Striptease press release - July 29, 2001

Topless Poet Halts Logging to Save Salmon
Cops Decline to Bust Protest, Albion, CA

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Calling themselves the"Albion Nation", residents of a tiny hamlet on California's rugged north coast have launched their second successful David and Goliath-style "uprising" against the corporate giant (GAP/Banana Republic/Old Navy/Mendocino Redwood Co.) owned by the Fisher family of San Francisco, whose logging practices threaten the habitat of the nearly extinct Coho salmon.

In a pre-dawn blockade Friday morning the petite and bare-breasted poet "La Tigresa" clung to the running boards of huge logging trucks chanting
her earth goddess poetry to frenzied tribal drumming while a crowd of residents and salmon supporters cheered and danced. The astounded loggers
were for the most part respectful, particularly the Hispanic workers who seemed mesmerized when La Tigresa recited her Earth Mother poems in
Spanish. The sheriff was called, but, according to the CHP officer who finally showed up hours later, the sheriff, "didn't have the heart" to bust up the proceedings.

After a final poem, "The GAP RAP" ("They make their clothes in sweatshops where they treat the workers like slaves, /then come up here and turn our
rivers and forests into mass graves")La Tigresa left the scene, to polite applause from the CHP. Other forest defenders --among them schoolteachers, students and watershed experts-- entered the "Enchanted Meadow" area of the forest with the loggers, where their audible presence prevented the loggers from cutting a single tree, due to the risk of a tree falling and killing a bystander as happened in the death of David (Gypsy) Chain in Humboldt County in 1998.
According to recently issued government reports the Coho salmon, native to northern California is nearly extinct as a species. "Enchanted Meadow" is the name given to the wildlife sanctuary awarded in a previous settlement after the first Albion Nation "uprising" in 1992. Current MRC logging practices threaten all wildlife in this sanctuary, as well as the Coho salmon in the Albion River, home of one of the last free wild runs of Coho salmon left on earth.
At a victory rally later in the day Albion Nation activists outlined plans for their continuing "uprising". A march to MRC's lumber mill is scheduled for 9:00 am Monday morning, starting from the Mendocino Botanical Gardens on Coast Highway One and marching down the highway to the Gibney Lane mill. A large rally is slated for Aug. 11 during the height of the busy Mendocino tourist season. "Tourists come from all over the world to experience the grandeur of our redwoods and do not want to see the area destroyed by corporate greed," said La Tigresa, whose GAPRAP states:

"Way up north on the Mendocino coast
We got the scenery folks be digging the most
We got the tall redwood trees
We got fat salmon in the streams,
But look out! look out! We're losing it fast
The redwood trees are on their last
The Coho salmon are practically extinct
Our water's too polluted for anyone to drink
They spray cancer-causing chemicals into our country air
Our children die of cancer -- I ask you, is this fair?"

Calling for sustainable logging that would ensure jobs AND forests forever, La Tigresa has won the hearts of many loggers to whom she says,"I want you to keep your jobs. I want your children and grandchildren to have jobs in the forest. No forest means no jobs. With selective cutting we can sustain the economy AND the environment forever."

Conservationists and forest scientists have been outraged at the certification for sustainable logging recently granted to MRC in what they feel is flagrant abuse of the concept of sustainable logging. Forestry expert Linda Perkins pointed out at the rally that despite repeated violations of sustainable forestry codes MRC has received certified sustainable status that should be granted only after the violations have been corrected and eliminated.

"Continued use of carcinogenic herbicides by MRC has been linked to the unusually high rate of cancer in Mendocino county," states La Tigresa,
who promised to "stand up and strip down" in defense of Mother Earth, and advised, "it's better to go naked than to shop at the GAP!"

contact La Tigresa 415/331-1500 ext 322
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