Washington — As the U.S. Senate prepares to vote on H.R. 1904,
the legislative equivalent of President Bush’s so-called “Healthy
Forest Initiative” (HFI), forest protection activists in
Washington, D.C. delivered a 6-foot-diameter slab cut from the
stump of a logged 440-year old tree to the Department of Interior
today. A message on the slab read: “Clear-Cut Cowboy says, ‘No Tree
Left Behind’ ” in protest of the president’s wholesale dismantling
of environmental laws.
“Despite promises to the contrary, the Senate version of HFI
provides so many loopholes that old-growth trees will continue to
be cut down on public lands,” said Matt Stembridge, Forest
Campaigner with Greenpeace. “This slab is symbolic of the bill’s
defects and of the Bush Administration’s attitude towards America’s
forests.”
According to Department of Interior officials, including
Director of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Kathleen Clarke,
the BLM is neither cutting old trees nor clear-cutting. However,
the giant slab came to Washington, D.C. from an old-growth sale
named “Mr. Wilson” on Medford BLM land in Oregon. 113 acres of
clear-cuts and another 100 acres of logging are slated in the Mr.
Wilson sale.
On Friday, several activists blockaded a road leading to the
Bear Pen sale on the Medford BLM in the same watershed as the Mr.
Wilson sale. The adjacent old-growth timber sales are in the
Glendale Resource Area of the Medford BLM, with logging taking
place within an area designated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service as critical habitat for the endangered Spotted Owl.
“In just two years, the Bush Administration has overseen the
unraveling of decades of environmental laws and protections, such
as its dismantling of the landmark Roadless Area Conservation Rule
and the gutting of the Northwest Forest Plan and the Sierra Nevada
Framework Plan,” said Stembridge.
In addition to undermining
environmental protections, the Bush Administration has also begun
to attack certain civil liberties, from limiting citizen
participation in the management of public lands to possibly
labeling peaceful protestors as terrorists. Greenpeace is currently
facing an unprecedented federal charge for exposing a shipment of
illegal mahogany from the Amazon in 2002. Charged under an obscure
1872 law, Greenpeace may be the first organization in U.S. history
to be indicted as a corporate entity for peaceful protest
activities of its supporters.
