Environmental activist enlists student help

In 1989, a truck rammed her car and sent her and her children careening through the air and into another vehicle. In 1990, while en route to a speaking engagement, a pipe bomb exploded under the seat of her car fracturing her pelvis in ten places. But despite both attempts on her life, Judy Bari is alive and well and was on hand Monday night to enlist further devotees to her organization, Earth First! Bari, whose speech was sponsored by the Penn Environmental Group as part of a week-long celebration of Earth Day, spoke to several dozen students at the University Museum. Co-chairperson Steve Ross said he selected the nationally recognized activist -- who has been arrested by the FBI as a suspect in her own car bombing and has been the subject of dozens of death threats -- as an alternative to what he sees as the typical environmental lobbyist. Bari opened her presentation with a musical selection of songs addressing the plight of her cause, the killing of the California Redwoods. Accompanied by two other members of Earth First!, she invited the audience to join in a chorus of "It's all bullshit" as she denounced the destruction of the environment. Bari said she sees this destruction as an imminent threat which warrants an immediate solution. Human beings, she said, are responsible for improving their troubled surroundings. "What I came here for is to give everybody a little reality check, because this isn't about recycled toilet paper," Bari said. "It's not a matter of personal choice, it's a matter of public policy. I don't know exactly how we ought to live, but I know this is wrong." The difference between Earth First! and other environmental groups, Bari explained, is in the tactics it employs. Its members operate on the principle of direct action, which often involves human barricades and tree sit-ins. In this second form of protest, an individual sits in a tree in order to prevent it from being cut down. "When you look up at a [redwood tree], you realize how insignificant we are," she said. "The tree is a greater being than we are." One of her musical accompanists, named Alicia Little Tree, "sat in" a tree for nine days. Bari blames the devastation of the Redwood forests on corporations which she says operate under immoral business practices. "They're just in there for the short-haul, and they don't care what happens when they're gone," she said. "They treat [their employees] as commodities to use up and discard." According to Bari, she has formed coalitions with the loggers to forward her cause. A former labor organizer in Baltimore, Bari has used her skills in an attempt to improve their current situation. "The workers can't speak out before being fired, but I can," she said. "We have to confront and name the corporations that are destroying the earth and bring them down." Clarifying an apparent contradiction between protecting the welfare of both trees and loggers, Bari explained that she does not advocate or expect a society to live without a timber industry. "I'm not saying don't cut anymore trees anywhere," she said. "What I'm saying is that we need to log in a way that doesn't destroy the forest." Bari said her philosophy, dubbed "Biocentrism," is at the heart of her environmental program. Biocentrism is revolutionary, she believes, because it contradicts communism, socialism, Western religion and what she calls "the male dominance of this society." "I don't think that all men are the oppressors," she says, "but most of the oppressors are men."

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