[Peace-discuss] Secret History of Tree-Spiking by Judi Bari

[Ricky Baldwin]

The Secret History of Tree Spiking

Part 1

By Judi Bari - Anderson Valley Advertiser, February
17, 1993, and the Earth First! Journal, December 21,
1994; reprinted in Timber Wars, © 1994 Common Courage
Press.[1]

In May, 1987, sawmill worker George Alexander was
nearly decapitated when a tree-spike shattered his
sawblade at the Cloverdale Louisiana-Pacific mill in
northern California.
This grisly accident sent shock waves through our
community, and eventually led Northern California
Earth First! to renounce tree spiking. Southern Oregon
and Southern Willamette Earth First! joined us, as
well as a few Earth First!ers from Stumptown, but
that's all.

The rest of Earth First! still endorses spiking, and
many of them even today react to our no-spiking policy
by denouncing us as traitors and dismissing us as
wimps, without ever considering the reasons for our
actions. Because of this, because there are so many
new Earth First!ers who don't know this history, I
think it is time to re-examine the issue of
tree-spiking. A few years ago, George Alexander and
his wife Laurie agreed to talk to me about the 1987
incident. The following account is based on my
conversation with them.

"I was the perfect victim," began George Alexander, "I
was nobody." George, a lifetime Mendocino County
resident and son of an old-time Willits logger, was 23
years old and just married, with his wife Laurie three
months pregnant at the time of the accident. George's
job at the mill was called off-bearer. The off-bearer
operates a huge band saw that makes the first rough
cut on logs as they come into the mill, sectioning off
slices of wood that will later be cut to standard
lengths and planed for finished lumber.

Off-bearer is one of the most dangerous jobs in the
mill. The saw that George Alexander worked on was
sized for old-growth logs-52 feet around, with a
ten-inch blade of high tensile steel. "That saw was so
powerful that when you turned it off you could make
three more cuts through a 20-foot log before it
stopped," George told me. One of the dangers of
working as off-bearer is that if the blade hits a hard
knot or metal debris (from old fences, choker chains,
nails, etc., embedded in the wood), the sawteeth can
break. To protect against this, workers have to wear a
heavy face mask and stay on the alert, checking each
log as it goes through.

George knew the job was dangerous, but he also was
confident of his skill. "I always figured that if the
blade ever hit me, it would hit me on the urn." he
said. He knew every sound the saw made, and could tell
by listening when something was going wrong. He also
knew to look for the tell-tale black stains that
usually show up on the smooth surface of the de-barked
logs if metal is present in the wood.

Although George Alexander was an LP employee, he was
no company man. Louisiana-Pacific had earned his
disrespect long ago through the callous way they treat
their employees. "We're not even people to them," he
said. "All they care about is production." The perfect
example of this L-P management attitude was Dick
Edwards, the day shift foreman. Edwards was always
after everyone, but he seemed to go out of his way to
harass George. In the months before the tree spiking,
Edwards would often stand on the catwalk overlooking
George's work station with LP Western Division head
Joe Wheeler, just watching George work.

L-P has never been known to spend too much time
maintaining equipment or worrying about worker safety.
But in the weeks preceding the tree spiking incident,
conditions had gotten worse than usual. The bandsaw
blade was wobbling when it ran, and cracks had begun
to appear in it. But when George and other workers
complained, Edwards shined them on, saying the new
blades were not in yet, and they would have to ma1ke
do. "That blade was getting so bad," said George,
"That I almost didn't go to work that day."

Normally when a big tree is sawed, they start from the
outside and square off the edges first. But the tree
that George was sawing on May 8, 1987 was a 12-inch
pecker-pole, and because it was so small he took the
first cut down the middle. Halfway through the 20-foot
log, the saw hit a 60-penny nail. "That nail must have
been recently placed and countersunk," George told me.
He had checked the log when he started cutting it and
had seen no sign of the metal. And because he hit the
nail square-on, there was no warning sound. "Usually
there's a high-pitched metal sound and you have time
to get out of the way," explained George. "This time I
didn't hear nothing but 'BOOM!'"

The next thing he knew, George was lying on the floor
covered with his own blood. "I knew I was dying. And
all I could think about was Dick Edwards, and all the
shit he gave me when I complained about the saw. I
tried to get up, but they pushed me back down. I tried
to beckon to Edwards so he would come close enough for
me to get my hands around his throat in a death grip.
If I had to die, I wanted to take that bastard with
me."

A 12-foot section of the huge sawblade had broken off
and hit George in the throat and face, ripping through
his face mask and cutting into his jugular vein. His
jaw was broken in five places and a dozen teeth were
knocked out. The blade was wrapped around him, and his
co-workers had to blowtorch it off while they tried to
keep him from bleeding to death.

"The saw hit me flat," said George. "If it had hit me
with the teeth I'd be dead. I'm only here because my
friend Rich Phillips held my veins together in the
hour before the ambulance came."
LP didn't call the press right away, but when they did
they had a field day. "Tree Spiking Terrorism,"
screamed the headline in the Santa Rosa Press
Democrat. And even though there was no evidence that
Earth First! was involved, the Eureka Times-Standard
proclaimed, Earth First! Blamed for Worker's
Injuries." Mendocino County Sheriff Shea put out a
widely quoted press release that was almost gleeful in
its condemnation.

"This heinous and vicious criminal act is a felony
offense, punishable by imprisonment in State Prison
for up to three years," he wrote, "Still undetermined
in the investigation is the motive of the suspect or
suspects, to deter logging operations or inflict great
bodily injury and death upon lumber processing
personnel," Even Louisiana-Pacific President Harry
Merlo got into the fray, blaming "terrorism in the
name of environmental goals" for George's injury.

Meanwhile, George and Laurie Alexander had a different
take on the incident. "I'm against tree spiking,"
George told the press from his hospital bed. "But I
don't like clearcutting either." Laurie also tried to
include L-P in the list of culprits. "I hate L-P," she
told me. "I like trees." But the press wouldn't print
a word Laurie said, and George's comments about mill
safety and clearcutting were mentioned in only one
news article, by Eric Brazil of the San Francisco
Examiner.

Earth First!, on the other hand, was much less
generous in their reaction, displaying practically no
sympathy for this innocent man who had just been
through such a terrifying ordeal caused by a spiked
tree. And after advocating the tactic for years even
putting out a manual on how to do it and teaching tree
spiking workshops at [the] Earth First! Rendezvous,
when the shit came down they tried to disassociate
themselves from it. "This is probably the first time
we've made international news, and we weren't even
involved in it," was one comment attributed to Earth
First! in the San Francisco newspapers. Dave Foreman
came off sounding even more flippant, as he was quoted
as saying, "I think it's unfortunate that somebody got
hurt, but you know I quite honestly am more concerned
about old growth forests, spotted owls, wolverines,
and salmon - and nobody is forcing people to cut those
trees," This moral arrogance didn't win Earth First!
many supporters in our area. In fact it discredited
Earth First!'s claim of non-involvement, and made it
even easier to tar us with the incident and portray us
as unfeeling "terrorists."

But did Earth First! spike that tree? The answer is
almost definitely no. Back in 1987, Earth First! was
just getting started in Mendocino County, and the only
issue at the time was old growth. There was no
consciousness yet about baby tree logging, and the
spiked tree was only 12 inches in diameter, There were
signs that this may have been the work of a disturbed
individual. LP traced the tree to a cut on Cameron
Ridge Road near the coastal town of Elk, where
neighbors had been complaining about LP's liquidating
the forest and threatening their water supply. One of
the local residents was a strange 50-year-old man with
bleached blond hair, who drifted in and out of the
area and mostly kept to himself. He liked guns, and
was described by neighbors as a survivalist. Before
the tree spiking incident, loggers reported finding
mutilated animals around the site--a beheaded deer
hanging from a tree, a skinned dog draped over a
bulldozer - hardly Earth First! tactics, to say the
least.

The Mendocino County Sheriff was certainly aware of
the survivalist tree spike suspect, but they were
strangely quiet about him, and the case was eventually
dropped without any charges being filed. Recently,
when I got my FBI files, I found out why. The
sheriff's reports on the spiking were included in my
file, and I learned that the suspect's name was Bill
Ervin. He lived in southern California, but he owned
property in Elk and sometimes stayed there in a crude
cabin. Ervin freely admitted spiking trees on his own
side of the property line, and he did it because L-P
is well known in this area for cutting a few feet past
their property line and taking their neighbors' trees.
"I may get crucified for this," Ervin said when
questioned by the sheriff. "I may be in error, but I
understand that one can spike trees on one's own
property."

Bill Ervin made no secret of the trees he spiked. He
marked them with yellow flagging and left the spikes
sticking part way out of the trees. He borrowed the
hammer from his neighbor and told him what he intended
to use it for. He also told a truck driver at the LP
logging site, and he told a California Highway Patrol
cop. So it is reasonable to assume that LP may have
known in advance that there were spiked trees in the
area. But if this was the work of a lone crazy person,
that still begs the question of where he even got the
idea of spiking the tree. The answer is probably Dave
Foreman's book, Eco-Defense.

There is also reason to believe that the tree that
broke George Alexander's sawblade was not spiked on
Bill Ervin's property, but rather was hit while lying
on a log deck after it was cut. The saw hit the spike
about nine feet up the tree. If you figure a foot for
the stump, that means it would have to have been
spiked ten feet off the ground. Bruce Anderson
described the technique like this in the May 27, 1987,
Anderson Valley Advertiser: "One average-sized person
teams up with a midget. The midget gets up on the
shoulders of his partner to hammer in the spikes. LP
can nail those pesky terrorists before they nail the
trees by arresting any stray midgets they spot roaming
around Mendocino County."

Bill Ervin also insists that he used only 16-penny
(approximately six-inch) nails on the trees he spiked.
No other size nail was found when the sheriffs and LP
security cops inspected the trees in the area, and
there is no evidence that Ervin ever possessed either
any larger nails or a hammer big enough to pound them
in with. Yet the nail in the log at the Cloverdale
mill was a 60-penny, 11-inch spike. The sheriffs gave
Bill Ervin a lie detector test, however, and they
claim he failed on the following questions: "Did you
spike the logs at the log deck on Cameron Road?" and
"Did you spike any trees outside your property?"

So all in all, it's still unclear who was at fault in
the Cloverdale tree-spiking. We don't even know if the
tree was spiked to keep it from being cut, or to
create a martyr and make Earth First! look like
terrorists. But it really doesn't matter whether an
Earth First!er, a lone survivalist, or L-P president
Harry Merlo himself spiked that tree. The point is
that if you advocate a tactic, you had better be
prepared to take responsibility for its results. And I
don't want anything to do with causing the kind of
injuries suffered by George Alexander.

While George was convalescing from those injuries, he
was contacted by someone from the yellow ribbon gang
of pro-timber stooges. George doesn't remember her
name, just that it was "some woman from Humboldt
County." She asked him to go on tour with her
denouncing Earth First! for tree spiking. And George
refused.

No matter what you think of LP's forest practices,
this much should be clear: George Alexander is not the
enemy. He has no say over his bosses' policies, either
in or out of the mill. I have heard Earth First!ers
say that doesn't matter, he shouldn't be working at an
LP mill. Well, I shouldn't be driving a car either,
but that doesn't make it okay to put a bomb in it.

After George refused to go on tour denouncing us, he
was forced to return to work at L-P before his
injuries even healed. His and Laurie's baby was about
to be born, he needed money, and there were not many
jobs where he and his family live. George got worker's
compensation for the time he was off work, but LP
didn't offer him a cent for the trauma and hardship he
suffered. They made a big public show of putting up a
$20,000-dollar reward for the information leading to
the conviction of the spiker, but George Alexander had
to file a lawsuit against Louisiana Pacific to get
anything at all. And while the company was crying
crocodile tears over his injuries in public, in
private they were fighting him tooth and nail over his
damage claim. He ended up with just $9,000 and an
involuntary transfer to night shift. "They used my
name all over the country," George told me. "Then they
laid me off when the mill closed down."

"LP is just sorry I didn't die," said George
Alexander. "Yeah, I know," I replied. "They're sorry I
didn't die, too."

[1] Portions of the article are not included in the
Anderson Valley Advertiser version of this article,
and portions are not included in the Earth First!
Journal version (which is somewhat longer). We've
included all information from both versions to provide
a comprehensive account. 


Part 2

By Judi Bari - Anderson Valley Advertiser, March 8,
1993; reprinted in Timber Wars, © 1994 Common Courage
Press.

Tree-spiking is a failed tactic by any standard. It
has been practiced by Earth First! for 10 years now,
and I think it's fair to say that the results are in.
Here's [an excerpt of] Dave Foreman's description of
tree-spiking from Eco-Defense

Tree-spiking is an extremely effective method of
deterring timber sales, which seems to be becoming
more and more popular. If enough trees are spiked to
roadless areas, eventually the corporate thugs in the
timber company boardrooms, along with their corporate
lackeys who wear the uniform of the Forest Service,
will realize that timber sales in wild areas are going
to be prohibitively expensive.

Believing this to be so seems to be an article of
faith for some Earth First!ers. But a look at the
actual history of Earth First! tree-spiking will show
that it hasn't really worked out that way.
The most intensive spiking campaigns occurred in
Oregon and Washington, although there have also been
tree-spikings in California, Colorado, Montana, Idaho,
New Mexico, Arizona, British Columbia, southern
Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, and New Jersey, to name a
few. And I'm not going to say that none of them saved
any trees, because in a few cases they did, especially
early on, or in areas without a timber based economy.
But the successes have been few and far between. Even
unabashed Earth First! apologist Chris Manes, writing
in his well researched book Green Rage, could only
come up with two timber sales that were canceled
because they were spiked, one in George Washington
National Forest in Virginia, and one in the Wanatchee
Forest's Icicle River drainage in Washington state. I
don't know about the trees in Virginia, but the Icicle
River sale has since been cut. Earth First! activists
from Shawnee in Southern Illinois also report that
when the hard-fought Fairview sale was finally
clear-cut, the only trees that were left were a few
oaks that had been spiked.

But there have been scores and scores of
tree-spikings, and in the vast majority of cases, the
Forest Service or timber company just sent people in
with metal detectors and, often with great public
fanfare, removed the spikes and cut the trees.
Sometimes spikes were missed and sometimes they hit
the blades in sawmills. But the timber industry has
made it quite clear that this is a price they are
willing to pay.

The first known tree-spiking in Earth First! history
occurred in the Siskiyou Mountains of Oregon in 1983,
on the Woodrat timber sale on Bureau of Land
Management (BLM) land. Notice was given of the
spiking, and some of the trees were marked with yellow
ribbons to make them easy to find and verify. The BLM
reacted by having the loggers cut the trees and leave
them on the ground for firewood cutters to saw at
their own risk.

In 1984, a group calling itself the Hardesty Avengers
mailed a letter to the Oregon Register-Guard
announcing that a 132-acre sale on Hardesty Mountain
in the Willamette National Forest had been spiked. The
area was scheduled for helicopter logging by Columbia
Helicopter. The Forest Service responded with a plan
it called "Operation Nail." sending 20 Forest Service
employees into the woods to remove the nails before
they went ahead and cut the trees.
In 1985 in Southern Oregon, Earth First! was engaged
in a high-profile direct action campaign to save
Cathedral Forest in the Middle Santiam Wilderness.
Demonstrators blockaded roads, staged the first
tree-sits ever, and even occupied an area scheduled
for blasting with dynamite, some of them actually
sitting on the charges. In the midst of these actions,
a few Earth First!ers took it upon themselves to spike
some of the trees at Pyramid Creek. And to read about
it in Chris Manes' book, I can see where people get
the false impression that tree spiking is a drastic
but effective last resort. "Despite continued
opposition in the form of civil disobedience," writes
Manes, "the road crept inexorably toward the sale. AS
a last ditch effort, (Mike) Roselle sneaked into the
stand one night and spiked it. He sent a letter to the
timber company announcing the spiking, and signed it
"the Bonnie Abbzug Feminist Garden Party, a reference
to the voluptuous ecoteur in The Monkeywrench Gang.
The authorities caught neither the allusion nor the
tree-spiker."

What Chris Manes doesn't tell us is that the spiking
didn't work. It caused a spate of negative publicity,
and it caused Mary Beth Nearing, one of Earth First!'s
most inspirational organizers, to publicly distance
herself and the Cathedral Forest Action Group from the
spiking and Earth First!. But it didn't save the
trees. In fact, Mike Roselle himself, speaking in Rik
Scarce's book, Eco Warriors, admits that the spiking
"barely slowed them down." The Forest Service sent
rangers in to pull the nails, and the trees were cut.

Other areas in Oregon that were spiked and cut include
the Hobson and the Deer Creek sales in the North
Kalmiopsis, the Top and Skook sales in Hell's Canyon
National Forest, Bull Run in the Mt. Hood area near
Portland, and a Boise-Cascade sale in the
Wallowa-Whitman National Forest. At this last site
some of the spikes were missed by the loggers and made
ii into the mill, breaking teeth off of six
saw-blades. The saw teeth shot across the mill like
bullets, injuring no one but terrifying and angering
the mill-workers.

In fact, the main effect that tree-spiking seemed to
be having in Oregon was to piss people off. In June
1987, Earth First! was protesting the Lazy Bluff
timber sale in the North Kalmiopsis roadless area.
Tree-sitter Randy Prince was perched 80 feet up in an
old-growth fir when a logger cutting in an adjacent
area hit an 11-inch spike and damaged his chainsaw.
The logger stormed over to Randy's tree, revved up a
saw, and, screaming something about tree-spiking,
began cutting down the tree with Randy in it. He cut
out a notch 1/3 of the way through the tree before he
was talked into stopping. Shaken, Randy denounced
tree-spiking and publicly distanced himself from Earth
First!, and the Lazy Bluff timber sale was cut.

By this time it was becoming clear that something was
going wrong with the tree-spiking strategy. It seemed
that all this publicity was backfiring, putting the
timber industry in a position of having to cut trees
or lose face. So when Holcomb Peak in the Siskiyou
Mountains was extensively spiked in June 1987, the
spikers tried to correct past mistakes and do it
"right". No notification was sent to the press.
Instead, the BLM, the logging contractor, and the
mill-owner were quietly notified, in order to give
them an opportunity to quietly back out and cancel the
sale. No luck. Instead, they called the press and made
the incident into a media circus, with BLM rangers
posing for photos in the woods with tree spikes, and
the timber industry rallying to raise a $13,000 reward
for information leading to the arrest of the spikers.
And the trees were cut.
The ultimate media manipulation in the tree-spike
wars, however, came in 1988 when Senator Mark Hatfield
and Congressman Bob Smith (known to jaded Oregonians
as the Representatives from Timber) were on a tour of
the Gregory Forest Products sawmill near Glendale,
Oregon. In an amazing display of synchronicity, at the
very minute when the congressional delegation was
watching the operation of a band saw, that very band
saw just happened to hit a spike and explode. The
delegation had just been shown spikes found in logs
from the Silver Fire in the North Kalmiopsis. None of
the dignitaries was hurt by the flying sawblade, but
they were predictably impressed. "Tree-spiking is a
radical environmentalist's version of razor blades in
Halloween candy," was Congressman Bob Smith's comment.

Meanwhile, some of the Oregon Earth First! activists
were getting tired of answering for this ineffective
and marginalizing tactic. "Personally I don't think it
works," Earth First!er Steve Marsden told the Seattle
Times when asked about tree-spiking in June 1988.
Fellow Earth First!er Bobcat expressed the same
frustration, complaining that it makes them have to
talk about "tree-spiking pro or con instead of old
growth pro or con." but pressure was great within
Earth First! to refrain from criticizing a tactic that
others still engaged in. And tree-spiking was
certainly going on outside of Oregon.

Spiking in Washington state was just as extensive as
Oregon, and its results no better. Starting with the
temporarily successful Icicle river spiking in 1986,
sale after sale was spiked and cut, including the Lake
Creek and Natches areas of the Wenatchee National
Forest, Green Mountain and Granite Falls in Mt.
Baker-Snoqualmie, and Storm King Mountain and Karamip
in the Colville National Forest. The only spiked sales
that I could verify as "probably still standing" are
the Spoon sale and Olston Quirkendale in Mt.
Baker-Snoqualmie, and they were set aside in the
spotted owl ruling, not due to the spiking. In 1989
the Sugar Bear sale was spiked in the Cedar River area
near Seattle. Although the cut in the watershed was
eventually halved due to a public campaign by Earth
First! and others, the spiked area was cut.

Spiking was not saving many trees in Washington, but
it was certainly raising the ire of the timber
industry. Band saw blades were broken by tree spikes
in four different Washington sawmills between 1987 and
1989, resulting in the standard cries of "terrorism."
Finally in September 1989 the timber industry and
corporate press mounted an all-out assault on
Washington Earth First!. A four-part series was
published in the Bellingham Herald listing acts of
sabotage in the area, quotes from Eco-Defense, and the
names, addresses, places of employment and photos of
key Earth First!ers. No proof was given to show that
these public Earth First!ers were actually responsible
for any of the sabotage listed, but the atmosphere was
so hostile that no proof was needed. Earth First!ers
had to leave town for their own safety.
The classic example of tree-spiking regularly cited by
Earth First!ers as proof the tactic works occurred on
Meare's Island in British Columbia in 1985, where the
Society to Protect Intact Kinetic Ecosystems (SPIKE)
drove 26,000 helix nails into old-growth cedar trees.
What the tree-spike advocates didn't tell you is that
there was a whole campaign going on over Meare's
Island, and the spiking was only part of it. The issue
on Meare's Island is native land rights, as the
Claquet people who live there have never ceded the
land or signed any treaties. When the Canadian
government attempted to sell timber rights on the
island to MacMillan Bloedell, a coalition of natives
and whites fought back with a lawsuit and a five-month
occupation. When MacMillan Bloedell tried to come in
and cut before the court could grant a restraining
order, hundreds of people massed on the beach to
prevent their helicopters from landing. The court
finally halted the logging until the final ruling.
That ruling is expected soon, and the Canadian
government has stated that if MacMillan Bloedell wins
in court they will take the timber spikes or no
spikes.

Closer to home, California has had far fewer spikings
than our northern neighbors, with many of them
occurring in 1987, the same year George Alexander was
hurt by the spike at the Cloverdale LP mill. Just one
month after that incident in Mendocino County, Trout
Creek was spiked in a last-ditch attempt to save it
from being cut by its owner, Pacific Gas and Electric
(PG&E). Friends of Trout Creek had been negotiating
for a compromise, but when the spikes were discovered,
PG&E angrily broke off negotiations. Things looked bad
until Earth First!er Sequoia came up with a plan. She
organized a protest in which people were asked to
withhold $1 from their PG&E bills and mail in a green
card to show public support for saving Trout Creek.
PG&E received so many green cards that it backed down
and agreed to save the whole grove with no compromise.

There were also a few tree-spikings in California's
National Forests. A minor uproar occurred in June 1987
right after the Trout Creek spiking when it was
discovered that a spiked sale in Mendocino National
Forest had been cut anyway and sent on to the mill,
despite injuries to George Alexander one month
earlier. A 202-acre sale in Tahoe National Forest was
spiked and cut, as was a 240-acre sale at Running
Springs in the San Bernadino National Forest, sold to
LP at Inyokern. One of the strangest tree-spiking
incidents in California was again on LP land, this
time near Guerneville in Sonoma County. The newspapers
received a notice that the Sonoma County Coalition to
Stop LP had spiked trees at the Silver Estate. No
spikes were found, but nonetheless LP said it had a
suspect. He was described as "a black man with a bone
through his nose who rides a bicycle and carries bows
and arrows," obviously a better example of LP's racism
than its investigative capacities.

As tree-spiking continued across the US, the
government increasingly tried to crack down on it.
Although no spiker has ever been caught, laws were
passed to make spiking a felony in California.
Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. In 1989, the
federal government passed its own laws, and that
brought the FBI into the picture. When the Post Office
timber sale in Clearwater Forest, Idaho, was spiked,
the FBI responded by rounding up University of Montana
professor Ron Erickson and several of his Earth First!
students. They were forced to give hair samples and
fingerprints, write "Stumps Suck" 25 times, and submit
to a federal grand-jury investigation. No evidence was
found to link them to the spiking, and no charges were
brought. But this intimidation served to separate
Missoula Earth First! from its support in academia.
And the trees were cut.

With this kind of history, you have to wonder why some
Earth First!ers cling so tenaciously to the myth that
tree spiking works. One of the explanations commonly
given is that, regardless of whether it saves
individual trees, spiking is an economic constraint on
the industry. "The idea could have come from the
Chicago Business School," says Chris Manes in Green
Rage. "If the cost of removing spikes is high enough,
the cut will not be made, or at least the decreed
profit margin will discourage logging in
[controversial] areas." With this logic, Chris Manes
would have flunked Econ 101. There are several flaws
in this theory. The strategy of tree-spiking was
designed for federal lands, where most remaining
old-growth in the US is located. In these cases it is
the Forest Service, not the timber company, which
bears the cost, both of removing the spikes and of
charging lower rates for the timber to make up for the
risk of broken saws. The Forest Service is not
required to make a profit, since it is financed by tax
money, and one of the scandals of the looting of our
national forests is that the Forest Service subsidized
big timber by paying for log road construction and
selling timber below cost. Between 1982 and 1987, the
Forest Service received $800 million a year in federal
timber sales, but spent $1.2 billion a year making the
timber ready for sale. That's a loss of $400 million a
year. There aren't enough tree spikes in the world to
make a dent in this agency.

And even in the case of tree-spiking on private lands,
this economic theory assumes that the price of lumber
is fixed, so that any increase in production costs
will result in a decrease in profits. But old-growth
timber is so valuable, and there is so little of it
left, that the timber industry could charge anything
it wanted and still sell every stick. Any increase in
production costs due to tree-spiking would simply be
passed on to the consumers.

Nor are the timber companies put off by the threat of
injury to employees, as we have already seen in real
life. Dave Foreman tells us in EcoDefense that tree
spiking is "unlikely to cause anyone physical injury
even should a blade shatter upon striking a spike,
which is an unlikely event." But Foreman also admitted
to the Christian Science Monitor in 1987 that he had
never seen the inside of a sawmill. And it is clear
that he doesn't understand the depths of depravity of
the timber companies. The routine maiming and killing
of timber workers is coldly calculated into the cost
of the lumber, and a few more injuries are hot going
to stop them. LP made this clear after George
Alexander was hurt. "LP will not let tree-spiking be a
deterrent," said spokeswoman Glennis Simmons. And she
meant it. LP kept running the logs from that same
spiked sale through the mill, even though workers
encountered two more spikes and broke another saw
blade. Other timber companies were just as emphatic.
After the Buse Company in Everett, Washington broke
four saw blades on tree spikes in 1987, manager Ron
Smith commented: "I assume they think if they do
things like this, the timber industry will get
discouraged and will just quit cutting trees. But I
don't think that's going to happen.
And it hasn't happened. Yet just because Dave Foreman
told us 10 years ago that it would, most of Earth
First! continues to ignore reality, no matter how much
experience we have. The forests that Earth First! had
been instrumental in saving in this area (Trout Creek,
Cahto Wilderness, Headwaters Forest, Albion, and Owl
Creek) have all been saved through blockades and
public organizing campaigns, often combined with
lawsuits. And it's time we faced the truth about
tree-spiking. It is unquestionably dangerous to
workers. It needlessly endangers Earth First!
activists on the front lines. And it [more often than
not] doesn't save trees.

Ironically, most of the early advocates of
tree-spiking--including Dave Foreman--have all left
Earth First! for safer harbors after suppressing
debate by treating any questioning of their tactics as
heresy.

And, although most of them have refused to make any
public statements about it, the Earth First! groups
that most strongly advocated tree-spiking in the early
days have quietly abandoned the tactic. Yet the myth
lives on.

Last month in Maine, a letter was sent to the local
press stating that the trees at Mt. Blue had been
spiked by Earth First! I don't know if the letter was
real or fake, but a group of Earth First!ers
blockading Mt. Blue were subsequently arrested,
dragged through the coals from their campfire, and
roughed up in jail. And I wondered if a new generation
of activists is going to repeat the mistakes of the
last 10 years. Those of us who are out on the front
lines putting our bodies in front of the bulldozers
and chainsaws can't afford to be isolated and
discredited by something as in effective and
incendiary as tree-spiking. If we are serious about
putting Earth first, we need to choose tactics because
they work, not because they seem macho or romantic.
That's what no-compromise really means.



__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com