New West Book Review
Mike Roselle Details Years of Environmental Activism in “Tree Spiker”
Missoula's Mike Roselle discusses his years as a controversial environmental activist.
By Guest Writer, 10-02-09
Tree Spiker: From Earth First! to Lowbagging: My Struggles in Radical Environmental Action
by Mike Roselle with Josh Mahan
St. Martin’s Press
252 pages, $24.99
Mike Roselle is a co-founder of the San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network, Earth First!, and the Ruckus Society. Tree Spiker details his life as an environmental activist and outsider agitator. In his acknowledgments, Roselle notes that this book doesn’t completely cover the movement or even his memories, but that we should think of it as “a series of campfire tales and late-night bar talk.” And that’s exactly how it reads: like sitting next to a great storyteller and hearing his fascinating experiences.
Anyone living in the West, or anyone even remotely interested in the environment or environmental groups, should read Tree Spiker. When I looked at the gothic-like cover with spooky trees and horror writing yellow font, I wasn’t sure how much I would like it. In college I read Edward Abbey’s books and found Hayduke’s slovenly sexism and tossing aluminum cans out car windows unattractive, and I figured Roselle would be more of the same. But then I read he spent part of his childhood in Butler County, Kentucky, where a billboard with a picture of three hooded Klansmen burning a cross welcomed people to Klan country. That intrigued me, but Roselle hooked me with:
“I heard a rumor that my father, Stewart Lee, was in town. I hadn’t seen him since my step-grandfather chased him out of our house with a pistol he kept for that purpose. The last time I saw him, he was running down South Eighth Street toward the bars on Magnolia Street.”
Not surprisingly, Roselle’s friends were the few black students brought in to desegregate his high school, and his activism started with protesting the Vietnam War and for legalizing marijuana with some women’s liberation and gay rights sprinkled in. Aside from the environmental organizations Roselle helped create, he also worked as an outside agitator for groups such as Greenpeace. But don’t let that outside agitator label fool you. Roselle excels at finding loopholes, irritating people, and being stubborn, but not at destruction. He practices peaceful non-violence. As Roselle says, “it takes more courage to sit in front of a bulldozer than it does to burn one.”
He doesn’t paint that ‘us and them ideology.’ He’s someone you can have a conversation with. Even when it seems clear who is on which side, people surprise, from the police officer who arrests Roselle without handcuffing him and then offers him coffee from his thermos and banana bread his wife had baked, to Roselle’s former co-workers who engaged in destructive anarchist activities. That doesn’t include the illegally logged mahogany floating down the Amazon past the Greenpeace office in Manaus, or the steak dinner with Costa Ricans whose meat Roselle had helped ban in the United States. Even former President Clinton manages to surprise and disappoint with his Salvage Rider that allowed logging in federally protected roadless areas.
If you think of environmentalists as kooks who break the law, Roselle offers an excellent rebuttal: “Illegal logging is not just an issue in the rain forests of the Amazon and Africa. It happens every day in America…There is a reason environmental groups win most of their lawsuits. The timber companies are breaking the law.”
Roselle shows some horrifying examples of the US Forest Service trying to open up roadless areas for deficit timber sales. The taxpayers pay to build roads so that private corporations can make a profit logging public land. The cost of building the roads doesn’t include the cost of the damage to the environment, how this damage impacts the surrounding communities, or how these communities fare once the timber companies leave, because they aren’t practicing sustainable forestry like they claim. Not even the ancient Romans were able to enforce their forestry laws and because of it, they eventually ran short of timber and water.
Throughout Tree Spiker Roselle shares some of the entertaining and disheartening moments from his life as an activist, and there are mentions of the beautiful wild places that we have already lost. Towards the end, Tree Spiker devolves into more of an ideological argument and lecture, but by then we’re ready to hear it. Still, Roselle roots his points in concrete circumstances and people. He wants us to hear him, especially those who disagree. Roselle doesn’t like protests because they are “more parade than protest, more speech than action, a convergence of the believers, by the believers, for the believers.”
Anyone living in the West knows what a complicated relationship we have with our landscape. The beauty attracts most of us, and yet the pioneers settled the land, changing it from something wild to a place that was habitable by their standards. We all want to lead nice lifestyles and not be left behind financially or developmentally from the rest of the country. But often the corporations and government policies are not doing what’s best financially for the community, and are not maintaining a sustainable environment. It shouldn’t just be the rebels and hippies speaking up and fighting for the land. We should all put Earth First, before it’s too late. So pull up a seat at the bar, or next to that campfire, open up Tree Spiker and spend some quality time with Roselle. You’ll end up entertained and, hopefully, a little wiser, and maybe even ready to stand in front of a bulldozer.
Mike Roselle will read from Tree Spiker at Back of Beyond Books in Moab on October 15th (7 p.m.), in Jackson at Valley Book Store on October 20 (5 p.m.), in Missoula at Fact & Fiction on Tuesday, October 27 (3 p.m.) and at a fundraiser at The Badlander (7 p.m.), and in Portland at Julia’s Cafe on October 30 (7 p.m.).
Paula Younger is a Denver-based writer and teacher for the Lighthouse Writers Workshop whose work has appeared in Best New Writing, The Georgetown Review, The Momaya Review and other publications.
sounds awesome
xxxx
a huge thanks to Mike Roselle for his book "Tree Spiker". there is a lot to be learned from his wisdom and experience in environmental atavism. It's easy to feel overwhelmed, hopeless and angry over the problems facing our environment. Mike Roselle gives us hope through his successes and wisdom from his follies. His message is clear, that young people are needed to continue his fight. It's for us this book was written, we inherent his fight to protect the environment. Entertaining, informative and compelling, Mike Roselle has entered the ranks in environmental writing with E.O, Wilson and Jane Goodall.
Comment By Lisa M, 10-03-09Awesome, well written review. Can't wait to pull up a chair beside some one else's fireplace and read this one.
Comment By Chuck, 10-04-09Anyone that buys this book is contributing to the deforestation of our precious lands and only helping the author exploit the environment for the almighty dollar. Roselle needs to apologize to the environmental activist community and give 100 percent of his profits back to the movement.
Comment By Cynthia, 10-04-09before we start casting stones at Mr. Roselle for writing a book... on paper... (because all books are written on old growth forest) (I'm trying to convey sarcasm) Do your research. most publishing companies already use recycled. we aren't clear cutting forests to print books. trees are specifically grown for the purpose. like a food crop.
Comment By Absurd, 10-04-09To those so opposed to logging.
What are your homes built from? Lumber or recycled tires?
Please share.
Mr. Roselle should be sent to Washington DC where he might take the opportunity (or not - it's his choice) to "spike" an unlimited number of excessive bureaucratic violations of our freedom and thus reduce environmental pollution at the same time!
Comment By bearbait, 10-15-09Gee. I think about tree spikers and the first thing that comes to my mind is the L-P headrig off-bearer grievously hurt when the head saw blew up after hitting spike in Ukiah. Any sympathy for a blue collar worker who suffered grievous injury from that activity? The Taliban of Trees are still chicken shit night fighters too cowardly to step up and do their sabotage in the daylight. IEDs for mill workers. Nice American past time. Recreational mayhem. And the author of this review evidently approves!!!
So, in his upcoming dotage, Roselle needs money to live the good life he so doesn't want others to have, and writes a book. Reviewing it is aiding terrorists. Buying it is aiding a terrorist. This glorification of the Weatherman, Black Panthers, Symbionese Liberation Front, Earth First crap only leads young people to bad ends. But, that is what university is all about, I guess.
The University is fraught with tales of brave young people experimenting with fire. I still think about my buddy who was influenced by the cool dudes with old money from the East Coast who dabbled in heroin. Man, they were living life on the edge!! What a trip!! They got hooked, so at some point Dad and Muffy would stuff Skip in rehab, and sooner or later, Skip would be working for the family brokerage, clean as a whistle and so over it. My blue collar buddy from grade school, without family resources to claim him, to save him, died a junkie. And that is exactly what the Roselles of the world give us. A false sense of accomplishment and cover for being a menace to people who were trying to feed their families. So how many of those "saved" trees have now burned in "Fire for Resource Use"? What a waste!!
Ecosabotage cost a lot of innocent people their jobs, their businesses. They had war waged on them. I haven't seen any truces signed, any compensation to those people's losses. Roselle's war is still ongoing. His type are still vandals and criminals. I hope some pissed off mill worker or logger shoves his book where the sun don't shine at some book signing. When your life is about hurting people, and you regale people with your accomplishments in that endeavor, you are fair game for retribution sometime. He is one sick person. Elevating a criminal to adored status does nothing to hurt the Wall Street money that drives MegaPulps and the Whorehousers of the world. All Roselle did was hurt innocent people trying to feed their families. There is and should not be, an glory in that. Lionizing him for being a criminal who does not believe in protests but direct actions of criminality is a disservice to your readership.
I'm beginning to think that nobody who comments on this thing actually reads the books.... or looks in to the topics the are talking about. That pour blue collar sawmill worker in an interview stated that the saw was in much need of repair. In fact he blamed the accident on the company he worked for, seeing how the "tree spike" was a 1 and a half inch nail (witch was not used by any of the Earth firsters)
Any tree that was ever spiked by them was marked. the point was not to kill some innocent blue collar guy just trying to earn a living, it was to detour that particular tree from being cut down.
The use of non-violent civil disobedience to get a point across is not a new idea. with out it, we might still be drinking out of water fountains marked whites only while our fellow man drinks from the spigot around back. We are in the midst of a different revolution but it still echos in similarities. In the future the tree-huger will be the norm, guys like Mike Roselle will be hailed as heroes, we will as a whole make better decisions for the environment and ourselves.... because otherwise, there just isn't much of a future. At least not one i would want to live in. What kind of world do you want for your children?
Cynthia thinks burning down buildings, car lots full of suv's, parked log trucks is good sport and the way to a better future. She thinks there is no harm in pouring sand in equipment crankcases. breaking all the instrument glass, for "monkey wrenching" is honest work. Yeah. And no, I don't read the books. I read the newspaper, and the results of arrests and trials. Those heros go to jail when caught, and get convicted when tried, and get sentenced to prison terms. That is criminal activity, not civil disobedience. Lionize the crooks all you want. They will prey on you when they feel like it.
Comment By Cynthia, 10-17-09that was Earth Liberation Front.... Mike Roselle is Earthfirst. big difference.
Comment By Rita Reichert, 10-18-09Fascinating! This is an area I know little about, but my interest has been tweaked...
Comment By Susan, 10-22-09A well written review that invokes one's interest without giving away too many details. From reviewing the other comments, it looks like this book would be a great one for book clubs. Seems there is much to be discussed and, even, potentially debated.
Comment By Humans first, 10-29-09Confiscate the criminals profits and send him to jail for his crimes.
Comment By Dick, 11-16-09Intresting. i guess everything involves tradeoffs and this book helps
conveys that. We need to worry about the environment and look at the total cost of doing anything including the environmental costs which are seldom looked at.
No, Dick, what is interesting is the Federal Land management agencies now incinerate those very same forests each summer, by deciding that it is too dangerous or expensive to fight fire. The health issues with smoke evidently are not enough to warrant NEPA consideration of those decisions. Losing listed, critical ESA habitat to fire is allowed. And, no matter what you think would be right, there is really no practical benefit to suing over allowing a fire to burn to winter. By the time the case were settled, all the damage is done. Orwellian, really, and a good case for government, by government and for government, being the preferred result of the Gliberals. If we have to burn so you can't have it, we will. And they have.
The tempestuous act of pounding spikes into trees did not save them. Fire just burns around the spikes. We now have an environmental industry built around EAJA (equal access to justice act) extraordinary legal fees paid to environmental law firms for their efforts to appeal and sue every administrative decision to manage public forests and private alike. You throw enough shit at the wall, some will stick, and you only need some to make millions in billable legal fees. EarthJustice, the legal arm of the Sierra Club, now is billing their lawyers as high as $600 an hour. Those EAJA fees are half or more of the annual incomes of some NGOs "fighting for the environment." No successful lawsuits for a year has one in Oregon rocked back on their financial heels, and they have laid off a good part of their legal staff. They spent $300,000 lobbying the Oregon legislature, successfully, to pass a limit on burning fields, and only got $20,000 in donations for their effort. It was a self confessed "bad business plan." As opposed, I would guess, the good business plan of suing the US Govt. They pay your legal fees if ANY change in management direction by the agency being sued comes from the legal action.
Roselle had a bad business plan, and now has had to write a book. Is a book a better business plan? Probably. Will a book make a difference in the whole of the world? Probably not. Does putting people at risk justify his actions? No. Never. He was and is a criminal for his actions. So in these times, it might be better to read a book about Willie Sutton. His business plan, though not legal, was honest and forthright. He robbed banks because that is where they keep the money.