If Not Now, When?
Published in
"The Ecologist"
February 2004
If not now, when?
The treesitters versus the logging
companies is a battle of some of the world’s most determined activists against
some of the world’s most ruthless corporations. It’s also a battle that we
cannot afford to lose.
By
Derrick Jensen and Remedy
Phoenix
is screaming. He hangs by one leg a
hundred and sixty feet above the forest floor. The man holding onto this leg
says he’s dangling him there in order to make him safe.
Eric
Schatz, of Schatz Tree Service — whose ad in the yellow pages declares, [itals]Yes, we even rescue cats[itals] — is at work for Maxxam
Corporation/Pacific Lumber, evicting tree-sitters from old growth redwoods PL
plans to cut. His two assistants, Jerry and the appropriately-named Ox, pull
Phoenix’s legs back onto the plywood platform that has served as home to
several tree-sitters these last four months, but they leave his torso hanging,
bent at an unnatural angle. Ox pushes down on his chest, bending him further.
Phoenix continues to scream.
Minutes
pass. Finally, in a message sent not only to Phoenix but to all of us standing
below, Phoenix is pulled halfway onto the platform and a rope is put around the
back of his neck. Ox uses the rope to bring Phoenix’s face close to his. No one
on the ground knows what, if anything, is said. Soon after, with Phoenix’s head
and back still over the plywood edge, Ox climbs atop him to stand with both
feet on Phoenix’s chest, then puts one foot firmly on his neck.
The
climbers bind Phoenix with ropes and lower him to the ground, where he’s
promptly arrested. Soon they go to work on Jungle, another treesitter, also one
hundred and sixty feet above the ground, who has locked his arms into the metal
sleeves of a ‘lockbox’ (a device activists use to voluntarily lock themselves
to something where only they can free themselves) around an outstretched branch
of this ancient tree.
Jerry
hauls up a generator and grinder, then sits for a smoke. Ox drops a potato chip
in his mouth, then still chewing steps forward to kick Jungle in the ribs. Ox kicks
him again, then ties a rope around each of Jungle’s legs so he can stand on it
to cut off the treesitter’s circulation.
This
is how they pass their break.
Break
finished, the climbers begin to cut away the lockbox. Jungle’s screams can be
heard over the whining of metal on metal. Ox takes his foot off the rope, and
pulls it up, leaving Jungle’s full weight to hang from chains around his
wrists. He screams louder.
The
lockbox severed, Jungle is lowered and arrested. Minutes later, another ancient redwood hits the ground. It shatters on impact: the tree stood on a
steep slope, and it fell to the downward side. This happens a lot - the company
has killed the tree and tortured the treesitters for no financial gain.
This
is what it’s like on the front lines of the fight to save the last of this
continent’s ancient forests. Welcome to
the world of treesitting.
The
first treesit in defense of forests in the Western United States occurred in
1985, when Oregon’s Cathedral Forest was being cut by Williamette
Industries. Mike Jakubal, a rock
climber, modified his gear to ascend old-growth Douglas-Fir trees in an attempt
to stop this destruction. It didn’t take loggers long to figure out how to deal
with this new situation. From 80 feet
above the ground, Jakubal watched as trees as close as 20 feet from his
platform were cut. By day’s end, every
surrounding tree had been cut. He rappelled down to this suddenly
devastated landscape, where for millions of years stood a diverse and thriving
forest ecosystem. While sitting on a
stump amidst the wreckage, Jakubal was knocked to the ground and arrested by a
Forest Service law enforcement officer.
Undaunted
by this initial failure to halt deforestation, activists began using this
tactic more and more often, refining it as they went. In 1987, Randy Prince
conducted the first long-term tree-sit in the Lazy Bluff Timber Sale in
Oregon’s North Kalmiopsis roadless area.
On the 42nd day, a logger cut one-third of the way through the tree he
was in before being talked into turning off his chainsaw. The tree-sit ended that day as the tree was
significantly weakened by the cut.
1987
was also the first year tree-sits were used in the ancient redwoods of
California. In the early stages of the
struggle to save Headwaters Forest, three tree-sitters were perched 130 feet
above the forest floor, but were forced down when PL loggers and security
agents used slingshots to pelt them with rocks.
Treesits
continue to take place across the country, as hundreds of mainly young people
take to the trees to try to protect the places they love. In opposition to
portrayals in the corporate media, these treesits often take place with
extensive community support. For example, in one group of treesits in 1999, the
ground support crews were made up primarily of loggers and their families from
the small town of Randall, Washington, who were opposing the cutting of the
forest on Watch Mountain above their community by a distant corporation, Plum
Creek Timber Company. Logging of the 60,000-acre area would have meant certain
death for the community from clearcut-triggered landslides. In this case, the
community won.
There’s
an important lesson to be learned here: while treesitters were in their
perches, and ground supporters were hiking in supplies, townspeople were
organizing their outrage during community meetings that overflowed with
everyone from children to the elderly. Buses were chartered for people to
confront Plum Creek’s officers in Seattle. The small town of Randall raised a
unified voice, vowing to not give up until the deal to cut the forest was
stopped. It was a celebrated victory.
Unfortunately,
it was a rare moment of triumph in a history of continuing destruction.
Families continue to be piggybacked from their drowning homes in the middle of
the night because floodwaters are sliding off hillsides denuded of trees, and
the coast guard is routinely called in to rescue motorists stranded atop
vehicles on washed out roads. Others have houses sporting two-foot high
waterlines in every room as constant reminders of the now-annual ‘hundred year’
floods. Property values plummet, flood insurance skyrockets, and meanwhile
corporate timber is rewarded for its crimes.
All
across the world communities are living with the consequences. Maxxam has been
forced to deliver agricultural and drinking water to residents of the Elk River
watershed since 1998 due to logging operations that have muddied and destroyed
water quality. Logging destroys streams by causing massive erosion. Natural
forests act as sponges, absorbing rain then releasing it slowly over time.
Cutting these forests causes ‘hundred-year’ floods to become annual or
semi-annual events. In 2002 residents were flooded seven times.
In
Freshwater, however, Maxxam has been able to avoid paying for permanently
destroying the town’s water supplies by silt from clearcuts. The residents of
this small community, however, have had to pay tens of thousands of dollars to
get municipal water piped in from Eureka in lieu of the local clean water
they’d relied on for decades. In
addition to losing water supplies, residents are forced to pay out of pocket to
put their houses on stilts in answer to the newly regular flooding. As recently as eight years ago, the people
who inhabit these areas would be kept awake by salmon runs making their way up
the creeks, their thrashing tails propelling them upstream. Now it’s rare to see any salmon at all. In Cloney Gulch, the vicinity of my treesit,
populations of Coho Salmon are down to one-tenth what they were less than ten
years ago.
Activists
— and citizens — everywhere can tell similar stories. Boise Cascade, for
example, overcut the Pacific Northwest, and as ‘cut and run’ timber
corporations do the world over, moved on to deforest other regions. To tell
just one horror story of Boise Cascade, it moved a mill from Idaho to Papanoa
in Guerrero, Mexico. Overcutting led to dried springs and communities with no
water. Community members protested. 17 were murdered and 20 others wounded in
the now-infamous Aguas Blancas Massacre. Although Boise Cascade was forced to
leave the region — no one would sell them trees for their mill — Rodolfo
Montiel, leader of the farmer-ecologists, was arrested and tortured with
electric shock. As soon as Montiel was jailed, Boise Cascade's former partners
attempted to begin logging again.
Then
there is Weyerhaeuser, which by its own admission in [itals]only one year[itals] deforested 45
square miles in Washington state, 25 square miles in Oregon state, and 152
square miles in the southern US. This is in addition to forests liquidated in
Indonesia, the Philippines, and Canada.
Or
Sierra Pacific, which between 1992 and 1999 increased its clearcutting by more
than 240 times, and increased the size of its average clearcut from 46 to 361
acres. It now has plans to clearcut a million more acres — an area larger than
Rhode Island — over the next 10 years.
Exterminate them all!
When
a forest is cut, not only trees are killed. Whether it’s lions in ancient
Greece, spotted owls or coho salmon right now in the Pacific Northwest, or
gorillas in Africa, the loss of forests means the loss of the creatures who
live there.
The
list of plants and animals damaged or extirpated by the deaths of once-great
forests is long, and getting longer every day. Golden-crowned lemur, orangutan,
Siberian tiger (of whom there are only 250 left), marbled murrelet, Port Orford
cedar (killed by a fungus transported on logging equipment), black
forest-wallaby, aye-aye, red cedar, mahogany, ivory-billed woodpecker, Carolina
parakeets, golden-capped fruit bat, Hazel’s forest frog, smooth-skinned forest
frog, Amur tiger, Amur leopard, forest owlet, Nelson’s spiny pocket mouse,
Saker falcon, red wolf, panda bear, and on and on.
Scientists estimate an
average of 130 species are driven extinct every day. That’s about 50,000 each
year. That is not just by deforestation, but by the larger effects of
industrial civilization. Nonetheless, 75 per cent of the mammals endangered by
the activities of industrial civilization are threatened by loss of forest
habitat. For birds, the figure is 45 per cent. For amphibians it’s 55 per cent,
and for reptiles it’s 65 per cent.
Worldwide,
forests are under attack. One estimate says that a hectare (two and a half
acres) of forest somewhere in the world is cut every second. That’s equivalent
to two football fields. One hundred-and-fifty acres cut per minute. That’s
214,000 acres per day: an area larger than New York City. Seventy-eight million acres (121,875 square
miles) deforested each year: an area larger than Poland. Indeed, about
three-quarters of the world’s original forests have been cut, most of that in
the past century. Much of what remains is in three nations: Russia, Canada, and
Brazil. In the continental US, only 5 per cent of native forest still stands.
And
what do those who run the timber corporations want to do now? As Harry Merlo,
former president and CEO of Louisiana Pacific stated, with no hint of irony: ‘We need everything that’s out there.
We don’t log to a 10-inch top, or an 8-inch top, or a 6-inch top. We log to
infinity. Because we need it all. It’s ours. It’s out there, and we
need it all. Now.’
And so the fight goes on. Contrary to what many people
think, treesitting doesn’t require everyone to spend months or years without
touching the ground. Over the years I have met all sorts of people working hard
to stop or slow deforestation. There
are people who file lawsuits against individual Timber Harvest Plans (THPs), and
people suing timber companies outright.
Some people oversee monitoring stations that sample waterways to track
the effects of logging on water quality, presenting their findings to the
appropriate agencies. There are residents who come out in droves to speak at
meetings with these ‘regulatory’ agencies, or those who include their voices in
the public comment period that is part of the approval process for THPs.
On our public lands volunteers work on Timber Sale
appeals – combing through thick stacks of brain-busting, bureaucratic paperwork
which insist clearcutting hundreds of acres of forest will lead to ‘no
significant impact.’ Citizen monitoring stations record the millions of pounds
of sediment being dumped into our waterways from eroding clearcut
hillsides. Other volunteers search the
forests for endangered species such as red tree voles and rare plants in hopes
of protecting small pieces of land. And yet the trees continue to fall, runs of
salmon disappear, water quality is degraded, and the staggering effort put
forth by concerned citizens leaves scarcely a discernable mark (or tree). It’s an awful reality that begs the question
of what to do next.
What must be
done?
In the relatively short history of attempts to stop
deforestation in North America, thousands of people have been arrested. Activists and organisers have had
pepper-spray applied directly into their eyeballs, have been car bombed for
building bridges between exploited timber workers and environmentalists, been
shot at, and one man was killed by a tree intentionally felled his direction
(just after the logger had been caught on videotape threatening to do just
this). Corporations sue activists and
activists sue them back. Laws are
passed to protect environmental health, only to have deforesters appointed to
‘enforce’ those laws. For example,
California recently passed a law giving the Water Quality Board the authority
to stop logging that would further degrade impaired watersheds. Within weeks, a chief apologist for Maxxam
was appointed to the California Environmental Protection Agency.
This is routine. Thus, soon after Lee Thomas left his
job as head of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) he
joined Georgia-Pacific, one of the companies he had pretended to oversee.
William Ruckleshaus, who also headed the EPA, went on to sit on the board of
Weyerhaeuser, Browning-Ferris Industries, Cummins Engine, Coinstar, Monsanto,
Nordstrom, Solutia, and Gargoyles.
Likewise, who better to oversee the U.S. Forest
Service than the attorney who defended Louisiana-Pacific from charges of
monopolistic practices detrimental to the people and forests of the United
States? Ronald Reagan appointed such a person — John Crowell — Chief of the
Forest Service. Crowell immediately set a goal of doubling timber production
from the national forests by the turn of the century. That didn’t happen, in
part because there weren’t that many trees left to cut, even if the market
could have borne all that wood. But the cut did increase until by 1988 the US
had become a net exporter of wood products for the first time, and Americans
were subsidizing the US Forest Service’s destruction of public forests with
billions of tax dollars. How can we work within a system that ‘works’ like
this?
So, what can those of us who care do? So long as we
relegate ourselves to symbolic resistance, we are assured that nothing will
change. And so long as we expect a
parade of ‘heroes’ to step forward to do the work for us, ecological and human
health will continue to be destroyed, and all to the sound of a robotic rubber
stamp that claims ‘no significant impact’.
Part
of our problem is that most of us who pretend to resist generally don’t know
what we really want. Do we want fewer clearcuts, smaller clearcuts, kinder and
gentler clearcuts? We don’t know. And even if we do, we aren’t willing to do
what’s necessary to stop those in power from murdering the planet.
Instead,
more or less all of us yammer more or less endlessly about hope. You wouldn’t
believe — or maybe you would — how many editors for how many magazines have
said they want me to write about the apocalypse, then enjoined me to ‘make sure
you leave readers with a sense of hope.’ But what, precisely, is hope? At a
talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I couldn’t, and so
turned the question back on the audience. Here’s the definition we all came up
with: Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no control.
It means you are essentially powerless.
Think
about it. I’m not, for example, going to say I hope I eat something tomorrow.
I’ll just do it. On the other hand, I hope that the next time I get on a plane,
it doesn’t crash. To hope for some result means you have no control over it.
Does
anyone really believe that Pacific Lumber will stop deforesting because we ask
nicely? However, when we realize the degree of power we actually do have, we no
longer have to ‘hope’ at all. We simply do the work. We make sure salmon
survive. We make sure prairie dogs survive. We make sure tigers survive. We do
whatever it takes.
And
what will it take?
We
can join those who are sitting in trees. Or if we do not want to climb, we can
bring them food and water. Or we can help them in other ways, filing lawsuits,
testing water quality or searching for endangered species. In short, we can use
whatever skills we have in whatever ways we can to keep the remaining forests
standing.
The
only question, then, is whether we are willing to do it.
Derrick Jensen’s most recent
book (with George Draffan) is Strangely like War – The
Global Assault on Forests
Remedy
is a forest activist who spent 361 days in a 1,200 year-old redwood without
touching the ground before being forcibly removed by Maxxam hired
climbers. She lives in Humboldt County,
California.
Page
last updated 5/1/04.