By the last two weeks of August 1990, Redwood Summer had already been one of the largest and longest sustained campaigns ever organized, at least in part, by Earth First!. It was certainly the longest and largest such campaign organized, in part, by the IWW. It had been successful, at least, at raising awareness of numerous issues surrounding capitalist profit driven forestry. It had also been successful at dispelling some corporate driven myths and exposing the underside of timber dependent economies. It had inspired locals concerned about such issues to take stronger and more courageous stands. Much of this had been accomplished primarily using a very anarchic, consensus driven, affinity group model of organizing, which had not been attempted on such a scale ever before, at least not in the existing context. All of this took place in the face of heavy propaganda, repression, and violence from corporate timber and its enablers. In the wake of these factors, and after several months of working long hours on a volunteer basis, the activists involved in Redwood Summer were beginning to show signs of disorganization and fatigue. This was especially evident during “Reclaim the Redwoods Week” which took place during the final weeks of the third month of the campaign.
According to LA Weekly reporter Greg Goldin, Reclaim the Redwoods Week was not originally planned at the outset of Redwood Summer. Indeed, According to Earth First!er Michelle Dulas, it seems to have been a hastily made decision by Redwood Summer organizers active at the Arcata Action Center, which was one of the campaign offices, in order to keep the calendar from filling up that week as well as ensuring that attention wasn’t distracted away from what the organizers considered to be the most crucial issue at hand. While this may have been a well intentioned move, very little planning and strategizing seems to have gone into it. Even Redwood Summer organizers, such as Judi Bari and Ed Dennison were unsure of its details, and if they were unclear on its finer points, rank and file participants were, for lack of a better term, stumped. When queried, most spokespeople replied, “I don’t know; you’ll have to ask at the Arcata Action Center.” At least one activist, a student at UC Santa Barbara declared, “I’d like to know (what’s going on) for myself. We don’t know, and nobody can tell us.” Goldin went on to elaborate what he finally discovered when he arrived in Arcata:
“(A)t a nonviolence training session held for the benefit of newcomers, the best advice that could be offered was, ‘We’re out of ideas here, so go from an affinity group; be calm, be creative, think and get in touch with your feelings.’ As to such practical matters as legal-defense funds, bail money, medical supplies, there was scant advice. As to concern for being lost in the forest, the chilling response was, ‘I don’t know if the guides know their way around.’ As to long-term strategy for saving the redwoods, such inquiries were scorned as ‘sequential thinking. Think like an artist. Think globally.
“When the affinity groups finally did sit down to map out their twilight marauding, they emerged with actions reflecting the same guilessness and foolhardy glee that dominated the other self-indulgent activities of base camp: tree-hugging, skinnydipping, ‘grief circles’ and the party-line assertion that male testosterone was ultimately responsible for environmental rape.”[1]
Goldin’s dismissive, even sneering, editorializing on the subculture of the activists directly involved with Reclaim the Redwoods Week reflects a liberal-reformist bias to some extent, although his criticisms were not entirely without merit. While it’s true that the affinity group model does often result in actions being planned by local groups without the knowledge of campaign spokespeople or regional organizers, usually, in order to succeed, at least some basic sense of what is intended is essential for achieving the desired goals and plugging in potential support. Also, the apparent lack of knowledge of or concern for the long term strategy displayed by the unnamed activist in Goldin’s account doesn’t reflect the sheer command of the issues shown by the likes of Judi Bari and others, and it is more than likely a product of inexperience above all else, given the unfortunate reality that the organizational resources of Redwood Summer had been spread extremely thin, especially by this time. Still, these factors contributed to numerous tactical errors that could easily have been avoided by a little “sequential thinking” or even a little common sense.
In Sunday, August 19, 1990, for example, William David “Squirrel” Bradley (one of the four “Squirrel Brothers” affinity group mentioned previously) had, with the help of several supporters, ascended 75 feet up a redwood along US Highway 101 near the site of the original Redwood Summer base camp at Honeydew in southern Humboldt County. There, he hung a banner reading “Save the Headwaters” across the highway near the Honeydew freeway exit. The California Highway Patrol rerouted the traffic from the highway for five hours while men the CHP described as “expert tree climbers” climbed up after the activist and chased him through the tree tops until they caught him and arrested him nine hours later, around 4 PM. Bradley was charged with “resisting arrest” and “delaying and obstructing an officer of the law in pursuit of his duties”.[2] Although the event was covered by the mainstream media[3], none of the organizers had the forethought to print up or distribute leaflets explaining the issue or its urgency to the motorists who were rerouted onto the scenic bypass, Avenue of the Giants. While it could be argued that Redwood Summer was a known quality by this time, the potential to network with possible supporters of the campaign was lost.[4]
The Honeydew tree sit was just a warm up for the week of “reclamation”, however. The actual week would begin with a return to Murrelet Grove to try and prevent further logging there, continuing the actions that had begun there in early August.[5] The actions for the upcoming week had been largely developed by the 150 or so Redwood Summer demonstrators in the base camp now located at Willow Creek in Trinity National Forest fifty miles northeast of Arcata. Earth First! organizer Mokai described the tenor (at least) of the upcoming actions:
“What we’ll be doing is going into the woods, pushing logs into the roads, (and) harassing loggers. We’ll be right in their faces, confronting the loggers, really being in total disagreement with them. We’ll be running around like wild Indians…It will be like the forest defending itself.”[6]
At least, that is how Greg Goldin quoted Mokai, and if true, it isn’t consistent with the message or the community building dialogue promoted by Judi Bari. To be fair, Pacific Lumber loggers, at least those who had not been among the dissident workers at the company—many of whom had by now been marginalized despite five years of struggle attempting to reverse the Maxxam takeover—tended to be among the most hostile to Earth First!, outside of the most reactionary elements among the gyppo crews in Mendocino County.
Late in the evening, on Monday, August 21, 1990, Redwood Summer activists returned to Murrelet Grove to prepare for the next day’s actions. Colorado and Wild Rockies Earth First!er Michael Robinson described what followed:
“About 70 people entered the area surrounding the grove. They varied in experience from those who spend most of their time in the backcountry, to newcomers who had rarely been camping. Working in small affinity groups, at night and in the more dangerous daylight, we built roadblocks of slash piles, downed logs, and rocks. These obstructions were sufficient to force log truck drivers to stop and move them by hand, and sometimes necessitated the diversion of a front end loader from its job piling trees to a new one clearing roads.”[7]
In what Richard Johnson later described as “a wild melee”, activists barricaded logging roads, stood in front of bulldozers, and formed human chains around redwoods while loggers attempted to, and sometimes successfully, cut trees with chainsaws just above the activists’ heads. The workers fired gunshots, drove bulldozers, and rolled large logs downhill at demonstrators. Others chased and wrestled activists to the ground.[8] Some activists responded by placing stink bombs in the cabs of the logging trucks, while others chose a milder form of protest: placing children’s artwork on the trees. 36-year old Louisiana native Dakota Schrempp, who had been inspired to come to California for Redwood Summer details her experience this day:
“I’m pretty much of a non-confrontational person, but I started crying, seeing those old trees, man, just lying there dead. The loggers (were) yelling at us, pushing stuff at us. We’re yelling back and saying don’t cut these trees. I just hugged the tree, tried to center myself…The tree was so big, I could see the guy next to me, and the guy next to him, but couldn’t even see the other people around the bend…
“(One logger using an ax) put (it) down, and we started talking…He said he got paid $80 for cutting down the tree, and the tree had outlived its usefulness. We said please don’t cut our old forest, but he said, ‘When I get old and outlive my usefulness, I hope my children chop me down.’”[9]
One Redwood Summer protestor put his hand on a logger’s chainsaw, which was not operating at the time, as if to say to the logger, “if you cut this tree, you will have to also cut off my hand.” The logger chose not to activate his saw.[10] Robinson further elaborated on the course of events:
“For two days and nights activists played cat and mouse with Maxxam, blocking the roads surrounding and entering Murrelet. Security and police vehicles cruised the roads looking for blockaders; but attired in forest camouflage and lying flat in brambles and tall grass, we were hard to spot from a pickup truck.
“Occasionally, we would dive into the thickets too late for concealment. The pickup would stop, and security or sheriff deputies would rush out. Since almost all the roads were dug into steep slopes, our only recourse was to tumble down virtual cliffs through a maze of second growth trees, vines and bushes…Almost all of us escaped, since few cops or security goons felt like following us down. Amazingly, nobody broke any bones in these escapades.
“The second night, in an unwise move, the group met on a road to plan a mass action. Before any planning could begin, we heard a pickup hit one of our barricades. The pickup stopped and the driver started firing shots into the air, into the woods…no one knew where. With over fifty people assembled and no flashlights, our normal hiding procedures broke down into panic, as everyone rushed for what little cover could be found. Fortunately, the driver decided not to risk more blockades and didn’t come closer, but had he done so, his panic and ours could have proved fatal. Soon our herd came out of the woods and dispersed into saner, small groups to sleep in areas with more cover.
“The next morning we decided that about two-thirds of the group would occupy Murrelet itself to stop the cutting, while the rest would do support—more road blockades to stop police and logging trucks alike.”[11]
As Robinson said, nobody suffered any broken limbs, though one demonstrator had to be treated at a hospital after a worker drove a pickup over his foot. Miraculously, the activist escaped series injury, but he was arrested.[12] Nobody had wanted to get arrested, but the police ultimately arrested 37 of the protesters[13], though the rest escaped.[14] 22 of the arrestees refused to give their names and were sequestered by the sheriffs in the county jail. Supporters started a vigil outside of the jail in solidarity with those inside.[15] Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, supporters of Redwood Summer organized a rally and “lock-in” direct action at the Maxxam office there in coordination with the action in Humboldt County. Two days later, in Scotia, while fifty people demonstrated in the streets, three Redwood Summer activists decided to conduct a hostile takeover of Maxxam by walking into the P-L lumber mill office lobby and presenting the company with a new corporate structure of their own, this time devoted to sustainable logging and environmental stewardship. The three were immediately arrested and hauled off to jail. At least thirty women, sporting yellow ribbons, most of them undoubtedly organized by Mothers’ Watch and most likely not actually employed by or related to people employed at Pacific Lumber counter demonstrated chanting “Save our jobs!” repeatedly. The fifty demonstrators, once again refusing to be dismissed as “anti timber” as opposed to “anti corporation” simply started chanting “Save your jobs!” in response.[16]
It would be difficult to describe “the battle for Murrelet Grove”, or even “Reclaim the Redwoods Week” as successful. The grove itself was ultimately logged, reduced from 222 acres to approximately 75 by the end of August 1990 alone, and in this respect, the redwoods were claimed by Maxxam.[17] It is, however true, that many new activists experienced the slaughter of old growth firsthand and this no doubt raised consciousness. True, the actions slowed Maxxam down and cost the corporation thousands of dollars in stoppages and security expenses. More than likely this particular series of demonstrations actually kept a handful of timber workers employed a few days longer, just as all demonstrations did, though it would be impossible to measure this effect individually or cumulatively. And, even though Murrelet Grove was cut, it didn’t dampen the spirits of most of the demonstrators who refocused their efforts elsewhere on Maxxam’s attempts to cut old growth, such as at a 131 acre clearcut on Freshwater Creek a few miles to the north.[18] Nevertheless, it was apparent, at least to reporter Greg Goldin, that Redwood Summer activists were experiencing a great deal of fatigue, much disorganization, and at least a smidgen of hubris. While much of this could be chalked up to inexperience and lack of numbers, which was inevitable given the unprecedented scale of such a campaign, it was clear that much needed to be addressed if Earth First!, or for that matter, the IWW, would be able to actually become a significant force for change in the community. Many of these discussions were already taking place among Redwood Summer organizers beneath the surface, but as the Reclaim the Redwoods Week was in progress, something happened that forced these discussions and debates into the limelight: Dave Foreman announced his resignation from Earth First
Notes:
[1] “Lost in the Woods”, by Greg Goldin, Los Angeles Weekly, September 7, 1990.
[2] “Here and There in Mendocino County”, by Bruce Anderson, Anderson Valley Advertiser, August 22, 1990.
[3] “Lone Timber Foe Closes Hwy. 101: Man Dangles from Logging Protest Banner”, by Alvarado Delgado, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, August 20, 1990; and “Anti-Logging Protest Closes Highway 101”, AP Wire, Ukiah Daily Journal, August 20, 1990.
[4] “Lost in the Woods”, by Greg Goldin, Los Angeles Weekly, September 7, 1990.
[5] “The Battle for Murrelet Grove: Resistance as a Form of Elegy”, by Michael Robinson, Colorado & Wild Rockies Earth First!, Earth First Journal, Mabon / September 22, 1990
[6] “Lost in the Woods”, by Greg Goldin, Los Angeles Weekly, September 7, 1990.
[7] “The Battle for Murrelet Grove: Resistance as a Form of Elegy”, by Michael Robinson, Colorado & Wild Rockies Earth First!, Earth First Journal, Mabon / September 22, 1990
[8] “Redwood Summer Timeline”, by Karen Pickett, Earth First! Journal, Samhain / November 1, 1990; and Richard Johnson, Mendocino Country Environmentalist, various issues from June 1, 1990 – October 1. 1990.
[9] “Bitter End to Redwood Summer”, by Jane Kay, San Francisco Examiner, September 2, 1990.
[10] “1990: A Year in the Life of Earth First!”, by Judi Bari, Anderson Valley Advertiser, January 2, 1991.
[11] “The Battle for Murrelet Grove: Resistance as a Form of Elegy”, by Michael Robinson, Colorado & Wild Rockies Earth First!, Earth First Journal, Mabon / September 22, 1990
[12] “Redwood Summer Timeline”, by Karen Pickett, Earth First! Journal, Samhain / November 1, 1990; and Richard Johnson, Mendocino Country Environmentalist, various issues from June 1, 1990 – October 1. 1990.
[13] Detailed in “Redwood Summer Plays ‘Cat and Mouse’ in Woods”, by Clark Mason, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, August 21, 1990; and “37 Timber Protesters Arrested”, by Tobias Young, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, August 23, 1990.
[14] “The Battle for Murrelet Grove: Resistance as a Form of Elegy”, by Michael Robinson, Colorado & Wild Rockies Earth First!, Earth First Journal, Mabon / September 22, 1990
[15] “A Pattern of Violence”, by Richard Johnson, Mendocino Country Environmentalist, September 15, 1990.
[16] “Redwood Summer Timeline”, by Karen Pickett, Earth First! Journal, Samhain / November 1, 1990; and Richard Johnson, Mendocino Country Environmentalist, various issues from June 1, 1990 – October 1. 1990.
[17] “Bitter End to North Coast Summer of Discontent”, by Jane Kay, San Francisco Examiner, September 2, 1990.
[18] “The Battle for Murrelet Grove: Resistance as a Form of Elegy”, by Michael Robinson, Colorado & Wild Rockies Earth First!, Earth First Journal, Mabon / September 22, 1990