on the cover / By Malcolm Terence

Klamath: Direct Action!

Tribal members train with Earth First! in Six Rivers National Forest showdown

(March 4, 2010) ORLEANS — Molli Jane had clambered up the ropes not effortlessly but quickly. But now she hung there halfway up a large Douglas fir tree and strained to make the muscular transition to descent.

Below, her coach, a veteran of many Earth First! forest actions, repeated the instructions. Molli Jane sucked in her breath, slipped her right foot into a loop and lifted her weight off the waist harness to reach the safety ropes above her. She slid them down with her left hand, then held the main rope against her right thigh. The arrangement worked and she slid gracefully down the ropes, bathed in sweat and a huge smile.

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Molli Jane, a 20-something Karuk Tribe member, was scaling trees as part of a three-day training for activists sponsored by the Klamath Justice Coalition. The immediate target of her education was a Six Rivers National Forest logging operation in her community. KJC members had stopped the operation in December — by blockading a logging road with their bodies and a pile of burning brush, and by a letter of complaint — after it strayed from agreements the Forest Service had made with her tribe and other community members, including a promise to protect a spiritual trail used by the tribe. Despite three years of collaborative planning, they said, a major community fire protection project was looking like old-time logging in new clothes.

But what if logging resumed before the Forest Service had met the set of demands made by the Karuk Tribe and other community and regional groups? Some in the tribe, like Molli Jane, wanted to be better prepared for that event. So they were ramping their civil-disobedience-in-the-woods skill set up a notch — up into the trees, with the guidance of tree sitters who’d developed and honed their skills during the previous era of infamous timber wars. And members of other tribes, and non-Natives, were joining them.

Many of Molli Jane’s tribal relatives had shown the same resistant spirit a generation earlier when they stopped the G-O Road, a log-haul superhighway to connect Orleans with Gasquet. And it was easy enough to spot that Molli Jane was tough when she was a very young girl, growing up on the Salmon River. Neighbors 10 years her senior remember that she’d throw rocks at them when she was mad and seemed afraid of nothing. Tough and a little mischievous.

Besides that, while she might be new to the kind of tree climbing used to stop timber sales, Molli Jane was no stranger to political action to protect Karuk interests. In 2004, she went to Scotland with a group of local activists when a company there owned the dams on the Klamath River — dams the tribes wanted removed to open fish passage. The European cameramen loved her with her photogenic looks, dressed in tribal regalia and cradling her two young children. And she could handle interviews like a media pro.

When the Scottish company sold the dams like a toxic asset to billionaire Warren Buffett, Molli Jane joined what became hajj for local activists to Buffett’s yearly springtime presentation to shareholders in Omaha.

As soon as Molli Jane was safely on the ground and undoing all the climbing gear, the coach, who used only the tree-sitter nom de guerre “Farmer,” shifted to the next newbie climber ready to scale the adjacent tree. Charlie Myers from Pecwan was already buckled into his harness and the safety loops were already attached to the main ascent rope.

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