Alert! Tree Sitters Under Assault 1/16

Today, Thursday Jan. 16, Pacific Lumber and Humboldt law enforcement began moving in on tree-sits on PL land in Humboldt county. It is unclear at this writing how far they will go to try to remove tree-sits from their property, but people have felt recently that PL might soon try to remove the tree sits.

On Thursday, PL's "climber Eric" dismantled a tree-sit in PL's Demonstration Forest near the Avenue of the Giants, taking down sitter Sequoia, and showed up in Freshwater, where there have been many tree-sits, not dipping below about a dozen the last couple
months. Freshwater is also the area where Remedy has been in an old growth redwood for 10 months, along with Wren who has been in a nearby tree for 8 months. The Freshwater watershed has been under
assault by PL logging, where the Headwaters Deal Habitat Conservation Plan allows 500 acres to be clear cut annually.

Remedy told us by cell phone that law enforcement and PL climbers, climbing gear in tow, arrived at a tree-sit on Kneeland Rd., about 5 miles from her tree, surveyed the scene, but did not attempt to climb
the tree and extract the sitter.

PL is carrying out aggressive logging in key areas, including occupied habitat of the endangered marbled murrelet. Their logging has also been causing slides and flooding, with tremendous impact on local residents and on salmon and steelhead fisheries.

There have been on-going tree-sits in the Demonstration Forest, Gypsy Mountain, where David Gypsy Chain was killed in 1998 by an angry logger, in a stand of old growth in Grizzly Creek, in the Mattole watershed, and in Freshwater.

PL is coming under fire with the release of a scientific report making the correlation between their accelerated logging and devastating water quality problems such as the flooding and mud slides befalling neighbors downstream from PL logging sites, degradation of drinking water supplies and loss of agricultural crops. The recommendation to scaling back the cut coming in that scientific report and the fact that the case challenging the Sustained Yield Plan of the Headwaters Deal may have caused PL to
accelerate their cutting in the last of their available old growth, which happens to be above already impaired water courses and in endangered species habitat.

Those facts have made the tree sits all the more urgent.

Support is needed! Call the two numbers below to find out how you can help.

Areas of tree-sits are as follows

*Demonstration Forest, near the Pepperwood exit off 101, in the Avenue of the Giants

*Freshwater watershed, which is east of the north end of Eureka

*Gypsy Mountain and Grizzly Creek areas are out highway 36, east off 101 near Fortuna and south of Eureka Check with BACH office and North Coast Earth First! before going up to offer support.

Northcoast EF! 707-825-6598
BACH office: 510-548-3113