Lisa Henry on her 22nd Birthday

Interview by Beth Bosk – New Settler Interview, January 1991

A dirt road snakes through the once-forested hillside where the energy that courses through the new homesteads comes from the sun. Children birthed in their mothers’ beds now attend the “necessary small school” located on their ridge. Only the bank of steel mailboxes with which the Post Office replaced the old mail casks at the high fork rings a discordant note. Posted on the steel bank, the week she was to move into the cabin she had been building on before her pelvis was blasted by the bomb put under her car seat, was a broadside: A CASE OF COORS TO THE STUD WHO BURNS JUDI BARI OUT OF HER HIPPIE SHACK & A SIX PACK TO THE STUD WHO BURNS OUT ANOTHER ONE OF THE HIPPIE SHACKS ALONG THE WAY.

Judi Bari has just now returned to the hippie shack (as it is also affectionately called) from a meeting with other moms and a Willits school offi­cial, attending to the prospect that the 100 year old log cabin Where her daughters attend school is about to be replaced by an L-P pre-fab reeking of formaldehyde. Judi is superb, of course…Until an over-friendly dog runs up and pushes against her.

Beth Bosk:  Lisa, I see in your face how hard it is for you to separate yourself from Judi’s pain when she comes home from a place where she has gone with such resolve, takes a fall, and returns with the agony that may be with her for the rest of her life—as just happened.

Lisa Henry:  It’s definitely hard to separate…One of the biggest struggles for me the entire time is how do you keep yourself whole while at the same time you are assisting someone who is in immense physical pain and who is at once really self-reliant and absolutely physically and mentally strong, yet needs help with things that she never needed help with before?

And how do you deal with that in a way that is both respectful and gives dignity to both parties, in that you still have your own self, that you’re still a person, that you are not pushing down all your needs for another person? I guess that’s the whole struggle around working with Judi—of being a ca­retaker in general—but it’s also made harder because Judi Bari is such a phenomenal person and I’m a strong ego also.

But we hit it off right from the first and there was no question that I would live with her. Originally the plan was I was going to live with her over the summer and learn how to become an organizer. When I met her in March, there was so much work to be done for Redwood Summer—and the damn thing hadn’t even started yet—that Judi needed an extra organizer to be with her and help get done the extra grunt work that was piling up.

My expectations were for endless traveling from place to place, meetings, all-night mailer mailing sessions, long discussions on strategy, not much sleep. I was just gearing up for this enormous endeavor when the bombing occurred. But after the bombing came down, there was no question that I would not live with her during the fall.

It’s been an absolutely incredible experience. I’ve learned everything I didn’t expect to learn. I learned how to sing harmonies; I learned how to hang sheetrock and insulation and now to build a brick mantle. I learned the little tricks, the basic building blocks of organizing. I thought I would be doing a lot of intellectual work at the beginning of the summer, but it’s mostly been just hanging out and helping out and learning by osmosis; and making mistakes and getting advice on how to improve.

For awhile, after we got into the house, we had time to have three hour conversations about everything in the world, from feminism, to age-gender gaps, to having communes and setting up models of society, to the state of the world.

One time we talked for hours about student communes, and how great they were—until someone had kids. How we haven’t figured out how to live communally through all stages of our lives, men and women and children. Another time we discussed revolution from Marxist and Anarchist perspectives—do you need a state after revolution? Would an anarchist revolution fail because a society needs a state after revolution, and people will create one if it is not designed for them? Or would anarchist process transform our concept of state so when we got “there” after a revolution it would be something we can’t imagine from “here”? Those kinds of conversations.

Judi often tells me, she learned by making mistakes. And then she went on. And that’s what I’ve been doing lately—making mistakes, getting over them, taking responsibility and keep going. For example, learning through error how to talk to the media after an action has happened: making sure they understand what you’re doing and its background—making your story irresistible, or getting arrested at Livermore Test Labs and giving a false name when my real one would have spared me a lot of headache. But those kinds of “object lessons”, as Judi calls them, are really good.

BB:  When did the summer start for you Lisa?

LH:  It started in February…when Judi came over to Anna Marie Stenberg’s house and talked about Redwood Summer. I got a phone call on my answering machine. Zack (Stenz) said, “You’ve got to come over. Redwood Summer is going to be really big and we have to be in on it. Come meet Judi Bari.”

BB:  And at that time you were doing what?

LH:  I was coming home to decide whether I was going to the Nevada Test Site or whether I was going to work all summer or whether I was going to Latvia, to be part of the entourage for my Uncle Ivar’s Latvian rock band. He lives in Canada.

At that point, I had just been radicalized by events at U.C. Santa Cruz, where we had a sit-in and takeover of the administration building. And on another issue, I had put together a rally that was attended by 350 undergraduates.

I was a student at Santa Cruz studying Women’s Studies and Environmental Studies, a double major, and I had just switched from Women’s Studies, Environmental Studies to Women’s Studies with an emphasis on radical social movements. So I was just becoming radicalized, and I was coming home thinking: “I want to do some direct action. What am I going to do?” And I thought, “Nevada Test Site.”

I came home and the first thing lack told me was that Redwood Summer was going to be much-bigger than that, that it was going to be here and I should get involved. So I went over to Anna Marie’s and I met Judi Bari. Later Judi said to me she liked me from the minute we met, and all I had said to her was [brightly], “Hi!”

The ironic thing was that I had lived in this county for seventeen years (my dad’s a forester, my mom’s a politician) and I didn’t know anything about forests or forests practices.

I assumed that the Noyo Harbor got muddy when it rained, and I took for granted all the trucks on the road that were a pain in the butt, but I’d never really made the connection between defore­station and what was going on in the harbor and on the roads.

Judi gave us all this information. She just talked for an hour and I wrote everything she said down. I still have the notes. They are very, very basic, but I didn’t know any of it. And I got very excited, and Zack and I talked at a high school in Mendocino two days after that, starting to work for Redwood Summer. Then I went back to my campus and started to organize, and that’s where Judi was coming when the bomb went off in her car.

BB:  What was that day like for you?

LH:  The day started for me with such relief. I had been working so hard for this thing and it was going to be over. They were going to have a great time, there was going to be a good turnout, and I was just cleaning up doing little odds and ends.

BB:  What does it take to organize a movement in its fled­gling stage? This was to be a five-campus swing. Santa Cruz was the first stop. The idea being, Earth First! troubadours Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney would go on the road to entice college students to join them to help stop the logging frenzy up north…

LH:  It wasn’t even “entice”. There’s no enticing about it. Once you tell people what’s going on they are going to want to something about it. As far as the tasks on my end: I had to make a lot of phone calls. I had to get posters up and out everywhere. I had to make PSAs and write press releases to newspapers.

I just was running around, basically trying to get the technical ends of this thing together, hoping against hope that we would have a good showing. I’d built up from having ten people at my first meeting to forty people, and I was hoping for 100 or more, maybe even 200. It ended up with 150. But people stayed away. They’d heard on the radio about the bombing.

BB:  How did you learn about it?

LH:  I was just finishing up. They were expected at four o’clock in the afternoon, and at a quarter of four, I was just coming up over the hill. I’d just had a hellish day trying to put this whole thing together, and I felt a wave of relief; I was looking out over the ocean, and the sun was going down and I felt, “Ah. I’ve done it. I’m an organizer. Now I’m going to go see Judi and Darryl. It’s going to be a wonderful evening.” I went down the hill and I walked in the door and my housemate put her hands on my shoulders and she said, “You have to sit down.”

I replied, “They’re dead, aren’t they.”

And she said, “No, they’re not dead. But Judi is in intensive care and she might not live.” Then she told me Darryl had a broken wrist and had concussions.   

I was just in shock, but I grabbed a piece of paper, and as I went into shock, I started writing everything I had to do.

My housemates were on the phone, and I had been having some problems with them because I was using the phone number as a contact point and they were feeling uncomfortable with these radical politics. They felt uncomfortable after the power lines were downed in Santa Cruz and I started getting all the phone calls for that.

That was an Earth Night action, where some splinter group knocked down some power lines and it was immediately associated with Earth First!, Santa Cruz. The phone was tapped at that point, and I was freaking out, and they were freaked out that the FBI was tapping our phone. We brought in a phone tap device, and it said, “Yep. You’re having your phoned tapped.”

So there was a big bunch of tension in the house, and my house mates basically said, “You can’t do your work here.”

They picked me up, led me out to a car, put me in a car and took me over to my friend’s house, and told me, “We can’t deal with this. Do your work somewhere else.”

That began the process of me getting kicked out of my house. They took me to my best friend Cheri’s house. I told her the story.

I couldn’t cry. I just tried to figure out what Judi would have wanted me to do at this point. She would want me to go through with the rally. She would want us to tell the press the real story, or at least, what we knew up to that point. So, I called Zack.

Zack was very choked up at that point and I felt very cold, and I said, “Okay, we’re going to split this up according to TV and radio news, and were going to go through with it.”

We were both very relieved that we had something to do. Of course, I didn’t know how to do this at all. I had to look up TV stations in the yellow pages, for Christsakes! And I still couldn’t drive, I was so shaky.

But I went up to the campus and there were all these news people there and everyone wanted to know what happened. People had come. The UCSC Organic Farmers’ Garden asked if they could ship their entire harvest to Redwood Summer. An under­cover cop came up and started asking me stuff about myself.

He was the first one who said to us, “The FBI believes that they did it themselves.”

And I was so outraged. I hadn’t heard any news from any Earth First!ers, still, I knew they would never be carrying a bomb. It was a set up. I told him that. And it was nice to see that out in the news from the very get-go in Santa Cruz, without the AP stuff and the FBI bullshit getting into the news before we could have a say.

The next days were just spent in a daze. I got kicked out of the house. I kept organizing vigils and my housemates just couldn’t deal with my organizing.

They didn’t want me to use the phone. They were afraid for themselves. Nobody was giving me real support.

And then all of a sudden, it was like I had walked over this fine line, and all of these ghostly people started walking out of the background of my life into the forefront. It was like people on the street—and my friends—it was like they had this secret life and that secret life was radical direct action where you start getting harassed, you’re doing dangerous things, you’re getting arrested—things I had never dealt with.

Some of my friends turned out to be people from CISPES, Lockheed Action Collective, and Animal Liberation Front. I would tell them my stories, and they would say, “Yes, I’ve done this and this and this…” And one of those people, whom I’d known for a long time and knew she was a politico, she came over, took over my phone and said to me, “I’m going to help you organize your life so you can get things done,” (I was still in shock) and she called a friend and she said, “I have a woman here who doesn’t really have a network, can we use our network to help her out?”

And so she checked with her network and they set up people to vigil in our house in case the FBI wanted to raid it, she got me a ride to the vigil in Oakland; she helped support me afterwards when I was moving out. She was from the Lockheed Action Collective.

So it was like all of a sudden, I had stepped over the fine line and I was meeting these people who had had the same experiences I did and it was like they had been there all the time, but I hadn’t seen them, and all of a sudden I was talking about differ­ent things and felt more comfortable talking about them because I was with people who had gone through the same things.

And that’s pretty much how it has gone. A lot of the friends I had made in Santa Cruz before the bombing, who were political, I still can’t talk to because they say, “Lisa, you’re putting yourself in danger. So why are you doing this? This is not the right means. You should do something else.” And that has been painful, that they don’t understand. But, then I have this whole batch of new friends who understand perfectly what’s going on.

Demos now are like family reunions where I know dozens of people. There’s bond built up with people you’ve gone through real intense experiences with. Jail was that way for me. It was one of the most trying and changing experiences for me in my life.

BB: Why don’t you lead into the activity that put you in jail—you’re biggest partake of Redwood Summer?

LH:  I got a call from Jennifer Beigel, whom I had not met, and she said, “You’ve got to get up to Base Camp. We need some organizers here.”

So I set off for base camp in Honeydew, and I was working real hard to get stuff in shape and it was nearing on to the June 20^th demonstration at Samoa. I was all excited, but I really hadn’t thought about getting arrested and didn’t want to. I’d taken a nonviolence training, but there was so much to do. I hadn’t really foreseen what I was going to do at this demo.

Then, two nonviolence trainers came: Tom O’Neil, who I had known, and David Solnit from the Bay Area Peace Test, and I said, “I think I’ll go through nonviolence training again—just for the hell of it and I think I’ll take it with these Bay Area people.” (They split it up between Davis and the Bay Area) “I think I’ll see what’s different about his nonviolence training.”

So we went through it. And it was really great, because not only did we talk about the “hassle lines” but our trainer actually had us do a scenario where we sat in front of a log truck and people were ha­rassing us, and media, and they were pulling us apart and trying to arrest us.

He had us practice compliance holds, and how to lift people up, and how to make your wrist solid so your hand doesn’t bend, and how to tuck your thumb into your fist, and how to tuck your head.

BB: Can you be real explicit here Lisa?

LH: Police grab your fingers and they’ll bend them. It’s very easy to take a finger and smash it and then you do whatever they want. But if first, you put your thumb in your fist and then you make your fist into a straight iron bar, they can’t bend it down and behind your back.

You can tuck them under your arms. You can tuck your arms underneath your legs and lock them—and then make a chain with other people. You have to tuck your head because they grab you underneath and they push on your jugular veins and they pull you up by your jaw bones; they pull you up by your eye sockets, they pull you up by your ears. They pinch you all over.

So we’re getting this full-on experience. No previous nonviolence trainer ever told me about this…

BB: How you can really get hurt by the cops. How these so-called “compliance holds” are really on-the-spot torture?

LH: …How you can get really hurt, but, also how to protect yourself. Things that you might have to deal with. And all of a sudden I went, “I’m going to demo and this might happen.” Then I decided I was going to get into an affinity group and I was going to do some kind of action.

In the training we even went as far as what you do in jail, and I was starting to organize in jail, and I got pulled out of jail and then David said, “Why didn’t you resist? Why didn’t you say, ‘Where are you taking me?” And l was like, “Wow!” My head was spinning.

This was the night before the demo and we’re starting to get an affinity group together. We started planning banners, what we were going to say, we thought about who was going to represent us to the press, plotting out that we were going to go to the IWW march before—the picket line—that we wanted to be included in that, then we wanted to blockade a logging truck. We wanted to find one. We wanted to get in the road and block it as long as possible, and we were going to have certain people scout it, and maybe somebody was going to climb it.

The next morning, we woke at five o’clock, drove there, did the IWW picket line, we went and had another meeting on the beach, we surveiled the situation and all of a sudden, there are hundreds of cops.

BB: Tell me what happened on the beach. How the fusion occurs in a last-minute affinity group. Affinity groups in Mendocino County are sometimes of decade-long duration. People know each other well?

LH:  Our group was really wild, because nobody knew each other, so there wasn’t a lot of security in the sense that an affinity group is supposed to be real tight so you can’t have infiltrators.

But though we didn’t know each other by name, we knew what we were doing was dangerous, so we went into a real secluded area on the beach and talked, and a guy came up and said, “Can I be in­cluded in this?”

He was wearing moose ears and moose feet and he was all clad in brown and he kind of looked like a gypsy—no, more like a Renaissance man—and we let him in, and he turned out to be one of the strongest, most fun people in the group.

We talked about whether it was a good idea to climb the logging truck, how we should stop the truck—all that stuff. We tightened it up and it was coming on to the rally so we were trying to find other affinity groups to do this with us. We set a time. We knew how it was going to go, who was going to enter the road, and we had rainbow arm­bands to identify each to each other.

So we go through the entire Samoa rally, and meanwhile we’re doing press interviews, and I’m starting to get better at this. I get on CNN, and Mike Roselle comes up to me and says, “You did great,” and I’m even starting to get kind of cocky.

Then at one fifteen, we were lined up along the side of the road, very nervous, watching this stream of endless trucks go by, and all of a sudden, like two hundred deadheads and hippies just stream into the road and start dancing. There’s this drum circle and all the trucks stop. And the cops don’t know what to do.

There are hundreds of cops now, and we looked around and everything had stopped. So our affinity group went out into the circle, and we roamed around looking for what we should be doing. We were wandering around the cop cars, and it was very surreal, because they weren’t stopping us.

We were looking for the perfect moment and the L-P chip truck that was coming wasn’t the perfect moment, so we moved away and we saw this truck in the distance.

And then we see this man from Seeds of Peace, and he’s standing—like the man in Tiananmen Square—with his arm straight out holding up the chip truck, and we’re like “What are you doing? Are you crazy? It’s a chip truck!” and we start screaming for him to get out of the road so the chip truck could pass and so the log truck would come by.

And he looked at us and he put his hand on his hip and he moved out and then the chip truck moved by and then this log truck came up and we all sat in front of it, and the roar went up from the crowd, this throaty roar sweeps across the crowd. Somebody has done something and here it is and it’s stopped. And people scramble up onto the truck and banners go flying and people are on the cab all of a sudden, and people are circling us, protecting us.

And then the cops start methodically cutting off the people by making these lines and moving them out. And we started chanting, we talked—people were yelling at us, “Get out of the road!” And we were saying why we were there, and the media was in our face.

It was just like the rehearsal, except you were so focused on the circle. Nothing else mattered. It was like a blur.

So when we went to court, and the judge asked us, “Did you hear any of these warnings?” It was really hard to hear anything. Everybody was yelling. Everybody else was yelling Earth First! except for us. We were very focused and trying to prepare for this horrendous experience which we were expecting.

It was very painful. They started to arrest us and I tucked my head and did the whole thing, but they ripped my glasses off and did all these things to my face. But you don’t feel them at the time because you are so pumped up. They flipped me over back­wards, and then they stood on my leg—the guy stood on my leg and asked me if I would get up. And I was like, “You’re standing on my leg”. Of course I didn’t stand up.

BB:  Do you know the name of that officer?

LH:  Officer Lawson. He was the guy who maced Ian in the face when they were on the log truck. He also hurt another one of my friends. He’s this kind of porky, sandy-haired, mustached kind of guy who seemed eager to pick out the most feisty people and see if he could cow them. He picked out Ian. I don’t know how he picked out me, but I turned out to be feisty and boy, was he cruel with a compliance hold.

He just kept me in the sucker really hard until I was walking and then I was arguing with him to loosen it because I was walking. Finally, he threw my hands out and said, “There!” He was just a really cruel man. I took his name and his badge number. When you say “Officer Lawson” around Humboldt people go, “Oh him, yeah.” He has a temper and he’s known to be a mean person. Even other offic­ers said that. The lawyers too, they’d had experiences with him.

BB: Policemen are also known as “Peace” officers.

LH:  You know what I felt like at Samoa, was that they were trying out all these fancy new ways to hurt people and get them moving.

You could see it on the video; they would try all these different holds—methodically. First they would pinch you, and then they would try to get your hands out, then they would do all these face holds. They would just like get progressively worse. One woman, they just went straight for her head without trying anything else, and just lifted her by her jaws and she was screaming in pain. It just seemed like this was, a game to them, this was the way to get protestors off the road. They’d all gone to this training workshop where they’d learned how to move people with pain.

And the only thing that saved a lot of us was that we’d been trained the day before and we knew that we had a choice to get up or not. We knew what they’d do if they tried to move. And when we wouldn’t move we knew how to protect ourselves, and we knew the procedures all the way through. Strangely, that was very comforting.

BB: Those of you who sat in front of that logging truck at Samoa became the “Lorax Seventeen”. How did that naming come about? It was a reflection of the resiliency of Redwood Summer.

LH:  Well, we went through jail, nine women and eight men, and the hardest decision was whether we were going to plead not guilty or not, because they were not going to let us out. They were going to keep us till arraignment, and then they were going to lay the heaviest sentence they could on us, and we had to make a decision: were we going to take this probation and all these fines or were we going to fight it and at least plead not-guilty.

I felt really defiant. I said, “I’m going to plead not-guilty. They’re not going to fuck with me. I can always change it to no contest later, but they are not going to get away with this.”

One of the Radical Ions from Sonoma got us a lawyer immediately, but still we didn’t know each other’s names. The women got to know each other very well by the end of the four days in jail, but only nine of the forty-four women arrested went to jail, and we didn’t know the men, and we got out of jail and went into arraignment and it was all crazy.

Seventeen people in all pled not-guilty, and out of those people only ten went to trial. Then, only two of the women who went to trial were in jail, and the rest of the eight were men, and some of those people were from jail and some of them came into the trial—they had been cited and released, and then decided to plead not guilty at their arraignment.

So what happened was, we all scattered, but we made sure we had phone numbers for each other and we set up defendants’ meetings immediately, in the Bay Area and back at base camp and at the first defendants’ meeting in the Bay Area we tried to think of a name for ourselves.

Were we going to be “People for Forestry Now” then “People for Responsible this-and-that”, and it was just so boring. Then we thought of “trees” and we thought of “Truffula Trees” from Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax, and we said, “Why don’t we just call ourselves “The Lorax?”

But it wasn’t really the “Lorax Seventeen”. It was the “Samoa Forty-four” and then the “Samoa Seventeen” and then it was “The Lorax Ten” who went to trial.

And the name just had this charm to it that was amazing. There had been controversy around The Lorax in this region already. Bill Bailey of Laytonville wanted to ban the book from the schools because it put logging operations and gyppo owners in a bad light. It made us feel like we were more a part of a family, and we slowly started becoming more of a family. We all moved up to Arcata for the trial. Some of us worked for a month preparing legal briefs, photocopying. We rented an office in the Action Center and things started getting rolling.

They have these little lawyer meetings, where the lawyers decide what they are going to do for their clients, and at the first defendants’ meeting we said, “This is a political trial. The defendants will have the bottom line as to where this trial goes. We may be making legal decisions you don’t think are wise. But we want maximum input. We’re coming to all your meetings.

So I drove up there from the Bay Area and I presented this to them the first time and then somebody else came to the second meeting and said, “We’re here again. Have you started thinking about different defenses?”    

At the first lawyer meeting one of the lawyers said to me, “You should have just said that the spirit of the trees brought you into the road.”      

This sarcasm was indicative of their cynicism about the world and about what we had done. Redwood Summer was becoming a big pain in the ass for all lawyers.

BB:  Because these are court-appointed lawyers.

LH:  One public defender and the rest were court-appointed attorneys. We all requested court-appointed attorneys except for two people who wanted to represent themselves.

We all decided that we would have this team. There were eight lawyers and we wanted them to work with each other coordinated by one environ­mental lawyer, Ken Collins of Arcata, who we knew had a good track record. But he wasn’t a criminal lawyer. The rest of them were criminal lawyers. So we had this wonder team that included somebody who understood our political principles. The rest were very good criminal lawyers and we knew they could probably figure out some way to construct a defense for us.

So we kept bugging the lawyers, and we asked Ken how to get through to lawyers. He said, “Talk to them individually. Talk to your lawyer, tell him how much this means to you.”

This is happening a month before trial, and then we all arrive there pretty much on the scene a week before trial. We started eating communally and sleeping in different spaces—backyards, porches, the beach, houses—where ever we could find. We cooked at the Arcata Action Center.

Then David got this idea that we should do these t-shirts, and he found a person who would donate all the stuff and I had screen printed before and David had screen printed…

We constructed this beautiful picture of the Lorax saying, “I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees. Take Direct Action Against Corporate Greed”.

It was a four color separation (which cost an enormous amount of money but we were getting it at cost) and we screened all these t-shirts and sold them at a reasonable price. And all of a sudden Lo­rax had enough money to buy food and reimburse people for gasoline and fix somebody’s car and photocopy and do whatever we needed to get done. We made 300 t-shirts and by that time the trial was starting.

BB: To exemplify the relationship between one of the Lorax and one lawyer, tell me about your relationship with your lawyer.

LH:  His name was Tim Cissna, and Tim Cissna was reported to me as being a very conservative kind of person. But Ken Collins told me he was a really hot criminal lawyer and I should make friends with him. So, I made an appointment to go see him and I told him my story. I gave him the basic spiel about this being a political trial and asked about our chances, and he told me it was very grim, but he would be willing to work with it and asked what kind of plea bargains we would be willing to take.

It was a very formal kind of meeting and I felt kind of hopeless about the whole thing, until the lawyers meeting really started and this kind of chemistry started building up between the lawyers.

We got to hugging the lawyers at some point. They became like our surrogate parents. They kind of sheltered us, kind of keeping us in line as we bounced around the walls. We were always coming up with these great ideas that needed critiquing to say the least. Each person had their lawyer, and first thing in the morning you would go up to your lawyer and shake hands and get the update. Some people made such good relationships with their lawyers that they followed on to represent them in other matters—they got arrested again in Redwood Summer and they were represented again by the same lawyer.       

But it seems like it was a sort of interesting par­ent-kind of relationship in some ways. They would get real angry at these silly things we had done, but in reality, we had these principles that we were fol­lowing—sort of like an eleven-year old kid: they have the truth in them and know what they are doing, but there are these people who have much more experience than these kids do telling them—“this is the way you do it.”—and we just kept going.

It came full circle at the final defense arguments, where our lawyers went and said, “These people have an amazing amount of integrity, they’re really good, they believe in what they are doing and they are well informed.” They basically knit all of those feelings into their closing arguments, and we had been able to all testify by the end of the trail—all ten of us—and we came off really good, really, really good.

BB:  What was the defense?

LH:  At first it was a Necessity Defense, up until four days before the trial, which is: we were acting to prevent a higher crime. There was a crime that was being committed and we have to stop it—it’s based on the Nuremburg Principles.

BB:  What crimes were you thinking?

LH:  Deforestation—I was thinking, massive deforestation. Pollution of the air and water was a secondary concern. Then there was the massive job layoffs that would occur when you have this mill moving to Mexico, and I thought that was a crime. There was the herbicide spraying, which was also a real hot issue up in Humboldt county, and we were going to prepare it that we were sitting down there to prevent a greater crime from being committed, which was, going through the operations business-as-usual.

Then four days before trial, Billy Bragg, one of our lawyers, came in and said, “I have this really hot secret defense,” and he brought it to us. It was PC 692, 94.

And what it said was basically that the public has a right to take action to prevent a public offense, but the crime they would commit would be negated—it wouldn’t be a crime—because you were acting to stop a greater public offense.

It wasn’t like in this Defense of Necessity, where one might trespass to enter a burning building to save a child; you were instead striking somebody or holding them down to prevent them from doing great harm to another person.

Basically, our argument was, we sat down in front of the truck to prevent the raw materials from going into the mills and creating pollution.

What Billy Bragg brought us was the information that L-P was committing ongoing daily felony violations of their permit to discharge toxins into the water, and he had a person from Water Quality Control Board who was willing to testify to this. And then we got the documents, and Joe Wheeler had signed them himself. It was chronic too, it wasn’t acute.

Over a long period of time they were allowed to have so much toxins in the water. And they monitor these fish, which incidentally, are very hardy fish—it’s very hard to kill them—and they measure the toxicity. And when the fish start to die, those numbers are put into a little list, and if you go over it, you’re in violation, and if you stay under it, supposedly, you’re all safe.

That’s another question. L-P never violated their acute test, which means massive, massive outflow of toxins which kill many other forms of life, they’d done it just as chronic build-up.

We’d already known that you can’t eat a lot of the shellfish in that harbor. Surfers would come back with rashes. Mark Masarra of Surfrider Foundation had a suit against the pulp mill. We’d heard there were more cases of stomach cancer in Eureka than anywhere else in the state, and I’d heard that women in general have a high rate of cancer. So people knew this, but it was wonderful to have the documents there.

We just looked down them for the past five months before we had committed our little act, and we saw that out of the 24 tests that were viable, 19 were in violation. It was 1.3 to 128 times the amount that they were supposed to be discharging. And we found this one record where it was 400 times!

BB: I’m not clear exactly how this related to the criminal charges against you?

LH:  Well, we argued that we sat in front of the truck to prevent the raw product from going into the pulp mill, being pulped where upon it would be released into the air and the water, and we would be complicit in committing a crime if we didn’t stop this from happening, therefore sitting in front of it was a legal means of stopping an ongoing, daily felony.

We argued that Wheeler signed these reports monthly—the ones that were out of compliance. He knew that they were exceeding the levels that should have been, and therefore, L-P’s crimes weren’t misdemeanors—negligence. It was willful felony, and that was our argument.

The D.A, Kuharek, he was shocked. He thought we were going to bring in a Defense of Necessity. He’d spent all his time organizing around that, figuring out how he was going to nail us on technicalities.

Meanwhile, we were pretty much stipulating, that “Yes, we had sat in front of a logging truck.” And he really couldn’t figure this out. And then in our opening argument, we presented this new defense, which we had kept absolutely secret for a week (It was so hard to do that, but we had kept it mum), and then came into the courtroom and laid it out there and his jaw dropped and he didn’t know what to do, He only had like twenty-four hours to start preparing himself for this onslaught that we were going to throw at them. But we knew it was going to be tight.

Most of the trial had been spent trying to find some kind of balanced jury. We’d spent two and a half weeks solid interviewing 300 jurors; it was disgusting. But it was also, kind of like a public forum out there. Some people were saying, “This spotted owl thing is really screwed up,” and, “I don’t agree with you,” and, “you’re all Earth First!ers.”

Mill people and secretaries and environmentalists went through, and the ironic thing was that they would have to hear each other because there would be one hundred perspective jurors in court at a time, so they would have to listen for hours to each other talking about the different issues from different sides.

And then, the mill people usually wanted to be on the jury, so they would try their best to lie and get on the jury. And the environmentalist were like—“I think it’s so great what these people are doing!” They were so blatant in their support and we’re like, “Shut up! Shut up! If you could just hide yourself a little bit you could get on the jury and we need just one person on there to get a hung jury.”

And they wouldn’t shut up.

It was very silly. But after two weeks, we finally settled on this jury, which was really risky. We thought we would be acquitted or convicted by this one person, one very strong man—we called him the Admiral—who had done court martial trials. We thought, well, we’ll either convince him or we won’t. And he was probably going to be foreman, and he was.

Once we got into the trial, it all went very quickly. The D.A. was saying, “They are taking the law into their own hands and are changing the Constitution from “We the People” to “We the Ten”. He said this with much bravado. He wrote it on the board, “We The People”, crossed out “People” and wrote “We the Ten”.

It was like, woo. “Anarchy is going to envelope the entire world. Starting here.”

And he said that it was a very clear cut case and that we had no concern for safety and that our actions weren’t a viable alternative, we hadn’t done other legal things—even though we had.

But with the defense we were using, you don’t need to exhaust all legal means. In the Defense of Necessity you do.

In the Defense of Necessity, you have to do everything before you commit this act. But with our defense, you have to have a reasonable suspicion. We didn’t even have to have the papers in our hands citing the violations, we just had to have a reasonable suspicion of a crime, which we did, and we didn’t have to exhaust all legal means.

BB:  How did the jury respond?

LH:  The jury nodded a lot. For the most part they were very attentive. The admiral kept falling asleep—in court—which was really quite disturbing when you’re giving testimony and this person is snoozing off on you. We watched the people very carefully, and it started to split up into like little gangs. There was one little gang in particular that looked really nasty. We had miscalculated them during jury selection and they were starting to lead the charge against us.

The DA tried to keep himself stony-faced, but through our testimony, we were very careful to face everybody in the jury. I and John Rasmussen from Humboldt county were chosen to do all the testimony if we could get away with it, because we didn’t want to jeopardize it by having people accidently contradict the testimony—everybody sees the same thing differently. We wanted to have a real tight defense.

And it turned out, the DA wanted to see if he could undermine our defense by getting all ten of us up there and having us slip up and falter, to show the jury what fools we were and how uneducated we were.

So we practiced being assertive and telling our story without being shy or embarrassed by what we were doing. We addressed the court directly. I looked at every single juror. I told them, “I’m a women studies / environmental studies major. My father is in CDF and my mom is a politician.”             

Another person said, “I’m a double major in botany and social sciences.” And “I’m a carpenter. I work with wood. I work making furniture and I’ve surfed in the ocean and I’ve gotten body rashes.”

These were the kinds of things we were saying to them, and we got every single issue out. We didn’t have to talk only about toxins—we talked about toxins, but we got to talk about everything else too. I said the words, “dioxin” and “formaldehyde”, and “overcut” and “L-P’s moving to Mexico”, and just went on and on.

And when we got done and we saw the jury going by, we would see some of them smiling. So we were pretty sure we would get a hung jury. We knew that we had two or three people on our side.

The prosecuting attorney made the mistake of showing the police video of our arrest over and over again. And everything was off. You couldn’t really hear the warnings. All you could hear were people screaming Earth First! around us, but us sitting there very quietly, practically meditating, just trying to keep calm.

Then the last thing you were left with was Lawson ripping Ian off the truck and macing him in the eyes.

One of the other dramatic arrests in the video was of one of my friends, a woman probably 45 years old, a very thin woman, getting ripped up by her head and she’s screaming. Then you see Lawson ripping Ian off the truck, macing him in the eyes.

That’s the last thing you’re left with. And the prosecuting attorney thought that would show how violent we were. It had the exact opposite effect.          

We had eight attorneys, and all of them could enter these wonderful closing arguments. We read The Lorax for some of our final defense arguments. My lawyer had gotten Aldo Leopold’s book, Sand County Almanac, and he read part of that.

Another lawyer said, “God damn it. I am a member of Greenpeace and I think what they are doing is great.”

Another brought up the civil rights movement and direct action being taken in many social movements, and that we hadn’t harmed anybody, hadn’t intended on harming anybody. It just came off beautifully.

It took three days for the jury to deliberate and it was just excruciating. We sat there on the lawn and people yelled at us and we held rallies and we ate lunch there every day, communally, and It turned out, we got this hung jury—which by then was kind of a letdown.

We really thought we were going to get acquitted. The more experienced people thought we were dead for sure; we were going to get convicted. But we got this hung jury, and at one time, it was nine to three in our favor. In the end, it was seven to five in our favor. In the very end, seven people voted for us, for acquittal.

And so we got off—scot free. Well, sort of. Now they are trying to nail us for $17,000 in court costs. [Long pause]…I want to get back to what I was doing with Judi right after the bombing.

What happened was she got bombed and I was left on my own with no direction. The Lorax helped me learn organizing, slowly. I had to learn the hard way. I wasn’t really an apprentice to anybody.

After we got through arraignment and out of jail, I went to Oakland and started living at Karen Pickett’s house. I was doing some work for Judi while she was in Highland Hospital. Sometimes I’d spend four hours and sometimes I’d spend thirteen hours there with her.

BB: There is a photograph of Judi in her hospital bed by a San Francisco Examiner Image photographer, Katy Raddatz, with a caption I will never forget. “She played her violin while I was photographing her. What spirit and courage in the face of such devastating pain and uncertainty! As eloquent as Judi is, it was her music and the light in her eyes that spoke to me.”

Extraordinary photographs of Judi in her hospital bed flashed across the north coast throughout the summer, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, full page picture of Judi Bari laughing with Darryl Cherney as he serenades her, her foot trapped in traction (which you do see), laying full-on the large hole in her butt where a spring in her car seat impaled her (which you don’t see) laughing with him, (which you see) collapsing in pain minutes later (which you don’t see)…Will you talk about those individual vigils at the hospital—staying awake with Judi Bari at night as she fitfully slept—from the perspective of one of those women who did so.

LH:  She wouldn’t sleep at all, pretty much. Maybe five minutes, here, five minutes there. Constant pain. In traction. And there was the physical terror that prevented her from sleeping—that the person who planted this bomb might be still out there. Her body was expressing the terror, feeling the terror, and the adrenalin just wouldn’t go away for two weeks, three weeks, six weeks, it just went on and on.

And when we would hear bad news, the pains would come back again. So trying to figure out why the pains would come at sometimes and not at others, correlating it to getting news that was frighten­ing, like this person might be a suspect, or this theory is now being formulated, or this action happened, and I-Judi—might be in danger. And we started trying to figure out: Well, what’s the best ways of healing her?

I learned that touch had a really healing quality. at the hospital, and that is what we started doing.

It was cuddle therapy. And when she got out of traction, the first thing I did was crawl into bed with her, and that was really nice. She would argue and organize in her sleep—she would get delirious. It was a tough job. And I felt that I had stepped over another line.

There were people who expected her to do all this stuff she couldn’t do because she needed time to heal. There were just such high expectations. People wanted her to participate in all the demos, and the pain of not being able to go there and do them herself was just overwhelming.

BB: You became known as the “Judi Bari channeler”—in jest of course. But you were her courier to the many meetings held in the north coast.

LH:  But it didn’t work. It was when we were at a critical juncture in our organizing, thinking that Judi could have direct input to every single minute decision while she was two hundred miles away and in such pain.

Basically, we were pretending that nothing had happened, that Judi was just physically removed from the meetings. But what wasn’t there for her was the repartee that happens in dynamic meetings. You just can’t bring a disembodied idea and drop it into a meeting like that. We needed to figure out another way to capture the spirit of Judi’s strategies, but make decisions for ourselves.

Eventually I realized that nobody could speak for Judi and I would have to speak for myself and Judi knew that too. And I began my speech at the Redwood Summer rally in Fort Bragg with the words, “I was supposed to speak for Judi Bari, but when I asked her what she wanted me to say for her, she said, ‘Speak for yourself’.”

Judi stayed in the hospital in Oakland most of the summer, then because of the constant stream of visitors and press and our total disregard for the hospital’s rules they tossed her out, much before she was healed—most people don’t know that.

At some point, at the end of the summer, I agreed to live with Judi. We were going to build this hippie shack into a house. I was going to work for home care, and my role was going to be different. It wouldn’t just be plain organizing, it would be home care, house care, kids—the whole bit.

But I felt it was the time and the place. I never had any questions about it. It was like “I am the person who does this. This is my role.” I never asked, “Is this good for me?” I felt I had to help out because I didn’t know if anyone else could. And that wasn’t an ego thing. I mean, how many people have the time to devote their whole life to somebody for three months?, who are willing to do anything to help them heal? I figured, I was the one.

So I moved in and it has probably been the hard­est job I have ever had. Judi’s been really good about giving me time off, but living in this county you never have time off. On my time off I do WMI[1] or I read about the FBI, or I show up to save trees one-by-one from Caltrans on Highway 20. There is no time off in Mendocino county.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, but I feel that this experience has taught me much more than school. I’ve feel like I’ve aged enormously. I feel very old and very distant from my peers. All my Mendocino county friends are much older than I am. They could be my parents. I was just talking with Naomi Wagner on the phone yesterday, and we were just talking away, and I thought Wait a minute. This woman has a daughter who I went to school with! and isn’t this strange that I’m always making friends with my friends’ moms.

Like Zack’s mom, Anna Marie—all these adult adults. Sometimes it makes me feel inadequate, because I’m not up to where they are, but they’ve lived 15, 20 years more than me and they’ve had all these life experiences; and still I feel I have to aspire to be as together as they are. That’s probably the hardest problem about living here, that my peers are so excellent that I sometimes feel real stretched out. Today is my birthday; I’m 22 years old, only 22. I get to be silly for a little while longer.

BB:  What was your family life like, Lisa?

LH:  My father committed suicide when I was a child. I was about five years old, and we found out on-route to visit him. It shattered me, thinking as I did that families should include a mom and dad. In reality, I hadn’t had a lot of contact with my dad and I can’t remember him very well. It was mom who was always taking me places and doing things.

But I remember the year between my father’s death and my mother’s marriage to Norman Henry—who I call “my dad”. I don’t even think of him as my stepfather—I remember thinking of that year as an eternity when I kind of just wanted more people around.

My mom worked all the time. She was a working class social worker and she wasn’t around. I needed this other person.

So my dad stepped in, and he was a forester. He took us skiing and we did woods things and I learned how to build things and I was treated equal with my brother—there wasn’t this sexist upbring­ing—I was allowed to try whatever I wanted.

But having your father die when you are at such a young age, there are ramifications. What I remember about those days were people telling me that my dad isn’t dead, there was some confusion at first whether he was dead or not. They were telling me he was very sick—this veiling of what actually had happened—and I knew, kind of clinically, the details: that he had shot himself in the head with a small arms, like a 22, not a shotgun.

It deeply affected my brother. He saw ghosts and became obsessed with death. For me, it manifested itself with the absolute fear of being left with other people. I was withdrawn. I wouldn’t spend the night at other people’s houses. I had the fear of ab­andonment.

A lot of times I still get that. I can’t say good-bye. I say, “See you later.” And a lot of times I will try to experience things as if it were the last day of my life. And sometimes I get real fears that my parents are not going to be there, especially around the bombing. It all came back again. All of a sudden, I dreaded going over and seeing my parents, because when I left, it was like, “Will I ever see them again? Will something weird happen to me too?”—just living with Judi. As far as we knew, Judi was still a target and that made me a target too.

But also living with Judi has helped me work through my own fears, directly. While other organizers flip out because it’s hard to deal with somebody who is supposed to be dead and isn’t, I get to deal with her on a daily basis, and I get to reassure myself that she’s there, she’s getting better, and that we are working on healing her and finding the bomber. That it is not nebulous. Things are happening…

But it is hard when a parent dies, and I guess it did hit me again in college, and I got depressed for awhile. Then Redwood Summer burst on the scene and I got involved and that pulled me out of my depression quickly. I felt engaged with the world.

It felt weird when my father’s grave was moved to Redding, because I felt like I didn’t know where he was. There was this weird fear: “Where is my father?” The thing is, I look a lot like him. And I’m told I have this half-brother wandering around who I don’t even know, who is the spitting image of me. Also, having somebody commit suicide in your family makes you fearful that you might also—always living with the fear that you’re going to repeat the pattern of your parent.

BB: Your history must give you a very authentic empathy with Judi’s daughters. She could have died.

LH:  To start with, one of Judi’s daughter’s is named Lisa. So I’m “Big Mean Lisa” and she is “Little Mean Lisa”. Judi wanted me to talk to Lisa about my experience of losing my father, and I never got around to it. But I did feel an intense empathy for Lisa, and once we broke the ice, we were able to have a normal, healthy relationship, in a situation that was so profoundly horrifying; because I had once gone through what she had.

Jesse is five years old—exactly how old I was when my father died. So to play with her and have tickle fights and make her happy when she has so much fear to deal with makes me feel like I am taking care of myself too.

As for my short depression in college last year, once I found the direct action movement, suicide disappeared from my mind. You know, when you are going through puberty, a lot of times you fantasize about doing away with yourself. It’s a romantic, Gothic notion. I and my friends went through that.

I was depressed in high school because it is depressing going through Fort Bragg High School. You feel like shit all the time. And especially if you feel different, which I did. But once I got into this movement, I wanted to be allowed to live so that I can make a change.

BB: The ‘change of paradigm’ struggles within families in Western literature occur between fathers and sons. You’ve identified your mother as a “politician”. She is Liz Henry, the Fourth District supervisor, and the first woman to be first elected rather than appointed to a seat on the Mendocino county Board of Supervisors. You reflect the new paradigm, she represents the old paradigm’s liberal approach to making things better…

LH…and I’m always throwing a monkeywrench into her plans.

Some women have a real strong relationship with their mom. I’ve always been pretty independent and distant from both of my parents. I love them very much and I did what they told me, pretty much, even though they gave me a lot of leeway.

But when I moved to Santa Cruz, I shifted into politics, and that was fine as long as I was in Santa Cruz, because they were struggles that were far-away and distant from things that had to do with my parents. Then I announced that I was going to live with Judi Bari for the summer, and my mom said, no, adamantly. And I said yes, I was.

BB: Your mother feared for your safety…

LH:  They feared for my safety, but they also thought it was a non-viable way of doing politics. They thought I should work through the System more.

My dad was disgusted with Redwood Summer; my mom just didn’t want me to do it, thinking that I was going to ruin her career. That was the big thing—”You’re going to ruin my career”—and that’s a lot of pressure to put on your kid.

But I was putting her in a spot, and I’ve actually grown over the summer to respect her politics and understand that she is taking stands on issues. She has told me that she is moving as far as she can within the constraints of her office—and her beliefs. We’ve kind of moved dynamically through the summer. We went through phases.

First they didn’t want me to talk about timber politics at all. We’d get into these big fights, and at one point, my dad walked out of the room. He didn’t want to hear what I was saying and he removed himself. That’s how he dealt with it.

It got better. We started talking about Redwood Summer, the logging situation, politics—as if these were normal subjects, just a household thing. I tried to restrain myself and not get into heated arguments with my folks. Because I was used to these dynamic arguments within the Movement and I found them fun. They didn’t. And they didn’t want that. They wanted a calm house life.

My father works for CDF, and I grew up believing that CDF was as benevolent as the church is supposed to be, that they’re doing the right thing in the right way.

It was a shock to me to find out—through Judi Bari that there was this ecological destruction going on, which I had grown up thinking was normal. I’d been taught not to notice it. So that meant that I had to reevaluate my father’s role in the timber wars.

That has meant looking at my father as a worker and trying to figure out what his value systems are and still be able to live in the family—not drive myself out of the family. It’s hard having somebody in your family who you want to ask hard questions of, but you are afraid to know the answers. Both your folks and you want to wear the white hat. You both want to be the good guys.

But we have gone through a dynamic relationship, my mom and I, where she will be okay with it, and then I will push it, then she will become not okay with it, and it will go back and forth.

And as she becomes more accepting, then I will do something else (maybe unconsciously, maybe consciously) that pushes my politics further.

Like I’ll put myself further out there in the limelight, or I’ll do something politically daring, or I’ll comment on something she is doing and that will cause tension between us and she’ll ask me to stop because I’m putting her in a bind and creating political pressure for her.

I have made political faux pas in her opinion, things that she says makes it hard for her to work as a supervisor.

Like I went up in front of the crowd at the Fort Bragg demo and asked her to come out publicly for an investigation of Judi’s bombing. At that point, no Mendocino county politician, save David Colfax, had. Other people had argued with my mom to do so and she had told them, “Well, it’s not my jurisdiction.”

And that day, I thought, “Wow, you have to do something!” I told her, “People are really prime for having you support an investigation now, spontaneously: Sure, people will fall on both sides of the fence, but you can’t be a politician and expect everyone to like you. That’s not politics. That’s a dream world.”

My mom hadn’t told me at that time that she had been receiving the threats that she had. And I wasn’t dealing with the fact that within the 4^th District, she was considered to be a radical woman politician. That she was a potential target of violence as a part of this wave of violence against radical women.

BB: In your speech, you likened Fort Bragg to a dysfunctional family.

LH:  Yes. It felt like that…I had been wandering around—I didn’t hear any of the rest of the speeches, because I was wandering, wondering what had happened to this town that I loved so much—I thought that I loved it.

People from outside the area didn’t understand what our town was going through that day. At the end of the march, there were Bay Area people who told me it was boring! They didn’t realize that this was a radical moment in Fort Bragg history and the icebreaker for further political demonstration. They didn’t understand that the people who were wearing the yellow t-shirts yelling at us across the police blockade were school mates, neighbors, people we knew by name.

I was feeling that the struggle going on in my family was a metaphor for the struggle going on in Fort Bragg. It’s not like a war between two distant countries.

We were all so delicately interconnected, and at once responsible for situations, and complicit. At a demonstration the week before, a mill worker’s wife held a sign that said, “IF YOU TAKE AWAY HIS JOB HE’LL TAKE IT OUT ON ME.” She was standing by her husband. It was just so blatant.

Women have always been targets of violence in Fort Bragg but the timber struggles in the north coast have made that situation crystal clear. Women are the relief valve. The way timber workers deal with their anger and frustration is to take it out on women—or emasculate men…I can’t remember all the metaphors. It wasn’t a very well thought out speech.

BB: It was one of the best, Lisa, one of the most heartfelt.

LH:  One of my points was that there was also dysfunction within the environmental movement. I pointed out that there were only a couple women speakers coming up, and that was a pretty skewed thing for us to do, that we weren’t working healthfully.

Everything seemed unhealthy. I felt as a community, we were going around with this small town “Main Street” facade of everything being okay, whereas everything was really, truly screwed up—the yellow ribbon people and the green shirts fighting with each other was just a symptom.

And I saw it as people just repeating patterns that were already there. Whereas they should have been allies, they were like siblings are. They were squabbling because there was this discomfort that wasn’t being caused by them; It was being caused by this parental presence, these paternal corporations, Pacific Lumber, L-P, G-P, who were doing all these evil things and harassing these siblings who were fighting because of it and who were blaming each other instead of blaming these parental figures. And school, it seemed to me was just a set up for repeating the patterns that were larger patterns of the consumptive nature of society.

I thought of me and my brother, where often we would repeat patterns that we’d just seen everywhere else. So we would fight because our parents were fighting, or our friends’ parents were fighting and that was just the way it was done. And I just called for an end to that. I didn’t want us to be complicit anymore. I said, “Let’s not you and me fight. Let’s turn and fight the corporations instead.”

And I used the analogy of my family having problems with Redwood Summer as the fight between the community having problems with Redwood Summer, and I finished with a call for everyone to Coyote howl in support of my mom coming out in public saying, “I want an investigation of the bombing of Judi Bari.”

I had spotted my mother in the audience from the stage, and excitedly, I asked her if she would do this. And she said, “I don’t know. It’s politically really tricky for me to do this at this point.”

That’s the way my mom works. And I wanted her to work like me, quickly, spontaneously and emotionally. And I said, “Mom, look at all these people—there were 2000 people at the rally—you’d have this great support.”

But she didn’t want to do it at that time, so at the end of my speech I said, “Everyone who wants Liz Henry to call for an investigation of the bombing, give a coyote howl” I did it because I wanted to show her how many people really supported her. In my circle, that’s the way you show support.

Howls just rang out over the field, and as I turned back to see her reaction, to see if now she would come up to the stage. She had disappeared. I didn’t go home after that rally. The brave thing to do would have been to go home and have it out with the folks. I didn’t see them for quite a while and boy, when I did, my mom and dad were upset. They re­ally laid it on about how that was irresponsible and embarrassing to do that to them…And I still haven’t figured out whether that was the right thing to do or not. It felt like, it was such a simple thing for her to do.

BB: Your family has become an icon—much like Madonna. It makes it all the more poignant (and pointed), this fierce fight over deforestation, that you are Liz and Norm Henry’s daughter: the child of a politician and the state’s forester. And an odd icon, in that this struggle is happening within the feminist community between mothers and daughters, as well as between “those white men” and the rest of “us”.

LH:  This stuff with my mom happened once before. The staff of Sidewalks, which was me and a gang of guys, were putting our first issue to bed. Zack Stentz had written and expose on Jack Azevedo, the man running against my mom for 4^th District Supervisor. Our contention was that Azevedo was a neo-Nazi, because he read and preached on the radio from a neo-Nazi tract called Imperium. No one else had brought this up…

So, It’s like twelve o’clock, and we’re putting the final touches on the paper—this is at your house—when we get a call from someone on my mom’s campaign, her campaign manager, who tells us to pull the article; Zack fielded that call with a bunch of great rational reasons why we would never pull the article.

Fifteen minutes later, I get a call from my mom telling me to pull the article—that I should be the one to pull it. Forget editorial collective. She said it would blow the election for her. That people would accuse her of negative campaigning. I told her I was my own person, and that people could separate her from me, and my opinions from hers, but she said she’d be guilty by association. And she hung up on me.

The rest of the Sidewalks crew kind of had an idea of what I was going through, but not really. To them it was just a decision to run the article or not—to risk libel or not. I thought I was going to be disowned, or at least have a very painful and difficult home life if I ran the article.

So I cried my eyes out, while this bunch of guys tried to decide whether they would hold me or not.

And then I picked myself up and kept laying out the paper till it was all done—including the Azevedo article. We were just being truthful, and saying it directly.

That shattered me, my mom’s phone call. It wasn’t just anybody, it was somebody who has cared for me as I grew up and who I expected to have more authority. There was immense emotional pres­sure.

And with me, it was an even stronger bargaining chip—when you feel abandoned because one of your parents have died, and you still have parents left, but you don’t know if they will stay or not, or whether they will kick you out if you do this—that’s an amazing emotional pressure to put on somebody; So here I am dealing with that: feeling abandoned and not supported. Yet feeling really rebellious, like I have to push out and do it.

Part of my growth has been discovering that radical politics is the politics I really like. This is where I fit in on the continuum. Other parts of my life make me an outsider already; therefore, I fit right into radical politics.

And also discovering that establishing yourself outside your family is just a normal process of individuation—which is really hard for women. Boys tend to push against their mom easily, because they are men and the moms are women, and then they get all this respect from society. (Judi and I talk about this all the time. Men get this enormous respect from society just because they are men. Even when they are ten and twelve years old, they get the respect that their mom doesn’t get.) My brother found it really easy to rebel in the normal fashions. I found it harder, because I rebelled in the normal fashions and it didn’t feel comfortable. I just finally had to spend time alone in Santa Cruz in a healthy environment where I grew, my intellect grew, and I discovered things I liked and didn’t like without having parents in on it. And I came back really strong and forceful and a different person than my mom.

And at first my mother did this turn—around thing where she respected me—even asked my advice about things—and that was very strange for me, having her ask my advice. The daughter coming back as a person instead of as a mini-mom. Then we came into this dynamic thing through Redwood Summer and that has been tough.

BB:  I remember being so cognizant that night, as you pasted up the paper, after your mother’s call, that not only were you the only girl there, but that the mantel of warrior had fallen upon you, the girl—the woman—of the staff; and that the guys were very much aware that had happened and wanted each to support you (there was no way they could share it), and were struggling with ways how.

LH:  Guys throughout high school have been frigh­tened of me and I have been at several keg parties where guys have said to me, “Well, I really wanted to go out with you when I was in high school, but you were just really annoying. You said what you thought and you were really strong, and that was a turn-off to me.”

And it was like. Fuck you. I’m going to be as strong as I want. Plus the part of me being queer. So I had no interest in them anyway. But through high school I thought I did. That was an awful tension.

But I’m always the only woman in these guy crowds. All my friends from high school were pretty much guys, because they got to do all the fun stuff. They got to do all the rough and tumble stuff. Their intellects were respected.

We had this heater in the halls of the high school where we all hung out at and there were some other women there, but they didn’t like to push it as much as I did and the guys just seemed more fun to hang out with. Even though there was this tension I couldn’t figure all through high school, as to whether I was gay or not. And they didn’t seem interested in me, they took me in as a comrade…

But I’ve had great resentment, because I used to be the only woman there, and I was also the driving ego force and they still got more respect than I did. Men just flat out get more respect. I saw if when I went to a wedding with my brother and everybody looked at him. And I see it when I work with Zack. From the day of the bombing on, I’ve had to push myself in front of cameras and talk to reporters, because they gravitate to Zack. He looks nice. He’s tall. He’s a man. And he’s white. And they go for him. It’s like I have nothing to say.     

And that’s rough on me. I guess that’s why I hung out with men, because people considered me just one of the boys, and I got a lot more respect than I would have had I played all these foo-foo games with the girls.

BB: You call yourself “queer”. You use that term rather than “gay”. The language of being a lesbian woman is in flux right now. What do you mean when you say, “I’m queer”, and talk of a “queer nation?”

LH:  In Santa Cruz, we started reclaiming these words that nobody else wants to reclaim. Queer is just a wonderful word because we have gay, lesbian, bisexual—right?—and there is a movement right now to make sure bisexuality is prominent and respected, or at least there is dialogue going on about it, so it’s really hard to say, “gay / lesbian / bisexual”. It just gets all lumped up. And then you have to switch the words around so there is no hierarchy—I mean, this is Santa Cruz for you: the PC alert. You’ve got to be politically correct.

So queer was this word that said it all. It just said there was something strange about you, and it had an understood meaning throughout society, and it was a fun word to say, and it was forbidden.

We just grabbed and ran with it. I have a jacket that says, “Queer and Present” which is a take-off of “Clear and present danger” which was used in the seventies, and it’s used up to now: If you’re a clear and present danger, they have reason to arrest you. So a gay/lesbian group in the seventies took it “Queer and Present Danger”. I work with some videographers down there doing a documentary, and we call ourselves Queer and Present.

That was part of my radicalization, meeting Vito Russo, a gay author, teacher and film critic who recently died of AIDS and government inaction. He was a guest teacher at UCSC. Vito Russo taught me to be proud, and to be strong, and that I have a history; that gay politics is way in the forefront and we must reclaim these words and do what we can.

And we held sit-ins at UCSC, and started trying to build a coalition between people of color and white queers.

The people of color didn’t know whether they should call us queers or not—we called ourselves queers. It’s sort of like do you call somebody “a person of color”? Do you call them black? Afro-American? African-American? What do you call them?

And what if they use epithets like “nigger” between themselves? You know, some people use those negative terms about themselves, and I see it as internalization of abuse and oppression. So people were accusing us of internalizing our oppression in calling ourselves queer.

I saw use of the word “queer” different than the word “nigger,” We were using “queer” in such flamboyant, excellent, flat-out way and it was such a convenient word to use. It was really nice word to use.

And it’s really fun to come out in Mendocino county. And in the AVA at that. It was also kind of scary. Garberville is the place I’ve been harassed. You wouldn’t think it of Garberville. I came out in Bruce’s paper, because he’d written a homophobic little thing, and he tried to excuse himself with an interview with a gay man the next issue—and it wasn’t very good. He kind of acquiesced without admitting he was homophobic.

It’s been a year ago since I came out to my par­ents. I came out to my parents because I was living in a lesbian household, pretty much, and I’d gone from living in a woman’s household where there were straight people to living in a gay household; and it was so much more fun and so much more freeing. I just felt more of myself than ever before. And I was really into gay politics and I was going, “Should I tell my parents? Should I not?”

And it was really scary. I thought they would do the usual “This is just a phase you’re going through” thing. But they seemed to be just fine with it.               

But the thing is, that they don’t really mention it. We don’t really talk about it as a subject—which is very common. I’m not closed about it, but it’s hard to bring up. I haven’t brought anyone home with me yet, but it’s just a matter of time. I’m not sure what they would do if I did. I think still in the back of everyone’s mind is “she just couldn’t make it with the guys so she’s turning to women”—the usual conception. That’s the kind of feeling I get about the whole thing from my dad.

To me queer was like something that was kept secret from me all my life. Nobody would say those words. I didn’t really know what they meant. I went through high school expecting to be heterosexual. I thought everybody was and nobody even brought up the idea and the concepts of gay life. I had to get away. Go to Germany. Find out about it. Come back, live a year in confusion, working and going to school, and then go to Santa Cruz.

And as soon as I hit that campus, it was like “ahhh!” I checked out the gay/lesbian/bisexual resource center. I started meeting friends and I went “Ahhh, this is what I am missing. This is my home. I feel so much more comfortable.”

And my mom noticed. She noticed I was being more cheerful and pulling out of depression. She said, “Good for you. I support you.” And she stands right up to it when people come to her with: “Is your daughter a lesbian?”—just like she stands up to: “Isn’t your daughter an Earth First!er?”

It was hard to come out with people my own age in Fort Bragg, but I’ve done it slowly but surely. And it gets around. Zack was the first one I told and I went on from there to other people. And most times it’s the usual, “Oh, that’s what was wrong with you,” kind of thing.

BB:  What does it mean to you to be an Earth First!er?

LH:  That means I put the earth first. I see the earth as much more than humans sitting on a hunk of rock with a bunch of trees and plants. It’s almost a Gaia concept of this is a living being, and we have all these interactions, and if you take out one chain it will destroy it.

We have to preserve both the yellow shirts and the green shirts, and the trees and the plants and the landforms. The corporations are the main culprits. Earth First!er means to me that we’ve got to address the things that are preventing the earth from functioning. And that means social problems, that means corporations.

BB: You drive around with yellow ribbons on your car.

LH:  That’s my social critique on “Bring the turkeys home out of Kuwait.” Judi and I have this theory, that if everybody flies yellow ribbons they’ll be rendered meaningless.          

It also gets me into traffic easier. It does. People wave me into traffic in Willits and they wave at us even if they don’t know us. So that’s the real reason I have a yellow ribbon on my car. Actually, Judi put it on and I’m getting bored with it already. Usually I fly a yellow and a green ribbon at the same time, and then a purple one for gay pride. But that one turned white and people thought I was surrendering to the yellow ribbon people, so I took that off. [laughs]…

Biocentrism and the thought that all life is created equal is really central to me, but I didn’t take to this “deep ecology” concept at first. I thought it was really foolish and very privileged because it was coming mostly from white males, and they were saying that all life is created equal. “I am equal with a rock.” But then they were saying contradictory things like let’s close the borders and let bioregions support themselves. They weren’t looking at the social issues.

So I was turned off to deep ecology, and really turned on to social ecology and [Murray] Bookchin down at Santa Cruz. And then I came here and realized that Bookchin was really arrogant and himself elitist, and that trashing deep ecologists was a sport for him. The questions around the fate of the planet just seem to be intellectual games for Bookchin, while deep ecologists up north here use deep ecology on a very practical, day-to-day level. I’ve taken from both now. I know we have to look at the social problems as well as the dire planetary problems.

BB: The saying is, “If you’re not a part of the solution, you’re a part of the problem.” For our region, what solutions do you see?

LH:  Oh, that is so hard for me, to figure out what the solutions are. Ever since I was ten; I’ve been trying to figure out what should go in the place of the G-P mill.

For a long time I’ve known that something has to be done when the mill closed, even though I hadn’t made the connection with deforestation. I used to think we should have a university, here on the north coast, because my theory was, there weren’t any books here. People were burning down libraries, for Christ sakes! And that’s the reason why we are so backwards up here, because nobody has access to information.         

Well, I’ve eschewed that. What we need is some kind of light industry that is somehow healthy, and healthy for the economy. I still don’t know what it is. Humboldt is trying to put in a sushi factory, a seaweed processing plant. But that goes to upper class people who can afford it, and I don’t agree with that. I don’t want this kind of yuppie stuff in my home town.               

Recently, I’ve been thinking that sustainable forestry, the Jan Iris style of forestry, would employ tons of people. In the Cahto wilderness there is such a load of underbrush around the trees, that it’s a fire hazard. What the Department of Forestry wants to do is let it sit and it will all go up in flames and create an intensively hot fire that will burn it all out.

BB:  So corporations like L-P can come in and haul out wood as, “salvage” they’d never be able to get their hands on elsewise.

LH:  I think we should send hundreds of people in there to do hand clearing. That would employ a lot of people.

BB:  Hand pruning hardwoods creates a straighter heartier timber. It’s like adding value right there in the forest while you are sustaining it.   

LH:  There’s a woodworking school over on the coast. We could use that finer wood to have furniture made here, have housing made here. Having different kinds of woods for different furniture finished here is a solution. My friend makes willow furniture.             

And addressing the WMI problem: WMI sends the paper to Taiwan. So would we. There is no way to deal with these, things now. Starting an environmentally sound way of recycling paper would. I hear Art Harwood has been talking about starting such a plant for recycling paper. Then we would be getting stuff from the outside to us because We would be one of the only people doing that.

Those are some of the ideas I’m thinking of—providing services that are desperately needed with an eye to a stable state. Creating Ecotopia. We call ourselves Ecotopia Earth First! up here now because we are looking to conduct ourselves in a manner that is a model for society.

Recycling at this point is so bogus. We need to pre-cycle. We a still have all these bottles going around and they get smashed up and melted at a very high energy cost instead of being cleaned and reused. We have enormous amounts of paper. People need to cut down on the consumptive lifestyle.

Inland is such a working class area compared to the coast. I like the inland better than the coast. People are willing to stop using so much product. Do the pre-cycling instead of recycling.

But there is still going to be the need there, while the world catches up with us. Why can’t we pioneer in that and cater to the people in our community instead of sending sushi off to Japan or even harvesting all our urchins and sending them off to Japan? There’s no urchin beds left! And that kind of stuff upsets me as much as sending the logs down to Mexico.

My theory is that Americans want to externalize things. It’s kind of a male thing to do: It’s there in space exploration—conquests, colonization. When you have internal problems, when you’re not settled with yourself, when you’re not in a healthy relation­ship with nature, you externalize it. You go somewhere else.          

And that’s what I did when I was in high school. I went somewhere else because I thought it would solve it. But then I realized, wherever you go, there you are. You have to work it out with yourself. You have to work it out with your environment. You can’t just go elsewhere and it will be solved.

That’s what I see we’re doing here. We’re doing the invasion of Iraq because we can’t deal with our S&L scandals, and the situation in northern California, and we can’t deal with the poverty and hunger nationwide.

And so, I felt like I’ve come home, and really, really rectified that in my life by not going somewhere else and doing, my political work.

But coming to my own home, and my own home town, and dealing with my own environment, and standing up for my political principles in a place where it is kind of dangerous to do that.

I felt that I was setting an example. There is a lot of work to be done and why don’t you clean up your own backyard and work with your our family and friends.

And it was a big feat coming home. Who wants to deal with their folks when they’re doing these things? Like I called my mom today and talked to her about the cutting of the trees on Highway 20. I said, “I’m calling as your constituency. I need to talk to you about this and I need you to listen to me and make political decisions about this.” And here it is my birthday and that is something special for us both.

BB:  And did you also thank her for giving you life, and sustaining that life over the years?

LH:  You know, I did do something like that on my last birthday. On my last birthday I sent her a card, a beautiful Susan Seddon Boulet card. It’s the sign for Cancer and it’s a painting of a woman sheltering another woman. It’s my favorite picture in the whole world, and I said, “Mom, I thank you for giving me life. I’m glad I’m here, and we should work more together because we’re both working towards the same goals, we’re just taking different routes.

We’re not that different. We should compare strategies and work more as a mother and daughter team.

And I love you very much.”

She never really responded to that. My brother read it and cried. He thought it was phenomenal. But my mom, well, I guess I’m going different places.

Zack and I have talked about this a lot. I think our generation is willing to fess up to our mistakes and go forward and be really frank and blunt with our feelings. To give those people big hugs who never wanted to be hugged or touched in the first place, and to really be, brave and bold and try to evolve in this world.

Part of that was me just coming back to my mom and saying, “Thank you for putting me here. And sorry for embarrassing you, but that’s just part of the process we are going through.”

Note:

[1] WMI refers to Waste Management. Lisa Henry was part of a campaign to prevent Waste Management from taking over local recycling services. Anna Marie Stenberg and Duane Potter were also part of this campaign.