Small Environmental Group Has a Big Impact on Logging

REDWAY, Calif. — The setting is Spartan: A single, unheated room in a metal industrial building shared by a grimy radiator-repair shop in a forgotten town in the middle of the woods.

Do not be fooled by the modest headquarters of the Environmental Protection Information Center. The relatively small group has had an impact on California as big as its name.

Since its founding in 1977 by southern Humboldt County residents opposed to herbicide spraying on forests near their homes, EPIC has filed a host of lawsuits that have significantly changed the way loggers--and state logging regulators--operate in California.

Now the group has turned its attention to the electoral process. EPIC is a primary member of Forest Forever, a coalition of large and small environmental groups promoting a statewide ballot initiative aimed at revamping state forest practice laws.

The proposal, which will be circulated for signatures soon, seeks to rewrite the ground rules of forest management in California.

Among its many elements, it would raise $710 million to buy ancient redwood forests threatened by logging, generate $32 million to find jobs for displaced lumber workers, ban the controversial clear-cutting of forest areas and reconstitute the Board of Forestry to end alleged “corporate domination.”

It is an ambitious agenda, but EPIC is used to thinking--and acting--big.

One EPIC lawsuit, against the giant Georgia-Pacific Corp., forced the state to start reviewing logging plans in the context of all other logging plans for the area. In another case, a judge ruled for EPIC after assailing the state for “rubber-stamping” harvest plans--sometimes before they were even completed.

With only 350 dues-paying members--mostly local but some from as far away as New York, and all paying from $12 to $25 a year--EPIC operates chiefly on the volunteer labor of a small cadre of lawyers. One is Richard J. Moller of Redway; another is Thomas N. Lippe of San Francisco.

“They’re very dedicated. They work at this 20 to 24 hours a day,” said David Galitz of Pacific Lumber Co., a frequent EPIC target. “I don’t know how they are as effective as they are, but they are.”

“We’re not trying to put loggers out of business, as some seem to think,” said EPIC President Cecelia Lanman of Garberville, fending off criticism that the group is too closely aligned with radical environmentalists.

“Our work will create longer-term employment in the forest-products industry. You can’t keep in business if you cut more than you grow, as has happened for several years. We want a sustainable timber industry.”