Hazel and I are walking through a second-growth forest near Fall Creek in the Cascade Mountain foothills of Oregon’s Willamette National Forest. I notice a subtle shift in the light when we arrive at what Hazel calls “the gate,” a triad of large trees—a Douglas-fir, a hemlock and a cedar—that mark the edge of a grove of shadowy old growth. It’s the site of the ninety-six-acre Clark timber sale, which has been occupied by protesters for more than two years. When we reach Logging Unit 36, I see a sign declaring “Red Cloud Thunder” hanging above a logging road.

Hazel looks up and calls, “Hi, trees!”

“Hi, Hazel!” one of them calls back.

More than 150 feet above our heads are platforms joined by webs of climbing rope—a “tree village” nestled in high branches. A human figure zips down a traverse line connecting two towering Douglas-firs, which the protesters who occupy this stand have named Happy and Guardian. The tree sitters can navigate between the platforms, constructed of recycled plywood and tarp. I can’t tell how many people are living in the canopy, maybe five or six, but from the lilting voices filtering down, it sounds like they’re having a pretty good time.

Before long, the ground-based residents who support Fall Creek’s arboreal society emerge from the woods looking a bit like Lost Boys (though maybe half are female). George, a young woman with a shaved head carrying a big knife, shows up first. She’s passing the time by carving totems in scraps of bark and says she’s been at Fall Creek “for a while”—it’s easy to lose time in the forest. “I really like being out here because I’ve always wanted to live in the woods,” says the Baltimore native. Other residents (Hazel estimates there are anywhere from 30 to 100), with names such as Thorn, Digit and Purple, hail from places across the United States—Kansas, Connecticut, Seattle. They are soot-covered, pungent-smelling, black-clad, dreadlocked, pierced and tattooed. I might be leery of them if they weren’t so friendly and polite.

When Hazel asks if they have anything to tell a freelance journalist, someone named Fox throws down a hand-scrawled note. “I realized that I needed to come out here and experience these majestic forests before they disappear,” he writes. “And they will disappear given the rates of so-called forest management.”

The concern is nothing new, but the response is. Long-term tree sits and other “direct action” tactics have become fashionable forms of protest against logging on public and private lands. Until recently, the average tree sit lasted only a week or two. Today they’re measured in months and years. Julia “Butterfly” Hill famously endured two years in a redwood named Luna, long enough to work out a deal to protect the tree and its immediate surroundings. The tree village at Fall Creek, like similar protests around the Northwest, are collective affairs, with hundreds of activists coming and going and exchanging roles—from tree sitter to ground supporter to community-based organizer.

Tree sitting represents a new chapter in the environmental movement. A bold, youthful cadre of activists is poised to take the place of aging baby boomers who maintain comfortable ties to the establishment. “I think it’s fair to say that there is a more militant or confrontational approach to direct action that’s emerging,” says James Johnston, who directs the Cascadia Wildlands Project and supports tree sits in his spare time. “A lot of that’s born out of different backgrounds, a more urban, anarchist approach, as opposed to white, middle-class, college-educated, starry-eyed-idealist types.”

The point of creating a tree village is to make it impossible to harvest timber without harming a human being. “We’re the last line of defense,” says Dirt, a.k.a. Dean Rimerman, who organized the Fall Creek effort and now staffs the Eugene, Oregon, office of the loosely knit organization of tree sitters known as Red Cloud Thunder. “We’re willing to put our bodies on the line and make [ourselves] vulnerable to any kind of suffering they want to inflict on us.”

Darryl Cherney, a seasoned Earth First! activist based in Humboldt County, California, says that though tree sits tend to be very labor-intensive and do not always accomplish their goals, they offer certain advantages: they attract media attention, provide inspiration and give people a tangible cause to rally around. Most important, Cherney says, “you know that they can’t cut the tree as long as you’re up there.”

Setting up a tree sit requires skill, strength and determination (as well as a working knowledge of knots). After climbing a tree, often with the aid of a logger’s lanyard, the lead climber slings a rope around the trunk, to which other lines are attached. The friction of the rope against the trunk’s bark keeps the rope from slipping. The climber then throws down a heavy line to a partner below and hoists up a platform, which is also secured by ropes. Other tree sitters follow, inching their way up ropes using harnesses and special knots. Then they join the trees of the grove together with climbing rope, making it difficult for loggers to cut down one tree without affecting others.

Tree sits such as those at Fall Creek and another at nearby North Winberry Creek have become fairly sophisticated arboreal villages with several makeshift platforms. Tree sitters cook their meals on Rocket Stoves, highly efficient gadgets that burn leftover materials, such as slash from nearby clear-cuts. (That’s why tree sitters are so sooty.) Food and supplies go up and down on a cargo line. Elaborately rigged tarps capture rainwater. A bucket and a jar, kept in the “basement,” under the platform, serve as the lavatory, emptied in nearby clear-cuts. (To tree sitters, clear-cuts are the toilets of the world.) High up in the canopy, the protesters play music, identify lichens, make beeswax candles, guard their food supply from flying squirrels and contemplate the checkered landscape around them.

But it’s not a vacation. As with other direct action techniques, tree sitting carries real risks. Last spring near Eureka, California, an activist named Yarrow nearly fell to her death from a redwood tree where a colleague is staging a tree sit. Yarrow plummeted fifty feet before a nub on the tree caught her rope. At the Madre Loca tree sit on a Bureau of Land Management tract near Glide, Oregon, a logger reportedly tried to kill a tree where a protester was lodged by girdling it—cutting around the base of its trunk and allegedly endangering the life of the tree sitter in the process.

Activists engage in other dangerous tactics as well, such as barricading roads, badgering loggers on the job and suspending people from pods hanging from propped-together logs that are used to block logging roads. In July at the Eagle Creek tree sit in the Mount Hood National Forest, near Estacada, Oregon, a teenage protester in a pod threatened to hang herself when law enforcement officers moved in to clear the road to the sale. (She eventually came down and was arrested.) Last year in British Columbia, where activists are trying to block logging in the Upper Elaho Valley, a group of timber workers beat up protesters at the end of a deserted road. And in 1998, David “Gypsy” Chain, while trying to disrupt an active sale on Pacific Lumber Company land, was killed when a logger cut a tree and it landed on top of him.

Tree sitters believe their drastic measures are warranted because the forests—indeed, all life on the planet—are in dire crisis. Hazel tells me, “I know that myself and many other people I know have actually put some serious thought into the concept of ÔAm I willing to die for this place?’ And people have said, ÔYes.’”

Tree sitting has evolved as a tactic as the radical environmental movement has expanded and grown more sophisticated. According to Dirt, the idea for multiple platforms connected by traverse lines was gleaned from the tactics of activists in England. Some of the first organized tree sits in the United States took place in the 1980s, when a network of activists calling themselves the Cathedral Forest Action Group tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to block logging in the Cascade and Siskiyou mountains of Oregon. But much of the current momentum for tree sits in the Northwest stems from a fight over a timber sale called Warner Creek in Oregon’s Cascades, southeast of Eugene.

In 1991, a fire set by arsonists burned 9,000 acres of virgin forest near the logging town of Oakridge. The U.S. Forest Service planned to log a portion of the burned timber, which remained commercially valuable despite the fire. Conservationists were outraged. Many feared that thelogging would send a tacit message, encouraging unscrupulous loggers: If you want to log stands that are otherwise off-limits, all you need to do is set a fire.

Events came to a head in 1995, when Congress passed the salvage rider, exempting Warner Creek and many other sales from legal challenges. Earth First! activists promptly blockaded the road leading to Warner Creek. Protesters chained themselves to buried “dragons”—concrete and steel contraptions dropped into trenches in the road. The blockade marked a turning point in the Northwest environmental movement, from an era of fairly short-lived protests to one of long, drawn-out campaigns. Protesters stayed at Warner Creek for eleven months, defending their self-proclaimed Cascadia Free State and enduring heavy winter snows on the road to the proposed logging site. In August 1996, they claimed victory when the Clinton administration canceled the Warner Creek sale.

Dirt says the blockade “was like a beacon of hope” that mobilized hundreds of activists. “People came from all over the country and found a family here,” Dirt says. Many of these people moved on to protest other timber sales around the Northwest.

In 1996, a couple of dozen Cascadia Free State veterans headed down to the Headwaters forest in the redwoods of Northern California, where the modern-day tree village of platforms and netting was born. The “Ewok Village” at Owl Creek, on land owned by Pacific Lumber, lasted for three weeks during the summer of 1996, until its inhabitants were evicted by company personnel. Apparently, a Pacific Lumber climber literally lassoed tree sitters with climbing rope and then lowered them down.

By trial and error, tree sitters learned methods to deter their would-be disrupters. At a 1997 tree sit in a redwood tree dubbed Love Pod, protesters built a doughnut-shaped platform extending all the way around the tree, cutting off access for unwanted climbers. More formidable barriers have been placed around trees at subsequent tree sits. After getting burned by even brief excursions to the forest floor (such as at Love Pod, where tree sitters were surprised by law enforcement officers after coming down to wash their dishes), activists learned to adhere to a cardinal rule: Don’t ever let anyone catch you on the ground.

Tree sitting was gaining favor among a growing network of activists. But it was the vigil of Julia “Butterfly” Hill that brought the practice to national prominence. Hill raised the bar for direct action after spending the brutal winter of 1997Ð98 atop her small, drafty platform in a redwood known as Luna. She also captured the world’s imagination, giving interviews far and wide via a wireless phone. Hill ended her vigil last December, after she and her supporters made a deal with Pacific Lumber in which they agreed to pay the company $50,000 in return for a pledge to spare Luna and 2.9 acres around the tree.

The daughter of an itinerant preacher, Hill later said that she felt like she was being “crucified” as she watched logging take place around her from Luna’s heights. But eventually, she said, the earth spoke to her and she gained an understanding of the healing power of love. At a recent conference of environmental activists, she proclaimed that she now loves everyone on the planet “whether they love me back or not,” including the widely despised Charles Hurwitz, chairman of Pacific Lumber’s parent company, Maxxam Corporation.

Though Hill made tree sitting a household word, she gets only grudging respect from many fellow tree sitters who resent the focus on her own spiritual quest, as well as the fact that she agreed to pay a hated corporation thousands of dollars. Cherney, the Earth First! activist, says, “It wasn’t love, it was grassroots organizing” that made Hill’s tree sit successful. A support team brought her food and supplies, organized media contacts and fostered negotiations with the company.

At the Fall Creek tree village, Hazel, a veteran of the Warner Creek blockade, is quick to emphasize the larger cause, which she considers at the moment to be red tree voles, rodents that live high in the canopies of Northwest old-growth forests. Under the terms of the Northwest Forest Plan, the Forest Service is supposed to look for a number of species, including voles, before commissioning timber sales—a step that the agency failed to take initially at the Clark and North Winberry sales.

The action of the tree sitters at the sites of both sales bolstered a recent legal challenge to the Northwest Forest Plan undertaken by the Oregon Natural Resources Council and other groups. Because the tree sitters were able to delay logging at Clark and North Winberry, those timber sales were incorporated into a settlement agreement between environmentalists and the Forest Service that required the agency to follow the so-called survey-and-manage requirements for a host of species. Surveyors subsequently found a number of red tree voles in the sale areas, a finding that is likely to limit any logging that may take place there. “The tree sitters play a crucial role in giving the process time to work,” says Doug Heiken, a representative of the Oregon Natural Resources Council. “Sometimes a timber sale is illegal but the wheels of justice move too slowly to protect it.”

Other tree sits have also shown success. For example, at Watch Mountain in Washington state, activists last year turned the tide of public opinion against a land swap between the Forest Service and Plum Creek Timber Company. Residents of Randle, once a hard-core timber town, turned out to support tree sitters who occupied a nearby stand of old growth that would have been transferred to the logging company. The parcel was later withdrawn from the land exchange and the stand was saved.

For professional land managers, tree sits represent a colossal headache. “You’re between a rock and a hard spot,” says Rick Scott, ranger of the Middle Fork District, which includes the Clark and North Winberry sales. “On one hand, if you go through a process that meets all the stated rules and regulations and standards and guidelines and seems to be accepted science of managing species in the forest, and you’re following all the established rules, why shouldn’t you proceed? And if one group decides to stop that with civil disobedience, then how to balance that is a difficult task. It’s difficult to know when something becomes a prevailing notion or when one group has just forced their will on another group.”

Scott seems to long for the days when environmentalists simply filed appeals and lawsuits and didn’t spill jugs of urine onto law enforcement officers, as the Fall Creek tree sitters are accused of doing by Patti Rogers, public affairs officer for the Willamette National Forest. Rogers says the protesters will likely damage forest resources, such as streams. (Tree sitters counter that the impacts of their activities are minor compared to those of clear-cutting and road building.)

Rogers also worries that the Fall Creek tree village poses health risks. “It’s pretty darn difficult just from a human perspective when you have people who choose to put their life at risk,” she says. “If someone falls, they’re an hour and a half from medical attention. We know that folks are using drugs; they’ve used alcohol; the sanitary conditions are sometimes deplorable. They’re kids for the most part. It’s hard not to be concerned. If someone falls out of a tree and it’s a runaway or a throw-away kid, do they just drag them off in the forest somewhere?”

She has offered to “spend some time getting to know each other,” but says tree sitters have been unwilling to meet unless she was willing “to give them what they wanted.”

They’re doing better than Nate Madsen, sitting in a redwood near Eureka, California, who can’t get Pacific Lumber to return his calls. He free-climbed a tree named Mariah on his way home from work one night—almost two years ago. He’s still there (though unlike Julia “Butterfly” Hill, he’s taken occasional breaks). He even managed to graduate from Humboldt State University, with the help of a solar-powered laptop.

Madsen, who called me from Mariah, feels that the act of learning how to live in trees may be the only hope for our species—feeling how the arch of one’s foot matches the shape of the boughs, how one’s thumbs wrap perfectly around branches, how the length of one’s body can stretch to reach the next limb. He has watched the light come on in people’s eyes when they view the landscape from 150 feet aloft, navigating a vertical dimension instead of a horizontal one.

And Madsen thinks the fact that someone like him is taking such an extreme stand in the prime of his life might be a beacon of hope in and of itself. He was raised in suburban Los Angeles on a diet of corporate media culture and rode dirt bikes for fun. He says he once had “an incredibly sour attitude” toward radical environmentalism. “Coming from my perspective and my background,” he says, “having gotten to this point certainly gives me hope for the world.”