Protester arrested for blocking logging

KERBY, Ore. – A protester was arrested Tuesday after suspending himself from a log 40 feet over the Illinois River and briefly blocking logging in a national forest roadless area.

Logging had started Monday on the Mike’s Gulch timber sale, made up of trees burned by the 2002 Biscuit fire on the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest. It was the first logging on a timber sale in a roadless area since the Bush administration eased the logging rules.

On Tuesday, protesters placed a log across a bridge over the Illinois River to block the timber cutters’ return.

To make it harder for authorities to remove the log, a protester, Laurel Sutherlin, was suspended over the river from one end of the log sticking out from the bridge. Sutherlin was on a platform dangling about six feet beneath the log.

Amid shouts of “don’t murder him” and “he’s not a tree” from about 20 protesters on shore, an arborist shinnied out on the log, rigged a pulley and rope to the platform, and then cut the webbing suspending the platform from the log.

Forest Service personnel slowly lowered Sutherlin to the river. He waded to shore, where he was handcuffed.

“Only in America. What a country,” said timber faller Jeff Hammers, of Klamath Falls, as Sutherlin was led away. “I am not against (acting on) convictions. But we have a system and it’s called democracy and they refuse to abide by that.”

Sutherlin was an organizer of protests last summer at the same location that failed to stop logging other trees burned by the Biscuit fire. He was expected to be charged with interfering with an agricultural operation.

The Forest Service said it was investigating whether the 10-inch diameter green Douglas fir log suspending Sutherlin was cut illegally.