Forest Bridges: The O&C Forest Habitat Project, Inc

Forest Bridges brings people together to embrace sustainable forest habitat management solutions for Oregon's 2.6 million acres of O&C federal forest lands, located in 18 counties of western Oregon. (To learn more about these special lands, click here.)

Policies of wildfire exclusion, well-intended air quality and smoke management rules, and the Northwest Forest Plan’s land classifications, which created large areas where activity is restricted, have combined to yield dangerously high levels of dead fuel accumulation on the O&C lands. Together with climate change-driven drought and higher temperatures, these conditions have contributed to even some of the oldest and most fire-resistant trees being lost to wildfire, the destruction of habitat in amounts and intensity far beyond historical averages, and unhealthy levels of smoke across western Oregon. Legal, regulatory and funding barriers have combined to disrupt the Bureau of Land Management from practicing effective sustainable forest management, including implementing thinning and prescribed fire practices and harvesting on the O&C forest lands in line with the sustained yield management requirements inscribed in the 1937 O&C Act, in such a way as to build and sustain wildlife habitats while reducing fuels across the whole O&C forest.

Since its founding in 2015, Forest Bridges has been developing a volunteer, grassroots collaborative process to build trust among individuals and groups to embrace and advance a common vision of policies and proposals (collectively, Principles of Agreement) specifically aimed at O&C lands. Based in science, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and practitioner experience, the Principles of Agreement address climate change, disease, economic stress, habitat degradation, management, wildfire resistance and issues impacting human health and well-being (e.g., wildfire smoke). They are intended ultimately to bridge the diverse environmental and management perspectives of conservationists, environmentalists, the forest industry, recreation, residents, governments and tribes to effect consistent, predictable, sustainable forest management on O&C lands. 

Forest Bridges became a 501(c)(3) in 2018 and recently hired its first paid executive director and transitioned its Forest Policy Analyst from contractor to full-time staff status. The aim this fall is to hire a full-time community engagement coordinator to roll-out a series of meetings to more fully engage the public on Forest Bridges' proposals and gain feedback, as well as recruit Friends of Forest Bridges (https://www.forestbridges.org/become-a-friend/).

Forest Bridges has been developing partnerships with five of the Tribal Nations of western Oregon and is implementing a diversity, equity, inclusion and justice project to enhance its organizational culture, policies, procedures and practices in these areas. In addition to its policy work, Forest Bridges intends to work in forest planning with the aim of contributing its 21st Century ecological forestry proposals--a "Forest Bridges' alternative"--to the BLM during its public scoping for the next O&C forest lands resource management plan.