The Republican onslaught is upon us, and in one sense, it should come as no surprise. Industrial death culture is fundamentally incompatible with wildlands. It can tolerate, even thrive on, recycling, low-flow shower heads and the Nature Channel, but it can not abide any real limitation of its access to the last large trees, free-flowing water and untapped minerals. What is surprising is the speed and the stealth with which our environmental laws are being trashed.
Environmental laws have always been something of an anomaly in American culture. Remember, it was Nixon who signed National Environmental Protection Act into existence--the same Nixon who incinerated Vietnamese villagers and poisoned our own troops with agent orange. While the National Forest Management Act and the Endangered Species Act were being written and authorized, the Marines were soaking Nicaraguan beaches in blood and the CIA was assassinating human rights activists in Chile and El Salvador. While the Clean Air and Water Acts were winding their way through Congress, timber cut volumes were increasing and dams were being thrown up on the few truly wild rivers left.
Ours is a deeply violent culture with little regard for the autonomy of other people or species. The passage of powerful environmental laws in the late 60's and early 70's did not so much reflect a change in American consciousness as the schizophrenia of American culture. That schizophrenia went unchallenged for several decades as our made-for-TV culture simultaneously protected and trashed more and more wild places each year. By the late 80's, however, it was clear that industry had logged, mined, dammed, or grazed virtually everything available. As the battle for the last of the last ensued, America could no longer pretend that conservation and exploitation are compatible. One has to end. One will end.
At stake here is not just 25 years of progress, but whether or not protecting wildness (as opposed to a clean "environment") will continue to be part of the American self image. If that disappears, so will every wilderness area, wild and scenic river, critical habitat, and endangered species. Right now, industry and its congressional proxies are pushing exemptions and suspensions via riders and obfuscation; they don't feel capable yet of bringing a direct, public assault on environmental ideals. This is coming. If they succeed in convincing the American people that salmon and flycatchers and undammed rivers are simply not worth preserving, no amount of monkeywrenching, civil disobedience, rallies and education will prevent our last wild places from resembling Europe's sterile, managed landscape.
So what are us "legal folks," as Jim Flynn recently called me, going to do now? Keep pushing as hard as we can. There are a lot more legal angles left and we intend to pursue them all as aggressively as possible. But we're also going to put more energy into inspiring people. We've not done nearly enough of this in the last few years. I say inspire not educate, because knowledge of ecological destruction and values does not necessarily lead to support for environmental causes. "Support," in any event, is too ephemeral. We need to inspire people to identify themselves and our culture with wildness, to believe that loss of wild places is not just an ecological or even a personal loss, but cultural and historical genocide.
People in southwest New Mexico need to identify themselves with the Gila Headwaters ecosystem and feel that on the deepest level, Gila Trout are an essential part of that experience. Southwesterners need to feel that the Army's assault on the San Pedro River is an assault on the Southwest itself. Westerners need to feel that vast, untrammeled conifer forests are their birthright. North Americans need to feel that big wilderness and big predators uniquely identify our place on the Earth.
We can no more create a new culture or a new consciousness than a southern California developer can create a new community. As environmentalists, we need to reach back into American culture and history to show and inspire people to feel that wildlands and respect for wild species is part of our own essence. And that essence is under attack by industrial greed.
One day I woke up and realized the world would probably end in my lifetime. I don't know exactly when this happened, but it was about the time I was doing my second year as a first grade student at one of the 12 or so Catholic schools I went to before dropping out. I remember kneeling in the hallway during a duck and cover drill praying that the Russians wouldn't nuke us. The Cuban Missile Crisis and the nuns had me convinced that this was the way it would happen, the big one, the day of reckoning. I eventually got used to it.
Naturally, this helped prepare me for a career as an environmental activist in which the end of the world is the subject of every press release, every video, and every policy statement. But the addition of irrefutable scientific proof of the coming apocalypse, be it the quick and dirty Nuclear War, or the relatively time-consuming Deforestation/Greenhouse/Ozone Depletion scenario did not change the essential theme that it was all happening because we had been bad, and we would be punished for it in a firestorm. When I first met Howie Wolke in the mid seventies, he reassured me with his belief that by the time the end of the world as we know it came, we would be too old to enjoy it.
I ran into Ed Abbey once on the West Bank of the Jordan River (Salt Lake City) in the Fall of '83. He was in town to sign some copies of his books for various environmental fund-raisers and to have some exploratory surgery done to check out a dark spot his doctors had found on his last x-rays. The doctor said it could be nothing, or it could be cancer, in which case he had six months to live. When I asked him how he felt about that he replied, "Mike, the only thing good about knowing your gonna die soon is that you can stop flossing your teeth." Of course his number wasn't up yet, it was just a dark spot on the x-ray after all, and he went on to write a couple more good books and several great essays and to make many more public appearances than he wanted to.
So there we have it from the great grizzled one, who never seemed to lose his sense of humor amidst the lifetime of heartbreak and frustration that is the price of an ecological education. I don't know if he really gave up flossing, but he never gave up the fight, never hid from his critics or let them get his goat. At the much-discussed 1987 Grand Canyon Rendezvous, Abbey was waylaid by a pack of foaming-at-the-mouth, lefty-anarcho-vegetarian, flag-burning, humanist Murray Bookchin moonies. While many knee-jerk Abbey worshippers were appalled by the audacity of these blasphemers with berets, Abbey seemed to be enjoying himself, relishing the sunny afternoon in this ponderosa pine forest on the Kaibab Plateau as well as the chance to answer his critics in an old fashioned political debate.
Maybe Wildcat Annie was right in her letter last issue; some of us can handle a little abuse once in a while, or at least we ought to be able to. Controversy is the predictable result of speaking your mind, and speaking up is the first duty of any revolutionary. Listening can be a painful experience also, as anyone who has ever attended an environmental conference can attest. Annie is also right about knowing our history, warts and all. But we should never forget one important thing: Our history, in spite of the tragedy we have experienced together, has been pretty funny at times. Earth First! has been driven by people with a well-developed sense of humor. So my advice to all you humorless ideologues out there who may be reading this: Get a Life!
Speaking of humor, Andy Kerr is one of the few guys I know who has been called a terrorist more than I have. But he's really not a terrorist. I kind of see him as our Johnnie Cochran. Anyway, Kerr is definitely the law-abiding citizen sort, except for maybe a few speeding tickets he got while yacking on his cellular phone. So I was surprised when he approached me at the Oregon Country Law Fair and said he wanted to get arrested and might need my help. "You came to the right place," I said, "We've put more people behind bars than most cops have." We made an agreement to get arrested at Hatfield's office if he voted to send the Salvage Rider to the Senate Floor for debate.
Hatfield did sell out to the Timber Beast, the Salvage Rider did clear the committee and now I find myself in an elevator on the first floor of the World Trade Center in Portland, Oregon. There are thirty riot cops in full dress on the fourteenth floor where Hatfield's office is located, twenty security guards in green blazers, a media circus, and the entire Oregon Natural Resource Council staff just outside the door, and I'm standing next to Kerr with a couple of pairs of handcuffs in my pocket telling him that if the Portland police approach, he should cuff himself immediately to the handrail.
As it turned out, we didn't have to lock down. Instead, we persuaded them to take us up to the 14th floor where they would ask us to leave, and then arrest us if we didn't. This was a curious arrangement worked out by action coordinators Twilly Cannon and Joe Keating, who convinced the cops that this was the only way we would leave on our own. It was possible, I think, because even though we were angry, we were civil. A front-page story in the Oregonian the next day described this as a well-staged media event, but they neglected to say that it was the cops that did all the staging. The police began by taking the media up to the 14th floor even though it was still closed off to the public, setting them up with good camera angles. Then, the cops escorted us up and let us give Hatfield's power-suited aid our press release and a derogatory picture of the proposed Mark O. Hatfield National Forest. Right on cue, the green blazers asked us to leave, and finally the arrest scenario came--the handcuffs, the paddywagon, the jail and all the other things that make an action fun to be at. We were soon out on the street before our lawyer could find out where we were.
Perhaps it is time now for people of Andy Kerr's stature to stand up and really confront the criminal mindset that keeps the timber industry, their wise-use goon squads and their bought-and-paid-for politicians like Hatfield in power. Are you listening Jay Hair? Carl Pope? Any of you other beltway big shots?
After the action, Kerr informed me that he had always seen civil disobedience as a desperate act of powerlessness, but after the action, he felt, well ... empowered. He said that it could be time for the mainstream environmental movement to move quickly towards the front lines in a struggle to save our dying planet. The alternative is to continue to watch while their memberships fall, their staffs become even more demoralized and their influence declines further both in Washington DC and in the rest of the country.
The Audubon Society's Brock Evans gave a speech in Eugene in 1985 where he stated that if things didn't start getting better that he would join us in blockading the bulldozers violating our last roadless forests. Well, its ten years later and things are worse than ever. What's it gonna be, folks, we don't have ten more years for many of the once common forest dwelling species. Its time to sacrifice something besides your credibility. It is time for action.
When you finish reading this piece, I want you to go take a look in the mirror and chant the following mantra: "I don't have time to be looking in the mirror. My planet needs me!" Then smash the mirror: You no longer have time for vanity. Grab yourself firmly by the ear and go outside.
Breathe. Are you breathing? Once more--deeper. What are you breathing? Do you smell, car exhaust, pulp mill, incinerator? If you're lucky enough not to now, you will soon.
Look around you. Do you see green and brown or dinge with some neon fuschia thrown in? Do you see the gleam of chrome or the gleam in the eye of a crow?
Taste. Can you taste the rancid grease from the McDonalds on the corner? Soot? Pain? The bitterness of mammals pretending they are not animals?
Touch. Is it cushy or concrete? Flesh or vinyl? Velvet or Astroturf?
Listen? The freeway? The diminishing songbirds? The amphibians in decline? Listen harder. Do you hear it? Go to the most unnaturally noisy place you can find and you will be able to hear it. Do you hear it now? That is the sound of nearly 25 years of environmental legislation being run through the Republicrat shredding machines by underpaid secretaries who have to sit on laps and take dictation.
Listen again. That's the sound of the handcuffs clicking on your wrists because you are about to put yourself on the line. If Andy Kerr and Mike Roselle can do it, so can you.
Even though sensory deprivation would be less painful, you must develop keen senses. You are going to need them and they will lead you down the right path. Your mission, should you choose to accept it ... wait a minute, cut the nostalgia. You have no choice; this mission has chosen you.
We must block the roads, seize the gates, sit in the trees, take the trucks, and clog the courts. We will ruin their events, point the finger, take names. Everywhere and anywhere. Choosing the time and place of encounter. Probing, embarrassing, stigmatizing, and shaming. Leave them no rock to hide under, no slime to slither away in.
You are probably going to jail soon. Get used to the idea. Let it run laps in your brain until it gets its second wind. Use positive vibration creative visualization techniques. Even if you don't get caught or you choose to do the work necessary to get people in and out of jail without being arrested yourself, get ready for intensity.
Remember when you were a little kid and you could jump on the bed for hours without feeling tired? Try it now. Run like crazy. Jump over stuff just because its there, even though you could walk around. Go outside in the rain and run around. Get soaking wet. Let hail pelt your body. Embrace the air. Walk around in the dark at night without a flashlight. Sit quietly somewhere and listen. Practice being invisible. Feel what it feels like to be in your timeless, mammalian body. Many of us had a favorite field or patch of woods to play in when we were kids. Go there, at least in your mind. Rage because its been developed. Now tell your body to physically recall running through that place with unworried abandon. Get physically and mentally prepared to have your stamina tested. You are going to need it.
Remind yourself that if they close off other avenues through theft of the process, if they ignore their own biological data, if their ugly perversion of justice stands, we have nothing left but direct action. They can try to cut; they can try to haul, but each and all of these activities will cost them if they are opposed openly and peacefully. A thief is more afraid of a bright light and a barking dog than anything else. We must expose this larceny and get the public to demand change, we cannot rely on just a few lawyers anymore.
This is going to be the most exciting summer you have ever experienced. This summer is one of the most important for environmental direct action. The recent wave of brazen, unabashed pro-industrial/anti-environmental legislation has relegated our already imperiled wild places to become natural resources. We must stave off the massacre with our bodies. The legislative pendulum will hopefully swing in a year or two. Meanwhile, we must fling our bodies on the line. Simultaneously, we must give our best effort at furthering the evolution of cultural consensus about wilderness. To permanently protect wild places, humans must integrate wildness into their personal identity. To have these values rub off on our fellow and sister large, hairless mammals, we must be firmly committed to total non-violence. That includes not only leaving your hostility behind when trying to block workers from doing their jobs, but also finding the humility to see the value in reaching out to them. We truly have a common enemy: Those who have greed running through their veins like some of us have blood. If we stop the sale or shut down the office for the day, it's only a matter of time before we need to do it again. We must have a long-term strategy to back up our actions in order to be ultimately successful.
People are talking. People are fed up. They hurt when they see those big trees rolling down the highway. They fume when they take their kids to see the salmon and there are none. They steam when they return to their favorite place of wilderness repose and find it slashed and gutted and hauled to Japan. People are ready to cross the line. It is our task to mobilize them, and to take effective actions that confront the timber industry in the forests, mills and boardrooms where they operate.
If at this time you want to learn and plug in, many well-established campaigns need activists. Cove/Mallard Coalition in Idaho is listed in the directory. The Headwaters forest campaign in Northern California and Albion Nation can be contacted through many of the directory. The Sugarloaf timber sale is being fought for by Kalmiopsis EF! in southern Oregon.
If you are an experienced organizer and you want to start a campaign around some newly endangered areas contact Phil Nanas At the Native Forest Council, (503) 688-2600.
If you can't leave your community to join a campaign, organize a campaign against a corporate villain in your area. Stone Container has been written up in the Journal and you can read about Champion International and Mitsubishi in this issue. Visit your local Mitsubishi dealer today! If you are a university student, your school almost certainly uses Boise-Cascade paper. Get the university to threaten switching companies unless Boise-Cascade agrees to preserve Sugarloaf. For more information, read the Journal.
Get off the superhighway and come down the road less traveled by.
Recently, a majority of corporate-backed Republican Representatives and Senators voted in favor of what might best be termed "The Timber Industry Welfare Act of 1995P96" as an amendment to the much larger government spending bill for this year (see accompanying article). The proposed law mandates that the federal government's land management agencies, the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, must cut down--no matter what--several hundred thousand acres of public forests located in the Pacific Northwest over a two-year period for the benefit of the timber industry.
To prevent concerned citizens from derailing the give-away of public assets to corporate timber interests, this ignominious legislation suspends all environmental and procedural laws and strips away Americans' right to challenge in court this vast forest destruction. In a fiscally irresponsible move showing that their budget-cutting rhetoric is just a mask hiding continued corporate subsidies, the Republican's timber industry welfare act proclaims that logging may proceed even if it costs taxpayers money and does not generate sufficient funds to cover the government's direct costs--estimated by Congress at $750 million. So much for the Contract with America's proclaimed objective of deficit reduction and increased participation by citizens in the activities of government.
The amendment utilizes benign terms like "salvage" logging and "forest health" to hide the impending, dramatic devastation of public natural resources that include salmon spawning grounds, tourist attractions and domestic watersheds. The timber welfare act continues a 35-year partnership of wealthy mill owners and politicians who raid public natural resources for private benefit. The House version of the so-called salvage logging program forces the government to cut 6.2 billion board feet of public forests--nearly double the total yield from the entire National Forest system--primarily in four Western states: Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana.
Using simple sound bites easily digested by the media and an uninformed public, the pro-timber industry subsidy crowd offers spurious and superficial reasons for destroying public forests without environmental safeguards or judicial review. Supposedly there is a crisis in "forest health"--an environmental emergency so urgent that we need to demolish the forests to make them healthy while suspending the laws that protect the environment, water, fish and wildlife. Scientists disagree, however, over the magnitude, and even the very existence, of the purported crisis in forest health.
If there is a crisis, it stems from nearly half a century of mismanagement of our public lands: easy-to-access areas were high-graded, whereby the largest and healthiest stands of old-growth were logged off; soils were damaged by logging equipment and poorly-constructed roads; weaker and inappropriate tree species unadapted to arid conditions were allowed to move in or were planted by public land managers; and continuous fire suppression allowed dangerous levels of tinder fuels to accumulate that otherwise would have been periodically cleared away by nature with low-intensity burns. And now, Congress wants these same land managers--who "lose" an estimated $100 million annually to timber theft and fraud--to go hog wild cutting down trees willy nilly with no legal avenue for citizen oversight.
The areas which are in fact most affected by human-induced stress of dead or dying trees are stands which were previously logged. Yet in order to meet the large quota of timber that Congress has mandated for the forest-extraction industry, roadless areas, steep canyons, areas adjacent to wilderness or parks, and headwaters forests--the most environmentally fragile and socially explosive locations--would have to be put on the chopping block. "Salvage" is defined very broadly in the timber industry subsidy bill to include any trees with some damage from or that are susceptible to fire or insect attack; speaking rhetorically, what trees aren't susceptible to a forest fire during a summer drought?
Even some environmentalists might agree that, in certain select sites already cut-over where there are densely-packed stands of small or dead trees and dangerous accumulations of fuels, highly-selective thinning and controlled burns could be valid prescriptions. The accelerated time-frame, removal of environmental constraints, and lack of judicial review of the timber welfare act, however, prevent this kind of careful and scientifically credible assessment from being made.
Another false pretense offered in support of the timber industry subsidy act is that dead or dying trees are going to "waste" rotting in the forest and this is a real shame since some mills are "starving for timber." As a matter of principal, it seems that the taxpayers should not have to feed a free-loading, private industry's over-production capacity or inefficient operation. For the past two decades, the number of mills and timber workers has been shrinking--despite rampant overcutting of public forests--due to modernization. Also, there is no timber supply crunch; our country each year exports 8P9Jbillion board feet of timber, of which 80 percent is raw logs and minimally processed wood products like pulp and chips. If Congress wants to increase the timber supply, it could ban or severely tax the export of this valuable, critical national resource--as Congress has done with oil, certain minerals, and select technologies. Historically, when Congress has mandated the dramatic escalation of logging on public forestlands, the market flooded with federal timber and prices were dampened, hurting private landowners.
Additionally, those "wasted" rotting trees are actually the future source of soil nutrients and wildlife habitat that make our forests so productive. Research from forests around the world demonstrates that removing rotting wood decreases soil productivity by removing crucial nutrients and organic humus. Downed, decaying wood also serves to prevent soil erosion and uncontrolled precipitation run-off, thereby helping watersheds to produce clean, sediment-free water.
Yet another deceitful argument advanced for the unfettered assault on public lands is that the poor timber industry is hurting and unemployed loggers need jobs. Economic evidence, however, substantially counters these myths: The Northwest's top 12 timber companies--accounting for the bulk of timber production and the majority of timber workers--saw their earnings increase an average of 150% in 1994 over 1993, with Georgia-Pacific Corp. having an increase of over 900 percent. Overall revenue or gross income was up 109 percent and employment held steady while productivity per worker increased. These are not signs of an industry hurting by any stretch of the imagination.
While the call for more "jobs" is emotionally appealing, it does not justify destroying public forests. For the past 12 consecutive months, Oregon's unemployment rate has been at its lowest level in 25 years and has been consistently below the national average. Many rural areas throughout the state have lower unemployment rates now with curtailed federal timber sales than during the unsustainable logging days of the 1980s.
Besides the deleterious effects to long-term timber supply and private landowners, the environmental fallout from the logging explosion on federal lands would extend to other industries. Extensive logging and roadbuilding cause severe soil disturbances that increase erosion and sedimentation of waterways, smothering endangered salmon eggs and thereby contributing to further decline of the Northwest's once prolific salmon runs and the accompanying commercial and sport fishing industries. Sediment-laden waters pollute domestic water supplies, which forces municipalities to expend large sums building costly filtration plants.
As soils become thinner due to logging-related damage and erosion and a lack of replenishing rotting organic material, their water-holding capacity decreases, which increases the likelihood of drought and catastrophic fire. Opening the forest canopy through massive logging further decreases humidity and increases aridity, which contributes to decreased late summer in-stream flows and a lowered water table, thereby adversely impacting fish populations and irrigation-based agricultural industries.
Although the Republicans offer fiscally conservative rhetoric wrapped in the flag, further examination of their actions reveals service to their true masters--large corporations and wealthy individuals that benefit from the free-spending of federal dollars and the give-away of public assets. So while governmental programs that serve relatively defenseless groups--the poor, inner city school children, minorities, the elderly and public wildlife--are drastically cut, corporate welfare subsidies remain not only unscathed, but see increased funding despite the negative effects on the deficit.
Some members of Congress, however, are fighting to eliminate corporate subsidies. Rep. George Miller (D-CA) has introduced the Public Resources Deficit Reduction Act of 1995 (HR 721), which would end federally subsidized logging, mining and grazing on public lands, resulting in savings to the taxpayers of $3 billion per year. Canceling just the entire federal timber welfare program--including the appalling "salvage logging" program and below-cost timber sales--would produce a savings of $700 million to $1Jbillion in 1995.
By suspending federal laws, stripping away judicial review, and rushing the "salvage" logging program, timber industry supporters in Congress tacitly admit that they cannot achieve the inflated timber targets that the industry desires without damaging our water quality, endangered fisheries, wildlife habitat and even our due process. This kind of governmental activity--abusing public resources and suspending the laws for the benefit of a private industry, and preventing citizens from seeking justice in the courts--borders on fascism. Once the lawmakers become lawbreakers, it becomes ever more tempting to suspend other laws, such as those protecting civil rights, consumers, workers and even public safety. Let's just hope that an outraged American public awakens before all the legacies of the Northwest--salmon, pure water, ancient forests, pristine mountains--are reduced to mere memories by our short-sighted, corrupt politicians.
Mark Ottenad of Salem is secretary and trail work coordinator for Friends of the Breitenbush Cascades.