A new fight for old growth

Activists take to the trees despite death in last year’s protest

By Ben Jacklet

The Portland Tribune, Jul 1, 2003, Updated Oct 30, 2009

The tree-sitters are perched on a platform large enough to sleep four, about 100 feet aboveground in the Mount Hood National Forest.

With ample supplies to last the summer and dozens of supporting troops in the forest and back in Portland, they vow to remain treed 24 hours a day, for as long as it takes to block the 167-acre Solo timber harvest.

And news that an environmental lawsuit has delayed the Solo cut for the summer hasn’t changed their plans. They think their presence in the canopy at Solo may ultimately kill the sale.

They are continuing to use the tree-sitting tactic despite the death last year of Beth O’Brien, a 22-year-old woman who fell out of a tree three days after the Eagle Creek timber sale in the same forest was canceled.

Meanwhile, an executive from the lumber company that won the contract for the trees there says he plans to wait out the protesters.

Rob Freres, vice president of Freres Lumber Co., says: “We could log it in the middle of winter. Those guys are probably fair-weather campers. They’ll have a tougher time running away through 3 feet of snow.”

The battles at Eagle Creek lasted three years. Three demonstrators were convicted of arson after admitting to burning logging trucks there. The headline-grabbing tree-sitter Tre Arrow remains wanted by the FBI in connection with that arson, nearly a year after the federal government first issued a warrant for his arrest. The sale was canceled in April 2002.

The Solo tree-sitters named their chosen tree “Horehound,” which was O’Brien’s nickname. They say the tragedy has brought a deeper level of seriousness to their effort to end commercial logging on public lands.

“People fall in love with these types of places,” says Ivan Maluski of the Cascadia Forest Alliance. “There’s so few old-growth forests left, they’re definitely worth fighting for.”

Glenn Sachet, a spokesman for the forest service, sees it differently: “When they say protest, what they mean is breaking the law, endangering public safety and damaging natural resources.”

Sachet says that his agency respects the rights of law-abiding dissenters but will deal harshly with saboteurs and lawbreakers. Occupying trees on public land is illegal, but protesters are rarely arrested and prosecuted before logging operations begin, which is after the timber is sold.

No one has been arrested at Solo so far. But there is evidence there of minor acts of sabotage.

Specklebellies and RTVs

The road leading into the area designated for logging is blocked with piles of logs and brush and cut with a trench. The activists joke that the trench was the work of a “Cascadian roadpecker,” a rare bird.

The roadpecker is, of course, a mythical beast. But Maluski and his cohorts are searching for a collection of species with similarly odd names to achieve their goals. That’s because, along with the usual tactics of occupying trees and blocking roads, the forest activists are using a new weapon of “citizen surveys,” where they climb trees and scour the forest for rare plants and animals Ñ with the goal of limiting or canceling the logging operation.

That helps explain why they spend so much time talking about specklebelly lichen, red tree voles and Malone jumping slugs.

On a recent day, Kyla Zaret is marching through the woods, looking for specklebelly lichen (Pseudocyphellaria rainierensis).

A slim 24-year-old, Zaret bushwhacks effortlessly, stopping occasionally to consult a copy of Bruce McCune’s “Macrolichens of the Pacific Northwest.”

Last summer, the forest alliance invited a lichenologist to give a seminar at Solo about how to find and identify old-growth specklebelly lichen, a rare species that looks kind of like a wrinkled, lime-green piece of paper. It grows only in the rain forests of the Pacific Northwest and is rare enough that the forest service has to survey for it before approving logging plans.

During the seminar, the lichenologist found a live specimen in the area to be harvested. The forest activists brought their evidence to the forest service, and the agency put a 150-foot buffer around the tree with the lichen in it.

Now Zaret is looking for more specimens, so that more of the forest can be placed off-limits.

The other great prize for the forest activists is the red tree vole (Arborimus longicaudus), a cryptic, nocturnal rodent that builds nests out of bits of fir needles that it spits out after chewing.

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