Celebrating their 14th year as a Wild & Scenic Film Festival On Tour host, KS Wild & Rogue Riverkeeper, will be holding their Festival on Saturday, March 14th, at the Historic Ashland Armory in Ashland, Oregon. Attendees can mingle before the films, where they can purchase food and drink, play in the silent auction, visit with the 18 other organizations from across the region who are eager to share their work, and connect with other members of this wild community!
Surrounded by local farms, forested foothills, and clear streams, Applegate Valley community members decided they needed to do something to stop the damage uncovered from unregulated public land management in southwest Oregon’s Siskiyou Mountains. In 1995, KS Wild’s founder, Spencer Lennard began to fundraise to hire staff attorney, Marty Bergoffen, to design and build what would become KS Wild’s conservation platform, tracking over 7 million acres of public forestland. KS Wild was born from this movement and the passion to hold the federal agencies responsible for the vast number of exploitive and harmful timber sales across the region, leading to the incorporation as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization from a donated canvas yurt in Williams, Oregon. They moved their headquarters to Ashland, Oregon in 2000 to be near the large population center in the region.
Over the past two decades, KS Wild has grown to become the leading public lands conservation organization in southern Oregon and northern California’s Klamath-Siskiyou region. KS Wild first established a public lands monitoring program that protected hundreds of thousands of acres of some of the best remaining old-growth forests in the region. As a watchdog group, KS Wild commented on nearly every public lands management proposal on the Rogue, Siskiyou, Klamath, Six Rivers, and Shasta-Trinity National Forest and the Bureau of Land Management’s Medford District.
In the early 2000s, KS Wild realized a need to complement their watchdog work by proactively promoting conservation of the special habitats and wild places in the region. They began to explore conservation opportunities for rare species, Wild & Scenic Rivers, and large intact blocks of roadless wildlands.
KS Wild established the Rogue Riverkeeper Program in 2009, which remains an important program of KS Wild and continues to share office space and other resources. The Rogue Riverkeeper is a member of the international Waterkeeper Alliance. While KS Wild shares administrative faculties and oversight with Rogue Riverkeeper, the program operates under a separate strategic plan.
KS Wild’s mission is to protect and restore wild nature in the Klamath-Siskiyou region of southwest Oregon and northwest California. They promote science-based land and water conservation through policy and community action. They envision a Klamath-Siskiyou region where local communities enjoy healthy wildlands, where clean rivers are teeming with native salmon, and where connected plant and wildlife populations are prepared for climate change.
KS Wild achieves this vision through outreach and advocacy-based education, by building community support for the conservation of the region’s special places and natural gems, by being the watchdog and steward of northern California and southern Oregon’s public lands, public trust waters, and the diversity of plant and animal life.
The Klamath Siskiyou Mountains are home to some of the most spectacular forests in the world. Dense old growth forests, towering pines in oak woodlands, and alpine meadows all mix together in this world-class ecoregion. This region borders the coastal Redwood forests (with the tallest trees in the world) to the west and the mighty Douglas fir forests of the Cascade Range in the east.
KS Wild focuses on public forests, mostly in the Rogue and Klamath River watersheds. Their trained staff and volunteers monitor public lands management on eight million acres (a forested area larger than the state of Maryland!). These public lands include the Medford and Klamath Falls Bureau of Land Management, and the Klamath, Six Rivers, Shasta-Trinity, and Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forests. Their goal is to protect the remaining wildlands, watersheds, and wildlife while encouraging restoration of forests that have been damaged by logging, mining, and development.
The Rogue Riverkeeper works at the local, state, and federal level to advocate for, support and implement protections for the Rogue River and the communities that rely upon it. They work to hold polluters accountable, and they participate in public processes to ensure that state and federal water protection laws are implemented and enforced. They work to connect with the local community and help raise their voice for clean water through educational float trips, river clean ups, and our annual Wild & Scenic Film Festival.
Allee Gustafson, KS Wild’s Membership Coordinator, says, “It’s an outreach event for us, and on this evening, we can harness the collective power of over 250 community members to take action on what we care about and value. We meet the moment every year and gather sponsorships, host a silent auction and raffle, with a goal to reach out to local businesses to establish trusting and friendly relationships within the community.”
Allee goes on to say that her favorite part of hosting a Wild & Scenic Film Festival On Tour Event is, “Working with our amazing volunteers who hand-pick every film, and the dozens of volunteers who help work the event. I also find immense gratitude to all of our amazing businesses that either became a sponsor or donated to our raffle or silent auction, it’s truly appreciated and goes a long way in keeping our budget sustainable each year so we can protect the best and restore the rest.”
