New West Book Review

Mike Roselle Details Years of Environmental Activism in “Tree Spiker”

By Paula Younger, 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.

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