Activists Walk the Walk, Sit the Sit

Walking through a stand of old-growth Douglas fir, a woman who calls herself Jitterbug leans her head back, cups her mouth and shouts a greeting: “Hello, trees!”

Almost 200 feet above, a woman peers over the edge of a platform and yells, “Is there anything I should know?”

Jitterbug tells her that she has brought a tree-sitting replacement, a teen from the Bay Area. The teen steps into a rock-climbing harness, attaches it to a rope and inches her way up into the treetop.

Activists have been living in trees outside Lowell for the last three years. Their aim is to prevent loggers from harvesting the Clark timber sale near Fall Creek in the Willamette National Forest.

The activists use birdcalls and frog croaks to communicate with each other. They use woodsy-sounding aliases, which they hope will prevent authorities from knowing their true identities. Jitterbug is among the tree-sitters who refuse to reveal their true names--even to one other.

“If your real name is known by anyone, your ability to do direct action can be compromised,” said 20-year-old Jitterbug, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette.

Tree-sitting is a tactic environmentalists have been using for about two decades. The number of people who volunteer for tree-sitting has increased over the last several years.

“When I first started my career, there was some tree-spiking. Tree-sitting didn’t seem to start until the mid- to late ‘80s. Now it has really taken off,” said Rex Holloway, a spokesman for the U. S. Forest Service.

Julia “Butterfly” Hill, who spent more than two years living in a California redwood to save it from being cut down, said the growing number of tree-sitters is a reflection of people’s anger about what’s happening to the environment.

“The passion for this type of direct action is growing because other methods are failing us,” Hill said.

Currently, there are at least five tree-sits in the United States, three in Oregon and two in California. Activists are threatening to begin others in British Columbia, Washington and Idaho.

According to Hill, the tree-sitting movement is driven by the same distaste for globalization and concern for the environment that has sent thousands of activists onto the streets of Seattle, Quebec City and other protest sites in the last two years.

“Our consumer society is out of control,” Hill said. “Everyone has a choice, and tree-sitters are doing these things because it is from the gut.”

Patti Rodgers, spokeswoman for the Willamette National Forest, argued that some activists are living in trees not for environmental reasons but because they are wayward youths with nothing better to do.

“It’s not like they are all out there because they believe in the cause. We have had a lot of trouble with runaway kids, throwaway kids. We have had a lot of trouble with felony warrants served on kids,” Rodgers said.

Rodgers said some activists have been cited for possession of drugs and alcohol. She said some go into the woods to party, although “there are definitely folks who have done this because that is what they believe.”

According to many environmentalists, Oregon is the epicenter of the tree-sitting movement--attracting volunteers from all over the world.

Scores of activists are tree-sitting in Oregon: at the 96-acre Clark timber sale near Eugene, at the nearby 309-acre Winberry timber tract, and at the 1,030-acre Eagle Creek timber sale, just north of Mt. Hood.

The Eagle Creek sale has been the site of showdowns between protesters and the Forest Service.

The company that owns the timber at Eagle Creek, Vanport Manufacturing Co., had made tentative plans to harvest trees there on June 1. On that day, activists blocked an access road with boulders. The Forest Service sent in a bulldozer to clear away the boulders, but protesters blocked the truck carrying the bulldozer by sitting on the road. The truck was forced to turn around.

Earlier that day, someone torched a logging truck at Eagle Creek and damaged two others. Activists camping at Eagle Creek condemned the arson attack. Federal agents are investigating.

Up in the treetops at the Clark timber sale, about a dozen protesters live in numerous tarp-covered, plywood-floor shelters called “pods,” which dangle from uppermost branches. The tree-sitters can move quickly from one tree to another on a network of ropes that resembles an aerial highway.

On the ground, base camp members help the tree-sitters with food, mail and replacements. They sleep under plastic tarps and fetch drinking water from a spring. Despite their primitive surroundings, base camp members make use of high-tech tools--cell phones and CB radios--to organize.

The Zip-O-Log Co. of Eugene bought the 96-acre Clark timber sale from the Forest Service in 1998 but so far has not started logging there.

Activists contend that their presence has prevented Zip-O-Log from logging. James Hallstrom, Zip-O-Log’s chief executive, refused to discuss the matter. The U. S. Forest Service maintains Clark has not been logged because it is low on Zip-O-Log’s list of priorities.

“There is an inequity of the time that those people have been out there. . . . They really haven’t had an impact at all,” Rodgers said of the tree-sitters.

Tree-sitters come from all walks of life and are all ages, said Eugene resident Erin Volheim, a volunteer with the nonprofit group Cascadia Forest Defenders.

“We have had 45-year-old men, 15-year-old girls, everyone as far as age range,” Volheim said. “They are people who care about the forests.”

Some of the activists live in the woods just for a weekend, others for a week or two, and some “stay in the forest until they grow moss on themselves,” said Mick Garvin, spokesman for Cascadia Forest Defenders.

Jitterbug has lived sporadically at the Clark timber sale for two years, at times sitting in the trees, other times helping run base camp. Many long-term tree-sitters, like Jitterbug, are transplants from other parts of the country.

Jitterbug moved to Oregon to join the tree-saving movement after graduating from high school in Ohio.

She says she would rather live in the woods permanently to protect the trees, but can’t afford to do so. So she works as a waitress part-time, spending half of each week in the woods.

She says her future doesn’t include college, or marriage, or career--just old-growth forests.

Jitterbug says she is in it for the long haul.

“We couldn’t have stayed out here this long unless we were serious about saving trees,” she said.