EARTH DAY ECO-GUERRILLAS : Democracy Is the Way to Hug a Tree : The tactics--destroying property and endangering lives--of Earth First! ‘monkey wrenchers’ hardly qualify them as the Freedom Riders of the environmental movement.

The celebration of Earth Day, 1990, will begin one of the most important chapters in the history of our species. It will be written by a generation that came of age amid the confrontational, often radical politics of the 1960s and ‘70s. In light of the lessons of those times, it is worth a moment to assess the radical offspring of the environmental movement of the 1990s.

There are citizen groups who believe that violence in the name of environmental or animal protection is justified. Their tactics are “monkey wrenching.” Earth First! is a West Coast environmental group whose leaders have advocated violence against the lumber and oil industries and developers. Members call themselves eco-guerrillas. Their training manual instructs followers in the methods of “monkey wrenching.” They have sabotaged logging equipment, ski lifts and power lines, “spiked” old growth timber to render trees mortally dangerous to loggers, strung garroting wire at neck level to prevent a cross-country motocross race and advertised in San Francisco for terminally ill volunteers to run high-explosive kamikaze attacks on dams in Rocky Mountains streams.

When the cause is just, many of us sympathize with or even participate in direct-action tactics that stretch the limits of the democratic process. Civil disobedience is a time-honored, legitimate response to political and economic exploitation. It requires nonviolent tactics, including the willingness to endure the blows of the oppressor without returning violence and the willingness to endure imprisonment for the “crime.” It requires extraordinary courage. By contrast, the Earth First! activists attack at night, destroy property and machinery, endanger human life and then flee.

Like Southern blacks during the 1960s, the environment is vulnerable and subject to exploitation. But the Freedom Riders proved that by daring to challenge the constraints of our democratic institutions the reins of power could be wrested from even the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow. They adhered to the democratic process even while testing its limits.

By its approach, Earth First! takes sharper aim at the rule of law than it does at the despoilers of the environment. Their tactics must be condemned as must the tactics of anyone who favors force over democratic principles: Brazilian generals whose legacy is the burning forests of the Amazon, Soviet leaders who presided over the barren seas and irradiated landscapes of Russia and the totalitarian regimes of Eastern Europe who traded the health and beauty of their nations for contaminated soil and air, dead forests and genetically mutated animals and deformed children.

We can take hope from some examples that, with courage and persistence, our system can work to preserve our resources, even against the most powerful adversaries. Employing nonviolent militancy, a tiny flotilla of Greenpeace volunteers stopped the most powerful nations on Earth from their multimillion-dollar annual whale slaughter. In democratic India, illiterate farmers of the Chipko movement hugged trees and thwarted bulldozers with their bodies and saved the Himalayan foothills from commercial logging. On the Hudson River, a small group of fishermen and other activists fought successfully to protect striped bass habitat against a proposed highway project in Manhattan that was funded by both houses of Congress, supported by both New York senators, the Army, the governor, the mayor of New York, the President, the city’s most powerful developers and unions and its daily newspapers.

Justice William O. Douglas envisioned a day when even trees would have standing to bring lawsuits in court to protect themselves. It sounds peculiar, but in 1985 the endangered Palila bird and some human friends successfully sued the state of Hawaii to stop destroying its habitat, and the spotted owl has sued the federal Fish and Wildlife Service to better protect Pacific old-growth timber.

Decades of political action by environmentalists and their friends have brought about the enactment of state and federal statutes that give far-reaching rights to protect the environment. Democracy is ever evolving, but violence, the tyranny of the few, can mutate, even arrest its development.

The democratic process offers the best hope for protecting our natural resources. Should we ever reach the advanced state envisioned by Justice Douglas, it will be due to a courageous citizenry in whose hands democracy has evolved from a system that merely governs human affairs, to one that recognizes and protects the sanctity of all creatures and all life.