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Logging

Alliance For The Wild Rockies Files Lawsuit To Stop Massive Clearcutting

Bull trout lost approximately 60 percent of their historic range before they were even listed as ‘threatened’ on the Endangered Species List in 1998. Yet the Forest Service wants to bulldoze and clearcut some of Montana’s few remaining, most pristine, bull trout watersheds that flow out of the Great Burn of 1910 area. Given the bull trout’s struggle against extinction, we’re going to court to halt this highly destructive project. The Alliance for the Wild Rockies filed a lawsuit on August 22 in federal district court in Missoula challenging the Redd Bull 2 logging project in the Superior Ranger District of the Lolo National Forest west of St. Regis, Montana.

Forest Protectors Launch Tree Sit And Lawsuits To Stop Ecocidal Logging

Standing at the edge of the Aldwell Forest clearcut just above the Elwha River in Washington State, the Murphy Company’s devastation of the landscape slaps you in the face. Here on land owned by the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR), a beautiful mature forest has been logged for hardwood, plywood, and other wood products. Hacked-off stumps are visible in all directions, a few trees left to stand. The former forest floor, once rich with organisms and nutrients that fed life, now stands heaped into huge slash piles to be burned. The land doused with herbicide to kill any competitors to Douglas fir seedlings that will become a new tree plantation monoculture.

Order To Expand Logging Threatens To Increase Climate-Fueled Wildfires

On March 1, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production.” The order claimed “onerous Federal policies” have hindered domestic timber production and that expanding logging was a matter of protecting “national and economic security.” It ordered the secretary of the Interior and head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), who oversee the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) respectively, to develop a plan to expand timber targets and streamline permitting “to suspend, revise, or rescind all existing regulations, orders, guidance documents, policies, settlements, consent orders, and other agency actions that impose an undue burden on timber production.”

Timber From Illegal Logging In Amazon Discovered In US, European Markets

A new investigative report, Tricks, Traders and Trees, by international NGO the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) reveals widespread illegal logging, corruption and fraud in the Brazilian Amazon. The investigation traced illegal timber that had originated from five logging sites in Pará state to the United States and European Union, despite laws that prohibit the importing of illegal timber and require due diligence from companies. “Our investigation shows how illegal Amazon timber is flooding EU and U.S. markets, fueling unfair competition for legitimate companies despite laws banning the trade in illicit wood.

Forest Defenders Launch Tree Sit To Stop Old Growth Logging

Josephine County, Oregon — In rural southern Oregon, community members are reigniting a dormant battle against logging. On the morning of April 1, a group of activists walked onto federally-managed public lands set to be logged. Climbers scaled an old growth ponderosa pine and hoisted a wooden platform over 100 feet into the air, suspended from the tree. It’s from this perch that a protester is now blocking access to a swathe of old growth forest at risk of being cut down. The blockade is preventing logging that’s part of the Poor Windy Forest Management Plan.

New Film: Colonialism And Capitalism Are Decimating Our Forests

Award-winning producer, activist and artist Eleanor Goldfield has a new documentary out, To The Trees, about forest defense in the Redwood Forests of Northern California. Beautifully filmed and composed, Goldfield shows the decimation of our old-growth forests and efforts to stop this crime while placing the struggle in the broader context of colonialism and capitalism. Clearing the FOG speaks with Goldfield about how she connected with forest defenders, the experience of making the film and what we can all do to protect our last remaining Redwoods, the giants of carbon sequestration. Aptly named, To The Trees will inspire you to embrace and protect our forests.

Activists Organize Direct Action Against Logging In California

A customer entering Home Depot, the largest home improvement retailer in the United States, will find elegant redwood with a certification of “sustainable forestry” available. Humboldt Redwoods Company (HRC) provides this shiny commodity. The company claims to be reducing the use of herbicides, and selecting trees for cutting, rather than “clear-cutting” (general clearing of an area). The agent that creates the concepts and criteria of selection and of sustainability, however, is the company itself.[3] For instance, they commit not to cut “old growth trees,” despite there being no scientific or consensual definition of the age or conditions that would characterize those.

Call For Solidarity From The #EkoniAci Movement

In order to enforce the moratorium on logging on their territory, Nitaskinan, members of the Atikamekw of Manawan are currently setting up a new blockade. It is located at km 16 on the road to Manawan, north of St-Michel-des-Saints. Logging companies have been informed that they will not be able to return with their machinery when the thaw occurs on May 19th. We need to be many to ensure that they respect this instruction. It is possible to come now to help set up the camp. Those who can free themselves, the most sensitive moments are likely to be from May 19 to 26. The blockade will remain in place afterwards and solidarity will still be necessary.

Innu Communities Say Logging Threatens Their Cultural Identity

The Montreal Gazette reports: “Two Innu communities on Quebec’s North Shore say they are ‘exasperated’ by the province’s ‘inaction’ when it comes to protecting the woodland caribou, a species threatened by logging.” “They say the Quebec government is not taking seriously ‘the irreversible damage the loss of biodiversity’ has on the Innu.” The article adds: “Councils representing the Pessamit and Essipit communities on Tuesday accused the province of dragging its feet on a proposal to create a 2,700-square-kilometre biodiversity reserve, about 150 kilometres north of Saguenay.” Marielle Vachon, head of the Innu Council of Pessamit, says: “[The loss of biodiversity] caused in large part by logging on Innu ancestral lands — without regard to our needs, our values, our rights and interests — generates inestimable cultural losses for our communities.

Weyerhaeuser Strike Enters Fifth Week

At four sawmills, two log export facilities, two statewide log truck operations, and seven logging camps, 1,100 Weyerhaeuser workers have been on strike since Sept. 13 over a basic union principle, fairness. Weyerhaeuser, after reporting record profits of $2.6 billion last year, proposed that its workers make concessions: accept wages that lose ground to inflation, and start paying a share of health insurance premiums. Weyerhaeuser is one of the rare employers that pays the entire health insurance premium, a benefit that used to be standard, and workers think if they give that up, it may never get better. Northwest Weyerhaeuser workers already agreed to concessions in their most recent contract, including a two-tier set-up which terminated the pension for new hires.

Activists To Rally Against Renewed Logging In State Forest

California - Community, environmental and tribal activists opposed to renewed logging in the Jackson Demonstration State Forest plan to rally in the forest Sunday and warn of potential civil disobedience in the future. The notice comes in response to a Cal Fire announcement that tree cutting would resume as early as this week on at least one of four incomplete timber harvest plans in the Mendocino County forest. Those plans were recently revised to halt removal of the largest trees. The return of logging crews ends an eight-month pause on tree removal that allowed state officials to start rethinking priorities for the nearly 50,000-acre forest and begin negotiations with local tribes that are seeking co-management rights.

Forest Defenders Continue To Block Destruction Of Rare Forest Habitat

This week, forest defenders are succeeding in slowing tree clearing using their bodies to protect sensitive and rare forest habitats from aggressive tree clearing from PG&E contractors in constant cold rain and wind. On Wednesday, October 19, supervisors from PG&E and arborists from Wright Tree Service Company put concerned park visitors at risk of serious injury by continuing cutting and dropping of tree sections in close proximity to where the visitors stood in civil disobedience to impede the cutting. The forest being cut lies within Humboldt Redwoods State Park. This area is under the jurisdiction of the Bear River Band of the Rohnerville Rancheria according to a 2020 MOU with the State of California.

What Is Ecocide, And Why Does It Matter?

Jamie Hunter has just returned from defying a court injunction to protect old-growth forest in Fairy Creek and is going to Glasgow next month to push for a major change to international law that would provide another tool against environmental degradation. The 21-year-old from Nelson, B.C., sees the actions as two fronts of the same battle to confront forces otherwise damaging the planet and imperiling its inhabitants. “To me, Stop Ecocide is a really tangible solution,” said the co-founder of its Canadian chapter. “Obviously, it’s not the only solution, but it’s a big piece of the puzzle because it really says that causing this damage to the environment is not OK.” Stop Ecocide is a global movement involving international criminal lawyers, Indigenous advisers, researchers, and diplomats working to add ecocide as a crime considered by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Horgan’s Fairy Creek Excuses Betray Citizens

The NDP government can’t keep dodging responsibility for the debacle at Fairy Creek — or the much bigger questions about the RCMP’s role in the province. Especially as increasing RCMP resources — with provincial government approval — are devoted to shutting down protests, frequently by Indigenous people. Last week, the BC Supreme Court refused to extend an injunction against protesters blocking logging, citing RCMP civil rights’ abuses — facilitated by the provincial government — in enforcing the court order. The dispute is about old-growth forests on southern Vancouver Island. Protesters blocked licence-holder Teal-Jones from logging in late 2020. On April 1, BC Supreme Justice Frits Verhoeven granted the company an injunction preventing the protesters from blocking roads or interfering with company operations.

Judge Refuses To Extend Court Injunction At Fairy Creek

A B.C. Supreme Court judge has refused to extend an injunction that was granted to prevent protesters from impeding logging operations at Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island. Justice Douglas Thompson ruled the reputation of the court outweighed the economic interests of the logging company, Teal Jones. Thompson pointed to the RCMP’s enforcement of the court injunction as the main reason for the court’s tarnished reputation. “The methods of enforcement of the court’s order have led to serious and substantial infringement of civil liberties, including impairment of the freedom of the press to a marked degree,” wrote the judge. One of the lawyers who argued against extending the injunction, Patrick Canning, said the ruling puts pressure on the province to resolve the ongoing dispute at Fairy Creek.
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