Читать книгу Blessed Peacemakers - Robin Jarrell - Страница 65

7 November 1949—2 March 1997

Redwood Friend

They called it Redwood Summer. Sponsored by the radical environmentalist group Earth First!, the plan was to launch an entire summer’s campaign against northern California timber companies seeking to log the state’s old-growth redwood forests. Hundreds of environmental activists, veterans as well as newcomers, were expected to participate in the protests.

One of the leaders was Judi Bari, longtime environmental activist and Earth First! organizer and spokesperson. She had become an environmentalist a few years earlier when, working as a carpenter, her boss indifferently informed her that some siding she was nailing on a house came from a 1,000-year-old redwood. “A light bulb went on,” she later remembered. “We are cutting down old-growth forests to make yuppie houses.”

Like the other activists who participated in Redwood Summer, Bari frequently chained herself to at-risk trees to prevent their cutting and blocked the paths of bulldozers with her own body. But unlike other Earth First! members, many of whom were ready to use violence against the loggers, Bari insisted on a nonviolent approach. She condemned some environmentalists’ practice of tree-spiking, in which metal nails are driven into tree trunks in order to ruin chainsaws and potentially injure loggers. Her inspiration was the nonviolent approach adopted by Martin Luther King Jr. during the struggle for civil rights. Because she was one of the most visible organizers of Redwood Summer, she became the target of an avalanche of hate mail and death threats. Although she reported the threats to local police, she couldn’t persuade authorities to take her seriously.

In May 1990, an explosion ripped through Bari’s car as she drove through Oakland, California. Caused by a nail-stuffed pipe bomb with a motion-sensitive trigger, the explosion nearly killed Bari, leaving her permanently disabled. She and the companion riding with her (his injuries were minor) gave police at the scene the names of several individuals and organizations who might have been responsible, but Oakland officials and the FBI instead chose to arrest Bari, claiming that she had made the bomb for the purposes of harming loggers but had accidentally set it off in her car. Given Bari’s reputation as an advocate of nonviolence, it was an outrageous indictment. The charge was dropped for lack of evidence a couple of months later. But Bari and her companion sued the FBI and Oakland Police for false arrest and violation of their civil liberties. The courts eventually decided in their favor and awarded them over $4 million in damages. By that time, however, Bari had died of breast cancer.

The tragedy of Bari’s attempted murder, although it brought immense personal suffering to her, led to something that the bomber, whose identity is still unknown, neither anticipated nor intended. The publicity surrounding the attempt on her life drew national attention to the destruction of old-growth redwoods, leading to the creation of Headwaters Forest Reserve in northern California, the nation’s largest area of protected redwoods.