— one reason why co-founder Paul Watson formed his own break-away group, The Sea Shepherd Society, now based out of Los Angeles. Watson realized that direct action could have far better results than polite debate. Direct action is a more radical form of civil disobedience and is wholly dependent on media for its success. It goes a step further than symbolic action (banners and protests) and its directive is to inflict enough economic damage so the company retreats (from mining, road building or logging, or factory fishing, whaling, etc.). Tree-spiking and trashing heavy equipment by putting rice in their radiators or sand in their gas tanks can be considered common practices of ecotage. Authorities tend to criminalize ecotage by branding it as a modern form of terrorism. According to the FBI, since 1996 there have been over six hundred incidents of domestic “terrorism” perpetrated by the Earth Liberation Front, or ELF, where arson is used to debilitate industrial activities in wilderness areas. Individuals who engage in environmental sabotage activities can claim them on behalf of the ELF if they meet three guidelines: (1) To inflict maximum economic damage on those profiting from the destruction and exploitation of the natural environment; (2) To reveal to, and to educate, the public about the atrocities committed against the Earth and all species that populate it; and (3) To take all necessary precautions against harming life. To date, no one has been injured or killed in any of these actions.
Jim Flynn, an Oregon-based environmentalist, in a 2007 USA Today article says: “I think that’s really what all these actions are about, is really getting public attention to some of these issues … if we were able to affect policy change through more legal means, then certainly that’s the way these people would go. Nobody enjoys being underground, and that lifestyle.”
Ecotage works and the authorities are unwilling to admit it. They can’t, because there would be a total breakdown of the system of order. The politics of wilderness (and wilderness is now considered a valuable commodity because of its scarcity) demand a stringent adherence to management doctrines, as one-sided as they may be toward industry. Allowing the armour to be chinked could crash the guiding principles of a multi-use objective. It would also give credence to the viability of the left-wing fringe environmental movement. Paranoia is the reason why the establishment has come down hard on the perpetrators, setting higher penalties for green crimes. In Marin County, California, three enviro-crusaders were arrested and sentenced to one year in jail and a total of fifty-thousand dollars in fines. Granted, these were serious actions against public and private property. In the United States, the FBI has clustered the granola-munching green activist with the bonified gun-wielding terrorist in an attempt to make any threat against homeland security one and the same as far as the law is concerned. The fixation on “terror-isms” that is rampant in the States is not quite as apparent in Canada, probably because we lack the proliferation of cult followings and radical left-wing green earth crusaders. We’re just nice people.
One form of ecotage that has had proven results worldwide is the construction of illegal trails; trails usually built on public land owned by the state or province and, in most cases, through a tract of land that may be threatened by development. The emphasis here is to attract people to the location, encouraging them to participate in a particular issue; and if enough people flock to the newly hacked out trail, their collective letters and complaints to the local administration just might be enough to halt plans for logging or mining.
In Temagami, while I was mapping out the canoe routes for the government guidebook, I also included upgrades on all the historic fire tower trails. The strategy behind this was to get canoeists off the water routes and onto land-based trails where the protection of viewscapes could be included in the master plan … much to the chagrin of local foresters whose old arguments in favour of clear-cuts to the shoreline was founded on the fact that paddlers never stray far from the water trails. During my tenure as interior ranger, I was privy to the district timber planning operations; whenever there was a proposed logging cut near or within a sensitive area, I would chart out and propose a hiking trail in that same block of land. In the past, if there were no objections or conflicts of use within a proposed cutting area, industry had carte blanche treatment. But propose a hiking trail that would increase tourist flow, and get the scheme into the system files, and you could successfully block the intent by industry to log or build roads in that area.
For me it was a clandestine, albeit dogmatic, approach to solving a problem in the system. I had a night key to the district office and I would forage through master plans and timber allocation maps in the middle of the night. Of the four proposed trails I managed to insert into the planning process, three trails came to fruition. In 1980, I diverted my portage crew to work on the Temagami Island trail system where local logging companies wanted access to one of Ontario’s most magnificent stands of old-growth red and white pine. Once the trail was established, the people came, and they walked through a forest they would not normally have the opportunity to see up close. The existence of the trail created its own lobby group. Although this was a legally sanctioned trail, the means in which it was conceived could be construed as under-handed and coerced.
Deeper into the Temagami wild lands is the Wakimika Triangle — a lush, sweeping forest of gargantuan pine trees, precipitous escarpments, and clear-water lakes. It’s one of North America’s largest remaining stands of old-growth red and white pine. Logging companies have been tripping over each other to get in there and cut it down. A timber access road was pushed north into its sacred domain, a bridge was built over the Obabika River and the Wakimika forest was in sight. While this was happening, our newly founded environmental group, the Temagami Wilderness Society, or TWS (now Earthroots), had been building hiking trails within the forest. This is an illegal activity on Crown property; however, it was sanctioned by the local Ojibwa family, the Misabe’s, whose traditional homeland included the Wakimika forest. At the same time, tree-spikers riddled the big pines at the terminus of the logging road (and beyond) with twelve-inch steel spikes, rendering the pine stands unmarketable. This was an act not carried out by the TWS for obvious reasons; their mandate was to get people walking the newly constructed old-growth trails in order to bolster support for the issue. This was too much, too fast, for the local forestry office to handle, and in Ontario, nobody had yet to be charged with building illegal trails, or fined for spiking trees. It was also too much for the logging companies to deal with: the bridge had been burned out, trees were spiked, and it wasn’t worth taking a chance running trees through the mill band saw, or for sawyers to cut down the trees with the chance of hitting a nail. The media dragged the local Natural Resources administration through the mud, pulverizing them in every major newspaper in Canada. In the end, the Wakimika Triangle, including the section of spiked forest, was indoctrinated into the park system.
As a side note, tree-spiking was first initiated to save forests in the 1800s, and then popularized in Dave Foreman’s (co-founder of Earth First!) book, EcoDefense. According to the Association of Oregon Loggers, “the average ecotage incident costs $60,000 in equipment loss and downtime.” And that’s exactly what tree-spikers aspire to achieve — to make the venture for the company unprofitable. In British Columbia, Meares Island was slotted for clear-cutting, but it was cancelled after extensive and well planned tree-spiking.
Does tree-spiking harm the trees? Not according to University of Maine biologist Jonathan Carter who did extensive studies on the subject: “Unless copper is used, steel and ceramic spikes will not harm trees.”
Many environmentalists feel that they have been put in a position where there is no longer any legal control over the issue and the only remaining options are those outside the law. The question remains: Does tree-spiking work? Some companies will engage workers in a spike removal operation using a metal detector and crowbar. This in itself is costly for the company and it gets to the point where they have to determine if the value of the trees is worth the effort. If I were a tree-spiker, this is what I would do:
1) Make sure the stand of trees is actually slated for logging. Timber allocation maps are usually prepared a year or two in advance of the proposed cut and available to the public. Get somebody not involved in the field work to acquire maps. You don’t want to waste your time spiking a forest that isn’t on the hit list.
