Fighting for Treedom

Julia “Butterfly” Hill received most of the things she asked for on her birthday--a carrot cake, a pint of fresh-squeezed orange juice and a bottle of organic zinfandel.

But the top item on Hill’s wish list will have to wait.

“I want a hot shower,” says the Earth First activist, who has spent 70 continuous days living in a tree to protest the logging of ancient forests and who celebrated her 24th birthday on Wednesday perched 180 feet up from the ground. “I want it to last so long that the whole city [of Eureka] runs out of water, and I want a case of wine to sip while I’m doing it.”

Hill has been wearing the same clothes since she climbed the 1,000-year-old, 200-foot-tall redwood, which looks over Humboldt County’s Eel River.

“I know it’s really nasty, but that’s what you do,” she says. In more than two months, she has bathed three times. “When it’s only 30 degrees outside, it makes for a very quick sponge bath.”

Engaged in the highest and longest-lasting tree sit in Earth First’s 18-year history, Hill endures frequent thunderstorms, wind gusts of up to 90 mph, temperatures just above freezing and verbal harassment by employees of Pacific Lumber, the company that owns the land and that has a state-granted right to log the old-growth tree.

“If she is concerned about her safety, her option is to come down,” says Mary Bullwinkel, director of communications for Pacific Lumber. “She is trespassing on private property.”

To remove tree-sitters, Pacific Lumber often sends a “climber” to scale the tree and remove the platform and the sitter, but because of the vast dimensions of this tree, he is unable to do so. Bullwinkel would not discuss what action the company plans to take.

But Hill refuses to leave the tree, despite limited amenities. Living on an 8-by-8-foot plywood platform enclosed in a dome of multicolored tarps, she uses an old margarine tub for a toilet, candles for lights and a one-burner propane stove to cook meals.

“I’ve had some really yummy [food] up here,” says Hill, a former restaurateur who has prepared Mexican, Italian and Asian dishes--all vegetarian--while in the tree. One Earth Firster claims Hill’s cooking is so good that visitors don’t want to come back down to the ground. Fellow activists make supply runs at least every other day, walking three miles through steep, forested terrain to get to the tree, where they stuff food and water into a sack, which Hill pulls up through the branches with a haul line.

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An Arkansas native, Hill has been involved with Earth First since October 1997. She came to the West Coast with friends and fell in love with the beauty of the trees while camping.

“When I entered the redwood forest for the first time, I fell to my knees and began to cry because it was one of the most amazing spiritual events I’ve had in my entire life,” says Hill, who is the daughter of an evangelist. “The cathedral of the redwoods brought me to my knees like no man behind a pulpit ever could.”

After she asked how she could help save the trees, others involved in the movement to save the redwoods encouraged her to sit in the tree as a show of support. She didn’t have experience, but after a brief training session in rock-climbing techniques, she scrambled up.

“That was my first connection with [the tree], because to alleviate my fear of heights, I started looking at the sap and these beautiful designs in her bark and I lost my fear,” she says.

Hill’s latest tree-sit is her third. Two weeks into this sit, she removed the harness securing her to the tree and hasn’t worn it since. Hill says she spends most of her time free climbing, often barefoot.

The tree is named Luna, so called because eight people hiked out with the materials for its platform during a full moon, stashing building materials in the brush until they could come back. When they returned the next day, Pacific Lumber was already logging.

“It was a real good motivator,” says Patrick Mulligan, a 28-year-old who works for the National Park Service and who helped design and build the treehouse. “You’re up there trying to build a tree-sit and there are all these chain saws going on around you. It feels like a battleground.”

The 10 members most closely involved in this tree-sit refer to it as an occupation, one that has been in progress since Oct. 5.

Pacific Lumber has a three-year right to log the land, which expires in September 2000. Hill does not say whether she will stay up there for the remaining 2 1/2 years but does express her desire to negotiate with the president of Pacific Lumber, John Campbell.

“What would bring me down is him agreeing to let this tree stand--to allow it to live and die by the laws of nature,” she says.

Pacific Lumber owns one of the largest, privately held groves of ancient redwoods in the world. Of its 200,000 acres--3% of which are logged each year--10,000 acres contain old-growth trees, like the one Hill is sitting in. The issue of protecting these trees is one that has polarized Humboldt County residents for the last 10 years. Pacific Lumber is the No. 1 private employer in the county, with 1,600 workers, all of whom depend on logging for their livelihood. Saving a tree might mean an end to their jobs.

“We are in the lumber business, and we would like to be able to harvest our forest and make our lumber and replant the forest and grow new trees so we can continue the cycle,” says Pacific Lumber’s Bullwinkel. “That’s what we do.”

Ancient trees are extremely valuable for their rarity, for their size and for the density of their wood. As one Pacific Lumber logger said, “It takes at least two or three [younger] trees to make up one old-growth tree.” Luna is estimated to weigh more than 100 tons and contain 20,000 board feet of wood. Fetching between $800 and $4,000 per 1,000 board feet, Luna’s estimated worth is in the six figures.

But it is worth even more to the environmentalists trying to protect it--the Pacific Northwest Earth Firsters, who put their bodies on the line for the sake of their beliefs.

“We’re not kidding anyone here,” says Josh Brown, an Earth First spokesman. “Of course Pacific Lumber is going to cut that tree as soon as Julia leaves, or once they get the tree-sitters out. But as long as we hold that tree, that’s a victory. Direct action alone will never stop the logging. But what it does, just like the civil rights movement did, is provide the images and gives the public an education about the issues so they can act.”

Learning of her daughter’s tree-sit, Hill’s mother called Gov. Pete Wilson to take action.

“I’d like him to get my baby out of that tree for her birthday,” she says. “Wouldn’t that be lovely?”