A Good Forest for Dying
The Tragic Death of a Young Man on the Front Lines of the Environmental Wars
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Early on a September morning in 1998, David “Gypsy” Chain and eight fellow Earth First! activists went into the redwood forests of Scotia, California. Their loosely organized plan to protest the destruction caused by the logging industry almost immediately turned farcically tragic. A. E. Ammons, a logger for Pacific Lumber, confronted the group, threatening them in an obscenity-ridden diatribe: if they didn't leave "I'll make sure I got a tree comin' this way!" The group retreated, moving deeper into the wilderness. A short time later, just as they were attempting to confront the logger yet again, Gypsy was dead, crushed to death by a tree Ammons felled.
A GOOD FOREST FOR DYING traces the long history of bitter clashes between environmental concerns and economic interests in the American West and shows why these tensions came to a head in northern California in the 1990s. It tells the story of how Pacific Lumber, once an environmentally friendly, family-owned business, became part of a conglomerate whose business practices made it a ripe target for environmental activists. But A GOOD FOREST FOR DYING is also the story of Gypsy Chain, a troubled young man raised in a loving family. A social misfit in his small Texas hometown, he died in a faraway forest before he had a chance to come to terms with himself and his family. His mother never lost faith in her sometimes wayward, idealistic son. After his death, and helped by a team of shrewd, leftist lawyers, she mounted a fight for justice in the name of her son and the cause of saving the redwoods.
A balanced, highly readable examination of complex, emotionally charged issues, A GOOD FOREST FOR DYING will appeal to a wide audience. Its insights into the inner workings of the radical environmental movement and its dissection of corporate greed and misdeeds are reminiscent of such provocative exposés as A Civil Action and Erin Brockovich. The story of Gypsy’s strange odyssey and the disturbing circumstances of his death–seen primarily through the eyes of his mother–is as powerful and as moving as Jon Krakauer’s classic Into the Wild.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
On a September day in 1998, David Nathan "Gypsy" Chain, an Earth First! activist, was killed on a mountain slope in the redwood forest of California. Earth First! cried murder, and celebrities like Bonnie Raitt joined in honoring Gypsy as a martyr slain by corporate greed. Pacific Lumber, which owned the land where Gypsy was protesting tree cutting, blamed the activists themselves. What really happened that day, and why was the event so polarizing? Beach, a writer for the Austin (Tex.) American-Statesman, has no simple answers. He explores the long history of the conflict, which encompasses not only a wide range of environmental beliefs and tactics but also the different viewpoints of loggers and corporate management. He describes the short life of Gypsy Chain, a sensitive but sometimes troubled young man who discovered, in the fight to save the redwoods, a transforming sense of purpose. And he reports the struggle of Gypsy's family and fellow activists to find justice through a seemingly hostile court system. Though Beach attempts fairness to all sides, his sense of moral outrage is never far from the surface and his rib-kicking prose takes no prisoners. Yet he switches viewpoints so quickly and so often it is difficult to determine which passages are in his own voice: does he really believe the loggers are "like the cowed inhabitants of a totalitarian state," for example? In the end he confesses to being a "raging moderate" on environmental issues, but also notes that "protest groups are... the living world's immunological response." A crucial point but, the larger question of how to make future policy remains unexplored.
