From Rhetoric to ‘Ecotage’ : Environmental ‘Fanatics’ Try to Keep Things Wild

Perched on a small, unsteady plywood platform 130 feet above the earth in the crown of an ancient coastal redwood tree, Greg King saw the light. It was a searchlight. And it was pointed at him.

Crews working for the tree’s owner, Pacific Lumber Co., had moved the light deep into the remote, old-growth forest northwest of here to keep tabs on King and another protester, Jane Marie Cope, as they camped in the trees last month to prevent them from being felled.

King and Cope eventually rappelled undetected down the husky conifers for a swift and silent escape, but not until they had turned their own spotlight--the glare of national publicity--onto the practice of clear-cutting virgin timber. The treetop antics also won no small measure of attention for Earth First!, a 7-year-old band of environmental activists and ecological saboteurs who promise “no compromise in defense of Mother Earth”--and back up that promise with everything from costumed theatrics to potentially lethal booby traps.

Indeed, the most notorious tactic associated with Earth First!--spiking trees with nails to inhibit logging and intimidate loggers--occurs regularly in forests from Texas to Washington. Not all spiking is done by members of Earth First!, which insists on the exclamation point in its name, but many blame the group for legitimizing the act as a means of protest. While Earth First! literature describes in detail how to spike trees and get away with it, leaders of the organization say use of the tactic--which can result in severe injuries to loggers--is a matter of individual conscience.

Chilly winter rains have recently coaxed Earth First! protesters out of the woods, but the weather has hardly dampened their intensity--or their rhetoric.

They decry wholesale extinctions, loss of rain forests, wilderness resource exploitation, air and sea pollution and excessive consumption. All of it, they warn, shows that humanity is close to fouling the Earth beyond redemption, and they must gum up the system until people radically alter their life styles.

‘The Biggest Crisis’

“Right now, we face the biggest crisis challenging biological diversity since the end of the Mesozoic Era, when all the dinosaurs disappeared,” said Dave Foreman of Tucson, Ariz., an Earth First! founder, philosopher and editor of the Earth First! Journal. “More plants and animals will become extinct in my lifetime than in all of the rest of history. We have to do something about that now, and compromise is not the thing.”

He called people a “pox upon the planet . . . a disease organism.”

If this is unlikely to win him many friends, he does not care.

“I’m not trying to argue with anybody,” he said. “I’m not trying to convince anybody; I’m not trying to convert anybody. I’m trying to reach people who already feel pretty much the way we do--wilderness fanatics.”

He has not reached those wilderness lovers in the Sierra Club, Wilderness Society and other environmental groups. They believe that Earth First! effectively harnesses frustrations people feel toward the Reagan Administration, but acts irresponsibly and offers no practical plans to deal with issues they protest.

‘Not Enough’

“We, too, have a view that there are some incredible environmental crises facing the world--depletion of ozone, increasing numbers of extinctions, famine in Africa,” said Michael McCloskey, chairman of the Sierra Club. “But this means it is time for responsible, serious world strategies to deal with them. Protests have their place, but they are not enough.”

Since it has no membership list, little organization and no formal leaders, it is not easy to gauge Earth First!’s size, except to note that Foreman said his newspaper is sent to 10,000 subscribers eight times a year.

The group’s decentralized structure and loose agenda also leave room for contradictions and inconsistencies--organizationally and individually.

Some members, for example, say “the system” is beyond hope, while others take pride in the reform legislation they have inspired; they balk at the idea of educating others, but demand fundamental shifts in popular attitudes.

At times, they can appear hypocritical, as when one attacked Styrofoam packaging while sipping from a plastic canteen, or when Foreman criticized human intrusion into the desert while strolling through his tract home at the very edge of Tucson’s low-density sprawl. Many criticize cars, but most drive.

Urgency, Simplicity

Despite this, Earth First! members are bound together by the urgency and simplicity of their cause.

“We say, ‘No more nuclear power. No more strip mining. No more logging in wilderness. No more damming rivers. Period. Period. Period.’ That makes our positions really very simple,” said Mike Roselle, another Earth First! founder.

Their ideas are based on the philosophy of biocentrism, described by George Sessions and Bill Devall in the book “Deep Ecology.” One basic tenet is that all species--plant and animal--have an inalienable right to exist, regardless of whether they are useful or attractive to humans.

That idea is one reason why Earth First! members often disdain the legal system.

“The fish in the river or the elk on the mountain are not plaintiffs in the lawsuit; they have really no voice at all in the law,” Roselle said. “If we can’t live without them, we are going to have to give them some rights.”

Slope to Disaster

Each animal and each stand of trees means so much to Earth First! because members believe that the Earth can tolerate only so much activity before its systems collapse. The next forest that is mown down or the next species made extinct may push humanity on a slippery slope to disaster, they say.

That sense of urgency accounts for the zeal, the willingness to take risks and their casual attitude toward the law. And they are no more afraid of hyperbole than a trespassing charge: Firsters almost without fail compare themselves to Resistance fighters in World War II and compare environmental damage to the Holocaust and other war crimes.

“I don’t see much difference between bombing a city and clear-cutting an old-growth forest,” said King, 26, the tree-sitter. “The only difference is the species” of the victims.

But merely stopping clear-cutting is not enough, King and others contend. By having exploited natural resources so aggressively in the past, people now owe a debt to restore the environment, even at the expense of property rights and dams--all dams.

‘Reclaim Some Places’

“Our argument all along has been that it is not enough to just save all the remaining wild places, but that we have to reclaim some places,” said Foreman, a 41-year-old New Mexico native and former Barry Goldwater Republican who makes a point of mentioning that he eats meat and likes to fish for food.

“We should reintroduce the grizzly, wolf, elk and bison where possible. These little vest-pocket backpacking parks aren’t adequate; you need large areas where evolution can continue, where you can have a complete predator-prey relationship.”

Vest-pocket backpacking parks, he makes clear, include Yellowstone National Park--at 2.2 million acres, the largest national park outside of Alaska. Earth First! prefers more radical sanctuaries, such as miles of pristine California coastline, a 25-million-acre Great Plains bison preserve and a new hardwood forest covering the eastern third of Ohio--even though that would require relocating the people now living in those areas.

“We need to show the self-restraint that we aren’t going to have to use, pave over, develop every square inch of the Earth, that we can leave some of it alone,” Foreman said.

Ideas Anger Loggers

Not surprisingly, these ideas puzzle and anger loggers, foresters and others who see themselves not as people who would extinguish life on Earth, but as folks just trying to make a living at a job that provides people with homes, furniture, paper, packaging, chemicals and other modern staples.

“Why do I have to keep justifying what I do when I know it’s not wrong?” said David W. Galitz, public affairs manager for Pacific Lumber Co. “In the least I find it frustrating, because you can’t sit down and reason with them. . . . They just won’t listen.”

Earth First members scoff at such criticism.

“The corporations have already taken 95% of the old growth,” said Darryl Cherney, 31, a frequent spokesman for the Northern California tree-sitters. “I think that’s about as compromising as I want to get.”

Firsters acknowledge ignoring some laws, but argue that the timber industry and government regulators do the same. Cherney noted that Humboldt County Superior Court Judge Frank S. Petersen earlier this month scolded state foresters for ignoring their own environmental laws.

(Earth First! is not always as successful. Late last month, Humboldt County Superior Court Judge William F. Ferroggiaro issued an injunction barring King and Cope from Pacific Lumber property. The company, meanwhile, is suing Earth First! protesters for the cost of security measures taken during protests.)

Keeps No Records

Ecological sabotage, known popularly as “ecotage,” is an important part of Earth First!’s reputation, but it is difficult to assess how much of it is done. For security reasons, Earth First! keeps no records; the FBI says it is aware of the group but is not investigating, and timber and mining companies decline to discuss the problem for fear of encouraging it.

However, ecotage is common enough to prompt Sen. Jim McClure (D-Idaho) to author a bill, the Forest Users Protection Act, making tree-spiking a federal crime on federal lands. Such acts now are not against federal law, the FBI said, although tree spiking has been illegal in California for more than a century.

McClure said he wrote his bill after learning about several examples of ecotage--”terrorism carried out by a handful of cowardly individuals”--such as the use of tree spikes in California and booby traps in Montana.

Ecotage is not new to the environmental movement--Bolt Weevils in Minnesota, Ecoraiders in Arizona and other small, fringe groups pioneered them 15 years ago--and not all ecotage today can be attributed to Earth First!. A spiked tree caused a band saw blade to fragment in a Cloverdale, Calif., sawmill last May, seriously injuring a mill hand, but authorities discount an Earth First! link.

How-To Sabotage Book

Still, Earth First! often is the first suspect for such acts because it has promoted them to an unprecedented extent. Foreman has even written a detailed how-to book for saboteurs, “Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching.” Monkeywrenching is a phrase from “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel about such a group of ecological saboteurs.

Foreman said he has sold 10,000 copies of the camouflage-green paperback, which instructs how to destroy lumber mills by spiking trees, wreck off-road vehicles by spiking roads, and topple power lines and billboards.

Although “Ecodefense” does not discuss firearms or high explosives and does urge caution to avoid injuring monkeywrench victims--”after all, we’re in it to save trees, not hurt people,” advises one passage--the book still gives Earth First! an unsavory reputation among mainstream environmentalists, not to mention lumberjacks and mill hands.

Foreman and others say monkeywrenching is a small part of what they do--and always is the last resort.

Nonviolent Intervention

“You know what? Fifty percent of what we do is probably letter writing,” Roselle said. “I think we can show more successes from the nonviolent direct intervention (such as sit-ins) than we can from the monkeywrenching.”

“What makes us different,” Cherney said, “is that we do have the teeth of monkeywrenching to back up our work.”

Foreman said the decision to monkeywrench is an individual choice, not one he can make for others nor one for which he can be held responsible.

“Davy Crockett once said, ‘Be sure you are right, then go ahead.’ I think that’s a real good philosophy,” he said. He only asks that monkeywrenchers “get away from the arrogance of thinking that you’re a human being, at the top of evolution’s ladder, and are protecting something lesser than yourself. . . . Just sit under a giant redwood or out in the desert and try to get in touch with the place and, in effect, become the place defending itself.”