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VANCOUVER, B.C. -- Barney Kern, a PATH member and Stoltmann Wilderness campaigner, is stubbled and tanned from weeks in the woods. Movinglike a lit fuse around the group's basement office in Vancouver, B.C., he rounds up supplies and tosses out blockade updates in short bursts. Then we play a word-association game.
"And if they try to cut the lock-box?" I ask.
"Quick-dry cement and quartz crystals poured inside will break theirblades >and drill bits," he says, smiling. "Police dogs?" "Cayenne pepper. It really fucks them up," laughs Kern, a member of Vancouver's People's Action for Threatened Habitat.
Tomorrow, Kern will test his resourcefulness at the blockade and tree-sit which aims to stop International Forest Products from punching roads into the pristine groves of the Stoltmann Wilderness area.
Erected on Aug.9, the blockade has united about 15 activists from across North America in a bid to protect 1,300-year-old Douglas fir giants and the crucial Elaho Valley watershed which stand in the company's devastating path.
Covering a 500,000-hectare chunk of the Upper Elaho Valley, the Stoltmann is home to the world's oldest grove of Douglas fir --and is no stranger to protest. In 1997, environmentalists and loggers set up opposingblockades for weeks on end, resulting in the protection of Clendenning Creek andcruel counter-attacks by InterFor's forest strategists. That same year,InterFor clear-cut a grove of 800-year-old trees in the Sims Creek Valley and later took down 1,000-year-old trees in Serenity Grove and countless old red cedars in a bear-denning area. Western Canada Wilderness Committee director Paul George said that every time the WCWC finds a "beautiful feature"in the Stoltmann area, InterFor intentionally tries to erase its "park potential."
Even politicians outside of southwestern British Columbia recognize the Stoltmann's long-term value as a national park. Three Liberal Members of Parliament have written a letter to B.C. Tourism Minister Ian Waddell begging him to table the park proposal in the provincial Legislature. And Liberal MP and former environment minister Charles Caccia is planning to introduce a bill in federal Parliament this fall to turn the Stoltmann Wilderness into a new national park.
But on the home front, the obstacles are enormous. InterFor is logging the area 14 hours a day, seven days a week - an unrelenting pace whichrips out about 1,700 truckloads of old-growth per year. In addition, the company built a bridge across Lava Creek last month, allowing them access to a millennium-old Douglas fir grove and confirming George's worst suspicions.
"There was no plan to go across Lava Creek and go into that Doug fir grove until we found it," he said in an interview with Vancouver's Georgia Straight.
And the action in the trees is beginning to heat up. Just two days into the blockade, four masked vandals terrorized the camp near Squamish, B.C. and threatened the wilderness defenders' safety. On the morning of Aug. 11, Kern fired an e-mail update to the PATH Vancouver office and to the local media:
"At 8:20 a.m. this morning, four men sped into our camp in a blue and white Ford crew cab with an InterFor logo on its doors. The men rushed intoour camp with axes and shovels in hand. They chopped the ropes to our tarps and smashed our lanterns.Gian, a protester at the camp, asked: Why are you disguised, why don't you face me man-to-man? Are you going to do something illegal?
One vandal pointed to our video camera aimed at them and replied, pointing to the videographer: Not as long as he holds that."
The vandals, who were later revealed to be InterFor employees, were given temporary suspensions and a slap on the wrist by the Squamish Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Their resort to violence, however, is clear proof of the moral bankruptcy of their position and their ignorance of sustainable economic alternatives such as eco-tourism and outdoor recreation.
"While InterFor and proponents of industrial clearcutting say they're providing jobs, their very corporate policies are actually destroying jobs and vital ecosystems," explained Stoltmann media liaison Jarah West of the Forest Action Network. "Jobs, long-term economic viability and the health of the environment do not speak to their bottom line."
On a similarly destructive note, fire inspectors are looking into the cause of a fire that ripped through 5,000 cubic metres of logged timber in InterFor's Tree Farm License 38. All that Paul Kuster, manager of the Squamish Forest District, could say was that it was definitely human-caused and was centered around InterFor's neglected fields of downed timber.
James Jamieson of WCWC said he distinctly heard about 60 rounds of smallarms fire in the area the night before the fire started.
Meanwhile, Kern will return to a camp under siege tomorrow. The brave protesters were served a court injunction Aug. 13 in an attempt to clear the way for InterFor's road-building attacks. Paul Hundal, lawyer for both PATH and FAN, should not have been surprised when he was given no notice of the action and had no reasonable period in which to fight the company'slegal strong-arm tactics. Hardened campaigners remember well that it took WCWC over six weeks to get an injunction to clear InterFor'scounter-blockade during the summer of 1997. Who ever said justice is blind?
The Squamish RCMP and InterFor employees have already forcibly removedone protester from the Lava Creek camp. And they undoubtedly hope to haul Ghost, a Texan tree-sitter, from his platform and quash the entire display of civil disobedience before lumber customers fly in from Europe on Aug. 26. Police dogs are roaming the area, their masters are camped close to the blockade for surveillance and InterFor's flunkies are smiling through their rotten, crooked teeth. Once again, the state apparatus comes to the aid of its corporate masters.
But, when tomorrow comes, they'll wake up to discover one small and naked truth: you should never underestimate the power of quartz and cayenne.