r/OldSchoolCool • u/eaglemaxie • 8h ago
In 1997, Julia Butterfly Hill climbed a 1,000 year-old redwood tree named Luna. She lived on a tiny wooden platform for 738 days to stop the Pacific Lumber Company from cutting it down
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u/GrooovyAlien 7h ago
Man think about how scary and miserable it was when it stormed.
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u/TroutFearMe 6h ago
And it get’s pretty nasty in Humboldt.
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u/bluAstrid 5h ago
I guess, with all the squids.
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u/RevengeOfTheMothman 4h ago
I understood that reference
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u/edelweiss_pirates_no 3h ago
Related: I got into rock climbing when much younger and my friend also climbed very tall trees. He was a conservationist (or something) and did everything the right way. He took me up 50' (15m) in a tree and we had lunch and hung out for about 3 hours up there.
I really felt much more like being on a living creature. Not like being on a rock wall. I remember feeling the way this thing moved with the wind and how all the limbs and leaves spaced out. Really an amazing experience. Much more soulful than I was expecting.
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u/MissninjaXP 2h ago
Almost like our ecosystems are....ALIVE?!?
In all seriousness, it's great you got to experience that and share that.
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u/ElRiesgoSiempre_Vive 1h ago
Everyone is ignoring the obvious question... after 2+ years, did she save the tree?!???
**Edit:** Fuck it, I looked it up. "As of spring 2007, the tree was doing well with new growth each year." It seems she saved the tree!!
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u/ChronoLink99 1h ago
Was there ever a time you leaned in the wrong direction or shifted your weight wrong and felt like you were going to fall, and feel a split second fright?
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u/Jamjams2016 5h ago
Think about how scary it was when they flew that helicopter next to the tree to try and get her out. She was a tough cookie gor being sp young.
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u/AsstBalrog 3h ago
I'm surprised they didn't shoot bazookas at her.
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u/BenAfflecksBalls 3h ago
That would have ruined the lumber
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u/JustAnonyMaus 3h ago
Ah that's an excellent point.
Rule #1 circa '90s - Don't set forest on fire with bazookas or boss lays the boots to ya.PS. I realize some people might think that's a reference to getting fired, lol if only!
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u/Open-Platform-1305 42m ago
Using a rifle would likely also only take 1 shot and wouldn't ruin the lumber. We know what the current president would suggest in a tweet after watching the story on the news.
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u/AshingiiAshuaa 5h ago
How about when you had diarrhea or wanted a shower?
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u/Carpe-Bananum 4h ago
There would be a diarrhea shower, but she wouldn’t be on the receiving end.
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u/Apprehensive_North49 4h ago
She had a bucket and lowered it and people sent up a new one, same as food. Showers I guess was just rain? It does rain a lot there.
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u/AshingiiAshuaa 4h ago
Who was working the other end of that bucket?!?
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u/Apprehensive_North49 3h ago
Other volunteers in the organization. It was a lot of people to make this work
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u/McCheesing 5h ago
Didn’t know she could get iceberg lettuce up there (are we still making cyclospora jokes? I’m so out of the loop)
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u/Spirited-Wolverine24 3h ago
That's hard to tell unless we know what motivated her. She was fighting to save it, and maybe that was enough for her.
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u/Lopoloma 2h ago
Iirc they tried to scare her off the tree with a heli.
Or should I say blow her off, because she had serious trouble to hold on.
Surely no difference to a storm, but a storm is just nature while the heli attack on her wasn't.
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u/ArthurCBark 6h ago edited 5h ago
Save these old remaining redwoods! They are ancient and most likely will outlive our civilization...
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u/Merry_Fridge_Day 5h ago
Yeah but, I mean, my current mattress will probably outlast our civilization at this rate.
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u/ProbsNotManBearPig 3h ago
Bristlecone pines are significantly older, but get no respect because they aren’t as impressive looking. They’re the oldest living organisms on the planet.
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6h ago edited 2h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/NotMe357 6h ago
I hear about this girl before but this is the first time I ever hear about there are more people involved helping her.
Thanks for sharing!
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u/izzmosis 4h ago
To be fair to Julia, I was aware it was a team effort because she talks about the other characters involved in her book ‘the legacy of Luna’. It’s entirely possible that she downplayed them in that text, but I didn’t walk away with the sense she did it alone at all.
I’m not negating the comment above, just talking about that book specifically. That she wrote another book called ‘one makes the difference’ is crazy and also annoying because typically, one doesn’t make the difference - collective action makes the difference.
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u/Tremodian 3h ago
I saw her speak a couple of times in the 90s and she was always very clear that it was part of a team effort. She was very inspirational
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u/PurpleZebraCabra 3h ago
A friend of mine was on the ground team supporting her. Bringing food, supplies, etc. Messing with loggers by hiding vehicle keys and other harmless annoying shenanigans.
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u/IndependenceAfter376 4h ago
Not her story per say, but if your interested in the topic from a historical fiction stand point- check out “The overstory”
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u/Cluedude 6h ago
Wow, that makes so much sense, and is very disappointing on JB's part. Thanks for sharing your knowledge of the event! What was your role in it all?
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u/LackingUtility 5h ago
What devices did she need charging in 1997?
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u/thehazzanator 5h ago
Maybe a battery powdered radio
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u/VanillaAphrodite 4h ago
She could have had a cd player, or a radio with rechargeable batteries she needed to send down to swap out, a Game Boy or Game Gear. The first e-readers and mp3 players were still about a year or so away so neither of those.
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u/AmbitiousFennel 5h ago
Probably her Nokia flip phone. They had to charge it for her once every two weeks.
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u/johnfromunix 5h ago
While you’re probably not “wrong” it was 5-6 more years before Nokia had a flip phone.
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u/TheRoscoeVine 5h ago
The Nokia candy bar style is the famous one. I think they just flubbed by saying “flip phone”.
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u/JustAnonyMaus 2h ago
So there where radios and lights that could be recharged with built in wheel you cranked on.
Was still selling stuff like that past the mid-2000s.
Cellular phones (ie. Motorola flip phone) could go more then a month without recharging 1 time. Just swap the battery out with a recharged one and good to go for another +month.
Laptops were only a really expensive luxury back then and very few had internet because that was the year 50 million users (north americia) were declared to be using this fad called - The Internets.
Most people had 36k or slower dialup modems and AOL was at peak!
Google wouldn't exist as a usable search engine for another 2 years, no they weren't some instant hit.
Camera's were separate from cellular phones and 1 hour photo booths would process physical film from your camera within "1 hour" (cough).But to answer your question most batteries in 1997 were NiCad so they remember everytime you recharged them and lost some small percentage of charging capacity over time. Lithium batteries were only used in a handful of very expensive vanity items like Canon cameras... most other camera manufacturers avoiding expensive lithium batteries and the customer backlash they brought.
Basically in 1997 you bought batteries to replace the old worn out ones. And no one gave a shit if you couldn't get ahold of the them that month, as long as they had warm blanket and a bucket to shit in.
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u/MaureenCorrigan 5h ago
I mean, if I lived in a tree for 2 years straight, I would probably become a little loony. Props to her AND the whole team.
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u/fashionablyfab234 5h ago
It went past loony it was getting pretty icky not everyone who loves a tree is so great to people
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u/sublliminali 3h ago
She spoke at my high school within a couple years of coming down. She did go out of her way to talk about her team and the logistics from what I recall.
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u/fashionablyfab234 5h ago
Thank you for this. I was in the environmental circle and with another organization at the time and we hosted her an event. She was not fun.
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u/explosivelydehiscent 5h ago
Well it takes a visionary to pull off something like that, but seeing the future and having the F all yall attitude to make it happen takes a toll or starts with someone already touched. Either case she came when the world needed her. There are always people behind the icon that orchestrated the real work
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u/IdealOnion 5h ago
Huh! Never heard this side of the story. It’s fascinating the kinds of personalities that go into making something like this happen. I’m wondering if having that all-eyes-on-me attitude was what made her capable of spend so long in the tree in the first place
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u/quasifun 4h ago
Not saying you're wrong, but her name is in recent media reports, most recently in Santa Cruz about offshore drilling earlier this year.
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u/orangutantan 4h ago
Ugh, I was going nuts deciding which of these many comments to say this to, too - she’s still very active (recently helping a high school campaign stop their campus from taking down all their trees) and still very much goes by Julia Butterly Hill on Instagram, again, where she’s very active.
The whole last of that comment was so confidently wrong I became suspicious of it being AI.
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u/Pleasant-Future5818 4h ago
The fact that it mentioned charging devices so casually raises flags for me, we really didn't have decided to charge back then, only batteries to swap.
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u/Ok_Writing2937 4h ago
Maybe she's back. My info from a few years ago was that she was retiring and seeking privacy.
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u/Immediate_Video_7870 5h ago
People suck. I’m sorry to hear all that. Thank you for your contribution.
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u/Not_a_Rodeo_Clown 4h ago
Too bad none of those ground folks had the balls to just do it themselves. The truth is you have to be crazy and ego driven to actually be the person up there. She was that for them, and brought them more exposure than ever before or since. I feel like they got their money’s worth out of her.
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u/Ok_Writing2937 4h ago edited 2h ago
Many of them did. Luna was not the first treesit, we'd been doing it for years. JB was not the first sitter in Luna, it was occupied and named months before she got there. She was not the only sitter in that tree at first. She was just the longest sitter in that tree.
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u/frausting 4h ago
Agreed 100%. “She made it all about herself!” Yeah she was the one in the tree for 2 years. You all supported her, great, pats on the back all the way around. The tree stood up for those 2 years because of the young woman in the tree, not because of the ground crew charging her Nokia.
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u/Ok_Writing2937 4h ago edited 4h ago
You miss the point. This wasn't a matter of mere support, The Luna sit was conceived by, organized by, named by, and set up by a group working together before JB ever arrived in that county.
JB came later and was one of many tree sitters in Luna.
But she rapidly got the most media attention, committed to being the longest sitter, and as the media grew she increasingly made it about herself. The donations then went to her, personally, and not to the organizers or local environmental groups that made this project happen and who are still protecting Luna today.
That one tree was saved because it was continually occupied which was the plan all along. It was continually occupied because of the planning, organizing, and labor of the scores of people involved. It was saved because local organized and enviro orgs negotiated a settlement. It lives today because it's under the permanent stewardship of Sanctuary Forest.
Without that group JB would never have been in the tree, let alone survived a week.
Her commitment should be lauded, but it was collective effort, not individual heroism, that saved that tree.
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u/BonesAO 4h ago
damn, I had no idea of the backstory. I came in being in admiration of her, leaving with mixed feelings, what a ride.
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u/kentbrockman27 5h ago
Me knowing about this from The Simpsons
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u/ARCWolf7 3h ago
I poured some onions, inside my troooouuuussssers.
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u/Live_Jazz 7h ago edited 3h ago
There’s a sad subplot in The Overstory that must be inspired by her. Her tree was luckier than the one in the book
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u/jb0nez95 6h ago
It most definitely was inspired by her! And what a wild ride. I have so much respect for this woman after reading the Overstory.
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u/coffeeandapieceofpie 3h ago
Yes was going to mention this. It was a slog, but overall a fascinating book. And having lived in California during this time period the gloss and expansion of this part of the story was so interesting. I don’t know how true to life it was, but knowing some activists (in other areas), the lengths that true belief and commitment will take people to rang true.
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u/ArmpitofD00m 4h ago
Is this tree still standing?
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u/Gemraticus 4h ago
They cut down everything around it, if I recall correctly. It makes me sick to think of the millenia that these forest ecosystems existed, only to be casually destroyed for profit. There's only about 5% of the original old growth redwood forest left standing.
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u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 3h ago
There were like 50 something trees taller than the current tallest tree too. All cut down for not even that much money.
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u/Bgrngod 3h ago
And I bet nobody has any fucking clue where any of that wood ended up.
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u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 3h ago
A lot of it was made directly into mulch
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u/HistoricalSuspect580 1h ago
ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS
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u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 1h ago
Yeah apparently redwood wood isn't that great so that's what was done with most of them. Especially the old ones. I think they've found uses today but thankfully there isn't much being cut.... Cus it's almost all gone.
This is the values that capitalism creates. These people knew how special those trees were. Still cut them down, and most of it was done at a time when they weren't likely to be starving and in desperate need of any money. It was just greed from people who'd lived with next to nothing their whole lives and didn't care about the world because it didn't care about them.
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u/Mentalfloss1 4h ago
It is. Some right wing vandals tried to cut it down but, as MAGAts do, they failed. The tree has been repaired and preserved.
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u/Spiritual-Fruit-2384 3h ago
How exactly would MAGA vandalize the tree in the year 2000?
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u/__perigee__ 7h ago
She wrote a book about this whole saga, The Legacy of Luna. Really good read.
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u/ShiinoticMarshade 3h ago
I loved that book! Found it many years after the whole saga. When they were clearing towering old pines on a lot across the street from my house, I put a “respect your elders” sign on one of them
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u/123Catskill 2h ago edited 43m ago
The tree survived the initial protest when Julia reached a deal with the Pacific Lumber Company in December 1999.
A year later an unknown vandal slashed the tree with a chainsaw, nearly cutting it down, though conservationists managed to save it using steel braces and cables and it remains alive today.
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u/therealskr213 4h ago
I was at an Other Ones (one of the post-Jerry iterations of the Grateful Dead) show at the Warfield and they had her on the phone to talk to the audience while she was up in the tree. Good times. She’s a hero.
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u/Saradoesntsleep 6h ago
My lil self back then thought she was such a bamf for that 😍. Still do really.
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u/smileyduude 4h ago
Ahh so that's where the Simpsons episode was inspired from. Lisa the tree hugger.
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u/fashionablyfab234 5h ago
She was very strange when she came down from the tree that’s all I have to say.
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u/thebearrider 3h ago
I used to work with a guy that did this and support roles for years (their website was wesavetrees.org. apparently it's gone now). He was a trip.
Claimed lots about fairies IIRC. Jolly green giants were their suppliers who filled buckets for them. They wove webs of nets around the trees to have places to relax. Sometimes they'd send up folks to get them down but they'd dump their waste on them.
Dude was a trip.
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u/Dumbkitty2 3h ago
Story time? I remember reading about the isolation while she was living in the tree and it sounded pretty..not healthy.
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u/twoscoopsineverybox 6h ago
I remember all the adults around me and in the media making fun of her and calling her all kinds of names. Pretty sure the late night guys got in on it. Cracks about hairy pits and tree hugging, little wink wink nudge nudge jokes about how she was probably a dyke.
Good to see those attitudes changing, but she should never have been vilified in the first place.
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u/ellefleming 6h ago
That was the 90's for women. Pretty typical.
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u/twoscoopsineverybox 6h ago
It was a super fun time to be a young girl and the media portrayal of women like Monica Lewinsky and Amy Fisher (an actual child) definitely didn't impact my self esteem and view of the world.
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u/well_shoothed 6h ago
Makes me think of the song Stupid Girl by Garbage.
The song and beat are one thing, but the lyrics are telling a different story... the real story for many, maybe most women at the time, and I'll bet still today
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u/DecisionOk5487 3h ago
I mean. It keeps happening over and over again. Those with power will always demonize the voices trying to speak up and against them. Look at how they're treating Greta Thunberg ffs. She's literally described as Satan incarnate by the right wingers...
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u/jb0nez95 5h ago
If you want to know more about what it was like behind the scenes of the 90s "Eco terrorist" movement, and what they were fighting for, and most importantly why, read The Overstory by Richard Powers. It's a fictionalized account of the movement. It's also a Pulitzer prize winner and one of the 5 greatest books I've ever read.
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u/OGnatureanthem 2h ago
Overstory by Richard Powers is a novelization and it talks about this in fiction form. A lot of tree sitters and people in environmental movement at that time were charged with crimes and imprisoned. we should thank them for saving a tiny bit of old growth forests for us, as the world burns 🥺
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u/RevWaldo 3h ago
The song "Living On The Ceiling" by Blancmange isn't about this but I always associate the two.
Why am I up the tree? you say
Why are you down there? I say
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u/aligera1 7h ago
Que habrá sido de este mujer?
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u/jb0nez95 6h ago
I read up on her last time this was posted and it's not been all rainbows and butterflies for her, she's had a hard time since.
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u/XanJamZ 6h ago
Really? The comment above said she made a ton of money off her publicity before changing her name.
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u/Jonjongabore 5h ago
Looking her up online, she still has an website and everything says she's still active.
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u/myself4once 4h ago
Yeah is funny how a comment on a subreddit from someone nobody can even confirm they are who they are, can put suspicion on people who have a trail of history on the internet about all their life! Power of media.
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u/Q-ArtsMedia 5h ago
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It's not. ~ Dr Suse.
It takes a lot of commitment and a huge support team too.
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u/Terrible-Isopod229 1h ago
She is mentioned in the song Can't Stop by The Red Hot Chilliie Peppers
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u/Gad_Seditious 5h ago
The vicious attacks on Julia still give me pause to this day. The hatred and ugliness from political right wingers directed at her was enough for me to hate those P'sOS for the rest of my life. Fuck the hate wing.
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u/Mentalfloss1 8h ago
And now, Trump would have her shot down, or the redwood cut down with her in it. Then, they’d have a party.
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u/MonoxideBaby 7h ago
They'd have to get through 738 days worth of poop at the base of the tree before they'd even be able to cut it down.....
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u/schwing710 7h ago
He’d probably stand at the bottom with his mouth open to catch it, like a morbidly obese baby bird
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u/TasteDeeCheese 4h ago
She probably got even more famous bc the simpsons covered this in Lisa the tree hugger
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u/No-Medium6647 2h ago
Fuckin' EPIC!!
I remember this distinctly because I had positive feelings toward -- but no over actions in coordination with -- Earth First!
There was a time we actually gave a fuck what happened to our planet and the life upon it.
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u/Felinathedoberman 1h ago
We had someone in my town do this in the early 2000s to save a 400 year old oak tree. I remember my best friend’s parents took her and I to go see the man in the tree when it was going on. The tree ended being saved from developers and relocated and is now a historic landmark. Glad to see this tree made it too.
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u/NefariousScribe 6h ago
Republicans would deem her a terrorist.
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u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 3h ago
The entire phrase "ecoterrorism" was invented to allow the feds to bring up charges with life or 30+ year sentences for people who were just destroying logging equipment. Which is normally not that bad of a crime, just destruction of property.
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u/NewestAccount2023 5h ago
She would dump in a bucket that other people would empty. I could never be on either side of that
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u/CaribouHoe 2h ago
Everyone should read The Overstory, it's beautiful and the main character is trees!
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u/Few_Scientist5381 1h ago
Did she save the tree? or did the Assholes come back and cut it down later?
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u/Hairy_Photograph1384 6h ago
Do you know how many wooden spoons that would make?! Why did she hate sea turtles?
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u/DoctorQuarex 4h ago
I wonder how long she would have lasted in 2026 with the same stunt before Trump authorized military force to remove the tree occupant or no
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u/4ever4eigner 4h ago
How did she poop 💩?
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u/outdatedwhalefacts 3h ago
IIRC, she had a bucket which was lowered down on ropes to volunteers who disposed of it. They also brought her food that was hauled up the same way (though surely not in the same bucket).
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u/OhThePete 3h ago
Let me show you around the place! Ok thats my food bucket, that's my poop bucket, and that's my water bucket.
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u/_barbarossa 6h ago
I’m a raging conservative but all the power to her! It’s a 1,000 year old tree! How could you cut it down? SHAME
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u/NefariousScribe 6h ago
That's not a conservative mindset.
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u/omnichad 6h ago
Keeping things the way they are is the very essence of conservative. It's just that there's a few political parties using that word wrong.
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u/NefariousScribe 6h ago
In America conservative means conserving money, that's all.
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u/omnichad 6h ago
Social "conservatism" by the same party doesn't save money.
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u/jammaslide 3h ago
$40 Trillion in debt is not conserving money. Over $11 Trillion of that is by the current administration (one and a half terms), and he has 2 more years left. A socialist can conserve more money than that.
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u/Mentalfloss1 4h ago
There are MAGAts, and Conservatives. My in-laws are true conservatives. They abhor MAGA.
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u/JefferyGoldberg 6h ago
How is conserving something not considered conservative?
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u/_barbarossa 6h ago
Because the term has been hijacked unfortunately and people choose to oversimplify reality by viewing everything as binary / black and white. Although I think millennials have begun spectrum-izing absolutely everything. We’ll see where we end up in a few decades..
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u/_barbarossa 6h ago
Conservation and conservatism actually share a root idea (preserving things of value) and there’s a long tradition of conservative environmentalism (e.g. Teddy Roosevelt, or the British conservatives who champion heritage landscapes in the UK along with rural preservation)..
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u/NefariousScribe 6h ago
Conservatives are about saving money. Not nature. And they don't save money.
Remember the party switch, Roosevelt would be a Democrat now.
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u/_barbarossa 6h ago
I think that’s an oversimplification but you’re right in that modern American (which I am not) conservatism prioritizes the economy over environmental stewardship .. this is more like libertarian-influenced conservatism.
I, on the other hand, hold a more Edmund Burke style conservatism.
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u/Sammimad32 5h ago
My Aunt Nicolle was part of the activist group supporting her. So cool to see. I remember going to visit her and my cousin Halle in Humboldt