Earth First! endured its harshest test—one that cut to the core of the group’s commitment, or lack thereof, to both social justice and ecological reform—in the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. Located between the Pacific Ocean and the Cascade mountains and reaching from California north into Canada, these ancient, undisturbed woodlands offer a storybook picture of wilderness (perhaps explaining why the Disney company used them as the setting for many of its nature films). These majestic forests contain within them tremendous diversity—not simply trees with large diameters, but also dead and rotting trees, in addition to more than 600 different species of organisms, everything from northern spotted owls to mycorrhizal fungi. Prior to human settlement, the old growth may have covered 15 million to 24 million acres in the Pacific Northwest.38
As previously noted, the privately owned forestland in this region came under increasing pressure after World War II, with the suburban housing boom driving up the demand for wood. By the 1960s, the stepped-up cutting led to the inevitable exhaustion of the private forest reserves. Nor did timber companies bother with replanting before this time. A decade later, the decline led the timber industry, in league with homebuilders, to lobby the government to sell more timber rights in the national forests.
The 1980s were a pivotal decade for the old-growth regions. First, mainstream and more radical environmental groups seized on a slowly developing body of new ecological knowledge that revealed, more clearly than ever before, the perils of timber harvests for various animal species. And second, the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 led to the appointment of federal officials who did everything in their power to increase timber cutting on national forestlands. Reagan also galvanized the environmental movement when he pushed through such long-standing critics of federal regulatory efforts as Anne Gorsuch and James Watt to take control, respectively, of environmental agencies like the EPA and the Department of Interior.
The man who had the largest say in the fate of old growth, however, was John Crowell, Jr. Reagan named Crowell, a lawyer for the Louisiana Pacific Corporation, a giant timber company, as assistant secretary of agriculture for natural resources and the environment, a position that gave him control over the Forest Service. He had barely unpacked his boxes before he called on the service to double the amount of timber it allowed companies to cut. With the U.S. economy in a recession and housing starts falling, the wood was destined for export overseas to Asia. The timber industry trained its sights on the old growth, in other words, not to meet domestic needs, but because it could make large profits by shipping unprocessed logs to foreign markets. In 1987, a record-breaking 5.6 billion board feet of timber was cut in the old growth of Washington and Oregon.39
It would be wrong to place all the blame for the liquidation on the Reagan administration alone. At the Forest Service, built-in incentives kept timber sales high. Under a law passed in 1930, for instance, the agency was allowed to keep nearly all of the money it made on timber sales for use in building roads and buying equipment. Meanwhile, counties made up entirely or in part of national forestland also found their financial destiny tied to the sale of federal trees. They received 25 percent of the receipts from timber sales, making them equally active proponents of cutting.
Even before the Reagan years, some members of the mainstream environmental movement had become disillusioned with the Forest Service’s commercial orientation and the greens’ response to it. In 1980, Dave Foreman, an ex-Marine and Wilderness Society staffer, along with several others, founded Earth First! on the premise that “in any decision consideration for the health of the earth must come first.” Three years later, the organization—fed up with the discreet legalisms of the major environmental groups—began driving nails into trees in Oregon’s Siskiyou Mountains. They reasoned that the practice of tree spiking, as it came to be called, would pose such a threat to safety—given the risk of serious injury when a saw blade struck a nail—that timber companies would place the affected areas off-limits to cutting. But since the people making the decision to proceed were not the ones who would bear the safety risk, the cutting continued. In 1987, George Alexander, a worker at the Louisiana Pacific company’s mill in Cloverdale, California, used a band saw to cut into a spiked log. Shrapnel sliced through his protective facemask, breaking his jaw and knocking out his teeth. No evidence surfaced linking Earth First! to the accident, but the group’s indifferent response angered many of its critics.40
The following year (1988), with timber cutting on federal lands booming, controversy erupted over the fate of the spotted owl. The logic behind the quest to save the owl, which makes its home in the Pacific Northwest’s old growth, was as follows. Environmentalists believed, based on scientific information, that the species served as an indicator of the general health of the forest ecosystem. Save the owl and the old trees would be preserved in the process. With the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service refusing to list the owl as endangered, 23 environmental groups filed a lawsuit arguing that the agency’s actions violated the Endangered Species Act of 1973.
Initially, the environmentalists triumphed on a number of fronts. In 1988, a federal court ruled that by not adding the owl to its protected species list, the Fish and Wildlife Service failed to comply with the law. Two years later the agency listed the owl. That same year, a Forest Service report recommended that the government protect the owl by banning logging on eight million acres of Pacific Northwest land. Finally, in 1991, a federal court barred the service from selling any more timber until it came up with a plan for managing the owl and its habitat.
These developments sent shock waves through the timber industry. In a sense, however, the owl controversy gave the logging companies just the issue they were looking for to help marshal support for greater access to federal timberland. Environmentalists, they argued, were stifling economic growth and snuffing out jobs. The owl was thus the perfect scapegoat for drawing public attention away from the problematic nature of the industry itself, in particular, its tendency to over-cut, eliminate jobs (either through automation or by moving its operations out of the Northwest), and export whole logs overseas. Instead the industry made it seem as if environmentalists, eager to use the fate of a measly owl to send the nation back to the Stone Age, were at the root of the region’s social problems. In fact, their very own business practices, not the environmental movement, were to blame.
Beginning in the late 1980s, the timber industry set out to advance its cause by joining forces with the Wise Use movement. Founded by direct-mail fundraiser Alan Gottlieb and ex–public relations consultant Ron Arnold, who was fed up with environmentalism’s assault on industry, the movement was made up of grassroots organizations dedicated to supporting economic development, preserving private property, and opposing federal interference in land-use decisions. In the tradition of the Progressive Era conservationist Gifford Pinchot, the Wise Use people stood for the responsible stewardship of the nation’s resources, or so they said. Mainstream and radical groups wanted to unduly compromise the economy through wilderness preservation, but not the Wise Users, who claimed they would deftly balance nature’s needs with economic imperatives.
In the Pacific Northwest, the industry backed groups such as TREES, Timber Resource Equals Economic Stability. One timber company invited a representative from the group to address disgruntled workers in 1990. “If we let these damn preservationists have their way with our National Forests,” he told the crowd, “we’ll be wiping our ass with recycled toilet paper.” Workers took the message to heart: Soon dead owls were found nailed to trees. One bumper sticker sold in logging towns read: “Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?” capturing the either-or quality (jobs versus nature) of the debate.41
As a result of the environmental movement’s focus on wilderness, with little thought given to those living near the sacred gems, Wise Use groups were able to cast the problem in dualistic terms: One was either for saving jobs or for saving nature. It was that simple.
The timber industry thus convinced many workers that their problems lay with the environmentalists—not with the corporations. Never mind that for over a decade starting in 1980, the firms had been cutting wages, shifting operations to non-union areas in the South, or moving mills to Mexico.42
By the early 1990s, Earth First!, detested by loggers and corporations both, was itself beginning to fracture under the stress placed on the organization by its extreme nature-centered views. Dave Foreman left the group as some members questioned whether the philosophy of deep ecology made any sense in a capitalist system riven with class conflict, where the real stakes were not whether nature would be used to advance economic growth, but how it would be used and to whose benefit. Could social justice for workers and ecological balance in the forest be made to work together? Judi Bari, the daughter of two socialists and herself a former union organizer, was one Earth First! member—opposed to tree spiking and the more general indifference to the rights of workers—who thought that they could. In the wake of the George Alexander tragedy, Bari tried to interest women and workers in the group by focusing on workplace concerns such as mill closings and safety. To advance her cause, she helped organize Redwood Summer, which took place in northern California in 1990, a nonviolent protest for both ecological and social justice modeled on Martin Luther King’s civil rights demonstrations.
Bari, who died of cancer in 1997, stood up for workers and correctly discerned the limitations of environmental reform. By focusing too exclusively on preserving pristine nature and ignoring the economic implications for workers of restricting access to federal timber lands—“they can get jobs in shopping malls,” one activist said coldly—these groups have forced loggers to embrace the corporate line, forfeiting on an opportunity to recruit labor to their cause.43 And yet, loggers too have been known to hunt, fish, and hike the woods. No doubt some of them have a love for wilderness that equals the passion of any card-carrying member of Earth First! Many like nature just as much as the next environmentalist. But what they do not like, it seems safe to say, is seeing their economic interests ignored. Far less willing to strike a bargain than the mainstream groups and far more interested in melding ecological issues with social justice, activists such as Bari have at least tried to widen the focus of environmentalism to move beyond a single-minded concern with wilderness and ask what saving nature means for those who make a living in such areas.
CONCLUSION
“There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one,” Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous nineteenth-century French visitor to America, once observed. Many reform groups, of course, most notably those involved in the civil rights movement, have turned to the law to advance their respective causes. But in invoking the law in its fight for national ecological well-being, the environmental movement has taken this trend to a new level. Environmental issues have been wrapped in multiple layers of legislative and legal doctrine, as nature has been literally legalized in a way that would have been unimaginable before the 1960s. Statutes with ecological significance filled just 30 pages of the Environmental Law Reporter in 1970; by 1989, the number of pages had ballooned to over 800. Those laws and rules have improved air and water quality and, more generally, have worked to restrain the aggressive impulses of corporations and developers eager to put profit over ecology.44
Even without the long-standing history of recourse to law, it is perhaps not surprising that a movement founded on a growing awareness of the ecological interdependence of modern consumerism would turn to it to sort out responsibility when things went wrong. Under the present free enterprise system, where the real environmental costs of an activity are often shunted from the producer to a local community (as in the case of factory-style pig farming) or to the public at large, the legal arena is perhaps the only place for righting a corporation’s conventional arithmetic. One of the truly seminal achievements of environmentalism has been its power to unmask the ecological consequences of human actions, a process that has at the very least brought various economic interests—from Montana mining companies to Texas oil men—face to face with the on-the-ground consequences of their decisions, whether they are willing to be held accountable for them or not.
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PLANET U.S.A.
In 1925, automobiles rolled off the Ford Motor Company’s Highland Park assembly line, outside of Detroit, at the rapid-fire pace of one every 10 seconds. Without rubber for tires, not one of them was going anywhere. The demand for rubber skyrocketed in the 1920s, the product of increasing numbers of cars and the Goodyear company’s introduction of the balloon tire, an innovation that offered Americans a more comfortable ride at the cost of 30 percent more rubber than the high-pressure tires used earlier. U.S. automakers faced just one problem: Southeast Asian plantations, controlled by the British and Dutch, had virtually cornered the rubber market.
In 1927, Henry Ford set out to break the Asia rubber monopoly by purchasing, for a miniscule sum, rights to land greater than the size of the state of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. Rubber had long been grown here; indeed, the Hevea species first evolved in this region before Europeans commandeered it for use on their Asian plantations. Ford and his associates named the massive new rubber plantation—what else?—Fordlandia. Workers set to work building roads, railroads, a port, schools, churches, tennis courts, even a golf course sculpted right into the middle of the jungle. By 1929, nearly 1,500 acres of rainforest had been cleared and planted with rubber trees. Trouble, however, broke out almost immediately. Malaria, yellow fever, hookworm, and labor riots plagued the Ford complex. The most serious threat came from leaf blight, a fungal menace that the rubber trees had once adapted to by growing in a scattered fashion across the forest floor. But the imperatives of capitalist production demanded the concentration of rubber trees, allowing laborers to tap the latex without having to travel much as they went from tree to tree. Five years into the project leaf blight traumatized Fordlandia. Ford and his associates moved to a new site, but again things went wrong. Drought struck in 1938 and in 1942 swarms of caterpillars descended on the trees. In 1945, Ford, a legend in American business history, bailed out of the project, stopped in his tracks by bugs and fungi.1
Ford failed in his foray into the Amazon. But for every such disaster there were hundreds of success stories, projects that together have transformed the ecology of the planet. It seems safe to say that when it comes to global ecological change no country has had more far-reaching impact than the United States. Yet as Ford’s travails suggest, there was nothing predestined about the success of American companies abroad. It was the product of a set of conditions that crystallized in the aftermath of World War II, a massive global economic restructuring that created an environment extremely congenial to U.S. companies wishing to do business overseas.
When one considers the environmental impact of multinational companies of American origin and adds in the effects of explicit foreign policy and banking initiatives designed to spread free markets, private property, industrial agriculture, and consumerism—not to mention the impact that domestic energy trends have had on global ecology—the term “superpower,” coined to describe the postwar United States, could not be more apt.
ARMS RACE ECOLOGY
When World War II ended, another battle began, the so-called Cold War. The conflict pitted the United States and its allies in the capitalist world against the Soviet Union and other Communist states. It lasted from 1945 until the toppling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the later disintegration of the USSR. Often viewed as a watershed in American diplomatic history, the Cold War is rarely considered from an ecological perspective. But the events and policies that grew out of it helped to reshape global ecology all the same.
HANFORD ATOMIC RESERVATION
The Hanford nuclear weapons facility located on the Columbia River in the state of Washington irradiated Americans downwind of the site, both accidentally and on purpose. (Library of
Congress)
Perhaps the most direct and long-lasting environmental impact stemmed from the nuclear arms race waged by the two states. Atomic bomb making requires the production of plutonium, described by the man who discovered it in 1940 as “fiendishly toxic.” For nearly 50 years, such U.S. weapons facilities as the sprawling Hanford Atomic Reservation in the state of Washington produced a toxic brew in the quest to defend against the Red menace. But ultimately, the main victims of atomic diplomacy turned out to be the American people themselves. The Hanford facility released into the surrounding air, water, and soil a host of deadly radionuclides, including uranium, americium, cesium, and plutonium. Between 1944 and 1947, the Hanford facility intentionally spewed into the air 417,000 curies of radioactive iodine 131, a cancer-causing agent—more than 27,000 times the amount of iodine involved in the notorious Three Mile Island disaster. What officials at Hanford were seeking to find out with this catastrophic human experiment remains, to this day, unclear.2
A far more extensive series of experiments occurred at the U.S. government’s infamous Nevada Test Site outside of Las Vegas. Between 1951 and 1963, 126 atomic bombs were detonated, above ground, at the 1,350-square-mile complex. In 1953, a third of the 14,000 sheep located east of the site died, killed off by radiation exposure. The results were positively macabre, with some lambs born without ears or tails or with hearts positioned outside their bodies. The human toll is impossible to calculate. In the 1950s, one Atomic Energy Commission memo described those living downwind from the site as “a low-use segment of the population.” The downwinders the government had in mind here were of course real, flesh and blood civilians—car salesmen, ranchers, housewives, in addition to many Native Americans dependent on deer, rabbits, and other animals and plants contaminated in the testing—human beings who lost hair, skin, teeth, lungs, and, in some cases, their lives.3
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