COLUMN LEFT : The Leaven in the Loaf of Activism : While Americans praise Mandela, Earth First! practices what he preaches.

At about the same time as Nelson Mandela was being prudently trundled through the streets of New York in a glass cage, Redwood Summer swung into action outside the main gate of Louisiana Pacific’s plant at Samoa, just outside this North Coast town.

It was a scene that told many stories, like one of those vast 19th-Century historical paintings. From where our crowd was standing on the sand dunes with our backs to the Pacific, gazing east across LP’s perimeter fence, we could see immense piles of roughly trimmed tree trunks.

Many of these trunks are no thicker than a human thigh, sure sign that what’s going on this summer is not prudent harvesting, as the timber companies love to maintain, but rather a delirium of cutting, against a deadline of minimally more serious regulation, particularly if a couple of initiatives--notably “Forests Forever”--pass this fall.

Opposite us was the export loading dock, whence LP ships out some of the timber taken partly from public lands. Over to the right was the pulp mill tower and beyond it the outline of the Simpson Paper Co. buildings, and beyond them the export loading facility of Victor Guynup, father-in-law of Doug Bosco, congressman for this district and regarded by many local environmentalists as a sellout.

So much for the forces of darkness in their larger outline. In the foreground were the dutiful minions of these forces, company guards and off-duty cops on day contract busily filming demonstrators mustering for the Earth First! action.

On our side of the highway, the forces of light amounted to about 700 people. There was an hour or so of speeches, including a denunciation by this columnist of the mainstream environmental organizations--such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the Sierra Club--that were happy to use the name of slain Amazon rubber tapper Chico Mendes in their fund-raisers, but that have sat on their hands and kept silent about Redwood Summer and the attempted murder of Earth First! activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney.

The sit-down blocked logging trucks for about an hour, 44 were arrested and, with one exception (an officer rabid with boot and Mace spray as he tried to pull an Earth Firster off the cab of a truck), the police behaved well. It was an auspicious start to Redwood Summer, whose next major action is outside the Georgia Pacific plant at Fort Bragg on July 21.

All day long I found myself thinking a lot about Mandela in the context of this Earth First! action.

Extremism. Mandela went to prison for 27 years, courtesy of a CIA snitch, as an “extremist” who challenged white racist power. In those 27 years, white racist power was slowly forced to confront the demands of him and his movement. People, timber executives and “responsible” environmental leaders among them, call Earth Firsters extremists, too. They sit down in front of logging trucks, perch on top of old-growth trees. They confront. Every attempt to reform evil policies starts with confrontation. The full name of Redwood Summer is Mississippi Summer in the Redwoods. These days they make movies about that first Mississippi Summer. Back then they were killing the extremists.

Symbolic politics, real politics. Mandela is a symbol. He is also reshaping the politics of South Africa. Earth First! uses symbolism. Blockading LP’s plant at Samoa for an hour is symbolic. But this symbolism widens the political spectrum, challenges the comfortable agenda of business-as-usual. Earth First! is the leaven in the loaf.

But what about Mandela? He is given a hero’s welcome in cities across the United States. He is hailed as a symbol of the aspirations, so cruelly thwarted, of blacks in this country. But when he departs, will poor people--that is, mostly blacks and other minorities--have gained anything, beyond the indefinable comforts of that ridiculous word “empowerment,” the milksop substitute for actual power? The symbol awaits its political correlative.

War abroad, war at home. It’s safer to admire things through a telescope. Chico Mendes, labor organizer and fighter for forests, became a hero to First World people. But Mendes was far away and so is the Amazon. Where’s the support for Bari, Cherney and Earth First! here in California? It’s fine to denounce the people who stole 27 years of Mandela’s life. If he had been an American black with those politics, he most likely would have been a victim of the FBI’s Cointelpro program in 1969. He would either be dead like Fred Hampton, shot in his sleep, or he’d still be a political prisoner, as at least 15 Black Panthers including Geronimo Pratt are to this day. Will amandla --power--be more than just this week’s catchword? The people who shout Earth First! live up to the promise of that phrase.