How Activists Across the Pacific Northwest Planned the 1999 Seattle WTO Protests

Featured image: Seattle Municipal Archives

David Solnit, cofounder of Art and Revolution: At the beginning of 1999, when we heard that the WTO ministerial was coming to the U.S., I thought, “Okay, this is our chance to step up like the Zapatistas did, like people in Africa and other parts of the world have.”

Lori Wallach: It was either going to be in Seattle, San Diego, or Honolulu.

Ron Judd, president of the King County Labor Council: I had a dream about WTO coming to Seattle—people thought I was crazy. Everybody goes, “How do you know that?”

I go, “Just what my gut tells me. Here’s my conclusion.” And I walked them through my assessment of why everybody just loves free trade in Washington State, from our congressional delegation, to our statewide elected leaders, to all of our local, regional, urban leaguers, right down to the county commissioners. Per capita, we’re the most trade-dependent state in the country. The meetings were going to be between Thanksgiving and Christmas, so the common view was no one’s going to show up to protest, all they’re going to do is cut ribbons and celebrate how good free trade is and use Washington and Seattle as the symbol of that. I said, “The great thing is, they don’t know we’re going to plan something that’s going to shock the shit out of them!”

Colin Hines: Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, a very old, duffer-y guy from the sixties, was asked, “What’s the most frightening thing in politics?”

He said, “Events, dear boy, events.”

Mike Dolan, field director for Global Trade Watch: I had already been in touch with folks in San Diego and I had been in touch with folks in Seattle. Hawai’i would have been hell in terms of organizing—impossible. As much as I’d love it, no thank you—just the buses alone. If they picked San Diego, I knew I’d be putting a lot of energy into a cross-border mobilization. But Seattle was a home-court advantage. The labor movement was there, all the environmentalists, militant liberals.

Victor Menotti: We knew that if they picked Seattle, the forest issues would be big—the Timber Wars were still quite fresh in that region.

four waters, organizer with the Direct Action Network: In 1996, a lot of us came together in Humboldt for what was called the Timber Wars. When Seattle came up, I had been working with Julia Butterfly almost two years at that point. She had been living in a two-hundred-foot-tall, one-thousand-year-old California redwood tree for 738 days in order to prevent it from being harvested.

Jim Flynn, organizer with Earth First!: Somebody once said that you need twenty-five people on the ground for every person in the tree to bring that person food and water. Then there is all the media work that’s got to be done. If you go sit in a tree, nobody will know—or they can do whatever they want to you—so you have to create a media situation so that the cops or the loggers themselves don’t do something really bad, just attack you in the middle of the night.

Hilary McQuie, organizer with the Direct Action Network: The traumatized militant forest activists in the Northwest were such an important strand of what came together in Seattle. I had done a little bit with Earth First! back in the day. Those Eugene, Oregon, tree sits-in—people ended up getting beaten up and getting their hearts broken—those sit-ins really created this energy.

Jim Flynn: A friend took me to some hot springs in the old-growth forest near Portland and that really changed my life, just being in an amazing place like that. I fell in love. Then I saw a bumper sticker on a car that said Earth First! I said to my friend, “What’s that?”

She said, “It’s an environmental group that is not afraid to break the law to get their point across.”

I said to myself, “Well, I don’t mind breaking the law.”

I was a juvenile delinquent. Joining Earth First! was like putting on an old pair of blue jeans. I was meant for it. It felt very comfortable. It was a community that I could jive with. I had a respect and love for nature, giving voice to the voiceless, fighting the good fight even though victory is never guaranteed and rarely achieved. It’s still fighting the good fight. I quickly became a backpack activist, going from campaign to campaign in a car pool with a bunch of people. It just became the social calendar for me and other people that built community.

Earth First! is pretty well-known in Eugene. There are anarchists involved. We had lots of connections in the community and some people started to see signs on some trees downtown. This was an area where the local annual Eugene celebration took place. It was nothing but a parking lot but in all the medians were huge trees, redwoods included. We knew one of the city council members, a ninety-year-old woman who was disgusted that they were going to cut the trees down before it could even get talked about. So she alerted us.

A group of us conspired to sit in the trees. That was really the entire plan. We thought it would delay the tree cutting until the next Monday night when there could be a council meeting. Not that we had a lot of faith in council meetings, but it’s what we had at the time.

So, in the wee hours of the morning, two women started a catfight outside a bar right next to the parking lot with the trees. It drew all the security guards and allowed the rest of us to get up into the trees. There were fifteen to twenty people who climbed at least four different trees. Most of them were in one huge oak.

At dawn, the police showed up with gas masks on their hips. There had been no confrontation and hardly any communication at this point. The tree with most of the people in it got threatened with pepper spray and they all came down, dragging their feet. Since the police were there with riot gear, the public noticed—people were waking up, word was getting out. Now there are hundreds of people. It’s becoming a big scene and people are getting angry.

They got most of the people out of the trees. This one guy, they got a ladder and used a couple cans of pepper spray on him, mainly focusing on his hands. It’s a skin irritant as well as a lung irritant. Eventually, he chose to come down.

That left me alone in a tree, a sweetgum. I took a firmer stance. I developed a position where I could stand relatively comfortably and then wrap each arm around a different branch until I felt like they couldn’t just pull me off. They tried. They went up I don’t know how many times. Each time the torture got more intense. They were twisting my feet. They were pulling my hair. They were trying pain holds. Eventually they had a fireman in a bucket lift and he grabbed the back of my hair and yanked down like he was working out in the gym. He was snapping my head back like a Pez dispenser, causing a lifelong neck injury. They used over twenty cans of pepper spray on me.

They used up all the pepper spray they could get from Eugene, Lane County, and neighboring Springfield. The pain compliance holds and the pepper spray, nothing worked. It was getting more and more intense and I remained nonviolent.

The police and people on the street are going wild. Long pause. It’s hard to relive this sometimes. Crying. It was getting more and more intense. There was a huge crowd, close to 1,000 people, but by this time I could barely open my eyes because they had pepper-sprayed my face. I was blind. I had a lot of supporters on the ground. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them. One said, “They’re moving in with more pepper spray,” or “They are moving out.” I knew some of them by their voices. Crying. They were screaming at the cops because they were so outraged.

I don’t want to discount chemical weapons but, in this case, it was mainly cayenne pepper, which has a pain effect but also has a numbing effect in some ways. They were wasting their time by respraying me with the same stuff once I was already drenched. I had my back to them the whole time. Eventually, I said, “Is that cayenne all you’ve got? Don’t you have any habañero?” They did not appreciate that and started using Mace. Mace was a hell of a lot worse for me. Mace causes all your mucus membranes to start gushing out. I was still able to resist that. Not that I was looking for glory but, on some level, I recognized that I was the last line of defense at that point.

They cut up one of my pants legs all the way to my inner thigh and they were spraying my inner thigh but they weren’t spraying my groin. People say that they pepper-sprayed my balls. They did not pepper-spray my balls.

They started cutting branches away from around me so they could get closer. Eventually, they got to where they could literally put their hands around me. They got a belt around my waist and attached the belt to the bucket on the lift. Then they yanked me. The first time they did it, I almost passed out. I had a really good grip around these two branches but they yanked me with the bucket and it bent me in half right in the stomach area.

They were escalating so I knew the second time would be harder. I knew that if I tried to resist, I would go flying off of there. I couldn’t resist anymore. The second time they did it, I let go and they took me down in the bucket to the ground. I was completely drenched in pepper spray. It was about a six-hour ordeal from dawn until early afternoon, June 1, 1997.

The cops had to put me in a patrol car so they wanted to rinse me off first. They took a fire hose to me because I was dripping with pepper spray and Mace. The pepper spray is oil-based, so spraying me with water had limited effectiveness. It spread the pepper spray to places that it hadn’t already been. So they put me in an ambulance and took me to a hospital. Then I was sent to jail. All of my skin had fully absorbed the pepper spray. It was thirty-six hours of sitting in a jail cell, just marinating. Even one week later when I took a bath, it all just re-electrified. It was like I got into a spicy bath. It was soaked into my skin. My hands were orange for one week. By the time they got me out of my tree, they had cut all the other trees down. My tree was the lone tree from what I heard. I didn’t see it, but as soon as I was gone, they cut it down.

John Zerzan, Black Bloc organizer: There was an energy that was emerging in Eugene, I would say as far back as the Unabomber phenomenon. In ’95 it was huge. You couldn’t get away from it. Right after Kaczynski was captured in ’96, I started overhearing these conversations. These kids were just down with Ted. He had just been arrested. We were going to send him some money for books. They understood the critique of technology and a technological society. They were completely in accord with it. I was just amazed. I started to see that it was way ahead of what we might have thought was brewing. It annoyed the left. I could see that too. They weren’t then—and still are not now—interested in the critique of a technological society.

At the same time, the forest defense was going strong. There was a lot of that building up, getting more militant and getting more folks involved in tree-sitting. There were protests and demonstrations in Eugene around that time especially starting in 1997, your standard street stuff. You could just feel that something was going on.

Suzanne Savoie, Black Bloc organizer: Y2K was coming up so there was a lot of passion around primitive skills and decentralizing, living more natural lifestyles and trying to do away with corporate control of your life. I think that because Y2K was looming, there was this mythology about we’re going to actually be able to break down the global system. I think the juxtaposition with Y2K at the same time that the WTO meeting was happening made it a really interesting time. We were seeing the writing on the wall, the kind of slow-motion apocalypse that was going to lead to the destruction of biodiversity and upend cultures and take away indigenous rights. People said, “Well, maybe we actually have an opportunity to turn the ship around right now before things get worse. We have an opportunity right now to try to live more sustainable lives, more in line with the capacity of this planet.” There was this feeling that we could do this.

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Excerpted from One Week to Change the World: An Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protests by DW Gibson. Copyright © 2024 by DW Gibson. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.