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April 24, 2003 Eco-terrorism in Humboldt? PL ads spark controversyby BOB DORAN The television ad begins with an image of a plastic milk jug, and then shows a photo of Rod Coronado, an environmental activist. With ominous music and the sound of explosions in the background, a voice explains that the jug is "an explosive tool of his trade." [below right , Rod Coronado as seen in Palco TV ad]
The TV ad is part of a recent media campaign by the Pacific Lumber Co. that also includes radio spots on local stations and full-page ads in the Times Standard, one of which suggests that anti-logging activists are at odds with the tradition of nonviolent protest exemplified by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. The campaign has stirred up debate in Humboldt County. Many see the "eco-terrorist" ads as inflammatory; others believe they are accurate. Few here know anything about Coronado and his activities, but some, possibly, are beginning to wonder if local timber protestors pose a threat. When the radio spots started running last week, KHUM-FM was deluged with complaints. After consulting a lawyer, Patrick Cleary, general manager of KHUM's parent company, Lost Coast Communications, decided to drop the ads. "I'm not going to run anything this inflammatory," said Cleary. "Our listeners were upset. It's not in keeping with who we are." Cleary added that he felt the ads were potentially slanderous and that he had concerns that his station could get sued. Pacific Lumber spokesman Jim Branham defended the campaign in an interview with KMUD-FM news last week, saying, "I think Rodney Coronado is the definition of eco-terrorism." Branham said the response has been positive. "We've gotten a fair number of phone calls, some e-mail and some personal contact, and it's been overwhelmingly favorable, folks saying, `Damn right.'" According to Branham, "The primary motivation [for the ads] was to let the people of Humboldt County know about this one individual, Rodney Coronado, and his presence and activity here in Humboldt County. "Quite often the people who are opposed to our company like to communicate their belief in nonviolence, their belief in peace and love and so on," Branham continued. "Yet here's a guy who's been out at the various protests on Greenwood Heights Road, [who's] shown up at contract employee's homes -- and [he] has served time in federal prison for his role in the fire bombing of a research lab." Speaking by telephone from Tucson, Ariz., Coronado confirmed that he had served time in prison for "aiding and abetting arson against Michigan State University's experimental fur farm." He also confirmed that he had confronted a Pacific Lumber contract employee -- Eric Schatz, the man in charge of removing tree-sitters for the company -- at his home. "I told him personally in front of the Humboldt County Sheriff's Department that we were not going to sit back and let him kill a nonviolent protester, and that if he continued to go into the woods and endanger people, we were going to be at his house to protest his actions. "That is all we did," Coronado went on. "We didn't destroy any property, we just stood there to bear witness. We were there to prevent him from going to work that day, and he didn't go to work that day." Coronado, who has advocated property destruction against Pacific Lumber in the past, did not claim involvement in the apparent vandalization of a front-end loader in the Freshwater area a few weeks ago. But he noted that the sabotage, if that's what it was, occurred immediately after the resumption of helicopter logging. "If I was a resident in an area and I saw Pacific Lumber cutting down trees and taking them away with this helicopter, that would be a point where I might cross the line and say, `Screw this company.'" Rick Bennett, assistant chief of the Eureka Fire Department, did not speak directly about Coronado. But he said there are "homegrown terrorists" who are bent on monkey-wrenching logging equipment and that one of their primary tactics is arson. "The logging companies have had their equipment torched and we've found gas devices on equipment set to go off that failed to initiate," Bennett said. Lt. Steve Knight, a criminal investigator for the Humboldt County Sheriff's Department, said he does not know of any recent cases of arson against Pacific Lumber or any other timber company. According to Knight there were several cases of arson on logging trucks "about five years ago." There are no active leads and all of them remain unsolved, Knight said. While primarily an animal rights activist, Coronado sees that struggle as parallel to the fight to save old growth forests. "I think we are in a desperate situation here," he said. "We are looking at less than 5 percent of the remaining ancient redwood forests not only of California but [of] North America [cut] for profit and for greed. In our efforts to stop that I think we are justified in using every tactic available short of physical violence." Coronado said he has been a member of Earth First! since 1985. He has "worked with them off and on, including against PALCO, as early as the first Redwood Summer in 1990." He said that in 1990, Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were on their way to his house in Santa Cruz when the bomb went off in their car. "We were hosting a benefit they were going to be doing that night. Also at that time the FBI believed we were a haven for eco-terrorists because of ALF [Animal Liberation Front] activity and Earth First!'s active presence." Was his home a haven for eco-terrorism? "No. We were a haven for resistance against terrorism. I have never engaged in physical violence. The last time I struck somebody was in the sixth grade. My police record will reflect that. Even the crime I was convicted for, the judge specifically mentioned that there was no danger or threat to injury against human life." According to Coronado, Humboldt County's Earth Firsters maintain a stringent nonviolent code. He traces it back to the influence of Bari, who insisted that actions involving destruction of property should not be associated with Earth First! "If anybody in the movement felt justified in doing [property destruction], [she said] they should use another [group's] name. So the Earth Liberation Front was formed and actions that involved arson were done under that group's name." Coronado said he lived in Humboldt County "through last winter," and still maintains a residence in Blue Lake. While he was here, he visited the various tree-sits and worked doing ground support. He also spoke at Freshwater tree-sitter Wren's six-month anniversary and at a Forest Defense fund-raiser at the D Street Neighborhood Center in Arcata. Branham, for his part, chastised local timber protestors for failing to distance themselves from Coronado. "I don't see any of them standing up and saying `This guy's a bad actor, we don't want him in our community and we disagree with his views,'" Branham said. Lodgepole, a leader among the Greenwood Heights tree-sitters, said that Coronado is "a really passionate guy, and that can be twisted to seem like violent." Lodgepole characterized the PALCO ads as "inaccurate" and "slanderous." "It's total lies," he said. "They're holding a whole group of people responsible for one person's action." No buyers for Bridgeville, Carlottaby EMILY GURNON The listing of four California towns on eBay -- a phenomenon that generated a media frenzy beginning late last year -- has resulted in no sales as of yet. Like a mobbed open house that empties without a buyer in sight, the eBay listings of Bridgeville, Carlotta, Platina (Shasta County) and Amboy (San Bernardino County) attracted the attention of newspapers and television shows worldwide, but the money hasn't followed. "Two more weeks," promised Chris Larsen of Sunset Realty in Arcata, the agent in charge of the Bridgeville sale. "The lady's on vacation; when she gets back from vacation, it's supposed to close." Larsen has been telling reporters "two more weeks" since February. "So we'll see, but I'm counting on it." Bridgeville, a tiny Highway 36 burg about 23 miles off Highway 101, garnered a bid of $1.78 million from an Arizona woman after articles in newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times. Actually, Bridgeville was not the first town offered for sale on the Internet auction site. That distinction falls to the ghost town of Danville, Nev., which was listed in November and got a got a few hits, but comparatively little media attention. "I was never in favor of listing this on eBay," said Trish Rippie, a real estate agent for the property co-owned by her ex-husband, Michael. "I thought it was a big waste of time." Silver miners -- the only ones likely to be interested -- would pay attention to Danville when the silver market rebounds, she said. The Carlotta auction, which ended in March, attracted a corporate buyer from the Los Angeles area, but they decided instead to purchase property in Oregon, said Sandra Spalding, broker/owner with Community Realty in McKinleyville. Fortunately, Carlotta's owner, Angelo Batini, "is just pleased as punch to sit right where he's at," Spalding said. The third California town to list itself on eBay also lies, in a strange coincidence, on Highway 36 -- 70 miles east of Bridgeville. Platina, a former mining town named for the platinum found there, boasts a store, tavern, several rentals, a post office, a water system and 66 acres. Yvonne Mills, who bought the land 19 years ago and has run everything herself ever since, listed her town -- population 60 -- on eBay for $600,000 after seeing all of the hoopla surrounding Bridgeville. "I thought maybe everybody's wanting a town right now," she said. That listing ended in February and, as of this week, Platina hasn't sold either. "I still have some people trying to get some financing going," she said. Lastly, the town of Amboy, located about 78 miles from Barstow in the Mojave desert on old Route 66, was listed for $1.9 million about five weeks ago on eBay. It failed to get a sufficient bid, said Rob McManus, estate director for Dilbeck Realtors of San Marino. "We went on just about the time of the war in Iraq and I think it had a significant effect on the auction," McManus said. "People's hearts and minds were somewhere else." EBay may not end up to be the preferred venue for real estate sales. But then again, "This is how the motors category started out," said eBay spokesman Kevin Pursglove. "I think we thought that selling cars on the Internet wouldn't be the most practical idea, simply because people like to kick the tires." Now that category does $3 billion a year in business, he said. Embedded in Iraq: Bay Area reporter saw the war first-handby EMILY GURNON
Koopman, 44, [photo at right] was embedded with the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle until his return to San Francisco on Tuesday. He told his parents in Nebraska, and his wife, that "while it's not exactly a garden spot, I'm OK. There's not like a guy standing 2 feet away with a gun in his hand. I'm surrounded by an entire battalion of combat marines -- it's a pretty safe place." It sounds like vintage Koopman. He'll make a joke, make light of a situation, just to make sure that no one he cares about feels pain at his expense. John Koopman and I worked together in the Bay Area for six years, becoming good friends. Before he left the Middle East, I called him on his cell phone at his hotel room in Kuwait and asked him to talk about his experiences there. In truth, he said, it did get scary. The worst moments were not when the fighting was actually taking place, because he could see what was going on. "Fear is always about what you don't know and can't see. During all the activity, I wouldn't feel fear because I could see things." He'd reason, "If I just don't go over there [into a firefight], I won't be in trouble." The times he'd get nervous were when the commanding officer would talk to the troops, mentally preparing them for a battle. "I'd think, this could be pretty bad. I always felt a little feeling in the pit of my stomach like, `I hope it's all OK.'" A close call Most of the time, it was. One incident, however, took this former Marine, who had not previously been in combat, completely by surprise. "The Iraqis actually fired artillery on us once. We thought it was our own artillery firing short or something," he said. The shell hit an armored vehicle about 10 yards from where Koopman was standing, killing two Marines and injuring four. If it hadn't landed inside the vehicle, he could have been among the dead. Another media person reported later that "a San Francisco Chronicle reporter was standing nearby" the explosion, which Koopman's wife, Isabel, heard on TV. It "completely freaked her out," he said. She did not know at the time whether or not he was safe. Other experiences, too, will stay with him. "The weird thing is I saw a lot of death and destruction there. But I would not say it was terribly worse than stuff I've seen already as a reporter covering accidents and murders and things. There's a veil that comes down when you're reporting on things. You concentrate only on certain things, [asking yourself] `What's important on this? What do I need to know about this?'" On the other hand, while he talked to men who were taking care of wounded children, he did not see any himself. "For that I'm eternally grateful," he said. "That would have been the worst part of it. That I could not take." Some critics expressed concern that the practice of "embedding" reporters directly with the troops would lead them to identify too much with their sources. Koopman disagreed. "You do what you do, even in this environment. If you're a reporter, you report." He also said that censorship of his reports "never happened." As long as reporters avoided writing about things that were off-limits -- such as future troop movements and immediate release of names of those killed -- they were left alone, he said. Dirt, bad food, his boy One of the hardest aspects of the weeks-long ordeal was the physical discomfort. Since he was traveling with a battalion, he had to put up with everything they did. As soon as they entered Iraq from Kuwait, "there was no running water, very little electricity; days were a grind of moving and very little sleep and eating MREs [military rations] and not bathing and being in sandstorms." At first, you get upset when a little dirt gets on your computer, he said. "After a few days, it's like everything is shit. Pretty soon you're dropping food in the dirt and you're picking it up and eating it; you just don't care anymore." Some of those things you can't know until you experience them, he said. You can't imagine "how much you sweat and how much grime accumulates behind your ears. Every day I would wake up, poke my head out of the sleeping bag, and think: `Oh, crap, I'm still here.'" No lights were allowed at night -- not even the glow of a computer screen -- so Koopman sometimes had to file his stories while crunched into the back seat of the colonel's Humvee. Even worse than the discomfort was being so far from his 8-year-old son, Jordi -- whose teachers told Isabel one day that he'd spent the entire afternoon crying in fear for his father. "The worst was when he asked me [over the phone] if I was going to get shot," Koopman said. "I said, "No, I'm not near any of the bad guys,' lying of course." In the middle of the chaos, the destruction, the "shithole" that was Baghdad, things would jump out at him that reminded him of his little boy. Some of the MREs are just generic foods in brown wrappers; others are brand-name items, like Skittles candy. "Jordi loved Skittles. I'd think, `Oh, geez. I should be back there buying Skittles for Jordi rather than being out here in this fucking place.'" He took the assignment because war is "the big story," and all reporters dream about covering the big story. "War has a visceral attraction for anyone who wonders about life and death." But he didn't have to be there. "If I really break it down, I probably should have said [to my editor], `No, I'm a parent, I can't take that risk.'" HUMBOLDT PEOPLE
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Cut
to screaming protesters, putative recruits in a "guerrilla
war against timber companies" trained by Coronado. "This
is a terrorist attack on our communities, jobs and our way of
life," the voice intones.
John
Koopman tried hard to reassure his family that going to cover
the war in Baghdad really wasn't all that risky.
DAVE
MESERVE IS HAVING HIS 15 MINUTES.