The Secret Wars of Judi Bari: A Car Bomb, the Fight for the Redwoods, and the End of Earth First!
by Kate Coleman
261 pages, Encounter Books.
Available for only $13.97 from the FrontPage Magazine Bookstore.
For all its faults—and there are more than enough to fill Kate Coleman’s eminently readable new book, The Secret Wars of Judi Bari: A Car Bomb, the Fight for the Redwoods, and the End of Earth First!—the radical environmentalist group Earth First! was a proponent of truth in advertising. The group’s notorious rallying cry said it all: “No compromise in defense of Mother Nature!”
Few embodied the ideological rigidity of that cri de couer like the group’s legendarily volatile leader, Judi Bari. Born in 1949 to communist parents who once harbored the Soviet spy Morton Sobell, Bari seemed destined for the radical life.
Her college days at the University of Maryland were spent getting an education in labor union activism, and Bari fancied herself, on grounds more flattering than factual, a working-class hero of sorts: She was going to captain the working-class masses to revolutionary victory. In what would become a pattern throughout Bari’s activist career, the masses had other ideas.
Recounted in investigative journalist Kate Coleman’s crisp, Newsweek-style reportage, Bari’s life takes a particularly interesting turn in the early '70s. It was then that Bari, trapped in a loveless, wooden marriage, spied salvation in the ancient redwoods that dotted the Northern California countryside. Bari the eco-radical was born.
Coleman traces Bari’s rise through ranks of then-budding environmentalist group called Earth First!, transforming it from a ragtag jumble of delinquent pranksters, drug-dazed hippies, and back-to-nature enthusiasts, into a nettlesome cadre of professional saboteurs. No peace-loving flower children, the group’s adherents were raring to confront the hated timber companies—“corporate earth rapists” in Earth First! speak. Under the spell of what Coleman accurately dubs “half-baked revolution,” they were ready to cut down the “capitalists” at every turn.
The fruits of this radical fervor were the so-called “timber wars” that simmered in the hinterlands of Northern California in late 1980s. The reader runs up against Earth First!-organized roadblocks, illicit “guerilla plantings,” and “tree-sits,” a tactic popularized by Earth First! wherein an eco-warrior rappelled to the tops of virgin redwoods in a bid to save them from the loggers’ clutches. In a more violent vein, the “Earth Firsters” carried out several acts of “ecotage,” sabotaging logging machinery and severing power lines with no evident regard for the human victims of their arboreal fanaticism. It is a telling commentary on the radical environmentalist movement that the most storied incident of the timber wars, a car-bombing, nearly ended Judi Bari’s life. The culprit, Coleman persuasively contends in the book’s epilogue, was a disaffected environmental activist: Bari’s ex-husband.
More than the perennial rabble-rousing of Earth First!, the real draw of the book is, appropriately enough, Judi Bari. And as Coleman makes clear, Bari, who succumbed to breast cancer in 1997, was nothing if not a study in contradictions. There was Bari the devoted mother, who bitterly fought her ex-husband for custody of her children, but who didn’t think twice about exploiting her preteen daughters to score a political point. Bari the sober-minded strategist, who spent her nights in a crack-and marijuana induced haze standing beers in seedy bars. There was Bari the braless feminist, quick to hurl charges of misogyny at her male detractors, but who was not above flashing her “pendulous” accoutrements if it meant winning converts to her cause. There was Bari the Red-Book-waving, Mao-quoting champion of the proletariat whose eco-provocations aimed to rob working loggers of their livelihood, and who was so high on her own self-righteousness that she was genuinely shocked when the working class loggers resisted her efforts to lure them into the environmentalist fold. And there was the Bari who paid lip service to peaceful protest but who, as the evidence gathered by Coleman argues, attempted to arrange for the assassination of her ex-husband.
Notwithstanding the wilder claims of Bari’s devoted followers, The Secret Wars of Judi Bari is not the work of a green-hating anti-Barista with an ax to grind. In addition to being a self-described “leftist,” Kate Coleman has an unmistakable affection for California’s natural splendor.
Nevertheless, she does not shrink from condemning the excesses of Bari and Earth First! She brings a particularly sharp eye for the hypocrisies of the environmentalist faithful. Everything from their road trips to activist confabs in their less-than-eco-friendly vehicular clunkers, to their repeated efforts to cash in on their activism by bombarding logging companies with bad-for-publicity lawsuits is held up to harsh light.
Fittingly, Bari herself is the subject of the sharpest scrutiny. For all her strengths as an organizer, the Bari that emerges from Coleman’s tale is aggressive, paranoid, often selfish, and frequently cruel. So much so, in fact, that Coleman observes that her proclivity for tarring her anyone who dared to disagree with her as “fascists” and “FBI agents” (Bari was well read in Ward Churchill’s conspiracist oeuvre) may have alienated more environmentalists than it attracted. Bari’s incessantly confrontational nature, meanwhile, may well have sealed the fate of Earth First! by making the group synonymous with leftist extremism.
Perhaps more damningly, Coleman demonstrates that Bari’s commitment to Earth First! played second fiddle to her obsessions with her own legacy; even more than saving the redwoods, Bari seemed determined to realize the gleeful prediction of an Earth First! comrade that, with the passage of time, “eco-terrorists will be looked upon as heroes.”
Far more plausible is the epitaph is suggested by Coleman’s book. In the final chapter of her life, Coleman notes, “Bari had plainly chosen the role of martyr over the role of environmentalist.” Like her Earth First! cohorts, Judi Bari never did learn the value of compromise. Especially when it concerned her own place in radical history.
The Secret Wars of Judi Bari: A Car Bomb, the Fight for the Redwoods, and the End of Earth First! by Kate Coleman is available for only $13.97 from the FrontPage Magazine Bookstore.