Gorton Staff Apologizes To Environmentalists

The Wilderness Society on Thursday demanded that Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., force his press secretary to retract a statement that key opponents of Gorton’s salvage-logging proposal “are the same people who would ‘spike’ trees to kill loggers.”

Press secretary Heidi Kelly said she would apologize to the group for “confusion” surrounding her statement.

She said the line, in a memo issued Tuesday, was a reference to an Earth First! activist arrested Monday during a protest of the Gorton proposal at Republican Sen. Mark Hatfield’s office in Portland.

Richard Hoppe, Wilderness Society vice president for conservation, said he interpreted Kelly’s original memo to refer to his group as well as others fighting Gorton’s plan to exempt logging from environmental laws, including the National Audubon Society and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund.

In a Thursday statement, Kelly said: “The memo was not referring to your organization and I appreciate your desire to not be labeled as tree-spikers.”

Earth First! once advocated driving metal spikes into trees - a tactic intended to prevent loggers from cutting trees for fear of injury or damage to saws. The group has disavowed the practice since 1990. No deaths have been attributed to tree spiking, but a Northern California mill worker was seriously injured in 1987 when a band saw hit a spike in a log.