Old-growth logging begins despite protesters

SELMA, Ore. — Loggers began falling trees inside an old growth forest reserve burned by the 2002 Biscuit fire on Monday after authorities hauled away protesters trying to block access while waiting for legal challenges in federal courts.

Five timber fallers toting chain saws, axes and fuel cans hiked past the protest site on the Siskiyou National Forest and a short while later the roar of chain saws and trees crashing to earth could be heard. Authorities arrested 10 people and towed away a disabled pickup truck draped with an Earth First banner.

About 50 protesters assembled on 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 law enforcement officers picked her up in her metal lawn chair blocking a logging road bridge leading to the Fiddler Timber sale. Another person was arrested nearby.

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 has expired, and work has to proceed quickly to avoid further loss of the fire-killed timber to 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 Wildlands Project and other environmental groups.

Another hearing is scheduled for March 22 on a separate lawsuit being considered by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. It also challenges logging in old growth forest reserves.

"It's not about us versus loggers," said Laurel Sutherlin, a spokesman for the Oxygen Coalition, a conservation group. "This is the front line of a national struggle."

The salvage logging on the 2002 Biscuit fire has become the focus of a national debate between conservationists and the Bush administration over how to treat the millions of acres of national forest that burn every year in wildfires and whether to log any of the remaining old growth in national forests.