What’s the Matter with California? by Jack Cashill

Author:Jack Cashill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2007-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

21. Eel River Valley

The breed of man/Has been queer from the start. It looks like a botched experiment that has run wild and ought to be stopped

—Robinson Jeffers, “Orca”

In 1997, to ward off the chainsaws of the Pacific Lumber Company, the twenty-three-year-old Julia Butterfly Hill climbed into a six-hundred-year-old Northern California redwood tree named Luna and remained there an astonishing 738 days. As it happens, she had been in a car accident a year before she began her tree sit and suffered mild brain damage. Her fellow “arboreal activists” apparently didn’t notice. If environmentalism is a religion, they quickly beatified Ms. Hill by electing her to the “Ecology Hall of Fame.”

Although raised Catholic, Hill’s mother and father converted to Baptist and later to nondenominational Christian. Her father, in fact, became a traveling preacher of an evangelical stripe. That background, Hill believes, has helped her keep a “core sense of the sacred.” Like still another Hazel Motes, she has built upon that core a wonderfully mindless Church without Christ, complete with its own origins story. “In the beginning,” she declares just a bit presumptuously, “God’s original intention was to hang out in a beautiful garden with two naked vegetarians. What a great vision!”

From those halcyon days in Paradise it has been all downhill. “Our choices have led us away from that Garden of Eden,” says Hill, and now the nation rushes headlong “towards this pretty horrific ending.” At home, she claims, America has “indiscriminately” turned old-growth ecosystems into “toxic dump lands” and handed its food needs over to “big-biz agricultural farming.” Abroad, it has created “the largest death machine humankind has ever known,” one that kills innocents as indiscriminately as it kills plants and animals back home. In a nutshell, we Americans have sinned enough against the environment to deserve whatever tough love Mother Gaia dishes out.

Ms. Hill was one person I really wanted to talk to. After some finagling, I did manage to get through to a guy named Paul, her gatekeeper. As Paul explained, a whole lot of media people want to talk to Julia. She was then preparing for a new fast and tree-sit, this time in a Los Angeles walnut tree with the celebrity company of the former folk singer Joan Baez and the former mermaid Daryl Hannah. The threesome and its allies hoped to keep the property’s owner, a guy named Ralph Horowitz, from building a warehouse on a fourteen-acre “people’s garden” in the midst of a homely old industrial district. Horowitz offered to sell the property to the gardeners and their celebrity friends at a fair price, but they couldn’t quite raise the dough, so they decided to squat instead.

Given the media demand on Ms. Hill’s time, Paul established some conditions. First and foremost, I had to promise that the book at hand would be published on some esoteric variant of recyclable paper. That, I told Paul, I could not guarantee. He then asked if I were sufficiently “passionate about this issue” to demand that the publisher use this certain paper.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.