|
BY JOHN SANFORD On Dec. 10, 1997, a 23-year-old Arkansan named Julia Hill climbed into the branches of a 1,000-year-old redwood to save it from loggers. Remaining in the Humboldt County redwood for 738 days, she descended only after Pacific Lumber Co. agreed to let the tree and a 3-acre buffer zone around it stand. At last week's Aurora Forum, Hill recalled what she discovered about stereotypes while trying to communicate with the loggers from her 180-foot-high perch. She said they maintained a "granola-munching, tree-hugging, radical-extremist, wacko-hippie, foo-foo New Ager, out-to-get-somebody's-job stereotype" of her, but she realized she also was guilty of stereotyping them. "Many of them actually have a love for the forest and a connection to the forest," she said. So one day she put a photograph of herself into a plastic zip-lock bag with some granola. She dropped the bag down to the loggers. "Part of my goal was to challenge the stereotype of what people who eat granola have to look like," she explained. Now 29, Hill is tall and rangy, with almond-shaped hazel eyes and cropped black hair. (She did some modeling while growing up.) Her voice is coarse and plucky. When she was about 7 years old, she earned the nickname "Butterfly" during a family hike when a butterfly alighted on her and stayed for a while. Now she goes by Julia Butterfly. In the photo, she was dressed up and wearing makeup, and she said the following exchange took place after the loggers got hold of the plastic bag: "Why did you send us down some picture of some chick and some nuts and seeds?" "Well, the picture is actually a picture of me, and I thought you guys might be hungry because you're working outside, so I thought I'd weight it down with some food. You should try it. It's good. It's like trail mix." The loggers then concluded why she was in the tree: "You need a good boyfriend." And they announced the perfect candidate: "A logger. He likes being out in the forest; you like being out in the forest. He likes trees; you like trees. It's a perfect match." Hill said that joke between her and the loggers lasted for the rest of her sojourn in the redwood. "I didn't necessarily stop any of them from logging, but it began to change the dynamic of stereotyping," she said. Hill is founder of the Circle of Life Foundation, which, according to its website, "activates people through education, inspiration and connection to live in a way that honors the diversity and interdependence of all life." She is the author of The Legacy of Luna (2000) and One Makes the Difference (2002). During the forum in Kresge Auditorium, titled "Your Body on the Line?" she was interviewed by Rebecca Solnit, a Bay Area author, critic and activist whose books include Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape of Wars of the American West (1994), Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000) and, most recently, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003). Solnit said that she, too, had a similar experience when meeting people who supported the recent war in Iraq, which she strongly opposed. The war supporters were "just as humane" as the anti-war activists but only held a different view of events, Solnit said. "They were very motivated by the story that Saddam Hussein was gassing his own people -- and didn't know that that was in 1988, while [the United States was] aggressively supporting him," she added. Solnit said she is heartened by the anti-globalization movement because it is inclusive. "It seems like we're beginning to be in a place where small-scale farmers and rural people and environmentalists and Third World workers and First World workers and practically anybody who cares about anything -- except corporate profits -- is really able to recognize what they have in common," Solnit said. Hill agreed, but added that "mainstream corporate media" and "mainstream corporate government" like it when rifts occur between various movements. Her foundation aims to demonstrate and strengthen the connections between these movements, she said, by asserting that they are, in fact, just various facets of a single movement grounded in common values. Indeed, she said that all people are activists. "Every choice we make has an impact on the world, including when we choose not to do something," she said. "Whether we like it or not, we all share the same planet, and when we take a breath in we just connected ourselves to Saddam Hussein, to George Bush, to Mahatma Gandhi, to Martin Luther King Jr. -- we just connected ourselves to everyone past, present and future." An audio recording of the forum will be posted on the Aurora Forum website (https://auroraforum.org). Sponsored by Stanford Continuing Studies, the Aurora Forum brings socially engaged writers, artists and scholars to Stanford to discuss the past, present and future of the nation's ideals and aspirations. The next forum, "American Media and the Culture of Fear," is being presented in collaboration with the Stanford Publishing Course and is scheduled for July 23. All events take place at 7:30 p.m. in Kresge Auditorium and are free and open to the public. A full schedule of dates, panelists and topics is available on the website. |
Julia 'Butterfly' Hill
|
Stanford Report, June 11, 2003
