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Diggers: An American
Alternative Movement Thirty Years Later
by Édouard Waintrop
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Series of articles that appeared in Liberation
newspaper, Paris, France, December 2000. Written by Édouard Waintrop
(with permission to republish here.) Translated by Lisa Mercer.
English-language version edited for context by Michael Wm. Doyle.
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Index of the Series
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Article One
Peter
Coyote and the Statures of Liberty
On the trail of some
Californian anarchists with the multi-faceted actor.
Libération
newspaper (Paris, France), Culture section (Monday, 25 December 2000), p.
20-21.
In 1966-67, unlike the
hippies of San Francisco, they were revolutionary anti-establishment
protesters. When nothing more
seemed possible there, they disappeared into nature, founded communities,
and took a new departure into radical ecology. Thirty years later, the Diggers have not abandoned their American
dreams...
On location in Mill Valley
On this day at the end of
October, Peter Coyote lunches close to home, in a little Mexican
restaurant in Mill Valley, north of the San Francisco Bay. Slim, handsome, nervous, not looking his almost sixty years, the
film actor (Kika by Pedro Almodovar, Bitter Moon by Roman
Polanski) remembers the ‘60s in the Haight-Ashbury, the hippie
neighborhood of San Francisco, and the Mime Troupe, the revolutionary
theater company where he began his career thirty-five years ago: "Each
of our shows was a frontal attack against the official culture and its
fashionable and apolitical shows. When
they accepted me among them, I was stunned. I had the feeling of debuting with the best, the most audacious of
all.”
Coyote also recalls the
Diggers, the most radical West Coast anti-establishment group that
descended from the Mime Troupe and which he has been very close to: a
group of militant anarchist actors who, after having been very active in
the psychedelic years, suddenly vanished from the scene at the end of
1967. He himself knows what
became of them. He was still
involved with them in the 1980’s, when they reappeared under a new
identity and still firmly convinced that society keeps changing.
In Sleeping Where I Fall
(1), a book of his memoirs, Peter Coyote begins by going back to
the very beginning of his experiences: he recalls his family whom he
defines as “very leftist.” He
recalls his mother, Ruth, a woman of Russian Jewish origin. In the 1950s, she witnessed the expulsion of a cousin from an
American public school for being a communist; Ruth remained outraged by
the experience. His father,
Morris Cohon, of Uzbek origin, was a banker, but counted among his friends
the founders of the Monthly Review, a monthly Socialist magazine. A few months before he passed away in 1971, he told Peter, who was
then living in a radical community in California, "Capitalism is
in the process of dying, son. It
is being consumed by its own internal contradictions. But if you believe that revolution is going to take five
years, you are wrong. It will
take fifty years ....” Despite
their shared political thought, Peter and his father didn't have an
idyllic relationship. As a
former college boxing champion, Morris Cohon would have liked his older
son to be a competitor. He
gave him boxing lessons, from which Peter always came out beaten. “A man who shows his son that he will never be
able to win builds around him a world of terror and of violence,” thinks
the actor today. Resistant to
the spirit of competition, he writes, “My pleasures were solitary:
reading, writing, watching people and animals .... The counterculture that
I discovered by following it seemed to be made for me, even if I didn't
understand all of its implications.”
In 1964, Peter Cohon/Coyote
left for San Francisco from the East Coast when wasn’t even yet
twenty-four years old. He had
wanted to become a writer, but instead he joined the Mime Troupe. He was fascinated by Ron Davis, the founder of the troupe. Davis was trying to transform contemporary theater, which he found
trifling and ornamental, by abolishing the distance between the stage and
the audience, by political art, and by denouncing the racism of
governments and police, American politics in Vietnam, and the repression
of black movements. From this ponderous program, the Mime Troupe carried
out its work with lively shows, inspired by commedia dell'arte and
performed them with much fanfare in the streets, in parks, and on city
squares. These spectacles,
which the establishment found more than a little provoking, often landed
the actors, as well as Davis himself, at the police station.
Revolt
In the troupe, Peter met
Emmett Grogan, a young New Yorker, who had known, from militant pro-IRA
burglaries, an adventurous adolescence and who would later tell all of his
story in Ringolevio (2). "Emmett was my brother; it was he
who pierced my ears in 1968,” he says. It was also with him that the actor shot up heroin. "He
was a difficult guy to understand — selfish and charismatic,
vulnerable and charming. A sort of Robin Hood, even if, contrary to what he wrote, he
wasn't the architect of the Haight-Ashbury revolt.” Cohon also met Peter Berg, alias “The Hun”: “the most
eccentric, the most radical, and without question the most brilliant
member of the troupe." He
participated in discussions that Berg organized. "Each had his opinion about the way to throw out the
system,” he says. Faced
with Davis the Marxist, Berg saw himself as the Libertarian — the polar
opposite of Davis. “The
Hun and Davis were two intelligent, rebellious, politically committed
guys. The Troupe was too small for those two.” When
the dissidents — Berg, Grogan, and the others — left Davis, they founded
their own group: The Diggers.
Psychedelic Parties
"Those who return to
the earth,” the
Diggers’ name comes from British history, from a 17thcentury commune. Some peasants had cultivated a piece of communal property that they
had appropriated. In
response, Cromwell crushed this little group of bold agrarian reformers
who had envisioned “scratching out forever from creation... private
property... the source of all wars, of all bloodshed, of crime and of
heinous and slavish laws that crush the people under the iron heel of
misery." (2)
Peter Cohon didn't follow the
dissidents. “I wasn't a
purist like the Diggers,” he explains between bites of a
burrito “al diablo.” He
took a real interest in what his friends did, spent his evenings talking
with them, rebelled like them against the assassination of militant blacks
by the FBI or against the Vietnam War, demonstrated, and took part in the
psychedelic parties of Haight Ashbury. In his book, he brilliantly describes this "incredible"
time "when personal style counted more than pedigree ...”. San Francisco became the hippie capital to which hundreds
of young people without money came believing they would find peace,
harmony, and LSD. The Diggers
were an exception. They
weren't content to denounce American society, its egocentrism, the role of
money; they also denounced the counterculture which was formed with its
tidy words “peace and love,” criticizing those who profited from the
situation, the little shopkeepers of Haight Ashbury who made money off of
the backs of the new arrivals. They
published offending pamphlets and posters, but above all they confronted
reality, fed runaways who had no money, and organized free distribution of
stew in the street under the slogan “Free Food for Free Life.” And they did these things day after day.
They also organized free
stores. And to promote their
ideas, they put on plays. In
some of them, they worked with local rock musicians: The Grateful Dead,
Country Joe and the Fish, or Jefferson Airplane. In others, they appeared by themselves. This is how they presented The Invisible Circus in a
neighborhood church. The play, with its strong sexual connotation, made the San
Francisco newspapers howl. Another
time, they paraded giant marionettes on Haight Street to celebrate the
death of money (a little hastily it seems). Coyote liked the Diggers’ sense of provocation. He describes them battling against established powers, such as the
mayor of San Francisco, as much as against the self-proclaimed
revolutionary organizations, inviting themselves to meetings of the
growing new left and to the congress of student unions in order to bait
their leaders.
The agitation of the Diggers
attracted people from other areas of interest. The poet and novelist Richard Brautigan (Trout Fishing in
America; Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel, 1942) liked to
share in their activities. They
had allies; for instance they opened a free store “for the black man”
with the Black Panthers Party, a radical Afro-American organization that
had its roots in Oakland on the other side of the bay.
For their plays and their food
distribution, they sometimes called on Hell’s Angels, a gang of
Harley-Davidson motorcyclists, not generally favorable to revolution. It seems that each group was impressed by the freedom displayed by
the other. By the end of 1967, however, the atmosphere of Haight-Ashbury
had changed. Hard drugs had
begun to wreak their havoc, and Grogan and Coyote were themselves victims
of the drug scene. The
anti-Vietnam War movement strengthened, as did police raids. Repression came down on the Black Panthers. On the 4th of July, 1967, the Diggers, who didn’t see
themselves on the stage of armed resistance, renounced their name. They became the “Free Family.” In the months that followed, they disappeared, hitting the road. Some of them settled out in the country. Peter Cohon followed them and changed his name. “I had a dream
in 1962 under the influence of peyote: I saw myself as a coyote. Seven years later, I went off into the desert with a Shoshone
Indian friend, Rolling Thunder. I pondered the experience and decided to
become Peter Coyote. That was thirty-one years ago. I have been Coyote longer than Cohon.”
The Diggers’ diaspora
stretches to the north of San Francisco through several communal farms.
Between run-ins over washing the dishes, lack of money, and stories of sex
turned sour, these communal, rural experiences were difficult. Still, some of them succeeded due to strength of organization,
conviction, and the help of friends. For example, “Black Bear Ranch,” situated in a lost corner of
northern California is where a new political and ecological thought is
developing. Coyote talks about a trip with Berg, who is becoming the
theorist of a new ecology, to the home of beat poet Gary Snyder, in a
community located on the Yuba River. There they found people who were trying to understand and respect
the flora and fauna that surrounded them and who were trying to fight
against mining companies, the felling of trees on too large of a scale,
and insane real estate practices. This
visit determined the destiny of the ex-Diggers.
New Ecology
Since the end of the 1970s,
Peter Coyote has returned to his work as a professional actor in the heart
of the system. “My
daughter was growing up, and I owed her a good education.” He has been an actor in Hollywood with Steven Spielberg (E.T.)
and Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich), in Madrid with Pedro
Almodovar, and in Paris with Roman Polanski. But he still considers himself a member of the Digger family. For example, he voted, like them, for Ralph Nader in the November
6th election. “The Democrats are only interested in the Left when it
is a matter of taking our votes. We
are going to refuse them our votes.” In the last pages of Sleeping Where I Fall, Coyote does some
personal reckoning. A good
number of his friends from the ‘60s are dead: Grogan of an overdose in
1978, Brautigan of suicide in 1984. Others
have succumbed to cancer or beaten it. Certain ones have become informers. And then there are those who have turned radical ecologist and
continue to want to change America and the world: Peter Berg in San
Francisco — “He no longer speaks to me, but we cross paths at
funerals and marriages,” Nina [Blasenheim], Jane Lapiner, Freeman
House, and David Simpson, who have moved onto the banks of the Mattole
River.
Notes:
(1) Sleeping Where I Fall,
Counterpoint, Washington, D.C.
(2) Ringolevio (Noire
Gallimard).
(Tomorrow: Céline and
Alice Rediscover the Diggers)
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Article Two
Two women from Nîmes
return to the trail of veterans of the revolt in order to make a film.
Libération
newspaper (Paris, France), Culture section (Tuesday, 26 December 2000), p.
30.
In 1966-67, unlike the
hippies of San Francisco, they were revolutionary anti-establishment
protesters. When nothing more
seemed possible there, they disappeared into nature, founded communities,
and took a new departure Into radical ecology. Thirty years later, the Diggers have not abandoned their American
dreams...
In December 1998 and June
1999, the cable channel, Planet, broadcasted The Diggers of San
Francisco. The film tells the story of the group between the years
1965-68, but also reveals what has become of its main members. The first part shows several former Diggers, some of whom still
live in the counterculture capital and others who have chosen to get back
to nature in northern California. In addition to actor Peter Coyote, the film also features Ron
Davis, founder of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which originally spawned
the Diggers. The film also
includes contemporary footage from films and news reports showing the Mime
Troupe, the marching Diggers, and several police raids.
Expressing Desires
One can appreciate what
separated the hippies from the Diggers: the hippies contented themselves
with their message of “Peace, love, and nature,” their joints and hits
of acid, while the Diggers wanted to radically change society, even if
they didn’t turn up their noses at the drugs. There was much contrast between them and leftist groups. The agitators rejected all politics on behalf of people without
agitators. Rather, they hoped
that those who saw their subversive “happenings” would refuse to
surrender control over their lives to anyone else. To Ron Davis, who reproached his former disciples for having
vanished at the end of 1967, when the movement against the Vietnam War
needed leaders, Peter Berg, Digger theorist, responds that the Diggers “didn't
have ambition beyond expressing ideas and desires — it certainly was not
their ambition to lead movements." So the Diggers unobtrusively left the scene, and, according
to Peter Coyote, their discreet departure made it easier for them to
succeed in retaining their individual identities.
The second part of the film
follows contemporary political movements inspired by the Diggers (Food not
Bombs, for example). In this
part, one can sense the libertarian atmosphere of the anti-WTO (World
Trade Organization) demonstrations in Seattle and their persistence in the
pursuit of the “American dream.” In the third and most moving part of the film, we meet the
ex-Diggers today. Most are
flirting with sixty, but still have not given up on changing society. They are activists for “bioregionalism,” a grass roots variant
of deep ecology against the “mercantilism” of the world. The Diggers’ activism shows that the revolutionaries of the
‘60s haven’t all passed over into the camp of stock-option holders.
Anti-hippie Aggressiveness
The other interesting aspect
of this film comes from the personality of its authors: two young women
barely over thirty and young enough to be the Diggers’ daughters. Originally from the Gard, Céline Deransart, film producer, and
Alice Gaillard, journalist, are two friends who, since middle school, have
had a passion for revolts and revolutionaries. "In 1994, we wanted to direct a film covering
anti-establishment culture from the 1960s through rap. And then Ringolevio, Emmett Grogan's book, fell into our
hands in the first incomplete translation. (1) We had read about the adventures of this modern Robin Hood and his
band, and we loved his anti-hippie aggressiveness that redirected our
interest away from all the tedious wide-eyed nostalgia. We practically fell in love with Grogan. We learned that he had been discovered dead from an overdose on 1
April 1978, on a New York subway train. Our dream collapsed, so we started to write a documentary that
would still include Ringolevio. But we didn't have any money.”
In Nîmes, the city they now
call home, a day after Feria (an annual festival with bullfighting in
Southern France), Céline and Alice learned from one of their friends that
the ex-Diggers could be contacted via the Internet. At the same time, they discovered how to contact actor Peter Coyote
from an American edition of Ringolevio. He himself was in the process of writing a book about this era. He told them his version of events and gave them some
recommendations. Tape recorder in pocket, Céline and Alice bought themselves
a trip to New York. They
didn't find much in the megalopolis and soon set out by bus, heading for
the West Coast. "We
had sent an e-mail asking for a meeting with Peter Berg, the man who knew
what had happened to all the ex-Diggers. He was surprised that two young women wanted to bring up the old
times. We met and interviewed
him. He understood that we
would be making this story a personal affair, and he opened up his network
to us. We had to drop the story of Grogan. Especially since most of the former Diggers thought that, in Ringolevio,
he had taken too much credit for the venture for himself.” Céline and Alice left for northern California to meet the
ex-Diggers who had settled in the heart of the countryside more than
twenty years ago. They
learned how the Diggers organize their life in the country and about their
present involvement in a local form of ecological struggle.
Shooting the Film
"After
more than a month, we left California with thirty hours of interviews. Back in France, we translated all of it and started to solicit
producers.” They
finished by finding a company that was interested in their project. But they would still have to wait until 1998, four years after
having written the first script, in order to leave for the Haight-Ashbury,
the former hippie section of San Francisco. Their cameraman and producer
Jean-Pierre [Zirn] went with them. “The shooting lasted three weeks
and the archival research two more. The
Diggers had shot their own films about their activities, and there were
some news reports. All of
this was available in universities. At
television stations, there was also some footage, but at a prohibitive
price. Finally, we returned
to France, and we edited the fifty-two minutes that Planète broadcast.”
Then
the film had a second life. Thanks
to Hésiode, an associative film distributor
from Marseilles, The Diggers was shown in Paris, in Nîmes, and in
Montpellier. “I have
new documentary projects about the alternative economy that is, in a way,
a continuation of the Diggers’ spirit today,” explains
Céline Deransart. And for
Alice Gaillard, now
project head for an Internet site, “if directing a documentary now
seems to me less
complicated than before, finding a subject that sustains me as long is
another story....”
[On
location at Marseilles]
Notes:
1.
Flammarion, 1973; in this edition, the book is 352 pages, as
opposed to 683 for the
Gallimard version, “la
Noire,” 1999.
2. www.diggers.org;
www.planetdrum.org
3.
Yesterday's Libération
4. His
catalogue includes films on Chiapas, the anarchist Spanish women, etc.
(telephone: 04 91 46 04 87).
(Tomorrow:
The Hun of San Francisco)
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Article Three
Peter Berg, the brains
behind the group, has evolved in the direction of environmental defense.
Libération
newspaper (Paris, France), Culture section (Wednesday, 27 December 2000),
p. 28.
In 1966-67, unlike the
hippies of San Francisco, they were revolutionary anti-establishment
protesters. When nothing more
seemed possible there, they disappeared into nature, founded communities,
and took a new departure into radical ecology. Thirty years later, the Diggers have not abandoned their American
dreams....
On location in San Francisco
He is not very tall. His gray
hair is pulled up in a bun, and he has laughing, almost slanted eyes
sheltered behind big glasses. Peter Berg reads his e-mails on a salvaged computer while
Judy Goldhaft, his partner, a fine-haired brunette with pale skin and pale
eyes, rummages through a file. They
are working on the floor below their apartment in the offices of Planet
Drum, the environmental foundation that they created a quarter of a
century ago In the 60's, they
were the most prominent activist couple in San Francisco. She was a dancer and an actress in the Mime Troupe. He, nicknamed “The Hun,” was the brains behind the
Diggers movement. At the
artistic level, Berg advocated a more radical rupture with mainstream
theater than did the Mime Troupe — he advocated an eruption of the
theater into life. At the
political level, "I dreamed of a world where each person
cooperated with his neighbor. I
dreamed of a society without oppression or money. My heroes have always been the Wobblies, the anarchist-unionists of
the revolutionary union IWW (Industrial Workers of the World), these
hoboes who tramped up and down the country in the 1910's and helped
workers organize themselves against their bosses.”
Erosion on the Equator
Today, Berg keeps himself busy
with ecology. He just spent
several weeks in Bahia of Caraquex, near the equator: “The earthquake
of August 1998 and the flooding rains that fell on the region in the
following months provoked an erosion that affected the tropical forest.” He talks about the local officials who seem to have become
aware of the problems. “The town council has started a tree planting
campaign, and it is developing an ecologically-minded tourism industry.
The council has also made contact with laboratories specializing in
ecology and with other associations to create an ‘estuarium,’ a
foundation devoted to the study of the estuary which waters the town and
to the life of fish and crustaceans — especially the shrimp that support
the population.”
Berg tries to understand the
structure of the society that he discovered. "It is very unequal. 5%
of the people own almost everything. 10% are members of the middle layer, and the rest work for two
dollars a day.” In such
a context, interest in ecology is fragile. "Bioregionalism, that's
it. You live in a natural context and a given culture. It is necessary to take these things into account, to imagine the
consequences of human activity on the flora and fauna, but also the social
relations and the frame of mind of the people on their willingness to
fight pollution. Without the
daily participation of the people, no preservation of the natural
environment is possible. When I was younger, I believed that we had to be
independent — that by giving the example, we were helping people to
change. Today, I know that
the master word is interdependence — with the ecosystem, with culture,
with others.” A
scholarly work (1) describes how Berg and the majority of the Diggers
evolved into this way of thinking. The
Diggers, like other movements of the counterculture born in the 60’s,
were influenced by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and other critics of
modern life. They spoke with,
listened to, and read Gary Snyder, “beat” poet of San Francisco. Snyder was committed to protest against the Vietnam war and against
anti-black racism. He also
advocated a return to a natural way of life and was a supporter of a
different type of political action, one that takes place on a local basis
and has a strong social and ecological conscience.
Since the 1967 publication of
his manifesto Trip Without a Ticket, in which he criticized
industrial ideology inherited from the 19th century and its
“culture-machine,” Berg has continued this argument. Before long, he left Haight-Ashbury to flee police repression
and the hippie spectacle there. With
some of his Digger friends, some Blacks close to the Black Panthers, and
some radical feminists, he settled in the Klamath region of northern
California. There they built
a rural commune called Black Bear Ranch. And there, around the working of the earth, they developed a new
political thought. They want
to promote another kind of agriculture and social organization that were
no longer oriented toward the state but rather toward regions.
Bioregionalism
In 1972, Berg left to observe
the first conference [on the environment] of the United Nations in
Stockholm, and he discovered that his concerns were shared by militant
Green Party supporters all over the world. In 1973, he came back with Judy Goldhaft to settle in San
Francisco because the counterculture was still powerful there, and because
this was a place from which one could spread ideas. He talked with Snyder
and founded Planet Drum, an intermediary association linking numerous
other groups. (2) The
expression “bioregionalism” appeared. "It emerged as a new field in which to study the complex
relationships among communities, humans, governmental institutions, and
the natural world, particularly through environmental politics. Bioregionalists believe that as members of distinct communities,
people cannot avoid thinking about their interaction on their surrounding
environment, or the influence that it has on them. This is what they call a bioregion, because, despite technological
progress, we are not isolated from nature.” (3) Berg explains: "This term came from a philosophy aimed at
life out in nature. We need
to adapt it to a complex reality and develop principles that are also
applicable to cities.” Berg
is helped by Judy and by his old friends, Freeman House and David Simpson —
ex-Diggers who have settled in the Mattole Valley in northern
California. In 1979, Planet
Drum began publishing Raise the Stakes. This biannual magazine
serves to coordinate experiences that give expression to the still vague
concept of bioregionalism. In
Raise the Stakes one can read news about the Kansas Area Watershed,
militants of the Northwest, those of the state of New York, [and] from the
Gulf of Mexico....
Heritage
Detouring from the direction
of the conversation, Berg mentions the hippies of his youth. "We give them a hard time, but I have to admit that with
their nature cult, they were sort of protoecologists. The articulation of ecological discourse has turned out to be,
along with feminism, the great societal gain of the 70’s — but it had
its roots in the preceding decade.” And it will have ramifications in the following generation as
well. Anyway, Planet Drum
works toward this goal by increasing its interventions in schools.
Today, Berg is delighted to
see young people coming to him who are set on fighting not only NAFTA [the
North American Free Trade Agreement], but pollution and the domestication
of politics by large industrial groups as well. "Bioregionalism is not a movement,” he adds. "It is a multiform network conceived around this attention
to ecosystems, and born of imperatives like sustainable development,
biological diversity, stability of the environment, and cooperation.” The following Sunday, Berg and Goldhaft take a drive into the
Napa Valley to visit the big wine cellars with friends, journalist Martin
Lee, a specialist in European and American fascism, whom Berg likes to
consult on political questions, and Peter Bennett, a British specialist on
virgin forests, who comes from Sri Lanka. Together they sample Pinots Noirs and Chardonnays like
connoisseurs, lunch outside, talk, and laugh. Peter Berg enjoys these friendly pleasures. This is even one of the reasons for his ecological commitment.
Notes:
(1) In Bioregionalism, book
of collected writings edited by Michael Vincent McGinnis, Routledge,
London, and New York.
(2) Join today at www.planetdrum.org.
(3) Bioregionalism, cited
book.
(Tomorrow: On the edges of
the Mattole River)
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Article Four
Jane
Lapiner and David Simpson Defend Nature with Theater
Libération
newspaper (Paris, France), Culture section (Thursday, 28 December 2000),
p. 25.
In 1966-67, unlike the
hippies of San Francisco, they were revolutionary anti-establishment
protesters. When nothing more
seemed possible there, they disappeared into nature, founded communities,
and took a new departure into radical ecology. Thirty years later, the Diggers have not abandoned their American
dreams....
On
location in San Francisco
In
order to get from San Francisco to the mouth of the Mattole River, in the
heart of the lost coast of California, it is necessary to drive six hours
north, crossing dark forests of sequoias and follow mountain ridges, then
heading down toward Petrolia, a town of a dozen buildings. The house of Jane Lapiner and David Simpson is not far off and is
suspended on a hill facing the mouth of the river on the Pacific Ocean. There one will find a half-dozen riding horses, turkeys destined to
a lugubrious fate when Thanksgiving time arrives, chickens, cats, a big
curious dog, vegetables, flowers, and several pine trees surrounding a
wooden house...
David
Simpson, former member of the Mime Troupe and ex-Digger, proudly looks at
the clear oak wooden floor that he has just finished: "And to say
that the people from around here are so crazy about sequoias that they
regard the oak as a weed!” Jane
Lapiner is also there, smiling. Lapiner
was born into a New York Jewish family of Polish origin which she
describes as progressive, and perhaps even communist, although she doesn't
know for sure. In 1961, when
she arrived in San Francisco, she was twenty years old. In those days her husband was a French and Italian teacher. In 1964, Jane joined the Mime Troupe, becoming one of the most
famous dancers in San Francisco. In
order to avoid going to Vietnam, David had enlisted in the Coast Guard
before the draft was issued. He
had had the luck of being assigned to the west coast. Once demobilized, he had joined the Troupe. An actor, an author, and a Digger, David also wrote for the Free
Press. It was in the Mime
Troupe that Jane met David, whose family was from Chicago, and the couple
had one daughter.
Wooden
House
At the
end of the ‘60s, Simpson and Lapiner, who, from then on lived together,
joined a community farm. In
1974, when the commune era had died off, they drove up to Humboldt
country, near Oregon, and settled on the bank of the Mattole River. They are now in the process of restoring a wooden house which they
had been living in until 1992, when it was destroyed by an earthquake. “The mouth of the river is situated on the friction point of
three tectonic plates: the Pacific, the North American, and the Gorda,”
says David. "The landscape is not very stable. We have since moved
into the adjoining barn nearby which hadn't been damaged,” says
Jane.
Night
falls. Jane goes onto the narrow strip of sand which separates the
river and the ocean. "It
is the 6th of November; the salmon's trip up river should begin.” Jane and David have been interested in the salmon since they
arrived here. Salmon are
funny fish. Those of the
Pacific are notably so: after a long voyage in the ocean, they swim back
only one time (while other salmon make the trip three or four times), in
order to spawn in the mild waterway where they were born; then they die. Their bodies run aground by the thousands on the high banks of the
Mattole, a fact that pleases the bears, vultures and coyotes. "This is an especially excellent ecological indicator,” clarifies
Jane. "In order for
everything to go well for the salmon, it is necessary that the river be
clear and the gravel on which they reproduce be clean so that the erosion
of the surrounding hills is slight — deforestation has to be brought
under control....” Next Tuesday David will discuss this issue with his
biologist friend, Gary Peterson. In
the meantime, he mentions the recent problems that he and other
bioregionalists of the valley have had to face.
"After
WWII, California experienced a housing boom for which numerous forests
were cut down,” continues
David. "Between 1947
and 1987, three-fourths of the valley’s trees disappeared. The erosion has been phenomenal. The wild salmon were in danger. The state had started to realize the seriousness of the problem,
but we didn’t wait for the state in order to involve our neighbors in
safeguarding the fish. We
aren’t environmentalists: for us, defending nature cannot be
accomplished by edicts handed down by centralized authorities. It is necessary to mobilize the people who are in contact with it. There will be successful results only if everyone begins
there. We try then to
demonstrate the necessity of controlled forest management and the
necessity of long-lasting development.” This is not easy. The
land owners hold prejudices against reformers and other bioregionalists
stemming from the ‘60s, even if they have adapted, even if they know how
to build a house with their own hands .....
“Stolen
from the Indians”
“Most
of the ranchers here were born riding horses,”
says David. "Their
grandparents took this land from the Indians. Mattole is the name of the people who lived here and who were
totally destroyed by the settlers.” The problem of the forest got complicated when a local forestry
operation company was taken over by a “[corporate] raider.” In search of quick profit, he had the woods cut completely down. The owners of the forests, who were well-paid, accepted it. The fishermen and farmers, who didn’t have an investment in the
deal, and the defenders of the salmon and nature objected. The valley was split. Workers
unions, furious to see the lumberjacks deprived of union rights, joined
the Green faction. They
demonstrated with the bioregionalists. “To see metalworkers cry
‘Save the Earth!’ was a wonderful surprise for us,” admits Jane.
In
order to reduce the tension, Jane and David, who have never renounced
their passion for interventionary theater, got their company, Human
Nature, on its feet, writing and editing the comedy Queen Salmon. It
renewed the dialogue even if nothing was resolved. The two former Diggers
have edited some other plays: in 1996, they performed La Frontera (The
Border) with some students from the Petrolia school where Jane teaches
yoga and dance classes. “It was about denouncing the state of
California, which refused to provide public education for the children of
illegal immigrants.” Its
success enabled the show to travel throughout the American West and even
into Mexico. In 1998, David and Jane presented The Wolf at the Door, a
comedy for which their friend, cartoonist Robert Crumb, created the
poster.
In
1999, they were in Seattle for the protest against the global market and
the WTO (World Trade Organization) and also to put on some performances. Last September, they left for the Great North, the country of the
Inuit and the Guitch'in, to write a play called Global Warming, the
Musical. David still
considers the stage and laughter to be weapons.
Pro-Nader
The
telephone rings. It is a call
concerning the urgencies of the moment. It is the evening of November 6, the eve of the presidential
election. One of the
couple’s four children (ages 22-38) calls. Who should he vote for? Throughout
the evening, they all telephone each other. David, Jane and their tribe are Ralph Nader and Green Party
supporters. But the
Democrats, who are campaigning for Al Gore, have launched “a
veritable internet bombardment,” says David Simpson. "Former radical militants are sending us dozens of insistent
e-mails. Why should I vote
for a candidate who is in favor of the death penalty? Who says nothing to condemn a racist penal system, and who only
sees ecology from afar? Under
the pretext that Bush is worse? When
they are elected, Democrats cut social budgets just like Republicans.”
Notes:
(1) "Bioregionalists
take into consideration the fact that, as members of distinct communities,
men can neither avoid thinking about the impact they have on their
changing environment nor the influence the it has on them. This is what
they call a bioregion, because, despite technological progress, we are not
isolated from nature.” In
Bioregionalism, a book of collected writings edited by Michael
Vincent McGinnis, Routledge.
(Tomorrow:
Totem Salmon)
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Article Five
Freeman House fights
against deforestation and the destruction of the ecosystem
Libération
newspaper (Paris, France), Culture section (Friday, 29 December 2000), p.
30.
In 1966-67, unlike the
hippies of San Francisco, they were revolutionary anti-establishment
protesters. When nothing more
seemed possible there, they disappeared into nature, founded communities,
and took a new departure into radical ecology. Thirty years later, the Diggers have not abandoned their American
dreams....
On location in Petrolia
When he arrived in Petrolia in
1980, with his “partner,” Nina Blasenheim, Freeman House already knew
about salmon. For several
preceding years, he had hired himself out on a fishing boat that operated
on the open sea of Alaska. The
fish that he pulled into his nets were, in his eyes, simple prey that
allowed him to survive and pay for equipment and loans from his employer. In 1980, he again made contact with the animal. These salmon, which make a counterclockwise tour of the North
Pacific, return to the Mattole River where they were born. Part of a greatly endangered species, they will survive (for how
long?) because of a little team which Freeman House helped develop. It is this experience, with quite a few other stories, that Freeman
House recounts in Totem Salmon, a superb book conveying the spirit
of the vastness that exists there but also conveying an awareness of the
fragility of the natural phenomena the author witnesses. Totem Salmon is described by poet Gary Snyder as “serious
and delicious, at the same time both personal and cosmic.”
In Extremis
Freeman House recalls that
originally, each salmon was adapted to a specific river against whose
current it swims, confronting natural obstacles, first to spawn there,
then to die there. But
deforestation has led to erosion that contaminates the waters and causes
an increasing numbers of floods. It
has also led to the deposit of numerous obstacles in the river due to rock
slides. These negative
environmental factors have almost deprived the Mattole, whose mouth is on
the lost coast of California, of her [native salmon species]. Elsewhere in the Northwest numerous sub-varieties of salmon are
disappearing. In confronting
this danger, local inhabitants could, as the state of California did,
breed salmon in large aquaculture facilities. But this option sacrifices biological and genetic diversity, and
therefore it weakens the species, writes Freeman House. Luckily, the
Mattole was too small and too far from the center of power for those at
the top to take notice of. The
situation was certainly not good, but at least they were able to cope with
it at a local level using adapted means to safeguard the genotype of the
local salmon. They survived
and prospered.
In his book, which merited
translation into French, Freeman House tells lots of stories about the
Mattole River; he analyzes the relationship between the Indians — the
Yuroks, the Karuks, and the Mattoles (the word “mattole” means
“clear water” in their tribal language) — and their fishing. He explains how the rituals of these peoples, destroyed by settlers
more than a century ago, helped them to conceptualize nature as a
long-term life reserve. He
also describes his friends, passionate like himself about preservation of
the region: David Simpson, the resident comedian of the river, Gary
Peterson, the bearded biologist, drawn away from the Humboldt University
by his love of the valley, and Richard Gienger, an ex-New Yorker who has
worked on the Bear River, an area a little farther to the north, since the
beginning of the ‘70s.
The author of Totem Salmon
is one of the rare original Diggers of California. A chain smoker now in his 60s, slim and naturally distinguished
looking, House manages the Mattole Restoration Council, the MRC. While his partner Nina works as a nurse in a hospital in Eureka, a
town to the north, he coordinates groups of volunteers who work in
specific areas such as “the salmon group,” “the reforestation
group” (since 1986, it has replanted 350,000 trees), “the valley
school intervention group,” etc.
Social Mill
Freeman
House talks with everyone from forest owners (including those hostile to
his initiatives) to school children, “so that the upcoming generation
doesn't make the same mistakes ours has. I have learned to negotiate with state bureaucrats to get financial
and legislative support. I
have also learned to organize fundraisers by private individuals, to
negotiate contracts, and to invent new strategies. At the beginning, there were only a handful of us to face the
stupidity of man; today, of a valley population that borders on 25,000
inhabitants, 200 volunteers belong to organizations that revolve around
the Council. We have
succeeded in keeping up relations with the ranchers who, significantly, we
contact to establish our maps of erosion and deforestation. Even those who
don't share our ideas know that their lives depend on the state of the
ecosystem, and they are willing to discuss it with us. The MRC is a big social mill, a point of contact where it is
possible to peacefully confront the property owners with the tenants of
civil disobedience.”
But it is not yet time for
self-satisfaction. When he
compares the aerial photos of the region in 1942, on which one can barely
see the river because so much of it is hidden by the forest, to those of
the ‘70s on which the waterway is perfectly visible because the trees
have practically disappeared, Freeman House trembles. In his book he writes that "modern technologies have
enabled man to destroy in twenty years what had taken an entire geological
era to construct.” And
it continues. The knowledge
is fragile and incomplete. The
danger of seeing this 300 square mile (about 900 square kilometer) corner
of California destroyed remains unresolved. "Bioregionalism at work is just this: the collecting and
counting of objective elements (the damage report), subjective (the local
culture, the relationship between political and economic forces), the
prescription (for a lasting development which respects biological
diversity), and the means (discussion with others). The future of this doctrine is more vague. For example, on
what level should
we work and fight? In order
to safeguard rivers and their adjoining ecosystems, it is certain that the
local level of the hydrographic system is the right sphere in which to
work. For global warming, it
is necessary to consider questions on another level. But then how do we coordinate the local battles and the
global wars? Each time we
have wanted to coordinate organizations like ours within the U.S., we have
run into insurmountable, subjective problems. The resolution of this problem will be the task of bioregionalists
of the future.”
Victories
House is still optimistic. Not only does he think that this battle has allowed the surviving
Diggers to overcome their possible despair, but he also sees young people
joining the struggle in significant numbers: "Some are sons of
rural people who have become technicians after having studied in the best
universities; others have become biologists and computer scientists to
research a different life. Some
are city kids who have refused to accept the future that we have prepared
for them.” Certain people are already collaborating with him within
the MRC. They share the
opinion of Brave Buffalo, an old Sioux Indian, whom House quotes in the
heading of a chapter in his book: “I have noticed that each man is
drawn to certain animals, trees, plants, or places on Earth. If he paid more attention to these preferences and tried to be
worthy of the species to which he is so attached, he would have dreams
that would purify his life.”
Notes:
(1) Totem Salmon, Beacon
Press, Boston.
(2) Read yesterday's Libération.
(3) Internet address: www.mattole.org
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