From the Southern Oregon Mail Tribune, by Paul Fattig
If you think the protests over the Fiddler timber salvage sale are a headache, be prepared for a migraine when logging starts in the roadless areas burned by the 2002 Biscuit fire, activists warn.
"When they move into the roadless areas, there is going to be more resistance," predicted Illinois Valley resident Annette Rasch, one of 20 women arrested March 14 for trying to block access to the Fiddler sale.
"This movement is going to continue to grow nationally," she said. "This is not the 'fringey far left' like some in the media are saying. Mainstream people are involved."
Nearly 50 people have been arrested since logging began on Fiddler Mountain, including a protester arrested last week in Portland for blocking a street near the Forest Service's regional office. Police had to lower his 30-foot-high tripod to arrest the protester, a member of a group called Stumptown Earth First! Portland was once known as Stumptown.
"There is extreme frustration with the Bush Forest Service," Rasch said.
"The public voice has been undercut with refusals to hear appeals, with road closures and access denied to our public lands."
In particular, many mainstream women who spent their lives writing letters and attending meetings have come to the conclusion protest blockades are the only answer, she said.
"If there is ever a time to put your body on the line, this is it," she said. "We consider it an act of patriotism.
"We are not the lawbreakers here they are," she added of the agency officials who decided to log old-growth and roadless units.
Although Forest Service officials have repeatedly said the Biscuit fire salvage project meets or exceeds all environmental laws, and represents only
4 percent of the area burned by the fire within the forest, opponents take issue with that stance.
They say nearly 13,000 acres of the roughly 19,500 acres to be logged are old-growth reserves protected by the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan to preserve old-growth habitat. They say more than 8,000 acres are inventoried roadless areas that should also be off limits.
Environmentalists note they were ready to accept the agency's original proposal to salvage a little less than 100 million board feet of fire-killed trees. That figure jumped to its current 372 million board feet following an Oregon State University study requested by the Douglas County Board of Commissioners and backed by the timber industry, they say.
Finally, they argue that well over 90 percent of the more than 23,000 comments received by the agency were opposed to the salvage plans.
While stressing his group isn't among the protesters, Don Smith, director of the Illinois Valley-based Siskiyou Regional Education Project, agrees that logging in roadless areas will likely increase protests.
"Logging in roadless areas will only make matters worse," he said, then added, "It would be unfortunate if the central focus of this controversial issue is around arrests and protests."
The real issue is about unnecessary conflict, he said.
"When we made an effort to find solutions, the thing we tried to impress was that logging in roadless areas is not a local issue," he said. "It has national ramifications. If the roadless logging goes ahead, it will open the floodgates to what happens elsewhere."
Dominick DellaSala, an ecologist and local representative of the World Wildlife Fund, agreed.
"This is precedent setting," he said. "The Forest Service is definitely pushing the envelope under what is permissible in the Northwest Forest Plan.
We firmly believe it's illegal."
Had the agency stayed out of old-growth reserves and roadless areas, there would have been no protests, he said.
"This has never been about loggers," he said. "Everybody needs to put their kids through college and pay the mortgage. We are not against the timber industry."
The Northwest needs to reach a point where both the forests and the industry are sustainable, he said. Not only will the salvage be a blow to the environment, it will be costly to the American taxpayers, he said.
"The conservation community is going to continue to beat the drums,"
DellaSala said. "This area is the Yellowstone of the West Coast. It needs to be protected."
The focus should be on protecting the region's unique biodiversity, creating sustainable jobs and thinning forests near rural communities to protect them from catastrophic wildfires, he said.
"This salvage does none of that," he concluded.
