The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods by Greg King (review)

The Ghost Forest is a horror story . . . and a revelation. The storyteller is Greg King, whose timbermen ancestors began arriving in California in 1873 to join in the logging of the redwood biome that had commenced only a decade earlier. They became so prominent during the early years of European incursions in the region that place names there still bear the family name.

King was born in 1961 and reported that when he was growing up in Guerneville, there were still large tracks of intact redwoods left, including a protected reserve near his home that he regularly explored. When it was time for college, he chose the University of California at Santa Cruz because redwoods were "so much a part of my spirit" (20) that he wanted them nearby.

After graduating with a degree in journalism in 1985, King returned to Guerneville and took a job at a small, weekly newspaper. Witnessing the ongoing destruction of the forests he loved, he soon quit his job, which forbade him from activist endeavors, and trespassed onto timber company lands. There he discovered a wonderous old-growth redwood grove, which he named "Headwaters Forest," and learned it was slated to be clear-cut. He soon joined in common cause with the Earth First! activists who, since the early 1980s, had been campaigning against deforestation in the region. In their efforts to thwart destruction, Earth First!ers were known for campaigns including lobbying, dramatic civil disobedience, in some cases tree spiking (putting metal or ceramic spikes in trees to increase the costs of cutting them), and other forms of sabotage. Along with Earth First! activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, with whom he worked closely during the second half of the 1980s, King became one of the most tenacious and famous of the activists battling for the redwoods.

Much of his book provides a riveting account of this resistance, especially up to and including the horror when in 1990, someone planted a bomb under the seat of Judi Bari's car. It went off on 24 May when Bari, accompanied by Darryl Cherney, had just left a house in Oakland for another meeting to organize "Redwood Summer," their envisioned campaign of mass protest and civil disobedience to protect the redwood forests. The bomb injured Cherney, but Bari's injuries were severe and permanently disabling. Afterward, Bari and Cherney were arrested and accused of being bomb-carrying ecoterrorists who were injured by a bomb they were carrying and intended to use in their campaign.

In The Ghost Forest, King describes well the lawsuit Bari and Cherney filed against the FBI and Oakland Police Department, which in 2002 led to a jury finding that these agencies violated Bari's and Cherney's constitutional rights to free speech, and against unlawful searches and confinement (false arrest). The authorities had also defamed these activists by falsely insinuating that they were bomb-carrying terrorists. Among several lies made by the law enforcement authorities, an FBI agent claimed that the bomb had been placed behind, not under, Bari's car seat. As Bari herself noted, no sane person would knowingly place a bomb in such a place. Noting that the northern California Earth First! groups had, in 1987, renounced tree spiking, King surmised that "one of the reasons for the attack against Judi Bari [was] to make us look violent when in fact we were leading the movement into a more powerful and tenable movement that embraced radical non-violent resistance."¹

Although in northern California the Earth First! movement was overwhelmingly nonviolent in practice and despite its 1987 pledge, the timber industry and its public relations firms effectively used the incident to defeat a 1990 California referendum known as "Forests Forever," claiming it originated with violent, extremist environmentalists.² The referendum would have saved tens of thousands of acres of redwood ecosystems. In his telling of...