Would a New City Council Log Seattle's Watershed?

The City of Seattle has a grand scheme to log--in some cases clearcut--in 36% of the Cedar River Watershed to pay for its 50 year management plan. This scheme jeopardizes the quality of Seattle's water and could destroy one of the most pristine watersheds in the nation. Over a million Seattlites get two-thirds of their drinking water from this watershed, yet few have had input into this plan.

The City Council makes decisions about the watershed, including specific plans to strip the slopes and maintain roads solely for the purpose of timber extraction. Roads contribute to degradation of water quality, stream channels, and ground water levels. Current scientific studies also indicate risk to wildlife increases dangerously in areas with road density greater than 1 mile per square mile. Seattle's watershed currently has nearly four miles of roads per square mile of forest, a density greater than that of streams that feed the water supply.

The position of potential new City Council members on these plans is unclear. This has not been a major campaign issue--yet. Ask candidates about their position on management of the watershed. Let's build a Council that will protect our resources and important habitat.

Ask candidates to support open the process up to greater public input, to find some way other than logging to pay for managing the watershed and to decommission roads not rebuild them.

They're Loggin' in Jammin'

Last month, Stump Talk reported on the impending logging in roadless areas in south central Washington's Gifford Pinchot National Forest (ETS! #43 & 45). In the past week, trees have begun to fall. The Jammin' timber sale was sold to Vanport Company just days before the expiration of the "Salvage Rider" last year.

Now, Vanport has brought in equipment, established a guard camp in the sale area and is preparing to bring more giants down. Last week, a row of trees over a hundred years old were cut to build a one-mile section of road to bring in more equipment and take out logs that will not be lifted out by helicopter.

Activists have re-established a base camp in the area and are making plans to prevent further logging. A call is out to all interested forest defenders to come to this weekend's (Sept 5-7) WALL (Witness Against Lawless Logging) Tour at the camp for workshops, tours of the new road and possible direct actions to protect this forest. The WALL Tour has been joining campaigns at eight threatened locations from northern California to Southern Washington where forest defenders have taken on the forces who wish to destroy our forests.

Annual Headwaters Rally

There will be a massive rally at Headwaters on September 14. Bob Weir, Bonnie Raitt, Utah Phillips, Dan Hamburg, and many others are on the list of speakers and entertainers. Last year some 5,000 people attended to protest Pacific Lumber's continued degradation of the 60,000-acre Headwaters Forest. Camping and lodging will be available. A nonviolence preparation and organizing event will be held the day before the rally on Saturday, September 13, to prepare rally-goers. There will be other organizing events preceding the rally, including nonviolence trainings-- essential for civil disobedience participants but not excluding others who wish to participate and learn nonviolence techniques. Come join thousands of other concerned people willing to stand up to Maxxam and save all 60,000 acres of the ancient forest. For information on the rally and how you can get involved, call the Headwaters Hotline at 1-510-835-6303.

Nevada Test Site Goes [sub]Critical

In the first event of its kind, the Department of Energy (DOE) exploded 3.25 pounds of plutonium July 2nd. Code named "Rebound," it is called subcritical because no nuclear chain reaction was produced by the explosion. This open-ended series of nuclear tests, used to produce new nuclear weapons, is just one small part of the DOE's ten-year, $40 billion nuclear weapons program.

The subcritical test used high explosives to drive a stainless steel plate into 3.25 pounds (1.46 kilograms) of plutonium to shock the plutonium and measure the effects. A DOE official said there is absolutely no threat to public health and safety from the Rebound test: "The plutonium remained in the underground room and in the dirt on the edges of the underground chamber. It certainly impacted the environment in that immediate area in that we have now pumped plutonium into the soil around that test cavity. None of it was released into the atmosphere."

Of course, his predecessors said something similar about the atmospheric nuclear bomb tests conducted form 1951 to 1962. The National Cancer Institute recently released information saying that the fallout from these tests was 10 times larger than that at Chernobyl. That's a Chernobyl for every year of the testing!

Between March 28th and July 2nd, over 100 people were arrested at the Nevada Test Site (NTS). Another series of actions will try to shut down the NTS before the next subcritical experiment, code-named Holog. The exact date has not yet been set but it will be late this month, before the fiscal year ends on September 30. For more information, please contact Shundahai Network at 702-647-3095, email: shundahai@radix.net.

Contact NW Forest Action Group (206-632-1656; email: can@scn.org) for more information and directions to action camps.