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Fighting for Change in Forest Advocacy, One Word at a Time

daniela and a volunteer screen printing with green ink in a tent at a campout

This year, Bark invested in local artists and volunteers who bring new perspectives on communication and engagement to Mt. Hood National Forest advocacy. These invaluable partnerships, alongside our monthly emails, social media dispatches, workshops, and community art events, provide engaging public avenues to communicate and advance place-based environmental justice. When you donate to Bark, you are supporting our staff and activist partners as we bring more poetry, beauty, and celebration into the way we defend the land and tell the stories of this place we all know and love. 

Help me raise $5000 today to support Bark’s public Communications Program.

Color photo collage of Barkers and their artwork. Image one is of a split fountain on a letterpress, showing ink colors going from pink to blue to green above handset wood type. Image 2 is of daniela and a volunteer screen printing with green ink in a tent at a campout. image 3 is of Mai and Summer grinning from ear to ear behind masks at the Earth Day rally this year. Summer is wearing a papier mache hat shaped like a salmon. Photo 4 is of Suze holding the printed poster in front of a painted wood cross section. The poem reads: "unafraid of currents unknown, take to the water with joy! every time, the forest will guide us to the changing ocean and back again."
Images left to right, top to bottom: close up of a split fountain ink on a letterpress during the poster printing process; daniela and a Bark volunteer screen printing artwork by Roger Peet with at the Little Crater Lake campout this summer; Mai and Summer setting up for the Earth Day rally this year put on by Making Earth Cool Again; Suze showing off the printed poem written by the Bark Communications Team, 2022.

For over 20 years, Bark has been deciphering intentionally complex Forest Service lingo to support public understanding in engaging the bureaucratic processes and the management of Mt. Hood National Forest. Now, our work toward equity calls us to unpack our own terminology around environmental ethics, inclusion in conservation, climate advocacy, and cultural knowledge. Bark’s Communications Team continually examines our own organizational language to ensure that our internal values are mirrored in our community practices. 

Your donation directly empowers our staff to keep exploring exciting opportunities in communication arts.

The way we speak to each other is deeply codified—from our lived experiences, informal and formal educational systems, to socioeconomic class, race, and culture. So, I want to ask you the same question we ask ourselves all the time at Bark: how can we better communicate to move environmental justice forward together? I believe that one of the ways is to embrace nuance, thoughtfulness, and attentiveness in the ways we communicate. We understand that continuing to speak in old frameworks is not going to bring us closer to each other, yet we face the challenges of climate change together.

For the forests (and for more poetry, too!),

Daniela del Mar, Bark Communications Coordinator

P.S. The Bark Communications Team is growing! We are so pleased to welcome Suzanna Stapler! Read her staff bio and see some of her incredible illustrations here.

Bark affirms that these are the rightful lands of the Multnomah, Kathlamet, and Clackamas bands of the Chinuk, Tualitin Kalapuya, Molalla, Tenino, Wasco, Wishram, Paiute, and the many other Native people who live here and who have always lived here. These Tribal Nations belong to and care for this land and we honor these Nations’ continued existence and resilience, as their sacrifices are still ongoing. We acknowledge their long-lasting and tireless work to nurture, advocate, and protect these lands in the Pacific Northwest.