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Logging

New Film: Colonialism And Capitalism Are Decimating Our Forests

August 28, 2023 Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. , , ,
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

June 5, 2023 Noa Cykman, Resilience. , , ,
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

May 14, 2023 Montreal Counter-Info, It's Going Down. , , , ,
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

December 2, 2022 Brent Patterson, PBI Canada. , , ,
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

October 14, 2022 Don McIntosh and Colin Staub, Northwest Labor Press. , , ,
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

August 31, 2022 Mary Callahan, The Press Democrat. , , ,
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

October 24, 2021 Anonymous, It's Going Down. , , ,
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?

October 8, 2021 Morgan Sharp, National Observer. , , ,
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

October 4, 2021 Paul Willcocks, The Tyee. , , ,
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

September 29, 2021 Lisa Cordasco, Vancouver Sun. , , ,
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.

Forest Defenders Blockade Logging Roads In Mattole Headwaters

September 24, 2021 It's Going Down. , , ,
Early Thursday morning, 20 forest defenders barricaded logging roads in the headwaters of the upper North Fork Mattole River in anticipation of Humboldt Redwood Company (HRC) logging operations. “Road building on steep, unstable slopes and logging of old-growth forest is unacceptable,” said a local resident participating in the blockade. “This logging plan will release a large amount of long term greenhouse gas, and along with industrial logging across the Pacific Northwest, constitutes a major driver of climate catastrophe.” HRC plans to log over 300 acres just outside of Humboldt Redwoods State Park. The activists say that while the company has policies against logging old growth forest, much of the unspoiled habitat here is excluded from protections.

RCMP At Fairy Creek Blockade Ignore The Real Emergency

September 1, 2021 Rita Wong, Rabble.ca. , , ,
On Aug. 9, the one-year anniversary of the Fairy Creek protection efforts, the RCMP raided Fairy Creek's headquarter camp. Twenty-five police vehicles, a helicopter and an emergency tactical unit were deployed against peaceful ancient forest protectors that day, and almost every day since. What is the emergency that the police are responding to with such a massively expensive show of force? Since the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a code red warning on Aug. 9, is it the climate emergency that is so clear to us this summer with deadly heat waves and extreme forest fires? No, the science tells us that RCMP are actually making this climate emergency worse by enforcing the clear cutting of some of the last remaining old-growth forests on the West Coast.

Fairy Creek Protesters Rally Outside Justin Trudeau’s Hotel

August 26, 2021 CBC News. , , ,
When Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau touched down in the Vancouver area on Tuesday as part of his election campaign, a group of protesters against old-growth logging in the Fairy Creek watershed were waiting to greet him at his downtown hotel. A mix of Liberal supporters and protesters, numbering about 150 people in total, stood outside the Marriott Pinnacle Hotel where the leader was expected to spend the night. Many of the protesters carried drums and chanted "Justin Trudeau commits genocide; the Liberal Party commits genocide," as Vancouver Centre Liberal incumbent Dr. Hedy Fry watched in silence. The Liberal Party later told reporters that Trudeau had gone out for dinner rather than heading straight to the hotel as planned because of security concerns from the RCMP.

Fairy Creek Got An Old-Growth Deferral

August 15, 2021 Zoe Yunker, The Tyee. , , ,
Splatsin First Nation Kukpi7 Wayne Christian knows the migration patterns of the last remaining southern mountain caribou in his territory in southeast B.C. — they spend their winters up in the mountains. He knows the way that water travels from glaciers to the region’s streams and back again. He knows what the region’s forests look like when they’re healthy. Last month, he saw something he’d never seen before. The shiny green leaves of the cottonwood trees that make up part of the forest’s understory had turned a dull, parched grey — almost dead. “I was thinking, what’s going on here? There is a signal here. Pay attention to this.” Christian was on his way to lead a ceremony beneath a cluster of ancient cedar trees, marking the Splatsin Nation’s support for the blockades led by a group called Old Growth Revylution that opposes old-growth logging in the region.

Police Raid The Hub For Fairy Creek Blockaders

August 10, 2021 Zoe Yunker, The Tyee. , , ,
In a major advancement of police activity in the old growth blockades around Fairy Creek on Southern Vancouver Island, RCMP raided the gate to the blockaders’ headquarters on Monday. It was the first time police had carried out arrests at the site identified as a communal hub for the movement. It also signals the likelihood of more confrontation ahead in the biggest direct action fight to protect B.C.’s old growth forests in decades. “The frontline has been brought to us,” Willow, a forest defender who is stationed at blockade headquarters, told The Tyee. The escalation occurred as blockaders were preparing to mark their one-year anniversary occupying the forests in Pacheedaht Territories surrounding Port Renfrew.
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