https://yewtu.be/watch?v=U2RXdKVYzH4
1986 Rainforest Road Show: Dave Foreman & Lone Wolf Circles
La Pena & U.C. Berkeley in October 1986.
Video by Greg Harder & Bob Ralston.
This is the earliest video I have of Earth First! It’s a combination of a couple of events, both of which I attended and both of which had a big influence on me as far as diverting me into the mighty river that Earth First! really is.
Greg Harder was videotaping many events, both Bay Area Earth First! protests, such as Whopper Stomper Month protests at Burger King, and the first protest against the genetically-engineered bacterium ice-minus/Frostban.
He would edit these down into segments for cable TV in the Bay Area. Here they capture a couple of public events, an early road show with Dave Foreman and Lone Wolf Circles and various northern California eco-troubadours including some of the earliest footage of Darryl Cherney, as it was shot a few months after the Earth First! Headwaters Forest campaign was founded, coming on the first anniversary of the Maxxam takeover of Pacific Lumber Co.
The anti-Whopper and Frostban protest footage is cut into the roadshow and an appearance by Dave Foreman at UC Berkeley. So this is one of Greg’s & Bob Ralston’s cable TV episodes.
This is when I became friends with Dave Foreman. You might note a rare circle dance with me between Dave and Mike Roselle until Karen Pickett squeezed in. The perceptive my find me in the images of some of these events.
Rant & Music in an eco-environment with slide shows or video. That’s the basic road show method. Here is the earliest footage of one of the road shows that got Earth First! off the ground.
Catch preacher man Dave Foreman and an early example of Warrior Poetry by Lone Wolf Circles (who did all the drawings and paintings on stage).
This is also the night I befriended Lone Wolf Circles. I had started to run a New Age/Green Politics book store (first Green Politics/Earth First! book store in the Country?) around April 1986. It was called Shared Visions/Sound Choices pioneered by Will Noffke, and we were opening a third space called Acts of Creation for workshops, dance, and body healing classes.
Wolf needed a place to store his paintings after the road show, and I arranged to both store them at Shared Visions and to decorate the walls of Acts of Creation with many of them as our first gallery exhibit.
And we also booked Wolf’s next road show at Acts of Creation. That one was where I met his tourmates the eco-activist songwriters Dakota Sid Clifford and Walkin’ Jim Stoltz with his Forever Wild slide show.
– Andy Caffrey