Aradia is Gone......

Public Service Announcement Sunday , Sept. 26, 04'

Aradia is Gone......

The Old Growth giant of a redwood known as Aradia...and all of her sisters and brothers in that great last grove of wilderness on the ridges above Grizzly Creek and the Van Duzen was hacked down in a Saturday raid by Maxxam corporate industrial loggers. Being defended for years, this site is adjacent to the very place Defender Gypsy Nathan Chain was killed by an angry logger felling a tree in his direction in 98'.

The movement is attempting to deal with their grief best they can now, many who were not arrested, being witness to these great life forms being dropped, a terrible and unforgettable sound and fury and deathly silence that stills the forest.

Living among such giants brings on such deep awareness and sensitivities as always when so close to wisdom of elders. We have lost incredible companionship, but will be endlessly touched by those teachings. Their very presence was what brought so many of us to make this stand, inspiring a better way of living in keeping with the perpetuity of the life of forests and natural habitats, rivers, mountains and wildernesses themselves, hardly understood enough by so many, to make it part of their priorities and yet the very essence of what will turn all of this around. For Forest Defenders know their work alone will never stop such devastation. It is only a small part of the beginnings of healing of this massive exploitation by industrial logging, but nowhere completed until more people at large, begin to understand the urgencies and the numbers of caring people necessary to make these changes a reality.

This and all the rest of the difficult issues of environmental and human rights facing us locally and nationally now, will take far more building of a grass roots movement, which accommodates and/or minimizes our differences in the shared knowledge of these times. So imperative to break through unnatural barriers and/or misgivings we may have about one another, to find ways to set mutual priorities worth working toward. . There must be ways we can pool our resources better, find the time and the place to get our best ideas and common denominators out and working. Whatever best reflects what so many of us feel is imperative to do now? How do we go about it?

Forest Defenders and Northcoast Earth First!