Justice, Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion (JEDI) Commitments
For decades, the Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center (Opal Creek) has inspired understanding of ancient forest ecosystems through education and interpretation. We worked to steward and further the understanding of natural and cultural values of both the Opal Creek Wilderness and the Opal Creek Scenic Recreation Area.
In the last few years, our organization has entered a regenerative phase; the Beachie Creek Fire of 2020 burned nearly all of our facilities at Jawbone Flats, and dramatically changed the landscape of the Opal Creek Wilderness and surrounding communities. It was devastating to experience the losses that come with such a fire, which ravaged the landscape so central to our identity and existence. Yet like the new forest sprouting among the snags and ashes of the old, we have also been provided an opportunity for regrowth. And now, as we reorient the organization and plan to rebuild at Jawbone Flats, we have an opportunity to do so in community and with more intention, and specifically to reimagine what it means to carry out our mission of “providing transformative wilderness experiences that grow a community of environmental advocates” in a way that centers principles of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI).
We have a responsibility to engage in JEDI work and address the structural and cultural barriers connected to the two prongs of our mission – providing transformative wilderness experiences and building a community of environmental advocates.
Our Why | Grounding our commitment in history | Our Role | Our Commitments
Our Why
We believe that all people should have access to transformative, relevant and resonant experiences. To have transformative experiences in wild landscapes, every person needs to be able to see themselves, their values, their connections to land, and their ancestral history reflected in the experiences we provide.
We believe that building a community of powerful environmental advocates requires broadening what it means to be an environmental advocate and centering the land-based values, perspectives, and needs of those who have been excluded from environmentalism. Their perspectives are not just additive to environmentalism, but in fact essential. Without their voices and perspectives, we continue to be limited in building a community of effective advocates.
Grounding our commitment in history
Our commitment to JEDI is grounded in understanding and addressing histories of injustice. We acknowledge persistent sociocultural inequities, such as racism, classism, sexism and ableism, have limited certain communities’ access and exposure to the natural world. In seeking to overturn those inequities, we seek justice.
The formation of United States was predicated on the genocide, removal, displacement, and assimilation of Indigenous peoples. The ecoregion that makes up Oregon’s Western Cascades, which is core to our organization’s origin story and identity, are Indigenous homelands. Specifically, Jawbone Flats and the Opal Creek Wilderness are on the homelands of the Santiam Molalla. Just downriver are the homelands of the Santiam Kalapuya. Adjacent lands where we offer educational expeditions and the many urban and wild spaces where our staff live, work and play are the Indigenous homelands of multiple Tribes.
Today, the complex histories of Indigenous heritage and colonial settlement are woven into this landscape of opposites and dualities: a heritage littered with the remnant debris of extractive mining vs. the memory of verdant old-growth forests. The history of the successful battle for conservation of the unique forests in the watershed vs. Oregon’s logging heritage and the loss of a traditional rural economy. The ongoing legacy of Black exclusion in the establishment of Oregon, vs. the reporting that all miners at Jawbone Flats in the mid-1950s were Black. The environmental movement’s celebration of untrammeled wilderness, vs. the evidence this landscape has been homelands to Indigenous people for thousands of years. Finally, the idea that these conserved uncut intact forests were resilient, vs. the rising intensity of wildfire effects in our modern era of human-caused climate change.
“the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
The complex and contested history of the Opal Creek landscape and the human relationships that intertwine here are important educational narratives. We acknowledge that the settlement of the United States, Oregon’s statehood, the founding of our organization, and the conservation and environmental movements at large are interconnected and layered with ongoing legacies of injustice. These histories have often erased or de-centered Indigenous and marginalized communities’ (particularly Black, working class, LGBTQIA+, and disabled communities’) connections to nature. Not only do we seek to ensure equitable access to nature for all, we accomplish this by prioritizing access, voice and opportunity to historically marginalized communities. We strive to expand and centralize these important stories of identity and place, so that all who interact with the Opal Creek organization have a broader understanding of community, the opportunity of being personally transformed, and the insight that each duality outlined above can be understood as transformational stories of injustice bending toward justice.
Our Role
We see our role in JEDI work in three interlocking ways – as community builders, facilitators, and stewards. Each of these roles builds upon one another and serves to inspire all of us to take meaningful action within Opal Creek and beyond.
As community builders, our role is twofold. First, we are responsible for creating equitable and inclusive community-informed processes to shape and guide Opal Creek’s work forward. Second, it is our role to build, grow, and support a vibrant community that engages all people at the intersection of environmental advocacy and JEDI. Much like a healthy ecosystem requires biodiversity, so does a successful and vibrant community of environmental advocates.
As facilitators of experiences, gatherings, and events, we have a role to play in ensuring that all are accessible to, relevant to, and reflective of Indigenous and other marginalized communities, and that we can provide opportunities for a greater diversity of human experiences that include complex and messy interactions. Healthy ecosystems not only require biodiversity, but also intermediate disturbances; bringing different communities together provides an opportunity to unsettle dominant narratives, re-invigorate our collective imagination, and give rise to equitable community-based action.
As stewards of Jawbone Flats, we have a role to play in ensuring that the ecosystem and infrastructure in Jawbone Flats supports, amplifies, and is attentive to the needs, values and knowledge of our community, particularly Indigenous communities and marginalized communities.
Our Commitments
To ensure we take concrete action on our JEDI values, we make the following commitments:
- Learning & growing: We commit to embodying and inspiring curiosity and courage, particularly related to JEDI, by actively seeking out learning opportunities and making substantive changes based on our learning.
- Engaging communities: We commit to better engaging with Indigenous, local, and communities of color to build mutualistic relationships that inform and guide our mission work.
- Educating on holistic histories and justice: We commit to providing learning opportunities that share holistic environmental and land-based histories (including Indigenous history and mining/logging history), connecting social and environmental issues, amplifying the voices of Indigenous and marginalized communities, and centering Indigenous and local knowledge.
- Increasing access and relevance: We commit to increasing the accessibility and relevance of “the Opal Creek Experience” and job opportunities by addressing structural and cultural barriers experienced by people with marginalized identities
- JEDI at Jawbone Flats: We commit to restoring, rebuilding, and stewarding Jawbone Flats with our community to support accessible and relevant experiences and inspire equitable and just environmental advocacy.
Each of our commitments will involve taking specific action in the near and long term, and these actions are articulated in our detailed JEDI Action Plan. We know that we have a challenging road ahead in reshaping our organization and rebuilding the place that has defined us for so long while also reimagining how we can do it inclusively, equitably, and justly. We intend to hold ourselves accountable and ask that you do the same.