Judi Bari Dies But Her Struggle Continues by Nicholas Wilson

Judi Bari Archives

Friends and family held bedside vigil	Judi Bari died peacefully at home this morning, March 2nd, at 6:45 am of the effects of breast cancer which had metastasized to her liver. Beside her were her 16-year-old daughter Lisa Bari, her companion and assistant Alicia Littletree, and fellow Earth First! organizer and close friend Karen Pickett. Her younger daughter Jessica, her parents Arthur and Ruth Bari, her younger sister Martha, and old friend Darlene Comingore had been visiting Bari yesterday, and were able to return to her home just after her passing. Bari is also survived by her older sister, Gina Kolata, science reporter for the New York Times. Bari asked that her friends get together for a party (the word she chose) expected to happen next weekend in her hometown of Willits at a time and place to be announced.
The common denominator in the causes she fought for was her indignation over injustice and her determination to fight it	Bari was perhaps most widely known as the survivor of a 1990 car bombing, which nearly killed her and left her crippled. Still in the courts is her lawsuit against the FBI, accusing it of attempting to frame her as a terrorist in order to discredit her and her environmental activist movement in the public's mind. Bari, born in Baltimore, Maryland, on November 7, 1949, was a firebrand orator widely regarded as the principal leader of the Earth First! movement in Northern California. She guided regional Earth First! to adopt a policy of non-violent direct action, and to renounce the use of tree-spiking, a tactic with a history of use in labor disputes between workers and timber companies. She was a fighter and organizer for social and environmental justice. The common denominator in the causes she fought for was her indignation over injustice and her determination to fight it. When she was a student at the University of Maryland, she majored in "anti-Vietnam War rioting," as she put it with her typical wit. While working at a U.S. post office bulk mail handling facility near Washington, D.C., Bari helped organize a strike for better working conditions, and put out a workers' newsletter. After meeting her husband-to-be Mike Sweeney on the East Coast, she followed him to California at the start of the '80s, where they married and lived at first in Sonoma County. At that time she turned her attention to U.S. support for repressive regimes in Central America, working with the Committee In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). After the couple moved to Redwood Valley, in Mendocino County, they found they had grown apart, and divorced amicably, sharing the care of their two daughters. While working as a construction carpenter, Bari began to wonder about the beautiful tight-grained redwood boards she was hammering nails into. When she learned they came from 1000 to 2000 year old trees, she quickly resolved to work to preserve the remaining old-growth redwood forests. She became the contact person for Earth First! in Ukiah in 1988, working out of the Mendocino Environmental Center in the Mendocino County seat.
"When Greg King and I were organizing demonstrations, dozens or maybe hundreds of people turned out, but when Judi got involved, thousands came"	The first sustained Earth First! action she helped organize was a blockade of logging on public land near Cahto Peak, in the Coast Range mountains near the headwaters of the South Fork Eel River. Ultimately, the 16 to 18 thousand acre forest was spared from the chainsaws and became part of the Cahto Wilderness area. Bari was one of the early organizers of efforts to preserve Headwaters Forest in Humboldt County. As Darryl Cherney put it, "When Greg King and I were organizing demonstrations, dozens or maybe hundreds of people turned out, but when Judi got involved, thousands came." Cherney and Bari had teamed up in 1988. Cherney recalled that he had first met Bari when he was having trouble laying out a flyer for his own campaign for Congress. He was working on it at the Mendocino Environmental Center when Bari walked in. She was known to MEC coordinator Betty Ball as a talented graphic artist, so Ball introduced the two and said Bari might help with the layout. Cherney recalled that Bari proceeded to work on the layout while criticizing him for his conceit in running. He said he instantly fell in love with her at that point, and they became a romantic duo as well as an Earth First! organizing team. Bari continued her labor activism when she got involved with helping workers who were doused with toxic fluid in an accident in the Georgia-Pacific sawmill at Fort Bragg, California. The company told the workers the spill was just mineral oil, but testing showed it was laden with PCBs. Bari organized the affected workers into Local #1 of the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) and argued their case successfully in U.S. Labor Court, despite her lack of legal training. Another justice issue which Bari took up was the defense of a Ukiah Planned Parenthood Clinic against an anti-abortion demonstration organized by Operation Rescue. Joining many other counter-demonstrators, Bari and Cherney sang a song they had composed titled "Will the Fetus Be Aborted," sung to the tune of "Will the Circle Be Unbroken." Bari later recalled how their counter-demonstration -- and particularly that song -- had horrified the anti-abortionists. She said she had not realized how much it would shock them, but said she had intended for them to experience how the women clients of the clinic might feel when confronted with shouting, singing, demonstrators holding up photos of aborted fetuses.
In a 1989 incident reminiscent of the Karen Silkwood case, Bari's car was rammed from behind	Betty Ball credited Bari with the feminization of Earth First!. "It had been incredibly male-dominated prior to Judi's entrance. There were women involved but none were as successful as Judi in putting the feminine spin into it, and getting rid of some of the macho chest-beating that had been prevalent in Earth First! prior to that. Judi's influence then allowed many more women to get involved, in more influential ways than had been possible previously. Judi also innately understood the importance of community-based organizing, as opposed to the nomadic style that Earth First! had before that." Many of her supporters think it was because she was able to begin building alliances between timber workers and environmentalists that got her the attention of timber company executives and made her the focus of efforts to target and discredit Earth First! Counterfeit EF! press releases advocating violent tactics were created by a pro-timber activist group and circulated to workers and the press by Pacific Lumber Company, among others, according to evidence developed in Bari's ongoing lawsuit against the FBI. In a 1989 incident reminiscent of the Karen Silkwood case, Bari's car was rammed from behind by a log truck, totaling her car and sending her, another adult and three children to a hospital with minor to moderate injuries. Law enforcement refused to treat the incident as anything but an accident, although Bari later discovered through photographs that the truck which had struck her car was the same one which had been stopped by an Earth First! blockade less than 24 hours earlier. When the truck driver saw that there were children in Bari's car, he said, "My God, I didn't see the kids," according to Bari's account.
1990 car bomb explosion under Bari's driver's seat nearly killed her	In the spring of 1990, Bari and other Earth First! activists began receiving anonymous death threats apparently from timber supporters. When she reported the threats, and took the written ones to law enforcement, she was dismissed with the statement that there was no manpower to investigate, and "When you turn up dead, then we'll investigate," according to Bari's account published in her 1994 book "Timber Wars" published by Common Courage Press. It was then the eve of Redwood Summer, when Bari, Cherney, and others were working to bring thousands of people from around the country to the redwood region in an effort inspired by the Mississippi Summer civil rights campaign of the '60s. The timber industry hired public relations companies, including Hill & Knowlton, to whip up opposition to Redwood Summer and to portray Earth First! in the public mind as violence prone extremists, even terrorists. It was in that climate of polarized tension that Bari and Cherney were traveling to college campuses to recruit support for Redwood Summer and meet with allied groups such as Seeds of Peace, a Berkeley, California, based group that was interested in helping provide food service to the masses of people expected to come and camp in the redwood area. On May 24, 1990, as Bari and Cherney were driving on an Oakland, California, street, a powerful explosion under Bari's driver's seat nearly killed her, and injured Cherney as well. Oakland Police and FBI terrorist squad members were quickly on the scene, and soon placed Bari and Cherney under arrest, telling the press that they were the only suspects in what police said was a case of terrorists injured by an accidental explosion of their own bomb, which they were transporting somewhere. Bari barely survived the bomb blast, which fractured her pelvis in several places, pulverized her tailbone, and caused extensive tissue and nerve damage, crippling her and leaving her with constant pain. The bombing and the accusations against Bari and Cherney were reported in the national media, fed by a succession of revelations from police and FBI about incriminating evidence found in searches of Bari's house which proved she was involved in making the bomb. But, two months after the bombing, the District Attorney declined to press any charges, citing lack of evidence. No other suspects have ever been identified by police or FBI, and both have continued to the present to say that Bari and Cherney were their only suspects.
Bari told Darryl Cherney last week, "Take Richard Held to trial. Take this case to trial. Don't let them off the hook"	In May, 1991, a year after the bomb blast, Bari and Cherney filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the FBI itself and several agents, and against the Oakland Police and several individual officers. Other defendants and co-plaintiffs were later dropped from the suit. The suit alleges that Bari and Cherney were falsely arrested by the Oakland Police, at the illegal, politically-motivated instigation of the FBI. Their attorney wrote in a new document in the suit, "Actually the bombing was a clear, carefully designed, criminal attempt to stop and silence Judi Bari, a leader of activist protest by Earth First! against destruction of the forest environment and local human communities by corporate logging powers in northern California; and to intimidate and weaken the movement she and Darryl Cherney were part of. The reality of this criminal -- terrorist -- attack was ignored and debunked by the defendant state and federal police authorities, and they have continued to do so up to the present." The suit will go forward, Cherney vowed. He said when he spoke with Bari by phone on February 21, she told him, "Take Richard Held to trial. Take this case to trial. Don't let them off the hook." "And that's what we're going to do," Cherney said. Held was the FBI Special Agent In Charge of the San Francisco office at the time of the bombing. He resigned from the FBI shortly after Bari, through the lawsuit, forced the disclosure of police photos of Bari's bombed car clearly showing that the bomb had been hidden directly under her driver's seat, rather than on the back seat floorboard, as police and the FBI had claimed to the press. In a December 15, 1996 interview with Eric Brazil of the San Francisco Examiner, Bari said that timber workers no longer agree with the argument that environmentalism is the main threat to their jobs. "They're not stupid," she said. "In Mendocino County since 1990, Louisiana Pacific laid off more than two-thirds of its workers and closed five of its seven mills. What we've been saying is true: It's corporations versus the rural community. We've never said no to logging. We just want sustainable logging."
"For all these many years, it has always been 'Judi Bari for Justice,' but now it's time for 'Justice for Judi Bari'"	It was January 31 when Judi Bari's health last allowed her to host her popular weekly public affairs radio show on Mendocino County public radio station KZYX. On February 21 the station broadcast a special call-in tribute during Bari's regular time slot for her Punch and Judi show. The host asked listeners to share stories and memories about Bari, and told them that she would be listening from home. Many callers spoke directly to Bari, thanking her for her work for environmental and social justice. Callers praised her kindness, courage, strength, leadership, intelligence, and hilarious sense of humor. One of those callers was former Congressional Representative Dan Hamburg, who began by saying, "It's important that we pay tribute to our heroes, and Judi Bari is definitely one of those." Hamburg said he has been involved in politics for close to 30 years, and has had some proud moments, but never any prouder moments than the two or three times he shared a podium with Judi Bari. Hamburg went on to say, "She's feared by those in authority, whether members of the Board of Supervisors, who could see what a standout she was as an organizer, and how powerful her ideas were, but certainly also by the FBI, which certainly knows much more about the Judi Bari bombing than we've found out so far." Then, speaking directly to Bari, Hamburg said, "But, Judi, you're feared by those people because you're truly a revolutionary. You see, with your vision, a different kind of world; a world where connections are made between the global economy and poverty and environmental deterioration. "You understand what the connections are between the big picture and the little picture. And that's why, I think, for so long you've been such a good teacher, not only to me but to people all over the county, state and country. I agree with that previous caller who said that you're somebody who will always be thought of, always be remembered as a great person in the movement for the world that we all want to see come about. Thank you Judi. Hang in there. You've got lots of people behind you, lots of people who love you and care about you. Thank you for all you've done." Bari said afterwards that the experience made her feel like Huckleberry Finn listening to his own funeral eulogy, but that she was encouraged and strengthened by the outpouring of love and support. Betty Ball summarized the feelings of many when she said, "For all these many years, it has always been 'Judi Bari for Justice,' but now it's time for 'Justice for Judi Bari.'" After learning today of Bari's passing, Ball said, "Some holes can not be filled. Judi was the most brilliant strategist and greatest imp I ever knew."