Please come to Wednesday’s Water Board meeting in Santa Rosa if you can! http://www1.pressdemocrat.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050313/NEWS/503130302/1033/NEWS01 Big Timber’s Last Stand The Latest Tree War Pits Pacific Lumber’s Logging Plan Against an Agency Aiming To Protect Streams From Runoff Sunday, March 13, 2005 By MIKE GENIELLA THE PRESS DEMOCRAT For two decades, the North Coast timber wars have been waged by protesters chanting in the streets and staging symbolic sit-ins atop towering redwoods. This week, the fight moves to an anonymous Santa Rosa hearing room, where the fate of the North Coast’s last surviving big-timber corporation is in the hands of state regulators …

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IMPORTANT PUBLIC HEARING! ATTENDANCE NEEDED! DATE: Wednesday, March 16, 2005 TIME: The hearing will begin at 9 am. Come early to get a seat! We recommend being there by 8 am. See http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/northcoast/agenda/03_2005/03_2005.html for the agenda. PLACE: North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board 5550 Skylane Blvd., Suite A, Santa Rosa (directions below) Regional Water Board to Consider Logging Levels in Maxxam/Pacific Lumber’s Impaired Watersheds On Wednesday, March 16, the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board (NCRWQCB) will hold a public hearing in Santa Rosa to consider demands by Maxxam/Pacific Lumber Co. (PL) for authorization to conduct extensive logging …

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BACHsters: This piece, written by Remedy, covers the decision made yesterday by the Water Board regarding the contentious timber harvest plans that Maxxam/PL has been trying to get approved by threatening bankruptcy (see previous BACH alerts). Your BACH rep attended the hearing in Eureka Feb. 23 when both PL and the watershed residents presented their arguments to the Water Quality agency, just before the executive officer made her decision. I will give a more detailed update on that hearing and related issues at the next BACH meeting (Thurs. March 10, 7 pm at the Rockridge Library in Oakland). Press coverage …

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press coverage we thought would interest you THE NATION A Titan of Logging Threatens to Topple By Tim Reiterman Times Staff Writer February 21, 2005 REDCREST, Calif. – Whenever Pacific Lumber Co. planned to dispatch helicopters to log its nearby redwood groves, the company would phone Christine Rising at her vine-draped bungalow above the Eel River. After finding someone to care for her horses, dogs, cats and pot-bellied pig, Rising, 51, would pack her clothes and head down the dirt road toward a Eureka hotel about an hour’s drive away. Then for days or weeks, she could escape the beat …

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Public COMMENTS NEEDED on huge old growth logging plan Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI), who amassed a gigantic land base from railroad grant lands in the late 1800s, making them the largest private landowner in the nation, and making its chair Red Emmerson one of the richest individuals in the U.S. is planning to log a large chunk of old growth forest on our north coast. Known for their rapacious practices in the Sierras, SPI now has considerable holdings in Humboldt county, including a parcel on Davis Creek near Petrolia in southern Humboldt, previously (publicly) owned by the Bureau of Land …

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dear BACHsters, This is an interesting piece that just appeared in the Eureka Reporter, an interview with the president of the Humboldt Watershed Council. It helps in understanding how we arrived at the unsustainable rate of harvest that PL is now complaining about mightily as being too low, and how Maxxam is raking off $100 million a year in profits for the past 20 years while keeping PL fully in debt and on the verge of bankruptcy in order to pressure regulatory agencies. http://www.eurekareporter.com/Stories/fp-02170507.htm One-on-one with Mark Lovelace by Glenn Franco Simmons The Eureka Reporter (Editor?s note: In last week?s …

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Eureka Reporter on Palco 2/9/05 PALCO Faces Financial Trouble; Critic Says It’s PALCO’s Fault by Glenn Franco Simmons The Eureka Reporter The Pacific Lumber Co. (www.palco.com/) reported Wednesday that it is working with the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, and separately with PALCO’s bank lender, in efforts to avoid a “financial liquidity shortfall.” “At PALCO, virtually all revenue comes from sales of lumber and other products produced from timber owned by our subsidiary, Scotia Pacific Co. LLC,” said Robert Manne, PALCO president and CEO. “This is why the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board should sign off …

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Maxxam/Pacific Lumber Tries to Extort More Logging Plans at Top Levels of State Government Pacific Lumber is once again holding ancient redwoods hostage and threatening dire consequences for the community and for protected ancient trees if they don’t get what they want. We’ve seen this before. During Headwaters deal negotiations in 1998-1999, their extortion efforts were for money (half a billion tax-payer bucks) and concessions on their Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP)-this time they are extorting suspension of regulatory limits on their logging. Maxxam CEO Charles Hurwitz himself met in private with top aides of the Gov. Schwarzenegger on January 11 …

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Stop Timber Industry Greenwashing Comments Needed by February 1 The timber industry’s American Forest & Paper Association (AF&PA) is pressuring the Green Building Council to promote wood from forests logged under the AF&PA’s “business as usual” Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) standards. The American Forest & Paper Association (AF&PA) is the most powerful timber trade association in the world. Its member companies include the largest loggers in the United States and Canada and the largest wholesale distributors of global wood products. The construction and renovation of commercial and residential buildings in the U.S. consumes vast quantities of wood often from endangered …

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Wednesday morning, as a warm day in dawned in the Rattlesnake Creek forest that feeds the headwaters of the Mattole River, two peaceful and dedicated tree-sitters (who are teachers at an environmental school) were visited by Eric Schatz, Maxxam/Pacific Lumber’s tree-sitter “extractor.” The tree sits started in the area last summer to save the steep old growth Douglas Fir grove and bring attention to the rapid devastation in the Mattole watershed caused by Maxxam/Pacific Lumber’s clearcutting, helicopter logging, road building, herbicide poisoning, and cutting of old growth trees. Pacific Lumber (PL), local front for Texas-based Maxxam Corporation, now outsources ALL …

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