The first posting is from Orin Langelle, Co-Director/Strategist for Global Justice Ecology Project and the second post, “JUDI BARI LIVES” is from Karen Pickett. Karen’s was first run in Oread Daily from an article for the Earth First! Journal. Karen is also a board member of Global Justice Ecology Project.
The Bombing of Judi Bari—Reflections Twenty Years After
(this one’s for you, Judi)
By Orin Langelle
Judi Bari shows police photo of her bombed car. Photo by Evan Johnson ©1993
I’ll never forget May 24, 1990. I was living in a farmhouse on the outskirts of Pacific, Missouri when a brief television report came on saying that a car carrying two environmental activists had been bombed in northern California. My stomach tightened because I new that tensions were high in that area due to a call for environmentalists to come to “Redwood Summer” in an attempt to stop the logging of some of the last standing ancient redwoods.
Within an hour my phone rang—it was the office of the Industrial Workers of the World, then in Chicago. “Judi and Darryl’s car was just bombed outside of Oakland. We don’t know their condition. We really don’t know anything yet.” And as a precaution I was urged to “go outside and check your car for any possible tampering—we don’t know if this is a hit to many organizers or just Judi and Darryl.” I checked my car and it was okay.
That was the start of many more phone calls. Thankfully Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were alive, but Judi was severely injured and both were arrested. Then nausea set in.
The following days were days of disbelief and what the fuck was going on?
The FBI arrested Judi and Darryl for “transporting explosives.” Not anyone that knew Judi and Darryl bought that one; I know I certainly didn’t.
Both Judi and Darryl were prominent Earth First! organizers. Judi gained notoriety in California for bringing environmentalists and loggers together, pointing out that the real enemy was industry (capitalism) that was exploiting both the workers and the environment for profit. In the weeks following the bombing, industry and the government would attempt to employ a divide and conquer strategy and drive a wedge between environmentalists and workers by spreading disinformation to the public that Bari and Cherney were “terrorists.”
I remember my friend Steve and I staying up all night, getting out a special edition of the newsletter of Big River Earth First! that expressed the Big River’s collective disgust at the bombing and arrest.
Shortly thereafter, EF! activists in southern Illinois (soon to be Shawnee EF!) held a press conference where they turned all their weapons of terror over to the FBI. The “weapons” consisted of paper, pens and typewriters (not many computers back then).
Big River Earth First! from Missouri went to the Federal Building in St. Louis and held a rally where we told the media that it was ludicrous to think that activists preaching non-violence would be carrying bombs or would blow themselves up. I photographed that rally, and due to a deadline rush, immediately sent my undeveloped film to the Earth First! Journal, then published in Arizona. The film was never received. (Now go to 2010 real time where the Arizona state abbreviation should now simply be nAZi.)
Judi’s pelvis was shattered by the pipe bomb that exploded under her seat. She was told she would never walk again. She did. And she lived until March 2, 1997 before breast cancer claimed her life—but not before suing the FBI (winning posthumously) and speaking on numerous occasions from California all the way to Maine.
I first met Judi in the Jemez mountains of New Mexico in 1989 during the Earth First! Round River Rendezvous, an EF! Annual gathering that brings hundreds of radical environmentalists together from across the U.S. and usually a few from various parts of the globe. I believe there was an immediate comrade-ship formed because I told Judi how I was impressed with how she brought an analysis forward that looked at the interconnections of ecology and working class solidarity. In the months that passed she and I exchanged letters and phone calls…
After May 24, 1990 many things changed in many ways for many people. Many of us from Big River EF! had been planning to go to go to Redwood Summer and put ourselves on the line. Instead however, a timber sale was announced by the U.S. Forest Service that was to take place in the Shawnee National Forest of southern Illinois. The Fairview area, slated to be cut, was rich in biodiversity, a haven for songbirds and loved by the many locals who went there to watch the birds or just plain escape the pains of the 20th century.
A southern Illinois regional environmental group invited Earth First! to come in and defend the area. Tents were set up in the logging road and an encampment spread throughout the timber sale area. Tree sitting platforms were made. One of our road blockades consisted of an old beat up sedan that, for some reason or another we dubbed “The Biscuit.” Outreach went to the local surrounding communities. We declared that our actions were in solidarity with Redwood Summer as well as the Mohawk uprising in Kanehsatake (Kanienkehaka), Canada.
For almost three months we held the area (at that time the longest EF! blockade in history). The local postmaster even gave us a postbox so we could receive mail. At one time we had to put up a sign declaring, “Please no more food donations today—we have enough organic food already donated.” The major daily newspaper in Springfield, IL, the states’ capital, went so far as to say that what was going on in the Shawnee National Forest, “was a popular uprising.” Almost every night the occupation was the lead story on TV across a four state region (at least until George the 1st started bombing Baghdad).
Eventually Forest Service special agents arrived from across the U.S. and the invasion of law enforcement and bulldozers began. The day they moved in, my friend John, who turned thirty years old that day and was wanted by the Forest Service for entering a closure area illegally, turned himself in by using a kryptonite bicycle lock to lock his neck to a logging skidder (sort of a bulldozer). The Forest Service responded by putting an aluminum shield around his head and cutting off the lock with an acetylene torch while John sang, “God Bless America.” (FYI: that played well in the press.)
The cutting really never began that year as a Federal Court granted attorneys representing the environmental activists a temporary restraining order forbidding the cutting of Fairview until further review.
To many of us on blockade, this also was for Judi while giving the finger to the federal authorities.
In the summer of 1991, on a trip to the west coast, Steve and I visited Judi and I interviewed her for independent radio. At the end of the interview Judi sang a capella a parody of “Lullabye and Goodnight” that ended “Lullabye and goodnight for the Earth is dying…go to bed now, lay your head, in the morning you’ll be dead. Lullaby and goodnight, while toxic wastes are seeping, Lullaby and goodnight, what the fuck are you doing sleeping.” Not only was Judi an organizer, she sang and played fiddle as well.
In fall of 1991 Faiview fell to the chainsaws that were guarded by the elite shock troops of the Forest Service.
I moved to Vermont around that time. My partner, Anne Petermann, Judi and I continued to remain in contact. Anne and I traveled to California several times to see Judi. She even came to Vermont a couple of times. We discussed many different issues from eco-feminism to the questioning of work for others’ profit to politics to revolutionary ecology…
Once we went to Albion to see Albion Nation and support the struggle there that Judi was involved in
Another time, upon waking up in the morning in Judi’s Willits, CA home, Anne and I got up and stepped outside. I’ve never smelled ‘skunkweed’ so pungent—all around us. Judi also was one of the first organizers to try and unionize marijuana pickers in Northern California under the Industrial Workers of the World.
During the years after the bombing and before Judi’s death, Anne and I became close to Judi. Judi was some someone who could give advice when asked and was someone who we stood by. Sometimes it wasn’t easy as Judi could be as cantankerous as a rattlesnake. But most times it was very easy.
Judi had a sense of humor despite the crippling effect the bombing had on her body and the chronic pain she was in. One time, when was asked by a reporter if she equated EF! with the Weathermen (a late 1960’s and early 70’s group that went underground and attacked the U.S. imperialism with bombs). Judi laughed and said, “No, we’re like the Yippies!” The Yippies or Youth International Party in the sixties were also outraged at U.S. imperialism and the Viet Nam war, but were pranksters who thumbed their noses at the establishment with colorful stunts. One year they ran a pig, Pegasus, for President. Unfortunately Nixon beat out the pig and lashed out with savage bombing campaigns of North Vietnam, Cambodia, etc.
When Judi told Anne and me that she had incurable breast cancer we could hardly believe it. Here was a woman that was not only a brilliant organizer, but had been bombed and crippled for her skills, then walked when she was told she would never walk again. Here was a woman who stood up against the sick system that was complicit in her bombing. Here was a real revolutionary ecologist.
After that, Anne and I spoke with Judi several times as she put her life in order during her illness.
A week before she succumbed to cancer, Anne and I spoke very briefly with her and set up a time at the end of the week where we could all have an extended conversation.
Anne and I wanted to say good-bye. Judi passed from the Earth she loved before that call and we never got that chance.
That weekend, when the memorials and sad parties were held in California, some of Anne’s and my close friends gathered here in Vermont. David Rovics and crew sang Judi’s parody of “May the Circle be Unbroken”, which was “Will the fetus be aborted.” –this song was what authorities gave as one of ludicrous theories of why she was bombed.
As David sang, a joint was passed around to those present. It was a special joint of not just pot, but also mushrooms that had been sent by Scottish EF!ers who were blockading another Roman, er English motorway. The mushrooms had been picked off an ancient witches’ burial site that was in the path of the bulldozers.
As the IWW organizer Joe Hill said before he was executed in 1915 by the state of Utah, “Don’t mourn for me. Organize!” These were some of Judi’s last words also.
!Judi Bari, Presente!
Orin Langelle is the Co-Director/Strategist for Global Justice Ecology Project
http://www.globaljusticeecology.org
JUDI BARI LIVES
Published May 12, 2010 by Oread Daily
It’s been almost twenty years since a bomb sent Judi Bari to the hospital seriously injured. About Judi, Nicholas Wilson noted, “The common denominator was her indignation over injustice, whether in the form of war, racism, sexism, political repression, economic exploitation, or the unnecessary destruction of ecosystems.”
That was Judi.
When the then labor activist Judi Bari joined Earth First! and brought the IWW back to timber country in 1988, real grassroots opposition began to grow in timber country. Judi was charismatic and she worked for a an alliance between workers and environmental activists. So it is no surprise that both before and after her death, she was the target of national PR campaigns and covert actions aimed at discrediting and neutralizing her, the Earth First! movement, and radical environmentalism in general. The public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, representing logging corporations, was shown to be involved.
Judi was downright scary to the corporate powers. They shed no tears when she was stricken with breast cancer and left this world in 1997.
But to paraphrase a tune about Joe Hill, someone who would have loved her, “she never really died.”
The following is from Earth First! Journal.
Remembering Judi Bari
20 Years Ago an Explosion Filled the Sky and Changed Earth First!
By kp
I can barely believe it was 20 years ago, because the events are so fresh in my mind. Of course, I’ve always said that I was about as close to the bomb exploding in Judi Bari’s car on May 24, 1990 as I could have been without being in the car myself. I was at work in Berkeley, and got a call from Kelpie, my roommate and fellow activist, that something terrible had happened. Judi and Darryl Cherney had been taken to Highland Hospital in Oakland, Califonia badly injured by a bomb explosion. I had been at a Redwood Summer organizing meeting at the Seeds of Peace house just the night before, and Judi, Darryl and fellow musician George Shook were planning to go to Santa Cruz for a Redwood Summer roadshow event on the University of California Santa Cruz campus. A few minutes before noon, Judi made a lane change, triggering the motion device attached to the pipe bomb that had been planted unseen under her driver’s seat. The force of the explosion drove the seat springs up into her body, pulverizing her pelvis and nearly killing her.
When I got to the hospital—before the crowds arrived and after driving like a proverbial bat out of hell on city streets—I was taken downstairs by FBI agents and Oakland police to answer questions. Initially, this seemed routine. Ask questions—that’s what the police are supposed to do after a bomb nearly kills someone, right? Because I figured they were Bay Area cops and wouldn’t necessarily know what had been transpiring behind the Redwood Curtain, I told them this seemed to be the culmination of what had been unfolding in our lead-up to Redwood Summer. Our campaign, dubbed “The Timber Wars,” was heating up and activists had been receiving increasingly frequent and virulent threats—Judi in particular. The conversation, however, quickly began to stink like a 4-day-old dead fish when they started asking me personal questions; I yelled at the officers that my friend was critically injured upstairs, and stated that I was leaving and not answering any of their questions. I was then taken to the Oakland Police Department (OPD) where I was held incommunicado for hours. An attorney tried to get into my holding pen, being barred from seeing me, while the crowd at both the hospital and the OPD (where Darryl was held, somewhere else in the department bowels) grew to over a hundred people in just a couple hours. (This was all before “instant messaging,” texts and all that.)
Well, it was more than fishy—it was downright conspiratorial, and what unfolded over the next few days boggled the mind, since we hadn’t known we were being tracked so closely by the FBI, despite the fact that it had been a year since they dragged Dave Foreman out of bed in his skivvies and arrested Peg Millett, Mark Davis and Mark Baker for monkeywrenching in Arizona. Both Judi and Darryl were arrested for transporting the bomb, and the FBI and OPD held a press conference to proclaim Judi, Darryl and Earth First! terrorists as they tried mightily to erode any support EF! might have. Didn’t work. Eight weeks later, they were forced to withdraw the charges, but the attempts by the FBI to try to frame the two— particularly Judi—continued as they destroyed evidence, manufactured evidence, fed false information to the press, harassed every activist they could find and used their iron fist to try to crush the movement. Sound familiar? Precursor of the Green Scare. But there were no fires, much less any kind of violence perpetrated by anyone associated with EF! As Judi observed wryly at one point, the FBI would have people believe that “not only are Earth First!ers terrorists who carry bombs around in our cars, but we are stupid, violent terrorists who hide live anti-personnel bombs under our own car seats.”
Fast-forward to 2002 when the lawsuit put together by Judi finally burst into a federal courtroom—twelve years after the incident, and tragically, five years after Judi died from breast cancer. Judi worked on the case until her dying day, literally, and made her friends and colleagues promise that we would carry on the case. We did, and thanks to heroic efforts of a scrappy team of radical lawyers, we won! The jury found that the FBI and OPD violated Judi and Darryl’s First and Fourth Amendment rights: free speech and protection against illegal search and seizure. The jury’s decision was unanimous and 80 percent of the award was for violations of the First Amendment, recognizing the FBI’s deliberate smear campaign against Earth First! and against Judi and Darryl.
Judi’s victory against the FBI is an important and unprecedented mile marker to remember, as is the bombing itself. We commemorate it 20 years later because it is important that we never forget, and that we remember to never give up and to keep a bold resistance to strong arm tactics as well as to assaults on Mama Earth. Equally important is recognizing what Judi brought to Earth First!, which goes beyond her challenge to the FBI. She brought us lessons from her background as a labor organizer and analysis that helped evolve our radical thinking both philosophically and strategically. We are reprinting her zine, Revolutionary Ecology, where she discusses biocentrism in the context of radical thought: e.g., Biocentrism Contradicts Capitalism, Biocentrism Contradicts Communism, and Biocentrism Contradicts Patriarchy. Check it out.
Judi is an icon, but she would bristle at being canonized. She is symbolic of a revolutionary, irreverent and bold approach to biocentrism, and she had her share of shouting matches with other movement icons; in fact, she reveled in it.
Recognizing the roots of biocentrism not only in ancient native wisdom but “in context of today’s industrial society, biocentrism is profoundly revolutionary, challenging the system to its core,” as Judi puts forward in her booklet Revolutionary Ecology. While it’s easy to see that “biocentrism contradicts capitalism,” and that “modern day corporations are the very worst manifestations of this sickness,” her essay purports that biocentrism contradicts communism even though her background in revolutionary was rooted in Marxism. This is because, really, all leftist ideologies call for the redistribution of spoils from the rape of the Earth. She saw the possibility of ecological socialism that would organize human societies in a manner that is compatible with the way nature is organized.
The world around us changes, sometimes at breakneck speed. The context of movement building is always in flux and demands that we always evolve our thinking and strategic organizing. At the same time, it is valuable (and smart) to weave in institutional memory and not lose the wisdom embodied in the revolutionary thinking of our companeras that are no longer around getting in our face, reminding us of their views. Viva Judi!
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An event marking the 20th anniversary of the pipe bomb attack on Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney will take place in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, over the course of two days. On Sunday, May 23, an event dubbed “Revolutionary Ecology” will take place at La Pena Cultural Center in Berkeley, (3105 Shattuck, across from the Long Haul Infoshop), with a panel of speakers including Ramona Afrika, music by Darryl Cherney and others, film and an exciting historical exhibit. On the actual anniversary, May 24, people from near and far will gather at the moment of the bomb explosion at the site it blasted through Judi’s car, nearly killing her and forever changing the Earth First! movement. The site is on Park Boulevard in Oakland, CA. Details for both events will be posted on the JudiBari.org website. Info number is 510-548-3113.
