The IWW And Earth First!: Part 1 - Establishing Roots
https://www.iww.org/hu/content/iww-and-earth-first-part-1-establishing-roots
Judi Bari was both an Earth First!er and a Wobbly from 1988 to 1993 and during that time there was a close alliance between the two organizations. Although some assume she brought the two together, the truth is more complex. When Judi Bari joined Earth First! and the IWW in the summer of 1988, Earth First!ers and Wobblies were already discussing the idea of forging an alliance. There are many reasons for this, but the overarching explanation is that Earth First! and the IWW are really different manifestations of thesame revolutionary impulse.
The IWW, founded in Chicago in 1905 by radical working class anti-capitalists from veterans of various movements and struggles, united around the idea of forming One Big Union of the working class. They offered a revolutionary alternative to the class collaborationist American Federation of Labor (AFL). The IWW pledged to organize all workers—regardless of ethnicity, gender or skill level—by industry rather than craft. Instead of the conservative AFL motto, “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” the IWW sought to abolish wage slavery altogether. No longer would workers collectively enable their own oppression by crossing each other’s (craft based) picket lines, they said. The IWW would organize the working class together. This was summarized by the slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all!”
The IWW set out to achieve this creatively, becoming known as much for its “right brain” artistic contributions to working-class culture as well as its “left brain” organizing activities.
The IWW’s artistic creativity was both visual and auditory. The IWW’s use of clever graphic imagery, especially in cartoons and “silent agitator” stickers conveyed IWW propaganda far more succinctly and effectively to workers (many of whom were illiterate) than any manifesto.
Likewise, the IWW was famous for its voluminous collection of songs and labor hymns, which slyly conveyed the union’s message of class struggle in rhythm, rhyme and meter. The latter resulted not just from the abundance of clever song smiths that joined the One Big Union but also largely out of necessity, to get around arbitrary anti-soapboxing ordinances enacted throughout the Pacific Northwest. These had been specifically designed to prevent IWW members from engaging in street corner oratory.
Such blatant First Amendment violations still exempted the singing of religious hymns, such as those performed by the Salvation Army (who themselves had a particular condemnation of the Wobblies and their call for earthly paradise, instead of “pie in the sky, when you die”). The IWW would write alternate lyrics to these hymns that both argued in favor of class struggle and against religious dogma that enabled the perpetuation of wage slavery.
Perhaps the most lasting of the IWW’s artistic contributions to radical working class culture comes from one person, Ralph Chaplin. It was he who wrote the anthem “Solidarity Forever.” Chaplin also introduced the iconic black cat logo, “Sabo-Tabby,” a clever play on “sabotage,” symbolizing the organized, collective and conscious withdrawal of efficiency by the workers at the point of production.
These cultural icons of the IWW were used extensively during the free speech fights that took place in the Pacific Northwest during the IWW’s heyday in the 1910s and 1920s, many of which were part of the Wobblies’ efforts to organize an industrial union of lumber workers throughout that region. During one such struggle, in Spokane, Washington, several of the songs sung by the members involved in the thick of it were printed on red card stock and sold to the membership at-large to raise much- needed organizing funds, thus giving birth to the Little Red Songbook. As a result, the IWW became known as “The Singing Union.”
Less well-known is that these rich and colorful parts of IWW culture, much romanticized by historians and radicals today, were designed as tactics in the service of advancing strategy at the point of production. Often their practical utility is forgotten, downplayed, or even deliberately hidden in favor of painting a picture of the IWW as a cultural curiosity rather than a union with clever and effective strategies that was at the same time revolutionary and fun.
Indeed, all of these facets coalesced around the IWW-backed Lumber Workers Industrial Union’s winning of the eight-hour workday and improved conditions through their effective “striking on the job” in 1917. Little did anyone realize, however, the effect the IWW’s struggles would have on the future of the environmental movement at the time.
Fast forward to 1980. Five environmental activists, led by Dave Foreman and Mike Roselle, disillusioned with mainstream environmental organizations, started a new group, inspired by Edward Abbey’s best-selling novel, The Monkeywrench Gang. They called their group “Earth First!” They found the mainstream organizations far too willing to make compromises with industrial polluters in exchange for preserving small, ultimately insignificant patches of wilderness for fear of alienating wealthy donors. In doing so, they lost sight of the far more steadfast visions of their founders.
To Earth First! this was not only unacceptable, it was suicidal. The founders believed—and to a large extent science has largely proven—that all living beings on the Earth are interconnected in a singular web of life. Biologically, an injury to one is an injury to all. Those who pushed for compromise argued from the standpoint of “better half a loaf than none at all,” to which Earth First! would respond by first explaining how very much less than “half” of the proverbial loaf had been gained, and moreover saving anything less than the entire loaf portended the eventual loss of the entire loaf. They adopted the slogan, “No compromise in defense of Mother Earth!” and called their philosophy, “biocentrism,” as opposed to human-centeredness, or “anthropocentrism.”
Earth First! wasted little time, engaging in many campaigns, often utilizing creative and humorous acts of civil disobedience. The first such major act involved the “cracking” of Glen Canyon Dam, although the “crack” was really a long roll of black paper that was unrolled to create the illusion of a fracture, a sort of “merry prankster” attempt at conveying the message that was nonviolent, but nevertheless militant. From this many other similar actions followed in defense of wilderness and in protest of despoliation by industrial pollution. Earth First! grew quickly as a result, even drawing in Monkey Wrench Gang author, Ed Abbey, in short order.
Inevitably this drew opposition from corporate interests and mainstream environmental groups (no doubt in fear that their thunder—not to mention funding base—would be stolen). The latter merely called Earth First! “irresponsible,” while the former called them “terrorists.” Indeed, Earth First! faced the same stigma assigned to the IWW by the employing class and reformist socialists back in the beginning of the 20th century.
One might assume that these experiences would have led Earth First!’s founders to the same fundamental conclusions reached by the IWW, primarily that capitalism cannot be reformed. At least on some level, it did. In opposing the destruction of the environment, which is an inherent function of capitalist economics (the privatization of wealth, including what we call “natural resources,” andthe externalization of costs to the working class, not to mention all other, nonhuman, species), Earth First!ers constantly found itself in opposition to the employing class by default.
However, Earth First!ers generally didn’t see themselves as being part of “the left” politically. Dave Foreman once described his movement by saying, “We’re not left; we’re not right; we’re not even in front or behind! We’re not even playing the same game!” Foreman’s statement revealed many of the contradictions that were deeply ingrained within this radical environmental movement.
To begin with, Earth First! wasn’t a formal organization. It had no constitution, no officers (other than the editors of its de facto organ, the Earth First! Journal) and no standards for identifying formal membership. Therefore Earth First! had no official policies or internal process. There was only a loose and ephemeral consensus of purpose behind those that identified as Earth First!ers. Yet Earth First! had chapters that met regularly and consistently, and more were forming as its reputation grew.
Furthermore, Earth First!—which had quickly sprouted international chapters—saw little difference between the destruction of the Earth by capitalist corporations and that of so-called “communist” states. While any leftist worth their salt knows perfectly well that what most people call “communism” is actually much closer to capitalism in practice than it is different from it, hence the pollution, Earth First!ers tended to eschew class analysis and political economy as “anthropocentric” concerns, and therefore, not relevant.
That was due, in no small part, to deeply engrained hostility to Marxism among some (though not all) of Earth First!s leading thinkers, particularly Dave Foreman, Ed Abbey and Chris Manes. All three of them had looked to a number of ecological thinkers from the past, including John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Wallace Stegner, Rachel Carson, and Henry David Thoreau, among others. All of them had advanced tenets of the philosophies of biocentrism, but they had also drawn inspiration from a very dubious source: Thomas Malthus, whose essay “On Population” was not an argument for environmentalism, but a defense of class privilege in reaction to the anarchist ideals of William Godwin.
Earth First!’s animosity towards leftism and anarchism can be partly explained by the fact that Dave Foreman had once been a Goldwater Republican, and though he had jettisoned much of the right-wing political baggage of this prior association, Foreman, like many other ex-rightists, could never completely embrace political theories associated with “collectivism,” even those that were libertarian in nature. As a result, he shunned class analysis and mass-based organizing in favor of individualistic covert guerrilla “eco-sabotage” or “monkey wrenching.” Such thinking patterns lead Foreman to embrace misanthropy.
Although Foreman was not the “leader” of Earth First! he was often identified by outsiders as such, a notion that was enforced by his being editor of the Earth First! Journal for much of the 1980s and his being one of Earth First!’s most outspoken thinkers.
Foreman and his adherents advanced a school of thought that blamed the destruction of the environment not on the inherent economic processes of capitalism, but instead on an over-abundant, over-prolific human population aided by technology. The solution to the problem was a return to pre-industrial society, perhaps even hunter-gatherer existence, with a greatly reduced human population (though no specific process or plan was ever articulated for achieving such a shift), leading Earth First!’s critics—including Murray Bookchin—to suggest that Foreman’s perspectives could be interpreted in any number of less than savory ways, even as an endorsement of fascism.
Foreman, as well as his fellow misanthropes, Ed Abbey and Chris Manes, did not work to dispel such rumors when each of them made statements of their own—some of them taken out of context—which suggested (among other things) that aiding developing nations, giving amnesty to illegal immigrants, and seeking a cure for AIDS interfered with nature’s processes for stabilizing the population.
The vast majority of Earth First!ers did not share these views. While they may have held some mildly misanthropic and Malthusian beliefs, for the most part their actions were far more progressive and class conscious in their intent. Indeed, as we shall soon see, in California’s Redwood region, Earth First!ers routinely made overtures of solidarity to timber workers when the latter had disputes with their employers.
The IWW still existed during that time, of course, and a handful of its members came in regular contact with Earth First!ers. A few IWW members even joined Earth First! and vice versa.
Ironically Dave Foreman, in spite of his misanthropic tendencies, was actually enamored with the IWW. He and his fellow founders actively looked to leftist organizations, including especially the IWW for cultural inspiration—though obviously they had eschewed Marxist and syndicalist economic analysis in doing so. Ralph Chaplin’s sabo cat icon graced the pages of many an Earth First! Journal in reference to ecotage. And, in a clear homage to the IWW, Dave Foreman even compiled various songs written by the copious number of Earth First! musicians into what he called, the Little Green Songbook.
Meanwhile, Ed Abbey—who described himself as an “anarchist,” albeit an individualist one—also spoke favorably of the One Big Union, perhaps because rumor has it at least, his father had been a dues-paying IWW member.
These connections did not go unnoticed by contemporary IWW members. None other than the Rosemonts (Penelope and Franklin), Carlos Cortez, and Utah Phillips all came into regular contact with Earth First!ers. The aforementioned Wobblies spoke favorably towards the new radical environmentalists, which drew a backlash from IWW members critical of it.
Critics pointed to the misanthropy and class ignorance of spokespeople like Foreman, Abbey and Manes. Their supporters countered by noting there were more similarities between the IWW and Earth First! than differences. They pointed out that there was one key difference: while the IWW talked of direct action, Earth First! was actually taking direct action. (That there was a fundamental difference between direct action against industrial activity, and direct action at the point of production, was often ignored, however.)
The debate raged on, under the surface in the IWW, until Franklin Rosemont—who was an editor of the Industrial Worker in 1988—decided to force the issue, quite literally. That year the publication’s editors made the decision to base a majority of each issue on a particular theme. For May, that theme would be “radical environmentalism,” and much of the focus—indeed MOST of it—would be on Earth First! Little did anyone know just how significant that decision would turn out to be.
To be continued...
The IWW And Earth First! - Part 2: The Crucible
https://ecology.iww.org/node/13?bot_test=1
The IWW connection to Earth First! was, believe it or not, woven in the woof. In fact, as far as the two organizations’ struggles with the timber bosses go, both could be said to have been forged from the same crucible: the Humboldt County town of Eureka in northwestern California, the de facto capital of the Redwood Empire.
Long before the IWW joined in Earth First!’s (ultimately successful) struggles to save Headwaters Forest in Humboldt County, the roots of that struggle began with the workers’ struggles against the timber bosses.
In the formative years of the timber industry in the United States and Canada—the last third of the 19th century—working conditions were abysmal. Then, as now, timber was one of the top five most dangerous industrial jobs in the world. Timber workers were subjected to long hours, dangerous working conditions, unsanitary labor camps, company towns (where the employer was literally the government) and no job security. The bosses, meanwhile, were making a killing on the backs of both the workers and the environment. Vast amounts of standing timber were held by what would soon evolve into modern timber corporations, and not too few of them had acquired their holdings through graft and very questionable homesteading laws.
This was no exception in the Redwood Empire. In Eureka, the California Redwood Company (CRC), whose owners were European capitalists, was one of the worst examples. Workers at the CRC, many of whom were populists—including a butcher by the name of Charles Keller, who was a member of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA)—formed the very first union of timber workers in North America to affiliate with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Together, they exposed the CRC’s graft, in spite of vigilante mobs organized by the CRC and the other companies as well as yellow journalism and slander by the local press. The union didn’t secure recognition, but they did improve working conditions slightly, and the CRC was forced to shut down.
The story of the IWW’s Lumber Workers Industrial Union and its successful fight for the eight-hour day is well documented elsewhere, but what is not well known is that, while the IWW never gained much of a foothold in the Redwood Empire (its successes were concentrated mostly in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana), its influence was felt there nonetheless.
In order to keep the IWW from gaining any support from among the local timber workers, two timber companies based in Humboldt County, The Pacific Lumber Company (PL) and The Hammond Lumber Company (HLC), introduced two innovations that would give the employers the upper hand in the class struggle which would ultimately have devastating consequences for the environment as well. HLC introduced the “bonus system,” under which they paid productivity bonuses to the department that achieved the highest production quotas, expressly to undermine shop-floor solidarity. This had the effect of not only inducing the workers to compete against each other and willingly enable a speed up, it facilitated the more rapid liquidation of the redwoods, because HLC cut their forests faster than they grew back.
Most of the other companies increased their production to keep up. Meanwhile, many other companies implemented and expanded the bonus system. Some companies, like Weyerhaeuser, who had a particularly intense ideological aversion to the IWW, as well as the more conservative business unions, even went a step further, introducing the contract logging, or “gyppo,” system throughout the Pacific Northwest.
This was done in reaction to the IWW’s winning of the eight-hour day in 1918 by way of their innovative “strike on the job.” The Wobbly organizers knew that their victory was temporary and anticipated that the bosses would expand the gyppo system to undermine it. The IWW had plans to respond to the threat, and had historical currents flowed differently, they might have succeeded by using solidarity unionism, but different forms of unionism, namely that of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) eclipsed the IWW due to the influence of the ascendant communist currents.
Although the gyppo system took several decades to become the dominant method of employment among logging crews, this system ultimately made it nearly impossible for any union (other than the IWW) to organize loggers, thus making the bargaining position of the more heavily unionized mill workers far weaker.
Meanwhile, in 1909, PL began charting a different course from their fellow capitalist operations. Sensing that they could keep their wage slaves loyal to the company, they began paying their workers generous benefits and introducing a variety of social programs. These changes weren’t introduced out of pure altruism, however. On the contrary—and the PL bosses made no secret of this—they were expressly implemented to keep the IWW out, as can be seen in the following quote:
“Get your men loyal and keep them so. Let this replace loyalty to a union. The spirit is what you want in your men. Ten good men will accomplish as much as fifteen ordinary laborers if the spirit and good will is there. Treat them right and they will treat you right.” (emphasis added, A E Blockinger, Pacific Lumber General Manager, writing in the Pioneer Western Lumberman, July 15, 1911)
And the bosses succeeded. When the IWW strike for the eight-hour day shook Washington, Idaho, and Oregon, PL simply paid more benefits and added more programs.
The IWW succeeded in winning the eight-hour day, but the credit was given to a company union established by the bosses (in reaction to the IWW) called the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen (LLLL). Membership in the LLLL was compulsory, and the U.S. military, under the command of Col. Brice Disque was dispatched to enforce its directive. However, Disque’s heavy-handedness was as bad as the bosses, leading to even some of the soldiers under his command to strike on the job like the IWW. Sensing defeat, Disque and the bosses “granted” the eight-hour day, and only succeeded in keeping the IWW from immediately regaining momentum by further implementing programs similar to those instituted by PL in Humboldt County.
The IWW rightfully denounced both the LLLL and PL attempts to steal their thunder, but couldn’t mount a response before the ascendant Communist Party stole the IWW’s thunder on the Left and among the working class in the 1920s and 1930s. As a result, much of the union organizing among timber workers was done by the CIO, whose left wing was largely aligned with the Communist Party.
Meanwhile, PL remained nonunion, but (unlike most of its competitors) it also retained its paternalistic culture for almost 70 years. During that time, its owners, who were all part of the same family and only the second group to ever control the company after acquiring it in 1909 from its original founders, became known as the “lumber company in the white hats,” both in terms of how they treated their workers as well as how they treated the environment.
While other firms liquidated their forests for quick profits, PL logged sustainably so that by the 1980s they owned the largest inventory of privately-owned standing old growth redwoods in the world.
Ironically, these sustainability practices would have likely resulted from workers’ control as well. The IWW called for sustainable logging, primarily because it resulted in safer working conditions and job security, but also because the union recognized that unsustainable logging only aided the bosses in their consolidation of profits.
PL’s uniqueness would be their ultimate undoing. By the 1980s, PL was cash rich, with a diversified portfolio of assets that included farmland and a welding business, their sizable and sustainably logged timber holdings, the company town of Scotia (just south of Eureka), and a well-funded pension fund. While other logging firms were quickly mowing down their forests and debt financing their companies in the neoliberal Reaganite era of the 1980s, PL was an anomaly, a rare example of a business that actually followed the examples set forth in naïve, high school economics text books. By doing so, PL made itself an attractive target for the ruthless capitalist raiders that had taken over the reins of capitalism at the time, and it wasn’t long before the company was picked off like a sitting duck.
Indeed, in late 1985, a corporate raider named Charles Hurwitz, aided by the infamous Ivan Boesky, took advantage of lax regulation over corporate securities trading and managed—through a very complex series of stock trades, not all of which were (barely) legal—to acquire enough shares of the Pacific Lumber Company to induce its owners to sell the rest of it to him.
Many shareholders, including descendants of the family dynasty that had owned the company for years, attempted to fight back and filed a barrage of (ultimately unsuccessful) lawsuits in the process. They were joined by many of the company’s 800 workers who approached the International Woodworkers Union (IWA, a founding affiliate of the CIO in the 1930s) and also took out a full-page ad in the Eureka Times-Standard protesting the takeover.
Such activity, at a company that had never had a union in its century of existence, was unprecedented. All of those in opposition to the takeover feared that Hurwitz and his Maxxam Inc. would liquidate the company’s assets and abolish its sustainable logging practices. These fears turned out to be correct.
Because Hurwitz had incurred huge debts in the process of taking over PL, to meet his debt obligation he liquidated much of the company’s assets and tripled the rate of cutting. Mill workers were forced to work 60-hour weeks, and a bunch of gyppo firms were brought in to handle the additional logging. The IWA, being bound to the AFL-CIO’s ineffective business union model, was unable to organize these new workers, and the union organizing drive fizzled. In spite of the increased jobs and lucrative overtime, longtime PL employees and environmentalists both agreed that the long-term future of the company and Humboldt County looked bleak. PL was no longer “the guys in the white hats,” but was now as rapacious and greedy as most other logging corporations that dominated the Pacific Northwest.
There were many local environmental organizations that opposed these changes (and were sympathetic to the workers’ plight as well), but they were busy fighting already raging environmental battles, including opposing herbicide spraying, offshore oil drilling, and clearcutting by other logging companies in the region. Somebody new would have to take on this new struggle. Fortunately, two recently arrived activists, Darryl Cherney and Greg King, did, and they would do so under the banner of Earth First!
Earth First! had already existed for five years and had even taken on timber companies for a couple of years, beginning in 1983 in the nearby Siskiyou National Forest in Oregon, but in those cases, the protests had focused on public lands rather than private holdings. Also, in the previous cases, Earth First!’s actions tended to alienate timber workers. This time—at least initially—the new Earth First! chapter would attempt to ally with the workers, because it was fairly obvious they shared a common enemy.
Earth First! couldn’t organize workers at the point of production however, and the business unions had proven incapable, but there was one union that could succeed. It was only a matter of time before it would make its presence known, and that crucible of forest radicalism, Humboldt County in California would work its magic once again.
To be continued...
Earth First! and the IWW, Part 3 - Tree Spikes and Wedges...
https://ecology.iww.org/node/117?bot_test=1
When Greg King and Darryl Cherney cofounded Southern Humboldt County Earth First! in 1986, the principle target of their actions was the now Maxxam controlled Pacific Lumber Company. Sensing that the 800-plus Pacific Lumber workers--of which almost 350 had made it known in a full page ad that they opposed the Maxxam takeover--and the environmentalists shared a common adversary, King and Cherney tailored their campaign to the workers as well as the forest itself. Their earliest demonstrations conveyed the message that this particular Earth First! group at least, was concerned for the future of the loggers and millworkers as much as they were for the redwoods and the flora and fauna that depended on it.
A good number of the workers welcomed this show of solidarity, and a handful of them, including shipping clerk John Maurer, millworker Kelly Bettiga, mechanic Lester Reynolds, and company blacksmith (whose job primarily consisted of forging specialized logging equipment needed for the cutting of the unique redwoods), Pete Kayes--who would eventually join the IWW, engaged in regular, amicable dialog with the environmentalists.
At first, Maxxam largely ignored the protests and dissidents but as Earth First!'s efforts gained momentum and support, and as more workers began to grumble about their mandatory overtime and question the now rapacious timber harvesting efforts, the bosses began to take the growing grassroots resistance more seriously. An unprecedented spate of successful legal challenges by a local environmental watchdog group called EPIC under a hitherto inconsistently enforced California forestry practices act was the straw that broke the camel's back.
Using the PR Firm Hill & Knowlton and stoking the ego of the more conservative "scissorbill" employees, Maxxam fomented the creation of a "timber worker" front group known as Taxpayers for the Environment and its Management (TEAM). The organization initiated an intense propaganda campaign accusing the environmentalists of being "unwashed-out-of-town-jobless-hippies-on-drugs" whose sole aim was to destroy the economic well being of the humble residents of Humboldt (and Mendocino) county(s). TEAM claimed to be composed entirely of timber workers, but it was ACTUALLY largely made up of low level managers, gyppo operators, and assorted ranchers, many of whom belonged to other, similar front groups, such as one called WECARE, that had previously exaggerated the differences between workers and environmentalists.
To be fair, Earth First! had inadvertently set themselves up to be a prime target in such efforts. One of the most controversial tactics advocated by this militant direct-action movement was the practice known as "tree-spiking", the act of driving large nails into standing trees, followed by marking the affected arbors with a large, spray-painted "S" in white, and then making an anonymous call to the targeted logging operation in an effort to deter the timber cut.
Dave Foreman was an especially strong advocate of this tactic, but he also stressed that it should be done selectively, and great care taken to prevent any harm or injury to the frontline workers (hence the painted "s"). However, what Foreman didn't count on was that the employers, as a rule, placed profits above the workers' safety and cut the spiked trees anyway and sent them to the (often poorly maintained) mills, thus putting the millworkers at risk of injury or even death.
To make matters worse, Foreman had no way of knowing that folks who were NOT Earth First!ers, but willing to spike trees, might use the tactic, but neglect to use the recommended safety precautions. Further, he failed to account for the negative press that would result from tree spiking efforts gone awry, and the employers' willingness to use it to drive wedges between timber workers and environmentalists. Earth First! would quickly find out in May 1987 just how much they hadn't foreseen.
Early that month, in the Louisiana Pacific Mill in Cloverdale, California--in Southern Mendocino County, a millworker named George Alexander was nearly decapitated when his bandsaw struck a spiked log. The company waited ten days before issuing a press release, but once they did, they blamed the "tree spiking terrorists" (meaning Earth First!), and issued a $20,000 reward for the apprehension of the perpetrator.
What the company issued press release didn't reveal, however, was that the northern California Earth First! groups didn't use tree spiking as a tactic, that the spiked log had been sabotaged after it had been cut, due to the placement of the spike, and that the most likely suspect was not an Earth First!er, or even an environmentalist, but actually a right wing gun nut who bragged about spiking the tree in protest against L-P for illegally logging trees outside if their approved timber harvest area on his private property! (L-P had an established reputation for doing such things).
Furthermore, L-P also didn't reveal that Alexander was not a company man--indeed he was mildly sympathetic to Earth First!, though he opposed tree spiking, for obvious reasons), and he was actually very critical of L-P for its lax safety practices and profit mongering. The press and L-P also failed to mention that while the company offered a generous sounding $20000 reward, Alexander had to threaten a lawsuit in order to get even a paltry fraction ($9000) of his medical bills covered by the company! This didn't stop L-P from using the bloody images of an injured Alexander for their own propaganda purposes (a move Alexander resented).
The Corporate Timber front group, WECARE offered to pay Alexander to be a spokesperson for their anti-Earth First! propaganda, but Alexander refused. That didn't stop WECARE from using his image as well. And the odd timing of the delayed press release may have been calculated to coincide with an Earth First! protest against Maxxam (which is not unlikely since both Maxxam and L-P called upon the services of WECARE to create pro corporate timber propaganda.
Unfortunately, enough timber workers throughout the Pacific Northwest bought the propaganda, and by May 1988, were sufficiently convinced that Earth First! was a band of unfeeling terrorists. The willing collaboration of the capitalist press only further cemented this image in the minds of the general public. Worse still, careless Malthusian influenced statements made by Dave Foreman, Ed Abbey, and Chris Manes--whose views did not by any means represent the majority of Earth First!--only further added to the tension. Most leftists, including many in the IWW, saw no redeeming value in Earth First!
On the other hand, in the days before the Internet, many Earth First!ers knew nothing of Pete Kayes, John Maurer, Les Reynolds, or Kelly Bettiga and their openness towards environmentalism. They had no idea that George Alexander was very close in his own views to their own. Instead, their conception of the typical timber worker was the reactionary caricature of them provided by the likes of TEAM and WECARE.
Everyone assumed that the timber bosses had won, but no one could have anticipated how wrong that assumption was.
To be continued...
Earth First! and the IWW, Part 4 - I Knew Nothin' Till I Met Judi
https://ecology.iww.org/node/266
"Every once in a while a new radical movement arises and illustrates the social firmament so suddenly and so dazzlingly that many people are caught off guard and wonder: “What’s going on here? Who are these new radicals, and what do they want?...
"This new movement...starts delivering real blows to the power and prestige of the ruling exploiters and their governmental stooges. This in turn inevitably arouses the hostility of the guardians of the status quo...who raise a hue and cry for the punishment and suppression of the trouble making upstarts...
"The new movement, with wild songs and high humor, captures the imagination of masses of young rebels, spreads like wildfire, turns up everywhere, gets blamed for everything interesting that happens, and all the while writes page after page in the annals of freedom and justice for all..."
These words were written by IWW member Franklin Rosemont in one of his four articles about Earth First! In the May 1988 edition of the Industrial Worker. In doing so, he brought the IWW squarely into the middle of a firestorm of controversy, and not just on the left, but in timber dependent rural communities as well.
On the left, Earth First! had been (with some justification) excoriated for the reactionary sounding positions taken by Dave Foreman, Ed Abbey, and Chris Manes on starvation among Africans, limiting immigration, and AIDS being "nature's" remedy for excess population, all of which were based on the wrongheaded notion that Thomas Malthus's views on population and starvation had any merit or any relevance to the environment (they don't).
Timber dependent communities lambasted Earth First! for entirely different reasons. Obviously, the bosses hated Earth First! because the latter threatened their profits. Timber workers--many of whom suffered from a sort of capitalist induced "Stockholm Syndrome", not the least of which was made worse by collaborationist business unions (where they existed at all)--echoed the bosses rhetoric, particularly when the capitalists used the word "jobs" when they actually meant profits. Earth First!'s association with tree spiking, and their stubborn refusal to jettison the tactic didn't help matters much.
Ironically, few on the left, and practically nobody in the corporate media paid any attention to what was going on in "ground zero" for the timber wars, California's northwestern redwood coast. Earth First! there had never used tree spiking, and they had gone to great lengths to express their sympathy for the timber workers' plight-identifying capitalist timber harvesting practices as the actual threat to the workers' livelihoods.
And it was. Timber Workers' job security and working conditions had been adversely impacted by automation (by 1988, it took two people do do the work that eleven did in the 1930s), raw log exports, depletion of standing timber due to over harvesting, and speed ups (made worse by union busting).
The capitalists--largely through the use of very effective propaganda and P.R.--were successfully able to divert many (though not all) of the workers' attention and shift the blame to environmentalists, including especially Earth First!. Taking advantage of half truths and gross exaggerations of Earth First!'s own shortcoming, the bosses framed the former as "unwashed-out-of-town-jobless-hippies-on-drugs".
The Earth First! chapters in northwestern California found themselves unable to respond (though they certainly tried). In spite of their best efforts, they lacked experience at cultivating the relationships necessary to build meaningful connections between radical environmentalists and rank and file timber workers, who--when stripped of superficial cultural differences--actually had a great deal in common.
The IWW would soon provide that missing link, but not without a great deal of heated debate among Wobblies and Earth First!ers. The May 1988 issue of the Industrial Worker proved highly controversial. While a clear majority supported the idea of the IWW working closely with Earth First!, there was a substantial enough minority of skeptics and naysayers who were vocal enough to force a debate, which raged for several months.
As one would expect, the Malthusian dogma championed by Foreman, Abbey, and Manes sparked the opposition. Franklin Rosemont--writing under the pseudonym "Lobo x99" tried to defend Earth First! by drawing sharp distinctions between Foreman, Abbey, and Manes, but it didn't help. Rosemont's article, "Earth First! vs the Rumor Mongers", published in the September issue of the Industrial Worker drew a backlash from Ed Abbey. That in turn drew a host of rebuttals from various Wobblies, the most vocal being Louis Prisco and Jess Grant of the Bay Area IWW, whom Abbey then denounced as "Bookchinites" and "Marxoid Dogmatists" (which was ironic considering that Murray Bookchin's own perspectives on "social ecology" assigned Marxism and syndicalism to the "dustbin of history").
If anything, Rosemont's defense of Earth First! (at the expense of Abbey, et. al.) was a whitewash, and /that/ drew a rebuke in the pages of Anarcho Syndicalist Review (known then as Libertarian Labor Review), cofounded by the late Sam Dolgoff--a long time IWW member--and others. Meanwhile, even the primitivist Fifth Estate called out Earth First! for its ill-chosen romanticization of Malthus.
None of this had much relevance to Humboldt Earth First! activists, Greg King and Darryl Cherney, who were doing their best to communicate with angry timber workers who'd been whipped up into vigilante mob hysteria by the bosses and their front groups (TEAM and WECARE). On top of that, the local politicians (Democrat and Republican alike) had aligned themselves with Corporate Timber.
All of them kept repeating Corporate Timber's standard litany of falsehoods as talking points: the corporations "were the backbone of the local economy" (never mentioning that they siphoned all of the profits out of the community); they "planted more trees than they cut down" (neglecting to point out that this was meaningless, since most saplings died before reaching overstory status and forest ecosystems were far more complex); that the environmentalists were "unwashed-out-of-town-jobless-hippies-on-drugs" (mostly false); and that California had "the best forestry regulations on the books" (which had no teeth, since the capitalists made sure that their foxes were guarding the state henhouse).
Deciding that enough was enough, King and Cherney decided to run for office. Cherney, in particular, ran for congress against the incumbent Democrat in his district, Doug Bosco. They described their "Earth First! Platform" (which was neither anti-worker, anti-immigrant, racist, nor homophobic) as being 6' by 3' and 150' up in the trees. Talented musician and former childhood actor that he was, Darryl used his guitar and voice to spread his message and billed himself as "the singing candidate".
In spite of that, Cherney still needed to use more conventional means of outreach, including old fashioned handbills. While he was a skilled songsmith he was not a particularly adept layout artist. Seeking help, he happened into the recently opened Mendocino Environment Center (MEC) on 106 West Standley Street in Ukiah one day in May of 1988.
The "MEC" was principally staffed by two Earth First!ers, the wife and husband team of Betty and Gary Ball. The Balls referred Cherney to another volunteer, a carpenter named Judi Bari, who--along with Gary Ball--worked for a small local company called California Yurts. Bari was a very skilled layout artist (as well as highly intelligent) , and while she agreed to help Darryl with his design, she pointed out that his campaign was ultimately futile.
Bari, a one time union activist, impressed Cherney with her knowledge of labor and environmental issues. He was at the same time impressed with how effortlessly she wove class and ecological struggle into a single all encompassing whole. Bari, meanwhile, thought Cherney had much to learn about how class issues underpinned environmentalism. The two also shared a mutual romantic attraction for each other.
Cherney admonished Bari to join Earth First!, but the latter initially demurred. She believed Earth First! was saddled with too much white, male, middle class privilege to be truly effective (and she cited Foreman's, Abbey's, and Manes's Malthusian perspectives in particular). Cherney countered by pointing out that Earth First!'s anarchic structure allowed local chapters to adopt their own unique character.
After some thought, Bari finally agreed to join Earth First! on one condition: at the upcoming California Earth First! rendezvous in September in the nearby Siskiyou National Forest, Bari would lead a workshop on the IWW and it's relevance to the current ecological struggles of Earth First!
To be continued...
Coming Soon: Part 5: "The Earth isn't Dying; it's Being Killed".
https://www.iww.org/hu/content/iww-and-earth-first-part-1-establishing-roots
Judi Bari was both an Earth First!er and a Wobbly from 1988 to 1993 and during that time there was a close alliance between the two organizations. Although some assume she brought the two together, the truth is more complex. When Judi Bari joined Earth First! and the IWW in the summer of 1988, Earth First!ers and Wobblies were already discussing the idea of forging an alliance. There are many reasons for this, but the overarching explanation is that Earth First! and the IWW are really different manifestations of thesame revolutionary impulse.
The IWW, founded in Chicago in 1905 by radical working class anti-capitalists from veterans of various movements and struggles, united around the idea of forming One Big Union of the working class. They offered a revolutionary alternative to the class collaborationist American Federation of Labor (AFL). The IWW pledged to organize all workers—regardless of ethnicity, gender or skill level—by industry rather than craft. Instead of the conservative AFL motto, “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” the IWW sought to abolish wage slavery altogether. No longer would workers collectively enable their own oppression by crossing each other’s (craft based) picket lines, they said. The IWW would organize the working class together. This was summarized by the slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all!”
The IWW set out to achieve this creatively, becoming known as much for its “right brain” artistic contributions to working-class culture as well as its “left brain” organizing activities.
The IWW’s artistic creativity was both visual and auditory. The IWW’s use of clever graphic imagery, especially in cartoons and “silent agitator” stickers conveyed IWW propaganda far more succinctly and effectively to workers (many of whom were illiterate) than any manifesto.
Likewise, the IWW was famous for its voluminous collection of songs and labor hymns, which slyly conveyed the union’s message of class struggle in rhythm, rhyme and meter. The latter resulted not just from the abundance of clever song smiths that joined the One Big Union but also largely out of necessity, to get around arbitrary anti-soapboxing ordinances enacted throughout the Pacific Northwest. These had been specifically designed to prevent IWW members from engaging in street corner oratory.
Such blatant First Amendment violations still exempted the singing of religious hymns, such as those performed by the Salvation Army (who themselves had a particular condemnation of the Wobblies and their call for earthly paradise, instead of “pie in the sky, when you die”). The IWW would write alternate lyrics to these hymns that both argued in favor of class struggle and against religious dogma that enabled the perpetuation of wage slavery.
Perhaps the most lasting of the IWW’s artistic contributions to radical working class culture comes from one person, Ralph Chaplin. It was he who wrote the anthem “Solidarity Forever.” Chaplin also introduced the iconic black cat logo, “Sabo-Tabby,” a clever play on “sabotage,” symbolizing the organized, collective and conscious withdrawal of efficiency by the workers at the point of production.
These cultural icons of the IWW were used extensively during the free speech fights that took place in the Pacific Northwest during the IWW’s heyday in the 1910s and 1920s, many of which were part of the Wobblies’ efforts to organize an industrial union of lumber workers throughout that region. During one such struggle, in Spokane, Washington, several of the songs sung by the members involved in the thick of it were printed on red card stock and sold to the membership at-large to raise much- needed organizing funds, thus giving birth to the Little Red Songbook. As a result, the IWW became known as “The Singing Union.”
Less well-known is that these rich and colorful parts of IWW culture, much romanticized by historians and radicals today, were designed as tactics in the service of advancing strategy at the point of production. Often their practical utility is forgotten, downplayed, or even deliberately hidden in favor of painting a picture of the IWW as a cultural curiosity rather than a union with clever and effective strategies that was at the same time revolutionary and fun.
Indeed, all of these facets coalesced around the IWW-backed Lumber Workers Industrial Union’s winning of the eight-hour workday and improved conditions through their effective “striking on the job” in 1917. Little did anyone realize, however, the effect the IWW’s struggles would have on the future of the environmental movement at the time.
Fast forward to 1980. Five environmental activists, led by Dave Foreman and Mike Roselle, disillusioned with mainstream environmental organizations, started a new group, inspired by Edward Abbey’s best-selling novel, The Monkeywrench Gang. They called their group “Earth First!” They found the mainstream organizations far too willing to make compromises with industrial polluters in exchange for preserving small, ultimately insignificant patches of wilderness for fear of alienating wealthy donors. In doing so, they lost sight of the far more steadfast visions of their founders.
To Earth First! this was not only unacceptable, it was suicidal. The founders believed—and to a large extent science has largely proven—that all living beings on the Earth are interconnected in a singular web of life. Biologically, an injury to one is an injury to all. Those who pushed for compromise argued from the standpoint of “better half a loaf than none at all,” to which Earth First! would respond by first explaining how very much less than “half” of the proverbial loaf had been gained, and moreover saving anything less than the entire loaf portended the eventual loss of the entire loaf. They adopted the slogan, “No compromise in defense of Mother Earth!” and called their philosophy, “biocentrism,” as opposed to human-centeredness, or “anthropocentrism.”
Earth First! wasted little time, engaging in many campaigns, often utilizing creative and humorous acts of civil disobedience. The first such major act involved the “cracking” of Glen Canyon Dam, although the “crack” was really a long roll of black paper that was unrolled to create the illusion of a fracture, a sort of “merry prankster” attempt at conveying the message that was nonviolent, but nevertheless militant. From this many other similar actions followed in defense of wilderness and in protest of despoliation by industrial pollution. Earth First! grew quickly as a result, even drawing in Monkey Wrench Gang author, Ed Abbey, in short order.
Inevitably this drew opposition from corporate interests and mainstream environmental groups (no doubt in fear that their thunder—not to mention funding base—would be stolen). The latter merely called Earth First! “irresponsible,” while the former called them “terrorists.” Indeed, Earth First! faced the same stigma assigned to the IWW by the employing class and reformist socialists back in the beginning of the 20th century.
One might assume that these experiences would have led Earth First!’s founders to the same fundamental conclusions reached by the IWW, primarily that capitalism cannot be reformed. At least on some level, it did. In opposing the destruction of the environment, which is an inherent function of capitalist economics (the privatization of wealth, including what we call “natural resources,” andthe externalization of costs to the working class, not to mention all other, nonhuman, species), Earth First!ers constantly found itself in opposition to the employing class by default.
However, Earth First!ers generally didn’t see themselves as being part of “the left” politically. Dave Foreman once described his movement by saying, “We’re not left; we’re not right; we’re not even in front or behind! We’re not even playing the same game!” Foreman’s statement revealed many of the contradictions that were deeply ingrained within this radical environmental movement.
To begin with, Earth First! wasn’t a formal organization. It had no constitution, no officers (other than the editors of its de facto organ, the Earth First! Journal) and no standards for identifying formal membership. Therefore Earth First! had no official policies or internal process. There was only a loose and ephemeral consensus of purpose behind those that identified as Earth First!ers. Yet Earth First! had chapters that met regularly and consistently, and more were forming as its reputation grew.
Furthermore, Earth First!—which had quickly sprouted international chapters—saw little difference between the destruction of the Earth by capitalist corporations and that of so-called “communist” states. While any leftist worth their salt knows perfectly well that what most people call “communism” is actually much closer to capitalism in practice than it is different from it, hence the pollution, Earth First!ers tended to eschew class analysis and political economy as “anthropocentric” concerns, and therefore, not relevant.
That was due, in no small part, to deeply engrained hostility to Marxism among some (though not all) of Earth First!s leading thinkers, particularly Dave Foreman, Ed Abbey and Chris Manes. All three of them had looked to a number of ecological thinkers from the past, including John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Wallace Stegner, Rachel Carson, and Henry David Thoreau, among others. All of them had advanced tenets of the philosophies of biocentrism, but they had also drawn inspiration from a very dubious source: Thomas Malthus, whose essay “On Population” was not an argument for environmentalism, but a defense of class privilege in reaction to the anarchist ideals of William Godwin.
Earth First!’s animosity towards leftism and anarchism can be partly explained by the fact that Dave Foreman had once been a Goldwater Republican, and though he had jettisoned much of the right-wing political baggage of this prior association, Foreman, like many other ex-rightists, could never completely embrace political theories associated with “collectivism,” even those that were libertarian in nature. As a result, he shunned class analysis and mass-based organizing in favor of individualistic covert guerrilla “eco-sabotage” or “monkey wrenching.” Such thinking patterns lead Foreman to embrace misanthropy.
Although Foreman was not the “leader” of Earth First! he was often identified by outsiders as such, a notion that was enforced by his being editor of the Earth First! Journal for much of the 1980s and his being one of Earth First!’s most outspoken thinkers.
Foreman and his adherents advanced a school of thought that blamed the destruction of the environment not on the inherent economic processes of capitalism, but instead on an over-abundant, over-prolific human population aided by technology. The solution to the problem was a return to pre-industrial society, perhaps even hunter-gatherer existence, with a greatly reduced human population (though no specific process or plan was ever articulated for achieving such a shift), leading Earth First!’s critics—including Murray Bookchin—to suggest that Foreman’s perspectives could be interpreted in any number of less than savory ways, even as an endorsement of fascism.
Foreman, as well as his fellow misanthropes, Ed Abbey and Chris Manes, did not work to dispel such rumors when each of them made statements of their own—some of them taken out of context—which suggested (among other things) that aiding developing nations, giving amnesty to illegal immigrants, and seeking a cure for AIDS interfered with nature’s processes for stabilizing the population.
The vast majority of Earth First!ers did not share these views. While they may have held some mildly misanthropic and Malthusian beliefs, for the most part their actions were far more progressive and class conscious in their intent. Indeed, as we shall soon see, in California’s Redwood region, Earth First!ers routinely made overtures of solidarity to timber workers when the latter had disputes with their employers.
The IWW still existed during that time, of course, and a handful of its members came in regular contact with Earth First!ers. A few IWW members even joined Earth First! and vice versa.
Ironically Dave Foreman, in spite of his misanthropic tendencies, was actually enamored with the IWW. He and his fellow founders actively looked to leftist organizations, including especially the IWW for cultural inspiration—though obviously they had eschewed Marxist and syndicalist economic analysis in doing so. Ralph Chaplin’s sabo cat icon graced the pages of many an Earth First! Journal in reference to ecotage. And, in a clear homage to the IWW, Dave Foreman even compiled various songs written by the copious number of Earth First! musicians into what he called, the Little Green Songbook.
Meanwhile, Ed Abbey—who described himself as an “anarchist,” albeit an individualist one—also spoke favorably of the One Big Union, perhaps because rumor has it at least, his father had been a dues-paying IWW member.
These connections did not go unnoticed by contemporary IWW members. None other than the Rosemonts (Penelope and Franklin), Carlos Cortez, and Utah Phillips all came into regular contact with Earth First!ers. The aforementioned Wobblies spoke favorably towards the new radical environmentalists, which drew a backlash from IWW members critical of it.
Critics pointed to the misanthropy and class ignorance of spokespeople like Foreman, Abbey and Manes. Their supporters countered by noting there were more similarities between the IWW and Earth First! than differences. They pointed out that there was one key difference: while the IWW talked of direct action, Earth First! was actually taking direct action. (That there was a fundamental difference between direct action against industrial activity, and direct action at the point of production, was often ignored, however.)
The debate raged on, under the surface in the IWW, until Franklin Rosemont—who was an editor of the Industrial Worker in 1988—decided to force the issue, quite literally. That year the publication’s editors made the decision to base a majority of each issue on a particular theme. For May, that theme would be “radical environmentalism,” and much of the focus—indeed MOST of it—would be on Earth First! Little did anyone know just how significant that decision would turn out to be.
To be continued...
The IWW And Earth First! - Part 2: The Crucible
https://ecology.iww.org/node/13?bot_test=1
The IWW connection to Earth First! was, believe it or not, woven in the woof. In fact, as far as the two organizations’ struggles with the timber bosses go, both could be said to have been forged from the same crucible: the Humboldt County town of Eureka in northwestern California, the de facto capital of the Redwood Empire.
Long before the IWW joined in Earth First!’s (ultimately successful) struggles to save Headwaters Forest in Humboldt County, the roots of that struggle began with the workers’ struggles against the timber bosses.
In the formative years of the timber industry in the United States and Canada—the last third of the 19th century—working conditions were abysmal. Then, as now, timber was one of the top five most dangerous industrial jobs in the world. Timber workers were subjected to long hours, dangerous working conditions, unsanitary labor camps, company towns (where the employer was literally the government) and no job security. The bosses, meanwhile, were making a killing on the backs of both the workers and the environment. Vast amounts of standing timber were held by what would soon evolve into modern timber corporations, and not too few of them had acquired their holdings through graft and very questionable homesteading laws.
This was no exception in the Redwood Empire. In Eureka, the California Redwood Company (CRC), whose owners were European capitalists, was one of the worst examples. Workers at the CRC, many of whom were populists—including a butcher by the name of Charles Keller, who was a member of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA)—formed the very first union of timber workers in North America to affiliate with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Together, they exposed the CRC’s graft, in spite of vigilante mobs organized by the CRC and the other companies as well as yellow journalism and slander by the local press. The union didn’t secure recognition, but they did improve working conditions slightly, and the CRC was forced to shut down.
The story of the IWW’s Lumber Workers Industrial Union and its successful fight for the eight-hour day is well documented elsewhere, but what is not well known is that, while the IWW never gained much of a foothold in the Redwood Empire (its successes were concentrated mostly in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana), its influence was felt there nonetheless.
In order to keep the IWW from gaining any support from among the local timber workers, two timber companies based in Humboldt County, The Pacific Lumber Company (PL) and The Hammond Lumber Company (HLC), introduced two innovations that would give the employers the upper hand in the class struggle which would ultimately have devastating consequences for the environment as well. HLC introduced the “bonus system,” under which they paid productivity bonuses to the department that achieved the highest production quotas, expressly to undermine shop-floor solidarity. This had the effect of not only inducing the workers to compete against each other and willingly enable a speed up, it facilitated the more rapid liquidation of the redwoods, because HLC cut their forests faster than they grew back.
Most of the other companies increased their production to keep up. Meanwhile, many other companies implemented and expanded the bonus system. Some companies, like Weyerhaeuser, who had a particularly intense ideological aversion to the IWW, as well as the more conservative business unions, even went a step further, introducing the contract logging, or “gyppo,” system throughout the Pacific Northwest.
This was done in reaction to the IWW’s winning of the eight-hour day in 1918 by way of their innovative “strike on the job.” The Wobbly organizers knew that their victory was temporary and anticipated that the bosses would expand the gyppo system to undermine it. The IWW had plans to respond to the threat, and had historical currents flowed differently, they might have succeeded by using solidarity unionism, but different forms of unionism, namely that of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) eclipsed the IWW due to the influence of the ascendant communist currents.
Although the gyppo system took several decades to become the dominant method of employment among logging crews, this system ultimately made it nearly impossible for any union (other than the IWW) to organize loggers, thus making the bargaining position of the more heavily unionized mill workers far weaker.
Meanwhile, in 1909, PL began charting a different course from their fellow capitalist operations. Sensing that they could keep their wage slaves loyal to the company, they began paying their workers generous benefits and introducing a variety of social programs. These changes weren’t introduced out of pure altruism, however. On the contrary—and the PL bosses made no secret of this—they were expressly implemented to keep the IWW out, as can be seen in the following quote:
“Get your men loyal and keep them so. Let this replace loyalty to a union. The spirit is what you want in your men. Ten good men will accomplish as much as fifteen ordinary laborers if the spirit and good will is there. Treat them right and they will treat you right.” (emphasis added, A E Blockinger, Pacific Lumber General Manager, writing in the Pioneer Western Lumberman, July 15, 1911)
And the bosses succeeded. When the IWW strike for the eight-hour day shook Washington, Idaho, and Oregon, PL simply paid more benefits and added more programs.
The IWW succeeded in winning the eight-hour day, but the credit was given to a company union established by the bosses (in reaction to the IWW) called the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen (LLLL). Membership in the LLLL was compulsory, and the U.S. military, under the command of Col. Brice Disque was dispatched to enforce its directive. However, Disque’s heavy-handedness was as bad as the bosses, leading to even some of the soldiers under his command to strike on the job like the IWW. Sensing defeat, Disque and the bosses “granted” the eight-hour day, and only succeeded in keeping the IWW from immediately regaining momentum by further implementing programs similar to those instituted by PL in Humboldt County.
The IWW rightfully denounced both the LLLL and PL attempts to steal their thunder, but couldn’t mount a response before the ascendant Communist Party stole the IWW’s thunder on the Left and among the working class in the 1920s and 1930s. As a result, much of the union organizing among timber workers was done by the CIO, whose left wing was largely aligned with the Communist Party.
Meanwhile, PL remained nonunion, but (unlike most of its competitors) it also retained its paternalistic culture for almost 70 years. During that time, its owners, who were all part of the same family and only the second group to ever control the company after acquiring it in 1909 from its original founders, became known as the “lumber company in the white hats,” both in terms of how they treated their workers as well as how they treated the environment.
While other firms liquidated their forests for quick profits, PL logged sustainably so that by the 1980s they owned the largest inventory of privately-owned standing old growth redwoods in the world.
Ironically, these sustainability practices would have likely resulted from workers’ control as well. The IWW called for sustainable logging, primarily because it resulted in safer working conditions and job security, but also because the union recognized that unsustainable logging only aided the bosses in their consolidation of profits.
PL’s uniqueness would be their ultimate undoing. By the 1980s, PL was cash rich, with a diversified portfolio of assets that included farmland and a welding business, their sizable and sustainably logged timber holdings, the company town of Scotia (just south of Eureka), and a well-funded pension fund. While other logging firms were quickly mowing down their forests and debt financing their companies in the neoliberal Reaganite era of the 1980s, PL was an anomaly, a rare example of a business that actually followed the examples set forth in naïve, high school economics text books. By doing so, PL made itself an attractive target for the ruthless capitalist raiders that had taken over the reins of capitalism at the time, and it wasn’t long before the company was picked off like a sitting duck.
Indeed, in late 1985, a corporate raider named Charles Hurwitz, aided by the infamous Ivan Boesky, took advantage of lax regulation over corporate securities trading and managed—through a very complex series of stock trades, not all of which were (barely) legal—to acquire enough shares of the Pacific Lumber Company to induce its owners to sell the rest of it to him.
Many shareholders, including descendants of the family dynasty that had owned the company for years, attempted to fight back and filed a barrage of (ultimately unsuccessful) lawsuits in the process. They were joined by many of the company’s 800 workers who approached the International Woodworkers Union (IWA, a founding affiliate of the CIO in the 1930s) and also took out a full-page ad in the Eureka Times-Standard protesting the takeover.
Such activity, at a company that had never had a union in its century of existence, was unprecedented. All of those in opposition to the takeover feared that Hurwitz and his Maxxam Inc. would liquidate the company’s assets and abolish its sustainable logging practices. These fears turned out to be correct.
Because Hurwitz had incurred huge debts in the process of taking over PL, to meet his debt obligation he liquidated much of the company’s assets and tripled the rate of cutting. Mill workers were forced to work 60-hour weeks, and a bunch of gyppo firms were brought in to handle the additional logging. The IWA, being bound to the AFL-CIO’s ineffective business union model, was unable to organize these new workers, and the union organizing drive fizzled. In spite of the increased jobs and lucrative overtime, longtime PL employees and environmentalists both agreed that the long-term future of the company and Humboldt County looked bleak. PL was no longer “the guys in the white hats,” but was now as rapacious and greedy as most other logging corporations that dominated the Pacific Northwest.
There were many local environmental organizations that opposed these changes (and were sympathetic to the workers’ plight as well), but they were busy fighting already raging environmental battles, including opposing herbicide spraying, offshore oil drilling, and clearcutting by other logging companies in the region. Somebody new would have to take on this new struggle. Fortunately, two recently arrived activists, Darryl Cherney and Greg King, did, and they would do so under the banner of Earth First!
Earth First! had already existed for five years and had even taken on timber companies for a couple of years, beginning in 1983 in the nearby Siskiyou National Forest in Oregon, but in those cases, the protests had focused on public lands rather than private holdings. Also, in the previous cases, Earth First!’s actions tended to alienate timber workers. This time—at least initially—the new Earth First! chapter would attempt to ally with the workers, because it was fairly obvious they shared a common enemy.
Earth First! couldn’t organize workers at the point of production however, and the business unions had proven incapable, but there was one union that could succeed. It was only a matter of time before it would make its presence known, and that crucible of forest radicalism, Humboldt County in California would work its magic once again.
To be continued...
Earth First! and the IWW, Part 3 - Tree Spikes and Wedges...
https://ecology.iww.org/node/117?bot_test=1
When Greg King and Darryl Cherney cofounded Southern Humboldt County Earth First! in 1986, the principle target of their actions was the now Maxxam controlled Pacific Lumber Company. Sensing that the 800-plus Pacific Lumber workers--of which almost 350 had made it known in a full page ad that they opposed the Maxxam takeover--and the environmentalists shared a common adversary, King and Cherney tailored their campaign to the workers as well as the forest itself. Their earliest demonstrations conveyed the message that this particular Earth First! group at least, was concerned for the future of the loggers and millworkers as much as they were for the redwoods and the flora and fauna that depended on it.
A good number of the workers welcomed this show of solidarity, and a handful of them, including shipping clerk John Maurer, millworker Kelly Bettiga, mechanic Lester Reynolds, and company blacksmith (whose job primarily consisted of forging specialized logging equipment needed for the cutting of the unique redwoods), Pete Kayes--who would eventually join the IWW, engaged in regular, amicable dialog with the environmentalists.
At first, Maxxam largely ignored the protests and dissidents but as Earth First!'s efforts gained momentum and support, and as more workers began to grumble about their mandatory overtime and question the now rapacious timber harvesting efforts, the bosses began to take the growing grassroots resistance more seriously. An unprecedented spate of successful legal challenges by a local environmental watchdog group called EPIC under a hitherto inconsistently enforced California forestry practices act was the straw that broke the camel's back.
Using the PR Firm Hill & Knowlton and stoking the ego of the more conservative "scissorbill" employees, Maxxam fomented the creation of a "timber worker" front group known as Taxpayers for the Environment and its Management (TEAM). The organization initiated an intense propaganda campaign accusing the environmentalists of being "unwashed-out-of-town-jobless-hippies-on-drugs" whose sole aim was to destroy the economic well being of the humble residents of Humboldt (and Mendocino) county(s). TEAM claimed to be composed entirely of timber workers, but it was ACTUALLY largely made up of low level managers, gyppo operators, and assorted ranchers, many of whom belonged to other, similar front groups, such as one called WECARE, that had previously exaggerated the differences between workers and environmentalists.
To be fair, Earth First! had inadvertently set themselves up to be a prime target in such efforts. One of the most controversial tactics advocated by this militant direct-action movement was the practice known as "tree-spiking", the act of driving large nails into standing trees, followed by marking the affected arbors with a large, spray-painted "S" in white, and then making an anonymous call to the targeted logging operation in an effort to deter the timber cut.
Dave Foreman was an especially strong advocate of this tactic, but he also stressed that it should be done selectively, and great care taken to prevent any harm or injury to the frontline workers (hence the painted "s"). However, what Foreman didn't count on was that the employers, as a rule, placed profits above the workers' safety and cut the spiked trees anyway and sent them to the (often poorly maintained) mills, thus putting the millworkers at risk of injury or even death.
To make matters worse, Foreman had no way of knowing that folks who were NOT Earth First!ers, but willing to spike trees, might use the tactic, but neglect to use the recommended safety precautions. Further, he failed to account for the negative press that would result from tree spiking efforts gone awry, and the employers' willingness to use it to drive wedges between timber workers and environmentalists. Earth First! would quickly find out in May 1987 just how much they hadn't foreseen.
Early that month, in the Louisiana Pacific Mill in Cloverdale, California--in Southern Mendocino County, a millworker named George Alexander was nearly decapitated when his bandsaw struck a spiked log. The company waited ten days before issuing a press release, but once they did, they blamed the "tree spiking terrorists" (meaning Earth First!), and issued a $20,000 reward for the apprehension of the perpetrator.
What the company issued press release didn't reveal, however, was that the northern California Earth First! groups didn't use tree spiking as a tactic, that the spiked log had been sabotaged after it had been cut, due to the placement of the spike, and that the most likely suspect was not an Earth First!er, or even an environmentalist, but actually a right wing gun nut who bragged about spiking the tree in protest against L-P for illegally logging trees outside if their approved timber harvest area on his private property! (L-P had an established reputation for doing such things).
Furthermore, L-P also didn't reveal that Alexander was not a company man--indeed he was mildly sympathetic to Earth First!, though he opposed tree spiking, for obvious reasons), and he was actually very critical of L-P for its lax safety practices and profit mongering. The press and L-P also failed to mention that while the company offered a generous sounding $20000 reward, Alexander had to threaten a lawsuit in order to get even a paltry fraction ($9000) of his medical bills covered by the company! This didn't stop L-P from using the bloody images of an injured Alexander for their own propaganda purposes (a move Alexander resented).
The Corporate Timber front group, WECARE offered to pay Alexander to be a spokesperson for their anti-Earth First! propaganda, but Alexander refused. That didn't stop WECARE from using his image as well. And the odd timing of the delayed press release may have been calculated to coincide with an Earth First! protest against Maxxam (which is not unlikely since both Maxxam and L-P called upon the services of WECARE to create pro corporate timber propaganda.
Unfortunately, enough timber workers throughout the Pacific Northwest bought the propaganda, and by May 1988, were sufficiently convinced that Earth First! was a band of unfeeling terrorists. The willing collaboration of the capitalist press only further cemented this image in the minds of the general public. Worse still, careless Malthusian influenced statements made by Dave Foreman, Ed Abbey, and Chris Manes--whose views did not by any means represent the majority of Earth First!--only further added to the tension. Most leftists, including many in the IWW, saw no redeeming value in Earth First!
On the other hand, in the days before the Internet, many Earth First!ers knew nothing of Pete Kayes, John Maurer, Les Reynolds, or Kelly Bettiga and their openness towards environmentalism. They had no idea that George Alexander was very close in his own views to their own. Instead, their conception of the typical timber worker was the reactionary caricature of them provided by the likes of TEAM and WECARE.
Everyone assumed that the timber bosses had won, but no one could have anticipated how wrong that assumption was.
To be continued...
Earth First! and the IWW, Part 4 - I Knew Nothin' Till I Met Judi
https://ecology.iww.org/node/266
"Every once in a while a new radical movement arises and illustrates the social firmament so suddenly and so dazzlingly that many people are caught off guard and wonder: “What’s going on here? Who are these new radicals, and what do they want?...
"This new movement...starts delivering real blows to the power and prestige of the ruling exploiters and their governmental stooges. This in turn inevitably arouses the hostility of the guardians of the status quo...who raise a hue and cry for the punishment and suppression of the trouble making upstarts...
"The new movement, with wild songs and high humor, captures the imagination of masses of young rebels, spreads like wildfire, turns up everywhere, gets blamed for everything interesting that happens, and all the while writes page after page in the annals of freedom and justice for all..."
These words were written by IWW member Franklin Rosemont in one of his four articles about Earth First! In the May 1988 edition of the Industrial Worker. In doing so, he brought the IWW squarely into the middle of a firestorm of controversy, and not just on the left, but in timber dependent rural communities as well.
On the left, Earth First! had been (with some justification) excoriated for the reactionary sounding positions taken by Dave Foreman, Ed Abbey, and Chris Manes on starvation among Africans, limiting immigration, and AIDS being "nature's" remedy for excess population, all of which were based on the wrongheaded notion that Thomas Malthus's views on population and starvation had any merit or any relevance to the environment (they don't).
Timber dependent communities lambasted Earth First! for entirely different reasons. Obviously, the bosses hated Earth First! because the latter threatened their profits. Timber workers--many of whom suffered from a sort of capitalist induced "Stockholm Syndrome", not the least of which was made worse by collaborationist business unions (where they existed at all)--echoed the bosses rhetoric, particularly when the capitalists used the word "jobs" when they actually meant profits. Earth First!'s association with tree spiking, and their stubborn refusal to jettison the tactic didn't help matters much.
Ironically, few on the left, and practically nobody in the corporate media paid any attention to what was going on in "ground zero" for the timber wars, California's northwestern redwood coast. Earth First! there had never used tree spiking, and they had gone to great lengths to express their sympathy for the timber workers' plight-identifying capitalist timber harvesting practices as the actual threat to the workers' livelihoods.
And it was. Timber Workers' job security and working conditions had been adversely impacted by automation (by 1988, it took two people do do the work that eleven did in the 1930s), raw log exports, depletion of standing timber due to over harvesting, and speed ups (made worse by union busting).
The capitalists--largely through the use of very effective propaganda and P.R.--were successfully able to divert many (though not all) of the workers' attention and shift the blame to environmentalists, including especially Earth First!. Taking advantage of half truths and gross exaggerations of Earth First!'s own shortcoming, the bosses framed the former as "unwashed-out-of-town-jobless-hippies-on-drugs".
The Earth First! chapters in northwestern California found themselves unable to respond (though they certainly tried). In spite of their best efforts, they lacked experience at cultivating the relationships necessary to build meaningful connections between radical environmentalists and rank and file timber workers, who--when stripped of superficial cultural differences--actually had a great deal in common.
The IWW would soon provide that missing link, but not without a great deal of heated debate among Wobblies and Earth First!ers. The May 1988 issue of the Industrial Worker proved highly controversial. While a clear majority supported the idea of the IWW working closely with Earth First!, there was a substantial enough minority of skeptics and naysayers who were vocal enough to force a debate, which raged for several months.
As one would expect, the Malthusian dogma championed by Foreman, Abbey, and Manes sparked the opposition. Franklin Rosemont--writing under the pseudonym "Lobo x99" tried to defend Earth First! by drawing sharp distinctions between Foreman, Abbey, and Manes, but it didn't help. Rosemont's article, "Earth First! vs the Rumor Mongers", published in the September issue of the Industrial Worker drew a backlash from Ed Abbey. That in turn drew a host of rebuttals from various Wobblies, the most vocal being Louis Prisco and Jess Grant of the Bay Area IWW, whom Abbey then denounced as "Bookchinites" and "Marxoid Dogmatists" (which was ironic considering that Murray Bookchin's own perspectives on "social ecology" assigned Marxism and syndicalism to the "dustbin of history").
If anything, Rosemont's defense of Earth First! (at the expense of Abbey, et. al.) was a whitewash, and /that/ drew a rebuke in the pages of Anarcho Syndicalist Review (known then as Libertarian Labor Review), cofounded by the late Sam Dolgoff--a long time IWW member--and others. Meanwhile, even the primitivist Fifth Estate called out Earth First! for its ill-chosen romanticization of Malthus.
None of this had much relevance to Humboldt Earth First! activists, Greg King and Darryl Cherney, who were doing their best to communicate with angry timber workers who'd been whipped up into vigilante mob hysteria by the bosses and their front groups (TEAM and WECARE). On top of that, the local politicians (Democrat and Republican alike) had aligned themselves with Corporate Timber.
All of them kept repeating Corporate Timber's standard litany of falsehoods as talking points: the corporations "were the backbone of the local economy" (never mentioning that they siphoned all of the profits out of the community); they "planted more trees than they cut down" (neglecting to point out that this was meaningless, since most saplings died before reaching overstory status and forest ecosystems were far more complex); that the environmentalists were "unwashed-out-of-town-jobless-hippies-on-drugs" (mostly false); and that California had "the best forestry regulations on the books" (which had no teeth, since the capitalists made sure that their foxes were guarding the state henhouse).
Deciding that enough was enough, King and Cherney decided to run for office. Cherney, in particular, ran for congress against the incumbent Democrat in his district, Doug Bosco. They described their "Earth First! Platform" (which was neither anti-worker, anti-immigrant, racist, nor homophobic) as being 6' by 3' and 150' up in the trees. Talented musician and former childhood actor that he was, Darryl used his guitar and voice to spread his message and billed himself as "the singing candidate".
In spite of that, Cherney still needed to use more conventional means of outreach, including old fashioned handbills. While he was a skilled songsmith he was not a particularly adept layout artist. Seeking help, he happened into the recently opened Mendocino Environment Center (MEC) on 106 West Standley Street in Ukiah one day in May of 1988.
The "MEC" was principally staffed by two Earth First!ers, the wife and husband team of Betty and Gary Ball. The Balls referred Cherney to another volunteer, a carpenter named Judi Bari, who--along with Gary Ball--worked for a small local company called California Yurts. Bari was a very skilled layout artist (as well as highly intelligent) , and while she agreed to help Darryl with his design, she pointed out that his campaign was ultimately futile.
Bari, a one time union activist, impressed Cherney with her knowledge of labor and environmental issues. He was at the same time impressed with how effortlessly she wove class and ecological struggle into a single all encompassing whole. Bari, meanwhile, thought Cherney had much to learn about how class issues underpinned environmentalism. The two also shared a mutual romantic attraction for each other.
Cherney admonished Bari to join Earth First!, but the latter initially demurred. She believed Earth First! was saddled with too much white, male, middle class privilege to be truly effective (and she cited Foreman's, Abbey's, and Manes's Malthusian perspectives in particular). Cherney countered by pointing out that Earth First!'s anarchic structure allowed local chapters to adopt their own unique character.
After some thought, Bari finally agreed to join Earth First! on one condition: at the upcoming California Earth First! rendezvous in September in the nearby Siskiyou National Forest, Bari would lead a workshop on the IWW and it's relevance to the current ecological struggles of Earth First!
To be continued...
Coming Soon: Part 5: "The Earth isn't Dying; it's Being Killed".
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