Who Killed David "Gypsy" Chain?

by Alexander Cockburn

He and fellow EarthFirsters were trying to stop logging in the Headwaters Forest, 350 miles north of San Francisco. A videotape made on the morning of Sept. 17 recorded this exchange between a tree faller and the EarthFirsters:

Faller: "Get out of here! Otherwise, I'll fuckin' make sure I got a tree coming this way." Not long thereafter, one Douglas fir was put down right next to a group of protesters, then another. While fleeing, David had his head stove in by a branch from the downed tree. The faller who'd been roaring threats came up, saw what had happened and fell to his knees in prayer.

A.E. Ammonds, the 52-year-old faller who put the tree down, was the party immediately responsible for Chain's death. But Pacific Lumber and Maxxam, which put him in the woods that day, should be the ones facing charges and penalties.

Headwaters is the largest private holding of old-growth redwoods in the world. When Charles Hurwitz, head of Maxxam, announced a few years ago that logging would begin there, radical environmentalists put their hopes in a plan for the U.S. government to seize the land from Hurwitz as compensation for his $2 billion looting of a Texas savings and loan.

Next came a proposal by former Rep. Dan Hamburg to have the U.S. government buy up 40,000 acres of the entire 63,000-acre watershed for a substantial sum. When this bill failed in the Senate, EPIC, an enviro group based in Garberville, Calif., formulated a strategy to tame Hurwitz by rigorous application of federal and state regs. Thousands of acres would be put off limits to save dwindling habitat for the marbled murrelet, the Northern spotted owl and the coho salmon. Given the wasted condition of the forest after a decade of Hurwitz's onslaughts, such protections would put most of the land out of his reach.

Hurwitz thereupon threatened to file a "takings" suit against the government, demanding hundreds of millions of dollars for this inhibition on his enjoyment of the rights and ravages of private property. The Clintonites, along with the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society, retreated immediately and argued that prudence required they give Hurwitz more than he had ever dared dream.

Enter Sen. Dianne Feinstein. The California Democrat successfully lobbied President Clinton into a deal whereby the feds and the state of California would pool money to acquire less than 10,000 acres, the minimal core area of Headwaters. Of that, only 3,500 acres consist of old-growth redwoods, for which the government offered Hurwitz the astounding sum of $480 million.

There was an opportunity to lay this whole dreadful plan low. The feds OK'd their $250 million slice of the deal last year, but it still had to be approved by the California Assembly, where EPIC was stirring up fiscal conservatives over the huge cost to taxpayers and making enviro-minded legislators writhe at the preposterousness of a so-called Habitat Conservation Plan that would allow the company to largely liquidate the forest outside the 10,000 reserved acres.

As Feinstein and Washington power lobbyist Tommy Boggs worked the phones for Hurwitz, the one group that might have stopped them, the Sierra Club, made "a close judgment call," according to its director, Carl Pope, and "did not actively try to block the bill's passage but rather put its energies into improving it." Thus on Sept. 1, the bill inched past the finishing post.

The stage was set for the fatal denouement. Because of the deal ratified in Washington and Sacramento, there is no room for regulatory restrictions. Loggers will be sent into the woods as they have been for a century, risking life and limb and systematically eliminating the resource that has sustained them. The only restraint will be direct action by people like Chain. There is no alternative.

After Chain was killed, the Sierra Club board passed a resolution of "outrage." This was opposed by David Brower, who argued that the club should recognize its own culpability, abandon pious expressions of regret, cultivate "inrage and get its balls back."