Julia Butterfly Hill
Created | Updated Feb 9, 2008
On December 10, 1997, a 23 year old woman climbed 180 feet up a tree... and didn't climb down again until December 18, 1999.
Julia 'Butterfly' Hill lived on a six-by-eight foot platform, roughly 18 stories high for two years, sheltered from the elements in a tent made from tarpaulin. She did this amazing thing to protect a giant redwood tree, perhaps a thousand years old, from the Pacific Lumber1 logging company. Known as the Stafford Giant to residents of the community of Stafford, California2, the mighty tree was affectionately renamed 'Luna'. Thanks to Julia 'Butterfly' Hill's determination and courage, Luna and her immediate neighbours will be not be turned into planks.
Julia continues her activism via the lecture circuit; she appears before diverse groups, such as labour organizations, school children, politicians, and regular folk who care about the world they live in. The Circle of Life Foundation, which she founded while sitting in Luna's branches, promotes her philosophy of personal responsibility for the environment by striving to:
'inspire, support, and network individuals, organizations and communities, so together we can create environmental and social solutions to the problems facing humanity and the planet.' A documentary film entitled 'Butterfly' will air on the PBS network in America in June 20, 2000.
The convoluted hillsides of the Pacific coast of North America were once thick with some of the most magnificent trees on Earth, towering hundreds of feet above the forest floor like a vast natural cathedral. The life they sheltered was among the richest and most varied to be found anywhere. The human inhabitants were so well provided for by their forest home that they were able to devote more time to leisure and artistic expression than any people ever have... or are ever likely to have... anywhere. Nowhere else on the planet has supported such a number of people who lived so well with what they had at hand. In little over a century, almost all of this has been destroyed.
In the beginning, human beings lacked the power to do serious damage to this magnificent environment. It took teams of men days to fell a single tree, and their means of transporting the fallen giants was limited by the endurance of muscle power. Now the forests are given over to corporate giants, who stride across international borders and scythe the hillsides bare with all the tools of modern industry... and the appetite of modern greed.Whole forests are swept away, with all the plant and animal life they contain. Everything goes! The very soil that gave the great trees life, without the protection of their mighty branches, is swept away, filling the pristine rivers and streams with mud and silt, destroying the salmon that nourished whole cultures.
The corporate monsters soothe whatever doubts and concern our governments have with the mantra, 'Jobs... jobs... creating jobs'; but those jobs disappear with the trees, taking with them the 'jobs' of the people who were defined by the forest, whose identities depended on it. For them, their livelihood, their art, their spirituality, their very existence is at stake. For they cannot delude themselves that a monoculture tree farm by a silted stream is the same as a living forest and a teeming salmon run.
Their loss is perhaps the greatest; but, in part, it's shared by all. The value of a forest is not the view of it from your window or the resources it contains. It's real value lies in knowing it is there; that there is a part of our planet that is the same now as it was when we first arrived; that we haven't sullied everything. The survival of the forests is a talisman against a future we all dread, though we are not all conscious of it; one that, as long as the forests live, we can hope may never come.
The amazing thing that Julia 'Butterfly' Hill did was sit in a tree for two years. The remarkable thing is that, eventually, a giant corporation made a small concession to her and the viewpoint she represents. The truly sad thing is that she had to sit in a tree for two years to make people care.
