May 24, 1990: 34 years ago, May 24 1990, a pipe bomb exploded in Earth First! and IWW [...]

34 years ago, May 24 1990, a pipe bomb exploded in Earth First! and IWW organizer Judi Bari’s station wagon as she drove through Oakland with her comrade Darryl Cherney, injuring both passengers. Authorities unsuccessfully attempted to pin the bombing on the activists themselves

When they were bombed, Bari and Cherney were making their way from Berkeley to Santa Cruz, where they planned to rally UC students to participate in Earth First!’s upcoming Redwood Summer, a series of mass direct actions to protect Northern Californian old-growth redwood forests

Redwood Summer, which was modeled on SNCC’s 1963 Mississippi Freedom Summer, marked a departure from earlier EF! actions, which had been characterized by a more conservative, masculinist, middle-class politics concerned almost exclusively with militant wilderness conservation

Bari, a Marxist, led EF!’s west coast branches in a left-wing direction she called “revolutionary ecology,” tying ecology to feminism and socialism. She founded IWW Local #1 to organize timber workers, hoping to heal the antagonism between loggers and radical environmentalists

A major point of friction between Bari and other EF! leaders was Bari’s rejection of tree spiking, an eco-sabotage technique that nearly resulted in the death of one logger. She argued that strategic nonviolence was key in building solidarity between workers and environmentalists

For her work, Bari had received numerous death threats. Despite this — and clear evidence the bombing was an assassination attempt — Oakland police and the FBI arrested Cherney and Bari (who was still recovering in Highland Hospital) on suspicion of transporting explosives

Police, who went so far as to suggest Bari and Cherney had bombed themselves “in hopes of creating a martyr,” tried and failed to build a case against EF! Bari and Cherney eventually successfully sued the Oakland police, although Bari died of cancer before damages were awarded

The bombing remains unsolved. Theories about who was responsible vary widely. Blame has been assigned to right-wing Christian terrorists, the FBI, and to Bari’s ex-husband Mike Sweeney, a former member of Maoist group Venceremos with a history of violence and bomb-making