Ex-Tree Dweller Still in Logging Fight

Julia “Butterfly” Hill, who spent two years in an ancient redwood to protest logging practices, tried her hand at mainstream tactics Wednesday, urging the state forestry board to impose an immediate ban on the cutting of California’s oldest trees.

Hill, 25, was joined by scores of other environmentalists pressing for an emergency rule protecting old-growth trees, whose dense canopy is critical to spawning salmon and other sensitive species.

But the impassioned pleas did not convince the board that a ban is warranted. Instead--as many in the audience shouted “Shame! Shame!”--the members late Wednesday voted 6-1 to deny the emergency rule. In a minor concession, the board did agree to establish a policy study committee composed of different sides in the debate.

State officials said the emergency ban would have affected as many as 23 million trees, or 31% of the total timber volume on private land in California. The timber’s estimated value is $31 billion.

Meeting before a huge, overflow crowd, the forestry board heard testimony from a long parade of speakers. But the star witness--at least in emotional terms--was Hill, who achieved almost mythic status among environmentalists for her marathon tree-sit in Humboldt County.

“This is all about protecting the trees, including the one I lived in, which was more than 1,000 years old,” said Hill, clutching a plastic bag of mud she said she collected from a hillside that eroded after removal of a tree.

“This is an emergency,” she added later. “That’s why all these people came to Sacramento from their beloved forests and family life.”

To order a ban on old-growth logging, the nine-member Board of Forestry would have had to conclude that ongoing harvesting represents a threat to “public peace, health and safety or general welfare.”

The groups pressing for action cited a recent logging job near Garberville as evidence of a need for an emergency ban. Under an exemption from harvesting rules, crews clearing forest for a PG&E; power line cut down old-growth trees. The work was stopped after environmentalists alerted authorities.

Resources Secretary Mary Nichols, who met with the protesters on Tuesday, opposes an emergency ban but favors tighter environmental review for any logging that involved old-growth stands, a spokesman said.

She also has ordered the Department of Forestry to undertake an inventory of ancient trees and develop recommendations for their protection.

The daughter of an itinerant preacher, Hill was an unemployed drifter when she joined the forest protest movement that flared anew after Maxxam Corp. bought Pacific Lumber and began clear-cutting large tracts of trees. During her vigil, she lived on a platform slung between branches 150 feet above the earth.

She descended from the tree--which she dubbed Luna--in December after negotiating a compromise with Pacific Lumber.