Gravity. It’s not just a good idea; it’s the law.

A young man in the Ramsey Gulch area, 20 miles south of San Jose, California, learned that lesson the hard way. Unfortunately, he won’t be able to pass his newfound wisdom along to anybody, because it killed him. “Naya” (his reported “forest name”) was pronounced dead when he arrived via helicopter in Santa Clara after falling 50 feet from a redwood tree last week. He was attempting to save the tree with this strange brand of heroism known as “tree sitting”. It was his first mission. Of course, EarthFirst! put him up to it, without being decent enough to even know his real name. Last April, another tree-sitter, one Beth O’Brien, died the same way, plummeting from the top of the tree she had sworn to protect.

To Dennis Davie, of the Santa Cruz branch of the environmentally concerned group, Naya’s death seems like an inconvenience; his reaction should cause many a confused young person to come down from their lofty perches. He is quoted by the Associated Press as having said “Santa Cruz EarthFirst! is deeply saddened by this tragic event. We never like to lose an activist.”

First of all, Dennis, it wasn’t a tragic event. It was a stupid miscalculation in judgment. Second, you didn’t “lose an activist.” You killed a man. He didn’t fall through the cracks; he fell out of a tree. He isn’t missing. He’s down in the morgue, where your organization left him.

EarthFirst! has been protesting in that neck of the woods since last August, attempting to stop the monstrous Redwood Empire logging company. Davie, who cares more about wood than he does about people, knows that tree-sitting is dangerous. His organization gives people two days of training for this “activity”, but Naya didn’t even receive that much, because he had experience as a rock climber. Even the logging companies admit that the young people sent up the trunks by EarthFirst! believe themselves to be taking on a monumental and heroic task, but is the risk worth it?

This all gained popularity among the neo-hippie movement in the Pacific Northwest in the late ‘90s, when one Julia Hill (forest name: Butterfly) spent two years of her life camped out in the top of a redwood tree, which includes such niceties as urinating and defecating on the tree, by the way. She agreed to come down, with the lumber company promising to leave “her” tree alone – in return for $50,000 to compensate them for the lost lumber. So all you spoiled rich kids in Marin County and thereabouts can take note of that. Just have mommy and daddy buy you a redwood tree with the money they had saved in the hopes of sending you to college, and spend the time doing something more productive.

For instance, you could circulate petitions (on recycled paper, of course) that would seek to change the way logging companies are allowed to operate. You could have picketed the headquarters of the logging companies, carrying cloth banners instead of wooden signs, naturally. You could have written letters to the editors of your local papers – but you’d only want them published electronically (believe me, I understand). That’s all known as “democracy”, and if you had stayed in school, maybe taken a political science course or two, you would have known that.

As someone who has fallen out of trees before, and luckily survived virtually unscathed, I can tell you that poor Naya didn’t die with some semblance of a wood nymph’s smile on his face. He lasted only twelve hours on his platform, and while nobody has determined yet what caused him to succumb to gravity, we might safely assume that he was asleep and rolled off. Talk about waking up on the wrong side of the bed… the point is, he died in absolute, unmitigated terror, and probably spent some time in great agony, with many broken bones and punctured organs. I hope the folks at EarthFirst! are proud of themselves, and of their latest martyr.

I am not being pro-timber here. I’m being anti-dumb. But those kids up there are susceptible to the literature and rhetoric of the radical environmentalist, and they should not have to lose their lives because someone else can’t figure out how to productively curtail logging. Even Butterfly ended up weeping, more likely over the lost two years of her life than over the tree itself, when a vandal with a chain saw took a big bite out of her redwood a year or so after she finally left it in peace. By the way, I live in a brick house, and I felt pretty badly for the number of giant Ponderosa pines that went up in flames this past summer in the White Mountains of northeastern Arizona. Many good men and women spent many long weeks fighting that blaze, saving as many of your beloved trees as possible.

If only people like Dennis Davie cared as much as that, to be careful and considerate in their approach to arboreal husbandry. I hope Naya’s family sues them out of existence, something even the loggers haven’t been able to do. EarthFirst! needs to be stopped, before they kill again.