Generation green - youth fight for planet - Brief Article

Sierra, Nov, 2000 by Heather Millar

Young rebels with a cause are taking to the streets, the parks, and the treetops to fight for the planet.

My liaison has told me to yell, "Hello, trees!" to announce my arrival at the Fall Creek tree-sit, about 40 miles southeast of Eugene, Oregon, in the Willamette National Forest. As I hike into the site along fire roads and trails, I wonder if I'm going to feel too silly to shout the prescribed greeting, Luckily, when I finally reach the clearing, a few people are squatting on the ground, beating on bongo drums. "Hi, sorry I'm late," I wheeze, telling my backpack slip to the ground. "I'm ..."

"We know who you are," says a young man, his electric-blue eyes framed by dreadlocks and his septum pierced with cherry wood. "You wouldn't have gotten this far if we didn't want you to. Ground security saw you hiking in."

"Lots of Freddies around lately," says a second bongo player, his orange hair tipped with blond, like flames "Gotta be careful." ("Freddies," I learn later, is tree-sit lingo for the U.S. Forest Service. The tree-sitters believe they're under constant surveillance by the authorities.)

In the center of the clearing, river rocks have been arranged to form the Celtic sign for the sun. A Maypole strung with ribbon stands at the north end; a compost pile and refuse pit lie far to the south. Two hundred feet above, out of reach of Forest Service cherry pickers, a cluster of "nests" made from rope, wood, and blue tarps--home for a revolving crew of roughly half a dozen tree-sitters--has been lashed to a few monumental Douglas firs. A huge cloth banner flutters between two trees, proclaiming the group's name: Red Cloud Thunder.

"Hey ... Lorax?!" a female voice calls down from the tree village to the young man with the pierced nose. She identifies herself as Sprite, but the platform's height and the glare of the afternoon sun make it impossible to see her face. "Why don't you show our visitor around the forest for a while?" she asks. "Give her an idea of what we're fighting for?"

Sprite and Lorax are one branch of a large and diverse group of young activists fighting for the environment. While the tree-sitters employ direct-action tactics, their peers lead hands-on restoration projects, campaign for green political candidates, organize protests, and recruit new members for established groups like the Sierra Club. Their efforts burst into the public consciousness in December 1999, when young demonstrators helped shut down a meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. In April, protesters next rattled the Washington, D.C., meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

After the demonstrations in Seattle and D.C., the mainstream press largely focused on the gladiatorial thrust-and-parry between protesters and police. How many were arrested? Was pepper spray used? Did the meetings go on despite the protests? Less emphasized was the way in which these events gave young people from dozens of organizations an opportunity to work together and a chance to flex their political muscle.

The youthful crowds at the WTO and World Bank demonstrations were conversant not only in the social repercussions of globalization, like the staggering debt amassed by developing nations, but also in the ways that the corporate system is rapidly depleting our natural resources. While some campaign against sweatshops or the death penalty, huge numbers of youth activists are tackling the big environmental issues: logging in our national forests, habitat destruction from the Amazon to Siberia, industrial pollution, damage done by non-native species. And they approach these issues with all the energy and optimism of, well, youth.

In New York City, students clamor to be admitted to the newly renovated High School for Environmental Studies. In 1990, about one in every ten high schools had an environmental club; now, approximately nine in ten do. Green student organizations are proliferating around the world, with 19 nationwide groups in North America alone.

"I think the environment is vital to, you know, everything else," says Ingrid Chapman, a 20-year-old University of Washington student and a member of Free the Planet!, a national network of student environmental groups. "I care about human rights, and I care about the economic takeover of the planet, but I think the environment is the basic issue underlying everything."

Out in the Oregon forest, Sprite and Lorax (tree-sitters tend not to use their given, or "Babylon," names) depend on this growing awareness and action. While the young activists in Cascadia Forest Defenders (also known as Red Cloud Thunder) take a stand in the trees, dozens of loosely associated members of Earth First! and other organizations support the effort, soliciting donations of money and organic food, delivering supplies and mail to the forest, providing security, and gathering information about Forest Service plans. In shifts, the tree-sitters have managed to occupy these trees since April 1998, ever since the U.S. Forest Service auctioned off 96 acres of old-growth forest to the unfortunately named Zip-O Log Company based in Eugene.