Sierra Club Takes a Swing at Riggs for Logging Ties
11/22/97
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Headline: Sierra Club Takes a Swing at Riggs for Logging Ties
Source: The San Francisco Chronicle
Date: 11/22/97
Author: Jim Doyle, Chronicle Staff Writer
Copyright: The Chronicle Publishing Company
Copyright 1997 The San Francisco Chronicle
Sierra Club Takes a Swing at Riggs
Ad hits logging ties, pepper spraying
SAN FRANCISCO
The Sierra Club plans to unleash a TV advertising
campaign next week that attacks Representative Frank
Riggs' close ties to the lumber industry and his
strident defense of the swabbing of pepper spray into
demonstrators' eyes.
The 30-second spot is scheduled to begin airing Monday
on North Coast cable TV stations, and will be broadcast
for two months.
``It will be the largest television campaign we've ever
conducted,'' Carl Pope, the Sierra Club's executive
director, said at a news conference yesterday in San
Francisco.
The ad includes a few seconds from a police videotape
of an October 16 Earth First protest at Riggs' district
office in Eureka. In that incident, Humboldt County
deputy sheriffs used Q-Tips to swab liquid pepper spray
into the eyelids of three women and a 16-year-old girl
who had chained themselves to a redwood stump in Riggs'
office.
It also features Riggs' defense of the police conduct
on a network television show. ``I don't know how more
patient or more humane the police could have handled
this incident,'' Riggs is quoted as saying.
The ad also shows trees being felled in the Headwaters
Forest -- the nation's largest grove of ancient
redwoods. And it ends with an appeal for North Coast
voters to telephone Riggs and ``tell him to stop
attacking our environment and start protecting our
forests.''
In a statement issued yesterday, Riggs accused the
Sierra Club of aligning itself with the ``militant
fringe of the environmental movement . . . It is clear
that the Sierra Club will not be content until they and
their allies put all loggers on the North Coast out of
work.''
Riggs, a Republican from Windsor, faces a tough
re-election fight next November.
State Senator Mike Thompson, a Democrat from St.
Helena, is running against him in the 1st Congressional
District, which stretches from Mare Island to the
Oregon border.
Riggs, a former Sonoma County deputy sheriff, has drawn
criticism from across the country for his support for
the pepper spraying of protesters at his office and a
similar incident at the Pacific Lumber Co. office in
Scotia.
The Sierra Club's Pope accused Riggs of being ``out of
touch with the values of mainstream Americans. . . .
Not only is he defending an inexcusable use of torture,
he is party to the assault on our forest lands and our
environmental laws.''
Riggs ``gets more lumber money than any other member of
the House, and there seems to be no limit to what he
will do for them,'' Pope said. He criticized Riggs'
efforts to pass a bill last year that would have
exempted Pacific Lumber from the Endangered Species Act
in its attempts to log the Headwaters Forest.
President Clinton has signed into law a bill that would
protect 7,500 acres of the Headwaters Forest and
subject the remainder of the 60,000-acre grove to a
government-approved ``habitat conservation plan.''
Some environmentalists have praised the law as a first
step toward saving the forest, but others, including
Earth First, insist that it clears the way for the
eventual logging of much of the grove and doesn't go
far enough to protect the habitat of salmon, marbled
murrelet and other species.