On December 10, 1997, Julia “Butterfly” Hill climbed to a platform 180 feet above the ground in a giant redwood tree she called “Luna.” She didn’t come down for two years. Here’s why she did it.
THE GOOD
For 118 years, the Pacific Lumber Company logged the largest privately owned old-growth redwood grove in the United States, a stand of ancient trees up to 360 feet tall, 15 feet in diameter and up to 2,000 years old. P.L., as the locals in Scotia, California, called the company, began in 1863 with 6,000 acres of timberland. By the 1920s, the company had 65,000 acres and, with 1,500 employees, was the biggest employer in Humboldt County. By the time Stanwood Murphy became company president in 1931, the Save the Redwoods League of San Francisco was already very vocal about the need for preserving the ancient redwoods. Murphy listened and made a revolutionary change to his business: P.L. would no longer clear-cut its holdings (standard practice at the time), but would adopt a “selective-cut” system of logging. This meant that the company would cut no more than 70 percent of the mature trees in a stand, leaving enough younger trees to hold the soil and to seed a new generation. Murphy never allowed more trees to be cut than the forest could replace in a year.
Murphy and his heirs were hailed for their sustainable logging practices, as well as for their treatment of P.L. employees. The company provided the loggers affordable housing, health and life insurance, a pension plan, and, by the 1960s, scholarships for their children. According to Warren Murphy, the last Murphy to run Pacific Lumber Company, “We were the good guys. It was fun, it was easy—it was a great life.”
In 1985 a Texas billionaire and corporate raider named Charles Hurwitz attempted a hostile takeover of the family-owned Pacific lumber. On September 27, the takeover became official: P.L. was now a subsidiary of Hurwitz’s company, Maxxam Inc. of Texas…and life in Scotia changed forever.
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Maxxam Inc. now had a massive amount of acquisition debt: $800 million. New CEO Hurwitz decided to make some radical changes of his own. After announcing to P.L. employees his version of the Golden Rule—“He who owns the gold, rules”—he sold off the company assets, drained the $60 million pension fund and adopted a new logging policy: Clear-cut the redwoods as quickly as possible. Hurwitz made no secret of his plan to eliminate all of the ancient redwoods on P.L. property within 20 years. As the 1,000-year-old trees began to fall at an alarming rate, environmental groups protested. When they filed suits to stop the logging, Hurwitz responded by speeding up his operations, resorting to illegally clear-cutting hundreds of trees in an old-growth grove known as Owl Creek. He only had a permit for thinning the grove, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials maintained a presence there to ensure that Hurwitz stayed within the law. But the government agents only worked on weekdays, so Hurwitz’s loggers went into the forest on weekends and holidays and took down as many trees as they could…as fast as they could.
Environmental groups were up in arms. Earth First!, Save the Redwoods League (formed in 1918), the Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters, EPIC (the Environmental Protection Information Center), and the Sierra Club all joined forces. Thousands attended rallies in San Francisco and across Northern California. They staged sit-ins at the company’s offices and marched through local timber towns protesting P.L.’s clear-cutting practices. But in the end, the demonstrations did little to slow the logging, so the protesters went to the groves and became activists. Some chained themselves to trees (hence the term “tree hugger”), others chained themselves to bulldozers; still others locked their arms together with steel bands to form human walls across access roads to stop the logging trucks.
In September 1987, they added a new tactic to their arsenal: two activists—code-named “Tarzan” and “Jane”—climbed a pair of redwoods that had been marked for destruction…and sat in them. If the loggers felled those trees, they could be charged with murder, so for the time being no one was going to cut them down. It was the first successful tree-sit.
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Ten years later, in October 1997, Julia Hill wandered into the Earth First! base camp in Stafford, California. The wide-eyed 23-year-old from Arkansas was anxious to do her bit to save the redwoods. In 1996 she’d nearly been killed by a drunk driver, and she spent most of the next 12 months in rehab. “As I recovered,” she later wrote, “I realized my whole life was out of balance.” A road trip out west brought her to the redwoods, where she’d had an almost religious experience while visiting a grove of the silent giants. “My spirit knew it had found what it was searching for,” she said, and she resolved there and then to do whatever she could to save the trees. An activist who went by the name “Almond” sized her up, then said they needed someone to tree-sit “Luna,” a 1,000-year-old redwood that Pacific Lumber had marked for felling with blue paint a few months earlier. So far the activists had prevented Luna’s destruction by rotating tree-sitters in and out of it, but they’d run out of volunteers. Without hesitation, Hill said, “I’ll do it.”
Over the next few days Hill got a crash course in the art of tree-sitting. Almond told her tree-sitters usually stayed up in the tree for three to seven days at a time, depending on their tolerance for cold, hunger, and threats from loggers. Volunteer ground crews hiked in food, water, and supplies, and packed out trash (including personal waste). Every rotation and every supply delivery required the ground team to sneak past P.L. security guards and Humboldt County deputies in the middle of the night. Almond advised Hill to take a “forest name” to protect her identity. Other tree sitters had names like Cedar, Geronimo, Blue, and Zydeco. What was hers going to be? Hill thought back to when she was seven and hiking in the Pennsylvania mountains. A butterfly had landed on her shoulder and stayed with her for hours. She chose “Butterfly.”
Before she knew what was happening, Julia “Butterfly” Hill found herself standing at the base of the giant redwood, staring up. She’d never even climbed a rock before, much less a 200-foot tree. Now she was being strapped into a climbing harness and, after a quick lesson on how to tie knots, about to scale the equivalent of an 18-story building. She swallowed her fear and began to climb.
For the second part of Hill’s story, go to page 261.
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