DIARY UPDATE FROM:

Patricia Fromm, Germany

June 11, 1997

Right now I'm sitting on a grapple yarder in the middle of a huge clearcut on King Island, located on the central coast of British Columbia, Canada. For days, Greenpeace, the Nuxalk Nation and three other environmental organisations have been stopping the destructive activities of International Forest Products, or Interfor.

Actually, before being on this huge machine, I walked through virgin temperate rainforest and was really amazed. The ground and everything is smooth and mossy. You feel, hear and smell water and humidity everywhere. Once you find a deer trail, you can see their tracks and can easily follow them up and down the valley.

In the clearcut, the contrast between the magnificent old-growth forest and the human destruction is obvious. Trees had been cut already and the slopes are full of logs laying one across the other.

Along the road through the clearcut, big piles of wood waste make me wonder if there are any trees left intact anywhere.

Seeing several hundred years old cedar slashed down makes me angry and I don't accept that a company like Interfor can do such devastation without being made responsible. They are destroying many of the last remaining pristine valleys and don't even take into considerations that they are dealing with a legacy important to the entire world.

To express the spirits here up in this human-made desert, I give you the words of a song called the "clearcut blues", a song that the crew of the Moby Dick dedicated to the folks out in the forests.

"My hope is that as many people as possible can know what is going on in these unique forests. I feel strong about showing the logging companies what are their limits. It's absurd but I'm facing arrest for protecting plants and animals that can't speak for themselves and yet meanwhile, Interfor can violate habitats and laws without legal consequences. So: let's take action for sacred rainforests."