Looking for a good summer camp? A weeklong environmental activist training camp being held this week in Montana’s Bitterroot National Forest might be for you. Sponsored by Greenpeace, the National Forest Protection Alliance, and other, like-minded environmental organizations, the camp is teaching some 70 participants the finer points of civil disobedience. The camp is designed to turn out a generation of activists equipped to fight the widespread logging that, Greenpeace says, will result from the Bush administration’s Healthy Forests Initiative. To that end, campers are learning not only about grassroots organizing and species identification, but also about safe tree-sitting and how to file appeals to disrupt federal agencies and stall forestry projects. Participants and organizers alike say they are nonviolent and not interested in damaging property but are willing to risk arrest to protect the forests. “You deal with radical situations in radical ways,” said participant Don Muller of Sitka, Ala.
