Interviewed by Beth Bosk – New Settler, Issue #26, November 1987
Beth Bosk: I once asked Dave Foreman where in his mind lay the fine line between rebellion and revolution.[1] And Foreman did a very wise thing. He took back the language, answering me first, with words he—Earth First!—were giving definition to with their own actions.
He said to me at that time, “It is resistance to insanity that is encapsulated in Monkeywrenching.
“Monkeywrenching fits in with the bioregional concept.
You go back to a place and you peacefully re-inhabit it. You learn about it. You become a part of the place. You develop an informal and alternative political and social structure that is somehow apart from the system.”
We talked some more, and he added, “Monkeywrenching is a means of not only resisting the destruction of what you hold dear and beautiful, but it’s also a means of self-empowerment, of finding alternative means of relating to other people, and other life forms. … Yes, there is a fundamental difference between ecodefense resistance and classic revolutionary or terrorist behavior.
“I think,” he mused, “that some of us have basically been brought forth as antibodies against the human pox that is ravaging the plane. That’s the only way I can figure it out.”
I could not have been more struck by the antibody analogy than when, two years later, almost as an afterthought, Darryl Cherney told me that he was hitch hiking through Humboldt County and was left off at the doorstep of the EPIC offices in Garberville, possibly to the day that Maxxam took over Pacific Lumber Company in November of 1985.
Greg King pretty well covered the political reasons why you and he perched for a week in the All Species Grove as it was being clearcut by Maxxam loggers. And though I certainly don’t want to restrain you from referring to those reasons during our interview, what I would most like to focus on is what it is like in the canopy midway up a tree. What the smells are like. What the other-species activity is like. What your own life becomes like.
Five million years ago—give or take—a 4-foot hominid—small brained and frozen thumbed as she was—assumed an upright stance, and left her tree perch for the savannah. Very few of us have returned for a consecutive stay since then.
Jane Cope: It’s easy to get a sense of the forest as a living being when you sit there day after day. Time is no longer regulated by a clock. Sunrise happens. Sunset happens. Things flow very much more normally, and at a more acceptable pace. You can actually feel yourself slow down and tune into the pace of the forest.
And you can almost get a sense of what it would be like to be a tree and be there every sunset for a thousand years.
You really get an opportunity to tune into the pace of the biological community.
We didn’t get to see as much wildlife as you would have thought. A few birds. We saw crows, nuthatches, an occasional woodpecker. The crows that we saw were generally flying by. The smaller birds were eating in the canopy. At one point I did see a red tail hawk with a snake in its talons on its way somewhere else. That was very exciting, to see it from that perspective.
Mostly there were insects. We saw several different species of ants, and many different species of spiders. Many species of beetles.
BB: How were they contributing to the forest? What was their business on the same tree that you were inhabiting?
JC: Every plant and animal in the forest is recycling. They are taking nutrients from one storage unit and moving it through their bodies and turning it into a nutrient that something else can use. “Business” is not the right word for it. They’re all equal members in the forest community, in my mind. They’re all connected and they are all productive, but not in any separate way. What you really get a sense of when you are up there is of how you are an individual, and there are a multitude of other individuals and your purpose in the forest is no greater than theirs.
BB: Did you feel any inter-species collaboration going on between you and other critters on the same tree? Were they at ell curious about you there on your platform—you being the unique presence?
JC: The beetles would come in out of space and land on your lap—almost as if they wanted to check you out—and sit there unafraid. You could get them up on your finger and get a real close look at them, and they were absolutely beautiful. They have a very colorful, often iridescent armor. Then, it seemed, when they had their interests answered, they would move on. We saw many, many different types of beetles. In fact, I never saw the same beetle twice. And each one was vastly different from the others—they had different additions, different color schemes, and different routes and lifestyles and adaptations in the canopy.
I saw individuals—ants—moving up and down the trunk of the tree and what I really felt fascinated by was their ability to climb over this thick, flakey bark with deep furrows—several inches deep. The bark is a very rugged terrain and the ants move quite quickly over the flakes and down into the furrows. I was impressed by their ability to cross the crevices. And I was impressed that they were each on their own—following the same pathways—but each solving the problems of traverse with a mind of its own.
There were definitely mysteries. At dusk one day, we saw something that I guessed was a termite. Greg was sitting with me and a swarm of them came through and landed on my platform. Immediately when they landed, their wings dropped off. These were elongated, reddish insects…like a large ant. They had segmented bodies with very transparent wings—which dropped off—and we were startled. Then they left—without wings—and I’m assuming they went into the tree, but it was dusk and late, and we did not track them to their destinations.
But to answer the other part of your question: Did I feel any specific collaboration between myself and the other species? Not in terms of the wildlife. But I definitely had time to tune in with my tree and feel the physical support I was getting from my tree.
And also, from the forest as a whole, I was getting encouragement. When I need strength I go to the forest. And I breathe, and I live with the forest, and I come out regenerated. Sitting on my platform, I could feel that sense of strength and power coming from the forest and coming into me…[pauses] When I’m there, and when I’m looking up into the canopy, and when it is quiet all around, I can almost feel the respiration of the trees.
BB: Where was it that you ware perched—In terms of the full measure of the tree?
JC: The trees were 250 feet tall, maybe a little bit more, and we were both at the first branches, we were perched at 140, 130 feet respectively. Greg was a little higher than I each time, but we were both hung at the lowest branches.
One day I put some time into climbing up the tree, and with quite a bit of work, got up to 190 feet. I didn’t have tree climbing equipment, so I was doing it like a rock climber.
It is exciting up there. It is relatively easy to get around. There is almost always a branch within reach, or you can flip a line up to a nearby branch and work out a system whereby you can climb your line. And it feels comfortable up there. It feels like I have returned home.
I remember having an ant on my hand and lifting it up towards my mouth to blow it off, and I stopped myself. Had I blown the ant off, it would have fallen 140 feet to the ground. So I put it carefully back on the bark and watched it travel away.
There is a whole intense network of travel-ways that the insects use through the furrows of the bark, along the branches to get out to where the greenery is. But much of the activity is at such a microcosmic scale, and then later in the week we were talking with loggers and there was disturbance going on. We never did see deer or elk, which I think you would normally see if you were in a place like that and being very quiet.
BB: Tell me how the perch proceeded.
JC: We were at the All Species Creek perch for five days. The first two days we were by ourselves and that was one of the highest times of my life. I had such clear perception of my biological place in the community. Just the passage of time was normal. There were no constraints on me to answer the phone; get into the car—nothing unnatural. Even the smells are different up there—more needles, because it is more needles where you are hanging out. When you’re on the ground in the forest there is more of a soil smell, more plant. You become aware of where you are that way. The fresh air up there is so impressive.
My platform was very comfortable. It was three feet by six feet, with a suspension system that allowed me to stand up on the platform. That made it very livable. We stashed our gear so it was convenient, and that doesn’t leave many options. Your back pack goes on one side and your food goes on the other and your water goes somewhere where you can use it—that’s about all the choices that you had. I had a lot of my things tied under the platform which helped to balance it.
Those first two nights were idyllic. Evening time is a really nice time just to be quiet and appreciate the changing light. You hear much more of the sounds of wildlife at that time of day. The morning time too, is wonderful. We always woke up with first light and just would lie in our sleeping bags and listen and smell and taste and appreciate. There’s a morning activity that is much more boisterous than at any other time. Evening activity is more deer crashing around, beings getting to places, rather than waking up and feeding. There is a definite difference in the noise level.
BB: On the third day, the loggers were sent to frighten you from your perches.
JC: Yes. There was an onslaught of human disturbance on Wednesday. And the noise levels never did return to what they had been. In terms of the wildlife, there just ceased to be so much activity. It would go somewhere else. The first couple of nights we had enjoyed the spotted owl calling. The last three nights, we weren’t able to hear. There would be one or two calls and the generator would go on beneath us. Noisy human presence in the forest sends away the wildlife you would otherwise see. I’ve spent a lot of time sitting still in the forest and a lot of creatures will walk right past you. But with the kind of activity that was happening with the loggers guarding us with generators and lights and rigs coming and going, it precluded all that.
BB: I once interviewed a man who had taken a kayak out alone into one of the straits up in British Columbia. He was looking to be with a whale, to be alone with it. And suddenly he found himself very near an orca, out on the ocean, far from shore; and he wondered what on earth had beset him, to go off so foolishly.
But he told me his sense of danger lasted only momentarily and it was replaced by sense of goodwill—towards the orca, towards the ocean, towards the universe itself. He said the orca turned towards him and he could feel the whale reading his intention sonarly, reading the subtle vibrations he was sending out through the thin kayak shell; and the whale reacted to that message with its own stance of good will. I wondered then if you too felt as if you were being read by other creatures in the forest at the time.
JC: I think of the whole forest, and I mean the whole forest, from the redwood bioregion all the way up to Sitka Spruce bioregion in Alaska and from the highest mountains to the coast. In my mind, that is one big forest but it is in a lot of different stages of climax and it has a lot of different bioregions, but it is one entity. I can feel a sense of community and communication with that entity. And I definitely get positive feedback for what I am doing, which is defending that entity of the whole.
BB: How did it start for you?
JC: Magic. [smiles] I was encouraged to go to a meeting. It turned out to be a non-violent preparation. Some individuals who had just done the first blockade on the Bald Mountain Road in the Siskiyou Mountain Range of Oregon came to try to en-courage more people to do what they had done. They had such an energy about them and such a clarity, that I was immediately turned on, and in a week or two, I was in the second blockade.
This was five years ago when I was 22, a student studying biology. I was two years into a biology degree and enjoying it very much, but experiences in school helped me put together the fact that nothing is independent of everything else. And our activities as humans are not independent from the rest of the biological community.
I felt that I was learning a lot of very interesting details while the eco-system was literally going down the river. So I dropped out and began to learn how to organize on that Bald Mountain Road campaign, and began to learn the meaning of non-violent direct action, which is what I am most interested in pursuing. It is the tactic I am most interested in using for the old-growth struggle. I have been involved full time ever since the spring of 1983.
BB: I don’t think it’s by accident that so many of you in the forefront of the Earth First! movement come from Oregon. The Wobblies had a hand in carving its history. The kind of legislators Oregon has sent to Congress the past two generations tend to be as outspoken and maverick as from any other state in the Union. And the bills Oregon passes upon its citizens are always ecologically frontrunner kind of bills. And sound.
So it doesn’t surprise me when an Oregonian like yourself takes action which might seem odd or extreme, because you take a look at the front running Oregonians have always been responsible for, then you see it as the bell weather of what’s to come rather than out of the ordinary or outside the mainstream.
One of the faces of the Earth First! movement is a looking backwards at Paleolithic periods as an appropriate model for the future. I’d like to talk to that for a while, because in many ways it reminds me of the way the Women’s Movement rewrote herstory ten years ago in a way that best invigorated feminists.
JC: The history that we are creating is what we are doing now. But, I think we do look back into the ages for examples and models, of the way human beings should exist on the face of this plane. I am amazed that society continues to exist and proliferate the way that it does. It is incomprehensible to me. It is so far from what is reality and what really works.
Human beings need to have sustainable life-cycles which are tied to the earth and to the land that is available to them. They need to have a sense of place. And they need to make a “living” in that place that doesn’t harm all the other members of their immediate community—be they river, trees, wildlife. And the last time we did that best was when there were about 20,000 people on the earth.
When we were hunting and gathering, when we were a shifting society, we had the least impact on our environment.
BB: And now we are more than two billion. So how do you feel we should rein back from that number and the furious lifestyle First World peoples lead and impose on others?
JC: We need to change the dominant paradigm. We need to get back to an understanding of our connection to the earth, and a real awareness of how much we are taking from it. It would take for every individual to make major changes in their lives, and that would mean having fewer children, using a lot less. And even then, it would take years and years and years of recovery. Years of raising children who are able to use less and have a sense of place and that sense of respect. It would take years of regenerating forests and rivers, of cleaning out the wastes we’ve deposited from all of the eco-systems.
BB: A few years ago, the primatologist, Sarah Hardy, published a book, The Woman That Never Evolved[2], which looks at other female primates as they really are in the wild, and not as male primatologists imposing their gender values on their field observations have portrayed them in the past. For instance, female primates tend to be more aggressive, more political and more self-provisioned than was previously noted.
Now, as a feminist, I have always had trouble extending the concept “Keep Your Laws Off My Body” to the matter of abortion. In this day and age it is ridiculous to continue to equate life, and personage and individuality with the birth moment. In my mind, once another life has started and you deliberately end it, you’ve murdered. And that is the choice you are making.
One of the insights you get from Hardy’s book is that there is a continuum on which fertility, birth control, spontaneous abortion (miscarriage), abortion, infanticide and even gender-choice all occur. And notions and judgments as to what is natural and what is un-natural and criminal are just terms.
Ironically, something likewise is happening In the Fourth World because of what Victor Perera called salaria, the sadness of native people who’s culture vanishes in their generation. And my notion is that the infertility happening here can not merely be chalked up to the toxic overlay we have given our cities and suburbs and farmlands, that we need to de-populate globally, and here our very pollution is giving us as much assistance as the best-intended zero-population regulations in China. All ways are painful to the generation deprived of children, but less painful than extinction, less painful than global warfare.
I guess what I’m trying to get across, is that Gaia (which is the concept of this planet as a living, aggressively self-protecting entity) is going into a phase, an epoch perhaps, of depopulating itself. You are a part of the self-defensive strategy of this plane. Darryl Cherney is certainly one of the antibodies. And the Pope knows of what he speaks when he says we shouldn’t be mucking around in Petri dishes and sperm banks to make more people[3].
What does it take to become a tree percher?
JC: Tree climbing is something we’ve been doing for three summers. Basically, I just got my “tree legs” this summer. And I really like it a lot. It’s very independent. There’s no one to bail you out of any situation you might get yourself into but yourself. So it is very empowering.
It’s relatively simple too. It’s been explained to me like a puzzle. All the pieces fit together. You just have to see how they do that. The puzzle is a multitude of tools. The tools are either hardware-like a caribiner, or an 8-ring for descending, or a jumar for ascending—or ropes and webbing, a bunch of flexible cord that you can tie into knots, and then the certain knots create certain tools.
For ascending we use a prussic knot, which is just a simple loop that is made out of 9 or 6-mil purlon. You fasten it in a prussic knot around your rope and it allows you to move up. But when you put your weight on it, it stops you. So if you have two of those, you can move one leg up, stand on that leg, move the other leg up.
Hanging from that prussic knot, you would have an etreau, which is a rope ladder. That’s made out of one-inch webbing, and it is a couple of loops. Your foot fits in those loops, and you move one side of your body up at a time just like you’re walking up a ladder one foot at a time. It gives you something like a step ladder to work with.
We had a traverse—a rope between the two trees so we could go back and forth. When I was up there, my traverse was ten or twelve feet above my platform, so I made myself a real simple ladder out of a piece of one-inch webbing to reach it. Once you become familiar with what the tools can do and what you need, you can start making your own tools to fit the job.
BB: You and Greg are on two different trees connected, essentially, by a cord. There must be a very strong bond that grows between you. Did you find yourselves having tandem dreams?
JC: No. We tried to dream together, but we didn’t. It was a couple of days before we got the traverse set up correctly and boy, was it wonderful to be able to get a hug from a friend I mostly we used the traverse to talk quietly so the loggers couldn’t hear what we were talking about, and to send equipment or food back and forth. We were about 120 feet apart.
BB: How does the branch change as it goes sideways that far up? And what was it like for you? Your major intimacy was, of course, with the trunk of the tree.
JC: It did seem somewhat unnatural to be hanging at 140 feet out in the middle of space, held up by this hardware and these tools. One of the things I do give human beings credit for is their agility and their ability to figure out systems, and to do things that are unnatural but not harmful. And it is not harmful to the environment to hang out that way. It is challenging and a lot of fun to figure out how to make things work and how to make them safe. And sometimes we would go out on the traverse just for the fun of it, like other primates…You are fixed on the trunk because the branches break, and redwood branches tend to be more brittle than some other conifers. You definitely have this connection—your lifeline is the trunk. But I had a familiarity with the branches above me, because I got up into them and played. Redwood branches slope downward. And it was fun to jump off the platform and go sailing through the branches out into space. And then you could look around and really get a good look at the trees. It is yet another perspective than perching.
BB: What is sunlight like up there?
JC: Sunlight is varied. Oftentimes we’ve gotten stuck under the branches and in the shade the whole time. There was another sit that was like that all the time. All the time, I think I had 20 minutes of sunlight all day. Alcott Springs had more wind and more cool temperatures and more mental barrage from the machinery there. The All Species Creek sit was much more peaceful. We drew straws and I had the sunny tree.
I had sun first thing in the morning, and intermittently a couple of times during the morning, and then a nice patch in the afternoon. And I had the sunset, so I was real fortunate. You are a lot warmer; it is much easier to be comfortable.
So Greg would often use the traverse to come over and sit in the sun, and I did the same on the Alcott Springs sit. I would go over to his platform in the afternoon for an hour or so to sit in the sun and talk.
BB: What did you converse about?
JC: We talked of many things. We forged a friendship in the first tree-sit. One of the conversations, of course, was about what they were up to, meaning the security people.
We talked a lot about logging practices and what we were seeing happening on the site—noticing snags being cut down, noticing really big trees being hauled out.
In one instance in Alcott Springs, the crew actually shut down all the machinery for just a minute or two so that we could hear them falling a really big tree.
They took the time and effort to organize complete silence so that we could really appreciate what they were doing.
BB: You mean recognize the heroic nature of the work they do?
JC: No. I believe they were trying to rub it in. Trying to say, “You don’t want us to do this, but we’re doing it, by God!”
BB: Rather than to say, “Listen to how overwhelming the sound is when a tree comes down?” I meant there are different ways that men display themselves. Sometimes it’s like pissing on an opponent, but other times it’s more of a strut—a matter of pride, a display that puts no other being down, but says, “I feel good about myself and my work.”
JC: I think loggers as a group tend to feel darn good about what they do. There is a lot of back slapping and camaraderie as they go about it. But I think what they were trying to show us is that they were having their way with the forest, and they wanted us to hear it. And suffer through it.
BB: Were you treated more as a sex-object or a Joan of Arc by those same loggers?
JC: Both. They were impressed that a woman would get up there and do that. Loggers in general, I think, are one of the more sexist groups of men, and there were some very sexist comments, bordering on disgusting.
But at the same time, there were some gentlemen on the crew who expressed honest appreciation for the stuff it takes to be willing to do what we did. And I got as many positive comments as I got negative comments. I came away with more respect for the crew, and definitely, I came away with more respect for Pacific Lumber crews as a whole. They have a real team spirit that I can admire and relate to.
BB: They spent three nights out there guarding you. Let’s return to that story.
JC: The first morning when they arrived, it was comical, and I feel regret in not having a tape recorder, because we went through all the classic arguments—every single classic argument came up, and we discussed it.
“These trees are rotting.”
“Of course they are rotting. That’s what they are supposed to do.”
“This is private property.”
“Well, property is theft. There are some things that no man can own. And a forest is one of them. An ecosystem is some-thing no man can own.” We went through a lot of biological arguments.
BB: What is it like, a conversation from tree-top to ground?
JC: Actually we talked pretty much in conversational tones. Only a little bit heightened from that. But I could sit on my platform and hear their conversations very clearly, the loggers on the ground. Sound lifts up to you.
There’s nothing for them to do but look up to us, so it had some sense of: “You’re in a place of power. You’re in the forest with the forest as your ally. You’re out of reach. Completely out of reach.” So from my perspective, conversations could go on for days, and that would be fine.
And I didn’t at all feel as if I was talking down to them, I felt as if I was carrying on good conversations. But you’re almost removed from the conversations. It’s like you can step back and see it as tragi-comedy.
BB: And what was It you saw from your stage.
JC: They came in from all sides, boisterous and laughing—playing themselves, it seemed as a typical crew of loggers—and sat between our two trees on the ground, many of them lying on their backs looking up—which is what I would do, too. It’s a more comfortable way to carry on a conversation with someone who is above you.
So it was real relaxed. And we talked of them too. We talked about the fishing places they go to. Where they take their families when they have free time. We listened to how those trees are paying the bills that feed their children.
People have families and mortgages and don’t want to move. And I believe they have every right to make a living. But I think it can be done so much better than it is being done with so much less damage to the environment. And that was where we finally got to that first day: I found myself saying to them, “You guys have got to fight for your right to make a living in an ecologically sound way and to make it over time and to leave a resource here your sons and daughters can also log if they want to.”
BB: Are you comfortable with that word “resource”? I hate it myself. It always seems to me to mean whatever it is someone is going to butcher more delicately the next time round. Like the salmon out there in the ocean is a “resource” not living beings with their own intents.
JC: Perhaps it is because I do not always think of resources as needing to be used. I think of it more as a word taken apart—re-source—a “return-to” as its meaning.
It became very clear after awhile that it was a very basic difference in perspective between myself and the loggers.
When I’m the forest, I see a bunch of living entities, a bunch of individuals. Every fern is an individual that has the right to live. I was talking to guys who go out into the forest and they see board feet. They see peelers. Or beams. It’s a totally different way of looking at the forest. And that was the bottom line we came down to. We had to agree to disagree, agree that we just didn’t see things the same, And after that was there between us, at times I could get a glimpse at the way they saw things, and also, they could sometimes get a glimpse of what I see when I’m out there.
BB: What are the biotic reasons to leave old-growth alone? Old growth has made good lives for the men who bring it down. In many ways, lives we moved here originally to emulate.
JC: There are a myriad of economic and biological reasons, but I want to get past all that. Because I think the most important thing is that the forest has a right to exist for its own sake.
We don’t have to justify its existence by how much board feet we can get out of it, how many trout the streams are going to produce. It’s a living entity and it has the right to exist—without any kind of justification of excuse made up by humans.
BB: Most age-tested religions adopted precepts that turn out to be good for us after all. The dietary laws in the Muslim faith that prohibit eating pork, prevent trichinosis infestation. The proscription against strong liver-destroying drink, or, like with the Maya Lacandones, rituals which encourage mild liver—cleansing drink-prohibitions, rituals never precisely attributed to those reasons.
And there is a sense of righteousness, godliness, felt by the deep ecologist you base your habits on. But to respect the right of a forest to have an uninterrupted life of its own—wilderness—benefits us. And I would like you to talk to some of those ways.
JC: I experienced a stark difference walking through the Buseron Timber Harvest Plan, which is now complete waste-land. It’s turned up soil looks like it is half CAT roads, which means heavy machinery has moved over, compacted, disrupted, about half of that land. Stumps, slash, downed trees—the land looks like a moonscape, and the stark difference walking from that, over the hill and into the All Species drainage where every-thing is alive, everything is living and breathing and functioning, and sustaining itself—makes it hard for me to take it all apart and be specific. The land on the moonscape will never be the way it was. Never.
In All Species Creek, things are still relatively healthy, even though there had been some selective logging in there. It is much cooler. The shade from the canopy, which is mostly un-broken, keeps everything cool and also moist; and there is a big difference between the dry moonscape and the moist forest. I want forests left to their own sake to rot and recycle and regenerate.
And we benefit. Clean water is one of the most important resources people can relate to on a daily basis. Every one of us, from that first drink of water in the morning, should give thanks for having clean water—those of us who do. That is one of the things the forest produces. Forests really do grab onto moisture in the atmosphere and siphon it into the earth. Wherever there is a tree, there is much more water in the earth around that tree. Clean air is another. And when I was in the tree, having both of those things made me feel a lot more alive, a lot cleaner. A lot less consumptive.
Biological diversity is something the forest produces. And it really is the most important thing I ever have to say. The more diverse the ecosystem is, the stronger it is, and the more chance it has to outlive our petty degradation of it.
Also within that diversity, we as humans have the opportunity to observe wildlife, wild plants and to learn from this. It is not the artificial hearts that have prolonged most human life. Almost every known life-prolonging medicine has its source in the wilderness, in the rain forest and was discovered by Western people by observing how older peoples—even other primates—make use of these roots and barks and flowers in ways that never destroyed their sources. Tropical rain forests have produced a large percentage of our medicine, and the potential that’s there for future discovery is being destroyed without being calculated.
Maxxam now owns one quarter of the redwood old-growth left on this continent. And these groves that are left throughout the West and throughout the world—even though we can talk about them in thousands of acres—are comparatively so small, looking at what used to be there. We need to protect everything that exists. We need to add regeneration zones outside of those zones to protect what is left as much as possible. As time goes on, fresh air, clean water, wildlife habitat, biological diversity, are going to become more precious as commodities to human beings, and we need to preserve as many of our options now for all these values as well as medicinal values. But again, this whole issue gets back to human values. And clean water is important to me, and I feel better when I breathe fresh air, but that’s not why the forest is important to me. The forest is important to me because it is alive. Because it is. Because it has the right to succeed.
The most important thing that individuals can do is to help preserve wild lands. The hope for clean healthy forests in the future rests in these small scattered groves that have survived thus far. Every individual in their daily lives can take steps—they don’t have to climb a tree, they don’t have to stand in front of a bulldozer—but every individual can take steps which will contribute to preserving these wild lands.
And those include supporting people who do climb trees, supporting legislatures who are aware of the importance of these biological islands, and right down to simple things like consuming less and recycling. Very simple things can, over time contribute to the change in awareness that is coming, and allow us to preserve our old-growth.
BB: Greg tells us one night the loggers shone big lights up at you and the tree and you made a deal with them to turn it off, you felt attuned to your tree. Did you feel the tree responding in any way to that impertinence, the spot lights?
JC: I’m just not that sensitive. But I’m sure it did. I was sensitive to my own situation. It was nighttime and I had really enjoyed the peace and quiet and timelessness of the forest before they brought out the generators, so I was thinking more in terms of my own peace and quiet.
BB: What kind of deal was it that you made with them?
JC: In that instance, Greg had come to talk about when we would leave. It was towards the end of the week. He came across the traverse and sat on my platform, and he hadn’t been there but a couple of minutes when they turned on a second generator which was at the base of my tree. They essentially had one generator and one floodlight for each tree.
They turned that on and I realized it was probably because they were nervous about us talking.
BB: You don’t think it was because they were voyeuristic?
JC: Possibly. But they definitely had a commitment to the team, and they did not want any foul-ups. They wanted to catch us coming down and I think that they were nervous about us planning an escape.
BB: And yet you did escape. How did that happen?
JC: That was the first time. It was easy. I was surprised at how easy it was. The thing that enabled us, obviously, was the noise of the generator, and the fact that the lights cast a shadow. I was working on my platform by the light of the generator, packing my bags, thinking, “This is crazy. I’m doing this like it was broad daylight,” but when you’re 150 feet down there looking up, everything beyond the platform was in shadow. So I was in a shadow all that time, and yet I had light to work by. And then the backside of the tree, the side of the tree away from the generator; also cast a shadow; and we just rappelled down in the shadows. The only reason we were able to do that was because of the noise of the generator and the lights.
It was Friday night and they had just brought the generators out at the end of the work day and set them up, so we had a chance to talk about things. We saw a couple of our jungle bunnies across the river and made wild gesticulations to them so that they kind of knew something was going down. They crossed over and waited in the cold for hours. Meanwhile, we packed our stuff as fast as we could, so it was 10 or 11 o’clock when we rappelled down, and the noise of the generators was still in their ears, and I think they were watching TV, and they didn’t hear a thing. It was so nice to have two guys waiting to pick up our packs and walk us through the woods. You lose a little bit of your agility; you lose your “land legs” up there. So I remember stumbling away from these huge, huge redwoods—this beautiful grove—and looking back, and this light is still shining and you can see your trees and the platform and a lot of other trees. The fog and the light created a steaming jungle picture in my mind, and I just remember stumbling away from it, taking leave of my tree.
It worked out real well. Maybe we should have stopped at that, but we went back, and I’m glad we did the second tree sit. The second tree sit I got spiritually and physically higher than I’ve ever been in my life. And I also have more of an under-standing. Of the economic trap the loggers are in. One of the goals of non-violent direct action is to see your counterpart as your brother, and I feel that now. It’s not just a theory. I feel it. I got to the point where I was saying, “You guys, you have to fight for your right to sustained employment. You can’t let this big corporation rip you off.
“You’re selling them your health. You’re selling them your strength.” And it is not an easy job. People do wear out in industrial jobs like that. They wear out their bodies, their well being.
That is my platform in the future. I think activists and loggers should be working side-by-side against the big corporations. I think we can keep all these guys working in the forests. But it is not going to be cutting old-growth. It could be rehabbing streams; it could be putting old roads to bed that never should have been built; it’s going to be doing a lot of hand clearing instead of herbicides. The work is there. It’s just where we put it.
BB: There are men who choose to be fallers and choker-setters because they find it heroic work—bringing a thing down as big as that; making the decisions that do it safely and cleanly—for themselves and the crew, if not for the forest. Hand clearing brush is a different kind of work. You are not going to find many loggers taking kindly to becoming handmaidens to the forest.
JC: I understand there is a whole myth and machoism that goes along with what they do. They work hard and they are “real men”. You can see that in the way they treat each other… and the way they treat the forest. And that is why we have some of the problems we have in the world today.
BB: There was a cut on 409 In Mendocino County—this is state-owned forest land and a G-P crew. And they took out the trees in such a dreadful way, the next storm; you know some of those houses have had it. They took out the redwood and Doug fir and left the white fir, known hereabouts as ‘piss fir,’ which has practically no root system and falls in the next real wind after a selective cut. There’s a precedent for that happening on that road.
Anyway I have a friendship with one of the loggers working this cut, and halfway through it we run into each other and he tells me he’s on the crew and just about everything they say about this now-controversial cut is true. And right off the wall, I tell him I’m going to show up with 37 bare-breasted women and hug the rest of the trees.
This is absolutely off-the-wall—l never have any intention of following through, it is this imaginary strategizing where I have an Amazon-like image In my head of women of all different ages hugging trees. And I know the loggers are going to behave much more gingerly around bare breasted women. Given their givens, it’s going to be very hard for them to grab a bare breasted woman hugging a tree. And there have been Mendocino County women in the past chained to giant redwoods in the Woodlands, who were roughly ripped away from their trees. So in my own mind, I was taking into account the machismo and making it work for the strategy. But believe me. This was pure, unadulterated fantasy. I don’t have time to be a bare-breasted woman.
Every man on that crew, I was told later, showed up to work with a camera. All week long they waited for this action to happen. Posted lookouts. Waited for us to come. What I had flashed as a strong Amazon-like action, they were prepared to treat as a peep show.
But one of the things this story says is that the loggers themselves are ready to believe anything can happen and will. We’ve at least reached that level of consciousness where they understand people are prepared to do just about anything these days to save some of these groves. Right now that same road is fighting yet three more proposed cuts, and this time they are prepared with a lot of pre-publicity, and challenge in the board rooms, and it looks like they are going to stop them.
JC: It is happening all over the world. And it was the women from the villages of the Himalayas who came forward and hugged the trees and saved their rain forests and thereby saved their own lives. Those trees were on slopes, and other villages where there had been cuts had been swept by floods. It’s all the same here. We’re just not connected to the land enough to recognize it.
BB: The other thing village people have to their advantage, I feel, is that they work more as a unit. And one of the good things about the kind of community that grows in Mateel and even on the ridges of the Mendocino Coast, is that watersheds of people have organized themselves as if they were villages of people who are willing to act in unison on issues like that. Call it Watershed, Road Association, Small-But-Necessary School.
JC: It’s happened that way in Australia, New South Wales in the rain forest fight there. People, the re-inhabitants, burying themselves in roads, preventing a dam, keeping a lot of rain forest from being flooded. Old hipsters with their other trips—their water systems, their gardens—already together.
BB: I don’t want to overlook the aspect that the basis of these really risky actions is a confidence in the rest of mankind. We just expect other humans—including the embodiments of Maxxam—to value human life to the extent that they are not going to cut down a tree you are perched in and they are not going to run over a head that tops a body buried five-plus feet into the ground.
Jane: But they’re going to make you think they are going to. And because I was female, they were worse on Greg than on me.
But there was one time, I remember, when they were threatening to cut down my tree. And I was ready. I had my gear tidily put away. My personal effects were in order. And I remember completely the sensation. I was squatting and I was ready to go. I was ready to die with the tree.
BB: I want you to talk to that, Jane. About being prepared to be a martyr. I’m not sure many in this nation know this is how far this movement has flung—and it has.
JC: Squatting at the edge of my platform, looking down to the ground at this crew-and-a-half of loggers loudly complaining and threatening—bullying—I felt that it was really okay if my life ended in that way. Like everything was one and at peace, and that my duty would be fulfilled. And I thought, in terms of the overall struggle even, it would be a productive thing.
It is not, of course, that I want to die. But I see that individual tree as being a being. I see that individual tree as a living being that has as much right to life as I do. Our lives are equal. As are all the other individual lives in the forest. And if I could trade my life for the life of a forest or of an individual tree, that would be worth it to me. I truly see us all as having the same value.
I think the international connection is important. There have been many rain forest struggles involving indigenous people standing up and protecting their homelands throughout the world over the last 20-40 years. It is important that we realize these incidents are not isolated, that there are ancient groves all over the world being threatened by the same basic paradigm of corporate greed that is threatening these groves, and are being successfully protected by individuals standing up and saying what is right and what is true.
And our own reaction, at some point, is to protect our forest, but our standard of living is so elevated on resources that are transported and are on paper that it takes us longer to feel it at home. In the cities, we don’t have that connection like the Lacandones Victor Perera spoke of in your last issue, where we see the trees sliding into our river and polluting our drinking water. It takes longer for us to catch on to the fact that our environment is being destroyed and our lives follow that. Here in the country, the connection is not as obtuse.
By the way, it is important for you to know that for the most part I was not threatened by the loggers. We used the opportunity of having days and days and days with these guys to sing to them once in awhile. I like to share songs by Walkin’ Jim from Montana, which he writes on long treks in the wilderness. All of his songs resound beautifully in old-growth forest. There’s a nice echo. They express in a very full way, what is going on in wilderness, and also, how humans are impacting the wilderness. The loggers really tuned in. We serenaded them during the day when the generator was off and they were on security. Mostly they were sitting around chatting, sometimes, as I said, laying on their backs, talking to us.
BB: Did they ever serenade you?
JC: [laughs] No. They did not sing. One of them was a professional climber, Dan Collings. It was his duty to try to get those platforms out of the tree, so he was always watching for his opportunity—which didn’t come—but he was always on duty. Actually, he felt like a brother. He’s our age. And we had a lot of common interests. His family history is logging and he’s committed to being a logger. I now have more concern for guys like him who are young people investing their lives in this industry which just doesn’t have a future. Corporate people are literarily taking his life’s blood.
BB: A few days after you left your perch for the last time. Greg returned to the area to rescue the film he had stowed. Were your trees still standing?
JC: Yes. We were on the far end of a timber harvest plan, so they are working up the creek to where we were sitting. And we’ve been charged with destroying timber, so our lawyer will motion to keep those trees from being cut as evidence at our trial (smiles broadly).
Footnotes:
[1] See Ecodefense, New Settler Interview, Issue #8, December 1985.
[2] Hardy, Sarah, The Woman That Never Evolved, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.
[3] Bosk is specifically invoking a variation of James Lovelock's “Strong Gaia” hypothesis.