Who was Judi Bari? Ask a certain not-quite-endangered species of North Coast Californian and you’ll get pure hagiography: She was Mother and Protector of the Redwoods, a champion of the radical Earth First! group, martyred (nearly) by the FBI (she claimed) in the mysterious 1990 pipe bombing that destroyed her Subaru. And if you ask Kate Coleman (The Secret Wars of Judi Bari, by Kate Coleman; Encounter, 261 pages, $25.95)? As Darryl Cherney, one of Bari’s former lovers, recently put it in the Times: “Today there are few progressive heroes left. But even the ones who have died must be killed again by literary assassins like Kate Coleman.”
Or not. Coleman, whose Vast Right Wing Conspiracy character assassin credentials include residing in Berkeley and contributing to Mother Jones, has written an account of Bari’s life so agenda-free that it borders on dull—hard as it may be to believe that Bari, a fiddler, karate enthusiast, and former employee of “California Yurts” could be made dull. So why have Coleman’s readings been protested or canceled? It is through no fault of hers that Secret Wars fails to flatter Bari’s memory: The facts don’t, either.
It is unsurprising that a woman, intoxicated by the grandeur of nature, would want to spend her life defending it. But why should she one day feel an overwhelming passion for the Worker (no loggers!), the next day for Central American “anti-imperialists,” another day for abortionists, another day for old-growth Redwood forests? That’s an awful lot of passion, even for a Californian.
Bari loved agitation for its own sake, the cause itself being incidental. Even her choice of men suggests this; it turns out, Dr. Kissinger, that activism is the greatest aphrodisiac. Coleman may never be this reductive—her journalistic style only hints at anything like a judgment—but one wishes she were. Bari’s career is of interest mainly to specialists, but her overgrown self-importance begs to be slashed, burned, and milled into top-grade comedy. For Bari, sawing a slab of Redwood (to build a yurt, no less) was “apocalyptic.” Being tear-gassed was “profound.” During her brief career as a postal worker, she was disgruntled. She wrote folk songs. Not even a capable and decorous biographer can rescue her from self-caricature. Let us save our open minds for someone else.