[Peace-discuss] tree-spiking, population control, guilt by association

[Ricky Baldwin]

Folks,

This exchange began after a newcomer at a recent AWARE
meeting proposed a working group on “population
control”.  The tradition of AWARE has been that if
someone has an idea for a project, they may solicit
input but they do not need the permission of others in
the group or consensus to proceed.  If they find
others who will work with them, they can make their
own decisions.  In the case that nobody “bites”,
however, the idea dies.  It appears that the
population control idea may meet exactly that fate, as
the idea seems to find no takers but has met a great
deal of consternation.

I think I expressed my opinion on that subject at the
meeting this Sunday.  But basically I believe the big
question on “population control” is who is it in
control.  If people want access to information or
services to help them to have smaller families, or
form farmer cooperatives, or whatever, that’s one
thing.  If a group of people wants to tell another
group of people they have to have less - or more -
children than they want, that’s quite another.  I may
say more about that in a separate post (and you may
pray that I don’t, but I still may, ‘cause I can be
difficult like that).

But along the way, a number of comments were made to
the effect that birth control and/or population
control advocates are not to be trusted because they
just want to get rid of poor people, and the proof is
in their history and associations: Social Darwinism,
Earth First!, etc.  If I’m mischaracterizing the
arguments, please correct me.  I don’t find such
proofs too convincing, usually, so it’s possible that
I’m overstating my case.  In general if I were
persuaded to disavow causes based on history and
associations I could certainly never be anti-war or an
anti-imperialist.  Outspoken advocates of these ideas
have held some pretty heinous notions alongside their
anti-war or anti-imperialist ideas, after all.  

For example, several leaders of the anti-imperialist
movement opposing the Spanish-American War and later
against the suppression of Filipino rebels (US troops
“freed” the Philippines from Spain and then decided
not to leave) were also virulently anti-immigrant. 
They argued, in fact, that annexing the Philippines,
Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hawaii, and other places inhabited
by people perceived as the wrong color would have the
same bad effect as immigration: degrading, in their
view, our sacred American institutions, traditions,
etc.  You still hear this sort of thing around, as I’m
sure folks know, and some of it is from folks who
oppose the current wars in Iraq and other foreign
places (they don’t deserve our help, don’t Americans
come first?, etc.).  I happen to think that opposing
war and imperialism was the right position at the time
anyway, as it is now.

A few years ago I also ran into people who believed
that NAFTA opponents were just racists who didn’t want
their jobs going to anyone else.  Certainly there were
those.  It didn’t mean that opposing NAFTA was wrong,
which I think most of us did and for the right
reasons.

Anyway, somewhere in this discussion the subject of
tree-spiking came up, I think as an example of how
advocates of smaller human populations don’t care
about human life.  Certainly there are those elitists,
Social Darwinists, etc., who deserve every bit of this
scorn.  And I think I said at the time that I agreed
with most of what was said.  I intended to quibble
about a few things (as I do) after I found out how the
whole thing got started.  Once I found out, by the
way, I could understand how everyone got so excited,
but frankly I don’t think it’s leading anywhere. 
Anyway I think I‘ve said my piece on that.  But since
then the tree-spiking remark led to so much anger and
so many questions that I think it deserves a little
more explanation.  And besides, I promised to clarify
it.

What I said was that tree-spiking gets a bad rap,
meaning that the issue is hyped out of proportion and
there is a lot of mythology around it.  I do not
advocate it, just to reiterate that.  I just think
it’s important to know the truth, particularly when
powerful interests have every reason to distort it. 
In this case, those interests would be the US
government and big logging companies.  So let’s be
clear.

Tree-spiking started in the late 1800s.  It was a
tactic used by disgruntled workers, unions and by
landowners to prevent logging in certain areas, by
certain companies or by non-union workers.  Radical
environmentalists and owners of land that was being
encroached upon (logging companies sneaking over their
property lines) revived the practice in the late
1900s.  Though potentially dangerous, there is little
documented evidence of injury resulting from
tree-spiking.  

Labor and environmental activist Judi Bari, mentioned
before, renounced tree-spiking as Tom said, and was
followed by most of Earth First! -- all after a single
case in which a saw mill worker was badly hurt while
using a blade (that was unsafe due to OSHA
deregulation and his boss‘s contempt for the safety of
the workers, even though there had been numerous
complaints about the sorry state of this particular
blade).  The government was quick to accuse Earth
First! But there was no evidence that they had done
it, the victim blames his boss not Earth First!, and
FBI records later obtained revealed the name of
another suspect -- a nearby landowner who admitted
spiking his trees because logging companies had been
stealing trees off his land.  It’s not clear he did
this one either, by the way.  Judi Bari has actually
written on this, and it’s available online.  Maybe
I’ll post it separately.  It’s worth reading for what
it reveals about a number of related issues.

I brought up Judi Bari, by the way, not to claim that
she advocated tree-spiking, but that her biggest
contribution was to reject the false dichotomy between
the labor and environmental movements that government
and business want us to accept -- and which I felt the
argument over population control was falling into. 
She rejected this by working with both groups toward
their common interests, which are numerous.  Many
others have also done this.  But it’s a lesson I think
we still need to learn.

So, again, it is not clear at all that
environmentalists have caused a single injury by
tree-spiking, as is commonly believed they did.

But I also have to apologize for unintentionally
misleading folks.  In my attempt to be brief and to be
flexible, I think I gave the wrong impression.  I
never meant to imply that some accidents were or are
acceptable, like “collateral damage“ or something. 
What I was trying to say was that there have certainly
been a lot of people involved in tree-spiking and I
would not pretend that all of them have been
responsible, but we still cannot let ourselves be
taken in by government and corporate propaganda that
tars everyone who used or advocated this practice as
killers or, at best, people who care more about trees
than human life.  It ain’t so.

Earth First! and many other people have taken great
care to do it safely, and in none of those instances
has anyone ever been hurt, at least as far ass we
know.  It’s still too dangerous, as well as
ineffective, but that’s the truth.  These folks place
spikes as high up in the trees as they can reach,
several feet above the loggers’ saw blades, contrary
to popular belief.  The purpose, once again, is not to
injure anyone but to prevent the logging, by spoiling
the value of the wood and making it expensive or
difficult to mill it.  The logging company and the
press are then usually notified, although sometimes
just the company.  The trees are also posted or
marked, decorated with a ribbon, etc. so the spiking
can be verified.  Once again, I cannot claim that
everyone who ever spiked a tree took these
precautions, the practitioners have been so varied and
dissociated over so many years.  This is of course
true of any number of other activities that can
potentially cause injury if done incorrectly.  

Certainly anyone who would play fast and loose with
peoples’ lives deserves condemnation, but it is wrong
to find them all guilty based on the (possible) crimes
of a few.

Many people now believe that a number of loggers were
injured in spite of these precautions, if they know
about the precautions at all.  This remains to be
shown.  But in my haste, wanting to allow the outside
possibility that things occur that have not yet been
documented, I made the following point, though maybe
not very well: it is possible that some workers may
have disregarded all these notices -- and my previous
work in the area of occupational safety and health
tells me that a kind of worker machismo will sometimes
lead them to do things like this -- or they may have
been ordered to disregard them by corporate bosses who
care little for the workers’ safety (I think we all
know this happens).  In fact I know of no case in
which either took place.  In any event this is not the
same crime that environmentalists have been accused
of.  

We may still believe their actions were wrong, too big
a risk, etc., as I do, but justice is never served by
accusing people of crimes we know they did not commit
or by allowing that accusation to stand.  So if I
shock someone or invite condemnation on myself by
defending someone who is falsely accused, so be it.

I believe that people in the anti-war movement should
be sensitive to this.  We do not condone the murderous
attacks on September 11, 2001, nor al-Qaeda itself,
nor the Taliban that was, nor the tyrannical regime of
Saddam Hussein.  But we still do not believe that
anything goes - like Bush’s lies or the “war on
terror” - so long as it is opposed to these actions
and these people.  We believe, at least I think we
believe, that telling the truth is always important,
and taking our share of the blame, making sure that
the powers that be take their share of the blame, is
paramount.  It is our antidote to the black-and-white
propaganda that creates certain people as “enemies of
freedom” and such like, “with us or with the
terrorists”, etc., etc., and that allows war to seem
to be a sane option.  

This is the point I was trying to make when Phil felt
the need to attack something I never said, something
like people deserving to die on hijacked planes
because they knew they were unsafe.  I was and am very
disappointed by this remark of his, I have to say, not
because I apparently failed to make my point clear,
but because I like Phil and regard him as a person
committed to compassionate causes and as such an ally.
 I can only assume that it was made in the heat of the
moment, and that he must have been surprised at what
he thought I was saying, as I was when I got his
email.

So let’s be clear.  I do not condone either
tree-spiking or hijacking planes and crashing them
into buildings, but I also do not think the two are
analogous; it is the need to tell the truth about
both, even though we disagree with them, that is
analogous.  That was my only point about that.  

The situation Phil described, in my opinion, is not
analogous at all.  The appropriate analogy would be
more like this: a number of groups -- al-Qaeda, a
radical environmental or workers or airline
passengers’ movement, etc. -- doing something like
damaging the engines of planes, then each time
announcing to the press and to the airline that they
had done so and that the planes in question were too
dangerous to fly, and posting in the airport that
these planes had been sabotaged and were too dangerous
to fly.  The analogy would also require that such
sabotage and warning have a history of being for real.
 Then the airline decides to fly without proper safety
checks, without finding or fixing one particular
sabotaged plane in which there were no notices.  In
the end only one person is hurt, though very badly, by
flying debris when something goes wrong.  Something
like that.  Are the saboteurs responsible? 
Absolutely, whoever they are.  So is the airline.  And
the rest of the saboteurs who did not do this one
plane, though not responsible for it, should realize
that injury has resulted and the tactic must be
abandoned.  Their gamble essentially was wrong,
anyway, because they were gambling with the safety of
others, and doing so in an arena dominated by actors
whose actions they had no control over.  The risk was
too great and not theirs to take.

But if the government, and maybe the airline, claim
with no evidence that one of these groups -- in
particular one that had been very careful about taking
safety precautions - disabled the engine and brought
down the plane, killing a whole crew and all
passengers, then the FBI blew up one of the group who
had actually renounced the tactic and badly harassed
others, and the biggest part of the progressive left
believed the lies, I would have to speak up.  Wouldn’t
you?

It's still not all that close a fit, in my book, but
maybe you see the point.

I happen to agree with both Tom and Phil, with whom I
had this brief exchange, about the value of the timber
workers' lives and health.  And I do appreciate their
concern for their fellow human beings (being one of
them, myself).  

As an aside, I also agree that Dave Foreman is or was
a kind of dangerous lunatic - not as dangerous as
George Bush, but then, how many people are?  

I hope this helps clarify the issue, even if we still
disagree.

Ricky

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