On Jan. 5, a former teacher began serving a 30-day
sentence for refusing to part from a 400-year-old Engelmann spruce
she was trying to protect from loggers.
Joni
Clark’s sentence of 30 days is the stiffest penalty yet for a
tree-sitter in Colorado. She was found guilty of violating the
Forest Service’s Special Closure Order in January 1994. Citing the
First Amendment, Clark appealed the verdict.
“The
tree sit was completely legal until the fifth day,” she says,
noting that the forest was closed only after a Denver Post photo
journalist paid a visit. Under normal circumstances, a person can
sit in a tree or anywhere else in a national forest for 14 days at
a time.
Clark perched on a platform 50 feet up
the trunk of the ancient spruce tree during the summer of 1993. She
and other supporters of the group Ancient Forest Rescue were
protesting the Red Mountain Timber Sale in the San Juan Mountains.
Clark climbed the tree, she says, because it was in the way of a
planned six-mile logging road.
On the morning of
the fifth day, Forest Service officers showed up with armed special
agents, Clark recalls. Other protesters were 100 yards down the
road. That left her alone in the tree.
For the
next eight hours, as Clark climbed higher, Special Agent Charlie
Burd followed, reaching the platform she’d rigged. She then
traversed the tree’s canopy along a zipline connected to nearby
trees. After Burd removed her platform and returned to the ground,
Clark was left literally out on a limb.
When
officers threatened to cut her ropes, Clark, by then exhausted and
dehydrated, says she decided it was time to come down. She was
shackled in leg irons and wrist manacles, put in the back of a
Forest Service paddy wagon, and hauled to a jail in Colorado
Springs.
Clark was released on bail the next
afternoon, on condition she not return to the Rio Grande National
Forest. Since her arrest, she has moved to the ski resort of
Crested Butte, where she runs an environmental group. Meanwhile,
Stone Forest Industries has completed its timber harvest after
building 11 miles of road.
Clark is spending 30
nights in a Colorado Springs halfway house and paying $25 a day for
her board. Was her civil disobedience worth it? Clark quotes a line
from writer Edward Abbey: “Wilderness doesn’t need any defense;
only more defenders.”
* Shara
Rutberg
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Protester starts her sentence.
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