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| Butterfly atop Luna in Northern California |
On December 10, 1997, barefoot environmental activist [and super heroine]
Julia “Butterfly” Hill climbed up a 600-year-old, 200-foot-tall redwood tree in a remote corner of Northern California and stayed there for 738 days.
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| Finding Mother Tree (S. Simard) |
A native of Arkansas, Butterfly had teamed up with
Earth First!, a group of by-any-means-necessary, redneck-hippie eco-warriors best known for its legally dubious “
monkey-wrenching” protest tactics.
Butterfly, however, brought a
Zen-like mysticism to the movement, and her motivation for occupying the tree, dubbed “Luna” (“anyone that would climb this high is a lunatic,” she later explained), was as much about
spirituality as it was politics.
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| This isn't "Luna" but another wonderful redwood |
“There’s no way to be in the presence of these ancient beings and not be affected,” the exhausted 24-year-old told a group of reporters after descending the tree in December 1999.
“There’s something more than profit, and that’s life.”
People had been tree sitting before Butterfly came along. But she ushered in a new sense of urgency and determination, the likes of which were completely irresistible to the press.
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| The General Sherman (Sequoia Nat'l Park) |
Between riding out torrential El Niño storms and freezing winds from her precarious 8-by-8-foot plywood perch, she conducted radio interviews via solar-powered cell phone, and hosted reporters and photographers willing to make the two-hour climb to her rustic penthouse.
On Earth Day in 1999, Joan Baez and Bonnie Raitt even dropped by. Baez called the visit “one of the most remarkable experiences of my life.”
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