Albion, California - Timber Giant Louisiana-Pacific Corporation (L-P) continues pressing a lawsuit against a group of neighbors and activists who tried to stop a controversial logging operation in California's redwood country last spring. The suit's targets have denounced the suit as a form of legal harassment known as a SLAPP suit (short for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation). The SLAPP is a tactic used by powerful moneyed interests to disrupt, divert and bankrupt their opponents. L-P is one of the biggest forest exploitation companies in the world with 1992 sales over $2 billion. L-P stock more than doubled in value last year.
Neighbors living near the Enchanted Meadow, a beautiful grassy wetland next to the Albion River in Mendocino County, tried to prevent L-P from logging 286 acres of steep, heavily forested slopes above the meadow. They were fed up with L-P's rapacious liquidation logging of its 300,000 acres of redwood and fir forestland in the county (L-P's own charts show over 90% of their local holdings have been cut). In particular, they were concerned about the company's onslaught in the small Albion River watershed 150 miles north of San Francisco, where over 125 logging operations had been carried out in the last 16 years.
The neighbors worked through the system, first dealing with the California Department of Forestry (CDF), opposing the approval of L-P's logging plan (called a Timber Harvest Plan, or THP). When state regulators approved the plan anyway, the neighbors used the only legal means of appeal, filing suit to overturn CDF's approval. The opposition was based on concerns about loss of wildlife habitat, erosion and siltation of salmon spawning areas, and impacts on beautiful riverside meadow used for decades by the community for hiking, picknicking, fishing and recreation. The forest is mostly maturing second-growth redwood and fir, originally logged 90-100 years ago. There also are 400-700 year old trees which had been passed over in the original cut.
The citizen's suit challenging the state's approval of the logging plan was dismissed due to procedural technicalities (standing, and failure to exhaust administrative remedies). The substantial environmental arguments of the case were never heard by the court. After a three-year delay while the suit was appealed to a higher court, L-P loggers started cutting in April, 1992. The neighbors persuaded CDF to order L-P to stop the logging because the plan did not comply with new, tougher wildlife habitat regulations passed since the plan's approval in 1989. L-P quickly went back to court, and obtained an order overruling the CDF stop order and allowing L-P to resume the logging immediately.
The next day, Friday, April 24, loggers began cutting 500 year old redwoods in a fern-fringed little valley known as Raven's Call. Feeling abandoned by the regulatory and judicial branches of the government, several neighbors of the Enchanted Meadow logging felt it was necessary to take nonviolent direct action to try to stop the logging. A few people ran into the logging area and warned the loggers that there were other citizens in the woods who might be endangered if the logging continued. Sheriff's deputies stopped the logging for the day for safety reasons after five ancient redwoods had been cut.
Neighbors from both sides of the Albion River, and from nearby communities called on local Ecotopia Earth First! activists to help organize nonviolent resistance. By Monday, two women had begun a "tree-sit" perched in ancient redwoods on tiny platforms 80 feet above the ground in Raven's Call. This prevented any further cutting in the area close to the tree-sitters. Others continued the tactic of going into the woods to try to persuade the loggers not to cut the trees. Another tactic used was to sit down in access roads to block logging equipment from being brought in. Daily rallies were held near the logging site, and up to 200 people came to support their neighbors' efforts to defend the Enchanted Meadow forest.
Although these actions may have slowed the logging, they did not stop it. Many of the resisters were arrested for trespassing on L-P land, or for attempting to block access roads to the logging area. The logging and the protests, which became known as the Albion community uprising, continued for seven weeks, during which over 90 people were arrested on minor trespassing and road blocking charges. Over a dozen people tree-sat in strategically located old-growth trees - one stayed up 33 days and nights, setting a new record. L-P barred the press from the logging area and hired Pinkerton security guards, notorious as company goons in labor disputes over the last hundred years.
The logging was stopped after seven weeks by order of the state court of appeal on June 11, based on an appeal of the local judge's order that had permitted the logging to begin. At this writing the logging remains stopped pending the outcome of the appeal, which could be decided before the April 1 beginning of the summer logging season.
Meanwhile, three weeks after the start of the protests, L-P filed a lawsuit against over a hundred defendants (including 15 named individuals, three groups and all their members, and 100 anonymous John and Jane Does). The suit asks for damages for trespassing and interfering with business. It seeks not only actual damages, but also punitive damages which could be many times that amount. Those defendants who own homes and property could be at risk of losing them.
Although L-P claims the suit is a legitimate civil suit seeking to recover financial damages, the defendants say the suit is really a SLAPP. Although SLAPPs are disguised as normal lawsuits seeking payment for damages, in reality they are an abuse of the legal process. Their true goal is to harass and intimidate opponents and tie up their energy and money defending against the suit. That takes an average of three years, according to University of Denver professors Penelope Canan and George Pring, who coined the term SLAPP, and who did a study of over 300 cases. About 90% of such cases are dismissed without coming to trial. Those who file SLAPP suits can easily afford the legal costs of bringing suit, and those sued are usually lower or middle-income neighborhood volunteers trying to defend their local environment.
One clue that L-P's primary motive in the suit is not to recover damages is that their attorney's fees alone are many times the actual damages they may have suffered due to delays in the logging and extra security costs caused by the citizen protests. There is no basis in law for the defendants to be required to pay L-P's legal costs, even if L-P wins the suit. As of this writing, about 60 people have been named defendants, leaving potentially 55 more John and Jane Does still to be identified and added to the list of defendants. The defendants have raised and paid out over $13,000 in legal costs in the first eight months. Several times that amount will be needed before the case is over - win or lose.
Court Victory Gives Hope - Another L-P Albion Logging Plan Revoked
A recent court victory gave the SLAPP defendants new hope, and ratified their feelings that their nonviolent civil disobedience against the logging last spring was justified. The original lawsuit filed in 1989 by the neighbors to challenge the Enchanted Meadow logging also challenged another L-P logging plan nearby in the Albion watershed. Although the Enchanted Meadow portion of the suit was thrown out on procedural technicalities, the portion of the suit dealing with the other plan came to trial last fall. On January 6, Mendocino Superior Court Judge James Luther (the same judge who overruled the CDF stop order and allowed the Enchanted Meadow logging to proceed, and the same judge who is presiding over the SLAPP suit) decided the suit in favor of the neighbors, revoking CDF approval of the other L-P plan.
Judge Luther concluded that CDF "Failed to perform its duty to look for, identify, and consider adverse cumulative impacts and that (CDF) failed to perform its duty to respond to significant environmental points raised by the public; that (CDF) therefore did not proceed as required by law." The judge revoked CDF's approval of the logging plan.
It was a letter to CDF from Betty Ball, coordinator of the Mendocino Environmental Center in Ukiah, that proved to be the key to getting the suit heard by the court. Ball's 1989 letter had raised concerns about cumulative environmental impacts to the Albion River watershed of the combined effects of 24 logging operations in just the previous two years, all in the small Albion River watershed. Reacting to the legal victory, Ms. Ball said: "We knew we'd prevail if the cases were heard on their merits. It's too bad the technicalities got in the way of the court even hearing the arguments on the Enchanted Meadow."
Also crucial in persuading the judge was a letter from the CDF to L-P in 1991 saying that over 125 logging plans had been approved in the Albion watershed, and stating that CDF did not have adequate environmental information to assess the cumulative impact of yet another logging plan in the watershed. This proved wrong CDF's assertion that they had done an adequate cumulative impact analysis of the Albion watershed before approving the earlier plan.
The neighbors who now find themselves caught in the web of L-P's SLAPP suit feel their actions to try to stop the logging were necessary and justified because the same evidence that led the judge to conclude that CDF wrongly approved the nearby plan applies even more strongly to the Enchanted Meadow plan. It was approved at the same time, in the same watershed, on lands of the same timber corporation, next to an even more wildlife-sensitive estuary. It is clear from the logic in Judge Luther's decision that he would have revoked CDF approval of the Enchanted Meadow plan, had it not been removed from the suit because the neighbors hadn't used the right wording in their letters to CDF opposing approval of the plan.
Although L-P claims it is suing only those who trespassed on its property to interfere with the logging, the list of defendants includes people who did not trespass or break any law. L-P has also intentionally left out or dropped from the SLAPP suit defendants likely to have public sympathy, or to make L-P look bad. Judi Bari, a well-known Ecotopia Earth First! activist who was crippled by a bomb placed under the seat of her car in 1990, not only trespassed openly during the protests, but was one of the main organizers of the civil disobedience. L-P dropped her as a defendant minutes after she testified in court about leaked L-P memos which exposed a management take-over plot, and showed that the company was intentionally overcutting their forestlands.
This writer (one of the original 15 named defendants) feels that L-P is trying to use the SLAPP suit to squash this citizen uprising as an example and deterrent to any others who might consider standing up against the corporate Goliath. If they succeed, they will set an extremely dangerous precedent broadening the use of SLAPP suits against other citizen volunteers who take a stand against timber companies.
Now is the time for all forestry reform activists to form a united defense, for unless we hang together, we shall all hang separately.
Contributions are urgently needed for legal defense. Tax deductible donations may be sent to:
Friends of Enchanted Meadow
P.O. Box 271
Little River, CA 95456
(Note: donations are deductible to the extent allowed under the IRS rules relating to donations to 501(c)(3) charitable and educational organizations.)
Further information is available from:
Nicholas Wilson, 707-937-0137
P.O. Box 943, Mendocino, CA 95460
(revised 2/3/93)
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 2004
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited