Seattle Times (SE) - Thursday February 9, 1995
By: AP
Edition: FIRST Section: SOUTH Page: B2
MOSCOW, Idaho - Two environmental activists were arrested yesterday as they blocked a logging road in the Nez Perce National Forest to protest resumed cutting, the Cove-Mallard Coalition said.
Mike Roselle, 40, of the coalition and Tom Fullum, 28, of the Native Forest Network were arrested and taken to Grangeville, members reported.
Last year the Idaho Legislature passed a law making it a felony to interfere with an approved timber sale. The two arrests are apparently the first test of that law.
Both men were booked into the Idaho County Jail yesterday afternoon for solicitation to halt or impede lawful forest practices, according to Idaho County Sheriff's Lt. Skott Mealer.
Mealer said a trailer carrying logging equipment was moving down the Noble Creek road, headed toward the area to be cut, when Roselle and Fullum blocked it.
Mealer told the two to move or they would be arrested, and they agreed to be arrested.
"They can pull the two of us off the road, but we expect dozens will come to take our place," Roselle said. "It's a sad day when ordinary citizens have to use methods like these to get our own government to obey the law."
A federal judge's stay of an injunction against logging, mining, grazing and road building in central Idaho was extended until mid-March, allowing the Forest Service to recommend logging by Shearer Lumber in the Noble Creek area, Roselle said. The injunction was intended to protect salmon-spawning habitat.
The activists also contend the Forest Service has disregarded the National Marine Fisheries Service's biological opinion requiring the resurveying of timber sales and widening of streamside buffers to protect spawning beds.
The Cove-Mallard timber sales involve 81 million board feet of logs and at least 135 miles of new roads.
Copyright © 1995 The Seattle Times