Butterfly’s Hard Landing

On this balmy October evening, some 400 well-heeled Angelenos have gathered in the auditorium of the Freud Playhouse at UCLA. They have paid up to $500 a ticket to attend a fund-raiser for the Ark Trust animal-protection group. Their ranks include stars such as Lindsey “The Bionic Woman” Wagner and Gillian Anderson of “The X-Files.”

Gloria Steinem is hosting the event, billed as “An Evening of Music and Inspiration.” Later, she will introduce singer Sophie B. Hawkins, who also is an animal-rights activist. But the first special guest will provide the inspiration. “No one is better proof of the power of one and the power of example,” Steinem says.

From stage right emerges a slim, lanky woman in black slacks, bare feet and a purple T-shirt bearing the message “Do Something.” She bows toward Steinem and faces the audience, the curtain behind her now covered in the projected image of a dense, murky forest. She is Julia Butterfly Hill--the eco-bionic woman who took Butterfly as her forest name and survived for two years atop a Northern California redwood called Luna. The audience gives her a standing ovation.

For the next 45 minutes, Hill paces the stage, a radio microphone attached to her waist, and delivers a bravura combination of performance art and pep talk, her husky voice oscillating in sermon-like cadences. She remembers her first visit to a redwood forest--”The air was so pure it tasted sweet on my tongue.” She describes sitting in Luna as loggers felled nearby redwoods. With ear-piercing wails, tears in her eyes, her body contorted, she evokes the sound of a chain saw slashing, of a redwood plunging to the forest floor.

Still bursting with energy and passion, her audience captivated, Hill concludes by exhorting them to follow her example in some way, to realize that life is “interconnected” and that the “power of one” has a ripple effect that can create change. “Love in action has the answer,” she proclaims before receiving another standing ovation.

“This isn’t an act,” she tells me later. “This is me, this is everything I care about.”

Two years after Hill completed her epic vigil in Luna, saving it from the loggers, she is big box office, an environmental movement messenger whom some have compared to Joan of Arc and Rosa Parks. At speaking engagements across the country, she draws packed crowds.

Branching away from forest-protection issues, she has embraced everything from animal rights to the campaign to free Native American activist Leonard Peltier, who is in prison for murdering two FBI agents. She has helped inspire others, including an Arkansas grandmother, to do their own tree-sits. “She’s an inspirational character,” says John Knox, co-executive director of Earth Island Institute, a leading environmental organization.

Hill is marketed and merchandised. On their way into the Freud theater, audience members filed past a table displaying an array of Butterfly products, including copies of her memoir, “The Legacy of Luna,” and two videos about the tree-sit, “Butterfly” and “Luna: The Stafford Giant Treesit.” There also are Butterfly note cards and T-shirts. One T-shirt carries a message from Julia: “We arise beautiful and free.” Some of the proceeds go to her nonprofit Circle of Life Foundation, which promotes efforts to protect and restore the Earth.

But some activists believe Hill has lost her way in the treacherous forest of celebrity. The down-home Julia of the tree-sit, they say, has metamorphosed into Julia Butterfly Inc., an example of the corporate machinery she once battled. They claim she has distanced herself from her tree-sit supporters and failed to articulate a cohesive message, preferring feel-good platitudes to thorough analysis of conservation issues. “She got famous, and her activism went out of her heart and into her mind,” complains Darryl Cherney, a veteran organizer for the radical Earth First! group. “She started talking about respect and love instead of the forests.”

With the recent death of David Brower, a Nobel Prize nominee and key figure in the development of the Sierra Club, Hill, who divides her time between friends’ homes in Humboldt County and the Bay Area, is America’s most famous environmentalist. Now she may be facing an even stiffer test than surviving in a redwood for two years. “She did well in the tree because she wanted to be alone and felt personally comfortable being alone,” says Doug Wolens, a San Francisco filmmaker who shot the “Butterfly” video. “Since coming down, she doesn’t have the ability” to tune things out.

I meet with Hill at her Westwood hotel a few hours before the UCLA appearance. She had flown from Oakland with her manager, concert promoter Paul Bassis, and a representative of Circle of Life. She is smarter than she was during her days in Luna. The grunge look she affected then--personal grooming, no doubt, being difficult 180 feet up a redwood--is long gone. Her dark hair, with a few incongruous streaks of gray, is parted in the center. Her T-shirt, she says, is made of organic cotton. She clutches a stainless steel mug that she takes everywhere with her. “I refuse to use disposable anything,” she explains.

There are still some rough edges. Her sentences tend to meander and, as the words pour out, she occasionally misspeaks--”people of conscious” instead of “people of conscience”; “building the GPA in our economy,” an apparent allusion to the GNP. It’s also clear that she’s not altogether comfortable with her lofty status. Yes, she acknowledges, her high profile furthers her activist causes through the media attention her fame attracts. But she talks about what she calls “celebrititis”--”a disease of our consciousness” that isolates the famous from the public--and insists she never sought the spotlight.

“I was always the woman in the corner of the cafe watching other people,” Hill says. “To be thrust out into the limelight is really difficult.”

When Hill climbed into Luna on Dec. 10, 1997, two months shy of her 24th birthday, she was an unknown, a stranger even to the Northern California forest activists who had been staging intermittent tree-sits in the redwoods for a decade. The daughter of an itinerant Arkansas preacher, she had grown up in poverty, wearing hand-me-downs and never knowing where her next meal would come from. After doing a bit of modeling, she studied business and art at Arkansas State University but left after two years to start a restaurant with her father, who had given up the ministry. After the restaurant failed, she moved to Fayetteville, Ark., to make money so that she could travel.

Then, in August 1996, Hill suffered brain damage in a car accident, the impact driving her right eye into her skull. While recuperating, she resolved to change her life, to “visit the places that had deep spiritual roots.” In June 1997, she traveled to Northern California and hiked into a redwood forest. She walked out, so her memoir says, “a different woman.”

That fall, having sold almost everything she owned in Arkansas, Hill returned to redwood country hoping to connect with forest activists. She wasn’t too impressed. A rally in Eureka struck her as disorganized; at a base camp for tree-sitters she “sat around a lot, looking for some way to become involved.” Finally, an Earth First! activist showed up at the camp looking for someone to sit in Luna.

The 200-foot old-growth redwood stood on a steep slope above the small Humboldt County town of Stafford. A year earlier, torrents of mud had slid down the slope into the town, a disaster that some residents blamed on the clear-cutting logging practices of Pacific Lumber Co. They tried to gather support to sue the company, a unit of Maxxam Corp. and the area’s dominant business. But Pacific Lumber carried on clear-cutting and marked Luna for the chain saw. The tree got its name because the moon was full when activists hiked out with materials for the tree-sit.

Hill’s new home was a rickety platform 20 feet below Luna’s topmost branch. She did not expect to stay that long. The tree-sitting record stood at 90 days, and she certainly didn’t plan to break it. But Hill would spend the next 738 days on her lofty perch, surviving everything the harsh weather and Pacific Lumber could throw at her. The company’s tactics included buzzing her with helicopters, making the platform sway in the propeller draft, and depriving her of sleep.

Early on, stories appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Time and People. In “The Legacy of Luna,” Hill says she viewed the publicity with alarm, her inclination being to “climb down and get far away.” But by the 100th day of the tree-sit, she was courting the media, assisted by Robert Parker, a forest activist. “They worked it really hard,” recalls Wolens. “That’s what got the media. They had a plan.”

Attractive and armed with a cell phone, Hill made an alluring and articulate spokesperson, one whose bond with the tree seemed to symbolize the potential for a more respectful relationship between humans and nature.

“She didn’t simply articulate a narrow political agenda,” says Herb Schwartz, a Garberville attorney who provided logistical support for Hill’s tree-sit. “It was poetic.”

According to Darryl Cherney, he and other members of Earth First! thought “the goddess had sent a messenger . . . You could get high talking to her on the phone.” More than a few activists developed a crush on the former model, who, with her 5-foot-10-inch frame, full lips, rosy cheeks and hair cascading below her shoulders, looked like she’d walked out of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Cherney says Earth First! also “worked hard to promote Julia,” seeing her as a national spokesperson for its conservation cause.

The publicity not only raised public awareness of the plight of old-growth redwoods but also exerted pressure on Pacific Lumber to reach a settlement with Hill. After protracted negotiations, the company agreed not to cut Luna, allow Hill permanent visitation rights to the tree and create a buffer zone; Hill’s supporters paid the company $50,000, roughly the value of an old-growth tree once felled.

On Dec. 18, 1999, Hill climbed down from the tree and headed for New York to do the morning news shows. “I guess I’m the queen of jumping in at the deep end,” Hill says. “The press was going to cover the story whether I was there or not . . . I had to go and say, ‘Yes, we had a victory but there’s still a lot of work to be done in this world.’ ”

By this time, Hill had parted company with Parker, making Bassis, who runs a company called People Productions, her manager. The public-speaking invitations came pouring in from organizations hoping to have her glow wash over their cause. The environmental movement has had its stars--Brower, John Muir, Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, to name a few--but none quite like Julia Butterfly Hill. She was, the San Francisco Examiner announced, “a global celebrity able to command more reportorial microphones and telephones and cameras than any other living environmentalist.”

But among some in the movement, there has been a Butterfly backlash.

“Within the ranks of longtime Northern California activists, Hill faces criticism of being a ‘corporate sellout’ and ‘self-promoter,’ ” the Santa Rosa Press Democrat reported in August 2000. “She is accused of relying on a professional manager and attorneys to manage her new career. And she is criticized for ignoring the cadre of activists who helped her stage [the Luna] protest.” Cherney was quoted as saying: “Frankly, I think she enjoys the cult that’s building up around her.”

More than a year later, Cherney, who, along with fellow Earth First! member Judi Bari was seriously injured by a mysterious car bomb in 1990, still isn’t too thrilled about Hill.

“[She] dissed many of the people without whom that tree-sit would not have been successful, and in a way that only seems to make her less effective,” he says.

Outside observers also have noticed a shift. “She seems to have moved over more to the mainstream conservation groups,” says John Campbell, chairman of Pacific Lumber. “She seems to be outcast by the more radical groups.”

The backlash is somewhat predictable, says David Harris, author of “The Last Stand: The War Between Wall Street and Main Street over California’s Ancient Redwoods.” Northern California activists, he notes, are a fractious bunch and Earth First! tends to be “sensitive to the issue of celebrity, the tendency to pick one person and say, ‘That’s it.’ ”

Cherney also has been accused on occasion of grabbing too much of the limelight.

Some hard-core activists objected to Hill’s agreement to save Luna, seeing any payment to Pacific Lumber as a betrayal. In March 2000, three months after concluding the tree-sit, Hill was interrupted by protests against the deal while making the keynote address to an environmental law conference at the University of Oregon. Two masked men and a woman marched through the university ballroom, their chests bared to reveal scrawled messages. One said simply: “Julia Sells Out.” After Hill resumed her speech, another woman from the audience, this one fully clothed, climbed onto the stage and launched into a 15-minute harangue.

“All I want to know is the truth,” the heckler raged. “Tell us now. Why did you give money to the corporation?”

Hill stood at the podium in tears before eventually finishing her speech.

“The Legacy of Luna,” published in April 2000 (on paper made from post-consumer recycled fibers and processed with chlorine-free bleach), is a particularly sore point. For one thing, Hill chose publisher HarperSanFrancisco, an imprint of HarperCollins, which is controlled by media behemoth Rupert Murdoch, whom some activists see as the personification of corporate greed. She says she labored over the decision but relented because she wanted to reach people “who never read a book like this.”

But she also doesn’t exactly paint a rosy picture in the book of Earth First!, accusing the group of wanting to bring her out of the tree during the first winter. In one passage, she relates a conversation with an activist who was visiting her in the tree. “I don’t feel an allegiance to whatever the heck Earth First! is,” she quotes herself, later adding: “If I had bowed to Earth First!’s wishes, Luna would have been cut in two seconds flat.” Cherney insists that Earth First! had legitimate concerns about her safety in the tree but “never decided that Julia should come down.”

Robert Parker, who has worked with Earth First!, gave the book a damning review, calling it “a great disappointment” that provided “a mostly dry account of day-to-day life in the tree mixed with meandering philosophy.” By failing to acknowledge the “massive community effort” that supported the tree-sit, he wrote, Hill had perpetuated “the public’s romantic perception that the tree-sit was the action of a lone individual.”

Hill has remained active on forest issues. She traveled to her home state and met with Mary Lightheart, a Fayetteville grandmother who had staged a tree-sit in a post oak that was to be cut to make room for a department store. Last July, she was arrested near Chicago, along with singer Bonnie Raitt and 18 other activists, for trespassing at the headquarters of timber giant Boise Cascade’s office-products division. They were protesting the company’s logging practices. Hill also attended Maxxam’s last annual general meeting in Houston.

But some believe that by taking on the world--she also espouses the cause of convicted murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal--Hill is losing touch with the forest, her efforts increasingly divorced from the local level at which activists can effect real change. In Northern California, her critics note, clear-cutting and the logging of old-growth redwoods continue unabated. Says Parker: “Acting as what essentially amounts to a rent-a-poster-child for the issue of the month serves little to further the serious efforts of grass-roots activists, if not indeed hindering them.”

According to attorney Herb Schwartz, Hill has not articulated a “transcendent” message as she did in Luna. “She essentially is like a butterfly who flew from a tree and still hasn’t landed,” he says. “In a sense that’s OK. She needs to explore the world and find out where her energies would be best used. But she’s ringing some false notes.” Schwartz would like to see her focus less on the anti-disposable lifestyle and more on the complex issues involved in forest protection.

Hill, in a sense, has become marginalized, he says. “She’s allowed herself to be pushed out to the edge” of the dialogue about the forest. “If she’d engaged in that dialogue, I don’t think anybody would accuse her of selling out.”

The criticisms evoke a mixed response from Hill. On the one hand, she tries to remain stoic. “In the world of activism, for every action there is an equal and opposite criticism, period,” she says. “I would go crazy trying to please everybody.” She also advises her critics to “take a real hard look at the history of the activist movement. We have a pattern . . . of putting people up on pedestals in order to tear them down.”

But when I ask Hill specifically about whether she “dissed” Earth First!, the emotion and the pain come through. “I won’t talk about it because I refuse to stoop to their level,” she says, her eyes filling with tears. “I won’t do it.” Then she adds: “They can say whatever they want and I’m going to keep sending them love anyway. And I’m going to keep doing what I do . . . because I wake up in the morning [asking myself], ‘What can I do today, how can I help the world today?’

“It’s going to make some people hate me, it’s going to frustrate other people. But I can’t change what I do because I believe in what I do beyond a shadow of a doubt.”

There is no mistaking the authenticity behind the words. At the very least, Hill is a counterpoint to the apathy so often ascribed to those of her generation, taking on a huge responsibility at an age when many in her generation don’t even vote, let alone stand up for conservation. “I can’t believe that after living in a tree for two years without touching the ground,” she says with a sigh, “it’s [still] not enough for people.”

She also genuinely believes, as a result of her experience in the tree, that things are “interconnected,” that “talking about the web of life is not a philosophy or a theology but an actuality. So my work is about making those connections [between different issues], helping people understand . . . how if we affect one thing negatively it ripples out and affects the world.”

John Knox of the Earth Island Institute endorses her approach. “She has a sophisticated view of the big agenda for social issues,” he says. “It’s about social justice.” Agrees filmmaker Doug Wolens: “While the message might be slightly different, it’s about the same values.”

Hill has delivered her message in another book, to be published by HarperSanFrancisco this spring and titled, “One Makes the Difference.”

“It’s stories of individuals who’ve made a difference,” she explains, a primer “on everything from how to ‘green’ your home to how to write a letter to your congressman.”

She’s also been negotiating a deal to make “The Legacy of Luna” into a movie.

As for Luna, the tree suffered a near-fatal blow in November 2000 when an unidentified vandal with a chain saw carved a 32-inch-deep gash into its trunk. Arborists performed emergency surgery, inserting braces that saved the tree. Hill’s initial reaction to the cutting of Luna was one of horror and grief.

“I felt as if I had been kicked in my stomach and all the air sucked out of me,” she recalls in her first book.

But a few days later, she expressed almost a sense of relief in a conversation with Wolens, the ambivalence toward her celebrity oozing out like sap. “If it falls in the next week, the next month or in 10 years, people will get the idea that it’s not about me, that I didn’t save a thing,” she told her friend, apparently groping for a way to deflate the public’s romantic perceptions about her.

For Wolens, the comment was “so Julia.” It was as if, he says, the vandalism had helped her “come to terms with people looking at her as a hero. She doesn’t want to be a hero.”