Judi Bari
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In the early hours of March 2, Judi
Bari, a warrior who had come through many
battles, died peacefully at her home in
Northern California's Mendo-cino County,
of breast cancer which had metastasized to
her liver. Bari was the most visible
leader of Earth First!'s struggle to save
the ancient redwood forests from the
timber industry chainsaws. She survived a
1990 bombing attack which left her
permanently disabled, was framed for
attempting to blow herself up, and was
suing the FBI at the time of her death.
Born in Baltimore in 1949, Judi was
always a fighter. As a student at the
University of Maryland, she "majored in
anti-Vietnam War rioting," as she put it
to her friends. She was a Retail Clerks
Union organizer when she worked at the
Baltimore Post Office in the 1970s, and
later led a successful wildcat strike at
the Washington DC Bulk Mail Center.
Judi moved to Northern California in
1979, working as a carpenter. It was there
that she had what she called an
"environmental epiphany" on the job. While
admiring a piece of siding, she wondered
aloud if it came from an old-growth
redwood. Her boss blandly replied that
the tree it came from was around 1,000
years old. "A light bulb went on. We are
cutting down old- growth forests to make
yuppie houses," Judi told an interviewer.
"I became obsessed with the forests." Judi
jumped into the Earth First! move-ment,
teaming up with singing activist Darryl
Cherney in 1988. The duo became a musical
fixture at redwood rallies, with Darryl
strumming guitar and Judi sawing away on
her fiddle.
Judi's background as an anti-war
protestor and union organizer served her
well in confronting Earth First!'s own
contradictions and limitations. She was
the first and foremost Earth First!-er to
stand up to the movement's media-hound
national leadership--a clique around Dave
Foreman who controlled the Earth First!
Journal and were spewing racist
pseudo-environmentalist hogwash,
scapegoating the Third World and
immigrants for the death of the planet.
With Bari at the forefront, Northern
California's Ecotopia Earth First!
challenged Fore-man's "eco-redneck" crowd
and repu-diated their xenophobic crap.
Other Earth First! locals followed the
Ecotopians' example, a grassroots revolt
was on, and Foreman was eventually forced
to cede control of the Journal.
He has since left Earth First!
Bari recognized that timber industry
propaganda was pitting timber workers
against environmentalists, the red-necks
against the hippies, the grassroots
against the grassroots, while the timber
barons laughed all the way to the bank.
And she realized that some Earth First!
tactics and rhetoric was playing into
their hands. She guided Ecotopia Earth
First! toward a strategy of non-violent
direct action. "Monkey-wrenching"--the
physical sabotage of bulldozers, or
drilling spikes into trees to snap
chainsaws--was officially renounced in
favor of open, participatory mass actions
like public blockades of logging roads.
Judi's next step was to build bridges
between the environmentalists and the
timber employees. She started a local of
the Industrial Workers of the World--the
old IWW, or Wobblies, the radical "One Big
Union" which organized militant logging
and mining strikes across the West until
it was crushed in Attorney General
Mitchell Palmer's draconian crackdown in
1920. Bari's Wobbly local at the Ft.
Bragg Georgia Pacific mill represented
five workers who had been poisoned in a
toxic chemical spill. Judi served as a
paralegal, writing briefs for the
workers' case before the US Labor
Department. Many believe this is what made Judi so
dangerous that she became a target.
In 1990, Judi and Darryl were
organizing Redwood Summer, a national
mobilization inspired by the civil rights
movement's 1964 Mississippi Summer--this
time calling for idealistic young people
to help save the ancient red-woods from
the chainsaws of Pacific Lumber, Georgia
Pacific and Louisiana Pacific. On May 24,
while driving through Oakland on the way
to a red-woods rally, Judi's old station
wagon exploded. The bomb had been placed
under the driversŐ seat, and Judi was at
the wheel. It was later determined that
the bomb was motion-activated.
Judi woke up in the hospital with a
fractured pelvis and pulverized tail-bone.
She also found that she was under
arrest--on charges of making the bomb.
Simultaneously, her home, Darryl's
home and the Oakland house where they were
staying were ransacked by the FBI. From
the first, the FBI and Oakland police
focused on Judi, Darryl
and Earth First! in their investigation of
the bombing. The voluminous evi-dence
pointing to the timber industry was
completely overlooked.
Judi had long been receiving death
threats from anti-environmental
para-military groups made up of timber
workers, with names like the Sahara Club.
One even showed her own face in a
crosshairs. The previous year, her
car--with her young daughters Lisa and
Jessica on board--was rammed from behind
by a logging truck, total-ing the car and
sending her and the kids to a hospital
with minor injuries. A fundamentalist
zealot calling himself The Lord's Avenger
sent a letter to a local newspaper
threatening Judi after she helped organie
a counter-protest against an anti-abortion
campaign at the Ukiah Planned Parenthood
Clinic. In the course of Redwood
Summer--which continued despite the
bombing--a bomb (which turned out to be a
dud) was planted at the Earth First!
office in Arcata.
Judi later wrote: "I cannot even
describe the terror of finding myself in
agony in the hospital, crippled for life,
reading headlines like BOMB MADE AT BARI'S
HOUSE and fearing that I would spend the
rest of my life in jail and not get to
raise my two small children."
After six weeks, the DA decided not to
press charges against Judi and Darryl.
Originally told she would never walk
again, Judi surprised her doctors by
walking in a matter of months, albeit
with a cane. But the true perpetra-tors of
the bombing remained at large.
In May 1991, one year after the blast,
Judi and Darryl launched a federal suit
against the FBI for violating their civil
rights. The suit especially targeted the
FBI's San Francisco chief Richard W. Held
who headed the investigation--a veteran
of "dirty tricks" campaigns against the
Black Panthers, American Indian Movement
and Puerto Rican independence struggle.
The discovery process in the suit
proved that the FBI was up to dirty tricks
again--this time against Earth First! The
FBI initially said they weren't watching
Judi and Darryl. But documents released
in the case (first released completely
blacked out until the judge ordered the
FBI to release them for real) proved
otherwise. There were surveillance reports
for the months leading up to and following
the bombing. Those for the month of
bombing were mysteriously "missing."
It was also revealed that the same
agents who investigated the bombing had
one month earlier led a "bomb school" on a
Louisiana Pacific clearcut in Eureka,
where they practiced detonating and
investigating car bombs. On video tape,
FBI instructor Frank Doyle told other
agents at the Oakland bomb site, "This is
the final exam."
Bari was then pushing a Mendocino
County ballot resolution to seize
Louisiana Pacific land by eminent
domain--the same company that donated the
land for the "bomb school."
Even while suing the FBI and learning
to walk again, Judi continued the redwood
campaign. She was diagnosed with cancer
just weeks after the movement's hour of
glory on September 15, 1996, when over
4,000 gathered and 1,000 were arrested
(including blues star Bonnie Raitt) to
protest Pacific Lumber's cutting of the
majestic Headwaters Forest in Humboldt
County--the biggest forest protection
protest in American history.
Now that Judi is gone, Darryl Cherney
has pledged to carry on the law-suit and
get to the truth about the FBI's true role
in the bombing case. And the movement Judi
helped forge will keep up the fight until
the last of the ancient redwoods is
protected from corporate greed.
Judi Bari was a tough, wise and loving
warrior who took on all the right enemies
and paid for it bigtime. We know that the
most fitting tribute to her life is
continue to struggle for the things she
fought for. In those immortal last words
of Joe Hill, the Wobbly leader who was
framed for murder and executed in Utah in
1915--"Don't mourn, organize!"
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