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 from being cut down in Oregon in June 1985, and what followed.

Earth First's first treesitting civil disobedience action.

The tactic was born of frustration with the inefficacy of road blackades in saving ancient forests for more than an hour or two

Mike Jakubal, aka the Wenatchee Kid is Earth First!'s first-ever treesitter, whose rock climbing skills I'd convinced him to transfer to old growth forest protection. We'd been sitting around a campfire with a group of otherout-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. In both cases - one memorable blockade featured Brian, a leader 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 exhaled pot smoke, giggling at an idea that had just struck me, and passed the pipe on around the fire circle. (Mike J was not a user)..."Couldn't you 'rock climb' your way up a tree?"

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."

Wenatchee, a quick-thinker quick-actor, seized upon the idea. "Yeah! yeah!" he shouted, leaping to his feet,

"I can do it!...I WILL do it!" Within minutes he was totting up a list of the supplies he'd need to pull it off.

Days later, we'd give him a send off as he pounded his way up the side of a tall fir tree in Willamette National Forest.

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.

The shortlived event--Wenatchee incautiously descended from the tree that evening for a looksee after witnessing a day of trees falling around him, and was nabbed by an alert Freddie--nevertheless proved, like the Wright brother's brief first aerial excursion over the dunes of North Carolina, that sit ins in old growth canopies could be done.

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.

(Which village tree sitting action was also regrettably cut short when all the tree sitters except Ron Huber abandoned their trees "for the weekend", against Ron's vigorous protests.

Sure enough, within hours federal agents, Linn County deputy sheriffs and a logging crew appear. Huber sends grapples into two neighboring trees and ties them off to his platform, too but can do little but watch from his platform, audiotaping the killing of the treesitters' trees, cursing the loggers each time they fell a tree. Listen to audio recording of this incident END

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