She May Be Broken, but She Remains Unbowed

WILLITS, Calif. — On a May day in 1990, Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney set off for a rally in Santa Cruz. The Earth First! activists were looking for volunteers who would throw their bodies between timber company saws and the regal old redwoods of Humboldt County. But Bari’s old Subaru never got that far: A pipe bomb under the driver’s seat exploded as they drove down an Oakland street.

The blast blew out Cherney’s eardrums and shattered Bari’s pelvis, sending her to the hospital for weeks and hobbling her to this day. Another casualty was the reputation of Earth First! For years the group had been synonymous with environmental radicalism for tactics such as tree spiking. This time, the front page news was that the two activists were arrested for transporting explosives, accused by the Oakland police and the FBI of being eco terrorists who accidentally blew themselves up.

Charges, however, were never filed. Bari was placed under arrest while in the hospital, where she spent seven weeks. The case against the couple soon unraveled as physical evidence indicated that the bomb was meant to harm the driver of the car, and prosecutors decided not to pursue charges.

Nearly seven years later, Bari is trying to turn the tables on the government: She and Cherney are suing the FBI and the Oakland Police Department, accusing them of violating their constitutional rights, hoping to make them explain their handling of the still-mysterious bombing and vindicate Earth First!

“I don’t think many people think we bombed ourselves anymore,” said Bari, whose unruly mane of hippie hair and bantam size (she stands just under 5 feet) disguise a firebrand personality and scalpel-sharp wit. “But we’re at the mercy of the media, which isn’t interested in our vindication, although they were very interested in our vilification.” Her fight has been made more urgent by a recent diagnosis of terminal cancer.

Neither the FBI nor the Oakland police had any comment, but at a November hearing in federal court in Oakland, the bureau sought to have the case dismissed without a trial, contending that it could not be blamed for failing to solve the crime. But the judge kept the case open, and Bari’s attorneys are seeking to put it on a fast track because of her illness.

To Bari, the FBI failed to adequately investigate the case and simply used it to try to smear her and the environmental movement, just another chapter in the bureau’s long history of attacking radical political groups. Ironically for a group whose name conjures up images of burning bulldozers, Earth First! had renounced sabotage and taken a nonviolence pledge not long before the bombing.

To many people, Earth First! remains a group of reckless outlaws. “They have no regard for the law and normal standards,” said Pacific Lumber President John Campbell, adding that tree spikes still occasionally turn up in the company’s mills, perhaps from years ago. “It’s been quite an expense for both the company and the county in terms of security. They’re taking away money that could be spent on education or folks who are less fortunate.”

In October, a jury in Idaho awarded the owner of road building equipment that was wrecked during a 1993 Earth First! timber sale protest in Cove-Mallard more than $1 million, mostly in punitive damages. “Earth Firsters are merely modern-day gangsters and thugs,” attorney Ron Blewett said after the civil trial.

Bari’s legal struggle comes at a time when the group has attracted relatively little attention but is still active and influential in some circles. Last year, two Earth Firsters locked themselves to a tree stump effigy filled with 600 pounds of concrete that they had smuggled into Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s San Francisco office. The activists were protesting the California Democrat’s role in brokering a proposed deal in which Houston financier Charles Hurwitz would swap 7,500 acres of redwoods with the government for $380 million in cash and surplus state and federal property.

The Headwaters Forest, in Humboldt County, which was named and put on the map by an Earth Firster, is the last old-growth redwood grove in private hands and ground zero of a fierce fight over the last decade between environmentalists and Pacific Lumber Co., which was taken over by Hurwitz’s Maxxam Inc. in a junk bond raid in 1985.

In September, more than 1,000 marchers were arrested trying to stop logging in the Headwaters--the biggest outpouring of activism in the struggle and one of the largest acts of civil disobedience in U.S. history. And Earth Firsters stayed in the woods until the end of logging season last year, living in trees for weeks at a time and draping the redwoods in yarn to gum up chain saws.

“I don’t think they’re going to listen to us,” Bari said. “We find that actions in the woods work much better. Direct action gets the goods.”

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Bari, 47, lives near Willits, this old Mendocino timber town halfway between San Francisco and Oregon and southeast of the Headwaters Forest. Under leaden winter skies, small tufts of clouds hang on the hills, if as snagged by the pine and oak. Miles past the last paved road, across the rain-swollen stream, the wood-burning stove is overheating her tiny cabin.

“Let me turn down the thermostat,” she said, opening a window.

The Northern California verdure is a long way from the Mexican desert where Earth First! was founded in 1980 by Dave Foreman, a former Marine who had been the Washington lobbyist for the Wilderness Society. The group had no official membership, no dues, no bylaws. Just a cause and a newsletter, the Earth First! Journal, which claimed as many as 5,000 subscribers by the end of the decade.

Bari, a carpenter and radical union organizer, fell in with the group after moving to Santa Rosa from the East in 1979. One day it dawned on her that the redwood planks she was turning into homes came from trees that had been living since the Middle Ages. “I was just marveling over its beauty,” she said, “and at the same time driving past trucks of logs and I put two and two together.”

Bari was soon active in Earth First! and the Headwaters fight, which turned increasingly bitter as “Redwood summer,” in which activists from around the country were invited to flock to the forest, drew near in 1990. Her car was rammed by a logging truck, and a photo of her with the cross hairs of a gun over her head turned up. And then she was bombed--an event that not only devastated her emotionally and medically but left her unable to take part in any strenuous physical protests.

“I always loved the field stuff,” she said. “It was the part I liked best; it’s been real hard not to be able to do that.”

At the time, Foreman and four other Earth Firsters were on trial in Arizona, accused of conspiring to sabotage power plants in three states. The defendants took a plea bargain, but insisted that the plot was instigated by an FBI agent provocateur. The charges against Foreman were eventually reduced to a misdemeanor; his cohorts received jail sentences.

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Foreman, who split with Northern California Earth First! over the nonviolence pledge and tree-spiking renunciation, soon left the group. In 1995 he was elected to the board of the Sierra Club. There, he shocked his former colleagues last year by throwing in with the losing side when the organization voted to support a ban on commercial logging on government land, a strategy he labeled politically unrealistic.

Bari still smarts from the fact that Foreman publicly broke with Earth First! while she was in the hospital and both were battling the FBI. “He led us down this path, gave us this reputation we’re still saddled with and now he supports Clinton,” she fumed. “It’s kind of galling.”

Actually, Foreman doesn’t support President Clinton--he’s a member of Republicans for Environmental Protection, who today laments radicalism for radicalism’s sake. “I’m reluctant to criticize Earth First! today,” said Foreman from his home in New Mexico. “There are a lot of heroes in it. I think Judi Bari is one of the most courageous people I ever met and one of the most committed. I tried to make it a friendly divorce. OK, we have different approaches. Let’s just go do what we do best.”

What Bari does best is act as a sparkplug for her Earth First! group, based in Mendocino County, which is the largest of the four in California and claims a mailing list of 3,500.

“Most of the men who always ran for the mike ran the other way after the bombing,” she said. “We’re less macho but way more radical.” Although the group has been criticized for alienating potential supporters with its strident style, others say such in-your-face activism brings pressure on corporations and attention to the issues.

“We need diversity in everything, from redwoods to environmental groups,” said David Brower, who was sacked as the executive director of the Sierra Club in 1969 for being too much of a barn burner but later won election to the group’s board. “They get the bruises, but they help wake people up. I think I’m as radical as they are.”

Earth First! is also credited with popularizing the cause of old-growth forests and the ideas of biocentrism and biodiversity. “There has been a proliferation of Earth First!-type groups, many of which do not go under the Earth First! label because they don’t want to be associated with some of those tactics that were employed in the 1980s,” said Bron R. Taylor, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and author of “Ecological Resistance Movements” (State University of New York Press, 1995).

In Southern California, for example, the Spirit of the Sage Council has done everything from picketing mountain bike races in Pasadena to legally challenging the Clinton administration’s methodical implementation of the Endangered Species Act. Said Leeona Klippstein, a founder of the group, which started six years ago as a collaboration between an Earth First! group and the Shohone-Gabrielino tribe: “The compromise of a living thing equals death.”