In December 1996, a mudslide comes down on the hamlet of Stafford, in Humboldt County, northern California, and devastates the village. The slope above it had just been clear-cut. The residents blame the logging company, Pacific Lumber, and the engineer Donald H. Gray concludes that the clear-cut was responsible. A few months later, the California Department of Forestry authorises logging on the neighbouring slope, the one where a coast redwood roughly a thousand years old grows, a tree that Earth First! activists have named Luna.
That is where Julia Butterfly Hill’s book The Legacy of Luna begins, and the choice is remarkable. She does not open with herself. She opens with a buried village and with an absurd administrative decision, and it is only in the next chapter, once the setting is in place, that she comes on stage.
What the book contains
Thirteen chapters, a prologue, an epilogue, an afterword. The narrative is linear, almost a diary, and follows the 738 days spent in the tree, from 10 December 1997 to 18 December 1999.
The first chapter carries a strange title, “Fighting Fear with a Wooden Fork”, and tells of the car accident in August 1996. She is twenty-two, a steering wheel is driven into her skull, she spends nearly a year relearning how to speak and how to move. Out of that rehabilitation comes a reversal of values, then a trip to California, the encounter with an old-growth forest, the discovery of the clear-cuts, and the abandonment of the round-the-world journey she had planned.
Then comes “Initiation”, in November 1997. She arrives at the activist base camp, where she is not particularly well received and where she does not fit in. She volunteers for a five-day occupation in Luna, with two activists nicknamed Shakespeare and Blue, guided by another named Geronimo. In it, Hill explains what a tree-sit is, a last-resort tactic once the legal and political routes have failed. In the next chapter, “Getting to Know You”, she gets about three minutes of instruction before going up the rope. She comes back down sick after Thanksgiving, with two viral infections.
December 1997, “Call to Action”. The cutting is getting closer, volunteers are scarce, she offers to stay three or four weeks to maintain a continuous presence. They leave at night on 10 December, with packs of around fifty kilos.
The following chapters unfold the siege, the storm, the wearing down, the anniversary of the first winter, then the negotiations that lead to the agreement.
The tree, the platform, the siege
Luna is two hundred feet tall, about sixty-one metres, and twelve feet in diameter. Hill settles in one hundred and eighty feet off the ground, fifty-five metres, on a platform six feet by eight, around one metre eighty by two metres forty. A second, smaller platform hangs on the other side of the trunk. Supplies come up by rope, handled by a network on the ground. She cooks on a camp stove, collects rainwater, and has a solar-powered telephone. That device is the real pivot of the book, the one that turns a local blockade into an international affair.
What she goes through reads in sequences, and this is the best of the text because it is the most concrete. First the loggers, twelve days felling dozens of trees around her, with the noise, the dust and the direct threat of falling trunks. Next the company’s security guards, ten days of siege meant to starve her out, floodlights trained on the platform all night, bugle calls at random hours to keep her from sleeping. Then Pacific Lumber’s helicopter, circling her position with its searchlight on, nine nights in a row according to a second-hand account. The French publisher’s blurb also mentions a napalm spraying, of which I have found no trace anywhere on the English-language side.
And the winter, which is an El Niño winter, with winds reported up to ninety miles an hour. She is fifty-five metres up under a plain tarp, in a tree that bends. She would say later: “After the first three months, I was broken on every level, physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally.”
She comes down on 18 December 1999 and walks three kilometres, barefoot, to the press conference.
What she gets, and what she does not get
The agreement is a conservation easement. Pacific Lumber undertakes never to cut Luna, nor the trees within a two-hundred-foot radius around it, about 2.9 acres. The protection is perpetual, and its custody falls to the Sanctuary Forest Land Trust. In exchange, Hill and her supporters pay the company fifty thousand dollars for the lost revenue. She asks that the money go to the laid-off workers, the company refuses and passes it on to Humboldt State University for research into sustainable forestry.
One tree, less than a hectare and a half, and the cutting going on all around. She does not dress up how narrow that is, and that is what makes the end of the book bearable.
The inner movement
Chapter 5 is the real centre of the book. She watches the trees fall around her and finds herself overwhelmed by hatred. She writes that if she did not find a way to deal with that anger, it would end up destroying her. What she puts in place is not a peace, it is daily work, repeated, exhausting, to turn that energy into attachment, including towards the loggers and the guards she has in front of her. The request she makes after her accident, and takes up again in the text, sets the tone of the whole book: “If I really am meant to come back and fight for these forests, help me know what I am meant to do, and use me as an instrument.”
The second movement is the bond with the tree. Luna starts out as a blockade tool, and becomes a relationship that she explicitly describes as a conversation. She tells of riding out the great storm by tuning herself to the redwood’s movements instead of resisting them. This is the part of the text that divides her readers the most, between those who see it as the essential thing and those who find her mystical.
A fight, not a communion
The book is also worth reading because it does not hide the fractures, and they run inside the activist camp. The scale of the media coverage opens a gap with Earth First!, which faults her for not carrying the movement’s hard image. She had chosen not to affiliate officially, claiming a disobedience carried out “for the redwoods and nothing else”. Hill herself tells of a conference call between activists that falls apart along the way, the disagreements turning to hostility. And after the death of the activist David “Gypsy” Chain during a logging operation, then the temporary withdrawal of Pacific Lumber’s licence, loggers in the county lose their jobs and local resentment rises against her.
None of this weakens the account. It gives it weight.
What became of Luna
Over the Thanksgiving weekend of 2000, less than a year after she came down, an unknown person attacks the tree with a chainsaw. A single gash, about thirty-two inches deep and nineteen feet long, more than half the circumference. Whoever did it was never identified. Steel wedges are driven in to release the tension, brackets bolted over them, and in 2001 the civil engineer Steve Salzman designs a cable bracing system able to hold in gusts of sixty to a hundred miles an hour. The canopy specialist Steven Sillett takes part in the operation. Luna is still standing.
In France, the relay has a name, Thomas Brail. A climbing arborist from the Tarn, he goes up a plane tree in Mazamet in May 2019, saves seven out of nine, founds the Groupe national de surveillance des arbres (the national tree watch group), occupies a plane tree outside the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and starts a hunger strike there on 31 August 2023. He is the one who prefaces the new French edition of January 2025, under the title “Des phares dans la nuit” (lighthouses in the night). The lineage is claimed.
What I keep from it is this. The book contains no instrument, no protocol, no measurement. It stands on the narrative alone, and it moved real things. And Hill gives her tree a name, as I name mine. She has entered into a relationship with something she struggles to name, to pin down, but which exists, is palpable and changes us forever.
Read in September 2022. Note written in 2026.
