legacy

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Twelve years ago on this date: December 10, 1997, Julia Butterfly Hill climbed 180 feet to the top of a 1,000-year-old redwood in Humboldt County, California. She was not being playful. Her act was one of civil disobedience. The Pacific Lumber Company was about to cut it and the trees around it.

A small platform, barely big enough for two people, covered by a tarpaulin had been constructed for her “tree sit.” Hill thought she might be off the ground for two, maybe three weeks, but her vigil took much longer. Her feet did not touch the ground again for 738 days. Over two years! During that time, she endured thunderstorms, winter snows, harassment from the lumbermen and legal actions against her and her group.

"Fierce winds ripped huge branches off the thousand-year-old redwood, sending them crashing to the ground two hundred feet below. The upper platform, where I lived, rested in branches about one hundred eighty feet in the air, twenty feet below the top of the tree, and it was completely exposed to the storm. There was no ridge to shelter it, no trees to protect it. There was nothing. As the tree branches whipped around, they shredded the tarp that served as my shelter. Sleet and hail sliced through the tattered pieces of what used to be my roof and walls. Every new gust flipped the platform up into the air, threatening to hurl me over the edge. I was scared. I take that back. I was terrified," writes Hill.

But she endured. More than endured, scampering barefoot around the uppermost branches, she found peace in the aged tree she called “Luna.” Volunteers on the ground brought her food and water every day, carrying away her waste she lowered in a bucket.

She became an international celebrity. Famous people climbed to the top of the tree to visit her. And eventually her courage and fortitude were rewarded. The lumber company finally agreed to spare the tree and forest around it. It was a moral victory by a barefoot woman named Butterfly and not a single shot was fired.

“Living in Luna had already taught me that one of best ways to find balance is to go to the extremes,” Hill writes.

There is a color photograph on the back cover of the book. Hill is standing at the tippy top of the tree. Clad in a bright red jacket, her arms are outspread. She looks superhuman and, for perhaps those 738 days, she was.

This is an empowering story Hill wrote herself while living at the top of a tree. From such a lofty vantage point, one is bound to achieve clarity.




"The Legacy of Luna" written by Julia Butterfly Hill.