Green Belters are asked to come to another area. In addition to helping to stem the tide of complete destruction of Kenya’s ecosystem, Wangari’s Green Belt movement has provided many economic opportunities for Kenya’s women.
Over the years, Wangari Maathai has received greater recognition for founding the Green Belt movement than any parliamentary seat would have provided. She has received many awards, become a Nobel Laureate, received a “Woman of the World” award from Diana, Princess of Wales, and the encouragement to continue her invaluable work in the regreening of Africa’s precious heartland.
“One person can make the difference.”
— Wangari Maathai
Tree-Huggers Unite!
The Chipko movement in India began in 1973 when a group of Indian women protested a government action to log near their village. When the loggers decided on a different spot, the women went there to stop the tree-cutting. In a country where widows are still burned with their dead husbands in some places, this concerted action is truly courageous. A year later, the tree action moved to yet another location. Gaura Devi, a respected elder and widow from the village of Reni, was tipped off by a little girl herding cows that loggers were on the way. Gaura flew into action and got a troop of women. When a logger threatened Devi with a gun, she replied with a fierce calm, “Shoot us. Only then will you be able to cut down the forest.” From this point on, the strength of the Chipko movement increased tremendously and even got requests from men to join. Chipko means “to hug;” these grassroots environmentalists encircle their trees, holding hands to protecting their fellow beings from destruction.
Judi Bari: Shero of the Forest Movement
The day after Judi Bari died, someone wearing an Earth First! t-shirt lowered the Willits Post Office Flag to half-mast. The flag stayed grieving until the postmaster put it back up some time later. The postmaster had to do a lot of raising the flag that week because every day the flag was lowered until the day of her wake, when the city hall flag stayed at half-mast for the day.
Judi was loved because she was an inspiration; she was admired and vilified because she was a great organizer. She knew how to organize all kinds of people—hippie kids to homesteaders—into an alliance that, by 1991, was beginning to include loggers and other timber workers. And for this she was bombed. She has the astute sense when to invoke the neighborhood and when not to. And for this she was bombed. She had the principled courage to stand in the face of macho Earth First!-ers and renounce tree-spiking; and she continued to do this in spite of being crippled and in chronic, unrepairable pain for the last six years of her life.
Here was the shero’s journey: to achieve the respect and honor due her work from loggers and other timber workers. Loggers who were tired of slogging right and left to cut baby trees to make a living; millworkers who saw that the company didn’t care for them any more than it cared for the forest. She brought them to understand that the company was cutting them out of a job; she was good at pointing out that putting the quarterly report before the health of the forest would destroy it for our children. And workers were beginning to understand her message; and “Big Timber” couldn’t stand that kind of message, so she was bombed. By somebody who is still out there.
A veritable army of people, whose desire to vilify Judi seemed endless, was led by the FBI, which labeled her a terrorist, charged her with bombing herself, and accused her one month before her death of faking cancer to gain sympathy from the public. Why on earth, why? I believe it was because she espoused and lived by a philosophy she called “biocentrism,” which holds that humankind as a species is only one of a continuum, an organism, and therefore had little right to exploit the resources of the planet to the resources’ destruction. She believed that giant corporations were betraying the public trust by the extraction of resources for obscene profit; naturally, this was appalling to those guardians of corporate America. So, if bombers could not destroy her body, then the FBI would destroy her reputation. If she could not be stopped from forming an alliance with workers, then she could be slowed down by intimidation, threats, isolation, and misinformation. It didn’t work; she came back, and never stopped until cancer struck her down six years after the bombing.
That was her sheroism. She challenged all kinds of macho forces on their own ground. When Louisiana-Pacific Security shoved her to the ground and conned the cops into arresting her falsely, she replied a few days later by leading a circle of women through their gate at Albion, surrounded the security officer while chanting the many names of the Great Goddess. “My God, they’ve cast a spell on me!” he cried, eyes rolling back into his head. When in the process of discovery she obtained Oakland Police Department photos of her bombing, she looked at them over and over until she could harden herself to reliving the trauma, and actively conduct her case against the FBI for harassment, slander, and other equally slimy machinations conducted by their COINTELPRO program.
Judi inspired many of us to embrace Earth First! principles, because she lived and worked by those principles and the principles of nonviolent direct action. She inspired us to learn the principles of forest management from all sides. She saw clearly and led us to see that the trust of honest men, who believed the forest would still be there for their children the way it had been for them, had been betrayed and broken by the giant corporations. She inspired us to work to save the trees of our backyards, stretching through northern California to the Oregon border and beyond: the Cascades, the Siskiyous, the Kalmiopsis Wilderness, Clayoquot Sound, clearcut after clearcut all the way to the Brooks Range.
Six years—the last years of her life—of relentless organizing true to her shero’s mission, cleaning up the corporate Augean Stables as if the corporate steeds were eating and eliminating the world. She never gave up, and she never lost her laugh. Great, deep, holding all the world laughter, even through the pain of her last months. She was cut off too soon—way too soon. What the bombing didn’t do, breast cancer—the women’s neutron bomb—did. Judi made the sheroic decision to die with dignity, surrounded by her children, her family, and her friends. In the months left to her after the 1996 Headwaters Rally, the greatest mass civil disobedience in the history of the U.S. forest movement (1,033 arrests that day; over 200 actions in the months following) she organized, explained, and delegated the mountains of material she had amassed: from the stuff for making banners (her last hangs on the Skunk Train Line proclaiming L-P OUT! and it’s coming true) to extensive files on her case against the FBI.
In that time, she also had the opportunity to see how much the hometown folks loved her. There was a benefit tribute a month before she died. Judi was there and took the time to express her joy and thanks by singing, “I am a warrior of the earth; I came alive in the Ancient Redwoods,” clutching all the while a bottle of Headwaters water, and, lastly, toking a bit of medical marijuana and blowing it into the Willits High School Auditorium air. “I’ve liberated Willits High!” she cried, and as we cheered and cried and howled to see that ephemeral smoke ascend the shaft of the spotlight, we knew we would never be the same for knowing her, having seen the Spirit pass among us once more with her great belly laugh. Viva Judi! Presente Siempre.
“The woman brave enough to sit in the crotch of a tree had hers blown up today.”
— Robin Rule, on the bombing of Judi Bari
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