March 2006 | UnCommon Reader
Thugs in the Woods
By Stephenie Hendricks
When I first encountered Judith Spencer, in June 2003, she should have been happier.
In 1999, after a long, demanding career as a nurse in San Jose, California, she and her husband Bob had decided to retire and leave behind the noise and pollution of crowded San Jose to settle permanently into what had been, since 1980, their vacation home — a small, comfortable place in the picturesque Sierra Nevada Mountains of northern California, right on the edge of the Stanislaus National Forest in the town of Arnold. It was remote, quiet, and beautiful — a dream location for a retirement home, Judith believed, and for attempting to realize another dream she had, that of becoming a writer.
I’d been put in touch with Judith by a contact that thought she could help me with some research I was conducting. As a journalist and an outdoorswoman, I’d been hired to conduct a report for a forest preservation organization about threats to the national forests of the Sierra Nevada. Judith could give me an idea of what was going on in the Stanislaus, said my contact. And that she did. It wasn’t, however, what I expected.
For one thing, living on the fringe of a national forest, she and Bob soon learned, now means living with the roar of engines. It seems the federal wilderness has become more populated by various kinds of off-road vehicles (known collectively as ORV’s) than by animals. The forest is now populated by motorbikes, by three-wheel all-terrain vehicles, by four-wheel-drive jeeps and trucks, by SUV’s and Hummers. They were all over the Stanislaus National Forest — and most other national forests — causing erosion, destroying fragile streams and wetland ecosystems.
Wild weekends with the ORV-gang were often fueled by beer, at the very least, and hard drugs at the worst. Meanwhile, the sound of gunfire every now and then did nothing to make the neighbors feel more at ease. And what really terrified locals was the most widely used drug of them all: cigarettes, the cause of an increasing number of lethal forest fires in California.
Judith and Bob Spencer were not the only ones disturbed by what was going on in the Stanislaus. Others in the community were also upset to find their idyllic setting so despoiled.
They organized themselves to lobby local officials to enact legislation to protect the community on their side of the forest and prompt the federal government to better control the situation on its side. They called their group Commitment to Our Recreational Environment — CORE. It was an ad hoc organization, but Judith was the one usually elected to speak at town meetings, and she was often portrayed in the local newspaper as CORE’s leader.
And so it was that Judith was the one who got the death threats.
One was a crude drawing, showing her being torn apart by all-terrain vehicles going in opposite directions. Another was a simple note, saying her days were numbered, in the most vulgar language imaginable.
The local sheriff was understaffed and ill-equipped to control the growing number of “ORVers” — as the users of ORV’s call themselves —let alone conduct an investigation to track down whoever was writing the death threats. Meanwhile, the sheriff got little help from the rangers stationed in the Stanislaus. They weren’t police and, after all, federal regulations permitted ORV activity. In fact, everything about U.S. policy these days is encouraging even more development in the National Park system to accommodate such tourism. ORV users are posing an even bigger threat to forests than the timber interests that environmentalists used to be most concerned about.
Many ORVers near Stanislaus thought that a public forest was open to any group who could find a real use for it, especially one as dramatic and popular as their own. More troubling, however, was the fact that some of these ORVers found justification for their activities in religion. Some of the riders were active in fundamentalist Christian groups that believed, as outrageous as it may seem, that their activities were sanctioned by God. A preoccupation with recreational vehicles seemed to allow riders, near Stanislaus and elsewhere, to interpret various passages of the Bible in peculiar ways.
For example, the Colorado Springs Christian Four Wheelers’ website shows photos of various members of their group tearing up mountainsides on all-terrain-vehicles and features a quote from Micah 4:2: “Come let us go up on the mountains” — an invocation not unlike the ones used by riders near Stanislaus.
Most peculiar among the many interpretations of the Bible that I discovered was one that proclaims that the Second Coming of Christ, and the ascent of all Christians into heaven, hinges on the exhaustion of our natural resources. It is a belief that has a complicated relationship to the Bible, for it requires that one believe that God’s call to have dominion over the Earth is taken literally — but one must also feel that the “End of Times” spoken about in The Book of Revelations is near. Some who concur with such an interpretation believe that global environmental annihilation is a divine requirement for Christ’s return. It’s an idea so foreign to the environmental movement that it requires pause to even comprehend.
I’d reached out to the Stanislaus community expecting to find myself documenting something I’d covered before: timber industry incursions on the national forests of the Sierra Nevada. Instead, I’d learned that Judith, a pleasant senior citizen who had simply asked some Mad Max wannabes in the woods to keep it down, had had her life threatened. But I had also discovered a large, well-organized group of religious ideologues, people who were politically active and especially vocal.
I realized very quickly that I had uncovered a far bigger story, for many of the organizations that the Stanislaus ORVers belonged to had allegiances with larger and better-funded advocacy organizations, many of which had direct ties to the Bush administration. Of course, ties between the administration and the New Christian Right have already been well-documented. It now became clear, however, that American environmental policy was also being greatly influenced, even shaped, by Christian Fundamentalists. Indeed, anti-environmental ideologues and members of the Christian Right share a thinly veiled consensus of ideology that implies a divine imperative to their policies.
The evidence of this seemed substantial and wide-ranging, and yet it is little known to the general public. As with much of the mainstream discussion of contemporary American politics, it is as if those who know about it can’t believe it, or are intimidated into not talking about it. For, as I was also to learn, at the suggestion that an extreme religious ideology may be involved in the creation of American environmental policy, most people — even environmental activists — invariably fall into an uncomfortable silence. To my surprise and relief, I also discovered fundamentalist Christians who interpret the bible differently — who believe that the Earth must be restored in order for Christ to return. Another underreported story is the Holy War going on in the Religious Right about what it means to be a Christian, and about what kind of Christians are leading this country and pushing forth environmental policies that go against the Christian directive to protect the Earth.
Excerpted from Divine Destruction: Wise Use, Dominion Theology, and the Making of American Environmental Policy by Stephenie Hendricks. Copyright © 2005. Published by Melville House, mhpbooks.com
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