There were seven protesters from Greater Adirondacks Bioregion Earth First! at Little Green Pond that day. Three of them were floating in inflatables in the middle of the pond, one shaped like an alligator, the others a whale and a dolphin.
This is what 60 law enforcement officers discovered on the morning of Thursday, August 23, 1991, when they showed up armed with revolvers, billy clubs and police dogs to ensure that agents from the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) could dose the 69-acre pond in Santa Clara with 420 gallons of rotenone, a chemical that efficiently kills gilled organisms. The DEC argued that the fish kill was necessary to prevent yellow perch in the pond from infesting nearby Little Clear Pond, the state’s only hatchery for Atlantic landlocked salmon. Earth First! countered that damming the channel connecting the two ponds was preferable to killing all the fish.
The Earth First! “swimming party” was the latest skirmish in 16 months of protests and counterprotests as locals and environmentalists reacted to the release of a report from Governor Mario Cuomo’s Commission on the Adirondacks in the 21st Century in May 1990.
Some local residents and business owners were upset by the report’s 245 recommendations, including a suggested year-long development moratorium on much of the Adirondack Park’s private land and a plan for the state to purchase an additional 650,000 acres. People were worried that if the state bought large tracts of land for preservation, the local economy would suffer. In protest, the Adirondack Solidarity Alliance, a citizen’s group advocating “home rule” and property rights, organized a traffic slowdown on the stretch of Northway running through the Adirondack Park. A second motorcade attracting around 450 vehicles was led by State Senator Ronald Stafford, who sided with the protesters. The Adirondack Minutemen, a group founded in 1976 by Anthony D’Elia to protect property rights, threatened a revolt against “King Cuomo.”
But the report also attracted environmental groups who came to the Adirondack Park to defend New York State’s closure of roads in wilderness areas, protest pond reclamation and overdevelopment, and argue for more protection of wilderness areas. Of these groups, Earth First! drew the biggest headlines and the most heat.
When 20 members of Earth First! convened for a three-day “rendezvous” camping trip on Lewey Lake to study the governor’s report, the Citizen’s Council of the Adirondacks, a group that advocated for more local control over decision-making in the park, threatened to send a contingent to confront the activists at their campsite. They never showed up, but the threat ratcheted up anxiety among the environmentalists.
“I am very conflict averse,” said John Davis, who was editor of Earth First! Journal at the time and currently works for the Adirondack Council, a nonprofit organization that strives to protect the wild character of the park.
“I grew up in an academic setting, and we were all very polite, and my forebears were teachers and ministers, basically, so radical environmental action did not come easily to me.”
Jamie Sayen, a longtime environmental activist whose book Children of the Northern Forest was recently published by Yale University Press, recalled being ambivalent about the threats. “I doubt that that’s due to my inordinate courage and probably more my youthful thoughtlessness and the fact that it never occurred to me that the cops would want to bop somebody who’s wearing a three-foot-long Styrofoam fish hat.”
Earth First! was founded in 1980 to defend wildlife and wilderness areas more directly and uncompromisingly than most environmental groups were doing at the time. The group’s actions were informed by conservation biology, the study of biodiversity with the goal of protecting and managing it.
“We were saying that the science dictates, not political powers,” said Sayen. “And that’s the message that we are still sending.”
By the time Earth First! showed up in the Adirondacks, the organization was already in the national media for “monkey-wrenching,” where protesters strategically sabotage logging or development activities, usually to protect old-growth forests in the Northwest. The term comes from Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, which chronicles the fictional adventures of a group of “environmental warriors” who conduct sabotage in defense of the Earth. Earth First! protesters would sometimes tree-sit—barricading themselves in a tree to prevent it from being cut down—or damage bulldozers or pound spikes into trees.
Jason Kahn, who participated in Earth First!’s 1990 “Redwood Summer” protests in California, described tree spiking as an “inoculation.” If activists spiked a tree, they would call the logging company to identify it, the goal being to stop the tree from being harvested, not to damage sawmill blades or injure people.
Kahn taught earth science in Chatham, New York, for 30 years and now serves on the board of The Rewilding Institute. In the early 1990s he organized Earth First! actions in the Adirondacks.
Here, the group preferred blockading roads, protesting new development projects and pond reclamation, writing letters to the local media, and filing lawsuits. Claims of them monkey-wrenching were made but never substantiated. The Post-Star reported that Earth First! cut the guide wires to the fire tower atop Pharaoh Mountain, though there were conflicting reports over the status of the wires at the time of the alleged incident.
After hearing the rumor about Earth First! involvement, Kahn climbed the mountain to see for himself. “The wires were not cut,” he said. “They were rusted through, but they were still attached at the footings.”
The Post-Star also reported that loggers complained that Earth First!ers put sand in the gas tanks of skidders and left Earth First! decals at the scene, but no one was ever arrested or charged.
In the Adirondacks, Earth First!ers’ protests were designed as lighthearted photo ops. In September 1990, Sayen and high-school biology teacher Jeff Elliott protested the poisoning of lamprey eels in Lake Champlain. Elliott stood on the shore of the Boquet River, near where the DEC was dumping a lampricide, dressed in a white burial shroud. The next day a dramatic photograph of the stunt was published in the Post-Star.
A month later, using the same tactics, Sayen and Elliott protested a scheduled rotenone treatment at Tract Pond in Franklin County and again made headlines. Both were arrested and charged with obstructing governmental administration, resisting arrest, and assaulting a conservation officer, a second-degree felony. They spent three nights in jail but were later cleared of the felony charges.
But it was earlier that spring, at the entrance to Crane Pond Road, that proved to be a dangerous flash point between locals and environmentalists. Five years earlier New York State had officially declared the road part of the Pharaoh Lake Wilderness Area, which led to protests by local residents. The DEC blocked the road by placing boulders at the entrance, but masked protesters used heavy equipment to remove them.
So Kahn organized a simple plan: Earth First!ers would block the road with their vehicles on Labor Day weekend to uphold the legal decision to close the road, informing the media and the state police beforehand. The Post-Star published a front-page article about the protest, prompting dozens of people to confront the Earth First!ers.
Kahn recalled angry discussions, though they eventually calmed down to a civil discourse. But, he said, “every 20 minutes to a half hour, a new group would come and they were immediately pissed off right out of the box.”
The situation was tense. One of the counter-demonstrators told Kahn that there were snipers in the woods pointing guns at the Earth First!ers. Kahn didn’t believe it, but minutes later, gunshots came from the woods.
A New York State Trooper arrived on the scene, then got back in his car and drove away. Later, Warrensburg town supervisor Maynard Baker arrived, walked over to the protesters and sucker-punched Jeff Elliott. The incident was caught on camera by a CBS-affiliate station in Vermont and later aired in a segment on 60 Minutes.
Since the 1990s, “thankfully, the tension and animosity have diminished,” said John Davis. “Over time, local officials have realized that the Adirondack Park is good for our economies” and it’s “attractive to outsiders who visit because we are in a park with abundant open space nearby.”
For Kahn, the legacy of Earth First! lies in its unwillingness to compromise up front. Sayen recalls that in the 1980s, the scientists were not activists and the conservation movement was not acting boldly on behalf of wilderness areas. “We are not entitled to compromise the integrity of life systems that operate under natural laws,” he said. ”Human legislatures cannot ignore, repeal or override natural laws.”
