Environmental Media Services Also known as a "project" of the Tides Center

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Environmental Media Services
Also known as a "project" of the Tides Center
1320 18th Street, NW, Suite 500, Washington, DC 20036
Phone 202-463-6670 | Fax 202-463-6671 | Email ems@ems.org

If you’ve ever been advised to steer clear of a food, beverage, or other consumer product based on the claims of a nonprofit organization, you’ve likely been “spun” by Fenton’s multi-million-dollar message machine -- and Environmental Media Services (EMS) has probably been the messenger.

EMS is the communications arm of leftist public relations firm Fenton Communications. Based in Washington, in the same office suite as Fenton, EMS claims to be “providing journalists with the most current information on environmental issues.” A more accurate assessment might be that it spoon-feeds the news media sensationalized stories, based on questionable science, and featuring activist “experts,” all designed to promote and enrich David Fenton’s paying clients, and build credibility for the nonprofit ones. It’s a clever racket, and EMS & Fenton have been running it since 1994.

Tired of being nagged about which fish are politically correct to eat? Fretting about choosing the “right” catch of the day? You just might be under the influence of SeaWeb and the Natural Resources Defense Council (both Fenton clients), and their “Give Swordfish a Break!” campaign, communicated for over two years by the trusty flacks at EMS. Never mind that Rebecca Lent of the National Marine Fisheries Service said that Atlantic swordfish “are not considered endangered.” The point was to make SeaWeb and NRDC more believable and trusted when the next big enviro-agenda came along.

Freaked out about so-called “Frankenfoods”? Worried that biotech corn will make you glow in the dark? You’ve probably been exposed to something harmful, all right -- EMS’s anti-biotech message, approved and bankrolled by the large segment of the “natural” and organic foods industry that relies on Fenton Communications for its publicity. These include Whole Foods Markets, Green Mountain Coffee, Honest Tea, Kashi Cereal, and Rodale Press, a magazine publisher (Organic Style, Organic Gardening, and many more) that makes millions off of the misguided notion that organic foods are safer to eat than their conventional or biotech counterparts. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s position, by the way, is crystal clear. Former USDA Secretary Dan Glickman has said that “[j]ust because something is labeled as ‘organic’ does not mean it is superior, safer, or more healthy than conventional food.”

Afraid to eat dairy products from cows that have been treated with hormones to produce extra milk? Scared that the hormone, which the FDA calls “entirely safe,” will make its way into your body and cause cancer or other irreparable damage? Beginning with a huge press conference in 1998, EMS pushed that very message relentlessly for over two years. And they did it on behalf of Ben & Jerry’s, a paying Fenton client. Why would Ben & Jerry’s care? Because their ice cream is made with hormone-free milk, and David Fenton calculated that a little health hysteria would drive customers to their “alternative” product quite nicely.

It’s called “black marketing,” and Environmental Media Services has become the principal reason Fenton Communications is so good at it. EMS lends an air of legitimacy to what might otherwise be dismissed (and rightly so) as fear-mongering from the lunatic fringe. In addition to pre-packaged “story ideas” for the mass media, EMS provides commentaries, briefing papers, and even a stable of experts, all carefully calculated to win points for paying clients. These “experts,” though, are also part of the ruse. Over 70% of them earn their paychecks from current or past Fenton clients, all of which have a financial stake in seeing to it that the scare tactics prevail. It’s a clever deception perpetrated on journalists who generally don’t consider do-gooder environmentalists to be capable of such blatant and duplicitous “spin.”

The first rule of this game is that it’s strictly pay-for-play. For a price, you too can promote your product by maligning the competition with junk-science smear tactics. To Fenton Communications, you’ll be a “client”; down the hall at EMS, though, you’ll join the ranks of its “project partners.” And nobody will be the wiser.

Surely by now you know that money makes the world go ‘round, and the globe doesn’t stop spinning for Environmental Media Services just because it calls itself “nonprofit.” EMS exists to make money. It turns a profit for Fenton Communications by improving the bottom lines of a wide variety of Fenton clients. Understanding how the money changes hands, though, requires a shift in focus from Washington to San Francisco, where the Tides Foundation is based.

The Tides Foundation is an unusual philanthropy in many ways, not the least of which is that it gives away other foundations’ money. Corporations, individuals, and other foundations can all use Tides as a pass-through vehicle, “designating” that their cash be funneled to tax-exempt third parties. Tides is also unusual in that it runs its own “incubator” for these nonprofit entities, a subsidiary called the Tides Center that runs the day-to-day operations of new activist groups so they can focus on making life difficult for the rest of us. The end result is a “foundation” that uses its own tax-exemption as a sort of blanket coverage for newly-formed nonprofits (all of them left-of-center), while funding them with money that originates somewhere else.

In this arrangement, startup activist groups don’t have to risk being turned down when they ask the IRS for tax-exempt status: they just ride piggy-back on Tides’s exemption, giving them the same privileges extended to churches and universities without having to satisfy any real requirements. And big-money donors with anti-corporate or anti-consumer leanings can readily fund the lunatic fringe without having to disclose where their money went. They only need mention in their tax returns that a donation was made to the Tides Center, and their legal obligations are fulfilled. One more curious side effect of this deal is that newly-incubated activist groups (what Tides calls “projects”) can appear to have absolutely no expenses of their own for employees, lobbyists, or fundraising contractors, as Tides officially cuts all the checks.

So while Environmental Media Services was started, and is still run, by staffers of Fenton Communications, it was officially instituted as a “project” of the Tides Center in 1994. This gave Fenton some plausible deniability and initially shielded him from the suggestion that EMS was just a shill for his clients. It has also provided a ready-made funding mechanism for foundations, “progressive” companies, and other Fenton clients who don’t want their contributions to EMS noted for the public record [Editor’s note: despite the logistical roadblocks set up by Tides, our research still has been able to reverse-engineer several million dollars in foundation grants to EMS].

Of course, anyone ingenious enough to invent such a scheme is also probably crafty enough to abuse it as well. Consider that the Tides Center paid EMS president Arlie Schardt over $115,000 in 1998. Fair enough, since he was technically a Tides employee, in addition to being the “Senior Counselor” at Fenton Communications and a board member at Friends of the Earth. But that doesn’t explain the $583,727 that Tides paid to Fenton that same year, which was designated as “public relations” expenses in Tides’s tax return. You see, Tides has never “officially” been a Fenton client, as that would appear to be a huge conflict. The Fenton Communications web site doesn’t list Tides as a current or former client either. So what was the half-million-dollar payout for?

We may never find out. But we do know that in the past three tax years (1998-2000), the for-profit companies “eGrants,” Seventh Generation, and Working Assets (which sells long-distance phone service and brokers credit cards), have each put over $1 million into Tides. They are all, by the way, clients of Fenton Communications. So are big-money foundations like the Pew Charitable Trusts, the David & Lucille Packard Foundation, and the John Merck Fund. Together, they have contributed another $1.6 million (that we know of) to EMS, using Tides as a money-funnel.

The big picture, then, is a quasi-money-laundering scheme worthy of a name like “Tides” (apologies to Procter & Gamble). Fenton Communications’ for-profit and foundation clients put massive amounts of cash into Tides, and enjoy a healthy tax write-off for their trouble. Tides turns around and makes huge “grants” to Fenton’s nonprofit clients, including the Environmental Working Group, Natural Resources Defense Council, and SeaWeb (just to name a few). Tides also funds EMS, which David Fenton uses as a mouthpiece in order to promote fear campaigns which benefit his other for-profit clients. EMS makes good use of the “experts” who haunt the halls of Fenton’s nonprofit clients. Tides pays everyone’s salary, and even sends the odd half million dollars to Fenton Communication for its trouble.

The remarkable thing here is that this is all legal, and that it takes this much concentrated duplicity to produce an effective food scare.

In December of 1998, Environmental Media Services (with several Fenton Communications staffers in tow) held a press conference with guests including activist representatives from the Center for Food Safety and the Consumers Union. Before news cameras and dozens of reporters, this panel of “experts” warned that “recombinant” Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH) given to cows would render milk harmful to humans, and even cancerous. The Boston Globe, the New York Times, and ABC News (among others) all ran stories based on this “breaking news” event suggesting that American consumers should be suspicious of any dairy products associated with rBGH.

Not surprisingly, the press event produced by EMS made no mention of the fact that Ben & Jerry’s was both a Fenton client and a major stakeholder in the debate. Just one year earlier, Ben & Jerry’s had made headlines (again, with a wind-assist from EMS) with a legal settlement in which it would be permitted to use product labels touting its products’ lack of rBGH as an advantage for consumers. Back then, EMS was very open about its relationship with Ben & Jerry’s, sending out press releases touting the ice cream maker’s “legal victory.” Fenton Communications knew full well that its client was interested in painting rBGH-wielding competitors as cancer conduits, and EMS was happy to oblige.

What they never told you was that Ben & Jerry’s also had to agree to a disclaimer, which still appears on some ice cream cartons today: “The FDA has said no significant difference has been shown and no test can now distinguish between milk from rBGH treated and untreated cows.”


Copyright © 2007 Center for Consumer Freedom. All rights reserved.

JN 2003 - SPI settles suit

Sierra Pacific Industries has agreed to a $1.2 million settlement that requires it to clean up contaminated soils and groundwater at its Arcata Mill, located near Manila.

The agreement also requires the company to study the levels of pollution in sediment and aquatic life in the Mad River Slough, a popular fishing and crabbing spot immediately adjacent to the plant.

If those studies show that pollution from the mill poses a risk to human health, wildlife and the environment, then the company must undertake a more extensive cleanup -- one that could mean digging up and hauling away tons of contaminated sediment in the slough and even out in Humboldt Bay.

"Hopefully, this will ultimately help put people at ease about eating fish and shellfish from Humboldt Bay," said Jim Lamport of the Ecological Rights Foundation, a Garberville group.

David Dun, a Eureka lawyer representing SPI, said that even before the settlement agreement it was "a foregone conclusion" that some level of cleanup would need to be conducted at the mill site.

The settlement is the result of a lawsuit filed three years ago by the Ecological Rights group. The suit spurred the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board to more vigorously regulate the mill, site of a groundwater plume contaminated with high levels of a now banned wood treatment chemical called pentachlorophenol.

Penta, as its called, is usually associated with dioxin, one of the deadliest of all man-made chemicals.

Last spring the Ecological Rights group found low but still potentially hazardous levels of dioxin in shellfish near the plant. Later tests conducted by an SPI consultant found dioxin in commercial oysters out in the bay, but there is disagreement about whether those levels pose a health hazard.

In October federal magistrate Judge Maria Elena James of San Francisco ruled that the Arcata Mill had been in chronic violation of the Clean Water Act for several years.

Almost half of the settlement -- $500,000 -- will go toward the California Fish and Game Department for wetlands restoration and acquisition in Humboldt Bay. The remainder will go to the Ecological Rights group.

Fred Evenson, a lawyer for the group, said the money would be used in part to conduct "confirmation sampling" to ensure the accuracy of SPI's environmental and health study.

-- reported by Keith Easthouse

asje - a cog in the wheel

HWC on PL Bankruptcy
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EarthJustice Client - Humboldt Watershed Council

Ahh, the activist web - the plot does thicken...
Cases
California Logging Clean Water Exemption

In Brief: The Clean Water Act is meant to clean up the nation's waterways. In some areas, however, exemptions have been issued that have hampered the goal. One such is in California, where three water boards have ruled that loggers are exempt. Earthjustice is challenging the exemptions in court.

Staff:
Clients:
Environmental Protection Information Center
Humboldt Watershed Council
Updated: April 20, 2004
Case #11095

ACORN Voter Registration Fraud Allegations, 10/2004

ACORN Voter Registration Fraud Allegations Are Just the Tip of the Iceberg, Says Employment Policies Institute

Illegalities, Fraud and Contradictions Detailed in Report
on Lead Organizer of Florida's Amendment 5

WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 /PRNewswire/ -- A Florida state attorney is
investigating thousands of potentially fraudulent voter registrations
associated with the leading organizer of Florida's Amendment 5 ballot
initiative. But this is just the tip of an iceberg of illegalities, fraud and
contradictions connected to the Association of Community Organizations for
Reform Now (ACORN). In recent days, ACORN has been at the epicenter of
reports on thousands of potentially fraudulent voter registrations across the
nation -- including many by ex-felons -- submitted by ACORN employees in the
presidential swing states of Ohio, Colorado, Missouri Pennsylvania, New Mexico
and Minnesota.
The Employment Policies Institute has updated and re-released its report,
"The Real ACORN: Anti-Employee, Anti-Union, Big Business" with the latest
details on ACORN's involvement in what appears to be widespread voter
registration fraud. The report includes statements from former ACORN
employees on the illegal nature of the organization's promotion of the ballot
initiative to raise Florida's minimum wage to $6.15 per hour.
"This report reveals ACORN's pattern and practice of deception and fraud,"
said EPI research director Craig Garthwaite. "The latest allegations of
widespread voter registration fraud should prove to be the last of ACORN's
nine political lives."
Former ACORN Miami-Dade field director Mac Stuart has declared an intent
to sue ACORN and has made charges of rampant voter fraud operations. Stuart
was employed and specifically tasked by ACORN to generate 103,000 new voter
registrations from Dade County. He reports that ACORN threw out Republican
registrations while paying for Democratic ones. Stuart also charges that
ACORN targeted ex-cons and that he personally set up registration tables
outside the Miami police department and Dade County jail. He went on to
state, "The voter registration project has been operating illegally since it
started."
ACORN has paid workers for every voter registration card collected -- a
felony in Florida and also illegal in Missouri and Pennsylvania. ACORN also
routinely accepted signatures for Amendment 5 from individuals who were not
currently registered to vote -- a requirement under Florida law.
Voter registration and petition fraud is just the latest chapter in
ACORN's long sordid history. The EPI report also reveals:

ACORN Involved in Union Embezzlement -- In the late 1990s, ACORN's Project
Vote was involved in an $850,000 embezzling scheme, where union funds and
kickbacks were used to illegally aid the 1996 re-election bid of then-
Teamsters President Ron Carey. A New York federal jury found the Teamsters
political director guilty of the conspiracy.

ACORN bilks AmeriCorps -- In 1996, the Inspector General of the AmeriCorps
program stripped a $1 million grant from the ACORN Housing Corporation (AHC).
When applying, AHC had denied any connections to ACORN, since the grant was
not intended for political advocacy organizations. Evidence later uncovered
by the Inspector General found that not only was AHC created by ACORN, engaged
in numerous transactions with one another, and sharing staff and office space
-- but it utilized the AmeriCorps grant to increase ACORN membership, a
violation of federal guidelines.

ACORN Union-Busts Own Workers -- On March 27, 2003 the National Labor
Relations Board (NLRB) found that ACORN had violated the National Labor
Relations Act and was required to rehire and pay restitution to employees
terminated for attempting to form a union. The NLRB ruling is just the latest
in a trend of ACORN's union-busting tactics. ACORN employees have
historically demanded higher wages, safer working conditions and more timely
contracted wages. These efforts have been repressed behind closed doors by
the hypocritical ACORN leadership, which publicly advocates higher pay and
better working conditions for private sector workers.

ACORN and Minimum Wage Hypocrisy -- Most egregiously, ACORN promotes
ballot initiatives and local ordinances to force businesses to pay higher
minimum wages, as they are currently doing with the minimum wage proposal in
Amendment 5. In 1995, however, ACORN sued the state of California to have its
employees exempted from the state minimum wage. ACORN argued that being
forced to pay higher wages would mean that they would hire fewer employees --
the very dilemma faced by businesses. Incredibly, ACORN stated that paying
its employees a lower wage would allow them to be more sympathetic to the low-
and moderate-income families they were attempting to help. ACORN argued that
abiding by the state minimum wage would limit their ability to promote their
agenda and would therefore be a violation of their First Amendment rights.
The trial court judge dismissed ACORN's suits, stating, "leaving aside the
latter argument's absurdity ... we find ACORN to be laboring under a
fundamental misconception of constitutional law."

"ACORN's history of voter registration fraud, hypocrisy, abuse of federal
grant programs, and disregard for sound economics should raise a red flag for
voters considering support for Amendment 5," Garthwaite said.
The full report is available online at http://www.EPIonline.org.

The Employment Policies Institute is a nonprofit research organization
dedicated to studying public policy issues surrounding entry-level employment.


SOURCE Employment Policies Institute

WER Oct 17 2006 - Eureka Civic Association is the new player on political scene

Eureka Civic Association is the new player on political scene

By , The Eureka Reporter
Published: Oct 17 2006, 9:19 PM · Updated: Oct 18 2006, 12:12 PM

There's a new player on Eureka's political scene, and though it's small in numbers and even smaller in funding, Eureka Civic Association co-founder David Ogden said, it hopes to help promote a big change in local government.

"What I feel, and have felt for many years, is missing in Eureka is an organization that comes together to promote the candidacy of well-qualified individuals who will reach out to the entire community and represent the whole community equally," Ogden explained.

After coming to know each other through the nonprofit Citizens for Real Economic Growth - with which the ECA is not affiliated, Ogden emphasized - he, Eureka residents Tom Peters and Neal Latt together decided to form the political action committee as a vehicle for their shared ideas.

No one thing prompted the decision, Ogden said, "but it was more the cumulative effect of watching years of what I call 'do nothing' council members."

Not surprisingly, one of the most pressing issues for the group is the city's beleaguered Balloon Track parcel.

"(Rob) Arkley owns it now, and we're excited to see a local developer take it over," Latt acknowledged. "But it doesn't change our demand for full clean-up of the property, not just capping."

"Why hasn't the City Council taken any leadership whatsoever on that very valuable piece of property?" Ogden added.

In considering the Balloon Track property, as well as Eureka's entire Waterfront, he clarified, the city needs to actively involve the community and provide open, transparent government - and not only for Eureka residents, but for all residents in the surrounding area.

"We need more public participation, not a charade of one," Latt noted, drawing a distinction between the public comment that will be taken as part of the environmental impact report process for the Balloon Track and the public involvement that could be realized through community workshops, such as the visioning forum hosted by CREG last Friday.

While Balloon Track talk maintains a significant presence both in the community and the November election, however, the ECA is also keeping a watchful eye on things like public safety, the Sequoia Park Zoo, recreation opportunities - "all of those things over which the City Council has direct influence and control," Ogden observed.

The group's mission statement notes that it is nonpartisan, "dedicated to the principle of government for the people and by the people."

It has endorsed Eureka 1st, 3rd and 5th Ward City Council candidates Larry Glass, Ron Kuhnel and Nan Abrams, respectively, as well as Eureka Mayor Peter La Vallee and Humboldt County 4th District Supervisor Bonnie Neely.

"We feel they represent the kind of values and commitment to positive change we support," Ogden said.
"And the commitment to public process," Latt added.

The Eureka Civic Association came into official existence on Sept. 15, when it started a bank account and the related tracking of all monetary and nonmonetary contributions and expenditures for the state Fair Political Practices Commission.

Between Sept. 15 and Sept. 30, according to the ECA's financial disclosure statements, it raised $2,500, $1,000 from Ogden and $1,500 from McKinleyville resident Dr. Ken Miller.

During that period, $700 was spent on the production of two television advertisements, some of which will begin airing soon, Ogden said.

With the November election looming, the ECA is coming into the race "kind of a day late and a dollar short," he joked, though he promised it will be putting its efforts into get-out-the-vote campaigns and advertising.

More information is at www.eurekacivicassociation.org.

Ogden, who is retired from his work at Strictly for the Birds in Old Town Eureka, is also serving in a volunteer capacity as the treasurer for the campaigns of Glass and Abrams.

Referring to the upcoming city election, he said, "This is the biggest thing I've seen go down in Eureka politics in all the years I've been here - which is close to 20 years now. ... And it's about time."
(Rob and Cherie Arkley own Security National, which owns The Eureka Reporter and the Balloon Track.)

TS Op-Ed - County's OK of Klamath settlement is misguided

Enviro-weirdo Felice Pace's Op-Ed. The big question is why the enviro groups who had a seat at the table, and helped craft the agreement are suddenly hell-bent on damning it. The only viable answer is that they only make money if there is controversy, dissension and strife. Solving a problem kills their income stream.

Why would Humboldt County supervisors, lead by Supervisor Jill Geist, endorse a Klamath River water deal which a growing number of top fisheries scientists and hydrologists say will not lead to recovery of salmon? Why would the Humboldt supervisors rush to endorse something when key elements of the deal are still being drafted?

Unfortunately, the answer has more to do with “bonding” than with “biology.” Supervisor Geist told fellow supervisors last month that she had “bonded” with the Upper Klamath Basin's irrigators and that she knew this Klamath water agreement -- full of expensive special interest goodies -- represents a new era of cooperation on the river. And Jimmy Smith, John Woolley,
Bonnie Neely and Roger Rodoni bought it!

In the weeks ahead, it will become clear just how out of touch the supervisors are with what good science and common sense tell us is needed to fix the Klamath River and recover Klamath salmon.

Not only does the agreement not provide enough water for fish, it locks in industrial agricultural operations in the Lost River and on Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuges for 50 years. This will result in such a high rate of pollution in the Keno Reservoir (a PacifiCorp dam that those promoting dam removal want left in place) that it will continue to be without oxygen or life for five weeks a year.

The ripple impacts on salmon downstream will be disastrous even if the dams are removed.

Those promoting the water deal want us to believe that it is necessary in order to convince PacifiCorp to remove four Klamath River dams. This is not the case. In fact, tying what Hoopa Tribal Chairman Lyle Marshall has called “an Old West water deal” to dam removal makes removal of the dams less rather than more likely.

Why were the supervisors in such a rush? The Klamath water agreement insures flows for Klamath irrigators who are strongly allied with the Bush administration, and the rush is to get a bill that George Bush can sign as his term expires.

This is a 50-year sweetheart deal for this special interest group at the expense of salmon and the river. Would not a new administration do more for the Klamath River, Klamath salmon and Klamath Basin wildlife refuges?

Humboldt County gets nothing from the deal while neighboring Siskiyou County would receive $23 million. In the event of future serious disagreements and need for legal action, Humboldt County would be prevented from joining in to defend the Klamath River, its communities and salmon stocks.

A supervisor's job is to take care of home, not irrigators in southern Oregon. Guaranteeing water for a small group of wealthy “irrigators” over salmon is a terrible precedent, and not the way we should manage our rivers.

Deals crafted in back rooms, with participants sworn to secrecy, rarely spawn good public policy. The Klamath settlement is too flawed to salvage. Look for a public forum on this complex settlement soon so you can find out for yourself “the rest of the story.”

Meanwhile, Jill Geist and the other supervisors have some questions to answer: How is this water deal going to impact your constituents? Why have you abandoned what good science tells us salmon need to recover?

Humboldt citizens and this newspaper should demand answers. You can find the Humboldt County supervisors' e-mail addresses and phone numbers at: http://co.humboldt.ca.us/board/ (The Times-Standard

Felice Pace has been advocating for Pacific salmon, water reform and the restoration of the Klamath River since 1986. For 15 years he led these efforts for the Klamath Forest Alliance. Felice presently resides at Klamath Glen near the mouth of the Klamath River and writes KlamBlog, about Klamath River issues (http://klamblog.blogspot.com/).The views here are his own.
Article Launched: 03/26/2008 01:27:14 AM PD
***
This article is posted here as supplemental background material. For discussion and more information visit watchpaul.blogspot.com.

Larry Glass, Mark Lovelace and CREG

Interesting looking back at Larry Glass' involvement and statements about the Marina Center... and look, there's Mark Lovelace in a prominent position... it's all the usual suspects, "Baykeeper" too...

From: "Mark Lovelace" mailto:mail@healthyhumboldt.org
Date: March 22, 2006 9:47:02 AM PST
To: "Healthy Humboldt Coalition" mail@healthyhumboldt.org
Subject: Home Depot poses economic, cleanup concerns
Reply-To: "Mark Lovelace" mail@healthyhumboldt.org


Development poses economic, cleanup concerns, group says
Thadeus Greenson
March 22, 2006

EUREKA -- Members of the newly formed Citizens for Real Economic Growth expressed concerns about the environmental and economic impacts of the proposed Balloon Tract development Tuesday night during a presentation at the Humboldt County Democratic Central Committee (HCDCC) headquarters.

About 45 people attended the presentation and the following question and answer period, both of which were rushed along due to the time constraints of a following HCDCC business meeting.
Citing an array of economic studies, as well as city and county planning documents, Citizens for Real Economic Growth members Larry Glass and Mark Lovelace argued that the proposed Balloon Tract development goes against city and county plans for development and would irrevocably harm the local economy.

Security National owners Rob and Cherie Arkley are proposing to build a 400,000-square-foot development on the Balloon Tract that will include shops, restaurants, office space, a Home Depot, the Discovery Museum and lofts on an adjacent parcel. The Arkleys will be asking the city to change the site's zoning from public to commercial and industrial to pave the way for the project.

”Why are we pursuing this?” Lovelace asked rhetorically. “It goes against everything that's on paper about economic development in Humboldt County and the use of this property and it goes directly against the will of the voters.”

The will of the voters to which Lovelace referred, was a 1999 ballot measure in which Wal-Mart tried to obtain a similar zoning change that was rejected by a 61 percent margin.

Lovelace cited a number of economic studies regarding the impact of Home Depot stores on competing hardware businesses. He said not only would a Home Depot take major amounts of business away from some 200 local retailers, but it would siphon that money directly out of the local economy.

”There's a wealth of information on the Web, and I would really encourage people to go out there and seek it out,” Lovelace said. “Don't just take my word for it, go out and do your homework.”

During his portion of the presentation, Glass said he feels like the public is being left out of the Balloon Tract decision-making process and lambasted the city of Eureka for not aggressively pursuing the clean-up of the site that was left contaminated by Union Pacific Railroads.

Pete Nichols, director of Humboldt Bay Keeper, was in attendance and said major issues remain surrounding the contamination of the site that will be addressed either during negotiations with Union Pacific in the coming weeks or ultimately with a lawsuit.

Security National Senior Vice President Brian Morrissey attended the presentation and said afterward that, while he didn't agree with everything being said, he thinks these types of public information meetings are important. He added that Security National is confident that the majority of Eureka supports this project.

Security National will hold an open house today focusing on environmental issues. Panelists who have worked on the site or have brownfield expertise will be available to answer questions at the open house, which will be held from 6 to 9 p.m. at the Red Lion in Eureka.

Lost Coast League, Humboldt Watershed Council and EPIC

The genesis of a lawsuit?
Home >> EPIC Cases >> Cases filed - 1997 to the present >>
The Ancient Forests of the Mattole River
Lost Coast League, Humboldt Watershed Council and EPIC v. Pacific Lumber and CDF

Date Filed: September 8, 2000

While we believe that this case clearly raises a number of critical issues regarding implementation of PLs HCP, we failed to secure a Preliminary Injunction pending the trial. The future of this case is somewhat uncertain.

On Friday September 8, 2000, EPIC, the Lost Coast League, and the Humboldt Watershed Council won an emergency stay from the California Court of Appeals to stop a 53 acre logging plan in ancient forest in the North Fork of the Mattole watershed. Our local trial court was unable to find an unbiased judge to hear our motion for a restraining order, but fortunately we had anticipated this hurdle and were able to get an emergency stay from the District Court of Appeals by the afternoon.

THP 475 proposes a clear-cut in the heart of the states largest contiguous stand of unprotected low-elevation old-growth Douglas fir forest, in one of the most seismically active and geologically unstable areas in the U.S. The area is home to the threatened Coho salmon and steelhead trout, as well as rare River Otters, Peregrine Falcons, Pacific Fishers, and Northern Goshawks. This plan is the first of six pending harvest plans in the immediate area.

If these plans go forward, PL could potentially liquidate much of the 4,000 acres of ancient Douglas fir in the Mattole River watershed. Unfortunately, the California Department of Forestry has illegally waived PLs responsibility to analyze the effect of leveling this old growth forest.

This is the first logging plan that we have challenged in court that allegedly complies with the standards of the Headwaters Deal. This challenge has illustrated how difficult it is going to be to overcome the perception by the court that the Headwaters Deal protections are adequate, just because the Deal entailed mountains of paperwork and documentation. Either through this case or in some other forum, the weaknesses of the Headwaters Deal urgently need to be exposed and remedied, before all remaining high-quality habitat is liquidated.

MOVEON'S SMEAR: A VILE NEW LOW

MOVEON'S SMEAR: A VILE NEW LOW

September 11, 2007 -- MOVEON.ORG's exploitation of the Internet misleads the public into thinking it's a breakthrough phenomenon. It isn't: Technology aside, MoveOn belongs to the first half of the 20th century, not to the 21st.

Pretending to represent grass-roots democracy, it is totalitarian in outlook and practice. Complete with on-line commissars to enforce party discipline, this neo-Stalinist group crushes dissent mercilessly.

Far from populist, MoveOn is elitist, made up of the same sort of pseudo-intellectual activists who "knew" that Bolshevism, Maoism or fascism was what was best for the common people.

And make no mistake, you are the common people these activists despise: In their lofty view, you're not qualified to choose presidents, senators or even alder-men. They mean to make your choices for you.

MoveOn has been a cancer within the Democratic Party for years now, and not one leading Dem has had the guts to recommend surgery. Indeed, Democrats are terrified of the group's much-exaggerated power - but, then, it's always been the illusion of power, the bravado, that put totalitarian minorities over the top.

Yesterday, MoveOn reached a new low. Unable to refute the changed facts on the ground in Iraq, the commissars questioned Gen. David Petraeus' personal integrity in a very expensive ad in The New York Times. (Nice "populism": an ad in a newspaper no working man or woman ever reads.)

In our democracy, it's fair to disagree with the general's analysis - hopefully, from an informed position. But attacking the man himself in a back-door bid to undercut his testimony is reminiscent of the Stalinist practices of the 1930s.
Gen. Petraeus is a thoroughly honorable man who has dedicated his life to protecting us. I feel particularly qualified to defend him - not only because I know him, but because he and I have disagreed ferociously on many issues in the past, in print and in public. But I never doubted his integrity. This is a man of whom every American, Democrat or Republican, should be proud.

And MoveOn's smear tactics should shame every conscientious American.

It's high time for the Democrats, who so love revisiting the McCarthy era and their myths of courageous resistance (in fact, it was a Pentagon lawyer, not a liberal pol, who stopped Tailgunner Joe), to stand up to this un-American tyranny of an intolerant minority.

Having seen MoveOn attack legislators who dared to deviate from its party line, Democrats are terrified of offending the Internet's "Ministry of Truth." But how can politicians who lack the courage to stand up to a pack of e-thugs be expected to lead our country in these perilous times? New York's Sen. Hillary Clinton projects an image of strength and resolution; will she condemn MoveOn's personal attack on Petraeus? Hasn't a single Democrat got the guts and decency to say, "Enough!"?
I'm always labeled a conservative, since I write about military affairs and foreign policy - fields where the Republicans, even at their worst, have been more convincing than the Democrats. But on many domestic issues, from conservation to women's rights, I'm distinctly left of center.

In other words, I'm a typical American - a political mongrel who votes on issues and the candidates' qualities, not the way party mandarins insist I should. But I couldn't bring myself to vote for any candidate so morally weak and cowardly that he or she won't stand up for our common values against MoveOn. And take warning, Democrats: There are tens of millions of voters just like me.

Oh, the political right holds plenty of intolerant, single-issue groups, too. I don't like them much, either. But MoveOn is in a neo-Stalinist class by itself, since cultural elitists fund and publicize it, and the media refuses to subject it to serious scrutiny (while happily dissecting conservative organizations).

Let's hope that MoveOn's vile attack on Gen. Petraeus marks a turning point - that Democrats of conscience will stand up and condemn such behavior carried out in their name.

New York Post - MOVEON'S SMEAR: A VILE NEW LOW - September 11, 2007

This one is worth including here because it speaks so clearly of the political climate today. What's happening in Humboldt County is smaller scale but mirrors that of MoveOn.org. Anyone who is remotely construed as conservative is attacked and marginalized, people who work and produce are attacked and marginalized, while those who do not are glorified, criminals are becoming revered, there is outpouring of sympathy for the criminals who have ended up shot by police but none expressed for the victims of crimes, and Gallegos rides this wave. His work ethic is deplorable, he has brought his office down to the lowest low, rather than built it up.

It's like the world is upside down, bad is good, good is bad. I hope it will right itself soon.

ARIZONA STAR - Rancher wins $600K in suit against enviros

Jim Chilton

Rancher wins $600K in suit against enviros
The lawyer giveth, the lawyer taketh away

The Center for Biological Diversity has built a national reputation - and made a living - by suing the federal government on behalf of endangered species.

In 2003, it got reimbursed for $992,354 in expenses after winning in court - about double what its 10,000 members donated that year.

But now that same legal system has hit the Tucson-based group with a $600,000 judgment - one-quarter of the center's net assets at the end of 2003, according to the most recent annual report posted on its Web site.

Policy Director Kieran Suckling said the group he helped start in 1989 won't back down in the wake of Friday's verdict.

"The center has been here a long time, and we'll be here a long time in the future," he said.

"In our history we've lost some battles, which meant forests got cut down and endangered species got hurt. That's the darkest day. What happens to us as a group, as individuals, is nothing compared to the suffering of plants and animals," he said.

Calling itself "nature's legal eagles," the center claims credit for safeguarding 335 species - about one-quarter of the 1,264 plants and animals now protected by the federal government.

Using a provision in the Endangered Species Act that allows for citizen petitions, the center has forced the government to list creatures at risk of extinction and map millions of acres of "critical habitat" that can face stricter regulation.

Jim Chilton's suit also named three of the center's current and former workers: Martin Taylor, Shane Jimerfield and A.J. Schneller. But they won't be held financially liable for the libel, Suckling said.

Although the center has insurance, Suckling said he wasn't sure how much of the jury award it will cover. He also noted the legal fees the center earns are reimbursed expenses.

"That's not a pot of money sitting around unused," he said.

The fees won in 2003 were unusually high, he said, with the typical amount around $300,000 per year.


By Mitch Tobin
ARIZONA DAILY STAR

Tucson's Center for Biological Diversity must pay rancher and banker Jim Chilton $600,000 because the environmental group defamed him with a press release and photos posted on its Web site, a jury decided Friday.

In a 9-1 verdict, jurors in Pima County Superior Court awarded Chilton $100,000 for the harm done to his reputation and Arivaca cattle company. The jury tacked on an additional $500,000 in punitive damages meant to punish the center and deter others from committing libel.

Chilton, whose wife, Sue, is chairwoman of the Arizona Game and Fish Commission, sued the center over material that alleged he mismanaged his 21,500-acre Forest Service allotment, northwest of Nogales.

Many of the center's 21 photos depicted barren patches that captions described as "denuded" by cows. But Chilton's lawyer showed jurors wide-angle photos taken at the same locations that revealed the surroundings as worthy of a postcard, with oaks and mesquites dotting lush, rolling hills.

The center countered that the material it published in July 2002 couldn't be libelous because it was honest opinion. The photos weren't doctored, the center said, and they were public records that were part of its failed bid to block renewal of Chilton's grazing permit.

The center, which is typically the plaintiff in court, will probably appeal the decision, and its insurance should pay for at least some of the damages, if they're upheld, said policy director Kieran Suckling.

"We did things with the best of intentions. If there were some mistakes, they were honest mistakes," he said.

Suckling said he was most worried about the verdict's "chilling effect" on advocacy groups.

"We really feel victimized by a wealthy banker who can afford to hire a large legal team to nitpick you to death," he said.

Chilton, donning a white cowboy hat outside the courtroom, said he doubted he'll be able to collect all the money from the center, which he described as "schoolyard bullies."

"It does not matter if I ever collect a dime. We were in it because it's a righteous, just cause. People have taken too much abuse for too long in this community," he said. "I'm glad our system has a watchdog, and that's the jury system."

Chilton said he'll use the award to pay his lawyers, reimburse himself for costs, then donate what's left over to the Arizona Cattle Growers' Association legal fund so it can "fight for justice."

Chilton, a fifth-generation rancher, said he wants to start a more collaborative relationship with the center and will invite the defendants to visit his ranch to discuss its biodiversity.

Suckling dismissed that invitation as "cynical media spin."

"The only contact Mr. Chilton has ever had with the center is threatening letters from his lawyers going back seven years," he said.

The two-week trial, with 21 witnesses and more than 100 exhibits, featured odes to the ranching lifestyle, plus dry testimony on the labyrinth of public-lands policymaking.

To prove the material was defamatory, Chilton not only had to show it was false and hurt him, but also demonstrate the activists knew they had lied or shown "reckless disregard" for the truth. Such evidence of malice had to be "clear and convincing."

The bar would have been lower had Chilton not been ruled a public figure by Judge Richard Fields. An ordinary citizen would only have to show the center was negligent through a preponderance of the evidence.

Kraig Marton, Chilton's attorney, told jurors in closing arguments Thursday that he'd proved at least four photos weren't even on Chilton's allotment and that the center willfully ignored scientific studies praising Chilton's grazing practices.

"They were out to do harm, out to stop grazing and out to do whatever they can to prevent the Chiltons and others like them from letting cows on public land," Marton said.

Quoting the Bible, Shakespeare, Ben Franklin and Warren Buffett, Marton told jurors "our reputation is everything."

"What other people think of you makes you who you are," he said.

Sue Chilton - whose 2001 appointment to the Game and Fish Commission was bitterly opposed by the center and other "green" groups - testified her husband became withdrawn and plagued by insomnia and stomach pain because of the press release. A paid witness for Chilton said the center's scrutiny had cut $200,000 from the value of the allotment he bought for $797,000 in 1991.

Chilton testified that if he were to resell the permit, he'd have to disclose the center's attacks.

"It would be like trying to sell a house that has been subject to systematic terrorist activities by local gangs and not indicating to a potential purchaser that gang hits had been made on your house," he said.

But because the First Amendment guarantees the right of free speech, Judge Fields instructed jurors they couldn't consider the center's statements libelous if they viewed them as opinions, rather than facts.

"We must enforce the people's right to express their opinion and have public debate over issues," Robert Royal, the center's attorney, told jurors. "That is what makes this country great."

Royal, who called only one witness, told jurors they shouldn't even consider the photos. They were part of the center's written appeal of the grazing permit, and such legislative matters can't be libelous, he said.

The photos didn't show the entire allotment, he said, because the center, like the Forest Service, wanted to focus on problem areas, or "hot spots."

"How can we take a photo to show 21,000 acres?" he said.

As for the release, he said, "we went through every one of those issues and described how those statements were correct."

The juror who didn't vote to award damages said after the trial that the panel's 2 1/2-hour deliberations were cordial.

"I just felt that the center had a right to have their own opinions," said Sam Moore, 55, a pressman for a printer.

To win punitive damages, Chilton had to prove the center acted with an "evil mind," meaning it intended to cause harm, was motivated by "spite or ill will" or acted to serve its "own interest."

The center may have accidentally taken photos of the wrong places, Royal said, but that can't be considered "reckless" if Chilton's own registered surveyor made a similar mistake in creating a map for the trial.

But Marton told jurors they only had to look at the center's anti-grazing agenda and refusal to apologize in court for proof of its contempt toward Chilton and his way of life.

"If you're gonna lie," Marton said, "you have to pay the consequences."

Contact reporter Mitch Tobin at 573-4185 or mtobin at azstarnet.com

ARIZONA DAILY STAR - Rancher's suit puts enviros on defense

ARIZONA DAILY STAR: Weds., Jan. 12, 2005
Rancher's suit puts enviros on defense
By Mitch Tobin

Tucson's Center for Biological Diversity is no stranger to lawsuits related to grazing. But in a turning of the tables, the litigious group now finds itself as the defendant in a Pima County courtroom.

Arivaca rancher Jim Chilton is suing the environmentalists, alleging they defamed him in a two-page press release and 21 photographs posted on the center's Web site in July 2002.

Chilton's libel suit, which seeks unspecified monetary damages, argues that the news advisory and photo captions contain "false, unfair, libelous and defamatory statements" about Chilton's management of his 21,500-acre Montana Allotment, northwest of Nogales.

"These are lies masquerading as facts," Kraig Marton, Chilton's attorney, said in an interview. "This case also shows how photographs can lie."

Chilton's wife, Sue, was appointed to the Arizona Game and Fish Commission in 2001 over the strenuous objections of environmentalists. The center's advisory says she "tried to suppress" Game and Fish recommendations about the allotment on the Coronado National Forest and that the Chiltons "have an agenda hostile to wildlife and endangered species."

The Center, which has built a national reputation for aggressive litigation and media work on behalf of endangered species, says its actions weren't libelous because they were opinions.

"The news advisory and the pictures are not false information - they're the truth," said Robert Royal, the center's attorney. The Center also says documents on the Web site can't be libelous because they were public records that were part of its unsuccessful effort to block renewal of Chilton's grazing permit.

"The Chiltons are really trying to create a chill effect to scare people away from commenting on public lands and the actions of public agencies," said Kieran Suckling, the Center's policy director.

Judge Richard Fields has already ruled the Chiltons are public figures, which raises the bar for proving libel. The jury of six women and four men is expected to get the case next week.

Marton said he'll reveal in his closing statement how much money his client is seeking.

"The primary focus of the case is to prove the center made false statements," he said.

The suit names not only the Center, but three of its current and former employees: Martin Taylor, author of the release; Shane Jimerfield, the Web site designer who posted it; and A.J. Schneller, who was responsible for some photos and captions.

The suit alleges the Center hurt Chilton's ranching business and caused him "to suffer great mental anguish, humiliation, public hatred, contempt, ridicule" and damage to his "integrity and reputation."

"I'm outraged," Chilton said after Tuesday's hearing before a nearly empty courtroom. "For five generations we've ranched in Arizona as stewards of the land and all evidence indicates we're doing a wonderful job."

Larry Medlock, a now-retired Forest Service official who concluded grazing on the allotment didn't have a negative environmental impact, testified Tuesday that the press release had several false statements.

Medlock, who visited the allotment some 20 times, disputed the Center's claim that part of the allotment was "grazed to bare dirt." He said it was true cattle had broken into a preserve for Sonora chub, a threatened fish, but the cows had come up from Mexico and weren't Chilton's.

Chilton's lawyer asked if the photos showing denuded areas were an accurate representation of the allotment.
"It doesn't give a true picture of what the Montana Allotment looks like," Medlock said, adding the ground could have been laid bare by activities other than grazing.

Taylor, author of the release, then took the stand for nearly two hours of sharp questioning from Chilton's lawyer. Taylor said he wrote the release in an hour, faxed it to the news media, then called some reporters in a failed bid to drum up coverage of the controversy.

"I wasn't biased against the Chiltons," said Taylor, an entomologist who left the Center in 2003. He flew in from his native Australia for the trial.

Marton sought to prove Taylor had an anti-grazing agenda and an ax to grind when he went out to inspect the allotment. The lawyer said Taylor willfully ignored scientific studies showing positive effects of grazing and said he took photos that focused on bare sections rather than areas around them covered by vegetation.

"I wanted to document the problem areas," Taylor said. "I wasn't attempting or pretending to do good science."

"Did you ever call the Chiltons before you wrote the news advisory to get their side of the story?" Marton asked.

"That's for journalists to do," Taylor said. "Not us."

? Contact reporter Mitch Tobin at 573-4185 or mtobin at azstarnet.com.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Ruckus Society

from activistcash.com
Ruckus Society
369 Fifteenth Street, Oakland, CA 94612
Phone 510-763-7078 | Fax 510-763-7068 | Email ruckus@ruckus.org

The Ruckus Society was founded in late 1995 by two giants of the radical environmentalist movement: Mike Roselle and Howard “Twilly” Cannon. Roselle was a founder of Earth First! (of 1980s tree-spiking fame), the group which spun off the domestic terrorist Earth Liberation Front in 1992. He also co-founded the radical Rainforest Action Network. Cannon built his extremist credentials as a front-line activist and ship’s captain with Greenpeace’s French and Russian anti-nuclear campaigns.

Ruckus is turning into a violent version of Forrest Gump, grooming the footsoldiers of the “protest industry” for every major newsworthy protest event since its founding. Activists descending on San Diego for the 2001 “biodevastation” demonstrations (railing against life-saving food technology) looked to Ruckus leaders for planning, logistics, media attention, and physical tactics. The same can be said for the massive and violent protests against Philadelphia’s 2000 Republican Convention, and the aggressive anti-World Bank demonstrations in Washington, DC, during that same year. In these two latter cases (as with Seattle), serious damage was done to private and public property alike. In Philadelphia alone, 23 police cars were damaged and 15 officers were injured.

Whether the target du jour is biotech foods, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, or globalization in general, the organization recruits, trains, transports, and houses the army of militants needed to earn media coverage and make life difficult for the rest of us. Some observers have even claimed that Ruckus paid protesters to show up in Seattle. Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland Institute, wrote that one protester there told a colleague, “Sorry, I’ve got to go. If I don’t get to the finish line of the march I don’t get paid.”

Ruckus itself has no problem getting paid, reaping six-figure grant awards from the likes of Ted Turner and the “caring capitalists” at Ben & Jerry’s. When the multinational corporation Unilever bought the ice cream maker in 2000, it agreed to continue Ben & Jerry’s bizarre flavor of philanthropy for the foreseeable future. The Turner foundation has also contributed heavily to Ruckus, including over $150,000 in grants made via The Ecology Center, Inc., a Montana group where Ruckus’ first slate of officers met in the mid-1990s.

Ruckus’s primary contributions to the activist agenda are its “action camps”: weeklong boot camps for leftist protesters, usually held a few weeks prior to a major organized demonstration. A few hundred young Ruckus recruits typically attend each camp, where they are trained in the finer points of “police confrontation strategies,” “street blockades,” “urban climbing & rappelling,” “using the media to your advantage,” and “learning to lock your head to something” (among other things). Predictably, food served at the activist camps is vegetarian all the way. One 1998 camp chef told The Washington Post that “people here have some serious views on food, but that’s to be expected.” A participant in the same event adamantly insisted to a CNN camera crew: “Absolutely no meat whatsoever; no meat products, by-products, whatsoever.”

If you’ve heard of Ruckus Society at all, it was probably in relation to the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. Americans watched in horror as organized hoodlums ran roughshod over the city’s commercial district, smashing windows, setting fires, overturning vehicles, ransacking a Starbucks coffee shop and a McDonald’s restaurant, and generally putting lives at risk. It’s no coincidence that the Ruckus Society staffers were in the middle of the melee, giving on-the-record quotes to national media figures. Nor was it an accident that Ruckus director John Sellers represented the protesters when the terms of their arrest were being negotiated with Seattle police. The Ruckus Society is generally credited with organizing the whole Seattle spectacle in the first place. When the dust had settled, Sellers smugly told USA Today, “We kicked the WTO’s butt all over the Northwest.”


Overall, the Ruckus Society is doing exactly what it set out to do. It used to be that activists became more outrageous in order to gain the attention of TV cameras. By breaking laws, escalating conflicts between police and protesters, and operating military-style training camps, Ruckus is upping the ante for other environmental activist groups who wish to be taken seriously within the movement. The effect is that of redefining the cutting edge of the anti-consumer movement, by sanctioning violence and engaging in organized conflict with law enforcement.

The Ruckus Society seems to have no compunction about breaking laws when they become inconvenient to “the cause.” John Sellers himself has been arrested over 40 times, most notably outside the 2000 Republican National Convention, where he was held on a $1 million bond until the event had concluded. While radicals claim that Sellers was railroaded by law enforcement, it’s worth noting that police officers confiscated a variety of weapons from protesters at the scene of Sellers’s arrest, including piano wire and gasoline-soaked rags tied to chains.

Why do Mike Roselle, John Sellers, Han Shan, and others organize willing twenty-somethings and teach them how to raise hell in the streets of America? To paraphrase Bill Clinton, it’s the global economy, stupid! To hard-core environmentalists like those at the helm of Ruckus, the worldwide spread of free trade and the modernization of third-world economies must be bad things if they are the result of genetically improved foods, franchised restaurants, logging, mining, and drilling for oil. And the instrument of the world’s demise is the multinational corporation. The damage done to Starbucks and McDonald’s during the Seattle riots in 1999 is one good indicator of the level of visceral hatred and violence involved.

Never mind that biotech foods will save lives. Set aside the fact that one out of every 15 Americans has his or her first job at a McDonald’s. And forget that globalizing the food chain will do a lot more to narrow the gap between rich and poor than can be accomplished by parading protesters wearing monarch butterfly costumes, or by the violent trashing of American cities. They continue to grab headlines with outrageous behavior, gaining additional foolish and impressionable converts along the way. To date, Ruckus has held over two dozen “action camps” in the United States; as the group’s profile grows, so does the waiting list of young activists who will do just about anything to participate.


Despite the organization’s ties to well-documented acts of violence and its officers’ connections with domestic terror groups, the group constantly claims to limit itself to “non-violent” protest in the spirit of 1960s civil disobedience. But the trail of economic damage wrought by these organized thugs (to say nothing of the broken windows and injured policemen) would suggest otherwise.

This, too, is no coincidence. The Ruckus Society was Mike Roselle’s brainchild; by the time the idea got off the ground, Roselle’s other projects had already matured. The most notable is Earth First!, a loosely organized gang of eco-criminals who pioneered the tactics of “monkey-wrenching” (intentionally damaging logging equipment) and “tree-spiking” (driving 11-inch nails into tree trunks in order to mangle approaching chain saws).

Ruckus clings desperately to the image of Martin Luther King, Jr. (featuring him prominently on their web site), and to words like “non-violence” and “civil disobedience,” but drawing such lines of comparison is an insult to the 1960s generation of social activists. While Dr. King was more than willing to stand up, give his name, and accept the legal consequences for his civil disobedience, Ruckus activists are generally known for wearing masks, assuming aliases, giving false names to arresting police officers, and other cowardly dodges (sometimes for no reason other than the disruption of the judicial system).

Another direct tie between the Ruckus Society and unlawful activity is Cathie Berrey, the group’s “blockades trainer.” Berrey helps to run the Ruckus camps and teaches attendees how to link arms, chain themselves to immovable objects, block traffic, and keep law enforcement from getting where they need to be. She is also the North Carolina coordinator for Earth First!, and a longtime spokesperson for the Direct Action Network, another violent protest umbrella group. Berrey is a self-described anarchist with connections to the now-infamous, violent “black bloc” that has descended on Seattle, Washington, Genoa, Montreal, and other modern protest sites. Nadine Bloch, another Ruckus camp trainer, has been linked to the “black bloc” faction that attempted to disrupt the 2001 presidential inaugural in Washington, DC. FBI countertelligence deputy Terry Turchie has told Congress that “Anarchists working within movements such as the ‘black bloc’ committed much of the property damage accompanying these protests.”

Nearly half of Ruckus’ roster of camp “trainers” proclaims membership in Earth First! as well.

Profile:
Ruckus Society
Copyright © 2007 Center for Consumer Freedom. All rights reserved.

SB - Seeds of Change (5/5)

Seeds of Change

Solutions sprouting from grass-roots efforts
(Fifth of five parts)

By Tom Knudson
Bee Staff Writer
(Published April 26, 2001)

Change is knocking on the door of America's environmental movement. Change is remodeling it from within.

From the outside, the pressure is coming from ranchers, corporate executives, small-town merchants, educators, schoolkids and other ordinary people embracing a home-grown style of environmentalism that is quietly saving species, restoring forests and grasslands, and preserving open space.

From the inside, it is coming from a broad spectrum of environmentalists -- chief executive officers, fund-raising specialists, state directors, program officers, lawyers and others -- struggling to bring more science, entrepreneurial skill, accountability, teamwork and results to a movement they say has grown self-righteous, inefficient, chaotic and shrill.

"Haphazard conservation is worse than haphazard development. We've had haphazard conservation for 30 years," said Patrick Noonan, chairman of The Conservation Fund, a Virginia group that provides financial and technical support to small environmental organizations.

Yet this new brand of stewardship remains more seed than storm, lacking the clamor and conflict that often accompany environmental news. Its disciples do not view the world darkly. Their habitat is one of hope, not hype.

"We've effectively sold the idea that the world is screwed up," said Dan Taylor, executive director of the National Audubon Society's California chapter. "What people are looking for now are some durable solutions on how to make it better."

Just as consumer taste shapes the corporate landscape, so, too, is hunger for a new kind of environmentalism changing the conservation world. The number of environmental groups is booming -- up from a few hundred in 1970 to more than 8,000 today. And most are sprouting not in traditional power centers -- such as Washington, D.C., or San Francisco -- but in other cities, small towns and rural areas.

The grass-roots nature of the change can be read in the names of the organizations themselves: the Malpai Borderlands Group in Douglas, Ariz.; the Henry's Fork Foundation in Ashton, Idaho; the Great Valley Center in Modesto; the Applegate Partnership in Oregon.

"People now realize they can organize themselves," said Noonan. "They can band together in their community to save that river, field, mountain or whatever. It's America at its best."

Behavioral patterns are shifting, too. No longer is influencing public policy so lofty a goal. Today, some groups focus on a more tangible prize: buying, protecting and restoring land. And no longer do all groups simply say no to economic development; today, a few are learning how to make commerce and conservation walk side by side.

Change is leafing out at the national level, as well, where five of the country's 10 largest groups focus not on advocacy but buying and protecting land -- up from just one 30 years ago. Those groups -- The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, Ducks Unlimited, the Trust for Public Land and the Conservation Fund -- have another common denominator: They are among the fastest-growing environmental groups in America.

Two of the 10 biggest groups, and many smaller ones, prosper without junk mail or telemarketing. Five are wealthy enough to compete with corporations for land. Two have their own scientific research institutes. At least two take in significant sums of money -- $4 million a year or more -- from corporations, including oil, timber and mining companies.

Like experimentation on the dot-com frontier, such activity is bringing a burst of creativity to the conservation community, spawning start-ups and spinoffs that bear little resemblance to conventional environmental groups.

Look closely at this landscape and you see organizations with no members, no lawyers, even no payrolls. You also see conservation efforts sprouting in unlikely places -- including an Appalachian farm supply store, a commercial fishing fleet in Mexico, a fast-growing Florida suburb and cattle ranches in California and Arizona.

"You have to manage with people in mind nowadays ... You can't turn the land back to what it was in 1840," said Warner Glenn, a southeast Arizona rancher. Glenn is working with The Nature Conservancy, university scientists and others to keep grasslands healthy for rural families and for wildlife.

Priorities are beginning to change, too. No longer is the designation of parks and wilderness areas as dominant a theme. Today, some are focusing on the restoration of worked-over land, public and private alike, an approach many scientists say can produce greater benefit for the natural world. Some are taking conservation to the inner city, creating parks and cleaning up toxic sites in neighborhoods overlooked by mainstream groups.

And no longer is it enough simply to point out problems. Today, people inside the environmental movement and outside are picking up shovels, planting trees, healing wetlands, tearing out parking lots, working with government and industry -- and solving problems themselves.

This new environmental frontier has no road map, no catalog of places saved or species protected. But plenty of people know it well. One is Bill Kittrell, director of the Clinch Valley program for The Nature Conservancy in the Appalachian Mountains of southwest Virginia.

Closer to Nashville than Washington, southwest Virginia seems an odd place for a branch office of the nation's largest environmental group. The countryside -- thickly forested with hickory, walnut and other hardwoods -- is picturesque. But, speckled with small towns and abandoned coal mines, it is no pristine wilderness. Eighty-nine percent of the area is private land.

Yet for the Conservancy, which focuses on protecting rare and endangered species, this quiet corner of Appalachia is more important than a national park. One morning not long ago, Kittrell was waist-deep in the Clinch River, trying to illustrate why.

He sloshed this way and that, using a large viewing scope to peer into the water. Five minutes passed. Ten minutes. A few moments later, one of his colleagues -- biologist Braven Beaty -- reached into the river and scooped what looked like a small yellow-brown stone off the bottom.

"Here we go!" Beaty said. "This is a fine-rayed pigtoe mussel. This is a federally endangered species."

Held in the sun, the mussel gleamed. And Kittrell beamed. "This is what we call a G-1 species," he said. "That means there are fewer than five population groups worldwide. The loss of any one population is a threat to the entire species."

All told, southwest Virginia's rivers and creeks are home to 48 rare and endangered mussels and fish, the highest number of imperiled species in any ecosystem in the United States, outside Hawaii. That concentration of rarity -- and a determination to remedy it -- was what drew the Conservancy to southwest Virginia.

"Most environmentalists, they always want more," the Conservancy's former President John Sawhill told The Bee before his death last year. "We wanted to know, 'How much is enough? What do we really need to do to conserve biological diversity in the U.S.? How will we measure success?' "

"So we came up with the idea of creating what we call a conservation blueprint: a map showing all the sites nationwide that need to be protected in order to accomplish our mission," Sawhill said. On that map, a handful of areas glow red and orange -- color codes for extreme biological danger. They are southwest Virginia, Hawaii and parts of California, Nevada and Florida.

"Now we know where we're headed and what we're trying to accomplish," Sawhill said.

The Conservancy also works closely with local residents, including Buddy Thomas, owner of the Castlewood Farm Supply & Garden Center and president of the chamber of commerce in Russell County, Va.

"I've heard it so many times from these farmers: 'What importance are these little mussels?' " Thomas said. "When I tell them those mussels are God's little filters to clean the water, they look at it a whole different way."

"I got a 2-year-old girl," Thomas continued. "You know what my favorite thing in the world is to do? It is to get my fishing rod and my kid and play in that creek. Everybody loves the creek. I can't find many people who want to see it hurt."

Thomas even formed his own conservation start-up -- the all-volunteer Copper Creek Watershed Citizens' Awareness Group -- to bring farmers, environmentalists and others together to solve problems.

"We'll get a lot further doing things together than by butting heads, making threats and telling people they can't do things," he said. "You tell people around here they can't do something, they'll do it or die."

A similar approach is unfolding outside the United States, where Conservation International, the youngest of the nation's major environmental groups, concentrates on a handful of the planet's richest biological zones, from the Congo Basin in Africa to Mexico's Gulf of California.

On turquoise water under a sweltering sun, Conservation International scientist Juan Garcia is putting a new strategy to work to save a wide variety of marine life in the gulf. He is working with the very people who are exploiting the gulf, also known as the Sea of Cortez.

Garcia labors alongside fishermen, trying to make shrimp trawling, one of the world's most wasteful fishing technologies, less destructive. Dragged behind large boats, trawl nets snare everything in their path, including sea horses, marine turtles and silvery schools of fish too small to eat.

In the Sea of Cortez, trawl nets capture up to 9 pounds of unwanted species for every pound of shrimp, one of the highest ratios anywhere.

"We are working with six or seven vessels," Garcia said. "They are very enthusiastic about trying to find a solution."

Such community-driven conservation efforts are the brainchild of Conservation International's founder and chairman, Peter Seligmann, who believes the secret to environmental success in other countries is to "make sure everybody understands conservation is in their self-interest."

Seligmann is applying conservation to internal matters, too. A few years back, he abandoned junk-mail fund raising in favor of personal solicitations to major donors. The result: more accountability for donor dollars.

"If you have a million people giving you $25, nobody has the leverage to say -- 'OK, how did you spend my money?' -- because they don't care. It's just 25 bucks," he said. "But when somebody gives you $1,000, they have the right to know, and you have the obligation to inform them, how you spend their money.

"The other problem with direct mail is it requires exaggeration," Seligmann said. "You don't build effective long-term conservation programs based on exaggeration."

Even some groups that continue to raise money though the mail are doing it differently: They refuse to cry wolf.

"We very rarely say, 'The world is coming to an end, send $25,' " said Taylor, the Audubon Society leader. "What we do say is, 'Send us money so we can buy this area, restore that area.' That approach has performed nicely."

In Tucson, the Sonoran Institute takes matters a step further -- it doesn't have a membership at all.

"A membership is very expensive," said Luther Propst, executive director of the organization, which protects open space across the western United States, Canada and Mexico. Instead, it raises money from foundations.

A membership "will also influence your decision-making, often in ways that take you away from science and what your field people tell you. You are tempted to oversimplify. We find that foundation officers appreciate it when you are honest."

Frustrated with junk mail, even Greenpeace is trying alternatives, including something called "direct dialogue" in which volunteers stand on street corners and ask for donations.

But instead of seeking a one-time contribution of cash, the Greenpeace volunteers are asking for a monthly credit-card or checking-account deposit, thus eliminating junk mail and cutting fund-raising costs. That approach is popular in Europe but relatively new in the United States.

"Our argument to donors is, 'This (direct deposit) is how you can really help us,' " said John Passacantando, Greenpeace's executive director. "We're spending too much money to get your money."

Some environmentalists are even taking a fresh look at the movement's most potent weapon: the law. "The law prohibits bad things; it doesn't encourage good things," said Michael Bean, a senior attorney with Environmental Defense, a major national group.

Bean, one of the nation's most seasoned endangered species lawyers, has sued to get the California desert tortoise on the endangered species list and compel American shrimp fishermen to reduce the accidental catch of sea turtles in their nets.

Now he's found a new niche: saving wildlife without litigation.

"The preconceived notion is that the best way to get results is always to tighten the screws," Bean said. "But there are some circumstances in which you get better results by creatively loosening the screws."

One such case unfolded in North Carolina where landowners, wary of land-use restrictions, were leveling pine forests to ward off an endangered woodpecker.

Bean helped broker a deal in which landowners not only agreed to stop such "panic cutting" but also to manage their forests in ways that would attract the birds -- all in exchange for a guarantee from the federal government that they would suffer no new restrictions on using their land.

Bean said the idea behind such "safe harbor agreements" is simple: People who do good deeds shouldn't be punished for doing them.

Incentives are coming to regulatory matters, too.

"We believe in regulation. But you can only go so far with a regulatory system. Free enterprise is the greatest motivator the world has ever known," said Noonan, the Conservation Fund chairman.

"Developers come to us all the time," Noonan continued. "They don't want to get tied up, fight it out for years. They want certainty. I can jam any developer I want. I may not win, but I can jam them. For two, three, four years. That's power. But it's also frightening power."

When a large investment group recently announced plans to build a new subdivision in fast-growing Palm Beach County, Fla., Noonan worked with the developer to create ribbons of open space that will provide habitat for endangered species, restore surface and groundwater flows, and link neighborhoods with bicycle and pedestrian trails.

"We're not going to stop population growth, at least not in our lifetime," Noonan said. "So I suggest the next big leap is: How do we support good development?"

Increasingly, environmental groups also are using the free market to accomplish something that has proved nearly impossible for local, county and state regulators: stopping sprawl.

They are doing it by buying land, even in some of the most booming real estate markets in America. "We're un-developers," said Will Rogers, president of the Trust for Public Land, which recently saved a choice 534-acre parcel from subdivision in the hills above San Jose, for $1.9 million.

Some of the trust's work takes place an ecosystem overlooked by many conservation groups: the inner city. In Oakland, it is turning urban blight into parks. In Los Angeles, it is converting a toxic Superfund site into a soccer field.

"There is an increased awareness that land can be recycled, that parks can be created often out of brownfields" -- abandoned industrial sites, Rogers said. "It's gnarly stuff, in terms of toxics and liability. But it's a big, exciting category. We've done probably 36 brownfields projects over our history."

Noonan's Conservation Fund recently pulled off one of the biggest conservation transactions of all -- buying from a logging company 300,000 acres in New York, Vermont and New Hampshire for $76.7 million.

"We outbid Wall Street on that one," Noonan said. "That's happening more and more."

Like a brokerage house for the environmental movement, the Conservation Fund brought together other nonprofit groups, foundations and public agencies to complete a transaction none could have completed on its own.

"The big weakness of our movement is we don't collaborate very well," Noonan said. "We're seeing a new set of people come into the movement who can talk the language of business and who are humble enough to know they can't do it alone."

Land also can be protected through strategies such as that adopted by California rancher Scott Stone: Restore it to ecological health. Last year, as bright orange flames raced along a creek at the Yolo Land and Cattle Co. northwest of Winters, Stone stood nearby, watching contentedly.

"You can see what we're trying to get rid of," he said, pointing to vast golden fields of yellow star thistle, medusa head and goat grass -- non-native, ecologically harmful weeds and grasses.

The spread of non-native weeds and other species may seem insignificant, but it is actually one of the nation's most serious ecological problems. Exotic weeds and grasses choke out native plants, increase fire danger and destroy wildlife habitat.

Conventional remedies -- herbicides and hoes -- offer little hope. The problem is simply too large. For many weed species in the West, the only option is fire. And in California, few people know more about the therapeutic power of fire than Central Valley farmer John Anderson, who helped Stone plan and carry out his pastoral pyrotechnics.

"That star thistle is history!" Anderson shouted gleefully as knee-high flames raced along a dirt road.

Sitting on the ground as smoke curled around him, his face streaked with ash, Anderson turned philosophical. "We need to reinstitute a culture of fire in the West," he said. "We've feared it for years, and now nobody knows how to burn."

Anderson took advantage of his fireside chat to call for the creation of a massive new federal program to restore land to ecological health -- "a national land health care system," he called it.

"You really can't nickel-and-dime habitat restoration," said Anderson, a member of the National Audubon Society board. "Most of the money we're getting now (from government agencies) is nickel and dime. We need big bucks ... We need millions and millions of dollars to fight weeds right now."

But there are alternatives to federal money, too. You can, for example, call on school kids, as The Nature Conservancy is doing south of Sacramento at its Cosumnes River Preserve.

"We decided that the way to the heart of the community was through the schoolchildren," said Mike Eaton, director of the preserve. "So we set out to create hands-on opportunities." Today, about 4,000 schoolkids a year plant trees, collect acorns and gather frog, fish and duck stories to take home.

Tapping into community spirit is also an approach used by the Malpai Borderlands Group, a network of ranchers in Arizona and New Mexico. There, free market tools such as conservation easements and cooperative grazing partnerships are put to work to protect ranches and open space critical to wildlife.

"There are very few ranchers in this country that are not pro-wildlife," said Warner Glenn -- a member of the group's board -- relaxing on the porch of his ranch home last year as lightning illuminated Mexico's Sierra Madre range to the south.

In 1996, Glenn became the first person to photograph a wild jaguar in the United States. He wrote a book about it and is donating a portion of the proceeds to jaguar conservation.

When the population of a rare species of leopard frog dropped precariously in a drought a few years back, another Malpai rancher, Matt Magoffin, fashioned a homemade water truck. He and his family hauled 1,000 gallons of water a week to the frogs for 2 1/2 years.

"Environmentalists are fighting with ranchers, but we both want the same goals," Magoffin said. "We want to maintain open space and keep subdivisions from spreading across the landscape."

Corporations have also joined the ranks of nontraditional conservationists. And many environmentalists are distrustful.

"The lack of accountability on the part of America's corporate leadership is back where it was in the 1870s," said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. Less than 1 percent of the Sierra Club's budget comes from corporations, and such gifts are run through a rigorous environmental screening process.

But Conservation International President Russell Mittermeier embraces corporate wealth.

"The private sector drives much of what happens in the world," said Mittermeier, who has been likened to Indiana Jones for his intrepid travels through tropical jungles to save endangered primates. "One can either be in an adversarial relationship with it, or one can work with people in the private sector who are really concerned and interested in change."

Ford Motor Co. has donated more than $5 million to Conservation International for habitat protection in Brazil and Mexico. Starbucks is backing efforts to promote the cultivation of shade-tolerant coffee plants in Chiapas, Mexico, saving forests from being logged to make way for coffee plantations.

William Clay Ford Jr. -- the car company's chairman -- has served on the Conservation International board member. So has retired Intel Chairman Gordon Moore, who recently gave the group $35 million to start its own research arm.

Although many environmentalists say corporate support is a public relations ploy, Mittermeier said his own experience indicates otherwise.

"William Ford is as strong on this stuff as anybody in the organization," he said, "Gordon Moore is totally committed. He goes on every field trip, climbs every mountain."

The National Audubon Society welcomes corporate donations, too. "Somebody once had a great phrase when asked, 'Would you accept tainted money?' " said Dan Beard, the society's chief operating officer. "The response was, 'The only thing wrong with tainted money is there t'ain't enough of it.'

"What we ought to be doing is building an environmental ethic in corporate minds," Beard said. "We ought to be converting the world to an environmental ethic. If you just ignore people -- or point fingers at them -- that isn't going to do anybody any good."

SB - Playing with fire (4/5)

Playing with fire

Spin on science puts national treasure at risk
(Fourth of five parts)

By Tom Knudson
Bee Staff Writer
(Published April 25, 2001)

The scientific paper that landed on Tammy Randall-Parker's desk was thick with jargon and data. But to Randall-Parker, a biologist with the Coconino National Forest in Arizona, it was riveting.

Citing an enormous accumulation of vegetation and deadwood in Western forests -- the legacy of years of effective federal firefighting -- the report by a prestigious team of specialists warned that unless such stands were thinned, they were likely to erupt into flame, threatening a rare, falcon-like bird: the northern goshawk.

Randall-Parker felt compelled to act. But when she and others suggested thinning near a goshawk nest, environmentalists protested on the bird's behalf, stopping the proposal dead.

Then came the fire that Randall-Parker feared. "I watched it just explode," she said. The 1996 blaze devoured centuries-old trees as if they were kindling -- including the one that cradled the goshawk nest.

"There was not a green tree left," she said. "What the scientists said could happen -- did happen, right in front of my eyes."

Environmental advocacy has long struggled with scientific fact, despite its very basis in science. But in the battle over the majestic conifer forests that blanket much of the West, advocacy is often shoving science aside -- and forests, wildlife and human communities are suffering the consequences.

Tweaking science to make a point is nothing new for environmental groups. To protect rare species, for example, some groups trot out just those studies -- or snippets of studies -- that support their view. Some will pick and choose facts that serve their interests in campaigns to create wilderness areas.

Misusing forest science is different.

It is playing with fire. Not the natural fires that have nourished forests for centuries, but unusually savage ones that jeopardize homes and human lives and can inflict more serious environmental damage than logging.

"We're not sure if some of these burned areas will ever recover their native biological diversity," said Wallace Covington, a professor of forest ecology at Northern Arizona University and a nationally recognized fire scientist. "Certainly, over evolutionary time, new species will emerge. But these are major devastations."

Science will never settle all conflict over forest and fire management. But during the past two decades, university, government and industry scientists have written a series of papers published in academic journals and elsewhere that point again and again to the rapid and dangerous accumulation of woody debris in Western forests -- and the need for thinning.

"There is strong consensus among credible scientists that 100 years of fire suppression has led to a buildup of fuel in Western forests that makes them very susceptible to destructive, unnatural, ecosystem-destroying wildfire," said Neil Sampson, a visiting fellow at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and former chairman of the 1994 National Commission on Wildfire Disasters.

"Time is not an ally," he said.

Environmental groups aren't convinced. Where science sees a tinderbox, they see timber sales in disguise. And despite a steep drop in the volume of timber sold from federal forests in recent years, they say the U.S. Forest Service cannot be trusted.

"We're dealing with an agency that -- at the district level -- is a rogue agency," said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, which is backing a "no commercial logging" campaign in Congress.

"There are some very good people in the Forest Service," Pope said. "But there are some people who really still think their job is to keep the local mill running."

Sampson said it's just not so. "The idea that thinning the forest is a boondoggle for the timber industry is bizarre," he said. "Much of what needs to be removed isn't even economically valuable. They are going to spin the science and lose the forest."

Wildfire today is inflicting nightmarish wounds -- injuries made worse by a failure to heed scientific warnings. For example:

* In 1994, Covington and a colleague warned that the Kendrick Mountain Wilderness Area in northern Arizona was so clotted with vegetation, it was ready to explode. "Delay ... will only perpetuate fuel buildup and increase the potential for uncontrolled and destructive wildfire," they wrote in a scientific analysis for the Kaibab National Forest.

Some thinning was done -- but not enough. Last year, a large fire swept through the region, carving an apocalyptic trail of destruction.

"What happened is much worse, ecologically, than a clear-cut -- much worse," Covington said "And that fire is the future. It's happening again and again. We're going to have skeletal landscapes."

* Listening to fire and forest scientists, Martha Ketelle pleaded in 1996 for permission to log and thin an incendiary mass of storm-killed timber in California's Trinity Alps. "This is a true emergency of vast magnitude," Ketelle, then supervisor of the Six Rivers National Forest, wrote to her boss in San Francisco. "It is not a matter of if a fire will occur, but how extensive the damage will be when the fire does occur."

Because of an environmental appeal, the project bogged down. Then, in 1999, a fire found its way into the area. It spewed smoke for hundreds of miles, incinerated spotted owl habitat and triggered soil erosion and stream damage in a key salmon-spawning watershed.

* Early last year, officials of Santa Fe National Forest in New Mexico urged that dense pine stands near Los Alamos be thinned. "The underlying need is to reduce the potential for large, high intensity crown fires that threaten people, property, wildlife (and) watersheds," they stated in a report.

The project was slowed by a lack of funds and by environmental concerns. Last May, the Cerro Grande fire, the largest and most destructive in New Mexico history, erupted in the very area recommended for thinning, damaging or destroying more than 220 structures, including several portable structures at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

"Witnessing the Cerro Grande fire is the closest I'll come to seeing a biblical event in my lifetime," said Bill Armstrong, a forester with the Santa Fe National Forest. "It was unstoppable. Awe-inspiring. Futile. It was not, however, an unpreventable act of God."


Step into the forest outside Flagstaff, Ariz., and you enter a world of living matchsticks. You see dozens, hundreds, thousands of spindly, stunted ponderosa pines, crowded close together in shadowy thickets -- each competing with the others for moisture, soil nutrients and sunlight.

It is a much different setting from the one described by E.F. Beale, an explorer who passed through the area in 1858. "We came to a glorious forest of lofty pines," Beale wrote in a journal. "The forest was perfectly open and unencumbered with brush wood, so that the traveling was excellent."

What made that 19th century forest spacious was fire.

"Frequent surface fires were as important to ... forests as sunshine and rain," Thomas Swetnam, director of the University of Arizona's Tree-Ring Laboratory, told Congress last year. "Indeed, in southwestern ponderosa pine forests, the only natural events more frequent and regular than fire were the changing seasons."

Smokey Bear changed all that. Preventing and putting out fires, though, turned forests into thickets. Covington, the fire scientist, has quantified the change. In the Kaibab National Forest in Arizona, he found an area that sprouted 36 to 81 trees per acre in 1876 had grown shaggy and dense with 692 to 1,801 trees per acre by 1994.

A 1999 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office concluded: "The most extensive and serious problem (for) national forests in the interior West is the overaccumulation of vegetation. According to the Forest Service, 39 million acres are at high risk" of fire.

Not content to lick lightly along the surface of the forest, snapping up grass, brush and small trees, modern-day blazes roar up a staircase of woody debris, leaping high into the forest canopy. Such contemporary "crown fires" burn so hot that they destroy everything from microscopic life in the soil to majestic, old-growth trees that have been nourished by centuries of cooler fires.

"The fires we are experiencing now -- and I've been in this business 27 years -- are unlike anything we have experienced in this country before," said Paul Summerfelt, a fuel management officer with the Flagstaff fire department. "And this is just the beginning."


The buildup of fuels in Western forests was a prominent topic in the 1996 Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project report, a 3,187-page scientific assessment of the California mountain range.

Citing a remarkable accumulation of vegetation and deadwood, the $6.5 million, congressionally funded report warned of a fiery future -- unless overcrowded stands were thinned soon.

"Current quantities of flammable biomass -- primarily small trees and surface fuels -- are unprecedented," the report stated. "Simple physics and common sense dictate that the area burned by high-severity fires will increase. Losses of life, property and resources will escalate accordingly."

One suggested remedy was small-tree logging, followed by prescribed fire. "Logging can serve as a tool to help reduce fire hazard," it stated.

Environmental groups overlooked that part of the report.

Instead, they plucked one sentence from thousands to argue that all logging is bad. Here's how the National Forest Protection Alliance, a consortium of activists, used the report last fall in an action alert, under the heading, "What the Government's Own Scientists Say about Logging and Wildfires":

"Timber harvest, through its effects on forest structure, local microclimate and fuels accumulation has increased fire severity more than any other recent human activity."

Fire scientist Phillip Weatherspoon knows the sentence well. He helped write the Sierra Nevada report. The excerpt, he said, refers to historic logging that left Western forests littered with woody debris -- not modern thinning designed to clean up such debris.

"By itself it is misleading," he said. "This has been really abused."

Informed of Weatherspoon's concern, Jeanette Russell, network coordinator for the forest alliance, said: "This is the most popular fact we have. It is a quote congresspeople have used."

Chad Hanson, executive director of the John Muir Project and prominent foe of commercial logging, maintained there is nothing wrong with using the passage in isolation.

"It's a true statement," Hanson said. "It does not require additional statements to make it true."

The controversy is white-hot, powered by decades of distrust of the Forest Service. As Timothy Ingalsbee, director of the Western Fire Ecology Center in Oregon, explained in a letter:

"The fact that thinning is an abstract concept makes it subject to discretionary abuse .... In every single case of an alleged 'fire hazard reduction/forest ecosystem restoration' project that the agency has proposed the use of commercial thinning, the first thing the agency seeks is removal of the logs."

Not all environmental groups oppose commercial thinning, though. In Flagstaff, the Grand Canyon Trust has joined with Northern Arizona University, the Forest Service and others in an effort to thin dense stands.

The group, though, has hit a snag with no-commercial cut advocates within other environmental groups. "They say we are a tool of the timber industry," said Brad Ack, the Trust's conservation director.

"They say that logging increases the risk of fire," he said. "But that is out-of-context science. A lot of these folks are simply against cutting trees. It's almost spiritual environmentalism."

Hanson remains skeptical.

"This is not about science," he said. "This is the drumbeat of thinning being driven by the (Forest Service) commercial timber program. Science is being victimized."

No pro-thinning effort has drawn more heat than the Quincy Library Group, a coalition of conservationists, loggers and business people in the Sierra Nevada that is a national model for fuel-reduction efforts. What's fueling that heat is sometimes partial truth and hyperbole.

During congressional debate, for example, a coalition of environmental groups -- including the Sierra Club and the Sierra Nevada Forest Protection Campaign -- claimed a Quincy-sponsored bill would "double logging." What the coalition didn't say was that logging volume was already at a 50-year low and that doubling it -- which is not actually what the bill proposed -- would have kept it well below historic levels.

"I still support that statement," said Craig Thomas, conservation director of the forest protection campaign in an e-mail. "It doesn't matter what the logging level was in the clear cut days (of the) 1980s. Those levels had no ecological validity."

The bill, passed by Congress, was meant to end the jobs versus trees gridlock, reduce fire risk and restore forests to health; it calls for thinning 40,000 to 70,000 acres of dense stands a year, while protecting 650,000 environmentally sensitive acres.

"They claim that we're clear-cutting, that we're going to destroy the spotted owl and ruin ancient forests -- and we're not," said Michael Yost, a professor of forestry at Feather River College and a member of the Quincy group.

"My wife and I have belonged for many years to the Sierra Club, The Wilderness Society and other organizations. And we've stopped our memberships," Yost said. "It's not in retaliation. It's just that I can't believe what these people are saying anymore."

In another case, the forest protection campaign distributed a flier to the U.S. Senate featuring a photo of a gigantic stump. "Sierra Old Growth Still Being Logged," it said. "Vote No on the Quincy Logging Bill." But the tree stump had nothing to do with the Quincy effort, or with Quincy itself. The tree was logged in another area.

"There is truly a conviction on the part of environmental groups that they can distort reality to convey impressions they believe are the truth," said Linda Blum, another Quincy member. "The focus is on ideology and politics -- not the environment."

Thomas said Quincy supporters are blowing smoke.

"This is their tactic: to try to demonstrate that we're some evil beast," Thomas said.

And while Thomas said he was not involved with the flier, he defended its use. "Who cares where the tree was cut?" he said. "The important thing was to convey a truthful message that old-growth forests were at risk in the Quincy proposal."

Some environmentalists don't merely manipulate the science. They attack the credibility of the scientists, including Covington, a Regents professor at Northern Arizona University.

For more than two decades, Covington has labored to bring a science-based ecological restoration gospel to pine forests around the West. His work has been published in academic periodicals, including the prestigious British journal Nature. Yet environmentalists consider his research suspect.

"Wally Covington is a darling of timber-industry supporters in Congress," said Hanson. "A lot of his data is open to question. He is a competent guy, but he is guessing."

Covington replied: "The science is solid. This is not a guess. They are attempting to discredit me because my views are different than their views."

"Science is not just the selective citation of studies," Covington said. "Science is built upon an entire body of knowledge. It's not slanted toward proving a particular point of view."

Sorting fact from fiction can sometimes be difficult. Armstrong, the New Mexico forester, recalled attending a meeting last year at the invitation of the Forest Conservation Council, a local environmental group.

The subject: a thinning project proposed by Santa Fe National Forest officials aimed at protecting the forests and streams that make up Santa Fe's watershed. The forest council didn't like the idea.

"The director got up and presented to the audience a long list of scientific authors and citations, all of them refuting what we were proposing to do," Armstrong said.

The list sounded impressive. "But we didn't know what to make of it," Armstrong said. Later, the group forwarded its scientific objections to the national forest in a letter.

"The claim that 'thinning,' whether commercial or not, will decrease the risk of wildfire continues to be conjecture," the group's president, John Talberth, wrote on Feb. 18, 2000.

Then he cited some science. "According to Forest Service researcher Jack Cohen, thinning forests ... does little, if anything to protect nearby homes and towns from losses during wildfire and may, in fact, be inefficient and ineffective," Talberth wrote, footnoting a 1999 report by Cohen.

Cohen's report does say that. But it also says: "This (research) should not imply that wildland vegetation management is not without a purpose and should not occur."

The forest council left that part out.

Cohen said the group is misrepresenting his research, which focuses narrowly on risk to homes and does not assess the ecological impact of thinning. "They're certainly distorting the context," he said.

In an e-mail, Cohen said: "I think it very unfortunate that some environmental groups play the current spin games that have become very much a part of our culture. Intellectual dishonesty has become a norm."

Talberth responded with an e-mail, too: "We stand by all that we have said," he wrote. "The truth is that there are two sides to the story and if these researchers cannot stand to acknowledge that, then maybe they should consider careers as politicians and leave science to those with more objective thinking."

Talberth's original letter quoted another study, in the journal Forest Science. That article, too, was cited out of context, said Carl Skinner, a California fire scientist who co-authored it.

Armstrong said the scientific citations show up again and again in other environmental appeals and protests. "We get this pseudoscience and misquoted stuff all the time," he said.