Resistance and Ignominy at Cove-Mallard
Last Stand in the Big Woods
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

"Every time I've compromised, I've lost. When I held firm I won. The problem with too many environmentalists today is that they are trying to write the compromise instead of letting those we pay to compromise do it. They think they get power by taking people to lunch or being taken to lunch, when in reality they are only being taken."

-- David R. Brower

There was no reason it had to come down like this: Two militant greens standing in the middle of an isolated, snow-crusted road in a place where a road should never be; bracing their bodies against a train of logging trucks, snowmobiles, and Forest Service jeeps groaning at the gate, demanding entry; willingly subjecting themselves to arrest by Idaho troopers armed with guns, clubs, and a draconian and sub-constitutional new law. All in a last-gasp attempt to halt a vastly destructive timber sale in the heart of the nation's largest roadless area, a timber sale two federal judges had already found to be a brazen assault on our national environmental laws.

Charged with felony conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor, Mike Roselle, a founder of Earth First!, and Tom Fullum, of the Native Forest Network, now face possible five-year prison terms and $50,000 fines under Idaho's so-called Earth First! Statute - a law geared to smother popular dissent against the transgressions of multinational timber companies by slamming the jailhouse door on anyone bold enough to bodily protest logging on federal lands in the Potato Atate. The bill was signed into law in 1993 by then-Governor Cecil Andrus, a noted liberal who called the Cove/ Mallard protesters "just a bunch of kooks."

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