During the Vietnam War, Judi Bari was involved in political protests and community organizing as a student at the University of Maryland. Working as a carpenter some years later, she discovered that the wood she was using to build a luxurious vacation house in California had come from old-growth stands. She quit and became a fulltime advocate for saving California's ancient forests.

She signed on to work with the environmental group Earth First! because of the group's total commitment to environmental justice. "They were the only ones willing to put their bodies in front of the bulldozers and the chainsaws to save the trees," she told an interviewer.

Widely credited with bringing music, humor and a lot of compassion to the previously all-male leadership of Earth First!, Bari was a charismatic and well-organized organizer, drawing big crowds when she spoke and getting thousands of people interested in ecologically responsible living.

Refusing to demonize the workers in the timber industry, Bari built alliances between them and environmentalists. She even helped workers at a lumber mill sue the mill's corporate owners when a toxic spill of PCBs was passed off by management as "mineral oil."

An opponent who was so out-of-the-mold and effective got a lot of attention from the corporations whose profits were endangered. Bari's car was rammed by a logging truck; she and two other Earth First! members were hospitalized as well as four children, two of them Bari's.

A year later, Bari initiated and promoted Earth First!'s "Redwood Summer," a campaign of non-violent mass protests against logging the giant trees. Her campaign rules included No drugs or alcohol and No sabotaging of timber operations. Nevertheless, Bari got a wave of serious death threats that police refused to investigate. When Bari and her partner Darryl Cherney set out to Oakland to recruit members for the campaign, Bari's car was blown up by a motion-activated bomb planted under her seat. Both organizers were injured, Bari so seriously she was hospitalized for nine months.

Within hours of the explosion, Bari and Cherney were arrested for purportedly transporting explosives to be used in terrorist actions. A national public relations campaign depicted them and all Earth First! members as "ecoterrorists." When she left the hospital, Bari and Cherney filed a suit against the FBI and the Oakland police for "refusing to look for the real bombers."

"I know one thing" Bari said, "I didn't bomb myself."

Partially paralyzed and in great pain, Judi Bari continues to organize non-violent protests against unsustainable logging practices.

Update: Judi Bari died in 1997 from breast cancer. In 2002 a Federal court ruled in her favor and against the police officers and FBI agents. The court said that they had framed her and Cherney for the car-bombing and that the two Earth Firsters had a First Amendment right to organize in defense of the forests.