By Alexander Cockburn – Anderson Valley Advertiser, May 30, 1990
Driving through Oakland on their way south from Ukiah to Santa Cruz, Judi Bari and her fellow Earth First!er, Darryl Cherney, were almost killed by a bomb that exploded in their car. This was last Thursday.
Two days earlier Bari was speaking at a rally outside the Mendocino county courthouse. She told the crowd that to date she’d received over 45 death threats. After the first ten, Bari half-joked, you get used to them. Now, badly mangled and in the hospital, she’s under arrest, as is Cherney, on suspicion of being ecoterrorists.
Prosecuting attorneys look at Earth First! activists the way Nero looked at Christians. They flick through the late Edward Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang, pull together a few news clips on spiking and get ready to throw the book.
Judi Bari didn’t get used to the death threats. They bothered her, as they would any sane person. Last August in broad daylight, a logging truck rammed her car from behind in the middle of Philo. By some miracle, neither she, nor Darryl Cherney, Pam Davis, nor the four children in the car were hurt. The D.A. said there was insufficient evidence to prosecute.
Things are tense in Mendocino and Humboldt counties. The rally outside the courthouse was the launch-off for Bari’s brainchild, Mississippi Summer in the Redwoods, shortened for convenience to Redwood Summer. The target is the timber companies, preeminently the giant corporations Georgia-Pacific and Louisiana-Pacific, which have been over-cutting for years and who plan to accelerate this practice in the months ahead.
Bari has been planning a nonviolent campaign. Redwood Summer will kick off on June 20 with an effort to shut down operations at Louisiana-Pacific’s log export dock in Samoa, a little port town in Humboldt County. From here Louisiana Pacific ships out logs sawn in half, thus qualifying them as “ partly finished product” and hence evading the ban on the export of raw logs from public lands. Another function of the action in Samoa will be to point out that Louisiana-Pacific is setting up a large mill in Mexico and plans to mill its logs there.
The over-cutting is indisputable. The timber companies’ own statistics, buttressed by UC Extension analyses, show an over-cut of 225% on both private and public lands. The companies, unchecked in their ravages for over a century, know well enough that public opinion has turned against them. Hence the panicky clear-cutting scheduled for this summer, hence too the assiduous slanders against Bari and the Mendocino Earth First!ers (the movement as a whole varies widely in political outlook and strategy from region to region) as eco-terrorists driving spikes into trees, heedless of possible injuries to loggers and mill workers.
Bari has spoken out against spiking. Actually, there has been just one confirmed spiking in Mendocino County and that was (in 1987).
It was traced to an elderly fellow from Los Angeles who was camping next to a timber site. The Mendocino county DA declined to prosecute. In that particular episode, a millworker was injured, since Louisiana Pacific had no protective screen round the saw. These days they are milling second, third, and even fourth cuts, which can consist of old fencing or telephone poles. Debris of all sorts comes flying off the blade.
Louisiana Pacific, famous for union busting, is constantly on the receiving end of fines from federal and state oversight bodies for failing to protect its workers from occupational hazards. R. Fortunado Reyes, a young Mexican worker in Louisiana-Pacific’s Ukiah mill, was killed last year when his super-visor ordered him to clear the “ green chain” —a part of the lumber assembly line—manually, while it was running. Under protest Reyes went to clear the chain and was crushed to death.
The timber companies keenly foster the image of middle class environmentalists careless of the fate of loggers and millworkers in an area like Mendocino County where unemployment runs between 15 and 20 percent. But timber workers are well aware of the overcutting. Three mills in Mendocino County have closed down this year through a shortage of large logs.
Bari has been calling for “ sustained yield practice,” meaning that you have to plant as many trees as you cut down. This is far from radical. She worked hard at getting the support of timber workers, and at letting them know that she and her fellow activists were alert to their concerns. Like any sensible environmentalist with a radical outlook, she knows that coalition building with labor is all-important.
But if you try to build such coalitions you make dangerous enemies. No one familiar with Bari, Cherney, and the Earth First! group in Mendocino County believes for a second that the two were wittingly carrying a bomb in their car. Fake Earth First! leaf-lets have been circulated through mills with threats to set the woods on fire and to attack loggers.
Demonstrators against over-cutting have been physically attacked. Not a single official in Mendocino County denounced the many threats against Bari. To the contrary, they railed at her for organizing Redwood Summer.
Bari’s associates reckon that the screwball right, emboldened by the indifference of county officials towards attacks on the left, set the car bomb. The murder plan failed, but now the victims are being blamed. Redwood Summer is off to an ominous start.
Miscellaneous Excerpts
(1) From a flyer passed out at a timber Industry rally in the northwest: We are hard workers in an honest and thriving industry which a small group of preservationist radicals have targeted for extinction…My child is more important than your owl. My child is more important than the quality of your air. My child is more important than a tree. My child is more important than your hiking expedition…I must do everything I can to protect my child…If a grizzly bear was carrying off your only child and that was the last grizzly on the face of the earth, who would go? We are a group looking for a leader. Insane decisions are being made by our elected officials.
(2) From a letter sent, apparently, to the Environment Center: These Earth First! people are not modern day Robin Hoods whose cause is not the poor of the forest, but the trees themselves; these are violent men and women who engage in acts which could kill fathers in the name of Mother Earth. Earth First! denies their activities have cause [sic] injury or death, I guess that doesn’t include burning buildings, throwing bombs, spiking trees. As we all know there is a timber man who will face years of reconstructive surgery [*] —that isn’t considered “injury”?…I don’t understand your group, how can you be involved with this group? No one can condone—and everyone should condemn—those who use violence to deny American men and women their livelihoods and even their lives…Why don’t you call them the name their group is—Assholes First!…This is America and we shouldn’t feel threatened and singled out. We are watching too!!!!! …For the obvious reasons, I will leave this unsigned. Pretty sad when you can’t say what you want in fear of your family and friends being harassed [sic] and even worse being hurt by these Earth First! people, who do use terrorist acts of violence and don’t think they don’t. I hope and pray your group is not involved in their underhanded tatics [sic].
(3) A forged Earth First! press release, complete with Earth First! logo, circulated in the Eureka area: News Release: We, followers of the movement Earth First! of Northern California do not agree with non-feral Daryl [sic] Cherney’s recent statement advocating no tree spiking. We are in a “war” with the north coast timber companies. Companies do not have rights, only “Mother Earth” has rights. We must save all trees.
“Mississippi Summer” – Come one, come all to Humboldt County.
We intend to spike trees, monkeywrench, and even resort to violence if necessary. We will not stand for the destruction of “Mother Earth.”
People of the Northcoast must stop raping the forests “Now”. We have no time left.
Next agenda – “Wetlands”
(4) From a letter to the Environment Center: What is it going to take to make you people realize that your demonstrations are dangerous? Is it going to take someone to get hurt or even killed? (emphasis added) Loggers aren’t going to full [sic] around a lot of them are carrying weapons, and we don’t blame them either because they are only trying to make a living and support [sic] there [sic] family [sic]. We work not like you city people who all you have to do is go and pick up your welfare checks (which are paper which are made from trees). This is our town, we know how to run it.[1]
Notes:
[1] Cockburn wrote a similar article comparing Judi Bari to Brazilian Rainforest activist and organizer Chico Mendes, see “Chico Mendes in the First World, by Alexander Cockburn, Anderson Valley Advertiser, June 6, 1990.