Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (PT) - MONDAY FEBRUARY 12, 1996
By: DON HOPEY
Edition: SOONER Section: NATIONAL Page: A-9
Don Hopey is the Post-Gazette environmental writer.
Tree-huggers with a smile, and damn proud of it, Robert Amon and Robert Hoyt rolled their "Roadshow for the Roadless" here last week.
The three-month, 40-city roadshow, now half done, aims to publicize the four-year battle to halt logging in the Cove/Mallard region of the Nez Perce National Forest in Idaho. The area borders the River of No Return, in the middle of the largest roadless wilderness in the lower 48 states.
"It's salvage logging with the 'l' taken out," said Amon, 58, a retired -- and unlikely looking -- Equitable Life Insurance Co. executive in rumpled windbreaker jacket, jeans and salt-and-pepper beard.
The road trip, from Minneapolis to Maine, is following the tactical and philosophical road map established 20 years ago in a campaign for legislation to establish Alaskan wilderness preserves.
"Once we get the word out," Amon said, "it will be up to the American people whether to save this magical place."
The timber sales approved by the the U.S. Forest Service would result in more than 200 clear-cuts of 30 and 40 acres each, producing 81 million board feet of timber. That's enough to fill 26,000 logging trucks.
Amon said this checkerboard of clear-cuts in the middle of the biggest unlogged ecosystem in the Lower 48 will devastate recently introduced wolves, endangered salmon and a wide variety of wildlife ranging from elk to wolverine.
To make the cutting possible, the Forest Service plans to build 145 miles of logging roads.
"With road costs and the price it's getting for trees, the Forest Service will lose about $6 million on the deal," Amon said. "In this age of so-called fiscal responsibility, that's totally outrageous. The government is allowing destruction of an American treasure, and they're using taxpayers money to do it."
But it is ecological outrage fanned by Amon's Cove/Mallard Coalition that has spawned high-profile protests. Hundreds of people have been arrested after burying themselves in logging roads and chaining themselves to gates and police cars to prevent logging trucks from entering.
So many people have come to Cove/Mallard that the Idaho Legislature in 1994 passed the "Earth First! Law," which makes it a felony to solicit people to come to Idaho to interfere with logging.
Amon and Hoyt have violated that law at every stop of their tour so far. One of the songs penned and sung by Hoyt, and interspersed with videos from the Nez Perce protests, is titled "We're Not Playing By Your Rules Anymore."
"Direct action is becoming the thing to do in the environmental movement of the 1990s," said Amon, who operates a permanent outdoor kitchen for protesters from May to September on his 20-acre Nez Perce inholding. "We've had hundreds of people come up and join us -- local residents, Philadelphia lawyers, folks from Australia and England."
Indeed, trees are being chopped in Alaska, Washington, Oregon and Idaho and supporters are not taking the unkind cuts lying down. Direct action, also known as civil resistance, has become part of the forest landscape. Arrests are common at forest salvage operations at many national forests throughout the West and even overseas.
In England, a diverse band of environmental guerrillas has taken to living in treetops 50 miles west of London to stop tree cutting for a highway bypass.
In the Nez Perce, the timber cuts were supposed to take six years to complete, but with four years gone, only about 20 percent of the trees have been cut and 30 of 145 miles of logging roads built.
An injunction to stop the logging, won in 1994, was recently overturned.
"We've slowed them down," Amon said, "and, to paraphrase an old legal saying, logging delayed is logging denied."
Enviro-quote-of-the-week: "I'm too old to be tied to a tree, but it's good that some people will do it."
-- Annick Grey, 60, who passes soup, sandwiches and fruitcake to protesters living in trees near Newbury, England
Copyright © 1996 PG Publishing Co.