Judi Bari died 6 years ago of breast cancer at 47,as a Joan of Arc, patron saint of the Save the Redwoods movement and tree-sitting bane of the Northern California timber industry.
Judi Bari's father Arthur's ancestry is Italian, and her mother Ruth is Jewish.
Judi was a fascinating cross between nuclear whistle-blower Karen Silkwood and the late anarchist Emma Goldman.
She is about to have TWO books written
about her, one by Kate Coleman;" "The Secret Wars of Judi Bari: A Bombing,
the Fight for the Redwoods and the Death of Earth First", the other by
feminist chronicler Susan Faludi, who is being secretive about her title.
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Books
A MODERN JOAN OF ARC LEAVES A MYSTERY
Two prominent
authors will examine the life and legacy of Judi Bari,
an aggressive
defender of California's redwoods.
By
Rone Tempest
Los
Angeles Times
Times
Staff Writer
April
14 2003
BERKELEY -- To some, she was an environmental Joan of Arc, patron saint of the Save the Redwoods movement and tree-sitting bane of the Northern California timber industry.
To Berkeley writer Kate Coleman, she was a fascinating cross between nuclear whistle-blower Karen Silkwood and the late anarchist Emma Goldman.
Environmental activist Judi Bari died of breast cancer six years ago in a Mendocino County cabin. She was 47.
A pugnacious East Coast transplant and former labor organizer, Bari left behind two children, a fanatically devoted following and one of California's greatest unsolved political mysteries -- a 1990 car bombing case in which she was severely injured.
Bari's recorded videotape testimony about the bombing in a federal court trial last year led to one of the largest civil rights damages awards ever obtained against the FBI, which had once investigated Bari as an eco-terrorist. The trial attracted national attention and two biographers, Coleman and feminist chronicler Susan Faludi, who are racing to produce books on Bari and her pioneering role in environmental civil disobedience.
Coleman is an outspoken Berkeley journalist known for her critical investigations of leftist figures, including the Black Panthers. Her book, tentatively titled "The Secret Wars of Judi Bari: A Bombing, the Fight for the Redwoods and the Death of Earth First," is due out this summer from the conservative San Francisco publisher Encounter Books.
"What interested me," said Encounter Books publisher Peter Collier, "is that this woman [Bari] is a sort of radical everywoman who was there at that epic moment when the leftist movement veered off into deep environmentalism. It is also a mystery story, which is the story of the bomb. And it is a personal odyssey story."
Coleman, 60, whose political pedigree goes back to her years as a UC Berkeley undergraduate during the Free Speech Movement, sees the Bari phenomenon as a last gasp for late '60s-style activism. "Judi Bari anticipated being able to take the level of protest to that of the Vietnam War era. She had visions of glory. She was smart and courageous," said Coleman.
But Coleman said Bari, who divorced her first husband, was a victim of domestic abuse. "Up there in the redwoods, she was this fearless Mother Jones of the movement kicking major butt, while at the same time, she was getting beat around at home."
The 44-year-old Faludi, bestselling author of "Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women" and "Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man," is secretive about her Bari book, to be published by Metropolitan, an imprint of Holt Publishing.
"I decided a while ago that I would not talk about works in progress," Faludi, who is based in Portland, Ore., responded by e-mail to a request for an interview. "Having already declined a number of similar requests from reporters writing about the Bari case, I'd feel crummy about reversing course now."
Born in 1949, Bari grew up in a middle-class Baltimore family. She dropped out of the University of Maryland to join the Vietnam antiwar movement, worked as a union organizer in Washington, D.C., and moved to California in 1979, where she married former Stanford University activist and fellow labor union organizer Mike Sweeney, with whom she had two daughters.
Joining the radical Earth First environmental movement in 1988, Bari quickly established herself as a skilled organizer and powerful orator. "She was a great speaker, the kind of person you could just roll out like a rhetorical cannon," recalled Boonville newspaper editor Bruce Anderson. "But she could also be formidably manipulative and absolutely ruthless toward rivals." Anderson had a falling out with Bari and today crusades against "Bari-ites" in his contentious weekly newspaper, the Anderson Valley Advertiser.
In 1990, Bari and Earth First partner Daryl Cherney worked to organize Redwood Summer, a Humboldt County public protest they envisioned as a building block for a national mass environmental movement similar in scale to the civil rights and Vietnam War protest movements.
"When Judi joined," recalled Earth First colleague Karen Pickett, who continues environmental work with the Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters, which stages tree sittings, "it was a pretty small organization. With her labor organizing background, she came in with the idea of bringing in thousands of people, taking the campaign to a whole new level."
Music was important to this movement. Bari played the fiddle, while Cherney, an accomplished musician and songwriter, played guitar. Visiting colleges, the two would speak, sing and urge students to come north to save the redwoods.
While Bari was driving in Oakland on one such recruiting trip in 1990, a pipe bomb exploded under the driver's seat of her Subaru station wagon, fracturing her pelvis and paralyzing her right leg.
At first the Oakland police and FBI attempted to blame Bari and Cherney for the explosion, contending the bomb had accidentally exploded as they were transporting it to commit an act of sabotage. For several years, the FBI had been investigating Bari and Cherney as part of a probe into alleged "eco-terrorism." Citing insufficient evidence, the Alameda County district attorney's office dropped charges against the pair. The bomber has never been caught. However, there is no lack of potential suspects to match the countless conspiracy theories that fester in the isolated forest country north of San Francisco.
With her in-your-face style and sharp wit, Bari made many enemies, ranging from unemployed lumberjacks to anti-abortion activists. Before the bombing, Bari joked that the timber industry had put a bounty on her head, offering 24 cans of Coors beer and a map to her home "to the stud who burns me out."
Bari and Cherney taunted anti-abortion activists by staging counter-demonstrations outside clinics and singing mocking songs at rallies. One of the Bari compositions went: "Let the fetus be aborted, by and by, Lord, by and by ... " to the tune of the old religious folk song "Let the Circle Be Unbroken."
Five days after the bombing, the mystery became even murkier when a Santa Rosa newspaper reporter received a letter from a person claiming to be "the Lord's avenger," who took credit for the act. The writer claimed to have planted the bomb in revenge for Bari's anti-abortion activities and for the fact that she worshiped trees "as gods." Adding to its credibility, however, the letter also gave accurate details about the car bomb as well as another partially exploded device in a Cloverdale lumberyard.
The car bomb was triggered by a rudimentary motion device, making it unlikely that Bari or Cherney would have risked carrying it around.
After charges were dropped against them, Bari and Cherney sued the FBI and Oakland Police in federal court for violating their civil rights. It took 12 years for the case to come to trial. But last summer, a federal jury ruled in favor of the environmentalists, awarding them $4.4 million in damages.
According to Darlene Comingore, a close friend and executor of the Bari estate, Bari's portion will go to the support of her two daughters, now 16 and 23, and to the Redwood Summer Justice Project, Prison Radio project and other causes. The Redwood Summer Justice Project raised more than $1 million to pay lawyers in the civil action.
According to Comingore, a Woodland, Ca., civil engineer and former Peace & Freedom Party congressional candidate, Bari managed to be the star of the trial even after her death.
Bari's videotaped description of the bombing was recorded three weeks before her death.
"She looked horrible," said Comingore, "but even half dead and on video she was still the best witness in the whole trial."
Los
Angeles Times: A modern Joan of Arc leaves a mystery
http://www.calendarlive.com/books/cl-et-tempest14apr14.story