(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Fighting Back Against Anthropogenic Mass Extinction [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-19 People who defend these epic trees face the same threats the trees face. The arid American West was colonized primarily by killing and exploiting native flora, fauna, intact ecosystems, and indigenous people. One of the most pernicious enablers of this colonization is and was the massacre of old growth heritage forests, some of which had trees hundreds of feet high and hundreds of years old. The massacred intact ecosystems, flora, and fauna were replaced by monoculture “tree farms” and hidden by visual corridors. Visual corridors are thin layers of trees along roadsides, leading travelers to believe intact forests stretch to the horizon. But if you stop and walk through the narrow strip of trees, you emerge onto a blasted hellscape of stump forests—silent, poisoned, barren. Inspired by the books “The Monkey Wrench Gang” and “Desert Solitaire” by the late environmental author Edward Abbey, people across the West, but mostly in Northern California and Southern Oregon, began doing non-violent civil disobedience to stop the destruction of the few intact old growth forests that still existed by the 1980s. In 1997, a courageous young woman named Julia Butterfly Hill and a cadre of earth defenders created a media-savvy protest. Julia climbed 200 feet into a 1000-year-old redwood tree she called Luna, built a platform, and vowed to live in the tree until loggers and their employers agreed to stop killing old growth trees in the region. Myself and many others helped Julia by providing food, water, and other supplies, which had to be hiked in and then rope-raised to her living platform high above the ground. We witnessed relentless attempts by loggers and logging companies to kill Julia. These attempts included: Flying massive helicopters within feet of the tree to try to blow Julia out of it. Loggers and local police gathering at Luna’s base to violently attack Julia’s support crew so she wouldn’t have food or water. Loggers attempting to chop or chainsaw the tree down while Julia was living in it. Loggers and climbers attempting to reach Julia’s platform and do her harm. Loggers and others howling vicious invectives and threats at Julia, calling her pagan, eco-whore, tree-hugger, commie, bitch, witch, goon, and worse. They also threatened to rape her. Local law enforcement was nothing more than a publicly-funded enforcer for the logging companies and loggers. They made no attempt to protect Julia. It was the opposite. They routinely beat up, sexually violated, illegally arrested, and otherwise injured non-violent environmentalists. When some of our friends did lockdown protests at a pro-logging California legislator’s office and at the headquarters of Pacific Lumber Company in 1997, Humboldt County sheriff’s deputies grabbed them by the neck like they were going to choke them, forced their eyes open, and swabbed pepper spray directly into their eyes. Anyone with a conscience could see this was torture, but it took eight years and three trials before a federal jury agreed that the sheriffs used excessive force. However, this “victory” was hollow, as the jury only gave one dollar in damages to each of the activists attacked by police. Similar injustice is seen by what happened to forest defender David Chain in Humboldt in 1998. He and other forest defenders were repeatedly threatened by loggers. One logger who had hurled threats at Chain cut a tree in what witnesses describe as an unusual manner so the tree fell directly on Chain, instantly killing him. Of course, Humboldt law enforcement and the local district attorney refused to do anything to the logger who killed Chain. In fact, the district attorney threatened to charge the group Chain was a member of, the no-compromise Earth First! activist collective, with manslaughter in his death. This despite the fact that Pacific Lumber and its loggers had been charged with hundreds of violations of California forest safety regulations in the 1990s. The State later yanked the company’s logging license. Before losing its license, Pacific Lumber recklessly clear-cut forests above the tiny Humboldt town of Stafford. On New Year’s Day, 1997, the hillside slid down to bury the town. As always, the logging company denied responsibility, but later had to pay $3.3 million to residents affected by the company’s ecological destruction. Ironically, Julia Hill’s Luna, which was protected in an agreement she made with the logging company as a condition of leaving her treesit, is just up the mountain from where the mudslide that buried Stafford started. Earth First! activists and other forest defenders had already warned Stafford residents that logging and paper pulp processing plants threatened their community and many others. Indeed, Earth First! organizer Judi Bari, who was also a labor activist attempting to help loggers fight bad treatment by their employers, was blown up and severely injured in 1990 by a pipe bomb placed in her car. True to form, federal and state law enforcement refused to professionally investigate what Bari and her travel companion said was an attempt to assassinate her. Instead they were arrested by local police and the FBI, charged with transporting the bomb for terroristic purposes. The charges were false, and later dropped. Bari sued the police and FBI for how they handled the bombing investigation. A jury found in favor of Bari in 2002, but by then, she had died of cancer. As a labor organizer, Bari and the rest of us tried hard to create solidarity with loggers and their families, who had no problem admitting that logging companies exploit their workers and ruin the environment. However, they were desperate for income and felt they had to keep killing forests for money, even though it injured and killed workers and endangered entire regions. Many times environmental activists were chased, threatened, held at gunpoint, sexually assaulted and otherwise harmed by loggers and police. These experiences helped us realize America is not governed by the rule of law, but rather by fiefdoms consisting of local industry, law enforcement, and citizens dependent on ecologically deadly industries for employment. Verbal abuse against us was shocking, but also revealing. Some things said to us include: “What are you going to wipe your butt with if we don’t cut down trees?” “You want to take food out of my kids’ mouths.” “The only green I see when I look at a forest is dollar signs.” “I’m going to kill every spotted owl I can find.” “The Bible says God gave us dominion over the earth and we can do whatever we want to it.” “If you want to keep on breathing, you better get your ass out of our forests.” “You tree-hugging pagans are all going to hell.” Clever gallows humor included a pun intended to ridicule the name of Earth First!, the environmental organization. Bumper stickers in the region said, “Earth first, we’ll log the other planets later.” It should be noted that protecting the environment and innocent animals have been legislated as terrorism in the United States. Forest defenders, water defenders, environmental justice and animal rights activists across the country have been arrested, beaten, run out of their homes, imprisoned. In federal courts and during arrests and incarceration, we’ve been treated far worse, facing much harsher prison terms, jail conditions, fines, and other punitives than even the most violent of the seditious Trump terrorists who beat up police officers and attempted to overthrow our government. In Louisiana recently, environmental activists protesting the poisoning of air, land, and water in mostly-black communities by environmental criminal Formosa Plastics were arrested for civil disobedience. Other activists in the area have experienced racist, violent threats from the company, other ecologically-ruinous corporations, some of their employees, and government officials. The sad fact is that only a tiny fraction of the native forests, plants, trees, and animals that existed in our country before 1650 exist today. Our species, the most dangerous apex predator ever to have evolved, is an anthropogenic mass extinction event. Our entire civilization, and every human born, comes at the expense of the biosphere. The following short, cute video accurately depicts our reign on earth, although the ending may be a bit of wishful thinking. Anything you can do to fight back on behalf of the biosphere and native flora and fauna, please do. But watch out for those who oppose you. Environmental activism can be fatal. The arid American West was colonized primarily by killing and exploiting native flora, fauna, intact ecosystems, and indigenous people. One of the most pernicious enablers of this colonization is and was the massacre of old growth heritage forests, some of which had trees hundreds of feet high and hundreds of years old. The massacred intact ecosystems, flora, and fauna were replaced by monoculture “tree farms” and hidden by visual corridors. Visual corridors are thin layers of trees along roadsides, leading travelers to believe intact forests stretch to the horizon. But if you stop and walk through the narrow strip of trees, you emerge onto a blasted hellscape of stump forests—silent, poisoned, barren. Inspired by the books “The Monkey Wrench Gang” and “Desert Solitaire” by the late environmental author Edward Abbey, people across the West, but mostly in Northern California and Southern Oregon, began doing non-violent civil disobedience to stop the destruction of the few intact old growth forests that still existed by the 1980s. In 1997, a courageous young woman named Julia Butterfly Hill and a cadre of earth defenders created a media-savvy protest. Julia climbed 200 feet into a 1000-year-old redwood tree she called Luna, built a platform, and vowed to live in the tree until loggers and their employers agreed to stop killing old growth trees in the region. Myself and many others helped Julia by providing food, water, and other supplies, which had to be hiked in and then rope-raised to her living platform high above the ground. We witnessed relentless attempts by loggers and logging companies to kill Julia. These attempts included: Flying massive helicopters within feet of the tree to try to blow Julia out of it. Loggers and local police gathering at Luna’s base to violently attack Julia’s support crew so she wouldn’t have food or water. Loggers attempting to chop or chainsaw the tree down while Julia was living in it. Loggers and climbers attempting to reach Julia’s platform and do her harm. Loggers and others howling vicious invectives and threats at Julia, calling her pagan, eco-whore, tree-hugger, commie, bitch, witch, goon, and worse. They also threatened to rape her. Local law enforcement was nothing more than a publicly-funded enforcer for the logging companies and loggers. They made no attempt to protect Julia. It was the opposite. They routinely beat up, sexually violated, illegally arrested, and otherwise injured non-violent environmentalists. When some of our friends did lockdown protests at a pro-logging California legislator’s office and at the headquarters of Pacific Lumber Company in 1997, Humboldt County sheriff’s deputies grabbed them by the neck like they were going to choke them, forced their eyes open, and swabbed pepper spray directly into their eyes. Anyone with a conscience could see this was torture, but it took eight years and three trials before a federal jury agreed that the sheriffs used excessive force. However, this “victory” was hollow, as the jury only gave one dollar in damages to each of the activists attacked by police. Similar injustice is seen by what happened to forest defender David Chain in Humboldt in 1998. He and other forest defenders were repeatedly threatened by loggers. One logger who had hurled threats at Chain cut a tree in what witnesses describe as an unusual manner so that the tree fell directly on Chain, instantly killing him. Of course, Humboldt law enforcement and the local district attorney refused to do anything to the logger who killed Chain. In fact, the district attorney threatened to charge the group Chain was a member of, the no-compromise Earth First! activist collective, with manslaughter in his death. This despite the fact that Pacific Lumber and its loggers had been charged with hundreds of violations of California forest safety regulations in the 1990s. The State later yanked the company’s logging license. Before it lost its license, Pacific Lumber recklessly clear-cut forests above the tiny Humboldt town of Stafford. On New Year’s Day, 1997, the hillside slid down to bury the town. As always, the logging company denied responsibility, but later had to pay $3.3 million to residents harmed by the company’s reckless greed. Ironically, Julia Hill’s Luna, which was protected in an agreement she made with the logging company as a condition of leaving her tree-sit, is just up the mountain from where the mudslide that buried Stafford started. Earth First! activists and other forest defenders had already warned Stafford residents that logging and paper pulp processing plants threatened their community and many others. Indeed, Earth First! organizer Judi Bari, who was also a labor activist, was blown up and severely injured in 1990 by a pipe bomb placed in her car. True to form, federal and state law enforcement refused to professionally investigate what Bari and her travel companion said was an attempt to assassinate her. Instead they were arrested by local police and the FBI, charged with transporting the bomb for terroristic purposes. The charges were false, and later dropped. Bari sued the police and FBI for how they handled the bombing investigation. A jury found in favor of Bari in 2002, but by then, she had died of cancer. As a labor organizer, Bari and the rest of us tried hard to create solidarity with loggers and their families, who had no problem admitting that logging companies exploit their workers and ruin the environment. However, they were desperate for income and felt they had to keep killing forests for money, even though it injured and killed workers and endangered entire regions. Many times environmental activists were chased, threatened, held at gunpoint, sexually assaulted and otherwise harmed by loggers and police. These experiences helped us realize America is not governed by the rule of law, but rather by fiefdoms consisting of local industry, law enforcement, and citizens dependent on ecologically deadly industries for employment. Verbal abuse was shocking, but also revealing. Some things said to us include: “What are you going to wipe your butt with if we don’t cut down trees?” “You want to take food out of my kids’ mouths.” “The only green I see when I look at a forest is dollar signs.” “I’m going to kill every spotted owl I can find.” “The Bible says God gave us dominion over the earth and we can do whatever we want to it.” “If you want to keep on breathing, you better get your ass out of our forests.” “You tree-hugging pagans are all going to hell.” Of particular gallows humor was a pun intended to ridicule the name of Earth First! the environmental organization. Bumper stickers in the region said, “Earth first, we’ll log the other planets later.” It should be noted that protecting the environment and innocent animals have been legislated as terrorism in the United States. Forest defenders, water defenders, environmental justice activists across the country have been arrested, beaten, run out of their homes, imprisoned. In federal courts and during arrests and incarceration, we’ve been treated far worse, facing much harsher prison terms, jail conditions, fines, and other punitives than even the most violent of the seditious Trump terrorists who beat up police officers and attempted to overthrow our government. In Louisiana recently, environmental activists protesting the poisoning of air, land, and water in mostly-black communities by environmental criminal Formosa Plastics were arrested for civil disobedience. Other activists in the area have experienced racist, violent threats from the company, other ecologically-ruinous corporations, some of their employees, and government officials. The sad fact is that only a miniscule fraction of the native forests, plants, trees, and animals that existed in our country before 1650 exist today. We’ve created a wholly unnatural, dying biosphere as we hurtle towards a paved-over, searingly hot, polluted, noisy, bleak dystopia of our own making. Our species, the most dangerous apex predator ever to have evolved, is an anthropogenic mass extinction event. Our entire civilization, and every human born, comes at the expense of the biosphere. The following short, cute video accurately depicts our reign on earth, although the ending may be a bit of wishful thinking. Anything you can do to fight back on behalf of the biosphere and native flora and fauna, please do. But watch out for those who oppose you. Environmental activism can be fatal. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/19/2153846/-Fighting-Back-Against-Anthropogenic-Mass-Extinction Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/