Judi Bari
Judith Beatrice Bari was an American environmentalist, feminist, and labor leader, primarily active in Northern California after moving to the state in the mid-1970s. In the 1980s and 1990s, she was the principal organizer of Earth First! campaigns against logging in the ancient redwood forests of Mendocino County and related areas. She also organized Industrial Workers of the World Local 1 in an effort to bring together timber workers and environmentalists of Earth First! in common cause.
Bari suffered severe injuries on 24 May 1990 in Oakland, California, when a pipe bomb went off under her seat in her car. She was driving with colleague Darryl Cherney, who had minor injuries. They were arrested by Oakland Police, aided by the FBI, who accused them of transporting a bomb for terrorist purposes. While those charges were dropped, in 1991 the pair filed suit against the Oakland Police Department and FBI for violations of their civil rights during the investigation of the bombing. A jury found in their favor when the case went to trial in 2002, and damages were awarded to Bari's estate and Cherney. Bari had died of cancer in 1997. The bombing has not been solved.
In 1999 a bill was passed to establish the Headwaters Forest Reserve under administration by the Bureau of Land Management. This protected of mixed old-growth and previously harvested forest. It was a project that Bari had long supported.
Early life and education
Bari was born on November 7, 1949, and was raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, the daughter of mathematician Ruth Aaronson Bari, who became a recognized mathematician, and diamond setter Arthur Bari. Her parents were Jewish and Italian in ancestry, respectively. The elder Baris were both active in left-wing politics; they advocated for civil rights and opposed the Vietnam War. Judi Bari was the second of three daughters; her older sister is Gina Kolata, a science journalist for the New York Times; and younger is Martha Bari, an art historian.Although Judi Bari attended the University of Maryland for five years, she dropped out without graduating. She said that her college career was most notable for "anti-Vietnam War rioting".
Bari began working as a clerk for a chain grocery store and became a union organizer in its work force. At her next job as a mail handler, she organized a wildcat strike in the United States Postal Service bulk mail facility in Maryland.
Move to California, marriage and family
Bari moved to the Bay Area in Northern California, which was a center of political activism. In 1978 she met her future husband Michael Sweeney at a labor organizers' conference. They shared an interest in radical politics. Sweeney had graduated from Stanford University, and for a time in the early 1970s had been a member of the Maoist group Venceremos, which had mostly Chicano members. He had been married before.In 1979, Bari and Sweeney married and settled in Santa Rosa, California. They had two daughters together, Lisa and Jessica. The couple divorced in 1988 and shared custody of their children.
Political and conservation activities
During the early to mid-1980s, Bari devoted herself to Pledge of Resistance, a group that opposed US policies in Central America. She was a self-proclaimed virtuoso on the bullhorn. She edited, wrote, and drew cartoons for political leaflets and publications.Around 1985, Bari moved north with her husband and two children to the vicinity of Redwood Valley in Mendocino County, California. It was an area of old timber towns, such as Eureka and Fortuna, and a new wave of hippies and young counter-culture adults who migrated here from urban areas.
In 1986, Houston millionaire Charles Hurwitz acquired Pacific Lumber Company, with assets in Northern California, including in redwood forests. He doubled the company's rate of timber harvesting as a means of paying off the acquisition cost. This enraged environmentalists. The federal government also investigated the transaction because of Hurwitz's use of junk bonds. Activist protests against old-growth timber harvesting by Pacific Lumber became the focus of Earth First! in the following years.
On May 8, 1987, a sawmill accident occurred at the Louisiana Pacific mill in Cloverdale, California. Mill worker George Alexander nearly died of injuries suffered when a saw blade struck a spike in a log being milled, generating shrapnel. Adverse publicity resulted.
Earth First!, which at that point still promoted "monkeywrenching" as part of its tactics, was blamed by the company and some workers for the spike because of incidents of equipment sabotage that had taken place in the vicinity where the log was harvested. But responsibility for the spike was not determined. However, it was later confirmed that the prime suspect in the case was not an Earth First! activist but a local "disgruntled" landowner.
The bad publicity from the incident resulted in Earth First! disavowing tree spiking.
In 1989, Bari was instrumental in starting Local 1 of the Industrial Workers of the World, which allied with Earth First! in protests against cutting old growth redwoods. Bari used her labor organizing background to run a workshop on the Industrial Workers of the World at an Earth First! rendezvous in California. Through the formation of IWW–EF! Local 1, she sought to bring together environmentalists and timber workers who were concerned about the harvest rate by the timber industry. She believed they had interests in common.
That year, Bari organized the first forest blockade, to promote expanding the South Fork Eel River Wilderness, managed by the US Bureau of Land Management. Related to her other interests, that year Bari also organized a counter-demonstration to protect a Planned Parenthood clinic in Ukiah.
Many timber workers believed that the environmentalists were threatening their livelihoods. At this time, environmentalists were backing their legal suits against timber overcutting by staging blockades of job sites in the woods and tree sitting. Loggers saw such actions as harassment. Confrontations between loggers and demonstrators were often heated and sometimes violent. Reactions to Bari's involvement in the protests were severe: her car was rammed by a logging truck in 1989, and she received death threats.
In August 1989, environmentalist Mem Hill suffered a broken nose in a protest confrontation with loggers in the woods. She filed a legal suit accusing a logger of assault, and claiming law enforcement did not protect her from attack.
Bari emphasized non-violent action and began to incorporate music into her demonstrations. She played the fiddle and sang original compositions by Darryl Cherney, who played guitar. Sometimes she sang her own songs. Their song titles and lyrics aroused controversy, as many listeners considered them offensive. Cherney's 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 media portrayed her as an obstructionist saboteur. Some activists and area residents found Bari to be egocentric, humorless, and strident. Her tactics often rankled not only members of the timber industry and political establishment, but fellow activists.
Differences emerged between Bari and her husband over their political paths and diverging lives. He headed a recycling company in the county. They struggled to reconcile political action with the obligations of parenting. In 1988, with a divorce between herself and her husband underway, she met Darryl Cherney. They began a romantic relationship based partly on shared political beliefs, and appeared together at various protests.
In 1990, the Sierra Club withdrew its support from legislation amending California Forest Practice Rules and moved forward with a process to establish a Headwaters Forest preserve on Pacific Lumber Company land. They submitted a voter initiative, Proposition 130, dubbed "Forests Forever." The timber industry was strongly opposed to it. In response, environmentalists began organizing Redwood Summer, a campaign of nonviolent protests focused on slowing harvest of redwood forests in Northern California until such forests gained extra protections under Proposition 130. They named their campaign in honor of the 1964 Freedom Summer of the Civil Rights Movement. Bari was instrumental in recruiting demonstrators from college campuses across the United States. But on November 6, 1990, Proposition 130 was defeated by California voters, with 52.1% against. Opponents emphasized the disruptive activities of Redwood Summer, which interfered with timber workers, and the support of Earth First! for Proposition 130. It had been accused of sabotage and violence against workers in the past.
During organizing for Redwood Summer, Bari directed efforts in Mendocino County, and Cherney went on the road to recruit activists. Bari had local connections and a rapport with some lumber industry workers that was developed during her organizing efforts of an IWW local. While recruiting, Cherney was kept at a distance, so that his reputation for advocating sabotage and propensity for hostile outbursts toward timber workers could not damage the campaign.
On April 22, 1990, a group called Earth Night Action Group sabotaged power poles in southern Santa Cruz County, causing power outages. Upon hearing of that incident, Bari reportedly said, "Desperate times call for desperate measures," and "So what if some ice cream melted?" Observers interpreted her statements as approval of sabotage, and thought Earth First! might still be involved in such activities. A provocative flyer was publicized that had been written by Cherney: he called for "Earth Night" actions, and it featured images of a monkey wrench, an earth mover, and figures representing saboteurs in the night. Cherney said the flyer was facetious. The identities of members of the Earth Night Action Group has never been established; their relationship to Earth First! was a matter of speculation.
On May 9, 1990, a failed incendiary pipe bomb was discovered in the Louisiana Pacific sawmill in Cloverdale. A hand-lettered sign, saying "L-P screws millworkers", had been placed outside the mill. Responsibility for the bomb was never established.
On May 22, 1990, Bari met with local loggers to agree on ground rules for nonviolence during the Redwood Summer demonstrations. In the early afternoon of May 23, 1990, Bari started a road trip to Santa Cruz to organize for Redwood Summer and related musical events. She stopped for a press conference in Ukiah and for a meeting at the Seeds of Peace collective house in Berkeley.
That night she stayed overnight in Oakland, at a house near MacArthur and Park boulevards. On May 24 she and Darryl Cherney drove away from the house, and a short time later a bomb exploded beneath her seat. She suffered severe injuries and Cherney suffered lesser ones.