By Michele DeRanleau – San Francisco Weekly, June 6, 1990
The most dramatic part of the story is familiar: At 11:53 on the morning of Thursday, May 24, as Judi Bari pulled her compact car through an Oakland intersection, a bomb exploded in the back seat of her car, fracturing her pelvis and knocking her unconscious. She and passenger Darryl Cherney immediately became the primary suspects in the bombing, and every law enforcement agency from the U.C. Berkeley campus police to the FBI began looking for clues linking them to the bomb.
The ensuing media coverage focused on Bari and Cherney’s work with “Mississippi Summer in the California Redwoods,” a series of protests against corporate logging practices in northern California sponsored by Earth First!, a radical environmental non-organization.
But one aspect of this story, perhaps the one that may hold the key to the bombing, has not been told. Judi Bari is associated as much with the labor movement as with the environmental movement in the forests of Northern California.
Assuming that Bari, a committed pacifist and mother of two school-age children, would not carry a live bomb around under her seat, many people close to the situation believe Bari’s support for labor is at the root of the bombing.
“It was definitely the labor stuff that got her,” said Anna Marie Stenberg, a close friend and colleague of Bari’s.
“The labor stuff” Stenberg refers to included encouraging mill workers to file complaints against Georgia Pacific Lumber for allegedly exposing them to toxic PCBs, and opening lines of communication between timber labor and environmentalists, two groups that have historically been at odds with one another.
From the beginning, Bari saw the workers and environmentalists as being on the same side. After all, if there are no forests, there are no jobs, and at the current rate of harvest, Northwest Coast forests will be gone by the year 2005, according to Hans Burkhart, an environmental researcher in Northern California.
With 14 years of labor organizing under her belt, Bari began reaching out to timber workers, explaining how the over-harvesting of the forests ultimately meant the loss of jobs. As timber companies reached record profits last year, they continued to cut wages, automate, and move some milling operations to Mexico while felling the last of the forests to fund corporate acquisitions and payoff debts accumulated in a period of rapid expansion.
“She made the connection between the exploitation of the forests and the exploitation of the workers,” Stenberg says.
And even the industry admits Bari was becoming an effective force against the timber industry.
“She was successful in driving a wedge between the companies and the workers who work for the companies,” said Dave Odgers, a spokesperson for Georgia Pacific in Eugene, Oregon. “She was trying to create dissatisfaction with the companies.”
Bari also raised awareness of labor issues in the environmental movement, even within the ranks of Earth First!, whose slogan, “No compromise in defense of Mother Earth,” reflects the group’s unyielding tactics.
Bari was instrumental in convincing California Earth First! to rescind its endorsement of tree-spiking, where metal spikes are jammed into redwoods in order to thwart loggers’ saws.
Bari maintained that the timber companies would go ahead and cut spiked trees anyway, so the action only endangered and alienated the workers.
“The artificial separation between workers and environmentalists was bridged by Judi,” Stenberg said. “That’s what made her such a threat and such a target”
People who know Bari describe her as a hardworking, dependable, imaginative and inspired organizer who took a project and followed it through.
One of these projects, a PCB suit against Georgia Pacific, was a solid case of corporate irresponsibility, and if successful, may have had enormous implications for the timber industry.
Last February, two workers in the Georgia Pacific mill in Fort Bragg were working on an oil pump when a damaged capacitor filled with PCBs burst above them. (Frank Murray) reportedly ingested the toxic coolant, which has been shown to cause numerous health hazards, including cancer, even in minute doses.
For three days after the incident, the company insisted that the five to seven gallon spill was only mineral oil, and convinced the hospital that the worker’s stomach should not be pumped. Three shifts of workers went into the contaminated plant, two welders were ordered to work on the contaminated area, and the plant burned the PCBs into the atmosphere around Fort Bragg during plant operation, according to the complaint.
The workers complained to the union and the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Cal-OSHA), but the agency rejected the claim.
Bari and Stenberg heard about the accident three weeks later and began organizing and advising the workers, convincing them to take the case to Federal OSHA, which eventually found that Georgia Pacific had “willfully exposed” the workers to the PCBs.
Georgia Pacific appealed the decision and a hundred loggers eventually sent in requests to participate in hearings, according to Stenberg.
But at the urging of union leaders, Georgia Pacific, and OSHA attorney Leslie Campbell, the workers agreed to a plea bargain in which the “willful exposure” was reduced to “serious” and depositions taken by Federal OSHA were invalidated for future lawsuits against the company.
(Treva VandenBosch, Roland Atkinson, Joe Valdao, Julie Wiles, and Cheryl Jones) are continuing to pursue a personal injury lawsuit against Georgia Pacific. Georgia Pacific’s Odgers says he “wasn’t aware” that Bari was involved in the OSHA case, but said he was “not surprised.”
Odgers wouldn’t speculate on the bombing, but said, “The timber industry is very concerned with the reputation and tactics” of Earth First!. Georgia Pacific “shares the general belief of the industry and law enforcement” that the group is dangerous, Odgers said.
The timber companies have a huge stake in keeping workers and environmentalists on opposite sides of the fence. To counteract Bari’s work and the Redwood Summer, timber companies are sponsoring a “yellow ribbon” campaign during Redwood Summer, in which “flying a yellow ribbon from the antenna of your pickup truck is a sign of solidarity with timber,” says Naomi Wagner, another of Bari’s colleagues.
“As long as labor and environmentalists are on opposite sides, the industry doesn’t have to worry,” Stenberg agreed.
Bari’s supporters speculate that the bomb may have been meant to kill Bari or be “discovered” in her possession as part of a plan to keep timber workers and environmentalists from joining forces against the industry. But the plan may ultimately have the opposite effect.
“If whoever did the bombing was attempting to sabotage Redwood Summer, the plan has backfired,” said Daniel Barron, a member of Earth First!. Barron said that recent vigils in Ukiah and Fort Bragg drew hundreds of people, including many loggers and mill workers who have come into contact with Bari in the past.