Humboldt County, CA: Forest Defenders Halt Logging Work North of Strawberry Rock

Report on recent actions against logging in so-called Humboldt County in Northern California.

For two consecutive days this week a large group of forest defenders shut down logging operations northeast of Tsurai (Trinidad). Monday and Tuesday morning, protestors walked into an active clearcut, forcing machinery to shut off. After a long standoff with Green Diamond Security, Humboldt County Sheriffs arrived and the protesters departed into the forest.

One forest defender commented, “As wildfires, heatwaves, floods and other disasters become more frequent and persistent, more of us are waking up to the fact that the climate crisis is not a looming future, but a present reality, intensifying every day. It’s time for all of us to get creative and take direct action to slow and halt the incessant death-drive of industrial capitalism.”

Green Diamond is the fifth largest landowner in the country. They maintain certification on their California timberlands with the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). This certification does not preclude them from clearcutting. Many of the logs are then transported to Humboldt Redwood Company’s Scotia Sawmill, and marketed as sustainable timber.

Another commented, “In the midst of a global climate crisis, the FSC and state bureaucracies do more to empower corporate-run ecocide than they do to prevent it. It’s up to everyday people to challenge this violence directly, halting their destruction whenever we can.”

Forest defenders have been protecting groves in the area around Strawberry Rock for several years using nonviolent civil disobedience, including tree sits, which have been continually occupied since April of 2020 after Green Diamond began clear-cutting in the area.

A sitter commented, “If we have any respect for life on this Earth, human or otherwise, we need to take agency, not as consumers, but as stewards and relatives of the marvelous beings who hold our habitats in balance.”