AT TWENTY-FOUR, FRED Smith had never done a tree sit before. His hair was still long then, and he was traveling up and down the coast, through California, Oregon and Washington, living out of his Chevy Blazer, spending time in nature and meeting people. The meeting people part had not always been easy for Fred, but he had some tricks he liked to employ now. He carried a guitar and different types of percussion instruments in his car. He’d drive into Eugene, or Arcata or Santa Barbara, find wherever it was that the hippies were hanging out, and ask if anyone wanted to jam. He also liked to buy fresh produce at the local farmers’ markets and give it away to people. In this way, through fruit or through music, he met Jeff, a forest activist living in Ashland. Jeff had agreed to take part in a tree sit in the Siskiyou National Forest. There, a swath of old-growth fir, pine, hemlock and redwood was tagged for salvage logging. It was 1997. The ethereal raven-haired activist Julia Butterfly Hill was about to begin her 783-day vigil in the century-old redwood tree she’d come to call Luna. The tree sits sounded romantic, and fun, and maybe a good way to make a difference while also meeting girls. When Jeff said he needed someone to fill in for him for a few days, Fred said to sign him up.
The tree sit was in Northern California, part of a well-organized campaign. The activists had built platforms between two and twenty stories up amongst the branches. Some were in the shape of stop signs encircling the trunks. Others were simple rectangles about eight feet long by six feet wide. While Fred was there, two people were assigned to each perch. This way, there was always someone up there in case a person needed to get down to go to the bathroom or stretch their legs. They worked in rotations of a few days or a week at a time. Mostly they spent their shifts up in the trees, talking, getting high and eating the food ferried up to them by fellow activists on the ground.
At first, Fred liked living like that, up in the branches. He loved waking up surrounded by those heady-scented boughs and hearing the wildlife of the forest, the woodpeckers, chickadees and nuthatches, singing and calling above and below him. They weren’t threatened by loggers while he was there. The forest dome was alive with scurrying animals, with squirrels, chipmunks and wood mice making their way from tree to tree.
“People forget what a big world it is up there,” he would later tell me.
Fred’s perch partner, another young man, was nice enough. He smiled a lot but didn’t like to talk much. One day the young man went down for a quick break and disappeared for four hours. Fred thought he might die from the boredom. Maybe this kind of activism wasn’t for him. After a few days, Jeff came back and took over from Fred, so that he could continue on with his travels.
When not traveling, at that time Fred worked for Outward Bound, assisting with their educational programs and doing wilderness instruction. Among his colleagues, the general attitude was that, as outdoor educators, they were doing their part. Other people could be activists. Eventually, though, to Fred that wouldn’t seem like enough.
Fred is in his early forties now. He’s 6'5" and a dead ringer for a sunburned Dennis Quaid. Because of all his years spent living out of doors, snow camping or hiking in the desert, at all times he has the elements-battered look of someone just returned from an expedition. When I realized who it was he reminded me of, I asked him not if someone had pointed out the resemblance, but how often.
“A lot,” he said.
Fred dresses like he’s trying to rebel from his own preppy taste. He wears slacks and buttondown shirts from Brooks Brothers, but with the casual disregard of a private school student trying to subvert his uniform. He wears flip-flops or nice loafers with no socks, often kicking them off in order to go barefoot at every conceivable opportunity. He is also partial to funny T-shirts. One of his favorites is black, with green text in the style of the Star Wars opening crawl, which reads WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT, ALL GALAXIES ARE FAR, FAR AWAY.
Fred was born in Manhattan, but spent his early childhood in the suburb of Bronxville, an hour north of the city. When his family moved there, the first strip malls were just going in. It was the kind of bucolic American childhood you find in old movies; wide, safe streets full of children of all ages to play with. After school, kids were sent to play outside unsupervised, and then called home for dinner at dark. Beginning when Fred was five years old, the family started spending part of their summers on Fishers Island in Long Island Sound. They rented a modern house built in a young pine forest, a half-hour bike ride into town. When he was younger, he and his siblings would go down to the shore and spend the day picking mussels for their parents. The mussels grew densely on the rocky parts of the island, and seemed inexhaustible. Still, by the time Fred was in high school, nearly all of the mussels were gone.
When Fred was nine years old, the family moved back to Manhattan, purchasing a Park Avenue apartment on the Upper East Side. He hated living in the city, and didn’t fit in with the kids at his new private school. He was tall for his age, but not precocious. By eighth grade he was already 6'3"; taller than his parents, his classmates, and all of his teachers. He wasn’t very dexterous, either. He was physically awkward and despite his size he “wasn’t great” at sports. He felt like the city was too small for him, that it didn’t give him enough room to stretch out. When offered the opportunity to go away to boarding school in Rhode Island, he took it. Things were a little better there than they had been in Manhattan, but not a lot. Still, Fred found two seemingly unrelated things that offered escape and solace: the deeply nerdy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, and the great outdoors.
Dungeons & Dragons came first. It is, at its core, a fantasy adventure game for people who like rules, but it also helps if you like pretending to be someone else. First launched in the early 1970s, it has historically held a special place in the hearts of young boys for whom being oneself may not be very much fun. Despite the mayhem that the presence of dragons and dungeons would seem to imply, it is very much a game about order. There is a strong sense of moral clarity. The types of character you can choose to inhabit exist on a regimented grid, divided by race, class, abilities, ethical and moral alignment, etc. You can be a dwarf, an elf, a human, or any number of other fantastical non-human and demi-human entities. In addition to this, you can be a cleric, a druid, a magic-user, a thief, a paladin, a bard, and so on. You can be good, neutral or evil, lawful or chaotic.
Almost all of the characters that Fred invented for himself were aligned as “lawful good.” He liked the idea of the virtuous knight, or the healer. But while most players, Fred’s friends included, preferred the more dashing characters—the heroic paladin or the mysterious elf—Fred’s most successful character was a dwarf named Drago.
Drago was a fighter, but also a cleric; able to heal himself and his friends. He was lawful, and good, and as much as is possible for an imaginary being, was well respected among a certain circle of socially-challenged adolescent males of the late-1980s Upper East Side. With Drago, Fred had not only made himself heroic, but being a dwarf, he had also made himself smaller.
The thing was, Fred craved space. In the summers, he convinced his parents to let him attend an outdoor nature camp, where he learned to chop down trees, split firewood, cook with a camp stove and use a compass to navigate. After his freshman year of high school he started taking Outward Bound courses, a practice he would continue through college. Fred was an atheist at this point, prone to writing godless poems, and stories about angry young men whose lives unspooled within a moral vacuum. At Denison University, he wrote his senior thesis on relations between the United States and Cuba. After graduation, instead of moving back to New York and looking for a job, he did what a lot of young people—especially young men—were doing in the 1990s when they were unsure of how to respond to the world: he packed up his car and hit the road.
He set out for the summer in his Chevy Blazer with his father’s financial backing and a college friend named Burgh. They were both twenty-two. The young men drove south into Florida, arriving in the Keys on a day when a hurricane was blowing in. They found a bar called the Hog’s Breath (“Hog’s breath is better than no breath at all” read the T-shirts) and got drunk in the middle of the day with the locals, while the winds raged outside. When the weather cleared, they went fishing at the beach. Fred caught a manta ray. In the Everglades, they were encouraged by a local to antagonize an alligator with a stick.
Fred didn’t think of himself as environmentally focused at the time, but it was something that gnawed almost constantly at the back of his mind. During the Outward Bound courses he took, he’d spend weeks in the wilderness, cut off from any sign of civilization.
“We were in the top 1 percent of back-country badasses,” he told me of the excursions.
But whenever it came time to come down from the mountains, he was always horrified by what he saw; by what human beings had done to the landscape on the edges of the wildlands.
“As soon as you left the wilderness area, getting back to front country, there were clear-cuts all over the place, cow patties everywhere,” he said. “After weeks seeing what a natural system looked like, interacting with the elements, with life and death, and suddenly you see this—I’d think, what the fuck is wrong with these people?”
Driving around the country that summer after college, seeing what he called “the bad development of the ’90s”—strip malls and small town centers that were dead now because of big box stores—he was struck by a similar feeling of disgust.
That didn’t mean they weren’t having fun. He and Burgh found a casino in Mississippi and spent twenty-four straight hours gambling. Fred managed to get his winnings up to $2,000, then $3,000, before finally losing it all. In New Orleans they found themselves at a bar in the French Quarter at five in the morning. A woman in a white dress and dangly bracelets sidled up to Fred and explained that she was a sorceress, a witch doctor, and had put a hex on her ex-husband, making him physically incapable of entering New Orleans.
“Do you want to come home with me?” she asked.
They continued west, over the green flatlands and red desert of Texas to Santa Fe, where Fred met an old friend from his summers on Fishers Island and then went to stay with him in Arizona. They drank too much coffee and smoked too many cigarettes, and in the afternoons they went rock climbing and bouldering in the desert.
He returned east in the fall to complete a wilderness EMT certification, and started working for Outward Bound. The jobs took him to North Carolina, Oregon and Colorado. In between those contracts he hit the road. He started reading more about wilderness and the philosophy known as Deep Ecology—a belief that the environment as a whole should possess the inalienable right to flourish, independent of its usefulness or lack thereof to mankind. This belief system already had its own literary canon to which Fred would turn, putting aside his Charles Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson for the writings of Arne Naess, Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey.
Abbey in particular took up the clarion call to exalt nature where transcendentalists like Emerson, Thoreau and Muir had left off. His nonfiction book Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, first published in 1968, became something of a bible to early environmental activists of the 1960s and 1970s. He was certainly important to Fred. With his powerfully written prose, Abbey also added to that call a kind of wild anger and rebellion, a Walden for the Beat era. The book tells of Abbey’s time working as a park ranger at Arches National Monument (now a national park) in Arizona in the 1950s. He writes of a sense that the non-wild life, the life of cities and concrete and responsibility, was somehow non-real; that it was a dream from which we could—and should—be woken, and the thing that could wake us was wilderness.
Abbey was passionate, an anarchist, a curmudgeon and likely a true misanthrope—so mad about the state of the world he could spit. He writes:
My God! I am thinking, what incredible shit we put up with most of our lives—the domestic routine (same dreams every night), the stupid and useless and degrading jobs, the insufferable arrogance of elected officials, the crafty cheating and the slimy advertising of the businessmen, the tedious wars in which we kill our buddies instead of our real enemies back in the capital, the foul, diseased and hideous cities and towns we live in, the constant petty tyranny of automatic washers and automobiles and TV machines and telephones!
When not railing against modernity, Abbey revels again and again in the beauty of the desert, describing it as “the flaming globe, blazing on the pinnacles and minarets and balanced rocks.” But the desert was also “a-tonal, cruel, clear, inhuman, neither romantic nor classical, motionless and emotionless, at one and the same time—another paradox—both agonized and deeply still.” Wilderness was a place in which one’s muddled slate could be wiped clean, where a man could take his place once more in the natural order of things. By acknowledging that vulnerability, there was a power and strength to be found. Mankind was reinstated as predator by his willingness to also be prey.
Abbey’s was a path of semi-engagement. More a writer than an activist, he wrote both novels and nonfiction, serving as the Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University in 1957. He spent a year in Scotland on a Fulbright. Compared in appearance and comportment as a young man to the actor Gary Cooper, he was known in later years as “Cactus Ed,” a weathered man with a prolific beard. When he died at age sixty-two of complications from surgery, he had his friends bury him in the desert in nothing but an old sleeping bag, so that he could more directly return to the earth he loved. He wrote that he wanted to “meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself.”
As the twentieth century wore on, more and more young men and women were becoming fed up with consumerist culture, alarmed at the environmental degradation they saw around them. The question was, how to respond to this problem? Many began by walking the same path, reading the same authors and visiting the same places in search of meaning. The question was then, of course, what do you do about it all? Say you’ve stepped away from what the world expected of you, turned your back on the rat race and absorbed some nature. Now what?
That all depends, in a sense, on what kind of character you choose to play. Will you be a warrior, or a mystic? Chaotic or lawful? For Christopher McCandless, the tragic wilderness wanderer of the early 1990s made famous by Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild, that path was one of disengagement. Less drawn in by the activism of Abbey and more inspired by the contemplation of Tolstoy and Thoreau, he shunned society and its problems entirely, eventually dying alone—through bad luck or folly, it isn’t entirely clear—in the Alaskan wilderness in 1992. Many, though, took a far more active approach.
Abbey published a novel in 1975 called The Monkey Wrench Gang, which many have cited as the spark that ignited the environmental direct action movement. In it, a small band of vandals set out to stop environmentally damaging activities in the Southwest, particularly the building of the Glen Canyon Dam. The characters are a far cry from the stereotypes of conservationists today. They eat red meat, drive big cars, own firearms and litter the roadside with empty beer cans. Abbey’s habits were said to have been similar. Nevertheless, the book served as an adequate, if skeletal, instruction manual for ecological saboteurs to come.
Inspired by The Monkey Wrench Gang, in 1977 a Californian anti-pesticide activist named John Hanna founded a group he named the Environmental Life Force—ELF, for short. Rather than declaring war on pesticides, he said that war had already been declared on nature, and he was simply fighting back. Their logo depicted an “elf” holding a cork gun—a confusing message, since their protest modus operandi was to set bombs. (More a leprechaun than an elf, the original ELF logo nevertheless would not be out of place in Fred’s adolescent world of dark knights and fighting dwarves.)
The original ELF took Abbey’s call for anarchy to heart. There was to be no central leadership or chain of command. For Hanna, the spraying of crops near his home in Watsonville, California was both a pressing and a personal matter. He described a crop duster dousing his car with the pesticide parathion as he drove down the highway, while it swooped to spray a neighboring strawberry field. (Parathion was originally developed in Germany as a nerve gas, and EPA scientists have since urged a federal ban.) Not long after the original ELF was formed, the group shot out a window at Senator Dianne Feinstein’s empty Monterey vacation home with an air pistol. They then exploded seven crop dusters using homemade napalm bombs while the planes were parked on the tarmac of the tiny Salinas airport. The group also claimed responsibility for the pipe bombing of an Oregon paper company that autumn. Hanna was arrested in 1978 and sentenced to seven years in prison, the only member of the original ELF to serve time. The group disbanded that year.
Two years later, in 1980, Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang served as inspiration for the creation of another environmental direct action group, Earth First! The exclamation point is part of the name, and its members are called Earth First!ers. The founders included the oft-jailed activist Mike Roselle, environmental lobbyist Dave Foreman, and wilderness advocate Howie Wolke. All had read Abbey’s work and had ties with the Southwest. The Earth First! logo features a monkey wrench crossed hammer-and-sickle-style with a tomahawk. Bolstered by the environmental ethics of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the conservation science of Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, they pledged “no compromise in defense of mother earth,” a promise that would become their slogan. Still active today under different leadership, the group has a quarterly magazine with the tagline “media from the frontlines of ecological resistance.” Again, this was a group who saw the fight for the environment as a war.
Their approach was biocentric, an expression of the Deep Ecology ideal, but their methods began as more peaceful than that of Hanna’s ELF. (Hanna, once out of prison and settled in Santa Cruz, also wrote critically of resorting to such incendiary methods.) They advocated for wilderness proposals that went beyond what mainstream groups seemed willing to ask for, and planned theatrical stunts. In 1981, with Edward Abbey himself present, the group rolled a plastic image of a “crack” down the face of Glen Canyon Dam. As the black band snaked downwards, it did appear from a distance like a fissure was spreading down the concrete. Activists stood across the way and cheered, holding signs that read TEAR DOWN THE DAM and even NUKE THE DAM.
“I think we’re morally justified to resort to whatever means are necessary, in order to defend our land from destruction,” Abbey told an Earth First! camera operator before the rally. “Invasion. I see this as an invasion.”
Standing on the bed of a pickup truck, Abbey delivered a now famous speech to the small crowd:
The industrialization, urbanization and militarization of the American West continues. [ . . . ] More dams are proposed, more coal burning and nuclear power plants projected, more river diversion projects, more strip mining of our mountains, clear cutting of our forests, the misuse of water, the abuse of the land. All for the sake of short term profit! [ . . . ] How can we create a civilization fit for the dignity of free men and women if the globe itself is ravaged and polluted and defiled and insulted? The domination of nature leads to the domination of human beings. Meanwhile, what to do? Here I can offer nothing but more of the same. Oppose—oppose the destruction of our homeland by these alien forces from Houston, Tokyo, Manhattan, Washington D.C. and the Pentagon. And if opposition is not enough, we must resist! And if resistance is not enough, then subvert! After ten years of modest environmental progress, the powers of industrialism and militarism have become alarmed. The Empire is striking back! But we must continue to strike back at the Empire by whatever means available to us. [ . . . ] We will outlive our enemies. And as my good old grandmother used to say, we will live to piss on their graves!
EARTH FIRST! ORGANIZED their first tree sit in 1985, with just one person sitting in one tree. It lasted only for a single day, and the forest around the tree was all cut down. The tree sitter and activists on the ground, including Roselle, were all arrested. Still, it was deemed a success, and the next time out they built twelve platforms for tree sit activists. Again the sit was short and the activists were all arrested—one directly from his platform by two sheriffs in a crane box.
From the mid-1980s onward, Earth First! was primarily concerned with preventing logging and the building of dams, and other development they saw as detrimental to ecosystems. But by 1987 the tenor of the group had changed, with greater emphasis on anarchist political ideology. That year younger members heckled Abbey while he spoke at an Earth First! gathering, angering the group’s founders who were growing increasingly uncomfortable with the change in tone. Abbey died the next year. In 1990, Foreman, Wolke and other members of the original guard severed ties with the organization. Roselle stayed. Thus far their protests had not included firearms or explosives, and though against the law, remained peaceful. Now more of a movement than a specific, centralized group, Earth First! has outposts in a variety of countries on five continents.
Yet despite its increasingly anarchist leanings, Earth First! remained a relatively mainstream organization. This was not enough for some. After all, even Abbey himself had called on people to defend the land from destruction by “whatever means are necessary.” For many, it seemed apparent that the necessary means included more than sitting in a tree. In 1992 the second iteration of ELF, now called the Earth Liberation Front, was formed. More extreme in its tactics than Earth First!, the new ELF specialized in arson. On the attributes and alignments matrix, how good or evil they might be depended on your perspective, but there was no arguing that they were chaotic. Their efforts would be dubbed “ecoterrorism” by the FBI.
Fred Smith’s involvement in environmental direct action would remain limited, still more comfortable in a quest he deemed lawful. Though he had friends who would get deeper into forest activism, including blocking logging roads by setting their legs in trenches of concrete, the Siskiyou tree sit would remain his only real act of civil disobedience. In 2001 he enrolled in the graduate program in environmental studies at the University of Montana in Missoula, deciding to fight for the environment by working within the system. He was inspired by those using a legalistic approach to make sure that existing environmental laws were enforced, and to advocate for new ones. The Clinton era, he said, had bred hope for some environmentalists that an aboveground approach would be effective. It was the first time that a president had appointed an ecologist to the head of the Department of the Interior.
“From the perspective of a land-based environmental activist, you couldn’t have had a better president,” Fred said.
While in graduate school and directly after, Fred worked with a number of groups founded by forest activists, but who nevertheless were taking the aboveground legalistic approach. They would target proposed logging projects and poke holes in Environmental Impact Statements, some of which relied on outdated science from a decade or more prior, when better, updated information was now available. Matt Koehler, Fred’s boss at the Native Forest Network (now the WildWest Institute) tutored him in how to “use the law to stop bad shit,” as Fred put it.
“We knew the key provisions of every law—the Endangered Species Act, the Environmental Protection Act, the Clean Water Act—they were there to use at our disposal to shut down something that we knew was going to be bad,” Fred said. “It was practices like that that essentially shut down logging in the Pacific Northwest with the spotted owl thing. We wanted to save the trees and we used endangered species to do it.”
Besides, saving the trees had become fashionable, even if that couldn’t have mattered less to Fred. Julia Butterfly Hill, who initially thought she might spend a few weeks at most up in her tree, ended up breaking the world tree sitting record by a long shot, living up in the twenty-story redwood without once coming down for just over two years. Though she was not officially a part of Earth First!, they had organized the tree sit base camp where she started. News crews climbed up to interview the charismatic activist in her perch. Bonnie Raitt paid a visit as well, and performed a benefit concert for her.
In the videos of Hill still living in Luna, her face is luminous as a saint’s, her moss-green eyes burning like the eyes in a painting of Joan of Arc. Her purity of conviction was undeniable, not to mention her beauty. She made a compelling poster child for the anti-logging movement. She was featured in magazine, newspaper and television stories all over the world—usually accompanied by an attractive photo. Good Housekeeping magazine named her one of its most admired women in 1998, and printed a full-page picture of her looking like an Elven princess out of Tolkien, an Arwen Evenstar of the redwoods. People magazine named her one of the World’s Most Intriguing People of the Year. Julia came down from her tree at the end of 1999 while Fred was finishing his first semester of grad school. Her efforts had managed to save her tree, as well as a two-hundred-foot buffer zone, which she purchased from the Pacific Lumber Company for $50,000 with money raised by herself and fellow activists. The forest around that buffer zone was cut down. When she finally descended on December 18, thirteen days before the turn of the millennium, she collapsed in the mud at the foot of Luna and wept.
Fred spent the next seven years based in Missoula, working as an aboveground environmental advocate. He still took his long road trips from time to time, and when he got to be in his early thirties he decided he’d like to move to California permanently. When he was thirty-four, he got a job interview for the position of Executive Director of the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin, based in Point Reyes. Before his interview, he decided to take a drive through the local countryside. It was a sunny day in late October and the landscape crackled with the dry beauty of early fall—the shining, fog-free ocean, the flashes of red vines hanging down from evergreen oaks, and the fields of pale grass floating with the fairy-like seeds of thistle fluff. But as he drove through the Point Reyes National Seashore’s pastoral zone, he was shocked by what he saw. Farms! Industry! Inside a federally protected natural area! Many of the Seashore ranches seemed to be in poor ecological condition, and in a national park! “Why is the park allowing this?” he thought. If things here were handled the way they were in other national parks, Fred thought, if some of the Point Reyes ranches didn’t clean up their act, it was only a matter of time before they would have to go.