Tree Spiker: From Earth First! to Lowbagging: My Struggles in Radical Environmental Action
272
Tree Spiker: From Earth First! to Lowbagging: My Struggles in Radical Environmental Action
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Overview
Lauded by some, despised by others, Mike Roselle is one of the most controversial figures in the crusade to protect the environment. Mike has succeeded in stopping a lumber project by spiking trees, struggled with death threats and the car bombing of fellow activist Judi Bari, endured countless days in jail, infiltrated the Nevada Test Site to delay nuclear bomb detonation, helped put a gas mask on Mount Rushmore's George Washington, and aided actor Woody Harelson in draping a banner up on the Golden Gate Bridge. He has spent over thirty years fighting back against big business, negligent management and the lawless actions of the government itself for the safety and preservation of our great earth.
Tree Spiker: From Earth First! to Lowbagging: My Struggles in Radical Environmental Action is a fascinating autobiography from the front lines of a radical movement.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429956833 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/29/2009 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 271 KB |
About the Author
MIKE ROSELLE is a co-founder of the San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network, Earth First!, and the Ruckus Society. He has been featured in numerous magazine articles, news segments, and documentaries. JOSH MAHAN is an environmental journalist and editor.
JOSH MAHAN is an environmental journalist and editor, as well as a wilderness adventure writer.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Mighty Oak
The sun was going down over the United States military's number one top-secret base. From where I stood, I could see into the town of Mercury, a town so hush-hush that buses carrying in workers from Las Vegas didn't even have windows. North of Mercury was a view of Frenchman's Flats, where the military tested its arsenal of nuclear bombs. Ronald Reagan was president, and the Cold War was at its height.
Welcome to the Nevada Test Site. It was the evening of April 7, 1986. In eighteen days, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant will have a major reactor meltdown, spewing vast amounts of radioactivity across the U.S.S.R. and world. That evening, though, politics were still entrenched firmly in a pre-Chernobyl nuclear reality. So I was trying to hike into ground zero as part of a Greenpeace team to stop the Mighty Oak nuclear test from happening.
In the early stage of nuclear testing, bombs were detonated in the atmosphere. By 1986, they were detonating the nukes at the bottoms of wells drilled deep into the desert floor. The result was more than six hundred craters pocking the desert floor, some a half mile wide, from the nuclear explosions that had been set off by the Department of Energy.
The sun continued to drop over this wasteland, and I readied to get back to work. I was high above the testing grounds, on a steep cliff, more than fifty miles from where we had been dropped off. It had been a long walk. We had hiked around Groom Lake, an area once known as Area 51, and then into a narrow canyon leading into the Jumbled Hills. It really hadn't been that hard to infiltrate the renowned military base — just a few strands of barbed wire.
Ever since it was first created as the place to blow off nukes, the Nevada Test Site has been the focus of intense opposition. To begin with, the ranchers who used to live in the region didn't want to sell their land to the government. After the aboveground tests began, the people downwind started complaining of health problems and said their animals were dying from radiation exposure. Protests began immediately and eventually pushed the tests underground by forcing the United States and Russia to sign a treaty banning atmospheric tests.
Back here in the Jumbled Hills, overlooking the test site, we heard the thunk-thunk-thunk of a chopper on patrol. About ten miles away and a thousand feet below us, a chopper slowly worked its way up the sandy canyon we had just hiked. In the low light of dusk, the half-inch indentations of our footprints were casting visible shadows. The jig was up.
As the helicopter proceded up the draw, we looked for a place to hide. The vegetation was scant. There were no rocks, and no features of any kind to hide in or under. It was just a high, dry ridgeline. I sat next to a flimsy creosote bush, feeling a little exposed, and waited. It was nearly dark.
More helicopters flew over us to the summit of the ridge and circled back. I was spotted, and a helicopter trained a high-powered floodlight on me. I felt like a frog in the swamp. I stood up to face the blast of air coming off the rotors.
Suddenly behind me, I heard a soldier yell, "Don't move or I'll shoot! Put your hands above your head."
I turned around to face him. He had jumped out of the helicopter before it circled around. Other soldiers had unloaded along the ridge top, and I could see the rest of my team being rounded up.
With his gun trained on me, the soldier was backlit in the glowing light of the fading sunset. At that very moment, the ammo clip fell out of his M-16 and onto the ground. He gave me a quizzical look and shrugged his shoulders.
"You know who we are?" I asked.
"Yeah, you're Greenpeace," he replied frankly. "We've been out here looking for you for three days. We were about to go home."
Then he asked to borrow my flashlight. I obliged.
By now it was dark, and he signaled his location to the other soldiers. Eventually we were all loaded into the back of four-wheel-drive pickups, blindfolded with our hands bound, and driven down into Mercury.
Once in town, we were placed in the command center of the cat-and-mouse game we had been playing since announcing our plans to hike to ground zero and interfere with the bomb test. The command post was in a large room with a table, coffeepot, chairs, and some radio equipment. The soldiers were tired, but friendly enough.
"Are there any more of you?" one of them asked.
"No," I answered truthfully. "You got all of us. We were pretty much out of food and water anyway."
Eric, our campaign director, asked, "If we're under arrest, we need to call our attorney and ask him to be present before we answer any more questions."
"Go ahead," the soldier said. "You can use the phone on the desk."
Eric picked up the receiver and made the call. Back in our hotel room in Las Vegas, the phone rang.
Peter, our press officer, picked up. Instead of talking to our lawyer, Eric gives the green light for Plan B. The B Team is deployed as we sit in the command center.
Plan A had been a stealth attempt to get in under radar. Plan B was going to be a full-throttle race into ground zero, driving in on a network of ranch roads above the test site.
At first, the B Team tried driving in without headlights, but the endeavor proved too slow and difficult. The lights came on, and they sped down the gravel road, quickly becoming lost in the crisscrossed network of unmarked and unmapped roads. Again pink filled the skies. The sun was starting to come up, and the bomb test was set for 8 A.M. Tension began to rise. If the team couldn't make it into the test site, there would be more devastation — the nuclear blast would occur.
Just then an air force security vehicle neared the caravan of antinuclear activists.
An officer approached. "What are you doing out here, and where are you going?" he asked mechanically.
"We're a tour group looking for wild horses," Jim Puckett, the lead Greenpeace driver, coolly retorted.
"Oh, you want to go that way," the officer said, pointing north. "Just make sure you don't go down this road. It leads right into the bombing range." With that, the security officer got in his truck and drove off.
The caravan raced along as the sun came up, now sure of their direction. Soon they saw the test site boundary — and a squadron of hovering helicopters at the gate blocking their path. The caravan slammed on its brakes. Activists piled out, trying to put on their packs and run. Once again, the helicopters had offloaded soldiers behind the vehicle, and these soldiers now surrounded the caravan.
"Don't move or we'll shoot!" the soldiers yelled once again.
Steve Loper looked the closest soldier straight in the eye. The stare down lasted only a moment before Loper said to the gunman, "You won't shoot me. I'm from Greenpeace." With that, he took off running down a nearby steep slope covered in piñon pine and juniper trees. He was gone in an instant. Three or four soldiers immediately plunged after him, crashing through the dense thorny forest.
B Team had managed to make it within spitting distance of ground zero, and a massive search was now under way for Loper. By the time Steve was discovered clinging to a tree, the countdown had to be canceled. It was the first time antinuclear activists had ever been able to delay a nuclear-weapons test anywhere in the world.
Eventually I was taken to the county jail with the A and B Teams, charged with criminal trespass, and released to the glare of television cameras broadcasting the story worldwide.
Two days later, April 10, the Mighty Oak test was conducted in the tunnels of Rainier Mesa. The nuke was detonated in a huge pipe drilled into the side of the mesa. Part of the test was to determine how well space and military hardware could withstand a nuclear blast. The doors and seals failed, releasing significant levels of radioactive Xenon 133, detected fifty miles away. The blast also vaporized most of the monitoring system and contaminated a large section of the tunnel network, setting the Star Wars program back years.
The Department of Energy was playing with fire. That's why we had tried to stop them.
Soon, Congress would pass a bill making such detonations illegal. Reagan would sign it.
The Department of Energy would deny anything had gone wrong with the Mighty Oak blast for three weeks, and even censured the Russians when Chernobyl released massive amounts of radiation into the atmosphere. When the DOE did fess up, the announcement was overshadowed by the world's reaction to Chernobyl, even though Mighty Oak rained more radiation on American soil than Chernobyl did.
This was just another day at the office with Greenpeace.
The purpose of actions such as the hike into ground zero was to confront some of the most serious environmental challenges of our time through the use of nonviolent direct action. We then provided dramatic images of these actions to the news media to grab the attention of people sitting on their couches, gobbling up otherwise approved programming.
Since 9/11, environmental groups have been wary of such confrontations, choosing instead to appear more reasonable. But with the advent of global warming and the need to address the out-of-control burning of coal and other fossil fuels, this tactic is a mistake. It will certainly take actions like those of Greenpeace to motivate the public to apply more pressure on the government to seek real climate-change solutions.
CHAPTER 2
Hippies, Yippies, and Zippies
I never wanted to be an activist. I wanted to work as an artist, as a crewman on a tugboat, or maybe as a garbage man. But never an activist. Protesters were on television all the time. They were usually college kids getting beat up by the cops. But all that changed in 1968, when my family moved from Louisville, Kentucky, to Los Angeles, California.
Actually it was the second time we moved to L.A. We first moved out there in 1966 and returned to Louisville when my mother decided she didn't like California. After one year back in Louisville, she decided she didn't much care for Kentucky, either. So we drove back to L.A. with my four brothers and two sisters in a '59 Mercury station wagon pulling a U-Haul filled with everything we owned. In 1968, Louisville was in a steep economic decline and embroiled in a struggle between its African-American and white citizens, which occasionally brought the National Guard to our fair city to keep the peace.
I was enrolled as a student in Edgewood Junior High School in La Puente, California, when a friend of mine by the name of Michael Stevenson suggested that if I was opposed to the Vietnam War, I should wear a black armband on May Day. I did, but not so much from my opposition to the war. I had been all for the war ever since watching John Wayne in The Green Berets at the drive-in. I wore the armband because I didn't have very many friends and I wanted to be accepted into some group. This had been the first offer of inclusion. It would turn out to be a very small group — three of us total. But they forced me to take a position against the war, something I had not done yet.
Most of what I knew about the war was from the newspapers and television. Peace was around the corner, the news said, and America could not afford to lose a war, no matter what the reason for starting it was. This was a war against Communism, and to be against the war was to be for Communism. I didn't really know what Communism was; from the grainy black-and-white footage shown on TV, it looked like a bleak place where people spent their time making cinder block buildings and standing in line for bread. They also had lots of soldiers, tanks, and the atomic bomb. I had gotten used to hiding under my desk during frequent duck-and-cover drills to prepare for the inevitable air raids that the Communists were waiting to launch.
One of the things Mike Stevenson and I would do to pass the time in the quiet suburbs of La Puente was sit on his roof and listen to FM radio. KPPC was a station out of Pasadena that played the latest rock and folk music. The station had a weak signal, so you needed to sit on the roof to get reception. Programming often included guest speakers who talked about the war. They were rooting for the Communists to win. Now, I could understand them being against the war, but being for Communism seemed a bit extreme, and I couldn't believe a thoughtful person could want the commies to win.
On the weekends, we would sneak out of our houses and hitchhike to Bond Street in Hollywood. Bond Street had a number of bookstores that specialized in comic books. Mike and I were both collectors at the time, with a special interest in Marvel Comics. On Bond Street, any back issue of Spider Man, Fantastic Four, or Captain America could be had for the right price. Sometimes we would buy a comic book, but usually we just looked through the store as if we were in the Louvre admiring great works of art. We would examine rare issues in their clear plastic bags as if Michelangelo himself had drawn them.
There were other attractions in Hollywood in 1969. The streets were full of hippies in all sorts of colorful clothes. The women sometimes wore fishnet or see-through blouses, and the men had long hair, just like the protesters did on television. There were head shops selling posters, underground comics, and all sorts of pipes and cigarette papers. There was also the Los Angeles Free Press, which I bought as much for its photographs of naked women as I did for the articles it contained, most of which were against the war.
Another thing we liked to do without telling our parents was hitchhike to the love-ins at Griffith Park. We listened to music by Buddy Miles and Country Joe McDonald, and to many speeches against the war. Some of these speeches were made by Communists, but the speakers didn't look like what I thought a Communist should look like. I volunteered at the Green Power Feeds Millions table to make sandwiches out of stale bread and U.S. government surplus peanut butter for the long lines of hungry protesters. I discovered that making sandwiches allowed you to infiltrate the underground. Before long, I was selling the L.A. Free Press in my neighborhood until the night I was almost arrested by the West Covina Police for what they called peddling pornography in front of a Denny's restaurant.
The first time I was arrested was that summer in Elysian Park. I was at a concert to promote a national mobilization of antiwar activists to march on Washington, D.C., for another moratorium. The march was sponsored by the Student Mobilization Committee — a front group for several branches of socialist political parties, including a Communist party, the Workers World Party, and its youth wing, Youth Against War and Fascism.
These guys were real, live commies. One Communist I met in the park that day looked very agreeable. She was a young woman wearing a fishnet shirt over a low-riding granny skirt. I was not used to talking to girls who had nipples sticking out of their shirt, and felt a little uncomfortable. Still, I would have done anything she asked. But she only wanted me to help her pass out some leaflets. I would be the best leaflet passer-outer she ever saw, and I would come back for another stack. She would realize that I was a good comrade, and then she would sleep with me in the bushes somewhere.
I never saw her again.
I was passing out leaflets with great gusto when an officer in the Los Angeles Police Department asked me what I was doing. I asked him if he wanted a leaflet. Two officers grabbed me from behind and began to cuff me. They informed me I was under arrest for the distribution of leaflets in a public park. I started yelling about the U.S. Constitution and freedom, and they began to thump me and twist my arms into painful positions. I looked around and saw that there was a lot of thumping going on. We had been surrounded by a thousand LAPD officers wielding nightsticks. They dragged me off toward the pavement where their cruisers were parked, and I could see that several cop cars were damaged, with dents and broken windows. I could smell tear gas.
The cops shoved me into a cruiser and drove up the hill. They had a large staging area set up for booking a mob of people. After being photographed with my arresting officer, who had punched me earlier, I sat handcuffed in a school bus with barred windows and watched the riot unfold on the lawn below. I was fifteen years old. I did not give them my name or any other information, not for legal protection, but because I had not yet figured out what to tell my parents. The cops pegged me as an adult because of my size. So I was on my way to the adult lockup in the old L.A. County Jail, a very famous place, according to my older brother, who was still in there. I was much less afraid of L.A. County Jail than I was of going home, where my stepdad would certainly side with the cops, and maybe even provide some additional thumping.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Tree Spiker"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Mike Roselle.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments,
Foreword by Dr. Roderick Nash:,
Radicalism in American Environmental History,
1. Mighty Oak,
2. Hippies, Yippies, and Zippies,
3. Brinkerhoff 54 — The Founding of Earth First!,
4. The Rain Forest Icon,
5. Four Months in a South Dakota Prison — Another Day at the Office,
6. Why I Quit Spiking Trees,
7. Redwood Summer and the Bombing of Judi Bari,
8. Holding Idaho's High Ground — A Decade in Cove/Mallard,
9. Greenpeace Confronts the Mahogany Pirates,
10. Raising a Ruckus Society,
11. Battle in Seattle,
12. Green Scare — The Brief and Brutal Career of the ELF,
13. Appalachian Destruction — The Fight Ahead,