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Tree Spiker: From Earth First! to Lowbagging: My Struggles in Radical Environmental Action

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Mike Roselle and I have been pals ever since we both found ourselves in Bay Area Earth First! back in 1985. Mike asked me to make a video for Redwood Summer and to organize the official Redwood Summer road show. For all of these years I've followed his amazing series of planet changing campaigns, and I've always been a big admirer of his cleverness, intellectual brilliance, and strategic genius. He's General Roselle of the Timber Wars to me. So when I got his book I devoured it in a day.

First, it is extremely well written. Mike has never been real big on public speaking, leaving the rabble rousing to his cohorts, like fellow co-founder of Earth First! Dave Foreman, so Mike's eloquence might surprise some. Mike has always been a hang out, drink beer and chat behind the scenes kind of guy. Then suddenly, you find him blast out like a bull to shut down logging and mining roads with a couple of friends by doing nonviolent civil disobedience road blockades. Or maybe you might find him crawling around the face of Mt. Rushmore helping his Greenpeace colleagues hang a banner and a gas mask on George Washington.

But there is so much more to this hero of the forests than just in-your-face direct actions. And it does take a book to paint the picture. In fact, my only real complaint is that the book is too short. Although it is sort of written like an autobiography, it's really just a memoir of the high points of his career, a sort of Greatest Hits (to the resource extraction industries). It begins chronologically, but when Mike leaves Wyoming for southern Oregon in 1983, the chronology gets cut-up. The book switches gears and each chapter looks at the history of a different campaign or series of campaigns Mike started or was instrumental in making happen. These chapters are amazingly concise, yet powerfully evocative. When I finished the book, I had the experience of just finishing a whirlwind tour of the world, from reading just a few pages. Mike (and co-author Josh Mahan) are the best Earth First! writers since Ed Abbey. They may even be better than Abbey. This book never gets ponderous or self-indulgent. Every single word matters. Every story counts, just as every remaining stand of Old Growth forests still counts.

I was surprised that Mike pulled some punches. There are some big holes in the story, which is why it can't really be considered a full autobiography. If you knew Mike in EF! you'd be surprised to find not a single bad word for Dave Foreman in the whole book. The story of Mike's complaints with the Earth First! Journal staff, and the arguments that led to Dave Foreman and the staff resigning from EF! is missing. So is the entire $3 million F.B.I. COINTELPRO against Foreman and the others of the Arizona 5. Mike's separation from his wife Karen Pickett is mentioned only in the context of Mike describing his connecting up with his next girlfriend-activist partner. But he never talks about marrying Karen! You read that she is his fiance, and the next you know, they are separated! So the Direct Action Fund they started up to help lowbagger activists with phone, photocopying, gasoline and food money for their proposed campaigns isn't in the book. This fund even helped activists in Poland.

I would have liked to know about the NAGs (Nomadic Action Groups) that were formed in the Oregon timber campaigns, and the Vegas to Barstow race. Unexplainably, Mike even omits explaining anything about what a lowbagger is, or what his [...] web site is all about.

This isn't an Earth First! history in any way either. Actually, it's more like being an EF!er. You intermittently drop in on an action or show up at a Round River Rendezvous, but you have no sense of continuity for the movement itself. But this isn't a weakness of the book. There is so much crap that has happened in Earth First! over the last thirty years, that an attempt at comprehensiveness could very easily become tedious. This book is NEVER tedious! I'm sure Mike just thought that material too arcane for the general public.

Ironically, in writing his memoirs, Mike has written a book for right now and for the future. You see, I think Mike wrote this book for us, as a kind of handbook hidden in history. You get deeply into Mike's strategic thinking on each and every campaign he describes, especially as the book wraps up and he takes on the 1999 Seattle WTO occupation and the formation of the Earth Liberation Front. And damn, if Mike's assessments of both of those events isn't full of surprises.

Mike has more activist tools in his toolkit than almost anyone (and it contains no monkeywrenches or tree spikes anymore!). Although Mike has dropped in and out of Greenpeace over the years-and again, surprisingly, he is generally effusive in his praise for the organization-Mike does not have any bureaucrat genes. Instead, he assesses the ecological and political plight of a situation and designs a tool for the tasks at hand (e.g. he forms a new group). He is the founder or co-founder of Earth First!, Rainforest Action Network, The Ruckus Society and now Climate Ground Zero, but he leaves the bureaucracies, and even the personal fame he could get by being the guy always behind the microphone, to others. Usually, to younger people on the rise. But unlike many in EF!, he isn't working out his personal baggage in his activism. He is a pragmatist. Everything he does in activism is to get the job done. Mike has never, ever, forgotten that he works for the planet, and that his fight is the fight for continued evolution. He wakes up, as do I, every morning feeling the disease of accelerating planetary ecosystem devastation. But instead of pulling his blankets back over his head like most of the rest of us, he plans how he's going to kick corporate butt that day, and he goes out and does it. And then, at days end, he goes out for a beer or a joint, that is, unless he's in jail for an action.

What you get with this book as Mike describes each action, is a collection of collective empowerment stories. You learn how NOT to screw things up, and you get a whole mess of strategy fodder to consider for how to design powerful, effective grassroots politics right now. When you put down the book after reading the last pages, I bet you'll have a strong yearning to go out and buy your bus ticket to West Virginia to join up with Mike and his Mob to fight Mountaintop Removal Mining.

So what are you waiting for? Buy the book, and copies for all of your activist friends for birthday/holiday/Earth Day gifts, and then get out to West Virginia. We have no more time to wait. The Climate Crisis is upon us at full speed. The heroes we've been waiting for are us.

I became acquainted with Mike Roselle more than 20 years ago. But it seems like only yesterday. At the time I had just moved to Oregon and was doing volunteer work for National Audubon. We had begun the first old growth inventory and mapping project on the National Forests, an essential task the feds somehow had neglected -- even as they proceeded to liquidate the last 5-10% of the ancient forests.

I needed some seed money -- at the start of that project -- and Mike stepped up and delivered big time. Soon we were deep into the stand exam data and ortho photos, and within three years had completed the project. The maps we developed were digitalized, and have since become an essential part of the GIS data base. They are used every day by wildlife biologists and conservationists. I want to extend a personal thank you to Mike for being there -- and for answering the call. I would bet that many others have similar stories to tell about him.

I recommend Mike's memoir to everyone who cares about our fragile and increasingly endangered planet. Mike's adventures on behalf of the earth make for excellent reading. It's a rich book, and a page turner. The book fills in many gaps. Mike was personally involved in many of the big battles, from Redwood Summer to the fight to save Cove-Mallard (Idaho's last big roadless area), to the current campaign to stop the mountaintop strip mining in West Virginia. I really like Mike's discussion of tactics versus strategy, and his thoughts about civil disobedience. We are entering desperate times, and as Mike writes, this very desperation can make us very powerful, that is, IF we have the guts to embrace it.

TREE SPIKER is all about courage. My only regret is that the book is too short. Hopefully Mike will add some additional chapters to the next edition.

Mike Roselle is a co-founder of the San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network, Earth First!, and the Ruckus Society. Tree Spiker details his life as an environmental activist and outsider agitator. In his acknowledgments, Roselle notes that this book doesn't completely cover the movement or even his memories, but that we should think of it as "a series of campfire tales and late-night bar talk." And that's exactly how it reads: like sitting next to a great storyteller and hearing his fascinating experiences.

Anyone living in the West, or anyone even remotely interested in the environment or environmental groups, should read Tree Spiker. When I looked at the gothic-like cover with spooky trees and horror writing yellow font, I wasn't sure how much I would like it. In college I read Edward Abbey's books and found Hayduke's slovenly sexism and tossing aluminum cans out car windows unattractive, and I figured Roselle would be more of the same. But then I read he spent part of his childhood in Butler County, Kentucky, where a billboard with a picture of three hooded Klansmen burning a cross welcomed people to Klan country. That intrigued me, but Roselle hooked me with:

"I heard a rumor that my father, Stewart Lee, was in town. I hadn't seen him since my step-grandfather chased him out of our house with a pistol he kept for that purpose. The last time I saw him, he was running down South Eighth Street toward the bars on Magnolia Street."

Not surprisingly, Roselle's friends were the few black students brought in to desegregate his high school, and his activism started with protesting the Vietnam War and for legalizing marijuana with some women's liberation and gay rights sprinkled in. Aside from the environmental organizations Roselle helped create, he also worked as an outside agitator for groups such as Greenpeace. But don't let that outside agitator label fool you. Roselle excels at finding loopholes, irritating people, and being stubborn, but not at destruction. He practices peaceful non-violence. As Roselle says, "it takes more courage to sit in front of a bulldozer than it does to burn one."

He doesn't paint that `us and them ideology.' He's someone you can have a conversation with. Even when it seems clear who is on which side, people surprise, from the police officer who arrests Roselle without handcuffing him and then offers him coffee from his thermos and banana bread his wife had baked, to Roselle's former co-workers who engaged in destructive anarchist activities. That doesn't include the illegally logged mahogany floating down the Amazon past the Greenpeace office in Manaus, or the steak dinner with Costa Ricans whose meat Roselle had helped ban in the United States. Even former President Clinton manages to surprise and disappoint with his Salvage Rider that allowed logging in federally protected roadless areas.

If you think of environmentalists as kooks who break the law, Roselle offers an excellent rebuttal: "Illegal logging is not just an issue in the rain forests of the Amazon and Africa. It happens every day in America...There is a reason environmental groups win most of their lawsuits. The timber companies are breaking the law."

Roselle shows some horrifying examples of the US Forest Service trying to open up roadless areas for deficit timber sales. The taxpayers pay to build roads so that private corporations can make a profit logging public land. The cost of building the roads doesn't include the cost of the damage to the environment, how this damage impacts the surrounding communities, or how these communities fare once the timber companies leave, because they aren't practicing sustainable forestry like they claim. Not even the ancient Romans were able to enforce their forestry laws and because of it, they eventually ran short of timber and water.

Throughout Tree Spiker Roselle shares some of the entertaining and disheartening moments from his life as an activist, and there are mentions of the beautiful wild places that we have already lost. Towards the end, Tree Spiker devolves into more of an ideological argument and lecture, but by then we're ready to hear it. Still, Roselle roots his points in concrete circumstances and people. He wants us to hear him, especially those who disagree. Roselle doesn't like protests because they are "more parade than protest, more speech than action, a convergence of the believers, by the believers, for the believers."

Anyone living in the West knows what a complicated relationship we have with our landscape. The beauty attracts most of us, and yet the pioneers settled the land, changing it from something wild to a place that was habitable by their standards. We all want to lead nice lifestyles and not be left behind financially or developmentally from the rest of the country. But often the corporations and government policies are not doing what's best financially for the community, and are not maintaining a sustainable environment. It shouldn't just be the rebels and hippies speaking up and fighting for the land. We should all put Earth First, before it's too late. So pull up a seat at the bar, or next to that campfire, open up Tree Spiker and spend some quality time with Roselle. You'll end up entertained and, hopefully, a little wiser, and maybe even ready to stand in front of a bulldozer.
[...]

If you are looking for a nuanced, difficult to digest analytical discussion of recent and current approaches to environmental politics and action and the underlying ecological thought that informs that movement, then look elsewhere; Tree Spiker is not the book for you. This was not a jargon laced, put me to sleep treatise, but instead was a fun read that taught me some things about the environmental movement.

Mike Roselle and Josh Mahan weave stories into more than a memoir, into something more like an elder sitting you down over a few nights and talking with you. Tales of successes and mistakes, anecdotes that made me laugh aloud, and sage advice are brought together in an easy to read narrative.

From adventures with an ill fitting gas mask intended for George Washington on Mount Rushmore to confrontations with Mahogany Pirates, Tree Spiker will keep you entertained while giving you some pointers on how we all can fight to save the Earth. Get the book. Read it, then go to [...] and find what Mike Roselle is up to now.

Tree Spiker helps to fill in the gaps of environmental history in the U.S., much of which has not been recorded in books. Roselle describes various environmental actions over the years that have been carried out on the frontlines by groups such as Earth First! and Greenpeace. For example, Roselle was there when Woody Harrelson climbed the Golden Gate Bridge to hang a banner. Rosselle also shares his opinions regarding the effectiveness of using violence: "It takes more courage to sit in front of a bulldozer than it does o burn one."

"spikes trees (a form of protest in which metal spikes are hammered into a tree trunk to make the tree harder to cut down)."

Call it what it really is, an attempt to maim or kill a logger. When a chain saw blade hits metal, it can come apart sending shrapnel flying like a grenade went off. Mike Roselle belongs in prison.