S1E97 - Eleanor Goldfield on "To the Trees" & Forest Defense

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Eleanor Goldfield comes on to talk about her film, "To the Trees," a documentary that highlights forest defense tactics in Northern California. The film is meant to call into question our current relationships to nature, how we might reframe them, and why that reframing is vital to our survival and having a livable future.

Guest Info

Eleanor Goldfield (she/her) is a filmmaker and journalist who works to highlight different movement and struggles. You can find her work and her film "To the Trees" at tothetreesfilm.com and artkillingapathy.com. Eleanor can also be found on Twitter @RadicalEleanor and Instagram @RadicalEleanor

Host Info

Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: Eleanor on "To the Trees" & Forest Defense

**Inmn ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today, Inmn Neruin, and I use they/them pronouns. Today we are talking to a filmmaker about a really beautiful film called To the Trees. And I'm really excited for you all to hear this conversation. We're going to talk a lot about logging and forest defense and just kind of like the extraction industry in general, and then just about some, you know, cultural or psychological paradigms that we have around resource extraction. But first, we are a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcasts. And here is a jingle from another show on that network.

**Inmn ** 01:40 And we're back. Hi, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Could you introduce yourself with your name, pronouns, and a little bit about your background, and what you're here to talk about today?

**Eleanor ** 01:55 Sure, thanks so much for having me. My name is Eleanor Goldfield. She/her. I'm a queer creative, radical filmmaker, and journalist. And I've been doing frontline--I hesitate to say activism--I've been doing frontline actions and journalism since 2010 together. And before that I'd been doing organizing and community organizing since about 2003, before the second Iraq War. And I'm here today to talk about my latest offering in the film domain, which is called, "To the Trees," and it's about forest defense tactics in so-called Northern California and also about our relationship to nature and the necessary shift that that must take for us to have a livable future.

**Inmn ** 02:50 Cool, um--I mean, not cool that a film like this needs to get made but cool that a film like this now exists and can teach people a lot of really awesome things. I highly encourage everyone to go out and watch the movie. It's really wonderful. It's really beautiful. But could you kind of give us just like a recap of the movie.

**Eleanor ** 03:17 Sure. Yeah, and the films available at ToTheTreesfilm.com. And all of my work is also available at ArtKillingApathy.com. So kind of a general overview of the film is that I went out there to do.... This is kind of how I work. I ask folks if they need any support--and I'm ground support, by the way, because I don't do heights. Although, I did climb a redwood when I was out there, which was a terrifying experience. And I'm never doing it again.

**Inmn ** 03:49 They're so big,

**Eleanor ** 03:51 They're ginormous. And that was my first...that was the first tree I decided to climb because...yeah, whatever. And it took me 45 minutes. And it's 200 feet up in the air, and I was terrified. And it took me like 15 minutes to get up the courage just to step off the platform. And the tree sitter, they were like, "You just step up," and I'm like, "What do you just step up? I'm gonna die," and they're like, "No, you're not. You're gonna be fine. I swear" and I'm like, "Oh God, this is so terrifying." And they're like, "Yeah, maybe you are ground support."

**Inmn ** 04:20 Ground support is crucial.

**Eleanor ** 04:23 It is crucial. Yes. And it's very much.... That's very much me. I was built to like just be grounded, I think. So I went out there basically saying, "I would love to help you all and do support and also, if it's cool with you, I'll bring a camera and I'd love to just hear some of your stories." And so folks were cool with that. And so there I go, traipsing into the woods. And it's a beautiful tree village. And the redwood forests, if folks have never seen them, I mean it's like Narnia. You know the forest floor is Like this plush, you know, soft and welcoming space. And then you look up and it's like the trees are so tall that you can barely see the crowns. It's just kind of like this green haze above you. And so I just started talking to folks and talked to a couple of tree sitters. I also spoke with somebody who does more of the judicial side of things, like trying to get forest...or like logging companies in court and how that kind of works with tree sitters. And then I also spoke to an indigenous woman, Marnie Atkins, who is a member of the Wiyot tribe, spoke to her a lot about perspectives on what's going on in these forests and the paradigms that are different between her people and the colonizers who came. And so it's kind of a.... [trails off] I call it at the end, I have this, I have this slide that says, "To the trees: It's a dedication, a call to action, a promise, and a militant apology." And I wanted folks to feel that, that it's an offering and it's also an invitation, not just to act in whatever ways we can but also to question the way that we think about these beautiful places, whether they be the redwood forests or whether they be the the ecosystems that are outside your front door.

**Inmn ** 06:42 Yeah, yeah. And it's.... I feel funny that this is one of my first questions, but it was one of the pieces of the film that kind of really got me--it's like always knowing that Capitalism uses things for really silly things--but learning that the main use of redwood trees is to just turn them into kind of crappy decks. Is that right?

**Eleanor ** 07:12 Yeah, yeah, it's based on market forces. The best use of a redwood tree is decking. And not only that, but redwoods can be 2000 years old. And of course, if you were to chop down a 2000 year old tree--which by the way, there's no law against it in California or anywhere else in the in the United States--if you were to do that, yes, that deck would last a while--it wouldn't last 2000 years--it would last a while. But the way that they cut down trees at the rate--because of course, no one's gonna wait 2000 years--they cut down these trees in their infancy. So the strong heartwood of the tree has not had a chance to develop. And so you're cu