Butterfly's Ascent: Tree-Sitter's Redwood Gains Not Extensive
12/27/99
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Title: Butterfly's Ascent
Source: CounterPunch
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: December 27, 1999
Byline: Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
Under the clearest of north coast skies, four days before the winter solstice
and the brightest moon for the next hundred years, Julia Hill, aka Butterfly,
descended from her aerie in a redwood near Stafford, California, touching ground
for the first time in two years, to a worshipful welcome from her cohorts, who
call themselves the Circle of Life. Her way was prepared. Within 24 hours she
was in New York, speeding to a rendezvous with Good Morning America, with
Letterman lined up and other assignations with the press scheduled and brokered
in a business-like manner.
In the deal that brings Madame Butterfly back to terra firma, Hill agrees to pay
Pacific Lumber $50,000, culled from donations, t-shirt sales and book royalties.
In exchange, Pacific Lumber pledges that it won't log the Stafford Giant (which
Butterfly calls "Luna"), the 1,300-year old redwood that was her arboreal
hermitage for two years. Maxxam keeps the title to the land and only Butterfly
is given a "perpetual right to visit the tree".
The transaction is scarcely social in nature. Admittedly, they had a lot more
money but when the Rockefellers bought a redwood grove, at least it became a
public amenity.
The company also says that it won't clearcut within 200 feet of the redwood,
although it reserves the right to conduct salvage logging inside the so-called
buffer zone-all they were really able to do to begin with.
Every time money changes hands in the forests of Northern California Senator
Dianne Feinstein hovers, harpy-like, over the transaction. First, she sealed the
Hurwitz bail out scheme, giving the corporate raider $480 million for the core
Headwaters grove, along with a green light to log the hell out of the
surrounding landscape. Feinstein called it a win-win solution.
But the only winners were the senator and her husband's buddy, Hurwitz. Not only
did Hurwitz get a hugely inflated price for Headwaters, but the deal also makes
it nearly impossible to protect lands outside the core Headwaters area. Ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny, as the psychoanalyists say. This time we see the
process in miniature, with Butterfly paying her own ransom. "I am very pleased
this agreement has been reached," Feinstein said. "I've talked with all the
parties involved. I believe Pacific Lumber did the right thing. I am now hopeful
that the Headwaters agreement will be carried out. I believe that it is in the
best interest of old-growth forest and sustained-yield of timber." In other
words, let the logging commence.
The civil disobedience actions on Pacific Lumber lands near Stafford didn't
start with Julia Hill, but with Earth First!ers and local residents who feared
that logging on those unstable slopes put their community at risk of killer
landslides. On New Year's Day 1997, part of the logged over hillside above
Stafford gave way. Mud and rocks and stumps hurtled down on part of the town,
damaging or destroying more than 30 homes. The landslide originated on Pacific
Lumber lands. The company said the blow-out was an "act of God", offered the
residents $1,000 each for their loss and busily began planning the logging of
the remaining forest on the slope, including the stand containing the Stafford
Giant. On October 7, 1997, Earth First!ers began a tree-sit in the 300-foot tall
redwood. They were cheered by local residents of this logging community, a scene
that was repeated earlier this year in residents of the timber town of Randle,
Washington, where the wives and daughters of loggers baked dinner for tree
sitters on steep hillsides which Plum Creek Timber Company wanted to clearcut.
Julia Hill came along in the October of 1997, on a self-described journey of
spiritual discovery. Hill is the daughter of an Arkansas preacher. On August 18,
1996, she was in a terrible auto crash that laid her up for nearly a year.
Released from her doctor's care, Hill says she "headed West following my spirit
to an unknown destination." Her journey brought her to northern California where
she saw "the great majestic temple of the Redwood forest" for the first time.
"My spirit knew it had found what it was searching for," Butterfly writes. "I
dropped to my knees and began to cry, because I was so overwhelmed by the
wisdom, energy and spirituality housed in these holiest of temples." After a
night of prayer on the Lost Coast Hill had a revelation. God spoke to her and
told her that she should do what she could to save "the awe-inspiring" forests.
Hill says she returned briefly to Arkansas, "settled my lawsuit, sold everything
that I owned, said goodbye to the closest friends I ever had, and came back out
west determined to do whatever I could to be of help."
On December 10 she ascended the Stafford Giant a young woman, a dedicated seeker
with little background in the environmental movement. She expected to up there a
couple of weeks at most. The weeks turned into months, the months to years.
Along the way something happened. Julia Hill became Butterfly and she christened
the Stafford Giant, Luna, embodying it with a spiritual presence. "Luna and I
have become one," Butterfly wrote 79 days into her tree sit. "Luna and I, with
the amazing efforts of a wonderful support team, stand together in defiance of
the destructive practices of corporate greed and paid-off politicians. Luna is
our beacon of hope and truth. In all her majestic glory, she has become our
platform to the world." Two years later, Butterfly has come down a full-blown
mystic, the Gurdjieff of the redwoods. The fiery anti-corporate rhetoric had
been replaced by banal new age homilies and awful poesy.
It is impossible to demean the courage of Butterfly's vigil. Tree sitting is a
hazardous avocation. In the winter with high winds and driving rains it's an
especially dangerous business. Pacific Lumber also resorted to numerous
intimidation tactics, such as cutting down ropes tied to surrounding trees,
logging nearby lands with helicopters, setting security forces around Luna in
attempt to starve Butterfly out by keeping her from being resupplied.
Treesits, especially ones that last for more than a year, are hardly
ecologically benign forms of social protest. Had Butterfly's roost been
constructed on federal lands, it would have required a full-blown environmental
impact statement. In the swirl of hagiography, an important fact has been
overlooked: this is endangered species habitat. With all the action going on 180
feet up Luna, it's difficult to imagine spotted owls or marbled murrelets
nesting there. Still, that's okay, if the tree was to stand as an objective
correlative for the ecosystem, where the ecological integrity of that particular
stand could be sacrificed in the name of protecting the entire redwood
ecosystem. But that's not what happened. Indeed, the equation was reversed. Luna
was transubstantiated into a temple worthy of saving in itself because of its
spiritual merger with Butterfly. The rest of the ecosystem be damned. This is
exactly the kind of process that environmentalists have been trying to avoid for
years. It's not about spotted owls, we said. They are only a symbol for the
health of the ecosystem. But by protecting the owl, millions of acres of ancient
forest could be cordoned from the chainsaw. The protection of Luna yields only
Luna.
It's possible to recognize the bravery of an act of resistance and at the same
time remark its folly. Butterfly's 774-day sojourn was a foolhardy exile among
the arboreal titans, misbegotten and obsessive, amounting to a kind of
ecological fetishism.
We've never met Butterfly. But we've listened to her cell-phone sermons, read
her monologues from on high and her poems. Here's a sample from a poem called
"Truly Blessed":
Varying shades of green
raise their arms to embrace this magical beauty I climb to the top of my perch
reaching in to the heavens
raising my hands in absolute adoration
to the spiritual wonderment of Creation
Gary Snyder this is not. But Butterfly is articulate and telegenic. The photos
of her, wrapped in the redwood fogs, depict a woman of haunting beauty with
faraway eyes, like Falconetti's Joan d'Arc in Carl Dreyer's film. The
beatification of Butterfly probably began the day steelworkers hoisted Bonnie
Raitt and Joan Baez up to meet her in a scene worthy of the brush of a French
neo-classical painter. This, a kind of eco-tele-evangelism, is perhaps one
reason Butterfly became a national celebrity, while the less photogenic
defenders of Cove/Mallard and Warner Creek waged similar campaigns to an
indifferent (if not hostile) press.
Pacific Lumber wanted Butterfly to sign an agreement that she wouldn't seek to
profit off her experience on their lands. She objected and the company relented.
But Pacific Lumber got its point across. How many stylites (pillar-sitting
mystics) signed book contracts? Now there is talk of a movie in the offing, with
north coaster Wynona Ryder, the skin-and-bones actress from Petaluma, slated to
play Butterfly.
But what is the message here? In the wake of her deal with Maxxam, Butterfly has
said that Maxxam had taken "an unprecedented, courageous first step towards
ending the timber wars. Their initiative in this agreement and covenant
symbolizes hope that a new era of peace and cooperation has begun between the
timber industry and environmentalists--between corporations and communities."
If the high priestess of Luna now says that Maxxam is all right, who could argue
with her without being called a heretic? Well then, let us be heretical. This is
the same company that has ravaged the redwoods, ripped off its workers' pension
fund and looted a savings-and-loan. Now, once again, they are being paid not to
destroy the environment. And what do we tell those steelworkers, with whom
environmentalists have lately made a fruitful alliance? The 3,000 men and women
that Charles Hurwitz has locked out of Kaiser Aluminum plants in Washington,
Iowa and Ohio. It's going to be a meager Christmas for those workers and their
families and we don't think Butterfly's blessing of Maxxam is going to sit very
well with them. Indeed, it tends to confirm every worst prejudice they had about
"tree huggers."
We shouldn't blame this turn of events on Butterfly, so much as the organuizers
who allowed her to stay up the tree for that ridiculous period of time. After
all, they could have got her down in speedy fashion, simply by telling her that
they wouldn't be reprovisioning, and were sending up another sitter. But
Butterfly was their Ace in the Hole, the title of a good movie years ago, when
Kirk Douglas acts a reporter who realizes that the story will die as soon as the
man stuck down a mine shaft is rescued. Up that tree Julia was a valuable
commodity, and they didn't want to give it up.
The legacy of John Jr. and Laurence Rockefeller stack up pretty well next to
Butterfly. Yes, given their incomprehensible wealth their efforts on behalf of
the redwoods could be considered chintzy. Undoubtedly ego-driven-Laurence wanted
to know that his money had preserved the world's tallest tree (in Rockefeller
Grove) so badly that he was willing to let an even taller one be secretly logged
off in the Redwood National Park further north to keep his record. But at least
they bought up whole stands of trees, dozens of entire groves (with some
clearcut and high-graded lands mixed in). And they turned them over to public
ownership, in national and state parks. Certainly, this act of checkbook
environmentalism indirectly benefited the clearcutters, driving up the price of
Lousiana-Pacific, Simpson and Georgia-Pacific's holdings. But what the
Rockefellers bought was at least ours, open for anyone to hike through it and
marvel at. Butterfly's deal with Hurwitz is another story entirely.
Even worse, the deal reaffirms the hostage-taking mentality of corporate raiders
like Hurwitz, forcing enviros to buy endangered species habitat from
corporations to keep it from being destroyed. This is a doomed strategy that
will pad the pockets of corporations but do almost nothing to aid the
environment. At $50,000 per tree, it will take something like $3 trillion to
buy-back the rest of the threatened big trees in the Pacific Northwest. In other
words, the combined wealth of Bill Gates, Paul Allen and the Sultan of Brunei
couldn't save what's left of the ancient forests.
Many enviros-in-training, a startling number of them Catholics, have felt
themselves drawn to a particular breed of saint, the ascetics and eremites went
out into the wilderness for forty years to stand alone against the forces of
nature. One such was St. Anthony Aegyptus, about whom Flaubert wrote his
beautiful novella, the Temptations of St. Anthony. For thirty years Anthony
lived in solitude in an abandoned Roman battlement at Pispir in the heart of the
Sahara, standing on a tall pillar from dawn to dusk, staring into the eastern
reaches, awaiting revelations from above. He talked to lions, who helped him dig
a grave for St. Paul of Thebes and ravens, who brought him bread, his only
sustenance. The desert winds ate away his flesh; his open wounds became a host
for maggots, which, according to Athanasius' Life of Anthony, kept him from
succumbing to gangrene. Anthony returned to Alexandria in time to crush the
Arian heresy. In a small Gothic church in Tarcento, a village in northern Italy,
the sacristy, a tomb-like room made of thick blocks of rock hewn from the
Dolomites, contains the relics of St. Anthony: an ancient bell, a sliver of a
crucifix and a leathered strip of flesh said to be part of his tongue.
Decades from now what relics of Butterfly will pilgrims journey to Stafford see?
Her cellphone, Gore-Tex jacket and book contract? Certainly, Luna won't be
around. When the surrounding landscape is clearcut, this mighty redwood, exposed
to brutal winter winds and rain, will come tumbling, a $50,000 piece of blow-
down, whose meaning will be as inscrutable as that "colossal wreck". Shelley's
Ozymandias, an enigmatic, fallen statue in the desert sands. CP