Sacred Nature

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The First Amendment rights that are really violated in the case are the environmentalists' right to free speech, says Fenner. "This is nothing more than a SLAPP suit--a strategic lawsuit against public participation," he charges. "[The loggers] are trying to stop us from being heard. That's the crux of what's going on here."

So far, legal scholars agree. "It's an absolutely frivolous suit," says University of Minnesota law professor Michael Stokes Paulsen, an expert on religion and the Constitution. "I wouldn't be surprised if [the loggers] wind up having to pay the defendants' court costs."

The clearest indication of harassment is that a purely constitutional claim names the environmentalists at all, says Paulsen. Except for slavery, the Constitution only limits the actions of government, not individuals, he notes. Therefore, private groups can't be sued even if they are trying to establish a religion. "This is also a potentially grave infringement on the constitutional rights of people to petition government for redress of grievances," Paulsen adds. "They are saying that people with religious beliefs may not lobby the government, and that's clearly wrong."

Even if the case survives, Paulsen says, it's "extremely improbable" that the courts will declare deep ecology a religion. Supreme Court decisions have "uniformly come down on the side that a belief system must involve a god or gods," Paulsen explains, "or at the furthest extreme, a transcendent belief system that affirms the place that a traditional god or gods would have held. A pagan fertility cult could count as a religion, but as I understand the allegations, deep ecology seems at most to be a deeply held philosophical system--there's not an Isis, or a nature god."

But even if the environmentalists are linked to deep ecology, and the courts say deep ecology is a religion, there's still a final hurdle: proving that Forest Service policy established a religion. "It isn't enough to say an outcome resembles a religious principle--otherwise, laws against murder would be overturned because the Ten Commandments say ëthou shall not kill,'" Paulsen notes. "You have to show that this policy could be explained on no other reasonable grounds than the promotion, endorsement, and coercion of specific religious activity. Again, based on my reading of the government, they simply don't want to sell that much wood."

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