VANCOUVER - A 10-day logging protest six years ago is going to cost Greenpeace more than $6,000 after a court in B.C. said the environmental group has to pay loggers for lost wages.

Madame Justice Janet Sinclair Prowse ordered Greenpeace and two of its members to compensate four loggers who lost work when protesters shut down a logging site on Roderick Island in May 1997.

Wow, the B.C. courts are having a good day today! This is absolutely the right decision in this case, but I wish Greenpeace had had the sense to pay the loggers up-front. Not only would it have been the right thing to do, it would have been very smart from a public-relations perspective. One of the major arguments trotted out by the anti-environmental brigades is the "threatening peoples' livelihoods" line, which serves nicely to distract folks from the real point of the environmental movement. It would have been nice to see a major environmental group pull that argument's teeth.