Seventy feet up an ancient Redwood by Cal Winslow on April 20, 2021
Greasy Pete, his “tree-sitter” name, went up the “Mamma Tree” on the eighth of this month; Bugs followed, climbing the next closest big tree on the eleventh. Today, they sit on platforms 75 feet up a 200 foot-tall redwood tree, well-equipped to survive indefinitely.
The expectation was that there would be a confrontation on the morning of twelfth – the date set for the Anderson Logging Company of Fort Bragg to begin cutting. Several dozen supporters joined the tree sitters early that morning, prepared to form a human chain to cross the logging road and stop the trucks. It didn’t happen. This delay has provided some breathing space for Greasy and Bugs, but no one doubts that the confrontation is coming.
The Nation, check out our latest issue.
Subscribe to
Support Progressive Journalism
The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today.
Did you know you can support
The Nation by drinking wine?
The strike began in February 1919, during the epidemic’s third wave, and brought Barcelona to a grinding halt. In January, the Ebro Irrigation and Power Company, known as La Canadiense for its Toronto headquarters, lowered wages, and fired 8
oficinistas, white-collar workers, for protesting. When 140 blue-collar workers were barred reentry after walking out in solidarity, they appealed to the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), a union that had gained enormous traction in Barcelona over the previous year. The CNT called a general strike, spreading the word “as if it were an epidemic transmitted through air, spreading through contact,” as activist and h