By Bruce Anderson – Anderson Valley Advertiser, February 28, 1990[1]
Monday in Ukiah Earth First! announced plans to bring students from all over America to the Redwood Empire this summer to confront Big Timber. Earth First! militant Judi Bari says the idea to call in idealistic students from campuses around the nation comes from a similar call in the early sixties to head south to register black people who were systematically denied the vote in southern states.
“It worked then,” Bari says, “and it will work now. Young people are absolutely disgusted at the rape of the last redwoods in the world to satisfy the greed-lust of a handful of millionaires. We think we can get more than a thousand people out here this summer to stop logging right in its tracks in Mendocino, Humboldt, Trinity, and Del Norte counties.”[2]
Bari points out that regulation of some variety is coming to the timber companies. “They know that either one or another of the pending initiatives or state or federal regulation is in the works. Too many people are disgusted with the radical overcut going on. So the timber tycoons are going to cut as many trees as fast as they can this summer. We’ll be there,” Bari promises. “Congressman Bosco might want to call it ‘A watershed summer.’” Bari says the civil rights volunteers who journeyed south in the early sixties we’re met by authorities as rigid and as unyielding as those who dominate the timber areas of Northern California. “People who went to places like Mississippi to register black voters were up against local power brokers who had no regard for the law. It’s the same here, even though most people, including most loggers, know the forests are being destroyed for short-term profits. We will fight the authorities with non-violent civil disobedience. We will put our bodies in the way of the cut just like the old civil rights workers put their bodies in the way of authorities persecuting blacks back then.”
The young people are expected to begin arriving in significant numbers in early June when school is out. “This is going to take a lot of community participation,” Bari says. “We’ll need people to house and feed volunteers like the churches and black communities of the South housed the freedom riders of the early sixties.” Earth First! organizers say they will call upon residents of the many and varied watersheds to help organize demonstrations against Big Timber. “We’ll be contacting people who live in all the local, watersheds, from Big River to Schooner Gulch,” Bari promises, “because they know the areas intimately and want to save them.”
Bari and Earth First! troubadour Darryl Cherney traveled to Sacramento Monday for a national student organization called the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC). “The students were very enthusiastic about a summer of direct action in the Redwood Empire,” Cherney reported. “Ten universities were represented, including UCLA and San Diego State to the south and Humboldt State to the north,” Cherney said. SEAC puts out a newsletter distributed to colleges throughout the country. Notice of this summer’s action will soon be made known to student environmental activists on all the nation’s campuses…
Notes
[1] A similar call ran in the April 1990 Industrial Worker.
[2] Historically, however, very few actions have been organized in the counties of either Del Norte (north of Humboldt County) or Trinity (East of Humboldt County) by Earth First!. Some Redwood Summer demonstrations took place in Sonoma and Marin Counties (south of Mendocino County) however, and at least one week of demonstrations took place in Sequoia National Park located far south of the area covered in this history.