Press Release – Mendocino Commentary, March 17, 1988
Armed with 400 redwood and Doug fir saplings, an army of 17 Earth First!ers marched onto Maxxam / Pacific Lumber property Sunday, March 6.
But, as opposed to the confrontational methods of previous Earth First! protests against MAXXAM, which placed demonstrators 150 feet high in redwoods to prevent them from being cut down, these protesters came to heal the wounds of previous battles. They came to plant trees.
Accompanying the tree-planters on their expedition was NBC National News. Perhaps the most important thing Earth First! was able to highlight for the news team was the unsuccessful replanting performed by a Maxxam / Pacific Lumber crew. Nearly all the saplings were dead. This didn’t surprise Earth First!, however. Absence of topsoil, compaction of the earth, and erosion were prevalent. The 47-acre clearcut, located in the watershed of Booth’s Run Creek, 15 miles south-east of Eureka, resembled a moonscape.
Booth’s Run Creek was the staging area for history’s first aerial redwood occupation on May 17, 1987. The story broke national news and set the stage for two subsequent successful tree occupations in late 1987, where Greg King and Jane Cope, aka “Tarzan and Jane”, perched 150 feet above the forest floor for seven days, and then for five days in two different groves.
Maxxam / Pacific Lumber Chief of Security Carl Anderson joined the tree planters late in the day, asking them to leave, but not before all 400 saplings had been planted. Earth First!ers conversed cheerily with Anderson as he escorted them off the property. There were no arrests.
This was not the first guerilla tree planting conducted by Earth First! In 1986, 50 tree-planters representing a coalition of environmental groups planted 3,000 redwood saplings on the land of Georgia-Pacific in and around the Sally Bell Grove in the Sinkyone Wilderness. That area had also been the site of a previous Earth First! / Sinkyone Council direct action to stop logging.