas is really more the lifestyle that living in the forest offers”. As the coordinator of the Southern Willamette Forest Collaborative, Sarah has worked to help the community translate the political world of the United States Forest Service (USFS), and their work makes it more accessible for people to have opportunities for meaningful engagement with these natural lands. This collaborative is one of the resources that has helped build the connection the surrounding community has with the forest.  

"Our forests are important because of their natural resources that we all depend on, whether it be forest products or the ecosystem services that our forests bring to us as humans. And it's just a very important part of the natural world that we live in.”

With so much forest easily accessible, Oakridge residents and wandering visitors have endless opportunities to enjoy the many social benefits the forest provides. Sarah tells us that people stay in the area because “you really do have the forest outside your back door, and everything you like to do is close (by)”. Some of the activities available include mountain biking, snowboarding, skiing, swimming, hunting, off-roading, kayaking, paddle boarding, hunting, foraging for mushrooms, huckleberry and blackberry picking, and far more - but recreation is not the only benefit provided by the extensive tree cover in the area.

The tree cover provided by the size of the forest generates significant ecosystem services. Among these ecosystem services are regulating services, such as clean air and clean water, and supporting services such as nutrient cycling and habitat for wildlife. The forest also provides food and other provisioning resources in the form of berry and mushroom harvests. The Oakridge community also receives the refreshing advantage of cultural services from the forest. These cultural services include annual Christmas tree and bridge lightings, annual tree-planting ceremonies originating over 60 years ago, and organized river cleanups.

As a kid growing up in Oakridge, the forest was always Sarah’s backyard and many of her fondest memories were formed in forest-oriented environments. Uncoincidentally perhaps, through nearly all her career path, Sarah has worked with and in forests. She has spent time in many western states fighting wildfire as a smokejumper for the USFS. In her time traveling around the West as a result of this work, Sarah grew attached to the very different forests that characterize western landscapes, notably the Gila National Forest of southern New Mexico. Yet during all of that time, Sarah remained in awe of the Willamette Forest: “What I love is that we have such big trees—huge douglas-fir, ponderosa pine, and western red cedar trees surrounding us—that are literally hundreds of feet tall... that’s what’s really unique here. And it's very green and lush."

As an adult, Sarah and her family decided to move back to Oakridge. Doing so meant that Sarah's own kids would be able to enjoy the same forest activities she did when she was a kid. The Willamette forest is full of recreational activities for every season—swimming, ice skating, hiking, paddle boarding and kayaking, Jeep rides, and road biking. For Sarah, her husband, and their three kids, the best activities to do in the forest are hiking, swimming, and camping. When we asked Sarah what her favorite activity to do in the forest is, Sarah divvied her response up into seasons. In the winter months, Sarah takes a short trip to the high country to find snow where she will ski/snowboard with her family. When the seasons change and the weather gets warmer again, Sarah says she “love[s] swimming in the summertime and getting to go out on the lakes. And after a long winter, the summer feels so glorious here in Oregon." 

Throughout the whole year, Sarah can be found running trails. Since she grew up in this same area, Sarah is placed within the same habits she was around as a kid, and says, “I’m still running the same trails now that I was running when I was 13." We asked Sarah what some of her favorite features of the Oakridge area are, and although she avoided revealing the locations of any of her 'secret spots', we did hear about Diamond Peak and berry picking in the area—both key characteristics of the Willamette forest. This forest is still Sarah’s backyard today, and that’s something she wants to keep in her family.

Sarah moved back to Oakridge because she wanted her kids to experience forests and create their own memories within them instead of simply hearing about memories from her. To Sarah, the love for Oakridge forests is “a generational love of place." Sarah and her husband work to pass down these familial geographic attachments to their kids. The family's most loved activities take place in the same spaces that Sarah visited as a kid and even further back some generations: “Our family, for multiple generations, has swum at the same swimming hole on the North Fork of the Willamette. So, I would say that’s definitely a family tradition to spend at least a couple dozen days out there in the summertime. And then we always camp at Waldo, a really unique lake in Oregon, and it’s surrounded by wilderness, so it’s one of the most pristine lakes in the world." Sarah’s relationships with the forest have led her to lead a life of sharing the beauty of the forest with the community and helping to restore for future generations too.

Sarah Altemus-Pope became the Coordinator and Facilitator of the Southern Willamette Forest Collaborative (SWFC) in Oregon, of which Sarah explains is the result of a successful master’s degree project with the University of Oregon. She loves her career as an executive member of a non-profit organization, and considers it “rewarding work.” Although her current job does not place her in the outdoors of Oregon nearly as much as some previous stints in her past, she acknowledges this engagement with the forest is more often focused on discussions with colleagues. This means that project site scouting and “field trips” are her main opportunities to physically incorporate forests in her everyday work.

When we asked Sarah what the SWFC's ultimate goals were, she replied that they were “to make sure people have an opportunity to engage in the decision-making process [for local forest-related policies], make their perspectives heard, and be able to share and learn with one another… As I’m facilitating meetings, I’m making sure we have a variety of perspectives known and represented.” Sarah and SWFC are working to restore the forests for the community in a way that considers all of the different community groups whose livelihoods revolve around the forest's health and accessibility. This approach mirrors that of other established forest collaboratives in Oregon, which are also working to maintain community connectedness to their local forests.

Sarah’s exposure to forests throughout her professional life is not limited to her founding of SWFC. She noted that her earliest jobs were her source of income to fund her schooling, but that they acted to fuel her passion for forest policymaking and management. As a matter of fact, she revealed to us that at her first job when she was 15 years old. sh was working for the USFS as a trail crew member. Later on, she spent time in USFS fire crews and at 20 years old she began a smokejumper career in Montana which lasted for several years. Beyond her field experience fighting forest fires, she also worked on an international USFS assignment in collaboration with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) before eventually creating the Southern Willamette Forest Collaborative.

We took the time to ask Sarah what had changed recently in light of local forest conservation movements and SWFC activities. She spoke about the recent shift in Oakridge's economic focus because of the changes to forest management policy and the popularity of outdoor recreational activities in nearby areas. She also acknowledged that forest management and conservation-oriented environmental careers are very nomadic by default, which has made it continually difficult to bring job opportunities to Oakridge that are within the environment-conservation realm. “The jobs are still there, to some extent, but they’re different… while we still do some logging, [there’s] not nearly as much as there used to be. And there are some jobs around restoration, but not enough as there should be.” 

Sarah sees the loss of forest management and conservation-based jobs as one of the main concerns for the future of the small city of Oakridge. She indicates that “[SWFC's] goals are to advance forest restoration and to do it in a way that ties local community jobs to local forest management”. If such jobs could become more location-stable, or 'stagnant', it would appeal to the general wealth of Oakridge to promote such community-intensive careers.

SWFC's work in Oakridge has improved opportunities for the community and has developed more direct engagement with the USFS and their policy-making process. Sarah strongly feels both that the forest collaborative’s existence is the main driver of the introduction of forest policy that “would not otherwise be done,” and that the future direction of the USFS and all other organizations focused on environmental conservation/restoration/sustainability will include the reinvestment of funds used t to curtail the many raging west-coast wildfires. As she told us, “...right now, we spend billions of dollars on fire suppression, but that money could go upfront [into forest management] in ways that can make communities [and their forests] resilient [especially to wildfires].”

Sarah's forest stories reveal not only Sarah's deep connection to the Willamette National Forest, but also an entire community's economic, ecological, and cultural relationship to this forest. As Sarah's story shows, interactions with forests from a young age can fuel longstanding and meaningful connections with the natural world. Her strong ties to Oakridge's forested area led her to develop an organization to foster active engagement between the Oakridge community and the surrounding national forest. Sarah and SWFC help the community of Oakridge better understand the many services the forest provides for the community's well-being and illustrates the importance of community interaction with local forests in the process of policy-making.