By Alexander Cockburn – Anderson Valley Advertiser, July 4, 1990
At the action launching Redwood Summer outside Louisiana-Pacific’s export dock at Samoa was Mike Roselle, one of the handful of people who, along with David Foreman, founded Earth First!. As Earth First!ers brought a logging truck to a halt, climbed up on it and draped it with banners, Alexander Cockburn talked to Roselle about Earth First!, its problems, its successes and the difficulties its most famous figure, David Foreman, has made for the grass roots people.[1]
Alexander Cockburn: It seems to me Earth First! has a problem. Its grass roots activists constantly have to account for some terrible statements made by David Foreman and by Earth First!’s original inspirer, the late Edward Abbey. Foreman’s said that nature—in this case famine—should be allowed to take its course in Ethiopia, and both he and Abbey said immigration from Central America should be curbed, and the refugees turned back. And of course a pseudonymous writer in Earth First! Journal, “Miss Ann Thropy,” said AIDS was desirable as a form of population control. I know people who are keen on Earth First! and eager to work with it or in it, but are really put off by this sort of thing and a sort of anti-humanist Malthusian kick that Foreman is on.
Mike Roselle: There’s a big difference between, the grassroots reality of Earth First! and the national image we’ve projected. In (1987) there was a tree spiking and a worker, George Alexander, got badly hurt. Now the tree spiker was an elderly Republican—from Los Angeles who had nothing to do with Earth First!, but three days after the accident Louisiana-Pacific had a press conference saying we’d done it. We’ve done actions for years, but whenever they had us on TV they also had George Alexander speaking through his bandages.
Another problem is that we have a newspaper, Earth First! Journal, in which we print a wide range of viewpoints. It’s easy to excerpt pieces from there and say, well, this is the kind of thing they support.
AC: But Mike, Foreman’s and Abbey’s statements weren’t misinterpreted or taken out of context.
MR: No, they weren’t. They stand on their own, and they are recognized as being racist, extremely ignorant and insensitive. There’s big debate in the grass roots of Earth First! over these issues. The problem is that Foreman doesn’t want to discuss the issues any more. He feels his words speak for themselves and he’s been misinterpreted. So the rest of us are left hanging and we have to deal with this dirty laundry that Foreman has left all over the place and to defend ourselves on positions we don’t even have. Any effort to resolve this has been met by the stubborn opposition of the current editors of the Earth First! Journal, John Davis and Dale Turner, two people (in Tucson) not involved with the grass roots of Earth First! and hand-picked by Foreman. There’s a lot of bitterness right now in Earth First! about the total loss of control of the paper and how, as grassroots organizers, we haven’t been able to address the most important issues. When we walk into the offices of the local peace committee some place and want some help on old growth, we don’t want to have to answer for David Foreman’s statements on immigration or his position on the future of tribal people in Ethiopia. Foreman has announced his retirement and continues to say that he doesn’t speak for the movement. Unfortunately, he gets a lot of phone calls from the media and they don’t know that, and I don’t think he makes it clear to them. I think he’s become a liability to us, preventing us from getting across the image of us that we, think is more realistic. I think we’re starting to see a change in that as people start to realize that, indeed, as he has said all along, he doesn’t speak for the movement.
AC: Who does speak for the movement?
MR: I like to say the movement speaks through the campaigns. We’re an action organization and that’s the only reason we exist. We have purposely stayed away from offices and staffs and this type of overhead because we like to be spontaneous. Now, the other part of Earth First! which puts out a newspaper has an office, four paid staff members; in fact they’ve got two offices; they fly each other across the country in jets; that’s not Earth First!. . .
AC: Where does the money come from?
MR: It comes from people who assume they are supporting the Earth First! movement, but in fact are supporting a very small percentage of people who work on a publication and none of that money goes to the movement. So don’t subscribe to the Earth First! Journal and think you are listening to the voice of the movement, or that any of that money will be used in that movement because none of it will. They are not even printing articles that are generated by the grass roots now. The new editors even refused to print my criticisms of the new structure. Try this: pick ten or twenty people out of this crowd and ask if they’ve read the last four issues of the Journal. My guess is you won’t find more than one person that has.
AC: What’s the answer?
MR: We have newsletters, we communicate with each other pretty well, but it’s a real problem for us. We have this national newspaper which in name and in looks and the way it’s presented appears to be the voice of the grass roots movement when in fact they’re very arrogant and alienated from the grass roots movement, and this has become more of a problem every year, and right now it’s on the verge of coming to a head, because there’s so much dissension in the grass roots.
The editors of the Journal are entrenched. They’re not going to make any move to resolve this. So we have to confront them. It may be that we do this through an alternative national paper. We already have one. Why should we put out another one? We would like to democratize our own paper. But we have a stand-off here. It’s not happening. So whether we will somehow be able to get our input into the paper or start another one will be decided by the end of the summer.
AC: What kind of values do Earth First! groups have?
MR: When you look at where we are organizing, you’ll find our groups are part of this more progressive movement toward social justice and economic justice as well as environmental sanity. We’re really not that different from the people working in the civil rights movement or anti-war movement. We’re not a bunch of reactionary, redneck cowboys who want to save the wild Rockies. That’s part of it, but really there’s so much more.
When we got involved in old growth ten years ago, the older groups said we couldn’t organize in these sparsely populated timber communities. They said we couldn’t get old growth or the spotted owl on the front pages. We tried a different bold approach: non-violent direct action.
We went out there, got arrested, beat up, sued, run over by bulldozers, and we’d come back. We slowly won a grudging respect from the loggers. They’d never seen a Sierra Clubber out there. We were accessible and even if they didn’t agree with us, they knew where we drank, they knew where we lived. The communities themselves became less afraid of us, and that’s where the timber companies reacted and tried to portray us as a very violent, secretive almost cultish force in their community. But that’s kind of a rearguard defensive action against us and it’s not really working.
AC: There’s a lot of talk. here today about environmentalist-worker solidarity and coalition building. As a realistic assessment now, what’s the situation, the chances for making common cause?
MR: Well, our biggest ally in this has been Louisiana-Pacific and Georgia-Pacific. Their actions have been so arrogant and outrageous that we’re not sounding so unreasonable any more. And since we’ve had this presence and since we’ve shown our commitment, they’re not crossing the line and joining the Sierra Club or the National Wildlife Federation. They’re crossing the line and getting involved with community grassroots groups who may not necessarily be Earth First! groups, but it’s the kind of groups we encourage and work with. One of the benefits of all the work we’ve done on the North Coast is that along with us there have been all these other grassroots movements that have been growing as the issue gets more attention and is getting more urgent. People may have got into Earth First! and then felt they couldn’t be that confrontational all the time and saw a lot of other things that weren’t being done. There’s so much to do that no one organization can do it all. So the grass roots groups are all taking a piece of the action and they’re dividing up the turf. We’ve got restoration groups, groups concerned primarily with fisheries, groups on chemicals and pesticides, toxic emissions, wildlife, public lands groups. Then we’ve got people looking at the business end of it, worker buy-outs and all that stuff. We work together, and so it doesn’t mean they’re not going to get involved with this movement that we’re part of.
AC: What do you think will happen with the “big ten” environmental movements over the next few years?
MR: They probably won’t get involved till it’s time to take credit and send out mailers saying they saved the old growth. They’ve never been willing to become part of front lines; they feel threatened by grassroots groups who are not willing to trade off acreages at $20 lunches in Washington DC. The two ways of working are so different. We may win a new law in Washington DC, but we may lose it with a rider passed by a powerful senator two years later. We’ve seen that happen over and over the last ten years. But grassroots support like this—it’s something that will always be here. So we can’t just save the old growth; that’s not going to solve all the problems up here.
AC: What is the salient characteristic for you of an Earth First! group?
MR: They’re generally people who have some experience in the environmental movement, but were frustrated by the slow pace of change or the bureaucratic structure of those groups. Really, you’re talking about more traditional, conservation-style environmentalist, not a social person so much as one that really likes solitude and appreciates wildlife. We seem to have that in common, though we do have people who are more urban-oriented. Generally they’re people who like to spend a lot of time outdoors. A lot of our work gets done on camping trips and river trips, rather than having meetings. Most of our meetings are held outdoors over weekends, or three or four day gatherings in the wilderness, or near wilderness. So we have that. Obviously there are some limitations to our diversity. We’re mostly white. Most of the people do not come from the more dis-enfranchised segments of the US community. We have to deal with that. We are trying to work with as many other groups on a similar level. It’s important for us to get people from Richmond to come up to save redwoods, but then we should go down to Richmond and protest at the Chevron plant. But I think we’re a ways away before we see bus-loads of inner city folk come up here to preserve wilderness. It doesn’t mean that they don’t support us, or we don’t support them.
AC: Where are you originally from?
MR: Louisville, Kentucky. When I was ten years old my family—seven children—moved out to California in a ‘58 Chevrolet two-door. My dad worked out here for a while, then we went back to Kentucky. Then I left home when I was sixteen. That was about 1971. I traveled quite a bit. I was involved with white Yippies and the larger anti-war protests at the time.
AC: How do you feel about a filling out of groups such as Earth First! toxic groups, environmental groups. Environmental Project on Central America and so forth into a broader movement. Do you think that’s good, or do you think that with a movement comes bureaucracy and other problems?
MR: Well, we think we’re trying to develop not so much a movement or an organization as a process. Teaching people how they can get involved in these issues from filing appeals against the timber harvest plans, all the way up into going out in the woods and lying in front of the bulldozers, and we’re even willing to discuss what happens after that if that doesn’t work, although that’s the shaky area that always gets us into trouble. Everyone can do this. They don’t have to join Earth First! to do this. They can join their own groups. They can act independently. A lot of people like not to join but to help with artwork, songs, money, or by just going up and removing survey stakes and clearcut markers in old growth. That’s got to be inspiring to individuals, rather than giving money to the Sierra Club or delegating political responsibilities to them.
AC: What frightens the big environmental groups about Redwood Summer?
MR: The environmental movement has been pistol-whipped by the snail darters loss in Tellico dam, by the furbish lousewort, and they have this mentality that they have their place and they’ve got to operate in that place. But we’re not going to stay in that place. You’re not going to pigeonhole us into being the kind of organization that you want to do business with. And we’re willing to confront the industry itself. The Sierra Club has never said clearcutting is wrong, or invasion of all wilderness is wrong. They want to seek some kind of solution that pleases both sides. Well, you can’t please Louisiana-Pacific and Earth First! at the same time.
AC: What do you think will happen with Redwood Summer?
MR: This is a good start. This is very different for us. When I organize an action with the people we know around here, we know who’s going to show up; we know what we’re going to do pretty much, but we might have a dozen people sitting down at a timber sale, or a hundred people at the L-P office in Ukiah. We know pretty well everybody, But this summer we’re going to have to mobilize people we don’t even know and we’ve never heard of, so it’s more intangible for us. We always have fun at our events; and that’s a very important thing to get people back to the next one. People aren’t going to come to an Earth First! demonstration after reading about it in the San Francisco Chronicle. They’re going to come to it because one of their friends came and liked it or something like that. We started off at the Grove action with 30 people. There’s probably 20 of them here today, and that’s eight years.
Notes:
[1] This is the first mention of the growing rift between Dave Foreman and Mike Roselle which also reflected a growing split between the Earth First!ers running the Earth First! Journal and most of Earth First! in northern California.