Burn-Area Logging Starts After Protests

Loggers began cutting down trees inside an old growth forest reserve burned by the 2002 Biscuit fire on Monday after authorities hauled away protesters trying to block access.

Five lumberjacks toting chainsaws, axes and fuel cans hiked past the protest site in the Siskiyou National Forest and a short while later the roar of chainsaws and trees crashing to earth could be heard. Authorities arrested 10 people and towed a disabled pickup draped with an Earth First! banner.

About 50 protesters assembled in the Siskiyou National Forest before dawn, first at a green steel bridge across the Illinois River, and later at the pickup truck barricade in an attempt to stall logging that had been made possible by the expiration of an injunction.

“We have no laws in our forest so we will be the law,” said Joan Norman, 72, of Selma, before Forest Service officers picked her up in her lawn chair that had blocked a logging road bridge.

John West, president of Silver Creek Logging. Co., said the protesters had a right to their say, but a federal court injunction that held up the logging for months had expired, and work had to proceed to avoid further timber loss from insects and rot.

“The people of this country have given the Forest Service the responsibility for taking care of this land,” West said. “The Forest Service is trying to do that.”

Attorney Lauren Regen said protesters were trying to delay the logging long enough for a U.S. District Court hearing scheduled for Wednesday on a temporary restraining order sought by the Cascadia Wild-lands Project and other environmental groups. The environmentalists contend that logging removes the large trees that are the building blocks for natural regeneration of a forest.

A hearing is scheduled March 22 on a separate lawsuit being considered by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that challenges old-growth logging.