Judi Bari 
Environmental warrior.  
By Dennis Bernstein 
March 5, 1997 - San Francisco Bay Guardian 

ON THE MORNING of Sunday, March 2, Judi Bari, radical environmentalist, union organizer, and committed campfire fiddler, passed on at the age of 47.  

Bari's unrelenting devotion to protecting workers and the environment ultimately cost her her mobility, and perhaps her life. Yet despite an onslaught of attacks on her self, her family, and her cause, she continued to speak out powerfully against corporate killers.  

Indeed, of the hundreds of activists and organizers I have interviewed over the last 20 years, very few showed the courage of their convictions the way Judi did. She was verbally attacked, physically beaten, threatened with death, arrested, run off the road with her two daughters in the car, and ultimately pipe-bombed nearly to death, and yet she kept her resolve and revolutionary spirit intact.  

One of the qualities of her commitment that differentiated Judi Bari from many of her environmentalist contemporaries was the connection she made between the environment and the economy. In an interview I did with Judi in 1991, a year after the bombing, she made this link very clearly. "We called Redwood Summer because we had both an ecological crisis and an economic devastation," she said after a fiery speech at an anti-Gulf War rally. "It was important to slow down the fast cut because they would be leaving an already poor rural community decimated, just like the rust belt or the dust bowl, with people having nothing else to do for a living without the forest."  

She was also a committed feminist who set an example for the young women she worked with.  

One of Judi's last public appearances was Nov. 22 at the Federal Court Building in Oakland, the scene of many encounters with the FBI, whom she had been suing for false arrest ever since she was bombed in Oakland in 1990. Outside the courtroom Judi held a rally and press conference at which she expressed her concerns for people she considered victims of the FBI's Cointelpro program, including Leonard Peltier, Geronimo Pratt, and Mumia Abu-Jamal. And she stated quite clearly her purpose in attempting to hold the FBI accountable for its illegal and deadly activities.  

"As long as they are under the scrutiny of the public eye they can't get away; that's why they are a spy agency, that's why they are called spooks," she said. "If people are watching them, they can't get away with it, and that's I think what this lawsuit has done. The fact that we filed this lawsuit has already had a chilling effect on the FBI -- we haven't had the death threats and intimidation during the recent Headwaters demonstrations."  

For the past month I had been calling up to Judi Bari's place to see how she was doing. Usually one of her several devoted comrades and caretakers would answer and tell me that Judi wasn't doing very well and that she wouldn't be able to come to the phone. I would send my love, hang up the phone, and pray for some miracle of healing that of course would never come.  

Last Thursday, when I called to gather information about Judi's latest encounter with the FBI in Oakland federal court the previous Friday, she took the call herself. Her voice was weak but still determined. She wanted to know how I was doing and if we were keeping the bastards honest.  

She told me she had heard a recent interview we had done with Irish Republican radical Bernadette Devlin, who is fighting to get her pregnant daughter released from prison. Judi was troubled by the situation and told me that she had named her oldest daughter after Bernadette Devlin.  

On Jan. 31 Judi Bari hosted her last radio show on Mendocino County public radio station KZYX -- The Punch and Judi Show. Last week, according to the Albion Monitor, the station broadcast a special during her regular time slot and asked listeners to share Judi stories. One of the callers was former U.S. Rep. Dan Hamburg (D-Ukiah), who said in a direct address to Judi Bari: "Judi, you're feared by those people because you're a true revolutionary. You see with your vision a different kind of world, a world where connections are made between the global economy and poverty and environmental deterioration. You understand what the connections are between the big picture and the little picture. And that's why I think for so long you've been such a good teacher not only to me but to people all over the country."  

When I asked her last November what she would be doing over the next few months, Judi said she had gathered 14,000 documents, through Freedom of Information Act requests, from the FBI. "It's going to be a long winter," she said. "We've got a lot of work to do."  

Tragically, on Sunday at about 6:45 a.m., Judi's long winter was cut short by her losing battle against cancer. But those around her understood her final message, one that she shared with me before she said good-bye Thursday morning: "Stand strong and keep up the fight. Don't let the bastards get you down." Dennis Bernstein is a producer at Flashpoints, a KPFA public-affairs program.