Printer-friendly version Email story link

‘This isn’t just her story, it’s our story’

Three days after timber sale is canceled, forest activist takes fatal fall from tree

By Ben Jacklet

The Portland Tribune, Apr 19, 2002, Updated Oct 30, 2009

ADVERTISEMENTS

Some of Portland’s fiercest forest warriors gathered beneath a huge Douglas fir tree in Mount Tabor Park last Sunday to pay tribute to a fallen comrade.

Beth O’Brien died at age 22 on Friday, April 12, after dropping 150 feet from a tree platform in the Mount Hood National Forest.

At the candlelight vigil, O’Brien’s comrades remembered her as Horehound, a Dumpster-diving, freight train-hopping, tree-sitting anarchist who died a heroic death in defiance of an untrustworthy government.

One friend choked back tears as he read from a poem composed in O’Brien’s honor: “Our struggle will be passionate,” he vowed. “We will fight for you.”

A day earlier, U.S. Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden had called O’Brien’s death “utterly senseless.”

The timber sale O’Brien was fighting, the object of nearly three years of tree sits in the forest and numerous demonstrations in Portland, had been canceled three days before O’Brien fell.

But O’Brien and her colleagues from the Cascadia Forest Alliance continued their battle, even after it already had been won.

O’Brien had snowshoed 6 miles into the forest and scaled up into the forest canopy that day to protest the proposed Eagle Creek timber sale. An inexperienced climber, she lost her grip while trying to scale a rope ladder extending from one tree platform to another and plunged to her death.

The sudden death of O’Brien, and the tragic timing of the event, has sparked deep emotions in Portland, Washington, D.C., and Santa Rosa, Calif., where O’Brien grew up. It also shines a spotlight on Cascadia Forest Alliance Ñ and on the traveling subculture of youths who eschew American materialism and mainstream environmentalism in favor of direct action and anarchy.

At the vigil, O’Brien’s friend and lover, a bearded 24-year-old who identified himself as “Monkey,” clutched her journals tightly and told those gathered: “This isn’t just her story, it’s our story. The things that she wrote could apply to any traveling punk kid.”

Another supporter read a message sent electronically from South Africa: “(O’Brien) died while making a difference. Billions of people on this planet are part of the problem, while Beth was part of the solution.”

‘We’ve heard promises before’

Wyden, the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests, worked for 18 months to block the Eagle Creek sale. The area is east of Estacada in Clackamas County.

He announced the deal’s cancellation April 9 on the Senate floor. That same day, his staff contacted environmental groups in Portland, including the Cascadia Forest Alliance, to tell them of the triumph.

The tree sitters didn’t buy it. They refused to believe that Wyden could be successful working within a system they reject.

“We made the decision to stay out there because we wanted to wait for the final paperwork,” said Sarah Wald, a spokeswoman for the alliance. “We’ve heard promises before, and we weren’t leaving until we got the documents.”

Wyden’s chief of staff, Josh Kardon, said, “I don’t want to (fault) their decision to stay up in the trees. They know why they made the decision. I’m sure they feel that they were right, and I’m sure that they are extraordinarily sad about the loss of a friend and a colleague. Sen. Wyden was very emotional when he heard the news because he had worked for so hard for so long to cancel the sale, and because he’s a father with kids not too far from the age of Beth.”

‘Then she fell’

About 1 p.m. April 12, O’Brien and 17-year-old Camas Roy snowshoed in from where the forest service road was blocked with snow.

They carried food and supplies for John Felsner, a 31-year-old volunteer for the alliance who had been living in the trees for several months.

Felsner later told Clackamas County sheriff’s deputies that he recognized Roy but did not know O’Brien. He noticed that O’Brien was not particularly adept at using the three-rope system to climb, so he came down to instruct her.

1 | 2 Next Page >>