[News] Environmental Campaigns - Facing Down the Machine

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/

October 30 - Nov. 1, 2009


Mike Roselle Draws a Line


Facing Down the Machine

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
and JOSHUA FRANK

The beard is graying. The hair is clipped 
military-short. He is a large man, oddly shaped, 
like a cross between a grizzly and a javelina. 
It’s Roselle, of course, Mike Roselle­the outside 
agitator. He and a fellow activist have just 
spread an anti-coal banner in front of a growling 
bulldozer in West Virginia on a cold February 
morning in 2009. He’s in this icy and unforgiving 
land to oppose a brutal mining operation and will 
soon be arrested for trespassing. Massey Energy, 
the target of Roselle’s protest, is the fourth 
largest coal extractor in the United States, 
mining nearly 40 million tons of coal in 
Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee each year.

The arrest was nothing new for Roselle, who cut 
his teeth in direct action environmental 
campaigns decades earlier as a co-founder of 
Earth First!, ex-director of Greenpeace U.S. and 
later as the whit behind the tenacious Ruckus 
Society. Unlike most mainstream environmentalists 
you are not likely to see Roselle sporting a suit 
and lobbying Washington insiders on the 
intricacies of mining laws -- you are more apt to 
see this self-proclaimed lowbagger (one who lives 
light on the land, works to protect it and has 
few possessions to show for their hard work) 
engaged in direct, but non-violent, 
confrontations with the forces of 
industrialization, using tactics honed during the 
Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. And 
his dissent in West Virginia is more than justified.

The mountaintops of the Appalachia region, from 
Tennessee up to the heart of West Virginia, are 
being ravaged by the coal industry -- an industry 
that cares little about the welfare of 
communities or the land that it is chewing up and 
spitting out with its grotesque mining operations.

The debris from the mining pits, often 500 feet 
deep, produce toxic waste that is then dumped in 
nearby valleys, polluting rivers and poisoning 
local communities downstream. Currently no state 
or federal agencies are tracking the cumulative 
effect of the aptly named “mountaintop removal,” 
where entire peaks are being blown apart with 
explosives, only to expose tiny seams of the precious black rock.

On December 22, 2008, a coal slurry impoundment 
at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston coal 
fired power plant in Harriman, Tennessee spilled 
more than 500 million gallons of toxic coal ash 
into the Tennessee River. The epic spill was over 
40 times larger than the Exxon Valdez in Alaska. 
Approximately 525 million gallons of black coal 
ash flowed into tributaries of the murky 
Tennessee River - the water supply for 
Chattanooga and millions of people living 
downstream in the states of Alabama and 
neighboring Kentucky. The true 
costs­environmental and social--of the spill are still not known.

As a result of the ongoing destruction of this 
forgotten region of Appalachia, Roselle and 
others affiliated with his latest group, Climate 
Ground Zero, have set up shop and vow not to end 
their actions until this mining practice has been 
outlawed. But the West Virginia media, long in 
the pockets of Big Coal, has not depicted Roselle 
as a non-violent activist who has been pushed to 
act because his conscience has forced him to. On 
the contrary, Roselle has been portrayed as a 
potential eco-terrorist and a threat, not only 
jobs in the region, but human life as well.

“A quick search of Roselle’s name on the internet 
produces pages of accusations that he will go to 
any length for his cause, vandalism that could 
put lives in danger,” reported WSAZ-TV on February 11, 2009.

Fox affiliate WCHS-TV8 went even further in a 
story they aired on the same date stating, 
“Roselle has been called an ‘eco-terrorist’ by 
some because of his tactics. He's someone we 
think you should know about. Tomorrow night don't 
miss the ‘Roselle Report’ when we'll take a 
closer look at how this man's radical methods of 
protest may put lives at stake in West Virginia.”

Being labeled a terrorist isn’t a new accusation 
for Roselle, who has been at the forefront of 
dozens of non-violent direct action environmental 
campaigns throughout the past several decades. “I 
have been arrested over forty times in twenty 
states,” Roselle remembers with a smirk. “My 
longest time in jail is four months in South 
Dakota for an action on Mt. Rushmore against acid rain.”

Even anti-environmentalist Ron Arnold, who coined 
the term “eco-terrorist” in Reason magazine in 
the early 1980s, came out with a statement in 
opposition to Roselle’s terrorist label.

“I don’t agree with him, but he’s no terrorist. 
I’ve covered Roselle since 1995 and even devoted 
dozens of pages to his protest activities in my 
1997 book EcoTerror: The Violent Agenda to Save 
Nature,” says Arnold. “I covered his actions to 
distinguish between radicals and terrorists. I 
say he’s a radical environmentalist, not an 
eco-terrorist. It’s not a crime to be a radical 
and Roselle has never been charged with any violent crime.”

Despite Arnold’s clear distinction between 
terrorism and environmentalism western states 
like Idaho and Oregon seem to disagree.

***

Saving Idaho’s wilderness had come to this: Two 
militant greens standing in the middle of an 
isolated, snow-crusted road in a place where 
machines should never be; bracing their bodies 
against a train of logging trucks, snowmobiles, 
and Forest Service jeeps groaning at the gate, 
demanding entry; willingly subjecting themselves 
to arrest by Idaho troopers armed with automatic 
weapons, Billy clubs, and a draconian and 
sub-constitutional new law. All in a last-gasp 
attempt to halt a vastly destructive timber sale 
in the heart of the nation's largest roadless 
area called Cove/Mallard, a timber sale two 
federal judges already found to be a brazen 
assault on our national environmental laws.

Charged with felony conspiracy to commit a 
misdemeanor, Roselle and Tom Fullum, of the 
Native Forest Network, faced a possible five-year 
prison terms and $50,000 fines under Idaho's 
so-called Earth First! Statute - a law geared to 
smother popular dissent against the 
transgressions of multinational timber companies 
by slamming the jailhouse door on anyone bold 
enough to bodily protest logging on federal lands 
in the Potato State. The bill was signed into law 
in 1993 by then-Governor Cecil Andrus, a noted 
liberal who called the Cove/ Mallard protesters "just a bunch of kooks."

The 90,000-acre Cove/Mallard Roadless Area is a 
biological cradle in the mountains, a rolling 
landscape of ponderosa pine forests, meandering 
streams, and wet meadows that serves as a 
critical biological and migration corridor 
between the Salmon River and the high country of 
the Gospel Hump and Selway Mountains. One of the 
most wild places in the lower-48, its brisk 
streams are home to steelhead, chinook salmon, 
bull trout, rainbow trout, and cutthroat, while 
the broad meadows harbor some of the best elk 
country in the Northern Rockies. Bighorn sheep 
and mountain goats inhabit the tall mountains and 
the entire area is a key part of the Central 
Idaho grizzly bear and gray wolf recovery areas. 
In fact, over the past 10 years the Fish and 
Wildlife Service has documented numerous 
confirmed wolf sightings in the Cove/Mallard Roadless Area.

Federal and state governments have long targeted 
the civil rights of environmentalists. In the 
mid-1980s swaths of new laws were passed that 
targeted the acts of direct action oriented 
environmental protests. The laws followed a tree 
spike incident in Sonoma County, California 
during the height of the battles to save the 
ancient Redwood forests. As a worker thrust his 
blade into the trunk of a mighty tree, the blade 
hit a spike, snapped, and flung back only to 
strike the logger. The media and logging industry 
called it eco-terrorism. But it wasn’t an 
environmentalist that hammered that spike into 
the tree; it was a furious local right-wing 
landowner who had no part in the protests to end 
logging of the Redwoods in the state. He was just 
pissed it was happening in his own backyard. 
Nonetheless, the tree spiking opened up attacks 
by the media, treating the incident as legitimate 
terrorism. The timber behemoths lobbied hard and 
the result of was series of laws that were meant 
to deter activists from targeting the logging industry in any way in any form.

The problem with most of these laws is that they 
do not decipher between acts of civil 
disobedience and vandalism. There is no line 
drawn, for example, between property damage like 
arson and chaining oneself to a logging truck. 
States across the West followed California and 
Oregon’s lead, making it a crime to hinder or 
delay any timber sale on public or private land. 
Activists that shut down logging operations 
directly, even by nonviolent means, were soon 
being deemed eco-terrorists, and not only by the 
media, but by the state laws themselves.

“Some of these laws, like the Earth First! 
Statute made it a felony to conspire to or 
advocate any of those actions,” recalls Roselle. 
“During debates on the House floor, outraged 
legislators said the law was intended to apply to 
professional radical environmentalists who 
recruited innocent kids from college campuses, 
and sent them off to block legal-logging 
operations, and take food out of the mouths of working families. Imagine!”

The Noble timber sale was one of nine big timber 
sales slated for the Cove/ Mallard. These sales 
called for 200 different clearcuts, the logging 
of 81 million board feet of timber, and the 
construction of 145 miles of new logging roads. 
The Cove/ Mallard timber sale planned to leave 
behind only an empty infrastructure: its web of 
roads a lethal impediment to the migration of 
wolves and elk; its eroding swaths of bare land 
quietly smothering salmon and trout.

The evidence of an imminent ecological collapse 
of Idaho's river systems in the area is 
overwhelming. In one of America's wildest state, 
more than 70 percent of the streams are out of 
compliance with the standards of the Clean Water 
Act, dozens of stocks of salmon gasp along with 
the bull trout at the brink of extinction. This 
means that every additional clearcut or mine 
gouged into these watersheds creates a necrotic 
wound in the fragile ecosystem. This was the 
emergency situation to which Federal Judge Ezra 
responded with an injunction to halt the logging.

Of course, the predictable backlash swiftly 
erupted in rural Idaho when news of the 
injunction was leaked to local timber 
contractors, ranchers, and mining companies by 
the Forest Service. Local papers played up the 
inevitable chest-beating by a mongrel assortment 
of tree-cutters, ranch-hands and placer miners 
from towns with names like Challis, Dixie and 
Kamiah. Then came the apocalyptic assessments of 
the ruling by mega-corporations such as 
Boise/Cascade, Pot-latch, and Hecla Mining: Mills 
and mines will be closed, they warned, thousands 
will be thrown out of work, bars will run dry and 
already impoverished communities will be driven 
deeper into destitution. Environmentalists and not greed were to blame.

The injunction also became a pretext for yet 
another round of vituperative cant from Idaho's 
reactionary congressional delegation against 
provoking folks like hippie Roselle. On the floor 
of the Senate, Dirk Kempthorne (who would later 
become Idaho’s governor and then Interior 
Secretary under Bush the Younger) bellowed that 
he would seek congressional action to shred the 
injunction and "the ill-conceived laws it was 
based on." Meanwhile, Helen 'Call-Me-Congressman' 
Chenoweth denounced the injunction as the work of 
"animal worshipping nature cults." And the 
stentorious Larry Craig, the ex-senator with the 
wide stance, amplified the volume of his "forest 
health" crusade -- a cruel hoax on the public in 
which the last roadless forests in the West will 
be stripped of the meager protection provided 
them by current environmental laws and opened to 
indiscriminate chainsaw surgery in the name of medicating the ecosystem.

The response to Idaho’s Earth First! law was 
predictable says Roselle, “We went to a bunch of 
college campuses ... we intended to recruit a 
bunch of new students to block, impede, halt, 
obstruct, and otherwise obliterate logging in the 
Cove/Mallard Timber Sale. We continued to block 
the road until the U.S. Forest Service was 
halted, impeded, blocked and obliterated in 
Federal court. It turned out that the logging in 
Cove/Mallard never was legal after all.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Idaho’s 
anti-environmentalist statues aren’t the worst 
you’ll find our here in the Northwest. In fact 
the neighboring state of Oregon has pushed the 
envelope so far that home invasions, felony 
charges and police brutality have become the 
norm, not the exception to how law enforcement 
reacts to environmental campaigners. And like 
Idaho’s egregious Earth First! law, Roselle is 
also at the center of Oregon’s attempt to paint 
environmental civil disobedience as eco-terrorism.

***

It was during the State legislative session of 
1999 when the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association and 
the Oregon timber industry joined forces to lobby 
their allies at the capital in Salem to pass 
special criminal legislation, worthy of a felony 
charge, for any individual or group that 
interfered with business operations. Entitled 
“Interference with Agricultural Operations,” 
(Ag-Ops law) the new statues prohibited any 
activist, sans union or labor disputers, that 
knowingly or intentionally “obstructs, impairs or 
hinders or attempts to obstruct, impair or hinder agricultural operations.”

Call it Oregon’s version of Idaho’s Earth First! 
law, or at least its latest incarnation, and like 
Idaho’s statute, Mike Roselle found himself in 
the middle of the liberal state’s crackdown on pesky enviros.

In March of 2005 activists traveled to Josephine 
County, Oregon, near the quiet town of Ashland, 
to protest what they believed to be illegal 
logging operations. Like good direct action 
environmentalists of old they blocked public 
roads that led to the cut in the Siskiyou 
National Forest where the Biscuit timber sale was 
taking place. The logging operations were being 
contracted by the United States Forest Service 
(USFS) to private timber outfits that were 
looking to cash in on a rather dismal occupation.

Like the untouched forests of Idaho, the Siskiyou 
National Forest is one of the most biologically 
diverse landscapes in the continental United 
States. It houses five nationally designated wild 
and scenic rivers, as well as one of the 
healthiest stocks of native salmon in the 
country. The plan introduced by the US Forest 
Service included extensive logging in 12 roadless 
areas, which covered well over 12,000 acres of taxpayer-managed land.

In all, the USFS placed 1900 acres of public land 
on the auction block and of those, 1160 were 
mapped out for demolition. The venture, titled 
the "Biscuit Fire Recovery Project", was the 
largest forest service sale in US history. In 
all, almost 30 square miles of federal land was 
handed over to chainsaw happy timber barons.

Not surprisingly, the Forest Service wanted 
onlookers to believe these types of logging 
operations are for "restoration" purposes only, 
not profit, as this patch of old trees in the 
Siskiyous fell victim to massive natural wild 
fires in the summer of 2002. During a meeting 
between timber, conservation, and USFS officials 
on July 26, 2006 over lawsuits the groups had 
filed regarding the Biscuit sales, eco-activists 
were simultaneously erecting a 75 foot tall tree 
platform and a large road blockade in hopes of 
halting access to "Indi", the first salvage sale 
site set for cutting by the beginning of August.

"Logging is not restoration," said activist Kay 
Pittwald as she hung from her suspended platform 
high above the soggy forest floor. "The future of 
this remote area is healthy salmon, clean water 
and a thriving tourist economy. It is not a place 
for an out-of-country timber grab to ship wood products to Asia."

U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan, who handled 
the lawsuits, was of little comfort to the 
conservationists that attempted to stop the 
logging in the courts. Indeed Hogan, one of the 
most conservative federal judges in the Ninth 
Circuit, has a long history of siding with 
extractive industries (and later being over-ruled 
on appeal). In 2001 he called for the de-listing 
of threatened Coho salmon and in 2002 he allowed 
logging in Montana's Bitterroot National Forest 
to proceed after talks between Big Greens and industry officials.

Forest fires, like the one in the Siskiyou 
National Forest, became stigmatized only when 
forests began to be viewed as a commercial 
resource rather than an obstacle to settlement. 
Fire suppression became an obsession only after 
the big timber giants laid claim to the vast 
forests of the Pacific Northwest. Companies like 
Weyerhaeuser and Georgia-Pacific were loath to 
see their holdings go up in flames, so they 
arm-twisted Congress into pouring millions of 
dollars into fire-fighting programs. The Forest 
Service was only too happy to oblige because fire 
suppression was a sure way to pad their budget.

In effect, the Forest Service's fire suppression 
programs (and similar operations by state and 
local governments) have acted as little more than 
federally funded fire insurance policies for the 
big timber companies, an ongoing corporate 
bailout that has totaled tens of billions of 
dollars and shows no sign of slowing down, even 
under President Obama. There's an old saying that 
the Forest Service fights fires by throwing money 
at them. And the more money it spends, the more 
money it gets from Congress. Sadly, the Biscuit 
Fire Recovery Project was no different.

"Their world-view dictates that ‘healthy forests’ 
equal tree farms," said George Sexton who worked 
as the Conservation Director for the 
Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center at the time. 
"Industry wanted a train wreck at Biscuit."

In the eyes of the activists who blocked the 
logging road that March afternoon in 2005, they 
had been successful. Logging was halted for the 
moment. But when logging operations stop, law 
enforcement officers are dispatched to get the 
chainsaws running again and in order to do so 
activists are arrested and charged, often with 
trespassing (on private lands) or disorderly 
conduct. But in this case, with a new law in 
their arsenal, the Biscuit protestors, Roselle 
included, were charged with disrupting logging 
operations. A potential felony. For those 
arrested the court imposed sentences of two to 
four days in custody, additional fines, and probation for 18 months.

“[One] problem with [the Ag-Ops law] is that it 
does not forbid ‘hindering’ an agricultural 
operation to the point of cessation, property 
damage, or any other tangible point,” writes 
Lauren C. Regan and Misha J. Dunlap of the Civil 
Liberties Defense Center in their appeal brief, 
which claimed the law used to sentence the 
defendants was unconstitutional. “Instead, it 
leaves the person conducting the ‘agricultural 
operation’ free to decide when a group of people 
shall be dispersed and/or arrested. The point at 
which there is harm (or ‘hindrance’) under [the 
law] is not readily identifiable and, in fact, 
reaches to protected conduct of peaceable 
assembly at sites of agricultural operations. 
This clearly violates Article I, section 26 of 
the Oregon Constitution. The constitutional right 
to publicly assemble in a public forum cannot be 
proscribed by a statute that is intended to 
protect commercial interests. Commercial 
interests do not trump fundamental constitutional rights.”

The lawyers also argued in their brief that the 
law is aimed at the content of ones’ speech and 
targets that speech based on the content. In the 
context of the statute used, it does not prohibit 
all speech aimed at disrupting agricultural 
operations, but only certain types of speech -- 
that which does not relate to labor protests.

On October 28, 2009, the Oregon Supreme Court 
ruled in favor of the Biscuit protesters, 
striking down the Ag-Ops Law as unconstitutional. 
The court ruled that unfairly singled out 
environmental demonstrators as a separate class, 
in violation of the equal protection clause. 
Labor protests, for example, were specifically excluded from the law.

“The overwhelming majority people prosecuted 
under the law were environmentalists,” said Dan 
Kruse, an attorney for the protesters.

***

Back in West Virginia Mike Roselle sits back and 
conducts one of his many radio interviews by 
telephone. Empty beer cans are piled up in the 
kitchen. Roselle’s rental home has become the 
headquarters for Climate Ground Zero. In this 
particular interview Roselle it is spelling out 
his defense of the treesitters who are attempting 
to halt Massey Energy’s mining operations by 
setting up camp in their blast zone. It was an 
unusually busy summer for Roselle, as hundreds of 
boisterous activists descended on West Virginia 
to voice their objections to mountaintop removal. 
The fight has heated up, so much so that even 
Roselle is surprised at the grassroots 
outpouring. There have been dozens of arrests and 
several major protest actions. Yet Roselle is 
still sympathetic to the workers’ concerns and 
shrugs off the negative media coverage as par for the course.

“Those who are not involved in the mining 
industry are almost unanimously opposed to it. 
And even a lot of the folks who work for Massey 
Energy are not really happy with what they’re 
doing, but they’re kind of­because this is one of 
the poorest states in the country, they don’t 
have many choices. There are no other jobs,” Mike 
Roselle told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! in 
April, 2009. “I don’t think there’s really that 
much support throughout West Virginia for 
destroying the mountains. There is support, I 
think, for supporting the coal industry ... the 
best way to maintain coal jobs in West Virginia 
is to end mountaintop removal immediately, 
because it employs a lot less people than 
underground mining. Underground mining is a lot 
less destructive to the environment, and it could 
be even less so if more regulations were enforced and new ones put in place.”

So his fight to save the mountains of Appalacia 
continues. Laws may attempt to deter Mike Roselle 
as accusations of terrorism attempt to tarnish 
his reputation. Yet he soldiers onward, and will 
do so until he sees an end to mountaintop 
removal. In the meantime, however, you can expect 
Massey Energy, in conjunction with Democratic 
Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia who 
receives hundreds of thousands of dollars from 
the coal industry in his state, to do its best to 
outlaw the actions taken by Roselle’s Climate 
Ground Zero campaigners. Even if it means 
trampling over their civil rights in the process.

Have a beer with Mike Roselle and Josh Mahan in 
Portland tonight (October 30) as they talk about 
their new book, 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312556195/counterpunchmaga>Tree 
Spiker, at 7 PM, Julia's Cafe, 2130 NE Broadway Portland, OR 97232.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of 
<http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Books.html>Been 
Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the 
Politics of Nature and 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567513360/counterpunchmaga>Grand 
Theft Pentagon. His newest book, 
<http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Books.html>Born 
Under a Bad Sky, is just out from AK Press / 
CounterPunch books. He can be reached at: 
<mailto:sitka at comcast.net>sitka at comcast.net.

Joshua Frank is co-editor of Dissident Voice and 
author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567513107/counterpunchmaga>Left 
Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush 
(Common Courage Press, 2005), and along with 
Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of the brand new 
book 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1904859844/counterpunchmaga>Red 
State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in 
the Heartland, published by AK Press in July 2008.

This is an excerpt from GreenScare: the New War 
on Environmentalism, forthcoming from Haymarket Books.




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