Dennis Zarelli: Shaking the tree: an eco-defender's ordeal

Shaking the tree: an eco-defender's ordeal
Asset B21270 Posted By ZoeBlunt

Sims Creek in the Elaho Valley. Photo: Western Canada Wilderness Committee.

“This is precedent-setting for any environmental direct actions in
Canada in the future.” Dennis Zarelli sounds stunned by what’s happened.

The thirty-year-old activist (and comrade of mine) was convicted of
obstructing justice in December 2006. A BC Supreme Court judge refused
to believe police endangered his life in a tree-sit one hundred and
fifty feet off the ground. He is facing nine months in jail at his
sentencing in February 2007.

“Even had someone died six years ago, it seems the courts would have
found that it was our own fault.”

The Douglas firs in the upper Elaho Valley are some of the biggest in
Canada. Photo: Western Canada Wilderness Committee.

As the battle raged six years ago, it looked like the old-growth forests
of the Elaho Valley were doomed. Eighty percent of the area had already
been logged. A priceless grove of record-setting trees was about to
fall. Wilderness advocates from the coast and across the province
pledged to help defend the area. Hundreds visited and fell in love with
the canyonlands along the Elaho River in British Columbia’s Coast
Mountains near Whistler.

But International Forest Products (Interfor) kept marching on. Each
year, chainsaws and bulldozers chewed through whole mountainsides full
of cedar, fir and hemlock, leaving massive scars on the steep slopes and
filling fish streams with silt.

Repeated appeals to the government and Interfor failed, so forest
advocates took to civil disobedience and peaceful protests to stop the
logging. I was with Zarelli and other forest defenders on the frontlines
of Interfor’s logging operations for months at a stretch. We built a
protest camp at the end of the road from downed trees and tarps, and
took turns cooking communal meals, hauling water, and playing
cat-and-mouse games with the loggers. By the end of July, two dozen
people were camped at the road’s end.

We were holding the line to protect thousand-year-old firs and cedars
north of Lava Creek. The previous year, contractors had punched in a
logging road over fierce resistance and incredibly rough terrain. The
battle front shifted to the new bridge over Lava Creek, which was the
only way to access the upper valley.

The blockade on Lava Creek Bridge, July 2000. Photo: Zoe Blunt.

Using peaceful civil disobedience in this case meant putting our bodies
on the line in such a way that the workers would have to risk killing
someone to carry on with the logging. Normally, it’s an effective method
for stopping traffic. But years of confrontations in the Elaho Valley
taught us that blocking the road on the ground invited certain disaster.
Loggers for Interfor had a deep and abiding hatred of tree-huggers, and
they expressed it with death threats and violent attacks on protestors
whenever they could.

In September 1999, a hundred loggers descended on the camp in September
1999 to make good on their threats to get rid of us once and for all. I
was in Whistler that day, and others were in court. The eight remaining
campers tried reasoning with the mob, but to no avail. Loggers beat and
choked three people, who were teken to hospital after the attack. They
burned the camp to the ground, destroying $30,000 worth of equipment,
gear and personal belongings. Police took six hours to respond to 911
calls, and once they arrived, they arrested the tree-sitter and let the
thugs go.

Peaceful civil disobedience is a real challenge in these circumstances.

But the violence by loggers – and what was seen as complicity by police
– only made the protestors more determined to use peaceful means to stop
the destruction.

“Everything we were doing kept getting more escalated,” Zarelli says.
“We didn’t want to block the road for just a day or two.” He and three
friends set out to create a hard blockade that would keep the road
blocked for a couple weeks. They devised a system to block the bridge,
put themselves in harm’s way, and stay out of reach of the police, all
at the same time.

Lava Creek Bridge is wood, concrete and steel, 120 feet long and 12 feet
wide, spanning a rugged canyon. A hundred feet below, the creek roars
and foams. At the north end, high up in a pair of gigantic firs, Zarelli
and three others perched on small platforms attached by ropes and
conduits to a barricade on the bridge twelve stories below.

Two platforms, 150 feet up in the tree at left, are difficult to see
from the ground. A yellow gear bag hanging below the canopy is more
visible. Photo: Zoe Blunt

The tree-sit blockade was a calculated risk. The four tree-sit platforms
were suspended from ropes anchored to the treetops and to the bridge
blockade. The ropes ran from the top of one tree, down to the bridge,
through a pipe wedged under the pickup truck, out the other end of the
pipe, and up to the top of the second tree.

Click on the diagram for a full-size image. A traverse line (not shown)
connected the two trees like a high wire, allowing the tree-sitters to
move from one tree to the other. Source: Elaho Valley Anarchist Horde: A
Journal of Saquatchology.

The truck itself was filled with rocks, piled with logs and wrapped in
barbed wire. Two signs warned that tampering with the structure would
cause the platforms to drop, and the tree-sitters would fall to their
deaths.

Barbed wire reinforced the truck blockade on Lava Creek Bridge. Photo:
Zoe Blunt

When the tree sits and bridge blockade were set up, the area was under a
court injunction and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were keeping a
close eye on the protest site.The tree-sitters were confident the RCMP
would heed the signs and be very cautious when they moved in to make the
arrests.

They were mistaken.

From July 26 to August 2, dozens of RCMP officers laid siege to the
blockade. An Emergency Response Team was mobilized, and footage of
rifle-toting sharpshooters storming over the bridge was broadcast on
national television for a week. But as the days wore on, the cops grew
visibly frustrated that they could not evict the protestors in the trees.

They took it out on anyone within reach. From his perch in the tree,
Zarelli watched three officers drag me by the neck from the woods, twist
my cuffed hands up behind my back, and throw me headfirst into a police
trailer. I ended up with damage to my arms, shoulders and neck. (The
cops told a judge later that I injured myself, and she took them at
their word.)

Zoe gets busted. Photo: Daniel Gautreau

By July 28, officers had partially dismantled the blockade on the
bridge. Then, without any warning, Insp. Bud Mercer used a pruning rod
to cut the ropes supporting the platforms. What happened next became the
focus of police investigations and court battles for six years.

RCMP Cpl. Darik Schaap dismantling the blockade. Photo: Zoe Blunt

When the lines were cut, the platforms suddenly tilted. The tree-sitters
panicked when they realized the main support lines were no longer
holding them. A witness reported:

The platforms drop, catching in lower parts of the canopy. One of the
sitters is hanging from a branch screaming at the cops until helped back
up. The action on the line is frantic, the goons with the big guns are
off in the bush, police climbers start to climb the connected trees to
cut off traverse points. The climbers move slowly, another cop on the
ground yells instructions through a megaphone. (Journal of Sasquatchology)

Philippa Joly, another witness on the ground, watched in horror as the
lines were cut.

“I remember seeing them cut the rope and then there was this slow-motion
feeling – everything slowed down,” she recalls. “I saw the rope fall out
of the tree. It came falling down. I saw other things falling from the
tree. We were all holding our breath, waiting to see what would happen.”

The four young people remained in the treetops, clinging to the
now-unstable platforms.

Metal rebar and a 55-gallon drum cut in half prevented police from
climbing this tree. Photo: Zoe Blunt

Later, the police climbers assaulted the tree-sit in earnest. As the
climbers started up the un-armored tree, the two sitters in that tree
scooted across the high-wire traverse line and joined their companions
in the armored tree. The climbers backed off and did not try to pursue
the protestors.

“It was like living in a war zone,” Joly says. A police helicopter
circled and hovered overhead. ”[The police] were totally insane, with
full-on camouflage and sniper rifles. Then they disappeared into the
woods. And we’re like, what’s going on? Are our friends safe?”

The standoff that followed lasted five more days before the four
protestors climbed down and gave themselves up to be arrested. They
later pleaded guilty and were sentenced to time servied – one day.

Dennis Zarelli under arrest after nine days in the tree. Photo courtesy
of Dennis Zarelli.

The shock of watching the officer cut the rope was too much for Zarelli
to just let it go. In September 2000, Zarelli filed a complaint against
Insp. Mercer, and a justice of the peace laid four criiminal charges of
aggravated assault against the RCMP officer.

It’s rare for police to face criminal charges for acts they commit on
the job, and Zarelli didn’t expect much to come out of it.

“I wanted to basically see attention drawn to the RCMP acting recklessly
at the blockades,” he explains. “They were working with Interfor.”
Officers stood by while a forest worker drove an excavator into the legs
of a tripod that was occupied by a protestor, he says. The rest of us
had witnessed similar incidents.

Protestors were hauled off and charged over minor acts of peaceful civil
disobedience at the request of the company. But when loggers threatened
us with guns and violence, we couldn’t even get the cops to take a report.

Two forest defenders were sentenced to a full year in the pokey just for
standing in the road. Not one of the thugs who beat the campers and
burned down the camp spent a day in jail.

Zarelli felt he had the potential to turn the tables and use the legal
system to hold the police accountable, for once. But the charges against
Insp. Mercer were stayed a month after they were filed. When the Crown
prosecutor reviewed the police videotape, he said there was no evidence
Zarelli’s life was in danger.

Then the harassment started: phone calls to Zarelli’s parents, his
friends, and their employers from people identifying themselves as
agents with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). His house
was under surveillance for months.

Finally, the penny dropped. Word came that the RCMP had issued a warrant
for his arrest – the Crown was charging him with obstructing justice for
filing a false police report. (The perjury charge was added later.)
Zarelli turned himself in.

The court drama that played out in December 2006 was surreal, Zarelli
says. The Crown lawyer argued the protestors were trying to entrap the
police. The blockade and the connected tree platforms were an “elaborate
ruse,” according to Crown prosecutor Ralph Keefer. The claim that they
were using civil disobedience to stop the logging was a charade, he
said. The four forest defenders just wanted to get the cops in trouble
on national television. The prosecutor accused Zarelli of planning the
whole thing just so he could lay false charges against Insp. Mercer.

Incredibly, BC Supreme Court judge Sunni Stromberg-Stein agreed. In her
reasons for judgement, she stated, “This was not an act of civil
disobedience; this was a criminal act.”

Joly attended Zarelli’s trial because she wanted to witness the
proceedings. “It felt really important to be at court because I was
there when it happened.” She says the cops all told the same story, but
on examination, their testimony actually underscored Zarelli’s complaint
that they were negligent.

“All the cops said they couldn’t see how the ropes were set up,” Joly
tells me. “All the cops gave statements affirming they couldn’t see the
ropes from the ground, but the reaction when the ropes were cut led them
to believe the setup was a ruse.”

“But the fact that they cut the ropes without knowing if it was safe to
cut them just showed their negligence – which was Dennis’s original
complaint.”

“The Crown was trying to show we hate the police,” Zarelli says. “He was
bringing up stuff from ten years ago, things that happened in the
Walbran [Valley] and Clayoquot Sound. I wasn’t even at those protests.”

Joly finds the Crown’s arguments unbelievable. “They were playing up
this thing about us having a vendetta against Bud Mercer. Until that day
he hadn’t even been there. We didn’t even know him.”

Zarelli was convicted of obstructing justice. He escaped a perjury
conviction on a technicality, because the original complaint against
Insp. Mercer was not taken under oath. Zarelli faces nine months in jail
at his sentencing February 20, 2007.

Zarelli says the trial’s outcome is deeply disturbing, and not just for him.

“If people put their lives on the line to protect the environment, and
the cops come in and take them out with reckless regards to their lives,
the cops will now be able to refer to my case saying that
environmentalists hate the cops and will lie in court for their cause,”
he says bitterly.

The view from Lava Camp. Photo: Western Canada Wilderness Committee.

Today. the thousand-year-old firs and cedars still stand north of Lava
Creek. Facing beatings and brutality, long prison sentences and death
threats, the forest defenders held the line. We were forced out and
hauled off in handcuffs, but we would not give up, and we kept coming back.

Interfor finally began serious negotiations with the Squamish Nation and
a moratorium on logging in the Elaho Valley went into effect in 2001.
The logging rights to the whole watershed now belong to the Squamish
Nation, and the area north of Lava Creek is set aside as a Wild Spirit
Place – to be protected in perpetuity.

Related

*
http://www.gnn.tv/threads/22990/Shaking_the_tree_an_eco_defender_s_ordeal