FORTY-FIVE MILES east of Eugene, in a nine-acre patch of conifer in Oregon's Willamette National Forest, the Trolls and Ewoks are restless. Around a smoky campfire, with rain falling on a tarp overhead, a dozen of them hold a war council. They argue whether or not to dig up, yet again, the logging road that gives the U.S. Forest Service access to the forest. The clearing is surrounded by a dense undergrowth of head-high ferns and vines. Moss hangs like laundry from branches as the massive trunks of Douglas fir and hemlock disappear upward in the gloom. Wet and cold, faces smudged with soot and dirt, the Trolls look as though they've lived in this forest all their lives. Their dress is a mix of Zapatista and gutter punk, with camouflage pants, black hoodies, and bandannas to hide their faces from the "Freddies," their epithet for Forest Service officers. Ranging in age from eleven to sixty-three, they go by noms de guerre: Fungus, Swamp, Ferret, Coal, Lorax, Half-Pint.

It is the summer of 1999 and doing "road work" will bring in the Freddies, another round of arrests, and the confiscation of equipment. On the other hand, a confrontation will revive the Trolls' flagging energies, adding the thrill of battle to the trench-warfare ennui, self-doubt, and infighting that have set in since the Forest Service last "invaded" earlier in the summer. Most of the Trolls chain-smoke hand-rolled cigarettes and when a twig breaks in the forest, they shine flashlights out into the heavy darkness, hoping to spot a "Superfreddie," a quasi-mythical figure in flak jacket and night vision goggles sent by the Forest Service to spy on them. "I know you fucks are out there!" shouts a nineteen-year-old troll named Tangent. "You're never gonna cut down this fucking forest!" Swamp, a twenty-four-year old activist from Massachusetts who has lived in the forest for the better part of a year, is more realistic. "A lot of the time we think they're out there watching us when they probably aren't. But it's a constructive paranoia. It keeps us on our toes, " he says.

Frustrated by too much talk and too little action, a few Trolls slip off and spend the entire night with picks and shovels, digging a four-by-four foot trench across the road, deep enough to break the axle of any vehicle that tries to cross it. The next day a dissenting group will fill the trench back in. It is a typical outcome of group meetings here. "We never agree on anything, which means they never know what we'll do next," says Fungus age twenty. He is frying mushrooms he picked in the forest. He wants to train baby ravens to attack the color green that the Freddies wear.

Since April of 1998, this group of a few dozen protesters have occupied this area of the forest in Fall Creek, constructing a network of tree houses in the upper canopy in an effort to save ninety-six acres of old-growth trees from the sawmill. They call their tree village Red Cloud Thunder, after the last war chief of the Oglala Sioux. There are six two-hundred-foot-high tree sits in the main village, surrounding the end of the logging road and blocking heavy machinery from accessing the forest. The standard model for a tree sit is a "donut," a high four by eight platform around the tree that a forest service climber will not be able to get around to pull the sitters out. The sits are jerry-rigged out of scavenged plywood, rope, and tarps, and their height makes any attempt by the authorities to remove them all but impossible. The trees are connected through rope walkways, so an Ewok, as the tree-dwellers call themselves (distinguishing themselves from the Trolls on the ground), can move between all the sits without touching the ground. Each sit has enough food and water to withstand a two-month siege.

To the U.S. Forest Service, which maintains the federal government-owned land, and the Zip-O Sawmill lumber company, who paid almost two million dollars to cut its timber, the protesters are holding the forest hostage, and are little more than sociopathic vandals squatting on public lands. In the two and a half years of occupation, there have been over eighty arrests and thousands of dollars in damage to forest service property. The head of the Smokey the Bear statue at a nearby ranger station was hacked off in the middle of the night, the stump covered in red paint. "I guess now he knows what it feels like to be a stump," joked Tangent. Now a sign at the station bars entry to anyone wearing masks or bandannas. Sue Olson, public affairs officer of the Forest Service, is incensed. "Most of the people out there don't have a clue as to what they're protesting. Some of them are anarchists, with belligerent, atrocious behaviors. I'm talking about putting up barricades of logs across the road and covering them with human feces." None of the Ewoks deny the "shit-barricade" incident, but for many it seemed perfectly reasonable in the logical framework of defending the forest. "I hate to put it in terms of us and them, but they're the ones who want to clear out this forest and sometimes those tactics are necessary," says Swamp.

IT IS A GRUELING HALF-HOUR ASCENT, in harness, up a climbing line into the tree village to Yggdrasil, a tree sit named for the World Tree in Norse myth, which Lorax, a twenty-four-year old sitter, built in his first winter in the woods. Lorax, whose wild red dreadlocks riddled with fir needles are countered by pale blue eyes, was born in the Bronx and has worked as everything from a logger to a body piercer. He spent his first winter in Yggdrasil. The trees are massive, averaging 250 feet, with the blue tarps of the sits looking like kites tangled in their branches. From this height, the boundaries of the forest are clearly defined, and, a few hundred yards in any direction, the tree farms and clear cuts that surround the village are visible. The various sits are each occupied by one or two Ewoks, who shout to each other across the open clearing and pass food and supplies around through a network of pulleys. The Ewoks studiously ignore the dizzying height, walking around their sits without safety harnesses. Yggdrasil is outfitted with the necessities of life at two hundred feet: five gallon jugs of water, buckets of food (stale bagels, wilted produce, and expired yogurt -- mostly dumpster-dived or donated by health-food stores in Eugene), blankets, tools, climbing equipment, ropes, and piles of books ranging from The Hobbit to the Unabomber manifesto. There is a walkie-talkie attached to a car battery, which is charging off a solar panel at the top of the tree.

At any given time there are a half dozen Ewoks and a dozen or more Trolls who support them from the ground. The population is constantly in flux, many arriving from the streets of Portland and Eugene, angered at what they see as society's complacency at the destruction of the Northwest's forests. "When I came out here," says Lorax, "I just fell on my knees. I knew right then that I had found something I could fight for heart and soul. They'll cut these trees down over my fucking dead body."

Hazel, a twenty-eight-year old woman sitting in Kalima, a twenty-minute traverse from Lorax's sit, is as well-informed and eloquent a spokesperson as the Ewoks could ask for, but she doesn't apologize for the more radical elements of the village. "Some people think that anarchism just means 'Fuck You.' It's really about a process and respecting other people. We're here as much to establish a culture of resistance as to save these trees. And we've become radical even among radical activists, coming up with new ideas rather than reusing formulaic tactics. But really it's not that radical," she says looking out through the towering fir trees toward the logged areas on the perimeter of the village, "when you think that they want to cut all this down." She was trapped up in a tree for a week during one Forest Service closure, an armed guard at the base of her sit. "I was a prisoner of conscience," she says, "But I knew we were right and that was the most free I've ever felt."

TREE SITTING, PERHAPS BEST KNOWN through Julia "Butterfly" Hill's two-year occupation of a Northern California redwood, is increasingly common in the Pacific Northwest. The campaign of the Red Cloud Thunder village is the enfant terrible of the movement. Unlike Butterfly, a former model turned activist who used her sit as a soapbox and became something of a media darling, the denizens of Red Cloud Thunder feel deeply ambivalent about the media and public opinion. "Good PR and freedom fighting don't always go hand in hand," says Lorax. Having put themselves at the periphery of society, Lorax feels, a chief difficulty is getting people to understand what the Ewoks are doing and why. "I know this can only be won in the court of public opinion, so we're waiting for people to get up and voice their opposition. The hard part is, how do you get people to give a fuck when what we're doing out here is so far from their reality? And how can we go back and tell them?" It is a common sentiment among the Ewoks: The longer they stay in the woods, the more alienated and suspicious they become of mainstream society; any car that makes it up to the village will quickly find itself surrounded by a group of masked anarchists holding shovels and picks like a scene out of Children of the Corn. There is something of the existential hero in their attitudes, simultaneously feeling that it's a lost cause and having no choice but to fight for it. For the time being, the Forest Service has elected to stay away, leaving the tree village more or less alone, which actually makes it harder for the Ewoks to function. "Waiting for something to happen, for them to come in and try to log, makes a lot of people edgy, so we fight among ourselves from anxiety," says Lorax.

Beginning with Earth First! in the early 1980s, activism in the Northwest has centered on the fight to save the last five percent of old-growth forests from logging, with varying degrees of success. In the redwoods of northern California, a decade-long battle to save the Headwaters redwood grove culminated in a 480 million dollar publicly-funded buyout to Pacific Lumber/Maxxam owner Charles Hurwitz. It was a deal that many activists saw as amounting to ransom. Julia Butterfly's tree sit ended in December after she paid Pacific Lumber $50,000 to preserve the redwood she had occupied for two years. "Paying someone to not cut down trees is just a sell-out, plain and simple," says Lorax. In 1998, a year-long road blockade by Earth First! at Warner Creek, Oregon, led to that forest being saved. Another tree village, Growl and Howl, was cut down by the Forest Service when the occupants came down in a storm. When the ninety-six-acre Clark timber sale was bought by Zip-O in early 1998, Dean "Dirt" Rimerman, one of the founders of Red Cloud Thunder, filed a series of public complaints. But the sale was slated to proceed, and the first sit went up in April of that year. "We saw it as the last line of defense between the forest and the logging company," says Rimerman. The campaign has since evolved into a training ground for many of the nine other tree sitting campaigns that have sprung up in the last two years in the Northwest.

While the roughly six million feet of board slated to be cut at Red Cloud Thunder are a mere blip in the billions taken annually from national forests in the Northwest, the Ewoks see their crusade as crucial. "What else are we going to do?" asks Lorax. "We're standing up to them, getting in the way. If it wasn't for our presence this forest would be lying down." The Forest Service's Olson won't give them credit. "It wouldn't necessarily have been cut yet. Zip-O is still within their contract duration." Zip-O's contract, originally set to be completed by the end of this year's logging season, has been given two extensions, until the summer of 2002. According to the Forest Service, those extensions are "market related adjustments," giving Zip-O the opportunity to wait for an upturn in the depressed timber market. And while Zip-O has refused any comment to the press about the protests, their Eugene yard, piled high with old-growth logs, shows that they have plenty of other work to do while the Ewoks have tied up their ninety-six acres. Rimerman shrugs off the notion that free market economics rather than tree sits are keeping the forest standing. "They can believe whatever they want, but it's two years and they haven't made their cut yet."

In fact, most of the victories of the forest movement have occurred outside the forest. Direct action works to bring attention to a cause, but lawyers end up cutting the deals. The Ewoks, though, are deeply mistrustful of governmental double dealing. "Legislation is always about compromise," says Rimerman. "We already compromised ninety-five percent of our forests. There's no more room for it." Little has been done legislatively to give the Ewoks faith in the process. Clinton's 1994 Northwest Forest Plan was offered as a solution between environmental and timber interests, preserving some forests while allowing others to be cut. The tree village falls into the so-called "sacrifice zone." Although the Forest Service follows a relatively strict set of environmental protocols, the Ewoks see no room for cutting old-growth trees.

The fate of federally owned timberlands has the potential to be radically altered by the upcoming elections. George W. Bush blamed the forest fires that decimated six million acres in the West this past summer on a decade-long decline in logging, and would seek to lift restrictions in logging federal lands. Gore has supported the designation of new national monuments and a ban on road building in roadless areas of the national forests (a crucial first step to any logging operation). Bush, while interested in rescinding the wilderness and monument designations of the Clinton administration, claims not to know the extent to which the president can "unscramble the egg." He has also received a million dollars in campaign financing from the timber lobby. Many of the activists at Fall Creek find Gore's policies to be the lesser evil, but don't expect the government to halt public-lands logging operations; only Ralph Nader has promised a moratorium on logging in National Forests. Regardless, most of the Ewoks have little or no faith in the capacity of government to rally to their cause. So they have retreated to the trees and taken the matter into their own hands.

THE STANDOFF UNDERSCORES a chief dilemma for the Forest Service: The timber interests think they're environmentalists and environmentalists think they're rapists. Congress won't fund them, so they lose nearly a billion dollars a year subsidizing logging on public lands. "We're expected to be all things to all people," says Forest Service public relations officer Patti Rodgers, and in the Ewok mythos, they make a perfect enemy. Rodgers sees the problem as a failure to communicate. "I wish they would see that there is more to life than their opinions. I've wanted to go out there and sit around the fire with some homemade pie and cookies and try and be real human beings with each other. But I think we're past that. That's their village, their culture, and it's not a culture that welcomes the U.S. Forest Service. There's no leader who could speak for them, because they are a very transient population. These are runaway kids, these are throwaway kids. They can be dangerous, nasty, and violent."

There have been plenty of confrontations for Rodgers to base this assertion on. Accusations and counteraccusations have been common: The Ewoks claim the Forest Service used a bulldozer to ram an occupied tree, nearly shaking out the occupant. While insisting that never happened, the Forest Service claims the sitters poured jugs of urine on them, which the Ewoks deny. The eighty arrests in the campaign's history have been on charges ranging from blocking a government road to felony assault on a federal officer (a charge that was later dropped), and violent encounters at other environmental protests have lent to the tinderbox atmosphere. According to press reports, eight protesters in Elaho Valley, British Columbia were hospitalized when a group of one hundred loggers attacked their camp. In 1998, a twenty-four-year old protester named David "Gypsy" Chain was killed when a logger felled a redwood on him. Bruce Gainer is the Forest Service's chief law enforcement officer in dealing with the situation. When asked how it's possible to safely get a person out from two-hundred feet up in a tree when they don't want to go, he dodges. "We'll carry that out in a very safe way. But I'm not gonna tell you what that is."

Many of the Ewoks fear that sooner or later one of them is going to be killed. "Everyone out here is ready to give their lives for this forest. But we don't need any more martyrs. Gypsy was enough. A dead activist can't fight anymore," says Swamp. While no one has been seriously hurt at Red Cloud Thunder, the dangers of tree sitting are ever present. A sitter in California fell eighty feet from a traverse line, shattering his pelvis. One woman did fall off a platorm in the village in the dark, but by a quirk of fate she landed on another platform ten feet below. "That tree just grabbed her out of midair," says Lorax. This reflects not only the physical danger of tree sitting, but the widely held belief among the Ewoks that the trees are sentient beings. "It's difficult to make people understand that we see these trees as fundamentally equal to us," says Lorax.

The Ewoks have an array of defenses in their sits: mace, girth-stoppers (long poles to hold down a climber's chain), even a super-soaker loaded with cayenne pepper. And as a homemade form of biological warfare, some of the sitters are ready to dump their shit buckets on the heads of anyone trying to climb up. "They can't get us out." says Lorax, "Not even Climber Dan. He hog-tied a girl in Northern California and lowered her to the ground. Of course, she was a nonviolent protester. We have a self-defense clause."

Climber Dan, a.k.a. Dan Collings, is a logger for Pacific Lumber in Humboldt County, California. At forty-two, he's been climbing after people in trees for twelve years. He estimates he has taken fifty sitters down from trees, usually by taking their food and gear and starving them out. He is a mythological creature to the Ewoks, able to skirt any manner of defenses. He has never gone up against the Ewoks, and when he hears about their tactics, he is unenthused about the prospect. "If they called me and said, 'Here's five-thousand dollars just to see what you could do,' I'd do it. But the first shit bucket that came rolling down, I'd probably decide that that wasn't enough money." So is there anyway to get them out? "If you want to play shitty, I'll just dump a truckload of tires at the base of the tree and light 'em on fire. They'll come down in a big fucking hurry."

Nevertheless, Collings doesn't think the situation should escalate. "They're bullshit, but what would I want to splat someone all over the ground I don't even know for? It's just a tree. They can stay up there until they're old and gray and collecting social security they never paid on for all I care."

Despite Gypsy's death, which devastated many of the tree sitters, they haven't changed their tactics or the risks they're willing to take. Indeed, Rodgers is more worried about the Ewoks than they themselves are. "Sometimes those trees just blow over. And what do you think would happen if one of those kids fell? They're dead. What do you think they would do in their little anarchist culture? When I hear a kid saying 'I would give my life for this tree,' I think, 'You don't have a life yet, you don't know what life is. What are you giving?'"

In a fittingly strange denouement, the cavalry riding in to end the standoff may come in the form of a two-inch-long nocturnal rodent, the red tree vole. These upper-canopy voles, a favorite crudite of the threatened spotted owl, are themselves threatened, and in September 1999, a federal judge signed a temporary hold on logging the trees of the Clark timber sale until surveys are done to see if the vole lives there. The catch is, nobody ever actually sees the voles, so their presence must be determined by looking for their nests. And despite the hold, the Ewoks have no intention of coming out of the trees unless the sale is completely canceled. "We know if we left the trees now, they'd cut the ones we'd occupied down just for spite," says Lorax. Indeed, one tree, named Joy, was cut down when it was left unoccupied, and lies in the forest as a grim reminder of what they are fighting for. Bruce Gainer won't say what he will do if they left the trees, but the Ewoks aren't willing to take any chances. "Our foot's in the door, and we can't take it out," says Lorax. And that's exactly where their collective foot has remained for the last year. The Ewoks and Trolls maintained the tree sits through the snowstorms and high winds of the Oregon winter.

Today, the standoff continues in the treetops, while Hazel spends much of her time harassing the Forest Service to conduct the red tree vole surveys as thoroughly and accurately as possible. "The best thing would be for them to find such overwhelming evidence of the voles that the sale would be canceled. We'd like nothing better than to come out of the trees," she says. Lorax agrees: "What the Freddies don't understand is that that's when we win, when we can take the sits down and leave the forest alone. And go find another one to defend."

Matthew Power is a freelance writer. He lives in the South Bronx and has written for Spin, Blue, and Discover.

Photos by Basil Childers.

Share your thoughts on radical environmental activism in the Loop.

FEED Lo-Fi Home | FEED Hi-Fi Home | Search | FEED via Email | Community

©2000 FEED Magazine