Activists Warn Logging Protest Only The Beginning Group Says Harvest Shows How Salvage Rider Has Gone Awry; Timber Industry Says All Sales Have Been Approved

A protest in the Kootenai National Forest near Troy, Mont., Monday was only the beginning of a long campaign to cut back logging on the forest, activists say.

There are signals the fight over the Kootenai could eventually rival the five-year running battle over central Idaho’s Cove-Mallard timber sales, where hundreds of protesters have been arrested. That could hamper North Idaho mills, which depend heavily on the Kootenai Forest for timber.

It’s that sizable harvest from the Kootenai that has environmentalists’ attention, including 130 million board feet of timber being sold under the emergency salvage rider.

“The Kootenai is a good example of the salvage rider gone awry,” said Bill Haskins, executive director of the Ecology Center in Missoula. “It’s a good place for people who want to know ‘what’s the worst that could happen’ with salvage logging,” Haskins said.

Kootenai Forest officials point out that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has signed off on the salvage sales in question. In addition, the forest has has won every lawsuit environmentalists have filed in the last six years.

“People may disagree with what we are doing,” said Joan Dickerson, Kootenai timber sale planner. “The courts have affirmed we have complied with environmental laws.”

Monday’s protest was done under the banner of a group calling itself Citizens Against Lawless Logging. It resulted in the arrest of five Missoula residents at the Pulpit salvage timber sale.

Mike Roselle - a co-founder of Earth First!, George Beardsley, Jeff Juel and John Dillon were arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct. The four originally locked themselves to a Forest Service gate, preventing logging trucks from collecting trees from the sale, activists said.

Later in the day they freed themselves from the gate to allow a logging crew to go home. They continued to block the road and eventually were arrested by the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department.

Dan Funsch later was arrested for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. He was suspended above the gate by climbing ropes and a sling, said Glenn Marangelo of the protest group.

Environmental groups have been fighting logging on the Kootenai for years, filing forest plan appeals and several lawsuits. They say the Kootenai is selling more timber under the salvage rider than any other forest in Montana and North Idaho.

The rider, passed by Congress in 1995, eliminates appeals of logging in burned areas. “That cuts people out of the process,” Marangelo said.

Environmentalists also charged the Kootenai was relying on phantom trees when making it’s inventory, leading to overestimates of how much it could safely log. Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas last year acknowledged mistakes were made and ordered the Kootenai to fix its inventory system.

But the error hasn’t caused overcutting, emphasized Joan Dickerson, timber planning officer for the Kootenai. She contends the environmentalists aren’t acknowledging several important efforts on the Kootenai.

Although 55,000 acres burned in 1994, only 17 percent of that timber is being logged, she said. The timber sale protested Monday “is being helicopter logged because of our concern for bull trout in particular and for the watershed,” Dickerson said.

The group of fire salvage sales also includes obliterating or rehabilitating 28 miles for road. And the Forest Service agreed to stay out of the roadless areas.

, DataTimes MEMO: IDAHO HEADLINE: Protests just starting