By Alexander Cockburn – June 20, 1990[1]
People call Earth First!ers “extremists”, and looking around here today, it’s obvious that you are. I’d like to talk about another “extremist”, Chico Mendes. Now Chico Mendes was a leader of the rubber tappers in the Amazon, who was murdered on December 22, 1988.
Why was he killed? Because he and his fellow rubber tappers were trying to defend their rainforest, which was also their livelihood, from the land barons who have been burning the trees off and speculating with the land. These land barons are to the Amazon what Louisiana Pacific and Georgia Pacific are to the north country.
When Chico Mendes and his fellows began to make serious headway against the land barons, they hired some goons and they killed him. Now we should be clear who this “extremist” Chico Mendes was. He was first and foremost a labor leader, who was looking to protect the livelihoods of his people. He was also an environmentalist. He and the other rubber tappers were prepared to put themselves on the line to save the forest. They developed “emphates”, or “stand-offs” where they and their families would literally stand in the way of the logging crews and the gunmen and face them down.
So what happened when Mendes was murdered? The major environmental groups up here in the US rushed to denounce the killing. They sent out mail-shots by the thousand with Chico Mendes’ face on the envelope, raising money in his name. Most of
this money, by the way, didn’t get anywhere near the Amazon. Some of these mainstream groups, like Environmental Defense Fund really went to town on Mendes.
Now what happens when the war comes home? What happens when it’s no longer a matter of a first world group looking at a third world killing, but when the killing or the attempted killing happens right here? Today, as we stand here at Samoa, Nelson Mandela is being given a ticker tape parade in New York. He’s a hero from the Third World. But what would have happened if Mandela had been a black leftist living in the USA? Most likely, he would have been murdered along with Fred Hampton, in 1969, under the FBI’s COINTELPRO program.
Now there wasn’t that much of a difference be-tween what Mendes was doing and what Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney have been doing. All of them were fighting to save trees and look to the long term interests of local workers. But when someone tried to kill Bari and Cherney, what did all the mainstream environmental organizations do then? How did they feel about Redwood Summer?
Well, the Sierra Club had nothing to say about the attempted murders; and about Redwood Summer they said, when I and some colleagues at The Nation called to ask, that they would not be involved with Civil Disobedience. EDF and World Wildlife and National Wildlife all had nothing to say about the attempted killing and Redwood Summer. From all the mainstream organizations it was the same wretched story of cowardly refusal to comment.
Some groups did come through. The Indian Treaty Council, the River Council, Rainforest Action Network, and Greenpeace. So what does this tell us? That “extremists” are honored, save in their own country, because “extremists” challenge business-as-usual.
For over a hundred years corporate America has followed the tactic of “divide and rule”. Set worker against consumer, or worker against environmentalist. I don’t think this tactic will go on working for much longer, because more and more people clearly see what the options and the choices really are. And I’d like to leave you with a truly wonderful example of how people who’d been the deadliest of enemies came together to form an alliance.
Notes:
[1] Alexander Cockburn, a long time columnist for The Nation, and a resident of California’s northwestern region, spoke at the June 20, 1990 rally in Samoa. Here are some excerpts from that speech.