Mike Roselle's Tree Spiker (with Josh Mahan) Dean Kuipers's Operation Bite Back Douglas Bevington's The Rebirth of Environmentalism
Engler, Mark
Shattered Dreams JEFFREY W. RUBIN T U T D 2 P , H , S C C ’ F W M by Miriam Pawel Bloomsbury Press, 2009, 384 pp., $28 In 1978, just after I graduated from...
...However, Bevington challenges this argument...
...Redwood Summer did not produce immediate legislative gains...
...Evans believes the “displeasure and embarrassment [he] probably caused for the higherups” contributed to the offer of early retirement he received shortly thereafter...
...When other approaches failed, Chavez fired them outright, though he had no right to do so, and the reps sued...
...But while the radical environmental movement was making significant inroads on local and regional levels, dissatisfaction with Washington continued...
...Had someone confronted them with the idea that a small number of people would never be able to inflict serious enough economic damage to enemy industries, they likely would have responded with a defense of the “propaganda of the deed,” the romantic but unfounded idea that their audacious actions might spontaneously inspire mass support from an army of latent sympathizers...
...The results were impressive...
...Most of the building damage was covered by insurance, and most of the computer hard drives that they smashed were backed up...
...They were correct in one respect: violence on the part of loggers, security officers, and police at forest demonstrations was indeed everpresent...
...In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Coronado commenced a notorious series of ALF attacks...
...When Chavez turned on him, attacking his proposal in the communal dining room at La Paz, Medina packed up and left the union...
...Instead, UFW board meetings functioned to produce the outcomes Chavez wanted, and he manipulated people and facts to achieve this, down to unfounded accusations and character assassination...
...For the most part, these protests have gone forward without the support of the nation’s largest and most wellfunded environmental organizations...
...Pawel shows that in the months before the ceremony at La Paz, militant vegetable workers in Salinas were waging and winning key strikes, despite Chavez’s insistence that the strikes were costly and unwinnable...
...In the early months of 1990, Bari was leading an organizing drive called Redwood Summer...
...This is an elusive task, despite the many revealing anecdotes and quotations, because the context is always provided by others...
...I also learned that social movements are sometimes not what they seem...
...These locally based organizations emerged directly from radical movement culture and shared its outsider outlook...
...an old nail was just as likely as a tree spike to have broken the saw...
...Public support was nice,” they stated, “but alone it had rarely saved animals [sic] lives...
...In 19801981 the paid reps in Salinas won election after election for the UFW, working effectively as a team to extend the union’s reach in the region...
...Earth First!’s expansion reflected the wider growth and maturation of radical environmentalism...
...His subsequent meeting with Chavez began the fifteenyear run of an eclectic, unorthodox, and wildly successful legal team that could spin circles around California’s growers and their own highpriced lawyers...
...It allowed the logging industry to cut into previously protected oldgrowth expanses under the pretense of clearing dead trees...
...The Union of Their Dreams paints a vivid portrait of the cost of leadership that stifles dissent and activists who accept being silenced for the sake of the struggle...
...Families arrived in their Sunday best from across central and southern California for a formal ceremony and communal lunch...
...In an early memo cowritten by Coronado, ALFers explicitly disavowed the crucial quest to build popular sympathy...
...As Roselle contends, “Those people cannot justify the amount of money we spend keeping them there...
...Instead of focusing only on the interplay between decentralized directaction networks and the Big Green establishment, Bevington highlights the role of a third tier of organizations...
...The vessels had been blatantly violating a recently established worldwide moratorium on commercial whaling...
...A few American activists sought to import it...
...What are effective ways to combine the kind of direct action that challenges the powerful with the long, slow work in institutions that often consolidates gains for poor people...
...And like the protagonists in Miriam Pawel’s groundbreaking and deeply moving The Union of Their Dreams, I did not speak of these events to anyone for more than a decade and never aired them publicly...
...Roselle describes Redwood Summer demonstrations as “the largest this country had ever seen” against logging...
...He can be reached via the Web site www.DemocracyUprising.com...
...Times editor Dean Kuipers...
...Operating on a fraction of the budgets needed to run their Washingtonoriented counterparts, groups including Earth First!, Greenpeace, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, the Rainforest Action Network, and the Center for Biological Diversity concocted a powerful mixture of civil disobedience and confrontational litigation—tactics that the politically wary environmental establishment observes with trepidation...
...But the need for mass support also means that tendencies toward factionalism and selfisolation are more destructive than ever...
...RAN, as just one example of ongoing activist innovations, would be a leader in developing campaigns targeting highprofile corporations...
...founders “thought that radical action might help the [Big Green groups] look more moderate and do better in Congress...
...A new group called the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) also appeared...
...What is more surprising is that Chavez himself saw unionization as a threat and acted to undermine it, ultimately crushing the very workers who had gained confidence and voice through their experience in the UFW and become leaders in their workplaces...
...Environmental Radicalism: The Extremes and the Earth MARK ENGLER TS:F EF!T L 2 MS RE A by Mike Roselle with Josh Mahan St...
...Without providing explicit analysis or commentary, Pawel’s narrative makes the case that Chavez’s lack of interest in establishing a wellrun union was the central factor in the UFW’s eventual weakening...
...Nor does Pawel give us the view of ordinary farmworkers, as they encountered the electrifying movement battles and the reality of union contracts...
...With a penchant for daring media stunts, Greenpeace would not only become an influential player in its own right but an important model for other radical groups that would rise to prominence a decade later...
...And finally, should movements demand sacrifice and unlimited commitment from activists or should they make it possible for those fighting for social justice to lead sustainable economic and personal lives...
...After being fingered as a mastermind, Bill Rodgers, a leading ELF activist who went by the code name Avalon, suffocated himself in his prison cell with a plastic bag...
...As long as the health of the public and the natural world are regarded as just two special interests among many, the process is doomed...
...And the book would benefit from more attention to the weight of gender in this story, especially Huerta’s role as a powerful and charismatic woman at the pinnacle of the movement (and an avid collaborator in the purges and the Game) and the impact of sexism in the daily functioning of the UFW, from macho swaggering and decision making by men to Chavez’s continual references to women as seducers and spies...
...The union is not La Paz...
...The big lessons of The Union of Their Dreams go to the heart of dilemmas faced by movements for social justice...
...I understood that I had been part of a purge, but I didn’t understand why the purge had happened or what it meant...
...He purged them from the union over a period of five years, from 1976 to 1981...
...Commenting on the Outside article, Roselle writes, “In truth… besides our bombastic rhetoric, we weren’t really that much different from the other conservation groups...
...While still maintaining its dissident disposition, the Center succeeded in getting a record 335 species protected under the Endangered Species Act...
...RARE II was designed to determine what portion of the remaining eighty million acres of national forests without roads would be protected from extractive industries...
...In the end, those who were purged from the UFW left in great confusion and pain...
...But Chavez and Huerta were wrong about how to sustain a union and forge a broader movement...
...The Pacific Northwest witnessed an unprecedented wave of forest sitins...
...Few areas were safe, and a grassroots response seemed more urgent than ever...
...A nowlegendary organizer, she made reaching out to loggers an important part of her forest radicalism...
...Douglas Bevington, in The Rebirth of Environmentalism, notes that “activists who had previously eschewed Earth First!’s tactics”—including former U.S...
...Such personal sacrifices, however, paid dividends...
...This was dramatically illustrated in May 1990, with what seemed to many like a repeat of the government’s 1960sera COINTELPRO program...
...A consideration of Big Green should also not underestimate the extent to which mainstream outlets that allow people to identify as environmentalists—even if only by sending a check or reading a glossy magazine— help build broadbased sympathy that is essential for grassroots activists trying to build community support for localized fights as well as for those trying to create a permanent progressive electoral majority in this country...
...Major demonstrations have also coalesced on the coasts...
...But they used more formal organizational structures to better raise funds and, most critically, to pursue aggressive environmental litigation...
...It is doubtful that an adequate solution to global climate change can be secured through the giveandtake political bartering of Big Green organizations...
...The high point of the ceremony was a slideshow put together by the most advanced class, setting out in English the students’ experiences and hopes for the future...
...But the story Pawel does tell is riveting...
...The notion that tree spiking was merely a publicity stunt that could generate constructive conversation was quickly dispelled...
...The campaign marked a shift away from isolated acts of monkeywrenching and toward mass organizing...
...This would detract time and attention from seemingly bigger and more important battles of the sort Chavez relished, and for which he was adept at strategizing and gaining widespread support...
...At least that is how a significant faction of progressiveminded environmentalists saw it, including some field organizers for the large national groups...
...When Cohen and his stellar legal team, which had played a key role in the union’s dramatic successes, insisted on an increase in wages (unlike other staff, lawyers were paid, but only $750/month) Chavez refused, despite significant support on the board for the lawyers’ proposal, and by 1981 the entire legal team had left...
...Activists formed grassroots biodiversity groups to attain these, providing courtside backup to ontheground mobilizations...
...The alternative will be for us to attempt to survive on a compromised planet...
...It is also used to justify violence against the entire movement...
...These are people who are trying like hell to get themselves a strong union...
...It is not surprising that growers throughout California continued to oppose the UFW, bringing to bear the combined force of police, courts, and hired thugs to oppose higher wages and a functioning union run by the workers...
...Over the following two decades, Earth First...
...But if it doesn’t work here, it won’t work anywhere...
...He has written widely on social movements and politics and received a MacArthur Foundation research and writing grant for his work on democracy and grassroots innovation in Brazil...
...I lived down the road from the UFW headquarters, a mountain retreat center known as La Paz, and the director of the union’s new school for organizers hired me to teach English there...
...The elements of the radical environmental movement that were effectively stopping logging, preserving wetlands, and protecting endangered species instead devised their own potent diversity of tactics—combining civil disobedience, coalitionbuilding, and publicity stunts with an embrace of citizens’ lawsuits...
...Thirty years later, Pawel’s meticulously documented book portrays the rise of the UFW and the mix of passion, solidarity, and organizing genius that enabled it to take on the largest agricultural enterprises in the country...
...Chavez was the first to see how the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, by offering guarantees for union organizing, would shift the work of the UFW from protest to administration, and he wanted none of it: “We don’t want to win elections anymore,” he told a key Catholic leader...
...one was last year’s Capitol Climate Action, which blockaded a coalburning power plant that provides energy to Capitol Hill...
...Here is Chavez in 1968, even before the first big UFW victories, talking about other farmworker leaders and prophesying the future: In a confrontation, I can beat them...
...Yet it seems clearly impossible within the confines of present politics to both appease all those lobbying in negotiations and broker a solution that meets the standards scientists tell us are necessary to maintain life as we know it on earth...
...The book presents pivotal 1960s and early 1970s moments in the UFW’s trajectory, from the initial strikes on the part of Filipino farmworkers in 1965, which spurred the nascent Farm Worker Association to action, to Chavez’s 1968 fast for nonviolence, which he carried on for twentyfive days and ended with Robert F. Kennedy at his side...
...Though at times it may seem a last line of defense, it ultimately polarizes the issue and alienates supporters...
...He was consistent over decades in his belief that campaigns for social justice depended on such organized force for their moral and political clout...
...Some of Earth First!’s earliest actions were flashy media stunts that took a page from the Greenpeace playbook...
...in came vegan cuisine, anarchism, feminism, and animal rights...
...In times when the very climate that supports life on earth is in jeopardy, the need for bold action that can effectively rally popular sympathy and convey a sense of urgency is greater than ever...
...The union ultimately broke apart over issues of pay and democracy...
...The ranks of the ALF and the ELF remained tiny...
...J W.R is associate professor of history at Boston University, where he is also research associate at the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs...
...In the spring of 1980, a small group of these organizers, including Dave Foreman, Bart Koehler, and Mike Roselle, took a camping trip to Northern Mexico...
...The group’s name was Earth First!, with an exclamation point...
...Today workers live in cars, shacks, and rundown barracks, and the UFW can neither organize farmworkers nor win union elections effectively...
...He describes spiking as more of a publicity ploy than an attempt at sabotage...
...They gambled that, by showing a willingness to make profound sacrifices, they could draw attention to a previously ignored outrage, convey its seriousness, and sway public opinion...
...I want to make this one thing clear,” he told the group in Chavez’s presence...
...This was to be one of many changes in the organization...
...The more we win,” Chavez said with regard to elections brought by the new law, “the weaker we’re going to get...
...Roads were blocked...
...They believed that organizers were “leading lambs to the slaughter” by subjecting recruits to violence at the hands of the logging industry...
...Rushmore to protest acid rain and through continued ocean actions against drift nets and nuclear tests...
...after all...
...Its slogan, “No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth,” was not just a rhetorical “Never Surrender...
...Still, it is not too harsh to agree that, for all the billions of dollars they have spent over the decades, the national environmental organizations should have a far more impressive tally of accomplishments than they do...
...Pawel’s nuanced analysis brings with it a sad truth most people don’t know: only a tiny percentage of California’s farmworkers are unionized today, and the pay and working conditions in most of California’s fields are as bad as they were in the 1960s, before the landmark struggle that captured the national imagination...
...activists had typically spraypainted spiked trees as a way of leaving a calling card and creating a deterrent against logging...
...That imaginative leap gave birth to the grape and lettuce boycotts, the national campaigns that urged consumers not to buy nonunion products, garnering thousands of fervent UFW supporters nationwide and bringing some of the most powerful U.S...
...But the very militancy of ecoradicalism’s nonviolence was in its activists’ willingness to expose themselves to the risk of violence and arrest...
...Three years after the boycott began, the growers of the Coachella Valley met the UFW’s demands...
...they also marked a cultural one...
...But the paid reps in the fields, including Lopez and Bustamante, did not go quietly...
...Chavez also insisted on sacrifice and total commitment, repeatedly refusing to pay union staff and saying, “We’ll organize workers in this movement as long as we’re willing to sacrifice...
...The novel, in fact, had a significant influence on Earth First...
...In response, Chavez acted to keep them from winning seats on the UFW board, outmaneuver their votes at the 1981 convention, and oust them from their paid posts...
...Their precompromised position was further diluted in negotiations...
...Chavez put it more bluntly, lamenting the “socalled democracy” in which the leader, as he explained it, must inevitably get rid of his strongest people because otherwise they will get rid of him...
...And I know how to do every fucking stab...
...Waves of animalrightsrelated arson continued through the late 1990s...
...In Roselle’s case, although he maintained longterm ties with Earth First!, he also cofounded the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) and the Ruckus Society and spent time on the staffs of Greenpeace and the Resource Conservation Alliance...
...Officers placed the critically injured Bari under arrest while she was still on the operating table...
...And it represented a highwater mark in terms of recruiting and radicalizing new organizers, who flocked to the group...
...Farmworkers received health services at governmentfunded rural health clinics, regardless of citizenship status or ability to pay, and the landmark Agricultural Labor Relations Act, achieved through a decade of struggle on the part of the United Farm Workers (UFW) movement, promised access to union representation for those who harvested the country’s fruits and vegetables...
...He concedes that the national groups have helped by fighting off some atrocious Republican attempts to gut environmental regulations, but he probably does not put as fine a point on this as it deserves...
...But by the time the paid reps won their case in court, they were long gone from the union, unable to find work in the fields, and the union itself was in shambles...
...The tape of a meeting of field office directors at La Paz reveals that Medina said the offending words in 1971, as he explained the importance of having workers take ownership of their contracts...
...Despite the fact that the two were leading proponents of nonviolence, the FBI was on the scene within minutes to accuse them of manufacturing the device themselves...
...Then I’ll do it again for some other reason...
...It would be just as accurate to say that Earth First...
...might not have been to blame: the trees being cut at the mill were second growth, rather than ancient wood being extracted from previously roadless areas...
...As the UFW amassed power through tactics of nonviolence and sacrifice—volunteers for the union worked night and day for no pay, just food and housing—the sale of grapes and Gallo wine plummeted, along with the public image of the companies that produced them...
...Its challenges promise to put the lessons gleaned from past environmental advocacy to the test...
...Indeed, differentiating union business from Chavez’s desire for a broaderbased poor people’s movement, and doing so in a democratic fashion, might have energized both struggles and provided a more sustainable path to the future...
...The union is in the field offices, where the people themselves are building it...
...Jerry Cohen, a twentysixyearold lawyer working for California Rural Legal Assistance, met union staff at Delano’s People’s Bar and offered advice in a freespeech dispute involving union protesters...
...In one 1981 protest, bannerunfurling activists rolled a giant “crack” down the face of Arizona’s Glen Canyon Dam, a perfect hook for news photographers...
...And The Union of Their Dreams clears up the mystery carried inside everyone who worked for the movement through the late 1970s and early 1980s, from lawyers and ministers to farm workers and volunteers...
...The money has got to go somewhere else...
...The meal ended quickly and awkwardly, the families dispersed, and the teachers from all three classes were ushered to a small table in a backroom office...
...Nevertheless, Roselle realized that the group was “facing a major PR disaster...
...If grassroots biodiversity groups were once best known for litigating on behalf of the spotted owl, Bevington remarks, they are now drawing more attention for standing up for the polar bear...
...Groves of spiked trees meant frustration and delay for timber companies...
...The extent to which these images seem familiar is a testament to the effectiveness of the radical environmental movement’s entry into the mainstream of American consciousness...
...In the end, the Forest Service, then being run by a former Wilderness Society executive, recommended that less than a quarter of the area in question be preserved...
...So Chavez and Huerta were likely right that the phrase in the graduation slide show was an attack on Chavez, placed as it was at the center of a gala public event at La Paz at a time when workers in the fields were challenging Chavez headon...
...Faced with the reality of the fields, he understood that farmworkers were not revolutionaries, as they were sometimes depicted in boycott activities in the East...
...The absence of democratic decisionmaking procedures in the UFW reinforced the tension between union and movement and made it impossible to debate these matters openly...
...Confronted there by Huerta, Richard Chavez, and Cesar Chavez himself, we were accused of being part of a subversive plot, railed at, called “chicken shit” by Cesar, and thrown out of La Paz and the union...
...Instead, they wagered that their goals would be met through a “campaign of maximum destruction...
...In 2005, the arrest of fourteen accused arsonists resulted in a highly unromantic scene in which ecomilitants scrambled to snitch on their fellow activists in order to avoid the draconian, thousandplusyear jail sentences the government had authorized itself to impose...
...But it fortified a multidecade campaign that drew wide support and resulted in the preservation of a substantial portion of Northern California’s Headwaters Forest...
...In her vivid description of the purges, as in many other parts of The Union of Their Dreams, Pawel makes spectacular and persuasive use of the tapes Chavez sent to the Wayne State University archives...
...This was an effort to create a mass, civilrightsstyle mobilization, but to stage it in Northern California’s majestic and imperiled backcountry...
...The direct action and public rallies of groups like Earth First...
...And I don’t think I want to do that...
...Meanwhile, it was the grassroots direct action effort that stopped logging in ancient forests, by spending day after day, year after year, blocking illegal roads...
...As Roselle recounts in his new memoir, Tree Spiker, one evening’s events included “a solemn ceremony where Dave, Bart, and several other former Wilderness Society field organizers who [had] recently quit burned their Wilderness Society patches in the fire...
...Some thirty years after they first appeared on the national scene, these grassroots environmentalists have defined for two generations what a resolute commitment to defending the natural world can entail...
...The book’s achievement rests in part on Pawel’s remarkable sources: six hundred hours of tapes Chavez made of UFW meetings from 1965 to 1980 and sent to the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University...
...Soon after lunch began, however, Huerta stood up to denounce an act of treason...
...Between classes, I passed Cesar Chavez as he strolled from office to lunch, and at celebrations I watched Dolores Huerta fly across the dance floor, projecting the allure and pleasure that accompanies immersion in a struggle for social justice...
...Tellingly, Roselle’s first words when he saw the news of the mill worker’s injury were, “Judi’s not going to like this...
...Pressure must therefore be brought to bear from the outside to change the existing political landscape...
...causing millions of dollars in damage, no person was ever injured—a record better than, say, the antiabortion movement...
...This did not harm the trees but made things dangerous for loggers, who risked damaging their saw blades and hurting themselves...
...They wore cowboy hats, guzzled beer, and tried to emphasize their workingclass bona fides in order to distance themselves from the effete, potsmoking hippy image that the public expected of environmentalists...
...The “Big Green” organizations in Washington, D.C., worked closely with the Carter administration on the survey...
...They kept silent because they could no longer work for a great cause and believed they would weaken it by speaking out...
...In the bright sun, families strolled from the school building to the dining room, congratulating the graduates and helping themselves heartily to the cafeteriastyle buffet...
...In the 2001 PATRIOT Act and the subsequent 2006 Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, the federal government explicitly defined the kind of attacks perpetrated by the ecoanarchists as terrorism...
...Though Big Green didn’t support the nonviolent protests,” Roselle writes, “they reaped huge benefits when saving oldgrowth forests became mainstream and profitable...
...When courageous strikes proved insufficient to challenge the strength of the California growers, Chavez looked outward to a country where protest and mobilization had gained unprecedented traction...
...Huerta demanded that the teachers identify the authors of the subversive phrase...
...Chavez savagely opposed the growing autonomy and initiative of the paid reps, the farmworkers who were elected by their peers to head ranch committees and do union business, from contract administration to organizing...
...The founding myth of these latter organizations begins in 1979, with an obscure Forest Service survey called the Roadless Area Review and Evaluation...
...In response, Coronado, along with two other activists, sneaked onto their decks under the cover of night...
...Given that Roselle entitled his memoir Tree Spiker, he admits to doing surprisingly little of it in the book and disavows the tactic relatively quickly...
...Corresponding with the cultural shift, some anarchists in environmental circles began to take inspiration from the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) in Britain, a country that has a wellestablished subculture of animal rights militancy...
...Martin’s Press, 2009, 272 pp., $24.99 O BB:R C ’W SA ’W by Dean Kuipers Bloomsbury, 2009, 320 pp., $25 TRE :G A SOP B by Douglas Bevington Island Press, 2009 304 pp., $35 In the forest, a protester Ulocks her neck to a bulldozer set to plow a road through an immaculate redwood grove...
...From the first strikes, Chavez infused the UFW with a religious sense of mission, embodied in his fasts and in visions of a selfsustaining, quasireligious order to nurture the movement at its core and expand the struggle...
...Many hundreds were arrested...
...Armed with such revelations, activists pushed national organizations such as the Sierra Club into adopting much stronger stances on ancient forests...
...agricultural corporations to the bargaining table...
...A strategy of property destruction free of naïveté would anticipate a hysterical response from the government...
...developed an arsenal of techniques—tree sits, lock boxes, tripods—for putting activist bodies on the line to blockade logging sites and inhibit ecologically invasive construction...
...Sent to administer contracts in Calexico in 1971, Medina turned his organizing skills, honed on the picket lines and boycotts, to making the union work, providing benefits for workers and order and predictability for growers...
...She was indeed furious about the news from the Cloverdale mill, and by the end of the 1980s, Bari brokered a notreespiking declaration among Earth Firsters in the state...
...Kuipers describes this view when he writes that Earth First...
...The union is not Cesar Chavez...
...A natural at understanding the needs of his fellow farmworkers and persuading them to picket and strike, Medina recounts the moment of pure joy he experienced with the union’s first election victory—indeed the firstever secretballot election for farmworkers in the United States—at the DiGiorgio ranch in Delano in 1966...
...One can imagine an It’s a Wonderful Life alternate reality in which grassroots activists, unrepresented against corporate influence peddlers, decide they need lobbyists in D.C...
...With his clear and persuasive missives, Hartmire galvanized a nationwide network of supporters, from key organizations of religious leaders to teams of sympathizers in cities and suburbs across the country...
...Other grassroots groups documented that the Forest Service lost money on its timber sales, sometimes running at a deficit of $1 billion per year—which represented a huge subsidy for the industry to exploit our public commons...
...Send them home and let’s start over...
...a statewide ballot proposition designed to protect oldgrowth areas was defeated that November...
...Thirtythreeyearold Chris Hartmire, who ran the California Migrant Ministry, joined Cesar Chavez in Delano as the first strike began and in short order put the ministry at the service of Chavez and the union...
...Having met while working in Wyoming, founders such as Roselle and Foreman called themselves “Buckaroos...
...One group profiled by Bevington, the Center for Biological Diversity, shrewdly used such funding to grow from “a handful of hippies operating off unemployment checks” in the early 1990s to a national organization in its own right...
...In fact, between 1988 and 1999 there was a 79 percent drop in logging in national forests, due in large part to both protests and lawsuits filed by activists rather than national groups...
...Judi Bari was a Northern California native, carpenter, ecofeminist, and labor activist...
...So what was going on at the English class graduation in 1979...
...In the 1980s and 1990s, a legion of what he calls “grassroots biodiversity groups” with names such as Wild Alabama, the Environmental Protection Information Center, and Heartwood were founded...
...It was a horrific sellout...
...Chavez didn’t agree with Medina that the union needed to be run by farmworkers...
...It involved driving long metal spikes into oldgrowth trees...
...Playing the Game, a harsh variant of the encounter group therapies popular in the 1970s, participants ganged up verbally and emotionally against one member, hurling brutal insults and criticisms, ostensibly with the goal of strengthening the group...
...Earth First!’s spiking days were coming to an end...
...Those Mexican American farmworkers who rose up to run the union in the fields—the real fruit of the twodecade UFW struggle and the core of an empowered new generation and democratic union—spoke back to Chavez and fought him even after they were told to leave, something that none of the Anglo lawyers, ministers, boycotters, and organizers chose to do...
...The graduation for the three English classes at the UFW school was a momentous event...
...The dam was widely viewed as an environmental monstrosity...
...As it turns out, they were the ones being led to the slaughter...
...The teacher of the advanced class refused, as did the rest of us...
...In a poignant final meeting in 1978, Medina laid out his ranchbyranch analysis of the area around Salinas, where he had been sent to organize, and the staff and budget he would need to carry out the task...
...In 1995, the Clinton administration caved to antienvironmentalists and signed the “Salvage Rider,” another tragic piece of compromise legislation...
...Trees were climbed...
...So what looked like democracy to outside observers—long hours of discussion at La Paz or workers voicing concerns and opinions at the 1973 UFW convention—was characterized candidly by Hartmire after that convention as “controlled democracy...
...I can beat them because they haven’t been around organizations, they don’t know how to stab each other...
...Shattered Dreams JEFFREY W. RUBIN T U T D 2 P , H , S C C ’ F W M by Miriam Pawel Bloomsbury Press, 2009, 384 pp., $28 In 1978, just after I graduated from college, I worked at a migrant health clinic in California’s San Joaquin Valley and saw what 1960s activism had achieved...
...But when the exposé did not provoke the prompt public backlash Coronado had hoped for, he vowed that he would return to liberate the animals he had left behind...
...Between 1998 and 2004, the ELF took credit for a rash of assaults on housing developments and SUV dealerships, as well as for fires that caused $20 million in damage to the Vail ski resort in Colorado...
...Rather, farmworkers were “just trying to make a living...
...Judi Bari and Redwood Summer did not only signal a tactical shift in Earth First...
...Throughout the UFW struggle, Chavez envisioned a movement that challenged the powerful through direct action in the streets and fields...
...Bevington reports that owing to protests, only half as much logging as had been expected took place...
...But once you do that, so you do it to save the union, then every time there’s opposition developing, boom, you get them . . . . In other words, I got to pull a Joseph Stalin...
...In the 1980s, it publicly shamed Burger King into stopping its purchase of rainforest beef, and later it won major concessions from Home Depot, Mitsubishi, and other businesses...
...Indeed, Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang depicted a band of ecosaboteurs conspiring to blow it up...
...At the end of the show, photos of Cesar Chavez, La Paz, and a farm worker in the fields came onscreen with a voiceover saying, “The Union is not Cesar Chavez, the Union is not La Paz, the Union is the farmworkers...
...A significant moment for ecoradicals in the United States came in September 1971, when Greenpeace famously sailed into the popular imagination by navigating its boat the Phyllis Cormack into a blast zone off of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands in order to stop a scheduled nuclear test...
...We have entered the age of global climate change...
...What, then, can we learn from the legacy of radical environmentalism...
...There were reasons to believe that Earth First...
...In 1990, Foreman publicly distanced himself from the group, claiming it had turned toward identity politics...
...Had Chavez been willing and able to delegate authority and relinquish control, then others could have run the union, and Chavez himself might have focused on building a broader poor people’s movement...
...By the time I do that, then I’ll be a different man...
...How do you balance internal democracy with the need for quick and effective strategizing...
...These covert enemies, Huerta explained, had inserted the words “The Union is not Cesar Chavez” in the slideshow as part of an effort to usurp the leader’s authority, and they needed to be named and expelled from the movement...
...In the courtroom, a scrappy legal team demands an injunction to protect the habitat of an elusive, endangered panther...
...How can extraordinary leaders be held accountable as they pursue visionary goals...
...Some of the deepest questions, such as why Chavez wouldn’t dedicate time and resources to building the foundations of a wellrun union, remain only partially answered...
...But not all the buzz about monkeywrenching was just talk...
...and the trust and frankness with which Pawel’s informants spoke to her, overcoming the shame of silence and defeat so she could tell this story...
...In 2004, an Oakland jury finally ordered law enforcement to pay $4.4 million in damages to the victims for their mishandling of the case...
...They could help stall a local development project...
...The Icelandic government, shamed by negative international publicity, declined to prosecute...
...There they came up with the idea for a new, grassroots organization that would be less respectful of Washington’s insider process and unafraid to employ confrontational tactics...
...But in the case of the ALF and the ELF, the activists were caught offguard...
...The purges and the Game worked in tandem, setting the stage for UFW members to turn on one another as Chavez dictated, even as they suspected or knew the trumpedup charges to be false...
...However, the UFW wasn’t functioning very well in the fields: the union’s hiring halls were inefficient...
...They then pried open valves that flooded the engine rooms and sucked the boats under...
...Aided occasionally by a few comrades, he engaged in the trashing or burning of a wide range of facilities connected to the fur industry, including research labs at Washington State and Michigan State Universities...
...Pawel recounts the story through the words and experiences of eight key participants—a minister, two lawyers, three Mexican American farmworkers, and two Anglo boycott volunteers—painting the big picture by providing the texture of individual lives...
...From the start, Earth Firsters worked to put a new face on the environmental movement...
...In the 1960s and 1970s, large national organizations such as the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Natural Resources Defense Council surged in membership and helped pass landmark legislation such as the Wilderness Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act...
...More than two dozen of them signed union contracts in the vast UFW meeting hall in Delano...
...What happened to make such a successful and inspiring victory for social justice end in bitter, drawnout defeat...
...It is not surprising that Roselle, a serious thinker about building organizational structures, was far quicker than Coronado to denounce property destruction...
...Up until that time, we had pulled a few stunts, blocked one road in New Mexico for a day, and staged a few relatively small demonstrations...
...Bevington uses the foil of the scrappy, minimally funded, and hugely effective grassroots biodiversity groups to slam the bloated Washingtonbased environmental lobby...
...At the same time, they have given rise to extreme factions that trash research labs in the name of animal rights, torch condo developments to combat sprawl, and, in the process, alienated wide swaths of the American public...
...They viewed the compromise as indicative of a fear of conflict and a blind commitment to insider negotiation that had developed inside Big Green...
...had an important place...
...In 1965, nineteenyearold Eliseo Medina witnessed the farm worker strike in his hometown of Delano and immediately signed on to the nascent organizing campaign taking shape there...
...Chavez saw in Synanon an efficientlyrun alternative community with lessons for the poor people’s commune he hoped to establish, and in the Game he sought a means to renew the commitment to sacrifice on which the union had long been based...
...The saboteurs’ accomplishments were dubious...
...These groups have once again tempered the outspoken criticisms they made during years of Republican rule in order to work with a Democratic administration on legislative proposals they see as realistic...
...It must be brought to bear by people who will be labeled extremists, but who are disciplined in their radicalism—committed to building everlarger coalitions of support and shifting the center of public opinion, while staying steadfast in their demands...
...Early media coverage, such as a 1983 Outside magazine article, portrayed the grassroots gang as a reallife version of Abbey’s posse, and Foreman published a book, Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching, that advocated acts of sabotage like pulling up surveyors’ stakes, downing billboards, and putting sand in the gas tanks of bulldozers...
...I went home distraught and scared...
...If some activists had exposed the movement, and themselves, to greater violence and repression, they did not derail grassroots campaigning as a whole...
...The polite young man, long in awe of Chavez, gradually realized that the visionary leader looked down on the workers themselves—for what he saw as their interest in money for their families, rather than broader social change—and did not share Medina’s conviction that the first task of the UFW must be to secure and administer decent contracts...
...Hippies chained themselves to bulldozers...
...Further movement coups included Greenpeace’s growth into one of the world’s most prominent environmental organizations through highprofile actions like dropping a gas mask over George Washington’s face on Mt...
...Within a few years, Coronado had taken his animal rights advocacy to dry land...
...field, offices were disorganized, and health insurance plans didn’t provide promised benefits...
...But when Medina brought his concerns to board meetings at La Paz, which he did repeatedly over years as a board member, they were belittled or ignored...
...He would later spend some five years in prison for these crimes, and ultimately he renounced ALF tactics...
...I guarantee that...
...The moment we stop sacrificing, we stop organizing...
...Pawel does not tell the union’s history from the perspective of Chavez himself, so the reader must piece together his view...
...There are traitors here who want to destroy Cesar,” she said with characteristic fierceness...
...In 1990, Coronado and his cohort had taken to calling Earth First!’s California campaign “Redwood Bummer...
...ME , a writer based in New York City, is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus and author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books, 2008...
...Some Earth Firsters did engage in tree spiking, a tactic that would create considerable controversy by the end of the decade...
...As Kuipers explains, after 9/11, FBI agents “routinely told the press that the ELF and the ALF were the numberone targets,” even though in hundreds of known actions in the U.S...
...A leading figure within this camp was Rod Coronado, now the subject of the book Operation Bite Back by L.A...
...On the seas a small, agile boat chases after a much larger whaling vessel to interrupt its hunt...
...In 1987, a mill worker in Cloverdale, California, was injured after his bandsaw shattered upon hitting what was thought to be a tree spike...
...We want to prove to you and everybody else that the whole thing stinks...
...She begins with the innovative strategies and iconic moments of the UFW’s rise to national prominence, then moves seamlessly to the conflicts the UFW faced in becoming a functioning labor union, from administering hardwon contracts to navigating Chavez’s utopian visions and authoritarian practices...
...As soon as the early grape contracts were signed, Chavez began to speak of a Poor People’s Union and farm worker cooperatives, endeavors he later asked Chris Hartmire to initiate at La Paz...
...Just before Redwood Summer, a bomb went off in a car being driven by Judi Bari and fellow organizer Darryl Cherney...
...turned away from his identity politics: out went the latent machismo of harddrinking, libertarianleaning Buckaroo culture...
...But others took up where he left off...
...Was the UFW to be a union or a poor people’s movement...
...The climate of fear and distrust worsened with the introduction of the Game, borrowed from the cultlike drug rehabilitation program Synanon...
...Because the groups ran on shoestring budgets, sympathetic funders were able to make a big difference with small infusions of cash...
...But legal injunctions were needed to secure lasting protections...
...It was also a pointed political reference...
...By the start of the George W. Bush years, “the Center was responsible for about half of all the wildliferelated cases handled by the government’s attorneys...
...That same year, Earth First!’s inaugural national gathering, a July 4 camping “Rendezvous,” drew about seventy activists...
...John Giumarra, Jr., the Stanfordeducated son of the grower known as the Grape King, outlined what was at stake, at a moment when growers and farmworkers alike were beginning to believe that agriculture in California would become a unionized industry: “If it works well here,” he said, “if this experiment in social justice as they call it, or this revolution in agriculture however you want to characterize it, if it works here it can work elsewhere...
...Activists from throughout the country would converge to take up nonviolent direct action to save the last unprotected groves of redwoods in the state...
...Already, new waves of direct action have swelled in Appalachia, as activists challenge the practice of mountaintopremoval coal mining...
...It was a way of focusing national media on a local environmental fight—of saying to the Forest Service, in Roselle’s words, “Let’s have a dialogue about these trees and what your buddies in Big Timber are doing on the public lands...
...It took years of campaigning for activists to counter public acceptance of the false charges of violence...
...And yet the negative impact they had on mass movementbuilding was profound...
...Coronado grew up in a bedroom community south of San Jose, California, but he was reared on family fishing trips and long hikes in the Sierras...
...And he maintained this line, preferring to fight grand battles against the system rather than to work within its new institutions, even at key moments in the 1970s when members of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board supported the UFW’s goals and were poised to work in its favor...
...Immediately after the passage of the ALRA, Chavez began to turn on his trusted supporters...
...In the final sections of The Union of Their Dreams, Pawel recounts the moving story of these paid reps through the activities of Sabino Lopez, an irrigator, and Mario Bustamante, a lettucecutter, both of whom became leaders of the increasingly selfconfident Salinas vegetable workers...
...They are the most moving heroes of Pawel’s story...
...Tactics of ecosabotage, on the other hand, were based on an entirely different calculus of how to produce social change—one that actively undermines strategies of nonviolent personal sacrifice...
...In Tree Spiker, he argues against it on organizing grounds: it “is corruptive, requires secrecy, and generally isolates its practitioners from the very people and places they wish to serve...
...In 1984, at nineteen, he joined the crew of the Sea Shepherd Society, mentored by its captain, Paul Watson, whose exploits trying to stop illegal whaling are now televised on Animal Planet’s popular TV program Whale Wars...
...In an effort to appear reasonable and moderate—and avoid being labeled as extremists by logging and mining lobbyists—the environmental groups recommended that only a portion of the forests be protected...
...He tried for a time to work as an undercover documentarian, capturing some notoriously gruesome footage of a fur breeder snapping the necks of minks with his thumbs before skinning them for their valuable pelts...
...Recognizing the contemporary power of claims for social justice, Chavez sent farmworkers who had never left their home state to organize consumer boycotts in Chicago and New York City with a few dollars in their pockets and the names of one or two contacts...
...One common interpretation of the relationship between grassroots radicals and established, national nonprofits holds that outside dissidents enhance the bargaining power of the “respectable” insiders, making them into more attractive bargaining partners for business and government...
...A decent living...
...Representative Jim Jontz and National Audubon Society vice president Brock Evans—“participated in civil disobedience for the first time...
...An early injunction won by grassroots legal efforts halted most oldgrowth logging in the Pacific Northwest between 1989 and 1994, famously shielding the habitat of the spotted owl...
...By mid1977, the Game was played weekly at La Paz, and almost everyone there joined in, along with union staff from around the state...
...But in the decades that followed, many—if not most—of the major environmental gains in this country have been the product of a more militant and countercultural strain of ecocampaigners...
...The total number of individuals involved could be measured in the dozens...
...Among the unprecedented gains of the successful strikes was the requirement that employers pay farmworkers to work for the union as paid reps...
...Two years later Coronado led a daring, effective action to sink two docked Icelandic ships...
...Research assistance provided by Rajiv Sicora...
...They believed the destruction of animals for fur or medical research should be ended using whatever methods necessary, including arson and sabotage...
Vol. 57 • March 2010 • No. 2
