Two Arrested For Blocking Logging Road Activists Say Forest Service Disregarding The Law
Two environmental activists were arrested Wednesday as they blocked a logging road in the Nez Perce National Forest to protest resumed cutting, the CoveMallard Coalition charged.
Mike Roselle, 40, of the coalition and Tom Fullum, 28, of the Native Forest Network were arrested and taken to Grangeville, members reported.
The activists view it as the largest roadless area remaining in the lower 48 states.
Last year, the Idaho Legislature passed a law making it a felony to interfere with an approved timber sale. The two arrests are apparently the first test of that law.
Both men were booked into the Idaho County Jail Wednesday afternoon for solicitation to halt or impede lawful forest practices, according to Idaho County Sheriff’s Lt. Skott Mealer.
Mealer said a lowboy with a track hoe was moving down the Noble Creek road, headed toward the logging unit, when Roselle and Fullum stepped into the road, blocking its path.
Mealer told the two to move or they would be arrested, and they agreed to be arrested.
Roselle and Fullum will be arraigned today in magistrate court in Lewiston, and court hearing dates will be set.
“They can pull the two of us off the road, but we expect dozens will come to take our place,” Roselle said. “It’s a sad day when ordinary citizens have to use methods like these to get our own government to obey the law.”
A federal judge’s stay of an injunction against logging, mining, grazing and road-building in central Idaho - including the Cove-Mallard - was extended until mid-March, allowing the Forest Service to recommend logging by Shearer Lumber in the Noble timber sale, Roselle said.
The injunction is intended to protect salmon spawning habitat in central Idaho.
The activists also contend the Forest Service has disregarded the National Marine Fisheries Service’s biological opinion which requires the resurveying of timber sales and widening of streamside buffer zones to protect salmon spawning beds.
Wednesday’s action means the complex of timber sales in northcentral Idaho are headed for a fourth year of protests.
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