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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (Nov. 22, 2006)
JEFF “FREE” LUERS AND CAROL BERG F rom the end of the Warner Creek forest blockade in 1996 to the sentencing of Jeff “Free” Luers in June 2001, Heather Coburn saw eco-radical women doing the work that was most critical to the movement but drew the least media attention: housing, feeding, educating and entertaining the growing masses of activists. “During the heyday of anar- chism, even though it was the camo-clad men doing most of the talking, almost all of those projects were being bottom- lined logistically by women,” she said. ECO-ANARCHY IMPLODING women, but male activists weren’t willing to kick out offend- ers who had valuable skills. “We became pessimistic and de- pressed with the situation,” wrote the article’s anonymous au- thors. In early 2001 the women took a stand and asked four men to leave Fall Creek, two of them for good. During a “gender- bender” month, only women occupied the tree village, teach- ing each other forest survival skills while men in town organ- ized funds, gathered donations and brought them food — al- beit reluctantly. “The men were totally against that,” Cater said. In Eugene, the gender divide was only getting worse. One woman, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation — we’ll call her “S.” — became alarmed around 2000 when an eco-anarchist allegedly commented that he would rape a woman for the revolution. S. launched what she called an an- archo-feminist counter-movement, criticizing and publicly shunning the activists who she felt were fostering abuse — a list that started small, but widened to include even well-known feminists such as Heather Coburn and Kari Johnson. “There was a lack of analysis of white, male, able-bodied, hetero priv- ilege,” S. said. “There’s no way a movement can sustain itself if it’s not built from the bottom up and if all of us haven’t ad- dressed our cultural oppression.” The anarcho-feminists’ work did prompt some people within the movement to make changes. Most media and ac- tivist groups adopted anti-oppression policies, and the ques- tion of privilege became one that every activist confronted. But not everyone appreciated it — least of all Tim Lewis, who was perhaps the biggest target of the anti-patriarchy move- ment. “There was a major attack on men by women who felt like men had too much power in the community,” he said. ECO-RADICAL WOMEN WERE DOING THE WORK MOST CRITICAL TO THE MOVEMENT BUT DRAWING THE LEAST MEDIA ATTENTION. Coburn was among those unsung heroines. In 1998 she and two others took on the lease for Ant Farm, one of several com- munal pads where hundreds of scrappy activists crashed over the next three years. She ran an all-women’s show called “Vaginal Discharge” on the pirate radio station Radio Free Cascadia and co-organized the “Free Skool” classes that spread activism skills throughout Whiteaker. As a volunteer with Food Not Bombs, she scavenged surplus food from local businesses and served it to hungry people in neighborhood parks. In 1999 she and a friend dug a garden into Scobert Park and launched an urban gardening movement called Food Not Lawns. Another caretaker of the movement was Shelley Cater, a friendly single mother then in her 30s who managed Out of the Fog, an organic coffee house by the Amtrak station. Cater in- vited Fall Creek forest defenders to hold meetings in the café, opened her 5th Ave. home as a campaign headquarters, shut- tled donated food and supplies to the aerial village and re- lieved tree-sitters between rotations. The Fall Creek activists, mostly males under 25, started calling her “Mom.” A few stalwart women also hung up in the trees — includ- ing a woman called Warcry, a smart and fiery activist who’d come to Oregon after sitting in the redwoods of California’s Headwaters Forest. She relished the Fall Creek activists’ fuck- y’all, flag-burning attitude, so different from the peacenik vibe at Headwaters. “In Northern California you couldn’t burn an American flag,” she said with a laugh. “Right up the road in Eugene, it was kind of expected of you.” But not all Fall Creek women felt safe in the forest. According to an article in Earth First! Journal (“Confronting Oppression, Aug.-Sept. 2001), men were doing most of the cool engineering work — hoisting platforms into the trees, stringing rope bridges between the tree-sits, teaching one an- other to use the climbing gear — without passing that knowl- edge onto their female counterparts. Worse, some creepy dudes were allegedly harassing and sexually assaulting “Some men left town because they were literally threatened with murder or having their balls cut off.” T he turmoil fueled debates that blazed across a growing number of home-grown independent media forums: on the public-access TV show Cascadia Alive!, which aired weekly from 1996 to 2004; on anarchist philosopher John Zerzan’s show, Radio Anarchy, which began on Radio Free Cascadia and continues today on KWVA; in the pages of Earth First! Journal, which was based in Eugene from 1993 to 2001, as well as in Green Anarchy magazine; and in the films and reports produced by Cascadia Media Collective, which Randy Shadowalker launched in summer 2000. The media surge stoked more discontent from behind-the- scenes activists who felt that the movement’s largely hard- edged spokespeople didn’t accurately represent them. Shadowalker saw a cliquish, badder-than-thou attitude begin to dominate the eco-anarchist scene, alienating its natural al- lies on the left — people who sympathized with the movement but lived within the mainstream. “When that [alliance] was gone, the spell was broken,” he said. “It almost went poof.” Other eco-anarchists saw liberals as unnecessary allies, hopelessly trying to reform a political system whose very exis- tence they opposed. “People were tired of being told what to do or how to act by these PC motherfuckers,” Lewis said. Compounding the internal strife, federal investigations made Eugene anarchists edgy, paranoid and suspicious of in- filtrators. An ongoing string of incendiary crimes in the Pacific Northwest brought the FBI magnifying glass ever-closer to Eugene, directing a hot beam of surveillance onto the scene. On Dec. 25, 1999, arsonists placed gift-wrapped buckets of fuel rigged with kitchen timers around the Monmouth, Ore. offices of lumber company Boise Cascade, burning the place to ashes. Days later the arsonists explained why in a commu- niqué sent to ELF spokesman Craig Rosebraugh: “Boise Cascade has been very naughty. After ravaging the forests of the Pacific Northwest, Boise Cascade now looks toward the virgin forests of Chile. Early Christmas morning, elves left coal in Boise Cascade’s stocking.” Five days after the Boise arson, saboteurs toppled a BPA tower near Bend. Activists report that police closed in on the scene — tailing them after demonstrations, snooping outside their punk par- ties, snapping photos of them in the streets. Tim Ream, con- vinced that the feds were preparing to raid his house, nailed legal statutes pertaining to searches on his front door. “What does it mean to hang out with your lover in your house when you feel like you’re being bugged?” he asked. “It’s a weird space to live in.” L acey Phillabaum sat somberly in front of a bed of pop- pies in Whiteaker, her face darkened by night shadows, and justified the black bloc’s behavior at the Battle of Seattle. “There’s nothing in the world like running with a group of 200 people all wearing black,” she said, blue eyes fixed on a point beyond Tim Lewis’ camera, “and realizing each of you is anonymous, each of you can liberate your de- sires, each of you can make a difference right there.” It was mid-June 2000, just days before the premiere of Lewis’ documentary about the combustible trinity: Eugene, anarchy and the WTO — then called Smash!; now titled Breaking the Spell. Anarcho-feminists had been calling Lewis an attention-hogging sexist for months, and now he figured he better get a woman to host his film. Phillabaum, an articulate and bold activist who had been an EF!J editor from 1996- 1999, was an obvious choice. She would later regret agreeing to it. It had been a heavy couple of months. Phillabaum and oth- ers, under the banner Eugene Active Existence, had organized the Seven Weeks Revolt!, a roster of community education, street theater and resistance rallies that actually spanned about eight weeks. It kicked off around April 24, when more than 100 people gathered in front of the Lane County Jail to hold a candlelight vigil for jailed Philadephia journalist and con- victed cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. Police alleged that pro- testers blocked traffic, ignored orders to disperse and, in one instance, kicked a burning can at them. Protesters, in turn, ac- cused the cops of showing up in excessive “robo-gear,” intim- idating and assaulting them. Police fired rubber bullets at one demonstrator and arrested eight. Eugene anarchists became the boogeymen of the Northwest, repeatedly blamed for police overreactions at protests. When a group of Eugene radicals joined more than 300 demonstrators in Portland during a May Day march, some 100 cops fired beanbag shots and slammed horses and ATVs HEATHER COBURN SAVING SEEDS NOVEMBER 22, 2006 1 3 SASCHA DUBRUL PART III
