Mike Roselle with Josh Mahan
St. Martin’s Press (2009)
Review by Paul J. Comeau
Greenpeace. Earth First!. Rainforest Action Network. These organizations are synonymous with the struggle to defend the environment through non-violent direct action. In his memoir Tree Spiker, Mike Roselle, a founder or key player in some of these organizations’ most successful and notorious campaigns, documents his versions of some of these events, part of a lifetime of struggle to defend the environment. The book is far from a complete history of all the actions and events that occurred in the last thirty years, but it paints an interesting picture of the environmental justice movement from the 70s through the 90s, with reflections and commentary from the author on the successes and failures of the campaigns and actions documented therein. Roselle paints in broad strokes when establishing historical contexts, and time frames, but his fine line detailing of the actions in which he played a part, are tense and vivid, akin at points to reading a Robert Ludlum or Dan Brown thriller.
Tree Spiker begins with a prologue describing Roselle’s involvement in Greenpeace’s April 1986 action at the Nevada Test Site, where for the first time ever, anti nuclear activists succeeded in delaying a nuclear test blast (5). The gung-ho style of the narrative sets a tone of machismo sustained throughout most of the book. From here, Roselle flashes back to his youth in the late 60s, telling readers “I never wanted to be an activist” (7). He describes his perceptions of activism at the time, and goes on to relate how he slowly fell in with the activist scene in Los Angeles, CA, more out of a teenage desire to fit in and get laid, than as a result of any deeply held convictions or political beliefs. He describes his teenage years of dropping in and out of various high schools and various living situations, and hitching around the country, before hitchhiking to Miami Florida for the 1972 Republican and Democratic National Conventions. He relates his various adventures in Miami, from helping fashion a giant papier-mâché marijuana joint (24), breaking up a fight between celebrity activist Abbie Hoffman and a disgruntled critic (26), to participating in the riots outside the Republican National Convention (29). Roselle remained involved with the Yippies until the inauguration of Nixon in DC, but he drifted away from the movement as the war wound down on its own (32).
In Chapter three, Roselle describes life after his youthful adventures, and the events that lead into his joining the environmental movement at the end of the 70s. Moving to The mid-west in 1975, Roselle wound up in Jackson, Wyoming where he spent the next four years of his life as a “cross-country ski bum,” (37), working odd jobs at various restaurants, and as a derrick hand on oil drilling rigs in the Wyoming “oil patch,” when restaurant work slowed down at the end of the tourist season. By 1979, Roselle was ski-bumming and working on Brinkerhoff-54, which he describes as “brand-new iron, the biggest and the best [drilling rig] in Wyoming” (37). While working on Brinkeroff, Roselle learns of a plan by the oil company to move the drilling rig into the Gros Venture Wilderness, a protected forest region. This knowledge caused Roselle a bit of a moral dilemma. When not working or skiing, Roselle had fallen into doing activist work with local environmentalists to keep drilling out of Teton County. “I was not against drilling for oil,” Roselle writes, “But I had become convinced that drilling had its limits. Those limits included no drilling in roadless areas” (38).
Faced with this knowledge of the company’s plans, Roselle decided that “If rig 54 was moving into the proposed Gros Venture Wilderness, I would not be moving with it.” Second, he decided that he had to tell the environmentalists he knew about the plan. He decided to tell his friend Howie Wolke, a notoriously well-known local conservationist who was very vocal in defending against drilling in the Gros Venture, and a member of a loose knit group of conservationists known as “Buckaroos.” The Buckaroos were mostly all professional conservationists, working with groups from the Wilderness Society, to the Sierra Club, but they were militant in ways that many of the organizations they worked for were not, and had a reputation for being wild and rowdy. “Wilderness,” writes Roselle, “for a Buckaroo, was the only reason for living, other than alcohol and sex,” (41). When not attending public hearings, meetings, and doing other activist work, the Buckaroos were at the bar, drinking heavily and arguing with loggers and oil workers. “In the bar is where the Buckaroos were made,” Roselle writes (43). It wasn’t long before the Buckaroos invited Roselle to join them on a wilderness retreat to Arizona and Mexico. On retreat, they drank, caroused, and lamented the state of the then current environmental movement.
On the return trip, Roselle, along with Wolke, and fellow Buckaroo Dave Foreman, began throwing around ideas for a new kind of environmental group. The group would take a stand where other environmental groups had backed down. With a pen and some typing paper the three scribbled out a manifesto for the new organization. Roselle describes the behavior of his comrades as they brainstormed: “They were drinking beer from cans and tossing them out the window with a shout of ‘Hayduke lives!’ in honor of Edward Abbey’s eco-saboteur character in his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang” (50); an ironic and oddly contradictory scene for a group of activists brainstorming ideas for a new environmental group. Idiosyncrasies like this appear throughout the book, though Roselle makes very little if any light of them. By the end of the trip, the three had a manifesto including two pages of bullet points with the words “No compromise” between each point, a logo of a crudely drawn fist, and a name: Earth First! (50-51).
The first action that broke headlines for Earth First was the hanging of a large black banner down the face of the Glen Canyon Dam, a banner made to make it appear as though the dam was cracked (58). The dam was a symbol to many environmentalists of the failures that happen when environmental groups are too willing to compromise (55), and the symbolic cracking of the dam marked the commitment of Earth First to the words of their manifesto: no compromise. This no compromise attitude took them to their first major campaign, against Getty Oil drilling in Teton County in the region known as the Gros Venture Wilderness (59-60). The Buckaroos, already busy stirring up public sentiment against the proposed drilling, called a rally at the site for the proposed road into the wilderness that would lead to the drilling site (63-64). Over three hundred people, many of them locals, turned out for the rally, which made state-wide news headlines (64). At the same time, the Buckaroos put their activist experience to work, researching the legality of the proposed road, and drilling site, and found legal footing on which to challenge the proposal. Public sentiment, plus the legal challenge, won the day, and Earth First! and the Buckaroos were successful in saving the Gros Venture from drilling (65), without having to engage in civil disobedience.
The middle chapters of Tree Spiker follow a pattern set out in the early chapters, with each chapter recounting either the founding of a particular organization and one of the campaigns that established it, or a particular piece of derring-do on the part of Roselle and his comrades. These chapters are interesting for their insider history, and the first person accounts they provide, but the part of Tree Spiker that I found most interesting, and I would argue most useful to environmental activists today, is the last three chapters of the book. In these chapters, Roselle outlines the actions of the “Battle of Seattle” (Chapter 11) and recounts the history of the Earth Liberation Front (Chapter 12), and his pointed critiques of both lead to his analysis of the way forward for the environmental movement (Chapter 13).
In the chapter on “The Battle of Seattle,” Roselle makes excellent critiques of the ineffectiveness of large-scale protests, arguing that “They [were] more parade than protest, more speech than action, a convergence of the believers, by the believers, for the believers” (223-24). He further argues that such actions can actually be detrimental to movements: “When thousands of activists converge on one location and nothing happens, the movement risks losing its credibility” (224). While Roselle arrives at some good conclusions, his reasoning for reaching those conclusions has flaws. He places blame for most of the problems of the Seattle protests on “anarchists,” arguing over several pages that the anti-globalization movement hurt itself by allowing them to participate (222-29). Roselle bases his view of anarchists largely on stereotypes, as we can see when he describes them here as: “…largely an intellectual, white, middle-class youth movement with little support outside coffee shops in college towns and urban centers,” (228); and here: “There was no room for anyone who did not conform to their rigid set of principles and worldview. The food was vegan, the music hip-hop, and clothes black. Tattoos and piercing were required” (234). These descriptions serve to make anarchists into caricatures, upon which it is easy to pin blame, and Roselle does (229).
In analyzing the ELF, Roselle draws a line in the sand seeking to distinguish the actions of the ELF from those of his past organizations, EF!, the Ruckus Society and the Rainforest Action Network. Roselle argues that where the ELF went wrong was in embracing violence as a tactic, and he classifies arson, sabotage and property destruction all as violent acts, and condemns such actions. He argues that his organizations were committed to non-violence, akin to the civil rights workers of the 60s, and that in the training classes they held, and the campaigns they participated in, violence and property destruction were strongly discouraged (236).
While he provides a good analysis of the flaws in the legal defense of the individuals prosecuted (236), Roselle argues that many of their problems were self created. He calls the Green Scare, the belief that the FBI and other agencies were deliberately targeting environmental activists in an effort to disrupt the environmental movement, a self-fulfilling prophecy. He believes that the arrests of the ELF and the fears swirled up by their own lawyers in the process of their defense have fueled the hysteria, creating an atmosphere of fear that has have partially paralyzed the environmental movement, scaring away people from the real work that needs to be done, and isolating the movement from the public (236-38). The strongest argument Roselle makes against the ELF and the Green Scare, is that “In the end, it changed nothing, and the energy expended could have been much better used building a broad-based and disciplined environmental movement” (238).
It is towards that end, building a broad-based and disciplined environmental movement that Roselle turns his attention in the last chapter of Tree Spiker. Here, Roselle makes the bold statement that “I am convinced that ranks of the youth are what we need to move forward” (242). He argues that what the new environmental movement needs is a campaign of civil disobedience on par with the campaigns in the south during the height of the civil rights movement to bring the issue to the fore and to motivate people everywhere to take action, a campaign that only the youth can carry out. He ends on a hopeful note, with a call to all to join in the new environmental movement.
Overall, Tree Spiker is a recommended read for environmental activists, social justice activists, or anyone else interested in the environment and the history of campaigns to defend it. Today, Roselle maintains a website which publishes his more recent thoughts and musings on the environmental movement, as well as hosting a diverse range of other writers and topics. For more, check out www.lowbagger.org
May 7, 2010
Environmentalism, Publication Reviews, Social Movements