The Warner Creek camp, which protesters occupied for eleven months, became a national symbol of opposition to the salvage rider. Photo © Kurt Jensen
After the worst of the violent fire had burned out, Oakridge volunteer firefighter Ray Gardner high–stepped through the twisted, steaming rubble of what had been, just hours before, the Oakridge Ranger Station near the southern border of Oregon’s Willamette National Forest. He made his way to the one corner of the complex that hadn’t completely burned, peered in the window and took in what was left of his father’s office.
“Pictures I drew of him when I was a little kid were melted across the wall,” Gardner says, remembering the office his father, the station’s District Fire Management officer, had occupied for years. “I saw all my pictures on his desk and on his wall. Some had smoke damage. Some were melted away.” Gardner reached inside the window and took down a plated axe that was hanging above the window, “to know it would at least survive,” he says.
Precious little withstood the inferno that incinerated most of the 1960s–era complex the morning of October 30, 1996. A passerby alerted firefighters to the blaze at 3:30 a.m., and three hours later the 12,000–square–foot ranger station was a smoking ruin. By then, groups of U.S. Forest Service employees—seventy–three worked at the station at the time—were huddled together in the dim morning chill, breathing in the charred scent of irredeemable loss. The blaze incinerated scores of research files and historic maps, audio tapes of old–time loggers, pieces of former fire lookouts and countless personal photos and mementos.
Some workers wept. Others were shocked wordless. “Everyone was devastated in their own way,” says Forest Service silviculturist Tim Bailey, who lost a six–foot–tall bookcase filled with research material, plus a pair of comfortable boots.
“What was hardest for people to accept was that our sense of safety, our sense of security, had been lost,” says then–District Ranger Rick Scott. The station had been the site of protests before, but they occurred in daylight and were expected. “To have such a violent act as burning down the building—it altered the frame of reference in terms of personal safety.”
What no one knew that eerie October morning was that thirty miles away, a trio of novice arsonists—later identified as Kevin Tubbs, Jacob Ferguson and Josephine Sunshine Overaker—were ensconced in a private home, trying to deal with their own shock. Similar devices used in an attempted arson at the Detroit Ranger Station a few days previously had malfunctioned. The trio was stunned at their own success when the Oakridge site was totally consumed by fire.
It would take almost ten years for investigators to publicly name the three individuals who set fire to the ranger station. When they did, they linked the arsonists to a loosely knit “cell” of eco–saboteurs—the government uses the term eco–terrorists—acting in the name of the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front.
In January 2006, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Oregon released a sixty–five–count indictment, charging eleven individuals in a five–year arson spree targeting seventeen businesses and government facilities across the West. The Oakridge Ranger Station fire was the cell’s first “successful” action.
Since then, several other activists have been arrested in the government’s “Operation Backfire” case. Eight of those indicted have pleaded guilty to reduced charges, three have fled the country and four are awaiting trial.
If circumstances had lined up differently, the Oakridge Ranger Station might have never been among the eco–saboteurs’ targets. But a series of events conspired to make it ground zero for a new breed of forest protest that deviated radically from the road–blocking and monkey–wrenching that had been employed by individuals and groups such as Earth First! to protest logging of old–growth trees in the Pacific Northwest. The arson shocked even fringe environmental groups and solidified the belief in many people’s minds that, for some, the freedom to protest had become an excuse to transgress basic tenets of responsibility and decency.
“The burning of the ranger station was a violent act,” says current Oakridge Mayor Sue Bond. “You don’t do that kind of thing. They stepped over the line. That is not what civilized people do.”
SALVAGE RIDER FROM HELL
The chain of events that led to the Oakridge arson began, ironically, with an episode of arson in the woods.
In October 1991, the Warner Creek fire, located in the Willamette National Forest southeast of Oakridge, burned 9,000 acres of young stands and old–growth forest in a habitat conservation area for the northern spotted owl. Forest Service investigators determined early on that the fire was started deliberately. Although the perpetrator was never caught, many environmentalists suspected the fire was set to protest the forest’s protected status and to free up timber for salvage logging.
Timber interests pressured the agency to sell a portion of the burn’s dead and dying timber. Local conservationists pushed back. They were adamant in their belief that an arson fire should not translate into profit.
“If criminal arsonists can get rewarded with salvage timber sales in an area prohibited from being logged, every other habitat conservation area in the system was vulnerable,” says Timothy Ingalsbee, at the time a university instructor from Eugene, Oregon and a leading voice in calling for the logging ban.
The agency didn’t agree that logging was prohibited on the burn, and battled back and forth with environmentalists for years over how much logging, if any, would be acceptable on the charred slopes. Environmentalists were buoyed early in 1995 when a federal magistrate in Eugene ruled that the Forest Service hadn’t adequately addressed the issue of arson in its environmental impact statement for logging in the burn.
But their euphoria was short–lived. A few months later, Congress intervened with its own legislative smackdown: the infamous salvage rider.
Wildfire had crackled across the West in the summer of 1994, and timber companies were itching to salvage–log whatever they could. Well–placed Republican senators attached a rider to the 1995 budget rescissions bill that expedited logging by exempting salvage operations from environmental laws, administrative appeals and judicial review. The rider also directed the Forest Service to re–open sales of old–growth timber stands in the Pacific Northwest that had been withdrawn because of environmental concerns.
President Bill Clinton originally vetoed the bill, which also contained a host of non–forest measures. Some compromises were hammered out, but the salvage rider hung on; the political tide in Congress wasn’t flowing green. The popular bill also included flood relief for Californians and emergency aid for victims of that spring’s Oklahoma City bombing, at the time the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Clinton signed the bill in July 1995.
A cry of outrage echoed across the country, and not only from environmentalists. The Washington Post called the salvage rider “arguably the worst piece of public lands legislation ever.” The New York Times dubbed salvage logging “an old–growth rip–off.”
In August 1995, the Forest Service auctioned off a fifteen–acre sale in the northern edge of the Warner Creek burn. In Eugene, desperate environmentalists turned to the courts. But on September 6, U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan lifted an injunction against logging at Warner Creek, saying that the rider had “cleared the way” for short–term salvage projects.
A skeleton crew of activists had already scoped out a site along Forest Service Road 2408, the only road leading to the sale. Word traveled fast, and by nightfall a contingent of activists was heading southeast to join them.
In the days and months to come, scores would follow.
NOT ONE BURNED STICK
Within days protesters had blocked the road with barricades of rocks and downed trees. They dug fifteen–foot–deep trenches across the road and constructed lockdown devices out of cement, steel drums, plastic pipe and rebar in the event law enforcement officers, dubbed “Dudleys,” closed in. They made runs to Eugene to pick up donated food, established a kitchen area and set up “tarpees,” tepees made from blue plastic tarps. They built a fortress complete with a moat, drawbridge and catwalk. Lookouts carrying radios watched for approaching vehicles.
They called themselves Cascadia Free State. Their rallying cry: “Not one burned stick.”
“The protesters had the moral high ground from start to finish,” says Ingalsbee, who acted as a liaison between the camp and the media. “After [trying] other means of protest, it’s the morally right thing to do to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience. At times it is a necessity. And this was a necessity.”
Veteran forest protester Mick Garvin had a decade of experience under his belt when he arrived at Warner Creek. He didn’t expect to stay long. “I thought we were going to get creamed,” he says.
Forest Service agents confronted the protesters early on. As planned, Garvin, the camp’s designated lockdown person, lay on the ground, inserted his arm through a hole in a metal door and a plastic pipe, and then locked it to a piece of rebar. A dozen other activists sat in front of him. When asked to leave, Garvin refused. To his amazement, the agents turned and left.
The Forest Service made periodic visits, “but they didn’t push it,” he says. “Eventually we got the idea that you can take a place and hold it. And hold it.”
Meanwhile, media–savvy activists helped spread the word. The Earth First! Journal, which was being published in Glenwood, an industrial flatland just east of Eugene, kept its readers informed about the blockade. One protester, Tim Ream, began a hunger strike and camped out on the plaza of the federal building in Eugene for months, keeping the issue in front of the left–leaning university town.
But in Oakridge, about twelve miles from the camp, residents were less than enamored with their ragtag new neighbors. Many thought all the fuss about a minuscule sale of burnt timber was a bit over the top. In the early 1990s, the timber–dependent town had its livelihood yanked from beneath it when logging was shut down in much of the surrounding national forest to protect the spotted owl. Many townsfolk didn’t feel much sympathy for protesters who apparently didn’t need to hold down a job or support a family.
But what really got under the locals’ skin was that the protesters seemed to be getting preferential treatment. Certainly none of the townspeople felt that they could set up camp and block a Forest Service road for weeks at a time, especially one that led into prime hunting ground.
“People were angry,” says Paul Kemp, who at the time was an economic development specialist for the city. “The protesters were allowed to be up there flouting the law, and down here we were held to the law. Law enforcement just stood back.”
Not everyone was seeing red, however. Over several decades, former Oakridge Mayor Rod Paddock had seen his favorite hunting and camping haunts crisscrossed by logging roads and transformed into barren clear–cuts. It took thirty years for the Oakridge native—and son of a logger—to conclude that there had to be a better way to get timber from the forest. When the Warner Creek issue came to the fore, he sided with the protesters.
“I believe logging can be done, but I believe we have to be very careful and very smart in how we do it,” he says. “We have all that knowledge. We just don’t use it.”
Paddock and his wife brought the protesters produce from their garden and a load of wood. They didn’t try to hide their support and no one ever confronted them about it, Paddock says, adding that others told him privately that they, too, didn’t want to see the burn cut.
The protesters maintained the camp through a winter that dumped a record nine feet of snow on their sketchy headquarters. The nights were long and the wind from the north was bitter cold. Food was sometimes scarce. Drifts clogged the road and supplies had to be packed in on skis or snowshoes. The core group dwindled to less than eight.
“It’s amazing we didn’t get anybody hurt,” Garvin says.
The springtime melt brought a resurgence of bodies and energy. The summer of 1996 welcomed a stream of supporters, including budding and seasoned activists, curious professionals and impassioned retirees.
As the anniversary of the rider approached, the furor of sentiment against it seemed to be working. The Forest Service had been unable to sell even close to the amount of board feet it had planned on. The Clinton administration was keeping a watchful eye on the Pacific Northwest, which it needed on its side come the November presidential election. In July, Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman issued an order restricting salvage sales in roadless areas; two weeks later the Forest Service withdrew a second planned sale in the Warner Creek burn that would have encroached on a roadless area.
By mid–August rumors were circulating that negotiations were under way to buy back the Warner Creek sale. Protesters were hopeful, but didn’t plan to pack up until they were convinced it was a done deal.
The Forest Service, however, made the decision for them. On August 17, law enforcement agents descended on the camp, arresting five protesters, a local newspaper photographer and a reporter. It took the agents just a few hours to fill in the trenches and bulldoze the camp, shoving the collapsed fortress down the steep embankment on the north side of Road 2408.
The arrested protesters were taken to jail, but refused to give their names until they saw proof that the sale was cancelled.
On August 23, the administration announced a $475,000 settlement with the Oregon timber company that had bought the Warner Creek sale. The jailed activists gave their names and were released. The protest community celebrated what it considered to be an all–out victory.
Two months later, the Oakridge Ranger Station burned to the ground.
ONE OF US
Daylight had barely penetrated the lingering smoke that October morning when theories began emerging regarding the who, the how and especially the why of the fire. Investigators wouldn’t announce it was human–caused for another week, but that didn’t stop the local rumor mill from grinding out speculation.
Along with many others, silviculturist Bailey immediately suspected forest protesters, but says it confused him that no one came forward to take responsibility for the fire. “If an organization like [Earth Liberation Front] had done it, they would have taken credit for it,” he says, “and they didn’t.”
Others thought the fire might have been set by a disgruntled family member of a Forest Service employee, or delinquent kids. “Actually, we didn’t have a clue,” says Larry Roberts, publisher of the Dead Mountain Echo, the town’s weekly newspaper.
A good share of the activist community was mystified as well. Garvin didn’t for a moment think that anyone from the Warner Creek camp was responsible. “We thought we were being set up,” he says.
Individuals in the forest protest community hold a wide spectrum of values, he says. “Everyone has their line drawn, what they’re comfortable with and what’s beyond the pale.” At the camp, people kept things moderate. If someone wanted to explore more extreme actions, he says, they didn’t talk about it openly.
“But when it came to fire, it was, holy cow, a little out of character.”
Garvin stuck to his guns for years, believing that someone in Oakridge had burned down the ranger station to discredit the protesters.
“Then we found out it was Kevin and Jake,” he says.
Jacob Ferguson, a streetwise drifter who had found some acceptance in the activist community, and Kevin Tubbs, a college graduate and committed animal rights activist, were camp regulars for many months, Garvin says, until the summer of 1996.
Tim Lewis, a Eugene videographer who documented the encampment, described Tubbs, now thirty–seven, as a compassionate, patient and hard–working man. “He encouraged people to learn how to do things,” Lewis says. “He was the kind of person you wanted up there to create a campaign that was consistent and solid.”
Ferguson, now thirty–three, was quieter, a smart, intense guy with a shadowy past and little fear. “He had a bad–boy image,” Lewis says, “and people were attracted to that.”
Ferguson, who was often accompanied by his partner and their toddler, was cut from different cloth than most of the other protesters, Garvin says. “We were a bunch of bio–centrics who loved the forest for the sake of the forest and didn’t want to see it get logged. Jake was looking for an easy cruise. We accepted a lot of behavior that mainstream society might not be so down with, and that fit with him.”
The camp also served as a kind of magnet, drawing together a handful of more extreme activists. At least six of the individuals charged, named or acting as witnesses in the case spent time at the protest camp. Among them was William Rodgers, considered a ringleader in many of the arsons, including the 1998 fire at Vail Ski Resort in Colorado, the Earth Liberation Front’s largest and—with damages estimated at $12 million—most costly conflagration. Rodgers committed suicide in December after being arrested by federal authorities.
“I feel I owe the folks in Oakridge some kind of an apology,” says Garvin, who now runs a reforestation business. “I thought it was someone there. I never thought it was someone I knew well. I have a lot in common with people in the Forest Service. You don’t go into the Forest Service to create wood pulp. You go there to be a steward of the land.”
A FRUITLESS ACT
Today, a new, $4 million, state–of–the–art ranger station sits overlooking the same grounds as its far more humble predecessor. And if you travel east of Oakridge up Road 2408 you have to look close to spot any remnants of the shaggy protest camp that garnered such notoriety it drew a crew from 60 Minutes and inspired stories in the national press. Downed, fire–killed trees now block the road’s last stretch leading to the edge of the burn.
This past July, a pale and dazed Kevin Tubbs stood before U.S. District Court Judge Ann Aiken in Eugene and pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy—to commit arson and to destroy an energy facility—and fifty–five counts of arson or attempted arson. He admitted involvement in fires at nine different locations, beginning with the Oakridge Ranger Station and ending with a May 2001 fire at Jefferson Poplar Farms in Clatskanie, Oregon.
Prosecutor Kirk Engdall read from documents that briefly laid out what happened after Tubbs drove Ferguson and Overaker to the ranger station and dropped them off.
“Ferguson and Overaker placed incendiary devices around the ranger station building. Once completed with the placement of the devices, Ferguson and Overaker rejoined Tubbs at the vehicle, and Tubbs drove them back to Eugene, taking a circuitous route to avoid law enforcement detection. The devices functioned and the ranger station was destroyed by fire.”
At a previous court hearing, Engdall had explained that the reason the trio did not release a communiqué taking responsibility for the fire was because the action was contrary to the wishes of most of the movement. “Most considered it a ridiculous and fruitless act,” he said.
The prosecutor recommended a sentence of fourteen years in prison; part of Tubbs’s plea deal includes co–operating with the government as a witness in upcoming trials. Overaker is considered a fugitive. Ferguson, a primary government witness in the case, has not been charged in any of the thirteen arsons, attempted arsons or other crimes in which he was named.