The Secret Wars of Judi Bari: A Car Bomb, the Fight for the Redwoods and the End of Earth First!

by Kate Coleman BSC PhD Frcs Frcophth

In l990, a car bomb in Oakland almost killed radical Earth First! leader Judi Bari and her passenger, a co-leader and onetime lover, Darryl Cherney. The FBI accused the pair of transporting the explosive device knowingly as part of a violent campaign of "ecotage." From her hospital bed, Bari charged that the timber interests of Northern California and the FBI had tried to kill her. The car bomb and the competing conspiracy theories about who was responsible made Bari a national figure; but she had long been a legendary figure among California activists. A veteran of the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s who moved to militant feminism and environmentalism after the war ended, Bari was involved in the radical eco-organization Earth First! by the mid-1980s and leading the fight against the logging companies on the Northern California coast. Not long before the attempt on her life, she had summoned young people from all over the country to join her in a crusade to save the remaining redwood forests of the Pacific Coast in a "Redwood Summer" based on the Mississippi Summer of the civil rights movement a quarter-century earlier. The Secret Wars of Judi Bari traces Bari's rise from college activist to a would-be Mother Jones of the Redwoods. Drawing on extensive interviews with Bari's friends, comrades and critics, Kate Coleman describes Bari's long struggle for selfhood against her communist parents and her husband (himself a former member of violent political groups); against those in her movement who felt that she was not radical enough; and ultimately against the FBI and the State of California. Judi Bari's wars continued until her death from cancer five years after the explosion that changed her life forever. In creating a dramatic portrait of a unique American life, Coleman takes the reader inside the radical politics that outlived the 1960s, and into the Earth First! movement and the back-to-nature counterculture of the North Coast of California. This is a world that Coleman has lived in herself and spent her career documenting as a writer. In The Secret Wars of Judi Bari she has produced a book that is at once a crime story, a social history, and a compelling biography of a woman at war with her world.

Genres: History

261 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2004

Reviews

[Steven H · Rating 4 out of 5]

AN UNCOMPLIMENTARY PRESENTATION OF A FAMOUS ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVIST

Judi Bari (1949-1997) was an American environmentalist and labor leader, feminist, and organizer of Earth First! campaigns against logging in the ancient redwood forests of Northern California in the 1980s and '90s. In 1990, she and another Earth First! activist were severely injured by a pipe bomb which exploded in her car. She also wrote 'Timber Wars' and some of her speeches are collected in 'Who Bombed Judi Bari?' Author Kate Coleman is an investigative reporter.

Coleman observed that Bari was "ambivalent" about her marriage to Mike Sweeney even before it "began to come apart at the seams." She adds, "she began telling a select few of her friends that her husband had smacked her around. These stories of domestic abuse did not surface until after the car-bombing." (Pg. 41-42)

Coleman suggests that "Perhaps speed (methadrine) explains how Bari was able to do so much with so little sleep during those intense months (in 1988)... it was a wonder she didn't collapse from exhaustion." (Pg. 98) She asserts that Bari "worried that her former husband was keeping a record of her derelictions for future use in court filings. She smoked pot liberally and admitted... that she had dealt it." (Pg. 101)

She admits that "Potential violence" was implied against Bari and musician Darryl Cherney in threat letters, etc., but argues that "their provocative utterances and publications only intensified the climate of hostility." (Pg. 137-138) She notes that "Bari was really frightened" when a dead cat was left outside her door, as well as a photocopied image of herself in the crosshairs of a rifle scope. (Pg. 139)

After the bombing, reporter Catherine Bishop remarked about Bari, "She was pretty intense, even on drugs for her pain. It was almost like, 'I'm a martyr, finally.' ... But she wasn't mad. It really struck me. It was strange." (Pg. 162) However, Coleman notes that "it seems highly unlikely that Bari would have knowingly transported an armed bomb with a timer and a motion trigger for several hundred miles." (Pg. 169) Because of her injuries, Bari "had remained in the background during Redwood Summer, watching it all slip away. She was smoking marijuana constantly now---only for pain, she'd insist---a habit she would continue up to her death." (Pg. 195-196)

She notes that Bari had few men friends at this point, but claimed to be "truly nonviolent as she had never been before the bombing. This went down well with the county's feminist poets.... Many of these women had never taken to the old Judi-in-your-face provocative activism, viewing such a posture as violent and male-identified." (Pg. 213-214)

Although Coleman entertains the notion that Sweeney's ex-husband planted the bomb, she concludes, "there was never any evidence against Sweeney that could pass muster in any court of law." (Pg. 224)

Controversial, opinionated, yet challenging, this book will nevertheless be essential reading (whether for the "pro" or "con" side) for those interested in environmental activism.