Who Edited the Gospel - Jack Hitt Hit - Piece
My Favorite Poem:
A Code Poem For The French Resistance
The life that I have is all that I have
And the life that I have is yours.
The love that I have of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.
A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have,
Yet death will be but a pause,
For the peace of my years in the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours.-- Leo Marks
ERRATA: [the shear number of errors is astoundingly!]
Word Count 1080
The Poorly Edited Comic Book of Treesitting - The Gospel of Harpers Magazine
Every sentence in the "Book of Treesitters has errors in it: Treesitting was used in many places before 1995 and got big in 1996; treesitters on public lands are not trespassers or illegal and if corporations are breaking the law then you can trespass legally on them too. Need I mention the "stopping a greater crime" legal defense - pre-emptive law enforcement. Treesitters do not usually save only one tree, but dozens at least - and if not for the massive violence against treesitters and other forest defenders, combined with the pitiful donations that we receive, we could save thousands of trees with treesits - if not all of them! Most of us are not bongo playing dread-heads many environmentalist and direct action protesters have advanced degrees and a decade of organizing experience.
Hitt should have mentioned at the beginning of his story about Earth First! and treesitting that the US government directly or through its henchmen (private security and local police forces who work for giant corporations) have waged a war of intimidation, deceit and murder against radical environmentalist that parallels the Spanish inquisition, the persecution of Galileo - the witch hunt of Salem, Massachucetts; though oppression against environmentalists pales in the light of systematic FBI criminality at Hounded Knee and across the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1973.
Hitt grabs the reader with the story of Tre Arrow who law enforcement and loggers conspired to kill and failed, only managing to break a few bones and scare the death (or fear) out of Tre. Hitt apparently is unaware that since this government crime, Tre Arrow has gone underground to avoid prosecution for several arson attacks against logging and construction machinery. Arrow is no doubt guilty and a victim of state oppression and the trauma of fighting against a huge system while few seem to care at all. In a true court of law Tre’s pardon due to because a higher law was being broken - not to mention the wrongful injuries that the police caused him and which he most surely deserved recompense if not revenge. [Run straight and true Tre Arrow and burn the truth out of the fascist bastards who police our minds.]
Three treesitters have died not two. It was this omission that led me to question Hitt’s scholarship overall. Why didn’t Hitt honor 22 year-old Beth O'Brien of Portland, Oregon, who died after falling from a tree at the Eagle Creek timber battle in the Mt. Hood National Forest by naming her? Since you talked about Tre Arrow you should of told the whole story of the two year Eagle Creek campaign and how Beth died just a day before the timber sale was canceled, partly because of a government study critical of the Forest Service’s plans. Here was an example of good science that should have been in the article.
I like the way you describe the murder of David Chain, "An infuriated logger cut a tree down and crushed him to death… [after] yelling things such as ‘I wish I had my fucking pistol." Again the bias toward avoiding controversy appears when Hitt mentions the out of court settlement with David’s mother, but then he fails to mention the companies involved: Maxxam of Houston and Pacific Lumber of Scotia. He mentions that "the company" allowed the tree that killed David to be set aside as a memorial but forgets to inform us that Maxxam-Pacific Lumber is now logging all around this memorial. I guess it is trivia to Hitt, but Maxxam agreed as part of the settlement with David Chain’s mother (Cynthia Allsworth) to set up a safety council to reduce dangers in the forest between loggers and protesters. This agreement has been completely violated and ignored by Maxxam who has tried to kill several treesitters in the last few months.
"[Guy’s name? Still looking] who went by the forest name "Naya," had only been in the tree for about 12 hours on Tuesday evening when he fell, according to Dennis Davie of the Santa Cruz contingent of Earth First!" Santa Cruz Earth First! Is deeply saddened by this tragic event. We never like to lose an activist," said Davie. "This was a young man in his first tree-sit." Earth First! has been staging tree-sit protests against logging company Redwood Empire's operation in the Ramsey Gulch area, about 20 miles south of San Jose, since August." http://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:71N1KYCtfbEJ:www.nwaonline.net/pdfarchive/2002/october/12/10-12-02%2520B3.pdf+tree-sitting&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
Maybe Hitt avoided this death because of the controversy surrounding the loggers behavior and the police who refuse to investigate and allowed tampering with the crime scene.
"The Middle Class acceptance of tree-sitting broke new ground when a man climbed a tree [an OAK!] in Northern [NO! Southern] California." Julia Butterfly did not name the tree LUNA - I was there about two months before her when us Lunatics named it.
Hitt resorts to the usual simplification and stereotypes by focusing on treesitters "odd language" calling trees ancient ones and saying this is crypto-aboriginal… and this "drives opponents berserk [?]" (p. 49). Treesitters are trespassers, they are illegal, they make no sense because they only save one tree - all false. He has to mention bongo playing dread-heads and focus on a few statement s like" These trees want to survive… they are there because they want to be." - Instead of trying to express to the US public how difficult it is to get media without getting arrested, breaking the law or getting killed Hitt focuses on the weirdo-wackiness of young environmentalists - where as in reality there are many college and Ph.D. educated activists who could argue or talk the stockings off of Condolezza Rice or twelve GW Bushes. Hitt manages to commit almost every error of journalism in his supposedly friendly description of EF!- I guess the truth of the matter - that we are multi-issue, educated, serious brave warriors instead of kooky, experimental performance art freaks and mystical dread-heads - just would not fit his thesis - his flow or the catchy style he needed to float the article [even though he is more or less the boss of Harpers mag !!!]
The glaring omissions so apparent to anyone half familiar with forest defense makes me wonder why Hitt did not contact any Earth Firsters or other treesitters and why he did such poor research - lack of interest, sloppy and rushed effort?
THE REVIEW [ intro draft – 7-25-03 ]
Wait! Who Edited the Earth Gospel Hit-Piece? A Contemptuous Review of Jack Hitt's, "A Gospel According to the Earth;" Harpers, July 03.]