Monkey-Wrench Gang Sequel : Earth First! Just Rude, Not Violent, in Attempts to Stop Local Projects

Standing atop a remote, sage-dotted hill near UC Irvine under a perfect sky, Craig Beneville and Mike Scott explain the importance of protecting the area from devastation by bulldozer. And they’re willing to go to great lengths to save it.

Unlike environmentalists who don suits and ties to negotiate compromises with developers such as Irvine Co. Chairman Donald Bren, these guys are--well, rude.

At a recent meeting of the tollway agency, for example, they wore Bren masks, passed out “Bren bucks” and shouted, “I’m Donald Bren and I own all of you!” At another board meeting, they dumped cow dung in the aisles. Earlier this year, Beneville chained himself to the door of the tollway agency in Costa Mesa.

Beneville and Scott and their compatriots are cheered by environmentalists for having the guts to do things others shy away from. But at the same time the environmentalists are applauding, they are worrying that such provocative tactics may damage the cause.

A strategy of disruption and confrontation, say some public officials and mainstream political consultants, is doomed to failure. The collective critique: You don’t want to offend and alienate conservative Orange County, now, do you?

“I just find that their conduct is disgusting and so disrespectful,” says Newport Beach Councilman John C. Cox Jr., chairman of the San Joaquin Hills Transportation Corridor Agency.

“They won’t be effective,” adds veteran political consultant Harvey Englander.

“I can’t imagine the Laguna Canyon Conservancy going to a tollway board meeting and dumping cow chips,” says Mike Phillips, the conservancy’s director. “But we certainly understand their level of frustration.”

So who are these wild men?

They are among Orange County’s 30 or so members of a loose-knit, national radical group called Earth First!

Key tenets: As just one of many species populating the Earth, humans have no special claim to the planet; people may have to be relocated to restore natural habitats damaged by humans; and compromise with developers, ranchers, politicians and others doesn’t work.

Earth Firsters are perhaps best known for efforts to prevent logging in forests of the Pacific Northwest. Indeed, the group has been the target of several criminal investigations into whether members may have spiked trees with large nails to prevent logging.

Dozens of members have been jailed in Western states for actions ranging from blocking the paths of bulldozers to sitting in trees slated for cutting. In one case, a member of Earth First! in Wyoming allegedly pulled out more than a mile of survey stakes leading to a Chevron well site. The strategy is known as “monkey wrenching”--sabotage of development projects.

In May, 1990, two of the group’s members were injured when their car was bombed in Oakland.

Earth First! founder Dave Foreman pleaded guilty last year to a felony charge of conspiring to sabotage nuclear facilities. Foreman, who lives in Tucson, was given five years’ probation with the possibility of the conviction being reduced to a misdemeanor. While Beneville and Scott advocate civil disobedience, they say any acts of violence are the responsibility of individuals, not the organization. “Some people do their own thing,” says Beneville. “We certainly don’t advocate hurting people.”

But tollway agency spokesman Mike Stockstill believes that the national group’s use of civil disobedience and sabotage should automatically disqualify Earth First! from having any clout whatsoever. “Earth Firsters aren’t much better than thugs,” Stockstill says.

Beneville and Scott say, however, that the group’s tactics--such as tree-sitting in a Northern California forest--made the fate of that forest so compelling that Gov. Pete Wilson is now in favor of saving it.

In Orange County, members ardently oppose three planned tollways because the roads will cross some of the county’s most ecologically sensitive lands. But they also oppose new housing developments. In June, 1990, for example, 18 members picketed the Newport Beach headquarters of the William Lyon Co., one of the nation’s biggest home builders. The protesters held signs that said, “Orange County, Not Tract County.”

Beneville and Scott are itching for more action.

“We’re going to do demonstrations and occupations of offices of people who miss the point,” says Beneville.

Earth First! has dubbed this the “Sage Scrub Summer,” a period of “direct action” aimed at stopping the tollways and other projects that threaten to wipe out major areas of coastal sage scrub, home to a variety of rare species.

Typically, Orange County’s Earth Firsters meet at Cafe Irvana at UCI. Neither man matches Orange County’s button-down image of success. They both belong to the embryonic Green Party, which is on the fringe of politics here.

At 25, Beneville--who is single and lives in Irvine--is an unemployed 1992 UCI political science graduate, who is thinking about returning to school. “I’m living off my student loans,” he says.

Beneville adds that he has no prior history of political activism or involvement in community organizations.

“When I was growing up here, I thought environmentalism was a bunch of Chicken Little-ism--you know, ‘the sky is falling.’ But about six years ago I started learning about what was happening to the planet.”

The bearded and bespectacled Scott, who maintains UCI’s fiber-optic communications network, is also a neophyte activist, though he worked for the nuclear freeze initiative in 1979.

“I was a Boy Scout,” Scott says. “Some of the values of the Boy Scouts foster an appreciation of the Earth.”

“My friends and I used to stalk mule deer where all those buildings are now,” says Scott, gesturing toward the campus below one side of the bluff. “Sometimes there just comes a point in time when you say enough is enough. I think there’s been enough (development) here for some time.”

Divorced, Scott, 33, is a single parent who lives with his two children--Garnet, 9, and Opal, 6.

Both men understand clearly that they have an image problem with mainstream America, which could carry over into Orange County. But they and others feel there is a place for them in the county development/preservation debate.

While members of other groups such as the Laguna Canyon Conservancy and the Laguna Greenbelt would not dump cow chips at a tollway board meeting, these organizations’ leaders say Earth First! raises the public consciousness about environmental issues.

It was the Laguna Conservancy’s Phillips who invited Earth First! founder Foreman to address an outdoor rally against the toll roads earlier this year.

“I certainly worried about it beforehand. The tollway agency sure gave us a hard time about it. But, judging from the the reaction of the audience who heard his speech, we did the right thing.”

“We’re planning to train people in civil disobedience ourselves,” says Phillips. “It’s always been my suspicion that a lot of mainstream groups publicly denounce Earth First!’s tactics but privately cheer them on. It’s a fine line between trying to save the planet and not alienating mainstream America.”

“The environmental movement in Orange County has always had a soft edge to it,” says Laguna Greenbelt activist and Laguna Beach Planning Commission member Norm Grossman. “Maybe it’s changing. . . . Young people on the campuses are becoming active again.”

Greenbelt member Elisabeth Brown said a county official recently expressed to her a deep repulsion to acts of civil disobedience.

“We commonly think of it as people laying down in front of a bulldozer, or chaining themselves to something,” she says. “But a developer who destroys some sage scrub on purpose or who grades some land without a permit is also civil disobedience, and that’s what’s been happening here.”

Brown says tollway opponents “should find their own way. That’s how I feel about Earth First! My way is not the only way.”

Scott, who bicycles to work from Costa Mesa, says there’s a myth that all Earth Firsters are violence-prone radicals. “We’re a group of individuals,” he explains. “We’re lawyers, real estate agents, students, housewives, professors--people from all walks of life.”

Beneville was arrested last week for trespassing as he tried to deliver a “Biodiversity Begins at Home” message to President Bush at the Hyatt Regency Irvine. He says the action was part of “Sage Scrub Summer.”

What about future arrests?

“I will consider it a matter of personal integrity,” says Beneville, surveying the hilltop of prickly pear cactus, buckwheat and purple wild artichoke. “ . . . This is only a small part of California that’s at risk of being lost forever. The entire ecosystem is at stake here.”

“Sentiment without action,” says Beneville in quoting author Edward Abbey, “is the death of a soul.”