Earth First!’S Impact On Logging Debatable

Five years after launching their anti-logging campaign in central Idaho, there remains a question about just how much has been accomplished by activists operating under the Earth First! banner.

Besides what some have called good theater that has led to 200 arrests for obstructing work and legislative passage of an anti-Earth First! law, the Forest Service maintains there has been little impact from the often innovative protesting techniques.

“There have been slowdowns in the work when we had to dig people out of the road or grind chains off their necks or remove a bumper from a vehicle or remove their arms from cement,” Nez Perce National Forest spokeswoman Elayne Murphy says.

“In terms of really obstructing the project, cutting them back, it hasn’t happened.”

But publicity about the peril to a key piece of the 3.7 million acre roadless area - the largest in the lower 48 states - has helped sway many Americans against logging there, including locals, said Robert “Ramon” Amon, the affable owner of land where the activists stay when they are not actively trying to halt logging in the Cove-Mallard area,

“If you talk to most Idahoans one on one, outside of the logger bars, we have 90 percent of the support,” he said.

Amon claims the forest demonstrations and anonymous “monkey-wrenching” damage to heavy equipment have frustrated the timber industry and forced the federal government to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep the protesters under surveillance.

And he claims success for the campaign simply because the Forest Service intended to have all the logging under way in six years and will not make it.

Of the 81 million board feet of timber approved for harvest at Cove-Mallard, less than 7 million have been logged so far.

Murphy concedes the deadline will be missed, but swears Earth First! is not the reason.

“The main thing that has slowed progress is we’ve impacted ourselves because of the listing of salmon and to protect habitat,” she said. “The activists can’t take credit for that.”

In addition, a federal judge halted logging for nearly all of 1994 before rejecting the contention of the Idaho Sporting Congress that the Forest Service has not complied with guidelines for salmon recovery.

For their part, the activists do not care what stops logging as long as it stops.

In late June on the Jack Creek Road project, they built barricades resembling those thrown up in Paris during the French Revolution. Heaps of slash timber, metal culverts buried upright and tripods with protesters perched atop will present impediments to loggers once they do try to get into the sale.

Highland Enterprises of Grangeville, which is building the road for Shearer Lumber Co., pulled out in late June because of “real frog-strangling rains,” the Forest Service said.

Murphy said Highland is working elsewhere and will return to Jack Creek when the other project is done.

Amon believes the hostility local people once had toward Earth First! is dissipating.

“Local merchants are opening their doors,” he said. “We’re not Ruby Ridge, we’re not Waco, we’re not violent.”

Elk City General Store owner Trent Woods seems to agree.

“We just keep out of each other’s way. It’s no big deal, really,” he said. “They come into town from time to time and do some business, but they don’t identify themselves as Earth First!ers.”

Only 77,000 acres, Cove-Mallard is a link between the Gospel Hump Wilderness and the River of No Return and Selway-Bitterroot wildernesses. But it played a critical role in the creation of the 2.3 million-acre River of No Return Wilderness.

Former Republican Sen. James McClure and the late Democratic Sen. Frank Church won approval of the wilderness in 1980 partly because they assuaged the timber industry with the prospect of cutting logs in Cove-Mallard.

And the timber sales now being protested involve only 8 percent of that land. Moreover, the Forest Service warns much of the Cove-Mallard is matured lodgepole pine, capable of exploding in a firestorm.

Amon believes the aesthetic value of the unending timber that the Cove-Mallard provides more than counters those factors.