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FIVE

CONFESSIONS OF AN

ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVIST

Moderation? It’s mediocrity, fear, and confusion in disguise. It’s the devil’s dilemma. It’s neither doing nor not doing. It’s the wobbling compromise that makes no one happy. Moderation is for the bland, the apologetic, for the fence-sitters of the world afraid to take a stand. It’s for those afraid to laugh or cry, for those afraid to live or die. Moderation … is lukewarm tea, the devil’s own brew.

— Dan Millman, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior

There is something deliciously alluring about defying the general order of things. Rebelling against the system is a little like outdoor adventure — it adheres to all the fundamental criteria that combine risk with pleasure and a grab-bag of unknowns. There is an obvious or prescribed goal, the journey in getting there (with an element of risk), and a reward at the end. The reward is not a tangible entity; it’s the sheer elation in having participated. Dissention has a further purpose and compensation — there is an uplifting of the spirit — the fight for a cause.

Writing this chapter was difficult for me as there were possible implications that I could be involved in subversive actions against logging companies whose method of tree “harvesting” is to clear-cut every living species in a given area. And I say “given” figuratively because government forestry offices are only too generous in gifting companies with huge tracts of timber — the “harvesting” of wood fibre that often does not reflect local jobs. There are, however, some acts of defiance that I can write about with a certain amount of selective detachment.

Ecotage is a portmanteau of the eco prefix and sabotage. It is used to describe (usually) illegal acts of vandalism and violence, committed in the name of environmental protection. As a term, it goes back to 1972 and predates the more recent neologism, “eco-terrorism.” Ecotage is also referred to as “ecodefence” or “monkeywrenching.” Nineteen seventy-two was a hallmark year for a lot of things. A band of counterculture hippies from the Don’t Make a Wave Committee, from Vancouver, British Columbia, founded a new environmental group called Greenpeace; in Ontario, a troupe of wily canoe-heads assembled to form the Save Maple Mountain Committee, in turn giving confidence to the local Native band to slap a ten-thousand-square-kilometre land claim in the face of the provincial government.

I had been canoeing in Temagami for three years and Maple Mountain was a pivotal icon in the heart of the ancient pinelands. The ensuing fight to protect the mountain from being developed into a world-class ski resort became a national issue. The Native land claim effectively put a block on specific development within the district (mining, prospecting, and cottaging), but it was still business-as-usual for the logging companies who were penetrating the wilderness with intrusive roads. By 1978 — the year I was conscripted by the government to maintain the district portage trails — Maple Mountain became the vital focal point for a broader protectionist stand to save the surrounding wilderness from clear-cut logging operations. One of my duties included a guiding trek up the mountain with an assemblage of environmentalists, media personalities, local government officials, and representatives from the Teme-Augama Anishnabe reserve.

It was one of those dog days in mid-summer when you sweated profusely even while sitting motionless in the shade. Everyone collected at the old ranger’s cabin at the base of the mountain, four kilometres from the summit. My trail crew had already cleared the old fire tower trail and built boardwalk and bridges across the bog holes; still, the climb was legend amongst canoeists — steep, precipitous inclines and a steady one-thousand vertical foot ascent to the apex.

The newly formed Preservation of the Lady Evelyn Wilderness Committee organized the event and had invited one of Ontario’s most reputable environmental groups, represented by a thick-bearded executive director. It was a tough walk for many. Hot, constant uphill, rock-strewn slopes, biting flies; water bottles were empty by the time we reached the top of the mountain. Luckily, there was a water spring at the top, once used by the fire tower rangers. I was with a handful of dehydrated hikers, first to get to the summit, and we headed straight for the spring, located a couple hundred metres past the tower. It was covered with a piece of plywood to keep animals out of it and birds from shitting in it as they perched in the trees above. To keep the silt on the bottom from getting stirred up, you had to dip your cup carefully in the still water. But before anyone could fill their cups with clear, clean water, the environmentalist broke through the bevy of parched trekkers, fell to his knees, and stuck his hairy, sweaty, bearded head deep into the cool spring. He retreated quickly after filling his cup, still catching his breath and waving at the flies, moaning about how hard the climb was. Nobody said anything. We all waited for the water in the spring to settle; someone skimmed the hair out of the disturbed pool while others preferred to go thirsty. Quick speeches were made, some left tobacco as an offering, and the bearded eco-warrior had already headed back down the mountain.

Why I’m relating this story is critical to how I personally envisioned life as a green crusader. Champions of the wilderness, I thought, would be gallant, self-sacrificing and noble individuals. The social revolution already had its heroes deeply wedged into the psyche of North Americans. Canada had Greenpeace — spearheaded by writer Bob Hunter and activist Paul Watson; and in the States, Edward Abbey’s book, “The Monkey Wrench Gang” — a how-to book for would-be saboteurs — spawned the formation of the direct action environmental group, Earth First!, under the tutelage of Dave Foreman and Mike Roselle. But the egoistic antics of the bearded enviro guy — the jerk — confounded my perception of green guardians; in fact, over the years I was to come to the realization that there were more zealots, monomaniacs, fanatics, and hedonists within the green movement than I would encounter either within the industrial or the bureaucratic authority. Plunderers of the green Earth know exactly what they want and the means to which they will go to obtain it. Their motives are clear-cut and money-driven. Environmentalists, on the other hand, whose intentions are more cryptic and symbolic, are motivated by passion, often to the point where they lose sight of reality.

Not to completely trash the green movement, but it functions primarily as a consciousness monitor — to prompt us to keep taking our blue box to the curb for pickup. I have lost my faith in the mainstream movement as they tend to compromise away the very wild lands the in-your-face environmentalists work so hard to protect. And this happens because the green leaders want to remain affable and polite in the eyes of the wolves — they don’t want to be eaten up in the process. Process bogs them down in boardroom parley until they give in. Drawn out negotiations are simply industrial stall tactics, but … we need the mainstreamers to lend credibility to the movement, chiefly because Canadians are polite, obliging people and they’d sooner open their wallets to respectful, non-confrontational canvassers.

But, what about the other part of the movement … the “direct-action” advocates, front-liners, and monkey-wrenchers? Even Greenpeace has backed off from their action tactics — one reason why co-founder Paul Watson formed his own break-away group, The Sea Shepherd Society, now based out of Los Angeles. Watson realized that direct action could have far better results than polite debate. Direct action is a more radical form of civil disobedience and is wholly dependent on media for its success. It goes a step further than symbolic action (banners and protests) and its directive is to inflict enough economic damage so the company retreats (from mining, road building or logging, or factory fishing, whaling, etc.). Tree-spiking and trashing heavy equipment by putting rice in their radiators or sand in their gas tanks can be considered common practices of ecotage. Authorities tend to criminalize ecotage by branding it as a modern form of terrorism. According to the FBI, since 1996 there have been over six hundred incidents of domestic “terrorism” perpetrated by the Earth Liberation Front, or ELF, where arson is used to debilitate industrial activities in wilderness areas. Individuals who engage in environmental sabotage activities can claim them on behalf of the ELF if they meet three guidelines: (1) To inflict maximum economic damage on those profiting from the destruction and exploitation of the natural environment; (2) To reveal to, and to educate, the public about the atrocities committed against the Earth and all species that populate it; and (3) To take all necessary precautions against harming life. To date, no one has been injured or killed in any of these actions.

Jim Flynn, an Oregon-based environmentalist, in a 2007 USA Today article says: “I think that’s really what all these actions are about, is really getting public attention to some of these issues … if we were able to affect policy change through more legal means, then certainly that’s the way these people would go. Nobody enjoys being underground, and that lifestyle.”

Ecotage works and the authorities are unwilling to admit it. They can’t, because there would be a total breakdown of the system of order. The politics of wilderness (and wilderness is now considered a valuable commodity because of its scarcity) demand a stringent adherence to management doctrines, as one-sided as they may be toward industry. Allowing the armour to be chinked could crash the guiding principles of a multi-use objective. It would also give credence to the viability of the left-wing fringe environmental movement. Paranoia is the reason why the establishment has come down hard on the perpetrators, setting higher penalties for green crimes. In Marin County, California, three enviro-crusaders were arrested and sentenced to one year in jail and a total of fifty-thousand dollars in fines. Granted, these were serious actions against public and private property. In the United States, the FBI has clustered the granola-munching green activist with the bonified gun-wielding terrorist in an attempt to make any threat against homeland security one and the same as far as the law is concerned. The fixation on “terror-isms” that is rampant in the States is not quite as apparent in Canada, probably because we lack the proliferation of cult followings and radical left-wing green earth crusaders. We’re just nice people.

One form of ecotage that has had proven results worldwide is the construction of illegal trails; trails usually built on public land owned by the state or province and, in most cases, through a tract of land that may be threatened by development. The emphasis here is to attract people to the location, encouraging them to participate in a particular issue; and if enough people flock to the newly hacked out trail, their collective letters and complaints to the local administration just might be enough to halt plans for logging or mining.

In Temagami, while I was mapping out the canoe routes for the government guidebook, I also included upgrades on all the historic fire tower trails. The strategy behind this was to get canoeists off the water routes and onto land-based trails where the protection of viewscapes could be included in the master plan … much to the chagrin of local foresters whose old arguments in favour of clear-cuts to the shoreline was founded on the fact that paddlers never stray far from the water trails. During my tenure as interior ranger, I was privy to the district timber planning operations; whenever there was a proposed logging cut near or within a sensitive area, I would chart out and propose a hiking trail in that same block of land. In the past, if there were no objections or conflicts of use within a proposed cutting area, industry had carte blanche treatment. But propose a hiking trail that would increase tourist flow, and get the scheme into the system files, and you could successfully block the intent by industry to log or build roads in that area.

For me it was a clandestine, albeit dogmatic, approach to solving a problem in the system. I had a night key to the district office and I would forage through master plans and timber allocation maps in the middle of the night. Of the four proposed trails I managed to insert into the planning process, three trails came to fruition. In 1980, I diverted my portage crew to work on the Temagami Island trail system where local logging companies wanted access to one of Ontario’s most magnificent stands of old-growth red and white pine. Once the trail was established, the people came, and they walked through a forest they would not normally have the opportunity to see up close. The existence of the trail created its own lobby group. Although this was a legally sanctioned trail, the means in which it was conceived could be construed as under-handed and coerced.

Deeper into the Temagami wild lands is the Wakimika Triangle — a lush, sweeping forest of gargantuan pine trees, precipitous escarpments, and clear-water lakes. It’s one of North America’s largest remaining stands of old-growth red and white pine. Logging companies have been tripping over each other to get in there and cut it down. A timber access road was pushed north into its sacred domain, a bridge was built over the Obabika River and the Wakimika forest was in sight. While this was happening, our newly founded environmental group, the Temagami Wilderness Society, or TWS (now Earthroots), had been building hiking trails within the forest. This is an illegal activity on Crown property; however, it was sanctioned by the local Ojibwa family, the Misabe’s, whose traditional homeland included the Wakimika forest. At the same time, tree-spikers riddled the big pines at the terminus of the logging road (and beyond) with twelve-inch steel spikes, rendering the pine stands unmarketable. This was an act not carried out by the TWS for obvious reasons; their mandate was to get people walking the newly constructed old-growth trails in order to bolster support for the issue. This was too much, too fast, for the local forestry office to handle, and in Ontario, nobody had yet to be charged with building illegal trails, or fined for spiking trees. It was also too much for the logging companies to deal with: the bridge had been burned out, trees were spiked, and it wasn’t worth taking a chance running trees through the mill band saw, or for sawyers to cut down the trees with the chance of hitting a nail. The media dragged the local Natural Resources administration through the mud, pulverizing them in every major newspaper in Canada. In the end, the Wakimika Triangle, including the section of spiked forest, was indoctrinated into the park system.

As a side note, tree-spiking was first initiated to save forests in the 1800s, and then popularized in Dave Foreman’s (co-founder of Earth First!) book, EcoDefense. According to the Association of Oregon Loggers, “the average ecotage incident costs $60,000 in equipment loss and downtime.” And that’s exactly what tree-spikers aspire to achieve — to make the venture for the company unprofitable. In British Columbia, Meares Island was slotted for clear-cutting, but it was cancelled after extensive and well planned tree-spiking.

Does tree-spiking harm the trees? Not according to University of Maine biologist Jonathan Carter who did extensive studies on the subject: “Unless copper is used, steel and ceramic spikes will not harm trees.”

Many environmentalists feel that they have been put in a position where there is no longer any legal control over the issue and the only remaining options are those outside the law. The question remains: Does tree-spiking work? Some companies will engage workers in a spike removal operation using a metal detector and crowbar. This in itself is costly for the company and it gets to the point where they have to determine if the value of the trees is worth the effort. If I were a tree-spiker, this is what I would do:

1) Make sure the stand of trees is actually slated for logging. Timber allocation maps are usually prepared a year or two in advance of the proposed cut and available to the public. Get somebody not involved in the field work to acquire maps. You don’t want to waste your time spiking a forest that isn’t on the hit list.

2) Plan the operation well in advance of the actual cut. Some companies will position motion detectors and video cameras along roads, bridges, and within the stand itself nearing the time of operations. Plan alternative means of access and avoid roads and peak forest-use seasons.

3) Have someone else purchase spikes, or devise a surrogate project like deck-building, retaining wall, or any reason why you would purchase spikes. Cut off the heads so they can’t be pulled out of the trees or use rebar cut in ten-inch lengths. Ceramic spikes are also becoming popular, as metal detectors can’t locate them.

4) Clean your work area thoroughly. A six-month investigation by state conservation officers and the FBI traced tree-spiking nails to Frank Ambrose, twenty-six, an affiliate of the ELF, through hardware store surveillance tapes. His car was also spotted near the forest at the time of the incident, and police found hammering and metal-cutting tools and cotton gloves with a residue similar to that from the spikes in Ambrose’s apartment.

5) Sink the nails past the bark line so that the protective sap layer covers the spike and is more difficult to extricate. Use tree-climbers (spiked foot harnesses used by arborists and linesmen) or a ladder to pound nails in at higher levels.

6) Always use gloves and leave no trace.

7) Carefully inform the authorities of the exact location of the spiked forest well in advance of any intrusive road building or logging.

Illegal trail building can do harm to the environment if not carefully executed. Mountain bike enthusiasts are notorious for building new trails on private or government lands and are often caught, punished accordingly, and the trails removed. These ventures are usually self-serving with no intent to help save an area from development. Well planned and conceived hiking trails, including water trails or canoe routes, work favourably in garnishing public support. However, a poorly constructed trail can have a rebound effect if improperly established. Portage trails need to be carefully scrutinized for historic or cultural importance and cleared accordingly. New hiking trails must also conform to the doctrines of sustainable trail-building techniques: avoiding fall-line or steep inclines where runoff may occur; avoiding cutting trees more than four inches in diameter; and avoiding sensitive flora and fauna. If an illegal trail conforms to proper trail construction methodology and there is no harm done to the ecological integrity, the local forestry office has less of a case against the perpetrator. Trail construction should be done in the off-season with the employment of hand tools only. On average, two seasoned trailbuilders can construct five hundred to a thousand metres of trail in a day’s work using nothing more than a Pulaski (a single-bit axe with an adze-shaped hoe extending from the back), loppers, and rake. The pay is lousy but the associated benefits are enormous.