“Transmit the message
To the receiver
Hope for an answer someday”
—Talking Heads, Life During Wartime
Political Theatre
“Monkeywrenching can also be seen as a sophisticated political tactic that dramatizes ecological issues and places them before the public when they otherwise would be ignored in the media.”
—Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First!, as quoted by Alston Chase, In a Dark Wood: The Fight Over Forests and the Rising Tyranny of Ecology (1995)
Who’s crazier?
The mud-streaked naked hippie running through the woods with a clown mask on?
Or
The armed federal agent in paramilitary gear leading a vicious K-9 chasing after to arrest her for hillwalking?
Santa Barbara backcountry bathtub, four-feet deep and chilly under the hot sun.
El Niño Rising & Precipitation Accumulation Intensifying
El Niño appears to be forming this year.
That does not mean we’ll experience a winter of above normal rainfall, necessarily. But the chance for it does seem more likely than usual at the moment.
In addition, whether or not rainfall totals for the entire season measure in above normal, we may experience torrential cloudbursts in short periods of time, with downpours that plunge with force and rush over the land in ways we’ve rarely if ever seen.
Singular events of significant precipitation accumulation are more likely in California with climate change, and could result in torrents of runoff damaging roads and trails and other humanmade developments.
Hell’s Half Acre, Santa Barbara backcountry.
Trial By Raindrop
Shouldn’t the Forest Service manage these wetter, more intense weather events in ways that accord with common daily behavior as seen across the nation?
Humans are not risk averse beings.
We take precautions like wearing seatbelts, but our lives in practice are not hemmed in by an “abundance of caution,” that ivory tower theoretical abstraction.
“In the United States, motor vehicle crashes are a leading cause of death,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells us.
Driving carries significant risk. So what? Most everybody drives anyway.
And so this begs a question. When the rains fall, will the Forest Service close our public lands?
Will Forest Supervisor, Kimberly Winter, close Los Padres National Forest and throw us out of our own backcountry by force, at gunpoint?
Will she prohibit hillwalking in 30% of Santa Barbara County that is national forest?
Will a woman treat us like convicted rapists for merely walking? Oh, the irony.
That Kimberly Winter may once more close the forest is not an unreasonable assumption. The question is not unwarranted.
Ms. Winter closed the forest before, citing “storm damage” and justifying the prohibition based on an expansive interpretation of public health law, contrary to the Constitution as per case law precedent, supposedly “to provide for public health and safety.”
The Forest Service now sees fit to burnish the resume of her predecessor, Christopher J. Stubbs, with reference to his prior role overseeing the closure of Los Padres National Forest in 2023.
“At Los Padres, Stubbs built key partnerships on a 2-million acre, urban-coastal National Forest and led his staff through severe flooding and storm damage during the winter of 2022-2023.”
Mr. Stubbs lead subordinates that toed the party line in pursuit of a paycheck, in a disservice to the common folk, as if that’s something to boast about or admire.
Who among them stood on principle, in defense of the Constitution, and resigned in protest?
Where were all the No Kings protesters?
Ms. Winter is a doctor of thought, a philosopher, of sorts. She holds a PhD from the University of Georgia.
Would that she thinks deeply when the rains fall heavily, and designs a plan of sound management that accommodates common recreation afoot out yonder.
Surely hiking is no more dangerous than driving.
They’re our bodies. Shouldn’t hiking be our choice?
Condor National Forest beckons.
Interlude
“. . .wandering the hills with no discernible purpose because he was a man and that’s what men did.”
—Eminent local novelist, T. C. Boyle, San Miguel
Off-trail in Santa Barbara County, deep within the hinterlands.
A day’s worth of hiking just to reach the staging ground for the next day’s adventure, further into the woods, into the unknown, to see sights for the first time.
Hiking, scrambling, crawling at times, fighting brambles of dense chaparral raking and scratching skin, dribbling droplets of blood, pouring sweat, face coated in dust and grit and duff, quenching thirst infrequently with warm water, rationing because only so much can be carried, and there’s no guarantee of finding more in the field; nibling nuts and dried fruit, chawing jerked beef, swallowing salt tabs and B-vitamins and caffeine pills, skittering across stone slopes, traversing steep and loose hillsides uneasily, skirting ledges, and downclimbing dry pour-over waterfalls, never knowing if the haphazard route will go or if mid-way through a reversal will be mandatory, to retrace the route entirely, back from whence we came, all the way back up in brutal defeat, because the indifferent mountain offers no other recourse, and the sun is slipping lower, ever lower.
Not enticing for most people, but requisite for some.
Meat and potatoes for the human mind. Salve for the soul.
That is the promise of public lands, “accessible by the simplest means—feet and legs and heart.”
Speaking of heart. . .
As my friend, David “Crash” Stillman, once quipped, somewhere off-trail together on the south slope of Haddock Peak out in the back of beyond, “you got the sickness, too.”
Yes. It’s an incurable affliction.
It’s sort of like hunger. It can be satiated, but only temporarily. Soon more food is needed or else you get hangry and fidgety.
My case is not nearly as severe. It’s only a mild compulsion.
Stillman’s is pathological; 21 miles in 22 hours, out of bounds, through a riverbed, up and down a pathless mountainside, to stand but briefly atop Devil’s Heart Peak, all alone in a desolate land.
Why?
God only knows.
There is no rational answer, as George Mallory once suggested of climbing Everest.
It’s something in the DNA of mankind, an indelible mark seared into the psyche by the hot iron of evolution.
“If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go.
What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life.
We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live.
That is what life means and what life is for.”
—George Mallory
The “pursuit of happiness,” as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence.
That’s “the foundation of liberty,” John Locke wrote in 1689.
Santa Barbara County coast. Stay salty!
Guerilla Gauchos
“This was psychological warfare.
When the catskinners arrived at Bald Mountain, they freaked out as the four men suddenly appeared, looking like giant Hobbits, and announcing that they planned a nonviolent protest to stop the construction. …
This set the stage.
And the next day, when eco-commandos returned in cowboy costume, Earth First!’s guerrilla theatre was born.”
—Alston Chase, In a Dark Wood
Remember one lesson of the Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s.
Demonstrate the absurd by being absurd. Political theatre, the forest a stage.
When they draw a red line, tap dance all over it.
Make them enforce their crazy laws. Make them own it. Document it, project it, and use it against them.
“Road workers and Earth Firsters! were really having at each other now—arguing, spitting, and cursing—in front of furiously scribbling reporters and whirring video cameras.
. . .deputies arrived and arrested Roselle and his friends, the cameras continued to roll.
The story made the evening news. Stations around the country showed this same footage, over and over.
Each time it played, the incident looked bigger.
On the small screen the crowd seemed large, and viewers couldn’t tell that this whole carefully planned incident had been orchestrated by four unshaven guys in cowboy hats.
“. . .rather than crossbows and six-shooters, their weapon would be television.
As Alinsky advised protesters of any kind, have fun doing it.
“Rule 6: If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.”
—Saul Alinsky, Rules For Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971)
“. . .what Foreman called ‘nonviolent direct intervention—with wit,'” Chase writes, quoting Foreman.
“That is, guerilla theatre and creative monkeywrenching. . .
Ed Abbey, who lived near Foreman in Tucson, became a kindly stepfather to the Earth Firsters!, reveling in the fact that their lives imitated his art.”
To arrive at this emerald gem one must first pass a No Trespassing sign, before then passing another sign declaring that the land behind it is forever protected as a preserve.
A Most Potent Weapon
“Nobody knows where or when guerilla theatre started.
A kind of subversive drama, it may have originated with traveling road shows during the Middle Ages.
Some Earth First!ers claim their use of it was inspired by the early Spanish ‘mudhead cantinas,’ in which peasants would put on plays to mock the nobility.
The idea was to make fun of authority, undermining its mystique with satire.
But the modern version married this idea with television.”
Today the average bloke in the street has more power than ever with the littlest thing.
A sleek handheld device more powerful than computing machines that once filled buildings the size of small homes.
Today, with cell phones in pocket, we’re all cinematographers on the spot.
With the Internet, we’re all broadcasters and distributors in real time.
Leverage the power.
Power to the peasants.
Figueroa Mountain
Los Padres Lunatics
“Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule.”
—Saul Alinsky, Rules For Radicals
Who is crazier?
The naked hippie running through the woods with a gingerbread mask on, catch me if you can, scrawled across his bare back?
Or
The armed federal agent chasing after to arrest him for walking the public lands?
Related Posts
Language of Forest Closure: Assault on an Ancient Right
Hiking is Not a Crime, Let Forest Be Thy Medicine
Hiking is Not a Crime; Bull Moose and Titmouse
Hiking is Not a Crime; Hiker’s Precheck Forest Entry Pass
Hiking is Not a Crime; Done Dirty By Diktat
Reference
“In May-July 2026, El Niño is likely to emerge (61% chance) and persist through at least the end of 2026.
In November 2026- January 2027, there are nearly equal chances (25%) of a very strong, strong, or moderate strength El Niño.
Stronger events do not always mean bigger weather and climate impacts. Stronger events can make it more likely that certain impacts could occur.
—NOAA, ENSO Evolution Status, April, 2026
“. . .most recent computer projections suggest that as the world warms, California should get wetter, not drier, in the winter, . . .”
—New York Times, Science Linking Drought to Global Warming Remains Matter of Dispute (2014)
“A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that the probabilities of increased amounts of precipitation falling during a single event (also known as precipitation accumulation) will be higher with global warming.”
—NOAA, Global warming precipitation accumulation increases above the current-climate cutoff scale (2017)
“. . .there will be a robust future intensification of winter precipitation, . . .It will accelerate well past what we have seen in historic data.”
“. . .there has been an observed increase in wintertime precipitation in California due to ongoing greenhouse gas emissions32,33, accompanied by an increase in extreme precipitation34,35. Conversely, other seasons, notably spring, are expected to become drier36, signaling an intensification of the wet-dry seasonal cycle37, more frequent dry spells and floods38, and an increase in summertime drought in California39.”
—Nature Portfolio Journal, Robust future intensification of winter precipitation over the United States (2024)
Jack Elliott's Santa Barbara Adventure 