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December 8, 2005
TICKERTAPE: On Monday, the hearing board
of the North Coast Unified Air Quality Management District put
off a decision on whether to grant the Evergreen Pulp Mill
a variance that would allow the mill to continue operating while
repairs to faulty equipment are pursued. The board will hear
the issue again next month ... The Times-Standard reported
that the parties in the 1997 pepper spray case, in which
officers from the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office and the Eureka
Police Department swabbed the eyes of nonviolent protestors with
the noxious substance, are nearing a final resolution of the
matter. In May, the eight protestors prevailed in a long-running
civil rights lawsuit brought against the city and the county.
According to the paper, the parties are nearing agreement on
the legal bill for the plaintiffs' attorneys, which the city
and county are required to pay.
Humboldt State University announced Monday
that it had beat out Cal State East Bay for a $2.15 million annual
federal grant to develop and manage a Small Business Development
Center covering all of northwestern California, from the Monterey
Bay to the Oregon border and including San Francisco and environs.
A white male adult wearing a green bandana over
his face robbed a Shell station on W. Harris Avenue in Eureka
early Tuesday morning. The Eureka Police Department issued
a press release that helpfully informed mini-mart employees that
they should be wary of patrons who wear bandanas covering their
faces ... While Fortuna and Arcata don't like to
think they have much in common, in recent weeks both cities have
suffered from a series of incidents in which yahoos have
driven their pickup trucks across city parks and schoolyards
for thrills, tearing up carefully tended turf in the process.
In their guise as members of the Eureka Redevelopment
Agency, members of that town's City Council were scheduled to
make a final decision Tuesday night (after our deadline) on whether
to award a prime bit of bayfront real estate to the Hampton
Suites or the Humboldt Bay Hostel and Sustainable Living
Center, aka the Eco-hostel.
ADAM AND STEVE: Good God. The testimony
went on for Two Solid Hours, reaching paroxysms of homophobia
parading as religiosity and eliciting tears from lesbian mothers
and even from Supervisor Jill Geist. There were pastors sounding
off about upholding morality and protecting kids "just like
you'd protect them from pedophiles." There was incoherent
babble from a woman who attempted to say that gay marriage is
wrong but inadvertently revealed that her own marriage sucks.
There were threats that the North Coast would become a "dangerous
place" if we support gay marriage, which sent the supes
chambers into waves of laughter and forced Supervisor Roger Rodoni
to pound his gavel. Oh, and of course, someone had to toss in
that old rhyming standby -- "Adam and Eve, not Adam and
Steve."
But in the end, the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors
finally said: Gay marriage is fine by us. For all the pre-vote
public uproar it created, the county's support of the resolution
drafted by the county Human Rights Committee has no legal power
and does not afford gay couples any rights. Basically, it says
that Humboldt supports an end to legal discrimination against
same-sex couples that would like to marry. The resolution is
"symbolic, healing and educational," said HRC member
Jamila Tharp at the Supes meeting.
Roger Rodoni, who cast the lone dissenting vote,
put it another way, saying that gay people won't be able to run
up to the fifth floor of the HumCo courthouse and get married
just because the motion passed. Rodoni criticized the language
of the resolution and said that he needed to stand by his Second
District constituents, who overwhelmingly voted for Proposition
22 in 2000, which said that marriage is only between a man and
a woman. Supervisors John Woolley, Geist and Bonnie Neely supported
the resolution. Supervisor Jimmy Smith was at jury duty.
A TREE-SIT, A FLY-IN: On Pacific Lumber
Company's website, in the News Room, the latest notice is a Dec.
5 announcement of the children's Christmas celebration in Scotia,
as well as news of the twinkling lights along the streets, the
company's donation of 100 turkeys to local organizations, and
other pronouncements of joy typical of the season. Quoth the
news release: "If you look to the east on the hillside above
Scotia, you will see another PALCO holiday tradition -- the live
Christmas tree that lights up the evening sky. This same redwood
tree has been decorated every year since 1936 with 800 colored
lights as well as the glowing star at the very top."
It sounds lovely, and perhaps it's not the image
one might expect to encounter if one were paying heed to another,
anti-Palco, tradition: logging protesters. Rather, you might
expect to see some Scrooge-faced Palco exec shinnying up that
Scotia redwood, broad daylight, to smack that star off into space.
See, there's been a stink lately over a timber
harvest Palco commenced on Nov. 11 in the Nanning Creek Grove
area. Activists -- a few of whom did shinny up old redwoods to
stage a tree-sit in the grove once the logging began -- say the
harvest, though given the go-ahead by the required agencies,
threatens protected species such as the marbled murrelet, which
relies on old growth trees for nesting. "Nanning is a grove
of ancient redwoods containing trees up to 15 feet in diameter
and comprising the largest chunk of intact unprotected habitat
for the federally listed marbled murrelet," a Dec. 6 news
release from the Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters and the Environmental
Protection Information Center reads. Other activists locked themselves
to trucks (and were arrested), filed court challenges to the
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's permitting of the harvest
plan, and on Tuesday "flew in" to Sen. Dianne Feinstein's
office in San Francisco dressed as marbled murrelets and were
joined by giant redwood tree puppets. The activists blame Feinstein
and others instrumental in the 1999 Headwaters Deal for neglecting
to protect endangered species. "The deal was based on politics
-- not the law or science," said Cecelia Lanman, former
program director for EPIC. The activists say that subsequent
legal victories "have invalidated permits to kill endangered
species granted under the Headwaters Deal."
Palco's News Room has no news release on the tree-sits
or fly-ins.
WWWDRS BACK ON: Meanwhile, a visiting judge
from Lassen County ruled Tuesday that the North Coast Regional
Water Quality Control Board may proceed with developing watershed-wide
waste discharge requirements for the Freshwater Creek and Elk
River Watersheds, against the wishes of Pacific Lumber, the majority
landholder in both areas. The WWWDRs, when finally passed, would
approximately half the amount of logging that Palco is able to
do in the two watersheds. The company has opposed them at water
quality hearings and in the courts, winning a temporary restraining
order stopping them on the eve of NCRWQCB hearings in Ferndale
earlier this year.
The restraining order is now lifted, and the board
can resume its hearings as early as next month. "Judge Letton
has rightly recognized that the court does not have jurisdiction
to pre-empt a properly-functioning regulatory process, based
upon speculation as to the outcome," said Humboldt Watershed
Council's Mark Lovelace in a press release. "Hopefully now
the Water Board can get back to the business of trying to provide
some relief from flooding for the residents of Freshwater and
Elk River."
JENNIFER WHALEN DD: As in drunk driving.
News Channel 3's bibulous anchor was caught twice doing it in
Humboldt County, once Sept. 9, 2005 and again on Sept. 23. She
lost her job as a result. Deputy District Attorney Shane Haushchild
was all over the Whalen beat, dashing off a somewhat self-congratulatory
press release on Dec. 1. The document reads: "Initially,
both incidents were charged as misdemeanors, however, it was
discovered by this Office that Whalen had three prior driving
under the influence convictions in the State of Missouri, all
of which occurred within a relatively short period of time. Under
California law, a driving under the influence charge with three
or more priors within the past ten years can be charged as either
a misdemeanor or a felony."
In other words, you can't get hammered on the spirits
of the North Coast and get away with it forever, and Whalen found
out the hard way. She pled guilty to two felonies on Nov. 30.
The press release goes on to detail her plea agreement: She won't
go to the slammer right away, but she'll be on "supervised
felony probation for up to five years." But the 25-year-old
will still have to serve up to 180 days in the Humboldt County
jail, her license will be revoked for four years and she won't
be able to own a gun.
Hauschild brings it home with a big old reprimanding
pull quote: "Someone with five driving under the influence
convictions within the past two and a half years needs treatment,
but also needs to face the criminal consequences of her actions
and this plea agreement accomplishes both. While the defendant
may be ill and have a serious alcohol problem, it is no excuse
to put the lives of the public at risk ... hopefully the gravity
of having two felony convictions, and three years and eight months
in state prison hanging over her should she violate any term
of her probation will be a wake-up call and motivate her to get
the help she needs."
Sure Whalen's been bad -- really bad, and all over
the country, but you have to wonder if this tar-and-feather treatment
might have something to do with the fact that Whalen is -- or
was -- a local celebrity. How often do DUI arrests make headlines?
Putting the civilization back in wilderness
Greg King now persuades the willing in his
bid to save the wildlands
by
HEIDI WALTERS
A civilization which destroys what little remains
of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from
its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.
-- EDWARD ABBEY
It isn't just romantic nonsense, perpetuated by
rabble-rousers, poets and wilderness lovers, this notion that
there is a vital connection between civilization and wilderness
-- or, as the oft-quoted Henry David Thoreau put it, that "...in
wildness is the preservation of the world." Where aesthetic
arguments fail to move a hardened soul, practical ones may succeed
-- namely, the production of clean air and clean water. But it
works both ways: In civilization lie the means for preservation
of the wild.
Which is why Greg King, director of the nonprofit
Siskiyou Land Conservancy, has relocated his organization's office
to Arcata: to make the most of the local civilization's keen
interest in preserving the wildlands of the Klamath-Siskiyou
bioregion, among other things. There's an office-warming party
this Friday evening, during Arts! Arcata, at the conservancy's
new office, 1160 G Street (inside the Bryan Gaynor office building,
next to the Presbyterian Church).
King, his wife (singer songwriter Joanne Rand)
and daughter (who will be attending HSU soon), have been living
in Orleans the past several years, on a ranch, immersed in the
wilds and the rich local life of the tiny town (with no copy
machine). Over the past year King's latest endeavor -- the land
conservancy -- has taken off. In less than a year, the new conservancy
has secured the preservation of 388 acres of wild lands: 160
acres of donated mixed-forest land along McCoy Creek, which feeds
into the Wild and Scenic South Fork Eel River; a conservation
easement for 148-acres along the Wild and Scenic South Fork Smith
River in Del Norte County; and the Stony Creek parcel, 80 acres
of ancient forest harboring rare plants and salmon along the
Wild and Scenic North Fork Salmon River, purchased with money
bequeathed to the conservancy.
"The move to Arcata became essential, because
we were dealing with land managers and people in this area,"
says King. "There's a very strong interest here in our work.
And we kind of exploded out of the gates this year. All three
of the [preserved] parcels are very significant biologically
and culturally. And people started contacting us." The conservancy's
rapid success also has induced a need to accelerate fundraising
-- something better achieved in a bigger population center. But
even though he's moving the conservancy's office to the city,
King says the focus will remain, as ever, on the land. The land,
after all, has been at the heart of everything he's done, the
result of that wilderness-civilization connection that for King
may very well be innate.
"I grew up in the redwoods," he says.
As a child, King played in a remnant grove of old redwoods near
his family's home in Guerneville, Sonoma County. But the connection
goes even farther back. Between the 1860s and 1880s, four King
brothers moved into Sonoma County, following in the footsteps
of an uncle who had settled in Mendocino County (the King Range
is named for him). "So it's kind of a genetic thing,"
says King. "I have this connection to the ecosystem."
That connection led him out of Guerneville -- thought
to have once been, long before King's arrival, home of the thickest
grove of trees in the world -- to a major in politics from U.C.
Santa Cruz, and then a job as an investigative journalist, focusing
often on the timber industry, for The Paper in Sonoma
County (now called The Bohemian). He received his first
death threat there, after exposing forest practice rules violations
by timber harvester Louisiana-Pacific (which he'd begun investigating
when it began logging ancient redwoods not far from where he'd
grown up). During the Spring Equinox of 1986, King was investigating
Georgia-Pacific Corp's harvest in Sally Bell Grove when he met
Darryl Cherney, who was headed out to stage a protest in the
grove. They went together -- Cherney needed King's ride -- and
from there, King made an impassioned leap into hands-on activism,
becoming deeply involved in the fight to preserve old-growth
redwoods in Humboldt County following Maxxam's takeover of Pacific
Lumber and increased timber harvests. For the next four years,
King did much of the ground-truthing the activists used to create
maps of Maxxam's timber holdings, including land they dubbed
the Headwaters Forest, and "to detail the California Department
of Forestry's complicity with Maxxam." It was the height
of his experience as an adversarial activist, a time during which
he received more death threats, was assaulted a number of times,
and saw his friends Cherney and Judi Bari wounded by a car bomb
in Oakland.
"We were the most infiltrated group, after
the American Indian Movement, by the FBI," he says.
King returned to journalism in 1990, but eventually
was pulled back into the direct-action fray. He had fallen in
love with Rand, she had introduced him to the Smith River, and
he had learned of the rampant pesticide use on the lily fields
in that watershed. He founded the Smith River Project in 2001,
and the Kings lived on a ranch they'd bought near Orleans. "[The
lily fields fight] got to be hugely controversial," he says.
"My face was all over the paper." So when a windfall
of money befell the Project, King started the Siskiyou Land Conservancy
and his career took another turn -- this time into a less confrontational
arena.
The conservancy's focus is on helping create sustainable
communities, he says, and preserving wildlands through purchases
-- often of private inholdings surrounded by national or state
forests -- or negotiating conservation easements with landowners.
He says the conservancy work represents an evolution within himself,
away from the adversarial brand of activism. "Our goal is
to only work with people who want to work with us," he says.
Actually, he amends, the main goal is to protect the wildlands
-- through friendly means, if possible. One of the parcels along
the S. Fork Smith River for which the conservancy negotiated
a conservation easement is a good example.
"We found a buyer in Eureka" who was
amenable to a conservation easement, he says. "They could
build a house. There'd be no new roads, no logging, no mining.
But they can farm and have a garden. And they love it, and they
love the idea of protecting it."
King suspects the conservancy will thrive in Arcata.
The Klamath-Siskiyou ecoregion will remain its focus -- as one
of two areas in the continent (the other is the Appalachians)
that escaped glaciation, it is one of the oldest ecosystems around.
"There's one place, between the Trinity Wilderness and the
Marble Mountains Wilderness, where within one square mile there
are 17 species of conifers," King says. "So it's a
seed bank."
That said, King is already turning some of his
focus toward more immediate backyard activism -- namely, the
"Q Street development" in Arcata, which he sees as
less-than-green. But more on that later. For now, there's the
party to attend to. It's this Friday, at 1160 G Street, and there
will be food cooked by Klamath River Cuisine of Orleans, music
by Salmon River flamenco guitar maestro Rex Richardson, organic
wine from Orleans vintners Cabot Vinyards and a showing of paintings
by Arcata artist Alan Sanborn.
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