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<font size=3><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/<br><br>
</a></font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">October 30 - Nov.
1, 2009<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>Mike Roselle
Draws a Line <br><br>
<br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">
Facing Down the Machine
</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By JEFFREY ST.
CLAIR <br>
and JOSHUA FRANK <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">T</font>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>he 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
“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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
“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.”<br><br>
Despite Arnold’s clear distinction between terrorism and environmentalism
western states like Idaho and Oregon seem to disagree.<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">***<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>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.<br><br>
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."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
“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!”<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">***<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
"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."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
"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."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
“[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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
“The overwhelming majority people prosecuted under the law were
environmentalists,” said Dan Kruse, an attorney for the
protesters.<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">***<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>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.<br><br>
“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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
<i>Have a beer with Mike Roselle and Josh Mahan in Portland tonight
(October 30) as they talk about their new book,
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312556195/counterpunchmaga">
Tree Spiker</a>, at 7 PM, Julia's Cafe, 2130 NE Broadway Portland, OR
97232.<br><br>
</i><b>Jeffrey St. Clair </b>is the author of
<a href="http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Books.html">
Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature</a>
and
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567513360/counterpunchmaga">
Grand Theft Pentagon</a>. His newest book,
<a href="http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Books.html">
Born Under a Bad Sky</a>, is just out from AK Press / CounterPunch books.
He can be reached at:
<a href="mailto:sitka@comcast.net">sitka@comcast.net</a>. <br><br>
<b>Joshua Frank</b> is co-editor of <i>Dissident Voice</i> and author of
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567513107/counterpunchmaga">
<i>Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush</a></i> (Common
Courage Press, 2005), and along with Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of the
brand new book
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1904859844/counterpunchmaga">
<i>Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the
Heartland</a></i>, published by AK Press in July 2008.<br><br>
This is an excerpt from <i>GreenScare: the New War on
Environmentalism,</i> forthcoming from Haymarket Books. <br><br>
<br><br>
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