Arrests May Halt Protests Earth First! Demonstrations In Idaho May Affect Montana

Fri., Aug. 9, 1996

Associated Press

Arrests at an Earth First! camp in Idaho may have thwarted a planned protest by members of the radical environmental group at a timber sale east of Helena.

Earth First! demonstrators were scheduled to arrive this week at the Wagner-Atlanta salvage sale on the east side of the Big Belt Mountains.

Their potential arrival has U.S. Forest Service special agents on alert and waiting to see what comes next.

According to a spokesman for Earth First!, it probably won’t be much.

Law enforcement officers were at a wilderness Earth First! camp in Idaho Wednesday arresting some of those who would have been heading this way, Robert (Ramon) Amon, an Earth First! spokesman, told The Independent Record newspaper in Helena.

“All hell is breaking loose here,” Amon said. “My suspicion is it (the Wagner-Atlanta protest) won’t happen.”

State and federal officers used the early-morning hours to sweep down on sleeping environmental activists near Dixie, Idaho, who were blocking a timber sale road in the Nez Perce National Forest.

Five people were arrested, while heavy equipment was used to clear away barricades of trees, metal culverts and other materials intended to halt construction of the Jack Creek Road in the Cove-Mallard area.

All five were taken to the Idaho County Jail in Grangeville, and were expected to be transferred to Boise to be charged by the U.S. attorney’s office.

Earth First! is a radical environmental group that advocates using nonviolent civil disobedience to slow or halt perceived “crimes against the wild.”

In the summer edition of The Wild Rockies Review, a quarterly newsletter by the Wild Rockies Earth First!, the Wagner-Atlanta sale is one of three other sales that make up this summer’s “Roadless Area Rescue Expedition” by Earth First! members and others.

The Atlanta-Wagner sale calls for harvesting 15 million board feet of timber off of 1,650 acres of national forest land.

The sale also calls for clearing 200-acre openings, the building of temporary roads and activity in three roadless areas.

Duane Moe, a special agent for the Helena and Gallatin national forests, said Wednesday that six agents are on alert status in case protesters do arrive and try to disrupt the sale.

Moe said it was “pretty hard to predict” if the protesters would show up or not.

Timber is not yet being cut but workers are in the area constructing roads and preparing the sale, Moe said.

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