Entertainers Provide Bond to Fight Logging

With an eleventh-hour assist from Hollywood, two environmental groups posted a $250,000 bond Wednesday required to block logging on a tract of unprotected redwoods in the Headwaters Forest near Eureka.

A judge had given the Sierra Club and the Environmental Protection Information Center until Wednesday to come up with the money, intended to offset income losses that may be suffered by the company that sought to log about half of the 1,000-acre tract.

After a frantic scramble, the groups managed to secure large donations from actor James Garner and singers Bonnie Raitt and Don Henley. Henley donated profits from a Tuesday night concert in the Bay Area.

“It was incredibly generous,” said Elyssa Rosen, a Sierra Club senior regional representative. She noted that Henley’s contribution represented about half the total needed to post the bond.

The bond was required by Superior Court Judge Quentin Kopp, who last week blocked a plan by Pacific Lumber Co. to log the area known as the Hole in the Headwaters.

But the judge, a former state senator with a reputation as a maverick, also took the unusual step of requiring the environmentalists to post the substantial bond. The money will go to Pacific Lumber if the company prevails in a trial, expected later this year.

The groups chose not to challenge Kopp’s decision on the bond but said it could have a chilling effect on legal action brought by environmentalists and other public interest groups.

“Any way you look at it, there’s a worrisome precedent being set here,” Rosen said. “It’s of great concern.”

In his ruling, Kopp said the Sierra Club has vast resources to draw on to finance the bond. Sierra Club officials countered that the organization has little in cash reserves.

The bond allows environmentalists to press forward with a case that got a boost with Kopp’s ruling. The judge concluded that the state Forestry Department had made a “transparent” effort to avoid public comment on timber harvest plans for the land, which lies within a forest preserve established in a landmark deal last year.

Kopp found that the department should have considered the effects of noise from helicopters that would hoist trees from the steep hillsides and of using a logging road above Elk River salmon spawning grounds.