From: "Dennis Soper" <dsoper-AT-efn.org>
Date: Sun, 18 Jul 1999 15:39:48 -0700
Subject: Re: Urgent: harassment/questions


On 17 Jul 99, at 19:17, danceswithcarp wrote:

> Mike Lewis?  You're an EF! kind of guy.  Is this normal behavior for that
> crowd?  I thought the idea was to get in touch with the
> wilderness/wildness of both the nature of earth and humynkind.  I see the
> reaction to whole Makah whaling issue as being WAY out of proportion to
> the actual event.   Part of wild living is killing.

That was the *old* EF!-- before Cactus Ed died and Foreman turned 
into a snitch.  Welcome to the *new* EF!....

Last winter, we had a storm with some 70 MPH winds.  There was 
this big-leaf maple with about a 3-ft (1 m) trunk growing on the 
riverbank at the edge of the rose garden that I ride through on my 
way to work every day.  After that storm, the tree was leaning about 
20 degrees south where it hadn't been before.  So the parks 
department puts up a line and detours the bike path so that they can 
figure out how to get this tree out without dropping it on the rose 
garden.

So about a dozen of the local Earth Firsties move into the tree, 
talking some gobbledegook about this being an urban forest and 
demanding that all trees in urban areas be allowed to fall naturally 
and decompose where they drop.  They even named this tree 
"Storyteller."  Anyway, to make a long story short, they stayed up 
the tree for a  coupla weeks.  One evening they removed themselves 
from the tree, making some big media hoopla that they now 
"understood"-- translation:  The tree moved another 5 degrees while 
they were up in it-- that the tree needed to come down.

The problem is that the *old* EF! were folx who were rural by nature 
and upbringing.  They lived with nature and understood it.  This new 
group are urban by nature and have all these interesting notions 
about nature, often formed from watching "Bambi" as kids.

Just my .02,
Dennis
"Custard pies are a sort of esperanto: a  universal language." 
                     --Noel Godin