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Photo by Bob Pennell Jay Lininger of Williams, one of about 40 people who took part in a protest at the Bureau of Land Management's Medford office Tuesday, holds a "report card" showing the group's dissatisfaction. BLM flunks protesters' standards Resource manager defends logging as part of NW plan By PAUL FATTIG Managers of the Medford District of the Bureau of Land Management received their pink slips Tuesday morning. Some 40 environmental protesters gathered at the BLM's Medford office to symbolically fire the managers to show their disapproval over continued logging at the agency's Deer Mom timber sale in Selma. The agency should stop all logging activity at the site until U.S. District Court Judge William Dwyer in Seattle holds a hearing Aug. 20, they said. At that time, Dwyer will likely issue a temporary restraining order naming perhaps 100 other timber sales, including the 800-acre Deer Mom, they believe. Early last week Dwyer placed nine federal timber sales in Oregon and Washington on hold, saying the BLM and Forest Service had violated the Northwest Forest Plan by failing to properly survey and manage for threatened plants and animals on those sales. "It's just a matter of time before this thing (Deer Mom) gets shut down," Jay Lininger, representing the Klamath Siskiyou Wildlands Center, told the protesters. "The BLM should honor that ruling and cease and desist its unlawful practices." Like other speakers, he stressed the importance of nonviolence. "The BLM fears that you are violent, that you are dangerous," he continued. "That is because the BLM has violence in its heart. "But it's extremely important for us to reaffirm that our opposition to the BLM's plan is rooted in nonviolence and civil protest and civil disobedience," he added. With that, Lininger began an oral job review, rating managers on everything from protecting forest health and violating the law to protecting diversity and wasting taxpayers' money. The protesters, by unanimous voice vote, agreed to fire the managers. "They have every right to do their demonstration," observed Grants Pass Resource Area Manager Bob Korfhage after the protest. But Korfhage, who was named to receive a pink slip, defended his and the district's management of its forestlands. "Our view has always `been that we are implementing the Northwest Forest Plan as it was intended," he said. "The type of timber sales we have met the intent of that plan." Cutting continues on Deer Mom because it was not named in Dwyer's earlier decision, he said, adding that he did not want to predict what the court may decide on Aug. 20. But rally organizer Annette Rasch of Takilma said the agency was merely attempting to cut as much timber as possible before Deer Mom is named. "This is an obvious scenario of the BLM getting the cut in under the gun," she said. Selma resident Mort Mondale, representing the Deer Creek Valley Natural Resources Conservation Association, said the association had worked with the BLM for more than two years, offering alternatives to the agency's planned sale. Like the others, he stressed the protesters opposed violence. "Yet the BLM has armed guards and we can't even go into the forest to pray," he said of the closed Deer Mom timber sale. "Except for two traffic tickets, I have never done anything illegal in my life," he added. "The BLM is convicted by courts of violating laws. But they have the armed guards. We don't violate laws, yet we are kept out of the forest we love." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA