Judith Beatrice Bari (1949–1997) was an American environmentalist, feminist, and labor leader. She was the principal organizer of Earth First! campaigns against logging in the ancient redwood forests of Northern California in the 1980s and 1990s. She also organized efforts through Earth First! – Industrial Workers of the World Local 1 to bring timber workers and environmentalists together in common cause.
Earth First! is a radical environmental advocacy group that originated in the Southwestern United States. It was founded in 1980 by Dave Foreman, Mike Roselle, Howie Wolke, Bart Koehler, and Ron Kezar. Today there are Earth First! groups around the world including ones in Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, New Zealand, the Philippines, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Tree spiking involves hammering a metal rod, nail or other material into a tree trunk, either inserting it at the base of the trunk where a logger might be expected to cut into the tree, or higher up where it would affect the sawmill later processing the wood. It is used to prevent logging by risking damage to saws, in the forest or at the mill, if the tree is cut, as well as possible injury or death to the worker. The spike can also lower the commercial value of the wood by causing discoloration, reducing the economic viability of logging in the long term, without threatening the life of the tree. It is illegal in the United States, and has been described as a form of eco-terrorism.
A pipe bomb is an improvised explosive device which uses a tightly sealed section of pipe filled with an explosive material. The containment provided by the pipe means that simple low explosives can be used to produce a relatively huge explosion due to the containment causing increased pressure, and the fragmentation of the pipe itself creates potentially lethal shrapnel.
The Centennial Olympic Park bombing was a domestic terrorist pipe bombing attack on Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, Georgia, on July 27, 1996, during the Summer Olympics. The blast directly killed one person and injured 111 others; another person later died of a heart attack. It was the first of four bombings committed by Eric Rudolph. Security guard Richard Jewell discovered the bomb before detonation and began clearing spectators out of the park.
Eco-terrorism is an act of violence committed in support of environmental causes, against people or property.
THERMCON was the code name of an FBI operation which was launched in response to the sabotage of the Arizona Snowbowl ski lift near Flagstaff, Arizona, in October 1987 by three people from Prescott, Arizona, Mark Davis, Margaret Millet and Marc Baker. In a November 1987 letter claiming responsibility, the group called themselves the "Evan Mecham Eco-Terrorist International Conspiracy" (EMETIC). The group named themselves after Evan Mecham, the then-Governor of Arizona. The Arizona Snowbowl spent $50,000 repairing the damage.
Viola Fauver Liuzzo was an American civil rights activist. In March 1965, Liuzzo heeded the call of Martin Luther King Jr. and traveled from Detroit, Michigan, to Selma, Alabama, in the wake of the Bloody Sunday attempt at marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Liuzzo participated in the successful Selma to Montgomery marches and helped with coordination and logistics. At the age of 39, while driving back from a trip shuttling fellow activists to the Montgomery airport, she was fatally hit by shots fired from a pursuing car containing Ku Klux Klan members Collie Wilkins, William Eaton, Eugene Thomas, and Gary Thomas Rowe, the last of whom was actually an undercover informant working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Although the State of Alabama was unable to secure a murder conviction, Wilkins, Eaton, and Thomas were charged in federal court with conspiracy to intimidate African Americans under the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, a Reconstruction civil rights statute. On December 3, the trio was found guilty by an all-white, all-male jury, and were sentenced to ten years in prison, a landmark in Southern legal history.
Venceremos was an American far-left and primarily Chicano political group active in the Palo Alto, California area from 1969 to 1973.
Joseph Tony Serra is an American civil rights attorney, activist and tax resister from San Francisco.
The Pacific Lumber Company, officially abbreviated PALCO, and also commonly known as PL, was one of California's major logging and sawmill operations, located 28 miles (45 km) south of Eureka and 244 miles (393 km) north of San Francisco. Begun in 1863, PALCO was carefully managed over most of the twentieth century by generations of the Simon J. Murphy, Sr. Family or managers chosen by the Murphys from 1905 through 1985. Primary operations existed in massive log storage and milling operations at the historic company town of Scotia, California, located adjacent to US 101 along the Eel River. Secondary mills were located in nearby Fortuna and Carlotta. PALCO had extensive timber holdings exceeding well over 200,000 acres (890 km²) in the Redwood and Douglas-Fir forests of Humboldt County. For generations, it was one of the largest private employers in the entire region, appropriately known as the Redwood Empire.
Richard Masato Aoki was an American educator and college counselor, best known as a civil rights activist and early member of the Black Panther Party. He joined the early Black Panther Party and was eventually promoted to the position of Field Marshal. Although there were several Asian Americans in the Black Panther Party, Aoki was the only one to have a formal leadership position. Following Aoki's death, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's records on him were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, showing that, over a period of 15 years, he had been an informant for the government. HEADS-UP; The F.B.I. stated that Richard Aoki was their informant after his death. The F.B.I. introduced audio tapes as their proof. The audio tapes could have easily been produced by the F.B.I. purposely to under mind the status that Richard Aoki had in our community. Richard had no surviving family that could question the assertions of the F.B.I., and the F.B.I. offered no additional proof of their statements beyond the audio tapes. Never forget, the F.B.I. was the enemy of the Black Panther party. The word of the F.B.I. should be questioned.
Darryl Cherney is an American musician and environmental activist. He is a member of the Earth First! environmental movement. Born and raised in New York City, he lives in Humboldt County, California.
Stephen Henderson Talbot is an American TV documentary producer, reporter, writer, and longtime contributor to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and the series Frontline. His more than 40 documentaries include the Frontline films "The Best Campaign Money Can Buy", "Rush Limbaugh's America", "The Long March of Newt Gingrich", "Justice for Sale", and "News War: What's Happening to the News". Talbot has also written and produced PBS biographies of writers Dashiell Hammett, Beryl Markham, Ken Kesey, Carlos Fuentes, Maxine Hong Kingston and John Dos Passos. He was co-creator and executive producer of the PBS music specials, Sound Tracks: Music Without Borders".
Alice DiMicele is a folk musician and environmental singer/songwriter from Ashland, Oregon.
William Patrick Staley is a former American football player. He played five years as an AFL and NFL football player for a total of 49 games. Two seasons with the Cincinnati Bengals, three with the Chicago Bears
Organized in 1990 by Earth First! and the Industrial Workers of the World, Redwood Summer was a three-month movement of environmental activism led by Judi Bari aimed at protecting old-growth redwood trees from logging by northern California timber companies and was part of the Timber Wars of the 1990s. The first official protest associated with Redwood Summer took place in June 1990 at the Louisiana Pacific export dock in Samoa California. Before the protests officially started, the campaign gained international attention on May 24, 1990 when the campaign leader, Judi Bari, and a fellow activist, Darryl Cherney, were involved in a pipe bomb explosion that critically injured them while they were driving through Oakland, California. The explosion led to the FBI accusing Bari of manufacturing and transporting bombs. Due to the FBI not being able to adequately support their claims, she was eventually found innocent. The movement was also known to use many controversial techniques to disrupt the logging companies including tree spiking, symbolic protests, and disarming machinery. Though the protests were supposed to remain non-violent, many critics argue that Earth First! is a radical group and the techniques used in the protests are debated.
Seth Rosenfeld is an American journalist. He is the author of Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power, published in hardback in 2012 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in paperback in 2013 by Picador. Subversives was a New York Times best-seller and won the 2013 Ridenhour Prize for books; PEN Center USA's Literary Award for Research Nonfiction; the National Society of Professional Journalists' Sunshine Award; and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.
Josiah "Tink" Thompson is an American writer, retired professional private investigator, and former philosophy professor. In 1967, he published both The Lonely Labyrinth, a study of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works, and Six Seconds in Dallas: A Micro-Study of the Kennedy Assassination. The culmination of his half-century-long Kennedy assassination project, updating his own and others’ investigative work, correcting certain errors, and reconciling the whole body of valid forensic and eyewitness evidence, was published in early 2021 as Last Second in Dallas.
Greg King is an American journalist and environmental activist in Northern California. He is President and Executive Director of Siskiyou Land Conservancy, a non-profit land trust.
