Sojourner Truth Radio

Three decades ago, in the summer of 1990, activists from Earth First! occupied the Fairview Timber sale site in the Shawnee Forest— which is located in Southern Illinois for 79 days — using their bodies to block the logging equipment and using legal strategies to challenge the harvesting of the lumber in court. This historic action has come to be known as the Shawnee Showdown. This relatively small group of activists were successful in stopping commercial logging in the Shawnee National Forest in Southern Illinois for 17 years. But in 2013, the Forest Service won a motion to lift the injunction. Currently, thousands of acres at the Shawnee National Forest are scheduled for logging operations. Shawnee is managed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, they allow logging on public lands, wood is then sold to logging companies at a price that is below market value. The fight to save the Shawnee Forest continues today, with the most recent attempt by organizers to transfer the Shawnee National Forest out of the U