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| Pacific Lumber Moving In On Tree-sitters For Immediate Release - Contact: Karen Pickett, Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters office: 510-548-3113; Remedy, cell phone in the tree in Freshwater: (707) 498-0601; Northcoast EF! 707-825-6598 LAWSUIT FILED AFTER TREE-SITTERS ARE ASSAULTED BY TIMBER COMPANY CLIMBERS On Thursday Jan. 16, Pacific Lumber and Humboldt law enforcement began moving in on tree-sits on PL land in Humboldt county. Yesterday, PL's "climber Eric" dismantled a tree-sit in PL's Demonstration Forest near the Avenue of the Giants, taking down sitter Sequoia, and showed up in Freshwater watershed, northeast of Eureka, where there have been over a dozen tree-sits. Freshwater is where 28-year-old Remedy has been in an old growth redwood for 10 months, along with Wren who has been in a nearby tree for 8 months. The Freshwater watershed has been under assault by PL logging, where the Headwaters Deal Habitat Conservation Plan allows 500 acres to be clear cut annually. Remedy reported by cell phone that law enforcement and PL climbers, climbing gear in tow, arrived at a tree-sit on Kneeland Rd. on Thursday, about 5 miles from her tree, surveyed the scene, but did not attempt to climb the tree and extract the sitter. PL is carrying out aggressive logging in key areas, including occupied habitat of the endangered marbled murrelet. Their logging has also been causing slides and flooding, with tremendous impact on local residents and on salmon and steelhead fisheries. The tree-sits in PL's "Demonstration Forest" have been on-going since mid-November, when PL commenced logging in two plans in the Avenue of the Giants area. At a protest at the gate there on Nov. 15, protesters were assaulted, and then two tree-sitters were removed from high in the trees after they were zip tied, harnessed and lowered to the ground by PL employees who used pain-compliance holds. In response to that assault, a cross-complaint was filed today in relation to that assault against PL's "Climber Eric", "Climber Jerry", PL President Robert Manne, PL chief of security Carl Anderson, and Pacific Lumber Company itself, for negligence, assault, battery, and negligent infliction of emotional distress. PL climbers returned to the Demonstration Forest on Nov. 18, and early December removing food, water and gear from the sits, but the tree occupations have continued despite the hardships. When PL climbers arrived on the scene yesterday, they told the tree-sitter if he made any sudden combative moves, the Sheriff Dept. people on site would shoot at him. Faced with potential violence, Ethan Coonen descended from the tree and was charged with trespass. Other on-going tree-sits in PL's old growth, some of them lasting months, are on Gypsy Mountain, where David Gypsy Chain was killed in 1998 by an angry logger, in a stand of old growth in Grizzly Creek, and in the Mattole watershed. PL is coming under fire with the release of a scientific report making the correlation between their accelerated logging and devastating water quality problems such as the flooding and mud slides befalling neighbors downstream from PL logging sites, degradation of drinking water supplies and loss of agricultural crops. The recommendation to scaling back the cut coming in that scientific report and the fact that the case challenging the Sustained Yield Plan of the Headwaters Deal may have caused PL to accelerate their cutting in the last of their available old growth, which happens to be above already impaired water courses and in endangered species habitat. Those facts have made the tree sits all the more urgent.  << Back to Press Release Archive | Latest Press Release | Newsroom | | 
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