Friend of the Watershed
Friends of the Corvallis Watershed is a grassroots community group that advocates for the Corvallis Watershed and fights to protect this precious community resource.
This website is a work in progress being updated regularly as more information and resources become available.
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SPEAK OUT NOW!
A new vision statement for the Corvallis Forest. . .
Question: What can we residents of the Corvallis community do to meaningfully address the global climate change crisis and the global extinction crisis?
Answer: Start locally by protecting the Corvallis Forest—a valuable carbon sink and a rare old-forest watershed that current and future residents depend on for drinking water. Yet, its future is compromised by the city’s steady push for more logging and timber revenues...
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We need a new vision for the Corvallis Forest that drives a local, active and ethical response to both global climate change and extinction, while protecting this emblematic forest for long-term drinking water quality and supply.
Action Item:
Attend the Wednesday, March 22, 5:00 p.m. meeting of the Corvallis Forest
Stewardship Plan Update task force. You can attend in person or on-line. Speak in support our new proposed vision statement below. Tell the task force why it’s important to protect and preserve the Corvallis Forest.
The old vision statement in the 2013 Corvallis Forest Stewardship Plan:
“The Corvallis Forest within the Rock Creek Watershed is a professionally managed, healthy ecosystem with a diverse forest and productive habitat for all species native to the watershed.”
Talking points: What’s wrong with the old vision statement?
It doesn’t say how far ahead it’s looking... It could be next week or the next century. It says nothing about drinking water or water quality. It says nothing about climate change. Why is “professionally managed” part of the vision statement? Probably because the current managers, who specialize in timber management, want to keep it that way. “Healthy” is a vague, ambiguous term as is “diverse forest” which could be highly fragmented and full of invasive species.
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Talking points: A proposed new vision statement for the Corvallis Forest: 100 years from now, the Corvallis Forest within the Rock Creek Watershed is a model municipal drinking water catchment, esteemed by Corvallis residents as a protected, late-successional forested landscape that provides safe, reliable quantities of drinking water with greatly reduced treatment costs, resilience to climate change impacts, diverse terrestrial and aquatic habitats for native species, and abundant carbon storage.
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Talking points: Old guiding principles:
Old guiding principles can be found in the 2013 Corvallis Forest Stewardship Plan needed general rewriting. We’ve re-drafted them below, including removing this one:
• Corvallis Forest is a generator of revenue that is primarily used to offset the cost of forest management, and secondarily helps fund the City of Corvallis water utility system.
New guiding principles:
• The Corvallis Forest is managed for source water protection to preserve and enhance the ecosystem functions of the forest that naturally supply high quality municipal drinking water for the city of Corvallis;
• The Corvallis Forest is managed to preserve and enhance the ecosystem functions of the forest that regulate stream flows supplying reliable quantities of drinking water throughout the year;
• The Corvallis Forest is managed on behalf of the residents of Corvallis as a model of late seral forest preservation, providing a local, active and ethical response to the global biodiversity crisis and the climate change crisis;
• The Corvallis Forest is managed to preserve the ecosystem functions of the forest that provide stream water quality, reliable quantities, and temperatures in support of aquatic species and habitat;
• Corvallis Forest is managed to maintain the existing variety of different ages and types of forest that provide diversity of native terrestrial and aquatic habitats;
• The Corvallis Forest is managed as a “good neighbor” to residents living near and around the watershed;
• The Corvallis Forest is managed as an integral part of the larger Rock Creek Watershed, all of which embodies the valuable ecosystem functions that the inhabitants of the Corvallis region depend on;