Explanatory commentary by Judi Bari, copied from 1990: A Year in the Life of Earth First! published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser, January 2, 1991, reprinted in Reprinted in Timber Wars, © 1994 Common Courage Press (recopied according to "Fair Use" guidelines)
The first thing we did in March was go to the Oregon Law Conference, where EF!ers were prominent on many panels. My panel was on Labor and the Environment, where Oregon millworker Gene Lawhorn publicly challenged me to make good my statements about labor by renouncing tree-spiking. I did, and to my surprise received overwhelming support from EF!ers there. We met afterward and decided to renounce tree-spiking in Northern California and Southern Oregon.
- Environmentalism and Labor: Bridging the Gap - Speech given by Gene Lawhorn at the Public Interest and Environmental Law Conference (ELAW) in Eugene Oregon, March 4, 1990
Meanwhile Pacific Lumber tried to sneak and put a logging road into Headwaters Forest, where the Timber Harvest Plan (THP) had not been approved. Unfortunately for them, EF! just happened to be trespassing there that day, and caught Maxxam red-handed. Maxxam claimed it was a “trail” for its wildlife biologist. But the Mud Babies Affinity Group videotaped the 30-foot-wide, one-mile-long road. We took it to the press, the Sierra Club took it to court, and Maxxam had to stop.
We also announced Mississippi Summer in the California redwoods around this time.[1] Darryl and I began promoting it at a student environmental rally in Sacramento. We also announced it at an EF! rally in Eureka, when Darryl and George went in to start a 10-day jail term for the heinous crime of tree-sitting. Mike Geniella wrote an article about Mississippi Summer in the Press Democrat, and it went national on the wire service. Fortuna’s mayor announced that he wants no more EF! demos in his town. Requests for info started coming in from all over, and we realized this thing was bigger than we thought.
We held one last demo in March, at the Redwood Region Logging Show in Ukiah. A bunch of hippie-looking EF!ers created a distraction while two logger-looking EF!ers climbed Okerstrom’s prize $700,000 feller-buncher and hung a banner that said “This Things Kills Jobs & Forests.” A few weeks later that same feller-buncher burned in the woods near Willits. When asked if we were responsible, I told the press it wasn’t me—“I was home in bed with five witnesses.”
[1] This announcement was actually made in late February.
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