By Richard Johnson – Mendocino County Environmentalist, August 1, 1990
On July 21, the modern environmental movement proved its maturity at a major forest protection rally in Fort Bragg on the northern California coast. More than 3,000 activists from all over carried messages of peace and planetary harmony into this hauling, brawling lumber mill town as hundreds of police lined the streets.
Organized by Earth First! and supported by a myriad of other national, state, and local environmental, social justice, and peace groups, a months-long direct action campaign called Redwood Summer aims to slow corporate deforestation of its own timberland and to save old growth redwood groves.
Only some 2% of the original ancient old-growth redwood forests are standing today in the Pacific Northwest, and except for a limited number of parks and wilderness areas, most of these are slated to be cut for lumber.
Fort Bragg’s major employer is the Georgia Pacific corporation. Headquartered in Atlanta, GP is the world’s largest forest products corporation. Over the last decade, the company has racked up record earnings by de-unionizing its logging operations and automating its mills in an era of rising timber prices.
A recent university-government study shows that over the last ten years, timber corporations in Mendocino County have cut an annual average of twice the volume of yearly growth on their own lands here. Last year, they cut some 320% of growth.
As new laws and bureaucratic measures at all levels of government promise to reform logging practices on both public and private timberlands in California, outside-owned corporations like GP have gone on a clearcutting binge, hacking down more timber volume this summer than ever before in the hope of liquidating their investments before the new rules take effect.
On company timberlands in GP’s backyard uphill just east of town in the Noyo and Pudding Creek watersheds, over 6,000 acres of forestland has been converted to stumps in just the last six years. Massive clearcuts on the steep slopes have caused widespread topsoil erosion during heavy winter rains, wiping out forest productivity and bringing the once-prosperous salmon fishery to its knees.
As forest overstory disappears, summer fogs burn off sooner in what may be a permanent climate change for the maritime zone. Seedlings in what was once the most productive forestland in the world now struggle for life against the scorching summer sun.
Both company and union officials have estimated that sometime in the middle of this decade, the GP mill will face an “age gap” in which the average diameter of the standing trees on company land falls below that which can be economically milled. Government sources put the duration of the age gap at 30-50 years. GP—whose chairman Marshall Hahn has said, “Greed is a noble motivator”—is ready to finish up the crumbs and leave the table.
In this context, any delay in cutting or decrease in the rate of deforestation will not only save precious natural ecosystems to continue their thousand-year-old lives, but will also strengthen the sustainability of second growth forests, assuring a steady supply of timber and jobs into the future.
The demands of Redwood Summer’s Fort Bragg rally were:
- end liquidation logging,
- worker-community ownership of GP’s timberlands and mills,
- sustainable forests for a sustainable economy and a sustainable earth.
As Fort Bragg’s largest industry with a payroll of some 400 millworkers, Georgia Pacific calls the tune here. Seeking to protect its economic and political preeminence, the company has relied on a strategy of using surrogates to pit the local community against Redwood Summer.
Redwood Summer has already seen a series of actions from public protests to administrative witnessing, to direct actions at logging sites, plants, public offices and private homes over a three-county area. Activists have behaved well throughout, and there has been no politically significant violence from our side, from loggers, or from law enforcement.
While many Redwood Summer recruits have come from all over the country, an equal number are local residents who have witnessed the destruction of the forests here and have themselves suffered various forms of intimidation and disrespect for too many years.
In reaction, the company has encouraged and bankrolled the formation of a counter-movement whose trademark is the yellow shirt. The ostensible leaders of this effort are the Anderson logging firm and the AFL-CIO woodworkers’ union local, each of which is financially dependent upon GP.
This summer in Fort Bragg, the Yellow Shirts have organized a number of rallies for timber workers and their families featuring free food and country music. Incumbent democrat state senator Barry Keene and US congressman Doug Bosco have each paid homage to GP by speaking at these events, fostering contempt for environmentalists and urging the workers to defeat the Forests Forever initiative on the November ballot.
At a Yellow Shirt counter-rally on July 21 attended by some 1,200 local residents, congressman Bosco pictured Redwood Summer demonstrators massing across town as “kids” who should go home and clean up their own environment. His tone and demeanor enforced the atmosphere of latent violence implicit in the reactionary Yellow Shirt campaign.
Leaders made the counter rally take a pledge “not to dialog with misinformed, uncaring environmentalists, so help me, God.”
In town to enforce order and to protect the property of GP and the local merchants were riot-control units from some 35 northern California jurisdictions numbering some 450 officers including the cities of Petaluma, and Arcata, the police arms of CDF and the national park service, and the Alameda County sheriff in person. Their presence represented weeks of preparation and training, as well as the coordination of municipal and county governments under an “incident command” structure set up by the state office of emergency services.
By 2:00 PM that afternoon. a careful count showed about 3,000 people at the rally. Their plan was to march eight blocks south to the GP office doors just west of the corner of Redwood and Main. There, selected affinity group teams would ritually cross a line that had been painted on the street and be arrested.
Led by a sound truck-stage playing reggae music, the protesters marched a joyous, triumphant parade that called out for harmony and peace with the earth and love among all people. It was an expression of free speech and concern for the health of the forests. the people and the planet such as had never been permitted in downtown Fort Bragg since the mill was built in the middle of the previous century.
As they marched, they sang “We are the children’s army, we pray for world peace.” “Mother, I feel you under my feet. Mother, I feel your heart beat,” and chanted, “Earth First! Profits last!” and “Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Export Logging’s Got to Go!”
But at the corner of Redwood and Main, the direction of the action changed abruptly. While demonstrators milled into the cul-de-sac next to the company offices, a group of several hundred young people wearing yellow shirts were shouting and making obscene gestures at them from the facing street corner.
When police carefully separated the opposing sides and established lines facing each other only twenty feet apart, the Redwood Summer rally changed from a Civil Disobedience (CD) action to a dialog with the growing crowd of reactionaries–many of whom had obviously been drinking.
For an hour and a half, the Yellow Shirts screamed insults and epithets at the demonstrators, who showed the purity of their intention by responding with friendly hand waving and songs. On a balcony above the corner, residents of an apartment passed whiskey and beer bottles while giving the finger to the protesters and yelling, “Get a haircut you fuckin’ hippie!”
Environmentalists experimented with the reactionaries by trying out different songs on them. When the Yellow Shirts were driven to a frenzy of fury by Darryl Cherney or black woman singer Eternity, we tried waving the American flag while singing the national anthem. They booed us for that, too.
Leaders of the Redwood Summer demonstration then asked for timber-workers to come up on stage to speak. One young man wearing a Louisiana Pacific T-shirt took the microphone and said he didn’t understand the protest. When he asked how many of us lived here, about a quarter of the rally put up their hands.
A second speaker, Duane Potter of Fort Bragg got the attention of both sides when he said he used to be a logger who thought the only good tree was a stump. But he “had to give up drinking and using pot” before he understood that the G-P company was abusing both the forest and the workers. So after 15 years he quit logging to go into the recycling business. Potter urged his fellow timber-workers to see that environmentalists were telling the truth, while the company was just exploiting them.
Leaders of the demonstration then proposed that the rally retreat north to the staging area while peace was still being maintained. With some deep regrets, the affinity groups agreed and the action was concluded without incident.
The police are to be unconditionally congratulated for their operation at the July 21 rally. Everyone was impressed with the level professionalism in such a large police action.
“This rally was an overwhelming 100% success,” said organizer Anne Marie Stenberg of Earth First! and the Industrial Workers of the World. “The Redwood Wall has been cracked, and we have established an honest, peaceful dialog with the workers that has never been allowed before.
“The Yellow Shirts told them not to talk to us, and we talked openly anyway. Now we can establish a community forum in which everyone’s grievances against the company can get addressed.
“The jobs and the prosperity don’t come from the company, they come from the forest. We are looking for G-P to get out of town and let the people who live here determine their own destiny in an atmosphere of peace and reconciliation,” she added.