Ron Huber describes the brainstorming session that led to the first Earth First! old growth treesitting action--an effort to save a thousand year old Douglas Fir and its companion trees from being cut down in Oregon in June 1985, and what followed.

Earth First's first treesitting civil disobedience action.
A tactic born of frustration with the failure of road blackades to save ancient forests for more than an hour or two.

Mike Jakubal, aka Wenatchee, is Earth First!'s first-ever treesitter, whose rock climbing skills I'd convinced him to transfer to old growth forest protection. Here's how it happened: We'd been sitting around a campfire with a group of other out-of-state activists who'd answered the call put out by the Corvallis Oregon-based Cathedral Forest Action Group to protect Oregon's Old Growth at the Witness camp.

CFAG was a citizen's group that brought Gandhian tactics of non-violent civil disobedience to the Earth Firstian struggle to protect the remaining ancient Douglas Fir stands of Willamette National Forest from the clearcuttery the Reagan Administration had unleashed there.

The group's organizers tactics included setting up a "witness camp" and logging road blockades. Witness Camp visitors were taken to the Cutting Edge, where they could see both ancient forest ecosystems and freshly killed remains of recent logger attacks on neighboring areas.

The group's logging road blockades tried to both halt further roadbuilding into the wild woods and to block loggers from entering the forest via the spaghetti of roads they'd already cut. One memorable blockade featured Brian Heath, a key organizer of Cathedral Forest Action Group, holding a (solitary) sit-in athwart a crate of explosives about to be used for blasting a roadway through a rugged ridge; citizens were arrested in well orchestrated peaceful sit-in actions across logging roads, bringing the media to cover the issue of the Reagan Admin-sanctioned destruction of those ancient forests.

The fines were light, jail time brief, but one consequence of those arrests that rankled many of the visiting forest activists was the order by the judge barring the convicted road blockaders from entering the Willamette National Forest for one year. We hadn't travelled thousands of miles to get busted and bumped from the forest after spending no more than an hour "defending" the trees in a road blockade. Even the Oregon media had begun to lose interest.

This spawned our little outsider activists brainstorming session round the Oak Flat campfire that hatched the Earth First! tree sitting offensive, a tactic that now occupies an important place in the toolbox of earth activism.

Asked what skills he had, Wenatchee described his rock climbing experience, but shrugged. "We're not protecting cliffs."

"So couldn't you..." I blew a smoke ring, goggling at an idea that had just struck me. "Couldn't you 'rock climb' your way up a tree? Hold the protest there?"

The outsider activists contemplated the notion.

"I mean, killing trees with people in them would be bad PR for the Willies, not to mention get them murder raps. They wouldn't do it."

Jakubal seized upon the idea. Yeah! yeah!" he shouted, leaping to his feet, "I can do it!...I WILL do it!"

The next evening he brought the idea up with CFAG leader Brian Heath and got his blessing, though the action was to be carried out as an Earth First! action, not a Cathedral Forest Action Group one. (This tactical split presaged a more serious CFAG/Earth First! schism that summer) Totting up a list of the supplies he'd need to pull it off, Mike set plans for a speedy recon of the Santiam to locate his soon-to-be-host tree.

Days later, we'd give Mike, (now nom de guerred "Doug Fir") a send off as he pounded his way up the side of a tall fir tree in Willamette National Forest.

A day of havoc and desolation followed, as the wild forest was killed around him.

Sudden aftermath.

In the early evening, Jakubal quietly lowered himself to the ground to inspect the freshly killed stumpland around his tree. He remained on the ground more than an hour, then was busted around 7:30 pm by forest service law enforcement agent Slagowski, who got between Mike and the tree; which tree was then speedily cut down first thing next morning . Luckily Mike's camera survived the fall, though he didn't get it, or his other gear back from the freddies for some months.

Upon his release in Sweet Home late that night, Jakubal walked for miles toward the Sanctuary until being picked up by some loggers coming home drunk from a party. One, who let him sleep on his couch, was a shelf fungus collector, Mike recollected, two decades later. The house was full of forest scenes scratched into the bottoms of the dried fungi.

Mike got up at dawn, thanked his host--who mumbled a blurry acknowledgement through his open bedroom door, and continued heading toward the Sanctuary camp, finally to be picked up by by passing forest activists who brought him to the sanctuary camp, where he related his tale of woe.

Despite the Wright Brothers-like brevity of Mike's first-ever Earth First tree-sit, the tactic of tree climbing to hold sit-ins in the canopies was validated. (So long as one never leaves one's tree human-free; always have a replacement come up the tree before you come down.)

CLICK HERE for an audio recording of Mike Jakubal hammering his way up the tree, while his support crew encounters the Willamette Industry loggers and vice versa.

Shortly thereafter we'd brought the tree-climbing sit-in concept to a Washington state Earth First! rendezvous, hanging try-out platforms from tree limbs at the rendezvous site and demonstrating tree-climbing techniques. This resulted in a wave of aerial activist wannabes surging south to the Santiam, joining with others from around the nation to set up the first Aerial Village in the Squaw Creek watershed in Willamette National Forest in June 1985. END

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