Welcome to Freshwater, California USA. Location of a year long tree-sit Protesting Logging of the Redwood Forest. The people living in the trees were evicted by Eric Schatz... A Sub contractor working for MAXXAM Corporation.

View from the top of Freshwater Valley near Eureka, California. Looking at the Ocean... Now that MAXXAM has cut down all the trees, it's easy to get a fine view of the valley below. 

We went to a tree-sit/ecology action where 9 Earth First!ers were arrested. (full text of newspaper article I wrote below) It Happened on Greenwood Heights road. That road goes very far up into the hills of the Trinity Alps near the area called Kneeland. It's a totally different climate up there in comparison to Eureka. It's hot grassland with cattle ranches.

This is a picture of the clearcut forest two years later when pampas grass has grown where redwood trees used to be.

Scenes before the trees were all cut down... very dark pictures in the forest... Protesters watch the eviction of the treesitters by Eric Schatz... a contractor that specializes in removing ecology activists from PALCO trees... yep, that's a business here in Eureka...

 Eco-Action Families... the forest people...

"No Compromise 

in the Defense of Mother Earth"

Man moving from one treehouse to another on mountain climbing ropes. Thru the amazing power of the Internet, The man who is pictured above emailed me... He has the "Forest Name" of Rudi Bega... and is helping with the Nanning Grove treesit... Please visit his websites. Thanks!

www.wesavetrees.org

We Save Trees has some stunning photographs of the forest...

www.rudibega.org

Police, sheriffs and the Highway Patrol all attended... why highway patrol? 

I saw no traffic related problems...

RANTING OF A DERANGED LUNATIC (MOON WORSHIPPER) ABOUT REDWOOD TREES... ME !!!

Full text of an article I wrote for the Humboldt State University newspaper about an ecology protest. Update: The forest is returning to health after being clearcut. The pampas grass is thriving and that helps keep the soil on the steep mountainside and out of freshwater creek. Pacific Lumber clearcut this forest in 2003 and every six months I go and take a picture of the same location... There is a "convenient" abandoned logging road where it is easy to park and hike around. You can see the Eureka Bay quite easily now that all those trees are out of the way...

Soon MAXXAM will be just a bad memory... Like ENRON and Silverado Savings and Loan. MAXXAM has filed for bankruptcy and has closed the Fortuna and Carlotta lumber mills. Now they want to sell 6,600 acres of land that may not be logged for 42 years to pay off creditors... Very expensive... not kidding... like 5 million dollars for 160 acre plots... Just Ridiculous... No one will buy them...  just a tactic in the lawsuits... 

HEADLINE: 8 arrested March 18th in Freshwater tree-sit.

One tree chainsawed to death.

This morning I drove to Beautiful Freshwater (near Eureka, California) to visit the Tree Sitters. There were 10 sherrifs cars and 5 highway patrol cars. I saw 3 people handcuffed and then put in a sherrifs van. One person down the road was handcuffed and in the custody of a different sherrif. This lady was wearing "press" dogtags and was complaining that all she was doing was taking photographs. There were about 40 people standing around, talking on cell phones and playing drums. I could hear the sound of chainsawing. Then a large tree fell over. It makes a tearing sound then a big thump and a wail arose from the people. When four highway patrol cars stopped in the middle of the crowd and turned on their spinning lights, I left.(I was afraid of the police...protect and serve...corporations) As I was walking to my truck I noticed another highway patrolman writing tickets. I asked a citizen what that was all about and he said "don't woory about getting a parking ticket, none of these people will pay them anyway". I am concerned about the highway patrol being there. THERE CLEARLY WERE NO HIGHWAY RELATED PROBLEMS THERE. What's up with parking tickets? We were in the middle of the forest. 

...this part written later that night... 
We went to a protest to defend redwood trees today. There are 8 people that are camping at the top of redwood trees to prevent loggers from chainsawing the trees. The owners of the forest (Palco/MAXXAM) hired a guy (eric schatz)to climb up the trees and forcibly evict the trespassers. Then the Humboldt county sherrifs arrest the tree-sitters and send them to jail. Yesterday, there were 7 tree sitters and the police arrested 3 people. Then, during the night, 4 people went up. The grand total of people INCREASED. The loggers started chainsawing at the bottom of a tree that had people camping in it. This action enraged the crowd. We feel that if a logger cuts down a tree with a person in it that it is dangerous to that person. The loggers cut away a 2 foot circle of bark all the way around the tree. Someone said that was called "girthing" and the purpose was to kill the tree. My wife decided that some medicine was needed for the tree, so we went to the hardware store and bought a bucket of "tree wound" compound. It is used to seal the bare wood after pruning. We drove back to the ecology protest and she (with help from others) spread the healing compound on the bare wood. I got to spend a lot of time talking to a knowlegable fellow named "Atilla". He said that the MAXXAM corporation has to cut down redwood trees in order to pay the interest on a giant "junk bond" debt. MAXXAM, a texas corporation, purchased the Pacific Lumber Company about 10 years ago in a hostile takeover financed by "junk bonds" that they got from Mike Milken. (remember, Ivan Boesky and Mike went to jail for wall street fraud) I saw on the News tonight that our governor, Gray Davis, has ordered the highway patrol to work 12 hour shifts to help defend the state of California from "terrorist" attacks. GEE, WHY WERE ALL THOSE CHPs OUT IN THE FOREST TODAY ? WHAT TERRORIST ATTACKS WERE THEY DEFENDING US FROM ? Atilla also told me why there were large trucks that look like they carry sand. They are used to haul gravel to build logging roads. After I left the protest in the morning, I drove way back into the woods and noticed large orange trucks with PALCO on the doors. The reason Palco hired a subcontractor (eric schatz)to do "tree service" is to protect themselves from lawsuits in case anyone gets hurt. 

How to get there: From highway 101 traveling North, Take the Myrtle ave exit in Eureka and drive to Freshwater road. Take a right and then an IMMEDIATE left onto Greenwood Heights road. Drive 2 miles. When you see all the sherrif cars, you are there. From Arcata, travel south on 101 to Indianola cutoff. Take a left and drive to Myrtle ave. Take a right on Myrtle. Left on Freshwater road.  


of course, the ecology action happened four years ago and now you may visit and see how the forest is healing itself...

Two members of the Ecology Group Earth First! were bombed by the FBI in Oakland. There was a Trial and the FBI agreed to award the Survivor a large cash settlement but denied doing anything wrong. Judi Beri died and  Darryl Cherney Survived. He has retired from Activism but still performs as the leader of a musical group. They sing satire protest songs...

Interesting Movie: Who Bombed Judi Bari? 
https://www.imdb.com/video/vi742497305?ref_=tt_pv_vi_aiv_1

Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were falsely arrested for car-bombing themselves on May 24, 1990 while on an Earth First! musical organizing tour for Redwood Summer. They sued the FBI for violations of the First Amendment, claiming the FBI knew they were innocent but arrested them to try to silence them. Having survived the bomb but now stricken by cancer, Judi Bari, a leader of the movement to save California's old growth redwoods, gives her on-camera, deathbed testimony about the attempt on her life and her colorful organizing history with the radical environmental movement Earth First.

—Anonymous

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1754621/

Who Bombed Judi Bari? is an American historical documentary about an assassination attempt on the life of Judi Bari, an American environmental and labor activist, which occurred on May 24, 1990.^[1]

While driving through Oakland, California on their way to a benefit concert for the Redwood Summer campaign to save California's coast redwood trees, Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were injured when a pipe bomb detonated under the driver's seat of their car.^[2] Bari, who was driving, was critically injured. Oakland police and the FBI approached the explosion as a terrorist incident, arrested Bari and Cherney, and tried to prove that they were transporting their own explosive device which accidentally detonated. The two were never charged with a crime. In 2002 they won a lawsuit and were awarded $4.4 million for civil rights violations by the FBI and Oakland Police Department.^[3] The authorities allegedly did not investigate any other suspects.^[1] Discovery during the lawsuit revealed crime scene photos that clearly showed the bomb was located under Bari's seat, not in the back seat as investigators had alleged.^[1]

In 2012, a federal judge ordered the FBI not to destroy another pipe bomb that had only partially detonated at a lumber mill about a week before the car bombing, which investigators agreed had been built by the same bomber. Attorney for Darryl Cherney, Ben Rosenfeld, had requested that an outside lab perform DNA testing on the Cloverdale bomb, which the FBI claimed it had never performed, a request which the judge upheld.^[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Bombed_Judi_Bari

American History: The Humboldt County Timber Wars... A Hostile Takeover of Pacific Lumber Company and The Extreme Logging of Old Growth Redwoods in Northern California. MAXXAM SUXX

In 1985 Charles Hurwitz borrowed money (Junk Bonds) from Michael Milken and bought the company Pacific Lumber, located near Eureka, California. Then Hurwitz increased the rate of logging in the Redwood Forest and cut down all the highly profitable trees. Then he split his corporation MAXXAM into two divisions. One division was used to do actual logging and sawing of boards and the other division was used to hide the profits. When the bill came due on the Junk Bonds, Hurwitz declared bankruptcy and took the money back to Texas. Including the pension funds that paid retirement benefits for employees...

Photo of a Car in front of a Giant Pile Of Redwood Logs at A Lumber mill in Eureka CA - EARTH FIRST

Then the Pacific Lumber Company was purchased at a foreclosure sale by The Fisher Family. They had made a fortune selling clothes at a chain of stores called "The Gap". They reintroduced the business plan called "sustainable logging" where the Lumberjacks would only cut down as many trees as grew during the year. This plan was invented by the original owner of Pacific Lumber, Simon J. Murphy... The concept was to cut 1% of the forest every year and plant new trees so that in a hundred years the new trees would have grown big enough to harvest.

Earth First!

During this time there were many ecology protests in Humboldt County. Including "Tree Sits" where forest protectors would build a treehouse in the upper branches of a giant Redwood in order to prevent Lumberjacks from Chainsawing the tree down. It would be possibly fatal for a tree sitter to be in a tree that was falling and the corporations were not willing to risk actual Human Life for profit. (Bad Publicity)... At the Tree Sit I attended MAXXAM Hired a Local man to "Evict" the Tree Sitters by climbing the tree and wrestling with the people... eventually carrying them to the ground where the Police arrested them.

Others committed "Tree Spiking" where large metal nails were driven into the wood of a tree and then the heads of the nails were clipped off. That way, if a tree was at the sawmill and the blade hit the metal, the blade would explode killing millworkers. Once again the corporation was not willing to risk people's lives and so trees that were spiked, were not cut down. The Forest Protectors spray painted the spiked trees so that the Lumberjacks would be aware of the danger.

Still others went to the Offices of Political Leaders and staged "Sit-Ins" where they would handcuff themselves to each other and chant/sing songs while being filmed by TV Cameras... At one of these events the local police used pepper spray on the protestors who were young women. The young women screamed loudly... and it was filmed by TV Stations. When this was broadcast on the TV News it outrages the citizens of California... There is a biological reaction to young women being harmed... This Media Event lead to a massive protest Statewide and the California Legislature Bought a Large Tract of Land and created the Headwaters Forest Park... The park protecting a stand of Old Growth Redwoods near Fortuna, California. It is a pretty park with a paved trail that is popular with people that have wheeled vehicles like bicycles, wheelchairs, skateboards and baby buggies. The hike from the parking lot to the Giant Redwood Trees is about five miles and simply too far for most people to walk but it's easy for people on wheels.

Another technique used to stop the logging was Scientific Ecology Studies that concluded that the Spotted Owl was losing it's habitat and it was in danger of going extinct. See Illustration below...

Two members of the Ecology Group Earth First! were bombed by the FBI in Oakland. There was a Trial and the FBI agreed to award the Survivor a large cash settlement but denied doing anything wrong. Judi Beri died and  Darryl Cherney Survived. He has retired from Activism but still performs as the leader of a musical group. They sing satire protest songs...

Interesting Movie: Who Bombed Judi Bari? 
https://www.imdb.com/video/vi742497305?ref_=tt_pv_vi_aiv_1

Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were falsely arrested for car-bombing themselves on May 24, 1990 while on an Earth First! musical organizing tour for Redwood Summer. They sued the FBI for violations of the First Amendment, claiming the FBI knew they were innocent but arrested them to try to silence them. Having survived the bomb but now stricken by cancer, Judi Bari, a leader of the movement to save California's old growth redwoods, gives her on-camera, deathbed testimony about the attempt on her life and her colorful organizing history with the radical environmental movement Earth First.

—Anonymous

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1754621/

Who Bombed Judi Bari? is an American historical documentary about an assassination attempt on the life of Judi Bari, an American environmental and labor activist, which occurred on May 24, 1990.^[1]

While driving through Oakland, California on their way to a benefit concert for the Redwood Summer campaign to save California's coast redwood trees, Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were injured when a pipe bomb detonated under the driver's seat of their car.^[2] Bari, who was driving, was critically injured. Oakland police and the FBI approached the explosion as a terrorist incident, arrested Bari and Cherney, and tried to prove that they were transporting their own explosive device which accidentally detonated. The two were never charged with a crime. In 2002 they won a lawsuit and were awarded $4.4 million for civil rights violations by the FBI and Oakland Police Department.^[3] The authorities allegedly did not investigate any other suspects.^[1] Discovery during the lawsuit revealed crime scene photos that clearly showed the bomb was located under Bari's seat, not in the back seat as investigators had alleged.^[1]

In 2012, a federal judge ordered the FBI not to destroy another pipe bomb that had only partially detonated at a lumber mill about a week before the car bombing, which investigators agreed had been built by the same bomber. Attorney for Darryl Cherney, Ben Rosenfeld, had requested that an outside lab perform DNA testing on the Cloverdale bomb, which the FBI claimed it had never performed, a request which the judge upheld.^[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Bombed_Judi_Bari

Full Text of a Newspaper Article I wrote for The Humboldt State University Lumberjack Newspaper about a Tree Sit in Freshwater, California
http://gvan42.blogspot.com/2017/06/freshwater-tree-sit-near-eureka-ca-2003.html

http://gvan42.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-headwaters-forest-coloring-book.html
Link to the Headwaters Forest Coloring Book.

http://gvan42.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-mill-creek-trip-with-save-redwoods.html
Photographs and Description of events at the Dedication Ceremony of the Mill Creek Park with the Save the Redwoods League.

http://gvan42.blogspot.com/2018/04/two-pinecones-in-humid-weather-and.html
Photographs of a Hike in the Headwaters Forest.

http://gvan42.blogspot.com/2018/04/photographs-of-clearcut-logging-in.html
Photographs of Clearcut Logging in Arcata, California on Fickle Hill Road up in the mountains behind town...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Lumber_Company

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headwaters_Forest_Reserve

https://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Forest-Californias-Redwood-Timber/dp/0816653259

Photo of a Clearcut a couple of years later. Once You Cut Down the Redwood Trees, It's Sunny and the Pampas Grass Thrives... Greenwood Heights, CA Near Arcata

****** (~);-} ******

A Newspaper Article: American History: Junk Bonds and Redwood Trees in Humboldt County

Milken's Unpardonable Redwood Felonies - 
BY J.A. SAVAGE
https://www.northcoastjournal.com/humboldt/milkens-unpardonable-redwood-felonies/Content?oid=16723085
Some crimes cannot be forgiven. There's Harvey Weinstein's sexual assaults, the Sackler family's (alleged) opioid proliferation and, for Humboldt County, Michael Milken's junk bonds.

So when President Trump pardoned "Junk Bond King" Milken for his criminal offenses last week, the message to Humboldt was clear: No matter how many ancient forests you plunder, it's an admirable undertaking — as long as it makes money.

Milken's felonious financing was a primary cause for Maxxam's massive clearcutting of big redwoods in the 1980s. Maxxam used Milken's junk bonds to leverage a hostile takeover of Pacific Lumber Co. But junk bonds have huge interest rates because they're deemed risky investments and the exhausting interest on those takeover bonds was repaid with the hard currency of ancient trees.

When Milken started using investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert to create the financial underpinnings for forest destruction, Humboldt was already reeling from nearly a decade of Enviro v. Logger politics. The attitude toward forests was tearing apart the social fabric of Humboldt County at the time. It was a one-industry economy, logging, and it was tanking. Jobs were scarce. The community grew polarized. The factions got violent. It got bloody. Entire watersheds were denuded.

Enviromentalists were in fist fights with loggers in Eureka's streets. The timber industry, backed by Humboldt State University and the Times-Standard, was promoting giant clearcuts. In the name of "silviculture," clearcuts were followed by dropping napalm for controlled burns after logging, then helicopters spraying the components of Agent Orange – 2,4,5-T (until it was banned) and 2,4-D. The herbicides' aim was to kill all wide-leaved vegetation before it could compete with the next softwood cash crop.

Humboldt's reality in the early 1980s sounds like the plot to a horror film or perhaps, an insufferable documentary. But that wasn't bad enough. No, Michael Milken's junk bonds entered the scene and made it much, much worse.

Until Milken premiered his rapacious financing scheme in Humboldt, junk bonds had been a finance mechanism of last resort. His criminal actions changed the industry to parlay those bonds into huge investment opportunities and enormous profits. Through the investment firm Drexel Burnham Lambert, Milken's junk bonds were specifically channeled by the newly formed Maxxam corporation to Pacific Lumber's 1985-1986 takeover. Until then, Pacific Lumber was a family-run business that cut and milled redwoods in relative sustainability.

As a result of Milken's maneuvering, vast swaths of ancient trees were clearcut in order to pay off debt. To service junk bonds' enormous interest rate, Maxxam immediately doubled or tripled (depending on which data to believe) Pacific Lumber's previous rate of cutting down ancient forests. For those of you who can translate, that was 285 million board feet a year to pay off $900 million in debt, with much of that in Milken's junk bonds.

Repaying the enormous interest rates on Milken's junk bonds led to the devastating of entire watersheds. Ancient redwoods, once cut and milled, could wholesale for $100,000. And that, according to the former chief executive officer of Maxxam, Charles Hurwitz, was the reason behind Pacific Lumber's acquisition.

After Maxxam started paying off Milken's junk bonds with ancient forests, tree-sitters moved in to offer redwoods their personal protection. Julia Butterfly Hill was the most well known but forests were secretly scattered with dozens like her. Conflict escalated with the deaths of forests activists like Judi Bari (car bomb) and David Gypsy Chain (felled tree).

"It led to many years of timber wars," Sharon Duggan, the Environmental Protection and Resource Center's attorney during that time, said in retrospect.

While "wars" is military glib, those facing down a phalanx of Milken-financed Maxxam D9 Caterpillars could understandably describe it as one.

The "wars" only lasted a few years before the trees, and their profitability, were plundered and Humboldt reeled. The rapacious harvesting left Humboldt's economy a wreck. Maxxam was facing bankruptcy. Milken and his ilk started being picked off by prosecutors for violations of all sorts of financials laws enforced, at the time, by the federal government. Humboldt's tree-sitters wobbled back to earth.

It was 1990 when Milken pleaded guilty to six felonies. That was on the heels of the federal government's 1988 takeover of Maxxam, at a cost of $1.6 billion. (A resulting deal created the Headwaters Forest Reserve.) To round off the failures surrounding Milken, illegal activities forced Drexel Burnham Lambert, Milken's junk bond bank, into bankruptcy in 1990.

Milken suffered just a little for the criminal behavior. Trump's pardon last week wasn't necessary to get him out of prison — he's been out for a long time. He only served two years of a 10-year sentence for his criminal activities surrounding junk bonds. He is still a wheeler-dealer, hosting international conferences for capitalists. He's the kind of man who networks openly at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. His net worth was $3.8 billion as of the day of his pardon, according to Forbes.

When the White House announced Milken's pardon, it defended him as "one of America's greatest financiers. [He] pioneered the use of high-yield bonds in corporate finance. His innovative work greatly expanded access to capital for emerging companies."

J.A. Savage witnessed forest destruction as USFS Six Rivers post-clearcut crewmember, a forest firefighter and an Los Angeles Times stringer. She prefers she/her pronouns.

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Music Video: "California Is Burning" by Greg Vanderlaan - Protest Song - Ecology - Environment - Climate Change - All Over The World People Are Rioting in the Streets...

https://youtu.be/HwRgS4i-9qg

California is Burning... Australia's Burning [E A/D A] 
Siberia's Burning... Brazil is Burning... [E A/D A]
All Over The World People Are Rioting in the Streets... [D G D G ]
Paris, Hong Kong and Bolivia... [D G A ]
Climate Change Is Real AND it's Coming For You... [D G D G ]
Hurricanes, Floods and Tornadoes... [D G A ]  AND DROUGHTS! (spoken)

Santa Anna Wind... Drives Everyone Crazy... 
in Southern Californi-a.   [E A/D A] 
Diablo Wind... Drives Everyone Crazy... 
in Northern Californi-a.  [E A/D A] 
Can We Please Have Our Very Own Yellow Vest Riots
Right Here In The US of A? [D G D G  D G A]

What IF Six Billion People Die?  [E A/D A] 
What IF Everyone Has To Migrate North? [E A/D A] 
Where Do We Go When We Run Out of NORTH? [E A/D A] 
The Time Has Come to Wake Up! [E A/D A] 

It's the END of an ERA... 
The Internal Combustion Engine ERA... [D G D G ]
The Is No Such Thing Beautiful Clean Coal... [D G A ]
Marketing Can No Longer Save Us From Reality... [D G D G ]
Reagan Riding a Dinosaur Carrying a Machine Gun... [D G A ]
Is Not a Practical Solution... Sorry, Mike Lee... [E A/D A] 

ExxonValdez,  Deepwater Horizon, [E A/D A] 
Giant Explosions at a Texas Chemical Plant... [E A/D A] 
Martinez, California and Chevron in Richmond [E A/D A] 
Spewing Toxic Smoke for All to Breathe... [E A/D A] 
It's Like the London Fog BUT, Everywhere... [D G D G ] 

It's Time for the Green New Deal. 
Windmills and Solar Panels. [D G D G ]
Electric Cars and Trucks. [D G D A D ]
Bicycle Power or Extinction... [D G A ]
It's Time for the Green New Deal. [spoken]

A/D =  E0 A0 D2 G2 B3 e0