When we left Julia “Butterfly” Hill (page 132), she was just beginning her two-year stint on a platform near the top of a 1,000-year-old redwood tree called “Luna” to save it from being felled by loggers.
NEITHER RAIN NOR SNOW…
Winter had already begun to settle in on the forest when Julia Hill climbed Luna on December 10, 1997. Her cold-weather gear consisted of a T-shirt, a thermal shirt, one pair of thermal pants, a wool sweater, a pair of wool pants, and a lightweight sleeping bag. Hats were a challenge; they kept getting blown away by the constant wind. Gusts of 70 mph tossed the platform around like a boat on a rough sea, shredded its tarp roof, and howled so loudly that she couldn’t think. It rained continuously, and storms would last for days. Lightning struck so close that the platform shook, the sky lit up like a neon sign, and Hill’s hair stood on end. She endured only one snowstorm that winter, but the chronic cold, combined with being constantly wet, gave her frostbite. At one point she broke a toe, but her feet were so numb she never knew it until she saw the toe turn from white to blue to black. The pain was excruciating. She took duct tape, cardboard, and toilet paper from her “medical” kit and wrapped it around her toe to form a makeshift cast, but from that time forward, her feet were in constant pain.
While Hill was struggling to survive the rain and cold, loggers from Pacific Lumber—whose livelihoods depended on cutting down trees—kept up a constant campaign of harassment. They hacked off the baby sucker trees growing out of Luna’s trunk, each blow of the ax shaking Julia’s perch. They felled nearby trees so that they crashed through Luna’s outer branches, nearly shattering Hill’s 4′ x 7′ platform. To keep her from sleeping, the loggers trained floodlights on her and blew bugles and air horns all night long. They hired a helicopter the size of a passenger plane to buzz the platform, creating 300-mph updrafts that nearly sucked her and a visiting reporter out of the tree. They tried to starve her out by preventing her support team from bringing food and supplies. And they hired “Climber Dan,” a former logger who specialized in taking activists out of trees by force. Climber Dan ended up cutting a traverse line connecting Luna to a nearby tree while “Almond,” who was helping Julia tree-sit for the first few months, was on it. Almond would have plummeted 100 feet to the ground if a branch hadn’t broken his fall.
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Hill never intended to stay up in Luna for more than a few weeks. “But two weeks turned into three,” she wrote later, “and after three, I thought, ‘I’m so close to a month I might as well stay.’” During those first few weeks, she shared her perch with other tree-sitters, but one by one the others came down, unable to stand the cramped, uncomfortable platform any longer. Hill, however, found herself becoming more and more attached to life in the treetops. She actually began to think of Luna and herself as one entity.
Nevertheless, at 71 days she’d had her fill and was ready to quit. The cold weather and the shaking she’d endured during storms had taken their toll, and she was near her breaking point. Then a visiting journalist named Erik Slomanson put a provocative idea in her head. “You know, if you want to do this right,” he said, “you’ve got to stay to the 100-day mark because the world record is 90 days, and Americans love record-breaking.”
The challenge of breaking the record gave her the impetus to go on. Plus, the efforts of the loggers to intimidate her out of the tree completely backfired. “I didn’t ask anyone’s permission to stay in Luna; I just did it,” she said. “Ironically, their opposition just encouraged me to continue on.” Added to that was her fear that the moment she came down, Pacific Lumber would immediately cut down her tree. That had been the company’s pattern with other tree-sitters. “There’s no way I’m letting this incredible tree fall,” Julia told her support team. “I’m not going to do it. As long as I have the ability to keep this tree standing, I’m staying up here.”
Weathering storms was one thing; dealing with harassment was another. But what about the mundane tasks of everyday life? For instance, how did she…
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• Get supplies? The ground crew gave Hill a pager and established codes to let her know they were coming, when they were nearby, and when to drop a duffel bag attached to a rope. Once the crew stuffed the bag with supplies, she would haul it back up. When the company security guards surrounded the tree to keep the crew from getting to Hill, her crew found ways to outwit them. Once 19 activists danced around the tree, yelling, “23! 23!”—the code for her to drop her duffel bag. All of them held supply sacks, but only some of bags actually had supplies. While the guards repeatedly tackled activists with decoy sacks, one of the activists managed to clip the real bag onto the rope.
• Get water? She rigged the tarps sheltering her platform to collect rainwater, which she used for washing, cleaning, and personal hygiene.
• Cook? Hill used a single-burner camp stove fueled by propane. She made couscous, oatmeal, farina, and instant soup, and combined them with dried fruit, nuts, fresh vegetables, and spices.
• Bathe? She took sponge baths. She heated water on her camp stove, stripped from the waist down, scrubbed for two minutes, dried off quickly, and put her clothes back on. Then she repeated the process from the waist up. Temperature, water, and fuel rations didn’t allow for rinsing. She rarely washed her hair; it used too much water, and she was afraid a wet head would make her sick.
• Go to the bathroom (the #1 question on all Bathroom Readers’ minds)? At first she used a funnel with a hose over the side of the platform to urinate. When the wind kept ripping the hose away, she changed to a funnel and a jar, which she emptied over the side. By the time the urine fell 180 feet to the ground, the wind had turned it to a fine mist and spread it over a wide area. (Because Luna was in a rain forest, the acidity of the urine did not burn leaves or plants, which it would have done in a dry forest.) For solid waste, Hill used a bucket lined with a heavy-duty trash bag. The bag was stashed in a hole in Luna’s trunk that had been formed by lightning years before, and was packed out with the other garbage.
• Sleep? Hill slept under a tarp in a three-season sleeping bag the first year. The second year, she was given a winter sleeping bag and a bivouac, a tent-like shelter that wrapped around the bag.
• See at night? Candles were her primary source of light after dark. She also had a headlamp, but that required precious batteries, so she rarely used it.
• Communicate with the outside world? At first, Hill only talked by yelling down to her crew when they came with supplies every few days. Later she was given a radio phone powered by solar panels connected to two motorcycle batteries, an emergency cell phone, a hand-cranked radio, a tape recorder, a digital camera, a video camera, walkie-talkies, and a pager.
• Keep from going crazy? Hill had roommates at first, other activists who stayed for days or weeks at a time. After they dropped out, she had visitors—journalists, fellow activists, and, on a few occasions, celebrities, including Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, actor Woody Harrelson, and singer Bonnie Raitt. But most of the time, she was alone. She immersed herself in books, educating herself about forestry and environmental issues. She listened to radio shows and talked to experts about slope erosion, watershed analysis, and timber-harvest plans. She spent hours reading about a variety of topics, from sustainable logging and northern California history to Charles Hurwitz’s financial dealings. In the end, Hill’s treetop studies earned her an honorary doctorate in humanities from the New College of California.
After she broke the 100-day tree-sitting mark, Julia “Butterfly” Hill suddenly became a public figure on a national level, bringing tremendous visibility and sympathy to her cause. Money began to pour into the environmental groups filing suits against the Pacific Lumber. Not only was the company hemorrhaging money trying to defend itself in court, it was losing the public-relations battle as well: Political figures from Senator Dianne Feinstein all the way to President Clinton joined the chorus criticizing Pacific Lumber.
A year into Hill’s sit, the California State Legislature passed a bill to protect the tree but not the grove. “Even with the new protections,” Hill told a reporter. “Luna and the slope she stands on will be destroyed under the Headwaters Forest Agreement and Habitat Conservation Plan, along with hundreds of other steep, unstable slopes and thousands of acres of virgin and residual old growth. The government once again has turned its back on the local residents and the endangered species that it is required to protect.”
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During Hill’s second year, Pacific Lumber began to offer its own concessions. P.L. representative John Campbell regularly talked with Julia from the bottom of the tree, attempting to negotiate a settlement. But he wouldn’t guarantee that Luna’s grove would be spared after Hill came down, so there she remained. “My bottom line is protection in perpetuity for Luna, and a substantial buffer zone around her to protect her fragile ecosystem.”
Finally, on December 18, 1999, Pacific Lumber/Maxxam Inc. signed a preservation agreement and deed of covenant to protect the giant redwood and a 20-foot buffer zone around the tree. After 738 days, Hill had won her battle. She climbed down Luna, and her feet touched soil for the first time in more than two years.
Today Luna remains protected, at the center of a grove stretching 200 feet in every direction. Because of its isolation deep in the forest, the grove isn’t really a tourist destination. However, members of a nonprofit group called Sanctuary Forest regularly visit to ensure that the promises made by the company are being kept. As for Pacific Lumber, the firm filed for bankruptcy, Hurwitz and Maxxam Inc. pulled out, and in 2008 a new company—whose majority shareholder is the clothing chain The Gap—was created with a corporate mission to log using sustainable forestry practices.
Hill became a motivational speaker and wrote a book about her adventure. She also co-founded a nonprofit group that trains small groups to work toward social change. At last report, Hollywood is making a feature film about her two-year adventure.
But at her core, Julia “Butterfly” Hill will always be an activist. “When you see someone in a tree trying to protect it,” she said, “every level of our society has failed.” In 2002 she joined a protest outside of Occidental Petroleum’s offices in Ecuador to stop construction of an oil pipeline through the Amazon rain forest. “The little gringos have been arrested,” said Ecuadorian President Gustavo Noboa, “including the old cockatoo who climbs trees.”
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