00:00For many environmentalists, the timber wars started in 1989 in the Willamette National
00:08Forest, prompted by the U.S. Forest Service controversial timber sale known as the North
00:13Roaring Devil.
00:17I got a call from a friend that they are logging this stand of old growth trees.
00:25And so I just, you know, grabbed my tent and sleeping bag and headed up there.
00:29It was actually Easter Sunday weekend.
00:32What I found out is there was a court case coming to put an injunction on that timber
00:38sale.
00:39It would be two days before the injunction papers were filed.
00:43Until then, the law was on the side of the Forest Service.
00:46Even if we won the lawsuit in court, the judge couldn't order us to put the trees back up,
00:52so it would have mooted the lawsuit.
00:54We called that chainsaw justice.
00:58The protestors had to stop.
01:00It was just a small group of us got up there and tried to, you know, erect barricades,
01:06you know, rocks and logs and things that just stopped the Forest Service going in.
01:12One of the barricades, we piled rocks and buried someone up to their neck.
01:18And the Forest Service would bring in giant front-end loaders, smash and menace what took
01:23us hours.
01:24But each day, you know, more and more people came.
01:27It started with a dozen of us, then it was 50, then it was, it seemed like hundreds.
01:33Because people were so outraged.
01:36We're citizens trying to prevent law-breaking by our government.
01:43We didn't win that battle.
01:45But that was the first time that environmentalists weren't called terrorists.
Comments