Iwanted to be an activist since I was a little kid. My parents were pretty concerned people—my mom was a teacher and my pop was a United Rubber worker in a Goodrich tyre plant, till they closed it down. So I grew up in somewhat of an activist house. I remember when I was ten or eleven watching a Greenpeace story on Sixty Minutes—all these lunatics with long hair in little inflatable rubber boats, zipping round the ocean and putting themselves in front of explosive whale harpoons. I guess that’s when I decided I wanted to do that, some day. That would have been around 1977, in the heyday of Greenpeace. After college in west Pennsylvania, I went back-packing around the South Pacific for about a year. There my commitments were reinforced by seeing the environmental devastation of the region, particularly in Australia. My uncle managed one of the largest oil refineries in the Southern Hemisphere for Caltex outside Sydney, and Greenpeace was regularly plugging his outfalls into the Cronulla Bay. I would see these images on the news and feel inspired. Then my uncle would come home and say, ‘Those green bastards! You know, they flooded my pipes today!’
When I got back to the United States, I started to work for Greenpeace in Philadelphia in the winter of 1990, and got into my first action in the spring of 1991. I then moved down to Washington to be the Assistant Director there in the summer. I became a Director a few months later, and ran the DC office of Greenpeace for about five years. At the time it was pretty healthy economically, but soon afterwards it started to crumble—I was constantly saying good-bye to friends as it downsized and downsized. By 1996 I decided I wanted to work more on rivers and forests anyway, and to see the Northwest. Greenpeace wasn’t working on forests at all, and wasn’t focusing on rivers as much I wanted. So I left and pretty soon afterwards got involved in a bunch of EarthFirst actions in the Headwaters forest in northern California. One of the things I wanted to do was take the ethic of excellence and the technological sophistication of Greenpeace actions, and spread it around. Greenpeace had an amazing training regime, but it was only for an elite cadre inside the organization. My idea was to dumb this down technologically, so it would be cheaper, and then popularize it.
Mike Roselle, my non-violence trainer at the last Greenpeace action camp and one of the founders of EarthFirst, was the key person. He had been the first direct-action coordinator for Greenpeace in the United States. In the early nineties he and Twilly Cannon were living out in Montana, where they were up against a really nefarious piece of legislation called the Timber Salvage Rider, which was opening up some of the biggest roadless areas left unlogged in our national forests, on the pretext of clearing the three Ds—down, dead or dying, and diseased trees. This was antithetical to everything that a real biologist would tell you about an ecosystem—in fact, dead and dying trees are of vital importance to any kind of forest. It was just a rationalization to destroy some of the last wilderness left. There was big struggle against it, that drew in a whole new generation of activists. Mike, who comes from Kentucky, grew up on and off in orphanages because his mom couldn’t afford to have the kids at home. He was like a living legend, a veteran of actions involving hundreds of arrests, that I’d read about while growing up. In 1995 he and Twilly and a few others founded the Ruckus Society.
Basically they took the Greenpeace direct-action model, threw away the little rubber boats, and imposed it on the forests. Instead of teaching how to steer inflatables, they taught people technical tree-climbing for doing tree sit-ins, tripods, and tree villages, to defend wilderness areas. Then they built a large scaffolding to teach urban climbing techniques. The rest of the skills were very traditional: non-violence training, media training, direct action planning and strategy, and scouting.
At the time I was still working for Greenpeace; so far as I recall, when Roselle, Cannon and the others held their first informal camp, I was on the Rainbow Warrior. But I was soon working as one of their lead climb trainers, even before leaving Greenpeace. I took over as Director two years ago.
At some point during the campaign against the Timber Salvage Rider, Howie Wolke—one of the founders of EarthFirst—made an off-hand comment to Roselle that we don’t need a wilderness society any more, we need a ruckus society. That really resonated with Roselle. Ruckus, as the definition on the back of our T-shirts says, is a loud, angry interruption, a hullabaloo, a disruption. It’s not an acronym, it doesn’t stand for anything. It just announces what we’re about: strategically, non-violently raisin’ hell, because we don’t like what’s happening to the planet. Some people claim it’s too provocative and we need to change it, that people are going to misunderstand us because of it. ‘When your name is the Ruckus Society, they’re going to believe just about anything they are told about you’. But it suits us.
The Ruckus Society is in many respects anomalous, in that we have some attributes of EarthFirst, and some attributes of a movement, while organizationally we in some ways resemble Greenpeace or Rainforest Action Network. But we’re not actually any of these things—we’re not an institution, and we’re not a movement, we operate in some middle ground. We like to think of ourselves, if you will, as a volunteer fire department for the movement. What we want to do is hold a place in the centre, which offers the resources and contacts and political opportunities for people to come together. You can think of Ruckus as a set of concentric rings. We have a very small staff; then we have probably twenty or thirty volunteers that really orbit close to that; and about a hundred and twenty who probably come to one camp a year, or once every couple of years; and then we have close to three thousand people who have graduated from our programme, with whom we keep in close touch. Who are they? Demographically they’re still fairly homogeneous, but getting more diverse. When we first started, it was almost entirely folks from Greenpeace or Rainforest Action Network, with a few EarthFirsters. But in the five short years we’ve been around, an entire generation of Ruckus trainers has had the torch passed on to them, and as we’ve gotten more involved with the human rights movement, with social justice and fair trade organizations, and labour groups—so we’re seeing a slow but steady diversification of that general population. We have a couple of grandmothers that are trainers, though no grandfathers yet. But most Ruckus trainers are somewhere between 22 and 35.