Logging Fight Cast In Concrete Law Barrels In Before Earth First! Activists’ Tactic Hardens

It sounds like a scene from the movie “The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight.”

Earth First! activists tried to anchor their arms in barrels of concrete Tuesday morning, part of an effort to block a logging road in the Nez Perce National Forest. But the concrete was still soft when U.S. Forest Service law enforcement arrived.

So the two men, who identified themselves as Captain Kirk and another Star Trek character, were freed from the barrels. And immediately jailed.

They are charged with trespassing on a closed road and obstructing an officer.

Activists took three barrels to the middle of the Jack Creek logging road, one of several timber sales in the contentious Cove-Mallard timber sale complex southwest of Grangeville. The activists lined up between the barrels. They joined hands inside a plastic tube, stuck it in the center barrel and had the tube covered in concrete, according to a spokesman for the Cove-Mallard Coalition.

Then each put their free arm into another piece of plastic pipe and plunged it into one of the remaining barrels. Concrete was added. “They were trying to stop the road building,” said Robert Amon of the Cove-Mallard Coalition.

“They figured it would harden by dawn’s early light and would stop trucks, feller bunchers (logging equipment) and other equipment coming in … to clobber the last of the old growth,” Amon said.

Forest Service officials said it appears the activists took precautions to keep their bare skin out of the concrete. If they didn’t, they were in for serious pain, according to the Portland Cement Association, an industry trade group in Skokie, Ill.

“You will get an alkali burn if you stay in contact with fresh concrete for any amount of time,” said Bob Shuldes, a consulting engineer with Portland Cement.

This is the first time Earth First! activists have resorted to concrete clothing in an anti-logging campaign that has included almost every other tactic. Protesters have buried themselves in logging roads, used bicycle locks to attach their necks to gates, locked themselves to the bumpers of cop cars and attempted to drain the oil from law enforcement vehicles.

The Cove-Mallard campaign has produced hundreds of arrests and hundreds of misdemeanor convictions. And logging and road building continues on the project, located southeast of Grangeville.

, DataTimes