California: Wings of a `Butterfly' Offer Feeble Protection for
Redwood Ecosystem
12/24/99
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: Wings of a Butterfly Offer Feeble Protection
Source: Los Angeles Times
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: December 24, 1999
Byline: ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Dec. 18, Julia Hill, a.k.a. Butterfly, descended from her aerie in a
redwood near Stafford, Calif., touching ground for the first time in
two years. In the deal that brought 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 not to log the Stafford Giant (which Butterfly calls
"Luna"), the 1,300-year-old redwood that was her arboreal hermitage
for two years. The company also says 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.
The civil disobedience actions on Pacific Lumber lands near Stafford
didn't start with Julia Hill, but with Earth Firsters 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 collapsed 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 Oct. 7, 1997, Earth Firsters began a tree-sit in the 300-foot-tall
redwood. They were cheered by local residents of this logging
ccommunity, a scene tha was repeated earlier this year by residents
of the timber town of Randle, Wash., where the wives and daughters of
loggers baked dinner for tree-sitters on steep hillsides that Plum
Creek Timber Co. wanted to clearcut.
Julia Hill came along that same month on a self-described journey of
spiritual discovery. The young woman--a dedicated seeker with little
background in the environmental movement--ascended the Stafford
Giant. She expected to be 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," investing it with a spiritual presence. "Luna and I have
become one," Butterfly wrote 79 day into her tree-sit. Two years
later, Butterfly has come down a full-blown mystic, the Gurdjieff of
the redwoods with the fiery anti-corporate rhetoric replaced by banal
spiritual homilies and indifferent poesy. It is impossible to demean
the courage of Butterfly's vigil. Tree-sitting is a hazardous
business. Doing it in the winter is downright dangerous, with high
winds and driving rains.
Pacific Lumber was not slow to resort to intimidation tactics, such
as cutting down ropes tied to surrounding trees, removing logs from
nearby lands with helicopters and setting security forces around Luna
in an attempt to starve Butterfly out. Nonetheless, tree-sits,
especially ones that last for more than a year, are scarcely
ecologically benign forms of social protest.
In fact, had Butterfly's roost been constructed on federal lands, it
would have required a full-blown environmental impact statement. In
the whirlwind of hagiography, an important fact has been overlooked:
This is endangered-species habitat. With all the action going on 180
feet up in Luna, it's difficult to imagine spotted owls or marbled
murrelets nesting there. Still, that's OK, 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. The protection
of Luna yields only Luna.
What is the message here? In the wake of her deal with Maxxam--the
Houston-based corporation that owns Pacific Lumber--Butterfly said
that Maxxam had taken "an unprecedented, courageous first step toward
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? So, let us be
heretics.
This is the same company that has ravaged the redwoods, ripped off
its workers' pension fund and looted a savings and loan.
And what do we tell those steelworkers, with whom environmentalists
have lately made 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."
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.
And when the surrounding landscape is clearcut, "Luna," exposed to
brutal winter winds and rain, will tumble, a $50,000 piece of blow-
down whose meaning will be as inscrutable as Shelley's Ozymandias,
that fallen, enigmatic statue amid the desert sands.
Alexander Cockburn Writes for the Nation and Other Publications