Julia "Butterfly" Hill is still up a tree -- way, way, way up in the branches of a California coastal redwood she calls Luna.
She's perched about 15 stories uphigh on a tiny platform about 20 feet from the top of the ancient redwood. She's been aloft 15 months and 13 days, protesting logging practices in the Northern California highlands spread out beneath her.
Butterfly, her "forest" name, greets her second spring aloft with new resolve to fight for the protection of the old-growth redwoods ranged about her in the forest place called Headwaters Grove.
She dismisses as grossly inadequate a compromise reached earlier this month between state and federal officials and the Pacific Lumber Co., which owns about 210,000 acres of the woodlands she sees from her aerie.
"Our government," she says, "seems to think that compromises to the last of these endangered forests and the species of plants and animals that call these forests home are just the art of politics," she says, in an impassioned recorded message from her base camp.
"To these forests in a critical condition, a compromise is a death sentence."
Butterfly, 25, has formed an extraordinary sisterly relationship with her tree. Well, Pacific Lumber's tree. The company says she's trespassing.
The 116-year-old logging company had a pretty good environmental record until it was acquired in 1985 in a hostile takeover by the Maxxam Group and its CEO -- billionaire junk-bond artist Charles Hurwitz's one of the world's richest men. Among other things, he's been accused of costing U.S. taxpayers $1.6 billon in the third biggest savings and loan failure in the 1980s at a Texas savings and loan.
Hurwitz doubled -- Butterfly says tripled -- the rate of cutting and threatened to clear-cut Headwaters Grove. The 3,000-acre woodland has been called "the largest remaining unprotected old-growth forest left on Earth." Earth First! environmental activists discovered and named the Headwaters Grove a decade ago and have led the fight for its preservation ever since. Protesting these logging operations is what got actor Woody Harrelson and other activists arrested in November 1996 for scaling San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge to demand protection for the redwoods.
A tough bargainer, Hurwitz stood firm against the $480 million Headwaters preserve deal until the very last minute when some "clarifications" were made and he got a call from President Clinton aboard Air Force One.
Spurred in part by publicity Butterfly's sit-in generated, the compromise would turn 3,000 acres of cathedral-like virgin redwood groves into a park and add a 4,500-acre buffer zone. The company accepted restrictions on cutting of 210,000 acres to protect the endangered coho salmon and northern spotted owl. Another 7,700 acres would be left unharvested for 50 years to protect the marbled murrelet, an endangered seabird that nests in old redwoods.
What the deal did not include, though, was the land where Luna stands. Two hundred feet high and up to 14 feet in diameter, Luna grows on Pacific Lumber land about 240 miles north of San Francisco, near a company town called Scotia. Luna got its name because it was discovered by Earth First! activists during a full moon.
A newcomer to Earth First! in November 1997, Butterfly began her "tree-sit" almost immediately, on Dec. 10. On her anniversary in the treetops, she issued a statement that has become almost a mantra:
"When I climbed Luna, I gave my word to her, the forest, and all people that I would not allow my feet to touch the ground until I feel I have done everything I possibly can. I still feel that there is more to accomplish from this perch."
The daughter of an Arkansas evangelist, Butterfly was working as a bartender in Fayetteville in August 1996 when she was in a car accident that almost killed her and, she says, changed her life radically.
"Almost a year later," she says, "I headed west following my spirit to an unknown destination."
She wandered along California's northern Lost Coast, where she bumped into environmental activists who convinced her to help with the Headwaters Forest protests.
"When I entered the great majestic cathedral of the redwood forest for the first time," she says, "I dropped to my knees and began to cry because I was so overwhelmed by the wisdom, energy and spirituality housed in these holiest of temples."
She hiked onto the ridge where Luna stands and began practice climbs with another tree-lover with the forest name Almond.
"When Luna came under attack in early December," she says, as other trees in the vicinity were being cut down, "Almond and I decided to come to tree-sit for a while and hold the fort."
Not long after, Almond climbed down and drifted away. For Butterfly, two weeks turned into three.
"And after three, I thought, 'I'm so close to a month I might as well stay.' "
And now, after more than a year, she still lives on her 5-foot-by-8-foot platform about 180 feet above the forest floor, which is a little like living atop Baltimore's Washington Monument, only with branches. She's weathered snow, sleet, torrential rains and 60-mph winds, not to mention prop wash from Pacific Lumber helicopters and the haranguing of its loggers.
Butterfly says she feels Luna protected her during her first nights, when high winds rose to 40 to 60 mph and she clung to the trunk like a frightened child.
"Then I felt the tree telling me to relax, bend with it," she says, "and I knew it was going to take care of me. I felt such peace."
Now she's committed to protecting the tree, come what may.
"Luna would be cut down in very short order if I left. If anything happened to her," she says, "I'd feel like it would be happening to me."
All the old-growth trees on the ridge around Luna have already been cut, Earth Firsters say.
"Nothing seems to daunt Butterfly," says Robert Parker, who used to run the Luna Media Services Web site for Butterfly. Her spartan dwelling notwithstanding, contemporary protest can be high-tech and computer-savvy. Butterfly conducts frequent interviews by cell phone.
She's debated with Joseph Campbell, president of Pacific Lumber, during a CNN broadcast, and with a company PR woman on Time Magazine Online. She's been interviewed by ABC News Online and the CNN morning news and a host of newspapers and magazines. The question she's come to dislike the most: "How do you go to the toilet?" Her answer: "Like anyone else."
In the middle of September at a nearby Earth First! demonstration, another environmentalist was crushed beneath a Douglas fir that was felled during his protest. Steve "Gypsy" Chain became a martyr to the activists trying to preserve the old-growth redwood stands in Northern California.
Visitors who make it up to her platform find her acclimated to her redwood aerie and agile as a squirrel. She clambers barefoot to the tiptop branches of Luna to sing and pray. Even skeptical reporters are struck by her spirituality.
"I do my best not to be clouded by my human side," she says. And she has had unique spiritual experiences during her yearlong vigil.
"I have witnessed the changes of the seasons, the beautiful full and blue moons and breathtaking sunrises and sunsets from this incredible vantage point," she says.
"Unfortunately I have also witnessed continued devastation and destruction of this hillside and much of the forest and watershed."
Nicholas Wilson, a marcher who climbed to the base of Luna for a summer rally, vividly recalls Butterfly high in her tree dancing to the beat of Mickey Hart, the Grateful Dead drummer who has been a consistent supporter.
"Holding on only with her legs and bare feet she sways her torso, head and arms, dancing to the rhythm, the cheers and the exuberant wolf-howls of the throng. A brisk and chilly wind blows her long hair straight out, giving the impression that she's part of the tree and its foliage."
Pub Date: 3/23/99