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By Eric Brazil OF THE EXAMINER STAFF Thursday, February 12, 1998 ©1998 San Francisco Examiner STAFFORD, Humboldt County -- After 64 days living near the top of a 200-foot- high redwood, through storms and a siege aimed at dislodging her, Julia "Butterfly" says she is so attuned to her host that she believes she has felt its tears with her bare feet and body. Butterfly's pantheistic embrace of the tallest, thickest, oldest redwood in a 200-acre patch of forest is the focal point of Earth First's sustained effort to halt old-growth logging on California's North Coast. The 23-year-old Arkansas woman, who adopted the name Butterfly as a nom de protest, has become a pain in the neck for Pacific Lumber Co., which had hoped to turn the tree in which she sits into finished lumber worth close to six figures. Company workers have turned spotlights on her, honked at her through air horns, tried to interdict her supply lines, and, Earth First contends, buzzed dangerously close with logging helicopters. All the while, the skies have dumped the worst storms in years on her head. So far, though, Julia Butterfly prevails. Pacific Lumber Co. is temporarily stymied. So the tree she calls "Luna," also known as "The Stafford Giant," has a reprieve. "My spirit led me here, and I mean to stay with it," she said in a walkie-talkie interview Tuesday as light rain fell through a drifting fog on the 1,700-foot ridge above the Eel River south of Stafford. "We have extended the life of this beautiful tree through the winter." >From her 8-by-8-foot platform aerie -- higher than a football field is wide -- Butterfly can see the Pacific Ocean, the Scotia sawmill of Pacific Lumber Co. and a helicopter logging operation, all exemplifying the forest practices that she is protesting with her marathon tree-sit. "This protest is more than symbolic," said Patrick "Fisher" Mulligan, one of 10 members of the Earth First crew that planned and is sustaining the marathon tree-sit. "Here, we're slowing PL down, stopping them from killing this tree" and denying the company a quick profit. Finished old-growth redwood lumber is worth $800 to $4,000 per 1,000 board feet, and Luna contains an estimated 20,000 board feet. Pacific Lumber, a subsidiary of Houston-based Maxxam Inc., owner of most of the world's privately held old-growth redwoods, including Headwaters Forest,which lies north of the tree-sit, has been relentlessly criticized by environmental activists during the '90s for alleged overcutting and cavalier logging practices. The company was flayed with bad press in January, when news broke that Humboldt County deputies had smeared pepper spray on the eyelids of anti-logging demonstrators. So its public response to Butterfly's tree-sit is measured and subdued. The company intends to convert Luna to lumber, but "we're obviously not going to cut that tree down while there are people in it," Pacific Lumber spokeswoman Mary Bullwinkel said Wednesday. Company helicopters are also unable to haul out half a dozen logs ready for the mill because they're in a 150-foot buffer zone around the tree-sit. "In the past, we've had some of our climbers go up and remove their gear, and that entices them to come down," she said. "We're looking for ways to entice them down." Tree-sitting is a standard Earth First protest technique, but the Stafford tree-sit is a special effort, the highest and longest ever attempted. It began in early October, when a team of activists hiked up the ridge carrying the platform in pieces, sent a free-climber to the top, reassembled and occupied the platform before the company discovered the trespass. All this happened during a full moon; hence, the name Luna. Stafford has been an environmental battle zone since Dec. 31, 1996, when a massive mudslide that began in the vicinity of a just-completed Pacific Lumber timber harvest destroyed or damaged 10 homes. It is also Earth First's base camp. Several Stafford residents are suing the company for damages. Butterfly's tree-sit is just to the west of and slightly above the mudslide's point of origin, and it stands out against the ridge line. "Jumpshot," a member of Butterfly's support team, calls the tree "a fist in the sky." "For a week they tried to starve us down," Butterfly said. "We were under siege. Their security set up a base camp under the tree, but we had plenty of supplies to outlast them. "They also buzzed the tree with a helicopter," she said. "It was terrifying. I'd never experienced anything man-made with so much power and feeling so dangerous," she said. Bullwinkel said that Butterfly's account was false in fact, that there had been no intentional buzzing. In any event, "she's willing to sit up there nonstop during a storm," Bullwinkel said. "I don't see much difference other than that the (helicopter) crews are being extremely cautious and careful." Butterfly's intransigence exemplifies Earth First's battle cry, "No compromise in defense of Mother Earth." But she is a far cry from the rough and rugged, backpacking and mountain climbing stereotype created for Earth First by its founders. Daughter of an itinerant minister, who settled his family in Arkansas after a peripatetic mobile-home life, Butterfly spent two years in college, worked in retail, ran a restaurant, tried telemarketing and made jewelry before taking off on a vision quest that led her to Humboldt County's Lost Coast. Briefed on the old-growth fight by an acquaintance, she visited Earth First's base camp in the fall, volunteered to learn climbing -- and found her life's work as an eco-warrior. "I was scared at first, and then I just started paying attention to the tree, drawing strength from the tree," she said. "I could see all her scars and wounds, from fires and lightning strikes. I was making a spiritual connection." The tree is so old that huckleberry and salmonberry bushes and ferns grow amid its branches. "Eventually, I took my shoes off so I could feel the tree and started free climbing around," she said. When Pacific Lumber started logging the steepest part of the ridge and hauling logs out by helicopter, "I found myself crying a lot and hugging Luna and telling her I was sorry," she said. "Then, I found out that I was being covered by sap pouring out of her body from everywhere, and I realized, "Oh, my God, you're crying too.' The sap didn't begin pouring out until the logging started." Butterfly's conclusion: "Trees pass information on how to hold up hillsides and how to grow, and they also know how to communicate feelings." Butterfly attributes her name to "an extreme spiritual experience with a butterfly when I was a child" -- it rested on her hand during a long, trying walk. A chatty, cheerful woman, she has had several companions during her tree-sit but went through the worst of last week's storms all alone. "It was like riding a roller coaster," she said. "I was laughing hysterically; it was exhilarating, it was terrifying. It was something I lived through, and I'd prefer not do to it again. I was completely beaten and exhausted by the roar and the noise, but I still enjoyed the fact that I was up here in this beautiful, amazing, powerful tree and that I was still alive when the morning came." A vegan -- except that she eats honey and wears wool -- Butterfly said she was much stronger now in her upper body than when she first climbed her tree, "but I think I may have a little trouble when I get down. My leg muscles may have atrophied a bit." Her biggest physical complaint: "I am freezing up here." Aloft, in her sleeping bag, beneath multiple layers of tarpaulin, she reads by candlelight ("The Monkey Wrench Gang" by Edward Abbey, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera and Earth First journals) writes poetry and tape records her thoughts. There may be a book in her experience, one of these days, she said. She writes: It is a desperate picture that these branches frame, I want tostrike out at the ones to blame, But that won't heal this sadness too deep to name. Butterfly plans to spend her birthday aloft. She will be 24 nextWednesday. ©1998 San Francisco Examiner
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