by Sarah Pike, Cross Posted from Aeon Magazine Julia Butterfly
Hill spent 738 days living in a 55m California Redwood tree in a
successful attempt to prevent the clearing of surrounding
forest. Photo by Eric Slomanson One day last summer, a young
woman looked down on a small crowd of vocal supporters and
police officers from her hammock or ‘sky pod’, 60ft above an old
logging road in Moshannon State Forest in Pennsylvania. The pod
was tied to trees and anchored to a blockade across the road, so
that anyone trying to move the blockade would release her in a
dangerous, perhaps fatal, fall to the forest floor. Another
activist on the ground had locked his neck to one of the lines
anchoring her pod. It was a familiar sight from protests against
the logging of old-growth forests, but here the target was
different. Workers who arrived for their shift that Sunday
morning could not get past the blockades to attend to a 70ft
hydraulic fracturing drill rig used to extract natural gas from
the rock formations beneath th