on the cover / By Keith Easthouse

EPIC Changes

Former climbing instructor takes the reins at environmental group

(Aug. 18, 2011)  The trees slated for cutting, mostly Douglas fir and marked with slashes of blue paint, were on the small side-about 18 inches in diameter. More striking, both for their size and number, were the stumps. Four to five feet in diameter, they stood as reminders that there was once an old-growth forest here.

“People expect to hear that ancient forests are falling,” said Gary Graham Hughes, one of the new hands at the helm of the Arcata-based Environmental Protection Information Center. “The truth is they already got hammered.”

Gary Graham Hughes, EPIC’s new executive director, recently took a potential donor to see the redwoods at Grizzly Creek Redwoods State Park. PHOTO COURTESY OF EPIC

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Hughes has recently taken over Humboldt’s most prominent locally grown environmental group at a time when it is savoring a Richardson Grove victory, girding for a new fight over proposed park closures and gambling on a beefed-up leadership structure.

On a recent Sunday, Hughes led fellow environmentalists and a potential donor through a patch of forest south of Ruth Lake, where commercial logging is planned in the Six Rivers National Forest. The Beaverslide Timber Sale and Fuel Treatment Project, near the headwaters of the Mad River, would allow commercial logging on almost 2,400 acres, as well as thinning and controlled burning aimed at reducing wildfire risks on another 2,300 acres.

EPIC worries that if chainsaws once again disrupt the quiet of this less-than-virgin forest - a forest, diminished as it is, that still harbors populations of northern spotted owls — it would degrade the threatened owl’s habitat. And it would add five miles of roads to an area already heavily penetrated by them.

The Forest Service’s regional office has rejected EPIC’s appeal to stop the timber sale, and now the ball is in EPIC’s court.  “We haven’t fully made the decision about whether to go to court, but it’s a pretty strong probability,” said Hughes, who has been the group’s executive director since April.

Going to court has been a specialty of EPIC’s since its birth in the 1970s. At first it was a loose-knit group opposed to aerial herbicide spraying on timberlands in northern Mendocino and southern Humboldt counties. As EPIC fought on, it became a litigation tiger, leading a protracted battle to stop old-growth logging near the coast north of Ft. Bragg, particularly in the Sally Bell Grove. Today that grove is part of Sinkyone Wilderness State Park.

EPIC’s lawsuit in to save the grove led to a 1983 decision which has been enforced in nearly two dozen later cases. It requires the California Department of Forestry to consider cumulative impacts to water quality, wildlife and other resources when reviewing timber harvest plans.

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