Judi Bari - Career of Activism

Career of Activism

Bari began her activism early in her working career. After dropping out of college, she worked as a clerk at a local branch of a chain grocers, where she became a union organizer. At her next job as a mail handler, she organized a wildcat strike in the United States Postal Service bulk mail facility in Maryland.

She met Mike Sweeney while still living on the East Coast; after moving to Sonoma County, California, they married. As she was not working, she had the time to devote to Pledge of Resistance, a group that opposed U. S. policies in Central America.

In 1986, Charles Hurwitz acquired Pacific Lumber Company and doubled its rate of timber harvesting as a means of paying off the acquisition. This enraged environmentalists and drew attention from government agencies because of the use of junk bonds. Meanwhile, on 8 May 1987, a sawmill accident occurred that would come to affect Bari's life. A worker at the Louisiana Pacific mill in Cloverdale, California nearly died of injuries suffered when the mill's saw blade struck a spike in a log being milled. The steel turned the whirling blade into a storm of tensile shrapnel with a fallout of publicity. Earth First! was blamed for the spike, but cleared by police investigators.

After divorcing Mike Sweeney, Bari moved northward to Mendocino County. In 1988, she met Darryl Cherney and began a romantic relationship with him based partly on mutual political beliefs. She also joined Earth First! and participated in blocking loggers from their job sites. The blockaded woods became part of the Cahto Wilderness Area. In 1988, she also joined in demonstrations to protect an abortion clinic.

At the time Bari affiliated with Earth First!, environmentalists backed their legal suits and lobbying against perceived timber overcutting with blockades of job sites in the woods and tree sitting. In turn, loggers punched and shot at demonstrators, as well as running their vehicles off the road with lumber trucks. Timber cutters were known to topple trees in the direction of demonstrators.

To counter these tactics, and to widen the scope of their demonstrations against timber harvesting, Earth First! came up with the idea of Redwood Summer, protests inspired by the Freedom Riders of the civil rights movement. Bari was instrumental in this process of calling in demonstrators from college campuses across the United States Reactions to her lobbying tactics were severe, including a purported ramming of her car by a logging truck in 1989, as well as death threats.

In 1989, she used her labor union background to begin organizing timber workers against the corporations for which they worked. In line with her beliefs in nonviolent action, she harnessed the power of music as part of her demonstrations. She played the violin and sang her own original compositions. Her song titles and lyrics aroused controversy by usage of loaded language. Her song about tree spiking, Spike a Tree for Jesus is one example; Will This Fetus Be Aborted, sung as a counter-protest to an anti-abortion rally, was another. The resulting publicity tended to play down her commitment of non-violence; despite her disavowal of tree spiking and her espousal of civil disobedience, media portrayed her as an obstructionist saboteur. Bari's activism made her seem egocentric, humorless, and strident to some, and her tactics often not only rankled the timber industry and political establishment, but fellow environmental activists.

In August 1989, environmentalist protester Mem Hill suffered a broken nose in a protest confrontation with loggers in the woods. A subsequent legal suit not only accused a logger of assault, but claimed law enforcement did not protect her from attack.

By the following year, Mendocino County had been convinced that the public interest was best served by reclaiming for the public domain 300,000 acres of timber land from Louisiana Pacific. Ballot proposition 130, dubbed "Forests Forever", would come before California's voters in the Fall of 1990. It was designed to prevent over-harvesting of the state's timber. The logging corporations were strongly opposed to it. In response, environmentalists began organizing Redwood Summer, a campaign of nonviolent protests focused on saving redwood forests in Northern California.

On 9 May 1990, a failed pipe bomb was discovered in the Louisiana Pacific saw mill in Cloverdale.

On 22 May, Bari met quietly with local loggers to agree upon ground rules for nonviolence during the Redwood Summer demonstrations.