On January 26, 1998, the Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC), the Sierra Club and the Northcoast Environmental Center sued Pacific Lumber (PL) on behalf of the coho salmon for violating the Endangered Species Act, and in an effort to protect some of the best remaining salmon habitat in California.
Coho Sa1mon V. Pacific Lumber, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, claims that federal and state agencies have failed to take adequate measures to curtail logging activities that harm coho salmon and their habitat, and that Pacific Lumber's ongoing timber harvesting is killing and harming coho in. violation of the Endangered Species Act. Coho have been listed as "threatened" in northern California and southern Oregon since May of 1997, and in central California since October of 1996.
"The State of California has consistently colluded with the timber industry in order to block effective protections for the salmon, and the Federal government has utterly failed to show any leadership on this issue," said Josh Kaufman, Conservation Chair for the Redwood Chapter of the Sierra Club of California.
The lawsuit aims to set standards for coho protection not just on PL lands but throughout the coho~s range. Since the first populations of California coho were listed in October of 1996, the National Marine Fisheries Service has repeatedly failed to produce promised guidelines for how landowners can avoid "taking" (harming, harassing or killing) the fish.
Many of the same attorneys who helped EPIC win its landmark victory in Marbled Murrelet V. Pacific Lumber have again joined forces with EPIC on behalf of the coho: In both cases Pacific Lumber was clearly and flagrantly violating the Endangered Species Act, and the relevant State and Federal agencies failed to take any meaningful action. In both cases, non-profit groups have had to step in to enforce the law.
The Marbled Murrelet case was finalized last February when the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed EPIC's resounding victory. That case has since provided de facto protection for thousands of acres of coastal old-growth murrelet habitat.
Coho v. PL will show that Pacific Lumber's logging activities have caused direct harm to coho and their habitat. In the past two years, PL has filed over 60 Timber Harvest Plans in prime coho habitat surrounding the North Fork of the Elk River, and Freshwater, Yager, Lawrence, Jordan and Bear Creeks, representing roughly 7,700 acres.
Logging and road-building on steep slopes and in stream corridors cause significant erosion of topsoil and loss of shade, making coho streams too shallow, warm and muddy to support fish. Logging can also exacerbate the risk of landslides, and eliminates older trees that will fall into the streams to provide crucial habitat for the coho. Very few viable populations of coho remain in California, and several of these are in streams that run through Pacific Lumber lands.
The California Department of Forestry caught Pacific Lumber violating the Forest Practice Rules over 100 times in 1997 alone. Many of these violations were related to hauling logs on wet roads, which produces stream choking sediment harmful to coho.
"The winter logging restrictions imposed on PL by the Department of Forestry are tragically inadequate; analogous to having a serial killer register his handgun,'~ concluded EPIC President Paul Mason.
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