On December 10th, 1997, Julia Butterfly Hill climbed up 180 feet into a 1,000 year old coastal redwood tree named Luna. She wouldn't return to solid Earth for two years and eight days.
Luna sits in Humboldt County, California, just outside the small logging community of Stafford. A year prior, a massive landslide hit Stafford, causing horrendous damage to homes and displacing many community members. An investigation into the cause of the slide described the role of vegetation in absorbing moisture and providing relative stability to the land, an area which had recently been clear-cut by the Pacific Lumber Company. All it took was one heavy rainfall for the mountainside to shed its unprotected layers of earth. Despite the recent catastrophe, the California Department of Forestry relentlessly approved a new plan, one that would clear-cut a nearby hillside and endanger Luna, the 1,000 year old Pillar of Earth.
Tree sitting is an act of environmental activism, involving one or more people climbing a tree to prevent it from being cut down. To cut it down—or to cut down those trees nearby—means threatening a life, the type of negative publicity logging companies would rather avoid.
Julia Butterfly Hill is the most well known of trees sitters, immortalized in her memoir The Legacy of Luna. From getting to know Julia through her own story, she is a woman of conviction and faith in her Creator. She doesn't use the word God, instead speaking of belief and prayer in refreshingly naturalistic terms, those which emphasize personal intuition and divinity found in the everyday experience. Julia paid attention to the world for omens and took action when they occurred. It was in this way that she found herself high in Luna’s canopy, with essentially no prior experience in environmental activism.
“Tree-sitting is a last resort. When you see someone in a tree trying to protect it, you know that every level of our society has failed. The consumers have failed, the companies have failed, and the government has failed.”
— Julia Butterfly Hill
Throughout Julia’s two-year standoff with Pacific Lumber, she endured physical, mental, and emotional hardship. She recounts the life-threatening storms and extended isolation (although she did have visitors), but spends much of the book focusing on the emotional weight of living so near to Luna, as well as becoming the face of an ongoing national headline. Few humans have ever grown so intimate with a singular tree—particularly one as grandiose as Luna—and through Luna, Julia felt the forest’s pain and pleadings for peace.
Every year the planet loses 10 million hectares (roughly 25 million acres) of trees, primarily to make space for crops and livestock and for the production of various paper products. 41% of deforestation can be attributed to the beef industry alone. In terms of emissions, deforestation contributes 4.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. From this perspective, a significant impact can be made by rethinking our relationship with meat, perhaps going a day or two each week with a protein substitute.
It may just be my social-media-less perception, but it seems as if activism of many forms have lost the non-violent radicalism I associate with decades past. March on Washington, Tank Man of Tiananmen Square, Ghandi’s Salt March and various hunger strikes, the self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức. These are what real social protests look like! I tell myself. Yet, am I merely romanticizing the power of a snapshot image, the frozen portrayal which comes to signify what are always more complicated events? I would guess yes, as well as admitting relatively little understanding of their broader historical contexts.
The news tells us things are worse than ever, just ticks away on a dwindling doomsday clock. Have the endless entertainments of modern life made us complacent with our downward spiral? Or, perhaps more likely, has the eroding existence of selling ourselves for a company’s profit finally sent us into a nihilist nosedive? Any chance for relaxation or leisure we then grasp, as the propaganda machine of Consumerism works behind the scenes, manufacturing our consent and ensuring we’re delightfully distracted.
Or have I just succeeded in outlining the existence of living as a white American? I know there are examples of peaceful activism throughout the last five years besides protests for the murder of George Floyd and the broader Black Lives Matter movement, but the fact of the matter is that the color of my skin and socioeconomic status allow me to avoid contention with these issues.
As I’ve learned more about this topic throughout the writing of this article, I now see that truly radical protests—the type described above, in which personal lives are risked—result from a lack of alternatives. It’s impossible for me identify with this reasoning, and to suggest that my newfound involvement in any matter will produce significant or newfound change creeps close to white saviorism. And so I genuinely want to know: what are my social and political responsibilities outside of continually pursuing knowledge and education? And for those who are protesting as a last resort, what comes next?
Down on the ground at the base of Luna, loggers from Pacific Lumber would try their hand at convincing, even scaring, Julia out of the tree. Loggers remained at Luna’s base for weeks on end, shouting insults and blocking other activists from resupplying Julia with vital resources. A logging helicopter was brought in, flying so close to Luna that the intense winds threatened to blow Julia out of the tree. Resistant to their efforts, Julia persisted in her values and attempted to communicate—possibly even connect with the loggers—through love and emotions, rather than hate. Frequent phone calls with John Campbell, the president of Pacific Lumber at the time, led him to actually visit Luna and Julia in person. A civil conversation ensued, setting the stage for a diplomatic resolution.
My hometown is engulfed in a local rift between those who’ve spent decades there and an incoming religious sect with some unfavorable beliefs. With any divisive issue, I don’t believe the path to progress involves animosity, contempt, or eventual violence. That’s easier said than done. Israel and Hamas are fresh on our shared consciousness; atrocities on both sides, without littlesemblance of de-escalation, and the saving of lives, anywhere in the mainstream. Global/regional conflicts are rarely so simple as to boldly assert “good” and “bad” sides.
On December 18th, 1999, Julia and her extensive team of supporters won (to an extent), as Pacific Lumber agreed to protect Luna and all other trees within a 200-foot buffer zone. Luna still stands today as an example of what just a handful of (white) humans can achieve.
I don’t mean to say that we should all devote our lives to a singular cause and forget all else—in many ways, Julia’s placement in Luna was a collection of serendipitous moments which can’t easily be replicated. My message, I think, is that in order to instill change, we must re-evaluate our priorities and willingly sacrifice—at the very least, our time—and use our voices to push on areas in which we seek improvement, for ourselves but more often for others. My own inaction falls heavy on my mind, as I’m concurrently inspired by Julia for her dedication of both time and physical safety—two years of life dedicated to a tree. To what lengths should we go to save a human life?
It seems we’re all eager (at least in my own social eco-chamber of sorts) to grasp on to a greater cause, if only someone would set an example. I believe such influence can be small—a conversation or shared book—and doesn’t require endangering ourselves or others. That the masses are controlled through propaganda is not a new idea, and the historical notion that this is dismissable, conspiratorial thinking has passed. The exploitative traits of social media algorithms should alone be enough to make one wonder what beliefs the will of a government can produce. Pursuing a free world means pursuing a free mind. I plan to continue reading and learning about the experience of people of color, for Julia acted out of choice—but what does it look like to act out of desperation?
“We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.”
—Walter Lippmann