By Rob Anderson - Anderson Valley Advertiser, May 2, 1990
Summer in the Redwoods on yesterday’s (May 1) Board of Supervisors agenda and invited Earth First!, representatives of the timber industry, and County law enforcement to come before the Board and discuss ways of handling the coming summer demos short of serious injury and/or economic disruption. Henry no doubt hoped for a rational and civilized exchange of opinions, but she must have been disappointed in what she got.
What she got was Earth First’s Judi Bari—unintimidated by either the presence of blustering, macho loggers[1] or the presence of Sheriff Tim Shea in the seat next to her—making her case for the Mississippi Summer in the Redwoods in a voice that, shall we say, needed no amplification. Bari maintained, as Earth First! has all along, that they’re planning nothing but nonviolent protests to slow down the industry’s 225% over-cut, but that the timber industry is behind a campaign of misinformation which is stirring up hatred and violence toward Earth First! Bari displayed a copy of a forged inflammatory Earth First! press release, which has been distributed at mills and in logging towns.[2] She showed the Board a copy of a death threat she received. She also displayed an aerial photo of the Skunk Train line, showing a narrow band of trees on each side of the track, which gives passengers the impression they’re traveling through a forest. Bari pointed out that the corporations are destroying the forests and future timber jobs along with it. Bari referred to the lynch mob atmosphere being stirred up, for example, by Charlie Stone on radio station KDAC on the Coast.
At this point, Supervisor Marilyn Butcher started to grumble, “I’m not going to sit here…” But Butcher was interrupted by Henry who tried to pin Bari down as to the scope and duration of the summer’s actions. Henry was concerned, for one thing, with the County’s ability to afford a large-scale law enforcement action to handle the demos. She also referred to a talk she had with Bari in which Bari suggested that the County call out the National Guard if it can’t handle the situation.
Henry clearly thought this was irresponsible of Bari, though that seems like asking Gandhi to consider the problems the British Army had handling his followers. Even the usually steady Henry seemed close to coming unglued over the issue. At one point she said, “If one person is killed or seriously injured, I don’t think I can continue in this position.” Yet Mem Hill was smashed in the face by logger Dave Lancaster during an Earth First! demo last year. Greg King was also attacked. Judi Bari and her children were apparently deliberately run down by a logging truck in Anderson Valley last year. And even the break-ins at the AVA offices last year look more and more like timber-related terrorism.
Bari was saying that the County’s budget crisis wasn’t caused by Earth First! when the meeting began to unravel. She was interrupted first by Supervisor Nelson Redding (who, along with Supervisor Butcher, has never breathed a word of reproach to the timber industry):
Redding: “I’d like to hear from someone else…”
Bari: “There’s a hate campaign orchestrated by…”
Butcher: “Judi, you brought it on yourself…”
Sheriff Shea: “I can’t sit here all day…” as he got up and stalked out of the room. Butcher, too, got up and huffed around the room, threatening to leave. “Good riddance,” someone muttered from the Earth First! side of the room. Shea eventually returned to make his statement, which turned out to be a press release about his department’s preparation—including “a possible call for outside assistance”—for the summer. Shea couldn’t read the statement, since he’d forgotten his glasses, so the Board’s clerk read it for him. Shea’s said the sheriffs role “will be to take impartial and objective law enforcement action,” though Bari told the Board about calling the Sheriff’s Department after one of her death threats and getting this response from one of Shea’s “impartial and objective” underlings:
“We don’t have the manpower. If you show up dead, we’ll investigate.”[3]
All of the Board members wrung their hands in horror and talked about possible violence, though, again, Bari pointed out that there had been several violent attacks on Earth First! in the last year, but the Board seemed uninterested. Both the Board and the Sheriffs attitude seemed almost calculated to reinforce the “Mississippi Summer” designation of the Earth First! campaign. We’re old enough to remember the unconvincing statements made by politicians before the 1964 Mississippi Summer—especially the hypocritical talk about “violence” (“What about the violence of the status quo?” was the Movement’s response), and the bias and unprofessionalism of Southern law enforcement is of course, legend.
Logger Jerry Philbrick of Comptche also made some threats in the course of a rambling, emotional monologue (“We didn’t start this thing…The shit’s going to hit the fan…If anyone damages my equipment or endangers my employees…We’re not out there looking for Earth First!ers yet…We’ll use whatever force is necessary.”), but when Bari pointed out the implicit violence in his remarks, the Board was again silent.
So who’s acting irresponsibly? Earth First! has maintained all along that their demos are going to be nonviolent and that volunteers are going to be screened and trained accordingly. The Board of Supervisors has demonstrated in the last year its complete impotence in dealing with the timber crisis, referring the issue of timber practices, for example, to the Forest Advisory Committee. And what if this committee finally concludes that Earth First! is more or less right, that a gross over-cut is underway and even the smallest trees are being taken? (We must have passed a dozen logging trucks on the Boonville-Ukiah road yesterday, many of which carried ridiculously small logs.) What then? The Board and the County have shown no inclination to confront the timber industry on any level. Last year they weren’t even willing to make the industry pay for the damage it does to County roads ($1 million worth) when it hauls timber in the winter.
The fact of the matter is, as surely both loggers and Earth First!ers know, the Board of Supervisors has no political will to do anything about the ongoing moonscaping of Mendocino County, that these almost choreographed appearances before the Board of Supervisors are looked on by all as opportunities to get a little ink from the media for their point of view.
But the loggers and the timber industry don’t really present a point of view intellectually; they squirt out a lot of emotion—mostly fear and anger. Maribelle Anderson, for example, comes from a long line of logging families, and she told the Board yesterday that “(She’s) trying to stay calm…Logging is my life and I hope it will be my future,” and had hopes about maintaining a “decent life” in the County and paying for her children’s education. She claimed that Earth First! is not interested in the workers, though Earth First! has gone to great pains to convince everyone otherwise; that their demos are aimed politically at the corporations and responsible government agencies who control the industry, and that, finally, overcutting is destroying future jobs. But Maribelle was having none of it: “Decent people would call it [the demos] off.”
This is the same hogs-in-the-trough argument that timber workers and their families haul out over and over again. Their snouts are apparently so deep in the slops that they can’t see any larger issues. To hear timber workers and their families tell it, no one else works for a living, has families to support, or mortgages to pay; We know they don’t like the sound of Judi Bari’s voice. Nor do they like what she’s saying. Maybe they should read her lips: NO TREES, NO JOBS![4]
That Green Union Guy's Notes:
[1] One major criticism of Robert Anderson’s (otherwise excellent) article is the somewhat inaccurate use of terminology. It would have been more accurate to describe these “loggers” as the more well to do gyppo logging firm owners (or in generic “Marxist” terminology: “petit bourgeoisie” as opposed to “proletariat”). That distinction should be carried throughout the article, because the only “loggers” and “timber workers” mentioned here are Jerry Philbrick (a gyppo owner, who later befriended Judi Bari) and Maribelle Anderson, the wife of a gyppo-logging firm owned by Mike Anderson. Nelson Redding and Marilyn Butcher were not loggers, but right-wing County supervisors. By this time, Local #1 had gained the support of a large number of actual rank & file timber workers.
[2] At least some of these fake press releases were attributable to Candy Boak.
[3] Bruce Anderson elaborates in the “Here and There “ section of the May 9, 1990 Anderson Valley Advertiser, “That old expression ‘hopping mad’ came to life last Thursday in the Supervisors’ chambers when the magnificent Judi Bari had Sheriff Shea and the tightly wrapped Supervisor Marilyn Butcher jumping out of their chairs to pace furiously around the dais. Shea, declaring he had ‘better things to do’ actually walked out at one point during Bari’s address. Bari, if you’ve never had the pleasure of seeing her in action, is a brilliant public speaker. She gets it out there loud, clear, and fast without becoming rattled or otherwise distracted when the inevitable counterattack begins. She’s the most effective radical activist the AVA Has ever seen, and we’ve seen a few. Butcher, Shea et. al. are way over their heads with Judi Bari.”
[4] Bruce Anderson comments, in the aforementioned “Here and There” section of the May, 9, 1990 issue of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, that: “You’ve probably noted by now the similarities between Mississippi Summer in the California redwoods and the original Mississippi Summer. The first Mississippi Summer was a voter registration effort in the South by roughly a thousand persons, mostly college students. Then as now, the pseudo liberals (Liz Henry, Norman DeVall, Gail Lucas type) opposed Mississippi Summer on the grounds the demonstrations would provoke a violent response. Let criminals triumph rather than confront them, in other words. Then as now, the corporate newspapers denounced the effort as the work of free-floating ‘outside agitators’, maybe even communists, as if there were no real issues involved. Then as now, the entrenched politicians belatedly scurried around trying to put a compromise solution together that would not upset the money as Senator Barry Keene is doing now with his industry-inspired timber bill. Then as now, when the summer has ended, and national attention has been focused on the corporate rape of the Western United States, all of these fearful, well-meaning people will say, ‘Well, of course I was there. I supported the kids. It was a good thing to slow down the cut, to make the giant timber corporations responsible to our communities’.”