Dressed in a suit and speaking in hushed tones about the Garden of Eden, Rabbi Stephen Pearce seemed out of place standing before several hundred environmentalists in Justin Herman Plaza during a San Francisco rally last Friday.
But when the spiritual leader of San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El proclaimed that the redwoods “don’t belong to industrialists who hold title to sacred space. We’re the stewards of God’s gifts,” it was as if Pearce were preaching to his own. Which, in a sense, he was.
Three days before a moratorium on logging in the Headwaters forest was due to expire and hours before a deal was cut, Pearce and about half a dozen of Northern California’s social and political leaders urged protection of the world’s last ancient redwoods at the noontime rally.
Late Friday night in Washington, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Deputy Interior Secretary John Garamendi hammered out a deal with Charles Hurwitz, owner of Maxxam Inc., the parent company of Pacific Lumber, and owner of the disputed Headwaters forest and other redwood groves in Humboldt County.
The trade includes $380 million in cash and yet-undetermined public property for the creation of a 7,500-acre public preserve of redwoods. Hurwitz will retain 200,000 acres of land in Humboldt County and also receive 8,000 acres of forest from Elk River Timber. However, Hurwitz cannot salvage log the trade areas for the next 10 months.
Reactions to the deal are mixed. Some environmentalist believe the logging restrictions are not strict enough. Others are relieved.
“In many ways this is a good symbolic victory for the environmentalists,” said Rabbi Lester Scharnberg of Temple Beth El in Eureka in a phone interview. “I’m not really sure if we look at it in the context of what would be just, as opposed to legal, if real justice is served, though.”
Scharnberg has been a vocal opponent of Pacific Lumber’s logging policies since Hurwitz’s takeover of the company in the 1980s. He added, “The debate of the Headwaters themselves will soon be over. But the context in which the battle is framed is much larger. We as Jews, and as spiritual leaders, have an obligation to extend our compassion and moral concerns to all of God’s creations.
“We have to expand our vision of the community of God. Traditionally we’ve seen it as people. It’s time we saw nature not as a prop but an integral part of God’s creation and God’s great plan,” Scharnberg said. “I don’t know if we can expect secular courts to come to full recognition of this, but their decision seems to be a step in the right direction.”
Meanwhile, at Friday’s rally, which concluded with a march to Feinstein’s San Francisco office, environmentalists of all stripes came together.
Organized by a number of groups, including Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and the Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters, the rally attracted local businessmen and women, students from Santa Cruz and hippies from Mendocino and Humboldt counties. Speakers ranged from former California Gov. Jerry Brown and S.F. Mayor Willie Brown to activist Judi Bari and former Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir.
Some wore fishhead and bear-face masks; others carried handpainted signs of support. A “wolf howl” of praise resounded when Pearce told the following parable:
Two men were fighting over a parcel of land. They asked the wisest man to determine its owner. “Let us ask the land,” the man said.
The wise man put his ear to the ground and it revealed its decision. “The land says it belongs to neither of you, but you belong to the land.”
“Our planet is dying because we think we own the land,” Pearce said. “This is contrary to our role as God’s stewards of all that lives.” Corporations show hubris, he said, by thinking they can “despoil God’s land.”
Both Jerry Brown and Willie Brown addressed political solutions for saving the forests. Environmental activists updated current activities on both sides of the debate. Weir offered perhaps the simplest message.
“The forest is mostly gone now. We can’t keep giving it away,” he said, then picked up his guitar and played “Throwing Stones.”
The crowd sang with him: “Politicians throwing stones… ashes, ashes, all fall down,” and faded out.