For 3^rd straight year Earth First sets up Idaho protest camp

GRANGEVILLE, Idaho (AP) 4 Earth First activists have peacefully hiked 85 miles into their central Idaho encampment to launch the third year of their protests against logging in areas of the Nez Perce National Forest.

Group spokesman Robert “Ramon” Amon said the walk from Grangeville to Dixie came off without any confrontation between activists and locals.

“It was fine,” Amon said on Monday. “We didn’t have any trouble and we had some good conversations with people along t|)e way.”

A picnic the activists sponsored last Tuesday drew only four local people, he said, and one of those was a Forest Service liaison assigned to accompany the group on its walk.

Earth First is protesting logging in the 77,484-acre Cove-Mallard area. Cutting was completed last year in the Grouse Creek drainage of the Cove-Mallard and was scheduled to begin this summer in the Noble Creek drainage.

But logging has been temporarily halted by U.S. District Judge Harold Ryan in a lawsuit filed by the Idaho Sportsmen’s Coalition. The group contends the Forest Service is breaking environmental law by logging the Cove-Mallard.

Ron Mitchell, coalition director, said Ryan was expected to hear oral arguments in the lawsuit within three weeks. The judge’s order coincided with the period during which no logging was planned anyway.

But if Ryan continues the injunction, Amon said activists will turn to other roadless areas where timber cutting is proposed.

“Our goal this year, as it was last year, is simply to bring people here and show them what’s happening, teach them the history of the place, the politics of the place and let them draw their own conclusions as to what they should or should not do in order to protect it,” Amon said.

“An act of civil disobedience would be appropriate,” he added. “Whether that happens this year I have no idea. I have no intention of getting arrested this year.”

Dozens of activists were arrested last year for chaining themselves to gates, burying themselves in roadbeds and other violations in protest of Cove-Mallard logging. The Legislature passed a law in the spring making it a felony to solicit people to interfere with a legal timber sale.

This January the activists reformed under a new name: the Cove-Mallard Coalition. Amon said the name change is not an attempt to distance itself from or repudiate Earth First, known for “monkey-wrenching” acts of vandalism on logging equipment.

“The Cove-Mallard Coalition is simply an attempt to broaden the base of the campaign by allowing for more individuals and groups to ally themselves with the Cove-Mallard campaign without having to embrace the slogan, Earth First” he said. “Some people feel uncomfortable with that.”