COLUMN LEFT : A Chill Falls on ‘Redwood Summer’ : Lumber companies step up their overcutting as bombing victims face charges.

Prosecuting attorneys look at Earth First! activists the way Nero looked at Christians. They flick through the late Edward Abbey’s “Monkey Wrench Gang” for examples of eco-sabotage, pull together a few news clips on tree-spiking and get ready to throw the book.

So when Earth First! activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were almost killed by a bomb that exploded in their car as they drove through Oakland last Thursday, they were promptly arrested.

Two days earlier, Bari had told a rally outside the Mendocino County courthouse that she had received more than 45 death threats. After the first 10, Bari half-joked, you get used to them. Now, badly mangled and hospitalized, she’s facing charges of transporting the explosives that blew up under her driver’s seat.

Last August, in daylight and in the middle of the town of Philo, a logging truck rammed Bari’s car from behind. By a miracle, the three adults and four children in the car were not hurt. The district attorney said there was insufficient evidence to prosecute.

Things are tense in Mendocino and Humboldt counties. The rally outside the courthouse was the launch for Bari’s brainchild, Mississippi Summer in the Redwoods, shortened for convenience to Redwood Summer. Its aim is to generate a surge of nonviolent civil disobedience akin to that of the Mississippi civil rights campaigns of a generation ago. The target is the timber companies, primarily the giant corporations Georgia Pacific and Louisiana Pacific, which have been overcutting for years and plan to accelerate this practice in the months ahead.

Redwood Summer’s opening event June 20 will be an effort to shut down Louisiana Pacific’s log export dock in Samoa, a little port town just south of Eureka in Humboldt County. Here, Louisiana Pacific ships out logs sawed in half, thus qualifying them as “partly finished products” that evade the ban on the export of raw logs taken from public lands. The demonstrators will also draw attention to the fact that Louisiana Pacific is setting up a large mill in Mexico to process its logs--resulting in the loss of hundreds of local jobs.

The overcutting is indisputable. The timber companies’ own statistics, buttressed by UC Extension analyses, show an overcut of 225% on both private and public lands. The companies know well that public opinion has turned against them. Hence the panicky clear-cutting scheduled for this summer; hence, too, the slanders against Bari and the Mendocino Earth Firsters as eco-terrorists driving spikes into trees to interfere with cutting machinery, heedless of possible injuries to loggers and mill workers.

But Bari has spoken out against spiking. There has been just one confirmed spiking in Mendocino County, in 1986, injuring one millworker. It was reportedly traced to a man from Los Angeles camping next to a timber site. The Mendocino County district attorney declined to prosecute.

Meanwhile, Louisiana Pacific, notorious for union-busting, has been repeatedly fined by federal and state oversight bodies for failing to protect its workers from occupational hazards. Fortunato Reyes, a Mexican worker in Louisiana Pacific’s Ukiah mill, was crushed to death last year when his supervisor ordered him to clear “the green chain,” a part of the lumber assembly line, while it was running.

The timber companies foster the idea that environmentalists are a bunch of middle-class people in Volvos, heedless of the fate of loggers and millworkers. But timber workers are well aware of the truth of overcutting. Bari and others have called for “sustainable yield practices,” meaning trees are not cut beyond the ability of the forest to regenerate. Otherwise, the jobs disappear when the trees are gone. This position is far from radical; it’s supported by a growing percentage of timber workers.

Bari strove to build coalitions with these workers, and that kind of politics made her dangerous enemies. No one familiar with Bari, Cherney and the Earth First! group in Mendocino County believes for a second that the two were wittingly carrying a bomb in their car. Fake Earth First! leaflets with threats to set the woods on fire and to attack loggers have been circulated through the mills. Demonstrators against overcutting have been physically attacked. Not a single elected official in Mendocino County has denounced the many threats against Bari.

So the murder plan against Bari and Cherney failed, but the victims are being blamed. Redwood Summer is off to an ominous start.