By Gary Sargent - Industrial Worker, November 1991.
Note that the terms "Ecotopia Summer" and "Redwood Summer II" are used here interchangably. "Ecotopia" is a direct reference to the Ernest Callenbach novel of the same title (published in 1975).
It took a few lumps this time around, along with some of its defenders, but Headwaters Forest is still there-still uncut. Maybe by this time next year, we will have saved it for good. Meanwhile the timber-mining corporados keep trying to gouge as much of it away as they can before the deal is finalized with the public-private co-op fronted by Trust for Public Land that is trying to raise the ransom needed to protect this last island of original Redwood forest ecosystem from the saws of the profit-junkies at Pacific Lumber-Maxxam.
Those who understand how precious this tiny remainder of a once-vast heritage is, keep trying to stop them-in the words of Malcolm X, "by any means necessary." Ecotopia Summer began the last week of June 1991 with the Earth First! Northwest Regional Rendezvous in the Siskiyou Mountains of northern California. It was a typical EF! bash with continuous workshops, music and good times. Around July 1, the alarm was sounded that PL. (Pacific Lumber ) had started cutting right next' to Headwaters Forest in the most critical wildlife corridor in the watershed, pursuant to a THP (Timber "Harvest" Plan) which quietly slipped through in February.
While a massive phone-in kept Governor Pete Wilson and Superintendent of Resources Doug Wheeler's phones tied up for days with demands to stop the cutting, on July 3 four Earth First! women locked themselves down to PL logging equipment at the site. They spent their Fourth of July holiday in the Eureka jail. This action kicked off a week of direct action called Redwood Action Week. A base camp was set up in the Honeydew location with Seeds of Peace once again providing sustenance in classic Seeds style.
Planning circles at the camp decided that large actions of 30-40 people featuring a variety of simultaneous tactics (e.g., road blockades, equipment lockdowns, cat-and-mouse games in the woods) were essential to keep loggers occupied at something other than cutting trees. Knowing that the loggers had diamond saws capable of cutting kryptonite locks, EF!ers quickly arranged to get newly invented lockboxes from Greenpeace and rushed them to the camp just in time for the next action.
Around midnight July 7, two teams of several affinity groups each were dropped off at different several miles from the logging site. They were to rendezvous at a good blockade site on the entry road before dawn. That morning trucks and a bulldozer were driven at blockaders accelerating a high speed. Blockaders stood their ground until it was clear that it was jump or die. They, jumped-one with a dozer blade four or five feet from him with the hammer down. Other loggers chased people, kicking and punching. Several women were punched and thrown to the ground. Two loggers would grab someone, one by hands and one by feet, swing him/her like a sack of wheat and thrown them into the ditch. PL security guards made citizen's arrests. The police cooperated with PL security goons when they arrived, but refused to arrest loggers for their many crimes of assault and battery, even with many witnesses.
The next action was a tree sit with a banner hanging across Avenue of the Giants, the scenic Redwoods along the Eel River. Again planning broke down--no media was at the site when the banner went up, and no one even had a camera, much less a video camera. The first members of the public to see it were PL security goons. They stormed the tree-sitters, damaging some expensive climbing equipment and stealing a bunch more. They attacked people again, injuring several, and when the police arrived there were a few arrests-again all protestors.
Back at base camp, consensus was to continue actions for another week, moving down to Mendocino County where there is a stronger community of support and where progress has been made with police in meetings with activists about what is appropriate behavior for activists and police in protest situations. Base camp moved to the Willits area.
In Mendocino County, it's a bit less like a war zone. Things are less polarized. Divisions between timber industry workers and eco-freaks are less sharp. There's more neighborly interaction. Someone organized a joint stream cleanup and volleyball game with EF!ers and Harwood Mill workers. At first the mill folks said it wouldn't be fair for them to play against EF! because EF! won't spike, but eventually a few of them came around.[1]
Meanwhile, down in Sonoma County on the Russian River, the power brokers of the big corporations and their puppet government in Washington were gathering for their annual campout at Bohemian Grove. Earth First! joined the Bohemian Grove Action Network in the annual action, protesting the closed-door policymaking that is business-as-usual, this time with a blockade at the gate. Eleven were arrested.
That evening four EF!ers hiked into the Grove and climbed trees a few yards from where the power junkies have their secret "Cremation of Care" ritual. At the climax when the revelers explode an owl statue as a symbol of "Dull Care," the Earth First!ers began chanting "You can burn your care but not your guilt" until they were arrested. At the same time in the community center in Guerneville, the Boho Grove Action Network was holding a "Resurrection of Care" event with speakers (including an ex-hooker who had worked the Grove for two bills a trick), performers, and a buffet banquet featuring hemp-tofu burgers.
A few days later in Sacramento, Earth First! took the action to the State Capitol in a well-organized demo featuring five independent actions. Two young women in bathing suits smeared with mud streaked through the Rotunda, two men in suits and ties chained themselves to the statue of Columbus, others hung a banner from the Rotunda, which stayed up for 20 minutes, reading "Save Headwaters Forest." A woman with green hair was Krypto-locked to the Governors door by a man with a multi-colored mohawk. This all caused quite a delay in the start of the Assembly and got some early news coverage. It was upstaged, however, and knocked out of the evening news by Southern Pacific's massive spill of lethal chemicals into the upper Sacramento River.
Back in Mendo-Land, outside Willits, the second week of Redwood Action Week was rolling-or not. At a "Baby Trees" logging site on Sherwood Road, local Willits Wobs and Earth First!ers had buried a Ford Pinto in the entrance to the logging road, effectively stopping the trucks from rolling out and the cars .full of loggers from rolling in. Law enforcement was much more balanced in Mendo County than in Humboldt. During the past year, local activists initiated face-to-face meetings with D.A.s and police officials to counter the hysterical timber-industry propaganda about "eco-terrorists." Officers from the California Highway Patrol, Mendocino Sheriff's Department, Willits, Fort Bragg and even (grudgingly) Ukiah police issued a statement that we have a right to protest and that they will protect us in the exercise of our First Amendment rights. Representatives from these agencies even took nonviolence training from Earth First! nonviolence trainers. Apparently they did just fine except for the consensus decision-making part which they couldn't quite handle.
Then there was the Skunk Train Action--again organized and carried out by locals. The Skunk Train is a local tourist attraction which features a narrow-gauge railroad winding through a lovely (and narrow) swath of virgin redwoods, surrounded on all sides by acres of clear cuts, just out of sight of the tourists. There were actions at both depots, the main action at Willits. Some Skunk Train employees helped hang nine banners along the tracks, visible from the train. At the Willits Depot the Skunk tourist brochures were replaced in the racks by Earth First! brochures that looked just like the originals. These brochures were even typeset and printed by sympathetic workers at the same print shop. Scenic photos were replaced with photos of scenic clear cuts. "Avenue of the Giants" became "Avenue of the Clear-cuts."
This action was a good illustration of a growing phenomenon in the Timber Wars struggle in northern California, especially in Mendocino County: the increasing cooperation between some environmentalists (particularly EF!ers) and many workers, including timber industry workers, against what more and more people are seeing as a common enemy the huge timber-mining corporation such as Georgia Pacific, Louisiana Pacific, Simpson, and, of. course, Pacific Lumber Maxxam. Workers are becoming increasingly aware of the extent to which these outside exploiters are destroying the economic base of northern California and leaving the workers in the lurch.
All the companies mentioned have dismal recent records in workplace safety, wage reduction schemes and outright union-busting. The AFL-CIO unions "representing" these workers have consistently sold them out. The IWA even refused to file a grievance when a worker at a GP mill in Fort Bragg had several pounds of PCBs dumped directly in his face. When their lap dog "union" did nothing for them, these workers turned to the only person they knew might help-IWW organizer Judi Bari.
She carried their grievances for them, even to the point of suing Georgia Pacific in federal court. FW Bari had been organizing workers in the mills of Mendocino and Humboldt counties and talking to loggers and other timber workers for years about the way these corporations are oppressing workers and destroying the land. [2] The IWW is the focus for this growing worker-environmentalist solidarity. Many of the people who organized and carried out the Mendocino County Ecotopia Summer actions are IWW members. The fight for the workers and the fight for the land are one struggle and are bringing together many people who had previously seen themselves as in either one struggle or the other.
In the Willits area of Mendocino County, the actions were literally rolling again. On August 17, the Ecotopia Bike Ride closed Highway 20 between Willits and Fort Bragg on the Mendocino coast with 200 human-powered vehicles, mostly bicycles. The cyclists started at the crest of the ridge for an easy 10-mile downhill to the state park picnic area, the midway point, where they had a spirited rally featuring free Ben & Jerry's ice cream for the riders.
The next day at 8:30 a.m. on Sherwood Road the 70 hardcore pedal-pumpers gathered with mountain bikes for the second phase of the bicycle action, a grueling 36-mile dirt logging road "Tour of the Clear cuts," which finished in Fort Bragg. After the "tour," one of the riders, graphic artist Kalus Sievert, said: "I didn't see anything that looked like Ecotopia to me-I'd call it the Ecocide Bike Tour." Klaus has seen clear cuts before, but he was still shocked by the Sherwood Road moonscape. He was particularly impressed with the difference in climate under the forest canopy (cool, moist, green) and in the adjacent clear cuts (hot, dry, dusty). The visual image that stayed with him was a view near Fort Bragg of the brown, parched clear cut hills with a narrow ribbon of green forest in the canyon along the route of the Skunk Railroad. Local people had to fight for even that thin strip of trees a few years back when Georgia Pacific Lumber Company bought the Skunk Railway with plans to log right up to the tracks.
The last day on the Ecotopia Summer Calendar was August 27, the National Day of Outrage against Maxxam, the junk bond trading corporate raider holding company that captured Pacific Lumber in a hostile takeover in 1985. There were simultaneous actions at Maxxam's area headquarters off Route 101 in Mill Valley where protestors dressed as trees kept falling down in front of the building and in view of traffic along the local road and freeway, in front of Maxxam headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles; and at the New York Stock Exchange where protestors kept urging investors to sell Maxxam short.
So it was a mixed bag in northern California this past summer. Progress was made on several fronts--education, worker solidarity, community liaison--and lessons were learned. The headwaters Forest has still not been cut, but it is still threatened. Its defense continues in the courts, in Forest Service hearings, in the woods and on the ballot.
There is a new Forests Forever initiative being circulated to once again bring the issue to the voting public. A sellout (a so-called compromise in the state legislature called "The Sierra Accord") has been discredited and has lost the support even of the few mainstream (Sierra Club-type) environmentalists who initially supported it. There is continued strong pressure for a real sustainable forestry bill in the legislature but grassroots activists are not holding their breaths.
Barring a miracle over the winter, we can expect the struggle for sustainable forest practices and the saving of the last great original Redwood forest in the Americas to heat up again next summer. Look for Redwood Summer III.[3]
Footnotes
[1] This is a humerous reference to Northern California Earth First!'s Renunciation of Tree Spiking on April 11, 1990.
[2] This is not quite accurate. Judi Bari had only recently joined the IWW and Earth First! (in 1998) and had only been concerned with environmental issues since 1985, according to her own statements. Darryl Cherney, on the other hand, had consistently tried to link these issues since 1985.
[3] There was no "Redwood Summer III", but Summer of 1992 the defense of "Enchanted Meadow" lead to the event known as the "Albion Uprising", described elsewhere in the history of IWW Local #1 and Louisiana-Pacific.