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Five earth First was founded in nineteen eighty by five men Dave Foreman, Mike Rosell, Howie Woke, Bart Kohler, and Ron Keysar during a week long hiking trip in the Pinnacade Desert.

Of the five, Dave Foreman was the most charismatic, the most galvanizing speaker.

He and other Earthbursters would go on road trips, stopping at campuses to recruit students for the cause.

Would tour colleges in the Pacific Northwest.

I was going to college at the time in Oregon, and a friend of mine said, why don't you come and listen to this guy is really interesting.

I'm Christopher Manus.

I wrote a book, Green Rage, about earth First and the radical environment movement in general.

So I went and he was really charismatic and sparked my interests in environmentalism in a new way.

Because he was not part of the professional organizations, national organizations like the Sierra Club, who were by this time rather stolid and corporate.

So he would come up in his blue jeans and his dirty T shirt and hat, and he'd yell and scream and say, we need to do something to stop this.

Here's a taste of Dave Foreman style, speaking in front of a crowd at the nineteen eighty seven Grand Canyon Round River Rendezvous, an annual meeting of Earth First activists from around the country.

It's time for a.

Warrior society to rise up out of the Earth.

I burn ourselves in front of the juggernaut of destruction, the Vina bodies against the human box that's ravaging this precious, beautiful planet.

I don't want to live if there aren't Denny rhyanosh Ressas.

I don't want to live if there aren't Anny Moundlines in California.

That's what my life is for.

Has to throw it in the wheels of this insane progress and the fight for it.

That's what warriors are for.

He was a wonderful spirit.

There's some kinds of charisma.

His charisma was authentic, so he didn't have to cultivate it.

Christopher was intrigued.

It was the beginning of his association with Earth First.

There was no membership, but in the membership cards we had participants, and I was involved.

Earth First was a new kind of organization, one that prioritized action over negotiation, one who's ethos was summarized in their motto, no fromise in defense of Mother Earth.

I'm Toby Ball and this is rip current episode four monkey Wrench.

Earth First was not an organization with a hierarchy.

It wasn't really a single organization at all.

It was a number of local groups united by the principles of Earth First.

To the extent that there was a central organization, it was through a newsletter edited by Dave Foreman, the Earth First Journal.

A self described New Mexico redneck, Foreman did not fit the stereotype of a radical environmentalist.

He was a conservative in his youth, campaigning for Barry Goldwater during the nineteen sixty four presidential election campaign, among other things.

Don't look now, young man, but somebody has his hand in your pocket.

It's the hand of big government.

It's taking away about four months pay from what your daddy earns every year, one dollar out of every three in his paycheck.

I ask you to join me and helping restore the individual freedoms and initiatives this nation once knew to make government more of.

The servant and not the master of us.

All in your heart, you know he's rightd loan.

For Barry Goldwater.

After an undesirable discharge from the US Marine Corps Officer Candidate school and a stint as a teacher on the Zuni Indian Reservation, he worked for seven years at the Wilderness Society, mostly in New Mexico, but also for a year as director of Wilderness Affairs in Washington, d C.

This year would leave him disillusioned with attempts to protect the environment from within the system.

This is Foreman interviewed sometime around nineteen eighty seven.

He's sitting in the woods wearing a tan T shirt and a camouflage bucket hat.

He's burly and his beard is wild.

Ten years ago, I was the chief lobbyist for the Wilderness Society in Washington, DC.

I began to feel, along with other people, that the environmental movement was steadily losing its passion and its soul.

There were basically two things going on.

People working for environmental groups who had started out as volunteers and passion to amateurs were becoming professionals.

And we're becoming more concerned with careers with salaries, with status, with access to high places, for the intrinsic value of access to high places.

And while that was going on, we were asking for less, we were taking weaker stands in position.

A major reason for his anger was the outcome of an initiative called the Roadless Area of Review and Evaluation that President Jimmy Carter had the Forest Service undertake.

This is longtime Earth First activist Andy Caffrey talking about President Carter.

All of the pundits and historians who were talking about him talked about all this environmental stuff that he did, but he was the person who spurred the creation of Earth First because under his administration, they were doing a survey of all the unlogged force in the US and they were going to make a decision which ones to preserve.

The Forest Service was coming up with these plans, what were we going to designate as wilderness, what are we going to open up prologing, and what are we going to hold in the banks because we haven't decided yet.

And right about seventy nine ish nineteen eighty, they came out with a new rollers Area Review and Evaluation.

Professor of Religion and Nature at the University of Florida.

Bron Taylor four minutes of time had been along with many of his compadres, had been conservationists in the Willderness Society and other mainstream environmental organizations, and they felt like they had gone in and they had made biologically informed, rational analyzes about what to protect, and they were arguing it ought not just to be rocks and ice high elevation.

It needs to be these lower elevation biologically significant old growth forests and so forth.

The idea here was that instead of looking at how many acres would be preserved, it was important to look at where those acres were.

If they were an unforceded or alpine areas and not old growth forests, they would not really be protecting wild forest land.

They felt like the extractive industries folks and the off highway recreational folks who came in and argued that it's our sacred right to be everywhere we want, that's what liberty is all about, or those who viewed capitalism as a kind of a sacred economic system.

When the reviews recommendations came out, it was clear that the environmentalists had not won the argument.

Ten million acres in the lower forty eight states were recommended as wilderness areas.

Thirty six million were open for development and eleven million were set aside for further assessment.

Basically, Forman and his crew felt like they got slaughtered when the Forest Service recommendations came out.

There was a lot of forests that was preserved acreage wise, but most of it was what we call snow and ice.

It was a high elevation scenic stuff, and the ecologically significant river bottoms were completely abandoned to the timber companies.

So he unleashed all of these rapacious timber interests, and that was what spurred a bunch of lobbyists like Dave Foreman and Howie Walkee for the Wilderness Society and Friends of the Earth Earth to completely reject that kind of activism.

And they thought, well, if a political spectrum is like here, where do political decisions get made, Well, let's expand the range of political debate and energy by creating a real extremist green movement that might shift the center more towards our side.

Then came the hiking trip to the Pinnacade Desert and the birth of the idea of Earth First.

Earth First was not going to engage in lobbying in the tactics of groups like the Sierra Club.

I know their original feeling about it was that the environmental movement had become so compromised by a corporate interest that it was not doing what it needed to do.

It kept giving things up.

The Glen Canyon damn incident was the incident that precipitated all this.

Their first action took place on March twenty first, nineteen eighty one, the first full day of spring, when they pulled off an ambitious prank at the Glen Canyon Dam in northern Arizona.

The Glen Canyon Dam controls the flow of the Colorado River, and his creation had flooded the land up stream, creating Lake Powell.

This large scale environmental destruction was exactly the kind of thing to attract the attention of the newly formed group.

The earth First action began at nine forty that morning.

This is an excerpt from the Earth First Journal's article about that day, read by a voice actor.

Six earth Firsters drove to a locked gate on the western access road of Glenn Canyon Dam near Page, Arizona.

A one hundred pound bundle was muscled over the fence, and four men and one woman carried it four hundred yards out to the center of the dam, as the remaining commando drove away the vehicle.

When the attack team moved out into the dam, they saw some seventy five First members watching from the waterway of the Colorado River Bridge just downstream.

The team of earth Firsters from Wyoming, New Mexico, and Montana reached the center of the dam and placed their bundle on the lip of the downstream side.

A huge cheer rose up from those on the bridge and was answered by cries of earth First from the wilderness berserkers on the dam.

Two ropes were tied to a grill bolted to the top of the dam, and then accompanied by shouts of free the Colorado.

Three hundred feet of black plastic tapered from twelve to two feet in width, held together by seven hundred feet of rope and one thousand feet of duct tape, cascaded smoothly down the five hundred foot tall face of the dam, creating the impression of a crack growing down the concrete monster.

Among the people in attendance was the reclusive and curmudgeonly author Edward Abbey, Abbey wrote The Monkey Wrench Gang, a novel about a band of roving anarchists in the American Southwest who sabotaged and man made structures they felt were harming the environment.

And Abby was the patron saint, the eminent screeze of the movement, and his book, of course, Monkey Wrench Gang was Earth verst was almost a It was art becoming reality.

Abby spoke at the Damn staying in part.

I think we're morally justified the resort to whatever means are necessary in order to defend our land from destruction, invasion.

I see this as an invasion.

Things looked like creatures from Mars to me.

I feel no kinship with that fantastic structure over there, no sympathy with it whatsoever.

Yeah, I would advocate sabotage subversion as a last resort when political means fail.

Were the fake crack of the dam was an apt first act for Earth first, hinting at the future, the subversion and whimsy of the prank, the publicity it garnered, and the nod to eco sabotage or monkey wrenching as a weapon against environmental destruction.

Private investigator Josh Morsel.

This is an active theater.

It like references sabotage.

They didn't hurt the dam at all, but it's like theater that sort of simulates hurting a damn.

The talk of sabotage played a role for Earth First.

It energized people.

It's exciting lest people feel like we don't play by the rules.

We're going to accomplish something, We're going to do something real when they're skeptical and disillusioned about the capacity to save the environment through conventional institutional channels.

The conventional institutional channels were too passive, too much a part of the establishment.

This thinking goes to.

Really address the threads to the environment.

A new approach was needed, one that focused on action in the field, not negotiations and lobbying in the corridors of power.

This is Dave Foreman again speaking at the nineteen eighty seven Grand Canyon Round River Rendezvous.

One of the things we said when we started Earth First was we'll let our actions set the finer points of our philosophy.

That's one of my disagreements with the Greens is that they seem content to sit around and hammer out these detailed agendas and statements of principles and all of this and never do anything about it.

Earth First is the only activist green group around, if you want to look at it that way.

The others are debating societies.

We don't have to figure it all out.

We don't all have to.

Be pure, we all don't have to be saints on this planet to do something for it.

But do something.

Yeah.

When Foreman spoke of the others that were essentially debating societies, he was speaking first and foremost about the Sierra Club, the biggest and most influential of the establishment conservation organizations.

The world view of the executive director of the Sierra Club is closer to the world view of Jim Watt Ronald Reagan than it is to that of Earth.

First Again Christopher Manus.

James Watt, who was the Secretary of the Interior at the time, was a crazy evangelistic Christian who thought that the world was ending.

He even said, I'm not making this up.

He said, what's the difference that we cut everything down?

You know, Jesus comes first.

And one reason why we see cr Club as being inadequate is that they are basically trying to reform a system which we feel is totally destructive.

Of life, and we are trying to subvert the system.

We'd like to see the system collapse.

When I say the system, I mean the modern industrial system as we know it.

And one reason why we see the modern industrial system as being so destructive is because it is based on the premise that human beings are superior, and that is, for human beings that the world exists.

And I think that a lot of Sierra Clubbers accept that premise, whereas earth Thirsters reject that in favor of a biocentric worldview.

It's probably no surprise that some people found this kind of rhetoric strange and threatening.

Earth Verse critics were quick to exploit this tone.

Here is Sue Jorger, executive vice president of the Southern Oregon Timber Industries Association, in nineteen eighty seven.

They don't have any compassion for people.

They're out there, say, trying to save the wilderness.

And who are they trying to save it for.

If it's not people, I don't know what they're trying to save it for.

It's hard to imagine a statement less in tune with Dave Foreman's philosophy.

And while the philosophy was jarring enough for many people.

What really worried them were the lengths to which Earth First would go to achieve their defense of Mother Earth after the break.

As we mentioned earlier, Earth First was a direct action group, meaning that they would be taking actions that confronted the forces they saw as destructive to the environment.

This could take many forms, including marches and protests, but also monkey wrenching actions such as putting sand in construction equipment, pulling up survey stakes, marking wilderness road paths, and other activities including as we will see, tree spiking.

Dave Foreman, speaking at the nineteen eighty six Rainforest road Show at the University of California, Berkeley, I'm not going to.

Tell anybody to stand in.

Front of a bulldoze.

That's got to be a very deliberate, thoughtful decision on their apartment, because there are consequences.

I'm not going to in praage anybody to go out and pull up survey sticks, because one of my best friends did that and got six months in jail because he was careless.

He got the consequences, but he was willing to accept it.

It brings up the interesting question of violence.

What is violence?

Is self defense violence?

My definition of violence is to try to impose your will on something else, to dominate something, to try to take it away from its own evolutionary destiny.

I think cutting down a redwood forest with the chainsaw is violence.

I don't think it's cutting sand and a bulldozer to prevent that from happening.

His violence.

I think it's self defense.

But it's got to be done.

Whatever you do with full deliberation, was full thoughtfulness, with the complete understand that you're engaging in something very profile.

In fact, I think.

He should started to do it as though as a sacrament, as a religious act.

That doesn't mean you can't have a lot.

Of bull I'll drink a beer as a religious act.

Sutimes.

It pretty much is joy.

In nineteen eighty five, Foreman had published a book called Eco Defense, A Field Guide to Monkey Wrenching, some of which he wrote and some of which he compiled from others' writings.

It was a how to covering a wide range of eco sabotage techniques.

The contrast with traditional environmental groups such as.

The Sierra Club could not have been clearer.

From nineteen eighty seven, this is Bob Hattoyd, the Southern California regional director of the Sierra Club.

He is holding a copy of Eco Defense and is asked a question about it.

A shocking book.

It scares me in a way.

You know why.

It scares me because there's the potential for violence, potential for violence and harm to human beings.

And I have a problem with that.

I don't want to see old growth forest ripped down, and I don't want to see people poisoned, and I don't want to see the air polluted.

But I don't want to see.

Anybody die either.

I really don't.

Hatchway specifically mentions tree spiking, and this became the most controversial of the monkey wrenching activities.

Tree spiking simply involves driving a large nail into a tree.

The nail will damage any saw that hits it.

A sawyer's chainsaw will be damaged or broken.

A mill saw will have its teeth shredded or worse.

Both of these situations are dangerous for the timber worker, though Eco Defense played down the potential for serious harm to workers.

The book describes the usefulness of tree spiking.

The answer is that the value of spiking is as a long term deterrent.

If enough trees and roadless areas are spiked.

Eventually, the corporate thugs in the timber company boardrooms, along with their corrupt lackeys who are the uniform of the Forest Service, will realize that timber sales in our few remaining wild areas will be prohibitively expensive, and since profits are the goal, they'll begin to think twice before violating the wilderness.

This is earth Burst activist Mark Williams talking about tree spiking in the late nineteen eighties.

Monkey matching is kind of almost a coup de grand, the most unexpected tactic that we have, and as so on the cost the other side the most money and is harder some to defend against, and it absolutely is part of a no vital strategy.

Even the threat of sabotage was enough to be disruptive.

While the Earth First group in Ecotopia did not engage in much actual sabotage, they certainly talked about it, and that talk was taken seriously by people in the timber industry.

Here's Darryl Turney, Judy Berry's partner in organizing earth First and Ecotopia, talking about sabotage in northern California was so general.

Truth Radio.

In my time in the late eighties and right through the nineties, I would say there was probably a lot more talk about sabotage than there was actual sabotage.

However, there was sabotage, so it's not I don't want to cover that up.

What was new about it was that the environmental movement up to that point, I think was perceived as weak, was perceived as caving in a lot to the corporations and to the government.

There is no human being in this world who at some point won't physically defend themselves in some manner.

If somebody breaks into your house, you have every right to defend yourself against that.

And I think what the earth First movement has seen is that the corporations and the industrial technology have broken into our house, our house being Mother Earth, and our systematic destroying it.

But then in nineteen eighty seven, a sawmill worker was injured by a tree spike.

Now I can tell you unequivocally that that tree spike was not part of any Earth First action.

It was not in a forest that somebody was trying to defend, and the trees were actually very small.

However, regardless of the circumstances, it was proven that a human being can be injured, and it was that moment which Judy Barry drew from to renounce the tactic of tree spiking.

The sawmill worker was a twenty three year old named George Alexander.

He was an offbearer, which meant that he pulled logs off the line as they were cut by a band saw.

At about ten to eight on the morning of May eighth, nineteen eighty seven, the saw hit a spike lodged in a redwood log and shattered.

A piece of the saw ripped into Alexander's face, causing severe lacerations to his left cheek, knocking out teeth, breaking his john five places, and cutting his jugular vein.

One of his fellow workers pressed a T shirt to Alexander's wound, slowing the bleeding and likely saving his life.

He was back at work two months later.

To the press and the public, the likely suspects were obvious.

The Santa Rosa Press Democrat wrote an editorial that began, can there be a more effective method for discrediting the conservation movement than the violent tactics endorsed by a handful of radicals who claimed to be environmentalists?

Louisiana Pacific President Harry Murlow released his statement saying it was only a matter of time before this terrorism in the name of radical environmental goals caused a serious injury.

Sue Yorger, the Timber Industry Association vice president, had this to say.

One of the most bothersome things here is that our local and Sierra Club and even our local Earth First chapter have not come out and strongly condemned the activities of Earth First.

You never heard anybody saying, well, gosh, it's really too bad that the mill worker down in northern California had his face ripped up by a spike.

And until people start saying, hey, we don't think it's worth human life to save these areas, you know, they're in a sense condoning murder.

In reality, the tree had not been spiked by anyone associated.

With Earth First.

Editor of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, Mark Scaramella.

The trees came from a plot of land that a Republican neighbor was very upset about the trees having been cut.

An investigator concluded that he probably spiked the trees in the neighboring plot to stop them from being cut.

That never was prosecuted, but that's what the report concluded that it was in first who was show the neighbor.

The fact that this story has had so much staying power is perhaps a testament to how little physical harm tree spiking actually caused.

This is Utah Senator Mike Lee referring to it in a twenty twenty one Senate hearing.

Back in nineteen eighty seven, there was a gentleman who worked in a sawmill.

His name was George Alexander.

He was twenty three years old at the time.

He wasn't wealthy.

You don't get wealthy by working on a sawmill.

He was just doing his job, trying to make ends meet.

While doing his job, operating a sawmill, all of a sudden, his saw struck a spike that had been placed into that tree.

I don't know.

Exactly when that spike was placed in that tree, but at some point somebody put it in there with that object, with that intent, with that understanding of what it would do, and it had its intended effect.

The blade shattered and it severely wounded him.

It caused a wound stretching from his eye all the way down to his chin, his teeth were smashed in and his.

Jaw was cut in half.

The incident made national news.

This was two years before this incident that we're talking about now, so it became understood then what happens when you put a spike in a tree.

Now, other people were not as fortunate as George Alexander.

Other people have died, other people have received worse injuries than he received.

But he was permanently maimed and disfigured and endured a severe amount of pain, discomfort, inconvenience, and incapacity as a result of this savage act of brutality.

He doesn't name any of the people he claims to have died or been maimed.

I wondered if that was because there aren't such people.

In nineteen ninety five, a Senator from Idaho named Larry Craig introduced a bill to increase criminal penalties for tree spiking.

He too claimed that people had been killed and maimed, but he said there was no list that he could locate, according to the Idaho Statesman newspaper.

In the same article, the Statesman says that at the time, the National Forest Service had records of about two dozen instances of spiking resulting in one injury, presumably George Alexander's.

The legislation passed anyway.

I tried to find any instance of someone being killed by a tree spike, but was unsuccessful.

That doesn't mean that there isn't one, but it's not easy to find out about it if there is.

Again, Judy Barry and Earth First and Ecotopia renounced the practice of tree spiking after George Alexander was injured.

Author of Defending Giants, Darren Spease.

It actually became a schism.

Dave Foreman, who was one of the original founders, you know, with Roselle and others of Earth First, we're like, no, no, we created this organization to like stop the destruction of wild places period.

The consequences kind of be damned.

The lion in the sand is drawn, and we're going to side with the forests and with the trees and with you know, endangered species.

The North Coast Earth First folks were like, no, we're not going to tree spike.

We don't want to do we don't want to harm like loggers when they're out there, they're like our neighbors, they're in the community.

They're not the ones making the decisions.

About this stuff.

They're just doing their jobs and and that created a schism.

It was a real thing.

A lot of like the older earth First folks were like, no, this is not the way we do things.

We wouldn't need to stop industrial logging at all costs.

Earth First activists Andy Caffrey.

Now, the thing is, nobody has ever been hurt by an earth First tree spiking, because it's not about vengeance, it's not about hurting laggers.

The whole idea is you go in and you put spikes in several trees, sometimes they even mark them, and then you call the timber company and tell them about it.

And the whole idea is that they won't go in there because they don't want to hurt the workers.

No one ever hit a spike when they were cutting a tree, but the laggers.

There was this.

Big focus on tree spiking, even though they didn't They couldn't find anybody, any timber workers anywhere in the country who had ever been hurt.

But so so they had a press conference Mike Grizel, Darryl, Greg King, Judy and they said we can't say that Earth versus renouncing tree spiking, but we as prominent activists within the community are saying that we will discourage it and that we reject that tactic.

She's been portrayed as a non violent saint, you know, the woman who led to the renunciation of tree spiking.

There was always a caveat about that though.

You know, that renunciation was for their region because of the threats they were encountering.

She didn't want to make that for all Earth Firsters everywhere, that there ought never be that kind of tactic, And that was a controversial tactic, even in northern California.

Just like in any kind of radical movement, not everybody agrees with about everything, right, So that was very controversial and it was very harshly criticized by those outside of the Pacific Northwest who felt like she was pretending to speak for the entire movement.

Reporters didn't understand the subtlety of the Earth Verse has no formal leaders, there's no organization.

It's like Christianity as opposed to the Presbyterian Church.

It's that amorphous.

But the reporters, you know, here were like nine people who they had interviewed and talked to before.

These were the people in southern Oregon and northern California that led most of the actions that we had up here, so they kind of saw them as if that was a formal office that they held.

So by the time the story got across the country, it was more like Earth verst is abandoning tree spiking.

Well, I hated this.

I was not one of those people, and I tried to get them to not do it because as a media guy myself, I knew how this would get muddled.

And they had no authority to speak for Earth First and all these other Earth verses.

Who the hell are they to speak for me?

In the Earth First Journal, published in nineteen ninety four, Judy Barry and a person going by the name of Wolverine laid out the arguments against and for tree spiking.

Wolverine acknowledged the tree spiking goal of increasing the cost of cutting quote why is there so much media government reaction against monkey wrenching, including spiking because they're scared of it.

It weakens them.

All they care about is money is what fuels their destruction.

So monkey wrenching has a valid role to play.

It ups the Annie, it puts greater pressure on them to consider if the project being wrenched is economically or politically viable.

Judy focused on the difference between above and below ground tactics.

She argued that mixing the two was suicidal.

Above Ground tactics, such as standing in front of a bulldozer, rely on the thread of moral outrage if the protester is run over by the bulldozer.

Tree spiking reduced the sympathy for protesters and threaten the lives of those undertaking above ground actions.

She recommended focusing Earth First activities on above ground work and leaving the underground stuff.

To quote Elves in the Woods again, Taylor, what she was saying is that tree spiking is counterproductive.

She didn't have a moral.

Objection tree spiking.

She said it's counterproductive here.

We've got to renounce it to strengthen the movement.

Judy's stance was the reaction to the hostility and violence encountered by earth Fursters and Ecotopia, confrontations and violence that often took place on remote logging roads or deep in the woods, isolated places.

An atmosphere of paranoia and fear grew in the late nineteen eighties.

In the months leading up to the.

Bombing of Judy Berry's car.

The threats they were becoming more specific and seemingly targeting her, especially a woman engaged in the middle of this.

Ru Hal was probably more of a target than Darryl Turney was.

She just drew that kind of animosity increasingly, the level of threats I felt were more dangerous and they were possibly getting in the harm's way next time on Rip Current.

Rip Current was written and hosted by Toby Ball.

Our executive producers are Trevor Young and Matt Frederick, with supervising producer Remat el Kylie and producers Nomes Griffin and Jesse Funk.

Original music by Jeff Sadoff.

Our voice actor for Judy Barry is Gina Rickikey.

Editing and sound design by Nomes Griffin, Rima el Kylie and Jesse Funk.

The show is mixed by Rima el Coyoli.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.