When I wrote this piece, the Mt. Hood Forest Service was in the process of gathering information that would support their upcoming “TAP” project, a nationwide initiative aimed at reducing road volume in the National Forest system.

Client: Bark is a Portland 501(c)(3) working to protect Mt. Hood National Forest.

Project Description: Mobilize members of the Bark supporter base to attend a series of Forest Service open-houses to (as the newsletter states) “demand that roads for recreation be maintained, and roads for logging be removed.”

A Quote

“What if you could improve Oregon’s water quality, recreation access, and economy without spending a dime?”

The Inside Scoop

When I wrote this piece, the Mt. Hood Forest Service was in the process of gathering information that would support their upcoming “TAP” project, a nationwide initiative aimed at reducing road volume in the National Forest system.

For those not in the know, the road density in National Forests is actually pretty obscene—a statistic we tossed around at Bark at the time stated that the roads in Mt. Hood National Forest alone could reach 3,000 miles from Portland, Oregon, to Miami, Florida.

Kinda boggles the mind a bit, doesn’t it?

And here’s the best (read worst) part: the vast majority of those roads are old, disused logging roads from forever ago that were already supposed to have been removed.

But they weren’t.

And then more logging projects got approved, and more roads got built because “REASONS”—rinse and repeat.

Problem is, the Forest Service lacked (and from what I understand still lacks) the budget to maintain the roads, even though under-maintained roads cause a whole litany of environmental problems. (In fact, the roads themselves are a huge part of what makes logging so destructive.)

Anyway, the upshot is that with the removal of forest roads, the big question the Forest Service needed to answer was, “Which roads stay, and which roads go?”

Bark’s goal, as a no-B.S. environmental group, was to show the Forest Service that the public favors maintaining roads for recreation access, not logging. This newsletter was a special alert aimed at getting folks to attend a series of Forest Service open-houses to help voice that concern.

My Favorite Part

Sticking it to the man and protecting the environment.

See the results:
SPECIAL ALERT: Stop Logging Roads from Limiting Recreation