By Darryl Cherney – Country Activist, August 1987 and Earth First! Journal, Mabon (September 23), 1987
It is becoming painfully more evident with each passing day that the community spirit and county consciousness that the old Pacific Lumber used to symbolize has vanished in deference to the corporate greed and “money first!” attitude of its conqueror, the Maxxam corporation. Never is this ever so present than in the current lawsuit that Maxxam / P-L has filed against the 13 folks arrested in Humboldt County during the two days of protest on May 17 and 18, 1987.
The old Pacific Lumber (PL) would have never engaged in such crybaby tactics against such minor violations of their “space.” But then the old PL was a venerable, long-term oriented operation who did not invoke the outrage of its surrounding community by playing “monopoly” with the lives of real people and real forests, incurring a $750 million debt, depleting $35 million surplus from the pension fund and trashing out Humboldt County’s pride and joy, the virgin old growth redwood forests, the largest and the last in the world.
The suing of five women who attempted to hang a banner on an old growth log deck, one woman who simply walked over to talk to the police, three men who climbed trees and four media people is completely consistent with the new Maxxam image—tough corporate raiders who bow down and pray to the almighty dollar seven days a week. It is an image seen before in these parts in the guise of Louisiana-Pacific, Georgia-Pacific and other outsiders who pushed the local folks out with economic bullying tactics. Now, the boom and busters have convinced the slaves that they need their masters, substituting the real joys of life—family, pride in work, and the great outdoors—with rape and run overtime pay for new pick-up trucks, VCR’s, and environmental-ist scapegoats for the inevitable bust to follow.
It is precisely this current lawsuit against the trespassers which seeks to further the myth that the enemy of the woodwor-kers is the environmentalists, when the timber bosses know (and fear) full well that the ecologists and the union (IWA) are working to achieve long term stability in an area notorious for its boom-bust cycles, which can only be attributed to poor and greedy logging practices.
The current suit is entitled P-L vs. Sally Bell (et al) and of course, the name conjures up memories of the battle for the Sinkyone in which the Sally Bell Grove was named for the last surviving member of the Sinkyone tribe and where a young Humboldt mother renamed herself (legally) Sally Bell in honor of those native people genocided into extinction, but whose spirit still burns within many. It may be more than coincidence that our latter-day Sally Bell leads the list of defendants and thus finds her way again into the history books of the defense of Mother Earth. The forests and ancestors of the Sinkyone people have ways of speaking to us that Charles Hurwitz of Maxxam have no manner of understanding.
The lawsuit itself seems a bad joke. It accuses that the tres-passers “did the things…maliciously and to oppress” Maxxam / PL. It claims that the defendants “willfully conspired…to com-mit trespass.” It bemoans that Maxxam was required to protect their “property in an effort to stop said trespass,” at a cost of $22,000. Total amount demanded by this billion dollar conglo-merate from Texas is $42,000, including “punitive damages.” It is unlikely that these thirteen predominantly local residents earn half that sum collectively in a single year. But a Houston billionaire might find that hard to understand.
The lawsuit further contends that anyone who “furthered the conspiracy by cooperation with and/or lent aid and encourage-ment to and/or ratified and adopted the acts of defendants” is libel in the suit as well. So much for freedom of speech, assembly, religion, and the American constitution. The tree Nazis are not only oppressing the wilderness, they are oppressing any American citizen who might agree with us. In this case, their legal “doctors” inflict the torture of the weight of a lawsuit over our heads and years of slow, agonizing litigation.
Your contributions will go directly for their legal typing, copying and telephone costs. That Maxxam/P-L would spend so much money, if in fact they are even telling the truth, seems like a blatant waste of dollars, inefficiently administrated by paranoid corporados, who could have better used it on land restoration or in creating two full-time jobs in Humboldt for a year, rather than spending it on a group with no prior reputation for causing damage in a full year of protests.
Furthermore, there was no evidence of any of the extra security personnel at any of the scenes. What is particularly insulting to our county is that no one from Maxxam/P-L had the common decency to call any of the demonstrators personally to voice their concerns as any locally based firm might have done to a neighbor they were concerned about. No, Maxxam spends so much time in the courts speaking through their attorneys that they have forgotten the basic art of communication. Even after the fact, they did not present their costs to anyone, offering an opportunity for folks to make restitution. No, Maxxam knows only the American strong arm method of the lawsuit.
(NOTE; EPIC’s lawsuit is more akin to an administrative appeal working within the system and is not a suit for cash. It requests that existing laws be followed where there is no police agency to enforce such laws or where the police agency (CA Dept. of Forestry) is breaking those laws, themselves.)
The heroes and she-roes of this action are worth naming. Most are your neighbors. They are Sally Bell and Agnes Mansfield of Garberville; Betina Garsen, Tierra Diane Paiz, Aster Phillipa, Kurt Newman, Debra Jean Jorgenson, Lynn Burchfield, and Linda Villatore (last three w/media) of Arcata; Larry Evans of Eureka; Darrell Sukovitzen of Guernville, Tim Holt (media) of Sacramento; and Karen Pickett of Canyon.
Pacific Lumber vs. Sally Bell may ultimately be a great thing. Should Maxxam/P-L lose either the criminal or civil suit then they shall in fact be established as the guilty ones and the defendant’s motivations and legal ground will be declared justified. Maxxam/P-L is taking a bold gamble indeed and many in the movement welcome the challenge believing that Maxxam will wind up playing not just the fool, but the criminal. For while Maxxam plays their petty court intimidation games, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Congress of the United States are conducting independent, separate investigations of Mr. Charles Hurwitz, his Maxxam group, the Ivan Boesky connection, and all the other foul smelling indicators that this whole takeover of Pacific Lumber may have been illegal.
Mr. Hurwitz should remember that chickens do come home to roost and when the dust clears it may Sally Bell et. al. cheered as defenders of our humble Humboldt and Mr. Charles E. Hurwitz who winds up in a jail cell adjoining Ivan Boesky’s and other corporate criminals who have nothing less in mind that the entire destruction of our way of life in favor of theirs as their ultimate evil goal.
(NOTE: Criminal charges have been dropped against the four media folks, while civil charges remain.)