Generation green - youth fight for planet - Brief Article

Sierra, Nov, 2000 by Heather Millar

After 45 heart-pumping minutes, I crawl over the edge of a plywood platform with the help of a 20-year-old named Spring. The riggers constructed their tree houses with a medieval-castle mentality. No climber can enter without the help of the sitters: The climber has to push out from the trunk, and then be pulled over the edge of the platform. This done, I collapse in Kali-Ma, the Grand Central of the tree village. Two large trees, Grandma and Yggdrasil, hold us up; plywood donut platforms encircle each tree and a large, two-tiered platform hangs between them. "You made it!" says Spring. He gives me a big hug.

While I recover from the climb, Spring squats at an L-shaped shelf that serves as a kitchen. A rocket stove, fueled by a propane tank hanging under the platform, hisses as he stir-fries a vegan dinner of brown rice, vegetables, soy sauce, and sesame seeds. Sealed boxes of spices, grains, and amino acids are stacked nearby. A Plexiglas bread box keeps flying squirrels out of cookies and crackers.

Across the platform, another shelf serves as a library and staging area. On one side lie a radio, a walkie-talkie, a yogurt container filled with wildflowers, an empty government-issue prune can full of tools, a video camera donated by University of Oregon students who want to film a documentary on the tree-sit. Since there's not a lot to do in a tree, the rest of the shelf groans with books: McLibel: Burger Culture on Trial; The SAS Escape, Evasion, and Survival Manual; a Forest Service Draft--"Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement"; In the Absence of the Sacred; the writings of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski; and Baking in a Box, Cooking on a Can.

Sure, Spring says as he chops and seasons the vegetables, tree-sitting is tough. The northwest storms blow wet and cold. Though it's May it snowed just last week. Exercise becomes a distant memory; joints begin to stiffen. It's almost impossible to stay clean. Everyone fights the psychological tension, the fear that at any moment the lumberjacks and the Forest Service might burst into the clearing, burn or confiscate the gear on the ground, take down the village, or cut all the trees around it. Spring was at the Umpqua (a.k.a. "Right View") tree-sit near Roseburg, Oregon, when crews clearcut the forest all around Madre Loca, the tree where he was living. "The forest screamed as they killed it," he says.

Dusk begins to fall, and the sitters in the other trees start to hoot and call in the deep-throated code they've created. They're coming over to Kali-Ma for dinner, gliding in on harnesses along ropes strung between the trees. All took very different paths to what they call the "Ewok Village."

Spring hit the road after high school. "I was dissatisfied and I went to seek," he says. "Here, I can take a real stand against injustice." His parents didn't understand at first, but now they're supportive, he says. Spring's younger brother, who's almost 17, has become politicized by his older sibling's actions, and will join him in the trees soon.